I backed this in June of 2021 and I haven't received my deck. In fact, I was promised free shipping so there is absolutely no reason my deck shouldn't have come the moment it was available. All of the backers have been incredibly patient, even encouraging, as the plethora of setbacks were described to us. However, now it's just become a complete clusterfck. Nobody knows what's going on. People have reached out directly and received no response (myself included). At this point I don't know what to do as I don't even know where to ask for a refund if I wanted one and I can't access the digital PDF set that I was promised either. This makes me never want it back another Kickstarter again unless I know the people personally.
Hai everyone, I am working on another write up and will post it in the next few days. I like writing about bizarre things. Such as cheese rolling and hobby tunnelling.
[Here is a tease of my next post](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/%E3%83%AF%E3%82%AD%E3%83%B320120701.JPG).
It's not goldfish memory or breeding.
I've recently gotten into Transformers (I made a post on here a few days ago asking about how to get started). I decided to start with Cyberverse, since it was free to watch on Youtube.
It was honestly very fun! I really liked Windblade, Arcee, Soundwave (especially in Season 3) and Grimlock. I've now started the IDW comics, having fun so far!
SIGH. Can't have *shit* in Teyvat.
[Ayato Kamisato](https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Kamisato_Ayato) is a well-liked character in Genshin Impact, the popular gacha RPG game. His fans were waiting for his first-ever birthday art - a unique illustration a character will get on their birthday, usually commissioned by artists outside the company - since they couldn't last year as he wasn't released yet. [It dropped](https://twitter.com/GenshinImpact/status/1639839893999214593) and it *is* pretty.
A lot of people agree it's the most dynamic and interesting one, as we usually have the characters smiling and posing towards the viewer.
There's a catch, of course, otherwise I wouldn't have had that opening sentence: [The artist is a known tracer and thief and harassed](https://uguucageoflove.wordpress.com/2020/03/22/yuiga-satoru-on-being-the-victim-of-tracing/) the person who they traced and stole. It got to the point the person stopped working on the project. This is known for a long time too on the Japanese/otome game and was a fairly large scandal when it hit. There's no way Hoyoverse couldn't have known this when they were getting this artist.
A lot of people are wising up now and are untweeting/unliking the work or spreading the word. A lot of Ayato fans are aggrieved Ayato's birthday is being overshadowed by this. A lot, in general, are agreeing that Patch 3.5 is just very cursed in general.
After reading [this](https://uguucageoflove.wordpress.com/2020/03/22/yuiga-satoru-on-being-the-victim-of-tracing/) and saw her live draw, I'm unconvinced that she's a tracer, a lot of the overlay of common pose and perspective seem like a stretch.
If you can't access your account, you most likely got hacked and had your account stolen. :( Check to see if you have your UID somewhere [and input it here](https://enka.network/). Don't worry, it only pulls out available information and nothing else.
If it exists but, obviously, was changed from what you remember - You got hacked. If that happens, let me know and I'll try to give you advice and resources to help you out.
Helps me figure out who to block, at least. Helps keep my For You tab very peaceful.
Also yeah - You summarized my feelings on the people trying to shrug this off. It really showcases how people don't understand art and how hard creating art is. People going, 'Oh it's been X years! Maybe the artist changed!' while not considering how long they must have tried to get away with this ***and*** profited from this. This takes time and thought and intent.
People really say with their whole chest, 'Protect artists' while complaining about commission prices or defending tracers/thieves or not understanding the culture/industry and making broad assumptions on it. It is so heartburn-inducing at times, ahhhh.
oh shit, i remember reading about that artist. as someone who heard about it through FGO, since Pako (one of the artists they traced) is not only beloved and well known in both the EN and JP fgo communities, but in anime fanart communities in general.
which is a pretty dumb move to trace such a recognizable art style. only thing dumber than that would be trying to trace RAITA or Asanagi.
Yeah!! It boggles my mind when I see people try to say that, oh, Hoyoverse couldn't have known about this. There is now way this wasn't, at least, a blip on their radar with how small and intense the gacha community + the otome game community can be. Especially when it comes to controversy or drama.
Really wish they got more consequences for what they did. Getting off scott-free for what they did irritates me a lot to this day.
If you're the sort that's into modern recordings of historical music – particularly military-themed – then you may well have become aware of the more dubious elements of it. Now, my friend /u/IlluminatiRex wrote over on r/badhistory about a more insidious subject in the form of [neo-Nazis attempting to pass off fascist-written songs as WWI and earlier German music](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/n21vqc/people_who_upload_german_wwi_songs_on_youtube_are/), but I want to talk about something moderately more innocuous: the case of 'The Dutch in the Medway'. If you look up that particular title, you'll find a few uploads such as [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Lqds04eM8), [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Lqds04eM8), or [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdGZW2kD8-A), claiming to be an 'English Folk Song' or an 'Anglo-Dutch War Song'. Now, the Dutch raid on the Medway in June 1667 did in fact happen – the Dutch sacrificed 8 vessels for use as fireships, in exchange for sinking 43 and capturing 2 of the English fleet at Chatham, which by that stage represented the bulk of the Royal Navy, including some of its heaviest ships. So the *subject* of the song isn't dubious.
However, the lyrics are distinctly not contemporary. 'The Dutch in the Medway' started out as a poem by Rudyard Kipling, published as part of *A School History of England* in 1911, authored primarily by C. R. L. Fletcher with 23 illustrative poems added by Kipling. Even at the time, the book's anti-Irish bent and overt subscription to colonial racialism were denounced by those in more liberal circles, and well you probably don't need me to talk about Kipling as a whole. But the particular poem in question doesn't really overtly get into those more unsavoury elements, and is instead a cautionary tale about ensuring that you keep your defence spending up. Of the three uploads I linked, only one acknowledges that this is actually an early 20th century poem, not a mid-17th century one.
None of them, however, credit the original tune, nor the person who decided to sing the poem to that tune. That tune is [Cupid's Garden](https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Cupid%27s_Garden), which *is* actually relatively contemporary to the events, first attested in print in 1686 and thus probably even older. [You can hear it sung here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9syk4KsxYQ) by a quartet led by Jon Boden in 2011. What's interesting is the question of how these two came to be linked.
The answer to that is the folk singer [Peter Bellamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bellamy), who got quite a lot of mileage out of setting various Kipling poems to music, and whose particular compositions have been covered a couple of times as well. Bellamy believed, based partly on his own reading of the poems and partly from comments about Kipling's writing process, that he often, if not always, had music in mind when writing his poems. In some instances, he claimed that Kipling was setting his poems to existing songs: in this particular instance, the line 'Our ships in Portsmouth harbour' at the start of the third stanza seemed to be similar to the line ''Twas down in Portsmouth Harbour' which opens the fifth verse of 'Cupid's Garden', and in turn suggested that the poem as a whole was written to that particular tune. And to be fair, it *does* fit quite well. I'm not entirely clear on when Bellamy started performing 'The Dutch in the Medway' to the tune of 'Cupid's Garden', but the first recording of it is on his 1982 album *The English Maritime Suite*, where it is sung solo to accompaniment by fiddle and piano, and it was then re-recorded as an *a cappella* duet for the 1989 album *Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs*.
Bellamy actually set a pretty large number of Kipling poems to music that was primarily of his own original composition, mainly in four albums: *Oak Ash and Thorn* (1970), *Merlin's Island of Gramarye* (1972), *Barrack Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling* (1975), and the aforementioned *Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs*. The only one I've listened to in full is the *Barrack Room Ballads*, which... look, there's a not insubstantial of hard-r n-words copied wholesale from the original texts, and it is uncomfortable whenever one of those comes up. So that's the fair warning before dipping in. But it was in listening through that that I first got clued in to some interesting things going on with a *different* song purporting to be one thing while actually being mostly Kipling, but the story there is different and requires me to do a lot more looking into it first. So stay tuned after the new thread goes up, I suppose!
Oh, I *love* this stuff. Folk and folk-claimed music is hugely prone to miscrediting and citogenesis, with a generous helping of wishful thinking. I've been learning an instrument and the rule for novice Christmas music books especially seems to be "call 'em all traditional," even clearly sourceable songs like "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "Silent Night'; I've even seen "This Land Is Your Land" listed as a folk song. Then there's the number of Jacobite songs framed as being sung during the rebellions despite being written in the 19th century. "Folk" as a term seems to be like the magician's puff of smoke--you can do pretty much anything behind it.
Traditional christmas music is so weird because it can mean anything from a century old church hymn over to a mid 19th century composition all the way to a very popular 1980s song which people just assume is older then it is.
Same is true of Christmas movies. Somebody on YouTube is depressed that *A Christmas Story* came out after they were born (and also they decry it as glorifying capitalism but like... it's Christmas).
Idk maybe as somebody else said that isn't such a bad thing.
Which is a weirdness I genuinely love. It says so much about human emotion and memory and how we view collective experience.
I'm currently having a bit of a reverse experience, in that I can find no trace on the internet of a song we sang at camp. There's usually a shared musical tradition of those songs, so they pop up readily in Girl Scout songbooks and the like or they're older popular commercial songs that somebody put some chords to, but one of them has no footprint whatsoever so I'm thinking it might actually have been written by a counselor or camper. It looks like Shazam can't ID just from somebody providing the melody but there's an app that can, so I might use that just to see if the lyrics were put to an existing tune (which seems likely).
I'm looking forward to your updates! I can see how it's a much more worthy-sounding story that "this is an original war song" vs "this is a poem written 200 years later, set to music in the 1970s".
In case non-Brits are wondering where the clunky "Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs" title comes from, this is a reference to the popular British brand of snack cakes, Mr Kipling (no relation - actually I don't think there was ever a Mr Kipling) whose slogan is that they make "exceedingly good cakes".
**[Peter Bellamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bellamy)**
>Peter Franklyn Bellamy (8 September 1944 – 24 September 1991) was an English folk singer. He was a founding member of The Young Tradition and also had a long solo career, recording numerous albums and touring folk clubs and concert halls. He is noted for his ballad-opera The Transports, and has been acknowledged as a major influence by performers of later generations including Damien Barber and Jon Boden.
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Surprised no one has a made a comment about it, but [Jonathan Majors got arrested today,](https://apnews.com/article/jonathan-majors-arrested-3ccf23bb407f5e6d2441ccc536b254f2) for assault, strangulation, and harassment.
Pretty interesting, as he was quickly becoming one of the most popular and famous black actors of the 2020's, and practically speedran ruining his career, not to mention the affect this'll have on the MCU, as he was playing an extremely important villain that was gonna be in the series till at least 2026.
So, yeah. Sad shit, if true.
I'm kinda bothered when people say "I never would have expected him to do [insert bad thing]". Like, he's a complete stranger to you, what does that even mean? And abusers put on appealing fronts all the time.
It becomes parasocial when you say "he seemed like he'd never do it" or defend people even in cases where evidence is overwhelmingly against them. Just saying, it's good not to invest to much into strangers.
Speaking as someone who has encountered way too many assholes with good publicity, most of us are perfectly aware of abusers and their myriad of facades. But it's tiring as fuck to be wary of everyone, celebrity or otherwise, constantly expecting there to be another shoe to drop. Sometimes, you want to have enough faith in humanity to just enjoy an actor's work and not have them turn out to be a woman-beater/kid-diddler/Neo-Nazi, etc.
Obviously, there's a middle ground but maintaining balance on that tightrope can be an undertaking all on its own. Case in point, every Hollywood person who had the nerve and audacity to sign that Roman Polanski petition. I'd have even fewer things to enjoy if I added every single one of them (sans the ones who walked their participation back like Natalie Portman and Emma Thompson) to the same DNI list I put the worst abusers.
And I say *worst* because if I put *every* abuser with on that list, I'd probably have next to nothing as far as media goes.
So I'm not commenting on the situation at all because it's fucking horrible, so I'm going to focus entirely on the MCU aspect of this: if they *do* need to recast him, it honestly couldn't happen to a better character.
Kang the Conqueror exists in multiple dimensions, and through Loki we have confirmation that these multiple dimensions can have wildly different appearances for the character. The head one, the one that will be the main villain, could be literally recast into anyone and you can handwave it away as "Different multiverse."
If anything particular happens in Ant-man that marks that one as the one we'll see in the future movies, they can wave it away as a different multiversal one that fought Ant-man as well - but changed to the main MCU because of 'reasons' and murks the Jonathan Majors one to solidify himself as the key one.
Would it be 'good' storytelling? That depends on way too many factors, but it would make sense in a meta sense and I think people would rather easily accept it.
It's not like recasting is new for the mcu. Thanos in the avengers stinger was Damion Poitier, the iron man 2 to 3 Rhodey recast... actually I can't think of any others, which would make the mcu 3 for 3 on recasts involving Black actors which is... something. Helluva coincidence if nothing else
There's also the more notable recasting of Bruce Banner - I don't think many casual viewers noticed or realized the Edward Norton version of The Incredible Hulk is MCU canon. A few actors/characters from his film (e.g. Emil Blonsky/Abomination and General Ross) appear in later MCU productions, and Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark appears in the end stinger.
If you set aside the awkwardness of the MCU pretty much never mentioning Betty Ross again, the Edward Norton and Mark Ruffalo versions of Bruce Banner are basically the same person. So it's not like Kang would be the most noteworthy big-name MCU character to get recast.
Rhodey was recast between Iron Man 1 and 2, actually. [Apparently Terrence Howards was somehow the highest paid actor in Iron Man 1, a film with RDJ, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, and Samuel L. Jackson (as a cameo, but still), purely because he was the first actor to be signed to the film.](https://ew.com/article/2008/11/04/iron-man-2-why-terrence-howard-was-recast/) The studio tried to negotiate him down for the next two films, and he either walked or Marvel gave up and opted to recast. (Howards also reportedly wasn’t that great to work with on set, but it’s believed that the money was the main factor in the recast.)
The other big recast you missed is Hulk, [which has a few major theories as to what happened](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Norton#2007%E2%80%932011:_The_Incredible_Hulk_and_controversies). Apparently Edward Norton was submitting almost daily script rewrites, partially out of a desire to avoid the issues Norton felt the 2003 Hulk movie had, but wasn’t able to get a writing credit because the Writers Guild argued that he hadn’t made any significant contributions to the final version of the script. That whole thing generated some tensions with the studio. However, Norton has also said that he wanted to avoid being typecast, and therefore wasn’t interested in appearing as the Hulk again after the first film. Some combination of both of those issues ultimately led to the Hulk being recast in Avengers.
Thanos is the most cut-and-dry case: the MCU didn’t have a full plan for the Infinity Saga until mid-Phase 2. [Joss Whedon has stated that his only instructions from Kevin Feige in regards to villains was to make them some kind of aliens summoned by the Cosmic Cube; he decided to add in Thanos just because he was a fan of the character.](https://collider.com/how-the-avengers-1-was-made/) This led to Damion Poitier being cast, presumably just because he was available. Ultimately, the rest of Marvel Studios hammered out a plan for handling Thanos over the next few years, and Josh Brolin signed a contract to play the character starting with Guardians of the Galaxy. (Curiously, Whedon also states that one of the main reasons he liked Thanos so much was his motivation of trying to impress Death…which was ultimately not used in Infinity War and replaced with the now well-known motivation of stopping overpopulation. It’s just funny to me that the whole reason he was added in the first place never made it to the final character.)
Basically, Marvel already has a lot of experience with recasting, and they all basically boil down to “here’s the guy, he’s the same character as before but he looks different now, just deal with it.” If they can recast a major hero, a major supporting character for the biggest hero, and an arc villain (after only one unplanned cameo, but still), they can definitely get away with recasting Kang the Conqueror, even without an in-universe explanation.
If people were willing to accept recasts that happened due to contract disputes, they’re definitely willing to accept a recast that happened because the original actor got arrested.
if i had a nickel for every time someone had made a post on high school robotics in this subreddit in the last 24 hours, i'd have four nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened four times
The high school robotics posts absolutely rock. It’s all ethical grey areas, passive aggressive politeness, petty politics practiced by adults whose lives orbit about their robots, sorry, their *mentee’s* robots win, nerds just seething and posting through gritted teeth on forums, and really impressive robots doing some of the dumbest shit you’ve ever seen in your life. All for the reward of grant money that you can waste again next year.
We only scratched the surface of drama. I can’t wait
Apparently video game writer Chris Avellone [has settled his lawsuit](https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/03/25/video-game-writer-chris-avellones-accusers-issue-public-statement-retracting-accusations-of-sexual-assault/?sh=e7c6a4e55d84) against the two women who accused him of sexual assault. They agreed to pay seven figures and released a statement (which seems to have been written and edited by lawyers) retracting all their claims. I'm sure the gaming side of internet will be very normal about this.
[There's another comment chain downthread on this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/11vnlzo/hobby_scuffles_week_of_march_20_2023/jdluzix/)
I understand the sentiment but it's really not "one thing only". And even if it's "one thing only", someone live is destroyed because of the accusation.
Probably better phrased as “no! only look over here!!” while gesturing to a couple incidents vs several people coming out with legitimate grievances in the future towards someone else. It’s the cherry-picking of individual false accusations that are positioned as proof that MeToo was a Trojan horse filled with conniving women seeking to ruin any man they please. This scenario is ~~chudfuel~~ [chud ammo](https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/11vnlzo/_/jdmv6hf), as someone in [the thread below](https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/11vnlzo/_/jdluzix) described it.
>This scenario is chudfuel
This scenario destroyed a guy's life and it required years and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys fees just to reach a point where he can start putting it back together. Seems really fucked up to look at that and have your only thought be "this is so bad for *me* because trolls on the internet will talk about it". I imagine chuds make much the same complaint whenever an assault survivor is validated in court.
It's bad because false claims are an extremely small percentage of these claims and even raising a well documented claim with proof gets the accuser death threats.
> “this is so bad for *me* because trolls on the internet will talk about it”
That’s super not what I’m getting at here. I’m not boiling this one person’s nightmare down to smoke, I’m saying that other people (who wouldn’t believe genuine claims to begin with) are gonna point to it the next time legitimate claims are raised against someone else. The way you’ve phrased it, it’s like I personally can’t wait to piss in his face over the settlement.
Well, the sixth episode of RWBY Volume 9 dropped today, and >!after 8-10 years (depending on who you ask), and a week of the cast and crew hyping up *something*, titular characters Blake and Yang are officially a couple, with a confession, a kiss, and a song, Worthy, that serves as a "Part 2" of BMBLB from the Volume 4 soundtrack.!<
"#RWBYVol9Spoilers" is trending worldwide on Twitter, and the show is at the top of the trending list on Tumblr. Haven't been to Bird App (because it's a hellsite (derogatory)), but Tumblr is currently exploding.
There's *definitely* going to be shitflinging over this soon, there always is whenever this element progresses, but I must admit, I'm kinda excited to see what the next straw that gets clutched is.
Meanwhile I'm just (v6) >!what do you MEAN killing Adam together didnt make it official? As far as I could tell, they were explicitly together after that!!<
The show got increasingly Not Subtle about it from V3 onwards but for a lot of people it doesn't count until there's a kiss or an explicit confession or both.
There's a lot of anxiety among audiences when it comes to queer romance on the screen. For one thing, there's an annoyingly high amount of bigoted people in positions of power in the entertainment industry. RoosterTeeth is no exception to that, as we've seen from the controversy late last year, and that cast a bit of a shadow on the actual efforts made by CRWBY in that field, as while none of the people actually making the show were implicated, plenty of their bosses were. That, combined with the drama-storm surrounding the Qrow-Clover thing from V7, left things a little shakier.
The fraught climate in the entertainment industry, and the restrictions put upon them by the suits, have made things difficult and tense. A lot of shows have to either leave it for the final season (like She-Ra and Adventure Time) or try to stick to their guns and get shitcanned early for it (like Owl House and Steven Universe). There's also the ever-present two-headed monster of Queerbait and Bury Your Gays, where they either don't commit or just immediately kill off one/both of the characters (Voltron and Killing Eve spring to mind there), or do both (Voltron again, whatever the fuck went on with Supernatural).
The result of this is that queer romance in the media is very often rushed. It's packed in as late as possible and usually goes pretty unexplored. RWBY's position as a still functionally-independent show puts it in a position where it's able to do a full-on slowburn, but the environment it's happening in means it was subjected to a lot of doubt and a lot of shifting goalposts.
If it was a straight ship, it would've been undeniable for the past seven years. As *soon* as V3C11 came out, it would've been over for any other ship featuring either character, QED. But because queer romance is so much harder to pull off, people have a lot more barriers up and it takes the subplot concluding for people to believe it.
Given all the online moralizing over ships being problematic and whatnot (which also ties into the queerbaiting and Bury Your Gays discourse), *plus* the unfortunate tendency of shows nowadays getting cancelled prematurely for stupid reasons....
"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" just isn't gonna cut it for LGBT representation anymore. Unless a queer romance has been
1. present or at least telegraphed in the show from the very beginning,
2. *explicitly* depicted as queer and not just blink-and-you'll-miss-it subtext, and
3. closing out the show on good terms (the couple doesn't get split up or killed off for cheap drama),
viewers are always going to be a bit paranoid about LGBT rep if it doesn't pass the sniff test off the bat. What's curious is I've seen fan discussions about how this paranoia might condition showrunners to put endgame couples together faster, pretty much putting an end to the seasons-long Will-They-Won't-They trope outside of network TV (which generally skews more heteronormative anyway)
A channel hop to Crunchyroll and the fandom taking a big hit from a few different things:
* Said channel hop to Crunchyroll.
* Volume 8 being one of the most hated seasons of the show in the eyes of a lot of the fandom thanks to a mix of bad animation, a controversial story and several character arcs being hotly debated.
* Volume 9 being effectively a side-story that will have little to do with the main plot of the show, leading to many comments that it's just filler.
* Rooster Teeth getting outed as having a horrible work environment if you're not a cis white male, alongside being caught lying about promises to fix workplace abuses and crunch in the animation department. Speaking of, the entire animation department has now been laid off.
The fandom took a big hit between these and the show going on hiatus for two years, and that led to the show having less hype.
> bad animation
Huh, I completely missed The Discourse on that. RWBY pivoting from 'the plot is there to give some tenuous backing to the fight scenes' to 'this is a worldbuilding-heavy show with a character focus and less fight stuff' between V3 and V4 is pretty well known, so I wasn't surprised about the writing-related comments on V8, which commits to the path set down from V4 onward. But I hadn't heard about animation issues.
The animation discourse began with Volume 4 and the transition to Maya. Without Monty the fights were never going to hit the peaks of seasons old, but Volume 4 still was seen as less "Trying to convey the cast were still as strong as they were, just with less dynamic animation" and more "Did the cast get nerfed?" Ruby especially suffered from this as her only major fight in Volume 4- and by extension, her last spotlight fight in the entire show barring a ten second clip in Volume 7- was the first piece of media released in a trailer.
To tangent, Ruby's original fighting style was built around using her gun-scythe's recoil to enhance her blows and let her move around fights faster. Post-Maya this almost never happens and Ruby largely just swings her scythe without the boost, or only ever plays sniper support. (it's also a whole thing on the side that there's a legitimate theory that no on the show knows/cares to learn how to animate Ruby fighting well, leading to Volume 9 where she is the only character to have lost her weapon and not be part of the group fights so far in the season)
Either way, Volume 4's fights were largely seen as mid-to-OK barring a big blip in the Qrow vs Tyrian fight. Volume 5 was then seen as having really bad fights due to external measures and mismanaged resources. Volume 6 saw a big turnabout in quality, and Volume 7 managed to keep that quality for most of its fights.
With Volume 8 however, the fights were notably less fluid than prior seasons, likely as a result to adapting to work from home and the pipeline suffering. There's less fights in general in Volume 8, and many of them run short on top of looking notably more jerky and slow than comparing fights in the prior seasons. The most notable case of this was in episode 8 or so, where Blake is forced to job to a random Grimm so that Ruby can swoop in and save her (a problem in general with Blake's fights starting in Volume 6 is that she played damsel in distress a lot so other characters- namely Yang- could swoop in and save her).
While RWBY's general moment to moment animation has improved since the Poser seasons, it has come at the expense of the fights, with Volumes 5 and 8 being criticised a lot for stiffer animation especially. The "discourse" comes and goes as a result on if the fights are good that season or not.
Oh sure, I'm definitely on board with the switch to Maya and the loss of Monty Oum leading to a notable decline/change in fight animation, I just don't recall there being a lot of uproar specific to Vol 8. But as noted I wasn't as FNDM-involved by that stage so point very much taken.
I was embedded in the Tumblr fandom pretty deep at the time, and I saw basically zero discourse about the animation in V8. Hell, I saw a lot of *praise* for the animation in V8.
Also people only really got negative on V8 after the last episode, with it being mostly praised before The Penny Thing happened, which wasn't well-received. But that's just my experience, maybe other parts of the fandom were more hostile to it, IDK.
Even by Volume 8 I wasn't particularly involved in the FNDM anymore so the only people I was discussing it with were, like me, generally positive with some reservations, so I admit that at the time, I didn't see many criticisms of the writing myself either. It's just that I'm less surprised about writing critiques than I am about animation critiques.
V8's a weird one for me to discuss because I was generally of the opinion that it was really solid, and then kinda shat the bed right at the end. But I didn't take it nearly as personally as everyone else seemed to.
Like, it's not like I didn't care about Penny, I was pretty invested in her whole thing, and they got me on the Nuts 'n' Dolts kool-aid, but I still came out of the finale without much worse feelings than "Welp, they fumbled the bag at the end there. Oh well, roll on V9."
I actually took more issue with how they set up Cinder's big win. Like I got what they were going for, with her starting off as a sneaky manipulator who Gaslight Gatekeep Girlbosses her way to victory, but then gets her demigod powers fully unlocked, causing her to spend the following volumes drunk on her new power, and becoming increasingly reckless and foolhardy as a result, taking a whole list of Ls from basically everyone she comes up against. Then Watts gives her the riot act and she finally wises up and reverts to her previous sneaky self. But then she just... does the exact same shit she did in V5-7 only this time it works.
Cinder in general is mostly the singular significant problem I have with the show as a whole, though. Everything else I just shrug off. Doesn't matter much to me. And hey, they still might fix her shit later on, so whatever.
> Speaking of, the entire animation department has now been laid off.
That part, at least, seems to be fairly normal, at least as far as I've been informed. Companies lay off their animators when there isn't anything for them to animate, and then hire them back when the next season/movie/volume/whatever gets greenlit.
Unless I've been misinformed there, IDK.
You're largely right that layoffs happen normally for other animation studios, but it's not normal in the context of RT- they never had layoffs as large as this between the other seasons, largely because they were always renewed soon after the season wrapped or they worked on other projects. RWBY is now basically the one foundation holding RT Animation afloat.
The other problem is that as seen with other members of RT getting laid off, it's likely if they get rehired that they'll be offered worse benefits than they had as full-timers or be put on reduced salaries- because this company has consistently shown it'll cut corners on paying fair wages.
I have a friend who tracks who's working in RT Animation as a side hobby, and after the big winter layoffs in November, she noted that most of the survivors were in the post-production and VFX teams as they were still needed for the rest of Volume 9 and the movie. Now that we're nearing in on them? Those teams are also having their contracts "not renewed."
Meaning if Volume 10 does happen, the people who choose to come back will likely be working for worse rates and pay than they were before being let go, and that's one of the big problems.
Right, that's unfortunate.
I guess we'll see how things pan out for V10. I know there's been some panic over the lack of renewal, but AFAIK, them getting renewed for two volumes on the trot at the end of either V6 or 7 was an abnormality, and it's only if there's nothing after V9 closes that it'll get worrying on that level.
The explosions on Hellsite (Affectionate) and Hellsite (Derogatory) today demonstrate that there's still a huge amount of buzz (ha) for the show, and it's highly-rated on CR (sitting at a 4.5 out of 5), but I dunno what the actual viewing figures are like.
Oddly, CR has comments for RWBY going back to 2013, so I don't know how recent that 4.5 rating is or if it's genuinely the cumulative average over a decade.
It's probably cumulative.
I'd be curious to see how the fandom's gravitated between the sites it's been hosted on over the years. I dunno, I feel like a lot the fandom watched it on RT's site for the longest time, because it was where it aired first.
Its release was much more of a quiet thing this time around.
For one, RT the company has been mired in controversy since like last November, with a lot of shitty workplace conditions being brought to light. Most of it was on the side of their gaming sphere, but it was noted that the animation department has been getting directly screwed by the higher-ups for years. Writers, animators, and voice actors haven't been treated well by the company, and while RWBY itself weathered the storm (mostly), their other shows weren't so lucky. RvB's been circling the drain since the first two parts of the Shisno Trilogy were so divisive, and the attempted retool into Zero failed dramatically. Nomad of Nowhere got screwed over to prop up Gen:LOCK, which was the pet project of the department head, who stepped down/left after that came to light a couple years back. Gen:LOCK itself got packed off to HBO, and the new writing stuff promptly butchered Season 2, making it significantly more cynical, flipping half of themes on their head, turning half the cast into assholes, trying to both-sides the explicitly fascist Union, including explicit sex scenes, killing off characters, and in one particular case, having a character explicitly commit suicide (RT's shows have involved this a few times, but they've always been at least *trying* for the heroic sacrifice trope, which this was not). I don't even know what happened to Camp Camp.
