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manysketchbook · 7 months ago

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Firffels: the Wuzzles Competitor That Disappeared

Recently, I found this toy at my local thrift store. I thought it was an oddly cute nativity toy, but upon closer inspection the tush tag read "FIRFFELS. I'm glad to be a SHAMEL." I did a quick search online and the first result was this page on Ghost of the Doll, a toy collector's site that archives information about 80s/90s toys and includes a forum where anyone can seek help with identifying toys. This lead me down a rabbit hole of figuring out just what Firffels were: a failed line of toys promised to be the next hot phenomenon, with minimal documentation online and a handful of toys floating around in thrift stores.

Other than Ghost of the Doll, I found info about Firffels in this 2010 blog post by Trish Babbles (written in an edgy, mean-to-be-funny style that I think is too uncharitable, but it was a different time to be online lol) and this blog post by AF Blog. My other info comes from Othello Bach's website dedicated to the book itself (her personal site is no longer functional) and from a handful of youtube videos I found of a Firffels commercial. Many thanks to these sources, without them there'd be like, nothing online about these creatures.

Firffels are based on the children's book Who ever Heard of a Fird? by Othello Bach, first edition published in 1984 by Caedmon Childrens Books (upon Googling, it appears that Caedmon is owned by HarperCollins now and focuses on audiobooks). The story follows Fird, a fish-bird hybrid, as he travels the world to find other firds. Along the way he encounters a goofy, lovable cast of other hybrid animals who have all never heard of a fird. The story ends with fird learning to love his uniqueness and find peace with being who he is. As is apparent in the Amazon link above (not sponsored, just showing my work), a used copy is $86 dollars right now. An audiobook narrated by Joel Grey (an actor that I'm unfamiliar with who is apparently known for his role in Cabaret) was also released on cassette, listed on Ebay for $75+. Luckily, there is a youtube video of someone doing a complete read through of the book, but the camera angle is poor. This is the only visual record I could find online of the interior illustrations by Michelle Dorman, other than a brief look at a few in a low quality VHS promo rip I'll get to in a minute, and the image below from an Ebay listing. There may be a few more photos in some Etsy listings that I missed.

In Trish's blog post they complain that Shamel is an ugly monstrosity and there were a few comments on Ghost of the Doll's forum of the same nature about Shamel, but I think Shamel is the cutest one! It just looks like a new breed of camel, meanwhile Fird in the background here is...he's so cartoonishly goofy. Idk how else to describe him. He's so fuckin' goofy. He'd make squeaky Spongebob-esque sound effects when he walks, I imagine.

The book was allegedly a hit and Remco bought the merchandising rights. They went all in, as is detailed in the 5 minute promotional video below. Based on a cast of 6 characters, plush toys and posable action figures hit the market with a promise that Hanna Barbera would develop an animated tv show starring Firffels, housewares would be made, there'd be a clothing line, and Design-a-Firffel contests would be held. A few housewares seem to have been made and plush toy sewing patterns were released, but I was unable to find evidence that anything else moved forward.

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Absolutely fucking insane fact: according to this video, Caedmon Publishing was owned by Raytheon at the time. Thanks Raytheon for these cuddly children's toys and also, uh, horrific weapons of war?

After I bought Shamel, I went back to the store to see if there were more. There were! I found Bertle and Elephonkey, who still had the original tags. I swear the day earlier I had seen a frog toy with butterfly wings but it wasn't there anymore. I remember passing over it and thinking "eh, butterfly wings on a frog aren't cute," and did not bothering even looking at the tags. My mistake. Turns out that toy was worth a decent amount of money and was part of this whole story.

Bertle's pink belly super bright in real life, like neon. There is a sunbleached spot on it's front.

Elephonkey is the only one with original tags. I also included an image of the tush tag. For each toy the tush tag is the same but displays the character's name.

Hybrid animals are not a unique concept. Wuzzles, a line of plush toys that were animal hybrids with wings and likely made to compete with Care Bears, are brought up in most posts and forums where Firffels are mentioned--usually to disparage Firffels as being knock off, less successful Wuzzles. Wuzzles weren't exactly successful either, though they definitely lasted longer and had more reach, likely due to the backing of a Disney/Hasbro budget. AF Blog in 2015 makes a good point that I agree with: it's unlikely that Wuzzles and Firffels were ripping each other off due to production timelines. Toy lines can be in development for years before any information is made public. It takes a long time to design toys, then get them to a manufacturer, then go through the revisions process. Not to mention the time it takes to ship things out, negotiate contracts at every step of the way, etc. And, as AF Blog notes, Whoever Heard of a Fird? was released in 1984, a year before the first Wuzzles tv episode aired, and Firffels hit the market a year later.

People draw hybrid animals all the time. For example, furry adoptable artists draw hybrids all the time (take a shot every time you find a closed species that is a feline with a fish tail or deer feet or some other animal's defining trait), the Lego movie had Unikitty, and I literally went to Walmart today and in the toy section there was a miniature rabbit-like rainbow animal with wings and a unicorn horn there. The thing that makes these toys potentially appealing, in my opinion, is that they choose safe and popular traits: sparkly horns and feathery wings, for the most part. Things that are easily marketable.

The thing with Firffels is that they combined animals with traits that are less immediately appealing. Image below from Ghost of the Doll.

Some of them are cute but the others miss the mark. Personally I like Shamel and Bertle (the plush version only tbh).

Worth pointing out is that the character illustrations do not match the toy designs. If you go back and watch the commercials included in the 5 minute promo video, you can see that the Bertle plush and action figure are brown and green rather than pink and blue, and that Shamel's hair is brown instead of purple. I saw varied photos of the Butterfrog plush: some were lighter green while others were darker. Could be an issue with differing cameras, but I don't know for certain. And then there's Elephonkey, who is the most inconsistent of the bunch:

The first image is the prototype toy as it appears in the commercial. It is grey and flesh colored, with odd looking plastic hair. The second image is from Ghost of the Doll, of how the Elephonkey action figure actually appeared in stores. Third is a photo of my Elephonkey plush. Compare it with the official character art...well, he's not my favorite design in any incarnation.

I think the toys in the commercials were prototypes that were changed to brighter colors so as to appeal more towards girls. In the 30 second plush commercial there are 4 girl actors and 1 boy actor, with the camera shots getting closer to and focusing more on the girls' faces, so it would make sense. In contrast, the action figure commercial features 1 girl and 2 boys, and most of the camera shots are of the kids' hands playing with the toys, giving off a more boyish, gender-neutral vibe. Classics of gendered marketing, am I right? lol. But I think the change was a good one. I wouldn't have picked up Shamel if I hadn't seen the purple hair, and I definitely would not like Bertle if he wasn't pink. It gives the toys more of a cohesive style, a unique identity, and they fit in more alongside the Wuzzles/Care Bears visuals with the vibrant, happy colors. There's more of a toy-like quality to them, which increases the cuddle-ability and inspires more of an urge to play.

Discovering and logging all this inconsistency has been pretty fun. But it makes me think that these toys were probably doomed by a chaotic, unorganized development process behind the scenes. And given that the book was published in '84 and toys hit the market in '85...the signs seem to point to production being rushed.

To be fair to Firffels, it was probably a little harder in the 80s to hit it big with kids. You had to be lucky, you had to have connections with the right distributors, you had to anticipate what is universally appealing to children--one of the most unpredictable audiences out there--and you had to pay to air your commercials during prime child viewing hours. These are all things that are still true, but we have the internet now and the advertising power of the internet is scary. Going viral on TikTok has the potential to skibidi someone's toilet career. iPad babies are growing up into grade school kids who throw birthday parties every year and get toys as gifts. We are living in an era where mass-producing cheap little polyester plushies and plastic figures is easier than ever and corporations have massive budgets to pump into kids' eyeballs through every advertising avenue they possibly can. They don't even need to come up with the designs anymore, they can just partner with whatever Roblox game is popular right now and capitalize on that. Maybe Othello Bach should get on Roblox.

Actually, it appears that Bach was given the short end of the stick by the time Firffels were pulled. Though her personal website is no longer up, her other website dedicated entirely to Whoever Heard of a Fird? has some info:

At the height of Fird's success, with over 100 licensees cramming the store shelves with children’s merchandise and an animation contract with Hanna-Barbera, the book and all the merchandise suddenly vanished from the shelves. Although she lost the rights to several other published children’s books at the same time, Othello has never received a reasonable explanation for what happened.

So this passage actually clears something up for me. This whole time something that hasn't really lined up is that I had assumed that Othello Bach published the book first and then was approached for merchandising rights after the book sold well. I actually think now it's possible that from the get-go the book was written with the intention for it to become a worldwide sensation. Not so much Bach's intent, though. I have some professional familiarity with licensing and other such creative publishing contracts, particularly with books. Based on what I know, I believe it's more likely that Bach pitched her manuscript to Caedmon Publishing and Caedmon, seeking to create popular IP, was like, "this has potential and we are going to sign you on not only for the book, but for more." That might be why the character designs are so strange: they were trying too hard to get famous quick and had instructed the illustrator (it is regular practice for publishers to pair authors with an illustrator and given how much was on the line for this IP, Bach might not've had much input here) to design characters that could also become toys. It's unlikely that Michelle Dorman, a kids book illustrator, had product design skills needed to make standout, awesome toy designs. Not a knock on her, illustrators just have niches within their field that they're best at it. It's why you see so many illustrators complain about how often they get approached to design logos--that's not what we do, thank you.

What's sad is that clearly Bach had signed a bad contract that gave away most of her rights as the writer to the publisher. She openly says so above. My guess is that Caedmon told her they needed more rights than usual to be able to conduct so much merchandising (like signing contracts with Remco, much easier to do when you don't have a third party also involved), and because they were pouring so much effort into it on their end. Bach is just the writer, so while the original idea is hers, Caedmon would have matched her with an illustrator and taken charge of all the licensing and merchandising. For a publisher this is a huge commitment financially and personnel-wise, so it makes sense why they would have put forth a contract that gave them so many rights. If Firffels had become as popular as they'd hoped, they don't want to not own the IP. They would have poured all those resources into it and not be able to reap all the rewards because that pesky author would own it. It's almost like contracts like these are predatory and only serve the interests of the publisher. Almost like publishers are companies existing in a capitalistic system and therefore only serve profit, not people. Almost like companies will never truly have artist's best interests at heart, and if you are ever to sign a contract with a big publisher you need to have a good lawyer by your side.

It makes me so sad to read that they didn't even give her a reasonable explanation as to why everything was cancelled. She does not even appear to have any of the merchandise on hand, as all the photos on her website are from Ghost of the Doll. In hindsight we can guess, obviously, why the cancellation happened but I'm in the moment it was probably upsetting. It's still upsetting, given that she has included this in her website for the...revamped book!

However, like Fird, Othello refused to give up. For the next 20 years, she tried to regain the rights to her work. Entertainment attorneys assured her it would never happen. They said, "It can't be done!" But... it could be done and Othello did it, regaining the rights back to all her work.

Yeah, so, I actually think this is the saddest part about the whole thing. She managed to get some of the rights back and republished the book with...new art...that looks so fucking BAD. Image from her website:

Sorry to this illustrator, but got damn. There is no sauce to this art whatsoever. It is unseasoned, not even salt and pepper. This looks like ass and would never fucking fly with any editor worth their chops. It took me ages to figure out that the long yellow curved line is Fird's tail. Like, this is so unbelievably sad to me. I don't even really like the original art a whole lot, but compared to this...

My informed guess as to what happened is that Bach lawyered up and fought. As we know, Caedmon is now owned by HarperCollins. I can't say for certain but there was probably some case to be made that Caedmon being sold breached the contract, or nullified parts of it, or perhaps the contract expired. It could even just be that HarperCollins didn't care about an old, unprofitable IP and granted Bach her rights back. There is also Remco to consider: they also hold some of the rights, but probably just for the merchandise? Given how prominently their logo is displayed on the toy tags, they might actually own a significant share. Perhaps they were happy not to have anything to do with the book so long as the merch rights weren't touched. I don't know! There's no info about it on the site and this stuff is usually under NDA.

So Bach got her rights back, but she's just the writer. She doesn't own any of the art, so in order to republish the book she had to hire a new illustrator. She likely did not have a huge budget for it, maybe even paying for it out of her pocket because the Choice Books logo she has in several spots on the Fird website appears to be for a distribute on demand service, in place of a traditional publisher.

As the writer, she also would not have gotten the rights to use the original audiobook, so she had one re-recorded. It also appears like she does not have the rights to the name "Firffels" either, as the only places it appears on the site are in photographs of merchandise and in titles specifically referring to the work that is still owned by Caedmon. She carefully refers to her own work as "Fird" for short or the book's full title, probably because she cannot legally imply that she owns or made anything else.

I dug into this thinking it would be a quick look at some strange, forgotten toys from a bygone era. Instead I found a story about how an artist can so easily be shafted by publishers. Everything always loops back around to workers' rights, it seems. Stories like this about shitty publishing contracts (see: Webtoon if you want to get into something current) still appear so often, man. It's depressing, and indicative that the publishing industry needs some reforming ASAP. Like, Illustrators, when are we getting a proper union?

But I'm glad Bach got her rights back and got her book republished within her lifetime. I'm sad she didn't have the budgets for a better illustrator. Sorry to bring that up again, I work as an illustrator irl and I have opinions about craft, lol. Also I just think that given how hard Bach had to fight, she deserved to have better art made. That being said, here's another link to her current website. There's not much there but what is there is a monument to a battle she fought and won, and is proud of.

The lack of detailed, clear, centralized documentation of these toys frustrates me. One of the most frustrating things about the internet for me is that there are few easily accessible, publicly available archives of toys--even for modern toys. I've had to use Amazon reviews and Ebay listings and broken online stores to decipher publication years. With this in mind I decided to do a write up and provide clearer pictures of the toys that I have (I'll take hi res pics in natural lighting too someday). Archives are important to me and the internet kinda sucks for it, I say as someone who started this blog for that purpose. If Tumblr goes down, so does everything I've posted here. As an artist who works primarily digitally, one of the scariest things is knowing that I'm laboring over an ephemeral body of work. It's just not going to exist for very long unless I print it out on archival materials. Data is not the same as a physical object. My Firffels have survived for 39 years but the digital art I draw every day is unlikely to last past 10 years because websites die and files get deleted.

I bought the Firffels from my thrift store thinking I'd resell them. I'm low income so I sell many of the things I thrift. I prefer to buy the older toys or the ones that need cleaning because it makes me feel better about being a reseller (I don't want to take away options from low income kids in my area, ya know?). But I'm putting in the labor to freshen them up and I'm putting in the effort to make unavailable toys available again, at least for one person. And I don't have a whole lot of shelf space to display the toys in my collection...but for now I think I'll keep them.

