Red Panda Adventures

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

Tonight’s episode of Red Panda video will be “Monkey See, Monkey Do”.

It occurs to me this almost certainly means that the Mad Monkey has a canonical appearance. And he’s almost certainly not going to look how I was imagining him. This is going to be weird.

(Not that this’ll be the first time that’s happened, even within this series. What do you mean, Andy Parker is blond?)

Between prosopagnosia (which tends to cause impairments in imagining faces along with recognising them) and a generally low-detail visual imagination, I don’t tend to imagine characters’ appearances all that much. They’ll usually have a skin colour, often hair to some level, and sometimes a build and/or general facial structure. For some reason, I have an unusually clear sense of what the Mad Monkey’s hair looks like: light brown, somewhat curly, balding, sideburns, thick eyebrows. (He’s pretty short, too.)

(I didn’t have much sense of what Professor Zombie looked like, so seeing her appearance in the previous episode didn’t really weird me out: there wasn’t much of anything for it to clash with.)

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #reactionblogging #fun fact: this post has been in my drafts for weeks #I just haven’t had time to actually watch the damn episode #oh look an original post

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

Red Panda reaction-blogging update:

I listened to “Death From Above” and “The Judas Boats” on my traditional Saturday afternoon walk yesterday.

First of all, while I miss the primeverse*, I think I am starting to warm up to this one, or maybe it’s starting to warm up to itself and I’m sensing that. The Red Panda is starting to feel more…himself, in spots, and I’m not sure if that’s a character thing, or if Taylor’s gotten more confident at voice acting in later episodes, or what.

Also…okay, look. For my readers who have not listened to the Red Panda Adventures, and who–like me–are often very sensitive to authors’ politics shining through in their fiction, I want to assure you that it is pretty subtle. There’s no anvils, there’s almost no pressuring even by the standards of someone who can hear SJ dogwhistles a little too well.

That being said, there is nevertheless a clear sense, while listening to the primeverse Red Panda Adventures, that a liberal wrote this. Not enough to be pressury, just enough to be…home-y. I get the feeling that, while I may not know what makes this author tick (I often have trouble with grokking what makes a given liberal tick), I do know what he considers socially acceptable and what he doesn’t, and I can trust him to stay within those bounds as much as he can given the setting, and to provide a sense that the narrative disapproves in those times he can’t.

The pilots don’t feel like a liberal wrote them. They feel like…like an apathetic centrist wrote them. Someone whose birth subculture has not much overt bigotry but a lot of low-level background stuff, who might very well come to the conclusion that this was still horrible if he ever gave it some serious thought, but who never has given it that thought. There’s these little moments in the pilots of…other people might call them “microaggressions”, but I think of them as culture shock. Those little off-balance moments where you realise that your interlocutor’s standards of social acceptability are different from yours, that you can’t predict (can’t trust) what they’re going to do and say as well as you thought you could.

It’s not my place to ask**, but I wonder if maybe Taylor was an apathetic centrist at the time, and moved to liberal-land sometime in the mid-00’s. If he did, it’s fascinating that it shows so clearly. If not, it’s still very interesting that it feels like he did.

Alternatively, maybe it feels apathetic-centrist because it was intended to be played on mainstream radio for a “mainstream” (thus presumed apathetic-centrist) audience, and in podcasts he could be more himself. I think I’m going to have to listen to the Season One Spectacular again, particularly the bits about how the Red Panda came to be.

—

*I was going to switch to some other podcast for my walks for a while once I was done with Red Panda ones, but I think I might have to go straight into a re-listen.

**I don’t really want other people to ask, but it occurred to me that somebody might take it upon themself to ask anyway. If so, please do not link me to him. There’s some stuff in my Red Panda tag that would be very awkward for the author to see.

(Okay, upon reflection I can think of one anvil: the Chinese-laundromat bit in The Crime Cabal. But it was short, and also in a book rather than the main audio series.)

—

Also, @theshadiertwin, I wouldn’t have noticed the hurt/comfort-ness and Red/Baboon/Anna potential on my own, but I think I can see what you mean.

Tags:

#oh look an update #Red Panda Adventures

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

Red Panda reaction-blogging update:

I listened to “Death From Above” and “The Judas Boats” on my traditional Saturday afternoon walk yesterday.

First of all, while I miss the primeverse*, I think I am starting to warm up to this one, or maybe it’s starting to warm up to itself and I’m sensing that. The Red Panda is starting to feel more…himself, in spots, and I’m not sure if that’s a character thing, or if Taylor’s gotten more confident at voice acting in later episodes, or what.

