#still suffering from reading the early volumes/watching the early episodes too much making it hard to do a full reread/rewatch

[origami10]

Ok send help I loved Ajin so much it was my favorite anime and I watched it so many times I lost count, but i've lost hope for it getting another season... where in the manga should i start? should i just start from the beginning? I've heard it's different so I'm scared

AJIN OuO

It is different, but I think you'll like the manga too!!

I think two main parts that are in the anime, but different, are manga chapter 22 (in vol 5) where Kei and Kou leave the small village they've been hiding out in, and the Forge building arc, which runs from about chapters 31~42. If you're really invested in skipping parts of it, I'd suggested starting from chapter 31, since that'll give you context for how the Forge arc and the later arc(s) are different.

(Also like everything after chapter 42 is different because none of the adaptations made it past then)

Personally I'd recommend reading from the beginning if you have the chance, I feel like a lot of what makes Ajin good is the character development, and there's small moments that feel like they could make a difference in how you interpret things.

Get ready for the whiplash in the art style in the early volumes, though!

(Also, probably not specifically relevant to your question, but I just heard Kodansha is going to do 3-in-1 print volumes of Ajin [in English] soon)

[fallen-gabrielle]

Hello, fellow Detective Conan fan! I'm also an extreme avid fan of the serie, I discovered it on Cartoon Network France back when it aired in early 2000s. I'm not exactly that active in the fandom, because another fandom is my current brain rot and I don't know what to add to the community. I still read the chapters and buy the mangas whenever they come out. I have the Magic Kaito (Kid is my favorite character) and the Hanzawa-san volumes too (and the WPS). Now for the movies themselves!

Hard question. Definitely a movie where Kaito has a huge role. The Fist of Blue Sapphire was great because for one, we got to see Kaito had ptsd from his meeting with Makoto from canon, and that had me laugh way too much that it should have. Also, we got to see more on Kaito's side to prepare his heist (kinda) and we only see that in Magic Kaito (okay, I know we saw that in the Fairly Lips case, but i'm just saying, i want to see more of that).

Curaçao 🥺 I'm super emotional about her and I always cry when I see her dying.

Trick question, because I never really thought about it. I haven't really made a list or ranked the movies so I have no idea. They all have their pros and cons, therefore they are pretty much equally good to me. I will prefer certain things, yes, but that doesn't mean a movie is bad because that one thing i like isn't there. But probably movies 9 and 17 just to name something.

Another hard question. Because I will take anything that will be thrown at me. I just need my DC content. But I must admit, if we could get a movie where it's mainly about Kid and the Ekoda gang (Aoko with a bigger role, Hakuba being that nerdy little shit that everyone loves, Akako being mysterious [cuz she's not allowed to be mystical nor magical, lame], Keiko existing, I would be happy. Yes, that would be basically a MK movie with the DC cast, but let me dream five minutes, okay. Let me have this.

So, apparently, we will get some MK backstory. I love that. I highly doubt that Kaito's identity would be reveal but it would be interesting if that happens. After all, Kaito knows about Conan/Shinichi, it would be normal that Conan finds out about Kaito Kuroba. But since we have the whole Heiji-Kazuha-Momiji thing in the movie, I highly doubt we will have time for some MK stuff (also there's no way they would do that cuz the movies are technically not canon so) I hope i'm not getting to hyped for nothing. Okita seems to be invited to the party too. More rivalry stuff between him and Heiji? Also also, perhaps a quick Yaiba-Moroha cameo ? That's just me being super hopeful but it's okay if it doesn't happen. I think there's way too many people in this movie and the plot might suffer from it. I have nothing against a plot where Heiji has to face Kid, but Momiji being here seems extremely unnecessary, same with Okita. That could have been the plot of another movie but without Kid. Overall, I'm trying to not have too many pre-concieved ideas or else I know I will be disappointed.

Pretty much everything xD? we get some interesting stuff in the movies and a part of me dies everytime I have to remind myself it's not canon. Well, a few things have been kiiiinda canonized by Aoyama? Such as Kaito knowing Conan's identity? Meaning that technically all the movies with Kid are now canon? It's still unclear and I'm demanding some clear answers!!!

Yes, I am!! Ihave all the available DVDs with the french subtitles.. I even went to watch the movies in cinéma these last two years. The scarlet bullet was during the pandemic so i couldn't go see it, but I raced like crazy for The Bride of Halloween and The Iron Submarine (where i went with my sister and bro in law, they loved the movie and hope to see the next one if it will indeed come out next year. The french dub didn't make much entrance to the dubbing production so we might not get more DC movies in french 😥)

Generally, I don't watch the non canon episodes because to me it feels like a waste of time. The only exception I make is for the movies (and sometimes the magic files and ova) because they are interesting in their own way.

Detective Conan Movie Thread…

Hi everyone, I am Saku Holmes an avid fan of detective Conan and have been watching since I was 4. I want to allow you all to make new friends and find hidden members of the detco community. I am doing this for other things in my blog.

Let’s make a thread for the detco movies! Pls share your opinion and pass this along! To start this thread let’s ask a series of questions:

What’s your favourite detco movie and why?

Who is your fave character from detco movie that only made an appearance in the movie ( not in the series)?

What’s your least favourite movie and why?

What do you wish to see in the upcoming movies?

What’s your theory for movie 27?

What scene from the movies do you wish was canon?

BONUS QUESTION: are you upto date with the movies? 😂

This is a question I want to ask for myself but if you want me to do similar engagement post, comment down below or in my blog posts I have a google form where you can enter what you want to see ( your personal details are not saved/ non included in the submission of the form) if you don’t feel comfortable with that’s just send me a DM🥰

[prettywarriors]

Ok ill bite whats the worst mg series

alright, whats the worst magical girl series in your opinion?

Thanks you two for letting me do some yelling. The obvious guess would likely be one of the recent edgelord shows right? Magical Girl Site or something similar? But nay I say, for while MGS and Day Break Illusion and such and what not generally tell you what to expect right away. Don't like super violence and suffering? Watch something else is the clear message from the get go. One of the bait and switch series then like Madoka or maybe Yuki Yuna? For what faults they may or may not have, at least these series do something and are interesting, even if you're not huge on what goes down in the series. A parody then? They range from affectionate to banned in New Zealand but regardless of quality and their feelings for MGs, it's a parody. It's a joke and shouldn't be taken seriously (plus they're usually short so you can just forget about them forever).

So what makes a series terrible then, I am sure you are asking. IMO? Setting expectations for an interesting and enjoyable series, and then dashing them to hell.

Come with me below the cut, as I talk about Key Princess Story: Kagihime Eternal Alice Rondo!

Spoilers abound so if you care about those for a 15 year old series, click away.

Background: Kagihime was a 4 volume manga that ran from 2004-2006 that was picked up for a 13 episode anime adaptation near the end of its run. The manga is created by a pair (Kaishaku) who you may know for making Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto. Kannazuki no Miko, and Steel Angel Kurumi, and the anime had a script written by the same writer (Mamiko Ikeda) for Tenshi Ni Narumon who also did some script writing for Princess Tutu and Seven of Seven. The anime also had 6 character music videos which are fairly simple but a nice addition to the series for the main girls. Discotek has been publishing the anime in the states in recent years, and the manga was brought over by *squints at book spine* Dr Master Publications.

The Premise: Girls transform and enter weird outside of reality spaces to fight each other with giant keys to take each other’s stories to create a third Alice In Wonderland story.

Well, an off-brand Alice story written by Alternate L. Takion, rather than Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson, that while the series uses all the aesthetic hallmarks of the tradition Alice, the little we see of the in universe Alice story is clearly different. Which is fine, at the end of the day, it’s still about someone who loves the Alice stories and wishes there was more, and even makes his own fanfiction version. His? Oh yeah, while the girls do all the fighting, the main character is Aruto, a teen boy who loves Alice, and for reasons we don’t know till late game, can enter the liminal spaces that the ‘Alice Users’ fight in. He chases a girl who looks like the Alice he sees in his story, who is named Arisu, and gets roped into this fanfic battle royale. He is also the older brother of the very needy Kirihara, who also ends up being and Alice User. As does Kirihara’s bff Kisa. To round out the group of enemies-turned-friends-who-will-work-together-to-collect-the-Eternal-Alice-without-having-to-fight-eachother group is a young genius researcher Kirika who wants to know more about Aruto’s connection that allows him to enter the spaces where the girls fight.

Then there’s all the other girls, some of whom still have real importance to the story and some who have a few panels or 2 scenes total. But with a whole bunch of girls to design, the creators reached out to a whole lot of other people to have them create designs! Eventually the battle gets down to the last few girls, there’s a confrontation with the guy running the whole thing, and while the anime and manga vary quite a bit the whole time, in both version Aruto ends up with Kirihara. Oh and Arisu was created by Aruto’s super imagination powers.  

The Promise: Here on is subjective, particularly with what I personally saw as potential from this series. because I need you to understand how much I want to like this series. 

~Alice in Wonderland themed: I know some people aren’t alice fans and that’s fine you do you but as a big alice fan this is great. We have a few alice episodes and themed characters amongst series like CCS and MGRP, and even Alice themes in other series like Tweeny Witches and Alice 19th. But damn it I am down for Alice series.

~Giant Keyyyyyyyys: Yeah yeah Kingdom Hearts but these keys are much more staff like for a lot of the characters which ads and air of elegance rather than the KH ones that for me at least feel well designed for big ol props rather than actual weapons. We also get...

