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ライドウと土蜘蛛

KANEKO'S CRIB NOTES LXVI: A RACIST (?) METAPHOR FOR VENGEANCE

I'll be honest with you all, we're running out of cribs. Who knows what the landscape will look like next year. Only one thing is for sure: Kaneko's bare, spooky carcass will be on full display at least once more by our fine friends at Colopl.

LEPRECHAUN: An often controversial design because "why is an Irish fairy clad in a Union Jack boot, isn't that a bit insensitive to Ireland? "; however, Eirikr puts that argument to rest with an exhaustive look into the design's context. And yeah, Leprechaun's "scandalous" boot is clearly cribbed from the one used by the Spice Girls' Geri Halliwell.

HOMO GORLEO: There are two things to say about Metaphor's human designs. The first is that most seem to be inspired by the works of Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, like Gorleo here, which iterates on a figure found on the center panel of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych.

HOMO AVADES: The second thing we can say about the Metaphor humans is that we're frustrated by the lack of transparency regarding who designed them. One would assume that would be Shigenori Soejima, but Atlus has been less than forthright about something so apparently obvious. For the time being, we'll just have to credit them to "Studio Zero Art Team." Avades itself is at least more clearly adapted from the central figure of the the right panel of Bosch's Garden.

NYAMI NYAMI: We've made light of Doi in the past for over-relying on Wikipedia as a source for things, and, hey, it happened again for Vengeance's Nyami Nyami, this time an image of a wood carving of the deity used on the JP Wikipedia page that Doi clearly saw while researching and used as a reference, not that we're faulting him for it!

AMABIE: A design actually borne out of Atlus piggybacking on a Japanese Amabie meme during the Covid-19 pandemic, Doi's Amabie is based on a 19th century woodblock print that's the genesis for virtually all modern depictions of her.

This year's crib set came down to the wire, and almost included Agony, but the source was not as incontrovertible as I like these things to be.

I did machine translate the core bit of Agony's description, though:

No mention of Jesus at all, obviously.

[Devil Summoner World Guidance] Agony

A zombie martyr carrying a cross on his back. The meaning of his name is "anguish" [agony].

I figured I could make him similar to UFC's "Kimo Monster". Since the zombie is carrying a cross, I was also thinking of referencing The Mission* but that would have resembled the movie too much and it would have gotten me in trouble, so I decided to turn him into "Agony" because of his pain. (Kaneko Kazuma)

*thanks @eirikrjs (also blame me for the lack of Agony in this post :D)

The 2003 PlayStation 2 RPG Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne contains unused dialogue seemingly spoken by Luigi in its files. It is part of a text file containing placeholder messages for a negotiation system, with the Luigi message being called "DUMMY_SUCCESS_INFO", indicating that it was a placeholder for succeeding in persuading a character to divulge information.

Why Luigi was chosen for this is unclear, especially due to the lack of Mario references in the rest of the game and code.

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