#the art of the manga is really something to behold

[nya-vivi]

Shikanoin Heizou's character main inspiration (and why it is not Detective Conan).

Before anything, I will like to preface this by saying that I have not seen (or read, for that matter) any Heizou's character inspiration analysis that covered the work I'm about to cover. I could be completely off mark and there could be one, but I'm afraid I have simply not seen it. If there is and someone could be so kind to @/ or link it, I will update this post to add that analysis.

Another thing I will like to say is that I do not deny the obvious inspirations and takes on the popular manga and anime series like Detective Conan (Meitantei Konan) and Bungou Stray Dogs, but to my understanding, those works do take inspirations from other previous works, such as the Sherlock Holmes' saga, the mystery works of Edogawa Ranpo and other very popular detective novels referenced in Heizou's constellation names (you can find a link to that here!), so rather than to say Hoyoverse's inpirations were newer detective media, I would say all those share a common inspiration of older works of the same genre.

The rest of the analysis under the cut, to not clog anyone's dashes. This should be spoiler free for the most part, but there may be allusions to some of Heizou's hangout event endings.

Said all that, allow me to recount the events that led me here, as I feel it is appropiate.

It felt like a miracle came to me one day I was browsing the novel aisle of my favorite manga shop. I was waiting for my friend to decide which Puella Madoka Magica to buy to inflict psychological pain on her psyche when I saw a weird title: Police Detective. So naturally, being the big snooper I am, I took it to snoop around and saw the full title: Police Detective Heizou.

Flabbergasted.

I had been looking into his character for a while and hadn't been able to find anything. Althought, to be completely honest, not very inquisitively, as I got frustrated and thought that another person would be so kind as to do the work I didn't want to do (spoiler: it didn't happen). So really, to say I was shocked wasn't an exageration.

I had always thought that Heizou was a…pretty weird name to name someone based on Japanese culture, even more having more common names in animanga like Ayato, Ayaka, Shinobu, Kokomi… You get me. So I had always the suspicion our dear Heizou was based on something, I just couldn't find what.

And lo and behold there was! I did a small mistake, I didn't get a photo nor did I write down the name of the author, so I didn't have a lead comming home and cried about it. And then I decided it was time to woman up and to search well and wide. And I found a very elusive wikipedia page called Onihei Hankachou.

Onihei Hankachou (鬼平犯科帳), as you can read on wikipedia, was a series of historical novels written by Shoutarou Ikenami from 1967 to 1989, based on a real-life special police officer called Heizou Hasegawa (the wikipedia article is in japanese, my apologies in advance).

I will not be detailing everything in the wikipedia article, as I think It is well explained, but because every analysis needs both evidence and explanation, I will comment on the more important and notable things.

I'm going in the same order as the wikipedia. To not confuse anyone, 'Heizou' will be the genshin character, meanwhile, the novel and historical figure will be named by his surname 'Hasegawa'.

While we don't know fully the home life of Heizou, we know that, like Hasegawa, he was looked down. Not because of illegitimacy, but rather because he didn't want to inherit his father's dojo and wanted to become a detective. Because of that, Heizou ran away from home.

This can be corroborated in Heizou's Vision Character Stories and in the Shikanoin Heizou's Inazuma Commercial Street Bulletin Board message.

In the Vision one it says: But just like every other rebellious child in the world, he only wished to escape having to take up his father's work, even as he was forced to learn martial arts alongside him.

Meanwhile in the Bulletin Board, his older brother discredits him saying 'he names himself a detective'. While it's true that there's no detective position in the Tenryou Commission, the wording feels really condescending.

Then, it says that he led a fast life. This has little to explain, but in a lot of his Character Stories, he is always running off and nobody knows where the hell he'll be next lol.

On the remaining highlighted text, in his hangout route Heizou Talks Fraud we can see how Heizou does reinsert previous minor offenders to act as his eyes and ears in the streets, and in Kuki Shinobu's voiceline titled Shikanoin Heizou, Heizou regularly buys information off of the Arataki gang in exchange of good words whenever Shinobu bails them out.

While Heizou reinserts minor offenders, we can see that his attitude towards what I call assertive criminals (ie.: criminals that knew they were commiting a crime and didn't care nor showed remorse) is pretty strict and even irritated in some cases. After all, he hates the abstract concept of 'Crime' and everything it means, but he is also very cunning and knows how to make use of those assertive criminals.

Meanwhile, like the literary Hasegawa, he is pretty forgiving and merciful towards accidental criminals. In the route of Long-Sealed Mystery, he didn't want to involve Ryuuji with the murder more than he was involved and didn't include it in the final case paperwork; and when the whole debacle with smuggled goods happened in The Missing Thing, Heizou decided to stick around instead of making things difficult for Sangonomiya, but still with a warning to Gorou to not lie to him again.

All in all, I think it is pretty obvious how the novels and the character 'Heizou' relate to one another. Obviously, a lot of details were changed, but the connection is undeniable.

As final message, I have to say that I did not have the pleasure nor the time to read the novels, but I encourage everyone who wishes to know more about the source material to give it a read if they can! This analysis is not really a deep dive into the parallels of the work and the game, mainly a word-vomit on a topic I had been very interested for some time but had not the chance to really look up.

I close this big post with well wishes <3 anyone who wants to share or debate or anything (as long as it is politely!) is very welcome to do so!

[inosukenumberonefan]

How to catch Kokushibo's eye

Unlike upper rank 2 and 3 I belive he would go for a demon because they're isn't any circumstances where a human would cross his path and live.

You'd have to upper rank 2 or 3 because I feel the only way to get to really talk to him would be challenging him to a blood battle or being assigned a mission with him (Or you could harm one of the demons that are above you but he prolly would dislike you for that)

In these two scenarios you'd have to be about the strength of upper 2 or 3 because

In a mission you have to be as close as you could be to be able to keep up with him and not hold him back.

In a blood battle if you were upper 4 5 or 6 he' wipe the floor with you and absorb you for being so naive and stupid and if you somehow managed to beat him and leave him alive bro would never recover and never talk to you again. (Inferioty complex gonna hit hard)

In both of these scenarios you'd have to be have a specific personality for him not to despise you.

His ideal personality:

Queit: Hes not much of a talker but that does not mean he's a listener after about 30 seconds of you raving or talking about someone not "work" related he gets annoyed. (I headcanon him as not liking loud noises either)

Most of your time spent with him will be in comfortable silence and small talk so you need to be down for that

Loyal: This has been established in the manga that he very highly believes in the hierarchy of the demons so he would not like someone who frequently does not listen to Muzan or complains (I belive the reason he let Akaza live was because of his loyalty to Muzan)

Serious: This is pretty self explanatory. Bro does not like goofing around and he takes getting stronger and being a demon VERY serious so someone who doesn't he'll label them as a distraction and annoyance

Calm: He prefers queit and tranquility so someone who doesn't freak out and get hyper or whatever is VERY MUCH preferred. He needs someone who will address him calmly instead of freezing up in fear (still gotta treat him with respect)

Extra points!

Sharing the same ideals as him which is doing anything to get stronger and training very hard.

Being a training buddy (will elaborate more on this later)

Using a katana as a weapon.

Being turned into a demon by Kokushibo

For age you can either be a super old demon 300-500 years (like him) were you've slowly climbed the ranks maybe going up a rank every 50 or so years until finally you challenge him.

Or....

You can be a baby demon 0-50 years. (The younger you are the more impressed he is) it takes a demon roughly 55-100 to devour enough humans to become an upper rank so being able to climb the ranks faster then most, to him that condems respect.

NOW I HAVE A VISION!

Imagine you're a baby demon just recently turned, you were a previous demon slayer a Hashira or Kinoe. Your skills and powers were already great but now they're out of this world. You've climbed the ranks fast and managed to secure a position in the upper ranks.

Now stick with me... Your BDA is related to your swordsmanship (like Kokushibo's 😽) so you seek him out here's the scene.

"Am I right to assume you used to be a demon slayer Kokushibo-sama?" He stands there contemplating his response or whether or not he should respond.

"As were you." You nod.

"Your blood demon art and sword skill truly are something to behold." You compliment and he tenses up at the praise. "Mines actually quite similar-."

"I have important matters to attend to. Please don't waste my time with formalities." He interrupts.

"I was hoping to find a sparring partner." He wasn't very expressive but you could tell he did not want to do that AT ALL. "I understand your reservations but I do belive its been some time since you've gotta a proper fight and not that I don't find you immensely strong but the Hashira's of this era are out of the world especially with them unlocking the mark, it would be a terrible for any of us to die because we haven't gotten proper practice."

It takes him a while but he agrees because you're also fighting with a katana like a demon slayer and you're matching the power of a hashira so it's a good agreement!

[jujumin-translates]

[A3!] ★ Main Story | Act 14 - DREAM CATCHER | Episode 12 - Established Reputation

Tenma: Looks like we still have a little time before the film festival.

Izumi: That said, I don’t know if we have enough time to actually go sightseeing somewhere…

Misumi: Let’s just walk around~!

Muku: Just wandering around the area for a bit would be pretty fun!

Kumon: Oh, there’s a park over there!

Kazunari: Let’s go, let’s go!

Yuki: Whether we’re in Japan or the U.S., you’re all still the same.

Izumi: That’s just one of the nice qualities of Summer Troupe.

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

Misumi: Ah! They’re drawing pictures~!

Kazunari: Looks like it’s chalk art.

Muku: It looks like they’re handing out chalk to people. I wonder if it’s some kind of event.

Young Man: 《Do you guys want to try drawing something too?》

Kazunari: 《Really? We’d love to!》

Young Man: 《Here you go!》

Yuki: We’re allowed to draw something?

Kazunari: Yep, seems like it. I wonder what I should draw~.

Misumi: I think you should draw a picture that looks like Summer Troupe in a triangle~.

Kazunari: Then if I do something like this~...

Kumon: Hey, we should try drawing something too!

Muku: Sounds like fun!

Kumon: Let me go borrow some chalk~.

*Kumon runs off*

Young Man: …

Young Man: 《You’re good. Are you Japanese?》

Kazunari: 《Yeah. I’m a designer.》

Young Man: 《Really! I’m studying design too. I’m studying abroad from Spain. I thought about maybe studying manga in Japan, actually.》

Kazunari: 《Really? You should someday! How are you liking studying abroad?》

Young Man: 《It’s really inspiring. It’s made me realize that the world I had been seeing was really small.》

Young Man: 《I knew there was lots of moving art and design not only here but all over the world, but I never realized how important it is to actually see and touch it.》

Young Man: 《I’m bursting with ideas. Thanks to this, every day is filled with enrichment for me. Stimulation is really important.》

Young Man: 《I’ll definitely go to Japan someday. Well then, have a nice day.》

Kazunari: …

Kazunari: Stimulation, huh…

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

Kumon: Whoa~! Gorgeous! There’s so many Hollywood celebs!

Muku: That person was in the movie directed by Jim Cooper we saw the other day!

Kumon: Oh, you’re right! That movie was really interesting!

Izumi: It really is amazing to see the person themselves right in front of you like this.

Yuki: Seeing everyone so dressed up like this really is a sight to behold.

Kazunari: I’m gonna take tons of pics to post on Inste!

Kumon: Huh? That person is Tenma-san’s--.

Issei: Hello.

Kazunari: Issei Sumeragi-san!

Issei: Good to see all of you.

Tenma: It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, after all.

Izumi: Thank you so much for this invitation. It really was too kind of you to cover everything including the cost--.

Issei: It was nothing. Summer Troupe’s growth is also Tenma’s growth, so don’t worry about it.

???: 《Oh? Issei, is that who I think it is?》

Issei: 《Allow me to introduce you. This is my son Tenma.》

Muku: !! It’s Director Jim Cooper…!

Kumon: I-It really is!! U-U-U-Umm, can I please get your autograph!?

Jim: 《Haha, here you are.》

Kumon: T-Thank you!

Jim: 《You’re welcome.》

Jim: 《Right, Tenma, I streamed your movie the other day.》

Jim: 《Your acting was so impressive that I looked up your name and found out that your family name is Sumeragi.》

Jim: 《So I checked with Issei to see if it was what I thought.》

Tenma: Umm…

Kazunari: He said he streamed your movie the other day, TenTen~. After that, he looked up your name and found out that you’re Issei-san’s son.

Tenma: 《Thank you.》

Muku: It’s amazing that Director Jim Cooper knows your name, Tenma-kun…!

