Red and Black: The Scourge of Society

[spotto]

Hello blog I always neglect! Another post here by Spotto. No worries, despite the lower frequency of my posts, occasionally thoughts pop up in my mind that I do want to write down, and here they will go.

 

Currently I have the RWBY opening stuck in my head. And just yesterday I went through a night of delirium due to sleep deprivation going through the newest Touhou game, Double Dealing Character. So this post will obviously be of those two things, but of one central theme I suppose. The theme is empathy. 

 

For me, my view upon life is always of balance. My interests, despite being limited and perhaps overly niche, do fall in rather vague genres, like my music taste. Maybe my lack of experience of going through every inch of the media allows me to have more tolerance in certain tropes that pop up in storytelling again and again, but like usual, I compare myself with those I know and why we all have sometimes conflicting perspectives of the world.

 

So before I go unnecessarily philosophical or what have you, the two topics above! We'll go for the more recent one, that with DDC. Plenty of new characters have been introduced onto the Touhou plate, as well as the glorious side serving of musical alcohol. We also get our usual silly plot out of the way and of course probably the main reason for a game to exist, the game itself and its gameplay! I played DDC briefly before I collapsed into well-needed sleep, and before that went through several playthroughs of those who decided to stream or record their own goings.

 

The biggest part of Touhou are the characters, as least in terms of my interests. This is also the second main game to come out that I've been here to experience, so comparisons with Ten Desires is inevitable. I didn't talk too much about Hopeless Masquerade here (as opposed to Ten Desires and especially SoPM) because all of my reaction were summed up in dozens of Tumblr posts flooding my poor friends' dashboards with MikoMikoMikoMikoMiko. I knew my hype for this game would not nearly be as huge, and so it hasn't.

 

Anyway the first new character I saw was Yatsuhashi, a tsukumogami of a Japanese instrument, a Koto or whatever. Then it turns out she has a sister who you get to fight depending upon your shottype (Shottype A gets the sister, B gets Yatsuhashi) though the midbosses of the stage are swapped. My initial thoughts of Yatsuhashi wasn't much. She looked kind of plain, but immediately I noted she was the third brunette (actual brown hair, not black) to be introduced to the gigantic Touhou cast, which was interesting. Other fans, in particular the Japanese ones compared her to Alice, with their similar headgear. Alice has become one of my most favourite characters, so immediately I descended upon the idea that she was an inferior Alice. :D Mostly joking though.

 

Her sister is Benben, a biwa tsukumogami. The name was very noticeable. Benben is a pretty strange name, but the names in DDC were already pretty damn strange already. (Benben just seems EVEN STRANGER!) Regardless of her odd name that sounds like the onomatopoeia of a burly man, she had a very nice design. I thought her hair was short at first, but then noticed longer hair at the back. The separation of the short hair and the back made it look like hair extensions. She also looked like a musical Akyuu what with the flower in her hair and similar hair colours. These two tsukumogami aren't exactly blood siblings, what with being objects and all but apparently they were born around the same time and decided "LET'S BE SISTERS" just because. That's pretty awesome.

 

On the other hand...two MORE tsukumogami? Medicine is suspected to be one, Kogasa the first official one and then Kokoro is one (Menreikis are types of tsukumogami it seems) and finally two more here? Soon enough the tsukumogami will outnumber the fairies! These ones seem more generic due to their last names, as opposed to being related to their abilities or whatever seem to just be "Tsukumo". So these two were born, decided to be siblings for kicks and then chose the least creative last names possible. Good job you two.

 

Before I noticed the stage five boss, or even acknowledged her, I paid attention to the music instead. Usually stage five boss themes are on the lower end of my music tastes, but this one was really good! Especially since I had no clear favourite song in Ten Desires (wasn't too impressed with its soundtrack) with maaaaaybe the very first track you hear after the menu screen, Night Sakura of the Dead Spirits as the favourite, this theme I found myself bobbing my head to. It's not an instant classic like the songs from the older games, or my absolute favourite Emotional Skyscraper, which I initially found okay then warmed up to so much it became my absolute favourite but it was definitely a song I loved at first listen, and that's more than what I can say for ANY song AT ALL in Ten Desires or even Undefined Fantastic Object!

 

So yeah, the boss. The boss looked like Nue and Suika had a lovechild with a random red streak in her black hair to look "ULTRA XTRA KOOL". Her name is Seija, which is going to be highly confusing with Seiga's name due to random typos, sort of like Tokiko and Tojiko, but thankfully one character is an obscure written works character and the other is a midboss. This time around though, Seija is the mastermind of DDC and that doesn't help when comparing to Seiga's large role in Ten Desires, so... Seija however is pretty insanely loli, which I do have a bit of a problem with and will bring up later in this post. Her outfit is pretty nicely designed and she's supposed to be an amanojaki, which is like an oni but smaller or less intimidating. She seems a little redundant compared to Suika who is a loli oni, but we'll see. I do find her cute and if the plot I heard of in this game is true, hilarious.