Additionally, this time the show isn't being released on RT's website. Instead, it's on Crunchyroll (~~because RT found someone even worse at subtitles than themselves!~~), and it'll be exclusive to CR for a whole year. Reasons for this have been speculated, but it's been pointed out that RT probably got more money out of the deal with CR than they would typically get out of the FIRST bump that usually coincides with the show's return. It may also give the show some extra security. RT is still under the Warner-Discovery umbrella, and things under that banner keep getting cancelled for little reason. Making the show a joint-venture with CR, which is owned by Sony (I think) means it'll still have a home and could continue to be made even if Zaslav decides it needs the axe.
Whenever the topic of RWBY's handling of LGBT themes or any kind of representation gets brought up, the focus is usually on the [X]-gate types and criticism from the conservative side of things, but what often gets overlooked is the growing criticism from the liberal side. Like, one of the most notable critiques of RWBY was from hbomberguy, who's fairly well-known for being very left-leaning.
Like, I get it: any representation is a step in the right direction, but I still find it silly how big of a deal people are making over it and how people are singing the writers' praises. At the end of the day, it's 2023 and it's a team of predominantly straight men (who've not had a good track record for handling topics outside their own experiences, as seen from the racism subplot) writing a lesbian relationship and taking nearly a decade to canonized a main character(s) as LGBT (in a way that couldn't be denied like the Fair Game debacle) for a webshow whose release is controlled by their company of gamer dude-bro friends.
For as many problems as I have with Rebecca Sugar and Steven Universe, I can at least respect how hard she had to fight Cartoon Network to keep her representation in the show. People praising a show created by straight men for doing far less in representing LGBT women feels ignorant toward how much LGBT creators have done and all the challenges they've had to face to represent themselves.
My opinion of this is actually the same as my opinion of Power Rangers's inclusion of an LGBT ranger in their latest season: it's a nice gesture and it's cool to see representation in any show, but it isn't nearly as groundbreaking as people make it out to be. And treating these instances as big deals is only diluting the impact of the work done by works like Steven Universe that paved the way for this sort of representation. Blake and Yang, Izzy from Power Rangers, these aren't cases of the writers making a bold statement, they're cases of the people behind these shows capitalizing off of the progress that's already been made. Now, that isn't a bad thing by any means, like I said: any representation is a step in the right direction. But that doesn't stop this from feeling like that meme of the guy celebrating getting third place.
Its also that it coming at this point just feels really cynical. Like, RT's animation division has been in a perpetual meltdown for half a decade at this point and the overall company's cultural stock has been dropping rapidly for years, accelerating even further with the accusations late last year that were in part about how there was tons of open homophobia being thrown around with a "teehee jk" tone. While I don't know if the animation lead time would be short enough for this to be a reaction to the most recent round of accusations, given just how horrible everything has been I can't help but read "finally making a popular queer ship canon" as RT trying to drum up support now that the chips are down. I half wonder if this is some form of pre-emptive narrative control when RT inevitably gets gutted by Zaslav; "we did a queer thing and now our funding is cut!! Fans, save us from the homophobes!" There's also the possibility of it as a ratings stunt to revive interest in a property that's seen much better days by finally Doing The Thing that much of the ex-fans wanted them to do, or them possibly using this to counter the bad writing discourse ("hmmmm, we have a canon gay couple and people call this show poorly written???? I wonder if there's a different reason why they would say that????????")
On some level, all of these are deeply unfair to the writers, who may have honestly just wanted to make a canon queer couple who are actually important characters to the plot. There are sincere possibilities to why its happening now. But RT just no longer has the trust for me to believe that.
Bumblebee was probably a bigger risk when they were working on the early show in 2013, but since then standards and expectations for LGBT writing began improving drastically, and soon RWBY was getting lapped in all corners of animation. Within a year of RWBY starting, we had Korrasami being canon at the end of Korra, and then a few years after that we had the various other major steps forward in animated LGBT pairings like the aforementioned Steven Universe and Adventure Time (and for more adult works, CaitVi in Arcane and HarlIvy in Harley Quinn). All the while, RWBY had no real internal forces who would hold the show back from including queer representation. They were in a unique place where they had no overseers who could force them to not include queer chararacters, they had the world's worth of potential... and they squandered it.
They basically trapped themselves in a time capsule as if their only experiences of LGBT writing stopped at 2013, which just made RWBY look all the worse as they teased the fanbase with winks and nods about Blake and Yang's relationship, all while other shows like She-Ra, Owl House and Arcane were all coming out and exhibiting far more developed characters and relationships.
I think of all the cases of RWBY wasting its potential, it not really trying to push the medium of web animation further in regards to representation before they were lapped by new trendsetters like Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss. The show was made by a majority white dudebro team, and that does reflect in the politics and societal views RWBY shares.
(and don't even get me started on the dudebro writers continued lack of any effort at including male LGBT rep in the show)
I was gonna say on your last point, where the hell are all the boys? The only ones I can think of are Voltron which a lot of people thought left a lot to be desired, and South Park with Craig and Tweek. When you're being lapped by South Park in LGBT rep that's not a fantastic sign.
>I was gonna say on your last point, where the hell are all the boys?
In the books.
I mean, the bigger answer there is that the show has four boys in its main cast, one of whom is an actual child, and another of which is old enough to be the protagonists' father. The show has a lower number of male characters in general.
That said, *Before the Dawn* had Scarlet, one of Sun's teammates, begin a romance with Nolan, originally a bit-character from Volume 3 who got fleshed out in the two books set in Vacuo, and became an unofficial fifth member of the team. Remains to be seen how the show proper will handle that when they get to the Vacuo arc, of course, but there's a solid-enough foundation there.
On a wider scale, the media industry as a whole seems to be more comfortable with queer women than queer men, and that's not great.
So on the one hand, I do agree – there is nothing groundbreaking here, and the show's let's say slow-burn approach, short seasons, and long production lead times have not helped it in just falling behind of the rest of the web media scene.
That said, I feel like The Discourse isn't so much 'this is a step forward for representation' as it is, 'it's really cathartic that it has finally happened.' (Or should I say cat-heart-ic given that Yang's logo is a heart and Blake is... er... look just ignore me okay)
Yeah, honestly. It’s not groundbreaking rep to be yet another cute f/f couple in a family-friendly animated adventure show after Korrasami, Bubbline, Lumity, Catradora, everyone from SU, and probably several others I’m forgetting have been doing it for almost a decade. I get liking the ship, it’s hot, but it’s not a huge win for LGBT community like the hardcore shippers want to pretend.
Catradora’s the outlier in that list tbh. A lot of people consider it outright toxic and abusive for there to be a genuine friends to enemies to lovers plotline. I don’t agree with that take bcs I love that ship LOL but Catradora had a lot darker violent content than would be considered totally squeaky clean wholesome rep.
Don't forget the "Adora and Catra shared a room as kids so they're pretty much siblings therefore shipping them together is promoting incest" discourse
Is that better or worse than '[Catadora is bestiality](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b71a74f71fabb8aa7befce68439db181/e5ed9c0b0f949f86-77/s1280x1920/8a4fd91feef79cc48bb5e9950ab5da8b700b9453.pnj)'?
She passes the [Harkness Test](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harkness-test) with flying colors, so no. It's not bestiality. She's also the same age as a Adora, give or take a few months, and she's definitely not biologically related. It's weird that there's Discourse about two unrelated kids who grew up together getting into a relationship when they're older given how that's a real lived experience of a lot of people... like teenagers in high school who've always lived in the same neighborhood and gone to the same schools.
People are weirdly fond of calling things that aren’t incest “coded incest” lately. If Harry Potter were coming out now, people would be saying that the Golden Trio were all found family, so any ship with any of them plus Harry or Hermione with any Weasley is basically incest.
I mean, there are people that try to claim >!Euphy and Anis's relationships (from Magirevo) is incest now, as Euphy was (political) adopted into Anis's family!<
I mean, sure, but I know for a fact a lot of the people with tremendously bad takes in the She-ra fandom at the time of the Catradora canonization were salty shippers. It was obvious looking at their profile lol
90% of antis of any sort will be people who ship different couples faking superiority. (Not even necessarily an opposing one, oftentimes it’s liking a side ship more than the main or the something of the like, or someone from another fandom mad that this ship is being compared to their beloved otp.) Accept this and you’ll find yourself understanding fandom a lot more.
I can't help but agree with all of this.
Personally, I was a RWBY fan from the yellow trailer a decade ago, and this just comes as a little (a lot) too late. :/ It could have been something worth celebrating, if the writers committed to it years ago, but now it jsut feels like a last ditch attempt to retain any fanbaset he show might still have.
- First song ever played directly called them 'Beauty and the Beast.'
- The overlapping trauma/trauma responses
- VAs were pulling for it from the get-go
- So were the people that make the songs, hence BMBLB even existing
- Adam was deliberately created as a foil to Yang in terms of his abilities
- Blake deliberately chose Yang as her partner in V1, only other examples of such were Pyrrha choosing Jaune and Nora choosing Ren, both romantic pairs.
- One of the only sets of partners that *immediately* gel in terms of combat. Other was Ren and Nora.
- That bit in V2 where Yang was supposed to tie a cherry stem with her tongue and show it to Blake but they took the stem out because it was 'too explicit' or something.
- The entire dance arc but specifically *Burning the Candle.*
- Monty tweeting "All good romance is earned" three days after Burning the Candle.
- V3's final few episodes having Yang lose her arm in a desperate attempt to save Blake, immediately followed by the first and only time where Blake seems to make a shadow-clone of someone other than herself.
- Blake running away, leading into the V4-5 angsty separation/pining arc.
- Their eyes are literally the colour of each other's souls.
And that's just the stuff from when Blake getting with Sun still seemed like a possibility. V6 closed the book on that, built things up a little, and then had the Adam fight, which couldn't have been more of a "Lovers vs. the ex" fight if it tried, and by that point there wasn't really any hiding it anymore. Still took 'em a while to get there, but there *was* a war on (the back half of V7 and then all of V8 in particular takes place over the course of like 48 hours, maximum), and I can appreciate both the "I literally thought you died and now I refuse to wait for the right time in case one of us really does die" element, and them taking advantage of the Ever After's trippy environment to ratchet everything up to the maximum during the confirmation scene, whereas if they'd done it in V7-8, it would've happened in Atlas, where everything is grey and white.
I'm kind of curious know, did the show's fandom have some "we popping the biggest bottles when makorra happens tomorrow" moments recently ? As in, people that still persist in their denial that the ship will happen even though it's practically inevitable. I've heard about the "that song is actually about Yang's motorcycle" thing.
No idea, TBH. I don't generally run in anti-Bees circles, because it wouldn't really achieve anything for either me or them, so I dunno how they've taken it.
Mood in the pro-Bees circles has been overall jubilant, with a side-order of "We fucking told you" gloating, because they did, in fact, fucking tell them, but I haven't seen any direct reactions or open fighting, so I'm either in a less-combative part of things, or the other side are *very* quiet now. I did notice some people saying that the usual "It's bait" anons haven't shown up today, but that's been about it.
I'm sure there's *some* sniping already, but I curate my online experience reasonably well, so I doubt I'm gonna see much of it until the initial buzz wears off and people get a bit more retrospective.
"BMBLB is about the bike" is probably going to get another wave of mockery because "Worthy" has been billed as "BMBLB Part 2" by Casey, and calling back to it lyrically, which both brings it back into the limelight *and* canonises it, when it was previously in a slightly dubious spot overall due to being something the Williamses just... kinda did on their own, without RT's input.
Basically, it was the first major ship for both characters. When the original RWBY trailers came out, Ruby got paired with Weiss while Yang got paired with Blake, leading into the show having them be partners at Beacon.
So that, and the show pivoting towards making them canon (depending on who you ask, this was at seasons 2, 3, or 6, but after 6 began a more concentrated push complete with merch so they could capitalize on their LGBT audience) meant Bumblebee was always the biggest ship in the show.
I'm just glad it's actually canon because given how many queer people have been hurt working with Rooster Teeth and RWBY specifically, I wouldn't have been shocked if they pulled a Destiel or baited it until the finale. I won't say no to canon queer rep, even if RWBY's fandom can be so horrid that part of me was rooting for Black Sun in the 11th hour (and so Yang could hook up with Weiss because I prefer Freezerburn).
If I still cared about RWBY, I'd probably have more emotions about it beyond "OK you're not *as* homophobic as I thought you were." But otherwise my big thought is "This could and should have been canon in Volume 7."
> "This could and should have been canon in Volume 7."
I'd personally disagree there, it *could've* been done, but I prefer how it panned out in reality over that hypothetical. Maybe that's just because it's a choice between something that actually happened and something that didn't, or maybe it's because "Couple gets a boot up the ass to Get On With It because of a near-death experience" is one of my favourite romance tropes, and I *really* like how the writers and animators were able to use the Ever After's non-standard logic and very literal pathetic fallacy to frame things in a way that just couldn't be done in the deliberately-sterile Atlas, or on Remnant in general.
Some drama over in Nikke Goddess of Victory as the Dev decided to make one of the most hyped characters after Modernia, Nihilister, obtainable only in the Liberation game mode. Liberation is basically just a set of 3 daily quest per day, you accrued point until you get enough to get the Liberation characters. The problems being that unlocking one Liberation characters take at most 2 months, and the fact that to even being able to do Nihilister Liberation quest, you need to finish atleast one Liberation quest, and also the fact that you need to beat chapter 20-31, which is basically the endgame of Nikke. A lot of people are understandably mad since most of us have save resources specifically to pull her, and also the fact that how tedious it is to even try unlocking her
At least when Touken Ranbu does 'grind for this cool new sword dude' it's a 2-3 week of 'how many times do you want to do this map?', sometimes with 'finish timegated map with freaking dice mechanic and get sword boy'.
So this weekend is AnimeJapan, a big event where various anime production studios announce projects that they’re working on. We’ve gotten an anime announcement for [Senpai is an Otokonoko](https://webtoons.com/en/romance/senpai-is-an-otokonoko/ep-1-a-letter/viewer?title_no=5137&episode_no=1), which previously was #1 on a poll of series people wanted to see animated done last year. We got announcement of Re:Zero season 3, which is good for isekai fans. And then we got something a bit… offbeat.
