Author: Tiberius

Here, you will find a variety of opinions in anything and everything concerning entertainment. Movies, games, animation, music, TV; if it's a form of entertainment consumed by many, I may have written about it or I plan to do so in the future. Unless otherwise specified, expect weekly updates each Friday.

How and Why I Recommend YouTube Channels

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Jumping from channel to channel

Since it’s a month that’s divisible by 2, and I’ve gotten into the habit of recommending interesting YouTube channels every other month, I figure I shed some light on how such a system came to be. In the last quarter of 2022, I had come across a channel called The4thSnake, dedicated mainly to video game lore, but most importantly the Mortal Kombat series. For the 20th anniversary of the release of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, the British YouTuber released a video that went into detail explaining every single nook and cranny hidden within the game, sort of like a visual love letter to the 3D era when for the most part, WB Games — who now holds the MK franchise — won’t or can’t re-release the 3D era games. Other videos like this of his heap praise on the old MK games while criticizing NetherRealm and wishing Ed Boon and the Mortal Kombat team in the modern day would do more or at least change some things from the established canon in the reboot series. Towards the end of these videos, The4thSnake would recommend a video that also talked about Mortal Kombat, but in different aspects, and not all of those channels or videos were very big. Sometimes these are small channels with a sub count only a few hundred strong.

Here’s the video in question:

The video is over 40 minutes, so grab some snacks and a drink.

Part of why I love this video so much is because it taps into what I remember most about this era of Mortal Kombat. The nostalgia of the PS2 and Xbox days were strong in these types of games. The hardware limitations of both at the time allowed for more creativity in some areas, but now that I think about it, it also meant more work which is why most entertainment has fallen back on algorithms and computers.

As for the recommendation itself, I like to take in information without their being an expectation that I have to recite what I learned. Miniature rant: presentations were what bugged me so much about school. From my own observations, YouTubers who make informational videos with extra content or information tend to leave a video card up in the description or a pinned comment in the comments section below. History YouTubers like Cynical Historian put in a bunch of information citing sources and such and corrections wherever applicable if there was an error that slipped by until the editing process.

Additionally, there’s a sort of unofficial collaborative effort in the recommendations. Unlike the system YouTube uses, which is a glorified time sink, YouTubers recommending other channels/videos slightly differs since the recommendation will relate to what the recommending YouTuber was talking about in said video. For instance, a historian recommending a mythology video for context behind a cult/religion in an ancient civilization makes sense at the outset, whereas a recommendation for something completely unrelated may rely mostly on the context.

The way I’ve done it doesn’t necessarily relate to entertainment as this blog does, or rather the channels I recommend are people I subbed to or I just like to watch even occasionally. It’s also one of the ways you can tap into what I like at the moment, though the last three words in that phrase are the most important. I’ve been on YouTube since at least 2009, back when entertainment boiled down to trolling the viewer by way of putting a jump scare over stock footage of a sedan driving down a winding highway. I didn’t officially start on YouTube until June 2012 and the videos I watched and at times made were all Lego stop-motion films or brickfilms. A term coined in 1989 by the independently filmed and produced short-film The Magic Portal by Australian filmmaker Lindsay Fleay, presented below:

Production on this film began in 1985 and despite being completed in four years, it clocked in at over 16 minutes long. Over the years, brickfilms have surpassed that video length and have taken considerably less time to film and edit, bar a few individual cases of technical difficulties. At the time, I collected Lego sets and I even dabbled in brickfilming myself. From the outside looking in, the illusion of making inanimate objects walk was amazing, and easier to absorb as a concept for me than hand-drawn animation. However, when I did it myself as a 13-14-year-old I discovered several problems that can make the process a nightmare.

As noted above, the process is very time-consuming. There are methods to make sure continuity in animation is consistent with each passing frame, like the onion-skinning method, though some errors still slip through the cracks and can be noticed in the final product. Unless you’re an editing master, you’ll have to redo a scene or even the entire animation. Over time, my interests evolved. With YouTube channels like pantsahat or Moonshine Animations expanding to action figures, Figma, and S.H. Figuarts, new limits have been achieved, though in that small circle I was briefly involved in, it was limited to Lego and only Lego. That community had no love for Duplo or Mega Bloks and likely still doesn’t. Mega Bloks to us were Tiger Electronic handhelds for video games; a cheap imitation ripping off what’s popular without understanding the why.

Ever since, I’d come to watch and even subscribe to YouTubers who covered a variety of different topics, though staying within the same entertainment umbrella. Video games, TV shows, movies, comics to a lesser extent, and by 2017 around the same time I was in college, anime and manga, which I had gradually come back into since. Of course, there was Toonami, but it was around this time that I realized backdoor shenanigans were largely responsible for why some TV shows aired episodes either out of order or simply stopped without warning. So imagine how let down I was when Toonami ended in 2008, or when Nicktoons put Invader Zim or The Legend of Korra in the dead zone of TV, or when Disney XD just stopped airing the dubbed episodes of Naruto: Shippuden in 2009. Fitting something into your schedule and then having it disappear from beneath you is the one surprise I never wanted to face. And on that note, I really feel for the current iteration of Toonami being unable to air the second season of Mob Psycho 100.

I also don’t think I’m alone on that front. A variety of studies have since come out to announce that cable TV has fallen out of favor with YouTube largely replacing it over the years. What started as a video-sharing sight in 2005 has grown into a huge network that after 18 years has begun to inherit the problems that were already there with cable television. Think about it: ads (skippable or not), sponsors, individual channels, verification systems, a form of monetary support for the channel in question, a ratings system; YouTube is pretty much television made for a modern audience. And they also seem to agree with the introduction of Original shows, Premium, and TV, three systems I don’t see myself supporting because I don’t even have that kind of money to spend on entertainment.

Having said that, most YouTubers appreciate support even if the most you’re capable of giving is viewership, likes, and subscriptions, all of which are for free. The same thing goes for sharing and linking videos across the web. Since I use reddit regularly, these links are all over comment threads on the site, typically as memes and reference humor but also for some interesting finds. Holding for a phone call may have cost us our time and caused us grief waiting for an operator to connect us to a business, but of all the choices for generic hold music, Tim Carleton’s Opus No. 1, when you actually listen to it uninterrupted, is a solid soundtrack. Personally, I’d choose it over elevator music.

All things considered, my bimonthly recommendations might as well be a share button in a fancy suit, and so far only once have I had to retract one due to backdoor misconduct. A single slip up can sully a YouTuber’s reputation and the platform will deem it necessary to write an entirely new set of guidelines to keep every content creator from making an already bad image even worse, sometimes at the cost of content.

PewDiePie dropping a slur by accident or Logan Paul filming a suicide victim in Japan are two examples of recklessness leading to a near-total disaster, but if I have to throw them a bone, they’ve at least learned from their mistakes to be more careful if there’s ever a next time. Regarding the redacted recommendation, Blair Zon of iilluminaughtii fame has garnered slight after slight and the more information that gets out the worse she looks. When I retracted the recommendation back in April in favor of two others who were slated for later dates, the initial controversy was in its infancy. Looking at video essays now, some of which clock in at over two-and-a-half hours, it’s gotten much worse. And the self-awareness is in another castle. The view may be excellent from a glass house, but if you want to keep it that way, don’t throw stones.

Then again, stuff like this is hard to predict. Even if you do pay attention, the signs of trouble can be very hard to see, from a distance or even up close. Which brings back awful memories of when Rooster Teeth booted one of theirs a few years ago for grooming allegations. For what it’s worth, my recommendations don’t have to be adhered to very strongly. They’re there for those who are interested or who want to know more about XYZ. I have no way of knowing how helpful they are, but as I wrote above I like to think of the recommendations on this blog as a share button in a set of new clothes.

And for this week’s recommendation, the YouTube channel The Professional.

https://www.youtube.com/@theprofessional155/about

The Professional is a gaming and current events channel that focuses primarily on action and stealth games. His chief areas of focus are the GTA and Red Dead series, but also Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Hitman, and several others. Additionally, there are lore and explanation videos on individual topics and subjects around the games played and occasionally current events, some of which may have crossed your news radar in recent memory. I recommend this channel for the games and the information about the games in question.

Boruto: Timeskip Update 2

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Two Blue Vortex

As much as I’ve written about not wanting to be the Boruto guy, I honestly don’t mind such a connotation just as long as I’m allowed more topics to cover and in that regard on this blog, I’ve succeeded. But to circle back to the topic of this week’s post, Boruto’s timeskip arc has an update. Last week, third party sources brought news to the Boruto community concerning the upcoming timeskip arc. The next chapter is expected to release on August 21 under the new subtitle, Two Blue Vortex, and joining Kawaki and Boruto who both have future redesigns is Sarada Uchiha.

Consistent with trends, there’s already fan art of the new design. Here’s a personal favorite of mine:

And no, the Bayonetta comparisons aren’t lost on the community. Simultaneously, the reveal debunks previous predictions made years prior while also shedding some light on existing concepts. For starters, rather than follow the Naruto convention of the subtitle Shippuden with Raiden and the associated kanji for lightning (雷), Two Blue Vortex deviates significantly from the formula used to craft Naruto and Naruto Shippuden as further proof that Boruto is simply not that kind of guy. Naruto had Sage Mode, was a Jinchuriki, shunned by the village for being the host of the Nine-tailed fox and fought tooth and nail to be seen as more than just the sum of his parts. Boruto, in contrast, was designed with nearly everything handed to him on a silver platter, largely because his parents either had none of it or weren’t allowed all that much to enjoy what they got. And seemingly overnight, he eventually loses it all.

When the story starts proper, Boruto is pretty much a spoiled little brat with a legacy over his head. Naruto was inaugurated as the Seventh Hokage, following a lifelong dream that everyone said was impossible, and his grandfather Minato Namikaze, had the distinction of being the Leaf Village’s shortest serving Fourth Hokage. Considering the negative connotations associated with the number four in East Asia, the Four is Death trope is a time-honored tradition. Guido Mista was right to worry.

Boruto being spoiled is a direct consequence of the shaping of the Ninja World in both his father’s and grandfather’s times. From Minato’s time period, it was expected and tacitly accepted that ninja would have enemies. Constant warfare meant friends were made as fast as they were lost and often from a young age. Minato’s ninja cell were the equivalent of child soldiers during the Third Shinobi War. Even after becoming Fourth Hokage, the peace was tenuous at best, and the ninja villages would essentially shift from fighting organized militaries to disorganized terror cells. This problem didn’t really begin because of anything Minato did, but Naruto’s adolescence was where it got worse.

