#that anime/manga was absolutely insane

[discoabc]

me: please for the love of god let me finish writing tkab chapter 3

my brain: hey so remember that vampire knight show?? what the actual fuck was up with that

[nebuladreamz]

The voices are loud and I am WEAK

[moonpaw]

Fighting DEMONS rn trying not to get invested in one piece to figure out wtf you're posting about!!!!

come here cyber.... we have this thang

‎

[ohromeoraine]

I just need to rant here for a second because OH MY GOD-

Stars Align is so fucking incredible. By the end, tears were streaming down my face and i just screeched, “What the actual fuck?!” Because this anime sent me through the five stages of grief within the span of one season. These boys need new parents and hugs, and fucking everything. I would give them my soul, okay, that’s how much these boys need it.

The worst part is that no one and their fucking mother talks about this anime because the fandom is practically dead, but i want to rant to someone about this so badly. You have no idea the inner workings of my brain that go absolutely feral when someone even mutters, “stars align.”

YES. TELL ME ALL ABOUT WHAT YOU THOUGHT OF IT AND I WILL BREAK DOWN EVERY CHARACTER EVEN IF THEY ARE A PATHETIC EXCUSE OF A HUMAN BEING.

I will pull an Oliver Wood and try to drown myself in the shower if someone supports certain behaviors from the characters here.

ALSO, DID I MENTION THAT THERE IS A CANON NONBINARY CHARACTER?!

ACTUALLY FUCKING CANON. I’M NOT MESSING WITH YOU.

They are literally one of the sweetest fucking characters in stars align and i would hand them the goddamn universe if i could.

So, if you haven’t watched Stars Align(available on Hulu and Crunchyroll if we’re talking main streaming services) please invest your time to do so because you will not be disappointed.

There’s only one season because of budget issues(not enough streams was the problem I’m pretty sure), but holy fuck you will not be disappointed i swear.

[mydream-synopsis]

how do ppl act Normal after watching a film

[bungouchronicles]

I love how bsd literally just went:

"Wait, actually there's vampires now!"

88 chapters into the manga and we just...let them??

[robiny]

volume 3 of trigun maximum is honestly insane… the best thing created I’m not sure I will ever feel this thrill and enjoyment ever again as I felt while reading it…. wolfwood and ninelives fight is.insane. I had to pause multiple times to scream and stare at the panels cause it was so beautiful and cool and the ending???? wolfwood being literally smitten ?????? and what if I say Trigun is underrated… like the manga is The manga of all time, it’s so good it’s gonna ruin every other piece of content for me forever. I wish I could read it infinite amount of times as if it were the first time, so I could never get used to it

[lesbiansanemi]

Watching the togachako scene literally conjures up unnamable emotions, btw

[float-p]

MY VN SOULBOND IS AVAILABLE FOR WISHLIST ON STEAM YAY!!!

>>>> here <<<<

that's the art boys

and there's choices and consequences!!!

trying to finish the demo to release it still this year ♥️

[kiyomitakada]

[chin in hand] i feel like pretty much all except one of the ships i like in dn are ones where i am dead certain one of them was in love but idk about the other one

[dontmindme2600]

I really hope manga artists and ppl who work on anime start protesting because the conditions they’re forced to work under are terrifying, especially considering the MASSIVE amount of anime content that’s been being shit out these past few years. the stories of huge companies with high budgets having to hire amateur animators from twitter, the mass production of samey, bland stories and merch that everyone will forget exists two years later. Terrifying shit like stories of people just collapsing and dying at their desks, the stories of mangaka having no free time and not being able even meet with their own children, no breaks to eat or sleep, no living, having your dreams turned into a nightmare. The sad thing is that I know if these protests happens people are gonna be bitching about it, like we haven’t been absolutely spoiled enough already. Like dude just go back and watch the 5 anime that came out last season that were genuinely good, but you missed, because you were watching 3 other new ones at the same time. I would love for protests to break out, I’m actively hoping for them. I would gladly watch no new anime or manga come out for as long as it takes for these people to get good working conditions that don’t require them throwing away their lives.

