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tothisemptiness · 2 months ago

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Theory on the chronological place of Treasure series

The age old question for Loretiny bc sadly Treasure series gives us very very little context. Everything I will say in this post is purely theory so take them for that.

Let's start with what we know: Fever is a prequel to Treasure, so Treasure must fall in thr gap between Fever and The World.

The main theme of this era revolves around piracy, a treasure to be found, a new world to take, and the Men in Black Fedoras. There is also a theme of overpowering desire, which i presented my views on here.

Now the interesting thing is, while the pirate theme is ATEEZ's main concept as a group and is explored heavily in this era, it doesn't really fit in with the general lore. What to make of it?

Well, at the end of Fever series, they had barely met the Men in Black Fedoras, who stayed in Guardians' Island, and took on their role as the leaders of the revolution with the Black Pirates organization. In The World Ep.Fin: Will we learn that the Men in Black Fedoras are still in prison. Now it really doesn't make sense that they never tried to bail them out of there given that they are crucial figures for this organization.

Here comes my theory: they did try and here is where piracy kicks in. Especially after seeing the resistance in my country I realized you don't leave your comrades in prison. Especially not the leaders. The Guardians' Island is on the sea and ATEEZ sail there from the mainland where Strictland is, as seen in Zero: Fever Part.2 diaries. However, no voyage is without trouble, Odyssey is the biggest example of that, and the group strays a bit from the main action of the revolution and thus is formed the sub-storyline that is the Treasure series.

"Pirate King" and "Treasure"

These two give us a soft introduction to the lore, and this is a bit meta since in real life chronology they are the first songs but in the lore they are basically an introduction in the middle of the story. We can think of these two as a worldbuilding paragraph in a book: the story is suspended and we get some explanations from the writer. They set up the motivation of our characters in this era, which is different from the motivation they had in Fever era. Now they have a certain place they aim to go through this journey and a treasure to obtain. "Treasure" specifically shows that the treasure is their destination place itself with the lyrics "To a place no one can find, my treasure".

I'd argue this place is the "new world", as I will also speak about in "Wonderland". Their treasure is the free world they will get at the end of their revolution, which they just became a part of. As a side note, in this era the "treasure" is spoken about in a very abstract way, as if they themselves don't know what it exactly is. On a deeper level of analysis, also using the individual stories of our characters, I could also say that the real treasure to them is a sense of accomplishment and psychological fulfillment. As if what the treasure is doesn't matter to them, it is just important that they obtain it. The theme of running after a sense of accomplishment/glory rather than the original goal/dream shows up in the Golden Hour diaries as well, so I think it is important to note.

Both MVs take place in a desert.

A lot of loretiny discuss whether it is a real setting in the lore or not, some even saying it shows that the era doesn't entirely relate to our main storyline. However, this is what Hongjoong said in his Lore Lecture videos about the desert's meaning in lore:

"Think about the desert. In the desert there are no roads, directions, or signs, are there? We are walking towards the direction where we want to go, aren't we? You can see the desert as the background that reflects ATEEZ's situation in that way."

Therefore, I don't believe the desert in the MVs are a real place in World Z and just support the storytelling.

"Wonderland" and "Horizon"

"Wonderland" tells the story of them first joining the Black Pirates. They will make a new world of their own out of this corrupted one. They know that the government lies and hides the truth behind closed doors and they will open them. The whole song is about the beginning of an end: they just started the rebellion that they hope will put an end to all this. And their first serious mission is to get the Men in Black Fedoras out of prison.

"Horizon" represents their voyage on the sea.

"Illusion" and "Wave"

As I previously mentioned, no voyage is without troubles, and ATEEZ run into theirs here. The absurd setting of "Illusion", the crescent (which gives the Cromer the ability to communicate in dreams), the overall sudden cheerful themes in the smack middle of ATEEZ's dark concept, and the constant order to "open your eyes" in this album points towards characters being asleep and all these being a dream. There are two different theories on who is asleep:

1) ATEEZ ran into trouble and are put to sleep by force and some is trying to wake them up to resume their journey by the Men in Black Fedoras.

This is my own theory. The reason why I said "by the Men in Black Fedoras" is that at the end of "Illusion" we see a Man in a Black Fedora lead ATEEZ out of a tunnel.

2) The Men in Black Fedoras are seeing hallucinations due to the yellow smoke in Guardians' Island and are being told to wake up. This is a theory I saw in Loretiny spaces and is supported by subliminal MiBF mementos that show up in "Illusion" MV.

"Answer"

We know at the end of the story they are still imprisoned. What happened at the end of the story?

The toasting in "Answer" suggests a planning and agreement happened. There are two ways this went:

1) ATEEZ got Halateez out of prison but keep it a secret even from the Black Pirates, and the government is lying to the public that they still have them so as not to seem incapable.

2) Halateez have a plan and they willingly made ATEEZ leave them in prison. We don't know what the plan is yet.

Either way, "Answer" must be the first time ATEEZ have a proper talk with Halateez, which brings us to this famous VCR.

"Are you evil?" ask ATEEZ. A revolution is not without violence. They don't even properly know who these men are, they found themselves in this fight just because they called. In ATEEZ's eyes it is perfectly natural to doubt their intent.

"Are you good?" Ask Halateez. No person is perfectly good, who are ATEEZ to ask if they are evil? On top of that, they joined the revolution now, they are not much different than Halateez at this point.

On the table, not only do they plan the revolution, they also have a talk about their identities.

And this ends the Treasure series. Now they must realize the revolution in The World.

You may have noticed I didn't mention "Say My Name" at all, which is because it actually belongs in Fever when ATEEZ rescue Yeosang. It is the only outlier in this series and the explanation is very meta: on their second comeback, with barely a bit more budget, ATEEZ had to clearly show they had a lore so they did a flash forward with "Say My Name", which shows a more concrete part of the lore rather than the abstract moodboard-esque MVs of "Treasure", "Wonderland", or "Wave" and piques interest.

How did you even come up with this??

Completely reasonable question since this is a very speculative theory. I noticed a pattern. Whenever we see a ship in ATEEZ'S performances, we also see Men in Black Fedoras on the side (or their symbols). The mask in "Illusion" MV, the Kingdom version of "Wonderland", this "Horizon" stage. Therefore, there must ve a relation between them and ships and the only time in canon we saw it was when ATEEZ sailed to the Guardians' Island and met them.

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miriamundertale · 11 months ago

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Azerothian Growing Pains

or: guide to playing backstab rogue solo in classic wow!!!!

this one is a huge mess please dont feel bad if you dont read it

when i was 9 years old, my dad at some point decided to let me get into playing a game he was playing again, world of warcraft. this wasn't the first time i had played, during the first few months, before the release of the infamous war effort, my dad had done similar and created an account for me to play on; but since the last time any attempts were made i was more or less kept around as a guild mascot, I had a lot more freedom given. i could play any race on the same faction, any class, and the logical choice was to copy my dad somewhat and choose undead, then be a little different and copy his alt's class of rogue. a few times of modifying the randomly generated names left me with Jalgun, a rogue who lives forever in infamy among my friends for his very silly name. I remember hitting level 15, and quickly abandoning silverpine for the barrens, a third death at the son of arugal steeling my resolve to find a source of comedy in barrens chat, barely understanding what made it funny or why it became so well known. I remember stonetalon, bereft of players, purely defined by a giant water wheel that now punctuates the whole zone for me. a continual testing of western plaguelands, running over to see if the plagued bears there were still level skull. at 40, i got 60 gold from my dad to cover the amount i was missing to unlock my first mount, and wound up spending the next few weeks just exploring around. at some point, a guildie and friend of my dad found me out in the world, and took me to razorfen downs to run multiple times for two coldrage daggers, stating how good they were in pvp and they'd be a great grab. I got one fairly quickly, but the second dagger never dropped. Jalgun's last moments before being lost for a decade were simple, my first alterac valley. nothing big or grand, nothing that stuck in my head like the waterfall, or coldrage dagger. I got off, parked in lights hope chapel, and then we were no longer playing wow.

when I was 21, I decided to get into a game that i was playing again, one that I had come back to on my own in an expansion themed similarly to the one i had last seriously played, Legion. the main difference this time being a focus on the fun of experiencing something i did as a kid at an age where i could really process it, really understand the reason why hooks from it still dug into me. why i could still picture that water wheel clearly even then. processing a different angle and view of myself at the time, i went drastically different, alliance, choosing paladin because of the comedy of self inflicted torment i saw in leveling a class others saw as miserable for my first max level character, dwarf not just to avoid the boring answer of human, but as another little joke about the existence of dwarf female characters not existing. for the first time in anything, I named a character after myself. I can't say there's anything especially deeply dug into my psyche from the leveling process the way that jalgun did, but I do remember my genius idea after getting a world blue (random drop rare item, a lot rarer than your average item but not the rarest tier of random drop. "world" drop items are notable in the fact that they are all bind on equip and often sell very well on the auction house due to their rarity.) that gave bonus damage against demons to completely rebuild around farming a few of the demons in aszhara for reliable felcloth to make some money, as well as sneakily getting to shatterspear village to farm with very little contest from other people. I think what mostly sticks into my head with Miriam is the time I spent raiding, the fun I had in the comedy that the meta of holy paladin for healing was just to crit as much as possible so you never truly spent a drop of mana healing. after a few months, the guild I was in for raiding splintered, and rather than search elsewhere I turned to another character who's name I had snagged at the same time as Miriam.

I think around when I started the journey of leveling jalgun again is when the fact that the idea of a meta had really sunk into my brain was first realized by me. nothing huge specifically, but remembering my dad talking about his own rogue in original burning crusade, saying "people still really don't realize how strong combat is, they spend about 10 seconds wondering why the fuck a rogue with maces does that much damage before they realize they're dead" which in 2019 turned out weirdly prescient. the classic ideas of dagger rogues were largely mediocre compared to deep down the combat tree, especially for leveling. I of course, still thriving on the high of discovering my own contrarian spirit, immediately veered into not just a bit on playing weaker, but also somewhat a statement of challenge to the idea of daggerless rogue, and committed to my own personal rogue dagger build.

one of the things that you come to learn as you play against a defined "meta" of any kind isn't that things become the most widely adopted due to being the absolute strongest, or being the intended or best way. they become widely adopted due to ease. a strategy may be much stronger than another, but if the other strategy is just a few button presses with no potential for misstep, it will almost never win over the more reliable one. combat rogue for leveling, more than anything else, is consistent. you gain higher hit chance from talents and miss less, you need less positional work to achieve damage, and you literally just need three buttons for your core rotation most of the time. even if similar in effort, assassination or subtlety would never be anywhere near as consistent.

while locked by requiring a dagger in the main hand, ambush has an insanely high damage multiplier of 250% of base weapon damage plus a decently high base number. on top of that, there's' two total talents that give it up to a massive 85% crit chance, as well as one that just naturally gives you another 5%, meaning you only need to get 10% from gear to guarantee ambush crits. in world of warcraft, there are two main ways a melee character does damage. colloquially, they're referred to as yellow hits and white hits, named after the color of the text. yellow is damage from spells cast, ones like ambush or backstab, and white is the normal basic attacks your character passively does. while they compose a decent amount of the damage dealt, white hits normally don't have any specific mechanical skill or interesting things aside from some specific positional timing to avoid taking damage if you know how to kite with your auto attacks. however, a fascinating but unknown mechanic of white hits is while they normally decide if they crit or not off of their own calculations rather than ones tied to the spells cast, if you start combat with a spell the first white hit from each weapon uses that spells crit rate rather than your normal crit rate. what does that all mean? well, lets say you had a spell with a 100% crit rate while your normal crit rate is 10%, and you started combat by using it. rather than calculating if they crit off of that 10%, they instead calculate off of the 100%, meaning you don't just do ambush damage plus weapon damage, you do critical damage for both, leading to a ratio of 500% weapon damage plus 200% weapon damage plus a flat amount. if you keep your dagger as up to date in level as you can, ambush will oneshot mobs 98% of the time until around level 45.

I love learning mechanics of games. I love the act of finding little bits and weird parts, and seeing how they wind up interacting. every time i played them, the joy of a deckbuilder card game was purely in the deckbuilding rather than the gameplay itself. the issue I would always run up to in it was that a good percentage of the playerbase does not view that as especially fun or part of it, and works through finding prebuilt ones by experts. when i was younger, i would get upset over it, feeling like there was some sort of self harm in cutting out the part of the game I saw most fun. nowadays i see it as just how it is, though being someone who isn't an expect it's hard to really compete against stuff like that which winds up souring me on it a lot, which is something i need to work on.

you might notice that this guide would only work until 45, and the more keen wow players would know ambush isn't unlocked until level 18. what does one do in those scenarios, when you're still trying to gain the powerhouse of your build, or when the gimmick seems to die out? well, there is a similar spell to ambush that deals solid damage and benefits from a few of the same talents that ambush does, backstab. backstab, like ambush, is conditional in being positioned behind a target. early on, it can be treated like a pseudo ambush to open, giving you a reliable bit of early damage, but seems dead in the water the second that the mob is facing you. thankfully, around the same time you also get a spell called gouge, which gives you a stun that lasts for a few seconds, but breaks when they receive damage and turns your basic attack off. it gives you more than enough time to walk behind the enemy and land another backstab, and then you just wait for the cooldown to finish on gouge to repeat the process until the enemy is dead. interestingly, a lesser known bug is that for some unknowable reason, mobs will sometimes turn to face another direction, which almost always seems to be enough to get their back into you, making backstabbing easier.

a few years back, after some insanely kind help from a blizzard cs person (who almost certainly doesn't work there anymore and deserved better than that company anyways) i got access back to Jalgun. reset back into undercity, level 52, and I felt a conflict begin inside me that I still wrestle with today. do i play Jalgun? do I preserve him? what should I do with one of the few childhood things I can reliably only have fond memories for? after a few weeks, the decision I finally settled on is that 10 year old me would have kept playing him, so it'd be unfair to not do the same. I gingerly comb through Jalgun's Inventory, his equipped items, his bank, and excise everything that is sentimental or has "rare" value; open the mail to get the bags and gold I had sent over from a main, and rush to archiving as much as I can. laying gear out like an outline, blazewind breastplate centered, fleshhide shoulders secured to the side, topped off by ebon mask. Coldrage Dagger was in his main hand.

as expected with a build that relies on esoteric game mechanics, there are limitations you have to follow. the first is that you cannot use any poisons that do damage over time, and instead largely rely on instant poison if you use poisons at all. second, and probably weirder, isn't just the fact that you have to use a dagger in your main hand for your abilities, but the fact that None of those abilities care about your offhand. while normally coordinating weapons of the same type is good for damage and optimization, that isn't always the case for backstab rogue. your offhand is entirely a statstick. hell, an item that just goes into your offhand and does not do damage itself is as effective if the stats are good enough.

when I was 26, I got bored one day. i opened season of discovery, a temporary wow server type set up by blizzard which has you explore the world itself for ways to augment and change your playstyle. during the original launch, I thought there would be some interest in me for playing it, so I wound up making a character that day. not a rogue, but a priest. due to heavy congestion in the undead (did you think i chose another race?) starting zone, I decided the real best option was instead to make the trek to the tauren starting zone, ascertaining that if anywhere was likely to be empty, it would be the arguably least played race's starting area. my priest made it all the way, and after a few minutes i decided it wasn't clicking and logged off. this most recent time, however, I had to stick to the bit fully. the priest boring me as an idea, I once again do the normal thing for me at this rate and make an undead rogue. her name isn't jalgun.

when levelling solo, it's basically impossible to avoid downtime in classic wow. at best, you need to stop for a few to drink water after a few pulls to regenerate your mana. solo rogues can have some rough downtime from time to time, and while it's not as bad as other classes, it can be frustrating while you have a core mechanic of the build centered around a buff that can time out if you eat too long. on top of that, classic can be very costly, in game. the notable milestones of costliness being level 40 and 60, where you get your normal speed and swift speed mount respectively. thankfully, rogue's have a fairly unique way to get around those both, and it all comes from one source: pickpocketing. while arguably a flavor ability more than anything else, pick pocket can have some incredible return on investment. reagents for spells like vanish or blind can be found in lockboxes you pickpocket, 4-5 silver a mob can be in their pockets, and they regularly carry food or potions with them. while they can be sold, being able to treat potions like rpg consumables much more readily while levelling drastically improves the flow of combat.

whenever I take long breaks from wow, I wind up essentially putting my characters on holiday in certain places. for my warlock, he goes to the pandaria farm. my priest goes to the original undead starting zone, and jalgun, of course, goes to that water wheel; somehow untouched after the cataclysm, after nearly 20 years of existing, just as constant as it is in my mind. As time goes on, the core of the game changes, classic goes from solved on paper to solved in practice to desperately optimized and treated like a perfectly maintained box and set of rules to play, minds consumed by a need to do their childhood right, then to play the spreadsheet right. the world that they loved at best a backdrop for trying to perfect numbers; to be the best out of 40 people in raids where you realistically need 15-20 competent people to make it work. when I play, I see the water wheel. I see razorfen kraul, I hear the clanging, tempoless, brill inn's music, my eyes sting from the overwhelming orange coming off of durotar. but now, in this play through, I've realized I've been seeing more than that. I see the wowhead page I pulled up to find the best daggers, my map shows me the levels each zone recommends, 5 funny little bars on the top left of my screen tell me who's doing the best at the numbers part of the game, and while i do find victory when my silly setup remains at the top despite being off meta, the focus on those numbers haunt me. every time I play, there's more added to World of Warcraft, and I start to barely notice the weird jank from clashing addons. I spend time hoping for someone to invite me to a dungeon, as an escape from the normal routine, dealing with people frustrated how unoptimized things are in a game twice the age of their children. every time, I'm afraid I'll stop seeing that water wheel.

I might just have to hope Jalgun keeps seeing it for me.

#miri.edu #i should tag this wow #i kinda dont want to #partially because i barely feel comfy having this on a tumblr where people read instead of the wordpress which is largely ignored #partially because it feels weird to put something like this in wows tags #idk #this whole experiment was an emotional mess for me

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foulserpent · 4 years ago

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how do you feel about NGE? ive been watching it bc my friends like it a lot (and are going to watch the cowboy bebop live action w/o watching the show first so im giving them incentive) and i really have not been liking it at all. even if its points are in i guess Parody of what it's doing, it never works.

i watched and liked it when i was 15 and still have strong feelings of nostalgia for it + appreciation for a lot of things it does well and interesting ideas it has. and that said theres a reason i dont recommend it to anyone lol

#in terms of the good parts it hits its stride towards the end and i think EOE is an objectively good movie for the most part but #at the end of the day its still just another show sexualizing teenagers #and even in terms of its good ideas it still isnt executed great bc the show kind of cant decide how to handle its characters #like is shinji a traumatized child Or a spiteful jab at the audience Or someone to be criticized Or self referential #and the answer is 'all the above' but it gets really mucky bc its being pulled in all those directions #without much balance #the rebuilds are just Not Good but it gives a great example of this issue bc the ending is two Entirely different things depending #on what narrative framework shinji is operating from #from the meta context where shinji is representative of the audience and anno its a positive ending about #growing up and letting go and healing.#but its also shinji confronting his problems and then running away from all consequences in the ultimate escapist fantasy #and that sort of thing is an issue in the og series too just in a way where its torn between spite towards shinji as a vector for the #audience (or the director's own struggles) and a more level view of him as a complicated person who is ultimately a very unwell child #and anyway this is an issue with all the characters and all the psychological themes #i think the area where its straight up 100% good is a lot of the very visceral qualities it has and some of its imagery and stuff

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carrionbeast · 4 years ago

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Part 1 of my @daredevilexchange Daredevil + Defender Exchange Piece for @hehearse! Part 2

Also available on Ao3 once the collection is revealed! Prompt used: talking about lost opportunities, lost chances

Image IDs are on Ao3, separately in chapter 2 and also under the cut!

[Image description: 6 images containing 11 Daredevil fan comic pages and 1 cover

Cover:

Daredevil is written in the bright red, tilted lettering of the classic logo. In the upper left corner is a box with a black outline, split in two. The top half is a red box with white lettering, reading DDE, mimicking the marvel logo should be and under it, in a white box, is the number 1 in black lettering. Under these two boxes is the name of the author and artist, Neon Brutalism.

The cover features a large empty hourglass, tilted towards the upper left of the page. Trapped in the bottom of the hourglass, we see Daredevil and Foggy. The glass is too small for the both of them and they’re tangled in each other’s limbs. Matt’s sitting with his knees bent, uncomfortably on his tailbone. The toes of Matt’s boots are pressed up to the glass and his hands are pushing up against it above him and to his side, the red fabric of the gloves lighter where it’s tight against the curved glass. He’s blushing under his mask, tilting his head away from Foggy. Foggy, dressed in a suit with bow tie, with his legs up in the air, has one hand between Matt’s boots and one above his head, against the glass. The bottoms of Foggy’s shoes are up against the glass, right leg across Matt’s lap and his left leg behind Matt’s back. Foggy is also looking away from Matt and blushing deeply.

At the bottom of the page, the title, “The Glass of Sand and Fog” is written in white lettering with a thick black outline. /end image description]

[Image Description: Interior cover:

No art but text in the center that reads:

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of Marvel. The original characters and plot are the property of the creator of this story. The author and artist is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any previously copyrighted material. No copyright infringement is intended.

In the lower left corner of the page, more text, that reads:

“For Heherse, Daredevil and Defenders Exchange 2021” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 1

Panel 1 - Inside a warehouse. The moon glows through the warehouse’s glass-block windows, casting a sharp light on the room. The camera is pointed up at the villain, a thin, short-haired man, half-hidden in shadow. His right eye is obscured by a large monocle and he has a triumphant expression on his face. He is standing on top of a giant clock with a large battle-axe replacing the hour-hand. The axe-hand is pointing to the number twelve in roman numerals. The man is dressed in high-waisted riding pants with suspenders and an old fashioned button-up shirt. In his left hand, he holds a staff with a small hourglass on the top.

The Villain: “Don’t worry, Mr. Nelson! You still have one more hour for Daredevil to come save your miserable life! But beware, the Axe of Time may be the end of you both!”

A speech balloon coming from below the panel’s edge.

Off Camera Voice: “What the hell is the axe of time?”

Panel 2 - The camera pulls out to reveal the full shape of the clock. It stands solitary on a short platform in an empty warehouse. The villain leans over the clock to glare downwards with an offended expression.

Sitting on the platform, positioned at the 6 on the clock, under the axe, is Foggy. He’s wearing a bowtie and a slightly rumpled suit. His hair is parted in the center and slightly messy. His hands are bound together at the wrist and his feet at the ankles but he does not seem very distressed.

The Villain: “Well, not all of us can afford the giant hourglass needed for a sands of time trap.”

Foggy: “It’s just really thematically confusing.”

Panel 3 - Medium zoom in on the villain. The camera right side of his face is hidden in shadow and his grin is toothy and threatening.

The Villain: “You should be more worried about your dear friend Daredevil -”

Panel 4 - Same zoom. The villain is confused and raises a single eyebrow.

The Villain: “Wait. Friend? Associate? Client? I’m unclear on the nature of your relationship.”

Panel 5 - Medium zoom in on Foggy’s face. He rests his chin on his bound-together hands and stares forward in resignation.

Foggy: “Yeah, you and me both.” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 2

Panel 1 - Pulling back into the shadows a little, the villain grins, still gripping his staff.

The Villain: “Well, no matter…”

Panel 2 - The shadows behind the villain have shifted into the silhouette of a figure with horns. Enormous, bright red eyes glare ominously forward into the camera.

The Villain: “Once your companion shows up to save you, he’ll meet his grisly-”

Panel 3 - The villain’s speech balloon continues into the next panel but his sentence is cut off as the shadows materialize into Daredevil. Daredevil punches the villain in the face, fist flying towards the camera. We see the villain’s full face at last as his monocle goes sailing off his face and out into the gutters between the panels.

