Bad pacing is the most common problem I see in stories, regardless of medium. I tried reading a new fantasy book today that had good prose, decent characters, and a world with a lot of potential. But the way it was paced killed all investment I had or could’ve had in it.
Also, the way people talk about pacing is very rudimentary and shallow. The criticism is either “pacing too slow” or “pacing too fast” and that’s it. No room for nuance and no explanation for what makes a certain pace too fast or slow.
Makes me want to write a short guide on how to pace stories properly, or at the very least a “what to avoid” guide.
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I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
The thing about the whole "it all tastes the same to me" phenomenon is that it applies to every sphere of human experience, not just food. Sometimes a person's political awareness is so limited that they genuinely can't tell those two opposing positions apart – and while that doesn't excuse them, you can save yourself a lot of aggravation by learning to recognise when this is the case.
Sometimes I look at a thread and I think "okay, I recognise that you feel you're being sealioned here, but the fundamental problem is that you're trying to debate the thesis of The Wretched of the Earth with someone who thinks Avatar: The Last Airbender is an incisive denunciation of colonialism".
Everybody and their mothers understood why removing Sokka's misogyny in the ATLA live action was a bad idea and made the story worse but suddenly when they remove Sanji and Zoro's misogyny in OPLA it's a good thing?? Make it make sense
Sure, I'll make it make sense. Because comparing the two starts from a place of false parallelism.
In ATLA, Sokka's misogyny was present for 3 episodes in the very beginning of the show, and then used to deliver narrative carthasis in episode 4, in the form of Sokka's 180 turn into feminism. The tension of flexing the rubber band of Sokka's misogyny was brief, and the release of that tension then felt appropriatly sized, because it came so soon in the series. The the rest of the show continued slapping instant karmic punishments to characters who expressed misogynistic beliefs. (Anyone who underestimated Toph, Yue's bethored, the guys who catcalled Katara, etc, etc). The world of ATLA is such, that it bends itself to always prove the misogynist wrong. (of course atla also has it's weak points where it falters with this aim, but the express aim is clearly there) The audience is primed, so that they can ignore the flinch of hearing a misogynist micro (or macro) agression, because they can expect the cathrasis of a karmic punishment to follow.
This works very well in the genre of escapist fantasy adventure. Shows like Succession, or Breaking Bad, or IWTV can present misogynist characters, who never learn or face any consequences, because the cathrasis of those shows comes from watching unpleasant people wallow in their self-inflicted miseries. They are shows about characters you love to hate.
Escapist fantasy adventure as a genre doesn't want to create characters you love to hate. It wants to create characters you love to love.
One Piece is an escapist fantasy adventure. It wants to create characters we love to love. So, it also has to ask the question of: How much can we pull on the rubber-band of discomfort before delivering any kind of cathrasis to the audience. The complaints that animanga One Piece faces, comes from the fact that for a lot of people, the answer is not this much.
Complaints about ATLA liveaction removing Sokka's *Suki teaches him about feminism* moment, and complaints about animanga One Piece having characters dropping misogynistic microagressions casually all over the place, come from the exact same emotion. 'I wanted to see a moment of fantasy-wish-fulfillment where a man changes how he behaves, and I was not delivered that emotional cathrasis.'
This has nothing to do with whether any of the misogyny of the characters makes sense in universe.
Different people will find different character flaws more or less bearable, and it's always a tight-rope you have to walk on. But creators do have a choice in what flaws they expect the audience to find interesting and where the line of so-insufferable-I'm-picking-a-different-show lies. I think for OPLA crew, the choices would have been
Leave it as it is, rubbing that *discomfort without any comfort* button way too roughly for a HUGE chunks of the new audience.
Create an entirely new storyline about Sanji and Zoro facing consequences and *changing their ways*. And I would be willing to bet actual money that the fans of the animanga would have been even more pissed if OPLA had started soloing with the storyline like that.
Just sand down the sexist corners, as the show did. And from these three options, I fully belive they picked the right one by pikcing this.
This turned into a pretty long rant, but it does bother me that it is often the case that misogyny is seen as *bigotry light* and the onus of accepting that media has misogyny in it, is put on the female audiences. I have a feeling that we as as society are much more accepting that making a character a racist is going to need helluva strong narrative justification, because the discomfort that choie like that causes in an audience is expected to be very high. But often it seems that the discomfort misogyny is expected to cause in an audience is.... much less. I don't like that assumption.
With Zoro especially, his backstory sets him up to have rejection of sexism as part of his underlying motive as a character, which his writer then failed to follow through on.
In ways that might be partly to make the character more complex, because rejecting it and not perpetuating it are in fact different actions, with a social trend that ingrained, but I think were mostly just the writer kind of losing interest in that narrative thread.