The Akatsuki, close to achieving its’ goal under false pretenses, and with only a few members left, outright started the Fourth Shinobi War, by way of necromancy and cloning. Initially, through desperation and gradually through teamwork, the ninja villages set aside all differences to combat a worse threat: Madara, Obito, and soon Kaguya Ohtsutsuki. After their defeat, it was a time to rebuild a better world for the future. Naruto’s tenure as the seventh led to many gifted children, some of them directly from the old Konoha 12 of before. They essentially lived so that Boruto’s generation would have it easy, but the down side to that is they don’t see what others are lacking in until it’s missing from them. Which does happen to Boruto gradually. Starting with the seal on his hand and the control that Momoshiki is always threatening to take away, though for the most part he doesn’t have to as long as he leaves things up to Kara, Isshiki, or Kawaki.

With Kara in tatters and Isshiki soundly defeated, Kawaki and Code are the last enemies Boruto has to face in the timeskip. How that comes to pass will be revealed after August 21 when TBV debuts properly so for now, here’s what I know and what I see from the reveal. It’s been confirmed from years prior how Kawaki and Boruto would look. Kawaki would wield a staff/rod-like weapon in the future, and aside from a change in attire, he wouldn’t differ all that much from the Chapter/Episode 1 teaser. In the redesign, he sports longer hair and a tunic and haori that bears a striking resemblance to what Isshiki had.

Boruto meanwhile had a scar over his eye, a headband with two perpendicular scratches, slightly longer hair, a cloak, a sword, and better control of his Jougan. The updated design stays true to what was seen in the manga in 2017, but with a few noticeable changes. The cloak is similar to how Sasuke wears his, the scar is shorter, and the hair is almost the same if not shorter than his current look. We haven’t seen the sword yet, so it’s not known if he’s using one of his own or if Sasuke has an arsenal and let him have an old relic.

From what we saw of Sarada’s design, with all the talks and fanart depicting her with longer hair and a longer tunic similar to what Sakura had in Shippuden, but the Bayonetta-style design immediately tosses that out of the window and calls back to when fans of Naruto thought or expected Naruto himself to have longer hair as he aged.

Additionally, Sarada’s presence on the cover may suggest that the new chapter will include her somewhere in it. As I recall, a beginning scene in Shippuden shows now-genin Konohamaru running into Teuchi. We’ve already made clear that Boruto as a character and as a manga is not the same as Naruto so the tone may be a bit more sullen or serious compared to this classic Shonen slapstick.

Some on the Boruto subreddit also noticed the symbolism in this preliminary design for Sarada, with Uchiha clan earrings, the ring on the choker, and the cloak she seems to be donning. If it’s a cloak she’s wearing, then it may be paying homage to Sasuke. If it’s a jacket, then it could be an homage to Boruto. Or both, but with everyone under the shinjutsu and believing Boruto to be the traitor, everyone’ll think it’s only to remember Sasuke who seemingly abandoned the village once again.

Speaking of shinjutsu, Eida, love her or not, still has a critical role to play in the plot. The shinjutsu she subconsciously used to reverse Kawaki’s and Boruto’s lives has yet to be fully explained. The same goes for her Senrigan.

All we have on both are what was shown in the manga and Amado’s exposition. According to Amado, shinjutsu, like omnipotence, essentially make facts out of fiction and as Amado has surmised, all ninjutsu are humans’ best attempt at recreating the shinjutsu. If that’s the case, then the Omnipotence that kicked off this predicament would function at an even higher level than that of Madara’s or Kaguya’s Rinnegan/Rinnesharingan. Whatever has been the most powerful genjutsu shown in canon or in filler, Omnipotence is even more broken than that.

As for the Senrigan, since it literally translates to “clairvoyance” Eida essentially knows everything that’s going on anywhere in the world and what has happened. Like a very powerful librarian or historian.

As powerful as the Senrigan, it’s not like Eida will know what’s going to happen next in general or to individual people. Again, it’s more like reaching into the past than it is about the future. So far, it’s served as a means of communication between Eida and Shikamaru, her and Amado, and whoever else she likes or can tolerate. Circling briefly back to the Omnipotence, of all the people affected, Sarada remains unchanged which appears to be linked to how much Eida liked being with her and Sumire. As such, it was also shown that Sumire was unaffected by the shinjutsu.

I can’t promise anything on accuracy for this next chapter as shown by my track record thus far. Any predictions I make are going to play it fast and loose until the chapter proper comes out. Having said that, there are some things I can’t see with any degree of accuracy. There are three that are, as of writing this, anyone’s guess: Sumire, Himawari, and Daemon.

Starting with the most significant one plot-wise:

The extent of Daemon’s abilities are that just thinking about harming him is reflected in real time back at the would-be attacker. For instance, there’s a panel where Boruto and Kawaki both think about teaching the little runt a lesson only for it to literally backfire. So they both need to put up with his silliness to keep Eida from running off until further notice. For what can be said about him going forward, the only level of development seen was that he sensed an energy from Himawari, and we don’t know for certain how well the manga will follow up on that until then. Speaking of which:

The latter episodes of the anime put her in an academic setting with Kawaki going in as well on an undercover mission. For Himawari’s abilities, the Byakugan emerged in her the same day as Naruto’s inauguration and she’s shown to attack with the signature killing intent that each ninja knows about in battle. But for the most part, it’s been depicted as subconscious and while she was shown to be effective during this late anime arc, it remains to be seen if it even gets a reference in the manga if not an accompanying light novel.

Finally, there’s Sumire Kakei, who admittedly got a more generous treatment in the show, despite her starting out as a spawn of a former member of Danzo Shimura’s Foundation within the ANBU Black Ops. The show and the children accepted her with open arms and since the students graduated, she took on an apprenticeship with Dr. Katasuke Tohno. As far as a prediction, this will likely continue unabated, save for the subject area of their study being Boruto instead of Kawaki, but on the side she might be keeping in touch with Sarada on her progress to the best of her ability. And this is just the Hidden Leaf Village. The anime might bring the Sand Ninja back into the fold, but for what or how I can’t foresee. Even if it feels like Shinki et al don’t impact the story much, they’re not unaffected by the events thus far, and are at the mercy of the Sand Village’s moves as shinobi as well. Even a short filler or catch up for the audience to remind us they exist would be acceptable to me.

No matter what happens, Code is still a problem and it’s all up in the air how they choose to address that. Either way, I’m eagerly awaiting the manga’s and anime’s return.

My Favorite Podcasts

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How I found my favorite series to listen to

Before I start off proper, I want to say that I had a draft lined up for a hypothetical compare and contrast post between God of War’s Kratos and Grand Theft Auto V’s Michael DeSanta/Townley, based on some throwaway lines that I looked too into, specifically Thor lamenting that Kratos wasn’t the same as the Ghost of Sparta that physically deconstructed Mt. Olympus the hard way; and Trevor refusing to let Michael forget that he was a bank robber, a thief, a career criminal like he is and trying tooth and nail to bring him back into the fold. As you would expect, the comparison was very apples to oranges. RockStar doesn’t hang onto most of their cast from previous games. There’s a balance there between old nostalgia and new characters, and RockStar has a rotating body of protagonists compared to SCE Santa Monica. As a result, most RockStar characters have self-contained arcs while Kratos spent the better part of about nine games growing from pride to mournful to determined to vengeful in a manner of writing that whether by accident or on purpose mirrors the story structure of ancient Greek epics and recently Norse epics. One is a parody of American pop culture and the other is loosely inspired by Greco-Roman tales of adventure. If there’s a grain of truth to something like infinite monkey theorem, then I could probably produce a Shakespearean comparison between these convincingly, but until then I’ll keep it on the backburner.

So let’s get to the topic of podcasts.

I’m writing this from the perspective of a listener, not a seasoned podcaster. But I’ve spent a pretty long time listening to several so I figured I’d throw some pennies into that fountain. How I started was with Rooster Teeth Productions’ namesake podcast. It began around 2009 as the Drunk Tank, but at the time needed to switch names at a later date if it hoped to attract sponsors. I think, after a few years, Drunk Tank as a name would’ve been great for a podcast.

I found this out a few years ago on YouTube thumbing through the old videos because I wanted to see how much they’ve grown over the years. The first episode of the Rooster Teeth Podcast/Drunk Tank was much, much shorter than anything that had been produced after nearly a decade as an active podcast. An hour and ten minutes in 2009 compared to about three hours or more after 2014. Incidentally, the podcast wasn’t what made me an active subscriber of Rooster Teeth’s website or their YT channel. There were honestly different opportunities for me to become a subscriber early on that were brushed off. The first time was in 2013 around the Halloween season when I was 20 videos deep into a Dead Space 3 Let’s Play video, and RT’s gaming division, Achievement Hunter, bought ad space for an admittedly creative Halloween costume to show off. Almost fifteen-year-old me wanted to get back to the sci-fi action horror. I subbed to RT in 2018 after catching clips of their anime-style show RWBY in a WatchMojo.com video, and have since discovered their network of content in the Rooster Teeth podcast and Achievement Hunter’s Off Topic podcast, both of which I listened to while in college and during the pandemic.

As of writing this, they have several more podcasts that they produce, including Red Web, Black Box Down, F**kface (yes, really), and a few others, some of which I’ve listened to or are still listening to to this day. Halfway through the pandemic and in the leadup to my enlistment in the Army, I was somewhat spoiled for choice and bounced around podcasts like I bounce around YouTube channels.

A podcast I was tuned into briefly was the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Weird story for that one, select media outlets had mentioned Joe Rogan’s name before but in a negative light. Naturally, I took to listening to some episodes myself and the context of the conversation about Rogan was out of a concern that he’d been inadvertently promoting then-unproven COVID-19 precautions as cure-alls by allowing controversial practitioners to speak on his show. When I thumbed through his episodes, I found that as an entertainer and commentator by trade, there’s no shortage of eccentric people. Rogan knows this and going back to WatchMojo.com, they have different videos detailing Rogan’s many different guests, some of which have gotten “interesting.” Here’s one video:

The sensationalism seen in modern media tends to lift firebrand personalities and ideologues to a point where a full story isn’t guaranteed. Personally, I put the blame on sensationalism around horror stories and reports, but an unintended benefit of that is wherever I see this type of outrage media, I’m at least patient enough to keep an ear to the ground and wait for every detail to be discovered before I pass judgment.

