I find the messages in both the Lara Croft needlepoint and Subversivecrossstitch.com to be really, really interesting. Subversive Cross-stitch really said it best already, as these artworks are subversive in their way, one art more than the other. They make statements about femininity and then turn those ideas on their heads within one of the most long-lasting traditions of feminine art. While Subversive-Cross-stitch is clearly working to undermine traditional cross-stitch, Cross-Stitch Lara is almost finding a level meeting ground between the very controversial character and girl-gamers.

I think anyway. D: It made sense in my head, okay?

GNAC was originally a club-website that had to be sacked in favor of a general anime site that also had to be sacked because I found out that, by myself, I really didn’t care about anime and had no interest in putting together a site about it. But a website for girly-nerds to show off their creations or get academic about their favorite nerdy passions? That was something I could get on a wagon about.

So, I’ve been working very hard on building the main website and fleshing out the blog you see here. I had initially planned to build a website with two major sections–a Reviews section, a Not-Reviews or ‘Features’ section, and a weblog mainly for discussion. The workload ended up being huge, monstrous and needing heavy duty surgery, so I cut the features section when I realized I really didn’t need a one as it was limiting the versatility of my weblog. So, um, think of this as our features/discussion weblog, while the main-page serves as a place where we put stuff we want to keep forever and forever, or at least without comments enabled. As for updates…Under the blog-cut!

There are a lot of updates now. To give each a single announcement, would just be…silly. On the main page, there are now lots and lots of reviews while the girls and I have been sharing our thoughts on Anything We Like with the internet, like Disney and Phoenix Wright and Kathyrnne’s beautiful nerdy ballgowns.

Omg! Updates x a million!

Video Games:
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations
Trauma Center: Under the Knife
Elite Beat Agents

Books:
Moongazer by Marianne Mancusi
Enchantment by Orson Scott Card
Deerskin by Robin McKinley

Movies:
The 10th Kingdom
Stardust
Beowulf

Anime:
Elf Princess Rane
Howl’s Moving Castle

For features and pieces of human interest, like cake and cosplay, please see your adorable neighborhood GNAC weblog.

Basically that means this! I take things like this:

And turn them into this:

The point of cosplaying or costuming is perhaps one of the nerdiest around! You’ve decided that you love this character or series SO much that you want to take upon their characteristics, how they’ve dressed and parade around in public dressed as them… You even get your picture taken by nerds as big as you are, and you act as though you’re the character!

The process of costuming can be long or short, depending on how quickly you get things done. First, you have to choose your character… and what may be harder is what outfit they wear that you enjoy the most. My example is my costume from the Empress Sissi of Austria… which there is now a musical about in Germany, which was borrowed by the Japanese to create a spectacular stage show with dazzling costumes.

My first step was to find the perfect wig, which I achieved…. then modelled for all my geeky internet friends to see!

Following this step, you should find the fabric and patterns you need… Normal people usually don’t take pictures of this step unless they’re REALLY excited about the fabric and patterns. When you finish a piece, if your friends even care, it’s always nice to update them with a few little snapshots of what you have done so far.

After, all that’s left is to wear it to your own flavor of nerdiness… Anime Conventions, Scifi conventions, to the park, to school… Those are only a few of the choices. If you wear it where other people are impressed, or if you’re nerdy enough to do a photo shoot… You’ll end up with plenty of “in character” pictures to cherish for years to come!

Such is the art, and geekiness, of cosplaying!

If you love cake, especially when other people do the baking, and you love video games; Gamecakes was baked just for people like you. It’s on our blogroll, there’s a link in this post. You’ve no excuse and nothing better to do so please, please go visit, browse, and wish you knew how to cook if you’re me, while making very advanced wedding plans. (I want to get married now just so I can have a tower cake in the shape of a stacked Xbox360, Xbox, PS2, and golden Gamecube.)