~Weapon variety: It counts as a key if it’s a thorn whip that can be shaped like a key right? How about a giant pocket knife? Crossbows can also be keys. Hush. And we have this variety because

~Guest Artists: For magical girl series where we have a variety of outfits designed by different people, we have Kagihime, Uta~Kata, and uhh I guess Magia Record? But that’s a mobile game with a hella number of characters and with how mobile game works I wouldn’t count it just because it’s less the intent of the series to have variety and more the nature of having lots of girls. (Precure doesn’t count because unless I missed a memo each season’s set is still by one designer). If a series isn’t about a team and therefore doesn’t need cohesion, bringing in other artists is a great way for variety and new looks. 

~The long term goal: Fighting with other people who love the same piece of media you do in hopes of creating new material that will be viewed as official? That’s just fandom nowadays. But it’s a legitimate interesting concept, and opens up so many doors for a message for the series, be it ‘what you create is no less valuable than the canon work’ or ‘it’s hard to let go when something you love doesn’t have more to it but you can still love it for what it is’ or ‘bond with the people who like the thing you like ya idiot instead of fighting about it’. The concept is interesting and there are so many narrative ways you can take this.

~Gays: Between the anime and manga, we have at least 5 wlw. Is it a magical girl series without some gays? (side note- the manga had a short thing where the MC wears a girl’s uniform and is pretty comfortable in it and while there is no way this was the intent, between that and the emphasis on the stories that live in girls and how the fight zones have no men, I’m just saying, Trans girl Aruto.)

~Greater Fairy Tale Premise: We meet a Little Match Girl based MG who is obsessed with Andersen rather than the Alice books, and touch on a Sleeping Beauty character in the manga. The manga at least implies that classic stories and fairy tale authors uh. Live on in a liminal space as immortals with world warping powers within that world and there could be opportunities for other girls in the real world to fight for Little Mermaid 2: Electric Boogaloo.

The Good: Everything has positive points, no matter how bad it is.

~Character Designs: Some of those looks slap. As do most of their weapons. 

~Backgrounds: I have a strong opinion on backgrounds in anime that can be easily boiled down to old watercolor backgrounds good, modern filtered photos as background bad, and as a 2006 series, this might not be Memole nice but they’re quite attractive. 

~Splash Pages: Easily my favorite thing after the designs, each chapter’s title page for the manga just has a character standing in a setting. Which is not everyone’s thing I’m sure but it’s a nice simplistic way to let the characters breathe imo. Even if at least some of the settings were deffo traced. But that’s how backgrounds work to some extent? If I ever get to the Met again, I am tracking down this exact photo, but here is a likely candidate for an example.

~Different Versions: I do not understand the need to make an adaptation that tries to be a 1:1. Kagihime had the same ideas and characters and did some of the same beats but very much had a different finale story and a lot of changes in the middle (like the Alice cops in the manga). Again, not something everyone probably wants I’m sure, but I very appreciate this, especially since the Anime kept good pace with the number of Manga chapters (reading the manga again while watching the anime at 3.8x speed just now was very interesting to see the different interpretations of events in a different medium.)

The ‘Fine’: Yeah.

~Anime Visuals: Look 2006 was still early enough into digipaint that I will give it a total pass on these. The colors are too bright but in a very bland way, the lineart is nothing interesting, and the faces are. Iffy. But it’s not total garbage to look at (probably helped by backgrounds and character designs...) it just came out in an era where not enough people knew how to stylize things to account for the weakness of the tools of the time. (It was 4 years earlier but I feel Kagihime is the polar opposite of Chobits with its painfully bland color palette while still being just. Flat. Sorry for the drive by Chii.) 

~Music?: There sure were songs. Obviously, they are nothing to me.

The Bad: CW for.... somehow all the big things to an extent. 

~Fanservice: Look, I am fine with fanservice, especially for a series that’s, ya know, not targeted at kids, big Mai Hime fan here even if I would recommend skipping the panty thief episode. And honestly the series generally isn’t fanservicey, at least by the modern standards of having the camera choosing under the skirt rather than an over the shoulder shot like I’ve seen plenty in other shows. Even the sexier outfits like the rose whip dominatrix aren’t bad BUT. When the girls fight. One takes her phallic key and drives it into another girls chest between the boobs while the loser cries in pain and then her book comes out and when the victor rips out pages, the loser’s clothes also rip. It is very SuperS Amazon Trio assault metaphor-y. There’s also a bit of fanservice with the sister becauseeeee....

~Incest: If you read the premise up there, first wow good job because I’m sure not re-reading that, you might have noticed I said MC ends up with his sister. As someone who is a big mythology fan and watches plenty of anime, I have a decent tolerance for your obligatory ‘oh we’re siblings but actually cousins so our feelings are okay’ or whatever the fuck Citrus has going on I don’t know that series and I don’t vibe BUT. I have limits and boy did this series go beyond that because multiple episodes are dedicated to the sister being in love with the brother? And the brother returns her feelings but knows that they are wrong so he put everything he likes in his sister into his version of Alice who, of course, physically manifests as Arisu who he creates accidentally with his uh. Magic imagination powers. But again in both versions MC still ends up with his sister. Hey, at least the manga eventually said the boy was adopted when the sister was like, 3, so if nothing else no blood relations? The anime did not ad this. -_-

~Under Utilized Characters: Arisu’s gradual revelation that she has no childhood memories because she isn’t a real person is so interesting and they don’t do nothing with it but also? That’s the kind of thing I personally would love to dig into and Kagihime, while touching on this world shattering revelation, easily loops back to So Anyway She Should Fight For The Man and to hell with developing a life or personality outside of what has been written for her. The rest of the main 5 were 2 note characters which. Could be worse? The most interesting character ends up being the child genius who accidentally murdered her childhood bestie (and/or lover? depending on version) and her coming to terms with that (the friend is alive but the version changes how and why she thinks she’s dead). Then the villain has the motivation of ‘i lost my creativity and now have become an immortal living outside of normal space and am getting girls to fight each other because that’s like a story so I’m still relevant right?’. But shoutout to the anime for then taking death of the author literally. The numerous other girls are canon fodder outside of like. The manga version of the dead gf and the little match girl.

~Battle Royale: This is not a thing I have an issue with generally. Again, but Mai Hime fan, I need to read MGRP 11, BUT by not developing the non-main girls there is no emotional connection which makes them just canon fodder and that’s boring as sin for a royale system. The initial main character fights revolve so much around the MC guy being there that they fall flat, and the 2 or 3 final battles in both versions still feel without any stakes. Also for a royale thing most of the characters don’t actually die, which cool! Neat! Except when they do? Some nobodies and a somebody are murdered (at least in the manga) and the tone never feels like it’s supposed to be upping the stakes, it’s just. Some people are dead now. And do you want to guess which of the main characters died?

~Gays: Oh boy the best friend of the brother-complex sister is in love with her and (in the manga) dies. She does apparently get better for the last chapter but the death itself is only felt by the rest of the cast for a page or two before we go back to feeling sad big brother wants to kiss his mentally generated sister clone rather than his actual sister u_u. Bury your gays is nothing new, but I wonder if it was also intended to be justified because Guess Who Is Creepy and a bit Perverted? Oh look the lesbian keeps the used swimsuit of her beloved and manipulates events to get an indirect kiss and when she sees the sister trying to strange Arisu for a moment she decides to do it for the sister? It’s not good. You want bad gay rep in a magical girl series, well here ya go. We also had a nobody in the first(second?) episode whose story pages reveal her having a kiss with a girl, and then we also have the prodigy again and- in the manga- her. Uh. childhood lover who she thought she killed but the girl has been wiping her mind over and over so prodigy remembers ��killing’ the friend and not the she’s alive so she can keep? fucking with her? Toxic!

~Sexual Content: But wait you say, you already covered fanservice! Ah but that is sexual content for titilation. This is sexual content for dramatic backstory! The red riding hood character was sexually assaulted, another character was manipulated into sex first as a teen and then more often to ‘get into the publishing industry’, and the same writer forces some aggressive kisses on the MC. None of it is gratuitous which is nice, but also, was it necessary? Not making a new point for this but read riding hood’s dog was also murdered so unnecessary animal death gets tossed on in there. 

~Male Lead: You can have a male, non magical character as the main character surrounded by magical girls. This is not how to do it. If I can make a vicious and hopefully not understood reference, Aruto is basically Tate from the Mai Hime Manga. If you understood that, I am so sorry. If you didn’t, congrats! Don’t read the manga. Or do and send me asks about the iconic final page of the first volume (18+). Anyway, this dude is boring, everything revolves around him, BUT I’ll be generous and say at least this isn’t a harem series? It looks like it out of context but it’s just a triangle with a fun attached scientist and token lesbian.

~Premise: They didn’t make good use of it. The initial goals of ‘take other girls pages from their soul books because if we get enough we unlock a third alice book’ is good! And then we add the twist that that was never going to happen and either if we get all the pages we can grant a wish, or these fights are just happening for the amusement of and asshole. Either way, yeah okay I guess. But at no point do we ever achieve this forbidden wish granting book and the asshole just. Lives. Nothing happens to him. His peers don’t even dunk on him. The only real changes from the beginning and the end of the series are: the siblings are now chill with dating, and the scientist lady won’t turn into a child in magical spaces. Oh. Yeah.

~Why did we make this adult a child sometimes?: I think we know why. Stop trying to get those types of folks to watch your already meh series. I also could have sworn at points in the past looking up images for this series I’ve seen extra art for Yuuri the Thumbelina-y Alice User that seemed like it would fit alongside anything by POP. You know, the Moetan guy. If you don’t know, god I wish that were me. 

Wrap Up: I have definitely forgotten some points and am well within my rights to ad to this whenever I remember more points but uh. Yeah.  

Listen you want an alice themed battle royale with nice outfits? Rozen maiden is right there. Battle Royale magical girl series that’s good with fanservice? Mai Hime. Series with different outfits while being based on a classic story? Pretear.

