obitoslover

[obitoslover]

Do Suna ninja seriously wear open-toed sandals? There feet will always have sand in them.

[obitoslover]

The craziest thing about the "Beyond's mum fucked a Shinigami" theory is that there is actually a Shinigami with "Beyond" in his name. Like if you want the perfect candidate for B's dad, Armonia Justin Beyondormason is Right There. We also know that the Shinigami King can invent rules and punishments at his own discretion, and given that Armonia Justin is the king's advisor, I don't think it's too insane to assume that the king would have spared his life???

[obitoslover]

Is it cool if I leave them with you guys I gotta take care of something

[obitoslover]

Honestly the fact he even thought about something like this is so funny. Also love how he immediately concluded that Near will be fast enough to protect Mello's identity. You're so right Light.

[obitoslover]

it's ok guys I got this (takes poison damage so he doesn't have to)

[obitoslover]

absolutely obsessed with this panel currently

"...!" what a reaction to seeing mello show up unexpectedly. on top of like. his face. i dont have words or deep analysis here im just rotating this panel in my mind like im defrosting it in the microwave

[obitoslover]

what do you think could be Mello's hobbies??

Thank you for the ask!! This is a question I've wondered about a lot.

In canon, I don't think he had a ton of time for himself. He was very focused on the case and that would've eaten up most of his time and energy. I DO get the impression that he puts a lot of effort into his appearance, and enjoys doing things like makeup and painting his nails and fashion in general. I think he takes really good care of himself and would be particular about his self-presentation. I also like the idea of him as a writer, per LABB. I think at Wammy's House, he was a big reader as well. I actually think it's really sweet for him to have quieter hobbies like that, given that his character & life in general is so active and a little violent.

It wouldn't surprise me if Mello kept up with L's activity during the timeskip period too - I'm pretty sure I've read that Light was still solving cases during this time, although I couldn't find my source for this, but I think Mello would try and keep track regardless of whether that's progress on the Kira case or progress on other cases. I am very fixed on the idea of Mello having more of a genuine fascination with detective work and crime than Near does. Although he calls the new L "incompetence itself", so if Light WAS taking on other work, I assume he was only accepting easier cases or a much lower volume than what the first L did.

Another idea I'm quite attached to with Mello and Near is the two of them being opposites in fairly mundane ways, so since Near's hobbies are often creative and involve building (granted he does seem to take great pleasure in destroying his creations <3), there's a case to be made for Mello having more destructive hobbies. This may well be the stupidest thing I've said on this blog but literally the only thing coming to mind is ripping up weeds lmao. Maybe there's some insane AU where he grows a vegetable garden.

I do definitely think he'd like to keep active though, and mafia era especially, I can see him going out for spontaneous drives if he has access to a vehicle (or the wherewithal to steal one), or pacing back and forth when he needs to clear his head. Non-Kira, I also think it would've been great for him to get involved with a contact sport. I don't necessarily think he's the kind of person who actually enjoys violence with regards to all the various counts of murder and kidnapping he committed in canon - all of that was very much a means to an end - but at Wammy's House, we do see him throw a soccer ball at some kid's head and pull another's hair, so I'm inclined to say that he does have some tendencies towards aggression that would be better channelled into a healthier outlet.

[obitoslover]

Shark and Orca :3

[obitoslover]

Snowman

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[obitoslover]

Detective team AU where Near, Mello and Matt are all working for L and run an office Secret Santa exchange

[obitoslover]

BUNGOU STRAY DOGS WAN !! CHAPTER 21

I’m back with my crampy translation !!! I got too much time for this so I didn’t wait until someone translated it… (but of course I still wait for her translated it for my lesson too) then like always, english and japanese aren’t my forte so bear with it

Continuar lendo

[obitoslover]

Warming Up

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[obitoslover]

"Toshiro Is Sexist," "Toshiro Owns Slaves": What's Really Going on With This Guy?

I've seen a lot of debate on whether or not Toshiro is problematic because he's a slave owner or because he's sexist in the context of his crush on Falin. While I do want to examine his relationship to Falin, I'd like to take a few steps back and unpack his upbringing first. We'll dive into the gender and class dynamics he was raised with and how it impacts his behavior in the main storyline.

Like all people, Toshiro is shaped by the environment he grew up in. Toshitsugu, Toshiro's father and the head of the Nakamoto clan, is the most impactful model of authority and manhood in his life. Toshiro does recognize some of his father's flaws and tries to avoid replicating them. But whether or not he emulates or subverts his father's behavior, Toshitsugu is often the starting point for Toshiro's treatment of others, particularly marginalized people.

