#not sure if this has been said before but s1 succession it's all I'm thinking about

[todd-queen]

they are the same family to me

can you see the vision

[ladyluscinia]

Ok, I think I might be exiting the "are you fucking kidding me?" period and ready to make a real argument, so lets talk about Three Act Structure!

Is OFMD S2 just the "Darkest Hour"?

A very common explanation I've been seeing for some of the... controversial... aspects of S2 is that it's meant to be that way. That the middle act is where the protagonists hit their lowest point. Where we get the big failure point. Where everything looks kind of shit.

S2 is supposedly just that point. It's The Empire Strikes Back. People have been making that comparison since before the first episodes even dropped, telling everyone to expect something that could be disappointing or unsatisfying - it's just a matter of needing to wait for S3 to pull it all together.

It's not a baseless framework to consider the show through - I'm pretty sure David Jenkins has mentioned it in interviews (or at least mentioned he planned for three acts / seasons) so it's certainly worth asking how he's doing at the 2/3rd mark.

So - quick summary of Three Act Structure:

Act 1 introduces our characters and world. It includes the inciting incident of the story and the first plot point, where a) the protagonist loses the ability to return to their normal life, and b) the story raises whatever dramatic question will drive the entire plot. Act 2 is rising action and usually most of the story. The protagonist tries to fix things and fucks them up worse, in the process learning new skills and character developing to overcome their flaws. Act 3 is the protagonist taking one more shot, but this time they are ready. We get the climax of the story, the dramatic question gets an answer, and then the story closes.

If you want examples, the Star Wars Original Trilogy is a very popular template. And, hell, he said it was a pirate story... the main Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy also does a solid job with their three acts.

Let's compare. (Spoiler: I'm not impressed 🤨)

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First thing I need to establish... Wait. Two things. First is that Three Act Structure is flexible, so we can't really analyze success or failure by pulling up a list of necessary plot beats that should have been hit in X order. Second is that if you tell me you are writing a romance with a Three Act Structure - where "the relationship is the story" - the first thing I'm going to do is ask you how you are adapting it. Because while there's not necessarily anything preventing you from applying this to a character driven plot, most people are familiar with it as plot structure for externally driven conflict.

Unless there's a reason the status of the main relationship is intrinsically tied up in the current status of the war against the evil empire, a standard Three Act Structure is going to entail either an antagonistic force that absolutely wants your main couple apart being the main relationship obstacle OR the romance aspect being a subplot to the protagonist's narrative adventure. None of those sound like how the show has been described.

So how is OFMD adapting it?

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Act 1

(Can't figure out how well Act 2 is doing if we don't start at setup.)

Right out the gate, OFMD breaks one of the main "rules" for a story where the Acts are delivered in three parts. Namely the one where the first Act is treated as an acceptable standalone story, with it's own satisfying yet open ended conclusion.

In Star Wars, A New Hope ends with the princess rescued, Luke finding the Force, Han finding his loyalty, and the Death Star destroyed. The Empire isn't defeated, the antagonists still live... the story is not over, but this one movie doesn't feel unfinished.

Similarly, Curse of the Black Pearl gives Jack his ship back, Elizabeth and Will get together, and Norrington has the English Navy let them all off the hook and give Jack and the pirates one day's head start.

OFMD's final beat of S1 being Kraken Arc starting is not that, even if Stede returning to sea is still a pretty hopeful note. Now... I don't necessarily think this was a bad call. At least, not if the story is the relationship. It's easy to close on a happy ending and then fuck it up next movie if the conflict is external and coming for them. Not so much if you're driving the story with your protagonists' flaws, in part because it should be really obvious at the end of setup that your main characters need development and can't run off together right now. I actually like that they were risk-takers and let S1 look at the situation clearly vs doing a fragile happy end, because it takes into account the difference between a character-driven and plot-driven narrative.

I think OFMD's Act 1 actually ends at maybe the Act of Grace? Well, there through the kiss on the beach, counting as our "first plot point" before everything goes wrong, basically.

At that point, they have setup the story and characters. We've been introduced to Edward and Stede's current issues. Signing the Act of Grace does make the intertwined arcs between them real - it's no longer a situation that either one of them could just walk away from like it was in 1x07 - and we narrow in on the (alleged) driving question of the show:

It's not about "Will Stede become a great pirate?" or "Will we develop a better kind of piracy for the crew?" - the show is the relationship and the big question is "What is Stede and Edward's happy ending?"

Act 1 ends on their first solution, being together and making each other happy and admitting it's more than just friendship. Act 2 starts, appropriately, by saying both of them are currently too flawed for that to go anywhere but crashing and burning.

Now... looking back, what does Act 1 do well vs poorly?

I think it's really strong on giving us the foundation for BlackBonnet's characters and flaws. We aren't surprised Stede goes home or Edward goes Kraken (or at least... we weren't supposed to be surprised. There are still a lot of holdouts blaming Izzy for interrupting Edward's "healing" despite how at this point in the story it doesn't make sense for Edward to have the skills to heal... but I digress). The relationship question is compelling at the end of S1, the cliffhanger hooks, and the fandom explosion of fics did not come from nowhere - the audience was invested.

I also think Act 1 does a great job of settling us in the universe. We understand the rules it abides by, from how gay pirates are just a fact of life to how there's no important organs on the left side of the body. Stede has a muppety force field. Rowboats have homing devices, and port is always as close as you want it to be. Scurvy is a joke. The overblown violence of pirate life is mostly a joke, but we are going to take the violence of childhood trauma seriously.

Lucius's fake-out death, while technically part of Act 2, works well because Act 1 did a good job of priming everyone to go "obviously this show wouldn't kill a crew member for shock value, and we're 100% supposed to suspend disbelief about how he could have survived getting flung into the sea in the middle of the night." And we do. And we get rewarded for it.

Regarding antagonists - a big focus of any setup - the show is deliberately weak. The one with the most screentime is Izzy, and he's purposefully ineffective at separating our main couple. Every antagonist is keyed to a particular character, and they function mostly to inform us of that character's flaws and development requirements. The Badmintons tell us about Stede's repression and feelings of inadequacy, and Izzy tells us about Edward's directionless discontent and tendency to avoid his problems. Effectively - the show is taking the stance this will be a character driven narrative where Stede and Edward's flaws are the source of problems and development the solution. No person or empire (or social homophobia) is separating them...

...which leads me to something not present - there nothing really about the struggle of piracy against the Empire. Looking at Curse of the Black Pearl... we see piracy is in danger. The Black Pearl itself is described as the last great pirate threat the British Navy needs to conquer. Hangings are omnipresent - Jack is sentenced to die by one almost as soon as he's introduced to the story, when his only act so far had been to wander around and save Elizabeth from drowning. OFMD tries to invoke this kind of struggle in 2x08, but there's no foundation. Our Navy antagonists are Stede's childhood bullies, and so focused on Stede the crew isn't even in danger when they get caught. The Republic of Pirates is getting jokes about being gentrified, not besieged.

Even the capture of Blackbeard by the Navy is treated as a feather in Wellington's cap but not a huge symbolic blow against piracy... because we just do not have that grand struggle woven into Act 1. You only know the "Golden Age of Piracy" is ending if you google it, or have watched a bunch of pirate shows.

Overall, a solid Act 1, well adapted to the kind of story they've said they were looking to tell - a romance in the (silly-fied) age of piracy, instead of a pirate adventure with a romantic subplot.

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Now, Sidebar - Where is the story going?

The thing about the dramatic question - in OFMD's case: "What is Stede and Edward's happy ending?" - is that a) there's normally more than one question bundled up in that one + sideplots, and b) while you aren't supposed to have the answer yet, you can usually guess what needs to happen to give you the answer.

Back to our examples... Luke's driving question is "Will the Empire be defeated?" Simple. Straightforward. Also: "Will Luke become a Jedi?" The eventual climax of our story from there is pretty obvious... the story is over when Luke wins the war for the Rebellion in a Jedi way. That's the goal that they are working toward.

Pirates of the Caribbean is a bit more complicated. We're juggling more characters and have a less defined heroic journey, but there are driving questions like "Is Jack Sparrow a good man?" and "Is Will Turner a pirate / what does that mean?" and even "Will the British Navy defeat piracy?" They get basic answers in Curse of the Black Pearl, and far more defined ones in At World's End. Still, this is another plot-driven narrative. They've laid the foundations for the Pirates vs Empire struggle, and when that final battle turns into the trilogy climax then you know what's happening.

OFMD is not doing a plot-driven narrative. To judge how they are doing at their goals, we have to ask what they think a happy ending entails in a character sense.

Clearly it's not the classic romantic sideplot, where the climax is the first kiss / acknowledgement of feelings. They've teased a wedding in Word of God comments a lot, so that's probably our better endpoint. Specifically, though, a wedding where both of our protagonists aren't ready to flee from the altar (big ask) and where they've both grown enough that their flaws / mutual tendencies to run away from life problems won't tank the relationship.

In Stede's case it's still massive feelings of inadequacy and being too repressed to talk about his problems. Also he ran away from his family to chase a lifelong dream of being a pirate - "Is Stede going to find fulfillment in being a pirate captain, or will the real answer be love?" Edward meanwhile expresses a desire to quit piracy and retire Blackbeard, but we also find out he's struggling with massive self-loathing and guilt from killing his father - "Is retiring what Edward wants to do, or is he just running away?"

If they are going to get to a satisfying wedding beat at the climax of their story, what character beats do we need to hit in advance?

Off the top of my head - both characters need to self-realize their flaws (a pretty necessary demand of anyone who runs away from problems). They are set up to balance each other well, but also to miscommunicate easily. They have to tell each other about or verbally acknowledge that self-realization so it can be resolved. Stede has to decide how much being a pirate means to him. Edward has to decide if he's retiring and what he wants to do. They both need to show something to do with getting past their childhood traumas given all the flashbacks. Through all this, they also need to hit the normal romance beats that convince the audience they are romantically attracted to each other and like... want to get married.

Oh, and this is more of a genre-specific sideplot, but once they demonstrate a behavior that hurts the people who work for them, they need to then demonstrate later how it won't happen again. Proof of growth, which is kind of important in a comedy where a lot of the humor is based in them being massively self-centered assholes. Stede doesn't earn his acceptance in the community until he kicks Calico Jack off the ship, making up for causing the situation with Nigel in the first episode. A workplace comedy can get a lot of material from the boss as the worker's antagonist, but if you want the bosses to stay sympathetic you have got to throw them some opportunities to earn it.

All that sounds like a lot, but like - the relationship is the story, right? If we spend so much time on establishing flaws big enough to drive a story, we also have to spend time on fixing them. Which is where the turning point hits.

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Act 2: How it Starts

This is where the full story reality-checks your protagonist. Glad you saved your boyfriend and embraced new love in Act 1, but his repressed guilt means he's about to completely ghost you, and your own abandonment issues and self-loathing are about to make his dick move into everyone else's problem.

Again, it's a non-conventional choice OFMD has this start at the very end of S1 rather than with a sudden dark turn in the S2 premiere, but it's still pretty clearly that point in the Three Act Structure.

In Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back opens with a timeskip to our Rebellion getting absolutely crushed and hiding on a miserable frozen planet. The Empire finds them as the plot is kicking off and they have to desperately flee. They get separated. Han and Leia try to go to an ally for help and end up in Vader's clutches. It's a sharp turn from the victorious note that A New Hope ended on.

Pirates of the Caribbean's Act 2 starts dark. Dead Man's Chest opens with our happy couple Will and Elizabeth getting arrested on their wedding day for the "happy end" escape of the last movie. Jack has not been having success since reclaiming his ship, and we'll soon find out he's being hunted by dark forces. As for the general state of piracy, we get a horrifying prison where pirates are being eaten alive by crows, and a new Lord Beckett making the dying state of piracy even more textual. "Jack Sparrow is a dying breed... The world is shrinking."

The key here is making a point that our heroes aren't ready. This is the struggles part - things they try? Fail. The odds do not look to be in their favor.

Now, OFMD apparently decided to go all-in on flaw exploration, especially with Edward. The first 3 episodes of S2 are brutally efficient in outlining Edward's backslide. In S1 you could see he had issues with guilt and feeling like a bad person. S2 devolves that into a destructive, suicidal spiral where Edward forces his crew into three months of consecutive raids, repeats his shocking act of cruelty with Izzy's toe offscreen (more than once!), escalates it with his leg, and finally they state directly that Edward hates himself for killing his dad so much that he fears he's fundamentally unlovable and better off dead.

Stede's struggles are subtler, but most definitely still there. He's deliberately turning a blind eye to tales of Edward's rampage, half from simply being too self-centered to care about the harms Edward causes others, and half from being unable to face or fathom that he had the ability to hurt Edward that much. Upon reunion he wants to put the whole thing behind them, not addressing why he left in the first place. Very "love magically fixes everything" of him, except Stede is no golden merman.

Interestingly, here, BlackBonnet's relationship dysfunction has very clearly been having a negative impact on the surrounding characters we care about. Make sense, since it's the driving force of the story, but that also adds a lot more relationships we need to make right. Like... Edward is the villain to his crew. The show focuses on their trauma and poisoned relationships with him. And then draws our attention even more to Stede taking his side to overrule their objections to him.

For a story where the conflict and required resolutions are primarily character based, and the setup had already given the main couple a good amount to work with, dedicating a lot of S2 to adding more ground to cover was... a choice. Potentially very compelling on the character end, certainly challenging on the writing end... but not a complete break with the structure.

Bold, but not damning.

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Act 2: How it Ends

Now it is true that Act 2 tends to end on a loss. Luke is defeated by Vader and loses his hand, and Han has been sent away in carbonite. Jack Sparrow for all his efforts cannot escape his fate, and he and the Pearl are dragged to the locker.

But the loss is not the point. The loss is incidental to the point.

Act 2 is about struggles and failure, but it's also about lessons learned. There's a change that occurs, and our cast - defeated but not broken - enters the final act with the essential skills, motivation, knowledge, etc. that they lacked in the beginning.

Luke Skywalker could not have defeated the Empire in Return of the Jedi until he'd learned the truth about his father and resisted the Dark Side in The Empire Strikes Back. (Ok, confession, I'm using Star Wars as an example because literally everyone is doing so, but frankly it's a better example of formulaic Three Act Structure repeating within each movie because on a trilogy level - relevant to this comparison - it is a super basic hero's journey in a very recognized outfit and as such the Act 2 relevance is also... super basic "the hero tries to fight the antagonist too early" beat where he learns humility. Not really a lot going on. So, for the better example...)

Dead Man's Chest has a downer ending with the closing moment of the survivors regaining hope and a plan against an enemy now on the verge of total victory - a classic Act 2. But in that first loss against Davy Jones we get Will's personal motivation and oath to stab the heart, Jack finally overcoming not knowing what he wanted and returning to save them from the Kraken (being a good man), Elizabeth betraying Jack (being a pirate), Barbossa's return, and Norrington's choice to bargain for his prior life back. The mission to retrieve Jack from the World's End is the final movie's plot, but things are already on track to turn the tables back around as we enter the finale.

Now, relevant sidenote - one major difference between Three Act Structure within a single work vs across three parts is that Act 2 continues into Part 3, and only tips over into Act 3 about midway through. This is because obviously your final movie or season cannot just be the climax. That's why both movie examples start with a rescue mission. They have to still be missing something so they can get the plot of their third part accelerating while they go get whatever that something is.

But if you wait until the 3rd movie / season to get the development going at all - you're fucked.

Jack's decision in the climax of At World's End to make Elizabeth into the Pirate King goes back to the development we saw in the Pearl vs Kraken fight in Dead Man's Chest. So does Elizabeth's leadership arc. Will's whole arc about becoming Captain of the Dutchman gets built upon in the third movie, but it starts in the second. Not just as an idle thought - he's actively pursuing it. Already consciously weighing saving his father vs getting back to Elizabeth as soon as he makes the oath. Everyone is moving forward in Act 2. Their remaining development might stumble for drama, or they might be a bit reluctant, but I know that they know better than to let it stick, because they already faced their true crisis points.

I'm not sure we can say the same about OFMD.

S2 does a good job of adding problems, yeah, but there's not really any movement on fixing them. Our main couple stagnates in some ways, and regresses in others.

Stede opened Act 2 by running away in the middle of the night back to his wife without telling Edward anything. We know he did it because of feeling guilty and his core childhood trauma of his dad calling him a weak and inadequate failure. Now in S1 he actually speedruns a realization of his shitty behavior with Mary, but what about S2? Well...

He continues to not talk to Edward about... pretty much anything. My guy practiced love confessions galore but Edward only finds out about going back to his wife via Anne, and it gets brushed aside with a love confession. He seems to think Edward wants him to be a dashing pirate, or maybe he just thinks he should be a dashing pirate. Idk, it doesn't get examined. Regarding his captaincy, they give him an episode plot about Izzy teaching him to respect the crew's beliefs, but this is sideplot to a larger arc of him completely overruling their traumas and concerns (and shushing their objections) to keep his boyfriend on the ship so. That.

Stede kills a man for reasons related to his issues, shoves that down inside and has sex with Edward instead of acknowledging any bad feelings. At least this time Edward was there and knows it happened? Neither Chauncey's death nor his dad have been mentioned to anyone. He gets a day of piracy fame that goes to his head, gets dumped, and ends on a complete beat down by Zheng where he learns... idk. Being a boor is bad? He's still wildly callous to her in the finale, and spends the whole time seeking validation of his pirate skills. He reunites with Edward, kisses, and quotes Han Solo.

Where S1 ended on a great fuckery, his S2 naval uniform plan after they regroup is ill defined except to call it a suicide mission - and we don't get to see what it would have been because it devolves into a very straightforward fight and flee. And gets Izzy killed. Quick cut funeral (no acknowledgement of his S2 bonding with Izzy), quick cut to wedding (foreshadowing), quick cut to... innkeeper retirement? Unclear when or even if BlackBonnet discussed Stede's whole driving dream to be a pirate and live a life at sea, but I guess that got a big priority downgrade. Despite the fact he was literally looking to Zheng for pirate-based compliments in the post-funeral scene.

I guess he's borderline-delusionally dogged in his pursuit of love now - so unlikely to bolt again - but he's also got at least a decade of experience mentally checking out in a state of repression when he's unhappy. And he's stopped being as supportive and caring toward the crew in that dogged pursuit, while arguably demonstrating a loss in leadership skills, so, um, good thing someone else is in charge?

And if Stede is a mess, Edward's arc is so much worse.

As established, they devote the Kraken to making Edward worse. He literally wants to kill himself and destroy everyone around him in the process because Stede left, and this is fixed by... Stede coming back. That's it. The crew tries to murder him and then exiles him from the ship (and Izzy takes the lead on both, indicating exactly how isolated Edward has become), but it's resolved in half a day by Stede just forcing them to put up with his boyfriend again. Like they think he murdered Buttons and still have to move him back in???

The show consistently depicts Kraken Era as a transgression against the crew, but they also avoid showing Edward acting with genuine contrition. He admits he historically doesn't apologize for anything, and then mostly still doesn't. It's a joke that he's approaching probation as a performance (CEO apology), and then the only person he genuinely talks to is Fang - the one guy cool with him - and the only person who gets a basic "sorry" is Izzy - the guy he really needs to be talking to. Edward's primary trauma is guilt, but apparently he only feels it abstractly after all that? He's only concerned with fixing things with Stede, despite Stede being about the only person around who hurt him instead of the reverse.

Speaking of primary traumas, Edward hating himself doesn't really go anywhere after the beat of self-realization. Apparently Stede still loving him is enough of a bandaid to end the suicide chasing, but he doesn't like. Acknowledge that. Edward is maybe sorta trying to go slow so he doesn't hang all his self-worth on Stede again (you can speculate), but they a) absolutely fail to go slow, and b) he doesn't make any attempt to develop himself or another support structure. Just basically... "let's be friends a bit before hooking back up." And then we get the whiplash that is Blackbeard and/or retirement.

Kraken Era is Blackbeard but way worse, like no one who has known Blackbeard has ever seen him. In the Gravy Basket Edward claims he might like being an innkeeper, before destroying his own fantasy by having the spectre of Hornigold confront him over killing his dad. The BlackBonnet to Anne & Mary parallel says running away to China / retiring makes you want to kill each other - burn it all down and go back to piracy. Stede rightfully points out prior retirement plans were whims. Edward gets sick of the penance sack after a day and puts his leathers back on to go try "poison into positivity". But also claims to be an innkeeper (look - two whole mentions!) when trying not to send children to be pirates after teaching them important knife skills.

