#scratch that I did post one time in grad school
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Resurrecting my old studyblr from undergrad even though I’ve graduated with a Bachelor and Master of Science since the last time I posted.
I’m teaching myself Swedish! Even though I can tell you the difference between kvinna and kvinnan thanks to Duolingo, I still don’t have a single clue about the basic building blocks of the language. Many thanks to Fun Swedish on YouTube for illustrating the nuances of vowel pronunciation via the spiciest of memes.
#scratch that I did post one time in grad school#but it wasn’t study related so it doesn’t count#swedish#svenska#studyblr#langblr#mine#notes#study#languages#language study
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Another Update
Hello Friends,
I have a rather long (but optimistic!) update to share with you all today. As many of you are probably tired of reading these kind of posts, I have a TL;DR here, but I did want to share what has been on my mind in that past half-year that I haven't been here.
It has been rough, and busy as always, but I think I'm finally facing myself and my project for the first time in a very long time.
TL;DR (it's actually long, I have a lot to say (*_ _)人)
I soul-searched and decided to stop compromising on my own feelings with regards to this project. I gave in to everything I wanted to do.
Plot changes, which means some character changes, which means some of the demo is outdated.
GotRM will be switching over to Twine.
----
OH MAN DID I SUFFER THE LAST FEW MONTHS
After my previous update, I hunkered down and really analyzed how I wanted to proceed with GotRM as a project. Because even prior to that post, I had already been going through long periods of hiatuses (which you are all aware of), and while I didn't lie about school taking up my time, I was also harboring a growing dissatisfaction with my own writing that really killed my progress for a long time.
So after everything had settled, I sat down and forced myself to peel apart my work. I know I said I would answer asks, but I uninstalled all of my social media and put aside this blog to focus. I made a note of all the things I liked and didn't like, and I made a list of things I wanted to change or improve on. The biggest point was that I also looked at my efficiency during actual writing sessions: how much of my time was spent writing vs. fighting with code? How could I change that?
And after a lot of deliberation, I figured there were a few things I had to change from the ground up, summed up in four points:
My working style was super incompatible with grad school. I can't spend 20-30 minutes scrolling up and down CSIDE checking code or looking for narratives while also jumping between chapters to make sure events line up. As this story grows, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the branches, so I needed an alternative working method, which I am adhering to now, and it prioritizes efficiency.
I hated the way I was tracking and coding stats in-game. I have griped so much about coding stats, and I have adhered to such a rigid style that I really felt trapped whenever I was confronted with balancing them out. So I'm throwing that to the wind and redoing how I utilize and convey them. Player-side, this decision doesn't change much since I never fully utilized stats in the demo anyway, and the stats page with indicators will still exist, but I'm getting rid of stat bars and how I treat stat checks.
The story I want to write now is different from the one I started out with. I've known for a while that GotRM was becoming far more than the tiny, wishful novella that I wrote as a teenager. I held onto that old story for a long time, but there's just so much I want to change that I realized I'd been clinging to a story I no longer enjoyed writing. So I spent the majority of the last few months rewriting GotRM from scratch. I redid some worldbuilding, I changed a lot of plot points, and I fixed a lot of characters' backstories accordingly. This meant scrapping stuff from even the demo, but that turned out to not be the biggest issue because:
I wanted to branch away from ChoiceScript. Honestly, I never really cared about getting officially published, but the camaraderie in the forums and on Tumblr were why I committed to CS and CoG. However, ultimately, I really want the functionality that other tools can offer GotRM, and so after a long internal debate, I will be switching over to Twine. Fortunately, since I was rewriting everything anyways, this has been relatively painless, and passage mapping has made everything so much neater. I am trying my best to make it up to chapter 2 before I release the new demo, so please look forwards to that!
And so yes, I am still here, chugging along.
I love this game and this story: it's been my creative escape for as long as I could remember, and you can imagine how frustrated I was when I realized I was starting to dread working on it.
I am forever learning more about myself and my writing style, and this is simply more of that journey. Thank you everyone for sticking around, for joining the discord, and for checking up on me--that I have all of you has truly been a dream.
Hopefully more updates to come soon! I understand that there may be questions about these new changes, so please ask away! I will (try) to release some asks that I've been working on in the drafts too, but I will wait until at least tomorrow to release them so that this post doesn't get drowned out immediately.
And as always, with a lot of love,
FriendlyBowlofSoup (Mei)
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Ghost from the Past [Part 1]
gnawing on the bars of my enclosure, I hate grad school rn and writing brings me comfort. I am the messiest, of-two-minds bitch about writing another fic (if you... have noticed my posts) I cannot ignore how DESPERATE I am to write something now A Non-Hero's Guide is done
anyway this is rough and subject to change of course but for ONCE I started with the beginning
tentatively titled *~*~*Ghost from the Past*~*~* which I know is super cliche
[edit: just some administrative stuff, no changes to the story right now!]
[Part 1 (You are Here)][Part 2][Master Post]
[gif by mercymaker]
Lying in a pool of slime, surrounded by roaring fires, Eletha tried to remember what she was doing to end up in this mess. It seemed like just plain bad luck; she was doing her normal thing, wandering near Waterdeep to do some hunting. One moment she was tracking a stag, the next she was here.
It’d been a while, she was due for an adventure.
A figure dropped in front of her and brandished its sword. Eletha put up her hands. “Just passing through, officer.”
“Doubtful, ghaik.” Their parasites communed in some way, sending their memories to one another. This proved to calm the strange woman. “It appears we are in the same situation. We must push to the helm.”
“Point and they’ll get an arrow in the eye,” Eletha told the woman, who hummed in satisfaction.
Eletha wasn’t much of a leader. She’d been wandering around Faerun for almost 230 years, alone. Well, not always alone. She had her animal companions and sometimes met people on the road. She’d met a lot of different people and creatures, but never whatever this woman was. She’d also never met a mindflayer. There was always time for firsts.
Lae’zel seemed young, but knowledgeable. And eager to be in front. Eletha could admire that, remembering what it was like to be young and imagining herself as a hero. True to her moon elf heritage, she was always on the go, but she’d lost a lot of that ‘hero’ mentality.
Besides, having someone else in front meant a higher chance of survival.
“Help!” someone cried, punctuated by the sound of fists on glass.
“Leave her. We must get to the helm,” Lae’zel warned Eletha. She waved her off, inspecting the pod instead.
“She could be helpful, but go on if you want,” Eletha explained.
“T’Chk.” Lae’zel made undoubtable complaints in her native tongue.
“Thank you,” Shadowheart told Eletha after introducing herself.
“We better go, or she’ll have an aneurysm,” Eletha said after nodding.
It wasn’t the first time she woke up on a beach, the details of how she got there hazy.
Naturally, she wondered where she was. Then she wondered if Bonnet, her most recent animal companion, was okay. Bonnet had all her good stuff; if she didn’t find her, it was going to be really annoying building up her stash from scratch.
“Hey, Cha, wake up,” Eletha insisted, shaking Shadowheart’s shoulder.
“Did you call me Cha?” Shadowheart asked after rousing, a little indignant but mostly confused.
“Sorry, force of habit.” Eletha had been around long enough to suspect Shadowheart was more than she was letting on, but she’d also been around long enough to know when to let sleeping dogs lie. “I keep mostly to myself.”
Eletha was quick to help Gale.
“I didn’t expect to run into a real moon elf,” he remarked after introductions. Eletha raised an eyebrow.
“As opposed to a fake moon elf?” Gale laughed nervously.
“I meant no offense. Only that you seem like a real adventure-y sort. The only moon elves I know are stuffy wizards.”
“I think I know the ones you mean.” His eyes lit up in excitement.
“So you’ve been to Waterdeep?”
“I was near there when I got, ya know-” Eletha wiggled a finger by her temple. Gale nodded sagely.
“Mm, yes, I do know.”
“Anyone hear that?” Shadowheart interrupted.
“Yeah, that’s why I came this way,” Eletha explained, sensitive ears wiggling as she tried to pin down the source of the sound. “Also, hoping to find my stuff.”
“You there!” the source of the noise called out to them. “Come here-”
“Astarion?” Eletha asked, squinting against the sun, struck with disbelief. The elf looked more shocked than her.
“A-ah…?”
“Astarion Ancunin?” she repeated, close, but not too close.
“No- I mean, yes,” he answered. He wasn’t ready to commit to a fake name on the spot.
“You look almost the same…” Eletha said quietly, mostly to herself. She took a step forward and her eyes narrowed even more.
Astarion put up his hands defensively and took a step back. “I’m afraid I-”
“You seriously don’t remember me?” Eletha asked, annoyance overriding suspicion. Astarion’s smile was strained, nervous.
“If I’m being honest? No. I’ve met a lot of people, darling.” Eletha barked a laugh devoid of humor.
“You were a dickhead then, you’re a dickhead now. Great.” She waved a hand at him to follow as she walked past him.
“Wait, there was one of those disgusting-” he tried to call out. Eletha threw a stone in that direction and a boar came rushing out of the weeds.
“Your ruses still need work,” she muttered angrily, along with a string of elvish insults.
They didn’t find her things, or Bonnet, but they did find Lae’zel. After that, they decided to make the best of camping for the night.
Eletha was no stranger to resting on the ground like a common animal. While doing her best to make it a little less miserable, Astarion approached her.
“So. We’re resting here? Turning in for the night?” Eletha only grunted, layering some underbrush into a makeshift. It was only for a few hours. Amusement curled Astarion’s lips and next words. “Not exactly my usual night. Curling up in the dirt and resting is… a little novel. You seem the type to manage just fine, however.”
“I am,” Eletha said, the sounds grinding out like two stones scraping against one another. Astarion chuckled nervously.
“So… we know one another?”
“Yes.”
“Did I… wrong you in some way?” Eletha snapped a discordant twig. “Well… it was certainly a long time ago, so I hope it won’t get in the way of us traveling together.”
Eletha stood slowly, the jagged end of the twig white-knuckled in her hand. Astarion’s eyes flicked down to it and then up into her mismatched eyes. She took a deep breath and Astarion weighed his options.
“If you want a drink, you have to ask,” she told him quietly, so only he could hear.
“W-what?”
“Those aren’t your eyes. And you’ve barely aged a day.”
“Darling-”
“Call me that again,” Eletha warned, the carefully restrained anger in her eyes flaring.
“Eletha,” Astarion corrected, but it clearly still made her uncomfortable. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You were always a horrible liar,” she said, almost sadly. She flicked the stick aside and shoulder-checked him on her way to the campfire.
“So, you know one another? How fortuitous,” Gale remarked as Eletha sat down next to him.
“I’m happier about running into you,” she told him after taking a bite of the stew he’d made for the night with what she managed to find. “This is good. But everything tastes good after a day like this. But thank you all the same.”
“Hopefully better meals will be around the corner,” he said with a smile. “And better bedding.”
“Wizards.”
#bg3#astarion#astarion ancunin#astarion bg3#astarion/tav#astarion x tav#astarion x oc#tav bg3#astarion/oc#bg3 fanfiction#fanfiction#original character#Eletha Nightstar#titus writes#titus post#text post#Ghost from the Past#baldur's gate 3#bloodweave#astarion/gale#gale/tav#gale#gale dekarios#gale of waterdeep#gale bg3#astarion/gale/tav
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I've been rather busy with grad school projects lately (and it'll probably last a bit longer), but recently a friend surprised me with some gift art of my dnd lad and his own. Since the campaign has been put on hold (and also wanting to scribble another idea related to it), I had an itch to scratch.
This is a "what if" redesign of my boy, alongside some of my personal scribbles I've done of him over the past few months that I'm still fond of
So a bit of exposition!
I say "what if", 'cause Tint here is a special case where his design was intentionally left untouched, or well, intended to keep his outfit and general look the same as my art style matured. Reason why is that I wanted to keep it consistent with his ongoing campaign, and I found it fun to draw things as it developed. So any different takes of him I did (which there is at least one of, that being his Metronome look) was like an AU or was what actually part of the campaign, which you'll see with all the scribbles below.
Though the thing was that back then, I made Tint as more so a one-time, hypothetical character. At the time, I actually didn't think I'd ever get the chance to play dnd 'cause of constraints I had (how wrong I was). But hearing a couple of friends talk about how fun it was for them, I basically made him just to imagine that "what if" (just noticed that that first sketch was actually posted here, and yeah I even said it was a hypothetical on the canvas, hah).
Because of that though, I went for a rather basic design: purple tunic, round glasses, long scarf. Fun fact: foxfolk was picked mostly just because I was comfortable drawing it after scribbling Note and Clef so much (and magic seemed rather fitting for a fox given the ethereal side of folklore involving them). I still like him since I grew attached to playing him, don't get me wrong! But now that I know a good bit better on anatomy & character design, and Tint's story took shape, I figured it'd be fun to explore what he'd look like if I were to redesign him.
As a tangent, gosh it's so surprising to me how my ability to do anatomy and structure on a character has grown in just the past couple of years. Not to say I dislike it, but I conditioned myself to only be capable of drawing that style consistently. I think I only could've had this growth because of the friends and inspirations I slowly learned from.
And yeah! There's a lot more intent on his palette being themed around light or radiance (and I've been informed it looks reminiscent to the colors on Isaac from Golden Sun, which is a funny coincidence), and hopefully he looks more adventurous yet studious type of mage!
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truth or dare ask game:
🥐🔪🧃🍄🌻🥤🥑🛼(hehe)
yes Im nosey sshhh
🥐 this is an oldie for anyone who was a member of ONTD on livejournal but “i know bitch, i was watching” still makes me laugh and i still quote it to this day
🔪 weirdest topic researched for writing…probably for my undergrad thesis when i was originally planning to include baroque art, i did a deep dive into frederik ruysch’s tableaus of baby skeletons. somewhat related, his daughter rachel was one of the most popular dutch still life artists of the era yet most people don’t know her name.
🧃honestly idk if there is anything about me i haven’t posted lmao i am the queen of oversharing but um. don’t know if i’ve ever talked about how i was chosen as a freshman to present at the deyoung museum on the topic that three years later would become my thesis. it was typically an event only open to seniors but the head of the art history department was so impressed she made an exception :) also connected to that - my grad school capstone advisor was present and the first time i met with her she told me she remembered me and my presentation 12 years later. so keep researching that weird shit you like it will make an impression on at least one person lol
🍄 hmmm since it’s lesbian visibility week let’s go with cirrus/cumulus. i think they were aware of one another in the pit, even intrigued by one another but neither made a move. not until after they were summoned when one evening cirrus got into a scrap with dewdrop and cumulus jumped in to break it up. when dew accidentally swung on her, cirrus lost her whole shit. took aether and mountain holding her back and even then, they got scratched to shit and bit. cumulus, with her eye swollen, walked over to her and gently stroked her face murmuring reassuring words to her. dewdrop felt so guilty he apologized to not only cumulus but also cirrus. it was the last time they ever (physically) fought and every time dew saw cumulus with that black eye it made him sick to his stomach. and the girls? never slept without one another since.
🌻 someone i appreciate but don’t talk to on a regular basis wow this is a hard one. maybe not a specific person but to everyone who regularly likes or reblogs my fics, even if i don’t follow you trust me i see you 🩵
🥤there are so many people on here who are incredible writers but truly @anamelessfool and @the-lisechen blow me away every time. such beautiful prose that really gets you emotionally and they are both incredible at creating compelling OCs. cannot recommend them more.
🥑 if we lived on the same continent i’d absolutely say @forest-rot but other than them i’d say @bimbotheosis lmao she’s got a bigger car than me that can better hold a body and is close enough that it would be efficiently done
🛼 -> 🙊💦🍜🧎🏻♀️🪤
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(For the fanfic tropes game) what are your thoughts about apocalypse AU’s?
F: Hate it. Will immediately make me nope out of a fic.
Hate is too strong! I have no negative emotions like that, I'd just never even open it... but that's mostly because it's an AU.
Here's the thing, the very weird thing. For the first [mumble mumble] years of fic writing, I pretty much had negative interest in all true setting change AUs.
then, somehow, at the end of 2020 I got obsessed with the big gay Chinese live action show, The Untamed[1] and got more into fandom than I've been in years. (I go in and out). In that fandom, which can be hard to write sometimes because everyone gets so spread out and dead, I fell in love with modern AUs. Modern AUs, and modern with the magic of the show. (Chinese cultivation). Then I watched other Chinese costume dramas... and didn't want modern AUs, or any AUs. I thought "get back to the imperial palace, you aren't in grad school!!!"
So I like modern aus and modern aus with cultivation in exactly one fandom. I will very happily write them and obsess over my own, but I can't get myself to read them. But also I'm so fussy to begin with, if someone gave me a 3-5 paragraph essay about why I in particular would love an AUs, I'd give it a couple thousand words.
Do I like this? No! Not at all! Did I realize when I reblogged this that I might say this multiple times? Nope!
Thanks for the ask!
Here's the post: https://www.tumblr.com/blocksruinedme/726599099509571584/lazy8blog-give-me-a-fanfiction-trope-and-ill
Give me a fanfiction trope and I’ll grade it: A: Love it. Spend my time combing AO3 for it. B: Like it. Not one of my bigger cravings, but it can scratch a certain itch if I’m in the right mood. C: Neutral. A good author might be able to sell it, but a bad one will kill it deader than dead. D: Not my favorite. I avoid it if I can, but it won’t necessarily put me off reading something. F: Hate it. Will immediately make me nope out of a fic.
[1] There's a funny me-canon-divergence where I got really into the SMP that was huge can in 2020 and who knows where I'd be now...
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🌻🧿💝
For the ask game
Thanks, sun. I’d say oh going for the jugular here but I believe that’s actually the carotid
🌻what makes you want to give up on writing? What makes you keep going?
I enjoy interacting with fandom because I want people to scream with. I want to give up when I spend a lot of time on a thing and I go hey check this out! And everyone is kinda eh and they go back to what they were doing. It’s so hard to get people to interact with written stuff.
I can spend hours making a cosplay thing, and when I post an image lots of people will comment on it. When I post a story I get a lot of crickets and it’s frustrating as fuck for me. I don’t think I’ve done a great job making connections among other writers, and I really don’t know what to do about it. Add this to the imposter syndrome they install at grad school and I then do a number on myself. You have no idea how many times I’ve been very close to just orphaning my AO3 account and vanishing.