The Nakamoto clan exists under a patriarchal hierarchy with Toshitsugu at the top. As noted by @fumifooms in their Nakamoto household post, his wife has more authority than Maizuru. She's able to ban Maizuru from parts of their residence, but despite disliking his infidelity, she can't divorce him or stop him from cheating on her. Their marriage is not an equal partnership.

On an interpersonal level, Toshitsugu and Maizuru also have a fraught relationship. While she does seem to care for him, she's often frustrated by his thoughtless behavior.

For example, he drunkenly buys Izutsumi for her — without considering how she'll have to raise this child — and invades her room in the middle of the night. When he cryptically says, "It's all my fault," she replies, "I can think of a lot of things that are your fault." She calls him an "idiot" and "believes that [Toshiro] will grow up to be a better clan leader than his father," implying that she takes issue with Toshitsugu's leadership.

Because Maizuru and Toshitsugu are described as being "in an intimate relationship" and "seem[ing] to be lovers," Maizuru appears to be a consensual participant. Still, this doesn't negate the large power imbalance between them as a male noble clan leader and his female retainer. This imbalance introduces an insidious undertone to Maizuru's frustration with Toshitsugu. Like Toshiro's mother, Maizuru doesn't have the agency to do as she pleases in their relationship; he has the ultimate authority. For instance, she doesn't seem to want to raise Izutsumi, but she has to anyway.

While Maizuru's role as Toshitsugu's mistress is significant, she's also the Nakamoto clan's teacher and Toshiro's primary maternal figure. She cares deeply for Toshiro: tailing him, feeding him, and taking responsibility even for his actions as an adult. While it might seem sweet that she cares for him like a son at first, Maizuru was notably fifteen years old at the time of his birth. In the extra comic below, he's six years old and has already been in her care for some time. Even if we're being generous and assuming that she didn't start raising him until he was six, she was still only twenty-one at the time she was parenting her boss/lover's child with another woman.

Maizuru's roles as mistress and maternal figure, in addition to her role as retainer, demonstrate the intersection between gendered and class oppression in the Nakamoto household. Despite her original role being a retainer trained in espionage, Toshitsugu presses her into performing gendered labor for him and eventually, Toshiro. She's expected to be Toshitsugu's lover, perform emotional labor for him as his confidant, care for his child, and carry out domestic tasks like cooking. She says, "Even during missions, I was often dragged into the kitchen." If she was a male servant, I doubt she would have been expected to perform these additional tasks. She can't avoid these tasks either, stating that her "own feelings don't factor into it."

Toshitsugu disregards his wife's and Maizuru's desires and emotions to serve his own interests. Because he has societal power over them as a nobleman and in Maizuru's case, her master, neither woman can escape their position in the household hierarchy.

As a result, Toshiro grew up within a structure where men and male nobility, in particular, wield the most societal power. The hierarchical nature of his household and society discourages everyone, including him as a clan leader's eldest son, from questioning and disrupting the existing hierarchy.

The other Nakamoto household members also internalize its sexist, classist power dynamics.

For example, Hien expects that she and Toshiro will replicate the uneven dynamics of the previous generation, regardless of her personal feelings. She sees her and Toshiro's relationship as paralleling Maizuru and Toshitsugu's relationship; she is the closest woman to Toshiro and his retainer, so she's shocked when Toshiro doesn't attempt to begin an intimate relationship with her. Notably, she doesn't have actual feelings for him. Her expectations are centered around the household's precedent of placing emotional, sexual, domestic, and child-rearing labor onto the female servants without any regard for their personal desires.

Hien also probably knows that her position in the household will improve if she is Toshiro's lover because she's seen it improve Maizuru's position. However, the fact that being the future clan leader's lover is the closest proximity she, as a female servant, has to power further reveals the gendered, class-based oppression she and the other women live under.

It's important to note that the Nakamoto clan bought Benichidori, Izutsumi, and Inutade as slaves, so they have less power and agency than Maizuru and Hien. The clan further dehumanizes Izutsumi and Inutade as demi-humans; their enslavement contains an additional layer of racialization.

Toshiro isn't oblivious to the gendered, class, and racial power dynamics of his household. He tries to distance himself from participating in its exploitative power structure. He walls himself off from Hien, who he's known since childhood, to avoid replicating his father's behavior and making his servant into his lover. He disapproves of his father's enslavement of Izutsumi and Inutade, and he lets Izutsumi go when she runs away in the Dungeon.

But does any of this absolve him of his complicity in his household's sexist, classist power dynamics and racialized slavery?

The short answer is absolutely not.

