#wanted to examine why a little

[kingofanemptyworld]

it’s missing nobara hours once again and I am near tears thinking about one of the worst fates ever bestowed on fictional characters: the tragedy of unfulfilled dreams and a life cut short.

you could obviously make the argument that most fictional deaths hit that mark — they don’t make it to the end of the narrative, so there have to be goals they never accomplished. and in jujutsu kaisen you definitely have a number of characters suffering that specific tragedy. but! There are two characters who I think embody it more than most of the others (particularly the more recent deaths, because, ugh, that’s a whole other beast of a thought and I won’t be getting into it here).

anyway. nobara and nanami. that’s who I’m talking about.

so, I’m excluding junpei from this for a few reasons. his death is horrible and cruel, he was too young, mahito took advantage of his trauma and turned him into a weapon against his friend. he dies without really being able to make amends with itadori or avenging his mom. absolutely a tragedy. but we don’t know junpei for very long, right? he’s confined to his arc (and the first opening goddamn that was mean of them) and he’s largely never mentioned again outside of it.

nobara, on the other hand. we meet her in episode 3 and she’s there throughout the rest of the first and second season. she’s also brought up again in the manga, if only briefly. we also get a very clear idea of her personal goals from the very beginning. we don’t know all the details of her relationship with saori, but we know she’s why nobara came to Tokyo, and by extension why she became a jujutsu sorcerer in the first place. nobara’s character is driven primarily by this one goal to escape her hostile, closed-minded town and reunite with this childhood friend. later on we come to understand exactly what this friend means to her but from day one we have a pretty good idea of what nobara wants and what she’s willing to do to get it.

it’s not the only important thing to her, not after she spends time with itadori and fushiguro and the second years (maki in particular). she makes new friends and they fill up the chairs in her life and she wants to protect them, physically and emotionally. but the common thread that runs through her entire arc — which is further revealed in season 2 in her flashbacks — is meeting saori again. her, fumi, and saori, back together for the first time in years. that’s what she wants. it’s one of her last thoughts. and she dies knowing she’ll never see either of them again.

tbh I’m almost crying writing this out, can you tell I experience genuine grief over her death?

but you get the point.

now, nanami is a slightly different breed of tragedy for me. he’s older, an adult although not old. we also get some idea of what drives him in season 1, which is reinforced in the hidden inventory arc in season 2: he wants to do something meaningful, something that actually helps people rather than the soul-sucking corporate bullshit he did before, and he wants to protect the next generation of jujutsu sorcerers. knowing what happened to haibara explains how protective he is of itadori, maki, nobara, and fushiguro in both seasons. and that very sweet interaction he has with the bakery woman, who definitely wants him to come by again. we have no idea if he ever did, or if he totally closed that chapter of his life and never went back. either way, it’s a lingering regret of it, I assume. maybe not for that woman specifically but for the normalcy he gave up to return to the sorcerer world.

and his actual death confirms that: nanami wanted to rest, but he wasn’t able to let go of what he learned to do, eradicating curses to save people. to make a difference. so he can’t rest, he sets that goal aside, and he doubles down on protecting the youth.

cue that heartbreaking scene of him seeing itadori for the last time and, going against his better judgement, entrusting itadori — young, inexperienced itadori who he promised to protect with his life because that’s what adults are supposed to do — to continue the fight in his stead. he doesn’t want to, the reluctance comes through loud and clear. but he does. and in doing so he knows he’s damning itadori to more tragedy and more heartbreak.

the more defined the goal, the more we feel its presence throughout the narrative, the more gut-wrenching it is to know these characters failed to achieve what they wanted most in the world.

these two are also especially tragic to me because neither of them really shared these goals with anyone that we know of. maybe nanami spoke with ino, or, less likely, gojo. maybe nobara did tell itadori and fushiguro about fumi and saori in full detail. but we really don’t know for sure. nobara doesn’t ask itadori to find saori with her final words, nanami doesn’t tell him about haibara or the bakery woman. these were quiet, personal goals they kept close to their hearts. which just makes everything so much more viscerally sad to me.

