#sure i will maintag this i guess

[bloodiegawz]

i love having blorbos to project pain onto

[schrodingersstone]

The rogue probably vanished so quickly because rogues are sneaky and therefore quiet. I wonder if they'll be able to hear us the way you can? Speaking of hearing, have you tried calling out to your rogue to see if they're nearby recently? You might have more luck meeting in the middle, perhaps?

(Excited question-asking one)

N: They would just flock to my location if I started yelling.

N: I can fight, sure.

N: ...

N: But I Don't Want To.

[smile-files]

(my ii3 rewatch is going swell! i'm quite enjoying myself.)

it is sort of funny how nickel goes from blaming everything on balloon in ii2 to blaming everything on clover in ii3. he very much wants to contextualize his misfortune, wanting someone to get mad at (he doesn't like feeling in the wrong personally, and i doubt he'd like to think he's just unlucky); when he starts to get along with balloon in ii3, he needs another scapegoat, and clover's the perfect pick...

as i was saying, nickel seems to have some hidden guilt about treating balloon badly before, with his stubborn, heels-dug-in hatred of balloon fading away now that he doesn't have to save face in front of baseball and suitcase. of course, he wants to save face in front of balloon too, so he half-passes it off as box suggesting it (he always wants a passive lackey to help him push for what he really wants, huh?). nickel's caught in a limbo of not wanting to seem like he had a sudden heel-face turn/change of heart, but also wanting to express that he genuinely enjoys balloon's company (because he's actually letting himself do so now). he isn't being explicitly nice to balloon, but he's simultaneously secretive about the fact that he only did it because "box" told him to -- he doesn't want balloon to think his amicability is nothing more than obligatory, but he doesn't want to be vulnerable either. really interesting stuff.

in any event, nickel's friendlier with balloon now, so obviously balloon could no longer be his scapegoat. he still doesn't like feeling guilty for his own mistakes, nor does he enjoy his troubles being blameless, so he picks clover as his target: largely because he's cynical and can't cope with the idea of pure goodwill, happiness, and innocence which clover represents. she is everything that he isn't, but at the same time what he wants to be; he resents that. this cynicism about clover probably connects with his cynicism about balloon in ii2 -- he initially couldn't wrap his head around a manipulative person changing for the better. weirdly, he still hasn't completely gotten over balloon's heel-face turn as of now (he still doesn't believe in that kind of change, at least not fully), and yet he's still chummy with balloon. as far as i can tell, nickel is strongly projecting his own reservations onto balloon: that he himself can't change and be a good person.

[horrorknife]

anya and jimmy are so jack and wendy torrance coded. jack gets hired on as the caretaker and completely abuses his time in the hotel to do Nothing But "Write" while wendy's really the one looking after the overlook. this heavily parallels the way that jimmy is insistent that he's the glue holding the crew together when anya is the one doing most of the heavy lifting and peacekeeping. the moment she dies all hell breaks loose the same way all hell breaks loose when wendy finally snaps at her husband for his assumed assault of their son. if we really wanted to stretch it, we could count curly as danny because he's at the mercy of the people looking after him and ends up simply having to lie there while he witnesses the horrors that someone he once trusted inflicts on him and everyone around him.

[you-and-youth]

being a cameron fan is sad because like half the fandom hates my favouritest guy. he deserves everything good tbh

[akftww]

@puppybeast hi. sorry. you reblogged this image from me and your tags just inspired me to make this in an absolute frenzy. sparkle on its baturday.

[fox-guardian]

Any of the Archive Gang's fur babies. I don't care which, but there is always space in the universe for floof.

