Floating Catacombs

Another year, another dozen-ish essays of weeby crit. My writing voice is growing stronger. I will not be stopped. Bullets have no effect.

Here’s a roundup post, in case you missed anything or are new to this blog.

1. AH HA HA HA HA

2. Do you think Yuna effectively utilized girl power by funneling gil to her paramilitary looting squad on the Celsius?

3. HOW MANY U’S ARE IN QUUUUUUX AGAIN

4. Interlude: Char’s Counterattack

5. The Arima Kinen is Decadent and Depraved

6. How Long Must My Journey Go

7. THIS WOULD LOOK NICE ON YOUR WALL

8. More Like Kowloon Washed City Amirite

9. Ramblings of the Killer

10. The Larian Secret Sauce

11. took the day off

12. Carmilla Flow

Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next December!

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 12

We conclude, as always, with some yuri manga I read this year where they weren't high schoolers.

Asagiiro no Saudade

Saudade is a potent enough form of longing that it's managed to get its own Wikipedia page. For this manga it's invoking angst, childhood friends reuniting as adults, and a pledge to write manga together or die trying. These are all tropes I've seen around, though maybe not combined in this exact way.

What really makes this manga interesting is its straightforward and brutal depiction of Ren's dysphoria. There's a handful of gendery manga out there about wanting to be a girl and hating yourself for it, but surprisingly few about the inverse, despising the shackles of womanhood placed onto you by society and struggling for self-understanding and actualization. Here is one. With only the first volume out at the time of writing, anything could happen with this manga, but I really hope it does not drop the ball with this particular plot thread, because it could really be something special.

Ebisu-san to Hotei-san

I’m movin' different. This shit ain’t nothin' to me, gal. I’m a princess. I’m bitin' the GL on Christmas. We smokin' Lillicious. Smokin' that Hachimitsu-Scans, late 2000s, office ladies, blushy faces, Akira Kizuki kush. We smokin' shoujo ai. I’m on 12 Vicodins, smokin' on nondescript systems development careers. We smokin' family drama. We snortin' that good coworkers to lovers, crying at the office, cute shit. They must have cheerful amnesia. They forgot that I’m her. That Dynasty-Scans pack hittin'. That lily smell like a Hellcat V8. We smokin' shit on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite, blowin' the Lord’s manga. I’m sick in the head. I'm on them Batoto updates. I’m on that Gunjou grindset. I left my yuri goggles in the Benz trunk. I’ll have to stunt on them next time. I don’t give a fuck if I get baited. I don’t need to see the confession anyway.

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 10

I’ve poked at this idea a few times before, but people really hate cuckoldry in their anime and manga. In the eyes of the otaku, one of the worst things an author can do is have the protagonist’s affections spurned, or for a love interest to cheat. This is an unspoken inviolable law and will lead to more reader complaints than if the character had suddenly started murdering babies. But why?

The baseline (male, heterosexual, reading shounen) weeb tends to identify with the main character of the things they are consuming far more than they care to admit. It’s so obvious when you look at how blatant of the wish fulfillment is when it comes to romance in shounen. Most anime girls here are treated with an air of sexual purity – if they flake on the protagonist, even when it makes the work more narratively compelling, then that ruins the vibe. As I identified in my CCA post, cuck stuff, and even the specter of cuck stuff, surfaces deep shame and insecurity in a lot of men, to the point of causing endless culture wars. And when it happens in their manga, they get mad at the main for being a sexual failure, and dish out virulent madonna-whore shit at the woman. This is an otaku complex as old as otaku themselves – just look at Tomino’s oeuvre! Of course, gay people are smarter than this, and that’s why nobody complains about the air of lesbian ntr anguish in say, Kakegurui or Madoka or Bloom into You. In those, it is treated like a spice.

Anyways, I played Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, and Divinity Original Sin 2 earlier this year. I swear this will be relevant.

Shadowheart took the world by storm in 2023 because most people are not inoculated against tsunderes. Or elfs, or goth baddies for that matter. Of course, it also helps that she’s God’s favorite princess. Most party members get periodic plot moments in the first two acts followed by a dungeon in the third leading to some major character decision, but Shadowheart additionally gets the entire Temple of Shar in which to play out her struggles with faith and devotion.

One of the neat things about BG3 is that the darker and edgier parts of its storytelling are often also the stronger ones. This is not typical! For the bulk of “choices matter” CRPGs, especially in recent memory, evil options mostly just exist as a perfunctory way to let players fuck shit up. In one of his videos, Noah Caldwell-Gervais makes a strong argument that Fallout 3’s evil route is less about roleplaying as a bad guy and more about abstaining from roleplaying, just blowing things up and acting violently towards the characters and the world strictly for sandboxy player enjoyment. Meanwhile, BG3’s Dark Urge option is straight-up the better way to play the game. Baudelaire Welch did an excellent job with letting you jump in to the narrative as an established and thoroughly tortured character who has to proactively rise above their demons to do good in the world. Having this background provides in-universe context for taking the darker routes, making every decision, even the bad ones, a concrete narrative investment, as opposed to a blank slate PC where you have to make all that up whole cloth and just hope it coheres, or not really care in the first place.

With all this in mind, Shadowheart’s Dark Justiciar route is really quite excellent. It’s a nasty little tale – a girl plucked from her parents, brought up in a straightforwardly evil cult, given a chance to see the light, rejecting it either out of her own volition or through the player’s corrupting influence, and coming full circle by willingly severing the last ties to her former self. Her parents showing up at the end as one last tie to her past doesn’t really come across as a Christian Baby-type gotcha like it does in her normal route. Here, it’s just one more twist of the knife on the path she’s committed herself to. She says as much.

I was not anticipating just how much this would affect the romance.

See, romancing Shadowheart when she returns to Selune is mostly a story about being there for your girl as she goes through a total identity upheaval. It’s fine, but ultimately ends up feeling a bit too narratively clean. You helped save the elf, so now she will swear herself to you. Obvious it’s written more cleverly than that, and I’m cutting out a lot of detail (I do like the way that Dame Aylin and Isobel act as her lesbian mentor figures), but it’s still ultimately a bit underwhelming, even if I get that these are all the same reasons that most players really really like her.

Romancing Sharran Shadowheart, on the other hand, is properly insane. Act 2 is a whole arc of understandably putting your budding relationship on ice so that she can navigate her test of faith without distraction. Then, roughly 30 seconds after becoming a Dark Justiciar, Shadowheart turns around and essentially tells you "I know we have some sort of thing going on, but I have to dedicate my heart and spirit wholly to my goddess now. Maybe we can still occasionally kiss on the dl though, if you're okay with coming second to my true obligation." What follows is the epic highs and lows of Elf Cuckold Simulator, as you desperately try to do anything resembling a normal relationship with her and keep getting swept aside in favor of her Duties. You are led on, practically broken up with, led on some more, until eventually you are granted exactly one crumb of pussy, and promptly informed afterwards that that was an exception. Once the world has been saved from the interdimensional squids, Shadowheart's ending scene has her leaving you, seemingly for good this time, to pursue her best evil pious life.

(Subsequent patches added an epilogue cast party to the game, and if you reconnect with her there she compares your situationship as a fine wine, to be savored and drunken sparingly, and teases that she’d like to invite you to her cellar down the line. There is no escape. You will be doing this song and dance and never getting enough of what you want for the rest of your life.)

This is why I play video games. To get divorced by women. Dating sim wish fulfillment is so passe. Guaranteeing that your player character can get everything whatever they want within the established narrative boundaries leads to far worse writing in general. Having someone push back and downright toy with your emotions under the just-barely plausibly deniable guise of religious dedication is so much more memorable. I love the bizarro alternate version of Baldur’s Gate 3 I played compared to everyone else, and I wish more people got to experience it.

While Baldur’s Gate 3 can’t be beaten when it comes to the depth of its party members, the studio’s previous mouthful, Divinity Original Sin 2, is easily the better game in combat and worldbuilding. I’m glad Larian is returning to their bespoke setting going forward, because I had a great time with this game. For the expected playing-a-high-quality-CRPG reasons, and because it happened again.

Choosing to romantically pursue Shadowheart, you could be forgiven for not seeing all of that stuff coming. With the Red Prince, it’s on you.

The Red Prince is a lizard man and a right proper royal bastard who is traveling the land in search of his betrothed. With their blessed bloodlines combined, she will birth the first true dragons in centuries and he will Restore The Lizard Empire to its Former Glory. A total pompous fuck, but in a way that I found charming compared to say, Astarion.

The Red Prince is taken. He’s the most conceptually taken guy in the world, and he makes that very clear from the get-go. And yet, if you want it badly enough, he will entertain your romantic fancies and deign to have sex with you, you guessed it, exactly once. All of your romantic conversation choices with him come off as needy and jealous and sad, trying and failing to find a way to coexist with his literal platonic ideal of a lover. Then once he reunites with his princess, he’ll cut things off for good, informing you that this was always just a relationship of convenience and now he has to Step Up. All that, and you still gotta help keep the dragon eggs safe afterwards.

This one’s just plain emotional masochism, making it sufficiently more challenging for me to beat the allegations. But I really do think it’s great that Larian includes these weird-ass routes alongside the more conventional party member romances, because there are more important things than just straightforward player fulfillment. This, too, is a fine vintage. Plus I like lizards.

