[1561] Little girl stuff

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[1561] Little girl stuff

Post by paarfi » Mon Aug 12, 2019 8:39 pm

Fred has posted the comic to his Patreon. He'll post it to the main site and elsewhere probably tomorrow.
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by paarfi » Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:08 pm

I have always greatly admired CS Lewis's defense of fairy tales and children's literature. I think, had he lived long enough to know of them, he'd have felt the same about magical girls. You don't have to give up little girl stuff when you become a big girl, Moeko. Never stop dreaming.

My defence consists of three propositions.
1. I reply with a tu quoque. Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But the on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development: When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by Liminaut » Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:07 pm

I love the comic, and the last panel is powerful, but breasts without areola look really weird.

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by Roamer » Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:37 pm

paarfi wrote:
Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:08 pm
I have always greatly admired CS Lewis's defense of fairy tales and children's literature. I think, had he lived long enough to know of them, he'd have felt the same about magical girls. You don't have to give up little girl stuff when you become a big girl, Moeko. Never stop dreaming.
Especially when you never got the chance to be a little girl.

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by cidjen » Tue Aug 13, 2019 9:30 am

@Luminaut: I think it's supposed to be 'implied nudity' as in a Magical Girl Transformation Sequence.

~~~~~~~

What Moeko probably now needs from Erika, are some wise words to cheer up...

Similar thing? happened before

Thank you, Fred, for the page!
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by Teddy-Werebear » Tue Aug 13, 2019 10:21 am

Moeko clearly has fangs... in every shot. Clearly having a nervous breakdown, also. Has it been a slow rolling nervous breakdown for years? A decade or more? Some things you cannot fix. Some things you cannot replace. Some things you cannot throw out. Some things you cannot escape.

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by darrin » Tue Aug 13, 2019 10:45 am

paarfi wrote:
Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:08 pm
I have always greatly admired CS Lewis's defense of fairy tales and children's literature.
Or in defense of literature that others considered "children's" that arguably wasn't; go back a few hundred years and "fairy tales" were a (non-child-specific) genre, as legitimate then as say detective or romance genres in modern times. He (and his friend Tolkien) put a lot of effort into trying to make ("modern") people aware of this.
I think, had he lived long enough to know of them, he'd have felt the same about magical girls. You don't have to give up little girl stuff when you become a big girl, Moeko. Never stop dreaming.
Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. A lot of what he and Tolkien were trying to do was take the literary and story-telling legacy of the Anglo-Saxons and make them accessible to a modern audience. I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that at there best, a fair fraction of Japanese "anime/manga" is intended to do something similar for Japanese folk traditions. (Yes of course there are Sakuradite-powered mechas, but there are also oni and ghosts and magical girls.) And of course certainly there is (at least in the West that I'm aware of) the unquestionable assumption that these are by definition "children's" works exactly because they are cartoons and drawings.

I had a musician friend who was always saying things like "what if Brahms had lived long enough to hear Dixie". I can't help wondering what those two geniuses might have been able to do if they'd been exposed to the anime/manga corpus, traced them back to their original folk sources, and then projected them forward again as they had so successfully done with the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

One can dream,,,
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by cidjen » Tue Aug 13, 2019 10:59 am

darrin wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 10:45 am
One can dream,,,
Wooow.
OT & FTR, which book is this from ? Silmarilion?
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by jkhartl » Tue Aug 13, 2019 11:29 am

cidjen wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 10:59 am
Wooow.
OT & FTR, which book is this from ? Silmarilion?
This is from the appendices to The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King. Aragon, the last of the Númenoreans has decided he has lived long enough. This left Arwen in a lurch, now that she is mortal, died soon afterward.
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by PhysProf » Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:08 pm

