InAnimete: Part 11 - Needless

Oh, Needless. This show has everything I detest: underage girls dressed in almost nothing, a frustrating and utterly pointless protagonist, sexualisation of children in the plot of the show, poorly explained super-powers, a sci-fi setting, and a camera which is constantly trying to peer up skirts, among other issues.

And the show is fucking fantastic. Actually, fantastic might be a bit much for the anime along, but the continued narrative and development in the manga really puts this over the line of "pretty good" for me. I suppose this could be considered a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. It really muddies the water of what a "good" anime is by my standards. With that out of the way, let's get into it.

InAnimete: Intermission A - Relationships

Hudson's Note: Over the three days this was written, I had been waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning to watch Suede's stream of "The Rose of Versailles". It was worth it. The price, however, was my piece for the week being beyond human comprehension. I maintain my policy of not editing finished articles (bar this note) with the exception of spelling errors so...good luck, reader.

Well, I just finished My-HiME, an anime about high school girls who are given secret superpowers and thematically related mechs. However, this anime manages to overcome the fact that the previous sentence describes it and manages to become absolutely fucking fantastic. I've also started (but haven't finished) a show called Midori Days. I'll explain the premise of that one a little later, but the main thematic connection between the two shows is the amount of emphasis relationships have on the plot.

Mix Tape: Misogyny & The Angry Young Man

I read a fantastic article by Campster at the beginning of the Gamergate shitstorm talking about video games. If you read any of Campster's work, you'll know he does this quite often. The difference for me was the format: mix tape.

I really liked the format, and the songs within. Sure, a mixtape is pretty old-school. Sure as hell pre-dates my time. But video-explanation-video just seems like a really flowing experience - it's essentially a way of solving this problem without turning music off.

So, what am I writing/ Mix Taping about? Well, in essence, it's my take on Gamergate. Why is that not in the title? Well, if someone comes across this sometime in the future, I don't want to explain what the fuck Gamergate is, and I don't want to come up in any kind of search engine for that bullshit.

I don't like Gamergate, and I should make this perfectly clear. I'm a Socialist and a Feminist. I believe everything is inherently political (just read anything I've written. Seriously, anything). Sure, I SHOULD hate Gamergate for its terrorist tactics, its misogyny and its entitled bullshitery, and I do, but first and foremost I don't like reactionary conservatives who want the things I believe in taken out of a medium I appreciate. These guys were never going to "succeed" anyway, for the simple reason they never communicated what they actually wanted very well, but they can still fuck right off for trying to keep people with my politics out of games merely for being women.

So, although this is nominally about Misogyny and the Cult of the Angry Young man, know that in many ways this is about Gamergate. Shall we begin?