Kumon: Yeah, yeah!

Jim: 《I look forward to working with you one day.》

Kazunari: He said he looks forward to working with you!

Tenma: 《...Likewise.》

Kumon: That’s amazing!

Kazunari: We’ve got TenTen Mr. Worldwide over here!

Issei: Well then, we can’t stay with you, but please do enjoy yourselves.

Izumi: Thank you so much!

Izumi: (I’ve experienced Tenma-kun’s popularity first-hand back in Japan, but I never expected his popularity would go beyond the ocean…)

*Thud*

Izumi: 《Ah, I’m sor--.》

Suspicious Man: --.

*Supicious man runs off*

Izumi: (What was that about? He ran off like he was in a panic. I guess he was in a hurry or something.)

Yuki: You okay?

Izumi: Yeah…

Muku: I’ve heard there’s lots of pickpockets overseas, so you have to be careful when you’re distracted in big crowds like this.

Izumi: (Wait--.)

Izumi: !!! My purse is gone!

Muku: Huh!?

Yuki: So was that a pickpocket just now?

Misumi: We’ve gotta catch him!

*Misumi runs off*

Kazunari: 《That man’s a pickpocket! After him!》

Misumi: Move, move~!

Izumi: (It’s impossible to escape through a crowd like this--.)

???: 《--Alright, alright, okay, stop right there!》

Suspicious Man: 《!? 〇✖⬤✖✖!》

???: Hah?

*Punch*

Suspicious Man: Ugh--.

Ibuki: 《Tch… Don’t think you can screw with Ibuki just ‘cause they’re cute! ✖✖〇⬤✖!》

Izumi: I have no clue what they’re saying, but I feel like I heard some pretty not nice words in there…

Kumon: Wait, is that…?

Ibuki: Huh!? ManPani Gang! 

Kumon: It’s actually Ibukichi!?

Ibuki: What are y’all doing here?

Kazunari: That should be our line!

[ ⇠ Previous Part ] • [ Next Part ⇢ ]

[yamcha-thelonewolf]

How would you feel if Toriyama made Yamcha a fighter again and was actually stronger this time? I'll always be thinking how when he smacked Beerus in the back he made a face. What if he wasn't taken just by surprise that he did it but by the power behind it?

Like what if Toriyama did Yamcha dirty and decided he's not strong unless he does not want to fight?

Good question. Yamcha is still a fighter, for me. He never really gave up, even though what DBS showed us seems to say otherwise. I can't accept the fact that he threw in the towel, that was never like him. Yamcha always shows to us, in his own way, that he still has a passion for martial arts. Get it? Martial arts. That thing that long ago in Dragon Ball was the leitmotif of the whole story.

However, I don't think Yamcha has really stopped believing in his potential. It is virtually impossible to do so after reaching such a power level that makes him literally one of the strongest human beings in the world. Plus if we consider the fact that, between him, Tien and Kuririn, Yamcha's features are the most "normal" (he's got a nose and only two eyes) we can also safely say that Yamcha is the strongest human being in the world.

Okay, this is a bit of nonsense that I sometimes like to bring up.... But think about it, it might as well be so if we have to be really precise.

«JUST LOOK HOW SERIOUS HUMAN MY FACE IS!»

So, I would just be happy if his warrior attitude, that was never really buried, was put on display again. Even a little sentence, a hint, a tiny scene where he is seen fighting or training with one of his friends... That would be enough for me.

Yeah, something like that... Dragon Buddies.

For example, I am so glad that he made his return in Moro Arc as a Z-Fighter; I would like to see the animated version of his moment. Unfortunately, I think this is not the beginning of his rebirth. I have always thought that Yamcha's only enemy is Yamcha himself, and partly so, but the truth is that the real villain of his story is Akira Toriyama himself. It pains me to admit it, but it is so. I can't understand why he is pandering so much to the idiocy of the DB fandom making fun of Yamcha.

Yamcha laughing at memes about Yamcha knowing that he could destroy everyone with one finger.

The hell, even in Majin Buu Arc he was amazing. All right, I know, they're fillers, but you want me to be honest? The fillers took better care of him than the canon episodes and the manga. I mean, at the beginning he was presented to us as a 40-year-old man who had now given up martial arts for good, wearing a banana yellow suit, expensive and sadly unsuitable for battles. He just doesn't seem to want to hear about it. But then, after several episodes of him goofing off or being a fanboy in the stands, like everyone else Yamcha dies, and it is in the afterlife that his will to fight is reawakened after so long. As it was with King Kai before. For those who have followed him from the beginning of Dragon Ball, to be able to see Yamcha again happy, excited and strong, with his uniform on like the old days, is a joy to behold.

Relative joy.

Guys, I can't accept the fact that Yamcha has to be dead to feel even more alive, or even worse that his existence depends only on fillers. Yes, I know, it's still better than nothing, though...

Another good job was also done by the OVA Dragon Ball: The Return of Son Goku and Friends!, probably the last work that remembers that Yamcha also exists and especially treats him as a very valuable fighter. I'll talk about it.

This moment is still one of my favorite. It is one of the most badass things about Yamcha, plus it reminds me so much of a scene where Tarzan does the same...

Look! On one side we have the ape man (no, not a saiyan), on the other side the wolf man... Damn, I love it! Well, maybe I'm digressing, but it is curious to notice how the act of undressing is cathartic for both characters. They both strip off a garment that does not really belong to them and wildly bring out their true nature, their animal instincts, but most of all their desire to protect those they love. That's Yamcha. After all, who says Yamcha has to save the world to redeem himself as a character? He can also do so by protecting someone. That is something he can do very well, and I will prove it to you. Anyway, I sincerely hope that his role in the world of Dragon Ball will also be recognized in DBS. I also hope he can use again even his sword, but unfortunately he became a meme and, apart from the Moro Arc, we only saw him slaughtered and humiliated even by his own friends. This is the saddest thing that could have happened, also because in OG Dragon Ball it would NEVER have happened. There is no more demeaning thing than seeing Goku completely ignore one of his close friends, one of the first, and treat him as if he were worth less than zero. Seriously... WTF?! The Goku I love would never have done that.

Alright, that's the real Goku! Thank you!

I mean, maybe Goku wouldn't have invited him to the Tournament anyway, but at least he would have stopped in front of him to say a few comfortably words. As he once did.

Because, you know, that's what you do with friends and those who have been there for you in the good and in the worst of times. Let us remember that Yamcha took care of Goku together with Chichi when the virus struck him in the heart...

Well, I try hard to think that this is all a joke, though I doubt it. I strive to think that the whole attitude that the characters have had in DBS toward Yamcha is just the result of a studied plan to piss him off and spur him to undress again and howl like he used to. But... I know it's not.

Therefore, even though Moro Arc slightly brought our Z warrior back to the forefront and confirmed that Yamcha is still very strong, I still do not consider myself satisfied. What I would like more than anything else is just a confrontation between him and the protagonist, Goku, in which the saiyan helps him believe in himself again. And if it is not Goku, someone else is fine as long as Yamcha is reconsidered with dignity.

I don't think I'm asking for that much. Goku has helped so many people, dinosaurs, mice, monkeys, strangers he has met only once in his life, even bad guys... So why not help the first character who consciously believed in his abilities?

...Guess I have started a new topic. I will definitely talk about the relationship between Yamcha and Goku as soon as I can. Being the main character, a positive assessment of Yamcha by Goku could change the current idea of this character and make him much stronger as a result. I mean, Goku is the Mr. Satan of the real world. What he says is the truth, so it is only up to him to make sure that Yamcha can come back stronger than before.

Thanks for asking! 💕

[centrally-unplanned]

Comic Box 1997 End of Evangelion Issue - Archive Scan

Comic Box was a magazine in Japan launched in, from what I can gather, 1982. It was a bit of an ‘alt” magazine - it has an imprint, Comic Box Jr, which focused on doujinshi for example - and would cover anything anime-adjacent, including western films. The October 1997 release of the magazine was dedicated to the release of the End of Evangelion film, and to answering the question “what was the phenomenon called Evangelion?”. Towards that end it features fan submissions, art, comics, essays, all talking about what Eva meant to them. Some are serious, some are fully comedic, way way more than I expected are erotic, and overall it is a time capsule of how the anime community was thinking about Evangelion when EoE came out. The magazine dissolved in 1998 from what I can tell, so this was one of its last releases - you can still see its absolutely vintage website here! Complete with dashing chibi cat gif.

I discovered this magazine through japanese anime/manga archivist-in-residence ehoba on twitter, who provided photos and rough summaries of some of the pages. They are just camera photos of an open magazine though, not scans, and not at all complete. I hunted around for a while to find a scanned version, messaged ehoba and a few others, posted on forums like Evageeks, and drew total blanks. I couldn’t find any listings of it online, so I set the quest aside...until I was placing another order for some artbooks for import and decide to check Yahoo Auctions Japan and lo and behold, there is was! It arrived this week.

So that image above is not one pulled from the internet - I have scanned the entire Evangelion segment of Comic Box - October 1997 issue. I am a neophyte scanner & image editor, these aren’t gonna be amazing or anything, but while I hope to make a more polished version I wanted to share the drafts now. I really aspire to translate it, but of course I don’t speak Japanese, so I am going to see how far working with some people I know and brute-forcing with AI would go. If you are interested or know someone who would be, definitely reach out! 100% would crowdsource this. If someone already scanned and translated this, also let me know, I would groan heavily and curse my google skills but i’d rather it be available and know, and not waste time.

Below will be some reduced-down PNG’s of the magazine to fit Tumblr image limits with Ehoba’s notes and a few of my own attached to them. A link to the full images as a singular PDF is on the Internet Archive [Here]

A reflection of a very known thing in this magazine is that, from my perspective, End of Evangelion is definitely Asuka’s moment to shine, but it didn’t matter because the 90′s Eva fandom *loved* Rei. She was the most popular by far, and I think dethroned Sailor Mercury on the ‘best girl’ polls in magazines of the era. Nowadays if you poll audiences - as the NHK did recently - Asuka is the most popular girl, but it was a different, proto-moe-boom time.

"Evangelion was fake. A fake made by one director, or by the staff. However, it was a very real fake. God, it was so good."

Watermelon Kaji absolute goat here; so cool indeed

How much Asuka is suffering in all these images vs god-salvation Rei is, again, saying alot about the waifu wars.

"I don't think episode 25 and 26 were professional work. I understand that the ADR script and previews with layout sheets are supposed to be avant-garde, but something is wrong with it." "TV show is not an individual's job, so I wanted them to deal with the schedule limitation."

90% sure this Asuka ‘escaped’ and I saw it on the internet in the early 2000′s - maybe the author published it elsewhere in a doujin, I assume a lot of this art would have been repurposed for other mediums.

Honestly the art is incredible for this magazine sometimes, the splash pages they have are filled with Evangelion’s anime-spiritual energy.

"Unit 02 has a mouth, which means it can give a blow job." "The biggest surprise is Rei in cowgirl position. The official content does that, so hentai authors have nothing to do."

(Gainax putting hard-working hentai doujin authors out of a job, what assholes!)

"My heated up feeling toward Evangelion was quick-freezed by episode 25 and 26. EoE defrosted it, but now I feel distant from Evangelion."

How much Episode 25-26 come up here is great evidence for how divisive they were - End of Eva is absolutely seen as commentary on, and opposition to, the TV ending. I think in the west the initial reception of the original ending is overall more positive? Certainly nowadays, would be curious how it is seen in Japan today.

OCR’ing this image will literally murder me, pls I can’t

"Bullshit plot, surficial information, shallow dialogues, inconsistent direction, story with tons of plot holes, the director's masturbation, the otaku's useless attempt to enlighten other otaku..." "BUT I LOVE IT."

10/10 take

"'Sincerity' of someone I don't like just confirms that I still don't like them. Anno apparently thought that honest depiction of himself can be depiction of otaku, but that's not wrong. Anno is exceptionally creepy."

God-tier Anno portrait here. I love how many of this art showcases “settings” from End of Eva and which ones hit the audience - re-using the movie theatre seats for Shinji, that is really cool!

Evangelion - Slayers edition! The artist names are in the black box panel on the page lining, I absolutely hope to track down a few of them and see what kind of works they made.

"I think each material of Evangelion was nothing new. In the early half, however, I was moved by their techniques of arranging and remixing those materials." "Creators' strong desire for expression supported this story, but I'm not sure."

