#hnk morga

[alirex-art]

Closing of the year with Morga ! Happy new year 🫶🫶

[raspberry-rampage]

at the request of @peppermintfreak I tried drawing Morganite, the old one. idk if I’m happy with this attempt, their hair is very hard to put into a composition! but I like their smile!

who do want to see next in this style?

other portraits in this little series: Lapis / Cinnabar / Rutile / Yellow / Padparadscha / Jade

[darkthemaenjoyer]

Ghа... .i like this,,

[mieowkoid09]

Just thought I'd point out

Phos met Padpa when they were 70ish. And New Goshe and New Morga met Phos when they were 70 too.

P a r a l l e l s

Pain

[housekinokuni]

I think he’s having fun!

image provided by hnk wiki

[techno-toister]

color wheel challenge

but it's hnk background characters

[mieowkoid09]

The fact that in the party at the end translations they dont EVEN MENTION EACHOTHERRR. They make me soooo sad

Thinking about Morga and Goshe lately

[garblegarden]

Did you finish Houseki no Kuni? What did you think of it, in the end? Did you like it? Have any criticisms?

I've been keeping up with HnK since 2020ish (I even endured the 1.5 year hiatus after chapter 95!) and I did indeed finish it! I have many thoughts.

I was initially drawn to it because I like minerals and this was a fun looking series where all the characters have a mineral namesake and where the bits of geology are actually accurate, or at least there's an effort made to give characters matching abilities and appearances to the minerals they're based on. Cleavage and mohs hardness and rarity are taken into consideration for characters and their strengths and weaknesses, partners typically have a theme that makes them make sense, (i.e. benito and nepti are partners because they occur together in nature, melon and hemimor have piezo and pyroelectricity, morga and goshen are both beryls, rutile and padparadscha sometimes occur together (i.e. star sapphires and other corundums) etc etc etc), and their colors typically actually match what rock they're based on. That's good to see!

I think that Ichikawa's sense of design and aesthetic is really top-tier in this one. The kind of unsettling simplicity that permeates everything is really appealing to me (Like how the earth is literally just shallow seas with a single grassy field for a landmass, how the gems all dress the same and do so completely monochromatically, the moon is just this kind of pastel rainbowy color, etc etc etc) and makes for a really unique setting.

Ichikawa also makes a really good use of black and white to make some really striking panels in the series with high levels of contrast, detail and simplicity used in the right spots, and in opportunities where she gets to use color (i.e. the artbooks and covers) they look just as cool, too. Like, you don't get a sense that an illustration she makes in either medium would be better off in a different way, she just has a really high level of skill both when limited to black and white and when given the ability to use color.

The character designs are pretty solid, but my absolute favorites are Phos's last few designs. Everyone else is ok too, but "evil maniac broken up big leaf and spikes everywhere" phos ruled, "sobbing and sopping wet-with-mercury-gold-amalgam, naked, bald and being born fully grown but without skin" phos is slept on all the time and should be appreciated more, and "big floppy white thing" phos is for sure in my top 3 character designs of all time if not my absolute favorite. Big featureless white thing with reaction diffusion patterns? SIGN ME UP!!!

In terms of the actual plot I thought it was pretty nice and the whole "ship of theseus" thing was fun to watch play out but as many other people point out, the series doesn't really give a whole lot of time to anyone aside from Phos. Admittedly they are the protagonist so this makes sense, but what about the other guys? Everyone else's character arcs have definite starting points for interesting development (i.e. many characters have inferiority complexes in comparison with their peers due to how they were raised to see their material properties as different from one another, yet they were all treated as the same sorts of lifeforms, causing them to resent one another. This is further perpetuated by the fact that they're hunted for sport and not given much time to form their own societal roles outside of "fighter" "seamstress" "doctor" or "weaponsmith" and so on. All very basic roles, because there really isn't much of an opportunity to do much more on account of being attacked by the moon all the time.

However, a qualm I have with this is how the narrative frames the moon as being an inherently superior society in comparison to that of the gems. I was in a state of despair finding out that all of the gems were cool with being converted into lunarians and assimilated into their society with no issues at all. Now, this could be intentional, a sort of "the winners write history" take on the subject, or a "gems are inherently compliant with whatever's easiest for them because they're all so tired after centuries of war that they'll go with whatever at this point" sort of thing, but there isn't much of an effort being made to suggest this to the reader and it just kind of leaves me with a weird taste in my mouth where I'm not really sure if the grand-scale cultural erasure that happens to the gems is trying to be presented as a good thing or not.

A similar criticism is in regards to aechmea and cairngorm's relationship for kind of obvious reasons. I think most of us have beef with these two. It's very evident that there's a big power imbalance between the two of them. However, nothing negative is shown about their relationship, and in the end gorm goes into the endless void never having become their own person. And this would be alright if it weren't framed as a good thing! I don't mind a tragedy! It's just, with many other things here, (maybe this is a show of poor reading comprehension, idk) it's very hard to tell what Ichikawa's intentions were when writing these parts of the story and so it feels kind of weird. The parts of the later volumes focusing on them were kind of hard to get through. And why does aechmea keep growing. He keeps getting taller and cairngorm keeps not doing that so as the manga goes on it looks more and more......... suspicious

Another thing I think is both infuriating and fascinating is that everyone's goal of eradicating humanity is very very biased. The only people who get to have a say in it are all misanthropists, and there isn't even a physical humanity to destroy anymore either, it's all just vibes. Aechmea wants to destroy humanity because that's the only way he'll get into the pure land of nothingness if everyone else is destroyed too, Adamant wants to destroy humanity because that's what he was made for, Pitapat wants to destroy humanity to take revenge against the guy who stole his creator's life's work, Phos wants to destroy humanity because the former two kind of forced them into that and 10,000 years later after cooking on a beach in the worst "holy robot eye"-induced trip of their life they (at least in my take of the book) have literally nothing else to do other than destroy humanity, like that's the only thing they've been given to do for their whole life, so they do because they've never had a purpose otherwise. They're all misanthropists, but humans have been extinct for eons at this point, so what's the point, really? To eradicate selfishness and desire and that's what humanity represents and sort of manifests even millions of years into the future? (I mean, it is a series based on buddhist principles) Now maybe it's because I think the enduring human spirit is cool and this isn't a book for people who rock with the enduring human spirit, but Phos and Pitapat kind of celebrating both of their deaths at the end going "oh yeah we did it we destroyed humanity" kiiiiind of lost me. At this point humanity is such an abstract concept that it seems like there's not much of a point in scrubbing themselves off the face of the universe in order to prevent other intelligent races elsewhere in the universe from evolving and becoming selfish. That'll probably happen regardless of whether the last remnants of the human era sacrifice themselves or not. (In fact, that's already implied by Life and Culture of Y-3579203181277. So, like, what's the point? Maybe that is the point, that there's no point. I dunno. Much to think about. This is why this series has wormed its way so deep into my brain, because nothing about it is clear.)

It DID look beautiful, though!

[tama1313]

[Part 2] Most underrated HNK character?

(part 2 because the little option)

Because... I'm just curious

We have so many characters but I keep seeing always contents about the same characters...

So (if I have time) once we get a winner I'll draw them

In a random order...

[four-eyed-floozy]

New morga coloring I did in celebration, I'm not too familiar with manga coloring but I think I did ok!

[alirex-art]

Morga sketch progress. Cannot complete it because 1 month of finals yayyy ( ・_・)ノΞ●~*

[daisukoth]

I wonder if the lunarians can predict when a gem is gonna emerge somehow.. Not that i see the point of them getting rid of old goshe and morga but the coincidence of the same exact same gems emerging after they're gone is really big...

[dewa-chan]

Sakura Morganite.

[housekinokuni]

my hand is feeling better so i colored these

Thinking bout how Phos always wants to help but always gets shot down lmao

[punkportmt]

Inktober 25 : Morganite (prickly)

[vvisti]

3/31 Morganite