For the JRE itself, I like to think of it as a catch-all type of podcast. There’s no single point of focus; every guest is unique and brings many individual takes and opinions with them. This rotating body of personalities makes for a unique experience for each episode. Political outlets would make me believe that he’s made his platform a home for fringe ideals and beliefs, but that’s not what I found. Individuals of this stride do come on the JRE but so do many others. All in all, my conclusion is that outrage bait in modern media is very ineffective as expressed in this video:

For Joe Rogan, it’s also very misleading. Talking heads in American media can make you believe the wrong thing about a person, but then you see more of what they have to show for themselves and in my experience I’ve shaken my fists at demagogic rhetoric for lying to me and I’ll continue to do so. For more obviously political podcasts, Tim Pool is more consistent in that field, among others who were also guests on the JRE. I also think he was dealt a bad hand, especially during the height of the pandemic. All things considered, the U.S. at the time had a frustrating response to the pandemic, and I think some journalists really wanted to vent at the time. I’ve no horse in that race, so I won’t comment further on that.

As for the rest of the podcasts I’ve listened to or subscribe to regularly, the ones under the RT umbrella do have a singular focus most of the time. Red Web is hosted by Achievement Hunter personalities Trevor Collins and Alfredo Diaz and delves into unsolved mysteries, some of which have a criminal element, others tend to be centered around modern phenomena like cryptocurrency or strangely placed architecture or local abnormalities and cryptids. I emailed them once in 2021 to see if they had plans on doing an episode about the Toynbee tiles which I have seen in Lower Manhattan when I was in college.

They do have an episode on these mysterious tiles, though I can’t claim to have been the inspiration for that episode. Black Box Down is all about aviation incidents throughout history. From the early days of Wilbur and Orville Wright to modern airline industries and carriers, there’s always a story surrounding an aviation mishap of some sort. One thing I’ve noticed during a filler episode (don’t remember which one) was that most of the audience had either never flown, rarely flown, or held some irrational fear of flying in some capacity. But when they learn more about aviation and planes, the fears are alleviated somewhat.

Personally, we never made enough to fly continuously growing up. Other family members have taken me flying twice to Miami and Orlando for Disney World and Universal Studios theme park respectively, so I never had a fear of flying or aviation. Nor have I really had as much of an interest in flying. So what’s the draw for me? Well, I also wanted to know the secrets behind why planes fall out of the sky and whatever you think that may be, a lot of times it comes down to luck. It may have something to do with terrorism in a post-9/11 world, but flashy articles about aviation are likely to be older than that. You’d be shocked to learn that air hijackings were common during the Cold War era and most of the time the planes landed safely.

BBD’s hosts are also Rooster Teeth personalities, Gus Sorola and Chris Demarais. To my knowledge, this podcast is going to cease production soon as one of the hosts, Gus, has plans elsewhere, but if you want to catch up, the Rooster Teeth website and podcast apps have all the episodes.

F**kface is hosted by three more RT personalities, Geoff Ramsey, Gavin Free and Andrew Panton. The premise behind this podcast is a series of personal stories of the three guys being idiots. Funny and embarrassing stories from childhood, school, work, etc. It’s the podcast equivalent of “if you ever feel like an idiot, remember [insert overlooked example of stupidity here].” F**kface is one of my favorite podcasts, partly because its relatable and also because I’m not always in a learning mood like with Red Web and BBD. Sometimes I wanna turn my brain off.

Speaking of which:

Trash Taste Podcast is the crown jewel podcast that I subscribed to back in 2020 during the pandemic and haven’t looked back ever since. Of all the podcasts I’ve looked at (and they aren’t that numerous honestly), TT is the one that I could forget about for a while and come back to, which was what happened after I was medically separated from the Army.

Trash Taste started off with the goal of being the prime anime podcast and has gradually morphed into a slice of life experience about living in Japan, specifically the Tokyo Metro area which might itself be a city-state like Singapore. Just sayin’, I’d love a manga series at least that took place in Matsuyama or Fukuoka or something. I won’t stop ’til I find that series.

If the name is familiar to readers, then you may recall that I recommended Trash Taste and the three hosts’ YouTube channels all the way back in February of this year. The three hosts are the anime YouTubers, British-based Connor Colquhoun or CDawgVA and Garnt Maneetapho or Gigguk, and Australian-based Joey Bizinger or The Anime Man. All three of them began their journeys on YouTube mostly independent of each other, but with a soft spot for anime.

Garnt’s first videos were reuploads from 2007 reviews he did of series like Bleach, FLCL, Lucky Star, and K-On! as examples. Early on, the inspiration of Zero Punctuation was strong, but similar to what befalls many creators, Garnt eventually found his footing and got to reviewing anime his way. So if the first video is titled “Bleach Review,” a review of Chainsaw Man or Call of the Night would be something along the lines of “Manga’s Newest Best Boy,” with Pochita in the thumbnail somewhere. Additionally, with many anime getting slated for adaptations in a year, a smart move on Gigguk’s part was to quickly summarize the anime of the season.

Connor’s early videos were made up of prank calls while impersonating the star character of the Black Butler anime. He also briefly hosted a podcast based around voice acting, which is what the VA in his online handle stands for. Connor’s content doesn’t really separate himself from his hobbies; he makes himself quite clear that he’s a gamer, a JoJo fan, a Hunter x Hunter fan, a Black Butler enjoyer, and a voice actor. As an added bonus, he mentioned a few times on his channel, in collabs and on the podcast itself that initially, his audience was 93% female, hence the moniker on the associated subreddit “The 93%.”

Finally, Joey. Unlike the other two, Joey the Anime Man has a closer connection to Japanese pop culture being half-white, half-Japanese, or in Japanese law, a hafu. He’s very in tune with his Japanese side to the point where his articulation is better than most Japanese people in Japan. Much of his older content, from my point of view, was rather short form. He started off with anime-centered content (read: hot takes), but was also doing a bunch of other stuff as well. Anime news, manga recommendations, and also gameplay videos, which he has long since moved away from.

All three do still make content on their individual channels, stream on Twitch and upload the VODs for those who are unable to tune in on Twitch live. All of these are recommendations all their own if you’re capable of supporting their content.

The reasons for choice in podcasts are all complex and varied, but I remember listening more closely to the Rooster Teeth and Off Topic podcasts so that I could have non-distracting background noise for homework assignments. I had the radio in the background tuned to my city’s classic rock radio station perpetually since around middle school. It relaxes me. But around the time I was in college, I wanted more. So I turned to podcasts, which admittedly was rough around the edges in the beginning. Only now have I realized after trial and error that you don’t exactly need to put all of your undivided attention into a podcast episode 100% of the time. You can, but all in all, I like to think most podcasters expect a healthy mix of active and passive listeners.

I should also mention that years before Trash Taste debuted in 2020, Gigguk had an anime podcast on his own channel known as Podtaku, a portmanteau of Podcast and Otaku, but as explained in this video, that podcast ran into a whole host of problems surrounding direction and timing:

I’m certain there are OGs who remember these days, and thanks to these experiences, the anime community arguably has one of the best podcasts to date, even if it’s more about living in Japan then just anime alone. And I think that’s for the best — Podtaku practically walked so Trash Taste could run.

Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable Coming Soon

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Reorganizing my list is sometimes a blessing in disguise.

Over the course of this blog, I’ve put sneak peeks at the end for the next week’s topic, and I did that last week in light of some recent news. The manga Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable (alternate name: Dosanko Gyaru is Mega Cute) has been greenlit for an anime adaptation in January of 2024.

I believe I’ve also made it aware that more often than not manga series I champion just sit in the back of the class unnoticed and unsung by handful of devotees while popular manga that I don’t pay a lot of attention to are the ones that get a greenlight relatively quickly. This is a rare instance of another manga I happen to enjoy getting the anime treatment, and soon. I recall reporting about adaptational rumors in late June concerning the My Hero Academia spinoff, but so far, no further reports on that have surfaced as of this writing, sadly. But at least you have a complete arc to round out the picture of the MHA franchise.

For Hokkaido Gals, let’s catch up to speed. In Japanese pop culture, the gal (or gyaru) is a subculture of usually teenage girls engaging in fashion trends. The typical gyaru is seen normally with a sweater (wrapped around their waist or actually wearing it), a bright-colored mini skirt, thigh socks or leg warmers, a blouse with the top few buttons undone, often light or even blonde-dyed hair, makeup, jewelry, and an attachment to her cell phone. Derisively, gyarus are said to also have a stigma of being loose and promiscuous. Call it fanservice or a mean-spirited inside joke, but of the gal-focused series I’ve seen or observed, in all but demeanor they give me the impression of Hollywood’s idea of the popular girl/cheerleader archetype.

All things considered, I think these tropes were the writers’ best attempt at therapy for an unresolved wrong. But between Galko-chan, Hajimete no Gal, and even Dosanko Gyaru among others, I’m finding that this negative stereotype is getting debunked as we go on, though its replacement isn’t all that much better.

Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable does a few things differently than previous gyaru-centric series. The typical trope is that it’s centered in Tokyo, the male MC is from elsewhere in Japan, and the gyaru MC is a native who knows her way around the Tokyo Metro. In reality, it’s a statement that means she can navigate the tens of millions of citizens, residents, and tourists who coalesce around the main hot spots of Akihabara and the famous Shibuya crossing. It’s really no different from highlighting any given tourist-y spot in any major city like NYC or L.A.

So to turn this trope on its head, the main MC is himself a Tokyoite who comes up to Hokkaido. This teaches me the power of a popular thing physical or conceived, so there might be an equivalent in other parts of Japan. The male protagonist of this manga is Tsubasa Shiki, the rather upper-class sheltered Tokyoite who has moved north to Hokkaido with his grandmother. On the way to school, he runs into gyaru and female protagonist of this manga, Minami Fuyuki, and while he attends the high school up in Hokkaido, Tsubasa meets other gyaru characters in the form of Sayuri Akino, Rena Natsukawa, and interestingly, Fuyuki’s mother.

When I say Tsubasa’s a sheltered upper-class guy, I mean it in the sense that he grew up comfortably and averagely enough to openly declare his main attraction to a very average type of Japanese woman; dark hair, composed, reserved, prim and proper — none of which are inherent in Fuyuki. As a matter of fact, she’s the type of gyaru I described earlier in this post. As for that stereotype that seems to have replaced the derisive promiscuity one, Fuyuki is also somewhat ditzy and short-sighted. In the early chapters of the manga, she’s shown to struggle with studying and even test-taking as Tsubasa and Sayuri make strides when all of them study together while Fuyuki struggles to catch up. It would be more accurate and charitable to say that she doesn’t have the kind of academic intelligence. Honestly, for all the sightseeing done in the manga, she’s a shoe-in for Hokkaido tourism, especially in a place like Sapporo or Hakodate.