This guy is set up to be actively angered by the idea that women have any kind of inherent weakness, because his rival he couldn't beat was convinced that she was doomed to fall behind him because of the male puberty buff to muscle development, and he was like ABSOLUTELY NOT HOW DARE YOU CHEAPEN MY INEVITABLE TRIUMPH LIKE THAT and then she died in an accident, so the question was doomed to remain unresolved forever.
Zoro by rights has a more intense relationship with sexism-qua-sexism than any of the girls on the crew. And Oda simply did not write that, because he is not up to it. His reach exceeds his grasp, which I don't resent as much as I might because I can't help giving him credit for reaching at all; it puts him well above industry standard.
Removing some of the unexamined sexism Oda put in is honestly one of those places where an adaptation has an opportunity to avoid a failure point of the original material. Not just on ideological grounds, but in that the way Oda wound up writing Zoro on gender was a failure of execution compared to the initially presented concept.
The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.
Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?
From the moment of his arrest, even left-of-center media has been presuming his guilt without examining anything (e.g. calling him "the killer" instead of "alleged" or "accused") and then when I say he didn't do it, the nearest person chimes in with some quip that tells me they think he did do it but should go free anyway. Don't get me wrong, I would have the same attitude if he had done it. But he didn't. It makes me feel like the only sane person in the world, even among my staunchly leftist friends.
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Always remember that the EU did a study in 2013 about the effects of piracy on media publishers and found that there is no correlation between piracy and sales! (And then they tried to hide that study bc that's not the result they wanted)
So piracy is at worst not even a problem, and at best it's free advertisement.
Source: (the link to the actual study is in the article)
In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU
we simply do not give enough attention to the fact that the US is. Shooting itself in the foot at every turn. not in a individual incompetence way, not an an orange idiot in the White House Way, but in a “the US spent a century designing a world order where everyone was either reliant on the US or terrified of the US (often both) and now people at every level of federal government are destroying that system” way. While USAID very much did in fact contribute to like, food and medicine and whatever to people in need around the globe, this was not out of the kindness of American hearts, this is an arm of liberal empire. the carrot so to speak. and as for the stick, the point of having a military the size of the US military is not to use it. It’s to park on peoples lawns until they stand down. when you use it, and then lose, or deliver anything other than immediate and crushing defeat, you illustrate to the people whose lawn you’re parked on that spending billions of dollars isn’t enough to win a war necessarily. Iran could have closed the strait at any point, but they didnt bc the USA would bomb the shit out of them. When they get bombed first, there’s no reason not to close the strait. The US played its hand and it came up wanting. this is to say nothing of the damage to alliances with other liberal democratic countries. the people currently in power swallowed USA propaganda hook line and sinker, believed in it so completely, that theyre shaking the foundation of what lent that propaganda its believability. to say nothing of the fact that their aims are despicable, their methods are just. an embarrassment to empire building. they took a perfectly good empire and started lopping shit off. they’re trying to increase the output of a machine by ripping cogs out of its still-running engine.
"Beleaguered" is a wonderfully expressive word. I am beset by troubles so manifold that they have formed a league. I am playing host to a diplomatic summit of the United Nations of Fuckery, and negotiations are not going well.
Assassins, hitmen, and career killers talking to Doctor: “I’ll be there for you, even in the shadows, you are the coolest freak in the world, I am so happy to have met you.”
Hunters talking to Doctor:
(Typhon)
(Snow Hunter)
“You are so immensely weak and clumsy, oh my god, I have to make sure you don’t Die.”
The fact that these people are trying to depict me as unreasonable for refusing to accept a society in which I'm forced to forgive and live alongside my childhood abusers as the pinnacle of restorative justice genuinely feels like a psyop to make advocates of restorative justice look bad
Wait really? They’re just… openly codifying in policy that all transpeople are terrorists?
What about the politically motivated killings of trans people by Christians and conservatives? Why is that not terrorism, when a child is made to feel so unworthy and wrong through no action of their own that they are driven to suicide?
Forgiveness and co-existence requires repentance and ACTIONS TAKEN to REPAIR the broken trust.
Someone who will not do that is not ever going to co-exist in good faith. They're going to wait for the first opportunity to stick a knife in your back.
Turning the other cheek only REALLY works when you're certain that the kingdom of god is just around the corner so there's no point in doing anything except prepare for the end times and getting INTO the kingdom of god.
So yeah. Forgiveness is for those who earn it. Forgiveness without reparations and repentance is empty platitudes.
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There is something sooo deeply American going on with Seattle Children’s Hospital that I think would brick the minds of everyone outside of the United States.
