#sailor moon had five seasons and by the end of the show the girls were more than halfway through high school

[alteredphoenix]

The absolute irony of watching an episode (and a half) of Miraculous Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir out of curiosity the other night while waiting out a PC update to be done only to get hit with the news it just ended its first arc after eight years.

[memecucker]

Akazuchuchin Chacha is a funny series bc it was like only popular in the Philippines (where it aired in ABS-CBN as well as cable channels) where I remember it being super big and I remember there being this weird thing at the end of the series where they Chacha straight up said “we don’t need you anymore Magical Princess” and gave up her mahou shojo powers and the remaining like five episodes were like pure slice of life stuff about fantasy boarding school when the three seasons had been a more Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura magical girl action show

Anyway I just found out that the manga was originally slice of life and the action battle princess transformation stuff was original to the anime bc that was really popular at that time. Which meant the random filler episodes about silliness or magical school stuff were actually the faithful adaptations of the manga

[destinygoldenstar]

Character Death In Ninjago

This video explains why permanent deaths need to happen for the audience to care about the story going forward. As always, support the creator. (Tw: There’s some Walking Dead clips in this video. That’s a bloody show.)

So I am personally very mixed on this discussion.

On the one hand you have a kids show with restrictions on what they can get away with. And at the end of the day, it’s a toy commercial, and killing off a main character would be losing profit. AND different shows have different priorities than others. My Little Pony is a praised show that keeps everyone you care about alive. The Owl House didn’t kill anyone you’re routing for now that I think about it. (Except Flapjack. RIP) And for people who say Ninjago should be super gritty and edgy, are forgetting what the shows priorities are. And if you really want that, that’s what fanfiction is for. And I am no stranger to that. I’m the writer of Total Drama Danganronpa Island. A gritty fanfic where two thirds of the cast die horrifically.

We’ve all had a phase. This show does NOT need to be Batman to be good. A show does not need to be dark to be good.

HOWEVER, when the narrative stakes call for it, and you have SO MANY FAKEOUTS, eventually you have to pull a trigger on a character, beloved or not. This is why at one point or more, there should have been a death. A character does not come back.

Does it need to be gruesome? No. Are fake out deaths bad? No. Season 3’s fakeout death is one of my favorite fakeout deaths of all time because it’s a natural point for the character, and impacts everyone around them, even after they are revealed to still be alive. But there’s a limit to using fake out deaths before they become cheap and nobody buys it anymore.

Now, YES, this show DOES have permanent deaths. Like villains. But you want them gone. There’s also the Royal Family getting assassinated. Mystake never comes back. But you don’t remember these because they are very inconsequential to the story.

If you’re gonna resurrect a character from the dead, that’s fine, as long as you know there’s a purpose for it. Ninjago actually does this very well. Zane’s fakeout (his FIRST one, and no other one) works because it’s s logical step in his character conflict of identity, and the death impacts the other characters, giving them a new perspective on their own dynamics and priorities, plus it benefits Zane’s character in giving him a crisis of a new identity. Garmadon fakeout works because there’s a permanent consequence that is his relationship with his family. That’s dead. Forever. There’s no getting this perfect parental figure back.

It’s a great way for fakeout deaths to work, if there is a permanent consequence. That’s why bringing Nya back was a bad call in my opinion. There were no permanent consequences. Imagine if the ninja couldn’t bring her back? Imagine if they had to grapple with the fact that their grief consumed them and put them in prison, and they had to accept the fact that the girl they loved is gone?

But of course that wouldn’t happen because Nya is a part of the main group. I love Nya as much as anyone, but I wanted her sacrifice in Seabound to stick, because it was a wake up call for the story, personally.

There’s a line when it comes to pulling off fakeout deaths, and when you need to decide to let a character go. Zane and Garmadon, I can excuse. Nya? This should have been permanent OR had a permanent consequence. But okay, the main six ninja have plot armor. Fine. I understand that.

What about the side characters? They’re not safe. Unless you count Pixal as a seventh ninja, she’s not safe. Wu’s not safe. Now obviously, don’t kill characters Willy nilly. Kill them because it makes sense for the story.

Dragons Rising is out, and five of the six ninja are side characters now. Their plot armor is used up. Someone might die. Who knows? Someone could pull a Han Solo.

But is one of my biggest problems with Sailor Moon. Books and shows alike. Every season has the main characters pull fakeout deaths.

EVERY. SEASON. And by Stars, I just don’t buy it anymore.

Like oh, this evil Sailor Guardian assassin is dusting off guardians left and right? And it wants me to believe they’re staying dead?

Yeah nice try. (this is a problem with ALL versions of the story.)

If you’ve seen Sailor Moon, you know what I’m talking about.

In Book 5 of the Sailor Moon comics, there’s a death that choked me up when I first saw it. That’s the death of Sailor Pluto.

She was a likeable side character who was close to Chibi Usa. She had her own goals and dreams of one day leaving her post and seeing the world. Her only chance at seeing it being through this kid.

But when the child she loves turns to the dark side and is about to end the universe, Pluto breaks a taboo of her responsibility and freezes time to save everyone.

And the penalty is death.

She dies with no regret, and the kid watches, full regret over what her actions of jealousy and envy had led to. She obtains her dream of unlocking her powers and following the footsteps of her mom, but the one person she wanted to see that happen isn’t alive to see it. It’s a REALLY heartbreaking chapter.

SO OF COURSE WE BRING PLUTO BACK IN THE NEXT STORY ARC.

This is for… pretty much no reason, as she doesn’t do anything, and you can very easily write her out with nothing changing. Because there’s no consequences to it and the story acts like it never happened, that character death is ruined.

Would the story have been better if the character stayed dead? In this case, yes, as it grounded Chibi-Usas character. Bringing Pluto back removes her consequences altogether.

Then there’s season one of the show having the Sailor Guardians die in the penultimate episode. I read the books before I saw the show, I knew they weren’t dead, as this doesn’t happen in the book. That was just there for drama.

It was well directed and impactful drama on its own, admittedly. But still drama.

I WOULD talk about a certain Polentina, and how her resurrection was done so lazily, then they did nothing with her character and killed her AGAIN a season later. Making the entirety of her life and death pointless. And how this show does have a very good permanent character death that is very well executed and is one of the best moments of the show because of how well done that is. HOWEVER, I won’t because most people HATE it whenever I talk about that show. So therefore, you won’t get my support if you push me away. (I might try again one day, but I just feel very uncomfortable with it from how uninviting others viewers are)

On the other hand, death doesn’t make a show good. There is merit to an uplifting show where everything turns out right in the end. If done right.

So how do you guys feel about character deaths in Ninjago? Is this too much to ask? Am I being unreasonable?

[caramel-ribbons]

Feminist Recs for Anime (For Women’s History Month)

If you want a little more in-depth explanation, then check out my previous post, but this is a project I’ll be dabbling in for women’s history month. Throughout March (we’re already five days in, I know, don’t mention it), I’ll be recommending feminist anime, or at least anime I believe are feminist, for you to add to your list as a celebration for women’s history month.

These anime feature strong female protagonists, fleshed out casts of female characters, little to no fanservice, and some have social and political themes related to womanhood, female friendships, and focus on female-driven narratives.

2. Sailor Moon (Original 90s Anime)

Features a majority female cast with a female lead and a sci-fi fantasy story.

Today, we’re going with a classic. Everyone knows what Sailor Moon is. Even if they don’t know the names of all the senshi, and even if they haven’t picked up a single issue of the manga or watched a single episode of either one of the anime adaptations, they still probably know the words to the English theme song or can attribute the now iconic sailor uniforms to this show. Not to mention this catchphrase. Sailor Moon has become a staple of the magical girl genre and is responsible for its popularity and many of the tropes we now associate with it.

For a run down on the story, Sailor Moon is about Usagi Tsukino; an ordinary teenage girl who is one day assigned a magical destiny to become a sailor senshi (a guardian and monster fighter), find a missing princess, and defeat an evil queen who’s in some way responsible for her disappearance (at least this is the plot of the first season cause the show drifts away from this initial story as we’re exposed to more villains and characters). Along the way, she finds the other senshi and learns more about her duty to not just the Earth, but to her galaxy.

Sailor Moon is well-beloved for a reason. It’s funny (think slapstick and situational humor), and starts off with relatively low stakes, but as the show goes on, the mystery and intrigue surrounding this story is slowly revealed to us. It’s big in terms of the scale of its plot. Since this is a sci-fi focused on planetary themed heroes, the villains and challenges vary between monster of the week to galaxy-level threats, especially in later episodes and seasons. Villains become harder to defeat, and the ensuing battles as you near the end of seasons becomes so gripping it’s hard to resist stopping once you’ve reached the final 5 or 6 episode finales.

Most of the characters aren’t the most deep or unique, but they are all fun and likable, and they’re definitely solid in terms of how diverse they’re portrayals of femininity are. This is one area where Sailor Moon shines. More than most Western animated shows, Sailor Moon managed to offer varied depictions of teenage girls unseen at the time. Some were elegant and artistic like Sailor Neptune, others were hot-headed and ambitious like Sailor Mars. You had the quiet intelligence of Sailor Mercury as well as the determined passion of Sailor Venus.

Makoto, aka. Sailor Jupiter, one of my favorites of the senshi, embodies this femininity concept as she is both feminine (an excellent cook and hopeless romantic), as well as masculine (brave, strong, and an excellent fighter). The anime doesn’t demonize femininity or masculinity, and as a result, the characters are allowed to fall on a scale in terms of their gender expression (which we’ll get to later). While the anime has since been criticized for having characters who feel too rooted in stagnant tropes, I think that, for the most part, the sailor senshi are given enough screen time and development to at least be easy to root for. And, the relationships the girls have with each other really inspires you to love them as you become invested in their friendship.

And, of course, Usagi, our Sailor Moon, is a protagonist who ages well. This is a chosen one story, and I’d argue that it’s one of the better ones because of how it handles Usagi. She famously starts out as a lazy, flighty crybaby but comes into her own as a leader and learns to take her destiny more seriously (…for the most part anyway). The chosen one narrative really lands because, as the series progresses, we see Usagi grapple with her responsibilities. Her kindness is valued as much as her strength, if not more. The thing that makes her question and voice regrets towards her destiny is the same thing that drives her to make good choices, especially in the later seasons.

Beyond the coming of age themes featured heavily in this show, there are themes of fate, love, loneliness, responsibility, and even moral and philosophical questions asked later on in the show when our characters are a little older. Relationships are important in this series whether they be the romantic (think Sailor Uranus and Neptune as well as Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask), or platonic. Friendships, specifically female friendships, are not only seen as important. They’re a superpower. As much as Usagi’s relationship with Mamoru, aka. Tuxedo Mask, is an important relationship throughout the series, it’s the bond Usagi shares with her fellow senshi and friends that helps them save the world, and as cheesy as that sounds, to have something so simple and so beautiful be the solution to end of the world level problems feels comforting in the times we’re in right now.

When it comes to the good, Sailor Moon is a mixture of fun, episodic adventures and serialized, earth-shattering conflicts. Also, there’s the show’s overall aesthetic. While the animation itself is pretty slow and stilted, (particularly in the older seasons), the backgrounds are very pretty to look at and the fashion is objectively magnificent (unless your Tuxedo Mask then rip). There’s a reason you see so many aesthetic boards related to this anime. The pastel, watercolor style is so nice to look at. As for the soundtrack, it’s as magical as the show. Some favorites of mine, besides the theme song, are the ending of season 3, Tuxedo Mirage, Moon Revenge, and We Believe You.

There’s also Sailor Moon’s diversity in terms of gender expression and sexuality. The girls often talk about boys, Usagi even has a relationship with Mamoru (the only recurring male character for a solid four seasons if you don’t count Artemis), but they’re not straight in the slightest. With the entrance of two important characters, Sailor Moon displays it’s first instance of LGBT representation that would set the series a part from other anime of this time:

Sailor Uranus and Neptune.

The same way Sailor Moon earns its status as a mainstay in Shoujo and magical girl anime, Sailor Uranus and Neptune, aka. Haruka and Michiru deserve their status as one of the best examples of LGBT representation not only in Shoujo, not only in anime, but in media itself. Even though we (technically) never see them share a kiss, the relationship between Haruka and Michiru is one of the strongest in the series. They’re given history, they get to express affection. These two are literally meant to be by each other’s side. When they enter the series, suddenly all of our protagonists display some level of attraction towards them, especially towards Haruka, and increasingly it isn’t seen as weird to them where it once was. Best of all, Haruka and Michiru are characters who are allowed to be beautiful and talented as well as morally-questionable, even downright unlikable, and while this makes it hard for some fans to enjoy their 90s portrayal, I really like having one of the earliest examples of queer characters in anime being two women who are admirable and heroic as much as they are unsympathetic and flawed.

But Sailor Moon doesn’t stop at inclusions of LGBT relationships. It also explores gender identity in a way that still feels unfamiliar even now. Haruka is more butch-presenting. The aforementioned Jupiter is both girly and tomboyish, and then there’s the depiction of the Sailor Starlights as gender-fluid. One of the Sailor Starlights, Seiya, even had a (mostly) unrequited crush on Usagi.

Now for the…not so good.

Sailor Moon is long. Like…absurdly long, and like most long-running anime, this is due to massive amounts of filler. I will say that the filler episodes vary. Some have great character moments, some are emotional, and there are some episodes which are just as much must-watches as any plot-drive episode. I’d even argue for some of the filler arcs people like to skip such as the twin alien arc of season 2 and the Nephrite arc which, while creepy and weird and definitely worthy of criticism, offers greater development for a side character and gives us our first glimpse of a sympathetic villain.

That’s not to say there aren’t any bad filler episodes. That’s definitely not the case. Sailor Moon has its fair share of boring, tedious, or otherwise unnecessary episodes which do nothing to develop the characters or flesh out their dynamic. The original anime is 200 episodes long, so it’s up to you to decide if you want to watch all the episodes or if you want to plow through and decide which episodes are worth your time because I can say that not all of them are.

There’s also the divisive nature of Usagi, or rather, how she’s treated. For some, the show is too mean-spirited to her regarding her laziness and immaturity (basically her child-like traits because she’s, y’know, a child). For some, this is particularly egregious with how she’s treated by Luna, Chibi Moon, and Sailor Mars. This is also a good time to mention the…strange diet culture surrounding Sailor Moon. It isn’t unique to this series, sadly, and it isn’t even the worst example of it. Everything from Toradora to Azumanga Daioh to K-On to Lucky Star has dialogue and even certain characters who are the butt of fat jokes or minor, but still present, diet plot lines. Sailor Moon isn’t the worst offender, but it’s still present, particularly with Usagi who, despite being as skinny as all of the other senshi, seems to be the main recipient of weight-related comments.

So, if you want a show with a wide variety of female characters and a greater focus on their friendships and heroism, and if you’re willing to deal with some filler content, minor references to diet culture (as long as you skip episode 4 I’m begging you to skip episode 4 it’s not good), and some minor but persistent humor poking fun at our protagonist, then I think everyone looking for female-centric anime should start here.

(Also if you’re willing to put up with some pretty nonsensical drama between Usagi and Mamoru for two seasons, give this a shot).

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Anime Nostalgia

A weird journey.

I got to the end of my stack of watch-right-now anime (finishing S1 of Medaka Box and shuffling it back into the to-watch-eventually pile) and each time I finish the stack I add in a new show and watch episode 1 of it. In this case that was Majikoi-Oh! Samurai Girls! which was weird because I’m already watching another show named just Samurai Girls and in a stack of shows 180 strong the odds of both of them showing up at once aren’t great. The odds of two different Tenchi series showing up at once are a lot higher.

I watched the whole episode, but about five minutes in I was like, “I’ve seen this show, right?” And by the end of the episode I was like, “I’ve definitely seen this show and also I remember why I hate most of the cast even though only one of them shows her character...issues in episode 1.” So I dropped that from the stack entirely, marked it watched, and drew the next card. It was Slayers, which I knew I’ve seen before but wanted to give a real rewatch.

The thing is, since 2000 I’ve had the BGM from Slayers in my music collection. Not the theme songs, mind. I don’t have the OP (Get Along, Try Again!) or the end credits (Peace Of Mind, To Be!). I have Slayers’ drama music. Their hijinks music. The character themes for Gourry and Zel and Rezo. In a small way the background music of this show has been background music for my life for 22 years now. And watching it is one of the first ways I befriended a bunch of my fellow high schoolers at Horizons when we were all in grades 7-9.

Slayers is kind of low-budget. You see a lot of places where they cut corners, especially in these first episodes where it’s clear they didn’t know they had a hit yet. But it’s also tightly written, has clear and interesting characters, and is very funny. Also even when it’s just a basic cost-saving slow panel-pan, the backgrounds are quite pretty. There’s something akin to Sailor Moon in terms of “they didn’t have to go quite that hard on the background art but they did anyway” in some scenes.

So. Slayers is on the list until the end of its first season. I’m looking forward to it!

[melodyalanaroster]

Miracle Romance

"Oh my god." Alana gasped with tears in her eyes. She stood in front of a large mirror and stared at herself. "I finally look like Serenity." She smiled as she left the dressing room and showed herself to Nathaniel. "You look amazing." Nathaniel smiled. Alana began to cry. “For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be like her... And now, even for a few moments... I can be her.” Tears made their way down her face as she smiled. "I guess I have to break your one rule." Nathaniel smiled. "You are not dying your hair black." Alana remarked. "I could wear a wig." Nathaniel replied. “But Nath... We talked about this...” Alana began. "I am not letting anyone else be your Endymion." Nathaniel interjected.

★

Throughout Alana's life, she had made it very clear that Sailor Moon had been a staple to her. It was a staple in the Roster family. By the time Alana reached the point of living in the Black Tower, at least four generations of the family enjoyed it. Including both primary sets of sisters, Margaret and little Ravenna.

She would play pretend with Viktor, Severina and Sam when they were children. She would always be Sailor Moon and Princess Serenity, Viktor was Tuxedo Mask and Prince Endymion, Severina was Sailor Venus and Sam was always Sailor Jupiter. The tree house in Alana's backyard was often the Moon Kingdom and they would frequently save the world. The adventures would always end with the power of love winning and the kids going into the house for a snack.