Sayuri combines two tropes into one, but also comes with several surprises of her own. In appearance, she’s exactly Tsubasa’s type of girl and in fashion she dresses like a gyaru, even if only slightly. For the surprises, early in the manga, there’s two and they have an uneven connection. Sayuri has a condition known as hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating, and thus she refrained from intense physical activity. Instead, she’s become a hardcore gamer goth girl, probably the type to skip over cutscenes and 100% a game. Sounds like someone else I know of.

Rena Natsukawa is a third gyaru character, but is also a hafu, meaning that she has one parent who isn’t ethnically Japanese. She’s also a high-achieving student who just so happens to have near-unrestricted access to the library and is a tutor to her peers. Moreover, she’s admired by Fuyuki herself, so if Fuyuki ever needs help with her studies, Natsukawa-san is not too hard to find.

What’s interesting about this manga is the common tropes that are broken down. It borrows from series like Hajimete no Gal and Sono Bisque Doll, while also carving something new for itself. Call it for what it is, but with so many series alluding to or stating that they’re set in Tokyo, it’s nice to see other parts of Japan get the spotlight they need. It’s something I welcome personally when someone outside the U.S. goes to a place that probably doesn’t have a strong tourism industry, though on the other hand, the isolation tends to suit places like this better. No outside disturbances to ruin what makes a certain place unique.

The gyaru characters come into stride in their own unique ways. Since I’m only about twenty chapters in with the manga clocking in about almost 100 so far, I can’t say with certainty if there are more gyaru characters who show up down the line, but keeping the cast so small thus far does a lot to flesh them out evenly and gradually as the series progresses. Most of what I described of the characters thus far is in the chapters they each debut in with more to be revealed, but again, I’m not that far as of writing this so even if I wanted to spoil, I couldn’t. I really want those who’re interested to catch up to the manga in time for Silver Link to start distributing the anime next January.

Once it airs, if there’s nothing else taking my time away, I’ll report my findings as it airs.

While my hopes are up, some poking around in associated forums on Reddit leave me with a few concerns. I refrained from spoiling myself, but I’ve heard through the grapevine, that the most recent chapters haven’t been as good in regard to characterization, seemingly undoing the character development since the beginning and, to my interpretation, trapping Tsubasa in a needless love triangle. But I’m regarding these observations as rumors until I see it for myself, and I advise anyone to do the same. As for where to read the manga, it is getting released in volumes here in the west, but to catch the chapters as they release, my source has been the Manga Plus website and app run by Shueisha themselves.

https://mangaplus.shueisha.co.jp/titles/100116

Alternatively, there’s pirate sites, though it’s best to use caution. I recommend Manga Plus for this series specifically, because every chapter is available without subscription if you’re short of cash yourself. It’s a fun series overall and I hope it makes a seamless transition to anime. Still, holding out hope for Vigilantes though…

Mob Psycho 100

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Of the boy who lifted… with his mind

And now to turn your attention to a series that needed to be moved to the first week of July to make way for anime rumors: Mob Psycho 100.

This series was started by the mangaka One of One Punch Man fame as a contrast of sorts to both his previous manga and its central protagonist, Saitama. The protagonist of Mob Psycho is middle schooler Shigeo Kageyama, a boy who possesses the power of telekinesis but is remarkably restrained with their application. In fact, when we’re first introduced to the boy, at times he activates these powers accidentally.

Growing up, Shigeo, nicknamed “Mob,” is well-aware of his abilities and how much it makes him stand out. His main goals are to fit in with the rest of his peers at school and hopefully tell his crush his true feelings unimpeded, but there’s a bit of a snag: the boy has trouble reading social cues. Being an introvert is one thing, and it tends to overlap a lot with social anxiety and/or awkwardness, but they’re not the same thing. In summary, introversion in practice means that while the introvert has no problem interacting with folks, they don’t always favor having a rotating body of friends. In my experience in high school, in college, and in the Army, as much as I interacted with most of my peers, I stuck around with the same five or six people I always had, and that was fine for me.

Mob is generally similar, starting small and having, by my count, around ten people he talks to the most, over half of them outside of the school they all attend. Whereas Saitama from One Punch Man looked and often behaved disinterested in his job as a hero due to every single battle ending in a single punch and somewhat ruining the fun, Mob may look disinterested in a lot of things, but this is a trademark of his personality.

He has trouble expressing himself physically or verbally and often falls back on short sentences and responses in contrast to these hyperactive classmates of his. You could argue that this is a tell that he might be on the autism spectrum as noted by this Tumblr post:

https://www.tumblr.com/lost-caticorn/182635758969/why-i-think-shigeo-kageyama-mob-is-autistic

And this video:

Keep in mind, the opinions expressed in both of these are those of the creators based on their own observations and are meant to be points of debate rather than absolute truth, so read and watch with an open mind, but take these opinions for what they are.

To achieve his goals, Mob shacks up with a fitness club at his school. In context, this is a direct snub to the club that had originally requested (read: begged) for him to join their numbers: the telepathy club. This club, started by student Tome Kurata is focused mainly on paranormal like that of telekinesis and extrasensory perception or ESP, which is applicable to Mob’s physical traits rather than something more personal. As another example of Mob being treated differently, the club tries to get him to join based on that alone, and was more of an excuse for a bunch of nerds to eat snacks and hang out compared to the body improvement club that actively works out every day.

When I say being treated differently based on a single trait, it’s easy to look at that as being dismissive or distracted by that single trait instead of treating it as part of a whole and think of bullying or teasing, but on the other end of the spectrum is parading that difference as though it’s the most amazing thing in the world when the reality is markedly different.

Largely by virtue of possessing such powers, Mob’s difficulty with others is that he wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with his peers, but his inability to read the atmosphere holds him back. Conversely, others want him to be able to react to the environment of a situation, but can’t understand themselves why he’s unable to do so. In the scene I described where he joins the fitness guys instead of the paranormal folks, the student council president in a somewhat hostile tone of voice doesn’t chide him for his indecision, but emphasizes that Mob should neither be pressured nor judged for his choices. It all needs to come from within, and so his decision to join a body improvement club may seem random at first until you recall that he wants to impress his crush. He didn’t let the telepathy club pull him in, instead he chose the team that would yield positive results, and one where his powers could reliably take a backseat.

Having said that, as the series goes on the paranormal finds him one way or another, sort of like Stands in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, he turns out to be a huge ESP magnet. Most of these people start off highlighting these traits as the be-all, end-all and expect Mob to follow suit, but as I’ve noticed, he’s not that kind of kid. As much as he doesn’t want these abilities to be hindrance, he doesn’t want them to be a highlight either; Mob wants them to be seen as regular as anyone who, say, has double-joints or light gray eyes or a scar or blemish–it’s a part of him, not all of him. And while a few characters learn to see him as they see themselves — a kid who wants to fit in no matter what — others, mostly antagonists, zero in on that aspect because it worked for them and they hoped to accomplish similar success after pairing or using Mob for themselves.

Outside of Mob’s immediate family, another person who shows him respect no matter what is his boss and mentor: Arataka Reigen.

In contrast with the boy, Reigen is an extrovert who can read people so well, if humans came with a manual, he could convince you that he co-wrote it. Note that I said “convince” as this is a part of Reigen’s character. While Mob is honest and kindhearted for the most part, Reigen is a con-man with all the confidence of an old west snake oil salesman. I jest, but these are lines referenced in either the manga or the anime. Reigen is fully aware of the scam he operates at his paranormal consulting firm Spirits and Such Consultation Office, where Mob works part-time after school. The name of the business doesn’t take itself all that seriously, and he knows that he’s more or less a glorified masseuse who markets home remedies as foolproof methods against ghosts and hauntings, but what makes him such a draw for many in the series and even people reading/watching the series is that in the face of adversity he can think on the fly.

Only some folks can stay composed under pressure and Reigen belongs in that camp. He consciously uses lying and exaggeration as a tool in almost every aspect of his life, professional and personal. It doesn’t work all the time, but it gets him quite far when it does. Mob though tries his best to fit in as honestly as he can but finds more difficulty in this aspect than Reigen, who can stumble his way into fame if he could. And this is largely the point, they’re opposites in personality but neither let’s that get in the way of what is portrayed as a fruitful mentor-pupil relationship.

Reigen is knowingly duplicitous to everyone, but doesn’t want Mob to become a shady individual like he is. Mob is honest and pure, but largely because he’s just a kid, he’s also somewhat naïve to how people really behave. Mob, above all, wants to fit in and have friends, and Reigen wants him to be kind, but also smart, which is part of what I love so much about the series. Mob’s a quiet boy, who wouldn’t hurt a fly unless pushed to do so, but still his a lot of growing up to do. Reigen will gladly help him out in this aspect, but doesn’t really throw him in at the deep end.

In regard to Mob’s telekinesis, it’s in line with his emotions. In response to different situations in the series, there’s a counter from 0 to 100. The more stressful a situation, the higher the number climbs and when he reaches his limit, his powers go into overdrive. How he’s feeling when he gets there also plays a factor and his powers are proportional to his emotions. On a good day, Mob can pass the telekinesis off as the parlor trick he would want it to be, but extreme feelings of rage, sadness, compassion, or even ecstasy results in great and, depending on the circumstances, dire consequences.

I’ve watched all three current seasons of Mob Psycho 100 and only recently did I discover the theory that he may be autistic. The two sources I pointed to at the beginning of this post hold a lot of weight, but I’m not sure how I feel about the theory. Both the sources provided are stating their own opinions, but I’ve heard similar theories thrown around for different characters in manga and anime, often as a joke due in large part to the overlapping of autism and similar disorders like Asperger’s, social anxiety, or just plain old introversion. The two prime examples that have taken residence in my head as of late are those of Chainsaw Man’s Asa Mitaka and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’s Jotaro Kujo. Even if it’s also a joke, the CSM fanbase has some more evidence of Asa’s traits than the JoJo base does regarding Jotaro. He just doesn’t like loud and boisterous people, and even wants his own mother to lay off a bit.

