After seeing enough people in the Fabula Ultima discord servers talk about how they want to try out more games in the vein of FabU's original inspirations, I'm giving myself the task of finding freeware that can fit the bill. Fabula is very open about its Final Fantasy inspirations, but surely you don't need to be name-brand to fit the tone. Right?

A little trickier than expected!

Part of this, I suspect, is that amateur games that are very obviously copying off of popular ones aren't going to get a lot of attention and discussion, so I'm not going to find them on the community awards pages. The other part of it is that I'm judging against a pretty specific plot template* that's not even explicitly outlined in the fabula core book, so I'm making things significantly harder on myself lol.

On the bright side, Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruin (my beloved) fits nicely with some optional rules in an expansion book. So at last there's that.

*A "world tour" adventure fantasy where each party member represents an in-universe culture and the party literally or symbolically gathers support from each of those cultures in their stand against the villains.

despite some folkloric precedent for "guy who turns into a bat," the werebat 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!

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 data stored on my brain (instead of the hard drive) to find them again

I can use my website to find some of them. happy side effects of trying to share my discoveries with others, i can rediscover them myself

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 they would actually put on tv, but here we are.

Unlike Creamy Mami or LuluttoLilly, the other magical idols i'm experienced with, Full Moon takes a fairly limited approach to the supernatural. The shinigami are the source of the magical transformation, and nearly all magical intervention in Mitsuki's life is their doing (compare Yuu/Mami stumbling across a new magical creature every few episodes). This gives Full Moon a pretty unique niche, where it can focus more on the often-brutal realities of the idol industry. It's not quite a neverending misery parade, Mitsuki gets a fair number of wins. But it never quite lets you forget that this is an extremely difficult path to travel, even as Mitsuki frequently succeeds by being the Goodest Girl Ever.

The ultimate ending feels like a sigh of relief, not just a cheap victory. the Child Mortality Magical Girl Show of all time

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.

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 an expectation that sets you up for disappointment, and can obscure the significance of a work's variation from the genre standard.

So: How do we end up with this expectation in the first place? a few ways I've found:

1) Bottleneck events. A reader encounters a work somehow in isolation from the rest of the genre. This might mean that it's their first time reading in the genre and they're ready to judge the whole genre on the single work. But it might also mean that a work becomes a breakout hit, vastly more popular than others in the genre, or it's an adaptation to a medium that doesn't have as many entries in the genre. It's a function of visibility; the more you stick out, the more you invite various lenses of interpretation, whether or not they're very productive.

2) Discourse Poisoning. This often accompanies bottleneck events; sometimes a community spends significant time discussing the genre and constructing a definition or set of priorities that meets their particular needs. Once the community has reached consensus on what the genre should be, they'll start to compare works to their criteria and reject them from the genre if they don't meet the standard. Once the community starts producing their own works, these standards become reified as they create works that consciously adopt the established standards, forming a "crystallized" version of the original genre.

3) The work itself calls attention to the genre it's working in. References or comparisons to other works, appealing to genre logic as an explanation or justification, etc. This can happen in the text itself or paratext like marketing, author interviews, etc. Here's the key thing: Once you say something happens "because of genre," you're claiming that you've identified an essential element of the genre. That means the stakes are higher, the question isn't just whether the elements are good for your story, the question is whether your genre analysis is correct.

4) uhhh probably more than that idk

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 and Madoka, Urobuchi writing a Fate prequel, etc), but I'm intrigued by the... otaku crucuble of the VN scene suggested here, I guess. no thesis just putting strings on a corkboard and going "someone should check this out huh"

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 of Princess Fighter, a magical girl franchise that's very much riffing on Precure. There's monster fights, lots of punching, multiple seasons, they recreate the pose from Futari wa Precure, it's not exactly subtle. She's got a fun dynamic with Biko Pegasus, the tokusatsu enthusiast whose favorite show became real. But the term "magical girl" is conspicuously absent from her various monologues; she prefers the term "princess," which links directly back to PriFai and, of course, her own name.

Sweep Tosho calls herself "Magical Girl Sweepy" (mahou shoujo), but also claims to be a witch (mahou) like her grandmother. Her aesthetic is farther from modern magical girls compared to Kawakami, but it does cohere pretty well with the first magical girls, the "little witch" era. For a while I assumed that the designers had started from "Sweep->broom->witch" and used that as the seed for her presentation in Umamusume, but as I dug a little deeper, I found out that there were other "witches" in the real horse's pedigree: Samantha Tosho and Tabatha Tosho, apparently named after characters from American sitcom Bewitched... which was also a major inspiration for those same "little witch" magical girls!

"Bewitched is an honorary magical girl series" would be an appropriate joke to make here but I think it's also just true?? the whole title of Bewitched Agnes depends on this being a recognized consensus??? and now I guess the web of associations that led to Magical Girl Sweepy demonstrates that too.

her song is pretty great btw

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 player party trigger the advancement or completion of these plots.

Fellowship doesn't demand a fully-defined world, it invites you to continue to add details during play, each player contributing information that their character is most likely to know in-character. So, when the Overlord starts every game with a plan to destroy a named community, the most likely option is that you're targeting either an important location from the players' backstories, or the literal first location they're visiting in-game.

Without directly saying so, it nudges you into putting the players' hometowns in the crosshairs. This rules.

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.

locking in and finishing Full Moon would make it easier to compare the two... both magical idol revivals but themselves separated by over a decade...