大丈夫？

If you want to support a nonbinary indie game dev/artist on this beautiful Trans Day of Visibility, remember to wishlist my game on steam!

It has:

vampires

jokes (some are even funny)

goldfish care rants

existential dread

lunch thieves

an undiagnosed autistic protagonist (I'm autistic so, writing what I know and all that)

pixel art

good music

you get to kill your boss in some routes!

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

okay so we know James Silent Hill 2 killed his wife, yes? i feel like we all know this. (or we do now, anyway, because i've just told you.)

in spite of killing his wife, James Silent Hill 2 (2001) is not capital E Evil. he just kind of sucks. he's not a good dude. you feel bad for him because lord knows the man is going through it but he is also very explicitly an antihero, which you may have deduced based on the part where he killed his wife

now in Return to Silent Hill 2026 directed by Christopher Gans (Christopher Gans when I catch you.) they have made some small changes to this storyline. one of these changes is that James is a good guy now! he's just a good guy. he's real solid. but you know, it's hard to square that with the fact that he killed his wife, and you can't really cut that out because it's kind of the main twist.

so Christopher Gans scratched his chin and he thought very hard and finally he said, well, what if we made it so that killing his wife was a GOOD thing? and presumably everyone in the writers' room went yes of course that's exactly what should happen.

so the way it goes in Return to Silent Hill 2026 is, James's wife Mary falls victim to an evil cult, and she gets all fucked up, and so James has to kill her. he doesn't want to, obviously, because he's such a solid guy, but he has no choice, and so he squares his shoulders and just goes for it, and it's his big hero moment where we as the audience are supposed to be like "yes James!!! old yeller that bitch!!!!"

and lest, god fucking forbid, we have any hint of moral ambiguity, Mary comes to her senses temporarily right before he shanks her and in her moment of lucidity she consents to being murdered and is actually pretty okay with it, and he cradles her tenderly and it's a super touching moment, and we really feel for James; it's rough to have to kill your wife! but that's how it is with cults sometimes.

They also gave Mary a dad who is a priest of the cult, and he is the one giving her the bad blood juice that makes her evil and sick, and is also sexually assaulting her. They're doing this partially because Ganes has made Angela and Laura explicitly Part of Mary's Psyche (the reveal is Laura (who looks like a Spirit Halloween creepy child prop) creepily saying "do you.... even.....know Mary's full name.... James" and then it shows a shot of Mary's gravestone, where her full name is written as 'Mary Angela Laura Cultdadlastname'), and every monster in the movie has been redesigned to have either Mary's face on it or Mary's slammin hot bod. They gave the lying figure a huge rack. They replaced the mannequins with a spider lady with Mary's face and a huge ass. So anyways, now Angela's backstory is actually Mary's, and the door father is NOT SUBTLE, and James reaches out to tenderly cradle Mary's head on it while Assault Imagery is happening.

The only monster that's not Mary is Pyramid Head, obviously, but Pyramid Head is James. He's just James. There's no metaphor to it, every single interaction they have, the camera zooms in on Pyramid Head's mask so you can see James' face through a crack in it. They made James an artist so that they could 'reveal' this information by having a flashback of drunk James painting a giant triangle on his face in a self portrait. James gets mad that Maria isn't Mary and he concentrates like Jimmy Neutron having a brain blast in order to summon Pyramid Head to kill her.

The whole movie also starts with a scene of James smoking a joint while driving recklessly in a Mercedes. It's not egregiously bad but it does betray that someone in the production pipeline thought James was supposed to be cool. James is super cool and a good guy and he's really in love with Mary, and she's his girlfriend instead of his wife because they wanted to make it a little more plausible that he didn't know she got sick while they were on a several month 'break'. They broke up because he found out she was part of a cult and when he confronted her she was like 'i hate being part of this cult and I want to leave the cult but I have to stay' and he was like 'i also want you to leave the cult but I guess you have autonomy' and then he drove away. Sadly. In his product placement Mercedes.

please don’t make me defend this movie. why are you making me defend this movie.

I don’t agree with the…. *creative* choices they made with respect to the monster designs, but these choices are still absolutely in line with the game’s themes of sexuality, shame, and guilt. They’ve just…. made it more obvious. In an age where critical thinking and media literacy is on the quick decline, that may even be for the best.

Quite literally all of silent hill two’s monsters are driven by three core concepts: BDSM, sexuality, and shame. Please digest this.

The lying figure has always been sexual. It has always represented mary, via james’ desire and his shame surrounding it. In the original game it had an ass that wouldn’t quit. Who cares if it now has huge tits? That is still fundamentally on theme. Like that is inconsequential. I mean, have you even seen fukuro? Any of Masahiro Ito’s concept work? Have you ever actually looked at the monsters? Considered the context in which they appear?

Okay, they replaced the mannequins with a spider like monster with a huge ass and mary’s face…. This is still correct? The mannequin monster is literally mary’s spread legs, complete with her orthosis garments, connected at the dual pussy. I do not think it can get more obvious than that. Like…. Come on. Why are you making me defend this movie?

I don’t agree with combining mary an angela’s stories at all, but abstract daddy has always represented BOTH of their stories, because the abstract daddy we see in the game is seen through James. It was never Angela’s abstract daddy. They were never seeing the same thing. If you follow this logic, and you’re fucking dumb like most silent hill movie makers are, the choice to combine the two into one character feels so obvious. If you’re dumb. Whatever. That’s not the point.

The part about these statements on abstract daddy, you’re so called “door father,” that really get me is that it is “NOT SUBTLE.” Did we play the same game? Brother, when has abstract daddy ever been fucking subtle? This monster is a bad frame fused together with the flesh of two bodies, wrapped up together in a sexual position. Now, knowing angela’s story, we know this is not consensual, but for james…. It represents something else entirely. And beyond this, when we first meet abstract daddy, it is in a flesh filled room littered with holes. Holes that have a phallic object pistoning in and out of them. While angela cowers beside the abstract daddy. Not subtle? Not subtle??? We’re decrying this sequence in the movie for being not subtle? It’s literally never been fucking subtle.

Lastly—and I cannot stress this enough—pyramid head is james. It’s not metaphor. He IS james. He is a direct reflection of james psyche. The notion that james can control him is… fucking stupid. But, on the same hand, pyramid head kills maria. Multiple times in the game. The narrative choice is dumb and a direct consequence of everyone needing everything spelled out for them, but like. It’s also *not wrong*. Pyramid head kills maria because james is resentful of her for not being mary; on the same hand, pyramid head is also killing maria because james killed mary, and it is repeating his guilt and shame to him.

These monsters are mary. All of the monsters are mary, except for when they’re james. Even other people’s monsters are mary, because it’s james seeing them. They’ve always been fucking mary.

ps. The game starts in the aftermath of james killing mary, in which he drove recklessly to silent hill in a state of grief and intoxication and passed out. He wakes and has concocted the memory that mary has been dead three years, yet he received a mysterious letter from her because he doesn’t want to remember the truth. James is reckless the entire game. The movie starting with james driving recklessly while smoking weed is not only mostly accurate, it’s also just correct. James also sees himself as the good guy. That he killed mary for the sake of everyone. Narratively, the decision to make her a cultist is fucking stupid. But the motivations behind james and his actions are the same. Like that is james.

"You're an angel and I'm a dog,

Or you're a dog and I'm your man."

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(id in alt!)

only good thing to come out of new 52 was this suit