Rammstein’s Deutschland looks very French to me

Art & Criticism, Music, video
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I can’t help but look at the video for Deutschland and see Enki Bilal in it.

Enki Bilal and Pierre Christin/Jean-Claude Mézières’ Valerian series, or rather one particular album in that series, Sur les Terres Truquées. The latter because it’s a story set in a series of (faked) important historical moments that ultimately collide together into one big mess at the climax of the story. Not unlike the video with its mosaic of dark scenes from Germany’s shameful past, from Romans slaughtered in the woods of Germania to Rammstein themselves as Jewish prisoners being executed. In the end these too all blend together.

But I was mostly reminded of Enki Bilal. That mix of perverted science, mythology and religion, the fascination with fascism and totalitarianism, the sense of decay and degeneration, it’s all very Bilalesque. Ruby Commey too, as Germania could’ve walked out from one of his stories, beautiful and the focal point of each scene she appears in, but corrupted. There’s a layer of grime in most of Bilal’s settings that you see in the video too, the scene of the monks devouring offal frex. Whether or not the makers were actually inspired by him or not doesn’t really matter, but it sure looks like something Bilal could’ve made.

Short but shite — First Impressions

Anime
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Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai: daddy wants titty pudding

Sometimes you read a manga and it doesn’t work for you, then it gets an anime adaptation and it all clicks? Well, Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai isn’t one of those. The first episode was less than 13 minutes long, but I didn’t even make it half way. Horie Ao, our protagonist is a very serious high school student convinced all the boys are sex crazed monsters, because she was raised by her porn writing father and he is a sex crazed monster. And that’s the joke. It’s deeply unpleasant as well as not very funny, nor is thhe idea of “ha ha she’s actually horny all the time behind her serious student facade”. Dropped.

Nobunaga-sensei no Osanazuma: she is going to be my wife

The one joke in Nobunaga-sensei no Osanazuma is that the wife to be of famous Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga is displaced in time and mistakes his far distant descendant also called Oda Nobunaga for the real thing. She’s fourteen so of marriagable age and therefore immediately attempts to sleep with our protagonist, who at least has the grace to refuse. Nevertheless his first reaction to finding her in his arms is that it’s like one of those anime where a girl falls from the sky so she’s going to be his wife. He’s a teacher by the way and in the very first scene one of his students tells him she’ll marry him after she graduates if he remains single, which he is actually happy about and just no.

Yu-No is a no go? — First Impressions

Anime
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I think I was right about this one:

This was very much what you expect from a belated adaptation of an nineties visual novel. A lot of setup, as we follow our protagonist around school talking to the various girls he knows before the plot kicks in about a quarter to the end. Quite a lot of the shots actually resemble those you’d see in a visual novel, overly rendered static backgrounds with the characters talking in front of them. To be honest, it’s not a very visually interesting series, so-so character designs matched with sub par animation and boring backgrounds. And when it does try to be interesting you get shit like this:

Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO: panty shot as introduction

That’s the obligatory sexy school nurse, who has heard of the notion to dress professionally but didn’t think it applied to her, waking up the protagonist by standing over him and giving him a good look at her panties. Dude himself starts propositioning her immediately in a way that’s clearly a routine between the two of them. Again, it’s all visual novel stuff we’ve all seen a million times before and you have to wonder why anybody would create this particular adaptation now. Even if the original was ground breaking in its time, that’s almost twentyfive years ago and we’ve seen a lot better since than what this first episode promises. The rampant sexism of the protagonist doesn’t help either.

Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO: no a glowing naked girl is not your father in disguise

If the plot is interesting a lot of this can be forgiven, but so far the story has barely kicked in. There’s a mysterious controversial scientific project going on which the protagonist’s step mother is involved with, there’s a mysterious shrine and an archeaology club at school investigating it, led by an obviously evil professor and finally there’s the strange object protag-kun’s dad — who disappeared a few months before — sent him. And finally there’s the mysterious naked glowing girl, who is not his father in disguise. All of which comes together at the end of the episode, when Something Happens and our hero wakes up again in his own bed, with nobody having noticed anything strange…

Again, all stuff I’ve seen before but for the moment just about enough to give this a second episode. I don’t think this will be a good series, but I’ll settle for mildly interesting. I need something to play in the background while doing the dishes after all.

