Manga Snark

Everything hurts right now.

I'm dealing with some spotting between periods and abdominal aching right now, and the gynecologist can't figure out why, suggesting with a shrug I try a different birth control method. An old pinched nerve in my shoulder blade has flared up and refuses to go away, even with two weeks of steroids and muscle relaxers to try and aid the healing process. My digestive tract is behaving very erratically and gives me trouble damn near every day. My body seems to be malfunctioning in every conceivable way, and I only have one plausible explanation for it all.

Climate anxiety.

Every summer it gets worse. I'm tense all the time, looking out the window and gulping down a lump in my throat when I see the dry hot yard that, just a few years ago, would have been drenched in rain because this is supposed to be a fucking rainforest. I'm connected to the internet all day every day and am exposed every minute to news about wildfires, flooding, extreme weather events, heat domes, etc. Every day the prognosis for our planet's livability gets more and more dire; first we had twenty years, then ten, then five, then two, and now many are saying it's too late. My own head betrays me with sudden visualizations about what life might be like even next year, and the thoughts that arise unbidden cause my heart to race and pound in my throat.

But I've been keeping all of this to myself because everyone else is just... continuing to live like none of it matters. I look around whenever I go out in public (not too often anymore, unfortunately), wondering about the inner lives of the people I see bustling about doing their shopping and socializing. They look so unconcerned, it appears their worries are very narrow in scope, but what is really going on beneath the surface? Are they as terrified deep down as I am? Do those moments in between the business of daily existence flood with freezing horror at the prospect of having to live on a husk of a world sooner than expected? Do they stew in the depression and despair like I do?

But I can't ask, not even online. There are so many people who reject having to see or hear anything regarding climate anxiety and despair. I have to hide it behind a spoiler tag or else people will pile on and accuse me of fear mongering. "You're not helping the problem, you're just making people feel worse about it," I'm told by the finger-waggers. "None of what you're saying does anyone any good. Doom and gloom only gives us all depression, and then what good will we be?"

So I keep my anguished screams bottled up until such a time that it is deemed "appropriate" to let them out. Maybe that time will never come. I could be dying in the midst of a heat dome or flooding event and people may still, in that moment, ask me to keep my suffering under polite wraps so as not to disturb anyone whose day it might ruin.

My best bet may be that society decides on sane and sweeping adaptations to lessen the devastation, so that my screams dissipate naturally without being disruptive. But that seems like too much to hope for anymore. Everything seems like too much to hope for these days.

You would think 2020 would have been THE year to play The Sims for me. All this time stuck indoors, not much else to do but solitary activities, and a craving for control over some virtual life if not your own. But in addition to the stress and horror around every single corner this year, the near constant depression/anxiety cocktail I've been intoxicated on for months on end, I've just been so frustrated with my TS3 game on my desktop. It's gotten bogged down with disorganized custom content, and it isn't long before most of my saves slow down to a snail's pace without any hope of speeding it up again. Anyone who's familiar with TS3 knows its problem with integrating CC so well that it's impossible to uninstall after a while.

My only hope of improving my gameplay was to uninstall the game with all those bells and whistles, obliterate ANY evidence that it existed on the computer to begin with, and then carefully and selectively reinstall everything that I still wanted on the computer, refusing the rest. But because I'm a sentimental digital PACK RAT that balks at the thought of accidentally getting rid of anything I may "need" for future gameplay, I had a hard time with the prospect. Plus, it's a VERY daunting task, and I wanted to play right away.

So, I decided to take advantage of my Origin registration of base game and expansion packs, and take those over to my somewhat robust laplet instead. I figured I could run a fairly vanilla installation of TS3 on here, and just kind of explore the game expansion by expansion through a bare-bones legacy family, moving them through all the content I have in the order it was released, generation by generation. I call this a "discoveracy" but I'm sure the person who came up with it first called it something less awkward, because I KNOW I'm not the first one to try this goofy little idea.

My issue right off the bat was logistics, because I didn't make this easy on myself since the beginning. When I first started with TS3 years ago, I created a profile on the official website that I eventually became rather unhappy with, and I wanted to change the name. EA doesn't allow that level of customizability for your account on the site, so I made another one to use, but I couldn't move the game registrations I already put on the first account. I now had two accounts with a number of different expansions registered to both.

So, THAT was a problem.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to merge the accounts, but this was many MORE years after the first account that I had long abandoned was created, and I didn't remember the email address I used to make it, so I couldn't log into the account anymore. While EA can merge more than one account you've created out of stupidity on Origin/their official site, they need to verify that both accounts are yours, and would have to send an email to the address I had forgotten ages ago with a verification code. Since I couldn't confirm my ownership of the first account, EA sent me an email to my current address to apologize and say there was nothing they could do if I couldn't prove to them that I was the owner of the first account. SIGH.

