#which will win? the power of friendship or the power of being a special grade hater

[cozmic-cherries]

Favorite flavor of SukuGo is "I can fix him" Gojo and "I can make him worse" Sukuna.

Just Sukuna whispering in his ear: Aren't you tired of being nice? Don't you wanna go apeshit?

[tired-sapphic]

my top 10 jujutsu kaisen characters as of now:

[PART 2/2]

[part 1 here]

(manga spoilers ahead)

5. yuta oGOATsu

at some point he was actually my no.1 but that was when the jjk 0 brain rot(i was obsessed w that volume) was real. he is just THAT dude, idk what to tell you. his growth from a scared little dude to a powerful little dude with an actual will to live was nice to see. i love his relationship with maki, i can't say I ship them but if they end up together then i'd be pretty happy(..so maybe i do ship them? idk). also love his dynamic w gojo. idk i just love him, he's cool. if the current anime season ends on him saying he's there to kill yuji, that'd be fucking hilarious, i live for drama.

4. maki

MY GOAT. she had a tough upbringing in that fucked up misogynistic household and said "fuck yall, i'll kill u all" n she did. goal-oriented. joking aside, i love her dynamic w her sister mai (great character). i wish she had a better relationship w her bcs they used to be so cute growing up but nevertheless, despite their anger and frustration, their love for each other never dwindled n u know what? that's how sisters are. that particular chapter w mai has to be one of my favorites. the parallel w toji is smth that i also really like. her story is sad as hell and i just want her to be happy in the future.

3. mahito

mahito being top 3 is a choice but that's just how it is when u have good taste. one of the most entertaining and ,imo, hilarious characters. i've always thought his powers were cool simply because of how creative and adaptable they are. he's childish and extremely dangerous and to me that's a good combo. just a really good villain. my headcanon is that if u play uno with him he'll secretly start eating some of his cards so he'll win.

2. megumi

i loved him back when he was constantly getting his ass beat and love him now. seeing his domain expansion for the 1st time had me so hyped i literally got up from my seat when i was watching it lmao. great seeing him learn how to utilize his shadows. also love his relationship w gojo so the current fight in the manga is stressing me out (i'll be mad as hell if he never finds out who his dad is). his friendship w yuji is so pure, i want them to reunite again so bad

1. sukuna

my favourite character. he has this kind of confidence one can only have when they'reTHIS powerful. i like that there's no sad backstory trying to humanize him in any way, like no that guy is just straight up evil lmao. his dynamic with uraume has always been so interesting to me and i love watching them interact. he's scary and has no hesitations when it comes to offing people but he's not illogical. it's clear that he values strength (and "true" jujutsu) a lot but at the same time has shown respect towards the curse jogo who is obviously less powerful than him (can't wait to see that fight animated). his relationship with kenjaku is kind of interesting. idk why but i never thought they would be cool like that lmao. his DE, malevolent shrine, is the coolest DE imo. he's just so fascinating to me and it's very entertaining seeing just how strong his presence is. one of my favourite earlier scenes is him taking over yuji in ep.4 or 5 and the special grade just fucking shaking from fear before he even did anything lmao. also interesting how he didn't seem to have intentions of killing that curse, not until the curse tried to fight. he dislikes when people don't "know their place" which is evident when mahito went into his domain twice (he was also cool w the idea of him and mahito laughing at itadori so it's not like he kills curses for no reason, i feel like as long a curse doesn't try to do too much and shows him respect, he'll probably won't kill them..? lmao) idk i just want to crawl into his head and explore his mind. ah and he's also a foodie 😁

[fruit-salad-ship]

So in the my hero au which schools did the trio go to when they were teens

Grey went to 4, getting kicked out of 3 before landing in a small rinky-dink place out in the country, a special school for 'last chance' kids. His quirk was hard to handle and he'd made many mistakes trying to wrangle it, hence landing in the middle of no where. He however made friends with the kind endlessly in detention with a temper on her. Peach had been at this school the whole time, put stright in as a troubled child, a girl who did not bend to the rules, and struggled to get along with just about anyone. She started out by bullying Grey, he was the new kid, stood out like a sore thumb, built like a barn with a fancy arm??? Yeah she singled him out almost instantly. He proved himself in combat and their rivalry began. A rivalry that grew to true friendship once they realised their quirks blended perfectly in a fight. Tag team brawls against them made for near impossible odds at winning. The small time school left them without the credentials to join big fancy agencies, they instead had to work hard to earn a reputation at smaller places, working through the ranks until a bigger place saw their sucess rate and hired them on the spot. Plum however went to Shiketsu High as a honors student for her smart nature and ability to think several steps ahead. Though her quirk wasnt physically powerful she was able to be sharp enough to create situations that let her skills shine. She had nice friends, a good home life, and graduated with top grades, being hider by a prime agency instantly as a sidekick. She was requested as help with difficult heros elsewhere, and was partnered with Peach and Grey, seeing it as an opportunity to stand above the rest and be noticed for a true pro. All she had to do was wrangle two others right? No big deal.

Wrong. Huge deal.

[that-bi-bitch-writes]

A Cursed Reality-JJK x M!Reader (Ch.2)

Question: Do you guys prefer longer chapters or shorter chapters? I’ve been making an effort to write longer chapters but if you hate reading them I’ll write them less.

Warnings: fluff, comparison of Inumaki’s speech to a disability/handicap, cursing. Dislike of Maki (Not me. wrong bitch. I love her)

Previous || Next

Chapter Two:

[Name] actively dislikes hanging out with the second years. Not that they’re bad people in any way, it’s just he’s anxious and awkward, and even after spending a year familiarizing himself with the school and the people in it, there’s like a small group of people he would invite to his birthday party.

That and he just doesn’t care for Maki Zen’in. And it is most definitely mutual. To him, she’s just pretty. She also won’t die in a battle between her and a curse below first grade. But that’s about the end of her appeal. Of course, Panda is fun to tease but he typically plays the peacemaker between the second years. [Name] would rather not care about people in peace.

There’s no dramatic reason to it all, it’s just [Name] didn’t really come to Jujutsu Tech by choice so he hadn’t intended on making friends. He obviously failed considering he befriended Inumaki within his first day and they have some homoromantic vibes going on in their friendship.

That’s not to say you can’t platonic cuddle with your best friend but when you longingly gaze into each other’s eyes and he’s the only friend you’ve made besides an annoyingly hyper 30-year-old because no one else understands you like he does… And it kind of goes both ways considering you’re the only person he trusts himself enough to have a full-on conversation with.

Yeah, it’s not looking very good for the argument that they’re not gay. They’re not though. At least not now.  

“[Name]”

“Yeah toge?”

“You look like you’ve got something on your mind” Inumaki responded. And although he had plenty of experience saying words, having a conversation without using safe words felt a little weird. It was an aspect of who he was now and [Name] being immune to the cursed speech wouldn’t erase the problems he had with talking and it didn’t make [Name] his savior or soulmate.

Luckily [Name] was both lonely and not a complete asshole because he had no problems adapting to the switch between Toge’s ‘onigiri glossary’. Learning it was actually a really fun experience because it turns out Inumaki did not have the exact translation of all his safe words. He would just say an ingredient and [Name] had to fill in the blanks. There was a lot of trial and error and a lot of [Name] smiling down at Inumaki’s concentrated face.

“I was just thinking.” [Name] broke the contemplative silence.

“Hmm”

“You know” [Name] started again “... They say it was believed people kept their souls in their throats” and as Inumaki gave a confused denial (“fish flakes”) [Name] was internally panicking on whether or not he should keep going with this specific train of thought or make a joke to deflect from the very real and emotional but corny statement he was about to utter.

“Ah fuck it. I want to exercise the curses in the world or at least enough to keep you safe so you don’t keep damaging your soul when you use your cursed technique”

“Sujiko”

[Name] looked at Inumaki. And as if breaking off pieces of his soul didn’t matter to him, Inumaki spoke, a short sentence that stunned [Name] into silence

“I love you”

If Gojo hadn’t come in, they might’ve kissed.

“[Name]-kun!!!”

Aaaand [Name]’s sentimental mood was gone. Don’t get him wrong, Gojo definitely would get an invite to [Name]’s birthday party, but the man was like 30 running around being overly cheerful and with that teasing nature he was definitely repressing some trauma. He also definitely had some of the worst timing

“What is it Gojo?”

“No sensei at the end? So mean!

“Fushiguro was sent out to find a cursed object but he’s been out all day with no calls back home or anything. Of course I plan on going to check on my beloved student, but I am busy for the next hour or so. Can you please check on him? For your favorite sensei?”

“My favorite sensei is actually Nanami and he’s not even a sensei but yeah I’ll check on the emo kid”

‘You’re pretty emo yourself dude’ Gojo thought to himself

“Ah Thank you [Name]-kun. You’re a lifesaver” Gojo called out behind him as he left to do whatever it is crazy white haired ‘old’ men do.

‘He’s/I’m totally not doing this for free’ both [Name] and Inumaki thought at the same time.

[Name] got up suddenly and started getting ready to leave paying no attention to Inumaki who watched him get ready with a casual interest. Before [Name] headed out, he turned to look at Inumaki with a serious and concentrated expression.

“Toge.”

“I love you”

“What the hell happened here?”

“....”

“Fushiguro-kun, if you please”

“Well I only know half of the story so it’s best if we hear it from Itadori”

All eyes whipped to the shirtless Yuji who had just gotten control of his body back from Sukuna, the apparent king of curses.

“I’d say it started when I went to school this morning but I think it started a little earlier for Fushiguro. Right Fushiguro?” Yuji asked

‘I swear I’m going to explode if someone doesn’t tell me the how we got this far I mean Fushiguro is bleeding from his head, this pink haired enthusiastic kid is possessed and I can’t tell if he’s too sweet to care or if he lost a few of his brain cells when he and the little emo first year wrecked this building’ [Name] thought to himself.

Clearing his throat he began “Well okay Fushiguro has a lot of really bad injuries so is it okay with you if he just quickly shares his part and then you take over?”

“Ohh Yeah that makes sense” Itadori awed and both he and [Name] turned their attention to poor Megumi who was bleeding from his forehead.

“Yesterday I was sent to retrieve a special grade cursed object and when I got there it was gone. Gojo sensei told me I couldn’t go home until it was recovered. The next day I stalked around the school and investigated when I saw Yuji for the first time.”

“Oh I remember that. It’s my turn to take over now. Uhh. I was in the occult club with my senpais Sasaki and Iguchi and we were asking the spirits about which animal the Student Council President was weaker than ( a fish) and then he burst in the room because he didn’t approve of our club-”

“Fast forward please” [Name] interrupted

“Fushiguro found me after my grandpa died and told me Iguchi and Sasaki were in danger because of the finger so I led him to the school where they said they were going to peel off the seal”

“And that’s why we’re here” [Name] surmised

“So what’s the situation”

“Gojo-sensei”/ “Old Man what are you doing here?” Megumi and [Name] called out

“I wasn’t gonna come but the higher ups got involved. I knew you’d all be fine though, I sent [Name] here to deal with it.”

“That’s true” Fushiguo mumbled

“I’m glad you all have faith in me” [Name] started “But that means I came here for absolutely nothing”

“... So did you find it?” Gojo asked

“Um sorry.... I ate it”

Gojo who didn’t hear the whole introduction and [Name] who didn’t quite get to the eating of the finger part in the story turned to Yuji in shock

“For real”

“For real”

“Haha you’re not kidding. They’re combined. How does your body feel?” Gojo asked Yuji

“Okay”

“Can you switch to Sukuna?”

“Sukuna?” Yuji asked

“The curse object you ate”

“Oh yeah. Probably”

“Ten seconds” gojo said “Take control again after ten seconds”

“I dunno about this”

“Don’t worry. I’m the strongest Jujutsu sorcerer”

Megumi looked to [Name] after hearing a curious “hmm” but [Name]’s face showed no anger or displeasure.

“Megumi hold onto this will ya” Gojo’s voice bled through Megumi’s thoughts of who would win between [Name] and Gojo. Give it a year or two and it might actually be [Name].

“What’s this?” Megumi asked

‘It better be a fucking weapon’ [Name] thought ‘Because if he sent me out because his important business was shopping he’s gonna regret it’

“Kikufuku Mochi” Gojo replied casually before feeling bloodlust leaking from [Name]. He’ll just have to make it up to the second year somehow

“Behind you” Fushiguro called out and [Name] sucked his teeth hoping Gojo would get hit at least once. He did not get his wish once

“I’ve got a student watching so..I hope you don’t mind if I show off a little bit” . And after that Gojo commenced kicking Sukuna’s ass. Sukuna tried to monologue a little as he sent out a powerful attack, but he missed Gojo on account of Gojo’s infinity dispelling the attack. By the time Sukuna realized Gojo was unharmed it was time for Yuji to switch back.

“Oh was everything okay?” Yuji asked as he came to his senses.

“Oh what a surprise” Gojo responded “You really can control it”

“Yeah, but he’s kind of annoying”

“It’s a miracle that’s the only side effect” Gojo said right before knocking Yuji out with one finger

“If he wakes up and isn't possessed, he might have potential as a vessel. Okay question for you two. What do I do with him?”

“Even if he is a potential vessel… He must be executed under jujutsu regulations…

“But I don’t want to let him die”

“Is that a personal opinion? Gojo asked

“Yes, a personal opinion. Please do something about it.

Gojo smiled and the two of them turned their attention towards [Name] who had been silent throughout the whole experience.

‘Besides being a little too excitable, he’s not bad. Like a puppy. I’d keep him as a pet.’ [Name] thought

“Don’t kill him” he said

“A precious student's request. And one from my favorite second year? Of course. Leave it to me!” Gojo said before lifting Yuji up.

[Name] still a little upset he was called away for nothing, raised his hand in front of his mouth so gojo couldn’t see what he was doing and whispered

“Fall over”

“Aak! [Name]-kunnn”

Fushiguro was shocked to see Gojo faceplant on the ground with Yuji on his shoulder. If the combination of Fushiguro’s wide eyed expression and the sight of Gojo in pain made [Name] giggle a little, he’d never admit it.

