Reviews August 2021
Aug. 18th, 2021 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrAnime: Comic Girls, Blend-S, Jingai-san no Yome
Western Animation: Centaurworld
Books: They All Say I’ve Met a Ghost, Artificial Condition
Webcomic: Survive as the Hero's Wife/This Villainess Wants a Divorce!
Games: GardenPaws, Calico
Anime:
Just as I was wondering why I keep trying fanservicey anime about cute girls, some I liked!
Comic Girls (on Crunchyroll): femslashy, fluffy slice of life about a group in a dorm for highschool girls who make manga. Very silly, and unabashedly fanservicey, but with enough heart and humour that I enjoyed it. I saw somewhere that the author is a lesbian and it does have that vibe, especially the self-insert-y repressed lesbian whose fluffy slice of life schoolgirl stories keep being rejected because she's so antisocial she doesn't understand how normal girls think or act. There's no romance per se, but one of the girls has an explicitly romantic crush on a butch girl whose gender expression is mostly treated with respect, and the two are very shippy. There's some typically unfortunate treatment of weight/dieting.
Blend-S (on Animelab/Funimation): A nice girl who inadvertently gives off an intimidating aura gets a job as a waitress at a maid cafe where her job is to be sadistic to the customers. I'm a little embarrassed about enjoying this, it's pretty male gazey and Problematic but I will put up with a lot for even quasi-femdom (she is still very much a Nice Girl) and it's overall a pretty cute and funny workplace comedy for what it is. I think the reason I enjoyed this while a lot of romance anime aimed at dudes squicks me is that there's no obvious self insert male character, it's more of an ensemble where the female characters get as much interiorty as the male ones. The sadist girl does have a love interest, the flamboyantly flirty Italian owner of the cafe, but he didn't feel like audience stand-in or wish fulfilment character. Specifically, none of the other female characters are even slightly interested in him, hooray. And while he REALLY SHOULDN'T BE HITTING ON HIS TEENAGE EMPLOYEE they make a cute enough couple if you can roll with All Of That. There's a feminine presenting amab character who could be read as transfeminine but I think is meant to be read as a cis guy with a drag persona, and the treatment is middling for a mainstream anime aimed at straight dudes: The character is sympathetic and happy, and the other characters are overall friendly and accepting, but there's definitely some 'lol he pretends he's a woman, that's silly and weird'. There's also a waitress with a 'cute young little sister' persona, a type of character I find squicky, but the woman is actually a short snarky grad student putting on an act so I could deal.
Jingai-san no Yome (on Crunchyroll): An odd, mediocre little anime about a high school boy who is married off to a non-verbal but sentient monster for hand-waved reasons. The episodes are like 3 minutes long and I still only managed 2, it's not very good and I was only watching because the premise made me go "wait what?" And I remain baffled, it was like someone did a humorously inoffensive fluffy G rated edit of the non-porn bits of some porn-logic dubcon xeno BL. I guess...some people...are into that?
Western Animation:
Centaurworld: a weird as hell animated show about a regular horse from a grimdark fantasy world ending up in a Wacky Fantasy World. She meets a little herd of oddball talking centaurs who she initially finds deeply off-putting but eventually they become friends and help her try to find her way home to her rider. I didn't expect to like this show at all from the trailer but despite all the fart jokes and deliberately off-putting weirdness it's surprisingly sincere at heart and I enjoyed it a lot, weirdness and all. It's funny, disquieting, heart warming, and has a bunch of really good songs which sometimes made me cry. One episode deals heavily, if euphemistically, with suicide, I thought it was handled fairly tastefully but it could hit buttons for people. There's a running gag about kleptomania and I was not kidding about the fart jokes. Also if you're anything like me you'll end up shipping the horse with the bright pink motherly alpaca and not know what to do with all these feelings.
Books:
They All Say I’ve Met a Ghost: an incredibly fun Chinese m/m fantasy romantic comedy about an earnest teaching graduate who who gets hired to teach Communist Ethics to a class of odd students he refuses to believe are ghosts, despite increasingly exasperated warnings from a cute young priest/exorcist. It's got a great comedy setup I can't remember having seen before, where an earnest person defeats attacks from supernatural creatures through dogged good will without even realising they're in danger from these 'pranks with surprisingly good fake blood' etc. His earnest, compassionate, determined, Brendan-Fraser-in-90s-movies personality eventually wins over everyone, alive or dead, but they're not all happy about it haha. The romance is pretty understated, but cute. Given the premise I was a bit worried the book would feel like communist propaganda, but it is pretty clear on the key factors to his success being his decency and general good sense rather than adherence to dogma, especially since, you know, Communism says ghosts don't exist. Though he's very compassionate, I wasn't always comfortable imagining him applying his approach to 'people with delusions about being ghosts' to anyone who actually is just a human being with mental health problems, but he never meets any. Also he's openly gay and cheerfully aware of his attraction to the priest from the start, which is not something you see often with this sort of character. There's some horror elements, I didn't find it too much but have a moderate tolerance.
