celestialmechanic replied to your photo “”

Wait, have you always played Ar Tonelico or did I actually convince someone to try it?

It was actually @baroquespiral​ who redpilled me here, but yeah, I hadn’t played any of this series until today.

I’m playing Ar Tonelico 2 and it’s really unreasonably good!!  I kinda suspect that the only reason this game isn’t a classic is that people are put off by the tacky softcore-porn aspects of the premise.  But surprisingly (?) in light of that stuff, the writing is emotionally involving and just really good all around.  Also, the battle system is very satisfying, and it may be the lowest-tedium console RPG I’ve ever played

meisnewbie:

nostalgebraist:

The rise of the nakige genre of visual novel sounds like a joke someone would make about defying gender stereotypes

For people who haven’t ventured as far into the deep-weeb abyss as I have, here’s the story: there are these erotic Japanese computer games, right?  Which are like choose-your-own-adventure books with pictures and music, about dating anime girls and eventually having sex with them?  OK, so some of them started having really sad, tearjerking central storylines, often involving the female lead having a terminal illness (and, sometimes, being brought back to life by the magical power of the male protagonist’s love or the like).  These tearjerking elements would be the main focus of the latter parts of the game, to the exclusion of erotic content.

And this was really popular.  Early entries in the niche were heavily hyped and well-received upon release, despite having markedly less focus on sex than was the norm.  Eventually, the company best known for this formula, Key, released a visual novel in the same style with no erotic content at all.  It sold just as well as the others, generated a number of lucrative adaptations in other media, and is one of the most popular and famous games in its medium.

Basically, all these guys buying porn games were like “wait, these new games are meant to give me a good cry rather than get me off?  This is the kind of content I want to see more of,” and thus a genre of porn for straight men metamorphosed into a genre of gentle love stories that make you cry at the end

It goes even deeper than that! Clannad’s first half ended with the relationship starting and deals with themes regarding ~marriage~ as well as ~fatherhood~. The main writer for Key also reads cancer patient diaries for inspiration.

Unfortunately, outside of Key there doesn’t seem to be much traction for releasing new games that are all ages, at least not before they are ported to more consumer friendly platforms like vita, ps3/4. Several titles from fairly well established studios bombed when they decided to release without porn (Type Moon’s Witch on the Holy Night and minori’s Supipara are the examples that come to mind) and the perception within the industry is that no porn = no sales even if the scenes themselves are fairly token (some writers copy paste the same moans over and over again, I would like to think in protest).

Unrelated, but there’s also another series which got announced for localization called Baldr Sky which is a cyberpunk epic based on the Sprawl trilogy, the two games IIRC are longer than the LotR trilogy, but the story as well as the DMC style gameplay far far far outshadow what little porn there is.

Oh my god, the thing about writers copy/pasting moans

It’s like the opposite of American moviemakers trying to get lower MPAA ratings?

(via meisnewbie)

meisnewbie:

nostalgebraist:

I posted this as a comment over at Ozy’s blog, but I figured it was a long enough ramble that it might as well be a tumblr post.  Cut because it’s yet another post about incels and Nice Guys and all that stuff you don’t want to read yet another post about

Keep reading

IT’S ~well actually~ anime man time!!!!!! EXCITING PEDANTRY BELOW THE CUT.

OTAKU Credentials: I learned Japanese to read eroge, can mostly read simple Japanese without assistance (e.g. most manga) and can read college level stuff with some access to a dictionary. Know people who read 2ch pretty regularly and consume a large amount of eroge (think 50+ games and counting).

Keep reading

Ah, this is interesting and I think it does weaken that part of my argument a lot.  I am probably over-weighting Key because I’m only familiar with the VNs that I see recommended the most (due to curiosity about what “the best of the medium” looks like), and most others I see in that category (say on lists of “kamige”) are very far from the original romance themes and don’t seem to derive their appeal from any fantasy about male-female relations.  Plus Key did sell amazingly at least for a while.

Also, IMO Key’s work is just really bad* relative to other things commonly mentioned in the same breath, so I have to do more psychologizing than usual to reach a satisfying explanation for why it’s so well-regarded.  That does make my own preferences a hidden premise of the argument, though, which is not ideal.

I didn’t know anything about White Album 2, and wow yeah its popularity does seem like a big strike against my hypothesis.

*(except for Planetarian, which I really enjoyed when I read it, but that was around 8 years ago so the current error bars on that judgment are big)

(via meisnewbie)

Subarashiki Hibi is a denpa game. It’s hard to actually define a denpa game, except by naming other denpa games and leaving the interpretation up to the player. But I’m no wimp so I’ll give it a shot.

