#I just read a lot of manga on my phone and have opinions about it

[windowsloth]

I read Skip and Loafer last week not really knowing anything about it and was really charmed by it; I was posting some reactions on bluesky but I wanted to write a slightly more coherent paragraph or two here too! Spoilers obvs

(I also really haven’t engaged with any kind of discussion about the series so I don’t know like. How people feel about basically any of it. Not that that matters but just for context)

What a good comic?? I’m really in love with the way it’s paced, I’ve been trying to find a good word for it and it just feels very patient and restrained. It is very willing to let you just sit with a moment for a while, and it avoids being overly didactic in a way that comics often can be.

I think this first really hit for me when Mitsumi goes back to her hometown the first time during summer break; she sleeps in and her mom cuts up watermelon for her and we get this montage across the next few pages, shown in landscape-style horizontal panels. It opens on Mitsumi with her bedhead munching on the watermelon. And then we see her look at her mom working in the kitchen, then the curtains blowing in the summer breeze. And then we get a series of shots of the town, the mountains, and the ocean, all with the sfx of Mitsumi chewing before ending on an almost full page panel of her bleary-eyed face. It’s a very small moment but to me it so effectively communicates a vibe, the emotional tone of being back somewhere familiar and just soaking in the feeling of it.

This is something the comic does relatively often, and it feels like a slight but significant difference in approach to the way a lot of other comics will handle pacing for big splashy moments. Varying the panel size (especially by doing like a big spread or splash page) to break up the pacing or punctuate a dramatic moment is super common, especially ones where the art itself is a big part of the draw. I’m a sucker for cool art in comics, I’ve said before that I’ll read comics I’m not enjoying as long as the art is fun, and one thing I find interesting about Skip and Loafer’s approach is that when there are those big splash page moments, they don’t feel particularly flashy.

To look at another example, there’s the moment when Mitsumi fully acknowledges to herself that she has feelings for Shima. We get several pages of them having a goofy little interaction through the classroom window while he’s jogging, and then we have the two individual pages of Mitsumi alone standing by the open window after he runs off before another group jogs by. Again, it’s a very quiet moment that you just get to sit with for little while. There’s a huge contrast to that and the kind of splash page you get in a lot of other comics.

Obviously, it’s probably not fair to think of something that’s notorious for its big elaborate dramatic spreads like Berserk, if only because they’re operating in such different genre modes, but even things that are closer in vibe like a Witch Hat Atelier have a kind of flashiness to their art style that isn’t present in Skip and Loafer. To be abundantly clear—I mean that in a totally neutrally, I don’t mean that as slight on any of those comics. Even if I restrict myself to the slice of life/romance genre, you often get splash pages for confessions and kisses; scenes that have a lot of emphasis on pose and motion and that tend to feature lots of lighting effects or or other stylized elements. I’m thinking here of something like a My Girlfriend Isn’t Here Today which I think does a pretty effective job of playing up the melodrama with a big cool panel (the “friends don’t kiss” scene, for example), or an Akebi-chan’s Sailor Uniform that is kind of singularly focused on the human form in motion (for better and for worse—although I’d argue some of the more recent stuff with Erika and Akebi is a solid example of the comic playing with quieter moments and stillness too). It makes me think of really long one-take shots in movies. They can be very cool! But I think it often can lead to a whole conversation about when something goes from being a stylistic choice to being a gimmick. And again, I’m not trying to throw shade at any of the comics I’m bringing up, rather I’m to say that Skip and Loafer to me feels incredibly thoughtful about when and how it breaks up its pacing and art.

A lot of the more dramatic moments have this more contemplative, cinematic style. There’s a marked difference in the visual language between, say, a lot of Nao’s sections and a lot of Mitsumi’s school days. The really deliberate compositions and the way imagery will be repeated, the way certain things will be withheld (I’m thinking here of the crab scene that’s almost entirely focused on Mitsumi until we finally get the reverse shot of Shima blushing up to his ears). The gap between the more cartoon-comicy aesthetic of a lot of the school antics and the more reserved, graphic novel vibe of the more dramatic moments is really effective! The comic transitions from one to the other really seamlessly most of the time, which is so cool to read. And then it also occasionally slams them into one another like when Shima asks Mitsumi out and we suddenly get that cinematic style being used for a comedy beat, and it rules.

The deftness with which the tone changes is also another thing I love. I love a story that can pull off a big swing in tone, but for me that’s often something like a Chainsaw Man or a Midsommar where you’re pairing horror/tragedy with comedy and that unsettling back and forth is an a big part of the engine making the thing go. Skip and Loafer is about young people learning to navigate their relationships to one another and to themselves, and it does that in both very lighthearted, comedic ways, and in deeply earnest, emotional ones. It manages to modulate between two subtly different those tones perfectly, and I think that’s really impressive! They both feel distinct but also cohesive enough that it’ll switch from one to the other before you even really notice. I said earlier I didn’t want to slight any of the other comics I was mentioning so I’ll be vague and say I read another pretty popular series recently that fails pretty badly at this. I think it tries to do a similar thing in terms of swinging from comedy to melodrama and I don’t feel like it succeeds at pulling off that switch at all. The comedy is so silly and the melodrama is so contrived that I’m never able to actually take any of it seriously (bonus points if you can guess, idk why I’m being coy about this I’ll also just tell anyone who’s read this far and wants to know). It goes all the way back to that vacation montage I mentioned initially. It’s this wonderful, peaceful moment that gets undercut by a joke in a way that doesn’t detract from the preceding moment.

That patience and that intentionality when it comes to the tone of the comic also pays off in the writing too. I’m sure other more articulate people have lots to say about Nao and her arc/character, but I was genuinely floored by all of it. There’s a real respect for the audience in the way you’re given enough to understand precisely what’s going on without feeling like the comic is avoiding being too direct or pulling its punches. Mitsumi sees Nao as her aunt and so that’s how we understand her as well—it takes a couple dozen chapters to get direct confirmation that Nao is trans, and again it ties back into that idea of young people (especially girls) learning to exist in the world and around one another. Her chapters are just so well put together; I think her conflicted feelings about watching Mitsumi grow up while being haunted by her own lost adolescence is so poignant and the way she’s becoming a kind of mentor to Mika is so, so sweet.

I’m not one to nitpick issues of representation, but it does feel like Skip and Loafer takes a pretty different approach there than other comics, too. I like Moon on a Rainy Night, and I think it’s really cool that the author does research into the communities she’s writing about but you can also feel that in the way it’s written. I have similar feelings about She Loves to Cook and She Loves to eat. I’m not saying they’re somehow virtue signaling or tokenizing or anything like that but the word I keep coming back to is didactic; it feels like they’re trying to educate me as well as represent different types of people and experiences. That’s not to say that one approach is wrong, and I don’t even think it’s necessarily a fair to hold them up together since they’re definitely doing different things, but since I read all of these pretty recently so I couldn’t help drawing a comparison or two (But while I’m on this mini tangent, I’m really curious to see where My Dear Lass takes some of the gender stuff it’s got going on at the moment).

This has gotten sooooooooo much longer than I thought it would oops there’s so much more I could say but just a lightning round to try and wrap this up: I ship Makoto and Yuzu really hard, partly because I am very susceptible to nerd x gyaru but also because I do think a kind of comp het narrative feels like it would fit pretty naturally into Yuzu’s entire deal. I love the differences in the ways different characters are written when they get narrative focus; in particular I like how vague a lot of Shima’s chapters end up being. I think narratively it makes sense to save a lot of his Past Stuff as dramatic fuel for later, but on a character level it makes a lot of sense that a guy who clearly doesn’t understand himself well wouldn’t be nearly as clearly introspective as someone like Mika, who is so deeply insecure. I like little disphit Yamada, especially when he and Mitsumi get to be little gremlins together because they’re both dumb as hell. Finally, just another specific moment I loved: Fuji immediately nailing Shima to the wall with her “yeah, Mitsumi is pretty awful at everything except studying, huh?” comment. I just thought that was really nice! He’s confronted with his feelings more directly shortly afterward, but I like him realizing like “wait do I see her differently than other people she’s close to?” especially considering his thought process in recent chapters; the way he thinks Mitsumi has fallen for his facade without realizing how similar they really are in that regard.

Anyway if you actually read all of this you’re a real one lmao thanks

[teamatsumu]

Helloooo! I'm just thiiiiis happy you're open to hearing requests because I adore your writing so much!

I'm flying a lot this year for work and weddings and whatnot, and I'd love your take on Haikyuu characters travelling solo overseas on a plane! How they react if they're seated next to a cute reader and do/don't make any moves, or they're a complete mess and somehow miss the flight - whatever your thoughts may be on them as passengers 😊

Akaashi, Suna, Osamu have been on my mind but I'd honestly eat up anything you write about anyone really ❤️

Ohhhh my god i love this idea my thoughts are RACING

AKAASHI:

He is very quiet on planes, I think. Keeps to himself, doesn’t bother anyone. Definitely gets a window seat, doesn’t get up to use the bathroom unless it’s absolutely necessary. His flights are uneventful at best, and he manages to finish that one book he was slowly reading over the last few weeks.

If he is seated next to someone he finds cute, he doesn’t say anything about it. He will look at you from the corner of his eye, tiny glances every now and then, but he won’t bother you. But if you initiate conversation, he will definitely engage in it. And quite enthusiastically too. You nearly fly off your seat when you realize he works as a manga editor, and Akaashi happily answers all your wonderous questions. He thinks you’re enthusiasm on the subject is contagious, and he feels elated when you ask for his number near the end, because he is not sure if he would have the courage to.

SUNA:

Suna also minds his own business. He has his laptop, his phone, and a good pair of noise canceling headphones. He is set for the trip. He is someone who puts his comfort above all. Meaning his own pillow and blanket, and even more comfortable slippers for longer flights. He is about to have the time of his life.

But then he notices that his neighbor is cute, way cuter the more he looks, and he can’t help but have half his attention on whatever you’re doing. He might comment on something too, and if you respond positively, that can spark conversation. He doesn’t talk more if he thinks it’s bothering you. Suna knows his boundaries. But he is not shy, and he is sure he can use his wit to create a little friendship and maybe get your number by the time you two get off the flight.

OSAMU:

Osamu is a patient flier by all means. Between him and Atsumu, he always guns for the window seat, and often gets his way too after a few choice words and winning a few petty bets. When he is traveling alone, he exclusively gets a window seat, even if he has to pay extra. And of course, he needs to know what they are serving on the plane.

