#and I'm more of a manga person anyway

[13eyond13]

love it when a character that's hard to read intuitively for you has like a dedicated fandom interpreter who can just glance at their blank face in a panel and then give you a 3k word essay on their innermost thoughts & desires & fears and neatly tie it back into the themes & whatnot as if it's the most obvious thing in the world

[potatoof69]

ppl will do anything to deny a yuri ship man imagine if ochaco said "let's talk about romance" to a guy and called his smile "the cutest in the whole world".

like that shit would be canon fast nobody would deny it. and if by the end of this hypothetical bnha run ochaco had turned around and ended up with some other dude people would go insane, but bc it's wlw it's just not taken seriously.

it's like if katara had said to zuko "let's talk about romance" down in that cave or if zuko had called her cute. and then katara ends up with aang with no further mention of that. zutara shippers would be going more apeshit than they already did.

but bnha can just leave the issue hanging for 30 chapters, nearly one whole year, and then just kill off toga at the end offscreen and it's all fine i guess when izuocha inevitably happens because it has a boy and a girl instead of a girl and a girl.

[calvins-creations]

I watched all of dungeon meshi in three days. Uh.

[skrunksthatwunk]

nobody's doing it like itsuki yyh. i've been thinking about him and sensui a lot today but like. ok get this. imagine being a demon and this cute human guy (you are gay btw green hair and pronounsed and everything) shows up and tries to kill you and almost succeeds. you survive because you lament that you're gonna miss the finale of a show you watch/see a niche pop artist on tv (depending on adaptation, but either way these are your last words and it airs the next night), and he says he's into it too. you become partners. this man, shinobu sensui, is a spirit detective who's been haunted by demons his whole life, has been killing them with the complete, unwavering belief that he's right for it, since he was in pre-k. you being a demon does not seem to change how he thinks about this. it doesn't change your feelings either, since he fascinates you. you help him kill demons.

one day, your human is confronted with one of the worst sights imaginable, one that shatters his worldview completely. he sees demons being tortured and slaughtered hedonistically by a group of humans. he can't process it. he splits. your shinobu is now one of seven within his body. you love each of them. you love him. you watch as he pivots into a deep hatred of humanity, and of himself for slaughtering so many demons, and of his own inescapable humanity. you love it. you can't get enough of it. watching someone so pure and self-assured become confused, disillusioned, twisted, evil, broken, it thrills and captivates you. it's beautiful, and you egg it on. you make it worse, obsessively. you make him worse. you only want what he wants, really. but you want him to want it worse. sensui is spiraling and you don't steady him, you accelerate it and accelerate it, until he's deciding that before he dies (which will be sooner than you'd like, sooner than you know what to do with), he's going to end humanity. he's going to unleash demonkind on them and secure his redemption, his doom, his punishment. it's a baptism by fire. what a way to go. a very sensui way to go, and you love it like the rest of him: poisonously. you don't need a word of convincing, no argument (as desperate as sensui is to argue his case for this), not a second of that tape, to follow him. you watch as sensui breaks the fragile people he encounters, wrenches them into misanthropic weapons. he's amazing at it. minoru is amazing at it. he brings together his crew of heart-bleeding, self-loathing pawns, and in your downtime you and sensui watch human tv, share your love for animals, plants, the human world. you cherish, distract yourself with, and celebrate these together. they're what brought you together in the first place, and you will destroy them together. you wonder if he knows that these things he loves will surely die when the demons come. you expect he views them as necessary casualties in ridding the world of human evil. how deliciously cruel he can be. you savor it. you have to savor it. you don't like thinking about the end. that sensui will barely be alive to enjoy his victory. is he so convinced of humanity's foulness that he would never bend, never doubt his genocide at all? or would he come to regret it? would he hate himself even more than he does now? once the greater evil, humanity, is eliminated, would he turn his sights on himself? he may see himself as one of the "enlightened" humans who know mankind's evil, but he is still a human with plenty of demon blood on his hands. you want to know. you're desperate for it. you don't ask him what he thinks he will become. you want to watch it unfold naturally, for as long as he is around. let the ink bleed over the page. don't blow. don't wave the paper, don't even touch it. be patient.

your sensui is killed spectacularly at the finish line. he was struck down by a human reborn as a demon. how fitting. it's what sensui wanted, and you are happy for him, as much as you can be. it's bittersweet. you knew it would end soon. you both did. you talked about it all the time. and now it's... over. the portal is being resealed. demons will not wipe out mankind. humanity will go on, unaffected. your sensui's lonely war against his own kind is already being forgotten by the few who knew of it. such a beautiful moment, swept away by time, your sensui. and now his enemies want to claim his soul. his body. to bring him to the afterlife, for whatever judgement awaits him. and you fulfill your final obligation to him. you take him away. sensui did not want any part of that, and neither do you, not particularly. it sounds rather painful, all considered. you lift him and slip away to where no one can reach you. your own little dimension, your own little pocket of existence, just the two of you. no one can touch him now. you, either, not that you care. you hold him like you have for years, and think of your future together. here, where no one can reach him. no one will touch him or stain him or rip him or tear him ever again, not even you. but you will always be closest, and that's enough. cut off from humankind and demonkind completely. it's only you. and it's only him. you wonder how long you will live, like this. a long time. it makes no difference. sensui has broken completely, and you hold the shards of him. every piece remaining is yours, is in your arms, will be yours forever. you wonder if this should be enough for you. if you should be satisfied. you are. as someone whose last regret was missing a late night program, you don't see much point in leaving. what is there for itsuki without sensui? what is there in the world worthwhile? demons, humans, the rest of it. none of it would ever compare. not even to the shards.

you wonder, and it is far from the first or the last time, how sensui will change now, in your arms. white to black, skin to bone to dust. and when you die your soul will dissipate like his, and in a little unreality you and he will linger forever, where no one can know or recall. you will die a secret of the world, a potential wasted, a close call, a scream that is swallowed last-minute. and you will be together. it's all that's mattered for a long time. you wonder if you'll ever change. you don't expect to.

[roitaminnah]

yuri update for my yuri warriors I'm so sorry I wish I could draw girls kissing every hour of the day alas. i can barely draw at all these days. sad face. but I persist..... #yuriwarrior

[mulletmitsuya]

random tokrev rant ahead !!

when i first started this blog it was going to be for random shitposts, groupchats once in a while, and mostly tokrev analysis but i was so scared of discourse that i just chose to do the funnier stuff 😭. when tokrev was at it's peak i'd be reading 20k+ words of analysis and it was so fun!! but i felt like i couldn't word what i wanted to say properly so that discouraged me but i wish i'd ignored that because there would have been at least one person who understood what i was saying yk?

[every-sanji]

[franeridan]

I was thinking about how hug-y opla luffy is and I realised that if you strictly consider instances in which he meant to hug someone and not just hold them (so take out every single time he's picked up someone and either lugged them around or flung them across a battlefield) in the manga he hasn't actually hugged that many people at all, has he

[saph-yells-into-the-void]

the amount of DISDAIN I get from some ppl saying that blue flag is written for the straights.

girl I did not stay up til 6am reading this manga, tearing up and crying bc of how much I saw myself in characters like touma and masumi and how painfully relatable their pain/struggles were just for you to say that blue flag is for the straights

be so fr rn

[paimonial-rage]

What trope you will NEVER write ?

While there are tropes that I really don't care for (Enemies to Lovers, Childhood Friends to Lovers), I don't really think there is a trope that I wouldn't write? I think the only thing that would come close is Fake Dating. Not because I have anything against it, I just don't see how it would ever take a part in any of the fics I would want to write. And there also may be a bit of a skill issue with that one too. LOL

But as a whole, I don't really write according to tropes. I don't really care for tropes as a whole. Some of my fics may contain tropes, but it's not purposeful. I just want to tell a story in the way I see fit. If it contains a trope, that's because it fit in with the story I wanted to tell. I always have goals when I write things? I want the fic to achieve certain things. But like fulfilling a trope is never one of them. Idk. I don't read for the trope. I read to read a good story. And that's how I write.

[claire-starsword]

Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max - Chapter 2

Translation notes:

The map in the first page is not the one seen in the final game, but the early version released during development. More info on my pre-release page as usual.

The enemies in that page are also enemies announced early before release: Rune Knights, Dark Priests, Dark Dwarves, Goblins, and the scrapped Mimic of course! That's fun to see.

Save for Lowe's odd age here, the training with Varios is very similar with how it goes in the actual game, with Lowe singing praises of how Max is on par with the knight captain. If none of that sounded familiar to you, you are welcome to hate the localization as much as I do.

Like, you think we're done with this? No way baby, Max's speech on memories is also a reference to a NPC in the start of the game! I legit got angry while doing the comparison on that one, it's a very iconic line that matches both Max's amnesia plot and the series' whole theme of forgotten evils resurfacing, it did not deserve to be replaced by generic slop. I'm glad I get to bring it back here and that it gets space in the manga as well.

Nova seems to have ears instead of horns in his brief cameo during the castle audience scene. Could be an old design, or the manga artist taking liberties or misunderstanding things. I find it curious though, because in the final version he's classified as dragonewt, however the GBA version will notoriously declare Elliot the last dragonewt on earth instead. This would make sense if Nova was intended to be something else at some point, and the GBA version tried to restore that, though it was nonetheless very badly explained.

Let's talk a bit about Max's speech patterns. In the original game, he obviously doesn't speak much, but the ending still shows him using the formal pronoun "watashi" for himself, and speaking casually to Adam, while more politely to the stranger they meet there. This continues in Final Conflict, where he's pretty casual to the team but sticks using watashi at the same time. This changed in the GBA version, where he switches between the more casual and masculine pronouns "boku" (softer) and "ore" (rougher) depending on who he's speaking to. I'm not knowledgeable enough to discuss this in depth but I do get the feeling that the choice of "watashi" for him in the original was a bit unusual. In any case, this manga just makes him use "ore" constantly. At the same time, he's pretty much always polite, even to his teammates. So he definitely doesn't come off as rough.

As example of this politeness, Max here also uses the usual "-san" honorific for basically everyone except Lowe, a literal child. I usually ignore those since they don't flow very naturally in english (at least for dialogue between friends/close teammates), but I did keep a couple instances when he has barely met Tao and Hans, because it felt fitting for a first meeting, especially with him being so notably polite in this version.

Let's talk about the rest of the team now! I've translated their in-game introductions in case you're not aware of how their personalities differs from the english version.

Hans was announced since the early coverage of the game, so every design difference you see here is the artist's choice. At no point was his personality touched upon however. So could it be that we were meant to have edgy rival Hans at some point? I find it unlikely given Hans' cute face, but my theory is that Hans had zero official personality at this point, so the manga artist just threw some elf stereotypes in and tweaked the design to fit that. It's hard to not associate Hans' attitude here with Mae's in the final game though. There's a lot of evidence in the pre-release page I keep linking to for Mae and the other centaurs' prejudice against Max to have been added late in development. So could it be that at some point elves were supposed to be the arrogant ones? Maybe! Could it be that the artist just shoved Mae's personality on Hans instead to erase her instead? Also possible! It should be clear already that the guy is not decent about female characters, and mild spoilers but, Mae is simply not gonna be around for this one save for small background cameos, which is mind boggling when she was clearly the main female character at this point in development. But could it be this has nothing to do with Hans and it's just a coincidence that his personality matches hers here? Also maybe! If it's not obvious I'm just rambling ideas at this point. To close the topic on Hans, he would eventually be confirmed as a noble in Shining Force Gaiden, as his son is mentioned to come from a noble family in the manuals. Though this is just the standard background for most characters in this game.

Tao is a curious case. She is seen in screenshots since the game's announcement, but it took longer until her art and profile were revealed. Said profile also says nothing on her personality, so my take on her here is the same as Hans. I doubt she was meant as the spunky girl we see here, but it's possible that the artist isn't warping her final personality, and she was just a blank state at this point. But it's hard to tell for certain.

Ken, on the other hand, was announced from day one to admire Max, which is probably why he's very much the same as his game version here.

Luke is the only one of the starting team to not be seen in early screenshots, and there's some evidence that Gort was meant to be the first warrior of the team instead. So the manga here gives us a better idea of when Luke was worked on during development.

The fighting tournament Ken mentions is brought up in the ASCII guide book as a tradition of Guardiana. Always fun to see little worldbuilding tidbits like this were planned from the start. And while nowhere else mentions this as the place where Ken first saw Max, it makes a lot of sense.

Finally, the battle at the Gate taking place on the inside, so dark it needs to be illuminated by torches? That's how the place looked in early builds as well.

[01tsubomi]

i'm taking the jlpt this sunday and had a stress dream last night abt it bc it sort of snuck up on me and now it's kind of a question of how much my actual japanese abilities will carry me (versus if i should've been cramming on flashcards this past month) but the listening portion is far simpler conversation than my coworkers and i have so. i think that maybe instead of "damn i should've been studying japanese" my perspective should just be "i speak japanese"

[kyouka-supremacy]

I am totally pushing the aku top of the school agenda HOWEVER this mf would pop a vein before tutoring anyone (teaching math would end up in murder)

I swear I am extremely fascinated by and genuinely interested to understand what prompts this fairly spread perception of smart Akutagawa because I really can't see it.

Akutagawa is THE flawed character of the franchise. He has barely any redeemeing qualities. His being a ruthless, mindless dog, a beast, an animal is a central theme of his character: he's one of the most inhuman characters, no rationality, no emotions. It only makes sense he'd also be lacking in intellect, one of the most intrinsically human qualities, right? Let's also keep in mind that when it comes to intelligence, he was specifically trained since a very early age so that he wouldn't develop any critical thinking skill or wisdom. He was appositely built to be an executor, never a thinker. A killing machine, a mindless beast. He was made to be a tool, not a person. He is the very epitome of irrationality- and that much shows in everything he does! There's plenty canon evidence to support it. His actions are never guided by preliminary thoughts, he just acts on instinct, akin to an animal. He will kill his target in chapter 4 although his mission is specifically not to, he will barge into a building full of security guards right through the front door without even ordering his subordinates to offer support, he will go rogue and storm into the Moby Dick destroying everything in his path no matter the consequences, he will naïvely jump off a balcony to catch a repetitor just because his worst enemy said it had Dazai-san on the line- do I have to continue? His whole character is exclusively driven either by orders, or by instinct and irrationality. Guys, it would have been SO MUCH EASIER if upon seeing Ranpo's message Akutagawa had just took out his phone and gone “hey Chuuya-san, it's likely we've found the mastermind and the whole thing will be solved here at this place, can you come over one second?”. But he didn't, and it's not simply a matter of suspension of disbelief (in the way that the events are more satisfying this way). Was it for his pride then? Indeed, but Akutagawa's pride and irrationality are in a perpetual concomitant relationship of cause and effect, where one is constantly born from the other. I do think his very simple and straight-forward objectives (1. kill the Jinko 2. be acknowledge by Dazai-san 3. die) are themselves expression of his simple mindset, and so is a certain naïvety he has, that I honestly wish more people took into account when characterizing him.

It's funny because, the thematic relevance of it is the whole point- in reality, I don't think there's such a thing as a stupid person, I firmly believe everyone has their own kind of intelligence, a field each of us excells in. But it's exactly because Akutagawa isn't a person (well. in this context at least), but a character, that one can push a characteristic to its extremes in order to make it symbolic of something, in order to make an archetype out of his character. And Akutagawa at his core is irrationality, he is Dazai's failed trainee and ugliest foil, he is the ultimate pawn, he is the beast. The fact that Akutagawa is a character– it's relevant. He's not a person, he's a vassel for themes. I can dare to rudely talk about him like he was an animal because it's the narrative itself that before anyone else pushes the reader to see him in a dehumanizing way. Akutagawa once literally tore the skin off a man's neck with his teeth effectively killing them. It's quite not simple dog coding anymore lol. But he's just a dude from a book really, he's just symbolism: and that's why he can become a dog, or a pawn, or the stupidest person of Yokohama, as the author or reader pleases. It's really not that deep ahah

I can guess a possible counterpoint would be that perhaps, in a universe where he wasn't subject to the slums and Dazai's abuse such as high schools aus, Akutagawa would get his chance to be witty? But then I can't help but think, if you don't make Akutagawa stupid... Aren't you taking a fundamental trait of his character away from him? What's left of Akutagawa then? What would be the point of reading, let's say, a sskk high school fic if you can't recognize Akutagawa in it? But then again I guess this is exactly the reason why I can't bring myself to like most of alternative universe bsd fics (╥﹏╥)

Also, ultimately, there *are* personal preference components to it. In my headcanon Akutagawa has autism / adhd, and although those don't always have a negative impact on one's academic results, there is a chance they do. And I'd honestly lean towards that chance more when it comes with Akutagawa, because he is the pathetic man that has everything going wrong for him. There's symptoms in his impulsivity and scarce self-control, and I believe they'd make school life very hard for him, especially when it comes to focusing in classes and for studying- which is fitting tbh, can you imagine Akutagawa ever having a happy life? (I'm jk I swear I love him)

Besides, I must have mentioned how one of the main appeals of sskk for me is how despite being thoroughly flawed people they can still be loved. It's surprisingly comforting to think that even the most evil of people can be loved, and it's the same when it comes for stupidity. Stretching Akutagawa's flaws just makes him more symphatetic and enjoyable to read about.

[vatrocvet]

What are your favorite animes?

Phewwww, I used to be big into anime as a kid but nowadays I'm super picky. The ones I enjoyed the most recently are Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and Soul Eater (though I think the manga is stronger). I also liked Stone Ocean a lot even though I left it unfinished (oops). And Paradise Kiss was a pretty good watch though i might read the manga at some point because it has a lot more content.

[themagical1sa]

ykw?

it would be incredibly funny if crushie liked me back too late

especially when i might be starting to like someone else

[torgawl]

i'm actually obsessed with this line from chapter 6 of trigun maximum. this might be my favourite scene so far!!!

bonus cool vash panel from the same scene because it's so *chef's kiss*: