Nothing's more permament than a placeholder

I'll start with, if you want to make the argument that Star Wars episodes 4/5/6, AKA "The actually good ones" utilize some of the iconography of fascism but don't really engage with the politics of fascism beyond an extremely superficial level of "It's bad" I think you can actually make a pretty strong argument.

From there, you could argue that it's a mistake for newer Star Wars material to engage more directly with the real world politics of fascism; that doing so would tend to dilute the more interesting or fundamental characteristics of the universe of Star Wars, or possibly simply come across as farcical.

I don't think this is an insane analysis of Star Wars, although I'm aware that I'm steelmanning an argument that is not usually made very well.

When people say "Everything is political" I find that what they often mean is, "Everything has the politics I attribute to it." If I say, for an old example from when I was young, that comic book covers with heroines in skimpy costumes and cheesecake poses are regressive and sexist then what I want is a transformation of the culture so that those things are kind of marginalized and seen by most people in the subculture as cringe.

People who said they didn't think that was the case, in my experience, often got very passive-aggressive responses like, "God, nobody's going to force you to stop reading gross sexist garbage, get over yourself."

If you spend a lot of time in the comics subculture, and you tend to make friends there and it's a big part of your social universe, and you also like cheesecake stuff, this is genuinely an obnoxious response. You are not worried that the fun police will confiscate your Vampirella comics, you are worried that you will face social pressure to pretend you don't like them, or else be gently pushed to the margins of the hobby and that it will stop being a place where you can relax and be yourself and become a place where you are more self-conscious, subject to ostracism, and pushed to the social margins than you used to be.

And like... The psychology here is going to occur whether or not the cheesecake art is actually regressive or not.

I've seen a lot of left-wing media analysis that strikes me as wrong, that involves using a series of commonplace left-wing cliches as a kind of Procrustean bed, imposing certain readings on pop culture in a sloppy way that involves ignoring significant portions of the thing they are talking about.

And as I've dipped my toe into looking at a lot of anti-woke commentary, a lot of it is even worse about this. I've been really surprised at how many anti-woke nerds are really just deeply ignorant about the pop culture products they claim to defend.

Which is fine on its own; there's nothing wrong with not having an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars minutia... unless you're positioning yourself as an arbiter of what Star Wars ought to look like and what the fandom ought to think about it.

Because that's what this shit is actually about. Especially now that you can monetize takes on youtube. An actual given piece of pop culture can become nothing more than a kind of excuse to wage fights about who should be more important in fandom spaces and what attitudes people ought to pretend to have if they want to be welcome in your corner of the fandom.

What drives me nuts about the left-wing people is that there's a long history of passive-aggressively refusing to admit that this is happening, and what drives me batty about the right-wing critics is that they generally don't have the strength to come up with their own sense of how things ought to be, instead they reflexively reject anything that looks "woke" simply because proving to "woke" people that they aren't in charge becomes more important to them than anything else.

Also a bunch of them are really racist and sexist, can't forget that.

On one layer, I think it’s overdone and undercooked. That is, everyone tries to do it and it’s seldom good. It rings as the least interesting part of something often and yet it’s inherently something big in scale, so it’s harder to ignore and just by itself it implies a lot of things apropos of the worldbuilding. It feels like it usually is a result of stakes creep. “Damn, how do we make an even bigger villain and/or more dangerous scenario?”

In that vein yea careless stake and world building scope creep are the main perps I feel, it's just seen as a way to escalate the world into something bigger and more unfathomable instead of using it as basis for why the here and now is important, for why meaning is important even in the grand indifference of the universe.

Another big thing in my personal opinion is that the average media including cosmic horror has not touched either the king in yellow or any Lovecraft story, and instead just grabs the recycled tropes inspired by inspirations with no interesting message behind what the author wants to convey by using cosmic horror.

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POV you're ejected from imperial court

1. you go full-throated modernist and say “and then nothing the protagonists did actually mattered because we are all crushed into paste beneath the vast unfeeling gears of capitalism” (YES that is modernism and NOT postmodernism because we are LAMENTING the powerlessness, that the center cannot hold, that the individual facing the institution is like the romantic cavalry charge facing the rip of a maxim gun behind barbed wire).