Okay here’s my Osamu headcanon, he does not like plane food. And he has a habit of mumbling under his breath about it. Usually, people who complained about it would annoy you, but the boy next to you has this thick accent and is speaking in a dialect you haven’t heard before, that you find extremely funny.

You indulge him, and he opens up immediately. He complains about the food and you echo his opinions. Before you know it, you are having a fiery discussion on food, and Osamu is seconds away from kissing you on the spot when you say that you think Udon is the best noodle.

Time flies by with him, and you get off the plane with promises that you would visit Onigiri Miya for a free meal soon.

[kajilychnis]

Arcane order headcanon

I wanted to share some headcanons on them about their knowledge about modern "technology". First let's start with Bellroc. (Sorry I will use "he" for Bellroc and Skrael, ik some people prefer to use "they/them")

First, Bellroc hates human technology the most of the three, In my opinion, he's the one who knows the least about technology. I think he knows heaters, it's probably one of the things he appreciate the most. Everything that is camera, telephone and etc, he hates that. This reminds me of the scene where Bellroc smashes Toby's camera (I JUST REMEMBERED THAT IT WASN'T TOBY'S CAMERA BUT KREL'S ROBOT DAD OMFG HOW DID I FORGET XD). I'm pretty sure Bellroc combs his hair with a comb.

For Skrael, I would say that if he wasn't a demigod he would actually be a geek. He loves refrigerators, he might even go inside and take a nap. I imagine him eating ice cream inside a freezer. He hates guns, he finds it pathetic. He knows everything about torture machines, he probably has a book on torture and medieval torture, speaking of books, I'm pretty sure he likes reading. Besides, I'm sure he knows manga, I don't know why but it wouldn't surprise me (I don't think he reads them though) I believe that among the three, Skrael is the one who knows the most about human technology (that doesn't mean he knows a lot…) So when Bellroc sees something human he automatically asks Skrael what it is. Often Skrael answers wrong.

Bellroc : ... *is staring at a phone charger" ...Skrael, what is this ?

Skrael : The phone leash.

Bellroc : ...

Skrael : ...

Bellroc : What's a phone ?

Nari doesn't know much about human technology but she probably doesn't like "human things" that pollute. But I honestly think she's a little more understanding about what humans use while Skrael and Bellroc love to make fun of human's new inventions. She knows that humans invent things to make their lives easier. She knows everything about gardening equipment, in fact she learned it with the help of Douxie. I think she likes to read too but she doesn't have the same taste as Skrael at all. I truly believe that when Douxie works and stays home alone, she watches TV. Douxie probably bought her a phone so she can contact him whenever she feels in danger or is in danger. She never uses her phone and she always forgets where she puts it, when she uses it it's to check the weather for her plants.

[bibibbon]

Characters with wasted potential : kaminari Denki

I have never seen a series treat it's own electric/thunder user so badly like MHA does with denki kaminari.

Here is the thing kaminari is a pretty cool character; I like his character design and I think his character arc is alright but can use a lot of change.

In all honesty when it comes to kaminari I feel like his arc is literally supposed to be the same as mineta. Both of their arcs focusing on how they treat woman, them being cowards but growing out of it and learning how to be proper heros. However, when it comes to developments kaminari has his speed runned or just has him instantly change.

1) This is controversial but I personally would use have him be contrasted/foiled to mineta just to make his development more impactful.

2) I would have him show more of his cowardice and how he only really wanted to be a hero because its a cool thing to do or to follow in the footsteps of his mother (I would have pro hero Electra or just a simple electrician be his mother)

3) I would build up his friendship with jirou from the beginning and have both of them develop into better people/heroes with that friendship. (Maybe they can become a ship considering I do ship kamijirou 🤷‍♀️)

4) Emphasise the struggle kaminari has with his quirk (how quick he is to go overboard due to the lack of control) and how he tries to work to overcome it in his own unique way. I would have it so that his mum already helped him a bit by teaching him how to use his quirk in little amounts and big amounts but he struggles to get it into a medium range. I would also have him just experiment with it overall and maybe he could build a little friendship with Izuku or even mei who could introduce ideas like denki being able to act as a circuit, use tasers or even charge phones.

5) As kaminari gets to understand and become a better friend with jirou his views on mineta start to change and his whole views of "I have to go easy one girls" or " it's mean to fight girls like that" (something he said to bakugo during the sports festival) start to change as he grows respectful and becomes more appreciative to woman.

6) this is a 50/50 but I saw this one fic that said it would be cool if kaminari just started using flirting as a fighting tactic to fluster villains and easily take them down. That's something I kind of like and would be interesting to have incorporated into kaminari's character. You could have him work with midnight to build up a skill like that (would make midnight's death more impactful)

7) I feel like as it comes to the war arc his cowardice should logically still be there but the desire to help protect his friends and reunite with them should be stronger and we would still get the whole epic scene he had in the first war arc

8) have him canonically have ADHD it makes sense. I mean this is a universe just like ours the only thing different is superpowers and idk if I read his character wrong but to me kaminari has always given me the whole idea that he has ADHD or that his character is 'ADHD coded'. In my opinion it would be interesting for him to not really know why he struggles at doing something that everyone can find easy to do so when it comes to his grades he struggles in that aspect and has conflict because of that however, he can go through an arc realising that he has ADHD and find ways to both accept that and adapt to it (I don't know if that sounds rude, Iam sorry if it does)

9) I really like denki and jirou bonding over music and him actually respecting and liking her passion. I feel like we should get more of denki making music and exploring his more of his own passions. Like we know denki likes music and manga so why don't we have characters casually talking about that or doing that with him. I also like the idea of denki simplifying everything (like the UA security system) and making it seem like something that would come out of manga so he can understand it better

I feel like that kaminari could of been an interesting character with flawed views that end up developing. Ultimately, I feel like the reason I prefer him to mineta (even though they both act in a very disgusting Mannar towards woman) is that he shows chances of change and his character isn't just being a weird, disgusting pervert like mineta's is. To me kaminari could of been a coward kid who found it difficult to really fit in and do the things that everyone does but ultimately ends up overcoming that struggle while expanding his views and becoming a more respectful person.

[eyedelater]

demon slayer notes

i started watching demon slayer, without having read the manga, at the urging of a family friend who is new to anime and insists it's extremely good. here are my thoughts on the anime and then the entire manga through to its end.

in this post, i appended followup notes to some points upon revisiting them because i had to make sure to go back and tell my past self what happened.

i watched episodes 1 through 20 without writing anything because i wasn't planning to. i watched many of those episodes on my phone, which is unusual for me, but i was traveling at the time. so i probably missed some finer visual details.

my impression of the show before i started, from having skimmed the start of its wikipedia page some months ago, was that it seemed to be relatively high quality but very formulaic Standard Shounen Fare, and it did not catch my interest. after watching 20 episodes, that opinion hasn't really changed. so many of the elements of the show are typical and just barely riff on extremely basic tropes. i'm sure there are many people who argue that demon slayer in fact drastically and ingeniously transforms those generic shounen tropes, but i'm not so sure about that. [followup note: the story does improve in terms of nuance later on, but i'm not retracting this paragraph.]

they did kind of an amazing job on the anime in terms of animation and effects. i should really rewatch those first 20 episodes on my computer screen so i can better appreciate it.

tanjirou is a very, very good boy. almost too good. where are his flaws? his internal monologues are always so apt. almost too apt. his backstory is of course compelling, but he hasn't won me over quite yet… i do like his headbutts, though… [followup note: i guess his flaw is his penchant for excessive self-sacrifice? which is one of those job interview "flaws" that is more likely to be a virtue.]

i'm looking forward to nezuko having more and more agency as the story progresses.

i'm looking forward to zenitsu learning to shut the fuck up more and more as the story progresses. i do have to give his voice actor a lot of credit for going completely all-out every time and never holding back.

i immediately love inosuke because he's a dumb bastard.

will tomioka giyuu fill the hayakawa aki-shaped hole in my heart by not being doomed? [followup note: not really. good for him not being doomed though!]

the art style is so samefacey… golden kamuy spoiled me…

the demon slayer corps seems to think it's hot shit and have many, many levels of hierarchy, but they're disorganized enough to regularly and greatly underestimate the threat of demons such that they keep sending their own fighters to their deaths. they need to work on their intelligence gathering, if nothing else.

all the hashira seem to care an awful lot about the life of the hypothetical person hypothetically killed by nezuko, but their organization is sloppy and heartless in its deploying of weak demon slayers. is this clumsy writing with plot holes, or is it a hint for the astute as to the organization's dirtiness and disorder? [followup note: i want to say it was the former or i guess neither. the master turns out to be really humble and kind to his hashiras. did he not grasp how bad a job they were doing wrt casualties?]

i like how sanemi's eyes continue to look insane even when he's calmly using polite speech

"My arms and legs are really short right now." ~zenitsu while his arms and legs are really short

i do hope boys watch this and come away with the idea that tanjirou's habit of intense and unconditional kindness is cool.

i did like when the girls told zenitsu to his face to be respectful to girls and he was humbled. [followup note: i discovered this was added into the anime and not present in the manga. good addition]

the last few seconds of the OP for the mugen train arc make it seem like rengoku is gonna die. (explicitly prepares my heart for that)

by the way, after the first season ended and we're on to the next arc, inosuke is still the best. i don't do it myself, but i enjoy watching others live life with true wild abandon. i really enjoy his kind of annoyingness more than zenitsu's.

rengoku is committed to never breaking eye contact with the camera

in ep2 of the train arc, tanjirou said "and where are you looking?!" (in japanese) to rengoku, but they translated it as "and when did you get so big?!" because i guess they felt like it would be a better visual joke because they animated rengoku really big? but they should've kept the "where are you looking?" because it's funny that tanjirou addressed what i was already thinking and had in fact written in the previous point. they did it twice in one episode too. is this going to be something we learn about rengoku? that he doesn't look at people? i thought we saw him look at people… [followup note: it's not. also the same joke was in the manga so they especially should have translated it right.]

rengoku said that black sword bearers never know which thing to master. obvious flag for "tanjiro's going to master them all of them and be the biggest baddest hashira in shounen history." too obvious (if i'm right) [i was wrong]

who's gonna tell gotouge-sensei that headbutts don't make your head bleed

prediction: kibutsuji targeted tanjirou's family because of their ancestry and some great prophecy about how that bloodline is fated to someday defeat him. he killed everyone who was home but thought that had to be all the kids because there were so many. he turned nezuko into a demon just to see what would happen and/or because he did actually remember the right number of kids and he wanted her to kill tanjirou. it may also turn out that kibutsuji was responsible for tanjirou's dad's death and/or the scars on both their heads. [followup note: i was wrong about a lot of this, but he did target them for their bloodline]

tanjirou gathered the courage to slit his own throat waaay too easily and quickly.

the netflix translator for the subs for the first few episodes (at least) of the train arc is taking far too many liberties for my liking. i wonder if the subs are different on crunchyroll, which i don't have. i should note that the first 20ish episodes i watched, i watched on a non-netflix non-crunchyroll site and i guess they were fan subs. but i didn't notice anything wrong with those subs.