Also…okay, look. For my readers who have not listened to the Red Panda Adventures, and who–like me–are often very sensitive to authors’ politics shining through in their fiction, I want to assure you that it is pretty subtle. There’s no anvils, there’s almost no pressuring even by the standards of someone who can hear SJ dogwhistles a little too well.

That being said, there is nevertheless a clear sense, while listening to the primeverse Red Panda Adventures, that a liberal wrote this. Not enough to be pressury, just enough to be…home-y. I get the feeling that, while I may not know what makes this author tick (I often have trouble with grokking what makes a given liberal tick), I do know what he considers socially acceptable and what he doesn’t, and I can trust him to stay within those bounds as much as he can given the setting, and to provide a sense that the narrative disapproves in those times he can’t.

The pilots don’t feel like a liberal wrote them. They feel like…like an apathetic centrist wrote them. Someone whose birth subculture has not much overt bigotry but a lot of low-level background stuff, who might very well come to the conclusion that this was still horrible if he ever gave it some serious thought, but who never has given it that thought. There’s these little moments in the pilots of…other people might call them “microaggressions”, but I think of them as culture shock. Those little off-balance moments where you realise that your interlocutor’s standards of social acceptability are different from yours, that you can’t predict (can’t trust) what they’re going to do and say as well as you thought you could.

It’s not my place to ask**, but I wonder if maybe Taylor was an apathetic centrist at the time, and moved to liberal-land sometime in the mid-00’s. If he did, it’s fascinating that it shows so clearly. If not, it’s still very interesting that it feels like he did.

Alternatively, maybe it feels apathetic-centrist because it was intended to be played on mainstream radio for a “mainstream” (thus presumed apathetic-centrist) audience, and in podcasts he could be more himself. I think I’m going to have to listen to the Season One Spectacular again, particularly the bits about how the Red Panda came to be.

—

*I was going to switch to some other podcast for my walks for a while once I was done with Red Panda ones, but I think I might have to go straight into a re-listen.

**I don’t really want other people to ask, but it occurred to me that somebody might take it upon themself to ask anyway. If so, please do not link me to him. There’s some stuff in my Red Panda tag that would be very awkward for the author to see.

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #Gregg Taylor’s Twitter looks exactly as I would expect a Twitter to look #given only that it was run by the same person who wrote the Red Panda Adventures #mostly tweets about the shows and other fandoms and home life #but with occasional standard liberal fare mixed in #oh look an original post #reactionblogging #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 5 Comments

I watched the first issue (both parts) of Season 12 of the Red Panda Adventures yesterday! I did say something about maybe doing more reaction-blogging, so:

God, I’d forgotten just how bad I am at stories with pictures, especially stories with pictures and words, and especially especially moving pictures. (It could be worse: they could be moving photographs rather than drawings.)

Pictures are so complicated; even if I can take my time, I usually miss a bunch of stuff*, and it only gets worse if it’s time-limited. It probably doesn’t help that I’m used to Red Panda episodes being purely audio: I suspect it strengthens my tendency to treat videos as basically audioplays, just with minor visual enhancement (getting the broad strokes of the imagery and missing all of the details).

(This is one of the reasons I have a lot of trouble with any webcomic** more complicated than XKCD, the other reason being that even steady webcomics update so slowly that by the time they reach the end of a plot thread, you’ve forgotten what the beginning was. When you combine these two effects, you tend to end up with climactic moments relying on minor details that I haven’t seen in ten months and also didn’t even notice at the time. I’m sure there must be people webcomics work for, but they really do not mesh well with my brain.)

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I did have fun. I just had to strike a compromise between “overwhelmed by quantity of sensory input” and “not getting the full effect of the story”, and I’m a bit out of practice at that.

Maybe I should try watching these episodes multiple times, shifting my focus on rewatches. They’re short enough that it wouldn’t take ages: I could probably even do two watches of an issue consecutively without burnout. (Even without soaking in Everything, watching videos gets mentally taxing after a while. One standard-length TV episode (~45 min) is somewhere around my limit.)

—

*Fun fact: image descriptions have a curb-cut effect. I’m (effectively) not blind, but I often find I understand an image (especially a comic) a lot better after I’ve read an image description, because the description pointed out important bits that I didn’t notice. (I wonder if I should try described video sometime.)