Larian is still a relatively small studio compared to the triple-As, with the writer's room is roughly a baker's dozen. This means you can pretty easily map out who wrote which characters in each game, and what sort of themes they like to dabble in. Believe it or not, the BG3 elf cuckoldry and the DOS2 lizard cuckoldry were written by two completely separate writers! That’s so much funnier than the alternative, because it means that this is just part of the Larian House Style.

Announcing a new Divinity game should have been a grand slam for the company, but Larian’s been finding themselves in hot water because the CEO keeps making stupid claims about how generative AI will be used throughout the development process and how everyone is totally on-board with this. I’m of the mind that his proclamations could have been much worse, that he intended to find a middle ground on AI and ended up pretty out of touch because, like, he’s a CEO. If this is the case, most of the creatives will be politely ignoring him, minority owners Tencent will be pleased enough by the appeal to AI in the first place, and the writers and designers will continue to do their stuff largely unfettered. Hopefully.

And said stuff better include more insane relationship melodrama where the player character’s wants are actively toyed with. This is a competitive advantage!

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 9

Who owns the cultural zeitgeist? Does it trickle down from the rich and famous, or does it rupture up from the young and broke? Is it steered by the critics, the consumers, or the creators themselves? Where do these categories blend together easily, and where do they clash? I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. But here is a game that effortlessly slides itself into the conversation, knife in hand.

Anthology of the Killer puts its cards on the table immediately by sheer virtue of being a Unity walkaround with a jank cartoon aesthetic and a dinky Yamaha soundtrack. This is a living fossil of early 2010s trashcore indie alt-games, and brought me right back to the good old days of stuff like Crypt Worlds and Armada and Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. That’s because solo developer Stephen Gillmurphy/garmentdistrict/thecatamites has been plugging away at games in this loose scene for almost two decades, cooking up such classics as Magic Wand and Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog. Anthology of the Killer is easily their most ambitious work, spanning nine episodic installments released from 2020 to 2024. As such, it began life as a pandemic project and ended by highlighting the cruelties to be revealed that have also always been there.

As should be obvious by the name, Anthology of the Killer has murder on the mind. It’s set in a world not unlike ours, except that the societal death drive has been cranked up a few notches and everyone is trying their best to pretend that everything’s normal, even the ones doing the murdering. Especially the ones doing the murdering. Protagonist BB is a broke university student who makes zines about the strange goings-on around town, investigating various subcultures and getting press-ganged into haunted houses that have metastasized into entire haunted institutions. She’s a great window into this world, and has all the snarky commentary that you’d want out of an adventure game protagonist. Then there's the rogue's gallery of XX City. We’ve got the requisite slashers and ghosts, sure, but there’s also a night college of academics obsessed with murder from a philosophical perspective, menacing advertising and insurance agencies, literal washed-up surf rock revenants trying to summon a New Wave to drown the world, and the cops. The fucking cops, who want so badly to be cool and validated that they actively collaborate with murder cultists because they think that’s hip now. And at the top of this class/violence pyramid seems to be the countless off-screen elites, who spend their days moving assets around in Special Economic Zones and tossing money into up-and-coming art scenes to try and bend them into making art that better serves the powerful.

I am used to seeing this kind of scorched-earth comedy wielded against politicians and religions and tech CEOs, but Anthology of the Killer takes it out on rich art snobs in particular. Even the framing mechanism of the anthology, a coiling exhibition peppered with commentary from disappointed attendees, plays into this. Time and time again in these games, the upper class look to inject themselves into the scenes of the young and the queer in a bid for legitimacy and street cred. But they also don't like to get their hands dirty, so they fund things from afar and send in a trickle-down hierarchy of cops and professors and local pariahs to try and enact their wants. The end result is a cult of murderers infiltrating the community theater, putting on murder-themed stage productions because they’ve concluded that the rich want blood, like the gods of old wanted sacrifices.

This all seems like an oddly specific bone to pick until you remember that Stephen Gillmurphy lives in Ireland, a country that is presently built entirely around international tax evasion, and that the art market is one of the classic mechanisms of money laundering among the elite.

If you didn’t know this authorial detail going in, you can deduce it during Blood of the Killer, in which BB uses a government free travel scheme to take the train to a small rustic town in the country. The European angle, while not all-encompassing by any means, does make a lot of disparate Elements Of The Killer click together. This is a collection of stories about influential people chomping at the bit for both coolness and new ways to do tax evasion. The shift to a post-industrial society has forced them to deal in new kinds of power, pivoting to laundering money and culture, while the situation for those on the ground continues to be just as bleak as it was before.

It’s interesting to see where sexuality does and doesn’t show up in Anthology of the Killer. While it's a touchstone theme for the greater horror genre, it’s fairly downplayed here. BB is constantly being threatened with kidnapping and murder and whatnot, but these games are pretty careful to avoid even the suggestion of sexual violence, and I think that lets them better explore the capital/nostalgia/poseur complex they’re trying to shine a light on. But there is one chapter all about libidinal desire, and it is Heart of the Killer. Here, a consultant traps BB in an Electronic Dream Phone-themed resort to try and figure out her romantic preferences (so that the Youths can be better advertised to). This fails miserably, because she is not straight, or gay, instead something far weirder. BB ends up as the final girl in Heart not through virginity or sexual purity, but from having fetishes so particular and arcane that the nostalgia-consultancy complex simply cannot digest and regurgitate them. For her it is the frog from the Rainforest Café. While Of The Killer games are comically exaggerated, I really do think that there's a grain of truth to this part. The sexual basis behind the bulk of furry fandom acts as a strong bulwark against total cultural capture. Sure, a company like Disney can make a children’s movie like Zootopia by surgically excising the sexual aspects, or they can attempt to toe the line with something like a Lola Bunny, but both fail to actually steer “furry” into their hands, instead simply adding new cultural touchstones that people can imprint on at a formative age. Going down this line of thinking also made me realize that a Simpson is a kind of furry, and that’s how you get a BB.

The tone stays remarkably consistent throughout BB’s saga, while the scope and narrative ambition slowly grow with each installment. The final chapter, Face of the Killer, takes the themes bubbling just under the surface in the rest of these games and spells it all out brutally clearly in a three-act movie sructure. It threads together a vast web of conspiracy that is just so stupid in its means and goals, which is great from both a horror and a comedy angle. Any artistic scene with its finger on the pulse risks elite capture, and in this world that means incorporating blood. Fucking Mappy from classic Namco game Mappy (I will never escape Bandai’s clutches) shows up to start a mass murder ritual, while the severed head of the cult's professor pontificates that violence is the throughline between the State of Nature and the Commonwealth. The state's monopoly on violence will cause an atmosphere of flippant mass murder to bubble up in counterbalance, so why bother to fight it? Join the masquerade of death. Face of the Killer ends with the titular Killer bringing upon his new world, supposedly an evil negative of the original, and as BB explores the aftermath it turns out that pretty much everything is the same. The only differences are that some of the product brands have changed, the members of the city council have more violent names, and just a few more people than usual are putting on rubber masks and grabbing the nearest sharp implement. It’s a delightfully circular ending, the kind that offers no solutions other than a reminder that shit has always been fucked and that there’s no way out but through, trying your best to live and make art that is truly your own through whatever hell you find yourself in. After all, history is a nightmare – and loving it!

As I crawl inevitably towards the untrustable age of thirty, it’s good to play something so deeply concerned with Not Selling Out. I am fundamentally not a BB, but it’s still better to be a ZZ than a Marcie.

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 8

Nostalgia is one hell of a drug, and Kowloon Generic Romance runs with this idea on the visual, thematic, and literal level. Its shining thing is the Kowloon Walled City, a single city block in Hong Kong built up to impossibly dense levels during the second half of the twentieth century. You only get these unzoned skyscraper settlements where a) the political status of the area is contested, b) there are borders or physical barriers preventing sprawl, and c) the space is undesirable enough to escape redevelopment or bombs. From the back-to-back colonial occupations to the Chinese Civil War, the geopolitical conditions that led to the creation and eventual destruction of the Kowloon Walled City are one of a kind. There will never be another.

…okay but what if there was??? Kowloon Generic Romance knows exactly what it wants: hot muggy summers, grimy streets, alleyways that never see the sun, densely packed interiors, hawkers with every counterfeit product under the sun, and a gruff, tight-knit atmosphere. But this idealized Kowloon is getting chipped away at from the outside: residents now have phones, trendy instagrammable restaurants are constantly popping up, and long-time residents seem to keep disappearing. Not to mention the giant sci-fi device quietly floating above the town. There is mystery afoot in this small yet towering world. And in the same way an empty field makes the Miyazaweans dream of yuri, doesn’t the thought of an anarchic urban enclave where every building is over ten stories tall inevitably have you imagining a beautiful woman with short black hair and glasses smoking on her balcony in there?

It certainly does for the author of this manga. Kowloon Generic Romance slots firmly into the “cozy hell” aesthetic milieu present in VA-11 Hall-A and really any sufficiently slice-of-life dystopian work. Slow pacing is important for these kinds of stories - it gives the reader time to bask in the vibes, let beauty emerge out of the grit, and get a feel for how normal people go about their lives in an objectively rough but aesthetically pleasing setting. In fact, it takes a whole volume before the central mystery of the story is even hinted at – that protagonist Reiko is a clone of a deceased woman, Kuji-B and she’s been swapped into her former life with no explanation or long-held memories.

