@Shalvenay Definitely better, I think. Not sure it'll completely suit your requirements, but it sounds like almost anything would be an improvement from high fantasy games.
yeah, I've had some thoughts as to 'things I want to do as a DM'
yeah, there are a lot of places where I'm willing to bend physics in a fantasy world
(you want a spell that acts as a shield against lighting bolts? sure, it'll just return 'em to sender ;)
another thing for me, and this is a D&Dism more specifically that gets under my skin hardcore, is how Gygax and co. reified good and evil when originally constructing D&D
good and evil are types goshdarnit, not values!
</rant>
example: my vision of what Drow should be is as darker-skinned, pointy-eared Egyptians for which spiders play the role that cats played in ancient Egypt
(so...living off of a narrow, riverine fertile strip in a desert landscape, with a long history of civilization)
It's a (mostly) well-written show with a lot of good humor and fun characters. Quite a rarity (... unintentional puns haunt me, a head's up) for western animation targeted at and focusing on girls.
Also worth noting that my opinions are based on season one and the first leg of season two (not even half of it). From what I have picked up about the rest via osmosis, I'm afraid it's going to go downhill.
The entire concept of Equestria Girls frustrated me, too -- not because of the humanization (that's kinda cool, conceptually) but because the plot was so generic. It's every other no thought female-targeted western cartoon about the ~odd girl out~ with a catty rival and everyone is cheerleaders and who's going to be prom queen? (nobody cares because I've seen this 5000 times)
What amuses me most about Rainbow Rocks and surrounding hype (bearing in mind I haven't actually seen the film yet) is how unfazed Rarity is by Fluttershy's magical girl transformation in one of the teaser-things.
I haven't seen it, I just listened to the songs. They are way better than I expected. Also, the evil band ponies have really cool names that I wish I could steal for magical girls, on that subject.
But then, we're talking about a place whose dominant life-form is apparently unable to contain more than one emotion at a time without snapping like a dried-out rubber band.
It is true, though. I am Fluttershy. Minus the mind control. :v Horribly shy and soft-spoken, flocked to by animals, totally into Rarity (okay so that last one is extrapolation, but the yuri goggles have melded to my face, it's too late now).
The events of them are only alluded to... what, once more, with a minor appearance of the first's 'love interest' in one episode, and then never again? And even then they could just as well have been reusing existing assets?
Like, Equestria Girls rides the rails of a School Band Plot, but in the context of the story the band plot is just a sham: it's the story of a jealous magician stealing her rival's symbol of power to dominate a pocket universe, and the rival must work within that universe's rules in order to retrieve her symbol of power and defeat the magician.
@Metool Yeah. And like I've said before here, I'm totally okay with Twilight falling for a Canterlot Guard. Season 3 shows us that she's obviously got some creepy hot-for-brother thing going on unconsciously, and dating a Canterlot Guard who isn't Shining Armor could help her deal with that.
So I'm actually hoping they go forward with that plot arc, because the subtext is delicious.
@BESW It was just sort of the principle. What attracted me to FiM in part was that it wasn't just a rehash of what I spent a bunch of my childhood watching and being mildly bored with. It was doing something different, with situations that were variable and frequently more interesting. That made it really hard for me to get into the concept.
@Pixie Oh, agreed. It's a different flavour of MLP:FiM and while I found it not inconsistent, it's definitely different.
The films basically had to adhere more closely to standard expectations, and I think they did the best they could possibly have done and still been greenlighted: they took the basic formula and re-interpreted it.
At the end of the first film they successfully get the villain to genuinely recognise the Power of Friendship and turn to good.
The whole second film is about how nobody --even the Mane Six, as much as they try-- has really accepted her change of heart. That's the emotional core of the whole story.
@BESW Oh, that referred to FiM: the main FiM was doing something different than said cartoons I spent a bunch of my childhood watching and being bored with. EG did not appear to be. Maybe I could stand to give it more of a chance, but that was a big barrier to it catching my interest. There were other things that bothered me about it as well (lazy character design, for one) but those are a little less important.
I watch a lot of Netflix on a little tablet that I keep beside my computer while I work.
But that mostly works because of the kind of work I do (graphic design), where I do it (at home or in cafes) and what I watch (it can only be stuff that's good for half-listening).
I watch a lot of subbed anime, so it's better to give it my full attention. Other than that, I watch... other cartoons, Hannibal. :v
I think the last thing I watched on Netflix was actually Goosebumps? >w>;; Though I should pick up with the second American Horror Story series sometime.
At any rate, right now it looks like I'm watching (lots of things really should go to On Hold but) 10 shows, plan to watch 23, and have 36 on hold. Those lists are incomplete. :v
I've enjoyed some Miyazaki and the like--best Mary Norton film adaptation ever--but I don't usually seek it out and most of the stuff that's been recommended to me is usually not my taste for other reasons.
I think I watched the first episode of the X-men series and wasn't terribly impressed. That's the only one I've seen any of. I'm not so into Marvel (mostly through lack of experience), though I do like the X-men. I was a little sad. I guess Storm is always cool no matter what?
I have no idea where it falls in terms of anime quality or style, but it was fun and stylised and did some very cool stuff exploring Eastern vampire mythology.
That's good to know. I think we have the DVD collection pretty cheap at the toystore I work at.
Anime was an important part of my childhood, really. It was one of the things that really inspired me to creativity. Sailor Moon, of course, was the first and most important to me, for a lot of reasons.
Oh, yes, books were my childhood as well. I inhaled books. Both before and after Sailor Moon, they provided a really important escape.
