Been looking through fanfic (not something I normally do), specifically for pairings I like but don't often read for (again, not something I usually do).

An infuriating amount of what I've found shirks the characters and their relationship in favour of pale imitation that fall along the lines of heteronormativity-bordering-harlequin tropes. I'm consistently finding the women being made weaker and the men more domineering and coercive. Of the OTPs I'm particularly defensive of, it's honestly annoying me. I'll spare the details but feel free to ask in the comments if you're curious.

I don't read fic too often, so I'd like to know: what's your experience with this, folks? At first I thought it was just something to do with the pairings I ship, but now I'm thinking, maybe it's just that most people tend to round down to the nearest harlequin trope (or yaoi trope, in the case of slash).

Thoughts?

I wrote a Bleach ficlet last night, so... those of you who would enjoy, please do?

Title: Persimmons
Rating: G
Word Count: 500
Fandom: Bleach
Characters: Gin / Rangiku
Spoilers/Warnings: Allusions to spoilers, but nothing recent.
Summary: Rangiku shows Gin how you can use persimmon seeds to see what the coming winter will be like.

( 'They say,' she says, leaning forward with a sly smile on her lips, 'That you can use the seeds to predict the weather.' )

http://community.livejournal.com/bad_rpers_suck/6884656.html

I think everyone can appreciate this.

Shit's going down in Iran. Most of what I read seems to be implying that I ought to do something about it. I really don't think there's anything I can do about it except alert you all to the the following in case you've been under a rock and didn't know:

Shit's going down in Iran.
(tl;dr version: The election was stolen, people tried to protest, exactly what you think would happen when people try to protest an unfair election is currently happening)

So yeah. There you go. I'm not sure what you're supposed to do about it either, but at least now you're kind-of informed?

This post annoys me.

I don't think it's fair to conflate vanilla and everything that is vanilla with masquerading kink. I agree with a lot of the individual points of the post (almost all of them), but the fact that they label everything they complain about as "vanilla" annoys the hell out of me, because... well, I just don't think that's what it means, and it's rather disparaging to represent everything and everyone who is "vanilla" as being too ignorant to know what they really want.

This post also annoys me.

While again I agree with the central point ("I want relationships defined by the participants rather than particular archetypes or ideal types of what a relationship should be like"), the meandering into het expectations and slash expectations and how het means belittling one gender de-facto so the obvioius choice is slash really grates on my nerves. Maybe that's the obvious choice for some people. The obvious choice for other people is to write het relationships as being between equals, which to me seems way more obvious than the alternative. The implication is again that that's somehow impossible, and so we must turn to slash (and not femmeslash, mind you). I see that implication a lot. Suffice to say, I call bullshit.

I mean, I don't want to go on some tangenital rant about how us poor vanilla hetshippers are ~so oppressed~ or whatever, but I still kind of want to ask these people if they've ever even spoken to someone whose preferences those were? Over the age of 15, preferably?

I don't know. I'd try to go correct them but I doubt anybody would listen to me and it probably isn't worth it anyway.

Would be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments, though.


EDIT: Ohshit, one of the OPs has a Naoto icon on top of that.

Full pic is under the cut. It's the Shadow of my Persona character.

( This was supposed to just be a colour block in, but... )

So, as auronlu brought to my attention earlier today, I've never really recced any AMVs in my journal... and now I'm going to do just that.

( Cut for those who don't care! No, they're not all FFVII. )

There were more, but many of them have been removed thanks to copyright. I also tried not to rec stuff that's already really popular.

I'm so sure that you people are all dying to read my thoughts on yaoi amv/fanvidding.

I'd like to be able to say that this list was positively created (like, "guidelines I like to follow" or whatever), but I'm me, so I can't. What really got me thinking about it was facepalming over hugely bad but mysteriously popular FF vids on YouTube with heroine_junkie. That whole place is kind of an echo chamber and people are generally vicious about bad or critical comments, so I retreat to my journal to complain feebly and pontificate on what makes a good video.

( 5 things good videos need (alternate title: 5 things the majority of popular FF videos are lacking )

NOTE: I'm really much more youtube-oriented than a-m-v.org-oriented (I think a-m-v.org is a lot more niche and appeals to a more particular audience, I hate downloads, and I've never had a problem with slogging through bad or mediocre fanwork to get to the good stuff so I wish the rest of the world would stop whining about quality control), so your mileage on the quality of FF videos/what a lot of vids are sorely lacking will vary.

OTHER NOTE: I don't claim to follow my own rules all the time, and I really don't mean to sound like I think I'm teh gr8test ffmver evar, 'cause I know I'm not.

I'd be crossposting this all over the place if I knew where to put it.

Audio: Angel - 8mm
Video: Vagrant Story

Saw Up yesterday.

Predictably, it was smashing.

There were a few niggling little problems - the villain/hero tension was actually one of those kind of contrived situations in which the whole situation probably could have been neatly avoided if they'd just sit down and have a nice, calm, chat, and everybody's reasons for their priorities are a little ambiguous.

But the movie is entertaining enough that it's really hard to care. It's funny and touching and anybody who pulls out the ol' "I can't relate to animated characters" and isn't emotionally affected while watching the opening of this movie has a goddamn heart of stone.