I gave up for a while, but not permanently. I got a bug up my ass to figure out what that email was one day, and after an afternoon of cyberstalking MY OWN OLD ACCOUNTS on various websites I had also abandoned (the ones that still existed, anyway), I finally cracked my own fucking code. I figured out my old email address, and was able to log into my old account. Huzzah! Victory for Writch!

I figured that since I had access to the old account now, I didn't really NEED to merge it with the newer one, because I could just install the game and expansions on my laplet from each account and it would be fine. I started with the old account that had the base game plus the first expansion registered to it, and then started my little legacy family as described above, my founder dropped in Sunset Valley to begin, and his children moving to Riverview, and their children traveling in World Adventures. Lots of fun was had, and I was cruising through my game.

Unfortunately, when I switched to my newer account to grab a stuff pack I had registered there, all my expansions and store content I had installed from the previous account was lost, and so was my save, corrupted by my carelessness. The installation of ALL my expansions and stuff packs, and worlds was only possible on my desktop because I possessed the physical discs at the time of installation, but I gave those discs away to my sister shortly before I really started leaning into my plan. Now that I only had the games on two separate Origin accounts, I was never going to be able to play all of my content at once like I planned.

Soooooo, back to EA I went with a request to merge the accounts, except this time I had the means to prove I was the owner of the old UN-abandoned account, soon to be RE-abandoned and then deactivated. It went VERY smoothly.

Well... mostly. They were unable to transfer the three worlds I had on the other account, which REALLY stung, because they were a couple of my favorites. Believing they were lost forever, I bugged EA to give me a voucher to get new copies, but to this day I haven't heard back on the issue. Probably because it turns out it doesn't matter, because I can just grab the .sims3pack for each world from my desktop's downloads file and copy them over to a thumb drive, and from there install them easy onto the laplet copy of TS3.

Or so I thought. I tried to do it a few days ago, and while the files said they had installed on the launcher, going into the game revealed that there were no such objects available in the game. At first I thought it was complicated bullshit regarding some sort of digital signature specific to the deactivated account that prevented me from using the content that I BOUGHT, forcing me to buy it again if I wanted it on my new account... but it turns out the downloads folder in my new game was just corrupted by my switching accounts before, and taking it out so it could be replaced by the game again fixed the issue.

And there it is: the result of so much time and effort and many strings of curses, a functioning TS3 game... just in time for 2020 to be over. I guess I can start publishing on this blog the adventures my new "discoveracy" sometime in 2021. If time allows.

Strangely, I hope it won't.

So, the symbolism of a phallic object creating life, and the owner of that object now being responsible for maintaining and protecting that life ISN'T subtle, but no, keep telling me how unreasonable it is for me to interpret Sesshoumaru and Rin's relationship as father-daughter rather than romantic.

Sesshoumaru's high regard for his father implies that his only semi-functional relationship was the one with his dad, and therefore he's most likely to best understand and mimic the relationship between a parent and their child, but sure, it's absolutely stupid for me to interpret Sesshoumaru and Rin's relationship as father-daughter rather than romantic.

Oh, and this one is the best, check this out - an author likes to choose the best tool for the character development that they're going for, and among those tools are character relationships. Romance is a good tool to use for trust and intimacy issues, but while that's INUYASHA'S issue, it's not SESSHOUMARU'S. Sesshoumaru's issue is that he's a bit of a cold, snobbish and spoiled jerk, and in order for him to develop compassion, the priority is to stop him viewing others in terms of how strong they are and update his notion of a person worthy of respect. The best tool for that is to give him a relationship that exemplifies UNCONDITIONAL love, in which the other person can't contribute anything back to it. He has all the obligations and responsibilities, and they get all the benefits. A parent-child relationship is the perfect tool to foster a responsible and compassionate use of power and the valuing of people who are weak and otherwise incapable.

But okay, keep insisting that I'm wrong to interpret Sesshoumaru and Rin's relationship as father-daughter rather than romantic.

Please don't misunderstand; I'm not saying here that a romantic interpretation is WRONG either. This is Japan we're talking about after all. Their stories tend to feature sexualized little girls put into very abusive, horrible situations that everybody in-universe and outside like to pretend are perfectly fine. There's a chance that BOTH interpretations are right here, as gross as I find that notion. My purpose in pointing these things out is merely to demonstrate that the filial interpretation of Sesshoumaru and Rin's relationship doesn't come from nowhere. There are STRUCTURAL storytelling elements here that can't just be hand-waved away.

