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The Arachne System (SPIDERLIV 3)

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[X] It was an enhancement to your Arachne suit that essentially gave it additional armour, as the suit would selectively stiffen or relax around impact points using the smart fibres. The whole suit would be knife-proof now, and greatly reduce the impact of a lot of blows even to soft parts. Plus, it'd be even better against bullets, which would hopefully reduce bruises.
 
deadcrystal said:
KlK is just such a weird...thing. Gods but the fanservice nonsense is just so utterly unnecessary and if they just didn't have that in it, it would be so much easier to just enjoy it.
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I have opinions on Kill-la-kill. Its a good show! Generally!

I personally think the super outfits have such a strange design that is not great. Like, when the uniforms are in super mode with the big shoulders and like really weird bikini looks with high heels? Not good. Especially not Ryuko's, I think she looks terrible in that outfit and the design is awful. The actually resembles a school uniform version looks awesome IMO. Satsuki's normal version is actually fantastic, and her super version is middle of the road but still not great.

I'm not actually against fanservice, to speak about it plainly there are shows that are meant to cater to that particular appetite and this is a fan service show, whatever. But it isn't even good fan service IMO, I don't find the designs sexy or interesting at all. If you are going to fill your anime with fan service at least make it interesting and sexy fan service. I understand this opinion is not widely shared though, just that it is excessive. I know lots of people who really like the designs, which I am baffled by, but whatever. Also, there are some particularly uncomfortable moments.

Anyway, this is not a kill-la-kill thread and it is probably not the place for an extensive discussion about the place of fanservice in media and how that relates to kill-la-kill specifically, so I'll stop there.

Really liked the update, Liv's reaction to kill-la-kill was great and fun to read, the idea of a magical girl show via route of vampires was fun, and the gate reaction was pretty much how I would expect Liv to respond to something like that.

[X] It was an enhancement to your Arachne suit that essentially gave it additional armour, as the suit would selectively stiffen or relax around impact points using the smart fibres. The whole suit would be knife-proof now, and greatly reduce the impact of a lot of blows even to soft parts. Plus, it'd be even better against bullets, which would hopefully reduce bruises.
 
open_sketch said:
"You know people actually use shit like this to justify military spending? Like yeah we need five hundred trillion billion more dollars for a nuclear powered drone carrier, what if aliens attack?"
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To be fair (as Athena says), some of that ridiculous spending would be justified in the MCU. Well, some, of it would be. I mean, I don't know if tanks or drones would be much use against, like, alien spaceships or whatever.

Elero said:
Pff, as if anime invented that. Mark Twain did it before it was cool!
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Yeah, Edisonades are far from new, although people are still making them.

Hell, I read a (awful) book recently where a modern chemistry PhD student ends up in a world with roughly 1600's tech and decides to speedrun capitalism. Sigh, this is why folks need to study the humanities.

[X] It was an enhancement to your Arachne suit that essentially gave it additional armour, as the suit would selectively stiffen or relax around impact points using the smart fibres. The whole suit would be knife-proof now, and greatly reduce the impact of a lot of blows even to soft parts. Plus, it'd be even better against bullets, which would hopefully reduce bruises.

It doesn't seem like a slight improvement to her strength would benefit Arachne much. I would vote for a new prosthetic arm if it made her daily life easier, but the text mentions it wouldn't make much of a difference there.

Increased durability will probably benefit her the most, especially with bullets.

EDIT: Is the Gate graphic novel as blatantly propagandistic as the show? I read a few issues, and it didn't seem too blatant. On the other hand, I am incredibly bad at picking up at detecting propaganda.
 
