#I read more comics than manga just to be clear

[grycensharp07]

Saying that something isn’t ’real reading’ just because it has pictures in it also does a huge disservice to the multiple artists working on those comics and mangas. They’re working around the clock to get an issue of a series their working on (or multiple depending on if they’re working on various titles) gets put out on a deadline, which is typically one every month, that a huge amount of dedication and passion and I respect the hell out of those guys for being able to pull that off. That’s not even mentioning creators who are writers and artists working on possibly multiple stories at the same time

Let’s not forget how interesting of a medium comic/magma storytelling is. There’s so much teamwork that goes into it, you have the writers having to collaborate with multiple different artist (penciller, inker and colorist) who all have to work together to make sure the pages and panels flow properly based on how many pages they’re working with per issue. And there’s also the letterer who’s responsible for both aiding to put the words to paper while also not covering up the art. Then there’s the editor, who’s likely juggling multiple things, who helps make sure everything reads properly and that the characters are all acting themselves. It’s an incredible amount of work put into getting these stories out there, sure a lot of them fumble the bag or miss the landing, but it doesn’t take away from the effort.

And comics and manga are such an interesting genre of storytelling too, because they’re a medium that can basically be a clusterfuck of multiple genres that fit so well together. Marvel and DC’s universes have a little bit of every genre co-existing in the same universe with heroes and villains with completely different vibes and aesthetics that share a lunch room together, and the universes never feels like there’s too much going or that one thing doesn’t fit. Like, yeah of course the noir detective furry is best friends with the one of the last members of an alien race and the Amazon made out of clay or of course the super genius in a mech suit is friends with a man out of time and a Norse god. It’s also a genre that can tell stories that on paper sound completely ridiculous but are still handled in a really straight forward way, or an idea that should be serious but the characters react to it in a ‘yeah we did that last Tuesday’ type of way and depending on how the writer handles it, and both can work completely fine.

Comics and Manga can certainly be deep and tell meaningful stories but at the end of the day, like any book you read, you should read them for enjoyment and fun. And more than any other type of literature, those genres are just having a good time telling their stories

lol I fucking HATE how often I heard teachers say "comics/graphic novels aren't REAL reading" when I was a kid. They want kids to choose to read, but they don't want to make reading fun. "Don't read this, it's just pictures, don't read that, it's too easy for you." And yet, you go back to class and read the assigned stories and... you have to analyze more than just the words. Your assignments revolve around understanding the characters, and analyzing the imagery/metaphors, and making predictions, and identifying themes.

So how, then, are comics not real books? If reading is just about the text printed on the page, then why do we do homework about the meat of the story?

Why would a child ever challenge themselves to read harder books if you make all reading a chore? Why would they ever choose to read outside of class if you haven't done the basic first step of helping them want to read?

[jacksintention]

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[gallusrostromegalus]

I did not care at all for Aizen Sosuke when I first read bleach. I found him boring, and worst, unthreatening.

So it's pretty jarring for me that I have been OBSESSED with him in your AU. I'm rotating him at great speed

Walt Disney was a jackass who was flat-out wrong about a lot of very important things, but he employed a great many geniuses of storytelling, and there's a piece in Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson that discusses a key feature of Disney Studios Character Design:

"Of all characters, villains are the most fun to develop because they make everything else happen. They are the instigators, and always more colorful than the Hero. They may be dramatic, awesome, insidious or semi-comic, but they MUST be appealing. Almost any story becomes innocuous if all the evil is eliminated, but we do not necessarily gain strength by being frightening. we want a character that will hold the audience and entertain them, even if it's a Chilling Type of Entertainment."

And I've found that to be an important principle of character design, especially the kind of canon restructuring I do.

Aizen had a LOT going for him in canon- for all of Bleach's other faults, Aizen's conspiracy and THE REVEAL are spectacularly constructed and executed. I legit screamed and threw my mug across my dorm room when I read it in the manga the first time. He's also conventionally attractive and the translations I was reading gave him the speech patterns of Every Douchebag In Your 101 Political Theory Who Thinks He's The Smartest Man In The Room, which made him a terrific combination of Unfortunately Charming, Menacingly Competent and Engagingly Obnoxious.

...But he falls flat in a few key places.

Aizen's reasoning could be MUCH more sympathetic- After all, he is RIGHT. Soul Sciety does suck ass and all the options kind of suck. Who designs a universe like that? An asshole who needs killing, that's who. The best kind of Unhinged Madmen are the kind who spell out their reasoning and you realize that there but for the grace of Not Having Super Powers Go I. Canon!Aizen makes a few Good Rhetorical Points, but seems to lack any personal connection to his all-consuming plan.

Another issue is that nearly every villain with A Plan has a clear end goal AND a lot of the menace is drawn from the fact that the plan *could* work. Aizen's plan for betraying the court guard and then killing them off before proceeding into the Royal Realm to Kill God sorta falls apart when it's clear he planned to use pretty much all his accumulated forces dealing with the court guard and doesn't seem to have a plan for the Even More Powerful Royal Guard, let alone God. For how meticulously planned the rest of the plot is, the last two VERY IMPORTANT steps are just handwaved.

So I sat down and started with the plot beats Aizen MUST hit, and tried to imagine what kind of guy would he have to be to get there? And I came up with this:

Sosuke Aizen is a fundamentally good man with genuinely good intentions who is really trying his best for the whole world.

Think about it- what lengths would you NOT go to if you think you found a genuine shot at Fixing Everything Wrong With The World Forever? We all talk about killing Hitler if we found an actual Time Machine- would you do it if your only chance was when he was a baby? Would you kill an infant if it meant you could stop World War II before it starts? Of course you would! One small life for over 75 million? You'd be insane not to! What if you found out that you could prevent the future extinction of Humanity by killing your best friend today? Ten Billion lives? For theirs? It's simple, really- Hell, it's your Moral Obligation to do that if you were SURE!

-And Aizen IS sure. He is absolutely, totally, completely sure that He Can Save Everyone if he just gets rid of that idiot sitting on the throne of heaven. He's seen the plans! He knows where the gate of heaven is! It's So SIMPLE he just has to get inside, and he knows EXACTLY how to do it, yes it'll be hard and there will be... unpleasant parts but. IT. WILL. WORK.

He is of course, insane.

Aizen didn't have One Bad Day that set him irrevocably on the path of madness. It was a succession of catastrophic disappointments and realizations that he was living in a fundamentally irrational world that made irrational thinking look sane. The Catastrophe that befell his family, working for the central 46 and later the court guard and seeing how the organizations were inept to the point of abuse or corrupt to the core, learning that The Actual House Of God is a place he can just? Go to? Anyone would start thinking you were just a handful of white lies and homicides away from Fixing Everything, Forever.

Not only is Aizen insane, he is nowhere near as smart as he thinks. He is smart- He does have a knack for being able to guess just what will spur someone to action or make them recoil in fear. But mostly he gets extremely lucky Many, Many, MANY times. On some level I think it gives him Confirmation Bias that this is what he's supposed to be doing. Aizen is also nowhere near as smart as (nearly) everyone else thinks he is. His bizarrely good luck makes him look like a hyper-competent genius when really it was really the catastrophic failure of Soul Society as a Society that let a merely mediocre conspirator to evade detection for so long.

Being that he is at most, mediocre, he had to have Outside Help, specifically Gin's emotional support and Tousen's Competence- and if there's a part of the fic that stays true to canon, it's this.

Gin is Aizen's emotional rock in Canon. He's the ONE guy that Aizen genuinely trusts, and considers his 'my only real partner' in his scheme. There's more than one occasion in the manga where Aizen more or less asks Gin "Is this actually a good idea?" and Gin backs him up every time.

...Which is more than a bit at odds with Gin's later stated goal of "I did all this to kill you at your most vulnerable to protect rangiku" . It never rang true to me. So I started thinking why on EARTH Gin would be backing Aizen up like that, and realized there was a hole in my world building that he slotted into nicely :)

On the other hand, the entire fic was started because I didn't like how Tousen's character arc ended, so you can imagine how much he's changed.

But in canon, TOUSEN DOES ALL THE FUCKING WORK.

Lab work? Tousen.

Supervising the arrancar directly? Tousen

Actually getting victims for the Hogyoku experiments? Tousen.

Altering all the archives to keep Aizen's plot hidden? Tousen.

Sending all the Orders allegedly from the central 46? Tousen.

Making sure Unohana believes Aizen's fake body is real? Tousen.

Managing all the day-to-day operations at Las Noches? Tousen.

There's even this little exchange, which is Tousen's first appearance in the Manga:

Aizen establishes this entire meeting is a little fake-out a few pages later with "now isn't that a convenieint time for the alarm to go off?"

which makes him look like he's investigating, but he's also going "Good job on disrupting everyone with the alarm Gin!" It's ballsy of Aizen to do a check-in on his plan with his main nemesis in the room, but also his style.

I think the same thing is happening here with Tousen. To make sure Ukitake wouldn't raise a huge fit about the proposed execution of his beloved lieutenant, which might fuck everything up for Aizen because Ukitake is one of like, three people Yamamoto will listen to (sort of).

...So he had Tousen poison Ukitake to keep him out of the way.

ALL. THE. FUCKING. WORK. It's even in his name! The characters for "Tousen" Refer to a legendary scholar the emperor of China sent out to discover the secret of immortality- only to kill the scholar when he returned with that secret. The character for "Kaname" means "Necessary/Vital/keystone" or "to organize/take account of". His name LITERALLY means "Scholar who is essential for the plan (that we're going to kill later)"

Another thing Kubo did well in Bleach: his name game is Off The Fucking Charts.

-but I digress.

In AEIWAM, it's much the same only this time Aizen sees this very dangerous witness who is immune to his illusions but also extremely snart and capable young man and instead of risking being caught out by the one damn guy who can see right through him, opts to Curse Kaname into doing as Aizen says, and doing all the fucking work of this conspiracy against his will.

It's Not Nice, but Aizen genuinely thinks he's doing Kaname a favor by subjecting him to this degrading and incredibly painful servitude- I mean, Aizen's only other option was to Kill him to keep his silence, and isn't it wonderful that you get to help fix the universe? You're the one always going on about Justice, I don't understand why you didn't jump at the chance to mete out some Divine Justice.

