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margridarnauds · 4 years ago

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Hey there loving your blog! If I'm not imposing too much, can you talk about tohobeth? Any version and anything at all!

I ALWAYS have time to talk Tohobeth. Since I feel like it would be unfair to talk about productions I haven’t personally seen, I’m going to keep my discussion mainly to the 2015-2016 production, since I have the DVD on it. My views on it aren’t as solid as they are on, say, 1789 or MA, mainly because, somewhat embarrassingly, I only got my DVD AFTER I left the States, with my mom scanning the files in and sending them on to me via GDrives. And, with my Master’s program....well. I’ve not been able to watch it anywhere near to where I usually do before forming hard opinions. (Generally speaking, it takes about....six months or so for me to REALLY settle into my opinions, though, as you can see re: Lady Bess, there are a few times where my opinions are still variable after years.)

It’s a fact well known at this point that I’m not the biggest Hanafusa Mari fan in the world, and it’s also a fact that she was recorded as Elisabeth twice, as opposed to Hana Ranno, who was double-cast in the role with her, getting a DVD of her own. Was I happy about this? No. Whenever I see Hana Ranno footage on Youtube, I feel this sort of ache in my chest because I REALLY would have loved to see her Toho Elisabeth. Maybe she wouldn’t have been a personal fave, maybe I would have actively hated her performance, but as it is, she’s acquired a semi-mythical significance to me now as The One That Fell Into Oblivion.

Such a pity she couldn’t show up on the DVD. Such a pity.

Part of why I’m so scathing, of course, is that I tend to REALLY like getting both casts so that I can see the differences between performers, and, with a musical called “Elisabeth” that obviously has Elisabeth as a protagonist...it can almost feel like getting half of what I normally get. It’s still good, I still do recommend the DVD, obviously, but also if I could go back in time to talk to some Toho execs and be like “Look, guys.....record both Sisis.”

Now, I come not to bury Hanafusa Mari, but to praise Tohobeth, so I won’t be too far on the attack here especially since, to be perfectly fair, I feel like Elisabeth is the single best Toho performance of hers I’ve seen (between Mozart, Lady Bess, Marie Antoinette, and Elisabeth). She’s been playing the role since 1996, so she has very much fine-tuned her interpretation at this point, and there are MANY people who feel like she’s the definitive Japanese Elisabeth. This is the role, more than any other single role, that made her a legend in the industry. I personally feel like she REALLY starts hitting her stride about midway through the first act and, by the start of the second act, she’s at her peak performance. The role of Elisabeth is very challenging for any actress; most Elisabeths are drawn to one of the three stages of Elisabeth’s life that we see - Some of them are very good at playing 15 year old Elisabeth, some the Young Wife/Empress, and some the older, bitter Elisabeth, and, personally, I feel like Hanafusa is best in the latter role. As an actress, she very clearly feels a draw to sadness and mourning (in both Lady Bess and Marie Antoinette, she took the sadder interpretation of both characters she played, as opposed to her costars, who separated between the low points and the high points of their lives) and Older Elisabeth gives her the chance to stay in her comfort zone. Unfortunately, when it comes to Younger Elisabeth, especially in the very beginning, I find that she can age revert herself a little TOO much, so that she plays Elisabeth-at-15 as Elisabeth-at-8, which makes her interactions with both Der Tod and Franz Josef a little bit on the uncomfortable side.

A personal highlight for Yoshio!Tod for me is his Die Schatten Länger in the first act, where he goes from sympathetic to seductive to sinister and then back to seductive. It’s an impressive performance of one of my favorite moments, if not my ULTIMATE favorite moment of the entire musical, and he does it so effortlessly. Watching him....he reminds me a little of Uwe Kröger? He isn’t quite as aloof and ageless as 1992!Der Tod, but looking at him in the role, I do get this vision of this otherworldly entity. He has this kind of floating, ethereal voice that we tend to associate with the classical Phantom of the Operas, with a very nice, smooth lower range in particular. I do also like his dynamic with Hanafusa Mari during “Wenn Ich Tanzen Will” -- She isn’t as reactive as some Elisabeths that I’ve seen, but I do still get the feeling of the two of them acting and reacting to one another, and this production is thankfully less....aggressive than certain productions. (2005, I’M LOOKING AT YOU.) I always prefer this scene as a verbal battle of wills, not necessarily Der Tod manhandling Elisabeth, and Toho delivers that.

His performance almost makes me forgive him for 2006 Marie Antoinette. Almost.

Shirota Yu on the other hand...he’s STILL otherworldly, but in a totally different way. He isn’t immature (I’ve SEEN immature Deaths, and he’s not), he isn’t the Bastard Boyfriend Der Tod, but there’s...something almost NAIVE about him at times? Not in a way that makes him less deadly, but in a way that makes him MORE so. He’s never interacted with a human before, not on this level, it’s very obvious he has no idea how humans really function or work, and Elisabeth confuses him just as much as she intrigues him. I also think that, at various times, you can REALLY see him having the time of his life in the role, playing a very, very expressive Tod in comparison to his more refined, aloof counterpart. Take their respective approaches to the death of little Sophie.

“Oh, Elisabeth! This is so ~sad~ Here, let me console you! (This should work, right?)”

“Hm, interesting, it seems like she’s upset. This isn’t what I anticipated.”

And, at the beginning of Der Letze Tanz, which I’m including here purely because Shirotan is looking particularly memeable here.

“Hello, it’s me, and yes, I’m majestic, I know, look at me.”

“You hate death, but live as a mortal. Curious! I am very intelligent.”

He’s a little rougher than Yoshio, a little less refined (I’ve heard Yoshio Inoue’s Der Tod compared, both positively and negatively, to a European aristocrat, which is actually a little ironic since, of the two of them, Yu Shirota Fernández is technically the more “European”, but. Well. In approach...) He has a wonderful voice (honestly, if you ever want to send your eardrums to heaven, listen to his cover of Die Schatten Werden Länger with Ramin Karimloo. Thank me later), though it’s different than Yoshio Inoue’s more classical voice. I think he has a little bit of a pop influence in there. Which might SEEM like the kiss of death for a performer, but in my opinion, he does work it. (Look, I can’t say anything negative about the guy: My mom has a massive crush on him, I own his album, and also I wasn’t able to finish the one video of him immediately following Miura Haruma’s death where he tried to sing through tears because it GOT me and now I can’t see Shirotan’s face without wanting to give him a massive hug. Which I can’t. Both for geographical reasons and also social distance.) It’s actually a little hard to compare the two Tods because, while they wear the same costumes, sing the same music, act against the same actress, they take such radically different approaches that it’s hard to say “Oh, yes, this one!” or “Oh, yes! That one!” Especially since I’m not sure that Shirota Yu’s voice would have worked with Yoshio Inoue’s approach or vice versa. I ended up loving both Der Tods for various reasons. I THINK that if my copies of Elisabeth were dangling off a cliff and my archnemesis told me to pick one, I would have to end up rescuing Yoshio Inoue’s version because I tend to prefer my sleek, elegant Tods (”Tode?”) but like. I’d be in mourning. Not the least because I’d have to tell my mom about the loss of Yu Shirota’s Tod.

