#but it does have some really wonderful character arcs and handles depression and PTSD in an interesting way

[nyoomerr]

Currently at chapter 101 of HGLL (you have successfully dragged me in). One of my favorite things is how hangover soup is the main character lmao. CEJ using several custom-made S-tier teleportation items, unlocking a new S-tier skill, and threatening one of the world's top hunters so he can open the restaurant on time is hilarious

the relevancy of hangover soup within HGLL can be directly tied to how happy the characters are, allow me to demonstrate:

...so enjoy the peace while it lasts :'D

[lilyhoshikawa]

Bonds beyond time was a work of art bc it showed us this version of Judai we never see before. One that has matured and learned from his experiences, at the same time a competent adult with the knowledge and sense of responsibility to do what he has to, yet also not entirely consumed by his guilt and depression as he was in season 4. He isn’t “cured” but he also isn’t hopeless, he’s regained his sense of joy and excitement even in the sense of terror, the things that made him Judai.

A lot of ppl fixate on Judai in season 4. He’s brooding and serious and standoffish and, to them, this makes him a cool protagonist. Never mind that he is also, at the same time, neglectful, tactless, and above all, deeply hurting. He attempts to vanish from his friends’ lives multiple times, he blames himself for everything and refuses to let others in as to his struggles, handling it all himself. He’s an emotional ticking time bomb. He is serious only bc he has no other way to be. And sure, in a shounen anime, that can come across as cool, but they weren’t exactly trying to make the negative effects of his adulthood depression known.

BBT is wonderful in the way it shows us how he’s moved on after that final duel with Yugi. He’s learned that while yes, as an adult and a person with responsibilities, there are some things he can’t neglect, some things he has to take seriously and put serious effort into, but he’s also learned that he doesn’t have to lose his sense of joy while doing it. There are so many moments in BBT where Judai will go from seriously analyzing a situation to smiling and laughing. It proves he still has the tools and understanding to handle and analyze a situation seriously, while also not letting that rule him. The way he fights fiercely as he know he needs to but still grins and jokes and laughs all the while- that’s the real Judai, the one that was lost in his depression during season 4.

This is also exemplified by his relationship with Yubel. I was always sad that Yubel didn’t appear in season 4 until near the very end, but I think if I give the writers more credit, it might have been intentional. Yubel ends up being the perfect counter to Judai’s newfound cynicism and seriousness. A snarky, sarcastic spirit who back-sasses him as he makes his plays, who knows their role to protect him and assist him but also doesn’t let that duty get in the way of who they are, the personality and the little light sense of humor. In BBT we see them desperately calling out to Judai during the duel, warning him about attacks, while also giving him occasional compliments, comments, or snide remarks. It’s possible to be this way because they have a bond now- a unique understanding, both of them, of their duty and ability and their role, but also an understanding of one another and their personalities, and they feed off it. It’s like two coworkers who have known each other a long time- they have in-jokes, their personalities mesh well, and even in the most serious of times they’re able to keep their uplifted demeanor, they still joke with each other even as things get serious, because they know how to work together.

I think a lot of ppl miss the point with Judai’s character, and the arc he experiences. One of his major flaws during the first 3 seasons is that he does not understand or take seriously the gravity of the situations he gets into- he treats them all as a game. This finally catches up to him in season 3 where his actions have real, genuine consequences. And realizing that is emotionally devastating for him. In season 4, his own PTSD about his situation has turned him into who he is. He’s under the impression now that he needs to take every situation so seriously that he cuts himself off from others and loses the parts of himself that made him who he was, his joy is gone, his humor is gone, all bc he feels that’s what he has to do. And that depression absolutely destroys him, it’s draining to live that way.

What we see in BBT isn’t a Judai who has been fixed, but who has recovered. He hasn’t reverted back to who he was in S1, carefree and without concern, but he hasn’t clung to the mindset he had in S4 that was eating away at him. He’s learned from his experiences and healed, and become a more rounded person because of it.

I can’t help but look at him among the 3 protagonists lined up there and think of how much development he went through, how much he changed. It’s something we don’t see much in Yugioh, bc doing that with a protagonist can be a risky gamble. It can change them from what made them so likable to begin with.

But with Judai, I think it really is perfect. And I’m happy we got to see a glimpse of what he’s like after recovering.

[july-19th-club]

also im one of those people who genuinely likes lisa . i think she’s smart, practical, and above all knows when to quit. but i seeth at the bit with the way that the end of her arc was written bc like....how much more interesting and meaningful would it have been to acknowledge that the real reason this relationship doesn’t work out is because both participants specifically want something that the other can’t give. which isn’t to say they don’t try very hard and earnestly to give it anyway; that’s where the tragedy is i think.