Hope anyone who read all of this at least got what I was saying, even if they don’t agree with it. And thanks for reading because whoops. 

[fishyfod]

(Slightly) more organized thoughts on the V8 finale.

tl;dr I think the finale had some issues.

I’ll start this off by emphasizing again that this is my opinion, so read something else if you can’t handle negative criticism of RWBY. I say this because too often people in this FNDM can’t handle a difference in opinion without insulting or patronizing others, and I want none of that.

Now, RWBY’s general structural issue is a lack of time to fulfill all their ambitions, and they usually tend to neglect one aspect a bit more than others. In volumes 7 and 8 this proved to be quite a problem, because they wanted to tell quite a complicated story while introducing a fairly large amount of new and returning characters. I very much like the story they told in these volumes, but it must be said that the development and focus on the regular cast, and team RWBY in particular, has suffered for it. It’s not a deal breaker for me personally, but I do think it’s an issue.

So when I saw the finale episode only had about 20 minutes, I figured the best course of choice for RWBY would be to focus on the Atlas-only plots, and leave RWBY & co’s stories for the next volume, which by all accounts seems to be focused only on their character. And credit where credit is due, this is what RWBY decided to do with this finale. This doesn’t really solve the underlying issue that the main cast has yet again been relegated to such a minor role in their own show, but I can live with it.

I still do have a problem with how RWBY’s role in this finale was handled, and forgive me because this might be the least well-explained part of this review. The best way to describe it would be that, though I know I’m watching team RWBY, they don’t feel present in the finale? I struggle to put my finger on it, if it’s more an issue of direction or execution, but something about RWBY’s fight felt off for me.

By comparison, when I think of the episode before, I don’t have this issue. While the way Yang fell isn’t RWBY’s best execution, the reactions of RWBY to that fall worked quite well. There was individual focus on Yang falling, Blake screaming and raging at it, Weiss’s heart breaking into two, Ruby falling into more despair - the tragedy works because of it. I don’t feel the same about the finale, RWB fall almost as if they’re passerby rather than the main characters.

Again, maybe this is just me, maybe I’ll change my mind later. Whatever.

I think Cinder is the one I’m most satisfied with. She seems in character, she acts a lot like she did in her confident state during Beacon, and I did get the impression Salem knows Cinder is lying to her. I admit that I did not expect this direction for Cinder, it seemed like the right spot to have her break free from Salem, but it’s too early for me to call where her arc is going to.

The only nitpick I have with Cinder is how she offed Arthur. I felt like it could have a little more focus? I get that his death is supposed to feel completely inconsequential, but I wish there was just a little bit more there. Again, only a nitpick.

Vine - I think my opinion on Vine’s death is quite unpopular. It felt too last minute, without enough setup. See, while killing Harriet here would have its own set of issues, she was well developed enough where you could actively feel for her, while also expecting a possible death. I can’t say the same about Vine; Vine is only a teensy bit more developed than Elm, which isn’t a lot. He’s making a huge sacrifice, but the lack of character makes him seem expendable by design. It feels like the writers put all their efforts into threatening Harriet’s life, realized last minute that actually they could a lot more with her character (good call), so they shoved in Vine in her place because they still needed a bomb sacrifice.

On the flip side, three of the Ace Ops surviving and proving once and for all they broke away from Ironwood too, with Harriet and Marrow still alive - that is good. I’m not sure what more they’re planning to do with their characters, but it’s preferable to far worse alternatives I can imagine. We’ll see.

Then there’s Penny. sigh

I’m not sure what I can add that P5, bell or cosmokyrin, and probably a few others haven’t already said, but I don’t think it was well written. The whole body-thing in “Creation”, sure, I can accept that was a difference of interpretation. This? This whole, let’s resurrect Penny, develop her immensely as a character, reaffirm her autonomy multiple times over, avoid multiple deaths, only to die like this?

I know the common comparison people make here is with V3, and I can see where people are coming from. After all, Pyrrha and Penny’s deaths were impactful and tragic there, and most people agree that was well written. What’s the difference here? Some differences in circumstance are worth visiting here.

Penny of the Beacon era, lovable character that she was already, was not the most developed character. At the end of the day, most of what we knew of Penny then was in relation to Ruby - we knew Ruby cared for her a lot, we knew why they bonded, so we had setup as to why her death would impact the Fall so much. It works, because it gave enough focus on her for us to care about, but not overly so where the shocking factor of the Fall wouldn’t work.

With Pyrrha, I think we all knew the signs were there at the end of the day. I’d argue that Pyrrha’s very conception as a character lead to her death, she was just slightly too perfect for us not to expect a tragedy to occur. Importantly, her major arc in V3 sets us up to her death - through her conversation with Ozpin’s gang and Jaune, the introduction of Ember and the soul transfer device, killing Penny - by the time Pyrrha dies you’re prepared for it, and it still hurts. Even if the tragic scenario presented (losing Pyrrha because of the soul transfer) wasn’t the one used, dying because she tried defending the use of those powers from Cinder made sense. It was enough of a switch you weren’t bored because you expected everything to go to plan, but it wasn’t too drastic where you felt completely unprepared for what would happen.

The trouble with how Penny’s death was handled here, is in part because they just kept pushing us to the edge, making us worry about one tragic scenario, another way for Penny to die, only to alleviate our fears - only to kill her off anyway in a completely separate way. It happened so often in these two volumes, when we were already fresh off recognizing Penny wasn’t dead in V3, that rather than feeling like an expected death that is tragic, is feels like they toyed with out perception constantly only because they could. When you raise and lower death flags over and over in such a small amount of time, the tragedy you aimed to convey is lost. Perhaps unintentionally, the point no longer seems to be telling a tragic story, it’s only playing this cruel game of perception with the audience. What’s the joke about Jean Grey in x-men, that she keeps being killed off and resurrected so often it’s hard to care about it all? Is this how I’m supposed to look at Penny, RWBY’s Jean Grey?

Granted, I’m not sure that if they committed to one consistent death threat with Penny and followed through, that necessarily would’ve been better. I’m not sure how I’d think of RWBY if she died from the virus, for example. At least, however, I’d be more confident in saying that was a difference of direction, rather than a difficult writing choice to comprehend.

It’s only fitting I’d talk about Winter now, huh? I think you all know my stance about her as a character, I’d argue that she, Ironwood and Cinder were the best handled characters in these two volumes by a fair margin, but the finale leaves me very conflicted about her.

On the one hand, it’s everything I want. Winter’s confrontation with Ironwood is like a mix of Blake facing off against Adam and Yang confronting Raven, and while not as impactful in terms of storytelling, they do deliver on the same fronts. Winter calls out Ironwood for his lies, establishing once and for all it was by her volition she broke off, her conscience that was always better, and there is something poetic about her gaining the Winter Maiden powers to fulfill her goal of protecting others.

...but I can’t separate this from Penny’s fate. And it frustrates me to no end, because I love her connection to Penny, I made comparisons of how it reminds of Bumbleby’s relationship, it drives their characters forward so much, heck, I like that Penny took a part in taking down Ironwood with Winter, in a sense. But because Penny’s death feels so contrived, its connection to Winter almost cheapens the importance of their relationship with each other. And it doesn’t seem quite needed either, since they individually as characters already broke free from Ironwood.

I can sort of see that I am supposed to interpret it as a tragedy, and I do indeed think Winter getting the Maiden powers is tragic for her character (not unlike Spring Maiden!Yang theories), and I am excited to see where this is going. I thought this was the end for Winter’s major impact on the story, but there’s a whole other arc waiting, and Penny’s a major part of it too.

To say I’m conflicted about Winter would be an understatement.

The actual silver lining, for me, is the post credit scene. Volume 9 is an opportunity for RWBY to try and change some of the problem I presented initially. My hope is that by focusing almost exclusively on team RWBY, with Jaune and Neo, and putting less emphasis on developing the settings of giant-tree-land and not over-complicating the plot. Hopefully, this would allow them to focus on developing the main cast again, in in particular addressing some of the main issues presented; notably, the Bees confessing, Ruby maybe reaching her breaking point, Yang’s issues being addressed, and hopefully something more individual for Blake and Weiss as well. Neo is an interesting curveball to throw into this equation, and I have a decent amount of hope with Jaune (although then I remember it’s probably going to be about Penny, and, ugh...).

Yeah, that’s all I have at the moment. If you want to talk about it, my inbox and DM’s are always open. If you disagree with me that’s fair, just give me the minimal amount of respect rather than being an ass about it.

[greekbros]

My current thoughts on Boruto. It's long and hard please be patient.

(please note, this is MY personal opinion, it doesn't matter and it will effect nothing in your life, we're all mature rational people. If you plan on sending me death threats over an anime, you really shouldn't be on the internet. This is an extremely long post, don't try to be a smartass and say "lol too long not going to read" in the comment section, you're not proving that you're more smarter than me or have a better argument, you're just kind of proving that you're not intellectually stimulated enough to have a decent conversation or discuss about the issue oh, it's also not a good way to win an argument because that just kind of makes you out to look like an idiot. And the last thing you need when making an argument is look like an idiot of yourself.)

So, as the Boruto series progresses...it's...not... improving....and I'm now starting to realize that there was a reason why nobody actually talked about the written novelisation of Gai, Kakashi and Asuma's daughter's mission.... because it was balls.

The shows development at this point is now solely depending on filling up a quota of episodes before they can officially start making episodes based on the manga, as a result, the show is now purely just filler and arguably filled with unnecessary development. The issue is that this development should be coming in at a gradual and moderate pace. Unfortunately most of the development is going towards characters that may not actually affect the series as a whole, unlike in the Naruto and Naruto Shippuden series, the development of the characters went directly towards individuals that were affecting the story at the moment. I'm starting to realize that this type of development in Access can create and effect I like to call "the procrastinated essay" effective writing.