What keeps me going? I still tell myself stories and I still play with things and I write it down and move it around. Sometimes it comes together. I try to think of it as more of an exercise so I can distance myself from needing outside validation, but being the oldest kid and considered gifted also installed some weird praise kink that only recently become aware of - I have a history of being frustrated at work when I don’t get recognized for doing things well (but every misstep gets magnified)
I’m a really competitive person. That isn’t bad by itself. But I do better when I have a thing where I can compete with myself- so, when I run I can compare myself to past metrics. When I compete in cosplay, I can look at other people in my division and do a pretty good job knowing where my skills will fall and learning what I need to practice. With writing…I have no idea what I’m doing well or badly or why something gets received the way it does since it feels like I release stuff into the void.
I do have a much healthier relationship to it than I did in 2020 but it’s a work in progress.
🧿 what steps do you take to not take things personally if a fic doesn’t do well, or if your writing/sharing experience isn’t going how you’d like it?
I don’t hawk my stats.
I have a really low bar about what “well” means. I write mostly in a personal AU and I write a lot of genfic. Neither of those get read the way popular pairings in popular versions of characters get read- it’s not typically what I read, either. So if I have a piece that gets a hundred hits, I’m thrilled. Almost everything I have has gotten there.
I also go review what has done well. There are a couple things that seem more popular than I thought they should be so I scratch my head about that. I chuckle over that one smut thing I wrote that gets hits every goddam day. I reread comments that really touched me. Like, I wrote a fic about a miscarriage and I have gotten some really touching feedback about it.
And I take breaks.
💝 what is a fic that got a different response than you were expecting?
Actually, it would be that fic I just mentioned, The Risk of Love. It’s back story on my version of Zelda, so it’s set in an AU, and it’s told as a character thinks about an incident that happened long before the first fic….and it happens long after that fic. The topic is not for everyone. Like I wrote it because I felt I had to, and I loved how it came out but I was like no one is gonna read this and I don’t care.
And people read it. Someone read it fandom blind, and like….blind and fourteen levels down a rabbit hole AU and they still took time to say how it affected them, even though they did not get everything going on. I got messaged on Reddit about it.
Original post here
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Hey guys, I'm writing a sort of Log Horizon fanfic and trying to motivate myself to keep writing, so I'm posting the first part I've fleshed out. Let me know what you think.
My Guld of Me
Intro
“Did I fall asleep? I was just playing online, I wouldn’t have passed out, but why am I waking up?” I think to myself as I open my eyes and look around. “This looks like a room in a medieval inn, but I was just in my own bedroom. Why am I here? Where even is here?”
I sit up and look around, taking stock of the tiny room. There’s barely room for the twin size bed and a side table. The wardrobe at the foot of the bed would be blocked if the door opened. This room must be an economy build. That still begs the question: what am I doing here?
I swing my feet off the bed and realize that there’s even more that’s not right. My body feels different. I look down to find that my thin hands look a little daintier than usual, and my chest is sticking out weirdly. “Oh my god! Am I a girl?!” The alarm bells ring in my head and I start having a silent freakout. I quickly stand up for a pat down inspection of myself. I always had a butt for a guy, but now I’ve got hips. My chest doesn’t stick out that far, but I think I’m wearing some kind of sports bra. I’m probably as short as I always was, but maybe that won’t be so unusual as a girl. I’m wearing a dress, no scratch that; I’m wearing robes, so at least my silhouette is fairly formless. I’ve got…oh no, I have cat ears.
I try to run to the compact water closet in the corner of my room and instantly bash my hip on the side table. I’ll worry about that later. I look in the vanity mirror and see the same blue eyes I was born with widen in horror as it dawns on me what’s happening. I am incarnated as my Elder Tale character, a cat girl mage.
What the hell? The new expansion isn’t a VR game, and even if it was, this is way too real. I was just playing on my computer, exploring one of the outer towns before the expansion changed everything. I had just bought a room in the inn before logging out, but now I’m logged in hard. Wait, can I log out?
I squint around the edges of my vision and see a bit of the usual UI for the game. I find the logout button after some fumbling, but it’s grayed out.
This can’t be happening. Why am I here? I wasn’t even hit by a truck to be granted this isekai bullshit! I was in the middle of grad school. How am I going to turn in my next paper? I guess my classes are gonna have to wait. I hope my mom is okay. I wanna go home. I need to go home. I Need to go home now. I NEED to be home Right Now.
A text box pops up into my vision. “Casting: Call of Home” and a progress bar fills up. My hands glow and my vision goes white, then black.
I wake up at a table to the sound of people shouting. I look around and I’m in the main lobby of an inn, one I recognize. This is definitely the main city from Elder Tale; I’ve spent a lot of time here, but it’s usually calmer. The room is as crowded as ever, but instead of silent avatars going about their business, real people are scattered around displaying various degrees of hysterics.
I need to get out of here. I need somewhere private, I need my own space. I need my guild house. I had all my alternate characters pool their resources into a house just for me, that’s where I need to be right now.
I move as quickly as I can, stumbling through the crowd as my vision narrows from the panic. I make it to the guild building by keeping my head down, but instead of instancing to my home as soon as I cross the guild threshold, I’m met with a hall of doors. I don’t know how I know where to go, but my feet take me to one identical door of many and my hand reaches toward the knob. As I clasp the handle, a pop up window shows “Big Blue House” and I know I’ve made it.
I open the door with a sigh of relief, I finally have somewhere I can be alone to resume my freakout in peace. I close the door behind me and turn around. All around my living room are half a dozen pairs of blue eyes staring at me, wide in shock just like mine.
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The saga continues.
So it's been a year since the anime ended, and a little bit more than that has passed since I got these asks. As you guys know, I always reply to messages, no matter how long it takes. And I really needed time to reply to these. I don't even mean just because I'm living alone in Tokyo and have to juggle grad school, part-time job, my actual job and doing all the housework by myself, plus occasional fun immigrant paperwork things. I mean all of this and the fact that I had to go out and actually do research for a lot of things regarding volume 3, in order to confirm the conclusions I took reading it. I also went to Japanese Twitter to see people's analysis of this volume and of the previous volumes, especially MasaMina, because this book is one of the most complex novels I've ever read. The amount of hidden meaning in EVERYTHING is no fucking joke. And as I wrote, I just kept finding more of it. I remember saying way back when S1 was airing that Tsurune had many, many layers. This volume, however, had infinite layers. Again, no joke.
I feel like what has transpired in this book is what Ayano Kotoko actually wanted to do from the very beginning, but there was no guarantee of whether the series would be successful enough to get a continuation, so she had to hold back at first, and then she dumped into volume 3 all that she hadn't been able to include in volumes 1 and 2. It's honestly no surprise that this one was so convoluted. It made me start to think that series should've been a seinen manga instead. So yeah, there was a lot that I had to check while writing this actual essay. Because yes, that's just how gigantic it turned out to be. 20 pages on Word. Even I was surprised when I finished it. Scratch that, I was terrified.
I have to say that I feel utterly insane for making this post. I know that a lot of you guys are aware of how difficult life has been for me over here, how I haven't been able to stay consistently active online in the past two years. I also know that the fandom is dead as hell right now in the overseas side. I'm sure nobody would've minded if I had never finished writing this thing, but I wanted to. More like I wouldn't be able to rest easy unless I did it. I feel like I needed to have the hidden things, theories and interpretations of what happened in this volume written down all in one place, even if we never get any more volumes. Kind of like a reference book so that people can look back on it whenever they need to remember what is what.
I have noted that most novel readers on both the Japanese and the overseas sides of the fandom have either gravely misunderstood this volume or didn't really get much of it. No surprise here, because, I have said this six years ago and I will say it again: although Tsurune is an amazing novel, it's not well-written. Especially volume 3. So this is an attempt to explain what transpired in it, at least on the MasaMina side of things, which is what you guys have requested. That's about 2/3 of the book anyways, lol.
Warning for insanely long post under the cut.
Before I begin, by all means, guys, share this post with anyone you know who also has questions or things they didn't understand about volume 3. Chances are you will find the explanations for them here. If you don't, then don't hesitate to hit me up, because for now, I'll have more free time to answer asks.
Anyway, here's the much-requested continuation of the Tsurune Bible, one year in the making (which now even has its own tag, just to make things easier for you guys and myself, lmao).
This volume already starts out serving MasaMina from the cover. It’s just so cute that Masaki has been slowly approaching Minato in each cover until they’re finally side by side, lol. Gotta love that Minato’s yugake and underglove look like a hand on top of another in the back cover. Good symbolism, good food.
In this volume, Masaki and Minato’s first interaction is kinda like volume 2, where Masaki amuses himself with shit Minato says. The boys are fucking around with Minato, having told the kouhai that touching his forehead brings luck and proceeding to come up with different versions of the rumor, in all of which some part of Minato’s body brings good fortune. Masaki says it’s actually Minato’s feet that they have to rub, and tells Minato to “get his legs out”. Yes, this is the mandatory old man joke, because Masaki just has to tell at least one in every volume, and it has to involve Minato. Minato asks him to cut it out, saying that he’s neither Pindola nor Billiken, which reminds me of an interaction from volume 1, where Masaki beckons Minato into the dojo like he’s a small animal, prompting Minato to assert that he’s neither a dog nor a cat. Masaki breaks into giggles and contemplates patting Minato’s head like usual, but doesn’t do it. We readers know that this novel always comes full circle later on, and this interaction is no exception.
The initial portrayal of MasaMina in this volume immediately turns angsty despite this wholesome moment, because Minato is actually having a hard time dealing with Masaki avoiding him lately. The yearning and obsession with Masaki’s eyes has reached a new level in this volume, if that was even possible. Masaki has been consciously dodging Minato’s eyes, and this upsets Minato to a point where he starts doing the same to Masaki, because finding Masaki’s gaze only to have it turn away from him is too much for Minato to handle. And unbeknownst to Minato, Masaki doesn’t really want to be doing this, but he has to, and he also feels bad when Minato avoids him.
Following this bullshit is a hint that I’m sure most people missed, and I would’ve missed it too if someone hadn’t pointed it out on Twitter. This novel, as we’re painfully aware, is full of galaxy brain shit, especially when it comes to MasaMina. But this volume goes so fucking overboard. Around page 66, there’s a joke about Seiya mothering Minato, because that’s also mandatory, but the joke isn’t like the previous volumes. “Seiya home security, protecting you 24 hours a day 365 days a year”. 365 days a year, meaning leap years are not included. If the year has 366 days, Seiya won’t be able to protect Minato for one day.
No, the OP wasn’t reading too much into it, I promise. Stick with me here, y'all.
I know that the anime might have confused everyone as to which year Tsurune is supposed to be set in, as the second season implies it's set in 2023. However, the novel begins from the year 2016, its year of publication. That means Minato was born in the year 2000 and that the accident that killed his mother happened in 2012, both of which are leap years. He also had his first proper meeting with Masaki in 2016, yet another leap year. So basically, Minato's most life-changing events happen in leap years.
Apparently, same goes for Masaki. He had to change his name in his last year of high school, and in that same year, he got target panic and his master forsake him. The following year, 2012, was when he received the death certificate of his brother and became estranged from his grandfather. That was on his birthday, so it was summer. The novel doesn’t mention in which season the accident with Minato and his mother happened, but according to the anime, it was in summer. Both events definitely did not happen on the same day, ‘cause if Minato’s mom’s death was on the same day as Masaki’s birthday, this would’ve already been mentioned at some point. But they happened within a short time gap from one another, that’s for sure.
Soulmates just be synchronizing like that. It’s been going on since volume 1, where they’re so obviously mirrors of each other that literally everyone can see it. Not to mention that really bad things and really good things happen to them alternately, in a way that they always come off as even in the end. The scars, losing members of their families to tragedy, target panic, “I now understand where my master was coming from” moments, near-death experiences related to car accidents, sixth sense, a keen connection to gods and the supernatural, get along well with nature and now, as established in this volume, allergy to poison/venom. I say poison because ginkgo fruits and seeds are actually poisonous on main, but most people can handle eating them if it’s in small amounts. Minato can’t, though. As for giant hornet venom, it usually doesn’t go as far as killing people, but Masaki must've nearly died from it, or else he wouldn’t carry an antidote with him. All volumes are adamant about Masaki and Minato being mystic creatures living amongst men, who find comfort in the natural and spiritual worlds, and who are pure not just in mind but also body.
Let’s not forget that just like Minato, Masaki also has someone who acts like a guardian around him. Ren, who wanted to protect Masaki from his issues with his grandfather, but failed at it. Who wished Masaki would quit archery for his own good, only to watch him go back to it because Minato happened. Who watched Masaki almost die saving Minato’s life and God knows if he really meant what he said when assuring Minato that it wasn't his fault. Who messes around with Minato to no end, and maybe he does it partly to take out his frustration with Minato's existence on Minato himself. Who is always the one to reveal the dark parts of Masaki’s past and how Masaki isn't a normal person. Who called Minato a marebito. Seiya probably has a similar sentiment regarding Masaki. “Maybe it would’ve been better for you not to have met him,” is what both he and Ren implied at first. But turns out neither Minato nor Masaki would be where they are without meeting each other, as confirmed way back in the last tournament of volume 1. Bad things have always happened to them, but they can overcome them thanks to their karmic connection to each other, be it direct or indirectly.
Ayano just loves this bound by fate trope and takes it to extremes. No news spotted.
Back to the dog and cat thing, the next MasaMina hint we get is actually in a scene where Masaki doesn’t show up—the one where Minato tells his teammates that he feels like he’s being watched lately. Obviously, Masaki is the one watching him when he's not looking. He just doesn't realize that because he's also incidentally avoiding Masaki.
A little later into that scene, he has The Talk with Nanao about Masaki not looking him in the eye lately. This part is ridiculously funny for so many reasons. Firstly because it bothered Minato so much literally everyone could tell. Because of course it would. Not getting his daily dose of Masaki’s undivided attention is torture for this poor little bastard. Secondly, the suggestive way that Minato talks about anything concerning Masaki is just too much. Ayano doesn’t even try to hide that Minato’s wording gives people the wrong idea—Nanao immediately assumes he's having love troubles, because of course that’s what it sounds like.
When Minato says that’s not really it, Nanao resorts to calling the individual in question “the person Minato is interested in”, which… still makes it sound like it’s love troubles, lmfao. And it's a deliberate word choice, because when Minato denies that it’s love, Nanao prefaces his next sentence with a “hmmm”, as if he doesn’t believe it for a single second. Maybe this doesn’t translate well into languages other than Japanese, but it’s the sound that people make when they don’t really believe what they’re hearing. Kind of a “you sure, buddy?” expression. Then again, Minato isn’t lying. I have said it time and time again, but this isn’t a BL novel, yet the author loves her ships and would totally make them canon if she could. Therefore, her approach is to make it so that the characters’ feelings for each other can be taken as both platonic and romantic, with neither canceling the other.
In Minato’s case, he does love Masaki. The whole series makes it clear enough. However, that love can manifest as anything. As in, it’s a platonic relationship on main, but if there were a window for it to turn into a romantic one, I honestly doubt he’d turn it down. Because there was one later in this volume, and he didn’t. Ultimately, Minato seems to be in love, but as it is posteriorly revealed, he’s happy just being by Masaki’s side. Therefore, he doesn’t see Masaki as a possible target for romance—actually, this volume suggests that he has to make a conscious effort not to see him as such. So when Minato denies to be talking about love, he means it, because he isn’t trying to pursue Masaki. But that, again, is a deliberate word choice from the author. He denies to be talking about love, but he never denies being in love. Nanao’s reaction is also deliberate, and surely he knows exactly who Minato is talking about. Or else, his reaction wouldn’t make sense.
And then comes something that just shook me to the core when reading this scene for the first time. They hear the cry of a varied tit. In Japanese culture, the varied tit is known as a tricky bird, lmao. This, too, is deliberate. Even because it’s not the first time that a bird is used to represent what’s going on in a scene. In volume 1, when Minato is riding his bicycle and ends up at the Yata Shrine, he’s guided there by a grey wagtail. In Japanese, the name of this bird is “kisekirei”, which can be read as “spirit of miracles”. Someone on Japanese Twitter pointed out that the grey wagtail is said to be a herald of love (as in romantic love, exclusively) in Japanese culture. Again, Minato denies to be talking about love, but narrative devices come in to suggest that he is in love, regardless.
Nanao is one of these narrative devices. He’s presented as being in the same situation as Minato in this scene, essentially saying the same things as him. When he says he isn’t too bothered at being dropped as a regular and that all he wants is to be around Kaito, he means it, but that's not entirely true. It’s revealed afterward that he actually was frustrated. He fights hard to be placed as regular again, and Kaito is the one to give him motivation for it. Like Minato, Nanao wasn't lying. It's just that, at this point in the story, he hadn’t yet realized how he truly felt.
And all that shoujo jazz.
Hilariously enough, much like Nanao didn’t seem to believe Minato, Minato also doesn’t seem to believe what Nanao says. He translates Nanao’s thoughts like he’s reading Nanao’s mind (“I want you to be by my side”), because that’s exactly how he feels too, about Masaki. But again, although just being around Kaito is what he wants now, Nanao starts wanting more later. Then what about Minato? Does he start wanting more along the way as well? Ayano flings that information at us and tells us to make of it what we will, but the text throws a big “yes” at our faces later on.
Following this comes the infamous “don’t look at me like that” scene, where Minato is trying to talk to Masaki and Masaki insists on leaving it for after the training camp. The way that Minato just comes at him with a question worded in the most painful manner possible is fucking delightful. Masaki had the whole trauma with being ignored by his master in the past, so when Minato asks if he’s so bad a disciple that it warrants Masaki ignoring him, that’s probably the worst thing he’s heard so far as a coach.
Similarly, when Masaki tells Minato, “I’m really sorry, but please don’t look at me with those eyes”, that’s probably the worst thing he’s heard from him. At least I can’t recall anything else Masaki has said that brought him to the verge of tears like that. But turns out it’s the opposite of what he thinks: Masaki is avoiding him because it’s so obvious that he’s The Favorite TM that everyone else is getting jealous. And then the whole thing just transforms into double-entendre, because it’s also mandatory for these dumbasses to have at least one conversation that makes them sound like a couple in every volume.