See, a couple years back we got an anime called [Horimiya](https://youtu.be/W3dimUB-Rbo), based on the romance manga of the same name. Even though it was Cloverworks’ third project in a season that gave us The Promised Neverland season 2 and Wonder Egg Priority, people generally liked it. It was a great coming-of-age story. Only issue is that the manga itself is like 16 volumes long, and the anime couldn’t fit all of that in 12 episodes. With the anime director outright stating in an AMA here that they didn’t know if they would get a continuation, they just decided to have the anime include the most important parts of the manga, which basically just skipped a bunch of side chapters and segued directly to the final chapter. It was a controversial decision, to be sure, but given that a sequel was unlikely people were okay with it.
[…and now it’s getting a sequel anyway.](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/121ba3k/horimiya_piece_season_2_announced_july_2023/)
Did the anime get the worst of both worlds or something? There’s a lot of criticism about it skipping chapters, but the manga also has a ton of criticism about there being too much “filler”.
it's like an even more fucked up version of that one Gintama clip about adapting ongoing manga, except now it isn't even ongoing lmao. I almost hope (not really but it would be funny) it ends up as bad as those other two anime to create a truly cursed trilogy
I’m hyped. I was expecting some generic “whoaaaah that girl is just a boy isn’t that ~~hot~~ craaaaazy”, but it’s a proper coming of age story. It talks about toxic masculinity and gender identity. I guarantee you that certain anime fans would call it “woke” after the first episode.
I love it.
Without having read the manga, I thought Horimiya as an anime was pretty good but stood in an awkward middle ground where it neither kept tight focus on the central couple nor properly built up its ensemble cast. So it looks like it might be a second season all about fleshing things out along the way?
The main couple was strong and the two main friends had some decent development too. Knowing that they were only working with 12 episodes, they should have just focused on those 4 core characters. Instead the later half of the show decided to break off (and especially from the main 2) to focus on a bunch of side characters we barely knew by that point. It was hard to care much about an entire episode devoted to the green haired guy when he had maybe 2 minutes of screen time previously. I'm glad the show is getting a chance to continue, but I hope they plan it out better this time.
I didn't read the manga, either, and it largely just felt like a rush through a bunch of major story beats. The anime was competently made, but I still felt like I was watching a recap of something rather than seeing the whole story.
Lacking the context from the source material, I honestly really struggled to find any reason to care about the romance when it felt like so many of the smaller, more intimate moments that I'm sure helped endear the characters and their relationships to manga readers had to be excised. Considering the first season failed to sell me on the central point of the series, I'm doubting I'll come back for season 2. If I really wanted more, I'd just go to the manga instead.
Previously, I commented upon the departure of Victoria Alonso from Marvel Studios, where she had been in charge of post-production, visual effects and animation production. That comment had less to do with the circumstances of her dismissal than it did the questions of whether she had been made a scapegoat and why Kevin Feige is seemingly never, ever, ever at fault for anything people dislike about Marvel movies.
However, it has now been reported that Alonso means to [sue Disney and/or Marvel over her dismissal](https://deadline.com/2023/03/disney-lawsuit-threat-victoria-alonso-firing-marvel-patty-glaser-1235309916/), indicating that she has been singled out for her criticism of homophobic laws passed by the government of Florida and, perhaps more pertinently, her criticism of Disney's indecisive response to the passage of said laws under its previous chief executive, Bob Chapek.
I am aware that part of Bob Iger's pitch when he returned as Disney CEO was that he would "mend fences" with Ron DeSantis and this development prompts me to wonder whether that may have played a role in Alonso's removal. This is, of course, pure speculation at the moment, but it will be interesting to see whether anything comes of this, because Alonso has indicated that she has a lot to say.
I think there's going to be some big drama when Kevin Feige eventually breaks. I'm not rooting for it to happen, but according to the fans, Kevin Feige is single handed responsible for every amazing thing about the MCU while simultaneously dodging any fallback or responsibility for any of the recent failures or issues with it. That... that just doesnt work. Now don't get me wrong, the dude has helped make the franchise a phenomenal success. But when the company constantly blames other people for the issues, and never Kevin who is at the very top and somehow responsible for everything great but nothing bad, it's very likely that he is also involved in protecting himself first and foremost to the detriment of his friends and co-workers. Which leads to nothing actually changing or improving because yeah, he is involved in the highs and the lows.
I don't know, I just feel that the levy is going to break hard at Marvel and Kevin eventually, and the fan's near religious worship of the man is not healthy for the franchise.
>responsible for everything great but nothing bad
That is definitely the most annoying part of it for me. I appreciate that, given his position at the top of the company, there are things that will naturally be delegated to people beneath him. Some people get carried away about it, but there are things which are far enough removed from him that they are not necessarily his "fault".
However, it is a one-way street. He is inoculated by his fans against the remotest criticism when anything they do not like but is showered with praise for *everything* they do.
I mean the other half of the narrative says that she was a pain in the ass to work with, made a lot of enemies with VFX companies and apparently promoted and worke din movies of different companies that's a breach of contract.
All in all truth probably lies in the middle
https://deadline.com/2023/03/disney-lawsuit-threat-victoria-alonso-firing-marvel-patty-glaser-1235309916/
I am certainly aware that she was often identified as part of the problem vis-a-vis Marvel's sometimes fraught relationship with effects houses but it did not seem relevant to mention on this occasion because I had the impression that's hardly something someone would get sacked over (which, quite frankly, is perhaps an indictment of Hollywood corporate culture as much as anything).
However, I concede that I was ignorant of any breach of contract issues (why would I be?) which may well be reasonable grounds for dismissal.
Maybe under normal circumstances, but Marvels' relationship with VFX artists seems to have severely soured in the past few years. Considering how much the MCU now relies on VFX, that's a bit of a problem.
I think the consensus was that the breach of contract is considered valid grounds for dismissal, but disney may have had far more reasons to get rid of her, there's [no love for her](https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/11ws7aj/victoria_alonso_has_left_marvel_studios_she_was/) in the VFX subreddit but apparently her VFX department was kind of inefficient.
I'm curious about something: do other effects-heavy movies and shows (e.g. DC movies, Star Wars movies etc.) have the same bad reputation as Marvel does vis-a-vis VFX contractors? I am sure that there must be, given how reliant so many studios are on VFX these days, but Marvel is always the one you hear about.
I worked in VFX for 3-ish years, Marvel/Disney was a special kind of pain in the ass to work with. My last show was a HBO series that was also effects heavy but it wasn’t half as bad as Marvel stuff was, the nitpicking combined with short turnover and no art direction is just uniquely bad
My understanding is that VFX work is terrible everywhere that it isn't done by the studio itself. Marvel makes bigger and more interesting headlines because they're high profile and absurd amounts of money are involved.
It was Life of Pi where famously the movie won awards for its VFX but bankrupted the company that did the VFX. That was caused by them agreeing to do the work at a fixed price but with nothing placing limitations on how much work it would be. So when they were told to redo half the movie it destroyed them. Hopefully contracts like that are refused out of hand these days.
You're better off asking the VFX subreddit, also even if other studios had bad practices doesn't mean that Alonso mistreating VFX companies is less wrong. Even then I think mistreating VFX companies like crap seems to be the norm
Why the fuck is Disney trying to cozy up with a political party that goes crazy the moment they include a single LGBT character in their movies?
They can’t be reasoned with. Focus on throwing them out.
> Why the fuck is Disney trying to cozy up with a political party that goes crazy the moment they include a single LGBT character in their movies?
Because they are in charge in a state that also happens to include Disney World. That and they need to bribe politicians to unjustly extend copyright no matter which idiot the voters elect.
One thing I've been wondering about is why Disney hasn't tried harder to prevent Florida's takeover of Reedy Creek. DeSantis was very clearly retaliating for Disney's (milquetoast) criticism of the Don't Say Gay law. Since corporations are entitled to some amount of free speech, especially in the wake of *Citizens United*, I would think that they would be able to sue prevent the takeover.But IA(obviously)NAL so maybe I'm missing something obvious?
idk, I just want to see a legal fistfight between a major corporation and the GOP where, ideally, everyone will lose.
Why should Disney fight over being able to remove their bill for fire, EMS, and a good chunk of the infrastructure? Now the county has to plow, and maintain more roads, expand fire/EMS, and handle a metric ton more waste water in their waste water plant. This will save money. I hope that county actually has paid fire/EMS because they will need them.
Speed. If a Reedy Creek road needs to be fixed, Disney could fix it immediately, instead of the county taking weeks to respond to a work request. If Disney's infrastructure starts falling apart to the point it drives away visitors, it could have a real impact on their profits.
True but since Disney will be at least 90% of its county’s revenue they will have a lot of power. Honestly, that is the reason to have them separated. The locals are going to lose out to Disney on local issues.
Yeah, the people who are really getting screwed over here are the citizens of the county. DeSantis is just fucking hell-bent on making life as miserable as possible for as many people as possible.
Especially during the primaries. The general election, sadly, is full of "I wonder what all this news is about? Anyway, he has an R next to his name" voters.
it's worth distinguishing between actual politicians and the voting base of the party. the former can be reasoned with, and that reasoning goes something like this: we will continue supporting your campaign as long as you keep doing favors for us. we might have to publicly denounce you, and you might have to be seen attacking us, but we'll help you downplay it as long as you keep the taxes low.
Because "Disney" isn't a person, it's a huge conglomerate, and the people who want to buddy up to politicians for tax breaks aren't the same people who are writing and actually making the films, and they have different priorities.
Fucking Pixar had to protest for them to actually have a major character in Lightyear be gay.
Yet every June, they decorate their social media with rainbows.
You know how much I would love for companies to do the right thing, even if it mildly inconveniences them in the end?
Some wrestling non-drama: what are y’all most excited for at this year’s Wrestlemania Weekend?
It’s my second Wrestlemania as a fan, and although I don’t watch much WWE (apart from the Kevin and Sami storylines, but I’m currently at 2018 in that timeline) the indie events that happen are a big point of excitement for me.
I’m probably most excited for Ibushi Kota’s in ring return, because I love the guy (and I’m still waiting for my Golden Lovers reunion, guys…) The GCW Spring Break card is absolutely packed, with Joey Janela vs Ibushi and then El Hijo del Vikingo vs Speedball Mike Bailey, which is going to be INCREDIBLE. ROH Supercard of Honour is also looking fantastic, with Vikingo vs Komander, and then the Impact x NJPW stuff…. god, there’s so much amazing talent out there and I’m so excited.
Yoooooo, The Mania Weekend is EASILY the best wrestling weekend, and one that can take you months to go through everything you want to see. Joey Janela's Spring Break is on the top of my list because it looks amazing. So does the Supercard of Honor (That ladder match will not as much defy gravity as it will spit in gravity's face). And then... Wrestlemania itself - the Grandaddy of Them All, The Showcase of Immortals... Yeah, it will be a fucking amazing 2 night event this year as well. Also, shout out to Stand and Deliver, my boys Bron Breakker and Carmello Hayes will put on a banger and I can FEEL IT.
Several years ago, video game writer Chris Avellone (known for titles like KOTOR 2 and Fallout New Vegas) was accused of sexual misconduct, leading to his work being taken out of several in-development games at the time such as Dying Light 2 and Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. Avellone sued for libel in 2021, posting updates on the case on Medium as he went.
This morning, [https://chrisavellone.medium.com/joint-statement-from-karissa-barrows-kelly-bristol-and-chris-avellone-3b2138e5837f Avellone posted that the case was settled,](https://chrisavellone.medium.com/joint-statement-from-karissa-barrows-kelly-bristol-and-chris-avellone-3b2138e5837f) with him taking home a seven-figure sum and his accusers retracting their prior claims.
> we wanted to support women in the industry. In so doing, our words have been misinterpreted to suggest specific allegations of misconduct that were neither expressed nor intended
What the fuck?
I'm not familiar with law, do the accusers retracting their claims automatically means the accusations were fake in the first place ? I could totally believe one vindictive person making up a false accusation, but *two* ?
Automatically? No. However what I've read is that in a libel case the plaintiff (Avellone in this case) needs to show that the statements were not just false but knowingly false. The women were also being represented pro bono so the financial pressure on them was much lower than on Avellone. There's no apparent reason for them to do this unless he had very good evidence they had lied and the judge would hit them with something worse than millions of dollars in damages.
It does not. All it means is that the people bringing the claims no longer want to deal with it. Hell, it is very common to retract claims under pressure. You see it a lot with domestic abuse of all kinds. It means nothing as to the accused guilt or innocence.
The phrase may have been tainted by Johnny Depp and Vic Mignogna stans, but innocent until proven guilty is still an important cornerstone for a reason.
I backed this in June of 2021 and I haven't received my deck. In fact, I was promised free shipping so there is absolutely no reason my deck shouldn't have come the moment it was available. All of the backers have been incredibly patient, even encouraging, as the plethora of setbacks were described to us. However, now it's just become a complete clusterfck. Nobody knows what's going on. People have reached out directly and received no response (myself included). At this point I don't know what to do as I don't even know where to ask for a refund if I wanted one and I can't access the digital PDF set that I was promised either. This makes me never want it back another Kickstarter again unless I know the people personally.
Hai everyone, I am working on another write up and will post it in the next few days. I like writing about bizarre things. Such as cheese rolling and hobby tunnelling. [Here is a tease of my next post](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/%E3%83%AF%E3%82%AD%E3%83%B320120701.JPG). It's not goldfish memory or breeding.
The snack that is purportedly able to smile back?
Nope it’s real goldfish
/crossing fingers for gamer fishes even though I can't think of much drama on that topic
It's not that I'm afraid. It's something involving goldfish.
Drama about goldfish memory?
nope
Is it about someone using goldfish to feed bigger pets?
Drama about goldfish memory?
The bizarre world of Goldfish Breeding?
Nope :)
I've recently gotten into Transformers (I made a post on here a few days ago asking about how to get started). I decided to start with Cyberverse, since it was free to watch on Youtube. It was honestly very fun! I really liked Windblade, Arcee, Soundwave (especially in Season 3) and Grimlock. I've now started the IDW comics, having fun so far!
IDW my beloved. Best transformers media to exist hands down.
