https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/10/29/who-is-luce-the-anime-mascot-of-the-catholic-church-explained/

The Catholic Church has unveiled a new cartoon mascot known as “Luce,” and the raincoat-clad anime girl has already made a splash online.

Luce has been embraced and denounced by the extremely online masses, and, inevitably, inspired a ridiculous amount of fan art, and memes.

Who Is Luce, The Vatican’s New Mascot?

Luce was designed as a kid-friendly mascot for the Catholic Church’s upcoming 2025 Jubliee Year, which is all about hope, forgiveness and holy pilgrimages.

Catholic and kid-friendly do not belong in the same sentence.

Luce means “light” in Italian; the anime girl is designed to appeal to the youth of today, who have grown up watching One Piece and Demon Slayer. The character is rendered in the “chibi” art style, meaning short, cutesy characters with big heads and stubby limbs.

Luce was designed by Simone Legno, the Italian pop artist behind the tokidoki brand, who takes inspiration from street graffiti and Japanese art.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the organizer for the jubilee, says the mascot was inspired by the Catholic Church's desire "to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth."

Luce also appears to be a pilgrim, which is why she wears a raincoat, muddy boots and walking staff, symbolizing her perseverance through a storm-ridden landscape.

Luce’s whole outfit is loaded with Catholic iconography and symbolism; she wears rosary beads around her neck, and her bright blue hair might be a reference to the Virgin Mary’s blue hair covering.

Luce also has scallop shells in her eyes, which are an iconic symbol of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, with the shell representing the way to the Cathedral.

Luce proved a pleasant surprise for anime-loving Catholics, instantly inspiring a deluge of fan art and positive commentary.

Many made comparisons to Rei, a blue-haired character from the legendary anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Others pointed out that Luce bears a striking resemblance to the “Morton Salt Girl,” the official mascot of Morton Salt.

It didn’t take long for artists to reimagine Luce in multiple different styles, and a variety of poses; the mascot even inspired Halloween costumes.

However, not everyone was impressed with the Church’s new anime girl; more traditional commentators saw the chibi mascot as an embarrassment, too modern and silly to represent their faith.

Some even compared the name of the anime character to the devil himself, Lucifer, but the supposed link was quickly debunked.

Okay this sounds like some shit my crank protestant theocratic fascist coworker would try to say smear the Catholics, like the fact that it's an anime isn't cringe enough as is.

Many commentators urged the traditionalists to lighten up, and made jokes about the cultural divide between Luce fans and haters.

Brightly colored cartoon characters are a fun, inoffensive way to appeal to the youth, and the Catholic Church could stand to shed its image as a dusty, archaic institution.

While Luce has been introduced online, the character is due to make her official debut at the Lucca Comics & Games convention in Lucca, Italy, in the first week of November.

Luce will also appear as the Vatican’s mascot at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, where she will be used to promote the theme of “Beauty Brings Hope.”

He's referencing the storming of the Winter Palace and the dissolution of the widely loathed provisional government during the Great October Socialist Revolution. Is Gabe Newell a modern Alexander Kerensky? Will he be defended to the last by a Women's Battalion of Death when the games worker red guards storm Bellevue? The answer, of course, is yes

I'm interested to see what they're releasing since they've had so much time to really let their brain juices simmer. I hope it's tasty

https://archive.is/U26c8

Seriously this the first time I've ever heard of this. I'm even asking around and everyone's going reactions

At the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak, Alaska, in 2019, the Israelis successfully tested an anti-ballistic missile system that intercepts weapons in space. Now, in the Israel-Hamas War, it’s finally being used in battle, pushing military conflict above the atmosphere.

Kodiak Island is better known for its salmon-guzzling grizzly-bears than its rockets. But the forested Alaskan isle, separated from the mainland by the Shelikof Strait, has had a small commercial spaceport since 1998. Kodiak’s Pacific Spaceport Complex is intended for launching small satellites into polar orbit and got its start as the country’s first commercial spaceport. More famous facilities, like Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Vandenberg Space Force Base, are government-operated spaceports. Yet the majority of the 31 launches that have taken place at Pacific Spaceport Complex since its opening have, in fact, been for the military or government, including one foreign one: Israel. The shift towards supporting launches by the men in black has frustrated many of Kodiak’s residents, as I discovered when I visited the island last month.

Why is there a spaceport on Kodiak Island?

Kodiak might seem an unlikely spot for launching satellites into orbit. Spaceports are generally built closer to the equator to take advantage of the additional thrust provided by the Earth, which spins faster in the middle. Since the entire planet rotates once every 24 hours, objects on the equator are advancing 1670 km per hour. Those halfway to the North or South Pole are moving a mere 1170 km per hour, or 30 percent slower. Consequently, more rocket fuel is needed to launch from poleward locations to achieve the whopping speed of 40,270 kilometers per hour necessary to achieve escape velocity.

This advantage of equatorial launch sites, however, is negated when trying to launch into polar orbit. Polar orbits are used by satellites performing Earth observation or reconnaissance missions that image the entire planet. Each time a polar-orbiting satellite circles the Earth, it passes over the North or South Pole, providing full planetary coverage. Polar orbits are becoming increasingly popular as both governments and commercial firms seek to provide up-to-date satellite imagery of the entire planet.