So, if you haven’t seen Enchanted, I’m sure you’ve at least heard something about it. It premiered the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to pretty high praise, with gorgeous animation and careful writing that walked confidently the very precarious business of taking an up-and-coming princess from an animated fairy-tale kingdom to cramped and cold Manhattan, while satirizing all the Disney princesses that came before her. The satire of Disney, however, is good-natured and a completely different rant since what I really found interesting about this film is its handling of sexual themes, in attraction and in relationships. It portrayed positive facets of love that are normally ignored in Disney romances. Sexual behavior in general is either treated negatively, such as Frollo’s lust for Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame or silent sexualization of female characters, like Ariel’s string-bikini or Tinkerbell’s tiny green slip.
Enchanted does the strange, revolutionary thing of actually engaging a discussion of Disney’s portrayal of sex, both in jokes and in more serious moments. In the wider picture, the movie also tackles society’s ideas of love and marriage and divorce, but in a stale, superficial way. (Divorce is bad, Divorce happens over people’s inability to solve stupid arguments, they should have dated more, and what-not.) Its discussion of Disney’s stance on sex and love is entirely more thoughtful and detailed. For one thing, the film’s characters are perfectly aware of sex and its role in relationships. This awareness takes on a more complicated angle because while the characters from Manhattan are aware of sex, Giselle and the people of the fairy-tale world are not. It’s an interesting observation of how sex and sexual behavior is really disconnected from the world of the Disney canon, except in the visual aspect of its character design. It’s a division of adult worlds from those of children. The adult world still leaks over into the children’s as the little girl in the movie, Megan sums up pretty well as she tells Giselle over a women’s magazine on their mommy/daughter day-trip on the town.
“You know about boys,” Megan says, “they only want one thing.”
“What?” Giselle asks, in suspense.
“I don’t know,” Megan answers. “No one’ll tell me.”
That’s adorable, isn’t it? Too cute. Anyway, to get around to my point in a few hundred words when I could probably spend a paper on this, Enchanted interestingly addresses maturity, growing up, finding love, as well as sex and its mystery in the eyes of a child and that “How Does She Know?” is catchy and viral musical number that is going to visit you in your head for hours and always at inappropriate moments.
Anyway, despite its positive (for Disney) portrayal of sex, it’s a good thing, people who love each other have sex, etc., etc., Enchanted still remains mute on the subject of if children should really understand sex or be kept in the dark about it. Their silence could mean anything–it’s a parent’s decision, sex is and is only part of an adult world and we’re-not-gonna-tell-the-kids-anyway, or they’re just not sayin’.
Either way, I still liked it and now, I want y’all to have a pretty song.

Enchanted–So Close.

Then I sat around for a while and did a little more thinking with my English Major Hat, and that’s when it hit me that the cases of Trials and Tribulations are tied together even more than just in a plotful manner. We’re talking themes– and this one is LOVE. And not just the big type of love with friends and family included– but we’re talking romance all the way through this time.

YAY. I LOVE LOVE.

It doesn’t seem so at first glance, though– case 2 and 3 are relatively insignificant compared with the plot-laden cases 1, 4, and 5, but even they tie back into the central theme of things quite nicely. I will now go through case by case and point out some really obvious things, while dodging the spoilers as best I can\

Case One- Turnabout Memories

This case has Phoenix reminiscing about the day he met Mia Fey, the day he was on trial for the murder of his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, Doug. His girlfriend, of course, being the unsettlingly sinister “Dollie”. Young love is the entire theme of the case– with both Phoenix and Doug’s motives called into question. Is the trouble here just a case of jealousy in young love?

It’s very obvious to spot it in this case, what with “Feenie” and “Dollie” trading nauseating cutesy-wutesy pet names and waxing poetic about how lovely their loving love is (with Feenie at one point swearing in court that Dollie is too perfect to poop). Also notice how broken Phoenix gets when it starts to look like Dahlia is just a nasty psycho murdering people left and right on a whim. But– and here’s where it gets interesting– Mia’s motives in the case are kept mostly secret, but are ALSO powered by our nice main theme. She’s fired up for only her second case ever, and she accepted it only one night in advance– but why? Notice how she explodes into fits of violence (taken out on Grossberg) every time Phoenix or Dahlia mentions their relationship. And notice the name of the victim in the police report you receive from Grossberg about midway through the case. It all seems insignificant until far later in the game, unless you catch Grossberg’s line as he gives Mia the report– “Study it carefully, my dear. This report details, er… how you came to lose your boyfriend.”

Case Two- The Stolen Turnabout

As I said earlier, the filler second and third cases are distant from the main plot, but the second case shows just how far people are willing to go for love. We are introduced to Ron and Desiree DeLite– who I believe are the first and only married couple we encounter in all three PW games. Ron becomes our client through a series of misunderstandings regarding the identity of the phantom thief Mask*DeMasque, including a super bizarre twist in which we accidentally unknowingly prove his presence at the scene of a murder. Even so, it’s extremely evident the close relationship between the hilariously effeminite Ron and the seemingly delusional biker chick Desiree– who seems convinced that her mousy, wussy husband is some kind of incredible manly man. I know I wasn’t the only one who laughed when they heard that Ron used to be a security guard.

