#truly they’re insanely fucked up. like I can’t think of a stronger word to describe how mad they are.

[twelve-kinds-of-trouble]

was it casual when I dreamed up exact copies of your ever-present leather bands? was it casual when I called you a faggot and a dog? was it casual when you dreamt that I swallowed your tattoo whole? was it casual when I gave you drugs and taught you how to dream? was it casual when I told you I killed my father? was it casual when I told you my best friend was a forgery? was it casual when I saw you wake up and bleed near to death? was it casual when you told me it was never going to be me and you? was it casual when I asked nice the first few times and you made it ugly? was it casual when I killed myself in front of you and changed your life forever? was it casual?

[queen-of-bel]

phew okay this was sitting in my drafts for so long, but an analysis for second best devil survivor boy (tadashi nikaido) 

naoya | atsuro | amane | gin | mari

Tadashi Nikaido is genuinely one of my favorite characters ever, but I see him get reduced to just "tsundere gangster" but he really is a lot more than that.

Let's look at how he was first introduced. If you remember, there was a thug who was harassing an SDF solider to be let out of the lockdown. He's quickly stopped by Kaido who clearly has no desire at all to spar with the SDF. After Atsuro notes that Kaido has a reputation of treating his members well, Kazuya approaches Kaido for help. Kaido doesn't know of any secret exits, and hasn't seen Naoya. Then, Kaido decides to take it a step further, asking the picture of Naoya to be sent over IR so he can show his crew once the cell lines come back on. This wasn't something that Kazuya asked him to do. This was something that Kaido volunteered to do. He didn't have to do this for 3 strangers, but he did anyway.

The next big thing we learn about Kaido is the "bloodless murderer" and its connection to Kaido. In case you need a refresher, one of the victims was Kaido's brother. It's at this point that we start to see a darker side of him. He finally figured out the secret behind the murderer (that it's a demon) and how to avenge his brother (by using the COMPs). He even calls his brother a "wuss", implying that he thinks his brother died because he wasn't strong enough to fight off the assailant.

Alright, let's throw Mari into the picture now. In case you need a second reminder, Mari is childhood friends with Kaido and his brother. Mari and his brother eventually get into a relationship, but Kaido secretly was in love with Mari, too.

The text differs slightly between the original game and Overclocked, but when Kaido and Mari are arguing, Mari beings to either say how Kaido's brother was her lover, or that she blames herself for his death. Either way, Kaido becomes enraged and cuts her off, and even goes so far as to say he wishes he were the one to kill his brother. He then yells at Mari to stay away from the bloodless murderer before storming off.

The glaringly obvious takeaway is that Kaido has serious issues conveying his emotions. No doubt he's jealous that Mari fell for his brother and not him, but he's also having difficulty expressing his grief over his brother, even resorting to saying something like this to cover his grief. Mari realizes this is just a cover, though, and asks Kazuya to forgive Kaido, as Kaido seems so angry at the moment because of his brother's murder.

Now, jump to the battle where Yuzu gets us into that bet with Kaido and Honda. This is where the lockdown begins to break him. After Kaido realizes he can’t win the bet against a bunch of high school kids, he cries out “I wanted to gain power, but I can’t... I can’t protect anything!” His strong will is what summons Pazuzu, who comments on his "bitter cries of despair".

Note that the first reason he states he wants power is to protect something. He doesn't want power for personal gain, or any selfish reasons. He wants the strength to avenge his brother and protect Mari. He doesn't care about crushing everything or taking over the world-- he just wants Mari to he safe.

So whether or not Mari survives the battle with Kudlak is going to really define Kaido's outlook, but before we jump to the fifth day, let's take a look at what happens on day 4.

At Suidobashi, we find Kaido and Honda getting into a fight with a bunch of civilians, with the intent to kill the civilians. After talking to them, though, Honda says that the civilians attacked them first, and Honda and Kaido were merely acting in self-defense. After they leave, Atsuro says if he were in Kaido's place, he would've lost control, too.

Let's now talk a bit about Kaido's role as a gang/thug leader.

Kaido doesn't want to lead the Shibuya Daemons. He explicitly tells Kazuya, "I don't really care... I'm only leadin' these guys 'cause it was my brother's gang." Kaido only views this as a responsibility his brother left for him, but despite the fact that he has a reputation for treating his members well, he couldn't care less about the Daemons.

So, jump back to the battle where Kaido/Honda are fighting the civilians. This is all really important to consider when Kaido calls Kazuya and everyone "justice freaks".

At first, it seems like Kaido is just displaying typical, thuggish, "fuck the cops" kind of behavior. But considering his behavior and what we know about him up until this point in the game, it doesn't really make sense.

Kaido didn't start the Shibuya Daemons, nor does he want to lead them. Kaido broke up a fight between a gang member and an SDF soldier, when he easily could've joined in, or at the very least, ignored it. Knowing all this, Kaido is probably best described as just "transient" as opposed to having any actual convictions. Maybe he doesn't care enough to outright respect the law, but he doesn't seem to have an active interest in breaking the law, either.

So where does the "justice freak" thing come from?

The most likely answer to me is that Kaido is frustrated with the Japanese law enforcement for not making any progress in the bloodless murder cases. He laments several times that it's been so long since his brother was murdered, and they still don't know who did it. One of the instances where this is shown is when Kazuya gives Kaido Mari's bag. Kaido says "I've been waiting for this... It's been seven months now since my brother died... I'm finally gonna nail the bastard that killed my bro and cornered Mari!"

So, Kaido already has lost hope in the justice system, and knowing that it was the government who enacted the lockdown certainly didn't improve his opinion on the government. Also, now that he sees demons, the same creatures that killed his brother, are on the loose, Kaido knows that if he makes one misstep in the lockdown, he'll die. Especially considering that he thinks his brother could've protected himself if he was stronger.

At this moment, laws don't matter to him anymore if they're just going to hinder his survival. Note that Kaido never did anything that didn't have to do with his survival. He never robbed anybody, he never looted any stores, all he wanted to do was get stronger so he could survive and protect Mari.

Okay, so now let's jump into the 5th day mess, where Mari's fate is defined.

Let's start with if Mari dies.

If Kazuya is there for the battle against Kudlak, but didn't give her purse to either her or Kaido, Mari is killed in front of everyone. Kaido absolutely loses it, and afterwards, falls into a state of shock and depression. I'll touch more on this later, but Kaido says "Mari... I let down my bro... And now you too..."

The next time we see Kaido, he's fighting Keisuke, where their morals are clearly clashing over the proper use of power. This bit of dialogue is only triggered if Kazuya witnessed Mari's death, but Kaido does say "without power, you can't protect anything close to you" before continuing the fight with Keisuke.

If Kazuya didn't witness Mari getting killed by Kudlak, he'll get a email from Kaido that night saying that Mari was found dead. His words indicate that he lapsed into a depression from how powerless he felt.

Either way, the takeaway is that if Mari dies, Kaido blames his lack of strength for his failures. This solidifies the thought in his mind that if you want to survive, you have to be strong. After all, if he were stronger, he could've avenged his brother and saved the woman he loved, right?

Okay, let's rewind day 5 and see what happens if Mari survives.

If Mari survives, and Kaido defeated (well, helped to defeat) Kudlak, he credits this to his strength. This is evidenced in his fight with Keisuke if Mari survives, where he says "If you don't want to die, you gotta get strong! The weak have no right to complain!"

Whatever happens with Mari's fate, the events of the fifth day confirm to him that if he wants to survive and protect anyone, he's got to get stronger. He just has to.

It's after the fifth day that he totally snaps.

On the sixth day, he rants to Kazuya how humans are basically rotten and his desire to crush everything. The stress of the lockdown has finally gotten to him. After he sees stuff from the Japanese government abandoning the civilians in the lockdown and their plans to kill everyone, to the civilians in the lockdown losing all sanity, killing others and causing pure chaos in the streets, Kaido has lost all hope in humanity.

He's extremely bitter towards YHVH and the angels who enacted the lockdown in the first place, which is why he teams up with Naoya to make Kazuya the overlord. At this point he's just gone insane, truly believing that he can't survive without power, and after a week of seeing people's ugly side, he detaches himself from humanity, seeing people as only stepping stones to make himself stronger.

I want to stress one more time that Kaido does not typically share these sentiments. Even at the end of the lockdown, he knows deep down that people aren't inherently bad. He knows that people were pushed this far because of the lockdown, just as he was. This is evidenced by his reaction to Keisuke's actions on the sixth day. If Keisuke is alive, he tells them that he forgives Keisuke for what he did. If Kaido killed Keisuke, Kaido will apologize to Atsuro, saying that under different circumstances, he and Keisuke would make great friends. He even takes it a step further, saying that he understands if Atsuro doesn't forgive him, and if it would make Atsuro feel better, he can kill Kaido.

The best example of Kaido's true nature is in Amane's eighth day, where he actually agrees to help the Messiah and protect the barricade from the demon tamers fighting to get out. He says that this is the least he can do, considering how hard Kazuya is working to help people. These actions would make no sense if Kaido was truly as power-hungry as he appears to be on the sixth day. In fact, this solidifies the theory that Kaido just... exists. Just two days prior, he was seething with rage, vowing to crush the SDF and YHVH. And yet, now he's siding with the Japanese government and the Messiah.

Clearly, Kaido is the type of person who just adapts to the situation he's in. He doesn't particularly have any morals, but instead, he just goes with whatever is happening in his environment. This is even implied in the materials guide, where under Kaido's favorite music, it says "club music?" including the question mark. Being a highschool dropout (also stated in the materials guide) and a gang leader, it's no surprise that he frequents clubs, but it's interesting that he has so little convictions that even his taste in music is left to be shaped by his environment.

Honestly, I think it's very possible Kaido has some form of undiagnosed mental disorder, quite possibly borderline personality disorder. Besides his feelings for Mari, he has no real convictions or ambitions in life. He's just aimlessly doing what life handed to him. His brother died? Well, guess he has to take over his gang. Being stuck in the lockdown? Gain more power to help him survive. Messiah is working to save humanity? Time to side with the angels.

Yes, Kaido has his issues, but the reason why we see his nasty side so often is bc of the cruelty of the lockdown and how that honestly made him snap. The game, however, also conveys multiple instances where his true nature is shown. Despite it all, he's very conflicted about the whole situation-- bouncing back and forth between attempting to murder others to listening to his conscience and displaying compassion towards others. At the end of Naoya's no kill route, Kaido states that he's doing this because he wants to stay by Kazuya's side. Metatron even notes that Kaido is doing this out of loyalty to a friend. Granted, Kaido isn't the only person Metatron says this to, but if Kaido really did only choose this path to gain more power, Metatron would've said so.

Kaido lives an aimless and metaphorically nomadic life, at times showing symptoms which hint at depression or an underlying mental illness. What he is not, however, is your typical power hungry SMT chaos rep. He's a far more complex character than that. He allows his convictions to change very suddenly, just to match the environment he's in. Really, he's this tangled mess of emotions that he has never resolved, and as a result, has become an extremely apathetic and aimless person.

[themyskira]

Wonder Woman #49

Previously in James Robinson’s sad spiral into senility: Wonder Woman accidentally summoned +~teh D4rK g0dz~+, a group of alternate-universe Greek Gods who are allegedly extremely dark and gritty and terrifying. ROLL CALL!

Mob God: goddess of chaos, shit version of Eris

The God With No Name: loser who walks around with a sheet on his head

Savage Fire: auditioned for the part of sexy Satan, was disappointed to be cast as a war god instead; crotch is literally on fire

Karnell: evil love god who is ~tortured~ because insert generic fridging story here

King Best: calls himself that with a straight face; giant stone Darkseid knockoff

Written as devastatingly evil heavy-hitters, they mostly just succeed at invoking intense second-hand embarrassment.

Now, after being AWOL for an entire issue, Diana is back and ready to take the fight to the Dark Gods. It’s time for a showdown!

