#now i REALLY need to learn to animate

[shannonsketches]

Why is the anime so weird, it's not even the same series dude?? It's like,

Anime:

GOKU: I have a great idea to bring peace to the universe, and my leadership and compassion alone will unite us all. I have No Flaws and am A True Relatable Everyman :)

VEGETA: NO! I AM THE BEST AND I WILL CAUSE PROBLEMS UNTIL I AM RECOGNIZED AS SUCH!!!!

Manga:

GOKU: Vegeta what's cornmeal made of? I know it's what the corn eats, but what's it made of? VEGETA: Hey Kakarot let's play the quiet game until one of us dies.

[trans-mike-afton]

i thought of this during my 3 minutes of going down and getting yogurt . and now im just supposed to be normal and not cry over this

yknow that art thing thats like "do u think were soulmates in every universe" but its with glamrock fronnie and instead they say something like "do u think we were always soulmates" and its an animation and it transitons through all of their previous versions so smoothly and its getting gayer with every flash and at some point it comes to fredbear and spring bonnie doing a dancy dance and that transitions into henry kissing william . do i make sense . what the fuck am i saying

[starlettisketches]

I rendered my qsmp!Jaiden sketch from the other day >:}

[kingwaino]

i don't talk about him a lot on here but a couple years ago i got a beta fish which i so sweetly named sebass-tian hamil-fin. i'd never had a fish before but at the time, since i wasn't in my apartment a lot, a fish was really the only thing i could care for. unfortunately, he passed away today.

i didn't think i'd be this upset by it because i could kind of tell over the past week or two that he wasn't doing too well. i tried my best to make him feel better but unfortunately, it wasn't enough.

i plan to go and get another fish tomorrow but i just...don't really know how to feel about it right now. he was my first fish and certainly won't be my last.

[palettepainter]

Amazon: HEEEY!~ Hazbin hotel is getting a second season!

Me: Oh okay, that's cool I guess.

Amazon: They'll be even MORE action this season!! We're gunna focus on Alastor's backstory, and Pentious will be a key character, and Vox is gunna be a more prominent protagonist, and we'll show off more overlords, and Vaggie and Charlie get a "sexy life"~

Me: Uh-huh. And I can only assume that this season has a bigger episode count so that any of those plot points you mentioned have time to breath for more then ten minutes unlike season 1?

Amazon:

Me:.....You're gunna give this season time to breath ri-

Amazon: WE HAVE MERCH AT HOT TOPIC NOW TOO!!~

.

(Incase people don't read the tags: The reason this annoys me so much isn't because I hate the show, it's because I want this show to do well. I want this show to make me feel like I should care for any of it's characters and plot points because it's well made, not because it's been created by an artist who is already popular online. I truly believe the animators and voice actors are giving it their all for this show, the voice acting is honestly the best quality in my opinion and everyone nails their roles, but the writing and pacing has so far been a cluster fire.

This is a legit show now, it's being funded by Amazon's money with literal broadway stars as parts of the cast. If season 1 taught the people creating this show anything it's that there needs to be breathing time for the plot points and the characters, and I sincerely hope that season 2 takes this into account. I doubt it with how much they've said they're going to include, but I really hope that, for animation as a whole - cuz god knows Disney hasn't been pumping out good animated movies as of late - season 2 takes into account what season 1 did poorly and improves on it)

[kvroii]

It's been years since I used to frequently draw pixel pagedolls like this, but I decided it would be worth trying again. Actually, back in 2018 and 2019 I drew a lot of these, so I feel comparatively out of practice! But here is a pagedoll of the Third One that I drew for a bit of fun.

[lyssq]

Thinking about her again (acod my goodbye animatic with thaena and kihrin at the end of memory of souls)

[threewaysdivided]

How Different do you think Young Justice Season 3 would have been had Jay Olivia and Michael Chang returned?

[For context, we’re referring to this post where I broke down the major writing/directing credits for each episode of Young Justice Season 1 and found that former Teen Titans 2003 directors Jay Oliva and Michael Chang had handled over 75% of the episodes in Young Justice Season 1 before vanishing from the credits of all later entries, and this post where I summarise how those later entries actively destroyed the arcs, themes and narrative of the original season.]