The Villain makes a distressed noise.

Panel 4 - A bird’s eye view down at the floor from the top of the clock. We can see Daredevil’s boots standing on the top of the clock. The villain lies unconscious on the floor, his monocle next to him, cracked and his staff out of reach.. Still sitting on the platform is Foggy, who looks up at the camera with a fond expression.

Foggy: “My hero.”

Panel 5 - Camera at ground level, Foggy watches as Daredevil jumps towards the ground. Daredevil: “I’m guessing this was a me-related kidnapping?”

Panel 6 - The camera is over Foggy’s shoulder. Daredevil is facing away from Foggy as he unties Foggy’s hands. His expression is regretful and apologetic and the far-side of his face is slightly cast in shadow.

Foggy: Well…

Daredevil: Sorry... /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 3

Panel 1 - Daredevil sits on his knees as he unties the ropes around Foggy’s ankles. He’s still regretful. Foggy reaches over to pat Daredevil on the shoulder with a comforting expression.

Foggy: “Really, don’t get pouty. This guy wasn’t exactly threatening.”

Panel 2 - Daredevil and Foggy are both standing now. Foggy is holding the remnants of the rope in his hand and examining it with a dubious expression. Behind him, Daredevil looks confused.

Foggy: “He didn’t even tie me to the clock.”

Daredevil: “That’s a clock?”

Panel 3 - Far zoom out at ground level. Foggy and Daredevil walk away from the camera towards the double-doors of the warehouse. Light from the street casts a shadow behind them as they move towards the light.

Daredevil: “Why’s there an axe on it?”

Foggy: “His theme is inconsistent.”

Daredevil: “Hm.”

Panel 4 - Pull back and reveal the outside of the warehouse, a square brick building with a low, flat roof. The full moon hangs low in the sky. The streets around them are empty and a bright streetlamp casts the warehouse area in light, reflecting off the power lines and windows of the warehouse. Daredevil climbs a rickety ladder next to the warehouse door, leading up to the warehouse roof as Foggy stands on the ground and watches him climb.

Daredevil: ”To be honest, I think time is scary enough without a giant axe clock.”

Panel 5 - Foggy grins up at Daredevil as he climbs up the ladder towards the camera.

Foggy: “What, worried about getting old? Daredeviling getting hard on your knees?”

Daredevil: “No, no…”

Panel 6 - As Daredevil’s boots retreat out of the top of the panel, Foggy starts to climb up after Daredevil.

Daredevil: “It’s hard to explain.”

Panel 7 - At the top of the warehouse. The roof access door visible over h’s shoulder, Daredevil is standing on the flat roof and reaching over the ledge to pull Foggy the remaining distance up the ladder.

Daredevil: “Maybe it’s the idea of stuff slipping away, missing chances, that sort of thing.”

Foggy: “Let’s not talk about slipping when you’re pulling me up a rusty ladder?” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 4 -

Panel 1 - The New York City skyline lights up the horizon as Daredevil and Foggy sit on the ground of the roof, their backs to the ledge wall surrounding it. Daredevil hugs his knees and Foggy has one leg stretched out and one bent slightly, more relaxed. Foggy looks at Daredevil.

Foggy: “So, what slipped away from you?”

Panel 2 - From behind, Daredevil pulls his cowl up and off, revealing Matt’s hair. It’s static-y and wild from being under the cowl.

Matt: “Oh…”

Panel 3 - Matt grips his knuckles and faces down, blushing brightly as Foggy, with a determined expression, runs his fingers through Matt’s hair trying to smooth it down.

Matt: “Just… Stuff.”

Panel 4 - Matt in profile, gently wincing. The blush has receded and Foggy is smiling at him.

Foggy: “Oh. like how I still wish I had tried out for the Hell’s Kitchen community theater production of The Scarlet Pimpernel?”

Matt: “Ha, kind of.”

Panel 5 - Meta panel, borderless with a white background. Cartoon-y versions of Matt and Foggy pop up from the edge of the lower panel’s border, standing next to an elaborate image of Foggy dressed in a French Revolution era military outfit, reminiscent of Norm Lewis’s from the 2006 revival. Cartoon Foggy is looking at the version of himself in costume thoughtfully, cartoon Matt has his arms crossed and is nodding.

Foggy: “Well, it’s not too late. They’re doing Les Mis in the fall. What do you think, should I try out for Fog Valfog or Fog-vert?”

Matt: “Oh, Fog-vert, one hundred percent.”

Panel 6 - Tight on Matt, his face is half-hidden in shadow. He’s smiling slightly but is more sad than anything else.

Matt: “I think I’m too late for what I’m thinking about, though.”

Panel 7 - Panning over to Foggy, who is reaching for Matt’s shoulder.

Foggy: “Oh, come on, Matty, don’t be so broody.”

Panel 8 - Tight on the lower half of Matt’s face and his shoulder, where Foggy’s hand is resting. Matt is blushing again. In the background, Foggy is prattling on about something unclear but Matt isn’t paying attention.

Panel 9 - Matt in profile, his head cast down and shadows cover the top half of his face. He’s hesitant to explain.

Matt: “Foggy I - …” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 5 -

Panel 1 - Pull out to see Matt facing the camera and Foggy next to him. Matt isn’t facing Foggy and is still blushing. Foggy’s excited and has taken his hand off Matt’s shoulder.

Matt: “... Do you want a ride home?”

Foggy: “Oh hell yes, I do!”

Panel 2 - The lights of the New York buildings around them blur as Matt swings through the city on his billy club, Foggy’s arms tight around his neck.

Panel 3 - Foggy’s apartment, small amongst the New York skyscrapers. Scattered lights are on in the windows of the buildings, but Foggy’s apartment is dark.

Foggy: “So, uhhh…”

Panel 4 - Inside Foggy’s apartment, the lights are off. Matt stands stiffly with his arms crossed in the corner, next to the window, staying in the shadows. Foggy, in the foreground, is pulling off his dress shirt, revealing his undershirt. His belt is unbuckled and hanging loosely. He’s not looking at Matt.

Foggy: "... So you think Javert? Its a good role. I'm - I mean, I'm not sure I can carry it but ..."

Panel 5 - Matt’s blushing bright red under his mask again and he points outside, leaning towards the window, slightly panicked. Foggy’s a little disappointed.

Matt: “I - um, sorry. I need to go. Because - I … Crime.”

Foggy: “Oh, sure, no proble-”

Matt: “Bye.”

Panel 6 - Foggy frowns as a red blur leaps out the window.

Panel 7 - Cut to a bright day. Foggy, wearing a dress shirt with vest and tie, is sitting at a restaurant table across from Kirsten, who is wearing a blouse and slacks. The table has a glass of water and an uneaten burger and fries in front of Foggy and fried shrimp and salad in front of Kirsten Foggy has his eyes closed and arms crossed, frowning. Kirsten is leaning back, resting her left arm on the back of the chair and holding her drink casually in her right hand.

Foggy: “And that is the longest I’ve seen him in two weeks.” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 6

Panel 1 - A restaurant patio on a New York street during the day. Foggy buries his face in his hands.

Foggy: "I had the perfect opportunity there. He was talking about - things he wished he'd done. UGH- Kirsten, why did I have to keep talking about musicals?"

Panel 2 - Close on Kirsten. She smirks and rolls her eyes.

Kirsten: “Hm, changing the subject to avoid being honest about something? Sounds like you've been hanging around Matt plenty to me.”

Panel 3 - Foggy holds a french fry and scowls at Kirsten while she takes a sip of her water through the straw.

Foggy: “Hilarious. I'm pretty sure he knows how I feel anyway.”

Panel 4: Foggy, chewing, rests his cheek in his hand and looks away from Kirsten, pouting.

Foggy: “He turned red and panic-jumped out the window before I could finish talking about Javert."

Panel 5 - Pull out to a bird’s eye view. A graffitied truck rumbles by the patio as Foggy takes a bite of his hamburger. Kirsten has put her drink down.

Kirsten: "Well, is that better or worse than an actual rejection?"

Panel 6 - Foggy is glaring down at his burger as he chews, annoyed.

Foggy: "At least an actual rejection has catharsis. Avoiding me is just him being a selfish dick." /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 7

Panel 1 - The camera shifts slightly, pointing up from under the table, revealing the restaurant name behind Foggy and Kirsten; The Dog Track, and in the corner of the sign, the disclaimer “No longer associated with the New York Gaming Commission”. Kirsten is keeping her face carefully neutral as Foggy’s expression is more irritated.

Kirsten: “That’s a little uncharitable.”

Foggy: "Just because I'm in love with him doesn't mean I don't know what he's LIKE."

Panel 2 - Kirsten tilts her head and holds a fried shrimp on a fork in her right hand.

Kirsten: "And you can't just skip all the drama, pick up your phone and call him right now because...?"

Panel 3 - Tight on Foggy, who isn’t meeting Kirsten’s eye and is blushing.

Foggy: "It's ... complicated!"

Panel 4 - Pull out on Kirsten and Foggy. Kirsten is grinning and Foggy is hunched over, eating his hamburger and looking annoyed and embarrassed.

Kirsten: "You know you're about 15 years late for this high school shit, right?"

Foggy: “You’re 15 years too late.” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 8 -

Panel 1 - Another warehouse at night, large shadows cast around the room.There’s no moon lighting the windows tonight. An enormous hourglass stands on the dirty floor, a few old crates are up against the wall and some of the pipes nearby are leaking water out onto the floor. There’s a human figure in shadow within the top section of the hourglass and another one on the floor, pacing. All the sand within the hourglass is in the bottom section.

Shadowed Figure in the Hourglass: “So did you get a grant or what?”

Shadowed figure on the floor: “Silence.”

Panel 2 - Foggy, of course, is the one trapped inside the hourglass. He’s annoyed but sitting comfortably like he’s in a hammock. He throws his hands up, gesturing to the hourglass around him.

Foggy: “It's just this is kind of a big budget upgrade from two week ago! I thought you spent all your money on that tranquilizer you hit me with.”

Panel 3 - Foggy frowns, skeptically and taps the glass with a finger.

SFX: Tink-tink

Panel 4 - Close on the villain, still cast in shadow. His monocle has a crack down the middle and he is wearing a waistcoat over a dress shirt and he’s furious. The hourglass is visible behind him and as Foggy pulls his cell phone from his pocket, watches the villain from within the hourglass.

Foggy: "... You know I need to be in the bottom part of this, right?"

Villain: “I know how an hourglass works.”

Panel 5 - Over Foggy’s shoulder, within the hourglass, we see his phone. There’s a series of unreadable text messages sent to and from a devil emoji, but the latest one, sent from Foggy, simply reads “Halp”.

Foggy: “Touchy, touchy…” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 9 - 5 panels.

Panel 1 - Foggy is still reading his phone, more or less bored with the villain’s theatrics and waiting for a return text.

Foggy: “So, what, you forgot you needed a way to flip it over?”

Panel 2 - The villain crosses his arms and glares up at Foggy, offended.

Villain: “I’m sorry, do I come into your place of business and tell you how to do your job?”

Panel 3 - The camera faces Foggy within the hourglass. He throws his hands up in frustration, still gripping his phone.

Foggy: “Sorry, this is an even less deadly death trap than the first one!”

Panel 4 - Super tight shot on the villain’s eyes. The cracks in his monocle gleam and his visible eye makes him look deranged with the rest of his face in shadow.

Villain: “I am perfectly content to just push the hourglass into the river, Mr. Nelson, and let Daredevil find your bloated corpse when it washes up."

Panel 5 - Foggy smirks, looking profoundly unintimidated and reading his phone.

Foggy: “I’d be more intimidated if I thought you could afford to replace it.” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 10 - 6 panels.

Panel 1 and 2 - The villain furiously points up at Foggy.

Villain: “I will have you know Mr. Nelson, I”

The villain is suddenly cut off when a red billy club flies in from the left side of the panel, hitting him in the side of the head. His monocle goes flying and the villain himself drops like a sack of bricks.

Panel 3 - Daredevil in silhouette jumps down and lands gracefully on the silhouette of the hourglass with Foggy inside.

Foggy: “You know I don't think this guy thought this supervillain thing through.”

Panel 4 - Foggy looks up and watches as Daredevil perches on the edge of the hourglass and pushes it open at a hidden hinge. He faces down at Foggy.

Daredevil: “I don’t think any of them do.”

Panel 5 - Free of the hourglass, Foggy stands in the background next to the exit of the warehouse, one hand on his hip and the other rubbing the back of his neck. He eyes Daredevil as Daredevil scowls, fastening ropes around the villain’s hands.

Foggy: “So, we haven't really had a chance to talk at the office lately…”

Daredevil: “Well, we’ve been really busy.”

Panel 6 - Daredevil faces the exit, his face hidden and looking away from Foggy, who stands in the foreground.

Foggy: “I, uh, do need to talk to you about something -”

Daredevil: “Sure - yeah, sure, just uh….” /end image description]

[Image Description: Page 11 - 6 panels.

Panel 1 - A red blur as Matt takes off, leaving Foggy in silhouette behind him.

Panel 2 - Matt’s office, during the day. Matt is sitting in a leather chair behind his desk. He is wearing a suit and tie and his eyes are hidden behind his rectangular, red sunglasses.. Kirsten is there, sitting on the edge of Matt’s desk, half-turning to look at him as they talk, she’s wearing a pair of high-waisted slacks and a flowy blouse. Matt’s office is tidy, with a long filing cabinet in the corner with a braille printer on top. His desk is clean aside from his braille reader, hooked up to his closed laptop and a mug next to him. Other buildings are visible in the window behind him. Kirsten’s expression is slightly skeptical and Matt is wincing, embarrassed.

Kirsten: “So you left a devil-shaped dustcloud.”

Matt: “Look, I’m not proud of it.”

Panel 3 - Matt leans back in his chair, smiling weakly.

Matt: “I just need some time. I’ve been actively pushing this down for years, it just… comes back up sometimes.”

Panel 4 - Kirsten is skeptical and Matt smiles grimly. Behind Kirsten, we see Matt’s office door which reads Murdock (in reversed letters).

Kirsten: “And that’s why you’re hiding in your office.”

Matt: “And that’s why I’m hiding in my office.”

Panel 5 - Zoom in on Matt. He’s half-smiling, but clearly sad.

Matt: “I just… I know he won’t be a dick about it. But it’ll make him uncomfortable and I …”

Panel 6: Matt slouches all the way down in his chair, the office around him having vanished into a white void and leaving him alone to sulk.

Matt: “I’ve put him through enough.” /end Image description]

#daredevil #mattfoggy #fan comic #long post #daredevilexchange #matt murdock #foggy nelson

398 notes · View notes

shihalyfie · 4 years ago

Note

You talk a lot about how the Digimon are born from the kids own souls, would you be interested into describing how the digimon partners reflect their humans' personalities?

Oh man, I love this topic! (You’ll have to forgive me in that my desire to do justice for it is why it ended up taking me this long to answer it.)

The part about the Digimon literally being part of the kids’ souls comes directly from official (it’s been mentioned several times, not only in what I just linked). This was never stated outright in the original Adventure or 02, and it took until Kizuna to really shove the link between the partner and the human’s inner self in your face and make it a huge part of the actual story, but fans had been catching onto it long before that, and even without reading what the staff had said. Kizuna throws a bit of a nail in this because it’s said to be a bit lore-noncompliant, but considering how much of the background lore it still goes out of its way to adhere to, and the fact it still does match the fundamental concept of “human heart = Digimon partner” regardless of detailed minutiae, we can still apply and analyze this concept with no problem, especially since Adventure and 02 always walked the line between sci-fi and fantasy, and there is undoubtedly a spiritual element to them no matter how you look at it.

(My personal comfort zone in analyzing Adventure and 02 comes moreso from a human behavior and mentality perspective, which is also why my meta on this blog tends to focus more on the human drama aspects of Adventure and 02 and especially the latter’s story being so heavily about human relationships, but if you’re interested in said spiritual elements, I heavily recommend @analyzingadventure‘s very comprehensive meta on Adventure background lore and themes, which also covers similar territory in detail. We’re different people, so our takes on it probably differ in some respects, but that’s the beauty of having different perspectives, after all.)

In any case, back to your question. I think it would be best to break this down piece-by-piece with the Adventure and 02 kids in detail, so more is under the cut!

...Well, okay, before we continue, I do want to touch on something briefly, and it’s regarding the fact that “evolution” in this series is generally a metaphor for human growth. That counts for when everyone gets their evolutions, but it also counts as a metaphor overall -- after all, Adventure is about self-assertion and pushing oneself as far as possible (the major evolution gimmick being tied to Crests), whereas 02 is about cultivating differing aspects of yourself and applying it to how you form relationships with others (the major evolution gimmick being tied to Digimentals and ultimately Jogress). The human self is quite a flexible thing, and the Digimon themselves quite often change personalities as they evolve. (I touched on this briefly in my discussion of honorfiics and first-person pronouns earlier, but in Japanese, the Digimon will often even change personalities and speech patterns as they evolve.) This also leads to a few other potential observations (not really corroborated by official, just my personal view of it):

Speaking from a meta perspective, the fact that only the “front protagonists” end up getting the highest level forms is pretty obviously so they don’t have to spend toy budget on allocating it to everyone, but from an in-story perspective, Adventure episode 50 adds an implication that not reaching as high of a form may also have to do with how inherently attuned one is to combat (Jou says that he believes that Gomamon will never reach Ultimate because he doesn’t have the sort of strength Taichi and Yamato do, and it contributes to his conclusion that his skills are more meaningfully applied as a healer instead of as a fighter). Of course, none of the Adventure or 02 cast is necessarily the belligerent type that inherently likes fighting in itself, but of course certain ones are less emotionally drained or more attuned to it, so you might be able to see a rough pattern there. (Again, I’m not going to sugarcoat how this still has a lot of dismaying issues on the meta level, but the difference between “how much this sucks on a meta level” and “whether this at least tracks in-story” is a common theme on this blog.) In a franchise sense, Digimon were of course conceptualized as fighting monsters, but within the narrative of Adventure, it probably stands to reason that having a manifested part of your soul or inner self shouldn’t necessarily mean they have to be fighting things all of the time unless it’s necessary.

It’s very often been pointed out that the 02 cast is at a sort of “combat disadvantage” compared to their seniors (well, and Takeru and Hikari, anyway) because their highest forms require two people/Digimon to be in play, so their overall combat power is rather low. My impression is that this is by design (and it’s a subversion of the usual expectation of shounen anime sequels where the sequel will often power creep everything to make the new guard outdo the first). That the 02 team is inherently dependent on each other for support, and to a degree far more than their seniors, is rather baked into its narrative, and moreover, from an in-story perspective, the 02 group doesn’t seem like the type to really care about being outflanked by their seniors (on the contrary, they’d probably take that as more proof that their seniors are amazing). Moreover, the forms you see their Digimon in most of the time tend towards the smaller Baby-level forms instead of the Child-level ones, and while this is partially due to plot logistics about being in the real world (and, admittedly, kind of inconsistently applied), it gives you a much stronger impression of the 02 kids and their partners in general being people who aren’t that individually imposing or strong and get more mileage out of flexibility and variety (see: the Digimentals and the huge number of lower-level forms the kids have access to).

With this kind of metaphor, I caution against taking it too literally as a 1:1 thing (especially since official has been generally quiet about it and there isn’t much in the series text itself to corroborate this), but I do think there is certainly some kind of relevance that’s worth thinking about.

Many people, including the official notes I just linked, refer to there being some Digimon partners that are "like-minded” with their partner, and some that are “opposite” in personality. This is roughly true, but I find this to be a very simplified description of the concept; it’s more like all Digimon partners are a reflection of the less easily exposed part of their human partner (and, most pertinently, the part that would allow them to express themselves in ways they wouldn’t normally), it’s just that the kids with more straightforward or less extreme personalities don’t have as much to hide or cover up in the first place, and so their partners come off as more “like-minded”. Even Urawa Megumi, voice of Iori and Armadimon (arguably one of the pairs of partners that seem “opposing” in personality), stated that she didn’t personally feel like the two characters are all that different, since humans have different sides to them, and Armadimon is functionally an expression of the side of Iori that isn’t apparent.

Because the Adventure narrative has the Digimon partners be linked to human mentality, this leads to the side effect that you won’t have a Digimon partner who ever truly denies the human partner (barring external factors like Evil Ring-induced brainwashing), which is something producer Seki Hiromi was quite insistent about. That said, this is a very Adventure and 02-specific thing, since other series go more into different angles about how one would approach partnership when this factor is not in play; half of Tamers’s drama regarding partners comes from the fact they are not necessarily mentally linked all of the time, and need to find a way to build a relationship by bridging that gap, and so non-Adventure universe entries are more freely able to explore the concepts of a Digimon partner more consciously entering conflict with their human partner. Well, that’s the beauty of having a multi-entry franchise, after all.

Taichi and Agumon

Taichi and Agumon immediately jump to mind as the first among the “like-minded” pairs, especially since the series shows them so often in sync and chilling together. Taichi himself is a straightforward person, so it stands to reason that his straightforward personality would also lend to Agumon coming off as being rather much like him.

However, there is one slight difference between the two, and it’s that Agumon has a somewhat stronger sense of “easygoing chill” than Taichi does, right down to using the more polite boku first-person pronoun in contrast to Taichi’s more assertive ore. He also lacks Taichi’s penchant for mild insensitivity -- in fact, very unlike Taichi, he has an incredible amount of emotional insight (02 spends quite a bit of time in 02 episodes 32 and 46 to showing off Agumon as someone who makes up for all of his lack of intellectual understanding with emotional and borderline poetic insight). And, really, while Taichi is a bit surface-insensitive, and while he seems to be impulsive, he actually is a conscientious person and is trying his best in his own way, and he isn’t the kind of person who cares about societal things like seniority, and he demonstrates multiple times that he’s easygoing and chill, and so you can say that’s a part of Taichi as well. Remembering that a Digimon partner’s presence helps their own human partner grow, Agumon being so openly friendly helps Taichi maintain good relations with others without running afoul of them.

One of Agumon’s most famous traits is that he likes food, which is not actually something that was in the original Adventure or 02 all that much but has been somewhat exaggerated since. That said, back in Adventure, while it was established that all Digimon regularly need food in order to maintain their evolutions, Agumon would usually be the first to complain “I’m hungry,” and whenever they did get food, Agumon would be one of the most prominently enjoying it. Food is, after all, one of the simplest and most universal of pleasures, and there’s a lot of visual framing of Taichi chowing down just as ravenously as Agumon is -- so, honestly, he probably got it from him.

Taichi also speaks a bit about his pain of being separated from Agumon in the space between Adventure and 02, and he directly refers to Agumon as “the other me”. The word “partner” was not actually used very much in the original Adventure or 02, and Taichi is not able to fully elucidate the sentiment of Agumon’s connection to his own self, but he still understands this much and why the loss cuts him so deeply, and by the time we get to Kizuna, it’s presumably why he uses similar language in his thesis proposal to refer to him. (I already covered the circumstances of Agumon’s relationship to Taichi’s existential crisis in Kizuna and how it led to their separation earlier, so I will omit it here for the sake of avoiding redundancy.)

Yamato and Gabumon

This might surprise some people to hear, but I would also pin this as one of the more ostensibly “like-minded” pairs. Gabumon is shy on the surface, but turns out to be quite passionate -- he uses the same assertive ore as Yamato, in contrast to Agumon’s boku, and he demonstrates his capacity for passion and action in that he’s arguably one of the most assertive in the cast. Note his taking initiative against Yamato’s frostbite in Adventure episode 9, or declaring his intent to stay with Yamato even if it means going against the others in Adventure episode 44, or singlehandedly dragging Yamato out of the hole of darkness in Adventure episode 51.

And, of course, Yamato himself is someone who initially seems a little awkward or detached around everyone, but is actually very passionate, so that’s all the same. And because Gabumon himself is so open about communicating with the otherwise closed-in Yamato, Yamato is able to express himself better over the course of Adventure.