because what lisa wants out of this partnership is stability and a family man, i think she specifically says ���someone my kid can look up to.’ and dean cares about them both and genuinely does try to be some kind of parental figure, he cooks, he teaches skills, he provides. and he genuinely enjoys this for the most part. but because he and lisa never have that full discussion of exactly how fucked up his own childhood was, they never managed to acknowledge that without a lot of self-reflection and probably therapy, he's only good at being a parent because he was required to be from a young age, and he has no experience or understanding of the rest of what this life entails. nor does lisa want to be involved in even hunting-adjacent stuff, any more than he wants her to be involved with it. but it’s inevitable that ben will have questions, which he does, and which they handle poorly. she expects that having taken this man in she can then expect them all three to settle blithely into middle-class comfort, despite her personal distrust of the supernatural and his trauma from it.

and what he wants is...less clear, i think. he comes to her because she’s the safest, furthest thing away from the life he knows, and because it was his dead kid brother’s last request basically, which means that from the get-go this sweet safe life is a lot of responsibility. he wants something that will alleviate his grief and loss and help him feel like a full person again, but the rub is that this is an individual who’s never felt like a full person. he has relied on his family to feel complete his entire life, and you can’t transplant those emotions directly from one environment to another, it doesn’t work that way. more crucially, his brother died in a brutal, catastrophic manner that provided next to no closure, so he’s just walking around suburbia carrying shell-shock and depression around like cement shoes everywhere he goes, and neither he nor lisa are really anywhere near as prepared as they claim they are to handle ‘launching a cohabiting parenting relationship from pretty much the ground up on a foundation of forty parts genuine emotional fondness sixty parts raging unrelenting PTSD’.

so it’s no wonder it falls apart, but the show fails to really articulate why. dean doesn’t know what he wants in the long term, and the impression we get is that this is CLOSE TO but not QUITE what that thing would be, if he knew what it was and could talk about it. and so it falls back on the tired ‘i can’t drag you into my mess because it would be dangerous’ ‘i’m just not cut out for civilian life and i’m bad to be around’ stuff, which is only true as long as the plot allows it to be true. so it’s not really character-relevant at all except for the part where dean is a guy who constantly assumes he’s a tragedy magnet and blames himself for it. and we’re back to the self-loathing bit, which is not really news by now and really not nearly as interesting or important as ‘man just realizing at age of thirty that he has no clue who he is or what he needs in the slightest’

[livlepretre]

ok wait i have some thoughts about acotar that you may or may not agree with... but basically i loved acotar/acomaf but hated acowar and i didn't even try to read acofas. there was a lot i hated about acowar but basically it sums up to 1) hated how sjm tried to retcon rhys into being this perfect amazing flawless person kind of destroying everything that was interesting about him in the first couple books. 2) THE EXTREMELY GRATUITOUS AND NUMEROUS SEX SCENES IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR. LIKE ??? oh god especially that one scene where feyre wakes rhys up by... yeah. 3) king of hybern fell so flat as a villain i was expecting to get more backstory or smthg on him but no he was just... there. and evil. for no real reason. and then they killed him. like... ok. 4) TAMLIN WAS SO OOC. AND I HATE HOW SHE VILLAINIZED HIM. i also find the whole fandoms take on tamlin to be very bland and ridiculous. like yeah he obviously was not the right person for feyre and he made some serious mistakes for which he should be held accountable, but he was traumatized too! he was a very flawed character but he's not a villain!!! that scene where he's like making rude sexual comments about feyre in front of everyone felt so ooc for him. hated it. 4) mor's coming out storyline was... very bizarrely handled, and frankly i just found it hard to believe that mor's sexuality was something sjm had planned from the start of the series. as a bi woman that whole plot just rubbed me the wrong way. anyway. ya those are my thoughts but i'm curious to know what u think about this series lolol

Oof complicated question. 

I think in general I come down positively on ACOTAR based mostly on the strength of the first 2 novels? I read ACOTAR and ACOMAF back to back right after ACOMAF came out, and let me tell you: I was obsessed. I was devastated. I was enthralled. It filled some very particular requirements for what I really wanted-- it was gorgeous and atmospheric and really frightening and romantic. I thought the characters were well developed, and I just thoroughly enjoyed the world-building with vicious alien faeries and the real sense of danger, as well as the magic and the breathtaking imagery. As a painter myself, I LOVED reading about painting in a way that felt so true to the actual experience of what it’s like-- so much rarer and harder to actually find than one would think-- ACOTAR and An Enchantment of Ravens are the only two novels I can think of that even grasp the experience. I loved Feyre as a human, loved loved loved the trials, and I loved how even after she became High Fae, there was an element to it that was incredibly disturbing-- the idea of having a human soul in a fae body, which meant that things that sort of roll off of the fae around her-- like violence and killing-- profoundly disturb her and wreck her soul. I loved that. (at least, that was how I interpreted the “be glad for your human heart” thing, and also why I assumed she didn’t recognize the mating bond... that maybe, as a human soul in a fae body, it would be lost in translation for her until it was actually consummated). 