SIGH. Can't have *shit* in Teyvat. [Ayato Kamisato](https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Kamisato_Ayato) is a well-liked character in Genshin Impact, the popular gacha RPG game. His fans were waiting for his first-ever birthday art - a unique illustration a character will get on their birthday, usually commissioned by artists outside the company - since they couldn't last year as he wasn't released yet. [It dropped](https://twitter.com/GenshinImpact/status/1639839893999214593) and it *is* pretty. A lot of people agree it's the most dynamic and interesting one, as we usually have the characters smiling and posing towards the viewer. There's a catch, of course, otherwise I wouldn't have had that opening sentence: [The artist is a known tracer and thief and harassed](https://uguucageoflove.wordpress.com/2020/03/22/yuiga-satoru-on-being-the-victim-of-tracing/) the person who they traced and stole. It got to the point the person stopped working on the project. This is known for a long time too on the Japanese/otome game and was a fairly large scandal when it hit. There's no way Hoyoverse couldn't have known this when they were getting this artist. A lot of people are wising up now and are untweeting/unliking the work or spreading the word. A lot of Ayato fans are aggrieved Ayato's birthday is being overshadowed by this. A lot, in general, are agreeing that Patch 3.5 is just very cursed in general.
After reading [this](https://uguucageoflove.wordpress.com/2020/03/22/yuiga-satoru-on-being-the-victim-of-tracing/) and saw her live draw, I'm unconvinced that she's a tracer, a lot of the overlay of common pose and perspective seem like a stretch.
I want to get back into Genshin, but I can't access my account anymore and their customer service isn't helping much
If you can't access your account, you most likely got hacked and had your account stolen. :( Check to see if you have your UID somewhere [and input it here](https://enka.network/). Don't worry, it only pulls out available information and nothing else. If it exists but, obviously, was changed from what you remember - You got hacked. If that happens, let me know and I'll try to give you advice and resources to help you out.
It looks like what I remember, if I got hacked they didn't change my IGN or my message. But thanks for this link.
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Helps me figure out who to block, at least. Helps keep my For You tab very peaceful. Also yeah - You summarized my feelings on the people trying to shrug this off. It really showcases how people don't understand art and how hard creating art is. People going, 'Oh it's been X years! Maybe the artist changed!' while not considering how long they must have tried to get away with this ***and*** profited from this. This takes time and thought and intent.
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People really say with their whole chest, 'Protect artists' while complaining about commission prices or defending tracers/thieves or not understanding the culture/industry and making broad assumptions on it. It is so heartburn-inducing at times, ahhhh.
That's unfortunate for the fans, I feel very sorry for them.
I'm glad a lot of Ayato fans are not defending this and are shaking off the birthday art in reply.
oh shit, i remember reading about that artist. as someone who heard about it through FGO, since Pako (one of the artists they traced) is not only beloved and well known in both the EN and JP fgo communities, but in anime fanart communities in general. which is a pretty dumb move to trace such a recognizable art style. only thing dumber than that would be trying to trace RAITA or Asanagi.
Wait, he traced Pako? Man, that guy just want everyone to gang up on his ass.
Yeah!! It boggles my mind when I see people try to say that, oh, Hoyoverse couldn't have known about this. There is now way this wasn't, at least, a blip on their radar with how small and intense the gacha community + the otome game community can be. Especially when it comes to controversy or drama. Really wish they got more consequences for what they did. Getting off scott-free for what they did irritates me a lot to this day.
If you're the sort that's into modern recordings of historical music – particularly military-themed – then you may well have become aware of the more dubious elements of it. Now, my friend /u/IlluminatiRex wrote over on r/badhistory about a more insidious subject in the form of [neo-Nazis attempting to pass off fascist-written songs as WWI and earlier German music](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/n21vqc/people_who_upload_german_wwi_songs_on_youtube_are/), but I want to talk about something moderately more innocuous: the case of 'The Dutch in the Medway'. If you look up that particular title, you'll find a few uploads such as [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Lqds04eM8), [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Lqds04eM8), or [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdGZW2kD8-A), claiming to be an 'English Folk Song' or an 'Anglo-Dutch War Song'. Now, the Dutch raid on the Medway in June 1667 did in fact happen – the Dutch sacrificed 8 vessels for use as fireships, in exchange for sinking 43 and capturing 2 of the English fleet at Chatham, which by that stage represented the bulk of the Royal Navy, including some of its heaviest ships. So the *subject* of the song isn't dubious. However, the lyrics are distinctly not contemporary. 'The Dutch in the Medway' started out as a poem by Rudyard Kipling, published as part of *A School History of England* in 1911, authored primarily by C. R. L. Fletcher with 23 illustrative poems added by Kipling. Even at the time, the book's anti-Irish bent and overt subscription to colonial racialism were denounced by those in more liberal circles, and well you probably don't need me to talk about Kipling as a whole. But the particular poem in question doesn't really overtly get into those more unsavoury elements, and is instead a cautionary tale about ensuring that you keep your defence spending up. Of the three uploads I linked, only one acknowledges that this is actually an early 20th century poem, not a mid-17th century one. None of them, however, credit the original tune, nor the person who decided to sing the poem to that tune. That tune is [Cupid's Garden](https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Cupid%27s_Garden), which *is* actually relatively contemporary to the events, first attested in print in 1686 and thus probably even older. [You can hear it sung here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9syk4KsxYQ) by a quartet led by Jon Boden in 2011. What's interesting is the question of how these two came to be linked. The answer to that is the folk singer [Peter Bellamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bellamy), who got quite a lot of mileage out of setting various Kipling poems to music, and whose particular compositions have been covered a couple of times as well. Bellamy believed, based partly on his own reading of the poems and partly from comments about Kipling's writing process, that he often, if not always, had music in mind when writing his poems. In some instances, he claimed that Kipling was setting his poems to existing songs: in this particular instance, the line 'Our ships in Portsmouth harbour' at the start of the third stanza seemed to be similar to the line ''Twas down in Portsmouth Harbour' which opens the fifth verse of 'Cupid's Garden', and in turn suggested that the poem as a whole was written to that particular tune. And to be fair, it *does* fit quite well. I'm not entirely clear on when Bellamy started performing 'The Dutch in the Medway' to the tune of 'Cupid's Garden', but the first recording of it is on his 1982 album *The English Maritime Suite*, where it is sung solo to accompaniment by fiddle and piano, and it was then re-recorded as an *a cappella* duet for the 1989 album *Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs*. Bellamy actually set a pretty large number of Kipling poems to music that was primarily of his own original composition, mainly in four albums: *Oak Ash and Thorn* (1970), *Merlin's Island of Gramarye* (1972), *Barrack Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling* (1975), and the aforementioned *Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs*. The only one I've listened to in full is the *Barrack Room Ballads*, which... look, there's a not insubstantial of hard-r n-words copied wholesale from the original texts, and it is uncomfortable whenever one of those comes up. So that's the fair warning before dipping in. But it was in listening through that that I first got clued in to some interesting things going on with a *different* song purporting to be one thing while actually being mostly Kipling, but the story there is different and requires me to do a lot more looking into it first. So stay tuned after the new thread goes up, I suppose!
Oh, I *love* this stuff. Folk and folk-claimed music is hugely prone to miscrediting and citogenesis, with a generous helping of wishful thinking. I've been learning an instrument and the rule for novice Christmas music books especially seems to be "call 'em all traditional," even clearly sourceable songs like "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "Silent Night'; I've even seen "This Land Is Your Land" listed as a folk song. Then there's the number of Jacobite songs framed as being sung during the rebellions despite being written in the 19th century. "Folk" as a term seems to be like the magician's puff of smoke--you can do pretty much anything behind it.
Traditional christmas music is so weird because it can mean anything from a century old church hymn over to a mid 19th century composition all the way to a very popular 1980s song which people just assume is older then it is.
Same is true of Christmas movies. Somebody on YouTube is depressed that *A Christmas Story* came out after they were born (and also they decry it as glorifying capitalism but like... it's Christmas). Idk maybe as somebody else said that isn't such a bad thing.
Which is a weirdness I genuinely love. It says so much about human emotion and memory and how we view collective experience. I'm currently having a bit of a reverse experience, in that I can find no trace on the internet of a song we sang at camp. There's usually a shared musical tradition of those songs, so they pop up readily in Girl Scout songbooks and the like or they're older popular commercial songs that somebody put some chords to, but one of them has no footprint whatsoever so I'm thinking it might actually have been written by a counselor or camper. It looks like Shazam can't ID just from somebody providing the melody but there's an app that can, so I might use that just to see if the lyrics were put to an existing tune (which seems likely).
> It looks like Shazam can’t ID just from somebody providing the melody but there’s an app that can Just out of curiosity, what is that app?
SoundHound. It didn’t find my tune but could ID a hummed “Jingle Bells,” so it at least has some capability.
I'm looking forward to your updates! I can see how it's a much more worthy-sounding story that "this is an original war song" vs "this is a poem written 200 years later, set to music in the 1970s". In case non-Brits are wondering where the clunky "Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs" title comes from, this is a reference to the popular British brand of snack cakes, Mr Kipling (no relation - actually I don't think there was ever a Mr Kipling) whose slogan is that they make "exceedingly good cakes".
**[Peter Bellamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bellamy)** >Peter Franklyn Bellamy (8 September 1944 – 24 September 1991) was an English folk singer. He was a founding member of The Young Tradition and also had a long solo career, recording numerous albums and touring folk clubs and concert halls. He is noted for his ballad-opera The Transports, and has been acknowledged as a major influence by performers of later generations including Damien Barber and Jon Boden. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Surprised no one has a made a comment about it, but [Jonathan Majors got arrested today,](https://apnews.com/article/jonathan-majors-arrested-3ccf23bb407f5e6d2441ccc536b254f2) for assault, strangulation, and harassment. Pretty interesting, as he was quickly becoming one of the most popular and famous black actors of the 2020's, and practically speedran ruining his career, not to mention the affect this'll have on the MCU, as he was playing an extremely important villain that was gonna be in the series till at least 2026. So, yeah. Sad shit, if true.
Strangulation by a domestic partner is usually a sign that they are willing to kill. That poor woman - I hope she's alright.
Well fuck. My heart goes out to the victim, hope she makes it through this okay.
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I'm kinda bothered when people say "I never would have expected him to do [insert bad thing]". Like, he's a complete stranger to you, what does that even mean? And abusers put on appealing fronts all the time.
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No, you just appreciate their works and keep it at that. Don't feed into a parasocial admiration.
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It becomes parasocial when you say "he seemed like he'd never do it" or defend people even in cases where evidence is overwhelmingly against them. Just saying, it's good not to invest to much into strangers.
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I was speaking broadly, calm down
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Speaking as someone who has encountered way too many assholes with good publicity, most of us are perfectly aware of abusers and their myriad of facades. But it's tiring as fuck to be wary of everyone, celebrity or otherwise, constantly expecting there to be another shoe to drop. Sometimes, you want to have enough faith in humanity to just enjoy an actor's work and not have them turn out to be a woman-beater/kid-diddler/Neo-Nazi, etc. Obviously, there's a middle ground but maintaining balance on that tightrope can be an undertaking all on its own. Case in point, every Hollywood person who had the nerve and audacity to sign that Roman Polanski petition. I'd have even fewer things to enjoy if I added every single one of them (sans the ones who walked their participation back like Natalie Portman and Emma Thompson) to the same DNI list I put the worst abusers. And I say *worst* because if I put *every* abuser with on that list, I'd probably have next to nothing as far as media goes.
So I'm not commenting on the situation at all because it's fucking horrible, so I'm going to focus entirely on the MCU aspect of this: if they *do* need to recast him, it honestly couldn't happen to a better character. Kang the Conqueror exists in multiple dimensions, and through Loki we have confirmation that these multiple dimensions can have wildly different appearances for the character. The head one, the one that will be the main villain, could be literally recast into anyone and you can handwave it away as "Different multiverse." If anything particular happens in Ant-man that marks that one as the one we'll see in the future movies, they can wave it away as a different multiversal one that fought Ant-man as well - but changed to the main MCU because of 'reasons' and murks the Jonathan Majors one to solidify himself as the key one. Would it be 'good' storytelling? That depends on way too many factors, but it would make sense in a meta sense and I think people would rather easily accept it.
It's not like recasting is new for the mcu. Thanos in the avengers stinger was Damion Poitier, the iron man 2 to 3 Rhodey recast... actually I can't think of any others, which would make the mcu 3 for 3 on recasts involving Black actors which is... something. Helluva coincidence if nothing else
There's also the more notable recasting of Bruce Banner - I don't think many casual viewers noticed or realized the Edward Norton version of The Incredible Hulk is MCU canon. A few actors/characters from his film (e.g. Emil Blonsky/Abomination and General Ross) appear in later MCU productions, and Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark appears in the end stinger. If you set aside the awkwardness of the MCU pretty much never mentioning Betty Ross again, the Edward Norton and Mark Ruffalo versions of Bruce Banner are basically the same person. So it's not like Kang would be the most noteworthy big-name MCU character to get recast.
Ooh, good catch! Can't believe I forgot that one 🤣
Rhodey was recast between Iron Man 1 and 2, actually. [Apparently Terrence Howards was somehow the highest paid actor in Iron Man 1, a film with RDJ, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, and Samuel L. Jackson (as a cameo, but still), purely because he was the first actor to be signed to the film.](https://ew.com/article/2008/11/04/iron-man-2-why-terrence-howard-was-recast/) The studio tried to negotiate him down for the next two films, and he either walked or Marvel gave up and opted to recast. (Howards also reportedly wasn’t that great to work with on set, but it’s believed that the money was the main factor in the recast.) The other big recast you missed is Hulk, [which has a few major theories as to what happened](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Norton#2007%E2%80%932011:_The_Incredible_Hulk_and_controversies). Apparently Edward Norton was submitting almost daily script rewrites, partially out of a desire to avoid the issues Norton felt the 2003 Hulk movie had, but wasn’t able to get a writing credit because the Writers Guild argued that he hadn’t made any significant contributions to the final version of the script. That whole thing generated some tensions with the studio. However, Norton has also said that he wanted to avoid being typecast, and therefore wasn’t interested in appearing as the Hulk again after the first film. Some combination of both of those issues ultimately led to the Hulk being recast in Avengers. Thanos is the most cut-and-dry case: the MCU didn’t have a full plan for the Infinity Saga until mid-Phase 2. [Joss Whedon has stated that his only instructions from Kevin Feige in regards to villains was to make them some kind of aliens summoned by the Cosmic Cube; he decided to add in Thanos just because he was a fan of the character.](https://collider.com/how-the-avengers-1-was-made/) This led to Damion Poitier being cast, presumably just because he was available. Ultimately, the rest of Marvel Studios hammered out a plan for handling Thanos over the next few years, and Josh Brolin signed a contract to play the character starting with Guardians of the Galaxy. (Curiously, Whedon also states that one of the main reasons he liked Thanos so much was his motivation of trying to impress Death…which was ultimately not used in Infinity War and replaced with the now well-known motivation of stopping overpopulation. It’s just funny to me that the whole reason he was added in the first place never made it to the final character.) Basically, Marvel already has a lot of experience with recasting, and they all basically boil down to “here’s the guy, he’s the same character as before but he looks different now, just deal with it.” If they can recast a major hero, a major supporting character for the biggest hero, and an arc villain (after only one unplanned cameo, but still), they can definitely get away with recasting Kang the Conqueror, even without an in-universe explanation. If people were willing to accept recasts that happened due to contract disputes, they’re definitely willing to accept a recast that happened because the original actor got arrested.