An Excerpt from the captain's meeting in between the Massacre that made the visored and Zaraki's arrival, when Kaname realizes Yamamoto is 100% serious about his promotion to captain of the 9th and goes to throw up in the garden. Aizen offers to go check on him while Unohana very politely reads the general the riot act:

---

"You broke your toy Aizen." Kaname coughs.

"…I really am sorry for running you ragged like this. I really shouldn't have gotten so mad about you hiding the the hogyoku- it was very petty of me." The bastard sighs, taking off his glasses and rubbing his face, entirely genuine.

Kaname stayed on his hands and knees, weaving slightly as another wave of nausea flowed through him, powered by disgust and rage.

"How about this- I've got a lot coming up with the new job, training Gin and disposing of Kiganjo- So how about I promise to not give you any orders for a while? You will have to keep our arrangement a secret and not interfere, of course, but other than that, you're free to do as you please for- a year and a day is traditional isn't it? No, that's not going to heal by then- Oh, would you look at that!"

Kaname didn't have the strength to offer his usual rebuttal that he won't look at anything, ever. The sides of his head tingle like his skul was being pressed between two enormous hands made of static electricity.

"It's 11:11! Alright, I won't give you any Orders until 11:11 am on November 11th, 1911. That's easy to remember! What do you think?" Aizen continued cheerfully, patting his back and the Curse nails.

"…I can't." Kaname groaned. He could scream if he had the energy, but due to Aizen's Illusions, nobody would hear him. "I actually physically can't think. Please…"

"Of course! You really are such a help to me, it would be a shame to lose you. I'll even amend our contract, so you don't get paranoid-" There was a sizzling sound and a new stroke of hot pain up Kaname's spine as Aizen did something to the wretched Bakudo. "There. No compulsions for eleven years and a day. What do you say?"

Kaname grimaced, but dropped his head. Save the energy to fight another day. "…thank you, Aizen-sama."

"Good man! Let's get you on your feet." Aizen beamed, putting his glasses back on and offering him an arm.

---

He genuinely thinks that he's doing everyone a huge favor and if they don't get it it's because they're just not smart enough, but it's alright, He's a Benevolent God and they'll appreciate all his hard work the next time around :)

Aizen is a man who is FULL of joy. He loves what he does! He actively takes pleasure in it! And I think that's something that REALLY delivers in terms of sympathy AND horror for him. Who *Wouldn't* have a great time actually fixing the universe? He's a good man who enjoys doing good works, and this is the greatest work of all!

It also Delivers on the Horror when I get to write the deliciously fun scenes where Aizen is Elbows-deep in a novel War Crime and waxing poetic about how GREAT this is, or being confused why the people around him are reacting with fear. Don't you want to make everything better too?

[kelaeri]

The Many Languages of Dick Grayson

Apparently, according to Nightwing #54, he can speak 12, so I went on a little quest to see just how many I could identify.

Starting off with The Essential Batman Encyclopedia, the entry for Dick Grayson lists him as being trained in French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese with having some proficiency in an unknown Romani dialect. Given there are multiple examples of him speaking these languages throughout the comics, I am inclined to trust this claim. To start, we've got several examples of French (Gotham Knights #14, Detective Comics Annual #12, Nightwing #73, Grayson #10-- also featuring Spanish)

In Grayson #1 he speaks Russian only briefly, but in Detective Comics #36 he speaks it throughout.

As far as the Chinese languages go, while I believe Dick can speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese fairly well (Batman/Superman World's Finest #3), his Hanzi recognition and literacy could use some work.

Similarly, when the Titans head off to Japan in Titans Annual #1, we have Nightwing speaking Japanese in battle; however, when it comes to the prospective job of being a manga translator in Nightwing #125, he claims he doesn't know Japanese, which leads me to believe he is only proficient in speaking Japanese/Chinese and struggles with the writing systems.

So what about the languages not covered in the encyclopedia? To start, we have another romance language: Italian (Nightwing #72).

Followed by some alleged German (Nightwing #51, JLA #44)

And conversations in Farsi (Robin #175)

While I've seen some Tumblr and Reddit posts claim he knows Kikuyu, The Power Company: Manhunter #1 only says he "brushed up" on his Kikuyu before going to Kenya, so it is unknown how much of the language he actually speaks, but to me it doesn't seem likely to be a lot.

He also, to some unknown degree, speaks Tamaranean-- at least enough to hack into an alien computer (Action Comics #842).

As far as unspoken languages go, Dick is fluent in ASL, which is proven numerous times when he communicates with Jericho (New Teen Titans 1984).

And lastly, the two languages that remain rather uncertain are Romani and Cant-- largely due to the nature of the languages themselves and their representation in comics. "Romani," for instance, has several different dialects, and when Devin Grayson introduced it for Dick (Gotham Knights #20-21, Nightwing #91), she never specified which, and based on the lines she wrote, her research into the language was questionable at best. Writers since have recognized Dick's Romani heritage, but have not otherwise suggested he retained much of the language to be considered fluent.

Cant is an even wider term than Romani and can be seen as more of jargon for a particular language than a language itself, sometimes even being called a "pseudo-language." The colloquial term for American circus cant is Carny, or "Carny speak" as Boston Brand puts it in Batman: The Brave and the Bold #14 when he and Nightwing encounter a kid who speaks it.

So... this leaves us with 11 languages Dick has notable proficiency in: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Farsi, and ASL. And ~3 languages he has unknown proficiency in: Tamaranean, Kikuyu, Romani, and Carny/Cant (if you want to count it).

Maybe memory-loss Dick was including either Tamaranean or Kikuyu in that count from Nightwing #54, or maybe he knows some other language we haven't seen yet. Given how close the family is to the Al Ghuls, I personally think it would be cool if one of them was Arabic.

But anyway, hope you enjoyed this post! A lot I've seen covering this topic are very surface-level and label some of his more iffy languages as "fluent," so I hope this cleared things up. I've read tons of Nightwing, and I swear there are more examples, but sifting through the 1,000+ comics I've read of him is a lot haha. If y'all know of some others, let me know!

[room-surprise]

How Old Is Thistle?

(EDIT: I've made a follow-up post to this one that goes deeper into the math and additional evidence that the 5:1 ratio is correct. You can read it here!)

I've seen people debating this and a lot of folks insisting that Thistle is a child, and since Thistle just debuted in the anime, I wanted to do a full write-up to help myself and others figure this out.

We don't know how old any of the Merini family members are exactly, so the best we can do is guess based on the information we have, but after carefully studying the manga, I think Thistle is at least a teenager, but much more likely a young adult, and definitely not a prepubescent child.

Here's what we know:

EDIT: Depending on what translation you read of some of the extra materials, Freinag implies that Thistle is the same age as some of his advisors.

Here's a detailed translation of this panel from my friend Fumi:

Elves age 5 times slower than tall-men.

16 year old tall-men in Dungeon Meshi's medieval time period are adults, they commonly join the military, get married, have children, etc.

An 80 year old elf is an adult. Pattadol is 82 and she's a lieutenant in a military unit. It's her first job and she's obviously a rookie, but Captain Flamela tells Pattadol to accomplish her mission or die trying.

Many fully adult elves look like what we might consider children or young teens, because they're short, petite, and have androgynous features.

An average elven adult is around 150-155cm tall (5 ft), meaning some are shorter than that, and some are taller. Thistle is 130 cm, which is short, but not unheard of.

Fleki is 130 (26) years old and she's 140 cm tall (4'7")

Otta is 137 (27) years old and she's 130 cm (4'5") tall, the same height as Thistle!

They are both women, but there's probably plenty of elven men in their height range.

Just so we can compare Thistle to some adult elven men, Mithrun and his brother are probably adults (or close to it) in the panel on the left.

Mithrun (in this image) is somewhere between 75 and 144 (probably in his 80's), and his brother is older than him (so he could be in his late 80s or 90s). As you can see, they don't look that different from Thistle, Otta or Fleki.

So, how old is Thistle?

(Spoilers below the cut)

Thistle was brought to the royal court as a child (found on the street, stolen or purchased, we don't know how they got him). At the absolute youngest I'd guess Thistle is 25 years old here (so about 5 years old for a tall-man.) He can already play the flute, and possibly the lute, and most children that aren't prodigies can't handle playing an instrument (physically or mentally) until they're around 5.

EDIT: We now know that Thistle is the same age as Freinag, the king that takes him in! So Thistle must be at least 25 years old in this comic, though realistically he could be anywhere from 25 to 40 based on how Kui drew Freinag.

He lived in the court for an unknown amount of time, Freinag hasn't changed much but Thistle appears to have aged a little, so let's say it's been 5 years and Thistle is 30 (6) when Delgal is born. More than 5 years could have passed, but I'm trying to keep the numbers low.

Delgal gets married and has a child. Delgal should be at least 15 at this point, but since he has a full mustache before his wedding, I think he's in his 20's, since teenagers tend to not be the best at growing robust facial hair.

(He has a full beard by the time Eodio's a young child.)

Thistle puts the kingdom inside the dungeon around this point, however, people are still aging: Delgal's grandson Yaad is born, and Eodio is clearly a young adult here, probably in his 20's. Therefore, there is NO REASON to assume Thistle stopped aging. "The dungeon lords don't age" is a common fan headcanon I've seen people spreading, but it has no clear canon basis.

Yaad ages until he looks about 13-15 years old, and at this point all of the people of the kingdom and Thistle appear to stop aging, and 1,000 years pass.

So, the youngest Thistle could possibly be, if he was 30 (6) when Delgal was born, if Delgal was 15 when he had Eodio, and Eodio was 15 when he had Yaad, and Yaad is 13 years old...

Is 73 years old, which would make Thistle about 14.6 years old by tall-man standards.

HOWEVER, I think it's VERY unlikely that all the characters are that young.

I think it's clear from Kui's drawings that Delgal and Eodio are not 15 years old when they become fathers, and that Freinag is at least 25 when he takes in Thistle.