Speaking of crushes...look. Takanori Sato’s Franz. We know that I have a minor, unfortunate crush on his Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette, and as Franz...He did SUCH a good job with a character who is hard to make sympathetic in the limited time he has. Most audiences are rooting either for Elisabeth/Death or Elisabeth/Independence, and Franz quickly loses sympathy as the musical goes on, so an actor who can make him likeable is working against the tide there, but Takanori gives him SUCH a huge degree of warmth that I found myself rooting for Elisabeth/Franz to make things work out even though we know that it can’t.

I repeat my assessment from my Marie Antoinette write-up: #FersenDerTodWho?

Mario Tashiro...we know that I do love this man’s work. In my opinion, he has one of the single best voices in the industry. But also, in my opinion....as an actor....he just.....doesn’t have it. He tends to act like the single most one-dimensional version of a role he can get away with. In the beginning, when Franz is young and in love with Sisi during “Nichts ist Schwer” there were a few moments where I felt like I might go into a sugar coma.

They’re so cute together. Kill me now.

And, unfortunately, Franz doesn’t have enough time to REALLY show off his range, with the exception of a few low notes and the act one finale (which to be fair, he is BRILLIANT in), to the point where I did, however slightly, end up preferring Takanori Sato both vocally and acting wise. I wouldn’t say that he’s wasted in the role, because he DOES do a good job with what he’s given, but I do think that it’s hard to appreciate just what he can do from this alone.

It’s only fitting, after talking about Franz, that his mother should come right after him always lurking in the background, as always. And, overall....there isn’t THAT much difference, namely because Sophie, as a role, just doesn’t have that much variance in the role. And most of the fanbase is kind of. Actively rooting for her to die at any given point. There’s not that much that a given actress can really do with it. It’s nothing against them, it’s just a matter of how the role is written. I do find it interesting how both approached the death scene: Tatsuki Kohju’s Sophie is crying at the end, frightened of the afterlife as she clutches, frantically at the death angels before she slumps over, her cane falling out of her hand. As powerful as she was in life, she’s terrified of what comes beyond, as powerless as any other mortal. Suzuke Mayo tries to say something, mouthing some words, but then jerks sharply at a pain in her chest, trying to stay conscious for as long as she can but staggering backwards anyway, falling into the arms of the death angels with a look of pure relief on her face. You get the feeling that she’s been fighting for Austria for so long, made so many personal sacrifices of her own, that the chance for rest is coming as a relief to her. I THINK I prefer the latter interpretation, but honestly, both of them are solid in their own right, though I’m not sure that the role REALLY gets enough to justify a double-casting. (Also....I have to say that, while I wouldn’t necessarily get a musical just for Susuke Mayo, I’ve seen her in enough to have suitably warm feelings for her performances, so I’m already coming in with some amount of bias.)

Lucheni...I don’t REALLY pay as much attention to, compared to, say, the main trio, but he is our narrator, and both Luchenis did take very different approaches to the character. Songha’s Lucheni was...well, if he isn’t in love with Der Tod himself, he’s obsessed with him. We see him reaching out to Der Tod both at the beginning (when he appears on stage for the first time) and at the end, when Der Tod drops the knife to him. There’s a fervor to him in those scenes in particular that I tend to associate with worshippers in a Baptist Revival. Yamazaki is a little bit more subdued, in the beginning I get the feeling that he’s almost under Der Tod’s trance himself, and, in general, I think he’s a little bit more cynical, though, by the ending, he’s dropped a lot of that pretense. He looks at the knife after he’s stabbed her (Songha’s Lucheni almost lets her walk into the knife, but Yamazaki’s STABS), before a smile comes to his face as he falls down while running, finally laughing. It’s like he’s been playing things more or less subdued this entire time and this is his real BREAK, now that he finally has the opportunity to kill. With Songha’s...

He’s actually shocked. I’m not generous enough to Lucheni, as a character, to say that he really feels bad about killing ELISABETH per se, but that...he’s borderline-fetishized Death for so long, waited so long, and then, when he finally has the chance...it doesn’t live up to his expectations. A woman walked into his knife. (She walked into his knife ten times.) There’s nothing dramatic or exciting about it. One small action, and it can’t be taken back, there’s no getting away from it. He actively stumbles around stage afterwards, confused as he tries to run away, like he doesn’t know what to do now.

Of the two of them, Songha has a rougher, kind of growelly voice, to the point where I didn’t REALLY like his Lucheni all that much until I started to analyze his acting. Voice is a MASSIVE factor in whether I enjoy a performance, simply because...it’s my eardrums. I very much want to keep them intact. (For what it’s worth, Songha is NEVER rough to the degree it hurts my eardrums, but there have been a few...) It’s arguably fitting for someone who, as a character, is as rough as Lucheni, but it wasn’t to my personal taste, while Yamazaki...I mean, he’s playing Der Tod in the 20th anniversary. Whenever we get the 20th anniversary. He’s played some of the most celebrated roles in Japanese theatre. The man has RANGE and a fantastic control of the role. (Also...look. As a bisexual woman, I’m just going to say it: He’s more personally attractive to me, though the Toho Lucheni isn’t....really....designed to be attractive. If you go in expecting Takarazuka Lucheni or Serkan Kaya’s extremely pretty Lucheni...well. He isn’t. Either version of him. He looks like someone just pulled him out of a garbage can.) I did notice that both of them have quite a bit of growl in their voice during “Milch”, though, so some of this could be directorial intervention. While BOTH of them absolutely nail the high note in the Prologue, in my opinion, Yamazaki’s riffs are an absolute HIGH point for me (...okay, yeah. Literally and figuratively. I didn’t mean to make a pun. But here we are.) I do think, at the end of the day, I prefer his voice, though I think that both of them did interesting things with the role, taking what is essentially opposite approaches. I don’t think I have a really clear favorite there. One of these days, I’ll have to check out Songha’s other work to see what his voice is like in its “Natural State” so to speak since if, for example, I’d only ever heard Oka Kojiro’s voice in 1789, I’d have just assumed he only knew how to bark out his roles.

One role that wasn’t double-cast but that I WOULD like to draw attention to anyway is Furukawa Yuta as Rudolf. My friend @chibimyumi‘s already written some wonderful meta on Furudolf that I highly recommend, and there’s very little that I can really add except to say that he’s probably my personal take on the role, mainly because, while he IS sympathetic, that isn’t the entirety of his character. He isn’t just a pawn in Der Tod’s game,though Der Tod is unquestionably manipulating him, but a character in his own right. I’ve noticed in the Elisabeth fandom...it can be quite common to go “POOR WOOBIE RUDOLF” and....yes, he did have a very tragic life, but there was more to his life than just the tragedy. He had a life and a personality outside of that (that and....the general erasure of the 17 year old girl who died by his side, but it’s hard to be too harsh on the fandom for that when the musical itself kind of skips over that.)

Now, on those notes, there’s one thing that...I don’t want to talk about, but I feel like it’s an elephant in the room if I don’t.

Namely, Hass.