It just basically means that they're just throwing in pointless character, World, and story development that may be harmful to the end result of the story. Character development isn't bad, the problem is when it's starting to become so vapid and it starts to pollute the basic plot of the story. If all of these filler episodes were appearing sometime in the middle of the initial manga story, this wouldn't be a problem. In fact this may be a reason as to why some of the filler episodes in the original Naruto series may have been more enjoyable and bearable than it was now. This is a real shame because this is also in invertedly ruining the development of the characters, we have an entirely new cast of characters but it seems that the entire show is depending on rehashing the characters Andre casting them as old characters from the series. Basically giving the newest characters the same kind of silly issues that were originally resolved in the original series, bringing in villain characters that are practically identical to the original villain characters we were presented, and even presenting the same issues there were in the original series but in a different guise. so what were actually seeing is a very poorly written in poorly constructed version of the original series in the end, which is why everything feels so boring, cringy and arguably comes off as repetitive. We have four arcs that are completely dedicated to the same issues we were given in the original series but given to us any vapid and somewhat disjointed manner. It also presents the characters as far too developed for their age, I understand that the constant argument people have given me for this is that they're supposed to be the children of the main characters those they're supposed to surpass them, but that just makes the newest cast of characters to be overpowered and also present the question of "if they're the newest generation and they have to surpass the eldest generation, why are they so powerful if they grew up in a time of Peace, why did they surpass their parents without any real effort and why do they need it even surprised their parents if they don't even need to fight".... This ultimately creates a situation where it is extremely unrealistic that an individual will surpass a previous generation if they have no need to surpass them.

This brings up the type of theme, growing up in a time of peace, instead of focusing on issues that may stem from this kind of theme, we're focusing on basically stuff that may not be even that important rivers ends or maybe it doesn't even happen in a situation like this. There are characters who literally do not know what a Jutsu is and yet for some strange reason it's still being taught, there are characters who don't even do anything yet there in ninja teams and they are expected to perform ninja duties. Instead of a look into a world where now basically becoming a ninja isn't a necessity, we're being treated to the same type of story that we previously had but now we're put into a situation that this would have never happened in the first place.

As for both the story itself, it's clearly going on solutely nowhere, the manga itself does have a plot and I will acknowledge that there is something going on. However, seeing how the series is just going off on a filler tangent, I'm wondering if all this unnecessary story development will affect the primary plot. the original reason why the Naruto series was so good was because that it began with a very basic quest based plot and gradually started to present itself with a deeper story, The fillers were just a break from that and also to create a breath within story writing. this is going to be extremely important for the readers to remember, the fillers aren't meant to waste time, they're meant to create enough time for the writer to create Amore organized story.

boruto is heading towards a wall with all of these fillers and I'm pretty certain that it's going to be its downfall, as for animating the novels, this should have been something they've done at the end of Shippuden and not within more than a hundred episodes of boruto. At first I thought it was going to actually enjoy the animated novels, however I'm starting to realize how extremely pointless and they are. I don't really have any gripes or ill contempt towards any of the characters, I just find it that there is a lot of unnecessary pieces of information that the series is trying to peddle towards the audience.

This brings me to my next point, the whole purpose of all these pointless filler episodes is purely to fill in for time for the manga to start having some growth to it. Which kind of bothers me because Naruto in the original since never actually had the luxury of having a bunch of filler episodes before Kishimoto could come up with a few novels. In fact which brings me to another detail of my point, Kishimoto had to write new chapters almost every two weeks or less in order to keep up with scheduling. Towards the end of the series this may have affected the quality of the story to a very small extent but overall it never truly affected the series as a whole, in fact it may have helped it. Ikemoto is going on the same route as the Steven universe writers, they're taking way too much time to come up with a story those creating a really poorly constructed in poorly organized story.

So for those were reading the manga, you all are obligated to wait for new information for the manga by having to succumb to watching really poor quality writing for the anime, which goes back to the manga itself as it can also suffer from poor writing.

do not get me wrong, I really wanted to like the series, I really wanted it to be the next step in my life as a fan of the show, unfortunately it is starting to kind of proved to me that it's not only not up to the same quality as the original series and Shippuden but it is also going through basically what creates a mundane and mediocre anime. Instead of coming up with an animated boruto series so early on in its development, it should have waited for a few volumes to come out before I could even come up with a fully-fledged anime. Will we have currently now is basically an entire anime consisting of fillers that are not only ruining the Canon of the series but are sort of a massive waste of time.

To make a long story short and I deeply apologize for such an unnecessarily long post, but my point is that the series is going to crash and by the time it's getting to its primary plot, it's going to lose a lot of popularity, and it's ultimately going to fail. it's depending way too much on the previous material to even focus on its own story and it is simultaneously ruining the previous series by presenting information that is contradictory to what the original rules were. unfortunately, there is a chance that the boruto series may never improve, it is just going to continue driving itself into the mud until nobody watches it anymore. There is a chance for it to improve by ceasing these endless filler episodes and just start getting on with the original plot of the series, they may lose a few people waiting, but at least it'll get to its points and I'll get to actually tell the story has been meaning to tell for a while. what they should probably do is stop now, reorganize the story with what ridiculous information they've already given us, and maybe even focus on making an animated series on the other novels. Now I understand that a previous point I made in this post was what was going wrong with this idea, however there could be some form of benefit to go back into the series and answer a few questions before going on to boruto. Basically, what I'm trying to say is maybe even doing this will lighten the amount of information the series is giving us by presenting us with a proper transitioning explanation. You can't give us a character like Hidan, then at one point in the novel say that he just made up the religion on his own accord then give us an entirely new character to replace him but at the same time using the aspects that made Hidan so unique. That's called character recycling, that's not introducing us to a new villain, that's just pissing everyone off. Especially me because I've taken enough writing classes to smell a bad plot of mile away.

P.s) I'm just extremely tired of really inappropriately annoying people tell me that I'm too stupid to understand boruto and that I need a 300-point IQ to like it. seriously this isn't Rick and Morty, it's a spin-off of Naruto for fucksake it's supposed to be a little more of a higher standard

[bbclesmis]

Can the BBC’s Les Misérables do justice to Victor Hugo’s epic novel?

Few who love Les Mis the musical have read its source: a 1,500-page Victor Hugo novel. As the BBC tackles the book, David Bellos explains why it’s such a popular text to adapt.

The Sunday Times, December 16 2018, 12:01am

At dawn on June 19, 1815, in a muddy Belgian field where Napoleon has just lost his last battle, a scavenger filches the watch and purse of a dying soldier; a few weeks later, a long-term inmate of Toulon jail is released with a yellow passport and 109 francs. That’s where interlocking stories of Les Misérables begin, with Thénardier robbing the father of Marius, and Valjean setting off towards Digne.

If you think the magic of Les Mis comes mainly from the operatic version by Boublil and Schönberg, wait until you see the new adaptation by Andrew Davies, drawn from the book and not, like Tom Hooper’s 2012 film, from the musical, which leaves out most of Hugo’s novel’s story and doesn’t even mention the Battle of Waterloo. Davies’s script begins at the beginning, and the director, Tom Shankland, makes a truly memorable opener out of it.

Any adaptation of Les Misérables stands in a global tradition of spin-offs in every medium. In the cinema alone, there are about 70 full-length Misérables, in languages as varied as Russian, Farsi and Arabic. In Japan, there has been an independent strain of Mis-mania, expressed in manga and animé, for 100 years.

It’s not hard to see why Les Misérables is so much more attractive to dramatists than any other novel of the 19th century. Despite long passages of historical and philosophical discussion, Hugo’s saga of the poor has a simple narrative arc. It tells the redemptive life story of the former convict Valjean, from his release at Toulon to his death in Paris 20 years later. And, despite the sufferings that fill its pages, it is an optimistic story of how a man from the bottom of the pile may aspire to goodness and achieve it through persistence and sacrifice (plus the kind of luck that novels can invent). That’s dramatic enough.

Hugo was also a dramatist of genius. He created grand scenes ready for staging. The candlestick episode at Digne; the courtroom in Arras, where Valjean gives himself up to save an innocent man; the hold-up in Boulevard de l’Hôpital and Valjean’s escape from it; and the opening vision of a vulture-like thief robbing a dead man the morning after the greatest battle ever fought. Nearly all these great scenes feature a hero, part Hercules, part Christ, who defines himself through actions, not through thoughts and words. In fact, Valjean hardly says a word to himself, and not many to other people, either.

This leaves adapters and directors free to create their own image of this mythical figure. We’ve had a Valjean who looks like a tramp (the rough-hewn Harry Baur in Raymond Bernard’s 1934 film) and one who looks like a banker (in the Japanese TV serial), alongside handsome young men (Fredric March, Liam Neeson) and an action-movie star (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who had trouble pretending to be the right age. What we’ve not had is a Valjean who looks like Hugo: a short, broad-shouldered man in late middle age, in remarkably good physical shape. Despite being too tall, Dominic West, in this new TV version, comes closer than most. Les Misérables is not autobiographical (Hugo never went to prison, got buried alive or went down the sewers), but the writer’s moral self-identification with the suffering hero is one of the fundamental strengths of his book.

It was destined for the stage from the start. Even before the last volumes went on sale in July 1862, Charles Hugo, the writer’s son, began drafting a stage spectacular. A script doctor was hired to get it into shape for its premiere in Brussels in January 1863. It still flopped. But, published as a book, it influenced adaptations as to what to cut and keep.