It turns out that most of the cast is haunted by matters of identity, and that that’s one of the prerequisites for even being able to interface with this version of Kowloon. Most of it is pretty gendery, too. Reiko’s past life had a femme fatale air about her that she finds herself unable to replicate, and her mans Kudo, the former lover of Kuji-B, is distraught when she tries to replicate it. Her best friend, Yaomay, is a former child actor whose mother was grooming her into her own mini-me. She cut all ties, ran away to Kowloon, and got so enough cosmetic surgery that nobody would be able to recognize her from her past. Techno-pharma CEO Miyuki has that classic Mysterious Anime Intersex thing going on, which adds an extra layer of familial resentment to his schemes on top of further queering his yaoi moments. And then Xiaohei actively has a gender nightmare going on. He’s so tortured about growing up and no longer being able to convincingly crossdress that he literally manifests as a cis woman in Kowloon out of a mixture of desire and nostalgia-turned-regret. It’s like that sometimes.

You could probably hazard a guess as to what’s going here on if you were reading between the lines, so to spoil it all outright, this version of Kowloon is a simulation that aims to replicate how city was before it was demolished three years prior. It’s populated entirely by clones and people with strong enough wants and connections to the original city that they can actually partake in the simulation, which ends up eating away at their memories of the outside world. The tech powering it was developed by Miyuki after he inherited his abusive adoptive father’s company. He aimed to use it to torture his old man with endless bad memories, but the project took so long that said old man developed dementia, rendering it all useless. The actual emotional core of the simulation ended up being Kudo, wracked with grief over his fiancé Kuji-B killing herself, wishing he could turn back time and share an endless summer in Kowloon with her. It’s a messy but fun mix of sci-fi and romance, built around the literal and metaphorical weaponization of nostalgia. While it still could whiff the landing, I had a good time with this manga, even if it's not the easiest recommendation.

But the anime…. the struggle of getting this stuff onto the screen! Kowloon Generic Romance received a thirteen-episode adaptation earlier this year, animated by no-name studio Arvo Animation clearly biting off more than they could chew. Not only was the project daunting from a plotting and aesthetic standpoint, but with Bandai Namco on the production committee, they were almost certainly dealing with heavy-handed oversight and brutal deadlines.

As both a cost-saving method and a necessary wellspring of nostalgia, Arvo frequently tries to invoke old-school anime aesthetics, and it only works sporadically. The character art is pretty good, but there’s a consistent struggle to move these characters that frequently kills the vibe. The backgrounds on the other hand, are fucking amazing! They were done by renowned art studio Aoshashin, who are frequent contributors to Studio Orange productions and more recently worked on Look Back. They contributed all their art in advance, avoiding the production crunch entirely. So it’s jarring to see the animators struggle to properly light their characters against their surroundings, with animation way too choppy for the disparate elements to mesh. The production lurches from episode to episode, where some pretty much have it together and achieve the artfulness I’d want out of this adaptation, and some absolutely do not. In one episode, the character art falls back on 2000s-level line thickness and detail. This whole thing smacks of some truly nasty crunch, and even if the studio had been given the proper amount of time and resources, there still would have been the hard problem of the episode count.

Remember how I said earlier how vibes-based works live or die on their pacing? The anime version of Kowloon Generic Romance adapts eleven manga volumes into a single cour. The normal conversion rate for anime is three or four episodes per tankobon, so needless to say this is absolutely breakneck. Not only that, but they had to come up with an anime-exclusive ending, since the manga is nearing its conclusion but isn't quite there yet.

Given those parameters, the only way to achieve a complete adaptation is to cut out the slice of life aspects and turn the story into more of a thriller. It works… sometimes. The biggest problem is that the central romance is much harder to care about when we hardly ever get to see the characters interact organically. It also means that the story’s jargon and plot bullshit both accumulate at a much faster pace, making it a more confusing watch than it needs to be. In some ways it's a respectable move to try and get to the perceived “meat” of the work and tell a story with a start and a finish rather than leave on a cliffhanger if you know you’re not likely to get a second season. It’s just that a shame it came at the cost of what I liked out of the original. As most are, the anime-exclusive ending is half-baked. Reiko finds a way to become a Real Girl, and her and Kudo get together for good instead of moving on with their lives. It clashes with the rest of the show's themes around desire and letting go and living your absolute self, and makes the whole thing suddenly smack of Final Fantasy X ( / X-2 HD Remaster) at the last minute.

I actually got to attend a Bandai Namco industry panel focused on Kowloon Generic Romance earlier this year at an anime convention – it was very enlightening in ways that were surely unintentional. While much of it was just PR for an anime that had already ended and was clearly not the breakout hit that they wanted it to be, they had producer Ryouya Arisawa headlining the event, and I was surprised by just how young he looked. When asked about his experience working on the show, he responded that he was stressed about getting the episodes done on time, and was relieved that it was over now. In studio speak, I’m pretty sure that means that many long nights were had on an absolutely grueling production. He then made a remark about how after wrapping up work on the anime, he immediately had to pivot to producing the movie!

That’s right, Kowloon Generic Romance also received a film adaptation earlier this year, and they apparently press-ganged this poor man into working on them back-to-back. I can only hope he got some rest on the international flight to the con. As far as I can tell, the KGR movie never got a release outside of Japan, and that it was pretty terrible. The anime already had to rush to try and hit all of the major plot beats, so I can only imagine how impossible of a task it was to get everything across in under two hours, all while being hampered by the usual challenges of translating manga aesthetics into live-action.

??????????

So that leaves us with one "okay but failed to live up to its potential" and one "why would you even try this" between these dual adaptations. In conclusion, it’s kind of awesome to have an endless stream of opportunities to write about some new way that Bandai dropped the ball. See you all next year for Hathaway 2!

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 7

I watched through Twin Peaks for the first time this year and obviously found it to be Peak, perhaps the defining text of its genre and medium in the same way that Utena and Homestuck are for theirs (although Utena is resoundingly the only one of these with good filler). This has led to the original broadcast of Twin Peaks being one of the most deeply analyzed shows out there, and it sometimes feels like everything that could be said about it has already been said. The fans have had three decades, after all! So instead, I am going to focus on Lynch's follow-up works and trace one particular line between 1992’s prequel movie Fire Walk With Me and 2017’s sequel series The Return. It is the dual image of the old woman and the child.

Let it be known that Mrs. Tremond is an excellent character and I fucking hate her. Fire Walk With Me is a deeply upsetting movie in pretty much every way it could possibly be. There’s a layer of nightmarish dread to the whole movie, punctuated by graphic depictions of some of the worst things that could ever happen to a person. And even amidst all of this, the element that really manages to get under my skin is that old lady. In the show, she plays a fairly minor role, offering clues about Laura's secret diary through putting on a little ghost story. She uses the family name Tremond and lives with her grandson. The previous two that lived in their house were also Tremonds, and the next two that live there will be as well. Upon Cooper and Donna’s prying, she seemingly reincarnates overnight into a new person just to fuck with them. Something’s clearly up, but the show never has time to dig into it, even during the dregs of Season 2. Instead, that’s saved for the movie, where the old woman’s status as a Black Lodge entity is made painfully clear. She’s seen moving back and forth between Twin Peaks and Deer Meadow, living nearby both of the young women that BOB goes on to rape and murder and wrap in plastic. She exists seemingly as a constant, looming in a more passively menacing way than any other Lodge spirit could.

Perhaps the second worst day of Laura Palmer’s life kicks off when she finds Mrs. Tremond (going by by Mrs. Chalfont in FWWM) and her grandson standing at the far end of the Double R Diner’s parking lot, beckoning for her. The blue static swells in. The old woman gives her a painting; the young boy gives her the hint that BOB is coming from inside the house. They’re letting Laura know that they’re affiliated with the Lodge, and both of their offerings act to further ensnare her and make her feel helpless to her fate. In a movie with unsettling imagery by the minute, it’s that fucking painting that unnerves me the most. The way it becomes a set, and the old woman and the child become ushers to lead Laura right to the stage of the Red Room. Laura is fully trapped between the dreaming and waking world for a while there, just to be let in on the fact that a man named Dale Cooper is coming to try and save her, and that he will be too late.

It is a passive and cruel evil that the Tremonds weave. The first two seasons of Twin Peaks are deeply concerned with the masculine and forceful use of violence, as most acutely manifested by BOB. The show offers a way out through the alibi of demonic possession, but Fire Walk with Me makes it clear that Leland knew exactly what he was doing. The flashback where Leland visits Teresa Banks for a threesome and flees after seeing his own daughter in the cohort ends with The Child dancing around in the parking lot, almost triumphantly. It’s almost like these wacky Tremonds are avatars of forbidden knowledge and terrible inaction spilling over into violent doom or something! If I think about Fire Walk With Me any longer I’ll get sick to my stomach (top 5 movie for sure, though), so let's skip ahead twenty-five years to The Return.

