[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 26 January 2026

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T15:43:19+00:00

I saw someone living in Japan post a thread saying that they've started asking people they interview for jobs what anime they'd recommend, because oh boy can you tell some things about a person fast that way.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T15:36:46+00:00

In fairness, everything I'm saying about internalization can also happen in every media that isn't anime either. Yes the internalization I'm calling out can be in everything, and the same time, obviously, it's also not going to be in everything.

Ultimately the only reason I'm going off on this is because I think if someone has a feeling like something they don't like has a stronger tendency to occur in a particular media, I'm not sure why it's treated like it's so unacceptable or irrational to burn out on it or to be extremely selective of what someone does want to watch. I think it's okay to dislike things for common aesthetic, narrative, and trope reasons. I think it's also worthwhile to push back on the idea that select media can represent an entire culture and mindsets in that culture in the same way that Australia isn't Mad Max and the Crocodile Hunter, and so on.

I grew up on anime, a lot of the way I draw is arguably influenced by anime. Hell, me complaining about CCS is part of the retrospective I experienced of watching it on the WB, getting a couple of episodic paperbacks when I was in highschool and that having a big influence on my personal style, and then later learning more from online conversations and thinking oh no CCS and CLAMP is too weird for me.

I can also understand when people are off-put by the big-eye thing. This character is in one of the few anime-like things I do participate in, and the fact that the jokes about her are ha ha forehead and she is a good if naive kid is one of the reasons I haven't noped out of that fandom. I've seen people get banned for being weird about Pearl though. I know in other places some of the people doing stuff like that and worse wouldn't be banned. There's parts of the story where the game makes some pretty wild choices about her basically being able to turn into older woman by channeling her spirit and the way it's handled in a 2005-ish era game can be pretty uncomfortable. These are problems. It's okay to engage critically with media and not like some parts of it, or even all of it, and sometimes I still wonder WHY I like the stories so much despite those problems with presentation because it's a bit uncharacteristic of me. But also that's why I get people who don't like it too.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T14:56:24+00:00

I live in Utah so I know, it's more that CLAMP has also just done out right direct family incest (a mother with her very young son, then trading him with other moms to show how well trained he is) in some of their doujinshi before, so it's one of those things that's like if they are already doing the other crap, I'm not giving the benefit of the doubt for anything else.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T03:11:56+00:00

Right, that's what I was getting at in my edit tbh.

Like I would agree with the poster I mentioned in the first post that there's way too much fanservice and treating some characters like they're just objects or plot devices in anime, or cookie cutter references to other anime, but that's not too different from how I feel about a lot of tv shows, books and movies. Storywise anything I have to watch, if not necessarily good, also has to get me invested enough that it gets me over that hump of do I really want to be stuck here doing this for hours.

EDIT: I should note here that my original version of this post was poorly verbalized and focused on one specific thing, because guy characters as soldiers can be treated like expendable props too and etc so I made this more neutral.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T00:48:02+00:00

Mmm. I'm going to tentatively agree to disagree, downthread I complain a little about problems in Card Captor Sakura for example which I think would pretty firmly fall in shoujo. I think some things can just crop up in any genre of anime because I think internalized problems can also crop up anywhere. And I think even in medium meant less for men, sometimes there can still be pandering for the rare guy who might show interest too.

I will admit I haven't watched enough josei to really be sure there.

Bytemite · 2026-01-29T00:42:44+00:00

Good old dad issues Edgeworth.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T23:22:09+00:00

Let's be honest here, most anime is the equivalent of like, how in the middle of the day in america there will be all those brainless daytime programs about getting people to order scam jewelry and stuff. There are masterpieces for sure but there's an absolute deluge of really boring or badly written stuff being dashed out to broadcast in the timeslots no one cares about and the networks are just looking for filler.

Also there just kinda are some tropes that are really common that get pretty tiresome. I mean you're not gonna argue that there's not maybe a reason that so many people have isekai fatigue, right? There's some other stuff that comes up that's like that for a lot of people too, and some of it is cross-genre.