I don’t like talking about this scene, mainly because it’s deeply uncomfortable subject matter, and it’s deeply controversial subject matter that, as a goyische white person, I really am out of my depth in talking about. There’s a reason why “Hass” was censored from the Zuka, and I know that some fans have gotten hooked on the Zuka, only to go to the German or the Toho, and have subsequently found themselves shocked and/or traumatized. I understand that it’s meant to be deeply uncomfortable, and the Toho DOES show Rudolf actively getting them to stop, which further solidifies the idea in Die Schatten Werden Länger of Rudolf WANTING to stop things from getting out of control, but he can’t. The Toho is also a little bit more brutal than I’m used to, showing an explicit attack on a Jewish man. It’s the kind of thing that, especially in the German and Austrian productions, was meant to give the audience a wake-up call and remind them of their own past, as a country, but can be traumatizing for any Jewish fans or fans of color who might be watching. Especially given that Lucheni, who we tend to associate as a jerk, yes, but as our more-or-less likeable narrator, is actively taking part. I know what they were going for, but also there’s a reason why I never stream this production without a warning ahead of time, and I also tend to end up skipping this scene.

The staging is very nice, probably one of the more intricate Toho stagings I’ve seen, with a lot of props and backgrounds moving around, often mid-song, as well as projections in scenes such as Die Ersten Vier Jahre in order to show the passage of time.

The costuming is, predictably for Toho, fantastic, lavish without being quite as sparkly as their Takarazuka counterparts, having quite a few nice velvet numbers in there. The costuming of Elisabeth is so iconic it seems pointless to discuss outfits like the Sternenkleid or the coronation outfit, but I think this production does well on even some of the non-iconic ensembles. See:

And...you know, I said no iconic numbers, because they tend to be all people talk about, but like. One Sternenkleid pic. Because it’s what she deserves.

Is it Too Soon to say that I’d stab her for that wardrobe alone? Because damn. And that’s not even touching the jewellery.

I want.

Overall, I believe this is probably my favorite production of Elisabeth. Toho really knocked it out of the park, and it’s a good compromise between the Takarazuka and the original Austrian in many, many ways (I do love them, for example, keeping Der Tod’s presence in Alle Fragen Sing Gestellt from the Takarazuka) while also making a production that’s distinct and stands on its own two feet. I really would like to have another proshot of the 2019-2020 cast, whenever the Japanese theatre community is in a more stable place, because I really, really would like to see Manaki Reika, Yamazaki, and Furukawa Yuta’s takes on their new roles, because I feel like they could be really, really solid and I’ve heard fantastic things about at least Chapi and Furukawa Yuta (nothing against Yamazaki, just that I don’t know anything about his take on Der Tod.)

#long post #elisabeth das musical #toho elisabeth #Anonymous

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theholyyuunoaduck · 4 years ago

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Reasons why i hate mikaela hyakuya

@gurensangel @chaoticgaymess sorry i know you wanted me to repost your post but its easier just starting my own and making my own hashtag so incase anyone else asks me about this i can just look for the hashtag and send them this

Mikaela is honestly one of those characters i desperately and i mean desperatly tried to love i mean his kid self was so so easy to love and want to protect and hell i cried a shit ton for him and his past his problems everything but the reality is mikaela is a toxic person and here im going to be explaining everything as clearly as i can though im sure that everyone has heard most of these arguments i also have some most people wouldnt even consider

Why is mikaela toxic? Well simply said when you have one person and only one then its obviously going to be an underlying mental health issue now you could say other characters are similar to mikaela within that regard like every other vampire but heres the thing we dont get to see much of the other vampires so im more or less apathetic to those vampires and their actions however in accordance to mikaela we have watched his actions since day one and his chemistry with the rest of the cast of owari no seraph what grinds my gears isnt the fact that mikaela acts with violence and distrust towards everyone but the actions that the rest of the cast have taken towards mikaela and his inability to react differently towards those same exact characters aka shinoa squad

Shinoa squad has never once treated mikaela with prejiduce with agendas or anything of ill will since day one the fact that shinoa basically is the cause of death of many of her comrads during the nagoya arc where mikaela attacks the jida troop (and yes it is a troop considering that after reading pannel after pannel theres upwards to 20 soldiers who the majority of which are equiped with standard blades unlike the protagonists you know basically cannon fodder) but my problem is the fact that in that chapter shinoa instigated their betrayal to save mikaela from the rest of the troops shinoa's life was threatned straight after acknowledging that this could be the last she ever layed eyes on yuichiro by letting mikaela escape with him first threatened by a random soldier and then right after rika inoue and by her superior narumi makoto and shinoa the fucking chad she is just took all the punishment because she knows damn well that it is her fault her comrads died because of her distraction to allow mikaela to escape eating away the precious time guren baught his soldiers to run away and escape and how does mikaela respond? He tells yuu to abandon them it doesnt take a genius to say that betrayal especially to the hiragi family is met with death even if mikaela doesnt understand the rules and regulations of human law i doubt vampire law is much different meaning he knows damn well shinoa could lose her life for betraying the army for his sake and not just shinoa but her entire squad

I already know what youll say "but but mikas a vampire he has no emotions" bullshit absolute pure fucking bullshit of an argument considering the fact yoichis mention of the word family/freinds was cause for pause for mikaela and not just mikaela look at ferid look at crowley theyre all so vibrant and brimming with personality and emotion and i am damn well sure no one disagrees this could just be kagami's writing and forgetting about this plotpoint

The fact that despite this mikaela is a manipulative fucker we all know yuu is a dumbass no one can deny this the fact that mikaela is willing to point his sword towards yuichiro and threaten him his so called beloved speaks volumes about mikaelas ego his straight up ego thinking that he's the only one that could be right after all mikaelas the wisest of the bunch right i mean after all everyone of his other decisions was followed through with outstanding results anyone? Anyone? Thats right not once has the squad or especially yuichiro listend to mikaela and do to that fact everyone is alive and kicking examples? (This is also an example of manipulative mika) Mika: Yuu abandon shinoa because if she's as great as you say us sticking around will only cause her trouble you cannot tell me that isnt mikaela trying to twist yuu's feelings for his family to abandon them because had they listened to mikaela shinoa would have been impaled by the chains kureto produced to awaken the seraph of the end

And almost right after that same situation upon mahiru injuring yuu awakening abadon mikaela high tails and runs away carrying yuu and we actually see a pannel of shinoa squad scrambling for saftey straight up abandoning them again and going so far as to yell that he is yuu's only family despite all the other shit

Alright so lets play into the whole mika doesnt have feelings dont you think that having no feelings would make your sense of judgement all the better? And if so with all the evidence and actions of shinoa squad why in Gods blue earth would he basically act like an actual dick towards shinoa who saved his life risked her life for him as if shinoa is the sole reason yuu is in the prediciment of being possessed by yuu?? Isnt that the least bit infuriating??