**I haven’t really tried non-web comics.

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #(okay so this was more about my relationship with video-based media in general than about RPA specifically but still) #oh look an original post #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I was researching video conferencing recently for a school assignment #and the supporters praise it for conveying zillions of microexpressions and whatnot #which to me seems like a *downside* #video chats immerse you in so much input that your brain *has* to dump most of it #but you have limited control over which parts get dumped #and your conversational partner doesn’t know what made the cut and what didn’t #ideally you want to prevent people from sending messages you’re not going to receive #so that they *know* you don’t know it #(and if your partner is better at processing large quantities of real-time information than you are) #(they have an advantage over you) #(which they might exploit) #tag rambles #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging

{{next post in sequence, branch 1}}

{{next post in sequence, branch 2}}

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

theshadiertwin:

brin-bellway:

@theshadiertwin asked:

Welcome to Decoder Ring Theatre fandom!  What episode are you on?

shortly followed by: Ah!  I see you caught up!  I’ll amend my question, then – what was one of your favourite episodes!

I try to only answer asks indirectly because of the first-degree ask bug, and normally that works fine. On the other hand, if I post the ask unanswered and then give my actual answer in a reblog, it won’t go in the public tag, and that doesn’t seem suitable for this. I’m compromising by putting ask and answer in a text-post OP.

—

To pick one…well, the one that comes to mind is “The Golden Idol”. I love when characters think through the implications of their superpowers. The Mad Monkey’s plan here is *magnificently* clever, creating an entire fake person out of glamours and memory implants.

I spent a few minutes of this one facepalming when it looked like he’d enthralled the Flying Squirrel, seeing as how the show had *just gotten done explaining* that you can use mind control to prevent people from getting mind-controlled by others, which means that–as someone with a mind-controlling partner whom she would trust with her very soul–Kit Baxter has possibly the best access to psychic shielding on the planet. Shouldn’t they have learned their lesson after Diablos?

And then it turns out that our heroes *totally thought of this*, and she’s actually been faking being under the Mad Monkey’s spell this whole time so that he would let his guard down. That was a beautiful moment.

I love clever plans, and I love when they’re defeated by out-clevering (both the bluffing and how the Red Panda figured out what was going on in the first place), and basically cleverness is my narrative weakness.

—

(When I skimmed through the episode again just now to see if I’d gotten it more or less right, I heard Kit mention Ajay Shah as a potential suspect, and I was like “Hey! I know who that is now! Neat!”. Once I’ve finished the rest of the pilots and tie-ins, I’m going to have to re-listen to the series at *least* once to hear how it sounds from the perspective of having the whole thing. I *know* I didn’t get as much out of the “The World Next Door” as I could have, for one.)

If out-clevering is your thing, I can see why RPA works well for you!  I do love those episodes, but a part of me always prefers when a villain (usually the Genie, tbh) tries to make some clever complicated plan specifically to counter the Boss, but overlooks Squirrel and her Flying Fists of Anti-Magic Justice.  It just makes my heart sing when she makes the henchmen cry.

Re: Earth-2/Sillyverse/The Originals, don’t go in expecting what we got from the main storyline.  Not only was there not enough time to fill out the plot, there’s a lot of other rough edges as well.  Some fans can’t get past that, and I understand that.  As for myself, I love the Sillyverse – there are some Canadian History in-jokes that the more serious tone of the main plot just can’t work in, and for all that Dr. Anna is less active in the plot than Kit, she’s still a woman who can stand on her own two feet – both in the lab and in the field.  Besides which, there’s no episode in all of the DRT catalogue that hits all my hurt/comfort buttons quite like the Sillyverse episode “The Judas Boats”.  I keep meaning to write a Red/Baboon/Anna fic based on a certain incident in that episode, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.  Even if it’s not the kind of thing that really grabs you, I do suggest giving it a listen – there are occasional references in the main story, especially in the WWII episodes, that will make you grin a bit on a re-listen!

(also, hope you don’t mind, but I’ve mentally pegged you as Harry Kelley in our little tumblr network of agents!)

>>don’t go in expecting what we got from the main storyline.<<

*nod* I know. I heard them saying how different it was in the Season One Spectacular (which I did listen to, but several seasons late because I didn’t notice it existed at first).

>>there are some Canadian History in-jokes<<

My grasp of history is often a bit shaky in general, plus as a first-generation immigrant* I’m missing a lot of the cultural osmosis one might get from growing up in Canada. (I only just found out a week or two ago what the Red Ensign was named after.)

>>(also, hope you don’t mind, but I’ve mentally pegged you as Harry Kelley in our little tumblr network of agents!)<<

Why’s that, if you can put it into words?

(Big shoes to fill, but at least I’ve got a while to do it in.)