“You too, Minato—you wouldn’t react when I waved at you.”
“That’s ‘cause I thought you didn’t want to look me in the eye.”
“It’s not like I don’t want to, but it puts me in a spot sometimes.”
“What do you mean ‘in a spot’? Just spill it out.”
“There are times when I also really wanna stroke that forehead of yours, but I can’t let anyone see us like that now, can I?”
“Wha… Wha… What’s up with that?”
That's fucking clownery, Ayano. Low blow, Ayano.
No, but, seriously. How does this woman come up with such out-of-pocket shit like this? It’s better than any romantic comedy I’ve ever come across in my life. Minato completely misunderstanding and assuming the worst when the truth is that his master is actually looking after him is no news in this series. It has happened in the previous volumes as well and it's one of the staples of their relationship, but it’s also so chick flick-like it drives me nuts. The whole “you were actually being showered with care and kindness in the only way he could give it to you at that moment” thing is delicious. And so is Minato’s realization that Masaki is feeling just as bad as Minato for having to distance himself. That he wants things to be like before but can’t afford it because it would disrupt the harmony of the club. Like, yeah, king! Go get punched in the gut with affection! You (unironically) deserve it!
This follows a pattern that happens in every volume, where Masaki always, at some point, has to do something for Minato’s own sake that ends up upsetting him, which in turn upsets Masaki as well. And when Minato confronts him about it, he finds out that Masaki was actually caring for him all along and gets all flustered. In volume one, this happens when Masaki tells Minato that he should join his friends at the club because he wouldn’t be coming to the Yata-no-Mori kyudojo forever, which means Minato would eventually be drawing his bow alone. This completely screws Minato up internally, because how dare you give me so much and then suddenly announce that you’ll leave me in the near future. But turns out Masaki just thought that this would be the best for Minato, and when Minato finds out the truth, he’s “so embarrassed he could die”. Jump to volume 2, where they fight over Minato’s recklessness in regard to his injury and his bad form, and Masaki finds himself having to forbid Minato from coming to practice. Minato loses it because you’re the one who got me back into archery, yet now you try to take the bow away from me. And then he realizes where Masaki was coming from, and calls him an idiot because he’s frustrated.
Ayano clearly likes to do this kinda shit where Minato gets insecure assuming the worst whenever he’s deprived of anything related to Masaki, only to reveal that it was for his own good, then having them resent the lack of proper communication in-between. All in all, these situations are portrayed in a heartwarming way that showcase Masaki is actually a responsible adult and Minato is, as he says, a very cute disciple. But it also makes it look like married couple bickering, because this woman just loves fucking with us like that.
And also because this follows the same pattern as what archery means to Minato.
In every single volume, something happens that deprives him not only of Masaki, but of archery itself, because to him, those two things are connected. When he feels like Masaki is about to disappear from his sight in volume 1, he begs him to stay. When he’s forbidden from coming to practice, he could’ve just gone to Saionji or practiced at home with the rubber bow if he wanted, but instead, he kept coming to the dojo like the jealous little bitch he is to watch Masaki teaching everyone but him. Minato’s love for archery and his love for Masaki are portrayed in the very same way. He gets burned by them at some point, but he also gets healed upon understanding that the burn was for the sake of growth. Just as it says in the last tournament of volume 3:
“Goodbye” is a spell. Something devised from the very beginning.
The sound of a knock on the door. Ringing through.
Yearning, chasing, wishing.
Crouching down, struggling, being doubted and scorned.
Raging, despairing, cursing.
Repenting, lamenting, accepting death.
And when one gives up…
They bow down their heads, love, forgive. Thus the door finally opens.
“Welcome,” it greets.
To love means to forgive yourself and others.
Just like with archery, Minato yearns and chases and wishes for Masaki, but he hits walls along the way. It breaks him and he literally goes through the five stages of grief when it happens, but then he decides to accept it and face Masaki about it. And in doing so, he finds out the truth, and with the truth comes the catharsys. He finds himself even more in love with archery, so I'm willing to bet that his love for Masaki also deepens whenever these misunderstandings are solved. The reason why he gets so disproportionally flustered in the aftermath is because, on the inside, Minato is like, “So you were thinking of me all this time??? You weren’t trying to abandon me???? I love you so much????? Fuck you?????”
And maybe he also gets flustered at how Masaki words his arguments? I mean. “I can’t let anyone see us like that” undebatably refers to not letting other people see them being intimate with each other. It’s not the first time that Masaki talks like this. In volume 2, for example, there was that one scene where Masaki told Minato to not “take on anyone’s style” but his. Minato was also extremely flustered back then, thinking that Masaki didn’t have to word it that way. This is one more thing that only works in Japanese, because the expression he used was “don’t dye yourself in anyone’s color other than mine”. “Dyeing oneself in another’s colors” means taking on someone’s way of doing things, and it’s an expression most often used to describe the role of a wife in marriage, where she’s expected to “dye herself in her husband’s colors” (as in, to follow his way of thinking and do what he says). This is a double-entendre that can be read as “don’t you cheat on me”, and we’re completely free to interpret Minato’s reaction as “you didn’t have to make it sound suggestive, what am I supposed to do with that thought now”.
In that same fashion, when Masaki says they can’t afford to let other people see them being so close or else it’ll give them the wrong idea (which is actually the right idea, because Minato is indeed his favorite disciple), it gives Minato, for a split second, a free sample of what it would be like if they were in a relationship. Because if Minato were in love with Masaki, as the birds imply, then this way of interpreting Masaki’s words is 100% something that would go through his head in that moment. Actually, even if he weren’t in love with Masaki, the wording is inexcusably implicative. There’s a million other ways he could have put it. But if we take it from a “Minato is in love” perspective, it’s easy to understand why Masaki’s word choice only adds up to his frustration, and his reaction makes even more sense. Again, the text gives us leeway to read it like that, and it’s intentional. It wasn’t written in this way by coincidence, nor is it a coincidence that we get this kinda shit at least once per volume.
I feel like I’m repeating myself a lot in this analysis, but much like everything else in Tsurune, their relationship is cyclical. This shit is going to happen all the time with these two, as if it’s a rule between them. Masaki does the best for Minato and ends up hurting him in the process without meaning to, which means he’s also hurting. And when everything is solved, Minato doesn’t know what the fuck to do with himself, because that’s how much he loves Masaki. It’s almost like Masaki himself is an embodiment of archery for Minato at this point.
The whole process of shooting in Japanese archery, as stated in volume 2, is about severing your life and being reborn. Minato’s journey with archery has also been one of having his love for it be tested, and when it seemed he was about to lose it, the fire is set alight again by Masaki. His affection for Masaki goes through the same path, and just when he thinks Masaki is about to turn his back to him, he gets this kind of dopamine dump and is able to reaffirm that their bond would never break so easily. In fact, any little bit of logic would be enough for him to realize that, but although Minato is a pragmatic person in general, logic just doesn’t apply when it comes to Masaki. This is entirely mutual, because the same things happen to Masaki as well. He can’t look at Minato in the eye because it obviously makes him feel guilty, and when Minato dodges him, he gets a taste of what he himself is doing to Minato. It's all about retribution, which is a concept present in Shinto, Buddhism and Japanese archery.
The realization that Masaki was avoiding him for his own sake makes Minato lose it. He probably would’ve reverted to calling Masaki an idiot or a pervert and lashed out at him like usual if his grandparents hadn’t arrived to the scene. And then what happens next felt like a fucking fever dream. I still remember the first time I read it so damn vividly. The way the elderly couple just stormed in and presumed that Minato was crying for entirely different reasons. Minato trying to undo the misunderstanding. The car accident suddenly being brought up. The iroha poem that Minato’s mom used to sing being mentioned out of fucking nowhere. Masaki being Masaki and interpreting it for Minato and, again for whatever reason, has to put a hand on Minato's back while doing it. It’s all just so fast and ridiculously shippy. The stupid couple vibes, the way that Minato’s grandmother seems to approve of Masaki and bless the relationship by asking Masaki to “take care of Minato forever”. Seiya and Kaito watching over them from a distance and worrying whether everything was gonna go well or not. It’s all like a reverse parallel to when Ren asked Minato to take care of Masaki, except unfortunately very rushed. Just MasaMina being shoved down our throats as per usual, except lightning style.
On the topic of shoving down throats, the following scene with Masaki spitting his coffee when Minato’s apron fell down has puzzled people for the longest time now. To this day, I can’t really explain what happened here. I’ve seen people speculating that it was “lucky lechery”, and ugh. Ew. Gross. But though I can’t really imagine it, it’s true that he didn’t spit the coffee due to the sight being funny. He wasn’t laughing. And he was the only one who was so weirdly surprised. I have a lot of qualms about thinking of it that way, but Masaki has always been portrayed as having the dirty mind of an old man. Honestly, it’s disturbing to imagine it, but an intrusive thought isn’t... too far-fetched. What makes me feel not so bad about this is the fact that, looking back on the talk between Minato and Nanao, it’s easy to figure not only that Minato is “interested” in Masaki, but also that, whatever the way he looks at Masaki is, Masaki doesn’t correspond. With that in mind, I'd rather interpret this apron scene as Masaki being caught off-guard.
As Minato says, he’s looking at Masaki, but Masaki has his eyes on the Gods. Of course, Masaki was properly looking at Minato, as we know, just in a different way from how Minato looks at him. Masaki was being a responsible master and watching over his disciple in spite of everything. So by all accounts, Minato’s feelings are not reciprocated, which again pushes the idea that Minato is in love. If his distress was just from him being concerned with his master as a disciple and nothing else, this would fall into their master-disciple dynamics and therefore would automatically be reciprocated. There’s no other way around it. Masaki is looking at him as a disciple and Minato is… doing something else entirely. Again, whatever that something else is has been left to our imagination, but the birds are just fucking unexplainable from any perspective that isn’t romantic. They didn’t even have to be there. Hell, the café scene was also completely unnecessary.
Amazing how this book still has the power to make me lose my fucking mind.
First hint of the “imina” is dropped as Masaki tells the boys about it, and Minato concludes that it is “the name of a life”. In Japanese, this is written as 命の御名, and there are two ways to read 御名. One of them is “gyomei” and the other is “mina”. “Gyomei” is used when referring to the name of the emperor, while “mina” is used when referring to a name that is sacred, such as the name of a god. The one that Ayano chooses as the furigana here is “mina”. Of course, this also is a reference to Minato’s name, as well as foreshadowing to the whole thing with Masaki’s birth name.
More foreshadowing ensues as Minato is shown giving instructions and teaching the kouhai in the next scene. I didn’t catch it at first, but it was really just him doing that amongst the upperclassmen, so yeah, future coach!Minato putting his skills on display once again. I say once again because it’s not the first time he gives advice to people regarding archery. He’s been doing it since volume 1, with Manji. Many mistook him for being savage back then, but he was giving candid advice when he warned Manji about target panic. Not to mention that he has the ability of setting people’s souls ablaze and making them want to draw the bow. He’s got talent for it.
This goes on right before Hikaru watches him talk to Masaki like they’re a married couple. Just obvious as fuck. Hikaru is shipping this shit. I’m only half-joking when I say this, because he quite literally considers himself “lucky to be around them”. He’s canonically enjoying this domestic load of bull. Now, I don’t know how many people noticed, but the way Hikaru thinks of them is pretty damn unnatural. Maybe it’s just me, but this struck me as intentional. I feel like he was being used as a reminder for how the readers should view these two. Unfortunately, thanks to the anime, many people got the wrong impression about Masaki and his relationship with Minato, which is most definitely not how Ayano wants people to see them. I mean, let’s be honest, fellow readers. We know that Masaki is her favorite character and this is her favorite relationship. I honestly believe she wants us all to see them in the way Hikaru does: a master and his disciple being cute with each other.
The dialogue is also gold. The way that Minato is able to deduct that Masaki’s offer to come to his place and look for the book he wants inevitably means having to clean up in the process. The way that Masaki can tell that Minato knows what’s coming just from him saying that it’d be a pain in the ass. Him responding with, “Don’t think you can get fish without doing some work” and Minato retorting that he’s more into red meat than fish. This was the author’s way of showing that these idiots are in the same wavelength. The good humor and wholesomeness is palpable in how sassy and comfortable they are with one another. There’s mad levels of intimacy here, which is, again, completely unnecessary plot-wise. It’s there because Ayano wants it to be there. Not to mention that there’s double-entendre again.
I’m talking about the “vegetarian” and “carnivore” part of the conversation here. In Japanese, “vegetarian” and “herbivore” are the same word. Y’all know the terms that Japanese people use to define who’s passive and who’s dominant in a relationship? Yep, that’s right, it’s “herbivore” and “carnivore”. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but with the amount of hidden meaning, suggestiveness and word play that this volume has, I don’t even doubt anything anymore. And we gotta be real here: as far as all 3 volumes go, Minato is ridiculously physical when it comes to Masaki. Not only is Masaki the person he has more physical contact with, he’s the only character whose touch and presence Minato actually craves. He’s always reaching out to grab Masaki, and just the prospect of not getting his fix of head pats is literally enough to make him tear up. And Minato isn’t even the kind of person who likes physical contact. More often than not, he’s annoyed by it, if it’s coming from anyone else. That aside, he’s also weirdly physical when he’s thinking about Masaki. I’ve said this time and time again, but Minato often describes Masaki in his head in ways that sound very much like he’s physically attracted to Masaki. So far, the descriptions of Masaki that we’ve gotten from Minato’s point of view are:
He’s got basically every Japanese ideal trait of conventional attractiveness
Has “adult charm but still retains some childishness in him”
Warm hands, slender fingers, bewitching eyes
A smile like the New Moon
And as most recently defined by this volume, smells really fucking good (at least to Minato)
All of these are physical things. And we always get this from Minato’s perspective only. Meanwhile, Minato obviously has nothing that Masaki would be physically attracted to, of course. But even while putting Minato aside as an option (because he’s not at all an option), Masaki is a priest. Yes, Shinto priests can get married, and they don’t even have to be married to have sex, so there are no inhibitions imposed on him in that regard. But even then, due to their lifestyle, Shinto priests tend to be abstinent. This is something I read on an interview with an actual Shinto priest, and Masaki seems to fit into the stereotype, given that he doesn’t seem to be remotely interested in romantic relationships or being sexually involved with anybody. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, isn’t anyone’s “friend with benefits”, and doesn’t appear to give a shit. This isn’t because he’s too busy or doesn’t have social life. As established in volume 2, he has always had many friends, and he himself says it in volume 3 that he thinks all women are beautiful. However, “the only ones he considers to be cute are his disciples”. What I’m trying to say is: regardless of Masaki’s dirty jokes and old man attitude, he might actually be the more pure-hearted one between him and Minato in that regard. He definitely doesn’t have any idea that Minato thinks those things about him, and if he knew, he’d be taken aback for sure.
By the way, quick translator's note here, but when Masaki says that “the only ones he considers to be cute are his disciples”, the word “disciple” is actually not in plural form. Basically, we're free to interpret that as either him talking about all his disciples... or just one. And the second option is the most likely to be what he means, because the club is full of female members now. It wouldn't make much sense for him to draw a line between "women" and "disciples" when half of said disciples are girls.
Just take that piece of trivia and run with it.
Another implication that Masaki doesn’t get the effect he has on Minato is the scene where everyone goes out to play in the dog and cat park. Seiya had clearly planned for Masaki to go with the first-years instead of with them. When I first read this volume, I was weirded out by how Seiya suddenly turned into a prick to Masaki and began to resemble his anime counterpart. But then, in-between, he would be acting like his usual self, teaming up with Masaki to debate with Kaito and Keima, unintentionally laughing at Masaki’s old man joke, lending the marker to Masaki so that he can scribble on Takumi’s face, etc. Minato and Kaito’s passiveness also struck me as kind of weird, because if Seiya were being outright hostile on purpose, they wouldn’t stand for it. This led me to believe he wasn’t just being a little bitch, and at some point, Seiya in this volume started reminding me a lot of how Kaito acted with Minato when they had just met. And then I realized that this is probably what Ayano was going for here.
Back when Minato was still trying to avoid being part of the archery club despite Seiya’s attempts to get him into it, Kaito was criticizing him for not making it clear enough that he was never going to join. Minato obviously gave off the vibes of someone who still loved archery and wanted to do it, so in spite whatever he said, Kaito was basically arguing, “Well, it ain’t working. Try harder”. Seiya is taking this same approach with Masaki, except without saying anything directly to him. Other than that, he also seems to be doing kind of the same as Ren does with Minato.
Seiya was the one who did the poll with the club members, so he was the first person to find out that they thought Masaki favored the second-years, especially Minato. And the problem here is: the first-years aren’t wrong. Masaki really does lean towards the second-years, not exactly because he likes them more, but because he’s closer to them, having already been with them for a whole year. As for Minato, the second-years know how deep his bond with Masaki goes, but the first-years don’t, so there’s no convincing them that this is fair. What does Seiya do? He pushes Masaki away from them—away from Minato, in particular—and onto the first-years. And in this process, he’s probably aware that he’s hurting his best friend, which definitely leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, so he takes it out on Masaki. It’s killing two birds with one stone. He gets to throw shade at Masaki for making him do this while also being like, “Who said we’re close to this guy? Nuh-uh, not me” in front of the first-years.
Speaking of shade, the comments Seiya makes on Masaki in this volume are pretty damn interesting. They all have something in common. Can y’all guess what it is?
“Amazing, Masa-san. So you’re a mix of monk, priest and old man.”
“Now, Masa-san, please go tag along with the first-years. You’re the one responsible for looking after us, right? Your club president will be watching over the second-years, so rest easy.”
“He’ll be just fine; he’s an adult.”
“If you know it, Masa-san, that means you’re also someone from ancient times.”
