Monkytown

Making an idle game isn't hard. I could probably code it before the next Diminish episode shows up. But you have to make assets for it. So, one picture will do.

Imagine To be hero X but political.

There would be a lot to say about the new chino-japanese series, like the animation (all I know is it's a league above what I usually watch), the pacing (thank God for that) or the frankly juvenile universe (just guard the lift, guys...). But what I want to do is imagine what politics would be like in a world where trust and fear make and break people.

So, imagine a completely fictional incompetent criminal.

Imagine an incompetent criminal who is scamming China for PR and China goes "yeah! I trust that guy".

You don't need elections anymore. Have 1-3 duels, I mean debates, raise your arm at the end and whoever has the biggest number gets to lead the nation.

Your politician becomes a superhero, aka a puppet. You think he says the truth, he has to say the truth. You think he is loyal, he has to go fetch your shoes for you. (You want a dictator, he...)

Your politician will be under the drinking age.

Teenage series obliges, only the youth seems affected by trust/fear, just like only teen girls seem able to fuel the universe. So any 18 year old would easily beat their elders and then be term-limited simply by how far the trust system can stretch.

4. Your politician would fail. So badly.

Say you want him to fix climate change. Okay, just control the weather, dim the sun, it's okay, not too hard. Now make the trains free. How... Okay now win the war. HOW?! They have a politician too, they also have superheroes, like how. Fix the budget but don't raise taxes and don't touch health care or retirement. I mean short of creating money out of thin air - and cause inflation - your political superhero just can't.

And since you think this guy says the truth, the guy has to say the truth, so he does. And nothing tanks trust like truth. He goes "it's impossible", you go "I trusted you!", he is out. Now young politicians may be deluded but they'll see the pattern from a mile away and fall to fear before your hammer does. Your denial reduced the political pool to fearful villains and weak heroes and you're like "why can't we have good things?!"

5. It's not just politicians.

Take a company director. His employees don't trust him? He will be forced to suck at his job. The stock market believes in him? He can see the future. And now all your CEOs barely graduated because you need that superheroic edge to compete; they also get downgraded when their power wanes, which puts ep' 1 in perspective. Companies would spend a fortune promoting their boss more than their brand and products.

And yeah, To be hero X is for teens, so the trust system that lets you bend space and time is only for tatakai. But in an adult world, the superpowers we want are mold removal, tax processing or the more exciting space program. Oh yeah Elon Musk would thrive in that world, which also tells you trusty warlords would take over and bring the world back to a superheroic feudalism.

What makes To be hero X interesting, for any age, is its societal depiction of heroism as a trap.

What makes To be hero X boring, for an adult, is how it only uses that power for e-sports.

Or let me put that another way. It would be a pretty stupid story if it focused on the CERN's crowdtrusting of its FCC via their human mascot the genius LeRoiTitouan. (Although a Congolese space program in that universe would be fascinating.) Please keep it to the Coliseum. But when you make the crowd do a 180° for the script, after rightly pointing out how that same crowd willfully blinds itself, understand that the adults will be politically unimpressed. No matter how genuine you are, no matter how "himself" the hero, heroism must remain a trap and the crowds will trust their fiction, not you.

Diminish, of course, but also Adventures with anxiety.

Yes.

I thought I had run out of things to say about Diminish, for now, but then Neytirix. I’ll never get to see her “steal” Apollo, but I can at least have fun with the idea. ‘Specially given how resilient they are.

Evermore Diminish.

Brief explanation: Apollo claims to be “born from the solar winds of a dying star”. I assume the solar winds are what those lanterns contain. 

Technically, the stream coming from whatever that dark sun was meant to be was meant to be way more subtle, whereas Shadollo was meant to be way more... lighty. But I only figured out the shadowy effect by accident when it was too late and rolled with it.

Yeah, Diminish.

Still Diminish.

More Diminish.

All haunted game stories into one.

More Crow64.

It was a while since I did what this tumblr is about.

In the movie “Adventures of Baron Münchausen”, the baron gets old and find his old companions. He sits with them and plays cards, and one of the players is death.