2. the protagonists aren’t able to fix the world but they are able to chip away at some part of a larger, more intractable problem (if you portray this as a good thing then online communists everywhere will call you a neoliberal bootlicker and publicly fantasize about your violent death. If you don’t portray this as a good thing then everyone on bluesky will send you their Aaron Sorkin monologues. both outcomes are equally obnoxious and miserable)

3. your protagonists are so good at understanding the assignment that everyone just needs to give them total power to reshape the world and then they fix everything (you just did the CEO-of-racism thing with extra steps)

One might even make the case that the conventions of storytelling itself push back against most attempts to address and discuss structural problems. And if one really wanted to, one could make the case that this means the act of storytelling is in and of itself regressive and reactionary: ‘protagonist’ is merely the modern signifier of the proverbial Good King whose ill treatment by the Bad Boyars (antagonists) both excuses his abuse of authority while justifying his desire for even more authority.

First we have the broadly worded content restrictions. So much of this is just strictly bad for several reasons (for example, you cannot have a NSFW game that doesn't even fetishize rape but has rape be an important thematic element under these new rules) but my personal favorite is that these are so broad that huge swaths of content are just banned from itch.io. You like VNs of monster girls having sex? Sorry, but your favorite spider girl VN is animal-related, we cannot prove that you don't want to fuck spiders so its gone.

(a real problem anyone thinks about??????)

Game where you can transformed by magical artifacts and sometimes fucked? Sorry, that's non-consensual content. Banned. You cannot be transformed into a maid against your will. You also cannot have your protagonist call an older woman "mommy" because likeeeee that's incestual right?

"Minor-presenting" what the fuck does this mean. Genuinely. If a grown woman wears a fetish uniform is that minor presenting??? What the fuck are you talking about.

Also by the way if they feel your content is "too bad" for their platform, which includes a list of conditions incredibly broad to contain things like "a woman who likes being gagged during sex", they will just steal your revenue. No no no not just the revenue from the work in question. All of it. This makes any NSFW work a ticking timebomb, especially since itch.io doesn't have the fucking staff to deal with all of this! There's no second chances. You are not protected against fraudulent report or our dumb as fuck employees.

itch.io right now is just not a safe platform for NSFW content, and honestly, it really should be said, a fair swath of SFW content too. Don't use it, find alternative ways to survive in the market right now.

It's not going to be easy, but it's necessary. Here's a link to an article going over some solutions. I cannot personally vouch for any of these in particular but you need to do what you gotta.

Or rather, infamous. Ol'haru has the record of the largest streak of consecutive losses in the sport, ending with a career of 113 losses to 0 wins. Despite that, she was absolutely beloved by everyone in Japan, and had a pretty significant fan club. At her trainer's words, she was capable but simply enjoyed running with other horses too much, and wouldn't break out of the pack to seize a win.

This is reflected in her personality: She's a jovial, easily distracted klutz that simply races because she finds it fun. In a game where "why am I in this sport ?" Is a core question that moves every character forward, she sticks out like a sore thumb. It is even represented in gameplay, with her special skill giving her a stamina boost when she's surrounded by other umas mid-race.

Uma musume is basically a roguelite. Every character's career mode has a certain number of goals to reach before the final scenario race. You fail or succeed, then you can use your veteran uma as an "inspiration" for further runs, inheriting part of her stats and skills. Those goals are usually "Reach X amount of fans" or "Place 1st in this race". One of Urara's goals is to run in the Arima Kiren, one of the most prestigious races in Japan. Emphasis on "Run", no need to reach the top 5 or anything. Why you ask ?

Because Urara joined this event because a lot of her classmates also did, and wants to run with them too. Everyone, MC included, notes how unsuitable Haru is for this. Every girl has different affinities for ground type (firm turf or loose dirt) and race lengths (fast sprints vs mile long medium vs longer ones). The Arima Kiren is a Long Turf Race, and Haru is abysmally bad at both, preferring sprints and dirt. Moreover, due to most of the previous races being sprints, you are encouraged to build her to increase her speed and neglect stamina. It's essentially putting a 100m sprinter run a marathon. No matter how good your stats are, you're gonna beef it.

But it has a storytelling reason. After the race, there is a somber cutscene where she admits she had fun, but also she can't help but feel sad and ugly cries at you. Maybe there's more to racing than "having fun". A competitive spirit awakens in her and she vows to take future races more seriously.