I think I'm a bit confused by panel 3: so Moeko first saw the story when her mother played it on their VHS (?), then she later became the idol, then fell into a coma and Erica became the idol? Who was the idol that Moeko saw? Or am I misunderstanding things?

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by paarfi » Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:33 pm

PhysProf wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:08 pm
I think I'm a bit confused by panel 3: so Moeko first saw the story when her mother played it on their VHS (?), then she later became the idol, then fell into a coma and Erica became the idol? Who was the idol that Moeko saw? Or am I misunderstanding things?
Moeko is a real magical girl, just like Yuki, Meimi, Ririka, Cha-san, etc. The highly fictionalized stories of these real magical girls get turned into anime. This is paralleled from real world anime, where Meimi was portrayed as Meimi Haneoka from Saint Tail, Ririka as Ririka Moriya from Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, and Cha-san as ChaCha from Akazukin Chacha. And it is also paralleled in the MT-world anime where Moeko here was portrayed as Moeko in the GirlPhase anime, where she was voiced by Erika.

So Erika, through playing Moeko in GirlPhase, was showing Moeko her story and life that might have been. All those magical girl animes are "based on a true story" types of fiction. In Ririka's case, they changed her looks and attitude [1499], and in Moeko's case they seem to have invented a life almost from whole cloth.

But that life, almost totally made up though it was, gave Moeko something she didn't have. When her mother played GirlPhase on the TV in the hospital room, it let her see that might-have-been. It let her live her life, even if vicariously through a TV character, in a way that she'd never be able to do for real.

This all ties into larger themes in MT, with Miho being the CharacterAnalogue for the Tragic-Dying-Girl-Who-Never-Really-Got-To-Live story type, which is clearly Moeko's story and is what causes the link between them. And it also ties into other things Fred seems to be exploring, like the power of stories and fandom.
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by Initial B » Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:34 pm

Got me in the feels. How many years of regret and longing go into that last panel. Erika needs to give her a big hug. Erika should translate what Moeko just said to Largo. He seems to always have the right insightful comment hidden behind his manic personality.

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by PhysProf » Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:48 pm

paarfi wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:33 pm
Moeko is a real magical girl, just like Yuki, Meimi, Ririka, Cha-san, etc. The highly fictionalized stories of these real magical girls get turned into anime. This is paralleled from real world anime, where Meimi was portrayed as Meimi Haneoka from Saint Tail, Ririka as Ririka Moriya from Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, and Cha-san as ChaCha from Akazukin Chacha. And it is also paralleled in the MT-world anime where Moeko here was portrayed as Moeko in the GirlPhase anime, where she was voiced by Erika.

So Erika, through playing Moeko in GirlPhase, was showing Moeko her story and life that might have been. All those magical girl animes are "based on a true story" types of fiction. In Ririka's case, they changed her looks and attitude [1499], and in Moeko's case they seem to have invented a life almost from whole cloth.

But that life, almost totally made up though it was, gave Moeko something she didn't have. When her mother played GirlPhase on the TV in the hospital room, it let her see that might-have-been. It let her live her life, even if vicariously through a TV character, in a way that she'd never be able to do for real.

This all ties into larger themes in MT, with Miho being the CharacterAnalogue for the Tragic-Dying-Girl-Who-Never-Really-Got-To-Live story type, which is clearly Moeko's story and is what causes the link between them. And it also ties into other things Fred seems to be exploring, like the power of stories and fandom.
Thanks, Paarfi - that's very helpful! I hadn't known all the "real-world" links to anime, so I've got some catching up to do. I'm still trying to figure out how Moeko and Miho are linked, but that's slowly coming clear as this chapter progresses.

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by NinjaDefenestrator » Tue Aug 13, 2019 2:03 pm

How does Miho factor into this? When Moeko recently appeared in her dying vision as a little girl in a nightgown, she yelled something like “You had so much life, you gave some of it to me!” So...how did that work, exactly?

That’s been in the back of my mind during this scene.

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by Orriens » Tue Aug 13, 2019 2:14 pm

paarfi wrote:
Mon Aug 12, 2019 8:39 pm