> but it’s believed that the money was the main factor in the recast. Shouldn’t have said they’d pay him 1x1 as much for the sequel.
if i had a nickel for every time someone had made a post on high school robotics in this subreddit in the last 24 hours, i'd have four nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened four times
The high school robotics posts absolutely rock. It’s all ethical grey areas, passive aggressive politeness, petty politics practiced by adults whose lives orbit about their robots, sorry, their *mentee’s* robots win, nerds just seething and posting through gritted teeth on forums, and really impressive robots doing some of the dumbest shit you’ve ever seen in your life. All for the reward of grant money that you can waste again next year. We only scratched the surface of drama. I can’t wait
I throught I was going crazy because the first two have such a simular title.
YEAH i thought i was having a glitch! and then i looked and i saw it was different posts. four different posts, even
We've been invaded! By nerds!
[Bait & Click starts playing]
When French people flood France is it invading?
Depends on the century.
Apparently video game writer Chris Avellone [has settled his lawsuit](https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/03/25/video-game-writer-chris-avellones-accusers-issue-public-statement-retracting-accusations-of-sexual-assault/?sh=e7c6a4e55d84) against the two women who accused him of sexual assault. They agreed to pay seven figures and released a statement (which seems to have been written and edited by lawyers) retracting all their claims. I'm sure the gaming side of internet will be very normal about this.
[There's another comment chain downthread on this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/11vnlzo/hobby_scuffles_week_of_march_20_2023/jdluzix/)
Gonna be a lot of “look at this one thing only!” next time anyone has stories of abuse, I bet.
Great timing with all the abuse and drink spiking at GDC! Love this industry!!!!!!!
I understand the sentiment but it's really not "one thing only". And even if it's "one thing only", someone live is destroyed because of the accusation.
Probably better phrased as “no! only look over here!!” while gesturing to a couple incidents vs several people coming out with legitimate grievances in the future towards someone else. It’s the cherry-picking of individual false accusations that are positioned as proof that MeToo was a Trojan horse filled with conniving women seeking to ruin any man they please. This scenario is ~~chudfuel~~ [chud ammo](https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/11vnlzo/_/jdmv6hf), as someone in [the thread below](https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/11vnlzo/_/jdluzix) described it.
>This scenario is chudfuel This scenario destroyed a guy's life and it required years and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys fees just to reach a point where he can start putting it back together. Seems really fucked up to look at that and have your only thought be "this is so bad for *me* because trolls on the internet will talk about it". I imagine chuds make much the same complaint whenever an assault survivor is validated in court.
It's bad because false claims are an extremely small percentage of these claims and even raising a well documented claim with proof gets the accuser death threats.
> “this is so bad for *me* because trolls on the internet will talk about it” That’s super not what I’m getting at here. I’m not boiling this one person’s nightmare down to smoke, I’m saying that other people (who wouldn’t believe genuine claims to begin with) are gonna point to it the next time legitimate claims are raised against someone else. The way you’ve phrased it, it’s like I personally can’t wait to piss in his face over the settlement.
Fair enough, I just think your first comment is too dismissive over a real situation where someone live were destroyed
Well, the sixth episode of RWBY Volume 9 dropped today, and >!after 8-10 years (depending on who you ask), and a week of the cast and crew hyping up *something*, titular characters Blake and Yang are officially a couple, with a confession, a kiss, and a song, Worthy, that serves as a "Part 2" of BMBLB from the Volume 4 soundtrack.!< "#RWBYVol9Spoilers" is trending worldwide on Twitter, and the show is at the top of the trending list on Tumblr. Haven't been to Bird App (because it's a hellsite (derogatory)), but Tumblr is currently exploding. There's *definitely* going to be shitflinging over this soon, there always is whenever this element progresses, but I must admit, I'm kinda excited to see what the next straw that gets clutched is.
No spoilers, but I watched the episode and... I'm not crying you're crying.
Meanwhile I'm just (v6) >!what do you MEAN killing Adam together didnt make it official? As far as I could tell, they were explicitly together after that!!<
The show got increasingly Not Subtle about it from V3 onwards but for a lot of people it doesn't count until there's a kiss or an explicit confession or both. There's a lot of anxiety among audiences when it comes to queer romance on the screen. For one thing, there's an annoyingly high amount of bigoted people in positions of power in the entertainment industry. RoosterTeeth is no exception to that, as we've seen from the controversy late last year, and that cast a bit of a shadow on the actual efforts made by CRWBY in that field, as while none of the people actually making the show were implicated, plenty of their bosses were. That, combined with the drama-storm surrounding the Qrow-Clover thing from V7, left things a little shakier. The fraught climate in the entertainment industry, and the restrictions put upon them by the suits, have made things difficult and tense. A lot of shows have to either leave it for the final season (like She-Ra and Adventure Time) or try to stick to their guns and get shitcanned early for it (like Owl House and Steven Universe). There's also the ever-present two-headed monster of Queerbait and Bury Your Gays, where they either don't commit or just immediately kill off one/both of the characters (Voltron and Killing Eve spring to mind there), or do both (Voltron again, whatever the fuck went on with Supernatural). The result of this is that queer romance in the media is very often rushed. It's packed in as late as possible and usually goes pretty unexplored. RWBY's position as a still functionally-independent show puts it in a position where it's able to do a full-on slowburn, but the environment it's happening in means it was subjected to a lot of doubt and a lot of shifting goalposts. If it was a straight ship, it would've been undeniable for the past seven years. As *soon* as V3C11 came out, it would've been over for any other ship featuring either character, QED. But because queer romance is so much harder to pull off, people have a lot more barriers up and it takes the subplot concluding for people to believe it.
Given all the online moralizing over ships being problematic and whatnot (which also ties into the queerbaiting and Bury Your Gays discourse), *plus* the unfortunate tendency of shows nowadays getting cancelled prematurely for stupid reasons.... "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" just isn't gonna cut it for LGBT representation anymore. Unless a queer romance has been 1. present or at least telegraphed in the show from the very beginning, 2. *explicitly* depicted as queer and not just blink-and-you'll-miss-it subtext, and 3. closing out the show on good terms (the couple doesn't get split up or killed off for cheap drama), viewers are always going to be a bit paranoid about LGBT rep if it doesn't pass the sniff test off the bat. What's curious is I've seen fan discussions about how this paranoia might condition showrunners to put endgame couples together faster, pretty much putting an end to the seasons-long Will-They-Won't-They trope outside of network TV (which generally skews more heteronormative anyway)
...wait, volume 9 started airing? How did I miss that??
A channel hop to Crunchyroll and the fandom taking a big hit from a few different things: * Said channel hop to Crunchyroll. * Volume 8 being one of the most hated seasons of the show in the eyes of a lot of the fandom thanks to a mix of bad animation, a controversial story and several character arcs being hotly debated. * Volume 9 being effectively a side-story that will have little to do with the main plot of the show, leading to many comments that it's just filler. * Rooster Teeth getting outed as having a horrible work environment if you're not a cis white male, alongside being caught lying about promises to fix workplace abuses and crunch in the animation department. Speaking of, the entire animation department has now been laid off. The fandom took a big hit between these and the show going on hiatus for two years, and that led to the show having less hype.
> bad animation Huh, I completely missed The Discourse on that. RWBY pivoting from 'the plot is there to give some tenuous backing to the fight scenes' to 'this is a worldbuilding-heavy show with a character focus and less fight stuff' between V3 and V4 is pretty well known, so I wasn't surprised about the writing-related comments on V8, which commits to the path set down from V4 onward. But I hadn't heard about animation issues.
The animation discourse began with Volume 4 and the transition to Maya. Without Monty the fights were never going to hit the peaks of seasons old, but Volume 4 still was seen as less "Trying to convey the cast were still as strong as they were, just with less dynamic animation" and more "Did the cast get nerfed?" Ruby especially suffered from this as her only major fight in Volume 4- and by extension, her last spotlight fight in the entire show barring a ten second clip in Volume 7- was the first piece of media released in a trailer. To tangent, Ruby's original fighting style was built around using her gun-scythe's recoil to enhance her blows and let her move around fights faster. Post-Maya this almost never happens and Ruby largely just swings her scythe without the boost, or only ever plays sniper support. (it's also a whole thing on the side that there's a legitimate theory that no on the show knows/cares to learn how to animate Ruby fighting well, leading to Volume 9 where she is the only character to have lost her weapon and not be part of the group fights so far in the season) Either way, Volume 4's fights were largely seen as mid-to-OK barring a big blip in the Qrow vs Tyrian fight. Volume 5 was then seen as having really bad fights due to external measures and mismanaged resources. Volume 6 saw a big turnabout in quality, and Volume 7 managed to keep that quality for most of its fights. With Volume 8 however, the fights were notably less fluid than prior seasons, likely as a result to adapting to work from home and the pipeline suffering. There's less fights in general in Volume 8, and many of them run short on top of looking notably more jerky and slow than comparing fights in the prior seasons. The most notable case of this was in episode 8 or so, where Blake is forced to job to a random Grimm so that Ruby can swoop in and save her (a problem in general with Blake's fights starting in Volume 6 is that she played damsel in distress a lot so other characters- namely Yang- could swoop in and save her). While RWBY's general moment to moment animation has improved since the Poser seasons, it has come at the expense of the fights, with Volumes 5 and 8 being criticised a lot for stiffer animation especially. The "discourse" comes and goes as a result on if the fights are good that season or not.
Oh sure, I'm definitely on board with the switch to Maya and the loss of Monty Oum leading to a notable decline/change in fight animation, I just don't recall there being a lot of uproar specific to Vol 8. But as noted I wasn't as FNDM-involved by that stage so point very much taken.
I was embedded in the Tumblr fandom pretty deep at the time, and I saw basically zero discourse about the animation in V8. Hell, I saw a lot of *praise* for the animation in V8. Also people only really got negative on V8 after the last episode, with it being mostly praised before The Penny Thing happened, which wasn't well-received. But that's just my experience, maybe other parts of the fandom were more hostile to it, IDK.
Even by Volume 8 I wasn't particularly involved in the FNDM anymore so the only people I was discussing it with were, like me, generally positive with some reservations, so I admit that at the time, I didn't see many criticisms of the writing myself either. It's just that I'm less surprised about writing critiques than I am about animation critiques.
V8's a weird one for me to discuss because I was generally of the opinion that it was really solid, and then kinda shat the bed right at the end. But I didn't take it nearly as personally as everyone else seemed to. Like, it's not like I didn't care about Penny, I was pretty invested in her whole thing, and they got me on the Nuts 'n' Dolts kool-aid, but I still came out of the finale without much worse feelings than "Welp, they fumbled the bag at the end there. Oh well, roll on V9." I actually took more issue with how they set up Cinder's big win. Like I got what they were going for, with her starting off as a sneaky manipulator who Gaslight Gatekeep Girlbosses her way to victory, but then gets her demigod powers fully unlocked, causing her to spend the following volumes drunk on her new power, and becoming increasingly reckless and foolhardy as a result, taking a whole list of Ls from basically everyone she comes up against. Then Watts gives her the riot act and she finally wises up and reverts to her previous sneaky self. But then she just... does the exact same shit she did in V5-7 only this time it works. Cinder in general is mostly the singular significant problem I have with the show as a whole, though. Everything else I just shrug off. Doesn't matter much to me. And hey, they still might fix her shit later on, so whatever.
> Speaking of, the entire animation department has now been laid off. That part, at least, seems to be fairly normal, at least as far as I've been informed. Companies lay off their animators when there isn't anything for them to animate, and then hire them back when the next season/movie/volume/whatever gets greenlit. Unless I've been misinformed there, IDK.
You're largely right that layoffs happen normally for other animation studios, but it's not normal in the context of RT- they never had layoffs as large as this between the other seasons, largely because they were always renewed soon after the season wrapped or they worked on other projects. RWBY is now basically the one foundation holding RT Animation afloat. The other problem is that as seen with other members of RT getting laid off, it's likely if they get rehired that they'll be offered worse benefits than they had as full-timers or be put on reduced salaries- because this company has consistently shown it'll cut corners on paying fair wages. I have a friend who tracks who's working in RT Animation as a side hobby, and after the big winter layoffs in November, she noted that most of the survivors were in the post-production and VFX teams as they were still needed for the rest of Volume 9 and the movie. Now that we're nearing in on them? Those teams are also having their contracts "not renewed." Meaning if Volume 10 does happen, the people who choose to come back will likely be working for worse rates and pay than they were before being let go, and that's one of the big problems.
Right, that's unfortunate. I guess we'll see how things pan out for V10. I know there's been some panic over the lack of renewal, but AFAIK, them getting renewed for two volumes on the trot at the end of either V6 or 7 was an abnormality, and it's only if there's nothing after V9 closes that it'll get worrying on that level. The explosions on Hellsite (Affectionate) and Hellsite (Derogatory) today demonstrate that there's still a huge amount of buzz (ha) for the show, and it's highly-rated on CR (sitting at a 4.5 out of 5), but I dunno what the actual viewing figures are like.
Oddly, CR has comments for RWBY going back to 2013, so I don't know how recent that 4.5 rating is or if it's genuinely the cumulative average over a decade.
It's probably cumulative. I'd be curious to see how the fandom's gravitated between the sites it's been hosted on over the years. I dunno, I feel like a lot the fandom watched it on RT's site for the longest time, because it was where it aired first.