Killing Ned Low is a serious, bad thing that prompts ill-advised sex and then going hardcore into retirement mode - leathers overboard, talk about mermaid fantasy, get retirement blessings from Izzy, end up dumping Stede for a fishing job instead of talking about how he's enjoying piracy. The fishing job, however, is also a bad thing and a stupid decision because Edward is a lazy freeloader fantasizing about being a better person. We have an uncomfortable, extended scene of "Pop-Pop" weirdly echoing his abusive dad and then sending Edward to go do what he's good at - disassociate, brutally murder two guys, fish up the leathers, rise as the Kraken from the sea. He continues with comically efficient murder but also he's reading Stede's love letters and seeking to reunite with him so... wait, is this a good thing? Post makeout / mass slaughter he's trading compliments on his kills with Zheng so. Yeah. Looks like it. Murder is fine.

Wait, no, skip ahead and Izzy is dying and Edward suddenly cares a whole lot as Izzy makes his death scene about freeing Edward from Blackbeard. Now being a pirate was "encouraging the darkness" because Izzy - a guy who had little to no influence over Edward's behavior - just couldn't let Blackbeard go. Murder is bad again, and he is freed. Minus the little detail that the murder he explicitly hates himself over was not related to Blackbeard or piracy whatsoever, so presumably haunts "just Ed" still. Anyway he's retiring to run an inn with Stede now, as the "loving family" Izzy comforted him with in his dying moments sails away from the couple that can best be described as the antagonists of their S2 arc. Also Edward implicitly wants to get married. It's been 3 days since making out was "too fast". He's still wearing the leathers.

So most of the way through Act 2 and Edward's barely on speaking terms with anyone but Stede, who he has once again hung his entire life on really fast? Crushing guilt leads to self-hatred leads to mass murder and suicide, but only if he's upset so just avoid that. He's still regularly idealizing Stede as a non-fucked up golden mermaid person (that maybe he personally ruined a bit) because he barely knows the guy. His only progress on his future is "pirate" crossed out / rewritten / crossed out again a few times, "fisherman" crossed out, and "innkeeper ?"

Just.

Where is the forward movement?

It's not just that the inn will undoubtedly fall apart - it's that the inn will fall apart for the near-exact same reasons that China was going to at the beginning of Act 2, and I can't point to anything they've learned in the time since that will help them. I guess Stede realized he loved Edward enough to chase after him, but that was in S1! They should be further than this by now. You can't cram another crisis backslide, all the Act 2 development, and the full Act 3 climax into one season. Certainly not without it feeling like the characters magically fix themselves.

If they just fail and keep blindly stumbling into the same issues because they don't change their behavior, then Act 2 doesn't work. You're just repeating the turning point between Act 1 & Act 2 on a loop.

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Where Did They Fuck Up?

Actually... lets start on what they did right.

The one consistent aspect of S2 that I praised and still think was done well in a vacuum (despite being mostly left out of the finale) was the crew's union-building arc.

With only 8 episodes and more to do in them than S1, side characters were going to get pinched even if the main plot was absolutely flawless. That was unavoidable. With budget cuts / scheduling issues, we regularly have crew members simply vanish offscreen outside of one scene, meaning cohesive arcs for your faves was not likely. Not to say they couldn't have done better - my benefit of the doubt for the TealOranges breakup and Oluwande x Zheng dried up about when I realized he was literally just her Stede stand-in for the parallel - but something like Jim's revenge plot from S1 was realistically not on the table without, like, turning half the crew into seagulls to afford it.

The union building works around this constraint really well. They turn "the crew" into the side arc, and then weave Izzy's beats in so that they aren't just about Izzy. The breakup boat crew working together to comfort each other and protect him turns them into a unit, and Stede's crew taking it upon themselves to address the trauma vibes while the captains aren't in the way solidifies it across all our side characters. The crew goes to war with Stede's cursed coat and wins, they Calypso their boss to throw a party, and they capitalize on a chance to make bank with an efficiency Stede could only dream of.

We don't get specific arcs, but Frenchie, Jim, and Oluwande are defaulted to as leaders in just about every situation, and Roach is constantly shown sharing his inventions with different characters. Individuals can dip in and out without feeling like the sideplots stutter. Any sense of community in S2 is coming from this arc - even if there are cracks at the points where it joins to other storylines (Stede and Edward, Zheng, etc.)

So why does it work? Well, because it's a workplace comedy, and you can tell they are familiar with working on those. They know where the beats are. They know where to find the humor. They know how to build off of S1 because they made sure the bones were already there - an eclectic group of individuals that start as just coworkers, but bond over time in the face of their struggle against an inept boss who they grow to care for and support while maintaining an increasingly friendly antagonism because, you know, inept boss.

OFMD does its best work in S2 when it's being true to its original concept... and its worst work when it seemingly loses confidence in its own premise.

"The show is the relationship," right? It's a romance set in a workplace comedy. The setup of Act 1 was all about creating a character-driven narrative. So given that... where the hell are we getting the dying of piracy and a war against the English Navy?

That's not a character-driven romcom backdrop, it's an action-adventure plot from Pirates of the Caribbean or Black Sails. It's plot-driven, creating an antagonistic force that results in your characters' problems. Once the story is about the fight against the Empire, the dramatic question becomes the same as those adventure stories - "Will the British Navy defeat piracy, and will our protagonists come out the other side of the battle?"

Forget the wedding. The wedding is no longer the climax of the story, its back to the happy ending flash our romantic subplot gets after winning this fight.

Except, of course, trying to pivot your story to a contradictory dramatic question near the end of Act 2 can be nothing short of a disaster, because either you were writing the wrong story until now, or you've completely lost the plot of the real one. I shouldn't even be trying to figure out if they are doing this, because it should be so obvious that they wouldn't.

And yet.

What do the Zheng and Ricky plots add to the story if not this? Neither of these characters have anything emotionally to contribute to Stede and Edward - they truly are plot elements. It's a hard break from the S1 antagonist model, but it also takes up a lot of valuable screentime. This was considered important, but still Zheng's personality and motivation only gets explored so far as it's an Edward-Stede-Izzy parallel with Oluwande and Auntie, and they only need the parallel for Izzy's genre-jumping death scene. Which follows a thematically out-of-left-field speech about how piracy is about belonging to something good (workable) and how Ricky could never destroy their spirits (um...?). And then David Jenkins is pointing to it and saying things about "the symbolic death of piracy" and speculating S3 might be about the crew getting "payback"??? An idea floated by Zheng right before our temporary retirement, btw.

Fuck, the final episode of S2 didn't have time for our main couple to talk to each other because it was so busy dealing with the mass explosion of Zheng's fleet and Ricky's victory gloat. We get lethal violence associated with traumatic flashbacks until they need to cut down enemy mooks like it's nothing, at which point we get jokes with Zheng. The Republic of Pirates is destroyed outright, and it feels like they only did it because they got insecure about their "pirate story" not having the right kind of stakes. Don't even get me started on killing a major character because "Piracy’s a dangerous occupation, and some characters should die," as if suspending disbelief on this aspect makes the story somehow lesser, instead of just being a fairly standard genre convention in comedy. Nobody complains about Kermit the Frog having an improbably good survival record.

Did someone tell them that the heroes have to lose a battle near the end of Act 2, so they scrambled to give them one?

Just... compare the wholly plot-driven struggle in 2x08 to Stede and Edward's character-focused storylines in 1x10 and tell me how 2x08 is providing anything nearly as valuable to the story. Because I can't fucking find it.

At best they wasted a bunch of time on a poorly integrated adventure plot as, like, Zheng's backstory or something, and just fucked it up horribly by trying to "step up" the kind of plot they did for Jim. In which case the whole thing will be awkwardly dropped but damage is done. Otherwise, they actually thought they could just casually add a subplot like this because they've done something wildly stupid like think "pirate" is a genre on the same level as "workplace comedy" and can just trample in-universe coherency while you draw on other media to shore up their unsupported beats.

Bringing us to the most infuriating bit...

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"...end the second season in a kinder spot."

If this was the goal, the entire season was written to work actively against it in way that is baffling and incompetent.

The really ironic thing is that the reason that the Act 2 part typically gets a downer ending is because of the evil empire that OFMD did not have to deal with until they pointlessly added it. A plot-driven story has an antagonistic force - a villain - that the heroes need to defeat. Something external working against them. The story ends when they beat the thing, and it's not much of a climax if they do most of the defeating before you get there. Ergo, they have to be outmatched up to the climax. Ergo, the second part cannot end on them feeling pretty comfortable and confident going into the third.

The same rules do not apply in the same way to a character-driven arc.

We already established Edward and Stede declaring their love is not the end of the story. Nor, necessarily, is both of them confidently entering a relationship. Even once they've developed a bunch they will have to show that development by running into the kinds of problems that would have broken them up before and resolving them better.

David Jenkins keeps talking about this idea that S2 is getting a hopeful open ending and S3 will get into potential problems, and like... I don't see any reason why they couldn't have done that successfully. They didn't, but they could've.

If S2 grew them enough as characters and then had them agree to try again in the last minute of the finale, they absolutely could have had a kind and hopeful ending where you were confident they could do it. And then a potential S3 can show that. It's a bit rockier than they were counting on, but they have learned enough lessons to not break up. And then the overall plot can build to proposal (start of Act 3) and wedding (the romantic climax). It doesn't have to be a blow out fight to be emotionally cathartic.

(Hell, the main rockier bit that they overcome in the S3 Act 2 portions could be marriage baggage. I'm sure they both have some. It would work.)

In the same way focusing on our character's long term flaws and character-driven conflict makes an Act 1 "happy ending" more difficult, I suspect it makes an Act 2 "happy ending" easier.

Instead they wrote an Act 2 that failed to convincingly start development and got confused on its direction, and then presented a rushed finale ending in a copy of the predictable disaster from S1 as though it's a good thing. They yanked the story at least temporarily into an awkward place where a romcom is trying to sell me on a bunch of serious drama / adventure beats that it has not put the work into, and inviting comparisons to better versions of those same beats in other, more suited media that make it look worse. The need to portray everyone as reaching happy closure overrules sitting with a major character death and using it for any narrative significance, while still letting it overshadow those happy endings because a romcom just sloppily killed a major character with a wound they've literally looked into the camera and said was harmless.

If I'm being entirely honest, Dead Man's Chest ends effectively at Jack Sparrow's funeral and then cuts to the British Navy obtaining a weapon of mass destruction, and it still feels kinder and more hopeful just because I leave with more faith the characters are actively capable of and working toward solving their problems.

OFMD S2, in contrast, has half-convinced me our main couple would live in a mutually obsessed, miscommunication-ridden horror story until they die.

---

Additional Reading

Normally I link stuff like this in the post, but that requires more excitement than I'm feeling right now. Here's my alternative:

Where I thought they were going with Edward - really outlines the mountain of character development they still have unaddressed

Where I thought they were going with Izzy - touches on a lot of themes that might be dead in the water & also context that's still probably relevant to why Izzy got a lot of focus in S2

My scattershot 2x08 reactions

An ask where I sketched out the bones of this argument, and another where I was mostly venting about the fandom response

This one, this other one, and this last one (read the link in op's post too) about genre shifts and failure to pull them off

The trauma goes in the box but it never opens back up - the whole point of Act 2 is that they needed to start opening shit like that - and also they focus so much on needed character growth and so little on following through

They can't even carry through on character growth that we got last season???

Why Izzy's death feels like Bury Your Gays ran smack into shitty writing

EDIT: Oh and this post is REALLY good for outlining the lack of change in way less words than I did

[eyesteeth]

y'know personally i think it'd be really thematically fun if faulkner jumps in the aquifer in the series finale and carpenter pulls him out.

i've said before that they very much are an earth/water duo and carpenter doing well as someone close to the maiden (death -> graves & cairns -> earth) while faulkner's absolutely fucking struggling with the river faith (river -> water) keeps strengthening that impression. and also as i've said before faulkner's inability to swim ties in well with this too - he, within the framework of this overarching "faith-as-water" metaphor, physically cannot survive in these conditions.

meanwhile, carpenter can swim, and that ties in well with her position in the faith. she's well-known enough to be on mercer's list even when she's been presumed dead for months, and was present for many notable events, enough that faulkner directly asks her about them in s1. she doesn't like her position there, she'd much rather be out of the water, but she can swim if she has to, and because she's had to for so long, she's gotten very good at it (or, because she's spent so long as a member of the faith, she knows how to blend in and not get found out).

now, going all the way back to the "born to water, born to land" speech in the first episode, i'd wager carpenter is one of those amphibious people who are a mix of both, while faulkner is land all the way. carpenter could survive up to a point, but her strength would give out eventually, as shown in season two with her leaving the church. meanwhile, faulkner never had a chance - it was never going to end in success for him.

and so, within this metaphor, carpenter's the only one who can get him out of the water. no one inside the church is going to save him - they're essentially water-born creatures that don't understand why he's struggling, if they even notice at all. meanwhile, carpenter can identify this struggle because she's had her own crisis of faith, and she's equipped to swim him out of there and onto dry land.

and i fully believe this. quite honestly, if faulkner doesn't end up crossing paths with his sister, he is almost definitely going to finally successfully kill himself, and go down in the verses as the role he played and not the person he actually was.

and hey, y'know. big body of water right there in the aquifer. good of a place to die as any. quite convenient, really. surely no one plot relevant has crash-landed there recently.

(or maybe not the aquifer specifically, pacing is as pacing will be, after all - any body of water in the wastes would do for this.)

it would just put a fun bow on everything i think. you're out of the water now, you don't have to go back in there, no one's going to make you go back in. let's be on land. quite frankly, it's better for all of us if you stay on land. i'm going to be fucking pissed if you go back in the water honestly.

and hey, maybe she kills him, maybe she doesn't. her rules don't count if it's for him, after all. but at least he'd get to die on land. far easier to bury him that way, should it come to that.

but if he's allowed to live out of the water - out of the faith - he can finally stop being a prophet or high katabasian and just go back to being a brother.

[saurongorthaur9]

Right now, the most likely scenario I see happening in the finale is some Marvel stupidity. They fight, Sauron shows her visions, he gets the Nine while she’s distracted by illusions or wtv, and she resists his temptation at the end. Plot twist; all the foreshadowing was wrong and a red herring, and they had the guts to pull a E+G kiss for shock value, but not to have Galadriel actually succumbing to Sauron. I might even start to believe that Dark Wizard is Saruman after all, since we are going for full on bullshit in here.

I just hope the show doesn’t get cancelled due to losing a chunk of their audience for pulling bullshit like this. Charlie is killing it as Sauron, he deserves to play that role until the end of the show.

I still have the hope that they can make a decent finale. I'm not holding my breath for anything spectacular or breath-taking, but I think it will be decent. Like, yes, the kiss debacle lowered my respect for them because of how much I utterly despise unnecessary shock value in storytelling, but they have given us a really great season overall.

I know I've been mostly negative since yesterday, but I do recognize it was one blunder amidst a sea of a lot of amazing, great storytelling and character-building. The whole Annatar & Celebrimbor story was brought me to my knees, it was so much better than anything I ever dared to dream or hope for. So many of the characters and scenes have made me smile, laugh, and cry. I've found myself deeply caring for characters that I hadn't really given much thought to before. They do know how to tell a good story.

They managed to give us a great Season 1 finale that was a successful culmination of the foreshadowing throughout the season. It was bold and shocking (in the good shocking way) and set up all the emotions for Season 2. I still can't fully wrap my head around the fact that we saw Sauron full-out propose to Galadriel in a big professional production. So I don't want to lose focus of what the show has done right in the face of what it's done wrong.

Like I said in one of the other anon asks I answered this morning already, I don't think they're going to pull out anything big this season, like the proposal was in S1. I have a hard time believing they'll attempt to rock the boat again right after Episode 7. But I'm still holding onto hope that they at least tell a decent story and set up plot and emotions for Season 3.

I will be confused about why they laid the foreshadowing about a Galadriel corruption arc out so thick. I still absolutely think that's the place that makes the most sense for the story to go. But if they can explain it well enough that I don't feel like I was cruelly played with all season, I'll take it.

If nothing else Charlie and Morfydd will take whatever they are given to work with and throw everything they've got into it, that at least I'm sure of. And even if it's mediocre, I'm sure the two of them can at least make it glimmer.

[lazinesswrites]

Writing Patterns

Rules: list the first line of your last 10 (posted) fics and see if there's a pattern!

I was tagged by @auburnlaughter a little while ago; thank you! ❤

I'm doing the latest 10 fics I've posted to Ao3, oldest first, and I'll include links because... every excuse to self-promote? Everything here is Star Wars, most of it Bad Batch (from before s3, save the last two), and most of that is more or less Crosshair-centric.

Sunrise Caf (TCW post-war AU, pre-CodyWan, 1k, G)

“Do you still prefer your caf black, now that you have access to more options?” Obi-Wan asks as Cody sits down at the small kitchen table in Obi-Wan’s new apartment.

Labor of love is ours to endure (TBB s1 finale AU-CD, 4.6k, T)

Wrecker watches as Hunter talks to Crosshair about chances; watches as Omega says her piece too.

To feel your heart as it's keeping time (TBB, Batch twins, 3.3k, G)

Since Crosshair’s recent and long-awaited return to their squad, Tech has found that treating him like one would a feral tooka has been relatively successful in getting the sniper to relax around him.

Don't You Doubt (TBB, Cross & Hunter, 2.5k, T, part of a series)

Pabu is very quiet at night.

And please be there; I can barely hang on (But oh I wait 'til I break) (TBB, h/c, 3.8k, T) (this one's in Russian too!)

Crosshair didn't know they'd be here.

Mirjahaal (TBB, pre-show, 2.1k, G)

Echo doesn’t know what Crosshair’s problem is.

Breakthrough on Bracca (TBB, AU-CD, 4.6k, T)

Crosshair wakes to a face on fire and a clear mind.

Change of Heart, Change of Plans (TBB, AU-CD, 5.6k, G)

A flash of white armor in his periphery, accompanied by the sound of familiar voices – or rather, one familiar voice from multiple people – has Hunter diverting from their route, leading his siblings into a dark and dank alley, waiting for the troopers to pass.

We're Still What's Left (TBB s3e4 cont., grief, 1.7k, T)

“But… how did you escape?” Hunter asks the kid, and Crosshair figures that’s his cue, even if he’s not sure he’s quite ready for whatever awaits him out there.

Homecoming Heroes (TBB, sequel to above, 2.8k, T)

Pabu is… nice.

Thoughts and tags below the cut:

So... Patterns? I was gonna say something about fairly long sentences, but then half of them turned out to be pretty short, actually 😅

I guess I try to set the scene: Who's there, what are they doing, what's the Problem (if the characters know, yet) etc. Try to make clear what canon scene we've jumped into, when relevant (I.e. in Labor of love, which picks up towards the end of Kamino Lost, when Hunter has just said something like 'you gave us a chance Crosshair; this is yours' and Omega has said 'they're still your brothers, Crosshair. You're my brother too.', which is what Wrecker's thoughts are referring to.)

I also tend to start right in the middle of Something, especially in the more action-filled ones. This is both because I then avoid losing people to "boring" exposition or world-building or descriptions right out of the gate, and also because beginnings are Hard, so the way I typically start writing a fic (or anything, really) is to start with whatever scene I've got in mind that sparked the idea for the rest of the fic, regardless of when it actually takes place, and then build the rest around it. Or by writing notes/something like an outline if I don't have a specific scene in mind but more just a sort of general feeling or plot or theme or something I want to write about, and then expand those into text-text. This approach means I often end up explaining the things that need explaining throughout the fic, so there's no need to put it all at the beginning. And also - it's fanfic. By far most of my readers will already be familiar with the characters and general setting; I just need to make clear where and how we might deviate from that.

That's all, I think. But hey! if you got this far and you noticed something I didn't, why don't you tell me? (please be nice, though, I'm not looking for critique; just curious)

NPTs: @whimsicalmeerkat @hxad-ovxr-hxart @spacemagicandlaserswords @battlekilt

[x0401x]

The saga continues.

So it's been a year since the anime ended, and a little bit more than that has passed since I got these asks. As you guys know, I always reply to messages, no matter how long it takes. And I really needed time to reply to these. I don't even mean just because I'm living alone in Tokyo and have to juggle grad school, part-time job, my actual job and doing all the housework by myself, plus occasional fun immigrant paperwork things. I mean all of this and the fact that I had to go out and actually do research for a lot of things regarding volume 3, in order to confirm the conclusions I took reading it. I also went to Japanese Twitter to see people's analysis of this volume and of the previous volumes, especially MasaMina, because this book is one of the most complex novels I've ever read. The amount of hidden meaning in EVERYTHING is no fucking joke. And as I wrote, I just kept finding more of it. I remember saying way back when S1 was airing that Tsurune had many, many layers. This volume, however, had infinite layers. Again, no joke.