"I fused my being with this entire train!" ok i've been giving this anime some shit for being predictable, but credit where credit is due, i did not expect that. that's really funny. i hate Lower One's voice btw.

i can tell that some, if not all, of the move names characters shout out are puns like the move names in one piece, but because there are no translation notes, i can't understand them :( [followup note: there aren't any in the official translation either :( and i looked up an unofficial translation and it didn't have any either :( i guess when i'm done with the manga i'll look at a wiki for the move name meanings… of course i dare not look at a wiki when spoilers are still a concern…] [followup followup: didn't care enough before posting this to look at the move name meanings]

anyone who has read my blog, you know what i'm gonna say about nipples, right? it's obvious, right? about inosuke's and others' empty chests. it's obvious. people will be like "you want explicit nipples depicted on the chests of TEEN BOYS?" no i want minimal abstract representations of nipples because everyone has them and it's normal and it's weirder to see a blank aladdin chest. this is about NIPPLE POSITIVITY. i will die on this hill time after time

if two guys are fighting a train together and they synchronize their breathing, is it gay

i liked when inosuke gently set injured tanjirou back down. character development

ok i REALLY dislike the netflix subs for these episodes. don't ADD shit. it's simple. just don't. you have to respect the author. you have to respect the author.

i prepared myself for rengoku's death. thanks for the hint, train arc OP. i see now that he was introduced to serve the purpose of character development for tanjirou.

the appeal of a stone-faced character like tomioka giyuu is twofold: a) they look cool all the time, and b) you develop a desire to see them emote.

tanjirou's gonna get yelled at for losing his sword again…

i like how akaza made it a point to beat up tanjirou's sword. to give us viewers closure as to whether tanjirou was gonna get that sword back.

i feel like i've seen an oversized amount of fanart involving rengoku, given the length of his lifespan in the show. (nothing i looked up, but just by osmosis.) is this like a portgas d. ace situation? i hate shipping ace with anyone because he's dead. or could it be that the character i've seen around was actually senjurou? doubtful

zenitsu's VA is doing a good job, like i said, but i bet zenitsu is a lot more lovable in the manga where you don't actually have to listen to him losing his shit…

i'll officially be mad if anything happens to inosuke.

uzui's three weed-smoking girlfriends…

so the boys are not even just infiltrating the houses of pleasure but they're aiming for the rank of oiran

tanjirou's bad lying face can't compete with luffy's bad lying face… sorry… [followup note: it was better in the manga]

inosuke who can get ahold of himself well enough to actually stfu and act like a girl… excellent

yeah fuck the translator for these netflix subs in the entertainment district arc too. you can't just write whatever you think would sound cool for their lines.

i have to find out the japanese for inosuke's catchphrase "comin' through" (according to this translation). wait i should just turn japanese captions on. ……there are no japanese captions… gimme a break…

they're literally in japan, literally wearing traditional japanese clothing, and they translate "obi" into "belt" instead of leaving it as is. am i overestimating how many people would know what an obi is........?

i do think it's a smart and interesting decision to explicitly section the anime into arcs instead of seasons, or rather, you could say, putting season breaks only at arc breaks. very smart.

uzui's own wife calls him tengen-sama? red flag

you know, i did have one major misconception about this story. i thought that the fact that yaiba is in the name would mean that tanjirou would inherit some particular sacred demon-obliterating blade and it would play a major part in the story (a predictable trope). but tanjirou in fact keeps destroying his swords. maybe that will actually happen later. [followup note: it didn't really. i mean tanjirou gets his one good sword later, but it's not like the sword is what wins the fight for him or anything.]

looked at tanjirou and thought "deku" tally: ||||||||||||||||||||||||

this story sure does have a lot of the protagonist's internal monologue. that's somewhat unusual for shounen, i feel like. is tanjirou just conjuring up text boxes all the time in the manga? i guess i'll have to read it after this… for completionism. [followup note: it seems the manga has an unnamed narrator who sometimes chimes in and they excluded that from the anime completely, instead relying on a combination of show-don't-tell and tanjirou narrating instead. not a bad choice.]

nezuko bit through her gag, which was really good, but she didn't immediately start talking, which is what should have happened. to remind us that she can. other demons can talk. [followup note: i see now that she is apparently left in a childlike state and has to relearn talking. ok]

(watches nezuko shrink back from grownup mode) self-infantilizing imouto…

ok, i figured out that the subs are just the lines from the dubs. that means my ire lies with whoever translated the lines for the netflix dubs. that's right, i'm not just gonna excuse it because i was mistaken about the source.

tanjirou looking at ezui and seeing rengoku's head appear next to him is 100% a death flag. his three weed-smoking wives are gonna mourn him at the end of this arc. it's gonna be the start of a pattern of tanjirou getting scarred by the loss of hashira after hashira right in front of him. [followup: glad for tanjirou that this didn't happen.]

by the way, i bet someone out there has something smart to say about uzui's three wives and what they mean for feminism. i don't care to think about it very hard though. but i know someone does.

zenitsu is conveniently asleep for a very long time in this very long battle

the budget for this anime must have been SO high. or the animators were seriously overworked. because there is so much love and so much hard work put into what seems like EVERY single shot. it's incredible. like some of these shots there's no logical need to go so hard but it's just sooo consistent that every shot has to have a life-changing amount of work put into it. i can't get over it.

(after entertainment arc ep9) i said i would be pissed if anything happened to inosuke, and i meant it. we'll see what happens from here. if inosuke dies, i'm not reading the manga. because i'm stubborn.

gyuutaro called tanjirou a bonkler…

this battle was already frustratingly long and now the defeated gyuutaro's dead defeated corpse had to release one last extremely destructive attack? according to what logic?

i like when nezuko has tanjirou on her back for once. reverse sibling onbu

this smells a lot more like hunter x hunter than hero academia or one piece. in terms of the character designs, to some degree, and everyone's penchant for talking a lot, and vibes. and i'm saying "smells" in my own way and not in a tanjirou way, okay?

they have IVs in the taisho era? with saline? i don't know anything about history.

does everyone in the sword village need the hyottoko mask? at all times?

i can tell by the OP of the sword village arc that demons will attack the sword village.

i really like the artistic choice of letting characters emote through their masks if necessary.

this son of a bitch has poison too? isn't this getting old?

i liked the little episode preview where kanroji is asked how she sheaths her sword and the answer is she simply just does. very good

of course even haganezuka turns out to be a hottie (rolls eyes emoji)

i don't want to call out gyokko here, but he could just put muichirou in the water vase again.

kibutsuji looks a lot less laughable without his stupid fucking hat.

so demons started existing because kibutsuji took weird medicine from his doctor?? [followup note: I Guess So.]

i guess i have to give gotouge-sensei credit for really sticking with the gimmick of the whole sword village wearing those masks.

i like genya.

tokitou's soft spot for tanjirou is really cute

i caught up with the anime without writing very much. i'm still blown away by the production value. speaking of blown away, i'm curious as to what happened to 2 of kagaya's 5 apparent daughters. [followup note: they really died.]

[{{{{{{{{caught up with the anime}}}}}}}}]

[{{{{{{{{comments below concern the manga}}}}}}}}]

inosuke lived, so i started reading the manga. i'm struck by the different feeling that tanjirou gives off. manga tanjirou seems a little more serious and less perky. maybe it has to do with the line delivery in the anime shaping my view of him (though the voice actor has done a great job). i did, at the beginning of the anime, get the strong early impression that tanjirou's voice was very "grown man trying hard to do a teen boy voice," and i cringed just a bit. but that feeling faded as the anime went on. i also assume the art style changes a lot as the manga progresses, such that the style resembles the anime's style more in later chapters. the anime seems to have done an amazing job of faithfully and precisely adapting the manga, at least for early chapters. i'm really jealous of the demon slayer anime on behalf of all the great mangas that got weird or lousy anime adaptations.

the babyface style of the early manga is also very strong. even giyuu looks like a little kid.

and genya's face in his first appearance is really funny. he got a glowup for the anime. whereas zenitsu looks 100% the same. i'm looking forward to inosuke's manga face.

i read a lot more of the manga without saying anything. i've gone on and on about the high quality of the anime, but i kind of feel like the manga is better. that is to say, the art feels very authentic and pure and full of love and care. manga tanjirou is just as much of a Very Good Boy as anime tanjirou, but without a certain feeling of Trying Very Hard. is it the voice?

the manga has a kind of Classic feel to it. not like it resembles any particular manga from the past, but more like, gotouge-sensei was aiming high and trying to make something evergreen. trying to forge a new classic.

and reading the manga was shocking because it's like, the anime is truly the most faithful adaptation i've ever seen. every scene feels like it's shot-for-shot-for-shot precisely what was in the manga, with every line carried over. practically nothing was left out. the spacing and timing of content was perfect; nothing was excessively crammed or stretched out. only a few things were added, like the scene with the bento sellers before the train arc (unless that came from some bonus chapter i never saw). but the additions feel normal and necessary. truly a staggeringly faithful and loving adaptation. why did they give demon slayer this exceptional treatment…? because reading the manga, it's like, this is good… but is it life-changingly good enough for them to have gone THIS all-out with the anime? i haven't decided yet. [followup note: i still haven't decided?? i might make future posts about this.]