Artificial Condition: The second Murderbot novella, in which the eponymous security android seeks answers about it's past and despite itself once again gets dragged into helping out some humans who've gotten themselves into trouble. I liked most of this a lot, but I was very disappointed in the writing around the sex-worker androids, they got some sympathy but were basically treated as Inherently Tragic and Doomed to Misery, the narrative giving them none of the agency or depth it gives Murderbot (whose life the narrative does notice is tragic in very similar ways) or even AIs.
Webcomic:
Survive as the Hero's Wife/This Villainess Wants a Divorce!: (two titles for the same comic) A fun if not massively original 'regular Korean girl wakes as the villainess of a cheesy het fantasy romance, her attempts to not die inadvertently set off a romance with the hero' webcomic. But it's a fairly enjoyable example of the genre, with an engaging heroine and sweet if sometimes squicky romance: they enter an arranged marriage when they're both 'children' but she's mentally an adult, and this initially skews the power dynamic in her favour. But he's a self confident (if somewhat tsundere) romance hero so by the time they get together it's pretty balanced. Also she has a cool friendship with her boyfriend's original love interest, who is an interesting character with her own arc and motivations. The comic is ongoing but the couple have gotten together, and the comic took time to wallow in the romance for a bit before moving on with more plot, so you could stop there.
Game:
GardenPaws: A fun and gentle but somewhat janky farming/gathering sim set in a cute 3d world of little talking animals. I've played it for 68 hours and still haven't gotten bored or finished my first playthrough. It lacks the plot/characterisation of Stardew Valley, but I've found it similarly addictive. While paper thin the characters have just enough charm to make me enjoy doing nice things for them, even if they are amusingly selfish about it sometimes. And there's a bunch of interlinked crafting questlines which are sort of like a 'plot'. It's just a series of stuff like 'the baker asks me to ask the construction koala what's required to upgrade their shop, the koala says they have an idea but will need purple dye, to make the dye I need to unlock the blueprint seller, once they show up they ask me to build them some furniture to settle into their new house, when I do that they gives me the blueprint I needed for the sprinkler for the flower seller" etc, but I enjoyed wandering around seeing what people would ask me to do next and what this would unlock (nb your character and most NPCs use 'they' pronouns. The game still has a mildly heteronormative vibe). It's a bit buggy, sometimes in frustrating ways. I did not enjoy the fishing or combat so just haven't done them, which I am sure has slowed down my progression but I'm still chugging along happily enough and thus far have found alternate ways to get any fish etc I need. Playing it with nice graphics made my laptop sad, but it's been ok on the lowest settings and the world is still pretty to wander around. Also, stuff on the ground is easier to see without grass in the way ;) There's also the ability to customise your appearance and house etc, it's a bit janky but I do really enjoy being an androgynous purple dragon with butterfly wings in a top hat.
Calico (Windows only): I reviewed this negatively a while ago but I looked up a walkthrough and realised I'd missed a pretty obvious quest hook and after that the game got more fun. Almost entirely cat cafe related fetch quests for cute queer pastel magical girl type folk, if you like the sound of that you'll have fun otherwise you will not. It's cute and good natured but janky and not very deep.
Western Animation: Centaurworld
Books: They All Say I’ve Met a Ghost, Artificial Condition
Webcomic: Survive as the Hero's Wife/This Villainess Wants a Divorce!
Games: GardenPaws, Calico
Anime:
Just as I was wondering why I keep trying fanservicey anime about cute girls, some I liked!
Comic Girls (on Crunchyroll): femslashy, fluffy slice of life about a group in a dorm for highschool girls who make manga. Very silly, and unabashedly fanservicey, but with enough heart and humour that I enjoyed it. I saw somewhere that the author is a lesbian and it does have that vibe, especially the self-insert-y repressed lesbian whose fluffy slice of life schoolgirl stories keep being rejected because she's so antisocial she doesn't understand how normal girls think or act. There's no romance per se, but one of the girls has an explicitly romantic crush on a butch girl whose gender expression is mostly treated with respect, and the two are very shippy. There's some typically unfortunate treatment of weight/dieting.