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soldouthaz · 5 years ago

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Hiiii I don't know if you've already done one like this, but who are your favorite fic writers? I always love your recs and I'd love to know who your favorites are so I can check them out! Also I love your fics!

hii! thank you so much for this ask I can’t believe I hadn’t though of doing this before!

most of these authors are people that I have talked with at least once before, and I can vouch for their character 1000%. reading their writing is so much more gratifying not only because it’s well written, but because of the satisfaction of knowing that they are truly good individuals as well. I am also thinking about doing one of these recs for artists and other content creators as well if anyone would be interested in that!

I'm in the middle of midterms right now so my brain is very scattered and I'm sure I’ve forgotten some people, but know that there is no way I could possibly list all of the wonderful authors that have made a difference in my life. but please check out these authors and leave them some love if you do! as always, please stick to your own interests and don’t spread any hate!

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please let me know if I have used any incorrect pronouns or linked anything incorrectly, or if you'd like me to unlink to something! :)

in no particular order:

✰ falsegoodnight

ao3 | @risthebrave | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, soulmates, uni au’s

personal recs: x , x , x , x

where do I start? the plots she comes up with are 10/10, the writing is absolutely amazing, and she’s just generally a wonderful and considerate person. you can just tell by reading her work how passionate she is about writing when you read her work. each and every one of her fics is a huge yes from me and I'm so excited to for all of her wips! and it definitely doesn’t hurt that she’s an amazing person in general either!

✰ pinkvinyl

ao3 | @pinkvinyl | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, pwp

personal recs: x

they only have one work out as of this date but oh boy it’s so so good!! the imagery here is just on an entirely different level. they make it so easy to visualize the scenes and it makes the fics that much more lovely to read! (+ happy birthday ashley!)

✰ outropeace

ao3 | @outropeace | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, soulmates

personal recs: x , x , x

andy is amazing!! I just finished their most recent fic last night and I'm obsessed. I love the dialogue with their works and they always manage to write raw emotion so beautifully. the angst is wonderful as well! their work is always just the right amount of length and detail to always leave you wanting more :)

✰ faeriestyles

ao3 | @yvesaintlourent | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, trailer park! harry, a/b/o, pwp

personal recs: x

I'm not entirely sure why hayley doesn’t think her fics are anything less than amazing. she only has two out currently but I can’t tell you how excited I am to see some of what she’s been teasing on twitter! she has a gift with her scenes! the way she describes the settings makes you feel like you’re there with the characters, and it’s easy to get lost in the words (in the best way!).

✰ allwaswell16

ao3 | @allwaswell16 | twitter

common work tags/tropes: cowboy au, assassin au, bottom Louis, bottom harry, a/b/o, soulmates, uni au’s, hate to love, vampires, drabbles, football, royal au’s, side ziam

personal recs: x , x , x , x

TONS of awesome fics to choose from! there’s definitely something for everyone here. anitra is a lovely person in general and I, as well as many others, appreciate her dedication to writing consistently lovely fics over and over again. I still haven’t made my way through all of them yet but I have no doubt I’ll love them! she also runs a *podcast* for other fic writers and reviews which spreads so much positivity and happiness in our corner of the fandom :) she’s amazing!

✰ smittenwithlouis

ao3 | @smittenwithlouis | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, fantasy au’s, magic, hybrid Louis, mythical creatures

personal recs: x , x

super super talented! their fics are always well written and they’re probably my favorite fantasy writer in the fandom!! I really like the magic elements and the different takes on popular mythical tropes, and you can really feel the emotion through the dialogue and the settings. despite having a lot of fantasy aspects, every fic feels very realistic which is usually very hard to do with these topics!

✰ lads_laddylads

ao3 | @lads-laddylads | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, pwp, vampires, uni au’s

personal recs: x , x , x

I'm a sucker for literally all of emma’s storylines. I think I've reread her most recent fic about five times now! even after not writing for a bit it’s clear that the talent never left! she’s definitely got some classics in her portfolio and I can’t wait to see what’s coming :)

✰ whoknows

ao3 | @crazyupsetter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, canon elements, dom/sub, a/b/o, supernatural / fantasy elements, drabbles, pwp, hybrid Louis

personal recs: x , x , x , x , x , x

I'm pretty sure everyone already knows about this author but they’re so incredibly talented and their fics are some of my favorites so I couldn’t leave them off of this list! they have thirty two lovely fics as of this day to choose from for this fandom, as well as a few for others as well. they’re another author that has something for everyone! there’s just something about the way they write that lets you get lost in it. I always finish their fics with a smile on my face and feeling fulfilled from another wonderful read!

✰ itjustkindahappened

ao3 | @tequiladimples

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, fluff, mythology, drabbles

personal recs: x

I still need to finish reading the rest of their works but I cannot say enough about ‘collision’! this author’s attention to detail and dedication to accuracy and descriptions in their writing is just incredible! you can tell just how much time and effort went into it, and, in my opinion, it was so so worth it! I admire them so much :) it’s so refreshing when these kinds of tropes are well done and you can just get lost in the writing from the first word down to the last line!

✰ delsicle

ao3 | @eeveelou

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, ‘thick alpha’ verse, pwp, dunkirk inspired works, mpreg, polyamory, some dark themes / horror, Alex from dunkirk, drabbles

personal recs: x , x , x , x , x

another fandom favorite! I've been absolutely obsessed with ‘feeling it out’ since it was first published! they write a/b/o (and everything else!) so well that they make it look easy! the characterizations are so unique and I've never read anything like them before - I can’t get enough! I always look forward to their posts and already know it’ll be one of my new favorites!

✰ jaerie

ao3 | @jaerie

common work tags/tropes: a/b/o, bottom Louis, bottom harry, canon elements, gender swap, drabbles, mpreg, historical au’s, pwp

personal recs: x , x , x ,

I really admire this author because of the way they tend to go against the grain. they write the things they want and it’s obvious that they enjoy it, and I really admire their ability to do so! there are tons of options here as well! (check the tags before reading!)

✰ louizsv

ao3 | @louizsv

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, d/s dynamics, vampires, some fantasy / supernatural elements

personal recs: x , x

their first fic still has me absolutely floored - it’s definitely one of my all time favorites! their writing is usually between 10k - 20k but it’s amazing the amount of detail and plot they can articulate in that length. if you’re looking for a simple, cute, lovely read, you’ve chosen the right author! :)

✰ brooklyn_babylon

ao3 | @brooklyn-babylon

common work tags/tropes: bottom harry, pwp

personal recs: x

I'm not sure if they want me to tag their main account so I'll just tag the one above :) this author definitely has a way with words! I only found their work recently and it hasn’t disappointed throughout the many rereads in the time since. they write tension and emotion beautifully and their characterization is lovely! I'm looking forward to anything else they might publish!

✰ 2tiedships2

ao3 | @2tiedships2 | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, enemies to lovers, fake dating, fluff

personal recs: x , x , x

pretty sure I've already talked about this author several times but I couldn’t leave them off! their fics are written so beautifully and realistically that you cannot put it down until it’s over. the first time I found them I fell down a rabbit hole and read all of their works within the week! I reread their fics on a monthly basis and I have absolutely no regrets.

✰ disgruntledkittenface

ao3 | @disgruntledkittenface

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, bottom harry, drabbles, d/s elements, gender swapping / girl direction, hurt/comfort, fluff

personal recs: x , x

I so much admire the variety in these fics, as well as the time and dedication this author has put forth for readers. it’s obvious how much they love writing! everything from the meet-cute’s to the smut is exceptionally well written and immersive. their work has been and will always be very close to my heart , so if you check them out please leave them some love! :) (also please make sure to check the tags before you read!)

✰ summerwine

ao3 | @smrwine

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, pwp, feminization, dom/sub

personal recs: x , x , x

I'm sure this author is also no stranger! they truly have a gift for writing such aesthetically pleasing and wonderfully worded fics, stock full with dreamy settings and descriptions. their writing is just on a whole different kind of genre and I don’t think I'll ever get tired of reading and rereading their works!

✰ loadedgunn

ao3 | @loaded-gunn

common work tags/tropes: bottom harry, bottom Louis, pwp, dom/sub, gender swap / girl direction

personal recs: x , x , x

reading this author’s fics is almost like you’re being allowed into a private moment between the characters. sometimes I even hold my breath when I'm reading so I don’t disturb the moment! this writing is soft and lovely and every single scene is thick with emotion in the best way. the chemistry between their characters is insane!

✰ edensrose

ao3 | @holdingthornsandroses | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, historical au

personal recs: x

I have yet to read this author’s second work but I have no doubt it will be just as absolutely amazing as the first one was! I am amazed at their ability to twist such a classic storyline and completely make it feel like their own, and to do so effortlessly. I adore their attention to detail and originality in their fics and I can’t wait until I have some time to dig into their latest one! (and it helps that they’re just a very lovely person!)

✰ angelichl

ao3 | @angelichl

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, bottom harry, uni au’s, a/b/o, dom/sub, supernatural elements, drabbles

personal recs: x , x , x

reading this author’s work is like getting immersed in another world. I have yet to find another author that can so beautifully write this melancholic and yet morally satisfying type of aura through their words. this is another person that writes dialogue and emotion very tactfully, and it really resonates when reading. (check the tags!)

✰ istajmaal

ao3

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, bottom harry, phone sex operator fic, pwp, dom/sub, gender swapping

personal recs: x , x , x , x , x , x

oh boy I'm already sweating! I really really enjoy the way that this author describes and I hope they come back at some point! all of their storylines are so unique and very refreshing. not to mention how they have a way of writing smut that literally has me so hooked into the story that I forget to breathe sometimes! truly a fantastic writer!

✰ mercutionotromeo

ao3 | @mercutionotromeo

common work tags/tropes: bottom harry, pwp, daddy kink, dom/sub, fluff, drabbles, gender swapping, light age play

personal recs: x , x , x , x , x , x

one of my all time favorite authors!!! I've been reading their works for years now and I still can’t get enough. it’s soft and lovely and warm and just very very comforting in general. they have a way of making their fics seem like an entire little world no matter how short or long they are. they haven’t written in a bit but I'll continue dutifully waiting on a notification!

✰ sunflowerstyles

ao3 | @sunflowerstyles

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, hurt/comfort, daddy kink,

personal recs: x , x

this author is kind of like the b!L version of mercutionotromeo, at least in my opinion. their last fic was published in 2016 but I've reread their work so many times since then in hopes they'll come back at some point! this person does a wonderful job with angst & hurt/comfort and when I'm in the mood for those tropes these fics are definitely some of my first contenders! (make sure to check the tags! some of the hurt/comfort aspects may be triggering for some readers). lots of emotion and very soft, loving fics!

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please let me know if you need any more! happy reading and I hope you find some more lovely authors to choose from! :)

#ask #fic recs #this took me 84 years I hope you like it!

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talpup · 5 years ago

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Lost Song: 1

Summary: The war between the Dragons and Griffons ended 233 years ago, and both races right along with it.

Or so it was believed. There are three individuals that will soon change that.

Kai is the last of the Dragons and he seeks to take what he sees as his rightful place and rule over all of Oblvi. Meanwhile, Shouta, the last Sphinx, wants nothing more than to do his job; keep the peace and and teach the young Fourth’s to hopefully avoid the mistakes of their ancestors. And Teris, a Foundling who is just trying to understand and survive in this strange new world that is supposedly her own.

All three have their own wants and desires, but Kai’s plans, Teris’ existence, and Shouta's past mean that none of them may get what they want.

***So this fic will have a LOT more world building than my others. Please feel free to comment. For those who have read my Chaos fic, yes, I'm reusing the term Oblvi. Words are hard and I liked the term; but this fic isn't connected to Chaos. The same goes for reader/oc's name being Teris. She's not the same Teris from Erase the Shadow.

This fic is rated explicit and has warnings of sex, violence, and other possible triggers.

If you prefer reading off AO3 here’s the link for that: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24009679

Special thank you to @inorganicone2230 who knows of my love for the mythic and encouraged me to start this fic without stressing about the other two I’ve got going. Your friendship means the world to me. And I can’t wait to go down the rabbit hole of ideas with in for this fic.

1.1

“What do you mean she wants to give him back!”

The Arbitrators snarl caused the already nervous Miyashita to hiccup and vanish. With a swallow the Changeling slowly reappeared.

“I—it—it is not a matter of want.” The nervous Sprite responded. “Rather a matter of necessity.”

The Arbitrator glared at the little man seated across from his desk. As a rule, Enji didn’t trust things he couldn’t look in the eye. So it didn’t help his annoyance that he had to stretch his back and lean slightly forward in order to see the Changeling given that the Sprites forehead barely reached the level of the desks polished surface.

“Explain.” Enji demanded when the Sprite showed no sign of going on.

“Well, ah, you see--” Miyashita stalled looking every where but at the frightful Manticore.

Enji growled his impatience, struggling to keep his human form. To think that this little gnat had had the nerve to chitter at him for offering a book on which to boost his child-like frame upon.

“The thing is.” Miyashita went on with carefully. “Her Ladyship would not be able keep the Reaping even if she wanted, for he is not human.”

Not human! Enji blinked. A second Foundling in as many days. This was just great. At least the first, a woman, hadn’t been discovered during a Changeling Reaping. Though Enji couldn’t decide if that was worse or better. In any case, this would certainly garner the Council’s attention. Something nobody wanted.

1.2

“Aizawa. Please, come in.” Nedzu beckoned.

Shouta stepped into the Director of Traverseen Halls office and closed the door. At the sight of Yagi and Todoroki, Shouta’s shoulders slightly tensed. Thankfully, in human form his black hair was long enough to cover his neck and no one noticed the brief rise of his heckles.

“Please. Take a seat. We have much to discuss.” Director Nedzu urged.

Shouta did so choosing to take the open chair near the Arbitrator rather than Toshinori. Sinking into the too soft seat, Shouta tried to think of any trouble his class of 1-A might have caused last time they were in town. It was the only explanation he could think of for why both the area Arbitrator and Toshinori, the area Elder, were here.

Coal black eyes on the Director, Shouta questioned. “What’s this about? I have class in twelve minutes.”

“This will take longer than twelve minutes I’m afraid. But there’s no need to worry about your students. I sent Nemuri to cover your class.” Nedzu told.

Shouta's eyes narrowed. Though the animal looking creature tried to sound his usual chipper self, he could hear a tight telling of concern in the Hybrid’s voice. The Sphinx sniffed. His pure blood and Nedzu’s overly mixed meant that he could smell it too.