right, demon slayer is solidly good, i would say, but on the whole, it's not quite For Me. that's because if i evaluate it by my old standby metric, the COCK test, it is decidedly NOT Completely unhinged, and there is a decided lack of Creatures. to be perfectly fair, i'm sure it Offends the church, and it does Kick ass. and really, if someone is just a bit less weirdly picky than me, this manga could change their life. but it's just not batshit insane enough to push all my buttons. i feel some hunter x hunter influence, but obviously hunter x hunter knew how to be insane enough. not that hunter x hunter does it all for me either.

it does get credit for having somewhat deeper and rounder characters than jujutsu kaisen. like at least they have an extremely strong reason to be doing what they're doing.

the manga is self-serious in a genuine way, and the anime feels self-serious in a very slightly phony way. though i don't mean they're overly self-serious. there is welcome comic relief in both. it's better in the manga but still well-translated into the anime (literal translations of the subtitles aside). and the comic relief is actually funny a lot of the time, which is more than i can say about jujutsu kaisen. this has been my obligatory shitting on jujutsu kaisen for the first time in a while. if you missed it, the story is that i gave jujutsu kaisen all the chances in the world for me to love it, but it disappointed me (and killed my favorite character for no reason).

i've been worried this whole time, not having a good sense of exactly how much chapters have been squashed or stretched, about how many chapters would remain after i caught up with the story as far as the anime went. but now i'm just about at the end of the hashira training arc (mansion just blew up) and there are still about 60 chapters left. that's sooo many. i was worried there wouldn't be much story left, but there is! that's good, because there's a lot left to explain.

i have noticed exactly what has been added to the anime adaptation. pretty much everything added was smart and suitable. although the extremely long approach of kibutsuji to kagaya's bedside was i think not so necessary. but yeah, fleshing out the training in the hashira arc a bit, going into slightly more detail on people's backstories, adding a few more character building moments, none of it feels irritating in any way. but if it turns out they added any zenitsu whining moments, that's unforgivable. there are already enough of those.

i bet huge inosuke fans were a little irritated at the casting of his voice. a true ruffian's voice that clashes to the extreme with his pretty face. i think it's pretty apt though. maybe a little too large-adult-sounding. but teenage boys are like that.

i've been reading an unofficial manga translation, not sure who it's by, and it's interesting to note which phrases were left untranslated in this compared to in the official translation. in this unofficial TL, why is oyakata-sama left as such instead of translating it to "master" when it's just a title that plainly means "master?" and in the netflix subs/dubs, why are hashira and hinokami kagura left untranslated? and yet both translated "obi" as either "belt" or "sash" when i think it could have safely been left as is. and why was "nichirin sword" left untranslated in both when you could just call it a sun blade or sun sword? is it because nichirin sounds too cool and japanese?

oh yeah, i kept thinking but kept forgetting to write: it's well known that demons are always eating humans, but we don't see them in the actual act of eating people very often at all. it seems they often like to just kill people, like weasels kill hens. for fun. but we have seem douma in the act of eating people note once but twice.

the unifying backstory of Everyone's family being killed by demons is getting a little old…

ok i remembered one bad thing the anime did. giving us that whole ridiculous nezuko montage when she was exposed to the sun and we thought she was gonna get obliterated. that was reeeally pushing it. trying that hard to fool us is just embarrassing for you.

so ubuyashiki kagaya became a father at the age of 15. no, younger, because kiriya has two (twin?) elder sisters. at least 14.

the two ubuyashiki girls did die… that's not cool… don't use them just to confuse kibutsuji…

zenitsu leveled up? zenitsu can work while awake now? maybe he'll also shut the fuck up?

…

i ended up staying up very, very late and read many dozens of chapters in one night and finished demon slayer. not the best circumstances for properly absorbing the story, but i did it anyway.

i was not prepared for genya to die and i think that should not have happened. we needed to see more of him and his future. i'll say it: it should have been sanemi instead. justice for genya.

i don't think that many hashiras needed to die… especially tokitou-kun didn't need to die so horribly... and i certainly didn't expect sanemi to be one of only 2 hashira survivors.

i guess we're just lucky that inosuke and zenitsu got away with all their limbs intact. limbs were dropping like flies for a while there.

i was satisfied with the reveal of the backstory about the tsugikuni brothers and how yoriichi entrusted his earrings and stuff to tanjirou's ancestral family.

i thought the final reveal that yoriichi's 13th move was all the other moves strung together didn't have an amazing payout in the end… did it? did i miss something big?

there was the Explicit mention, in dialogue, that kanroji and iguro and others may reincarnate happily. i wish gotouge-sensei would have allowed that to happen in the audience's imagination instead of having a timeskip chapter that shows everyone's descendants and reincarnations. it wasn't unbearable, but i didn't like it. also inosuke's descendant didn't go hog wild at all.

after reading the whole manga and no longer fearing spoilers, i finally looked up inosuke's catchphrase. i was very pleased to find out that it is chototsumoushin 猪突猛進, which is an existing four-character compound that includes the kanji for boar and means rushing recklessly (as a boar does). i knew there would be some degree of untranslatable nuance in there! the nuance is that that phrase definitely describes an undesirable act, but inosuke yells it with glee while rushing in recklessly, and that is perfect. it's like yelling "BULL IN A CHINA SHOP!" in the anime, one subtitle translation was "COMIN' THROUGH!" which is a little lifeless and completely missing any boar energy. my favorite translation is "BOAR RUSH!" because it carries the boar energy and makes it seem like he's shouting a move name when he's really just barreling around the hallway. i don't remember if i saw that one in the netflix translation or if it was a fansub. one more version i saw, in an unofficial manga translation, was "pig assault." that one's not a winner. it isn't even the kanji for pig; it's the kanji for boar. also if i had been watching the anime with earbuds it's entirely possible i would have been able to discern what inosuke was saying from the beginning, because i went back and he says it quite clearly, but that doesn't matter now.

i feel a little weird about making a whole long post about something i don't have crazy strong feelings about, but i wrote all this out, so... read my important opinions... sorry for saying "i guess" so much and using so many ellipses...

overall, i wish the ending was less bittersweet (i hate character death, as always) and dislike the timeskip chapter, but i still rate demon slayer (the story itself) as GOOD. that means it is worth watching and reading. there are several slots above GOOD on my personal rating scale, but GOOD isn't bad. it's GOOD. and that's what demon slayer is. someday i will probably rewatch and/or reread, and i'll keep up with the next anime season.

[euniexenoblade]

Mordred do you have any anime or manga recommendations you havent talked about recently?

I feel like there's a lot of anime I never talk about for one reason or another, like RN I'm writing up a whole thing about maidime (maid anime) for my anime blog and if I ever get it done then yay but it's dragging lmao

But yeah, I really liked the adaptation of Children of the Whales, the world building is insane and the animation was so spectacular for a TV anime. Really stands apart from most shows.

I really like the show Erased. Time travel and time loops aren't that uncommon but still I felt that Erased found a really neat way to tackle the topic of it. It's a real fucked up story so trigger warnings for child murder and serial killer shit, but for real spectacular show. Basically there's a serial killer and dude goes back in time to be his kid self and uses his adult knowledge to try and stop the killer.

I mention this show plenty I think but I always need to sing it's praises, Humanity Has Declined is probably in my top 15 TV shows. It's such a fun, bright take on a post apocalypse and it's so funny. If you take anything away from this post, watch this show. Whenever I try to compare it to anything, the only thing I can think of is Adventure Time, it's a bright whimsical comical telling of happenings after an apocalypse. Though plot wise it's nothing like AT so, maybe the comparison isn't the best. But essentially the protagonist is a UN representative to go between the remaining humans and the newly evolved fairies. The arcs are in reverse chronological order and its lovely tbh lol.

Time of Eve is one of the first shows I really hooked into. It got rereleased as a movie, so whatever version you find is right. But it's about a world where there's robot house keepers and shit and one day the protag follows his robot to a coffee shop where robots meet and have the ability to be free. It's very nice and I should rewatch it I haven't seen it in a long ass time.

To get that yuri rep in there, if you've never watched Maria-sama ga Miteru (Maria Watches Over Us) you gotta drop your toes in. It's four seasons but you'll know if it's for you or not right away. A girl attends an all girls Catholic school and gets caught up in the student council and the personalities in it. Imo this is the premier Class S yuri and I love this series so much.

I could go on and on honestly.

As for manga, I'd say my manga opinions are very known cuz I post all sorts of screencaps and shit as I read, but considering most of that was on my old blog.

Read Liberta. Just do it. Vampire lesbian escapism fantasy. It's awesome.

The Summer Hikaru Died is a gay horror. Basically a dude's best friend goes missing and then suddenly turns back up months later. But the dude knows it's not his friend because he saw his friend's dead body in the forest. That's not a spoiler, that's like 4 pages in. It's phenomenal.

I think I see people try to disparage it these days, but Future Diary was a really good read. Dude ends up in a weird game where his cell phone tells the future and he has to kill other people who have prophetic phones (and vice versa) so they may become a new god. But on top of this one of the players is a yandere girl obsessed with being with him. The anime adaptation is good too just be ready for them to show. Too much. Watch the TV show version and not the Blu-rays, they uncensored stuff in the Blu-ray and it's such a weird decision when you see it.

Goodbye Eri and Look Back are both one shots by the Chainsaw Man author. Both deal with losing someone dear to you at a young age and both handle it in completely different ways. Both are fantastic though.

I could go on and on and on

[perilegs]

also, good news you would only need to play 1 game because fire emblem is usually stand alone and really only ever connects in universes in pairs or vaguely. Niles/Zero is from Fire Emblem Fates/IF which is like 98% standalone theres just easter eggs from Awakening. However like i said it was unfortunately and infamously absolutely nearly destroyed by bizarre localization and censorship so if you usually play your games in english... bad news. It's playable, sure, but for best story i would suggest JPN if you can read it. If not, play as usual and use translations when done to supplement / patch your knowledge. There's a manga, 4koma(s? i cant remember if theres 2?) and an audio drama set as well which is both available online translated which i would recommend. The audio drama can also be listened to first iirc, and is translated on youtube with the in-game VN style. You can also ask me questions because i am something of a FEF expert its my favorite entry. english makes the story seem a lot worse than it is i promise and also it became a fandom meme to like, hate it? so dont trust fandom opinion. if you have a pc that can run skyrim it can run FEF emulated. probably. its a bit slow on citra mobile if you have a fairly recent phone but its not unplayable last i checked / on my own tests. otherwise, a cracked 3ds will run it of course best, and is the only way to actually get the ultimate edition now due to eshop shutdown. <- autism

ohh that's very good to know, thank you!! i'm a bit tempted to start with awakening and then do fates but 👀

i unfortunately can't read JPN (every day i dream about the gaming opportunities i would have if i started studying it when i first wanted to...), but i've heard there's apparently a fan patch translation of if and it might be better than the localization.

but this is so much good info, seriously thank you!! ✨

[tigreblvnc]

BLUE LOCK MATCHUP — m1ckeyb3rry

Your match WAS...