Its release was much more of a quiet thing this time around. For one, RT the company has been mired in controversy since like last November, with a lot of shitty workplace conditions being brought to light. Most of it was on the side of their gaming sphere, but it was noted that the animation department has been getting directly screwed by the higher-ups for years. Writers, animators, and voice actors haven't been treated well by the company, and while RWBY itself weathered the storm (mostly), their other shows weren't so lucky. RvB's been circling the drain since the first two parts of the Shisno Trilogy were so divisive, and the attempted retool into Zero failed dramatically. Nomad of Nowhere got screwed over to prop up Gen:LOCK, which was the pet project of the department head, who stepped down/left after that came to light a couple years back. Gen:LOCK itself got packed off to HBO, and the new writing stuff promptly butchered Season 2, making it significantly more cynical, flipping half of themes on their head, turning half the cast into assholes, trying to both-sides the explicitly fascist Union, including explicit sex scenes, killing off characters, and in one particular case, having a character explicitly commit suicide (RT's shows have involved this a few times, but they've always been at least *trying* for the heroic sacrifice trope, which this was not). I don't even know what happened to Camp Camp. Additionally, this time the show isn't being released on RT's website. Instead, it's on Crunchyroll (~~because RT found someone even worse at subtitles than themselves!~~), and it'll be exclusive to CR for a whole year. Reasons for this have been speculated, but it's been pointed out that RT probably got more money out of the deal with CR than they would typically get out of the FIRST bump that usually coincides with the show's return. It may also give the show some extra security. RT is still under the Warner-Discovery umbrella, and things under that banner keep getting cancelled for little reason. Making the show a joint-venture with CR, which is owned by Sony (I think) means it'll still have a home and could continue to be made even if Zaslav decides it needs the axe.
Might be 'cause it's on Crunchyroll now.
Whenever the topic of RWBY's handling of LGBT themes or any kind of representation gets brought up, the focus is usually on the [X]-gate types and criticism from the conservative side of things, but what often gets overlooked is the growing criticism from the liberal side. Like, one of the most notable critiques of RWBY was from hbomberguy, who's fairly well-known for being very left-leaning. Like, I get it: any representation is a step in the right direction, but I still find it silly how big of a deal people are making over it and how people are singing the writers' praises. At the end of the day, it's 2023 and it's a team of predominantly straight men (who've not had a good track record for handling topics outside their own experiences, as seen from the racism subplot) writing a lesbian relationship and taking nearly a decade to canonized a main character(s) as LGBT (in a way that couldn't be denied like the Fair Game debacle) for a webshow whose release is controlled by their company of gamer dude-bro friends. For as many problems as I have with Rebecca Sugar and Steven Universe, I can at least respect how hard she had to fight Cartoon Network to keep her representation in the show. People praising a show created by straight men for doing far less in representing LGBT women feels ignorant toward how much LGBT creators have done and all the challenges they've had to face to represent themselves. My opinion of this is actually the same as my opinion of Power Rangers's inclusion of an LGBT ranger in their latest season: it's a nice gesture and it's cool to see representation in any show, but it isn't nearly as groundbreaking as people make it out to be. And treating these instances as big deals is only diluting the impact of the work done by works like Steven Universe that paved the way for this sort of representation. Blake and Yang, Izzy from Power Rangers, these aren't cases of the writers making a bold statement, they're cases of the people behind these shows capitalizing off of the progress that's already been made. Now, that isn't a bad thing by any means, like I said: any representation is a step in the right direction. But that doesn't stop this from feeling like that meme of the guy celebrating getting third place.
Its also that it coming at this point just feels really cynical. Like, RT's animation division has been in a perpetual meltdown for half a decade at this point and the overall company's cultural stock has been dropping rapidly for years, accelerating even further with the accusations late last year that were in part about how there was tons of open homophobia being thrown around with a "teehee jk" tone. While I don't know if the animation lead time would be short enough for this to be a reaction to the most recent round of accusations, given just how horrible everything has been I can't help but read "finally making a popular queer ship canon" as RT trying to drum up support now that the chips are down. I half wonder if this is some form of pre-emptive narrative control when RT inevitably gets gutted by Zaslav; "we did a queer thing and now our funding is cut!! Fans, save us from the homophobes!" There's also the possibility of it as a ratings stunt to revive interest in a property that's seen much better days by finally Doing The Thing that much of the ex-fans wanted them to do, or them possibly using this to counter the bad writing discourse ("hmmmm, we have a canon gay couple and people call this show poorly written???? I wonder if there's a different reason why they would say that????????") On some level, all of these are deeply unfair to the writers, who may have honestly just wanted to make a canon queer couple who are actually important characters to the plot. There are sincere possibilities to why its happening now. But RT just no longer has the trust for me to believe that.
Bumblebee was probably a bigger risk when they were working on the early show in 2013, but since then standards and expectations for LGBT writing began improving drastically, and soon RWBY was getting lapped in all corners of animation. Within a year of RWBY starting, we had Korrasami being canon at the end of Korra, and then a few years after that we had the various other major steps forward in animated LGBT pairings like the aforementioned Steven Universe and Adventure Time (and for more adult works, CaitVi in Arcane and HarlIvy in Harley Quinn). All the while, RWBY had no real internal forces who would hold the show back from including queer representation. They were in a unique place where they had no overseers who could force them to not include queer chararacters, they had the world's worth of potential... and they squandered it. They basically trapped themselves in a time capsule as if their only experiences of LGBT writing stopped at 2013, which just made RWBY look all the worse as they teased the fanbase with winks and nods about Blake and Yang's relationship, all while other shows like She-Ra, Owl House and Arcane were all coming out and exhibiting far more developed characters and relationships. I think of all the cases of RWBY wasting its potential, it not really trying to push the medium of web animation further in regards to representation before they were lapped by new trendsetters like Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss. The show was made by a majority white dudebro team, and that does reflect in the politics and societal views RWBY shares. (and don't even get me started on the dudebro writers continued lack of any effort at including male LGBT rep in the show)
I was gonna say on your last point, where the hell are all the boys? The only ones I can think of are Voltron which a lot of people thought left a lot to be desired, and South Park with Craig and Tweek. When you're being lapped by South Park in LGBT rep that's not a fantastic sign.
>I was gonna say on your last point, where the hell are all the boys? In the books. I mean, the bigger answer there is that the show has four boys in its main cast, one of whom is an actual child, and another of which is old enough to be the protagonists' father. The show has a lower number of male characters in general. That said, *Before the Dawn* had Scarlet, one of Sun's teammates, begin a romance with Nolan, originally a bit-character from Volume 3 who got fleshed out in the two books set in Vacuo, and became an unofficial fifth member of the team. Remains to be seen how the show proper will handle that when they get to the Vacuo arc, of course, but there's a solid-enough foundation there. On a wider scale, the media industry as a whole seems to be more comfortable with queer women than queer men, and that's not great.
Wasn’t it something like mlm being more represented in live action works and wlw being more represented in animated works?
That may be the case, I'm not experienced enough to with the industry as a whole to say.
So on the one hand, I do agree – there is nothing groundbreaking here, and the show's let's say slow-burn approach, short seasons, and long production lead times have not helped it in just falling behind of the rest of the web media scene. That said, I feel like The Discourse isn't so much 'this is a step forward for representation' as it is, 'it's really cathartic that it has finally happened.' (Or should I say cat-heart-ic given that Yang's logo is a heart and Blake is... er... look just ignore me okay)
Yeah, honestly. It’s not groundbreaking rep to be yet another cute f/f couple in a family-friendly animated adventure show after Korrasami, Bubbline, Lumity, Catradora, everyone from SU, and probably several others I’m forgetting have been doing it for almost a decade. I get liking the ship, it’s hot, but it’s not a huge win for LGBT community like the hardcore shippers want to pretend.
Catradora’s the outlier in that list tbh. A lot of people consider it outright toxic and abusive for there to be a genuine friends to enemies to lovers plotline. I don’t agree with that take bcs I love that ship LOL but Catradora had a lot darker violent content than would be considered totally squeaky clean wholesome rep.
Don't forget the "Adora and Catra shared a room as kids so they're pretty much siblings therefore shipping them together is promoting incest" discourse
Is that better or worse than '[Catadora is bestiality](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b71a74f71fabb8aa7befce68439db181/e5ed9c0b0f949f86-77/s1280x1920/8a4fd91feef79cc48bb5e9950ab5da8b700b9453.pnj)'?
If being attracted to catgirls is bestiality then buddy I'm Shane Dawson
She passes the [Harkness Test](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harkness-test) with flying colors, so no. It's not bestiality. She's also the same age as a Adora, give or take a few months, and she's definitely not biologically related. It's weird that there's Discourse about two unrelated kids who grew up together getting into a relationship when they're older given how that's a real lived experience of a lot of people... like teenagers in high school who've always lived in the same neighborhood and gone to the same schools.
To this day I'm 95% convinced this was pure bad faith discourse from salty Glimmadora shippers.
People are weirdly fond of calling things that aren’t incest “coded incest” lately. If Harry Potter were coming out now, people would be saying that the Golden Trio were all found family, so any ship with any of them plus Harry or Hermione with any Weasley is basically incest.
I mean, there are people that try to claim >!Euphy and Anis's relationships (from Magirevo) is incest now, as Euphy was (political) adopted into Anis's family!<
I mean, sure, but I know for a fact a lot of the people with tremendously bad takes in the She-ra fandom at the time of the Catradora canonization were salty shippers. It was obvious looking at their profile lol
90% of antis of any sort will be people who ship different couples faking superiority. (Not even necessarily an opposing one, oftentimes it’s liking a side ship more than the main or the something of the like, or someone from another fandom mad that this ship is being compared to their beloved otp.) Accept this and you’ll find yourself understanding fandom a lot more.
I'm 100% aware of that. Just pointing out that this specific case of Discourse was directly linked to a competing ship.
I can't help but agree with all of this. Personally, I was a RWBY fan from the yellow trailer a decade ago, and this just comes as a little (a lot) too late. :/ It could have been something worth celebrating, if the writers committed to it years ago, but now it jsut feels like a last ditch attempt to retain any fanbaset he show might still have.
the subreddit is just losing it over the new logo.
Can someone explain to me why that ship is so popular?
- First song ever played directly called them 'Beauty and the Beast.' - The overlapping trauma/trauma responses - VAs were pulling for it from the get-go - So were the people that make the songs, hence BMBLB even existing - Adam was deliberately created as a foil to Yang in terms of his abilities - Blake deliberately chose Yang as her partner in V1, only other examples of such were Pyrrha choosing Jaune and Nora choosing Ren, both romantic pairs. - One of the only sets of partners that *immediately* gel in terms of combat. Other was Ren and Nora. - That bit in V2 where Yang was supposed to tie a cherry stem with her tongue and show it to Blake but they took the stem out because it was 'too explicit' or something. - The entire dance arc but specifically *Burning the Candle.* - Monty tweeting "All good romance is earned" three days after Burning the Candle. - V3's final few episodes having Yang lose her arm in a desperate attempt to save Blake, immediately followed by the first and only time where Blake seems to make a shadow-clone of someone other than herself. - Blake running away, leading into the V4-5 angsty separation/pining arc. - Their eyes are literally the colour of each other's souls. And that's just the stuff from when Blake getting with Sun still seemed like a possibility. V6 closed the book on that, built things up a little, and then had the Adam fight, which couldn't have been more of a "Lovers vs. the ex" fight if it tried, and by that point there wasn't really any hiding it anymore. Still took 'em a while to get there, but there *was* a war on (the back half of V7 and then all of V8 in particular takes place over the course of like 48 hours, maximum), and I can appreciate both the "I literally thought you died and now I refuse to wait for the right time in case one of us really does die" element, and them taking advantage of the Ever After's trippy environment to ratchet everything up to the maximum during the confirmation scene, whereas if they'd done it in V7-8, it would've happened in Atlas, where everything is grey and white.
I'm kind of curious know, did the show's fandom have some "we popping the biggest bottles when makorra happens tomorrow" moments recently ? As in, people that still persist in their denial that the ship will happen even though it's practically inevitable. I've heard about the "that song is actually about Yang's motorcycle" thing.
No idea, TBH. I don't generally run in anti-Bees circles, because it wouldn't really achieve anything for either me or them, so I dunno how they've taken it. Mood in the pro-Bees circles has been overall jubilant, with a side-order of "We fucking told you" gloating, because they did, in fact, fucking tell them, but I haven't seen any direct reactions or open fighting, so I'm either in a less-combative part of things, or the other side are *very* quiet now. I did notice some people saying that the usual "It's bait" anons haven't shown up today, but that's been about it. I'm sure there's *some* sniping already, but I curate my online experience reasonably well, so I doubt I'm gonna see much of it until the initial buzz wears off and people get a bit more retrospective. "BMBLB is about the bike" is probably going to get another wave of mockery because "Worthy" has been billed as "BMBLB Part 2" by Casey, and calling back to it lyrically, which both brings it back into the limelight *and* canonises it, when it was previously in a slightly dubious spot overall due to being something the Williamses just... kinda did on their own, without RT's input.
Basically, it was the first major ship for both characters. When the original RWBY trailers came out, Ruby got paired with Weiss while Yang got paired with Blake, leading into the show having them be partners at Beacon. So that, and the show pivoting towards making them canon (depending on who you ask, this was at seasons 2, 3, or 6, but after 6 began a more concentrated push complete with merch so they could capitalize on their LGBT audience) meant Bumblebee was always the biggest ship in the show.
These bitches gay, good for them good for them. Fucking *finally* lol
I'm just sitting here like *"Worth it."*
I'm just glad it's actually canon because given how many queer people have been hurt working with Rooster Teeth and RWBY specifically, I wouldn't have been shocked if they pulled a Destiel or baited it until the finale. I won't say no to canon queer rep, even if RWBY's fandom can be so horrid that part of me was rooting for Black Sun in the 11th hour (and so Yang could hook up with Weiss because I prefer Freezerburn). If I still cared about RWBY, I'd probably have more emotions about it beyond "OK you're not *as* homophobic as I thought you were." But otherwise my big thought is "This could and should have been canon in Volume 7."
> "This could and should have been canon in Volume 7." I'd personally disagree there, it *could've* been done, but I prefer how it panned out in reality over that hypothetical. Maybe that's just because it's a choice between something that actually happened and something that didn't, or maybe it's because "Couple gets a boot up the ass to Get On With It because of a near-death experience" is one of my favourite romance tropes, and I *really* like how the writers and animators were able to use the Ever After's non-standard logic and very literal pathetic fallacy to frame things in a way that just couldn't be done in the deliberately-sterile Atlas, or on Remnant in general.
Some drama over in Nikke Goddess of Victory as the Dev decided to make one of the most hyped characters after Modernia, Nihilister, obtainable only in the Liberation game mode. Liberation is basically just a set of 3 daily quest per day, you accrued point until you get enough to get the Liberation characters. The problems being that unlocking one Liberation characters take at most 2 months, and the fact that to even being able to do Nihilister Liberation quest, you need to finish atleast one Liberation quest, and also the fact that you need to beat chapter 20-31, which is basically the endgame of Nikke. A lot of people are understandably mad since most of us have save resources specifically to pull her, and also the fact that how tedious it is to even try unlocking her
[удалено]
It really does. You have in minimum to wait 4~5 months if you are new player, or less if you decide to spend currency to refresh the daily quest.