He wondered if Todoroki could smell Nedzu’s unease. While dragons, griffons, and sphinx's were the most ancient of beasts; manticore's were older than most. It afforded the species better honed senses, especially if they were pure bloods. Something Arbitrator Todoroki was overly proud of. Honestly, Shouta was surprised the respect Todoroki showed a hybrid like Nedzu, whose lineage was so mixed and mutated that even Nedzu himself couldn’t say what all he was.

Unlike pure bloods, hybrids carried remnants of their true form over into their human form. The more muddled ones blood became the more remnants got carried over. Nedzu’s lineage was so mixed that he couldn’t alter the image of the humanoid animal he appeared as. And given the fact that Fourth’s who couldn’t change into more human-like forms were thought of as less at best, Nedzu had faced a hard life. Not that one could tell by his usually bright personality.

“Tea.” Nedzu offered the three men seated before his desk.

Enji and Shouta shook their heads, while Toshinori politely took a cup.

Curiosity and impatience getting the better of him, Shouta spoke up. “Sir. I ask again. What is this about?”

Nedzu set down the tea pot. “That’s why I like you, Aizawa. Focused. Straight to the point. Something that was rarely found in your species.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Shouta deadpanned. He was the last of his kind. Locked in stone as a cub and found long after the dragons and griffons thought they had extinguish his species.

Enji huffed, crossing his arms. He felt no sympathy for Aizawa's loss. The way he saw it it was sphinx-kinds own fault for not siding with the dragons.

Toshinori lowered his cup of tea. The reminder of what dragon and griffon kind had done when the sphinx's refused to chose a side in the Dragon-Griffon War still sat ill with him despite him having served the griffons.

Nedzu knew well enough that Aizawa wasn’t seeking sympathy or calling anyone out for their past allegiances. The Sphinx was merely stating a fact. “Arbitrator, if you would.”

Enji uncrossed his arms. “A week and half ago, the Changeling Queen of a local clan visited Terra for a sanctioned Reaping. Unfortunately she couldn’t keep her claim as the being she reaped turned out not to be a Fourth.”

“A foundling Fourth.” Shouta mused. “Irregular to find one young enough that it hasn’t realized what it is, but not impossible. Sprites more than any other Fourth like to mess with humans. Despite the Council’s laws, Changeling’s will find a way to trade their young for human children.”

“As a member of the Ilca it��s your job to stop them.” Enji rumbled.

“Your opinion of me flatters. But I’m only one sphinx. I can’t be everywhere.” Shouta stared at the reddening Arbitrator a moment before going on. “Besides, some Fourth foundling isn’t what this is about. Such a clear and simple breach of Council law wouldn’t interest both you or the area Elder.” He glanced passed Todoroki to Yagi. “So I ask again. What is this about?”

Shouta realized he was being rude but he didn’t care. He had a class to get to. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Nemuri not to let 1-A run rampant...okay, that was precisely it.

Not one to be rushed by anyone, and certainly not some member of the Ilca, Enji went on. “The Foundling the Changeling Queen reaped is a man. Obviously young. Says he’s twenty-nine. Likely a hybrid of sprite and spirit. Though time will tell exactly which species his lineage is. But that’s not all. The day prior to that a trader whose license allows him to bring goods in and out of Terra returned with a Foundling of his own. A woman. The trader was a Derrick, said he sensed the presence of a Fourth and followed it discovering an unconscious woman in an alley. Unable to rouse her and finding no pass that allowed her to be in Terra he brought her back with his load. Since the woman claims she doesn’t know the Derrick and only regained consciousness once here we had no way of verifying his story. Derrick’s are tricksy creatures--”

“They’re a benevolent species known for pranks of little harm.” Shouta interrupted.

“That hardly means the Derrick is telling the truth.” Enji bristled.

Rather than argue, Shouta looked across to Yagi. “What does the area Elder think?”

Toshinori set down the tea cup. “I believe him. The Derrick has no reason to lie.”

Enji scoffed. Yagi might be a powerful Talos, but he was too kind. Too trusting. The Elder’s compassionate, charitable nature made him weak in Enji’s eyes. He would've been a better Elder. The area needed a firmer, less accepting leader.

Shouta smirked into his scarf-like piece that served as restraints and a weapon of sorts. He had never really cared for the boisterous, attention hungry Elder. But if they insisted on making him late for class, the least he could do was irk the Manticore by reminding him of his lesser place to Yagi.

The Sphinx fixed his gaze on Nedzu. “As intriguing as all this is, Sir. What does it have to do with me or Traverseen Hall in general?”

“Both Foundlings are to be trained and placed in your Ilca.”

Shouta's mouth opened. He worked alone. And with good reason. Though the species divided by the Dragon-Griffon War were slowly coming back together, there was one species. One person. That they all hated. Him.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Nedzu said.

“Do you?” Shouta asked.

“The Foundlings don’t know about our history. They won’t care that you’re a sphinx.”

“I work alone.” Shouta said.

“Correction. You <em>worked</em> alone.”

Shouta frowned into his scarf-like piece at Todoroki’s taunting words.

Yagi cleared his throat. Only he, Todoroki, and Nedzu knew that the woman was a griffon. But if she was to be part of Aizawa's Ilca, he thought it important for the Sphinx to know.

Sensing the Elder's plan, Nedzu spoke up. “Discovering what either of them are is of secondary consequence at the present. Neither of them remember anything about who they truly are, if they ever knew in the first place. They didn’t even know Oblvi existed and therefore know nothing of our world. The goal is to see that they have the tools and ability to survive.”

“And you don’t think making them part of my Ilca is counter productive to their survival?” Shouta questioned, levelly. Just being part of his Ilca would make things unnecessarily difficult on them when it came to making acquaintances, never mind friends.

Nedzu ignored the query. “Seeing as you have a full schedule teaching and being an active Ilca, I have ordered Oboro to instruct and train the male Foundling. And Kai do to the same with the female.”

Kai. Shouta's teeth pressed together at the mention of the Dragon. “So you think she’s a beast of some kind?”

Nedzu nodded. “She’s certainly not a spirit, sprite, or demon.”

Shouta sighed. At least she was of the same division as he. But the other Foundling? It wasn’t that he had anything against spirits or sprites…

Still ill at ease about keeping the truth of the woman’s lineage from the Council, Enji stated. “Yagi and I have spoken with the Council. They are eager to learn exactly what kind of Fourth’s the two are.”

Boisterous voice taking on a more serious edge, Yagi told Aizawa. “I’m more concerned with seeing that these two learn how to survive and don’t inadvertently hurt someone. Proper instruction and first hand experience are vital to that. Sending them out with an Ilca member will give them both. Especially if that Ilca member is an accomplished teacher.”

Shouta disregarded the compliment, silently cursing the Elder’s reasonable thinking. Tiresome as it was, the idea was logical. The two foundlings clearly weren’t some young-lings to be enrolled in the Ilca course at Traverseen Hall. A three year sedate course of learning would only be a danger to themselves and others. Being older their power would be greater. They needed to learn to control it as quickly as possible. While throwing them into the fire might seem a recipe for disaster. It was only rational way to assure their power displayed itself and force them to control it.

Still, Shouta didn’t like being saddled with two members to his Ilca. As much as he liked teaching, he worked alone. Not to mention the hassle and danger of not knowing what kind of Fourth’s they were.

As if reading his mind, Nedzu said. “Aside from basic base instincts, once they learn and begin to display their inherent abilities, we will be able to narrow down what kind of Fourth’s they are.”

Shouta nodded in agreement. While a particular species instinct didn’t always run true or as strong for every Fourth of that species; that, combined with the inherent abilities, should give them a better idea of what kind of Fourth they were. They already knew the divisions of the two. Beast for the woman. And spirit and sprite for the man. The next step would be to learning what phylum they were part of, then class, followed by order, tribe, genus, and finally species.

Shouta cursed his own species inherent love of puzzles and riddles. Even if given a choice by the three seated around him, he wouldn’t have been able to say no to such a tempting mystery.

“I’ll take them.”

1.3

A knock on Kai’s office door sounded. “Enter.”

Teris eyed the man that had escorted her, slowly walking passed him to enter the room.

“Kai. The Foundling female.” Hari introduced.

“I have a name.” Teris snapped. She looked to the man behind the desk, her breath catching in her throat.

Kai’s head shot up, gold eyes lifting. The aura she gave off. The prideful power…

Teris chalked her hammering heart and tingling senses up to the events of the last three days and not the man seated before her. “Where’s Hizashi?”

“Who?”

“The other Foundling.” Hari explained.

Kai’s disappointment was palatable. For a moment he had thought. Had hoped that she was a dragon. Just the feeling of ancient, unbridled power she gave had excited and thrilled him. But that excitement and interest diminished in an instant. Dragons weren’t pack Fourth’s and whatever this woman was, she clearly was if she cared enough to ask about the other Foundling whereabouts.

Setting aside the quill, Kai closed pushed away the stack of orders. “The other Foundling will be learning with those from his own division. You will be learning with yours.”

“Beasts.” Teris said, pulling the word from memory. A lot had been said to her and Hizashi these last few days, it was hard to remember and keep it all straight.

“At least you’re not completely oblivious.” Kai muttered under his breath.

“I have a three masters and was close to getting my doctorate before--” Teris stopped. These people. These things didn’t need to know about her abduction and trouble she had escaped from before being found and brought over. More over being taken was a sign of weakness and every instinct she had was telling her not to appear weak before this golden eyed man.

“Your Terra education will be of little good here.” Kai dismissed, not at all surprised she had heard him. Excellent hearing was a trait of most beasts. Simmering eyes focused on her. “Though I can appreciate your obvious interest in learning. I myself enjoy the endeavor of bettering not just my body but my mind.”

If her world hadn’t been turned upside down, Teris might've remarked that his body didn’t require any bettering; but she kept the passing thought to herself.

“Let’s start properly, shall we. I am Chisaki Kai. That’s Kurono Hari.”

“And what kind of creatures—Fourth’s are you?”

“That’s impolite to ask.” Hari grumbled.

Kai held up a staying hand. “True. But forgivable. I’m a dragon. Hari’s an arepyiai. And you are?”

“I—I don’t know.” A part of her still wondered if she should be here. The other, great part, still questioning if this was all real. Maybe she was still back in that cell. Her abductors…

“Why don’t we start with your name.” Kai suggested.

“Nova. Teris.”

“And may I call you Teris?”

Teris nodded.

“Good. You may call me Kai. What don’t you show me your true form.”

Teris’ hand pressed to her shirt collar. “M—my what?”

“Hari.” Kai commanded.

Hari changed into his true form. It was a startling sight. Unlike more ancient Fourth’s, arepyiai’s were far from beautiful. More horrid miss-mash of the two root species that arepyiai stemmed from. He had the bird-like lower body of a harpy, along with their smaller wings. While his torso was lion-like with the head of an eagle, showing the griffon part of his species lineage.

Teris jumped back.

Kai noted her quickness even in human form, adding it to the list of telling things about her that would eventually reveal what she was. “Your turn.”

“I—I can’t do that.”

“Afraid there’s not enough room? Don’t worry. Traverseen Hall was built with dwarf magic. The room was made to accommodate Fourth’s in their true from. It will expand as much as required.” Kai offered.

“That’s… Not what I meant.”

Kai sighed. It was foolish to think it would be so easy. “Fine. We met. I will teach you. Be back here first thing in the morning.”

It wasn’t as if he had much of a choice. The Rat, Nedzu, hadn’t given him a choice.

“That’s it.” Teris blinked.

Hari already back in human form, had the door open, ushering arm extended.

“The day is nearly done and I have work to do.” Kai stated.

He couldn’t help a small smile. She was pretty. And if she was bright enough to have three masters from Terra, she might be a welcome diversion from the rigors of his goal.

Hari returned shortly after seeing her out. “What do you think?”

“Too soon to tell. But whatever she is, her species is old. It’s inconvenient. Having her around. Even if it’s just during the day.”

“Wonder if the Rat suspects.”

Kai shook Hari’s concern away. “Even if Nedzu suspects anything. A Foundling would make for a terrible spy. She doesn’t know enough about anything to find something out of sorts.”

“Even so. I’ll order the rest of the Ilca to be careful when she’s around.”

Kai nodded, pleased. He was just glad that his Ilca had a full complement of eight and the Foundling couldn’t be assigned to it. That definitely would've made his plans all the more difficult. He had the thought of teaching her the old way. The true and right way of things.

“Whose Ilca was she placed in?”

“Aizawa's.”

Kai frowned at that. The thought of teaching her suddenly became all the more appealing.

I write for my own enjoyment, but edit and post for yours. If you enjoyed reading this at all please comment and let me know. It’s the only thing that encourages me to keep editing and posting.

#bnha #aizawa shouta #shouta aizawa #kai chisaki #chisaki kai #todoroki enji #yagi toshinori #bnha nedzu #hari kurono #my hero academia #lost song

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lechevaliermalfet · 5 years ago

Text

In the Name of the Moon – A Look at Lunar Legend Tsukihime

There’s a popular joke in the Type-Moon fandom that there is no Tsukihime anime, but boy it sure would be great if there was one.

I had only ever been dimly aware of this attitude toward the Tsukihime anime myself. Watching it fansubbed for the first time in the early 00s, I wasn’t really plugged into the fandom, and the joke seemed like a minor thing to me. I had all but forgotten it by the time I was with my wife at Otakon in 2012, and we went to a panel about Type-Moon for fandom newcomers.

The panel was pretty salty about the Tsukihime anime, taking the joke about there being no such thing so far as to refuse to acknowledge it or discuss it. If I recall, they insisted on this refusal even when directly asked about it by someone in the audience. I also don’t recall them being all that complimentary about the Fate/Stay Night anime (the original 2006 series) for that matter. We had a long drive home after the convention – fourteen hours, give or take – and our discussion about the convention kept circling back to that panel.

She’d gone mostly to accompany me, I think, and because she didn’t have anything she wanted to do that conflicted with it. She had some minor interest herself, as she’d seen this supposedly nonexistent Tsukihime anime, and like me, she enjoyed it. So it was pretty irritating for her to go to this panel ostensibly for newcomers and then have them trash the one thing she’d experienced in the fandom. It was all the more irritating when you stopped to consider that at that point that it was, in all probability, one of the handful of things real newcomers might have experience with.

In its way, though, the panelists’ hostile and disdainful attitude toward the most accessible works in the general Type-Moon oeuvre did make for a suitable introduction. If not to Type-Moon and their work, then to the fandom, and the high levels of toxicity most of its assholes could and would display given the opportunity.

But I’m not here to talk about the Type-Moon fandom, except as it amuses me, or is relevant to the subject at hand.

The subject being this supposedly non-existent anime: Lunar Legend Tsukihime.