USED to be being the operative term. We find out that Ron was fired for stealing and selling company secrets for money to support his wife’s extravagant spending habits, convinced that Desiree would only care for someone like him as long as he could support her. Knowing full and well his wife’s hatred of criminals, Ron risks it all in the hopes of making her happy. Of course, our worries of Desiree being a gold digging bitch are cleared up by the end, when we learn that Ron’s particular style of criminal activity is one that Dessie finds incredibly sexy. Whatever floats your boat, lady.

Case Three- Recipe for Turnabout

Phoenix is once again defending the eternally unfortunate Maggey Byrd, who we last saw as a police officer accused of murder in the second game. Now she’s working as a waitress at the godawful Tres Bien restaurant, where a diner recently dropped dead after drinking a cup of coffee she placed out for him. It turns out that Maggey’s already been tried and found guilty of this murder thanks to the inept defense of a lawyer who claimed to be Phoenix himself– and the REAL Phoenix is only roped in by a pissed off Detective Gumshoe, whose crush on Maggey is both apparent and adorable.

Poor Gumshoe. He spends most of the case trying to win back Maggey’s affections after he’s forced to testify against her. On two separate occasions he orders Phoenix to visit her in prison to deliver his homemade repulsive-sounding box lunches of rice and weenies. While Maggey first refuses to eat them and swears she never wants to see Gumshoe again, after he provides the evidence that will serve to prove her innocence, Phoenix finally delivers the second lunchbox and Maggey cries as she finishes it. By the game’s end credits, the pair are openly dating and Maggey has purchased him a new coat as a present– but thinks it’s a bit too shiny and new for the scruffy detective. He then swears he will get it dirty in the name of love.

A more minor love subplot in case three exists between Viola Cadaverini and Furio Tigre, the sinister pair who run the Tender Lender loan offices. The wounded Viola, granddaughter of the city’s most notorious gangster, works as a secretary at Tigre’s offices and happens to be the only person who Tigre will break his tough guy image for. Though Phoenix initially thinks the two are in love, investigation proves that Tigre is actually only pandering to Viola because he’s the one who injured her in a car accident months earlier, and he’s scared Viola’s grandfather is going to have him whacked. There’s a moment of sympathy for the otherwise terrifying Viola as she tries valiantly not to accept this fact.

Case 4- Turnabout Beginnings

Phoenix flashes back again, this time to Mia’s first ever case. She’s defending death row convict Terry Fawles, who’s gotten himself into another spot of trouble after escaping prison and getting caught with the body of the woman whose testimony originally convicted him years earlier in his trunk. The truth of the case, though, spans back to the original crime for which Terry was convicted– the botched fake kidnapping of his teenage girlfriend, Dahlia Hawthorne. Won’t that bitch ever go away?

Naturally, Dahlia’s not actually dead and naturally, the case takes a shocking turn when we see the lengths that Terry will go to for the love of a girl he thought was dead. This time it’s actually disturbing watching poor Terry come to terms with the fact that his true love is a manipulative little bitch who’s betrayed him TWICE now.

This case also serves as the prelude to the dramatics of the relationships in case five– and here we also meet the eerily familiar Diego Armando, Mia’s superior at the Grossberg Law Offices, and a man whose name we should remember from three cases ago. This is the man who will become Mia’s boyfriend and whose apparent future death sets a thousand things in motion, and will serve as the key that connects the past to the present.

Case 5- Bridge to the Turnabout

Case 5 is pretty epic, so I’m not going to say much about it. It’ll be better when you play it that way. Let’s just drop a hint relative to our purposes here.

LOVE. Like. A BUNCH of it.

And so, even hidden beneath the epic plot of the third Phoenix Wright game, one so epic it serves as the end of an entire character arc, there is another undercurrent– one that serves as great news for the hopeless romantics of us all. T&T asks a lot of guiding questions. What does it mean to defend someone? How do the past and the present intertwine? But hiding beneath the surface is another question– What will we do in the name of love?

Anyway, welcome, welcome and welcome to the ‘Girl Nerds Are Cute’ weblog! Since we’re just kicking off, I’m leaving comments open to any and all users, anon-mice included, but please, please consider signing up and joining the blog. What is written here will become crucial to what we post on our main site. Consider this our little garden where we grow the features section, all right? Because we are.

Also, if you haven’t seen the main site yet, here’s a link: Girl Nerds Are Cute.