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hotwaterandmilk · 1 month ago

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I've been scanning the Yami no Purple Eye art book and it got me thinking about why I still feel so strongly about Shinohara Chie's horror-tinged works in particular. They don't have the sweeping settings, period detail or political intrigue of her historical titles, but they're still the works of hers I revisit most often.

I love the way Shinohara captures the physical and psychological horror of being a teenage girl. How truly overwhelming it can be to come into a new physical state and be hit by heightened strengths and fears. All while grappling with how to reconcile this new, hungry state with the "good girl" you were before the change. It's the way she combines this age-old puberty parable with an escalated 80s bent on 40s Hollywood female monstrosity that never fails to linger in my mind.

Let me unpack my rambling thoughts on this a bit and yeah they are pretty rambly I'm sorry I've got that neurological thing going on and it makes being articulate harder than it has ever been before. Forgive me!

Spoilers, bloody images and rambling re: Yami no Purple Eye, Ao no Fuuin, Umi no Yami Tsuki no Kage and Mizu ni Sumu Hana below.

The heroines of Shinohara's longer horror works are all seemingly average girls who are awakened to something horrific within them as teenagers (be it Rinko as panther, Ruka to psychic abilities, or Souko as an oni). Suddenly they're overcome not just by abilities but feelings, appetites, desires. They go from being good, average girls to young women battling forces within them stronger than anything known to science. There's always a boy there to support them through this, but they feel otherwise isolated or dangerous, unable to seek support from anyone else.

Yami no Purple Eye is frequently compared to the 1942 film Cat People and understandably so - in both you have a beautiful young woman descendended from "cat people" whose beastial side can take over when base urges overcome their normally sweet demeanor (though this film is absolutely not the first example of a 'cat person' in speculative fiction). The major difference, I would posit (aside from the more explicitly sexual nature of Cat People's change), is that Irena is an adult and while she also struggles with her identity and powers this battle is not new to her, she is hopeful for a way out but also somewhat resigned to the way things are.

Rinko from Yami no Purple Eye is new to being a panther, she is fearful of her secret getting out but also fearful of herself, of her purple eyes and her "unnatural" urges. While so much of Cat People is a relatively subtle look at female sexuality as a monstrosity in itself, Yami no Purple Eye shows a transformation that at puberty can be harnessed as a form of protection but also remains linked to the animal kingdom and not "enlightened" modern human society.

While Rinko's incredible strength saves her from all sorts of precarious situations, it feels new and out of her control. It isolates her from normal humans and it paints a target on her her back for Kaoruko, the primary antagonist of the series. I think what makes these pubescent power awakenings so alarming for all Shinohara's horror heroines is this lack of control. They didn't willingly trigger their transformation, they don't understand it properly, and they cannot control it. Ultimately each of them goes through a period of feeling incredible isolation from human society, which is common in a lot of speculative texts where the lead finds themselves estranged from society at large.

In Umi no Yami, Tsuki no Kage Ruka has the double-whammy of losing her normal life and her twin sister, Rumi, who has become deranged while coming into her own psychic powers. Although Ruka has the support of love-interest Katsuyuki, it is this love rivalry which put a wedge between her and her sister in the first place. At times, Ruka feels lost with all the destruction triggered by the sisters' transformation, held by Katsuyuki but with a 1000 yard stare in her eyes. Both Ruka and Rumi know deep down that only they can defeat one another, but how do you defeat your identical twin? How do you fight what is essentially your shadow self and your base instincts run riot?

It requires an understanding of the transformation, an acceptance of the change that has taken place, and a peace with what must come next - all of which takes Ruka the better part of 18 volumes to achieve. Mizu ni Sumu Hana takes a shorter route on a similar theme with the two Rikkas and the seeds, giving us another set of two near identical yet drastically different girls fighting for survival.

And being a teenage girl in these stories is very much focused on trying to survive. Another consistency across all these series that underscores the isolation of the heroines is the loss of those around them. Family members and friends are murdered or manipulated indiscriminately. Even if Shinohara's heroines try to seek support from someone other than their love interest, it is very quickly put to a stop by an opposing force. For a young woman in these worlds, struggling to understand her new body and changed mind, there is no option for support outside a male romantic interest.

