Like multiple times it has characters have a turn to the camera moment where they say some shit like "Kira is absolutely right about everything, but oh woe, oh calamity, for he is breaking the law and doing the violence that only the state is permitted to do, oh but what a tragedy for the legal system is too soft and permissive, and the police state too friendly and lenient towards the underclasses and so Kira is a necessary evil!" and the narrator keeps having bits about how Kira's policy of extrajudicially murdering everyone the state accuses of a crime is working and creating a gentler, safer world and it's just so fucking bad.

Light is a monstrous little fascist dipshit with the dumbest plan anyone has ever had, and his ideology is fundamentally deranged and abhorrent. Like how the fuck does "so he's changing the world, by just killing everyone accused of a crime after they've already been arrested and locked up!" even fit into anything but the most unhinged boomer brain as a solution to anything? His targets are almost exclusively people who are either innocent or who have already been neutralized and contained as a further threat, what does purging them accomplish? It's just turbo fash dipshit stuff.

Light is just a dumber rehash of Batman's League of Shadows foil that's used to show that Batman, who agrees 100% with the League of Shadows' entire ideology except for its inevitable logical conclusion, is actually Good and Pure and doesn't do bad violence stuff because that's the job of the police who get special good boy passes to do violence for the state.

Even the narrative itself doesn't offer any criticism other than showing Light to personally be a vile, abusive piece of shit behind the mask he puts on around other people, and it emphasizes him fighting back against the cops who are after him as being this moral event horizon moment more than all the literal mass murder because the TV man told him to shit he did. So far as the story has a moral it's this fundamentally reactionary liberal take about how the police state should be more repressive but it also shouldn't go too far, and that violence is the job of state-sanctioned actors and not the public.

It was pretty entertaining as a suspenseful horror thriller though, and the "cerebral back and forth" shit with Light and L was incredibly funny because it was all just Light being a self-defeating dipshit digging himself deeper and deeper by being a bloodthirsty egomaniac and L running in circles around himself trying the rhetorical equivalent of a Wil E Coyote gag as bait.

Like Bloom Into You is cute, but the anime literally just up and ends halfway through the story with no conclusion or even climax to the story (yes, I went and read the manga afterwards and the complete story was good, particularly in how it reached a point where the characters all realized how silly the central driving internal conflicts of the first half were), and when I look at relevant MAL stacks it's like "these aren't bait - well ok this one is, and that was is, but uh..." or "alright so it's an incestuous loli story but..." and all I can think is so this is basically the only place I trust to ask.

Side question, is there anywhere I can actually find translated light novels that's better than nyaa.si? Because as consistent as that's been there's still occasionally things like the Bloom Into You spinoff that's either not there or not complete.

So Girls Band Cry basically did the literal exact same ending that Jellyfish tried to do, except it actually involved all the cast instead of just being one of them getting to have a small personal win while the rest sit around watching from the sidelines like , and was also paced for that to actually work as the climax.

The first seven episodes of Jellyfish were better, hands down, but the last five were like an entirely different show (in fact, I'd say the tail end of Jellyfish was literally just the tail end of Girls Band Cry but worse because it didn't fit the characters or story trajectory at all and also wasn't executed well), with the one exception of episode 11 and how it dealt with Watase's gender. In contrast, the first half of Girls Band Cry wasn't great: the characters were abrasive and annoying and all the narrative drama was just Nina or Momoka getting mad and then storming off because of it, over and over, but it admittedly did manage to turn it around in the last five or so episodes and give it all some semblance of a coherent story arc.

Also tell me I'm not the only person who didn't realize until episode 10 that Tomo and Rupa were a couple? They never say anything about it that I caught, but it's pretty clear in retrospect that the two women who live together, spend every waking moment together, and who have a categorically different sort of relationship than they do with anyone else are together, at least after seeing these scenes from ep10 and ep11:

Unfortunately the Nina/Momoka pairing people were meming over never happened, though it's not particularly surprising since they just didn't have any particular chemistry past the first episode or so. In fact, looping back to the "Jellyfish turned into a worse version of GBC in the end" point, the heel-face turn Jellyfish did with Mahiru and Kano basically turned them into Nina and Momoka: friends, but held at arms length.