Despite his distaste for his father's exploitation of his servants and slaves, Toshiro still uses them. He refers to his party as "his retainers," and he has them fight and perform domestic tasks for him. You could argue that Toshiro doesn't like to and thus, doesn't regularly use his servants and slaves. In the context of him asking his retainers to help him rescue Falin, Maizuru says, "The only time he ever made any sort of personal request was for this task." But it shouldn't matter whether exploitation is a regular occurrence or not for it to be considered harmful. Toshiro asking Maizuru to cook him a meal still constitutes asking his female servant to perform gendered labor for him. He's also very accustomed to her grooming and dressing him.

Maizuru sees feeding, washing, and even advising Toshiro romantically as fulfilling Toshitsugu's orders to care for his son. They aren't fulfilling a "personal request." But just because her labor has been deemed expected and thereby devalued doesn't mean that it isn't labor or that she isn't performing it.

Maizuru's dynamic with Toshiro is also complicated by her role as his maternal figure. She loves him and wants to take care of him, and she doesn't have a choice in the matter. During Toshiro's childhood, the onus was on Toshitsugu to cease exploiting his lover and release her from servitude, but Toshiro is now an adult man. Seeing as how Maizuru defers to his wishes and calls him "Young Master," they still have a power imbalance that he's passively maintaining. Ideally, he would not ask anything of her until he has the authority to release her from servitude.

Throughout the story, Toshiro acts as if he has no agency and quietly disapproving of his father's actions absolves him of his participation in maintaining oppressive dynamics. While his father still ranks higher than him, he's essentially his father's heir. He has much more power than Maizuru, the highest-ranked servant. At the very least, he could leave his slave-owning household.

Unfortunately, his refusal to confront injustice is consistent with his character's major flaw: he does not express his opinions, desires, or needs. While this character trait obviously hurts his friendships, it also furthers his complicity in the injustices his household runs on.

Toshiro's relationship with eating food — the prevailing metaphor of the series — also parallels his relationship with confronting injustice. Maizuru mentions that he was a sickly child, so the act of eating may have been physically uncomfortable for him. As an adult, his refusal to eat crops up during his rescue attempt of Falin. Denying himself food might have been punishment for not accomplishing important tasks like rescuing Falin and/or a way to maintain control over something in his life when he felt like he'd lost control over the rest of it, again in the context of losing Falin. (Note: I suggest reading this post on Toshiro's disordered eating by @malaierba.)

But he cannot and does not avoid consuming food forever.

Similarly, Toshiro keeps his distance from his retainers and tries not to use them until the Falin situation occurs. His efforts to avoid exploiting his retainers amount to inaction — things he doesn't ask of them or do to them. But his inaction does nothing to dismantle the existing hierarchy that places his retainers under his authority, denies them agency, and often marginalizes them as not only servants or slaves but as women, and he ends up using them as servants and slaves anyways.

Returning to the narrative's themes of consumption, Toshiro cannot avoid eating just as he cannot avoid perpetuating the exploitative system of his household. The Nakamoto clan consumes the labor and personhood of those lower in the hierarchy. The retainers' labor as spies and domestic servants is the foundation of the clan's existence. Thus, the clan consumes their labor to sustain itself.

Within this hierarchy, the retainers' personhood is also consumed and erased. As Izutsumi describes, they are given different names and stripped of their agency to reject orders or leave. Maizuru and Hien also say their feelings are irrelevant in the context of Toshitsugu's and Toshiro's wants and needs. Both women are expected to comply with whatever is most beneficial and comfortable for the noblemen. Clearly, despite Toshiro's detachment from his household's functions, these social structures remain in place and harm the women under him.

Although we know the Nakamoto clan has male retainers, the choice to highlight the female retainers seems intentional. We're asked to interrogate how not only being a servant or a slave in a noble household impacts a person's life and agency, but how being a woman intersects with being a member of some of the lowest social classes.

Toshiro only distances himself from his father's behaviors of infidelity and exploitation so long as it doesn't take Toshiro out of his comfort zone. He doesn't free his slaves. He's far too comfortable with his female retainers performing domestic labor for him, and he barely acknowledges their efforts; they're shocked when he thanks them for helping him save Falin. He hasn't unpacked his sexist (or classist or racist) biases because he perpetuates his household's oppressive hierarchy throughout the narrative. Considering all of this, he inevitably brings this baggage to his interactions with Falin.

Falin is presumably one of the first women he's had extended contact with that isn't his relative or his family's servant. Because of his trauma surrounding his father and Maizuru sleeping together, he understandably falls for a woman as disconnected as possible from his father and his clan. He seems to genuinely like Falin, respects her boundaries, and graciously accepts her rejection. His behavior towards her is overall kind and unproblematic.