"Adam and Eve in the Eden East" "I hope they will live happily after the ending."

"The theater was like a funeral after the screening. No, I should say it was a literal funeral. Evangelion ended, it died. In terms of entertainment, Evangelion was completely and brilliantly killed."

Kaworu’s insta-inclusion into the ranks of the kid cast is always amusing to me; he is in one episode of the show after all, barely in Eva! But he is all over the art immediately. The power of design - and also being one of the first gay characters on television (as opposed to OVA’s) in Japan.

Hopefully if I can make progress on translation I can have actual thoughts to add to the scan, certainly I will post results if I get them.

I value, way too deeply to be honest, the preservation of the other side of the ‘media mix’ - how people responded to the media in question and what it meant to them. It is way more likely to be lost than the media itself or documents from the production side. May this contribution to preserving a bit of that experience be of value to those out there who would be interested in the history of Evangelion, and anime more generally.

If you think you know anyone or your followers overall would be interested in translation help, I would appreciate the broadcasting!

[plushmayhem]

Progress talk thread

I like to take a lot of backups as I draw so we I can show off my widdle Lilly wips!! I'm drawing again that means I get to talk about drawing again yahoo

Lately when starting a drawing I've been trying to block out very rough thumbnails as seen above! I usually just start drawing like, the head, and trying to then figure out a body under neath and line by line it all ends up pretty similar to my past stuff because it's just not planned out! I don't know where the road is taking me!

So by starting out and trying to throw together the general pose with just a blown up light brush I'm coming up with much more interesting piece! I can figure out the general shape of the entire piece and then start working on top. No making a shoulder then drawing the hand over it and then erasing the shoulder and getting frustrated because it just doesn't look connected right because I didn't plan it out… where does this drawing end? where's the limits?? where am I going?? So my current workflow involves

Make the dimensions of the piece roughly (just throw a coloured rectangle down) -> very roughly block out the shape of the body within it

This also has the benefit of inspiring me to fill in the blanks with a pose I didn't initially expect! The body is reversed from my initial vague idea because seeing the blobs made me go OH IT'D BE COOL IF I DID IT WITH THE BODY FACING THIS DIRECTION ACTUALLY LET'S MAKE THAT WORK!! If you look at the initial you can kinda see it looks more like she's looking down at you with the raised arm being the one facing you.

Anyways after doing my personal Holiday pic the other day, I was like, it would be cool to do a small run of postcards to send to people yahoo!! I checked the sizes of postcards and none were even close! They all had like an extra inch on of extra space on the bottom whoops! I free style my rectangle sizes when planning an illustration and I guess they're closer to square than the ideal rectangle! Whoops!

So for this one after getting the initial sketch down I thought, hey how close is this to 5x7? AND LO AND BEHOLD IT WAS THE SAME ISSUE!!! So I took filling out the extra space as a challenge. I'm trying to be more dynamic with my art after all!

I spent time adjusting the piece in sai2 using the transform tool with it's perspective skewing on. I wiggled and rotated and pushed n pulled and you get what you see above. A much more dynamic piece filling out the canvas!

The thing that took the most time in this phase was getting the skirt to a shape I found acceptable.

Up next was moving towards making it a finished piece!

Thick lineart is something I've been deciding if I want to stick with or not but honestly it's my natural state! I love thick lineart!! I grew up on manga I wanna see some black lines!!! In the future I wanna go back to colouring lineart as well but for now I believe I need to lean into my natural tendencies for thick lines!

I threw down my lineart to a mostly acceptable state, and brainstormed ways to fill the empty space surrounding Lilly. I found there was just a lot of empty space in the bottom left and I didn't really solve that in the final, but that's ok. It's something I'm trying to be aware of as I actually attempt illustrations. I want to finish pieces right now, I'm not in a place where I can let perfectionism slow me down.

Currently my layers are (face) and (lineart) I throw down some flat colours, a light layer above and for once I tried a shade layer too! It might of been a multiply layer. It was probably was. Anyways this is what I was happy with before moving forward with refining it. I'm currently going with more focus on like, backlighting/rimlighting because it's easier to make it work with my no context existing in da void illustrations haha.

To refine it, right now, I'm playing around with mainly using one layer. So I slammed together my layers other than the face (I made that mistake with my previous piece and that's how we ended up with the eyebrow incident. I wasn't going to put myself in a place where I had to erase an eyebrow again) and started sculpting!

I think sculpting is the best way to describe it, really. It's a lot of slamming down chunky lines, and since the lineart is on the same layer, I'm constantly pushing colours out and finding the ideal shape of both it and the lineart. It helps me push my shapes even farther and let the colours take priority when they need to. Instead of them being separate things I worry about they're all just one big piece!

I was a bit worried about merging the plaid pattern down as well, but I did my best to get the skirt in a place I wasn't going to adjust much after the merge. That was the biggest priority of the previous step really.

It's a lot of fun! I recommend people try it! Try sculpting your lineart a bit!

I added the necklace accessory after since I knew trying to fit it in earlier would also be a pain in the ass haha. I'm not a one layer purist! I'm just having fun!

The background, I went in with no idea for a bg. So this is what we get. I think it works fine for this piece, it's a vtuber attacking you with big fluffy bear claws with no context other than that they are a bear and they're going to fucking get you. Red fits, Lilly has a very orange/red hued design and it's an aggressive attack so the mood works. I could of even gone harder and made it look a bit more splattery but I wasn't sure if I was going to fill up the bottom left space or not.

Looking back maybe I could fit in her name on a cool blood splatter there but I am not a graphic design major my brain is growing slowly in this department thank you

Also fluffy claw gloves usually have much less defined fingers but I couldn't make mitts look good with my initial plans so I stuck with my initial idea!!! Thank u.

Anyways follow Lilly [Twitch]

[boxbot]

Hi there! I'm Vandy!

╔══•●•══╗ ∘₊✧─────────────────────✧₊∘ This acc was created when I was REALLY young so I'm finally repurposing it for actual use now! Behold, introductory post! ∘₊✧─────────────────────✧₊∘ ✧.* My pronouns are he/him ! ✧.* ENG/ESP ! I speak both fluently! En confianza háblame en cualquiera de los dos idiomas! ◝(^⌣ ^)◜ ✧.* I'm a trad/digital artist with a interest in illustrative arts ✧.* I'm diabetic and in school so most of my comms go into funding for my insulin and sensors (＾＾)ｂ ✧.* I'm more active on my insta and twitter! If you want more of my art it is more frequently found on both sites! (mostly insta ngl)! ✧.* I sell MLP/MISC adopts at my Toyhouse! If you're interested in buying designs or just checking out some OC pages I have put up there check the link out! ✧.* I'm working on my webcomic on the side of working on comms or friend projects! It's a slow process but one day I'll have something to show for it! ✧.* I LOVE ROBOTS!!! ٩( ᗒᗨᗕ )۶ SO MUCH!!! ∘₊✧─────────────────────✧₊∘ My interests! ∘₊✧─────────────────────✧₊∘ ⋆ ★ULTRAKILL ⋆ ★FNAF ⋆ ★Vocaloid ⋆ ★KinitoPET ⋆ ★World of Horror ⋆ ★Shipwrecked 64 ⋆ ★Junji Ito ⋆ ★Maximum the Hormone ⋆ ★Tallah ⋆ ★Pierce the Veil ⋆ ★VSynth ⋆ ★Criminal Interrogations ⋆ ★ROBOTS! MECHAS! ANDRIODS! CYBORGS! ⋆ ★Psychological Horror ⋆ ★Early 2000s Internet Culture ⋆ ★Manga/ Light Novels ⋆ ★Poetry ⋆ ★Teeth ⋆ ★La Casa de Papel ⋆ ★El Chavo del Ocho ⋆ ★60 Seconds ⋆ ★Zombies ⋆ ★YAZUKA ⋆ ★Sonic The Hedgehog ⋆ ★MLP ⋆ ★Get Scared ⋆ ★Sally Face ∘₊✧───────────────────────✧₊∘ Don't be afraid to reach out or ask me whatever!! I'm a multi-fandom type of person so it's very likely that we could have something in common!! Thank you for reading down to this point! ∘₊✧───────────────────────✧₊∘ ╚══•●•══╝

[giggly-squiggily]

🧍‍♀️ behold, it is I, again.

Okay oKAY LAST ONE I SWEAR AKSNDKBCJDB

okay sk8 pART TWO

OKAY OKAY SO !!!

I think that Hiromi is someone who grew up in a lower class household. He’s never understood the lives of those who grew up differently.

He totally follows behind the kids in the restaurant, turning off every light that they leave on. “We don’t own the utility company!” He’d say.

Here’s the HC-

Hiromi is always the first person on EVERYONE’S mind whenever they are at a place with mementos.

At the bookstore? Langa’s buying him the newest volume of his favorite manga.

On vacation? Reki is buying the DUMBEST tourist trap knickknacks. (I’m talking a sticker that says the name of the vacation destination but it’s misspelled and there’s clip art of a lobster on it)

At the grocery store? Cherry is buying a box of brownie mix and some walnuts so that he can make him a little treat. (Joe gets absolutely LIVID over the fact that Cherry would insult him by buying boxed mix)

THESE ARE JUST A FEW SILLY IDEAS 🤭

ILY SQUIGGLY THANK YOU FOR DOING WHAT YOU DO

{Headcanons to Dabbles: CLOSED!}

SHADOW BELOVED KLJRJKEKJRKJERKJEWJKRJKE I freaking love this-GAWD! ILY too Ducky- these are so beyond sweet and I'm grateful for the kind words! I've gotcha covered :3

Growing up in a low income home, Hiromi made it a point to practice fugal behavior in his day to day life. It was rare he ever treated himself or let himself be treated to nice things.

 On Hiromi’s shelf, an assortment of items sat.

~~~

“Langa! Turn off the lights when you leave a room! You don’t pay the- oh, you’re in here.” Hiromi blinked when his gaze fell upon the blue haired teen. “Sorry- I should have checked.”

“It’s fine. I erm- I have something for you.” Langa shuffled on his feet before shoving a bag forward, pressing it into Hiromi’s hands. “You’re reading them, right? The newest issue came out- and I figured you’d deserve a new copy instead of those bent ones you always buy. Okay later!” He was out the door as quick as he came.

Hiromi stared down at the bag, eyes wide as he pulled out the crisp manga. “Oh…he remembered…wait-LANGA THE LIGHT!”

~~~

“We’re BACK!” Reki yelled in glee as he walked into the hotel room, a bag of souvenirs over his arm. Miya shuffled in after him, eyes glued to his gaming system before he tumbled into the bed, still playing. “They had the coolest things, Shadow! Look what I got!”

“Reki, I know you like knicknacks, but don’t you think they’re a bit of a waste? They’re so overpriced-is that a dog?” Hiromi blinked as Reki cackled, waving the dog statue keychain around in glee. “‘Welcome to Shiboobya.”

“I KNOW! What a wild find!” Without much warning, he pressed the keychain into Hiromi’s hands, closing his fingers around it. “I couldn’t find one with your name on it, so you are now called ‘Hito’! Take pride in your new identity!”

“You should see Reki’s. He’s now known as “Rin”.” Miya shrugged, earning another round of cackles from the redhead.

~~~

“You FIEND.”

“You’re just mad I thought of this first.”

“That’s not the issue- BOXED MIX? Who do you think you are, bringing that trash into this house?”

“Tch. So dramatic.” Cherry rolled his eyes as he poured the remaining brownie batter into the greased up tray, pushing the bowl and spoon over to Hiromi with a cheeky grin. “Boxed batter is just as tasty as homemade, you elitist gorilla.”

“Oh that is RICH coming from the guy who’s favorite snack is Castella!” Joe fumed, shaking his head as Cherry put the brownies into the oven. “I hope they’re as burnt and dry as they look on the box when they’re done.”

“Good, they’ll match your complexion.” Cherry snickered, laughing harder when Joe tasered his ribs from behind.

Hiromi watched them with a soft smile, taking the abandoned spatula and giving it a lick.

Joe really was being dramatic. Boxed brownies were delicious.

~~~

A manga- the only one in the series with crisp edges still, a fading Hachiko Statue with a misspelled city and wrong name, an assortment of pictures of their slightly dry but delicious brownies, and a framed photograph of all of them together. 

These were Hiromi’s treasures.

[bbnibini]

hi hi! some ask game questions for your lilith <3 so cool to see people flesh her out more, shes such a fascinating character!