I feel like what has transpired in this book is what Ayano Kotoko actually wanted to do from the very beginning, but there was no guarantee of whether the series would be successful enough to get a continuation, so she had to hold back at first, and then she dumped into volume 3 all that she hadn't been able to include in volumes 1 and 2. It's honestly no surprise that this one was so convoluted. It made me start to think that series should've been a seinen manga instead. So yeah, there was a lot that I had to check while writing this actual essay. Because yes, that's just how gigantic it turned out to be. 20 pages on Word. Even I was surprised when I finished it. Scratch that, I was terrified.

I have to say that I feel utterly insane for making this post. I know that a lot of you guys are aware of how difficult life has been for me over here, how I haven't been able to stay consistently active online in the past two years. I also know that the fandom is dead as hell right now in the overseas side. I'm sure nobody would've minded if I had never finished writing this thing, but I wanted to. More like I wouldn't be able to rest easy unless I did it. I feel like I needed to have the hidden things, theories and interpretations of what happened in this volume written down all in one place, even if we never get any more volumes. Kind of like a reference book so that people can look back on it whenever they need to remember what is what.

I have noted that most novel readers on both the Japanese and the overseas sides of the fandom have either gravely misunderstood this volume or didn't really get much of it. No surprise here, because, I have said this six years ago and I will say it again: although Tsurune is an amazing novel, it's not well-written. Especially volume 3. So this is an attempt to explain what transpired in it, at least on the MasaMina side of things, which is what you guys have requested. That's about 2/3 of the book anyways, lol.

Warning for insanely long post under the cut.

Before I begin, by all means, guys, share this post with anyone you know who also has questions or things they didn't understand about volume 3. Chances are you will find the explanations for them here. If you don't, then don't hesitate to hit me up, because for now, I'll have more free time to answer asks.

Anyway, here's the much-requested continuation of the Tsurune Bible, one year in the making (which now even has its own tag, just to make things easier for you guys and myself, lmao).

This volume already starts out serving MasaMina from the cover. It’s just so cute that Masaki has been slowly approaching Minato in each cover until they’re finally side by side, lol. Gotta love that Minato’s yugake and underglove look like a hand on top of another in the back cover. Good symbolism, good food.

In this volume, Masaki and Minato’s first interaction is kinda like volume 2, where Masaki amuses himself with shit Minato says. The boys are fucking around with Minato, having told the kouhai that touching his forehead brings luck and proceeding to come up with different versions of the rumor, in all of which some part of Minato’s body brings good fortune. Masaki says it’s actually Minato’s feet that they have to rub, and tells Minato to “get his legs out”. Yes, this is the mandatory old man joke, because Masaki just has to tell at least one in every volume, and it has to involve Minato. Minato asks him to cut it out, saying that he’s neither Pindola nor Billiken, which reminds me of an interaction from volume 1, where Masaki beckons Minato into the dojo like he’s a small animal, prompting Minato to assert that he’s neither a dog nor a cat. Masaki breaks into giggles and contemplates patting Minato’s head like usual, but doesn’t do it. We readers know that this novel always comes full circle later on, and this interaction is no exception.

The initial portrayal of MasaMina in this volume immediately turns angsty despite this wholesome moment, because Minato is actually having a hard time dealing with Masaki avoiding him lately. The yearning and obsession with Masaki’s eyes has reached a new level in this volume, if that was even possible. Masaki has been consciously dodging Minato’s eyes, and this upsets Minato to a point where he starts doing the same to Masaki, because finding Masaki’s gaze only to have it turn away from him is too much for Minato to handle. And unbeknownst to Minato, Masaki doesn’t really want to be doing this, but he has to, and he also feels bad when Minato avoids him.

Following this bullshit is a hint that I’m sure most people missed, and I would’ve missed it too if someone hadn’t pointed it out on Twitter. This novel, as we’re painfully aware, is full of galaxy brain shit, especially when it comes to MasaMina. But this volume goes so fucking overboard. Around page 66, there’s a joke about Seiya mothering Minato, because that’s also mandatory, but the joke isn’t like the previous volumes. “Seiya home security, protecting you 24 hours a day 365 days a year”. 365 days a year, meaning leap years are not included. If the year has 366 days, Seiya won’t be able to protect Minato for one day.

No, the OP wasn’t reading too much into it, I promise. Stick with me here, y'all.

I know that the anime might have confused everyone as to which year Tsurune is supposed to be set in, as the second season implies it's set in 2023. However, the novel begins from the year 2016, its year of publication. That means Minato was born in the year 2000 and that the accident that killed his mother happened in 2012, both of which are leap years. He also had his first proper meeting with Masaki in 2016, yet another leap year. So basically, Minato's most life-changing events happen in leap years.

Apparently, same goes for Masaki. He had to change his name in his last year of high school, and in that same year, he got target panic and his master forsake him. The following year, 2012, was when he received the death certificate of his brother and became estranged from his grandfather. That was on his birthday, so it was summer. The novel doesn’t mention in which season the accident with Minato and his mother happened, but according to the anime, it was in summer. Both events definitely did not happen on the same day, ‘cause if Minato’s mom’s death was on the same day as Masaki’s birthday, this would’ve already been mentioned at some point. But they happened within a short time gap from one another, that’s for sure.

Soulmates just be synchronizing like that. It’s been going on since volume 1, where they’re so obviously mirrors of each other that literally everyone can see it. Not to mention that really bad things and really good things happen to them alternately, in a way that they always come off as even in the end. The scars, losing members of their families to tragedy, target panic, “I now understand where my master was coming from” moments, near-death experiences related to car accidents, sixth sense, a keen connection to gods and the supernatural, get along well with nature and now, as established in this volume, allergy to poison/venom. I say poison because ginkgo fruits and seeds are actually poisonous on main, but most people can handle eating them if it’s in small amounts. Minato can’t, though. As for giant hornet venom, it usually doesn’t go as far as killing people, but Masaki must've nearly died from it, or else he wouldn’t carry an antidote with him. All volumes are adamant about Masaki and Minato being mystic creatures living amongst men, who find comfort in the natural and spiritual worlds, and who are pure not just in mind but also body.

Let’s not forget that just like Minato, Masaki also has someone who acts like a guardian around him. Ren, who wanted to protect Masaki from his issues with his grandfather, but failed at it. Who wished Masaki would quit archery for his own good, only to watch him go back to it because Minato happened. Who watched Masaki almost die saving Minato’s life and God knows if he really meant what he said when assuring Minato that it wasn't his fault. Who messes around with Minato to no end, and maybe he does it partly to take out his frustration with Minato's existence on Minato himself. Who is always the one to reveal the dark parts of Masaki’s past and how Masaki isn't a normal person. Who called Minato a marebito. Seiya probably has a similar sentiment regarding Masaki. “Maybe it would’ve been better for you not to have met him,” is what both he and Ren implied at first. But turns out neither Minato nor Masaki would be where they are without meeting each other, as confirmed way back in the last tournament of volume 1. Bad things have always happened to them, but they can overcome them thanks to their karmic connection to each other, be it direct or indirectly.

Ayano just loves this bound by fate trope and takes it to extremes. No news spotted.

Back to the dog and cat thing, the next MasaMina hint we get is actually in a scene where Masaki doesn’t show up—the one where Minato tells his teammates that he feels like he’s being watched lately. Obviously, Masaki is the one watching him when he's not looking. He just doesn't realize that because he's also incidentally avoiding Masaki.

A little later into that scene, he has The Talk with Nanao about Masaki not looking him in the eye lately. This part is ridiculously funny for so many reasons. Firstly because it bothered Minato so much literally everyone could tell. Because of course it would. Not getting his daily dose of Masaki’s undivided attention is torture for this poor little bastard. Secondly, the suggestive way that Minato talks about anything concerning Masaki is just too much. Ayano doesn’t even try to hide that Minato’s wording gives people the wrong idea—Nanao immediately assumes he's having love troubles, because of course that’s what it sounds like.

When Minato says that’s not really it, Nanao resorts to calling the individual in question “the person Minato is interested in”, which… still makes it sound like it’s love troubles, lmfao. And it's a deliberate word choice, because when Minato denies that it’s love, Nanao prefaces his next sentence with a “hmmm”, as if he doesn’t believe it for a single second. Maybe this doesn’t translate well into languages other than Japanese, but it’s the sound that people make when they don’t really believe what they’re hearing. Kind of a “you sure, buddy?” expression. Then again, Minato isn’t lying. I have said it time and time again, but this isn’t a BL novel, yet the author loves her ships and would totally make them canon if she could. Therefore, her approach is to make it so that the characters’ feelings for each other can be taken as both platonic and romantic, with neither canceling the other.

In Minato’s case, he does love Masaki. The whole series makes it clear enough. However, that love can manifest as anything. As in, it’s a platonic relationship on main, but if there were a window for it to turn into a romantic one, I honestly doubt he’d turn it down. Because there was one later in this volume, and he didn’t. Ultimately, Minato seems to be in love, but as it is posteriorly revealed, he’s happy just being by Masaki’s side. Therefore, he doesn’t see Masaki as a possible target for romance—actually, this volume suggests that he has to make a conscious effort not to see him as such. So when Minato denies to be talking about love, he means it, because he isn’t trying to pursue Masaki. But that, again, is a deliberate word choice from the author. He denies to be talking about love, but he never denies being in love. Nanao’s reaction is also deliberate, and surely he knows exactly who Minato is talking about. Or else, his reaction wouldn’t make sense.

And then comes something that just shook me to the core when reading this scene for the first time. They hear the cry of a varied tit. In Japanese culture, the varied tit is known as a tricky bird, lmao. This, too, is deliberate. Even because it’s not the first time that a bird is used to represent what’s going on in a scene. In volume 1, when Minato is riding his bicycle and ends up at the Yata Shrine, he’s guided there by a grey wagtail. In Japanese, the name of this bird is “kisekirei”, which can be read as “spirit of miracles”. Someone on Japanese Twitter pointed out that the grey wagtail is said to be a herald of love (as in romantic love, exclusively) in Japanese culture. Again, Minato denies to be talking about love, but narrative devices come in to suggest that he is in love, regardless.

Nanao is one of these narrative devices. He’s presented as being in the same situation as Minato in this scene, essentially saying the same things as him. When he says he isn’t too bothered at being dropped as a regular and that all he wants is to be around Kaito, he means it, but that's not entirely true. It’s revealed afterward that he actually was frustrated. He fights hard to be placed as regular again, and Kaito is the one to give him motivation for it. Like Minato, Nanao wasn't lying. It's just that, at this point in the story, he hadn’t yet realized how he truly felt.

And all that shoujo jazz.

Hilariously enough, much like Nanao didn’t seem to believe Minato, Minato also doesn’t seem to believe what Nanao says. He translates Nanao’s thoughts like he’s reading Nanao’s mind (“I want you to be by my side”), because that’s exactly how he feels too, about Masaki. But again, although just being around Kaito is what he wants now, Nanao starts wanting more later. Then what about Minato? Does he start wanting more along the way as well? Ayano flings that information at us and tells us to make of it what we will, but the text throws a big “yes” at our faces later on.

Following this comes the infamous “don’t look at me like that” scene, where Minato is trying to talk to Masaki and Masaki insists on leaving it for after the training camp. The way that Minato just comes at him with a question worded in the most painful manner possible is fucking delightful. Masaki had the whole trauma with being ignored by his master in the past, so when Minato asks if he’s so bad a disciple that it warrants Masaki ignoring him, that’s probably the worst thing he’s heard so far as a coach.

Similarly, when Masaki tells Minato, “I’m really sorry, but please don’t look at me with those eyes”, that’s probably the worst thing he’s heard from him. At least I can’t recall anything else Masaki has said that brought him to the verge of tears like that. But turns out it’s the opposite of what he thinks: Masaki is avoiding him because it’s so obvious that he’s The Favorite TM that everyone else is getting jealous. And then the whole thing just transforms into double-entendre, because it’s also mandatory for these dumbasses to have at least one conversation that makes them sound like a couple in every volume.

“You too, Minato—you wouldn’t react when I waved at you.”

“That’s ‘cause I thought you didn’t want to look me in the eye.”

“It’s not like I don’t want to, but it puts me in a spot sometimes.”

“What do you mean ‘in a spot’? Just spill it out.”

“There are times when I also really wanna stroke that forehead of yours, but I can’t let anyone see us like that now, can I?”

“Wha… Wha… What’s up with that?”

That's fucking clownery, Ayano. Low blow, Ayano.

No, but, seriously. How does this woman come up with such out-of-pocket shit like this? It’s better than any romantic comedy I’ve ever come across in my life. Minato completely misunderstanding and assuming the worst when the truth is that his master is actually looking after him is no news in this series. It has happened in the previous volumes as well and it's one of the staples of their relationship, but it’s also so chick flick-like it drives me nuts. The whole “you were actually being showered with care and kindness in the only way he could give it to you at that moment” thing is delicious. And so is Minato’s realization that Masaki is feeling just as bad as Minato for having to distance himself. That he wants things to be like before but can’t afford it because it would disrupt the harmony of the club. Like, yeah, king! Go get punched in the gut with affection! You (unironically) deserve it!

This follows a pattern that happens in every volume, where Masaki always, at some point, has to do something for Minato’s own sake that ends up upsetting him, which in turn upsets Masaki as well. And when Minato confronts him about it, he finds out that Masaki was actually caring for him all along and gets all flustered. In volume one, this happens when Masaki tells Minato that he should join his friends at the club because he wouldn’t be coming to the Yata-no-Mori kyudojo forever, which means Minato would eventually be drawing his bow alone. This completely screws Minato up internally, because how dare you give me so much and then suddenly announce that you’ll leave me in the near future. But turns out Masaki just thought that this would be the best for Minato, and when Minato finds out the truth, he’s “so embarrassed he could die”. Jump to volume 2, where they fight over Minato’s recklessness in regard to his injury and his bad form, and Masaki finds himself having to forbid Minato from coming to practice. Minato loses it because you’re the one who got me back into archery, yet now you try to take the bow away from me. And then he realizes where Masaki was coming from, and calls him an idiot because he’s frustrated.

Ayano clearly likes to do this kinda shit where Minato gets insecure assuming the worst whenever he’s deprived of anything related to Masaki, only to reveal that it was for his own good, then having them resent the lack of proper communication in-between. All in all, these situations are portrayed in a heartwarming way that showcase Masaki is actually a responsible adult and Minato is, as he says, a very cute disciple. But it also makes it look like married couple bickering, because this woman just loves fucking with us like that.

And also because this follows the same pattern as what archery means to Minato.

In every single volume, something happens that deprives him not only of Masaki, but of archery itself, because to him, those two things are connected. When he feels like Masaki is about to disappear from his sight in volume 1, he begs him to stay. When he’s forbidden from coming to practice, he could’ve just gone to Saionji or practiced at home with the rubber bow if he wanted, but instead, he kept coming to the dojo like the jealous little bitch he is to watch Masaki teaching everyone but him. Minato’s love for archery and his love for Masaki are portrayed in the very same way. He gets burned by them at some point, but he also gets healed upon understanding that the burn was for the sake of growth. Just as it says in the last tournament of volume 3:

“Goodbye” is a spell. Something devised from the very beginning.

The sound of a knock on the door. Ringing through.

Yearning, chasing, wishing.

Crouching down, struggling, being doubted and scorned.

Raging, despairing, cursing.

Repenting, lamenting, accepting death.

And when one gives up…

They bow down their heads, love, forgive. Thus the door finally opens.

“Welcome,” it greets.

To love means to forgive yourself and others.

Just like with archery, Minato yearns and chases and wishes for Masaki, but he hits walls along the way. It breaks him and he literally goes through the five stages of grief when it happens, but then he decides to accept it and face Masaki about it. And in doing so, he finds out the truth, and with the truth comes the catharsys. He finds himself even more in love with archery, so I'm willing to bet that his love for Masaki also deepens whenever these misunderstandings are solved. The reason why he gets so disproportionally flustered in the aftermath is because, on the inside, Minato is like, “So you were thinking of me all this time??? You weren’t trying to abandon me???? I love you so much????? Fuck you?????”

And maybe he also gets flustered at how Masaki words his arguments? I mean. “I can’t let anyone see us like that” undebatably refers to not letting other people see them being intimate with each other. It’s not the first time that Masaki talks like this. In volume 2, for example, there was that one scene where Masaki told Minato to not “take on anyone’s style” but his. Minato was also extremely flustered back then, thinking that Masaki didn’t have to word it that way. This is one more thing that only works in Japanese, because the expression he used was “don’t dye yourself in anyone’s color other than mine”. “Dyeing oneself in another’s colors” means taking on someone’s way of doing things, and it’s an expression most often used to describe the role of a wife in marriage, where she’s expected to “dye herself in her husband’s colors” (as in, to follow his way of thinking and do what he says). This is a double-entendre that can be read as “don’t you cheat on me”, and we’re completely free to interpret Minato’s reaction as “you didn’t have to make it sound suggestive, what am I supposed to do with that thought now”.

In that same fashion, when Masaki says they can’t afford to let other people see them being so close or else it’ll give them the wrong idea (which is actually the right idea, because Minato is indeed his favorite disciple), it gives Minato, for a split second, a free sample of what it would be like if they were in a relationship. Because if Minato were in love with Masaki, as the birds imply, then this way of interpreting Masaki’s words is 100% something that would go through his head in that moment. Actually, even if he weren’t in love with Masaki, the wording is inexcusably implicative. There’s a million other ways he could have put it. But if we take it from a “Minato is in love” perspective, it’s easy to understand why Masaki’s word choice only adds up to his frustration, and his reaction makes even more sense. Again, the text gives us leeway to read it like that, and it’s intentional. It wasn’t written in this way by coincidence, nor is it a coincidence that we get this kinda shit at least once per volume.

I feel like I’m repeating myself a lot in this analysis, but much like everything else in Tsurune, their relationship is cyclical. This shit is going to happen all the time with these two, as if it’s a rule between them. Masaki does the best for Minato and ends up hurting him in the process without meaning to, which means he’s also hurting. And when everything is solved, Minato doesn’t know what the fuck to do with himself, because that’s how much he loves Masaki. It’s almost like Masaki himself is an embodiment of archery for Minato at this point.

The whole process of shooting in Japanese archery, as stated in volume 2, is about severing your life and being reborn. Minato’s journey with archery has also been one of having his love for it be tested, and when it seemed he was about to lose it, the fire is set alight again by Masaki. His affection for Masaki goes through the same path, and just when he thinks Masaki is about to turn his back to him, he gets this kind of dopamine dump and is able to reaffirm that their bond would never break so easily. In fact, any little bit of logic would be enough for him to realize that, but although Minato is a pragmatic person in general, logic just doesn’t apply when it comes to Masaki. This is entirely mutual, because the same things happen to Masaki as well. He can’t look at Minato in the eye because it obviously makes him feel guilty, and when Minato dodges him, he gets a taste of what he himself is doing to Minato. It's all about retribution, which is a concept present in Shinto, Buddhism and Japanese archery.

The realization that Masaki was avoiding him for his own sake makes Minato lose it. He probably would’ve reverted to calling Masaki an idiot or a pervert and lashed out at him like usual if his grandparents hadn’t arrived to the scene. And then what happens next felt like a fucking fever dream. I still remember the first time I read it so damn vividly. The way the elderly couple just stormed in and presumed that Minato was crying for entirely different reasons. Minato trying to undo the misunderstanding. The car accident suddenly being brought up. The iroha poem that Minato’s mom used to sing being mentioned out of fucking nowhere. Masaki being Masaki and interpreting it for Minato and, again for whatever reason, has to put a hand on Minato's back while doing it. It’s all just so fast and ridiculously shippy. The stupid couple vibes, the way that Minato’s grandmother seems to approve of Masaki and bless the relationship by asking Masaki to “take care of Minato forever”. Seiya and Kaito watching over them from a distance and worrying whether everything was gonna go well or not. It’s all like a reverse parallel to when Ren asked Minato to take care of Masaki, except unfortunately very rushed. Just MasaMina being shoved down our throats as per usual, except lightning style.