That in itself is horrifying (though admittedly not as well-examined within text as I'd like, it certainly does feel like a comment) but it becomes a hell of a lot worse if your love interest's goals are at odds with your own. We see this with Souko in Ao no Fuuin who is revealed to be an oni that must survive by consuming humans. Her (false) memories are human and she has only recently learned of her oni nature so understandably she doesn't want to be a predator, yet she must eat people to survive. Akira, her love interest, rather than being a dutiful normal boy like Shin'ya in Yami no Purple Eye, is from an opposing family tasked with destroying her.

Eventually Akira's affection for Souko outweighs his duty to eliminate her and the two work together to try and figure out a way for her to become human and thus no longer require defeating. But initially in Ao no Fuuin, Souko is entirely alone with her growing hunger and power, unable to confide in anyone and unsupported by a romantic interest which proves just as isolating as it sounds. Like Rinko, Souko has gaps in her memory, a sensation that she's done something unnatural but a desperate need to be wrong about it, to be proven human despite all evidence to the contrary. As both heroines have entered their teenage years they have lost all they knew of stability, family and normalcy to have it be replaced by the uncanny, unnatural and unacceptable.

To have the body and mind become unreliable in your teenage years, to feel overwhelmed by forces you didn't know were within you, to feel like you're the only one experiencing such horrors... I mean it's all a big puberty metaphor isn't it? And yeah, to a degree these stories are simply turning the horror dial up to eleven on a cross-cultural feeling of coming into the power and bodily changes of adulthood before your mind can catch up with them (though in the case of Shinohara's stories every lead is shown to be attracted to the opposite sex and not explored as being anything other than cis, so there's definitely a lot left unexplored regarding pubscent queerness in her worlds).

All of Shinohara's long-form horror heroines seem to go through a period of grasping back for the safety and "normalness" of their childhood selves, of who they were before their body and mind betrayed them. Souko repeats to herself countless times that she is human not necessarily because she knows it to be true, but because she wants it to be true. She longs for who she believes she once was and we see similar grief for Rinko and Ruka, now awakened to their new lives as teenage monsters, as they reflect back on the comforting dullness of the recent past with a newfound appreciation and longing.

Ultimately, however, Souko was never a normal teenage girl. Rinko's power was dormant but she was always of panther blood. Rikka was always going to be used as a pawn between black and white dragons. Only Ruka, whose power was awakened after surviving a near-fatal bacterial infection, ever had an entirely normal human childhood and even then she must accept that what she and her sister had in their innocence can never be rediscovered. For some of these heroines there was never a "normal" to go back to and even for those that did have a glimpse at average life, it is ultimately gone from their grasp regardless. Time marches ever onward and for these young women there is no ability to wind back the clock, they must continue forward like all of us, even if their awakening to adulthood is more violent and bloody than most.

While everything I've touched on so far seems absolutely godawful, I think it's important to tie this all together with a bow of hope. Shinohara Chie's long-form horror and suspense stories put all their leads through the wringer, but they are never without hope. There is some degree of happiness out there for all her heroines, victims of circumstance and blood. However, it is not the happiness they had anticipated for themselves as adults and I think that is key to the whole exercise. Shinohara's heroines can at times be passive, clinging desperately to the idea that they can reverse what cannot be reversed. But in the end they must accept and embrace their new bodily powers. Just as we all must accept adulthood even when it doesn't adhere to our childhood hopes and dreams.

Rinko goes through absolute hell to try to get her happy ending and ultimately she doesn't get it, but her daughter Mai does manage to carve out a sense of happiness just by being with the man she loves. Souko can shed her obligation to the Kimon and be with Akira because her previous incarnation's daughter willingly takes on the role of heir for her. Ruka can live on but to do so must kill a willing Rumi and accept that what happened to them will ultimately be forgotten by the greater consciousness. Both Rikkas are revived and can choose their ultimate lifespan as the lost lotus flowers blossom once more.

None of these are your traditional happy ending, but what links them together is a sense of sacrifice. Part of the journey into adulthood, into surviving the horror of having a body as a teenage girl, is accepting the flawed state of adulthood. It comes at considerable sacrifice and it isn't necessarily what you dreamed it would be, but it is yours and you got where you are as an adult through the blood, sweat and tears of your younger self. There's a beauty to that and to Shinohara's flawed heroines and their often patchy narratives. Having a body can be horrific, it can be overwhelming, and it is inherently isolating... but it is essential to experiencing the beauty we do have in this world.

And idk I just think that's neat.