If we assume Thistle was 30 when Delgal was born, and Delgal and Eodio were both at least 20 when they had children, even if Yaad is only 13 years old, that makes Thistle at least 83 years old (16.6), and makes him older than Pattadol, who is an adult at 82.

However, I think it's entirely possible that Thistle was anywhere from 40-50 when Delgal was born, and Delgal could have been anywhere from 20 to 30 when he had Eodio, and Eodio could have been anywhere from 20-25 when he had Yaad. If you use the maximum ages, and assume Yaad is 15, then Thistle could be as old as 120 (24).

I think a reasonable middle ground is assuming Thistle was 30 (6) when Delgal was born, Delgal had Eodio at 25, Eodio had Yaad at 20, and Yaad is 15... Which would make Thistle 90 (18) years old.

This of course says nothing about Thistle's emotional maturity or sanity, he's obviously stunted in some ways, but the point I want to make here is:

Thistle's age could be anywhere from 14.6 to 24 at the most extreme, but more realistically he's somewhere between 16.6 and 18.

And that's not even counting the thousand years that he's lived since then!

And that's all I've got to say about that 🙏🙏🙏🙏

(EDIT: Follow-up post with additional evidence here.) EDIT 2: I've seen a lot of people talking about the page Kui drew talking about elven earmuffs. It's considered just barely okay for Pattadol to wear them, but it's ok for Thistle to wear them... In which case I'd say Thistle could be any age younger than 83. That's handy as it knocks out some of the older ages!

So in that case Thistle's age is between 73 years old and 82, which makes him developmentally between 14.6 and 16.4!

[locuas642]

Dandadan and the Roof

(CW, mentions of suicide)

Okay so, I have seen people commenting on how Dandadan Episode 7 (A Kinder world) changed the scene to make it a lot more subtle that Acro Silky commited suicide by jumping off a rooftop. Particularly talking about how this might have left anime-onlies confused or did not quite fit how it looks in the manga, where it is a lot more clear.

First of all, I tihnk it's important to acknowledge the obvious. And other people are in agreement that, first of all, it just wasn't gonna happen that japanese TV censors would allow Science Saru to make it explicit she had commited suicide. This is not even a Japan thing, all countries have guidelines or a general rule for what is and isn't ok to show on television. The US has them and they have guidelines about how to portray suicide.

this is because there are things that are fine to show in one medium, but which would be controversial to show on another. For example, in the book Alive, which chronicles the rugbier team that crashed in Los Andes, there is a particularly haunting part of the book that goes into detail how the survivors were forced to commit cannibalism in order to survive, the most famous part of the real event. It's haunting, nauseating, horrifying and what real people were forced to do for them to survive and which the book chronicles not for shock value but to tell an accurate picture of what the survivors went through.

it's also something that no movie could actually explore in as much detail without having to be cursed with carrying the highest of ratings. And the truth is, there are things that are easier to swallow, to experience, to process, by reading about it than in watching a movie.

that is to say, what is OK for Manga to show (and this can vary depending of the magazine) may also happen to be very hard or even impossible to get the approval to show in an anime or live-action. and it's important to acknowledge this fact before going any further: for Science Saru to acomplish the hard task of keeping the scene but leaving it ambiguous enough to please the censors? that is something to be praised. And I talked with someone and we both agree, I suspect Science Saru might have, at some point, seriously considered changing it to her bleeding out on the street, given the focus we got on the blood, which was non-existent in the original scene.

With that said. I also think this is the version of the scene that best takes advantage of the strenghts of it's medium of animation.

I am of the opinion that any anime adaptation that tries to do a 1:1 copy of the manga, to recreate panels exactly or which keeps every single narration box is a bad adaptation. This is because they become slow, scenes become awkward and characters become weirdly static in a way they aren't in the manga.

But manga (and comics in general) is the art of telling a story through static images, while animation is the art of telling a story through movement. it's to use motion and music to create a feeling in the same way manga creates striking images to convey a specific feeling.

And that's what Dandadan did. it used motion, movement, music, it's ability to give life to images, to make this family of two feel more alive. they extended their scenes, because Animation allows them to show more and drive it home how alive they were.

And by this same token, they extended the scene in the rooftop to create this dreamlike sequence that leaves the unaware viewer trying to guess what is going on, to try to process the scene and understand it. to dare them to understand it and guess what happened. Using it's limited time as a strenght by finishing it and leaving the audience to think the answer for themselves.

And in all honesty? it's fine if people don't immediatly guess what happened, that they have to re-watch and and process it and think and feel. Or even be told. It is not a failing of the episode, but an invitation for the viewer to try to understand it, to grasp it's meaning.

It's what makes it richer than just trying to be 1:1.

[class1akids]

from an objective pov did hori manage to get right any of the themes/narratives that he created in your opinion?

I think he did an ok job of deconstructing the strengths and weaknesses of the Symbol of Peace and building a convincing case of why society should not rely on a single pillar (Armored All Might kind of destroyed this in the end, but not fully).

But even this theme was not landed well in the end when we end up with a future where heroes are becoming obsolete.

I've had a sinking feeling for a while - ever since reading the latest Horikoshi interviews where he kept talking about how to him is the editor who says "do your best" and how his manga was about "peeling off the label of the evil villains to show a human".

On the "do your best" idea - I think it's a bit simplistic to land here in a super-hero manga. People who encourage you in your life of course are invaluable - but Horikoshi comes across as a really insecure person who is deeply impacted by criticism. I think maybe an editor who keeps challenging and questioning him would be really more of a hero than someone who just encourages him no matter what. In think this created this kind of washed-out definition of a hero that he ended up with in the end of the manga. To paraphrase from Bakugou, "if everyone is a hero, noone is a hero."

On the "peeling off the label from the villains" - I think the problem is that all his villains are overly sympathetic and what we find in the end are victims who deserve to be saved and given a second chance. But Horikoshi doesn't go that far - he is content with just putting their psyche under a microscope and then throw them away as damaged goods. When it comes to the real evil villains - his peeling process is much less satisfactory.

I'm not going to talk about how he botched all the social issues he dabbled in. It's amazing to have a superhero manga that tackles racial discrimination, domestic violence, bullying, government mandated extrajudicial killings, child grooming programmes and fails to renounce any of these things clearly. The ethics of the manga are very weak.

I feel like Horikoshi was inspired by Western comics in terms of aesthetics and style, but if you compare it for example to its clear inspiration - X-men - My Hero Academia fails completely at being a challenging social commentary - so I wonder if he truly understands what were the moral dilemma that made those superhero narratives compelling.

Horikoshi in the end delivered a manga that is truly in line with the conservative values of WSJ and did not challenge anything about Japanese society.

[epickiya722]

"How is Horikoshi going to wrap up everything on five chapters?"

I don't know, you don't know. We just know Horikoshi and his team have a plan and they know how MHA is going to be wrapped up in five chapters.

They got it, they'll handle this. At the end of the day, this is Kohei Horikoshi's story.

Regardless, I feel like this is the case with some of you.

You're afraid of being disappointed. You're afraid of being disappointed because you have these expectations set so high. With that kind of standard, you're never going to be satisfied with anything.

So stuck on "this must satisfy me and only me" that you forget that that story not written by you is a story that is just being shared with you. Not given to you because you're special and you're not.

On top of that, some of you just crave for more, more, more. And more. And more. Even more.

You want nonstop content being pushed out while being impatient about it (looking at you, 'how dare we not get a new chapter this week' folks).

Just because one manga had been going on for longer than another, maybe even came out before that one, doesn't mean every manga is meant to last for a long time. Manga, anime, TV show, comic book, novel series, etc.

Fun fact, Horikoshi's previous works didn't last for ten years. His last one, Oumagadoki Zoo, lasted little less than a year. From July 2010 to April 2011.

Three years it ended before My Hero Academia came into the picture. And I'll be honest, I doubt Horikoshi even planned for MHA to last this long because he didn't have the experience before.

Once it got to a certain point, I doubt he even wants for MHA to go even longer.

Hell, that's something I know all too well as someone who writes. And from what I remember, stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Stories aren't meant to keep going on forever. They're meant to be read, to be told, to be understood, to be enjoyed.

Not be graded like some college report and not ongoing like the people who create those stories are damn machines.

Something that it's very clear to me that some of you forgotten that. Or even care, let's be real.

Some of you want perfection so bad and yet can't even write your own damn story.

Who even wants a perfect story anyways? I don't know about the rest of you, but a story with flaws is a story that could be learned from. Stories can guide you, too, in more ways than one.

Horikoshi's writing to me, at least, isn't perfect. It's entertaining. I got into MHA because I was entertained by the concept. I got interested into it because of a meme I saw. You think I wouldn't want to seek it out and see if it will entertain me?

Yes, there are some points of the story where I wanted to pull my hair out and I don't doubt that a future part may make that feeling return.

But at the same time, what if... that's the point? Maybe you were meant to feel that emotion? Maybe that's what the writer was going for?

Are you understanding me?

Maybe, example, with the end we got for Tomura was meant to upset you? Sadden you, anger you even? Stories work like that sometimes!

But I doubt the writer should be condemned for it because at the end of the day, it is just a piece of fiction. My Hero Academia is the same story where a woman can grow to the size of a building and a kid has a speech bubble for a head.

Now does that sound like a story that you should be acting like a complete fool over? Wishing harm towards and arguing with others over? Huh? Does it?

Honestly, after MHA ends, if you choose to move onto the next manga, anime, whatever how about stop expecting so much?

How about stop having this entitlement that the story must go your way and your way only?

How about remembering that eventually that story will end?

[vanessagillings]

Please talk about your favorite animated movies and what makes them special to you! I'm really curious about what you enjoyed about them both in the past and now?

haha, okay you asked!