[ID: Three digital drawings of Poundcake on a muted teal background. Poundcake is a brown pit bull with a white tummy, white front paws, and white hind legs, and the tip of her tail is white. Her eyes are dark brown and her ears are floppy. The first drawing is a bust of her smiling with her tongue out. The second drawing is of her sitting down and wagging her tail, smiling upwards with a heart-shaped sparkle in her eye. The drawing is heavily foreshortened, making her nose look very large. The third drawing is more sketchy, and shows her as a puppy, asleep with her snout in a purple sneaker. An arrow points to her and says "missed him" and an arrow points to the sneaker and says "Tim's shoe". Her face is wrinkled up around where it rests on the edge of the shoe's opening. She is not much larger than the shoe. end ID]

~~~~

i am constantly thinking about tim's dog poundcake of @archivistbot lore. tim having a dog is so Real to me and a pit bull?? named POUNDCAKE?? catering to ME SPECIFICALLY the concept is so real to me it feels so right.

also the one where she's got her face in tim's shoe is based on a thing my dog did with my dad's shoe when she was a puppy it was the cutest thing ever

[ariapmdeol]

what’s your favorite thing about seodore?

ohhh this is a fun question! It's hard for me to narrow it down to just one thing, but I think the part that makes me the Most Insane is that he just says So Much about the lore. It makes me crazy!!! He just SAYS SO MUCH.

My favorite conversations with him are his talks with LDL, and his message with us (YoUser) at the end of DLC, because he is ALWAYS JUST SAYING SHIT (affectionate)!!! The metafiction angle is soooo much fun!!!! I like the way his POV of the Meta Stuff, and of whether they should change the past or not, contrasts against the POVs of other characters! He's cool and interesting and fun and I like him a lot!! I like the conflicts about the Narrative. I like that he's Meta Aware but he's still so emotional about it,, there are a few lines in DLC and in Hermit's Room that make me really crazy

There's such a fun dynamic in how he interacts with other characters, too! I like how both he and Hatsutori frustrate each other because their perspectives are so deeply on different paths. I like how he's so gentle with Reiji, and all the conversations with Sanemitsu (i've gone on my seosane rambles a few times already oooops). I like his focus on will and choice.

I'm tucking screenshots under the cut but he makes me so happy. These are from Record 8 and from the end of DLC! I thought about grabbing screenshots from record 4/his convos with reiji and sanemitsu in that section, but I'm too lazy ^^; I hope this gets the idea across, at least

"infinite possibilities" and free will vs being bound by the limitations of the VERY GAME WE ARE IN. I'm Crazy!!!

LIKE!!! HE JUST SAYS THIS!!! I'm insane

[catgirlkirigiri]

I am once again posting furry satosugu

[walking-fnaf-encyclopedia]

cassie ily, what the fuck does this mean

it feels out of place. does that make any sense to anyone?? most of her shorter descriptions are like - character related? there are multiple of these - tragedy mask (“cry.”), comedy mask (“laugh.”), sun mask (“FUN FUN FUN!”), moon mask (“sleep.”), foxy mask (“ahoy!”), and glam freddy plush (“superstar!”).

we KNOW the first iteration of bonnie was gold, even if fnaf 1-4 arent canon, we see the old posters in security breach depicting spring bonnie, so her description of the golden bonnie being “a prototype?” has some basis. but a golden baby who was discontinued? weve never heard of that.

….but we do know of a springlock suit, from babys first location, that was never used. we dont know its color, or its character. but every other springlock suit weve been told about was golden, so is it an illogical leap to say it was golden? is it an illogical leap to say it was a golden baby suit, meant to be worn and walked around in to entertain guests?

interesting side notes that dont really fit in with my rambling, but gives some context or food for though:

notice that the golden baby plush is “golden baby”, while the only other baby plush is “plushbaby”. other than this and the golden coloring, there are no notable differences i can see.

cassie doesnt question golden baby being here, but does question plushbaby, despite not questioning nightmarriones presence. both are present in/from vr, which she points out in nightmarriones description. there has been reference to the mobile game princess quest, in security breach, which was originally part of mobile fnaf help wanted i believe. maybe thats the in-universe canon version of vr? i dont know about nightmarrione and plushbaby, but i believe circus babys minigame is in it. if plushbaby was cut and nightmarrione kept, then maybe this is something?

nightmarriones plush is called “nightmare plush”, despite nightmare being a separate character. unless he didnt exist in vr? that would be interesting. id have to double check though. there are a lot of characters in vr. was nightmarrione called nightmare in vr?

golden bonnies plush is a darker gold than the other gold plushes, which could be partly what cassie is referring to when she calls it a prototype. but, i dont think its a coincidence that only golden bonnies is like this, especially since one of the mini games in fnaf 3 (stage 01, i think) has a darker-looking, possibly due to lighting, golden bonnie.

you can look at all the collectibles in security breach and ruin yourself here, if youre interested. feel free to share ur thoughts i love talking about fnaf :3

[scover-va]

Rip Janet Afton you wouldve fuckin loved the shit outta the Glamrocks