Denpa games are a subgenre of horror eroge, popularised by the 1996 Leaf game ‘Shizuku’ which also lent the genre its name. The typical model is a horror story where the catalyst for the events that occur are based on familiar people acting in unfamiliar, yet seemingly orchestrated ways. Stories where the world seems to have gone mad; and the protagonist is not necessarily an exception. The name comes from the idea that electromagnetic waves (denpa) is causing people to act strangely (although it is rarely anything that mundane).

(source)

This is actually a useful term describing a specific subgenre of fiction I tend to like, but alas it is unknown outside of weeb circles

xhxhxhx:

pluspluspangolin:

xhxhxhx:

davidsevera:

xhxhxhx:

davidsevera:

IDEA: A website that tells you which anime is good good and not just anime good

tamerlane had a handful of interesting, idiosyncratic recommendations before he decided to take his site down – see his posts on 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003 – but good anime criticism is hard to find

He liked RahXephon, which is suspect, but it looks like he put thought into it at least.

I don’t know much about RahXephon, but Gwern gave it a 9/10, so there must be something there.

RahXephon is, imo, pretty good; a clear derivative of Evangelion that doesn’t succeed as gloriously as Eva but still does quite good for itself

on the other hand, gwern also rated Another 9/10, which is highly suspect, imo

(also, speaking of tamerlane, this is an excellent new essay of his, and he seems to be producing new work over at that site)

wow, I had forgotten

_Another_ was quite fun. I loved all the really creepy elements like the detailed dolls and the use of rusting metal to suggest blood, and the misdirection of sound effects to mislead one into thinking a death is going to happen when it didn’t, and the final resolution was reasonably clever.

highly suspect indeed

I second the recommendation of the tamerlane essay, which includes some great digs at Hayao Miyazaki

It’s generally true that the best Hollywood cartoons cost a lot to make, and Miyazaki’s films are some of the most expensive in Japan, so one might reasonably infer that Miyazaki’s films are the best the Japanese can offer. Among sakuga fans, however, Miyazaki has something of a pernicious reputation for watering down the quality in his films, “correcting” nearly every shot to match his uniform style. It’s become a running joke that Miyazaki will invite talented animators from outside of Ghibli to animate on his films only to have them produce their least interesting work. That Miyazaki regularly badmouths the rest of the industry no doubt contributes to this misperception.

Originally I just reblogged this w/o commentary, but having read part of the tamarlane post –

it’s funny, although I don’t think about it that often it really does seem true that much of anime barely qualifies as “animation.”  Not just low cel counts, but jerky, almost symbolic character motions that don’t even aspire to fluidity.  Some of this is why I have a hard time watching anime (it’s hard for me to pay attention to visual media when there’s not much going on onscreen).

But also, it means that whatever appeals to me about anime (and things do appeal to me) isn’t in the animation per se.  Really, I think anime is just good at striking, visually evocative images – I can browse the non-pornographic, non-”endless identicalscute girls” parts of pixiv for hours, because there’s just so much wistfulness, grandeur, danger, narrative charge packed into those images.  A quick random flip through pixiv folder, say, turns up this and this and this and this in quick succession, and in case you worry that’s just my curation, consider today’s top-ranked images (on whatever day you happen to be reading this!).

Animation purists will say that this kind of content is just better suited to comics, but it gains a lot from the whole audiovisual package, when that works.  At some point, emphasis on using what’s “intrinsic” to a medium starts to seem silly to me – is it a mistake when someone cares more about who wrote a comic (if it’s Alan Moore, or whoever) than who illustrated it?  Or imagine a silent film purist, complaining that voiced dialogue has no advantage over subtitles – “adding radio to film is just mixing media together!  I am fundamentally a taker-of-photographs-that-are-densely-spaced-in-time and have no interest in ‘sound tracks’”

(via nostalgebraist)

xhxhxhx:

pluspluspangolin:

xhxhxhx:

davidsevera:

xhxhxhx:

davidsevera:

IDEA: A website that tells you which anime is good good and not just anime good

tamerlane had a handful of interesting, idiosyncratic recommendations before he decided to take his site down – see his posts on 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003 – but good anime criticism is hard to find

He liked RahXephon, which is suspect, but it looks like he put thought into it at least.

I don’t know much about RahXephon, but Gwern gave it a 9/10, so there must be something there.

