Did they say something cringe recently?

I still listen from time to time. Not to my knowledge. Hell they're one of the handful of left media figures who've been consistently good on Palestine.

• ZA/UM itself, or it's shambling corpse.

• Red Info. The company Kurvitz and Rostov founded after they left ZA/UM, funded by Netease. Unfortunately we don't know much about what they are doing, other than that they have a project. Understandably the legal battle for the rights of Disco Elysium probably came first.

• Longdue. Unfortunately we know the least about this studio, just some concept art and some PR speak.

• Dark Math. This studio has a trailer for a game that's um... a little familiar, it's also associated with Kaur Kender who was one of the people involved in the shenanigans that went down at ZA/UM. Article

• and now Summer Eternal, who don't have a trailer or proof of concept or pretty much anything except a manifesto (and are therefore the true inheritors of the crown, imo). That said, they're explicitly set up as a worker's co-op with a structure that's designed to prevent a hostile takeover, so it seems some hard lessons have been learnt

The scuttlebutt is that ZA/UM's non-compete clause for their ex-staff expired today, which is the reason for all these announcements, but that's speculation that can't be corroborated so take it with a pinch of salt.

There's not enough text for it to be the former

I'm showing my age here but here but I thought the two most common readings of the film were:

1. Vietnam War movie in space:

The military at the behest of the MIC get sent into a situation that they have little to no understanding of which results in many good men and women dying, all because the powers that be think that they can turn a profit. Only by banding together can the working class (human or android) survive this situation

(And when viewed it this light, Avatar can be seen as more a refinement of James Cameron's anti-war views than a 180.)

2. Girl Power

Ripley, the lone survivor of the Sexual Assault Monster is forced/blackmailed by the Patriarchy(Burke) into confronting said monster because the Patriarchy wants to profit off of it, and then the Patriarchy is face when they find out that they can't control the Sexual Assault Monster and gets sexually assaulted. Only by building a coalition of feminist allies and confronting her trauma head on (with a power loader) can Ripley prevent the same trauma that was inflicted on her from being inflicted on the next generation.

My off-the-cuff armchair psycho-analyzing (which very well could be wrong, I'm just some random on the internet) is that particular situation tapped into people's own personal relationship traumas- men feeling like their partner refuses to acknowledge their emotions as valid, women's intentions being misunderstood due to toxic masculinity... and so on. And then once you're in that head-space it really is hard to pull yourself out of it, especially when other people visibly roll up with their support for the other side, which makes you go into a defensive crouch to validate your own position on the matter.

Will we (collectively, as a community) learn anything from this? Oh hell nah.

What you’re attributing to diegetic essentialism is the Thermian argument: using in-universe lore to deflect criticism. Slightly different thing.

Diegetic essentialism is when people (including leftists) flatten all meaning in a work in order to put media into boxes. The examples given in sigmarxism are Beasts of Chaos and Tau being written with superficial anarchists/communist aesthetics, so therefore BoC are anarchists and Tau are communists. (Neither of those things are true)

We do this because we need to let our in-group know that we’re watching the “correct” media, that we’re completely unproblematic because the media that we consume is completely unproblematic. (It doesn’t work that way)

Let’s use Attack on Titan as an example

I think it’s somewhere in season 3-

There’s a moment where the main character, who’s basically spent his whole life being taught to hate a dehumanised enemy, finds out that the “monsters” who destroyed his life are people exactly like him, scared children who were also taught to hate a dehumanised enemy: him.

And that shoe dropping makes such a potent anti-fascist message, because it lays bare in narrative form exactly how fascism fails, how it warps and distorts history in order to perpetuate a lie, because we’ve been with Eren from the start and seen his journey, and his shock at this revelation is echoed in the shock of the audience. It’s legit good storytelling.

And if AoT ended right there things would’ve been fine, but oh well.

My reading of AoT: AoT is the single most incompetent anti-fascist story ever told, that it warps right back around into endorsing fascism and anti-Semitism. This is because Isayama is a liberal: the moral of his story is “an eye for an eye makes the whole world genocided”, which is an idealist idea of fascism, a child’s understanding of fascism. Eren revealing himself to be a petulant manchild committing genocide because he’s afraid of losing his mother figure is supposed to be tacit condemnation, but Isayama still lets him get away with genocide, like the liberal he is. We’re just supposed to feel bad about it.

Anyway, going back to diegetic essentialism: anyone who asks “Is X piece of media ______” is deeply unserious and more often than not simply looking for validation of their own political beliefs. Art/media criticism is about deeply and seriously examining human subjectivity, to explore what that tells us about the world we inhabit and the people who inhabit it. Within us there are multitudes, and not even authors have the authority to dictate the meaning of their works- we have to determine that meaning for ourselves.

Was in an interview with the CEO on a Milsim gamer channel: https://youtu.be/FJs_kqHrzzQ?si=3Zy-kgXDPXLF8qxm

I don’t have a timestamp sorry, on my phone atm

I was on board until

like just make the love interest a middle aged office lady if you're writing for straights ffs. Or if you really need to capture the horny teenager market set it in highschool like every other piece of Japanese media

Jensen Huang and Nvidia about to receive a firsthand taste of FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY

Right, but as I understand it China still has some catching up to do in terms of the technology and manufacturing? It's amazing what they've accomplished so far tho, and they'll probably fully catch up to and surpass Taiwanese manufacturing soon enough

Oh right, the other new-ish non-Gundam mecha show that came out that was decent was 86, the first season of which is basically a giant tear down of the kind of performative support for the oppressed that liberals do, alongside an exploration about what being an ally really means. Show was really heavy tho.

I still remember mfers on r/anime saying that the depiction of racism and fascism in the show was too exaggerated and unbelievable. I wonder what they think about what's happening in real life in Gaza now, or if they even think about it at all.

Mechanime 1980-1995: Imperialism and war fucking suck, we need to create a better society where it won't happen anymore! (SUNRISE: buy our toys, kids!)

This is how we got the unironic Zeon stans. Just pure because no one explained to the kids who bought Zaku's why War is Bad.

(Because we're on Hexbear someone is going to link that red sails article about propaganda now lol)