Some northern countries and states like Alaska are hoping that satellite operators might turn to spaceports located in the world’s northern latitudes to reach polar orbits. Among them are not only the Pacific Spaceport Complex, but other other up-and-coming competitor spaceports like Andøya in northern Norway, Esrange in northern Sweden, and SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland, in the northernmost bit of the United Kingdom.

Despite the seeming advantages of polar spaceports, many of the commercial actors that the Pacific Spaceport Complex has sought to attract have swallowed the extra fuel costs of launching from the south and transported their rockets and satellites to spaceports like southern California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. These are much closer to major infrastructure and engineering facilities in places like Los Angeles and don’t require arranging complicated, expensive logistics to transport material to the Arctic or sub-Arctic by plane or barge. The cold waters around Kodiak Island make for some of the world’s richest fish and crab stocks, as made famous in the television show Deadliest Catch, but are notoriously harsh for boats. The turbulent weather around the Emerald Isle also means that rain, fog, and wind all challenge the reliability of the airport for satellite operators, which often have short windows in which to prepare and undertake missions.

The difficulties that the Pacific Spaceport Complex has encountered in attracting market share means that only nine of their 31 launches have been orbital. The rest have been suborbital launches, or those that fly into space but do not reach escape velocity and return to the atmosphere before fully orbiting Earth. While these might sound less than spectacular, military conflict is rapidly evolving in suborbital space, with one key innovator at the helm: Israel.

Anti-intercontinental ballistic missile testing on Kodiak

In July 2019, three suborbital launches went soaring into the blackness of space over the inky waters of the Gulf of Alaska surrounding Kodiak. These launches had one purpose: to test the Israel Defence Ministry’s Arrow 3 Interceptor Missile System. The state-of-the-art technology built by Israel Atmospheric Industries and troubled U.S. aerospace company Boeing employs “exoatmospheric hypersonic anti-ballistic missiles,” which can intercept and destroy incoming long-rang missiles above the atmosphere. The system provides a top layer of defense that complements Israel’s more famous “Iron Dome”, which shields the country from rockets and bombs fired closer to the ground.

Between 2008-2021, the U.S. government contributed $1.27 billion to Israel’s Arrow 3 program. Its support for Israel’s Arrow system has been consistent, with development first beginning in 1986. In 2004, the Naval Air Station Point Mugu Missile Test Center in southern California hosted tests of Arrow 2, which uses an explosive to destroy incoming medium- to long-range missiles. In contrast, Arrow 3 destroys incoming long-range missiles through interception alone in the exoatmosphere, or the region just above the Earth’s atmosphere. They must be designed to operate in a vacuum, requiring complicated engineering to deal with low pressure [1].

In June 2017, during a Congressional hearing, U.S. Vice Admiral James Syring explained the role that Kodiak would play in testing Arrow 3:

Admiral Syring: Yes, sir. We are close partners with Israel on development of their systems, system engineering in particular, and testing support also. And I have been intimately involved with them on David's Sling and Arrow, the more recent version of Arrow 3. And, frankly, that interceptor is now up into the exoatmosphere, and it has significant range constraints within the Mediterranean. And one of the better places to test is in Alaska, from Kodiak, and we plan to do that next year.

Mr. Coffman: Okay. So the Arrow 3 is designed to defeat the over-the-horizon capability of the Iranians. Am I correct in that?

Admiral Syring: Sir, it is designed to defeat the exoatmospheric ballistic missile threat from Iran.

In other words, given the crowded airspace around the Mediterranean, Israel was unable to test Arrow 3 to its full capacities. Moshe Patel, director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, said in March 2019 during a panel discussion in Washington, D.C.: “Arrow 3 is too big for the state of Israel…It is supposed to be good against nuclear threats that are coming from Iran. (But) we have limitations in our arena to conduct flight tests because of safety.”

(Continues in comments)

That said

Alternative title: Trotskyite gets put in charge, tries to push communism button, finds out the material conditions of a fucking ice age may not be conducive to declaring a final victory of the 5th internationale over Stalinism in a videogame.

My favorite quote in the article

Everyone was incredibly happy with me and all my kept promises right up until the coal ran out, which I'd kind of stopped paying attention to as I got ensnared in a thicket of political manoeuvring and ideology. I wasn't overwhelmed—the game does a good job of not bombarding you with too much information and mechanical complexity, and Stokalski says it's a conscious effort by the devs to make sure you're never "doing notes, doing maths on the side just to not die"—I'd just gotten wrapped up in ideas without paying much heed to material reality.

The article does ask a good question on the sort of conundrum that could become an identity crisis thst fire emblem has rode itself into with the steady inclusion of social aspects in their games ever since Awakening.

Personally I would be in favor of keeping the model they developed in 3 houses while refining it further with the game mechanics they developed in engage. I'd also like to keep the whole marriage and matchmaker aspect that we saw in awakening and fates out unless they figure out how to tastefully weave it into the storyline.

And while it would take too much gamedev time to implement it, it would be interesting to whether or not its possible to blend and synergize the fire emblem strategy game aspect with some of the musou aspects they've been lately dabbling in. I'm thinking akin to how the Total War series handles army battles but making the choices of how to play each battle as being either classic turn-based tactical mode or going full musou hack'n'slash nonsense as options for gameplay.