[tea-cat-arts]

Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will

[almoststedytimetravel]

Pour one out for the Persona characters that fell ill with "Time-skip cop" pray that they may one day find a cure.

[lynxalon]

i've seen a fair bit of... pessimism about dorym lately, esp with the ep107, for example wondering if dorian's opposing views on the gods making orym fall out of love, and i have to say. i very highly doubt it, ur fr talking about the man who has held on to will for so long, holding onto will's family and affectionately calling this *his* family too because that didn't stop when will died. i dont think falling out of love is an option or even a thought to orym.

that said, we know that orym has contingencies for if anyone in bells hells crosses the line into being a version of themselves they would despise, for anyone who jeopardizes their mission. his mission. i think, for the first time since knowing dorian, orym finally has a contingency for him. the longer dorian is back, the more orym sees how scarred he is by what's happened (understandable so) and knows that dorian is with bells hells all the way. but if he isn't...

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

Of my 2% capacity to be attracted to anyone, my type is like 90% women, 5% pretty men and 5% men you would swear are super fucking manly, and never questioned being straight and cis, but are now suddenly *stressed* that they can't figure out why their attraction to me [fully socially interpreted as a woman and labelled that way up until relatively recently] feels incredibly fucking gay

[mamawasatesttube]

you guys i have so many thoughts about tdr. i have so much to say. like i don't want to be super mean but dude that comic fucking sucks and i can't lie i think it made me kind of homophobic actually

[plantwriting]

I love looking too deeply into things that were clearly meant to be jokes and not serious in any shape or form. Today on the list: Kian’s relationship with Donna. Under the cut to avoid filling people’s feeds

Now I think most people will agree that Kian’s relationship with his own parents probably wasn’t great. I mean I’m just saying if my parents didn’t give me a last name I probably would just assume they didn’t want me or something. It’s one thing to support your child if they want to change their name but it’s a whole different thing to not even give them the choice to keep the name you gave them.

Now this plays pretty interestingly with Donna considering the fact that she’s without a doubt the best parent we see in the campaign. And we don’t know exactly how old Kian was when he and the others became friends, my personal headcanon is like 12-13, but if you have a child and they make a new friend who’s parents are probably known to be in a cult and also hippies and also didn’t bother naming their child? I’d grab that child so fucking fast and try to treat them as my own. Show them some love and support they wouldn’t get from their own parents.

And so like I find it extremely reasonable to assume that when they were younger Donna probably would have been very caring towards Kian (and obviously Rolan as well but this post isn’t about him). And I find it pretty reasonable to assume that if Kian’s parents were neglectful he would probably have just clung onto that care from an adult because he just needed some fucking paternal support.

But the thing is. I find it very easy to headcanon Kian with some major abandoment issues that honestly even rival Rand’s. Because I mean Rolan left them, Becky left him and he waited for her for fifteen fucking years, we can assume Rand wasn’t exactly emotionally available because he had his own issues (can’t really blame him for that but still), his parents were probably shit, and judging by the fact that Kian is very clearly a huge romantic who literally waited for his high school girlfriend for fifteen years, and yet in his introduction it’s made extremely clear that he doesn’t seem to do like serious relationships anymore? My guess would be that he had a lot failed relationships in his like early twenties and when none of them worked out he eventually just gave up and settled for one night stands.

Now this works alongside something else that is of course very notable about Kian: his looks. Like we don’t know their stats exactly I don’t think but he is canonically extremely attractive and probably has his highest characteristic in appearance. Because he’s a grizzly character. Of course he does (/lh).

But I find it very reasonable to assume that if someone had pretty bad abandonment issues and was extremely attractive and aware of that, it would become very easy for them to assume that people could only want them or care about them for their looks. And if we assume that, we can probably also assume that they would heavily lean into that and use their looks to get even some kind of affection and care from others even if it’s extremely surface level.