One of the first things that really sinks in about the third and final season of Twin Peaks is the age of the returning cast. Every new wrinkle and fold the actors have gotten over the years is captured on the characters with no hesitation. This feels most obvious in the drawn-out nocturnal scenes where Hawk, tired and older, converses with a dying Log Lady over the phone. Catherine Coulson herself passed away just days after those scenes were shot. Obviously his own death earlier this year has brought this line of thinking to the forefront, but it seems so clear that when filming The Return, Lynch knew there wasn’t much time, that this was the last and only chance to get everyone back together and make something beautiful again. And he did.

Of course, beautiful can be a strange descriptor for The Return, as this is a deeply menacing show. Like a serialized, generalized Fire Walk with Me, it leaves no stone unturned in displaying the rot at the core of contemporary American society. BOB walks among us, and he’s tearing through the underbelly of the country seeking out forces just as evil as himself. And one of the ways this evil radiates out is all of the violence enacted upon and around children.

There’s the child of the drug addict in Rancho Rosa, who receives a front-and-center view of Dougie’s car exploding and burning a man to death. There’s the boy horrifically and meaninglessly gored by Richard Horne as he speeds in anger from having his criminal enterprises upstaged. Episode 11 sets the record, as we get the children who discover a bloodied woman beaten nearly to death by Richard for witnessing his prior hit and run, followed by a twofer at the Double R Diner. A boy gets his hands on his father's gun and starts firing into the diner, prompting active shooter panic in the restaurant and a prolonged family dispute outside. Even as the situation is resolved, the car stuck behind them just keeps fucking honking, prompting Bobby to check on them and finding a girl throwing up, almost oozing bile in the car as the mother just honks and screams. It’s perhaps the single scene in the show where society feels the most irrevocably broken, and that’s saying something. And of course, we have the young girl in episode 8 who may or may not be an unnamed Sarah Palmer, who falls under a woodsmen-induced coma and has an evil frog-bug crawl into her mouth and this may or may not be the source of all of her Horrors.

The takeaway from all of this? The children are facing inordinate amounts of suffering, and anyone or anything that could have helped them has long since faded, if they ever existed. The nuclear family alone certainly can not save them. How could that have possibly held together in the wake of what happened to Laura Palmer? Her dad raped and murdered her, all while her mother Sarah just did her best to ignore it. Then afterwards, Sarah willingly let her niece stay in the same house, where the same damn thing happened. Throughout Twin Peaks, she asserts control over her life by acting like nothing is wrong, until eventually she just…. breaks.

Sarah is the only Palmer left to reach old age, and it is not a blessing. The years have only left her bitter, isolated, and paranoid. She spends her days drinking and chain-smoking and watching violent fights on television. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the whole show is her buying a cart full of alcohol and Bloody Mary mix at the store, and halfway through checkout suddenly becoming agitated and rambling worriedly about “men” coming before running out of the store. Hawk knocks on her door for a check-in afterwards, and she refuses all help. It’s a familiar, painful situation to anyone who’s watched their older friends or family descend into delusion. Sarah's scenes are often followed up with those of Audrey's, who spends this series trapped in something of a domestic Waiting For Godot with shades of complete mental breakdown. This is not a parallel you want to have.

Oh, and she's also probably the host of a great maternal evil or something. The last few episodes of The Return make repeated reference to an ancient demon known as Judy, who Dale Cooper seeks to vanquish for Blue Rose purposes, and Mr. C seeks to ally with to expand his criminal enterprises and domain over human suffering. It’s almost like these two men are two sides of a coin! Sarah’s last major scene in the show has her pulling off her face after a man approaches her at the bar to reveal the void underneath, with an emerging grin that tears into his throat. If she’s a host of Judy, then this guides and has guided much of her passive cruelty in the same way that BOB drew the capacity for terrible violence out of Leland. It’s a perfect little echo, the yin and yang of feeding on garmonbozia.

The last episode of The Return depicts a “crossing” – Cooper’s intent to create a new world where Laura didn’t have to die, where none of this BOB and Judy shit had to happen. In practice, it plays out like a sick joke, leading to a perfectly haunting ending. I believe that the Coop we see at the end of the show is something of an integration of all his selves – the heroic FBI agent always just a step too late, the quiet and unpredictable Dougie, and the calloused Mr. C more than willing to resort to violence. He has always been capable of being any of these people, and he will not admit it. As the rape of the land through atomic hellfire creates BOB and the woodsmen in Episode 8, Cooper’s rape of Diane guarantees that those same forces will be a part of the next world too. And because he’s both an investigator and a sadist, the only thing he can think of doing in this new timeline where Laura Palmer has ostensibly been saved is to track her down and take her to the scene of her original trauma. Cooper and Laura – or Richard and Carrie – eventually arrive in Twin Peaks, and knock on the door. To bring things full circle, a new Mrs. Tremond opens the door, provides no relevant information, and reveals that she bought the house from a Mrs. Chalfont. This information leaves Cooper flummoxed and Laura screaming. It’s as if she’s suddenly become acutely aware that across decades, timelines, and identities, this specific entity continues to torment her. Oops! Better luck next life, Coop.

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 6

It’s cool to have a new favorite band. Until this year, my answer all this time had been… Nightwish? They were the first band I ever got really into, aaaall the way back in middle school, and while I still think all of their eras are great fun, treating them as my number one hadn't been sitting right with me for years. And now, I’ve got SubRosa.

This is a band that's a bit tricky to pin down genrewise. They’re definitely doing doom metal, with a very rich and layered approach to the production. Like a lot of good doom, loudness itself is used as its own pseudo-instrument, and increasingly so as their albums go on. Definitely also some “psych” and “sludge” and maybe even some “post” thrown in there for good measure. But their most notable aspects are not RYM tags and are instead their dual electric violins, and striking vocals provided by Rebecca Vernon (backed by bandmates Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack). I really wish we lived in a world where strings and uh, women were resoundingly normal in metal, but that is not the case! So I cherish SubRosa, and how decisively they wielded their disparate elements such that even the haters could not dismiss them as a gimmick act.

First things first, Rebecca Vernon’s got an excellent voice – on the heavier songs she delivers powerful, raw vocals, especially at lower registers, without feeling out of range. She can also pull off some real beautiful and soft-spoken delivery that in no way sounds “princessy”. Such is the power of altos, and without being weird about it she’s pretty close to my own ideal voice.

So in picking a new favorite band I suppose I’ve swapped metal with violins and female singers for… metal with violins and female singers. Old habits die hard. Anyways, SubRosa has an unbeatable trilogy of albums from the 2010s, which you can identify by their two-tone black and beige illustrations of haunted women. Sometimes you find an aesthetic that works and roll with it till the bitter end.

The first in this lot, No Help For The Mighty Ones (2011), is the closest this band gets to straightforward bangers. There are some immediately accessible songs such as Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes and Whippoorwill, with catchy riffs and triumphant finales. Peppered throughout are some much harsher songs, as the band tries to figure out just the right mix of beauty and aggression to work with. But ultimately, it’s an album more wistful than angry, and the bittersweetness is delectable. It’s their work I find myself in the mood to listen to most often, even if that comes at the cost of the overall work not cohering as tightly as what comes after.  

More Constant Than The Gods (2013) is my favorite album of all time. It took two listens for it to properly sink in, but by the third I was enraptured. The songs are all apocalyptically heavy, sorrowful, and driving, and there aren't any softer interludes like their other albums have. Shit really is More Constant! And yet each track truly stands out. There’s just six songs, coming in at a bit over an hour, and there’s not a wasted moment in there.

The Usher wastes no time getting to the subject matter of the album title and artwork: death as supreme, feminine, terrifying, and inevitable. With at least four distinct sections, this song could honestly stand alone as its own suite, but here it’s just setting the stage, and my god what a flex that is. What follows is Ghosts of a Dead Empire, an unflinching reflection on colorism and colonialism in India. Doggedly heavy, it’s probably the closest SubRosa gets to straightforward doom. Cosey Mo hews closer to the songwriting style of the previous album, but even then, it’s a real step up – there's still the bombastic resolute choruses, but the backing violins swirl in and out to add this wondrously chaotic texture to the mix. The song is a feminist response to Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel, and one that practically outmodes its source material.

Then you’ve got Fat of the Ram, which coldly spells out the contradictions and suffocation of living in Utah, how piousness and cruelty go hand in hand. There’s a deep spiritual emptiness to these high halls surrounded by near-apocalyptic desert wasteland. The penultimate track, Affliction, is built off of a fascinating, stoner-y sliding guitar progression and builds up to some wonderful string work. If it is the weakest song on the album then that is a testament to the work’s strength. And No Safe Harbor…. I’m not the kind of person to go “this band saved my life” but I think this is the single song that’s done the most for me. It’s some of the most somber poetry and orchestral work I’ve ever run into, until halfway through when the flutes go nuts and a single-note riff starts crashing away in the background. It’s a song about facing down the deepest personal sorrow and letting it go – I’ve used it for terrible news and the end of relationships alike. There’s value in being down here at rock bottom, and trusting yourself to climb back up with newfound clarity and resolution afterwards. At least that’s what I’m thinking about whenever the honest-to-god doom dulcimer plays away in the closing minutes.

