[REALLY NORMAL AND WELL-ADJUSTED VOICE] well you never know maybe it COULD have saved me. if i ever actually achieved perfection. it could have happened then. if i was actually ever enough. Which i was not
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So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.
They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.
And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.
Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.
The visceral memory of that time is something that never leaves you. Everyone's jeans were many inches higher in the back than the front because you kept stepping on the hem and ripping it off. Your lower legs were so very cold. Every new pair of jeans literally enveloped your entire foot, they were so so long re: leg-to-waist ratio. Walking on a rainy day was a legitimate workout. You have no idea.
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tl;dr: all "algorithmically" pushed stuff on a newsfeed is mostly ads. nothing that's really surprising form this vulture article, but it is dismal and makes me grateful for one website where you only see things from people you follow WITHOUT horrible short-form video content
To me, the damning thing isn't that people would do this, but that the author reached out to the FDC about how this is very illegal, and:
When I asked a spokesperson for the FTC whether the agency had any plans to take action against clippers, he replied, āHi there, weāre not going to comment. Thanks.ā
I enjoy a joke about fucked up German fairy tales as much as the next nerd, but it's genuinely striking how often the source for the really fucked up stuff turns out to be "yeah, this is only in the Brothers Grimm version and doesn't appear in any extant oral tradition, and we're like 80% sure they added it themselves". To a large extent it's not German fairy tales that are fucked up, it's two specific German dudes.
when you see your little kitty walking toward you at a leisurely pace and say "hi baby!" bc you're excited to see her and she starts trotting a little bit faster 'cause she's excited to see you too. that's what life is all about i think
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i NEED people to realise foreshadowing is. in fact. a literary device. and not a Bad Thing. the audience picking up on your hints is a Good Thing. because. it makes the story and itās conclusion make sense. and some people will not see those but enjoy seeing them on a second read through. red herrings are one thing but if your novel consists of nothing but red herrings itās not a coherent story itās just a collection of paragraphs that donāt actually plausibly link to one another. you're not fighting with the audience you donāt look clever you look like you donāt know how basic fiction works. be vulnerable for once in your goddamn life and don't treat writing like a game to be won where the audience losing is a good thing.
Getting to the end of a story and going "THE CLUES WERE THERE THE WHOLE TIME!" is always joyous for me whether or not I picked up on the clues leading up
If I saw the clues and caught the hints then yes! I am clever and me and the author/creator/artist etc were in on it together the whole time!
If I didn't notice the clues or got fooled but can clearly see them in hindsight then "Ha! You won this time storyteller! I am delighted by this game we play!' and then I enjoy putting the pieces together afterwards and enjoying how clever it was. I feel like the creator respects me as an audience
If there is a "twist" that comes with 0 clues or foreshadowing at all I'm annoyed. I'm pissed off. I feel like I'm being condescended to and patronised. It's not clever or interesting and makes me annoyed I ended up caring about characters and plot points that ended up meaningless.
Because it's not that these stories don't have foreshadowing or plot clues. They just abandon it for a "surprising twist"
A story that pays off the clues is letting me into the fun and makes a participant in the story
A story that just gives me a "shock" but no pay off is telling me not to engage or get attached or care. So why would I watch?
Random plot twists that don't connect to anything in the story are not clever. If we don't see it coming because the writer didn't provide any clues, they aren't clever and it's totally unsatisfying (and I will NEVER read this writer again). These clues need not be lit up in neon with a parade of elephants and showgirls. But they need to be present
I'm a writer and am rarely surprised. Often, if I am surprised it's because the writer was a dumbass and included a "twist" that makes no sense (and therefore isn't really a twist, it's just random bullshit). If a writer genuinely surprises me, without being an absolute dumbass, I am FUCKING DELIGHTED! I will tell everyone I know to read the book/see the movie/watch the show.
Foreshadowing is the reward for paying attention. It's the story letting you in on the secret like a co-conspirator because you're the clever little audience member who has been picking up on the clues the writer has been setting up.
It even makes watching/reading again more worthwhile because if you didn't notice the foreshadowing the first time you have the joy of being able to notice the things you missed!
it's Ryland Grace's own damn fault for hearing there was a ship named Hail Mary slated for a one-way trip into space and not immediately clocking that it was gonna be "full of Grace" whether he wanted it or not
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I am so utterly fascinated by āSakiā, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decadesā worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from āthe fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheekā to āthe pussy is completely out on center pageā over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in āSakiā donāt wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And itās still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. Itās because the underwear ran out of places to hide. Iām obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of āSakiā, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didnāt even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I donāt know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, āthe one with the big boobsā, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesnāt get lost in the noise. Itās just that normallyāin like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for exampleānormally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and youād go, āWell, this is now untenable.ā
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
Itās like this, okay: thereās no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. Thereās a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with āSakiā is different.
Itās hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as āleeringā, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into itāI canāt imagine anyone is making her do thisābut āSakiā the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in āSakiā. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of āSakiā, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so itās no problem. Itās so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of āSakiā, right: itās just normal that they donāt wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. Itās been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. Itās just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, itās in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like whatās the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because itās mahjong time now, and weāre playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why Iām so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.