One of the things I also really loved about ACOMAF was that it took everything in ACOTAR and subtly turned it on its side. At that point, I was used to 1st love = true love, so actually reading a narrative where a heroine could change partners was really refreshing, and I liked all the ways that, looking back, we could realize that Tamlin wasn’t it-- that he didn’t try to free her from Under the Mountain (wow that should have been obvious) or how he never offered to teach her to read in the 1st book. I also really liked Feyre’s observation that she needed to feel protected in the 1st book because of where she was coming from then, but that by the 2nd book, because of the trauma of her imprisonment, she felt smothered and trapped. I thought the 2nd book did a good job of showing how Tamlin and Feyre could be really trying to make their pieces fit together the way they once did, but they had both been too changed by their experiences to work and had in fact become poison for each other. They both had PTSD, and I felt that was clear in the narrative. And I was happy for Feyre to leave, I loved the exploration of her depression and her slow recovery, and I was okay with how Tamlin was presented in that way because there is a way in which he really was as helpless as her-- yes, his actions were abusive, but I didn’t think that came from having an abuser’s personality. The tragedy was in the fact that he was also suffering and screwed up, and that meant that Feyre had to leave for her own sake, and that Rhysand ended up being what she needed. 

I’ll put my problems with the series under the cut. 

My problems started in ACOWAR, and it was primarily a characterization problem with Feyre that bothered me. To be honest, SJ Maas has this thing where she makes her main characters (male and female) just the most extraordinary over the top horrendous bitches out of the blue and it’s just like what the fuck. I think she does it for drama, and while I love a cold bitch (NESTA IS MY QUEEN)... that’s not Feyre. Her actions in the Spring Court were so much crueler than I would have anticipated. And it bothered me the way that those actions hurt everyone there, which was wild to me, as it was her home once, and that’s not Feyre. She’s the girl so empathetic that she gave those water faeries her bracelet to use as tribute. That she mourned so hard it nearly broke her for those faeries she killed in her third task. The whole point of the 1st novel was that she started with hate in her heart, but that she’s naturally so empathetic when given a chance to think about anything other than bare survival that love comes rushing in. So, I really disliked Feyre being a bitch for the sake of being a bitch. She felt unrecognizable to me. I realized recently that part of this is that Feyre actually completes her character arc in the 2nd book-- at that point, she’s figured out who she is, gained peace, happiness, and empowerment through it, and found a home. She’s answered all of the conflict within herself, so there’s just not really anywhere for her character to go in the 3rd book, which is part of why she feels so weird as a pov character. 

There were other things of course. Rhys had lost that edge I loved in him so much. (what was the point of that prologue, btw?) This is a little thing but giving Lucien a last name really wrecked a lot of the wonderful strangeness of the world building and I resent it. Especially since no one else has a last name. Sarah was on the right track when she gave Rowan the last name “Whitethorn.” THAT is a faerie last name. I don’t know what this Vanserra stuff is. What else. Hybern was supes whatever. Feyre making bargains was pretty much what we’d seen before. I didn’t mind the sex scenes because that’s just what you can expect from an SJM novel, and I don’t really have any comments on Mor’s coming out story. I also suspect that she was originally written as straight in ACOMAF, but then SJM changed her mind while working on ACOWAR. I’m not going to fault her for attempting to write more inclusively and more diversely (which, as we know, is already not something she excels at). I did find the hook up with Lucien’s dad real awkward though for everyone involved though. YIKES. TOGAS. YIKES. SJM also does this thing in her finales where too much of the books tend to be about the battles and the actual war, and that’s not nearly as interesting as the character moments that might occur because of the war. 

So, that leaves my primary complaint, which is Tamlin. I kind of think that it’s not even a matter of him being OOC, so much as Feyre being completely hateful toward him. Like, I remember thinking he was wildly OOC when he was siding with Hybern, a human hater, as he had specifically said in the 1st book that he would always fight against that. I remember being THRILLED when it turned out that he was playing Hybern, and how disappointed he was in Feyre for ever thinking him capable of actually siding with Hybern and bringing up that conversation they had in ACOTAR. I also loved it when he helped her escape the POW camp, and when he told her to be happy at the end. But honestly, after Feyre fucked him over SO! HARD! in the beginning of the novel, not at all surprised that he showed up at that meeting ready to talk smack. I was on his side during that whole thing, because by that point, I was like, get wreckt Feyre. (Which KILLS ME because I LOVED Feyre in the first 2 books, I think SJM really does mistake just horrendous bitchiness with confidence or something? It just horrified and embarrassed me the whole novel). I really do hope that Tamlin gets some sort of arc going forward. I was so depressed by our visit in him in ACOFAS-- sitting alone in that crumbling manor. I think he actually does deserve a “redemption” arc, although I don’t think he actually has to be redeemed. 

On the subject of bitchy Feyre: I do NOT like the way she treats Nesta in ACOFAS. I guess we see that Feyre has an empathy problem in ACOTAR in that she totally misreads her sisters in the first few chapters and thinks of them in the most uncharitable light possible, and of course, once she decides she’s done with Tamlin, she always assumes the worst of him, but wow. The way she handles things with Nesta just horrifies me. I just can’t imagine treating my siblings like that, or extending them so little empathy. 

And ACOFAS made me think about building snowmen and other horrible fluffy things and it was not my favorite. 

But all this being said I know myself and I am definitely going to read A Court of Silver Flames. I think it might be really good, actually. 

[whatadaze]

oh anne,

okay so i started this show after fifty years of seeing it float around here on tumblr and one of my closest friends grew up reading the books so i was familiar with the story. couple days ago i was looking for a new show to watch and was like “okie i’m going to start anne” and i’m so glad i did! i have to admit, the first episode was really long (but understandably) and i sort of let it play in the background while i unpacked. i found anne a bit annoying at first but after the second episode i was like, you know what? this little girl is INSPIRING. 

so here’s my hot take (that no one asked for lol)

**possible spoilers ahead**

anne CLEARLY has issues with anxiety, ptsd, and even some bits of mania, but the thing is, she doesn’t let that hinder her. she had such a horrible upbringing but learned to console herself with books and her imagination. it sounds a bit childish but if you really take the time to look at it, it’s quite beautiful. she was able to create something so wonderful despite her less than wonderful circumstances. she never uses her past as an excuse for anything and just views it as something that happened to her and led her to where she is now. 

and oh my goodness, the family dynamic between marilla, matthew, and anne! seriously one of the best television relationships i have ever seen. i love how cold and expressionless marilla is at first but she is one of the kindest, warmest characters i’ve ever seen. she doesn’t let anne get away with anything but does it reasonably and out of love. matthew is such a softie when it comes to anne, but he is just an overall softie towards everyone and i love that. anne just has that effect on everyone she meets because she is truly out of this world. which leads me to...GILBERT.

wow, what a cutie. i know it might seem weird to root for a couple that is so young, but just knowing that they do in fact end up together in the future makes this whole thing even more worthwhile. he is just so intrigued with her from the very beginning and i mean, i can understand why. anne is just so different from the other girls and really turns the town of avonlea upside down (in the best way!). and man, the way gilbert stares at her and challenges her and even the way he teases her is just so adorable. their relationship is so pure and they match each other so well! i’m so excited to see their relationship grows and watch them fall in ~lOvE~ 

now, the friendships on this show are amazing! if you know me at all, you know i’m a sucker for strong girl friendships. i’m sick of seeing girls pitting against one another, and i’m glad that for the most part, the girls on this show support and love one another! daina is the cutest and purest bean and i was hoping she wouldn’t be a stuck up rich girl when she was first introduced. (i’m glad i was wrong 2.5 seconds later!) she is EXACTLY what anne needs since she has never had a true friend and i’m so glad that she is there to support her and encourages her imagination and (sometimes) wild thoughts! ruby was a bit harder to warm up to but you know what? she is just a bit ignorant and i’m glad she has diana and anne to tell her what’s right + wrong. i think ruby has good intentions and she means well, and she is just such a cutie. i really couldn’t nOT like her, you know? and ugh, the rest of anne’s friends are super cute as well and i just love how anne brings her imagination and creative storytelling to the school + help stir up the rest of the kids’ imaginations as well. 

another thing i’m gonna touch base on is the topic of family. ugh, i love how this show teaches its viewers that family can be chosen as much as it is assigned by blood. and that sometimes, the ties that we choose to MAKE are often the strongest. of course, the main example would be the cuthberts. they are the least traditional family to say the least, with marilla and matthew never have begin married and anne being an adopted orphan, but their family dynamic is one of (if not THE) strongest bonds on the show. and i love them so much and want to protect them forever and ever!!! another example seen is at the end of season 2 with cole. he is such a talented, amazing kid but you can clearly see how depressed and out of place he feels with his own family. he can’t be his truest self and that really hinders him from being his BEST self. i’m so glad that he decided to live with Aunt Josephine at the end and CHOSE his family. HE CHOSE WHAT WAS BEST FOR HIM. lkajdflkjas 

and omg, i’m so glad aunt josephine played such a big role this season with all of the children. man, i aspire to be her. she is such a good influence on the children and i am really looking forward to learning more about her and her backstory! 

now i’m going to take a second to just rant a bit about the “antagonists” of this story. first off, MR PHILLIPS. i know this show is set in the 1800s but i COULD not handle the whole mr phillips x prissy thing. i know it was deemed “acceptable” back then but something about it always seemed disingenuous and wrong. (we learn later exactly why....) but man, the way he just took out his own internalized homophobia and anger at cole was just...IT WAS SNAPE LEVEL (AND THAT IS NOT A COMPLIMENT WHATSOEVER). for an adult to lash out on a child is never acceptable and lkajsflkd it just angered me so much. 

and bILLY OMG is every evil character just named billy? jesus, i could not stand that kid. he was truly a punkass for no real reason. (not that having a reason would’ve justified it) but i’m glad that cole still apologized to him and told him to think about why he destroys the things he does. and MAYBE that scene with the fox is hinting at a redemption arc of sorts in s3? i hope so...bc i’m sick of him pushing everyone around and calling everyone BUD. THEY ARE NOT YOUR BUD, BUD. 

ok last thing

when you think about the fact that this show is a children’s show, it makes the whole show even MORE amazing and out of this world. they tackle subjects such as feminism, mental illness, homophobia, racism, sexuality, bullying, and encourages kindness, imagination, reading, learning, and friendship. you might be thinking, “ugh this show is just trying to push its own liberal agenda” um excuse you, it is NOT. they don’t force it down your throat and are able to incorporate these topics in a natural, fitting way. it doesn’t stray from the storyline and fits really well into each episode. 

ALRIGHTY so that’s enough of extra shan for now

i’m so excited for season 3 and even though it’s airing in Canada first, i am willing to wait because this show deserves all the OFFICIAL views !!! 

i’ll try to avoid spoilers till then...

(random sidenote: i really wanna gif this show but have no idea where i can download the episodes...help...ajlfksdjla) 

ok toooooodles

[3w-writer-with-wings]

Does Takeru have high pain tolerance?

Just a little thought that I’ve been having ever since Takeru’s story has been revealed.

So when Takeru was rescued, he looked exhausted and sad, but otherwise not really looking like he had just been through six months of torture. In fact, when his grandparents showed up he even smiled and said he was okay. What truly breaks him is when he finds out his parents died while searching for him. So what Takeru has to deal with is an emotional pain, grief and blame. I’m not sure if that’s 100% accurate, but sometimes people with high physical pain tolerance are more affected by emotional pain than other people.

Now this shot might break this theory since Takeru reacts to the shocks pretty much the same as Yusaku, though it can also be possible that he was screaming from fear and disbelief that his favorite card game has been turned into a personal hell for him (I think he mentions during the duel with Go that Lost Incident took the fun from Duel Monsters for him). Either way, Lost Incident scarred him deeply, but not necessary due to the pain from electric shocks - he was isolated, starved, forced to undergo experiment and he also lost parents because of it.

Another scene that may break my pain tolerance theory – Burning Draw. Due to the taken damage Takeru falls on his knees, similar to how normal person would from the pain. However this is not the same moment when he activates his skill – if he really had low pain tolerance, he would be hurting when activating his skill, not long after. He probably collapsed due to exhaustion and not really the pain.

The lyrics from opening also kinda bring up the topic of the pain. In a way it is a song from Takeru for Yusaku: “I feel your flame” - I know how you feel, I’ve been there and it adds “I want to share your pain” - I know your pain was greater, let me take some of it away from you. Since he joined Yusaku, Takeru has been trying to help him in any way he could. He saw that Yusaku fought his enemies despite the trauma, but deep down he probably knew that he is hurting and decided to give him a hand.

Yusaku suffers from many things, but unlike Takeru, he can’t really smile or still enjoy duelling, meaning accident affected him differently. It could be that whenever he experiences the effects of PTSD, every possible positive emotion is ripped away from him so after so many failed attempts to try to live normally – Yusaku simply gave up as he no longer saw the reason to smile. PTSD reminds him of pain, pain reminds him of Lost Incident and because of it, Yusaku can hardly live normally by this point – the only thing left for him is to bring the people who scarred him to justice.

Somehow Takeru remains in his high spirits, not completely due to the loss of his parents, but he’s far more open with everyone than Yusaku. Once he started living with his grandparents he started hating everything and became depressed and closed, similar to Jin, though it was again because of his parents passing and not really the Lost Incident itself. Kiku even points out that Takeru has always been full of life and still is. It could be possible that he used to be a happy child but once Lost Incident happened, he started blaming it and therefore himself for his parents’ death and locked himself from the world as a form a punishment. That liveliness of his remains sealed within him until he sees the article about Playmaker, Go and Blue Angel. Not sure how he found out about Yusaku being a Lost Child, but in one way or another – those articles awakened something in him. Maybe after years of self-imprisonment, he has finally realized there is a way he can help and soon his cheery persona is back. When he tells Go that he needs to continue winning, he was probably pointing to the fact that the more he duels, the more his heart can be unlocked.

The first time Takeru was announced as a new character, I honestly expected another computer nerd like Revolver and yet still somehow chill person like Kusanagi. In no way I thought Takeru would be the cheerful friend that Yusaku needed for the past fifty episodes and even share the same past as him. Now that I’m putting pieces together, I kinda believe that Takeru is using Yusaku as his anchor, as the reason to continue fighting just like him. Perhaps once he met Flame and realizing Yusaku is a victim of Lost Incident just like him (I mean Takeru knew awful a lot about Lost Incident that Yusaku only came learn over the past episodes – like knowing about Dr. Kogami, the fact that each Ignis is based on a Lost Child and Cyberse world stuff – though then again Flame could tell him all of this – another a bit farfetched theory is this:

Though I doubt Takeru could afford it – yeah, Flame most likely told him everything completely for free (And I still wonder who bought the data – maybe Bowman and Haru? Or the shadowy figure they work for.)

Back to the main topic – maybe the whole fighting with himself was a result of him trying to let go of the blame for his parents’ death. He didn’t feel the same pain as others did and believes the emotional pain was a punishment he deserved and needed a while to know it is not. Maybe he’ll continue returning to his true self by each duel – with Blue Girl now. Maybe he secretly wishes to duel Playmaker but at the same time knows Yusaku would do everything not to lose so that’s why he tries to be helpful all the time. He still wants to challenge Yusaku, but not just yet – not until Yusaku is ready.

In the meanwhile Takeru tries to be a friend that he himself needed to Yusaku, knowing that Yusaku’s mental state is everything but okay. He tries to not be too intrusive and surprisingly Yusaku doesn’t mind it one bit, even allowing him to call him by the first name – something that is usually allowed to only close friends and family. I surely hope that Takeru uses his inability to feel pain to help Yusaku and healing his own soul through it.

The whole reason I came up with this theory is mainly Yugo from ARC V manga (in case you didn’t read all 34 chapters – the following contains heavy spoilers so read at your own risk).

Unlike Yuri and Yuya who both collapsed from the pain during the duel with Sora, Yugo looks surprisingly alright, even smiling and manages to get them all away to safety in time.

(may I also add how adorably similar the two of them look too?)

Okay back to the point – just like mentioned previously, despite the smile, Takeru is also grieving inside. Just like Yugo:

Yugo can handle the worst pain, like the after effects of receiving damage and continue riding his D-Wheel after nearly dying, but what he cannot handle is his family suffering – in this case, Yuya.

We still don’t know what exactly happened (hype for chapter 35), but whatever it was, the sole memory of it would, according to Yugo, make Yuya suffer. Because of that, he’d keep on erasing his memories and even Yuto would do everything to keep them from Yuya. In all cases, Yugo deeply cares for Yuya and would do anything to protect him.

Just like Takeru.

I believe that Takeru sees Yusaku as the family he wishes to protect from any more harm and uses his pain tolerance to provide support that Yusaku needs. Jin was too traumatized by it and Specter enjoyed, so Takeru is really the only one who understands Yusaku’s pain and is still capable to help him out.

Considering Kusanagi might switch sides and therefore leaving Yusaku, the poor guy will at least still have Takeru. Who knows, maybe after the whole betrayal episode, Kusanagi might reveal his true identity to SOL and Yusaku will need a place to hide – bam Takeru takes him to his hometown, away from Den City where Yusaku can emotionally recover after the betrayal and talks about personal things with Takeru for the first time and maybe he meets Kiku and his grandparents and learns to trust people again.

Anyway, hopefully, Takeru’s and Yusaku’s relationship is explored further in the series! I really love the two of them and they deserve the world!

[taz-writes]

What's Violet like (I LIVE for gorgeous and deadly fairies)? Are she and Lavender really close? What powers does she possess exactly??? What's her arc throughout the series?? Also, in terms of character rankings, who is your second main character, Aelia or Violet?? Sorry for the bombard of questions, I just really love Violet! (also, I'm pretty sure you've answered this before but I can't find it anymore, what's her sexuality??)

thank you for the questions!!! I love Violet so much, I consider her one of my best characters just because of how many layers she’s grown for herself. Her story is really close to my heart. 

Shortest answer first, I don’t think either Aelia or Violet is more important? They serve different roles in the story by nature, and they both have their places. Which one is the secondary “main” character depends a lot on which part of the story you’re looking at. In book 1, Vi’s actually more of an antagonist than a hero. She’s mean. Aelia’s a tertiary lead, because she can’t physically contribute to the plot, she has to do everything through long-distance communications. Violet is the secondary protagonist in book 2, where she does the bulk of her character growth. Aelia’s the secondary protagonist in book 3, which is all about her arc. In book 4, they’re about equal, but Aelia’s more relevant to Sayara’s plot. 

As for what Violet’s like, well. She’s a born and bred tsundere. She cares a lot about her family and friends, she’s very defensive of them, but if you try to get close to her emotionally then she will viciously defend herself as well. She also refuses to admit when she cares about people most of the time.... she desperately wants a white knight romance where she’ll get swept off her feet and whisked off into the sunset, but at this rate, she’s too cranky for that to ever happen. She’s a very private person, to the point where even the people she cares most about don’t always know what’s going on inside her head. She masks all her ‘softer’ personality traits under a sharp pointy facade of responsibility and protection, she considers it her duty to be the heiress and be the protector of the family so that nobody else she loves has to. 

Violet and Lavender are very close. Vi tries to pull her tsundere act on Lavender constantly, but Lavender never buys it, and they know each other well enough that she never will. They share a psychic link, so they feel each other’s emotions and sometimes also each other’s physical pain. They definitely know when the other one is hurt. Despite this, after certain events in book 1, Violet shuts herself down and locks Lavender out of her thoughts for a while. She’s really depressed, and she’s one of those people who self-isolates a lot by instinct, so Lavender doesn’t know as much of what’s going on as she used to. 

