Chapinator_X

WHY CRUNCHYROLL WAS FUCKING MURDERED BY FACTS & LOGIC!

Have you ever mailed yourself anything you ordered on the site?

Amagami SS is about finding a Christmas date.

This doesn’t have the scene in Yosuga no Sora where the student council catches the main guy doing his sister as she greets them at the door with a loud, resounding orgasm.

Most of the food we all eat has trace remnants of insect parts and rat hair/feces.

JYB is a solid choice, and it's nice that at the very least, they're passing the torch from one iconic mid-2000's VA to another iconic mid-2000's VA. Can't vouch for how Vic used to sound as Broly since I haven't seen any of his DBZ movies and only remember the times where Vic said it kept blowing out his voice to have to keep shouting as Broly. But given the burnt bridges and legal drama, it'd be the best case scenario to have him replaced by a VA of the same caliber.

I remember the Ke$ha music video this person made ages ago, but I finally sat down to watch this. Or rather, I watched it and skimmed through the songs. The art is very fluid and impressive, and there are some fun ideas present like the vocal effects of the Radio Demon's voice. But the content is definitely geared towards teenage theater kids from the Tumblr crowd. Things like the rampant cursing from nobody characters like the newscasters, the sassy gay promiscuous character who speaks in innuendo jokes, and the Wicked-inspired song numbers are exactly the type of junk I ate up when I was in that drama nerd crowd in high school, but it all feels so antiquated. Like a production from 2007 or 2012 that's been untouched in development hell until the funds came in from some producer to make what they have to work with.

Apologies for misreading your comment. I ended up interpreting the "fictional character" comment as a means of saying that it's hard to get angry at a character's lack of agency when their decisions come from the interpretation of both the author and the vast audience that takes in a character's actions far differently from one another. From there, I made my own tangent after remembering every time I've heard that the author often loses agency after they make a story because the audience has their own perspective on a character or events in the narrative. It can be kinda poignant where you can have a character that one person hates with the passion of a thousand suns and another person loves because their motivations or triumph in the narrative "saved them" when they were reading or watching a narrative during a difficult time in their life. At the same time, the "Death of the Author" rule can be heavy-handed in trying to take agency away from the writer and acting as if what they wrote is meaningless compared to how their audience reads it. It does rely too much on fluffing up our role as the spectator and the emotions we feel from a story from a passive perspective rather than doing anything constructive to contribute to the framework of the narrative's intended view. At the end of the day, the author lays out the ground rules on how the story is structured, how the characters behave, and how it all ends, open-ended or not. I guess that would be the main crux of my issue where it's hard not to be resentful at a manga's writer for taking a character that ended up having a personality change to serve the plot rather than show the natural progression of the character. It's that level of powerlessness the audience has in being able to change the events of the story, so the two options the viewer has is to either lash out at the writer(s) for the decision they made or reinterpret the events from the audience's POV to salvage or explain a character's motives for the sudden change. There is a little duality in my views in the two paragraphs above, but that's what makes it exciting to discuss. That, depending on circumstances, a writer's narrative is powerful enough to evoke a response necessary to debate whether to accept or reject an author's decisions if they go against your understanding of the narrative. You always have a small fragment of a story where you can relive the halcyon days, but at the same time, would that be doing too much to cast aside any of the positive merits of a story or is it a statement that you won't accept a new interpretation of that character that contradicts the narrative you have invested so much time with? As much as I'd like to reject the notion that anything has changed with a character I wished didn't make certain decisions, it's up to me to see what the author's intention is with making those decisions rather than trying to come up with emotion-driven reasons why to distrust their logic. With the one actress character I was discussing, I was angry with the author's decision to vilify her, but that's only one perspective since there can be an easier trajectory to see where she was slowly becoming more reckless as soon as her sisters enabled her to pull any move she can to get ahead, tapping into her desperate dedication and emotional strife in creating the right situation for her to make a heel-turn. The writer also takes measures to give her some justification through the mental state she's in, as well as gives us an alternative reading of a big sister character who goes against the tropes attached to her archetype by having things together far less once love comes into the equation. It's alright, I feel like this topic is a welcome space for any discussion of this sort. Fiction is one of those subjects where it's open enough for interpretation to be able to stimulate conversations that bring out interesting questions regarding how people react to situations outside of their own lives or what experiences they bring into a story they read or watch. Similarly, an author's thoughts, ideologies, and experiences go into enough of a story to paint you a picture of what emotions they want to evoke from a story, whether it be appealing to basic impulses or challenging our notions of understanding the reality we live and breathe.