[fraudulent-cheese]

Imagine an au where chris mclean and chef hosts inanimate insanity seasons 2

Everyone else are sti objects but chris and chef are the ONLY humans

Oh that would insane. The contestants would die like every episode it's crazyy

If the ship from episode 14 showed up Chris would've blown it up, just sayin

[spicyraeman]

Luis Trevelyan has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

the use of latin in the 100dmv series is like. cool. fun. a practical way for me to use my latin classes that i suck at. however everyday i worry for the day legs tries to use the words "book" or "free" because minecraft doesn't support macrons and without the macron those are the same word.

[extreme-technicality]

Kay so I’m aro right, and because of that I’ve got some funky cool weird shit around certain common relationship activities tee ehm, one of those being kissing. Broadly speaking, I don’t like it. Forehead kisses, shoulder kisses, basically anything not on the face, those are fine for me pretty much 100% of the time. But like. Kissing kissing?? Like making out?? Ahaha no. I’ll do it for like a bit or to prove a point or whatever but then I’ll either surreptitiously or blatantly wipe my lips off after.

My beloved sundrop knows I’m aro and, pretty early on in our qpr, asked what I’m comfortable with in regards to kissing, and after trying to explain verbally what I just outlined in writing they just simplified everything and said they’d follow my lead and let me initiate as I would. And that took SO MUCH pressure off!!

Let me explain: in literally every other relationship I’ve had, kissing was an expectation. Whether they were purely sexual or romantic, every single one of my partners just assumed we’d be locking lips eventually, if not constantly. (The sexual context made kissing more bearable, meaning that’s really the only time I enjoyed myself.) Making out for the sake of making out was more a duty or a performance than anything I did because I wanted to; I wasn’t initiating anything, I was simply fulfilling the expectation of my role. So to have all that pressure, that specific expectation removed entirely? For it to be left up to me and my comfort levels? I don’t think I can adequately describe the relief it gave me to someone who hasn’t experienced that before.

That initial conversation was months ago. Last fucking year, if I’m remembering right. And now I actively enjoy making out for the sake of it! It is so fucking weird, honestly, but like a nice kind of weird - the kind you get used to, eventually.

Anyway. Moral of the story, if you’re in a relationship and you wanna kiss your partner, ask what they’re comfortable with first. Different comfort levels? Do NOT for the love of FUCK pressure them, let them take things at their pace and to their comfort levels because pushing someone to do shit before they’re ready to is how you fuck a person UP. And it kinda pisses me off that it took me until my 20s to find someone who loves me unconditionally enough to work and live with me as I am.

[volfoss]

MT-001->MT-003: Jungle Emperor/Kimba (1950-1954)

TW: Discussion of racism (specifically anti-black racism)

Before I get into the plot and well. everything bad about this, I want to quickly explain that this is the first out of 400 volumes of Tezuka's that I will be reading/reviewing. This is absolutely the worst of his works by far and I need to very much emphasize that for anyone who wants to read the 5.5 pages of notes I took (that are under the cut, due to length).

Summary of Plot: A white male lion is known for terrorizing an African village, and they make plans to hunt and kill him. These plans end up succeeding, and his mate, who is pregnant with his son, is captured and taken onto a ship. She gives birth on the ship and pleads with her newborn son, Kimba, to escape and become the king of the jungle, like his father was. The story follows Kimba as he tries to follow in his father’s footsteps, but in his own special way.

Characters: Kimba/Jungle Emperor is a mixed bag when it comes to characters. On one hand, Kimba and his family manage to be entertaining without speech. Their motives are very clear and they are written sympathetically. Jacques the rat is a really good addition to the cast and adds a lot to Kimba as a character. The animal characters have a pretty interesting dynamic with each other, and I feel the little screen-time the villain got was pretty decent. I’m not normally a very big fan of stories centered around animals in the specific way that this does it, so the aspects of the charming animals could be better for someone who enjoys that sort of thing more.

On the other hand, the humans are not written in a super in depth manner (at least not compared to his later works that I’ve read). The protagonists quite honestly fall flat most of the time and don’t lend a ton to the story. The worst of the badly written humans are the African characters. They are horrifically reduced to the worst stereotypes possible, given how Tezuka wants to portray them as “tribes-people”. They are portrayed as stupid and are shown as rather backwards. The best example of the latter is early on, when the leader offers “the best hut” to one of the white characters and when he goes to investigate it, all the promised amenities are either broken or just there for props. They are also portrayed as overly violent and also docile towards the white characters. I cannot express enough how this ticks every single anti-black stereotype in media box.