The addition of music also has roots older than the West End musical version. Almost as soon as the first American translation of the novel appeared, a dramatist called Albert Cassedy dashed off Fantine, or The Fate of a Grisette, a popular opera with a score by Charles Koppitz. Music also plays an overlooked role in the novel: the tune Cosette practises on her piano- organ and the songs sung by schoolgirls in the Champs-Elysées, by convicts on tumbrils, by students in restaurants, hummed by a hunter in the woods and shouted out by an urchin on his way to the barricade, make up a concert programme of popular music in 19th-century France. It’s time to dust these off and perform them as the music Hugo had in his head.

Britain has had an unhappy relationship with Hugo’s epic tale because its authorised translation, by a retired military gentleman with his own views about what happened at Waterloo, was a complete disaster. For legal reasons, no new version could be brought out for decades thereafter. It didn’t help that the translation was available only in a costly hardback format.

Les Misérables reached its real audience in Britain through stage plays, and it’s amazing to see just how many there were: Charity, by CH Hazlewood, “founded on Victor Hugo’s story of Les Misérables”, was performed in London in November 1862; then came Jean Valjean, by Harry Seymour, Clarance Holt’s Out of Evil Cometh Good, in 1867, and many more. They concentrated heavily on Part I of Hugo’s five-part novel. The battle scene at Waterloo in Part II and the “revolutionary” stories of Parts IV and V seem to have been ignored most of the time.

In Russia, too, Tolstoy’s retelling of Les Misérables in simple language focused on Bishop Myriel’s charitable gift of silver to a rough customer. It was this fable-like episode, transposed into English by Norman McKinnel as The Bishop’s Candlesticks in 1908, that was turned into a silent short film by Herbert Brenon in 1913, which was then remade with a soundtrack in 1929. It never stopped, leaving Andrew Davies with a rich inheritance to renew — and to overturn. But he keeps one of the glitches that early translators made and that all Hollywood movie versions retain: he has Valjean steal the bishop’s silver cutlery, whereas in the novel he steals his silver plates (the French word “couvert” having changed its meaning).

One reason why Les Misérables has been remade in so many languages and periods is sex, or, more precisely, its total absence. It wasn’t prudery that kept Hugo off the topic. (He had plenty of experience, to put it politely.) But Les Misérables is about justice, social morality, crime, punishment, the meaning of history and the full potential of human life.

It’s true that old Gillenormand boasts of his past as a rake, but at 90 years of age, he’s long past acting out. It’s also true that Fantine becomes a prostitute — but Hugo deals with the episode in just seven words. Adaptations that put sex into the story express not what Hugo wrote about, but what some audiences are expected to find alluring.

On the other hand, a belief in the existence of a god is integral to the book’s meaning. Deeply sceptical of the Catholic church, Hugo omits Christian artefacts and rituals (including midnight Mass at Montfermeil and the church wedding of Cosette and Marius) to a degree that is almost comical in a panorama of 19th-century life, but he insisted that Les Misérables was a religious work. The prismatic glint of sunlight through foliage that Shankland deploys in the new BBC version, to show the start of Valjean’s conversion after robbing Petit-Gervais, seems to me an intelligent and respectful way of hinting at what Hugo meant.

One of the more puzzling aspects of Les Misérables and its flourishing international afterlife is its exclusive focus on France. There’s not a single foreigner among the 120 named characters in the novel; barring occasional remarks about London, Poland and the United States, Les Misérables talks exclusively about the history, politics, social structure and social ills of the country that Hugo considered to be top nation for all time, namely his own.

Though largely written in Guernsey and initially published in Belgium, the book was written for the French by a man whose long exile had no foreseeable end. Its first translator into Italian requested permission to cut historical passages because “there are some Italians, rather a lot in fact, who say: ‘This book, Les Misérables, is a French book. It is not about us. Let the French read it as history, let us read it as a novel.’”

Permission was refused. The intensity and completeness of this exposition of the social ills in 19th-century France effectively turned that now mythical place into a stand-in for the whole world. You can’t blame Hugo for not being in tune with 21st-century ideas of the politically correct, but you have to admire him for standing outside the conventions of his day.

His response to the translator has a prophetic sense, and answers in advance the question of why his French-focused masterpiece continues to attract readers, fans and adapters all over the world: “I do not know whether [my book] will be read by all, but I wrote it for everyone... Social problems go beyond borders. The sores of the human race, these running sores that cover the globe, don’t stop at red or blue lines drawn on the map. Wherever men are ignorant and desperate, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children suffer for want of instruction or a warm hearth, Les Misérables knocks on the door and says, ‘Open up, I have come for you.’”

David Bellos is the author of The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables (Penguin £10.99). Les Misérables starts on BBC1 on Dec 30 at 9pm; Dominic West is interviewed in the Magazine next Sunday

‘The Glums’: a potted history

● The full text of Les Misérables in the right order of reading was not available to British readers until 2008, in a version by the Australian writer Julie Rose.

● In 1897, the Lumière brothers shot a one-minute reel of a quick-change artist masquerading as Hugo, Valjean, Thénardier, Marius and Javert. This was the first time fiction had ever appeared on celluloid film.

● Victor Hugo’s wife, Adèle, operated as publicity manager for the novel’s launch. She created a poster campaign featuring illustrations of the main characters, making the novel’s imminent appearance known long before its publication. Nothing like that had been done before. She also had announcements prepared for newspapers and requested that they were held back from publication until she gave the signal, making Les Misérables probably the first work launched under embargo.

● When Hugo was ready to publish Les Misérables in 1862, he secured the publishing deal of all time: in today’s terms, he was paid about £3m as an advance on a contract allowing the publisher Albert Lacroix to print the book for just eight years. Lacroix had to get a huge bank loan to finance the book.

● Charles Dickens met Hugo in Paris in 1847, visiting his splendid apartment on Place Royale. There is not a trace of the event in Hugo’s records, which suggests the British author didn’t make a strong impression on the literary star of his day. In Dickens’s eyes, though, Hugo looked “like the Genius he was”.

● Hugo’s contemporaries weren’t all taken with his novel: “This book is written for catholico-socialist shitheads and for the philosophico-evangelical ratpack,” Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend.

● When Hugo fled France in 1851, both his sons were in prison and Louis-Napoléon — Napoléon III — was his sworn enemy. “Because we had Napoléon le Grand, do we have to have Napoléon le Petit?” he quipped.

● Les Misérables has been adapted for radio and cinema more times than any other novel.

● Classical literary French had a restricted vocabulary. Racine got by with about 2,000 words. Hugo uses about 20,000 different words in the 630,000 words of the text of Les Misérables — maybe as many as in all of Shakespeare working in English, which has a much larger vocabulary in the first place.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/culture/can-the-bbcs-les-miserables-do-justice-to-victor-hugos-epic-novel-50wtqgvdj?t=ie

[blackstarising]

stranger things 2 thoughts under the cut:

okay, this season was good, so everything after this is just going to be details but the season overall was good. any roasting is meant to be more of a light grill or even a light toast, if you will

first of all, can they just mail noah schnapp his emmy early? because that boy literally did the Most™. honestly, i don’t believe i’ve ever seen a child actor come full force the way he did. seeing will suffer onscreen was incredibly heartbreaking and noah definitely brought that depth to his role.

the soundtrack, the bush and mandale signs, the arcades, the clothing, the houses, all 80s, all wonderful.

i think the duffer brothers are trying to actually kill me bc not only do we get hopper but we got hopper in flannel doing dad thing and i am left here very thirsty and very distressed rip i brought this on myself

tbh i forgot that hopper even had a daughter until the fifth episode, because everything he was doing looked so natural

and i know there’s some Discourse brewing about jane (i’m going to call her jane consistently from now on, she deserves to be called by her real name) and hopper’s relationship, especially their fight mid-season, so i’ll throw my proverbial hat into the Discourse Ring

i’m not going to excuse hopper, actually, and i’ll even confess that as a binch with anxiety who hates yelling, i had to turn down the volume of my computer and read the subtitles at one point because it really messes with me

definitely, threatening to turn jane back over to the authorities was wrong, and a new low. but i also saw that it was very much anger born of worry. like, parents get angry, and he had a reason to, because you could see that he was watching his daughter willingly put herself in danger, and it’s not like she’s unaware of the consequences

that being said, i don’t blame jane for leaving. you could see she was starting to match the whole experience to her time in the lab with papa and the fact that she was counting the days. damn

so in the end, they both acted shitty, but they both owned up to that and apologized. and i think david and millie did a really good job in really portraying a realistic father-daughter relationship. it’s not always cute, fluffy, one-shot, material, it’s messy and screamy and painful sometimes.

but ohmygoodness their relationship hurts so good the bedtime stories the waffles the halloween candy sorry i need a mome-

max!!!!!! i!!!! love!!!!! max!!!!!! ever since i learned what internalized misogyny was, i’ve been a bit wary of tomboy characters. but max didn’t play into those stereotypes at all, which is super refreshing. she was very content to be who she was, but she didn’t need to denigrate other girls to do so!!!!!! and it’s just good!!!!!!! 