I LOVE animated movies. My theory on this is that it took me a long time to emotionally relate to most media growing up, where I felt next to nothing watching most movies and shows as a young kid, and didn't relate to books until I was quite a lot older (I read picture books until I was around 10, and then suddenly in middle school, I hopped right to adult novels like 1984 and the entire Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley, ha). But even before I emotionally related to fiction, I really enjoyed watching animation. It was nice to look at, and I enjoyed watching everything move and change. I grew up in the 90's where animated movies were largely 2D, and I spent hours watching and re-watching my favorite movies just studying how the characters moved -- it's definitely a lot of where I got my understanding of human expressions from. But I also think as I got older and started to relate more to fiction, animation was easier to parse emotionally than live action. The body language is clear. The stories are direct and not as forgiving of bad human behavior (I get frustrated sometimes with the defeatism in adult media, that assumes that People Just Act Badly, and that just needs to be accepted). Facial expressions are also exaggerated and more stylized -- think of a single arched eyebrow, for example, an expression that's commonly drawn to express one particular emotion in animation/illustration but which you next to never see on a real human face. My first introduction into serious reading was also manga -- a highly visual medium -- which uses a lot of the same tactics stylistically as western animation: big, expressive faces, bold gestures and big stories. Compare manga with western comics being printed at the time and it's even more obvious to me why I didn't particularly like comics until I was given manga as an option -- and thankfully I lived close to a kinokuniya, so I could spend all my allowance on untranslated books and magazines, which is also where I learned Japanese (もうたくさん忘れてしまいましたけど).

As far as my favorite movies? THAT IS SO HARD. The first animated movie that BLEW MY MIND was The Lion King. I saw it in theaters when I was eight and I was obsessed; it was definitely one of my first special interests. I know that entire movie line by line, frame by frame, and I had the stuffed animals and the trading cards and the clothes (man, was I teased for those clothes!). My other favorite movies as a kid were The Land Before Time, American Tale, and The Secret of NIMH (I was a big Don Bluth fan!) which have left deep impressions on how to approach storytelling for children; I warn you, I go hard on emotions for kids, because I needed that as a kid, and I know I'm not alone. Some of my other favorites are anything Miyazaki but especially Howl's Moving Castle (I relate to Sophie a lot), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (what I watch when I'm In A Mood), Ratatouille (a huge source of echolalia for my husband and me, we often detect nuttiness, let me tell you), Wallace and Gromit and Fantastic Mr Fox, which I watch every fall as an autumnal tradition. Even as an adult who likes live action, too, I still tend to like slightly over the top directors like Wes Anderson and Guy Ritchie, or movies that are highly cinematic like Road to Perdition, which is still one of my favorite films of all time.

In my opinion, animation is a super important medium outside of it being a very beautiful one. I truly believe it helped me access and understand emotion better as a child, and as an adult, it's a massive source of inspiration in my own work 💛

(Sorry for length, but you did ask!)

[fallloverfic]

I know not everyone has read the Delicious in Dungeon World Guide: The Adventurer's Bible, but there's an interesting section I think even some folks who did missed when it comes specifically to Mithrun and what he can and cannot do in re: taking care of himself. Spoilers for the manga. (And obviously to each their own headcanon, but I'm just looking at what's in the canon text)

On p.73 of the Delicious in Dungeon World Guide: The Adventurer's Bible, there's this bit of text in Mithrun's character section, "Even though he has no desires, he still has routine habits, so he can handle everyday life on his own. However, when he's in a dungeon, he tends to neglect things like eating and sleeping." Nowhere in there does it say anything about him needing help to bathe or go to the bathroom. We know Cithis is assigned to look after him (so that he "doesn't collapse during missions." (p.82)). We know from Daydream Hour that he at least seemingly needed help to bathe while he was recovering. It's possible he's since gotten over this and can do it on his own (one targeted focus of Milsiril helping him was to get him to keep himself clean).

Another note is that while Cithis does kind of leave things vague when asking Kabru to "see to his needs" (p.144, Volume 9, Chapter 61), the only thing she specifically tells Kabru to do is make sure Mithrun eats. Kabru is the one who takes it a lot farther. And while, yes, carrying Mithrun to safety and making sure he rests properly is a lot more than feeding him, it's also not "make sure he goes to the bathroom regularly". You could argue Cithis was just being delicate or they didn't have time... But still. Cithis didn't say this. She just says, "Until we do, we'd like you to see to his needs. Food in particular! Three meals a day. If you feed him properly... ...we'll overlook this incident." And this matches what the Adventurer's Bible says. In the Cithis comic in the Adventurer's Bible, the only things we see Cithis telling Mithrun to do are: eat, sleep, and switch out his clothes. While the clothes thing is kind of a question mark (and probably a joke), again: the only things we really see him having an issue/getting help with are really eating and sleeping properly. Principally, while it's clear he does need more help than just someone to feed him... the things we see Kabru do are adjacent to his eating and sleeping properly. Mithrun doesn't register a need to rest or eat, so he doesn't sleep or ask for food until he collapses. He's unable to sleep without aid (and a foot massage, to my knowledge, does not solve "uncomfortable but ignored need to go the bathroom"). And he generally tends to overuse his magic until he collapses. He doesn't like... collapse because he just forgot to go to the bathroom for too long. Nor does Kabru seemingly indicate that he smells. The one time he noticeably has an issue bathing is with the mushrooms, and Kabru seems to be going to the next level with Mithrun's hair glossy, which implies maybe Kabru's either getting Mithrun better shampoo or cleaning and/or brushing Mithrun's hair himself. But outside the mushrooms it's not clear Mithrun needs the help bathing, and the difference might be because his body has changed completely due to the mushrooms.

Additionally, what does Cithis say when Mithrun is using his magic a lot on floor one: "We'll have to make sure Captain Mithrun eats soon. Once we're finished here, let's get some food in town." (p.146, Volume 8, Chapter 55). Again... all roads lead back to: he forgets to eat and sleep properly at least some of the time, and his comrades have to keep an eye on him for that. But that seems to kind of be it.

Where I think folks might be getting confused is in trusting Kabru's estimation of things a bit too much, and I do understand why. After all, he's the massage feet guy! He kept them alive (with Mithrun's help)! He helped Mithrun choose to live on! He knows his stuff!

...But that doesn't mean that Kabru is always right. In fact, he's not right a number of times in the manga (e.g., when he's describing Past!Mithrun in the Adventurer's Bible, or when he's trying to convince Laios to wait without explaining what happened to Marcille).

But let's start at the beginning: the one set of panels where it's left sort of open-ended whether or not Mithrun needs help to remember to go to the bathroom:

(I personally imagine Mithrun just going along with it in the end might be due to the fact he's exhausted to the point of collapse, and just generally goes along with what other people want in these situations so long as it doesn't endanger his mission, such as with Cithis and Fleki)

I just think it's interesting it never seems to come up anywhere else that I'm aware of (even Daydream Hour doesn't show the caretakers going to that level of care, though I imagine he would at least need help getting out of his bonds to go to the bathroom), nor do we see how this specific scenario - Kabru literally dragging Mithrun out of bed to go to the bathroom while Mithrun protests he's doesn't need to go - turned out. The scene literally fades to black while they're running; not that I'd expect Kui to draw Mithrun doing his business or Kabru forcefully encouraging him to, but it does still leave it more open-ended than clear-cut. You could argue that because bathroom stuff grosses people out a lot, bringing it up once twice and solely for a gag works, but also only showing this much and not bringing it up again makes sense as well, so the fact that it isn't clear-cut + isn't brought up again doesn't necessarily mean that Kabru was wrong in his belief that Mithrun needed this help, so much as it's practical storytelling... Also Kui literally has a whole comic about Laios' poop creating forests from makeshift toilets, this comic is not above literal toilet humor.

But also it still leaves open the idea that Kabru was wrong. Because while Kabru is often right about things, he isn't right all the time (especially when he panics). And one of the notable times he was panicking about something, Mithrun was the one who slapped him to his senses.

(I mean part of it was probably revenge for Kabru knocking him out at Sissel's home earlier but the point still stands). This isn't even the first time Mithrun calls out Kabru's wild imagination: it's technically the second/third.

Also as astroloquacious pointed out in the notes: Kabru's role model for caretaking was Milsiril, who was notably overbearing. Specifically before he is thrust into working with and then looking after Mithrun, he recalls a memory of Milsiril being overbearing in her caretaking of Kabru, and how he would rather stay in Merini with its dangers than return to that life. He probably internalized some of the stuff he disliked about her. And if Milsiril, who is a lot older than Kabru, can get stuff wrong about his needs, then who's to say that Kabru doesn't get stuff wrong about Mithrun's needs?

tldr; Believe what you want about this aspect of Mithrun's lifestyle. Not showing a thing doesn't make a heavily implied thing untrue. But I think the Adventurer's Bible is pretty clear. Also, according to the complete Adventurer's Bible, it seems Pattadol is still helping him a little post-Merini, and he's clearly not averse to having a helper (e.g., Fleki). I just don't think it's necessarily factual that Kabru is right in that Mithrun needs this level of care/attention in this particular area, particularly outside a dungeon.

[nocturne-side-blog]

I mean, with a title like "well excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu," I have questions.

I knew that one was gonna raise some eyebrows. That's the main file for my Zelda Cartoon rewrite, where the Link and Zelda seen are their own incarnations in their own Hyrule (rather than supposedly the classic Link and Zelda). It integrates elements from later games and TLOZ media, and is more than likely intended to be near the end of the Era of Decline.

I know the original cartoon and its comics were intended to be the same continuity as the first two games despite the contradictions, so I also have been experimenting with integrating elements from the cartoon, comics, novels, and mangas based on Zelda I & II for my longfic the Return of Ganon + the novelization of the two games that will go with it!

When Link is given a mysterious sword in the deep caverns of Hyrule, he's brought before the Triforce guardian, Zelda. Link is snarky, Zelda is stubborn. They start out with an aversion to each other - rooted in a misunderstanding much like BotW Zelda’s, except it's mutual. They have a rivalry of sorts going on... Hyrule is very small and detached from its history, so scholars like Zelda are very few among the people of Hyrule; especially people like Link, who outright have a distaste for it.

