CarmineCatboy2

he forgot to mention that it was in honor of ukraine's struggle against russian imperialism

oh hollow knight characters are real now

People start to lose elements of themselves and their memories when they die, iirc like "xp loss" but their memories and shit

I do know that and also about the horde of players committing suicide by respawn on Log Horizon. It's just that so much of the story is built around the construction of a society of MMO players and MMO avatars that I focused on the slavery episode much more so than on the memory loss side plot.

On that note, it being an isekai matters, in that literally the MC being inserted into "his character's" reincarnation in the other world is part of a yet to be elaborated on plan by that world's goddess to fuck up the real Lufas's plans to fuck with her.

I'll be honest, I stopped watching Overlord after Season 1 because by the time Season 2 was a thing I had moved on. But I do stand by what I said though. By the same token as before, the story isn't about being displaced to another world. This Scheme, as you described it, could have involved anybody in the world really.

damn, atlus got so bold since persona 3

Makes it transparent how the Isekai aspect is just there as a way to lock in a public. Konosuba is a fucking comedy show and it still had the care to introduce the UI in a diagetic way (being adventurer guild cards) and for a purpose (creating jokes out of the main cast's hyper specific dumbassery).

Overlord for example would not have been affected if he was just some lich who woke up a thousand/hundred years later.

I would go beyond and say that Overlord fails to benefit from being Isekai the same way Konosuba does because its story is unconcerned with being an Isekai. The start of Overlord sort of hints at the notion that the main character was left behind by his online friends and that all his NPC companions/slaves remind him of those friends but I don't think that matters past episode 2. Meanwhile Konosuba is a genre deconstruction so it actually does care about making fun of all the stupid things you find in the wider genre, ironically making it one of the few Isekais that care about being an Isekai.

Grimgar didn't have anything close to a good production but its story at least was about how the protagonists were normal, regular people who needed to learn how to become killers in a world driven by MMO logic. Turns out the low level monsters they need to kill for money don't wanna die. So they eat a lot of shit for half the show and then keep eating shit after. It also probably helps that despite being driven by MMO economics (kill monsters to get a payday), the show does have stakes as death is a possibility at least.

Also in keeping with not utilizing one's premise, its soooooooooooooooooooooo boring to have yet another show that uses videogame logic and sticks a videogame UI onto the protagonist's eyesight only to not use any of it storywise. The one exception I can think of was Log Horizon as it is a story about what players would do given that they are not just trapped in a videogame world - they are used to theme park MMO kinds of socialization. Turns out that when you can respawn murder is not that big of a problem for a budding society of Player Characters. But when some people are level 10 and others are level 100 you kinda have to watch out for slavery. That's inherently interesting.

Isekai isn't bad. Spirited Away is Isekai. Power Fantasies aren't inherently bad either. The problem is how SAO christened Isekai into a haven for mass produced nonsense.

Part of the rethoric of european unification is that European countries are too small in today's world to go it alone. They have to band together as a block, which is a logic that predates both the Ukraine War and that one time in 2008 when systemic US fraud destroyed Europe's economy. It originated in a time of optimism, before the US encircled a divided Europe via wars in the middle east and such while hollowing it out. Nowadays the rethoric is used as a coping mechanism for european liberals and atlanticists. It is a desperate move against the reactionary nativism that would see the EU dismantled rather than held accountable to a democratic system.

Looking at the history of european nation states and how every institution arose due to the threat real or imagined of neighborly armies and industry, I don't think that's an unworkable slogan.

lathe

As I wrote in response to your question in the previous thread, why is there a need to accumulate trade surplus?

I think all countries are in a bind due to neoliberal hegemony. Being able to export a lot and accumulate currency via trade imbalances is the measure of success. Even the countries which benefit from the exploitation of the Global South like those of Europe, Japan and the United States also have this reflexive idea in their political consensus and end up making a lot of unnecessary missteps along the way. Europe should not be practicing austerity, it should not have cut off their neo-colonial relationship with Russia and it should just continue profitting, financially, from importing the fruits of cheap labour and selling it at an European Brand markup. And yet it endangers all of these things.

There is an understanding at least in discourse everywhere that the export driven models of the 1980s do not work any more; that some level of import substitution is economically desirable in the poor south and politically necessary in the wealth west. But it's all just words because financialized accumulation is how you measure success in the rich world and export driven imbalances is how you measure success in the global south.

China is of course on its own league when it comes to the export driven success as demanded by western institutions but its not the only example of such success. Brazil is in as miserable place as ever but it is also a best case scenario compared to, say, Argentina - where debt remains dollarized. And looking at Brazilian history, the last time the export driven paradigm was broken was due to 1929 and the Interwar Period. The Brazilian Elites had been talking about creating a 'national bourgeoisie' and implementing a form of national capitalism for a whole generation up to that point, but nothing was ever done until the 1930s murdered the landowner's ability to monopolize power and pushed the entire fabric of society to the brink.

Nevermind COVID or the Trade Wars. From where I'm standing China will talk about raising domestic consumption until raising domestic consumption is the only avenue for value creation.

There are americans who, to this day, maintain that the US did not lose the Vietnam War.

clippy at least had charisma after a fashion