My own relation to the Western Type-Moon fan community is tangential at best. A couple of guys I know (one a good friend, the other an acquaintance), back in the early to mid-aughts, were moderators for the Beast’s Lair forum, basically the center of the English-language fandom community at the time. Of course, at the time, the fandom was almost brand-new. Tsukihime was all the rage then, because Tsukihime was almost all there was. Fate/Stay Night was new enough that there hadn’t really been time for the discourse around it to even form, let alone evolve much. And in those days, Beast’s Lair was basically the forum owner and a few of his online friends, and I feel like half the reason it existed was because at that point, it was more convenient to just have a forum than it was to get a bunch of guys together on an AIM group chat with that level of frequency. This was before Mirror Moon created a translation patch for any of these games. These were guys who bought the game direct from Japan, paid the outrageous import fees, referred constantly to a GameFAQs walkthrough, and died like men. It was that, or learn Japanese. Most of them opted for the walkthrough. Thank Whoever you believe in that the game runs windowed, I guess.

Fate, which has been the bread and butter of Type-Moon’s success for well over a decade now, was a commercial game. But it was one built with on the base of the huge support Tsukihime had garnered following its launch. Tsukihime itself was a doujin game, made when the guys at Type-Moon were a bunch of nobodies and had no real money to speak of.

Because they were nobodies, and because they needed the game to sell big if they were going to make the kind of money they needed to make, they did what a lot of Japanese doujin developers have done and continue to do, and will probably do until the end of time, and put porn in the game.

This is not unknown in Western development circles either, just for the record. But Japanese culture is in some ways more permissive when it comes to depictions of sex or sex-adjacent topics and material in their mainstream entertainment. Porn can net you a decent career, or at least a halfway-decent living, and it’s generally easier over there for porn artists in any field of endeavor to “go legit” and make the jump to the non-porn version of their field.

That doesn’t happen in the West, or at any rate not in America. Or very rarely. We have (for better or worse; there’s a whole separate debate there) a much sharper division between the porn and non-porn sides of the entertainment industry, and that barrier’s much less porous. But porn fans will support you. If the success ceiling is far lower than in the legitimate side of the industry, it’s also true that the floor is likewise lower.

So here we have Tsukihime. Not “porn with plot”, or even “plot with porn”, but “plot (…with porn)”. It’s there because they were worried the game wouldn’t sell without it, and so there’s not much of it in the first place. What I’m saying is that if you’re wanting to get your rocks off, you’re going to be a while.

Which is not to say that Tsukihime as a game is inherently like… progressive, or woke, or anything like that. Oh no. Nonononono. It’s horror (-ish, depending on your route), for starters – a genre that thrives on objectification and exploitation. And then it’s Japanese, which gives it an extra few layers of seeming weird to American sensibilities. So this is less like going down the rabbit hole and potentially more like falling into a snake pit.

I say all this to lend some context. When we think of Type-Moon today, we tend to think of this highly successful production house with a star franchise that’s rapidly hitting the market saturation point. If it hasn’t already (and I have a friend who maintains that it has). And that is absolutely not Tsukihime. Not the game, and certainly not the anime. No ufotable animating, no Yuki Kajiura composing, no Gen Urobuchi directing the critically acclaimed and popularly loved (and irritatingly overpriced) prequel.

This is Tsukihime. This isn’t the property that launched Type-Moon to stardom. That would, again, be Fate. This is the property that let them make Fate the way they did. Tsukihime is the visual novel world’s equivalent of some garage band you never heard of releasing their demo tape as their debut album, and the demo tape is actually pretty good, even as it suffers from having basically rock-bottom production values. It’s one of those things where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You have to look at what it tries to be and tries to do, and like it for that. In that much at least, even as they differ in many other ways, that much is true of both the anime and the visual novel.

It’s worth it, though.

Phantasmal Fantasy

If we’re being honest (and why wouldn’t we be honest?), Tsukihime, at least going through the main route, is a little bit less straight horror and a little more what I think of as horror-fantasy. It isn’t horror because it’s rarely if ever actually frightening. But it uses horror aesthetics in a fantasy setting (urban fantasy, in this case), which may lend things a generally eerie and unsettling sense of ambiance and a particular feeling of threat to the main characters without ever quite getting your pulse up. It’s a hybrid genre I happen to have a huge soft spot for (I’ve been reliably informed that this is sort of My Thing). The entire Legacy of Kain series falls under that banner for me, as do most of the Castlevania games. The Dark Souls games all have it to some extent, and Bloodborne leans into it hard enough that it actually is kind of legitimately scary at various points. And then there are movies like Vampire Hunter D.

Lunar Legend Tsukihime, the anime based on the visual novel Tsukihime, was released in the early to mid 2000s. On a technical level, it’s very middle-of-the-road, with a bit of a generic visual style and workmanlike animation. But we’re talking about an anime based on a doujin hentai game. More mainstream visual novels’ adaptations tend to get better treatment. Tsukihime is well-regarded, but probably not really “popular” in the same sense as something like, say, Da Capo or Little Busters or Air, or... Look, Type-Moon’s getting the star treatment was pretty much going to be impossible at that stage. It took Tsukihime and the first Fate adaptation before we got to that point. That the Tsukihime anime happened at all is honestly kind of remarkable, and a testament to how much of an impact the game made.

Tsukihime takes place in the modern day (well, modern for the date of its release, which for the game was 2000, and for the anime would be 2003 or so). It’s a vampire story, of sorts, though the only creatures we’d recognize as traditional vampires are a minor threat at best.

Our main character, or at any rate, our viewpoint character, is Shiki Tohno. He’s part of a large, wealthy, and presumably powerful family, though he lives with an aunt and uncle whose ways and means are much more middle-class than his father, the head of the family. He was banished from the main estate eight years ago, shipped off to live with his aunt and uncle after an accident when he was about eight.

He doesn’t remember much about the accident. He (and therefore we) are initially told it was a car accident, and that it damaged his heart. He has fainting spells occasionally if he over-exerts himself, and otherwise generally anemic symptoms. Something to do with damage to his heart after the accident; it’s not really clear. The weakness makes him an unfit heir to be head of the family, hence his being put aside.

The real change in him is far stranger, and far harder to understand.

While recovering in the hospital, he begins to see odd lines running through everything, making the world look fractured. He discovers that if he cuts along those lines with a blade or other edged implement, the object will simply fall apart along those lines. It takes little to no force to do this. He could cut down a tree simply by dragging the edge of a knife along a particular line on its trunk, a line invisible to anyone but him. His attempts to convince others that these lines exist fall on deaf ears, and only cause concern for his mental state.

One day during his recovery, while wandering around outside, he runs across a woman named Aoko Aozaki who not only believes him, but understands what’s happening. She explains to him that he has a rare ability – perhaps the only one in the world with it – known as the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. What he is seeing is the inevitable destruction and dissolution, the “death”, of every person and object around him. The lines are the only way his brain can make sense of it, as this is something the human mind doesn’t readily grasp. She gives him a pair of glasses which make the lines go away while he wears them, and which therefore allow him to go on with his life as normal. She tells him that he mustn’t use this power of his unless absolutely necessary.

Shiki lives his life normally from that point forward, until one day while he’s in high school, he receives notice that his father has passed away, and Shiki is to move back into the main estate. Said estate is in the same town, so much of his day-to-day should remain the same – same friends, same school, same daily routine.

But a strange thing happens on his way to the manor after school. While resting in the park, he sees a young woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and a white sweater. From out of nowhere, he is overcome with a furious, murderous impulse. His body seems to move on its own, with no input or control from him. Off come the glasses, out comes the knife he carries with him, and he’s off chasing her. Bad things happen.

He wakes up in the Tohno mansion, having blacked out and been retrieved by Hisui, one of the two maids of the home. She dresses as a Western maid, while her twin sister, Kohaku, also a maid, prefers a kimono.

But his arrival at the manor comes with significant culture shock. In the wake of his father’s passing, possession of the manor and the position of head of family have both fallen to his younger sister, Akiha, whom he hasn’t seen since his accident some eight years ago. His memory of her is a little hazy, but he seems taken aback by the polite but stern young lady she’s grown into. Altogether, the four of them – Akiha, Shiki, Kohaku, and Hisui – are the only inhabitants of the house.

Shiki finds its size and sense of isolation intimidating, all the more because his daily life in and around the house is in for a massive shake-up. For starters, there’s a strict curfew, and also no television. When Shiki objects, Akiha puts her foot down, and seems determined that he will live according to the family’s ways and rules, or… Well, there is no “or else”. He just will, end of story.

So he sneaks out to go buy some snacks and magazines. On his way, he is accosted by one of his classmates, Ciel. But here, she’s dressed in an odd outfit, carrying a set of deadly-sharp swords, and seems intent on killing him until she satisfies herself that he poses no threat.

The next day, further weirdness ensues. He encounters the blonde lady, the one he thought he killed, very much alive and well. His initial relief that he didn’t actually kill her is quickly undone by her assertion that actually, he did, and with rare skill and gusto. She then goes on to describe the exact cuts he used to slice her into seventeen separate pieces.

Then it gets stranger.

She is, she tells him, a vampire, albeit not all that much like what you’d think of when the word comes to mind. And no, she doesn’t sparkle. Her name is Arcueid Brunestud, and she’s hunting an enemy of hers who’s in the area, and is responsible for a string of murders and mysterious deaths that have been occurring lately. She was doing well enough until Shiki came along murdered her. While she was able to recover from this inconvenience, their encounter has left her in a weakened state. Now she needs help, and who better than the one who put her in this position in the first place?

Twists, Turns, and Dead Ends

I’m a little conflicted about the problem with the Tsukihime anime. I can’t decide whether its creators overestimated what they could do in twelve episodes, or underestimated the material and the time it needed. I supposed it really doesn’t make much difference. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Bad news first.

There are some technical issues with the show, which are probably the least of its problems. The art style is kind of lackluster and workmanlike, and the animation is overall pretty by-the-numbers. There are numerous moments where you can see drawing or animation shortcuts were taken, and there are lots of long shots where the camera lingers on one place or on one person well beyond what’s necessary for drama. On the other hand, the more important action scenes do see a slight jump in quality, so maybe the producers were keeping something up their sleeve for when it counted.

The English voice work is serviceable. The actors’ voices are by and large a good fit for the roles, but the acting is occasionally a little wooden. The writing is somewhat off as well. Shiki disappears from his normal life for a while in the third and fourth episodes, and his friends’ and family’s discussions of it once he resurfaces don’t seem to agree on the times he was gone – at one point, even within the same conversation. This may be a translation or dub writing error, though. There are other weird gaffes (this time in the original script), such as that Shiki doesn’t notice that Kohaku and Hisui are identical twins. This despite the fact that their only notable differences are eye color and wardrobe.

But these are mostly technical troubles, and they’re things I can overlook pretty easily. The writing errors are never so serious that I get confused about what’s going on, and the artwork issues aren’t too out of line, either. Certainly I’ve seen other shows from the time that did worse and more often.

The real issues \with Tsukihime, and the problem most of the original game’s fans have, stem from the way it’s adapted from the game.

Like a lot of visual novels, Tsukihime has multiple routes, and many if not all of them are mutually exclusive. In fact, some don’t even involve Arcueid, who you’ll remember is one of the main characters. This presents some difficulties when making a TV series. On the one hand, there is a canon route, and you could probably make a decent twelve-episode TV series out of just that. On the other hand, there are lots of fans who prefer the alternate routes, who would be pissed if their favorite characters showcased in those routes weren’t given some screen time, and so you want to give them something. And, too, one of the intriguing things about a game like Tsukihime is all the lore and world-building that makes these divergent plotlines possible and interesting. Even when not pursued, elements of those routes may come up one way or another, and lend a certain richness and depth to the story. It would be a shame to leave that on the cutting room floor.

Another possibility the show’s creators could take is to craft their own continuity, essentially creating a story hybridized from multiple routes from the game while not adhering strictly to any one of them, and create a single story that way. This hypothetical hybrid story would then be better able to explore more of the background and lore, and incorporate that richness into its own new canon. But that would take probably more than twelve episodes, and twelve was all Tsukihime got. For anyone who’s curious about what this approach might look like, there’s a manga adaptation that incorporates elements of the other routes into the main story. It’s out of print now, sadly. Originally published by ComicsOne, it was taken over by DrMaster after ComicsOne went out of business. Then DrMaster themselves went out...

Anyway, the compromise measure that the show’s creators eventually decided on was to largely tell one story (the Near Side routes, particularly the Arcueid route), while throwing in bits and pieces from other routes… and then never following up on them. There wind up being a few non sequiturs and narrative dead ends or red herrings, almost as a kind of wink and nod to say that the show’s makers at least know those possibilities exist. But this results in the show being unfocused. For instance, a couple of episodes build up the Problem With the Tohno Bloodline, but this ultimately doesn’t figure into the story. This material comes from what the game refers to as the Far Side routes, and those developments largely go unnoticed during the Near Side routes which the anime’s plot focuses on. The problem is, again, that these are mutually exclusive as the presented in the original game. Weaving them together in the “new continuity” approach would be fine – maybe ideal for the anime, even – but it would take an amount of alteration to the continuity that the anime never makes. It winds up being less of a problem than it sounds like, but it does manage to be frustrating.

The main story, meanwhile, hints at interesting elements from the broader cosmological background that the game establishes (and which later Type-Moon games borrow and build upon), but many of those elements never quite leave the background. This leaves a frustrating sense of massive, powerful forces and entities moving in the background, that there is something far larger happening that we are not even quite glimpsing, but only being given hints of.

But if it sometimes seems that Tsukihime only scratches the surface of the greater and deeper lore of its setting, that lore and setting are still compelling. There’s an almost Lovecraftian sense of cosmic scale to the supernatural as it’s presented in Tsukihime. Arcueid, Nvrnqsr Chaos (no, that’s not a typo; it’s the real name of an adversary in the game, though the anime presents it as Nero Chaos instead), and her ultimate enemy, Roa – all of them are connected to higher forces and entities. The murders occurring in Shiki’s city are the most minor of problems in the grand scheme of things. This is what makes the anime both fascinating and frustrating. It shows us this conflict, but refuses to give the full context for it. So much seems to be held back; the full natures of these characters goes unexplored.

I like a little mystery. I like it when some things are unexplained, or when the answers are there to be found rather than to be given. It’s one of the things I love about Dark Souls and Bloodborne. But the story of Tsukihime fails to explore these mysteries in a way I find really satisfying.

I feel like this is the root of why a certain overly vocal segment of the fandom chooses not to acknowledge the anime. Coming to it from the game, I can see where it might seem a little disappointing. Many of these hooks can seem like teases to those who understand their significance enough to be upset that they ultimately don’t deliver.

