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Got the Hikaru nendoroid too!

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Things Akira Touya has done while claiming he dgaf about Hikaru Shindou

Go to a tournament where they both were participating and then walk in front of him just to show him he's being ignored

Try to guess how Hikaru is playing by the sound of the go stones on the board because he doesn't wanna show he's interested

Only watch Hikaru's game while his back is turned so he doesn't notice

Follow closely Hikaru's development as a player.

Have other people inform him of the games Hikaru play, and then study said games so much he can recreate them from memory.

Travel across Tokyo on foot just to go harass/yell at Hikaru in an internet cafe

Jump to the opportunity to mentor a kid because he's taking the same exam as Hikaru just to try to get information out of him

Train said kid to defeat Hikaru in a game out of spite (he doesn't try to do it himself because he dgaf about Hikaru, remember?)

Harass Hikaru (again) after he suddenly quits go

My man is basically a webtoon villainess

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Made a recreation of the Sai vs Touya Meijin game with fuse beads

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Romanticism and Hikaru no Go

There are but a few works where homosexual feelings can be stated as canon (aside the BL genre). Instead, we often have to make do with subtext and ambiguous sentences, situations, or facial expressions.

The height of frustration, that is.

Not being able to ship two male characters without receiving the fatal “That’s just your yaoist imagination” argument is considerably irritating, and comes from the fact that you just have the subtext on your side, whereas the text will rather be on the side of your adversary.

(Note that your adversary may have already eaten his/her hat on Killua’s case in Hunter X Hunter, where the amount of subtext may have exceeded the amount of text.)

Let’s take the example of Hikaru no Go. The two main reasons that are opposed when shipping Akira and Hikaru to people who can’t even consider the idea are the following :

        1. Hikaru is interested in Akari.

        2. There are not romantic feelings between Akira and Hikaru; they merely see each other as Go rivals.

The first reason is not even worth lingering over. When does Hikaru ever think of Akari, except when he randomly bumps into her at school ?

The second reason is more interesting, and it may concern many other works than Hikaru no Go: that so-called lack of romantic feelings between true rivals.

(Who are so much rivals that they think of each other each hour of the day.)

But what are we exactly saying when waving that “romantic feelings” argument ? Are we speaking about some shojoish sentimental effusion ? Or about unexpressed, bubbling feelings ?

For those who may not know, romanticism is not exactly what the word means to most people nowadays – some insipid, mushy romance that movies, books, animes, and bad shôjo are filled with.

Romanticism, basically, is an artistic movement that aimed at revolting against classicism and rationalization by letting intense emotions run wild out of aristocratic norms. These emotions being multifarious and (fortunately) not limited to love. Romanticism, hence, may be expressed through violence, desperation, morbidity, passion, obsession.

(That is not to say that the romantic movement was free from insipid and mushy romances.)

If we were to take musical exemples : Thais’ Meditation, which everyone of you has at least heard once (and which may have, hence, led you to think that classical music is fundamentally insipid, mushy, and boring) could easily fit in the failures of romanticism, which explains quite well why it now invades the worst tear-jerker works of our time.

Whereas Liszt’s Sonata could, in return, give a perfect example of the masterpieces that romanticism is able to create.

Let’s go back to Akira and Hikaru, now. We all agree there is no confession whatsoever. Actually, their interaction is extremely limited all through the manga, whereas we all have the impression that it constitutes the majority of the book.

That is precisely because both Akira and Hikaru share the same obsessional passion towards each other. They are constantly worried about their own progress in Go, but not only.

Can you remember Akira, panicking as Hikaru, depressed from what happened to Sai, thought of stopping Go ?

Can you remember how easily both of them, and especially the well-mannered Akira, lose their temper when interacting with each other ?

Can you remember the intensity of their long awaited match, for which Akira counted the exact amount of time they had to wait ?

Can you remember how Akira guesses right about Sai, saying he is the one that “understands Hikaru the most”, and how Hikaru reacted as if these were words of confession ?

(That was, actually, more than a confession. That was the irrefutable proof that Akira has cracked the most intimate, and rationally unbelievable, secret of Hikaru.)

Advancing individually on a common path to an upcoming and awaited reunion, yet worrying about the other and thinking obsessively about him to the point of fully understanding him without almost any direct communication ?

Could there really be a more fundamentally romantic background between two characters ?

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Hikaru's mom must be baffled...

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Ochi's not homophobic. Just jealous.

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Got the Sai nendoroid!

he's been surrounded

got into a fight with the gundams for some reason

and had a crossover with Niko from OneShot

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sai in the ghost on the net arc

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The urge to make a Sai amigurumi is strong but his clothes have so many layers that the result would probably look pretty chunky and barely movable, why must crocheted fabric be so thick 😭

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go on.... take him.....

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Had a Moment last night and made a glitter gif of my special guy

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I watched the anime and read the manga a few weeks ago, and now I'm watching the live action adaptation! I'm 6 episodes in and I AGREE everything on it has been awesome!! Usually I'm picky about story details being changed, but this show makes those changes work a lot better, it adds even more depth to the characters and foreshadowing for future events :0 I'm enjoying it a lot!

(also tumblr glitched a bit when trying to comment on the post and seems it deleted my comments, sorry if the notifications got strange)

Dear Followers,

This is a PSA. Hikaru no Go (2020) is now available to stream on Prime Video. You should watch it.

But Caity, you may ask. Why should I watch this Chinese live action drama based on the popular turn-of-the-millenium Japanese manga and anime of the same name? The answer, my friends, is because it is fucking phenomenal.

Hikaru no Go is my favorite sports anime. It was one of the first manga I ever read. When I own a home someday and have bookshelves, it is one of the only manga series I wish to own in its entirety in print. The story is deeply compelling, moving, funny, relatable. It truly has something I haven't found in another animanga in twenty years.

And the Chinese live action adaptation takes that perfect, beautiful source material and creates something equally perfect and beautiful (if not more so? feels blasphemous to say, but boy howdy I'm not NOT saying it).

The way in which the original Japanese story—the characters, the culture, the game of go—is translated into Chinese is really masterfully executed. The story is incredibly faithful to the original, and when it does differ, it does so in really creative, thoughtful ways that really work.

The actors fucking nail it. Honestly all of them, but I'm looking at the kids in the first two episodes in particular. Blown away by the performances of a couple of ten-year-olds. Kids have a bright future ahead of them, damn.

This show has the budget. If y'all know me at all, you know I'll enjoy a low-budget wuxia flick because it's a good time, but damn, if I had standards, they would be met and exceeded by this show. The hair, the makeup, the costumes, the effects (there is an effect every time the "ghost" is on screen where he is partially translucent. It is perfectly executed and incredibly impressive, at least to my layman eyes). The very first opening credits scene is super beautiful, the end credits are beautiful, it's all just so pretty and polished and feels good on my eye holes.

Honestly, I cannot gush enough about this show. It ranks up with Nirvana in Fire in my heart (which I do not say lightly, considering I went through my entire list and lowered the ratings I'd given each show accordingly after I first watched nif so that the 10 weighed more heavily).

tl;dr: If you liked the hikago animanga, you should watch this show. If you never read/watched hikago, you should watch this show. If you did not like hikago, you should watch this show. Please watch this show, I am begging you.

Sincerely, A Rabid Hikago Fangirl

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If I were an animator I would also create this kind of misleading art 20 years after the anime ended just for funsies

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I saw the cutest couple on the bus the other day and so AkiHika happened.

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Was thinking the other day that the Hikaru no Go story from Akira’s POV would still be called Hikaru no Go, except instead of a coming-of-age story it’s a detective story.

Experience the mind-boggling, infuriating, perplexing fuckery that is the Shindou-sai enigma from Akira’s POV in the form of a visual novel. You have 3 in-game years to not figure out what the fuck is going on.

(backgrounds from the anime and HnG games)

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I wanna convince my friends to watch Hikaru no Go but I find it kinda hard because of the length + it being about a board game so now I'm just like PLEASE GIVE IT A CHANCE the character development is amazing and there's so much depth given to the bonds that develop between the characters through their Go matches, the dynamic in the main rivalry is very unique and THERE'S A COOL EPIC GHOST 😭

so now I'm slowly injecting my brainrot into their heads by sending a lot of silly Sai pictures