— Nagi Seishiro

✦ Well, I didn’t think about it for very long :D

✦ I was waiting to read the part about the traits you like in the other person and… Well, honestly, I hesitated for a moment but still brushed it off, thinking, "meh, it's part of life."

✦ So here’s our most motivated player from Blue Lock :)

✦ (No.)

✦ And I have to admit that Nagi isn't a character I can easily place because he's so unique and not at all receptive to anything related to human relationships. I even think he belongs to his own manga, within the manga itself.

✦ That’s probably why we end up with a movie named after him and a series of mangas dedicated to him.

✦ For me, what creates a funny and unusual chemistry right away is the fact that you’re extremely different… but that you connect on very specific details that form a common bridge between you two.

✦ Example: "I’m also pretty quick-witted and good at thinking on my feet BUT I’m kind of judgmental." Without saying Nagi is the most reactive guy in the world, in moments of despair (lol, going straight to the tough stuff), it almost seems like he doesn’t think and manages to instinctively react to anticipate a decisive move on the field. Stimulated correctly, he unleashes potential that, in my opinion, is unmatched by anyone else. He’s got this ON and OFF mode! Most of the time, he’s sleeping, slacking, or playing games; but during very specific key moments, he wakes up and breaks all performance records. It’s almost like it doesn’t require any effort, you know? It’s just an aspect of his personality that awakens under certain conditions, but it’s part of who he is. Meaning, he didn’t really have to work on it beforehand to possess it. Some like to call it "genius."

✦ And I see that trait in you when you explain to me, "I’m quite smart but I don’t really try to be?? Like I mostly play on my phone or watch shows/read in my classes but I have perfect grades anyways."

✦ It’s both awesome, and it can also attract a lot of jealousy. Those who work hard but end up with average or even bad grades, while you don’t need to spend time studying; you succeed no matter what.

✦ I can see my duo of prodigies :)

✦ "It’s hard for something/someone to keep my interest for long, but when it does, I am SUPER into it, so I’m really good at pursuing goals and whatnot!!" Yes, it’s the same for Nagi. You both need a goal that makes sense to you to become productive. A discipline in which you can excel once you get into it; but also one where you become passive once an activity loses its appeal. A downside that’s not easy to manage, on top of driving those around you crazy, who see your potential but feel like you’re not using it to its full extent.

✦ "I’m pretty cheerful and kind for the most part, and I’m a chronic people-pleaser, so I’ll bend over backwards to help out people I don’t know that well/to be agreeable, but when I know a person super well (ex. my family), I can def be kind of demanding/picky." For Nagi, it’s really the opposite, and it causes him problems in the other direction; he cares too little about his surroundings and what others think to even react accordingly. Which leads people to label him as heartless and selfish, something he doesn’t deny but doesn’t really approve of either.

✦ I’ve often observed that people who expect a lot from their surroundings are those who don’t let just anyone into their personal space, out of a need to protect themselves. This involves a very meticulous and sometimes extreme filtering process, often demanding a lot and becoming tough or guilt-tripping others when they don’t meet those expectations—sometimes unrealistic ones.

✦ But this behavior wouldn’t last with someone like Nagi, from whom you really can’t expect anything, absolutely nothing. Even Reo, who might be the character who knows Nagi the best, experienced his worst moments of doubt because Nagi didn’t quite meet his expectations—the one of staying by his side no matter what. What seemed obvious wasn’t true, leading to a violent disillusionment for Reo.

✦ So, I think it’s a match that could be complicated because it’ll require both of you to make efforts to step out of your comfort zones and accept each other’s flaws, but it could be extremely rewarding and fulfilling. I’ll come back to explain with some MBTI, but you’re typically a duo where almost everything contrasts.

✦ "As for what people tell me… I guess that I’m super confident, funny, kind, trustworthy (I was the one in high school who knew ALL of the tea because people would just tell me their secrets unprompted)." Yes. Really, with EVERYTHING in contrast.

✦ Side note, but when I read texts, certain words have colors, sounds, and sensations for me. They give off something, and when I read your whole section of likes, I see springtime paintings, sweet, fragrant scents. I see lots of nature, countryside, flowers, I feel silk, the smell of books, the careful unwrapping of packages to keep in a drawer. When I read the word "pomegranate," I see the fruit and feel the texture and hear the flowing, viscous sound of its seeds. All of this gives me a very colorful overall vision, and I think it’s the complete opposite of what I feel when I read about Nagi, who for me is very monochrome, on the same horizon line.

✦ "Traits I like in others: people who are passionate about things, people who are very kind/gentle." Well, you can see why I hesitated, right? :D

And that’s when I stopped everything to rewrite it all. The ""real"" matchup is right here.

© TIGREBLVNC 2024 | SEPTEMBER '24 MATCHUPS EDITION.

[totallybakedcake]

And back to JJK. Demon slayer? Unfinished anime and how I got into anime..

This is just pure dumb stuff, randomness, and even cringe stuff thrown here, so feel free to skip!

For starters, JJK was one of my first animes. I had been dying to watch it, but I could not watch it because my brother was against it. But eventually, I did watch every episode until the Shibuya arc, and after that, I stopped because there would be too much violence and all that.

This led to my biggest mistake: starting anime and watching spoilers

Spoilers

Naruto was actually my first anime, and I binge-watched so many episodes at once and cried so much. It was super fun, and I even watched so many fillers, but my brother eventually said that season 2 of the series has too much of a serious tone and did not let me. So, what did I do?

Spoil the whole damn anime for me

And then finally, I was going to watch. I watched about another 200 episodes, and then that was the end of my Naruto saga. I know what happens in the war: Boruto, Naruto marrying Hinata, and all the Akatsuki backstory, so I just gave up.

And the same happened with JJK. I saw way too many spoilers, and I still watch the later chapter spoilers too; even JJK ended with me.

I was just going to start the manga from the Shibuya arc yesterday, but then I started Demon Slayer, which I also know the ending of.

The reason I am so into Windbreaker, Kaiju No. 8, Sakamoto Days, Spyx Family, the Millionaire Detective, Buddy Daddies, and even Gakuen Babysitters is because I did watch any spoilers for them.

-----------------------

The reason I even got into Quotev, or my first app where I read fanfiction,.

I had an obsession with Yuta from JJK, now that I think about it. I cannot help it; he is just too good, but writing fics about him is kind of awkward to me because of Rika.

It was from my grandmother's phone that I read my first anime fanfiction, It's Pure Love by Whale Crumpet. If you want a good Yuta fic, I would totally say to try this one out, but the author hasn't updated it since 2022, and I feel my heart breaking. Even though they said they would return to quotev, they never did.

The Yuta fic I loved the most was Cupid's Cursed Arrow by Strawberry Belle. Damn,  did I fall hard for this fic. I would tell everyone in my house that Cupid's arrow was updated as I read it; it would give me giggles each time. That fic also hasn't been updated for 5 months.

Honestly I am not a sucker for crossover manga. It has to be super specific to my liking but Euphoria by Sceretstarlight was just too cute. Made me fall harder. Even the author of that fic on quotev is like the real life version of Mitsuri. I love her a lot♥️♥️

It was then a random day where I suddenly got an idea to write a Yuta fic, and I wrote it, rewrote it again, and the rewritten one has ten chapters in my notebooks, which I still have for the memories. I did read it a while ago, and it was terrible, but I had no freaking experience, so what can I do for that?

If anyone does want to read and give me some opinions on that chapter 1, I did upload it in my random ideas thrown here as a quote. You can read that here.

The only original story I have made is Lost in Dreams, which is again on quotev.

----------------------

And for Tumblr, I clicked on the website once and was reading what I thought was a Yuta period cramp comfort, but it required me to sign up and all, so after a while, I did do that, but that fic was a Yuta vampire smut fic, and I ended up not liking it.

I just read fics, I have no idea how to make my own blog, about tags, dashboard, you could follow people and even like there works.

One thing I do know is I had a Sung jinwoo fic reading obsession like I loved reading about him okay. The first Jinwoo fic that stole my heart was by @catboyfics. Hunter is a series and it was the first Jinwoo fic I read and was so so in love with. It was my first non JJK fic I read and it felt different than the others if you know what I mean. I didn't understand how to save or like a fic on tumblr so I lost it and I was super devastated truly I was super duper upset and sad that I spent what 2 hours searching the Jinwoo tag on tumblr and when I did not find it I could have even started crying BUT I found it again and I saved the upload in my folder where I can easily read it and also followed catboyfics. I hope they are alright because they haven't been/ updated their blog in 2 months.. I also have no memory on how I got to know about tumblr but now it is my most used website..

------------------------

That is the current problem with JJK fics, imo; the tags and stories are just almost pure shit. I am not saying bad to the writers; they have fun and they do what they want to do, but seriously, we need more JJK fluff, comfort, taking care of female readers, and overprotective fics. I just stated what I like, but whatever.

I have so much to write, but will I write that? No

Will I write dumb, stupid, and nonsenseful things? YEAH

I feel so stupid writing this but whatever let me rant/write random things for compensation for this horrible day

[seeyouspacecoyote]

Long ass stream of consciousness post about my opinions on every fight in Record of Ragnarok so far:

Spoilers for Record of Ragnarok up to Round 9:

Round 1: Thor vs Lu Bu

Pretty decent fight overall, I genuinely couldn't guess who was going to win at first and though Lu Bu's death felt a bit anticlimatic at the end, with him getting his head smashed in by a hammer after all the build-up he had about being the strongest and most badass human and all that. But overall a good fight, I liked Thor and Lu Bu about equally so I was sad but not too sad after it was all said and done.

Round 2: Adam vs. Zeus

I was really hoping for Adam to win, naturally, but I had a feeling Zeus was going to take it because there's no way they would kill off the main villain that quick (and honestly, I don't think anyone else is gonna replace Zeus as the main villain, so to speak, even if there are other gods doing random evil scheming and shit in the background.) The fighting itself was good, though, it was the most straightforward slugfest of them all, no fluff, no frills, just two dudes beating the hell out of each other until one of them ran out of gas in the tank.

