#it's not even fandom-specific as most recently my eyes glossed over at someone talking about voting systems

[awkward-teabag]

You can still save yourself time by using initialism and making it so your post/tags are legible to those who don't know said initialism, too.

Include the full name early on (bonus points if you put the initialism in brackets after) and after that you can go back to shorthand as the info one needs to read it is right there. Even if someone still doesn't get it because, frankly, this is the piss on the poor website and some will always miss that, it still means someone doesn't need to go to another site (possibly several) to find out what initialism or an acronym stands for.

For tags, throw the full name in there in a solo tag. That way people will know what you're talking about and people new to the concept or fandom will have a greater chance of finding your post.

If you're with people who are familiar with an acronym or initialism, you can forgo this but if you're posting outside these spaces, know you're alienating others and possibly leading to confusion as different things can have the same initials.

A game I used to play had so many things that were shortened to "DS" by players and the time it cost to clarify which one was greater than writing out the full word to begin with.

People are not mind-readers so while you may know what you mean, others do not.

Can we start writing out the full titles of things again pls like some of the shows y'all talk about sound so interesting fr but then you start abbreviating and shit like "man I love hgtysbks" and "you gotta go watch abcdefgh" like girl. First of all gesundheit second of all What am I supposed to do with that What does that mean!!!!

[meta-shadowsong]

Some Thoughts on Defection

So, those of you who know me may be aware that I have a Thing for double agents and defectors. And, while I haven’t yet read Alphabet Squadron (it’s next on my list), I’ve read some quotes/commentaries, particularly related to Yrica Quell. This is not specifically about her or anything in that book (like I said, I haven’t read it yet), but it is inspired by some of the things I’ve seen—i.e., there’s one passage I’ve read where she talks about why she didn’t defect earlier, mentioning, among other things, the friends she’d made in her squadron. So, in connection with that passage and a few other commentaries I’ve read recently, here, in fairly general terms, are some thoughts of mine that have been percolating about the decision to defect from the Empire to the Alliance, and why that’s not necessarily a simple one.

DISCLAIMER: I am not in any way saying that the Empire is not Evil because it obviously is; it is worse than the people fighting it or the Republic that came before, wherever those groups/people fall on the greyscale, so to speak. Which, I acknowledge, is to an extent a YMMV thing. I just wanted to make that clear from the outset, because as I’ve mentioned in previous discussions on other grey-area/nuance-y/Discourse Bait™ topics, it’s easy to read too much into things that get said, and I don’t want my core feelings on the subject to be misinterpreted.

(Also, as a note—while this discussion could probably be broadened and applied to most fandoms with clearly defined Sides to a conflict, I’m using Star Wars, primarily the OT/Empire era, as a case study because that’s where my head’s at.)

Anyway, disclaimers/etc. aside, what I want to talk about here is that this—defecting—isn’t a single choice. It’s actually three.

So, the first question that needs to be addressed is the decision to no longer support the Empire. And while, in theory, this is a fairly straightforward question (as I said before, the Empire is Evil with a capital Yikes, I’m not at all trying to deny that), in practice it becomes a little more complicated.

Awareness of that evilness, to some extent, depends on the level of information this person has, or has access to. It also probably depends on why they joined in the first place, and on what position they actually hold in the Empire (i.e., a fighter pilot has access to different information and is subject to different indoctrination/pressures than, say, a low-ranked NCO working in the Army’s quartermaster department, or an ISB analyst with access to highly classified data, or medical personnel, or someone in a civilian/bureaucratic position such as an aide/secretary to a planetary governor, etc.). It depends on the things they’ve seen, both after joining the Empire and before it. I mean, since we’re talking about potential defectors, there comes a point where things are bad enough that the person in question at least start asking the questions, but where that point is and what it would take to shift the balance does depend on a lot of factors.

For example, and I think there’s an antagonist in one of the comics who falls into this category, it’s possible that someone is coming at this—joining the Empire, I mean—from a prior situation that was bad enough that they were of the opinion that, “yes, the Empire does terrible things, but at least they’re not those assholes.” Because the Empire is Evil, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who’s not the Empire is automatically Not Evil—see, for example, the Hutt clans or certain other underworld organizations. For this type of person, it’s about when the Empire’s atrocities outweigh whatever Those Assholes are/were doing. At what point the alternative, in their eyes, stops being worse. So, this person’s potential breaking point is going to take a lot more to reach.

But, moving on from there—our hypothetical potential defector has reached their breaking point and has come to the conclusion that they can no longer serve the Empire. And here comes question two—whether or not to actively fight against the Empire.

Again, a question we’d like to think is simple, but isn’t necessarily so. Some reasons why this person might choose to desert instead of defect—for one, straight-up self-preservation. Our hypothetical defector is acutely aware of what the Empire really does and is really capable of, or they wouldn’t be here. If they run, they’ll probably only get executed if they’re caught. But if they hit back, they’ll still be executed, but their road there will be much, much worse.

Even if they get past that road block, maybe they feel they have a lack of the necessary access or useful skills to fight back. Our low-ranked NCO in the quartermaster’s department may technically have basic military training, but when was the last time they actually used it? They’re primarily essentially a data monkey at this point. And they don’t even work with particularly useful data, unlike, say, our ISB analyst, or even our political secretary/aide. What could they do, other than get caught and killed immediately without making much of an impact—except, maybe, harming (primarily) their fellow low-level peons by messing with supply lines?

Which brings me to another reason, and the Yrica Quell quote I mentioned above. Actively fighting against the Empire means actively fighting against people who have been peers, even friends, for maybe a long time. So, our hypothetical defector may not be willing to do that. Now, they may also consider—what if I could persuade my friends to come with me? But then they risk exposure, and the wider the circle gets, the higher the risk—and the greater the cost if they do get caught. Maybe some of their friends have also reached a crisis point—or maybe they haven’t, and there’s a Betrayal in the offing, from one side or the other. I can see why someone couldn’t deal with that and would just leave instead.