01: What's their relationship with MC (if they exist alongside this AU Lilith)?

04: What do they look like? Do you have a picture/picrew of what you envision them to look like?

08: Anything you heavily associate with them? A color, a word, a picture, or something else?

11: Bonus: something else you really want to share about them that isn't mentioned on here ♡

Hi there! Thanks for the ask! c: I really liked how Lilith turned out in writing; she's really fun to write about and I wish there's more of her in the game. It's great that she has more lore in NB. Agreed! She's such a cool grandma💖.

01: What's their relationship with MC (if they exist alongside this AU Lilith)?

Unfortunately, they don't really know each other cause she's dead. :( For some reason, I think of her like the type of grandma who likes feeding their grandkid and sneaking them out to chill in amusement parks or malls on a weekday. She has such a fun, rebellious and unhinged nature that MC also has canonly in the game and it's really interesting to see! 04: What do they look like? Do you have a picture/picrew of what you envision them to look like?

Designing and art isn't my forte so I just based off her looks on the manga version of Lilith.

I did commission some art pieces of her with Samael and Levi! (Please note Samael is an OC-fied version of Simeon and is not an angel nor related to anyone in the Celestial Realm. It's complicated but his "Simeon" appearance is borrowed from a close friend. He actually doesn't look like that. If he were given a more human-like form, he would look more like an older version of Levi Her looks and colour palette are intentionally the same with Satan because Satan was made in her image (Lucifer was thinking about her when they fell). There's some of Lilith's traits that are reminiscent of Satan as well: her being a book nerd, her curiosity, her tendency to prank Lucifer, etc.

She always wears a flower on her hair; typically Abyssal Carnations (which are just carnations IRL but are much rarer since they're grown in the darkness/the AU's version of the underworld where Samael governs)

08: Anything you heavily associate with them? A color, a word, a picture, or something else?

Despite carnations being her favourite flower, I think of "lily/lilies" fitting her a lot. Not because of the flower itself but a passage from "Song of Solomon" which actually inspired the title of the spinoff I wrote before(and also her human name!):

"I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me...The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies." -Song of Solomon

11: Bonus: something else you really want to share about them that isn't mentioned on here ♡

I actually shared some things about Lilith on another RB, if you want to take a look, you can click here!

Most of her lore such as her being rebellious and sassy and being "friends" (they're married and she's down bad) with Samael is taken from lore and RL references. Samael and Leviathan being biological siblings is a creative liberty, mostly because some texts refer Samael as the serpent/connected to the serpent (depending on the source) who tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Since Levi also is associated with snakes and serpents, I was like "Wow you know what would be interesting-" and glad I made the choice since canon NB is vague enough for me to interpret Levi and Simeon's relationship to be familial. I'm glad canon also made Levi one of the reasons why Simeon wrote TSL ;w: I love Lilith's, Samael's and Levi's family dynamics so much!

[onedivinemisfit]

2022 Creator’s Self-Love Extravaganza

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 favorite works (fics, art, edits, etc.) you’ve created this year and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you’ve brought into the world in 2022. If you don’t have five published works, that’s fine! Include ideas/drafts/whatever you like that you’ve worked on/thought about, and talk a little about them instead! Remember, this is all about self-love and positive enthusiasm, so fuck the rules if you need to. Have fun, and tag as many fellow creators as you like so they can share the love!

Tagged by @bubblesthemonsterartist tho I daresay I am fashionably late at this point, more than two weeks into the new year. Did I forget? Maaaaybe. Which brings us right to the main problem;

I barely remember. Like. 2022. At all. Things happened, I’m sure, but it’s as if there’s a fine layer of mist atop my memories, stopping me from really seeing them. Last year wasn’t really very kind to me. For every up, three downs followed, and between two failed surgeries, a bout of covid, and then whatever the hell kind of flare happened in the autumn… yeah. Idek. It is what it is.

As such, I can’t really comment on my art as like, a whole process, this year. It just existed in the ‘now’, which is presently the ‘then’. I know I beat my submission record from last year, but it felt like a meaningless victory. Despite everything, I can feel it in my hand now, when I draw, that some progress has been made. Subconsciously perhaps, but it’s there.

Onto the ranking then! (I just had to pull up the archive cuz fuck if I remember what I posted, and when)

1.

*deep sigh* we all saw this coming, didn’t we? As much as I love, I curse this image, for in hindsight it felt as if all my creative energy for the entire damned year went into this one piece! Like how dare! But yes it is one of my best redraws ever, and more so than the characters, I feel like I added to the background something even better than the original. There, I said it.

2.

Omigod this entire thiiiiiing. Were it not for the redraw, this would be the top spot. I can’t explain, so many ideas are left in the brain for countless hours, days, months, YEARS. This was two years in the making, and never before did I manage to recreate something that had the exact same vibe as it looked in my imagination. Especially because I’m not a comic creator, hashtag compulsive disclaimer lol. Also while I was drawing it, seeing people go from “hmmm what’s this?” to “wait is that-?” and then “ooooooh it is the lead-up to The Thing” was priceless.

3.

A last-second outlier comes in third. I admit to making this in a hurry, just to have something really nice to show for december (a month which is usually a highly productive month to me, but 2022 didn’t let me have that either) and as such, since I was struggling, both with a deadline, and a lack of real inspiration, I feel like. I managed to improve, somehow. Call it magic, but this looks noticeably different to many of my other colored pieces.

4.

To be perfectly honest, this was a sketch. People might not think it one, for it has details, a color scheme, and even effects - but at the time I posted it, this was just a colorized sketch in my mind. Tumblr disagreed. And I was left in awe watching this first get reblogged within the fandom, then beyond, then go through a hanfu appreciation blog, and finally reblogged with a truly tender chinese poem attached that said person felt gave them the same vibe as what I had drawn. The people spoke, and I was both awed and humbled, and I learned a valuable lesson in humanity relating to art.

5.

Unlike the others, this was a conscious attempt at something different. I can’t really say why it should go in the fifth spot, but it does; i spent a lot more time than usual on composition, colors, and most importantly, mood setting. And putting characters so solidly into the middleground can be a challenge in itself for me, as I run the risk of getting storybook-ish. Which would’ve been disastrous for a scene like this.

Honorable mention;

Coping through art. @bubblesthemonsterartist has the honor of inspiring this, or like, being the one to “give me” the go-ahead to channel some of my experiences through the characters and story-telling in general. Back pain is something I know all too well, and it was well and truly therapeutic. I also got to do another test of “can I retell this scene, even if I switch part of the cast and premise?” And it seems I did. I will always remember @what-plant-metaphor-am-i ‘s tag; ‘# I feel like I just watched an entire episode XD’ <- never has my inner storyteller been more validated.

There, that wasn’t so hard! Sometimes I’m really thankful for the internet, and timestamps, and kicking my memory back into gear etc… anyway, since I am so woefully late to the party, I’m not tagging anyone specifically; if you wanna be fashionably late too, you know who tagged you~

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Love Flops

It can be very easy to treat anime, as a presence in the media landscape, as a single unifying perspective that connects to and expresses a singular mindset that is itself directly derived from the cultural perspective of the country in which it is commonly produced, and through doing so, be seen as a voice that reduces a region of billions of people into a compressed cultural parody that we simplify in its description through the title of being orientalism. Which is to say as much as it would be fun to treat, say, the data points of Love Flops and Sword Art Online as if they say something about Japan as a culture and Japan’s relationship to the current and prevailing technological nonproducts of Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, that’s at best a shorthand about trends prevailing in a few scattered examples and in no way indicative of a necessarily extrapolatable truism. It is not through any kind of greater cultural trend that these two anime know dick nothing about the things they claim to be about.

Love Flops is an anime that inspired a manga, and it’s the manga I read because that’s a lot faster than watching a lot of extremely mid anime. The specific reason I investigated it was the implied presence of a potentially interesting trans narrative, and a surprising twist to the narrative, two things that it turns out this anime doesn’t actually have, but also what it has is instead really dumb. Still, to talk about what is going on in this manga, I need to tell you what happens in it and the ending of it is important to that, so here’s the Spoiler Warning. You’re getting the full tengu mask here, I’m not going to elide any details for your enjoyment. Oh and I’m also going to mention something in Revolutionary Girl Utena, which feels almost like an embarrasment. You should watch that first.

And also, if you’re going to investigate this series, just to be clear, here’s a content warning: this story is borderline pornography. I don’t normally talk about ecchi media, but this one seems to have followed a really interesting arc where it started out as an anime that wanted to flirt with the racy material, then got its hand, as it were, under the covers, in the manga, at which point that material stopped being racy and just straight up features extensive sex scenes.

But they’re all imagined, I guess, if that changes how you feel about them.

Behold a protagonist: Asahi. His surrname isn’t important and neither is any actual trait about him. In the harem genre, a landscape of generic nobodies, he is a remarkably bland example of an entity, a unit of story protagonist and an iconographic example of story service. In the great machinery of narrative, he is a grey square lego brick, completely unable to disrupt any of the situations that are meant to lock into his existing slots and tabs. On one completely unremarkable morning, he sees a fortune teller on TV — a historical device for watching ‘broad casts’ from a primitive earlier version of the internet — who gives a list of words that are his lucky terms for the day.

On the way to school, a process that seems to take several hours, he then has a sequence of random run-ins with women that key into the specific keywords. Ooo, fortune tellers are real! That’s an interesting twist! Except in the process these random run-ins include a girl running with toast in her mouth crashing into him lips-first and exposing her underwear (or lack thereof!), a lady with giant boobs crashing them into his hands (or lack thereof!) on the train, a stranger falling down stairs and landing on his face with her crotch (or lack thereof!), interrupting a cleaning robot stealing someone’s underwear (or lack thereof!), and uh, rescuing a young man from being comically sexually assaulted by a dog roughly the size of his thigh (or lack thereof).

And like, this is all done with exactly enough attempt at comedy that you might go: Oh this is an aware story, this knows the tropes it’s doing while it’s delivering this fanservice, so maybe this is going somewhere and making a funny joke about it. You can see the plane coming in for landing here, you know what it’s going to do, you know what’s going to happen now and you just need the story to deliver anything in the process that makes it make sense, to kind of capitalise on the setup.

Anyway, then all these people he had random incidents with are all sitting next to him in his new class, which I understand by the rules of Japanese school involves them being engaged, except the one with the huge boobs that hid his hands on the train and she’s his schoolteacher. Wa wa waaa! It’s four or five harem openings where he had a bunch of meetings with The One True Girl (or boy, there was one boy in that list, don’t forget that) on the way to his first day of school and maybe the narrative wants to pick through that. Though one of them is a teacher and this doesn’t seem to be the kind of story that’s going to do anything difficult there.

And then they’re all at his house.

Because all of them have been part of a negotiated deal with his dad that he needs to marry one of them and they’re just… there. To the point of having built an entire expansion to the house for them to live in. Attached to the house he otherwise lives in alone. In one school day.

Now here’s my question for you, as I had to ask myself, as a reader: How stupid is this being on purpose?

See, the idea of building an entire expansion to the house in less than eight hours is stupid. But is it meant to be stupid, or is it the stupid you’re not meant to examine? In Love Hina, there’s a sequence where a turtle turns into a kaiju and another sequence where a character arrives to pick someone up to school in an immense drilling machine. There are things that any given story shows you that you often filter through the framework of that story’s conventional tropes and expressions of how that story creates and represents its reality. Being able to parse the context of media is part of literacy, and sometimes a story can play with that expectation. Even in really good and cool ways — like in Revolutionary Girl Utena, there comes a revelation in the end of the series that in fact a lot of things you might have imagined were just funny jokes and bit gags in the graphics were in fact real, literal things happening because one of the characters is an actual witch and getting to shape reality according to her story.

And thus the question: How much of your credulity is this series trying to strain?

The rest of the story spills out after this point with a bunch of nonsense that looks like you’d see in a story that was trying to be silly and funny. There’s a bunch of deliberate confusions and exacerbations of the problems he’d already set up, which includes things like the teacher being stalked by international spies, another character endlessly losing her underwear, some more dog-related teasing, and then a character who needs help with her Japanese homework, because she only knows Japanese from watching hentai.