Funny thing about that “shyness”, too -- the idea of Gabumon being particularly shy isn’t present in 02 much at all (we don’t get to see him very much, so it’s hard to say whether it’s completely gone, but it’s at least gone enough for the duration of his appearances). Which is funny, considering: guess who else stopped being shy and became naturally outgoing in 02? Yeah, so, as much as you might hear people (even official!) claim that the Digimon are static while their partners change, that’s not completely true -- the Digimon themselves develop in personality in the same way their human partners do. It’s just more subtle and less drastic, since they’re representing an abstract single part of their personality rather than being an exact match.

Sora and Piyomon

Sora and Piyomon have an interesting relationship in that they’re the only one where their relationship started off on a note of conflict -- mainly in that Sora was very put off by Piyomon at first and even looked down condescendingly on her (well, only for the duration of a single episode). In fact, Sora’s own surface behavior is very different from the kind and caring Sora we know -- Sora dislikes associating with the clingy and affectionate Piyomon for being “mushy”, and even declares that she doesn’t want to “take responsibility” for lugging her around.

Of course, Sora’s character arc later revolves around the fact that she has abysmally bad self-awareness and doesn’t even realize that she has a compulsive sense of responsibility to others. So Sora is affectionate and loving -- she just puts up a front of trying to act a little above that (well, at least, during this part of the series) and doesn’t even see herself as someone capable of being like that (again, purely during this part of the series).

Piyomon is also interesting in that she has one of the most dramatic personality shifts even as early as Child to Adult, where she suddenly switches from the casual atashi to watashi (sometimes even kono watashi, which is super regal), and becomes incredibly dignified and regal even as Birdramon, and you can certainly see why Sora immediately started taking her seriously thereafter. It also begs a lot to think about, considering Sora’s very convoluted character and the many layers of herself that even she isn’t consciously aware of.

The way Piyomon helped Sora shift her own mentality is pretty directly handed to you on a plate in Adventure episode 26 -- because Piyomon played the role of Sora in the metaphor of Sora’s behavior towards Piyomon correlated to Toshiko’s behavior towards Sora, Sora was able to re-adjust her position relative to her family and consider her both someone capable of love, and someone who is loved.

Koushirou and Tentomon

Koushirou and Tentomon are another pair that initially seem like they’re opposing types, with Koushirou being constantly curious and Tentomon being comparatively simple-minded, but the first key to figuring out where the similarity is ends up being a bit deceptive -- Tentomon says in Adventure episode 5 that he’s not particularly interested in himself. And, certainly, Koushirou is interested in Tentomon, but he, too, is not interested in himself -- in fact, he considers himself to be a topic he’d rather avoid instead of looking into everything else.

As far as language goes, while Tentomon does also use the stereotypically easygoing Kansai dialect, he also specifically uses the polite form, mirroring Koushirou’s own perpetual use of polite language. But unlike Koushirou, who uses it to keep distance from others, Tentomon is in fact very sociable, and is even portrayed as a Digimon who’s conscientious of others and “takes care” of them. And because Tentomon is so openly friendly, he manages to coax Koushirou out of his shell and allow him to think about more complicated things related to his own position in the world that he’d been avoiding.

As Koushirou’s character arc proceeds, we learn that he’s polite not only out of distance but also because he really is a very kind person, and moreover that he does eventually want to open up to others. And the payoff for this eventually comes in 02...

...when he ends up becoming one of the most visible members of the older Adventure cast to appear in the series, checking in on the younger kids and developing into someone capable of organizing and managing people. Hmm, seems familiar.

Mimi and Palmon

This one’s an easy one. Mimi is possibly the most straightforward person in the original Adventure cast -- well, that’s the point of her Crest after all -- and so Palmon is almost exactly like her, being a cheerful type who loves being cute. Any contrast between them is only really apparent in the very early episodes of the series, and that’s not even a contrast in theory as much as it’s just something that might intrigue audiences at first when Mimi spent a lot of those episodes complaining, but that’s also mostly because she was heavily under stress, and otherwise Mimi has always been kind and cheerful and indulgent in being cute.

Perhaps the only real difference is that Palmon, being a plant, is more willing to get involved with dirt and other things that Mimi ostensibly would rather not, but as the series progresses, Mimi manages to gain a higher sense of tolerance and get past her initial sense of materialism (which is something she’d had the capacity for the whole time).

Jou and Gomamon

Of the Adventure pairs, this one is probably the one that seems like the biggest contrast on its face, with the overly high-strung and constantly stressed Jou, and the more playful and relaxed Gomamon.

In the end, Jou is someone who’s defined by his desire to support others, and even admits at the end of the series that he’s better suited for a support role than for fighting, and that there’s nothing wrong with that as long as he continues to channel his desire to help people in a way he’s most comfortable with. So, in the end, he’s not actually an inherently aggressive type. And, meanwhile, Gomamon is the kind who’s constantly looking out for Jou, to the point of knowing (such as in Adventure episode 7) when he’s about to do something phenomenally stupid and minding him so that nothing bad happens to him, and so, this is probably why they’re ultimately able to settle down and end the series eye-to-eye (or perhaps hand-to-hand).

And, again, recall that Digimon partners generally reflect a part that’s vital to their own human partner’s growth; considering that Jou is most certainly one of the more extreme personalities in this cast, you get the feeling that he probably needs someone this chill to keep his massive stress tendencies in check.

Takeru and Patamon

Takeru and Patamon are an interesting case largely due to the two of them being so present for a whole two series. In Adventure, both of them seem to be largely like-minded, being playful, innocent, and childish -- although Patamon is more open about expressing the childishness that Takeru keeps trying to cover up. Patamon being roughly on the same playing field (no pun intended) as Takeru means that Takeru has someone he’s willing to be open with and let himself loose a little (such as in Adventure episode 12), because for the first half of the series, he’s almost entirely in the presence of elders and stifling himself for the sake of being “well-behaved”, and it starts his long journey of being able to understand his position and his actual sense of emotions over the course of Adventure and 02.

Patamon also has a striking personality change upon evolving, becoming the regal and dignified Angemon, and, interestingly, his appearances have a very “knight templar” vibe where he takes a no-compromise stance against dark forces and states that he’ll condemn all of them to oblivion. This is a stance that’s unnervingly similar to Takeru’s own no-compromise stance against the darkness in 02, and it’s interesting in that Takeru himself had been advocating for pacifism in Adventure episode 12, but this incident traumatized him enough to start taking a position that more resembled Angemon’s.

As we go into 02, Takeru’s contrast with Patamon initially seems like an increased mismatch, since Patamon is still ostensibly childish and playful while Takeru is ostensibly more mature. But for one, Takeru’s character arc is about the fact that he’s still pretending he’s more in control of his emotions than he actually is, and in some way you can also glean that there’s a sort of naivete present in his character that he keeps covering up with confident smiles. Patamon, for his part, does actually seem to have adopted a bit of a mentor role to the other Digimon, and we also learn that he’s capable of deliberately trolling people instead of just being generically playful -- much like Takeru himself, who’s a bit evasive and not entirely honest.

We do actually see Patamon reach HolyAngemon in 02 episode 34, but it doesn’t work out well, and while this is partially for plot mechanic reasons, it also says a lot that the “knight templar” stance that both Takeru and HolyAngemon have, with the full depth of no-compromise, isn’t going anywhere, and in the end, something more effective is only possible when Shakkoumon appears in 02 episodes 36-37 -- that is, Takeru is only able to better move on with Iori’s support.

Hikari and Tailmon

Hikari is the only of the Tokyo Chosen Children to have a Digimon who “defaults” to Adult instead of Child or lower, and it means that Tailmon herself comes with a certain amount of maturity -- on top of having been become a bit hardened due to her experiences being isolated. This is an ostensible contrast to the more pure-hearted and innocent Hikari, but note that Hikari’s own will can be pretty assertive when it comes down to it. On top of that, as much as Tailmon is a bit standoffish, Hikari is also “emotionally isolated” -- she has trouble vocalizing her negative feelings, and it’s difficult for anyone in Adventure or the first half of 02 to truly connect with her internal thoughts. Recalling that the Digimon partner reflects a side of the human partner that’s less easily exposed and allows the human partner to grow in ways they wouldn’t before, Tailmon’s sheer presence gives Hikari a route to action in ways she probably wouldn’t have beforehand.

In 02, Hikari becomes a little more mischievous and playful, and Tailmon also becomes a bit more willing to indulge (she even switches first-person pronouns in sync with Hikari, going from the more polite watashi to the more casual atashi). Both of them are now more able to enjoy themselves more openly. That said, Tailmon still has a certain degree of stuffy personal pride (she snarks at everyone quite easily for fussing over snacks in 02 episode 3), and Hikari herself remains emotionally elusive and repressive at the start of this series.

Tailmon evolves temporarily to Angewomon in 02 episode 13, which is the first time anyone (in this case, Takeru) makes some degree of headway to reaching out to her and allowing her to open up a bit more, but it’s not until 02 episode 31 when Hikari is fully reached out to via Miyako, which marks the first appearance of Silphymon.

Daisuke and V-mon

Now here’s a very like-minded pair, even more so than Taichi and Agumon -- and, after all, Daisuke is simple-minded, so painfully simple-minded that he’s practically incapable of hiding anything, and so V-mon is almost exactly like him, down to using the same ore pronoun and being feisty and mischievous (a point is also made that he plays soccer with Daisuke, something that Agumon didn’t necessarily do with Taichi), and, heck, in a rare show of Digimon-Digimon crushes, has a crush on Tailmon in the exact same way Daisuke has on Hikari. (By the time we get to Kizuna and its higher animation budget, a lot of attention is paid to having even their body language mirror each other.)

There is only one real functional difference between the two in disposition, and it’s that V-mon is very straightforward, friendly, and kind, without being prone to getting angry or spiteful at anyone, and in the end, it’s indicative of the fact that Daisuke’s tendency to lash out defensively at everyone is just a front -- at his core, he’s friendly, supportive, and kind. Daisuke’s experiences and banter with V-mon contribute to him getting the sort of validation he needed without having to worry about being on edge or lash out defensively, and because of that, he was able to form a healthier and more supportive relationship with the rest of the group.

Miyako and Hawkmon

This one seems to be a contrast right off the bat -- Miyako is bubbly, over-the-top, and rather messy and lacking in restraint, whereas Hawkmon is formal, graceful, and polite. But Hawkmon’s most prominent trait is his absolute loyalty and devotion to Miyako -- he’s very often referred to by both official staff and fans as her “knight” -- and is constantly minding her to protect her and make sure she doesn’t go over her head (most prominently, 02 episode 18). And as far as Miyako’s relationship to others goes -- she’s also devotedly loyal to everyone she loves and is constantly going out of her way to help others, and her character arc in itself is about the fact she wants to do her best to reach out to people and help emotionally support them in the best way she can, and Hawkmon managing to channel that to its utmost extent to Miyako in turn (in a very “who watches the watchman?” sense) allows her to regain her bearings and have better control over herself in the aftermath of 02 episode 18.

On top of that, as the series proceeds, it turns out that Hawkmon also shares Miyako’s penchant for dramatic theatrics and being a bit over his head -- even if he seemingly has himself more together than Miyako does, he’s not completely above it all...

Miyako is also the franchise’s first example of a female character with a masculine Digimon partner, and while Miyako herself openly identifies with and indulges in all things hyper-feminine, she also has zero issue engaging in more masculine-associated things as they suit her -- most prominently her Digital World outfit, and the fact she often displays a rather aggressive go-getter and hot-blooded/in-your-face personality that would not be out of place on a male shounen hero in a more conventional show. (Although, as much as these have generally been on the thread of “less visible aspects”, it’s not like this was that less visible of an aspect of her to begin with...)

Iori and Armadimon

Iori and Armadimon hold the honor of being the only pair in the Tokyo Chosen Children to be voiced by the same voice actress (Urawa Megumi), driving the parallel down even further. And while their surface temperaments seem different, with Iori being rather uptight and strict on himself while Armadimon is laid-back, carefree, and even somewhat assertive, they’re not that different -- Armadimon is basically the curious, impressionable, somewhat childish spirit that Iori would be if he weren’t constantly holding himself back. (There’s a lot to be said about Submarimon going out of his way to take Iori for a ride in 02 episode 16 so that Iori can finally properly enjoy himself for once.)

Iori takes a lot of very stubborn, no-compromise positions over the course of 02, but Armadimon asking just the right kinds of questions allows him to “snap out of it” and be a little more receptive to considering alternatives, or at least taking into account more emotionally-oriented issues he’s dealing with. You can say that Armadimon (especially as Upamon) softening Iori up a bit -- since Iori will never be cold or unforgiving towards his partner, no matter what -- serves as a precursor to Iori starting to question the limitations of his black-and-white view of morality, which allows him to successfully break through to Takeru and fill out the rest of his character arc.

Ken and Wormmon

Considering how much of the plot revolved around this one, this one almost goes entirely without saying! During Ken’s stint as the Kaiser, Wormmon represents the heart that Ken’s not entirely willing to leave behind -- and, also, the affection that he’s still craving from his family. The Kaiser going practically out of his way to deny Wormmon yet paradoxically keeping him around is basically his attitude towards his own “weak” and naturally kindhearted self. Notably, recall that the principle of “a Digimon will never deny their partner” applies here -- Wormmon’s “betrayal” of the Kaiser isn’t really any kind of denial, since he was doing it mainly for Ken’s own sake, and, more symbolically, it’s Ken reaching his own limit and coming to realize that this path isn’t what he really wants.

Wormmon is unusually clingy to his own partner over the course of 02, and it’s vital to Ken needing to learn to love himself and also getting important validation that he needs, especially during the critical point in time during 02 episodes 23-30 when he’s still not sure how to approach the rest of the group -- Wormmon gives him someone to talk to honestly and openly, giving him a proper springboard to sort out his complicated feelings about the others and himself. You can say also that as Ken becomes more open and straightforward over the course of the latter half of 02, he, in turn, becomes much more shameless about showing affection and opening his own heart.

Wallace, Gumimon, and Chocomon

Bonus round!

While it’s hard to fully apply Hurricane Touchdown to this theory (by official admission, it wasn’t properly cross-referenced with the original Adventure/02 series lore, and trying to correlate all of the evolutions in this movie to something metaphorical will give you a headache), Wallace’s two partners still fit very neatly into this overall theory of Digimon partners as a part of the self. Wallace is a character with very sharp duality, trying to be a flirt who asserts himself as a vagrant who’s about to “become an adult”, yet still feels an obligation to keep calling his mom and is engaging in increasingly self-destructive behavior.

Most pertinently, Gumimon and Chocomon represent the two stances Wallace is torn between: wanting to “return to the past” (Chocomon) because he’s still hung up on having lost Chocomon and is convinced that he can make everything just like it was before, and “being able to productively move on” (Gumimon). For most of the early parts of the movie, Wallace is stuck on Chocomon’s mentality of fixating on the past, and Gumimon isn’t even remotely subtle when he draws an explicit parallel between the two (saying that Chocomon didn’t like the heat, followed by offering to give Wallace shade as a hat). But once the conflict escalates and Wallace realizes just how deep in denial Chocomon is, to the point of being destructive to himself and others, Wallace comes to embrace Gumimon’s stance of practicality and moving on. In the end, the ultimate conclusion is reached, and Wallace is forced to fully accept that latter stance when Chocomon dies, but the movie’s ending (and Kizuna) provide an extra option: allowing the past to come back, but in a new form and treading new territory instead of trying to make it “the way it was before”.

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #kizuna spoilers #qwertyshuman #shihameta #shiha's ask box

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thirstforhelmets · 3 years ago

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Warden Eternal Dream Goes from ‘Villain Tries To Body Snatch Protagonist to Villain is Now Very Confused and Now The Protagonist’s Armor and Slowly Falling For Them’

TLDR; Convince fragment of misanthropic Promethean portal-making, potentially infinite Doppler gander-producing humanoid of destruction to not body snatch you through dumb explanations of why the cult worshipping him is whitewashing everything fun and depressing about humanity, that he should just observe humanity for himself with a guide, and did you forget to mention that human bodies natural produce drugs and he could experience them with you?! Also, you both kind of fall in love after a few years together and end up explaining it rather than confessing cause you’re too used to doing that all the time.

Basically, a cult somehow gets their hands on a remnant of Warden Eternal’s core and plan to put him in a human body to be their God. Only problem is that they need to have the BEST candidate for the Warden’s new body and do this convoluted scheme where they run a ‘Be The Master Chief’-type theme park/fun house thing in the biggest warehouse ever.

Like, you don’t have to be an augmented human or anything but there is layers to their bullshit where they are indirectly trying to get someone as unconsciously close to the Master Chief as possible. Like, you’re kind of doing a wacky version of the Human-Covenant War, except you’re pulling mind games and ‘seeing between the lines’ in each area’s ‘game’ and ruleset. Each area rewarding a piece of light armor that ‘helps’ you but also can ‘corrupt’ you midway through the ‘run’. You get ‘corrupted’? you have to start all over. Also, everything is fucking randomized to prevent meta gaming.

So, basically, the female protagonist accidentally fucks up midway through the beginning portion of the beginner area and turns off the communicator, not thinking anything of it since the staff does relay the rules and rules are written on the board for each game.

Bottom Line: The female protagonist gets all the armor pieces and the ‘late game’ upgrades in the challenge arena the entire way without any corruption points only through blatantly stupid luck only two or three steps down from the Master Chief, himself. AND you beat Warden Eternal by basically telling him that he’s missing out by turning you into a literal meat suit and that there’s lots of shit that’s worth experiencing with a human guide on human worlds. Also, if he mind-melded maybe just 10% with you instead of 100% he gets to have a free ride to know what shit like serotonin and endorphins feel like.

Also ‘these losers are showing you a wayyyy too sterile view of humanity. Come with me and we’ll experience the good AND the bad together! Just merge the rest of yourself with my armor and no one will know the difference!’

And he takes you up on it. (no idea what happens with the cult. I guess they’re cool with it? Dreams are weird.)

It then kind of skips forward a bit where he has experienced a lot of the human roller coaster that is emotions via you as a proxy and finds it worth maintaining the relationship for the 2-3 years of friendship.

It’s not like this went unnoticed though.

Dr. Halsey and ONI have been keeping very close tabs for obvious reasons (He still is still a teleporting historically-misanthropic Promethean death machine that can spawn portals at any time to throw copies of himself everywhere) He will ALWAYS be a very real threat even if he is taking a leisurely vacation from his misanthropic ways.

It doesn’t help that you are quick to anger and throw punches if someone REALLY goes out of there way to make an ass of themselves (He even acknowledges this by calling you a ‘monkey girl’ after you take him to the zoo and you both watch two monkeys throw wild haymakers at each other in their cage).

On a surface level, you are SO not the ideal candidate to be undertaking this kind of task so they have spies and always have a spartan team ready to go if Warden Eternal has had enough of being an observer and wants to start ruining planets and colonies. It even got to the point where even Master Chief had knowledge of the unorthodox relationship, seeing as he was interviewed by ONI earlier on about his experience with the Promethean.

So, the third act is the protagonist waking up in a large glass room with lift pads and all sorts of platforms, along with a rolling tv cart with a CRT television at the top, a vcr, and other dated technology gadgets that the Warden picked up a fondness for. It all stimulates your eagerly curious monkey-part of your brain but you kind of realize after a few moments that Warden (whom you affectionately call ‘Dan’ at this point, mostly to tease him) isn’t affixed to your bodysuit and that the old armor from the cult is there instead.

Worried, but not unfamiliar with his own need to wander about when in semi-public locations or the privacy of your usual accommodations (your mother’s house), you try calling out, seeing if he hijacked the speaker system or something to stay in contact like he usually does. The CRT unit turns on and you can hear a rather tired-sounding Dan talk to you through the room’s speaker system. He tells you that he has had enough of your shenanigans and wants to return to his old ways but you KNOW something is instantly off with your friend. That this isn’t like him. (the dream kind of implied this but I didn’t want to skip it just cause my dream did).

You kind of put two and two together and realize that this whole set up was ‘a zoo’: You were being observed separately for some reason and it stunk instantly of ONI, like Dan has described to you in the past.

You beg Dan to portal to you. That you two could just ‘coffin’ your way out of this trouble like you always did. (Warden Eternal literally coffins you in an air-tight form and pulls you both through a portal, incase it isn’t clear). He passively refuses the idea, making it abundantly clear that something terrifying was likely happening either to him physically or otherwise when it was always your go-to.

Whatever could make Dan just feel this defeated only meant that it probably involved your wellbeing. That you were likely a hostage.

Monkey rage starts simmering under the surface as you hated how dirty this all was playing out.

No one makes the Warden depressed unless it’s YOUR fucking depressed ass feeding him that chemical cocktail of your own equally depressed-making!

You shout at nothing but everything! Knowing full well whom-ever had set this up was listening and watching your every move! How dare they think they were animals to be locked up in a zoo?! How dare they think that they had the right to lock them up when nothing bad ever came of their travels, even when you unwisely slugged motherfuckers in the face! They always deserved it and you never hurt anyone otherwise!

Warden then makes a portal and reassembles himself in front of you, looking no worse for wear but his usually bright inner flame rather delicately smaller than normal. He really wasn’t doing so well. (god, it real hurt to see him like that. The pain I could feel was so heart-rending. Fuck you, Dream).

You tried to be an optimist for you both in this moment of reunion: Happy that you were right to assume he didn’t want to be a human-hating monster again and that he was still capable of making portals.

‘This is the end of the wonderful road for us’.

Dan seemed so resigned that it was clear that something dark was going to happen if you didn’t intervene. Like he was going to say goodbye forever.

It made you think back to another inevitable death that happened years ago: That of your beloved childhood cat.

You begged him not to go. Not to die and become a phantom you could only feel and hold in your most heart-breaking dreams. Dan knew of your feelings, of the phantom dips of a wonderful feline that walked around your almost-sleeping form to find a comfortable spot on your bed to lay down at night. He enjoyed the companionship of your current cat at your mother’s home, knew that your feelings of despair at waking from such dreams were enough to bore the deepest hole in the strongest of metals.

The fact that you felt such deep pain from the idea of him leaving this mortal plane for good helped resolve his own feelings. That this was one part of unconditional love.

He won’t see you harmed or killed but he couldn’t just leave you with a wound that heals ever so slowly: One that takes years to scab and even more for the phantom pains of the scar, itself, to dissipate.

The Warden would not let himself feel that either. Nor let the machinations of mankind’s worst guide him to self-destruct by their hands without his own intervention.

It’s with that, you told him you loved him. That the feelings you felt at that moment was love and that if he had to go, it was not to return as a phantom. It was more of an explanation than a love confession: you did do that often in the beginning when he questioned the point of such chemistry being a factor that drove the actions of humanity. But, still, it was nice to have that reassurance that this conclusion of his was not as obscene as it could have been.

With that, he dissipates his flame and delicately floats his pieces to you, reforming your jigsaw-like suit of ‘Mjolnir’ armor, complete with his annoying face plate blocking your sight. Letting out a nostalgic sigh you, grabbed the chin of the plate and pulled it up so it sat flat on top of your head. You were back together, the mind-meld back to its full, rightful ten percent.

With that, Dan closed the portal and the scene ends.

While some time has passed (the dream was not clear) not nearly enough allowed you two to explore what the enclosure provided until ONI placed another card down on the figurative table. Spartan Locke, from Strike Team Osiris, dressed down in a sterile white ONI uniform without any signs of hostile intent, enters your enclosure and states that he will be your guide if you wanted a tour of the facility you were in.

Both Dan and you immediately suspected potential for foul play since the Promethean did recognize his voice signature from Genesis. You both needed more intel about the place (and who was in charge) in order to negotiate your freedom and hacking anymore than Dan already did to talk earlier would be met with overwhelming force. Not taking the bait might be worse than just trying to chance something else.