On the topic of shoving down throats, the following scene with Masaki spitting his coffee when Minato’s apron fell down has puzzled people for the longest time now. To this day, I can’t really explain what happened here. I’ve seen people speculating that it was “lucky lechery”, and ugh. Ew. Gross. But though I can’t really imagine it, it’s true that he didn’t spit the coffee due to the sight being funny. He wasn’t laughing. And he was the only one who was so weirdly surprised. I have a lot of qualms about thinking of it that way, but Masaki has always been portrayed as having the dirty mind of an old man. Honestly, it’s disturbing to imagine it, but an intrusive thought isn’t... too far-fetched. What makes me feel not so bad about this is the fact that, looking back on the talk between Minato and Nanao, it’s easy to figure not only that Minato is “interested” in Masaki, but also that, whatever the way he looks at Masaki is, Masaki doesn’t correspond. With that in mind, I'd rather interpret this apron scene as Masaki being caught off-guard.

As Minato says, he’s looking at Masaki, but Masaki has his eyes on the Gods. Of course, Masaki was properly looking at Minato, as we know, just in a different way from how Minato looks at him. Masaki was being a responsible master and watching over his disciple in spite of everything. So by all accounts, Minato’s feelings are not reciprocated, which again pushes the idea that Minato is in love. If his distress was just from him being concerned with his master as a disciple and nothing else, this would fall into their master-disciple dynamics and therefore would automatically be reciprocated. There’s no other way around it. Masaki is looking at him as a disciple and Minato is��� doing something else entirely. Again, whatever that something else is has been left to our imagination, but the birds are just fucking unexplainable from any perspective that isn’t romantic. They didn’t even have to be there. Hell, the café scene was also completely unnecessary.

Amazing how this book still has the power to make me lose my fucking mind.

First hint of the “imina” is dropped as Masaki tells the boys about it, and Minato concludes that it is “the name of a life”. In Japanese, this is written as 命の御名, and there are two ways to read 御名. One of them is “gyomei” and the other is “mina”. “Gyomei” is used when referring to the name of the emperor, while “mina” is used when referring to a name that is sacred, such as the name of a god. The one that Ayano chooses as the furigana here is “mina”. Of course, this also is a reference to Minato’s name, as well as foreshadowing to the whole thing with Masaki’s birth name.

More foreshadowing ensues as Minato is shown giving instructions and teaching the kouhai in the next scene. I didn’t catch it at first, but it was really just him doing that amongst the upperclassmen, so yeah, future coach!Minato putting his skills on display once again. I say once again because it’s not the first time he gives advice to people regarding archery. He’s been doing it since volume 1, with Manji. Many mistook him for being savage back then, but he was giving candid advice when he warned Manji about target panic. Not to mention that he has the ability of setting people’s souls ablaze and making them want to draw the bow. He’s got talent for it.

This goes on right before Hikaru watches him talk to Masaki like they’re a married couple. Just obvious as fuck. Hikaru is shipping this shit. I’m only half-joking when I say this, because he quite literally considers himself “lucky to be around them”. He’s canonically enjoying this domestic load of bull. Now, I don’t know how many people noticed, but the way Hikaru thinks of them is pretty damn unnatural. Maybe it’s just me, but this struck me as intentional. I feel like he was being used as a reminder for how the readers should view these two. Unfortunately, thanks to the anime, many people got the wrong impression about Masaki and his relationship with Minato, which is most definitely not how Ayano wants people to see them. I mean, let’s be honest, fellow readers. We know that Masaki is her favorite character and this is her favorite relationship. I honestly believe she wants us all to see them in the way Hikaru does: a master and his disciple being cute with each other.

The dialogue is also gold. The way that Minato is able to deduct that Masaki’s offer to come to his place and look for the book he wants inevitably means having to clean up in the process. The way that Masaki can tell that Minato knows what’s coming just from him saying that it’d be a pain in the ass. Him responding with, “Don’t think you can get fish without doing some work” and Minato retorting that he’s more into red meat than fish. This was the author’s way of showing that these idiots are in the same wavelength. The good humor and wholesomeness is palpable in how sassy and comfortable they are with one another. There’s mad levels of intimacy here, which is, again, completely unnecessary plot-wise. It’s there because Ayano wants it to be there. Not to mention that there’s double-entendre again.

I’m talking about the “vegetarian” and “carnivore” part of the conversation here. In Japanese, “vegetarian” and “herbivore” are the same word. Y’all know the terms that Japanese people use to define who’s passive and who’s dominant in a relationship? Yep, that’s right, it’s “herbivore” and “carnivore”. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but with the amount of hidden meaning, suggestiveness and word play that this volume has, I don’t even doubt anything anymore. And we gotta be real here: as far as all 3 volumes go, Minato is ridiculously physical when it comes to Masaki. Not only is Masaki the person he has more physical contact with, he’s the only character whose touch and presence Minato actually craves. He’s always reaching out to grab Masaki, and just the prospect of not getting his fix of head pats is literally enough to make him tear up. And Minato isn’t even the kind of person who likes physical contact. More often than not, he’s annoyed by it, if it’s coming from anyone else. That aside, he’s also weirdly physical when he’s thinking about Masaki. I’ve said this time and time again, but Minato often describes Masaki in his head in ways that sound very much like he’s physically attracted to Masaki. So far, the descriptions of Masaki that we’ve gotten from Minato’s point of view are:

He’s got basically every Japanese ideal trait of conventional attractiveness

Has “adult charm but still retains some childishness in him”

Warm hands, slender fingers, bewitching eyes

A smile like the New Moon

And as most recently defined by this volume, smells really fucking good (at least to Minato)

All of these are physical things. And we always get this from Minato’s perspective only. Meanwhile, Minato obviously has nothing that Masaki would be physically attracted to, of course. But even while putting Minato aside as an option (because he’s not at all an option), Masaki is a priest. Yes, Shinto priests can get married, and they don’t even have to be married to have sex, so there are no inhibitions imposed on him in that regard. But even then, due to their lifestyle, Shinto priests tend to be abstinent. This is something I read on an interview with an actual Shinto priest, and Masaki seems to fit into the stereotype, given that he doesn’t seem to be remotely interested in romantic relationships or being sexually involved with anybody. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, isn’t anyone’s “friend with benefits”, and doesn’t appear to give a shit. This isn’t because he’s too busy or doesn’t have social life. As established in volume 2, he has always had many friends, and he himself says it in volume 3 that he thinks all women are beautiful. However, “the only ones he considers to be cute are his disciples”. What I’m trying to say is: regardless of Masaki’s dirty jokes and old man attitude, he might actually be the more pure-hearted one between him and Minato in that regard. He definitely doesn’t have any idea that Minato thinks those things about him, and if he knew, he’d be taken aback for sure.

By the way, quick translator's note here, but when Masaki says that “the only ones he considers to be cute are his disciples”, the word “disciple” is actually not in plural form. Basically, we're free to interpret that as either him talking about all his disciples... or just one. And the second option is the most likely to be what he means, because the club is full of female members now. It wouldn't make much sense for him to draw a line between "women" and "disciples" when half of said disciples are girls.

Just take that piece of trivia and run with it.

Another implication that Masaki doesn’t get the effect he has on Minato is the scene where everyone goes out to play in the dog and cat park. Seiya had clearly planned for Masaki to go with the first-years instead of with them. When I first read this volume, I was weirded out by how Seiya suddenly turned into a prick to Masaki and began to resemble his anime counterpart. But then, in-between, he would be acting like his usual self, teaming up with Masaki to debate with Kaito and Keima, unintentionally laughing at Masaki’s old man joke, lending the marker to Masaki so that he can scribble on Takumi’s face, etc. Minato and Kaito’s passiveness also struck me as kind of weird, because if Seiya were being outright hostile on purpose, they wouldn’t stand for it. This led me to believe he wasn’t just being a little bitch, and at some point, Seiya in this volume started reminding me a lot of how Kaito acted with Minato when they had just met. And then I realized that this is probably what Ayano was going for here.

Back when Minato was still trying to avoid being part of the archery club despite Seiya’s attempts to get him into it, Kaito was criticizing him for not making it clear enough that he was never going to join. Minato obviously gave off the vibes of someone who still loved archery and wanted to do it, so in spite whatever he said, Kaito was basically arguing, “Well, it ain’t working. Try harder”. Seiya is taking this same approach with Masaki, except without saying anything directly to him. Other than that, he also seems to be doing kind of the same as Ren does with Minato.

Seiya was the one who did the poll with the club members, so he was the first person to find out that they thought Masaki favored the second-years, especially Minato. And the problem here is: the first-years aren’t wrong. Masaki really does lean towards the second-years, not exactly because he likes them more, but because he’s closer to them, having already been with them for a whole year. As for Minato, the second-years know how deep his bond with Masaki goes, but the first-years don’t, so there’s no convincing them that this is fair. What does Seiya do? He pushes Masaki away from them—away from Minato, in particular—and onto the first-years. And in this process, he’s probably aware that he’s hurting his best friend, which definitely leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, so he takes it out on Masaki. It’s killing two birds with one stone. He gets to throw shade at Masaki for making him do this while also being like, “Who said we’re close to this guy? Nuh-uh, not me” in front of the first-years.

Speaking of shade, the comments Seiya makes on Masaki in this volume are pretty damn interesting. They all have something in common. Can y’all guess what it is?

“Amazing, Masa-san. So you’re a mix of monk, priest and old man.”

“Now, Masa-san, please go tag along with the first-years. You’re the one responsible for looking after us, right? Your club president will be watching over the second-years, so rest easy.”

“He’ll be just fine; he’s an adult.”

“If you know it, Masa-san, that means you’re also someone from ancient times.”

Yep. All of them contain reminders that Masaki is a grown-up, specifically. It’s like Seiya is saying, “You’re a grown man; get your act together”, just like Kaito was saying to Minato, “You’re an archer; get your act together”. It’s funny as hell that Minato is always present during these moments, so it might as well also be a reminder to Minato that Masaki is an adult and he isn’t, lmao. Other than that, this attitude of Seiya’s also feels like one more dig on the anime and how it portrayed him and Masaki. How it looks on the surface like Seiya is being gratuitously offensive when, in reality, he’s siding with Masaki.

It’s almost like the author is doing her own little rebellion and I’m here for this shit.

On the topic of making digs on the anime, I have to be honest about one thing that I felt throughout this whole volume. We know that the tendency is for it to get gayer the further the story progresses, but even so, we gotta admit that Ayano tripled down on the gay this time around. It was a lot, to the point that I saw people from the Japanese side of the fandom calling Tsurune a BL novel, both ironically and not, and saying that this volume had “too much gay”. This isn’t normal, guys. But although it makes me feel bad for the author seeing reviews like these, I must say I kinda get where they’re coming from. I was highkey shocked every time the characters had a “moment” with each other—not just Minato and Masaki but also Seiya and Kaito, and although they barely showed up in this volume, Eisuke and Koushirou too. Because, my God, it was all so visceral and heavy. Some parts gave me diabetes while others basically ripped my heart off my chest.

Am I complaining, though? Absolutely not. I’ll take a whole ton more of that. Still, there’s something about it that I can’t shake off my head even now. Very often did these passages feel like covert criticism toward the anime, as well as Ayano’s compromise with what she wanted her story to be. Like, “Oh, so the anime is portraying Masaki as an asshole using his students to seek revenge on his dead grandfather? Here’s him and Minato being domestic as fuck.” Or, “Oh, so the anime ignores Seiya and Kaito’s relationship? Here’s Seiya being sweet to Kaito and acting like his girlfriend.”

And don’t get me wrong, I do think she’s eternally grateful to KyoAni for picking up her work and not only publishing but also animating it, but that doesn’t mean she has to agree with what has been done with her story and characters. I mean, it’s so far removed from what she’s doing. I also see people in the Japanese side of the fandom commenting about how different the anime is from the original, and that it’s best to view both as separate stories. This isn’t normal either, although I saw it happen to Violet Evergarden as well. Add that to the fact that Ayano never gave any interviews, or even wrote a creator’s comment outside of the novel afterwords. I reiterate that do think she is thankful to KyoAni, but yeah, I also believe she resents the anime to an extent, and it shows in this volume.

Now back to the analysis.

One of the gayest things ever presented in the entire franchise is the reference to “Greensleeves”. Nothing could’ve prepared me for that shit. I have answered an ask about this scene where I break down and analyze the KaiSei side of it, which can be found here. This is one of the many instances where KaiSei is a direct parallel to MasaMina. Kaito talks about how the dog that Seiya is petting is “so clingy”. Minato has to deal with sharing Masaki with more club members this year, many of whom are openly crushing on him, so he’s jealous all over again. Kaito wonders if it’s okay for him to try to catch up to Seiya, who is full of secrets. Minato often tells Masaki not to treat him like a child and it’s always through him that we are shown Masaki and Ren keep a lot of secrets. Kaito wants to know what burdens Seiya and hopes that Seiya would share the load with him, rely on him. Meanwhile, Minato doesn’t mind Masaki not wanting to tell him about his circumstances, because an adult shouldn’t try to rely on a child to share his problems. However, Minato makes it very clear that he will stop Masaki if Masaki ever attempts doing something dangerous. Which means Masaki doesn’t even have a choice here—he will have Minato pull him out of the Crimson Lotus Hell whether he wants it or not. But I’m now getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s go back to “Greensleeves”.

English: Alas, my love, you do me wrong Greensleeves was all my joy Greensleeves was my delight

Japanese: Aah, my love, you're such a cruel one Greensleeves, you were my joy Greensleeves, such merry days I was happy just being by your side

The author’s choice of song and verses are… interesting, to say the least. The translation that comes with it is very interesting too, because it’s how she interprets the lyrics. The fact that “alas, my love” is a phrase we can canonically associate with KaiSei and MasaMina still sucks away all of my sanity, especially when thinking about how the lyrics fit into their interactions.

“You do me wrong”, “you’re such a cruel one”: Seiya was a dick to Kaito when they first met, until they had that big fight and later made up. Whenever Seiya was a dick, Kaito would answer at length and they would clash, so this was technically a mutual thing. As discussed above, Masaki sometimes has to do things that hurt Minato for his own good, which is also mutual, as Minato’s response hurts Masaki as well.

“You were my joy, such merry days”: Minato is happiest when Masaki is there. That much has already been stated since volume 1. Before Masaki joins the club, Minato is happy to be back to archery, but also feels sad that he’s no longer able to draw the bow with Masaki, until we get the most “surprise, bitch” scene of the series. Nothing of the sort had ever been implied for Kaito before, but this volume raises the question of whether or not Kaito is okay with Seiya going somewhere far away. Unsurprisingly, he never says he’s okay with it, because no one in this novel says things they don’t mean. What he does say is that it’s Seiya’s own decision. Regardless, everyone can tell how much it affects him. Now maybe that’s a big claim to make when it comes to Masaki and Seiya, but Masaki literally went to Kazemai because he wanted to keep teaching Minato and Seiya has gone to individual competitions because of Kaito.

“I was happy just being by your side”: Again, it has already been stated, quite literally, that Minato just wants Masaki to be by his side. Same for Kaito with Seiya. He wants Seiya to rely on him, but regardless of whether Seiya does it or not, just being by Seiya’s side is enough for him. This is actually an authentically Zen-like way of thinking and highlights how pure of heart Minato and Kaito are. It also affirms that they have a lot of feelings piled up, but they’re keeping it to themselves. Again, this is mutual. Suppose Masaki couldn’t teach at Kazemai anymore, he’d still be happy so long as Minato kept coming to Yata Shrine to learn from him. As for Seiya, he knows his time with Kaito is limited if he’s going to choose the path of medicine, so he’s enjoying what he can get for now.

The way Kaito’s red shoes chase after Seiya’s blue ones also feels a lot like the way that Minato is always chasing Masaki, both in the literal sense and not. And the way that Kaito and Seiya eventually end up walking together might very well apply to Minato and Masaki too. Masaki is a figure of authority in the dojo, but essentially, he and Minato are equals. From the get-go, Masaki allows Minato to speak with him informally and use a nickname to refer to him. Minato makes fun of Masaki, scolds him, yells at him, calls him an idiot, a pervert, a shitty old man, etc… because he can. Not because he doesn’t respect Masaki (“respect” is literally the word that defines their relationship in the official character chart), but because they’re on equal grounds with each other. Masaki knows better than to follow the stupid “I’m superior to you because I happened to be born first” unsaid social rule of Japanese society. He isn’t worthier just for being older and Minato isn’t lesser for being younger. He’s always poking fun at Minato for being a “little kid”, but that’s because he thinks Minato is cute when he acts childish. He’s not actually belittling Minato for being a child.

Aside from that, the things Seiya said about Bernese dogs also feel like a MasaMina hint. He talks about how they have a short lifespan even amongst other dog breeds and that any amount of years they live past the average is a “gift from God”. This is a reference to Minato. In every volume there’s at least one scene where Minato nearly dies. The car accident, the truck accident, the boar incident and Takumi’s little “prank”. Not to mention stuff from the boys’ childhood that is mentioned in-text, like falling from a tree along with their tree house, getting lost in a forest and accidentally eating a ginkgo fruit. Masaki even comments in volume 1 on how Minato gets injured often, and sure enough, he also gets wounded or sick in every volume. He injuries his hand when he and Masaki first meet, then hurts his neck after his fight with Seiya, then the ganglion happens, the fever, the allergy. In these cases, he always gets saved by sheer coincidence. Most of the time, the coincidence is the fact that Masaki is there for him. On volume 1, coincidences and encounters are described as “gifts”. Masaki is Minato’s “gift from God”, who keeps him alive despite his lifespan being at constant risk of running out.

Skip to the tournament and more foreshadowing of future coach!Minato comes up as he gets Hikaru to cast away his insecurities and shoot. I have discussed this before in previous analysis but Minato does it in an essentially Zen way, where he never outright tells Hikaru to “just do it”. He motivates Hikaru by telling him about bullet train names, which seems like a completely unrelated topic, but then he connects it to tsurune and makes Hikaru want to shoot. He’s being exceptionally sensible here, communicating with Hikaru in a way that sounds abstract, but which Minato knows will get through to him. That’s exactly how Masaki gets him to do things and it’s how masters usually do it. Zen is really just like that—you have to get people to find their own answers. This is the author telling us that Minato is in the right track to following Masaki’s steps.

After that, “Greensleeves” comes up again. Kaito’s interpretation of the lyrics is superb. Especially the ending, which he translates as, “This is goodbye, but please come here one more time and give me love”. That’s Minato whenever he thinks his relationship with Masaki is going sour. And although the verses are the same in English in this scene, the Japanese translation has additional verses for some reason.

Aah, I feel my chest about to burst You, who bestow me with love, what a cruel one you are You let me bask in your affection, only to say that you will abandon me Is this a test from the Lord?

Bro, that’s. That’s fucking Minato there. It's especially literal when applying it to volume 1, when Minato thought Masaki was getting tired of him after humoring him for a while with overcoming target panic. Where he was basically a parallel to Fuu, who returned to the forest after Masaki healed its injury. Except Fuu eventually came back, and so did Minato. What I get from this is that the gods are always testing how much he loves Masaki, and so far, he has given them the right answer every time. Minato also always almost leaves, but in his case it’s literal—he always almost dies. These near-death experiences always seem to kind of come outta nowhere, but they do have a proper reason to be other than ship tease. It’s the heavens above announcing that Minato’s time is up, except Masaki is there to intervene.

Masaki interprets “Greensleeves” as “an arm that is green”, with “green” being not exactly the color but rather a way to describe something miraculous. Touch it and you will be graced with a miracle. Meanwhile, Seiya says that the lyrics feel like someone’s words to God—a song of lament and resignation, with a hint of criticism in it. Sound familiar? Yeah. “Yearning, chasing, wishing. Crouching down, struggling, being doubted and scorned. Raging, despairing, casting curses. Repenting, lamenting, accepting death.” Saying “goodbye” (“this is goodbye”), and when one is about to give up, the door opens, and in comes forgiveness (“but please come here one more time and give me love”). “Greensleeves” is presented here as an equivalent to what the universal experience of doing Japanese archery feels like. Ayano Kotoko interprets it as the definition of “one shot and expire”. And by no coincidence, it’s also a description of the roller coaster that is Minato and Masaki’s relationship.

The origins and meaning of “Greensleeves” are unknown, so Ayano is taking the liberty to offer her own view of it. The way she conceptualizes it, it’s an analogy to coming of age. How is that related to Japanese archery? Through the process of honing oneself by way of practicing a Zen art, people grow—they “come of age”. Or, as the novel puts it, they become “adults (saints)”. Masaki has pointed out in the first volume that he’s like a baby to people who are older than him—age doesn’t really define how mature someone is. Reaching enlightenment equals reaching spiritual adulthood. True adulthood.

And how does that apply to Masaki? I don’t know if anyone’s been keeping track of it, but Minato and his feelings for him have come a long way since volume 1. He’s less reckless, less impatient and less greedy. He no longer freaks out or gets sad when Ren tells him shit, he shares Masaki with even more people at the club now and doesn’t pry on Masaki’s business. Slowly, through repeating this process of one shot and expire, of nearly giving up and then seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in their relationship, Minato and his feelings have slowly evolved and ripened.

So again, Minato’s love for archery and his love for Masaki are portrayed as following the same pattern.

Minato interprets “Greensleeves” as being a “naru poem”, a song that celebrates coming of age, as described by his mother. Later, in the last tournament, Ayano reiterates that affirmation in the text. And since the characters discussed about not just the song but also the individual referred to as Greensleeves in it, then there ought to be an equivalent to that as well—a character who is considered “a miraculous hand” by another character. Someone who gave them a gift, a miracle, once they made contact with them. In other words, “Greensleeves” as a song is the definition of how Japanese archery feels to everyone, but each character has a Greensleeves of their own in their lives.

To Kaito, it’s Seiya. To Ryouhei, it’s his sister. To Seiya, it’s Kaito. To Nanao, it’s also Kaito. To Shuu, it’s Minato. To Masaki, it’s his little brother. More on these later, because for now, the focus is on Minato.

Masaki suggests that Greensleeves is someone who cannot be touched even if one gives up everything for it. Minato opposes to this so vehemently it feels unnatural. He’s too outraged, but it’s because this hits a sore spot for him, without him even knowing it. He absolutely doesn’t want that to be the case, because it would mean that Masaki is out of his reach. Masaki all too often seems to slip from his grasp, off to somewhere far away (or as the novel puts it, to the “Other Side”, the “Farthest North”, the “Crimson Lotus Hell”, etc). And every time this happens, he grabs Masaki’s arms and begs him not to leave (again, one shot and expire). When he thought Masaki was a ghost and was about to pass on in volume 1, he grabbed both of his arms. When they’re in Masaki’s car in volume 2 and Masaki is lamenting how useless a teacher he is, Minato has to hold himself back not to grab Masaki’s arm before affirming that Masaki will be his master forever and always. The last scene of that volume is Minato falling asleep on Masaki while holding onto his arm.

Who else could be Minato’s Greensleeves, I fucking wonder.

Next scene is about future plans for the boys’ careers. Just a KaiSei galore. Fast forward to Seiya and Minato walking Kuma. And then it happens. The biggest middle finger that Ayano flips on the anime.

“The moon’s beautiful, huh?”

“Yeah, it is, very much. Minato, do you know about Natsume Souseki’s anecdote?”

“That he had the habit of plucking out nose hairs whenever he had writer’s block and would line them up onto the manuscripts?”

“That’s the one you went for? I meant the anecdote that Japanese people use other kinds of expressions when professing their love instead of saying ‘I love you’.”

“Sorry, I don’t know that one.”

“Minato, you and Kaito just don’t get fazed, do you?”

I’m sorry but this was fucking brutal.

So the author here takes a very common trope in literature, manga and anime. A classic that everyone loves to use for their ships. And then she completely destroys it.

Minato not knowing something that all Japanese people know is 10000% a stretch. Doesn’t matter that he’s a teenager—everybody and their mother knows this anecdote over here. And yeah, that wasn’t him being funny or embarrassed, because Seiya would’ve noticed it. This is meant to show that the gag was on purpose. That a romantic trope is the last thing Ayano would use for SeiMina. Instead, Minato is thinking about Masaki in this scene, as he asks Seiya if he wants to see some dormice. That’s a confirmed volume 1 reference, because Minato had brought the dormouse mascot that Masaki gave him to Seiya’s house. And Seiya is thinking of Kaito, because why would he bring up Kaito’s name out of nowhere? Did he ask Kaito the same question? In what fucking context? What the fuck did Kaito say back? I need answers, Ayano.

Fast forward further to Minato talking about his plans for the future for the first time. He’s at a loss, but he’s interested in what the job of a Shinto priest is like. In any case, it seems he’s going to find an occupation that is related to it, just not necessarily as a priest.

Fast forward even further to the Meigen Ceremony. In this ritual, Shuu is Kyoka Suigetsu, the “moon over the water surface”. Meaning he’s someone that can’t be reached, no matter how much one tries, because the moon’s reflection is but an illusion over the water, and the real moon is somewhere completely out of grasp. That’s basically what Shuu is to Minato. Minato envies Shuu just as much as he admires him. He strives to be a great archer like Shuu, but in the end, Minato can never be exactly like him—he can only be like himself. That’s just how archery works. This is, needless to say, 100% mutual.

Meanwhile, Masaki is Katsura Otoko. That’s the name of a youkai who lives on the moon. He’s said to be so beautiful that once one looks up at him, they become enthralled to the point they can never take their eyes off his figure. I’m sure we’ve read enough of Minato’s monologues about Masaki to understand that this is exactly what Masaki is to him. It checks all the boxes.

Ayano said “motherfucker is thirsty”.

Later on, Minato’s “sixth sense for Masa-related matters only” starts tingling as he feels chills at Masaki asking Nanao for that one picture. Minato can’t exactly tell, but he can feel that Masaki is up to something. More sixth sense bullshit ensues after Masaki’s traditional court music performance along with his mother and Ren. Minato asks Masaki about the Heart Sutra, which he remembered Saionji telling him to study in the past. They debate about it until Ren interrupts and, as Masaki takes his leave, the mandatory exposition of Masaki and Minato’s karmic connection comes to punch us directly in the face. We already knew that both of them have scars because they “belong to the gods”. We already knew that Minato can see people’s auras. Now we’re told they also see light differently, feel people’s energy and can hear things that normal people can’t.

Ren describes the two of them as having a “disposition for the spiritual” and wonders if Minato is like that because someone in his family was also like that. Seiya had previously asked if Minato’s mother had that kind of disposition, except the word was written differently when he said it. The term he used was 巫女気, while Ren used 神子気. Both read as “mikoke” in furigana, but they have different meanings. Seiya was asking if Minato’s mother had the natural disposition of a shrine maiden (巫女). Ren was affirming that Masaki and Minato had a natural disposition for something else entirely. 神子 reads as “miko” but doesn’t mean “shrine maiden”, exactly—the literal meaning is “child of the gods” or “child of a god”. This is a gender neutral version of “shrine maiden”, referring to people who carry out the same duties at shrines but aren’t women. There’s no translation for it, as far as I’m aware.

Many people on the Japanese side of the fandom have theorized about the implications of this interaction. Everyone seems divided between the following options:

Masaki and Minato are gods or demigods

Masaki and Minato are candidates for becoming gods

Masaki and Minato are descendants of gods

Masaki and Minato have been either gods or god candidates in their past lives

Masaki and Minato are the reincarnations of gods

In any case, the two of them are once again officially set outside the scope of normal human beings because they “belong to the gods”, one way or another. Personally, I lean onto the “god descendant” theory because of the mentioning of Minato’s mom. I also lean onto the “god candidate in a past life” because this volume brings out the topic of past lives and characters experiencing memories and feelings that aren’t their own. So I guess my bet is that they were god candidates in past lives because they’re god descendants.

As for what gods they are or have descended/reincarnated from, people mostly agree that it’s probably Amaterasu for Minato and Tsukuyomi for Masaki. I’m on board with that as well. Even if none of these theories turn out to be true, the fact that the two are parallels to Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi in the text is undebatable.

Minato and Masaki are often portrayed as the “shining sun” and the “guiding moon” of the club. Minato gets people motivated, “sets a fire” in them, and is associated with fresh verdure, which evokes the image of sunny summer days. Meanwhile, Masaki is a beacon—he’s there to lead these kids through the dark. This is even included in his character song. Yata Shrine is also associated with nighttime and it’s no coincidence that Fuu is an owl and not some other animal. Plus, Masaki is the first character to be described as having his soul “set on fire” by Minato (moon reflects the light of the sun).

Their birthdays also play into it. Minato’s birthday falls on the winter equinox in, you guessed it, fucking leap years. As volume 3 so eloquently puts it, that’s the time when the sun “dies and is reborn”. Masaki and Minato met for the first time in fall—a time of decay, of death. And then they met again in spring—a time for rebirth. When Minato came in contact with archery for the first time, it was the end of life as he knew it, and he began a new one. When he moved from middle to high school, having lost sight of his form and “given up” on archery, it was the end of that cycle, and yet another cycle began. Masaki was there in both of these moments.

Before meeting Masaki for the second time, Minato had a different attitude towards archery. He was in kind of a comfort zone as the oomae because he knew he could count on Seiya and Shuu, and didn’t like the cheering of the crowd because it was distracting. He was also a little averse to the Buddhist essence of archery and how it seemed to cross the boundaries of what he considered human, which is why Saionji told him to study more. It lowkey felt like he was looking for vestiges of his mother in doing archery, as suggested by the references to “Kaeru no Uta”. But now he is pretty much the opposite of all that. He’s the ochi instead of the oomae, which made him realize all sorts of things and has come to feel gratefulness for everything he has. And he himself attributes it all to meeting Masaki that night, during the last tournament of volume 1. In the same paragraph, it’s confirmed that Masaki would also have given up archery and be in a bad place if he hadn’t met Minato.

One of the first people to notice the change in Minato is Shuu. He says in volume 1 that he wanted to “shoot through a certain someone’s heart”, and of course he meant Minato, only to then realize in volume 2 that Minato’s heart had already “been shot” by someone. As if that wasn’t already enough of a shocker, Minato suddenly only had eyes for this person, meaning he wanted to shoot through their heart too. It’s said in this volume that “Bows and arrows had come into the world as tools to sever the lives of others, but archers used them to sever their own lives. And then, to be born again.” It feels like Minato and Masaki use bows and arrows to server not just their own lives but also each other’s. And when they’re “reborn”, their bond grows even stronger. They continuously do this dance together in every volume.

And for the billionth time, archery = their relationship.

As for Masaki’s birthday, other than it being exactly one month before Japanese archery day, it also falls on the 6th moon day of the lunar calendar. It’s a day for assimilation of cosmic energy, where one will find grace, love, forgiveness, mental and verbal work. It’s also a day associated with “prophecies” ("something devised from the very beginning", as the novel always says). If those are not perfect definitions of Masaki and Minato’s relationship, I don’t know what is.

There are other things that add up to the Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi theory. For example, Minato shutting off to everyone when he is in a slump because of target panic, just like Amaterasu hiding in a cave and taking the sunlight with her. People try to lure her out, just as Seiya and Ryouhei try to convince Minato to join the club. I’ve seen someone on Twitter discuss about Tsukuyomi being a violent god when provoked, relating that to Masaki’s “gorilla moves in the Kujou villa” (OP’s words, lol). This same person also theorized that the Kazemai archery club being dubbed the “mustache club” is also an Amaterasu reference. “Mustache club” in Japanese is “hige-bu”. “Hige” in this case means “mustache”, but can be written as 日下, meaning “under the sun”. The colors of the mustaches are also the colors of Japanese dragonfly types, so they are indeed a direct reference to Minato. There’s also Eisuke and his photosensitivity. He can’t handle the sun just as much as he can’t handle Minato.

“But Amaterasu is a female god” yes, and Minato has been confirmed as non-binary in the afterword of volume 3. The author had already set him up as an androgynous character from day one, but now she just went and said it: Minato is neither male nor female at heart. That’s also very Zen-Buddhist, because it means he’s detached of the very concept of gender—he’s just himself.

And of course, there’s the elephant in the room. The fact that Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi are both a couple and siblings. We’ve had Kaito monologuing in volume 2 that Masaki is the “big brother” of everyone in the club. In this same monologue, he also notes that Minato is closer to Masaki than everyone else. There’s something between them that goes beyond what Masaki has with the other club members. It's technically the same relationship as Masaki has with the others (master and disciple), yet it just goes deeper. Kaito never really says that Masaki likes Minato more, but it's what he seems to think. And he probably isn't wrong. Masaki loves Minato and all not-Minatos equally. I recall seeing a few people go, “so we’ve been BroTP’d” when the translation of this chapter came out, but one thing does not cancel the other. Masaki can be a reliable big brother figure to the club and Minato can still have the biggest crush on him. Shocking surprise, I know. Even more surprising considering the fact that Minato himself was never shown to think of Masaki as a big brother, and neither does Masaki see Minato as a little brother.

Then again, it's siblings and married couple. And now, thanks to volume 3, we can count “marriage proposal” as one of the things to associate with these two.

Chapter 5 was really something. I mean, I know volume 3 is literally “MasaMina the Book”, but this fucking chapter. Masaki just so happening to see a bicycle that looked exactly like Minato’s outside the store he was going into proves that he also has a fate-powered radar. He can find Minato even when he isn’t looking for him or doesn’t even expect Minato to be anywhere nearby.

The talk about the jeans is also funny as hell because the sentence “indigo blue seems like a good fit for you” is just too much. Too fucking much. I don’t even mean the literal implication that Masaki’s designated color suits Minato best. I mean the fact that you can read “indigo blue” as a euphemism for “Masaki”. It’s the whole “don’t dye yourself in any color other than mine” all over again. Fuck off, Ayano.

This whole scene is the cutest sequence ever. The two of them looking around the store together, and then going solo only to give each other presents after they were done just... rotted all my teeth off my head. Both of them asking for the presents to be put in wrapping, and it turning out to be the exact same wrapping, was a cherry on top. The ribbons got me a little off-guard because anyone would be embarrassed to do that shit. You don’t have to go this extra mile of present wrapping, but it's natural for them. And it’s absurdly adorable that they’re speechless for a moment at the coincidence.

Did they. Did they also realize how extra they were being? Did they?

Color matching is again implied as Masaki gives Minato a green shirt because it’ll “look good with the pants”. We get it, Ayano. Enough is enough, Ayano. And speaking of colors, way back in ancient Japan, blue and green were conceptualized not as different colors, but as different shades of the same color. The word “blue” was used for both for a long time. And by that I mean really fucking long. "Green" was only introduced in the Heian period, but it wasn't widespread until after freaking WWII. That's extremely recent. The Ainu go a step further and still conceptualize not only blue and green but also white as the same color. White is also one of Masaki’s colors, given that he’s a Shinto priest. Very predictably he wears white during important ceremonies at Yata Shrine.

Their colors are one and the same. These two idiots are one and the same. Yeah, we know, Ayano. We fucking know.

As they arrive to Masaki’s apartment, it’s revealed that Minato had already been there before. It’s also implied that he has slept over at least once, and that when he spends the night, they sleep together in Masaki’s bedroom. I was wondering why there was a brief moment earlier in the volume where Ren asks to stay at Masaki’s apartment for a while, only to be turned down. There seemed to be no reason for it, but apparently it’s because Minato stays there every now and then. Good fucking god.

Masaki’s habit of being messy in contrast with Actual Housewife Narumiya Minato is a voice whispering in the background that Masaki needs someone like that living with him. The part where their legs bump under the kotatsu and their reaction to it is to look at each other and laugh fucking ended me.

When Minato tells Masaki that Ren said things about his vision, Masaki tries to dodge it by saying, “yeah, I have good vision because I grew up in a place surrounded by greenery”, and surprisingly, Minato can see through it. He knows Masaki doesn’t want to talk about whatever Ren told him, and that his reaction means everything Ren said was true. And he backs off. He really wants to know but he gives Masaki space. I feel like this wouldn’t have happened in the previous volumes. Again, Minato is becoming more mature and less impatient as the story progresses.

Then comes the revelation of Masaki’s real name. I have talked about this scene at length in a previous post, which I’ll copy-paste here:

So Masaki’s first name was originally “Tamamori Masaki”. “Masaki” was written as 正樹 in the past and later became 雅貴, because he changed his first name as well when changing his last name. Same pronunciation, different writing. Just a random observation while we’re at it, but “Tamamori” is a weird surname. In a good sense. Like, it means “soul protector” in a very not obvious way. “Tama” means “sphere”, which has the connotation of “spirit”/“soul”. “Mori” means “protection”/“protector” (think of protection charms, “omamori”, for example). It’s not a common name by any standards (in fact, I didn’t even know this name existed before), and damn, does it define Masaki well. As a Shinto priest, he is literally a protector of spirits and gods. As a coach, he’s the protector of his disciples. And in general, he’s Minato’s protector.

We’ve known since volume 1 that Masaki had changed his surname to “Takigawa” because his mother had divorced his biological father and remarried. We also knew that he didn’t have his grandfather’s surname (Yasaka) before that, because that’s his mother’s father. He originally had his father’s surname, and until now, we didn’t know what that was. And we also didn’t know that Masaki had changed his first name along with his last name. There shouldn’t be any need for that. In fact, there shouldn’t be any need for him to change his surname either. Just because his mother remarried doesn’t mean he’s obligated to have his stepdad’s surname. Something else was the issue.

The issue being that Masaki’s biological dad is on Trash Dad Team.

Volume 3 is the one where we get the most of Masaki’s past until this point, so be ready for one hell of a ride now. For starters, his grandpa’s family is special. Not just because they run a shrine, but also because the people of their bloodline have a strong sixth sense. They can see and feel certain things that normal people can’t. I’m sure everyone could already tell that from volume 1, though. It’s always been hinted that Masaki has some sort of connection with the supernatural and the mystic aside from the fact that he’s a priest. It’s been even more strongly hinted that the same goes for Minato, and in this volume, we get a confirmation of it.

So there you have it. Masaki is a descendant of important people who have a long-standing, intimate relationship with the “other side”. One of his ancestors has their remains enshrined within a forest in another town and is worshiped by the locals. And here’s where things get wild: his father stole one of this ancestor’s bones from the shrine and ran the fuck away with it. His goal was probably to sell it to the black market or something. That kinda shit gets you an insane amount of money in Japan. However, before stealing the bone, he had tried to have the remains exhumed and handed over to him from the local people, claiming that he was one of the descendants of whoever was enshrined in that forest. From what the text implies, the actual descendant wasn’t him, but rather someone who was related to him.

Who that someone was? Masaki’s brother.

No, not Ren. Masaki’s biological brother.

Yes, Masaki has a sibling. Or had, before their father kidnapped him.

Masaki’s brother is three years younger than him and his name is never revealed. All we know is that they were close and Masaki loved him very much. When his father left, he took his youngest son along without anyone’s consent and ran away. Masaki and his mother have not seen him since.

“But wait, Japan is a country where the law actually works. How is it that the police hasn’t caught this guy? Is this a stretch from the author? Perhaps just bad writing?” you might be asking yourselves. Sadly, no. The author is actually being realistic here (and likely providing an educated critique to how flawed Japan’s law is when it comes to caring for minors in general). I know that what I’m about to say is going to sound crazy, but parental kidnapping isn’t a crime in Japan.

I wish I was making this up.

If two parents get divorced and one of them takes their child along when leaving, even if by force and without the consent or knowledge of the other parent, this isn’t considered kidnapping at all. Why? Basically, children are viewed as property of their families in Japan. If one of the parents wants to take their kid to their new home and raise them there, it’s completely legal. Their child, their choice. The child doesn’t have any right to object. The only one who has that right is the other parent, but they can only exercise it if they manage to catch the kidnapper in the act. Otherwise, if the other parent tries to get the child back after the child has been kidnapped, they need to have the permission of the kidnapper, because by then the child would be in a new residence that doesn’t belong to both parents, only to one, and accessing it without the consent of the residence’s owner would be invasion of property. And that is a crime that could get the other parent in jail, even if they’re literally just trying to save their child.

All of this felt completely insane to write and I presume it feels even more insane to read.

As to why Masaki’s dad took his brother away, it’s because of their special bloodline. Apparently, Masaki’s brother was just like him. After his father left with his brother, Masaki and his family figured that he’d come back to take Masaki too, and that’s why he had to change his name. That way, Masaki now belongs to his stepdad’s family, meaning that if his father tried to take him, then it would be legally considered kidnapping. It’s not very clear why Masaki also changed the writing of his first name, but it’s suggested that he did so because his father was the one who picked it for him.

But oh, it doesn’t get better. A while after the kidnapping, Masaki’s dad sent his little brother’s death certificate to them. On Masaki’s birthday. Ever since then, Masaki’s birthday has been his brother’s death anniversary.

Death and rebirth, and then death. The usual.

Masaki doesn’t think his brother really died. His father probably pulled some strings to forge the death and then got his brother a new identity. That way, his ex-wife’s family would give up on trying to get him back, and even if they decided to do otherwise, the chances of them succeeding would be next to none. Like, suppose they happen to get ahold of him by some dumb luck, they’d still never be able to prove that it’s him (with him being legally considered dead and probably having a whole different name now).

Masaki is understandably the most bitter creature on earth over this whole thing. He despises his father with a passion and hates his birth name. During his conversation with Minato about this, he says that his birth name is an “imina” to him.