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[X] It was an enhancement to your Arachne suit that essentially gave it additional armour, as the suit would selectively stiffen or relax around impact points using the smart fibres. The whole suit would be knife-proof now, and greatly reduce the impact of a lot of blows even to soft parts. Plus, it'd be even better against bullets, which would hopefully reduce bruises.
 
ancusohm said:
Is the Gate graphic novel as blatantly propagandistic as the show? I read a few issues, and it didn't seem too blatant. On the other hand, I am incredibly bad at picking up at detecting propaganda.
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Gate isn't literal actual purpose made propaganda, it is what happened when a fantasy anime and manga nerd who is also a former member of the JSDF and a military nerd made a story by mashing his two favorite things together and made it's protagonist a blatant self insert. I read the start of the light novels once just to see what he actually wrote, and it is pages and pages of him describing different weapons and calibers and why they chose this gun instead of that gun and how different calibers work against dragon scales and how various low tech tactics are disrupted by high technology, etc. I didn't get very far because I found it virtually unreadable, I can only handle so much discussion of 12.7×99mm NATO rounds vs 5.56×45mm NATO rounds and their relative effectiveness vs Wyvern scales.

Now try to make a plot out of military worship and guns meshed with dragons, elves, and other nerdy elements and you arrive at Gate. You can basically reverse engineer everything back to these points without any difficulty. The entire thing is an excuse to say "how would you most effectively fight a virtually unkillable dragon with modern military tech?" and similar stuff. But the whole military worship thing is so core to this guy's world view that it just comes out as propaganda because he wants the military to be the unambiguous good guys and he needs a reason to mash his favorite things together, which means invading the fantasy world under the idea that it is justified because of a preemptive strike by the enemy.

The further you get from the light novels the more it gets away from the minutiae of nerdy gun vs dragon stuff and the more it leans on the 'cool' imagery of modern military tech laying waste to people riding on horses and using wooden shields, so to answer the question yeah, it is more blatantly propaganda in the show. But I think it is also worth noting that Gate is more a symptom than a cause. That is to say, in a military worshiping culture you are going to generate an amount of military worshiping media, and in that sense Gate is just the Japanese version of so many military/cop worshiping films and TV shows we get over here. We generally just notice it more because the way it is military worshiping is done in a Japanese style, and we are not desensitized to that Japanese style as much as we are desensitized to the American style.

I actually think Gate is an interesting case study in incidentally generated propaganda (or you might call it organic propaganda) and especially how American leftists react to it specifically because it is created in a different from our own but similar society. It makes all the same ideological points as, say, Independence Day 2 (never actually saw it but I can guess) but does it in a very different way, and people react wildly different to the different styles. Gate isn't particularly egregious propaganda, it is just not propaganda in a form Americans are used to, and since so many of us are so American centric in our world view it stands out to our sensibilities.
 
LuckyLadyLily said:
Gate isn't literal actual purpose made propaganda, it is what happened when a fantasy anime and manga nerd who is also a former member of the JSDF and a military nerd made a story by mashing his two favorite things together and made it's protagonist a blatant self insert. I read the start of the light novels once just to see what he actually wrote, and it is pages and pages of him describing different weapons and calibers and why they chose this gun instead of that gun and how different calibers work against dragon scales and how various low tech tactics are disrupted by high technology, etc. I didn't get very far because I found it virtually unreadable, I can only handle so much discussion of 12.7×99mm NATO rounds vs 5.56×45mm NATO rounds and their relative effectiveness vs Wyvern scales.
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Ah, it's Japanese David Weber.

[X] It was an enhancement to your regular Arachne suit, basically a sort of soft powered exoskeleton using the smart fabric. It wasn't a lot comparitively, but it'd make you a little stronger and reduce the impact of heavy lifting a little, which would give you more combat endurance. Also, weirdly and hilariously, it could move independently of you, you'd just have to puppet it every step with your tech sense and that'd suck.
 
[X] It was a new version of your prosthetic arm, one which was stronger and could actually, convincingly hold the shape of a regular arm. Not that you needed that for day to day anything, but it meant you wouldn't have to switch arms to become Arachne, reducing the amount of shit you had to carry around for that. Your new steel arm would still be better, but this would do in a pinch.

Everyday utility! Always a good thing.
 