The last point to mention is the art: third act narrative problems aside, Jellyfish was a stylish and gorgeously animated show with vibrant static-but-lively backgrounds; Girls Band Cry had a fair bit of style to it and was probably the least bad looking CGI anime I've ever seen, but the CGI still just looks bad most of the time and the added motion from animated background action dilutes the shot and distracts from the actual focus of any given scene. I've come to strongly believe in the value of a static background as an economy of motion and focus thing, and a crowd of janky moving repeated-model extras wiggling in the background absolutely brings down the scene in a way that a static panel of out-of-focus background characters doesn't - so it should be no surprise that the best looking shots in GBC are the ones without a ton of background action or jarring movement that the CGI exacerbates.

So I get that it's not like in Cities: Skylines where it's used for pathfinding by people traveling around and instead is like "people go stand at the sad and unfulfilled person station in the hopes that a carriage will arrive to take them somewhere they need to go," but what happens then? They have an "I would like to go do a job at the job factory" travel goal and an "I would like to go shopping" travel goal, but do they also have an "I would like to go home" goal or do they just teleport back home after doing a task?

Do I need to coordinate them returning home or just being delivered to places they want to work and shop?

Edit: for that matter, how does refueling work for trains and busses? Do they just autonomously seek out fuel stops when they need to, or do I need to micromanage that somehow? Scratch that, I just watched a bus go to a gas station unprompted, through I'm still unclear on whether trains will find a fueling station or if they need to be routed through one.

The animation and color palettes are gorgeous, the soundtrack is great, and the story is both cute and poignant, revolving around an amateur artist, disgraced former idol, said former idol's fangirl/stalker, and a failing vtuber starting a band but focusing mainly on their personal alienation and anxieties instead of the music/performance side of that. The four main characters are all pretty unambiguously queer too.

Cons: might be yuri bait, and the rare fanservice shots are weird and tonally out of place with the rest of the story. There's also five episodes left in the season so there's plenty of time left for it to milkshake duck and retroactively ruin the first half.

Still a shame the anime never got picked up for another season.

Like as far as writing quality in general, art, characters, etc it's all quite good, but the whole "dungeon ecology" stuff being retconned away with "actually it's all eldritch horror wish magic so all that monster ecology stuff is fake bullshit that doesn't matter" kind of sucked as a core plot point, as was downgrading the dungeon lord from "scary ancient mage who knew how to make such a big and complex dungeon" to "just some dumbass who didn't understand the most basic things, and it was all just eldritch horror wish magic doing the heavy lifting." Making a core point of the wish magic "greed and cruelty are harmless and normal, but wanting to improve the material conditions of others? That's a serious moral hazard that feeds a world eating demon!" is some peak liberal bullshit, too.

Also I hate the narrative device of "this arc has reached it's climax and finished and we've wound it all down now, time to move on to the next-PSYCH lmao I take it back it's not done I'm undoing it now it's still on we're still doing the thing that just finished lol" because it's lazy and ruins tension and pacing compared to just finding some better way to segue into a new arc. Especially since it doesn't even really do much of anything with the retcon, and it was practically just an excuse to get rid of the timer they had and replace it with a different one they didn't know about.

Apart from those things it was all good enough, though.

Like the way its structured to start with is the extremely tight view that drives home that all these other characters have their own lives and existence but you only ever the few bits when Frieren's around and then they're gone, while the pacing keeps up this constant feeling of time slipping inexorably away and being lost forever. It hits hard and is structured perfectly for those themes.

Then it hits a point where the story shatters into a bunch of separate threads and grinds to a complete halt in the way that stories that split into a bunch of threads inevitably do. It loses the tight focus and the feeling of "yes, these characters have their own existence but you only interact that during the moments you're actually there" sort of thing in favor of just showing you a blow by blow of everything that's going on with them, and instead of time slipping away no matter how hard you hold onto it it instead stands completely still.

It stops being unique and impactful and starts being "that annoying thing from BNHA where they spend like half an entire season going into excruciating detail about some little training exercise with mild competitive elements that every single member of a huge cast is participating in" instead.

And also civitai ones.

So by now we probably all know about the concept of diegetic essentialism (tl;dr: treating a piece of media as if it were a whole and complete thing that exists in and of itself within itself when analyzing it, instead of only what the author actually shows), and we can see that it's both a real phenomenon that both fandoms and critics do a lot to the point that it's something that needs some level of criticism.