 

Remember when I said Miko was an underwhelming boss? I was all like MIKO IS WORST OF STAGE SIX BOSSES OMG TERRIBLE WHY YOU DO!!!! And then somehow I started liking her after SoPM because of her personality, then HM came out and floored me? Well that's what's gotta happen if I'm going to like Sukuna because while the music is quite good and climaxy enough, the design is not very final boss like. Probably very in tune for what Sukuna is based on, but not really all that appealing to me. ALSO ANOTHER LOLI GAH. I'm still not sure entirely her role in this game, so can't really say anything about that. Her ability to change other things' sizes is similar to Suika's density control, as in how she can change her own size. Truly these are her children.

 

Finally the extra boss! It took a big book of Touhou, a fighting game, and a friend who mains her to beat me up all the bloody time for me to find Mamizou decent, but I doubt we'll need that for HIROKAWA RAIKO. While her actually being the Shinto God of Thunder is up in the air, she's at the very least also a tsukumogami apparently associated with the other musicians (MORE TSUKUMOGAMI?) except she's special since she took advantage of what Seija did and became a god...or something. Will have to get back to you on that. Regardless Raiko is a drummer because she IS the drums, or maybe the banjos considering her preferred type of danmaku. Why are extra bosses lately so crazy silly? Well in terms of Raiko's design, that will be included in this very next rant of all of DDC's character design, including outfits and lolism.

 

I do not like DDC's character designs.

 

Now that we got that out of the way, reasons! A big reason is how Touhou characters are usually dressed. A big part of their identity is their clothes because they look fairly generic without them. And I find the fashion in Gensokyo to be very unique and awesome, rather traditional-looking yet with various aspects of fantasy lining up every girl's pretty pretty dress. But DDC introduces us to not one, but TWO characters wearing...kimonos. Or yutaka. Or whatever they are. Sure, that's pretty traditional but not really creative. It's just dressing up a normal person in their formal clothing. To really see a person's personality we need to stare at the clothing they prefer to wear everyday, not clothes they need to for certain days of the year. Raiko is similar except with a more modern equivalent, which seems to come out of nowhere because no one wears modern clothes in Gensokyo! Except maybe Hatate. But Raiko's isn't even stylized it just looks like a suit. This ruins the point of fanartists drawing their favourite characters in yutaka or suits! Ah well.

 

But then there are the lolis...and well, I have no problem with the appearance of a Touhou character except...that the popular notion that Touhou being a game of lolis is very misinterpreted. Some of th most popular characters in Touhou are in fact, very child-like characters, but a majority of the population have the appearances of teenagers or something. It's probably ZUN's art style that gives that perceived notion, but then you see official artwork of the characters NOT by ZUN and they tend to not look ridiculously loli except for the Grimoire of Marisa for whatever reason. But even compared to ZUN's art style, both Seija and Suzuna are REALLY TINY AND YOUNG. One makes sense I guess, what with Suzuna being related to the folktale of a one-inch boy or something but two in a row for some reason, looking so young is jarring. Yes, Remilia and Flan and a bunch of other characters are loli too, but they never looked this young in ZUN's artwork. These two took like they're four years old. (I think there is a plot reason though, so the loli rant might be nullified)

 

As for music, the stage five and six boss themes are great. Not sure what to think of every other song at the moment though. That's still better than Ten Desires. In terms of hype it feels like Ten Desires had way more, in terms of the fandom and even myself. Oh, and while this game lacks a unique system like cherry points or UFOs, the bosses themselves are gimmicky enough to make up for that. This is PLAYER MANIPULATION, THE GAME. You get stage five with flipping screens that invert your controls, stage six that resizes you into a huge blurry bullseye and an extra boss that shakes the screen presumably from the vibrations of her drums...or maybe the stage is inside a drum, yet to figure that out.

 

So first impressions? Up and down, some music tracks are pretty good, design is a little disappointing. (Even the graphics for the score and everything aren't as good as I hoped, it looks too similar to Ten Desires and there's little variation in colour) The good designs are fairly minimal and do look good, but the ones that don't are also rather simplistic, so we don't have any Shous running around this time. Sekibanki still looks like a yukkuri achi-Cirno with Vincent Valentine's cloak though. (My favourite design is probably Kagerou or Seija) The gameplay though? HILARIOUS to watch, potentially fun to play but I only briefly played and got murdered by Seija's gimmicks. Dying to stage five bosses is not new for Spotto!!! Definitely a funner-looking game than Ten Desires at least.

 

But hey, I warmed up to Ten Desires and its cast A LOT after a few years, will I do so for DDC? We have yet to see, but I tend to like the newer games. 