And bringing this back to Donna: if we assume that all my reachings in this post are correct (they are not, i am looking too deep into things because it is my favorite hobby) then it really just puts Kian’s relationship with Donna into an entirely new and way sadder light. Because suddenly it’s not just an extremely flirty person flirting with his friend’s mom for fun, but instead someone who’s been lacking any kind of paternal affection for his entire life trying to make himself sexually appealing to the one person he might have received it from because at least that way she’d care for him on some level.

And the thing is I don’t know if Kian would even be like… aware that’s what he’s doing. Or if he’d really just removed any possibility for platonic or familial love from his own life that he couldn’t even recognise that that’s what he really wants.

And maybe it’s even worse that it works. That Donna is attracted to him. That he can get that affection and love from her, someone who probably knew him as a kid, who might have practically raised him, and wouldn’t that just make him even more sure that he’s right? That the only way anyone could ever truly love and care for him is if he makes himself sexually appealing to them?

(Sorry for long post. I am. Thinking about him every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every-)

[wickershells]

people calling richard siken “unethical” for writing incest one time ohhhh we live in a hellish illiterate world. engaging with the concept of incest within the safe written boundaries of fiction is not some kind of grievous moral failing. finding it weird and unappealing and repulsive is entirely reasonable and understandable, but those are personal feelings; you cannot hold anyone else (especially writers and creators) hostage to your own discomfort. so why care about anyone writing incest, or finding it thematically or narratively interesting? people on here will cut out and sanitise elements of the sordid (think ‘soft horror’ or whatever it was called on tiktok) and exist solely within that space, accuse anyone who ventures out of it as having gone too far, and fail to realise that what attracts people to that kind of fiction in the first place is its very nature of being taboo and untouchable. why do we like horror, or tragedy? media that unsettles us? if it hits too close to home, believe me, i understand, but the best thing to do then is just to avoid and ignore it. nothing is worth triggering yourself over. but jumping at the chance to accuse a very real gay man of being a depraved pedophile (??? do you hear yourselves) because he doesn’t see any material harm that comes from random strangers in select corners of the internet wanting two brothers from a fantasy tv show to have sex is disingenuous at best and downright cruel and puritanical at worst.

[camellia-thea]

i'm still thinking about the conversation i witnessed last night :/

[percysoddity]

oh mygod i'm seeing an uptick in ronance PLEASE keep it coming

[orcelito]

So I've had no time to write today bc work etc etc but I've been thinking about it like All day and

I have chapter 17 all plotted out, and tbh could potentially write it in a matter of days, brain willing. It's finally back to Not action, which as fun as action is to write its also fucking Hard. So it'll be nice not having to agonize over the sound of a fucking chain (Twice) etc etc. Add in the fact that it's gonna be angsty as hell (angst is always the Easiest for me to write) & I rly think I could knock this one out quickly.

And the Great news is that. Examining the timeline and what I have planned...

Wolfwood is definitely arriving in chapter 18. And not at the end like I'd suspected. No, he's probably gonna be there towards the Start.

I've gotten through the two most difficult arcs to write for early ITNL, so the ball is really rolling now. We are Finally getting places...

[wilde-shit-posting]

If we discussed Oscar Wilde like The Beatles fandom discusses mclennon we'd be in other places

That being said you should go follow my Beatles blog @maccas-glass-cornflake

[jokeringcutio]

19 days: 74.511 words.

I didn't know I had it in me 😲 One more chapter to go!

[mamawasatesttube]

you guys i have so many thoughts about tdr. i have so much to say. like i don't want to be super mean but dude that comic fucking sucks and i can't lie i think it made me kind of homophobic actually

[t1erradelfuego]

please do not read the tags i am being insane at 10pm on a sunday night

[branmer]

god fandom is not that deep and i wish people would stop pretending that it is and being weirdly judgy and ugly about what other people end up hyperfixating on. just get over yourself