We’re now coming full cycle with one of the earlier foreshadowings, so I need to contextualize imina a little more. Before the Meiji Restoration, Japanese people had a custom of using several different names for themselves, as well as taking on many different kinds of epithets, pen names and titles. People hardly used their birth names even to sign official documents or works made by themselves. This was so that it would be the hardest possible for their real names to ever be disclosed. Only their families would know their real names until they passed away. That’s when their names would finally be engraved in their tombstones, family altars and whatnot.

Other than family, the only person who would know another person’s real name was the one they were making romantic advances on. It was okay to pull this move because, during those times, people flirted with the ultimate purpose of getting married, meaning their sweetheart would become part of their family eventually. But there was always a chance of them being rejected, so it was a risky feat. It meant they were betting everything on getting a "yes" as the answer. Wars and battles over territory, political power and assets were an everyday life thing, and so were betrayals, spying, ordered assassinations and coup d’etats. People had to protect their identities at all costs back then. Revealing your real name to an outsider was an act of absolute trust, and this is mentioned in the novel—it was like entrusting the other person with your life. Of course, this isn’t the case anymore, but Masaki revealing to Minato his birth name, as well as telling him this extremely personal and heavy story, is act of absolute trust, equal to putting his life in Minato's hands. Remember chapter 1: imina = "the name of a life".

But Masaki knows that he can share this with Minato. Minato won’t be put-off by it, won’t be judgmental towards it, and most importantly, won’t ever tell a soul about it. It’s actually real funny to me that Minato listens to this absurd story without batting an eye. He just accepts all of it, no questions asked. And the only thing he isn’t okay with is Masaki talking about his own name as if it’s disgusting and a burden.

Now I have to leave a translation of this part here because it’s fucking golden. You've gotten through this wall of text. You deserve it.

“‘Tamamori Masaki’. That’s my former name.”

“Your birth name?”

“I changed my first name along with my surname. My old name is an imina to me. Don’t really wanna be reminded of it.”

Masa-san was giving a bitter smile – one that was not like him. First there was Ren the other day and now this; these brothers just had too many secrets. Minato did not mind that they would not tell him about the circumstances. However, hating your own name was simply too sad.

“That doesn’t feel right. Imina were used up until the Meiji Era and they were something precious that only your lord and family members could know. Apparently, you’d only tell it to other people when courting them.”

“Fuh, that’s dangerous. Seiya would beat me to a pulp if he found out. Well then, mind giving me your reply?”

“To what?”

“To my marriage proposal.”

“Heh? I-I don’t know anything about that kinda stuff.”

“‘That kinda stuff’, huh.”

“I’ve never thought about that kinda stuff.”

“You just said ‘that kinda stuff’ twice.”

“You’re the worst master ever.”

“Minato, you’re like a jack-in-the-box. Whatever’s inside is always beyond my imagination.” Masa-san giggled.

——Looks like he was teasing me. Geez, I’m seriously no match for this man.

Minato stood up. “About time I head home.”

“Want me to give you a ride?”

“I’m good.”

When he pushed the door open, a gray sky spread out before his eyes.

“Uh, it’s raining. I didn’t bring my raincoat today.”

“Well-timed shower, huh? Wanna drink some coffee?”

“Hm.”

Minato closed the door.

Filed under: jokes that mean exactly what they mean.

I love that in Tsurune, the punchline in these moments doesn’t come from double entendre. The joke is precisely what it sounds like. When Masaki says “proposal”, the word he uses is specifically meant for marriage. But no, he’s not really asking for Minato’s hand. He just worded it like that because he knew it’d get a reaction out of Minato, and that’s where the humor lies.

I have seen some people (even some influential artists) in the fandom honestly believing that Masaki really was proposing to Minato in this scene, and if any of y’all ever happen to come across someone posting about that, rest assured. He wasn’t. It’s the same as when he joked about teaching Minato “the basics of a relationship”. He wasn’t being serious at all, but when he said “the basics”, it meant exactly what it sounds like.

I also think it’s really funny that Minato makes a mental note on the fact that he was being teased, which means he at first thought Masaki was being serious. For a hot minute, Minato honestly believed that Masaki was proposing marriage to him, in canon. His realization that it was a joke is literally written there. And the best part is, he didn’t say no. He took Masaki seriously for a moment and didn’t reject him. This had my head spinning when I read it for the first time. I was straight-up fucking disoriented for a while. I don't know how many people truly understand how outrageously big this is. Minato basically just said... that it was too early for him, lmfao. It feels like he was asking for time to reply. Like, "Gimme a few years so that I can say yes."

But don't be fooled, y'all. Masaki wasn't proposing, yet he was asking Minato a question that he wanted an answer to. Except this question wasn’t “will you marry me”. It was something else, hidden between the lines, which the novel comes back to in the last tournament. More on that later.

And just to finish up the analysis of this scene, gotta love the weather suddenly turning on Minato just so that he’ll get to spend more time with Masaki. He’s about to leave out of sheer embarrassment but the gods say, “Oh, no, you don’t”. And when he goes back in, it just feels like he completely forgot about how flustered he was a second ago. Speaking of flustered, this doesn’t translate into English, but the way Minato thinks about “being no match” for Masaki is distinctively feminine. It truly feels like a girlfriend or wife thinking about her man. The text pretty much slapped me in the face ‘cause it’s by far the girliest thing I’ve read in the entire novel.

Cut to Takumi’s first attempt to sabotage Minato and Masaki coming back after a week of looking for his brother. Mandatory Missing Masa-san Hours and wanting to go to him for advice are over, and Minato is relieved to see Masaki’s smile for the first time in a while, because this is also a mandatory “Masaki’s smile has a healing effect on Minato” moment.

New yugake in hand, Minato goes to Yata Shrine to get used to it, because duh. When Masaki misses the target more than once during their little practice, he gets dodgy again, except this time it’s hard to notice. He says it’s because he hasn’t drawn the bow for a whole week, and while this also plays into it, the main reason is his current state of mind. Which is also the reason why he doesn’t want Minato to touch him as he is now, as well as the reason why he was asking his grandfather from beyond the grave if he was really qualified to do purification rituals. Because right now, he's as impure as can be.

Masaki has murderous intent towards his father for ruining the lives of his family, especially his brother’s. When he swears that he’ll find his father and "choke the life out of him", he means it in the literal sense. He up and declares to the gods that he’ll kill his father with his own hands. And it's not valid for just this life, but no matter how many times they’re reborn, he’ll end his father if he ever finds him.

Don't know about you guys, but this reminds me a lot of S1 Masaki. More specifically, this feels like the author's take on S1 Masaki. Him being all bitter and gloomy, missing the target and bearing heavy negative feelings toward someone from his family is a first in the novel, and it's all stuff that S1 brought about. But the way S1 did it was just so wrong on so many levels and butchered Masaki's character so blatantly that I can understand if Ayano felt tempted to do her own fix-it of that. Feels like it's her saying, "If Masaki wanted revenge for being done dirty by a family member, this is how it'd go." It takes parental abuse and child kidnapping for Masaki to actually wish for something this serious. That's how far it'd have to go for it to taint his thoughts even when he's in the dojo, to the point he loses sight of himself for a moment and misses the target.

But anyway, back to the scene at hand. Masaki's desire to have his brother back feels more like a curse than a prayer to him at this point, but there’s someone who can break it. That’s why he doesn’t want this someone to look at him with “those eyes”. It's not just Masaki who has a healing effect on Minato—Minato, too, has a healing effect on Masaki. Again, everything is mutual and equal in this relationship. But Masaki can't afford to be healed just yet. He probably feels that if his hatred for his father dies out, it’s the same as giving up on finding his brother, and turning a blind eye to everything his father has done. However, Minato can hear what Masaki isn’t saying: “I wasn’t born for the sake of hating someone.” Masaki has made up his mind, but he actually wants out. He doesn’t hate his father because he wants to, but because he can’t help it. What he truly wishes for is that none of this was happening, and that his brother was there with him.

Minato knows that full well, so he nulls the fucking contract.

“Correction; I’m taking that back. What you said earlier isn’t valid. Masa-san is nothing but a perverted, shitty old man! That’s all!”

“Mi-Minato?”

“It’d be a problem if a Shinto priest says something like that and it happens to come true, yeah? I’ll go learn pro-wrestling. I’ll pin your arms behind your back and stop you.”

Masa-san blinked a few times, then burst out with a “pfft”. “That’s too much, Minato.”

“What’s too much?”

“Well, just everything. Just as I thought, my disciple is cute.”

“Hah? Don’t call me cute. And saying stuff like, ‘My birthday doesn’t matter’ even though everyone celebrates it with you... how can you spout something so selfish? There’s this thing my mom used to say. That a birthday is the day when people express gratitude to you for being born.”

“All right. My apologies. I will keep that in mind. I take back what I said a moment ago.”

“You’re talking like a middle schooler, Masa-san.”

“That’s rich coming from a little kid.”

“Don’t call me a little kid! I’m 16 and a second-year in high school!”

Masa-san laughed with a hand over his stomach.

——Isn’t that rude? I’m being serious here.

The bright red thing that had been surrounding Masa-san disappeared.

“Crimson lotus” was originally a Buddhist term, and the seventh of the Eight Hells, the “Hadoma Hell”, was also known as the “Crimson Lotus Hell”. It was said that those who fell into this hell would have their skin and flesh torn up from the excessive cold, thus their body would be dyed in the colors of fresh blood and suffer extreme pain. It was said that this made them look like a crimson lotus flower.

——I’m begging you, please don’t go away to that farthest north. Don’t disappear from my sight. Ever again.

So to break this one down, when Minato says “I take that back” and “what you said earlier isn’t valid”, he’s referring to Masaki’s declaration. He’s talking to the gods and telling them, “don’t listen to him, he doesn’t know better”. And then Masaki himself takes it back. The contract isn’t valid anymore, and even if Masaki tries to go through with it, Minato won’t let him.

It’s said earlier in the novel that breaking a contract with the gods isn’t easy. Once you put it into words, your fate is no longer in your hands. But Minato did it. Because if it’s Masaki, he can. Whatever concerns Masaki also concerns him. In that same scene, Masaki was thinking about how “First meetings are like the moon in an overcast night. Like a blink of peridot”, and then the Kazemai kids come to mind. This is a parallel to the ending of volume 1, where Minato tells Masaki about his grandfather's last words about him, and where first meetings are described as a “gift named coincidence, as if someone else had devised it”. This moment was a “gift from the gods” that Masaki received from the boys, all thanks to him meeting Minato.

Masaki bestows Minato with gifts, but he gets gifts in return.

This brings us back to “Greensleeves”. One of the many interpretations from the boys is that it’s a declaration of “I’ll hold your arms and stop you no matter how many times it takes, no matter how many times we’re reborn”. When Minato talks about pinning Masaki’s arms behind his back to stop him, that’s a direct reference to it. He’d already asserted in volume 1 that he’ll go after Masaki if Masaki dies, and now he’s asserting that he’ll go after Masaki into any number of next lives. This implies they’ve been through multiple reincarnation cycles together. Of course it’s not just You and Eddie who have known each other from past lives. No way that the author would introduce the concept of reincarnation only to limit it to secondary characters. None of this started now—it was, again, “devised from the very beginning”.

So if you put Minato's statemens together, what you get is: “If you die, I’ll go after you, and I’ll find you and hold onto you again.”

Minato is literally saying he’ll be with Masaki forever, beyond the borders of time. His grandmother asked Masaki to take care of him forever, Ren asked Minato to take care of Masaki, and now Minato is saying that Masaki doesn’t even have a choice—he will take care of Masaki whether Masaki wants it or not. All in all, I think Masaki isn’t completely free yet, but this is the first step to getting rid of his “curse”. I don’t know how many people realize that this means the fucking world to him. Minato is helping him pull himself out of his own personal hell, and I firmly believe that, in this moment, he thought the same thing that Minato did during his “proposal”. That he's no match for him.

Fuck me sideways.

Next thing we know, the boys are at the prefecturals. Masaki once again sweeps Minato’s thoughts during Kazemai’s turn.

“The pure of heart were fragrant. He knew with every inch of his body that this was no metaphor. Whenever he brought his face close to the owner of the fragrance, he was ecstatic. He could hear a whisper saying, ‘I want to let it intoxicate me for good; I wouldn’t mind even sinking to the bottom of a lake if it would mean that I can keep him to myself’, but those were the words of a demon. He must not fall for the sweet talk of the one who bore the same face as himself.”

Ex-fucking-scuse me, but why the fuck does this sound like a scientifically accurate description of what being in love is like from a biology standpoint? Feeling ecstatic whenever he comes closer to Masaki and is able to smell his scent? Is that fucking pheromones or what? Hello???

Amazing how literally all of Minato’s internal struggle in this volume consist of him trying not to give in to his desire of monopolizing Masaki. And my God, boy would go some crazy lengths for that desire. I've said this in an ask reply before, but I need to reiterate that it's just delightful how Minato's whole deal isn't whether or not he wants to cross the line with Masaki. It's that he does want to cross the line and he fully acknowledges it. He even seems to believe that he'll get what he wants if he pushes hard enough. But he won't cross the line because he "mustn’t fall victim to temptation". I mean, regardless of the nature of it (be it romantic or platonic or whatever), that is temptation, undebatably. It’s quite literally being presented as such by the narrative.

Masaki is very much tailored to Minato’s tastes, interests and necessities, we been knew, but this also means he’s Minato’s probation. He says earlier in this volume that being human comes with basic necessities, like hunger, sleep and libido, and that there’s no need to try to eliminate them from our lives. What we need to do is not to exaggerate—in other words, to fight back greed. Minato has to resist the urge to take Masaki for himself, 'cause that’s the only thing he’s greedy about.

Yeah, that checks it out. Minato is a carnivore, all right.

What also checks out is that MasaMina covers up depictions of all five senses. There are very specific things between them that correspond to the five senses, plus the two being gifted with sixth sense.

Hearing: tsurune, Masaki's laugh, and now meigen

Taste: coffee

Smell: the above-mentioned scene

Sight: always looking at each other and wanting each other's attention, plus the dozens of references to each other's eyes

Touch: two normally-not-tacticle little bitches have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time whenever they're unable to touch each other for an extended period, what the fuck is this novel

Yes, Ayano went Six Base Senses on us. MasaMina is Buddhism too, guys. Just gotta love that it’s not even a matter of whether Minato wants to cross the line or not—he does, and his whole arc in this volume is about him trying his best not to do that.

Bonus: one more thing from this scene that doesn't translate well is the sentence “bows and humans—a world for just the two of them”. This is very ambiguous in English. It might sound like “two of them” refers to a person and their bow, but in Japanese, the word used means specifically “two people”. Minato is thinking about Masaki here. No one else would make any contextual sense.

“Masa-san, there’s something I wanna tell you. I want you to listen without laughing.” Goddamn. That is one fucking way to start the second section of the last chapter.

So Minato has had a strange experience years ago but could never tell anyone about it, because Seiya would think he’s gone crazy and Ryouhei would dismiss it as a dream. Coincidentally, Masaki also has had a supernatural experience that he’s never told anyone before. For the millionth time, they entrust each other with a secret.

Minato has had an episode of sleep paralysis as a child. It was on Setsubun, the day on which Japanese people traditionally throw beans outside their houses to ward off evil spirits. He was feeling particularly out of it on that day and had no memory of the previous one—might very well be an indication that the veil was thin in that occasion and Minato was feeling the effects of it. During the sleep paralysis, he heard six sci-fi movie-like sounds shooting past him.

Masaki in turn tells him about the time when he fell into deep depression because of the whole thing with his brother and grandfather. He was sent by his mother to a temple to recuperate, but just kept having suicidal thoughts every single day, until he heard a voice from above the left side of his head saying, “all right”. Someone on Japanese Twitter pointed out that this the position of the head of the family in a family altar. That was Akihiro cheering him on. Masaki wanted to disappear, to never wake up again after going to sleep, but when he thought of his family, he couldn’t afford to take his own life. So he didn’t. He just continued doing his best, and Akihiro was seeing it all from the other side. This was also acknowledgement—the acknowledgement from his master that he longed so much for. That’s when he began to get better.

Not sure if Minato understands any of this. But their reaction is once again to look at each other and smile.

“Gives you kind of a weird sense of empathy, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s true. You can tell other people about this day when the time is right—when your words are filled with your truth.”

This moment is described as a “secret between master and disciple”, but the word “secret” in this case isn’t the commonplace 秘密. Nope, it’s 秘め事, which is, more often than not, used as an euphemism for “secret love maneuvers”. Deliberate, deliberate.

Please kindly go fuck yourself, Queen.

The six sounds Minato heard on that day come back to him during the last match of the final tournament. They are distinguishable from one another and take the form of “arrows of light”, piercing through his body from his head into the ground. It’s implied that these sounds are “meigen”. This might very well be the boys’ shots, plus Masaki’s, taking on a spiritual form and traveling through time and space to reach Minato, after he has found his “truth”. Maybe from a past life, where they did the Meigen Ceremony together, or maybe from something else that they will do in the future.

The shots are apparently compared to dragons in flight by the narrative, and it’s even suggested that they might have colors. The reason why they come separately in bouts of three might be a reference to the ultimate goal of Japanese archery (truth, goodness and beauty), as well as the three sounds that define a good shot (sae, tsurune and matooto). Can’t forget the references to Buddhism. Six is probably the most recurrent number in it, and Masaki even talks to Minato about the six realms, six senses and six cycles of reincarnation earlier.

People are shouting, “all right, all right” as the boys hit the targets, one “all right” for each of them. But Minato can hear a sixth “all right” immediately before the arrows of light hit him. Perhaps that was his mother.

Minato thinks to himself, “The days I’ve spent with you. The days I’ll spend with you from now on. Who am I supposed to thank for this happiness?” The “you” is in singular form, meaning he’s thinking about Masaki.

Kazemai is once again associated with the sun as the boys are described as “those who gather under the sun” and “heading towards a bright place”. They are depicted as dying and being reborn, becoming babies and growing up all over again, and at the end of that process, they will become true adults (saints) once they’re able to embrace even those whom they despise. Minato is very much on the way for that, as he despises neither Takumi, who literally almost kills him later, nor Eisuke for being a general dickhead or the twins for picking on him. He also was never depicted as hating the driver who killed his mother or the one who almost killed Masaki—this wasn’t ever even mentioned, and instead, he blamed himself for being the one who got the long end of the stick in both situations. And by the looks of it, he doesn’t hate Masaki’s dad for everything he’s done to Masaki and his family, either. He treats everyone equally.

“The sun was in itself a form of unconditional love. It shone down on everyone equally—both the good and the bad. The Japanese called that star Amaterasu Oomikami.”

Minato recalls his most recent encounter with Saionji, where he has given his answer to the Heart Sutra. Saionji basically tells him that he’s in the right track. This, added to his monologue above, makes me think that maybe. Just fucking maybe. Minato is always able to forgive everyone and everything because thanks to all of it he’s been able to meet and spend time with Masaki. So he’s grateful for both the good and bad things in his life.

The boys then go back, in their own heads, to the day they heard “Greensleeves” at the park. Seiya is thinking about what he was going to say to Kaito under that tree, meaning that Kaito is Greensleeves to him. Ryouhei probably has his sister in mind, as he had a two-page monologue about her in an earlier chapter. Nanao is also thinking about Kaito and how he gave him strength to not give up his position as regular. Kaito is most likely reminiscing to the monologue he had when chasing after Seiya. And Minato is speaking to his mother about the meaning of the song to him.

Minato’s interpretation of “Greensleeves” is that it’s a song where a master asks his disciple for the answer to a problem, and then smiles when the disciple answers. The problem: “Mind giving a reply to my marriage proposal?” The answer: “I’ll go learn pro-wrestling. I’ll pin your arms behind your back and stop you.”

Yep, that’s right. The “pro-wrestling” thing is one more of the many word plays of this novel. In Japanese, the words “pro-wrestling” and “proposal” sound very similar. Minato could’ve just said he’ll hold Masaki’s arms and stop him. He didn’t have to mention pro-wrestling. But he did so because Ayano wanted us to associate “puroresu” with “puropozu”. She wanted us to remember the marriage proposal scene when reading this part, because that was Minato’s answer to it.

In Japanese culture, if it wasn’t already obvious enough, you say things without really saying them. In Zen martial arts, this also applies, because everyone has to find their own answer to the problems and doubts they encounter along the way. And in romantic relationships, too (throwback to the Souseki anecdote).

