TKO Creations

Underneath the surface of this game, I swear is the West answer to those moe harem anime dating sims.

From the adorable and cheery artist, struggling so badly that she has to forage for food while being stalked by a creepy ex-boyfriend…

Or the shy bookworm tutor, who lives with her alcoholic mom in a trailer where she is constantly shamed..

Or the unusually peppy “goth” girl, who wants to be an adventurer and discouraged at every turn because it’s not a proper woman’s work…

Or the man returning from a war and has PTSD so bad that the sound of popcorn popping causes him to have anxiety attacks…

And all of it lurking underneath this veneer of quaint community charm.

I’m not sure whether to be impressed by the developer’s subtle writing talents or a little bit concerned for his mental state.

I’ve been mostly silent on this USA election cycle mostly because anything I really could offer had been said time after time already.  But now, in the aftermath, I think I see a niche where the opinions of this rather moderate Midwestern boy might be able to add to the discussion rather than parrot it.

So here goes.

(Warning: This is going to be long, and no I’m not going to give any tl;dr versions.  Part of the problem with the discourse in this country has been in chopping everything into 140-character text bites.)

An Open Letter to Many Different Groups

Dear Liberal Voters

(Don’t worry, I’ll be getting to many different people in time, I’m not going to spend this whole time picking on you.  Be patient and I’ll get to the rest of the class.)

I know this is going to be very hard for a good many of you.  Even if you aren’t a member of a minority group, chances are you know someone who is, and you know how scared they are.  I understand this, and I don’t want to make you think that I am trying to wave away their fear.

Now, with that said, I want you to form a picture with me.  For now, just remove any thoughts of race, gender, sexual identity, religion, or anything else from it.  Feel perfectly free to put anyone you want in any of the roles.

Picture a country where you need just one income to provide for your family.  You can either be that income maker or the person who cares for the home.  It doesn’t really matter which one you are.

You are in a country where you are comfortable leaving your front door unlocked because you know the people in the neighborhood, they’ve been a part of that neighborhood for years, and while you don’t always agree you’ve never doubted that if your house was on fire, they’d be the first people with a hose coming to help you.

In this country, life isn’t easy, but it never feels hopeless.  Your children can literally choose any path without terribly much worry.  If they were smart enough, they could attend college without much difficulty or financial burden.  And even if they weren’t, they would still relatively easily have the means to provide for themselves and their families in turn.

That would be pretty cool right?  Wouldn’t you want that?  Don’t lie.  You absolutely would, because that’s a really good place to be.

That’s the country that “Middle America” vaguely remembers.  And for a certain section of that voter base, that world actually happened.

And the reason I wanted you to remove race, gender, sexual identity, religion, etc. from it?  Because much of Middle America doesn’t see it either.  Their vision of when America was great is not bigoted as much as it is incomplete.

Perhaps that’s merely a different kind of terrible, one born of ignorance and a bit of selfishness rather than malice.  But the difference is that this kind of terrible is one you can reason with.  It’s one where you can acknowledge, “Yeah, that would have been really cool, but…”

These are people that don’t hate, they just don’t understand, and when you lump them all in with the “basket of deplorables” the only thing they do is feel unjustly attacked.  And you know what happens when you feel attacked?  You tend to dig your heels in, and push back.  The people of Middle America aren’t any different on that score.

I know the cool rhetoric is “black and white”, “good vs. evil”, or “you’re either with us or against us.”  And I also know that liberals are hardly the only side responsible for this level of discourse.  We live in a world where “trolling” is an art form, where people (usually of the alt-right) consider a “win” scenario to be as intentionally and blatantly offensive as possible in order to get people angry and break discourse.  There is no reasoning with those people, and I am certainly not asking you to try.

But you don’t know who is a troll and who is simply angry and desperate until you actually try to engage them.  And I know it’s really hard, especially right now, to put yourself in that position.  But you have to, at least if you want a chance to turn the tables as quickly as possible.  You need more allies, and the allies you can easily reach are the ones that are just as scared as you are, but for different reasons.

Dear Conservative Voters

Okay, now it’s your turn.

Ignorance isn’t much of an excuse, especially now that you’re seeing the fallout from a lot of people that are crying and upset and scared.  I see it quite frequently in this social media of people who deny white privilege up and down, dismissing these fears as overreaction, of people simply in grieving because “their team” lost.