[bixiaoshi]

what if i reread all of +1000 chapters of the one piece manga

[bamboowick]

Okay, so you know how we’re basically caught up with the manga in the anime? Like legitimately right behind the current chapters?

Because of BSD’s slow updates (being a monthly updating manga) and sometimes only having a like dozen pages in a chapter or a .5 chapter placeholder, it’s going to be a very long time before we get enough content for Season 6.

BUT!! I have a solution for this problem (so we don’t have to wait like 3 years or whatever long timeframe)

Start off Season 6 with Stormbringer.

It’s perfect. Half the season could be Stormbringer flashbacks since seasons are usually only around 12 episodes and there’s no way they can faithfully adapt Stormbringer in like 3-4 episodes. Heck, they could do more than half if they wanted. That depends on their pacing. But Bones likes to skip scenes sometimes so I wouldn’t hope for an exact replica of the light novel.

But if this were to happen, we wouldn’t have to wait so long for a next season and they’d probably have enough manga content to fill the last few episodes while they work on adapting Stormbringer.

Also I just really want to see Stormbringer adapted.

[kikizoshi]

It's a unique type of frustration when you agree that a character is deeply flawed but other people keep missing what's actually wrong with them and assigning them new flaws that they don't even have it's like free my man he did none of that. He did a bunch of other shit tho.

[jamswhams]

I'm so insanely grateful for this one guy on twitter with the best dazai takes as much as I like a lot of fan content everyone seems to miss out on the dazai mostly-canon characterization that I truly love, that shit awakened me I've never seen a character like him before and to be able to relate to something in fiction for the first time? Phenomenal experience 🙏

[gallusrostromegalus]

I did not care at all for Aizen Sosuke when I first read bleach. I found him boring, and worst, unthreatening.

So it's pretty jarring for me that I have been OBSESSED with him in your AU. I'm rotating him at great speed

Walt Disney was a jackass who was flat-out wrong about a lot of very important things, but he employed a great many geniuses of storytelling, and there's a piece in Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson that discusses a key feature of Disney Studios Character Design:

"Of all characters, villains are the most fun to develop because they make everything else happen. They are the instigators, and always more colorful than the Hero. They may be dramatic, awesome, insidious or semi-comic, but they MUST be appealing. Almost any story becomes innocuous if all the evil is eliminated, but we do not necessarily gain strength by being frightening. we want a character that will hold the audience and entertain them, even if it's a Chilling Type of Entertainment."

And I've found that to be an important principle of character design, especially the kind of canon restructuring I do.

Aizen had a LOT going for him in canon- for all of Bleach's other faults, Aizen's conspiracy and THE REVEAL are spectacularly constructed and executed. I legit screamed and threw my mug across my dorm room when I read it in the manga the first time. He's also conventionally attractive and the translations I was reading gave him the speech patterns of Every Douchebag In Your 101 Political Theory Who Thinks He's The Smartest Man In The Room, which made him a terrific combination of Unfortunately Charming, Menacingly Competent and Engagingly Obnoxious.

...But he falls flat in a few key places.

Aizen's reasoning could be MUCH more sympathetic- After all, he is RIGHT. Soul Sciety does suck ass and all the options kind of suck. Who designs a universe like that? An asshole who needs killing, that's who. The best kind of Unhinged Madmen are the kind who spell out their reasoning and you realize that there but for the grace of Not Having Super Powers Go I. Canon!Aizen makes a few Good Rhetorical Points, but seems to lack any personal connection to his all-consuming plan.

Another issue is that nearly every villain with A Plan has a clear end goal AND a lot of the menace is drawn from the fact that the plan *could* work. Aizen's plan for betraying the court guard and then killing them off before proceeding into the Royal Realm to Kill God sorta falls apart when it's clear he planned to use pretty much all his accumulated forces dealing with the court guard and doesn't seem to have a plan for the Even More Powerful Royal Guard, let alone God. For how meticulously planned the rest of the plot is, the last two VERY IMPORTANT steps are just handwaved.

