Today’s deck is the official World of Warcraft Tarot.
I’ve said it before, but WoW is like DnD for me. I’m way more interested in learning about it and its cultural impact than I am in engagins with the text.
It’s a bit of a shame in this case though, because even unaware of WoW intricacies as I am, you can tell there’s a lot of care in the deck itself.
In case the glare of the light doesn’t let you see it: Today’s spread is Ace, Two, and Three of Cups, all reversed.
There’s a very specific trend of “well, you spent a lot of time socializing, now’s the time to focus on yourself and finish all that stuff you haven’t finished yet, people are waiting“
There’s the usual chipping away at work and doing chores affair. While I was doing that I actually finished C. G. Jung: The Basics by Ruth Williams.
It’s a great book, and what I HOPED the Nietzche book from a while back would be… and to be fair it almost was that until the “written by a guy probably before WW2” part came through way too hard with him sayign things like “now, this belittling of women as cunning and dishonorable can be easily corroborated through observation…”.
The thing about these “summaries about philosophers” is that when you actually try to read their work the writing style is very often insufferable. Not just from the “I find this thing written before my grandpa was born” factor but also just because the writing style of these sorts of things tends to be poetic but as if a poem was trying to describe to you the structures of power in Europe.
Case in point. One of the main things I find interesting about Nietzche is how hard the nazis co-opted his philosophies which does bring an interesting conversation, both of why they were able to (spoilers: Talking about master race and slave race will kinda do that) and not just a back and forth on whether it was intentional or not (and if not, why) but also of how contemporary experts have dealt with the matter.
There’s a whole chapter in the Jung book about not just when Jung was giving talks with the nazis (which I didn’t know was a thing) and as many perspectives on the matter as possible (causing a very neutral stance), but also things like his idea of anima and animus (male and female spirit within every person) and how limiting that “female side” is conceptually to the point it feels like an afterthought.
The other thing I did was play a new DLsite game called 愛と平和の魔法少女ローゼリーフ ～孕ませ監禁レ○プなんかに絶対負けない!～. I recognized Kokuto Nikke’s artstyle from miles away so I was curious.
It was about what I expected, torture porn (quite literally) with a bent for a gag story that… honestly fell flat the way Gintana tends to fall flat for me, where it basically works like there’s a switch you flip between serious and gag. the serious works, the gags work, but the flip flopping between both is kinda jarring.
But I finish it… and then it got meta (there’s the title).
It’s a game about a game. About the spirit of a dead classmate being stuck in a copy of RPG Maker… and there’s one bit of anachronism I don’t quite get.
The story talks about how the author of the game broke his console after some classmates uploaded videos of the game to the internet… but by the time phone cameras were a thing (let alone video websites) RPG Maker was exclusively a PC thing unless you count RPG Maker DS, I guess? That was 2009 and I definitely had a phone with camera by 2009.
Anyway, after being mocked, the author threw the console and broke it with a rock, but inside the game he had deleted everything but the character based on a classmate that had just died.
So you’re playing in a world that the trapped spirit made trying to recreate the world she only remembered when touching the rock used to destroy the console.
…wait, eh?
Nevermind.
Honestly it’s not even a bad story, I’m a sucker for meta narratives, and I definitely get the intent. A world created by a spirit of resentment that kept trying to make the world she didn’t know she came from. The main character being the dead girl’s bestie’s sister who the original didn’t care that much about so she was under the radar when the plot starts.
My objection isn’t with the story, just with the execution insofar as tone balancing. One moment you’re seeing a prolonged scene about the yakuza literally telling the main character to either shoot the baby in her womb or herself (rape, tragic), then you repeat the battle and win and are treated to a scene of the character behind the plot being comically assaulted by her own creations (rape, comedic), and then you see a heartfelt story about a dead girl getting a second chance in life…
Pulling my pants up and down so repeatedly gets tiring man.