And on the subject of fear and consequences, what about people who have families, or other dependents, who might be at risk for reprisals? Look at Galen Erso, who chose to disappear rather than taking his knowledge and skillset to someone working against the Empire. And, yes, part of that is that he’s not super thrilled with the idea of working for a military anyway, part of that is that, at the time he left, there wasn’t really an organized resistance that could make effective use of those skills and that data, but part of it was also that he had a small child to protect. And even Saw, though he probably wasn’t quite as Extreme as he gets later, was willing to help the three of them just escape and settle elsewhere rather than insisting on trying to recruit Galen, or worse (…as an aside, there’s probably a whole Conversation to be had about Saw’s growing extremism and I think looking at how he handles the Ersos and then how he handles Bodhi fifteen years later is a good place to start, but I digress).

The point is, a deserter is different from a defector, and, as with the consequences for the deserter and defector as individuals, the consequences for the deserter’s friends and family are probably much lower than the defector’s friends and family will face.

Which leads to question three—whether or not to fight for the Alliance.

(This part, to me, is also Super Super Interesting and I don’t think gets discussed as much as Question One, or even Question Two, which tends to get glossed over and/or merged with One, even though they kind of are separate decisions, as I said.)

Anyway. Leaving aside the early days where, as I mentioned, there wasn’t necessarily much of an organized resistance to defect to, there are reasons for our hypothetical defector to try to do what they can on their own, or with a small cell of like-minded people, rather than joining the Official Rebellion. These might be petty and/or personal—for example, Mon Mothma is the face/Official Leader of the Alliance; what if our hypothetical defector comes from a place with historical Difficulties with Chandrilla, or has a specific issue with Mothma herself and/or her politics/previous actions, and can’t necessarily get past that?

Or it might come down to self-preservation again. Imperial propaganda/indoctrination doesn’t limit itself to covering up Imperial atrocities/painting the Empire in the best possible light, it also vilifies the Alliance. Our hypothetical defector, especially if we’re talking about our ISB analyst, or our pilot, or even our bureaucrat, may think that the fate that awaits them if they go to the Alliance is no better than if they get accused of disloyalty by the Empire—meaning, a quick execution, if they’re lucky. Whether or not they’re right, (and whether or not the weight of their prior actions vs. what they do moving forward balances out in their favor) the fear might still be there, and keep them working from reaching out.

Or they might have larger political and/or ethical concerns that make them hesitate to throw in with the Alliance. Because, after all, the Rebellion is officially the Alliance to Restore the Republic. And, while the Empire is much worse than the Republic was, even in its later stages, that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone who wants to bring down the Empire thinks that the solution to the problem is to go back to what they may see as a nonfunctional/corrupt/whatever issue government. Or they may have problems with other aspects of the Rebellion’s stated platform or goals. Or operational/tactical approaches. Look at the way Saw later broke with the wider rebellion over differing views on tactics—it’s not out of the question that our hypothetical defector, considering joining the Alliance, might have similar (or opposite) concerns.

And as another example—while not specifically Empire/OT related, we see this something similar during the Clone Wars, with Lux Bonteri. Granted, this isn’t handled as well as it could be (and the Third Option he takes is freaking Death Watch, which, nice going there, dude), but he still makes the point that just because he’s broken with the Separatists doesn’t mean he’s willing to join the Republic. The same analysis, especially for one living the situation, might well apply for someone looking to break ties with the Empire.

(Side note, completely unrelated—an issue I still have with Queen’s Shadow is the way the book handled Mina Bonteri, and took some of the meat/impact out of her being someone Genuinely Principled on the Separatist side of things by having her in contact with a ~shadowy figure~ who may or may not have been Dooku/Tyranus. But, like I said, separate conversation; talking about Lux just made me think about her.)

In conclusion—well, like I said, I’m Interested in defectors/double-agents/etc., in part because the process to get there, and what is done with the decision to shift loyalties, isn’t always a simple one. And one of the reasons I’m looking forward to reading Alphabet Squadron, when I finally sit down to actually do so, is that I think we’ll get a little more of that process/a little more detail on that mindset.

(I’m also thinking, if I’ve parsed the timeline right—which who knows, this is Star Wars where everything’s made up and the timeline doesn’t matter—anyway, there’s a chance that the actual process of Kallus’s defection might be a subplot in the Cassian series? Especially since they both use the Fulcrum codename…but we shall see. I’m SUPER EXCITED for that one either way, because it is right up my alley.)

…anyway. Uh. I’m not sure this really adds up to much, other than the fact that this is a Topic That Interests Me, and will probably be reflected in some of my fic later, when related plot points come up. And, like I said, since it comes up in a recent novel that I’ve seen discussions about, it felt like a good time to lay all this out in some kind of coherent, if slightly superficial, form.

So, the point is—defection isn’t necessarily a simple or easy choice to make, even when it’s the right thing to do; there’s a lot of thought and factors that go into it, unless it’s an impulsive heat-of-the-moment, ‘if I don’t do something RIGHT NOW IMMEDIATELY the consequences of my inaction are Insupportable’ type thing, but that is not the subject of this essay. And those factors can be interesting to poke at, at least for me.

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Tokyo Ghoul :Re Season 1

I just finished rewatching this, so I figured now was a good time to make a big post about it, especially because of how the manga also recently ended and so it’s a lot easier to look back on the story as a complete product.

As someone that’s already read the manga, it’s basically impossible to discuss this season without taking about the entirety of :re, so this is gonna have some casual spoilers for later stuff. It’s also mostly just gonna be me talking about how the anime feels as an adaptation, because of that.

