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seaofreverie · 5 months ago

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Sparkstember Day 18: Balls (Bullet Train)

Sometimes (oftentimes) it's true that all you need are Balls. I personally absolutely love Balls. I'm a big fan! Ekhem. Today I'm using the help of (I mean, copying most of the passages from it) my earlier Balls rant that I have written down after my first listen of it back in January. I really love this album and I don't want to completely skip over saying a couple words on it at least but I really don't think I have the headspace to write anything very good for it today. I'll still try though!

So yeah, Balls. It's a great album, fun and chill (in my sense of what I call and consider chill anyway), consistent, as Sparks albums tend to be, and as I suspected / hoped it does fit this specific vibe of driving around at night somewhere city-like and illuminated. Or being on a train deep at night and looking at the world zooming by (if you'd even see much of it on a train at night anyway.....). And I do think that it's not so dissimilar to Gratsax (I'd say now that it's definitely darker and moodier than its predecessor...). So it's interesting to think about how it's considered to be one of the "weak" ones (by music reviewers at least) while Gratsax is so beloved in comparision.

I will admit, I don't really know what the big problem with this album could be. As I said, it's fun, it has the melodies, it has the energy, it has the theatricality (I like seeing how more and more orchestral instruments such as strings are being incorporated into the music, in a way the jump into Lil' Beethoven two years later doesn't come of as THAT much of a shock because of this. The evolution of sound here is fascinating!) I really like the intense beats, just as much as the more laid-back and moodier pieces. And there's lots of gold to be found in the lyrics department as always.

One more thing I wanna say is that at some point I wondered if this music sounds older than it is. Maybe it does? But then I remembered that this was 2000 and honestly when I think about it, there just IS something about this album that fits so well with the Y2K image and vibe and all. Sparks 2000 and all that.

Favourite songs (and other highlights):

Balls: I mean. It's Balls.

Scheherazade: absolutely LOVE this one and I had the strangest impression of it sounding very familiar when I first heard it. Months later I found out that it was just briefly featured in TSB so I think that explains it (I will talk more about my TSB viewings on TSB day. EVERYTHING has to be explained in excruciating detail, lmao)

The Calm Before The Storm: bugsonas 4ever. Song itself is amazing too

How To Get Your Ass Kicked: how can a song about getting your ass kicked be so pleasant and relaxing, it always keeps cracking me up, how perfect that is actually

Bullet Train: I love it how introducing the topic of the song with a "It's the [topic of the song]" is a reoccurring theme on this album. Thank you Sparks for this ode to technology and art (these lyrics always have me giggling). And also it just goes hard as heck

It's Educational: a perfect fusion of / sequel to I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car and Progress (it's mostly the vocal delivery that reminds me of the latter)

The Angels: such an odd one here but I still like it a lot, I apparently said that it sounds "surprisingly mainstream for Sparks but somehow in a positive way". It's very sweet and I absolutely love how Russell sings here, it's so different from what we're used to but that only makes it hit you even more in the feels, lol. And I actually prefer the alternative version of this song that's featured as a bonus track, and I do think that's in big part because you can hear Russell better on it (or that was my first impression of it at least and it kind of stuck)

#balls dayyyyyyy #how weird that i went with a different drawing idea than the bugsonas considering that i'm such a big fan of them #(maybe the bugsonas COULD appear later. still don't have an idea for the final day so hm. thinking about this)#but yeah i couldn't pass up the opportunity to draw russell in this era of glasses & haircut combination #and i love sparks' tour photos too much to not give them some sort of tribute at least once #and honestly! i think this is my favourite drawing so far. might even beat out noisy boys #it turned out better than the vision i had of it in my mind!!! that NEVER happens. yet it did this time #(yet also i'm adding this to the series of me making my life harder for myself that it needs to be #because i insisted that the text has to be handwritten for WHATEVER reason. looks good tho so that's a win)#but also man. lil beethoven day tomorrow #i feel so sick about all three of the upcoming albums still and it brings me close to having an existential crisis #to think about how it's been almost a year already since i first heard LB. that's just soooo wrongggggg #i've already been thinking pretty hard abt these albums over the past couple of days (just like every day before that too tbh)#truly nothing else like them in this world. tune in tomorrow to see the madness unfold!!!#sparkstember 2024 #my art #goose monologues

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h-worksrambles · 4 months ago

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I wanna talk about Sasuke Uchiha

As someone who looks back on Naruto as one of their gateway anime and manga, I have a lot of very fond, but very complicated feelings about it. I remember so well the thrill of watching the highs of the Land of Waves or Chunin Exam arcs and even once we got into the highs and lows of Shippuden/Part 2, it still had plenty of moments that spoke to me. But there is one aspect of the series which I have incredibly mixed feelings about: one who unfortunately just so happens to me integral to the entire series. That being the character and arc of Sasuke Uchiha, one of the most famous parts of the series, and one of the most frustrating bits of missed potential.

Back in Part One, Sasuke begins with a great deal of promise. He, Naruto and Sakura are all immediately set up with distinct personalities. The tree climbing chapter is a great early moment that allows Sasuke to act beyond his stoic character trope and behave like the child he still is, in turn allowing for more natural chemistry with Naruto (remember that, it’s gonna be important for later). Moments like his sacrifice to protect Naruto from Haku or his panic during the fight against Orochimaru in the Forest of Death help to humanise and develop him further. As we learn more of his backstory and the traumatic loss of his clan, you come to better understand him and you can see the dynamic starting to form between him and his teammates. Their relationship is still very much early days but at this point it’s easy to get excited to see how they’ll develop together and grow a compelling bond….

And then the next arc seperates them. And here’s where the problems begin.

From where, Naruto is separated from his teammates during the search for Tsunade. Itachi returns to the narrative, and forces Sasuke to confront the sheer gulf in power between him and the brother he intends to kill, but this also leaves him bed ridden and out of commission for the rest of the arc. And Sakura…gets nothing for this whole arc because this manga has a Women Problem but I digress.

The result is that the very next arc is the fabled Break-Up TM, where Sasuke’s lingering trauma and jealousy of Naruto’s growth lead to his heel-turn to villainy on Orochimaru’s side. His motivations make sense and this arc is full of legendary moments. But when we get to Naruto and Sasuke’s showdown at the Valley of the End, the core issue emerges.

For being the core relationship that this series revolves around, and the focus of more Yaoi fanfiction than any one mind could comprehend…Naruto and Sasuke‘s bond is surprisingly underdeveloped. The manga made the…unique decision to split the core trio up for two arcs just when it had made the first breakthroughs to start to build a dynamic between them. The Chunin Exams should have been the start of the bond they’d build, one that would tragically fall apart due to Sasuke’s need for revenge. But their relationship development stops there, and the Sasuke Retrieval arc tries to cash in on a payoff it hasn’t earned. It’s hard to care when Sakura begs Sasuke not to leave because they barely have a relationship. And Naruto and Sasuke aren’t much better. Naruto barely understands Sasuke or his reasoning, so his appeals to bring him back ring hollow. Five arcs in and Naruto still barely really knows him. It’s telling that this is where Kishimoto starts inserting in more flashbacks to reveal the two did in fact interact more often as kids. Like the story knows this moment is happening to soon, and has to frantically back fill to convince us that these two are in fact best friends.

But, earned or not, the fight concludes, Sasuke elects to spare Naruto, wanting to remain a better person than his brother even as he takes revenge on him. A nice moment that tells us Sasuke has a moral compass even as he goes rogue, and even if I feel the manga hasn’t earned the idea that Naruto is his closest friend, the significance of Sasuke not wanting to kill him, despite all that bravado, isn’t lost on me.

And so, we move into Part Two, and at this stage, I’m mostly fine with Sasuke’s plotline. His post-timeskip reintroduction and subsequent heel-turn from Orochimaru, refusing to condone the latter’s actions any longer, sets him as a rogue element, unaligned but with his own ethics. And it builds to the genuinely excellent confrontation with Itachi. Unfortunately that problem of Team 7’s underdeveloped relationship really starts to become an issue here. So much of this part of the story is filled with Naruto and Sakura insisting that there’s still good in him, that they still love and accept him, defending him to ever other character. Despite the fact that they still barely know what he’s been through, why he’s doing what he’s doing, and only ever got scraps of affection under the only the direst of circumstances when he was around to begin with. But then we get the truth of Itachi’s motivations, the formation of Taka, and Sasuke joining the Akatsuki to take revenge on Konoha.

And the thing is, I actually really like this moment (sort of) and feel Taka Sasuke gets a lot of flack for the wrong reason. His downward spiral is honestly really compelling. Watching him break his ‘No kill’ policy and commit more extreme acts to root out the corruption in Konoha is a good watch. A lot of people focus on his motives ‘not making sense’. But considering the ideas at play in Sasuke’s story, that revenge is a dark path that will never satisfy you, or how loneliness and trauma from a young age could twist someone’s way of thinking, I honestly believe, from a motivations aspect, this is fine. Sasuke got his revenge, but it proved unsatisfying, and after chasing this for years, it feels hollow. So the second he has someone new to blame, something to fill the void, he’s off on the warpath. Sasuke has lived only for revenge, he needed it to give him purpose. It sets Sasuke up to learn that no amount of revenge will ever undo what he went through. Hell, I could even see a ballsier version of Naruto that, instead of going for a simple but effective ‘revenge bad’ plot, accepted that Sasuke kind of has a point, and that Konoha as an institution is kind of vile, like all the ninja villages. Even by the time we get to the Five Kage Summit, while his actions are deplorable, you can still see how his desire to punish the world for making his life hell, his need to find someone to blame and punish for his suffering, are all driving his actions. I like how he keeps looking for someone to blame and continues to finding that revenge unsatisfying, even when facing someone who pretty clearly deserves it. Yes, it avenges the horrific genocide of the Uchiha, but it doesn’t bring back everything Sasuke lost, or bring him peace. All it ends up doing is taking a greater toll on his psyche and I think it’s very well done.

Here’s my gripe with it though. Instead of doing anything interesting with those ideas of revenge, or questioning if maybe Konoha does deserve justice for the atrocities it’s complicit in, the discussion in the text around Sasuke’s journey becomes this very trite sentimental hand-wringing. A lot of Naruto and Sakura shouting ‘there’s still good in you! You’re our friend!’ Despite the fact that, as I brought up before, Sasuke’s never really had much of a believable relationship with them. They don’t really work as his moral compass because there was never enough of a connection there for that to work. You can’t hinge so much of Sasuke’s character around his relationships, when he’s so constantly stoic and never really forms much of a dynamic with anyone because he’s so utterly devoted to his mission. It’s empty. And it takes focus away from the things that actually do make Sasuke interesting. So much of the drama of Sasuke’s character comes from the fact that he’s alone. That his struggle with trauma and single minded fixation on his mission prevents him from making any connections, in stark contrasts to Naruto, who learns and grows alongside everyone he meets. The problem is that the manga still tries to extract drama from Sasuke’s relationships without putting the time in to earn them.

The story spends a lot of time telling, rather than showing us, that Sasuke is still redeemable, even as he remains coldly committed to increasingly extreme acts of violence. A lot of Naruto and Sakura telling us he still cares, rather than Sasuke showing he still does. By the end, the story is not about Sasuke understanding the pointless cycle of revenge, and making peace with his trauma. It’s about how Naruto and Sakura loved Sasuke hard enough to redeem him. With very little internal reflection or growth on Sasuke’s own part. It turns his arc into a weak ‘I can fix him’ that robs Sasuke of the chance to grow on his own terms.

To me, this is largely an issue of characteristion. Notice how so much of my discussion has been about Sasuke’s backstory, the theoretical beats of his arc, and the ideas around him. I’ve spoken much less about his personally and character traits and therein lies the issue. He doesn’t really have much of one. From Shippuden on, Sasuke largely has two modes, cold stoic focus or violent blood rage. He just doesn’t really have much personality, and that makes it incredibly hard for him to bounce off other characters and form a rapport. And this is especially bad during his interaction with team Hebi/Taka, who are not only incredibly flat and underused characters, but who have absolutely no chemistry with Sasuke at a point where he is carrying the story for large periods of screentime. I don’t really believe his relationships with other characters, and the moral event horizon of him betraying them. The Five Kage Summit arc frames what he does to Karin in particular as a shocking betrayal that shows how low he’s sunk. But…why? When did he ever give a shit about Karin? When did they have any kind of relationship that would make this betrayal particularly shocking or tragic? Before, the manga was willing to let Sasuke be scared, petulant, expressive, in a word, a child. Now, there is an expectation that Sasuke needs to be cool. So the story is utterly scared to let him emote beyond his character trope. And this unfortunately comes at a point where we really need to be able to empathise with Sasuke. We need to understand his conflict and inner turmoil over his actions to know that there’s still good in him. We need to know that he still cares for his old teammates beyond a token ‘I didn’t kill them that one time’.

It results in an emotional core that feels painfully one sided. Naruto’s love for Sasuke comes across far more like an expression of loneliness, and a desire to hold onto one of the first people he built any attachment to, rather than this bond being uniquely deep. All for a person who barely seems to even like Naruto, because they were wrenched apart before the story could organically develop their relationship. As a gay man who has a lot of Thoughts TM, about the underlying homoeroticism of Shounen rivalries (and how it intersects with the misogyny in the genre and lack of development of female characters, including love interests) it frustrates me that one of the most famous and most widely-shipped rivalries in the genre feels so flaccid. Because one side of this duo is so routinely given the bare minimum of stoic, flat characterisation, while the main protagonist spends far more time building organic, compelling friendships and relationships with other characters than his supposed ‘best friend’. Hell, if you view their relationship through a romantic lens, I actually think it becomes even worse. To prove that, I need only look at his ‘romance’ with Sakura, where you can basically take all my points about how one sided and forced Naruto and Sasuke’s bond is, and multiply it by 10. In some ways, it’s worse with Naruto because it’s so much more important to the story. Sakura’s fixation on Sasuke just amounts to a poorly written romance. It’s bad, but it doesn’t really have much narrative impact, frankly. But Naruto’s bond with Sasuke is the emotional core of the entire manga. If that doesn’t work, (and in my opinion, it doesn’t) then the entire story collapses.