Firstly, you need to accept one thing right now.  White privilege is real.  Don’t deny it any more.  Okay?  When someone says you have “white privilege” they aren’t dismissing your pain.  They aren’t dismissing your fears or your troubles.  They are saying that you inherently will not experience certain things.  You will not be exposed to certain, unique concerns, simply because you happened to be born with your specific skin color.

That privilege is part of the reason this happened, but it’s not inherently your fault.  But you need to just believe me, and believe them, when I say that their fear is not entirely unfounded.

See… you handed the keys to this country to people that have spent a good long time telling them just what would happen if this exact scenario occurred.  You have a coming Vice-President who has displayed support of “shock conversion therapy” for gay people (if you don’t know what that is, please look it up, or at least believe me when I say it is exactly how it sounds).

These are people who have had to deal with backwards leaders at the state level, much like the ones that have been elected, who have gone out of their way to make the lives of these minority people miserable, to let them know they aren’t welcome.

You have put the cards on the table that make this possible on a national level.  You may not have intended that, in fact I do believe that most of you absolutely didn’t intend that.  But if you truly meant these minorities no harm (as I hear repeatedly on social media)… then for the next two years at the very least you need to stand up for them, and let the people you elected know that you will not stand for it if they try to push their social agenda on the nation (and I’ll get to this later, but they will).  You need to make it very clear with your voice and your actions that when they try, their reign will be very short.

This election, more than any other, is not something you can set and forget if you are earnest in your repeated claims that you aren’t racist, or sexist, or bigoted.  This is one that will need constant vigilance, because I know what the people you elected are going to try to do the minute they think no one’s watching.

To the Democratic Party

Okay.  Are you finally listening now?

Or are you just gonna bury your head in the sand and continue to suggest that anyone screaming, “It’s the economy!” is a racist piece of trash?

Are you going to examine your nomination process and decide that “maybe it isn’t such a good idea to predetermine a favorite for 2016 in 2008?”

Or are you simply going to fan the flames that say anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton is a misogynistic neanderthal?

Because ya know what?  I’m going to come clean and admit that I voted for Hillary Clinton, but did not do so terribly excitedly.  She was, in my opinion, the least rancid pile of dung among the four piles of dung I had to choose from.  But I did not forget that I was still choosing a pile of dung.

And no, I don’t care that Trump was just as bad, or that the GOP is worse.  I’m not talking to them right now (but I will, don’t worry).

You kept asking “what was wrong with Hillary Clinton?” then promptly ignoring any of the answers.  Well, I’m going to give you some to ignore as well (and guess what… none of them are going to have to do with e-mails).

Firstly, she was secretive and withdrawn to the point of absurdity. Now, I get why.  She had been a part of a not-at-all subtle smear campaign from the GOP for the last oh… thirty years.  Okay?  I get that.

But maybe, just maybe, putting someone that gunshy of public transparency was a bad idea?

Her complete reluctance to reveal what she said to Wall Street bankers was absurd to begin with, and even more so when we finally figured out that it was completely banal.  How can you expect people to trust someone who is so absolutely distrustful of the general public?

Even if it’s horribly unfair to dismiss an otherwise qualified person for a job because of something they didn’t have much control over, you probably shouldn’t push that person into a role in which at least the appearance of transparency is vital.

Which leads to…

Secondly, her optics were terrible.  I mean, pretty much the day after it was discovered that the DNC had been not-so-secretly doing everything they can short of outright rigging the nomination process… she invites the leader of that into her campaign!

Did anyone in the party think that might look bad?  Did anyone tap Hillary on the shoulder and say, “Hey… uh… this is a really awful idea.  You might seriously wanna rethink it.”?

Thirdly, she came to represent a more “incorporated” version of the Democratic Party that your own registered voters are growing less and less excited about supporting with each passing election.

America isn’t exactly the most liberal country in the world, okay?  We’ve spent the better part of seventy years being beaten over the head of the evils of communism.  I honestly think it’s ingrained in this country’s DNA at this point.

And yet a man who openly calls himself a socialist gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money.  Wrap your head around that please.  That’s like if Germany today had a candidate run as a member of the Nazi Party and Germans went, “Yeah… I know… but look at what the alternative is!”

Listen, your party is a mess, okay?  And it’s not going to get any better the longer you blame everyone else for why your predestined candidate from eight years ago didn’t really resonate with voters now.  Start listening to the people who support you, for chrissake.  Maybe you’ll learn something.

Or don’t.  Blaming others for your failings has kinda become the DNC’s hallmark at this point.