So I sat down and started with the plot beats Aizen MUST hit, and tried to imagine what kind of guy would he have to be to get there? And I came up with this:

Sosuke Aizen is a fundamentally good man with genuinely good intentions who is really trying his best for the whole world.

Think about it- what lengths would you NOT go to if you think you found a genuine shot at Fixing Everything Wrong With The World Forever? We all talk about killing Hitler if we found an actual Time Machine- would you do it if your only chance was when he was a baby? Would you kill an infant if it meant you could stop World War II before it starts? Of course you would! One small life for over 75 million? You'd be insane not to! What if you found out that you could prevent the future extinction of Humanity by killing your best friend today? Ten Billion lives? For theirs? It's simple, really- Hell, it's your Moral Obligation to do that if you were SURE!

-And Aizen IS sure. He is absolutely, totally, completely sure that He Can Save Everyone if he just gets rid of that idiot sitting on the throne of heaven. He's seen the plans! He knows where the gate of heaven is! It's So SIMPLE he just has to get inside, and he knows EXACTLY how to do it, yes it'll be hard and there will be... unpleasant parts but. IT. WILL. WORK.

He is of course, insane.

Aizen didn't have One Bad Day that set him irrevocably on the path of madness. It was a succession of catastrophic disappointments and realizations that he was living in a fundamentally irrational world that made irrational thinking look sane. The Catastrophe that befell his family, working for the central 46 and later the court guard and seeing how the organizations were inept to the point of abuse or corrupt to the core, learning that The Actual House Of God is a place he can just? Go to? Anyone would start thinking you were just a handful of white lies and homicides away from Fixing Everything, Forever.

Not only is Aizen insane, he is nowhere near as smart as he thinks. He is smart- He does have a knack for being able to guess just what will spur someone to action or make them recoil in fear. But mostly he gets extremely lucky Many, Many, MANY times. On some level I think it gives him Confirmation Bias that this is what he's supposed to be doing. Aizen is also nowhere near as smart as (nearly) everyone else thinks he is. His bizarrely good luck makes him look like a hyper-competent genius when really it was really the catastrophic failure of Soul Society as a Society that let a merely mediocre conspirator to evade detection for so long.

Being that he is at most, mediocre, he had to have Outside Help, specifically Gin's emotional support and Tousen's Competence- and if there's a part of the fic that stays true to canon, it's this.

Gin is Aizen's emotional rock in Canon. He's the ONE guy that Aizen genuinely trusts, and considers his 'my only real partner' in his scheme. There's more than one occasion in the manga where Aizen more or less asks Gin "Is this actually a good idea?" and Gin backs him up every time.

...Which is more than a bit at odds with Gin's later stated goal of "I did all this to kill you at your most vulnerable to protect rangiku" . It never rang true to me. So I started thinking why on EARTH Gin would be backing Aizen up like that, and realized there was a hole in my world building that he slotted into nicely :)

On the other hand, the entire fic was started because I didn't like how Tousen's character arc ended, so you can imagine how much he's changed.

But in canon, TOUSEN DOES ALL THE FUCKING WORK.

Lab work? Tousen.

Supervising the arrancar directly? Tousen

Actually getting victims for the Hogyoku experiments? Tousen.

Altering all the archives to keep Aizen's plot hidden? Tousen.

Sending all the Orders allegedly from the central 46? Tousen.

Making sure Unohana believes Aizen's fake body is real? Tousen.

Managing all the day-to-day operations at Las Noches? Tousen.

There's even this little exchange, which is Tousen's first appearance in the Manga:

Aizen establishes this entire meeting is a little fake-out a few pages later with "now isn't that a convenieint time for the alarm to go off?"

which makes him look like he's investigating, but he's also going "Good job on disrupting everyone with the alarm Gin!" It's ballsy of Aizen to do a check-in on his plan with his main nemesis in the room, but also his style.

I think the same thing is happening here with Tousen. To make sure Ukitake wouldn't raise a huge fit about the proposed execution of his beloved lieutenant, which might fuck everything up for Aizen because Ukitake is one of like, three people Yamamoto will listen to (sort of).