As the kids reached adolescence, they were forced to stop playing. But, their love of the anime was still prevalent. Alana always kept up with merchandise news and rumors about the release of a second anime. Lynne had made sure that Alana and Sam had their own copies of the manga, original anime and movies. Viktor happily talked about being Endymion to Alana’s Serenity until they were forced to break up. They wanted to continue the fantasy, but circumstance parted them. Severina was always happy to talk to everyone, and toss out ideas for a proper cosplay group, but Sam dampened the idea with the reminder that, as long as Viktor’s and Severina’s fathers remained in control of their lives, they’d never be allowed to do so.

When Lynne moved Alana and Sam to Amouria, things began to change. "She won't shut up about that Nathaniel guy." Viktor growled as he sat down next to Severina. “Viktor, you knew from the day one that you and Mels weren't allowed to be together. She has to find her Endymion." Severina sighed. “But seriously? aunt Lynne moves her and Sam to Amouria and they both immediately find guys they like?” Viktor complained. “You know Mels talks about other guys too. Right now, it could be Castiel, Lysander, Armin or Nathaniel.” Severina tried to make things sound better. “No, it's definitely Nathaniel. She barely mentions the others to me. Mostly about Armin playing games, Castiel being an ass, and Lysander losing his notebook. But she dotes on Nathaniel a lot.” Viktor retorted. Severina sighed. "Viktor... Do you remember what happened to Adonis and Beryl? Their envy got the best of them, they became evil and they died. Please keep a clear head.” She reasoned. "I am not like Adonis and Beryl." Viktor shot. “Viktor, I can't believe I have to be the voice of reason here. Both of our moms made it very clear that aunt Lynne, Mels and Sam have more freedom than we do. They're not blue bloods. They have to find their miracle elsewhere... Although, you and I will probably end up being paired together in an arranged marriage set up by our fathers.” She explained. Viktor thought for a couple of minutes and sighed. "I just thought..." 

The first time Nathaniel ever went into Alana's room, he instantly noticed her Sailor Moon dolls. "They're really hard to find these days... And Sailor Moon means a lot to me..." She said as she explained what the show meant to her. “It's a connection to my past, my closest friends, and my family.” She smiled. Nathaniel looked puzzled for a bit, then smiled. "That's really sweet.". He smiled. He noticed a picture of her, Sam, Severina and Viktor on a shelf and picked it up. “You all look like you’re having so much fun.” He mused. “Yeah... That’s the only time we’ve ever been able to dress up.” Alana sighed, wistfully. The kids were in makeshift Sailor Scout uniforms. Their hair wasn’t perfect, and Viktor’s tux didn’t fit right, but they didn’t care. The photo had been taken a few weeks before Cosima Chevalier’s death, and was one of the last happy memories they had as a group. “Its cute.” Nathaniel chuckled as he looked at her lovingly.

When her mother went into the hospital, Nate arranged it to where Alana and Lynne could sit and watch whatever they wanted in the room. Lynne suggested marathoning Sailor Moon. The days in the hospital weren't as bad when they watched the show and Lynne stayed stable, but there were days where not even fighting evil by moonlight could save the day. But, that didn't keep them from trying. It didn't take them long to get through all five seasons and three movies of the original anime. “I heard they're making a second anime that's supposed to be closer to the manga!” Alana attempted to be cheery. She was sure that she, Severina and Sam had told her about Crystal, but she really couldn’t think of anything positive to say.  “That's lovely! Do you know when it's set to come out?” Lynne asked. “I have no idea. I'm sure Toei will update us when they can!” Alana replied. “I hope its soon.” Lynne smiled. Suddenly, Lynne began coughing and her monitors started to go off. “NURSE! HELP!” Alana cried.

Even when Sam and Alana fought so badly that the Military and RDR felt it was necessary to create a treaty between the two organizations to prevent the sisters from ever being enemies again, it was actually their love of Sailor Moon that truly began to bring them together again. Severina had gotten wind of the fight and forced the girls to go to her house. “OW! RINI! YOU'RE HURTING MY EAR!” Alana whined. “Seriously! What the hell?” Sam whined. “I don't care if I'm hurting you two! This kind of fighting is unacceptable! You two are sisters and you know that this behavior will tear the family apart! I won't allow that!" Severina began to cry as she lead the sisters to her home theater. "What's all this?" Alana asked. "You've forced my hand, so I'm pulling out the big guns!" Severina cried as she grabbed a remote and turned on the screen. Sam and Alana looked at the menu then at each other. "Go figure." Sam grinned. "Of course." Alana grinned. The menu on the screen was the DVD menu to Sailor Moon R: The Promise Of The Rose. By the time the song “The Power Of Love” was playing, tears were streaming down the sisters' faces. "Mels." Sam began to choke. "Sam." Alana's voice wavered. They looked at each other, sadness and regret in their eyes. “Mels... I’m s-so s-sorry f-for what I-I said..” Sam sniffled. “I’m s-sorry t-too S-Sami...” Alana blubbered as she hugged Sam. “I love you.” Sam muttered as she held onto her sister. “I love you too.” Alana murmured. 

When Death’s Domain was getting set up, Alana dedicated a whole room to the series. “You’re seriously going to have an entire room dedicated to Sailor Moon?” Derek had asked. “Yes. Its going to have shelves for merch, posters, and a couch to relax on.” Alana mused. “Melody can have whatever she wants for her apartment. And, if it helps her destress, I most definitely approve.” The  Red Death announced. “Well, the majority of my collection will be in there. There’s going to be something Sailor Moon related in every room.” Alana smiled. “Of course there will be.” Derek facepalmed. “I’m not apologizing. I love Sailor Moon and I wanna showcase it in my home.” Alana laughed. “And I’m sure you’re going to do nothing but post about your collection for a while.” Derek rolled his eyes. “Obviously. Moonies have a good presence online.” Alana mused. “I thought “Moonies” were people who followed the Unification Church?” The Red Death inquired. “Yeah, they are called that, but Sailor Moon fans are also called “Moonies”. I know, in certain circles, I have to be sure to differentiate... But, its what we’re called.” Alana explained as she shrugged her shoulders. The room ended up becoming a paradise for fans of the series. Shelves filled with various collectibles, a couch decorated with two throw pillows and a blanket, a coffee table with two sets of coasters, a large rug, framed posters, plushies, moon and star lights along the walls and showering down the window and a tv mounted on one wall. In contrast to the vast majority of Death’s Domain, the room was an explosion of bright colors.

★

Nathaniel stepped into the restroom for a few minutes. Alana watched the door in anticipation. When he came out, he was running his hands along the circumference of the black wig, making sure it was in its proper place. The thought of how similar he looked to Viktor shot through her mind. She did her best to suppress that thought. "You don't even like cosplay..." She muttered as she smiled. "You do so much for me, I don't mind doing this for you." He grinned. "Nathaniel! I love you!” She cried as she wrapped her arms around him. “I knew I was going to see Princess Serenity, I didn't know Prince Endymion would be with her!” someone called from behind them. They turned around and saw Sam leaning in the doorway. “Sam! I look just like her!” Alana cried. "I wonder if I can get Ken to be Nephrite." Sam commented. “I'm sure he would be if you asked him. You two would be the perfect Jupiter and Nephrite!” Alana beamed. “I didn't know this was turning into a full on cosplay group!” Ken laughed as he walked up behind Sam. "Why not?" Sam asked. "I'm not sure Viktor would appreciate being Kunzite." Alana remarked. “He'd have to get used to it. Since Nathaniel is Endymion, that demotes Viktor to Kunzite.” Sam stated. "Right because when you guys were kids, Viktor was always Endymion." Nathaniel rolled his eyes. “Viktor has had years to accept his position in my sister's life. If he doesn't accept it, it will not end well for him.” Sam replied. "Do you think he will?" Nathaniel asked. "If he truly cares about her, he will." Sam nodded. “Viktor has known for years that our time ended long ago. Accepting his new position is painful for him, but he is well aware of the fact that it's something that he must do.” Alana explained.

A few minutes later, Renee walked into the room. “You both look magnificent! The girls and I have gotten a backdrop ready, would you two mind taking a few pictures?” She beamed. Alana smiled and turned to Nathaniel, a very hopeful look on her face. "Would you be okay with that?" She asked. Nathaniel nodded. "Sure." He grinned. They followed Renee into a room. "Oh my god! You two look utterly amazing!”, “You look beautiful Mels! Nathaniel, you look so handsome!”, “True Moon and Earth royalty!” the other girls cooed when they saw them. “I think we should do a cosplay group. I'm Jupiter and Rini will be Venus.” Sam commented when she walked in. "I volunteer to be Mercury!" Renee cheered. "I'll be Mars." Lyra smiled. "I'll be Pluto." Veronica beamed. "I don't mind being Saturn." Nora suggested. "I wonder if we could get Lucy and Noelle to be Uranus and Neptune." Sam pondered. "We could also see about getting Ravenna to be Chibi Moon." Alana proposed. “I think that would be fantastic. Who would be the rest of the Shitennou?” Lyra asked. "I could see if Armin could be Jadeite." Alana thought out loud. "Are we really setting up a cosplay group?" Nathaniel asked. Sam looked at Nath, as if he had said something really stupid. "Do you not realize how highly rated Sailor Moon cosplay groups are?" She asked. Nathaniel shook his head. “Sailor Moon cosplay groups are some of the most elite cosplayers in the anime world. Sailor Moon being one of the most iconic anime in history, it is instantly recognizable. The cosplayers take some of the most beautiful pictures, make some of the coolest videos, and even do events. They may not be unionized like Star Wars' 501st Legion, but they come together and coalesce with great ease whenever they recognize each other. Children who recognize them run up to them the same way that they do with superheroes, and typically, they are nice to them. It is a sisterhood of love and justice.” Sam explained. "Not to mention how fun it would be to finally be in one." Alana cooed. “We'd still need Zoisite.” Veronica stated. "I wonder if Derek could be him." Nora pondered. “Uh, guys? Can we please get to the photoshoot?” Renee asked impatiently. 

After posting for photos for what felt like an eternity, Nathaniel and Alana went into the changing room to get out of their cosplays. "You do look really beautiful in that." Nathaniel smiled as he took the black wig off. Alana blushed. "Do you really think so?" She asked nervously. “Of course. You look magnificent.” He blushed as he walked over to her and kissed her. “Thank you for doing this my love. It means the world to me.” Tears came to Alana's eyes as she spoke. “I love you my Melody.” Nathaniel cooed as he wiped a tear from her cheek. “I love you so much Nathaniel!” She mused as she threw her arms around him.

★

A few weeks later, in the early hours of the morning, several cars arrived at an old castle in the country. “This place looks amazing! Perfect for our photo shoot!” Alana cheered as she got out of the car. “Welcome to the Astarian Royal Palace Lady Melody!” A woman with long brown hair, sunglasses and wearing a knee length blue dress beamed as she walked up to them. “Mrs. Reynard, I presume?” Alana asked as she shook the woman's hand. “Yes ma'am. We spoke over the phone.” the woman smiled. “You are fully aware as to why we need the palace today. Am I correct?” Alana inquired. “Yes. For your little photoshoot. Cosplay, I believe.” Mrs. Reynard replied. “Yes. Sailor Moon. Its important the palace be the backdrop to this shoot.” Alana stated. “The photographer will be here in a few minutes to set up. They'll need time.” Mrs. Reynard explained. “That's fine. We need time to prepare.” Alana smiled.

After a couple of hours, the members of the group began to step out of their respective preparation rooms and into a lounge. Lynne Roster as Queen Serenity, Sam as Sailor Jupiter, Severina as Sailor Venus, Renee as Sailor Mercury, Lyra as Sailor Mars, Noelle as Sailor Uranus, Lucy as Sailor Neptune, Nora as Sailor Saturn, Veronica as Sailor Pluto, Ravenna as Small Lady Serenity, Viktor as Kunzite, Ken as Nephrite, Armin as Jadeite, Derek as Zoisite, Nathaniel as Prince Endymion and Alana as Princess Serenity. When the entire group was gathered in the lounge, tears filled Alana's eyes. “It's so beautiful!” she happily cried out. “Awe! Mels!” Severina cheered as she hugged Alana. “This was a fantastic idea!” Lynne beamed. "How long do we all need to wear this?" Armin asked, slightly uncomfortable. “Just a few hours. We're gonna get a TON of shots! ” someone replied as they walked up. It was a young woman with short platinum blonde hair, bright green eyes, and pale skin. She wore black pants, a white button up top and a deep blue beret. "You all look so regal!" She cheered. “Alright everyone, let me introduce you to you Catarina. She's a friend of mine from boarding school. She's the photographer I told you guys about!” Severina introduced. “Hello everyone! It is an absolute pleasure to meet you all!” Catherine bowed. ” Severina introduced. “Hello everyone! It is an absolute pleasure to meet you all!” Catherine bowed.

The photoshoot took several hours, and took place at various locations within the castle grounds. Lynne insisted on at least one family shot with Sam and Alana, and one with Sam, Alana, Severina, Ravenna, Ken, Nathaniel, and Viktor. “This is odd. I don't quite know the anime, but those characters aren't actually family, aren't they?” Catarina asked, curiously. “Not exactly... I mean, Queen Serenity, Princess Serenity, and Small Lady Serenity are three generations of lunar royalty, and Prince Endymion is Princess Serenity's husband and Sailor Chibi Moon's father... But, this shot isn't about the show's family. It's about their family.” Lyra explained. “Oh. That's sweet!” Catarina smiled. Alana insisted each “couple” got their own picture. Viktor wasn't too happy that his couldn't be with Alana, but he didn't mind posing with Severina. Kentin was very happy to have a romantic pose with Sam. "Nephrite and Jupiter look so fantastic!" Renee cheered. “Are you kidding? I've been wanting to do this set for a long time!” Sam beamed. “My favorite part of all of this. I hate this wig, but being your knight is worth it.” Ken mused as he looked at Sam lovingly. "This is awkward." Derek rolled his eyes when he and Renee had their turn. "Oh grow up!" Renee snapped. "Derek... You know what happens when Renee gets mad!" Alana laughed. “Yeah... She gets pretty scary.” Derek sighed. Everyone laughed as Renee forced Derek into a somewhat romantic pose. "But this is so awkward!" Derek whined. "Just do it!" Renee demanded. When their part of the shoot ended, Derek sat down and shot back a bottle of water. “That was weird. "Lyra, Armin, you're up!" Alana cheered. “Now this will be interesting! ” Ken chuckled. “And in Dragon Ball references Armin! Toei may own both franchises, but now is not the time to try to mix the two!” Sam ordered. “Awe come on! That takes part of the fun out of it!” Armin whined. “Armin, if we were doing a smaller photoshoot, I wouldn't mind a few “fun” shots. So please be more serious.” Alana urgent. "Fine." Armin sighed as he and Lyra took their places in front of the camera. 

“God that was exhausting! Who'd have thought that Cosplay would be THAT much work?” Nathaniel whined he crashed onto the living room couch at Death's Domain. "If you had cosplayed as the Winter Soldier when Armin and I cosplayed as Captain America and Black Widow at that Marvel Exhibition in High School, you would have known, first hand, A LOT sooner!" Alana shot as she crashed down next to him. "You still won't let me live that down?" He asked. "Nope." She chuckled. "Why not?" He asked. “Because Armin and I worked our asses off to do our characters justice and we were hoping you would join in on the fun. Especially considering how Natasha and Bucky get together in the comics several times, so it would have been a cute “couple's cosplay” for you and me. Not to mention how cosplay is more than just “wearing a costume”. When someone properly cosplays, they also wish to play the character, even for just a day. They temporarily escape reality and enter the one the character they're cosplaying as resides in. Weeks, months, and even years are spent building props and even hand making the items and outfits. There is a lot of blood, sweat and tears that go into it!” She explained. "I know you and Armin love it, but I don't think I could do it as often as you want to." Nathaniel sighed. “I get that. Its not for everybody. But, I'm thankful you did it for me.” Alana Mused. “I love you Alana. You always do so much for me... And it has been a long time since I've been the "prince" to your "princess." He grinned. "And I'm sure rubbing it Viktor's face added to your enjoyment.” She chuckled. "That did make it a bit more fun." He smirked. "I really wish you wouldn't antagonize him." She sighed. over you and find someone else. It's the same with Castiel. You're not going to be with him, so he needs to quit pining." He shot. "Yes, but with Castiel, you two have reached a mutual agreement, and he has angered me in such a way that I spat that truth with him." She chimed in. "Which makes the situation with Viktor worse. had your family and Severina telling him for years... Yet he insists." He huffed as he rolled his eyes. "Despite that, he is still one of my best and oldest friends. We were raised together and are still like family. Can you at least try to play nice with him?" She requested. Nathaniel looked at her annoyed. "Please! Pretty please! My sweet Endymion…” Alana begged as she playfully batted her eyes. He thought for a minute and exhaled. “Fine. ” He sighed. "Thank you." She mused. “But if he oversteps the boundaries that you and I put in place, I won't be so kind.” He stated. She cuddled up next to him and kissed his cheek. "I love you Nathaniel." She cooed. He put his arms around her and kissed her forehead. "I love you too Alana."

★

Several weeks later, after the images from the photoshoot had been posted and gone viral, an idea came to Severina's mind. She turned to Alana and Sam and smiled. "What?" Sam asked. “What if we did a cosplay concert?!” Severina cheered. “Nope. I'm not singing.” Alana stated. “PLEASE! We could choose a song from Sailor Moon and singing it at a convention!” Severina urged. “Really? What song would we even do?” Sam asked. “What about “Moon Effect”? It's sung by all of the scouts!” Severina cheered. “Please no. I don't sing.” Alana begged. "But, you wouldn't be alone... And we can't do it without our Sailor Moon!" Sam sneered. “Honey... You're such a beautiful singer! Please!!!!” Severina pleaded. “No…” Alana muttered. “Damn it Mels! Just do it! We all know that you sing when you're alone! On top of that, Nath, Rini, Viktor, Mom and I have all been telling you for years that we all think your singing is beautiful! So, just do it!” Sam snapped. "Don't forget how your teammates think so too." Severina added. Alana thought for a few minutes and huffed. “Fine. I'll do it.” She sighed. “Huzzah! Let's do it at Comic Con!” Sam cheered. "No! That’s too big a venue!" Alana pleaded "That's why it should be done there! You'll get over your stage fright on one of the biggest stages on the Convention Circuit!" Sam explained. "My babies singing a Sailor Moon song in full cosplay? I'd love to help you with it!" Lynne cheered as she walked up to them. "Fantastic! We'll make it a family project!" Severina smiled. Alana looked around at the other women, thought for a few minutes, sighed, and sheepishly grinned. “I guess the Roster Family women are putting on a show!”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Words cannot describe how badly I've wanted to write something Sailor Moon related to my story... 

