hydradrive

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it’s been a while.

i need to draw more of him again...

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AND I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF IT’LL BE WORTH IT IN THE LONG RUN

AND I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF IT’LL BE WORTH IT IN THE LONG RUN

( art trade/that one art meme where you swap sketches with the other person with @swordaes on twitter. swordaes did the sketch. 🐯

with alt, less cluttered version. )

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i think the most salient way to shut up lightning is right ppl (who refuse to acknowledge that lightning's initial points were lies to begin w/) is to point out that lightning's rhetoric is literally just kiyoshi kogami's rhetoric before he thought he doomed humanity.

bottom text

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residue [1/2] ; or ?

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chibis are my passion burden

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Things established by the ends of Vrains:

-Bohman likely already knew Ai’s fate, according to dialogue Ai says near the end.

-Lightning apparently did not talk about how he personally was the reason the other Ignis were doomed to Bohman, like at all.

- Bohman acts really weird about Ai, saying that Lightning pointed him out as the only Ignis with instinct, and during 71-73′s duel, refers to Arousal Hydradrive Monarch having a ‘heroic’ figure that ‘suits his current state’.

- In the episode where Lightning’s lies are revealed, Ai says that Lightning described himself as the only Ignis with instinct, and the camera immediately switches back to Bohman with a flat expression on that line. (As an aside, there’s a very similar cutaway regarding Windy, and the way Bohman talks about that in relation to Soulburner’s duel implies he personally didn’t know Windy had been brainwashed that entire time, either, what with the ‘Windy... no, you...’ phrasing.)

Conclusions we can draw from this combination of facts : 

1. Lightning likely told Bohman the Ignis were collectively doomed just prior to R3 in one of their talks, (Episodes 71-73) based on the frankly odd way Bohman acts towards Ai in dialogue during that entire duel, deliberately leaving out the fact that he was the primary cause of it, and very likely pointed out Ai as the worst one. The reason for Bohman deliberately antagonizing Ai with the Cyberse World comments, and referring to himself as ‘heroic’, then, has to deal with Ai according to Lightning being the most flawed, human Ignis, with the most blame for how things turned out. 

It’s either that, or the specifics of Ai having a future so long as at least one other Ignis was alive was granted to Bohman once he absorbed Lightning and he just... absorbed the collective memories, I guess. Aka, after the point where that would be possible in any capacity, since at that point, all of the Ignis are gone.

Note, that if you choose the latter interpretation, that would imply that all of Lightning’s collective failed future visions all would have been granted to Bohman upon absorbing Lightning, too? And he would probably also have known about the trick Lightning pulled with the simulation hologram in S3. This makes ‘I hope you don’t regret it’ and ‘Maybe you have a future I don’t’... a lot, conceptually, what with the really quiet way he says it and then immediately proceeds to yell ‘FAREWELL MY ULTIMATE RIVAL’ at the top of his fucking lungs. He thinks he is very cool.

2. The reason Ai is dead silent at Bohman revealing that the thing Ai has and Bohman doesn’t is instinct during 71′s cliffhanger is because Ai realized at that time Lightning literally lied about everything, and more importantly that Bohman also does not know about the fact Lightning said things like that to Ai.

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I’d already had it up to here w/ a/o/3′s policies but at this point am thinking about making a google docs masterlist on here or twitter.

it would require me de-anonymous-izing a fic about jin (no genuinely bad shit, i literally just wrote a fic where he has mild psychosis symptoms like me and wants to murder lightning legitimately) but that’s a sacrifice i am willing to make

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I’ve been sitting on these for a bit but voila.

Transparents of a lot of characters, Bohman primarily.

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No more ‘Lightning is right’, just Jin and his gun.

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dig lightning up so jin kusanagi personally can kill him again

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hwee

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Go Hellnalysis (aka : hydradrive gets mad at the fanbase for ignoring go’s ongoing 2 season long breakdown for like, 5+ paragraphs)

We are talking S1 foreshadowing as it relates to the facts of S2. As already mentioned, I think it sucks of the writers to do it to him like how it sucks how they treated Emma and Aoi throughout the entire series and reeks of colorism like. having your two darkest skinned characters be actively antagonistic as s2 goes on is a bad fucking look. 