Adhoc vote count started by Night_stalker on Dec 23, 2020 at 4:41 PM, finished with 45 posts and 34 votes.
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LuckyLadyLily said:
I personally think the super outfits have such a strange design that is not great. Like, when the uniforms are in super mode with the big shoulders and like really weird bikini looks with high heels? Not good. Especially not Ryuko's, I think she looks terrible in that outfit and the design is awful. The actually resembles a school uniform version looks awesome IMO. Satsuki's normal version is actually fantastic, and her super version is middle of the road but still not great.
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Yeah, I'm with you there. Granted that's partly because I'm not super comfortable watching the super outfits, but even just on aesthetic grounds, the colors don't work right. Combat-mode Ryuko would look really darn cool if her suit just looked like a glowing vampire robot as she'd clearly prefer, but as-is, the sectioning is all off - super overcomplicated shoulders, then zero-detail red suspenders get the biggest highlight, and then all the visually interesting blades and glove-details and stuff get shunted to the background by not being the primary colorset.
Satsuki's super suffers first from the apparent intention to make it even more outrageous than Ryuko's, and secondly from the lack of a good secondary color. It's just hard to take Teenage Military Supervillain seriously in a microkini of any sort, let alone one highlighted by a local lack of mecha armor. Doubly so when her dress-leggings already serve as an effective, if somewhat obtuse, character thesis - apparently they've been pressed hard enough to show a crease, despite being tailored skin-tight.
If I knew and was on board with the show's thesis, and it absolutely required the super modes to be remarkably risque, I'd... probably make Ryuko's socks shorter, and Senketsu's eyes a smidge more angular. I'm not sure what I'd do for Satsuki, but I think it'd be a full ground-up redesign. Probably it would keep its' pockets and epaulets so it's not actually less functional as military equipment? It might wind up as a horrifying combination of cutoff-jorts and military chic.
But since visualizing this is not something I actually want to be doing, I'll stop here.

...

Back on the main topic for this thread, low-profile powered armor is cool, but it's not super useful to Arachne? It reeks of desperation moves, and we've had quite enough of those. Also, what's the point of summonable backpack armor if we don't bring the backpack along? It's a niche already filled, basically, and I want the stuff it builds to, but it's not something I want to trade anything for.
The cloth arm can't lift more than like thirty pounds so it's not super viable in a fight, and that's not the sort of thing I want to deal with. It's bad for identity protection, basically.
Better defensive armor would be great, though. No obvious downsides.
 
HoratioVonBecker said:
The cloth arm can't lift more than like thirty pounds so it's not super viable in a fight, and that's not the sort of thing I want to deal with. It's bad for identity protection, basically.
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open_sketch said:
[ ] It was an enhancement to your regular Arachne suit, basically a sort of soft powered exoskeleton using the smart fabric. It wasn't a lot comparitively, but it'd make you a little stronger and reduce the impact of heavy lifting a little, which would give you more combat endurance. Also, weirdly and hilariously, it could move independently of you, you'd just have to puppet it every step with your tech sense and that'd suck.
[ ] It was an enhancement to your Arachne suit that essentially gave it additional armour, as the suit would selectively stiffen or relax around impact points using the smart fibres. The whole suit would be knife-proof now, and greatly reduce the impact of a lot of blows even to soft parts. Plus, it'd be even better against bullets, which would hopefully reduce bruises.
[ ] It was a new version of your prosthetic arm, one which was stronger and could actually, convincingly hold the shape of a regular arm. Not that you needed that for day to day anything, but it meant you wouldn't have to switch arms to become Arachne, reducing the amount of shit you had to carry around for that. Your new steel arm would still be better, but this would do in a pinch.
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Our current cloth prosthesis only lifts thirty pounds. This variant seems more able to match normal weight capacity. Mayhaps not our strength capability, but sounds like it could match normal humans in lift. And it'll pass as normal in social situations. But yeah, niche circumstances. And really, the powered exo suit is really only something for Athena anyways. The basic armor is something we could even wear in public without suspicions, but so too is the arm. Hence, not sure what to vote for.
 
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Just Straight Up Eldar Mesh Armour
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    • "You done your rant there?"

    "And another thing! Fuck the protagonist so much! He's a useless piece of shit and I don't know what those assorted princesses see in him."

    "You can't tell in the animation, but he's crazy hung."

    "...Goddamnit Athena... and also, maybe this is just me being stupid, but if we're going to have dumb power fantasy crap like this, why is it never a girl getting to kiss all the hot elf chicks? It's always some generic looking dude with the looks and personality of your average two by four. Like just once, shower some lonely nerdy girl in catgirls. Just once."

