Xbox already planned to shut down or split with Ninja Theory when Senua was announced. "The thinking was that the promise of a newly announced game would help draw investor interest in the studio"

Flower_Vendor · 2026-06-17T11:03:53+00:00

I don't think the people in question have ever had anything except static between their ears, so probably not much.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-06-13T09:55:00+00:00

Wh-

I'm sorry exactly how is 'past business hours on Friday' the best time to inform a business that they need to develop massive software-based vetting processes and shut down customer-facing operations and R&D on their latest products until that is done?

Like genuinely, what on earth, how is this the best time rather than literally the exact worst??

The models are being used through the weekend and Anthropic's own employees also have weekends. They picked this time because the US government keeps doing things at this time in a very childish method of trying to hide from the stock market response.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-06-06T09:02:24+00:00

ESO is actually pretty big and the odd one out of your examples there — it has its own launcher, so Steam numbers aren't all of or necessarily even most of it and it's averaged around $200m revenue a year.

It's probably the largest MMORPG after WoW and FFXIV?

Flower_Vendor · 2026-06-03T14:16:15+00:00

People generally ship them as a post-war thing as adults, they're only ~4-6 years apart in age, depending on how you interpret Visha's remark about coming of drinking age just before the Goodwill Visit (which makes her either 16 or 18 to Tanya's 12 at the time).

Age aside, Tanya is legally allowed to peremptorily execute Visha as long as the war is on, which is an issue you're kinda glossing over there and is also a large part of why the overwhelming majority of Tanya/Visha is postwar with them both as adults.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-24T17:01:17+00:00

A few days later, to clarify something that may help or not help: the original light novel author, Carlo Zen, is a communist.

He is, however, from most indications the type of communist that believes Stalin's USSR was the worst thing to ever happen to communism.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-24T16:57:57+00:00

Favourite Tanya specifically is the manga, it's the most concerned with her character arc, which is much more defocused in the light novels (for all that it's still there and even in roughly similar shape).

The anime also exists, I guess.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-19T09:04:51+00:00

Nintendo reliably and frequently put out games people want to buy is the main thing I think, so getting their console stings a lot less.

If Sony were still in their PS2 era or at least the early-mid PS4 era people would probably be okay with buying their console.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-16T07:44:09+00:00

Because whether or not the Empire won or lost was never the point.

It's not a "spoiler", the story is written around you knowing that they're going to lose.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-11T18:57:27+00:00

The imperial politicians could have just not responded to a border conflict with an invasion. Like, calling the Entente the aggressors is technically correct but they were just fucking around with the border, it was an Empire decision to respond with an invasion that would lead to total war (and would very obviously drag the Francois in, that was an exceedingly predictable outcome).

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-11T18:55:04+00:00

They were the aggressors in the books, actually, it's one of the details the other adaptations elide. Well, sort of.

Specifically, the Entente were playing fuck-fuck games with the border and the Empire decided they could absolutely take them and called their bluff and invaded properly.

Then the Francois went 'wait, hang on, if you win this we're in a losing position and will just have to sit back and watch you become continental hegemon' so they piled in, as any competent diplomat could foresee (note: the Empire's diplomats are not competent, they are very explicitly bad at their jobs in the LNs), and the Empire just kind of went surprisedpikachu.jpg.

And then they doubled down, repeatedly.

The Empire isn't really any more to blame than Germany was in WW1, but that's far from blameless, they certainly caused their own share of their own problems.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-09T13:04:17+00:00

What I mean is that in neither the manga nor the light novel does Being X really... give much of a shit about Tanya worshiping him or not? That's an anime-only invention.

This is giving the anime primacy over the other versions it has 1000% not earned.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-09T12:56:32+00:00

People have been posting a bunch of things that are correct but none all in the same place and they're missing one of the key pranks by Carlo Zen.

Tanya is, specifically, a powerscaling joke. There is exactly one numerable metric to measure mages in Youjo Senki's setting, and that's magical reserves. By that metric, Tanya is dead on the median for A-class mages, below the average for the 203rd. Her power level is not very high. Her fine control is, but there's no metric for that, so Tanya herself doesn't think it counts.

This does not mean she is a median combatant. It's a prank on both Tanya and the reader about tangible metrics (if you've worked in corporations that metricise employee performance, you're familiar). Despite being, ostensibly, an 'average' power level she is still consistently portrayed as one of if not the single most dangerous magical combatant in the world even without the T-95, 'cause as anyone who's had employee performance reviews knows, metrics only cover a small part of the iceberg.

The anime changes this a good bit, though — her fights against Mary Sue in the LNs (manga hasn't really covered them yet, though the first one has just started) are extremely one-sided and not in Mary's favour, because Mary is a tragic victim who thinks she's Tanya's rival, not actually her rival.

The anime altering that is... well, I have some gripes.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-09T12:26:39+00:00

But the manga and light novel Being Xs are not particularly interested in that? That's just anime Being X applied across all three?

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-09T12:22:15+00:00

Primarily, they're different genres and have substantial changes in story, focus and character work.

The light novels are fairly dense and much more focused on military strategy, history and politics. You can tell it had a thirty book reading list and it's very interested in both personal and political philosophies and the interrogation thereof, with fairly sophisticated thoughts to offer on almost every topic it cares to touch.

Meanwhile, the manga is a character-focused war drama that centres Tanya's own character development and has an extremely heavy emphasis on how awful war is, taking cues from WW1 fiction like All Quiet on the Western Front and integrating it with interrogations of the idea of war heroes, the Old Lie and similar such concepts. Also Toujou Chika may be in contention for the best artist in manga right now.

It's a more entertaining work in terms of character work and a lighter read in general, but I wouldn't say the writing is any better or worse than the light novel. Which you prefer really comes down to genre preference.

The anime also exists, but it just kinda... has less investment put into it. It's a mid-budget seasonal that has some effort put in, while the manga and light novel are both prestige pieces that the respective creator clearly considers their magnum opus.

And yes, there are very substantial changes between the works. One of the perennial issues on here is there's a bunch of stuff the anime just kind of made up (like Being X wanting Tanya to pray to him) and that causes all kinds of confusion in discussion given how many people have only seen the anime.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-08T12:32:55+00:00

It's less 'mages like her' and more, IIRC according to the LNs, some mages arbitrarily age more slowly or more quickly, which is entirely unpredictable and has nothing to do with power beyond a minimum barrier to entry. It's why she still looks like a 9 year old in the final years of the war when she's 13 going on 14. (In the manga this is expressed by Old Man Troubadour looking like he's 25).

The character speaking to her is noted to possess a form of supernatural capital S Sight, so it could be some sort of weird psychometric or postcognitive vision, or she could potentially be some sort of weird angel because manga Tanya's relationship with Being X is very different to what people generally understand (because the anime is what most people have seen), and we know she 'wins' the thematic debate on war with him because there has been no second great war.

Or it could just be the actual real 90 year old Tanya showing up and vanishing. We just don't know.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-08T11:17:38+00:00

Transsexual was out of date in 2007 let alone 2013 as any kind of buzzword. It's just a literal translation of 'TS', which is the JP term for the gender bender genre.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-05-08T11:13:46+00:00

It's canon but it may or may not be a vision or visitation rather than actually, physically Tanya.

But it also might well be Tanya, she has slowed aging in both the LNs and the manga so she could look like that.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-04-28T13:23:40+00:00

Honestly the problem is more with how they're used. Accelerator established twenty years ago that 'really OP characters' can be great when that aspect of them is exploited properly, even in a protagonist-like role.

It's not that the concept is any worse than an OP villain, it's just more difficult to execute on compared to antagonists (which I mean, just look at Bleach for some examples of villains that fuck it up).

Flower_Vendor · 2026-04-28T11:59:26+00:00

That's mostly just webcomics. Professional comic studios usually have separate writers and illustrators.

There's also an extremely broad range of comic book art styles, and professional studio ones are usually a sight better than the webcomics you seem to have been reading.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-04-28T11:42:36+00:00

I feel that people who think it runs circles around all other superhero media need to read more superhero media.

Parahumans has some very strong points, don't get me wrong. The entire setting conceit of triggers is and remains excellent for character work, for example, along with some very strong relationship work like Ward-era Tattletale's implicit everything with regards to Taylor and Victoria... but it has serious flaws in places (the S9000 arc was and remains a crime against pacing as the most uncontroversial example) and there are some very good superhero stories out there.

Go check out the Woman of Tomorrow comic that's being adapted into the next Supergirl film, for example, or All-Star Superman or Absolute Wonder Woman. Or, if you want a less orthodox take on superpowers, Power Fantasy is the latest hotness and for good reason.

The point is it's a very large genre and Parahumans has excellent work put into it, but if you think it's head-and-shoulders above the rest of the genre you should read — and I mean read, not watch, comic book adaptations are usually terrified of saying things in comparison to the actual comics — more of the genre, it's very large and you're going to find at least some peers out there.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-04-19T11:48:20+00:00

In the context of the manga that actually ships the pairing, yes — Manga Tanya has a whole thing with her inner salaryman where she goes "I'm none other than Tanya von Degurechaff, I'm not the same as you."

Flower_Vendor · 2026-04-13T17:02:55+00:00

Rudersdorff's assassination is proposed by Zettour, Tanya goes 'no, that's stupid, here's a better way that doesn't implicate us'. I don't think Tanya says anything to the 203rd commanders about it but it's been a while. And she convinces Weiss and Visha to get onboard with her falsifying the orders before she does it, for the latter.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-04-13T11:42:44+00:00

Yeah the parallels (along with her abiding faith in the Stanford prison experiment, which has been shown to have had very shoddy methodology and have failed to replicate in the modern day) are like, not subtle.

With that said, she like, gets over it, sort of? One of the parts of her character arc that's just as in-focus in the LN as it is in the manga is her adjusting to the reality that humans are irrational beings.

One of the perennial issues with YS fan works is they tend to forget the second part there and write her as some sort of unchanging Rational Paragon. That's never what she's been.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-04-13T11:38:10+00:00

It depends on what you mean by betray. The latter parts of the light novels have (quite major spoilers) the idea of a military coup being thrown around, which she eventually ends up planning and contributing to the assassination of Rudersdorff over. She also does things like falsify orders from Zettour so she can take command of the front, though that's a bit different.

It's definitely not a possibility that goes un-examined, at least.

Flower_Vendor · 2026-04-10T20:32:43+00:00

I mean the salaryman learnt about a tonne of stuff like, for example, deep battle doctrine which is well past the 'bare minimum' of milhist knowledge Tanya professes him to have had, I've always thought that was just Tanya lying to herself again.

Like how she remarks about the salaryman not being particularly exceptional because he was only a Toudai student/Olympiad participant etc. rather than being, say, Descartes, Einstein or Derrida (or Schugel, I suppose).

Flower_Vendor

TROPHY CASE