But it’s there, and I am not happy that people defend Lightning weirdly when he treats people he knew for years badly, and then turn around and say wildly fucked up shit about Go.

I guess today is the day i Get Into It Again. I’ll be rehashing some of my points from my old thread on nac, so strap in i guess.

This is said to Playmaker in season two. 

‘After i lost to you’. 

So, by episode 4. And the text backs this up. The text in season one aligns.

In Go Onizuka VS Genome :

[ transcript for subbed text: 

Dr. Genome : Did your defeat at Playmaker’s hands force you to evolver? 

Go Onizuka : As much as I hate to admit it, yes. That was when everything changed. 

/end text screenshot id ]

That was when everything changed.

Let’s look at the rest of it, then. How it affected him, in the long-term. The Go Analysis... Is here.

MASSIVE CWs for discussion of canonical weight loss, brief discussion of disordered eating in the context of that, and a whole bunch of other stuff re: the brain hack that I don’t even know how to tag, really. medical? Basically, if you have any triggers relating to that, please exercise due diligence because I will not pull any punches about the implications.

tldr version :

This is real dialogue from Go Onizuka’s first (and only) duel against Revolver. 

No matter what he says trying to spin it a different way after this segment of text, that it’s about fighting for yourself, these statements exist, and they exist with the context given by his own words; that he was struggling, mental health-wise, when he said these words.

[ transcript for subbed text: 

Go Onizuka : Until now, I’ve battled in front of huge crowds. (There is a single beat frame, to indicate silence.) But I realized I’m all alone. There are no fans rooting for me here. I realized... We always duel alone. We fight for ourselves, not for anyone else. 

/end text screenshot id ]

But perhaps this isn’t compelling enough for people. Fine. Let’s go even further back.

[ transcript for subbed text for screen readers : Go Onizuka : It’s my fault that Makoto is in this condition. /end text screenshot id ]

Go has an easily seen habit of assuming the worst, and with regards to stuff like Makoto, blaming himself, to the point that if his manager hadn't said more on Makoto, he would've been going into VS Genome blaming himself for Makoto getting into duel monsters in the first place.

In episode 5 it was shown that with one loss he was entirely certain that nobody would care about him in any capacity:

But why?

... It’s brought up in one of the first episodes of the entire series.

[ transcript for subbed text for screen readers : 

Go Onizuka’s Manager : That’s exactly it. It’s a winner-take-all world, after all. 

/end text id. ]

And given an even more... depressing? Spin later, when Go thinks about it throughout S1 and S2 during his duel with Takeru:

[ transcript for screen readers : 

Before I was placed in the orphanage, I only relied on myself. The world I lived in was all about survival of the fittest. “You must protect yourself” was my credo. 

/ end text screenshot id ]

It’s genuinely that simple. He slipped back into his old way of surviving because the way he did in season one didn't. save him. it didn't save him from a duel he needed to win, not just for himself necessarily. he would have died if playmaker had lost. a lot of people would have. He was already starting to have these doubts about his entire reason d’etre for dueling, and his loss only further spurred it on.

It’s repeated, again and again:

[ transcript for screen readers :

Go Onizuka : For everyone to appreciate me, I must win! 

/end text screenshot id ]

That sentiment. “People won’t like me if I lose.” “People will abandon me, if I lose.” In his own words, his losses, losses in duels that were important, rotted him. And it /is/ true. His manager said he’d leave if he went to try and stop the Tower Of Hanoi and lost. And he followed through with it, by all implications. He didn’t come back until season 3. Keeping in mind that Go’s self-hatred spiral regarding guilt over in his mind dragging Makoto into the mess that was season one-era Hanoi shenanigans was only cut off because his manager and other people talked him out of it... Yeah.

This is before we bring in the other complicating factor : a certain little company, who never did anything good for anyone. A man, who despite supposedly being well-intentioned, did very little to help, until it reached the darkest point.

[ transcript for subbed text for screen readers, since that’s the primary important stuff : 

Akira Zaizen : But we don’t intend to acknowledge that the network was on the brink of destruction. So I ask you don’t cause the press to delve into this. 

/end text screencap id]

People focus so much on him yelling at the press because they keep asking about Playmaker but with this context?

[ transcript text for screen readers: 

Akira Zaizen: You’ll continue to be the focus of the press. /end text screenshot id ]

He’s not allowed to talk about how you nearly died.

He’s not allowed to talk about what really was at stake.

In fact, he’s not allowed to even act in a way that makes people even a little suspicious about what happened.

And yet.

‘But he could just ignore this advice’ . Not really. Go Onizuka’s platform was built in Link Vrains. Being the whistleblower about the actual danger of Link Vrains would not endear him to Sol, and potential backlash from Sol, from everything we know about the company? Hmm, gosh, wonder why that might be bad. Almost as if Go is basically a livestreamer who is at risk of having the video platform he exists on die.

It would be incredibly difficult to continue working under the public eye like that. The stress from that alone would start tearing someone to pieces.

Ergo, his decision to work for Sol Technologies as a bounty hunter. Both jobs now hinge on him currying favor with a horrible megacorporation, one just has less baggage from his past way of surviving and gives him the ability to talk a tiny bit more freely about things.

This is all the leadup, of course, to the ultimate lowest point. The duel chip. Brain hack.

[ transcript text for screen readers: ‘By implanting this duel chip, the brain’s thought capabilities expand.’ /end text screenshot id ]

[ transcript text for screen readers: 

Akira Zaizen: You can always refuse.

Go Onizuka : Your methods are dirty. You guide me to the gates of hell, but you don’t care what happens afterwards.  /end text screenshot id ] 

Let’s talk about the physical side-effects of the brain chip on Go Onizuka.

Me, personally? I genuinely wonder what came first; the most severe physical side-effects or a worsening of Go’s mental health that made him stop eating. 

It’s never stated what came first. We only see the mental health side effects of the chip in flashbacks initially.

I looked at one of the instances where Akira pulled go out of the sim wrt: the listed sys/dia ratios on-screen. They have those in certain shots, btw! They’re consistently really fucked up!

Here’s what those were, in one very notable instance:

... So, right off the bat, a heartrate of 195, huh.

And a sys/dia of 187/112 with a mean of 136. Wow! I wonder what that means for him!

I can tell you. 

He statistically would be in the range of having a hypertensive emergency. Having rates like this can damage your heart muscle when you don’t literally have a heart attack, hypertensive encephalopathy, ( which can cause dizziness and altered levels of consciousness, if we are getting into it.), kidney failure, coughing up blood...

I don’t want to speculate too much about why the Duel Chip caused this, but I will note that blood pressures like this sometimes come about as result of issues with the neuroendocrine system. This would tie in with a loss of appetite and some of the other things Go seems to canonically have had from the getgo of having the chip installed, and probably added on to his already pre-existing mental health stuff which I personally parsed as depression.

... I think this mostly covers the main points of what gets missed. Aka, literally all of his arc. Just, literally every piece of his arc. People miss all of it.

Also, to reiterate : it is NOT GOOD the way this is framed by the writers. it is loaded to, in a series heavily informed by the main character’s trauma, have a teenaged darker skin character ( Go is 19!! ) be portrayed as more erratic, etc etc. I do Not care about Lightning. He is a little robot, and while there is probably some ableism in the way trauma is represented therein as a corrupting force, it is far more worrying how Go is treated in terms of representation, and I am not going to bat for the guy who treated Haru like dogshit lmao. 

The fact that one of the two darker skinned MOC is given more obvious mental/physical illness signifiers in terms of symptoms to mark them as antagonists (when, again, Yusaku literally CANONICALLY HAS PTSD) fucking blows, and I’m going to personally fight the writers. 

But. I am also laying the blame at the fanbase’s feet for this shit, too. They literally ignored this to coo over Lightning. I’m going to bite them.

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realizing that yusaku's link vrains avatar being just him with a different hair color has the same feeling as nobody being able to recognize perry the platypus without his hat on

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he.

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i’m trying to learn how to draw roboppi more consistently, b/c them and haru are both incredibly difficult for me to draw due to how round their faces are.

it’s been... an experience.

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Rewatching episodes, Bohman’s repeated insistence about having ‘clear memories’ of the Lost Incident, Ai in the final episodes talking about how ‘a great simulation is like living a real life’, and the possibility that, since Haru was the one who was made to do the job of replacing the memories as implied by dialogue, and would probably need a template to work off of...

*chuckles nervously* what the fuck?

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THAT’S A PART OF ME, IN A DEATH (SO FAMILIAR)