#Ryogo Narita

[shibaleeart]

Read that CANON side story where a succubus tried to seduce Shizuo by turning into Izaya

[narwhalpanda]

Ryogo Narita, the author of Durarara and Baccano, has a new show and it has kind of isekai initial premise which worried me at the start but i can assure you all that so far it fucks severely and after two episodes it is set up for a really fun urban fantasy

Dead Mount Death Play is the name, check it out

[tori-go-ya02]

成田作品ログ 2023/04/02～10/01

[shocotate]

The latest Baccano book in Japan was released in 2016, so now the English versions have also caught up in May 2023. Here are the 22 current books on my shelf.

[nirbanox]

Sōya Azashiro

The only person we know is in Muken beyond Aizen is the 8th Kenpachi, Sōya Azashiro (Kenpachi Azashiro), who is hundreds of years after the Gotei formed.

He's a novel character, from "Spirits Are Forever With You"

Here's the quick rundown:

Strong child who got Bankai Young like Hitsugaya

Bankai ability is to fuse with his surroundings and he can do shit like make himself dissapear from your vision or make himself untouchable

He fused with the entire sereitei and could hear all that was happening there

Approximately 250 years ago he "learned something he shouldn't", apperently a grave crime that is not expanded upon in the novel, however it's clear that he learned the true nature of the world considering what we know now

All captian class soul reapers move to arrest him for this

They can't kill him, as he was literally fused with the sereitei at the time

Squad 0 Gets is going to be called down

He surrenders

gets thrown in the muken

[sunflowersandcherryblossoms]

This is stupid.

I can't even begin to tell you how stupid this is...

Not the concept of an Ancestral Zanpakuto! That doesn't bother me.

What bothers me is Narita's inability to come up with an original name for the Kuchiki Clan Ancestral sword, picking up on the one that would be quite impossible to be THE ancestral sword!

Muramasa was already presented to us in the Zanpakuto Rebellion Arc.

It was Kōga's sword. Kōga was only a Kuchiki by marriage. And he was already a Shinigami when he married Kuchiki Ginrei's daughter.

Which means he already had Muramasa!

And even so, an Ancestral Zanpakuto would only be passed onto a CLAN MEMBER BY BLOOD, that the Zanpakuto itself would choose, (Or, in Enrakyoten's case, be simply taken and subdued by it's user, like Tokinada did...) not to a stranger that simply married into the family...

So, let me tell you how fucking fast I'm ignoring this and get straight to making up my very own Kuchiki Clan Ancestral Zanpakuto!

[victoriadallonfan]

Are there any other Dead Mount Death Play enjoyers here

[amefuyuu]

I really don’t know how to properly describe how special and nostalgic Durarara!!! Is for both me and plenty of other anime fans. I didn’t get into it until the time when ketsu x2 was coming out but even then, I adored the fandom and all the content surrounding the show. Nowadays everyone KNOWS of drrr but no one talks about it or makes as much content for it. It’s both melancholic and heartbreaking to see a series you love so much and that was such a fundamental part of your online experience become a relic of times past. Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock and re-live those days because as cringe as they may have been, they were truly some of the best times I’ve had.

[magerywrites]

I should probably add some justification for proposing Fate doesn't really know who Ninshubur is, so let me elaborate. First and foremost, as far as I can determine, Fate interprets Ishtar almost exclusively from the Epic with the occasional flutter in the direction of the Descent.

It's aware that some of her other myths exist, but when I say almost exclusively from the Epic I mean things like how Archer Ishtar's material entry poorly paraphrases a quote from Enki in Enki and the World Order—who notes to Ishtar that "you destroy what should not be destroyed; you create what should not be created"—to report it instead as "Inanna? Is she not the most annoying goddess in the world!? She will destroy something that certainly does not need to be destroyed, and she will also create something that does not need to be created!" and attributes it to Gilgamesh.

Nasu, I'm very happy for you, and I'm going to let you finish, but I have read several different translations of the Epic, two of which are sitting on my desk as I write this, and our boy Gilly-P does not at any point say those words in that order.

Anyway. Speaking of an occasional flutter in the direction of the Descent, yes, Ninshubur has a major role in the Descent. However, of all the deities who feature in it outside of Inanna and Ereshkigal, Fate only ever acknowledges Dumuzi, who, likely not coincidentally, is also the only one of those deities the Epic mentions in relation to Ishtar.