This is where the story settles in, with a series of episodes that escalate, episodic narratives about how Main Character-San (not even familiar enough to be protagonist-kun), gets into some situation with one of these characters, in which a relatively normal doing or going-on is overheard by someone else in the harem, who then imagines a blatantly pornographic interaction between the parties involved. This is where the smut of this series shows up, and it’s almost an interesting idea I haven’t encountered before, where a harem anime gets to include sex scenes of the harems being fulfilled without ever making any of them actually happen and in the process ‘collapse’ the harem polyhedra and end the story.

It does escalate of course. Some of the early plights are about homework. Some of the later ones are about rescuing the teacher from her previous life as a deadly assassin. Some are instead about going to a bathhouse and the strange feelings that come from two dudes negotiating who does and doesn’t want to bone in that kind of social context where they’re just two bros naked and noticing each other’s dicks. There’s an uneven tone here, you see.

Then aliens invade earth and put exploding chastity belts on every male in the world. But don’t worry, one of the girls in the harem is a magical girl who can protect the earth as long as she’s powered up by boning.

I’m almost okay with this, too, because this is an idea I’ve seen in other work, stretched out to its capacity. What Love Flops brings instead is that its story treats all these concepts that are normally full-sized series hooks into instead single-chapter books that are about jamming a bit of a plot around a sex scene that also, probably, doesn’t actually happen. It is however, kind of pushing the boundaries of the world, you don’t get to do alien invasions as an episode of the week in most genres without it having some pretty distinct impact on the world.

Ready?

That’s when our hero wakes up and finds out that he has, in fact, been in a the Matrix where the whole point is teaching an AI program how to be a horny girl who wants to fuck him. Like the whole series is contrived and ridiculous because, surprise! It’s contrived and ridiculous! And those girls he was falling in love with? Don’t worry about them, they’re just AI constructs, they don’t exist!

In the commentary track for Hot Fuzz, Simon Pegg describes the way in which he thinks it’d be funny to end a movie abruptly, cut to black, and start playing Little Spanish Flea as the credits roll on the black. It’s a fun idea, and it leads to Fox and I watching movies together and sometimes interjecting on a cut-to-black with a hummed rendition of Little Spanish Flea.

If this was the Little Spanish Flea moment for Love Flops it would be kind of an amazing conclusion to the story. A whole narrative about how unrealistic relationships and imagined thirst and wants and all that stuff is literally a construct and that any character in the centre of it would need the whole universe literally built to consider their needs, and then what it means to step out of that kind of life and how it can be traumatising, I mean, that’s incredible, right? And all the genre conventions about how stupid the things involved with this story make a lot of sense. The world is literally contrived, there’s no hiding from it!

It’s not, though.

No, instead the finale of this story is about how actually, no, our protagonist doesn’t have to confront the question of what it means to be told a story, doesn’t need to consider those characters that were left behind and grow past them. The story even shows the inner life of those characters in terms of all the pornography they imagine, which I kinda find fun, imagining the idea that when an AI is given freedom to try to understand humans the thing it gets obsessed with is sex, a thing a lot of our cultures are also obsessed with?

Anyway, then the researchers make robot bodies for all these girl characters to plant their identities in and they mail these characters to our hero’s real life house, because the idea of them being objects does not seem to occur to the story. He gets them all! Hoorah! Harem ending! And y’know what, as someone who’s more okay with polyamry then I was when I was a kid, I don’t have a problem with the polyamrous part of it as much as I have a problem with the way that most of these characters are literal objects.

Anyway.

Alright, but there, I’ve avoided talking about it for a while now, what about that trans narrative? What about the bit where I talked about two dudes not being sure about how much they wanted to suck one another’s dicks? How can I be speaking with such disappointment about a polyamrous bisexual harem ending if only for the novelty of it?

Okay, one of these characters, Ilya. He’s the boy who was introduced being humped into submission by a dog – he was fully dressed, mind you, and the dog in question is very small. But you see, now you know the twist of the story you can work out that that’s probably a thing you can blame on the conceit that hey, the computer making the scene didn’t know how unrealistic it is to have a full sized human, even a wimpy one, being pinned and bullied by a dog the size of your thigh.

Anyway, the baththouse episode works the way bathhouse episdoes go. The Central Dork of this story is a guy, so he goes to the guy side of the bathhouse, and the girls go in the girl side of the bathhouse, with obligatory talk about curses and peeping and whatever. But then Ilya, well Ilya’s in the harem and he’s a boy! That means he has to be on the same side as our protagonist and there–

There!

Its’ revealed that actually, he’s been a girl all along demanded to present as a boy by her father, with just the most preposterous industrial-strength binder, because this is not a series being drawn by someone interested in boobs from the middle or bottom of the bra store. Do they store bras by height? That seems silly but damnit, we’re this far into this epistle, hell with it. Point is that Ilya is actually Irina, and then, the rest of the episode is her doing various shenanigans to keep trying to impress on The Hero I Guess that she is Actually A Dude, and she attempts to convey this by wearing a tengu mask underneath her towel.

Yeah.

Tengu masks have big prominent noses, which, for those of you who don’t have dicks, you might not realise, that isn’t incorrect for a thing you could use to feign being a dong, but they also are wood and stay in one position, which is not how dongs work, certainly not over time, in a bath. Now, there are some funny things done here! Particularly, Ilya’s performative behaviour of like ‘ah yes, this is how men behave with other men, what do you mean my dong is poking your back?’ is pretty funny as a way to represent the challenges of navigating gender in ways you’re uncertain. It’s not a chapter without charm.

When it’s over though, then you’re left looking at a story that’s about taking one of the few interesting ideas — a harem with a boy in it! — and briefly steps into an interesting space with it — a mis-assigned gender by a parent and changing from that — and somehow uses these two ideas to collapse together in the most boring way that culminates in sudddenly Irina — formerly Ilya — is just another girl in the toybox.

Yeah. There’s Love Flops.

A manga impressive in how aggressively it avoids doing anything interesting with all its interesting parts.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[starlight-time-machine]

Week in Review

04/07/2024 – 04/13/2024

Sunday

Week 9 of missing Cipher Academy

Monday

It’s a Manga Monday sort of week (instead of the usual Manga Sunday).

Woah, new character in Girl Meets Rock…I do like that the social web continues to expand, it feels true to life of the band and choir circles I used to run in in high school.

FENG!!!!!!!!!! YEAHHHHHHHHH (Undead Unluck) I’ve really grown to like this tsundere single father – the way Fuuko has filed down his fangs is so funny and endearing (as opposed to the horrible monster he was last loop when he killed my other favourite character, Shen). Plopping a guy literally all about physical combat into this intellectual word game is just the sort of unexpected twist that keeps things interesting, and I’m really excited to see how he fares (despite martial arts being his main focus in life, I do think he’s intelligent and crafty enough to maybe make some clever moves).

Oshi no Ko was fine. Didn’t really need a sympathetic backstory for the mysterious child god but okay.

Dandadan was fine. I liked the one honor student looking guy leading the charge of the delinquents, but Otarun entering the scene was definitely the highlight. This stretch of the manga just feels a little like meaningless spectacle (which, now that I think about it, worries me a little with regards to the anime. Dandadan’s fights are always high octane city destroying spectacles, so I hope Science Saru will be able to keep up…).

Magilumiere fine.

Chainsaw Man fun, mostly because people made funny Quanxi and Asa memes.

Tuesday

Busy today

Wednesday

Finally got around to watching the new Game Changer episode, and it was a definite improvement on the last one. Watching the layers of fuckery unfold was great, though I feel like the PA prompts were a little unbalanced in terms of the “gameplay” since they’re all nice people who would probably never say no to a PA outright.

Thursday

Today’s menu is chicken and mushroom broth with a side of mini pizza pockets (don’t judge me) for the DunMesh episode, which paired nicely once they got past the snot stuff and went to the potage stuff. After a few heavier episodes, I appreciate Kui balancing the tone out with some more slapstick comedy chapters, and Trigger has done a great job adapting the comedic beats (as they always do). We got the infamous Chilchuck birds and the bees scene, as well as the human face gourd sight gag and stone tsukkomi Marcille, and it was just a fun time overall.

Friday

The Drag Race lip sync tournament was alright. (I refuse to type out “lalaparuza” in earnest) I’m glad to see Mirage get some redemption, though I would’ve liked to see her go all the way, but Megami’s redemption was an even greater sight to behold. She just imbues her lip syncs with so much character and personality, and seeing that win over Mhi’ya was honestly pretty cathartic. (Lowkey I think Plasma should’ve won against Mhi’ya too, but whatever…) But in general, I wasn’t particularly wow’d by any of the lip syncs. I don’t know, last season just had so many heavy hitters (Sasha, Anetra, Jaxx, Marcia Marcia Marcia) that made the tournament genuinely exciting, but of this season’s batch I think only Mirage is on that same level to me (sorry Mhi’ya and Morphine…you can definitely dance but I wanted something more…). I’m cautiously excited for the finale next week – it’s looking like it’s Sapphira’s to lose, but I really hope Nymphia can pull through…

Saturday

Wanted something easy to watch in the background while I did other stuff so I booted up season 5 of Glow Up, which I hadn’t watched yet. Glow Up is one of those reality competition shows that I casually keep up with because I like seeing people be creative, but after Ophelia’s amazing run in season 2 I haven’t cared much about the other contestants/winners so far. Also I know next to nothing about make-up, so it’s kind of funny when I see something and I’m like oh that’s nice and then the judges are like that’s horrible and disgusting I can’t believe they’ve done this lol. I only managed to watch one episode today, but I do like how much Glow Up emphasizes the industry/working side of things and how almost all of their main challenges let us see the contestants not just utilize their make-up skills but also their ability to communicate with clients and supervisors. The classic first episode “do a look that tells me about yourself” challenge is always fun too, because you get to see which MUAs actually have a unique perspective and which just draw some hearts and call it a day. I think the person who did the bald cap anxiety look was my favourite – I appreciated how they didn’t go super literal with it, instead evoking the raw feeling of anxiety itself. Good stuff.

[hxhhasmysoul]

I wanna make it clear that I completely support the lgbtq+ community and that there are definitely animes out there that have underlying queer themeing (which is great), but I very much do not think that this line was implying that for a handful of reasons.

I’ll be real, the moment you wrote that you “want to make your support clear”, I was sure questionable shit would follow and you surely did not disappoint. 

First of all, a common reaction of this scene I've personally seen from the Japanese audience of JJK is that they assumed that Fushiguro is romantically interested in his sister since he has a flashback to Tsumiki. This is definitely a very different interpretation from the western audience.......if the author really wanted something within his story such as sexuality to be clear, then I really think it would have been something that would be universally understood and talked about within the Japanese audience as well (you know..the main audience).

Reading this one could come to the conclusion that there’s some consensus among the Japanese fandom, that Megumi is simply into incest. Which, surprise surprise, is not actually the case. Not only does at least some of the Japanese fandom question Megumi’s sexuality, actually based on this scene. Some of them also question his gender, though according to @/cursedvibes it’s often done in an unpleasant fetishistic way.

But, lo and behold they are not that completely different from the western fandom, as in they are not some homogeneous group with one take on a story and its characters.

Second, I think many people who intake media from the Eastern hemisphere of the world forget the fact that countries like Japan are still quite close-minded and homophobic. Just because BLs and such media exist doesn't mean it is actually accepted in general society.

Oh wow, like your bigotry is just so thinly veiled… Also even if the society is homophobic, which it is like most societies around thee world, in the west as well, it doesn’t mean that queer topics are somehow strictly relegated to media mostly directed towards women like BL or GL or towards gay men like bara. 

Like throughout history all over the world queer themes in media directed at the general population were included even if outing meant for legal consequences for the author, or for their work to be banned. 

Third, JJK is classified as a shonen manga no matter how you look at it. Meaning it is directed towards a teenage boy audience and very action-based (and I don't think the average Japanese teenage boy really consumes queer media 😅). There are definitely queer characters in shonen anime, but with a character archetype such as Fushiguro- it is very unlikely that the author had any intention of making him queer.

Yes, things directed at teen boys would never go too much into the queer shit because we all know that there would be no interest in it. Teen boys are a group where there are never queers, so they’d not care, because all people are exactly the same and are only capable of enjoying stories that strictly represent them... Especially those teen boys who like action, none of them could ever see himself in a queer teen boy among the main cast… 

It’s not HxH is a shounen classic, written by a guy who has always been an outspoken queer ally. Or not like Killua, its secondary protagonist, is a beloved character. Killua whose love, very likely canonically romantic one, for his best friend Gon, the protagonist, has been widely discussed and speculated on by the Japanese fandom and the creators of the HxH anime. 