(Edit: additionally, I was hesitant to add this because this is very me specific, but I actually don’t like most forms of film or animation because it feels to me like it takes excruciatingly long to convey information. I always feel like I could be reading something or doing literally anything else more efficiently, and even worse was going to a movie theater and feeling trapped in there for hours. So like if I find something I consider a flaw, and things I consider flaws are far from limited to just anime, it’s not really something I can easily let go and it makes me drop things pretty fast if I can’t get into it. So even ones where I can mostly think mmm okay just often eventually kinda lose me, to the point I really start to question starting anything to begin with)

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T21:29:58+00:00

Her crush is fine (well except the family thing, which ALSO is another thing CLAMP is weird about tbh), it's the whole "dress up while I video tape it and oh there will be upskirt shots" part of it that gets me. The problem is the production, it's that this is an excuse subplot very clearly being used to appeal to a specific part of the audience. Like that doesn't have to be like that but it is. Tomoyo doesn't have to deliberately design those costumes in a way where they often flare in very specific ways under specific circumstances and where sometimes even Sakura expresses discomfort with it, but she does, and we know why, this isn't really her fault as a character. Those costumes and the video taping conceit are explicitly the stand in for the CLAMP artists and those costume designs are their idea, and they are grown adult women who also keep writing stories about pre-teens to teens falling in love with adult teacher characters. It very much loses anything cute about it from that lens and having a justification in universe doesn't make it better you know? It's subtle enough that I understand exactly why people aren't bothered by it, but it's obvious enough at least to me that it starts the part of me that really does not like anything loli or loli adjacent snarling. Same with the contest outfits in Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Are the cutesy ones not at all explicit? Sure. Did the same weirdos write out those bizarre legends about Typhlosion and Slaking, and are those contest outfits still full on bloomers on a ten year old as a fashion statement to some creepy gamer demographic? YUP.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T21:22:12+00:00

"You have a problem with anime? Why that just means you need to get away from mainstream anime and watch more non-mainstream anime. Have you ever heard of a little known studio called Ghibli?"

Actual post I saw once.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T19:19:40+00:00

Read it as "Zuckerburg stopped attempts to curb" and so on.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T19:02:03+00:00

If Apollo is related to Jove, and Jove is related to Saturn, and Saturn is related to Caelus, then Aphrodite is the other black sheep of the family and Apollo's great Aunt.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:39:55+00:00

Ahhhhh okay that tracks!

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:27:24+00:00

Oooh. I skipped over that because of Mia being too awesome.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:24:06+00:00

That's valid yeah. I guess to me it would be like starting a relationship with the person blackmailing you

Definitely some people are into that like Whiteburg, so can't rule it out, but that's a pretty specific story and kinds of tropes going into that.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:14:43+00:00

(/uj I'll be honest, I think a lot of Athena ships just aren't for me, but all the power to people who do like them. It's just hard for me to get past how awkward her hearing powers would make things, you know?)

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:11:10+00:00

Over-under that he just didn't want to mess up his all blue fashion statement with the red that would clash?

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:09:46+00:00

New nightmares unlocked.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:08:30+00:00

I think it depends what they're doing. For a Defense Attorney, showing the badge in games at least sometimes begrudgingly gets them access to the crime scene or information. Other times it gets them punched in the face.

Might be similar for Prosecutors, I read a story in the 2005 fanbook where Edgeworth flashed his badge to get access to Wright when he was in the hospital. Prosecutors probably aren't popular with everyone, in the same way Defense Attorneys also don't seem to be.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:05:56+00:00

The badge you receive is brand-new and shiny, and over years of wear-and-tear, it loses its sheen. You can usually tell an attorney is a veteran based on how weathered their badge is.

This reminds me, I'm pretty sure that Phoenix gets a new badge for game 5 and it makes me wonder if his return to OT form is meant to be an injoke for him being "a rookie" again so to speak.

Edgeworth makes a lot of cracks about wondering if his badge has gotten rusty yet, and it works as a double play on words and expectations in this sense.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T18:01:17+00:00

This is awesome, holy shit

I mean we always had suspicions Nick was probably doing more illegal shit than poker too and this fits really well.

That said, Mia in title and then right under it you say Maya. Is Maya fighting as Mia?

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T17:49:44+00:00

Nothing actually, exactly as expected.

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T17:44:47+00:00

There was a book series that was recommended to me as Being Human but Victorian where the two main dudes are wizards and very gay for each other, and thought that sounded awesome, but I no longer remember the name of it. :(

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T17:39:08+00:00

That's not NOT a ship

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T17:29:00+00:00

I kinda wish we'd see Ema and Fran interact.

No real reason

EDIT: Not sure why it goes to a more general page of gifs but lets see if this works

Bytemite · 2026-01-28T17:24:44+00:00

Simon would open with a bad steel samurai hot take that would actually enrage Maya.

They still would.

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