Blend-S (on Animelab/Funimation): A nice girl who inadvertently gives off an intimidating aura gets a job as a waitress at a maid cafe where her job is to be sadistic to the customers. I'm a little embarrassed about enjoying this, it's pretty male gazey and Problematic but I will put up with a lot for even quasi-femdom (she is still very much a Nice Girl) and it's overall a pretty cute and funny workplace comedy for what it is. I think the reason I enjoyed this while a lot of romance anime aimed at dudes squicks me is that there's no obvious self insert male character, it's more of an ensemble where the female characters get as much interiorty as the male ones. The sadist girl does have a love interest, the flamboyantly flirty Italian owner of the cafe, but he didn't feel like audience stand-in or wish fulfilment character. Specifically, none of the other female characters are even slightly interested in him, hooray. And while he REALLY SHOULDN'T BE HITTING ON HIS TEENAGE EMPLOYEE they make a cute enough couple if you can roll with All Of That. There's a feminine presenting amab character who could be read as transfeminine but I think is meant to be read as a cis guy with a drag persona, and the treatment is middling for a mainstream anime aimed at straight dudes: The character is sympathetic and happy, and the other characters are overall friendly and accepting, but there's definitely some 'lol he pretends he's a woman, that's silly and weird'. There's also a waitress with a 'cute young little sister' persona, a type of character I find squicky, but the woman is actually a short snarky grad student putting on an act so I could deal.
Jingai-san no Yome (on Crunchyroll): An odd, mediocre little anime about a high school boy who is married off to a non-verbal but sentient monster for hand-waved reasons. The episodes are like 3 minutes long and I still only managed 2, it's not very good and I was only watching because the premise made me go "wait what?" And I remain baffled, it was like someone did a humorously inoffensive fluffy G rated edit of the non-porn bits of some porn-logic dubcon xeno BL. I guess...some people...are into that?
Western Animation:
Centaurworld: a weird as hell animated show about a regular horse from a grimdark fantasy world ending up in a Wacky Fantasy World. She meets a little herd of oddball talking centaurs who she initially finds deeply off-putting but eventually they become friends and help her try to find her way home to her rider. I didn't expect to like this show at all from the trailer but despite all the fart jokes and deliberately off-putting weirdness it's surprisingly sincere at heart and I enjoyed it a lot, weirdness and all. It's funny, disquieting, heart warming, and has a bunch of really good songs which sometimes made me cry. One episode deals heavily, if euphemistically, with suicide, I thought it was handled fairly tastefully but it could hit buttons for people. There's a running gag about kleptomania and I was not kidding about the fart jokes. Also if you're anything like me you'll end up shipping the horse with the bright pink motherly alpaca and not know what to do with all these feelings.
Books:
They All Say I’ve Met a Ghost: an incredibly fun Chinese m/m fantasy romantic comedy about an earnest teaching graduate who who gets hired to teach Communist Ethics to a class of odd students he refuses to believe are ghosts, despite increasingly exasperated warnings from a cute young priest/exorcist. It's got a great comedy setup I can't remember having seen before, where an earnest person defeats attacks from supernatural creatures through dogged good will without even realising they're in danger from these 'pranks with surprisingly good fake blood' etc. His earnest, compassionate, determined, Brendan-Fraser-in-90s-movies personality eventually wins over everyone, alive or dead, but they're not all happy about it haha. The romance is pretty understated, but cute. Given the premise I was a bit worried the book would feel like communist propaganda, but it is pretty clear on the key factors to his success being his decency and general good sense rather than adherence to dogma, especially since, you know, Communism says ghosts don't exist. Though he's very compassionate, I wasn't always comfortable imagining him applying his approach to 'people with delusions about being ghosts' to anyone who actually is just a human being with mental health problems, but he never meets any. Also he's openly gay and cheerfully aware of his attraction to the priest from the start, which is not something you see often with this sort of character. There's some horror elements, I didn't find it too much but have a moderate tolerance.
Artificial Condition: The second Murderbot novella, in which the eponymous security android seeks answers about it's past and despite itself once again gets dragged into helping out some humans who've gotten themselves into trouble. I liked most of this a lot, but I was very disappointed in the writing around the sex-worker androids, they got some sympathy but were basically treated as Inherently Tragic and Doomed to Misery, the narrative giving them none of the agency or depth it gives Murderbot (whose life the narrative does notice is tragic in very similar ways) or even AIs.
