Stepnix
despite some folkloric precedent for "guy who turns into a bat," the were bat is strongly informed by the modern urban fantasy vampire vs werewolves paradigm. they're funny guys. I think One Werebat Trying To Fit In Among Vampires would be a fun time. lemme see what tvtropes has actually. very little! disappointing! comments
Reading Mob Psycho 100, followed by Kieron Gillen's The Power Fantasy, was a very good idea. They don't quite interact directly, because MP100 is focused on the way power changes your relationship with yourself and others, and TPF is focused more on superpowered MAD scenarios, but they're very nice for holding up against each other. "middle schoolers don't want to be involved in international…
unexpected laptop loss with incomplete backups is, y'know, not great, but it does give me a chance to reconsider which patterns are worth bringing over to the new model. do i really want to keep up with those webcomics, do i really need to stay in touch with that blog, etc. the real frustrating ones are the ones i know i want to keep, but my carefully optimized habits left me without the proper…
HeartQuest is an early 2000s FUDGE-derived system for shoujo manga-style campaigns. Steel Roses is the expansion that adds mecha. Supposedly it's inspired by Escaflowne, Rayearth, and Sakura Wars, but i got a lot of loose Evangelion vibes from it. I'm just kinda amused and amazed that this exists. fascinating artifact. who convinced all these writers that mech games need AI rules. why are they…
what a weird show. I'm so glad it exists Looking for the Full Moon is a throwback: a 2002 magical girl hearkening back to the magical idol series of the 80s . A young girl, Mitsuki, gets a magical chance to become a pop star... because she's dying of throat cancer, and the reapers take pity on her for her last year to live. Genuinely this feels like an edgy web serial mahou premise, not something…
I wrote the manifesto like a year ago, pleasantly surprised it made an impression! oh and here's the actual manifesto link if you wanted that comments
Recently translated interviews from the director and series composition expert of LuluttoLilly! Last week's episode got uploaded to youtube but doesn't have english subs yet. whoopsie. comments
carnivorous concept, conqueror wyrm. your scales are so shiny, let me make them mine. down the hatch into context and comparison and no way out, intertextual inseparable invincible me. weren't you so lonely as a local lizard? isn't it be better to be part of something Bigger? hope you like fire, it's yours now. burn as bright as you want, they'll never see you again. Maybe a YA author will see…
Proposition: Approaching a work with the expectation that it is a perfect representation of its genre tends to make your experience worse. Genres are ongoing conversations across space and time, it's extremely difficult for a single work to distill all its inspirations in a way that preserves their original significance, and if it does succeed at that, it still has to be good on top of that. It's…
1) did you know that there's "JSTOR Daily" with short overviews of various topics and links to free articles about them 2) did you know that they did one about global BL fandoms comments
Lyrical Nanoha: magical girl spin-off of the Triangle Heart eroge VN series Prisma Illya: magical girl spin-off of Fate/stay night + Fate/hollow ataraxia eroge VNs Madoka Magica: Not a direct spin-off but creators wrote/directed several VNs There's plenty of similarities in the marketing strategies, themes and motifs, and some more direct shared production history (Shinbo working on both Nanoha…
( Read more... ) comments
umamusume: pretty derby is a nerd game for huge nerds. this is known. Among its nerdery is a remarkable sensitivity to magical girl history. There's two horsegirls who have magical girl motifs as a major part of their character: Kawakami Princess and Sweep Tosho (Special Week gets a mahou henshin sequence as part of her unique skill but there's no real follow-up for it). Kawakami Princess is a fan…
This got posted in a game design channel i visit. I'm not sure who to pass it along to, but it does look intriguing comments
Finally got my hands on Fellowship through a bundle after years of telling myself "i should read Fellowship." worth it! Fellowship puts some work into codifying GM actions and pacing. This is a good thing. Right now I'm looking at how it asks the GM to have two multi-stage plans running at all times, either to seize a new source of power, or to destroy a specified community. Certain actions of the…
My day job (self-employed) includes wandering around the internet and keeping track what people say about PbtA. Occasionally a new one will pop up. Lately I've been seeing "in a PbtA game, you shouldn't be rolling dice that often anyway." I'm like, you shouldn't what now? Where did THIS come from? — lumpley ( lumpley.bsky.social [BlueskySocial] ) Apr 16, 2026 at 10:51 AM vincent baker i am…
I'd heard that Studio Pierrot was doing a new magical idol anime for the first time in almost twenty years, and then forgot to follow up on it, and then saw that it's on youtube in English now. get hype . It's making some very clear callbacks to Creamy Mami, but the music design honestly reminds me of more modern American cartoons. bee and puppycat. idk. Real interested to see where this goes.…
One of my favorite mecha writers shared [this discussion]https://magicalstage.moe/2026/03/17/how-we-got-into-plot-and-how-to-get-out/] of the possibilities that open when we don't let The Plot be the main focus of our experience with a work, and included some further commentary: I think that if anything this understates its case. Plot must be less essential to animation than image, because you can…
they made a bunch of these. let's make a list Beauty and the Beast: An Enchanted Christmas (1997); Christmas special, frame story is a sequel but the main body is not. makes sense, include their most marketable designs. Belle's Magical World (1998); Beauty and the Beast again, compilation movie of a cancelled TV series (another recurring theme among Disneytoon output) Hercules: Zero to Hero…
If you run campaigns in systems that don't match the premise, you can be extra confident that the good and fun parts are the product of your own effort and genius. and when things go wrong you can blame the game. like and subscribe for more pro tips comments
forced to redo my RSS feeds bc my reader isn't working right. Theoretically, this would be my chance to stick it all onto my Dreamwidth reading page for convenience and to get me more active here... but i'm not feeling it so instead you're just getting this notice. sorry. i've gotten back into Fate Hollow Ataraxia, really enjoying it. Something about the way Medusa's backstory is handled really…
Adding "figure out differences between RPG Maker 2000/2003/XP/MV" to my to-do list. And I suppose "actually make something with them" too, that would also be good to do. it was a really good deal comments
I have discovered a new old Dracula, one even newer and older than my previous preferred new old Dracula: Mörkrets makter ("Powers of Darkness"), the likely-unauthorized Swedish version. It's nearly twice as long as the original, reframes Dracula as the head of a social darwinist conspiracy, and nobody realized it was different from the English version until a few years ago. There's two secret…
friend read through Riddle of Steel, which is mostly famous for its detailed combat system, and I'm struck by how much of a historical anomaly it is Author commentary describes it as responding to "dnd is too gamey and easy these days (00s)" which i mostly associate with OSR takes, but, Riddle of Steel is tackling that by trying for more and more detailed and realistic rules, rather than the…
a friend is informing me that her youtube recommendations are filled with Rainbow Dash being subjected to "a broad swathe of medical and psychological horror." anyone know what's up with that. why is this happening to her. is this what "whump" means or was i misinformed about that particular bit of fandom lingo. comments