Sailor Moon means a lot to me... It was my mom’s and my “thing”. No matter how much we fought, argued, and went at each other’s throats, we always bonded over the series. The first and last time I watched it in it’s entirety was with her just before her disease started taking its hold. She was the one who got me my first bits of merch, who was always happy to talk to me about it. The last Christmas gift I got her was a blanket with all the scouts on it, and she gave me plushies of Luna and Artemis. When mom died, Sailor Moon came to mean so much more to me. My aunt made me pendants with her ashes in them that look like the Legendary Silver Crystal, I got Pluto’s Garnet Rod tattooed on my back, and I became more adamant about collecting items. Each time I get a new item, I feel closer to her... There are times where I’ll even burst into tears because of Sailor Moon making me think of her....

Yes, I used the character sprite of Nathaniel that I edited from the Dark Chocolate Steward to make him look more like Endymion. I made his hair black, and edited his rings and earrings out.

Little tip... The bit about Adonis won't make sense unless you've read the Codename Sailor V manga.... If you’re not in the mood to read it, Adonis was a lowly Venusian soldier who was in love with his princess (Venus). Venus fell in love with Kunzite instead of him. He found her on Earth and cursed her to never be able to have love again, thus freeing more of her time up to focus on her duty as the leader of Princess Serenity’s Sailor Guardians.

This was originally going to be a Valentine's Day special for 2020. Then 2020 became the dumpster fire that it was and my real life needed more of my attention....

The majority of this does take place during the first year between University Life and Love Life. Before Nath and Alana go on their globe trotting adventure. The flashback section takes place at various points in time.

Credit goes to:

Naoko Takeuchi for Sailor Moon

@candysweetposts for the Princess Serenity Pack (seriously, thank you for going through with my request!)

@chinomiko and Beemoov for My Candy Love

[centrally-unplanned]

Allocating Your Aesthetic Budget: Sailor Moon Edition

Sailor Moon is a show that undoubtedly built a powerhouse of a visual brand. Should I even bother posting a screenshot of the sailor scouts, given that I am 100% confident anyone reading this can recall them instantly? I guess it won’t hurt: 

Anime is often really good at creating iconic designs like this, through repetition of the visuals. It is awkward in live action shows if characters just wear the same outfit every scene (what, they only own one outfit? Are they homeless/work in the tech industry?), but animation gives us enough aesthetic “distance”, an awareness that this isn’t accurate to real life, that you can buy into the conceit. By wearing the same outfit every time, it just becomes the character. Not to mention a studio can really save quite a few bucks by streamlining production with neat tricks like having only one character design to animate - when you are on a shoe-string budget, like pretty much every anime in the 90’s was, every cut corner counts.

What is interesting about Sailor Moon is that most of the time it doesn’t really use this conceit at all.

-----------

Episode 15 of Sailor Moon’s first season has, in its opening act, this shot of all of the Senshi (at the time) talking to the plot-of-the-day character, who clearly trains rock Pokemon in 16-bit caves in his off hours:

If you knew nothing about these three characters, you could probably infer about 80% of their personality just from their outfits. Usagi (the blond one in the middle, if that's necessary) is wearing:

Light pastel colours, with pink on top of that: girly, feminine, bubbly and breezy

Short-but-not-too-short of a skirt, and red heels: cares about fashion, wants to project an image of being a woman with a romantic hint to it

Long-twin tails w/ buns: Contrasting the shoes, she is still immature and childish. It also means she is the protagonist of an anime 

Rei (far right) rocks a very different look:

T-shirt and jean shorts, shoes over heels: sensible, practical, a bit sporty

Very short shorts, long black hair: Confident, a bit aggressive, and suggestive of a more overt sexuality

Ami (far left) settles into a more restrained vibe with:

Full, long, but sleeveless dress, bob-cut hair: Chaste, more conservative, but not to the point of prudishness; particularly with the length (and the hand posture, shielding her body) probably a bit shy

Monochrome blue colour in outfit & hair: reserved, serene, possessing a calm demeanor

I know I have seen the show already, but really none of these details are a stretch - this is just the language of fashion. And all of these outfits are outfits that the characters have never (or rarely) worn before up until this point. The cast of Sailor Moon, far from that animation conceit of “standard outfits”, change clothes all…

the….

time.

     I just randomly clicked on episodes to find these, it requires no hunting

And while it isn’t always as spot on as the top picture, they all in some way embody the language of visual design to speak to the personality of the characters. If you want to see more, check out one of the multiple tumblrs dedicated to the everyday clothing the Sailor Senshi wear, because of course those exist.

If this was a 2010’s Kyoto Animation show, pointing this out would be the end of it - every one of their shows has this level of impeccable detail. Sailor Moon is notable in that it is not at all that kind of show; the animation and designs in Sailor Moon take perpetual shortcuts to get the job done. I don’t think the transformation sequences need to be belabored - the way they permitted the team to recycle identical animation sequences, multiple times per episode, was surely a godsend to the production schedule. Yet not all of the budget limitations are so prettily masked:

     I’m sure they finished the background art in the...VHS release?

The show is filled with dirty animation, unfinished backgrounds, backgrounds that are a simple color gradient for no clear reason, and so on. It is clear that the Sailor Moon team did not have the resources for every detail - which is why the decision of what details they did choose to prioritize is so interesting.

----------

What is the point of Sailor Moon? I do believe that shows have “points”; and by that I don’t mean a message or theme but a core appeal to an audience, something specific that they will get out of the show. Almost every show appeals along multiple axes, and Sailor Moon is no exception, but I want to focus on one: aesthetic identification.

If you learn someone is a Sailor Moon fan, there is the obvious follow-up question you have to ask, namely “which Sailor Senshi are you?” It’s the which-Harry-Potter-house-are-you question of anime, a horoscope where you can choose your sign (in this case literally). The premise of this concept is not hard for media to execute on - it is just personality traits and aesthetics grouped together under a label, a basic building block of media and clickbait internet quizzes. Harry Potter, ironically, raised up its memetic question almost by accident, as its focus is so squarely on House Gryffindor that the others are almost forgotten; it was just so mind-bogglingly popular that it didn’t matter. 

Sailor Moon, however, takes this concept and allocates so much of its aesthetic budget into making it a centerpiece of the show. Sailor Moon herself is a klutzy, lazy romantic, Sailor Mercury is a shy, earnest bookworm, and so on, with none of them ever really becoming very complex characters. However, the show devotes itself to making you *feel* these archetypes as strongly and intricately as possible. All of those outfit changes are chosen because not only do real girls care about their outfits and can therefore identify more strongly with characters who do the same, but so they can constantly emulate their archetype in diverse, different ways. The show doesn't have the budget for intense action scenes, so after Sailor Moon engages in her hyper-serious transformation sequences, she proceeds to, nearly every time, bumble through the combat scenes like this:

Oh sure, the scenes are done this way because it is funny (and good comedy can be done on any budget - these shots are frequently still frames with motion lines!), but it is also done this way because Sailor Moon is a total screw-up, and if you identify with that it is validating to see someone “just like you” able to pull off wins despite it all. The transformation sequences are not only beautiful animation that showcases aspirational power, but are also crafted to highlight the personalities of the Senshi in question - unless you think aggressive, combative Rei got fire powers by coincidence. Half of the run-time of every episode is spent, not on the plot du-jour, but on light-hearted personal squabbles between the cast because those scenes are not just funny, but also allow for far more moments of character expression. 

All of that work pays off in building with the audience, not a connection with a character who reflects their identity in total, but a connection that reflects one aspect of their identity in an extremely deep (dare I say multifaceted?) way. I think if you were to describe Sailor Moon as a “shallow” show, you would actually be right to say so, in a sense. These characters will never have the true depth of personality, themes and so on of a more ‘adult’ show. But those adult shows have to spend their effort somewhere - for all that the themes of say Evangelion or Paranoia Agent are pristinely detailed and impactful, you aren’t ever going to be memorizing the moves of their transformation sequences. The way Sailor Moon committed so strongly to fleshing out the archetypes the Senshi stood for is, I think, one of the keys to how this cast of five became so iconic.

     Not even their school uniforms match! They had to spend time in-universe *justifying* this!

----------

A Final Note:

At least, everything I’ve said here applies to Sailor Moon at its peaks. The show, however, is not one without its stumbles, even in Season 1. This section doesn’t flow into the core essay too well, but I wanted to note it because if you were to watch Sailor Moon today, you might struggle to feel the dynamic outlined above. The biggest culprit here is the length - Season 1 is 46 episodes long, and sections of it most certainly drag. They also take a startlingly long time to introduce the cast - this choice builds tension around their arrival, but it also means the later Senshi get a lot less time to establish themselves. Sailor Venus in particular gets hamstrung by this - she is introduced and then immediately arc plot elements sweep the narrative, and so she is left as a hollow shell for some time. The pacing of the show is undoubtedly flawed.

I think Sailor Moon is a show that you do have to keep its time and place in mind for - namely, middle schoolers and anime nerds watching it on broadcast TV in the 90’s. As an adult you “get” the point of the show pretty quickly, and get satiated on it almost as fast. Watching it all in a few sittings only heightens this problem. For a younger audience, and one that is waiting for a week between episodes with no internet for plot reminders, all that extra time is needed to jog memories and build connections. And younger audiences just have that limitless commitment to the things they love! If you think no one could actually enjoy seeing the same transformation sequence for the 30th time, watch it with someone who would have died for this show when they were 10 and you will be disabused of that notion *very* quickly. 

Still, we can’t travel back in time - Sailor Moon is a show of its era. There are “filler-reduced” guides out there, though I caution that the plot of Sailor Moon is absolutely not the point of the show in comparison to the character dynamics, and so sometimes the filler is the best part (Cat-Rhett Butler is the best character in the show YOU KNOW I’M RIGHT). Certainly, however, some method must be used to cut down on its length. If you are going to be a first time viewer in adulthood, that reality should be kept in mind, and if you do accept it for what it is you can really appreciate its core appeal - and don’t forget to finish it off with a 1990′s era internet personality quiz to really wrap it up!

[sailormoonandme]

Minako Aino 30th Anniversary Episode Recommendations

Since ‘V’ is the Roman numeral for 5, why not celebrate the 30th anniversary of Codename: Sailor-V by revisiting a Minako spotlight episode from each of the five seasons of Sailor Moon?

My hopes with the following picks is to highlight some notable aspect of Minako’s character. 

Sailor Venus' Past: Minako's Tragic Love

Sailor Moon Episode 42/Sailor Moon Classic Episode 42

This episode is the best look the original anime gave us of Mina’s adventures as Sailor V and also highlights an ironically tragic element to her character. The Senshi of love sadly didn’t get the love she wanted.

Venus Minako's Nurse Mayhem 

Sailor Moon Episode 78/Sailor Moon R Episode 32 

As time went on Minako became more and more of a comedic character and this episode perfectly balances out that comedic element with Mina’s role as the Senshi of Love. The comedy comes from her clumsy nature but she’s only in those situations because she has so much love for her friends.

I Want to Quit Being a Sailor Guardian: Minako's Dilemma

Sailor Moon Episode 100/Sailor Moon S Episode 11

Although there is another, far more well known (and funnier), Mina spotlight episode from this season, it covers aspects of Mina’s characters that are also covered elsewhere and towards the end switches its focus away from Mina. This episode however is entirely built around Minako’s character. It explores the price of her heroism, particular regarding love, and makes excellent use of her talents at volleyball, a hobby established in the very first chapter of Codename: Sailor V

Storm of Love: Minako's Grand Two-Timing Plan

Sailor Moon Episode 141/Sailor Moon SuperS Episode 14

As the anime progressed a fun quirk was developed with Mina. This quirk could best be summed up as her ‘taking things too far’. When Mina set her heart on a task she rarely did it by halves. SuperS is often (perhaps unfairly) blasted as a season but I’ve found most fans agree this episode is both a highlight of it and in fact of the whole show. Like the Sailor Moon R episode, this outing builds comedy off the back of Mina’s reputation as the Senshi of love, except here the ‘love’ in question is not only romantic but also far from selfless. Comedy Gold ensues.

Go for Your Dream: Minako Becomes an Idol

Sailor Moon Episode 192/ Sailor Moon Sailor Stars Episode 26

The final Minako spotlight episode of the whole show. This episode explores Minako’s dream to be an idol, puts this into conflict with her duties as a Senshi and emphasises her relationship with Artemis, all whilst also building further to the final climactic episodes of the whole show. 

It’s neither the funniest Mina outing, nor one that emphasises her role as the Goddess of Love. However, in it’s own way it’s an all too appropriate. Not only was this the last Mina spotlight episode, but the last spotlight episode in general as the remaining episodes of the show were all very plot heavy. So our final ‘casual’ episode thematically closes the circle for Minako. 

She began as a normal girl who wanted to be an idol but then had Senshi duties thrust upon her by Artemis. And in being the first Senshi (and last to get a spotlight episode) she can sort of act as a surrogate for the others, who on some level also find their normal life ambitions blocked by their grander duties.

That’s all from me. Go ahead and celebrate Minako’s anniversary!

[cynthiaandsamus]

Custom Toonami Block Week 79 Rundown

Code Geass: Lelouch is establishing the official United States of Fuck Imperialism which is like the UN but actually does stuff, plus he has to deal with the fact that CC’s lost her memory and is acting like a demure slave girl harem choice from a VN. Charles is still trapped in the Human Instrumentality Shadow Realm so everyone figures this is a great time to unify everyone against Britannia. Kallen beats the shit out of Suzaku for being a dick to her all this time and the Knight of Ten is making his rounds because they realize they forgot to give him any buildup and he’s going to be a miniboss later so they have to cram all his being a dick personality into like five minutes while all the Knights of the Round assemble to prepare for an attack on Japan once the National Federation is formed. Llyod and Cecile for some reason enhanced the Guren for Suzaku even though he’s clearly more used to the Lancelot but apparently they enhanced it too much and made it a death machine like the Talgeese in Gundam Wing so Suzaku has to stick with the Lancelot. Looks like the Guren will have to sit and collect dust unless a certain pilot is rescued and then immediately has a convenient upgrade. Amazingly all the countries go along with everything Zero says and give up their militaries and have the Black Knights be the official military of the Federation. I don’t know how that works given that the Black Knights have been struggling to fight off one nation’s military idk how it’s supposed to substitute for a dozen nations’ military but I guess they conscript support and troops from the other nations or something. Charles comes back on the tv after the Federation is formed and is all “Awww what a cute little UN you have, fuck off bro.” which you’d think this’d be the perfect time for him to just out Lelouch as Zero and wreck the Black Knights’ morale but he doesn’t for some reason and they’re just gonna fight. Lelouch is freaking out and knows that having everyone want to murder the Britannian royal family includes Nunally so he calls Suzaku who just straight up goes “Bro cut the crap are you Zero or not?” and after so much plotting and scheming Lelouch just comes right out with it. Suzaki agrees to protect Nunally as long as Lelouch meets him alone at the Kururugi Shrine where this all began.

Inuyasha: This is another one of those Modern Day filler episodes which are always fun. There’s just something about Inuyasha running around in modern Japan being Spider-Man and saving people and catching bank robbers on the way to deliver Kagome’s lunch that’s so thoroughly entertaining. Basically Inuyasha spends this whole episode jittery that everyone’s so chill and ready to relax after Naraku just got away and is probably an inch from death but after a big adventure in the modern era where Kagome is as usual unprepared for her test, he ends up passing out on the bed after insisting a little battle with Naraku wouldn’t exhaust him. It’s a really cute little episode to let everyone bide some time and reflect on the past arc now that we’re starting a new wave of filler before we get to the Band of Seven and Mt. Hakurei stuff.

Yu Yu Hakusho: The first match of the tournament is about to begin and Botan, Shizuru, and Keiko come in with Koenma who is sick of baby jokes and puts on his bishonen disguise to impress everyone. There’s some neat lore about how they gave Koenma the guest team every year to bribe him into not shutting down the tournament without giving him anything of value and how the bloody show of the Dark Tournament pacifies the demons so they kill fewer humans, so that’s cool. Since Yusuke is still passed out, Kuwabara is de facto Captain and decides on simple one on one matches while the other team Captain just kinda roasts an eight of the crowd to see if it’ll wake Yusuke up. Kuwabara’s in the first match versus Prototype Killua, complete with afterimages and yo-yo tricks. They size each other up for a while and Kuwabara shrugs off getting his fucking neck broken surprisingly well while they go back and forth with “Well I can track YOU better” for a while. Togashi really loves his yo-yos of death so those have Kuwabara on the ropes and turn him into a fucking kite ready to slam back down into the arena, so yeah, Kuwabara’s having a rough time of it.

Fate Zero: Waver’s been having strange dreams about Iskandar, and not the ones people usually have about him. So he goes to get a basic history lesson on the historical figure that’s been chilling on his couch for a few weeks and spending all his money on xbox live arcade. They also go through all the ridiculously obvious historical inaccuracies and Iskandar’s just like “idk bro, I’m here so the book must be wrong” which is hilarious because Fate also does this with more modern historical figures that we have pictures of and shit so they basically sit there saying all historians have no idea what they’re talking about and gaslighting the field of history as a whole. On the way back Waver’s upset that Iskandar’s so awesome that it basically takes any effort on his part to win and it won’t be an actual achievement despite the fact that they’ve taken out like… one servant, MAYBE, and most of the other historical figures are equally over the top. But still Iskandar says that if your aspirations are big enough it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, everyone’s tiny in the grand scheme of things and clawing at greatness you can’t truly perceive is what matters. Also Caster and his boy have found the wreck they made of their workshop of dead bodies and are kinda fucked up about it but also ready to fuck up more people because God sucks or some shit. So Caster summons a Bloodborne monster which you think more people would notice and mention during Shirou’s time, like nobody in UBW ever said “Hey remember like seven years ago when a giant Bloodborne monster appeared in the river?” so I’m guessing there’s some kind of perception blocking going on. But yeah everyone’s gonna jump on the Bloodborne Monster next time for the season premiere.  