TBH it’s kind of hard to tell.  I have a few ideas, but like I was saying in that first post, it can be unwise to pedestal one or two members of a creative team when there are so many factors that can impact the final quality of a work.

Here I think it’s important to mention what a director does.  In situations where the director and writer are separate roles, the job of the director is to adapt the script to a visual form – working with the writers/editors to make changes as needed.  Directors direct how scenes are constructed, presented, acted and “shot” – which affords them a great deal of subtle influence over the pacing, focus and framing of a story.  The visual language of film can do a lot to control what information the audience prioritises as important, and how they interpret/perceive it.  Unsurprisingly, when you have bad, fragmented or inconsistent directing, you end up with stories that lack direction.

While Chang and Oliva having such a presence in the direction of Season 1 definitely lent it some of their specific personal creative flavour, I also think a lot of the major benefit came purely from having two people (and likely others who formed part of the S1-specific creative team) who were experienced in working together and had direct input/oversight of more than 75% of the season from start to finish.  That kind of creative cohesion makes it easier to track and maintain the continuity and progression of a narrative.  Compare and contrast with Outsiders, where you have a rotating shift of three less-experienced directors and a huge revolving door of new writers, with no-one working on more than a single episode in a row, the same directors almost never getting paired with the same writer twice, and a general sense that the story was being produced episode-by-episode with very few people having a clear sense of what had come before or would follow after.

One of the challenges is that the declining quality from Season 2 onwards points to something being fundamentally broken in the creative process at DC Comics/ Time Warner productions.  Young Justice Season 3 was the straw that finally broke my trust in Detective Comics Comics but it came on the heels of things like the original Suicide Squad movie (see this Folding Ideas video for an excellent dissection of those production and editing issues) and the transparently marketing-driven disaster that was Batman vs Superman.  It feels rather like modern-day DC is producing the in-house equivalent of shovelware: underinvesting in the timing and budget that its creative teams need for proper writing, editing, revisions and post-production in favour of churning out superficially saleable high-profit-margin products to cash in on recognisable IP’s and existing fandom markets.  Faced with that kind of incentive structure and production-crunch it can be very hard for a single (or handful of) creative team members to make course-corrections.

That isn’t to say that good media can’t be produced under tight conditions, but doing so generally requires a well-thought-out creative plan for the project.  And unfortunately, that kind of plan is something Greg “I don’t write endings” Weisman is notoriously bad at both creating and sticking to.  This was one of the problems I ran into when doing my YJ: Invasion autopsy: while you can correct some of the surface level problems, the root issue lies in a core story that’s bad from base principles and fundamentally incompatible with what came before.  Again, this can be overcome if other production team members are given enough time and creative authority to review and revise that story-core, but that doesn’t seem to be the production environment S2+ was allowed.

With all that said, I think it’s safe to conclude that, under the circumstances, Young Justice: Outsiders was likely always doomed to be a mess.  The combination of a lack (or even discarding) of a clear show-bible to act as a guide, a lack of clear project-plan (or, at least, plan-communication) from the showrunners,and a lack of pre-/post-production time for other team members to figure out what story they were even telling is pretty much a guaranteed recipe for narrative failure.

However, assuming that a pair of Oliva/Chang-like directors had been on the revival team, with input into most of the episodes, I think we might have at least seen some improvements to execution:

Firstly, we may have seen better cohesion and focus.  In the multi-layered onion of bad storytelling decisions that is the later seasons, the outer layer that many people seem to have bounced off is that it’s hard to care about what’s happening.  YJS2+ are boring and badly paced on rewatch, and a not-insubstantial part of that is bloat.  There is a plague of random new characters, exposition and world-details that don’t meaningfully contribute to the narrative (and for the record, I should clarify that ‘narrative purpose’ is a lot more than just ‘plot advancement’ – the problem here is that these elements are actually purposeless to the point of being distracting), scenes and ‘jokes’ that overstay their welcome due to a lack of proper substance, and ‘twists’ that exist for expectation-subverting ‘shock bait’ rather than moving the story. 