In case you couldn’t tell from these writeups, SubRosa are pretty damn well-read, and being based out of Salt Lake City strongly colors their work. This all comes to a head in their final album, For This We Fought the Battle of Ages (2016). It’s loosely based off of the book We, Yevgeny Zamyatina's very early entry in dystopian science fiction. Once again, I read it and found it far less engaging than the album makes it out to be! So good on them for drawing the compelling stuff out. For This We Fought… is chiefly concerned with capturing protagonist D-503’s mental breakdown as he is no longer able to conform to his perfectly regimented society after learning of an outside world and an active resistance movement. It’s a very intense album, concerned with control, individualism, forbidden knowledge, and apocalypticism. There are far less slow and somber moments than before, and instead the parts where the heaviness falls out from underneath feel almost like a beast slowly dragging itself forward.

This all comes at a price. Normally, I’m a staunch advocate for listening through albums from start to finish as complete works, but this one honestly suffers a bit when doing so. Black Majesty is a beautiful song, perhaps the heaviest and most complex SubRosa gets, containing a poem spoken, sung, and growled across seven minutes that really makes you feel the weight of carving a path through unyielding stone. It’s honestly best experienced in isolation – after the weight and length of the first two songs on the album, a third going even harder can lead to a bit of listener fatigue, which makes it harder to appreciate the majesty of the soundscape for what it is. But hey, at least the separation kinda fits with the album themes.

The final track of For This We Fought… is the only one disconnected from the album’s source material, but it’s still very much in conversation with the themes. Written in direct response to the 2015 LDS condemnation on same-sex couples, Troubled Cells is personal. It’s about walking away from Omelas, refusing to accept the promise of salvation at anyone else’s expense. It’s bitter, noble, and accompanied by a music video exclusively casting gay kids.

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 5

Warnings for drug use, blending fact and fiction, and the invocation of gonzo.

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 4

This was supposed to a fun little aside included in my Gquuuux writeup, but I went mad with power working on it, so here it stands on its own.

I’ve seen Char’s Counterattack thrice now – it’s a fun little puzzle, similar to The Adolescence of Utena where the visuals are magnificent and the symbolism rushes by at a mile a minute and the story is completely inscrutable at face value. There’s layers to this shit, and engagement with the prior text is all but necessary for valid interpretation. I should know, since the first time I watched this movie, I had practically zero Universal Century experience, and couldn’t walk away with anything better than just “why the hell is Char doing all this, that’s stupid, come on man”. But catching it in a historic theater earlier this year, with the original Gundam and Zeta under my belt, my sinuses freaking the fuck out having just gotten a septoplasty two weeks prior, I fucking got it. Char’s Counterattack is about how the rot of the world drives individual relationships to their breaking points.

Some political background: after watching 0079, you know that the Federation has pushed most of humanity off of Earth and are hording its splendor and its spoils to themselves. The remainders are the rich, the powerful, and the truly impoverished who couldn’t even manage to leave in the first place. Then Zeta shows how even with this sharply reduced population, the Earth is still succumbing to massive environmental devastation due to the lifestyles of the Federation elite and the pollution from near-constant warfare. Char meant every word of his speech at Dakar, that humanity has proven itself thoroughly incapable of protecting its cradle, and that the only way out is via total abdication. It’s his last breath of hope and idealism.

But since Zeta is about the death of the future, his dream is extinguished once it becomes clear that the Federation will never willingly relinquish their holdings or their lifestyles, and that these earth-space conflicts will continue on in perpetuity. There’s a scene where Amuro offhandedly tells Char that he needs to fight and die for his beliefs, and Char essentially responds with “okay ❤️ yay ❤️”, takes his words to heart, and spends most of CCA wondering why Amuro is so unhappy with him for trying to kill himself for his beliefs! Of course, Char has discarded every virtuous part of himself to get there, willingly taking on the fascist mantle of Neo Zeon as a last-ditch attempt to achieve these ends by force.

So now you have the political background for why Char wants to drop a meteor on the Earth and render it fully uninhabitable. A lot of it is just ecofascist defeatism, but if you’re approaching CCA with only the material perspective, it will still feel far too extreme and out-of-character. You need to open your cuckoldry third eye.

Everyone in Char’s Counterattack is getting cucked, both romantically and metaphysically, and all of it revolves around Char. Amuro is getting cucked out of retirement by Char’s doomsday camp antics. Char is getting cucked because Amuro won’t return his bids for attention or genuinely try to understand his beliefs, and just fights against him with grim determination. Nanai Miguel is getting cucked by Char because she’s stuck as his beard; this man is far more interested in Amuro than her. Quess Paraya is also getting cucked by Char, who is just stringing her along as he grooms her for battle the same way he groomed Lalah fourteen years prior. And Gyunei and Hathaway are both cucked in their romantic pursuits of Quess, who is hopelessly infatuated with Char. Everyone acts in their own interest and nobody gets what they want and everyone is mad about it forever.

This is the essence of the fascism conveyed in the film! Sure, Char also assumes the role of Zeon MegaHitler and puts on the cape and epaulettes and everything, but the justifications behind that can be endlessly argued over in a way that the raw emotions simply cannot. Tomino is poking at cuckoldry, whether real or feared, being a driving force behind the right-wing politics of resentment, something which most of us only caught up to around 2015 or 2016. The emasculation of being told no, or getting shrugged off, and imagining getting to take revenge and launching a damn colony drop in response. Cuckoldry is painted as weakness and self-hatred, a pathetic surrender, and god forbid you partake in it willingly.

If this whole thing smacks of gender, or if you can almost smell the Mishima, then you’re on the right track. Char is an all-time Repressor in this movie – it’s why he’s cut his hair short and taken up drinking and entered into a sexless and loveless relationship with a woman. It’s all for show, to try and mask his desperate, pathetic, doomed love of Amuro and what they could have been in a better world. Instead of a genuine romance with Nanai Miguel, we get a bunch of Char brushing her off and then eventually an alarmingly psychosexual scene where he buries his face in her breasts and asks for support because being a man is sososo hard and the sword of damocles hangs. And we haven’t even dug into his dynamic with little orphan Quess.

“They say Char Aznable is a lolicon” is a line that floors me anew every time. The worst thing is that he’s genuinely not! His wretchedness would be so much more narratively simple if he was. But no, he has a pattern of grooming young girls (and Kamille…) and sending them to their deaths in combat. He is weaponizing newtypes to an end, just like everyone else does with newtypes. But what is Char’s end here? Maybe in Zeta it was a dream of a better future, but that’s long gone by now. In CCA he’s just taking Quess under his wing so she can be a disposable element in his self-imposed mission. This man sees no future. He just wants one last time with his ex. People have been debating the politics of this movie for nearly forty years because they refuse to acknowledge the cuckolding angle that consumes the whole thing. They want it to be just ideology and scheming, for Char to be a rational actor operating on principled convictions. That's what he says he's doing, but he is being dishonest to himself, and he knows it. Self-hatred runs through CCA, and it outright consumes the movie in its last act.

Char’s infamous last words are every one of his psychosexual impulses laid bare. They’re also fully foreshadowed earlier in the movie during that Nanai scene. Gay men often have mommy issues, you know. You cannot treat this man as a well-reasoned idealogue, nor can you dismiss him as insane. He is a Char.

image that came to me in a vision

Ultimately, the meteor is destroyed, the apocalypse is forestalled, and most of our main cast is dead as a result. None of the material circumstances that led to this crisis have been resolved. All that's been bought is a few years of peace. Everyone will repeat these same mistakes again and again in the Hundred Year’s War that is the Universal Century. It’s all very, very Disco. “TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD — FOR NEW TYPES. IT IS TOO LATE FOR US. WREAK HAVOC ON THE EARTH SPHERE.”

And that’s why Beyond the Time playing during the credits is such a sick joke.

“You can change your future” – history will repeat.

“You can change your destiny” – the die is cast.

“We can share the happiness” – only in death.

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 3

A new year, a new Gundam to politely complain about. All is as it should be.

The first thing that should to be said about GQuuuuuux, tabling any snide remarks about the title, is that the theatrical preview event was a fantastic way to kick things off. None of us really knew what to expect going in, and then we got slapped in the face with half an hour of lovingly-rendered 0079 fanfiction where Char found the Gundam instead of Amuro and how this singlehandedly changed the outcome of the war. Then, a sharp artstyle pivot to half an hour of girls running around and getting in illicit mobile suit money matches and having emotions at one another in a gigantic colony-city built up in the aftermath of the Zeonic victory. Both halves are excellent work from the industry veterans at Khara, who succeed in both paying homage to the original Gundam as a legendary work and presenting their own unique and modern spin on it.

Most people immediately put forth Hideako Anno’s name when talking about GQuuuux, but he ultimately ended up with fairly limited roles in cowriting and production oversight. This is a work that truly feels like the product of an auteur smashing their favorite toys together, so I do get why people think it’s all Anno, as he’s spent the last decade doing exactly this for Godzilla and Kamen Rider and all his other childhood obsessions. But director Kazuya Tsurumaki of FLCL fame is the one calling the shots here, and once you know that, pretty much everything falls into place. The manic animation, the otaku deep-cut callbacks, the wildly escalating plot, the romantic freakouts – it’s all been done before, though not with this much color and this many robots.