To the Republican Party

I’m not even really going to talk about Trump.  There’s nothing that I can say about that fetid gasbag that hasn’t already been said a thousand times.  It clearly doesn’t matter anyway.

But I’m here to try and give you some earnest advice; because I honestly want to see a small government, low overhead, low spending, low red-tape, low bullshit approach work.  I want to see a government that focuses on oversight rather than regulation work.  There’s so much this government can do that it doesn’t do because it keeps getting lost in the forest for all the trees.

Please… please… PLEASE… let the social war go.

Please accept that this is a war you have already lost.  Accept that it is a war you cannot possibly win in the scope that you are trying to fight it.  Please let your social agenda focus on letting people live how they want.  If they want to live a Puritan-style “traditional family values” way, great.  If they want to live lavishly with people of the same gender or want to become a different gender entirely?  Let them.  Accept that it has nothing to do with you and let people be as they are.

I’ll even let you keep the abortion fight because ya know, it is a nuanced one and there is something to be said for a voice that is more emphatic for the unborn.  Okay?  You have something there.  Not much, and you should be much more careful on how you try to throw your weight around, but something.

Please.

Now as I say this, I know you won’t… because the Evangelical base that you sold your souls to won’t let you.  Even though public favor for these social issues are at all time lows, and will only get lower, you’re going to push this fight, it’s going to blow up in your face, and you’ll effectively lose all the ground you’ve gained within four years.

Because that’s what you clowns do.  You people are masters at clutching defeat from the jaws of victory.

And ya know what, don’t feel at all comfortable about maintaining your “conservative control” of the Supreme Court.  Let me remind you that it was supposedly “conservative” courts that approved civil rights, legal access to ready abortions, and gay marriage (all considered very liberal things).  Because by and large, these justices are going to defend the Constitution above all else, and they’re going to by and large side with public sentiment more than they won’t, regardless of what Senate confirms them.

You have two years to live up to the promises Trump made; to revitalize the infrastructure of this country, to restore or at least replace decently paying jobs to people that are hurting… before this country turns on you like the hounds of Hell.  You don’t have time to be fighting battles fewer and fewer people in this country want to see you fight.

But you will.  Because you’re idiots.

To Everyone

Thank you to all of you that made it this far.  Whew, huh?  This is one hell of a time, and not in the good way.  There’s a lot of anger, a lot of distrust, a lot of negative emotions swirling everywhere because honestly?  Most people, be they Trump of Clinton voter, wasn’t particularly happy about this election.  It was just ugly, and brought out the worst in all of us.

How do we recover from this?  I honestly don’t know.  I’d suggest listening, empathy, and just not treating anyone who disagrees with you like they’re Satan.  But at the same time, I know that’s never particularly been a trait of humanity as a species, much less this country.

For what it’s worth, whoever you are… wherever you are… I’m pulling for ya.  Whether you’re a lesbian black Muslim slumming it in some shanty downtown, or a poor, white Christian former factory worker wondering where the hell his job went… hell, even if you’re some rich socialite sitting on a billion dollars of fiat money completely oblivious to the fact that it’s not if the people you stepped on pull your palace out from under you but when… I’m pulling for ya.  I hope you get through this.

We’ve have enough people hurt, okay?  Let’s not actively try and make any more casualties.

Think we can do that?

…

Don’t answer that.  I’m depressed enough as it is.

Sincerely,

Thomas Knapp

Writer hack and general poor example of living life to the fullest

Seeing your co-worker’s art displayed for damn near all of Detroit to see makes me feel awesome by proxy.

Congratulations, Fred.  Bask in this.

Another year, another trip to Detroit, and another weekend of peddling books.

I know I made that sound far more dreadful than it really is.

There is a small difference of note this time around though, and it’s working me into no small amount of social anxiety, that I’ll be taking part in at least two convention panels (as opposed to the one or none that had been more common).  On top of that, one of those panels is “prime-time” Saturday evening.

So pardon me while I huddle into a corner and sob it out so I’ll be coherent in about two and a half week’s time.

I’m not particularly known as a “romantic” writer (at least, in the sense that I don’t particularly focus on romance in my stories). So, this may seem like quite a deviation for me… as a talk about a romance in a just concluded manga series.

Bleach.

Yes. I occasionally follow manga. Yes, they tend to be “mainstream” ones because those are the ones my local bookstore gets. Sorry if I fail to meet your hipster requirements.