At a surface level, the later seasons desperately needed someone to ask: both ‘what is the focal point?’ AND ‘what is the purpose of this moment/scene for the story?’ and actually make Greg Weisman give them a coherent answer beyond ‘just trust me, it’ll be totes smart when you (read: I) figure it out later’.  Like I’ve said before, there’s a lot of fat that could have been trimmed; shallow scenes that could have been reworked to serve characterisation and themeing, ‘references’ that could have had their screen-time reduced to passing easter-eggs, and other wasted time that could have been better allocated to developing a core cast of ‘focus characters’ with an understandable dynamic to help anchor the broader character web in a relational status quo.  Considering what we saw of Season 1’s character-focus, and Oliva and Chang’s previous involvement in Teen Titans 2003 (which was also very good at prioritising, reinforcing and maintaining characterisation/ character dynamics) I think some improvement in story-focus, especially towards characterisation, could have been achievable.

The other gain we could have potentially seen is more sensitivity and tactfulness in the presentation of certain story beats/ characters.  For this I want to highlight framing:  whether something is respectful or offensive comes down less to the inclusion/exclusion of particular elements and more to the way in which those elements are presented to the audience – the priorities, assumptions and worldview revealed by the delivery.   

Let’s do a couple of case studies just to get our heads around the idea:

For Example One, we’re going to make the point by jumping straight in the deep end of sexual assault and fanservice in media feel free to scroll to the next paragraph if this is a no-fly topic for you.  Our contrasting studies will be The Millenium Trilogy (a noir series I’ve previous referenced in contrast to the YJ revival) and the shounen anime Sword Art Online, both of which contain assault and rape scenes.  Millenium’s depictions of assault keep the perspective on the victims, focusing on the pain/ powerlessness/ degradation/ anger they experience during and after the violation, and examining their reluctance/ aversion to reporting these crimes, while maintaining a respectful detachment towards describing the acts themselves.  In contrast SAO contains an infamous scene where an arc villain attempts to rape the female lead, while the camera fixates on the fanservice of her breasts quivering as he tears her shirt off (in addition to a concerning amount of other fanservice scenes where female characters are penetrated, groped or “peeped on” in ways that are clearly nonconsensual and unwelcome).  From this we can conclude that the issue isn’t inherently with sexual assault being present in a story – how it’s framed makes the difference.  The Millenium Trilogy respects the autonomy of its female characters, using assault scenes as an important narrative device to confront the audience with the violence of systemic sexism and condemn the cowardly entitlement it enables as part of its wider critique of misogyny; Sword Art Online degrades, objectifies and disregards the autonomy of its female characters by using narratively unnecessary sexual assault as a vehicle to ‘reward’ its target audience with fanservice.  What matters is how the subject is handled: is the sexual assault of women treated as a serious problem in need of criticism or as a guilty-pleasure ‘treat’ for boys to enjoy?

Moving to a gentler and more home-field example, let’s compare how pregnancy is handled in Young Justice Season 1 vs Outsiders.  It’s easy to overlook in the wake of the brick-to-the-face that was “you got a baby in there!” but Season 1 also included pregnancy as a plot-beat; Queen Mera announcing the news that she is “with child” during the episode Downtime.  However, there’s that difference in framing:  after it’s announced, Downtime quickly moves past the physicality of Mera’s pregnancy to focus on why it’s narratively important - because Mera and Orin are the royals of a hereditary monarchy and their child will be first in line to the throne of Atlantis.  Despite this being her only episode in Season 1, Downtime also gives Mera multiple characterising moments outside of child-bearing; introduced her first as a Queen and teacher/mentor to the students of the Conservatory, and later demonstrating her power as a battle-mage during the Manta-trooper attack – her pregnancy being almost a footnote outside its narrative-relevance.  By contrast, I think the reason that “baby in there” line from Amistad gets memed so heavily is because it highlights Outsiders unnecessary fixation on the physicality of female characters being pregnant, in addition to a disproportionate tendency to depict female characters as married, pregnant or mothering in the absence (or even at the cost) of narratively meaningful plot or character development – reducing these characters to little more than “pregnant sexy lamps” (as @mimeparadox so eloquently put it in their recent review of similar issues with the Gargoyles revival).  Again, the difference is execution: where Season 1 used pregnancy in a character-specific and narratively-relevant way, Outsiders not only assumes but enforces it as the expected path for female characters – sacrificing both characterisation and screentime for a subtler form of fanservice: one that reinforces and validates a specific worldview of gender (and which has been increasingly revealed to lurk beneath the surface of performative ‘feminists’ like Eric Schneiderman and Joss Whedon).