Yep. All of them contain reminders that Masaki is a grown-up, specifically. It’s like Seiya is saying, “You’re a grown man; get your act together”, just like Kaito was saying to Minato, “You’re an archer; get your act together”. It’s funny as hell that Minato is always present during these moments, so it might as well also be a reminder to Minato that Masaki is an adult and he isn’t, lmao. Other than that, this attitude of Seiya’s also feels like one more dig on the anime and how it portrayed him and Masaki. How it looks on the surface like Seiya is being gratuitously offensive when, in reality, he’s siding with Masaki.
It’s almost like the author is doing her own little rebellion and I’m here for this shit.
On the topic of making digs on the anime, I have to be honest about one thing that I felt throughout this whole volume. We know that the tendency is for it to get gayer the further the story progresses, but even so, we gotta admit that Ayano tripled down on the gay this time around. It was a lot, to the point that I saw people from the Japanese side of the fandom calling Tsurune a BL novel, both ironically and not, and saying that this volume had “too much gay”. This isn’t normal, guys. But although it makes me feel bad for the author seeing reviews like these, I must say I kinda get where they’re coming from. I was highkey shocked every time the characters had a “moment” with each other—not just Minato and Masaki but also Seiya and Kaito, and although they barely showed up in this volume, Eisuke and Koushirou too. Because, my God, it was all so visceral and heavy. Some parts gave me diabetes while others basically ripped my heart off my chest.
Am I complaining, though? Absolutely not. I’ll take a whole ton more of that. Still, there’s something about it that I can’t shake off my head even now. Very often did these passages feel like covert criticism toward the anime, as well as Ayano’s compromise with what she wanted her story to be. Like, “Oh, so the anime is portraying Masaki as an asshole using his students to seek revenge on his dead grandfather? Here’s him and Minato being domestic as fuck.” Or, “Oh, so the anime ignores Seiya and Kaito’s relationship? Here’s Seiya being sweet to Kaito and acting like his girlfriend.”
And don’t get me wrong, I do think she’s eternally grateful to KyoAni for picking up her work and not only publishing but also animating it, but that doesn’t mean she has to agree with what has been done with her story and characters. I mean, it’s so far removed from what she’s doing. I also see people in the Japanese side of the fandom commenting about how different the anime is from the original, and that it’s best to view both as separate stories. This isn’t normal either, although I saw it happen to Violet Evergarden as well. Add that to the fact that Ayano never gave any interviews, or even wrote a creator’s comment outside of the novel afterwords. I reiterate that do think she is thankful to KyoAni, but yeah, I also believe she resents the anime to an extent, and it shows in this volume.
Now back to the analysis.
One of the gayest things ever presented in the entire franchise is the reference to “Greensleeves”. Nothing could’ve prepared me for that shit. I have answered an ask about this scene where I break down and analyze the KaiSei side of it, which can be found here. This is one of the many instances where KaiSei is a direct parallel to MasaMina. Kaito talks about how the dog that Seiya is petting is “so clingy”. Minato has to deal with sharing Masaki with more club members this year, many of whom are openly crushing on him, so he’s jealous all over again. Kaito wonders if it’s okay for him to try to catch up to Seiya, who is full of secrets. Minato often tells Masaki not to treat him like a child and it’s always through him that we are shown Masaki and Ren keep a lot of secrets. Kaito wants to know what burdens Seiya and hopes that Seiya would share the load with him, rely on him. Meanwhile, Minato doesn’t mind Masaki not wanting to tell him about his circumstances, because an adult shouldn’t try to rely on a child to share his problems. However, Minato makes it very clear that he will stop Masaki if Masaki ever attempts doing something dangerous. Which means Masaki doesn’t even have a choice here—he will have Minato pull him out of the Crimson Lotus Hell whether he wants it or not. But I’m now getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s go back to “Greensleeves”.
English: Alas, my love, you do me wrong Greensleeves was all my joy Greensleeves was my delight
Japanese: Aah, my love, you're such a cruel one Greensleeves, you were my joy Greensleeves, such merry days I was happy just being by your side
The author’s choice of song and verses are… interesting, to say the least. The translation that comes with it is very interesting too, because it’s how she interprets the lyrics. The fact that “alas, my love” is a phrase we can canonically associate with KaiSei and MasaMina still sucks away all of my sanity, especially when thinking about how the lyrics fit into their interactions.
“You do me wrong”, “you’re such a cruel one”: Seiya was a dick to Kaito when they first met, until they had that big fight and later made up. Whenever Seiya was a dick, Kaito would answer at length and they would clash, so this was technically a mutual thing. As discussed above, Masaki sometimes has to do things that hurt Minato for his own good, which is also mutual, as Minato’s response hurts Masaki as well.
“You were my joy, such merry days”: Minato is happiest when Masaki is there. That much has already been stated since volume 1. Before Masaki joins the club, Minato is happy to be back to archery, but also feels sad that he’s no longer able to draw the bow with Masaki, until we get the most “surprise, bitch” scene of the series. Nothing of the sort had ever been implied for Kaito before, but this volume raises the question of whether or not Kaito is okay with Seiya going somewhere far away. Unsurprisingly, he never says he’s okay with it, because no one in this novel says things they don’t mean. What he does say is that it’s Seiya’s own decision. Regardless, everyone can tell how much it affects him. Now maybe that’s a big claim to make when it comes to Masaki and Seiya, but Masaki literally went to Kazemai because he wanted to keep teaching Minato and Seiya has gone to individual competitions because of Kaito.
“I was happy just being by your side”: Again, it has already been stated, quite literally, that Minato just wants Masaki to be by his side. Same for Kaito with Seiya. He wants Seiya to rely on him, but regardless of whether Seiya does it or not, just being by Seiya’s side is enough for him. This is actually an authentically Zen-like way of thinking and highlights how pure of heart Minato and Kaito are. It also affirms that they have a lot of feelings piled up, but they’re keeping it to themselves. Again, this is mutual. Suppose Masaki couldn’t teach at Kazemai anymore, he’d still be happy so long as Minato kept coming to Yata Shrine to learn from him. As for Seiya, he knows his time with Kaito is limited if he’s going to choose the path of medicine, so he’s enjoying what he can get for now.
The way Kaito’s red shoes chase after Seiya’s blue ones also feels a lot like the way that Minato is always chasing Masaki, both in the literal sense and not. And the way that Kaito and Seiya eventually end up walking together might very well apply to Minato and Masaki too. Masaki is a figure of authority in the dojo, but essentially, he and Minato are equals. From the get-go, Masaki allows Minato to speak with him informally and use a nickname to refer to him. Minato makes fun of Masaki, scolds him, yells at him, calls him an idiot, a pervert, a shitty old man, etc… because he can. Not because he doesn’t respect Masaki (“respect” is literally the word that defines their relationship in the official character chart), but because they’re on equal grounds with each other. Masaki knows better than to follow the stupid “I’m superior to you because I happened to be born first” unsaid social rule of Japanese society. He isn’t worthier just for being older and Minato isn’t lesser for being younger. He’s always poking fun at Minato for being a “little kid”, but that’s because he thinks Minato is cute when he acts childish. He’s not actually belittling Minato for being a child.
Aside from that, the things Seiya said about Bernese dogs also feel like a MasaMina hint. He talks about how they have a short lifespan even amongst other dog breeds and that any amount of years they live past the average is a “gift from God”. This is a reference to Minato. In every volume there’s at least one scene where Minato nearly dies. The car accident, the truck accident, the boar incident and Takumi’s little “prank”. Not to mention stuff from the boys’ childhood that is mentioned in-text, like falling from a tree along with their tree house, getting lost in a forest and accidentally eating a ginkgo fruit. Masaki even comments in volume 1 on how Minato gets injured often, and sure enough, he also gets wounded or sick in every volume. He injuries his hand when he and Masaki first meet, then hurts his neck after his fight with Seiya, then the ganglion happens, the fever, the allergy. In these cases, he always gets saved by sheer coincidence. Most of the time, the coincidence is the fact that Masaki is there for him. On volume 1, coincidences and encounters are described as “gifts”. Masaki is Minato’s “gift from God”, who keeps him alive despite his lifespan being at constant risk of running out.
Skip to the tournament and more foreshadowing of future coach!Minato comes up as he gets Hikaru to cast away his insecurities and shoot. I have discussed this before in previous analysis but Minato does it in an essentially Zen way, where he never outright tells Hikaru to “just do it”. He motivates Hikaru by telling him about bullet train names, which seems like a completely unrelated topic, but then he connects it to tsurune and makes Hikaru want to shoot. He’s being exceptionally sensible here, communicating with Hikaru in a way that sounds abstract, but which Minato knows will get through to him. That’s exactly how Masaki gets him to do things and it’s how masters usually do it. Zen is really just like that—you have to get people to find their own answers. This is the author telling us that Minato is in the right track to following Masaki’s steps.
After that, “Greensleeves” comes up again. Kaito’s interpretation of the lyrics is superb. Especially the ending, which he translates as, “This is goodbye, but please come here one more time and give me love”. That’s Minato whenever he thinks his relationship with Masaki is going sour. And although the verses are the same in English in this scene, the Japanese translation has additional verses for some reason.
Aah, I feel my chest about to burst You, who bestow me with love, what a cruel one you are You let me bask in your affection, only to say that you will abandon me Is this a test from the Lord?
Bro, that’s. That’s fucking Minato there. It's especially literal when applying it to volume 1, when Minato thought Masaki was getting tired of him after humoring him for a while with overcoming target panic. Where he was basically a parallel to Fuu, who returned to the forest after Masaki healed its injury. Except Fuu eventually came back, and so did Minato. What I get from this is that the gods are always testing how much he loves Masaki, and so far, he has given them the right answer every time. Minato also always almost leaves, but in his case it’s literal—he always almost dies. These near-death experiences always seem to kind of come outta nowhere, but they do have a proper reason to be other than ship tease. It’s the heavens above announcing that Minato’s time is up, except Masaki is there to intervene.
Masaki interprets “Greensleeves” as “an arm that is green”, with “green” being not exactly the color but rather a way to describe something miraculous. Touch it and you will be graced with a miracle. Meanwhile, Seiya says that the lyrics feel like someone’s words to God—a song of lament and resignation, with a hint of criticism in it. Sound familiar? Yeah. “Yearning, chasing, wishing. Crouching down, struggling, being doubted and scorned. Raging, despairing, casting curses. Repenting, lamenting, accepting death.” Saying “goodbye” (“this is goodbye”), and when one is about to give up, the door opens, and in comes forgiveness (“but please come here one more time and give me love”). “Greensleeves” is presented here as an equivalent to what the universal experience of doing Japanese archery feels like. Ayano Kotoko interprets it as the definition of “one shot and expire”. And by no coincidence, it’s also a description of the roller coaster that is Minato and Masaki’s relationship.
The origins and meaning of “Greensleeves” are unknown, so Ayano is taking the liberty to offer her own view of it. The way she conceptualizes it, it’s an analogy to coming of age. How is that related to Japanese archery? Through the process of honing oneself by way of practicing a Zen art, people grow—they “come of age”. Or, as the novel puts it, they become “adults (saints)”. Masaki has pointed out in the first volume that he’s like a baby to people who are older than him—age doesn’t really define how mature someone is. Reaching enlightenment equals reaching spiritual adulthood. True adulthood.
And how does that apply to Masaki? I don’t know if anyone’s been keeping track of it, but Minato and his feelings for him have come a long way since volume 1. He’s less reckless, less impatient and less greedy. He no longer freaks out or gets sad when Ren tells him shit, he shares Masaki with even more people at the club now and doesn’t pry on Masaki’s business. Slowly, through repeating this process of one shot and expire, of nearly giving up and then seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in their relationship, Minato and his feelings have slowly evolved and ripened.
So again, Minato’s love for archery and his love for Masaki are portrayed as following the same pattern.
Minato interprets “Greensleeves” as being a “naru poem”, a song that celebrates coming of age, as described by his mother. Later, in the last tournament, Ayano reiterates that affirmation in the text. And since the characters discussed about not just the song but also the individual referred to as Greensleeves in it, then there ought to be an equivalent to that as well—a character who is considered “a miraculous hand” by another character. Someone who gave them a gift, a miracle, once they made contact with them. In other words, “Greensleeves” as a song is the definition of how Japanese archery feels to everyone, but each character has a Greensleeves of their own in their lives.
To Kaito, it’s Seiya. To Ryouhei, it’s his sister. To Seiya, it’s Kaito. To Nanao, it’s also Kaito. To Shuu, it’s Minato. To Masaki, it’s his little brother. More on these later, because for now, the focus is on Minato.
Masaki suggests that Greensleeves is someone who cannot be touched even if one gives up everything for it. Minato opposes to this so vehemently it feels unnatural. He’s too outraged, but it’s because this hits a sore spot for him, without him even knowing it. He absolutely doesn’t want that to be the case, because it would mean that Masaki is out of his reach. Masaki all too often seems to slip from his grasp, off to somewhere far away (or as the novel puts it, to the “Other Side”, the “Farthest North”, the “Crimson Lotus Hell”, etc). And every time this happens, he grabs Masaki’s arms and begs him not to leave (again, one shot and expire). When he thought Masaki was a ghost and was about to pass on in volume 1, he grabbed both of his arms. When they’re in Masaki’s car in volume 2 and Masaki is lamenting how useless a teacher he is, Minato has to hold himself back not to grab Masaki’s arm before affirming that Masaki will be his master forever and always. The last scene of that volume is Minato falling asleep on Masaki while holding onto his arm.
Who else could be Minato’s Greensleeves, I fucking wonder.
Next scene is about future plans for the boys’ careers. Just a KaiSei galore. Fast forward to Seiya and Minato walking Kuma. And then it happens. The biggest middle finger that Ayano flips on the anime.
“The moon’s beautiful, huh?”
“Yeah, it is, very much. Minato, do you know about Natsume Souseki’s anecdote?”
“That he had the habit of plucking out nose hairs whenever he had writer’s block and would line them up onto the manuscripts?”
“That’s the one you went for? I meant the anecdote that Japanese people use other kinds of expressions when professing their love instead of saying ‘I love you’.”
“Sorry, I don’t know that one.”
“Minato, you and Kaito just don’t get fazed, do you?”
I’m sorry but this was fucking brutal.
So the author here takes a very common trope in literature, manga and anime. A classic that everyone loves to use for their ships. And then she completely destroys it.
Minato not knowing something that all Japanese people know is 10000% a stretch. Doesn’t matter that he’s a teenager—everybody and their mother knows this anecdote over here. And yeah, that wasn’t him being funny or embarrassed, because Seiya would’ve noticed it. This is meant to show that the gag was on purpose. That a romantic trope is the last thing Ayano would use for SeiMina. Instead, Minato is thinking about Masaki in this scene, as he asks Seiya if he wants to see some dormice. That’s a confirmed volume 1 reference, because Minato had brought the dormouse mascot that Masaki gave him to Seiya’s house. And Seiya is thinking of Kaito, because why would he bring up Kaito’s name out of nowhere? Did he ask Kaito the same question? In what fucking context? What the fuck did Kaito say back? I need answers, Ayano.
Fast forward further to Minato talking about his plans for the future for the first time. He’s at a loss, but he’s interested in what the job of a Shinto priest is like. In any case, it seems he’s going to find an occupation that is related to it, just not necessarily as a priest.
Fast forward even further to the Meigen Ceremony. In this ritual, Shuu is Kyoka Suigetsu, the “moon over the water surface”. Meaning he’s someone that can’t be reached, no matter how much one tries, because the moon’s reflection is but an illusion over the water, and the real moon is somewhere completely out of grasp. That’s basically what Shuu is to Minato. Minato envies Shuu just as much as he admires him. He strives to be a great archer like Shuu, but in the end, Minato can never be exactly like him—he can only be like himself. That’s just how archery works. This is, needless to say, 100% mutual.
Meanwhile, Masaki is Katsura Otoko. That’s the name of a youkai who lives on the moon. He’s said to be so beautiful that once one looks up at him, they become enthralled to the point they can never take their eyes off his figure. I’m sure we’ve read enough of Minato’s monologues about Masaki to understand that this is exactly what Masaki is to him. It checks all the boxes.
Ayano said “motherfucker is thirsty”.
Later on, Minato’s “sixth sense for Masa-related matters only” starts tingling as he feels chills at Masaki asking Nanao for that one picture. Minato can’t exactly tell, but he can feel that Masaki is up to something. More sixth sense bullshit ensues after Masaki’s traditional court music performance along with his mother and Ren. Minato asks Masaki about the Heart Sutra, which he remembered Saionji telling him to study in the past. They debate about it until Ren interrupts and, as Masaki takes his leave, the mandatory exposition of Masaki and Minato’s karmic connection comes to punch us directly in the face. We already knew that both of them have scars because they “belong to the gods”. We already knew that Minato can see people’s auras. Now we’re told they also see light differently, feel people’s energy and can hear things that normal people can’t.
Ren describes the two of them as having a “disposition for the spiritual” and wonders if Minato is like that because someone in his family was also like that. Seiya had previously asked if Minato’s mother had that kind of disposition, except the word was written differently when he said it. The term he used was 巫女気, while Ren used 神子気. Both read as “mikoke” in furigana, but they have different meanings. Seiya was asking if Minato’s mother had the natural disposition of a shrine maiden (巫女). Ren was affirming that Masaki and Minato had a natural disposition for something else entirely. 神子 reads as “miko” but doesn’t mean “shrine maiden”, exactly—the literal meaning is “child of the gods” or “child of a god”. This is a gender neutral version of “shrine maiden”, referring to people who carry out the same duties at shrines but aren’t women. There’s no translation for it, as far as I’m aware.
Many people on the Japanese side of the fandom have theorized about the implications of this interaction. Everyone seems divided between the following options:
Masaki and Minato are gods or demigods
Masaki and Minato are candidates for becoming gods
Masaki and Minato are descendants of gods
Masaki and Minato have been either gods or god candidates in their past lives
Masaki and Minato are the reincarnations of gods
In any case, the two of them are once again officially set outside the scope of normal human beings because they “belong to the gods”, one way or another. Personally, I lean onto the “god descendant” theory because of the mentioning of Minato’s mom. I also lean onto the “god candidate in a past life” because this volume brings out the topic of past lives and characters experiencing memories and feelings that aren’t their own. So I guess my bet is that they were god candidates in past lives because they’re god descendants.