Now, in the spirit of fairness, I rather stopped following the series around volume 10 (after said local bookstore stopped carrying manga of any sort). So a few weeks back, when I learned that Tite Kubo was being pushed to wrap the series up, I decided it was time to catch up.

(Author’s Note: I’ll have to buy the other volumes at some point somehow… I don’t like freely consuming another creator’s work without compensation.)

Anyway, the ending was a rushed, narrative mess, which is to be expected, and I’m not going to go into that as some of my readers might be expecting. No, I’m going to focus on the fan fervor wildfire of the endgame “shipping”, because… I honestly find it interesting.

I didn’t particularly have a dog in the fight (I rarely do, my tendency, being an author myself is to respect the will of the creator on this score), but I’ll be honest when I say that… I can understand the revulsion that longtime readers might have had to the “canonized” pairing of Ichigo and Orihime.

To be fair, at the start of the Bleach manga, that “relationship” had damn near all the signs of a really bad romance. As in both in a literary and realistic sense, narratively cliché and by all initial observation done by a creator who didn’t seem to understand what a healthy relationship really is.

Orihime was the airheaded, cloud-cuckoolander girl, who happens to be absolutely gorgeous even though she doesn’t see it, with a figure at fifteen that most supermodels in their prime would kill to have. She had every appearance, by the tendency of mangaka, to be the literal manufactured woman who exists solely to be the hero’s girlfriend. Her entire early development was centered completely around the hero and how much she crushes for him.

So yes… I completely get and understand that initial revulsion by a large chunk of the fanbase. This is a story we’ve seen play out many a time, one that has crossed many bounds of time and culture.

But ya know what? At some point, Kubo somehow pulled out of that potential engine fire, and not only kept that plane from crashing and burning… actually plotted out a pretty breathtaking course.

If there’s one thing Kubo did well in Bleach (and trust me, it wasn’t closing narrative holes; he was pretty notorious for leaving hanging threads even without the threat of impending cancellation) it’s that he managed to have remarkable character development despite a (seemingly unwise) burgeoning cast.

Honestly, he managed to give depth and feeling to over a hundred featured characters. I personally wouldn’t even dare try a tenth that number at any given time. And Orihime… weirdly happy, potentially deranged, quasi-stalker, Orihime… arguably benefited the most from Kubo’s hand.

We learned the heart of her seemingly fake bubbly happiness. And in possibly the best sort of character twist because it’s the obvious one, it’s because a good portion of it was fake. From being abused by her parents… to a brother that turned into an undead beast and tried to kill her… this poor girl spent her formative years with pretty compelling reason to believe she cursed everyone she cared for.

As someone who survived parental abuse, this… is actually a very real reaction for someone who suffers at the hands of people who are supposed to care for them. You construct a mask, and you wear that mask every damn day. You pretend to be happy because if you show your pain, people will want to know why. But you can’t tell them. You can’t let anyone in. Because, remember? You’re fucking cursed. Anyone who gets close to you gets hurt. And the last thing you want is anyone getting hurt because of you.

That’s something you’re taught as a victim of abuse. That it’s your fault. The pain that you are being subjected to is because you did something. “This hurts me more than it hurts you. Why do you misbehave?” This is bullshit you are taught, and it’s the bullshit you believe.

That’s also why she can’t have a normal relationship with Ichigo for so long. Because when you care about someone that much, but know that if you tell them… and especially if they actually return that affection… you will directly curse the person you care for. You will hurt them, and it will be your fault.

I think back to the “Lust Arc,” and how much that really gnawed at me. Look at that girl through that particular storyline, and you see it. She’s blaming herself for all the harm happening to her friends. The guy she’s crushing on… transforms into the personification of the series’s equivalent of a demon… and it’s because of her. All because… she let him get too close.

How she is attacked by hollows, and doesn’t even fight back? Yeah… that’s what abused people do. They don’t think they’re worth fighting for, especially for their own sake. She was getting what she deserved, as far as she was concerned, and I went back there with her, and for the first time in a long time, I wanted to hug a fictional character, and tell her that it gets better… it’s not her fault… she can’t keep believing that…

So yeah, her character really resonated with me, especially as she grew and learned those lessons I did. And damn if I didn’t cheer when she finally accepted and internalized that the bullshit she had been programmed to believe was in fact bullshit, and that she wasn’t going to keep shying away from people who needed her as much as she needed them. That she could provide care and support just as much as she needed it… that she was a person with value, damn it, and people deserve some happiness in their life, and that the only thing that was actually hurting her… was her own fears, insecurities, and self-loathing.