Konosuba: So we pick up where we left off and Kazuma is working off his debt by… killing more toads. Wow this world really is like a video game, we get the same five enemies over and over again. However they’re fucked without Darkness throwing herself into monster orifices looking for a good time so Yunyun has to save them. We already met Yunyun in the OVA so it’s kinda weird to be re-introduced to her here in basically the same way but their relationship is basically like Gai and Kakashi if they only did the lame dorky challenges Kakashi suggested when he’s too lazy to think of a good one. Also there’s a cat now, I don’t think that really comes to anything, just a scene of Megumin going “we have a cat now” and everyone’s like “kay”. Kazuma and Megumin play Naked Chicken to see who can get more naked before the other backs down and end up taking a bath together because they’re both stubborn assholes. Also we get a quick snippet of Yunyun and Megumin’s backstories which you can basically make Yunyun’s the swing scene from Naruto (idk why Yunyun is bring out the Naruto references in me today) and Megumin is stealing bread like Les Miserables in increasingly bizarre and disgusting ways because she’s ridiculously poor or some shit.

Sailor Moon Crystal: So turns out that Usagi and Mamoru BOTH had their shots with the ‘fucks everything up’ sword with a pocketwatch and… the discarded gems of the four knights? Idk how that works given they were humans and also dead but what baffles me more is that both Usagi and Mamoru very obviously did not get hit by the sword but decided to fall down dead and not move for a couple minutes despite their shots very much being blocked and there being no blood. Anyway Queen Metalia has the crystal, bullshit is happening, 1000 years of darkness, you’ve seen Xiaolin Showdown, you know the drill. The remaining four Guardians get a cute little flashback of Usagi saying what she likes about them and then they give up their lives to revive her inside the dark energy blob of Queen Metalia and crystals and lights and shit happens and swords and wands are pulled out of nowhere and you know how a final boss goes, they beat it with the power of believing in themselves and shit like that. Also apparently the only difference between sealing Metalia away and killing her is hitting the giant bullseye on her forehead so yeah, hopefully she’s down for good this time. I don’t want to complain because this show was genre-defining but it’s hard to find things to say about something so generic and milktoast, it’s the Seinfeld problem where there’s been so many more interesting iterations that it’s just kinda “get on with it already” at this point. The only real markedly noticeable thing about it is how plainly and unashamedly it is about being a power fantasy for teen girls, and there’s something to that, harmless power fantasies can be fun but it just feels like the physical mechanics of this kind of progression being “She feels this shit REALLY HARD” is less exciting than some of the alternatives

Durarara!!: It’s the big Masaomi backstory episode and we get the whole deal of how he formed the Yellow Scarves and got into a relationship with Saki because Izaya wanted to orechestrate a gang war because that’s what Izaya does all day is orchestrate gang wars. It’s kind of amazing how many kids in this show are like “I don’t know how it happened but one thing led to another and suddenly I was at the head of one of the largest gangs in the city” like they kinda really yadda yadda over how that actually happens. But anyway Saki gets hurt in the gang war and Kadota’s gang has to save her because Masaomi’s adrenaline wears off at the last second and he can’t try and rush in and save her. I mean Dota’s van got there first anyway so how much he’d have been able to help would be doubtful but he feels bad about not even being able to try and Izaya says that fear and failure of his past will dominate his future actions which is exactly what he’s doing by letting his paranoia and frustration lead him to a war on the Saika army. Dota-chin tells him to face up to it and stop running or live with the shame of lying to Saki but Masomi can’t do that and his shame and determination to reverse the situation leads everyone into chaos as Anri discovers his secret.

[recentanimenews]

INTERVIEW: Jeff Trammell Speaks on Craig of the Creek and its Anime Influences

  In celebration of Black History Month, Crunchyroll is releasing interviews with prominent Black figures across the anime world! Stay tuned for more announced features, or donate to Black Girls Code, which educates young girls of color to encourage careers in computer science and technology!

  Anime has had and continues to have a huge impact across the globe, and that impact can be found more and more in Western animation! Kids who watched anime on Toonami are growing up and creating series of their own that take with them that seed of affection for the medium. One such creator is Jeffrey Trammell, the head writer of Cartoon Network's Craig of the Creek. Cameron Trentalange, our Associate Manager of Social Video, was lucky enough to talk with Jeff about his work on the series, his love of anime, and how the two are intertwined. See the video interview below, followed by a complete and uncut transcription of the full interview!

        Crunchyroll: Thank you for taking time to meet with us. We’re really excited to be chatting with you today. To get things started, if you could just introduce yourself to our audience, your name and what it is that you do.

  Jeffrey Trammell: My name is Jeff Trammell and I am the head writer, as well as a voice actor, on Craig of the Creek.

  How has anime influenced or inspired your work?

  How hasn't anime influenced my work? It’s been such a big part of everything we do. Everything I do as a writer … We're constantly thinking back to the storytelling, the kind of one arc, one-off episodes, as well as arc-long stories ... it’s really allowed us to use anime as a bit of a blueprint for the stuff we wanna do on Craig. Anime is a big part of the show. A lot of people on the crew grew up watching things like Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon and Evangelion. Samurai Champloo gets brought up a lot, too. So, any chance that we can get to kinda pay homage to those classic shows as well as the other stuff we’re into, we kinda jump at the chance to do.

  via Cartoon Network

  That’s awesome. Are there any other specific elements that reflect your experience with anime in Craig of the Creek or your other works? I know the Elders of the Creek seem to be very pulled from people you might meet in the fandom.

  I would say I'm a bit more of a casual fan. There's people on the crew that are certainly closer to the Elders of the Creek. I'm more like Craig in that I have my own certain fandoms that I'm into. But yeah, anime is such a big part of the show in the weirdest ways — every episode has something we're sneaking in. Our crew early on would meet to do anime nights, so we would watch The Castle of Cagliostro or Totoro ... stuff like that. It's very ingrained in our crew.

  That’s awesome. That sounds like a super fun environment to be a part of.

  It’s really great when your workday ends and you’re just hanging out watching anime and playing D&D. Like there’s no complaints on our end.

  Craig of the Creek often dips its toes into referencing anime, whether it's a background gag or, as you mentioned, an entire episode-long narrative like "Bring Out Your Beast." It sounds like, as a community, you and the team are largely inspired by anime. Was that kind of a coincidence that everyone was into anime or was that intentional in the structuring of the team?

  Our crew consists of a lot of younger writers and creators, so naturally the stuff we grew up watching included so much anime and the stuff aired on Toonami. Even the co-creators, Matt Burnett and Ben Levin are like, really big into this stuff. You go to their office and there's like the entire Evangelion set, or all of Dragon Ball. I think they really created a show full of people who they wanted to be around, who were all going to tell really fun stories. I think it just happened that anime was such a big part of everyone's life on the show.

  It’s kind of amazing to see how much anime has influenced so many people throughout the industry. You mentioned that you guys would do different movie nights for watching anime. Do you have any specific anecdotes or moments from working with the teams where you intentionally wrote an anime reference into the script and someone pointed it out later, or maybe an animator just added something entirely without it even being in the script? Are they any fun little kind of instances like that?

  Yes. There’s a lot of instances where I’ll write something in the script and then at the boarding stage, the boarders would take it so far out. We did an episode where the Elders get trapped under Elder Rock and there's a bit about them having a very cool replica shovel from an anime called Shovelmaster Gorobi Q that I put in there. Immediately, it just became this whole other thing where the basis of the show was that this person's soul is trapped in the shovel, so if you use it, you can tap into their spirit. One of the Elders is in love with the character who inhabits the shovel ... it's wild! I never expected that whole story to come out of this one line I wrote.

  via Cartoon Network

  That's incredible. One of my favorite little background gags is one of the posters for a show called Sadboy Pilotgeddon.

  Yes.

  Was that written into the script, or was it an element someone else wrote in?

  That was our storyboard artist Ashley Tahilan who is usually the impetus for those crazy moments in the show. She put in Sadboy Pilotgeddon really early on, and I think she's also the reason Shovelmaster Gorobi Q became the absurd thing that it is.

  I love it. In one of the very early episodes, there was a character who was holding up a volume of manga and says, "you read manga backwards." I feel like I have said that verbatim as a kid!

  via Cartoon Network

That was a really fun moment. We were trying to introduce the ninja kids who just hang out and read manga. We thought  when you're introducing someone to manga, you can't start without saying, "Well, ya read it backwards!" We decided we NEEDED to put that in the show.

It was very true to life. I love those little moments. Speaking more generally, what does it mean to be a head writer on a TV show?

  Being a head writer means a lot of different things depending on the show. On Craig, it's nice because I get to be the link between the writing and the storyboard artists. Our show is very cohesive in that it's very storyboard driven. That means we take the premise and outline and then hand it off to the storyboard artists, and they draw everything, including dialog. Then we come back together and they'll pitch their work to us. We'll make sure that we pitch ideas and jokes, and really punch it up to make it stronger. We have this kind of cohesion where everyone gets to really leave their stamp on the episode. Being a head writer means overseeing that process, the writing room, recording, assisting with directing, sometimes getting in on editing. It's so much more than just running the room. It's been a really cool experience for me. I get to follow the stories not just from their initial creation, but all the way to their end, which has been really cool.

That sounds so incredible. So, how did you break into being a head writer, as opposed to different writing roles?  

I actually have only been a writer here in LA for about five years. Before that, I was a security guard at Target, oddly enough. I've always had an interest in writing, and I wanted to break in, but I didn't know how. I was able to find out about a yearly contest called the Nickelodeon Writing Program, where you would enter scripts and, out of around 2,000 applicants, they choose up to four people every year. They move you out to LA, and you get to work at Nickelodeon as a writer. You get to learn, you get paid, and you get all these amazing perks. I got to take improv and sketch writing, just all of these incredible things. When I moved out here once I finished up at Nickelodeon, I eventually found my way to Cartoon Network. I started working with Matt and Ben on Craig of the Creek. I was a staff writer for the first year, and by the second season, I was promoted to head writer. I've been very fortunate, the way I got in. I think it was a lot of "right place at right time," but also luckily having the skills to back it up that led to this quick rise. 

  That's amazing, what an incredible journey!

  Thank you!

  To be selected from over 2,000 writers — I think that says a lot about the talent you have.

  Thanks, that's really cool. 

  In addition to Craig of the Creek, I know you have also worked on shows like The Owl House, and you mentioned that you spent some time at Nickelodeon. What is it like to write specifically for animation?

  Writing for animation is tough because there's a lot of visual storytelling you have to be aware of. You are also writing for someone else. I think if you're writing novels or similar stuff, you can write the story exactly as it is in your mind and someone else can read it and see where you're coming from. When you're writing for animation, though, you have to be aware that whatever you write, someone else has to draw. Someone else has to design. Everything you write is going to be on someone else, so it's tempering all of those expectations you have for your own writing. You have to tell a fun, captivating story without pushing it too far, or making every shot a crowd scene. Then people would have to animate 50 people running by in every shot. It's a very intricate level of storytelling where you have to really see what the most important parts of the story are and convey that.

  That's an interesting point. I think there's this sense with animation of like, "Well the options are limitless because I can just draw it!" But then there's the realization of, "Ah, well that burden is laid on a bunch of people who actually have to animate the thing."

  Yes.

  I imagine there's a good amount of give and take there. Did you always want to break into animation, specifically? Has animation been a passion for you?

  Yes and no. I mean, I've always wanted to work in animation because I've been a fan my whole life. A lot of people have that teenage phase where they think, "I'm too adult for cartoons," and they kind of move away from it, but I've never done that. I've always appreciated animation. But I also appreciate live-action. The first time I got to work on an animated show was Harvey Beaks at Nickelodeon, and I really got to work with that crew and see everything that went into creating 11 minutes of television. It's so much work from so many people. It's like watching a conveyor belt in action. Seeing those things really laying out in front of me gave me a brand new appreciation, even more so. Since then, I've known animation is definitely where I want to be. 

  via Cartoon Network

  That's so cool. Craig of the Creek features such a wide cast of characters. How do you and the team approach writing for so many different voices from different backgrounds? I think the thing that's been really successful for us has been to reach beyond our writing room. At the end of the day, we only have so many experiences and can only write from so many perspectives. Our crew is dedicated to representing perspectives people may not have gotten to see growing up. So, we reach beyond our room to the crew. People are welcome to share their stories, welcome to pitch ideas for stories and characters. We really want to make sure that at the end of the day, we're making a show that people are not only proud to work on, but that they're excited to show it to their family and friends. 

Is it common for writing teams to be structured in a way where they have opportunities to work across other departments, or is that harder to find?

  It really depends on the show. I've been on shows where the writers only hang out with writers and the artists only hang out with artists. Coming from Harvey, which was a very closely connected group, I knew that was something I wanted when I was starting on Craig. Matt and Ben had come from Steven Universe, so I knew they wanted the same things. Early on, we really made an effort to make sure our group was close and our crew was excited to hang out, to talk and share ideas. It's kinda been ingrained from the very beginning of the show. 

  I love hearing about the kind of collaborative environment. So, I know you've lended your voice to one of the characters on Craig, and that you've done voiceover for other cartoons as well. Did you always have an interest in voice acting, too?  

I've wanted to be a voice actor since I was a kid! I was definitely that one kid who recognized voices in shows. I was like, "Oh that's Phil LaMarr!" I immediately knew! I always thought it was cool — it was this way to embody a character. You really get to step into their shoes and become someone else in a way that's similar to writing. I've wanted to be a voice actor forever, so it was fortunate that I finally got that opportunity on Craig. It was really nerve-wracking, though! You go into the recording booth and it's really quiet, and you're immediately aware of every single noise, like the weird click your tongue makes when you speak. Everything is hyper-focused. But it's been really cool. I appreciate them giving me the opportunity to really get to do it on Craig. I was able to transition into other opportunities by doing voices on this show called The Fungies! at Cartoon Network. I have a blast every time!

You touch on something really interesting, which is how writing and voice acting both go hand in hand in terms of getting into the head of a character. What have you learned about writing through voice acting and vice versa?  

The thing I've learned about writing from voice acting is that, even if I'm not sure of a joke while writing it, actors are so talented that they can usually deliver it in a way I wasn't expecting. They'll usually knock it out of the park every time. It's also really taught me to write to someone's strengths — just knowing that one actor is really good at these frantic moments lets me know that I can really play them up in the writing. Or maybe another actor is great at delivering heart and emotions, so we can make sure to nail their speech. Being in the booth really taught me that voice acting is so difficult, so I want to make sure we're setting up everyone who enters that booth for success with the best script we can give them, the best lines we can give them, and really set them up to knock it out of the park. It's this weird sort of symbiosis where you each try to prop one another up. Going from each side, from one side of the glass to the other, has shown me that I think we both just want to make sure we're. giving the actors the best material we can, and actors just want to provide us with the best performances that they can. 

  via Cartoon Network

  It's really interesting to hear how that all comes together, and how both of those perspectives are sort of similar in some ways. I'm curious, how did the conversation about you voice acting in Craig of the Creek start?

  I was able to find my way into the booth by begging a lot! Haha, not really, but it's one of these things I had to speak up early about and just say, "Just so you guys know, this is something I'm passionate about. This is something I've really wanted to do." I couldn't be afraid to take those risks, even in a room where I'm pitching a character, putting myself out there with a goofy voice, hoping that I'm impressing them with the passion I'm giving these characters. Luckily, it worked out, and I think they appreciated my drive and how much respect I have for the craft of voice acting. I was also taking voice acting classes as well, so I was really not shy in letting them know that this was something I seriously wanted to pursue. 

I know on Rocko's Modern Life, one of the writers just kept inserting his voice audition in the pile, and finally, someone was like, "This one is really good, who is this?" and he was like "It's me!" I'm always curious about those little moments for everybody. 

  I wish I had known about that story, I might have gone that route!

  The sneaky route!

  Plan B, you know.

  Another question I wanted to ask is, how does it feel to know that people resonate with your work? Your writing and acting contributions to the show are excellent, and the series is a lot of fun for both kids and adults. There's something about it that just captures the charming innocence of being a kid with a big imagination. Everything is whimsical, but there is a lot of grounded humor and references to pop culture we all love. What does it feel like to have your work reach so many people?

  First, thank you for all of those kind words about the show, I really appreciate that. It means so much. I think it's one thing when you're working on something and you get caught up in it and think of it as a day to day gig. But Craig has never felt like that. Early on, it felt very special. The crew felt special, and we were all proud of what we were making. We were all hoping that people would relate to it and really have fun watching it. So, seeing everybody watch all of these moments where we have Sparkle Cadet and people really resonate with a black magical girl in a Western animated show ... Seeing people resonate with our various Slide the Ferret gags which may or may not be related to Sonic — I cannot say legally. Seeing the very heartfelt stuff, the family stuff, the stuff you don't see a lot, and watching people see those things and feel good and feel validated ... it's been incredible. It means so much, more than I can really put into words. It's just a really good feeling, and I feel proud of the stuff we're doing and continuing to do. 

via Cartoon Network

  You and the team are doing awesome work. One of my friends recommended the show to me a while ago, and once I started watching I was like, "Yeah, I get it." There's just something really nice about it. Also, Jeff Rosenstock's music is just great.

  Jeff's the best! Jeff's the absolute best. Every time he sends some music in, I'm like, "How do you do it?"

  Do you guys work together at all? Is there a "meeting of the Jeffs"?  

Oh, all the time. I'm very fortunate to call Jeff a friend. He's one of the coolest people I know. I think we're constantly in awe of each other, which makes for an interesting friendship. He's so talented and so funny, and he makes everything look so easy. It's kind of unfair how talented he is, but I couldn't be a bigger fan of Jeff, he's great. 

  Something I was curious about is if you had any influence on the music. The music really makes the scene sometimes, and then you have the opening and ending songs. Do you work with the music at all as a lead writer, like finding the right vibes for a scene or writing lyrics with Jeff? There's an episode where Craig sings in front of a live crowd, and I was curious what the creative process was like on an episode like that.