(also the fact that the boys didn’t question that max beat their high score. also good, also pure, beautiful, beautiful)

[suddenly wearing a mourning veil] okay we need to talk about bob. right now.

i was one of the people who was suspicious of him (not because of shipping reasons, but the show makes you a little on edge, you know?) so i definitely squinted at everything he did but like he was so sweet and supportive of joyce and the boys and he didn’t like overstep his bounds but the way he tried to encourage will was so sweet and and and he’s just working at radio shack and he checks in on joyce to eat lunch with her and make out in the supply closet [hyperventilates a little] and and and the slow dancing in his halloween costume and he knows BASIC [is practically sobbing at this point] and he loves the byers and he died so that they could be happy and he’s a superherO AND I WOULD DIE FOR HIM AND SEAN ASTIN HOW COULD THEY DO THIS TO MEEE-

also when he’s talking about how he grew out of getting bullied and “I get to date Joyce Byers!” i get so close to tearing up every time you have no idea

i love how we get development for the rest of the party’s families, and barb’s families too. especially lucas’ sister, a gem, an icon™

and just!!!! lucas!!!!!! i really love how he’s the straight man of the group, but you can tell he’s matured over the year that’s past (also that voice drop, i see you caleb)

and lucas and max is now the only relevant ship on this show im sorry i dont make the rules

dustin is so sweet and big hearted and i really loved seeing more of his depth. tbh i may or may not have started projecting a little especially at the last ep when no one would dance with him!!!! but it’s so hard when you’re so loving and no one returns it in the way you’d want it to!!!! and the fact that he was even willing to love and protect a demon from another dimension dustin please don’t let the world rob you of your sweetness

i was crying about noah earlier but finn also basically killed it this season. you could tell that mike was Depressed with a Capital D and even though he didn’t get as much screen time as he did last season, every scene he did have was Quality,

especially the scene when he was talking about how he and will became friends and those TEARS FINN JUST DRIVE TO MY HOUSE AND STAB ME MYSELF

i really loved watching jane grow and come into her own this season! you can tell that she’s very aware of her power, but there’s that internal struggle about how to use it, which made the final battle that much more poignant.

terry’s backstory was immensely heartbreaking, i don’t have much left to say about it

i really did love kali, though! the detour from hawkins was a bit unexpected, but i love that world building aspect and im really intrigued about kali’s backstory and also her...front story? damn i hope she’s in season three because there’s so much more tea left.

and like....what about 1-7, 9, 10? are they still alive [insert eyes emoji here]

i’m going to be Agressively Heterosexual and agree that billy is pretty™ but at the same time i’m super worried that he’s going to be woobified because he is abusive, and i’m 95% sure he’s racist. so yeah i really hope that doesn’t happen but it probably will [sips wine tiredly]

STEVEN, MY MANS. the development that started last season really paid off here! tbh even i felt hurt when he asked nancy “you don’t love me?” like this binch has got feelings! and he’s not perfect but he’s a lot more genuine than i gave him credit for and the fact that he babysits kids and calls them shitheads but also lets himself get his ass beat for them. oh steve, keep growing but never change.

okay, nitpick and potential unpopular opinion, but i kind of hated the jancy development in this season

because there really wasn’t any, i don’t know, and this is really shitty of me for all my campaigning last year, but it just felt very cheap and superficial

like nancy and steve break up very early in the season, conveniently

and then when they’re at conspiracy guy’s house it just felt too explicit, too heavy handed and cliche, like Conspiracy Guy is basically spelling out their relationship to the audience

and then they do the thing where they just....have sex, and maybe it’s because i’m wearing my grey-ace hat, but like, honestly, two characters having sex doesn’t mean shit, anymore, okay?

its mostly because of hookup culture imo

so jonathan and nancy have sex, but there’s no confession of feelings or anything, so it just feels like a cheap way to show the audience THEY’RE TOGETHER NOW ARE YOU HAPPY

and then they don’t really interact as much in that context for the rest of the season, so it’s left kind of ambiguous

and i understand that it’s a 9 episode season and this is more of a C plot, but i think i would have rather had a slow burn throughout the 9 episodes [cough] like last season [cough] with a more affectionate moment at the end than just break up, nancy’s free, SEX, done

it’s not a very emotionally gratifying narrative as it is

second nitpick: tbh the final battle of this season felt a little too note for note to the final battle of the first season, and it felt repetitive at times, so i admit i kind of lost interest in the middle of episode 9

i really thought the “watering the story down” to get JusticeForBarb™ was really clever 

and just....joyce. i’ll never get over joyce. i have no complaints, she’s a mom who punches back and she’s tenacious and good hearted and amazing and she raised two amazing boys 

i don’t know i need a nap 

[nonameinanytongue]

The Flower & the Serpent: The Violent Women of Game of Thrones

“Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”

-Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act V, Scene I

DC’s Wonder Woman opened this summer to critical acclaim. Pop culture outlets made much of its empowered protagonist and progressive themes, lauding everything from its feminist fight scenes to Wonder Woman’s thigh jiggle. In approaching the first superhero flick of the modern big-budget tentpole era both helmed by and starring a woman with such intense and specific scrutiny, much is overlooked and more repurposed to suit a flexible, almost reactive set of ideals held by fans and critics alike. If a woman does something in art that shows her to be powerful, it is interpreted as inherently feminist no matter its context in the work of art or the world beyond.

Perhaps in a world where women, homosexuals, and transsexuals lobby vigorously for the right to serve in active combat zones a conflation of ability to do violence and the possession of feminist power is understandable. Surely there are many women who, for reasons understandable or awful, crave invincible bodies and the power and grace to crush the people who hurt them. Many more are happy to acclaim any media in which a woman emerges victorious as another mile marker driven into the roadside on the highway of equality. Especially beloved are movies, shows, comics, and novels in which such victories are portrayed as straightforwardly virtuous and good. 

Think of Sansa Stark condemning her rapist and tormentor, Ramsay Bolton, to a grisly death at the jaws of his own hounds. How many fans and critics expressed unbridled joy at that, as though Sansa had won some kind of symbolic victory for all women? Her sister Arya’s rampage, which has taken her across the Narrow Sea and back again and claimed the lives of dozens, has likewise been applauded as a meaningful triumph in the way we tell women’s stories. For the record, I think both of these plots are intensely compelling and reveal volumes both about the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. Game of Thrones is a show nearly singular in its refusal to make violence joyous or cathartic, no matter the whoops and cheers of many of its fans.

Still, no matter how many times the show delivers searing anti-war images or explores the corrosive influence of violence on those who commit it, viewers remain hungry for the spectacle of women overpowering their enemies and turning back on them the weapons of their own oppression. In a culture where Redpill misogynists hold elected office and our president is a serial rapist, a desire to see women take power with a dash of fire and blood feels all too understandable, but celebrating the destruction of their personalities and lives is a reductive way to understand their stories.

In order to understand what Game of Thrones has to say about violent women, it’s necessary to set aside the thrill that seeing them materially ascendant brings and focus on the images, words, and larger context of the show’s particular examples. Where films like Wonder Woman thrive by repurposing a complex and horrifying conflict (World War I in the first film, the Cold War in the upcoming second) into a heroic battle between good and evil, Game of Thrones, rooted in a genre where conflict is often artificially cleansed of moral ambiguity through devices like entire species of evil-doers, makes no attempt to sand the edges off of its depictions of war or violence. 

Nearly every woman on the show, with the possible exceptions of Gilly and Myrcella, are directly involved in war, torture, and many other forms of brutality. From Catelyn and Lysa’s ugly mess of a trial for Tyrion, an act they surely must have known would cost many smallfolk their lives once Tywin Lannister caught wind of it, to Ygritte fighting to save her people by sticking the innocent farmers in the shadow of the Wall full of arrows, the actions of women with power both physical and political are shown to bear fruit just as ugly as any their husbands, sons, and brothers can cultivate. There’s an uncomfortable truth lurking there, an admission that some modes of action and ways of being may not intersect meaningfully with many of modern feminism’s tenets.

In this essay I will dissect scenes and story to illustrate the show’s deeply antipathetic stance on violence and the ways in which it is misunderstood both by those who enjoy the show and by those who detest it or object to it.

I. ARYA

If a man is getting his eyes stabbed out by a child he intended to beat and rape, does the child’s gender matter when determining what the scene is meant to convey? Is it somehow triumphant for a girl to do that to another living person, no matter how repugnant he might be? Isn’t it possible that what the scene communicates is not that Arya’s slow transformation into a butcher with scant regard for human life is something we ought to cheer for but that the fact she couldn’t survive in Westeros or Essos as anything else, much less as a little girl, is deeply sad?

Arya’s crimes nearly always echo those of her tormentors. Think of the first person she kills, a stable boy, not so different in age or appearance from her erstwhile playmate, Mycah, who was slaughtered by the Hound a bare few months before. Or else consider Polliver, the Lannister soldier who murdered her friend Lommy and whose own mocking words she spits back at him as she plunges her sword up through his jaw. More recently, her wholesale slaughter of House Frey recalls with a visual exactitude which can be nothing but intentional the massacre of her own family and their allies at the Red Wedding. In this last instance she literally dons their murderer’s skin in order to exact her revenge, pressing Walder Frey’s face against her own in an act that feels uncomfortably more like embodiment than disguise.

Arya’s long journey through peril and terror has hardened her, but there’s little reason to rejoice in her hard-won powers of stealth and bloodletting. Who, after all, does she resemble with her obsession over old scores and her penchant for cruelly ironic punishments if not the subject of this essay’s next section.

II. CERSEI

Cersei Lannister,  is distinguished from a hundred other interchangeable evil queens by the attention devoted to her own suffering. Sold by her father to a man who beat and raped her, denied the glory heaped on her twin by sole dint of her gender, humiliated and terrorized by the despicable son whose monstrosity she nurtured, and finally stripped, shaven, and marched barefoot through jeering crowds after being tortured for weeks or months in the dungeons of the church she armed and enabled, Cersei’s brutality serves only to deepen her misery and isolation.  

The aforementioned tyranny of the High Sparrow she put in power, the murder of her monstrous son by her political rivals after she groomed him to be the beast he was, her conflicted and good-hearted younger son’s suicide after his mother’s revenge on the High Sparrow and the Tyrells broke his spirit; Cersei’s litany of victories reads a lot like a list of agonizing losses when you look at it sidelong. Certainly her grasping, vindictive reign has brought her no joy. It’s true that audiences are expected to see Cersei as a horrible human being, which she is, but the time the show spends on giving viewers a chance to empathize with this badly damaged person trying to throttle happiness and security out of a recalcitrant world argues for a more complex interpretation of her character. Watching her need to dominate rip her family and sanity apart, ushering all three of her children into early graves, transforms her from a straightforward villain to a troubled and tragic figure.