Round 3: Kojiro vs. Poseidon

Hoo boy, this was my favorite fight so far, and not only because it was one of the only two fights where the guy I wanted to win most won. I like how much of an asshole Poseidon was right off the bat and how Kojiro didn't let Poseidon get to him at all, despite Poseidon being portrayed as one of the more frightening gods, Kojiro didn't back down and give up, he kept on pushing through and in the end he took it. The moment Kojiro sliced and diced Poseidon like sushi, I literally leapt off my couch and accidentally threw my phone on the ground I was so hype (I watched the anime before reading the manga.)

Round 4: Heracles vs. Jack

I had mixed feelings about this one, because obviously I lean more towards wanting humanity to win but also, I never really liked Jack, and I still don't care for him. He's just there to me, and he does nothing for me. I disliked him a lot in the beginning but now he's just, idk, whatever. I liked Heracles and wanted to see more of him but I had a feeling he was probably going to die because he was portrayed as being much nicer than his opponent while Jack was portrayed as a cunning, crafty trickster, and in most fighting anime/manga series, the fighter who relies more on cunning or sneaky tricks almost always beats the guy who relies more on strength or raw power.

Round 5: Raiden vs. Shiva

I wanted Raiden to take it so bad, Raiden cracked me up from the moment I first saw him lying naked on a bed with a bunch of random women of all sorts of random species, snoring his ass off like it was just a regular fucking Tuesday (no pun intended,) and his introduction scene made me start howling with laughter at his absolute unfiltered horny crackhead energy, plus I love how he was genuinely fond of Thrud from the moment he laid eyes on her and it tugged at my heart strings when he wanted to break their bond at the end so she could live but she chose to die with him anyways because she didn't want to leave him. But of course, given who and what Shiva is, obviously the outcome was as predictable as could be, as there's no fucking way they'd ever kill off Shiva in a fictional series, otherwise you'd have like 2 billion people out for blood and it's pretty damn obvious why.

Round 6: Buddha vs. Zero

Plot wise and thematically, I enjoyed this fight a lot, but it was pretty predictable, because as I mentioned for Round 5, there's a very obvious reason why they would never let Buddha lose, plus Buddha's the one who invented the volund strategy that even allows humans to be able to fight against gods in the first place. That said, I like Buddha as a character even if he's not much like the actual real Buddha, and I'm glad he won. However, Zero having to die really broke my heart, Zero was such a kind, sweet, innocent little guy and I cried a little harder than I'd like to admit when he died. Of course, it also doesn't help that Zero may not have even been a willing participant in the fight in the first place, given his various issues that he'd been dealing with plus the fact that given how he seems much younger than the other gods, it's possible that he might not have even been an adult by their standards and the idea of a child (possibly a young teenager,) fighting in a fight-to-the-death tournament is one that just doesn't sit right with me. That said, I have many opinions about Buddha and Zero, way more than I could fit into a single post, and I'm glad we got to see both of them for the time that we did, and even though I'll always be bummed that we'll never get to see Zero again, I'm glad he was there and I'm glad that in the end even though he died, he was able to return back to his un-corrupted self after his fight with Buddha.

Round 7: Hades vs. Qin

I honestly didn't have much opinions about this fight. For whatever reason, I could never make myself care much about either Hades and Qin as characters and while I appreciate that Hades cared about his brothers, I also don't care for the Greek gods much as a whole, and the rest of them besides Hades annoy me to some degree (especially Poseidon and to a lesser degree Apollo,) and Qin just has way too much going on to the point where he feels more like a collection of as many tropes as someone could fit into a single character packed together in a trenchcoat like a bunch of little kids standing on each other's backs and wearing a big coat to try to disguise themselves as an adult. I had a feeling Qin was probably going to win, but I couldn't really be bothered to care either way, although I did find it odd that Hades would lose to a human-if you had me guess which gods would beat a human no questions asked before I actually started the series, I would have definitely included Hades on that list because I mean, he's the god of death and the underworld, those titles carry a lot of weight.

Round 8: Tesla vs. Beelzebub. I had/have some problems with some of the previous rounds but hoo boy, Round 8 was a disaster. Tesla was given absolutely no prep time to even figure out what to do (and though you could argue the same for other fighters, it's only really relevant for Tesla because he's the only human fighter who was a non-combatant besides Jack, and Jack was already established as a sneaky son of a bitch who will find a way to trick anyone, so he didn't need any prep time.) Including Tesla on the roster was a very odd choice to begin with, and though I like Tesla as a character, I have very mixed feelings about how they handled him fighting. Also, Beelzebub-don't get me started on him. I haven't hated a character this much since Sasuke from Naruto, and to be honest, of the two of them, I think I hate Beelzebub more. Even just having Beelzebub be in the story at all pisses me off, and seeing him kill Tesla after what he did to Zero was one of the few moments in this series that just genuinely pissed me off.

Round 9: Somehow worse than Round 8, which I didn't think was possible. Leonidas hardly got any focus, his backstory was basically just an abbreviated re-telling of the movie 300 and he only got 3 hits on Apollo (granted, those 3 hits were apparently enough to bring Apollo to death's door, but still,) Leonidas had so much wasted potential it pissed me off. Apollo annoys me for various personal reasons and his sudden reveal that "Oh, he's actually not an arrogant preening prick with his head shoved up his ass," halfway through the fight felt so forced it was like a random ass-pull that just came out of nowhere. Leonidas basically didn't get to do much of anything besides be a disposable punching bag for Apollo for 5 fucking chapters and then Apollo's like "Oh, you (and Geirolul) were the peak of beauty." and somehow we're supposed to believe they just suddenly started liking each other out of nowhere. The whole fight felt sloppy and incomplete, like the authors just ran out of fucks to give and wanted to rush it and get through it as fast as possible to move onto Round 10, which I won't get into now for many, many, reasons that would take way, way too long to explain on this post.

[nicomrade]

I already wrote a lot about souichi but theres a thing I purposefully kept myself from bringing up cuz it wouldve just derailed my point and I wanna talk about it naow if you will let me… this is much much shorter n pretty straightforward I prommy

so we are told in the manga that souichis memory issues come from the deep sense of responsibility and pressure he feels. i agree with this, but i would add another reading on top of itt: that he also suffered from a traumatic event in childhood that triggered the memory loss to start with. in short, he forgot a traumatic event once (a very common trauma response) and then re-used this same coping mechanism to systematically erase every other uncomfortable memories over and over. this is where he learned it from.

This is headcanon- I have no case to say souichi suffering from CPTSD is subtext or anything, but the text does not contradict it either! more importantly, i think this idea is in parts supported by the text, and it also, in my opinion, makes souichis character more meaningful by grounding some of his pain in something a lot more common than “being the heir to an underworld, all-powerful gambling organization” (and the recovery he makes from that pain can then also be hopeful to CPTSD survivors a lot more directly). what follows is a couple things i want to revisit with this theory in mind

precedent

this theory does not come out of nowhere, souichi was not an entirely sheltered kid- he went to school, he hung with other kids. kakerous protection was not all encompassing, it is not impossible for something like that to slip through the net. There are also other usogui characters who were canonically traumatized by their childhood. souichi has a lot of parallels with yukiide kaoru specifically (as mentioned- i went into detail on this here). There's also Marco who was abused by Kokonoe Tarou and splintered his identity to protect himself, as well as Kaji whose character arc is about dealing with the ramifications of his parents neglecting and abusing him. usogui as a manga is very aware that childhood trauma exists and has a deep impact on how your brain works well into adulthood. I will also mention Suteguma as a victim of CSA (and with the later introduction of Robert K his story is given an optimistic spin) this is not a grimdark theory of an otherwise trauma-less work, childhood trauma is deeply intertwined into usoguis story. I don’t feel like it is a reach to see an implication for souichi there, too.

the memory hole

we know that Souichi (during most of the story) has so thoroughly accepted to live with the holes in his memory that he:

a. keeps written reminders for things he might forget (see Gakuhitos phone contact that also tells souichi what nickname to call him)

b. has fail-saves ingrained on an instinctual level to keep people from noticing his amnesia in the form of dodging questions, asking leading questions, implying he knows more than he really does, etc (see the scene with Gakuhito for this too- making Gakuhito call him on his phone so he can learn his name or immediately re-using Nanpou’s name he’s just learned to dissipate Touya’s suspicions in chapter 270)

c. jokes about his amnesia openly! (“forgive me since I’m extremely forgetful”) and also rationalizes it as some sort of “good” (the rest of the golf convo- “forgetting is blissful”, “the past is nothing but a cheap book, throw it away after reading it”- all chapter 100)

Souichi would not question a memory gap in his childhood even taking his photographic memory into account. he would just accept it and move on and never try to know because it would just be ONE hole in so many. Why would he care where the amnesia might've started? Why would he think twice about it?

3. memory and trauma

souichis big memory lapse in the story, the one that starts the lost bee arc, is triggered a few minutes before the ranking battle that takes his father’s life but in the pacing of the story we only learn of souichi’s amnesia after the battle’s finished. The two events happen almost concurrently. narratively, we are first presented tatsukis death and then we get into souichis episode. this is NOT to say that in-story souichi "felt" his dad was about to die and it triggered the episode, but the pacing does tie the two events together symbolically. his dad dies, and souichi reverts to a time before he was 21st leader, back when his dad was 10 years younger, before even eba's passing. because this- his fathers gruesome death in a ranking battle that souichi himself had reverted back to its old, murderous way- is too much to cope with. the memory loss IS (symbolically) linked to trauma. This idea is clearer in souichis 2nd meeting with Fukurou.

“His mind does not remember but his body is resisting the match” – souichi’s amnesia is here directly reflects a trauma response. This is an emotional flashback triggered by Fukurou and Poker linked together, his body is brought back to ‘98 despite his mind not actually remembering these events. This is trauma. The way Souichi’s amnesia is used in the story is already very similar to that caused by childhood trauma

4. the tragedy

Generally, this tragedy at the core of Souichi’s character- that there are huge swaths of his life that has totally escaped him despite their impact on him- speaks very strongly to a CPTSD perspective. Childhood trauma is very often forgotten and buried and only surfaces in odd responses to things without ever knowing the cause, along with the sense that you are missing more of your childhood than other people- while questioning if it really is so abnormal. His conversation with Fukurou at the start of Air Poker (in chapter 449) is especially hard for me to see as anything else.