On next of we shouldnt listen to mikaela in the same arc again mikaela suggests lets leave shinoa squad to face off against crowley AND FERID with this bullshit of "theyre after us theyll just ignore them" i mean are you kidding me? Ferid the man youve been with for 5 years is going to not have the time of his life killing a bunch of teenagers for the simple fact that if yuu is running away and leaving them.they must not be important to him therefore easy pickings for him

Lets not trust guren after all he's just using you he doesnt care the man loves that boy like as if he was his son and you can argue against me with this some time later but alright lets give mika the benifit of the doubt so obviously in mikas infinit wisdom his set course of action is killing him infront of yuichiro??? Really??? In front of him?? Killing his father infront of yuu man that just speaks volumes about how mikaeala only cares about the feeling he gets with yuu rather than carring about yuu as a person

Imo mika cares about how yuu makes him feel rather than who yuichiro is what do i mean by this? Its simple mika doesnt give a damn what makes yuu happy hell mika would cage yuu up if it ment keeping him safe and alive but is that really living? Its cruelty if i adopt a dog feed it and give it water but never play with it and isolate it thats basically animal cruelty

Anyway back to mika trying to kill guren just right there yuu begs mika to stop and grabs his arm pulling him back and what does mika do? What does he do? He lops off yuu's arm the one that was holding mikaela back from attacking what makes this scene even worse is i had so much hope for mikaeala because the last battle they won mikaela said the thoight of losing his.comrads made him dizzy what happened to him not having feelings? I lived loved loved that statement i imagined uncle mika to yuus kids being the best man to yuus wedding begging to be the one to make the wedding cake so so so so so many au's based off those little words and right after removing yuu's limb from him kimizuki and yoichi step up for guren weapons drawn and mikaela threatens them?!?!?! I mean honestly how fucking hypocritical can you be how big is his fucking ego???

Ill end it with this point because i have work in the morning i Still have another 20 bullet points i want to add but im starting to think i have artheritistis in my hand because my fingers hurt so much but anyway my point being mikaelas character contradicts yui's in an unhealthy way while yuu's character trait is to run towards danger to be a hero mikas is to run from danger its basically a tug of war and the thing is the story so far has actually turned out well for the cast running into danger for yuu made the 6th angels trumpet to grow silent destroying all of the four horsemen monsters and letting humanity take a huge step towards rebuilding but had it been mika's way theyd have run right out of that building never to see it again my point is if someone pulls and runs towards something and another character ties a rope to them and runs the other direction that tension will cause nothing but problems instead of running forward with the protagonist in order to keep them safe and actually contribute into the success of the mission

Also like the hashtags say this is only part 1 because as i said i have to sleep and my hand is killing me i should have done this earlier when i had more energy in order to bring along all the sources like the chapter and page where you can find these exact moments along with photos of said arguments/bullet points

#owari no seraph #seraph of the end #yuichiro hyakuya #shinoa hiiragi #mikaela shindo #mikaela hyakuya #reasons i hate mikaeal hyakuya part 1

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luckcycler · 5 years ago

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hi! i know you have a info page (or whatever it's called) for your characters butt doesnt work on mobile? anyways i wanted ask if you could tell me what ultimate talents they have?

Huh…

Not sure how invested you are with how you phrased your question but I just copy-pasted all the info on this ask.

I’ll put it under read more because otherwise, it will be super long

Basic info:

Heartbreak is a story of 16 former students of Hope’s Peak Academy who have found themselves locked in the bizarre setting of a love hotel. And thus, a new exciting killing game takes place once again!

As the concepts of guilt and justification clash together inside the sickeningly pink walls of the hotel, one starts to wonder who exactly is the morally righteous one?

And to shake things up… a new rule has been added to the monopad.

The cast:

Aino Inoue

Former Ultimate Mermaid

Age: 20

Class:75-B

Blood type: O

Likes: Long Walks on the Beach, Astrology

Dislikes: Sand

It’s time for opinions! Meaning opinions from this woman! This is Aino Inoue, the ultimate mermaid! Or more precisely a professional underwater mermaid actress. It appears childhood career dreams do come true! She became a very known underwater actress for her infectious charm and her ability to stay underwater for 9 minutes without breathing.

Her attitude towards others is very straightforward but that doesn’t mean she is unfriendly, actually quite the opposite and especially if she is under the liquid courage. What’s personal space? She certainly doesn’t know.

Aino is a very nosy person and loves to give relationship advice to other people, even when these other people really don’t want it. It doesn’t help that quite a lot of these advices come from her obsession with astrology and blood type personality theory.

She can also be seen more often than not with a cocktail in hand to a point her constant state of tipsiness worries some of the others. In Aino’s opinion, it just makes her twice as fun!

Daisuke Okamoto

Former Ultimate Robot Combat Champion

Birthday: May 25th

Age: 19

Class: 76-B

Blood type: B

Likes: Logic Puzzles, Memes

Dislikes: Raisins in Bread, Academic writing

Here comes the local memester! Daisuke Okamoto is the current robot combat champion. But despite his promising career path in the art of mauling battle robots and much to everyone’s bafflement. After his time in Hope’s Peak, he went to study engineering at his local university. He refuses to tell why he had such a change of heart even when he still regularly competes.

Daisuke is a second-generation immigrant with his mother being American and father being Japanese. Because of this, his sense of humor is influenced a lot by western internet culture. He tends to joke around a lot giving him a carefree attitude. He loves to entertain, although in serious situations his joking nature can come off as insensitive.

But under all the jokes and terribly outdated meme’s, he is very intelligent and a hard realist who wants to know every detail of the rules and isn’t afraid to ask them from Monokuma.

Gina Higanbana

Former Ultimate Biochemist

Birthday: October 31st

Age: 23

Class: 72-A

Blood type: B

Likes: Poetry, Family

Dislikes: Frankenstein (Story), Sour Plums

Speaking of eccentric mad scientists! Gina Higanbana, the ultimate biochemist is the sort of person who definitely befriended every monster under her bed when she was young. Gina is a boisterous workaholic which has paid off since she is known most for her study of parabiosis. Unfortunately, not all of her fame is from positive feedback, as some of her testing methods have been found very unorthodox…

Gina presents herself as larger than life, after all, she is a woman of science! Though she delves with modern problems, her way of talking is very old fashioned, and even poetic, making her sound like she would fit right into a 19th-century romance novel.

While being a semi loud presence to the group, Gina tends to withdraw to her own space and has trouble talking about subjects outside of her interests. But when it comes to teaching neighbor kids how to turn a volcano eruption experiment into a baking soda canon, she is the right person to tag along.

Hotaka Muramaru

Former Ultimate Florist

Birthday: January 27th

Age: 22

Class: 73-B

Blood type: A

Likes: Frogs, Bellflowers

Dislikes: Kiwa Fukuda

Hotaka Muramaru, the former ultimate florist… Well, a former florist, really. He isn’t doing too hot in his life at this moment. These days he mainly does gardening work around his area. It is unfortunate as he was known for his striking floral arrangements and attention to small details before his family’s flower shop business went down.

Hotaka as a person is very forgiving by nature. He doesn’t like causing conflicts and it is very hard to get him angry. Despite these positive traits, he seems to be nice for the sake of being nice which makes it hard to get close to him in a way that matters outside of everyday small talk. It seems preserving what little image he has left is more important to him. This has also made him quite the perfectionist.

Kana Nakano

Former Ultimate Lifeguard

Birthday: May 2nd

Age: 25

Class: 70-A

Blood type: O

Likes: Children, Geocaching

Dislikes: Spontaneous Plans

Kana Nakano, the ultimate lifeguard is very passionate about her job. She is the mom friend of the group you know you can always rely on in any hardships, niche killing games included. She has become a very popular lifeguard at her local kids’ poolside as she has a knack for talking to children. Though because of this her way of talking can sound very condescending when speaking to other adults. She tends to simplify her words and soften the meaning much to some of the group’s irritation.