Unfortunately, it was probably the easiest trap ONI could have sprung on you, personally, knowing your history of violent confrontations. Spartan Locke, while being ever unshakeable, kept steering conversations into the unpleasant. He kept bringing up Dan’s unwavering support of Cortana when she had the Mantle of Responsibility, his refusal to hear any opposition to the point of trying to kill the two spartan teams sent to retrieve Cortana (including the Master Chief), and his near limitless potential for the genocide of the human race, regardless if he hasn’t displayed any of his prior known abilities outside of utilizing portals.

You explained Dan’s situation: That he was only a fragment of the Promethean, you saved him from a cult bent on doing much worse than he had ever mentioned wanting to inflict on humanity, and, more to the point, Dan had never harmed a hair on a human’s head in the 2-3 years that you’ve been with him outside of you using his makeshift gauntlet to knock the stupid out of assholes who had it coming. You loudly and proudly declared that it was you and you alone in those cases who was responsible. Also adding it was ridiculous that they were being apprehended now, if your using of a Promethean’s armor to inflict trivial damage to thug’s faces was the reason for all of this.

It didn’t help.

No amount of justification or good behavior from a formerly violent alien species (HELLO!? The Arbiter?!? Anyone?!?) would sway Locke from his conclusion that everything about Warden Eternal was a primed nuke. That he was clearly lying. That you were a gullible idiot who managed to trip her way into a clearly bored cult deities’ hands. That it was plain luck that Dan ever found the experiences he had with humanity in the few years that the Promethean became an ‘observer’. It was all a badly convincing ploy to let him gather up-to-date information on humanity’s current assets and general combat abilities outside of the spartans he encountered.

And Dan just stayed quiet the whole time.

It wasn’t like the proud Promethean to be passive to insults against him, so much that it honestly had you a bit shaken that it could very much be the truth.

Your mind-melding was a one-way exchange.

You were not privy to the Warden’s thoughts unless he made them known.

It was through sheer desperation to dig in even farther.

Changing the subject just wasn’t possible, no matter how much you tried to diffuse it and cease this hostile, raging fire burning every diplomatic fiber you had inside. Not even being callus and pointing out that he was clearly trying to bait you into a fight helped.

Hell, it just made it even easier for the spartan to get right to the point.

With pleasantries clearly never on the table, you knew that Dan probably had ample reason beyond letting you speak on his behalf to keep silent.

You went in knowing the tour to be a bait but the cruel reality was your temper was the one weak chain in the link and no amount of screaming, incoherent crying and pleading would get this heartless man to empathize.

It was only when he grabbed your wrist to prevent you from going back into the observation room that you snapped.

In the time it took for you to swing for his jaw, the spartan had your back thrown down hard into the ceramic tile and nearly shattered your spine if not for Dan’s lightening-quick intervention. A gun was pressed hard into your exposed forehead, the man’s face almost terrifyingly cold as before as he used his weight to keep you pinned in place.

‘So, this was what it was like to fight a spartan.’

The blow had you extremely woozy, it felt like you didn’t have enough blood flow to move even a finger even if you wanted to continue to resist. The fight was snuffed out easier than a lit candle wick for the spartan.

“The gun is unnecessary. She cannot move, Spartan.” Dan finally spoke, utilizing the speakers in the hallways.

Locke seemed to think otherwise as he kept his position.

“That’s not the point, Warden Eternal.”

Apparently, that was all that needed to be said as Dan drifted his pieces off of your armor and body suit, opening a portal to send himself into an unknown destination.

It was only when the portal was sealed shut that more white uniforms came out from the seemingly empty connected hallways to descend on you. You were restrained and hauled away, them not even batting a lash when three pinky-length diamonds floated out from under your body to quickly follow. Those not carrying you on the stretcher were heavily armed with assault rifles at the ready but it was obvious that it was to reinforce the ‘you’re a hostage’ message to Dan.

(the dream then skips passed the recovery and to the final section)

Locke escorts you into another of the facility’s sterile, white-tile room with Dan at one end, like you expected, but this one had a reinforced glass wall running the length of one wall and an old, one-armed woman on the other side of it. The spartan had his pistol draw but was at military ease as you assessed the situation.

The speakers crackled as the woman began speaking. Telling you that she was Dr. Halsey of the spartan program, Cortana’s creator, and all this other stuff before quickly getting down to business: She wants the Warden to terminate himself but he reneged on doing so after talking to you. So, her only option is to have you force him to do so as all other methods available have failed.

Halsey theorizes that even if they look into more financially-burdensome options of disposal, the cult’s influence on the Warden Eternal’s current existence might result in him actually achieving a full takeover of your body should his metal form be forcefully terminated, creating more undesirable outcomes for all involved. Of course she mentions that he isn’t too fond of the possibility of dying or his death basically triggering the cult’s original intent and figures that if you just accept facts it would basically free him of the burden to live, in exchange for your life and freedom.

She restates all of the points Locke did, showing you video evidence of the damage unrestrained Prometheans have collected from the Master Chief and all spartans that ever encountered them. You watched as Warden Eternal dismissed humanity and any good will that could come from them taking up the Mantle of Responsibility (thought, to be honest, humanity as it was would be horrible caretakers of the universe, so past-Dan DID kind of have a point). It was clear that Dan was very much capable of being a destructive force worthy of being deemed as such, from what you could see.

Still, you reiterated your own points as calmly as possible. Wishing you had more concrete evidence (outside of bringing your mother or numerous other innocent people into this mess) to back your claims of Dan being committed to simply observing humanity, adding that the cult’s inability to get him to fuse with a body prior to your stumbling into him. He wasn’t ‘just’ the Warden Eternal anymore. While he was capable of immense destruction and human casualties he never once did more than bad-mouth them. Dan had ample opportunities to act but never did so. He wasn’t a trojan horse.

Halsey has Locke leave and brings in the Master Chief to try to give his opinion on the matter, thinking he, who actually met and dealt with Warden Eternal numerous times, whom she knew you admired (like everyone else).

Chief gives a brief, rather unbiased account of his experiences but refrains from answering Halsey’s question on if he thought the Warden was still dangerous. When asked, he says he doesn’t have a complete understanding of the last 2-3 years of the Warden’s current existence to be able to confidently conclude an opinion.

(this is meta but, yes, dream protagonist has all knowledge of most of Halo material and knows of Cortana and Chief’s relationship and parting but its never outright said.)

Knowing John’s struggles, you think that might be the reason he has decided to remain neutral at the moment. Halsey admonishes him for his lack of resolve but understands that she knew this could have been the case when she brought him into this. (Maybe Halsey was aware of John’s feelings and was indirectly helping him get closer with this almost scary mirroring of events? It didn’t feel malicious on her part. She genuinely wanted his opinion and trusted him to approach this situation better than they could).

At a current stand-still, you felt entirely pissed off by your helplessness and everyone’s refusal to even consider your experience! You turn your rage towards Halsey and decide to hit her where SHE likely would hurt, bringing up her looking down on you and saying that while your existence might just be a flash in the pan, everyone will forget the person, the woman, Dr. Halsey after she dies. You bring up hugely important women in history and how their efforts were ultimately downplayed, especially in the scientific sector. How people will continue to assume she wasn’t brilliant and just slept her way to the top to get grant money and that she basically stole ideas from other scientist, even if it was a collaboration of humanity’s finest minds.

(and because it’s a fucking dream) It’s exactly the shit that got under Halsey’s skin and, in a lapse of judgement (or just overinflated ego with her favorite spartan present), she lowers the glass barrier and uses every step she takes to get to you to give a run down on her hardships and chides you for your lack of common sense when given control of something far more powerful than you could ever understand.

You clocked her right in the face, breaking a finger or two from the force and lack of finesse.

Halsey falls to the ground with a broken nose but the Master Chief probably broke your jaw in addition to many other facial bone structures when he put you down face-first into the ground to restrain you.

Dan was absolutely furious and yelled at the over-use of force to restrain an un-augmented human but the lack of suppressive gun fire being leveled in his direction was an obvious sign of him staying put.

“Fucking run, Dan!” You managed to muffle out from having your face dug into the floor.

“I refuse to let even a piece of me leave!” Dan yells and eloquently adds that you’re a fucking moron for starting a fight when you’re the one who will (and is currently) suffering the consequences of throwing fists around a spartan. A SECOND TIME he might add!

You wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, mostly from the excruciating pain.

It was definitely love you were feeling at this most inappropriate of times, you knew that for certain. (god this was so fucking cute to experience).

Halsey cooled down quiet a bit during the down time and stood back up to coldly admonish you for your foolish temper.

“Then don’t exploit it, Fucker!” You growled in retort.

You are then put on a stretcher by the white uniforms and are entertained by armed escort to medical while a nurse is waved off by Dr. Halsey for the moment.

Only the Master Chief, Dr. Halsey, and Dan are left alone in the room and Dan uses it to calmly ask for leniency on your behalf. “She’s a hotheaded ape at times but one of the betters of your race.”

Dr. Halsey and the Chief quietly contemplate this for a brief moment before silently leaving Dan by himself in the room.

Walking to Medical together, Halsey bring ups the issue of using something as flimsy as ‘love’ to keep the Warden on a leash.

John simply agrees that it is love but doesn’t disclose his opinion on if it would be an effective tool.

She then quietly asks if killing them both through means as humane as possible would be worth the risk instead of something/someone/the environment killing either of them ‘in the wild’ or, at the least, the protagonist's natural death might just be delaying the calamity for future minds to worry of.

John is confident that humanity will find a means but otherwise has no opinion other than Warden Eternal is ‘stable’ (not currently dangerous but still does have the capacity for great harm).

Halsey isn’t too fond of John’s judgement but agrees that maybe a solution could be found should both the Warden and protagonist be persuaded to take part in a few tests from time-to-time.

John is secretly relieved to hear of this, his thoughts of Cortana and their two painful goodbyes still a scar that makes itself known from time to time.

(and the dream ends more or less around here. I have day-dreamed a bit where Dan bounds a small piece of himself to one of your spinal cord bones so that the mind-meld is 10% both ways so you can ‘feel’ his emotions too, as wild of an experience that is. Another point was that John and Halsey’s hope pans out and technology does ultimately progress to a point where, when the protagonist eventually dies to dementia in her old age, Dan slots the bonded bone and metal fragment into an advanced android body and ‘uploads’ his picture perfectly preserved memories of them (both good and bad) into the mix to basically resurrect the protagonist with almost perfect accuracy. You get to survive into the future beside him. His fondness for humanity slowly growing throughout the decades and culminating in him actually defending humanity in the many defensive wars it found itself in.

No, he never changes his mind that humanity is not fit for the mantle but believes it is worth preserving for future generation to flourish.)

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aplatonic-alpaca · 3 years ago

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Question. How do you feel about Undertale and its themes?

Taking the game as a whole, I don't really think all that much about its themes tbh.

I think the most about how revolutionary of a game it was at the time, for being a choice-based game where the choices actually mattered.

And I especially liked how meta it was. That any other game you wouldn't think twice about going on a killing spree hunting down monsters. But here, it's a literal genocide. A fictional universe has never felt so real to me as Undertale's world does. I still to this day think about what Sans' fight means on a meta level. And I remember experiencing the game for the first time through watching a let's play, and it was horrifying to realize that, had I played it myself, I surely would have unknowingly killed Toriel.

Based on you sending this ask to my blog here, I'm guessing by "themes" you're specifically talking about themes of Friendship, Love, and/or Empathy.

So, I did a rewatch of both the Pacifist and Genocide runs, and... I actually came across a lot of loveless antagonism.

After the boss fight with Flowey in the Pacifist run, he explains that he is "unable to love" when he's Flowey. On one side I'm glad that the "love" here so clearly encompasses all forms of love, but as a person who identifies as Loveless and genuinely don't feel like I experience "love" the same way that others do, it always hurts to see this trope.

I can't tell if this is better or worse in the genocide run. It's further explained that Flowey's saving and restarting and experimenting in alternate realities where he killed people is what made him so apathetic to everything and everyone. But its also at its worst where Flowey outright says "it's not worth living in a world without love."

Personally, I feel like my emotions are "dialed down" a lot from how others experience theirs. I'm not sure if its a low empathy thing, an anxiety thing, or something else or some mix of factors, but that's a big reason why I call myself loveless. And the past few years I've realized and come to terms with this, and so it hurts now whenever I see a villainous "emotionless" character who is framed as being a terrible fate to have.

I also think that the concept is never actually done right. It's really hard to make a character actually emotionless. Flowey quite clearly expresses emotions throughout the game - surprise, anger, fear in the genocide run, etc. Whether it was the point or not for Flowey to "actually" have emotions, I don't know, but the pacifist run ends with him being the only one unable to be saved and him dreading his return to being a flower unable to feel emotions like love. I remember being sad about this years ago and wishing he could be saved. But now I want to see that even more so, while being explored that he's not beyond saving the way he is.

However! I also noticed that he specifically says "Compassion" where most other series would instead say "Empathy." It's very common for series to vilify people who can't feel empathy. So that's pretty neat. And I think its also very interesting how this solidifies Undertale's themes as not about "empathy" but instead about "compassion." The word "empathy" is never used in the entire series, actually.

Nothing about the series' views on Friendship bothered me personally. But since the Pacifist route is heavily about befriending the entire cast, I'm very curious how other aplatonics may feel about it!

#this has been sitting in my inbox for so long very sorry about that #undertale #aplatonic #apl #apl discussion #but yeah i'm very aegoplatonic and platonic-favorable so i'm not the best to ask when it comes to analyzing and critizicing platonic themes #but these are all of my general thoughts and impressions

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momtaku · 4 years ago

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i feel like one of the biggest issues in the levi fandom in general all comes down to superbowl. i know you're convinced you're right which is cool. but i've read many different metas and takes and i have to say all of them are pretty well supported too. in my honest opinion, i truly think it could go either way. the way u view the super bowl really defines how you view eruris relationship. i just wish people could accept that. we have peoples on both side claiming theyre 100% right and there’s no other way to view it, both using parts of interviews and smartpasses that appeal to them. i wonder why it’s so hard to understand that isym left it so vague that it could go either way. eruris devotion is not as “obvious” as you claim. before stumbling across your blog i didn’t even think it was that significant a relationship. i cant deny it now but i wonder why it’s so hard for you or tsuki to get that not everyone is going to agree with your takes just because you think it’s textually supported. there’s soo many fans who watch the show and have no idea eruri is a thing until they join the fandom. it doesn’t make them stupid it just means we took different things from the manga. for some the devotion was plain obvious, for others it wasn’t. for some the devotion is interesting, for others it isn’t. why not just accept that?

Oh god please don’t lump Tsuki in with the likes of me 😂 What I am about to say about Tsuki has a Disclaimer for mistakes and misinterpretation because what follows are my thoughts about her--but I’d say her bias is best summed up as “the intricacies and possibilities of language”. If you’ve perceived a ship bias on her blog, I think it’s more that she sometimes pushes back on mistranslations she sees. She takes translation more seriously than anyone I’ve met. She’d rather lose an arm than contribute to a false narrative running loose in the wild. She realizes translation is a powerful weapon and wants it wielded fairly. For instance, one thing she’s expressed to me is that the Japanese ship fandoms are usually careful to preface “this is one way you can read this”, but when those thoughts come over to tumblr it becomes “this is the only way to read this.” I think that bothers Tsuki both because it’s unfair to the language she loves and to those who don’t speak it. And argh... let me just toss heart eyes all over tsuki. I really appreciate what she does. Helpful fandom translators are a gift. I appreciate that she’s open to eruri and levihan. I respect that she enjoys both ships and can see both sides. She’s not the enemy here. She’s helped me be more balanced and fair.

But otherwise this is such a good ask and I agree with much of what you're saying. I want to be clear that I don’t see it as my job to convince people. I'm not writing for that reason. I'm offering a viewpoint, so I'm not pressed or bothered by the existence of other viewpoints. I'm happy they exist because thinking about things from various angles has benefitted me and is a great way to consume media.

I make it clear on my about page that I write my opinions and not the canon thoughts of Hajime Isayama. My blog description plainly states my shipping bias. With me you can say the ingredients are clearly on the tin. I don’t try to hide that. There's not a lot that ruffles my feathers in fandom but I will say that when I happen upon "unbiased" meta writers I do sigh deeply. We all have biases and like it or not it’s obvious to anyone reading.

I will say at this point though in the manga there are topics where I'm done looking at all the angles. I've followed the snk meta community for 7 years. I've been open minded. I've read everything there is to read and spent my time examining my ideas to see how they hold up. I've changed my mind on plenty of topics because of this. My shipping preference being one of those actually. My words probably have a level of confidence that they didn't in my early meta writing days. So yeah, there are topics where I think I am 100% right, but the important point is I don’t call anyone else 100% wrong. I don’t take potshots at other shipping communities.

I think the main thing I’d push back on from your ask is that I’d say the way people define serum bowl is less about how you view Eruri and more how you view Erwin himself. At least that's what I've seen. Erwin’s negative qualities are a starting point for many. In sports terms I’d say it’s like some people automatically handicap him at -20 and he has to pull out from there. Part of that may be the anime’s harsher portrayal. I’ve heard some say his trope is one they don’t like. Others admit to an inherent bias against strong male authority figures. As you say, we all see things differently. We all bring baggage and bias into what we read. Cultural bias is there as well. Some themes go down better with certain audiences. Erwin being viewed as a cold emotionless leader who wrongly hid his motivations is a largely Western read. Some of Tsuki’s writings have touched on this. I’ll link to a few if you want to read more: cultural consideration about Erwin in general, chapter 72 from a cultural lens and a Japanese article on Erwin’s charms.

Regarding your last sentence, I don’t know what you want me to accept here. As I said initially, I’m not interested in convincing anyone. I don’t think anyone is stupid for thinking differently. I’m writing for me. I’m writing for anyone who wants to read my thoughts. The anons I get have asked for my opinion so I share that with them. I’m sorry if this frustrates you.

One thing I’ve been told is unique to the AoT community is the prevalence of meta writers and the authority they wield. Basically the criticism is that meta writers are the BNFs and not the artists and fic writers. I haven’t been in many communities so I can’t say if that’s true, but the idea has always bothered me. My meta is opinion and bias spoken in a (hopefully) coherent and entertaining way. It’s to be read, weighed and then discarded as a reader forms their own opinions. If I haven’t made that clear enough, I am now.

Thanks for the ask and the discussion it opened up.

#chatting with friends #meta writers #sorry this is so long #just wow that was a lot #tsuki I hope you're ok with my thoughts regarding you #it's how I see you #meta writer discussion #fandom things

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darlingpetao3 · 4 years ago

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House of W (Multiple!Wells x Reader, Chapter 4)

Rating: T

Summary: After having to deal with the deaths of an infinite number of Harrison Wells in the Multiverse, you, a magic-wielding meta, have a breakdown and unwittingly create a happy, fictitious sitcom life with some of your favourite men. In a world of comedy and cameos, can Team Flash and an out-of-town magician break through your powers to save you? And what if you don’t want to be saved...?

A/N: Alright! Here’s where we continue from where Team Flash left off. We’ll see Chapter 3 from their perspective, and somethings might make a bit more sense as well as raise more questions!

Tag List: @fandomdancer @bluesclues-1234 @pinkdiamond1016 @crissymadlock @firstofficer-tilly @disneyoncerlover815 @marvel-lady10 @thecaptainsgingersnap @noctvrnalmoth @alexxlynn @dontbedumb3 @heyl0lwhatsup @ryou-cosmos @arianalilyblack @sonnensplitter @imagine-yourself-happy

PROLOGUE | CHAPTER 1 | CHAPTER 2 | CHAPTER 3

Barry is the first to sprint out of the Cortex, leaving everyone else in the dust and papers flying.

The rest of Team Flash and Zatanna rush after the Speedster down the halls of S.T.A.R. Labs as fast as they can to the elevator. Only when they reach it are they met by Barry to inform them of your discovered whereabouts.

“She’s in the basement,” he tells them. “You have to see this.”

Indeed, they all take a ride down to the building’s lowermost level—an enormous concrete space and incredibly high ceilings. But there is one thing very much out of the ordinary here.

“Holy Forcefield, Batman…” Cisco says at the sight before them all.

A glowing, translucent purple sphere surrounds what looks to be an empty set—the set of your magical sitcom everyone had been watching for the past two episodes. It’s eerily dark and quiet. Chester can’t seem to resist its beauty and mystery as he walks even closer toward it and reaches out a hand.

“Careful Chester-!” Caitlin warns him a little too late. Chester yanks his arm back after touching the forcefield with a yelp. He looks at everyone.

“Are you hurt?” a concerned Barry asks.

“I…” Chester shakes his head in disbelief. “I saw something awful. It was, uh… from my childhood. I thought I’d forgotten it…”

“Why don’t you go sit down for a bit?” Caitlin ushers the poor traumatized man to a seat by the wall.

Meanwhile, Zatanna utters a few backwards phrases and moves her hands in the direction of the purple sphere. The gang waits to hear of what she’s learning.

“Just as I thought,” she says at last. “This forcefield (Y/N) has put up is embedded with Anarchy Magic. And it seems she’s made it so that whoever touches or tries to break through her magic will experience trauma and heartbreak from the trespasser’s life.”

“How tragically fitting,” Caitlin comments sadly as she thinks of you and all you’ve been through. Barry takes this information in and stares into the darkened sitcom set.

“What are we going to do?” Cisco wonders out loud.

“This could be our chance,” Barry says, already churning out the beginnings of a plan. “Zatanna, do you think you could breach through (Y/N)’s forcefield with your magic?”

“I’ll need a little more time to study it, but yeah,” Zatanna assures, “I think I can.”

“Great. We’ll prepare ourselves while we wait.”

“Wait for what?” Caitlin asks. Barry turns to her.

“For Episode Three.”

~ ~ ~ ~

The part of the S.T.A.R. Labs basement which Team Flash has access to has now been essentially transformed into half campground/half studio audience seating. The latter was Cisco’s idea, naturally.

Everyone had stayed the night on mats and foldable tents found in the Starchives. A certain longhaired engineer even made the correlation that this felt a lot like camping out in line in front of a theater for a much-anticipated movie release.

After staying up too late theorizing and plotting your safe return, the campers are rudely awakened by a jingle—a very groovy disco-sounding theme.

“Iiiiit’s startiiiing!” Cisco shouts, making sure to grab his pillow and a bag of pre-popped popcorn

The others—Caitlin, Allegra, and Chester grumble and mozy out of their sleeping bags, whereas Barry and Zatanna burst out of theirs with a raring purpose.

Through the forcefield, they can see a flurry of Wells men running around the house doing various tasks in preparation for your impending baby. It all feels very real to the onlookers, not fake or acting on any of the doppelgangers’ parts. They really do believe you’re having a baby.

Barry doesn’t want to fully believe it. Part of him still wants to believe this is all for show—a fictional world with pre-planned plots and storylines. It would be so much easier for him if that were the truth.

Because the other option was a lot more painful to deal with.

Even as everyone watches and laughs along at the antics, none of the ‘stars’ on the other side of the magic forcefield can hear them.

“She looks like she’s gonna burst,” Barry notes at your exponentially growing size. “At this rate, she’ll have the baby by the end of the episode. We need to help her. Zatanna, Caitlin, are you ready for what we talked about last night?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Caitlin says.

“Let’s do this,” Zatanna replies.

“Great.” Barry sighs a worried breath. “Caitlin, I’m giving you this comms so that we can keep in contact even on the inside. Zatanna has bewitched it to look like an earring. And I’m going to let Cisco take the reins on walking you through what to say since he is apparently this show’s number one fan.”

“Gotcha, boss.”

“Uh, guys?” Allegra pipes up. “Her water just broke!”

“It’s now or never,” Barry exhales.

Zatanna holds out her palms toward Caitlin, then speaks in a clear voice, “Mlaer moctis eht edisni ylefas niltiaC dnes.”

At this, Caitlin vanishes before the team’s very eyes. Everyone can only hope she is safely on the other side of the forcefield.

