12th Century Architect: This Cathedral Is Looking So Good. It Could Still Use A Little Something, Though.

THIS

This is The Problem with new dmc anime. All other stuff can be overlooked. But not this shit. They made a such grand mistake taking out the literal soul of the gameverse. Everything else doesn't work as it should without this conflict done right.

And it's done completely wrong. Who's idea was it to poorly disguise USA politics and racism problems as "demons", "slavery" and "hell".

Dmc explored the union of human and demon parts, questioned what they are, what they represent. With main themes as love, power and survival, explored through different concepts of family. It was always there in different forms that evolved and layered over each other with each new game and manga.

So the most noticeable outcome of those? We got intimate family melodrama with brutal and unstoppable action. Which is a receipt for success!

In the new anime we get boring "save the world, save them all" in a grand plot because "they're just like us" and Dante who has NO IDEA that he's a halfdemon and what was his family. Unless they play the amnesia card which would be ridiculous ngl but also even worse. So he's basically left without conflict AT ALL.

He's just a guy.

When the whole premise of dmc is that this "just a guy" is not in fact "just a guy".

I'm almost crying, send help

I think part of what makes the Netflix show so frustrating is the fact that there's definitely blind spots in the original lore that could allow for a deeper discussion on a demon's capability for love and goodness, but the show itself just did not seem interested in actually exploring those ideas.

I've seen some posts going around about how demons not being inherently evil was already established in the games, and I think that is true. The gameverse has a bit of a strange philosophy when it comes to demons and their capacity for good. On one hand, the original two games act as though the only way for a demon to be good is to actively distance themselves from their demonic heritage.

Dante telling Trish and Lucia that "devil's never cry" actually feeds into the idea that demons are inherently evil and that they aren't actually demons because they are capable of goodness. In those games, this is played straight. However, in later entries, they seem to recognise this for what it actually is - the rhetoric of a man who is projecting his own self loathing in regard to his demonic half onto the people in his life who are dealing with similar problems.

Vergil and his core beliefs around demonic power being the only thing to keep him safe when human fragility failed him is the first time Dante is forced to confront a flaw in his worldview. Vergil is technically correct in that their heritage is what has kept the two of them alive up until that point and that in order for Dante to stop his brother and Arkham, he'd need to embrace that power too. Dante seems to internalise this as the idea that his power needs to be used as a force for good - "with great power comes great responsibility," style, but still retains that he is good in spite of his demonic power.

Power in DMC is not inherently evil, the folly of the villains in the series is that they seek it to fill a hole that should have been filled with love instead. On some level, Dante recognises this, but is often too burdened by his self loathing that he has a hard time excepting and seeking out love himself.

In contrast, Nero is able to acknowledge what is truly important to him, allowing himself to be vulnerable when he gives and receives love, while also fully embracing his demonic side and the power it gives him. V also has a similar revelation, although his is just as much about learning to love life itself and rediscovering passions so he can have a better coping mechanism that isn't more power.

These core character arcs clearly indicate that the reason humanity is seen as morally superior in the games is their willingness to love and willingly give. To gain more out of life than just power (it's also what makes the power hungry human villains so evil, they want to throw away what makes them human for the chance at being powerful). Whereas demonic power means that demons live in a perpetually dog-eat-dog world where there is no incentive to love or create, you can only ever take. But when demons like Trish are given the chance to grow from that, they are just as capable of love as any human.

This then opens up for the line of questioning, well, if environmental factors are what's making demons so power hungry, then wouldn't exploring how being shut off from the opportunity to grow in the human world be an actually valid idea for the Netflix adaptation to explore? It could have been! Genuinely!

However, the writers were not interested in exploring that concept, not really. The need to fit established DMC lore into the shape of a narrative about how the Iraq war and the US government intensionally otherised Arabic people meant that those ideas couldn't be expanded upon because of how that would have impacted the portrayal of a very direct analogue of a real life group of people.

This is often the problem central to the fantasy racism trope, because it's a direct reference to a real group of people who's only actual differences from any other ethnic group is appearance and culture, any discussion of how physiological differences may impact the way they live and experience the world very quickly become a minefield.

The demons in the games are often one of a kind or a species with entirely alien biological incentives, trying to make them seem like their way of life would be no different from the average human is actively contradictory and just plain boring. It's part of why the demons that were taken from the game look so out of place compared to their more human shaped counterparts.

There is the potential in examining a demon's ability to love in the gameverse version of the lore, and it wouldn't have been a problem for the anime to explore that. That sort of exploration would have had to focus on how love can come in many forms, how a fundamentally different way of perceiving the world around you doesn't mean your perspective isn't valid. However, because demons are an exact reference to a real life group of people now, making them out to be anything other than just like any other human is risking a lot.

So that's the crux of the issue for me. I think trying to force the demons from the game lore into an Arabic shaped hole is kinda a bad idea. Hell, if they were desperate to make the US government into the big bad then there would have been precedent for it. DMC2 and DMC4 both concern powerful groups in society abusing demonic power for personal gain, the idea that a government would do the same isn't too dissimilar in my opinion.

To be honest, I feel a lot of the criticism of the anime has only been scratching at the surface of the actual problems so far. I'd appreciate it if the pre-existing fandom could recognise where problems existed in the source material before jumping to complaining about the adaptation, even though there is a lot to complain about...

“select your gender” except the options are uquiz aesthetics

The Best and The Worst Luke Skywalker content ever

Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian but it’s Toxic by Britney Spears

And then like

He says: there is no moral in this story

oh fuck real deep

Supernatural final and the following brainstorming in attempts to find SOME FRAKING SENSE was like

^ Jesus Christ posted : FUCKING NEWFAGS, MOTHERFUCKERS SHOWING UP

The cup says: Stles

The line says: New Fandom, Same Shit

Literally

#live footage of me not understanding what's going on with my life

Long. Heartless. Jolting.