  Jeff and I worked together on a musical episode called "In the Key of the Creek," where Jeff came to town. He was living in New York at the time and came to town for a week, and would sit in the writing room while we were breaking the story. He would just write these songs or he'd go home and like three hours later send us a demo saying, "Yo! I came up with this today." And it's like ... how?! This is incredible! Usually, Ben Levin, one of the co-creators, works directly with Jeff, but he's been very open to working with the rest of the crew. The episode you mentioned, "Vulture's Nest" ... I believe Tiffany Ford, one of our directors, wrote that song with Jeff. He's very open and accessible to working with the crew for songs and different episodes, which has been really cool.

  via Cartoon Network

  I have to circle back to this ... you mentioned Slide the Ferret — who may or may not be related to any other legal entity — but UNRELATED TO THAT ... As someone who is a huge fan of Sonic the Hedgehog (and also ferrets, coincidentally), Slide the Ferret really speaks to me. I was like, "This rocks. I love everything about this." I'm curious, was Sonic a big part of your childhood? Or the childhoods of the rest of the staff?

  Yes, Sonic 2 was the first video game I ever beat, actually. I would always get to the plane level and then have to hand it off to my sister. I remember when I finally beat Metal Sonic and Robotnik, and I felt like I was the greatest gamer in the world. So much of our crew has similar feelings about Sonic. Slide the Ferret came into the show very early. I think Matt and Ben came up with the character very early into the show. And then, I think the second the crew was like "oh, this is our Sonic and we can create all the lore?" it just got out of hand. There's like this show within the show loosely based on Dragon Ball where there's these things called the Chaos Orbs that you collect. They're like the Chaos Emeralds but we treat them like Dragon Balls.

  It's been great! It's been so cool to watch our design team really take that world and expand it even more. There's this character named Claus the Badger who is the coolest looking character I've ever seen. I keep pestering them to let me voice him, so we'll see how that goes. 

  That sounds like so much fun! I always love whenever there's a Slide moment. I'm just like, "Yup! I'm here for it." I'd like to know, what are some of your favorite anime?  

Oh man, okay. One of my favorites is My Hero Academia — shout out to my buddy Zeno who plays Hawks as well as The Green Pancho on Craig of the Creek. I've been enjoying Fire Force, The Promised Neverland, I love Dragon Ball Z, of course. What else ... Samurai Champloo — I used to watch that one every week with my dad, so it's special for me. I could name stuff all day, and I know I'm forgetting some. After I'm done, I know I'll be like, "Aw crap! Why didn't I mention this ..." But these are the ones I'll go with.

  Is there any message you want to share with fans of your work?

  Yes! If you want to see more, please find me on Twitter @MrJeffTrammell. I post about my work too much there. I would also say that there is so much more fun stuff on the way. If you are a fan of Craig of the Creek and you love anime, there may or may not be an episode coming up in which the Elders do an anime convention. It may also feature Slide the Ferret and a cavalcade of characters from that video game. Definitely keep your eyes peeled for that.

  This has been wonderful! It's been really cool to hear about your background with the show and how you broke into the industry. Thank you. 

  Thank you so much to Crunchyroll for having me!

  via Cartoon Network

    You can follow Jeff Trammell on Twitter @MrJeffTrammell. Craig of the Creek airs on Cartoon Network and is available on HBOMax and Hulu.

  By: Guest Author

[medea10]

My Review of To Heart

How did I get into this anime? I have been curious about this anime for a straight-up decade now and the randomizer decided to bless me with something not incest. Thank you Arceus!

Since she was young, Akari Kamigishi has been best friends with Hiroyuki Fujita. Because of kind acts he did for her as a child, Akari has stayed by Hiroyuki’s side. Now that they’re both in high school, something has changed in Akari and it feels more like she’s falling for her childhood friend. Will Akari find happiness with her best friend or will she end up friend-zoned?

And because this is a harem, there are quite a few girls hanging around Hiroyuki throughout the two seasons. Just to name a few, we have the brash friend, Shiho. Then there’s the tomboy type, Aoi. The very silent type, Serika! And then there’s the robotic maid, Multi. Yes, you read right. A robot! This is Japan after all! Oh yeah, there’s also the class rep, an actual American girl, and a quiet girl with supernatural powers.

Akari, girl, you need to step up your game if you’re up against all these chicks!

BETWEEN THE SUB AND THE DUB: Before I discuss all that, let’s go down the ugly story about To Heart for fans in the U.S. The first season (and only the first season) was dubbed by RightStuf (at least I’m certain about that). Everything else wound up undubbed and even unlicensed. To Heart was kind of left in the dust due to what happened when the first season was supposed to release in the U.S. A lot of damaged material was the culprit and this came during the time when animation was transitioning from animating using cells to going digital. So to sum that up, the anime debuted in Japan around 1999, Rightstuf licensed To Heart in 2004 with a release in 2005, and the actual release was delayed to 2007. And in back-in-those-days times, that’s pretty fucking long. I can see why they didn’t want to bother with this series after it took all that trouble to remaster a series many were calling only “OKAY”.

Now then, on with the good stuff! I went in thinking that this was a Geneon reject, but was blown out of my ass to hear voices from New York! Lisa Ortiz, Jessica Calvello, Veronica Taylor, Wayne Grayson, and my personal favorite (not who you’re thinking), Carol Jacobanis! Yeah, surprisingly I didn’t hear Ted Lewis here. But Jacobanis is my second favorite in the NYAV group. I am in nostalgia heaven! Yes folks, these were the same people to give life to many characters from Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Berserk, His and Her Circumstances, Bakuman, Gravitation…OH, gambled and lost! Well, you get my meaning! Thankfully this dub wasn’t as horrific as Gravitation (despite Hiroyuki’s voice actor is well-known for something from that particular anime). Here’s what you might recognize these folks from!

JAPANESE CAST: *Akari is played by Ayako Kawasumi (known for Ursula on Pokemon DP, Saber on Fate/Zero, Izumi on Beyond the Boundary, Aoki on Bakuman, Laura on Index, Yoshida on Shakugan no Shana, and Nodame on Nodame Cantabile)

*Hiroyuki is played by Kazuya Ichijo (known for Hoteye on Fairy Tail and Zafila on Nanoha)

*Shiho is played by Chieko Higuchi (known for Tomo on Azumanga Daioh)

*Multi is played by Yui Horie (known for Hanekawa on Monogatari, Tohru on Fruits Basket, Hanyuu on Higurashi, Minorin on Toradora, Charla on Fairy Tail, Chie on Persona 4, Maria on Umineko, and Riki on Little Busters)

ENGLISH CAST: *Akari is played by Debora Rabbai (known for Mika from Gravitation, Rika on His and Her Circumstances, Leina on Queen’s Blade, and Boogiepop [original])

*Hiroyuki is played by Rich McNanna (known for Jack Walker on Pokemon Movie 9 and Shuuichi on Gravitation)

*Shiho is played by Jessica Calvello (known for Prima on Pokemon, Hange on Attack on Titan, Excel on Excel Saga, Kanako on Maria Holic, Tsukino on His and Her Circumstances, and Aika on Aria the Animation)

*Multi is played by Tara Sands (known for Richie on Pokemon, Soujirou on Rurouni Kenshin, Mokuba on YGO, Badiane on Sailor Moon SuperS movie, Tori on Pokemon Movie ~ Deoxys, and Filia on Slayers Try)

SHIPPING: So remind me what genre this anime is!

HAREM!

We’re watching a harem! But it’s more slice of life than anything romantic. There are a lot of love interests for Hiroyuki throughout the series. It’s just that it doesn’t develop as much as one might think (except for maybe Akari) in season one.

And it’s so easy to think that Hiroyuki is the object of every one of these ladies’ desire. Serika waits for him to come to the club room. Aoi finds him helpful, as does Tomoko and Lemmy. Multi got attached to Hiroyuki’s headpats. As for Akari, she’s got quite the teddy bear collection because of Hiroyuki. After watching all of season one where Hiroyuki is hanging with all of these ladies individually, I thought there would be a moment of jealousy from one or more of these girls. Much to my surprise, that was not the case. It didn’t go down any of those bad-end routes you’d see with things like Kanon, Clannad, or God-forbid, School Days!

But then season two happened…

Ooh boy! First of all, Hiroyuki ended up getting his first confession of love from the most unlikely person ever. Kotone wasn’t even a contender in the first season as she had other issues. In fact, didn’t she have feelings for Masashi in season one? But halfway in the season, she gets ballsy and confesses to Hiroyuki. He rejects her and thankfully it didn’t get ugly (except Akari heard it and got jealous). Lemmy, I also thought wasn’t in play, but here we are! She was apparently childhood friends with Hiroyuki and brought it up when confessing her feelings. That unfortunately came at a bad time as he’s in a quarrel with Akari so he dismisses her.

And then there’s Akari! She’s been able to put on a smile and kind of be a wall-flower whenever Hiroyuki is doing something with one of the other girls. And most of the season, we see him mostly with Aoi and Multi. Thankfully, Aoi never showed romantic interests in Hiroyuki. I much prefer Aoi x Kotone if you want to know the truth. But halfway into season two, jealousy came in like a drunkard in a bar. Akari was definitely pissed when she saw Kotone confess to Hiroyuki and would get jealous seeing Hiroyuki and Multi together so much.

Oh yeah, good old Multi! Yes Multi loves Hiroyuki. Now does Hiroyuki love Multi back? It’s complicated! Because of Multi, Hiroyuki ends up pursuing a career in robotics and as a result spends quite a bit of time with her (pissing Akari off in the process). But because Multi is kind of a malfunctioning robot, who the hell knows if she’ll even remember being with Hiroyuki.

Now are there other boys interested in any of these other girls? The only other boy that has any prominent screen time is Masashi. It’s just that after season one, he’s only seen every so often because he’s busy with soccer. But in season one, it almost felt like Kotone was admiring him from the distance. Don’t get excited because that was just a one-and-done sort of thing before Kotone set eyes on Hiroyuki. Actually, Masashi does reveal his fondness for Akari (at literally the worst possible time). But it seems like Masashi ends up with Shiho in the end. So…whatever!

Hiroyuki DOES end up with someone. Just go down to the end of season two to get that answer.

ENDING TO SEASON ONE: The last two episodes of this season consist around Shiho deciding that she wants to throw a Christmas party at an old hangout from her middle school days! But this isn’t the only nostalgic kick she feels. Shiho ends up remembering the first day she met Hiroyuki and after he took care of a wound she got, Shiho starts seeing Hiroyuki in a new light. Yeah, up until this point, Shiho and Hiroyuki’s relationship could be summed up by saying they both give each other shit every day. Then you have Akari, who is also feeling a little nostalgic with trying to see if Hiroyuki is able to remember things from their past. During the finale however, Akari does develop a cold and has to bail on the party planning.

When Shiho came to visit Akari, it kinda comes out that both girls do care for Hiroyuki. But because this isn’t one of those kinds of romance animes, it really doesn’t get ugly. It’s more of an “I acknowledge your feelings for the boy I like and good luck to you”. Shiho really didn’t do any confessing and we get a cute moment with Hiroyuki and Akari out in the snow.

Let’s see how Season Two holds up!

OMAKE: Nozomi Entertainment also released the six Omake specials that came with releases of the first season. Not dubbed! Just a couple of minute-long specials that range from cute to wildly absurd.

There were also Omake specials in season two that mostly consisted of all the girls fighting each other in almost a Street Fighter or Dragon Ball style.

REMEMBER MY MEMORIES: Five years after the first season aired, To Heart returns with a bit of a time-leap from where we left off last and some slightly improved(?) animation. And if you’re wondering why this season isn’t called “To Heart 2”, there is a series named that already. To Heart 2 is a spin-off of To Heart. It’s just that none of the characters from To Heart are in To Heart 2. ANYWAYS…

It has been a year or so from where we left off. Hiroyuki, Akari and the others are now in their senior year of high school and a lot has changed. Minor character, Kotone who mostly kept to herself in the first season, has found another role in hanging out with Aoi (the chick who’s into martial arts). Serika is still silent, but that blue hue to her hair is definitely not silent. What the hell is with this new animation? And finally, Multi apparently left a year ago and came back in the first episode of season two. Only now Multi has amnesia. A lot has changed since season one, especially when it comes to romance. Buckle up!

ENDING TO REMEMBER MY MEMORIES: Yeah, this season layed on the melodrama really thick compared to the previous season. All the ladies love Hiroyuki and at least half of them expressed those feelings to him. Akari had some conflicted feelings when it came to Hiroyuki. She loves him, but feels like he doesn’t return the feeling due to him hanging around a lot of other girls (especially Aoi and Multi).

Speaking of Multi, this girl has had such the rotunda of computer issues. My stroked-out Dell PC from 2005 had more working power than this girl! For starters, her memories are in danger of being wiped away at several points of the series. We even begin season two where Multi returns after over a year with full-blown amnesia. And since then, Multi had some sort of malfunction issue arise every other episode. This was showcased in the finale, where Multi gets so upset and runs away to the amusement park!

So, Hiroyuki and all of his friends come together to look for Multi. They thankfully found her at the amusement park (during closed hours) and broke into the main-frame to the Ferris wheel. And did I mention these people almost committed assault on police officers? Yeah, these kids are about to have a rap sheet the size of Texas by the end of the episode. Anyways, Hiroyuki, Akari, and Multi ride the ferris wheel and have a nice talk before Multi falls asleep for…

…Let’s say a long time…

Fast-forward to high school graduation! Hiroyuki and Akari seem to be doing a lot better. They’re both going to attend the same college and are pretty much on better terms than when Akari was having a jealousy, bitch-fit. At graduation, they both decided to give each other the Christmas gifts they never gave each other. Because Multi was having another malfunction, they never got to give the gifts. Hiroyuki got a hand-knit sweater. And Akari got a ring!

Hiroyuki wanted it and so he put a ring on it!

During the ED credits, we see the characters we’ve seen throughout these two seasons and what they ended up doing after high school. Lemmy is back in San Francisco. Aoi and Kotone are still doing the fighting matches. Rio is a primary school teacher. Serica is still into the occult. Tomoko is working for her father’s business. Masashi is becoming a big soccer star with Shiho working on journalism (and I think Shiho ends up romantically involved with Masashi).

And we close with Hiroyuki and Akari working with the HMX robots and surprise, surprise, Multi wakes up.

And before you ask, I did NOT watch To Heart 2. And I don’t intend to…at least not yet. I’m saving it for another day and putting it back on the randomizer list.

This anime was…just okay. Yeah, a lot of things were predictable, especially when it came to who the main male lead was going to end up with. Come on, we all know Akari was going to end up with Hiroyuki in the end. If this were the visual novel, I’m sure there were infinite numbers of routes Hiroyuki could take and there’d be a good end to all of the girls. But I’m mostly anime only here! In terms of recommendations, ehh…I feel like there were other better harems you could watch.

Only season one of To Heart got an official release in the U.S., but you might have to search around for any DVD copies as I’m pretty sure it’s currently out of print. Anything else from the series, you’ll have to do some heavy searching to watch all the way through.

Okay, next licensed limbo/unlicensed classics!

What’s that one play everyone and their mother has seen, but you haven’t?

*sighs* Hamilton.

No, the other one.

Les Miserable? Wait, this never got licensed?!

Okay! I guess I’m watching that. I hope I can do well at this review considering I never watched the play, read the book, or watched that film where Russell Crowe can’t sing.

[shining-red-diamond]

Halloween Surprise*

Word count: 1.5k

Pairing: Taeyong x Savannah (OC)

Rating: SFW

Warnings: mentions of vomiting

A/N: Bolded words mean they’re speaking in Korean or Chinese, depending on the couple.

October 31, 2018. 7:21PM

The event was decorated extravagantly for the holiday, giving the atmosphere a spooky and exciting vibe. All of the SM artists attending were dressed as various characters and inanimate objects of pop culture. Some groups under the label were all assigned seats along with those who had significant other’s who joined them as dates.

This wasn’t the first SM Halloween party Savannah and Taeyong attended, but it was their first one as a married couple. He had dressed up as Syaoran from Cardcaptor Sakura, and she was dressed as Sailor Mars from Sailor Moon. Savannah had a friend who was a seamstress and was able to take the time to make her costume, resembling each aspect down to the last detail. She brought her costume with her to the SM building to get ready with the other girls in a separate room from the men. All day, the two had been ecstatic to have a fun evening with their friends after a relaxing honeymoon in Bali; and the moment Taeyong saw his new bride step out in her costume, he couldn’t help but smile widely and chuckle with his cheeks turning pink as cherry blossoms. Savannah even beamed at how adorable her husband looked, contrasting the handsome groom aesthetic he had sported over the last two weeks. It wasn’t that she didn’t swoon over him looking finer than a prince on their wedding day, but there were times where she swooned over his softer side. He has such a strong presence that it was easy to forget what a sweetheart he actually was.

However, Savannah had been feeling nauseated in the mornings over the past week or so. She thought she might have eaten something bad while in Bali, but she would have already been sick and over it while they were there. Fever was out of the question, because she never felt any flu symptoms despite it being cold and flu season. Her period was also five days late. Relief swept over her when she didn’t feel sick that morning, but she did come to one last conclusion that could explain her symptoms. The night before preparing for the party, Savannah went out and bought two pregnancy tests before Taeyong got home after practice that evening. She had a talent at hiding things, so she was successful in concealing the two tests from her husband.

Once he had left, Savannah took them, and both tests came back positive. She was pregnant. She was going to be a mom. There was a human forming inside her. Overwhelmed with happiness, she cried tears of joy before she had to get ready for the day.

Now, at the party, everyone else could tell Mrs. Lee Taeyong was over the moon about something, but they guessed it was because she had just married the man she loved and was happy. Little did they know, Savannah had something else life changing to tell, but she wasn’t planning to tell anyone until she told Taeyong.

Throughout the event, Savannah chatted with almost everyone there and took in the other couples’ costumes. There were a few who coupled up, some who grouped up, and a few who were independent with their costumes. Alice, Carrie, and Ivy were dressed as the Powerpuff Girls, Yuta and Nana were Snow White and the witch, Renjun and Violet were Peter Pan and Wendy, and Lucas and Sydni were Thor and Black Widow. Maggie came as a glamorous, white cat, Yoori dressed as a magical unicorn, and Megan cosplayed Ms. Frizzle. Lanying showed up as Annabelle, and her scar added the creepy effect to her costume.

“I’m surprised you didn’t dress up as Rose,” Savannah said, taking note of Alexis’s biker babe version of the Queen of Hearts. “You look amazing, but I thought you and Jaehyun had something planned this year.”

Alexis chuckled and shook her head. “Nah, he and Jungwoo wanted to do it as a joke, but he ended up putting every beauty queen out there out of business. I’m just rollin’ with it.”

“Well, you look beautiful, regardless.”

“You have got to be the prettiest Sailor Mars here,” Seulgi spoke up. She was dressed as a vampire, her dyed blonde locks bringing the look together.

“Thank you,” Savannah smiled. “I need to remember to repay my friend back for making it for me.”

“Give her my regards. She’s talented.” She leaned into her friend’s ear. “And maybe have her make costumes for my groups’ next comeback.”

The two giggled.

“Well, maybe I ca-“It hit her. The nausea she thought had subsided for today had returned to torment her again. She felt that snacks she had devoured earlier rise back up.

“Are you okay?” Alexis asked in concern.

An awful taste coated the inside of Savannah’s mouth. She wasn’t about to vomit in the middle of the party, so she dashed out the room into the nearest women’s restroom. Flinging open the first stall door, she fell onto her knees and everything she had eaten that day was released from her mouth into the toilet bowl.

A pair of hands held her hair back. “Just let it out. I’m right here.” Seulgi.

Once Savannah had finished puking her guts out, she flushed the toilet, sat on the floor, and her friend gave her a paper towel to wipe her mouth.

“How does one get sick all of a sudden?” Seulgi asked as she knelt by her.

“I don’t have a fever,” she weakly responded after cleaning around her mouth. “And it’s not food poisoning.”

Seulgi stared blankly at her friend before the realization hit her. She gasped as her eyes grew wide. Her hand covered her mouth in shock.

“Are you-?”

Savannah nodded. “I’m pregnant.”

“Oh my gosh!” Seulgi threw her arms around Savannah in glee. “Does Taeyong know? Savannah, I’m so happy for you.”

“Not yet. I wanted him to be the first to know.”

Seulgi pulled away. “I’ll act surprised.”

“Thank you.”

“Savannah,” Taeyong’s voice sounded from the doorway.

“I’m coming, honey,” she called back. Seulgi helped her up, and Savannah tossed the paper towel in the garbage can. The two women exited the restroom, meeting a worried Taeyong at the door.

“Thank you for checking on her,” he said to Seulgi before she walked back towards the party. He faced his wife again, his hands cupping her face. “Are you okay?”

Savannah nodded.

“You had disappeared from the party, and Alexis told me where you went.”

“Nausea hit me,” she explained, Taeyong’s arms wrapping around her waist and pulling her close to him. “But I’m better now.”

“Honey, you’ve been feeling nauseated every day since we got back from our honeymoon. Are you sure you’re all right? Do I need to take you to the doctor?”

She couldn’t keep it from him any longer. She hated when Taeyong got worried. Idol life was stressful enough, and she didn’t want to add to it by hiding her pregnancy another day.

“Well, I will go see a doctor eventually,” she hinted as her hands wrapped around the back of her husband’s neck.

His left eyebrow was now raised in confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

With a small giggle, she kissed his cheek and said, “Taeyong, I’m pregnant.”

The NCT leader’s expression transformed from confused into a look of shocked joy. His brown eyes widened and sparkled with happiness, and a giant smile stretched across his face.

“Savannah, are you serious?” His hands returned to her face, and she nodded. “When did you find out?”

“This morning after you left for practice. I wanted to tell you when we got home and show you the pregnancy tests I took, but Seulgi beat you to it.”

Taeyong couldn’t stop smiling as he pulled his beloved wife in for the biggest yet gentlest hug he could give her. Joy overwhelmed him so much in that moment he couldn’t stop the tears beginning to fall down his face. Savannah began to weep herself.

He broke away from their embrace and wiped her tears away with his thumbs, completely ignoring his own. “Can we do it? Raise a baby? Our baby? I mean my schedule is hectic, and you’re working for another group.”

She sighed. “I’ve been excited all day, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure of anything right now, Yongie. I’m not sure if I’m ready to be a mom. I don’t even know-”

Taeyong cut her off by pecking her lips, disregarding that she just vomited in the toilet less than five minutes ago. He then pressed his forehead against hers. “Don’t say things like that, baby. You’re going to be a great mother, because you take such good care of everyone else around you. I mean, sure, they’re not infants, but that kind of love and care can be carried over to any age.”

She was silent for a moment before whispering, “I’m still scared, though.”

“So am I, but how about we take this a day at a time?”

Savannah began to calm down and steadied her breathing, even though she hadn’t realized she was heaving out of nervousness.

“Okay,” she agreed. She pulled back enough to meet Taeyong’s eyes. “Can we go home, please? Fatigue is starting to kick in.”

“Of course,” he smiled before kissing her head.

[vrenaewrites]

CARAVAL thoughts:

FULL VIDEO HERE.

Confession: I DNFed caraval about 2 years ago. I even included this book in a video called “reading 5 star reviews of books I hate” (either screen record and insert the clip from that vid or link in the cards skip to like 6:40 or both)

 Chapter 1

We open with letters that our main character Scarlett has written to the caraval master Legend

She really wants him to come to her island but he hasn’t 

She finally gets one back with three tickets for her Tella and her fiancé 

Chapter 2

Scarlett’s feelings came in colors “urgent red of burning coals, frenzied yellow of a flapping bird’s feathers” 

She goes to tell her sister Tella and finds her making out with a dude lol 

Julian is his name 

The edges of the paper “blazed a shimmery gold, the color of magic and wishes and promises of the things to come”

Tella hates the count Scarlett is betrothed to but Scarlett wants to leave their home so bad she doesn’t care who she ends up with 

“Gods teeth!” Is the expletive…

The prize of caraval is one wish 

They have to leave the isle within 3 days which would be impossible before getting married 

Tella’s lips “shifted from broken to unbreakable” NO

Last time they left Scarlett’s dad did something terrible to her

Julian offers to smuggle them to the island for caraval on his sailor ship (pirate ship??)

“Goldenrod desire lit up inside her”

Wishes were about as real as unicorns

Their dad shows up with gloves “the shade of bruises” 

Tella accuses Scarlett of hooking up with Julian RUDE!!!!

And Julian agrees!

Ohh because the dad beats the other sister so they’re trying to protect each other by accusing each other 

Her marriage is 10 days away

Chapter 3

Her fathers perfume smelled like the color of his gloves 

Julian decides to take them off the isle for free after witnessing this 

Tella says if she leaves she will never return 

“Her world was a grand game board, and her father believed this marriage would be his penultimate move”

“More than your sisters face will bleed” is their dad assaulting them?? Did I just gloss over that when reading this the first time??

“Weather worn white archways” loved 

Governor dragna sounds like judge frollo 

Their mom disappeared 7 years ago - abandoned them 

They have priests and piety and the devil but they don’t use the BC AD calendar instead going by seasons and rulers...why

Chapter 4

She felt the lie from childhood “sneaking into her slippers and moving between her toes” no you didn’t

“A broken dock like a massive tongue jutted out to stones that reminded Scarlett if uneven teeth” 

It was nights like these she could smell the moon - I wrote taste at first and taste fits better imo

A friend tried to help them escape once and the governor drowned him for it, Tella didn’t know about this 

She meets Julian here at midnight and barters all 3 tickets to keep him from helping Tella escape 

Julian and Tella ambush her and knock her out 

Chapter 5

“A pock marked moon winked in the glass”

She has a dream about their nana telling them how legend got his name 

First of all, legend is a bad dumb name and you should feel bad about it, Stephanie Garber. Caraval is also a bad name. 

He was in love with a woman named Annalise and would perform at a coronation to earn her fathers respect, but he needed a witch to grant him a wish of talent 

He had to choose between fame and love

So his name is legend because his magic is legendary? How tf did John legend not sue over this?

“Behind her a cloud drifted over the moon, covering all but two tiny points of light, which hovered behind her silver hair like devil’s horns” love this visual 

I’m calling it now, we’re getting this flashback because somehow, the dragna sisters are related to Annalise or remind legend of Annalise and this is why Tella gets taken 

Chapter 6

She wakes up in a rowboat with Julian after 2 days which is always a good way to pass the 2 days journey it takes without having to make anything happen lol I respect it 

Julian calls her crimson instead of Scarlett - hated it then hate it now 

Trees “rose toward the sky like massive emeralds” and the waterfall “streamed down like melted peacock feathers” no it didn’t because that makes no sense 

Legends private island is called the island of dreams in Spanish 

Tella has set up a kidnapping so Scarlett can go back without getting In trouble

“The image of a purple fire breathing dragon came to mind, coating her vision with ashy shades of anxiety”

I remember stopping very shortly after this and now I remember why - I can do purple prose but DAMN 

Their mom had “vanished taking nothing with her, she disappeared like a broken star leaving the world untouched, save for the missing bits of light but no one would ever see again” Good purple prose 

We get some backstory on how her Nana was more involved after her mother left, and we get to hear again about how great her stories are, even though we just spent a chapter getting that first hand from a flashback

She barters with herself to stay only one day and then go home for her wedding 

There’s a hole in the boat so they swim but she didn’t take her dresses off so she starts to drown

“You deserve this” because of Phillippe, like hands the water pressed her down down down 

Julian saved her and cuts off her dress which she finds very intense 

Chapter 7

So much description of the snowy frosting sand pick one

I get that it’s a magical island but every descriptor up until the sand made it sound like a tropical paradise, and then suddenly the sand is snow and there’s ice and snow on the trees which were just giant emeralds so I’m confused

Because being wet and cold is more scary 

“ The snow on the rooftops rested like dust on abandoned storybooks“

A very diagon alley sitch where there are magical stores but none are open...because it’s caraval guys. They’re at the games 

They go into a clock shop where there are clothes waiting along with food roses and a note from legend 

They change and she sees awful scars on his hot muscly back 

Her dress is lame despite every YA trope about the heroine having a princess moment, that’s fun: just kidding it changed colors and shape to fit her perfect 

And Julian’s outfit is super hot 

He stole a pocket watch 

Scarlett was a pretty girl but she tried to hide it, her eyes were too honest, no one noticed girls in ugly clothes 

“Scarlet wondered if she had found a way to escape her fathers deadly games only to become a well costumed piece on a new game board” no shit Scarlett you came to the island for the game…

Also you were in such a hurry to find Tella and get into the game before it was too late and now you’re waxing poetic about how hot Julian is and how you’re hot but you don’t wanna be 

Chapter 8

“Sage shaded colors of suspicion” I really hate this device she’s using. I’ve used it to describe the colors my mind reading characters see in people's minds. But it’s like twice a book, maybe, to express extreme emotion. Not every time your feelings change. 

Some guy comes in and offers them a portal into caraval and Scarlett is like “sure thing” and Julian is like “ummm dumdum” and he leaves 

The guys like “oh you just gonna listen to that random guy?” And I’m like as opposed to you, another random guy?

He wants her voice okay Ursula 

“A passionate sky made of melting lemons and burning peaches” or say yellows and oranges…

“Until the door was no more” love this, sounds very fairy tale 

She leaves and it's like night already, she only has til midnight 

Scarlett and Julian get in by him pretending to be the count, her fiancé 

They take the path of the players, not the watchers

Chapter 9

“A panicked Vermillion moved inside of her chest as she thought of how specific legends letter had been”

Julian admits he’s played caraval before and Scarlett is like *gasp* but HELLO how did you think he knew all the shit he knew?

He keeps calling her crimson like every time he speaks to her, annoying 

“Julian’s smile turned seductive, all shameless curves and immoral promises” 

Chapter 10

“Soft golden lights licked her arms with gentle kisses of warmth”

I’m very bored when this house is supposed to be EVERYTHING

The guy who was giving them the rules says, “don’t let your eyes or feelings trick you” And then jumps off the balcony and Scarlet freaks out… He just told you not to trust what you see

Scarlett is the most annoying person

Their instructions are to get to the end by sunrise or they’ll be locked out in the streets, but she’s wasting time wanting to look for her sister - and Julian is telling her that her sister is probably staying at the same place and she doesn’t believe him despite the fact that he’s already done this game before, just trust him???

“A searing green door watched Scarlet like a glowing eye”

This just made me figure out why I don’t like that she’s using colors as an emotional device, because the main character is named after a color, and so it’s just way too many color descriptors

Julian got trapped outside noooo

Chapter 11

But it’s fine because she tells the innkeeper they’re guests of legend - which they are - and he’s let in. Great. Glad there are no stakes. They also used legends name to get the boat to the inn for free. 

The hallways in the inn “smelled like the end of the night, sweat and fading fire smoke mixed with lingering breath from words whose ghosts still haunted the air” no

Julian was “poison in an attractive bottle”

Their rooms are actually one room oops

Chapter 12

“But legend saw all during caraval”

She got a message from legend: it’s a key with tella’s name on it 

Lmao tella is having sex behind that door for sure 

“She felt five different shades of berry colored foolish” this is so stupid 

Every time something happens between tella and scar, we get a whole expository moment about how this is related to their mother or their father or the relationship between the sisters… We know. we can tell. we are not stupid.

“Warmth licking her cheek” this metaphor is too specific to keep using it

Some tattooed dude finds her - Dante - and is like “sleep in my room”

He asks her out but she declines because the count 

Damn her dress has transformed to be like see through which is why he was into her lmao 

She has a dream that legend is a creep lol

Chapter 13

Scarlett totally changes her tune re: enjoying herself 

She passes tella’s room and finds a wreck 

“Feathers covered the carnage as if a rebel Angel had gone mad” this is so dumb 

The key she got with tella’s name was a clue, that other people also got 

A pregnant girl offers to help scarlet, and a man steals scarlets favorite earrings from her mother 

Then the pregnant girl steals that stuff 

She realizes there’s a postcard in tella’s room that isn’t hers

Chapter 14

Tella only loved mermaids, and the postcard is of a castle, which was Scarlett’s thing 

The castle is a place on the isle that Julian recognizes 

Dante shows up and Julian is like hell nah 

Dante won last time Julian was here and it cost him a lot

“Shops wrapped in colors like a birthday presents, cerulean blue apricot orange saffron yellow primrose pink while the canals remained midnight dark” SHUT UP dude

This woman got like a color wheel or a color dictionary for her birthday the year she wrote this book 

Time moves fast in the castle 

What’s really annoying about this book is Stephanie Garber spends a lot of time talking about things that are boring, and one sentence on something like hummingbird-sized elephants and tigers

There’s a kissing tent and she’s like fuck yeah let’s go there

You’re engaged

Julian sees where she’s looking and is like yeah??

A tingle of periwinkle curiosity

Chapter 15

She goes into the tent of a half naked dude who could tell her fortune 

This is all very boring 

He has incense that makes people tell the truth and she admits Julian is the hottest guy ever 

She asks what’s the man she will marry really like? 

He’s not a good person 

She’s covered in only pictures he can see instead of pictures only he can see…

She had 2 questions but the way she asked used them up so she doesn’t get to ask about tella 

Chapter 16

He tells her to follow the boy with the heart made of black...obviously Dante, she thinks Julian 

She walks into a potion tent and finds an elixir of protectio

She mentions her father and feels “anise and lavender and rotting plums”

She describe the woman who works in the potion tent as having “bottle green” eyes, but this entire paragraph has the word bottle in it like 1 million times because shes describing a tent full of potions...all these colorful words you’ve used and this is where you use “bottle green”

I don’t mind the descriptor, my own eyes are bottle green, it’s very vivid, but badly placed 

She chases Julian to a decrepit garden with a fountain, and sees a glass button

She also saw a glass button in tella’s room...is this how legend spies on her? Is this where tella is being kept?

“Dreary yellow hopelessness” infected her

She sees the symbol of caraval inside the fountain and touches it, revealing a staircase 

Someone screamed as hot and bright as fire 

It’s madness tunnels 

The inn “smells of laughter and boasts laced with sweetened ale” this doesn’t make seeeeeennnnnnnnse

She finds Julian, but it’s actually Dante and he’s mean to her and she cries but it makes her mad at Julian?????? Stupid 

Chapter 17

Julian finally shows up, super bloody but he just had a head wound

She cleans him up and is getting super horny lol 

He got her earrings back!!!!!

The fire dies sending up a plume of smoke “the color of things better said in whispers” 

She tells him about the tunnels and he says legend treats his prisoners like guests 

Julian’s eyes are the color of “caramel and liquid amber lust”

He almost kisses her and then seems to wake up, leaves and “disappointment wraps around her in cool shades of forget me not blue” STOP

Chapter 18

She wakes up to white roses with red tips 

Julian is supposed to meet her but doesn’t 

A girl shows up “pretty as a watercolor and dressed as bold as a trumpet” DUDE

“Oh poor you, here you are on a magical island, and all you can think of is what you don’t have” get her!

Dante shows up and she realizes he has a black heart tattoo which DUH SCARLETT

chapter 19

The night is “brittle, crisp like the first bite of a chilled apple, smelling just as sweet with hints of burnt sugar weaving through the charcoal night air” THIS IS GOOD PURPLE PROSE! I can taste this!!!!!!!

She’s chasing Dante and finds a cider seller who’s drink will help her see things more clearly, the price is her last lie 

She drinks it and loses the color in her vision 

The game is constantly working against you?????? How?! You’ve stumbled across tons of clues without any work and there are no believable stakes to this game, this drink is the first time you’ve had a struggle…

Iko holds a journal that’s brownish green, “the color of forgotten memories, abandoned dreams, and bitter gossip”

Even in black and white we get this heavy handed color shit 

She realizes anything in color is important

She also sees the red roses on a carousel and the red cravat on a mans neck 

He makes her feel perilous shades of silky black - is Stephanie Garner an artist? Does she have synesthesia or something?? What is with this device!!!!

She looks in Iko’s book and sees pictures of her, the special guest

Sour shades of yellow green made her stomach roil with trepidation - HUH????

She’s like “why would he make the game about me?” You’ve been begging him to bring you caraval your entire life, why do you think? 

I think I remember the nana saying annelise had blonde hair, and so does tella...are they related to her? Is she nana? 