Another horrific part of this is their treatment of Merry. Merry is one of the two children, and in Volume 1, is kidnapped by the “Jungula Tribe” (as that is what this group is referred to) and by Volume 2, has formed an alter ego (or something along those lines, it’s not really made clear but it is handled badly) named, and I kid you not, Conga (or Konga, depending on the translation) and has taken over the tribe as their leader. She does this by creating electricity (which is pretty clearly implied as something that the tribe she now leads had never seen before, and treat it as something mystical and magical) by rubbing her pen against a cheetah pelt. Her taking over the group is seen as a sad thing but only specifically in the way that the other child that was her friend, feels very disconnected to her and cannot relate to her (and not the frustration that Tezuka was leaning into yet another trope of the white person having to lead the black tribe because they just know better. This is handled in that specific manner with her being pretty abusive towards the other characters, and is only really refuted in the manner of now there’s “good” people to lead them (who are white/Japanese) and the only big difference in the leadership is it is less abusive).

There is also ritual sacrifice, regarding the Pygmy (the specific group is not specified (otherwise I would be referring to them as such, as Pygmy is seen as a derogatory term) and this is how they’re referred to in canon) and many jokes about their short stature. They are shown trying to ritually sacrifice one of the white characters, and it is treated as horrific (but also with tones of comedy, as Tezuka constantly uses slapstick to show dumb the Africans in his work are), which from as far as I could find, was not something factual for the actual groups mentioned. Most of the groups mentioned seem to either be slightly made up (Jungula is one that I could not find any proof of anything similarly named existing) or slightly spelled off (but wouldn’t make any sense geographically, such as Gura (literal translation used here, the fan translation I’m using here just refers to this group as Donga, despite the katakana being “グラ”). This detail doesn’t really factor in with the already HEINOUS amount of racism but it is very interesting to me, as I feel it’s just another excuse for him to be using many stereotypes and mash them together, instead of portraying a nuanced version of any of the groups mentioned. Quite literally, they check off every single way to NOT treat African characters and there is no way around this part of Kimba, as these characters appear in pretty much every chapter. They are absent in Chapter 1 and 2, and I state this solely to make it very clear that in 21 chapters, the racism is present in nearly every single one. Genuinely and sincerely, there is no reason to read Jungle Emperor/Kimba for the characters (or really anything other than reading all of his works, like I’m doing) as they are all pretty flat and the very obvious issues are present throughout the entire work.

Art: As always, Tezuka excels at drawing animals in a very specifically stylized way that still lends to how they would appear realistically. Kimba as a character has an instantly charming design and is drawn in such a way that all of his movements exude a lot of character. But unfortunately, the elephant in the room for the entire read through was how he chose to depict Africans. With the setting (and it being written in 1950), I did not expect it to be good but it is unfortunately a topic that is often ignored in mainstream discussions of Kimba/Jungle Emperor (often, I find what is most discussed is using Kimba/Jungle Emperor as a punchline to talk about Disney stealing the Lion King’s concept from this), and is one that I’d like to discuss in the review. They are a very prominent part of the story (given the setting) and to put it very lightly, this is the worst instance of this in his work. It appears again in (given this is the first thing I’m reading in this chronology, I’m sure that there will be more instances, but this is just from what I’ve read going into it) Black Jack and lesser known works such as Hungry Blues, but this is by far the closest to minstrelsy (with how the Black characters are drawn and portrayed, it very much leans into how older media (Hollywood specifically) tended to derive Black characters down to simple and offensive tropes). It absolutely does ruin any enjoyment, as it is VERY glaring vile and present in nearly every chapter.

Ending: The ending is very bad with how Tezuka clearly viewed Africa as a place to be mystified, with how the final words are. I feel that again, a lot of the messaging in this is stuff that appears in his later works but they are a lot more clumsily handled here (for many reasons). It was a very frustrating ending with how most of the Black characters died, and after that, the white and Japanese (implied) characters from different countries realized their differences (with no mourning for the dead, which happened when ANYTHING tragic happened to any of the non-black characters).

Misc: This was the work I was dreading the most, and reading it first has really just been a very frustrating experience due to just HOW blatantly vile it is. To get into the Lion King comparisons (as that is the typical mainstream knowledge of this manga), there are certainly some similarities. Kimba/Jungle Emperor focuses a bit more on the human side of things (in terms of being pretty blatantly anti-zoo (with the second chapter focusing a couple pages on Kimba’s mother telling him how living in a zoo would be no good life for them, and how zoos are discussed on Chapter 3 of Volume 1) and anti-poaching (most clear in the entirety of the first chapter) instead of animal life and drama there, like the Lion King covers. Honestly, a lot of the plot isn’t super similar unless you’re looking at it from a VERY broad lens (I know I see the scene of the stars forming the dead parent’s face cited a lot here, the fact he has an animal companion that watches over him (even a bird for a bit of the plot) a bit is similar (again broadly), there being an evil lion, and the dead parent plot point), as it really does just focus on different subject matter. It is more of a generational tale than Lion King.