-Vi’s a psychic! She specializes in the darker ‘attack’ side of mental magic. She can twist someone else’s mind and cause excruciating pain, she can read minds, she can keep herself from being read. She teleports very well even in book 1, she also has impressive telekinesis. Violet can do mind control. This is intimidating. The rules for mind control in Feilan are pretty strict--you must have eye contact to attempt control, the ball is always in the defender’s court and you must navigate their mind in order to dominate it, if eye contact breaks then the link is weakened and it’s easy to lose control, etc--but Vi knows how to use it. Plus, she’s theoretically capable of mirages and misleading literal Illusion magic, but she hasn’t trained this area of magic as thoroughly and doesn’t use it often. 

Violet’s primary magical element is Darkness, despite her favorite abilities being Illusion-based, so she can access some Dark magic too. This manifests as a cloud of shadow that won’t be easily pierced by Light magic or other means, or as a move I’ve nicknamed ‘air shatter’ which literally creates a controlled black hole and destroys everything near it. These are mostly book 3 abilities, which develop after her ninth or tenth evolution. 

Later on in the series, she also develops psychic foresight, which is exactly what it sounds like. She has the limited ability to (involuntarily) see bits and pieces of the future as defined by various decisions. These flashes are not binding truth, but they can act as guides, suggestions, or warnings. 

Upon her final evolutions, Violet develops into an animaris, which is a specific type of primary-Dark secondary-Illusion psychic with some cool unique abilities! She’ll be able to manipulate sound as well as vision, and use a form of mind control that’s more like puppeteering where she doesn’t need eye contact. The puppeteering magic is super scary, and very OP, and won’t manifest in time to be relevant to canon. It’s worth pointing out, though! I think it’s neat. 

-Violet’s canon arc is about cracking her shell and defrosting her bad attitude. She’s a secondary antagonist slash rival archetype for Sayara in book 1, but her overall series role is the lancer. Her serious attitude and dark outlook on life contrast Sayara’s optimism and brightness, and where Sayara wants to be responsible but doesn’t know how, Violet knows exactly how and never asked for this. They learn a lot from each other. 

See, Violet’s depressed, but Violet has worked herself into a mental state where she’s firmly convinced that she has no other option. She actively resists trying to get better and learning to cope with her PTSD because she believes it’s a waste of time, and she’s made herself into a martyr figure inside her head. She’s actually really toxic to be around in the long term, her adamant refusal to solve her own problems is ripping her family apart. She insists that she does everything to protect her sisters, and she really genuinely means that, but she also subconsciously expects them to fix her when she’s broken and deal with her mental issues without ever questioning them. She’s built up an image of what her family is in her head, and that’s what she sticks with, even as they grow and change and defy what Violet’s preconceptions of them are. She puts a lot of weight on Aelia in particular, because she has a single-minded obsession with Elli’s wellbeing, and she perceives Aelia’s desire for independence as some kind of slight against her. In her mind, when Aelia says “I need breathing room,” it actually means “I hate you and I don’t want your help and I’m going to let myself get killed out of spite.” When Aelia says “you should go see a therapist,” Violet hears “you’re weak and pathetic and can’t fulfill your job and responsibilities to our family.”  It’s bad. 

Over the series, Vi learns to calm down a little and trust that her family can handle themselves. The hair-trigger temper and instinctual distrust of literally everyone is the first thing to go--she has to accept that sometimes she doesn’t have access to the bigger picture, and she needs to wait for evidence before lashing out. She has to develop enough to accept Sayara’s apology in book 2 after Sayara says some fucked up shit, she has to develop enough to learn that not everyone is out to get her. Moving forward in the series, she’s still dealing with the anger issues, but she also starts learning to actually manage her mental health. Her depression/anxiety/PTSD/etc is screwing over her whole family, and that’s a serious problem, and that’s what she has to solve in the latter half of the series. By the end of book 4 she does give in and go see a fucking therapist for her problems. Everyone is very proud of her.

-Sadly, Vi is the token het in the cast, but I do have a funny story about how that happened. What with the psychic link between Violet and Lavender, it wasn’t easy! 

So the twins have this empathetic link, and they feel each other’s emotions, and the closer they are physically the stronger that bond is. As little kids, they spent a LOT of time together, and when they started having dumb little puppy crushes they couldn’t tell whose feelings were whose. The twins knew one of them liked boys and the other liked girls, so at first they assumed they were both straight b/c this was back when everyone thought Vi was a boy. But then they started wondering, because they weren’t really sure, Violet in particular was super insecure. There was some awkward 10-year-old flirting, everyone felt weird about everything, nobody knew what was going on. The twins were always inseparable. And then Vi came out, and things got even MORE confusing, because they started pretending they were identical, and it worked so well that no one could tell the two apart--even some of their love interests. And then they went on a summer trip overseas together and got involved in an Actual Preteen Love Dodecahedron... 

They didn’t actually figure out whose orientation was whose until they turned 15 and Lavender went on a study trip to a medical school in the south, so suddenly they were far enough apart to tell the difference. Lavender’s the gay one, Violet’s the straight one, it’s simple enough but it took them years and years to find out. Pro tips for parents: when your psychic kids start having soap opera level romantic drama, maybe get them to spend time by themselves for a bit? It might solve some things!

