pandemonini

[pandemonini]

Washroom Update: Ignihyde!

Washroom series complete! 🥳

[pandemonini]

hater for hire. if you need someone to hate on anything i'm your guy. i'll hate on anything for next to no reason and i just do it for the love of the game. which i hate

[pandemonini]

Eyyyy long time no see! Not dead yet, I just forgor to upload lmao

So how 'bout I remedy this and giving y'all another mix of two hyperfixtions. This time Mononoke and Kpop Demon Hunters. Shingi has the vibe of doing Romance's back breaking pose and unhinged face so why not??

Bonus alternate version while I was fucking around with the blend modes

Enjoy okay baiii

[pandemonini]

Finished Mononoke (2007), and definitely I really liked it.

As for the final arc, the bakeneko one, it might sound strange but I really liked how Setsuko’s death is “sexualized���.

When her boss assaults her he is not trying to SA her. He is trying to impose himself physically to her so she stops threatening him professionally and socially. Yet, in their struggle, her bra (or camisole, but very clearly a piece of underwear) is revealed and he ends up between her legs while holding her above the bridge.

It is a very sexualized position and it works so well for what the story is trying to tell. Her boss is assaulting her/trying to destroy her article not only because he is corrupted. He is doing that to her because she is a woman.

Setsuko is almost right when she accuses him of being jealous of her. He is slightly jealous, but most of all he despises her. Because she is a woman. He dislikes that she is trying her hand at “serious” journalism (he wants to send her back to the lifestyle rubric of the newspaper), he probably dislikes that she dresses in an androgynous fashion (the fashion of the 20-30’s was often criticized for being too masculine and the anime drew our attention to this fact), etc. and is hoping that life is going to bring her back to her natural place without him intervening. When life doesn’t (because there is no such thing as a natural place for women), and she manages to uncover a bigger scandal than he could ever do, he starts sabotaging her not only because he is corrupted, but also to bring her back to her “proper” place himself.

Therefore, framing his physical assault of her the same way as SA makes that facet of their dynamic completely explicit. Setsuko is not only killed as a journalist threatening the statu quo would be, she is also killed as a woman threatening the statu quo (here the patriarchy).

Showing that through the choreography of the fight was such a clever choice.

(Also there is something to be said about her rage fusing with the ones of cats being run over by trains to create the mononoke. Guess who else was considered as acceptable collateral damage to preserve the statu quo (here trains arriving on time)?)

[pandemonini]

Pretty sure he’d totally pull off a Japanese tsubo shōzoku…🤔

[pandemonini]

My collection of "special papers," some closeups of the omake included for readability.

[pandemonini]

two of them

[pandemonini]

[pandemonini]

they're both centuries old but kon is mentally gen z (ri despises it)

[pandemonini]

WEEEEEEE

[pandemonini]

unfinished painting that was sitting in my folder for months LOL

[pandemonini]

small artdump of my random redraws + twitter banner

[pandemonini]

i like that him and shingi are canonically catboys

[pandemonini]

my next meal is the mononoke art and design crunch crunch slurp crunch

[pandemonini]

wao

[pandemonini]

I just want to see Medicine Seller bottom, anyone will do

[pandemonini]

One thing about Mononoke that I find kinda funny is that the samurai in the series are always pretty useless.

A lot of anime present samurai as these, like, hardcore unstoppable badasses, but whenever a Medicine Man runs into a samurai, they're either stupid, cowardly, or they just get in the way. At best, they're portrayed as being in way over their heads. Even the evil samurai in the series aren't particularly badass. They're just portrayed as thugs and lowlives that happen to have swords.

Not only is this funny, it also ties into the feminist themes of the franchise. A lot of Mononoke has to do with the hardships women face in a male-dominated world. That an exalted, all-male class like the samurai are in reality a bunch of losers helps show how bitterly unfair the gender dynamic in Edo society is. A lot of these guys are just allowed to fail upward because of their connections or social status or whatever while lower class women who are braver and more competent than them just get crushed by the system.

One thing that's never said outright but is still clear from the reactions of the characters is that only men of the samurai class are allowed to carry swords. Legally, a merchant like the Medicine Man isn't allowed to have one. However, not only are the swords the samurai carry completely useless against mononoke, but none of the samurai are even good swordsmen in the first place. Whenever they do use a sword to kill someone (which is rare), it's usually an unarmed civilian that can't defend themselves. These aren't hardened warriors; they're just bullies with a title. The Medicine Man is way more qualified to carry a sword than any of them.