Also, the little camper is an Asian kid. I so did not notice from the trailer. It is kind of nice to see a movie in which there is a little camper Asian kid and the other characters aren't like "WHY SO ASIAN, ASIAN KID, GO DO SOME MATH."

I also beat GrimGrimoire.

It's cute, but actually rather short. The battle system is okay when you're in the mood for it, but I think it's pretty silly to grey out all areas of the map where you don't have troops. Why not show me where my enemies are? That only encourages me to build nothing but my powerhouse monsters and win by steamrolling every damn time - which is what I did. Then again, I'm kind of an RTS noob and this game's combat system is RTS lite... Plus I started playing it on the easiest setting when I found the battles were taking too long.

The translation is a little dodgy, probably dodgier than most games I've seen in a while. It isn't "this guy are sick" style bad, but the way in which it is translated makes it very difficult to understand exactly what it is going on in any given scene, and I had to watch most of them twice and crossreference wikipedia to figure out that in scene 2-4, character A was talking about character B rather than character C, for example. The idea of the plot is interesting enough, and very cute - it's kind of like Hogwarts meets Groundhog Day. You're a cute little witch who shows up to learn magic and gets stuck in a time loop. Within the time loop, however, the Archmage Calvaros wakes and kills everybody in the castle except for you, so you need to find a way to break the timeloop after making it through the week without everybody you know dying.

In all, it's not a bad game, but I wouldn't say it's an awesome one either. I wish we got more out of some of the characters, but eh, at least they have fun designs.

This is kind of a longshot, but does anyone here know where I can download the Vagrant Story cutscnes? Or how to rip them from an iso? Or does anybody know a guy who knows a guy or anything like that...?

Title: Live
Video: Persona 3 (:FES)
Audio: Meant to Live - Switchfoot
Summary: Heard the song, thought it went well with P3 (though I don't care for it on its own so much). Guess it's a bit of a tribute to the protagonist/Aigis? I'm trying to break my "vidder's block."

THERE ARE SPOILERS.



Download link: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=168650

So I think I've figured out how Persona likes to handle its villains.

( SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT SERIOUSLY DON'T CLICK THIS )

Updated to-finish list:

Games
Shadow of the Collossus
Final Fantasy IV
Persona 4
Grim Grimoire
Pokemon Platinum
Rune Factory 2

Anime
12 Kingdoms
Princess Tutu
Michiko to Hatchin


It shall be a busy summer.


PS: I'm still famous. And so, so tired of race drama on FS. I'm probably going to sit the next few rounds out.

Also, I'd say semi-professional troll is more appropriate.

The first TEN people to comment in this post get to request a drabble(/sketch) of any pairing/character of their choosing from me. In return, they have to post this in their journal, regardless of their ability level. If you absolutely can't write, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to offer drawings or icons or something instead.

Acceptable Fandoms: Anything you have ever heard me mention. If I'm familiar with it, I will try. IT MAY NOT BE GOOD BUT I WILL TRY.

Thanks to heroine_junkie, I started playing Rune Factory 2 and Pokemon Platinum. I'd lament that this is distracting me from P4, but my TV hasn't turned on in like a week, so I have to keep smacking it periodically and trying again and I'll jump back over to P4 ASAP. I'm in October now, I think? And I still hate Yosuke. And Rise. Because her social link is all about her learning what everybody else gleaned from her damn dungeon!

Anyway yeah, I'm definitely gonna marry Alicia (for obvious reasons) and my team thus far is Prinplup/Vulpix/Combee/Ralts/Leafeon/Froslass. It's not exactly a well-thought out team but fuck you, real Pokemon masters win with their favourites mmkay.

I think McGuinty is a liar, a faux-liberal, and someone who totally misrepresents himself and his policy. I think he overburdens tax payers in favour of businesses and he is especially unfair to citizens of the GTA, most likely because we're a liberal city and our votes count for less anyway. I don't care how "green" it is to double hydro costs from 5-9, those costs should be doubled from 9-5, during daylight hours and when the people who are paying them are mostly businesses who can afford it and the lights can normally be switched off anyway.

On the other hand, I hate the people who complain about him and say that he only got re-elected because of sympathetic immigrants and the liberal media.

I want some good candidates next election for Christ's sake, not to mention electoral reform. Wonder how that's going over in BC.

Just did an art post, I know, but I just did an Aeris sketch I kind of like, too. I don't do a lot of FF7 fanart because I always feel like I'm not drawing the characters right, but I think this sketch came out okay.


( Maybe I'll fix it up and do something with it. )

When I started drawing I was gonna make her doing a limit break or something but then I got lazy so um yeah.

It's just a character portrait for a Persona OC (Just joined a Persona RPG and have been considering making one), but I haven't posted anything in a while (as if anyone watches this journal for the art, anyway), so here you go.

( Her Arcana is Magician. )

Thoughts are welcome as always.

This secret makes me so sad.

I need someone to explain to me how so many incompetent people get so far in life. Is it just the ability to afford education? Connections? Sheer dumb luck? I don't know, but I would very much like to shoot whoever was responsible for the staggering number of representatives who showed up to a job fair with no information beyond "Well, all our jobs are posted on the website."