Now, as the essay itself says, diegetic essentialism is a part of how media is consumed and parsed, and I could describe it as a sort of object-permanence for fantasy where you have to assume and work with the fact that a story isn't and can't go over every bit of progression in detail and so you have to assume that things are happening in the background, the character is still there if the camera pans off them or they aren't mentioned by name for a paragraph or a page, etc. So its point is more that it should only be a part of the actual act of consuming media, and you shouldn't do that "remembering that stuff off screen is there and stuff is happening offscreen" thing when analyzing a work to try to divine exactly what "really" happened offscreen in the fictional story.

With the release of Starfield, it became apparent that this is an incomplete perspective. For anyone who is not familiar with that, Starfield presented a high-tech, "utopian" society of space-car-brained fascists of several flavors, none of whom know what a phone is, and where despite having functionally limitless resources everywhere you look 90% of the population are either unpersoned homeless people you're legally allowed to hunt for sport, or the footsoldiers of one petty warlord or another. The official, explicit author explanation of the setting is that it's cool and good, and that it's a hopeful and aspirational future. The horror is all whitewashed and toned down, and internal criticism of the nightmare dystopia it's created is extremely weak and soft.

Naturally, the fanboys do diegetic essentialism to imagine how it actually does work and is as nice as it claims to be, handwaving over all the fascism and slavery to unironically do the liberal thing that Vonnegut mocked in Player Piano about how even the poorest members of society have fancy consumer goods that make their lives better than those of kings (which in Starfield's case they're inventing from whole cloth, since there aren't fancy consumer goods and no one even has a phone). Now we could just say "this is vapid and horrible on its face" and leave it at that, but that makes for a weak criticism and forgoes a chance to pick apart the brainworms that went into its creation.

It is for that exact purpose that I synthesized Diegetic Materialism as the answer. Because sometimes one does have to engage in diegetic essentialism to analyze a work, but this should remain grounded in material analysis. That is, if one is treating a work as real inside itself one's focus should be on how its internal cause and effect flows, what the material underpinning of some facet of it is and has to be. Effectively applying worldbuilding and character building criticism to better understand both the author and the work itself - characters should have motivations and backgrounds, setting elements should have causes and histories, and in the absence of these what one can reasonable infer should make sense or at least not betray the author's brainworms.

For example, the UC in Starfield: it's literally just Heinlein's Starship Trooper fascists, uprooted and set down in a context where they make absolutely no fucking sense. It's a highly militarized, elitist society ruled by a military junta and massive corporations, which locks personhood and rights like "owning property" behind military or civil service (and in a step beyond even Heinlein, there isn't even voting for citizens, the state is simply a self-enclosed military and bureaucratic hierarchy). Despite this, there's neither a reason for any of it nor dissent, nor do they do any of the things that would be required to sustain that system. They're a clean, happy, cosmopolitan society that preaches tolerance and peace and has social welfare programs, while the non-citizen class either lives in rental units in peaceful slums out of sight and there's no need for brutal enforcement or peacekeeping, or they're outcasts you can legally hunt for sport and no one thinks there's anything weird about this.

It's nonsense, and it gets more nonsensical the more you look at it because there's no cause and effect: why are the happy, tolerant, very concerned about social welfare people locking personhood behind military service? Why is there no dissent to any of this? Where is the conflict between the corporations and social welfare programs? Where is all the violence and immiseration that this society would require to sustain its militant and corporate hierarchy? Its diegesis makes absolutely no material sense whatsoever. Hence why it was the inspiration for "diegetic materialism."

Tl;dr:

Thesis: being a dumb nerd who does diegetic essentialism to divine unwritten details about a work.

Antithesis: saying that's bad and you should stop.

Synthesis: employing diegetic essentialism as a tool to let you apply materialist analysis in criticism of a work.

He said something like "focus on the pain, let it turn into water and wash over and away from you," which, in retrospect, isn't actually that bad of an outlook once you understand it, because noticing, understanding, and accepting pain is a pretty good way of dealing with minor injuries (like I splashed my hand with boiling oil 6 months ago and can still see the scar from that, but at the time I just kept cooking and ran it under cold water when I could step away for a second, and my response was to laugh about it and use it as a lesson to be more careful in the future), but goddamn is it the dumbest and least useful shit to tell a kid with a skinned knee.

Anyways I thought of this because of that other post about hot peppers, because eating lots of hot peppers is what actually taught me how to accept and process pain, since once you've got that capsaicin soaking into your soft mouth tissue literally the only thing you can do is accept it and relax until the pain fades out.