[sixeyesgojo]

Team Gojo as flowers

Summary: Gojo, Yuji, Megumi, Nobara and Sukuna as types of flowers

Characters: stated above

Content warning: mild manga spoilers

Word count: -

A/N: I’d appreciate feedback here (and in general) because I’m not sure whether to do this kind of hc for other JJK characters or not. I am thinking of Toge in particular because I love my salmon boy. Also fyi, this was some time after 135 but before 140 for sure.

Gojo Satoru  - Nemophila

I just saw these and immediately thought about how good they would suit him???

another name for them would be baby blue eyes (no, I had no idea beforehand)

they symbolize prosperity, victory, success or triumph over an enemy

flashback to Gojo beating Jogo tf up... but add a nemophila field in the background <3

That being said, his profile literally states that he is perfect in every way (except for his personality but we still love that, right?), so if this isn't success in every way then idk

This flower's essence is also said to be helpful for those who put up a mask over their painful sensitivity

Gojo also displays characteristics of cynism and mistrust towards the higher-ups

Furthermore, I think he is a little anti-social - doesn't have a lot of friends. As someone from the secret Jujutsu World, he's bound to be hidden in a way. This is enforced by the fact that he is the strongest, so a lot of people and curses are out to get his head. I'd think he doesn't keep anyone too close to him so that they do not become a target for anyone. Must be traumatizing to be him.

This flower helps soothen the soul's conflict, healing it slowly, which is exactly what Gojo needs imo

it really is the perfect flower for him

but it's native to North America

Yeah, watch him teleport there to bring back a bouquet of them for his s/o

Itadori Yuji - Protea (orange)

This kind of flower comes in many different shapes, which is why it's a symbol of transformation, which is exactly what Yuji embodies by going from a regular human being to being a Jujutsu sorcerer

Diversity: Yuji is open to anything, Gojo even described him as "having a few screws loose up there". I don't even think he questions how he is being taught by Gojo or anything for that matter?

Yuji also embodies courage and is known to be daring and i don't think i need to explain this one further

I mean, the boy literally jumped right into a curse to rescue Sasaki and Iguchi and help Megumi while not even knowing what a curse is

Orange proteas represent cheerfulness, joy and happiness - if that isn't our sunshine boy, then idk. After what happened to Junpei, he seemed a little down at first but recent episodes have shown that he will not slow down because of that and will keep on being the energetic fluffball of joy that he is.

moreover, they also symbolize unlimited possibilities as his cursed technique so far probably isn't even his final technique yet - compared to Nobara's hammer and Megumi's shikigami. All we know is that Sukuna's techniques are going to be his over time but we don't even know the full extent of the said curse's power yet

If anyone ever mentioned all this to him and showed him the flower, he would think it looks weird at first but will grow to find it interesting (especially the shape). It's not like the flower is native to Japan, so he most likely wouldn't have seen it anywhere.

Gets really excited if you were to give this baby one of these flowers

Fushiguro Megumi - Anemone (purple)

hear me out

The most common symbol for the purple Anemone is 'protection against evil'. While it's Megumi's primary focus in his line of work as a professional, you ought to know he became a sorcerer in the first place because of his sister, Tsukimi.

Fragility: While Megumi shows a lot of potential for growth, it's also said that he will most likely stagnate due to the mental aspect. He's pretty insecure about his own abilities and doesn't think much of himself but that doesn't mean he won't use his powers in order to protect someone.

Anticipation: As previously stated, Megumi shows a lot of potential as a sorcerer, even to the point that Sukuna (mind you, the creature that only cares about himself) has praised him and will not hesitate to make Megumi a pawn to whatever his big, mysterious plans may be. With that being said, if Sukuna himself is interested in our blue-haired boy, we can anticipate great things from Megumi in the foreseeable future.

This specific flower seems to be a double-edged sword in terms of symbolism. In some cultural circles, it is believed to be a symbol of bad luck, whereas in other areas it's seen as a lucky charm (in which we hope this is the one for our boy). I see the same principle applying to Megumi's descent and his mysterious technique - not gonna elaborate further though (feel free to ask though)

a rather dark symbol for this particular flower: "death of a loved one". In this case, I am referring to Tsukimi, his step-sister. She may not be dead but it is indicated that she is in a comatose state due to being cursed. It seems that Megumi does not know when - or rather whether - she will wake up or not. Knowing this boy, he probably has tried anything and everything in his power to wake her up (hell, he probably even consulted Gojo) but nothing worked so far. This poor boy is anxious about it all the time.

he's surprised anyone would even associate him with flowers but wouldn't mind it

Kugisaki Nobara - Orchid (mainly orange)

I had some trouble finding something for her but orchids seem to suit her best

couldn't really pick a particular color though but I am leaning towards orange

orange orchids represent: pride, enthusiasm and boldness

Nobara is very proud of who she is. She strikes me as a person who is not afraid to tell her story, even though she despices the countryside where she is from. She also takes pride in staying true to herself all the time, to the point of admitting that she only enrolled in Jujutsu High so that she could move to Tokyo to Yuji, who was basically a stranger at that time

She is also very enthusiastic about her own future. She knows she won't ever like having to exorcise curses but somehow, being a Jujutsu sorcerer excites her.

plus points for her being enthusiastic about winning in the Kyoto Goodwill Event Arc and just beating up the Kyoto students

I don't need to mention her being enthusiastic about shopping and sightseeing in big cities, do I?

Bold? Oh, she is bold. She has no filter when it comes to speaking her mind and would never hesitate to put anyone in their place. I see her going places in Gojo's revolution... and cussing at the superiors.

Yellow symbolizes new beginnings and friendships. Nobara does not have any problems making new friends, she adapts fairly well in new environments. There's also the way she mourned for Yuji, despite "only knowing him for two weeks" and I don't even doubt for a second that it was her making him hold the black funeral picture frame when he came back lol

Pink: grace, femininity, joy + purple: royalty and admiration

There is no doubt that Nobara tries to enjoy her life to the fullest *cough* moving to Tokyo

Moreover, there is something about her that just screams "queen behavior" to me and I don't even mean that in the slang sense. Have you all seen how graceful this girl moves? (I would like to thank MAPPA at this point)

Nobara shows respect where it's due - I'm just gonna mention Maki here - but is a very admirable girl herself

probably has an orchid plant in her room, ngl

Ryomen Sukuna - Snapdragon

please, the name already sounds a little dangerous

This flower shares a certain character trait with him: being unique

Snapdragons are usually associated with strength due to the way they even grow in rocky areas and if that's not screaming Sukuna's name, who is all about strength, then correct me

Deviousness is practically Sukuna's second name, so this symbol isn't exactly off the track either. Let me remind you about the way Sukuna and Mahito laughed at Yuji??

Graciousness: just like Nobara, he possesses some sort of grace that makes me percept him as a majestic being

but maybe that's just his throne of bones and title as King of Curses contributing

and him owning a shrine???

or maybe that is just the way he majestetically killed that special grade lol

"Only large insects like bumblebees can pollinate snapdragons because the petals are too heavy for smaller insects to push apart." I read this and if you reverse it a little, it somehow reminded me of the fact that Sukuna's fingers need to have a powerful vessel aka small fry won't do because they will simply die away.

Deception: despite being given the minimum amount of information about Sukuna in general, I just don't see him being anything but egoistic and evil. I just cannot picture it. So yeah, put everything evil in a pot, stir a little and don't be surprised if your result is not the Powerpuff girls but a four-eyed multi-talented and deceptive curse that is out to kill you for fun

[lady-griffin]

I Entered a Dangerous Dungeon

Acchan’s Story

Acchan’s story was very touching and sad. I thought the anime did a great job adapting her POV chapters concisely into this episode.

I love the scene of Acchan reading Past Katarina’s last text message and breaking down crying.

That got me right in the feels.

One slight criticism, is that in the Light Novel we learn that because of Past Katarina, Acchan has made many friends and is able to live on without her best friend. Because of the positive impact Past Katarina had on her life and how much she changed it for the better. 

So, while in the anime, Acchan does say she will live on without her best-friend, I feel like it doesn’t come across as strongly as it did in the Light Novel.

That being said. I thought Acchan’s story went really well with the flow of the episode.

In LN Vol.2 her POV honestly felt disruptive and broke the flow of the story for me. So definite kudos to the anime for fixing that.

The text message scene got me, but so did Past Katarina’s funeral.

It’s easy to forget, with Katarina’s silliness, density and antics, that she died tragically young in her former life. 

So well done on the anime’s part for hitting me right in the heart with that reminder.

--

Sadness and friendship aside. I like how Fortune Lover appears in Katarina’s Past Life.

The poster on Acchan’s wall gives the impression that Prince Geordo and Prince Alan are the two main love interests or the more primary capture-targets. 

As they are more front and center than Keith and Nicol.

But since this is Katarina’s story, Keith takes precedent over Alan because of his closer proximity and relationship to Katarina.

There’s also something I really like about Past Katarina struggling to succeed in the Prince Geordo route in the game and technically dying because of it. 

It feels like her new life is good karma or the universe trying to make it up to her…so to speak

As in Katarina’s new life she easily wins over Prince Geordo without even trying and by being herself. Hell, she doesn’t even notice that he’s in love with her or that anyone else is. 

I’m probably looking way more into that detail than is actually needed, but I just like that small detail to Katarina and Geordo’s relationship.

The Exam Plot

Sophia want to see Katarina after her sad dream (memories) was very sweet and touching. I just love their friendship and how it has cross time, worlds and lives. It’s beautiful.  

I don’t think the Exam Plot is from the Light Novels (6-9) and it wasn’t in the manga or Light Novels (1-5). 

So, kudos to the Anime for introducing this exam plot and exploring more of the academic life for Katarina and her friends.

I loved their school uniforms for the exam.

It was nice seeing them in the same outfits and they all look pretty damn good in them. 

I don’t know why I really like their uniforms so much, but I really do. I just really do.

As much as I love their day-to-day outfits, I would not be mad if this was their school uniform and what we saw them in for the majority of the time. 

But that’s probably just me. 

Katarina is 100% right about the insanity of this exam.

--

But thanks to this crazy exam we got to see more magic and it was great.

I’ve always felt like the Light Novels and the Manga didn’t elaborate or explore on this being a magical world and the fact that all of our main characters have magic (at least in the First Year/Game Arc). The later novels (3-5) do elaborate a bit further. 

In Fortune Lover, it’s clear that magic was just a mechanic in the game to explain why all these characters were in the same school and a slight twist to making Maria different and special, as well as make Fortune Lover different from other Otome games.

And if I’m not mistakes Katarina even says the same thing about Fortune Lover. 

Fortune Lover gave a limited view of this world. Even when it came to Maria Campbell’s life and background, but the actual Hamefura story explores the world to a much greater extent.

So, it always seemed liked a wasted opportunity not to do the same with magic.

As it never really felt that magic matters for certain characters at all. 

For example in the Light Novels’ Character Profiles -- Sophia is said to have Earth magic and Raphael is said to have Light Magic…

But clearly that doesn’t really matter, because the anime (and maybe manga) can easily change their original types of magic to Wind Magic (I’m assuming it was Raphael who used that wind-tunnel to save Sophia and Katarina). 

HOWEVERE, there does seem to be a mistake in Sophia’s profile as it’s just Katarina’s in regards to her likes, dislikes, etc. 

Sophia’s Profile in Vol.5 (english-translation) is more than likely wrong in regards to her magic. Which might mean Raphael’s magic in his profile is also wrong. 

So, we should take that into consideration. 

My point being that I’m very happy that the anime is taking different route with how it handles magic in comparison to the LN/Manga. 

It’s been a huge improvement.

--

Katarina is so fucking dumb (I love her). 

Not only does she push the red button on the floor without even thinking about it for even a second, but in addition, her contributing to the group with her earth-bump was hilarious and adorable. 

Plus, her picking the most poisonous mushrooms that ever existed was just so stupid and so amazing.  

I also love how both Mary and Sophia are pretty fucking dumb when it comes to Katarina (and really only when it comes to her).

Mary is fully prepared to eat deadly mushrooms as long as Katarina is the one who prepares them and Sophia just hops right on board.

And Sophia was really the only who was genuinely complimenting Katarina for her earth-bump move in the exam. Which is just so sweet and also so dumb.

I love the three of them so goddamn much + Maria being the only one of the girls not willing to the deadly mushrooms. 

While I am a bit disappointed that Katarina’s videogame knowledge wasn’t of any use to her in the exam, I did genuinely love Geordo pushing her towards the the path they decided to take. 

I also enjoyed Alan saving Mary and her slighty blushing and him looking slighty embarassed as well. 

I will say I was disappointed that we only really saw the boys be capable during the exam, not any of the girls. Except for when Sophia helped Nicol locate Katarina…but still.

And of course, Katarina found the magic-stone because she needed a tool to help her gather mushrooms. That’s 100% Katarina. Though, a part of would have prefer it if Katarina was very knowledgable about plants in general and knew that those mushrooms were deadly. (either way it works for me)

And the one councilmember in her head (happy) seeing a lizard as food was fucking fantastic. 

I love the noble girls being jealous of Katarina and talking about her. 

It’s nice seeing them before the big accusation scene happens. Just by showing the noble girls being mad and jealous of Katarina feels more organic to the story.

Plus, Maria noticing the Dark Magic behind Katarina. 

I’m very happy with the past two ‘filler’ episodes building up to the two big climatic scenes and events.

--

The main problem I had with this episode is that - 

The Exam Makes No Sense…

I know that not unusual for anime or plenty of other stories, but the exam really makes no sense.

Aside from one group, basically everyone else is basically set up to fail. Right?

If you find the magic stone than you pass. If you don’t find the (one) magic stone, then you fail. 

The exam isn’t really testing what they’ve learned or improved upon. 

It’s more based on luck and the amount of magical power one has. 

Which seems unfair, as we know that a good portion of the magic population is closer to Katarina’s level of power than Keith’s, at least in LN, but maybe it’s different in the anime (or maybe I read the LN wrong).

I guess it’s possible that even though the team that finds the magic stone automatically passes, the other teams can pass based on how they navigated through the ruins...maybe. That would make more sense.

Though, it’s very possible that Alan, Mary, and Maria didn’t pass the practical exam because they weren’t on Katarina’s team.

And while I doubt that will be addressed later in the anime - If Alan, Mary and Maria actually failed the practical exam then that would be a great reason for why they arrived late during the accusation scene.

They weren’t there because they had to retake the practical exam or do another one.

So, even if the anime doesn’t say that’s the reason, that’s going to be my headcanon for right now.