Am I.. a horny snake? Or an aggressive hagfish?

No. Most likely I'm a literal Heartless from Kingdom Hearts 😔🤌

Congratulations, youre body has taken on a new form! Spin this wheel three times. These words describe your new body

“Bad guys don’t deserve to be redeemed” is a boring plot mindset and it’s cancelled forever.

Show me bad guys that think it’s too late to turn their life around, and then turn it around. Show me bad guys that think they’ll never be loved because of the things they’ve done and then give them love and support that makes them feel like it’s worth it to change. Show me bad guys who are bitter, hold grudges, lash out at people, and then make them realize that this Isn’t Working and want more out of their life. Show me bad guys that ask the good guys for help!!

The “villain gets what’s coming to him and is never seen or heard from again” trope is old and played. I want to hear from them again. I want them to ask the good guys to drive them to their first therapy appointment. I want them to struggle through apologies, not because they’re too proud to say “I’m sorry” bc tbh that trope can die too, but because they can’t find the words to make things better and it makes it feel pointless to try.

Make it hard! Make it hurt! Make them question who they are and if change is possible and make them find out that they can be more than the destructive thoughts and behavior they’ve adapted! Make them learn that having bad thoughts doesn’t make you a bad person, and you can choose which thoughts and desires you entertain and act upon. Let the choice to ignore bad thoughts and focus on positive ones become easier over time. And let them feel proud of themselves for it!

Real people struggle with these issues every day and right now the social message is that if you fuck up, you’re scum and you deserve to suffer and you’ll never be more than scum. Real people need to know that you can’t undo the damage of things you’ve done, but you can be better in the future. Real people need to know that you’re not pigeonholed into being a Bad Guy for the rest of your life because you’re a Bad Guy right now.

Nobody “deserves” to be redeemed, it isn’t about “deserving” redemption, it’s about working your ass off not to keep hurting people because you can.

Friends: How do you choose your ships & OTPs?! It's so hard!

Me: The question is more like "how do I stop"

never having sex again. focusing my energy on violence

YES

I didn't even notice until op said it!

When I was watching that one scene in Avengers it felt so gross, I was immediately disgusted and had such a strong urge to turn it off and forgetforgetforget and pretend I didn't see anything. I guess it worked cause op made me remember it, but if I was asked out of nowhere what the worst show off feminism have you ever seen in cinema I wouldn't be able to tell. The Trauma. Ugh.

Anyway, again, I didn't really see that as something exceptional. It felt so normal and natural to me.

Usually I do pick up on BAD performance and all this bullshit female characters just for check. They don't have a story. They feel empty and unnecessary. The only quality that is important for the story with them is their sex/gender. Or there is nothing important for the story at all.

The point is the Mandalorian did a great job. Its female characters never felt bad like that. That fight included. The performance was good as expected. Therefore it never clicked as something special in modern social media. WHILE IT CERTAINLY IS. It is special!

Because right off the bat I can only remember Hannibal was such quality female writing where the were just right. Tbc it also depends on shows writing and perfomance level in general, so there are some more, but imho they are written less great in general.

And the amount of good female writing is truly saddening yet the good news are it grows! With time there is and will be even more great stuff!!

Non-performative inclusion and “The Mandalorian”

This post contains minor spoilers. Proceed with caution.

In the season two finale of “The Mandalorian” there is a scene near the beginning of the episode in which a strike team (minus Mando himself) storms onto an Imperial ship, blasts stormtroopers, etc. It’s an extended action sequence. Two of the characters are helmeted.

I was well into the scene before it hit me that all four of the characters on this strike team were women.

The fact that there was this all-female action team wasn’t new. I’ve seen that before. What was new about it was that this was the first time I’d seen a team of women that didn’t feel performative.

Remember that scene in “Avengers: Endgame”, the “she’s not alone” scene where All The Lady Characters Assembled, and you could tell the filmmakers were getting some kind of weird boner of “looooook at how many Strong Female Characters we have, let’s put them all together and have them be Strong Female Characters at the same time” and it felt super gross? That was performative.

I’ve heard and used that term before but I’m not sure I really grokked what it meant until I saw what its absence looked like, in “The Mandalorian.” 

It didn’t feel performative because each of those characters had been part of the narrative in their own time over the previous two seasons, with their own agencies and backstories. They were characters in the story as it needed to be told, they weren’t Strong Female Characters introduced for the purpose of being that (in a sexy way, of course). There was never a sense of ticking off the “kickass lady character” boxes. When Cara Dune is introduced, or Fennec Shand, or Bo-Katan, there was never that subtext of “Okay here is our Lady Character, isn’t she such a great Lady Character, look look we’re Doing the Thing you want us to do with having Womens in our Boy Stuff.”

No. It was, here’s a Rebel soldier. Here’s an assassin. Here’s a Mandalorian exile.  Here’s a Jedi. Here’s a magistrate. They have functions to perform and stories to tell in this narrative. Those functions and stories happen while these characters are women, not because they are women.

And it’s so, so subtle, the difference. It’s hard to put your finger on how it’s usually done wrong until you see it done right. It’s not just the writing although that’s a big part of it. It’s in how they were filmed, framed, shot, costumed, and lit. It’s in how they were directed, how the camera treated them - i.e. no differently than the male characters. None of these women were sexified, either. Not that they weren’t being portrayed by attractive women, but that wasn’t remotely played up or displayed in how they were styled, costumed, and made up.

Unfortunately now that we’ve all seen how non-performative inclusion of women into a narrative can be done right, everything else is going to seem that much more insufferable.