#yapping about nothing

The character designs are cute, simple and pastel! Easy to mistake for something you'd see in a common children's anime at the time. Yet they're constantly against these incredibly detailed, dimly-lit, almost oppressive backgrounds. Your eyes are always centered on the characters yet there's always this uneasiness that follows regardless of the scene.

Alien Nine hardly ever feels like its trying to trick its viewers with a false sense of cuteness before things go wrong. It feels more like its horror is simply hard baked into its world. There's no need to try and deceive the viewer with a sweet looking candy colored world before things go awry because from the very start, Yuri is uncomfortable.

When we look back at our childhoods, its easy to look back at things with rose tinted glasses. But whenever I try to think of any specific memory, I am then violently reminded of how much I spent my childhood feeling incredibly miserable. And how my misery was often dismissed by those around me. Maybe now I can look back and think about how a lot of my problems back them were rather small in the grand scheme of things, at that moment my feelings were still real and as big as anything else I knew. Completely lacking in any real freedom or choices, if I had the choice to go back I would reject it completely.

Alien Nine exposes a certain rawness of childhood. There are fleeting moments of happiness. There are moments of incredible anguish. But throughout there's this constant sense of disappointment and powerlessness towards the situation.

all i ask for is Thangyu merch (recieved a whole hundred dollars from family and immediately was happy because i could afford the plushshop Thangyu dolls), all I talk about is Thangyu, theyre constantly in my mind, theyre all I draw (for better or worse), obviously i have this blog which is mostly for Thangyu except when I decide to yap outside of them

and like. theres more. obviously. but yeah.

When a character or story seemingly has blanks which begged to be filled, rather than looking deeper into the story that surrounds them and making connections there, fans would much rather make up their own headcanons which often have very little basis on any established information. Rather they just tend to project their own traits onto a character and call it a day. Then present this as some sort of fix for what they perceive to be weak writing.

Now there are plenty of Funamusea characters who definitely have absolutely nothing going on for them. Mainly because they don’t exist within any specific context. There’s no coherent storyline they live in. Just a setting, vague occupation and a few informed traits. But for some bizarro reason, instead of recognizing that some characters don’t have much to them while others do, the average fan sees absolutely no nuance and decides actually all of them are like that.

As if there’s no difference between a character who has one line of dialogue in a random doodle vs a character who actually has an active role in one of the games.

Idk, to me there is just something a bit off about “parentifying” a teenage girl who was essentially forced to grow up quickly and become responsible for herself after the death of her parents. Something which she has never truly healed from.

I understand the idea behind it. With both Nagisa and Mami lacking true familial figures in their lives and finding family within each other. But the actual execution feels a bit shallow at best. Likely due to how little we see their onscreen relationship at all.

One can compare it to how Kyoko and Yuma are handled in Oriko Magica. But even that relationship is more specifically framed to be more of a sibling bond than anything else. Mirroring Kyoko’s relationship with her actual younger sibling before the tragedy.

Mami on the other hand, while she has already presented herself as the strong, reliable, mature one of the group, clearly projects those traits to hide her own loneliness and emotional instability. While Nagisa is being pushed as a “solution” to her loneliness, the other issues are left unresolved and frankly ignored altogether by future installments.

At worst, many of her traits are often flanderized by other Madomagi media. At some point along the way, her mature senpai attitude morphed into a motherly one? And she went from being justifiably horrified by the truth and lashing out as a result of longtime survivor’s guilt to uhhh I guess she just goes crazy whenever she learns about anything bad happening ever.

Who knows I’m just yapping. But I feel like Mami has consistently gotten the shorter end of the stick post-rebellion. Despite her appearance in the original series and The Different Story being so good. I loved her relationship with Kyoko and I wish there was a bit more acknowledgment of that rather than giving her a ten year old to take care of. I get that everyone really wants to see Sayaka with Kyoko but!!! Kyoko has two hands!!!

Perhaps a lot of this is just my own personal icks. I know that I’m not particularly fond of the whole “Young woman becomes emotionally fulfilled after having a child” kind of thing. Perhaps you can argue that’s not really the intent with their relationship but idk, the writers aren’t exactly subtle with it (Mami & Bebe = Mommy & Baby lol). It most certainly feels more for the sake of fan service rather than a logical progression of Mami’s character.