My non-spoilery TL;DR is that I think this was an imperfect but surprisingly great adaptation of a very flawed manga, and I honestly think I prefer it to the manga already. If season 2 can go anywhere near as well as I hope it will, at least now that we have confirmation it’ll cover the rest of :re, I would probably just suggest people watch the anime instead of reading the manga. It’s a shame that the anime side of the franchise doesn’t quite stand on it’s own because of how Root A went, but that’s not super relevant to the :Re anime.

Anyway, more detailed and spoiler-y thoughts under the cut, including some more of my speculation for season 2. [As a fair warning, this got really long, and there’s a fair bit at the end that could be taken as being anti-Tou//ken, even though I don’t mean anything malicious or ship hate-y by it]

It’s interesting to look back at this season of the anime, after having read the ending of the manga, and after having seen how disappointed people were with pretty much the entire second half of :re. People complain about the anime in general cutting out ‘important narrative details’, mainly to do with backstories and worldbuilding, but I feel like those things ended up being a double-edged sword in the manga that ultimately got people’s hopes up, and made them more annoyed at the ending than they should have been.

For instance, the anime didn’t go into Saiko’s backstory, and they didn’t show the fact that Shirazu’s father had killed himself, but it’s not like those things came up again [aside from Saiko’s family being mentioned in an off-hand bit of exposition in the finale], so I can’t exactly say that it took away from the story in any meaningful way.

In general, I feel like anime-only people would mostly just be confused as to why the manga side of the fandom developed such increasingly complicated theories about certain things, and why it disappointed them so much when, for example, Uta ended up just being some regular quirky dude and nothing more. Which I think says a lot about how it’s probably a good thing in the end that the anime glosses over the sorts of details that got people making theories as they read the manga.

The part of the manga that this season covers is definitely the most well-written part of :Re, but overall the series is a bit of a bloated mess, so I’m glad that the anime ended up being almost like a second draft of a novel, that just trims things down to a more reasonable size and pace. The effect should be a lot more apparent in season 2, though, since they’ll probably start cutting out entire story arcs, whereas with season 1 it was mostly just a matter of them shortening scenes a bit and being less repetitive in general with their storytelling.

There’s definitely some small parts where I think they cut a bit more than they should have, though, like how much they heavily gloss over Matsuri’s backstory and reason for being at the CCG, and then the whole Rose investigation. It’s not a huge deal though, since the audience can still basically understand what’s going on. It’s also made a bit better by the fact that those writing issues pop up during the part of the show that was best overall, so it’s easy to just focus on the good parts.

Other than that, I really had no issues with them cutting out story material. For the most part, as I said before, it was just a matter of the anime being less repetitive, and in general it came across like it didn’t need to spell certain things out to the audience as much as the manga did.

One of the more important elements that were cut was how they removed a lot of Akira’s warmer moments with Haise, and in general the whole framing of her being a mother figure to him. But honestly, after sitting on it for a while, I think I prefer it to how she was portrayed in the manga. It feels more in line with her characterization in the first series, and I think it just makes more sense and is more interesting for her to basically hold him at arm’s length most of the time. It’s also just a bit sad how, in the manga, she acted as a mother figure toward him because she was ordered to in order to manipulate him. On a more subjective and broad note, I think the manga slowly got more and more off-putting with how it handled familial or psuedo-familial relationships, in a sort of . . . Freudian way, almost. The stuff with Haise and Akira was a pretty minor example of it, but it ended up being part of a larger whole, so I’m not exactly upset that they just cut that little bit out.

I also think it gave it a bit more weight later on, when she awkwardly tried to comfort him during episode 10. Since it was the most overt act of affection that she’d displayed toward him until that point, and because it had so many conflicted emotions behind it. And in general, they kept her warm attitude toward him during episode 7, so that was nice.

While I remember, I should say that the whole house party scene in episode 7 was a great example of the anime editing down the manga into something more concise and less overwhelming. Changing it so that it was just about Haise, the Qs, Arima, and Akira, made it feel a lot more cozy. It was a little overwhelming to have like twice the amount of characters involved in that scene in the manga.

Anyway, back onto the topic of cut/condensed material, the other more blatant parts are how they gloss over some of the details of the Torso and Nutcracker investigations, which I think was fine. The manga mostly just dropped that police procedural-y tone pretty quickly, so it just feels a bit more consistent with the story’s overall tone, for them to not worry so much about the details, and to focus more on the action. And for episode one in particular, they didn’t really have much choice in terms of how to adapt it, since the end of chapter six was the first good stopping point they had. Anything before that would have made the first episode feel insubstantial, like it was lacking a meaningful hook. So I think they did the best with what they had. I appreciate that they took the chance to actively change how the Torso arc was structured and paced in order to make it fit more reasonably into one episode, instead of being slavishly 1:1 with how the manga did it.

One of the big changes that happened early on which I think got people off onto the wrong foot with the anime, so to say, was the whole taxi scene with Mutsuki and Torso in episode one. Hoo boy, that one sure caused a lot of complaints from people. Personally, I thought it was fantastic. Overall, it feels like the anime treated Mutsuki with more respect and dignity than the manga ever did. Which is one of the big reasons why I disagree with the idea that the anime ‘lacks heart’. In a sense, I feel like it reflects the strict love of an editor, rather than the obsessive love of a fan. But for this in particular, it really does just feel like the people writing the anime care more about Mutsuki than Ishida does, to be honest.

They actually kept like 99% of the content related to Mutsuki and Torso, but just reframed things slightly to be less in-your-face and shock-value-y about it all. The anime already explains how Torso exclusively preys upon ‘women with bodily scars’, and shows him being very specifically obsessed with Mutsuki’s body later on, so really they had no need to actually show Torso ripping open Mutsuki’s shirt and exposing his binder and whatnot. I’ve seen a lot of people accuse the anime of being too blunt with it’s writing, but it’s moments like that which feel like they respect the reader’s intelligence and their ability to put two and two together than the manga did.