As a person, she can also be very stubborn until she meets her goal. If nothing else, she makes a great leader figure with a lot of survival abilities and experience in tough situations.

Katsurou Furusawa

Former Ultimate Hunter

Birthday: September 5th

Age: 23

Class: 72-A

Blood type: A

Likes: Sewing, Peace and Quiet

Dislikes: Wet Socks, Attention

This timid yet patient boy who looks like he just crawled out of a swamp is Katsurou Furusawa. Though he doesn’t like talking about his talent that much, he is known as the ultimate hunter. He got his title for his exceptional trap making skills and the ability to stay unmoving for hours to no end, blending to his environments seamlessly, and waiting for a pray to trigger his traps.

Personality-wise, Katsurou is bashful and likes to talk to himself rather than others. He has a tendency to be a people pleaser, disregarding his own beliefs and feelings on topics just to appease both sides of the argument. He was never a problem child, as he has always done what his parents told him to. Even accepting the invitation to Hope’s Peak was not his idea.

Katsurou is also a huge daydreamer. He seems to be more comfortable with the world inside his head than the real world, and it shows.

Kiwa Fukuda

Former Ultimate Scapegoat

Birthday: December 31st

Age: 23

Class: 72-B

Blood type: AB

Likes: Citrus Fruits, Tacky Decorations

Dislikes: Paper Cuts

Though she looks quite sporty, her talent is far from a healthy career. This awkward and accident-prone woman is Kiwa Fukuda, our protagonist. Unfortunately to some, she is known as the ultimate scapegoat, though this information is confidential especially in court. Her line of work is basically taking the fall for a singular person’s or even a whole company’s mistakes. If that’s not deemed realistic, she will direct the fault towards a more suitable candidate. The amount of guilt Kiwa’s work as a scapegoat leaves her with has made her desensitized and apathetic towards others.

Personality-wise, Kiwa is laidback and can come off as an airhead thanks to her apathetic demeanor towards their current situation. She tends to joke about terrible subjects that make people around her a bit uncomfortable to say the least.

Kiwa is also clumsy and tends to get involved in accidents without trying to. Be it an injury, a misunderstanding or a terrible accident, it’s easy to assume she always has something to do with it whether it was her fault or not. Kiwa now wears a bicycle helmet all the time to make sure she won’t get a third fracture on her skull.

Kohaku Iwatomi

Former Ultimate Gemologist

Birthday: June 4th

Age: 19

Class: 76-B

Blood type: O

Likes: Shiny Things, DIY

Dislikes: Loneliness

This is Kohaku Iwatomi and he is happily ready to talk your ears off! Kohaku is known as the ultimate gemologist, mainly because he changes his specialty in gemology quite often, always wanting to try out something new. He seems to excel in all the areas he has tried out so far through pure dedication and excitement towards his profession. Though, for some reason, he has been working as a gem appraiser in his local pawnshop for longer than his peers thought he would withstand to.

Kohaku is a very cheery young man who loves to mingle no matter the topic. If you know him, you probably know his whole life story. He doesn’t like silence, nor does he bode well if left alone for too long. He isn’t narcissistic though as he is very empathetic and wears his emotions on his sleeve, he just really likes company and he has so much information to share with everyone!

Kohaku also has a liking towards thrift shop clothes and DIY projects hence his striking and pretty mismatched appearance.

Masami Kiyokane

Former Ultimate Croupier

Birthday: July 17th

Age: 22

Class: 73-A

Blood type: O

Likes: Board Games, Philosophy of Ethics

Dislikes: Alcohol

As if there were not enough party poopers in this group… This is Masami Kiyokane and he is known as the ultimate croupier. He got his title through diligent croupier work at organized events and after coming of age, at established casinos. Masami also has gotten quite good at seeing who is cheating and he knows most card games by heart. He seems fascinated by game rules in general.

Masami’s personality is pretty uptight and passive-aggressive. His way of talking tends to be a colorful use of personification, especially when he is going on a tangent and complaining about something. Though he talks big, very rarely is his bite worse than his bark as he mutters under his breath before admitting he is in the wrong.

Masami has a very strong moral system he believes in. His rather judgmental attitude is unusual for someone who has a hobby of learning about ethical philosophy though and often he gets called a hypocrite for playing favorites. He is not very happy about that.

Mei Kaneko

Ultimate Phonologist

Birthday: March 21st

Age: 18

Class: 77-A

Blood type: B

Likes: Corvidae, Accents

Dislikes: Wasting Time

This young girl is Mei Kaneko. She is the youngest of the group as she is the only one still studying in Hope’s Peak. She should be set to graduate soon and she is more than excited to continue with her dreams towards a real working life as the ultimate Phonologist!

Personality-wise, Mei is very energetic and will give her all to any task at hand. She is also very loud and a bit of a daredevil. If you tell her to not push the red button, she will definitely push the red button.

Growing up, Mei’s neighborhood had always been surrounded by corvids. As she slowly got more familiar with them, she developed a fascination towards the crows that kept playing in her backyard. Mei had been studying dialects and languages since she was little thanks to her bilingual home and decided, quite abruptly, that her life work from then on would have to deal with establishing communication with corvids.

Nori Ikari

Former Ultimate Sailor

Birthday: December 8th

Age: 20 (?)

Class: 75-A

Blood type: AB

Likes: Folk Tales, Making Rope Knots

Dislikes: His Knee Brace

This theatrically boisterous man is Nori Ikari, the ultimate sailor. Believe it or not, he is as young as 20 years old, which has led some of the group to believe he is a vampire in disguise. Nori comes from a vast lineage of sailors of different ranks but all just as proud seafarers! Nori got his title as the ultimate sailor after recklessly making a week-long fishing trip alone in a trawler boat made for a crew of 10.

Nori tends to tell long tales of his ancestors which sound just bizarre enough that no one is quite sure if Nori is speaking the truth or not. To be honest, everything he says just sounds downright like a big fish story all the way down to his accent. Is this man real? No one has a good answer to that.

Personality-wise Nori can be pretty intense. He has a habit of making a bigger deal out of very normal things. Nori values honor and traditions and tends to get quite defensive if his integrity is challenged. And if needed, he might challenge you to a sword fight at a parking lot if he deems you need a fair ass kicking.

Okemia Momose

Former Ultimate Opera Singer

Birthday: March 10th

Age: 24

Class: 71-B

Blood type: A

Likes: Vintage Aesthetic, Home

Dislikes: Hope’s Peak, Luck

This nervous woman is Okemia Momose. It’s been a while since people have heard her sing, but she is still regarded as the ultimate opera singer. She got her title for her incredible range and her ability to hold a note for almost half a minute.

Nowadays though, her fame is shadowed by a traumatic event she went through in one of her performances. She was one of the performers at her local opera house which was run by a Yakuza family. However, there was a very strained turf war going on around the area that one day resulted in a shoot out at the opera house. Unfortunately to Okemia, she got caught in the crossfire and a bullet hit her temple. Though she survived, she got inflicted irredeemable damage to her brain which developed into a stutter.