Masaki reveals to Minato the darkest truth about himself and shows Minato his ugliest side, then basically asks him, “So what are you gonna do with that, now that you know?” (proposal) and Minato’s answer is “I’ll take care of you” (pro-wrestling). Roundabout as can be, this is intentional. This bullshit is very well concealed in all these word plays and cryptic expressions because it’s supposed to hit you like a truck when you realize what they truly mean. Just like it hits Masaki like a truck back then. He most likely understood what Minato was really saying. Fundamentally, Minato was telling Masaki that he loves him without directly saying “I love you”.

The moon is fucking beautiful, huh.

And then Masaki laughs. The master asks, the disciple answers and the master smiles in response. “Greensleeves” has now come full cycle. This is also an ultimate Zen moment because Minato was essentially accepting everything that Masaki is, even the worst of him. This is quite literally a promise—a contract that Minato has made with him.

You know what else is also a contract?

It’s not a marriage proposal... but it is, actually. Those are not marriage vows... but they are, actually. Ayano is fucking with us.

She’s fucking even more in the following paragraph:

“Attraction towards the opposite sex and affection between parents and children are biological desires based on the prosperity of offspring, and it is not so difficult to love someone who has been kind to you. True friendship is beautiful and hard to earn. Those who walk the same path, master and disciple, are also friends. The only difference is that one is going ahead and the other behind, but the two of them continue on a never-ending journey together.”

So, before anyone goes “we’ve been BroTP’d” again, Ayano is affirming here that friendship is also an aspect of Masaki and Minato’s relationship, specifically, and that this is purer and more beautiful than love between couples or family. Now, what exactly is the extent of “friendship” here? Welp, traditionally, in Japan, “friendship” includes a lot of things. If we look back into Edo or Heian, both periods of Japanese history that are constantly referenced in Tsurune, “friendship” between men often included courting for a certain period. Especially between master and disciple. This was actually the common sense back then.

Yes, I’m talking about Shudo. I’m also losing my fucking mind, so bear with me here.

Ayano is definitely aware of the whole wakashu thing. This woman knows her history, okay? The “monk” jokes about Masaki aren’t for nothing. Monks used to work as Shinto priests as well back in the day and vice-versa, for Shinto and Buddhism were intimately connected for a long time. There’s also the ceremony that the boys participate for the Star Festival in volume 2, which, according to Masaki, was performed by chigo in the past. Chigo aren’t a thing anymore, of course, but this seemingly unnecessary comment indicates that, if this were a few centuries ago, Minato would’ve been a chigo and he and Masaki would obligatorily be in a relationship.

Now, remember the past lives theory? If Masaki and Minato have been master and disciple in their past lives, then they have been in relationships with each other in all of the lives where both of them were born as men. But that also means they had to marry a woman later on, because those were the times. In that paragraph, Ayano is quite literally saying that, regardless of who they marry, whatever they felt/will feel for their partners doesn’t hold a candle to what they feel for each other. "All women are beautiful, but only my disciple is cute."

But what would have happened if one of them was born as the opposite sex, you may ask. Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi all over again, probably. Minato is non-binary on the inside, so he would probably see and treat Masaki the exact same way and there would still be friendship between them.

Besides, once again, this is deliberate wording. “The two will go on a never-ending journey together”, “a world for just the two of them”, etc. Why do these sentences refer only to Minato and Masaki? Masaki isn’t Minato’s only master and Minato isn’t Masaki’s only student, so why does the narrative act like only the two of them matter here?

Japanese Twitter has speculated about this too. The conclusion is that maybe this is Ayano enforcing the concept of soulmates, and perhaps even of twin rays and twin flames. It’s often brought up how similar Masaki and Minato are, and twin flames/rays is based on the idea that each soul has its own frequency, which complies with the theory that “the world is made up of tsurune”. Not to mention the whole fate element and the implications that they’ve known each other from past lives. It honestly sometimes feels like the author is trying to say that Minato and Masaki are just one soul dwelling in different bodies or two separate souls that were once one. And they’re not the only characters who are implied to have a “half”—it’s very obvious that there’s a bunch of pairs in this story, and it’s not for nothing. Most likely, what Ayano means here is that Minato and Masaki will go in a never-ending journey not just regarding archery, but regarding life in general, including future next lives.

Ayano is being pretty realistic here too, because there are lots of little gay ships in Tsurune, but they will never be canon. MasaMina and KaiSei might have a veeery slim chance, but probably won’t either. Yet she’s laying the foundation that no matter who they end up with, their friendship is many steps above it. Have to admire her completely crushing the dreams of fans who ship themselves with the characters, lol. “He will never love you as much as he loves this other guy”, basically.

So in short, Masaki and Minato are master and student, which means they’re also friends. They’re sorta like siblings by default as well, and act like a married couple. All of this fits Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi just right. It also fits what Ayano says in the afterword about liking things that “are in-between” and “waver”—things that “can’t be put into a mold or categorized”. You really can’t put this relationship into a mold because it’s in all molds at the same time. It’s Everything and nothing at once. An optimal relationship from a Zen standpoint. A truthful, good and beautiful relationship.

The ultimate ideal.

Speaking of ideal, Masaki and Minato’s relationship is, in itself, the ultimate Zen ideal. I’m not just talking about how their dynamics literally follow the same flow as of Japanese archery, but also their relationship is the pinacle of what Zen standards consider to be pure. Minato never asked to be Masaki’s disciple and Masaki never offered to teach him. It just happened naturally, just like how they got into archery. Before they realized, they were doing it. Minato simply asked how Masaki was able to shoot so beautifully and told him about his target panic. Masaki, in turn, revealed that he also suffered from target panic in the past. And that was that. The next time Minato came to the dojo, Masaki started teaching him. Unprompted, unsolicited—directly, at least.

Minato needed to be taught and Masaki needed to teach.

So, back to this volume. The tournament ends and so nearly does Minato’s life. Another gift from God is bestowed upon him as Masaki saves his ass from imminent death for the nth time. Dramatic as fuck, like always. Yet he still says “excuse me” before shooting the allergenic into Minato’s tight, what a gentleman. Seiya’s reaction was priceless, I gotta say.

Masaki going after Takumi was kind of a shocker when I first read volume 3, but after reading it again in order to make this post, it was actually to be expected (notice that I'm saying "expected", not "okay", because that shit wasn't okay at fucking all). He has a lot of pent-up anger, but even if he didn’t, he’d never forgive anyone who puts his students in danger, let alone in a near-death situation like that. 'Cause Minato would have died if Masaki didn’t have that syringe with him. Minato, on the other hand, hasn’t yet learned pro-wrestling, but as promised, he comes to stop Masaki and shows that he, too, can be extra as fuck.

The afterword is packed with MasaMina this time around. Not just the confirmation of non-binary Minato and the uncategorizable things part, but also Masaki being described as someone who is human yet not. She really just up and said it, huh. Masaki is in-between the realm of people and the realm of gods, and more than once did he almost cross over to the gods’ side, but Minato was there to hold onto his arms and stop him. As Ayano herself puts it, she wrote this story because there are people whom she wanted to stop and keep by her side, and this shows in the way she writes about the main relationships of the story, especially MasaMina.

There’s also the way she describes what Tsurune is about—“this is a story of master and disciple and of bow friends”. The fact that she felt the need to clarify this and place “master and disciple” first speaks volumes about how this woman views her own story. This feels like another tiny act of rebellion against the anime, which makes it all about bow friends and barely shows any of the master and disciple aspect. Heck, it barely shows Masaki at all, period.

And like, this isn't even a matter of being salty about a fandom favorite getting sidelined, although that alone is already valid enough of a complaint in my opinion. It's also about the essence of keiko and how it simply doesn't work without the active participation of a master. It makes the whole thing seem to be about knowledge and practice (sport), when actually contemplation and looking inside oneself plays a much bigger role (art). Not to mention that it gives people the wrong idea about what the story and its characters are supposed to be. I've had people straight-up try to argue with me that Tsurune is about the main five boys and Masaki is secondary. I think we can finally put to that discussion to sleep, now that the author herself has spoken.

Tsurune-centric accounts on Japanese Twitter usually have the words "original work" in their bios. There's a reason for that, and it's the same reason why AO3 has separate tags for the Tsurune novel and the Tsurune anime. Even if we ever get to see volume 3 animated, it will only be as loose of an adaptation as can be, and we'll continue to get more and more anime-original content. I hope next time, if we ever get a next time, Masaki won't be borderline ignored again.

But he probably will, and that's what this post is for.

I hope this has clarified some things about volume 3. As I have already announced, I'm planning on making more analysis on other things that I wasn't able to include here because this post is already enough of a monstrosity as it is. I'll see you guys in the next ones!

Okay already.

Y’all are really damn eager for it, so here you have it: the infamous List of Erased Gay, AKA a glimpse of how we could be having it all if KyoAni weren’t doing us so dirty this year, Tsurune edition. The Violet Evergarden edition seems to have left a big impression, so maybe this listing will become a thing.

Then again, along with the canon gay that we lost, we gained a lot of anime-only shippy service that is not only weirdly fixated on Minato alone but also ruins the nature of many characters. KyoAni has been outright baffling this year in how little it understands the novels that it has been adapting, and even more in how proficient it has become in destroying the main relationships of each title. All in all, the personalities and purposes of the main characters have been severely altered, and there has been a disturbing trend (not only in Tsurune, but also in Violet Evergarden and Liz to Aoi Tori) of making the protagonists obsess with someone who apparently does only the minimum for them and being lukewarm with the people that seemingly care more for their wellbeing.

That’s not what any of these novels are about.

But since this post is centered on Tsurune, I’ll only talk about how the aforementioned major flaws apply to it. That boils down to KyoAni erasing most of what Masaki did for Minato and about 85% of the scenes they had together, replacing it with additional scenes without much purpose involving other characters. For whatever incomprehensible reason, KyoAni is hellbent on enhancing Minato’s relationship with everyone except the person he has the strongest bond with in the books, and a lot of you guys seemed to notice this. So, in order to address the cringeworthy disaster that the Tsurune anime has become, I’m naming this one as the List of Erased and Misplaced Gay.

Had to put it under a cut because of how long it got. While we’re at it, please consider reading the novel translations.

Keep reading

[strangertheories]

💙

I'm going to rank my favourite characters, ships and seasons of Stranger Things for you (:

Characters:

Robin Buckley - she's a disaster lesbian and I relate to her so much

Will Byers - very close second. The character helped me through a lot a few years ago, but he's fallen just behind Robin after S4

Max Mayfield - she's funny, cool but I care about her a lot and cried so much in Dear Billy

Steve Harrington - what is there to say about Steve that hasn't already been said

Lucas Sinclair - criminally underrated, super funny, protective, great boyfriend, great character

Shout out to Nancy and Hopper as well, didn't make it into the top five somehow which shows how great the characters are but I really love them (I love them all obviously, but these are my faves)

Ships:

Ronance - this is pretty much tied with second. Their dynamic is iconic, they'd be such a great duo and I love sapphic ships. I really hope they become canon (not sure) because they're so cute together and bisexual Nancy is a must.

Byler - again, pretty much tied. I love Will so much and I want him to be happy with Mike. They'd be great for each other. Duffers, please make them canon.

Lumax - I said before S4 that I preferred Elmax to Lumax, but after seeing it, I've changed my mind. They're so cute together. Their relationship is a lot more mature than others on the show. They're not constantly making out or gushing about each other; you can just tell that they deeply love and care about the other person. Lucas is the best boyfriend and he's the support that Max needs.

Jopper - solid ship, really sweet, great parenting duo

Seasons:

Season 1 - a perfect season of television in my opinion. Brilliantly crafted (especially with a lower budget), great pacing, great plot, great characters, a tear-jerking finale, what's not to love? There's a reason the show was so successful and I think that can all be seen in S1

Season 4 - I love how they went back to more mystery and horror content. I cried so many times watching it and it's such a fun and exciting season of television. Well worth the wait. My only complaint is that the California plot line was a lot less interesting than the other ones, but it was still a good, natural continuation of the series.

Season 2 - another great season of Stranger Things. It was a little slow at the start of the season, but the mystery was great and well written. The Lost Sister episode wasn't bad, but it completely killed a lot of the pace that the season had been working up. The season started Dustin and Steve's bromance too. (also, rip Bob)

Season 3 - you know a show has to be epic for this to be the bottom ranked season. It was funny, entertaining and engaging. However, I felt like the plot felt like less of a logical continuation than the other seasons did. As well as that, I like the mystery of the show and season 3 didn't really surprise me ever. They showed us everything that was going on (Billy being flayed, Russians building gate) and didn't let the audience put together the clues like in previous seasons. I also didn't just find it that scary. The last episode was one of the best of the show though, I still sob every time I watch it.

Hopefully this answer was alright! Thanks for the ask, anon (:

[sharkneto]

Did you see the script of the scrapped Hargreaves 23rd birthday episode? I think it's called "Happy Twenty-Third." If so what were your thoughts on it? Especially curious about what you think of Five parts.

I did! I enjoyed reading it, was fun to get different glimpses, but I'm not sure how "scrapped" it is versus one of the writers wrote some official fanfic. Which is still lots of fun! But it didn't feel... polished enough, to me, doesn't fit in right with S1 to have been anything that was going to be Official.

Loved the Allison bit, how she struggled so hard to not Rumor and her facing a bit on what people thought of her. I do think S3 Allison might not have had such a terrible backlash if there had been some more overt showing of her behavior pre-redemption; it was always a bit of a choice to start Allison's arc at her redemption, rather than that being a full arc we went on with her as the audience. But I do appreciate S1's subtlety in how they hint and drop at How Much Allison Rumored before then (as if "I Rumored my daughter constantly" wasn't enough).

The stuff with Klaus in jail felt fitting - loved that he got to use his Umbrella training (I feel like fandom likes to forget that he does have training and can hold his own in a fight when he wants to), loved that Leonard was lurking in the background of all those scenes. Interesting choice to have that be when Ben shows up, sixish years after he died. Klaus' conversation with Viktor was a lot of fun but---

Viktor felt... too fulfilled in this. Yes, he's coming off his success of Extra Ordinary but that he was in a serious relationship? With a woman? From how I always interpreted S1 Viktor, my understanding was that he had Nothing going on (because he couldn't because of how much the pills subdued him). The most boring, blandest life. That he was in a serious relationship, not just a couple dates in an attempt for one, and that it was with a woman felt like too much. The intensity with which he falls for Leonard (six years after this script takes place) always felt like, to me, that this was the first time someone showed him genuine interest and the first time, because no pills, he was really able to reciprocate. His fling with Sissy also felt like it was supposed to be interpreted to be his first time falling in love and having a relationship with a woman. Viktor before this point was too suppressed to explore his sexuality or gender. He couldn't until he was off the pills and found Sissy. So the fact that he was apparently in a then-lesbian relationship when he was 23 feels... off. That said, him finding out he was cheated on on his birthday felt Spot On for his life (rip, sorry Viktor). His conversation with Klaus was a lot of fun, too. He really did not hold back in Extra Ordinary, guy pulled no punches. But we already knew that Viktor has a vindictive streak a mile wide.

Not a lot to say about Diego - I always like Patch, his rivalry with the other cop felt fitting, I like it when the show lets him casually use his powers and remembers it's anything he throws and not just knives.

Same with Luther - he was Real Dumb but also 23 and really under Reggie so I can give his characterization benefit of the doubt. A fun nod to the Murder Magician with that plot.

And, now, the guy we're all here for: Five. Loved what he had going on with the Handler, I'm obsessed with their fucked up relationship. I think S1 handled it perfectly, hinting at things and letting viewers interpret to what degree of Fucked Up it is. I think him having a moment to himself with the woman in the bar was nice, good to see he's sort of living what little life he has. I haven't decided how I feel about her being named Delores. On one hand, a cute way to have caught his attention and shows he's thinking about his plastic wife. On the other, in light of S3 (which maybe isn't a fair thing to compare to because this is a S1 based script), I'm wary of casual references to Delores. She was treated so much as a joke in S3 (all the references to mannequins to Five, Five running down the hall with mannequin limbs) when in S1 she was the gorgeous, poignant piece of Five, this person he made for himself that was the best of him and he loved because he had no one else to love. So having the woman be named Delores also feels a little cheap. But nice for Five to get to have a normal moment, a human connection before he goes and murders and then comes back to try and continue that connection before the Commission intervenes (S1 Commission, my beloved). And then he gets to see Diego and he immediately fails the test that it is because of course he's going to fail anything that involves his family. That was great, and followed by a creepy, rather overt moment with the Handler? Excellent. Overall, good Five times.

So... where does that leave us overall. Did I enjoy reading it? Yes. Did I gain a better understanding of the characters and wish it was official? No. I feel like we already knew everything we get from the script from S1 and that S1 does it in a tighter way. Do I still want to watch Five having a nice time and dancing with that woman in the bar? Yeah, yeah I do. Old Five always deserves more love and I won't say no to more Five bits with Sean Sullivan, he's delightful.

[limerental]

Hi! This is a genuine question but I was wondering if you could tell me why some Witcher fans have an issue with Henry?? I’ve noticed you’re one of the several Witcher blogs I follow that has vaguely insulted him before so I figured you would definitely be able to explain why people don’t like him playing geralt/don’t like him in general

Ok uhh I started out kinda ambivalent toward him and then veered pretty quickly into Strong Dislike but have always tried to be vague about it because frankly his fans scare me but:

he's a privileged poshboy rich kid who grew up wealthy. most of his early success in acting is likely due to his parent's money and connections on top of his cartoonishly handsome looks

he does not really use his privilege and platform for good. he's been notoriously almost silent on social issues (not to mention his girlfriend's blackface scandal this summer)

speaking of social movements, he made a comment in 2018 at the height of #metoo movement about how he was old-fashioned when it came to dating, saying "it's very difficult to do that if there are certain rules in place. Because then it's like: 'Well, I don't want to go up and talk to her, because I'm going to be called a rapist or something." which is just :))) He did apologize claiming he holds women in "the highest regard" but I simply do not trust him

and speaking of women, his present girlfriend is about his age but he has previously dated a 19y/o while 33 which just skeeves me the fuck out. that's just standard rich asshole actor fare though

in witcher s2 interviews he has repeatedly said in interviews he wanted to improve on the grunty geralt of the first season saying he "wanted to be sure that we had a better representation of Geralt from the books" with less "grunting and f-bombing" and that "it was something I campaigned very hard just to provide a richer, more intelligent Geralt" (interview with syfy-wire), which he claimed was going against the showrunner's wishes.... saying in a different interview "and I saw I've got to toe that line between book Geralt and Lauren's vision" BUT in season 1, he openly said that it was his idea to add the excess amount of grunting, often grunting instead of saying his lines saying "And, it was often up to the other actors to go, 'I think he's not going to say anything now."

AND in a s1 interview with Lauren Hissrich, she's quoted as saying "One of the very first things that Henry and I discovered when shooting the first episode is that our Geralt doesn't need to talk as much as Geralt in the books. I had written a lot of words, like a lot of words for him. And what we realized is that our Geralt is a little more stoic, doesn't always respond. He...we like to make fun of his grunts. He answers in grunts a lot. That's one of, I would say, the biggest changes."

so in his s2 interviews, he is essentially throwing Lauren under the bus for... something that was his idea. which simply drives me up the wall.

he also does all of his own stunts despite the possibility of injuring himself and was so committed to method acting that he almost blinded himself in s1, all because he wanted his costars to see him as the character at all times. just comes off as stubborn arrogance to me.

he's claimed to have harped on book to show accuracy in s2, yet apparently he did not know the books existed when campaigning to be a part of the show. his comments about offering up lines from blood of elves on set just comes off as incredibly mansplainy

so many people get up in arms about him dehydrating himself for the witcher shirtless scenes but... that man takes stubborn pride in his excessive bulk and extremely restrictive diet. he's talked at length about how he eats the same thing every day and works out almost constantly. there's something bizarre about it. no way there's healthy stuff going on inside that man's brain.

i have gotten tired of linking sources now but just let's say... i don't trust him. i don't like him.

He is only popular as an actor because of his big tits because a) men view him as a hypermasculine power fantasy and b) women view him as a chivalrous handsome English gentleman.

He comes off as arrogant and irritating to me most of the time but has that smarmy kind of charisma where he can look you in the eye and tell you the complete opposite of something he said last year and not get called on it because he's good-looking and "such a dork aw he's just like us"

anyway lmao that's why, hope this helps

[ladyluscinia]

Been thinking about this too, and like. There's already the glaring issue that this fandom cannot seriously expect the people who were actively getting harassed (and still trying to bring attention to it / bring down the hostility levels / foster understanding) to now take responsibility for begging everyone else to think about X, Y, and Z so we can collectively move forward after that. Victims of harassment campaigns should not be the ones responsible for peacemaking afterwards?