Similarly, they kept the part where Mutsuki has social anxiety in the night-club because of people staring at him, but they just left it at that. Which was fine. And during the auction raid, they very bluntly make it clear that he ate parts of those dead investigators to heal himself, and just presented it as a pragmatic choice on his part, whereas I’m pretty sure the manga was less clear about it, and eventually tried to frame it as a ‘big shocking twist’ later on that was meant to play into the whole emerging theme of him being a crazy serial killer or whatever. Yet again, another way in which the anime treats him with more dignity, and isn’t just trying to manufacture forced shock value to surprise the audience.

On the note of the auction raid, it’s kinda amusing to me how that was the part of the story that was probably the most faithful to the manga, and cut barely anything out, but I think we can all agree that it was the worst part of it. To me, it mostly just suffered from the inherent flaws of the source material. The manga could at least somewhat coast by on flashy art and fight scenes, but the general opinion from manga fans has always been that the auction raid was a pretty messy and kinda uninteresting arc. It has good moments in it, but for the most part there’s just not a lot of emotional weight behind the fights, and to be quite honest, Takizawa in this arc is one of the more overtly edgy and over the top parts of the entire series. As a whole he’s a really good character, but man, that first impression of him being a minor character who comes back as a crazy half-ghoul with white hair and scary eyes, and who starts eating people and rambling about fruit sure is, uh . . . something, alright. If anything, the anime’s more subdued art made him come across as being less ‘overwhelming’ and over the top, which was nice.

Although they were just minor cuts to a few lines of dialogue, the auction raid did cut a few things though, which I also think were for the best. During the Mutsuki-Urie hug scene, Urie’s sentence just gets cut off as ‘you’re a . . . ‘, which is honestly way less clunky than the ‘you’re a wo(man)’ way it was phrased in the manga. On the one hand, it’s a very overt indication of how Urie still views him as a man even after figuring out about his biological sex, but on the other hand it’s so awkward and clunky in it’s delivery that most people didn’t even take it that way in the first place. I think it was just fine how it was in the anime, although I do sorta wish that during episode seven they could have included the detail of Urie continuing to refer to him with male pronouns even in his internal monologue, but oh well.

Similarly, during the scene where Suzuya kills Big Madam, the anime just had him say ‘Farewell’ instead of adding ‘Dad’ onto the end. To be blunt, I have no idea what the fuck Ishida was thinking when he wrote that line in the manga, and it’s stuff like this which is why he comes across as having Really Weird hang-ups about LGBT people. That line in particular in the manga was basically just an act of deadnaming, in essence, since Big Madam is obviously a trans-woman who clearly presents and identifies as female. So yeah, cutting that part of the line out in the anime was entirely for the best.

Some people complained about the use of Unravel during the Takizawa fight as being kinda nostalgia bait-y, which I get, but I think it was fine. It was surprisingly fitting, since that whole scene focused so much on Haise grappling with the identity of Kaneki that lives within him. I’m mostly just glad that they didn’t try and use it a second time, since that would have been a bit much.

Though the auction raid was a bit dull overall, thankfully episodes seven through ten were fantastic, and overall the peak of season 1. I really appreciated that they took the time to spread the material from volume four across three episodes. The anime’s definitely at it’s best when it focuses on character interactions/development, and that part of the story had a whole lot of that. Even though I think that for the most part this season was better than it’s respective part of the manga, these episodes in particular were just great. With the rest of the anime, you could definitely say that the manga’s fight scenes are superior, but when the story isn’t focusing on fights, the anime just feels fundamentally better. Episode seven in particular was very nicely structured, and felt a fair bit more fleshed out and cohesive than it did in the manga. I already talked about how the house party was way better than in the manga, but I also preferred how they handled the scene at the cafe, though I’ll wait to talk in detail about the scenes involving Touka and Kaneki until later, since I have a lot to say about that.

Oh, and the visual changes they made for the ED in episode seven were great, and got me kinda emotional, given that I know where things end up, lol. I’m really happy they inserted that one panel of Kaneki and Arima walking together during it, in particular. It really sets up the emotional weight that comes to fruition during the Black Reaper arc.

Although I still think episodes seven to ten were the best part of season 1, as I said above they do also have some of the more unnecessary story cuts. It’s just really easy to not care much for that when it’s surrounded by so much good material.

The final two episodes weren’t quite as great, since they were so action-heavy, but they were still really good, and I think I enjoyed them slightly more the second time around. Episode eleven in particular really nailed all of the emotions surrounding Tsukiyama and his servants. But it was in these episodes in particular that I also really noticed how the anime is a lot more gore-y and explicit than I expected it to be. It’s kinda surprising how often they just outright show characters getting stabbed through their stomachs, and so on. There’s also a lot of limbs being cut off in that whole arc in general, and even though they silhouette Kijima when he gets chainsawed, there’s at least one cut that just outright shows him with the chainsaw sticking into his head with no real censorship.

In general the only real censorship in this season was how some stuff like Hairu’s decapitation was strategically placed out of frame, and also that one scene where Yuma’s tongue was pixelated. But that’s about it. There’s certainly nothing like what we got in the first season of the anime, where obnoxious shadows and black bars got put over the screen during action scenes, or the colour scheme got all weird to try and obscure the gore, or whatever.