So, kudos to you, Mr. Kubo. On this score, you did good. You did real good.

As I might have mentioned earlier, I really don’t make enough money off my writing to support myself on royalties alone.  Most writers don’t, actually.

But my day job has recently been in a lot of flux, with a lot of changing hours and even changing where I work.  As a result, it has been laying waste to my sleep cycle, and thus, how much time I have to create.

As a result, if I’ve been really quiet, both on blog posts (that I know I promised to improve) and in my book writing progress… well… that’s why.  It’s not my normal ennui.  It’s me getting my ass kicked by my job.

It sucks.

As we face another round of fatal encounters between the minority population and officers of the law (as well as now the reality and threat of reprisals), once again Black Lives Matter is being thrust into the center of our attention, as well as the criticism against it.

One popular criticism I’ve been hearing lately has been to the effect of, “I’ll take Black Lives Matter seriously when it addresses black on black crime.”

On the surface, it sounds like a valid critique of the Black Lives Matter movement.  After all, if black people really cared about their lives in relation to society, shouldn’t they be focusing on their own first?  But once you really think about it… you realize that it is, in fact, a non-sequitur argument, and one that can be dismissed without merit.

Black Lives Matter, like most movements and organizations, focus on a specific issue or handful of related issues.  In this case specifically, the social degradation and violence towards people of color by law enforcement in the United States.  Civil crime and violence within the “black community” is not and never has been a matter of focus within the movement.

To say you won’t take Black Lives Matter seriously until they focus on black on black crime is like saying you won’t take Doctors without Borders seriously until they focus on cancer research.  Or saying you won’t take the World Wildlife Fund seriously until they focus on stray animal populations.  Or that you refuse to consider the American Solar Energy Society legitimate until they put their time and energy into building wind turbines.

Saying any of those things would be categorically absurd, because there’s no reason to expect those organizations or initiatives to step outside their matter of awareness, even if the others issues are tangentially related to their area of expertise.

The criticism further falls flat because it’s not like Black Lives Matter would be filling a void currently unfilled.  There are in fact several organizations that emphasize crime within the black community, and a good ten second Google search would prove that.  Like the Black Family Initiative or the aptly named “Preventing Crime in the Black Community”, or even in more general, the National Center for the Victims of Crime.

So, when you hear this criticism in the future, it does not deserve consideration.  It is a deflection.  An attempt to dismiss legitimate concerns to sustain the status quo.  It’s not even so much that these people don’t think black lives matter.  It’s that they don’t think black lives matter enough to challenge the familiar society they embrace.

Not being either British or European (nor having any ties beyond ancestral heritage), I really can’t make too many statements except in a generalized, macrocosm perspective.

On one hand, the European Union has done little to really justify its existence beyond helping the wealthy of the continent get wealthier.  Much like in the United States as our free trade agreements kicked in, there was little to no support for the middle class jobs that got shifted, leaving millions of people in the lurch with few prospects or alternatives.  That’s a problem.  It’s a big problem, and just like the elite in the U.S., the elites in the EU responded to that problem with a shrug and indifference as the armored trucks full of money backed into their bank accounts.

The deplorable “solution” to the Syrian refugee problem was also nothing that can possibly be defended, and their handling of the Grecian collapse was equally despicable.  It’s a bit disingenuous to wag your finger at England for succumbing to fears of the “brown people” while you’re doing everything you can to shuffle those same people off to a questionable regime in Turkey with no small amount of troubling human rights attitudes in exchange for more money and trade.

So no, the vote to leave the European Union isn’t inherently an anti-intellectual, selfish, uninformed one.

That said, if your alternative was to support a blatantly xenophobic, ultra-nationalist party, then your protest vote was put in precisely the wrong hands.  I would have thought Europe and Great Britain would know better than anyone what happens when you give that sort of sentiment validation.

And I’m not even talking about Nazi Germany (although they are a prime example).  The ethnic cleansing of Slobodan Milosevic and then Yugoslavia should still be well within the collective consciousness of the older Britons that voted in supposedly large numbers to support the UKIP’s nigh racist platform.

Not to mention how badly this decision will almost assuredly shoot yourselves in the foot.  At this point, it is almost assured that Scotland will push for another referendum on independence, and that this time in light of “Brexit” it will pass quite easily.  Northern Ireland could quite possibly follow.

Take it from American history; isolationism rarely ends well, and that’s the cold blanket that you’re wrapping around yourselves.