—

*I moved to Canada when I was 13. The 10th anniversary will be this fall**!

**I don’t think we’ve made any plans yet, but my family should do something extra-special this July to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation and our 10th Canada Day. (Whatever we end up doing, I intend to wear my citizenship pin while I do it.)

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #our home and cherished land #reply via reblog

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

@theshadiertwin asked:

Welcome to Decoder Ring Theatre fandom!  What episode are you on?

shortly followed by: Ah!  I see you caught up!  I’ll amend my question, then – what was one of your favourite episodes!

I try to only answer asks indirectly because of the first-degree ask bug, and normally that works fine. On the other hand, if I post the ask unanswered and then give my actual answer in a reblog, it won’t go in the public tag, and that doesn’t seem suitable for this. I’m compromising by putting ask and answer in a text-post OP.

—

To pick one…well, the one that comes to mind is “The Golden Idol”. I love when characters think through the implications of their superpowers. The Mad Monkey’s plan here is *magnificently* clever, creating an entire fake person out of glamours and memory implants.

I spent a few minutes of this one facepalming when it looked like he’d enthralled the Flying Squirrel, seeing as how the show had *just gotten done explaining* that you can use mind control to prevent people from getting mind-controlled by others, which means that–as someone with a mind-controlling partner whom she would trust with her very soul–Kit Baxter has possibly the best access to psychic shielding on the planet. Shouldn’t they have learned their lesson after Diablos?

And then it turns out that our heroes *totally thought of this*, and she’s actually been faking being under the Mad Monkey’s spell this whole time so that he would let his guard down. That was a beautiful moment.

I love clever plans, and I love when they’re defeated by out-clevering (both the bluffing and how the Red Panda figured out what was going on in the first place), and basically cleverness is my narrative weakness.

—

(When I skimmed through the episode again just now to see if I’d gotten it more or less right, I heard Kit mention Ajay Shah as a potential suspect, and I was like “Hey! I know who that is now! Neat!”. Once I’ve finished the rest of the pilots and tie-ins, I’m going to have to re-listen to the series at *least* once to hear how it sounds from the perspective of having the whole thing. I *know* I didn’t get as much out of the “The World Next Door” as I could have, for one.)

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #tales from the askbox

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

For anyone reading this wondering “wait, who liked my ancient Red Panda Adventures post”:

Yes, hi, I finally finished the audios! (except the pilot season, which I will try next) I figured it was time to see what the fandom looked like!

And…yes, it’s small, but after looking at the Hidden Almanac tag and seeing almost nothing, I’m mostly just glad anyone was talking about this at all.

(I don’t even listen to very many podcasts, why do I keep ending up in tiny podcast fandoms)

I don’t normally do reaction-blogging (maybe I should, it seems like it might be fun), and I don’t art, so right now all that’s in my Red Panda tag is a couple posts of me yelling about mind-control ethics, because I’m me. I’d love a chance to yell excitedly about other things together, though!

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #I’ve also read the books #I’ve watched the Kickstarter video comic but not the later ones yet #(nor have I read them in comic form) #oh look an original post #(also I’m glad people seem to generally agree with me that the Mad Monkey is fantastic) #(he’s been my favourite villain since his first appearance) #(and the finale was brilliant)

{{next post in sequence, branch 1}}

{{next post in sequence, branch 2}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

metagorgon:

gcu-sovereign:

ruthlessandstormyeyed:

Me, consuming any media that involves superpowers or highly charismatic people: WHY IS NO ONE OBSERVING MASTER/STRANGER PROTOCOLS

Because Genre Savvy is the province of the Stop Having Fun Guy in superhero movies, judging by the MCU titles that come to mind.

Hell, even though the trope is listed on the Cap: Civil War page, it counts more as a dumb reference than actually being clever.

It is harder, however, to speak of it globally on media. 

As much as I like to bag on Doctor Who, there certainly are times when they give a TInker with Master powers due suspicion (Demon’s Run)

master/stranger protocols are fun. the people who necessitate them are funner.

Regarding the OP: yep.

I haven’t actually read Worm, so I had to google what “Master/Stranger protocols” meant, but apparently it means “the stuff my inner genre-savviness is screaming about all the time”.

(”WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘IF YOU HEAR LAUGHTER FROM NOWHERE, GET OUT OF THERE IMMEDIATELY AND HEAD STRAIGHT BACK TO BASE’?! IF YOU CAN HEAR HIM, IT’S ALREADY TOO LATE!”