III. DAENERYS

Sold into slavery after a life on the run with her unstable and abusive brother and raped on her wedding night by a foreign warlord, Daenerys’s relationship to violence after her ascent to power is complex and heavily ideological. Her crusade to end slavery, motivated as much or more by strength of character and an innate sense of justice than it is by personal suffering and an impulse toward vengeance, has engendered sweeping changes throughout Essos, but at times it has taken on shades of the ostentatiously symbolic punishments for which her family name is famous. The crucifixion of the Masters is a particularly gratuitous example as Daenerys allows her desire to change the world and her need to feel good about the justice she doles out combine to produce a dreadful and inhumane outcome.

This act of performative brutality finds its echo in the rogue execution of a Son of the Harpy, imprisoned and awaiting trial, by Daenerys’s fervent supporter Mossador. Dany may claim that she is not above the law when Mossador confronts her, but when butchery without trial suited her she was quick to embrace it. Her case is uniquely complicated by her enemy: the slavers. Nothing excuses violence like a civilization of rapists and flesh-peddlers beating and maiming their human chattel onscreen, and there is powerful catharsis in seeing their corrupt works shredded and their hateful and exploitative lives snuffed out, but in making them suffer and in choosing the easy way out through orgiastic episodes of violence, Dany betrays her own unwillingness to do the hard work of reform. In many ways, her long stay in Meereen functions as the tragic story of her decision to embrace the grandiose violence her ancestors partook of so freely. We may feel good watching her triumph over evil, but we’re reminded frequently of the horrors and miseries of her reign.

IV. BRIENNE

Brienne’s pursuit of knighthood and adherence to its practices and code is no warrior-girl fantasy about a scabby-kneed tomboy learning to swordfight. Trapped in a body unsuited to courtly life, mocked by suitors and competitors alike, and yearning for the right to live by the sword as men do, Brienne finds challenging refuge in a way of life intimately associated with violent acts. From her butchery of the guards in Renly’s tent to her honor-bound execution of her one-time king’s brother in a snowy forest, Brienne’s path has frequently led her into mortal conflict.

At the climax of Wonder Woman, Diana kills a super-powered caricature of historical figure General Erich Ludendorff, a character who seems to exist solely to uncomplicate the moral landscape of World War I. A few minutes later she kills the man behind the man, her divine uncle Ares, and breaks his grasp on the people of war-torn Europe. The presentation of the act of killing as a triumph for human morality strips away much of what violent media can offer. Contrast Brienne’s desperate fight with three Stark soldiers as she attempts to spirit Jaime Lannister to safety on Catelyn’s orders. Screaming with every blow and leaving her opponents hacked to pieces, Brienne succeeds in her mission at an obvious human cost. Men, despicable men but men nonetheless, are dead. She and Catelyn are now in open rebellion against Robb’s authority. 

To kill is to sever a life and give birth to a living, growing tree of consequences. To explore it instead as a tidy way to resolve problems and make the world a better place is to misrepresent its essential nature. You can’t improve the world through butchery. You can’t heal by harming. What violence in media is meant to teach us is a capacity for empathy, a reflexive understanding that all people are as fully and completely human as ourselves. Loathsome or virtuous, kind or cruel, no human suffering should be a comfortable or affirming thing to witness. (The Republican Party’s elected officials and pundit corps certainly makes a strong case for an exception to this rule).

One might charitably assume that lionization of violent women and their specific acts of violence stems from a place of vulnerability, a desire to balance the scales and erase the danger and aggression with which almost all women must live on a daily basis. I would argue that while this may hold true in part, a deeper truth is that many people have not been taught to feel pain for others in a way that allows for true emotional vulnerability or complex feelings about morally ugly and confusing actions. It’s easier to cheer when the guy we hate gets his than it is feel sorrow for the former innocent who dished out justice, or empathy for the deceased whose life must surely have held its own miseries and secret hurts. 

Audiences would be well-served by taking a moment to step back from their reactions to violence in media and attempting to interpret what message the art is trying to convey. Is the violence slickly produced and bloodless, a parade of cool moments and heroic victories? Or is it focused on the humanity of victims and perpetrators and the cost of their actions? What is the camera telling us? The colors? The editing? Are we meant to agree with King Theoden’s speech about the glories of war in Return of the King when the very next cut brings us into the hellish, pointless confusion of the taking of Osgiliath? Are we meant to be happy when Sansa smiles at Ramsay’s death when the very last thing he told her was that she would carry him, his essence, with her forever? 

The most transcendent joy art brings is the opportunity to reach out of your own beliefs and feelings and into someone else’s dreaming mind, to parse the language of symbols and ideas with which they have addressed the world and make in the negative space between your consciousness and theirs a new understanding. Learn to relish the complex and sometimes hideous nature of humanity over the easy thrills and cheap moral lessons of crowd-pleasers made by billionaires. Understand that art that makes you uncomfortable could be helping you grow. 

A woman’s actions are not laudable just because she’s a woman, or just because she’s been wronged. In our rush to associate the violent triumph of women over the men who’ve hurt them with personal strength, healing, justice, and praiseworthiness we ignore what shows like Game of Thrones are saying in favor of what we want to hear. Violence should never be easy, and violence that assures us, or that we think assures us we’re good and rooting for the right people should always be suspect. 

In labeling anything that pleases us, that satisfies our own hunger for justice and supremacy “feminist,” we forget that feminism is first and foremost an attempt to remake the world. The structure of things as they are is brutish and oppressive, and to cry tears of joy as women, even fictional women, fall prey to the allure of those same structures is to fundamentally misunderstand the point of a life-or-death struggle in which at this moment in history we are perilously engaged. As assaults on our tattered reproductive rights continue, as women struggling with addiction, illness, and homelessness are thrown into prison en masse, as our political leaders openly contemplate sentencing the most vulnerable among us to death in order to pay off the corporate elite and the Left (justifiably, in my opinion) contemplates and utilizes resistance through force on a scale unheard of in this millennium in our country’s history, learning to see violence for what it is has become more imperative than ever before.

[seiten-taisei]

A Seiten-Taisei Rant about the new Saiyuki Blast anime: AKA: Why I’m not as excited about the new anime as I could be

For awhile now I’ve been holding back on posting on tumblr my thoughts on the new anime. I didn’t want to tie my comments to another post, so I have decided to do it’s own post.

Let me be clear, this is why /I’m/ not excited. This post isn’t meant to make anyone else less excited. I’m not here to stomp on someone else’s happiness. You may disagree with me, or you may agree. I welcome comments on the matter.

Because there may be some spoilers, I will put it behind a cut.

Why I’m not excited for the new anime:

There’s not enough content.

I’m getting to this point right away.

As we all know Kazuya Minekura struggles with releasing chapters because of poor health. As of writing this on February 27th, 2017, the last chapter we got was in late October 2016. This is not uncommon. We often see hiatuses that range from a couple months to nearly a year.

We understand, she is ill. That’s not the problem.

My fears first began when we were told we were getting an animated adaption for Blast. At the time we were barely 3 volumes into Blast, and months later we have only gotten about 2 more chapters.

Even if the anime is only 12 episodes there’s not a whole lot of content.

Why is this a problem? Let me take you back to the early 2000s.

Saiyuki Reload had ended and now we were knee deep in Saiyuki Reload Gunlock. The anime had just completed the Against the Stream arc, yet it was still continuing. Curiously, I continued watching. Even a worm was being animated, but there were only about 4-5 chapters released at the time.

We had no idea EaW was going to span nearly 6 volumes.

Apparently neither did the anime, and we got a mess of an animated adaption that many find to be terrible. The art suffered, the boys were off character, and the story was abysmal. So much good character development and amazing reveals were missed out on...

The new anime is coming too soon

Here’s another problem the continues on from the point above. Reload Blast is only getting started. There are a lot of questions that are being raised with each chapter, and the problem is that more than likely many will be unanswered. Maybe this is good to get readers into the manga, but therein lies another problem:

As I said Minekura has health issues and it’s not uncommon to go 2-6 months without a chapter. How will new fans react to that? Will they be accepting and patient as many fans currently are? Or will they drop it once the realize the sporadic schedule?

It would have made more sense to wait close to the end of the manga to generate sales for the entire series. This probably also puts pressure on Minekura to try and release chapters as quickly as possible when she should be focusing on her health. I can’t imagine how stressful this must be for her.

If the latest arc was longer and close to finishing, I can see them adapting that and it would be fine, but the way I see it: The first episode will no doubt be the first ‘arc’, where the guys are introduced and they save a village. This chapter is about 60 pages, 1/3 of a volume. So we’ve already gone through a ton of content leaving only about 2 1/2-1/3 volumes of content left to adapt into 11-12 episodes.

Now maybe they will animate sky burial and a filler episode with body switching. Maybe not. If they do then they can stretch that out a bit. If not? Expect slow pacing or fillers. Something the Saiyuki Anime are plagued with. The other problem? An ending that cuts off suddenly or a ‘gecko ending’, meaning the animation company comes up with a non canonical ending to the arc.

Neither are ideas I’m happy with, but I’m expecting to happen.

The current arc isn’t a good introduction for new readers/watchers

The new arc is good, but not to show to new fans. Why?

A lot of action, not a lot of character development.

Once the guys reach India things start moving fast. Not a bad thing, however it doesn’t allow us time to get to know our boys. The newest arc hasn’t been the best to see our boys’ personalities and their complexities.