A lot of people disliked the overall pacing of the finale, but I thought it was great. It’s easy to unfairly compare it to the previous season finales we had in the anime, but those were largely the products of Morita’s directorial vision, and how much he heavily fleshed out the source material. This was just a more straight-forward adaptation of how these chapters played out in the manga, so it feels kinda mean to bash it for not being as interesting as some of the previous season finales. Though even then, I kinda prefer how certain things were done visually in the anime. Like how heavily they used the checkerboard room thing during Haise’s dream sequence, how they fleshed out the child abuse memory scene to be more than just a single static panel, and in general how they portrayed Haise’s memories of the ‘underground garden’. That place always looked nice in the manga, but I really like how the anime portrayed it. It might seem jarring to some people that it was so bright, but I think it worked really well. For one thing it makes sense for it to be a well-lit area, and it has an interesting contrast against the violence that goes down there. The haziness of it all, and some of the visual effects, also made it more apparent in a neat way that the flowers were a hallucination of his, and not actually real.

I also thought that the scenes with Kaneki after he regains his memories were very well-done. I think some people misinterpreted him as being more hot-headed and angry than he actually was, since I remember there being some complaints about how blunt and monotone he was. It seemed perfectly fitting to me.

Eto’s voice-acting in general was also pretty damn superb, and really added to the experience. She was clearly having the time of her life with that one.

I liked that they waited until the finale to show Eto’s kagune talking. It gave it a bit more impact when it finally happened.

I honestly don’t really have much to say about Karren’s part in it all, but I think it was done pretty well. In general, the anime cut out a lot of her more repetitive scenes that just hammered in things we already knew, so that was good. I also liked how they were a lot less blunt and on the nose with how they revealed that she’s a woman. I still can’t help but roll my eyes at that one panel where Ishida basically goes ‘hey isn’t it such a neat coincidence that the kanji used for Kanae’s name looks like a female symbol :^)’. In general, her whole story arc is mostly just a kinda old-fashioned Mulan sort of arc, but it’s executed pretty well.

Oh, and the anime handled the scenes of her being tortured by Eto incredibly well. The garish purples and reds mixed with the oppressive clock noises were a really nice touch that made those scenes even creepier than they already were.

Before I forget, I should mention that, in a similar way as how I felt about Akira’s character in the anime, I quite liked how they handled Hairu. I get why people were disappointed by her, but I enjoyed the way that they toned down her airhead nature, and how they only really showed how she idolized Arima right before she died. In a way, it just made her seem more professional and self-motivated.

Now that the manga’s over and I’ve had time to look back at it as a whole, and to think about how season 2 will adapt it all, it’s been really interesting to see exactly what the anime kept versus what it cut, and how they reflects upon how they’ll probably handle the next season.

Firstly, they kept pretty much everything that sets up the Black Reaper arc, to the point of even ending the season off with a teaser preview of the big Kaneki-Arima fight. But they also kept details like Shirazu’s corpse being stolen, Okahira getting killed, Hinami getting taken into custody, Akira finding out that Takizawa’s alive, Amon getting teased at heavily, Scarecrow being shown in the auction raid [and even in the OP], Torso becoming obsessed with Mutsuki, etc etc. So it seems pretty clear to me that they won’t really cut much of anything out of that arc when the next season comes around.

One thing they cut, which I haven’t even seen many people comment on since it was pretty subtle, was the detail of Kaneki’s rapid aging and how it affected stuff like his vision and regeneration. The anime never showed Haise wearing his glasses [at least from what I remember], didn’t show him having headaches, and during the finale we didn’t see his weird kagune hand thing. So I think they’re just completely removing that whole detail from the story, which I’m fine with. But it does have some interesting implications for how season 2 will go. Overall, it was a pretty irrelevant plot point that ended up getting hastily resolved anyway, but in practice, it was mostly just relevant to add some more tension to the Goat arc by making it look like Kaneki was at risk of dying, and it helped give a reason for him to become Dragon, since it ended up curing him.

I think the main implication of them cutting it from the anime is that it’d make it a LOT easier for them to just not bother having Kaneki become Dragon, since they wouldn’t need to bother with using it as a way to magically cure him. I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’d help streamline the story immensely if they just have Rize be the one to become Dragon in the first place, and this would help facilitate that.

As I’ve said, from season 1 it looks like they’re being more respectful with how they’re portraying Mutsuki, so I wouldn’t be surprised if season 2 is much kinder toward him than the manga was. They might even more or less cut out the whole subplot of him becoming an antagonist, which would be good since that was just a dumpster fire of bad writing that didn’t even go anywhere meaningful.

One interesting addition they made was explicitly showing Eto delivering the Hangman’s McGuffin book to Haise. That’s a REALLY interesting detail, since in the manga, we found out much later on that Hide was responsible for sending it. I don’t think this is a retcon or anything, though. I think this was how it went in the manga, too. I’ve talked before about how I think Hide had been working with Eto since around the end of the first series, and that for some reason or another Ishida was unable to get around to explaining that, and this makes it seem like the anime might be a lot more open about their connection. It makes a lot of sense to me that Eto would deliver the book on Hide’s behalf. It makes me very excited to see how Hide will be handled in the next season. With the manga, it really feels like Ishida had to scrap a lot of his plans for his character, and so when he finally came back into the story he felt like a bizarre tacked-on remnant of a previous draft, so it’d be great if the anime ends up handling him in the way that Ishida might have originally intended. And on the note of Eto’s involvement in it, I wonder if she might drop a hint to Kaneki about how she sent the book to him. That’d be neat.

They also added in a shot of a missing poster for Hide at the very start of the season, but that’s pretty minor. It at least helps immediately remind the audience that his official status as of that point is ‘missing’, not ‘dead’, though.

Oh, and judging by the scene we got of him during the auction raid, he seems to still have the same injuries as in the manga. I really liked how they just outright showed him having a wheezy, broken-up voice. But either way, it goes to show that they seem to definitely be keeping that detail from the manga. It makes me wonder how they’ll handle things later, especially with the part where Kaneki remembers having eaten him. I wonder if they’d keep it as-is, or try and integrate it into the way that the scene played out in Root A. Overall, it definitely seems like they’re pretty much ignoring the story changes made in Root A, but we’ll see. I hope they at least flesh that part out a bit, since I still feel like the flashback we got to it in the manga just raised more questions than it answered.