“WHY ARE YOU NOT ROUTINELY COMMANDING EVERYONE YOU KNOW NOT TO ACCEPT COMMANDS FROM ANYONE BUT YOU?! THAT’S CANONICALLY A VALID COMMAND; YOU EVEN USED THAT TRICK YOURSELF ONCE! ONCE! WHY ARE YOU NOT DOING IT ALL THE TIME?! I HIGHLY DOUBT YOUR CONSCIENCE CHOSE THIS OF ALL PLACES TO DRAW A LINE!”)

Tags:

#it’s canonically a valid command #can be apparently be done with no side effects except the now-shielded person being unable to remember the time spent installing it #(which would only have to be a few seconds) #(and he’s wiped larger chunks of memory for worse reasons) #doesn’t require a continuous power outlay #and a dose from someone of his power level would last about two decades before needing refueling #and he does it *once* #sexuality and lack thereof #(my genre-savviness is particularly sensitive to issues with mind control) #(because high salience and because training from all the erotic horror I’ve read when I couldn’t find any non-horror erotica) #examples taken from: #Red Panda Adventures #(I think I’ve only ever posted about RPA when complaining about their treatment of mind control) #(I’m presenting a rather skewed viewpoint here) #(I would like to state for the record that I listened to the finale of the main storyline this past weekend and greatly enjoyed it) #tag rambles

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

So for the past two years or so I’ve been slowly working my way through the Red Panda Adventures. Recently I reached episode 100. Towards the end, our heroes are surrounded by a group of hostile sapient zombies (long story). There are too many to take them all out in combat, so the Red Panda uses his mind-control powers to put them to sleep. This being a Christmas special, he begins this process by calming them through evoking the joy and contentment of Christmas.

“You idiot!” I yelled. “You’re begging for an abreaction!”

(I managed not to actually yell this out loud. I was out for a walk, as is my custom when listening to the Red Panda Adventures, and I didn’t want the neighbours to get weirded out.)

For those of you who don’t speak hypnosis jargon, basically an “abreaction” is when a hypnotised person responds to a suggestion in an unexpected manner, generally because they interpreted it in a way the hypnotist didn’t intend, or something about the phrasing reminded them of something and sent their mind off on a different track, stuff like that. It doesn’t necessarily go badly 100% of the time, but–like all forms of miscommunication–it’s usually best avoided when possible, and this one definitely would go badly if it happened.

The trouble is, not everyone associates Christmas with joy and contentment. All it takes is one bitter Jewish kid (*ahem*) or something, one person whose associations with Christmas are negative, and the thing’s going to blow up in his face.

Now, hypnosis as practised in the Red-Panda-verse is very different from the real thing, so in the abstract it’s not inherently a bad thing to have this in-universe expert hypnotist doing things that even I, a person with no training who simply travels in the right circles to overhear hypnotists talking shop with each other, recognise as mistakes. But in this case, the differences between our universe and his make this worse. In the real world, if your induction backfires because it turns out your subject hates Christmas, you just feel kind of awkward and embarrassed and have hopefully learned a valuable lesson about not assuming everyone likes Christmas. But because he’s weaponising his psychic powers, his suggestions have to work, first try, without a hitch, without discussing it with the subject in advance, or he might die. It is, literally, vitally important for him to keep his inductions as generic and universal as possible, and not pull risky, your-mileage-may-vary shit like the spirit of fucking Christmas.

(For the record, he got lucky and it didn’t backfire on anyone. Still a stupid risk.)

To be fair, it’s easier for me to spot this because, as a bitter Jewish kid myself, I didn’t have to put myself in anyone else’s place to see why this was risky. I can tell you right now, anyone tries an induction on me based on the feeling of Christmas (foreignness and resentment and the particular type of loneliness one feels when surrounded by a crowd of happy people whose joy one will never share*), it ain’t gonna go well.

*You know what, Christmas could actually make a decent metaphor for being undead, or vice versa.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #Red Panda Adventures #(I have no idea if that tag is in general use or what) #(I’ve been avoiding looking into the fandom until I’ve caught up with the canon) #(so I don’t know how large or active it is) #rants #sexuality and lack thereof #(sort of) #(I mean I overthink fictional mind control kind of a lot and that’s clearly why) #(and it’s certainly why I was able to yell at him *in hypnotist jargon*) #I stuck the first paragraph in after the fact in order to adapt this post into not needing a jumping-off point #but at some point when somebody’s doing a generalised ask meme #I should totally ask them ”last time you yelled at a fictional character what were you yelling?” #Christmas #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging

{{next post in sequence}}