Honestly, I think how Kimba discusses the difficulty for him to grow up for a bit in a normal household (with humans feeding and clothing him) and then having to return to the jungle is really interesting. It gets into his struggle with how he wants to be innately kind (and more “human”/domesticated) but he obviously still has those animal urges built in (a scene that really exemplifies this is in Chapter 5 of Volume 1, where the villain taunts him about the fact that Kimba is upset by a gazelle dying and won’t eat from it, like a normal lion would). It tackles a lot of topics related to how humans can be bad (specifically, the way that one of the humans (who is pretty clearly exploiting the African characters) was a guard at a Nazi camp and you are very clearly not supposed to like this character) and even how, in Chapter 5, Kimba bringing “civilization” to the jungle (he gets the animals that listen to him to build paved roads, restaurants and set up farming practices similar to what humans do) is something that makes some of the animals suffer. There is unfortunately also a lot of really poorly handled colonialism (specifically, in chapter 10, where the “good guys” take over the Jungula tribe and dress them in traditionally European clothing and it is seen as a good thing, as they are no longer under control of Conga. The way that it is handled in this is very muddled, and the way that Kimba bringing “civilization” to the jungle animals is a net positive is a very odd thing to me). It does have some of Tezuka’s trademark anti-war messaging but it honestly just really does not work well here given the rest of the topics. There are definitely glimmers of what COULD be a better manga in this but unfortunately it is buried under far far too much racism.

I want to take a small moment to analyze a section of this essay written on Kimba, as I think there is a lot to unpack.

From the section covering The Roles of Africans in Kimba:

“Fans of Kimba may have wondered why there are no Africans to be seen in Kimba’s jungle; or for that matter, why no English version of Jungle Emperor is available. The problem is ironic and must have struck hard at Tezuka: the depiction of the African tribes in Leo can only be viewed by any modern person as racist.

This takes a moment to process and absorb because so much of Tezuka’s work explores (and attacks) the tenants of racism. Indeed, works as early as Astroboy seem to focus on racism-as-an-evil with such a deliberate ferocity that we can (and must) conclude that any such accusations regarding Tezuka are false. Let’s also not forget his own slogan: “Love all creatures! Love everything that has life!”

We might then wonder how it is that Tezuka has produced these images which offend modern sensibilities and which necessitated the replacement of African natives in Kimba with white hunters and ultimately prevented the publication of Jungle Emperor in English. It must first be said that very few of Tezuka’s human caricatures are particularly flattering–even of himself. What we find offensive in these drawings however is their stereotypical nature.

It is my opinion that the resources that Tezuka first drew from for the creation of his native characters are in fact the problem. More than likely Disney is the culprit here; though one might also consider the depiction of natives in the 1933 feature film King Kong. Most telling however are the now deleted sequences involving a black centaur in Fantasia. Other works by Disney from this period along with this sequence were clearly not meant as racist, but we can only judge from the perspective of the 21st century.

One possible source for Jungle Emperor’s Africans: a censored scene from Fantasia 1940. Though this type of depiction of Africans was common in US comics and animation in this period, we know Tezuka was particularly interested in the works of Walt Disney…”

To get into my thoughts on this part of the essay, we first have to discuss the material mentioned as potential inspirations for how badly these characters are drawn, mainly Fantasia. Fantasia was released in 1940, a decade before Jungle Emperor came out, and the racism was about as bad as in Jungle Emperor. It had many racist scenes in the specific Pastoral Symphony scene of the film, that were then removed in 1969 (source). I do also want to cite a slightly lesser known Disney work from 1925 that is nearly exact to how the Africans are drawn in Jungle Emperor: Alice Cans the Cannibals. I am not saying that this is where he got the inspiration from, simply to bring up the point that there was a lot of media that would treat Africans as cannibals and prone to human sacrifice. This essay gets into a lot of the early Disney racism in a very in depth way that might be of interest in regards to this point.