I think that in the grand scheme of things, it can be tough to come to terms on whether a character’s change is for the best for the story and would be a natural progression for such a morally conflicted character, or if a shift in personality marks a desperate attempt on a writer’s behalf to create a plot twist necessary for a new arc to begin. Especially when you’ve become emotionally invested enough in a character to feel let down when they are written differently from what you’d have hoped. The two points you make are on point with the balancing act on how it would make sense for a character like the actress to be susceptible to being led to making rash decisions out of emotional strife, yet feeling resentment that the only way the plot could create true adversity for the character would be to make her more villainous. Yes, that’s the series I was referring to. Didn’t want to give anything too plot sensitive away since it is far later than the anime got to. I also wanted to make the question general enough that it would allow people to bring in their own examples of stories where they would feel one way or another about a character’s personality shift or moral event horizon arc. Thanks, I’m glad that this topic was able to take off and give off an old OA vibe. I got too used to UE threads where it became about a user instead of a topic, so I figured it’d make for some fun discourse, especially when it’s a broad enough topic that both sides of the aisle are understandable.

Jeffree has a storied history of making racist remarks. It was enough for Kim Kardashian to come out to defend him from people upset that she was associating with someone who is known for their racist remarks.

It’s Jeffree Star’s views on Black people that get the ladies excited to buy his cosmetics.

I’ve been playing Death Stranding, but I also got the RE2 remake and Shenmue 1 & 2 during the weekend so those will be in rotation.

The actress had recently been going through confidence issues since she was wondering whether she should continue helping her younger sister get with a guy she liked or if she should try to have that guy for herself. In retrospect, it’d be easy to see how the actress would end up trying to get with him in spite of her younger sister, but she didn’t seem like the type of character that would go desperate and crazy lengths to sabotage her sister’s efforts. She spent a good 70 chapters as the eldest sister that had helped keep the rest of the sisters together and had been levelheaded about her career goals and maintained a close relationship with the younger sister she was a wingman for. The insecurity over her other sisters showing interest might have been what had done her in. It just left a bitter taste to see that her main method of trying to get with the main guy was to stab her sisters in the back and rewrite her character to portray her as someone who always was a backstabbing opportunist who didn’t hold everyone together nearly as much as the other sisters did. The character wasn’t perfect because there were instances where she had a clever and crafty streak, but it had more of a mischievous big sister feel to it than someone who intended on hurting her sisters. From a writers standpoint, I can see how it’d be interesting to see a character like that lose her way as someone who is buckling from the pressure of having to put her feelings aside for her sisters, but it doesn’t feel good that, as soon as her younger sister gave her permission to fight for the main guy, she went full psycho.

That is an interesting way of looking at Nadia as a character. It’s easy to feel miffed at her behavior in arcs like the Island or Africa ones that were padded on by execs. But it also calls to question whether a character’s personality is fluid enough to be captured accurately beyond the original author. If Nadia’s hubris and temper make it so that her actions wouldn’t feel out-of-the-ordinary based on multiple interpretations. Much like with the Star Wars example, if Luke would have acted as he did in TLJ regardless of whether Lucas or Johnson was behind the story.