“And now we wait,” Zatanna confirms.

“Popcorn?” Cisco proffers his bag to everyone.

“Shhhhh!”

With Caitlin now officially in the sitcom realm—clad in a white doctor’s coat and a stethoscope hanging around her neck—the door whisks open in front of her to reveal Nash Wells. Even for her, seeing his face again is a shock. While she and Frost were away with Doctor Tannhauser for a time, she had received word from Barry saying that Nash and the other Wells had sacrificed themselves.

And yet, here they all are, standing in the doorway with panicked eyes about the fact that you’re having their baby.

Oh, right! This is my cue, she thinks.

“Uh, hi,” Nash says, a little confused. “Who are you?”

~~“Remember, you can’t give your real name in case (Y/N) catches on. You have to play along,”~~ Cisco advises in her ear. She remembers that he, along with the rest of Team Flash, can see her on the other side of the forcefield. To her, however, she merely sees a plain wall.

“Yes, hi! My name is C… uhh...”

~~“Say Elsa, say Elsa, say El-”~~

“Elsa?”

Dammit, Caitlin curses mentally. Frost laughs in the back of her head while Cisco cackles in her comms. The doctor, now thoroughly annoyed, plays with her earring to turn off communication with the outside world. Cisco’s prank could have cost them big time. She’s going to do this herself. No distractions.

“I’m a doctor,” Caitlin continues. “I was making the rounds in the neighbourhood and heard some yelling coming from your home. Are you in need of a doctor?”

“Actually, yes,” Harry confirms. It’s so strange. He’s looking right at Caitlin—they all are—but they truly do not recognize her. It makes your friend realize just how powerful you really are.

Meanwhile on the outside, Team Flash is having mixed emotions about the birth of your baby. Barry is still in disbelief that he is becoming an uncle before his eyes. Cisco, Chester, and Allegra are fanboying and fangirling over the moment. And then there is Zatanna, watching with a neutral expression.

They watch Caitlin help deliver baby Liberty, although entirely and conveniently out of view from the “camera” and the transparent forcefield.

But when the surprise of Belle arrives, well, that earns literal applause from Cisco.

“Do you think they’re real?” Barry quietly asks Zatanna away from everyone else.

“I’m still unsure,” she answers. “They sure all look happy, though.”

Barry doesn’t respond to this.

Once the babies are safe with their cooing fathers and you’ve magically seemed to have cleaned up from the ordeal of birthing twins, you approach Caitlin.

“Doctor Elsa, I can’t thank you enough for your help today,” you say to Caitlin. For a moment, she forgets you’re referring to her with the accidental alias. “What a coincidence that you showed up at my door just as I was going into labour! You must have a sixth sense about these things.”

“It’s a gift!” she says pleasantly. “But really, how have you been doing? Are you well?”

You give her a curious look. “Yes, of course I’m well. I have two beautiful daughters and four wonderful husbands. A house full of love. I couldn’t be happier.”

Caitlin knows she shouldn’t press on anything about the ‘behind the scenes’ of your sitcom reality, but this is all so confusing and mysterious that her scientific mind can’t help but form a myriad of questions.

“What is it?” you ask.

Caity, I’m not sure… Frost begins to voice her worry in her head.

“It’s just…” Caitlin drops to a whisper so as to not let the Wells men hear, “how are they here?”

Your face drops. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“Your husbands. They… died. Vanished. How did you do all of this?”

Your entire body glows with a purple aura, and Caitlin half-wonders if you’re starting to levitate slightly.

You look like a vengeful and magical angel of death.

“Get out,” you tell her.

“(Y/N), no, please, listen,” she tries, but it’s too late. A powerful blast of energy hits Caitlin in the gut, knocking the wind from her lungs and backwards. Her body comes in contact with something hard, then squishy, and…

“Ronnie?” she says. “No, please…”

What she sees is all around her as she’s pushed back through the forcefield—the death of her husband, Ronnie Raymond. It’s like it’s happening all over again, watching as he flies up into the windy vortex above the city as Firestorm. The last time she’ll ever see him alive again.

“Caitlin? Caitlin!” Barry worries over his friend. She looks totally out of it as she lays on the concrete floor, safely back in reality once more. “Are you okay?”

Caitlin grunts, her brow furrowed. She’s trying to keep everything she saw inside. For a second time.

“Yup, I’m good,” she claims. Allegra and Cisco help her up and over to their makeshift audience seats.

Barry sighs and soon becomes lost in thought. “You know what I still don’t get?”

“What’s that?” Zatanna replies.

“What about in the last episode where they were working at S.T.A.R. Toy Manufacturing? Those were our hallways upstairs. And I don’t see any extra sets. Do you think the forcefield, I dunno, moved with them?”

“If that’s the case, it would be as if (Y/N)’s magic is writing and rewriting itself. And if so, as she moves, everything around her gets recreated. Like the era-changing set. That’s what we see on screen. It’s like a battery that was left on.”

“So what, does that mean eventually she’s going to run out of power? Or short circuit?”

“That, I still don’t know. This kind of magic she wields is unlike anything I’ve seen before. I’m learning about it as much as you are.”

Cisco does a little jog over the two conversing theorists.

“How is she?” Zatanna asks the engineer.

“Not physically hurt… but I can see that she is inside. Emotionally.”

Barry’s lips press into a thin line.

“Hey, so, do you think the Wells can… get out of her forcefield radius?” Cisco asks the magician. Instead, Barry answers first.

“Knowing (Y/N), she wouldn’t have made that an option.”

#reader insert #harrison wells x reader #harrison wells imagine #harrison wells fanfiction #harry wells x reader #harry wells imagine #nash wells x reader #nash wells imagine #sherloque wells x reader #sherloque wells imagine #hr wells x reader #hr wells imagine #the flash imagine #the flash fanfiction

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monkey-network · 5 years ago

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Why Shrek IS The Best

Tastes can change, you know? And it’s less about “What’s good about this now compared to before”, more of “Why would you like this now as opposed to before”? Unless allergic, you didn’t get why dark cola or hot chips tasted bad to you as a child, but when you grow up you can come to understand and appreciate it. Shouldn’t pressure yourself, that makes things worse, but things can certainly align in helping this newfound respect you get for something you’d believe you would never want again. That really is where I stand with Dreamworks’ Shrek. As a kid, while Toy Story left me traumatized for a while, Shrek left me side-eyeing with how crass and ugly it looked and I never wanted to think of it. But, as I grew up to respect animation a lot more, 2018 was where I looked back at Shrek and soon come to understand how wrong I was and how much greatness it has that I now consider it an all time great. And with it getting inducted into the Library of Congress, I thought it was finally time to present what I see in this film. Let’s do this right with...

The SOMEBODY

Now this frame has been meme’d to death. If there’s anything iconic about this film, ‘bout the franchise as a whole, it’s the exact moment when our main character charges out of his outhouse as Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ gets going. But this honestly just says a lot about Dreamworks’ direction from its previous films where compared to Disney that’ll take their time making the setup before getting into the hype point for its lead, Shrek gets going in one minute if we don’t count the logo intro. Not even The Emperor’s New Groove, which was going for the same tone before Shrek even released, took more of it’s time with the fairy tale aspect of it in its intro. Shrek literally wipes his ass with the fairy tale aspect before giving us the SOMEBODY, all around a minute. This frame really shows that this is sticking to the Disney formula in some way because it’s wasting no time getting into it. It represents the more brisk pace Shrek has with pulling you into what it’s gonna be about. This overall frame works in its thematic and parody aspect and I’ve yet to see anything top this exact moment, not even the greatest films I’ll ever remember.

But enough about the fact that I made a whole paragraph about this one frame of the movie. Let’s dive into what I say is a piece of the heart for this film.

The Earnestness

Speaking of Disney, you probably notice that their films have some cushioning in their presentation, like they generally don’t show things with a straightforward lens; there’s some theatrics in the way their best movies present themselves. That’s not a problem, mind you, but that helped me understand how Shrek does things very differently whether you consider it parody or not. While it throws mockery at the played out conventions associated with fairy tales, especially its most subtle jab at copyright, it doesn’t full on say fairy tales are annoying and bad. Hell, the film IS a fairy tale adapted from a fairy tale about a fookin’ OGRE that can eat lightning and kills with farts. But, it’s an accurate and earnest way to view a fairy tale from a somewhat realistic lens. Let’s take Shrek’s journey for instance.

Typically, the main character would want to experience something more; explore new horizons, prove themselves, find their calling. Shrek off the bat doesn’t need or desire any of that. He’s content with his life, beside the angry mob he casually scares off, and throughout the film he’s not interested in anything else outside getting the squatters out his swamp. He happily makes a deal with the villain of the film to exile those innocent refugees off his land so he could then build a wall to keep everybody out. Bringing up Emperor’s New Groove again, Shrek and Kuzco are the few characters I know that are actively antagonistic even when they’re forced into their situation from outside forces. However unlike Kuzco that gets to be emperor again but learns humility, Shrek is in the same spot as before but learns that there are people out here that can love him for who he is. I can’t say there’s anything grand about that, but it doesn’t need to be unlike the many Disney or any film that tries to shower you with the grandest themes. The relationships Shrek has with Donkey and Fiona are the most grounded I’ve ever seen because they’re not only natural, they’re hardly dolled up with the bells and whistles made to either drum up the biggest laughs or tug the heart strings viciously. When I think about it, I honestly could see myself in Shrek. He isn’t made to be a legend, he isn’t some secret genius or lost prince, he’s just an every-man ogre that wants to live peacefully or meet SOMEBODY that doesn’t treat as someone to be feared or disgusted at. Everything Shrek says is something anybody could or would say if they were his shoes because he, and the film in general, is the most grounded without making it all distractedly meta or genre-savvy. This is generally helped by...

The Dounkaey

Everyone’s talked about how Donkey is the best confidant for Shrek and Fiona. How he’s most true to himself to where he’s the most openly musical character in the film, and how he’s the most balanced here with his comedic vs serious moments. But I gotta say it too: Donkey is one of the greatest sidekicks ever. He’s a motormouth, but is never annoying to where you wish he left the film. The couple times he is purposefully annoying, not for a joke, is when he knows Shrek isn’t being truthful. He truly gets to know Shrek on this journey, and is the character Shrek gets to capacity to actually loosen up to, so it’s fitting that he’d be the one to push Shrek when the ogre’s sounding more vague than usual. Even when he’s harshly insulted, Donkey doesn’t take it as bad as when Shrek kept trying to shut him out again in the 3rd act after the Hallejulah sequence which is the scene in every Shrek movie where’s there a super sad song because Shrek is alone and yadda ya. I’ll get to it in a bit, but he is as much responsible in providing Fiona that seed of doubt that Shrek wouldn’t love her as the ogre she is. Donkey is the greatest friend because he wants to be there for those who are okay with him being around, and while you could give and take sidekick animals in your notable films with them in it, this film really wouldn’t have happened without him. Speaking of Fiona, I won’t retread what’s been said before like with Donkey but I did want to bring up something I haven’t seen many talk about,,,

The Love for An Ogre

I’ve seen many say the scene where Shrek overhears Fiona talk about “Who could love an ugly beast?” and misinterprets that as her talking about him as a cliched or contrived downside to the film, but I feel that a defense can be made. It personally makes sense that Shrek would misinterpret that and take it personally because 1) Who else would Fiona be talking about? 2) How would he know she was talking with Donkey? 3) Why would he just barge in on her? 4) Has no one considered that this moment is parallel to when Fiona overhears Shrek’s conversation with Donkey the night before?

Fiona is very much the antithesis to Shrek’s character where she can very much be open about what she wants but is scared at the idea of anyone figuring out who she really is. She’ll gladly be gross, kick ass, eat the young of a bird she let explode, but won’t let anyone see her true face. That’s why her curse makes sense, and why Shrek would take a fondness to her despite her initial disdain of him rescuing her. Fiona’s a character where the surface level beauty is her weakness as opposed to Shrek where it’s internal. Which is why when she overhears Shrek open up to Donkey about his societal isolation, she’s soon more comfortable around him. And it’s why when she opens up to Donkey about her looks, Shrek would unfortunately take it personal enough. I ask again, why would Shrek barge in on a conversation he wasn’t aware of or who she was talking about to not take it about anything else but him when what he heard such a cut so deep, especially from a character that bears his similar issues? It also helps that Donkey was in on it, as Shrek feels reasonably betrayed by the only other person he’s come to appreciate in his life. Contrived as it seems, it’s thematically important and appropriate to the conflict of Shrek’s character and the film overall. Don’t know how this could be conveyed any other way because it adds up at least.

I just wanna know how Shrek got to Faarquard’s and back by sunrise like did he run cuz that looked like a huge distance to travel on foot but anyways...

I’m sure things could’ve worked out if Shrek knew, either by barging in that night or through Donkey, but I think it’s fitting that the climax takes place at the wedding. After Shrek and Donkey understand their friendship, after Donkey reciprocates the Dragon’s love (more ways than one), and when Shrek grasps the mistake he made to charge over to Fuccquad’s chapel, we get to...

The End

After everything, we get to the moment where Shrek and Fiona get to share their first kiss, Fiona permanently transforms into an ogre, and we get this exchange. One of my favorite exchanges in the whole film:

Shrek: “Are you all right?” Fiona: “Well yes. But I don’t understand... I’m supposed to be beautiful.”

Shrek: “But you ARE beautiful”

We don’t need any other vows to understand their relationship was built up to this. This moment where Shrek can reaffirm Fiona’s feelings of being able to be herself in every way, because she allowed him to be himself in every way before. That’s that mutual love, baby, that just gets me every time and makes this film one of the best romance stories I know as well, even when it isn’t solely about the romance. This is Shrek’s story, and there’s nothing more touching than seeing this outcast not only get another to view him as a friend, not only someone to love, but people, if only a couple, to actually wanted to get to know him. I know Shrek 2 expands on this more, and it’s considered a golden sequel, but I will always cherish the first movie for how much it tells us off the bat while appearing as a “Take That” to Disney films. This is the genesis of Shrek feeling more accepted for himself and society and it just bears so much good commentary while being a good adventure nonetheless. Like you could say this film indeed has... dimensions? “You were trying to meme about la-”

The Conclusion

Mentioning it, I always had this thought with the conversation Shrek and Donkey had of why Shrek didn’t just “be an ogre” and pillage Fuccnut’s fortress. It’s possible Shrek could’ve taken out Faarquid himself, but that would mean being the beast he knows people have shunned him for, grabbed the torches and pitchfolks for, made him feel worse for. Shrek enjoys being an ogre, but he doesn’t like how society makes him feel lesser as an ogre. That really is what the four films have been about for him and what I’ve come to appreciate about these films personally. It can be easy to love yourself even when there are others out here that stand against you, but it’s hard to consider that anyone else could love you for who you are in spite of how you try to present yourself. But if there’s anything Shrek showed me, it’s that it’s possible. There can/will be people out here who appreciate the real you, will be there as much as you want to for them, and can help you realize more about yourself as opposed to suffering to silence eternally. Generally ideal, I know, but this film in the least offered me that thought in the most balanced way possible. It’s incredible how much of a tightrope this film has in its parody and sincerity and that makes its induction in the National Film Registry and being the first ever Best Animated Award winner pretty justified all things considered.

I know this film, the character, has been a meme over the years. As Schaffrillas mentions in his video, the direction Dreamworks made because of Shrek’s success kinda turned it into a heel people clowned on because, in theory, it was nothing but a joke with the onions and the swamp and IT’S NEVER OGRE. Then again, like I said in the beginning, tastes change. I’d say with Schaff’s masterful analyses on the film series and 3GI’s Shrek Retold and Shrekfest, the perception of the film sure enough shifted like the perception of Megamind. It’s one thing for a movie to blow people away or leave them thinking it’s horrible beyond belief, it’s another to take the time to then look back and see how those feelings have changed. For Shrek, it’s a film that was able to trudge out of the meme era to be a film many consider a strong, rewatchable, and unique. Like the beauty of Spongebob, Shrek is a considered a classic because as in the times as it appeared when it released, this film actually stood on its own with the most enjoyable and meaningful timelessness, exploring the desired love for the self, that deserves to be recognized. What else can I say, people?

It’s The Best

#Shrek #dreamworks #dreamworks animation #animation #movies #cartoons #reviews #analysis #long post #Good Stuff

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oumakokichi · 5 years ago

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What's your opinion on Kaito and Maki! I don't know if anyone's ever asked this before (sorry if yes) Ur blog is epic btw!

This question is pretty recent, so I feel like this is a great one to kick off with getting back into writing full meta! I know in the past I’ve answered a few brief questions on how I feel about Momota and Maki respectively, as well as their relationship in-game, but I don’t know if I’ve ever written at length about the two of them.

I also don’t know whether you want my opinions on them both as individual characters or their relationship together, so I’ll probably touch on both aspects! This ask will obviously include spoilers for the whole game, so I’ll talk more under the cut!

Momota and Maki are definitely two of the most important characters in the game. Both their dynamic with each other, as well as their eventual friendship with Saihara, are pivotal plot points that come up again and again. Momota’s good intentions and attempts to help Maki come out of her shell and self-imposed isolation from everyone else are initially met by her with skepticism, distrust, and a feeling that he’s being incredibly overbearing and putting his nose where it doesn’t belong—but in the end, she does find herself pulled in by his unrelenting optimism and offers of friendship.

As Momota helps Saihara begin to overcome his anxiety and self-doubt by pushing him forward and reaffirming that he believes in him, Maki also begins to face some of her own demons. Like Saihara, her issues are rooted in deep-seated trauma from a young age, though hers is considerably more severe as it concerns both physical and mental child abuse, as well as a life filled with violence and murder.

It’s interesting, because both Saihara and Maki struggle with what I would call self-loathing, but go about showing it in completely different ways. They both doubt their own ability to do anything right and feel that they’ll only hurt people in the end, but where Saihara overcompensates for this by trying to please everyone and being afraid of saying no, Maki’s approach is much firmer: she tries to shut everyone out completely, keeping everyone at arm’s bay in order to prevent any attachments from forming in the first place. As someone who lost pretty much everything at such a young age, she’s clearly afraid of the same thing happening all over again, as well as wary of anyone who might try to get close to her, only to attempt to “take her out” in the same fashion that she’s had to kill people her entire life.

Momota’s persistence in striking up a friendship with her is therefore really, really interesting. It’s the first time in Maki’s life that anyone has ever been so adamant about wanting to get to know her. Considering how harsh and unfriendly she initially is, as well as the fact that her talent is revealed to everyone by the end of chapter 2, it would make complete sense if Momota wanted nothing to do with her, in her opinion. She’s used to being alone, and she’s already convinced herself by that point that it’s preferable to the alternative.

But Momota is a character who fundamentally refuses to take no for an answer. This is simultaneously both his best and worst trait, in my opinion: it’s literally right in his catch phrase, whenever he claims that he’s going to reach the stars someday. He runs purely on the idea of faith and belief. There’s no middle ground with him: either you trust someone implicitly, regardless of everything stacked against them, or you don’t. Shades of grey, especially at the beginning of the game, are virtually nil. It’s a very “shounen protagonist” sentiment that winds up being somewhat challenged for him as the game goes on.

He’s interested in Maki, and wants to know why she closes herself off in her research lab. When the finger is pointed at her in chapter 2 and she falls under suspicion of murdering Hoshi, he defends her even at the expense of making himself look worse, and even to the point of claiming that he would “bet everyone else’s lives” that she’s innocent (a line which was completely omitted in the localization and dub, but which you can still hear him say in the jp dialogue of the chapter 2 trial).

There’s absolutely no evidence to back Maki up or support her; Momota’s defense on her behalf stems more from the fact that he hates Ouma’s equally black-or-white “guilty until proven innocent” approach, and resents the attempts at mutual suspicion and paranoia that Ouma tries to force between them. Momota is, in a word, stubborn. He figures things out by “feel” or “intuition” and is extremely slow to change his opinions even when facts and evidence are presented before him.

Again, this can be a good trait: his loyalty means he’s the last person who would ever throw someone else under the bus, and it’s the main reason he succeeds in getting closer to someone as emotionally closed-off as Maki at all. It’s less of a good thing, however, in later chapters like chapter 4, where his stubborn refusal to look at the facts genuinely endangers everyone’s lives in the trial and results in a huge blow-out that threatens his friend group with Saihara especially, but really with the whole training trio.

It’s this stubbornness of his that really baffles Maki. Initially, she doesn’t know what to make of Momota’s attempts to befriend her. She assumes he must be reckless, or stupid, or both, to want to get close to someone as dangerous as she is. But as she gradually begins to let her walls down and starts opening up despite herself, it’s such a nice change to see her eventually starting to believe in herself and view herself more positively as a result of Momota’s own belief in her.

I think momoharu as a ship works really well and has potential specifically because of these themes of “self-love” and “believing in yourself” that come up in the main game’s narrative again and again. And unlike the dynamics between Momota and other characters, such as Saihara, I feel like Momota and Maki are on much more of an even footing, where the two of them can view each other as equals and aren’t afraid to challenge each other whenever one of them is in the wrong about something.

For example, Saihara and Momota have much more of an imbalanced, sometimes one-sided friendship. That’s not to say that they aren’t both extremely important friends to one another—but between Saihara’s inability to say no to people and Momota’s tendency to take charge and view himself as “the hero” while everyone else is his “sidekick,” their relationship becomes incredibly uneven very quickly.

Add to this Momota’s unspoken jealousy of Saihara’s talent and his pivotal importance to the rest of the group in trials, and it gets even messier. I’m reminded of the chapter 4 trial, when Saihara really goes against Momota’s opinion on something for the first time by proving that Gonta is the culprit, and Momota is livid. Even when all the proof is laid out before him, and even when he knows, logically, he feels so betrayed by Saihara’s lack of “belief” in him that his underlying jealousy bubbles up and he lashes out. The localization considerably dulled the impact of this, but in the original Japanese dialogue, Momota even stops referring to Saihara by his first name for a long time, referring to him much more coldly by his surname from the end of chapter 4 until the latter half of chapter 5.

Momota and Saihara never feel as though they’ve really escaped that “hero and sidekick” dynamic until the very end of chapter 5 when they say their farewells, and even then there’s a real hesitance with Saihara to call Momota out when he’s wrong or ask for an apology even when Momota owes him one. If the game had explored more of Momota’s jealousy and feelings of inadequacy compared to Saihara, I would have really loved that, and I feel like there would be real potential to explore how they could eventually be on even footing… but as it stands, in canon we don’t really get that, and most of Momota’s shortcomings and flaws are somewhat brushed aside after his death in favor of Saihara remembering him more fondly.

This isn’t to say that Momota doesn’t have any flaws when it comes to how he interacts with Maki, of course. His character has a lot of “toxic masculinity” baggage, including unironically believing really outdated things like “women shouldn’t be fighting, they should be raising children,” or thinking that women are inherently weaker physically and more fragile emotionally than men. Luckily though, Maki often consistently proves him wrong on all of these points: her ability to wipe the floor with him during their training sessions is of course part of it, but it’s worth noting that she’s also considerably more level-headed than Momota is in many ways.

Where Momota is superstitious and afraid of the occult to a comedic degree, Maki remains the rational, down-to-earth one who doesn’t believe in such things. Where Momota is prone to letting his pride and temper get the better of him and refuses to speak to Saihara or apologize for the things he said during their fight in chapter 4, Maki is the one who attempts to push them into interacting with each other again, and believes that Momota is being much too childish about the whole ordeal. Again and again, Maki proves Momota’s outdated and harmful stereotypes about women wrong, and isn’t afraid to poke fun at him or get exasperated with his bullshit whenever he’s being kind of a dick.

Her relationship with Momota works specifically because of how much it feels like the two of them are on a more even footing. Where Saihara somewhat meekly accepts the “sidekick” role, even when he thinks it’s unfair, Maki doesn’t really accept it or go along with it in the first place, beyond showing up for training sessions. And when she gradually begins to develop romantic feelings for him, it feels authentic—particularly because it ties back into the idea of Maki learning to believe in herself the same way that Momota has believed in her from the start.