Shinohara isn't an artist to everyone's tastes and I do think there are strengths to her historical tales that perhaps aren't as present in her more horrific works, but her super powered horror stories manage to capture a type of pubescent alarm that a lot of other authors cannot master. While all these works do feel dated to a degree and present a limited scope of gender and sexuality, there's something I find timeless about revisiting the horror and joy of being a girl both cursed and blessed with the burden of a body.

Edit 14/10/24: I would like to point out that my use of the term "horror" here relates to consistent thematic elements presented in these series rather than their specific genre labels, roots in other sub-genres or relation to other foundational texts outside of Shinohara's oeuvre.

Shinohara's speculative work is frequently labeled battle/suspense manga (with some shorter works earning a 'suspense horror' description at their most intense) and I am in no way disagreeing with these labels or trying to relabel the above titles as strictly horror. Nor does this post seek to break down the full context of these titles as they fit into the development of 80s/90s/00s shoujo.

This post exclusively reflects my personal thoughts on the bodily perils faced by Shinohara's super-powered heroines in the aforementioned texts through a horror lens (which in turn reflects my area of focus back when I studied film).

Everyone will have their own intrepretations of these texts and these characters and that's what makes hearing people's opinions so interesting - always open to hearing yours if you stumble onto this. ^^

#personal #ramblings #shinohara chie #chie shinohara #blood tw #random manga i recommend #shoujo manga #shoujo #shojo manga #shojo #it's 1am here and i feel like garbage #so i may edit this more when i can think a bit better #but wanted to get it out there lest i just bin it #i highly recommend all of shinohara's art books btw #truly gorgeous artwork

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last-starry-sky · 18 days ago

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kinktober day 26 - wet dream

könig x f!military!reader pt. 1 (pt. 2 HERE)

[MDNI - NSFW - MIND THE WARNINGS: 1.4k, power imbalance: König is reader's Colonel but nothing implicitly happens, ymmv, unwanted/forced shared sleeping situation, fingering, biting, and dryhumping in a dream.]

tag list (lmk if you'd like to be added!): @slut-lmao, @mishaglass

It couldn’t get any worse than this. Being stuck out on some sort of bullshit wilderness/survival drill for a whole week was bad enough, but the fact that you happened to draw the short stick and were paired up with your Colonel of all people, really really really made you feel like you had been cursed.

You managed to spy a look his way while you were packing up while your troop prepared to hike out. The man was massive: tall and muscular. It made you hope he wouldn’t expect you to carry as much as he did. Considering you would be each other’s only company for the whole week, it wasn’t his physique that concerned you the most.

��Ready?” he asked, all six plus feet of his bulky, veiled form suddenly looming over you.

“Yeah!” you squeaked, standing up from your crouch, fumbling as you tried to thread your arm through the straps.

He just stood there while you floundered, face going hot under his emotionless gaze. When you were done, he nodded his helmeted head to the side, indicating that you should follow him down the dirt and gravel trail that would lead you up the mountain and to your campsite.

“You have the map, yes?” he asked once you fell in stride with him.

“Yes sir,” you said pulling the only slightly crumpled, folded paper map out of your back pocket.

“Good,” he replied, fingers tapping along the straps of his pack. “You’ll be in charge of that.” He looked down at you as you unfolded the map. You could feel his blue eyes burning holes in the side of your face as you walked along him. “You lead. I’ll follow, for once,” he said, a crack of insane laughter rippling out from behind his mask as he bumped his gloved fist lightly against your shoulder.

You responded with a shaky laugh of your own. “Ha ha. Yes, Colonel. Great idea.”

Oh, this week was going to be absolute hell.

You did fairly well leading the two of you along the loosely defined “trail” drawn on the map. You also did better at scaling the mountain than your Colonel, his height and bulk working against him as the ground became increasingly vertical and the underbrush crowded in. It was nearing nightfall by the time you arrived at your predetermined site.

“Stay here,” König told you, swinging his backpack off into the dry dirt beside you. “I’ll collect some wood, get a fire started.”

You nodded absently at him, busy hunting through your pack for your lantern so that you would be able to see while setting up the tent. As he trampled away into the treeline your brain caught on that word. Tent. Tent singular.

Lord in heaven, you prayed on your knees, tightly rolled tent in your hands, if you exist, please please please don’t make me share a tiny tent with that giant, insane man for-

König dumped an armful of branches next to your lantern. He squatted down, silently setting about the task of breaking them one by one over his knee into manageable pieces for the fire. It was your turn to stare at him, ogling his strength as you sat on your boots.