Stepping outside those two myths, Narita references Enheduanna in Strange Fake, which is an unexpected flex, and part of Ishtar's improved characterisation may be drawn from how Enheduanna speaks of Ishtar in the Exaltation and the Hymn. However, I'm strongly inclined to put that down instead to the fact that Narita—based on this section of his author's note at the end of of Volume 4—actually just genuinely thinks Ishtar's neat and is willing to write her far more charitably because of it. He's very plainly still drawing from the Epic, not just because of the way he writes Ishtar's personality, feats, and general description but because, well, one of the lynchpins of the entire story revolves around the entangled relationships between Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Ishtar, and Humbaba. It's fairly obvious where the man's coming from; it's simply that he's also willing to grant Ishtar genuine grandeur and dignity in the process, which cannot be said for Grand Order.

Overall, I'm forced to draw the conclusion that Fate just doesn't really care about any Ishtar content outside of the Epic, which, as a corollary, means it just doesn't really care about Ninshubur either. We will never get a meaningful Ninshubur—at best we'll get a passing reference like Enheduanna does—so she might as well not exist for its purposes. She's outside of its very specific snapshot of a limited array of characters, so we can ride as eternal, shiny, and chrome as we like out here on the borderlands.

To be clear, there's an obvious appeal to Fate's approach: when you're bouncing around so many mythological systems to put together your own spin on all of it, you kind of have to not get lost in the sauce, especially when you can't guarantee how many sources are even available in your native language. This is doubly relevant in the case of Mesopotamia, given that Gilgamesh has played a starring role since Stay Night—the Epic was always going to be Nasu's first stop for anything Ishtar, and it's not like Fate treats mythology in general as much more than a series of stories to adapt and play with in service of the stories it wants to tell. In the end, it's a largely reasonable approach even though it regularly results in unreasonable things.

I just like to dream of a world where somebody at Type Moon shared my specific hyperfixation too.

Look at her! Isn't she great? I think she's great.

(Source is Fate/Strange Fake Volume 5; artist is Morii Shizuki.)

Can I pretend that Ishtar really likes Haruri because she looks like Ninshubur?

It depends on how attached you are to Fate canon!

As you likely already know if you're asking me this question, but which I shall explain for the more general audience, in Strange Fake Ishtar has two main reasons for liking Haruri and deciding to protect her.

One of them is that, despite using magecraft, Haruri's values, opinions, and beliefs mean she's still "human", rather than a "mage", concepts Ishtar draws an important distinction between.

(There's honestly a lot to talk about in Strange Fake about Ishtar's relationship with humanity. It's not just in her big declarations about watching over them and ruling them, or how she can "find something to enjoy even in the most awkward of dances, as long as you never abandon your humanity", but also in the little things like how Enkidu notes that all the gods "except Ishtar and Ereshkigal" thought Humbaba was a "complete human being". But that's beyond the scope of this ask.)

The other, which I was alluding to in my initial response, is that Haruri's name "was kinda similar" to Siduri's name—that's the "deep reason" Ishtar has for naming Haruri her high priestess. Ishtar's instincts "couldn't possibly choose the wrong person", so that similarity was enough.

But it means that Ishtar's first association with Haruri is Siduri, not Ninshubur. If she had thought of Ninshubur first, she probably would have said something to that effect.

However, if you're willing to step beyond Fate canon, you arrive at a space far more rife with possibility.

By that, I mean it's an even bet if Fate even genuinely knows Ninshubur exists, so go wild, comrade.

Spread the Haruri-Ninshubur word!

Hell, go above and beyond and make it a little fruity: see this speculative essay by someone whose Mespotamian expertise makes me look like a flailing child.

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

enkidu hates her so much i can't hfjdskfh... every chance they get

[aeruii]

Dead Mount Death Play looks cool but being written by Ryogo Narita makes it even cooler!

[littleeyesofpallas]

How do you feel about Ikomikidomoe and hikone? I personally think they’re nice additions to the world but I’ve barely seen anyone else talk about them 

I think I did a post on that at some point actually, but I'm not in a position to go digging thru my archive on mobile. (found it, but it's mostly just poking at kanji in names rather than really commenting on the characters themselves, so I guess I can do more of that here.)

Broadly speaking I'm not really big on the LNs, least of all Narita Ryogo's. I know he is kind of the most beloved of the ancillary creators for actually addressing many of Kubo's obnoxious loose ends, my main beef with him is that even though he ties a lot of them off he never ties them off satisfactorily, and seemingly just for the sake of saying he did it; there's generally no thematic meat to any of it, all his hooksjust kinda amount to shuffling around Kubo's left overs. And granted, maybe that's a little harsh or unfair of an assessment, but I'm also not a big fan of light novels as a gimmicky genre/format to begin with, so take all that with a grain of salt.