What character archetype is Megumi exactly? One that is forbidden from being queer. Does it have a name?

Also we all know, archetypes are immutable. This is what art is all about, choosing predefined pieces and putting them together exactly as intended, never trying to do anything, sorry for using a vulgar word, creative with them. 

And Megumi isn’t actually even the main target of queer speculations in fandom, the relationship between Gojou and Getou has been heavily speculated on due to some lines in the manga. 

Gege has implied that Mai was queer several times. And has drawn a title card of Maki and Nobara that reads really very not heterosexual. Which is in line with how Nobara seems to have a crush on Maki.

And there are several trans and non binary characters.

But yeah, JJK very strictly toes the line of the conservative and queerphobic part of Japanese society.

The fourth and final and MOST IMPORTANT reason as to why I made this post in the first place...THE LINGUISTICS!

Okay, so there was some bigotry along the way but surely surely the appeal to linguistics, my comfort thing will fix this post… 

…

Okay so the textbook shit about pronoun use in Japanese tracks. Alas that’s just not exactly it.

…

All in all, please believe and consume media the way that you want. If you headcanon that a character is queer, that's completely valid and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

That’s very benevolent of you. 

What motivated me to make this post is because I somehow ended up on a side of the internet where people very strongly believe that it is canon that Fushiguro is queer and are viciously arguing anybody that disagrees.

I’m sorry fans are shitheads, it does not really excuse this post though.

So, it actually inspired me to make a linguistic post since when I thought more into it- the entire ordeal has a lot to do with linguistics!

It surely does, just not in the way you portray here. 

It's important to remember that TRANSLATION and LITERAL TRANSLATION are very different things. Yes, if you literally translate what Fushiguro says into English it definitely sounds like he has romantic interests in more than just women. But the Crunchyroll subtitles are honestly very good in translation, which is expressing the meaning in one language into another language while being cognizant of the cultures of the 2 languages and with as little discrepancy as possible.

So like the comment on what translation is, is almost correct, but Crunchyrolly did not do it well. 

__________________________________

There’s this joke about linguists:

Q: How many linguists does it take to change the lightbulb? A: Context please. 

(It’s even funnier when you do it with an “I love you” declaration instead of the question… the things that amuse me…sorry)

__________________________________

So the word that is suspiciously absent from your linguistic analysis of this scene is CONTEXT. Which I don’t think is a coincidence because of how you framed it, what video you used. 

Japanese is a pronoun avoidant language because it was created by a high context culture. It means that the communication in that culture is less direct and precise, worded less literally,  and heavily relies on both the cultural context that is known to the speakers and what can be inferred from the flow of the conversation itself. 

So context is extremely important in how the Japanese people communicate and ignoring it is just misleading. It’s also a very important thing for translation. And Crunchyroll, like you op, chose to ignore it.

The video you linked doesn’t include the beginning of the conversation. Doesn’t show the full context. Including the fact that Megumi answers after Toudou already mentioned that it’s okay if Megumi was into guys…

So Megumi chooses not to use a pronoun or any other way to denote the gender of his desired partner after someone implied he might be gay. Sure he might just be polite, but it’s kind of interesting that he doesn’t feel the need to reassert his heterosexuality. Would an author of a shounen manga for teen boys leave that ambiguous? Especially that according to you Megumi is some nebulous but strictly straight archetype and the author is from a conservative country. 

Hmm…

And what do we even know about this author, Gege Akutami? 

We do know that their work, JJK, sure has a left slant politically. It’s not the most progressively enlightened work on Earth or even in Japan, but Japan has a long standing tradition of leftist movements, it also has an active queer movement that’s fighting for its rights, they’ve even had some quite well publicised victories. 

And even if Gege isn’t always the best on the issues, they surely seem  aware of them and try to include them in their work. Also I did not mention Togashi Yoshihiro by accident, Gege’s kinda a big fan and it’s very visible in the way JJK is written that Togashi’s works have been a huge influence.

And actually Gege really consciously uses or avoids pronouns, over and over again. While Crunchyroll and Viz are notorious for needlessly gendering characters whose gender is purposefully ambiguous or unknown at that point in the story. 

There are even 2 specific scenes explicitly addressing gender in JJK. 

First we meet Kirara. Panda and Megumi had known her/them as a guy when Kirara was at school with them. But the moment they see her/them in the present, they instantly change the way they talk about Kirara. It’s clumsy but the intention and context are very clear.

Next we finally meet Tengen, who openly refers to her gender. 

It’s almost like in the CONTEXT of this scene LINGUISTICS isn’t such a mic drop as you suggest it is.

Fushiguro's Japanese Pronoun Avoidance

(disclaimer: this is just an insignificant little thing I wanna talk about that I found quite interesting)

In this scene, Todo tells Fushiguro to tell him what his type of woman is. He replies in Japanese with その人に揺るがない人間性があればそれ以上は何も求めません which literally translates to "If that person has unwavering humanity, I won't ask for anything more." In the Crunchyroll subtitles (shown in the video above) they specify the pronoun of she. In some other subtitle translations, they keep the original "that person" as well as in the English dub.

Now with this scene, I've seen some people criticize the Crunchyroll subtitles for "trying to make it seem that Fushiguro is talking about only women" since there are fans who strongly believe that this specific line was supposed to indicate that Fushiguro is actually queer. In an English context, this analyzation is very plausible and really does make a lot of sense. But remember, JJK is a Japanese work.

I wanna make it clear that I completely support the lgbtq+ community and that there are definitely animes out there that have underlying queer themeing (which is great), but I very much do not think that this line was implying that for a handful of reasons.

First of all, a common reaction of this scene I've personally seen from the Japanese audience of JJK is that they assumed that Fushiguro is romantically interested in his sister since he has a flashback to Tsumiki. This is definitely a very different interpretation from the western audience.......if the author really wanted something within his story such as sexuality to be clear, then I really think it would have been something that would be universally understood and talked about within the Japanese audience as well (you know..the main audience).

Second, I think many people who intake media from the Eastern hemisphere of the world forget the fact that countries like Japan are still quite close-minded and homophobic. Just because BLs and such media exist doesn't mean it is actually accepted in general society.

Third, JJK is classified as a shonen manga no matter how you look at it. Meaning it is directed towards a teenage boy audience and very action-based (and I don't think the average Japanese teenage boy really consumes queer media 😅). There are definitely queer characters in shonen anime, but with a character archetype such as Fushiguro- it is very unlikely that the author had any intention of making him queer.

The fourth and final and MOST IMPORTANT reason as to why I made this post in the first place...THE LINGUISTICS!

English, like many European languages, has an emphasis on using pronouns (you, I, she, him, they, etc). It is linguistically impossible to speak the English language normally without using pronouns.

In a pronoun avoidance language such as Japanese, pronouns are not needed whatsoever to actually complete sentences or make sense. In fact, it's more natural to not use any pronouns when saying any sentence. Usually, if you're using pronouns in a sentence in these pronoun avoidance languages, it's because you are specifying or putting emphasis on the subject of the sentence. Also, the use of pronouns are generally seen as quite rude in certain ways which further explains why pronouns are mostly avoided altogether.

In the literal translation, Fushiguro says その人 (that person) because it is simply more respectful and less crass than saying something like 彼女 (she) or some other female-gendered word to refer to his 'type of women' (which is what Todo's question is). It's also very natural for Fushiguro to say その人 (that person) as it fits into his very polite and respectful character personality. Also, when Todo asks his question, he specifically uses the word 女 onna which is a very rude way of saying "women", so Fushiguro's response may have also been to show contrast in the audacious wording that Todo used compared to the more respectful nature of Fushiguro.

All in all, please believe and consume media the way that you want. If you headcanon that a character is queer, that's completely valid and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

What motivated me to make this post is because I somehow ended up on a side of the internet where people very strongly believe that it is canon that Fushiguro is queer and are viciously arguing anybody that disagrees.

So, it actually inspired me to make a linguistic post since when I thought more into it- the entire ordeal has a lot to do with linguistics!

It's important to remember that TRANSLATION and LITERAL TRANSLATION are very different things. Yes, if you literally translate what Fushiguro says into English it definitely sounds like he has romantic interests in more than just women. But the Crunchyroll subtitles are honestly very good in translation, which is expressing the meaning in one language into another language while being cognizant of the cultures of the 2 languages and with as little discrepancy as possible.

(if you made it here, thanks for reading all of it. i just really wanted to yap about the concept of 'pronoun avoidance' again honestly)

[dejwritesarchived]

sculptures, chapter eight.

↠ characters: ran haitani, mentioned in story all the other bonten members.

↠ warning: profanity, smut, slight dc, mentions of gangs & yakuzas,

↠ pairings: ran haitani x [black fem coded] reader, rindou haitani x fem!oc, kakucho hitto x oc, slight oc x reader,

↠ timeline: timeskip, doesn’t really follow anime/manga

↠ chapter summary: it's time to discuss business that could push bonten further into riches. (y/n) and ran spend time together, which ran begins to questions his feelings for her.

↠ a/n: *pats self on back for finally updating after years* but seriously thinking about moving this on ao3, but i'm not sure yet.

[ &. playlist + aesthetic ]

[ &. previous + masterlist + taglist form ]

— tags: @misss-chrisss @indiecursor @maydayaisha @po3ticb3auty @gemimaya @massivelynervousprincess @erentoes @hufflefluffwh0re @todo7roki @littlemochi @xngelsau

RAN EYES STARED AT THE IGNORANT MALE IN FRONT OF HIM. He couldn’t believe he had to sit here and listen to him talk especially considering his words of disrespect a couple of days ago. Shuya Sato stood in front of Bonten members in one of Shao’s mom's restaurants. His eyes going towards Ran gave him the most charming smile that Ran wanted to slap off his face so bad. As he sipped at the brown alcohol in his glass, he loosened the red-colored tie around his neck waiting for the first official meeting with members of Sato yakuza and Bonten to start.

But it was quite different. Shao mentioned to them that they wanted Karma and Kakucho’s fiancé Aisha at the meeting also. Occasionally the two women were dragged into Bonten activities unexpectedly, but never in a planned way.

“I would like to formally introduce myself, I’m Shuya Sato. Shao’s half brother, actual heir of this yakuza.” Shuya respectively bowed in front of his guests before continuing. “Shao has updated me on everything about you guys. I’ve grown to respect the way you handle things.”

It seemed like Shao and Ran had the same puzzled expression on their faces considering that Shuya didn’t say that beforehand.

“Would you cut to the point already, I’m growing bored,” Mikey huffed as his eyes looked at Shuya.

Shuya stared at Mikey before sighing and going to grab the iPads from across the room. He handed each member of Bonten one. Ran’s eyes were beyond confused as he stared at an art museum.

“Stealing artwork isn’t particularly our cup of tea pretty boy,” Sanzu uttered as he toyed with the rings on his fingers.

Shuya's teeth got caught on his lip as he rolled his eyes before speaking. “Who are you guys' biggest enemies right now?”

“We have a lot of enemies,” Kakucho pointed out as he looked at Shao then at Shuya.

“I mean, don’t we all,” Shuya answered. “But there gotta be some competition you’re trying to take out, right?” Shuya questioned.

“Dude, could you just get to the point here,” Shao uttered from the back as he was waiting for his brother to explain the same plan he told to him.

Shuya rolled his eyes. “I wanted to give a dramatic speech but anyway I got caught up with you guys' slightly amateur work.”

“Excuse me?” Mikey asked. His head tilted to the side to glare at Shuya.

Shuya let out another sigh due to him being interrupted once again. His large hands shoved into his nicely tailored slacks before he’s speaking again, “Your work is amateur. If you guys worked smarter, the police wouldn’t constantly be snooping around you guys all the time.” Shuya bluntly admitted. “Now gentlemen and ladies,” he motioned to the group in front of him.

Ran could see the pissed-off looks from every one of his colleagues. Even Karma looked like she wanted to chew the guy’s head off.

“I want to make every one of us in this room rich,” Shuya flashed a smile before picking up an iPad swiping something on it and showing them a picture of a sculpture. “This sculpture right here beholds the whole Yakuma yakuza reserves. I’m talking about funds for drugs, guns, stocks, hush money, and the list goes on,” He explained.

Ran would swipe to the picture of the heart-shaped sculpture that displayed signs of a broken heart syndrome. It was a unique sculpture and he would even say that [Y/N] would be satisfied with it. Perhaps she would be interested in seeing the whole museum.