The CHILDRENS hospital has to restrict helipad landings because of noise complaints from the wealthy home owners living next to it. Only the most urgent patients can land directly at the hospital. While the other kids have to land a mile away and are taken to the hospital via ambulance. Which is an unnecessary risk to the child’s life and also makes the families pay for the helicopter AND ambulance.
hey guys great news. guess who saw a doctor recently and it turns out my shitty comprehension skills that coincidentally got worse around the same time i got hit in the head with a spinning loose bench board in middle school probably wasnt just an autism thing and chances are i have aphasia that’s just been unchecked this whole time
oh no no NO no no I am sorry my dear @thebirdtm you are NOT underselling one of the most seminal pieces of television of my entire childhood like that on MY watch.
"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.
To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.
And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...
(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)
...that they decided to drown it.
Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out.
You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...
...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...
...only for the ropes to snap...
...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.
(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)
Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.
Or at least the wrecking ball.
But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.
Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)
Wait NO-
Well, that was uncalled for.
Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.
Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...
...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...
...and be fueled up.
"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.
Look at that thing, you say.
Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.
And again, you are right.
The battery was disconnected.
Sorted that, tho
"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can!
"Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!
I grew up watching Top Gear and it shaped me in many ways. My adoration of old Toyota Hiluxes is one of them.
I have a bisexual guppy and its funny as hell to watch because it seems like he’s only bi out of desperation. Like all of the female guppies are unimpressed by him, and dont accept his mating displays, and every time he fails, he goes over to a SPECIFIC male guppy (the prettiest male guppy in the tank) like PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE and that male guppy always lets him????
As a two time sexual assault survivor, let me say so many of you stupid motherfuckers on this website will turn gleefully fascist at the prospect of punishing sex criminals as if false accusations of sex crime are not THE most common falsehood used to justify hate crimes against minorities, particularly people of color and LGBTQ folk - who, I will remind you, are disproportionately likely to be victims of SA themselves.
Like yeah! Give the government the legal power to sterilize criminals! That will never be a problem! Alan Turing? Never heard of him! It doesn't have horrible implications for the concept of bodily autonomy! Sexual abuse and abortion are famously completely different subjects!
Death penalty for sex offenders? It's not like there are already massive structural inequalities that make the death penalty vastly more likely to be used against people who are non-white, and among the white people it DOES get used on, they are overwhelmingly either poor, mentally ill or both! It's also not like making the death penalty available for crimes that are not murder heavily incentivizes murder as a way of removing a potential witness, since it carries the same penalty!
It's not as if there is a widespread fascist campaign to portray gender-affirming care as "sexual abuse" in the exact same jurisdictions that are also trying to push the death penalty for sex crimes! It's not as if the Tulsa massacre and the lynching of Emmett Till were "justified" by false accusations of sexual misconduct!
As someone who's been assaulted twice, your rhetoric doesn't actually help survivors like me live in a safer world. In fact, it contributes to a climate of thought in which the fascists who are openly gloating about sexually assaulting people thrive. They have the power right now - do you think they're going to use it to punish themselves? Do you think the motherfuckers on the Epstein List have any intention to be held accountable to their own laws?
"Oh, but I'd only use the justice system against real sexual abusers who actually committed sex crimes!" Yeah buddy that's exactly what the fascists said. You do not live in a magical world where you can exclusively punish the people who are actually guilty and will never fall for a false allegation. You will not build that world by doing the exact same things the fascists do and saying the exact same things the fascists say.
And don't think I haven't noticed that a whole lot of the people preaching fire and brimstone upon "only the truly guilty" are also happy to accuse people of being rapists and groomers for such horrific acts as... drawing BDSM art or writing noncon fiction. You know, things a lot of survivors do to process and cope with trauma, and that a lot of perfectly upstanding people do because they're into weird shit. Put simply and impolitely, I don't trust you baying-for-blood rabid fucking animals to know what a "real sexual abuser" looks like. Let's also not forget that some of you think pointing this shit out is the same as "defending sex abusers," because you are deeply unserious clowns.
One thing I never see any of the people who act like this do is actually talk about resources for survivors. In fact, a lot of the people who talk this way are the same people who don't want to spend their tax dollars on rape crisis centers, abuse shelters or comprehensive sex education - and even where they permit them to exist, they love to exclude trans people (who suffer sexual abuse at atrocious rates compared to their cis counterparts) from these services.
A society in which basic human rights cannot be taken away from even the most loathsome, horrendous people is the only one in which any of us can be safe, because it doesn't take as much as you think for the people with the power to convince everyone else that you are the most loathsome, horrendous person.
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At Toba aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes
