#he's a load bearing wall of a character & so is [redacted2] and the fact that they'll be in the spotlight soon is making me jittery

[helmetjellyfish]

hello! this post is going to be a little different from anything i've written before, because today we're looking at fish.

this fish, to be exact.

this fish is one of the many prehistoric creatures we see in minato's dreams from ch. 48. the translation team did a wonderful job identifying several creatures and explaining them in general, but i haven't seen any specific discussion about this one yet. so i figured i'd talk about what i think this fish is and what i think it represents.

the rest of this post will be under the cut, because there's lots of images and it's going to get quite long. here we go!

so what fish is this?

let's start by looking at these three images for reference:

(you may have noticed that the head shape of the fish in the first image is a bit different from the one in the second. however, since the rest of their bodies are very, very similar to each other, i'm assuming that they are intended to be the same fish and the head shape of the second one is closer to the 'correct' bodyplan.)

to begin with, we can see that the fins are attached to the body with these fleshy lobes, meaning that this fish is probably a "lobe-finned fish" belonging to the clade Sarcopterygii.

Sarcopterygii can be split up into three more clades:

Actinistia - the coelacanths and their close relatives

Dipnoi - the lungfishes and their close relatives

Tetrapodomorpha - the tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) and their close relatives

just based on morphology, we can narrow it down to Actinistia. so coelacanths! the thing with coelacanths is that one of their most notable characteristics is their weird tail:

this is a replica of the West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), which is one of the two species alive today. here you can see that the tail is split up into three lobes: the top and bottom lobes are the same width and length, while the one in the middle is smaller and protrudes further out. their tail is diphycercal, which means that the vertebrae extend all the way to the tip of the tail and the tail itself is symmetrical.

both living species of coelacanth have a diphycercal tail. in fact, almost every single genus in Actinistia has a diphycercal tail. but our fish doesn't. its tail has only two lobes, where the bottom one is much bigger than the top, which is a heterocercal tail. why is that?

it turns out you have to look really, really, really far back in Actinistia to find fish without diphycercal tails. and when you look back far enough...

you find Miguashaia, a fish that lived during the Devonian period 365 million years ago. a fish that also happens to be the most primitive coelacanth we know.

in other (slightly more overgeneralizing) words, it's the oldest coelacanth, so old that it doesn’t even have one of the main features we now associate with coelacanths. neat!

okay. why do i care about this fish?

isn't it odd that we see this same fish following minato for multiple pages during the dream sequence, when most of the other creatures only appear for a single panel or two?

it's especially weird by the time we get to the reunion with nagiko, when we stop seeing any other prehistoric creatures in the foreground (save for the basilosaurus skeleton). but this fish still stays next to minato, and neither him nor nagiko seem to acknowledge its presence. it... doesn't really do anything either. it just hangs around at minato's side or right behind him, like it's watching over him.

doesn’t it look a bit out of place in this scene?

and then what’s stranger is that we see it again later on. when haruno voices his concerns about minato's mental state in ch. 50, the implication being that he thinks minato might follow his wife to the grave, we get this panel to go with it:

there’s the whale skeleton and lion’s mane jellyfish, both of which have been previously used to represent nagiko. there's minato, reaching out to the jellyfish with the hand he wears his wedding ring on. and then there’s... the fish again. as before, minato doesn't interact with it at all. in fact, his back is completely turned to it, but the fish is still continuing to watch him from afar.

i already had some suspicions even before ch. 50, but this panel is the one that made me go "oh, okay, so that's definitely supposed to be a person, right?".

nagiko isn't the only character in the story who's connected to a particular deep sea creature or two: there's nagisa with the dumbo octopus, shizuka with the basket star, ryou with the cookiecutter shark, etc. we haven't had anyone with a prehistoric species yet, let alone a prehistoric coelacanth, but we do have someone who's depicted with modern day coelacanths pretty frequently:

so who would be a likely candidate for its ancient relative: a fish that's distinct enough from its kin to be recognized as a separate entity, while still sharing many visual similarities?

who's the person that's the most likely to come to mind whenever minato thinks of nagiko? a person who had always been at his side in his younger days? a person that minato can't truly see or talk to in his dreams, because he remains out of his reach?

a person who still continues to haunt him, even now?

wonder who that could be.