The biggest consequence of their approach is that GQuuux absolutely demands prior Universal Century knowledge. The One Year War flashbacks are there as fanservice, not elucidation, and if you don’t know who Kycilia Zabi is or what Char Aznable did then you’re just not going to get much at all out of this show. It's building directly off of tons of disparate elements from the first few Universal Century entries, especially 0079 and Zeta. The good news is that GQuuuux’s adherence to being Universal Century fanfiction through and through can be a genuine strength! From a Glup Shitto perspective, this show is fantastic, constantly dredging up unimaginably deep Universal Century characters and mobile suits and giving them major roles. They even gave us a third major Char Aznable yaoi option in the form of Chalia Bull, who in this timeline developed such a close bond with him that they had to coin a new term for coupled mobile suit teams – MAVs.

It’s funny, because I remember this show originally being pitched as a bridge between old and new Gundam fans back when it was first announced. The promotional videos heavily featured two-on-two Gundam arena fights and the colorful cutesey character designs of Take, the modern Pokemon character designer. This was originally supposed to be The Big Gundam 45th Anniversary Show! In contrast, the prior Gundam anime, The Witch From Mercury, was originally intended as just a minor stopgap try-new-things show in the leadup to GQux, and it ended up becoming huge. Not just among existing Gundam fans, but as an onboarding vehicle to Gundam at large (I technically fall into this category!) They didn’t seem to change anything about GQuux in response to G-Witch’s massive success, which is objectively a good thing – seeing through an artistic vision rather than just cashing in on trends and whatnot. It does lead to some conceptual overlap between the redheaded female protagonists and “witches” as an underlying theme, but it’s all so different in execution that it's not an issue.

Amidst all the Gates Capas and Gyans and Gelgoogs, Gquux has a very strong central trio of characters in Machu, Nyaan, and Shuji. Machu is a wildly different female protagonist than G-Witch’s Suletta, being spoiled, impulsive, and assertive. In contrast, Nyaan lives a fragile life, doing odd delivery jobs to make ends meet and constantly praying that she doesn’t get deported. She has to work for everything she does, and the class resentment between her and Machu definitely bleeds out. This is especially true in each of their relations with dreamy slut-boy Shuji – Machu coasts on her MAV dynamic and latent newtype flashes to feel close to him, and ends up stunned and incensed when Nyaan also develops a crush on him, expresses herself, and slides in. It’s cool to have a genderswapped version of the Char-Amuro-Lalah love triangle, with two people fighting over a third who is lost in a world of their own, dreaming of hopeful futures that will not come to pass. It’s less cool when Lalah actually shows up to hijack the narrative from them!

Even for those of us who have done our homework, the veneration of the Universal Century goes from a strength to a massive weakness by the end of the show, as the writers become completely lost in the sauce. As Gquuuuuuuuux comes to a head, it becomes increasingly clear that the they don’t want to do anything new within the framework they’ve concocted specifically to do new things. Once Lalah Sune is introduced and spouts her lore-dump (coincidentally one of the episodes written by Anno), the walls begin to close in and we’re stuck litigating old, buried conflicts in this new world.

GQux is GFucked like that. Most of the standalone episodes in the middle stretch of the show are solid – I really like the one about Xavier’s possibly-boyfriend Miguel being revealed to have poisoned at least three of his classmates and friends in an attempt to keep them from becoming Cyber Newtypes and losing themselves. It’s a twist of the knife in a way that feels very classic gundam, as does Lady Kycillia grooming Nyaan, taking advantage of her precarious status as a space immigrant. Meanwhile, the one with the feddy ace “witch” is not a Gundam episode – it’s an Utena episode! I know a Juri duel when I see it. It doesn’t have much lasting impact, and could have stood to be cut if that would have freed up some for Machu and Nyaan interactions, but it’s good on its own too. We eventually get two great episodes where Nyaan and Macchu find themselves on opposite sides of an Zeon internal power struggle, both given guns and a Mission at the same location. It’s the perfect setup for our girls to finally fight and attempt to kill each other! What could have been the coolest scene in the whole show is rudely interrupted by Char Aznable crashing in after being long-presumed dead, Lalah spouting some more doom, and Gundam showing up. Seriously, the literal RX-78-2 Gundam from 0079 arrives via spacetime portal to rain hell down on the world of GQuuuux for daring to exist. After being MIA for half of the show, Shuji goes from being his own character to merely acting as an avatar of the Gundam. Fucking Beyond the Time from Char's Counterattack plays as the penultimate ED. It’s all unearned, and completely derails anything interesting the show was doing prior.

Even at this late stage of GQuuuux, with just a single episode remaining, there was a way to put everything back on the rails, which would have been Macchu and Nyaan teaming up and saying No We Are Not Doing This and blowing up the gundam without hesitation in order to return to their own story. This is not the outcome we get. The Gundam does an Ultraman size transformation because the fine folks at Khara are just dicking around at this point. Shuji lectures from the Gundam about multiverse shit that would be bad in a Marvel movie and is bad here. Shuji and Lalah and Char argue with each other about the sanctity of the timeline, wasting valuable minutes. Chalia Bull himself asserts that he was trying to be the Char archetype of this world, and that Char doesn’t need to be here! But nonetheless, Char is here.

Instead of a decisive “fuck that”, the only reliable cure to last-minute plot bullshit, the fight ends with a heart-to-heart and a kiss between Shuji and Machu in the kira-kira. It completely invalidates Machu and Nyaan as the true emotional core of the show when they don't get to interact in the final episode. Not as friends, not as piloting or romantic rivals, just... nothing. Also, the epilogue reveals that Zeon just… let Char wander off and do community service? You gotta keep this man under lock and key, especially with two timelines worth of knowledge on being a Fucker.

I am a database animal at heart, and a Gundam otaku at that. I love when a show references a previous show, when I can trace the lineage of a character archetype or a robot design. I love narrative callbacks and creative reinterpretations. I should be the target audience for Gquuuuux. And yet, I left unsatisfied, because I am also a Feminist, and I wanted to see so much more with the Women who are ostensibly the main characters. Khara’s toy time has obstructed this.

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 2

Final Fantasy X-2 cold-opens with everyone’s favorite doomed priestess Yuna doing a magical girl transformation into a racy stage outfit and putting on an idol concert for a sold-out stadium, flanked by backup dancers while the guitarist zips around on a loudspeaker-hovercraft. This Yuna is revealed to be an imposter when the other two playable characters crash the party to beat the tar out of her. All unfolding on top of a giant hovering drum-kit automaton, mind.

in case you want to set the stage

This shit is so ass and I kind of love it. From the very first moments, X-2 presents itself as a repudiation of everything X tried and failed to stand for. While the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, its gutsiness has earned it my begrudging respect.

Of course, this is also the game with the central mechanic of affixing dresspheres to your garment grid so that you can change everyone’s silly outfits on the fly. Hearing these terms casually thrown around online before playing fried my brain a little, and had me dreading the possibility that Final Fantasy X-2’s essence would amount to “woman be shopping”. Luckily, it’s not shallow in that particular way. After chasing Slutty Doppelganger Yuna through the city and going on a quick treasure hunt, it becomes clear that this game is thoroughly a Charlie’s Angels. We’ve got the ass-kicking trio of girls each with their own strong personality and intended flavor of sex appeal – it’s astoundingly of its time, and two decades later we’re starting to see the genre resurface with works like Kpop Demon Hunters, for better or for worse.

There’s a very specific yet all-consuming sleaze to this thing. The pose-striking, the skimpy outfits, the maximalist camp – it’s an early 2000’s japanese street fashion magazine given form, with a dash of gravure to spice things up. It’s hard not to be charmed by the UI slingshotting from surprisingly slick cut-ins to the clunkiest PS2 menus upcycled from FFX, or the cheesy jazz soundtrack. The voice acting, while still not good, is a significant step up from X’s nightmare performances, which is crucial because this game is 70% one-liners by volume. Also there's a jump button and rudimentary parkour auto-platforming??

listen to this shit. look at the fuckin sousaphone cat. they could never make me hate this game

In keeping with the overall aesthetic onslaught, X-2 returns to a real-time battle system crafted to be the zenith of ATB. In practice it’s a sensory nightmare, with everyone constantly running around and repeatedly making the damage yelp sound effect and shouting one-liners and interrupting each other’s attacks. If you cannot navigate the menus fast enough you will be shredded to pieces. Dressphere changes are a half-minute meguca transformation affair, which makes changing jobs on the fly not only important from a tactical perspective but also useful for buying time. It comes as something of a relief when halfway through the game you unlock the Berserker class, which lets you set one of the girls to auto-attack at double damage so you don’t have to worry about her any more.

While the main party is trimmed down to the self-proclaimed YRP trio, you can also catch and fight with every monster in the game Pokemon-style, if you wish. There’s no real reason to, it’s just sitting there as a piece of the insanely maximalist game design. Much of X-2 feels like the result of a Square Enix internal game jam, with a plethora of minigames ultimately conceived of and coded by just one or two developers apiece. It’s an interesting approach, and both fits and amplifies the disjointed nature of this game. Of course the quality is wildly variable, but you really can just ignore anything that doesn’t land, since so little of this game is critical for progressing the main story. If shit sucks, hit the bricks! It feels weird to praise a game for including so many half-baked elements and then just letting you skip them, but that’s how you get such wonderful emergent comedy as "Zanarkand got turned into a tourist trap" and "Wakka Coin".