At this point, I think it’s worth noting that Jay Oliva and Michael Chang are both Asian-American men (i.e. less likely to be blinded by privilege a problem that Greg Weisman has always struggled with), that Chang himself was lead director on TT2003’s anti-bigotry episode Troq and that TT2003 on the whole is often praised for its respectful depiction of female characters (and also Victor’s cyborg status).

Given this, I think similar direction could have resulted in more respectful depictions of non-white and disabled characters.  As it exists, the revival at large (and Outsiders in particular) has a HUGE issue with unnecessary and disproportionate violence towards and villainization of characters-of-colour in a way that inadvertently reveals the bias of the creators; shock-value violence towards marginalised characters being treated as more acceptable and less needing of commentary because they clearly weren’t expected to be as relatable or worthy of empathy as the “main” characters.  Different direction could have seen some of the more needless violence removed in favoured of equally-shocking-but-more-narratively-purposeful elements, some of the narratively-justified violence reframed in a way that was more empathetic to the personalities and bodily autonomy of the victimised characters, or - given more time for revision - used to make a critique of in-story bigotry by presenting the disproportionate targeting of marginalised protagonists as being the product of systemically prejudiced antagonists (rather than casually-bigoted producers).

Similarly, I think better direction could helped respect female/femme characters more.  From Season 2 onwards Young Justice has an increasing problem with the male gaze in how it frames and poses women; Outsider’s borderline-fetishistic obsession with depicting late-term pregnancies again being a particularly egregious example.  Many of these scenes either didn’t need to be included (hence the meme-potential of wasting screen time on a toddler explaining how pregnancy works to a mature audience) or could have been made more narratively meaningful by prioritising specific characterisation over generic ring-fingers and pregnant bellies.   This male gaze issue was at its most insulting with Halo; even if different directors couldn’t change the incredibly disrespectful character-design decision to vacuum-seal a nonbinary, hijab-wearing minor inside a boob-socking, ass-grabbing, wasp-waisted super-suit, they could have worked to preserve Halo’s modesty and gender identity with posing and camera choices that minimised the attention drawn to Halo’s sexual features, and presented their body-language and posture in a less-feminising way.  

This likely wouldn’t have fixed the underlying biases baked into Outsiders’ plotlines but I think there was the potential to soften the execution to the point that they could have felt more like a “missed the mark” than the farcical offensiveness that we got.

That said, I don’t think anything could have truly saved this series.

As I said at the start, I think the thing that ultimately doomed Young Justice was the lack of a long-term story vision; the ego and overambition of showrunners trying to build a story that runs on teasing twists, mysteries and future-resolutions while also openly wanting it to go on forever.  Those two elements are fundamentally incompatible if you want a satisfying experience, and without a clear guiding plan you can’t expect the underlying creative team to successfully find a story’s identity during a rushed pre-production.  You can’t provide direction if you don’t know where you’re going.  It would be like trying to invent an entirely new plane and build it as it’s taking off: a crash is inevitable, the only question is the extent of the damage.

At best, I think we could have seen another Invasion-level non-story: a few isolated good character moments bogged down within a season that, while not overtly offensive, was still thematically confused, overstuffed with characters, driven by contrivance and insulting to the intelligence of anyone actually trying to follow the narrative.  A slow zombification, riding out a few extra seasons on plausible deniability, rather than Outsiders’ rapid crash-and-burn seasonal rot into an offensive cash-grab parody of itself.

And, in a way, I’m kind of glad that Oliva, Chang and the other Season-1-only creative team members didn’t come back for that.  Because, even if it would have resulted in a more palatable product, it would have come from forcing a group of marginalised creators to salvage a privileged dude’s mess.

I’ve spent far too many words over the last few years trying to unpick the layers of why Young Justice is such a narrative failure post Season 1 and now I feel like Benoir Blanc.  Because these problems are a glass onion and at their clear centre, Greg Weisman is an idiot.  He’s a demonstrable bigot, who had a publisher back away after he trashed their franchise with misogynistic queerphobia.  He’s a sex-obsessed loser who tried to launch a Not-Safe-For-Work production company writing Gargoyles Parody Porn while wearing an eye-patch and pretending to be a ‘fan collaborator’.  His writing reveals a consistently toxic attitude towards abuse, consent, boundaries and power dynamics.  Based on some of the creepier things he’s said/written, he could be potentially unsafe for certain fans to be around.  And even setting all that aside (and it’s a lot to set aside) he’s just obviously a hack: he claims things that are neither present in or even supported by the text, he promises future developments and fixes/explanations that he rarely if ever delivers, and he uses those holes as a springboard to pitch separate-purchase side-content that also seldom delivers, in a way that suggests he either has no idea what he’s talking about or is intentionally lying to grift his fans.

And, look, this problem is far from exclusive to Weisman: it certainly didn’t start with him, and it’s not even exclusive to the arts.  Across industries we are currently realising that we’ve let privileged guys who can talk a good game coast by on an assumption that they were qualified to hold their positions of influence, even as we held them to far lower standards of scrutiny than we would equivalent people of any other demographic.

Young Justice was never going to survive long-term (any more than the Gargoyles revival is) because the creative load was always resting on that rotten core.  I think we as a fandom were very lucky that Season 1 had both a sincere creative team and the production schedule needed to overcome it and give us something as good as they did.

I wish we could have seen that quality continue. But, at the end of it all, I’ll make peace with the disaster we got.  Because it was at least a somewhat honest reflection of its lead creator, rather than enabling him to keep failing upwards on the back of his colleagues' contributions.

So yeah. Better directors would probably have resulted in better surface-level polish... but you know what they say about polishing turds. No matter how much sugar they added, Outsiders couldn't be turned into a brownie. You'd still be being fed crap.

And frankly, whether it’s his characters, his audience or his co-creators, I’d rather not continue the pattern of letting Weisman shove the burden of dealing with and correcting for his bullshit onto less-privileged people.

[keeps-ache]

HEY

[shitty-check-please-aus]

I highly recommend studying Latin if you want to be able to predict plot twists before they happen, writers fucking love to name people in ways that tell you exactly what's going to happen if you know Latin

[deathtodickens]

I am finally back in a sketching mood and getting my left-arm muscle-memory used to using my Cintiq and drawing in Photoshop. Am also still (still) working on the last bits of Ages because next year it will be TEN YEARS since I started that fic. And I intend to conclude it (part one, anyway) by (preferably before) 2024.

[sundaysstrawberrykombucha]

So, two big things happened this month! One, legs decided to "reverse" a little. Really the calves shortened and the feet elongated...

Two, I lost a LOT of height. I used to stand around 5'9", and now I'm barely over 3 feet tall! I think... I don't have a measuring tape or anything.

I think I'm done with the Medication. I've already surpassed all of what I was looking for and, honestly, I'm kind of afraid to keep going for now.

((This is probably the last update for the Skunk HRT, honestly. I wouldn't know where to go from here other than to go full skunk, and that's not really where I wanted to take this.

Also, maintaining the weight was a way to keep Sunday looking more on the mature and adult side of being small. I was afraid that if I had made them thin, they'd just start looking like a child, and that didn't feel right. So they have a bit of weight on them, and maintain their adult features. I think it looks cute.

But yea, this is PROBABLY my fursona now. Let's be real, while I'll probably use Belle for a lot of things, since she has a lot of things to say, it never felt right saying she's my fursona, because she is literally a whole damn person. So this was nice to actually find my own self...

That is... If I don't do another sequence to bring their height back up... And maybe make them more monstrous... Being a monster would be neat...))

[lesbiansanemi]

I'm so tired

[geee-three]

okay now that im actually confronting it this makes a whole lotta sense that im going to continue to ignore

[triglycercule]

i WAS gonna complain about horror being a skeleton and therefore never able to do the akanbe face but then i remembered. i'm an artist!! i can just DRAW him doing it 😇😇😇 ok but he doesn't have eyelids iKNOW ill figure it out ok

[60inchyugiohheadcanons]

On Jōnouchi's ADHD (1.39k words)

This headcanon is probably the longest on this blog; it's some compiled thoughts on how growing up with (undiagnosed) ADHD has affected Jōnouchi. It's halfway between headcanon and fanfiction piece, and was requested by @bloodyscott, whom I kept waiting for too long for a response. I apologise sincerely for the delay.

This headcanon begins below the cut, as it's obscenely long. You may find it more comfortable to read this from the blog page, or on Archive of Our Own (NOTE: tumblr is acting strange. To access the page, copy the link and manually remove the href.li portion and the second https), rather than on your dashboard/search, in terms of formatting and such.

From infancy, Jōnouchi wailed his way out of his crib, out of his room, out of his house—as a baby, he thrashed towards whatever freedom he could find. He loathed the four walls of the crib; he'd scarce room to move. A skin infection brought him, aged 4, to hospital, and the very sight of overrun grey plastic seats and skinny cubicles exhausted him more than his illness had ever threatened to.

In primary school, others’ desks would blend together in a whir. Here he was, stuck, dizzyingly sedentary—the longer he sat, the foggier the world seemed to grow. When he kicked and whined at other children throughout electric lunch breaks, and they shrank from his vitality, he learned to eat alone. As his peers trudged from class in packs, watching the pavement, he sat, sullen, as his father drove him home. Somehow, Katsuhiro had never trusted him not to lose himself in chasing his surrounds. The fabric of the car seat would bite into his shorts, and he’d squirm for the window, squealing towards the noise outside: Birds that cawed; scraps of paper that fluttered and choked on smog. That was a fragile era, when his mother still waited, with dry hands and chipped nails, at home. When his father already stank of beer, but still spoke loudly, deeply, boisterously. Again and again, Jōnouchi’s mother would sit her son down, and write his name, stroke by agonising stroke. She’d recite each mora in time with each character. Yet sound would cluster through his head, and his own name would dissolve amid his mother’s instructions, amid the blaze of sunlight trapped on the windowsill behind her. He would write, and the strokes would come out rushed, mis-ordered, lopsided. 

Iro wa nioedo 

chirinuru wo.

At 10, his father grew quiet, and his mother yet quieter. Silence took up like a plague in Jōnouchi’s head, and swarmed in shapeless formation throughout parched mathematics lessons. Times tables hurled themselves headlong into a skull full of fog, and burst on contact. Are you listening? a teacher asked. How could he listen with a head full of noise, of unspoken words billowing back and forth? He gripped his seat, and glared back. Why should I care, anyway?

When his mother left, his father stopped caring to chaperone him. It had taken Jōnouchi a decade to earn the right to shed his infancy. He resented that it had been this long, so tried to join the huddle of middle schoolers. He told odd stories, and took off, queasy, in front of them. They withdrew their smiles when he approached on the second day. He growled his plaint, and resentment drove him to take the opposite route. He explored back alleys, wallflower convenience stores and dilapidated cinemas; the faster he walked, the more clearly he could see each brick, and the brighter each fleck in the pavement glinted. At speed, he delayed the journey home, and set his eyes on a gorgeous early winter sunset. The colours bellowed, too bold for winter, ungainly and vain. They were glorious.

Jōnouchi came home late. His father glared; fog crashed back down on his shoulders. 

Wa ga yo tare zo 

tsune naran?

A week before she cleared out too few of Katsuhiro’s belongings and packed too few suitcases, Jōnouchi’s mother drove both children two miles to the optometrist. My son, she explained, reads slowly, yet resents reading; it seems he can’t see very well. My daughter’s sight seems clearer, yet she complains of pain. The optometrist forced Jōnouchi to read down a chart of letters; he fidgeted, and, consumed in memories of a lonely lunch break the day prior, passed with flying colours. When the optometrist flashed a light to photograph his eyes, whatever hideous miracle that was, Jōnouchi screamed.