But you know what CAN be hand-waved away? A next-generation series that follows an established pattern of media companies taking their already successful properties and squeezing every last drop of profitability from them so the cowards making the money at the top of the heap don't have to take any creative risks. From what I understand of the premise that has been released, this story is not only nonsensical (a girl who dresses as a boy so it's easier to fight in the MODERN ERA? Fight WHOM????) but also as divorced as they can make it from the Inuyasha series by making sure these kids' parents are as removed from the picture as humanly possible. They're invoking Inuyasha and Sesshoumaru's names just enough to get old fans interested and their wallets lubricated with sweet, sweet nostalgia, but not enough for them to be much of a presence, if any, in the actual series.

Which has a few implications - the first of which is that someone pitched this idea as an original story, but the studio decided to adapt it to fit into the Inuyasha universe so that they could avoid that whole RISK thing I was talking about earlier. The second of which is that the producers of the anime (distinct from Rumiko Takahashi, I must remind you) are still so thirsty for Sesshoumaru and Rin being a romantic pair that they are pushing this pairing more than a DECADE later. I don't know if they just see that a good majority of fans like the pairing and are capitalizing off of it, or if there is somebody in the production company that has a very SPECIFIC fetish and has been demanding that all the Inuyasha fandom entertain it with them for literal YEARS. Either way, it's getting a little weird for me how desperately the anime folks want me to believe Sesshoumaru bones Rin when she grows up. I mean, DESPERATELY. There's more to unpack here than I'm comfortable with, if I'm being honest.

In contrast, Rumiko Takahashi herself was very vague about the nature of the relationship for as long as possible. She danced around the subject in interviews and didn't list Rin as a romantic interest of Sesshoumaru's in the profiles book. Since most of the fanbase was all for them as a ship, she could have fully endorsed the two as romantic at any point during the run of the manga and lost the support of very few of us. Hell, she had the opportunity to skip a little time in her Heroes Come Back contribution chapter to disaster relief after Fukushima. But she kept the bonus chapter VERY close to the actual end of the manga and didn't make any implications about Sesshoumaru and Rin's relationship at all, save for "status quo" vibes. All of this gives me the impression that maybe SHE'S not so into the pairing either, and she's trying to keep from alienating the majority of her fans by letting them believe Sesshoumaru and Rin are gonna get together.

Now, this is just my impression, and I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm the only one who's cracked the code on her thoughts on the series - I don't live in her head, and thank goodness for that. I'm rather attached to the feel of my own mind palace. And after all, there is the little matter of her having done the character designs of Sesshoumaru's daughters, which some have said is an endorsement in itself. But she also did the character design of Inuyasha and Sesshoumaru's father for the 3rd movie, and I don't consider THAT canon. I don't know what contractual obligations, if any, she has to pump these things out to the studio regardless of her wishes, just as much as I don't know what her personal interpretation of her own work is. All I know is Rumiko Takahashi didn't write the story for Swords of an Honorable Ruler, and she didn't write the story for the new series either, and that makes all the difference in how the tone and feel of it meshes with the original. Hell, even the anime itself had enough of a creative diversion from the manga RT wrote that it's always been rather hard for me to reconcile the two, since they just aren't harmonious in their messages and themes.

But no matter what she has done and implied, willingly or not, Rumiko Takahashi herself isn't ACTUALLY a bigger authority on her work than me. Not me, or you, or the fangirl squealing in her parents' basement. Once her work is out there, she has to be satisfied with whatever anyone else takes from it, and it isn't just hers anymore. It's all of ours, and a product of several million different outlooks and perspectives. If she wants to update how she interprets this story based on a new attitude of hers, she's entitled, but I don't have to change MY mind. She doesn't live in MY head either. The story is done, it's been done for years, and if she wanted me to interpret it differently than I did, she wouldn't have included the above reasons I listed in the story to begin with.

Rumiko Takahashi might have WRITTEN Inuyasha, but once it's in our minds, and colored by our own experiences, we get to KEEP it, and no one should be able to tell us any differently. Not even her. Not even an animation studio that probably has zero interest in telling a compelling story so much as making lots of money from an eager existing audience that is hungry for more Inuyasha content, regardless of the fact that it doesn't seem to be much more than tangentially related to the original series at all.

See: why we're all thoroughly annoyed with JK Rowling at this point, aside from all her blatant transphobia.

Yet, if you still want to hold onto Rumiko Takahashi as the ultimate authority whose endorsement through character design you see as the final word that Sesshoumaru getting with Rin is the CORRECT way to think about the relationship, I submit this final suggestion for your consideration: did you happen to notice that Sesshoumaru's twins don't have the "half-transformed" look that she designed Inuyasha with? Or even Shiori or Jinenji? That they just look like HUMANS, and don't even have his pointy ears?