It’s pretty difficult to judge the anime as it’s own thing since I’ve already read the manga, but I still think it did a really good job with getting across the emotional thrust of the story, and the character arcs, and whatnot. The Qs in particular were handled fantastically. I got the impression that anime-only people actually liked them, particularly Urie and Mutsuki, slightly more than manga readers did by this point. Probably because they heavily cut down upon the quantity of Urie’s more shitty bits of dialogue, and because they were less overtly weird and obnoxious with how they framed Mutsuki. I distinctly remember that the Mtusuki Discourse [tm] was already a thing by this point in the manga, but nobody watching the anime has any real reason to be all weird about him. So that’s been nice to see. 

Haise’s character arc was also handled really well. It really reminded me of how his whole arc was by far one of the best parts of the manga. At least in terms of :re. It’s just a really effective, tragic arc about how he’s stuck living in and clinging onto this fake life, and slowly being chipped away at and replaced by somebody that he effectively doesn’t know. Seeing him be a happy dad taking care of his surrogate found family of misfits is still endearing no matter how many times I read or watch it, and it hurts just as much to see him get ‘replaced’ by Kaneki and immediately abandon the Qs.

Tsukiyama’s part in the anime was also great in general, and also reflected the strengths of the manga. It’s pretty insane how much more interesting of a character he is in this part of :re than basically anywhere else in the franchise. It really helps that they spend like half of the season with his whole story arc being in the spotlight. They really did him justice.

Before I forget, I also wanna say that, even though the animation wasn’t much to talk about [but also wasn’t anywhere near as bad as some recent production disasters I’ve seen], the art itself, especially in terms of character designs and backgrounds, were consistently fantastic. In general, ‘consistent’ is definitely the word I’d use to describe the overall art direction of the anime. On the other hand, the manga is a lot more uneven in terms of it’s art quality, varying from hyper-detailed fight scenes or individual expressions to silly chibi reaction faces or some really sketchy fight scenes, and so on. The anime smooths things out to a nice, consistent mid-ground, which I appreciated. The manga has always been a bit too bombastic and over the top at times, especially with how it handles action scenes, so I kinda prefer how the anime handles it, even if can come across as being more boring.

I also kinda feel like it took Ishida a little while to nail exactly how to draw a lot of the new characters in :re, so them having consistent, clean designs from the start was pretty nice. Similarly, I get why people were annoyed at how the anime slightly changed Touka’s hair-style, but it just makes it more consistent with the rest of the series. In the manga, she ends up going back to her original hair-style and hair colour anyway, so it makes perfect sense to just have her design be consistent from start to finish, rather than making her hair blue and fluffy for a while and then going back to how it used to be. And judging by the s2 key visual, it looks like they might just keep this design for her for basically all of s2 as well, instead of literally just going back to exactly how she styled her hair in the first series. So I’d also appreciate that.

And on that note, I should finally get around to discussing my thoughts on how Touka was handled in general in this season, and her whole connection to Kaneki in particular. To put it simply, I had absolutely no issues with it. I really loved how she was handled in this season, and I think it has interesting implications for how she’ll be handled in season 2, but at the same time I get why some people have frustrations with it.

To start off with probably the most minor thing, they cut out the scene where she was visiting the hospital, although they still showed her flower basket being left on Shinohara’s bedside table. I’m fine with this change, since it felt like such a long-running mystery in the manga that I couldn’t help but feel disappointed when we found out about what was actually going on. And also, since they stilled showed her flowers there, it’s entirely possible that they’ll touch upon it sometime during season 2, and possibly have a flashback or something to reveal that she was the one sending them. So ultimately it might not even be cut at all, just handled slightly differently.

Just to cut right to the chase, it sounds like some people are annoyed that the anime cut out/toned down upon the romantic set-up between her and Kaneki, but that’s actually a big part of why I liked it, haha. Though they didn’t even technically cut much, if only because they barely have any scenes together in this arc of the manga to begin with. But they did cut stuff like that scene where Kaneki wonders to himself if she’s out on a date, and they cut the part where she talks to Tsukiyama about how the :re cafe is a place for Kaneki to return to if he wants to in the future.

I get why that bugs people. I’ve seen a few people complain that because of those sorts of cuts, it’d seem forced and out of nowhere when they get together in season 2. But, well, what if that’s the point? What if they’re NOT going to have them get together in season 2? I haven’t seen anyone really talk about this possibility, understandably, but I think it explains the choices they made with handling Touka as a character in this season.

The biggest point worth considering is the insert song they made for the cafe scene in episode 2, where Haise and Touka meet again for the first time since the original series ended. The soundtrack composer put out an official AMV for it on Youtube that uses that full version of the song. It’s a really wonderfully made AMV, and a very pretty song, so everyone should check it out. Put simply, it’s a song about the bittersweet process of letting go of an old crush, and moving on with your life, even after you have a random chance encounter with that person later down the track.

The lyrics are pretty blunt and unambiguous about it. The chorus is about how Touka kept dreaming that Kaneki would return to her side as if he’d never left her, but the song starts out with ‘I’m waking from this dream. Returning to reality is so bittersweet. I open my eyes, and the illusion is fading, slipping away’, and ends with ‘Although I’ve found you, I know this meeting will not last. I have to let go. Continue finding your own way, though I will miss you. It’s time to wake from this dream’. Especially since :Re already uses the motif of ‘waking from a dream’ to describe how Haise eventually has to give way to Kaneki, it seems very noteworthy that they so overtly used the same motif to describe how Touka wanted Kaneki to return to her, but slowly she comes to terms with the need to let go of that dream. They even play those last few lines during the scene in episode 2 itself, just to make it even more clear what it’s referring to.