As for what gods they are or have descended/reincarnated from, people mostly agree that it’s probably Amaterasu for Minato and Tsukuyomi for Masaki. I’m on board with that as well. Even if none of these theories turn out to be true, the fact that the two are parallels to Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi in the text is undebatable.
Minato and Masaki are often portrayed as the “shining sun” and the “guiding moon” of the club. Minato gets people motivated, “sets a fire” in them, and is associated with fresh verdure, which evokes the image of sunny summer days. Meanwhile, Masaki is a beacon—he’s there to lead these kids through the dark. This is even included in his character song. Yata Shrine is also associated with nighttime and it’s no coincidence that Fuu is an owl and not some other animal. Plus, Masaki is the first character to be described as having his soul “set on fire” by Minato (moon reflects the light of the sun).
Their birthdays also play into it. Minato’s birthday falls on the winter equinox in, you guessed it, fucking leap years. As volume 3 so eloquently puts it, that’s the time when the sun “dies and is reborn”. Masaki and Minato met for the first time in fall—a time of decay, of death. And then they met again in spring—a time for rebirth. When Minato came in contact with archery for the first time, it was the end of life as he knew it, and he began a new one. When he moved from middle to high school, having lost sight of his form and “given up” on archery, it was the end of that cycle, and yet another cycle began. Masaki was there in both of these moments.
Before meeting Masaki for the second time, Minato had a different attitude towards archery. He was in kind of a comfort zone as the oomae because he knew he could count on Seiya and Shuu, and didn’t like the cheering of the crowd because it was distracting. He was also a little averse to the Buddhist essence of archery and how it seemed to cross the boundaries of what he considered human, which is why Saionji told him to study more. It lowkey felt like he was looking for vestiges of his mother in doing archery, as suggested by the references to “Kaeru no Uta”. But now he is pretty much the opposite of all that. He’s the ochi instead of the oomae, which made him realize all sorts of things and has come to feel gratefulness for everything he has. And he himself attributes it all to meeting Masaki that night, during the last tournament of volume 1. In the same paragraph, it’s confirmed that Masaki would also have given up archery and be in a bad place if he hadn’t met Minato.
One of the first people to notice the change in Minato is Shuu. He says in volume 1 that he wanted to “shoot through a certain someone’s heart”, and of course he meant Minato, only to then realize in volume 2 that Minato’s heart had already “been shot” by someone. As if that wasn’t already enough of a shocker, Minato suddenly only had eyes for this person, meaning he wanted to shoot through their heart too. It’s said in this volume that “Bows and arrows had come into the world as tools to sever the lives of others, but archers used them to sever their own lives. And then, to be born again.” It feels like Minato and Masaki use bows and arrows to server not just their own lives but also each other’s. And when they’re “reborn”, their bond grows even stronger. They continuously do this dance together in every volume.
And for the billionth time, archery = their relationship.
As for Masaki’s birthday, other than it being exactly one month before Japanese archery day, it also falls on the 6th moon day of the lunar calendar. It’s a day for assimilation of cosmic energy, where one will find grace, love, forgiveness, mental and verbal work. It’s also a day associated with “prophecies” ("something devised from the very beginning", as the novel always says). If those are not perfect definitions of Masaki and Minato’s relationship, I don’t know what is.
There are other things that add up to the Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi theory. For example, Minato shutting off to everyone when he is in a slump because of target panic, just like Amaterasu hiding in a cave and taking the sunlight with her. People try to lure her out, just as Seiya and Ryouhei try to convince Minato to join the club. I’ve seen someone on Twitter discuss about Tsukuyomi being a violent god when provoked, relating that to Masaki’s “gorilla moves in the Kujou villa” (OP’s words, lol). This same person also theorized that the Kazemai archery club being dubbed the “mustache club” is also an Amaterasu reference. “Mustache club” in Japanese is “hige-bu”. “Hige” in this case means “mustache”, but can be written as 日下, meaning “under the sun”. The colors of the mustaches are also the colors of Japanese dragonfly types, so they are indeed a direct reference to Minato. There’s also Eisuke and his photosensitivity. He can’t handle the sun just as much as he can’t handle Minato.
“But Amaterasu is a female god” yes, and Minato has been confirmed as non-binary in the afterword of volume 3. The author had already set him up as an androgynous character from day one, but now she just went and said it: Minato is neither male nor female at heart. That’s also very Zen-Buddhist, because it means he’s detached of the very concept of gender—he’s just himself.
And of course, there’s the elephant in the room. The fact that Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi are both a couple and siblings. We’ve had Kaito monologuing in volume 2 that Masaki is the “big brother” of everyone in the club. In this same monologue, he also notes that Minato is closer to Masaki than everyone else. There’s something between them that goes beyond what Masaki has with the other club members. It's technically the same relationship as Masaki has with the others (master and disciple), yet it just goes deeper. Kaito never really says that Masaki likes Minato more, but it's what he seems to think. And he probably isn't wrong. Masaki loves Minato and all not-Minatos equally. I recall seeing a few people go, “so we’ve been BroTP’d” when the translation of this chapter came out, but one thing does not cancel the other. Masaki can be a reliable big brother figure to the club and Minato can still have the biggest crush on him. Shocking surprise, I know. Even more surprising considering the fact that Minato himself was never shown to think of Masaki as a big brother, and neither does Masaki see Minato as a little brother.
Then again, it's siblings and married couple. And now, thanks to volume 3, we can count “marriage proposal” as one of the things to associate with these two.
Chapter 5 was really something. I mean, I know volume 3 is literally “MasaMina the Book”, but this fucking chapter. Masaki just so happening to see a bicycle that looked exactly like Minato’s outside the store he was going into proves that he also has a fate-powered radar. He can find Minato even when he isn’t looking for him or doesn’t even expect Minato to be anywhere nearby.
The talk about the jeans is also funny as hell because the sentence “indigo blue seems like a good fit for you” is just too much. Too fucking much. I don’t even mean the literal implication that Masaki’s designated color suits Minato best. I mean the fact that you can read “indigo blue” as a euphemism for “Masaki”. It’s the whole “don’t dye yourself in any color other than mine” all over again. Fuck off, Ayano.
This whole scene is the cutest sequence ever. The two of them looking around the store together, and then going solo only to give each other presents after they were done just... rotted all my teeth off my head. Both of them asking for the presents to be put in wrapping, and it turning out to be the exact same wrapping, was a cherry on top. The ribbons got me a little off-guard because anyone would be embarrassed to do that shit. You don’t have to go this extra mile of present wrapping, but it's natural for them. And it’s absurdly adorable that they’re speechless for a moment at the coincidence.
Did they. Did they also realize how extra they were being? Did they?
Color matching is again implied as Masaki gives Minato a green shirt because it’ll “look good with the pants”. We get it, Ayano. Enough is enough, Ayano. And speaking of colors, way back in ancient Japan, blue and green were conceptualized not as different colors, but as different shades of the same color. The word “blue” was used for both for a long time. And by that I mean really fucking long. "Green" was only introduced in the Heian period, but it wasn't widespread until after freaking WWII. That's extremely recent. The Ainu go a step further and still conceptualize not only blue and green but also white as the same color. White is also one of Masaki’s colors, given that he’s a Shinto priest. Very predictably he wears white during important ceremonies at Yata Shrine.
Their colors are one and the same. These two idiots are one and the same. Yeah, we know, Ayano. We fucking know.
As they arrive to Masaki’s apartment, it’s revealed that Minato had already been there before. It’s also implied that he has slept over at least once, and that when he spends the night, they sleep together in Masaki’s bedroom. I was wondering why there was a brief moment earlier in the volume where Ren asks to stay at Masaki’s apartment for a while, only to be turned down. There seemed to be no reason for it, but apparently it’s because Minato stays there every now and then. Good fucking god.
Masaki’s habit of being messy in contrast with Actual Housewife Narumiya Minato is a voice whispering in the background that Masaki needs someone like that living with him. The part where their legs bump under the kotatsu and their reaction to it is to look at each other and laugh fucking ended me.
When Minato tells Masaki that Ren said things about his vision, Masaki tries to dodge it by saying, “yeah, I have good vision because I grew up in a place surrounded by greenery”, and surprisingly, Minato can see through it. He knows Masaki doesn’t want to talk about whatever Ren told him, and that his reaction means everything Ren said was true. And he backs off. He really wants to know but he gives Masaki space. I feel like this wouldn’t have happened in the previous volumes. Again, Minato is becoming more mature and less impatient as the story progresses.
Then comes the revelation of Masaki’s real name. I have talked about this scene at length in a previous post, which I’ll copy-paste here:
So Masaki’s first name was originally “Tamamori Masaki”. “Masaki” was written as 正樹 in the past and later became 雅貴, because he changed his first name as well when changing his last name. Same pronunciation, different writing. Just a random observation while we’re at it, but “Tamamori” is a weird surname. In a good sense. Like, it means “soul protector” in a very not obvious way. “Tama” means “sphere”, which has the connotation of “spirit”/“soul”. “Mori” means “protection”/“protector” (think of protection charms, “omamori”, for example). It’s not a common name by any standards (in fact, I didn’t even know this name existed before), and damn, does it define Masaki well. As a Shinto priest, he is literally a protector of spirits and gods. As a coach, he’s the protector of his disciples. And in general, he’s Minato’s protector.
We’ve known since volume 1 that Masaki had changed his surname to “Takigawa” because his mother had divorced his biological father and remarried. We also knew that he didn’t have his grandfather’s surname (Yasaka) before that, because that’s his mother’s father. He originally had his father’s surname, and until now, we didn’t know what that was. And we also didn’t know that Masaki had changed his first name along with his last name. There shouldn’t be any need for that. In fact, there shouldn’t be any need for him to change his surname either. Just because his mother remarried doesn’t mean he’s obligated to have his stepdad’s surname. Something else was the issue.
The issue being that Masaki’s biological dad is on Trash Dad Team.
Volume 3 is the one where we get the most of Masaki’s past until this point, so be ready for one hell of a ride now. For starters, his grandpa’s family is special. Not just because they run a shrine, but also because the people of their bloodline have a strong sixth sense. They can see and feel certain things that normal people can’t. I’m sure everyone could already tell that from volume 1, though. It’s always been hinted that Masaki has some sort of connection with the supernatural and the mystic aside from the fact that he’s a priest. It’s been even more strongly hinted that the same goes for Minato, and in this volume, we get a confirmation of it.
So there you have it. Masaki is a descendant of important people who have a long-standing, intimate relationship with the “other side”. One of his ancestors has their remains enshrined within a forest in another town and is worshiped by the locals. And here’s where things get wild: his father stole one of this ancestor’s bones from the shrine and ran the fuck away with it. His goal was probably to sell it to the black market or something. That kinda shit gets you an insane amount of money in Japan. However, before stealing the bone, he had tried to have the remains exhumed and handed over to him from the local people, claiming that he was one of the descendants of whoever was enshrined in that forest. From what the text implies, the actual descendant wasn’t him, but rather someone who was related to him.
Who that someone was? Masaki’s brother.
No, not Ren. Masaki’s biological brother.
Yes, Masaki has a sibling. Or had, before their father kidnapped him.
Masaki’s brother is three years younger than him and his name is never revealed. All we know is that they were close and Masaki loved him very much. When his father left, he took his youngest son along without anyone’s consent and ran away. Masaki and his mother have not seen him since.
“But wait, Japan is a country where the law actually works. How is it that the police hasn’t caught this guy? Is this a stretch from the author? Perhaps just bad writing?” you might be asking yourselves. Sadly, no. The author is actually being realistic here (and likely providing an educated critique to how flawed Japan’s law is when it comes to caring for minors in general). I know that what I’m about to say is going to sound crazy, but parental kidnapping isn’t a crime in Japan.
I wish I was making this up.
If two parents get divorced and one of them takes their child along when leaving, even if by force and without the consent or knowledge of the other parent, this isn’t considered kidnapping at all. Why? Basically, children are viewed as property of their families in Japan. If one of the parents wants to take their kid to their new home and raise them there, it’s completely legal. Their child, their choice. The child doesn’t have any right to object. The only one who has that right is the other parent, but they can only exercise it if they manage to catch the kidnapper in the act. Otherwise, if the other parent tries to get the child back after the child has been kidnapped, they need to have the permission of the kidnapper, because by then the child would be in a new residence that doesn’t belong to both parents, only to one, and accessing it without the consent of the residence’s owner would be invasion of property. And that is a crime that could get the other parent in jail, even if they’re literally just trying to save their child.
All of this felt completely insane to write and I presume it feels even more insane to read.
As to why Masaki’s dad took his brother away, it’s because of their special bloodline. Apparently, Masaki’s brother was just like him. After his father left with his brother, Masaki and his family figured that he’d come back to take Masaki too, and that’s why he had to change his name. That way, Masaki now belongs to his stepdad’s family, meaning that if his father tried to take him, then it would be legally considered kidnapping. It’s not very clear why Masaki also changed the writing of his first name, but it’s suggested that he did so because his father was the one who picked it for him.
But oh, it doesn’t get better. A while after the kidnapping, Masaki’s dad sent his little brother’s death certificate to them. On Masaki’s birthday. Ever since then, Masaki’s birthday has been his brother’s death anniversary.
Death and rebirth, and then death. The usual.
Masaki doesn’t think his brother really died. His father probably pulled some strings to forge the death and then got his brother a new identity. That way, his ex-wife’s family would give up on trying to get him back, and even if they decided to do otherwise, the chances of them succeeding would be next to none. Like, suppose they happen to get ahold of him by some dumb luck, they’d still never be able to prove that it’s him (with him being legally considered dead and probably having a whole different name now).
Masaki is understandably the most bitter creature on earth over this whole thing. He despises his father with a passion and hates his birth name. During his conversation with Minato about this, he says that his birth name is an “imina” to him.
We’re now coming full cycle with one of the earlier foreshadowings, so I need to contextualize imina a little more. Before the Meiji Restoration, Japanese people had a custom of using several different names for themselves, as well as taking on many different kinds of epithets, pen names and titles. People hardly used their birth names even to sign official documents or works made by themselves. This was so that it would be the hardest possible for their real names to ever be disclosed. Only their families would know their real names until they passed away. That’s when their names would finally be engraved in their tombstones, family altars and whatnot.
Other than family, the only person who would know another person’s real name was the one they were making romantic advances on. It was okay to pull this move because, during those times, people flirted with the ultimate purpose of getting married, meaning their sweetheart would become part of their family eventually. But there was always a chance of them being rejected, so it was a risky feat. It meant they were betting everything on getting a "yes" as the answer. Wars and battles over territory, political power and assets were an everyday life thing, and so were betrayals, spying, ordered assassinations and coup d’etats. People had to protect their identities at all costs back then. Revealing your real name to an outsider was an act of absolute trust, and this is mentioned in the novel—it was like entrusting the other person with your life. Of course, this isn’t the case anymore, but Masaki revealing to Minato his birth name, as well as telling him this extremely personal and heavy story, is act of absolute trust, equal to putting his life in Minato's hands. Remember chapter 1: imina = "the name of a life".
But Masaki knows that he can share this with Minato. Minato won’t be put-off by it, won’t be judgmental towards it, and most importantly, won’t ever tell a soul about it. It’s actually real funny to me that Minato listens to this absurd story without batting an eye. He just accepts all of it, no questions asked. And the only thing he isn’t okay with is Masaki talking about his own name as if it’s disgusting and a burden.
Now I have to leave a translation of this part here because it’s fucking golden. You've gotten through this wall of text. You deserve it.
“‘Tamamori Masaki’. That’s my former name.”
“Your birth name?”
“I changed my first name along with my surname. My old name is an imina to me. Don’t really wanna be reminded of it.”
Masa-san was giving a bitter smile – one that was not like him. First there was Ren the other day and now this; these brothers just had too many secrets. Minato did not mind that they would not tell him about the circumstances. However, hating your own name was simply too sad.
“That doesn’t feel right. Imina were used up until the Meiji Era and they were something precious that only your lord and family members could know. Apparently, you’d only tell it to other people when courting them.”
“Fuh, that’s dangerous. Seiya would beat me to a pulp if he found out. Well then, mind giving me your reply?”
“To what?”
“To my marriage proposal.”
“Heh? I-I don’t know anything about that kinda stuff.”
“‘That kinda stuff’, huh.”
“I’ve never thought about that kinda stuff.”
“You just said ‘that kinda stuff’ twice.”
“You’re the worst master ever.”
“Minato, you’re like a jack-in-the-box. Whatever’s inside is always beyond my imagination.” Masa-san giggled.
——Looks like he was teasing me. Geez, I’m seriously no match for this man.
Minato stood up. “About time I head home.”
“Want me to give you a ride?”
“I’m good.”
When he pushed the door open, a gray sky spread out before his eyes.
“Uh, it’s raining. I didn’t bring my raincoat today.”
“Well-timed shower, huh? Wanna drink some coffee?”
“Hm.”
Minato closed the door.
Filed under: jokes that mean exactly what they mean.
I love that in Tsurune, the punchline in these moments doesn’t come from double entendre. The joke is precisely what it sounds like. When Masaki says “proposal”, the word he uses is specifically meant for marriage. But no, he’s not really asking for Minato’s hand. He just worded it like that because he knew it’d get a reaction out of Minato, and that’s where the humor lies.
I have seen some people (even some influential artists) in the fandom honestly believing that Masaki really was proposing to Minato in this scene, and if any of y’all ever happen to come across someone posting about that, rest assured. He wasn’t. It’s the same as when he joked about teaching Minato “the basics of a relationship”. He wasn’t being serious at all, but when he said “the basics”, it meant exactly what it sounds like.
I also think it’s really funny that Minato makes a mental note on the fact that he was being teased, which means he at first thought Masaki was being serious. For a hot minute, Minato honestly believed that Masaki was proposing marriage to him, in canon. His realization that it was a joke is literally written there. And the best part is, he didn’t say no. He took Masaki seriously for a moment and didn’t reject him. This had my head spinning when I read it for the first time. I was straight-up fucking disoriented for a while. I don't know how many people truly understand how outrageously big this is. Minato basically just said... that it was too early for him, lmfao. It feels like he was asking for time to reply. Like, "Gimme a few years so that I can say yes."