…ooooorrrr we could just fart around for twenty pages and end on the most obvious fake-out imaginable.

First off, we need to talk about Stephen Segovia’s cover because WHAT.

Segovia is often praised for his dynamic, action-oriented art, and it’s not necessarily undeserved. Action is clearly his strength, and he excels at fast-paced fight scenes.

But he also has a tendency to deliver pages like this one, or like the splash page in WW #46, where no one part of the (invariably female) character’s anatomy seems to connect to any other part. Absurd boobs-and-butt action shots are nothing new in comics, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen such egregious examples. 

Look at Sexy Satan Lady: what is happening to her arse in that scene? Her left shoulder seems to have slipped halfway down her torso, and god only knows where her hips have fucked off to. Diana’s upper torso, on the other hand, seems to be directly attached to her hips, and she’s missing half her left leg.

But moving onto the bad joke that is this entire issue.

Diana and Jason are preparing to take on Best Buy, who seems less interested in transforming the Earth into a glorious hellscape than he is in playing out his monster movie fantasies by making himself giant and stomping on houses.

I’m serious. When the Biggest of Bads eats the entire Justice League, giving him access to unimaginable power, and he chooses to use that power to animate an impractically large and stupidly-taxing-to-operate body, enabling him to go on a slow-moving rampage through DC, I can only assume that his motive is ‘RAAAAA LOOK AT ME I’M GAMERA!!’ Because he could legitimately have used that power to consume the entire continental US in flames if that was what he wanted to do.

Steve radios in, and Diana instructs him to give the readers an exposition dump. She actually flags it, as if she’s a news anchor interviewing a reporter on the scene: “What about the other gods? Where in the world are they and what kind of damage are they causing?”

So Steve tells us who the other Dark Gods are, where in the world they are and what kind of damage they are causing.

James Robinson has been professionally writing comics for almost thirty years. I think it’s past time somebody told him to stop.

Sexy Satan Lady is inciting all the nations of South America to war.

Mobglob has the population of Britain in a rapturous thrall, which seems a little outside her ‘chaos and rioting’ wheelhouse. People are just staring into the sky, not eating or drinking or noticing anything around them. Steve says that children, babies and the elderly are already beginning to sicken and die from dehydration and exhaustion, which is strange, since this has only been going on for a good ten minutes.

Kandy Krush has the entire population of China consumed in a violent orgy, and the Horse With No Name is inciting Russians to suicide.

“And none of this includes the acts of madness and violence happening everywhere else in the world just from the Dark Gods’ presence on Earth,” says Steve, finishing his news report.

Remember, aside from Steve’s second-hand updates, we’ve seen no evidence of the Dark Gods’ presence infecting the world with this wide-scale hysteria and violence, aside from two people losing their shit at Diana.

Robinson tries to correct this now: over three pages, he shows us snapshots of four individuals in each of the four regions under assault from the Dark Gods, as their ordinary lives are swept up and consumed by the violent, chaotic supernatural forces that are slowly reshaping the world.

It’s a familiar device, particularly in horror comics, and the best writers can use it to truly chilling effect — think Alan Moore in Swamp Thing, Neil Gaiman in Sandman.

Robinson is no Moore and he’s no Gaiman. His is simply a by-the-numbers effort, one that in illustrates the chaos on the ground in technical terms, without imparting any particular sense of horror or empathy for the characters.

Panel 1: Character is going about their ordinary life.

Panel 2: Character comes in contact with the Dark God’s influence.

Panel 3: Character is consumed.

It’s weak, bloodless writing that only serves to rehash the two-page infodump we just got from Steve.

Diana and Jason take on Emperor Awesome.

“This planet will be unlike anything you could ever image after we’re done with it. Your hell. My heaven. Earth first and then the universe. Remade in horror.”

Again, so far you’ve done nothing but squander the power you’ve harvested on living out a kaiju fantasy, so I’m less than terrified.

Diana fluffs up her air, pushes in her neck, thrusts out her boobs and attacks tits-first.

“That’s it, brother! Hit him hard with the wind power of our father, Zeus…”

WHO TALKS LIKE THIS?!

This isn’t just lazy writing, it’s downright contemptuous. Do you think your readers are so absurdly dense that they’ve somehow forgotten that Jason has wind powers, which he inherited from Zeus, who is his father, and Diana’s as well because they’re twins? Because that’s the only justifiable reason to include such a stilted, pedantic line of dialogue in the middle of a Big Boss battle.

Jason doesn’t need reminding, and Diana’s not going to waste both breath and precious seconds. All she needs is three words: ‘Jason! Wind blast!’

(I’d argue she shouldn’t be saying anything at all here, since generally announcing each of your attacks to a larger and stronger opponent is a surefire way to get flattened, but then again, Jason is incompetent and in need of direction.)

There’s an unintentionally comical sequence in which Jason uses his wind power to lift Sir Excellent into the air and he and Diana manoeuvre the apparently unprotesting giant over the Atlantic Ocean, before dropping him in.

Thus, the scariest and most evil god that ever is or was is rendered temporarily helpless by a strong wind.

Obviously he won’t be out of the fight for long, because Robinson is nothing if not predictable.

In the meantime, Jason goes to have another crack at fighting Sexy Satan Lady. She gloats and he charges at her, while silently begging for Athena to give him the wisdom to best use the power of Dolos — Dolos being the personified spirit of trickery and cunning deception. Basically, he’s telling us that he’s planning to deceive the Dark Gods. Keep this in mind.

Diana has joined Steve for another multi-page infodump.

“We’re getting ready to deploy the Suicide Squad — multi-team, biggest version ever, actually. Plus the Titans and any Justice League reservists I can get my hands on… the trouble is, the gods keep turning the heroes, making them as insane as everyone else. The Ray, Zatanna, Damage, Beaumont and Sunny Jim in Britain, to name a few. The list goes into the hundreds. That, or as with the Justice League, they get absorbed by the gods who are made all the stronger for it.”

Hey, you know what’s more fun than watching superheroes team up to fight a world-ending threat??? Having a secondary character describe that happening from a safe distance!

Robinson has ample page-space to show us these things. The amount of time he spends each issue dicking around, rehashing things we’ve already been told and having characters deliver unnecessarily long infodumps, he could very easily devote to scenes like the ones Steve is describing here: Amanda Waller deploying a last-ditch, multi-team Suicide Squad. Other heroes and teams coming up against the Dark Gods and being overwhelmed. Magic users being consumed by the Dark Gods’ bloodthirsty and intoxicating energies. Heavy-hitters being made to turn against their own, or simply being devoured without laying a single blow.

And if Robinson is too lazy or too incompetent to write those scenes, then the very least he can do is shut the fuck up about it, instead of having Steve describe what sounds like a much more interesting comic.

Steve and Diana get word that all of the Dark Gods just vanished. (Actually, they get word that all of the Dark God just vanished, because nobody is editing this comic.) Then all five are sighted in the skies over Paraguay, where Jason had gone to fight Sexy Satan Lady. Diana rushes to Jason’s rescue aaaaaaand…

Jason: Looking for me, sister?! I have something for you— the lightning of our father combined with the fire of Hephaestus. Diana: Jason! NO! They can’t have driven you mad! I thought you’d be stronger— Jason: Mad? Why, sister, I’m saner than I’ve ever been. I see everything clearly. The Greek gods are nothing… ALL PRAISE THE DARK GODS.

In fairness, on its face this is a perfectly plausible twist, because Jason has continually shown himself to be weak-willed, incompetent and selfish �� and has a track record of being tricked into the service of supervillain conquerors with only the lightest bit of prodding.

But since we’ve already been as good as told that this is a fake-out (two pages ago, when Jason announced his intention to deceive the Dark Gods), this cliffhanger just feels like more padding. There’s so little substance to this story, I can’t believe it’s gone on for this long.

Fortunately, next issue is the final one of this garbage fire of a run. I’m hoping desperately for Jason to die in the final battle, but I’m willing to settle for banished out of reach.

However, I’m pleased to note that my Jason’s-magic-armour-doesn’t-do-anything theory remains intact.