Here's some snippets of it. :)

(Snippet 1)

“It’s dangerous to go alone.” An old man stands between three crumbling stone pillars. Moss gathers not only on their surfaces, but on his feet. Spectral fire flickers on the ends of torches left abandoned at the clearing of trees surrounding him. “Reborn soul of Courage– child of Calatia– take this sword from its pedestal. Your destiny has led you here.” Across from the sage is a young man, no older than ten years old. His hands are balled into tense fists at his side. The boy can hardly muster a word; it is difficult to even breathe. Such a gaze feels as though it has him in a chokehold. “It’s dangerous to go alone.” The man repeats. “Take this.” What a fool it makes him to be drawn to follow this stranger’s voice, the boy thinks. But what other choice does he have? Link takes a long, deep breath and steps forward. One after another, his feet scale eroded stairs. The shade of a cliff over the ruins covers his face, leaving only the glistening of the blade to hit one’s eyes. He wraps his fingers around the hilt. With another inhale, he pulls it from the stone. A gleaming light blinds his eyes.

(Snippet 2)

“Ohhh, Link! Look now!” The fairy squeezes herself between the curtains he just closed, before darting to the side and pulling one half open along with her. “We’re passing the golden goddess statues now! That means we’re here!” Golden goddess? Link lets his curiosity get the better of his boredom and peeks out. However, he is only met with the sight of three withering statues. They’re hardly “golden” seeming at all. “Those’re supposed to be… golden?” “No, silly, it’s stone! That’s just their title– You don’t know who they are?” “Spryte, do not pry.” The old woman cuts in. “Link is not of Hyrule, and even amongst ourselves our traditions and beliefs have long since faded from how they once were… Besides. You aren’t missing much, boy. Hylia is the only one who deserves your respect these days… If any of them.” “Impa, don’t say that!” Spryte flutters in front of her face, whisper-shouting. “I only speak the truth. He owes her, at least. They say she forged the blade whose shards were smelt down to forge his.” “...Then why didn’t she keep it?” Link had seemed entirely spaced out until this moment; it’s difficult to tell if he was even listening for a good portion of the conversation. “No one knows. Not anymore… but perhaps she has willed that heroes like you continue to exist, Link. And the timing… it is no coincidence.” Impa simply shuts her eyes again. What was that last part?! She can’t just go back to sleep after implying– What was she implying!? Almost as though she read his mind without even seeing him, Impa continues. “The King will not leave you in the dark when we need you most. He will tell you everything.”

I have drawings of it too, but they're pretty old.

[chaifootsteps]

I will try to act as the devil's advocate at a certain point. I don't like Viv's work and find it absolutely mediocre, which for some reason has gathered a giant community around itself. And yes, I agree that she is often a very irresponsible and hypocritical person. But some points in the accusations against her are not entirely clear to me. It seems to me that the accusations against Viv in misogyny are slightly exaggerated. I mean, yes, the female characters in her work are obviously given much less time than the male ones. But I don't think it's about sexism. It's more about fetishism. Viv is the obvious cruelest fujoshi who drools over feminine cute boys. Often, when I read some yaoi manga and a female character appeared in the plot showing interest in one of the main characters, little inexperienced girls almost wished this character dead in the comments. But I don't think it's related to misogyny or anything like that, it's just that girls are too obsessed with yaoi and sexualized boys, and see such a female character as a threat to their yaoi OTP. Yes, someone can cite her old comics and art as an example, but guys, kamon, most of them are almost seven years old, don't you think it's rotten for a media person to remember every joint in his life?

Let's not shame girls for being into yaoi and sexualized men. People are allowed to be attracted to fictional characters, but as far as treating female characters as a threat to a yaoi OTP, that is wrapped up in misogyny. Most people grow out of it, which brings us to...

2. Viv's not a girl. Viv's a 30+ year old woman.

3. There's a twitter account that specifically talks about things Viv's done in the last 10 years and omits fictional stuff.

[yuseirra]

More about 159~

hahaha XD aw, GOSH this comic is CRAZY, I think it would be fun if I read it as books and in volumes, it's because it's incomplete, and scattered eps that things feel so tense and awkward, I'm sure. It'd have more sense of flow as a volume.

I wrote a lot of things based on my stream of consciousness this morning (because well I draw hikaai and I DO care a lot about character portrayals and analysis) and I want to share it with you all! I reread it after the heat of the moment and I find it really funny,

If you want to feel assured about Ai and Hikaru (and perhaps ONK as a whole) or like the ship hikaai, I feel this is another post that could help you. Like I said in my ch 159 review, if this ain't it, I have no idea where this is going to head and I might as well take a break off from this piece for a bit and get some air. P3R episode Aigis is coming out on the 10th (great timing!) but I think I'm on the right track. I got so many things right since I picked this up thus far :D So for now, here we go again:

This is just my intuition and a piece mostly based on gut feelings.

Ha;; This morning, I saw someone extremely worried about Kamiki and Ai and couldn’t leave them feeling uneasy... I’m not in a position to calm others down, though!! I'm the one who needs to be calmed!! give me time to brace myself!!! I get tense because I care about where the story's gonna go too!!! I analyze characters and make fan works. I HAVE to look into the source material and make sense of things in order to do that o<-< I’m really stuck with this manga, aren’t I? What a ride... Okay I know the character looks a bit out of it. But listen, even if we criticize the character, we should wait for the next chapter before doing so. Come on, what would Kamiki even LIE about in the first place? Let’s sit down and think calmly. Let’s go over the facts.

Honestly, it would have been better for Kamiki if Ai wasn’t an idol. If Ai hadn’t been an idol, Ai wouldn't have had to die for deciding to keep her very kids with him!! Ai was murdered because she was an idol who had a boyfriend and kids(it's an absurd reason but to Ryosuke, that was his reason to go through with it). If she hadn’t loved Kamiki, she wouldn’t have died. This isn’t Kamiki’s fault, of course!! To add, if Ai weren’t an idol, they might not have broken up in the first place. Even if they had broken up, Ryosuke wouldn’t have tracked Ai down and killed her!! Things would have been so much better for this character if Ai hadn’t been an idol. His situation on the matter, It's totally the opposite of Nino and Ryosuke’s!

To Kamiki, Ai was certainly one-of-a-kind and irreplacable, yeah. But from Kamiki’s perspective, Ai was never a perfect, flawless figure that he found the need to idolize. She was someone who learned acting from him, who was clumsy and scattered, who needed his guidance in the beginning. She shared the same pain, opened up to him, understood him, accepted him, and loved him. Even though she gave him a deep wound and they parted ways, even when he thought she didn’t love him anymore, she remained precious to him to the point where he was willing to give his life for her. She was the person he wanted to marry. Ryosuke and Nino would kill her for not being perfect enough, but that’s not who Kamiki is. He’s actually the biggest victim of that incident only after AI herself. If Ai had survived, he might have been able to meet their children, reunite with Ai, clear up misunderstandings, and more importantly, Ai would still be alive. That alone would have made life more bearable for Kamiki than living in a world without her. I keep saying this but I'm sure he wouldn't have leaked the address to Ryosuke on purpose. I wrote many theories about this and I came to a conclusion that it must have been a mistake on his end, after getting drunk from sadness after Ai dumped him in the phone call. What kind of mastermind could he even be regarding this case? He was 19 at the time. It's total nonsense. There is no reason for him to try and attack Ai who tells him she has their children growing smart and healthy. He's lying about it to Aqua to make him feel better about avenging him because he believed that's what him and Ai's wanted.

What kind of grand conspiracy could a character like this possibly be behind? At least when it comes to Ai’s death, I don’t think he’s responsible. Even if he grew mad, I feel like that would have taken place after it happened. So what is it that this character wants? I’ve been curious about that too-

When I heard anime S2's opening, I immediately realized!! He wants to see Ai again! Would Aqua say something like,

Aqua has Ruby, Kana, and Akane. He’s not going to live just to get closer to Ai or live solely for her love. Maybe to fulfill Ai’s wishes, but that’s different.

“Without you, I cannot live anymore

I would sacrifice anything for you

I can’t get enough of your love

What should I use to fill in what’s missing?”

If Kamiki has any goal, it’s this: He's never been seen to have a desire for Ai to be the ultimate, perfect idol. He’s not twisted that way. If he’s twisted, it’s more like, “I’ll give anything for Ai.”

Think about it. If someone you love died, what would you want most? You’d want them to live again, right? You wouldn’t go around committing serial murders saying, “No one can surpass them!” You’d just want to see them again if there was even the smallest chance. That’s the most important thing. Nino and Ryosuke are twisted. They liked Ai as an idol, not as a person. But this person has two cute kids with Ai... even though they never got to see them properly. He says he has paternal love, and I believe that because there’s no reason for him to hate the kids. He was prepared to take responsibility, after all. Wouldn’t he be happy about having kids with Ai? Wouldn’t he find them adorable, especially since they look so much like him and the one he loves? Seeing how much he still cares for Ai, he’d probably love their kids too. He refers to them as "Yours(Ai's) and mine". He’d probably want to bring Ai back for the sake of the kids, if not for himself. He even believes Ai died because of him, so that would only add to his desperation and longing. When someone dies, they can’t come back, so that possibility doesn’t usually cross the mind-

However, It seems that the songs are saying there is some kind of hope for that becoming a reality even if the chances are very slim. To think Kamiki would have wanted to preserve Ai’s image as an idol and that's what's been driving him? No way. That’s exactly what killed Ai. He’d probably be sick of that... He just wants Ai to live. That’s his motive. He’s been hanging onto that.

As for the Hikaai ship, I had been holding off on judgment until Ai’s feelings came out. I felt like I won’t know until I hear from Ai herself how she feels about him so I waited out for quite long till the entirety of the movie arc, until it got its closure-

And it really occurs to me, people don’t seem to realize how much thought and conviction it takes for Ai to feel that strongly about a person.

Ai is scared, has a sensitive soul, overthinks things, is defensive, and gets wary. She’s afraid to love and get close to people because she doesn't want to get hurt.

But Ai couldn't give up Kamiki’s child because they were what she had with him, even while she was afraid it would be a burden to him!! Do you know how much certainty, affection, and love that takes? It doesn’t seem to resonate with people as much as it does for me, it's such a deep and strong feeling. That's what really got me. She was scared, but she still wanted them because they were theirs...and she protected their children with all her heart that point onward.