True, it wouldn’t make sense to need to fight over a character’s true behavior when it’s all dependent on how you read it. It might be frustrating when a character acts differently from when they first were conceived. But when it comes down to it, if you aren’t a fan of one part of the story, it isn’t like the other part never existed or the writer hadn’t created an otherwise convincing character before the plot changed them. What convinced me to ask the question is purely weeby. There was a character I liked in a romcom who, after 70 chapters, went from being a confused but well meaning older sister to being a nefarious schemer who aims to stab her sisters in the back to get what she wants. It feels paradoxical and they’ve recently softened her character, but it was a miserable arc because it felt like character assassination to see her play the villain to add some adversity to the story. Still, as you said, it’s a fictional character whose existence, motives, and actions are ultimately determined by the reader interpreting the piece. While I might see it as her acting against her ordinary self, another might see it as her snapping from the pressure of holding her feelings in.

True, it was a particular manga that I was into that inspired this question. There's a character I really liked in this harem romcom who was a confident actress that winded up struggling with figuring out whether she wanted to help her sister get with a guy she was interested in, or try to pursue him herself because she slowly started to fall in love with him. It felt like a complete departure from the character I remember and got to know. It felt like her character was hijacked because they wanted to find a way to write her out of the narrative and disqualify her from being the final girl. Similarly, there's the trouble with characters like Tien or Sakura who are blessed with the power of suck because they are either dogpiled by the writers who want to make the characters look worse and worse with time to devalue their image or have little material to go off of to give them some time to shine beyond the moments that the characters around them just keep dunking on them. Nadia's filler also aimed to make her look like a worse character so that Jean would have some kind of adversity he'd have to tackle with getting her on her good side. At that point, would I place blame on the writers for mismanaging the character or the characters themselves for being poorly conceived or inherently flawed?

While it'd be easy to get mad at a director or author because of the decisions they made with a character, it can provide a little more depth to a character if there is some kind of foreshadowing that they would be the type to make an irrational decision. To me, a worst case scenario situation would be if you had a character that transformed from a somewhat troubled yet well-balanced individual to an outright villainous figure who antagonizes their friends and starts acting psychotic around those they like. I placed it in the anime section because I know a larger problem with anime in general is being able to follow a manga where a character would appears to be stable until the plot decides they'd be more interesting if their character changed. Or if you have a filler where, because you have different writers handling a specific character, you have a character who acts even worse than normal because the writer of that section has it out for them. Would it be right to judge a character by their whole merits by including their behavior in filler material with how they are in general?

This can apply to any medium of fiction, but there have been too many stories I’ve come across recently where a character makes an absurd decision outside of their known behavior. I usually give writers credit for being able to understand their characters from the ground up. However, it’s hard to have faith when a character makes a calculated decision not because it aligns with their personality but because it serves the plot that they act in such a way. Can you still say that character is the worst or dislike a character for uncharacteristic actions, or does the blame lie with an author or writer that needs to find a reason to advance the plot at the expense of an established character?

Gazpacho is pretty good, but I wouldn’t go for a cold cup of popular hot soups.

Oh fuck, the Emiya cooking manga is there now!

I caved in and bought two volumes of the Quintuplets manga. I didn’t want to get saddled with one of the bundles and get stuck with arcs I didn’t care for so I just got the two I enjoyed the most from the anime.

Aside from standard video game or music channels I wouldn't recommend for everyone, I have a soft spot for traveling food Youtubers. Strictly Dumplings is a dude that tours around places to visit a place or a restaurant and tries out a ton of the food there. His thumbnails aren't the best, but it's fun to see what kind of foods he's able to come across in his travels. Mark Wiens is another great Youtuber with a similar format. The main difference though is that this dude has the most wholesome smile every time he bites into food.

Rashomon - 10/10 Set up my account for Kanopy and started my dive into the Criterion Collection movies I've missed with Rashomon a couple weeks back. It really goes to show how some older films can take a basic concept like having a group of people recall a particular crime and turn it into an engaging and intriguing experience. I'm still reflecting on the different perspectives of the crime and comparing/contrasting each point-of-view, thinking about which parts of each story are unreliable and why.