Deep down, Maki is someone who fundamentally believes herself not only undeserving of, but borderline incapable of love. She feels as though any human emotions she might have once had were stomped out of her from a young age and that absolutely nothing remains, to the point where she says “even Kiibo is more human than she is.” This self-loathing and dehumanization are the main reasons she keeps people at arm’s length: she simply thinks she doesn’t deserve any kindness, and that even if it’s given to her, she doesn’t know how to reciprocate in turn.

Her entire character arc is about unlearning this, and gradually coming to accept that she does have the capacity to love, including love for herself and for others. I’ve seen some people who believe Tsumugi when she claims in the chapter 6 trial that she “gave Maki those feelings for Momota” for the sake of the show, but I feel that believing that at face value really doesn’t do justice to Maki’s autonomy as a character.

Even if Tsumugi somehow did insert those feelings there (which I highly doubt, especially considering how she blatantly lies about giving Momota his illness too despite pretty obviously not knowing he was sick prior to chapter 5), the whole point of Maki’s confession to Momota in chapter 5 and reaffirmation of those feelings in chapter 6 is that she eventually comes to believe that they’re her feelings, and no one else’s. As someone who was denied any free will or choice for her entire life, her coming to view Momota as someone precious to her, as well as herself as an individual capable of making decisions and loving other people, is an incredibly powerful arc of character growth. I honestly really love to see it.

And it’s clear that Maki coming to love and value herself as an individual is exactly what Momota wanted to see from her. We don’t really know if he reciprocated her romantic feelings or not since he dies without really giving her an answer. I personally think he spared her an answer because even if he had said he reciprocated, it only would’ve hurt her worse to see him die immediately afterward.

But what he does make really clear is that he fully believes that because she could come to love him, she could also eventually come to love herself. Whether it’s romantic or not, he clearly cherishes her a lot as a person and wants her to be happy. He wants her to live on as herself, and not any of the roles she’s had to take thus far in order to survive. She eventually does do this, and I think he would’ve been absolutely thrilled to see it happen.

All in all, I feel like momoharu has a lot of potential for character growth (both for Maki and Momota), as well as for cute moments, comic relief, and all around as a feel-good ship. Momota definitely has some issues to work out with misogyny and toxic masculinity, and while it’s certainly not Maki’s job to hold his hand and walk him through those things, she’s the type of person who doesn’t mind putting her foot down and telling him no when she feels like he’s crossed a line, which is exactly the type of dynamic I like to see in relationships.

Anyway, I’ll wind this up here. This was a really fun question to go into, thank you again anon! I had a lot of fun getting back into the swing of writing meta, and I’m glad I got a chance to write a little more about my thoughts on momoharu, and Momota and Maki as characters.

#ndrv3 #maki harukawa #kaito momota #momoharu #danganronpa #ask #anonymous #my meta #ndrv3 spoilers //#okay to reblog #tumblr almost ate this ask as soon as i tried to draft it #luckily i had my response still written up in word so i could repaste it but phew #tumblr being as functional as ever i see

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recurring-polynya · 4 years ago

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What comparisons can be made between renruki and Ichiruki? I often wondered about this.

This is such a hot button issue that as soon as I received this (perfectly polite) ask, my body tensed up and my brain went Am I being trolled?

It’s honestly a shame that there is so much bad blood behind this, because it is, in fact, a very interesting thing to talk about, and I am going to attempt to do so in good faith, because I love thinking about this kind of thing. Even though I am very openly a Renruki shipper, I love all three of these characters very much, and I think that Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship is very important! I am doing my best to be neutral, although I have not read very much Ichiruki fanfic/meta, so please give me a benefit of a doubt. Obviously, I can’t stop anyone from reblogging this and putting their own comments on it, but I have no interest in getting in debates over it, so don’t be surprised if I don’t engage.

This is both long, and I am sure some people don’t care, so I’m gonna put the rest under a cut. I have tried to hard to write this in a way that will not make anyone mad, but if you think it will make you mad, please give yourself the gift of not clicking on it.

So, what is the same between Ichigo and Renji? Lots, actually. Physically, they are both tall, strong, and have ridiculously colored spiky hair. They are outwardly grumpy, but secretly have soft, gooey centers. Neither one of them is dumb, but they are both dumbasses. They are protectors: they would rather take any amount of pain or damage onto themselves than see a loved one hurt. Their friends are everything to them, and that goes triple for Rukia.

How are they different, then? There are three major bullets:

- Ichigo is alive. Renji is dead. Perhaps this is a little flip, but Renji belongs to same world that Rukia does, and Ichigo does not. This is not a value judgment, it is just a fact: If Rukia ends up with Renji, she stays where she is. If she ends up with Ichigo, either Rukia or Ichigo have to make a huge change. I will get back to this.

- Youth vs. Experience. Ichigo is a 15-year old boy, as we are told about 1000 times. There is some mystery over how old Rukia and Renji are, but they have graduated from secondary education and are currently employed. I think it’s safe to assume that they are roughly close in age to each other, but I think Rukia may perceive Renji as seeming older than herself-- he graduated from school, and she didn’t; he’s on his third squad transfer, whereas she’s hasn’t budged from her initial, entry-level job, and he’s now middle management. However, the arc of the story we don’t get to see, is that over the timeskips, Rukia not only catches up to, but surpasses him. Also, not for nothing, but I think that in the same way Rukia is immediately drawn to Ichigo because of his resemblance to Kaien, I think she is also drawn to him for his resemblance to Young Renji-- a grumpy, prickly young man, leaking self-doubt from every pore, whom she is more able to be generous towards through the lens of age and experience. (And I think this comparison could support either ship)

- Ichigo is the protagonist. Rules don’t apply to him. Fate breaks on his sword. He represents the triumph of love or hard work or dreams or what have you over the cruel millstone of the world. Renji, on the other hand, is firmly bound to the rules of the world in which he inhabits. In fact, that is arguably the entire purpose of his character. Renji’s fights are often used to set the stakes of the conflict-- ah, Renji got mangled, this guy must be tough. In the Soul Society Arc, he is an antagonist because he is doing what he is supposed to. In the TYBW, Kubo literally throws the two of them in a pit to fight some asauchi just to make the point that Renji is a shinigami and Ichigo is something else.

Let’s jump over to Rukia for a moment. Rukia is a great character, one of my favorite characters in any media. Rukia contains multitudes. She is tough and strong, but often melancholy. She can be beautiful and elegant, but she also lies and breaks rules and tried to put Kon in a dead cat once. Emotionally, she likes to present a cool front, but she has a big, loving heart, and she feels deeply. As a character, all of this makes her very easy to project onto, which is why I think so many people OTP her with someone, no matter who.Some people choose to try to make her into one of these things or another, and some people try to keep her as the full bundle of contradictions that she is.

There is no romantic content in canon Bleach. There is no romantic content in canon Bleach. There are many, many scenes that can be interpreted romantically, but no one goes on a date, no one kisses. Ichigo gazes longingly into the eyes of all his friends, it’s just a thing he does. Orihime does explicitly proclaim at one point that she loves Rukia, although I suspect that in the original Japanese, it’s the word for “friendship love” and not the very-rarely-used “romantic love.” I have seen a scene-for-scene comparison of IchiHime “romantic moments” only it’s Chad and Uryuu (which I choose to believe supports IshiChad, rather than negates IchiHime, but we may all choose for ourselves!) My point is that shipping in Bleach is a DIY craft, which, when we’re all having a good time, is what makes it so fun.

So, bringing all of this together, given that Ichigo and Renji are fairly similar characters, why are the ships so different, and what makes one appeal to some people and be abhorrent to someone else?

I think about romance stories a lot. I actually took a class on romance novels in college and I just really like to think about the mechanics of stories. In the truest sense of the word, “romance” is about extremes-- about sailing the high seas and wearing ostentatious shirts and shouting off a cliff in a rainstorm. When we talk about romance as a genre, the characters tend to behave in a way that we would not prefer our actual romantic partners do, but the over-the-top nature of it makes us swoon and our hearts drop -- except when it doesn’t. What is heart-breakingly romantic to some people can be a huge turn-off to others. The biggest fight my husband and I have ever had was over a kdrama. The male lead was hiding his identity from the female lead in order to help her, and I found it all to be deeply, deeply romantic, and my husband turned to me and said “He is being dishonest with her and I think it’s morally wrong” and I almost died.

So, let’s break down some of the themes of the two ships, which I think gets at the meat of what you were asking. Now, like I said, shipping is very participatory, and anyone may have their own ideas of how these relationships would be, and I am a big fan of “a great writer can get away with anything”, but in broad strokes, I think that these are the themes of the two ships:

IchiRuki:

Love conquers all/ Love is enough to overcome differences of class, age, lifestyle, geography, etc.

Instant connections/Love at first sight

Love is a force of the universe that cannot be denied or defeated

Young love

Grand gestures

Your partner changes you (in a positive way)/You effect change in your partner

Your partner is the center of your world

Your partner is the one person who can get through to you/You are the one person who can get through to your partner

Banter

Dumbassery

RenRuki:

Love takes work

Best friends to lovers

Second chances/Broken things can be repaired

Love is a choice

You improve with age

Shared experiences build love

Pining

Working together with your partner to create a mutually satisfying life together

Your partner enriches your world, but your independence is maintained

Banter

Dumbassery

There is also some degree of character interpretation at work, too-- there seems to be a huge degree of disagreement between fans as to whether:

a) Ichigo enjoys his normal, human life, and even though he do anything to protect what he loves, he would prefer to live a human existence with his human friends and family. He credits Rukia will helping him realize his strength and powers.

b) Ichigo is unsatisfied with his human life and that meeting Rukia opened the doorway to a life of excitement and adventure, on top of being given the strength to protect his loved ones.

As far as Ichigo pairings go, I think that most IchiHime people fall in category (a) and most IchiRuki (and GrimmIchi) shippers fall in (b). In both cases, peoples’ ships align with their view of what makes Ichigo happy. Most IchiRuki content I have seen seems to feature Ichigo moving to Soul Society, rather than Rukia moving to Karakura. Rukia pretty explicitly indicates at the end of the Soul Society Arc that she wants to stay in Soul Society, plus she’s got a pretty established life there. Contrast that to the story of Isshin and Masaki-- Isshin seems pretty flippant and disaffected about his life in Soul Society; it doesn’t seem like it was a particularly hard choice for him to give up being a shinigami. Also, it’s pretty clear that what Isshin did was illegal, and I’m not sure there would be an easy way for Rukia to just say “WELP, I’m off to live as a human, smell you jerks later.”

To try to wrap things up, I think the actual dynamics of an IchiRuki or RenRuki relationship would be very similar, actually. They would banter a lot and dive headfirst into danger and support each other no matter what. Byakuya would treat either guy with the vaguest, most grudging amount of respect. The primary perpetual, unresolved argument between Rukia and Ichigo would be “The Living World is dumb/Soul Society is dumb”, whereas with Rukia and Renji, it would be “Squad 6 is dumb/Squad 13 is dumb wait no I didn’t mean that Captain Ukitake is an angel.”

Personally, I headcanon Renji as being more able than Ichigo to step back and be the support person in the relationship (see that bullet about Ichigo being the protag), so I think that RenRuki could manage to run a functional household, whereas Ichigo and Rukia would just go on adventures until they got arrested for tax evasion.

*For the record, I am very pro-IchiRenRuki, except that they would be even worse at running a household. It’s just Renji trying to explain how a chore wheel works while Rukia and Ichigo walk out the door on him.

#shipping discourse #they're just all very shippable!#with each other!#with anyone!#may god have mercy on my soul for venturing this close to the third rail of bleach discourse

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passionate-reply · 4 years ago

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This week on Great Albums: how the heck have I gone this long without a deep dive on Ultravox?! I mean, I named “Passionate Reply” after one of their songs, for crying out loud! Find out what makes *Quartet* my very favourite of their albums. Transcript below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’m finally getting around to talking about one of my all-time favourite bands: it’s Ultravox, and their 1982 album Quartet. Quartet was the sixth album to be released under the Ultravox name, and the third to feature their best-known lineup, fronted by Midge Ure. While the band’s classic lineup would never match the impact of 1980’s “Vienna,” they enjoyed fairly consistent mainstream success through the mid-80s. Their preceding LP, Rage In Eden, produced only two singles, but both were well-received.

Music: “The Thin Wall”

While none of the four classic lineup LPs are what I’d consider skippable, I do think Quartet is the strongest of them overall, as an album. Vienna has great highlights, but feels like a varied patchwork of different ideas. Quartet, though, is probably their most cohesive work, both musically and thematically--in addition to boasting some of the most iconic singles of their career, like “Hymn”:

Music: “Hymn”

The sweeping grandeur of “Hymn,” and the way Ure’s powerhouse vocals propel the insistent urgency of its pleading hook, make it a very easy track to fall in love with, and it’s easy to see why it was a hit. We can read its lyrics as an earnest request for a just reward from God, or the vain wish of a crass and selfish believer who wants what God is too good to give, or perhaps the struggle of someone who wants God to make the world right, but knows there is no God listening...or, more darkly, that the God listening isn’t benevolent enough to fix things. Given that “Hymn”’s music video portrays each member of the band making a deal with the devil and being consigned to Hell for it, at least some level of irony is probably intentional. It could be argued that Quartet is a concept album about music itself, and the choice of the very meta title of “Hymn” for this track makes it fit in nicely alongside tracks like “Serenade” and “The Song.”

Music: “The Song”

A memorable closing track if there ever was one, “The Song” is perhaps the clearest representation of the motif of music as a dangerous, but irresistibly beguiling force, that draws us in against our will and does with us whatever it wants. The emphasis on rhythm really sells that idea here, seeing as rhythm is far and away the element of music we are most likely to react to involuntarily--tapping our feet, swaying in time. Quartet is the Ultravox album where their percussionist, Warren Cann, really gets a chance to shine. While Cann had a background in playing traditional rock drums, he also fully embraced the potential of mechanical percussion, and the allure of hypnotically perfect rhythm. Rather than seeing it in opposition to his practice, Cann would go on to combine elements of both live drumming and electronic percussion on many Ultravox tracks. Cann also delivers some backing vocals, in his deep, Canadian-accented voice, on the track “We Came to Dance”:

Music: “We Came to Dance”

The dark and slinky “We Came to Dance” would prove to be a successful single for Ultravox, though the single version would omit Cann’s spoken part in that bridge. But lest you think every track on Quartet is entirely percussion-propelled, look no further than the single that preceded it, “Visions In Blue”:

Music: “Visions In Blue”

With its tinkling piano, tense moments of silence, and one of Midge Ure’s more dramatic and virtuosic performances on lead vocal, “Visions In Blue” is a slice of baroque pop that bears a strong resemblance to “Vienna,” Ultravox’s original smash hit. Overall, Quartet has a bit less rock and roll to it than much of Ultravox’s other work, and particularly when compared to the heavier guitar solos of their preceding album Rage In Eden. That said, there are still several tracks here that are more guitar-driven, such as “Mine For Life” and “When the Scream Subsides.”

Music: “When the Scream Subsides”

The cover art for Quartet was designed by the famed Peter Saville, who would work with Ultravox for several of their best-known releases. Saville was inspired by renderings of architecture, and the four traditional views or angles from which a building is shown on plans or blueprints. From left to right, the cover of Quartet presents an imaginary building from each of those angles.

Given the more overt riffs on Cubism and Surrealism found on some of the single sleeve designs from the same period, I’m tempted to think the ghostly, empty architecture portrayed in the “metaphysical paintings” of Giorgio de Chirico may have also been an inspiration here.

The title of Quartet also suits the fact that at this point in their career, Ultravox were, indeed, a four-person band. While somewhat prosaic in that sense, I like that it calls attention, once again, to that theme of “music about music” that I mentioned earlier. While a lot of rock bands are comprised of four players, the term “quartet” is more strongly associated with classical and jazz, and I think those connotations enliven the baroque touches of tracks like “Visions In Blue.”

After Quartet, Ultravox would release one last album with their classic lineup, 1984’s Lament. Like Quartet, Lament would stick to a more cohesive theme--as its title implies, it’s a fairly morose and despondent album, with more gothic themes than their prior work. Lament was also a hit for them, with the single “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes” becoming one of their best-known and best-loved tracks.

Music: “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”

Lament was the last album to feature Warren Cann, who was dismissed over creative tensions during recording sessions for their 1986 follow-up, U-Vox, shattering the classic lineup that had brought them so much success. While Cann’s absence is far from the only thing wrong with U-Vox, I do think it played a significant part in the album’s poor reception, which would eventually lead to the abandonment of the Ultravox name altogether.

My favourite track from Quartet is “Cut & Run.” While I like it mainly for its thin synth blasts in the beginning and those delightfully 80s breath samples, it’s also one of the most sinister compositions anywhere in the Ultravox catalogue. “Cut & Run” basically glorifies suicide, in a pretty straightforward manner, portraying the act as “something spiteful and true.” To contemporary ears, it’s truly almost shockingly taboo, and I can’t imagine any artist getting away with it nowadays--especially not when placed alongside “Hymn,” and the demonic themes of its music video. Ultravox basically did substantially more than Judas Priest ever did to encourage devil worship and suicide, but I suppose their foppish synth band aesthetic let them off the hook? Listen for yourself, and see what you think. That’s all for today--thanks for listening.

Music: “Cut & Run”

#music #great albums #album review #album reviews #ultravox #new wave

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aros001 · 4 years ago

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First time read through light novel vol. 15. Random thoughts.

No waiting! Door's open! Car's ready! Let's go!

Oh, and just as an added note, I have not yet watched any of the second half of season 2. I wanted to wait until after I'd read this volume, which I believe is the first time I've ever avoided watching episodes of a TV series so that I wouldn't be spoiled on what happens in the book it's based on.

The greatest asset they had—Garfiel—was almost certainly already engaging the main threat—Elsa. Both possessed superhuman strength, so they could be considered evenly matched—or at least, Subaru hoped so. He couldn’t be certain.

It does occur to me that Subaru probably wouldn't be the best for judging people's relative power levels. He's met plenty of powerful people in this world; Elsa, Reinhard, Puck, Julius, Petelgeuse, Roswaal, Garfiel, etc. But the thing is they all completely dwarf him in power, to the point that on an even playing field he wouldn't even be able to put up a fight. Yes, Garfiel could be an even match for Elsa...but I could also see Subaru thinking the same about Frederica and she was way outmatched by Elsa. All Subaru was going off of was that Frederica was stronger than him in a way he could never naturally obtain himself and so is Elsa, so he immediately conflates the two in his mind as equal strength, simply because he's so low all the bars above him look like they're overlapping.

“Truly...it would have been better if Betty were simply a book.”

Unable to indulge in even fleeting fantasy, Beatrice confessed her sad, painful wish.

If only she could be a doll without a heart, a storybook unshaken by the passage of time, then she wouldn’t have to suffer.

Ironically, though books themselves can't suffer, they can certainly cause suffering, both in the meta sense with what Re:Zero puts its characters through and the audience along with it, and the literal sense with how the books of knowledge and their prophecies are ruining Beatrice and Roswaal's lives but they can't bring themselves to give them up.

“Even if it’s only within Roswaal’s book of knowledge, the fact that Betty has been recorded... Does that mean Mother has not forgotten about her daughter, I wonder?”

Though there's something to be said about those who wrote the books too causing the suffering. Again, both meta and literal.

“O-of course I thought about it! Betty tried checking if there was anything on these blank pages again and again...but nothing ever changed!”

“That’s why you’re an idiot! What about trying to heat them to see if anything was written in invisible ink?! These days, no one falls for that trick anymore, even when it’s a novelty New Year’s card! Consider some more possibilities, would you?!”

...

“Like what if your mother messed up and gave you the wrong book by mistake?!”

“Huh...?”

The latest theory Subaru proposed was so haphazard that Beatrice didn’t even know how to respond. That surprise quickly gave way to anger as Beatrice’s ire only grew.

“Do you intend to insult Mother, I wonder?! Mother would never make such a stupid mista—”

“Can you say for sure it absolutely couldn’t happen? You don’t have even the slightest doubt? Are you so certain the only possible explanation is that your mother deliberately handed her own daughter a book with nothing but blank pages?”

Subaru used fallacies and questionable logic to massage and obfuscate the truth.

Subaru's become kind of an expert on dragging people down to his level, hasn't he? Rem, Roswaal, Emilia, Garfiel. Now Beatrice. Also, he just keeps digging himself deeper against Echidna. First he rejects her in favor of Satella, then vandalizes her tomb by carving love letters into its walls, then he makes out with Emilia inside her tomb, and now his basically insulting her intelligence to her daughter. If they ever meet again I suspect Echidna might just try and drown Subaru in her tea instead of offering him any.

“M-Mother surely would never make such a mistake. I-is that not obvious, I wonder? This is Mother we’re talking about! Would you doubt your own mother’s words?!”

“Of course I would! The times I can trust her don’t come along all that often! My mom’s the same person who heard a report about a satellite falling into ‘the atmosphere’ and somehow thought it was ‘Aichi Prefecture.’ I stopped believing any news that came from her mouth after that! It’d be mega-embarrassing if I spread around something that stupid again!”

It was impossible to forget how he’d been mocked by his classmates and neighbors for taking that story seriously and sharing it with everyone. To top it all off, the original culprit herself forgot she had started the whole thing and even asked him, Why on earth did you tell people that?

I kind of love this, especially after Subaru's trial showed just how loving, kind, and supportive Subaru's parents are. This series makes a point of saying that good doesn't mean perfect, and that's okay. People are naturally going to have flaws and shortcomings and that there's nothing wrong with that, so long as those flaws aren't toxic or harmful to others or themselves. Nothing about Subaru's mom being an idiot who too quickly buys into click-bait sensationalist news keeps her from being the woman who saw him off to school and was supportive even after his long absences.

Emilia's Unknowable Present trial, getting to live a life with Fortuna and Geuse like Pandora and Regulus never came to their village, reminds me a lot of what the Black Mercy plant showed Superman when it got attached him, namely getting to live a life in a world where Krypton never exploded and thus he was raised by his birth parents and even started a family himself on Krypton. The plant feeds you a hallucination of your heart's deepest desire as it in turn feeds on you, and the only way to escape it is to basically give up everything you've ever wanted. For Clark, that was his son, who was as real to him as his actual child could be.

Interestingly, though the story is similar with both Emilia and Superman rejecting the fake world in favor of the real one, the state they're left in afterwards is very different. For Emilia, her resolve is strengthened and her feelings for everyone still frozen have only grown deeper, while for Superman he flies into a rage at the villain who put him under the Black Mercy, and once that fades he's just left with sorrow over what he lost. I suppose a cause for big difference is that Emilia can, in theory, get back at least some of what she's lost. Not Fortuna and Geuse because, well, they're kind of dead, but the other villagers she can save from the ice. Emilia's escape from the fake world wasn't just accepting what she'd lost but also a push for her to stop hiding behind the protections of everyone in her life, including her own, and actually face the world. She has a goal she can work towards to find strength in. For Superman it was meant to be just a straight tragedy.

“—Why do you desire a future that will hurt you so much?”

“I don’t want to be hurt. I’m searching for a future where I don’t have to be hurt, where I don’t have to run, hide, or push things away, where I can hold hands with others.”

“And the wounds you suffer? The pain? What you have lost will never return. Will you search for such a thing even so?”

“ ___”

Even Emilia had thought of what it would be like to have no one think of her as detestable. Many times over, she’d wanted to cast all the pain and suffering by the wayside.

The earnestness in Archi’s words gently and deeply touched upon scars that covered Emilia’s weak heart.

“...I want people to think I look cool.”

...

“I want to be like Mom, who I look up to so much. I want to be gentle and strong, like Geuse. I want to be like Granny Tanse and the others, who were never mean to me even once. I want to be like Archi, who smiled to the very, very end so that I wouldn’t get scared.”