This kind of love is something that you might encounter just once in your lifetime, you might never get to meet someone like that at all.

So I thought, “Good for Ai. She found someone she loved that much.” Kamiki must have been a really precious person to Ai to make her feel that way.

In my opinion, for someone to make Ai feel like that, they would have to be the kind of person who would give out their every part of their organ, even their heart to her if that's necessary, and still think it’s not enough. And when you listen to the songs, the speaker does really seems to express that kind of emotion. That's why I thought 'Oh, this is definitely Ai's lover. This is Kamiki that's saying these things.'

You have to trust Ai’s judgment. Ai is serious about love, and she found someone to give it to. He's the one person she decided on. She wanted to live her life with him, worried about him until the end, named her children after jewels because they looked like the one she loved. Had her son who takes after his dad so much have the characters "love" and "longing" in his name. That’s how much she adored him.

What does that tell you? And when you look at the backstory, it seems Kamiki thought he loved Ai even more than she loved him.

Then that must mean he must have treated her really well. So, it’s not about whether Kamiki loved Ai or not anymore. That's totally just a given!! What’s important now is what he has done since Ai's death.

In chapter 155, he said he was "going to do what he could for Ai" and left. Then Aqua showed up near him in this chapter saying, “I need to save you.”

When you listen to the songs, the narrator keeps saying they don’t mind dying. This is a character who has already said they could die for Ai. So what will they do? I think they’re planning to die “for Ai.” But is offering something for Ai or dying for her really what Ai would want? No. Ai would want Kamiki to live and be happy, and they know that, but they’re lying to themselves. That’s the lie this character tells. It’s a self-sacrificing but self-satisfying kind of thing. That's why Aqua says the lies "are for his own sake". This also explains why Ai left a message asking to help Kamiki. This character is someone who could go to extremes "for Ai", but Ai didn’t want that, which is why Aqua is trying to stop it.

If this isn’t the case, then I won’t be able to make sense of this manga... Haha, the Persona 3 DLC will be out soon, so I’ll just go play that...

This feels right to me, though. If it’s not, I don’t know what else it could be;;

Maybe Kamiki's been possessed by an evil god? But even if that’s the case, the motive he has would probably still be about "saving Ai".

On another note, Kamiki was so gentle and kind in his tone when speaking to Aqua. He spoke really softly, didn’t he?

If he had been able to raise the kids with Ai, he would have been the type to pamper and spoil them... He'd have been a sweet dad. I feel like Ai really did choose a good guy to father her kids.

The way he speaks to Aqua feels quite similar to the last lines and atmosphere of the lyrics of Mephisto.. something about it will be brought up soon, I mean Aqua's wearing that same clothes.

To Kamiki, Aqua must be his and Ai’s cute son, right? But does he know Aqua’s soul is originally that of a 30-something-year-old doctor? If he’s possessed by an evil god, maybe he is aware of these things. But if he doesn’t, it might be a bit awkward. His son is almost the same age as him inside...

Aqua is Aqua, though? But that thought still made me laugh a little. I could imagine Kamiki suddenly speaking very formally towards Aqua upon figuring out he's actually the doc who aided Ai with delivering his children safely. Kamiki seems like the type to speak with a lot of courtesy... the way he speaks has been very polite. It depends on the character, but I think that is part of how he is originally.

[aiura-stan]

0-6!

(If you’re wondering how I’m getting these done so fast, it’s because I’m doing these ahead of time. I'm running on a queue.) I used dictation and actual keyboard typing for this one, so it’s going to be long. (Side note, I love the ability to dictate things and using split screen mode! Highly useful features and I have no idea why it’s taken me this long to actually use them.) Also, I guess I should say that there will be spoilers in this and probably future posts too, because I’ve already read the manga. Okay! Onto the commentary.

I love that Saiki outright states he doesn't want to be the "guy you know what he's thinking.” Like, come on Saiki, admit it; you have a little bit in common with Kaidou. (I think he secretly kind of likes freaking people out. He definitely likes the fact that people are a little scared of him.)

He's always the odd one out; He's one of the loner kids. I don't think he really thinks it makes him look normal. I think that's just what he tells himself to feel better about the whole thing.

I think it's funny that he dislikes Kaidou for the same reasons that he thinks he's so different from everyone else. I mean, Kaidou is always trying to stand out, and Saiki does have a legitimate reason for not wanting to stand out. But even so. He’s just got it in his head that is so much better than Kaidou at the beginning of the series. Like, dude, you're no different from him. You're the same breed of weirdo in a different font. Lol. That font is “really intentionally manipulating others’ perception of you for personal reasons.” It’s just that Kaidou’s version is much flashier than yours. I like seeing it this early on in the comic; it's interesting to see how it all started. Also, Kaidou is a lot more polite than Nendou, apologizing for talking to Saiki out of nowhere. Amusing. He absolutely knows how to behave like a normal person, but chooses not to because his persona gives him confidence.

I also like that here in the beginning of the comic, we have an unnamed guy who is was basically parroting what Kuuusuke says further on in the comic, and it’s more clearly framed as delusional weirdo behavior.

Yes, duh, he came to you because you were alone, Saiki. Weirdo behavior attracts weirdos (weirdos attract weirdos.) That's just a basic social law for ya.

Also, I laughed out loud at “okay, I’m calling you Junpei.” good response, honestly. Saiki’s narrative commentary addressed to no one in particular is always really funny.

He also seems to be egging him on in the next panel with his sarcastic remarks (wow. Your punch was soooo fast I couldn’t see it at all), though it’s never clear in this manga whether the person being spoken about can actually hear anything he’s saying in all of its dry sarcasm. My headcanon follows the lines that Saiki uses hypnosis when he’s not actively addressing them (sending telepathic messages to them), so people just hear whatever they want to hear from him. Or something like that. I’m guessing that we, the readers, are supposed to assume that they can’t hear him unless Saiki is actively sending them telepathic messages/‘broadcasts’. "I fancy you" is a strangely British way of putting it. Which also means "I like-like you" if memory serves. Translators??? strange. anyways.

Ah… XD. I forgot that Kaidou saw him teleport in the manga. That’s perfect considering Kaidou’s name joke (shunkaidou = teleportation.) wahh, I wish this one came in the tankobon volumes so I could read them.

You know… since the third chapter of this volume was adapted into the anime, can volume 0 really be called non-canon? Maybe to the manga. Hmmmmmm.

Oh come on. Why didn’t they put this in the anime??? It would have been hilarious to have Kaidou imagining some kind of green monster-humanoid hybrid and then the screen transitions to Saiki’s expressionless face, with pink limiters and green glasses. There’s an element of color that manga sadly lacks. I get the point with the black arrows, Mr. Asou, but it just isn’t quite the same without actual color.

XD Asou’s attention to detail is good. We actually see the teacher wondering where the hell he’s going when he runs out of the room, and then following through showing that he won’t be running students down just to make sure they stay in class. It’s a small thing, but it definitely makes a difference, making the Saikiverse seem a bit more realistic.

Also, look, it’s this guy who appears a bajillion chapters later in that weird gag… What was his name again? Gah… refer back to this later, future me.

Yes, Kaidou becomes a completely different person outside of his riddiculous chunnibyou persona, which he only uses at school. I do like that Asou sensei writes him this way. It would be easier to have him be in character all the time, but he’s much more realistic like this. I love that Saiki remembers the stupid nickname he gave himself. It makes the contrast even more funny. Okay, I’ll stop analyzing Kaidou and explaining every joke for now.

XD XD XD

Things like this make me wonder if Saiki really doesn’t know that’s how his looks might be interpreted at a distance… even though he understood from the verbal description that he could be perceived as having “pink horns” and “green eyes.” And he spaces out in class just thinking about it. Thoroughly neurodivergent behavior.

I also love things like this, that imply but don’t outright show that Nendou just… openly teleports in front of Nendou because he can get away with it.

I also enjoy Saiki’s stubbornness in calling Kaidou ‘Junpei.’ Peak comedy.

I love that Kaidou would rather Saiki think he has multiple personalities instead of just being polite to people outside of school. And Saiki says he appreciates the effort… lol. I think he does actually appreciate it, in a way, sarcasm aside. Kaidou is committed to the bit.

“Whether that’s true or not, you need to get to a hospital.” Lollll. But also… makes me wonder if he really believes it, again. That along with the “Kaidou personality chart” further on in this comic. From Saiki’s other confrontations with people who clearly need help (including the one where he talks down a suicidal guy. And of course Terushashi’s brother.) It’s as if it never even occurred to saiki to have a sense of urgency about these kinds of things.

Mmmm! Once again I wish I had the Japanese version because I’m sure he is using polite speech here, for a minute.

Well, at least Kaidou acknowledges here that he’s in fact a chunni and therefore doing this on purpose. Which, again, makes me wonder why Saiki would ever believe even for a second that it isn’t an intentional thing. Or maybe it’s just supposed to be taken as sarcasm outright, but the panel where Saiki is confused about the Horns Saiki drawing really is throwing me off. Another thing I should look for raws of, to see if there’s anything to be gleaned from the OG text.

YES! You and saiki are pretty similar. In a way. Yes, he is worrying about his high school debut… in a way.

Saiki, it is entirely understandable that you think Kaidou is an egomaniac, but given his “other personality,” how did you not guess that he’s just lonely??? He literally had to explain his entire thought process for you to get it??? Yeah, emotional EQ in the single digits.

Earlier, I said Kaidou knew full well how to act like a normal person and just doesn’t do it, but he’s definitely awkward. I mean, of course it’s going to be awkward asking strangers if they’ve seen a guy with green eyes, sharp teeth and horns. (I am not quite sure why Kaidou is so committed to the bit myself.)

LMAO?!?

Saiki, that’s your own goddamned fault, lmao. Put your money where your mouth is and shut him down if you’re tired of annoying people “entering your life”… :)

That wraps up 0-6.

There’s a lot going on here, to be sure. In conclusion, I think Saiki works really well here as a character who is technically omniscient, in terms of perspective, but deeply limited in his ability to interpret information.