...So he had Tousen poison Ukitake to keep him out of the way.

ALL. THE. FUCKING. WORK. It's even in his name! The characters for "Tousen" Refer to a legendary scholar the emperor of China sent out to discover the secret of immortality- only to kill the scholar when he returned with that secret. The character for "Kaname" means "Necessary/Vital/keystone" or "to organize/take account of". His name LITERALLY means "Scholar who is essential for the plan (that we're going to kill later)"

Another thing Kubo did well in Bleach: his name game is Off The Fucking Charts.

-but I digress.

In AEIWAM, it's much the same only this time Aizen sees this very dangerous witness who is immune to his illusions but also extremely snart and capable young man and instead of risking being caught out by the one damn guy who can see right through him, opts to Curse Kaname into doing as Aizen says, and doing all the fucking work of this conspiracy against his will.

It's Not Nice, but Aizen genuinely thinks he's doing Kaname a favor by subjecting him to this degrading and incredibly painful servitude- I mean, Aizen's only other option was to Kill him to keep his silence, and isn't it wonderful that you get to help fix the universe? You're the one always going on about Justice, I don't understand why you didn't jump at the chance to mete out some Divine Justice.

An Excerpt from the captain's meeting in between the Massacre that made the visored and Zaraki's arrival, when Kaname realizes Yamamoto is 100% serious about his promotion to captain of the 9th and goes to throw up in the garden. Aizen offers to go check on him while Unohana very politely reads the general the riot act:

---

"You broke your toy Aizen." Kaname coughs.

"…I really am sorry for running you ragged like this. I really shouldn't have gotten so mad about you hiding the the hogyoku- it was very petty of me." The bastard sighs, taking off his glasses and rubbing his face, entirely genuine.

Kaname stayed on his hands and knees, weaving slightly as another wave of nausea flowed through him, powered by disgust and rage.

"How about this- I've got a lot coming up with the new job, training Gin and disposing of Kiganjo- So how about I promise to not give you any orders for a while? You will have to keep our arrangement a secret and not interfere, of course, but other than that, you're free to do as you please for- a year and a day is traditional isn't it? No, that's not going to heal by then- Oh, would you look at that!"

Kaname didn't have the strength to offer his usual rebuttal that he won't look at anything, ever. The sides of his head tingle like his skul was being pressed between two enormous hands made of static electricity.

"It's 11:11! Alright, I won't give you any Orders until 11:11 am on November 11th, 1911. That's easy to remember! What do you think?" Aizen continued cheerfully, patting his back and the Curse nails.

"…I can't." Kaname groaned. He could scream if he had the energy, but due to Aizen's Illusions, nobody would hear him. "I actually physically can't think. Please…"

"Of course! You really are such a help to me, it would be a shame to lose you. I'll even amend our contract, so you don't get paranoid-" There was a sizzling sound and a new stroke of hot pain up Kaname's spine as Aizen did something to the wretched Bakudo. "There. No compulsions for eleven years and a day. What do you say?"

Kaname grimaced, but dropped his head. Save the energy to fight another day. "…thank you, Aizen-sama."

"Good man! Let's get you on your feet." Aizen beamed, putting his glasses back on and offering him an arm.

---

He genuinely thinks that he's doing everyone a huge favor and if they don't get it it's because they're just not smart enough, but it's alright, He's a Benevolent God and they'll appreciate all his hard work the next time around :)

Aizen is a man who is FULL of joy. He loves what he does! He actively takes pleasure in it! And I think that's something that REALLY delivers in terms of sympathy AND horror for him. Who *Wouldn't* have a great time actually fixing the universe? He's a good man who enjoys doing good works, and this is the greatest work of all!

It also Delivers on the Horror when I get to write the deliciously fun scenes where Aizen is Elbows-deep in a novel War Crime and waxing poetic about how GREAT this is, or being confused why the people around him are reacting with fear. Don't you want to make everything better too?