But it’s not like Jotaro is careless. Just rough around the edges.

For Mob though, the theory does highlight the complexity of autism and similar disorders, but most internet theories throw terms around like darts on a dartboard. And I think the only way to be certain is to ask One himself, but then again, these are just theories so I’ll just leave them be. It is interesting viewing for those who are interested. But of course if you wanna form your own conclusions, you can watch the anime or read the manga for yourself.

Before I leave, I want to preview next week’s topic in light of more anime news.

As far as I’m concerned, we’re getting a good serving.

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes Might Get an Adaptation

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An overlooked spin-off may finally get some attention

In my notes, the topic of this spin-off was in the pipeline for at least a few months now, but thanks to recent rumors, it’s possible that the fabled adaptation may be entering its production stage. And as a follower of the series for a time, this has been a long time coming.

The original My Hero Academia launched in 2014 by mangaka Kohei Horikoshi, and was given an adaptation about two years later which, as of writing this, has wrapped up its sixth season a few months ago. Additionally, it’s had a series of light novels, video games, associated apparel and other accessories, and a pair of spin-offs in the form of the aforementioned Vigilantes and a chibi four-panel comic, both of which are much shorter than the original MHA manga which, as of writing this, is nearing 400 chapters and over 30 volumes. All things considered, since Horikoshi was a fan of Naruto growing up, I think it’s safe to say that if part of the dream was to have the same impact that Naruto had in the early 2000s then on that front, he’s succeeded.

The Vigilantes manga meanwhile sat in the back, being released in April 2016 and running up until May 2022, concluding its story in 15 volumes, so it can be cleared at a faster rate than it would take to catch up to the original manga from the beginning. The protagonists are Koichi Haimawari, a college student and part-time vigilante who mostly patrols a single area of Tokyo under the alter ego of the Crawler, jokingly mispronounced “Cruller”; Kazuho Haneyama, the trademark, pink-haired tsundere high school student who moonlights as an impromptu pop-star under the guise of Pop-Step; and Knuckleduster, a crusty Batman-like archetype, who embraces his quirklessness and dishes out justice the old-fashioned way.

At the outset, you can see the differences between the original’s Izuku Midoriya and this one’s Koichi Haimawari. Izuku, or Deku, began the story quirkless and with zero prospects to become a world-class professional hero until his idol, the world’s Number 1 superhero All Might, observed a hallmark of bravery and allowed him to prepare enough to inherit his quirk One For All, which has been handed down through generations of world-class heroes. Koichi, on the other hand, has a quirk called Slide n’ Glide which allows him to glide around and connect to flat surfaces with three points of contact. Kazuho’s quirk is leap which allows her to jump at great distances; this allows her to live out the idol persona she puts on.

Not just limited to these unofficial heroes, pros from the original series also make an appearance to include, the big man himself All Might, Shota Aizawa, Midnight, Present Mic, Detective Tsukauchi and several more, most of these folks being pros before teaching at UA Hero Academy. Most notably, the tone of Vigilantes is darker and a bit more mature than that of the original as it focuses on a college student this time around than a high school class. As I wrote above, All Might is there, but his presence is more of a backdrop than as a prominence. Koichi’s part-time hobby as a vigilante puts him in a tough spot legally. The original manga introduces the pro heroes who are licensed to step in alongside the proper authorities like the police and courts, and the villains are their polar opposite, but the Vigilantes manga clarifies what this means.

When quirks were first discovered in the MHA world, the laws were nonexistent. Vigilantes were the original unlicensed heroes who stepped up to answer to the rampant chaos borne from the emerging quirk era. The law eventually came up, not to explain the makings of a hero but to classify villains. The first place to have laws written on heroism or villainy was the U.S. state of Rhode Island. Of 189 vigilantes whose candidacy for heroism was up for review, only seven were allowed to continue on as the U.S.’s first pro heroes. The issue for the other 182 candidates was that they didn’t have the qualities that made the trademark hero and either continued on as vigilantes or villains. Ironically, the law’s adherence to licensing puts vigilantes in the same spot as villains despite vigilantes being the origins of the laws and most vigilantes running counter to full-blown villainy. The causal loop is definitely not lost on the manga though.

Burgeoning heroes who find themselves in vigilante limbo though aren’t hopeless thankfully; there’s a program that allows pro heroes to recruit vigilantes as sidekicks and incidentally, some big name pros in the original began as sidekicks before finding their own paths in the hero world. Vigilantes also has a sort of slice of life element to it as well. If Koichi was up for hero candidacy, there’s no shortage of witnesses to his do-gooding in the immediate neighborhood, as well as some pro heroes who can give him a leg up if he needs it. There’s glimpses of him aiding people with minor inconveniences just as he assists his fellow vigilantes and pros in stopping villains in any capacity.

There are also several plot points in the original that have origins in the spin-off series. Another notable difference between Deku and the Crawler were how they both deal with their lots in life: Deku’s aspirations would’ve been impossible even if he had a relatively worthless quirk; meanwhile Crawler’s initial poor handling of his own quirk didn’t really stop him from attempting to help, even if it was with a stray dog (that’s sort of a joke, there is a dog in trouble later in the manga; not so much of a spoiler since it gets resolved in about five panels). Deku obviously starts off in high school with his head in the clouds; Koichi tends to keep it realistic and is more in it for the good of the locals, so if he went the pro hero route, the money wouldn’t be his main motivation, though the same would apply to Deku.

The Vigilantes manga’s place in canon can be interpreted as a sort of foil for the checkerboard presentation of the main plot. Vigilantes as unlicensed, illegal heroes are shown to be a necessary evil in the law’s eyes, and a digestible aid from a practical standpoint. With pro heroes, there’s laws that rein a hero in from overstepping the established boundaries, but vigilantes being unregulated could go a step further to prevent an escalation before it becomes a problem for the pros, which turns out to be Knuckleduster’s own philosophy in the manga.

Personally, I welcome Vigilantes as a bit more grounded in its approach to what the original is doing. It’s still a Shonen series at heart, but in practice it takes things a bit further with an older, more mature protagonist who is still optimistic about his future even though he’s buried pretty deep in the gray muck of hero laws. It also has a bit of an edgier portrayal that would really challenge the cast of the original MHA, but not grotesquely or irreverently as Amazon’s The Boys. In the MHA world, Homelander and A-Train would be high on hero killer Stain’s crap list.

If the rumors are to be true, then a notable rarity in anime production would be the adaptation of a complete manga. The only other case that comes to mind would be that of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure reaching a successful adaptation in 2012, one year after the eighth arc of the manga was being written. That said, all we have are the rumors, so it might not be true until an animator or someone else in the industry has more concrete evidence of an adaptation in the pipeline.

For now, the chapters are available on Viz Media and Shueisha, and its 126 chapters are spread across 15 volumes. To my knowledge there’s no collection or box set to speak of for the lesser known Vigilantes arc, but don’t let that stop you from making your own. For my take, it’s a B+. Avoiding spoilers, there are minor instances that could’ve been reworked or omitted, but the rest of the time it’s a solid manga.

To go along with this overlong recommendation wearing the mask of a blog post is the last YouTube recommendation for the month of June. Adding onto the cadre of Trash Taste affiliates and allies is the YouTube channel Abroad in Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/@AbroadinJapan/about

The channel and other associated Abroad channels are run by British grammar educator and YouTuber Chris Broad who first moved to Japan in 2010. Ever since, he’s made video after video on daily life in Japan going by prefecture, sights to be seen, activities to perform, and generally places to visit. While not a full-blown weeb, his guest appearances on Trash Taste have introduced him to several anime series and he has revealed to the TT boys that his favorites included most of Studio Ghibli’s lineup and anything directed by Hayao Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon or even Kenichiro Watanabe to name a few directors. Normally, when it comes to Japan-based YouTubers, one of the first people to go to is someone who’s native, but spending over a decade and change in Japan should put him in the same room as other Japan-based YouTubers, especially since he’s been up and down the country.

If you’re still looking for a slice of Japan, but you’ve had your fill of anime, Chris Broad’s always got a video or series up, to include the likes of Dr. Jelly as part of a collaboration with The Anime Man, and Wacky Weekends and Journey Across Japan done mostly in collaboration with CDawgVA.

My Preference for Older Music

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Always the classics

Since this blog went up in January, I’ve written several weekly posts about primarily interactive and visual forms of entertainment, but the title of this post is about a form of entertainment that I don’t see most people discuss online a lot: music.

I hang around on the anime-based subreddits more so than anything music related, so these two fields collide mostly in passing than directly. The outliers here would be the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series and anime themed around music like Your Lie in April, Carole and Tuesday, K-On!, and Detroit Metal City. Does this mean the fundamentals of the discussion are different in music? Nope.

In anime, one of the most enduring discussions is dubs or subs. Video games have the console wars, and TV in general tends to have heated debate over what show is good or if X show is better than Y. All bog standard really, and regarding music, fittingly the songs are all the same. Old people music, dad rock, new age music… the debate around music has ties to the generational gaps. In modern history, it took pioneers within an established group to form something new, and in western music in particular, most music genres were spearheaded by black Americans in history. In the 1910s and during the First World War, 1st. Lt. James Reese Europe was known as the father of ragtime music. The interwar era and after had musicians like Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Louis Armstrong who led the music world in jazz during and following the Roaring 20s; and during the counterculture, civil rights era, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Jackson 5 helped open doors for more music genres to follow.

You might know more about the last group considering the reach they’ve all had since the 1960s compared to the musicians from before. And they all tend to reflect the differences in musical genres that they all grew up with and eventually grew to develop all their own. My family is definitely familiar with a lot of these musicians and the people they inspired or even collaborated with. Being with my mom, and being one of the younger people in my family, I was normally exposed to the older musicians and such.

In the eighth grade going onto high school, I started listening to AC/DC. My friend brought over his Xbox 360 which I didn’t have at the time yet, and one of the games for the system (GTA IV) had AC/DC on the in-game classic rock radio station at the time. After that I listened to more of the band in the first half of high school and continued on to more classic rock bands by day and metal bands at night. Most often my introduction came from hearing the music in a different medium. Chief among them: TV.

Above all, AC/DC and other bands like Guns n’ Roses benefitted fairly well from commercial advertising like the video above. I discovered other bands through a variety of different media. If it wasn’t TV or video games like GTA, it was different fan projects and animations. As much as I prefer older music, it’s clearly not the only type I listen to.