ALSO

The teachers literally split the top students of the entire grade into two separate groups…

I’m not exaggerating. 

The students who get picked to be on the Student Council (the harem) are the ones who ranked the highest in the evaluation exam at the beginning of the school year.

First Year Rankings

1. Geordo Stuart (Canon) 2. Maria Campbell (Canon) 3. Alan Stuart (Canon) 4. Keith Claes (non-canon) 5. Mary Hunt (non-canon) 6. Sophia Ascart (non-canon)

We don’t actually know the rankings of Keith, Mary and Sophia but since they’re also on the student council, we know that they must be ranked 4-6. We just don’t know the exact order. .

Having the highest ranked students in two groups, basically feels like setting up all the other students for failure.

Then you have Katarina who is right smack in the middle of the rankings (#80) as part of one of the two groups.

That gives me the impression that Geordo and Keith basically demanded that Katarina be on the same team they are on, not realizing the other was doing the same.

Which is par for the course.

As all the members of the harem (minus Maria), threatened the teachers that if Katarina didn’t get permanent permission to be allowed in the Student Council chambers, then they would all resign from the student council (Manga/LN).

I know I’m thinking about this too much. 

And that of course the main characters are going to be together, because they’re the main characters. But still...

Really with just one or two lines from the teacher would have at least solved one of the illogical problems here.  

Teacher – “We have place several of these stones in the labyrinth, your goal is to find one of them. If your team leaves the dungeon without finding a stone, your team fails.”

Or something to that affect...

As much as I love Geordo and Keith being exasperated by Katarina and protecting her.

This also could’ve have been a nice opportunity to introduce Katarina’s non-council friends. Rather than us just seeing them right before she gets accused of bullying. 

But again, it does make more sense to have the main characters to be teamed up together...because they are the main characters. I just can’t help but point out the logistical problems for this exam.

Though maybe the anime will build off what’s been established in this episode...maybe.

--

Overall, I really enjoyed this episode. 

I was hit in the feels right away, laughed so hard, and it was just a lot of fun.

And of course, I was very happy to see the anime is adding its own stuff to the story and elaborating beyond the Light Novels and Manga.

[praphit]

Mortal Kombat: Earthrealm’s Crappiest Fighters

I think we can all agree that the old school Mortal Kombat theme song ("Techno Syndrome") is one of the best songs of all time. Well... by "best" I mean annoyingly spellbinding. It kinda gets in you; especially if you've been following Mortal Kombat from the beginning of their run since the early 90's. "Dun Dun Dun Dun - DUNDUN (gong)... FIGHT!"  

Then, it be like "Kano" and you be dancing "Liu Kang" and you start shakin it. Then, it gets to "Sub Zero" and you're like "Ahhhh Shit! Here it comes!"  And then "Sonya" And everybody and their mama shouts "MORTAL KOMBAT" I'm telling you, back in the day, every time that song played - here comes the dancing AND fighting. Then, the cops would show up wherever the song is being played, and they'd dance a bit too, before they started looking for black people to shoot - it was a great time had by all.

This song demanded a rebooted movie from the classic (that's right, I said CLASSIC) 1995 film.

In the first movie, it was Liu Kang and a bunch of losers. I'm mean, just look at them.

You don't fear anyone there except for Liu; not even white Raiden (at the top).

With this 2021 reboot, we've got the same ol tournament plot - something about a martial arts tourney to decide who rules all of the worlds.

There's something about the MK logo appearing on people; it could appear out of know where - on your arm, face, butt, who knows??

Of course the bad guys have been cheating, and once again the ones chosen to fight for earth are Liu Kang and a bunch of losers.

Look how badass he is - you think making fire come out your body is easy?! This Liu mutha *uckin KANG!

Granted, You've got Raiden 

- with  the correct race and ethnicity this time, but he's kinda slow. This whole movie, you'll have fight scenes, people are dying. The ones not dying are screaming for help, and Raiden never shows up until those people who were crying out are also dead.

You've got Kung Lao, 

but he's kind of an asshole.

So, yeah, really just Liu again.

His team of losers:

Kano 

- Imagine if fate chose Jeffrey Dahmer to defend earth. Yep, that's pretty much what we have here.

Jax  

(on the left)

- some Arsenio Hall lookin guy who's about to have his arms destroyed (we learn this from the trailer) Yeah, so fate chose a guy with no arms to protect Earth! Well done.

Sonya 

- while everyone else has powers of fire, ice, lightning, she's got pretty pink rings that shoot out of her hands.

That's her tough face. Like she's saying "Leggo my Eggo."

And Cole 

- who specializes in getting his ass beat. Even his super power revolves around getting his ass beat.

Ladies and gentlemen, Earthrealm’s mightiest fighters! - here to save us!

There is plenty of action throughout this movie. I loved it!

Some of my favorite scenes:

Scorpion vs Sub Zero

From the very beginning, there's gore, blood, and guts! Sub has been after Scorpion, and in the process, comes after Scorp's family.

Can I just say that I've seen this whole enemy of your past comes after a reformed assassin before - the reformed badass assassin's family is always so meek. Life Tip, kids: If you're going to be a professional ass-kicker, then you need to be with a life partner who can defend themselves. I'm not saying they need to be a family of killers, but get them to take ONE Karate class, at least!

Goro is also very cool-looking (2021 version on the left)!

Way more menacing than the first time around (95 version on right) when he let some dude punch him in the balls to end the bout. I understand that it happens, but... you don't see Thanos or Darkseid getting punched in the man zone and looking all goofy afterwards.

The fight scenes involving Liu Kang and  Kung Lao were awesome!

Sub Zero in general was the main menace. He is haunting.

The violence. The gore. The campy parts as well, made this movie very enjoyable.

However, the third act kinda slows down. At some point, Raiden realizes "Wait, our team is just Liu Kang and a bunch a losers." And he has everyone camp-out and reflect... and drink. This is when the movie loses steam for me.

It's as if the action, the already next to terrible, campy dialogue, and "plot" run out of gas.

I mean, you have the typical "Hey, guys, let's work together!" type of thing that happens:

Arsenio Hall grew arms, Sonya tries to convince us that her pink rings are cool, Cole... well, is still getting his ass beat. But, everything gets a lil lazy. The ending fights go by too quickly. And the very last scene feels like everyone is tired, and so they just wanna go home.

We all know that evil is not going to win here, but I feel like it could have had it not been so lazy. Shang Tsung (the main villain/ evil sorcerer), supposedly having all this power just rolls out. It's like he looked at his watch and was like "Well, it's been fun, but I gotta get back to the wife. Peace!"

Plus, it was supposed to be a tournament... there was no tournament in this film. In fact, you had characters kill people and shout out things like "fatality" and "flawless victory" themselves, which is kinda weird.

Other than this laziness, I loved it! The action and fan-service leading up to the lazy third is still entertaining enough to outshine any lack one may feel towards the end. Again, I really enjoyed it! - And if you're a die-hard MK fan, you will too! - it's really made for you.

Grade: generous, entertaining B

One thing about all of these characters that kinda bothered me was the fact that they're all so comfortable with killing.

There's a scene where someone gets chopped in half, blood splatters all over them, and they're just like "Meh, on to the next." It's a tournament full of psychopaths!

I wonder if when the sequel comes out (and there will be one) if they'll address a lil of this, shamefully pull back, and introduce some "Friendships" 

[pinkhairedlily]

Wanting Validations

Chapter 5 of The Spring He Came Back | 5 of 12

“Momo, don’t forget your bento,” Baba called out just before Hinamori dashed towards her bicycle. She grabbed the two packed bento from her grandmother and pecked her cheek.

“I’ll try my best to give this to Hitsugaya today.” She was having trouble finding Hitsugaya without being caught by professors and other supervisors. “He’s gonna miss out on the fresh watermelon slices you packed in otherwise.”

Despite their staggered meetings, she found herself in high spirits. Dr. Aizen has continued to depend on her more, even letting her write a draft for a book section. She wasn’t sure if she had the qualifications to write such. She was only finishing her first semester, but the professor tempered her self-doubts with assurances.

“I don’t know if you ever noticed this, Hinamori. You’re a fast learner. You have the highest grades in your section, even above the upper middle-class folk,” Dr. Aizen handed her a large bulk of papers. “These are some designs I’m planning to use for my large-scale project next year. Go through them and annotate for me, would you?”

She was continuously yawning until she reached the academy. She glanced at the clock tower in the middle of the campus grounds and figured she can slip in a quick nap before her morning classes. She was busy deciphering the documents in the past few weeks to the point that she would sometimes go without sleep.

“I think I have a migraine,” Momo grumbled to herself. “Dr. Aizen should be consistent with his handwriting. The varying strokes in each document are like sending me on an acid trip.”

“What sends you into an acid trip?” Hitsugaya popped in behind her, dressed in the flashy, identifying grabs of a Soul member. He reached out to grab her arm and led her through a narrow alley between the buildings.

“Hey, good morning Shirou,” Momo said sarcastically while trying to match his steps. They arrived in front of a small almost-dilapidated room. “Are you gonna murder me?”

“Maybe, do you want me to shower you with yellow petals?” he joked. The room inside was definitely not worn down. The three Rs were there but were all asleep in bunk beds. Rukia and Renji sleeping together in the lower bunk with backs behind each other. That made Hinamori blush until she remembered Hitsugaya saying they were also childhood friends. Rangiku was passed out in the upper bunk with a subtle smell of alcohol.

“I see your nostrils twitching. Rangiku needs alcohol sometimes to power through her exams,” he gestured for me to sit on a day bed on the corner of the room.

“What is this?” Hinamori asked, feeling a little slow because she was only able to get two hours of sleep. She sat beside him and controlled the urge to close her eyes.

“It’s an escape dungeon. They think this is the sleeping quarters of the custodians, which of course is, but they rented it out to us.” Seeing Momo settled, he started to fill the nearby kettle to boil some water. “Did you get converted into a coffee addict or are you still my tea-loving friend Momo?”

“Black tea please.” Momo smiled at him. “How erratic are your schedules? Our class is about to start in one hour.”

He glanced at her, smirking. “How erratic is your schedule? Your eyebags are heavier than mine. Oh, is that a bento?”

“Baba made this. It has watermelon inside.” At such an opportune moment, Hitsugaya’s stomach grumbled. “Come on, let’s eat together like the good old days.”

She thought he was about to grab his bento box, but he reached out across her, their faces looming closer to each other. “Why don’t you sneak in some snoozes while I eat?” He was arranging the pillows behind her.

Hinamori woke up to the school bells ringing, a flurry of robes, and cacophony of curses. Slightly disoriented, she found herself waking up from Hitsugaya’s lap who was frozen red in his place, the empty bento box on the table beside him and a gray flask. How she got to that position she will never know because panic started to set in.

“Good morning, Hinamori!” Renji and Rukia both yelled before running through the door.

“Gotta go, childhood friends. Gotta thank you Histugaya. Renting this place primarily to see Hinamori and secondarily for us to rest is genius,” Rangiku said as she traipsed outside.

“Fuck,” Hitsugaya muttered under his breath, truly embarrassed. “Here’s your black tea Momo. Tell Baba her bento gave me the energy I needed.” He handed her the gray flask without meeting her eyes. “You gotta go, although your classroom’s much nearer.”

Still disoriented, she started towards the exit. Remembering a nagging question in her mind, she halted and glanced back at him, “Shirou-chan.”

“Hmm?” He still wasn’t meeting her gaze.

“How did you preserve the daffodils? It was below zero temperatures that week. Frost would have already killed them.”

This time he looked at her. “I just sprayed them with a solution I made, Momo. But I know you would have found a way to alter them naturally.”

Hitsugaya always has this weird way of validating her. His trust in her abilities has grown so much despite the time that they were apart. She wanted to honor that. “Thank you.”

-------------------------------------- 

It has soon become their morning routine – Hinamori with her bento boxes that soon included the rest of the group, Hitsugaya with the black tea for her and coffee for the rest, and few minutes of snooze on the sofa slash day bed. It wasn’t as if they haven’t slept beside each other since they were kids, but the slight reprieve was something to look forward to. They would be able to slip in mundane conversations in between, but almost often Hinamori would doze off in the middle of Hitsugaya’s rants. She has fully exchanged her nights with sleepless annotations for the experiment designs. She knew Dr. Aizen was ambidextrous, but it bothered her that the blueprints and guides frequently changed handwriting styles, and the discussion structures varied. Well, it couldn’t be helped that the professor’s thoughts ran too wildly that his hands were barely able to keep up. By the end of the semester, she was able to finish the book section, submit the annotations with her own suggestions for recalibration, and top her class.

“I think it was only a matter of time, Hinamori.” Rangiku quickly stole Hitsugaya’s sandwich from his hands and sat across them in their (open) secret hideout.

“What is?” Hinamori resisted the urge to clean the room. Printouts were sprawled everywhere, coffee stains on beds and tables, and a lot of instant ramen packs. While general admission students have the benefit of semestral break, the core Soul group tended to be occupied with competitions, conferences, and exhibits abroad. Hitsugaya’s group will be traveling to Karakura next week to compete against the infamous Ishida Uryuu, a prodigy of optics in physics.

“Why don’t you make your own sandwich Rangiku?” Hitsugaya grunted as he downed the last bit of his coffee and decided to lie down on the day bed behind his childhood friend’s sitting figure. After a minute or two, he started to snore.

“Your membership to the core group, of course. Hard to miss your superb accomplishments,” Rangiku replied. “Your radiant personality is also a plus. That would make it easier to hang out with us.”

Hinamori blushed at the compliment. “Thanks, Rangiku, but I really doubt I’ll get in.” The gap in expertise and intellect between core and general admission students was assumed to be wide enough to hinder friendships between the two groups, but she never felt that way with them. Granted that she was Hitsugaya’s friend, they never reacted strongly to her addition. It was true however that there was a gap. What inherent genius they have been born with, she compensated with hard work.

“Wish us luck though. I hate to see the bastard Ichigo smirking if we fail in the exhibit.” She’d be exaggerating, but veins really started to pulse around Renji’s temples.

“Stupid, there’s no if. We won’t fail. As if I’d let Ishida rub his win over my dead body,” Rukia interjected with the intensity of her competitiveness. She turned to Hinamori with an embarrassed smile. “Well, the deliberation will probably happen over the break. With us out in Karakura, they’d probably not look much into your relationship with Hitsugaya or with us.”

