I understand why kids shows keep using the formula of “main guy, comic relief guy, and girl” for their main trio. It’s tried and tested and it’s flexical enough to allow unique characterization while still letting the writers fall back on the cliche dynamics if they want to.
But I’m really really really tired of seeing it.
Then there’s the reverse of it for “teen girl comedies” where the dynamic is main girl, her best friend and non-threatening male friend.
Freudian trio. The main character is the ego the same gender character is the id and the different gender character is the super ego
don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Brian David Gilbert’s Unraveled content on its own merits, but as a serious sexuality researcher™ a good portion of the fun of getting into his videos has been seeing how the overwhelming reaction to this impeccably dressed geek working himself into a frenzy over video games is people getting wretchedly, breathtakingly horny for it
the funniest thing on the mbmbam tv show that never got acknowledged was how in the teen episode griffin only got one teen who clearly only chose him because they had the same name.
Of all the many wonderful, complex characters in Fullmetal Alchemist, I find that Izumi Curtis is one of the most nuanced and original, both within the series and in the shounen manga field. In a genre full of dead mothers and overbearing harpies, Izumi stands apart as a physically and magically talented fighter who is also an “ordinary housewife”; she has, most unusually for a shounen manga female character, survived not only childbirth but also an horrific, failed attempt to resurrect her dead baby.
She is chastened but not broken by the experience. Izumi is the only female alchemist within the series to have seen “the Truth.” Her payment is highly gendered - I take “my organs” (or “some of my insides,” as another scanslation group renders it) to mean her womb and ovaries. And she is the only character whose payment is neither returned nor compensated for with automail or a surrogate body*.
I think it is so gutsy (no pun intended) of Arakawa to have Izumi remain in this state. It feels so radical to see a woman whose worth extends far beyond her ability to give birth. Who lost a child but still finds meaning in her family, work, and community. Who has a fulfilling life but still mourns for and thinks about her lost baby, even after her guilt is assuaged. In another author’s hands, Izumi would be long dead, a woman with no value beyond her womb, existing only to provide fodder for another character’s development. Or she would be a villain, a broken woman madly hungering for what she cannot have. Or she would have her organs restored, and be shown pregnant or holding a newborn at the series end. Instead, Arakawa gives us a female character who is both happy and wanting, powerful and poignant, and presents those dualities as valid, inseparable aspects of a whole.
*Within the context of the FMA universe, adoption is shown as an option, but one which the Curtises appear not to have pursued. Surrogate pregnancy, I believe, is not discussed within the series.
So the director of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie made a public announcement that his team will now be working to change Sonic’s design and improve it, after the huge backlash from fans. Curiously, there’s been no mention of the movie’s release date being pushed back, despite the process of re-animating and filming entire scenes with a new character model being an enormously time-consuming and costly thing to be done to an already finished film.
…..This has me feeling a bit suspicious.
-puts on tinfoil hat-
Hear me out. What if the whole trailer (and Sonic’s design) was deliberately manufactured to be as strange and off-putting as possible? All the fan outrage, the discussion on social media, the redesigns by various artists, the memes…it’s all been free publicity. What if Paramount stirred it all up on purpose, with a deliberately bad design?
And now, for the next bold, calculated move…..the director is pretending to be very concerned with fan backlash. He’s pretending that they’ll work on the movie, cost be damned, because they really care about giving the fans what they want. So kind. So thoughtful.
Horseapples, I say! There will be no new changes to the movie! Because the real movie, with the real Sonic design, has already been made. And we already got a peek at it in the promotional art.
(that’s the real Sonic design, folks. It’s been all along! >:O)
Now am I saying this has all been a very elaborate and convoluted scheme by Paramount to get more butts in theaters to see a movie about a fast blue rat? Especially in the wake of fellow video game movie Detective Pikachu, a film that will inevitably make absurd amounts of money, and potentially raise the bar for expected quality/accuracy in video game movies? Yes. Yes I am.
-adjusts tinfoil hat-
It’s called outrage marketing, and it works really, really well on generations that have otherwise grown pretty numb to traditional marketing tactics. This is because, to put it simply, we really enjoy being pissed off at things together. It’s like all we have in common, sometimes. And marketing teams, being comprised of soulless vampires, have realized that this gets a ton of free publicity, because everyone needs to have an opinion or just be left out of the conversation.
Gillette did this, Pepsi did this, BK’s trying to do it right now by commodifying mental illness into their weird un-happy meals, it’s very much a thing.
If this movie drops and there’s not an expose on the shit working conditions of the artists who had to crunch like hell to basically re-animate an entire movie in a handful of months, then this is in fact almost definitely what is happening now.
They make us mad on purpose so we get talking about it, and then they attempt to address or “fix” whatever’s wrong to get us talking again. We don’t click ads anymore, but we do this very reliably.
I’m just saying, there is NO WAY Sega approved this trailer’s design. It is almost deliberately designed to be off-putting imo.