Online, there’s a series of stick figure animatics called Killing Spree created by Australian animator Sam Green. Going by the name of the series, the nature of its content is inherently violent even for a stick figure animatic. Fittingly, part of the soundtrack makes use of metal as a whole, the most common soundtracks coming from the band Disturbed.

Some of the tracks from their albums were used for background music in the animations and they inspired me to look through the rest of the band’s track list when I was in the tenth and eleventh grades. By the time I was a senior, this part of my metal phase influenced most of my tastes. Some of these aspects I still have and others I’ve abandoned because looking back, it was just stupid.

Black on everything gets a bit dull after a while, but one of the more memorable moments from this point in my life was a hand-me-down Led Zeppelin T-shirt that was a good luck charm to me about 85% of the time I had it on or near me. Then I graduated and the power of luck was seemed to have been wasted in high school. It was good while it lasted, but it didn’t stop me from listening to multiple different musicians. Throughout college and even now, I’ve diversified my tastes quite a bit. Rock, metal, and grunge are my top three all around, but I have since branched out. Though, I have a line drawn at certain genres and artists.

The spotlight makes it extremely difficult to be a controversy-free figure and I acknowledge that many of my favorite rock and metal icons have been under fire for various reasons. Looking deeper at the context though, there’s a difference between a minor legal trouble and being a ginormous jerk. In the case of the God of War series, the protagonist Kratos was an a-hole, but there were things he still cared about: glory, Sparta, and his family. Musicians across different genres have courted controversy and once or twice, especially by accident, tends to be forgiven. Sure, it’s embarrassing to learn that this musician got a DUI or an unpaid parking ticket or — if the rumors are true — flushed their drugs down the toilet to avoid the police, not realizing The Police was another British rock band, as what I’d heard had happened to the Rolling Stones. Sidenote: I just googled that to see if it was true and several articles seemed to have confirmed it. Like this one below:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-may-21-et-quick21.5-story.html

But some of this stuff is peanuts compared to what some other musicians have done off stage. Rappers like XXXTentacion and Tekashi 69 have been in hot water for more serious offenses like assault or trafficking, Kanye in December of 2022 sung the praises of Adolf Hitler while on a show with Alex Jones, and the less said about neo-Nazi hate music, the better.

But of course, I’m cherry picking. We each have our tastes and if I played the role of the old man yelling at the clouds any further, I’d live up to the old satanic panic narrative that followed metal bands and funny enough DND for years.

And the “ban this filth” nonsense has been around for ages, and around most aspects of media and entertainment. It’s all but lost on us now, but if you ask an old person who was there, two of the most outrageous topics of discussion would’ve either been Elvis shaking those hips or John Lennon placing the Beatles’ fame above that of Jesus Christ in the Bible Belt states.

For me personally, my mom was the one to introduce and inspire my affection for classic rock and such so she didn’t resist or protest my tastes. My grandma, on the other hand, tried at the start but she stopped when she realized some of the bands I listened to were all around her age now, and there were more important stuff to focus on than who I was listening to. Call me the oddball, but if it was hard for me to take violent video games seriously, then there was really no hope for the supposed satanic messages in Stairway to Heaven.

This week’s YouTube recommendation is akidearest. Months ago, I recommended the Trash Taste podcast and the individual hosts’ YouTube channels. This time, one of them, Joey “The Anime Man” Bizinger’s girlfriend, Agnes “akidearest” Diego, is also a content creator with a channel of her own. She began in 2014 describing different aspects of anime as a whole from associated conventions to a bunch of different tropes across many shows.

Since moving to Japan, she has continued with this type of content while also adding in different aspects of life in Japan, particularly different customs and conveniences that contribute to the culture shock likely to be experienced by foreigners to Japan. As a bonus, both Akidearest and The Anime Man have a video about their most recent trip to the Philippines.

https://www.youtube.com/@akidearest/about

The Nintendo Formula

TiberiusLeave a comment

One of the most consistent formulas since 1985

Before I begin proper, I’m basing this blog post on on-the-fly research and my own observations. Don’t take everything I put here seriously, I am going to be wrong somewhere in here.

Nintendo needs no introduction. There’s a strong percentage that a property belonging to them has come into your possession somehow. Donkey Kong? Mario? Kirby? Pokémon? Pikmin? Maybe it was something more action-oriented like Metroid, or something a bit more obscure with a cult following?

Well, no matter how it started, it almost always goes pretty well for what started as a hanafuda card company. Even the cult classics have devotees of their own. Just try to find someone who doesn’t know about the following:

A little bit of the background: in 1983, the movie E.T. was so popular, it franchised remarkably quickly for a film released at the time. As such, Atari got the million-dollar idea to make a video game out of the property over the course of about five or six weeks. And a lesson we continually forgot even after Sonic ’06 is that games are to NEVER BE RUSHED. Nothing good comes from kicking a game out the door before it’s ready. Like a beef hamburger, you need to cook it thoroughly.

In what became a lesson to burgeoning devs at the time, E.T. for the Atari 2600 went down in history as both the worst video game in all of gaming history and a mass murderer in the video game industry, almost killing it en masse before it got a chance to grow. Developers fell off left and right with how poorly received and sold E.T. was which might as well be an ironic twist of fate. This was E.T., one of Spielberg’s crown jewels, and the aftermath of its failure proved a few things:

  1. If the best of the best can’t take a W, then it certainly lowers morale for most witnesses
  2. Games based on movies would go on to have the worst W/L ratio of all time
  3. Considering Spielberg movie-based games to be released after this, it was for the better that the man quit while he was behind or we would’ve had Saving Private Ryan the game.

And no, I don’t mean World War II games which do work. I mean a game based on this movie above.

The mid-1980s were when the pool of video game developers had shrunk in record time. Then came Nintendo in October of 1985 to save the industry and breathe new life into the industry with a full library of launch titles, unlicensed games, and even to this day homebrew games. In the west, Nintendo became something of a god. They gave us the templates for nearly everything that made for great games, and as the years went on and more and more developers and studios worked with Nintendo to develop games, consoles, or distribute on their platforms, Nintendo has been running home with the gold.

In the modern day, they took the crown from Sega who abandoned console manufacturing in 2001 after the failure of the Dreamcast. Then again, to not sound like a propaganda piece for the Nintendo Empire, they’ve shot themselves in the foot several times. Censorship and a heavy push for a family friendly image turned off some of the more core players in the 1990s and 2000s for a start. Mortal Kombat’s Nintendo ports have been major misses than hits with all the blood, which can be turned off at least in Deadly Alliance, but of all the things to censor in the game, turning the blood to sweat is something I’d expect of a modern day Chinese distribution of Demon Slayer or Spy x Family.

At least Sega had the fans’ backs on this with the blood code.

Another failure was found in several of the consoles they released over the years. The GameCube was meant to be what the Switch is now, a console that can switch between mobile and home functions at will, but it wasn’t to be. The tech wasn’t there yet. By 2006, the Wii launched with high intensity motion controls that proved to be a fad at best and a nuisance at worst. Never mind the fact that Xbox tried it with the Kinect and PlayStation with the Move around the same time; the motion controls mostly worked with things like Wii Sports and other games encouraged to be played with families or with friends at parties and whatnot. Core gamers wouldn’t have been down for that, so third party devs were more likely to work with Xbox and Sony than stick with Nintendo’s wacky rules long term. Props to those who stuck it out though; we got some really creative games out of that.

The biggest one in recent memory was the Wii U, which was either worse than the Wii or better than nothing depending on who you ask. Honestly, the Wii U circled back to issues that plagued other consoles from the 90s, in the sense that the tech was too much and the devs weren’t capable of adapting to this new fangled machinery, hence why the 3DO and Neo Geo sold so poorly and had a tinier library compared to the Great Library that would eventually become modern day Nintendo. Of course, these all had their own hidden gems. Metal Slug anyone?

But the one notable blunder in Nintendo’s history that gets overlooked these days is that they technically created one of their rivals in PlayStation. Sony and Nintendo had worked with each other prior to the mid-1990s and in the lead up to the PSX’s debut console, Sony and Nintendo had been developing a game-changing console that would incorporate early 3D graphics and transition to CD-ROM technology. Unfortunately, Nintendo’s paranoia caused them to renege on an agreement and in a fit of rage, Sony made Sony Computer Entertainment as the ultimate vengeance. Basically, Nintendo is PlayStation’s father.

Despite the decades of video game development under Nintendo’s belt, their flagship series haven’t changed all that much. Even when Donkey Kong and Brooklyn’s least infamous plumber became well-known across the world, the core of their respective games hasn’t really changed since then. For as long as there’s been a Mario, there’s been a princess in another castle. Donkey Kong used to lob barrels at him, but retiring from that put him in the crosshairs of the crocodiles and King K Rule, paid for in part by the United States Marine Corps. If you don’t get that reference, watch this:

Third parties tend to get a pass when developing for a Nintendo console, but their own properties have been on the same script with almost no change whatsoever. Even the spinoffs don’t make much of a difference when they have little impact on story canonicity. I don’t mean the spinoffs from after Mario and Donkey Kong made names for themselves after the original 1981 game.

In another instance revealing how little I play Nintendo games, I can’t recall Mario making mention of saving Pauline from the ape, nor are there any mentions of the plumber dodging Donkey’s barrels. So what, did they have a professional relationship only? Because every spinoff suggests elsewise. For a franchise with 5% story, the spinoffs do a better job at fleshing all the characters out than the main games, so this is Nintendo’s fault for sticking with the same storyboard for almost 40 years.

Tennis, sports, partaking in the Olympics themselves, go-karting; if I fell into a coma and woke up decades later, oblivious to what Mario even is and I got into through one of the spinoffs, I would’ve initially thought they were all good buddies who play games together, which is probably a reference to a Nintendo ad campaign. This all being said, its a formula that works for nearly every Nintendo game. The only one I recall trying something different was Kirby with more enemies to fight, more complex plots at least during the GBA and DS eras, and callbacks to old mechanics or concepts from previous installments. And that pink round thing almost always has a score to settle with Dedede, even if things are different for Forgotten Land.

The crux in my custard here is that if they can throw more ideas at Kirby’s pink mass, then surely Nintendo has what it takes to try something else with some of their other properties. The Zelda series alone has a new idea with each release. Consider how different each Zelda game is from each other. Windwaker, Majora’s Mask, Ocarina of Time, A Link to the Past, and about 4,000 other Zelda games. There’s always variety in the story of Princess Zelda and the mute, canonical femboy.