But that’s not the experience that either I or my wife had watching the anime. We both came to it before we ever knew anything of the game. For us, those odd hooks were just moments where we went, “Huh. Weird,” and carried on watching the show. Sure, there was clear and unaddressed significance, but it wasn’t a problem. If anything, it made me more curious about the game.

The show may seem meandering to some, but to me, I just tend to think of its pace as sedate. It doesn’t really dig into the characters’ backstories, but it does help to develop them and give them room to breathe.

In particular, the anime spends a lot of time developing Arcueid. We see that despite her power, and her potential for wrath and violence, she’s surprisingly cute and innocent-seeming at times, and actually innocent when it comes to some things. You can see her interest in Shiki grow, but she seems unable to express it. Her attempts at being normal can come across as almost mocking, when they are instead sincere and well-meant, but hopelessly clueless.

What we learn of her story is somewhat sparse, but we know that she spends most of her time asleep, awakening only to deal with threats like Roa. The reasons for this are complicated, at least enough so as to be beyond the scope of this writing. Suffice it to say that there’s a wiki if you’re after more information. Just be warned: The writing there is pretty iffy. Anyway, Arcueid is capable of getting by just fine on her own (when some inconsiderate dick doesn’t just up and murder her, anyway), but it’s also clear that, thanks to spending most of her time asleep, she doesn’t really understand a lot of what’s going on around her. There’s a kind of obliviousness to her that might be frustrating in another character in a different show, but is somehow just endearing here. Like my wife said at one point: You just want to hug her. Which is not, you know, the normal reaction you have with vampires. “Aloof”, “compelling”, “seductive”… These are the words we tend to think of when it comes to vampiric “affection” in fiction. “Huggable” doesn’t really show up on the list. And yet, here we are.

There’s a certain cat-like quality to her. Elegant, graceful, mysterious, sometimes selfish, frequently endearing, and occasionally ridiculous. There’s comedy in her situation. Shiki, despite his powers, is otherwise kind of a dork who could not be more clearly in over his head, at least at the start. He spends most of the series bewildered, confused, scared, and very occasionally snapping and completely losing his shit against some eldritch horror. And yet he’s the one who has to keep Arcueid grounded (to the extent that this is really even possible) and basically explain to her how the world works. In some ways, it’s really Arcueid’s story.

The pace of the series helps it build a sense of brooding mystery as it explores the twin dilemmas of finding a way to stop Roa and figuring out Shiki’s uncertain place in and relation to the rest of the Tohno family. And as you might suspect, these two problems aren’t as separate as they first seem.

If nothing else, the opening theme is just about perfect. Subdued, mysterious, haunting; it sets the mood of the show almost perfectly, in a way that comes close to over-promising on what the anime actually delivers. It definitely sets a mood.

That mood is one I tend to get into around this time of year. I’m normally a night person in the first place. No amount of working mostly first-shift jobs over the last two decades has changed the fact that there’s some part of me that wakes up when the sun goes down, and wants to stay up until the sunrise. I like to be out and about in the dark. I can remember back when I was in college, I would be out with friends trying to find any reason at all to stay out as late as possible. Later in life, I’d duck out long after everyone else was asleep and go for roaming walks at night (at least, back when I lived in a reasonable neighborhood). With fall here, the urge just gets stronger.

There’s something of that feeling I get from Tsukihime, large portions of which involve that same nocturnal roaming, and take place in the nighttime times of life. And I enjoy stories about monsters and the supernatural – I went through something of a vampire fascination phase when I was younger, and still maintain a certain amount of interest – and so those things alone might have gotten my attention.

Fuck the haters; the Tsukihime anime exists, and it’s good. Not great, and not as good as it might have been, but it’s fine. If it’s not exactly gripping, edge-of-your-seat suspense, it’s still an entertaining way to spend the better part of five or six hours. Certainly worth a watch if you can track it down.

Tsukihime tells an odd, interesting story – moody, dark, weird, mysterious, fantastical – all things I like. A story of supernatural threats, monsters, mystery, and marauders in the night. It’s hard to think of anything more appropriate for fall – for October – for Halloween.

Availability

The DVD release for Lunar Legend Tsukihime was originally handled by Geneon in both Japan and the U.S., since they were part of the original production committee. After they folded, it was picked up by Sentai Filmworks, one of the several splinter companies that rose from the ashes of ADV’s implosion in the late aughts.

Geneon’s release was evidently a multi-volume affair. Which seems ludicrous today, when you typically buy an entire season of twelve episodes or so all at once these days, in a single set. But Geneon (which had previously been Pioneer) had been around since the VHS days, and a lot of those companies in some sense inherited the mindset that had governed the VHS release schedule, which was to release a volume every couple of months or so, with three or four episodes on each one, and that was that.

Sentai Filmworks’ version is a two-disc, single-volume set, so that would probably be the way to go. Especially if shelf space is a concern.

There is no Blu-ray release, and honestly, it’s hard to imagine what Blu-ray would really do for the show. At any rate, it seems to be out of print currently. Geneon, of course, folded about a decade or so ago. And although Sentai Filmworks lists it in their catalog, there’s no option to buy. And it doesn’t appear to be available for legal streaming anywhere. Like a lot of older (and I hate to think of this as “older” – I remember being an adult when it was new) – maybe I should say somewhat older anime – Amazon and eBay are your best bet if you’re interested.

Postscript the First – The Anime versus the Game

Tsukihime, as a visual novel with multiple routes, contains far more material than the TV series. HOWEVER, please consider this paragraph your giant, flashing, neon-lit trigger warning for content potentially involving sex, assault, sexual assault (of various kinds), incest, violation of consent, and more violence than the anime producers could show even with the series airing at otaku o’clock.

Just to be up-front for a moment, I haven’t played much of the game. Much of my information comes secondhand, or else is the result of reading the Type-Moon wiki and talking with friends who’ve played through it. I’ve yet to finish a single route. I’d like to, and I occasionally chip away at it here and there, but the problems are twofold.

The first problem – probably the main problem – is the low level of engagement. I get curious about visual novels from time to time, but they’re always a little too easy to put down, and a little too hard to pick up. And that may seem strange, since there’s so little to do in one. The amount of effort involved is nil. But that’s just the thing. I often wrestle with whether or not I even consider them to be games at all. And, look: It’s not like I think visual novels are unworthy of anyone’s time. They’re fine. Largely not my cup of tea, but fine. But what you do in a visual novel could hardly be called playing, any more than you “play” a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are no mechanics, no maneuvering through the world, no use of skills. Just decisions to make, and those not very often. The thing about an actual game is that I’m mentally engaged, fully occupied and firing on all (or most) cylinders. When I want to play a game, that’s what I’m after. And visual novels just don’t offer that.

Of course, I do love to read, and so it would seem like they should be right up my alley for that reason at least. But no. The writing is actually my second problem.

So far as I’ve observed, which admittedly isn’t much, most Japanese visual novels translated into English are pretty awkward, and this is probably a combination of factors. One is that what constitutes good writing (in terms of how the language is deployed) in Japanese differs considerably from what constitutes good writing in English. It’s not just visual novels, mind you. The couple Haruki Murakami books I’ve read have both also seemed off to some degree as well. I think it’s just something in the translation, some difference between English and Japanese in the matters of word choice, rhythm, and flow, and the sense for how these things work in each. I sincerely think that making a Japanese work really sing in English would involve a level of change that most translators (and visual novel fans in particular, given their greater likelihood of being total Japanophiles) are deeply uncomfortable with.

But beyond the general problem of Japanese-to-English writing, there’s the problem of Kinoko Nasu in particular, who is Type-Moon’s writer.

Nasu is, I think, something of a Lovecraft disciple, with his cosmic-scale sense for horror. But he’s also like Lovecraft in another very important and distinct way, which is that despite having really interesting ideas that set my imagination on fire, he actually can not fucking write.

I’m sorry, Lovecraft fans, I really am, but it’s true. Deep down, you all know it. Lovecraft, for his part, was a man who at some point earlier in his life swallowed a thesaurus, and was then hell-bent on vomiting it out over every page he wrote ever afterward. He never used one word if he could find a way to use five or six to say the same thing, never used a simple, elegant, and concise word when he knew a more complex one, and his style has so little flow you’d need an electron microscope to find it. You could make a workout of running back and forth to the dictionary while reading his work. Or you could make it a drinking game. And then die, of alcohol poisoning.

He had some great ideas, once you got past the writing, and the multiple onion-like layers of intense racism. And he was intensely racist; let’s not forget that. Not just “racist because it’s the 1920s or ‘30s and basically everyone white is racist right now,” I mean racist even for those times. People back then were a little weirded out by how much he hated the Jews, and black people, and anyone else who wasn’t the right shade of paper-white. But even just focusing on his writing, the feeling remains that he was not the best vehicle for his stories, and that’s just how it is. The most aching, taxing, fucking grueling reading I have ever done on stories I still actually liked is mostly found between the covers of the various Lovecraft compendia I have lying around the house. I like his stories; I just don’t like reading them much.

Nasu may well be his reincarnation (and oh, would it ever have horrified Lovecraft to be reincarnated as a Japanese person). A common complaint I’ve heard about Nasu’s writing (from people who’ve read it in Japanese) is that he has good ideas, but just isn’t a skilled writer. Now, I’m not qualified to really dissect how he comes across in his own culture, but when translated into English, he’s a painful read. Maybe it’s the fault of the group responsible for the translation (Mirror Moon), but at the very least, I can confidently state that he should stay out of porn. His sex scenes have some of the least sexy and most unintentionally hilarious writing I’ve seen in my life. It’s why I think that even Fate didn’t really take off to become the absolute phenomenon it is until after we started to get anime adaptations of it. Those adaptations would all have been written by other people, or at least had some amount of editing or collaboration to dilute the worst of his influence, letting the good ideas shine through without Nasu’s own writing griming everything up.

I don’t have a lot of basis for comparison, but I feel like on a technical level, Tsukihime is pretty basic. The character artwork is nice enough, with a distinct style. The backgrounds, though, are in most cases very clearly photographs that have been filtered or otherwise manipulated so as not to clash too badly with the character art. This was probably a shortcut to save time or money, or both.

On the balance, I’d say it’s worth looking into, with the major caveat that there’s a lot of stuff in it that didn’t (and couldn’t) make it into the anime, that makes the story overall much darker and more sinister than the anime could manage. Unfortunately, it’s going to be hard to find. There’s only the original version released in 2000. There’s talk of a sequel and a remake, but the amount of time that’s passed for no more attention or work than the project has received, to the extent that these things have become running gags in the fandom. They probably are things that the higher-ups at Type-Moon really do mean to create at some point, but which aren’t a huge priority for them, and so are very, very back-burner projects.

As I mentioned above, the anime and the game are both similar in that their quality persists despite somewhat lacking production values. But the anime’s middle-of-the-road budget and somewhat generic style was never the problem. The game, meanwhile, was pretty clearly made on a close-to-shoestring budget, but this actually doesn’t matter nearly as much. Visuals novels live and die on their writing, ideas, and artwork, I think. Rarely if ever do they rely on really cutting-edge graphics for their impact. And in truth, Tsukihime the game was always going to be marred far more by Nasu’s writing than anything technical.

A nice upside is that, since we’re privy to Shiki’s internal monologue, he comes across as a more interesting character. He seems to sometimes just float through the story in the anime, with bouts of intensity here and there when things go wrong or he’s totally lost it. But the game gives us his thoughts, and we get a better handle on why he does the things he does.

For English-speaking fans, there are walkthroughs, of course. But if that understandably sounds like too much of a pain in the ass, there’s also a fan translation (unauthorized) by Mirror Moon. In addition to rendering the game into English, I believe it also introduces an option for removing the sex scenes. So for those who are uncomfortable with those, this will answer that concern, at least.

Postscript the Second – Alternate Takes: Kara no Kyoukai

Frequently referred to in English-speaking circles by its subtitle, The Garden of Sinners, Kara no Kyoukai (which Wikipedia tells us means something like “Boundary of Emptiness”) is an interesting story from Kinoko Nasu’s early days. It began publication (independently) in August of 1998, and is set in that timeframe. Originally a series of novels, it’s primarily known in the U.S. as a boxed set of seven movies (plus a stand-alone eighth) priced exorbitantly by Aniplex USA (the Blu-ray boxed set for the first seven will set you back a cool $400). These movies tell the story of a different Shiki, this time a young woman who wears a kimono, boots, and red leather jacket, named Shiki Ryogi.

There are pretty clear linkages between it and Tsukihime, though these are thematic rather than narrative, and the result of ideas being reused. Nasu began writing Kara no Kyoukai first, and seems to have cannibalized some of its concepts for Tsukihime. The two stories take place in alternate universes. As with Tsukihime, this version of Shiki also has the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, although Kara no Kyoukai’s Shiki does actually come by them after an automobile accident. There’s also a redheaded sorceress with the last name Aozaki (Touko instead of Aoko), and I want to say that I’ve read somewhere that they’re sisters, and that Touko traveled to this alternate reality from the “main” one where Tsukihime and Fate take place. She was initially envisioned with sort of pixie-cut blue hair, but was converted for the movies into a redhead like her sister Aoko, and Nasu decided he liked the change so much that it became canon.

But although it features a Shiki with the Mystic Eyes, she shares the spotlight with Mikiya Kokuto, who’s a dead ringer for the Shiki of Tsukihime. His personality’s different – he lacks Shiki Tohno’s deeply buried killer instinct, for a start. Mikiya has no special abilities beyond a knack for information-gathering and a better-than-average capacity for deductive reasoning. Moreover, even without any special powers of his own, he seems to move with relative comfort in a world full of sorcerers and mystical murderers, in part by keeping an open mind, taking nothing for granted, keeping his assumptions in check, and taking everything as it comes. He works as an investigator for Touko’s paranormal detective agency, Garan-no-Dou. Shiki is mostly the muscle.

Mikiya has a younger sister, Azaka, who in her turn looks an awful lot like Shiki Tohno’s sister Akiha. Except for in flashbacks, where she looks like a young Rin Tohsaka from Fate instead. As with Tsukihime, she is attracted to her brother. Unlike Tsukihime, the two of them are actually blood siblings, so... At least with Kara no Kyoukai, this profound failure of the Westermarck Effect is entirely one-sided; Mikiya has eyes only for Shiki. TV Tropes would undoubtedly describe it as Single-Target Sexuality.

There are any number of other parallels between the two, but these are the most obvious. Much of the background lore seems to be similar between the two series, although Kara no Kyoukai doesn’t use the same parts of it, and doesn’t dig into the parts it does use quite as much. It’s much less concerned with cosmic entities like Arcueid or Roa or Nvrnqsr Chaos, and more concerned with its characters as individuals, and how they relate to each other. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t dive into the sort of metaphysical strangeness on display in Tsukihime and Fate – Kara no Kyoukai is aggressively weird – but its metaphysical struggles are more self-contained, connected more directly to the characters and less tied to the cosmological backdrop.

The movies were released in Japan beginning in 2007, almost a decade after the novels began publication, and well after the successes of Tsukihime and the first Fate series. They’re animated by ufotable, and feature Yuki Kajiura as the composer. I’d encourage anyone interested to track them down, though I know the price tag can be offputting. Aside from high-quality video and sound, the set is pretty bare-bones. There’s no English audio track; in fact, the impression I get is that this is basically just the Japanese Blu-ray release, re-encoded for Region 1. This includes the movies’ proper titles not being displayed in English anywhere on the discs or cases, so you have to do a little sleuthing to figure out which movies are which. This is doubly aggravating considering that the intended viewing order isn’t chronological, so it’s not immediately apparent if you’ve started with the wrong movie. If you feel totally lost and like you’ve just come into the middle of things, then it’s highly likely you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Thankfully, the menus are in English, and the subtitles are serviceable.

There’s a DVD version of the boxed set that costs less – I want to say the whole boxed set went for something like $200 – which is still a decent chunk of change, but more reasonable for a set of seven movies. Unfortunately, a quick browse of Amazon makes it seem even harder to find than the Blu-ray set. And, sadly, there are no legal streaming options for this series.

#type-moon #tsukihime #shingetsutan tsukihime #visual novel #anime #halloween #vampires #lunar legend tsukihime #arcueid #arcueid brunestud #shiki tohno

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moodring89 · 7 years ago

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CH.01 Down the Rabbit Hole

Pairing: Jeongguk x Reader / Side Yoonseok Chapter Rated: PG-13 (Future rating will change to M) Genre: Fantasy, Hybrid AU (Prince Bunkook. Sue me.), Royal AU, Cinderella / Labyrinth feels Summary: Yoongi's sister buys two tickets to the Autumn ball held at the Meadows, a notorious city known for its hybrid inhabitants, where she hopes to meet a certain bunny princeling. Chapters: 01, 02, 03, 04

“I’m sorry, what –?”

Yoongi held up a piece of mail, “Autumn Ball to be held at the Meadows in celebration of Prince Jeon Jeongguk’s Coming of Age?” The envelope was ripped at the top from where he’d opened it, being all sorts of casual about incriminating himself. “There’s no way in hell that our father is going to allow you to attend. You know this and yet you spent money on a ticket.”

“On two tickets,” she said, as she snatched the envelope from his fingers. “And why not?”

He didn’t know how to not sound like a prejudiced asshole, but he went for it anyway. “Because there are hybrids living in the Meadows and there’s still a ton o’ shit that we don’t know about them yet.”

“This is the first social gathering where hybrids and humans will be allowed to mingle and co-exist with one another, and like, in a party setting, which is just a bonus. It’s fascinating. No – it’s historic and you can bet your uptight, manhwa loving ass that I’d love to be there.” The blonde lowered his eyes at her, pouting resolutely when she continued, “I spoke with our father and you know what he said? ‘Get one for your brother, too.’”

He sighed, passively, “Well, I wasn’t expecting that. I was just rather hoping he’d do that thing where he beats on his chest and roars his short response of ‘fuck’ and ‘no’ from atop the highest mountain.”

She patted his shoulder with mock sincerity, “There, there, take the loss as it comes, swiftly and sweetly. Do you even own a proper suit and tie?”

“I have about as many suits as you do ball gowns.”

“So, zero then? ‘Kay, sounds good. We’re real ahead of this thing.”

Yoongi grabbed for his car keys, wanting to get it over with. “Let’s hit the stores now, before I decide to go in my pajamas. You know that I would, too.” When it comes to his sister, Yoongi tended to cave in, perhaps too easily. Whatever she wanted, whatever she needed, and most of the time – even things she could do living without, but he decided that she didn’t have to, like a new phone, or a bag.

They’d split up once they were inside the store, headed in two completely separate directions. She hadn’t expected half the town to be at this particular dress shop. Royal ball doesn’t exactly scream, ‘Let’s go to the local Mom-and-Pop boutique.’

The obnoxious text tone of Naruto’s catchphrase, ‘Believe it’ that she’d associated with Yoongi went off. She stared down at her phone.

Yoonji Unnie --------------------- It’s a fucking sausage fest here. 3:54pm

To: Yoonji Unnie --------------------- Funny, since it’s a clam-fam reunion over here, too. Any hopes of looking original have successfully gone out the window. 3:54pm

Yoonji Unnie --------------------- Unless we go with my pajama idea? 3:54pm

To: Yoonji Unnie --------------------- I’m not meeting the Prince of the Meadows in a camisole. 3:55pm

Yoonji Unnie --------------------- Gross. See you in the parking lot. 3:57pm

Yoongi was already inside the car, a plastic bag thrown carelessly into the backseat. She shut her door with a huff, somewhat affronted by it. “You were able to find a suit? I thought it was Wang city, far too many hand-to-gland casualities for you to possibly stay long enough to find something suitable.”

“Yeah, unlike you, I don’t care if I’m wearing the same shit as someone else, especially a fucking suit.” He started up the car and turned onto the main road, driving around idly, until they decided on their next stop. “Again, I would have gone in my striped pajamas without a single fuck to be spared. I like keeping my fucks to myself. However, something tells me that there is a dress code we have to adhere to...”

“Of course there is.”

Yoongi was scowling, as he tended to do so very naturally. “I would really hate to piss off the woodland creatures with our subpar fashion choices, so start calling out shops, and we’ll swing by to see if it’s packed.”

“Hybrids are people, not creatures,” she said, turning somewhat dejectedly to stare out the window. “Why do I have to remind you? You’re the intelligent one and yet you say the most asinine things.”

“What are you hoping to achieve by seeing the Prince? He will not favor you, as you do him.” It was such a sad anomaly, something that shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and it was too late. His sister had fallen in love through mere stories of the bunny princeling. What if the tales weren’t true? Don’t meet your heroes, wasn’t that the saying? The treaty between hybrids and humans had practically been forced, guns aimed at each other’s heads in a stalemate between two stubborn kings. It turned out that the two species needed to sustain each other, whether it was for the oil, the crops, or other various cargos: The union was not wanted, but it was necessary.

The thought that their father had even agreed to put them in some slight form of potential danger was preposterous to him. Although, it was possible that his darling sister was lying to him, right to his own fucking face. At least he could later credit himself for not being entirely blindsided by it. No one jukes Min Yoongi.

“I don’t even expect to be allowed to speak with the Prince, so what does it matter?” They were stopped at a light. For a long moment, the silence played with the tension, thus swallowing the siblings up whole. She sighed, finding it be unbearable, “I only wish to look upon him, to take glimpse of his true nature for myself, instead by word of mouth.”

“Alright, enough. You can stop with the poetic shit. I get it…” Yoongi felt frustrated, stopping in front of a shopping mall. It didn’t appear to be as busy as all the other stores they had passed along the way, probably due to an even lower standard in quality. He surrendered his card as a form of an apology, which she graciously accepted. “Don’t make it long.”

She’d made it especially fucking long.

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The tickets were a simple white cotton paper with speckled gold and elegant cursive. She half-mourned over the fact that she’d have to hand it over at the castle gates in order to get in. The girl kept the envelope, tucking it away inside the top drawer of her vanity. Tonight she would finally get to meet the Prince. After hearing so many stories of his time on the battlefield, of the scar which adorned his face along his cheek, how he’d spared a human General’s life.

Prince Jeongguk was an advocate for equality, a symbol of peace, and hope. He’d visited the Isles of Lunar and fed the sun to the poor. He did not leave, until all were healthy, and full. She’d heard that he’d brought in environmental scientists to study the moon enriched lands and that they’d found ways to sustain and harvest crops. That was how he’d inherited the nickname, ‘Lunar Prince’.

There were no photographs allowed to be taken of the Prince. However, the news articles were free to state as many details as they so desired. She’d tried to envision what he would look like given the various descriptions, tall and broad it had read, only one or two inches away from standing at six foot tall. Two velveteen rabbit ears sat atop a silky crown of raven black hair, pure white in color, and responsive to the change in his mood. One columnist in particular went on and on about the Prince’s dark eyes, how large, and doe-like they had appeared, despite their depth, and warmth. She’d rather enjoyed that bit.

For tonight, she’d wanted to dress in tears of silk and netted fabrics. The Meadows was said to be the pinnacle of nature itself, the homeland of the fae, and hybrid kind. Magic would exist in her world for only one night, but that was already more than what she could ever hope for. Her dress was a warm pigment of peach and was scattered with blossoms. Her hair was pinned up, save for a wavy strand here and there. Her skin would be devoid of any eye-catching jewelry and her makeup would be natural.

She would not pretend as though she belonged, because she didn’t. Yoongi stood in the doorway, wearing his suit more convincingly than she did her dress. Her brother should be more confident. Perhaps after tonight, he would be.

“I look ridiculous.”

She placed the tickets inside her clutch, “Oh, I’m very certain that we both look amazing. The word spiffy is still a thing and we are the definition.”

“Yeah, you should probably refrain from using that as a compliment.”

She laughed at his obvious discomfort, “I’ll be sure to use it at least three times tonight just to spite you.”

“Please do,” Yoongi said, twirling his keys in his hand impatiently. “Make sure to use it on your prince. He’ll then know for sure that you’re an ancient.”

“You wound me, brother.”

Yoongi rolled his eyes, wondering if he’d ever stop rolling them for the duration of the evening. The Meadows was almost an hour by car. They made the most of it by listening to whatever music Yoongi decided to put on, rapping along to old CDs that she’d been forced to listen to time and time again, and for as long as she could remember. His voice was perfect for it, which was why she encouraged him to continue making music, even if their father disapproved of it.

He’d threatened Yoongi with a florist position. It could be done rather easily, since the shop was run by family. Luckily, their father was currently away on business and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. If he’d been home tonight, she had no idea as to what would have happened. A huge argument, wasted money, and a solitude evening listening to the muddled sounds of Yoongi’s piano.

The Meadows was no longer a guarded territory and for the first time ever, humans were being granted free passage. The new lands held such a dark enchantment, a beauty that was so drastically different from what they’ve ever known that they’d spent the rest of the drive in a state of silent enrapt. They followed the cars in front of them to the castle, which was at the heart of the city. It was a citadel surrounded by forest and closed in by tall gates. Parking was easy enough, as Yoongi handed over his keys to the valet.

“You good? Do you need me to piggyback you?” Yoongi asked, watching as his sister hesitated, stumbling more so than walking. It was a sign that her nerves were getting the best of her. “We didn’t come all this way, dressed up like assholes for nothing, princess. Remember why you wanted to come here. To partake in a historic event, wasn’t it?” It seemed to be working, when he heard her laugh. “Plus, I’m all famished and in dire need of eating sweets off of doilies, or whatever the fuck they serve royals. Let’s at least get some food in our systems.”

She caught his arm, holding onto him for her own stability, “What if I lose my mind in there?”

“Then I’ll find it for you.”

Would it really be that simple?

#noonanet #jeongguk x reader #bts fics #jungkook x reader #hybrid au #fantasy au #modern royalty au #yoonseok

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yeonchi · 4 years ago

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Kisekae Insights #15: Hiroki and Akari’s Strawberry Mysteries Part 1 (with Hybrid explanation)

These next two instalments weren’t easy for me to write. Off the bat, the subject of these instalments is the relationship between the protagonist, Hiroki Ichigo, and his wife, Akari Ichigo. Why wasn’t it easy for me to talk about it? The subject and the storylines associated with it are heavily based on elements of my life and their associated fantasies.

Writing the review for Can You Hear Me? has really inspired me to talk about some high school friends who I wasn’t necessarily friends with (I say that because I never hung out with them much). In that review, I mentioned my high school crush as one person I was reminded of after watching the episode. The character of Akari is based on her, but this infatuation goes way deeper than you think given how much effort I put into writing her storylines in my project.

Portions of these storylines were inspired from the final episodes of certain TVB dramas from 2013-14. As such, I feel obligated to provide content (trigger) warnings as these storylines contain themes associated with mental illness, suicide and domestic violence.

In case you haven’t seen, I’m going to be giving my answer to the Hybrid in this instalment. I’m leaving the IRL context until Part 2 in the next instalment and I’ll also be taking a break after that. For now, enjoy the rollercoaster as we start going down the rabbit hole that is Hiroki and Akari’s relationship.

Hiroki Ichigo: The Enigma Beneath

You will notice that the character profiles for Hiroki and Akari are different from the ones I’ve done so far, particularly in that they have no job or personality descriptions. Aside from being officers or superheroes, any job I give them ends up being forgotten once the story arc gets going (I wish Chibnall could say the same about Yaz), so they don’t end up mattering anyway. As for Hiroki’s personality, I’ve already covered that in #2.

I’ve detailed Hiroki in his final incarnation here because most of the storyline revolves around this incarnation, but his previous incarnations do have significance in the storyline likewise.

Also, you will notice that I’ve designated Hiroki as the Hybrid. I’ve never really liked the Hybrid arc because it gave too many possibilities that pointed to multiple figures potentially being the Hybrid. Steven Moffat did reveal that the Hybrid was supposed to be the Doctor and Clara together, but to me, that’s just a red herring for the identity of the real Hybrid. This is my answer to the Hybrid arc – Hiroki Ichigo is the Hybrid.

Here are some of the criteria given for the Hybrid throughout Series 11 (BBC Series 9). The Hybrid is a creature crossbred from two warrior races, supposedly the Time Lords and the Daleks. According to all Matrix prophecies, the Hybrid will stand in the ruins of Gallifrey and unravel the Web of Time, breaking a billion billion hearts to heal its own.

Let’s break down the Doctor’s final line in Heaven Sent:

“The Hybrid is not half-Dalek. Nothing is half-Dalek. The Daleks would never allow that.” Just because the Doctor can say it can’t be half-Dalek doesn’t mean that it isn’t. Besides, Hiroki isn’t half-Dalek anyway – technically, he is part-Kaled, the Kaleds being the ancestors of the Daleks. But since the Kaleds are synonymous with the Daleks, this fulfills the Dalek portion of the Hybrid.

“The Hybrid destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins… is me.” Some people believe “me” refers to Ashildr, also known as Me, but I think that the Doctor accusing Ashildr of being the Hybrid is just him deflecting the blame because he was in denial of being the Hybrid (plus, the Doctor seemed to prefer calling her Ashildr instead of Me). The Doctor was born from Hiroki, so the Doctor saying that is a bit of a stretch. However, to be fair, the Doctor didn’t even know who the Hybrid really was until Rassilon told him in Space Squad Part 3. In comparison, Hiroki realised that he was the Hybrid in the Decade finale.

Now, for the time being, Hiroki has never stepped foot on Gallifrey, but I’m planning on rectifying that in Soulbound Series 4. As for unravelling the Web of Time, that’s already been done if you count all the timeline changes I’m going to detail, so hopefully I won’t need to address that again. Since Hiroki is a warrior, you can bet that he’s broken as many hearts as he’s willing to break in order to heal his own.

So how did Hiroki become the Hybrid? Firstly, Hiroki was born a human with Time Lord and Jenova DNA (see #2). Later on, in 2012, Hiroki became part-Kaled/Dalek after his DNA got mixed up with Akari’s during a regeneration (read on to find out).

In 2018, during Age of Riders Forever, Hiroki found himself being pursued by alternate versions of himself who had banded together and based themselves in the Capital (like the Citadel of Ricks in Rick and Morty). Hiroki upgrades his vortex manipulator so he can travel in time. After incorporating Kamen Rider Wizard’s Time Ring into his manipulator and using his own body to calibrate it, Hiroki manages to go into the past and make contact with his past self multiple times.

At some point, Hiroki was found and brought to the Council (the equivalent of the Council of Ricks), where he was given a mission to detonate a memory bomb in exchange for leniency. He does so, but when the Council comes to pick him up, he refuses to go back with them and teleports away. Hiroki’s travels had caused numerous paradoxes, but his vortex manipulator caused the temporal energy to build up inside his body, which would rip him apart and scatter him throughout the Time Vortex instead of ending the universe.

Sure enough, Hiroki’s body was ripped apart, but his consciousness was saved by his ex-wife and her family that he saved inside the supercomputer in Dewey’s library on Never Land. They then sent Hiroki back out and made him a new body using fairy dust, pollen, the happiness of everyone on the Mainland, the remains of his DNA from his old body and about half a field’s worth of dandelion seeds. After that, Hiroki leads the fairies and Flowertots in an attack on the Capital, saving his friends while killing the Council and all the other versions of himself. With Hiroki now being part-fairy and part-Flowertot, he gained the ability to utilise some forms of Never Land magic, but because he doesn’t possess a source of magic or a connection to one, it requires some time to recharge naturally.

And so, that was the story of how Hiroki became the Hybrid.

Akari Ichigo: Mystery Girl Becomes Seductress Becomes Assassin Becomes Wife

I didn’t put a personality description for Akari in the pic mainly because she’s based on my crush and I have no idea what her personality is like. Therefore, my personality description for her would only be based on my impressions of her and what I think she would be like in the project. Needless to say, I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. When she’s good, she cares for Hiroki really much (though it’s mostly because of the hypnotic seduction perfume), but when she’s evil, she just doesn’t care about him. In the Series 9 finale, there’s a bit where she literally says “I’m gonna put a cap in your ass” in a yandere-like manner before Hiroki smacks her around and shoots her in the head, but we’ll come back to that in Part 2.

Originally, I was of the belief that Akari was born in 1998, making her six months younger than Hiroki, but I later found that I was one year off; Akari was actually born in 1999, making her eighteen months younger than Hiroki. This change doesn’t affect the story a lot, but I am kind of pissed that I didn’t know this earlier.

Akari’s paternal grandfather is a Kaled named Antoni, meaning that from him, she has a link to the Daleks. Akari was used by both her family and the Daleks as a tool to get to the Doctor by having her seduce and kill Hiroki. They didn’t know that Akari would end up getting seduced herself and before they knew it, she ended up getting in too deep that they had to wrench her off him with the help of Girl Power.

On top of that, they also didn’t know that Akari had made such an impact on Hiroki that he went to extreme lengths to either take her back or kill her. Akari never loved Hiroki, but she never had the guts to say it to his face and break off their relationship amicably. At the end of the Last Great Time War, when Girl Power were defeated for good, Akari got back with Hiroki and all was well again. Or so they thought…

The introductions are over. Let’s get into the story. Before I do, I want to clarify that Hiroki and Akari weren’t known by those names until 2014 onwards.

First meeting retcon

Based on the release order of my stories, Hiroki and Akari originally met in 2011 when they were in their secondary school armies. However, paradoxes, timeline changes and retcons have made that first meeting WAY earlier than that.

The root reason why schools were forming armies and fighting each other goes back to the 90’s when the state government established Arming Schools for the Future alongside One Country Two (Naming) Systems. Towards the end of the 90’s, a member of Akari’s family became an MP to prevent those two programs from being abolished when the opposition party formed government.

After Antoni went off to fight in the Time War, Kaled agent Neramix met with his children and helped them incite a war between the schools to support the Dalek cause. The two armies that they incited happened to be the kindergarten armies that Hiroki and Akari were in.

In March 2003, the two armies went into battle. This was the first battle of the Time War on Earth and the first battle for Hiroki and Akari. During the battle, Akari runs away from her unit and hides. Hiroki spots her and sneaks away from his unit to follow her. After encountering each other, they hide together and talk to pass the time. Akari doesn’t want to fight because she doesn’t want to make the world scarier than it already is, but Hiroki fights because he wants to make the world nice again. Hiroki decides to escape with Akari and take her home, but after a distraction involving two incarnations of the Doctor and some TARDISes, Parker finds Hiroki and drags him back into the battle, leaving Akari wondering what happened.

Thanks to that interaction, Neramix had what he needed to slowly mould Akari into Hiroki’s future killer. Neramix would be killed by Kamen Rider Decade soon after, but his intention was to have Antoni’s grandchildren, namely Akari’s brother and cousins, oversee this plan and fight in the Time War in place of their parents.

Over the next few years, Hiroki and Akari would meet out of nowhere, but little did they know that these meetings were a result of time manipulations by the Daleks. On top of that, additional changes to the timeline led them to meet more frequently.

By February 2010, Akari’s primary school army had become part of the Oda Army. Parker was planning a campaign for his primary school army to defeat the Oda, Mōri and Date armies and conquer their territories. He arranged for Hiroki to “defect” to Akari’s army and act as a spy for a few weeks. When the invasion occurred, Hiroki returned to his army, breaking Akari’s heart. Another few weeks later, the two of them reconciled when their armies encountered each other again in battle.

The date of their “first meeting” was rapidly approaching and at the way the timeline was going, the Web of Time would become damaged. In December 2010, during the primary school armies’ graduation ceremonies, the Master (Harold Saxon) used a dimensional splitter to transport them into a pocket dimension and pit them against each other in a “Graduation Battle Royale”. Hiroki and Akari met each other again, but Kamen Rider Decade arrives and fights them as he attempts to detonate a memory bomb (a replica of a forbidden weapon of the same name in the Omega Arsenal) between them. Decade evades them and successfully detonates the memory bomb just as the armies are returned to their rightful locations.

The memory bomb would supposedly restore people’s memories of the correct timelines and erase the memories of Hiroki and Akari interacting with each other before 2011. As a side effect, however, their timelines were burst open with metaphorical superglue on the broken ends. A couple of months later, in February 2011, Hiroki and Akari were in the same secondary school army. At the end of their first day, Hiroki and Akari encounter each other again, weeks before their actual first meeting. They accidentally touch hands as they dodge a falling flowerpot and as a result, they discover that they are fading out of existence until they touch hands. After seeing the Doctor, they discover that they have “Intertwined Pinkie Syndrome” – well, not really, but their timelines were fused and if they were to let go of each other, they would fade out of existence as their timelines would have no beginning or no end.

As such, Hiroki and Akari were forced to live together for the time being. The next few days went a bit like the two music videos below (because this storyline was inspired from them):

youtube

Later, the Doctor discovers that the effects can be reversed if Hiroki and Akari are willing to sacrifice their lives to save someone. At the same time, the two stop an old lady from being hit by a reversing van. Their hands let go, but they do not disappear. Their timelines return to normal and they go back to their own lives.

Without the courage to say “I’m sorry”

Finally, Hiroki and Akari meet each other for the first time in March 2011. Hiroki begins to fall in love with Akari and before long, their friends become aware of this along with Akari’s cousins, Daniel and David, meaning that the pieces of their plan are finally coming together. They formed the Teiro Army and began taking action by intruding into Hiroki’s battles. Eventually, after Parker’s death and the fall of the Sanada Army, they built up enough strength to ally with other armies, who have affiliations with Hiroki, and turned them against him.

Over the course of the next 16 months, Hiroki’s friends encouraged him to talk to Akari and ask her out, but he never ended up doing so, either because she was with her friends or he couldn’t muster up the courage to do so even when she was alone. He got more acquainted with Akari’s friends than Akari herself. When Akari and her friends founded Girl Power in February 2012, Hiroki just happened to be on the other side of Hong Kong. Eventually, Maya, one of Akari’s friends, tells Hiroki to talk to Akari before it is too late.

In May 2012, Hiroki writes a love letter for Akari, though this was partly as a result of a plot by his friends. She shows it to her cousins, who then launch an attack on Hiroki and his allies, the Takeda Army. Despite fighting each other in the battle, neither of them even brings up the love letter.

Later, in July 2012, the Teiro Army takes over Hiroki’s secondary school army, forcing him to escape with the Takeda Army. Daniel contacts Hiroki and tells him that they have taken his friends hostage. Hiroki realises what is going on and calls out Akari for being too scared to tell him face-to-face about the love letter, causing her to snap and agree to meet him alone.

Sure enough, the two of them meet alone in a hall or stadium. After some pressure from Hiroki, Akari admits that she doesn’t love him the same way he loves her, but they can still be friends. Hiroki accepts her offer, but Daniel throws some rape gas (that he stole from the police) at them, saying that they don’t deserve each other.

Going on a tangent for a bit, rape gas is similar to tear gas, but the principle of how it works is basically “rape or be raped” – depending on a person’s mental state, they would either faint or develop the urge to sexually assault anyone in sight. In July 2011, the police first tested the rape gas at a university, where protesters and counter-protesters were protesting about kids fighting in armies, racism/crime, climate change, the fact that you can drive from Melbourne to Tokyo in a matter of hours and ACAB. However, this time around, Daniel modified the rape gas, meaning that Hiroki or Akari would have to violate or kill the other person in order to get out alive.

Hiroki and Akari managed to resist the effects of the gas, fighting each other until Parker and a few others, who had managed to free themselves, break in and save them. Parker dispels the effects of the rape gas from them, causing them to lose their memories of the past couple of hours as they are knocked out. They regain consciousness later before Hiroki, Parker and their allies purge the Teiro Army and their allies from the city.

Under his spell

Following the final battle against the Teiro Army, the Arming Schools for the Future program was abolished and the armies would become schools again once the holidays were over. Hiroki was given the privilege to choose whether he would stay with his army or leave and he chose to leave. For a while, Parker gave Hiroki a choice to join him or become a ronin (wanderer), but he refused because of Akari. The reason why he decided to leave was because people had become afraid of him following the events of the battle. Instead of joining Parker or the Takeda Army, he decided to become a ronin because aside from fighting, he had nothing else to live for.

Hiroki decided to travel the land while Akari went to Okinawa with her cousins, Narutaki and Veronica. Hiroki’s travels would eventually lead him to Okinawa, where a parallel version of himself from a parallel universe would help him ask Akari out by spraying him with some hypnotic seduction perfume. Akari became caught in the perfume’s spell and so, she and Hiroki became a couple.

A few months later in November, the Salacian Time War came along. Hiroki and Akari were not involved in the war itself, but they played a role in its endgame. Hiroki and Akari were hanging out with the latter’s friends when Daniel had them kidnapped and taken to their base in the Serra do Mar mountain range, codenamed “the forests of Wanmokai”. Hiroki is subjected to a weapon known as the Dehydrator, which sucks the strength out of the victim and drives their brain to the point of insanity. After a while, he manages to untie himself before falling to the ground. Following a meta-crisis regeneration which results in Takumi Kamijō being born and escaping from the base, Hiroki and Akari are found by Parker, who teleports them back to his base in Santos.

Later, Parker and the others are trying to power up the Harmony Signal, but even with Ultimate Madoka’s help, they still can’t get it fully charged. Hiroki is still struggling to regenerate following the meta-crisis and requires a catalyst in order to regenerate, so he decides to propose to Akari. As they kiss, Hiroki regenerates, but his DNA gets mixed up with Akari’s, making him part-Kaled (fulfilling the Time Lord and Dalek requirements for the Hybrid) and making his subsequent prototypes their children. The new prototype, Kumiko Hayashi, is able to provide Parker with enough energy to fully charge the Harmony Signal.

At this point, some people would say that dating for 3-4 months before proposing is a bit fast, but when you think about it, they’ve known each other for nearly two years, or nine years with seven on-and-off.

After another year of dating and getting caught in turbulent events, Hiroki and Akari got married in December 2013, with Princess Celestia acting as their celebrant and singer Miyuki Nakajima featuring as a guest at their reception.

A chaotic marriage

Even before his wedding, Hiroki had suspected that Girl Power was plotting something behind the scenes and that if he were to walk into their trap, he would die. Borrowing the Pony Doctor’s TARDIS, Hiroki went on a farewell tour in order to delay his own wedding, but upon hearing that his old friend, one of the commanders from his primary school army, had died, Hiroki decides to accept his fate.

The day after Hiroki and Akari’s wedding, a man named Reona Yukawa (a man from a hentai game with an IQ of 256) worked with the Master to save Antoni from the Crucible. Soon after, the Daleks begin attacking Hong Kong. Hiroki and Akari work with the Fourth Doctor as they meet with Parker and Violet, who defeat the Daleks with newer Daleks. For context, it is the bronze (Time War) Daleks fighting against the coloured Daleks of the New Dalek Paradigm. Despite their reception, I’ve never liked how the latter was underused throughout the series, so I thought I’d give them some love here. Meanwhile, the Fifth Doctor is in seclusion on Paris Island with Marco Wong and his wife, Princess Maritan (from the manga that teaches Japanese people how to swear in English with army imagery).

Suddenly, Antoni transports the landmasses containing the Doctor and his friends to their base at Koshi Castle in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hiroki, his prototypes and their partners are taken and they have their germ cells taken and placed in the Progenitor, rendering them infertile as the Daleks breed super-soldiers out of them. Soon after, Akari is kidnapped and brainwashed by Girl Power, who pairs her with a new husband, a white man (I don’t know why I pointed that out, that makes me sound racist) named Shaun. When Hiroki and the Fourth Doctor find them, Hiroki tries to grab Akari, but he is shot by all the Girl Power officers. The Fourth Doctor runs away to find Parker and Violet while Hiroki makes his way back to his TARDIS and regenerates into a new prototype, a four-year-old boy who would be named Kyōya Shinomiya.

In the Progenitor, a baby is being grown from Hiroki and Akari’s DNA – their daughter, who would be named Kasumi Shinomiya. Due to Takumi’s interference, the baby would end up in Manchester in December 2005, coincidentally the same place where Akari and Shaun would encounter Kyōya and Kasumi and form a family together. Meanwhile, Hiroki, having lost his magical boy powers following his regeneration, accepts a deal from the witch Walpurgisnacht and manifests into a female incarnation who would call herself Momoka Mizutani. Momoka opened up a Hong Kong-style café in Salford, with red drone Daleks disguising as her human staff, and for the next eight years, Momoka would become acquainted with the Shinomiya family as they became regular customers. She also uses an infostamp to make contact with Kyōya, unbeknownst to the rest of his family.

Eight years later, the Fourth and Fifth Doctors arrive in Manchester. They encounter each other and head to Momoka’s café to talk. Just as they learn who actually owns the café (Hiroki), Ayaka Kikuchi comes in with her army and engages in a shootout with Momoka and the Daleks. After defeating Ayaka’s army, Momoka transmats herself and the Shinomiya family to her ship, where she prepares to have Ayaka, Shaun, Kyōya and Kasumi exterminated using the Yashio’ori, a mythical weapon (from Warriors Orochi 3) capable of firing Dalek energy rays like machine guns or a concentrated laser beam that can pierce even dwarf star alloy. Unfortunately, the Yashio’ori was sabotaged by Ayaka and her allies so that the laser beam would not charge after Momoka fired it once during a demonstration.

Momoka is killed in the ensuing battle, but Walpurgisnacht took over her body and regenerated her, allowing her to continue with her plan. She searches out people who had wronged her over the years and enacts her own brutal justice on them. She also begins to experience psychosis brought on by a regenerative crisis, causing her to hallucinate her previous incarnation. The Doctors and Parker catch on to this and begin searching for her. Parker and Violet encounter her at UNIT and they convince her to surrender herself and not give up hope that things will be better. As Momoka proclaims that she still has unfinished business to take care of, Parker and Violet decide to work together with her so they can help her find the help she needs.

After confronting the Shinomiya family again, Momoka shoots Akari in the arm and kidnaps Shaun. She takes a video of him confessing to stealing Hiroki’s wife from him and sends it to Parker and the Doctors. Under the guise of delivering the ransom money to Momoka, Violet picks her up at a carpark and takes her to a getaway car she and Parker left for her. However, when they get there, Momoka is cornered, so she lets Violet go before she shoots herself in the head. Her body disappears as her TARDIS takes her away.

All this time, Reona, Antoni and the Master had used the distraction provided by their allies to prepare an army to start another Parallax War. The Daleks prepare to bind Akari and Shaun’s minds together as they prepare to become the emperor and empress of the new Girl Empire, but Kyōya, Kasumi and Momoka had been working to prevent this. Momoka summoned Hiroki’s past incarnations, along with his prototypes and even Storm Dasher, to fire infostamps at the throne, separating Akari from Shaun and breaking her from her conditioning. As the mind-breaker’s efficiency approaches 100%, Momoka uses a key to connect her mind with Akari, intertwining their timelines and making their previous encounters with each other fixed points in time.

Akari is freed, but all the Daleks turn on Reona, Antoni and the Master. After the first two are exterminated, the Master destroys Koshi Castle with a nuclear device before escaping, killing all the Daleks and super-soldiers with it. Girl Power managed to escape as well and most of their members went into hiding, but Shaun was apprehended off-screen, convicted of war crimes and sentenced to cryogenic suspension. Following this, Momoka regenerated into Hiroki, her final incarnation, and got back together with Akari. As a result of events, they (and some others) were eight years older than they should be.

This storyline was inspired by the final episodes of A Great Way to Care II (仁心解碼II), with Momoka being based on the character Apple Lam Chung-yan (林頌恩) played by Tavia Yeung (楊怡). Momoka would become a prototype and return in Series 9.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now. If you thought that last storyline was harrowing enough, wait till you get to Part 2. It’s the part where things get turbulent and I cross the lines of morality so many times that you’ll be calling me an incel before you even get to the IRL context. My judgement day is nigh. See you in the next instalment.

#kisekae insights

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thebluntcritic · 8 years ago

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10 Of The Most Stomach-Churning Horror Films To Watch (Or Not)

Horror is not a genre for the ambivalent. You either love them, or you hate them. However, even for fans of the genre there are limits to what they can stomach. All horror films rely on some combination of psychological, existential or physical horror, but goriness is optional. Here are some of the grossest horror films to watch... or avoid.

10. Visitor Q

Japanese director Takashi Miike is a horror icon. He's responsible for some of the most iconic films in modern Japanese cinema from Yakuza masterpiece “Ichi the Killer,” to J-horror favorite “One Missed Call” and of course slow-burn horror “Audition.”

“Visitor Q” is not one of those iconic films.

The story is simple enough; a strange visitor throws a family's world into chaos. The content is bizarre and disgusting. With gag-inducing scenes including incest, necrophilia and, worst of all, human milking, “Visitor Q” is not for everyone. In fact, it's for almost no one.

Yes, human milking.

9. The Fly

David Cronenberg is the unrivaled master of the body horror subgenre. His body of work, no pun intended, includes “Scanners,” “Videodrome,” and “The Brood.” Just amongst those three films you can find exploding heads, human-machine sex hybrids and a woman that births demon children from pustules on the outside of the body.

“The Fly” tops them all. In his most gruesome role ever, Jeff Goldblum plays an ambitious scientist that resort to using himself as a test subject for his cutting edge project. Unfortunately, the experiment goes terribly wrong and Goldblum finds himself slowly morphing into a giant fly. Audiences are treated to watching his body slowly fall apart, piece by piece. If you long to watch a man remove his own fingernails or dissolve his food with his vomit, check out “The Fly.” Disgustingness aside, “The Fly” is a horror great and deserving of acclaim in the annals of horror filmmaking.

8. The Midnight Meat Train

You might be surprised to see Bradley Cooper, four-time Academy Award nominee, in this 2008 scare flick. The film itself is a solid psychological horror, buttressed by an actor of Cooper’s caliber. But it’s the moments of gross out gags that will linger in your mind when you’re done with this one. In a role that will send chills up your spine, Vinnie Jones plays a mysterious butcher whose midnight rides on the New York subway draw the attention of freelance photographer Cooper.

As Cooper tumbles down the rabbit hole, you’ll witness Jones’ daily routine of cutting curious boils from his body, and his nightly routine of popping eyes from the skulls of public transportation patrons with a meat mallet. I’ll leave you to discover the shocking climax for yourself, but suffice it to say it’s repulsive.

7. The Last House on the Left

The 1977 exploitation film by Wes Craven is undoubtedly his most gruesome film. Craven went on to have more commercial success with his “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise, as well as the huge success of the “Scream” franchise.

However, “The Last House on the Left” is stylistically quite different. The film almost plays like a PSA against drugs after the protagonists fall into the grasp of psychopaths whom they mistake as marijuana dealers. Scenes of sickening violence are juxtaposed with comic relief of the bungling detectives that are on the case. Those moments of comic relief are much needed, because the violence is very hard to watch. Rape, disemboweling and severed genitals are bad enough, but the accompaniment of a cacophonous score seems to amplify the violence.

Don’t be fooled by the B-movie style of “The Last House on the Left.” The film gets its story from Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film “The Virgin Spring,” which can be found on the lauded film library Criterion Collection.

6. Excision

Sure, a film about a teenager obsessed with surgery is clue enough for what you’re getting into. Yet, “Excision” is so much more. The underlying themes of sexual autonomy and misogyny elevate the film beyond its shock factor.

But shock it does. Dream sequences laden with blood-slathered sex and murder set the tone for the protagonist’s obsessions. While the majority of the film’s grosser imagery has to do with the combination of blood and sex, its climactic open-chest surgery is the one that will really have you diving for the trash bin. Be forewarned, this is a film for fans of the strange and unsavory.

5. Imprint

Here we have another entry from Japanese master Takashi Miike. “Imprint” was actually an episode in the series “Masters of Horror,” not a feature film, but it is no less terrifying.

The film starts in the same way many Japanese parables do, with many retellings of the same story to show varying perspectives. However, there is only one storyteller in this film, whose story changes the more she is pressed for the truth.

This episode was actually banned from television, despite being on premium network Showtime. Its horrifying depictions of bamboo fingernail torture and aborted fetuses is likely responsible for that. Or perhaps it was the tiny hand growing from the side of a prostitute’s head that tells her what to do. Either way, it’s hard to watch “Imprint” and makes you wonder what is going on inside the melon of Miike.

4. Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)

While every film I’ve mention so far has merits worthy of exploring, “Human Centipede 2” does not share that trait.

A follow up to Tom Six’s cult horror hit “Human Centipede,” “Human Centipede 2” takes a weird turn. The protagonist is inspired to make his own eponymous human centipede after watching the first film. That’s right; Six references the first film within the second film. Vainglorious aspirations aside, the film itself is a joyless trek through abuse and misery, replete with shameless gore and unnecessary death. At every level, the film is repugnant and stomach-churning. For example, I checked out after a newborn baby was needlessly crushed beneath a gas pedal by its own mother. There is nothing of values within the minutes you’ll spend watching this nightmare.

3. Martyrs

An entry into the movement of New French Extremist horror cinema, “Martyrs” might well be the greatest of the subgenre. Aside from the shock factor of blood and gore, the 2008 film is pack with twists and turns that keep the audience wanting more, despite what they’re seeing.

“Martyrs” is the story of a young girl bent on revenge, searching for the people that abducted and tortured her in her youth. The protagonist is desperate for an answer to the great “why,” which is ironic because that’s exactly what her captors were after as well. Members of a creepy cult, her captors believe in the concept of a Martyr; a woman that, driven to the brink of death by torture, can see what lies beyond this mortal coil.

Though the moments of torture are difficult to watch, bordering on unwatchable, it’s the fascinating questions about existence that will linger in your mind long after you finish “Martyrs.”

2. Dead Alive

Fans of “The Lord of the Rings” series might be surprised to discover that New Zealand director Peter Jackson has a healthy résumé in gross out horror.

“Dead Alive,” also known by the title “Braindead,” tells the story of a town overwhelmed by a deadly primate virus that turns victims into zombies. Though it sounds like the plot to “28 Days Later,” “Dead Alive” couldn’t be more different in tone or content. The absolutely revolting practical special effects are paired with physical comedy, a combination that has audiences clutching their guts from laughing and disgust.

The film boasts what online pundits call the goriest scene in cinema history. Think about a protagonist taking on a town of zombies with an upturned lawnmower. But it wouldn’t be a Peter Jackson film without a creature of horrendous size and repellant appearance, and he delivers exactly that in the film’s insane climax.

This film, though likely the nastiest in the list, is easier to swallow given its humor. Though you probably won’t want to swallow anything after watching the dinner scene…

1. A Serbian Film

Let’s start with a disclaimer: I have not seen this film. I do not want to see this film. I will never see this film. And as you may have determined from this list, I’ve seen some disgusting stuff.

However, “A Serbian Film” takes it to a different level. For some context, the film is made by Serbian filmmaker Srđan Spasojević and is allegedly intended as commentary on the overly restrictive censorship in Serbian filmmaking, hence the name “A Serbian Film.” And though I lack the context of in depth understanding of the Serbian film world, I imagine he could have found a different way of standing up to the censors.

How bad could it be? After everything on this list, what could make this the worst? Let me paint a picture with words for you. Murder by copulation with an eye-socket. Newborn porn. Forced inces-

Okay that’s good. Just read the film’s Wikipedia page and decide whether you want to watch this repulsive, abhorrent film for yourself. I for one cannot and will not. Ever. My stomach is turning just thinking about it.

#horror #film #slasher #ghost #ghoul #movie #gore #torture #death #murder #human centipede #dead #alive #peter #jackson #miike

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soldouthaz · 5 years ago

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hii! thank you so much for this ask I can’t believe I hadn’t though of doing this before!

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please let me know if I have used any incorrect pronouns or linked anything incorrectly, or if you'd like me to unlink to something! :)

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in no particular order:

✰ falsegoodnight

ao3 | @risthebrave | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, soulmates, uni au’s

personal recs: x , x , x , x

✰ pinkvinyl

ao3 | @pinkvinyl | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, pwp

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✰ outropeace

ao3 | @outropeace | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, soulmates

personal recs: x , x , x

✰ faeriestyles

ao3 | @yvesaintlourent | twitter

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personal recs: x

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personal recs: x , x , x , x

✰ smittenwithlouis

ao3 | @smittenwithlouis | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, fantasy au’s, magic, hybrid Louis, mythical creatures

personal recs: x , x

✰ lads_laddylads

ao3 | @lads-laddylads | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, pwp, vampires, uni au’s

personal recs: x , x , x

✰ whoknows

ao3 | @crazyupsetter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, canon elements, dom/sub, a/b/o, supernatural / fantasy elements, drabbles, pwp, hybrid Louis

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ao3 | @tequiladimples

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ao3 | @eeveelou

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✰ jaerie

ao3 | @jaerie

common work tags/tropes: a/b/o, bottom Louis, bottom harry, canon elements, gender swap, drabbles, mpreg, historical au’s, pwp

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✰ louizsv

ao3 | @louizsv

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, a/b/o, d/s dynamics, vampires, some fantasy / supernatural elements

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✰ disgruntledkittenface

ao3 | @disgruntledkittenface

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, bottom harry, drabbles, d/s elements, gender swapping / girl direction, hurt/comfort, fluff

personal recs: x , x

✰ summerwine

ao3 | @smrwine

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, pwp, feminization, dom/sub

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ao3 | @loaded-gunn

common work tags/tropes: bottom harry, bottom Louis, pwp, dom/sub, gender swap / girl direction

personal recs: x , x , x

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ao3 | @holdingthornsandroses | twitter

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, historical au

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common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, bottom harry, uni au’s, a/b/o, dom/sub, supernatural elements, drabbles

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ao3

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, bottom harry, phone sex operator fic, pwp, dom/sub, gender swapping

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ao3 | @mercutionotromeo

common work tags/tropes: bottom harry, pwp, daddy kink, dom/sub, fluff, drabbles, gender swapping, light age play

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✰ sunflowerstyles

ao3 | @sunflowerstyles

common work tags/tropes: bottom Louis, hurt/comfort, daddy kink,

personal recs: x , x

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please let me know if you need any more! happy reading and I hope you find some more lovely authors to choose from! :)

#ask #fic recs #reposting this because it took me all day and I don't like the way the other one posted

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