#i can visualize things. just nothing original. nothing i havent seen or read or heard of before.

[vantasei]

if i am being honest. it is scary trying to be a quote unquote creator with no imagination. i cried about this in a dream i had a few nights back. i cried knowing i didnt know what to create. i cried knowing the face i drew was stolen from a pose i saw. i cried knowing the face i drew was a design someone else made. i cried knowing i cant do anything without stealing from someone else.

there were women in that dream, watching me cry. one of them came to hold me, sitting in front of that canvas (a tool i could never use. im too scared, in my life, that the money spent on the canvas and the paint and the brushes and the easel would all be for nothing when i realized i couldnt even think of anything to draw, much less to draw anything). but she had nothing to tell me. i had nothing to tell myself, to tell someone who cant make anything for themself, to tell someone who cant think for themself.

but when i wake up, i still choose to try to create. i still want to create. it makes me less alone.

[tumblunni]

AAAAAARARRRRRGHHH WHAT A WASTED PLOT TWIST god I feel so mad, that would have been really good in any other context it was really surprising!! it should have been really depressing and got me amped to see this villain be defeated, but instead its just depressing in the sort of ‘well there goes my only reason to keep reading this comic’ way :P Spoils n stuff for Phantom School, so don’t read under the cut if you’re interested in reading it. But meh its really obscure manhwa with a reaaaaallly slow translation and its dropped in quality so much and abandoned its initial premise, so I wouldnt blame anyone for not reading it... SERIOUSLY, why have we just run away from the whole concept of Phantom School for a twenty chapter arc that’s now been extendd EVEN MORE? The idea of a human being a teacher at a school for youkai is awesome!! I didnt come here for just a generic shonen battle against some random mysterious shadow guy who only got his identity finally revealed after 20 chapters. In a series where each chapter is 50 pages. 50 pages twice the size of A4, cos it started as an infinate-scrolling webcomic interface. A LOT OF PAGES. 20 chapters is over half the size of THE WHOLE STORY SO FAR and we ONLY JUST learned who the mystery villain is and why we should care about him and it as a reveal that killed off my fave character in a really sadistic way and revealed someone else was evil all along, and we havent even SEEN the goddamn protagonist for so long so they were the closest thing we had to protagonists right now an GAHHHH anyway, spoiler talk:

BLACKIE BLACKIE WHY gahhhhhh Literally RIGHT AFTER the comic revealed his backstory and why he trusts One-Armed so much, they show us him sacrificing himself to protect One-Armed after he was captured by the shadow monster, only to IMMEDIATELY give us a second flashback that recontexualizes everything and reveals One-Armed IS the shadow monster, and he was just faking it all to brainwash this guy into his willing servant and then eat his soul when he outlived his usefulness

Oh and I just need to take a second to point out how the translation is kinda bad and literal. The guy is named Blackie cos that’s the closest they could get to the nickname he had back when he was a normal mortal dog who got reincarnated as this humanoid youkai. It tends to have a problem of over-translating stuff that doesnt need to be translated?? At least ‘Blackie’ mostly works in-context, but its damn weird that this guy is called One-Armed. And used to be called Left-Armed before that! They translate EVERYONE’S names as if they weren’t names, they translate the names of all the youkai even! I guess its an easy mistake cos its a korean manga using japanese monsters, so I’d assume there’s a bit of confusion from a casual translator. *shrug* BUT SERIOUSLY Not even ‘One Arm’ but One-Armed. Super literal visual descriptors of everyone! It gets a bit weird and problematic when it comes to a disabled guy and literally a black guy named Blackie... And... Left-Armed??? ‘This guy is so spectacular, he possesses two arms! How Unusual!’ Its supposed to be because he could turn his left arm into a magic claw, but meh. And it gets uber problematic since the point is that One-Armed is now the villain and he uses shadow powers, so we have people yelling ‘damn that black guy for killing blackie’ and just... I’m glad this got translated so I can read it, but it can be really hard to understand sometimes :P