But Sailor Moon was the first thing I ever encountered with a varied cast of girls who took active roles and cared about things besides boys. I imprinted.
It's probably the thing that drives me to care about representation as much as I do: I know what that feels like. The first time I got to pick my gender in a video game was important, too.
That was a point that someone brought up in a blog post somewhere about D&D 5's stab at trans and nonbinary gender representation: it's clumsy, and it deserves a critical eye, but people don't always realize that they can play a certain way until you explicitly show them that they can. It takes a baby step there.
I wish I could find the blasted thing to link it. :B
My friend's mother was my only party member at the beginning because no one else showed up, but she was a very cool mom who'd played D&D in high school, so she kind of wanted to play anyway. We gained a few more players over time, but she kept on. At one point, we needed information, so we went to a tavern, As One Does. She had her female druid casually hit on a barmaid, As One Does. I think she was successful, too.
And... well, this I'll put in the actual RPG chat, since it pertains to RPs. :v
It was literally my first RPG session ever, and I was the GM. I really liked the idea of getting to role-play all the secondary characters, though. I saw a golden opportunity to do so.
@Pixie i remember whoopi goldberg wanted to be on Star Trek because when she saw the original series, she saw uhura, and immediately got all excited and went and told her mother there was a black woman on TV who wasn't the maid
also I wonder if that's one of the major important parts of magical girl stories: they're about girls. girls which are doing stuff like people, and getting stuff done, and kicking ass and taking names. and still being girls whilst they're at it. and being interested in boys, but not defined by their interest in boys.
And sometimes not being interested in boys, either. :P I was just about to say, I lament that they scrubbed the gay relationships from Sailor Moon in the original English dub because I was confused. As. Heck. About my own sexuality for a really long time, and a contributing factor was that I never had any models for it. I could have used those lesbian fighter princesses, gosh darn it.
@Pixie Dang, I can understand that. That's a pity they removed them.
I see the impact role models like that have on people nowadays when people are able to be open about it. (At least in a lot of places in the world.)
IIRC card captors had some gay relationship stuff going on too that they never featured in the anime - or that I never noticed when I saw it as a kid, at least
In practice, when I run a magical RP, I make space for characters who aren't girls, because that in and of itself doesn't undermine the concept (in some settings, such as Madoka Magica, it would actually solve some problems). But the girl power aspect is hugely important to the genre.
@doppelgreener A lot, yes (though not much 100% explicit because that is how CLAMP rolls, nothing is ever quite text). The Cardcaptors dub was, well... terrible for a lot of reasons, but they scrubbed that out, too.
@doppelgreener Yes, well. We've talked about how it has to be dealt with carefully because making a character's sexuality or gender the central lynchpin of their portrayal is usually bad regardless of what that sexuality or gender might be.
Argh!! I have some chicken kebabs in the oven and they've been in for 25 minutes and don't seem done, and I can't remember if they're a 15 minute recipe or a 35 minute recipe or a 45 minute recipe...
In the case of CCS, Tomoyo (Madison) is heavily implied to have a crush on Sakura (more so in the manga), and Sakura's brother Touya (Tori) and Yukito (Julian) are veeery heavily implied to be in a relationship. Syaoran has a crush on Yukito for a while as well, though there's Plot Stuff behind it (but also behind Sakura's crush on Yukito).
Except I don't even know what to call myself, really. No term quite feels right, mainly due to internalized stuff. I might gravitate toward queer except I have very poor childhood memories. I use it as a general term because it's useful, and I'm totally fine with people reclaiming it and will use it for anyone who does, but it still kinda induces a cringe.
Fueled also by the fact that I was really not attracted to any other human beings until I was a teenager, and that first one happened to be a boy. I'd not been exposed to other models, I had always been assumed straight by everyone else, so I thought, "oh, I guess I'm straight?" So I just kind of went with that, even though the glove didn't fit.
I began to get this complex about always having been sexually attracted (at times almost solely) to women but never having been in a relationship with one. What I realize now is that romantic attraction is just super, super, super rare for me, but it's possible with any gender.
Well, attraction to people around me is rare in general. I'm very... conceptual.
@Metool My boyfriend's like that, actually. And our shared ex... none of us quite understand the trend of mostly gay men falling for me, but my boyfriend hypothesizes I'm part of a secret government project to undermine the gay agenda.
People also keep telling me they know someone who looks just like me, so he also hypothesizes that I am being cloned to this end. :v
@doppelgreener I may do that. I'm fine with everyone currently in the chat seeing my photo, not so much the entire internet forever. I would certainly like to put my identity crisis in context. xD
@doppelgreener Ehh, didn't really have an ending other than 'our relationship officially died a couple months later when he dropped off the face of the earth'
@BESW (if we ever get to any point of exploring it, that will probably come up for Stellata. I have absolutely nothing in mind or planned, or at least nothing in particular because everything is a possibility, because she is a plant girl and who knows how this works for her.)
I think my friend was standing on an elevated deck outside our college cafe for that one.
You can kinda see why I would get mistaken for a woman when I wore baggy clothes--and one of my favourite accessories in winter was a trenchcoat, so baggy was the norm.
Ahh. I've been active on MLP Arena for a while because I collect older generations of ponies, and it's a good place to go. Gaia was my RP home for a really long time.
I wonder if I still have my adoptable template. I could probably dust it off. xD
Gaia Online, an avatar dressup and forum site with the problem most people associate with Neopets, a hyper-inflated virtual currency which is not mitigated at all by the heavily cash-focused administration. :v