The resistance is subtle, but it's there.

When I saw that Netflix had gotten their grubby hands on the first season of the Charmed reboot, I was pretty excited to see it. I loved the original Charmed when I was growing up, but let's face it, it was bad. It was all over the place, both in terms of character development and plot. They kept adding weird rules to the magic that often were in contradiction to the previous ones. They loved to have an episode here and there about how evil wasn't inherent, then had whole character arcs dedicated to how it actually IS *coughCOLEcough*. After a while, the show just became a vehicle to showcase the most hideous outfits I had ever seen in my life.

It was BAD.

So, I figured this reboot could only go up from there. How can you possibly do worse than all of the above in addition to a boy-child who turns out to be even more powerful than the super-powered women who were supposed to be the most powerful witches of all time?

I don't know, try tying your protagonists to their chairs while their white lighter comes out in the open right off the bat to exposit everything about the premise of the show about a third through the pilot. Try having said white lighter also summarize each witch's personality as it relates to her powers like an ASSHOLE. Try entirely SKIPPING OVER important character interaction between the unknown elder sister and the two younger to feel one another out and grow to trust each other, so that they can deal with some demon dog that attacked the youngest like we're already halfway through the season and they're used to each of their witchy roles. Except they're not halfway through the season. They're halfway through the PILOT.

I mean, the original Charmed didn't start out with a surprise sister (even if it had one in the fourth season, I know), but it STILL had to have the sisters reacquaint themselves and establish how they felt about each other. And they at least let them have a magical adjustment period longer than TEN FREAKING MINUTES.

Damn, I just can't figure out how they managed to make it WORSE. It's bizarre. It's like the world doesn't DESERVE a good show about the original female superheroes vanquishing evil or something.

Wait...

Not another! Man, chaos just doesn't QUIT. I try so hard to keep it at bay too; I dust and vacuum, clean the dishes, try to keep everything in its proper place, but the entropy just won't stop fucking up my shit! And I don't even have an excuse, because this is an open system and I can exert all my influence on things to put them back the way I want them, so it's not as though I can just say "screw it" and let everything go to hell. I'm culpable in letting it get its adamant way.

Why can't chaos just work for GOOD every once in a while?



( Onward )

Yeah, I think it's about time for one of those. A little chat about how careless Yami has been putting all his thinking off until the eleventh hour is. Or rather, abandoning it altogether when his problems aren't immediately solved with the setting of a trap.

"You know we support you, but turning off your brain the moment you have to figure something out without using your little cardboard warriors doesn't help. It just makes things worse, dude."

The problem is, I immediately imagined Honda being the one delivering this intervention speech, and we all know no one ever listens to that guy for how often he's just stating the obvious. And so, with a sigh, I realize the future is probably filled to the brim with more of Yami's complete shutting down in protest to having to think outside the bounds of his games, what with a practically zero chance of KT being told that this is not the correct way for him to make his main protagonist seem less like a Mary Sue.



( Onward )

Another one? Seriously, I thought I had given you all I had. I thought I had dedicated every last free second I had to planning out and writing these reviews. I thought I had spend every last cent of disposable income trying to collect all those trinkets, bits and bobs that they're always coming out with concerning you. What more do you WANT from me, Yu-Gi-Oh? What more could I possibly give you at this point?



( Onward )

The path to victory will be much easier to pave for Yami/Yuugi once that nuisance is gone. I can't wait to see how it's going to be done, too. Surely there's another card in Yami/Yuugi's deck that can take that sucker off the table. Catapult Turtle isn't any good, because a book isn't a fortress, but a pummeling is still in order, I think. Or perhaps a drilling. Too bad he can't just pave a LITERAL freeway through it, huh?



( Onward )

Semantics will tell you that the definition of "impossible" is that it literally CAN'T be done, but have you ever noticed all the crap this "impossible" label gets slapped on? People say all KINDS of things are impossible, only for someone else to do it later. Possibility is just an assessment that may or may not be accurate depending upon how much vision and work we're willing to put into a project, so it might not help to be told to do the impossible either, chapter. Maybe it's a more accurate encouragement to suggest we stop thinking in the limiting terms of possibility altogether.



( Onward )

Defenses aren't easy to set up or carry out. You have to present your research and ideas in a cogent, competent way while presenting yourself as a peer and authority in your field. Of course, Yami has that second part down, but that won't do him any good when he hasn't even DONE any research and shrugged his shoulders with the declaration that he'll figure it out in the eleventh hour. Whether you're defending your dissertation or defending your monsters, try not to be as unprepared as Yami, because a PERFECT defense is a bit beyond his reach at this point.



( Onward )