#whose dick byakuya...WHOSE DICK....

[hey-heigo]

normal day at the future foundation

[casliveblog]

Custom Toonami Block Week 170 Rundown

Inuyasha The Final Act: We get another one of those episodes where several plots that clearly happened in different orders are kinda happening all at once, so I’ll tackle them in the order they’re resolved rather than the order they show up in. Sesshomaru is still dicking around in the background trying to master the Meido Zangetsuha because it can already kill everything in one hit but really mastering it means a slightly bigger AOE of killing everything in one hit. Meanwhile Inuyasha’s actually kind of proactive in searching out his next upgrade like ‘you know I’m just gonna steal the arc villain’s powers anyway so might as well just hunt him down’ and luckily they find Dakki just as it’s being perfected, like minutes after, it’s crazy. Inuyasha kills the dragon demon that gave the scales for it with a classic game of demonic energy tennis and then the human that forged it pulls a Kaijinbo and decides to start wielding Dakki anyway despite the corrupting influence it has on his body. Another game of demonic energy tennis ensues and Tessaiga loses all its power but manages to crack Dakki and get it scared enough that it just starts pumping energy into its human wielder who just fucking explodes from it, so yeah Tessaiga has its second most useless upgrade now. Like I feel like since it gets Meidou Zangetsuha right after this and it’s very situational and hurts the user at first, Dragon Scale Tessaiga never really gets the chance to shine. Like it ‘absorbs demonic energy’ but that doesn’t really amount to much given Inuyasha doesn’t do anything with that energy, it’s basically a switch that turns off Naraku’s auto-healing. Energy absorption is really weird for a heroic power and Yashahime did a lot of weird shit with Towa using it too but at least with her it made her attacks stronger. Meanwhile Koga gets set up to be attacked by a baby wolf demon kid whose brother is being held ransom by Naraku’s newest incarnation once he realized ‘oh shit Kagura did all my grunt work what do I do now’, Byakuya. I don’t really get what the plan was, like this kid was never going to kill Koga and leading him back to them was kind of a whim that basically amounted to Byakuya getting to see the Goraishi in action. But Moryomaru does come around and Inuyasha gets to save Koga from having his shards taken for like the tenth time (though this time it’s because of bs conveinient Midoriko shenanigans so I guess the good luck cancels out the bad) and they do get to do a cool team attack now that Koga has an energy blast like the rest of the big boys. Also like, they gave the wolf demon kid a jewel shard? Naraku has almost the whole jewel completed at this point, we’ve seen it, so is he like… breaking off new shards? That seems like a bad idea given the only shards besides Koga’s and Moryomaru’s is the one you gave to a random kid to fuck with Sango and it’s currently Naraku’s biggest obstacle, like you’d think he’d stop giving out jewel shards and risking losing them. But yeah, turns out Dragon Scale Tessaiga is too much for Inuyasha to handle rn so he has an upgrade but he really doesn’t so now it’s time for second upgrade.  

Castlevania: So yeah we get the fabulous scene of the demons murdering Frollo which I think is the most popular scene in the series with good reason. Meanwhile Trevo gets help from Sypha doing crowd control and it’s really funny how he’s like ‘damn priest you almost made murderers out of these people’ only for the people to fucking murder the priest, like they switched fucking fast, guess a little ‘ ‘ey isn’t this guy an asshole?’ is all it takes to overcome years of Catholic guilt because all Trevor really does is say ‘they’re lying’, offer no evidence and everyone’s willing to just jump the priest over it, like he’s telling the truth but I feel like the villagers are just a bit too ready to believe him right away. The two of them manage to Seven Samurai their way into teaching the people how to fight demons just in time to have a really long scene of falling into Alucard’s daddy booboo room. Alucard and Trevor have a really cool fight because it’s like Sonic Adventure 2 you’re more likely to believe there’s one supernatural vampire/hedgehog that looks slightly different than you expected than the more unbelievable option that there’s actually two supernatural vampires/hedgehogs. But yeah they get all their flamboyant male showboating out of the way and agree to go kill Dracula because they’re all getting kinda sick of this whole demon horde genocide thing.