Webcomic:
Survive as the Hero's Wife/This Villainess Wants a Divorce!: (two titles for the same comic) A fun if not massively original 'regular Korean girl wakes as the villainess of a cheesy het fantasy romance, her attempts to not die inadvertently set off a romance with the hero' webcomic. But it's a fairly enjoyable example of the genre, with an engaging heroine and sweet if sometimes squicky romance: they enter an arranged marriage when they're both 'children' but she's mentally an adult, and this initially skews the power dynamic in her favour. But he's a self confident (if somewhat tsundere) romance hero so by the time they get together it's pretty balanced. Also she has a cool friendship with her boyfriend's original love interest, who is an interesting character with her own arc and motivations. The comic is ongoing but the couple have gotten together, and the comic took time to wallow in the romance for a bit before moving on with more plot, so you could stop there.
Game:
GardenPaws: A fun and gentle but somewhat janky farming/gathering sim set in a cute 3d world of little talking animals. I've played it for 68 hours and still haven't gotten bored or finished my first playthrough. It lacks the plot/characterisation of Stardew Valley, but I've found it similarly addictive. While paper thin the characters have just enough charm to make me enjoy doing nice things for them, even if they are amusingly selfish about it sometimes. And there's a bunch of interlinked crafting questlines which are sort of like a 'plot'. It's just a series of stuff like 'the baker asks me to ask the construction koala what's required to upgrade their shop, the koala says they have an idea but will need purple dye, to make the dye I need to unlock the blueprint seller, once they show up they ask me to build them some furniture to settle into their new house, when I do that they gives me the blueprint I needed for the sprinkler for the flower seller" etc, but I enjoyed wandering around seeing what people would ask me to do next and what this would unlock (nb your character and most NPCs use 'they' pronouns. The game still has a mildly heteronormative vibe). It's a bit buggy, sometimes in frustrating ways. I did not enjoy the fishing or combat so just haven't done them, which I am sure has slowed down my progression but I'm still chugging along happily enough and thus far have found alternate ways to get any fish etc I need. Playing it with nice graphics made my laptop sad, but it's been ok on the lowest settings and the world is still pretty to wander around. Also, stuff on the ground is easier to see without grass in the way ;) There's also the ability to customise your appearance and house etc, it's a bit janky but I do really enjoy being an androgynous purple dragon with butterfly wings in a top hat.
Calico (Windows only): I reviewed this negatively a while ago but I looked up a walkthrough and realised I'd missed a pretty obvious quest hook and after that the game got more fun. Almost entirely cat cafe related fetch quests for cute queer pastel magical girl type folk, if you like the sound of that you'll have fun otherwise you will not. It's cute and good natured but janky and not very deep.
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Date: 2021-08-18 03:05 pm (UTC)Ha, true! I sometimes turn down the graphics in games for the same reason, even when my PC can handle the lush plant life and immersively detailed ground clutter.
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Date: 2021-08-26 06:08 am (UTC)It hadn't occured to me as an approach before but I'm going to consider it in future games.
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Date: 2021-08-18 06:25 pm (UTC)...oh no. I will probably enjoy this and feel a little embarrassed about that too.
Also she has a cool friendship with her boyfriend's original love interest, who is an interesting character with her own arc and motivations.
I dropped this a while ago, when it took too long to get anywhere, but the original love interest is wonderful. I love her and her ambition, and I swoon at the knight/lady dynamic between her and the FL and the implication that the three of them form a power OT3.
I remember liking the empress a lot in this one. She felt to me like she was someone who'd gone through a lot of stuff and was trying to hold onto power as a result; she and the original love interest read as foils to me, in which they were both willing to settle in the original story (though she's obviously more morally dubious). In my optimistic heart, I hope she'll get a happy ending.
Also all the FLs in this genre are so pretty, and I loved the pining in this one. o.o
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Date: 2021-08-26 06:07 am (UTC)Yeah honestly I might end up dropping it I'm not very excited about where things seem to be going. But I had fun for a while, and agree that the three of them as a power triad is A+.
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Date: 2021-08-26 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-26 05:09 pm (UTC)ETA: ALTHOUGH, of course, since constructs are fictional and sex workers are very real, the way that it, like, reads can be very... yeah. I'm not articulating this well, but, I do understand that "in-universe thing that makes it make sense and not be That in-universe" doesn't necessarily make it less iffy as a work of fiction in our universe.
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Date: 2021-08-27 12:24 pm (UTC)Oh yeah, I didn't have a problem with Murderbot's attitude, it's ambivalence felt entirely in character for non-sex-work related reasons. Just the way the narrative was set up.
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Date: 2021-09-05 10:24 pm (UTC)Centaurworld is ENTIRELY CHAOTIC!
(May add this to my early-morning screens break.)
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Date: 2021-09-06 06:28 am (UTC)I hope the chaos brings you joy :)