There are those who argue that the series would have committed to making these two and item if they’d been different genders, and there’s a whole other discussion about how shitty it is that many Shounen manga still shy from making queer relationships their emotional core despite revolving so much around the bonds between male characters. But I still believe that if Sasuke or Sasuke had been written as female character, Naruto would either have been seen by fans as a simp to a creepy extent or there would have been even more criticism of how weird and abusive this dynamic comes off as, and how much it feels like Naruto is expected to ‘fix’ Sasuke, in a way that hurts both their character development.

This really comes to a head in the Five Kage Summit where the drama between these three feels more painfully forced than ever. On paper, I like the idea of watching Naruto and Sakura deal with difficult internal conflict over their feelings for Sasuke and what he’s done. I just wish their relationships with Sasuke weren’t so underdeveloped so that these scenes felt earned. We’re still not given enough time in Sasuke’s head for me to ever really buy that he grew to care for them, and still does. His interactions with every other character are so incredibly sterile. I think the reason people talk about Naruto over reacting or being irrational when it comes to Sasuke is because the story didn’t do a good enough job getting folks invested in their ‘bond’. Many readers/viewers walk away thinking Sasuke’s just not worth it and that Naruto and Sakura both deserve better.

While we saw enough to understand Sasuke core motivations , we needed more insight into his headspace and his conflicted feelings across the story. That moment in chapter 699 is one of the only times we really get to go behind the stoic exterior and see clearly what he’s really thinking. It injects some much needed humanity into him, and makes him feel more like a person, rather than an archetypal shorthand to build themes around. If more of that was spread across the story, I think his redemption would be more believable. As it stands, the moment where he reveals he cared about Naruto all along, feels like a last minute plot twist. Because his headspace was constantly kept at arm’s length from the reader, and it was barely reflected in the calculated stoicism or ultra crazy face that are Sasuke’s only two emotions at this point in the manga.

This storyline could have been a deeper insight into Sasuke’s inner world. Allowing us more into his perspective and headspace to watch him accept that, ultimately, he’s just trying to fill a void that’s been there ever since he lost everything. It could, alternatively, have been more of an ethical quandary that pointed out that Sasuke, who is the last survivor of a literal genocide, actually has every reason to demand justice. Exploring how to fix a broken, bloodstained system. What we got was a direct appeal to sentimentality, hinging Sasuke’s character and sympathy on his relationships, which were always ill defined at best.

Sasuke’s story was good on paper. I think he works really well as a commentary on the unhealthy effects of holding kids up as gifted, the dangers of isolating yourself, the effects trauma can have on a young mind and the unsatisfying and bloody cycle of revenge. The beats and ideas are all there, but was let down by flat characterisation and his redemption was yet another casualty of the messy ending. I have little interest in hand-wringing fan discourse about whether Sasuke is a war criminal, or how much his trauma excuses his actions. This is an idealistic story about forgiveness, brotherhood and breaking cycles of violence. It was inevitably going to end this way, and it would have been tonally bizarre if it hadn’t. The question is whether it builds believable relationships to tell that story, and I don’t think it does. Even as a case study in queer-coded rivalries, Sasuke feels underwhelming. Not only do I think there are more believably queer rivalries in Shounen manga, I think there are better ones in Naruto itself (shout out to Madara and Hashirama who, as intentional parallels to Naruto and Sasuke, end up exploring many of the same themes better AND with more convincing homoeroticism).

Maybe this would have worked if Part One was longer and Team Seven had more time together. Maybe it would have worked if Sasuke had more consistent opportunities for an internal monologue and more opportunities to express his internal conflict. Maybe if the manga was more willing to go further with the flaws of Konoha as a system, we could have taken Sasuke’s character in a more compelling, less trite direction. But what we got was ultimately a let down. One that leaves Naruto as a series with an unfortunately weak emotional core.

#sasuke uchiha #naruto #i rant about fictional characters who i think could have been better maybe perhaps?#but yeah this character and this relationship has bugged me for a long time

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