Even a worm would have been a fantastic arc to start with. It’s a complex plot thanks to a certain professor who is revealed to be a major instigator in problems our boys must face. Even a Worm had some major character growth, primarily in Goku and Sanzo, but had some very good interactions with Gojyo and Hakkai.

The antagonists, Hazel and Gat, had much more depth than what Gunlock provided and the main villain, Ukoku, is incredibly fearsome.

Plus let’s not forget some of the most anticipated and brutal fights, Seiten Taisei Vs Youkai Hakkai and Ukoku Vs the Sanzo ikkou.

Many people were looking forward to the fights, the reveal of Youkai Hakkai and Ukoku. Sadly it looks like we wont be getting that, even though it would fit quite well into a 26 episode season.

And on to my next point:

Even a worm will, more than likely, never be properly animated

Ever since the Seiten Taisei vs Youkai Hakkai fight I wanted to see this arc animated. Gunlock in no way does this arc justice. It’s obvious that Seiten Taisei is one of my favorite characters, but Even a Worm also shows how incredibly mature Goku has become. Many still think of him as a ‘kid’ who just likes to eat and fight, but he grows up so much in this arc and learns that the problems and solutions of the world aren’t always black and white.

Seeing the character art for Kanzeon and Kougaiji give me little hope that this arc will be animated as they don’t really appear much in Even a Worm but are prominent in Blast.

There have been folks hopeful that it could be adapted into an OVA, but that wouldn’t work as those tend to be 2-4 episodes, no where near the time needed to cover such a massive arc.

Saiyuki Gaiden was 3 episodes (+1 special) that was pulled from 2 volumes. Even a worm is about 6 volumes long. Definitely long enough for at least 13 episodes.

If only the Blast anime is adapted that gives me little hope for Even a Worm. It would be silly to animate Blast, then go back and animate the arc prior to it. Which means it probably will be skipped over.

I have dreamed of Even a Worm being animated for over 10 years, since we saw how much more complex and engaging the plot was. Yes Sanzo left the group in both adaptions, but his motives are made even more clear in the manga. Hazel’s characterization in the anime was horrid, and he was much more charming and interesting in the manga.

All I know is, if Ukoku appears in the new Anime somehow, it’s going to be strange. Nataku’s appearance alone will make little sense unless you’ve read Gaiden. There would have to be something added in to show Goku’s relationship to Nataku, how he’s an amnesiac.

What would have been nice would be a full series reboot done in this new style, from beginning to end. We have so many series and so many different art styles. 

I’m perfectly happy with the new art style, though. I was worried because Minekura’s art is so detailed it’s hard to animate. This looks like a decent style.

Now let me end with this:

If you’re excited for the anime, stay excited. Don’t let my pessimistic attitude derail you from your own happiness and excitement. And I will continue to support the manga and encourage people to watch the new anime (unless it ends up being bad). 

I love this series. I’m incredibly passionate about it. I have met amazing friends thanks to this series. So that’s why I decided to type this all up.

Again, feel free to tell me your thoughts. Or send me a message if you want to comment. 

[sobdasha]

thinking about Kagura today

I wasn't sure at first how I felt about her episode in the reboot versus the manga, but now I think it actually touched on some very important things for her character and I appreciate that so now I'm going to talk about it!

As plenty of other people have pointed out, Kagura's storyline is kinda weird. It starts off with over-the-top embarrassing comic violence, "it's a terrible relationship but it's played for laughs!", but then she gets really good and deep when she confesses to Kyou, and then she more or less drops off the face of the story. Like I like Kagura, but she's not one of my top faves, and when I'm not reading early manga volumes it's really very easy to completely forget about her.

And I think the "haha look she beats on Kyou isn't this funny!" bit that's played up so hard early on tends to disguise the fact that Kagura's character does have some real emotional depth. But I think something the reboot does right is to touch on that depth early on, amidst the chaos. Laying the groundwork now for future revelations, and also to punch you in the feels when you rewatch.

If Tohru and Akito are a parallel and a mirror-image, Tohru and Kagura are...I'm not sure. Kagura's a bit like Akito, but also a bit not.

Let's start here. Kagura is a bitty child. She's born cursed by the spirit of the Boar, and so it appears to be her fault that her family life is a shambles. Her parents argue a lot (specifically about her), her mom cries after. Her dad probably doesn't love her. She's got what looks to be a decent relationship with her mom in the future, but who knows what it was like as a child, maybe it seemed that her mom didn't love her either. Either way, Kagura is still the cause of her mom's suffering.

And Kagura is surely aware her life is going to be difficult and terrible and isolated. (Adults talk about it all the time in the family, after all. And kids aren't that stupid.) She's not "normal." She can't have a "normal" life with "normal" people. She hates herself.

She's a little kid, and she's already aware that she's running out of time to find someone other than God that she can be loveable to, and she's desperate. She doesn't want to be alone forever.

And then Kagura stumbles across Kyou.

Bless Kyou. Because her life sucks, but Kyou's life sucks so much more. Kyou doesn't even have friends among the other Zodiac members. Kyou's drawing fried eggs in the dirt alone because his mom doesn't let him socialize or watch TV. Kagura's life might be hard, and adults might talk, but it's nothing compared to the way they talk about and pity and put-down Kyou.

Kagura's so relieved, she finally starts feeling good about herself as she says she'll play with Kyou out of the goodness of her heart because he's so pitiful and has nothing at all.

(A few bonuses she probably hasn't figured out in their entirety yet, but she probably had a hint of an idea about at various points in her life: Kyou is also a Zodiac, so loving him isn't as problematic as trying to love a "normal" person, it's so much more convenient that way. And because Kyou is a Zodiac like her, Kagura doesn't have to worry about that part of her not being lovable to him. And presumably Kyou being the ostracized Cat keeps Kagura from being a threat to and a target for Akito.)

So Kagura makes friends with Kyou, pats herself on the back for a job well-done, is now no longer alone because she knows she's lovable to at least one person, and it because it's a person who's surely even more desperate than her she knows he can't get away…

And then she messes up, sees Kyou's true form, runs away in fear, realizes she's ruined all her chances, and after keeping her distance for a while she gets even more desperate and tries to force "love" on Kyou harder than ever in order to not get left alone, and also to kill off past!Kagura, who went from being a Good Girl Who Accepts The Cat to Awful Person Who Ran Away From The Monster, so now Kagura will be able to feel good about herself again when she becomes Kagura Who Accepts Kyou The Monster.

(Kyou's not fond of this whole thing. Kyou's been trying to pull away from their friendship, and he's definitely trying to pull away from a relationship. But none of that matters, right, because it's not like Kyou has any other options, right, so Kagura just has to keep trying, right?)

So when Tohru comes along, Kagura immediately gets worried and scared. Because like Akito, Kagura's been trying to force a bond on Kyou. And if Kyou meets someone outside that bond, someone who can love him the way Kagura hasn't been able to...that person will ruin everything. Tohru could very well take away Kagura's only chance at not being lonely and unlovable forever.

(Tohru pours and pours her love out indiscriminately in the hopes that one day for one moment someone, in whatever small way, will reciprocate back. Akito demands and demands love from people she's told she can expect to get it from, in the hopes that she'll actually feel it. Kagura, I think, projects her love--onto Kyou, specifically--not as a gift, and not exactly as a one-sided demand, but as an obligation; she's already anticipating that this unwavering, passionate devotion she's showing is what she should be receiving from Kyou in exchange.)

That brings me to what I think the reboot episode did really right. I made a "meh" face at first when I realized they were (reasonably) padding the episode out with "Kagura breaks things!" filler like the original anime had done. But then…it took a different turn. I try to avoid the original anime, so I might be wrong and they may have tried to so something like this too, but in the reboot I really get a very strong feeling of Kagura's vulnerability here.

Kagura's so very desperate to prove herself, to prove to everyone (herself included) that she loves everything about Kyou and would do anything for Kyou and their love is so strong that Tohru couldn't possibly be a threat. Kagura's fighting against that feeling that she's running out of time, and the harder she fights the more she wrecks things, and then she's running out of the house in tears trying to fix this spiraling mess.

And Tohru comes, and Kagura says, "Hey, Tohru? I wanna thank you, for coming to find me." And Tohru takes half the bag, and engages her in nonthreatening chit-chat, and it's just. Ughhhhhhhh it's so soft and gay and gentle and I die. I die every time.

And at first I never know how to unpack this moment--I know it's significant, I know it's gonna have a ton of resonance, but I'm never quite sure what it's alluding to.

And then I rewatched the episode just before starting to type this up and--

Later, on the roof, Tohru tells Kyou: "Isn't it a blessing to have someone care about you? Someone who worries about your happiness, and wants to always be by your side?"

That soft gay gentle moment that changes Tohru and Kagura's dynamic, and makes them start to become friends, is because Tohru just showed Kagura she's lovable exactly as she is, that Kagura isn't as alone as she thinks she is, no matter what happens with Kyou. And Kagura felt that, and Kagura appreciated that, and it's going to kick off some uncomfortable character development for Kagura in the future and ultimately cause her to lose Kyou but instead she'll gain a better peace with herself.

In the end, after Kagura gives up on Kyou, she takes time for herself to develop her own person and interests outside of her desperation to Not End Up Alone. It's a shame we don't get to see much at all of her, but it's referenced at the end--she's still a little bitter about it, but she does go Whatever, I don't need to be dating someone, everyone else can be all lovey-dovey if they want, my job working with little kids is perfectly fulfilling and I'm happy damnit.

(I am also in the camp of hoping that Kagura realizes she's a lesbian and settles down with a nice girl in the future. There's no reason she can't be happy alone, but she did sound bitter about it so I do want her to be happy with a girlfriend.)