 

And that is your monthly Touhou for the...month. Next rant or whatever is about the animesque web series, RWBY. It seems no matter how much Anime people suggest to me, I will always end up neglecting them and just going for the animesque stuff that isn't controlled by giant studios (SEE TOUHOU). I dunno why I keep avoiding all the Anime people recommend to me. I know Madoka is good, but don't want to watch it yet. I know Dangan Roppa just started and watching would be nice, but nope not yet. But hey, nonprofessional 3D animation thingy that looks like MMD and is voiced by Americans? SURE!

 

Well it helps that I've followed previous Monty Oum stuff. I also find Rooster Teeth pretty awesome, watching RvB waaaaay back in 2008 (will need to be especially bored to pick it back up though) and finding the Achievement Hunter stuff to be highly amusing. (Though I was exposed to Gavin via Slomo Guys instead) And also watched that stuff initially for the GTA Let's Plays because holy crap those are hilarious let's plays. So RWBY was the next step. I saw the RED trailer forever ago but RWBY never came back up until literally my entire dashboard was Rooster Teeth stuff. Still a little sad Dead Fantasy is probably dropped, but that was non-stop action with a poor attempt at implementing plot with no dialogue anyway because who the hell watches Monty Oum stuff for action?!?!?

 

Oh right, everyone.

 

Actually I don't understand the complaints that there is too little action in the series so far. Because the trailers are filled to the brim with that stuff already and Monty actually wants to form a plot before flinging random girls into action this time around, so good for him for doing that. I like plot and character with my acfion! Anyway, I started with re-watching the red trailer and then the other three that weren't out when I started at this project.

 

First of all the music is pretty damn awesome. The action is as expected, fantastic and the designs are all pretty good. I'm feeling so Alice about colour schemes though and I wish they were more varied despite the theme. Like, Ruby with red is pretty important yeah, but the red-black scheme feels so overdone lately. "RED AND BLACK = INSTANTLY COOL YEAH" but it would've been okay had Blake's trailer not ALSO BEEN RED AND BLACK. She has no red at all in her palette! I guess it's because of Adam who also happens to be red and black. Agh... too much red and black. The lack of a lot of blue on any character is disappointing too because that is such a universally liked colour that looks good with so many other colours. Maybe RWBY is special because it's trying to actually not be blue? I dunno.

 

Oh my god I just realized the two best designs in Touhou 14, Kagerou and Seija, are red and black. (and white too but eh) AAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHH

 

Oh right, RWBY. So yes all the trailers were damn cool and then I watched the first four episodes. Ruby was surprisingly bubbly and perky, but I like it and it's very expected of Monty's works considering what he did to his Dead Fantasy models. (GEE GEE GEE is stuck in my head forever) Dunno how much I would've liked the series for its characters if everyone was some quiet brooding badass in a deep dark world. Not a lot of variation with that really, except we have Yang who was obviously going to not be quiet or brooding but still badass and she is clearly Marisa I mean she is awesome.

 

But yes, the series! Starts with some action, throws in a stereotypical school (BEGIN GENERIC ANIMU PLOT!) with a headmaster that is clearly Kai I mean a headmaster in love with his coffee cup. What is with headmasters and coffee cups lately anyhow? The whole forest initiation thing and the possibility of dying reminded me too much of Naruto's chuunin exams, but despite what Naruto's controversial quality is, that setting IS pretty damn awesome. Also I do like how every character isn't some plucky inexperienced child. Ruby MIGHT be one, but considering the trailers are all prologues to the actual series every single character has some experience outside of just schooling. (I guess they would have to, to attend such a prestigious academy) Maybe Jaune doesn't have experience, but then how did he get into the school anyway? Huh.

 

While I do like the characters and comedic style so far, the actual nature of the animation doesn't flow well with the comedy. For example turning Ruby into super-deformed dork of a fangirl looked very weird with the surroundings and then having Yang disappear with her silhouette friends with as little animation as possible also looked awkward. The same is whenever else the series transitions into 2D animation for whatever reason. I do hope the artist either improves as the series goes along or they find another one, because that newscast looked like it was animated by the average deviantart user. :X Also, since you have 3D models instead of frame-by-frame animation, I don't think a lot of usual Anime tropes work well here. They work in Anime because of how minimalist it looks and how easily they can change their art-style. While it takes HOURS upon HOURS to even make a 3D animation in one-week, 2D animation, if I am not wrong still takes way longer. This is evident in all those pony model stuff and the millions of MMD stuff for Touhou and other series. I see more 3D PVs everyday and less of the animations because of how time-consuming a quality 2D animation thing is. Sixteen minutes of Fantasy Kaleidoscope took a year to make! D: It takes nine months for a single Simpsons episode! 