So yeah, I feel like that whole insert song helps make it clear that the writing changes made with Touka might just be rooted in the possibility of the anime committing to this idea of her moving on from Kaneki. It’d certainly explain why they cut out the scene where she says that the cafe is a place for him to return to, if she’s already resolved to let him live his own life, while she lives hers. It’s worth noting that, even though it’s technically about the same as it was in the manga, these writing changes put a different sort of twist on what Touka says to Uta in episode seven about how, in response to him asking if she plans to just wait for Kaneki to return, she says ‘I’m going to continue doing what I’ve already decided on’. In the overall context of the anime’s writing, it mostly comes across as her talking about how she’s not just waiting for Kaneki to return to her, but has chosen to move on from him. It’s worth noting that one thing the anime did change about that scene was that they had Haise visiting the cafe and getting served by Touka, shortly before she talks to Uta. The way that we see her, for a second time, treating Haise as just a regular customer, also helps emphasize the overall point.

On the note of Haise’s involvement in that scene, it’s also interesting to me how in episode seven in general they added some original scenes with him that went a long way to emphasize the idea of him being nostalgic toward Anteiku as a whole, more than anything else. He doesn’t even seem to have much of a reaction to Touka the second time around, and as I said above, they cut out the part where he wonders if she’s out on a date, so it comes across a fair bit less like he has a crush on her. And while I remember, I should say that the original scene with Haise remembering Anteiku but not knowing what it really is was incredibly good. 

And in terms of the scene between them from episode 2, I still just think overall that it was way better than the manga version of the scene was. It was so good and emotional. In particular I love how the anime really highlighted Touka’s shock upon seeing him again, and the way that she quickly adjusts herself and just treats him as a regular customer. It’s really effective, especially in conjunction with the insert song playing in the background. Haise’s line about how she looked sad, and at a loss, also has even more weight to it if she was resolving in that moment to finally let go of him for good.

So yeah, I honestly think that the anime might just not have them end up together at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have them hook up anyway, to be faithful to the manga, but it does feel like the only real explanation for why they’d make all those subtle but important changes to how they wrote her parts in season 1.

To begin with, I still think that even if they did include their whole romance in season 2, they wouldn’t really have the room to include ALL of the stuff between them from the manga. For one thing, I doubt they’d be able to animate the sex scene because of broadcast regulations and whatnot, and since I feel like the whole 24th Ward arc is one of the first things they might cut in order to fit the rest of the manga into twelve episodes, it might be difficult to include their wedding, or Touka’s whole pregnancy drama. And if they avoid having Kaneki become Dragon, they wouldn’t need to use his wedding ring as a plot device to have everyone find and rescue him. Plus, in general, even if they did include stuff like the sex scene, it’d probably have to happen in the same episode as when Kaneki starts living at the cafe, or the episode directly after it, which would probably feel a bit rushed.

Though even then, it would be possible for them to just imply that they hook up after the anime ends, or for them to just have them have sex off-screen and basically leave it at that until the epilogue. So it seems particularly interesting to me that it seems like the anime might be outright moving away from the idea of them hooking up at all, rather than just having it be that the anime doesn’t show as much of their relationship.

To be blunt, I feel like the only real reason why they’d actively shut down the idea of them getting together at all, rather than just reducing the time spent on their relationship, would be if the anime plans to have Kaneki end up dating a different person instead, in which case it’d obviously make sense for the anime to cut the romantic ties between him and Touka as neatly as possible. At the very least, I think we can all agree that they’re not just gonna have Kaneki be single in the anime forever. That’d just piss off everyone for no good reason, lol.

Basically what I’m saying is that the anime might have Kaneki end up dating Hide instead of Touka. At the very least, he’s Kaneki’s only other real romance option at that point in the story, so it’s either him, Touka, or nobody. But I think it’d make a lot of sense for Kaneki to end up dating Hide. We know for a fact in the manga that Hide is in love with him, and going by stuff like the whole Hide hallucination scene in the Cochlea arc, or him talking to Touka about how his desire to be with Hide again is paralyzing, it’s not exactly hard to believe that Kaneki could have feelings for him as well. It’d barely require any real changes or additions to the story to make it work. Just have Hide directly confess his feelings to Kaneki rather than having him awkwardly tell Amon about them. And unlike with Kaneki and Touka, there’d be no real expectation for them to include a whole sex scene or marriage scene or pregnancy plot-line with Kaneki and Hide, so they could easily get by with just leaving their relationship off at a mutual confession/kiss scene, until we see them together in the epilogue. And given that Hide already narrated the whole epilogue chapter of the manga, it’d be pretty natural and easy to have it end in the anime with him going out on a date with Kaneki or something.

I don’t want to get too, like, conspiracy theorist-y about this, but part of me still wonders if one of the reasons why it felt like Ishida handled Hide so poorly in the manga’s final arcs was because he might have originally planned to have Kaneki end up dating Hide. It’d certainly be a good explanation for why things got so out of whack with him, and Hide ended up feeling so out of place and unnecessary in the manga. It’d also explain why we conveniently only learn about Hide’s feelings for Kaneki when he talks about it to Amon, and why the intensity of Kaneki’s feelings toward Hide seemingly got thrown out the window when they actually got to reunite.

Either way, I don’t mean any of this in a ship-hate sort of way. I have very . . . complicated feelings about how Ishida handled Kaneki’s relationship with Touka in the manga, but these are just the observations I have about how the anime seems to be handling it, and what it might be setting up for season 2.

