Vernal Violence
Mar. 27th, 2026 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlMore importantly, bust out the chainmail—
Damn, that looks badass!
The lore is the main sale;
Come back for the grab bag of skins, missions and motifs
That you can go and get;
A damsel in distress might show a tit
—clipping., Welcome Home Warrior
Recently I saw a screening of Summer Wars with friend of the show Mousemousemoose, my first return to it since I saw a pirated stream by myself in high school over a decade ago. Since then I have finished my education, transitioned, moved to a city I had never set foot in before, gotten twenty tattoos, got married, and marked five years of living here with my now-husband. I have also witnessed the past decade-plus of [gestures broadly]. I have had several relatives die, most older, one younger. And now I return to this movie with many thoughts to rotate.
-This story is about a lot of things, but not really "AI risk" in any meaningful sense; Love Machine may as well just be a trickster-demon. This feels intentional, with a design that is surely referencing a lot of mythological figures I'm unaware of.
-Its attitudes towards family, history, and gender feel... conservative but not reactionary. The women excel at Women's Work, coordinating the family's labor and keeping the household running in a cascading crisis. This old, proud family handles the emergencies as gentry should: leveraging all of their resources and connections to fix them, or at least project enough confidence to hold the world together for another hour. Their centuries of martial might are never really interrogated as something that might be fabricated or Bad, Actually.
-However, I deadass thought Kazuma was a girl for the first third of the movie. I thought "The greatest PVP brawler in the world is actually a middle-school girl" would be within the bounds of Acceptable Gender-Role Subversion, but I guess not. The egg energy is off the charts, though, so you never know.
-I adore the contrast between OZ as a grand Takashi Murakami-ass dreamscape and the actual dinky minigames we see on peoples' devices. I choose to believe that the fully-rendered OZ isn't diegetic whatsoever, that's just how it feels to be locked the fuck in to a virtual world. But what a feeling it is!
-You could make a banger AMV out of this movie with Ask What Happened.
-But speaking of Dead Channel Sky, it shares a core theme of "history and the real world still matter and they will not wait for you." OZ is gorgeous, sure, but there's so much loving care put into even the most mundane real-world environments. The dilemma of whether to use the ice blocks to cool a computer or preserve a body is a very sharp metaphor, and I wish it was explored in some more depth.
-Though I've never seen or played Digimon in any capacity, I can totally see how this grew out of it; in another timeline, maybe this movie is the cornerstone of a whole multimedia franchise.
Damn, that looks badass!
The lore is the main sale;
Come back for the grab bag of skins, missions and motifs
That you can go and get;
A damsel in distress might show a tit
—clipping., Welcome Home Warrior
Recently I saw a screening of Summer Wars with friend of the show Mousemousemoose, my first return to it since I saw a pirated stream by myself in high school over a decade ago. Since then I have finished my education, transitioned, moved to a city I had never set foot in before, gotten twenty tattoos, got married, and marked five years of living here with my now-husband. I have also witnessed the past decade-plus of [gestures broadly]. I have had several relatives die, most older, one younger. And now I return to this movie with many thoughts to rotate.
-This story is about a lot of things, but not really "AI risk" in any meaningful sense; Love Machine may as well just be a trickster-demon. This feels intentional, with a design that is surely referencing a lot of mythological figures I'm unaware of.
-Its attitudes towards family, history, and gender feel... conservative but not reactionary. The women excel at Women's Work, coordinating the family's labor and keeping the household running in a cascading crisis. This old, proud family handles the emergencies as gentry should: leveraging all of their resources and connections to fix them, or at least project enough confidence to hold the world together for another hour. Their centuries of martial might are never really interrogated as something that might be fabricated or Bad, Actually.
-However, I deadass thought Kazuma was a girl for the first third of the movie. I thought "The greatest PVP brawler in the world is actually a middle-school girl" would be within the bounds of Acceptable Gender-Role Subversion, but I guess not. The egg energy is off the charts, though, so you never know.
-I adore the contrast between OZ as a grand Takashi Murakami-ass dreamscape and the actual dinky minigames we see on peoples' devices. I choose to believe that the fully-rendered OZ isn't diegetic whatsoever, that's just how it feels to be locked the fuck in to a virtual world. But what a feeling it is!
-You could make a banger AMV out of this movie with Ask What Happened.
-But speaking of Dead Channel Sky, it shares a core theme of "history and the real world still matter and they will not wait for you." OZ is gorgeous, sure, but there's so much loving care put into even the most mundane real-world environments. The dilemma of whether to use the ice blocks to cool a computer or preserve a body is a very sharp metaphor, and I wish it was explored in some more depth.
-Though I've never seen or played Digimon in any capacity, I can totally see how this grew out of it; in another timeline, maybe this movie is the cornerstone of a whole multimedia franchise.