AO3 as Hugo finalist is a victory for inclusive fandom

Fandom
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We’ve got a really great bunch of Hugo finalists this year, including everybody who ever uploaded their drunk Batman making out with Captain America fanfic at three AM on a Saturday night, as Archive of Our Owbn (AO3) was nominated for best related work. All joking aside, this is a very good thing, as AO3 is an example both of the very best modern fandom can do and something that would’ve never gotten a nomination before fandom had to defend itself from the Puppy takeover.

Let me explain.

As you know Bob, fandom, including fanfiction writing fandom, has been on the internet since the very beginning and as a community has had to mostly depend on commercial platforms Like Livejournal, Yahoo groups and Delicious to organise itselves and as such was always dependent on the kindness of at best uncaring strangers. These sort of platforms tended to tolerate, but not encourage fanfiction at best, actively purged it at worst. AO3 therefore started from the desire to have an independent space for fans by fans, not beholden to the whims of commercial entities. As such it fits squarely in the fannish tradition of zine making and con running for the love of it all.

But AO3 is more than that. It’s also a major open source project that’s rare in that it’s been largely run by women and, as the Twitter thread above explains, was set up to be a community project and a teaching project from the start. It’s responsive to its users and remarkably stable, when compared to social media sites like Tumblr or Facebook — it doesn’t have to serve ads after all. AO3 is open to all content, doesn’t censor, allows its users anonymity and pseudonimity and has a brilliant tagging and search functionality that keeps it all useable.

Both for what it offers and the platform it offers it on it’s worthy of a Hugo nomination, but without Worldcon fandom having to defend itself against the Puppies, a group of sad sack rightwing writers who wanted to use a reactionary backlash to cheat their ways to a Hugo, AO3 would’ve never be nominated. Thanks to the Puppies, actual fans mobilised to save their fandom from being taken over, we got organised and long term attempts to make it more inclusive and as a whole Worldcon fandom became more diverse. And with that diversity, that influx of new people both and old fans re-energised, came a new view on what was Hugo worthy or not.

The Puppies, with their obsession with strong men being manly men doing real manly science fiction and fear of women hate a project like AO3, mostly female run, catering to a philosophy of building consent and being welcoming rather than “getting gud”, hosting all those cootie inducing stories about K-pop stars french kissing each other. That’s why having AO3 among the Hugo finalists is a blow for inclusivity and a raspberry in their direction.

That it was named by Naomi Novik in a direct reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own? Icing on the cake.

Friday Funk: Curtis Mayfield

Music, video
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Back in 2004 I worked for a small startup company that made — hang on to your hats — software with which you could use your mobile phone to connect your laptop to the internet. This was back in the days when dinosaurs still roamed the land, the iPhone wasn’t even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eyes and there were like a billion different phone makers who each brought out a zillion different phones, all which needed to be tested to see if our software could recognise and use them correctly. Manually. To be honest the job paid lousy but it was a recession and the long hours were sort of made up for by things like free lunch (yes yes) and free drinks. But especially by the pooled music library that lived on the network to which everybody had uploaded their favourite music to work through the night with.

It so happened that one of the dudes working there was a huge funk and soul fan and thanks to that I got to sample a lot of groups and artists I’d barely heard off until then. One of which was Curtis Mayfield, who upon then, only knew from Move on Up as one of those songs you hear on golden oldies radio. Hearing him in context was a revelation. Being a metal head by nature I’d never done much exploring of the funk & soul genres, but what with Sandra being a Northern Soul veteran and getting my hands on that co-worker’s stack of classic funk ‘n soul that changed rapidly and Curtis Mayfield was on the forefront of it.

You can understand why looking at this 1972 Beat Club mini concert, can’t you? Socially conscious music you can dance to performed by a band at the height of its powers.