“___ ”

“I want to be like Puck, who kept protecting me so I wouldn’t be alone. I want to be like Ram, who wants to work harder than anyone else for the person she holds dearest. I want to be like Otto, doing his utmost for the sake of his friend. I want to be like Garfiel, who refuses to speak one timid word or complaint.”

“Emilia...”

“And I want to be like Subaru, who suffers and gets all beat up, who’s always reckless—who told me he loves me.”

I say it almost every volume but I'm loving the parallels between Emilia and Subaru. They don't want to be in pain, they don't want to suffer. They just want to be loved. They want to feel important and valued by those they love. They want to live up to the coolness and strength of everyone around them. Heck, Emilia seems to model herself after Fortuna about as much as Subaru seems to model himself after his dad. Both really are their parents' child (even if Fortuna is Emilia's aunt).

Even just her thanking Echidna like Subaru did for showing her the trial's world and giving her some closure she never could have had otherwise. Though Echidna's reaction is quite a bit more hostile than it was to Subaru.

The way to end the Trial was for Emilia to find herself and seek out a way to acknowledge, accept, and understand that self.

I'm curious if that is the general theme for the 2nd trial or if it's just specific to Emilia, because what we saw of Subaru's unknowable present, though he lost the right to face any more of the challenges, could certainly fit that description depending on how you view it. Emilia acknowledges, accepts, and understands herself by finally seeing herself as she is in the present and no longer turning away from her own reflection, while Subaru acknowledges, accepts, and understands himself by finally seeing the value in his own life beyond being a chip he can cash-in for RBD.

I am curious if there's any meaning to the differences in how Subaru and Emilia go through their trials though. Emilia's 2nd trial is like Subaru's 1st, where she's actually living and interacting with the world the trial created, with her memories of the real world needing to come back to her, while her 1st trial is like his 2nd, looking in on the world the trial creates only as an observer and unable to interact with anything.

Of course, it did not even think of defying the orders of its master. But it would obey those orders and nothing else. It simply owed a debt to the master, who had liberated it from the Curse of the Horn. Accordingly, it had listened to her request.

Hm. Now that's a curious bit of thought from the Giltirau. It's been established that demon beasts will obey whoever cuts off its horn. I'd always just assumed there was no choice in the matter. So is this just what the beast thinks is the case and it's deluding itself or under some kind of mind control, or is this genuinely how the beasts think and it obeys the cutter in order to pay them back for freeing them from the horn? If it's the latter, why is the horn a curse then?

“Eat the power of science, baby—Dust Explosion!”

Science, bitch!

The candle remained on the floor, showing no further sign of change. The one who had thrown it was frozen in place and sounded like there’d been a miscalculation.

Opp. Never mind. Subaru should have taken a lesson from Goblin Slayer. That man knows how to cause a dust explosion.

You know, one spoiler I got for this volume was that the mansion would catch on fire. I thought it'd be some way Subaru would be trying to free Beatrice from the library and the book of knowledge. I didn't think it'd be because of Otto accidentally burning the place down by using too much oil to kill a lion. Poor guy is going to be back to square one after this, if not horribly under debt. He only came along in the first place to try and sell his wares to Roswaal. If he burns down the clown's home he'll be lucky if Roswaal just declares them as even.

The Trials first showed a past linked to one’s greatest regret; then they showed a present that did not and could not exist; last, the challenger was shown a future she would inevitably have to confront head-on. These were the entirety of the Trials the tomb had prepared for her.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie, I couldn't make heads or tails of anything Emilia saw in "Face the calamity to come". I get the message and why she's able to pass but the descriptions were way too vague for me to get even hints of what was to come in this potential futures. Even looking it up didn't help much. All I've got for certain is Emilia telling someone she was once close to how much she hates them.

Of course, I am now wondering what Subaru's third trial would have been, had he not lost his qualification.

So the woman in the coffin looks like Echidna but isn't Echidna, at least from Emilia's POV. I've got three theories as to what that could mean:

This could be a case like how Satella and the Witch of Envy are technically two different people due to a split personality and thus Echidna and the Witch of Greed are two different people.

It is not Echidna's complete soul that was bound to the tomb. We know the soul transfer was an experiment that failed due to it not working out the way she wanted, so perhaps some parts of Echidna were lost in the transfer. Or we're going with Horcrux rules here and the Echidna in the trials is only a piece of her soul.

It was never Echidna who was giving the trials and having the tea parties but rather someone/something else assuming her form.

Then, as Emilia raced out of the tomb—

“—Eh?”

—the skin-stabbing cold and the ferociously blowing snow covering the Sanctuary made Emilia let out a white breath.

Aw, f**k.

“You ain’t immortal. It’s that ya won’t die till someone kills ya, right? Ain’t that right, vampire?”

“...You knew.”

“I had a hunch. Me, I loved readin’ books since waaaay back. I knew there were special sorts like that. Didn’t think I’d meet one right after leavin’ home, though.”

Oh! That explains a lot about Elsa, actually.

Elsa's story about growing up an orphan in the cold, being nearly (and thankfully only nearly) raped by a man she tried to rob, killing him and then finally feeling warmth from his blood and insides reminds me of a pitch I'd heard for a movie about Dracula's origins. After becoming the first vampire Dracula would take revenge on all those who had wrong him in his tortured life and the audience would feel sympathy for him...but only for a moment. Because whatever justice or righteous vengeance that might have been had is quickly overshadowed by the realization of the monster that has been unleashed upon the world.

“—I’m gonna kill ya, Elsa Gramhilde.”

“—It is because you will kill me that you are my first love, Garfiel Tinzel.”

Yeesh. They not on complete opposite ends of the spectrum but it's still hard to imagine a contrast more different than Elsa and Ram. Heck of a love triangle for Garfiel.

And of all the ways for Elsa to finally be slain, I can't say being crushed underneath a giant hippo thrown by a teenage man-tiger was one I expected.

“I’m impressed by how meticulous you are. How and when did you cast that spell on Lia...?”

“Spell...? Great Spirit, to what do you refer...?”

“Well, just listen. It got really hard to come out of my icon ever since we returned from the royal capital. If that was all, I would’ve pegged it as some kind of scheme by the Witch Cult group that attacked the village and the mansion, but I was stuck in there even after reaching the Sanctuary. So the spell had to come not from an enemy but from one of our own.”

...

“Fortunately, Lady Emilia was in low spirits from her argument with young Subaru. A little sabotage of your pact with Lady Emilia before departing for the Sanctuary was a trifling affair.”

“On the other hand, a pact between spirit and spirit mage is sacred... It’s not something that can be toyed with from the outside.”

“Even so, I have lived with Beatrice for quite a long time, you seeee. For better or worse, creating loopholes in predetermined things is a specialty of mine—though that girl is too obstinate for such things.”

Okay then. So while Puck definitely isn't a good father overall, it actually wasn't that he was refusing to come out when Emilia needed him. Roswaal used a spell to make sure that he couldn't, which makes sense given his big scheme, shown in a past loop, was to isolate Emilia from everyone and break her mentally.

“Love me? What are you saying?! You hate me. I am the man you hate. To you, I am a man linked to the cause of your homeland’s destruction. Surely, the truth is that you hate me enough to kill me!”

“In the beginning, it was so, but now it is not. Now Ram loves you.”

“That is absurd...! Who—who, I ask, would believe in such cheap emotions?!”

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this, and it's not because of any shipping reasons because I don't really have anyone I ship with Ram. Obviously I knew she had an attraction, I'm just wondering what it was that caused the change in Ram's feelings and what caused her to fall in love. With Subaru for Emilia and Rem for him we see how those feelings were sparked and even Garfiel for Ram has reasons that are simple attraction but easy enough to understand. So what was it for Ram?

“To Ram, this is...the root of all evil.”

Roswaal’s face went pale as he raced over to Ram. Smiling faintly at his action, Ram did not hesitate—she hurled the book of knowledge into the green flame still clinging to a fallen tree.

Sometimes the conditions for victory have little to do with actually winning the physical fight.

“No matter how far you go, you’re still human—you’ll never be like that devil.”

As the spirit flew off, his voice became distant, and his presence vanished, leaving behind only a soft glow.

What remained was the scattering snow and a girl carried by a devil—Nay, there was only a clown.

He was a wretched fool who had tried to become a devil and failed.

That is a really good line. I'm assuming the devil in question is Hector, given he's called the Devil of Melancholy. It is an interesting concept, trying to act like/resemble something you fear and horribly humbled you in the past.

“I won’t let anyone say it’s fine. As long as we’re alive, there’ll be none of this it’s fine stuff—that’s why I don’t want to give up on anyone, not anymore!”

She stood up. That instant, Emilia whirled around, thrusting her arm toward the forest behind her.

She froze to the bone the demon beast leaping toward her, enveloping it in blustering snow and glacial cold.

The creature she had caught was white, small enough to fit in her palm.

However, this was a ferocious being with gleaming red eyes.

—It had arrived. The demon beast known as the Great Rabbit had finally come.

Well....that definitely qualifies as a badass moment for Emilia. I remember when I first started reading the LNs I was worried I might have an unintentional bias against Emilia since, while I liked her fine in the anime, I liked Rem and her pairing with Subaru a lot more. Thankfully the books have really done a great job with Emilia, especially in her character development. I said back during the royal selection that LN Emilia definitely feels like she has more fire to her than her anime counterpart, at least in season 1. I don't think I ever would have expected her to yell at Roswaal the way she does here, and with it still being in character as she's doing it because she's worried about him and Ram.

Puck was a Great Spirit with origins identical to Beatrice’s. However, unlike how she lived according to the will of Echidna the Witch since days long past, he had started a new life long before the birth of the Sanctuary, and she had not seen him since.

Does that mean Puck has a witch as his "mother" too?

But what she found surprising was that he knew of Beatrice’s talents yet did not desire them in any way. Indeed, when he came to ask about curses, it was Beatrice, and not the archive of forbidden books, he came to consult.

The boy harbored no interest in the knowledge left in her care or Beatrice’s power whatsoever.

It's kind of funny how Subaru's ignorance and cluelessness have been both his greatest strength and biggest shortcoming since coming to this world. It wasn't even a thought in his head to consult the books for answers to his problems...probably in part to the fact that Subaru can't read this world's language. His logic was more than likely "Books might have the answer to my problem Beatrice has read a bunch of books. I should ask Beatrice for help!"

—She felt like she had reduced herself to a frivolous and very cheap clown.

Roswaal: "Achoo!"

For as Subaru ran through the inferno, swearing he would bring the girl with him, he was enveloped by an incredibly dense black miasma, almost like a cloak of shadow that shielded him.

Is this because of the Unseen Hands witch factor he got from killing Petelgeuse? Because the black miasma instantly make me think what happens when he tries to tell people about RBD and thus makes me think it's some protection the Witch of Envy is giving him.

A figure dressed in black emerged from the flames: a black-haired woman holding a black blade in her hand.

“Elsa...?”

OH COME ON!

“You’re not Elsa anymore, are you?”

When Subaru posed the question, Elsa—nay, the thing that had been Elsa—turned its empty black eyes toward him. There was no glint of life within them, only bottomless darkness. Subaru was peering into an abyss.

An empty body, a departed soul, and obsession incarnate. Driven by inexhaustible bloodlust, it dragged its smashed lower body along as it crawled toward Subaru through the raging fires.

This was far beyond an unnatural vitality that kept death at bay. The power had become nothing but a curse.

Just like Subaru’s Return by Death, it was nothing save a curse, a yoke placed upon her very life.

I've said it before, I like that dark magic in Re:Zero's world isn't just "spooky evil bad stuff" magic but rather DARK magic. Unnaturally and feels like it should not exist in the world. Elsa's a vampire but usually being a vampire in most stories tends to just equate to drinking blood, strong, and being hard to kill. Here, being a vampire makes Elsa truly seem like some unholy monster. Something truly undead. She's not a vampire because she was bitten by Dracula but rather she's a vampire in that she's a curse upon the world.

I really like how Subaru finally wins Beatrice over, and it's consistent with how he typically tends to make progress, by just being honest with people. He knows Beatrice doesn't need him and that he doesn't have anything to really offer her. So he simply tells her that he needs her and that he wants her around. He could lie or assume and just say he's the person she's waited 400 years for, but instead his words put the choice more in her hands. He's not going to set her free, she has to choose that freedom for herself.

Also, if Subaru's lifespan is just a blip in comparison to hers, what does Beatrice have to lose? If it's a waste of time, well then it's basically just a minute of her time being wasted, all things considered.

“—You wanted someone to take you outside! Isn’t that why you always sat in front of the door?!”

With a decisive sound, that world finally met its end.

The girl’s lonely cage, that solitary world known as the archive of forbidden books, was engulfed by flames and vanished.

But just before that happened, there was a sound.

—The sound of a single tome falling to the archive’s floor.

I HAVE WAITED SO LONG FOR THIS MOMENT!!!

—So began the pair’s first battle, one of the many, many times Beatrice the spirit and her contractor, Subaru Natsuki, would fight hand in hand.

I'm just imagining Subaru shoving Beatrice into Julius' face to brag about her.

Subaru: "You can keep your six little spirits, Julius! I got the best one of all right here!"

Beatrice: "Kindly keep Betty out of this dong measuring contest."

Once they gather the Great Rabbit's copies all in one place I thought they were going to either burn or freeze them all, but sending the Great Rabbit into another dimension was probably the better idea. If Beatrice's theory is right and the rabbit can only create a finite number of itself, even if it can spawn up to that number and infinite amount of times, then even if they failed to get all the copies, say one or two, then the remaining ones would be far less dangerous, since it can't spawn new copies as they all would still technically exist.

“I think you should say something to the one who worked the hardest.”

Subaru couldn’t help but give a short sigh when he saw her childish, cheek-puffing gesture. Then—

“Waaah!”

—sweeping an arm under her, he hoisted up her light body.

Ignoring her cutesy, plaintive cry, Subaru continued to embrace the girl as he twirled around on the spot.

“You did awesome! That’s my Beako! I love you!”

“W-wait a—! That’s not... W-would you let go, I wonder?! Betty is not...!”

“Good girl, good girl! You’re so, so cute! You’re wonderful, Beako! You’re the best, Beako! Beako forever!”

Aww. Subaru's such a good dad.

Given that Roswaal is indeed the original Roswaal, student of Echidna, having lived on into the present day by transferring his soul into the bodies of those in his direct family line, what age is the child when he transfers his soul into them? Is that like a Tanya situation, where Roswaal remembers everything from his old life but has to restart each time as a baby? Or is this like a rite of passage for the men in Roswaal's line and they take on the burden of the original's soul once they come of a certain age? It's difficult to say which is worse.

“It’s just—I think we need to have a proper talk about the baby in my belly!”

“...Excuse me?”

“I don’t know if it will be a boy or a girl, but we need to give it all the love and attention it needs! Still, I don’t know anything about these things... That’s why I have to discuss it with the child’s father...”

...

“Emilia-tan, you know babies aren’t delivered by birds or harvested from cabbage patches, right?”

“But babies are made when a man and a woman kiss, aren’t they?”

...

Given Emilia’s mindset at the moment, Subaru’s words were tantamount to saying he wanted to have lots and lots of children with her. Certainly, there was a part of him that did wish for that, but his top priority was setting Emilia straight.

“C-curse you, Puck...!!”

Subaru directed an angry murmur toward the absent kitty spirit, who continued to sleep deep inside the magic crystal.

—In the back of his mind, he felt like he could see the kitty spirit putting a paw on his head and sticking his tongue out with a thbpttt.

That is just bad parenting right there. Even if Emilia's mentally 14 her body is still physically 18 and would be dealing with at least the aftermath of puberty, if not puberty itself. Regardless of whether she should or shouldn't have sex it's still something she should know about, especially in a world like Re:Zero's where life expectancy probably isn't that high and thus it'd be more common for people to get married and have children at younger ages than in ours.

Also, I'm just kind of amused that in Rising of the Shield Hero, Raphtalia thinking pregnancy was caused by kissing was an anime-only thing, as in the LNs she was well aware of what sex was. Now I'm just going to be expecting Re:Zero to do the opposite and have anime Emilia know what sex is.

“Even if you’re not at full health, you just stood back and watched while people settled things with Roswaal. I was sure you’d flip out seeing him get smacked around that much.”

“What a foolish thing to say... Even Ram does not think Master Roswaal is someone who is never mistaken. If being punched is the natural course of events, he must accept what he deserves. But Ram is free to treat him with great gentleness after the fact. To not comprehend such a thing is the height of foolishness.”

Well, at least Ram's not blind to Roswaal's faults or unreasonably loyal.

“...This is your mother, right?”

“More importantly, this is Echidna, Subaru. Not the ‘Witch of Greed’ you are familiar with.”

Subaru echoed a question first hailed by Emilia, wondering about the two different Echidnas. At present, neither she nor Subaru had found a suitable answer to what that actually meant.

More fuel to the first two theories I had.

So the condition of Subaru's pact with Beatrice is that he can't form contracts with other spirits, and she used up all the mana she had stored up over 400 years to kill the Great Rabbit, meaning she can't do anything like their big battle again. Subaru's gate is completely collapsed, meaning he can't use magic at all, and just keeping Beatrice out during the day consumes all the mana he has. ...Fair enough. It does fit with how Subaru wins each arc, by drawing every sword he has to use and just barely winning despite what he loses in the process. Heck, he still is somewhat in the green here with what he's gained, given he has Garfiel on his side now. And I still feel like Subaru is going to brag about Beatrice to Julius. It also goes along with Beatrice's thoughts of how she and Subaru interacted in arc 2 anyway. He wasn't there for the knowledge or power in her possession. He came there simply for Beatrice. Everything from their pact to her knowledge and powers was simply an afterthought, if even a thought in his head to begin with.

“Emilia—I am your knight and yours alone.”

“—Yes.”

When Emilia responded to the words he spoke, an irresistible wave of emotions brought tears to her eyes.

Yet, even then, Emilia somehow managed to maintain her composure as she gently brought down the sword she had raised. She returned to Subaru, who continued to kneel, the symbol of a knight’s pride.

Reverently accepting it with both hands, he returned the sword to its scabbard.

Completing the ritual, Subaru looked up. With Emilia nodding in assent, he stood on the spot.

And then—

“Emilia-tan, it’s a bit late to mention this, but you look cute and superhot in that outfit.”

“Idiot.”

—with the solemn atmosphere of the ceremony shattered, Emilia stuck out her tongue at him with a reddened face.

My feelings for the Subarem ship haven't lessened but this arc has definitely raised the Subamilia ship up for me, and I didn't even dislike it before. I really did just need them to communicate and have more honest back and forths and this arc really managed to develop that nicely for them. I can buy that these are two people who will eventually have a romantic relationship.

“Mentally speaking, Anne and Emilia are not as far apart as some might think. If anything, Anne puts on greater airs than Lady Emilia. She might very well be the more mature of the two.”

“I’m still holding a grudge against her for planting the idea in Emilia-tan’s head that babies are made by kissing.”

Yeah, I'm still gonna blame Puck for not setting her straight on that.

“And now that you have rejected the path of the Sage and chosen the path of the Fool, I will never allow you to compromise. Is this not natural? It is you who wished for this.”

With Subaru unable to speak a word, Roswaal took a step forward, closing the distance between them. Then, reaching out with a hand, he grasped Subaru’s shoulder, gently pulled his face close, and whispered into Subaru’s ear.

“—Hereafter, if you lose someone around you who you should have protected, I will swiftly burn the remaining others away without hesitation and, with the cursed seal, become ash myself.”

“—?!”

“You have decided to shoulder all. You must not abandon anything. I will not allow a lost world to continue into the future. I reject your compromise—now that I have lost the book of knowledge, I have only you to guide me to Teacher, young Subaru. You and the path you walk.”

Jeez, Roswaal is such a good villain. Yes, he'll work with the hero and he'll do it willingly and genuinely...but that doesn't make him any less dangerous than before. If Subaru falters or fails, Roswaal will push him into using RBD to do things over. And there's little doubt he will, since we've seen him in a few loops already in this arc perfectly content with dying or throwing everything and everyone away when a plan didn't work out, either because he knew Subaru would loop and another life would be better...or simply because continuing on in a world where his plan failed wouldn't be worth anything. It's a good little wrench to throw into the story now that Subaru is going to try to rely on RBD less, and it's a good way of showing Roswaal has not magically changed 100% from who he's been throughout the story and that even bound by a curse he can still do a lot of damage.

The girl walked forward, her long pink hair swaying as she murmured to herself.

The Witch had been released unto the world once more.

...That's probably not good. If I'm reading this right, Echidna, or at least the not-Echidna of the tomb trials, has come back from the dead by way of soul-transfer into the body of one of the Ryuzus.

I cannot state enough how happy I am for this volume to come out and for this arc, that I did really enjoy, to come to an end. Not only was I not letting myself watch the anime until I got this but I wasn't going to let myself start on the web novels either until I finished reading this arc in the LNs. Since vol. 16 doesn't come out until the near end of June and there's no f**king way I'm waiting that long again, I think at some point I'll just start on arc 5 in the WNs and go all the way until wherever it is in the present because I NEED TO KNOW!!! Might even do random thoughts on both the WNs and LNs, which would be kind of interesting. The only comparisons I've been able to do before is the LNs to the anime. I've heard the LNs are pretty faithful to the WNs but I have heard of some differences, like Puck not being in the battle between Ram and Roswaal (and just Puck being a bit more of a prick in general in the WNs).

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Re_Zero/comments/m64crq/novels_first_time_read_through_light_novel_vol_15/

#re:zero #random thoughts #reddit repost

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shihalyfie · 4 years ago

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Neverland, the role of “nostalgia” in Kiuzna’s narrative, and the 02 quartet’s unusual immunity to it

In general, the 02 quartet (my shorthand for the four human characters introduced in 02 who weren’t in Adventure, namely Daisuke, Ken, Miyako, and Iori) have a position in Kizuna that you can call “shockingly favorable” in that they’re kept safely out of the most dangerous parts of the plot in ways the others aren’t. This especially sticks out when we get to the Eosmon incident reaching its climax, when Takeru and Hikari are placed in the same situation as their Adventure seniors, despite the movie and its surrounding media generally portraying them closer in line with the others in the 02 group than the Adventure group.

To be a bit blunt about it, the obvious main reason the story is set up this way is meta -- a lot of the climax’s effectiveness depends on the audience getting sensory impact via recognizing things from the original series (including 02 as well; how convenient it is that all of the international Chosen are in the positions 02 fans would recognize!), and so it’s obvious that said climax would evoke imagery related to the series that was Digimon Adventure, while the 02 quartet would be treated extra-kindly by the narrative due to the need to give them compensatory action screentime given certain real-life events. But just because the originating reason is meta doesn’t mean there isn’t also a story reason for it, especially considering the relevance of 02′s themes in Kizuna’s narrative, and the surrounding circumstances regarding both series.

Before we get into anything else, the first thing that needs to be established is that Menoa and Eosmon’s lure is pretty obviously depicted as working on a subconscious level. This is why everyone else in the narrative agrees that what they did is “kidnapping”, despite her insistence that she’s just doing what they wanted. While they can’t not admit to having moments of weakness, nevertheless, it’s likely that most if not all of the people Menoa kidnapped consciously knew better and had learned better lessons than this a long time ago; if Menoa had consciously offered Neverland to her victims, most of them would have probably said no! But as Daisuke said back in 02 episode 49 -- when he witnessed his own friends being subjected to something similar at the hands of BelialVamdemon -- there’s no sin in having feelings of worries or troubles (and, by extension, irrational feelings in general), and Eosmon’s abilities and Neverland happen to be able to directly target them. In fact, we ourselves got to witness this internal conflict when Menoa made her direct offer to Taichi and Yamato to join Neverland; they briefly considered it because of the circumstances, but were snapped out of it quickly with Agumon and Gabumon’s intervention, and were really, really mad at themselves for considering it shortly after.

We saw the process of how Ayaka became one of the kidnapping victims at the beginning of the movie -- it happened right after she complained that she wasn’t fond of the idea of becoming an adult at this point. So it does lend some truth to the idea that Menoa’s working off something with these cases, and that Eosmon did specifically target people who had those wishes to some degree. Moreover, note carefully how this kidnapping (and some others in the movie) is portrayed; Eosmon doesn’t actually emerge from the device in question (it’s obvious that nobody notices the giant butterfly monster), and the victim’s consciousness and partner are whisked away thanks to being caught by the device camera. In Ayaka’s case, because her phone was sitting on the table, pointed at her. The fact that this is not how the kidnappings are portrayed all the way to the end of the movie is a very significant point.

So let’s talk about Neverland and its construction. The whole thing is based on Menoa’s own very, very warped view of what “happiness” is. This means that Neverland is only an “ideal world” or “utopia” in a way that makes sense to her -- and once you learn the full extent of her backstory, it becomes apparent how she came to the mentality she did, and, more pertinently, how she ended up projecting that on everyone else. Hence, how she came to decide that she knew better and should decide for everyone, because she thinks she gets the right to decide on everyone’s happiness based on her own experiences. (She doesn’t.)

The way Neverland is constructed is that everyone has “their own places” -- their own individual islands that recreate “memories” of everyone being able to be together with their partner, forever. So in other words, it’s not just that everyone’s being turned into children; it’s that they’re being kept in an eternal loop of their best memory and unable to “move forward”.

Here are three very significant parts about this, which will be important to keep in mind as we go deeper into this analysis:

Menoa’s view of this utopia requires people to be separated -- for all she claims this is a utopia where people can play together, she discourages fraternizing and encourages everyone to stay only with their own partners. This is, presumably, to lessen complications with said memories, because what might be one person’s best memory might not be for another, and also because she thinks one person being alone with their partner is happiness enough in itself. As we’ll be seeing later, this is very much not the case for everyone.

A lot of these memories in Neverland -- and Menoa’s own mentality, as we eventually find out -- are heavily dependent on the concept of rose-colored nostalgia, or, that is to say, conveniently omitting or forgetting about all of the bad things about one’s past in order to portray it as such a wonderful thing that nobody should ever move on from. And in the end, that probably applies to real-life childhood in general, too; as much as it’s so often put on a pedestal for being a time when “everything was simpler”, you can also easily argue that it wasn’t actually all sunshine and roses, it’s just that the process of forgetting things or the grass-is-greener phenomenon makes you conveniently forget all of the bad things and frustration that came with it too.

Because the concept of needing to stay in the past forever is based on the idea that it’s preferable to growing up, these memories thus have a strong premise of “things you cannot do anymore” -- something that, bar going back to the past and never moving from it, you will never get back or be able to sufficiently recreate. It’s unlikely the islands themselves are one-to-one recreating their specific memories in the way they happened, but rather seemingly presenting them the opportunity to “constantly do over” things they want to recreate or do again, as long as those things are associated with a happy thing that isn’t as easily accessible anymore.

In the case of the five Adventure group members who were brought into Neverland, these “memories” that they’re seen trapped in are, of course, from Digimon Adventure.

It is of course foolhardy to pretend that the main reason for this wasn’t meta, since, of course, there’s a huge point to be made here about the relationship between Adventure and nostalgia, plus the simple fact that this is what we’re most likely to recognize and be nostalgic for, but it also makes sense within the context of the narrative; Menoa has an extreme bias towards the happiness of her childhood revolving almost entirely around her partner, and, of course, Adventure was when these kids first had their most formative meetings with said partners. (This is also probably the in-story explanation for why the other international Chosen from 02 appear at or close to their 02 selves; beyond the meta reason of it being a way to make them recognizable when we only knew them for such a short time, it also approximates when they met their own partners.)

On top of that, Adventure was not all sunshine and roses for its cast! After all, there was a ton of drama and emotional trauma and stress from running away from enemies trying to kill them, or trying to save the universe, and glossing over that is also foolhardy -- but this is also where our concept of “rose-colored” comes in. Menoa’s not offering the kids the entire adventure; she’s offering them a small slice of the moments when they were able to be happy, the moments that made them want to stay in the Digital World for a whole 110 years’ worth of time at the end of Adventure -- she’s basically offering them that very thing they wanted and had ripped away from them at the end of Adventure when the time dilation phenomenon stopped. Take out all of the bad stuff, and suddenly, the events of Adventure seem outright romantic -- it’s the whole school of thought that fueled Adventure’s inspirations of Two Years’ Vacation and Stand By Me, in which a lot of stressful stuff happened and yet you still can’t help but think there was something magical and romantic about it. (I cannot emphasize enough how much of a cultural impact Stand By Me in particular had in Japan, to the point where it’s considered the epitome example of a “coming of age story” and “summer adventure”.)

Let’s take a closer look at what’s on each of the Adventure kids’ personal islands:

Hikari is probably the one in the most unusual position among this group, since she didn’t join until over the halfway point, and the first arc she got involved in revolved around everyone wanting her and Tailmon dead. Thus, the memory we get to see her involved in is the Numemon factory in Adventure episode 49. Although this was in the middle of the Dark Masters arc (and, uniquely, very close to the end of the series where a lot of stress was involved), due to the limited amount of time she got to be in the Digital World, this was the one time she got to do something really cool and awesome and impressive for herself that had nothing to do with the others (again: see how the requirements for these islands require not fraternizing with friends and being isolated).

One thing that the Adventure kids got to do that wasn’t in play in 02 was that there were a lot of “romantic experiences”, involving strange adventures and things like phone boxes on the beach, and, very significantly, “Digimon friends” -- ones that the kids made a huge note of bonding with over the course of the series. This contributes to a certain sense of whimsy that was involved in this adventure that the 02 quartet ultimately never ended up getting to foster, because the lack of the time dilation phenomenon meant that they spent much less time in the Digital World overall (more on this in a bit), and once the time dilation stopped, it meant that these kinds of “whimsical” experiences were ones the Adventure group was permanently torn away from once that adventure ended. That dropping of the time dilation phenomenon not only cut that initial adventure short, it also prevented any future ones like it from ever happening again.

And, of course, this is an extremely rose-colored memory, because shortly afterwards, the Numemon ended up all sacrificing themselves for Hikari. But hey, when you’re in a space that can eternally loop good memories forever, everything’s fine as long as we conveniently never get to that part, right?

From this point on, you’ll notice that all of the memories that show up on these islands are from before the halfway point of the series, because after that, things started getting increasingly pear-shaped and much more difficult to disentangle the stress, mental breakdowns, and witnessing of deaths from. (Hikari’s probably wouldn’t have come from such a late incident if she hadn’t joined the party so late.) Although there still were looming threats around the horizon in the beginning of Adventure, they weren’t always immediately apparent to the kids at every turn, and in fact, the beginning of the series involved more of a “well, we’re in this situation and probably need to get home somehow” aura than it did a “the world is in danger and all of us might die” aura. (It’s also in direct contrast to the 02 group, who were given the details of the crisis and what they needed to do roughly from the get-go.) So in other words, if you want to have some rose-colored nostalgia about the romanticism of this adventure, these are some of the best episodes to pull from.

Takeru’s is obviously from the Village of Beginnings, corresponding to Adventure episode 12, when he and Patamon got to have a fun romp through the village, play together, meet Elecmon, and learn about how Digimon are born. It’s also very much something he did without the others, only with Patamon, and had a lot of “fun and happiness” associated with (later solo episodes with Takeru had a lot more upsetting events more intrinsically tied with it), and, again, it’s extremely rose-colored -- it wasn’t even a day later when Angemon died in front of Takeru’s eyes. But hey, that’s even more reason to pick a moment from before then to stay in forever! Can’t have trauma if that trauma never happens, right?

Also, note that Takeru is one of the few here who’s confirmed to be aware of the partnership dissolution issue at this point, and, unlike Koushirou, isn’t confirmed to have accepted a forward-thinking mentality about it yet -- this is a very, very prime time for his fears of being separated from Patamon again to have a nasty relapse.

Mimi’s is the closest to the midpoint of the series, from the affair with the Geckomon and Otamamon castle (from Adventure episode 25; the metal railings here resemble the stage railings from that episode). It’s from the period of time that was a “lull” -- when nobody actually knew about the encroaching threat of Vamdemon quite yet, and for all it was worth, there was no longer any danger. So Mimi got to live happily in the comfort of the castle and play around with the Geckomon and Otamamon...which, of course, also conveniently excludes the affair where she went on a power trip, made everyone miserable due to her selfishness, and immediately felt guilt over it.

Mimi’s associations with this incident are not entirely negative; she was clearly still having fun singing for them in the end (note how her clothing during that scene involved her regular outfit, which she has on here), and she still had a positive impression of her relationship with the Geckomon and Otamamon as per Adventure episode 47 and 02 episode 6 (and as per 02 episode 15, even though everyone’s initial encounter with TonosamaGeckomon ended badly, nobody actually has any lingering grudge against him). So if you filter out that whole affair with the power trip and the resulting embarrassment, it was a meeting with a bunch of fun Digimon friends, a romantic little castle, and a fun stage session where Mimi got to sing.

Jou’s refers to the Infinity Mountain incident in Adventure episode 7, and even from the get-go you can already see the level of rose-coloredness in Jou’s gesture -- in the actual incident depicted, Jou went to the mountain out of a sense of obligation and stress, and the initial climbing involved him having a bit of a bickering moment with Gomamon. But once they did get up there, it was actually their first time the two of them got to really “bond” -- and not only that, their encounter with Unimon had Jou even look on it with fascination, before the Dark Gear had ever come into play.

So in the end, Jou really would have found the incident enjoyable and worthwhile if not for that, and from there you can understand why it would be appealing for him to revisit that setting and finally get to have a bit of calm fun with Gomamon there -- especially since, again, the Neverland islands have a very strong preference for isolating the kids from others, and this was one of the few times Jou got to have a major moment of calm like this alone with Gomamon, with a slight reprieve from the constant feeling of stress and duty.

Koushirou’s most prominently resembles the “sealed room” in the factory in Adventure episode 5, and while Koushirou certainly continued to make a large number of exciting discoveries after that, this was the situation where Koushirou, with no one else but Tentomon to worry about in the immediate vicinity, got to have the largest sensation of “novelty” -- where he first came upon the fascinating discovery of data manipulating reality around him, and he actually got to see the world change around him by wiping things off a wall.

And, of course, there were other things going on like Tentomon confronting him with his first existential crisis, and how things quickly went south with Andromon...but we don’t have to remember that part for now, right?

An interesting thing about Koushirou: the circumstances of how he was “kidnapped” in the first place are actually somewhat obscured compared to the other four in this scene, since Menoa presumably needed him conscious in order to get his list out of him, resulting in his kidnapping scene also involving an emerging Eosmon and not having him be instantly taken the way we see Takeru and Hikari (more on this in the section below). It’s thus unclear whether he’d be in their boat had his position in Menoa’s plan not been unusual -- said memories in Neverland involved “gathering information and learning more”, something he still actively involved himself with even after the events of Adventure, and he’s also the first one to reach a forward-thinking mentality about the partnership dissolution phenomenon. Either way, once he was already dragged into Neverland, it’s natural that the place could find a good memory for him in the same way it did for the other kids who were “manually” dragged in, but the actual method of entry and whether Koushirou's post-Adventure life put him in a mindset similar to that of the 02 quartet (again, see below) is a bit ambiguous.

So here’s an interesting part about how the 02 quartet gets involved in this story: their own encounters with Eosmon happen during a part where the method of kidnapping has abruptly changed. As many have pointed out, this is also when the degree of the targets Menoa wanted had also suddenly escalated, because while her previous claims had involved the idea of kidnapping like-minded adults (who, indeed, were entertaining thoughts of nostalgia to even some degree), she was now kidnapping actual children, ones who weren’t even nearly at the point of the supposed drudgery of adulthood that Menoa claimed they would eventually have, and with her arrogantly deciding she knew better for all of them. The part that becomes particularly intriguing about this is that the exact same thing happens with Miyako -- she is explicitly stated to have connected her laptop to the Internet, resulting in an Eosmon physically emerging and chasing her instead of instantaneously snatching away her consciousness through a camera like her own fellow 02 group members Takeru and Hikari.

So in other words, the 02 quartet’s favorable position in this incident doesn’t just have to do with being lucky enough to have gotten Koushirou’s warning about the Eosmon early; they (or at least Miyako) also seem to have a certain degree of outright immunity to it, much like the young children who aren’t old enough to have nostalgia yet. (Also, keep in mind that Takeru was caught thanks to a security camera; “excess caution with electronic devices” alone wouldn’t necessarily have guaranteed their safety.)

Recalling that, for the most part, Takeru and Hikari are usually treated more like 02 group members in the context of this narrative yet are, in this one case, treated as being potentially nostalgia-prone, it stands to reason that the main difference between the two of them and their fellow members in the 02 group is the fact that Takeru and Hikari went on the adventure in 1999, and the quartet did not. So in other words, the reason the 02 quartet isn’t as prone to this is not so much that they’re fundamentally different-minded people, as much as they have a distinct lack of an experience they can be attached to the way the Adventure group is to their own 1999 adventure. (Remember that Menoa’s kidnappings work heavily on subconscious feelings; you can’t blame anyone for having these kinds of feelings no matter how much they’ve consciously learned.)

As I said earlier, it’s foolhardy to pretend that Adventure was all sunshine and roses, and, likewise, it’s also foolhardy to pretend that 02 was nothing but suffering for everyone involved. Both series involved a lot of balancing of funny, silly moments to be treasured as much as they involved stress (which is why people are so attached to both, after all). So the question is not so much how happy they were in their childhoods as much as the nature of what that happiness came from, and what relation it has to their current lives. And when you look at what experiences the 02 quartet had back in 02, you might notice a thread of the fact that it is significantly harder to romanticize the events of 02 than it is Adventure.

Let’s put it this way: Let’s say that the 02 quartet was kidnapped into Neverland and placed onto islands that fit Menoa’s view of happiness. What, exactly, would you pick from 02 itself that would work? What kind of “happiness” did they have back then that’s so romantic, so impossible to replicate now, that they’d want to go back to because it’s better than their lives now once you disentangle all of the bad stuff?

...Not much. Not much at all, actually. Hanging out in the computer room together? Doesn’t seem like they cared that much about the computer room part as much as the fact the others were there bantering with them (which would put a huge nail in Menoa’s islands mandating isolationism). Going out on a picnic together? No reason they can’t just go on another picnic again (and if the BD box is to be believed, that’s exactly what they did, and they even added Ken to it while they were at it). Hanging out with their Digimon in real life and doing silly hijinks? They’re...probably still doing that now, actually. Getting to find true happiness at a Christmas party? That’s a party from the real world (again, something they most certainly continued to do thereafter), one where the happiness came not from the romanticism of anything that happened to do with some adventure, but just the happiness of being surrounded by true friends, which, again, Ken is still clearly getting to do by the time of Kizuna.

Once you look at the circumstances of what the “adventure” of 02 was to the 02 group, you may realize that it doesn’t really resemble the traditional romantic image of an “adventure” much at all. Sure, they were blessed with being able to regularly go back and forth between the Digital World from the get-go, but it meant that -- especially without the time dilation in play -- the Digital World became much less of a picturesque area associated with a one-time memorable adventure as much as something they had to squeeze in their after-hours while juggling it with their school. The circumstances they encountered their Digimon and the Digital World in were at a point where it had a certain level of “mundane” to them, compared to their seniors; it wasn’t a “fantasy adventure in the Digital World” when so much of the story also revolved around real-world events as well, and you can’t really find many “mysterious fantasy” events in 02 that resemble much of those in Adventure. The closest might be...Daisuke seeing Numemon pile out of a vending machine in 02 episode 1? (Not very romantic.) Daisuke getting chased around by a Tortomon in 02 episode 22? (Really not very romantic.) Iori getting to tour the ocean with Submarimon? (Implied to more about relief from how much he was holding himself back than the uniqueness of the experience in itself.) Ken’s long-time-ago flashback from 02 episode 23 about meeting Wormmon for the first time? (Defeating a Gazimon is hardly that impressive; the important part was him bonding with Wormmon, which he’s...uh...still doing now?)

There weren’t any lasting relationships with Digimon friends like the ones in Adventure, maybe encountering some civilians once and not seeing them much again after that, especially since the lack of time dilation meant not getting to spend as much time visiting them much at all (think about all of the really fun experiences that the Adventure group probably had that weren’t shown in the actual Adventure TV series, just because it probably didn’t have enough drama that would make a good TV episode plot). This means that there’s very little, if at all, of 02 that represents something this group would want so badly to recreate that they can’t already do now; everything from back then was either something comparatively mundane, or something they actually would not want back. Unlike with Adventure, where a lot of the kids had irreplaceable moments that only happened to be spoiled a bit later, a lot of the “really awesome accomplishments” from the first half of 02 were explicitly against Ken, someone whom they’d probably rather not dwell on fighting again because of how much they love him now; many of those good memories are “retroactively poisoned” because of that, and it’s much, much more difficult to make a rose-colored version of those memories disentangled from the bad, because of how fundamentally intrinsic that retroactive poisoning becomes.

And, when you think about it, the mandate of “you have to be alone on your own island” would pretty much break these four in particular, especially since the 02 group is portrayed as the type to need mutual support more than anything else, and so many of the events that represent “happiness” specifically involved the happiness of each other being present. It’s not to say that the 02 quartet had no moments of happiness when alone with their partners, but, rather, being with each other provided so much more fulfillment to them that Menoa’s offer of a memory of their past that requires them to be alone probably pales in comparison to anything they could do now in each other’s presence. Maybe, like with the other kids depicted in these scenes, they could be buttered up with something nice if you successfully got them into Neverland, but it’s not like they have any real wistfulness about anything from back then to the point that they’d be subconsciously drawn towards it instead of having to be dragged in kicking and screaming -- and especially in the case of Miyako, the same one who managed to evade an Eosmon here, who was offered a similar “chance to be alone” back in 02 episode 49 and didn’t take very long to decide she hated it because of how much of her happiness comes from getting to be with others.

By the time of the end of Adventure, the Adventure kids’ ideal situation was to have a romantic and fun 110-year adventure with the sights and fun of the Digital World, with all of the weird fantasy surrealism and less of the world-saving, and that’s something they never got to have (and that Menoa was inherently offering them). By the time of the end of 02, the 02 quartet’s ideal situation was...to find a way to get back to normal life and hope their friend feels a little better, and that “ideal situation” is still persisting even into the time of Kizuna, so it’s hard to imagine they really want more than that.

And, again, when you extrapolate this into what Kizuna’s trying to say about real life, adulthood, and nostalgia: it is true that Menoa’s projecting a belief that absolutely does not apply to everyone. While it’s true that many people feel that childhood had a certain kind of magic that you can’t get back in adulthood, there are possibly just as many people who aren’t really all that nostalgic to begin with, either due to trauma or something about their childhoods being miserable, or, even in the lack of such miserable events, simply enjoying the added freedom and expanded range of ability that comes with adulthood to the point they consider it to be more than worth the tradeoff. The 02 group basically represents this crowd -- Ken’s life right now beats out his past in pretty much nearly every respect, and while there are certain concerns about not being able to meet up as often, they’re finding the same ways to do the same kinds of over-the-top hijinks they did back in 02, with arguably even more range now that they get to exploit Digital Gates to do world travel and act without worrying about their parents. They’re basically like the adults who see Menoa’s creed of “childhood is better because adulthood sucks” and go “sorry, can’t relate.”

That said, remember: this isn’t because the 02 quartet is somehow mentally stronger or anything, but rather just a byproduct of what experiences they've had and haven’t had. Takeru and Hikari’s position is unique here -- for all intents and purposes their mentalities are portrayed as closer to the 02 group’s, but they did still have the experience their seniors had and are thus still capable of being close to their position in this one regard. In the end, everyone is different, it’s no sin to have feelings based on those differences, and “being able to relate” to one’s position is also an important key here; because the 02 group’s position is so alien to Menoa’s, it’s unlikely they could have tackled her problems nearly as intimately as their seniors could.

What we learn about Menoa’s backstory establishes that she forced her vision of nostalgic happiness on everyone based on her own perception of her past in such a warped, rose-colored manner. She conveniently omitted or forgot about details such as the fact that her life as a “child” involved feeling ostracized from everyone and that she herself was guilty of neglecting Morphomon. Not only that, she herself claims that she’s the only one who knows what this feels like -- that nobody relates to her -- and thus, you can see that she came to her conclusion that her experiences are universal by the power of sheer extrapolation, hence why she thinks everyone inevitably loses their partner upon reaching adulthood despite pretty significant amounts of evidence to the contrary. (For all it’s worth, the fact that she still considers herself as having “become an adult” at 14 just because she got into university at that time is pretty conceited.)

Menoa’s existence as being so starkly in contrast to the 02 quartet’s is very likely because her entire character was built up from the ground that way -- her entire backstory of skipping grades into university is heavily based on 02′s initial development premise and Ken’s own backstory, meaning she explicitly represents the path that Ken and the other 02 kids chose not to take, and the timing of certain events in her backstory seems almost deliberately engineered to prevent her from witnessing some of 02′s important answers to Kizuna’s conflict, most notably her inability to witness the final battle and the important lessons everyone present learned about following one’s dreams without restraint, and how that relates to one’s partner. Menoa’s mindset is basically that level of incompatible with 02′s themes of “moving on from the past” and “not caving to arbitrary societal expectations”, to the point her character could only get to this point by going out of the way to exclude her from 02′s story and events, because she’s fundamentally built as a character who started off on a very similar path as them (getting to integrate her Digimon partner into normal life, having a similar backstory to Ken) before veering off on a very different one.

Moreover, about that backstory, and the reason why 02 was conceived as such a criticism of the concept of “skipping grades into university”: the concern that someone in this position will be kept from making any friends their age. Menoa puts the moment of “being with one’s partner” on such a pedestal and considers herself to be “the only one who knows what this feels like” partially because she has a fundamentally warped view of friendship itself. Even the Adventure group, which may not have had quite the absurdly tight level of bonding the 02 group had, still broke out of the illusion via Taichi and Yamato reaching out to them, and Taichi and Yamato giving each other mutual support helped them make the decisions they did in the movie. The movie is titled “bonds”, and “bonds” doesn’t just refer to those between human and Digimon partner, but also bonds between each other; Taichi, Yamato, and Sora slowly drifting away from the others at the start of the movie has very strong relevance to their respective existential crises, and the role that Taichi and Yamato play in supporting each other, and Mimi’s in supporting Sora in To Sora and even beyond that, say a lot as to how they’re already expected to be much better off than Menoa was.

It’s not that adulthood is inherent drudgery; it’s that Menoa’s own circumstances really are that warped to the point where she sees her very unusual experiences as fundamentally synonymous with how life is supposed to work in general. She was so obsessed with “being independent”, “being useful to the world”, and “being on her own” that she had no mentality of making friends or connecting to others besides her own partner, and once her partner disappeared, she seemed to make no attempt to rectify that. So of course her life in university following that ended up being not nearly as fulfilling as she’d hoped, since she was getting no real emotional support from anywhere, and, as 02 itself also drove home, apparent “approval from society” only ever makes you as “happy” as a Dark Seed-implanted child if you’re not also being supported by your loved ones in the process. Her adulthood sucked, and she decided that everything about her rose-colored childhood meant that childhood is fundamentally superior in every way, and thus decided that keeping everyone else in it would be “saving” them from the terror it involves -- even though (even if they’re not aware of the specifics of everything) the 02 quartet is not the kind to be able to relate to this at all, and, eventually, Taichi and Yamato, who do understand her position a bit better due to their own experiences, are able to get her to reconsider a little.

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #kizuna spoilers #shihameta

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