Anyway, that went on for way too long, lol. To sum it all up, I thought that season 1 was surprisingly good, in spite of it’s flaws. I honestly had very low hopes for it before it aired, since it seemed impossible to adapt properly, but I ended up being very surprised by how it went, and I’m very excited to see how season 2 wraps it all up. I was apprehensive about season 2 when it was first announced, but the more I thought about it, the more clear it became that with some strict and careful editing, it could easily adapt the meaningful parts of the rest of the story into 12 more episodes. Either way, if it goes well in the end, I might even end up buying both seasons on BD when Funimation eventually releases them.

[bellabooks]

Becoming Supergirl: How fandom helped me embrace who I am

I didn’t know it until just recently, but I am autistic, (on top of being a female, Cuban, and lesbian.) It went unnoticed my whole life, and I now realize that it was the core reason for most of what I faced growing up. Simple situations that most kids could overcome were harder for me. Being a kid, I was always considered different. Hell, I still am. Everyone who met me, especially my teachers, always threw around words like “odd”, “quirky”, and “weird.” I was quiet. I kept to myself, reading my schoolbooks and doodling whenever I daydreamed. I was always really clumsy too, constantly tripping or falling down. Even though I never interacted with other kids, they would still pick on me. I didn’t know why, I never picked up on social cues. I still don’t. I was considered the Teachers Pet and the smart kid in class and no one liked me for it. But I didn’t really care. Well I did, but I guess my mind just glossed over it. I remember my fifth grade teacher assigned us to write a story about the Appalachian Mountains for history. Man, I was SO hyped! All I did as a kid was read two books a day and write about things. Mind you I was ten at the time, but I always thought of myself as “older”. So I wrote it my story, showed it off to my mom and grandmother, anyone who would read it. I was so proud of myself for this awesome story I wrote. When I turned it in, I was excited for my teacher to read it. I stood there smiling, watching her read it. And then, all of a sudden, Mrs. Nelson was yelling at me, saying it was terrible. I specifically remember her grabbing my arm and shoving the paper in my face saying, “It’s called the Appalachian Mountains, not the rocky mountains!” “I wrote rocky as a descriptive word, not the actual mountain range.” I was so confused as to why she was mad. I still don’t get it when I think about it. I was thinking logically about the whole situation, instead of breaking down and crying at being yelled at. Just picture it, little ten year old me and the whole class staring at us, whispering and pointing and I’m just stood there looking at her like she was the crazy one. Of course, I was still affected by this, but not like a normal kid. I just wanted to know why she was mad. Not my mom though. Boy she went OFF when I explained to her what happened. Even went to the school to talk to the principal and I’m just there, sitting in my chair, daydreaming about a book I was reading. In a way she was angry for me when I was the one who should have been crying and sad over it all. In my head, I had written a great story and that was that. I kept facing these situations up until I dropped out of high school and got my GED. Honestly, I just couldn’t do it anymore and decided to just do things my way. So, I did. Mind you, I still was un-diagnosed at this time. Cut to me at 24, realizing I was gay. Now this was the one thing that I truly struggled with. I’d known that I always liked girls, but in my head I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I tried to approach it logically as I usually do. But slowly I let society and my best friend at the time get inside my head. It was the first time I dealt with something that I just couldn’t explain away or brush off. With Autism, you can be hyper empathetic, or completely non-feeling. Growing up, it was the latter for me, I realize that now. However, when you’re with a group of people who you consider family, and all they talked about was “gay is wrong” and “all gays are going to hell” it eventually settles in your head like a mantra. I started to deal with this internalized homophobia, and tried to convince myself I wasn’t gay. I dated boys and started to become this person that just wasn’t who I was. My struggle with coming out wasn’t just about me facing it and it brought out part of me I didn’t know about. It brought out the part of my autism that I had locked away inadvertently in my childhood. So I did what I thought would help. I turned to comics (and some alcohol. I am human after all.) Sounds silly, but it opened up this whole new world to me. Finally, I found a group of people who spoke my language! The fact that I could just sit there and talk to someone about Supergirl (Team #Sanvers and #Supercorp!), Doctor Who and most recently, Wynonna Earp, for hours and no one judged me for it? I fell in love. I was relating to these characters because I saw their struggle and realized that I wasn’t alone, and that there were others I could speak to. And not just the LGBT characters either. I mean, Supergirl goes up against bullies and life’s struggles like we all do. But she’s an alien from another planet who is struggling with the world she is now in, not understanding social rules and having to hide who she really is and all of her anger. I straight up relate to her every day. The fact that I could talk to complete strangers but not my own “friends” was also a huge eye opener for me. It brought this diversity in my life I hadn’t encountered and started to help me in a twisted way. via cwsupergirlgifs.tumblr Fast-forward to my diagnosis and everything just clicked. My obsessiveness with certain things was explained as having a special interest and me not wanting to be gay was my mind trying to protect me from shutdowns and meltdowns, which I went through big time. Freak outs in public from sensory over load, (I still can’t eat grapes) or shutting myself away for days at home because I just didn’t have it in me to even get up and shower. I’ve lost countless jobs over this, and people because I ignored them. I had just come out, found out I was autistic, and even though my inner circle accepted me, I still come across people who judge me for being gay or autistic. We all do. It’s the reality of society and the world we live in. I was just asked at work the other day if I dress like a boy when I don’t wear my uniform. (I just stared at my coworker until she grew uncomfortable and walked away. I laughed and high fived myself.) I also get a lot of “you don’t look autistic” whenever I tell someone. Every. Single. Time. This is the core problem with mental illness and why it is so easy for it to be ignored by people. I’ve come to accept my quirks and oddity and weirdness. I did lose that best friend; she just wanted me to be “normal.” Well guess what? I am normal, and normal is a 29-year-old autistic lesbian who enjoys watching comic book shows, and writing fantasy novels. http://dlvr.it/Nqh0pc