[x]

Anyways, this is all set two short years after That Sin Shit. What remains after you’ve killed God and your boyfriend has been deleted from existence? Girl’s night, every night, obviously. FFX-2 is primarily concerned with how a society traumatized by a thousand years of calamity defines itself in the aftermath. Spira at large may still be trying to figure out whether to transform itself with raucous exuberance or keep to traditions, but Yuna has firmly settled on leaving the past behind and grabbing life by the horns. There is a genuine dignity in how she refuses to be defined by the absence of Tidus, even if that’s also partially to create more fanservice opportunities.

A larger plot eventually unfolds, but Yuna’s zeal for fortune-seeking primarily serves as an excuse to drop her into every corner of FFX’s map, taking odd jobs and butting heads with all manner of NPCs. I said previously that X’s linear pilgrimage does a terrible job of making its world feel real and interconnected, and X-2’s open-ended approach goes a long way in remedying that. Even if you really ought to just take the airship, it’s now possible to walk from one end of Spira to the other and back, with plenty of characters old and new to check in on along the way. The game’s player-driven narrative approach lets the world speak for itself and feel as delicate and in flux as it is. It’s a rare example of asset reuse that outshines its original context.

Through some ancient found footage, that eventual main plot seeks to position Tidus and Yuna as the reincarnations of star-crossed lovers from a thousand years ago. The ghosts of said lovers go on to possess Yuna and the various boys leading each new faction, in order to reenact a failed revenge plot of a thousand years ago. This is an intentional echo of FFX’s unsent spirits, and a clever one – it’s narratively similar to the previous game’s grand reveals but tonally the exact opposite, and they knew better than to try and recycle the dad stuff alongside it. Yuna ultimately demands that she be able to live her own life, finally renouncing the sacrificial lamb status placed upon her in a way that she was never able to previously. We will not be bringing Tidus back, not even a proto-Tidus. Nor will we be nuking everything and starting anew. We have to let stand everything we’ve done, and only then can we move on.

Of course, the punchline is that you can have Tidus back, if you want it badly enough. There’s a secret deus ex machina ending available to those who achieve 100% completion. This requires a slavish commitment to the game, participating in countless tournaments, breeding chocobos, selling carnival tickets, playing carnival games, and using Yuna’s childhood island as a shooting gallery. It’s the product of exploring every nook and cranny of Spira and talking to every person at least five times. Sure, Yuna loves Spira and wants to help everyone and try everything, but at this level of meticulousness it stops being her story and becomes your story of one hundred percenting final fantasy ten two. And if you’re that invested, that obsessed with this game as a game, then sure, have yourself another Tidus. Knock yourself out. It’s just a game after all, so why not spawn characters back in all cheat code-like to squeeze everything you can out of it?

I only got 61%. Sue me.

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 1

There’s a scene about halfway through Final Fantasy X where the pope and cardinals of the game’s central religion reveal themselves all to be ghosts, revenants a thousand years into a planned eternity of subjugating the scattered vestiges of society. The traditions of dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, and so on and so forth. This is perhaps the closest the game gets to doing something interesting, so it’s pretty damning that it’s so far removed from the main cast of the game. I’ll try to work backwards from there.

Summoner Yuna is a lamb for the slaughter. Every part of her, from her parentage to her religious indoctrination, was deliberately crafted in preparation for her eventual self-sacrifice. Like Jesus Christ she is here to take on the sins of the world, but since this is an RPG the concept of sin is rendered literal in the form of a giant leviathan named…. Sin. Final Fantasy X takes the form of Yuna's pilgrimage across the continent of Spira on foot, visiting holy sites and gathering power in preparation for freeing the world from the giant whale calamity until it comes back in like ten years.

a pox on square enix for watermarking all my switch screenshots, although I'm glad they at least took the opportunity to... credit the character designer?

It’s not a terrible premise, and I do love a good narrative about this specific flavor of doomed priestess (see: The Tombs of Atuan, Baldur’s Gate 3, Harrow the Ninth). But this particular kind of story demands interiority, to be able to understand her thoughts and empathize with how she’s handling the impossible weight placed on her from birth. And unfortunately, we’re not playing as Yuna, instead interacting with her from the perspective of Tidus, a Zanarkandian yankee in Yu Yevon’s court.

Tidus is one of those protagonists where you take one look at him and can immediately infer the thousands of message board wars that have been fought over him through the decades. He’d be a weird protagonist in any game, seeing as he’s essentially a football player who gets shunted into the far future where society has been torn to pieces and the only organized entertainment left is football. Knowing this, you’d expect his arc to play out as a form of wish fulfillment isekai, but he throws that all away pretty quickly to pledge his service as Yuna’s knight, taking with him only the question of what brought him to this land and an unfulfilled grudge against his abusive dad.

This may come as a scalding take, but the central relationship between Tidus and Yuna is fine. Sweet, even, in a few moments such as the infamous AH HA HA HA HA cutscene where the extreme stiltedness is the point and they break out in genuine laughter about it shortly after. Since it’s supposed to be the emotional core of the story, it’s truly unfortunate that the game’s presentation actively works against it much of the time. The voice acting situation is dire in ways I could not have imagined, having grown up slightly after they had sorted out the awkwardness of the early PS2 era. Every line in the English dub of the game is tuned to the Japanese lip flap, resulting in unexpectedly fast or slow line reads constantly taking you out of whatever mood the game intended. It comes off as a shockingly amateur production, especially when compared to games from the prior generation where the characters didn’t even have moving mouths to orient dialogue around. The cutscene direction is also fairly uninspired, refusing to take any cinematic inspiration even though Metal Gear Solid had already set the gold standard there. And as if Square is afraid that you’ll fail to parse the intent of the dialogue because of the failed execution, they resort to fucking Wonder Years voiceovers at the end of cutscenes as well. Unfortunately, I have taken on Tidus’ begrudging delivery of “my old man”. It’s just too much fun to say.

I’ve only really been talking about Tidus and Yuna so far, but Final Fantasy X has a seven-person party, which is thoroughly overloaded from both a gameplay and a narrative perspective. To lighting-round my thoughts on them: Lulu is genuinely good and I wish we got more of her, Auron is mostly there for vibes and aura(on) but that’s fine, Kihmahri is the classic “why are you here” pick but Rikku is the one with the real startling lack of moments (she’s really only there as a conceptual bridge between Yuna and the Al Bhed), and it’s really cool that Wakka’s whole arc is about how you shouldn’t be racist and also he’s voiced by John DiMaggio doing a Jamaican accent.

I do love the occasional pre-rendered rooms, charmingly vestigial from the PS1 games

Most of this game's immediate plot beats fall apart upon the lightest examination, leaving the characters and their interactions with one another pretty weak. You want a strong cast for your 40-hour JRPG, and FFX simply does not have that. Being haunted and tortured by the past is probably the best of its broader themes – it’s neat how those pope-ghosts from earlier are trying to reify their control over Spira’s people at all costs, in direct opposition to Yuna’s job of sending away the dead, even though they are both different arms of the same church. They turn out to be directly backed by Yu Yevon, the religion’s founder who is even more of a ghost haunting the living. He chose to become a millennia-long calamity on all of Spira rather than accept the loss of his city, preserving it in a dream as he forced the real world to crumble to ruin. This is, straightforwardly, the original sin! Of course, this sequence of events is told in the most haphazard manner over dozens of hours because it’s a square jerpig.

Yuna’s pilgrimage manifests as a series of discrete maps that all happen to be near-straight lines stitched together. Spira is truly fractured – Sin has destroyed any possibility of large-scale society and forced almost everyone into small, isolated villages. But this game is not particularly concerned with having the areas you’re travelling through blend neatly into one another, leaving some very stark transitions. Why are the Thunder Plains in the middle of a larger forest area? Why is Bevelle essentially just a cutscene rather than the fortified temple city-state it’s implied to be? All of this adds up to Spira not feeling particularly “real”, and this is a story that only really works if the world coheres. The Calm Lands are the biggest joke of all – a gigantic and completely flat plains area with the camera wayyy zoomed out, that cannot even be appreciated as a set piece because the random encounter rate is just as severe as the rest of the game. In the lore it was the site of a previous Sin battle, and that’s just… never followed up on. It’s an empty, useless area that is chewed through and never returned to rather than a site of reflection. They should have discarded it entirely – the Zanarkand ruins already have that covered!

xenoblade has really spoiled me on JRPG vistas, but even then this one is so rough

Much of FFX feels similarly wasteful. This can be a very pretty game (especially the HD remaster), but you just kind of burn through area after area, which results in most failing to leave a real lasting impression. I understand that the spectacle is part of the appeal (hence the 45-second summoning and boss animations, which I do adore), but this design methodology doesn’t do it for me. The bosses early on are genuinely neat gimmicks, the midgame bosses require some strategizing and team composition tweaks, and then the endgame bosses are largely nightmares that must be grinded through, whether that’s getting specific equipment that counters them or breaking through a DPS check. Of course, none of the pre-battle cutscenes can be skipped, so be prepared to watch that five-minute scene where Seymour tells Kihmahri that he’s genocided the Ronso at least half a dozen times.

