#kakeru is probably gonna be the most changed design yet

[ninjagirlstar5]

This is for my mutual that requested that I do Kakeru next, so I did! I actually had this finished all in one day but it was very late where I was by the time I was done, so I had to shelve it for today instead.

Kakeru's OG design is just...funny, when you find out his Ultimate Talent. This man does not look like a lawyer and looks like any other muscular guy that probably does sports. Which makes it even funnier when you find out that, no, he doesn't actually do sports, he was literally just born like this! This man was blessed with the best health possible, and yet he feels ashamed for this because his sister was born very sickly, so he blames himself for "taking away her health" when it's not his fault. It's just how life goes sometimes. But anyways, back to his redesign. I chose to base this redesign off of his splash art as he actually looks like a lawyer in that than his in-game sprite, but changed it up and added details to it since I didn't want to straight up copy it. Based off of his OG design, he was dressed pretty casually, so I decided to have his shirt collar slightly unbuttoned and kept it untucked, his suit jacket open, and his tie a little more loose. I gave him boots to add a bit of flair to his design, gave him small earrings, an attorney badge, and a tie pin to keep it attached to his shirt and prevent it from flying off. It's to show that while he's casual, he's still a professional. Also, in his splash art, he's shown wearing glasses, so I'm questioning why LINUJ didn't let him keep that??? What, are those reading glasses, fake glasses to make himself look smarter, or are those glasses that he actually needs to see from? Imagine that those are prescribed glasses, and he's walking around the killing game with blurry vision the whole time he was alive, lmao. But seriously, it's weird cause in one of LINUJ's sketches where he drew what the 79th class would look like if they survived, he has his glasses again so the state of his eyesight is just one big question mark. So I just said, "Fuck it, he has glasses" and that was it. It honestly adds to his professional and smart aura, which actually adds to his intimidation since you'd expect him to be very serious...and then it turns out he's super sweet and shy outside of court. And what helps hint to his softer, sillier side would be the flame design on his tie, as ties with goofy designs like that can show that this person can be silly if they want to be (at least, character wise). And I didn't want to get rid of the flame design on his shirt completely, so I decided to call back to it by moving it onto his tie instead. A tie that his sister probably chose for him, so Kakeru would wear it all the time, hehe. His hair barely changed, I just adjusted it so that it has a better shape. As for the colors, I made Kakeru's tanned skin a bit more obvious, and kept his colors quite monotone aside from the tie and gold metal of his earrings, tie pin, attorney badge, and the buckles of his boots. Fun fact: I originally made his suit blue, but decided that he looked too much like Phoenix Wright and desaturated the colors to look more gray, haha.

Anyways, I love Kakeru. I just wished he acted more like a lawyer in-game, you know?

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Fruits Basket 2019 Episode 6: “Perhaps We Should Invite Ourselves Over”

If I had have been into this series when I was younger, I probably would have had a big gay crush on Kyo and Haru, but now that I’m in my early 20′s, let’s just say that Hatori can GET IT.

Anyway, this was another great episode, and I still really like the decisions they’ve been making with the pacing and the arrangement of events for the reboot. It all feels very natural and smooth, though it probably won’t please everyone.

Thoughts under the cut.

So in this episode we have chapters 7 and 9, or maybe I should say 9 and 7, since that’s the order they got arranged in, lol. It’s actually how I wanted them to handle it, since it works a lot better to have the sleepover happen at the end of the episode, so I’m happy with how it turned out.

It’s kinda interesting how the biggest changes in pacing the reboot has made have revolved around having stuff related to the culture festival happen earlier than they did in the manga. We had chapter 8 adapted back in episode 3, and now we have chapter 9 adapted right before the sleepover part. I think it’s a good choice all around. It helps make the reboot feel a bit less ‘episodic’ than the manga or the 2001 anime, if that makes sense. Like, instead of having the culture festival get brought up and then happen all in one episode, it’s set up a few episodes before it actually starts. It’s kinda hard to explain why I like it, but I do.

Even aside from how shuffling things about like this helped out the culture festival part, I’m happy that they didn’t spend TOO much time on the sleepover part to begin with. The episode in the 2001 anime where they spend an entire episode on it is one of my least favourite parts of the whole thing, since the comedy filler they had to add was super unfitting with the rest of the story’s tone, and it got really repetitive really fast. It worked a lot better here. For one thing, having it only take up half of this episode means that we still got introduced to Momiji and Hatori in this same episode, and it ended with the cliffhanger of Tohru getting invited to the Soma estate. In the 2001 anime, the sleepover episode felt very filler-y because the ONLY thing that happened in it was the sleepover, and they even cut out the hat scene, so there was absolutely no set-up for any future plot points in that episode. This episode feels a lot more substantial.

Also, I think I kinda prefer the sleepover getting done at this point in the story even more than how the manga did it. I always thought it was a bit awkward how abruptly we just get a sudden flashback in the manga to Tohru telling Uo and Hana about her living situation, but I think it was really neat that we got to see Uo and Hana get gradually more and more suspicious as the culture festival went on, until they eventually confronted Tohru about it. It also meant we got to see Tohru go ‘I’m not DATING him, I’m just LIVING with him, lol’, which was amazing. I just think it all flowed together surprisingly naturally, considering how substantially this episode was swapping and rearranging chapters. It kinda says a lot about how episodic the first few volumes of the manga were, that the reboot’s shuffled stuff about so much without it being noticeable.