Alright, the end. Ja mata! 💫

[running-with-toast]

Lettering sound effects in Shiori Experience

Hi! I’m Toast, the letterer on #dropout’s English translation of Shiori Experience. This series was my first time doing typesetting, and I’ve learned a lot over the two years I’ve been involved in the project. Each new chapter brings new challenges, and as our team has matured we’ve gotten more ambitious. We recently began translating the comic’s sound effects along with the dialogue, a decision which instantly doubled the size of our workload. 

Our most recent release, Chapter 64, was probably the most technically complex chapter we’ve done so far. The sound effects in this chapter were varied and complicated, presenting a number of interesting challenges. Today I thought it would be fun to give y’all a peek behind the curtain, and show the thought process and effort that goes into the adaptation of sound effects in Shiori Experience.

Shiori Experience is a music manga [citation needed], so it isn’t surprising that the sound effects can get pretty complicated. Music manga need to convey not just the sound, but more importantly the impact of a performance, conveying an auditory experience in a totally silent medium. Shiori Experience’s approach to this problem is to make the sound effects semi-diegetic objects. They hang in the air, burst out of crowds, get obscured by foreground objects, and cast shadows on their environment. This is a really cool effect, but also makes converting them from Japanese to English a fucking nightmare.

(Look at the shadows)

Shiori Experience is kind of a nightmare

In some ways, lettering for Shiori Experience isn’t actually that difficult. Sound effects in this series are goddamn everywhere and they’re fucking gigantic, but they’re always straightforward. Much like the art of the series, the sound effects are clean and angular, strong dynamic shapes which are easy to parse even if you can’t read the katakana. For a great example of this, look at this sequence from Chapter 64.

This sequence demonstrates what you can achieve with good lettering. The sound of the band is conveyed perfectly with these visuals. The clear and regular beat of the drums, the dark and energetic bass line, the screaming uncontrollable energy of the electric guitar. We didn’t even bother translating it. We didn’t need to.

But look at the sequence again. In spite of its apparent complexity, there’s only two fonts here, a dynamic block text and an angular brush. Those two fonts represent the vast majority of SFX in Shiori Experience. The rest is just text effects and perspective tricks.

So to convert these sound effects into English, we just have to find equivalent fonts. It took me a while to pin down a set of fonts I was happy with. For the pointy brush font I eventually settled on Jolly Lodger, a brush font with a sort of piratey vibe. I’m still not 100% satisfied with this conversion, it isn’t as pointy as the original, but it’s good enough for now.

And for the big block font I chose Boogaloo. It looks a little thin when it’s on its own like this, but it really bulks up with the right text effects.

Great! We’ve got our fonts! Doing the sound effects should be as simple as erasing the old text and replacing it with the new text, right? Wrong. The nightmare begins.

Different approaches

There are several schools of thought when it comes to lettering manga SFX. One is the "keikkaku means plan" approach. In a translator's note outside the panel, or in plain text near the SFX, describe what the sound is. This is incredibly easy. This is also lame.

(This is from the official release of Dungeon Meshi. I wouldn’t want to redraw this one either, but like, come on guys.)

Another school of thought is style matching. Similar to the translator’s note approach, but rather than plain text, the translation uses similar text effects to the original SFX. This works fine, but it can create a lot of visual clutter if implemented poorly.

(This is from Drifting Dragons. Please read Drifting Dragons.)

The last approach is full replacement. In this approach, the original SFX is (are you ready for this?) fully replaced by the new SFX.

SFX Redrawing

Replacing a sound effect isn’t as simple as just erasing it. We work with tankoban pages, scans of the Japanese volume release. These files are flattened, with the art and text all on one layer as a single image. We can’t just disable the text. In order to remove the original SFX, we have to redraw them.

(for context this is from when I had covid)

Redrawing means recreating the art hidden by the original SFX. This is a complex process, requiring a steady hand, sharp eyes, and  a lot of guesswork. Since we don’t know what precisely is underneath the original SFX, we have to use context to reconstruct it. The goal of any localization is to make the translation invisible to the reader. The same principle holds true in redrawing. The art we add needs to be invisible, meshing seamlessly with the original artwork.

(I made this dude up out of whole cloth. I’m honestly really proud of how he came out.)

#Dropout uses a mix of style matching and full replacement, with the choice between the two being determined by a number of factors. To illustrate that decision-making process, let’s break down the process of redrawing a page of Shiori Experience, specifically the spread across pages 172 and 173 from Chapter 64.

Deciding between Style Match and Full Replacement

This is the original untranslated page, and there’s a lot going on.

In the background of the first panel is the sound of the band, バアアアン, phonetically translated as "BA-A-A-A-N", localized as “BWAAAM”. In the foreground is the cheering of the crowd, ボオワアアア, "BO-O-WA-A-A-A" phonetically, “ROOAAR” localized. Lastly, along the side of panels 3 through 6 is applause, パチ, "PA-CHI", “CLAP”.

At a glance, this page is overwhelming. The cheering sound effect is huge, with custom text effects conveying the energy of the crowd. Worse is the clapping, which overlays multiple panels with dozens of unique partially obscured faces. This looks like a pain in the ass to redraw, but in the end I decided to do a full replacement instead of a simpler style match. With the number and size of the SFX combined with the visual density of the panels, doing a style match would result in a cluttered unreadable mess. Too much of the original artwork would be covered, and there just isn’t enough space. So, full replacement.

The redrawing process

As I’ve gained more experience, it’s been surprising to learn what constitutes a difficult redraw. You’d expect crowd shots to be the hardest, with lots of unique faces and little details, but they actually aren’t that bad IMO. More detail means more context means less guessing. Definitely a lot of work, but not difficult. Meanwhile, something like a gradient or screentone pattern which looks simple is actually a goddamn nightmare to recreate, as we'll see later.

That’s why I started my redraw for this page with the clapping. Again, this looks like it would be really hard, but looks can be deceiving. There’s a lot of clapping, yes, but the text is thin and spaced out. Whiting out the text reveals just how little artwork is actually hidden by the sound effects.

After whiting out the original text, the next step is connecting as many existing lines as I can. I do the panel and bubble borders on a separate layer since they’re simple structural elements. The artwork itself requires a bit more thought. I need to examine the original artwork carefully to avoid connecting lines that shouldn’t be connected. Context can also provide guidance where there are no lines to connect, such as the cheering guy’s hat in the first panel, or the clapping hand in the second panel. Also, when there’s lots of little SFX like this it’s easy to miss a few lines, like the box thing near the bottom of the last panel (don’t worry I catch it later).

The last step is adding in all the inking and screentones, the pattern templates which fill in the “color” to the line work. I have to go through with the clone stamp tool, collect samples from the image, and extend the pattern to fill the blank areas. This is the most annoying step in the process for me, because it requires a level of precision even beyond what’s required for the line work. Humans are pattern-recognition machines. Our brains are really good at catching tiny discrepancies, like when a section of a pattern doesn’t quite line up with the rest of it. My patch job on this panel wasn’t perfect, and you can see where I couldn’t quite line things up in areas like the guy’s checkered shirt in the first panel.

And with that, this redraw is complete! Now it’s time to insert the English translation of the sound effect.

SFX Lettering

The clapping SFX is in that same brush font I pointed out earlier, which we use JollyLodger for. There’s no real perspective things or text effects here, so mimicking the original isn’t difficult. Here’s the before and after.

This approach of fully redrawing the old SFX before inserting the new SFX only works in situations like this, where the text is small and there’s enough detail to reconstruct the image with a high level of confidence. As an SFX gets larger, like the roar of a crowd, the harder it gets to fully replace. This calls for a different approach.

Because of the size and complexity of this sound effect, I decided to do the lettering first. This is the block font I identified earlier, which is replaced by Boogaloo. I do some basic manipulation right away, applying a black outline and distorting the text to create the same perspective effect as the original. The SFX in this series are subtly three-dimensional, and the replacement text needs to be in the same orientation to sell the effect.

I’m also being careful with my placement here, doing my best to align the new text with the old. This will be important later.

Next we need to recreate the distortion effect. Photoshop has functionality to mimic this kind of effect, but I opted to do it manually. Osada (the mangaka) does all these layouts, SFX and all, on paper. The original effect was hand drawn, so the replacement effect is hand drawn.

The lettering for this effect is now complete, and we can begin the redraw process. Since we already have the letters in place, we have the advantage of knowing exactly where a redraw is needed, turning what would otherwise have been an enormous replacement into a minor patch job. From here, it’s the same process as the clapping SFX: Raw, Blank, Line, Fill.

Minor sidebar: translating Japanese sound effects presents an interesting and incredibly niche problem. The katakana symbol オ is translated phonetically as “o”. The problem with that is that when you’re replacing a オ with an O in a sound effect, the hole of the O is positions right on the center of the オ. This makes オ really annoying to redraw. Every O turns into a little window of totally new art, with barely any reference points to draw from. It violates the principle of invisibility, but there’s really no way around it. You can see I got a little lazy here, and clonestamped a different section of the crowd into the hole. As long as I don’t draw attention to it nobody will notice. I hope.

Sidebar over. Just for fun, here’s the before and after for the whole page.

Closing thoughts

So that’s what it takes to do the sound effects for one page of Shiori Experience. This page alone took me multiple days to complete, and it wasn’t even the most complicated page in this chapter. It isn’t why our releases take so long (that can be laid at the feet of staffing and scheduling issues), but hopefully I’ve given you a sense of how much work goes into each new chapter.

This chapter would have taken even longer without the help of Adi and Bangistus, who pitched in on a lot of the smaller SFX. Up until now the lettering of this series has been a solo show, Toast all the way down. Now that Adi and Bang are on the team I’m still keeping most of the big pages for myself, but being able to toss to the others when I get overwhelmed is going to be invaluable. Hopefully I can rely on them in the future as well, there’s some big things coming down the pipe

This series is a labor of love. Sometimes frustrating, often exhausting, but always worth it. I owe this series a lot, and I hope it shows in the work I put into it. I think it would be fun to do more behind the scenes process content like this, so maybe keep an eye out for that in the future.