Despite her towering over everyone with her height of a 6’5 feet, she is not very confident in herself. Okemia is a very high-strung person who tends to think the worst possible thing will definitely happen to her. Though she is nervous she has a lot of resentful opinions that are made from wise words

Shion Arai

Former Ultimate Figure Skater

Birthday: July 23rd

Age: 21

Class: 74-B

Blood type: B

Likes: Rhinestones, Straightforwardness

Dislikes: Cleaning, Bootlickers, Mornings

This person here is Shion Arai the ultimate figure skater! Under all the glitter, rhinestones, and an eccentric personality lies a somewhat kind-hearted individual who is willing to cooperate… as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them.

Shion got their title thanks to their impeccable ability to adapt and improve fast. They have won multiple competitions in their teen years despite starting the sport at age 12, which is considered quite late. After graduating Hope’s peak, Shion’s placement in the podiums has started to steadily drop. If asked about the slow decline of their career, Shion just shrugs nonchalantly, leaving it at that.

Shion identifies as nonbinary and they are very prideful towards their identity and their achievements. Despite this, they are also incredibly lazy and rarely bothers to do something they don’t want to. Their goal is to go where the bar is the lowest and if that’s not possible, they WILL complain.

Suzu Nagahashi

Former Ultimate Ballerina

Birthday: November 1st

Age: 21

Class: 74-A

Blood type: A

Likes: Rainy Days, Leather Jackets

Dislikes: Dancing

This cold and assertive young lady is Suzu Nagahashi, the ultimate ballerina and she is not here to get herself killed over some dumb motive. Suzu has been known for her skills all her life. Rumor has it her mother, a former ballerina, started teaching Suzu how to dance the moment she was able to take her first step. Absolutely no one was surprised when she got her invitation to Hope’s Peak, though she rarely showed up to school thanks to her harsh performance schedule.

Suzu is very stoic and she picks her words carefully. Though her tone of voice is very serious, her pink frilly dress makes her attempts to be taken seriously harder for her. Luckily Suzu is stubborn and will try her utmost best to keep the situation she has been thrown in solely under her control.

Tetsu Asukaze

Honorary Ultimate Taxi Driver

Birthday: October 1st

Age: 26

Class: N/A

Blood type: AB

Likes: Radio, Coffee, Extraterrestrials

Dislikes: N/A

This funky young man is Tetsu Asukaze and he is known as the ultimate taxi driver. Who would’ve thought that was a talent, huh? Tetsu’s situation as an ultimate is a bit different from others because he only discovered his talent after getting old enough to drive which meant his high school days were already over. Despite this, Hope’s Peak decided to give him an honorary title of an ultimate taxi driver. Whatever that means…

Even though Hope’s Peak had given a public acknowledgment of Tetsu’s talent, he doesn’t think much of it nor does he feel he really belongs with the other ultimates.

Personality-wise, Tetsu is your serene local cryptid whose life has no order and looking at his sleeping schedule it’ll stay like that. Despite his harmless chaos, he is a very sweet lad with a passion for the unknown and obscure theories.

Tsubaki Ito

Former Ultimate Mortician

Birthday: May 8th

Age: 24

Class: 71-A

Blood type: O

Likes: Medical History, Bad and Gory Horror Movies

Dislikes: Spirals

This unnerving and small woman is Tsubaki Ito, the ultimate mortician. She was born as a miracle child to an old couple that ran a mortician family business. In fact, everyone in her extended family is at least a generation older than her. As the years went by, her family slowly passing away from natural causes had become a regular occurrence.

Tsubaki is specialized in body restoration and desairology, as she tends to work with victims of causalities. She got her title by her ability to make even the worst of murder victims to look like they are merely sleeping in their caskets.

As the concept of death is an old friend in her family, Tsubaki has become desensitized towards the subject and can come off as insensitive towards the killing game. But what can you do when your daily routine occasionally includes pulling out a chainsaw from someone’s chest cavity due to a gruesome accident? Despite this, Tsubaki is very sweet and will address everyone with an endearing tone.

#Anonymous #drs heartbreak #fanganronpa

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arecomicsevengood · 5 years ago

Text

Watching Movies In Self-Isolation, Part Two

L’Assassin Habite Au Rue 21 (1942), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot. Clouzot is better known for directing The Wages Of Fear (the movie William Friedkin remade as Sorcerer) and Diabolique, but this is the first movie he directed. It’s a pretty effective comedy, as well as an Agatha Christie style murder-mystery thriller. It’s really cool to watch these things that feel like they are just “movies,” before a bunch of genre conventions got built up and put in place. This one’s also eighty minutes long, super-short. The premise of the movie is there’s a serial killer on the loose, leaving a business card on every dead body. A dude passes along to the police that he found a stash of the business cards in the attic of a boarding house, so the killer must live there. A police officer goes undercover as a priest moving into the boarding house to investigate the residents. His wife, an aspiring singer, has made a bet with him she can solve the crime first, and in doing so become a celebrity that will be hired to perform places, so she also moves into the boarding house, partly to annoy him. The stuff at the boarding house is basically the film’s second act, while the first and third act are more typical murder-mystery stuff, although the tone of comedy is maintained throughout, despite all the cold-blooded murders.

All These Women (1964), dir. Ingmar Bergman. Kind of dumb sex comedy directed by Ingmar Bergman, but with gorgeous Sven Nykvist cinematography, bright jewel-toned pastels, and sort of theatrical staging in spots seeming to foreshadow Parajanov’s The Color Of Pomegranates or eighties Greenaway stuff. About a critic who visits the palatial estate of a famous cellist to write a biography of him only to find a harem of women; the whole thing unfolding from the cellist’s funeral a few days later. The winking humor is both music-hall bawdy but in a way that feels self-aware or “meta” in the context of a sixties film.

The Touch (1971), dir. Ingmar Bergman. Bergman’s one of my favorites, many of his canonized classics resonate deeply with me, but he was also astonishingly prolific, with a bunch of movies of his blurring together in my mind, and even more that I didn’t know existed, like this English-language one, starring Elliott Gould. Gould’s another favorite of mine, being in a bunch of great movies in the sixties and seventies, but damn, he’s unlikable here. Unlikable characters “hit different” in older material because I’m not sure if you’re supposed to sympathize with them according to the sexist cultural attitudes of the day. Here he’s “the other man” Liv Ullman is cheating on Max Von Sydow (RIP) with, but he’s pretty emotionally abusive, just a shit to her, extremely demanding of her in a relationship he did nothing to earn, though it does feel like the movie is kind of treating him as a romantic lead.

The Anderson Tapes (1971), dir. Sidney Lumet. This is heist movie, starring Sean Connery as a dude fresh out of prison, planning to rob his girlfriend’s apartment building, costarring Christopher Walken in his first film role. It contains all the plot beats of a typical heist thing, all the satisfying “getting the gang together, planning things out in advance, chaotic elements interfere” stuff but also a totally superfluous bit of framing about like constant surveillance, video monitoring and audio tape. All this dystopian police-state stuff seems, implicitly, like it would make a crime impossible to execute, the criminals are monitored every step of the way, by assorted agencies. But then the punchline, after everyone’s arrested for reasons having nothing to do with that, is that all this recording is illegal and all the tapes should be erased as the high-profile nature of the case makes it likely the monitoring agencies will get caught. Sidney Lumet directs a good thriller, even though I don’t find Connery (or Dyan Cannon, who plays the girlfriend) particularly compelling.