But don't be fooled, y'all. Masaki wasn't proposing, yet he was asking Minato a question that he wanted an answer to. Except this question wasn’t “will you marry me”. It was something else, hidden between the lines, which the novel comes back to in the last tournament. More on that later.
And just to finish up the analysis of this scene, gotta love the weather suddenly turning on Minato just so that he’ll get to spend more time with Masaki. He’s about to leave out of sheer embarrassment but the gods say, “Oh, no, you don’t”. And when he goes back in, it just feels like he completely forgot about how flustered he was a second ago. Speaking of flustered, this doesn’t translate into English, but the way Minato thinks about “being no match” for Masaki is distinctively feminine. It truly feels like a girlfriend or wife thinking about her man. The text pretty much slapped me in the face ‘cause it’s by far the girliest thing I’ve read in the entire novel.
Cut to Takumi’s first attempt to sabotage Minato and Masaki coming back after a week of looking for his brother. Mandatory Missing Masa-san Hours and wanting to go to him for advice are over, and Minato is relieved to see Masaki’s smile for the first time in a while, because this is also a mandatory “Masaki’s smile has a healing effect on Minato” moment.
New yugake in hand, Minato goes to Yata Shrine to get used to it, because duh. When Masaki misses the target more than once during their little practice, he gets dodgy again, except this time it’s hard to notice. He says it’s because he hasn’t drawn the bow for a whole week, and while this also plays into it, the main reason is his current state of mind. Which is also the reason why he doesn’t want Minato to touch him as he is now, as well as the reason why he was asking his grandfather from beyond the grave if he was really qualified to do purification rituals. Because right now, he's as impure as can be.
Masaki has murderous intent towards his father for ruining the lives of his family, especially his brother’s. When he swears that he’ll find his father and "choke the life out of him", he means it in the literal sense. He up and declares to the gods that he’ll kill his father with his own hands. And it's not valid for just this life, but no matter how many times they’re reborn, he’ll end his father if he ever finds him.
Don't know about you guys, but this reminds me a lot of S1 Masaki. More specifically, this feels like the author's take on S1 Masaki. Him being all bitter and gloomy, missing the target and bearing heavy negative feelings toward someone from his family is a first in the novel, and it's all stuff that S1 brought about. But the way S1 did it was just so wrong on so many levels and butchered Masaki's character so blatantly that I can understand if Ayano felt tempted to do her own fix-it of that. Feels like it's her saying, "If Masaki wanted revenge for being done dirty by a family member, this is how it'd go." It takes parental abuse and child kidnapping for Masaki to actually wish for something this serious. That's how far it'd have to go for it to taint his thoughts even when he's in the dojo, to the point he loses sight of himself for a moment and misses the target.
But anyway, back to the scene at hand. Masaki's desire to have his brother back feels more like a curse than a prayer to him at this point, but there’s someone who can break it. That’s why he doesn’t want this someone to look at him with “those eyes”. It's not just Masaki who has a healing effect on Minato—Minato, too, has a healing effect on Masaki. Again, everything is mutual and equal in this relationship. But Masaki can't afford to be healed just yet. He probably feels that if his hatred for his father dies out, it’s the same as giving up on finding his brother, and turning a blind eye to everything his father has done. However, Minato can hear what Masaki isn’t saying: “I wasn’t born for the sake of hating someone.” Masaki has made up his mind, but he actually wants out. He doesn’t hate his father because he wants to, but because he can’t help it. What he truly wishes for is that none of this was happening, and that his brother was there with him.
Minato knows that full well, so he nulls the fucking contract.
“Correction; I’m taking that back. What you said earlier isn’t valid. Masa-san is nothing but a perverted, shitty old man! That’s all!”
“Mi-Minato?”
“It’d be a problem if a Shinto priest says something like that and it happens to come true, yeah? I’ll go learn pro-wrestling. I’ll pin your arms behind your back and stop you.”
Masa-san blinked a few times, then burst out with a “pfft”. “That’s too much, Minato.”
“What’s too much?”
“Well, just everything. Just as I thought, my disciple is cute.”
“Hah? Don’t call me cute. And saying stuff like, ‘My birthday doesn’t matter’ even though everyone celebrates it with you... how can you spout something so selfish? There’s this thing my mom used to say. That a birthday is the day when people express gratitude to you for being born.”
“All right. My apologies. I will keep that in mind. I take back what I said a moment ago.”
“You’re talking like a middle schooler, Masa-san.”
“That’s rich coming from a little kid.”
“Don’t call me a little kid! I’m 16 and a second-year in high school!”
Masa-san laughed with a hand over his stomach.
——Isn’t that rude? I’m being serious here.
The bright red thing that had been surrounding Masa-san disappeared.
“Crimson lotus” was originally a Buddhist term, and the seventh of the Eight Hells, the “Hadoma Hell”, was also known as the “Crimson Lotus Hell”. It was said that those who fell into this hell would have their skin and flesh torn up from the excessive cold, thus their body would be dyed in the colors of fresh blood and suffer extreme pain. It was said that this made them look like a crimson lotus flower.
——I’m begging you, please don’t go away to that farthest north. Don’t disappear from my sight. Ever again.
So to break this one down, when Minato says “I take that back” and “what you said earlier isn’t valid”, he’s referring to Masaki’s declaration. He’s talking to the gods and telling them, “don’t listen to him, he doesn’t know better”. And then Masaki himself takes it back. The contract isn’t valid anymore, and even if Masaki tries to go through with it, Minato won’t let him.
It’s said earlier in the novel that breaking a contract with the gods isn’t easy. Once you put it into words, your fate is no longer in your hands. But Minato did it. Because if it’s Masaki, he can. Whatever concerns Masaki also concerns him. In that same scene, Masaki was thinking about how “First meetings are like the moon in an overcast night. Like a blink of peridot”, and then the Kazemai kids come to mind. This is a parallel to the ending of volume 1, where Minato tells Masaki about his grandfather's last words about him, and where first meetings are described as a “gift named coincidence, as if someone else had devised it”. This moment was a “gift from the gods” that Masaki received from the boys, all thanks to him meeting Minato.
Masaki bestows Minato with gifts, but he gets gifts in return.
This brings us back to “Greensleeves”. One of the many interpretations from the boys is that it’s a declaration of “I’ll hold your arms and stop you no matter how many times it takes, no matter how many times we’re reborn”. When Minato talks about pinning Masaki’s arms behind his back to stop him, that’s a direct reference to it. He’d already asserted in volume 1 that he’ll go after Masaki if Masaki dies, and now he’s asserting that he’ll go after Masaki into any number of next lives. This implies they’ve been through multiple reincarnation cycles together. Of course it’s not just You and Eddie who have known each other from past lives. No way that the author would introduce the concept of reincarnation only to limit it to secondary characters. None of this started now—it was, again, “devised from the very beginning”.
So if you put Minato's statemens together, what you get is: “If you die, I’ll go after you, and I’ll find you and hold onto you again.”
Minato is literally saying he’ll be with Masaki forever, beyond the borders of time. His grandmother asked Masaki to take care of him forever, Ren asked Minato to take care of Masaki, and now Minato is saying that Masaki doesn’t even have a choice—he will take care of Masaki whether Masaki wants it or not. All in all, I think Masaki isn’t completely free yet, but this is the first step to getting rid of his “curse”. I don’t know how many people realize that this means the fucking world to him. Minato is helping him pull himself out of his own personal hell, and I firmly believe that, in this moment, he thought the same thing that Minato did during his “proposal”. That he's no match for him.
Fuck me sideways.
Next thing we know, the boys are at the prefecturals. Masaki once again sweeps Minato’s thoughts during Kazemai’s turn.
“The pure of heart were fragrant. He knew with every inch of his body that this was no metaphor. Whenever he brought his face close to the owner of the fragrance, he was ecstatic. He could hear a whisper saying, ‘I want to let it intoxicate me for good; I wouldn’t mind even sinking to the bottom of a lake if it would mean that I can keep him to myself’, but those were the words of a demon. He must not fall for the sweet talk of the one who bore the same face as himself.”
Ex-fucking-scuse me, but why the fuck does this sound like a scientifically accurate description of what being in love is like from a biology standpoint? Feeling ecstatic whenever he comes closer to Masaki and is able to smell his scent? Is that fucking pheromones or what? Hello???
Amazing how literally all of Minato’s internal struggle in this volume consist of him trying not to give in to his desire of monopolizing Masaki. And my God, boy would go some crazy lengths for that desire. I've said this in an ask reply before, but I need to reiterate that it's just delightful how Minato's whole deal isn't whether or not he wants to cross the line with Masaki. It's that he does want to cross the line and he fully acknowledges it. He even seems to believe that he'll get what he wants if he pushes hard enough. But he won't cross the line because he "mustn’t fall victim to temptation". I mean, regardless of the nature of it (be it romantic or platonic or whatever), that is temptation, undebatably. It’s quite literally being presented as such by the narrative.
Masaki is very much tailored to Minato’s tastes, interests and necessities, we been knew, but this also means he’s Minato’s probation. He says earlier in this volume that being human comes with basic necessities, like hunger, sleep and libido, and that there’s no need to try to eliminate them from our lives. What we need to do is not to exaggerate—in other words, to fight back greed. Minato has to resist the urge to take Masaki for himself, 'cause that’s the only thing he’s greedy about.
Yeah, that checks it out. Minato is a carnivore, all right.
What also checks out is that MasaMina covers up depictions of all five senses. There are very specific things between them that correspond to the five senses, plus the two being gifted with sixth sense.
Hearing: tsurune, Masaki's laugh, and now meigen
Taste: coffee
Smell: the above-mentioned scene
Sight: always looking at each other and wanting each other's attention, plus the dozens of references to each other's eyes
Touch: two normally-not-tacticle little bitches have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time whenever they're unable to touch each other for an extended period, what the fuck is this novel
Yes, Ayano went Six Base Senses on us. MasaMina is Buddhism too, guys. Just gotta love that it’s not even a matter of whether Minato wants to cross the line or not—he does, and his whole arc in this volume is about him trying his best not to do that.
Bonus: one more thing from this scene that doesn't translate well is the sentence “bows and humans—a world for just the two of them”. This is very ambiguous in English. It might sound like “two of them” refers to a person and their bow, but in Japanese, the word used means specifically “two people”. Minato is thinking about Masaki here. No one else would make any contextual sense.
“Masa-san, there’s something I wanna tell you. I want you to listen without laughing.” Goddamn. That is one fucking way to start the second section of the last chapter.
So Minato has had a strange experience years ago but could never tell anyone about it, because Seiya would think he’s gone crazy and Ryouhei would dismiss it as a dream. Coincidentally, Masaki also has had a supernatural experience that he’s never told anyone before. For the millionth time, they entrust each other with a secret.
Minato has had an episode of sleep paralysis as a child. It was on Setsubun, the day on which Japanese people traditionally throw beans outside their houses to ward off evil spirits. He was feeling particularly out of it on that day and had no memory of the previous one—might very well be an indication that the veil was thin in that occasion and Minato was feeling the effects of it. During the sleep paralysis, he heard six sci-fi movie-like sounds shooting past him.
Masaki in turn tells him about the time when he fell into deep depression because of the whole thing with his brother and grandfather. He was sent by his mother to a temple to recuperate, but just kept having suicidal thoughts every single day, until he heard a voice from above the left side of his head saying, “all right”. Someone on Japanese Twitter pointed out that this the position of the head of the family in a family altar. That was Akihiro cheering him on. Masaki wanted to disappear, to never wake up again after going to sleep, but when he thought of his family, he couldn’t afford to take his own life. So he didn’t. He just continued doing his best, and Akihiro was seeing it all from the other side. This was also acknowledgement—the acknowledgement from his master that he longed so much for. That’s when he began to get better.
Not sure if Minato understands any of this. But their reaction is once again to look at each other and smile.
“Gives you kind of a weird sense of empathy, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s true. You can tell other people about this day when the time is right—when your words are filled with your truth.”
This moment is described as a “secret between master and disciple”, but the word “secret” in this case isn’t the commonplace 秘密. Nope, it’s 秘め事, which is, more often than not, used as an euphemism for “secret love maneuvers”. Deliberate, deliberate.
Please kindly go fuck yourself, Queen.
The six sounds Minato heard on that day come back to him during the last match of the final tournament. They are distinguishable from one another and take the form of “arrows of light”, piercing through his body from his head into the ground. It’s implied that these sounds are “meigen”. This might very well be the boys’ shots, plus Masaki’s, taking on a spiritual form and traveling through time and space to reach Minato, after he has found his “truth”. Maybe from a past life, where they did the Meigen Ceremony together, or maybe from something else that they will do in the future.
The shots are apparently compared to dragons in flight by the narrative, and it’s even suggested that they might have colors. The reason why they come separately in bouts of three might be a reference to the ultimate goal of Japanese archery (truth, goodness and beauty), as well as the three sounds that define a good shot (sae, tsurune and matooto). Can’t forget the references to Buddhism. Six is probably the most recurrent number in it, and Masaki even talks to Minato about the six realms, six senses and six cycles of reincarnation earlier.
People are shouting, “all right, all right” as the boys hit the targets, one “all right” for each of them. But Minato can hear a sixth “all right” immediately before the arrows of light hit him. Perhaps that was his mother.
Minato thinks to himself, “The days I’ve spent with you. The days I’ll spend with you from now on. Who am I supposed to thank for this happiness?” The “you” is in singular form, meaning he’s thinking about Masaki.
Kazemai is once again associated with the sun as the boys are described as “those who gather under the sun” and “heading towards a bright place”. They are depicted as dying and being reborn, becoming babies and growing up all over again, and at the end of that process, they will become true adults (saints) once they’re able to embrace even those whom they despise. Minato is very much on the way for that, as he despises neither Takumi, who literally almost kills him later, nor Eisuke for being a general dickhead or the twins for picking on him. He also was never depicted as hating the driver who killed his mother or the one who almost killed Masaki—this wasn’t ever even mentioned, and instead, he blamed himself for being the one who got the long end of the stick in both situations. And by the looks of it, he doesn’t hate Masaki’s dad for everything he’s done to Masaki and his family, either. He treats everyone equally.
“The sun was in itself a form of unconditional love. It shone down on everyone equally—both the good and the bad. The Japanese called that star Amaterasu Oomikami.”
Minato recalls his most recent encounter with Saionji, where he has given his answer to the Heart Sutra. Saionji basically tells him that he’s in the right track. This, added to his monologue above, makes me think that maybe. Just fucking maybe. Minato is always able to forgive everyone and everything because thanks to all of it he’s been able to meet and spend time with Masaki. So he’s grateful for both the good and bad things in his life.
The boys then go back, in their own heads, to the day they heard “Greensleeves” at the park. Seiya is thinking about what he was going to say to Kaito under that tree, meaning that Kaito is Greensleeves to him. Ryouhei probably has his sister in mind, as he had a two-page monologue about her in an earlier chapter. Nanao is also thinking about Kaito and how he gave him strength to not give up his position as regular. Kaito is most likely reminiscing to the monologue he had when chasing after Seiya. And Minato is speaking to his mother about the meaning of the song to him.
Minato’s interpretation of “Greensleeves” is that it’s a song where a master asks his disciple for the answer to a problem, and then smiles when the disciple answers. The problem: “Mind giving a reply to my marriage proposal?” The answer: “I’ll go learn pro-wrestling. I’ll pin your arms behind your back and stop you.”
Yep, that’s right. The “pro-wrestling” thing is one more of the many word plays of this novel. In Japanese, the words “pro-wrestling” and “proposal” sound very similar. Minato could’ve just said he’ll hold Masaki’s arms and stop him. He didn’t have to mention pro-wrestling. But he did so because Ayano wanted us to associate “puroresu” with “puropozu”. She wanted us to remember the marriage proposal scene when reading this part, because that was Minato’s answer to it.
In Japanese culture, if it wasn’t already obvious enough, you say things without really saying them. In Zen martial arts, this also applies, because everyone has to find their own answer to the problems and doubts they encounter along the way. And in romantic relationships, too (throwback to the Souseki anecdote).
Masaki reveals to Minato the darkest truth about himself and shows Minato his ugliest side, then basically asks him, “So what are you gonna do with that, now that you know?” (proposal) and Minato’s answer is “I’ll take care of you” (pro-wrestling). Roundabout as can be, this is intentional. This bullshit is very well concealed in all these word plays and cryptic expressions because it’s supposed to hit you like a truck when you realize what they truly mean. Just like it hits Masaki like a truck back then. He most likely understood what Minato was really saying. Fundamentally, Minato was telling Masaki that he loves him without directly saying “I love you”.
The moon is fucking beautiful, huh.
And then Masaki laughs. The master asks, the disciple answers and the master smiles in response. “Greensleeves” has now come full cycle. This is also an ultimate Zen moment because Minato was essentially accepting everything that Masaki is, even the worst of him. This is quite literally a promise—a contract that Minato has made with him.
You know what else is also a contract?
It’s not a marriage proposal... but it is, actually. Those are not marriage vows... but they are, actually. Ayano is fucking with us.
She’s fucking even more in the following paragraph:
“Attraction towards the opposite sex and affection between parents and children are biological desires based on the prosperity of offspring, and it is not so difficult to love someone who has been kind to you. True friendship is beautiful and hard to earn. Those who walk the same path, master and disciple, are also friends. The only difference is that one is going ahead and the other behind, but the two of them continue on a never-ending journey together.”
So, before anyone goes “we’ve been BroTP’d” again, Ayano is affirming here that friendship is also an aspect of Masaki and Minato’s relationship, specifically, and that this is purer and more beautiful than love between couples or family. Now, what exactly is the extent of “friendship” here? Welp, traditionally, in Japan, “friendship” includes a lot of things. If we look back into Edo or Heian, both periods of Japanese history that are constantly referenced in Tsurune, “friendship” between men often included courting for a certain period. Especially between master and disciple. This was actually the common sense back then.
Yes, I’m talking about Shudo. I’m also losing my fucking mind, so bear with me here.
