Sex is rooted in reality, but the boundaries are socially constructed.
Similarly, Pluto is no longer a planet because “planet” is a socially constructed category. It doesn’t mean that it’s not rooted in tangible, factual reality, just that we culturally decide what characteristics are required to fall into the categories we created.
Regardless of caring about Jinshi’s feelings, it seems clear that the emperor recognizes Maomao’s usefulness and probably understands that she’d be much more effective with the power and access she’d be granted if she became the emperor’s sister-in-law, lol.
Clarifying question: Do the rules apply to the egging of fictional characters? On the one hand, there is no “truth” to their identity and speculating about their internal feelings is part of engaging with fiction, but on the other hand it may model bad behavior for engaging with real people.
Went through all the OPs EDs for this season (and tried not to be too biased against the shows I didn’t end up liking, lol). Here are my favorites:
OPs
EDs
Notable Non-Favorites
I really like the character arc they’re setting up for Kazuhiho where Marie’s excitement about Japan is helping him engage with real life more and eventually have more hobbies than just sleeping.
Also, as someone who lives on a fault line, the two reactions to the earthquake seemed pretty true to life, lol. Marie’s reaction was a bit over the top, but visitors definitely get pretty freaked out when we get an earthquake that makes locals go “oh, huh”.
Since this season seems fairly light and pretty heavily weighted towards the weekends, I’ve decided to supplement with other shows from my backlog to watch in between:
I’m glad Shin got a chance to shine this episode. Last time I was worried the kids would get sidelined too much, but it seems I was wrong, lol.
The resolution this episode felt sort of unearned. It seemed like we were being lead to believe that this A Tale of Perishing was deeper and more complex than the simple movie that existed in the real world, but then the solution to a philosophical disagreement was just a handsome anime boy and a musical number. And normally I’d be all for that, but that fixing Memmeln’s nihilism felt like a cop-out. Though I did still appreciate the handsome anime boy and musical number.
I think it’s really cute how long distance travelers leave those flower offerings. It’s easy to imagine how if you lived in that world you’d start to notice things like “oh, someone must have come through here from [wherever] recently” when passing by one of those statues.
I’m not really a gundam fan, or a fan of space operas in general, but I was recommended this when it first started and I really enjoyed the first half. I felt like the corporate setting gave a suitable dystopian feel for the meaty drama about kids dealing with the sins of their parents, and I was fully on board. But, somewhere in the second half I feel like it all got a bit lost. The plot became more complicated and the themes got a bit muddled, and I sort of stopped engaging with anything except the emotional threads of the characters, who continued to be very well written. Overall, even though it was enjoyable, it felt like it had a lot of wasted potential.
And I agree, not woke enough: not anti-capitalist enough and not gay enough. (But, to be fair, I’d say that about most things, lol)
That seems like it might be what they’re going for, but my problem with it is that we haven’t seen her actually engage with this idea very much. What is it she likes about this old movie? All we’ve seen from her is her complaints about it (QJ being useless, Destiny causing problems for no reason, etc). The things she draws to resolve the conflicts also seem like they should tie in to those themes because they’re ideas pulled from other anime, but she doesn’t engage with any of them as a fan either. It’d go a long way if we got some flashbacks of her watching or fangirling about the stuff that inspired her, or really anything that shows us how excited she used to be about animation.
TBH, I feel like Zenshu’s biggest strength right now is that it has a lot of space for viewers to bring their own ideas and themes related to artistic endeavors and insert them into the story, which I can understand being enjoyable for some people, but for me that just ends up feeling like they forgot a big piece of the heart of the story.
It’s a bit of a weak season for new shows, but I put together a tasting menu of 4 anime for my friend group to consider watching together: Zenshu, Welcome to Japan Ms Elf, Okitsura, and Sakamoto Days. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t take to any of them enough to change our original plans, so our list is still Apothecary Diaries, My Happy Marriage, and Hanako-kun.
The animation this week was pretty rough… hopefully it’ll be better next time.
Especially with her role in the eisaa, I’m even more convinced that Hina is observant enough to know fully what’s going on and is trying to be a subtle wingman for her bff’s obvious crush. I’ll be curious how she plays this with Teru trying to confess to her.
I truly do not understand what this anime is trying to accomplish and am fascinated by how ambitious it is visually while being seeming devoid of any meaningful themes (so far?). I think I’m willing to stick around for the rest of this show to see if it ends up developing into anything meaningful, but at this point I seriously doubt it.
Ada’s comment can be found here
And ya, if it’s true that Ada was the one dealing with the the reports, I’m not really sure what the mod team was even doing (other than making unpopular decisions without community input)
I’ve seen a lot of talk about how this move changes the admins the community will be under, but very little about how this will change the randos that pass through. The mods keep saying this won’t change anything, that the moderation will stay the same, etc, but the reason this community is the way it is is that there are a lot of locals that find it. When the new community shows up on l.w’s local page, it will bring in a far different crowd. Their posts, comments, and up/down votes will change the community, and there’s no amount of moderation that will fix that.
Mods, this is why people are mad you made this change without asking anyone. Many of us do not want an influx of .world users into this space because we know what kind of politics and biases they’ll bring with them and that, even if you moderate the bigots, the normies will still likely overpower the queer voices this community is known for.
This episode felt a fair bit weaker than the first, though it was still fun. Even though we’ve got a bit of a squad going, I worry that going forward Shin and Lu won’t be able to do much in their fights - if the enemies keep escalating in strength, Sakamoto will be the only one really capable of dealing with them, as we sort of saw with Son Hee and Bacho.
The cozy romance side of this is absolutely perfect, but I’m also pretty impressed by the isekai side as well. They’re setting up a decent mystery in why he’s able to cross over, and also we can see that he’s clever and tactically-minded without the show needing to tell us he’s a genius or is relying on some cheat skill.
I worry a little that this will turn into an unnecessary love triangle / harem (a common worry of mine and for good reason, lol), but I’m giving the benefit of the doubt for now and guessing that our dragon friend will be a knowing third wheel following them around for snacks.
If so, I think it failed at that job, because I’m one of those people that decide what to watch from episode 1 and I was going to drop this until i found a spoiler that made me give it a second look.
There’s a lot of negativity in here and I want to share a different perspective.
First of all, it is extremely, overwhelmingly obvious that your posts are satire. Looking through your posts, I found it basically impossible to imagine thinking you were serious, even if I had agreed with the things you were saying.
Second, all of the criticism here seems to be about how folks are sensitive when it comes to stuff about modern politics. That’s understandable - a fresh wound will be sensitive, after all. But I think that “this kind of humor makes me feel bad about the world” is the sort of use case the block button was made for. A better argument against what you’re doing would be that you’re causing harm, doing things like radicalizing people or antagonizing oppressed groups, which I haven’t seen anyone argue that you’re doing. (If anyone here believes that chad is causing harm, I’m open to having my mind changed, but you’d have to explain why.) I don’t think “this isn’t how I want to react to awful politics” is a reason to make you stop what I’m sure is a cathartic exercise on your end.