The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (1933), dir. Fritz Lang. I watched this years ago, after reading Matt Fraction praise it, particularly how skillful the transitions between scenes were, and I really enjoyed it, but didn’t remember much about it and was excited to rewatch it. It’s got a lot going for it: An exceedingly elaborate criminal plot whose only goal is to wreak chaos, low-level criminals caught up in something they’re morally unprepared to reckon with, a charismatic police detective interviewing a bunch of weirdos, Fritz Lang following up M by continuing to be a master of film and sound editing very early stitching it all together. The Mabuse character was previously the star of a silent film I haven’t watched, and here he’s mute, which is a clever choice I didn’t register until writing it out just now. He’s gone completely insane, but is nonetheless writing a journal filled with elaborate crime plots, and his psychologist is completely insane and following these directions, in a commentary on the rise of Nazism in Germany at the time.

House By The River (1950), dir. Fritz Lang. I watched this in the pre-Quarantine days, but it totally rules. Again, it feels sordid in part because of how old it is and my assumption you’re meant to identify on some level with the completely loathsome protagonist’s sexual desire and anger at getting turned down. It’s so creepy, he’s listening to the sound of his maid showering at one point. All the characters seem very fun to play, they’re all pretty cartoonish. This guy murder his maid, and then gets the idea that he should write a book about the murder when someone explains the idea of “writing what you know” to him, and he is then surprised when his wife reads the book and puts together that it’s a murder confession, saying something like “Really? I thought I disguised it pretty well.” The film functions as a dark comedy because every character is completely mortifying. Lang’s work becoming less ambitious and more reduced in budget during his time working in America is pretty sad but this movie feels legit deranged.

Midsommar (2019), Ari Aster. Heard good things about Hereditary, but haven’t watched it yet, having been put off by the plot summary of Aster’s preceding short film, about a kid who rapes his dad. This is like a longer version of The Wicker Man, basically, starring Florence Pugh, who I had heard was like the new actress everyone’s enamored with, but didn’t think was that compelling in this. A bunch of Americans go to a Swedish village, one of them (played by Chidi from The Good Place) has studied their anthropology extensively, but all are unprepared for the fact that their whole culture seems to revolve around human sacrifice and having sex with outsiders so they don’t become totally inbred. There’s a monstrously deformed, cognitively impaired child who’s been bred specifically so his abstract splashings of paint can be interpreted as culture-defining profound lore, which I took away as being comparable to the role Joe Biden plays within the death cult of the DNC.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2019), dir. Bi Gan. This got a lot of acclaim, but I am almost certain the main reason I watched it is because the director made a list of his favorite movies and included Masaaki Yuasa’s anime series Kemonozume on it. Does a sort of bisected narrative thing, where half of the movie is this sort of fragmented crime thing, a little hard to follow, and then you get the title card, and then the second half is this pretty dreamlike atmospheric piece done in a single shot, with a moving camera. I’m not the sort to jerk off over long shots, although I appreciate the large amount of technical pre-planning that goes into pulling them off. The second part is pretty compelling though, enveloping, I guess it was in 3-D at certain theatrical screenings? I’m a little unclear on how my fucked-up eyes can deal with 3-D these days and I was never that into it. The first half is easy to turn off and walk away from, the second half isn’t but I’m unsure on how much it amounts to beyond its atmosphere.

Black Sun (1964), dir. Koreyoshi Kurahara. This one’s about a Japanese Jazz fan and dirtbag squatter who meets a black American soldier who’s gone crazy and AWOL. He loves him because he loves Jazz and all Black people, but the soldier is pretty crazy and can’t understand him anyway. Jazz is, or was, huge in Japan and this is a cooler depiction of that fandom than you get in Murakami novels but it’s a fairly uncomfortable watch, I guess because the black dude seems so crazy it feels a little racist to an American audience? Maybe he wasn’t being directed that well because there would be a language barrier but it’s weird.

Honestly the thing to watch from sixties Japan on The Criterion Channel is Black Lizard (1962), dir. Umetsugu Inoue, which I watched shortly after Trump’s election in 2016, when all the Criterion stuff was still on Hulu, and it cheered me up considerably in those dark days. It feels a little like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, but with a couple musical numbers, and is about a master detective who thinks crime is super-cool and wishes there was a criminal who would challenge his intellect. Then the Black Lizard kidnaps someone. It’s a lot of fun, with a tone that feels close to camp but is so knowing and smart it feels more genuinely strange and precise. One of those things you get fairly often where the Japanese outsider’s take on American genre stuff gets what it’s about more deeply and so feels like it’s operating on a higher level. I really love this movie.

I had this larger point I wanted to make about just feeling repulsed by genre stuff that self-consciously attempts to mimic its canonical influences and that might not be all the way present in this post. Still, something that really should be implicit when talking about movies from the past is that they are not superhero movies, and how repulsed I am by that particular genre’s domination of cinema right now, and how much of cinema has a history of something far looser and more freewheeling in its ideas of how to make work that appealed to a broad audience, and how much weird formal playfulness can be understood intuitively by an audience without being offputting, and the sort of spirit of formal interrogation connects the films I like to the comics I like (as well as the books I like, and the visual art I like), this sense of doing something that can only be done within that medium even as certain other aspects translate.

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cero-blast · 6 years ago

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Your post about Gin "messing with people's heads" makes me think, doesn't this also apply to Ulquiorra? He also psychologically tortured Inoue, don't you think it's hypocritical to say Gin's actions don't nullify the bad things he did, but say that UH is good/not toxic? I'm not trying to hate on you, I don't ship anything in Bleach, I just wanted to know why Gin is considered a bad inexcusable guy but Ulquiorra's relationship with Inoue is glorified?

This will get… really long. I’m genuinely sorry it’s this long.

I never said Ulqiorra did nothing wrong (though it’s fair to say I didn’t happen to specifically point it out), or that UH is a ship with many positive feelings associated to it. That would be… an interesting take. I hope you don’t think I think that. But I also need you to understand that I don’t base my taste in ships on what I desire/consider healthy in real life. They exist in the context of the canon — not interchangeable with reality considering the existence of superpowers, ghosts, semi-human creatures and time warping — and that’s where it ends for me. Applying the dynamics in my ships to any situation other than the precise one of Bleach’s canon would make them fundamentally different.

I’ve wanted to mention this about Ulquiorra for a while now and I’ll take the occasion to do so. It’s a mistake to put him in the same framework as a human or shinigami. (The latter two also have their differences but based on observation shinigami seem to behave in a much more human-like manner compared to hollows/arrancars.) He’s practically incapable of understanding what empathy is or find any good reason not to hurt other people, which is why it’s surprising when he manages to grasp even a shred of the concept right before dying. Hollows are born from experiencing such severe pain that it distorts their whole ‘essence’, so something has gone terribly wrong with them emotionally by definition, whether they evolve to arrancar form or not. Ulquiorra’s aspect of death, his ‘theme’, is emptiness — characterized by complete neutrality towards everything. Since a person with a healthy mindset tends to focus on danger and negative events, neutrality often comes across as immoral for being equally conceding towards moral right and moral wrong. The point is, Ulquiorra’s motivations for provoking Inoue had nothing to do with him taking joy in causing pain to her. In fact, it’s hinted he’s not even fully aware he’s doing it, like the scene where he tells Inoue he’d laugh at her friends’ foolishness in her place. He’s unaffected by most things AND has difficulty placing himself in others’ perspective, which results in him assuming everyone around him would be unaffected. The only thing that factored into him doing just about anything was curiosity, the need to fill the void, however you want to put it. If a human or shinigami behaved the same way he did around Inoue, it would come across in a vastly different way and I’m not sure it would even interest me as a ship. Ulquiorra is not only a hollow, but a hollow with a particular impediment in understanding how others feel, and this is an integral part of him as a character, of his interactions, of UH, of anything regarding him. I know it’s funny as a fandom meme to act as if he were human, but he’s NOT and this needs to be kept in mind.