Can't Fred post it here himself?
I mean, does he even bother visiting the forums?

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by paarfi » Tue Aug 13, 2019 2:29 pm

Orriens wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 2:14 pm
paarfi wrote:
Mon Aug 12, 2019 8:39 pm
Can't Fred post it here himself?
I mean, does he even bother visiting the forums?
Fred does visit the story discussion threads a couple of times after he posts a comic. He likes to see if people are getting what he had tried to say. He has posted to these threads before, but that's pretty rare. This forum is really for fans to talk to fans, and he seems to like it that way. I start these threads (or occasionally someone else does) because Fred has so much on his plate that he can't do already, and this is a small thing that I can do for him to help.

As far as actually posting the comic itself to the story thread, I suppose we could. I don't know how many people would find that useful though, since it's already readily available on the main site. If a lot of people would like that, I guess I could start doing that too. Or maybe that's not what you were asking.
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by cidjen » Tue Aug 13, 2019 2:31 pm

PhysProf wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:48 pm
I'm still trying to figure out how Moeko and Miho are linked
Erika is an actress who played Moeko's role in the anime, but Moeko was in a 'coma' even before that anime was released.
Kimiko is an actress playing the character of who Miho has become just before dying for the first time (Miho hates being that character, because she was 'never that girl').
Kimiko is Erika's room mate and best-friends-with.
There are clues to possible relation between Miho and Moeko (siblings/sisters, or maternal - Miho being mother, or possibly a split personality of the same person, before and after some event possibly), reading those depends on how you interpret the clues and tropes those came from.

Other than that, what @paarfi said.
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by paarfi » Tue Aug 13, 2019 2:48 pm

NinjaDefenestrator wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 2:03 pm
How does Miho factor into this? When Moeko recently appeared in her dying vision as a little girl in a nightgown, she yelled something like “You had so much life, you gave some of it to me!” So...how did that work, exactly?
I'll take a stab at that, though I'm not totally sure I'm right here. Like I said a few comic threads back, I think there's a chain that works like this:
Story -> CharacterAnalogue -> RealPerson -> Character -> Fans

So in this case:
TragicDyingGirl -> Miho -> Moeko -> Erika/GirlPhase -> FanHorde
Story flows left to right; emotive fan power flows back the other way.

Per Junko's dad, the CharacterAnalogue provides the source for a particular Story type [1240], and the game or anime is just a framework for experiencing that Story [1239]. So I think Miho, as a CharacterAnalogue, provided the Story that brought the GirlPhase anime (among many others) to life. And the GirlPhase anime gave Moeko a way to live her life vicariously, in a way she couldn't in reality. It gave her a life she otherwise wouldn't have had.
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by cidjen » Tue Aug 13, 2019 3:09 pm

paarfi wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 2:48 pm
TragicDyingGirl -> Miho -> Moeko -> Erika/GirlPhase -> FanHorde
Story flows left to right; emotive fan power flows back the other way.
Hmm,
I think, Moeko in this scheme could be the version of the girl that became Miho, after nearly dying from cogenital syndrome; or before even setting off on the jurney that ended with Miho being pulled from the sea by pirates.

Story: Lively girl (proto-Moeko) -> ship catastrophe -> girl on the ship -> death of the pirates -> tragic person dying in a remote country house (proto-Miho) (this would also be why Miho remembers all of it, whereas Moeko seems to be just the lively, 'genki' kinda girl Miho claims /she/ was)

Moeko's part of the story gets made into a Magical Girl Story (possibly because it's somehow linked to surviving the ship catastrophe, musta have been magic that helped, ya see). This must have been also transplanted a happy ending to, ignoring what happened with Miho later.

The stories get separated.

Miho's part of the story moves people with its sadness of the tragic person dying. But the person nearly dying is in fact Moeko.

Fans of the Magical Girl story like it so much, that it gives both Miho and Moeko the Magical Girl Powers.

Fans of the Sad Dying Girl story like it so much, that it puts Moeko into coma. (it's not exactly clear, but wouldn't a game story development take a few years before production begins? Is it a coincidence, that Moeko fell into coma even begin Erika's anime started airing? Possibly when the story development/principal author, Ryoia Sayuri, who previously worked on Girl*Phase, got hired by Lockart to work on the story of the Sad Dying Girl.) (or if she worked on that one being with Lockart, she got shifted or changed stories herself, freezing Moeko's story development = putting Moeko into coma;)

