you know how when you're playing a belt scroller/beatemup and you've destroyed everyone around you, and the game tells you to get the show on the road? it's an arcade-y little piece of UI designed to direct players who might not realize they're done in the current area, and if you're lucky if helps reinforce the tone and setting of the game itself.

this can range from the utilitarian, as seen in the simple arrow from Final Fight 2, to the conventional but thematically appropriate gauntlet icon in Knights of the Round. getting even more whimsical you have one of my personal favorites, the strange creature directing you forward in Pu~Li~Ru~La, and of course the gold standard, GO! TO HELL! from Night Slashers.

Can yall think of any other good examples of this feature? please share with your favorites, i'd love to see em.

Content warning: discussion of ableism

Shy is a show about empathy. It is the protagonist Teru’s defining quality: a stalwart refusal to dehumanize the people who she is fighting against, no matter how brutal their actions towards her.

This belief in empathy is drawn less from the superhero genre and more from the magical girl genre, where the battles often are proxy fights over the hearts and societal problems that the characters are facing. The villains of these shows are often represented as manipulators: They may intuit the emotions of others and then twist them to their benefit–corrupting the precious dreams of those around them, as the villains in Sailor Moon SuperS do, or using girls’ despair over a patriarchal world as a source of fuel in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. We can see such a narrative at play with Stigma, who uses the pain and trauma of others to fuel his ambitions, twisting Iko’s survivors’ guilt around her parents’ deaths to make her curse the world.

Watching these arcs as an autistic person has often felt complicated to me. Most of these shows go to great lengths to set up a dichotomy between the deeply feeling, empathetic protagonist, whose humanity is their superpower, and the uncaring or unempathetic antagonist—whose assumed inhumanity justifies their punishment and death. With shows like Madoka Magica and its descendants, where the villain is straight up incapable of empathy, it is often less the actual actions of the antagonist that justifies this punishment, but their position as an abomination—somebody so heartless they cannot be allowed to live. It is hard not to see the ghost of eugenics underlying the narrative arcs of these villains—people whose neurological state is so horrifying as to borderline on an eldritch monstrosity, requiring their death. This is especially troubling given that lack of empathy is one of the calling cards of stereotypes about autistics.

I had myself experienced this stereotype first hand for years–being forced to go through applied behavior analysis, take on “social skills groups,” and be generally punished constantly, all to beat into my head that I should be more empathetic. All of it, of course, had the opposite effect–leading me to retreat further and further into myself, and cut myself off further from others.