RahXephon is, imo, pretty good; a clear derivative of Evangelion that doesn’t succeed as gloriously as Eva but still does quite good for itself

on the other hand, gwern also rated Another 9/10, which is highly suspect, imo

(also, speaking of tamerlane, this is an excellent new essay of his, and he seems to be producing new work over at that site)

wow, I had forgotten

_Another_ was quite fun. I loved all the really creepy elements like the detailed dolls and the use of rusting metal to suggest blood, and the misdirection of sound effects to mislead one into thinking a death is going to happen when it didn’t, and the final resolution was reasonably clever.

highly suspect indeed

I second the recommendation of the tamerlane essay, which includes some great digs at Hayao Miyazaki

It’s generally true that the best Hollywood cartoons cost a lot to make, and Miyazaki’s films are some of the most expensive in Japan, so one might reasonably infer that Miyazaki’s films are the best the Japanese can offer. Among sakuga fans, however, Miyazaki has something of a pernicious reputation for watering down the quality in his films, “correcting” nearly every shot to match his uniform style. It’s become a running joke that Miyazaki will invite talented animators from outside of Ghibli to animate on his films only to have them produce their least interesting work. That Miyazaki regularly badmouths the rest of the industry no doubt contributes to this misperception.

(via xhxhxhx)

tsutsifrutsi:

nostalgebraist:

There is this thing I see specifically in books that share some of their genes with the romance genre – stuff like Lymond, or the Raven Boys – where the central male characters and their relationships to one another will be lavishly developed, depicted as larger-than-life yet also painted in fine detail.  Often at the cost of pushing the female characters somewhat to the side, there’s an effort to evoke this tableau of “fascinating men,” men with many facets visible and hidden, many capabilities and many flaws and many shifting tensions with one another

It occurs to me that I’m not aware of anything that does the same thing for female characters, whether written by men or women?  There’s lots of stuff that focuses on female characters but I’ve never seen something that treats a group of women with the same sort of fascination

This is actually the fetishized-viewpoint sports/club anime thing, not the harem anime thing. Most of the recent bishounen-in-sports titles, like Free! and Kuroko no Basuke, are essentially “fascinating men” stories. This genre, like the books you mention, is almost exclusively for women and about men.

A subgenre of fetishized-viewpoint club/sports anime, though, is the pop-idol anime, which has its fair share of entries to titillate both men and women with interactions between fascinating people of their preferred gender.

I’d been meaning to reblog this forever but forgot about it until now

Anyway, interesting stuff.  I don’t know the idol subgenre at all, but I can definitely see how popular musicians might be very well suited to this kind of characterization.  On the one hand, people are fascinated by their personal lives, even (or especially) hidden foibles and dark sides, and a band provides a great setting for these complicated, evolving personal relationships.  And on the other hand, people tend to like popular musicians because they’re cool and glamorous and mythic, and any portrayal that totally neglected that, or portrayed it as complete artifice to the point of destroying it, would miss a lot of the appeal (although that could be done on purpose).

(Incidentally, I just started watching Love Live Sunshine after seeing @eudaemaniacal rave about it, and it’s … really fun, remarkably so relative to other anime in the “cute girls” zone that I’ve tried?  Like, I could only sit through about 3 episodes of K-ON, it felt like watching a transmission from and about aliens.  Hmmm)

(via tsutsifrutsi)

The rise of the nakige genre of visual novel sounds like a joke someone would make about defying gender stereotypes

For people who haven’t ventured as far into the deep-weeb abyss as I have, here’s the story: there are these erotic Japanese computer games, right?  Which are like choose-your-own-adventure books with pictures and music, about dating anime girls and eventually having sex with them?  OK, so some of them started having really sad, tearjerking central storylines, often involving the female lead having a terminal illness (and, sometimes, being brought back to life by the magical power of the male protagonist’s love or the like).  These tearjerking elements would be the main focus of the latter parts of the game, to the exclusion of erotic content.

And this was really popular.  Early entries in the niche were heavily hyped and well-received upon release, despite having markedly less focus on sex than was the norm.  Eventually, the company best known for this formula, Key, released a visual novel in the same style with no erotic content at all.  It sold just as well as the others, generated a number of lucrative adaptations in other media, and is one of the most popular and famous games in its medium.

Basically, all these guys buying porn games were like “wait, these new games are meant to give me a good cry rather than get me off?  This is the kind of content I want to see more of,” and thus a genre of porn for straight men metamorphosed into a genre of gentle love stories that make you cry at the end