“It’s quite smart to hide their funds in a museum, but how the hell would their funds be in that fuckin’ thing?” Mochi questioned. “How’d you know it’s in there?”

“Let’s just say, when you’re in between the legs of the daughter of the boss…She tends to kiss and tell,” Shuya winked.

“You’re disgusting,” Aisha says as she was sitting on Kakucho’s lap, her face scrunched up in disgust.

“I know,” Shuya huffs. “To answer your question Mochi, it’s a flash drive carved inside it that has account numbers of each bank account where money is stored.”

“Why should we trust you saying that they left their funds in that silly sculpture?” Ran asked as he leaned forward.

“I’ve been planning this heist for months now, I could have hired a team to do it myself…but here I am telling you guys,” Shuya sighed, staring at him. “Plus, my brother in the back said that this could push all of us to the top of Japan.”

“You called us amateurs and now tell us you want to steal a sculpture that the Yakuma yakuza is going to know is gone. This is going to get too messy and I don’t think it’s right to associate us with this heist,” Mikey confirmed.

The wicked laugh that left Shuya’s mouth made Ran roll his eyes in annoyance.

“I didn’t invite your other subordinates if I didn’t plan this correctly.” Shuya sighed.

He’s pacing back and forth now before he’s back talking, “Karma here is going to be our hacker, assuming that she can make fake security ID cards to get in the museum and hack the security system,” Shuya motioned to the woman who would only shrug her shoulders.

“That’s easy work right there. Of course, I can do that,” She says, letting out a laugh.

“And Mikey, I’m not dumb. I went to NYU,” Shuya affirmed.

“And dropped out,” Shao added.

“Oh shut up Shao,” Shuya said as a knock was heard on the door. Shuya’s lips curled into a smirk and Ran didn’t like the look. He watched as he unlocked the door letting [Y/N] in.

What was she doing here?

As Ran watched as she walked next to Shuya, Ran began to piece the pieces together. His heart quickened in his chest. He tried to push her further away from his Bonten lifestyle. But Shuya and Shao tugged her right into it. He was more upset at Shao than Shuya. It was something to expect from Shuya, but Shao. Why would he agree to this?

“She’s going to create a replica of the sculpture. My lovely friend [Y/N], Shuya's arms wrapped around her shoulders as she nudged them off to take a seat.

“The only problem we’ll have is safely transporting both the real and fake one to be able to make the switch successful,” Shuya says. “And when we do, that’s when you come in,” He points to Aisha. “You own a bank or two, we’re gonna have to transfer every single damn penny in the accounts to different accounts. Bitcoin, fake charities, hiding it in plain sight to cover our tracks,” Shuya explained as he looked at him. “We wait a couple of months before splitting it in half between Bonten and us,” he motioned to him, his brother, and [Y/N].

“And if these plans go to shit?” Mikey questioned.

“We’ll take the full blame for it, Bonten wasn’t involved,” Shuya admits. “However, it’s not going to go to shit because I planned it so well. From having some of my brother and I men working in the museum to even paying some cops under the table.” He adds. “All we need to be sure is to transport the replica to and from the museum safely without getting caught. Which due to us doing it at night, we won’t. [Y/N] has already started the sculptures, but we’re not doing it until two weeks from now.”

“But that’s all for now folks, try not to get in any problems with the Yakuma yakuza,” Shao adds. “Hypothetically if shit hits the fan they’re going to come to us ten times harder,” he sighs.

When the meeting was over and many Bonten members left, Ran stood up and approached Shao who was searching for the keys to the restaurant to lock up the place. When he felt Ran’s presence in front of him, he glanced up. “Before you lecture me about tugging her into this, it wasn’t my idea.”

“You could have talked her out of it or talked your annoying brother out of it. Are you fuckin’ insane?” Ran questioned. Even though his words came out as a whisper to keep the conversation private, his tone was still assertive.

Shao’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion at Ran’s tone. “Firstly, tone it down. Secondly, if you knew (Y/N) as I do, you would know when she puts her mind to something, she’s not going to let it go until it’s done.” He explained. “Stop trying to make it seem like I pulled her into our dangerous world all alone. You knew what you were doing when you accepted to be her model for her project.” Shao answered.

“Excuse me?” Ran questioned as his fist clenched tighter.

Shao’s next words which were going to be very harsh were interrupted by his older brother. Shuya would push the two apart, “Nope. I’m not having you two arguing weeks before this plan. I take full responsibility for asking her if she wants to do it. She could have said no, but she didn’t. Maybe, you should talk to her yourself.” The eldest Sato brother suggested.

“I swear to fuckin’ god if she gets hurt—”

“You’re killing us both, this isn’t the first time we’ve been threatened. Spare us the cliche line and go talk to her.” Shuya interjected.

Ran would push past the two to exit the restaurant, which was just his luck he saw (Y/N) leaning against his car waiting for him. He walked towards her rubbing the bridge of his nose, “I don’t want you involved in this,” Ran sighed as he looked at her.

“It’s not your decision to make,” [Y/N] commented as she looked at him.

“Then enlighten me on why the hell you’re doing this? Is it money? [Y/N] you know I can give you that,” Ran stared at her and he even could feel his hands shake at the words that tumbled out his mouth.

Perhaps he feared something would happen to her.

“I know you would, but it just wouldn’t feel right. You’re already a model for this freakin’ project, I can’t take your money also.” [Y/N] says as she takes a hold of his hand. “But I have my reasons.” She only says.

“And those reasons are?” Ran asked.

“I would rather show you,” She says as she gives him a sly smile. Her eyes lit up with excitement as she looked at him, “Do you know the way to my university from here?” She questioned.

“I believe so,” Ran said as he watch her let go of his hand.

“Let’s go, I reserved the art room for us at my university. I think it’s time you step into my world for once.”

“What?” Ran questioned as she was climbing in the passenger seat of his car.

SCHOOL WASN’T RAN’S THING, THIS ATMOSPHERE WAS EXTREMELY FOREIGN TO HIM. His eyes scanned over the artwork on the walls as they were walking down the halls of the art building, he was in awe at his new surroundings while [Y/N] was dragging him by the sleeve of his shirt. When they got to the art room that she reserved, he watched her unlock the door and motioned for him to step in. When the lights flickered on and Ran saw the replica of the same sculpture they were supposed to steal in two weeks.

“Holy shit,” Ran uttered in amazement. “It looks just the same,” he added as he circled it.

“I know right, it didn’t take that long considering the size. But, I think it’ll be a good stand-in for the original.” [Y/N] says as she lets out a sigh. “I was afraid to move it, so Shao suggested keeping it here.”

“But isn’t someone going to see it?” Ran questioned.

“I reserved this room for a month to do my final project. When the janitors come in here and clean, I just put a Lil blanket over it.” She motions to the closet.

“So, this is the room where we’ll be doing my sculpture of you. I’m sure you won’t have any problems navigating around campus when I tell you to meet me here now,” (Y/N) says as she would grab a hold of one of the aprons and tug it over her head. She reached behind herself to tie a knot with the two strings.

Ran sat on one of the stools watching her walking around the room. His head prompted on his hand as his lilac hues seem to follow her walking back and forth like a lovesick fool. “So, it’s really okay for me to just be naked in this room?” He questioned.

“There aren't any cameras in this room. Plus, technically I’ll be covering your lil friend for the sculpture.” She motioned to his crotch.

“Those silly Greek statues just have it all out though,” Ran pointed out, gaining a chuckle from her.

“You said it yourself that it wasn’t little Ran. I don’t think my professor wants to have your dick plastered in her mind when she sees my sculpture.” (Y/N) says as she grabbed another apron and gave it to him. “Today, you will be my student,” she joked.

“What? I’m not dressed to work with you,” Ran says.

“So? Just take off the jacket.”

Ran stared at her before he took off the suit jacket. He also unbuttoned the vest portion of it, throwing it on the coat rack. He soon rolled up his sleeves to the white button-down shirt he had on. He took the apron out of her hand and put it on quickly. “If the guys see me like this, they’ll probably laugh.” He joked sitting back down on the stool.

“Just wait until they see the sculpture,” She chuckles at his statement before she’s going to the supply closet to pull out stuff. “Originally, we were going to start the sculpture of you. However, I had to order more plasticine.”

“What is that?” Ran questioned. Similar to when she asked questions about Bonten, he was curious to ask questions about her world. After all, he currently is, according to her.

“It’s a type of clay used for sculpting. I mean, I could use other clays, but that’s the preferred one for sculptures.” (Y/N) answered as she tugged containers of stuff. “I’m assuming you never took a pottery class before?”

“Does it look like I took a pottery class before?” Ran asked.

“Fair point, just thought gangstas have other hobbies,” (Y/N) pointed out as she had her back turned to start making clay. “Do you have other hobbies?”

Ran stood up to stand near her, he stared at her as she was mixing the substance. “I don’t know, don’t think I had time to have hobbies growing up. Other than being a delinquent with my brother.” He answered.

“It’s not too late to start you know,” (Y/N) pointed out as she glanced up at him. “My mom was pregnant with me when she got into pottery,” She adds. “She didn’t know anything about art, just thought it would be fun to pick up that hobby.”

“And then she gave birth to an artist,” Ran pointed out, causing her to smile.

“Something like that.” (Y/N) says.

As the two continued to talk and soon the mini pottery lesson started, Ran would listen to (Y/N) explain to him what he had to do. She sat across from him as he was sitting in front of the pottery wheel. “Don’t push your foot down too harshly or you can mess up,” she says. “If you feel the clay drying up, add water.” She adds.

Ran teeth grazed alongside his lip as he was listening. He was nervous that he was going to mess up. But she was sure to remind him that it’ll be okay. Artists mess up all the time.

“I’ll help guide you through,” She gave him a smile that caused his cheeks to grow hot when he looked at him.

“Uhh, okay. I think I understand now,” Ran responded.

When the two started the pottery class, subtle jokes were being made and low laughter was exchanged. Ran found himself staring at (Y/N) once in a while as she was trying to focus on the pottery project in front of her.

“You’re going to mess up if you keep staring,” She pointed out as she met his eye contact.

Ran’s foot eased up on the paddle that increased the speed of the pottery wheel. (Y/N) glanced up at him with a confused look, “What’s wrong, Ran?”

“I appreciate you letting me step into your world.” Ran commented.

“Please, it’s the least I can do now that I’m a part of yours.” (Y/N) answered.

“But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why be a part of my world? It’s dangerous, you can get hurt,” Ran said. “And I would hate for that to happen,” He answered truthfully. “I know you said you wouldn’t accept my money, but I just can’t wrap my head around what would be the reason.”

“I’m moving to Berlin after I graduate.” (Y/N) blurted out. She found herself looking at the mess of a pottery piece they were attempting to do.

“Berlin?” Ran questioned.

“I was offered a position. I just thought this job could help me be set for Berlin and other things I want to do about my art career.” She admitted.

For some reason, Ran felt a dagger puncture his heart. His throat went dry and his words instantly became like mush in his brain. Berlin. She was moving to Berlin. He got so caught up in the moment that he forgot that she only got tugged into his chaotic world due to school in the first place.

“Congratulations.” was the only thing that could stutter out of Ran’s lips.

“Ran, I know. I should have told you before Shao and his brother, but I was just searching for how to tell you.” (Y/N) admitted. “Considering the circumstances of what happened that night when we went out, I already knew that it would hurt you.”

“We kissed and it felt real, a little too real.” (Y/N) answered. “As if it could have happened if alcohol wasn’t involved.” She soon adds.

“Well, would you have wanted it to happen if we weren’t drunk out of our minds?” Ran asked.

Silence overcame the two once again before they could hear someone coming into the room, (Y/N)’s eyes instantly landed behind Ran. Automatically pushing herself out of her seat to clean her hands.

“Professor Jackson, I didn’t know-“

“Here is one of the best students in my class, I had a feeling she would be spending her free time here.” Professor Jackson bragged. She had a young man standing next to her.

His hair was long, dyed two colors. Black and blonde, the back of his head were blonde and the rest was jet black. He had the notorious look of a rich boy that was in a band. His long strands were tucked back into a man bun giving the duo a good look at his defining features. His eyes were as dark as a cup of coffee. His plush lips only formed a subtle shy smile. He wore a cream-colored sweater and some light-colored jeans, followed up with a pair of Converses. His fingers were decorated with silver rings and multiple finger tattoos.