 

Then again I do not know the details of RWBY and how long they took to make the models and settings and script and voice acting and everything, but again the advantage of 3D is that you don't have to draw your character five million times in a billion frames. You get that model to manipulate instead. Regardless, being a web series that takes ages to make and is done by a small group of people as opposed to a gigantic team, if the Animu-looking comedy is easier to animate, despite its awkwardness, then why not. We all know the action will be flawless and is better than most things we've seen 3D or not anyway. 

 

So yeah, that's my thoughts on RWBY so far.

 

Wait, there's one huge important aspect I always touch upon when talking about things...CHARACTERS! Despite only 45 minutes of footage, how are the characters? Well...

 

Ruby's a good protagonist. Yang's awesome. I like Blake but she seems so mysterious we're going to need time for her. (I do realize the allusions to fairy tales in all the characters so) And then there is Weiss, a name I have problems pronouncing like Keine.

 

LIKE KEINE.

 

Hello world, let me tell you about Weiss, the best RWBY character ever and anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. HOHOHOHO! Lately I've been falling in love with such characters, kind of like Miko and Alice. Except Alice isn't nearly as outspoken while Miko isn't mean at all! She's just genetically superior to everyone else and everyone should worship her amazingness. But again this part of the rant isn't about Touhou and I dunno why I keep falling back on Touhou.

 

You could say it's cliche. I'll retort that I don't watch much Anime and put off all the good ones. But Weiss is obviously that character who starts off hostile and becomes warm in the end. We've had so many of these characters in media, off and on. They are the foil. They are the rival. They're usually the one character with the most amount of change throughout. I fell in love with the song in Weiss' trailer. The lyrics are most telling. They're actually not deep lyrics at all and the writing of it isn't to be marveled at, but it's sung very beautifully and the instrumentals are amazing. "Mirror, mirror, who is the loneliest of all?" So many interpretations can be brought up about that. There's the obvious one, pressure to be the heiress to a gigantic shady company and likely emotional turmoil growing up in such an environment. I'm reminded of a Negima character who quarrels with the main girl all the time, and despite her haughty personality she had a very heartwarming backstory and despite all the innuendo jokes, very innocent. Sadly she got heavily shafted in the actual important PLOT of the manga and...oh, going off on a tangent again.

 

Not to mention she's hilarious and amazingly blunt. See, if Ruby isn't the silent brooding badass, then people might assume it'd be Weiss from the trailer, but nope she isn't either. They gave that role to Blake, which I'm glad. (It was also very obvious with her, but since she's with some guy and has actual dialogue, the whole "silent" part and being able to brood alone kind of gets pushed to the background for a bit.) Obviously my favourite character can always change because there's a secondary team with some people who seem cool and countless others yet to be introduced. But at the moment, had Weiss not existed I'd probably be stuck wondering who my favourite is. Yeah, everyone else is awesome but they're all pretty equal and I don't tend to love things or go into fandoms if I don't ESPECIALLY love a character.

 

Well now I'm hungry and I don't know if I have enough brain power to finish this rant about empathy or what have you. The point I was going to make is that...I am very blessed to be surrounded by people who are very supportive and always nice. Because of these people, I feel I can identify with and understand others more than I would've, which is probably where my love of characters come from. My favourites are either overly flawed or seemingly have no flaws at all for some reason. But because of this, even if I may not identify with the character themselves (I don't identify with Miko? BUT SHE IS THE BEST) I'm still able to appreciate every character and love them for who they are. Sadly reality isn't as easy as fantasy. There are always those unpleasant people around us who have stories of their own and probably reasons for their demeanour, but getting through to them and actually expressing enough selfless motivation to look beyond their cover is one of the toughest things for humanity to do. One of my favourite quotes, "We judge ourselves by our intentions, but others by their actions" is well, my favourite. To me it describes how society is like perfectly.

 

Of course someone is going to disagree with me completely, something I so strongly believe in. I BET YOU THAT WILL HAPPEN IT ALWAYS DOES RAH but it is a little concerning when people you are close to disagree with anything you really, strongly believe in because while disagreeing and difference of opinion is fine, there's always that tinge of disappointment. What if they did have a similar view of life like I do? Maybe the world would be better if that were true? Or is thinking of it like so too human and selfish of a person? But isn't thinking like this how everyone perceives society? Christians believe if everyone was a Christian, the world would be a better place. Atheists think the opposite. So it's just a normal desire that everyone has because everyone feels their view and perspective of society, regardless of the experiences of other common folk, is the only one. Also the whole argument about "If we all had the same views we'd all be the same and that is boring!" because treating situations like so with absolutes isn't the best idea. There is an in-between of levels of similarity and difference. Too much difference and there is conflict. Too much similarity and there is apathy. A good balance and depending upon what that balance is, is in my opinion the requirement of a highly-functioning civilization.

 

Or I have heavily idealistic views, I don't know! NEED FOOD. END RANT! This has been Spotto. Hooray DDC!