Ayano is definitely aware of the whole wakashu thing. This woman knows her history, okay? The “monk” jokes about Masaki aren’t for nothing. Monks used to work as Shinto priests as well back in the day and vice-versa, for Shinto and Buddhism were intimately connected for a long time. There’s also the ceremony that the boys participate for the Star Festival in volume 2, which, according to Masaki, was performed by chigo in the past. Chigo aren’t a thing anymore, of course, but this seemingly unnecessary comment indicates that, if this were a few centuries ago, Minato would’ve been a chigo and he and Masaki would obligatorily be in a relationship.
Now, remember the past lives theory? If Masaki and Minato have been master and disciple in their past lives, then they have been in relationships with each other in all of the lives where both of them were born as men. But that also means they had to marry a woman later on, because those were the times. In that paragraph, Ayano is quite literally saying that, regardless of who they marry, whatever they felt/will feel for their partners doesn’t hold a candle to what they feel for each other. "All women are beautiful, but only my disciple is cute."
But what would have happened if one of them was born as the opposite sex, you may ask. Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi all over again, probably. Minato is non-binary on the inside, so he would probably see and treat Masaki the exact same way and there would still be friendship between them.
Besides, once again, this is deliberate wording. “The two will go on a never-ending journey together”, “a world for just the two of them”, etc. Why do these sentences refer only to Minato and Masaki? Masaki isn’t Minato’s only master and Minato isn’t Masaki’s only student, so why does the narrative act like only the two of them matter here?
Japanese Twitter has speculated about this too. The conclusion is that maybe this is Ayano enforcing the concept of soulmates, and perhaps even of twin rays and twin flames. It’s often brought up how similar Masaki and Minato are, and twin flames/rays is based on the idea that each soul has its own frequency, which complies with the theory that “the world is made up of tsurune”. Not to mention the whole fate element and the implications that they’ve known each other from past lives. It honestly sometimes feels like the author is trying to say that Minato and Masaki are just one soul dwelling in different bodies or two separate souls that were once one. And they’re not the only characters who are implied to have a “half”—it’s very obvious that there’s a bunch of pairs in this story, and it’s not for nothing. Most likely, what Ayano means here is that Minato and Masaki will go in a never-ending journey not just regarding archery, but regarding life in general, including future next lives.
Ayano is being pretty realistic here too, because there are lots of little gay ships in Tsurune, but they will never be canon. MasaMina and KaiSei might have a veeery slim chance, but probably won’t either. Yet she’s laying the foundation that no matter who they end up with, their friendship is many steps above it. Have to admire her completely crushing the dreams of fans who ship themselves with the characters, lol. “He will never love you as much as he loves this other guy”, basically.
So in short, Masaki and Minato are master and student, which means they’re also friends. They’re sorta like siblings by default as well, and act like a married couple. All of this fits Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi just right. It also fits what Ayano says in the afterword about liking things that “are in-between” and “waver”—things that “can’t be put into a mold or categorized”. You really can’t put this relationship into a mold because it’s in all molds at the same time. It’s Everything and nothing at once. An optimal relationship from a Zen standpoint. A truthful, good and beautiful relationship.
The ultimate ideal.
Speaking of ideal, Masaki and Minato’s relationship is, in itself, the ultimate Zen ideal. I’m not just talking about how their dynamics literally follow the same flow as of Japanese archery, but also their relationship is the pinacle of what Zen standards consider to be pure. Minato never asked to be Masaki’s disciple and Masaki never offered to teach him. It just happened naturally, just like how they got into archery. Before they realized, they were doing it. Minato simply asked how Masaki was able to shoot so beautifully and told him about his target panic. Masaki, in turn, revealed that he also suffered from target panic in the past. And that was that. The next time Minato came to the dojo, Masaki started teaching him. Unprompted, unsolicited—directly, at least.
Minato needed to be taught and Masaki needed to teach.
So, back to this volume. The tournament ends and so nearly does Minato’s life. Another gift from God is bestowed upon him as Masaki saves his ass from imminent death for the nth time. Dramatic as fuck, like always. Yet he still says “excuse me” before shooting the allergenic into Minato’s tight, what a gentleman. Seiya’s reaction was priceless, I gotta say.
Masaki going after Takumi was kind of a shocker when I first read volume 3, but after reading it again in order to make this post, it was actually to be expected (notice that I'm saying "expected", not "okay", because that shit wasn't okay at fucking all). He has a lot of pent-up anger, but even if he didn’t, he’d never forgive anyone who puts his students in danger, let alone in a near-death situation like that. 'Cause Minato would have died if Masaki didn’t have that syringe with him. Minato, on the other hand, hasn’t yet learned pro-wrestling, but as promised, he comes to stop Masaki and shows that he, too, can be extra as fuck.
The afterword is packed with MasaMina this time around. Not just the confirmation of non-binary Minato and the uncategorizable things part, but also Masaki being described as someone who is human yet not. She really just up and said it, huh. Masaki is in-between the realm of people and the realm of gods, and more than once did he almost cross over to the gods’ side, but Minato was there to hold onto his arms and stop him. As Ayano herself puts it, she wrote this story because there are people whom she wanted to stop and keep by her side, and this shows in the way she writes about the main relationships of the story, especially MasaMina.
There’s also the way she describes what Tsurune is about—“this is a story of master and disciple and of bow friends”. The fact that she felt the need to clarify this and place “master and disciple” first speaks volumes about how this woman views her own story. This feels like another tiny act of rebellion against the anime, which makes it all about bow friends and barely shows any of the master and disciple aspect. Heck, it barely shows Masaki at all, period.
And like, this isn't even a matter of being salty about a fandom favorite getting sidelined, although that alone is already valid enough of a complaint in my opinion. It's also about the essence of keiko and how it simply doesn't work without the active participation of a master. It makes the whole thing seem to be about knowledge and practice (sport), when actually contemplation and looking inside oneself plays a much bigger role (art). Not to mention that it gives people the wrong idea about what the story and its characters are supposed to be. I've had people straight-up try to argue with me that Tsurune is about the main five boys and Masaki is secondary. I think we can finally put to that discussion to sleep, now that the author herself has spoken.
Tsurune-centric accounts on Japanese Twitter usually have the words "original work" in their bios. There's a reason for that, and it's the same reason why AO3 has separate tags for the Tsurune novel and the Tsurune anime. Even if we ever get to see volume 3 animated, it will only be as loose of an adaptation as can be, and we'll continue to get more and more anime-original content. I hope next time, if we ever get a next time, Masaki won't be borderline ignored again.
But he probably will, and that's what this post is for.
I hope this has clarified some things about volume 3. As I have already announced, I'm planning on making more analysis on other things that I wasn't able to include here because this post is already enough of a monstrosity as it is. I'll see you guys in the next ones!
Okay already.
Y’all are really damn eager for it, so here you have it: the infamous List of Erased Gay, AKA a glimpse of how we could be having it all if KyoAni weren’t doing us so dirty this year, Tsurune edition. The Violet Evergarden edition seems to have left a big impression, so maybe this listing will become a thing.
Then again, along with the canon gay that we lost, we gained a lot of anime-only shippy service that is not only weirdly fixated on Minato alone but also ruins the nature of many characters. KyoAni has been outright baffling this year in how little it understands the novels that it has been adapting, and even more in how proficient it has become in destroying the main relationships of each title. All in all, the personalities and purposes of the main characters have been severely altered, and there has been a disturbing trend (not only in Tsurune, but also in Violet Evergarden and Liz to Aoi Tori) of making the protagonists obsess with someone who apparently does only the minimum for them and being lukewarm with the people that seemingly care more for their wellbeing.
That’s not what any of these novels are about.
But since this post is centered on Tsurune, I’ll only talk about how the aforementioned major flaws apply to it. That boils down to KyoAni erasing most of what Masaki did for Minato and about 85% of the scenes they had together, replacing it with additional scenes without much purpose involving other characters. For whatever incomprehensible reason, KyoAni is hellbent on enhancing Minato’s relationship with everyone except the person he has the strongest bond with in the books, and a lot of you guys seemed to notice this. So, in order to address the cringeworthy disaster that the Tsurune anime has become, I’m naming this one as the List of Erased and Misplaced Gay.
Had to put it under a cut because of how long it got. While we’re at it, please consider reading the novel translations.
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4/14/24
I'm back.
Well, I guess I shouldn't say I'm back - really, what I mean is that I went back to my alma mater yesterday (undergrad, not grad), sat in the crowd while current seniors presented their final BA thesis papers, reminisced about how much I miss the art world, and left the presentation feeling like I just had to do something to scratch that "why did I ever leave art behind, I need to get back to it right now!" itch.
What hasn't happened in the eight years since I was last here? The 2016 version of me who wrote the few posts that follow did have it rough, yes (it's hard not to look back at those entries and remember how lonely that time of my life was) - but little did she know that she only had a few years left of calling herself an arts professional. Years that I don't think I would redo necessarily, but I might have sunk my teeth in a little more if I could predict the detour my career path would take.
I only lasted in NYC for another month after my last post. I experienced some of the best times of my life in the four months I was there, but damn was it lonely. I was lucky enough to have a very good friend who lived in the city just a train ride away and who was there for almost every one of those best experiences, but my job sucked; my living space sucked; my boss sucked. If even one of those things was better it might have made all the difference, but it wasn't meant to be.
I packed my two suitcases and moved to New England on December 23, 2016. If it wasn't for the friends I'd made in grad school (and, let's be honest, my boyfriend at the time), I'd have no doubt ended up back at home in the Midwest. But I also had an opportunity I couldn't pass up - managing a photography gallery, essentially my dream job.
In the three years I was at the gallery, I saw, matted, framed, shipped, and catalogued some of the best works the history of photo has to offer. I worked a week-long photo show back in NYC and, again, experienced some of the most standout moments of my life (clearly NYC has that power over me; as my uncle would say, "that city has jazz in the air").
I stayed at the gallery for almost three years before one owner retired and the other decided to shift to an at-home gallery - aka, I was out of a job.
And that's how I landed in fundraising. A series of subsequent steps led me back to the Midwest and into a more suitable fundraising position for my personality (research-based, behind-the-scenes, and a bit more covert than asking for gifts). The boyfriend I had in New England is now my sweet husband. We travel, see family often, and are very happy.
But.
Yesterday, I caught up with one of my old professors. My history of photo professor, to be exact. He remembered what I'd shared with him during my last update - from 2017, when I was just learning the ropes of photo gallery management. When he asked what I was doing now, I told him and tried not to sound too bashful about no longer being in the art world. His response was, "That's great, but you were so close - you had your foot in the door." Polite, but disappointed. A not-so-subtle way of reminding me that I was there! I was doing it! I was a successful art (photo) historian!
But then... I left it behind. And I left it behind for all the reasons I started Bad Art Historian in the first place.
I found that the people who worked in the art world full-time weren't much better than the students who went through my grad program with me. Often, they were standoffish. I fairly consistently felt like I wasn't in on the joke, or that I wasn't doing art "right" because I wasn't high brow enough. I was intimidated by the people I indirectly worked with, and as someone who very much thrives on connecting with others, this left me feeling rejected.
That's not to say I didn't try. When my boss told me the photo gallery would be closing, I applied for plenty of art jobs. Assistant curatorships, gallery sitters, program coordinators. None of them worked out. Fundraising fell in my lap, and I wasn't in a position to deny it.
Honestly, It felt like a good change - welcome, in fact, especially when I very quickly realized that the people on my team were my kind of people. Friendly, outgoing, social, and supportive.
Which makes my photo professor's comment all the more rattly, because I had to remind myself that I left for a reason. I still hope that life will lead me back to the arts - but I don't think I betrayed myself by leaving in the first place. Accepting - and being okay with - that choice is difficult, but a worthy endeavor nonetheless.
Anyway. I'm back - maybe? We'll see how long this renewed energy lasts. But in this moment, I'm glad to be here.
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Artist Interview: Philip von Zweck
Philip von Zweck is an artist based here in Chicago, IL. I had the pleasure of interviewing him about his life and work.
I noticed you were from Slidell! How do you think your background relates to your work, both art-related and otherwise? What brought you to Chicago, and what kept you here?
Thank you, it is an interesting question about how background relates to work and life, etc. but not an easy one. I mean, isn’t that kind of what therapy is about? I feel like I could answer it in a few different ways (and will), and they might all be wrong. But I’ll give it a shot and try to not be on this couch for hours….
I was/ am not a good student.
I think I started school too young and am self-diagnosed as a dyslexic with some degree of ADHD. Shocker but… Louisiana doesn’t have the greatest public education system so when I was really struggling with reading at the end of the second grade my parents put me in a very small secular private school. There were between 16 and, maybe, 20 students per grade. By the time I got to junior high (6th grade) skateboarding was the common fascination of the boys and the small basketball court, which was pretty much the only piece of pavement on the school grounds, was usually taken over by skating at lunchtime. Skate culture was the thing all the guys did, like if there were 30 boys in junior high, I bet 25 had boards. Skating had a tremendous influence on me, especially in relation to art. Not only through board graphics and magazines but in particular street skating trains one to reimagine the built environment as a playground, to imagine and enact potential, and that expands out to looking for the creative potential in any circumstance. Skateboarding also introduced me to punk and post punk music which, in time, led to experimental and avant-garde music which has also been very important to me over the years, especially in terms of community post college.
Another important aspect of being in Slidell was just proximity to New Orleans, one of the greatest cities on earth even if it wasn’t as interested in the versions of contemporary culture as I was growing up. Perhaps it has changed now.
If we’re talking about background relating to work then of course, parents play a big role. My parents seemed to theoretically like what might broadly be categorized as “culture” but they are people of science and that sort of skepticism has defiantly been impactful but not necessarily helpful.
That background stuff said, which probably only scratches the surface: I took the Amtrak from Hammond on my 18th birthday to attend the only college I applied to: SAIC. A few months after graduating I started producing/hosting a weekly radio program which I left after 15 years, so that was one thing that kept me here, plus friends, relationships, etc. I considered moved to LA for grad school but I got a better deal from UIC then Art Center so stayed put. After grad school I taught for a year at Brooklyn College but being broke, lonely, and NY’s lack of allies led me to leave.
Now I have a job I generally like; I’m married with a daughter, two cats and a home; I have a gallery I like to work with; and although I haven’t been active lately some folks still remember me, so I just sort of feel settled.
You've been involved in the Chicago art scene for many years. In your view, how has the art scene changed over time, and how do you see it developing in the future?
I have been involved with a Chicago art scene for a sometime but having moved away from most of my community to the far Southside seven or so years ago, having a child and a pandemic I’m not as active or in the know as I once was so I may not be the best person to ask.
What I think I’m seeing, and this may be more of a 30,000-foot view, is that the art scene I was trained for by SAIC, the one that aspires to blue chip galleries and “encyclopedic” and “contemporary” museums, an art scene which comes directly from European colonialism and white supremacy is, to some extent, becoming less resistant to acknowledging other art scenes, other traditions or practices. As for the future I can’t make predictions but the hopeful side of me wants more of that.
You work with many kinds of media, including radio and sculpture. What do you like about each medium? How is your approach different for each?
I don’t really think about mediums. I often think more about access and possibilities, how can I take this thing I have access to and use it. You’re going to give me access to a xerox machine, I’m going to make zines; you’re going to give me access to a radio station, now I’m doing a show, or two; you’re going to give me an office, now it’s a gallery…
I used to say that my projects stemmed from two conceits 1) a desire to make stuff, to participate, without knowing what I wanted to make 2) a desire to make work for a non-art audience. These weren’t necessarily represented evenly in every project but for me there is very little difference between Something Else which was a weekly radio program of experiential sound work that only broadcast work submitted for airplay and Temporary Allegiance which was a 25ft flagpole on UIC’s campus where folks could sign up to fly whatever they wanted for a week at a time. They’re both public space so can find a non-art audience and they both allow me to participate without generating some of the content. I think of it as nested authorship, I make the pole someone else makes the flag…
That changed to an extent when I started wanting to free myself from a certain orthodoxy, I wanted to feel free to make anything, not just the sort of projects I already mentioned because that sort of liberation, to feel free, was the goal from the outset and I was in a rut. My problem remains content, the question of what to make but now I’m outsourcing that less frequently…
Even now though I think my approach isn’t medium specific, but I do like to spend time researching materials and techniques and I guess that would be medium specific. I’d probably be better off if I spent less time doing that and more time actually making things in the studio.
What is it like running an art gallery out of your own living room and office? Would you recommend it to other curators or artists?
There is a long tradition, especially in Chicago, of what’s known as Apartment Galleries or Artist Run Spaces. Some of these, like Western Exhibitions, are now well-established commercial galleries, but many have a short shelf life. For me doing shows in my living room was great, I only worked with people I wanted to work with, with people I trusted with keys to my apartment. I got to engage with these artists one a different level, like, if you’re an introvert it can be hard to just talk to people but doing a show, writing the press release, hanging the art, having an opening, having gallery hours, those are all excuses to connect with people. So for me it was very rewarding and it is a great way to build community. I highly recommend it to artists and curators; I almost think it should be a requirement, like a rite of passage. I don’t want to do it in my house and they changed the building access policies so I can’t really do it in my office anymore, but if someone wants to give me a space I’d go back to putting on shows and programming.