Speaking of, Seymour is our midgame fake-out antagonist, a store-brand Sephiroth from his hair to his plan. He wants power at all costs and is in on the game, planning to become the next incarnation of Sin in order to destroy the world and remake it in his own image or whatever. He’s goofy as hell, painfully obvious, and I am not a fan of whatever they were trying to imply with his mixed-race heritage. Nothing this game has to say about race is good – they never completely drop the ball with them, but the Al Bhed are still a nothing diaspora metaphor.

The roads of Spira contain few NPCs and even fewer sidequests, contributing to the feeling of an unceasing march forwards to Zanarkand (the less that can be said about the arcane temple puzzles that exist solely for padding, the better.) It makes it all the stranger when in the final hours of the game you are granted an airship and the opportunity to fast-travel to all of the previous areas, which are suddenly peppered with side-quests, bonus dungeons, and all sorts of other additional content. You’re literally about to enter Sin itself when this happens– both you and your party are prepared to see things through to the bitter end, whatever it takes, not to breed God Chocobos or hunt down the Ultima Weapon or whatever else is on offer. The tonal whiplash is nigh unbelievable, and while I’m glad that they ran with this idea for X-2, it’s completely unwelcome here. Back on the main path, the plot ultimately boils down to extremely simple terms: everything bad is Sin. Yu Yevon is Sin. The illusion of Zanarkand is Sin. Seymour wants to be Sin. The super-weapon from the ancient Machina war is Sin. Yunalesca perpetuates Sin. And of course, your old man Jecht is Sin.

Perhaps my favorite example of FFX’s unintentionally hilarious voice acting is when Tidus finally confronts his dad’s lingering spirit at the very end of the game. He’s choking up, trying to get across his impossibly conflicted feelings towards Jecht in the little time they have together before he fully loses himself to Sin. “I hate you” would be a difficult line read here even in the best of circumstances, and what do we get? “Ihateyou.” Poetry.

I'm making it your problem

Jecht’s battle theme, by the way, is dire early-2000s growly metal performed by a hardcore guy who was scouted by squeenix as he was touring Japan with the explicit intent of spreading straight edge culture. That’s why it’s unintentionally the perfect score for fighting against your evil dad who has willingly become the fuel for continued religious subjugation – it spells out all too clearly how the natural endpoint of sXe is just missionary work. 180,000 points of damage later, the fight concludes and Tidus dies, Yuna lives, roll credits.

what mixing puritanism and punk will do to a mf

Ultimately, I harbor little love for this game, as it fails at the bulk of what it sets out to do. But the worst thing is that even just five months out from beating it, I can already feel my mind trying to twist it all into a positive and fulfilling experience. The soundtrack definitely helps. Even as I write this post, Spira Unplugged is playing on repeat in my head, smoothing over all the plot nonsense and miserable gameplay to create pleasant oceanside memories. I think that’s why FFX is regarded high in franchise retrospectives – it’s a game that holds up extremely well in your mind, far better than actually playing it. The stars aligned to make a nostalgia monster, and I think that’s actually incredibly fitting. We have to lay Final Fantasy X to rest. We cannot let it continue to rule over us through nice memories and dreams. We have to send it away, and move on with ourselves.  

And managing. Per the rituals, I'll be posting an essay on each of the twelve days leading up to Christmas.

Another year, another twelve days of weeb blogging, and I'm quite satisfied with this batch. You will be too, if you're interested in yuri, moe, or Gundam.

Here’s a roundup post, in case you missed anything or are new to this blog.

1. Zeta Gundam and Being Weird About Women

2. Anaheim Gals Being Anaheim Pals

3. Do Not Watch Stardust Memory

4. UFO 50 Abducted Me For 159.2 Hours

5. So Help Me God, Lucky Star is Actually Good

6. Getting Scared Shitless by Boards of Canada

7. Teekyuu and Hubris

8. Tech So Bad It Sounds Like The Reviewers Are Just Plain Depressed

9. Clear Card Crit

10. Trying to Talk About Touhou Two

11. The Normal Author’s Girlfriend’s List Of Bad Yuri Anime

12. More Yuri About Adults To Accompany Your Seasonal Festivities

Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next December!

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 12

Happy Christmas and Hanukkah!

Per usual, I will close out this year’s blogging by going over some yuri I read this year starring adults.

Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko!

It’s always surprised me how unpopular Sal Jiang is amongst yurigoers. This is a woman who knows exactly what she wants in her stories and executes on it every single time. The thing in question just happens to be masochism. The pain in her work exists on a spectrum from physical to emotional, and honestly the emotional side feels like even more of a punch to the gut than watching women punch each other in the gut.

That all said, Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko is the first time Jiang plays her shtick for laughs, and to great effect. Hiroko is comically self-torturing, the kind of work-closeted lesbian who has developed insane control issues because of this and freaks the hell out at the mere thought of PDA. So naturally, her work kouhai, Ayaka, is a silly little femme who is head-over-heels for her and really wants to show it. Unfortunately, Hiroko thinks Ayaka is straight, and just being overly familiar and close because straight women are like that sometimes. A comedy of errors ensues that leaves Hiroko in her own personal lesbian hell. It’s fifth-dimensional lesbian kriegspeil, and it’s great! The usual Sal Jiang emotional violence is played for slapstick, and she’s a natural at it. There's even honest-to-god dyke drama at a lesbian bar! The emotions depicted in this manga feel very real, even as exaggerated as it all is. We need so many more stories about punished lesbians who will sooner eat their own organs than make a move if there’s even a hint of ambiguity. It’s such a fun character type to poke at.

This manga actually got a TV drama adaptation earlier this year, which I’ll have to check out! I hope she got paid plenty for it.

Wicked Spot

That’s right, we’re double-dipping with Sal Jiang manga this year. Wicket Spot is a new series that's currently being published under a new LGBT imprint from Kadokawa. It’s worth it for the “Oh yeah, I’ve been getting into Wicked” jokes you could make alone. This one's another comedy series, and I’ve liked what I’ve read so far. There’s plenty you can do with the modern-day-witches premise, and we'll just have to see how far she's willing to go this time around. The character faces are incredibly dynamic, and I love how much she’s leaning into the cheesiness and camp with stuff like that.

Jiang noticeably draws black leather with a lot of love and consideration, and I just think that's neat.

The Dentist Won't Stop Teasing Me

Look, I don’t want to be mean, but all of the yuri manhua series that make it over to Dynasty-Scans have even goofier and more contrived premises than comparable Japanese lilyschlock. At the same time, I appreciate how quickly they tend to spell it all out. This may be pure pulp, but teeth are important.

_

Sal Jiang has a Youtube channel where she'd upload ukelele songs, so I was going to link her cover of All I Want For Christmas Is You to cap things off here. Unfortunately, at some point she privated all of her videos! You'll just have to take my word that the gentleness with which she plays was hilarious given her work. So go check some of that out, or barring that, get in a sexually-charged fistfight with another woman. Mariah Carey would approve.

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 11

So you’ve seen some good yuri anime: Revolutionary Girl Utena (and the movie, if you want), Bloom Into You, Puella Magi Madoka Magica (plus, of course, Rebellion, which is essential), Bocchi: The Rock!, Girls Last Tour. You know HaruMichi and Farcille and poor sweet Tomoyo Daidouji and Quanxi’s whole deal. You’ve been queerbaited by Kyoani, or maybe you got lucky and watched Dragon Maid which was actually gay; you no longer get weirded out by incest; you wanted more Utena and got The Witch from Mercury S1 (good) or Revue Starlight (bad); maybe you’ve even gone back to Oniisama e and discovered Ryoko Ikeda’s incredible butch-for-butch technologies.

You’ve seen some good yuri and that’s been great. It’s just… there isn’t that much of it. Well, you could start reading manga, or books, or talking to actual women, but you want more yuri anime specifically.

To you, dear reader, I offer up this solution:

Bad Yuri.

Floating Catacombs 2025 Presents:

A Normal Author’s Girlfriend Production

The Normal Author’s Girlfriend’s List Of Bad Yuri Anime

Before we get started, let’s define our terms. First: Bad Yuri must not be in good taste. Second, let us consider some ‘ungood’ yuri, that we might understand what we aren’t looking for:

Case 1: Liz and the Blue Bird.

Boring and forgettable. Bad Yuri must be watchable.

Case 2: Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight.

Yeah the butchfemme was good but I spent this entire show waiting for KuroMaya and they only got half an episode. I don’t fucking care about ‘childhood friends’. Bad Yuri must be enjoyable.

Case 3: Hibike Euphonium

It has to be gay. Come on. This is like the most basic requirement.

Case 4: MagiRevo, Undead Murder Farce

Being gay is not enough. You have to have actual characters.

In sum: Bad Yuri must be in bad taste; it must be watchable on a minute-to-minute basis; it must not leave the watcher with a bad taste in her mouth; it must actually be gay; and it must have some semblance of characterization. In practice it is basically always violent and horny. We’re talking like Kill La Kill levels, although if you ever want to watch that you should just go see Promare instead. Also, I reserve the right to break any and all of these rules whenever I feel like it. Without further ado: