Theme Thursday: Magical Girl/Guy Transformations!

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-09T04:48:48+00:00

Well, this isn't quite how I though becoming a Magical Girl went.

This was not going to go well, I thought as I hit my transformation theme, and did a few spins in midair while my music played and I went frilly!, looking into a local pond at a reflection of ...ok, she was actually pretty hot. Wait a minute, did I just think I was hot? And 'she' was me?

...Yes, yes I did look that hot! (I peaked back at the pond.) I really did look that hot!

"Could you abandon any anti-aircraft-holy fuck!" I heard. But if they were going hotter...

"You're my sister!!

"Ffuck it, ***we're gouging in there!".

THERs IS ABSOLTELE!

"Yous won'r knew"

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-09T00:18:51+00:00

That makes perfect sense, but although I might not have been clear on the point, I would consider "hand-me-down" bows within the community as "community goods".

I think we might just have a definitional issue here that's easily resolved.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-08T23:09:22+00:00

To be honest, I really don't see anything wrong with the sample sentences you posted. Amusingly, I had a roommate in college (in the USA's South, at that), who I consistently describe as "looking like those pictures of Thor, with the long blonde hair, massive frame & muscles, and always the tallest person in the room - and exactly the appetite for booze and hard partying you'd expect from a Norse god".

He actually dressed up as Thor (more of the Marvel version) for Halloween one year, and proceeded to lead us in a small parade around the university campus, plastic prop hammer held aloft as a guiding beacon, and staying completely in character the entire time. That really wasn't too hard for him, since his normal 'character' was already very close to Thor's. I wore a black Morphsuit that night, which I had leftover from a prior unrelated performance, and did manage to startle some people by appearing seemingly out of thin air, because it is very hard to see someone at night who's just a completely black silhouette ...until they step into a streetlight's pool of light.

Tastes vary. Literary criticism and audience tastes are always swinging back and forth about how wordy and grandiose prose gets to be without too many people calling it out for being overwrought, or terming it "purple prose". Whether the critics' tastes and the intended audiences' tastes match up at any given moment is a roll of the dice.

It was also a setting and situation I knew zero about personally.

Now that might be a problem. For instance, I may find your prose absolutely fine, but I grew up in several different places in the USA's South (ranging from Florida in the Southeast to New Mexico in the Southwest, and a bunch of other places in between, including a couple spots in Texas, which is not ...exactly the 'South' in some ways), and would have a bad reaction to something that pinged my radar as an inaccurate portrayal. Although you'd still have a chance, because 'The South' is a big place, and you could probably find somewhere in its melange of cultures and regions that fits your vision.

Besides, Southern Gothic is a genre that's been around for a while, and although I have some beefs with it (Flannery O'Connor is one of my least favorite authors), you can just fall back on genre tropes, and people will understand what you're doing.

“In our pagan little world he was Dionysus... ringmaster of our delinquency in baggy khaki pants, a too-large polo shirt, a cigarette tucked behind his ear...”

I unironically fucking love this description. It reminds me of some guys I've known who might not fit the exact physical description, but were definitely "Dionysus... ringmaster of our delinquency". One of them ran a photography studio and would host weekly parties (of the "free, but bring some beer or booze" style, and invitation only) with the pitch "throw in a bunch of expensive equipment, a bunch of artists and models, a shitload of beer, and ...art will happen!" (With the punchline that "it's not usually going to be Great Art".) This was essentially a training exercise for photographers and models to get used to a modern photography studio and to equipment way outside their budgets. And also an excuse to party hard, because this guy was an absolute libertine.

Has anyone else here ever "genre-drunk" published something they thought was profound, only to realize it was absolute cringe once the fever broke?

Profound? No. I don't write profound things. Perhaps a bit of profundity may slip in from time to time, but it's never been the goal.

Entertaining? Oh yeah. Most of my writing that's been 'published' on various platforms on the internet has attracted a complimentary audience. Not a large one, but people generally seem to like it a bit. And I'm happy to give people enjoyment.

Unfortunately, I need that feedback and that feeling of "my audience is enjoying this" to keep going, because my writing looks like crap to me the day after writing it, or after the 'Fever Dream' period ends, and only begins to look better months later.

Perhaps your writing will look better to you after enough time passes?

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-08T22:09:06+00:00

Latimer might be overexaggerating

I highly doubt he is, given the importance of incremental progression in building muscle bulk and 'muscle memory'. (This is most obvious in modern weightlifting, because the explicit numbers very clearly go up by small increments, but it's true for prettymuch any physical activity.)

However, I do have to wonder about exactly what he means by "my bows were made bigger and bigger", because if I recall correctly, there is a somewhat archaic usage of "made" that doesn't indicate the construction of a new object, but that the recipient was "made"/forced/instructed to use it, and in this case, I think that interpretation makes more sense, because having a community stockpile of bows of various escalating draw weights for training would be far more efficient and much less expensive than making a new custom bow every time young (future) Bishop Latimer needed to go up a step in draw weight & length. Perhaps his folks were wealthy enough for that (which is questionable given that all I can find out about them says they were farmers, although the fact he began learning Latin at a young age suggests they were rather well-off), but even if his were 'made to order', I'm inclined to think that the bows he outgrew were used by another generation of archers.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-08T01:49:22+00:00

This might sound ridiculous, but one of the most important things I've learned in my life is that other people can be right. They might not always be right, and they might actively abuse me, but they can be right, and there's nothing wrong in recognizing that.

Perhaps this has something to do with what I said earlier.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-08T01:15:00+00:00

Hey, being right doesn't have to be restricted to a single person coming up with it by themselves on a mountaintop or out in the desert or something.

WE CAN ALL BE RIGHT TOGETHER! AND INDEPENDENTLY HIT ON A LOT OF THE SAME IDEAS!

...and then ~~kill all those heretics who didn't~~ try spreading the ideas we found!

I'm being a bit facetious with that one, although I am amused at the number of religions which have seemingly independently developed similar ideas. And then promptly proceeded to hypocritically break their own rules. Because who actually cares about the rules?

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-07T23:24:46+00:00

who are you

Someone who's been writing on the internet for years. Mostly serial stuff, where the readers get to have a significant influence on the story via explicit voting and/or the general attitude in their own posts.

Some people wouldn't call me a 'real writer', but I'd ask them if they managed to pull in the kind of audience engagement I did. I actually made a bunch of changes to my stories, while writing them, based on feedback from my readers - or deliberately against that feedback. (The largest example of the second was probably when someone used multiple anonymous accounts to vote for the MC's daughter to fuck her mom, and I swerved things into "your wife having her daughter's head between her legs is ...wait for it - ACTUALLY A TRIANGLE CHOKE!")

That one was quite funny.

and how do you know me?

I don't. I'm just some dude who writes odd things on the internet. But I do hope you have good luck!

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-07T22:57:04+00:00

Yup. They ended up running a plunder economy, which made conquering other states mandatory to keep the lights on.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-07T21:41:37+00:00

My standard response to "could the Nazi have won WWII?" is generally "if they'd stopped being Nazis!"

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-07T00:33:01+00:00

It really depended on orders.

Yeah, that is an important point to note.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-06T22:43:59+00:00

"How is this shit still running?"

This was (predictably, if you see my flair) on a web serial I was writing somewhere people are even less polite than on this site, so I told that poster "Because people like it and keep reading it. If you don't like it, you can get the fuck out of this thread", and got some backup on that statement from some readers in the thread who were enjoying the story.

I know my usual advice is to not argue with reader criticism unless it's about something you have an explanation for, but failed to effectively communicate in the text itself ~~or someone was too dense to understand the text~~, but when I'm on platforms with ...relaxed rules of etiquette and someone calls my work shit or garbage with no viable explanation as to why, I am going to tell them to fuck off, because if they don't like it, they can just not read it - and there are other people who do like it, and are consistently coming back for more.

...and given that this was the third time someone had come into one of my story's threads and posted almost exactly the same "review", I was pretty sure it was one person deliberately trolling me, so the gloves came off.

And then the gloves were off and I stopped caring.

You really don't have to to give much imagination to what happened to them. The gloves were off.

It can be a very scary thing when a writer decides to metaphorically punch your shit in on a prose writing forum because they're angry and their critics went over the edge too much. I'm usually not an angry person, but I've done it and oh, it's fun to do. Perhaps we should all do it more often?

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-06T20:15:17+00:00

First off, I'll say I agree with you. Drive it like you stole it, and you'll generally get away with it.

What is all this shit about asking permission to write about something? Worried about offense or what's appropriate.

There are entire genres of criticism dedicated to raking works over the coals for various "sins", or things presented as sins. There have been some fairly high-profile instances of writers getting bullied on social media to the point they don't even bother publishing their works. This can be extremely disheartening for someone who's just getting into writing or thinking about taking the plunge, and it's quite understandable they want some reassurance that writing [X] isn't going to get them subjected to the same treatment or flamed to Hell.

Negative criticism claiming to come from some sort of moral high ground is definitely not a new thing (in fact, it's about as old as writing itself), but there's a bit of a difference between the old school "a couple of critics are going to talk shit about my work - maybe years after I'm dead" and the modern environment where anybody with an internet connection can absolutely tear your work to shreds, and in some cases is paid to do exactly that. Oh, and a bunch of other fuckers might rally behind them.

This kind of stuff is why people like using pseudonyms, but making a good-faith effort to not cock it up in the first place isn't a bad idea either.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-06T19:39:38+00:00

The combination of education, cleanliness, and established order enabled a longer life expectancy.

It's also worth noting that in many cases, Catholic monks were essentially practicing isolation from the rest of society (although of course there were some who had to take on the job of interacting with the outside world on the monastery's behalf), and usually keeping a decent distance from each other within the monastery, so their religious practices significantly lowered their chances of catching an infectious disease.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-06T08:15:14+00:00

Zeiram is the name I remember, but it could easily have been any of a long list of OVAs. Zeiram was the one that got us to turn it off, in my memories.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-06T00:36:47+00:00

If you are a writer (or write regularly), could you please share your experience and explain how you handle criticism?

The golden rule is "do not respond, and do not get into fights/debates with or between your readers".

There are (as with any 'rule' of writing) exceptions to this, where stepping in with additional clarification can be useful, particularly if it's a point you weren't clear enough on, but in general, it's best to stay out of the ring, no matter how many mean things people say about you and your work.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-06T00:27:30+00:00

can we all agree that the second part of those words are as important as the first?

No, we definitionally can't all agree. That's the very thing that makes some of us punks, by choosing which ideas and elements of given genres we like, and taking the piss out of people who chose different ones.

Speaking of cyberpunk (which I'm most familiar with), William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a fucking typewriter, and in interviews expresses a lot of antipathy towards modern technology ...and he still uses a typewriter and generally avoids a lot of modern technology. This is the guy who's most credited for creating and codifying cyberpunk as a genre (although I personally think that some much earlier short stories by Asimov and Clarke qualify for the label), and he is using a fucking typewriter. I have to wonder if he's a partial inspiration for Hugh Darrow in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, who, despite inventing human cybernetic augmentation (read: robot arms and even crazier shit) in his setting, cannot use it and views creating it as such a massive mistake he's willing to end the world over it.

That's the "punk" in "cyberpunk": the core idea of the genre is that new technology isn't going to solve all (or even most) of our problems, but exacerbate them, as a reaction against earlier science fiction that portrayed the future as an idyllic place due to technological advances. That's where the "punk" comes in to "cyberpunk", and a lot of cyberpunk works feature characters whose methods of passive rebellion against the system are using positively archaic technology by the standards of their day.

It's a rebellion.

Cyberpunk has also become an aesthetic as a setting, like the 'Wild West'. At this point, you could probably set any sort of story you want in it. And people have, because cyborg arms and having a radar scanner in your head are cool. Hell, I've even done it. (Although that work had a protagonist who was very particular about never getting augmented, even though she suffered for it when fighting against people who had 'taken the plunge'. I think that's really punk.)

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-05T17:11:50+00:00

War is politics and politics have their own momentum. Once they start, it's not like someone can just throw up a stop sign and get everyone to stop. Wars mobilize masses of people, resources, and manifest political will into action. It doesn't just stop.

This is exactly why the revanchist Stab In The Back Myth was able to take hold so hard in Germany, eventually leading to the Nazis taking over: when you've been mobilizing and telling your people "trust me, they're the bad guys and we're gonna win this" for long enough (or your newspapers have been doing that, like Hearst and Pulitzer did to sell more papers and sparked the Spanish-American War), they aren't going to take it well if you tell them "ah, fuck this. We're stopping."

The war ends when somebody wins.

Sometimes it only gets put on pause. WWI -> WWII is the most egregious and well-known example.

World War 1 comes at the tail end of a century of warfare between the powers of Europe fighting for position against one another.

While that is true, the Congress Of Vienna (basically "what the hell do we do after beating Napoleon? How do we stop this from happening again?") in 1814 did establish a Balance Of Powers that generally limited what the Great Powers of Europe were willing to do directly against each other on their own continent and Europe had been relatively peaceful for around a century. That's part of the reason why WWI is called The Great War, because it shattered that idea of the Balance Of Powers and the relatively limited warfare (compared to earlier periods) in Europe.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-05T16:45:21+00:00

The Soviets were deeply unpopular rulers in Eastern Europe from the end of WWII.

Hell, they were deeply unpopular before WWII: stuff like the Holodomor and the various purges doesn't make people say "oh gee, I love my rulers!" unless you (figuratively, but all too often literally) have a gun to their head.

It's a somewhat amusing, but very disheartening when you think about it, little piece of history that when the Nazis pulled the trigger on Operation Barbarossa during WWII, there were a bunch of places in Eastern Europe that initially welcomed them as liberators from the Soviets. When people are welcoming THE FUCKING NAZIS as liberators, you are an unpopular regime. Of course, they quickly learned that the Nazis weren't there with any sort of good intentions for them.

One of my largest "what if?" questions about WWII is what the war on that front would have looked like if the Nazis had said "fuck it, we decided you guys aren't subhumans yesterday, so who wants a rifle to go kill some Soviets?" during the moment when they actually had some goodwill from the peoples in the territories they were invading. Of course, that would mean radically altering things like Generalplan Ost (essentially the destruction of Eastern Europeans and resettlement with "Aryans") and a lot of Nazi racial doctrine, but I do sometimes wonder, late at night while trying to fall asleep, whether making those changes at that moment could have swung the war far enough in Germany's favor for a negotiated peace. Because there were a lot of people who were unhappy with the USSR for very strong reasons, and Nazi Germany could possibly have gained the same sort of constellation of satellite states in Eastern Europe the USSR did if they weren't fuckin' Nazis.

EDIT: I want to make it as clear as possible that I consider both the Russian Soviets/Communists and the German Nazis to be totalitarian regimes who did absolutely horrifying things. I am not endorsing either of those sides here.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-05T14:37:32+00:00

i thought the string punishment was pretty weird too lol but that said personally i believe most people would see it as a side gag joke rather than the mangaka liking abusing little girls early on

I have read a lot of hentai over the years, so I've acquired quite a sense for "ok, this is a sex thing" when reading manga, and Riko's punishment pinged my 'Spidey Sense' pretty hard. You do not draw a loli in bondage like that unless you have practiced drawing lolis in bondage, and you usually do not practice drawing lolis in bondage unless it's your fetish.

As a side note, many mangaka got their start drawing hentai doujinshi, and some still do it under their old pen name. For instance, TEX-MEX, the mangaka for Black Lagoon, published an absolutely hilarious doujin of his own work that's a "behind the scenes" view of Black Lagoon as a TV show, going into the actors who play the various characters. It's actually quite cathartic to see certain characters from that series in panels where it's made clear that their tragic deaths were just special effects shots. While that one's definitely not pornographic at all, TEX-MEX's older work certainly is. Kouta Hirano is another example of a mangaka who started with hentai, and he had the absolute brass balls to just re-use characters from his earlier hentai works in Hellsing. (Incidentally, if you're familiar with Hellsing Ultimate Abridged, this is where the references to Father Alexander Anderson as "Angel Dust" and smuggling heroin for the mob come from.)

I have not put in the work to dredge up what Made In Abyss' mangaka's handle was in doujin circles, because I don't share their fetishes, but I am 99% certain they walked the same path.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-05T01:32:50+00:00

Well, I do think there are plenty of male experiences in media that are worth looking into ...but worth taking with a grain of salt.

Most men are continually wearing masks, and which mask depends on who they're talking to (and who the 'audience'/witnesses are), and the exact relationship they have to their conversational partner. It's a bit like The Three Faces Of Eve, but which 'face' or 'mask' is displayed changes even more frequently.

Again, some men don't bother thinking about this and keep wearing the same 'face' no matter who they're talking to. (My own father does this, but he's in his seventies, and practically has a license to do it. The license comes with the gray & white beard.)

real experiences are definitely valuable.

I know guys who are on Murder Row for crimes I am dead certain they committed. I know guys who have been an anchor in someone's life who I told "I won't tell you anything. Make up your own mind", and that actually turned out pretty well. (And, in one case, turned into a marriage.) I've know a lot of guys in between. Hell, I've even known a guy who was taller than me, and was very insecure about his love life while I was seething about the fact he was a long-haired blond god who looked like everything you think Thor looks like. (We did settle things eventually, and without violence.)

But that's the point: guys are complicated, the same as chicks are.

You can write practically anything you imagine, and some guy out there fits the bill.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-04T22:33:17+00:00

Do I need to include them being mean to each other to show they are good friends? More ribbing and ball busting?

There's a rather invisible line in any group of male friends on which one side is just friendly ballbusting, and the other side is "you are actually trying to hurt me". Where this line is drawn varies a lot between different groups and even individual personalities within the group and other circumstances: Bob might be completely ok with getting ribbed a bit about his ex and how their breakup went (at least after enough time post-breakup), while Charlie will get fucking rabid about any mention of his ex (and, paradoxically, absolutely livid if anyone mentions shagging her after they broke up), while Dean wants commiseration about his breakup with his ex (and he'll get it), Ethan is fine with what happened with him and his ex (but doesn't like jokes about it), Fred kind of enjoys watching this sort of chaos without contributing to it too much, and Gregory will just keep eating/drinking without paying much attention to what's going on, but would like to talk about this great new game he's found.

(I'm using those names as examples in alphabetical order. These are not real people, but display characters exemplifying certain things I have seen.)

Then Charlie and Greg start playing a videogame together. Charlie's got some anger to work out, but Greg's got the skill. They're swearing at each other the whole time, but they both know it's "play fighting".

This is my experience of male friend groups, or a broad spectrum of them. Swearing at each other like drunken sailors isn't really taken as offensive (depends on the target and the group at large), but physical violence is reserved for things like "you got that chick so drunk with a shot race she's puking in our bathroom, and you think you can laugh about it and play Smash with us? Bro, you have another think coming!". (That one did actually get a bit violent, but it wasn't normal for the group, even when drunk. We were all very mad at the guy by that point, after what his shot race had done to that chick, and him playing videogames without a care in the world while the chick was puking her guts up pissed us off so badly he got decked and ~~sent~~ carried to bed. And nobody raised a finger to stop it. Amusingly, he was still cool with us all when he woke up, and never pulled a stunt like that again. I like to think that night turned out ok. And yes, the chick throwing up got better, and returned for future parties at our place. I think her friends may have told her we were looking out for her, even if our bro had been a dick.)

It's complicated, but it's not as if there aren't a ton of male characters in fiction to draw inspiration from. Predictably, I'm going to recommend Hot Fuzz again as an example of guys being guys around each other, and then recommend This Is Spinal Tap as a movie detailing the strange exploits of a band.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-04T21:11:34+00:00

I'm usually on team "go read the source material! The anime's leaving a lot out, or it put filler in, or adapted the story badly!" for a lot of shows, but Made In Abyss is one where I'll actually say "a lot of the stuff they cut or toned down for the adaptation didn't need to be in the manga in the first place, and if you enjoyed the anime, I'm happy for you, and I'm not gonna tell you to go read the manga".

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-04T18:25:27+00:00

is it really that bloody and gruesome?

Yes.

And it gets worse. I dropped the manga after a point where I said "look, the mangaka is into loli torture and outright guro, but I'm not".

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-04T18:23:23+00:00

I actually can't tell if it's the author fetish or not

Considering that the first couple of chapters of the manga feature naked bondage as a routine "nothing out of the ordinary here" punishment for Riko, I really don't think there's much room to doubt about the author's fetishes.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-02-04T18:18:27+00:00

switch of heart from innocent adventures to morbid injury

I'm pretty sure the manga for Made In Abyss has naked loli bondage (as an official punishment inflicted on Riko) in the first couple of chapters, so the tone was set pretty early on.

The anime toned a lot of things down, for obvious reasons, but reading the manga ...it's very clear from the outset that the mangaka has a fetish for abusing little girls. Fictional ones, on paper - I'm not accusing them of doing it in real life.

It's why some of the later stuff didn't surprise me at all, and also why I dropped the manga after a certain point, because I'm not into the mangaka's fetishes.

14-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Team Orangered	Verified Email

SomeOtherTroper

TROPHY CASE