Anyway. Of all the things he did over course of three books in Can't Fear Your Own World, I do think Hikone was a really neat idea. I like the general idea of exploring artificial souls and synthetic life forms and the hybrid spirits and how that all relates to the nature of the soulking as a lynchpin of reality, I'm just not super about the specific plot he built around it all.

I'm not especially in love with Ikomikidomoe specifically, I feel like it either needed more or just different lore or that it could have been done without entirely. I really think Hikone being an artificial god candidate and the nature of what that means and as an excuse to explore how the other canonical attempts to replace god could/would have gone was enough to center a story around. In particular I was already not super fond of some of the late throw away lore additions about zanpakutou that exist independent of a singular individual. (ala Nanao's family sword, and Oh-etsu's harem). I feel like it raised a lot of questions that got immediately swept under the rug and added nothing of value to the lore at large. I don't implicitly hate the idea of a zanpakutou that embodies a different kind of identity apart from that of an individual wielder, but that idea feels like it requires a LOT of additional explaining that we never got. So the fact that Tsunayashiro has an ancestral sword for no particularly meaningful reason, and that Ikomikidomoe has its whole convoluted backstory always kind of annoyed me.

It's a shame too because Narita seems to ever so slightly brush up against an idea that Kubo himself danced around in world building --that the identity manifested in one's inner world as a sword spirit, and the mask a hollow forms from its heart are the same thing, and thus a Menos accumulating myriad hollows within itself to consolidate into one uniform identity is basically the same process as what Oh-etsu describes is behind creating an Asauchi. So the idea of a powerful hollow becoming a zanpakutou or something similar has precedent, but the weird convoluted choice to make Ikomikidomoe specifically a product of Ichibee and Oh-etsu's intervention, rather than a natural consequence of a Menos ascending toward Vastolorde doesn't sit well with me.

On a side note, it bugs me that Kubo just casually threw in the idea that Asauchi are made of, what, hundreds if not thousands of shinigami souls(?) and then just NEVER addressed this weird implication that Soul Society, and Oh-etsu personally, have just, like, institutionally and systematically been committing mass genocides on the regular for all of recorded history? Huge huge mess of a world building flub. Not that it "couldn't" be answered, but that it wasn't, and that the effort it would take to patch up the apparent plot holes it introduces would just be so much effort for the sake of nothing but maintaining the status quo of the story.

Since you've got me in this rant, it's almost the same with the Ouken thing. I'm already not fond of the awkward retcon(ish) thing Kubo did with making the keys the bones of the Royal Guard as if that somehow answered any questions, when the bigger issue had been the idea that, literal key or not, each of the royal guard members was implicitly baptized in the fire of an apparent Sodom & Gomorrah catastrophes with whole cities or other swathes of land, densely packed with living, spiritually aware people being scraped off the face of the earth, ala Aizen's unfulfilled (and frankly Kubo's seemingly half forgotten) plans for Karakura.

And in the face of that weirdness there was a fun unaddressed parallel in the Royal Guard's private "cities" floating up in the royal realm with the king's palace looking like the perfect inversion of the hypothetical hole in the ground we were shown during the Ouken explanation. Were those cities populated? By whom?? Or were they empty? I don't know which possibility is more interesting to explore; that the royal guard each had a whole cult of ascended spirits living with them, each under the domain of one guard, or that the guard just lived in the hollow shells of the sacrifice it took for them to ascend alone to nigh demi-god status.

Was it that the ouken itself was the condensed souls of thousands of people, just like the later reveal about both the asauchi and White, and they died or were otherwise sacrificed to make this object(or i guess imbue the object that is living bones into becoming it(?) god the bone keys thing was dumb...), or did the souls serve some other purpose? Could it have been that rather than melting down living souls to make the key, as was kind of implied, that to create or imbue a key with the power required to function as the ouken it simply needed the presence of those souls? Did access to the god realm require being actively worshipped as a god, by thousands of people, a united spiritual power of a singleminded cult, a city of followers united in ascending the key holder into the realm of god? Who the hell knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But on that level, you'd think that's the same as the idea of a family zanpakutou, right? If the zanpkautou imprints or a person to reflect their true inner self which then grows stronger and gains power in the material world thru acknowledging and reconciling with, then implicitly the idea of a zanpakutou shared by a family would imply that its spirit is not a reflection of one person's singular traits, but those shared consistently across generations and in exchange for the lack of personal identity it confers the strength of literally multiple people's worth of power, just all reflected in a single persona.(or maybe not, i dunno, maybe the inner world of a family zanpakutou has some atlab avatar state stuff going on, who knows? Probably not Kubo.) What was the Soukyoku's giant execution blade, its destructive power conspicuously described in a measure of zanpakutou, if not a massive communal zanpakutou?(complete with its own spirit manifest as a phoenix) And what is Ichigo's inner spirit of a younger Yhwach if not the communal spirit of the Quincy bloodline? Andi n the context of these sorts of escalations of scale and power, is then the soul king actually a "human soul" in the way the cycle of human/quincy and shinigami and hollow all traffic in the same base elemental "stuff"? Or was the Soul King not that type of a "person" at all, and just a giant collective zanpakutou, a singular spirit reflecting the inner truth of humanity as a whole, and his "bankai" the wheel of reincarnation itself. Anyway that's veering too far off into speculation and potential headcanon.

Getting back to Hikone, though... I like the idea of there being various different approaches to achieving the hybrid spirit form seemingly central to god status. Ichigo was naturally synthesized that way by the circumstances of his birth, Aizen used the hougyoku and "science" to forcibly and unnaturally synthetize himself, Yhwach was seemingly born not by actively joining disparate elements together but by simply being an offshoot of something that was already a hybrid... And then there's Hikone... and while I feel like plot wise there are a lot of issues to there just having been the means to synthesize artificial life just floating around in the background, while characters like Mayuri and Urahara and even Aizen are out there actively struggling with the process, but I like the idea of a kind of middle ground where, ignoring the stupid contrivance of the Gremmy brain thing, Hikone's fundamental contraction isn't quite artificial "life" in the spiritual sense that Bleach deals in so much as it is a "body" without a brain.

But I like the implicit idea of having to draw a line around that. If you can make a thing that fulfills most of the requirements of life, then which things reserved for living personhood can it do and which can it not? If you elevate that to the level of godhood, then it's a fun question that in the grand scheme of things where apparently someone needs to be stripped of their autonomy and sit in the crystal for forever to hold the world together, then can it just be a fake person with no autonomy to lose in the first place? Where as Aizen thought being god would be cool(and was very probably wrong), and Yhwach doesn't seem to want to be god so much as remove him and replace him with ???(unconfirmed: in which it seemed like(ironically) plan A was originally Juugram, and plan B was Uryuu), Hikone is the Indiana Jones rock and the golden idol solution to the problem: Can I just swap god out for this god-shaped bag of rocks and get away with it?

I'm sorry between being at work, and googling images, and then making this silly edit now, I've totally lost my train of thought... Uh... to summarize:

I like Hikone as an idea: I like "synthetic god" as a plot hook.

I like their name having associations with silk and, like, silk worms, as if they were spun and woven like a fiber but also with cocoon imagery attached.

I also think they're a super cute design.

I'd have liked the artificial souls to have more of plot behind them: like what are Urahara and Mayrui's actual goals in making them in the first place, other than just mad science for mad science's sake

I'd have liked for Ichigo's(and Aizen's for that matter; like how was it different and/or insufficient by comparison to Ichgio, or Yhwach or Hikone) hybrid theme to have a better actual conclusion.

I'd have liked better exploration of the nature of god souls and what that requires/means

[tori-go-ya02]

成田作品ログ

2023/11/05～2024/02/15

[lapinaraoflimbo]

Opening up, Dead Mount Death Play presents itself as a generic edgy Isekai. As far as the edge goes it's pretty good. Lots of blood and fodder, the big villain is a giant skeleton with a brain in a jar where its heart should be. The hero has a tragic past but is doing the right thing for the world.

The pivot comes like it would for any Isekai. The protagonist dies and gets resurrected in a different world- only this time the new world they come to is our world. The second twist, is that the protagonist of the story is that giant skeleton monster who's heart is a brain in a jar.

The third pivot of the series is a much more subtle one. But it's one that becomes more noticable if you are familiar with the other works of the author- Ryogo Narita. You see it in the way it starts to drop these characters throughout the story. Every one of these characters becomes fleshed out in a way so few characters get to be fleshed out. Every one has complex motivations and lives that move at a breakneck pace and all of them are wound up tight and ready to break into a grand cacophony that will consume them all.

The twist then, is that this is not an Isekai or a reverse Isekai. This is a Ryogo Narita story where one of the characters happens to be from a different world. This twist may seem like it would be a bad one. After all we have other stories from Ryogo Narita. Certainly after a point this same story format told over and over would become boring, and would adding in a slightly different shade of magic and some slight tweaks to the characters of the story really be that exciting?

Well the answer to that is that no, Narita is good enough at storytelling and character writing that nothing feels like it is copied over. Sure, there might be an assassin in Dead Mount Death Play and an assassin in Bacano and an assassin in Durarara. And from the surface it feels like they occupy the same niches. They are assassins, they all tend to be a little bit insane- typically in "you gotta love them" or at least a "you gotta love to hate them" sort of way. But the nuances and complexities go so deep it colors them in completely different lights. The same character could be copy and pasted from one story to the next, but the people they're surrounded by, the organizations they work for, the hits that they have to kill, the activities they get up to after work. All of them would branch out to make it seem like the characters were entirely and completely different in a fundamental way.

That is not to say that any characters are copy pasted versions of any other characters. It's to say that the way characters get written by Narita makes them all connected. Durarara itself is a character comprised of characters and the webs of those character interactions. There is no true individuality in these stories. Nobody can be isolated and analyzed without acknowledging the affect they have on others and the effect that others have on them. Each story by Narita is a testament to how complex the world we live in truly is and how beautiful and ugly those complex webs of connection really are.

It's this reason why Dead Mount Death Play doesn't come across in the same way other edgy anime do. Narita understands and writes characters in such a brilliant way that no matter who those characters are or what world they inhabit it becomes a reflection of our own lives and the disparate connections we are constantly making and losing- and the way that we are constantly changed by it.

[azdoine]

there's a lot you could complain about wrt Can't Fear Your Own World but i still kind of adore that Ryogo Narita's new OP OC character is a nonbinary 10 year old frankenstein designed to attack and dethrone god

[the8thsphynx]

Hiiii would you do Ginjo for the ask meme???

*vibrates*

favorite thing about them:

Fucking Look At Him.

Idk, I love how he’s the best of both worlds. We saw him as the alcoholic depressed dad friend and also as the unashamed bastard man. Get You a Man Who Can Do Both.

I’m also very in love with his Shikai/Secondary form with the skeleton armor. Jesus. *chef’s kiss*

he probably fs nasty lessgo

least favorite thing about them:

The wasted potential. Oh my fucking god. Fullbring Arc was so rushed and unfinished that we had to wait for Ryogo Narita (blessed be his name) to swoop in with CFYOW and give us SOME type of substance and motivation for Ginjo.

...Also livid over his bankai form. What the hell is this?? Why does he have fur pants?? Give him the skeleton garter and thigh highs back if you aren’t gonna act right, wtf.

favorite line:

The bar scene, where Ginjo is drunk as hell and trying to convince Giriko to let him keep going and then telling Riruka that she needs to go home because it’s late.

The english dub with Travis Willingham was superb in this scene, just goin’ full loser dad mode.

brOTP:

Oh, Grimmjow, 100%. The two of them would vibe hard, I think. Plus it’s not like anyone else wants to be friends with them lmao

There’s absolutely gotta be this deeper story between Ginjo and Giriko, hence why Giriko is so loyal to him throughout everything. We saw some teases of them being buds in the BBS birthday scenes (which I guess they don’t do anymore because this game is god awful) and I just think it’d be cool to see more.

OTP:

...Also Grimmjow. Both because I can’t see Ginjo being romantic or vulnerable with anyone to have a proper relationship and it’s basically the same with Grimmjow.

Aside from how they would get along great outside of that dynamic, I think they would click well having this Unnamed Thing together. FWB who also fight and drink heavily together.

...Also a lot of the OC x Canon ships I see with Ginjo are awesome. Special shoutout to Sef and Muwitch, y’all are the MVPs.

nOTP:

Geeeehhhhhhhkkkkk you really don’t see many canon x canon Ginjo ships since he isn’t that popular of a character, but my block-on-site is GinTsuki. I’ve said it before in previous questions for this ask meme, but I put hard-stop on Adoptive Parent/Adoptee or Older Mentor/Child Student ships; GinTsuki is especially in that for me since it’s canon that Ginjo took in and raised Tsukishima since he was a young child. So it’s very much not for me and it squicks me out badly.

random headcanon:

This man is a boomer and enjoys the cringy edgelord boomer memes. You know like these ones:

unpopular opinion:

The unpopular opinion is that I like him in the first place. Welcome to the post.

song i associate with them:

Nine Inch Nails - ‘The Hand That Feeds’

favorite picture of them:

I can’t pic a favorite, so here’s just a massive fucking chunk of my Ginjo folder below the cut:

The anime didn’t have to feed us like this, but they did.

GOD he’s so lame I wanna ride his face

NO BECAUSE-- *grabs you* look how fucking remorseful he is here. Look at this motherfucker.

*rattling the bars of my cell* MAN...