#arcvanniversary

[lermisv4]

Arc-V Month Day 30 - Curtains Down!

@arcvmonth This event... Honestly, it brought back memories for me. I had attempted in the past, years ago while the show was still airing, to complete all the prompt challenges of the @arcvanniversary blog way back when. My Parallel Thoughts collection is still quite dear in my heart, even though I never actually managed to complete anything even remotely in time - hell, it’s STILL incomplete.

Arc-V... changed quite a few things in my life to be honest, which to people in the “real world” would not be significant. It was what really introduced me to tumblr, even though I had no account back then - every single day for most of 2014 to 2016 I would go and check the fanart of this one tag in particular. It was the fandom that introduced me to TV Tropes and what fandom culture really was, and it took over my brain since, even when I was absorbed in other stuff.

Arc-V... it was the frustration of trying to catch new episodes when there was no internet while on vacation so I had to go to a cafe. It was the crazy theories we would each write less than twelve episodes into the show. It was that feeling that almost made me cry when I heard Swing, Pendulum of Souls the first time or when episode 7 happened and we all just knew that this show was about to be unlike anything else. And so much more- I could go forever.

This event reminded me of all of that. Right in the middle of exam period for me (as were the previous ones before I was in uni lol), but it made me retouch old AUs and other fanworks I thought completely lost in the wind, and showed me that the fandom is still alive out there. It has slowed down, certainly. But it’s still out there and I’m glad to see that.

Perhaps one day I will get to write the fics I want for Arc-V - once I have the time, ability, focus, and motivation. For now, events like these keep my passion alive, for which I’m grateful.

Thank you. I hope everyone else enjoyed it too.

[entermates]

☆ arc v anniversary month: week one, day four - seasons! ☆

[oddeyesarcpendulumdragon]

Arc V Month Day 2: Slice of Life

Just some kids going for coffee in a peaceful world after everything’s over <3

[managician]

ARC V Anniversary Day 6: Palette

I got this idea because it’s been really long since I did any manga coloring, so I figured a colorswap using Serena and Yuto’s palette would be fun, as they’re each my 2nd favorite counterparts. 

I was only gonna paint Yuzu at first because I wanted to see her with a dark color scheme, but I ended up including Yuya as well and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

[fluffymoe]

@arcvanniversary day 3: Ice cream ;A;

[entamewitchlulu]

Arc V Month Day 9: Favorite Legacy Character

y’all who have been here for a while already know the answer

My reasons for loving Edo are manyfold, and I’ll be honest, I did NOT expect him to be my favorite legacy, nor did I even expect him to BE a legacy character.  When he was announced to be the second GX character, I was actually pretty shocked.  Like, what?? Sure he’s important enough in GX, but it’s not like he was ever truly main cast the way Jack, Crow, Asuka, and Kaito were.  He was a total shocker for a choice.  And yet...I don’t really know that any other character could have covered his role.

So, shallow reason out of the way: he is so goddamn pretty.

He had the benefit of getting one of the best animation directors for his major episode, but like even outside of that, he glowed UP.  Sure he was sort of my character aesthetic to begin with, but they just went ham with the bishie.  Once he gets that stupid cloak off, too, that suit looks SO good, the updates they did on his design REALLY work for him.

plus, look at that smile!!

Outside of that tho, Edo is just....so fascinating.  He’s super loyal to Academia because that’s what he’s been taught is right, and due to his value and ethics system, completely adhering to “what he believes is right” is all he knows.  He’s determined, stubborn, and incredibly loyal, which makes him an excellent pawn for a force like Academia.  Essentially, Arc V took every bit of GX Edo’s righteous fury and dedication to the ideal of justice, and said “ok. what if a less than stable environment channeled that into the wrong things?” and it worked perfectly.

But because of his generally good heart and desire to seek justice, it also makes him an excellent conflicted character, because as soon as he’s shown something that greatly shakes his worldview, it sends him into a distraught frenzy...which given the right words, then helps him to see where he himself has not been the just person he thought himself.

His arc, while short, was just so incredibly fascinating, and his character has so many depths to analyze about how he was indoctrinated, and how his nature made him both so perfect for that indoctrination, and yet also easy to turn away from it.  Edo is the only person who could have played this role in Arc V’s story.