Iko tells her the notebook also holds all the true stories of caraval

Iko will give her the notebook if Scarlett will buy 2 dresses because the changing dress bothers her (??)

Iko takes her to a dress shop where the dresses are “the color of late night laughter, early morning sunshine, and waves crashing around ankles” 

The dresses cost nightmares or secrets or fears

She owes her worst fear and greatest desire, or she can pay 2 days of her life per dress 

It works but her greatest desire isn’t to find her sister, so she pays with 2 days of her life, not at the end of her life but at the end of caraval 

“Panic came in hemlock green, the color of poison and terror” 

“Something acidic and moldy and burnt bubbled up in Scarlett’s throat - the taste of death” like this 

Scarlett’s body dies but her mind will exist in a dream world 

Chapter 20

Dante finds her and drags her into the inn 

Julian hits Dante because he won’t let her go hell yeah

She tells him what happened 

Julian tried to give Scarlett a day of his life by having her drink his blood from his finger and she’s like “I wanna fuck this duuuude”

“His voice is so gentle, made of gentle” I liked this 

Then he drinks her blood from her finger, and the world shatters into a million shards of colored glass 

He lays down with her and holds her while she dies

Chapter 21

Death was the color purple.

She sees tella in the dream world, and tella has a huge dark book that swallows her and Scarlett 

They see young nana in a house similar to the one they entered at caraval, entwined with a young man

Her grandma is Anneliese DUH

Then she’s at the funeral of the woman who died at caraval before

Rosa was in love with legend and he rejected her so she killed herself 

Dante was rosa’s fiancée 

Legend is julian?!?!?

Loved This entire chapter but then it means nothing because none of this is real it’s all part of the game so it’s not really story development

Chapter 22

They both wake up 

Scarlett tries to convince herself the game is messing with her 

Then she remembers what the dream people said about legend loving to make girls fall for him 

She has a grey streak in her hair now 

Her dad is there!

She finally puts it together - her nana is anneliese 

“She could see the sting of her rejection in shades of stormy blue ghosting over his heart like sad morning mist” roll my eyes

But then she remembers that he gave a day of his life for her and is like why would he do that if he was legend 

 Now she’s changed her mind, so she goes after Julian to find him leaving Dante’s room and walking into tella’s 

She goes in after him to hide from her dad but the room is empty 

She finds another secret staircase like the fountain 

She trips over Dante’s dead body and finds Julian standing over it 

Chapter 23

Julian grabs her and is like “I didn't kill him, we were working together” 

He shows her a white rose tattoo he has, Rosa was his sister!!

She asks why he had been acting weird and he basically says he didn’t want to have feelings for her because that wasn’t why he had come to caraval 

Scarlett is like let’s get this fucker back, but she hears her dad’s footsteps in the tunnel  

Chapter 24

They start running, and they hide in a weird alcove from her dad that starts to squish them

She realizes it’s feeding off their fear so they relax and it lets them out

They end up in the sand tunnel and Scarlett is like how could you know I was going to caraval if you were already at our island when I got my tickets 

Julian explains that legend is punishing the descendants of anneliese and he invited her to caraval to stop the wedding

Legend had never responded until she signed her full name on the last letter, mentioning her wedding 

Julian is the fucking count dude calling it 

“His steady gaze reached out to the broken parts of her like a caress, a type of touch that moved through damaged flesh, past fractured bones and into a person's wounded soul.” WOW

Scarlett hears tella’s voice and almost runs straight off a cliff

“Tella loved danger the same way candle wicks loved to burn. It never seemed to scare her that some of the things she lusted for might consume her like a flame” Christ 

Julian knew tella would be taken during caraval 

Chapter 25

She had to find tella before legend consumed her like a flame burning a candle” you just used a candle metaphor like one page ago my dude. 

She gives herself one minute to cry and scream and Julian hears her so he barges in, worried 

He apologizes and she gives him the grace I’ve been waiting for as soon as he said he knew what would happen to tella: he had to avenge his sister. Everything they’re both doing is for their sisters, she should be more understanding 

Julian is “all kinds of tragic and lovely”

The box was “flat black, the color of failure and funerals” shut UP

Like if you wanna use the color device to describe your protagonists feelings stop being so fucking flowery with every single color in the book it is soooooooooooooooo distracting

It’s the other dress Scarlett has bought but now it’s white

Chapter 26

There’s a note in the box from legend that makes “invisible spiders crawl over her skin” ok 

She thinks the dress is the 5th clue - the buttons on the dress reminds her of the buttons leading to the hat store 

Chapter 27

They go to the top hat place and Julian is like “this is all wrong” 

Iko appears looking like “a teardrop the moon had cried” love it

She tells them not to go into the hat shop 

Let me guess, despite both of these omens Scarlett is still gonna go in 

“Scarlett had an emerald green premonition that she would make a discovery inside” sure why tf not gotta keep the story moving somehow 

She sees the store owner and was like LEGEND and he’s like nah dude I’m just wearing a hat 

But he is the guy that was wearing the red cravat and eyepatch from the day her vision went gray 

He is the count!!!!!

Chapter 28

Nicholas Darcy 

And her dad is there!!!!!!!!!!

Julian gets her out but the count chases her and they get on a boat 

She sees her dad and he looks afraid but she blames it on the rain 

They row to the castle and Julian convinces her to get inside to hide from the lightning 

And they argue about if she’s still planning marrying the count and she’s torn which hurts him 

He says “are you sure you want this?” Before kissing her and like is it a consent thing or is it him asking if he’s what she wants either way I love it 

“The boy who had saved her from drowning in more ways than one” explain…

They kiss and “every touch created colors she had never seen” that’s so anticlimactic 

Chapter 29

The stones fall through the hourglass like “drops of falling rose petals” that makes no sense but we have to include it because...

She finally realizes the roses that have been EVERYWHERE are part of the game duh 

She takes Julian to the fountain where the tunnel entrance is

She feels ochre shades of uneasy

Only NOW she’s giving pause at the idea of winning because she could wish them safe...shoulda been your goal all along. Should have been equally as important as finding tella since if you find her you win the wish….I’m signing heavily atm 

The governor and the count are there!!!!! 

Swear to god if Julian dies I’m going to fucking riot 

She wants to split up but Julian is like fuck no 

The count catches up to her and the governor pulls her by her hair up the stairs 

He punches her in the stomach to warn Julian and she gets back up, with the count trying to protect Scarlett

“A slick mud colored feeling coated Scarlett’s insides” because the governor is holding a knife to Julian’s throat

He cuts Julian’s face NOOOOOO

The governor takes Julian to his room and let’s the count sleep in Scarlett’s room because “he’s already paid for her, he can enjoy her a few days early”

Scarlett stands up to her dad!!!! And then she remembers tella’s words: what if the count is worse?

Scarlett tells the count if she makes her dad stop, she’ll be a good wife but if he doesn’t she will never be his obedient wife 

“Do you really want a bride who will only sleep with you because someone will be tortured if she doesn’t?” YES

Chapter 30

The count is like “listen I am NOT like your dad I’m sorry” and she’s like yeah but you’re not Julian 

The count starts undressing and Scarlett aims a poker at his eyeball lmao 

She finally remembers the elixir of protection in that dress from the tent and soaks the count 

The count is like “you’re playing into legends hands” and Scarlett is like “nah he did me a favor by getting rid of you”

Chapter 31

Julian’s cut isn’t that deep thank god but he’s still woozy 

“He tasted like midnight and wind”

Leap of faith - roses - it’s Rosa!!!!! She has to ask how Rosa died and Julian says she jumped off a balcony 

They decide to sneak out using the tunnels to go search all the balconies

Chapter 32

The town during the day looks like a “faded memory”

She hears music from the rose colored carousel 

The musician has been asking for coins the whole time but nothing else cost money

They jump onto the moving carousel and end up in the roses where Scarlett finds the caraval symbol

They have to jump, Julian gives her coordinates to a boat in case they get separated but they run out of time and she has to go in 

She lands in a river and lands at a staircase guarded with statues that are definitely frozen people 

Legend is there ofc 

Chapter 33

She’s a little star struck by legend 

His laugh is a rich spicy sound that echoes until he snaps his fingers 

Homeboy is mad 

Julian ends up there, dry, and...he’s working with legend...NOOOOOOO

Dante and Valentina were also part of the game 

Rosa was not his sister...DUDE

She clutches his pocket watch and legend opens it - Julian’s voice comes out apologizing for betraying her 

He does love her HE IS ENCHANTED!!!!!

LEGEND STABS JULIAN?!?!?!?!?!?

Oh fuck he is spitting blood oh fuck oh no 

Scarlett you got him killed you dumdum 

Chapter 34

I’m FUCKING FURIOUS 

she remembers that she gets one wish, and she wants to use it to bring Julian back and I swear to goooooddddddd if he doesn’t come back I’m gonna throw myself out the window 

Legend is gone, leaving a funeral invitation for tella set for tomorrow this guy is a MONSTER

Chapter 35

She ends up on a huge rooftop way high up 

“The air felt soft and poisonous” 

Tella is there feeling like “softness and sunlight and seeds for growing dreams”

We just used soft a sentence ago!!!!

Tella is like “you’re confused, the game is playing tricks on you”

Scarlett tells her about their grandmas history with legend 

She shows tella the invitation and it now says it’s to a party not a funeral

Chapter 36

Tella has met a boy that’s not legend...it’s a guy she met right before she got taken for the game…

She’s engaged to him??

Scarlett is like maybe tella is right and this is all part of it...Scarlett DUDE 

Scarlett has a bitter yellow puddle of dread in her stomach 

If Daniel is Dante or Julian I’m gonna scream 

Chapter 37

It’s legend of course 

Duh 

He tries to convince tella to tie Scarlett up you better NOT

TELLA

YOU DUMB BITCH

legend dares Scarlett to walk to the edge of the balcony to prove she loves her sister, so that he can feign worry to tella

They tie her up 

The governor and the count show up FUCK

finally legend admits to tella who he is and she just breaks poor baby 

Tella backs up to the ledge and says if the governor or the count touch Scarlett she’ll kill herself!!!!!!!

“Silver slippers sliding” toward the balcony 

Scarlett breaks free but tella FUCKING JUMPS

Chapter 38

So now who is Scarlett gonna use her wish on?!

Her father looks like “a dragon with no fire and broken wings”

The governor slaps Jovan and legend is like imma fuck you UP 

The governor killed Dante!!!!!!

She blackmails her dad with Philippe’s death 

She remembers her wish...but who does she use it on?! 

Which oof, oof, OOF

Tella is a brat lmao 

Legend won’t give her the wish!!!!!

He’s...fading?? 

Scarlett goes to give tella her blood 

She wishes her impossible wish but it doesn’t work

Chapter 39

She goes back up to get tella’s stuff and finds a caraval box with a letter inside from tella to legend that she didn’t know about 

Chapter 40

She goes to see legend and finds out he’s actually some dude named Caspar…that was why he couldn’t grant her wish 

There’s a stack of letter between tella and legend that basically illustrate that tella was willing to die for legend to get them to caraval 

Tella is alive?!?!?!?!?!?

This was all a fucking game?!

Her impossible wish came true, but she had actually died 

Tella orchestrated their dad getting to caraval so he could see her die, and so he would leave Scarlett alone 

Chapter 41

So Julian is not really dead, but tella wanted anyone who made Scarlett love them to be taken out, that way she wouldn’t get hurt by someone who was just pretending 

So she somehow warps this into meaning that Julian didn’t actually love her? Go...ask him??????? The fuck 

God poor Scarlett…

So people can die in caraval, but when the game is over, they come back...so there were no fuckin stakes except for tella’s death

Chapter 42

They go to legends party in the forest and Scarlett sees Julian 

Iko is there like go talk to Julian dumdum 

“Shades of the rich ruby love she’d felt mixed with deep indigo hurt turning everything just a little bit violet” I don’t care I want them to kiss Stephanie 

Julian is so hurt that she thinks she doesn’t know him

He’s related to legend…

Rosa dying changed his opinion of legend 

He tried to leave the game right before this caraval 

Legend is his brother!!!!!!!!!

He couldn’t leave Scarlett because she loved her sister like Julian loved his brother 

He stayed because of Scarlett despite how it hurt him to lie to her 

Yaaaaaay they kiss yay omg 

Epilogue

Tella is dancing drunk at the party and is dancing with a new guy who dances her to the edge of the party...then he’s gone?

He dropped something into her pocket...a coin with a note…

From legend!!!!!

You can see your mom soon if you keep up your end of the bargain!!!!!

[zoe360568]

LADIES GUIDE TO CELIASTAL MECHANICES BY OlIVIA WAITE

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She was a complete confection, a richly, roundly luscious, perfectly domestic delicacy. Like the Renaissance Madonna Stephen had once copied from an Italian gallery.

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You could never mistake the sound of true grief, once you had felt it yourself. It made the mettle of the soul ring in sympathy, like one bell softly chiming whenever its neighbor was struck.

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You could take a robin, put it in a cage, and carry it with you around the world—but if you never opened the cage door, how much of a difference would you have made to the robin’s life? All it would know was the view through the bars.

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Catherine’s eye traced anew the vines and flowers of the bodice, and an envious ember flared briefly in her belly.

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“My father was also a musician, sir, before astronomy diverted him. He always said music and mathematics were two sides of a single tongue.” Mr. Frampton’s smile was slight, but sincere. “I would agree, but my father would turn up his nose and insist that music is an art, not a science.” Miss Muchelney laughed in recognition.

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Words like embers danced on her tongue and she feared the lightest breath would kindle them into flame.

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Catherine lifted one hand and brushed the tears away. “I wish you had fewer reasons for it.” Lucy’s eyes were star-bright. Her lips parted on a breath that was far too soft for a sigh. Catherine’s whole body went tight and liquid—how easy would it be to just lean forward, and press her mouth to Lucy’s, and taste that sound on her own tongue?

Chapter Four

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Catherine and Lucy passed the next two weeks orbiting one another like a double star: ever moving, never touching, never truly separating. Between breakfast and luncheon they worked

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companionably in the library. After luncheon Lucy

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Catherine was not an outside observer, no more than a sailor clinging to a spar in a wreck was an outside observer of storms. She felt lightning-struck. Every conversation, every joke, every blush and averted glance sent another bolt through her. Whole territories were beginning to burn in parts of her soul that she’d always kept carefully darkened.

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propriety.

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ubiquitous

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Lucy’s shoulders relaxed in visible relief. “It’s a little unusual, I admit.” Catherine’s lips quirked. “Most beautiful ideas are.”

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It was as though someone had taken the case off the universe, and let the reader peer at the naked machinery that powered the stars.

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Falling in love with a genius was a daunting thought.

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decrypt

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As she watched, the light flickered and shifted, the blurred lens of a young girl’s notice sharpening into the more precise view of mature adulthood.

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“They don’t let you have anything whole, you know. If you don’t follow the pattern. You have to find your happiness in bits and pieces instead. But it can still add up to something beautiful.”

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bemoaning

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Aunt Kelmarsh snorted genially. “The ways of the world aren’t so permanent as they say, my dear. It was quite different in the last century. There were times and places one could be open and free about such things.” Lucy’s smile was knowing. “And there aren’t now?” Aunt Kelmarsh pursed her lips, amused. “If you know where to look for them.” “Or who to ask, apparently.” Aunt Kelmarsh put on her most mysterious air, humming innocently. Lucy laughed.

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but she had never openly acknowledged that the reverse must be true as well: love could exist—could even thrive—quite apart from the paper forms of marriage and classifications of sex. It was all at once appalling that she and George had been bitterly bound to one another in the sight of the world, while these devoted souls had had to cloak their joy and hide it behind walls and walks and secret gardens.

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Catherine made herself comfortable in the opposite seat and finally opened up the box with the thoughts she’d been hiding away for most of her existence. The inescapable truth: women could fall in love with other women.

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Strange indeed that an idea could change your life so completely, and yet fit in so perfectly with all that came before. She felt the force of it in her very bones. It was less as if her biography were being rewritten, and more as though Catherine were suddenly able to read the other set of lines that lay crosswise on the familiar page.

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was desire, the same as she’d felt for the attractive men she’d known, and some sly part of her must have recognized this all along because she had put a great deal of effort into keeping these thoughts and impulses from seeing the light of day.

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She’d believed she could bear a widow’s loneliness more peacefully than the misery of a bad marriage. But that was like choosing whether hemlock or belladonna was the better poison. In the end, they both sapped the life from you.

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But that kind of restrained flirtation was one thing. A seduction was quite another.

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Catherine was going to have to go about this carefully. One step at a time. Inviting, rather than pursuing. Always leaving Lucy the chance to retreat, or reject. It would sting, but that was nothing. Catherine valued Lucy’s freedom in this as much as her own. I want more; I understand if you don’t.

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Turning someone into a project was a terrible way to woo them.

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and inspiration slipped in like a breath and exploded in her body like a lightning bolt.

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Catherine wanted Lucy, but more than that, Catherine wanted Lucy to want her back. And Lucy wouldn’t, if she were still pining for the girl she’d lost. So Catherine let the days flow by like water while she put in stitch after stitch after stitch, as though each one were mending a small rent in Lucy Muchelney’s heart.

Chapter Five

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Let Future Lucy make the ultimate decision during revisions to the text. Future Lucy was always so much more decisive, somehow. Maybe because she was ever-so-slightly closer to death than Present Lucy?

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It ought to have been agonizing, living and working in close quarters alongside a woman so beautiful and yet so unattainable. But Lucy’s heart, newly mended, was prepared to bask in any

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sensation that was not the sharp pain of loss—so unrequited fascination for her benefactress came not as a trial, but rather as a pleasurable seasoning to any day’s difficult work. And if the feeling occasionally stole her breath and her wits and kept her awake into the small hours of the night, well, nobody had to know. Really, it was much safer and more convenient than any actual love affair would have been.

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Perhaps this was how her future could best be managed: devoting her days to scientific work and spending her nights silently, secretly pining for a woman with golden hair and clever hands.

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“I’d be delighted to show you.” Then the countess smiled. A new smile, shy and hopeful. A smile like the first ray of dawn. Lucy was enchanted.

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And now Lady Moth had made her a shawl as a gift. With her own hands. If Lucy was right, every stitch might as well be a caress.

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“I don’t think love works like that. You might as well ask the earth whether the sun or the moon is more important.”