“You . . . ah, do you . . .” you rambled while watching his hands. He stopped mid-snap, head turning to you. A shiver ran down your spine at his black, eyeless stare. “Did you bring a tent too?” you squeaked.

Your heart sank when he looked away, shaking his head. He broke the branch three more times - crack crack crack - sound ringing around the small clearing.

“Better to be close together,” he said dusting off his hands, standing up, and gathering the pieces of wood together in a pile. “Warmth. Danger,” he said striking a match, the small, warm light dwarfed by his large hands as he cupped it next to the tinder pile.

You shuffled uncomfortably in your sleeping bag. Sure, your body was exhausted, joints and muscles tired from the long day, but you worse mentally. Every time you heard a noise outside, or the man pressed next to you shuffle, you lay awake for minutes, not knowing what to expect. You would close your eyes, tell yourself it was nothing, and then-

“Need to sleep,” he said behind you, making you shake suddenly awake with fear. “Long day tomorrow.”

You nodded, flopping onto your side. Maybe if you couldn’t feel him staring at you, your exhaustion could pull you under. You shivered, curling down into the flannel lining so that it covered your icy nose. That’s when you heard König unzip his pack. There was a tense moment of silence before he reached over and unzipped yours as well.

You looked back at him over your shoulder, trembling more from cold than fear. He was halfway through zipping your sleeping bag to his when he looked up, catching your eye. It felt so weird to see him like this: dressed down in just his base layer, no veil, messy hair and scarred face left open for you to see. It made you wonder how many people had ever seen him like this.

“Share some of my warmth with you, if you don’t mind,” he said pulling the zipper together, trapping you inside with him. He laid down on his back, scrubbing his hands over his eyes before continuing. “Plenty to give.”

You lay back down, not even bothering to give a response as his body heat slowly crawled over to fill your side of the shared sleeping bag. You curled up, wrapping your arms around your chest for some sort of comfort, and finally, miraculously, fell asleep.

Warm hands stroking down your arms.

Breath caressing your cheeks as kisses pressed across your face, temple, mouth.

The solid mass of a leg pressing up against your core, rocking you as the hard, trapped cock sawed against your ass.

You moaned into the night, breath pouring out like steam.

Kisses peppered down your jaw to your neck, where a sudden bite made you bow away from your attacker.

There was a dark chuckle muffled against your skin before an assault of nipping kisses came mercilessly, one after another along with your whining moans.

“So good, maus,” a husky voice murmured against your slick neck, “So good to me,”

Strong fingers pressed against your pussy, hot arousal leaking through the thin fabric.

You shuddered, squirming and moaning, as the fingers worked clumsily around your clit.

The hips behind you came to a sudden stop, erection nestled in the fat of your ass as a deep groan rang in your ear.

“More . . . more,” you plead, hips urging the still hand to touch you again.

A growl, then the hand was pulling you tight against the solid mass behind you.

An accidental tweak of your clit had you spiraling, unwinding, crying hot tears down your chilled cheeks.

You swore you heard a voice as a hand pet over your head, soothing you to sleep.

“Ja, there you are. Sleep, sleep sweet maus.”

When you next opened your eyes, the morning sun was blazing through the open flap of the tent. Coffee was brewing over the renewed fire, and König was shaving facing away from you. You quickly pulled on your boots and jacket, trying to get up and over to the fire as fast as you could despite the slick pooled in your underwear and wobbling legs.

König looked over at you as you crashed out of the tent. You swayed unintentionally from side to side as you walked, his eyes narrowed in on you for a second, thinking, before turning back to his shaving.

“Sleep well?” he asked, waiting for you to pour yourself a cup of the mud he had prepared.

“Yeah,” you croaked, practically choking on the godawful brew.

“Good,” he said rolling up his shaving kit and dumping his wash water. “Rolled around a lot. Made a lot of noise, thought you were talking in your sleep,” he said nonchalantly, clearing his throat before standing.

You froze with the cup in your hand, eyes wide, an endless pit of guilt opening in your stomach. Oh god, you thought, last night . . . were you . . . did you-

“Almost had to wake you up, but you stopped. Anyway, when’s breakfast?” he asked, stretching his arms over his head, exposing his hairy lower belly as his shirt rode up. You looked away as your cheeks burned.

Perhaps this week wouldn’t be so bad after all.

#mw2 #könig/reader #könig x reader #starry writes #kinktober 2024 #idk guys im not in love with this so i hope you at least get something out of it #if you've got ideas for future prompts (to prevent garbage like this from happening again lmao) feel free to send them to me!

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