Zelda’s tastes are exquisite and pristine.

Even if Kirby is owned more by HAL Laboratory, Zelda is a wholly-owned Nintendo property and the ideas trough is always going to that hungry pig while the rest of the zoo animals starve. Maybe it’s due to the way Japan does things (what with most companies being run by old men who loathe change), but it really isn’t gonna hurt them to try something new with the rest of their lineup. Even one-off experiments are worth the effort. No one was really feeling it at the time, but the XCOM hybrid that was Mario and Rabbids was something different. Good? Bad? Don’t ask me, I didn’t play it. But there is gameplay of it in full on YouTube and it stands as the second thing I recommend aside from Nintendo picking a different direction after almost 40 years.

The third recommendation is a YouTube channel called Ryan McBeth.

https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMcBethProgramming/about

Ryan McBeth is a retired US Army platoon sergeant and expert in software engineering and development, cybersecurity, military analysis and open source intelligence. He has a lineup of t-shirts, makes videos and YouTube shorts (and probably also TikTok videos) about the military and battlefield analysis. Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started in February of 2022, he’s made videos about several aspects of the ground operations with some other stuff sprinkled on the side. I highly recommend his channel and as an added bonus, if you have any inquiries on software development or cybersecurity, try reaching out to him for that as well. And to top it all off, with YouTube being what it is regarding censorship, full length explanations and videos can be found on his associated Substack page.

A Somewhat Complex Introduction to Pokémon

TiberiusLeave a comment

Better late than never?

This will serve as both an indictment against me, and as an explanation for what I’ve always thought about the Pokémon franchise. Before we start proper, my original notes were going to say that this was a “Late Intro to Pokémon,” but that’s inaccurate and misleading considering what I grew up with. Such a title would suggest that I had never heard of Pokémon before or bothered to look into the series itself, which just isn’t true of the rest of the franchise outside of the games. The games were what I was late to, not the anime, or the toys, or the cards. So, this post will be mostly about the games.

I say that my introduction to Pokémon is inaccurate because growing up in the 2000s meant seeing some variation of the franchise on TV through the anime or through advertising. I certainly recall tuning in to Pokémon when it was on channels like Cartoon Network, or Nicktoons or 4KidsTV alongside Yu-Gi-Oh!, but admittedly, it hadn’t really caught me the same way Dragon Ball Z did at the time. Still, it was one of the two properties with something that can be imitated in real life in the form of the card games.

If you also grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, you or someone you know probably had a booklet or folder or something similar that had a full deck of cards or more. Like Yu-Gi-Oh!, I was normally just the bystander watching some of my friends play and battle it out from the sidelines. It got the most focus in the latter years of elementary and all throughout middle school, especially during recess. For me, the allure of Shonen series was the more intense battles that could be seen through the original big three: Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, with a special mention to Dragon Ball. I didn’t know it at the time, but the rest of the franchise went hand in hand with the anime, similarly to Yu-Gi-Oh!, so the point flew over my head on a supersonic jet.

I always thought all of this was enough to get a fill of the series, but there’s a noticeable difference between watching the show, engaging with the cards, and playing the video games; a difference I never saw until recently.

I knew how the games started for the most part: name character, choose starting Pokémon, adventure, battle. Sometime last year, I started the game on a browser emulator which as a sidenote, was not very hard to find, probably because the technology for a handheld is seemingly less complicated than that of a home console (don’t quote me on that), and I began with the first game in the series: Pokémon Red. My starting Pokémon was Squirtle, whom I advanced up to Wartortle after fighting off several wild Pidgeys and Ratatas. Then it hit me… like a wild Pidgey.

When I started this post, I was certain it was mainly about the Pokemon games’ layout and such, but it seems to be a bit more complicated than even I thought and opened up with. For all the love I give to adventure games and RPGs, some of the gripes came down to leveling up and the random fights that happened no matter what. Then again, there were other games that had this design philosophy and I remember getting far and playing most of them to completion. Naruto: Path of the Ninja, handheld versions of the Avatar games, in some aspects Genshin Impact and most recently Honkai: Star Rail. I even watched gameplay of a pacifist run of Undertale.

So, I clearly had no real issue with RPGs or JRPGs, but I didn’t start or attempt a Pokemon game until I was 23. So, what gives?

I don’t feel like leaving on a cop out answer, but the only one that makes sense to me would probably be overexposure. A franchise this influential to pop culture, media, and such that South Park can parody it, even when it just breaks ground in the west didn’t feel like there would be too much to discover by myself, which may also explain why I’ve been hugging and cheering on underrated and unsung manga like Undead Unluck, The Elusive Samurai, and one that I also discovered recently, but haven’t written about yet, Rokudenashi Blues.

But if you read all that and recalled that I’m so caught up with Naruto that I could in some aspect be the “Boruto Guy” with all the lore in just that franchise, you might also question how I can be overexposed to Pokemon but not take similar issue with Naruto and the other stuff. Why the bias? Well, first that’s a question to be asked about almost everything in life, and in context… as much as I tried to avoid it, the cop out “I don’t know” might have to suffice. Maybe the appeal wasn’t as strong for the games as it was for the 12,000 anime iterations. Unlike most of my friends at the time, I was way more of a moderate consumer of anything Pokemon compared to the other stuff that ate up my attention. Whatever a superfan of Pokemon hoped to have, I sought the same with Naruto all things considered and the free-roaming, adventure style I personally found more engaging then walking around Pallet Town waiting for the danger to find me like I mixed the paranoia pills with strong Colombian coffee.

I think it also comes down to the early Pokemon games at the time relying on the player’s imagination to fill in the blanks as opposed to what a modern Pokemon game is capable of now.

That being said, I wouldn’t say I’d want to stop trying to get into Pokemon. Googling the franchise will definitely put it in my radar in the form of banner ads down the line and admittedly none of what I bring up is bound to be a staple of the games anymore. The battles happening at random weren’t any fun in Path of the Ninja and from what I remember the furthest I got there was the Land of Waves arc. I might revisit this in the future after looking at gameplay of later Pokemon games. We’ll have to wait and see.

For this week, I recommend the YouTube channel Clownfish TV.

https://www.youtube.com/@ClownfishTV/about

Clownfish TV is an independent media outlet that focuses on games, TV, animation, comics, and pop culture mainstays and staples, chief among them Disney and its growing properties. Co-hosted by husband and wife duo, Kneon and GeekySparkles, the channel makes daily videos about media at a rate of two to three a day. Additionally, they have merchandise up for sale on their own website and as of this writing, a comic strip based on dialogue spoken in the videos.

Mortal Kombat 1

TiberiusLeave a comment

Another entry to the king of blood and guts

About two weeks ago, a teaser was released for the next installment in the Mortal Kombat franchise slated for released in September of this year. The gist of the teaser was that post MK 11 Aftermath, there’s a new timeline and therefore a new god because Kronika and her merry band of lackeys have been defeated or written out of history as to not muck anything up like they did the first time.

In spite of what I wrote above, the announcement doesn’t reveal much, though it still requires a general knowledge of the plot line of the games from 1992 to the 3D era of the 2000s for why it was soundly rebooted in 2011 and the timeline post-2011, both of which I think I can safely say I have knowledge in.

To set a primer, Ed Boon and John Tobias began working on a fighting video game with digitized sprites for the actors in 1991 for arcades. A small team of programmers, actors with an intermediate or advanced knowledge of martial arts, and a marketing team brought the dream to light, but with a twist: blood. Unlike other video games like Final Fight or Streets of Rage or more appropriately Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat got grizzlier with the inclusion of blood and the option to kill the opponent in the ring by dismemberment

In the era where video games were the same as children’s toys, Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, a video game released the same year as MK, were the subject of intense political debate over what is appropriate for a child to see in fictional media. You and I both know that try as one may, there’s no realistic way to imitate the exaggerated violence seen in a video game, but nevertheless the extremeness in the game led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB.

The ESRB is responsible for the guidelines for parents when it comes to purchasing video games for their kids. When it was created, most adults rarely played video games, or aged out of it with time (not including parents), and were likely to be unaware of what was in the game. But with a specific letter marking on the cover of the box, a parent can best determine what their child can play on paper. In my experience, it takes a trusting or admittedly negligent adult to let their child get away with playing something like GTA or Call of Duty, a problem that persists even now.

Still, whatever would come out of these government hearings on interactive entertainment wouldn’t matter much to gamers and arcade goers of the time. The controversy and the marketing worked wonders that Ed Boon and Midway Games could make more sequels in the 1990s and eventually get the games on home consoles when Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was given its’ own spotlight during E3 2002.

As for the plot of the Midway Games, the evil emperor of Outworld Shao Kahn has absorbed another realm into his empire and has his sights trained on Earthrealm. The Elder Gods put their foot down and give the realm a chance to fight back through a tournament. Over the course of a millennium, 10 consecutive tournaments are meant to take place with the last one determining the fate of the realm. Shao Kahn’s representative on earth is a sorcerer named Shang Tsung who has the power to take souls and replenish his youth. Basically, he’s immortal, and every time a fighter dies in the tournament he takes their souls, though he has different methods of stealing souls if he wants to (and he always does). The tournaments are spread out over the course of fifty years, which means theoretically someone can fight in two tournaments if they’re healthy and lucky enough to live to be that old.

MK 1992 begins at the 10th tournament, and the final boss of the game is Shang Tsung who additionally can shapeshift. I have fond memories of this levitating old man transforming into the sub-boss Goro while I was playing the game in the Midway Arcade Treasures collection.

But when he does lose, the character Ed Boon et al determines to be the default protagonist, Bruce Lee clone number 1009 Liu Kang is chosen to be the champion of Mortal Kombat. At the same time, Shang Tsung is reprimanded and demoted by Shao Kahn who decides to take matters into his own hands and becomes the final boss of 1993’s Mortal Kombat II, complete with a larger cadre of characters representing Outworld and Earthrealm.

History repeats itself and the heroes soundly defeat Shao Kahn, but the power hungry emperor isn’t done yet. By 1995’s Mortal Kombat 3, the man is desperate to have Earthrealm in his expansion pack, and at the risk of sounding like a cheerleader for several historical conquerors, Shao Kahn could’ve studied the techniques of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and militarily Adolf Hitler to learn why throwing your men at the frontlines like this doesn’t work or what worked for the defenders at the expense of the invaders, but then again, Shao Kahn has almost always been a one-track conqueror. Even a little bit of credit is too much for a character like him.