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hi hi hello!! I love your art style, derek and edie look amazing!! please tell me everything about edie!! when did she start liking derek? how did she feel about the marriage pact? what’s her relationship with cove like? what did she do after high school? and any fun facts you wanna share!! :)
a total of One (1) person has asked abt my girl Edie so this means im allowed to go insane crazy. thats the rules soz babes
more info under the cut !
this is gonna start at step 2 bc thats where it’s more Interesting
during step 2, edie is an INCREDIBLY anxious girl; she got into an accident when she was 10 and became disabled, so she has to walk with crutches or a leg brace which makes her feel very insecure, mostly bc she would rather die than stand out at ALL
bc edie is so insecure she really latches on to basically anyone who gives her any form of attention, so when derek starts looking out for her n making sure she’s included in things, she IMMEDIATELY starts crushing on him. it’s different w cove, bc at first she had a crush on him too but realised it was more of an infatuation, mainly bc he was just someone new and interesting. cove has no idea about this, and she’ll take that secret with her to her grave. she almost hopes that by pushing her emotions down and ignoring them they’ll go away on their own - which obvs, they don’t. because of this insecurity, she finds herself really upset by derek’s marriage pact and denies it outright, mainly because at this point she doesn’t WANT to feel like she’s just an option for him when she’s spent so long being basically as in love as a 13 year old can be.
after she turns 18 during step 3, she’s absolutely MISERABLE. she has no idea what she wants to do with the rest of her life and feels very pressured to follow Liz’s success. she’s drifted away from cove a little bit, but still considers him her friend; however, she does still stay in touch with derek, and he's basically her lifeline at this point bc he magically seems to understand what she’s going through. She does a bunch of crazy shit to her appearance, like getting tons of piercings, getting tattoos, and dyeing her hair, because if everything in her life is out of her control, she can at least control how other people perceive her. she did really well in school, but during her high school years it took more and more effort to keep her grades from slipping.
between steps 3 and 4, she’s resolved to move to an entirely different country to start her whole life over from scratch. she studied law and criminology in England, rents her own place, gets in a few long term relationships, and nearly completely cuts contact with everyone she knew in Sunset Bird. while it worked for a while, she found herself feeling incredibly homesick and miserable. she hated to admit it, but she was lonely. once she graduated, she had no idea what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. she started a career as a clerk at a law office, hated it, and floated between a lot of different jobs while juggling a toxic relationship, loneliness, and post-grad study all at the same time. she decided that enough was enough, and reached out to derek for support; this is FINALLY where things start looking up for our girl.
step 4 happens, she visits derek, and all of her feelings come rushing back all at once and it takes ALL of her effort to not immediately confess her love for him when she first sees him (because she’d just gotten out of her last relationship and didn’t want to rush into anything). but to hell with that, as soon as derek offers to have her live with him, she immediately accepts and they get into a relationship. she feels like she’s spent too much of her life taking things slowly because of her own insecurities, and she’s not gonna let them stand in the way of her happiness anymore. she and derek would get married pretty quickly, and edie really starts coming out of her shell towards the beginning of step 4.
some other fun facts:
her favourite flavour of ice cream is mint chip
her star sign is scorpio
her love languages are acts of service and physical touch
her favourite movie series is lord of the rings
her mbti is ENTJ
she does eventually go on to repair her relationship with liz, though it takes some time
she and cove become closer friends again once she moves back to sunset bird
she sees mr suarez as her father figure
she got a hello kitty tramp stamp when she was drunk once and it’s still her favourite tattoo
she’s a GREAT storyteller
she’s dyed her hair every colour under the sun (her ends feel like STRAW at this point)
she’s a Pro GamerTM
I think career-wise she’d become an academic, as well as a college professor perhaps
thank u for reading this far ily
#oh lord i went kinda ham huh#hope u like it mwah#Our Life Beginnings & Always#OL:BA#derek suarez#our life beginnings and always derek#our life derek#our life headcanons#our life jamie last#ol:ba oc#original character
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“you’d be surprised, cookie.” despite his wealthy upbringing and professional job, saul wasn’t exactly traditional himself. he had been a somewhat openly bisexual man in the early nineties when it was a turbulent time to be anything other than completely straight. at least he had the oasis of manhattan to escape to then, he couldn’t imagine growing up in a place like blue harbor in the same time period and not coming out through adulthood with some scars. “a lot of my college buddies and post-grad friends were very shocked when i showed up one day with a ring on my finger. they thought it would never happen to such a slu—” saul paused, grimacing slightly. if phoebe had any respect for him, he might lose it if he divulged just how… messy he had been when he was even younger than phoebe currently. it was part of the reason he felt such affection for someone like cj; he had been the same way, but he had been forced to grow up. cj seemed to be holding onto youth a little longer. “anyway, love makes you do stupid things, but it’s how i got my son. so i guess i can't complain in the end.”
saul laughed good-naturedly. “oh, everyone felt that way about george michael back then.” the flamboyance was just part of the fun when it came to wham!, but really, it was hard to find any popular music group in that period that wasn’t decked out in neon and spandex. his eyes squinted slightly. “yes, anthony edwards. i saw top gun because i would go watch any movie with tom cruise when i was a kid but i came away thinking goose was cute and that i’d never join the navy.” quite the opposite effect that it had on other moviegoers around the same age, but saul thought he was rather adept at recognizing propaganda, even as a young teen. having parents who were democrats who hated ronald reagan probably helped. as she listed her celebrity crushes, he shook his head rapidly. “yeah, i have no idea who those people are.” since he had been permanently busy with his career since law school, he never had a lot of time for pop culture unless it had to deal with reality shows like real housewives or below deck. most of his references came from the era he grew up in, but he personally thought eighties movies were intrinsically better anyway.
he nodded as she explained more about her cat’s clawing issues. “well, i don’t know if you’re ever going to be able to figure out psychologically why misty scratches you. not unless you hire the my cat from hell guy.” saul gave a small, empathetic frown. “it could be something simple like she’s overstimulated. are you petting her when she scratches you? or maybe bored. i got two cats so they’d be able to entertain each other while i’m at work.” which, granted, was pretty much all day. it was the exact reason why he never got a dog as an adult. that, and his apartments were too small back in new york, even when he was at the height of his career. “yeah, he got an apartment in town.” something that did bother saul slightly, since it seemed micah had moved all the way out to illinois just to not move in with him, but he had to be grateful micah was even within a fifteen-mile radius. there was an emotional distance that was hard to close, but at least they were physically close. that had to mean something. “well, thank you for understanding. i know how much you love them, though i’m sure they’re jealous now that you have a cat of your own.”
Whilst her own knowledge on etiquette was limited to the dining room scene from Pretty Woman, Phoebe tended to think she had some manners. She ate with the appropriate cutlery (unless it was something that required hands, like burgers and pizza), didn’t talk with her mouth full, and tried not to interrupt people in a sentence. Basically, the opposite of any behaviors Seb exhibited. “You can be the Professor Higgins to many, many wild Eliza Doolittles.” She joked.
The first part wasn’t something that Phoebe hadn’t heard before. From Foster, from Seb himself, so she just let out a resigned ‘hmm’. She debated letting Saul in on the reasons why she was…protective to the point of control with Seb. Their fucked up childhoods, the way they had to parent themselves. But, as much as she trusted the lawyer — as fond of him as she was — she didn’t want him knowing that part of her. So she latched onto the second part of his comment. “I don’t think CJ knows what taxes are, honestly. That's why he has his whole team.” It was one of the many reasons she had been happy to hear that Seb would be moving in with CJ; the one person in town so well looked after by a whole slew of people, she’d be guaranteed the bills and rent would be paid on time, and perhaps weekly groceries bought as well. Even if she were a hypocrite on the latter, fully surrendering that task to Foster.
When he glanced up, giving her the advice to not do anything society expected of her, Phoebe offered a soft smile in response. Her entire existence was going against societal norms. She was a product of a teen pregnancy, she grew up destitute, she was a girl, and bisexual. She had more passion and talent for art-based subjects instead of academia. Anything that the concept of society frowned upon, she had checked the box. “I don’t think the traditional thing is my speed.” She told him. Kids were forever off the table, and considering how she got Foster to use the boyfriend/girlfriend label, she highly doubted marriage would be on the cards in the future. If ever. And that was also something she was unsure she wanted anyway.
Whilst she hadn’t heard of the actor that had stolen Saul’s mother’s heart, she couldn’t help the little snicker that left her. “One of my friends from college, her mom felt that way about George Michael.” Just a little bit before her own mother’s time, but she supposed there had to be someone from Lisa’s generation who was closeted back in the day but still a massive heartthrob to the masses. She was curious about Saul’s comments on the actors, wondering if he was speaking objectively about their looks in the same vein of a father trying to bond with his teenage daughter about boy bands, or if his opinions were genuine. Phoebe never tried to speculate about sexuality, was extremely fortunate to grow up with two other people figuring out their own identity so that when she came to her realization in college, she wasn’t alone. And, as much of a crappy mom Lisa was in the other aspects of her life, at least she was an ally. “Anthony Edwards, huh?” She asked with a quirk of her eyebrow. “Harry Styles is my all-time crush. But, Sabrina Carpenter is my number one at the minute. What can I say? I like them short and blonde.”
Trimming Misty’s nails had indeed been the first thing on the list of suggestions of what to do with her. But after that experience, the groomer wouldn’t answer her calls anymore, and the vet had given Misty a strike. And she had been worried that Misty would just chew at the caps. Plus, it wasn’t like it was the cheapest option. “It’s not so much the scratching as the reason behind it.” She explained, even if Foster would say it was very much the scratching. “Micah, right? Yeah, he’s staying with one of my neighbors.” He was nice, even if things were a little awkward between them, neither of them quite knew the right thing to say to each other. “I understand you picking family for that, Saul. It’s not an issue.” Phoebe assured him, punctuating her sentence with another bite of pancake.
#* narrative / thread.#* narrative / phoebe.#* phoebe / 001.#I shorted this a lil just in case we wanna wrap it up soon?
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Life of a Lemon
I was 16 when I seriously starting considered doing art for life. The circumstances around that are a pretty beefy story for another day. There was some external influence that made me think that something that I didn't previously think was viable was something that could be viable. However, the resistance put in my place was strong, in hindsight avoidable but also strong for Young not completely Cracked possibly just heavily scratched Lemonade to handle.
I went to college for Fine Art, was part of my school's Fine Art honor Society went from the Historian in my Freshman year to the President my Senior year. I would say that the experience was empowering in and of itself, however, the breaks from school was filled with verbal abuse and attacks for my decisions from my family and me not fully knowing things trying to defend myself and prove people wrong. In retrospect I think trying to put effort in proving others wrong instead of working on myself and trying to be a better person was the wrong way to go. I was a different person back then and part of me thought I wasn't allowed to be happy by something that I couldn't see in the universe. I didn't know at the time I was that thing.
I even previously had a Tumblr that I put almost the most minimal amount of love into before ultimately deleting it at some point. I definitely could have used better guidance on doing things that would align me with longevity and maybe fight off some of the poison laid into my young lemony mind especially when it came to adaptability. Young Lemonade was set on getting into Grad School and figuring out. Young Lemonade did not get into Grad School.
However young Lemonade did get into making videos and created the Cracked Lemonade YouTube channel. Which was mostly me messing with ideas, editing them and placing them online. A lot of my earlier stuff is gone from there when YouTube started getting real serious with DMCAs and I just removed videos to be safe.
I've sold art but it felt like I couldn't move forward. I really didn't know what to do after my rejections from school and there was an event in real life that really deflated me involving my family which really set the pace of my 20's. Spending the second half of my 20's unlearning so many things I have been taught and healing.
I created art that was an expression of that journey as a whole. Have worked in multiple mediums and art is something that will always have a high viability to me because of how it can be used as a tool to express complex ideas, have fun or do both.
In 2021 I joined Twitter got into the NFT atmosphere and met a good deal of fantastic humans and artists (and not so good ones, future posts maybe) who are passionate about creating, discovered that they can place their paintings, digital art and stuff on the block chain as an alternative means of selling their art. Some even offer physical goods along with their digital goods.
There's no one way to do Crypto Art or do NFTs and general. Everyone is sort of figuring it out now. But I am seeing that a few of my friends are getting "We don't like your kind around here" and prejudice is whack. People are coming to this platform to share their art for the most part. A few have been scammed by larger projects promising unrealistic things. At the end of the day I'm just trying to exist as an artist who happens to also happens to be fond of placing art on the blockchain in exchange for cryptocurrencies in addition to art in exchange for fiat money.
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After I finished my post last night I ended up getting very upset about my dad. And cried on James for a little. And decided I should just. Go and see my parents today. And so that's exactly what I did.
The decision made me sleep a lot better. James got me a different blanket out and I slept pretty great. I did wake up before my alarm and felt pretty good. I always wake up easier when I have something to do. I got up and made the bed and went to get dressed.
Something scratched my eye and I couldn't get it to stop hurting for a half hour. Which was frustrating. But I used a bunch of eye drops and tried to wash my eye out. I couldn't really put mascara on because of it. But whatever.
James and me left here at 730. I drove us out to the museum to drop them off and went to great breakfast. I got out of the car to give them a big hug and kiss and then was off.
Except not really. Because when I got to McDonald's I realized I had James's coffee still. I texted them and they biked up to me to get it and I got one extra kiss. Very sweet. Love them so much.
I had a good drive out. It took about 2 hours and there was not traffic. I listened to lots of music. I did end up crying listening to some show tunes. Happens sometimes. I needed the catharsis I guess.
I was excited to be out of the car when I got there around 10. My legs kind of felt like jelly. But I was so happy to see my parents. And the doggies.
It was really great spending time together. We talked about my dad's leg. Which looked pretty scary and he looked pretty pale. But he was in good spirits. I did not like hearing him say 'if' around coming to my wedding. But I also just want him to be okay and whatever that takes is more important. I don't want to be selfish but I also. Have to have him there. It isn't acceptable that he wouldn't be there.
Around 11 my aunt Renee came over. She's not actually my aunt, she's my sister's mom. But she's always been my aunt and she's lovely. I really enjoyed all of us hanging out. I got to learn a lot more about my dad's younger life and there were lots of laughs. I don't think she's heard me talk so much before. I was kind of a standoffish kid. But man did she hear me today. I talk a lot and very fast. My grad school director used to say I talk through the trees. And it's absolutely true, I get there eventually but we are not on a path at all. I think she thought I was funny though and that is still positive.
We ordered lunch. And we compared jewelry. Talked about childhoods and memories. I told them all about art and stories from my life. Renee told us about the wild 21 day vacation she's going on. Which sounds amazing. And we talked about the wedding and how things are going to be. The decorations and the hotels and stuff.
We have to make some changes to the plan because of moving my dad around. But that is okay. So I may stay in the hotel on Thursday instead of James. But we will see.
Renee left and I spent another hour and a half with my parents. We talked about music and life and it was really nice. I wanted to stay more but I also wanted to get home before 9.
So I said goodbye. Mom sent me home with detergent and cat food. I let her know my dad's car windows were open? I got pictures with them and gave them hugs and then I was off.
The drive home was not as pleasant. It was directly into the sun the entire drive. And just horrible traffic. So it took almost 3 hours. Which was not ideal. I tried to keep myself awake and aware by having a full dance party. Which was a lot of fun and very silly.
I had the two pieces of pizza my mom gave me before I left. So at least I wasnt starving. I would take a break after 2 hours to stretch my legs. Mostly because my foot hurt really bad today. But I would just walk around the rest stop for a couple minutes before I was off and back on the road.
I got back here closer to 830 then I was happy about. But I got home in one piece.
I was really happy to see James. They were a little sad because they somehow lost their engagement ring. Again. I'm not upset but I feel bad that they are upset. It will be alright.
We both showered and that made me feel a lot better. Though I am pretty exhausted. I am also excited because I just got offered the grant position at the visionary museum! I hope it leads to more!!
But now is time for sleep. I hope you all sleep great. Take care of yourself! I have the garage sale with Anne, I hope it is fun! I hope you have a great night!! Sleep good!!
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What will your next fanfic be about? Are there ones that you have on the back burner?
Lmao it's adorable you think I have this like. Neatly planned and organized that I definitely know what I'm posting next.
I have two kinky erotica one-shots that I have a good amount written for, one JJK Sukufushi pwp and one 5+1 porn-with-plot Elena of Avalor fic (...I started a rewatch and Esteban promptly broke my brain, it's. been a thing). Barring that I bang out something short on tumblr or twitter (like my most recent fic, keep the king) in like an hour, or something else doesn’t unexpectedly overtake my life, one of those will go up next.
For the back burner… oh, god, so many things.
I have three fics planned for next Mermay, two of which are short (a Critical Role M9 fic that will not take much work to finish, and would’ve been done this year if Our Flag Means Death hadn’t seized me by the throat and consumed my life, and a TAZ: Ethersea fic, which I have planned out and I’m just waiting to write out and publish closer to the month). The third is a longform Witcher geraskefer fic that I uhhhhh sort of promised would be published this past May, but then grad school and ofmd happened and it Simply Was Not Finished. But I am very much hoping to get it done for next year.
There are two BNHA fics — one dabihawks, one postcanon future fic that I was writing for Banned Together Bingo and didn't finish in time — that I have a shit ton written for but may or may not ever see the light of day due to starting them before/during the first war arc and now they’re really not canon compliant anymore, and I’d have to do a lot of work to make them a more deliberate canon divergence, and just… idk if it will ever happen. Also because, frankly, ime BNHA fandom sucks to post fic in. Your fic just gets buried in the first ten minutes and I feel like the comments to kudos ratio is particularly bad. So I’d be doing a shit ton of work just for nobody to care about it if I bothered to share it.
I do fully intend to write another TAZ: Balance fic about Lup to turn Without Mercy and Without Blame into a triptych that covers all the birds. I lost part of my drafting for that unfortunately so it's just getting up the energy to rewrite it. Also in the vein of incomplete series, I will not feel done with in the quiet of his mind until I have at least written the forest kiss and "get away"; and I would be absolutely remiss not to do an epistolary Charon/Hermes fic for The Many Layers of Life and Death. None of those things are imminent, but they've been percolating in my head long enough that I think I will eventually get to them, it's just anyone's guess when.
And then there’s the WIPs.
Both The Way You Said I Love You and Written in Sand I have substantial swathes of the rest of the fic written for. For WiS, at this point, I’m waiting until I’ve chipped away and finished the whole fic so that when I finally do come back, I can just post chapters once a week and not go on another years long hiatus. For TWYSILU I’m just blocked on part of this specific chapter and I need to get back to it whenever my brain stops hating me about it. They 10000% are not abandoned and will not be, I am just slow.
I did not. Uh. Intend to post a single chapter of If I’m Not Back Again and immediately stop, but. Life. The current plan for that one is that I’ll write more when Good Omens S2 drops.
And if you go REALLY far back in my Ao3 you’ll find The Green Hunter, which I honestly make zero promises for, that one’s on an “if inspiration strikes” basis.
The only unfinished published fic I have that definitely will not be finished is Long Lost, and even that isn’t abandoned as such — whenever I finish WiS, I want to move over to a significant rewrite of Long Lost to scratch the Voltron itch without being forced to engage with canon. But WiS is the priority.
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