Notice the intensity in the “In...deed…” panel, with the darkness closing in, his hidden eyes. Souichi is closing onto himself here, after having been confronted with how abnormal it is for him to not remember this and he has to pay along like he didn’t forget it. with CPTSD in mind: isn’t this familiar? Something from his childhood that he’s forgotten? Someone he’s supposed to have been close to that he doesn’t even remember knowing? “You’ve been by his side for so long, you should know him well.” Well, he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t know anyone well at all. Because he forgot half of his own childhood entirely. Because he was changed forever. Because he became socially withdrawn- because he was taught not to get too close to anyone and this is what happens when you break the rules, you get punished.

If Souichi was traumatized as a child, he might’ve internalized it as the result of his failure to keep his distance, of him straying too far away from Kakerou, of trying to be like the other kids. This would, in turn, inform a lot of his self-inflicted dehumanization, of his loyalty to Kakerou that necessitates him harming himself, his aversion to breaking that one rule. He is Souichi Kiruma, Kakerou’s 21st leader, and he cannot ever be anyone else. When he strayed away from it as a child he got so deeply hurt he had to wipe it from his own memory so he could keep on going- and this opened the door to systematically erasing all of his “failures” and “flaws” this way. He can stay “perfect” forever- unchanged, un-traumatized, healthy. He can feel safe again.

i purposefully do not speculate on WHAT might've traumatized him here because I don’t have much to base it on and it is not the point i want to make. i just wanted to talk about this aspect that really jumps out to me with souichis character, just how EASY it is to relate to him as a trauma survivor. In turn, I find his arc’s themes of breaking unhealthy cycles and the focus on his family and friends’ support in his recovery become a lot more important and uplifting when it is grounded this way.

[vampkitty66]

2023 Spring Anime Season: My Thoughts Thus Far

Yamada-kun at Lv999 

Disclaimer!! These are just my opinions

Status: Currently Ongoing

Starting off we have Yamada-kun at Lv999. I will say after watching the first two episodes I immediately picked up the manga. It currently only has five episodes, and the final episode will be the thirteenth. This follows Akane, a college student who recently got dumped by her boyfriend for a girl he met in a online game they both used to play together. Wanting to make him jealous, she attends an event for the online game knowing that he’ll be there and meets a boy named Yamada. Yamada helps Akane out after she tripped and her ex boyfriend spots them together. Turns out her ex is a big fan of Yamada’s, and in an attempt to make her ex jealous she bribes Yamada to say that they are dating each other.  Since I am a shoujo lover myself, I felt super drawn to this series because it feels nostalgic. I think the characters are likeable and despite their age gap ( although I don’t find it a big deal as its only two years apart ) their relationship is healthy. Really enjoying it so far, I think its refreshing to see a romance anime nowadays with little to no fan service. If you haven't, I highly suggest picking up the manga.

Hells Paradise

Status: Currently Ongoing 

Completing the “Dark trio” we have Hells Paradise, I preface that I have not read the manga. With only five episodes so far, I've got to say that this might be one of the best watches for me this season. Mappa has really outdone themselves in my opinion, the animation is crazy. The story follows Gabimaru the Hollow who was captured and sentenced to death. With him practically being invincible, Sagiri, his executioner, gave him an opportunity to be pardoned. To be able to be pardoned he and other death row convicts have to find the elixir of life. I think the story is fantastic and the characters are all interesting. I’m really excited to see what comes next as the series continues, and we’ve already seen some development in some of the characters, as well as some of the backstories. Waiting for my girl Sagiri to be an absolute badass and prove everyone who doubts her wrong. Also just got to say that the opening song is  fire and its been on repeat for me. 

Skip And Loafer  

Status: Currently Ongoing   

Skip And Loafer, another romance anime with only five episodes so far (its very exciting to have so many wholesome animes come out this year) This one also feels like a very nostalgic shoujo, but its in fact a sienen. This one is based in high school and it follows Mitsumi Iwakura, a girl who lived on the countryside her whole life. Iwakura attends high school in Tokyo and even though she thinks everything will go smoothly, it turns out to be quite the opposite. Watching this made me cringe so hard not even going to lie, its awkward and goofy but that’s also what I like about it. Despite having to throw my phone to the other side of the bed because of the awful secondhand embarrassment I got, I'm definitely going to continue watching it. 

Why Raeliana Ended Up At The Dukes Mansion

Status: Currently Ongoing 

This was originally a manhwa that got adapted into an anime. I have not read the manhwa so I can’t base anything off of it, but so far I'm enjoying it. It follows Raeliana who was originally Park Eunha who had died in the real world and woke up to be Raeliana. The world that she is in as Raeliana is based off a novel she had read in her previous life, so lucky for her, she knows what's to come. There were a lot of isekai animes this season and to be honest, this is the only one I've watched. This seemed like an interesting concept, I don’t watch or read too many isekai series because a lot of them feel the same and I find some of them boring but maybe I should give it more of a chance? I digress, I like most of the main characters so far and if I were her, I’d totally jump on the duke bandwagon. The animation is a little iffy but I can look past it, overall I don’t have that many complaints about it.  

Honorable Mention

Oshi No Ko

Contains spoilers!!

Status: Ongoing

Note: This is an absolute mess of a review oops

Okay so I’ve only watched the first episode so far (I think there's two or three now??) The first episode was like an hour long and it was a lot. We start off meeting the two main characters in the hospital, the little girl and the doctor. We see Ai on tv and to be honest does no one else find it weird that the doctor is like obsessed with a teen idol? Yes I know its because of the little girl, she was his patient and she died blah blah blah. I just find it a little odd... I don't know, it’s fine, moving on. Ai is pregnant and the doctor gets assigned to her, turns out shes having twins and on the night that she is supposed to deliver, the doctor gets pushed and dies. The doctor and his little girl patient gets reincarnated as her twins but they are fully aware of their previous lives. So now a 12 year old girl and a 20 something year old man are Ai’s twins. Also forgot to mention, didn’t the doctor say something sus to the little girl before she died because didn’t she want to marry him??? Honestly I forget, anyways, fast forward the twins, Aqua and Ruby, get older throughout the episode. Ai has been doing her idol shit and what not and Aqua also dabbles into acting a bit. Ruby is dancing or something and all is swell until it all turned to shit. Ai is I think 20 years old now? There's someone who comes to the door and she opens it, he then stabs her and she dies. Oh and she finally tells her kids that she loves them. The episode is almost over at this point, Aqua asks this one guy to raise him or something and Aqua pretty much figures out that his dad hired someone to kill his mom so he’s in his revenge era now. This was a whole mess but its fine. I liked the characters designs a lot, I thought they were really pretty. I have some problems with this anime but I think I might continue to watch it and then do a whole review on it. Still baffled on how people claimed that this was the best first episode they've seen ( even topped aot ) I think it was a good episode don’t get me wrong and I liked the animation style and there were cute moments but I don’t think it was the best first episode I've seen. Ai’s song was fire though, I will say that.

[toomanyfandomsthings]

Hello, this is just ask for fun....

Favorite female character :

Favorite male character :

Favorite animanga :

Animanga you are currently enjoying :

Animanga that exceeded all your expectations :

Unpopular animanga you really love :

Favorite romance :

Favorite action animanga :

Favorite fantasy :

Favorite sci -fi :

Favorite drama :

Favorite comedy :

Favorite anime movie :

Next in your watch list :

Next in your read list :

Favorite antagonist:

Thanks if you want to answer....

Ooo thank you for the ask! :D Some of these are really hard to narrow down to just one, but I'll do my best!

Favorite female character: Hmmm if I had to pick just one, it would be Tohru Honda from Fruits Basket! <3 She's so sweet and genuinely kind and also so strong willed. She sees the best in everyone and wants them to be happy but also rarely puts herself first, and it's nice to see her grow over the course of the series. <3

Favorite male character: Aki Hayakawa from Chainsaw Man, without question <3 I love him so so much, his whole story arc is so well written and he is so kind and caring and such a sensitive soul and I'll spare you my whole rant about him but he's just the best and my favorite character in literally anything <3

Favorite animanga: Hmmm I'd have to say Tokyo Ghoul! I genuinely think that series is a masterpiece and I read it at a time where I really really needed it, so it has a special place in my heart <3 The characters are wonderful and so well written and the story is so gut-wrenching and heartfelt. Also Ken Kaneki is like...right behind Aki in terms of favorite characters out of all things I've read <3 I love that series a lot, I really need to re-read it sometime.

Animanga you are currently enjoying: Ahh I'm not watching too much recently because grad school work is kicking my butt, but I've been catching a few episodes of A Sign of Affection and I'm really enjoying that! (also helped by the fact that Itsuomi's voice in the dub is also Aki's please don't judge me XD) I've also been watching Bucchigiri?! and I....think I like it? Still figuring out my opinions on that one, but I like Marito Jin and he's kinda the only thing keeping me watching XD

Animanga that exceeded all your expectations: Chainsaw Man! I *hated* Chainsaw Man for a good amount of the time I was reading it, I was kinda only in it for Aki's story for the longest time. And without spoiling the manga, there's a big plot reveal at one point that, when it happens, puts a lot of the story in perspective and I genuinely had a moment where I had to put down my phone and be like "......oh my God.....this series is so smart." So once I re-read it with the whole story in mind, I absolutely loved it <3

Unpopular animanga you really love: Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori! <3 I will sing this show's praises every chance I get! The manga isn't translated in English, so I haven't been able to read it (though I do own up to volume 16) but there is a 12 episode anime on Crunchyroll listed under "Yotsuiro Biyori" and it is one of my comfort shows! It follows four very sweet gentlemen and their cat as they work in a tea shop and help their customers though their problems. It's so so sweet, the characters are so adorable and kind, and it's pretty episodic so you can jump in pretty much anywhere and follow what's going on. Definitely recommend it!