By 1997, Mortal Kombat 4 played with 3D graphics to give us another cast of ne’er-do-wells to fight. Shinnok, and his protégé Quan Chi. I admit that my exposure to MK4 is limited with the exception of some of the character endings making it to MK: Deadly Alliance’s krypt as unlockables, but one that I remember was that if playing as Quan Chi, the sorcerer betrays Shinnok and everyone else to hold infinite power. In another ending, the character Baraka takes serious issue with this and attempts to kill the sorcerer who just so happens to have necromantic powers and becomes another skeleton in Quan Chi’s graveyard, funny enough.

Quan Chi himself was written as the source of Scorpion’s woes. For the longest time, it was believed that the rivalry between himself and Sub-Zero was due to Sub-Zero’s clan of Lin Kuei warriors exterminating him, his clan the Shirai Ryu, and his family, when in MK4 it was revealed that the Lin Kuei never went after Scorpion’s wife and son. That was Quan Chi’s doing, and when the dunderhead revealed his hand in an attempt to be rid of his lapdog by transporting him to the Netherrealm, Scorpion grabbed the sorcerer at the last minute to exercise his misdirected vengeance on the sorcerer, leading into Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.

Released in November 2002, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance did 3D much better than its predecessor and had more room to expand on existing mythology thanks to cutscenes and extra content in the game’s krypt. With a payment of a specific amount of koins, different stuff can be unlocked from pre-production art to full characters and their alternate costumes to movies and interviews with the staff and many more.

Plot-wise, the game includes an introductory movie narrated by the thunder god Raiden to a gaggle of Earthrealm warriors whom he plans to lead in a coming battle. Quan Chi survived Scorpion’s onslaught in the Netherrealm and escaped into a hidden tomb containing the mummified remains of Outworld’s ancient dragon king. To make matters worse, he teamed up with Shang Tsung and the two sought to remove the obstacles in their way to power.

By Mortal Kombat’s rules, Shao Kahn was revived which teaches you all you need to know about how seriously death is taken in this universe. It’s not like in Naruto where a reanimation jutsu can revive a character by way of a sacrifice; most of the time, characters tend to Kratos their way back into the world of the living because “I decide when I die!”

Anyway, the Deadly Alliance takes out Shao Kahn and in a ballsy move for a creative in any industry, they take out Liu Kang himself. The champion of Mortal Kombat is killed and his and other dead warriors’ souls are used to revive the mummifed army of the dragon king. If they succeed, Outworld and eventually Earthrealm will fall at their hands.

Raiden had previously ascended to the position of Elder God, but the chaos and peril unfolding in the realms coupled with the Elder Gods’ inaction to it all motivated him to relinquish this position and take charge personally. Almost every warrior died or defected to the side of evil and 2004’s Mortal Kombat: Deception begins with a new narrator.

In Deception, the Konquest mode takes the player through the past of Shujinko and his journey to recover the Kamidogu, or godly tools, to be transported to the Elder Gods. This lifelong journey introduces Shujinko and puts him at different points in the Mortal Kombat timeline. As a matter of fact, he helped Scorpion find Quan Chi in the Netherrealm and was one of the first to learn of Liu Kang’s death with further developments pulling the two in different directions with a significant point of divergence. I wrote above that most of the warriors representing the good guys died or defected, but in Shujinko’s case, spoiler alert, he’d been an unknowing tool of a greater evil, worse than anything the Deadly Alliance could ever conceive and had been hard at work performing this evil for decades until the big reveal at the end of MK: Deception’s Konquest mode.

Before Shujinko defeated his enigmatic puppeteer, Onaga had marched into Outworld to take back his army and empire by force. Raiden and the Deadly Alliance knew the dangers that would come with an Onaga victory and sought to stop it, even to the point of self-destruction (which happens to be one of Raiden’s fatalities in Deception), but it proved fruitless when Onaga was revealed to be the sole survivor when the blast eliminated everything… or so it would seem. Raiden also lived, but was so corrupted by mortals messing with reality that he set out on a new mission to strike back pre-emptively.

Following Shujinko’s victory against the dragon king, Raiden appeared before him as punishment for allowing Onaga to even get as far as he did. The intentions of either didn’t matter to the immediate consequences, nor was it important to the corrupted thunder god that he rectified his mistake. Raiden wanted blood reparations and Shujinko wouldn’t be the only one to face this wrath.

Speaking of messing with reality, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon was the first time that it would happen in the MK universe and owing to its name, Armageddon was what was at stake at the time. Every fighter in Mortal Kombat history (including maligned characters) fought each other in the realm of Edenia, in a large crater where a pyramid dedicated the realm’s protector god Argus would later rise housing a fire spawn creature named Blaze. At Blaze’s death, the victor would set off a reaction with one of two outcomes: annulment of all abilities or total extermination.

In this game’s Konquest mode, the creators of the quest Argus and his wife, sorceress Delia, designed the quest with a winner in mind, their eldest son Taven. If things went right, he and his brother Daegon would engage in a quest sold to them as a friendly competition where they’d acquire weapons and armor to defeat Blaze and become full gods instead of the demigods they are now. Thing is, they intended for Taven to win it all, but when Daegon was awoken earlier than expected, he found out about this and went on a third, unpredictable path; he founded the Red Dragon clan and spent the last few centuries finding Blaze who it’s revealed was kidnapped and hypnotized to watch over the last dragon egg in MK: Deception. Bad sense of direction? Incompetence? Bull manure? Well, it’s convenient either way that in Armageddon’s Konquest mode Daegon’s clan had better luck ambushing his own brother than he did in finding the main element in the quest.

I made this meme just now. I’m probably wrong about Daegon’s efforts here, but with what I learned this late into the 3D era, it’s still a bit weird that he put more of his time in trying to kill his brother than in finding Blaze first. It makes it even weirder knowing how technologically advance the Red Dragon clan was to perform human experiments on their own members attempting to turn them into hybrid dragons like Reptile.

Anyway, Taven fights his way to Edenia intending to defeat Daegon out of necessity before being persuaded by Blaze himself to finish the quest. At the end of this, we can conclude that Taven became a god as intended and one of the adverse affects of the quest was that instead of death or depowering, everyone got stronger and the realms remained in peril, for which Taven would have to serve as the bulwark against extinction. And so the 3D era ends in a bit of a whimper.

The developer side had several troubles to deal with themselves. Mortal Kombat successfully franchised to get an animation and toy line ups and comics, but spin-off games were Midway’s Achilles’ heel. 2000 saw the release of Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, a game that Ed Boon wants everyone to forget.

If the co-creator won’t aid the game, why would anyone else, right? Before that, 1997 also saw the release of Mortal Kombat: Mythologies which was meant to tell the stories of individual characters beginning with the one who appears in every installment: Sub Zero, but the controls, graphics, and full AMV cutscenes saw hardly any returns on investment and so they didn’t bother with another spin-off until Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks in 2005, a game with excellent beat ’em up mechanics even if the roster is quite small. A sequel to this called Mortal Kombat: Fire and Ice was in pre-production, but the only traces of its existence come in the form of concept art before the project was canned between 2006 and 2010 when Midway’s assets were sold to Warner Bros. following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

By 2011, Ed Boon and co. started again under the new studio NetherRealm Studios and redid much of the story of the first three games in Mortal Kombat 2011, colloquially known as MK9. By the end of the game, Shao Kahn was soundly defeated and in the immediate aftermath, Quan Chi and Shinnok redo this timeline’s events of MK4, but with a twist. 25 years and the old generation of characters had had children of their own, many of whom joined in the fight to not only defeat evil but to contain it.

The connecting element this time around is Shinnok’s amulet which can’t be destroyed and thus needs to be heavily guarded around the clock. The problem here is that there are saboteurs around and the new leader of Outworld, Kotal Kahn, doesn’t easily trust Earthrealm. Things don’t go as bad for them until halfway through when Earthrealm chooses not to eliminate immediate threats and dangers where they spring up, even when they would all make sense.

The saboteur in question is a character named D’Vorah, who went down in history as one of the less welcome additions to the roster in recent memory. The point of divergence here is that Shang Tsung and Quan Chi don’t form the Deadly Alliance (though there’s a neat reference in MK9’s story mode). There’s also no Onaga and Blaze despite there also being references to them both. So no Deadly Alliance, and no Quan Chi to betray Shinnok. Instead, Shinnok is summoned behind enemy lines and finally for a necromancer, Quan Chi’s ability to command the dead is explored in this timeline when he has the souls of fallen heroes who dream of taking their revenge on Raiden, who still goes dark in this timeline.

The shoe’s on the other foot now with Dark Raiden taking the plunge against evil like how Shao Kahn opted to be the final boss in the other games. This time, Shinnok’s mother Kronika and his sister Cetrion rearrange the timeline to maintain the balance between light and dark, one of the most important instances being the fallout between Liu Kang and Raiden. Once they realize this on their way to stop Kronika herself with a new cadre of friends and an army to command, Raiden and Liu Kang combined to form Fire God Liu Kang which, fun fact is how MK: Mythologies ends.

This time, their fighting chances have gotten better and with Kronika’s defeat, Liu Kang has a new timeline to oversee, which is where we are. Based on what I wrote and what I know I have a few ideas of what to expect based on what happened, but there’s no guarantee everything will live up to my predictions even slightly. The Aftermath DLC in MK 11 ended with Shang Tsung’s defeat and Liu Kang starting with the ancestor of Kung Lao, the fabled Great Kung Lao who lost favor when he was defeated by Goro in the old timeline. My first and so far only prediction is that this time, Liu Kang cheers this one on and Kung Lao’s bloodline becomes venerated instead.

After that, remains to be seen. Ed Boon’s been doing this for 30 years and has a great love and respect for his own series, often dropping hints and teasers for fans on Twitter, so we can expect further updates from him in the lead up to MK 12 or Mortal Kombat 1 as it’s going to be known as.

I have opinions on sequels named the same as the original that can best be summarized in this episode of You Know What’s Bullsh-t?!

This week, I’m recommending the YouTube channel h0ser, recently rebranded as hoser.

https://www.youtube.com/@h0ser/about

The channel talks about history and geopolitics in a comedic manner, often with insert country’s most common animal here as a stand in for the nation in question, painted in the country’s flag. A buffalo for the US, a bulldog for the UK, a bear for Russia and the Soviet Union, etc. An old approach to when the channel did this through countryballs method.

Those of you who want to learn more about the world, hoser is one of many sources for that knowledge.