That's absurd.

But like... On another level I'm not even sure how successful that peacemaking could be if it was led by someone who was in "Izzy Canyon" over the hiatus? At least not on tumblr. Because on some pretty important fronts, the antis won.

One thing Izzy enjoyers from S1 never had going for us was numbers. For all the comparisons to Reylos or whatever problematic fandom was in vogue, the gen fandom centered on BlackBonnet that felt neutral to negative about Izzy was always the juggernaut section, and Izzy enjoyers a small minority hanging out in the Izzy tag.

Meaning we were actually small enough to successfully ostracize.

There's people digging their heels in and there's people having their "oh I guess he wasn't terrible" moments, but there's also undoubtedly a very large group of people who mass blocked all the "problematic" Izzy enjoyers starting in June 2022 (or got blocked for putting the 300th "Izzy is racist and his stans need to stop pretending otherwise" post in the tag, inspired by whichever popular meta had popped up on their dash).

And like... Can we meaningfully address the harassment campaign if most of the passive supporters - the people who read a couple metas about homophobic / racist Izzy and built the general assumption that his fans were "problematic" and deserving of ostracization - are completely insulated from engaging with (or even just having awareness of) any of the discussion?

There weren't enough antis to do all that without passive support.

There's literally nothing stopping most fans from just deciding S1 Izzy was still all of those things and S2 Izzy just developed / was punished enough that he's fine now. Which can easily extend to S1 Izzy fans were all of those things, so any mumblings of "discourse" with them before S2 were no big deal.

We couldn't bring attention to the harassment campaign in large part because most of what we said had to go through the antis to even hope of reaching gen fandom, and even then blocked blogs don't necessarily show up on your dash if someone reblogs them.

Has that changed?

Is there any likelihood of an Izzy enjoyer being able to successfully take the lead on these kinds of discussions if it hasn't?

And also to what degree would we be talking about damage already done? The person who was doxxed and the creators driven out of the fandom, absolutely. But what about the successful ostracizing? As soon as the blockwalls started I was wondering how they would shape the fandom, because blockwalls don't tend to come down. I don't even know if people would want to interact with gen fandom, but it still feels kind of like a hollow victory to consider the rest of fandom getting cool with Izzy while they've long since wiped every trace of "problematic" S1 Izzy enjoyers from their tag searches and dashboards 🤷‍♀️

It's a thorny issue, to say the least.

slowly moving out of my smug phase and transitioning into a "okay... so what happens next?" phase.

cuz like... what does happen next? i really really think the fandom as a whole needs to address whatever the fuck was happening for more than the past year. and i guess i'm wondering what does that actually look like? and what are you supposed to do if you spent a year and half being awful to people about a character you were wrong about?

and ik a lot of people will just brush it off or dig their heels in deeper that they weren't wrong and they didn't do anything bad, but i like to believe that not everyone will, ya know?

but idk it feels like part of a larger convo on fandom, antiracism, fan activism, and harassment.

[maschotch]

The 'I'm sorry dad' scene you just self-reblogged - the gravestone shows 1978 as her father's year of death and in the hospital ~in between~ scene in fisher king p2 it's said that she was 8 when he died. That puts her birth around 1970, which i find really interesting in the age lineup of the characters - she's the newbie for the s1 perspective and yet she's definitely older than JJ, Garcia, Reid and Morgan, but most interestingly she might actually be older than Hotch as well depending on which of the 19 versions of his age we're working from. I think that possibility adds an extra edge to their dynamic in particular and the difficulties they face in communicating and how to help/not help after garner. But like, in a way i'm not sure i can properly explain, you know.

i rewatched that clip because i didnt fucking believe you akdjkaxh its actually 1979 soooo fake fan just kidding its insane that you read the tombstone i didnt even think about it

okay criminal minds ages are always a fucking nightmare because they wont ever give us consistent timelines on any of their backstories, so ima do my best but obviously everything is up to personal discretion

if she’s 8 in 1979, that puts her birthday probably in 1971, making her 34 in 2005. this is the same age as the actress, so for efficiency’s sake lets say they never bothered to change their ages (with the exception of maybe hotch because it did seem like they intended for him to be late 30s). that would make hotch the oldest at 43, morgan next at 35, penelope at 33, jj 27, spencer 25. if they changed anything they reduced everyone’s age, but it was probably equivalent and didnt affect the birth order

this… makes sense to me. i think it goes to show how much work it took for elle to reach the bau and how capable the rest of the team is go join so early in their career. this is something elle has been working towards her whole life, and morgans around the same age and already achieved it. for at least a few years now. meanwhile hotch doesnt have ten years on elle, but he’s already been at the bau long enough to become unit chief—and he had a successful career as a lawyer before that. spencer, jj, and garcia are all exceptions because they either joined through alternative means or they have a different job entirely

which explains her demeanor a little more. as the new kid, she obviously had to prove herself. but she probably felt even more pressured to do so bc it took her longer to get here. she’s extra defensive, and her banter w morgan laced w harsher quips than necessary are all small ways she tries to compensate for her inexperience in order for them all to view her as equals. its why she feels more like a failure when she cant handle the job. it took her this long to get here and now she’s not sure if she has what it takes to stay. gives a little more reason for the others—especially hotch—to be reluctant to help in the aftermath of the fisher king: they dont want to disrespect her by doing so. they doubt their own capability to help her and they dont want to make it worse if all its going to do is wound her pride.

between elle and hotch specifically… i dont think it changes much actually. even tho hotch could be aged down a significant amount, i think hes still older than her. by how much im not sure but even a slight age difference plus being a superior is enough to maintain that dynamic.

[neonponders]

Stranger Things had a great first season, but the 2nd and 3rd have arguably gotten worse over time. The reason for this is that the sense of mystery that made the show originally great has eroded over time because of how much has been revealed to us about the particular mysteries of Hawkins, Indiana, making them no longer mysteries. There's also been a sense of repetition, with the show repeating its arcs every season, and anything new feels shoehorned in there. The horror vibe they were going for has faded with the introduction of more and more lore and content, and a lot of what made the first season good is now gone. Obviously, this is because the Duffer Brothers like money, and nothing will bring in more of that than slapping beloved faces on new products. Now, hear me out. What if Stranger Things was a connected anthology series? Season 1 would remain the same, but the following seasons would have similar, yet unique and different qualities to it than the first, with a new cast of characters, new locations, and new supernatural threats.

*sigh* seasons 2 and 3 are best of times and the worst of times lol the things the show gets RIGHT are so *chef's kiss* that the careless parts stand out in a bad way.

I do agree that there is too much repetition. I've ranted about it in my tags before but a parallel isn't enough. It has to mean something, or else they're just recycling scenes.

I'm not sure I agree about the mystery component. I think s4 did very well with the horror genre (but I also RARELY consume horror content. Like the last scary movies I watched were Saw 1 and Se7en lol long time ago).

The issue is that they wrote the seasons one at a time, and then wrote 4&5 at the same time (or so I read somewhere; this might not be accurate). There's no planning and it shows. The Duffers also revealed that they had a script for S3 featuring a Billy/Steve plot, but that script got thrown into the trash in favor of weird Billy fan service and CocaCola product placement.

As a writer, I'm actually inclined to try and understand what the writers are doing, and a lot of people forget that the show is not the writers' choice. It's the executives/producers. If they wallet-holders don't like something, the writers have to change it. That being said, everyone involved seems to just be riding on S1's success and not carrying about plot holes in the slightest.

Anthologies aren't usually my cup of tea, only because I lack the emotional bandwidth to invest in new characters all the time lol like i watch 2 shows a year, and 2022 was Our Flag Means Death and Stranger Things. That's my quota haha

Supposedly Netflix wants to do spin offs, though? They know Netflix is failing and that Stranger Things is holding it up, so they're desperately holding onto their life raft.

[pynkhues]

Was re-watching some of season one, and I still can't believe there wasn't fallout from Dean's cancer lie. That it was just dropped like that. As a writer is there some kind of time limit these things need to be addressed before it loses steam? As much as I still want Beth to confront Dean about it, I'm not sure if it'll mean the same thing after all this time?

Okay, I owe you a huge apology, anon, because you sent this months ago and it’s currently the oldest non-prompt ask in my inbox, and the only reason I haven’t answered it yet is that it’s such a good question, and one that I wanted to answer thoughtfully and - - well fully - - for you. I hope you’re still around and that you still might want the answer. 😊

It is frustrating that the show hasn’t had any fallout from the cancer lie yet. I feel like it’s been on my wishlist for every season since s1, haha, and I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m actually less bothered by Beth not having confronted Dean on it than by the fact that the show hasn’t mentioned it at all. After all, I think it’s believable that Beth would have a hard time dealing with it – the way she found out about that lie is now intrinsically tied to Dean getting shot, and the guilt that would be associated with that (and that we saw in the early part of season 2) feels grounded and authentic to me.

That said, I don’t believe for a moment that Annie wouldn’t have brought it up, and for us to get scenes like, say – 2.05, where Annie and Ruby bore witness to the reveal of another Dean-shaped betrayal in the conversation with Amber – feels disingenuous and like a missed opportunity to me. I feel like the cancer lie should’ve hung heavy over that conversation.

But! That’s not your question! Your question is if I as a writer think there’s a time limit on addressing these sorts of narrative moments, which is such a good question, like I said, and I think is probably something that’s subjective to how people like conflict in a story, but for me, the short answer here is no, I don’t think there’s an expiry date on something like that.

A lot of that comes down to how I understand and enjoy conflict in storytelling; which of course invites quite a few caveats around narrative and weight and characters, so hey! Let’s break that down a bit.

Conflict & Narrative Weight

Conflict is, of course, the driving force of any story. It’s what pushes characters through narrative, forces hands and creates tension, and what that conflict looks like is different story to story, arc to arc. There’s a lot out there on different types of conflict, but I typically like to break it down into four categories which encompass most of those:

Character vs Other Character

Character vs Self

Character vs Society (structures and institutions)

Character vs Environment

Generally speaking, stories can use any amount of these any number of times, and Good Girls in particular thrives on all four. Each of the girls have their own types of conflicts in each area, but I’d say that generally speaking they each have the focus of Character vs Self, and then a different primary conflict otherwise.

In s1 for instance, I’d break it down a bit like this:

I think it varies season-to-season of course, but in s1 at least, I’d position Beth’s conflict beyond her conflict with herself as primarily being with Other Characters, Ruby with Society, and Annie with Environment.

That’s not to lessen these other conflicts, this is just to say that they’re weighted differently. And they should be! Good stories have different weighted conflicts, because having life threatening dilemmas like Dean cutting the plate interspersed with lighter conflict like Annie trying to steal the canary interspersed with Dean trying to make up a story about why the fish died for his daughters, is what creates dynamic storytelling that has a rhythm and feels full of light and shade.

Point is, while the girls each have conflicts in all four areas, they’re weighted differently for the three of them.

In s1, Ruby has conflict with other characters like Shirley and Mary Pat, but they’re typically short-lived with lower stakes compared to Beth’s with Dean, Rio, Turner and Mary Pat, and alternatively, neither Beth or Annie have the same high stakes societal conflict that Ruby has with battling the hospital for Sara’s treatment.

And again – Beth and Ruby’s homes might become a battleground occasionally, but it’s got nothing on the way many of the environments Annie operates in have been heavy conflict zones – from almost being raped in her home in 1.01, to Fine & Frugal being an insanely hostile setting for Annie across both S1 and S2, from the smaller moments i.e. Greg springing Annie to tell her he’s suing her for custody, to the more extreme – Boomer trying to coerce her into sex, Boomer planting drugs in her locker and getting her arrested, the bodies being stored in the cool room, Noah’s infiltration. These are extremely major conflicts positioned around Annie and her environment.

These conflicts are both major and minor, episodic and long-term, resolved and left to hang, temporarily or forever. The point of all of them though is they’re there to build story, character and tension, and how they’re weighted, generally speaking, depends on their purpose and the character focus.

Dean’s cancer lie was, in a lot of ways, a response to his already-existing conflict with Beth. It originally gave the appearance of a snowball effect, which is a writing technique that this show loves, haha. The problem is, that’s not what happened with the cancer lie storyline. We didn’t get the cathartic end where the snowball builds and builds and hits, instead it was interrupted, which affects audience expectations.

What we expected was this:

But instead we got this:

(Sorry for my terrible post-it note diagrams, haha)

Basically that articular conflict was usurped by Rio’s conflict with Beth, which cut the snowball effect off mid-roll.

We should’ve had our big, huge fight – that moment where the snowball has gained all it;s weight and hits – only it was stopped.

Which! Isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Those dramatic stops of narrative arcs happen all the time, and many do it really well! Think of something like The Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, where the snowballing arc of Robb Stark’s rise was so suddenly stopped, and hell, I even think, in the moment, that cutting off Beth and Dean’s conflict for Rio’s dramatic re-entry into Beth’s life was extremely effective.

The difference is that the loss of Robb’s rise as a result of The Red Wedding was still weighted heavily, just not in the way we expected, and as a result was felt for the rest of the series (or at least, y’know, it was before the show completely fell apart, haha), whereas Good Girls seemed to bury the Beth and Dean conflict, and instead blanket it with a new layer of snow.

Beth got Dean shot.

That was the betrayal now, and that is what the first few episodes of season 2 gave weight to, and while that conflict evolved again, the cancer lie never quite got unburied.

Does that mean it never will?

Not necessarily at all, but to talk about that, I think I need to breakdown what I like to call Touchstone Conflicts and Landmine Conflicts.

Touchstone Conflicts

When I talk about touchstone conflicts, what I generally mean is the conflicts that are revisited frequently and come to be major parts of the character’s journey. These are the meat and potatoes of any story and what drives individual scenes as well as episodes and arcs and seasons.

Touchstone conflicts are conflicts Good Girls usually does really well. Think about how Ruby vs Society is revisited frequently through her troubles paying for Sara’s medication, then surgery, then different medication, and how that’s not only compounded with specialists, the hospital and the insurance company, but also her conflicts with Stan and Sara. The purpose of this is to keep Ruby’s motivation really present in our minds as an audience, but also to tease out Ruby (and later Stan’s) evolving sense of morality, which is pivotal to her conflict with herself.

Similarly with Ruby, I think she has the best touchstone conflict arc across the series in her worry around Stan finding out about what she’s doing in s1, him finding out in 1.10 (Oof at that particular snowball hitting), and then with him coming through for her in 2.01 before she gets her awesome ‘I’m that bitch’ speech in 2.02. It continues to be a touchstone conflict after that too, but I think it definitely peaks overall in there.

The thing about touchstone conflicts though is that they’re so regularly revisited that they become close to the surface and thus very present overall in the feel of the show which in turn means that they can be gateways to new conflicts and new scenarios. Annie’s conflict with herself and her own insecurities for instance are touched on so regularly in so many different ways, that when they build into conflicts with other characters – whether that be with Nancy, Beth or Ruby – it feels unavoidable in ways that are usually (although not always!) narratively satisfying.

With Beth and Dean, the cancer lie was a touchstone conflict in s1 along with Dean’s cheating, but while Dean’s cheating has now been a touchstone conflict across all three seasons, the cancer lie feels buried, as I said above, which can make it what I like to call a landmine conflict.

Landmine Conflict

Landmine conflicts are ones that are frequently established, left for a while – sometimes for chapters or entire series at a time – and then later explode. A lot of shows do this really well (and a lot really badly, haha) – Bojack Horseman, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are three shows that jump to mind as being good with landmine conflict – but a lot of shows do try it to varying degrees of success, particularly as landmine conflict typically makes for a buzzier story / episode than touchstone does.

Because here’s the thing – where touchstone conflicts are about building towards greater conflict, landmines are about exploding conflict open.

Good Girls, to me, is a show that wants to be great at landmine conflict, and isn’t. And look, it’s no secret that I love the show, but I don’t think landmine conflicts have ever been its strong suit. I mean - - the loft scene in 2.13 was definitely An Attempt, haha, and I think Boomer’s ‘death’ in 2.03 which then exploded in 2.12 was a slightly more successful attempt, but not overall that satisfying.

The point of landmine conflict though, in my experience of them, is usually based around three things:

Marking a drastic shift in the narrative / character arcs / relationships

Contextualising or recontextualising prior scenes and character moments to give them new narrative weight; and

Shock value and hype.

I’m tired of talking about 2.13, so let’s talk about the Boomer’s Alive reveal instead.

As a landmine, this did all of those things, although how effective that was is of course up for interpretation. It did though mark a significant shift in the story in terms of how the girls were going to try and get out from under Turner’s thumb, and it had a huge impact on Annie’s sense of self and her relationship with Marion, which would see an end put to that touchstone conflict untill it was revisited gently in 3.08 with Marion’s death.

Yes, but what does this have to do with the cancer lie, Sophie?

Right! Sorry!

My point is that I do think the cancer lie would be an (uncharacteristically, haha) effective landmine conflict for this show if they weighted it appropriately, because you’re exactly right in your ask – bringing it up randomly now would not be satisfying, because it’s no longer a touchstone conflict in either Beth or Dean’s arcs. It’s not one that sits close to the surface – it’s buried deep – and that doesn’t mean that it can’t or shouldn’t be dug back up, but if it is, it needs to go off.

And at this point in the story, I think the only ways that that could effectively be done is in either:

A divorce

Beth forcing Dean’s hand in the midst of another conflict

In a major fight between Beth and either Ruby or Annie where it’s thrown in her face; or

Some combination of the above

We need to feel it at this point in the story if they are going to use it, because it’s been left so long dormant that to revisit it needs to be shocking, it needs to mark a drastic shift, like I said above, but most importantly, it needs to contextualise the two seasons it stayed buried.

It needs to give the silence around the lie weight.

If it doesn’t, it will feel lacklustre and it will feel like too-little, too-late. To so forcibly blanket what was a major touchstone conflict of season one – not just with the characters it involved directly, but the characters on the peripheral of that particular story too – doesn’t diffuse the storyline, and it shouldn’t. I think we can all still hear it ticking, and whether or not it goes off is up to the writers, of course, but I do hope they pull the pin, and I do hope we all feel the bang when they do.    

[durtystars]

Honestly I feel like George was incredibly misunderstood. I think he is the result of trauma, bullying, and insecurities. I know he did awful things, but I truly believe he simply wanted to be loved, and never was.

@alexander-the-ham-man i will advocate for george when i can, but as for bullied i can't get behind that, as agatha cleared him up when he claimed he was hated but was mostly all in his head. as for trauma, it's been a year since i watched the show but i also don't think there was much evidence for it as far as i remember. but i absolutely agree with the insecurities part. we do have proof of his insecurity wound that his domineering uncle never failed to pick at. and seeing that he was ashamed of his father (for reasons made up in his head) and no mother (assumedly dead), it can make sense that by being raised by his uncle in a loveless environment confirmed his mindset that he didn't deserve it. i also don't think he deserved redemption but still, he could have been a very intriguing villain that deserved valid investment. all the coins to make him that way were strewn across at his feet every episode post S2 and no-one ever bothered to pick them up and do something with it (i don't mean this in jest, i seriously think the writers felt they didn't have to put in much investment in the characters anymore since aidan carried the show mostly by his looks coupled with eleanor's character).

unfortunately he was probably the character who suffered the most when the show started flopping in writing (around S2 imo) so there isn't a lot to dig around with his character outside of S1 and the first third of S2. there was a bit of the insecurity coming through with his marriage and paranoia concerning ross and liz but i can't count that for much since it didn't really go anywhere (and is probably the main reason why i hate him in the later seasons). if you're interested you can read my post about the parallels of george and francis (and if you're ready for some slight controversy, himself and mella) as i try my best to keep him as 3 dimensional as he was in the early seasons. as i said before he's not the only character that suffered in the show but if a prequel ever happened he'd be one of the most interesting characters to look into to understand why he became the way he was. honestly, if you know about the succession show from an objective mindset besides the whole 18c thing he has all the workings of a character right from that TV show and i'm sure the writer(s) would have a field day giving him the characterization he deserved. it sucks that he was as ignored in the writing as he was within the show itself.

yeah george deserves to hang and rot like the beast he is but have you ever thought about why he even became "friends" with francis in the first place. that they were told ross would leave for 3 months. so most likely george was already thinking of a plan to befriend the poldarks? that he is so desperate for ross' attention and yet terrified of it at the same time (because he doesn't know what he will do if he finally obtains it) he doesn't approach him directly, so he eels his way into francis' life? and in twisted his mind it's this simultaneous battle of trying to get as close to ross as possible & "winning" against him by getting close to the people he loves behind his back. george was already trophying everything in ross' life WAY before the whole liz debacle.