This isn’t really any sort of a change from how it’s been handled before, but I still think it works really nicely to have the sleepover happen right after what happened in the last episode, since the theme of found families gets expanded upon as we see that Uo and Hana pretty much took Tohru in after her mother died, and they’ve been looking out for her ever since. I wish more anime could take notes from this series and have these kinds of strong female friendships.

I’ve seen a lot of people say that they don’t like Momiji’s voice in there reboot, and I can see that, but I don’t really mind it. I haven’t seen the dub version of this episode yet, though. I’m curious to see how both voice actresses handle things in the long run, since Momiji’s physical growth is a pretty commented-on thing in the manga.

In terms of things I didn’t really like in this episode, one super minor thing was that they didn’t seem to have any sparrow symbolism going on in the Akito scene, unlike the manga. Maybe I just missed it, but if they really didn’t include anything like that, then it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

And on the topic of Akito, I’ve also been seeing some people say that they dislike how ‘obvious’ the “““twist”““ is, and honestly all I can say is that maybe people should step back and consider that if it ends up being so unavoidably obvious that Akito’s a girl when she’s voiced by a woman and has a naturally feminine/androgynous design, maybe that just means that it ends up being a pretty transparent secret, lol. tbh, the entire concept of treating Akito’s gender as this huge mystery we all have to keep just feels really contrived. It doesn’t impact the story at all, at least not until waaaaay later. I think it’s very telling of how unimportant it actually is that the reaction of everyone who either gets spoiled about it or just ‘guesses right’ the first time they see her is “oh ok then”. Because that’s really the only response you can have to it. It’s just not that big of a deal, at least now until we find out the exact circumstances of it all way later on. I know that I’m kinda biased and bitter about this whole plot point, but I feel like it’s going to be one of the things that falls the most flat with modern audiences. Most people are just gonna be put off by the idea that Akito being a girl should be seen as shocking and scandalous, and I think that a lot of people are gonna be annoyed when it becomes clear that it’s less about patriarchal family structures, and more about Akito’s mother being so jealous of the fact that her husband was paying attention to a woman that wasn’t her that she forced Akito to live as a man.

ANYWAY, with that rant out of the way, I guess it’s time for me to launch into another rant, since there’s the whole elephant in the room of “that whole scene where the joke is that Yuki’s in a dress”. To be honest, this scene in a vacuum isn’t really a huge deal, but when you’ve read the whole manga it’s kinda obvious that it’s a piece of a larger topic of how this series just has some weird hang-ups about gender expression, and especially about the image of a man wearing a dress. At least in my opinion, I think that Takaya has good intentions with all of this, but she still ultimately plays into and in a lot of ways validates outdated gender norms. I’ll get into it when it actually comes up, but Momiji’s character in general is the best example of how I think that even when she’s clearly trying to be understanding and supportive, it’s the sort of uncomfortably narrow-minded allyship that says “it’s ok if he wears a dress if it looks nice on him. He’ll grow out of it later on anyway, so we should just let it slide for now”. 

I also want to point out that even though they try and say in this episode that Yuki ‘has a complex about his looks’, it honestly doesn’t really come across that way. He only seems to get annoyed about it when he’s either forced to wear a dress against his will, or when Kyo calls him a girl as an insult, or when Kakeru calls him a princess as a joke later in the manga. And even then he never really seems to care THAT much. At least not compared to the things that he actually has complexes about. So it just all makes this whole thing seem even more forced, especially since it feels like Yuki’s more masculine in the reboot than he was in any other version of the story.

Although that does remind me that part of why I’m annoyed with how they never actually do anything interesting with the idea of Yuki having a complex about his femininity is that, sorta like with the whole plot point later on of him being ashamed of how he doesn’t have romantic feelings for Tohru, it all feels like it at least would be more interesting if he was gay. At least then there’d be room to explore the idea of him irrationally rejecting his femininity instead of it not going anywhere.

But that’s all getting into stuff that hasn’t even come up yet, lol.

Either way, for the most part I think this was a really good episode that made some nice adaptation decisions, even if it does also make it seem more and more clear that the reboot might ultimately suffer a bit from being TOO faithful to the manga, instead of changing/removing the more outdated parts of it.

Anyway, it looks like the next episode is going to be Hatori’s backstory. I think they’re gonna handle it like the 2001 anime did by having the episode basically just be all of chapter 10, with the more extensive backstory flashback from chapter 12 worked into it to flesh it out. If they do it like that, I think they’ll then spend episode 8 on the new years part, and then in episode 9 we’ll finally see Haru.

And on the topic of Hatori, before I forget, one reason why I like how they changed the timing of him contacting Tohru was because it let them show him looking at Kana’s portrait in his office when he’s talking about the prospect of having to erase Tohru’s memories, which was a really great way to handle that scene, and to set up the next episode.