In a similar way to Fantasia, Jungle Emperor also had to be redone, given how the original pages were nearly lost during the making of the anime in 1965. This led Tezuka to have to redraw a lot of it (which you can most certainly tell which parts of it were redrawn, given it was done in 1977 (for the collected Kodansha volumes)) and unfortunately, the racial caricatures are still present in this updated version. (source) I did want to make this comparison solely for media that is viewed somewhat similarly in the mainstream media (with not much discussion around the racism) that got revised later on. This is a thing however, that Tezuka would improve on in some of his works, but that fact does not even remotely begin to erase what he put in the Jungle Emperor. Even if the art was not as blatantly racist as it was, the way these characters are written is still drenched in stereotypes that obviously do still harm Africans now. In comparison to Disney doing all that they can to erase the existence of the material (and how, even in the modern day, they very clearly struggle to hold themselves accountable (specifically referring to Song of the South)), I’m not sure that I prefer the approach here with there being clearly enough fans of Kimba to fan translate it (as the version I’m reading had two different teams) and to praise it while doing so.

I feel that the insistence that it was just caricatures and not blatantly racist really falls flat when you consider how the characters in Kimba are treated. As I mentioned in the personality section, they are really just very flat stereotypes (with no names, as far as I remember, outside of the Chief) and do pretty blatantly fall into what is racist media. The various groups portrayed in Kimba are not done so with much compassion for them as characters and they are quite honestly just used as slapstick or to boost up other characters (whether by being villainous, and driving the heroes to oppose them or by, in a large panel depicting most of them dying (relatively graphically for this manga as well, with one character being shown in the jaws of an animal), which then brings the heroes together (not due to their death but because, seemingly, with them gone, the other characters realized that they (as the characters were from two unnamed countries) are not so different after all)). They are not even remotely given any compassion or depth compared to every other character and it really just falls into the old tropes of refusing to see Black characters as deserving of that depth (which quite honestly does feel like what happened here). They are shown more as a group and never really focused on them as individual people (as EVERY other character is given that).

There isn’t really a good way to handle the presence of very blatantly racist material in media, but I do think the repeated insistence of a lot of fans to insist that it wasn’t intentionally bad (or that it was just of its time) is not the way to go. Even if at that point, he had experienced the war (bringing this point up for a reason, stick with me), there are later examples of his work that deal with depicting Black characters in a caricatured way, most notably Hungry Blues. That was published in 1977 and still used similar caricatures (although the character in question leaned a lot less into stereotypes personality wise, as it was based off a real person he had met during the war). It is a very inexcusable part of his works and is something that is objectively the most prominent in Kimba (which is part of his early works). Even if a lot of his other works DO have very well handled anti-racist messages (Message to Adolf is one I can think of off the top of my head, Astro Boy also handles similar topics), this one objectively does not and I think it’s important to examine this in a critical way, instead of just brushing it under the rug. If you want to read one of his works that handles racism, anti-war, and the other messages he is known for, there are MANY that handle them better and not like this.

As a white person, I’m aware that my viewpoints on this matter may not hold as much weight as someone who would be affected by how these characters are drawn but I do believe with how little discussion of the very very blatant racism in this there is online, it is something that needs to be brought up. For further reading on the topics of stereotypes of Black characters in media, I found Donald Bogle’s book on the matter to be a very interesting read (although it does focus on Hollywood throughout the ages, some of the things in here did also apply to this) (link) and Henry T. Sampson’s book focusing on animated portrayals of Black characters (specifically, Chapter 3: Way Down in the Jungle: The Animated Safari) (link) to be very related to the topic at hand and be very excellent companions to reading about the topic of how anti-black tropes in media can be impactful and were very much part of the time period.

Overall Thoughts: I clearly had a lot to say on this one, as it is a topic that I do sincerely believe should be getting more coverage in regards to discussing this media. As a manga, it truly was one of the worst ones I’ve ever read, as the plot was pretty rough and the very obvious racism was well, obvious. On one hand, I do wish it was better and that when it was revised in the 70’s, that Tezuka took the time to show that he had grown from the mindset he pretty clearly had in 1950. On the other hand, the only value this has (in my opinion) is a very good case study on what not to do when writing African characters, as it truly fits every stereotype in different ways. I would not recommend this to a single person, it is easily by far the weakest of his works that I have read so far. The characters felt pretty flat and a lot of the moments clearly meant to be tragic fell pretty flat for me. The generational aspect was interesting but due to every other weakness of the work, just did not work for me.