[thousandmovieproject]

I’m a fucking idiot: I thought this was directed by Billy Wilder and wrote a whole long thing about how it both fits with and departs from his other work (Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend). Now I’m looking at the movie’s info online again and I see that it wasn’t Billy Wilder who directed this. it was William Wyler (Dodsworth, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Miniver). This is like the frustration I kept having int he ’30s when talking about the Howards Hawks and Hughes.

Anyway. Here’s the other salvageable bit.

William Wyler (Best Years of Our Lives, Jezebel, Mrs. Miniver)

Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend)

The Best Years of Our Lives is a gorgeous, moving, totally engrossing movie that’s both big as shit, in terms of runtime and intensity and its handling of delicate subject matter, but it also feels kinda small, intimate, and while it took me two sittings to get through the whole three-hour runtime, and even though I still don’t think I’ve totally understood or appreciated it, I can say that it didn’t feel at all like a schlep, and that I’m totally aboard for running through it a second time.

Settling in for a three-hour movie, incidentally, felt like a nice big leap back into routine cuz remember that norovirus I talked about in Brief Encounter and Battle of San Pietro? Well Id’ just gotten over it when I sat down to watch this. Here’s the scene: it’s like December 28th, I’m eating full meals again (slowly!) and moving on now from drinking just little sips of ice water and Gatorade to finally putting down some coffee. Some energy drinks. And seeing as it’d been about four days without caffeine, it was like I’d lost all tolerance for it. My receptors were fresh and clean and ready.

After testing the gastric waters with a light breakfast at home, then sitting around cautiously for a couple hours with no bad outcome, I took my laptop to Starbucks and got to work on the essay for Adventures of Robin Hood, sparked into speedy productivity by a single shot of espresso, and then when that was done I went back to the counter and got a large strawberry refresher — which looks like a big fruity sugar drink, and it totally is, but it’s also jacked with caffeine. So I got that and gulped it down and felt like I’d grown another pair of eyes when I finally put the movie on. Felt like I was watching it with more intensity than I’d watched anything else on the List — even though, obviously, I’m just sitting there with my eyes a little wider and my legs jiggling faster.

The movies’a bout three guys who come back from the war (Harold Russell, Dana Andrews, Frederic March) all fucked up in different ways; the latter two are plagued by emotional trauma, and their arcs make for a study of how soldiers with PTSD acclimate back into civilian life: the indignity of getting back into a low-paying job, the struggle to understand a laxity of youth culture’s mores, the back-riding monkey of alcoholism. The need for each other. The need for patience from everybody around them.

It’s Russell, however, who comes back with the physical trauma. He’s lost both hands in battle. They’ve been replaced by hooks — hooks with which he’s remarkably dextrous and, for the most part, contented. What gets to him is the way his family and neighbors treat him so differently. How they look at him with pity. Engaged to the love of his life, Russell starts to wonder if it might not be a greater gesture of love to break things off, and spare her a life of worry and marital servility.

I was wondering all through the movie if this actor actually has no hands or if he’d just gone all-in on mastering the prosthetics — turns out he really doesn’t have any hands, which adds a whole complex and immersive layer to the movie, but so does the fact that, as a three-hour flick that isn’t just taking PTSD but actually devoting itself to the topic, The Best Years of Our Lives feels like a curtain being drawn over the proscenium of wartime cinema. Feels like it’s an official induction to the post-war landscape — one that will still be obsessed with the war, and exploring the pertinent themes, but will probably also mostly revolve around processing the trauma.

As with Phantom Carriage and Lost Weekend I do feel like I can relate to the drinking problem on display here, and given my ostensibly complete but potentially ongoing breakup with Rosie I feel I can relate to the romantic issues faced by Dana Andrews’ character, whose girlfriend wants a more active and exciting life than he cares to provide (OK maybe I can relate to it a lot). Andrews ends up falling slowly in love with his friend/superior’s adult daughter, played here by a Teresa Wright who, just a couple years after her girlish turn in Shadow of a Doubt, comes across as an adult (which might be a bit of a hindrance, actually, since she’s playing a very similar character).

Where the movie also rings my bell is its depiction of male friendship — which, as I think I’ve mentioned in the past, is seldom communicated with emotional heft. One of the ways I was comparing this to Double Indemnity, back when I thought that Billy Wilder was the director of both, was in the way that it takes those male relationships seriously and doesn’t shy away from the idea that, apart from just loving each other, these men need one another. It’s the kind of idea that’s illustrated with zero inhibition in stories about women, but the depths of male friendship in lotsa films seem to be communicated through steely glares and wry smiles, curt nods.

Going back to that thing about this inducting us into the world of postwar cinema: it’s also sparking my interest for what movies of the 1950s will look and feel like. It’s a decade I’ve been kinda dreading, because it doesn’t have a major event like the Great Depression or the War around which everything revolves, but I’ve also been really interested to see how the worms and demons in the American psyche will come to the surface in a decade that’s known for its placidity and materialism and propriety.

#181. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) I'm a fucking idiot: I thought this was directed by Billy Wilder and wrote a whole long thing about how it both fits with and departs from his other work (