(or has been assigned to SDG story after the higherups determined G*P did not need more development, or even after the incident with Moe-bo not needing to transform into the Magical Girl form?)(EDIT hmm however Sayuri was a guest author on that one. ... so after causing fan upset, it also shifted Moeko's story property from whoever wrote it before Sayuri, to Sayuri herself? That was how the story could acquire most fan energy... so it decided, Ryoia is the person that can grant it that; but Ryoia went to work on SDG instead of G*P and the G*P story has paused.)

Miho hates the Sad Dying Girl story, but the Fan Horde is forcing her to be That Girl.

This kinda flow would prove that Miho is Moeko, later.
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by darrin » Tue Aug 13, 2019 3:43 pm

paarfi wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:33 pm
When her mother played GirlPhase on the TV in the hospital room, it let her see that might-have-been. It let her live her life, even if vicariously through a TV character, in a way that she'd never be able to do for real.
Which makes me wonder, did Moeko manifest herself to her mother the way she is doing so to Erika right now? "Don't worry mom, I'm actually ok, and the videos are helping, keep 'em coming"?

Or were they able to communicate during any non-comatose moments (if there were any)?

Or was mom just playing the videos out of hope? (Along the lines of it being recommended to keep talking to a comatose patient even if you don't see any signs they hear you) (Maybe Moeko can only manifest herself to fellow MGs, plus closely associated individuals like idols... or maybe it was too emotionally painful to talk directly to her mother...)

The questions of who knew what and when have been multiplying more and more rapidly as time goes on...
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by Tiger » Tue Aug 13, 2019 3:50 pm

Her little fangs are so cute

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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by BetaCygnus » Tue Aug 13, 2019 4:25 pm

Initial B wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 12:34 pm
Got me in the feels. How many years of regret and longing go into that last panel. Erika needs to give her a big hug. Erika should translate what Moeko just said to Largo. He seems to always have the right insightful comment hidden behind his manic personality.
So true.

=)
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by darrin » Tue Aug 13, 2019 4:31 pm

jkhartl wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 11:29 am
This is from the appendices to The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King.
Appendix A in fact :lol:. A shame the archives are still down and I can't just point to the thread, that was a fun one. (jkhartl, was the really pretty one with "A Elbereth Gilthoniel" on top of a colored version of Queen of Kuith yours? My apologies for my bad memory...)
Tiger wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 3:50 pm
Her little fangs are so cute
Indeed, she is almost as cute as Mavis Dracula. (Of course I haven't seen Mavis shirtless, so it is perhaps not a perfectly fair comparison... :shock: :oops:)
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by jkhartl » Tue Aug 13, 2019 6:39 pm

darrin wrote:
Tue Aug 13, 2019 4:31 pm
Appendix A in fact :lol:. A shame the archives are still down and I can't just point to the thread, that was a fun one. (jkhartl, was the really pretty one with "A Elbereth Gilthoniel" on top of a colored version of Queen of Kuith yours? My apologies for my bad memory...)
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Re: [1561] Little girl stuff

Post by piro » Tue Aug 13, 2019 6:46 pm

[/quote]
Can't Fred post it here himself?
I mean, does he even bother visiting the forums?
[/quote]

Actually, i do read the forums, often actually. I tend not to post much because i have an unfair advantage when it comes to me talking about what might or might not be going on. The place for ME to tell you guys what is up is in the comic, not here (because a story should stand on its own) - also, figuring things out is part of the fun of any story, IMHO and there have been a lot of interesting discussions over the years. There is something to be said for writing something or having characters do things that make people think.

Also, its amazing the kinds of things people pick up on, or things people see in the characters that i never even thought of before. Every person has their own perspective on life and the things around them, so its always interesting to hear what people have to say.

Oh, and there have been a number of times when i had come in here to clarify something (because people seemed to be going WAY off base on it) and i was told bluntly that i was wrong. Which was amusing. :)

Fred

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