ANYWAY

Its just so demotivational and horrible and gahhhh And it COULD have been a really emotionally affecting twist, cos its destroying a good character and revealing it was all a lie, and just.. gahhh But we ONLY JUST heard the backstory of One-Armed being a good guy and Blackie having his reasons to care about him THAT got me emotional, and the speed of the backpedal just negates that emotion instead of evoking new ones its just got SO dark and cynical now that it kills all my interest especially cos its so padded out long, and so hard to understand the translation... and seriously we’ve spent so many chapters focusing on these two instead of the protagonist and just GAHHH it makes a long filler arc feel so wasted!

and I’m just so damn sad for Blackie!! his backstory is that he was this sweet adorable puppy whose owner became homeless, and he doesnt understand it and he’s just ‘don’t worry, I’ll wait!’ you’re struggling to push this fast food cart up a hill? youre doing extra shifts? I’ll wait! we dont do that job anymore? we won’t sleep indoors for a long time? I’ll wait! you’re feeling too sad and tired to pet me today? I’ll wait! I’m sick? We cant afford to see the doctor? I’ll wait! Oh the doctor didnt do my surgery? I guess I’m not sick after all! I’ll get better soon, you just wait! Meanwhile his owner is crying and struggling to scrape together any money to afford it, starving even more than usual, going back to the doctor every day to beg for help even as everyone is all ‘ugh this stinky homeless bastard’, kicking him out and then one day Blackie can’t wait for his owner to come back, he tries to follow him to the doctor, and doesnt realise the traffic lights have changed his owner sees him about to be hit by the car and yells at him to wait, which just manages to save him! but while he was distracted saving his dog he got hit by the car instead :( and then we have Blackie licking his lifeless face, and the monologue of “Are you sleeping? I’ll wait! Can I lie down next to you?” *UGLY SOBBING*

And then he meets One-Armed cos he was the youkai assigned to reap this soul. Apparantly Blackie’s love was so strong that his pure soul is able to see soul-creatures, so he can grab his owner’s soul and try and protect it from One-Armed AND THE SECOND FLASHBACK JUST MAKES THIS EVEN WORSE IN CONTEXT Cos One-Armed was actually trying to eat that soul, and Blackie actually did save it! One-Armed was just this horrible asshole who’d infiltrated the soul reaper government group as a way to hunt for victims in his serial killer nonsense :P But then the story we get in the first flashback is that One-Armed is totally nice and Blackie caused him to lose his arm while fighting off a monster from eating that soul, and it was totally bad that he didnt cooperate and such So he feels like he owes One-Armed, and thats why he became a youkai and joined the organization as One-Armed’s new partner And then we have a montage of how he started trusting One-Armed and seeing him as his new owner that he loved even more than his original one, and then he lets go of the soul and lets his old owner get reincarnated... And ALL OF THIS was for nothing and he was being manipulated by a lying freako who controls this fake shadow monster to hide his own crimes, and he HELPED HIDE THOSE CRIMES unwittingly, cos he was so convinced his best friend loved him too! T_________________T

and its just... SUCH A SADISTIC WAY TO KILL HIM OFF it looks like ‘oh no the shadow monster has captured One-Armed, we have our chance to kill it but it’d mean killing One-Armed too!’ and Blackie cares about him so much that he abandons logic and stops the other heroes from taking that chance to kill the monster and then ONE-ARMED KILLS HIM And all along he was the real shadow monster and he faked his whole capture and Blackie just cos everyone the chance to defeat him and now he is dead and in retrospect he abandoned his ENTIRE LIFE to join One-Armed as a partner and it was all for a sick fucker who pretends to be a friend and just *SOB* *SOB* And now stupid shadow fucker has won and everyone is dying and EVEN WORSE THAN THAT it means this arc is gonna be EVEN LONGER and we probably will never go back to the school-based plot :P And the translators left us off on this cliffhanger and it took AN ENTIRE YEAR for this translation update so who knows how long the next one will be :P :( :( :( :( :( :(