This resurfaces the thought I've long had that VtM would be so much better if it took itself much less seriously. There were always flashes of it here and there (the clan stereotypes boxes in the old sourcebooks were often good for a chuckle) but they didn't leverage it enough and the whole thing became unable to hold up the ponderous weight of its own pretension.
Which is wandering well into the Off-topic Woods, so I should probably not continue that rant.

>The thing that really bothered me about that one was less the actual
>gore (although I'm not a big fan of it, hence blacklisting the tag) as
>the fact that Patchy and Remi knew it was going to happen to each Koa
>they sent in there (and so did the Koas), but they kept summoning them
>and forcing them them to go in anyway, because fuck 'em, they're only
>minor demons, and somebody's got to keep Flan occupied until she gets
>bored of this. I hate the takes where they're just... actual
>monsters, in the "vile, terrible people" sense.
>

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?

>Well, in Gensōkyō they call them "incidents". :)
>
>They can be presented as sympathetic characters (in a fair fiew
>doujins set after Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, they're actually
>depicted as friends of the SDM gang, having somehow bonded with them
>over the shared experience of having broken in and assaulted everyone
>there to halt what was really not that major a shenanigan). I like
>Marisa (the witch) a bit better of the two in those scenarios, because
>she's really pretty harmless, she just has poor impulse control (as
>opposed to Reimu, who, with the best will in the world, is still a bit
>of a bully even when being portrayed as basically nice). Evidently
>there's a line at the end of the game wherein Flan (who is the
>bonus-stage boss, the last one you fight) takes a liking to her
>because, although she lost, it was the first fun she's had in years,
>and so in the follow-up art you see them hanging out, which is cute.
>

I believe bonding through brawling is a fairly accepted trope, especially but not exclusively in Japan (for a Western example, see Klingons.) The above is probably being shoehorned into that despite the somewhat more fraught than typical initial circumstances.

>(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.

	-={(Astynax)}=- "An obsession with puddin' may or may not be present."