The Super Happy Love Award

Did you ever think you’d see such a title to a post on this site? It’s all thanks to Frostilyte, who nominated me for the Super Happy Love Award originally created by fellow anime/game blogger Pinkie to make the internet a happier place. That’s ambitious, but definitely a commendable goal, so I’m happy to do my part. Here are the rules, quoted in full:

1. Thank the one who tagged you and if at all please tag the original post as well. This is my first blog tag and a bit of a passion project so I would like to see where it spreads! Oh and use Super-Happy-Love as a tag!
2. Display the Super Happy Love Logo in your post Share the rules!
3. Choose a minimum of 2 out of these 6 prompts to answer in this blog! More is always allowed! These six prompts are as follows:
   • Tell about a person you love, this can be a friend, partner but also a celebrity or even youtuber who means a lot to you. As long as they once took breath on this earthly realm you are allowed to pick them… Tell us why you love them.
   • Write something about a fandom or franchise you love. It can be your favorite game series or about just about anything that is bigger than just a single product! Tell us why you love this so much!
   • Tell us something about a character that you love. Do you have a Waifu, a Husbando, maybe a mentor or someone who taught you a valuable lesson. Tell us why you love them.
   • Tell us something about a piece of music that you love. Does a anime intro mean a lot to you? Did you have a special memory to a pop song, like your first dance at your wedding? Maybe a piece of video game music? If you love it, you should tell us why!
   • Show us why you love a piece of media so much! A Book, A Game, A Anime, A Movie maybe even a random piece of fan art, you are free to pick as long as you can show us why you love it.
   • Write something about yourself that you love! For those who like a challenge, there is a hard mode in this blog prompt as well. Tell us why you love a certain aspect of yourself
4. Put on your rose tinted glasses. For once you are allowed to gush about the things that you love without having to balance it out with negatives so that you seem objective. In fact your are actively encouraged not to bring negativity into this tag. So no, “Nowadays is poopoo but back in my days…it was great”. Just say it was great! Love is blind after all!
5. Tag 6 bloggers you love so they can take on this challenge as well.
6. Everyone who comments something lovely about your post ALSO gets nominated (should they so choose).

Quite a challenge for me, but I’ll take it. Firstly, thanks to Frostilyte for the nomination. He runs a great blog over at Frostilyte Writes (now with a fancy new .ca domain, I’m jealous) featuring posts about video games and his original art. If you follow my site, you should follow his as well.

Now for the main event. I can definitely be positive about some of the stuff I like — I mainly write about stuff I like here, after all. So here we go:

1) My favorite franchise: Megami Tensei

In news that will be surprising to absolutely no one at all, I’m declaring that Megami Tensei is my favorite game series. I think I’ve declared that a lot, actually. But why do I like it? I’m thinking about writing a few more in-depth posts on the series in general and a lot of the themes in particular later on, but I can address that generally here.

It’s not what it looks like, really

One of the things that struck me first about the series when I first got into it with Persona 3 was its use of mythological, historical, and religious figures from around the world as demons (“demon” here being a neutral term for any supernatural being, not just the typically evil ones — even angels are included in that definition.) In Persona 3 and 4, these beings are the Personas, who are representations of the characters of you and your friends (and of a few of your enemies as well.) I loved Kazuma Kaneko’s unique designs, and when I discovered the mainline Shin Megami Tensei series through Nocturne I found some of the same and many more of these figures were fought as enemies and could be recruited into your party. There was a lot of novelty to that, but even after the novelty wore off I kept finding Easter egg-style bits of dialogue between related demons during combat that suggested the writers had really done their homework with regard to their stories and myths. So I was very happy to see Persona 5 include the same beings as enemies in its shadow worlds.

In that sense, Megami Tensei is a bit like the Fate series, which also makes use of both historical and mythological characters to tell its stories. Only Megami Tensei doesn’t take quite so many liberties, like making King Arthur a girl who the main character can get romantically involved with (Saber in the first route of the original Fate/stay night visual novel. If you know a better way to transfer mana, I’d like to hear it.) It also puts these figures into a very different context — instead of being purposely summoned like the Servants of Fate, the Personas are usually summoned entirely by accident or spontaneously (I know Saber was also summoned by accident in F/SN, but that’s an exception.) And in mainline SMT and some of its other spinoffs, the demons/angels/spirits/monsters/etc. typically decide to invade some place, usually Tokyo, without asking anyone’s permission, and then massive destruction usually follows that we humans have to deal with.

I just find that supernatural/human mix to be exciting. I like it enough that I wrote a whole daily Christmas series on some of my favorite demons in the series, and maybe I’ll even do it again this year.

Just because it’s the post-apocalypse and you got turned into a demon-human hybrid, it doesn’t mean you can’t get along and make friends

I could go on for many pages about Megami Tensei, and I probably will at some point not too far in the future, so I’ll save the rest.

2) A soundtrack I love: Sonic the Hedgehog 2

I guess this post is going to be all about games, but that’s fine, isn’t it? Video games have had a massive impact on my life, and probably on yours too if you’re reading my site. And a big part of that impact has been the music featured in those games.

Most games have pretty basic soundtracks. If you just need passable background music to fill the silence, it’s not too hard to create. There’s also some impressively and even entertainingly bad music to be found in games. But the soundtracks I remember are the ones featuring tracks that are both complex and catchy. The 90s childhood series that come to mind when I think of game music from back then are the ones you’d probably expect: Mario, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, but to me Sonic was the most memorable.

Almost all the classic Genesis/Megadrive-era Sonic games have great music, but Sonic 2 sticks in my head specifically for some reason. Maybe because that’s the game I remember playing most as a kid, but the soundtrack is absolutely top-tier as well, written by musician/producer Masato Nakamura. Some people prefer the Sonic 3 soundtrack with the rumored Michael Jackson contribution, and that’s an amazing one as well, but if I had to pick one to own in physical form, it would be 2 for me.

3) Bonus thing I love: this video of a virtual rabbit girl playing games and killing enemies while talking like a gangster

Look, I found out about Vtubers and now I’ve fallen down the Hololive rabbit hole. That’s an especially apt term to use in this case. If you want to know the deal with this stuff, check out Lumi’s post on the subject here. Or just ignore this and move on. That’s probably your best option. All my recommended YouTube videos are now Hololive clips and it’s an endless cycle of me watching one after another. Don’t do that to yourself.

Now for the nominations. I’ll nominate Lumi, since I’ve already taken the liberty to use his post above, and also:

Ace Asunder

A Richard Wood Text Adventure

Winst0lf Portal

Peak Weebing

KS Blogs

And as stated in the rules, whoever else is reading this and feels like it gets nominated too. And as usual, apologies if you don’t do these, feel free to ignore, etc. I still have one more of these tag posts to make, but in the meantime I’ll be watching more Pekora videos.

• hololive
• megami tensei
• music
• sonic the hedgehog
• super happy love blog award
• usada pekora
• video games