This applies to any arrancar or espada, really. It’s tempting to judge them on the same basis as enemies who are closer to humanity, mainly because of their appearance and intellect. But this is the trick itself the narrative plays, a progression that has been present in Bleach since the start: it created a human/monster (shinigami/hollow here) dichotomy, then spent the longest arc deconstructing it by blurring the lines between the two. It doesn’t matter how smart and eloquent the espada manage to get, the only productive way of interpreting them is as people who are missing a very core part of their personality, so someone severely psychologically ill. (I say this as someone who has their own problems, before it gets misinterpreted as condescension.) Should this absolve them from punishment? Bleach says a very clear no. They almost all get killed by shinigami, in Ulquiorra’s case Ichigo specifically — Ichigo, who, by his own admission, empathized with everyone he fought and even gets angry at Yammy for speaking ill of Ulquiorra after his death. (I don’t want to start arguing about how he was in hollow state when he defeated him. He would have killed Ulquiorra either way if he continued to stand in the way of protecting his friends.)

In summary, the espada aren’t human. Ulquiorra isn’t human. It’s unrealistic to expect him to behave like a human. You’re free to pick who you want to have compassion for among Bleach’s positive and negative characters and if you decide Ulquiorra is irredeemable in your opinion, that’s fine — many characters would agree. But at the very least it can be objectively said that Bleach spends a lot of time presenting ‘evil’ characters’ perspectives as nuanced and explicable instead of writing them off. It gives the audience a choice in the matter. A core message of the entire story is that we’re subjective and maybe we’ll never manage to see the world the same way as someone else, but that’s fine and it doesn’t make us all that different; hollows can become *almost* shinigami, shinigami can become *almost* hollows, and they both have ways to relate to one another while retaining the insurmountable differences and even fighting and killing each other.

Now, onto Gin. First off, you seem to be under the impression that I don’t like him as a character. That couldn’t be further from the truth; I only said it in the tags because I figured saying it in the post would have sounded like making excuses, which is not what the post was about. I don’t know if I would call him a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ person. All I know is that I really enjoyed him as a character and I could see how he evoked sympathy — in the tragic way antagonists do when they get some sort of redemption. I noticed it’s a common tool in fiction to make an impact on the audience, I suppose because we’re happier when we see ‘bad people getting fixed’ rather than someone already good doing more good things. It’s a Prodigal Son type of thing; can be argued about but it definitely makes an impact.

Gin is a quintessential ‘mysterious type’; he has a long-running plan that he executes throughout almost his entire life without ever consulting with anyone (an important detail). He had a hypothesis on what would be the most effective way to kill Aizen and constructed a convoluted plan based on it — a plan where the ends would have justified the means in many, many situations, and that required causing problems to a lot of people. He had, however, no certainty that what he was doing would lead to the desired results (which it then didn’t…). A lot of his provocation was a means to create a certain image of himself and there’s a big question of where to draw the line there, whether all of that was absolutely necessary. Leaving to Hueco Mundo and technical demonstrations of loyalty were, sure, but mocking Rukia on her way to being executed? He considered keeping everything a secret a prerequisite for things to work out — presumably because if he talked to anyone, Aizen could have noticed — but was it, really? Many of his actions were based on his personal judgement on what would and wouldn’t have ruined the façade, subjective and hunch-based since he didn’t know the outcome for sure.

Gin isn’t inexcusable, but I noticed a lack of emphasis on the damage his actions caused among fans, both because of the chronological order of the story and his affiliation with the protagonists’ side. Because the last thing he did was a good thing, that’s what he’s remembered by, without taking into account the sum total of his interactions with others. He posited himself as vicious until the last moment and did so consciously. Ulquiorra had a very, very gradual progression in the way he talked to Inoue, which doesn’t make it less rude and traumatic, but there’s a difference between him showing up and telling her she ‘has no rights’ and later taking an active interest in her views on the Heart. It would be equally reductive to interpret him by his last moment and nothing else, but all he did before led to that moment progressively, while Gin’s was a very abrupt twist.

My post was a comment on psychology on the most basic, technical level, not a moral judgement. The two are separate in the way we process trauma and that’s exactly what I find interesting. Having strong negative emotions associated to a memory (what I think Kira, Hinamori, Hitsugaya or Rangiku could have had with Gin’s betrayal) creates a very subconscious reaction that can hardly be fixed by suddenly finding out it was necessary for a positive cause, which is why healing from trauma requires years of therapy. Because *in that moment* you didn’t have that knowledge, the pain remains in your memory and it’s not a matter of logical reasoning. Now, I’m not saying Ulquiorra’s interactions with Inoue were numerous or productive enough to properly process the trauma he caused her — the canon info is ambivalent on how comfortable Inoue was around him towards the end of her captivity because there’s both scenes like the famous slapping one *and* her seeming more light-hearted towards Ulquiorra in Unmasked, plus no one has any idea of which came before which. All things considered, I think repeated discussion and an attempt at mutual understanding does a better job at elaborating something traumatic than one single piece of information on why what traumatized you was justified. And note that the *only reason* the understanding between Ulquiorra and Inoue could have been mutual is because Inoue was exceptionally patient, empathetic and willing to face discomfort, way beyond the base level or what should be expected from anyone. Even if it was a *small amount* of *not very productive* discussion, it’s better than one act in my opinion (which most of the people who had some sort of issue with Gin didn’t even directly witness). Which of them is *morally worse* depends on how you draw the lines and define morality and that’s not something I feel qualified to decide.

So, in the end;Ulquiorra:-working towards enemy goals overtly-motivated by curiosity, which can be considered self-oriented-gradual improvement-not fully conscious of the emotional impact of his actions-Inoue considers him an ambivalent presence but “Isn’t afraid”, in her words-half-succeeded, as in: failed the goal of killing Ichigo but sated his curiosity

Gin:-working towards enemy goals on the surface and soul society goals covertly-motivated by attachment to Rangiku and/or revenge, less self-oriented but still focused on close acquaintances -long-running façade of being a terrible person followed by a sudden twist towards the good side-completely aware of everything he’s doing, plan laid out hundreds of years in advance-Gotei 13 don’t interact with Gin throughout HM arc, consider the traitors a lost cause-failed to kill Aizen

Instead of this encyclopedia I could have just written “Gin isn’t irredeemable, I just said he did bad things before”, but I thought too much about it. And I might go through spelling mistakes once I wake up.

#anon #ask #long post

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