Lastly, just as a status update, #dropout is not dropping Shiori Experience.  We have a temporary translator who’s helping us put together Chapter 65, which will be coming out Eventually™. Not as long as last time, but like always don’t hold your breath. We’re not sure what will happen after 65 drops. We’re still desperately hiring for a main translator, seriously if you know anybody please hit me up.

That’s all from me. Take care y’all.

[sidecharactersdomatter]

Thoughts I had during TGCF Season 2 Ep 1

I’ve finished my quarter and I am spending my spring break reacting to Season 2! Let’s make this reaction series count!

-Welcome back to Puqi Village people, at morning and known for their chestnuts!  (The best nuts I’ve had outta the packet!)

-We are back at Puqi Shrine people!

-And the Altar is packed!

-Instrumental Hong Jue!!!

-Did he oversleep?

-Aww he’s so lonely! :’(

-Dang.  That is a clear stream

-Eeeeyep, he is thirsty!

-And a water droplet fell past his freaking throat!  They just had to animate that!

-It’s the same ring from last Ep!

-You mean, ‘Gege’ Yeah, I’ve already typed this, “I watch the English Dub religiously” Don’t judge me!

-It is the same ring people!!!

-Oooh he hid it!

-Yep like two years for us in 2023

-Oh her eye bags got deeper and darker

-Welp it just got serious

-Looks like we’re back in heaven

-They added 3D palace shots and camera panning

-Woah that was a really good transition with the bell toll

-I wonder what kept the emperor all season…

-Feng Xin!

-Mu Qing!

-It’s that female Blue robed NPC from Ep 4 on his far left!

-*Looks at how the camera pans up to the Heavenly Capital* My Oc Qing Tao is like: The Oldest Enemy I know, stairs…

-New opening people woo!!!

-New opening animation had me sold!!!  They really improved 2 years later

-I love how the music switches from a majestic powerful orchestra tune to a comical xylophone like leitmotif upon introducing Xie Lian.  To say, “And then there’s that guy.  Then there’s that guy.”

-Social Distancing, Ancient Chinese Pantheon Style

-Man tough crowd today!

-And after every official flees the Trash god, one of my Junior Official OCs, Long He goes, “Huh, who is that dude?”  And then his dad, a Civil God will say, “That dude is the Crown Prince of Xianle.  His highness crown prince Xie Lian!” And then that Civil god begrudgingly brings his palm to his face.

-*Hears Mengyou calling his highness*: Ladies, Gentlemen and Enby friends, Him!

-This has the energy of giving someone a lanyard pass to visit a certain building

-“It’s not that hard!”  “You ascended hundreds of years ago you know better!” “Now keep it with you!”  Only like 4 minutes into the first Ep and that NPC is already getting the best lines.  (More of Lang Qianqiu’s trusty assistant later this season folks!)

-He sounds just like the English actor for Elam, Justin Briner, from the Heroic Legend of Arslan (another awesome historical manga!)  Coincidentally, Elam is also one of Arslan’s most trusted Allies.

-I can’t wait to write more of my ATLA x TGCF crossover, The Scrap Immortal and the Avatar, just imagine the Gaang’s reaction to learning that there’s more than one crown prince worshipped!

-Man, it’s like I always say, “The rumor mill’s always a’runnin!”  Or water wheel since it’s ancient China

-Hi Ling Wen, man what kind of product did she use to hide those eye bags???

-I’ve started reading the Manhua series so, Huh? No cursed shackle?

-It’s been days and you still haven’t found the Moldy faced boy from Episode 3???

-I also can’t wait to write Aangs reaction inside that huge throne room, (“It’s bigger than the one in Ba Sing Se!”)

-Now we’re actually seeing the emperor, the first time was in the Episode 1 flashback near the end

-Now we get the first appearance of Pei Ming, who appeared in the Flashback of Ep 3

-Well that sounded patronizing coming from Pei Ming

-Now Pei Xiu has to reap what he sowed.

-Yep that’s a kill count

-I love how this next scene is basically,

Pei Ming: Your Highness, please tell everyone who accompanied you?  Then Xie Lian starts to compose an alibi:  Ah yes!  I will do that.  It was incredible!  What did we get swept in a sandstorm or something?  Oh yes! It was just a youth in red robes who was knowledgeable about the Ban Yue kingdom.  <- This incorrect quote is inspired by Zuko and Iroh lying to Commander Zhao about the state of their ship in episode 3, The Southern Air Temple.  (Does anyone else think that Xie Lian, is what would happen if you combined both Iroh and Zuko?)

-The face Xie Lian made when he’s trying to keep fibbing and brought his index finger to his cheek that was good body language

-Hi Windmaster.

-Oooh Feng Xin and Mu Qing

-Welp you tried keeping him innocent Xie Lian

-Not as complicated as your love life, maybe I should do a Pei Ming roast count?

-Hey Xie Lian is smarter than you look

-Pei Xiu still wants to protect Ban Yue even facing his impending banishment.

-Ok that line and Pei Ming’s attempt to kick Pei Xiu does seem like an abusive action in my perspective.

-Woah, and that was Jun Wu’s own gavel.

-Well that was a short trial

-Him calling Xie Lian to stay, has the exact energy of a teacher calling one student to stay after class to talk.

-Ling Wen is now talking with Jun Wu

- Now that was a really brief meet up between the Xianle trio.

-Thank you Wind Master, and they are a savage!

-Well he’s still mad

-*Sees Qianqiu still asleep standing up*: XDXDXDXDXD

-Aw he woke him up!

-Don’t worry honey, you didn’t miss much anyway

-How in the heck was he able to doze off through all that shouting. I almost fell asleep in a lecture and that’s nothing compared to TaiHua’s feat

-*Hears Jun Wu speak like*: Oh gods! Why did they have to make him sound so seductive! He’s like an East Asian Belos! (And I’m still busy working on Murder They Cast’s first phase)

-Oh Xie Lian’s expression when Jun Wu talks to him, it’s concerning!

-That soft “forgive me”

-I mean we learned about his huge failure in Season 1

-“How Disappointing!” STOP!!!

-Oooh I didn’t notice this during the rewatch but they played a stringed instrumental version of Bu San.

-Srsly HOW BIG IS HIS FREAKING PALACE?!?!?!

-A mural of heaven

-You gotta love Xie Lian’s modesty

-“Such a low opinion” yep his voice is like liquid gold and it is pure torture!

-“How’d you seduce trouble this time!” That tease in his voice why!!!!

-Aw good for you Xie Lian

-Just you wait till the second half of this season

-It’s their version of shooting a flare gun

-Oooh from left to right is Feng Xin, an unknown person behind him, next there’s Ling Wen(with what happens later in the series), Lang Qianqiu in the middle, Mu Qing is next, then there’s Pei Ming in front of him, and the last guy might be Quan’s Yizhen since he also appears in the 2nd half of the series. I hope I found every martial god

-Also the Thunder Master (my OC Leishi) tends to work part time

-There are retired officials???

-In tsiata (my TGCF x ATLA crossover, The Scrap immortal and the Avatar) Ghost City is more modernized than the Spirit World, since it’s mostly untamed wilderness

-Oh he had balls defending San Lang people

-“Your majesty makes me sound like a little princess” yeah that’s what you are honey

-That pose! I was watching this ep with my older sister and she said, “Man is draping himself!”

-He’s gonna touch the scimitar, isn’t he? (I’ve watched clips of Season 2 before doing my reaction posts)

-And Xie Lian still has the best preferences good on him!

-Xianle trio mention

- And I still think clearing the debt should’ve taken longer, but that’s just my small nitpick

-Yeah nobody round here can keep a secret

- *Sees Jun Wu walk up to Xie Lian reminding him to be careful and puts his hand on his shoulder*: That’s too much pressure!!!

- “I had it erected for you.” James Cheek totally had fun writing Season 2’s script

-I can see why he prefers his own shrine over how massive and opulent his new palace is.

-Hi Windmaster

-Ooh a pond reflection

-Yep that’s your traveling parter

-Then he just fans himself and he instantly slays

-Jacob Eiseman had fun with his performance and ate up every crumb

-Windmaster is Genderfluid Bisexual culture people!

- “Thoroughly~” Yep that just slayed me I’m down

-Yeah Qingxuan’s cultivation backstory is gonna age like curdled milk in Book 4

-Man I just love all of Xie Lian and Shi Qingxuan’s interactions with each other!

-Xie Lian, honey, you are way too good to be a tumor, trust me

-I love how Qingxuan also defended Ban Yue from Pei Ming

-“You were my kind of crazy” I love how Shi Qingxuan and Xie Lian instantly became besties

-Dude, Qingxuan puts the “fun” in function in both forms!

-This is exactly the reason I made my Thunder master OC Leishi female too.

-Now I gotta draw Xie Lian’s female form

-Yeah I react the same when letting a small amount of alcohol in my system

-The witching hour

-To quote a well known assassin Yor Forger, “No way I’m doing this sober”

-That one wrinkled ghost did not age gracefully

-Yeah their burial grounds are in Taiwan, awesome island I definitely need to visit

- Why did they have to design every Heavenly Official to be so Attractive???

-It’s the Spirit World from Spirited Away

-Ghost City would seem like a more modern area than the Spirit World in the Last Airbender

-The heck’s this confetti

-Ooh I like the green dressed spirit with the dark bamboo hat

-Hi Jian Lan

Literally any of my young adults would react to a promiscuous person with just one word in annoyance, “Prostitutes…”

-Honey Xie Lian is already outta your league, try finding someone else that’s your type

-Yeah you didn’t have to tell everyone about your medical condition, heck I don’t even want to picture the Gaang’s reaction after hearing it

-Ghost City is the Las Vegas of Ancient China

-Bouncers

-I love the female NPC that greeted Xie Lian she has a great voice and design

-Oh I know who that is

-He clutched his heart!

-“No thanks~” *Instantly fans myself*

-The camera pan to this throne!!! He is gay and he means business!!!

-James Cheek has ate it up!!!

-The soft “San Lang”

That was an awesome start to the Second Season. Sorry if I haven’t been posting I’m four weeks into my quarter and I also got back into writing fanfic, like the first chap of The scrap immortal and the Avatar. I’ll still do every reaction to Season 2 on weekends!