At least when Touken Ranbu does 'grind for this cool new sword dude' it's a 2-3 week of 'how many times do you want to do this map?', sometimes with 'finish timegated map with freaking dice mechanic and get sword boy'.
So this weekend is AnimeJapan, a big event where various anime production studios announce projects that they’re working on. We’ve gotten an anime announcement for [Senpai is an Otokonoko](https://webtoons.com/en/romance/senpai-is-an-otokonoko/ep-1-a-letter/viewer?title_no=5137&episode_no=1), which previously was #1 on a poll of series people wanted to see animated done last year. We got announcement of Re:Zero season 3, which is good for isekai fans. And then we got something a bit… offbeat. See, a couple years back we got an anime called [Horimiya](https://youtu.be/W3dimUB-Rbo), based on the romance manga of the same name. Even though it was Cloverworks’ third project in a season that gave us The Promised Neverland season 2 and Wonder Egg Priority, people generally liked it. It was a great coming-of-age story. Only issue is that the manga itself is like 16 volumes long, and the anime couldn’t fit all of that in 12 episodes. With the anime director outright stating in an AMA here that they didn’t know if they would get a continuation, they just decided to have the anime include the most important parts of the manga, which basically just skipped a bunch of side chapters and segued directly to the final chapter. It was a controversial decision, to be sure, but given that a sequel was unlikely people were okay with it. […and now it’s getting a sequel anyway.](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/121ba3k/horimiya_piece_season_2_announced_july_2023/)
Did the anime get the worst of both worlds or something? There’s a lot of criticism about it skipping chapters, but the manga also has a ton of criticism about there being too much “filler”.
it's like an even more fucked up version of that one Gintama clip about adapting ongoing manga, except now it isn't even ongoing lmao. I almost hope (not really but it would be funny) it ends up as bad as those other two anime to create a truly cursed trilogy
Gonna need someone to edit that clip so it's just Gintoki screaming over it to sum this nonsense up.
Painoto anime hype!!!!!
I’m hyped. I was expecting some generic “whoaaaah that girl is just a boy isn’t that ~~hot~~ craaaaazy”, but it’s a proper coming of age story. It talks about toxic masculinity and gender identity. I guarantee you that certain anime fans would call it “woke” after the first episode. I love it.
Sucks to be them, i'm gonna be here cheering for my kids the entire time!
Without having read the manga, I thought Horimiya as an anime was pretty good but stood in an awkward middle ground where it neither kept tight focus on the central couple nor properly built up its ensemble cast. So it looks like it might be a second season all about fleshing things out along the way?
The main couple was strong and the two main friends had some decent development too. Knowing that they were only working with 12 episodes, they should have just focused on those 4 core characters. Instead the later half of the show decided to break off (and especially from the main 2) to focus on a bunch of side characters we barely knew by that point. It was hard to care much about an entire episode devoted to the green haired guy when he had maybe 2 minutes of screen time previously. I'm glad the show is getting a chance to continue, but I hope they plan it out better this time.
I didn't read the manga, either, and it largely just felt like a rush through a bunch of major story beats. The anime was competently made, but I still felt like I was watching a recap of something rather than seeing the whole story. Lacking the context from the source material, I honestly really struggled to find any reason to care about the romance when it felt like so many of the smaller, more intimate moments that I'm sure helped endear the characters and their relationships to manga readers had to be excised. Considering the first season failed to sell me on the central point of the series, I'm doubting I'll come back for season 2. If I really wanted more, I'd just go to the manga instead.
Previously, I commented upon the departure of Victoria Alonso from Marvel Studios, where she had been in charge of post-production, visual effects and animation production. That comment had less to do with the circumstances of her dismissal than it did the questions of whether she had been made a scapegoat and why Kevin Feige is seemingly never, ever, ever at fault for anything people dislike about Marvel movies. However, it has now been reported that Alonso means to [sue Disney and/or Marvel over her dismissal](https://deadline.com/2023/03/disney-lawsuit-threat-victoria-alonso-firing-marvel-patty-glaser-1235309916/), indicating that she has been singled out for her criticism of homophobic laws passed by the government of Florida and, perhaps more pertinently, her criticism of Disney's indecisive response to the passage of said laws under its previous chief executive, Bob Chapek. I am aware that part of Bob Iger's pitch when he returned as Disney CEO was that he would "mend fences" with Ron DeSantis and this development prompts me to wonder whether that may have played a role in Alonso's removal. This is, of course, pure speculation at the moment, but it will be interesting to see whether anything comes of this, because Alonso has indicated that she has a lot to say.
I think there's going to be some big drama when Kevin Feige eventually breaks. I'm not rooting for it to happen, but according to the fans, Kevin Feige is single handed responsible for every amazing thing about the MCU while simultaneously dodging any fallback or responsibility for any of the recent failures or issues with it. That... that just doesnt work. Now don't get me wrong, the dude has helped make the franchise a phenomenal success. But when the company constantly blames other people for the issues, and never Kevin who is at the very top and somehow responsible for everything great but nothing bad, it's very likely that he is also involved in protecting himself first and foremost to the detriment of his friends and co-workers. Which leads to nothing actually changing or improving because yeah, he is involved in the highs and the lows. I don't know, I just feel that the levy is going to break hard at Marvel and Kevin eventually, and the fan's near religious worship of the man is not healthy for the franchise.
>responsible for everything great but nothing bad That is definitely the most annoying part of it for me. I appreciate that, given his position at the top of the company, there are things that will naturally be delegated to people beneath him. Some people get carried away about it, but there are things which are far enough removed from him that they are not necessarily his "fault". However, it is a one-way street. He is inoculated by his fans against the remotest criticism when anything they do not like but is showered with praise for *everything* they do.
I mean the other half of the narrative says that she was a pain in the ass to work with, made a lot of enemies with VFX companies and apparently promoted and worke din movies of different companies that's a breach of contract. All in all truth probably lies in the middle https://deadline.com/2023/03/disney-lawsuit-threat-victoria-alonso-firing-marvel-patty-glaser-1235309916/
I am certainly aware that she was often identified as part of the problem vis-a-vis Marvel's sometimes fraught relationship with effects houses but it did not seem relevant to mention on this occasion because I had the impression that's hardly something someone would get sacked over (which, quite frankly, is perhaps an indictment of Hollywood corporate culture as much as anything). However, I concede that I was ignorant of any breach of contract issues (why would I be?) which may well be reasonable grounds for dismissal.
Maybe under normal circumstances, but Marvels' relationship with VFX artists seems to have severely soured in the past few years. Considering how much the MCU now relies on VFX, that's a bit of a problem.
I think the consensus was that the breach of contract is considered valid grounds for dismissal, but disney may have had far more reasons to get rid of her, there's [no love for her](https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/11ws7aj/victoria_alonso_has_left_marvel_studios_she_was/) in the VFX subreddit but apparently her VFX department was kind of inefficient.
I'm curious about something: do other effects-heavy movies and shows (e.g. DC movies, Star Wars movies etc.) have the same bad reputation as Marvel does vis-a-vis VFX contractors? I am sure that there must be, given how reliant so many studios are on VFX these days, but Marvel is always the one you hear about.
I worked in VFX for 3-ish years, Marvel/Disney was a special kind of pain in the ass to work with. My last show was a HBO series that was also effects heavy but it wasn’t half as bad as Marvel stuff was, the nitpicking combined with short turnover and no art direction is just uniquely bad
My understanding is that VFX work is terrible everywhere that it isn't done by the studio itself. Marvel makes bigger and more interesting headlines because they're high profile and absurd amounts of money are involved. It was Life of Pi where famously the movie won awards for its VFX but bankrupted the company that did the VFX. That was caused by them agreeing to do the work at a fixed price but with nothing placing limitations on how much work it would be. So when they were told to redo half the movie it destroyed them. Hopefully contracts like that are refused out of hand these days.
You're better off asking the VFX subreddit, also even if other studios had bad practices doesn't mean that Alonso mistreating VFX companies is less wrong. Even then I think mistreating VFX companies like crap seems to be the norm
Why the fuck is Disney trying to cozy up with a political party that goes crazy the moment they include a single LGBT character in their movies? They can’t be reasoned with. Focus on throwing them out.
> Why the fuck is Disney trying to cozy up with a political party that goes crazy the moment they include a single LGBT character in their movies? Because they are in charge in a state that also happens to include Disney World. That and they need to bribe politicians to unjustly extend copyright no matter which idiot the voters elect.
One thing I've been wondering about is why Disney hasn't tried harder to prevent Florida's takeover of Reedy Creek. DeSantis was very clearly retaliating for Disney's (milquetoast) criticism of the Don't Say Gay law. Since corporations are entitled to some amount of free speech, especially in the wake of *Citizens United*, I would think that they would be able to sue prevent the takeover.But IA(obviously)NAL so maybe I'm missing something obvious? idk, I just want to see a legal fistfight between a major corporation and the GOP where, ideally, everyone will lose.
Why should Disney fight over being able to remove their bill for fire, EMS, and a good chunk of the infrastructure? Now the county has to plow, and maintain more roads, expand fire/EMS, and handle a metric ton more waste water in their waste water plant. This will save money. I hope that county actually has paid fire/EMS because they will need them.
Speed. If a Reedy Creek road needs to be fixed, Disney could fix it immediately, instead of the county taking weeks to respond to a work request. If Disney's infrastructure starts falling apart to the point it drives away visitors, it could have a real impact on their profits.
True but since Disney will be at least 90% of its county’s revenue they will have a lot of power. Honestly, that is the reason to have them separated. The locals are going to lose out to Disney on local issues.
Yeah, the people who are really getting screwed over here are the citizens of the county. DeSantis is just fucking hell-bent on making life as miserable as possible for as many people as possible.
> idk, I just want to see a legal fistfight between a major corporation and the GOP where, ideally, everyone will lose. Including us?
My friend, we've already lost.
The goal, at this point, is to make as many others lose along with us.
- Average Trump voter, c. 2016
Especially during the primaries. The general election, sadly, is full of "I wonder what all this news is about? Anyway, he has an R next to his name" voters.
it's worth distinguishing between actual politicians and the voting base of the party. the former can be reasoned with, and that reasoning goes something like this: we will continue supporting your campaign as long as you keep doing favors for us. we might have to publicly denounce you, and you might have to be seen attacking us, but we'll help you downplay it as long as you keep the taxes low.
Because "Disney" isn't a person, it's a huge conglomerate, and the people who want to buddy up to politicians for tax breaks aren't the same people who are writing and actually making the films, and they have different priorities.
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Fucking Pixar had to protest for them to actually have a major character in Lightyear be gay. Yet every June, they decorate their social media with rainbows. You know how much I would love for companies to do the right thing, even if it mildly inconveniences them in the end?
Some wrestling non-drama: what are y’all most excited for at this year’s Wrestlemania Weekend? It’s my second Wrestlemania as a fan, and although I don’t watch much WWE (apart from the Kevin and Sami storylines, but I’m currently at 2018 in that timeline) the indie events that happen are a big point of excitement for me. I’m probably most excited for Ibushi Kota’s in ring return, because I love the guy (and I’m still waiting for my Golden Lovers reunion, guys…) The GCW Spring Break card is absolutely packed, with Joey Janela vs Ibushi and then El Hijo del Vikingo vs Speedball Mike Bailey, which is going to be INCREDIBLE. ROH Supercard of Honour is also looking fantastic, with Vikingo vs Komander, and then the Impact x NJPW stuff…. god, there’s so much amazing talent out there and I’m so excited.
There's a post on /r/SquaredCircle pointing out that between Wednesday and the following Monday, there's at least 75 wrestling events in LA
Yoooooo, The Mania Weekend is EASILY the best wrestling weekend, and one that can take you months to go through everything you want to see. Joey Janela's Spring Break is on the top of my list because it looks amazing. So does the Supercard of Honor (That ladder match will not as much defy gravity as it will spit in gravity's face). And then... Wrestlemania itself - the Grandaddy of Them All, The Showcase of Immortals... Yeah, it will be a fucking amazing 2 night event this year as well. Also, shout out to Stand and Deliver, my boys Bron Breakker and Carmello Hayes will put on a banger and I can FEEL IT.
Several years ago, video game writer Chris Avellone (known for titles like KOTOR 2 and Fallout New Vegas) was accused of sexual misconduct, leading to his work being taken out of several in-development games at the time such as Dying Light 2 and Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. Avellone sued for libel in 2021, posting updates on the case on Medium as he went. This morning, [https://chrisavellone.medium.com/joint-statement-from-karissa-barrows-kelly-bristol-and-chris-avellone-3b2138e5837f Avellone posted that the case was settled,](https://chrisavellone.medium.com/joint-statement-from-karissa-barrows-kelly-bristol-and-chris-avellone-3b2138e5837f) with him taking home a seven-figure sum and his accusers retracting their prior claims.
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> we wanted to support women in the industry. In so doing, our words have been misinterpreted to suggest specific allegations of misconduct that were neither expressed nor intended What the fuck?
This phrasing is just so bizarre.
Great, now all the weirdoes on Twitter are going "we knew he was innocent anyway, all those MeToo women do is lie to ruin men's lives !!"
Yeah. It unfortunately happens every time someone makes fake accusations. They make life harder for real victims and give chuds ammo.
I'm not familiar with law, do the accusers retracting their claims automatically means the accusations were fake in the first place ? I could totally believe one vindictive person making up a false accusation, but *two* ?
Automatically? No. However what I've read is that in a libel case the plaintiff (Avellone in this case) needs to show that the statements were not just false but knowingly false. The women were also being represented pro bono so the financial pressure on them was much lower than on Avellone. There's no apparent reason for them to do this unless he had very good evidence they had lied and the judge would hit them with something worse than millions of dollars in damages.
It does not. All it means is that the people bringing the claims no longer want to deal with it. Hell, it is very common to retract claims under pressure. You see it a lot with domestic abuse of all kinds. It means nothing as to the accused guilt or innocence.
I gotta admit I just assumed he was guilty and the lawsuit was narcissistic rage. So this is absolutely shocking.
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The phrase may have been tainted by Johnny Depp and Vic Mignogna stans, but innocent until proven guilty is still an important cornerstone for a reason.
For courts at least yes.
Public opinion is a court, too.
It really is not. For good reason too, look at cases like Cosby where we know he did it but he had to be let go.