Katsuya Jōnouchi, the optometrist surmised, had perfect acuity of sight. He sought attention, stimulation. Meanwhile, Shizuka Jōnouchi, who had sat entirely still throughout her examination, had more ragged, derelict peripheral vision than her family had anticipated. Untreated, both your children will get much worse.

And in the months after Shizuka Jōnouchi became Shizuka Kawai and Mrs. Jōnouchi became That Bitch Who Never Cared, Katsuya Jōnouchi became horribly aware of how little time he had to be lethargic. He had to survive this schism; yet as he was, he barely felt capable of thinking. He walked, fidgeted, paced to prove to himself that he was a moving, breathing organism. Yet his father’s frustration would brook no exuberance. Long before Katsuhiro fully committed to flinging glass and spurning his son’s misery, Jōnouchi began learning to move silently, slowly, around his father. He memorised which mats snapped and snagged, which bits of fabric hissed when stepped on. He noted which windows opened most quietly. And yet he never managed a perfect, quiet exit. He couldn’t help but be conspicuous; he could only hope to get out too quickly for his father to react. And, to lift the torpor that followed escape, he would run to school, and, after, run back. Never did the sun shine brighter than when he was moving.

Uwi no okuyama

kyou koete.

When he met Hirutani, did he become more violent? No; every punch he threw during his delinquency had waited, kinetic and desperate, for days, months, years. In classrooms, his sole responses to being ordered around had been sullen deference, with sullenness being his sole demonstration of rebellion. Now, threatened with the obsolescence of his ego, of his perceived freedom, he chained himself to violence, over and over. The first time he punched a man in the gut, he found himself shaking. And rather than sink into sallow, domestic remorse, he slathered himself in white rage. And he went back and he went back and he went back, helpless to his own instincts, trying to dredge the noise in his skull out through his fists. No matter how many punches he threw, and no matter how many he received, he could not stop his head from blazing anew the moment he walked away.

Did Duel Monsters afford him any peace? He would be no man’s losing dog; nor would he be confined to dull celebrity. To play as a strategist consigned him to sitting still, committing himself to gambits he could never entirely trust, to moves that demanded a clear head. To play too whimsically would doom him to inferiority. Thus, he gave half his heart to diligence, and half to sheer fortune. Nobody could idolise his kind of folly, nor devalue his kind of skill. This was Jōnouchi’s will—to eschew having to wait in the mire of expectation; to escape the fog of obligation to anyone’s morals but his own. Honour suited him, so long as it was on his meticulous terms. In games of Duel Monsters, he became a knight-errant of sorts: predictably unpredictable, unexpectedly canny, blindly faithful. With this relationship to his own fate laid out so, he could finally draw cards without fearing those next to come. And thus, hyperkinetic, he found a peace in the game. So he played and played until he forgot how long he’d been playing, and Duel Monsters became as second nature.

Asaki yume miji

ei mo suzu.

Two weeks before Jōnouchi’s graduation, Shizuka invited him to her place to dine. Their father was not to join them. Jōnouchi protested, and his desperation died in a pinprick throat. Wisteria spilled itself over the footpath. Each step threatened to plunge, vertiginous, to the ground. 

When Jōnouchi saw his mother, his throat turned to sandpaper. She looked so old.

You cried so much as a baby, she told him. Kicked and screamed to see the world. You weren’t comfortable waiting in your crib—I’d end up coming to you at 4AM, walking you around the perimeter of the house till my heels burned. And you seemed so afraid of all the noises of the night—groaning engines, singing birds. Now, look at you—you’ve grown up so terribly fast.

Could he afford to tell her how even now, he bit down the urge to kick and scream, to launch himself, all fists and sparks, onto his tormentors? No; so, all night, he gripped his glass as tight as he could. The cold lingered and itched on his palms for days. Holding onto things, it seemed, was not so difficult as he’d once believed.