Not to mention, I’m in love with his relationship with both Yuya and Yugo. He’s such a good guy who truly wants to help people once he understands the best way how.

To end this off before I get even sappier, here’s a couple more adorable Edos

[yuyas-awesome-hippos]

Day 17

Cutest headcanons. 

Oh I see it as Yuya and Yuzu FINALLY admit their feelings and start dating. And as soon as they’re old enough, they get married. 

Rin finally realizes her feelings and she makes Yugo the happiest boy alive by dating him.

Ruri and Yuto continue to date and out of the counterpart pairs, they get engaged first. Ruri proposed and Yuto happily accepted.

I see Serena and Yuri at first awkwardly being around each other and slowly see each other as rivals then acquiences then friendly rivals then people they find oddly attractive but nothing else and finally admitting they like each other. And they get married as well but a good five years plus after the other three pairs are married which is awkward since they share a body.    

[nancelilspace]

Day 1: The fun has just begun

How did you get into Arc V, and what keeps you coming back?

At that time I was about to start the second part of Zexal, so when I was looking for the chapters, I found a link for Arc V when I clicked on it there was the trailer. Since then, the concept of the series to try to make everyone happy (and some similarities that I share with Yuya) was what caught me to keep watching the series.

[melly-artes]

Arc-V Anniversary Day 12: Lights

Performal lights, pendulum lights, entertainment lights!! What better light is there than the light of smiles in the making?

[radraptors]

Just a small town girl Living in a lonely world She took the midnight train going anywhere

This is for last year's @arcvanniversary​ prompt ‘Journey’

(Here's the pic I used as reference)

[talaofthevalley]

Arc V Month Day 22 - Favourite quotes

There is one in particular that has stayed with me ever since I first saw the scene...

“No matter how many you bring out...”

“Insects are insects!”

The combination of Yuya’s voice acting, the animation, the music, just everything, made this one of the most badass and threatening moments in the whole show to me.

Berserk Yuya already had a very sinister aura to him, but he didn’t have a real hard-hitting line until this moment. The double meaning between the multitude of monsters his opponent has and that Serena joined Ruri against him. No matter how many people go up to fight him, they’re nothing but weak, puny insects. Numbers won’t do anything, and that ended up being shown in the final duel against Zarc. Their numbers did nothing.

This moment just hit me really hard, with the explaining of the game being used to build up the tension, the gradual reveal of how the moment this line was out of Yuya’s mouth, Serena and Ruri had undeniably lost.

It’s just a very cool and well-written line, delivered frighteningly well, with everything coming before and after it driving it home further and further.

[entermates]

☆ arc v anniversary month: week one, day five - jewlery! ☆

↳ en bracelets ft. birthstone meanings

[oddeyesarcpendulumdragon]

Arc V Month Day 13: Mistake

Based on an AU of mine where Selena has to attend a family reunion and in order to prevent them from cutting her off from her college funds she has to recruit a fake boyfriend.  Yuuri is her only option.  She’s regretting her choices.

[managician]

For Day 1 of the @arcvanniversary! there’s no better way to start it off than with the entertainment babs~

[fluffymoe]

Day 5 of @arcvanniversary ^w^ Jewelry! This is the first time I digitally colored traditionally drawn lines!

[entamewitchlulu]

Arc V Month Day 20: Favorite Antagonists

ohohoho....man is there an antag I don’t like at all in this show?  Nearly every one of the main baddies are just so fun to hate, and even more fun to analyze.  So lemme talk about each of the main ones just briefly

God just look at his stupid face i love him!!!

Yuuri is just.  The whole package.  He’s the epitome of my guilty pleasure fave type of villain: the type who’s just gleefully evil, who legitimately knows they’re the bad guy and revels in it, and also talks very politely while doing so (I have a very specific Type when it comes to villains lol).  Not a very realistic villain, to be sure, but oh so fun to watch in action.  He’s got the gleeful malice, the truly frightening cruelty, a wild sort of destructive fervor, and is such a manipulative tease to boot.  Plus, he’s such a meme.  I love him.