“Apparently, according to the academy’s standards, friendships are not meritorious. Such a stupid rule,” Renji added. This was the reason why they avoided letting both students and professors see them together. Only Dr. Aizen knew of their friendship. He made her feel like she could trust him with her secrets.

As if Rangiku read her mind, she quipped, “You’ve been meeting Dr. Aizen lately, right Hinamori?”

“I volunteered as his research assistant. The professor has a lot of projects with the academy so I do my best to ease the load.”

“How many projects is he handling?”

“He has five large-scale projects programmed for this year.”

“And he’s doing it solo? Wow, that’s a lot of work and a lot of funding.”

“Thank God for the investors, I guess.”

“If you get accepted as a core member, he would lose a great RA,” Renji assured her. A big question mark was probably on her face because he immediately expounded his statement. “Core members are expected to complete projects on their specialization. If you’re as genius as the midget sleeping over there or Rukia’s brother, you can complete as many as you like. But most of the time, we work in groups like how professors work together too.”

Rukia aided him, “What Renji is trying to say, you won’t have the time to help Dr. Aizen anymore.”

A foreign feeling crept along her insides. Over the years, she has mastered the act of hiding her emotions with a nonchalant smile, and she did this now to brush off three pairs of probing eyes. Confusing emotions from the conversation accompanied her to the semestral break party organized by her section. Balloons and streamers decorated the interior of their go-to ramen house. The owner, enamored with the boisterous students, provided free-flowing broth and discounted noodles refill. Several of her classmates tapped her on the shoulder and congratulated her for landing on the top.

In the midst of jovial cacophony, she felt untethered. Needing the space to rationalize her thoughts, she quietly slipped out of the party and traced her steps back to the academy. She was floating in-between circles, trying to walk beside her friend and at the same time, trying to make sense of who she was and what she wanted to be. Her memories brought her back to her first conversation with Dr. Aizen where she truly felt seen and needed.

But she was spending her days playing catch up to someone who doesn’t need her. Did she really want to join the core group to realize her dreams or did she want to join simply because of Toshirou? She found herself in front of Dr. Aizen’s office. “Professor.”

The door opened, revealing a disheveled glass-less Aizen. His furrowed brows immediately softened when he saw her. “Hinamori, come in.”

Hinamori hesitated because she didn’t know why she went to his office in the first place and what she wanted to talk about. But she stepped in anyway without further prodding, afraid to disappoint him. “Professor, I-“

“I saw your annotations, and I appreciated the suggestions for calibrations. You made my job much easier, Hinamori. You brought these projects closer to completion at a much earlier date.” He brushed his fingers through his brown hair and sighed contentedly. “But I need you to do one more thing for me. It’s very urgent, and only you can do it.”

Warmth coursed through her body. He trusted her well enough to do this. “Anything for you, Dr. Aizen.”

He quickly scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to her. It was a description of a notebook– plain black cover, velvet finish, coffee-stained surfaces, and the first few pages ripped out. “It’s my long-lost notebook. I’ve searched everywhere, but I cannot find it. Maybe you can look through the libraries.”

“It will be difficult, Professor, given the broad description, but I will not let you down.”

“Of course, Hinamori. I know you too well already. You exceed my expectations. Do find it quickly for our funders. They are expecting me to complete the study over the break.”

“Over the break! That’s short notice, Dr. Aizen. You need to rest!” she complained. Embarrassed of her outburst, she covered her face with her small hands, flushing red at her visible concern towards her mentor. “I mean, please think of your health Sir.”

The brown-haired doctor looked at her incredulously and placed his hands on her shoulders. “I really lucked out with you, Hinamori. Why are you here again? Do you need to tell me something?”

She peeked at him through her fingers but found she can’t return his steady gaze. Straying her eyes to the floor, she requested, “Please deny my membership to the core group, Sir. I want to stay by your side more.” All of her senses were overwhelming her because of his close proximity and the comfortable weight of his large hands on her shoulders. Her emotions may have gone into override when he pulled her into a hug.

“Of course, Hinamori. You’re my one and only precious research assistant.”

She found the notebook the following day in the same library where she and Hitsugaya used to go, conveniently so as it was positioned beside her most borrowed ecology book. It was a tattered piece of document, but the experiment design and the parameters set were the first of their kind. She brought it immediately to Dr. Aizen and suggested to patent it. “You could name the methodology after you, Professor. Or better if it’s a theory – Aizen Laws on Ecological Succession or something.”

“Aren’t you a doll? You always say the most interesting things.”

With the set deadline for this particular study, Hinamori agreed to accompany the professor in a fieldwork on a mountain outside of town for a week. She would be back in time for Baba’s birthday.

--------------------------------------

She didn’t make it back in time. She got stuck with Dr. Aizen for two weeks in the mountain because he needed to repeat his sampling, not that she regretted it. Baba will understand. I expect she’ll be angry for a few days, but I’ll make it up to her. I just missed one birthday after all.

What she didn’t expect was Hitsugaya standing guard under the camphor tree, worried, angry, and defiant at the same time.

“Where the fuck did you go, Momo?”

NEXT CHAPTER | 6 OF 12 | IN RETROSPECT

[sailorfailures]

New Years in Sailor Moon

Happy New Year, everybody!

I thought I might take this time to talk about how we briefly saw New Years was celebrated in Sailor Moon, which turned into a crash course in Japanese/Shinto New Years traditions. Plenty of pictures and links below!

New Years (o-shougatsu) was celebrated most visibly in the live action series, where we got to see the girls - Usagi, Ami, Rei, and Makoto, since Minako hadn’t yet joined up with them - celebrating in a very traditional sense in Act 14; only they didn’t actually get to celebrate on the “real” New Years, because as we saw in the previous episode, Rei, a dedicated Shinto priestess, was busy getting Hikawa Shrine ready for the many people who would be visiting.

Hatsumode is the first visit to a Shinto shrine of the new year, a tradition which many Japanese families observe. Larger shrines will even organise festivals around the event, but even smaller shrines like Hikawa will see a massive bump in visitors - which means a sharp increase in sales, too, which requires extra work, so Makoto and Ami volunteered to help.

... Even if they weren’t too happy when Usagi failed to show up as promised.

Ami is preparing wooden ofuda wrapped in protective paper. Most Sailor Moon fans are already familiar with the concept of ofuda, as Rei uses paper ones to ward off Youma and other monsters, but these are destined for people’s homes.

Ofuda are basically charms of protection - hence why Rei uses them to guard against monsters who mean to cause harm - and these wooden ones are to be placed above doorways, near significant objects, or housed within special kamidana altars. They can be purchased year-round but are typically “renewed” once a year, so it’s natural Rei is expecting to sell a lot.

Makoto is helping to braid shimenawa, sacred cords of rice straw/hemp rope that are either wrapped around or hung over the entrance of a space that is deemed sacred/pure. This can mean a building, such as Hikawa Shrine itself, or an individual object liable to house a spirit, such as a sacred tree or rock. These ones are quite large, so they’re probably going to be used to decorate the shrine, but smaller shimenawa can be used to decorate a household shrine/altar, too.

On the table we can see two more popular Shinto shrine souvenirs. The first is ema, wooden plaques that you write your wish/dreams/hopes/goals on and hang at a shrine along with everyone else’s plaques, creating a wall of wishes. These are popular year-round, but the influx of visitors means an influx of ema, too.

Ema played a more significant role in Act 8, where Usagi sends Makoto to Hikawa Shrine to hang her plaque for her (as a ruse to get her and Rei to make up after an argument).

Left: The blank side of the plaque on which Usagi has written her wish (to win the NakoNako mascot plush toy). Middle: The back of the plaque, mass-printed with a generic design, in this case sheep since November 2003 (the original airdate) was in the Year of the Sheep/Goat/Ram. Right: Rei stands before a wall of ema other shrine visitors have tied up.

If you were wondering whether Usagi’s little illustration of a cartoon character is normal or not - it very much is, and only getting more normal. “Ita-ema,” in the same vein as ita-bags and ita-cars, are ema that have been decorated with various anime characters. It’s become so popular that even officially branded anime ema are being released, including, for the first time, an official Rei Hino/Sailor Mars ema available at the Sailor Moon Store in time for 2020.

Source: http://sailormoon-official.com/store/post_852.php

The last souvenir is a pile of hamaya, lit. “demon-destroying arrows.” These good luck charms come from the tale of Yorimasu Minamoto vanquishing a demon that threatened the Emperor - his bow and his arrows were declared sacred, and ever since, bows and arrows have been thought to frighten off evil spirits. Hamaya are popular souvenirs to give to children, traditionally boys, but increasingly so with girls.

The bow & arrow’s connection with demon-slaying and sanctity is probably why Sailor Mars herself uses a flaming bow & arrow to attack after her Super power-up.

In addition, Rei sold plenty of omamori, the small, portable, cloth versions of the larger ofuda charms. Again, most Sailor Moon fans are familiar with the concept of these small charms, as they were a plot point in Rei’s introductory episode of the classic Anime.

Left: Rei buried under an avalanche of dropped omamori in PGSM. Middle: The inauspicious omamori in the classic Anime. Right: Real life omamori from one of the Hikawa Shrines (different spelling, same pronunciation) in Tokyo that inspired Sailor Moon’s Hikawa Shrine.

There are a variety of different omamori in different sizes, shapes, and colours intended to offer the bearer protection against different concerns. There are omamori for love, relationships, and good luck with exams, as well as plenty for general protection. Again, these are available and popular year-round, but would make cheap and eye-catching souvenirs for the new Shrine visitors. It’s considered very bad luck to attempt to open up an omamori and look inside, even though they appear as small cloth bags.

Another tradition for those visiting a shrine on New Years is to get your fortune told by a randomly-picked slip of paper, an omikuji. If you don’t like the fortune you get, you can try and undo its bad luck by tying it around the branches of a pine tree or nearby wall of other bad fortunes. The Japanese word for pine tree, matsu, sounds the same as “to wait”, so by tying your fortune to a pine tree, you’re telling the fortune to wait there instead of following you. Though it wasn’t at New Years, Rei herself demonstrated this practice when she drew a bad fortune in episode 90 of the classic Anime.

So that’s the New Years Hikawa Shrine prep - phew! But how did the girls celebrate “New Years” together?

They all got together in their secret hideout under Crown Karaoke for snacks, drinks, and a good old-fashioned party!

The girls all wore perfectly colour-coordinated kimono, which are very traditionally worn when visiting a Shrine for hatsumode.

They decorated the room with two kadomatsu, arrangements of pine and bamboo cuttings placed in pairs that attract and provide temporary housing to spirits and invite good fortune, along with more hamaya and a kite, which are often flown for fun (“tako-age”) around New Years.

Hanging in the centre of their screen is a shimekazari, a decoration utilising a smaller shimenawa sacred rope that guards against evil spirits just like the larger version. It’s adorned with various items of good luck, including a lobster (symbolising longevity due to its impressive lifespan), pine needles (longevity again, since they’re evergreens), and a daidai citrus fruit (“dai dai” sounds similar to “from generation to generation”, again implying longterm success), flanked by two zig-zagged shide streamers.

They also have a kagami mochi display, two round mochi rice cakes sitting on top of each other on a sanpou stand, adorned with leaves and dried persimmons. Normally, kagami mochi are topped with a daidai (real or fake) or a more-widely-available mikan, but their kagami mochi is topped with... Luna!

On the wall we can see that each girl has written a kakizome - lit. “first writing” - where people write kanji, phrases, or poetry which they feel are lucky. The scrolls are then traditionally burned on January 14th. They might’ve been told to make some kakizome as part of their Winter holiday homework, but as this is a “fake” New Years celebrated around Feburary, these might not be the same ones.

It’s an interesting snippet of characterisation to see what kanji/phrase/poetry each character considers personally auspicious! From the left:

Rei: 悪霊退散 (Akuryou Taisan, “Foul Spirit Begone”)

No surprises here - this is the phrase Rei chants when she uses her paper ofuda to disperse an evil spirit, and to attack Youma once transforming into Sailor Mars. As you can tell from her handwriting, she’s very used to writing out these kanji! It’s easy to understand why she might feel that this was her lucky phrase.

Makoto: 質実剛健 (Jitsu Jitsu Gou Ken, lit. “Temperament, Sincerity, Health”)

This is an example of Chinese poetry in kakizome. Makoto’s gone for an older phrase, but you can understand why it would resonate with her, as her name also translates to “sincerity”. The literal meaning of the phrase is somewhat abstract, but could be translated into something like “May You Be of Level Head and Good Health”. It’s also more of a masculine phrase, fitting for the ultra-tomboyish Makoto in PGSM.

Ami: 友達 (Tomodachi, “Friends”)

Ami has gone for a singular kanji/word rather than a whole phrase, and it makes sense why she’s picked this one. Her character arc so far has revolved around her making friends who don’t just want to use her for her connections/grades, and learning how to navigate sincere “friendships” for the first time in her life. The word obviously carries a lot of weight for her without needing to be part of a longer phrase.

Usagi: 初日の出 (Hatsuhi no De, lit. “First Sunrise of the Year”)

Witnessing the first sunrise of the new year is very commonly/popularly observed in Japan. Legend goes that the God of New Years, Toshigami, comes out with the first sunrise of the new year, and that if you make a wish during the sunrise it will come true in the following year. It’s very befitting of Usagi that this optimistic and wishful tradition would be what sticks out to her the most!

Also, you may have noticed that Usagi’s handwriting is somewhat different from the others - while kakizome are typically written in very traditional calligraphy, Usagi is obviously far too dedicated to following the “cutesy writing” trend (marui ji, lit. “round letters”), as indicated by her excessively rounded shapes (compare the sharp corners of Makoto’s 質 vs. Usagi’s rounded 日) and little heart doodles. Cute to the core!

And so what did they do after hanging up all of these traditional, thoughtful New Years decorations...?

Pulled it all down to have a killer karaoke party, obviously!

After all’s said and done, New Years in Japan is still a time to have fun with and connect to your loved ones. While New Years in other countries is considered a prime time to go on a date, especially to have someone to kiss at midnight, New Years in Japan is a time for friends and family (interestingly, Christmas has become something of a “date event” in Japan instead).

So there you have it! Maybe you’ve already learned something new this early in the new year!

🎊 🎉 Happy New Year! 🎉 🎊

🎊 🎉 Akemashite Omedetou! 🎉 🎊

[samesanegirl]

The Weasley-Potter Clan

Teddy Lupin: 

The most loved and admired member of the Weasley-Potter clan

Has a special bond with every single one of his cousins

Whenever there is a Quidditch match in the clan, everyone fights for Teddy to be in their team

Pansexual king

Is totally into rock and punk music

Loves Victoire more than life itself

Social butterfly due to his charm and caring nature

Listens to The Weird Sisters non stop

He constantly changes his hair colour. However, he always keeps a pink and brown streak for his parents

Uses his Metamorphous powers to cheer others up

Hufflepuff beater - has taken the pleasure of training the Weasley-Potter children in Quidditch

Underneath his gleeful attitude, he often mourns over his parents and never forgets them

Victoire Weasley: 

Adores children, which explains why Hugo and Lily Luna love her

Other than Teddy, she would be best friends with Molly II due to their close age.

Charming, witty and drop-dead gorgeous

Has a very elegant presence and she is very feminine

Unashamedly girly and does not believe femininity makes her ‘weak’

Others assumed she was dumb, despite that she was sorted into Ravenclaw. This pushed Victoire to work harder

Ended up being Head Girl, graduating at the top of her class and becoming a Healer.

Unlike her cousins, Victoire didn’t play Quidditch 

Instead, she loves swimming as she grew up on Shell Cottage

Head-over-heels in love with Teddy Lupin.

Willingly helps others and loves giving advice

Critical about certain things and has opinionated & blunt nature

James Sirius Potter: 

Makes boring situations fun, no matter what

Chanels the spirit of the marauders

Quidditch fanatic

His free-spirited personality is contrasted against his competitive and serious attitude when playing Quidditch

Gryffindor Keeper

Whenever he wins a match, he throws the loudest parties ever seen in Hogwarts

Is the literal embodiment of Gryffindor

Has the craziest stories to tell

Loves to think himself as the ladies’ man. Unfortunately, Louis snatched that title once he hit puberty

Often takes the blame when everything goes wrong

When a girl captures his heart, he is romantic and cheesy as fuck

Fred Weasley: 

He grew up witnessing his father cope with grief. Thus, he has learned to not take anyone for granted

His obsession with Quidditch is on the same level with James

He and James can’t live without each other

Soul-brothers with James

Gryffindor Chaser alongside Dominique and Rose. They are unbeatable when united together

Very sweet and protective around her female cousins

Inherits Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes

Keeps a cool head whenever he, James and Dominique get into trouble

Gets drunk extremely easily

Girls fawn over his charming personality and looks

Willingly accepts any challenge, no matter how wild and crazy it is, he finds a way to complete it

Dominique Weasley: 

While Victoire is graceful and lady-like, Dominique is loud and rebellious

Considerably smart but never tries in Hogwarts

Complete wisecrack and smartass

Prank trio with James Sirius and Fred II

Dyes her hair different colours three times a year

Gryffindor Chaser

Uses her Veela powers to get what she wants

Flirty, confident and hilarious

Will get into a literal fist fight if you insult her loved ones

Loves road trips, parties, festivals and Quidditch

Suggests the wildest challenges and games to her cousins

A social butterfly and life of the party

Roxanne Weasley: 

Extremely loyal to those who win her approval

Fanatic of The Weird Sisters - something that her and Teddy obsess over

Has no mercy on the Quidditch pitch

Underneath her toughness, she is sensitive and sweet

Ferocious Gryffindor Beater

Badass as fuck and she knows it

Believes in female empowerment and is very accepting towards others

Has no time for bullshit or small talk

Lesbian and proud of it

Aspires to become a rock musician in the Wizarding World

Always has your back, no matter what

Does not give a shit about what you think or say about her

But if you insult her cousins, she will make your life a misery

Hugo Weasley: 

On the autism spectrum, but is fucking intelligent

Surprisingly, Hugo is smarter than his sister

Has a crush on Lysander Scamander

Equally obsessed with the Chudley Cannons like his father

The best chess player in the family

Always hangs out with Lily Luna and Roxanne

Ravenclaw Keeper, but switches to Beater position when playing Quidditch with his cousins

Fascinated by Magical Creatures and studies them

Is socially awkward and can be insensitive and blunt when he is stressed

Has a kind heart and a strong moral compass

Is passionate about activism and calling out injustices

Can be bossy and is fearful of breaking the rules

Has random knowledge about the most obscure things

Believes that house elves deserve their freedom and are not slaves

Louis Weasley: 

Once he hit puberty, the girls could not leave him alone

Fluent in French and English

Sweet temperament and an absolute gentleman

Interested in French and British culture

Obsessed with film and the Muggle World

Loves to travel to other countries and visit famous landmarks

Hufflepuff beater

Can be a little naive at times but is emotionally mature

Calm demeanour but lives for adventure 

People pleaser and can sometimes be a push-over

Genuinely wants the best for you

People come to him for comfort or support and to flirt in the process 

Molly Weasley: 

Loveable, warm, kind-hearted

Loves physical affection and always hugs her cousins for no reason

Makes the people she loves feel special and likes doing surprise parties or sleepovers

Loves to cook and bake different things

Obsessed with English Literature

Headgirl in her last year at Hogwarts

Whilst she is intelligent and hard-worker, she was nowhere near as competitive or ambitious as Percy

Does not play for the Gryffindor Quidditch team either, although she likes to watch it

Hopeless romantic and ships absolutely everything

Everyone is naturally drawn to her optimism

Lucy Weasley: 

Gets teased for being a nerd and for liking Muggle things, but she proudly admits it

Has a small blue streak on her hair

Does not play for the Ravenclaw Quidditch team. However, she plays as Chaser in the Weasley Annual Quidditch matches

Not academically competitive like Percy but manages to ace her exams anyway

Introverted and painfully awkward, but is loud around her best friends

People make assumptions around her asexuality and she hates it

Lucy has a close friendship with all her female cousins, whether they like the same things or not

Obsessed with comic books and Marvel films

Sarcastic humour and amazing comebacks

Fascinated with Muggle pop culture

Lily Luna Potter: 

The youngest in the family

Is in love with love and is an intense shipper of the relationships that her cousins are in

Mostly calm under stressful circumstances

Inherited her father’s sass and her mother’s humour

Daydreams 24/7

Super talkative - could start a conversation in an empty room

Has a very kind and lively nature

Intuitive, trusting and sensitive

Social butterfly and gets along with everyone she meets

Gryffindor Seeker - just as good as Albus Potter

Stands up for what is right and never hesitates to defend others

Dreams to be a journalist

Whenever Rita Skeeter makes rumours about her cousins, she jumps to their defence and roasts her

Rose Weasley: 

Perfectionist and very demanding of herself

Nothing can ever stop her from accomplishing her goals

Feels the pressures of being the daughter of two war heroes and tries to succeed in everything to please them and herself

Gryffindor Chaser

Her love for Quidditch matches James and Fred’s

Loyal to the Chudley Cannons, no matter how many times they lose

Vivacious and funny around her friends but is dead-serious when confronted with challenges

Competitive as fuck, whether it is Quidditch, academics or on a bet

Loving, caring and overprotective

Outspoken about her views and hates injustices

If you hurt her loved ones, she will Sectusembra your ass

Fiery temper and not to be messed with

Breaks the rules at school and manages to fool Hogwarts professors with her flawless grades 

Bonds with Scorpius over their shared neediness and love of books

Albus Severus Potter: 

Talented at Potions, which is his best subject as well

Very intelligent but is silent about it

Hates being centre of attention

Slytherin Seeker - and a supremely talented one

Hates his middle name after having a deep conversation with Professor Longbottom

Is confused why his dad didn't name him after Hagrid

Sarcastic as fuck

Would take the Killing Curse for Rose and Scorpius

Secretly listens to emo music

Is a pro at escaping trouble and is great at creating loopholes by thinking on the spot

Slightly awkward upon first introductions but he is very kind and caring

Avoids the Wizarding press as much as possible

Scorpius Malfoy: 

Strong moral compass and hates injustices

Generally reserved and quiet around those he does not know very well

Once you win his loyalty, he will move the earth just for you

Is a great judge of character and is an expert on body language

An absolute gentleman

Whenever his friends are stuck in trouble, he is a master at acting innocent and naive in order to help them

Quietly determined and ambitious

His kind nature is often mistaken for weakness

But Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy is the strongest person ever

He knows how to defend himself and does not tolerate bullshit

When Molly gave him a Weasley sweater for Christmas, he was in tears

Fascinated with the Muggle world and loves spending it there with Al and Rose

Incredibly intelligent and nerdy

Slytherin keeper

Is in love with Muggle literature, museums, architecture and art

[dukeofriven]

Good In The World

I meant what I said with that extended LOTR quote being what the Epilogues are about - about there being good in the world, and it being worth fighting for. Given that I’ve been up to my neck reading Hussie commentary lately I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty strong grasp on what makes him tick - and who boy does this guy love stories about friendship, teamwork, and love, loves them so much he sometimes sounds like Téa Gardner about to lay down a friendship speech on Yu-Gi-Oh. So - while noting that the extent to which the epilogues are and are not Hussie’s work are even more muddled that usual in regards Homestuck - the take-away is this: everything went wrong, in both Meat and Candy, because everyone forgot that - that friendship, teamwork, and love is the only reason any of them survived. The Sburb survivors came to Earth-C as literal gods, beings of inordinate celebrity and power, and then didn’t work as hard as they should have to still be friends and family. We point to John as some kind of recluse but it quickly becomes clear that everyone stopped working at staying together. Karkat and Dave are as much shut-ins as John, stewing together in their own incapacity. Katkat’s self-loathing, so often a hilarious joke in Homestuck is - free of the immediate pressures of Sburb - shown to be intensely debilitating. It undermines him repeatedly in Meat, and requires incipit genocide in Candy to be set aside, costing him everything that mattered on a personal level. Dave made the mistake of many in his position before him, leaning too much on the first epiphany about trauma and not taking the care to continue down the path to further healing and reconciliation with the past. It leaves him desperately reaching for intimacies he too scared of to actually experience. Coupled with an abused kid’s terror of perpetuating harm he lies to Karkat and Jade both time and time again to try and save their feelings. Jade, so utterly fucked up by years of isolation and loneliness, and so endearingly, crushingly full of love makes all the wrong decisions in trying to build a triad (that is - the triad could have worked, but she went about it all wrong) and makes two separate instantiations of Dave and Karkat miserable. Rose and Kanaya have no malice in their actions, but they do what married people always do: pull away from everyone else, and focus on themselves and their new lives. Harmless, normally - or, at least, not seriously harmful - but those lives took them underground and away from everyone else, The two most insightful and level-headed members of the party simply weren’t around when everyone needed them most. Unaware how bad things were getting they missed so many of the warning sides that would have clued them in earlier that everyone was going off the rails - and being as isolated as she was in Meat this left Rose vulnerable to the manipulation most likely to succeed: just like with Doc Scratch she was preyed upon by someone who could flatter her sense of grievance, knowledge, and uniqueness. Terezi wouldn’t have stood by and let things go to shit - but she was doomed the moment she tied her heart to ego personified, and so was absent too.  As for the Alphas, well - their problems were never resolved in the first place, their 'conflict arcs’ interrupted by the arrival of the betas. Only Roxy, element of void, utterly self-contained, a refugee from a dead reality, walked onto Earth-C able to withstand the horror that awaited them: celebrity. Skaia is benevolent, but it is not wise: Sburb seems to have a cherub’s worldview, full of bright colours and heightened stories, but not much maturity. When the victors of Sburb escaped to Earth-C the last thing they needed was celebrity, praise, and positions of note. The issues are all laid out in the prologue: John retired before he ever started working, every one of them richer than any mortal could conceive of. These kids didn’t need parades, they needed to go school. Jane didn’t need honorary degrees from every business school on the planet, Jake didn’t need a TV show centred entirely around his ass: what everyone needed was to be aggressively ordinary. Mundane and unregarded. They needed to put everyone in a group home with four on-staff counselors and take a chunk of years doing nothing but heal. Because everyone was damaged. Other than Calliope - a special case - everybody walked out of Sburb having witnessed at least one apocalypse. Put aside any of the individual traumas and deaths and abuses and sins and just focus on that alone: the death of entire worlds and the burden of saving seven sentient species. Rather than the ultimate Reward being a sit-down with kindly professionals who could help a bunch of kids cope with that, these literal children entered a new world and built new lives on a foundation of dust. The beta kids never finished seventh grade. Jane Crocker never finished high school. Jade Harley, Jake English, Roxy Lalonde, and Dirk Strider never went to school at all. Not one of those four had ever been around more than four humans in their lives until the day they won the game. They couldn’t have. Jade and Jake grew up alone on islands. Roxy and Dirk grew up in the apocalypse. Dirk grew up in a literal box. As Cascade hit Dave and John were the only living humans Jade had ever met who wasn’t her grandpa: and she spent three years alone on a ship with only the Nannasprites and consorts for company. (And Jaspers to chase.) For those four especially, think about they went through within 24-hours: BAM here’s a group of people including your alt-relatives and literal aliens BAM here’s a crazy fucking battle against technicolour chess people, killer dogs, and fish queens BAM here’s a pristine new-ish world better BAM produce thousands of species to populate a new world /TABLE SCRATCH/ Welcome to Earth-C in the year 5000 Celebrity Gods. Here’s your debit cards full of riches. Seriously - this all happens in about a day. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? They were sixteen years old. Four of them had no formal education of any kind, nor had ever been around enough to people to form a softball team. And that’s not even starting on the trolls, who had multiple culture-shocks and traumas of their own the sort through. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? There is, absolutely, a way all of this could have been addressed and become a happy ending. If you don’t like the Epilogues because you’re just sick and fucking tired of tragedy stories - boy do I feel you. Man, don’t get me started on shit like Westword we will be here all week. If you just wanted there to be a fucking happy ending because god-damnit people deserve to be happy - I feel that too. Had that been what we got I can’t say that I’d have been displeased. But if you’re angry because what happened in the Epilogues seems “unreasonable”  all I can do is wave my arms at all the shit everybody went through and ask you why going from that to retired celebrity godhood was good for anyone. What happened on Earth-C was nobody’s fault - not even Dirk’s. Of course he lost it. Of course he took his godhood to its logical conclusions - what possible grounding in real human beings had he ever seriously had, and what in his life was there to make him see people as people? Dude grew up alone in a box with SBAHJ and rapping robots for company - the only voice in his head his own, magnified in the echo chamber of ego and his own blindness to his inadequacies.  Why wouldn’t Jane cling to status quo of her dead world? Really, what did Sburb ever bring her but heartbreak, an excessively baroque Bad Relationship Simulator that took away her home and her position as a corporate heiress for a six month romp through a bunch of dead planets and inter-friend squabbling (We don’t talk about how fucking boring the alpha session was: nothing but undead and emptiness.) She reaches a new world, gets told how smart she is, gets a bunch of degrees - but as Dave himself notes, when you’re rich as can be and have everyone on the planet lining up to do business with you, it’s pretty easy to think you’re actually skilled at running things, especially if YOU STOPPED YOUR EDUCATION AT SIXTEEN AND GOT TOLD THAT YOUR SIXTEEN YEAR OLD SELF WAS THE APEX OF YOUR BEING. Take a moment to remember yourself at sixteen. Try to put sixteen year old you in charge of something meaningfully important - like, mmh, let’s say a regional bank. Uh - oh. Oh dear. Oh it’s on fire, is it? And the fire is spreading? Yeah, that’ll happen. [One glaring issue I’ll note in these epilogues is that nobody knows what the fuck to do about Dad Crocker, so they do... nothing, until Candy reminds you he exists in order to kill him to motivate Jane to do something she probably could have been easily prompted to do anyways by another means. I guess Dad Crocker just... happily let Jane not finish school or exert any kind of parental control at all after that point? On her or anybody else? You want to talk about OOC: what the fuck happened with Dad Crocker, of whom I expected better? And where did Tavrosprite and the Nannasprites go?] My point in all this is that Homestuck is a story about how important love, teamwork, and friendship is, and after the Earth-C victory everybody got lost. Everybody reacted to being Celebrity Gods in their own way, and it created little cracks that widened over time, and when everyone should have been coming closer together - group therapy sessions, even - they got further and farther apart. These emotionally-stunted mentally-teenaged kids with buckets of trauma, the power of gods, and the celebrity to match broke. One by one. All in their own unique ways. The Epilogues are in some sense a musing on the absurdity of adulthood - how its mantel is placed upon you regardless of whether you are ready or not, for reasons as arbitrary as ‘turning a certain age’ or ‘winning a video game.’ In some cases it takes our heroes DECADES of life before adulthood - before real maturity - begins to make something of an appearance, and even then it’s a crapshoot. Love, friendship, and teamwork are what matter in Homestuck: in the epilogues it takes years of monumentally boneheaded decisions for our heroes to remember this, and some of them never do.

Is there still a happy ending at the end of Homestuck? One that lies ahead? I think so. Hussies loves his characters dearly - and yes, he does. Of course he does. He didn’t spend ten years of his life telling the story of one dimensional Brechtian Archetypes to make some otiose point about the nature of narrative: if he had none of you would be feeling as you are now.  The difference between you and Andrew Hussie is that you see his characters like family: you leap to their defence whenever they are hurt, and when they are cut you bleed: “How?” you ask, “Could anyone be so cruel to do this thing?” But Hussie sees his characters as characters, in a story of which he is author, and in which pain and hurt and tragedy can be the vehicles through which good stories can be told: that the light is made all the brighter because of the quantity and quality of darkness that was banished. Candy and Meat are the story of a boy who can only destroy love because he thinks he understands it, and lashes-out when things don’t go as planned. Dirk is just as much the villain in Candy as in Meat, as Calliope makes very clear: the Candyverse is in some sense defined, or at least made more distinct, by his absence. He is a tragic figure on the macro scale - if only he and all the walking wounded of Sburb had been given help when they needed it - but his death in Candy is not a tragedy of ‘what ifs,’ it’s an act of petulance and cruelty by a kid who’ll take his ball and go home if he’s not allowed to play the winning game. His death destabilizes the Candyverse far more than John’s choice to stay, its just that its corrosive effects take longer to be obvious - and the gears he’d already set in motion didn’t cease to turn, though they may have slowed. Dirk destroys love, his effect on both timelines is to push people apart because division suits him, and to push his own view of what ‘love’ is on people who experience it far more expansively than he could ever imagine. He’s a sad little boy who grew up in alone in a box and entered a world that told him he was a literal god with the powers to match - by the end of Meat it’s clear that love, friendship, and teamwork mean nothing to him, only the perfect order of his own fevered imagination. What will bring him down in the end is the reclamation of that feeling at the end of Act 7 - the joy of victory, of having worked together, of the love of family both found and familial, and of the realization that they were none of them better apart. And then some therapists. Some actual therapists. For a good long time. (Also I hope that they find Doc Scratch and beat his sorry ass from here to eternity because that smug fuck has his puppety fingertips all over this thing, and if Dirk really is merging with his ultimate self that includes (as @geekycalligrapher noted) aspects that wound up in Lord English, including a not insignificant portion of one Doctor Vanilla Milkshake, Esq.) (Edit: I did, in fact, do a few edits when I noticed the opening sentences were missing things like ‘the subject.’)

[somegirlsnerdywords2]

Anime i’ve Watched

That begin with a C!

Yep this is how i’m going to bring over all the anime and manga i’ve watched and posted about on the old blog. It’s not so detailed but it will have to do. Anything new I watch or read from this point on will have their own posts.

Cardcaptor Sakura:

Genres: adventure, comedy, drama, magic, romance, fantasy, school, shoujo

Synopsis:  Sakura Kinomoto is your garden-variety ten-year-old fourth grader, until one day, she stumbles upon a mysterious book containing a set of cards. Unfortunately, she has little time to divine what the cards mean because she accidentally stirs up a magical gust of wind and unintentionally scatters the cards all over the world. Suddenly awakened from the book, the Beast of the Seal, Keroberos (nicknamed Kero-chan), tells Sakura that she has released the mystical Clow Cards created by the sorcerer Clow Reed. The Cards are no ordinary playthings. Each of them possesses incredible powers, and because they like acting independently, Clow sealed all the Cards within a book. Now that the Cards are set free, they pose a grave danger upon the world, and it is up to Sakura to prevent the Cards from causing a catastrophe! Appointing Sakura the title of "the Cardcaptor" and granting her the Sealed Key, Keroberos tasks her with finding and recapturing all the Cards. Alongside her best friend Tomoyo Daidouji, and with Kero-chan's guidance, Sakura must learn to balance her new secret duty with the everyday troubles of a young girl involving love, family, and school, all while she takes flight on her magical adventures as Sakura the Cardcaptor. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 8/10

Finished airing in 2000 with a total of 70 episodes. 

My Thoughts: A childhood classic that’s probably due for a rewatch! Give me that nostalgia! Gonna need to watch the English opening though. Just recalling how much the artwork in older anime tends to make me cringe though looking back Cardcaptor doesn’t look all that bad. 

Charlotte:

Genres: drama, school, superpower

Synopsis: While on the surface Yuu Otosaka appears to be just another charming and intelligent teenager, he has a secret—he has the ability to slip into people's minds and fully control their body for five seconds at a time. Yuu has been using this skill for years to gain the highest grades, which allowed him to enter a prestigious high school. When the enigmatic Nao Tomori catches Yuu using his power, she coerces him and his sister Ayumi into transferring to Hoshinoumi Academy, a school for students with supernatural abilities. The student council of the school, led by Nao, is tasked with secretly tracking down adolescents who abuse their powers. Yuu is forced to join the student council and together, they face formidable challenges that bring him closer to the shocking truth that his own, seemingly incomplete ability, might be more powerful than he could have ever imagined. An original story from Jun Maeda, creator of Angel Beats and Clannad, Charlotte explores the supernatural lives of these teenagers and the price they must pay for being special. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 9/10

Finished airing in 2015 with a total of 13 episodes. Also has a separate solo special episode. 

My Thoughts: If I remember correctly the final few episodes are what really stood out to me in this anime. The beginning was alright but just after the half way mark is when it really blew me away. A slow starter if you will. I’m a sucker for some high intensity emotional drama and i’m pretty sure that’s what happened here. Whether that makes this a good anime or not is debatable. Perhaps a rewatch is in order?

Cheer Danshi!! (Cheer Boys!!):

Genres: sports, drama, school

Synopsis: After suffering from a shoulder injury, shy first-year university student Haruki Bandou gladly takes the opportunity to give up judo, failing to find happiness in the sport regardless of his family owning a dojo. He did not expect, however, that his best friend Kazuma Hashimoto would also decide to leave their university's judo club at the same time as him. Despite Haruki's protests, Kazuma already has plans for a new and revolutionary activity: a cheerleading team made up of only men. Although heavily reluctant, Haruki ends up helping his friend set up the team. Through sheer determination, and with support from their newfound club members, Haruki and Kazuma persist in founding the Breakers, the first ever all-male cheerleading team of Meishiin University, slowly making history in spite of the feminine tag attached to the sport of cheerleading and the prejudices, physical challenges, and self-doubts that inevitably follow. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 6/10

Finished airing in 2016 with a total of 12 episodes. 

My Thoughts: Cheer boys! That’s it. That’s all there really is to it. Not a great or memorable anime. Just wasn’t for me. 

Chihayafuru:

Genres: drama, game, josei, school, slice of life, sports

Synopsis:  Chihaya Ayase, a strong-willed and tomboyish girl, grows up under the shadow of her older sister. With no dreams of her own, she is contented with her share in life till she meets Arata Wataya. The quiet transfer student in her elementary class introduces her to competitive karuta, a physically and mentally demanding card game inspired by the classic Japanese anthology of Hundred Poets. Captivated by Arata's passion for the game and inspired by the possibility of becoming the best in Japan, Chihaya quickly falls in love with the world of karuta. Along with the prodigy Arata and her haughty but hard-working friend Taichi Mashima, she joins the local Shiranami Society. The trio spends their idyllic childhood days playing together, until circumstances split them up. Now in high school, Chihaya has grown into a karuta freak. She aims to establish the Municipal Mizusawa High Competitive Karuta Club, setting her sights on the national championship at Omi Jingu. Reunited with the now indifferent Taichi, Chihaya's dream of establishing a karuta team is only one step away from becoming true: she must bring together members with a passion for the game that matches her own. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 9.5/10

Finished airing in 2012 with a total of 25 episodes. 

My Thoughts: I freaking love Chihayafuru. Sports, friendship and all that good stuff is what this anime has to offer! One of my top 5 series of all time with my all time favourite female lead. Highly recommend! 

Chihayafuru 2:

Genres: drama, game, josei, school, slice of life, sports

Synopsis: Chihaya Ayase is obsessed with developing her school's competitive karuta club, nursing daunting ambitions like winning the national team championship at the Omi Jingu and becoming the Queen, the best female karuta player in Japan—and in extension, the world. As their second year of high school rolls around, Chihaya and her fellow teammates must recruit new members, train their minds and bodies alike, and battle the formidable opponents that stand in their way to the championship title. Meanwhile, Chihaya's childhood friend, Arata Wataya, the prodigy who introduced her to karuta, rediscovers his lost love for the old card game. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 10/10

Finished airing in 2013 with a total of 25 episodes. 

My Thoughts: The good times keep on rolling and i’m even more in love with the series and its characters! An obvious must watch for fans of the previous season. 

Chihayafuru 3:

Genres: games, slice of life, josei, school, sports

Synopsis: Winning the high school team tournament was a great accomplishment for the Mizusawa members. Each of them has made great strides in improving themselves, and the victory symbolizes how far they've come. But after accomplishing one goal, their individual aims are within reach. Chihaya Ayase has her sights set on Wakamiya Shinobu and the title of Queen, and now that Taichi Mashima has made it into Class A, he can finally compete against Arata Wataya. Everyone in Mizusawa wants to get better, and there's no telling what the future holds if they keep trying. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 9/10

Finished airing in 2020 with a total of 24 episodes.

My Thoughts: Blessed with a third season and I can honestly say that i’m ever so thankful! Finally getting a little hint of romance with this third season as well. I can only hope there will be a season 4! 

Chio-chan no Tsuugakuro (Chio's School Road):

Genres: comedy, seinen

Synopsis: For the average Japanese high school student, walking to school can be a chore, but for first-year Chio Miyamo, it's always an adventure. Constantly running late due to her long night sessions playing video games, she is forced to come up with new routes to make it to Samejima Private Academy on time. On her many bizarre journeys to school, Chio contends with obstacles like street-blocking detours, overzealous kabaddi players, and befuddled motorcycle gang leaders. But these minor hindrances are no match for the special ops training that Chio, AKA the legendary assassin "Bloody Butterfly," has received from her extensive gaming obsession. Together with her best friends Manana Nonomura and Yuki Hosokawa, Chio will do whatever it takes to avoid her school's harsh penalties for tardiness. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 9/10

Finished airing in 2018 with a total of 12 episodes. 

My Thoughts: A perfect and hilarious situational comedy. Plus a glasses wearing female lead to boot! Highly recommend for those looking to watch something short and light. Great series for when you’re having a bad or off day in my opinion. 

Chobits:

Genres: sci-fi, comedy, drama, romance, ecchi, seinen

Synopsis: When computers start to look like humans, can love remain the same? Hideki Motosuwa is a young country boy who is studying hard to get into college. Coming from a poor background, he can barely afford the expenses, let alone the newest fad: Persocoms, personal computers that look exactly like human beings. One evening while walking home, he finds an abandoned Persocom. After taking her home and managing to activate her, she seems to be defective, as she can only say one word, "Chii," which eventually becomes her name. Unlike other Persocoms, however, Chii cannot download information onto her hard drive, so Hideki decides to teach her about the world the old-fashioned way, while studying for his college entrance exams at the same time. Along with his friends, Hideki tries to unravel the mystery of Chii, who may be a "Chobit," an urban legend about special units that have real human emotions and thoughts, and love toward their owner. But can romance flourish between a Persocom and a human? [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 10/10

Finished airing in 2002 with a total of 26 episodes. 

My Thoughts: One of my first animes and one that really caught and kept my attention. Character driven and comedic with a bit of a darker twist. Be forewarned though this one has some typical, eye roll inducing pervy scenes that seem to serve little purpose. Asid from that though it really is an interesting and beautiful stoyr. I actually have the complete manga series and have been meaning to read it for ages... maybe i’ll get around to it this summer. Dream big!

[thliahls]

b-b-b-back once again , cldn’t wait can’t be tamed .. as with all my intros .. tis a doozy so feel free to mssg me for a tl;dr if we feelin lazy i will totally understand , or scroll to the wc’s i tried to think of as many as possible bc i wanna plot wit every1 )): !! anyhaps like this n i will come force my heathen of a gurl on u !

⌠ GRACIE ABRAMS, 20, CISFEMALE, SHE/HER ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, THALIA HALL! according to their records, they’re a FIRST year, specializing in AWARENESS TRAINING, BREATH CONTROL, HAND TO HAND COMBAT + THREAT ELIMINATION and they DID go to a spy prep high school. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of dirt under a meticulously painted manicure, the shrill ring of her phone and poorly treated books creased at the spine. when it’s the (scorpio)’s birthday on 11/02/2000, they always request FISH FINGERS from the school’s chefs. looks like they’re well on their way to graduation. 

biography / pinterest

was born in the states but dad and her moved back to england the year she was born, which was also the year he graduated blackthorne. his mother was ‘never in the picture’ which has left her imagination to go down several paths, discontent with all of them. unfortunately daddy dearest crafts a space where she’d never dare ask ! she has a bit of an obsession with the blackthorne graduation ritual because of it .

was immediately placed under the care of two retired spies, sort of a foster care system within the spy community. dad still visited whenever he wasn’t working and still technically had full custody over her. up until she went to prep school, led a very sheltered life. homeschooled by them, but they were fairly lax. her dad expected a certain amount of training to be done, but her and her foster siblings usually mucked about a fair bit. her training would always be done in the form of games which she discovered early on that she loved to win, it made her fiercely competitive.

was very spoiled by them, grew up in a huge country estate and excelled in her home school classes without trying, which made her extremely entitled. she’d often wrestle with her siblings in the garden , and bring them to tears . biting them, pulling their hair, slapping them around . it would earn her a slap on the wrist , but it was never anything a sorry couldn’t fix . spends her free time laying in the grass reading , and learning the romance languages and was raised speaking cantonese bc that’s her foster parents native language . more invested in the sociology of linguistics and how it can be used to assert and diminish power but only cares for this in a self-serving way .

spy prep rolls around and it’s very exciting ! as predicted ( by herself lmao ) she does well, without even having to try. socially , she drifts through groups , picking up on cues on how to interact , what works well and what doesn’t . doesn’t find anyone particularly interesting and would much rather be reading but by not having any sort of allegiance to one particular group , it ends with her being very well-liked . the top marks is unsurprising, further fuelled by some amusing competition , finding that her desire to earn good grades comes more from wanting to spite others than actually wanting to achieve good grades . finals roll around and she gets the highest grade in her year and in tandem with being well liked, earns her place as valedictorian . she’s very proud of herself, not for earning valedictorian, but for besting aylin . 

in the months prior , on a field trip she meets a boy and for the first time in ever , exudes big dumb energy gets his number , starts texting him , starts sneaking off campus to meet him ... he’s a total casanova , a big romantic and exactly like the protags in the romance novels she reads . it’s a big prep school no-no but as long as no one finds out it’s fine ! then walks in aylin, and destroys her whole career by reporting her ( she doesn’t know for sure it was her , but has her suspicions since their rivalry had run throughout the entirety of prep school ). she’s kicked out , denied graduation , valedictorian and is humiliated . she calls her civilian boyfriend the night of , but his line’s already been disconnected , presumably threatened / beat up by her lovely dad .

her father is livid , but is able to use his connections to get her a place at another , less prestigious prep school and negotiates with the school to take her to and fro every day , like he’s picking her up from daycare . he stops working for a full year to do this , and expects her to feel indebted to him . the monotony of repeating the year makes her irritable, made worse by the snickers she constantly hears in the hallways . but she has gallagher to look forward to , knowing she’ll still be going there because continuing tradition is important to her father , who also decided her majors for her and had a big argument with him when she asked if she could take linguistics ! he makes her call him every single night at 6p.m. if she misses a call , he contacts the school . she hates him . 

personality 

passive aggressive emphasis on the aggressive : is always withholding judgement, but inevitably always lets a comment slip. think, ‘   you’re so confident to wear whatever you want to,   ’ or, ‘   wow ! that colour’s so bright i almost need sunglasses !   ’ petty as hell  in all respects physically too , spots a bruise on your arm ? you bet she’s gonna press it and ask if that hurts, then say sorry when you yelp . 

hypocritical : detests people who don’t try but doesn’t try herself and justifies it by getting really good grades . believes there’s no point sleeping with someone unless you love them , then will drunkenly hook up with someone that very same night . 

hope less romantic : she has no hope for others but remains a romantic . thinks people have given up on courting people and wooing them . expects flowers at her door , good morning texts and candlelit dinners . leaves secret admirer notes under people's door to people she thinks are cute and thinks she might have a crush on in the future , quite creepy but at least she doesn't use magazine clippings anymore ! 

spiteful : life is a game and she wants to win it ! makes everything into a competition , even unconsciously . goes up to the adjacent treadmill and makes the speed and incline several points higher than the person next to her . painting your nails with her ? she’ll make sure hers looks better and point out that you didn’t coat the ends of your nails . board game night with her is fun for no one but her , i’m so sorry if she ever ropes you into one !

bookworm : her disgustingly high standards about love come from her singular past relationships and books . read one too many jane austen’s and now she’s crazy

loyal : her loyalty is hard to earn , but once you’ve got it , you’ve got it .

*think the arrogant exterior of jesse eisenberg as zucc in the social network with emaline addario ( everything sucks ) type dramatics every so often to keep it spicy !

wanted connections

toxic friendship ! a slow burn relationship of passive-aggressiveness and co-dependency, one day they stop taking her shit or say they’re going to but always end up in each other’s company at the end of the day . or maybe one day they don’t come back to her and thalia is forced to admit she may have been too harsh .

hook-ups she has when drunk ! which she will only have when drunk , to follow her unspecified , no rights , belief system . will pretend like she does not know you the next day . oh to be a romantic , but a scorpio . a tough life .

people she has crushes on ! and leaves handwritten poetry under their door or in their notebooks , absolutely humiliating that she acts this way ! bonus points for a note that’s left under the door and the wrong person reads it . 

sparring buddies but make it feral ! no rules sorta deal, out in the woods, scratches from twigs, bloodied rocks, anything to let some of her pent up aggression out . they can go swimming after : )

daddy issues gang ! someone hears her on the phone in the hallway , inquires , proceeds to talk about how much they hate their fathers . thalia tells them how she’s going to kill him one day <3 alternatively , her father may have been the cause or implicated in the death of your chara’s loved one .

roommates ! self-explanatory , but she probably dislikes them and is unfairly harsh on them . sets rules but lets herself be exempt from them stuff like that x also for berlin she requested a room by herself lmao n deluded herself into thinking she wld be accommodated , thus i’m going to leave whoever she rooms with up to fate and she will hate it regardless of whoever she gets roomed with !

someone who hates aylin as much as she does ! yes this is deserving of a whole connection , thalia would probably die for this person . alternatively , aylin’s friends who she hates as a byproduct of hating aylin or tries to get them to hate aylin .

rivals ! because it’s the only thing that motivates her to do well in school .  

encryption major ! who helps her find out about her dad’s past , and present . what he’s done and what he continues to do . also a way for her to maybe switch one of her majors to linguistics and hacking a report that says she’s still in her predetermined majors .

take a chill pill ! someone who gets her to relax , makes her watch reality television which she relentlessly criticizes , but this person won’t give up trying to make her less of an awful human bean .

anything else ! i am , as the kids say , down to clown .

[too-many-kpop-hubands]

30 Day Fandom Challenge

Here we go again for my fandom challenge. You still with me? @domsberto I'd also like to nominate @jimonsprettyface

This next fandom is one that I have been a part of from the very beginning and it holds a special place in my heart. Hold on tight and for those who haven't seen it, spoilers ahead.

Day 2- Teen Wolf

(TV Show not Movie)

1) Favorite Character: Stiles Stilinski

Reason: I have a thing for adorable dorks apparently. 😂

Ok so I adore Stiles the most because he is the backbone and heartbeat of the group. Sure he's a spazz and a nerd but he also always finds a way to get the group out of sticky situations because of his intelligent and knack for looking at things from every angle (he truly is his father's son....it helps his Father is the Sheriff alot of the time). He is loyal to a fault and though he has a hard time trusting most newcomers, once you are in he will literally follow you to the ends of the earth. He is a hopeless romantic, as shown with how he is with Lydia and even Malia. He loves deeply and thought he tends to be a fuck up at times he always finds a way to make things right. He keeps the others in line and helps everyone that needs his help. As the only human of the group he takes his job very seriously and is damn good at keeping the group together even when he personally feels like falling apart. I adore him to no end.

2) Most Relatable Character: Liam Dunbar

Reason: Liam is an adorable, scared and confused little rage monster. Unlike the others on the show who had a few seasons to get used to the world of the supernatural, Liam was still new to the world and was often left scratching his head wondering what the hell was going on. I can relate to that because even in real life I don't know what the hell is going on most of the time. He is also the most relatable because unlike the others on the show, he actually acts his age for the most part and wasn't forced to grow up as fast as the others. Honestly, for a young Beta wolf he can be the most human of them all at times. He likes to have fun, he likes to hang out with his girlfriend and play lacrosse. He marches to the beat of his own drum, which I do most of the time. Another thing I can relate to is having a short temper. While my temper is not nearly as bad as Liam's (who as Intermittent Explosive Disorder) I still get how hard it is to calm down once that temper is triggered.

3) Most Underrated Character: Isaac Lahey

Reason: Besides Derek, Isaac probably had the most growth of all the characters on the show before his exit from the show. He had to shoulder alot of pain and loss in his life starting with his mom leaving and his brother dying, then suffering from years of abuse at the hands of his father. After being turned by Derek, he felt empowered to help not only himself but others as well and did all that he could to help people in need. He even found it in him to forgive his father for abusing him for so long, which takes strength all on it's own. He went from being a scared and abused little boy to being a badass who did everything he could to help people he cared about and those who were unable to defend themselves. I see you Isaac, I see you and I appreciate you.

4) Most Overrated Character: Derek Hale

Reason: Ok before I start this, let me just says that I love Derek Hale ok? He is all kinds of sexy and has some good qualities but of all the people on the show he is also the most overrated. Ok hear me out here before you come at me. Throughout the series Derek is hyped up as this big bad Alpha dude. Yes, he turned a bunch of teens into wolves and helped them, and Scott, learn the ropes but when it came down to a fight most of the time he either made things worse or just didn't show up when he was needed the most (example when they were fighting the Nogitsune, Dread Doctors, Ghost Riders, Alphas). Most of the time it was Scott and his pack that ended up saving the day. Sure Derek helped gather intel but as far as fighting goes, he didn't really do much for such a "Big Bad Alpha" who threatened to rip people's throats out with his teeth. Hell he didn't even kill the bitch that murdered his ENTIRE family, nor did he kill the Darach...instead he slept with her. Wow Derek, just wow. He ran most of the time, went MIA alot of the time only to make a dramatic entrance and knock a few people around when Scott already had things under control. I love Derek but.....some big bad Alpha he was.

5) Least Favorite Character(s): Tied Kate, Gerard, and Victoria Argent

Reason: First of all, Kate....She got away with murdering an entire family (minus Derek, Laura, Peter and Cora) and then manages to cheat death by turning into a freaky ass werejaguar when Peter ripped her throat out. How?!?!?! No matter how much chaos she starts she still ends up getting away. How is she not dead yet? Jesus! She was a manipulative person and honestly one of the most toxic on the show besides her shady ass who I will talk about next.

Gerard was a piece of work. He brainwashed Allison into trying to kill her friends, he praised Kate for killing the entire Hale family, he tortured and killed innocent supernaturals simply for existing and used Jackson in his kanima form to carry out his shady agenda. He was also a hypocrite. He hates supernaturals yet relied on Scott to help take away his pain when he was sick and dying only to turn around and train a new generation of Anti-Supernatural hunters to do his bidding. He was a piece of shit.

Victoria Argent was the Matriarch of the Argent family and even when her daughter (Allison) and husband (Chris) wanted to actually help the innocent supernaturals she did everything in her power to make sure they felt like shit for wanting to help. She freaking tortured and tried to kill Scott for no other reason than he was a werewolf that was screwing her daughter and then made herself out to be a victim when Derek came to save Scott and he bit her a few times after she attacked him. She refused to turn and killed herself instead of facing the consequences her actions lead to (her turning into the very thing she hated, a werewolf).

6) Favorite Canon Pairing: Stydia (Stiles Stilinski and Lydia Martin)

Reason: From the beginning when you first see Stiles and Lydia interact on screen you start to root for the spastic nerd to win the heart of the most popular girl in school. Stiles always saw the real Lydia that she hid behind her popular facade. He saw how smart she was, how much she actually cared for people despite pretending like she didn't. He had been in love with her since the 3rd grade and even when they dated other people, that love never died. The closer they got as friends the more you wanted them to just end up together. Several seasons later and we finally hear them confess their love for each other and finally FINALLY get together. Praise be to all things Holy! Stiles and Lydia manage to balance each other out and anchor each other. When Stiles has panic attacks, Lydia is there to help calm him down. When Lydia gets overwhelmed by her Banshee powers, Stiles is there to help ground her. Stiles saved Lydia more times than I can count but she saved him too on more than one occasion. Stiles and Lydia have a love that is beautiful and pure. I see them lasting forever and they should even now that the show has been over for a while now. They are beautiful and they are my OTP. I could go on forever but I will just leave it here.

7) Favorite Non-Canon Ship: Scisaac (Scott McCall and Isaac Lahey)

[Close Call Honorable Mention: Sterek (Stiles Stilinski & Derek Hale)]

Reason: Ok first of all this was a close race between my boys Scisaac and my boys Sterek but when I look back at both pairings, I love the purity of Scott and Isaac versus the almost toxic pairing that is Sterek. (I adore Sterek but come on! Looking back now they were hella toxic!) Now for Scott and Isaac they had their moments. They lived together and Scott always managed to find a way to help bring Isaac back to reality when he had moments where he would lapse into PTSD style symptoms and nightmares. They always had each other's backs and they always gave each other looks that went beyond that of just friendship. Hell Isaac even agreed with hearts in his eyes that Scott was the "hot girl". I believe that if these two had of both cut Allison lose and crossed the boundary of friendship into a romantic relationship they would have been just as strong as Stydia. A pure and passionate kind of love born out of genuine care for one another.

8) Least Favorite Pairing: Stalia (Stiles Stilinski and Malia Tate)

Reason: First of all their first hook up was in a freaking insane asylum so that right there is not a good start for any lasting relationship. Throughout their relationship, Malia took Stiles for granted and then had the nerve to get jealous when he paid more attention to Lydia (who he had been in love with forever at that point). Malia had the mindset of a child and was immature most of the time. Don't get me wrong, Stiles could be immature at time too but she brought out the worst in him. I don't dislike Malia. I actually like her as a character but not as Stiles's girlfriend. Plus this biggest reason I dislike this ship? It took longer for Stydia to finally happen. Let's not forget how she practically walked all over him.

9) Favorite Part/Moment: Lydia tells Stiles she loves him too.

Reason: Stiles had been taken by the Ghost Riders and everyone forgot who he was but before he was taken he told Lydia "Remember I love you." But she never got the chance to say it back before he and her memories of him were ripped away. When he finally came back there was a touching scene where Lydia said "I never got to say it back." And the two of them shared their first real kiss (not counting the kiss she gave him to stop a panic attack in a previous season). This was one of those moments that was several years long overdue and for us Stydia fans, we rejoiced when they finally got their shit together and actually became a couple. Praise!

10) Least Favorite Part/Moment: Allison is killed by the Oni

Reason: Allison Argent was a character you could sometimes love and hate at the same time. When they battled the Nogitsune and she sacrificed herself to the Oni to save Isasc, I sobbed like a baby. It was a way for the writers to write off the actress's character but one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the entire series. It is my least favorite because Allison died. It was a beautiful farewell as she died in the arms of her first love (Scott) but I can't even think about it without sobbing.

Thank you for sticking with me. Until tomorrow! ❤

[an-avid-reader]

I am Number Four (#1) - Pittacus Lore

my rating: 3/5 stars

John is Lorien - an alien species hidden amongst humanity. As he comes of age, his powers develop, which inevitably attracts the Mogadorians. But do not fret! There are 8 other Loriens, hidden amongst the humans under aliases, and they are here to protect Planet Earth from being invaded by the Mogadorians. Each Lorien is numbered, and John is Four. Unfortunately for him, the Mogadorians have found and killed One, Two, and Three in order to stop the Loriens from serving their duty and breaking their charms. Four knows he is next and must be careful with his relationships and who he can trust.

Link to Goodreads || Spoiler-free review below

Short review: wish I read this when I was in middle school (I have completed the series, and I’m going to tell you that I didn’t enjoy the series as a whole, but as a pre-teen, I would have been all over this series!)

Long review: I’ve been meaning to read this series for a while (I didn’t even know there was a film lmao) - I love a good sci-fi novel and this one seemed to be different to me since there’s a whole cast of characters as we go along.

Four - or John, is your typical main character. It’s really weird because there isn’t anything too special about him?? He’s seen in your main middle grade books, like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson; you know, male, straight, troublemaker, main character, special/chosen one trope. Yet there was something that separates him?? Ya know what I mean? Especially in this first book, his values and goals are quite clear. Or maybe it’s because he’s a ‘late bloomer’ - it took him a long time to actually develop his powers, and when he did...well he wasn’t happy...they were “boring” and “useless” (he can glow/lights - Lumen power). Anyways - his intentions are quite clear in the book, and it is mainly from his perspective. What I really liked was that you could tell when he cared about others - genuinely (such as Henri - his mentor, if you will). This made him more consciousness of his decisions, even if he ended up doing stupid things like fighting the school jock/jerk.

ANYWAYS. Due to the way the book is written, and John’s personality, the authors made some things pretty obvious; such as the love interest. To be honest, it was hella cringy when we first meet Sarah. It’s like the authors were trying to mold a teenager’s perspective when it comes to looking at girls, and it made me sort of uncomfortable?? Not to mention felt unrealistic, but I mean, that’s middle grade (Imma let that slide). In this first book, there is some development in their relationship, like dropping the bomb of “oh btw, I’m an alien” - and Sarah was just cool with it. I was just surprised that she didn’t ask more questions, maybe she was blinded by love. You know, as a 15/16 (how old are they???) year-old would.

I did appreciate Four’s friendship with Sam; Sam is the ‘side-kick’, though he doesn’t like to be thought of that way. His story is actually heavily embedded into Four’s life, so their friendship is taken onto another level. The three of them - Four, Sarah, and Sam made a great team and I liked the balance that was offered in their three-way friendship (/ friendship + relationship), despite being quick. Lowkey would have been okay if it was just Four and Sam -- I found that Sarah didn’t contribute too much to the story!

I’m not going to lie, I was pretty confused at the start of the book; we’re just thrown into action, however, it’s from Three’s point of view. Suddenly, we’re seeing the world from Four’s point of view. One thing is clear: Four and Henri have a special relationship, despite how secretive Henri is. I’m not sure how they lived throughout all these years without getting caught - I don’t recall that the government knows about Loriens/Mogadorians/aliens, yet they were able to acquire endless fake IDs and move swiftly from one location to another and live as their alias without an issue. I would’ve have liked to read more about the psychological effects (even if it was just a short paragraph). I think that would have enriched the story a little bit more as well as offer something different to the middle grade genre.

Honestly, if I hadn’t won the giveaway (which kindly included the whole series), I’m not sure if I would have continued the series. The first book only started to pick up towards the end, which is why I carried on reading. Again, I wished I had read this earlier on as I think I would have appreciated these books a little bit more.

***I know there was a scandal with the authors at some point, but that does not affect my review. Likewise, I did win these books through a giveaway, but my thoughts are purely my own.

If you’ve read this book (or series), I’d like to know your thoughts! Did you enjoy it or not? Let’s chat! =D

Thank you for reading my review, I hope you are having a formidable day, wherever you are in the world!

~ Cassandra / an-avid-reader

[loveart248]

KIRIBAKU SHIP DEVELOPMENT

I love many BNHA ships but Kiribaku holds a special place in my heart since it has so much positive canon material and I am always a sucker for the "Best friends who fall in love" trope since I enjoy slow burn with character growth. However, even taking the romantic possibility out of the equation, I just love that their relationship is so well developed in the story with subtle changes in their behavior all throughout as they go from 1. strangers who don't think much of each other to 2. reluctant allies who need to work together to complete certain tasks to 3. sort of friends with Kirishima pushing for a friendship to 4. best friends with an equal balance of respect and appreciation for each other. Below I tried to break down their relationship as it develops throughout the manga so...

WARNING: This is a long post and MAY contain spoilers for non-manga readers and anyone who has not seen the BNHA movie (not by much though).

Back at the beginning of the series, Kirishima used to think that Bakugou was a terrible person just like the rest of class 1-a, especially due to how he would treat Izuku. He was all like "That Bakugou is crazy and fights dirty" while Bakugou didn't even care about his existence yet. The only thing on Bakugou's mind at the time was beating Izuku and proving his superiority over everyone else. Thus, Bakugou was definitely not looking for friends as the only people he was used to having around him were "followers" as shown during his middle school times.

Then during the USJ arc, they automatically started working together to fight the villains as they were right next to each other during the initial attack. This right away showed how synchronized they were as a team due to their personalities and compatible quirks. So from the get go, they just seemed to flow well together.

Afterwards, they were sent off in the portal together giving them more time to fight villains side by side alone to get a feel of each others' personalities. During that time, you can slowly see Kirishima change his perspective of Bakugou from "This guy is crazy" to "Huh. This guy may not be that bad. He seems pretty cool right now".

This scene may seem minute but it is the moment that ignites Kirishima's interest in getting to know more about Bakugou. Kirishima basically starts to become more interested in Bakugou as a person as he starts to recognize his positive qualities despite his original assessment of Bakugou's personality.

Kirishima can't help but start to find Bakugou "manly" even after he tells off the other classes at the beginning of the Sports Festival arc. Even despite Kaminari's warning of "Don't let him play you" lol And this is just great because it shows that Kirishima was still somewhat hesitant about liking Bakugou as a person but was willing to give him a chance.

Kirishima begins to want to hang out with Bakugou and get on his good side as shown by the interactions above and some of the interactions at the beginning of the Sports Festival. Bakugou still doesn't think much of him but he let's him be for the most part. You also start to see Kirishima more impressed with Bakugou than before.

As the Sports Festival progresses, Kirishima finally gets his opportunity to prove his skill in Bakugou's eyes while also appealing to Bakugou's desire to win against Izuku. This moment shows an understanding of Bakugou's personality as he knows how to get Bakugou to agree with him despite Bakugou not thinking too much of him yet. It also shows a shift in Kirishima's preference of Izuku since now he would much prefer to be in Bakugou's team as he didn't even try to get in Izuku's team and barely tried to get into Todoroki's team based on his commentary.

THAT moment is when their friendship is truly born as Bakugou starts to acknowledge him and call him "Kirishima" afterwards as a sign of respect. During the match, you can see their dynamics in action with Kirishima trying to calm down Bakugou as Bakugou starts to lose his cool with opposing teams lol So basically the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The two are eventually paired off against each other and Bakugou wins but he STILL respects him as an opponent. He even comments on how difficult it is to get past Kirishima's defenses which is why he basically lets him reach his quirk limit to win. The fight is short but pretty funny because you can see them kind of teasing each other all throughout like good friends.

After the Sports Festival, the two are often seen around each other hanging out with Kirishima definitely feeling more comfortable around Bakugou to the point that he easily jokes around him and teases him. Slowly, through Kirishima's influence as he basically gets along with everyone in class 1-a, you can see more of the other students also feel more comfortable around Bakugou, especially the ones who were on his team at the Sports Festival.

Characters like Kaminari, Sero, Mina, etc. Sero is one that automatically attaches himself to Bakugou's group soon after the Sports Festival as he is shown comfortably teasing Bakugou for his haircut with Kirishima.

By the time the Summer Training Camp Arc happens, the audience already has some understanding of their friendship but it's still not in full display yet. It's more subtle and in the background than anything. During the summer camp though, you can finally see how much Bakugou means to Kirishima as a friend and as a fellow student after the villain attack that results in his kidnapping.

He feels guilty that he couldn't help his friend so he tries to convince the others to help him save Bakugou despite that being illegal. He only manages to convince a select few, two of which were already there when Bakugou was kidnapped and felt responsible too (Todoroki and Izuku) but the fact that he felt that much about it shows how much he cares.

In part, knowing Kirishima's character and motivations, you can tell that he wants to save Bakugou to prove to himself that he can be a true hero but you can also tell that saving Bakugou means more to him than that since Bakugou is not just "some guy" but his close friend.

During the entire rescue arc, Kirishima is all about doing his best to save Bakugou alongside the others to the point that he buys expensive night camera lenses to spy on the warehouse and chooses the disguises for the others (which were pretty funny disguises that make you wonder why Kirishima has such terrible fashion sense but can choose decent outfits for others XD).

Later on, Bakugou pays him back the money for the camera as a form of thanks for saving him. If BNHA Smash is anything to go by, Bakugou apparently did ALL kinds of odd jobs to get that money as quickly as possible (i.e. Nude modeling, dress like a bumble bee, bake cakes, etc.) 🤣

During the rescue arc, the most Kiribaku moment ever occurs in which Izuku comes up with the "Rescue Bakugou Without Confronting Villains" plan that ends up working ONLY because of how Bakugou views Kirishima as a friend and equal by that point. This is an important moment of development from Bakugou's side as it shows that he holds Kirishima in high regard and does not feel like Kirishima saving him is him looking down on Bakugou's own skill. This is significant since THIS specific detail is one of the factors that causes Bakugou to react in anger towards characters like Izuku and Todoroki most of the time: his belief that they are looking down on him and consider him inferior. So him accepting Kirishima's hand basically confirmed that their relationship is mutual as they both consider the other a friend without fear of judgment.

After this arc, there are countless other subtle moments throughout the series that show how close they are such as:

1. Bakugou tutoring him and going on study dates (a lot of that in the light novels). Also, the fact that Kirishima clearly wanted Bakugou to tutor him from the beginning since he never seeked out Momo like the others when he saw his grade.

2. The BNHA movie moments (assuming they are canon) which happened before the summer arc and add MORE development and insight into their relationship (i.e. Bakugou inviting Kirishima to i-Expo, sharing a room, Kirishima buying them suits, etc.)

3. Kirishima constantly complimenting Bakugou but also making sure he's not too rude to others (Literally them every panel in the manga nowadays lol)

4. Kirishima apparently helping Bakugou move all his stuff to his dorm and then...

5. Kirishima knowing that Bakugou went to sleep at 8 pm when showing off rooms hinting that they were hanging out prior to that

6. Bakugou's motivational speech to Kirishima that motivated him to push himself harder to create the "unbreakable" form/also basically a compliment from Bakugou to Kirishima.

7. Kirishima implying that he and Bakugou spar together sometimes (i.e. Bakugou asking to test his technique on him and Kirishima being fine with that while the others are scared lol)

And don't get me started on all the BNHA SMASH moments! Seriously, those are not canon at all but there are many. And Kirishima is extra affectionate in those 🤣 He has the power to make Bakugou do pretty much anything there.

To conclude this long post, whether as brotp or otp, the Kiribaku relationship development is undeniable. Just like the character growth they both experienced due to each other. Now, just because they help each other grow does not mean they are the only ones there for each other. Kirishima is not the ONLY one that understands Bakugou in the story nor is he his only friend or person he respects since Bakugou has many other people he respects and calls by name (i.e. All Might, Aizawa, Uraraka, etc.). Likewise, Bakugou is not the ONLY person Kirishima admires or considers a close friend (i.e. He has Kaminari, TetsuTetsu, etc.).

However, they clearly mean a lot to each other and help each other develop where they need to. Kirishima helps Bakugou open up to others more and Bakugou helps Kirishima believe in himself and his ability to be a hero. And that is enough for them. 😁