But if Falin had gone with him, she would've likely been devalued and sidelined like the other women of the Nakamoto household. No matter how much he loves Falin, simply loving her cannot replace the difficult work of unlearning his sexism. Love, of course, can and should be accompanied by that work, but by the close of the narrative, we gain little indication that Toshiro acknowledges or seeks to end his part in exploiting and devaluing women and other marginalized people.

A spark of hope does exist. Toshiro expressing his feelings to Laios and Falin suggests that his time away from home has encouraged him to speak up more. Breaking his habit of avoidance may be the first step towards acknowledging his complicity in systems of injustice and moving towards dismantling them.

Special thanks to my very smart friend @atialeague for bringing up Toshitsugu's relationship with Maizuru and the replication of dynamics of consumption and class! <3

[obitoslover]

Wolf dadmori i guess...🧍

[obitoslover]

I just remade an old silly comic of mine

[obitoslover]

what makes you think that mello doesn't want near dead? i think so too but I'm not entirely sure

Great question!! I have a lot of explanations for this.

There are two main practical reasons why Near dying would be catastrophic for Mello. Firstly, Mello and Near are designed such that they are stronger together, and functionally cannot succeed without the other. People generally understand that Near couldn't have caught Kira without Mello, but I think a lot of people miss the fact that actually neither of them could've done really anything without each other. Mello used a spy in the SPK to establish that Kira's weapon of choice was a notebook, which kicked off his plan to hunt the book down. Near used Mello's information after the explosion to determine that there was a Shinigami attached to the notebook, and that the 13-day rule was fake. Mello used Near to investigate Mogi, and subsequently, when that fell through, used Lidner to access Near's information about everything except the exact identity of X-Kira. Then, of course, Near needed Mello to kidnap Takada and subsequently reveal the true location of the Death Note. It's very much a back-and-forth, and even if Mello doesn't necessarily accept the idea that they can achieve more when working together, he definitely seems to understand that he needs Near to get ahead in some capacity. Dead Near = no information.

Secondly, there's the fact that Mello's entire motivation is to catch Kira before Near. I could talk about this extensively but I think, at its core, this is pretty straightforward. Mello wants a satisfying victory, and it doesn't really work if there's no one left alive for him to beat. There's a possibility that he could catch Kira on his own, but what would be the point of that if no one else he deems a worthy competitor is even trying to? He doesn't want handouts. He doesn't want a win by default. He wants to win fair and square, against a rival who is alive and well and in his right mind. Dead Near = no competition.

Then on a more emotional note - and this might be slightly more speculative but - it really doesn't seem to me like Mello actually hates Near??? When he talks to or about Near, it's either focused largely on himself/his personal desire to prove himself ("I'm always number two... no matter how hard I try..."; "I'll be number one") or actually pretty positive stuff about Near being better than him ("Near will calmly and unemotionally solve the puzzle"; "I know you're good at that stuff"). This is not to say that he likes Near either, but rather that he recognises that Near is very skilled in his own right, and what drives him is specifically proving that he himself is just as, if not more, skilled than Near. This makes more sense to me than him having a genuine vendetta against Near as a person and wanting him to suffer. He flies off the handle and aims a gun at Near when he feels like Near is treating him as a pawn, but by the end of that scene, he's smirking and talking about "waiting for [Near]" at the finish line, which seems like a weird thing to say to someone you a) were genuinely trying to kill a moment ago, and b) still actively want dead. I think this was a knee-jerk reaction to a phrase that struck a nerve and made him feel disrespected, rather than a legitimate assassination attempt.

I feel like to really understand Mello's feelings towards Near, you have to understand where they come from in the first place, and it's not because he feels Near has done wrong by him. It's not because he finds Near generally annoying or unpleasant to be around. It's because he was raised as a potential successor to L, and he hinges his self-worth on the notion of becoming L. While L was alive, his metric for success was to be personally chosen by him, but since L died without ever choosing, Mello set a new objective that would determine who is most worthy. Try to solve the one case that L couldn't, and whoever could do that first would win. So I think his goal actually has a lot less to do with Near as a person and a lot more to do with Near as a symbol, for all he represents and the ways in which his existence shapes Mello's own self-perception. With all this in mind, there's actually no explicit reason for him to want Near dead. For L and Light, the rules of their game were such that the winner would be the survivor. For Mello and Near, their game relies on both of them being alive.

My final note about all of this is that Near is pretty insistent that Mello doesn't want him dead ("If you want to shoot me, shoot"; "Mello wouldn't try to kill me"). Near demonstrates a very deep and accurate understanding of the intricacies of Mello's motivations, so I feel like that counts for something, too.

[obitoslover]

what is going on with that mannequin in the back?