“I didn’t know you had a guest with you (Y/N), I should have knocked.” Professor Jackson said.

(Y/N) cleared her throat before motioning to Ran who was washing his hands at the sink. “That’s my model for my final project. I just was letting him get a feel of our world,” She says letting out a nervous giggle.

“Oh, well that’s wonderful.” Professor Jackson replied. “And this is the newest student in the art program Asahi Hasegawa, he’ll be shadowing you for a day or two next week.”

“Shadowing?” (Y/N) asked.

“Yes, he has shadowed every graduate student I have, except for you. He could help with making clay for your lovely sculpture of that very handsome man next to you.”

Ran couldn’t help but smirk, giving the older woman a smile which she returned. His eyes soon went towards Asahi who seemed to be avoiding eye contact with both Ran and (Y/N). Perhaps, he was a bit shy.

“Well, that would work. I can’t wait to work with you Asahi,” (Y/N) says to him to gain his attention.

When he looked at her, he only mumbled a soft you too as his face grew red as a red delicious apple. Professor Jackson pats him on the back before laughing, “Well, I just wanted to show him the private art rooms, please continue what you two were doing.”

Professor Jackson left with Asahi not far behind her like a small puppy following its owner.

“You know it seems like attractive men just stick to you,” Ran jokes as he goes to wash his hands.

“You think?” (Y/N) sarcastically asked.

“Yes. Me, The Sato’s, and now your little student.” He chuckles while drying his hands. “Speaking of the Sato’s, you can trust them, right? It’s just if shit goes left…Bonten will cut off ties with them with a quickness.”

“Of course. Three days ago, I witnessed them fighting.” (Y/N) answered as she was cleaning the mess they had made. “And it wasn’t like bickering or something. They were going to kill each other.”

“And you don’t think Shuya is going to backstab us with this plan?” Ran asked. “Cause’ if he does, I have no choice but to handle him myself and if Shao gets involved, I can always get Sanzu or Rin to handle him..”

He watched as (Y/N) stared at him, her lips parting to question what he just said. “I don’t think he will because right after they fought each other, they headed to another district to collect some money as if they didn’t nearly just kill each other. It’s as if they put their differences aside to make sure their family name isn’t tarnished.” She answered. “I just think their brotherly love is much different than yours and Rin,” she adds.

Now it was time for Ran to be silent. As he leaned against one of the counters staring at the woman in front of him.

“You’re quite close to them now? I would hate for either one of them to steal you away from me,” Ran admitted to her. His bluntness jabbed at (Y/N) harshly.

“I’m not yours.” (Y/N) answered quite quickly.

“Not yet.” Ran add.

[sesskagevents]

SessKag Fandom Appreciation Week - Day 6

Artist interviews - Mama-ino

@mama-ino​ was nominated by Anonymous

What was your first introduction to SessKag?

Hmm, my first introduction. This is going to sound dumb, but it was at an anime convention. I used to be real big into cosplay and if I remember correctly I was cosplaying Ed from Cowboy Bebop and I came across a Sesshomaru. A rouge Sesshomaru has appeared! LoL Well needless to say Baby Ino (and a couple other peeps) wanted to take pictures. But when all was said and snapped, his partner came from the dealers room- AND LOW AND BEHOLD! She was KAGOME! Like I don't know, something about seeing two characters I liked very much walk off sharing a bag of chippies. I was like... please. Please let there be a fandom for them, PLEASE! And of course after the convention (and angry AOL dial up sounds) I searched for this fandom. And I found YoukaiYume's art, I think it was 'Tears she cried." And then I found fanfiction and more art, and there was no turning back for me. That was in 2006...lol.

How long have you been a part of the fandom?

Alas, since Anime Mid Atlantic 2006!!

What is your writing/art process like?

Scattered, tbh. Often times I'll write my ideas come to me and I write/sketch them out on sticky notes or scrap paper. (Bruh, I was not kidding about the 829482 sticky notes.) Sometimes I draw from a few words that would make zero sense to a stranger, but I make something from it. And even then I often time end up with maybe 5 WIPs that will never be finished. However my little ficlets are often times done then and there, don't get me wrong! Like the idea starts the picture, and as I'm drawing and analyzing what I've done- The finished product is what inspires the ficlet. Unless it is to one of the fics I've been writing (unpublished) for gods know how long. Often times if I'm running late on a project, its because I'm criticizing and knit picking at things. But to break that up I usually doodle silly little things, like Sailor Jaken for example. LOL

If you could let your fans know one thing, what would it be?

I'm not nor have I ever considered my works to be anything but baseline (at most). I fangirl many most of the SessKag community. I am very happy to be included in this community as I've found many of you are absolute gems and are equally as astonishing as the works you create (both arts AND fics)! You all are fantastic, and I love your work! I run off of caffeine and sarcasm? I am very VERY SHY and do not know how to take compliments, lol... Or my favorite medium to art in is probably watercolor.

Do you have anything you're working on right now that the fandom can look forward to?

Yes, actually. I'm attempting to draw to a fic I've been writing to for some time in a sort of chapter series. I'm self taught and really haven't master how to do this in a manga style doujinshi as of yet, so I gotta stay small, lol. Those of you whom can are freakin' amazing!

How long have you been drawing for sesskag?

2012 maybe?

Your style is so unique - are there any other artists that inspire your style?

I've always loved Naoko Takeuchi, Yutaka Nanten, Masaru Gotsubo, Rumiko Takahashi, Bengus...I wanted to grow up to be just like Tetsuya Nomura. I've always loved his monster and character designs. So quite a few different artists started my love to do the arts.

What is your favorite thing about the ship?

I dunno, something about Kagome being able to go tit for tat with Sesshomaru. But at the same time with his character growth coming to be a silent watcher over, to her very caring nature. Something about it clicks. Both are able to deal with Inuyasha in their own respective ways, but both are very much trying to prove themselves and grow. Additionally both were nurturing to two children, not their own- but very much became theirs.

What is your favorite thing about the fandom?

Community. Expression of love for other creators. Diversity in how we perceive or ships. But to be honest, most of all is acceptance. Willingness to accept a new art forms, new prompts, new style of writings! Hey you also ship personxperson, okay cool! You like Kagome with blue eyes/grey eyes/brown eyes, yoooo! Awesome sauce. I've never been part of a community so welcoming and diverse. I love it here.

How do you get inspiration for your works?

Overactive imagination usually just takes the wheel, lol. Poems, Nature, scenic walks, looking at photography of mountains and the sky, staring at the moon, listening to thunderstorms, reading. My inspiration is literally comes from all around me, as corny as that sounds. Literally I can be in the coffee shop and see a couple do something cute and be like, awwwww. Sesshomaru and/or Kagome would do that, lol. Or watching a thunderstorm and be hit with an image in my head. Sometimes I'm trying to sleep (keyword trying, Insomnia can we not) and all of a sudden my brains like-parkour!

[adiabolikpastel]

Is it okay if I ask you what you think of the Young Blood manga? I mean, what do you think of the art and story? 👉🏻👈🏻

I think you have some pretty interesting opinions. ^^

Oh sure~ I have a few thoughts regarding it, which I have kind of been waiting for it to come to completion before I really look into it- but- I would never turn away an adoring anon!

Please keep in mind that the following is just my opinions, and they may not align with everyone. That is okay, and I would love to talk about it more with anyone who would like.

Full response is under the cut - due to length. Thank you again Anon for the ask, and I hope my answer give you some food for thought! Oh, also Spoilers are below the cut so read at your own risk.

Artwork

I have enjoyed the art style used for this series! This is a style that they have used a number of times before, mostly with Kanato's manga - and I believe it works for this particular plot. Since the story is about their younger days, I think utilizing a style that can seem childish works really well.

It is also worth noting that there is a clear change when it comes to the children verses the adults. No adults look like a child, which can be something that happens in styles like this.

Story Point I

Ultimately, I don't think that this story has that much to offer. Not to say that I am not invested, I just feel as a whole, it doesn't have that much of a pay off. This is because we know all ready how this is going to end.

This is something that happens a lot in media, or in story telling - take for example the Little Mermaid. We got the first movie, and then a sequel (I.e. Haunted Bridal - Dark Fate - Lost Eden). After those both, for whatever reason, they decided to make a prequel the Little Mermaid Ariel's Beginnings.

While yes, this movie did show us lore, and we got to see Ariel's mom, the plot ultimately did not matter. Spoilers if you have not see that movie? We see a world where Triton does not allow music, cause the mom died - Ariel want's to sing and dance, low and behold, Triton changes his mind and now they can sing and dance.

Timeline wise, it puts us right at the beginning of the Little Mermaid first movie - or perhaps rather the series. Regardless, there was no greater point to that movie. Was it nice, sure, it was cute and I liked seeing more of the sisters and her mom - but really it did nothing.

This is what I feel Young Blood is essentially going to be. It's cute and it's nice, trust I am here for the baby Sakamaki - but ultimately it means nothing. We will see what these boys went through and then they will either get their memories erased, or something will happen, and they wont recall any of it - because none of this is mentioned in the game cannon (after 5+ games), so it cannot be really utilized.

Story Point II

Now... the other thing about this story is that it goes against the timeline we have been told about Diabolik Lovers Lore. At first I thought I was crazy, but then I did some digging. There is a timeline post made by Carlatsukinamistolemyhamsandwhich (that name tho- yes) that points out the order of events, from what I understood after reading the wiki. Most specifically the Millennial War.

The super cheat sheet version is this:

Giesbach the Ancestor King (first blood clan) had his son Carla

the Endzeit disease began

Shin is born

Their mom goes to Karlheinz for help with Giesbach, and sends her sister Menae to him in exchange

Giesbach wages war on Karl and Burai (snake clan)

Endzeit kills more first bloods, and war is won and Karl erases all memories of the first bloods from all but Carla

Menae and Burai have Cordelia

Menae dies, and Karl grooms Cordelia to eventually marry her

Karl takes another wife Beatrix then also Christa is cousin

Shuu is born (official heir)

Reiji is born

Triplets are born

Subaru is born

There are some things with the Mukami as well mixed in- but this isn't about them so we will stop there. Now... according to the latest chapter 7 - all of this is inaccurate! Which is troubling. Spoilers for chapter seven of young blood. In this chapter we see Reiji, Kanato and Laito all speak with Carla - who's father is ALIVE.

If you look at the timeline above, you will see that that man died LONG before any of them were born, as Cordeila was not even alive at the time. So that begs the question... why?

Why are they able to meet with Carla and only have read about First Bloods in books - if in this manga they have been alive? Why do we have these low demon wanting to hurt the boys? Why does this all have to do with a fig tree?!

There are a lot of questions swirling about - and one has to wonder if this is there (a) a mistake and they are just making this manga its own story line, with no actual consideration to the games cannon or (b) this is the truth. Karlheinz has done a lot of things in his life time. Manipulating space, time, memories, these are all things he does on a whim.

Perhaps, what we knew in the game cannon, is not actually the truth. What if this is? What if this is the real events of what happened. Karlheniz just decided to re-write history to better suite his needs. I wouldn't put it past him. However, that then begs the question once more - why?

Why do that? Why write out this cannon for the games and make all of it mean nothing?

Story Point III

This leads to my last big thought about the story. I think that it is preparing for new characters to be introduced. Namely, characters from the Vibora and the Wolf clan. On the wiki page that discusses the war - at the bottom is this information:

Based off of the cannon that the games have provided, both the Vibora and the Wolf clan have new rulers, since the time of the Millennial War. Which line up with when one of the Sakamaki brother's takes the throne from Karlheniz. Allegedly.

Perhaps this manga is a way for the creators to build up to the idea of introducing these two character. I mean, especially now that everything is all messed up from the original cannon. Perhaps the young heirs are also alive during this time, and this is their opportunity for them to have them debt in a new game.

Final Thoughts

All and all, I am enjoying the series. I love seeing the boys act this way - as it shows their brotherly connection. This is also something that happens in Dark Fate - towards the end- you just see them all come together. Here it is so innocent and pure, as it seems none of the animosity as set in.

There is no fire that burned down Edgar's village. There is no molestation and favoritism between siblings. There is no mental abuse. There is just them. I wonder if that too is something that Karlheniz has manipulated.

Regardless, I look forward to seeing how this story plays out. It has been a fun ride so far - and looks to be interesting going forward. I am in love with seeing Karlheinz so much - full disclosure.