Favorite romance: I don't actually watch a lot of romance anime, so I guess I'll probably have to say A Sign of Affection for right now XD Or Sasaki and Miyano, that series was cute too! :D

Favorite action animanga: Jujutsu Kaisen! The fights in that anime are unmatched <3

Favorite fantasy: Ahhh this one's hard! It's either Yona of the Dawn or The Case Study of Vanitas, but I'm leaning towards Yona purely because I think about it more often! Both of those series are phenomenal! <3

Favorite sci-fi: Psycho-Pass! <3 .....I say having only watched the first 2 seasons and the movie! But the first season of Psycho-Pass IS a masterpiece! And the movie is also really really good! .....We don't talk about season 2 XD

Favorite comedy: Life Lessons with Uramichi-Oniisan XD I love the comedy in that series *so much* XD It does get very dark and pessimistic with it's comedy though, I have very rarely shown it to other people and gotten a reaction other than ".....oh my God" so....be aware of that going in XD

Favorite anime movie: Howl's Moving Castle! <3 I have seen that movie an *unhealthy* amount of times, both in theaters and at home. I....I like that movie a lot haha

Next in your watch list: Metallic Rouge, Ninja Kamui, and Delicious in Dungeon, because friends recommended them to me! :D

Next in your read list: I really wanna catch up with Moriarty the Patriot, I have up to volume 13 and I need to take a day to just catch up with reading it <3 (the anime's great though please watch the anime)

Favorite antagonist: Shogo Makishima from Psycho-Pass <3 I love him so much, what an awful person who also totally makes sense for the world he is living in. He's got such an intimidating presence and also has so much charisma XD VERY good antagonist :D

Thank you so much for asking! :D

[gmaxmeltdown]

So I found this interesting Pokémon magazine at my Publix today

(I apologize for the bad quality my phone camera is shit)

Basically it covers everything about the franchise in short spurts, from the creation of the series, just some fun random tidbits, the anime, shortly goes over all the games and some of the ideas behind making them along with the card games and the mobile games and at the end there’s a fun little quiz, as to be expected though it doesn’t mention the manga or any side games besides PLA.

It’s pretty interesting and it reminds me of the magazines that’d come out during when the series was first a big thing to try and teach parents why their kids are obsessing over some weird onion frog lol.

It does seem to be a one off thing unfortunately and not a magazine series dedicated to Pokémon which sucks but it’s a fun read and I enjoyed it! (It was also 14$ which is way overpriced in my opinion but did have a lot of pages)

[meruz]

im gonna reply to some asks but not that many bc the last time i tried to type up one of these posts i accidentally closed the tab and lost like several paragraphs so now im scared

lots of heavypaint questions

@porch-gremlin

its the fan tool on heavypaint!! which is a free drawing app that i love a lot. and the fan tool is my fave its kind of a crutch actually im trying to use other tools gkfdhgsdg but its so fun i can do a whole painting using it exclusively. heres a video of it in action while i mess w the configuration options. u can slide the noise jitter up and down so its more or less streaky hehe ^^

thank you!!! heavypaint ROCKS!!!!! I love it... its like the only art program ill be a shameless shill for lol

also im flattered you think of my art while playing splat...i should draw more splat i feel like i havent done enough.

my phone!! I have a samsung galaxy note 20 that I am still not done paying off LMAO.... but I've been a galaxy note user for years. combined with heavypaint its a shockingly good mobile sketchbook.

I'm sorry it's crashing on your tablet... I don't have a tablet so I don't really have an advice. Unfortunately because HP is a small dev app it can be kind of finicky... especially in between updates. I think if you reached out to vaughn ling/heavypoly he'd probably respond though! he seems to keep up with the community pretty well.

@hellisrealsign nice nice.. I'm glad our tastes match up a little! hopefully that means you don't mind my frequent fandom jumping LOL. I promise to always be true to my homestuck-loving infinity-train-loving self.

LMAOOOOOO I HOPE YOU HAD A GOOD TIME? (covered in blood)

idk is it worth it to read any shounen manga for female side characters?????? (??) HEAVILY DEBATABLE. on one hand the casual observer would say no but on the other hand femslash shippers are the strongest people on god's green earth and will endure great tortures for paltry table scraps.

I think mha is a good manga but it's still a shounen, some of the tropes they squeeze the girls into kind of suck. I can kind of put my annoyance aside because regardless im still a big fan of cool fight scenes and the power of friendship but I think your mileage will vary depending on how much tolerance you have for that kind of story...? There's an awful lot of chapters afterall. I will say this: though toga and ochako aren't the main characters they're not in the background either. the path of their relationship spans multiple arcs across the entire manga and is both plot relevant and relevant to the greater themes/thesis of the story. it's pretty clear that the mangaka and editorial team are dedicated to giving these characters the time and page space to play out. it's not perfect but thats better than a decent amount of big shounen femslash in my opinion? shrugs

Thank you! for both the compliments and the concern. but I want to assure you that... to be perfectly honest I don't think I'll ever stop posting my art regardless of AI. I don't want to make this into a hot take like this is an entirely personal opinion and I don't expect any other artists to share my position but: Everything about my art that I consider valuable is inherently impossible for AI to replicate and everything about my art that is replicable and monetizable is not something I'm interested in owning or protecting. (this is also why at the end of the day i dont really care that much about art theft, tracing etc. and i think 90% of the time style theft is just silly)

I believe art should be freely shared and to restrict that is to make art into a product which is morally despicable and moreover uninteresting... to me. lol. I DO RECOGNIZE HOWEVER I'm very lucky to have both more of an online audience than I even want + a fulltime job that takes the pressure off any of my other art to make money. it's totally valid for other artists to have differing opinions on this especially depending on personal circumstances. AND also I make art that is primarily a product above all else for work everyday so im a hypocrite but. yeah thats my two cents.

I love posting art online LOL. I do it because its fun for me.

HAPPY NEAR YEAR!!!!!!!!!11111111

[washipink]

The Rain Review (Finale)

If you’ve been with my blog for the past week or so, You’ll know I’ve been reading a childhood favorite webcomic of mine, Rain by Jocelyn Samara. And you’d probably be wondering what happened to my review of the comic Year-by-Year. The answer? I went on a road trip for a few days and couldn’t help but read the whole rest of the comic. So today I’m here to talk about my overall thoughts.

For the uninitiated, Rain is a slice-of-life webcomic that started in 2010. It’s about a transgender teenage girl of the same name navigating her senior year at a Catholic high school. There’s a LOT of romantic and gender-related drama. Friends are made and lost. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll see yourself in the characters somewhere along the line.

My experience with Rain prior to this project only goes up to about 2014. I started reading it in middle school on Smackjeeves.com. Y’all remember Smackjeeves? I miss it every day. Apparently it redirects to a shitty webtoon clone now. IDK where I’m gonna find peoples’ sprite comics produced in 2013 now.

Anyway, I bring this up to say that I had stopped keeping up with Rain even though she was a major part of me accepting who I was. When I found out that her story had come to a close, I had a real need to find out how.

This time, there won’t be a plot summary because this comic ran for 11 years and it takes me long enough to do just 1. That and, if I may spoil my final opinion, I really want you to give it a read for yourself.

ART

I want to get this one out of the way because it’s a very common critique that even I hold to some extent. The art in Rain is a clear indicator of the era its artist hails from. In 2010, anime and manga had just hit the American mainstream. Everyone was reading those “How to Draw Anime” books and took a lot of notes from them. To showcase, here’s a page from Chapter 1, the first color page in fact.

This page is actually one of the busier pages in terms of art. Jocelyn doesn’t usually do background details much, if at all. Usually, backgrounds are depicted as solid colors that are associated with specific locations. Grey for the apartment, sky blue for outside, light green for school, etc. But the way Rain is drawn here bears a striking resemblance to the styles a LOT of people were using at the time.

While Jocelyn’s style stays rooted in, shall we say, American who got really into anime, her techniques evolve over time. Especially in terms of displaying what’s going on with limited background detail.

As an example, I really enjoy this scene. Rain and Emily are, in universe, speaking over the phone right now. But neither of them are holding their phones to their ears. They’re looking at each other as if they’re in the same room. Jocelyn uses a gradient background to signify that the two of them are NOT in the same room, but as they get closer during their conversation, they get physically closer in the panel as well.

This page is taken from 2014, about 4 years into the comic’s run. You can see that Jocelyn’s brush choices have changed. Everything is far smoother than it was toward the start. While the overall style is as simplistic as year 1, her technique has changed a lot.

That comfort with her work only continues to grow. Below is a panel from a bonus page that released after the comic’s conclusion. The line work is the cleanest its ever been.

STORY AND CHARACTERS

Now this right here is the REAL meat of the comic. Regardless of any feelings I had on the art, the characters really endeared me. And this being a slice-of-life teen drama, they had plenty of time to learn, grow, and clash against one another.

The majority of the conflict in Rain comes from people being set in their ways. Rain’s whole gaggle of queer friends is hiding from the school’s principal, who refuses to acknowledge that maybe there’s nothing wrong with being a little gay. One of the most compelling ongoing threads in the comic centers around Rain’s brother and sister trying to understand and accept her. These personal stakes were a really enjoyable break from the kind of thing I usually read. In Rain, there is no world to be saved or villain to defeat, but there IS a prom to go to. Sometimes, that’s all you need to tell a good story.

The comic has this small-town vibe I care for a lot. Sometimes, a character will exit another’s life and you’ll never expect to see them again. Then they’ll end up dating Rain’s aunt or something. Word spreads fast in Centerville. People are gossipy. Sometimes, you tell someone something and it reaches ears you didn’t want to hear it. That gossip is what makes things so dangerous for Rain. If the wrong person finds her out, then EVERYONE finds her out. The same goes for all her friends.

There’s all kinds of flavor of queer in this comic in a way that mirrors real life friend groups. We have a tendency to find each other like that.

With all kinds of queers being hormonal teens, things get messy FAST. There’s a lot of things that happen in this comic that I feel like baby gays need to see. There’s a point where a gay boy and a trans girl start going out because... this just happens sometimes. Nobody is “the villain” in this scenario. They both just tried to explore themselves and found mixed results.

That’s one of the big themes of Rain. Self-exploration. Every chapter, we’re learning more about these characters as they learn more about themselves. Nobody stays in the same headspace for too long. They’re constantly evolving.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Rain is ABSOLUTELY worth the read. It’s actually a really easy read. I was able to finish it in about 2 weeks, so I’m sure it won’t take up too much of your time. But, it’s a really heartwarming story that I’m sure a lot of us can relate to. Thanks for going on this journey with me. And be safe, Rain Beaus.