LAST EDITED ON Sep-18-20 AT 02:53 PM (EDT)
 
>This resurfaces the thought I've long had that VtM would be so much
>better if it took itself much less seriously.

Indeed, this could be fairly said for all the World of Insufficient Light games. I remember a friend of mine who was a lot more into said games than I was capping off with an epic rant about Wraith: The Oblivion when it first came out. "You can't do anything. You're dead. Want to interact with the world? You can't. You're dead. Want to talk to another character? You can't. You're dead. Want to have any effect on the game at all? You can't. You're dead. Fuck's sake!" :)

Also: Back in the '90s, the Maine Turnpike Authority undertook a massive project to widen the Turnpike from the end of the existing six-lane stretch, which ran from the New Hampshire border to the toll booths north of York, all the way from there up to Portland. As part of the run-up to the project, they put up huge informational signs near the start points (north- and southbound) explaining why it was going to be a good thing overall that the Turnpike was going to be a massive pain in the ass to traverse for the next three or four years.

These signs were headed, and oh how I wish phone cams had been a thing back then so I could have gotten a photo of one of them,

TURNPIKE: THE WIDENING

which I submit would have been the worst White Wolf game ever made. Or possibly the best. Gothic horror highway construction.

>I wonder if Japanese, or perhaps German, has yet invented a term for
>'vile, terrible person as protagonist' so it could be applied and
>filtered?

In English the closest we get is "A Film by Quentin Tarantino".

>I believe bonding through brawling is a fairly accepted trope,
>especially but not exclusively in Japan (for a Western example, see
>Klingons.)

True!

>The above is probably being shoehorned into that despite
>the somewhat more fraught than typical initial circumstances.

It kind of works in-setting, if only because a lot of the artists who go that route portray danmaku as a sort of recreational combat, like counting coup, where the object is to defeat your opponent without... you know, utterly retroactively deleting her entire family line from reality, which is something that a number of Touhou characters could do if they really felt like it. It's actually presented as the "less lethal" option, and plausibly so given how terrifying some of the characters' "true power" is portrayed. (Flan, for instance.)

>>(She's also one of those female characters who are always depicted as
>>talking like dudes from yakuza movies, ending almost every sentence
>>with da ze, which for some reason I find very cute. My mind
>>translates that into English with a Bugs Bunny/Harley Quinn accent. :)
>
>Animated DC products have ruined the Harley accent a bit in that I
>expect anyone using it to not be entirely sane. Not necessarily in a
>bad or unpleasant way, just not centered and stable.

Aw, Harley's not bad, she's just drawn that wa—(hand to earpiece) I'm... I'm being told she usually is actually quite bad.

(That aside, Marisa's OK, she's just kind of bullheaded and boundary-challenged. Except in the versions where she's an ardent kleptomaniac. In the good "buddy" interpretations, she hangs around the library a lot, annoying Patchouli, who doesn't socialize, but being generally harmless. In the bad ones, she just breaks in and steals books constantly, with Patchy shaking her fist Farmer MacGregor style. Those are usually the ones where Meiling gets stabbed a lot for always failing to stop her.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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