Beyond that though, though little to nothing is confirmed in canon, I find how he ended up the way he is very, very interesting.  Knowing that he and the boys are all the exact same person brings up some great questions on the nature-nuture discussion, and if they all had the same base nature, how did Yuuri’s nurture (or lack thereof) cause him to end up being so vastly different a person from his other counterparts?  Considering who was in charge of caring for him (whom we’ll def talk about later...), and Leo’s absolute hatred for Zarc, it’s obvious that some very, very awful things occurred to make Yuuri the way he is, and likely, most of his actions and personality are all very elaborate coping mechanisms -- not that he himself would ever admit to that being the case.  If you asked him, I’m sure he’d tell you everything he does is absolutely his own choice because he wants to be so terrible -- which is just as true as the fact that likely, not all of his choices were his own.

Of course we can’t talk about Yuuri, or about antags in general, without talking about Zarc.  I know he’s the ultimate big bad so I should probably save him for last, but I have other things I want to talk about so we’re just gonna hit up Zarc rn lol.  

What I love about Zarc (and honestly, what I love about most Arc V villains) is just how human his motivations are.  Like, he didn’t get possessed.  He didn’t get influenced by an eldritch god, or tainted by some wild magic that made him go mad.  He was just a mostly ordinary person, who, like Yuya, wanted to become someone.  He wanted to meet the expectations of the crowd -- and without anyone else to be at his side to help him process his emotions, he simply continued and continued down the path, seeking more and more validation even as the lengths he had to go to to achieve that destroyed him and his dragons, until he broke.

I can’t confirm it, obviously, but I’m of the opinion that most of Zarc’s evil schtick was just a mask -- both for his opponents, and for himself.  He’d been driven so far to the brink, so far away from the person he’d wanted to be, that he just let himself fall into a role so deeply that even he was fooled, when the truth was that he was terrified.  He was always terrified.  And that’s why Yuya’s arc accepting himself as Zarc and choosing to heal was so important, and so powerful.  

Zarc wasn’t a villain just for the hell of it.  He was a monster created by society.  And in the end, he was more tragic than villainous.

I can’t get out of an antagonist post without talking about this smug bastard.  I’ve talked about him a LOT (actually, I’ve talked about all of these guys a lot lol), but honestly? As much as I say I hate him, he’s just so deliciously evil that I can’t really, lol.  As a villain, he’s everything the arc needed -- a vicious manipulator who thought he was superior to everything and beyond the machinations of anyone else, until he slowly deteriorated as he realized his flawless plans weren’t so flawless after all.  He was, and probably still is, my favorite antagonist just because that illusion of control made him so frightening -- and once that illusion broke down, he became actually even more terrifying as he started to lose his self-control.  The before and after was pretty intense to watch.

And here we go.  When it comes to antagonists in Arc V, even if he’s not my personal fave?  I don’t think you can get much better than Leo Akaba.

Like, before the final arc, I really, really didn’t think much of him.  I barely cared about him.  And after Synchro, I was really just kind of bored of him.  Like, I didn’t imagine there was any way they could one up Roget -- Roget was literally the perfect villain.  How could this boring guy who spends all his time sitting in a chair and watching things happen without actively doing anything ever be better than that?  Part of me was actually feeling a little let down, because I couldn’t imagine getting anything better than Synchro.

And then That Episode went down, and it blew all of my wavering expectations out of the damn water.

As I mentioned before about the humanity of the villains in Arc V, Leo fits that theme to a T.  He’s not magical.  He’s not even really evil.  He’s just someone who found a way to justify the absolutely terrible, horrible things that he’s doing, and that’s so real -- that’s so terrifying.

As soon as you get the truth about Ray, about the dimension split, about everything, literally the entire show falls into place.  Every single bit of Leo’s character is thrown into stark clarity in just the space of an episode.  He’s not just a guy sitting in a chair -- he’s a madly grieving father who doesn’t even believe the world he’s in is real, so of course he doesn’t feel bad about using and abusing fake people in a fake world in order to get his real world and his real daughter back.  It’s horrifying, and yet it’s so human.  

Humanity and society was really the real antagonist of Arc V, and it just manifested in different ways: in the wild actions of a child clearly abused by the system that should have taken care of him, in the grasping for political power by an out of control authority figure, in the inconsolable grief of a father, and in the breakdown of a young man who was only trying to meet the expectations of the world around him.

There’s something very poignant in that.  It’s definitely one of the reasons that I’ll be coming back to Arc V again and again.