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“You can’t always judge by what came before. Sometimes, there is a revolution.”

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“May I kiss you?” Lady Moth held her breath, then let out a sigh that formed a single word: “Please.” Lucy leaned down, as the countess leaned forward, and the kiss exploded where they met.

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Just a simple brush of one mouth against another, but it sent heat and light and stars through every inch of Lucy’s frame. She pulled in a breath and tried it again, the same way, repeating the experiment. The same result: sparkling fire.

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When the kiss broke, the countess laughed a little, sounding surprised, and Lucy couldn’t blame her. She was beyond words herself. She wanted to sink her hands into the lady’s hair and hold her in place and kiss her until the sun went dark and the moon

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went dim and the stars blew out like spent wax candles.

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A new knowledge hummed between them, taut and arresting as the note of a violin.

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Then Lucy smiled, and for a moment her gaze darted down to Catherine’s lips. It was all the countess could do not to put her fingers up to feel the heat that gaze had left there.

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The afternoon’s tender delicacy was gone, replaced by a kiss that tasted lush as wine and scorched like fire. Catherine drank pleasure from Lucy’s ready mouth, the girl’s encouraging gasps firing her newly bold impulses. She hadn’t been dizzy from the wine at dinner, but she was giddy now, the room spinning around her and the only solid thing the skin and heat and feel of the woman in her arms. The kiss went

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But Lucy’s hands were careful and soft as they unlaced the back of Catherine’s gown, loosened her

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stays, and pulled all the pins from her tousled hair. It was closer to how Narayan would have undressed her—though Narayan would never have dropped a kiss on the back of Catherine’s neck, or combed fingers through Catherine’s tumbling hair in that luxurious way. It was—it was like every touch of Lucy’s hand was a silken thread, painting a sunrise one skein of warm light at a time. At the end, Lucy wrapped Catherine’s favorite velvet bed jacket around her shoulders and kissed her once more, sweetly. Catherine couldn’t help melting a little. “Good night,” she whispered. Lucy chuckled. “Good night, my lady.” “Catherine,” she corrected the girl. Lucy paused. “Catherine.” Her tongue lingered over the name, and her smile widened with pleasure. “Good night, Catherine.” She slipped out the door, leaving the countess feeling equally comforted and abandoned and thoroughly, thoroughly perplexed.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S4 Ep7: Mai Gets a Day Job (Killing People For Sport)

So, I looked at the calendar and realized, if  I don’t get this post up this week then you’ll only have one update from me for the whole of November since I’m leaving for over a week again. :/ So I’m just gonna get right to the good stuff because it has taken just a crazy amount of time to get to episode 7.  How great would it be if I also got to episode 8. Real great, right?

So lets do this, I can do this, I can write a recap without getting insanely distracted, watch me do it: This episode starts with Tristan sticking to the fatal flaw of his character sheet and seeing listed at the very top “low key toilet obsession.”

Ah Tristan.

And when you think “well, OK, they’re stuck by some historic Mesas, this is fine,” suddenly they are beset by the world’s most random biker gang of like 20 full grown adults/biker assassins.

And it’s not super clear if their driver died out there in the Arizona desert, or if he just put on a different outfit and joined this gang, but it won’t matter because like...it’s a filler arc in Yugioh so there’s gonna be some deaths.

This season seems to change genre like every 10 minutes, and so for right now we are in a Mad Max post-apocalyptic territory and PS every one of these bikers uses a lead pipe?

I feel like this is way more violent than a gun???

(read more under the cut)

And so, out the horizon comes another biker, like a masked cowboy on horseback, except she shoots these things instead of bullets.

These are trained assassins, by the way, just completely incapacitated by paper.

I just love the marketing team working alongside of this show that’s like “and what else can Yugioh cards do? destroy biker gangs. That’s right, one single card will absolutely destroy a biker!” and the writing staff was like “yeah, we can work that in. That totally works in universe, you don't even know.”

It’s Mai! Back from murdering the hell out of Pegasus, I guess she decided to ninja these 20 bikers, and did it so devastatingly, that they somehow blew up a motorcycle next to a live fuel tank? Like we’re talking Oliver Queen precision throwing here and like...

...Mai’s only been gone like a year right???

And so, seeing that this card is a harpy, which I dunno...doesn’t seem like it’s all that rare in comparison to a Blue Eyes or a God Card or I dunno any of the other signature cards we’ve heard about, Joey immediately recognizes Mai. Despite the fact that everything she is doing right now is completely out of character, and despite the fact that they are in freakin California.

RIP to all 20 of the people in that gang of bikers, because no one followed this limo away from the scene--everyone was, I assume, hella dead.

Youknow, I never expected Mai to kill more people than Bakura. I would have predicted Joey before Mai. I would have predicted Rebecca before Mai. Literally anyone else on this show before Mai.

Seto, crawling out of this oversized castle that I guess...is back on the real estate market now...decides that the irresistible pull of dragons printed on paper cards is stronger than listening to his brother’s needs to put down the damn cards and make a contractually obligated theme park.

I mean Mokuba kept him off the cards for nearly a whole year. What a healthy year that was for Seto.

Back in Arizona, apparently they didn’t make it more than a mile before Tristan busted the car. Not really clear why or how this happened, but they’ve decided to argue with eachother about it despite the fact one of them is clearly magical and does not really need to eat or drink or even maybe sleep?

Like we’ve seen Bakura basically survive off of one plate of tacos and 2 pints of blood, so just make Pharaoh push the car all the way back to California. Or just make Pharaoh use his millennium AIM to call up His tomb keepers and be like “Marik, we need a lift.” or maybe summon a very real monster because that’s a thing now?

Course this would rely on Pharaoh remembering that he has superpowers, which, somehow after 4 seasons, he always forgets how to use the moment he uses them. It’s like reverse Sailor Moon--Usagi tends to level up her Super powers, Pharaoh kind of tosses them out of the window and goes “oops” and becomes more and more mortal every single season.

So instead of magic they will just use Tea.

Amazing how none of them are really willing to date Tea seriously but they will acknowledge, out of the four of them, Tea is the best looking. So their strategy, bear with me, wasn’t to use the fact they’re children to get help from adults driving by, instead, the boys hid behind a rock so they could really make sure they were getting a hella pervy truck driver that would only stop for a single teenage girl stuck in the desert.

Only this group of kids would be like “Hey lets make sure the guy who picks us up is statistically most likely to be a serial killer” and then, weirdly enough, this horndog pedo truck driver ended up being the only person who didn’t try to kill them this entire episode.

So, lets go back to SF but coming from the north side...which makes no sense...but then again, they put Mesas in Napa County.

So last episode I assumed Rex and Weevil were dropped off in Oakland, but Rex informs us this episode that they are in “the worst part of town”

Where they get robbed twice, only to be saved by Duke Devlin, who I guess just lives here now because maybe it’s the only place he can afford in this expensive as hell city? Maybe he isn’t bothered by the crime-rate after that week he spent on Kaiba’s blimp/Seaquest mmo adventure?

Anyway, for some reason Duke--who is a game shop owner/developer by day--is wandering around the Tenderloin as a vigilante and saving people by throwing dice at them as some sort of side hustle and this is never discussed at all.

I would watch that spinoff series. Religiously.

Fun fact, there is definitely sketchy and bad parts of the Tenderloin you will know not to go to (you can smell it actually), but like a third of it is part of the best shopping district in the city and we used to just shop there unsupervised when I was a kid. It has an Anthropologie.

Not saying the parts that are bad aren’t bad. Whenever I drive through the non-shopping parts, I see at least one super sketch thing making me thankful I’m in the car. But I just don't know how Rex and Weevil managed to get robbed twice in one day. Just go five blocks in literally any direction.

Bro and I were like...HOW did this shot happened from this angle on the freeway...and then I only just now realized it. Something I forgot about because it’s from my parent’s generation...maybe the animators weren’t aware that the Embarcadero fell down after Loma Prieta?

So this was the SF landscape before the quake of 89′ (Which I have no memory of since I was a baby when this happened)

and after 89.

Like maybe the animators they had on this team remembered an SF from their youth that had a huge iconic raised street wrapping all the way around one part of it and just...never got the memo that an Earthquake made the entire thing fall down?

Either way, Duke is either driving these two directly out of SF, or he is driving them into 1988 and is taking a lovely drive on the Old Embarcadero, an experience which does not exist anymore, and which makes a lot more sense since Duke has to be somewhat near downtown, going by the skyscrapers and the vicinity to the Tenderloin.

Man. In the Yugioh Universe, Loma Preita just never actually happened. How is that factoid alone not the weirdest part of this episode?

(I am so glad Serenity is not here now that Duke’s back)

Welcome back to the show Duke, glad you’re bringing...Rex and Weevil...

To be fair, Duke has absolutely no idea who is and isn’t Yugi’s friends. Duke just kind of shows up and pretends like he’s part of the gang, and the gang has lost so much brain matter from all the cards and all the dark magic, they just assume he’s been here the whole time.

So at first I was like “this has to be a pun on Industrial Light and Magic” since there’s virtually no other film studios in the city--but ILM moved to SF 3-4 years after this season came out. So it’s just a weird coincidence, I guess. Or maybe it’s just a really uninspired name?

And so Mai, who I guess has been just waiting on this ledge for 8 hours decides to drop in.

Mai has evolved a lot since S1.

But, although Mai is just...straight up evil now, at least we get to see it taken out on Pegasus who, as far as this show is concerned, is a pretty evil bastard.

A pretty evil bastard who took like 3-4 episodes to beat in S1 but Mai could just do it off-screen.

It’s just funny that the entire time on the island Pegasus was probably pretty sure everyone there was trying to kill him EXCEPT for Mai and then the moment his back is turned he’s like “oh whaaaat?”

Like Bandit Keith is already in America. But rather than use Bandit Keith for this, lets use Mai to give Joey something to angst about. We can’t put her in a coma again--so lets instead get her vaguely possessed. Although seriously, if someone I liked did this to me I think I’d be over that crush really fast.

And then, speaking of Bandit Keith, we get to have a Greek Chorus this duel from the minibosses. Valon and the other guy with the handlebar-muttonchops.

I looked up “where does Valon’s accent come from” and literally there is no consensus, as far as I know.

And that’s where this episode ends.

Now I’m gonna go out of town for a week and then will need another week to make more of these so I’ll be on another hiatus. Holding out if I’ll maybe bring a laptop or something to where I’m going so I can type out recaps when I’m bored.

The problem is having the uhhhhh photoshop to do the caps. I can’t bear to do this in MS Paint because hell will freeze over before I lose all of my actions and hotkeys I made specifically to reduce the time it takes to make these. But we shall see.

anyway, if you want to see these from the beginning, click here.

[takaraphoenix]

(This is a relatively long post, so here’s what it is: It’s a love letter to Haikyuu!!, the TL;DR is literally: I love Haikyuu!!)

I love this story a whole lot. I never expected to love it as much as I do now. It’s tied for my favorite all-time anime with my two other favorites (there is no picking the ultimate because these three stories and genres are too different to find a definite one that outdoes the other; all three fill certain needs I have in an anime).

But this one was... unexpected. You see, my other two favorite anime are One Piece and Sailor Moon, both anime that have been with me since the 90s, anime that I grew up with.

Haikyuu!! is different, because I got into it during season 1. Back in 2014. It’s... It’s a baby anime - in that it is still so young, compared to the other two. The same can be said about the genres; both magical girl and adventure/fantasy were basically the two types of anime I’ve been enjoying since the 90s.

2014 was the year I first got into the sports anime genre. In fact, Haikyuu!! was the second ever sports anime I watched (my first being Kuroko no Basuke). I never really took that genre seriously or cared to even check it out, because well... sports. Sports aren’t my thing, so what could possibly be the appeal of watching an anime about them...? But a friend of mine was very deep into KnB and after one convention where she cosplayed Kuroko, I figured I’d give it a shot and I really ended up loving it. And yes, I admit, the main thing that made me pick HQ!! next was Hinata’s hair; the bright orange really jumped out at me when helplessly browsing for a successor.

I watched the whole thing - well, there wasn’t much of it at the time, only the first season - and I literally immediately watched the whole thing again. I started my rewatch the same day that I finished my first watch. I’ve never done that before.

And after I finished the first rewatch, I started reading the manga. I don’t... do that. I do own two shelves filled with manga, so yes I read them, some of them are in fact corresponding to anime I enjoy, but usually when I watch an anime I don’t feel the need to also read the manga. (I don’t like reading much.)

In this case, I just needed to know. I needed to know how it continued, I needed more. The only anime that ever happened with is One Piece. And, much like with One Piece, I am horribly bad at actually keeping up. After a couple of weeks of being caught up and waiting for weekly releases, I drop the manga again so it can... gather more chapters for me to read. And usually I forget about picking it up again, tbh.

I rewatched the first season once more when the second season hit. And rewatched both seasons before the third, shortly after the second season had ended. And, after the third one ended, another obligatory rewatch of it all.

We’re in 2016 now, at which point I was pretty deep into sports anime and had started watching multiple ones with multiple sports and was so busy discovering new news that, admittedly, in the following years there was no rewatch. I was falling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of new anime and the appeal of the shiny new beat out watching something for what would be the sixth time.

Only when 2020 hit with that fourth season did it happen again. At first, I only really wanted to watch that last episode of season 3, because well the release had hit me a bit out of left field and actually I’m kind of busy and there are so many things I’m already watching and supposed to do I can’t possibly watch 75 episodes of something I already know by heart. But mh, that final episode, how can I leave it at that? At the very least that final match, right? That third season. It’s only 10 episodes. I’ll just... skim through it, skip around it and watch the highlights - and oops, I forgot to skip anything. Well, now that only made me want more. I could maybe just--

Yeah, I watched the whole 75 episodes in a week. Which, admittedly doesn’t sound like much considering they’re only 20 minute episodes, I mean come on that’s ony 25 hours of TV. However it’s subtitles so it’s something that requires my whole entire attention and that’s not how I consume other media; I always write while watching TV. Anime is special, because no dubs for me. So it requires more time, in a way. And I usally only carve out time for maybe an episode or two a day when I watch an anime. With HQ!! it was that I accidentally kind of binged season 3 in a day like I didn’t mean to watch 10 episodes in a row but how do you stop? And it continued much the same (logically, if you look at 75 episodes over 7 days. That’s literally just math).

I had finished the rewatch and was left with the weekly wait and it is slowly killing me. My fingers are itching to just rewatch the whole thing again but I now have this girlfriend and like she’s super adorable and also loves anime and she made this whole list of recommendations so I’m kinda working through that and come on you can’t just watch one thing on a loop that’s ridiculous.

So I picked up the manga again, two weeks ago. I had left it off and bookmarked it on chapter 161. I’m currently on 311. That’s... 150 chapters in two weeks. That’s a lot for me.

That’s all a very long way of trying to express just how much I love Haikyuu!!, because I just... genuinely can’t stop? I’m so thoroughly enjoying this whole thing that I just wanna consume it again as soon as I’m done because it’s so good.

I love the character, I adore the characters. Hinata Shouyou is in my top five favorite male characters of all time. I love him so much. But not just him. Not even just his team, aka the main characters? This one just completely makes me love even the other teams - yes, naturally the main rivals the most because that is by design, but usually sports anime fall short on making me invest in anyone beyond the actual main team, it is very rare that the main rivals get some baseline investment from me. Usually I’m just in it for the main characters, why should I care about those... stepping stones? The teams they defeat on the way.

Haikyuu!! has me squeal and point stupidly when my big dumb owl shows his face (Bokuto ily). It has me excited for them all. Invested to a certain degree (naturally, I don’t want the other teams to win when fighting Karasuno, because duh).

I even love the female characters in it! I very rarely can even stand female anime characters because like... 90s American stereotype female characters be cringey but anime stereotype female characters are the bane of my existence. Here, I love them, I find them wholesome. They’re not being exploited like in certain other male-centric franchises where they need the biggest tits possible and the thinnest waists imaginable and only exist for the male gaze and for the male characters to be perverts about them.

Hinata isn’t some super gifted chosen one but he has to work hard, really hard. They all do. And they all get their growth and just the pure excitement whenever they do learn something new, whenever they do improve? Not to mention his character design, that short ball of sunshine and fluff. His hair kills me. Seriously, that orange fluffiness. He’s so smol but so energetic and so bright in that contageous anime protagonist way - meaning that he just makes everyone around him like him and cheer for him and smile with him (well, not everyone *side-eyes Tsukki*).

Tsukishima has such a great arch. He starts out as such a stereotypical bully who is just put into the way of the protagonist to create some tension, but then he actually gets fleshed out fully, gets his own arch and growth and I genuinely never expected to care about the damn bastard??

The humor in this one also kills me. So much dry-witted sarcasm and snark, so much of the humor lays in the facial expressions of the characters too! It’s a joy to watch and to read.

The pacing just works. There are some sports anime that rush too much through games and some that drag them out too long - but in boring ways. This anime turned one volleyball game into a 10 episode season and manages to convey so much tension and excitement that even after I had already seen it twice and absolutely knew the outcome, I still couldn’t even pause and had to watch the whole thing because I needed to see how it continues.

They manage to convey all this excitement and also the joy - the joy of the characters whenever a play works out - and the surprise when something new happens in ways that have me excited all over again, even when I really shouldn’t be because I already know exactly what happens.

And then there’s the animal theme. I love a good animal theme. The fact that basically all the teams have an animal associated with them. There are such great visuals given with the animal themes too.

Naturally, there is also always the component of shipping for me. Such great ships that I love so dearly and... honestly, nothing has ever made me ship an OT6 before because I’m over here, juggling all these overlapping ships and loving and cherishing them all.

I don’t know, on the greater scale of things and the vast, endless landscape of anime, this may just be one of many, but to me personally...? It is... It’s like this one was just perfectly tailored to me, specifically, in a manner I experience very rarely. TV shows are always about compromises. Sure, I like plotlines A and C and D but man do I hate B and yeah I love the main character but urgh X member of the main cast I just loathe and then there’s the unnecessarily forced canon romance that’s making me cringe - these kind of things.

With Haikyuu!! I just... enjoy everything. Every aspect of it. Every character of it. Every interaction between characters. The writing, the art-style, the animation, the pacing, the characters, the plotline, the execusion. I just love the whole damn thing.