    "So the problem with the power fantasy isn't the objectification of women, it's the objectification in a way that doesn't titillate you?"

    "... no! But... a little!" you said, "You know what I mean!"

    "I'm just fucking with you. So what've you made?" she said, "I've, uh, I was on call with Walker while you were anime-ing, wasn't paying much attention."

    "Well, Kill la Kill got me thinking about animated fibres, and that got me thinking about all of mom's Warhammer books, so... okay, check this out." you explained, laying out a sheet of the material you'd put together. "So basically, here's the idea. The spidersilk has great tensile strength and will prevent a bullet from going through, but it doesn't actually meaningfully slow it down much. It's basically just stopping the bullet from cutting into me, and the crazy density of my muscles disperses the force."

    "And then you get a great big fucking bruise and abrasion and it hurts like a motherfucker." Athena summarized.

    "Yeah, it does! The suit is keeping bullets from like, actually getting into me, but it's not cushioning the impact at all. Until now." you said, in your best movie trailer voice, then you hooked the little D-battery up to the material sample you made. It writhed uncomfortably for a second on the table, then lay still.

    "It's alive exclamation point exclamation point?" Athena offered.

    "Lol, no, it's uh..." you started. "So basically, I took apart one of those bundles of smart fibres and I modified the little 3d printer to make me sheets of it. When electricity runs through it, it goes rigid and attempts to maintain the shape it's currently in. And these capacitors-"

    "So you made Eldar mesh armour."

    "Yep!" you said, grinning. "Basically! I'll have to print some more but if I layer this into the suit, I'll be a lot harder to hurt."

    "I am fully in favour of things that make you tougher, though I swear to god if you use this as an excuse to throw yourself into greater danger I will turn this body around, so help me." Athena said. "Also... Your mom would love this."

    "... she would. Uuh..." you started the 3d printer on the next batch, tapping your fingers against the desk. "Do you think I could get away with showing her it?"

    "That's a good question. Because it'll be internal to the Arachne suit, I don't think it would betray any information. However, it's probably the most advanced piece of technology you've ever shown her, and it's something that doesn't seem to have been invented previously in anywhere near as useable a form. I don't thinks she'll pick up on it, but she'll probably tell others and that could bring unwanted attention."

    "... oh yeah. Good point." you said, a bit bitter.

    "But she would love it."

    ---

    [ ] Yeah, this has to stay secret, along with your other stuff. It isn't like she doesn't tell you how proud she is of you enough or anything.​
    [ ] "Hey mom, check this out!"​
     
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    • [X] "Hey mom, check this out!"

    Communication and understanding is key, and if all else fails, secrets all come out eventually in the spiderverse anyways.
     
    [X] "Hey mom, check this out!"

    Secret identity blah blah blah you can be nerds together with your mother there's literally no price tag on that.
     
    [X] "Hey mom, check this out!"

    Yeah, her mom is pretty cool. And it's not like liv didn't get attention from the internship anyway.
     
    [X] Yeah, this has to stay secret, along with your other stuff. It isn't like she doesn't tell you how proud she is of you enough or anything.

    I wanted to... but I just can't. It's too big a security hole if she isn't being looped in properly, even if it is probably fine.
     
    [X] "Hey mom, check this out!"

    Shouldn't be too hard to shove it under "interesting but useless".

    After all, to a layman's eye, this doesn't look all that different to Liv's smart fabric arm. If anything the latter will look a lot more spectacular than some twitching fabric.
     
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    [x] "Hey mom, check this out!"
    Are we accepting write-ins here? Because I could seriously go for some Telling her about the superhero persona telling her about Athena and letting Athena explain things while we hide. It sure is nice how socially adept and well-spoken she has gotten since she forked!
    Maybe not the full spiderliv thing, but some sort of inroads with the explicit intent of telling her eventually. Maybe come out with being a beyond-human inventor, but we really can't let Stark Industries know because we peeked at their stuff for ideas and they have more lawyers than there are visible stars in the sky. I dunno... I am just, like "tell her you fool" as though this were a bad romcom...
     
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