(no subject)

Trying to explain why I think Arknights has to be gacha.

Normally, you have a story, and then you have fanfiction of that story. Fans watch a movie about Luke Skywalker, and one of them makes up a story about his secret edgy brother Shadow Skywalker, and another one makes a self-insert called Jack Skywalker, and you can take or leave any of these stories. They’re irrelevant to the movie.

If your story gets very popular, sometimes you pay fans to write official fanfiction for you. For Star Wars, this is Kyle Katarn and Jacen Skywalker and Admiral Thrawn and all that. But this is still “secondary canon,” ephemeral and skippable additions. Someone can read, say, a Darth Vader picture book without knowing what the Yuuzhan Vong are, because both of those things build off of the original in separate directions. They can readily contradict each other, and a new movie can contradict them all, sweeping them off the table and declaring them non-canon. Most people only care about the movies anyway.

Arknights can have underwater Bloodborne, which is barely related to mafia drama with wolf-girls, which is barely related to a hairdresser named Susie Glitter, and yet none of them are really “secondary.” They all fit together into a single coherent world. But how do you subsidize that sort of freewheeling expansion? When creating something that makes the minority of lore nerds like me happy, how do you get the majority of casuals to spend money? You give each new story desirable new gacha characters to whale for. People who wouldn’t give a shit about Susie are deeply invested in a global-range spellcaster, and people who aren’t interested in Texas still love to see her rain down stuns on surrounding enemies. The constant expansion of the roster permits the constant expansion of the world.

(You could argue that the Marvel Cinematic Universe also pulled off this sort of expansion, but do you really want to point to the MCU as a positive comparison?)

P.S. I just realized this is what I was talking about when I said Sentinels of the Multiverse is a beautiful impossibility. It imagines a decades-long comic book franchise that somehow maintained this single coherent world.

(no subject)

I don’t think we can even elect a president who doesn’t live in fear of the Israel lobby. The Democrats depend on their funding too much (Washington Post estimates 60% of their private fundraising as of 2007), and even the Republicans have shit like Christians United for Israel. Whatever it takes to break this lobby, I think it will involve something other than voting.

(no subject)

The author of Bioshifter is even more Utilitarian than I am, and I think that plays into how you’re supposed to view the characters. Hannah is a traditionally “evil” character who’d be easy to hate and fear, and she befriends a lot of characters who could be considered “evil” in one way or another, but Utilitarianism doesn’t have a concept of evil people, so she doesn’t judge much. She kills people who pose a threat, and spares people who don’t seem to be a threat at the moment, even if they’ve done awful things in the past and may potentially become a threat in the future. Even the abusive mother Hannah considered evil is getting humanized now that she no longer poses a threat, and if there’s a way to “defeat” the Goddess, I think it will involve finding some kind of humanity in her beyond Hannah’s judgment of her as evil.

(no subject)

Cute little twist in the fantasy story I just read. The MC never wants her love interest to feel her magical fear powers, because it hurts to have someone you love fear you. Then he’s grievously wounded and too heavy to carry, and the only way she can get him to the medics is by scaring him so much he has an adrenaline rush and takes off running.