Jujutsu Kaisen: I don’t know who’s in charge of directing Meimei’s scenes but they always do it like it’s some kind of survival horror and it’s a special treat. Meimei defeats smallbox with the powers of birds and death which is definitely a sentence I never thought I’d say. Meanwhile Maki, Nanami, and Papa Zenin encounter that lil baby Cthulu thing who’s just digivolved into Perfect Cell Cthulu thing and he and Papa Zenin have a weird meta discussion about animation and HD while Cthulu’s just like ‘my friends are dead and I’m mad’ like I legit thought with how hyped up this tentacle guy was in the first OP and just kinda hanging around in the background of Kujaku’s hiding place he’d be some key figure but apparently he’s just some guy they pal around with, it’s like that bit in the Simpsons where the small yakuza guy does nothing and you’re waiting for him to do something cool and this is cool but it’s not exactly what I was expecting. Papa Zenin’s technique is pretty cool too like a weaponized form of windows movie maker and if you don’t make a full AMV in half a second you get stunlocked but of course since he uses his fists and not like a sword or something he doesn’t have a really good finishing blow so it takes a while to beat the shit out of someone, like that that point learn how to use a sword so you can cut someone’s head off while they’re stunlocked instead of beating them around for ten minutes. Anyway Cthulu Expansions his Domain which is just Super Mario Sunshine with angry murder fish and Papa Zenin does the move which is different from the other move that cancels domain shit and it’s really poorly explained it’s basically just ‘nuh-uh’ to the Domain shit by doing a frame perfect input cancel. And like they always seem to get the guys that don’t have Domains to fight the villains that do because I’m guessing if Papa Zenin could do Doamin stuff he’d have done it by now. Still, the guys hold up as long as they can against fish that can literally just teleport into already biting a chunk out of them and Megumi comes out of nowhere to give Maki her nunchaku back and use his Domain he learned like a couple weeks ago to at least de-power Cthulu’s domain from an insta-kill to like an 80% kill which is enough to actually fight at least but Megumi’s not doing so hot trying to drag Super Mario Sunshine into his Shikamaru Shadow World so he just plans to rip a hole in the edge of the domain for everyone to get out of because it’s one of those once a day things so if you just like move out of the way they can’t spam it. Papa Zenin’s missing an arm and Nanami’s missing an eye so yeah they’re ready to get the fuck out of dodge but Dadgumi pops out of the hole of all people, like father like son I guess just popping in to Super Mario Sunshine to fuck shit up.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End: I really like how despite the episodes being two separate vignettes likely derived from manga chapters being shorter than anime episodes, the two halves usually lead into each other in some way and carry a certain theme, it’s a good touch I didn’t see in something like Spy X Family that tends to go for mostly unconnected stories or full story arcs. Frieren and Fern are cleaning up a beach in exchange for a counterfeit book supposedly written by Flamme, who we find out in the second half is Frieren’s Master from a thousand years ago and famously didn’t write shit down so a bunch of people wrote shit down to say it was her. The running gag for this half is Frieren sleeps like a college student, up all night reading and then sleeping till noon, which means she won’t be able to see the sun rise on the festival when the beach is finally clean, but Fern Mama Bear’s up and knows it’s important to Frieren to see it and gets them out the door to watch it. Frieren contemplates why Himmel was so insistent on her seeing it back when they were in town and sees it as nothing special until she sees Fern smiling at it and realizes the real sunset was the friends she made along the way. The second half is the group visiting Eisen as the last other surviving member of the Himmel Troupe and Frieren’s like ‘bro I don’t wanna feel bad when you die too so lemme know any unfinished business shit you gotta deal with’ and sweetly enough, Eisen’s unfinished business is having Frieren deal with her unfinished business and getting her to voice her regrets to Himmel’s spirit in the afterlife. This is really kind of a setup for another ‘the way to solve your own problems is to help someone else’ kind of deal but I feel like this series has earned that kind of trite thing at this point and I’d honestly kinda prefer that to a magical ‘oh, heaven’s real and death has fewer consequences because of it’ twist. But yeah, they do find Flamme claims to have talked to the dead in the spot where the Demon King’s Castle was but she also was a notorious troll and may just be fucking with Frieren to get her to work her own shit out but either way Frieren was looking for a sidequest anyway so they might as well go on a NG+ adventure to the Demon King’s Castle to go talk to ghosts or whatever.

Vinland Saga: So yeah Gardar’s here to take Arnheid and their definitely alive and with her son but Wolf ain’t having that and Einar’s kinda slowly coming to the realization that just because they’re good to them doesn’t mean the guys that literally enslave people are the good guys. Thorfinn manages to talk him down and Wolf beats the shit out of Gardar so they can drag him off for questioning. The rest of the episode is kind of an awkward ‘what now?’ conversation between a couple of parties. Arnheid tells Einar about how Gardar left for war based of an unnecessary and vague idea of keeping his family safe and protecting them and ironically all the men running off to war for what amounts to the viking equivalent of fighting for oil is what opened up her village to being ransacked and her son dying (they don’t show them murdering a one year old obviously but I checked the wiki and apparently he was killed because you get more for female slaves that don’t have kids) and her getting sold as a slave. And now worst of all she sees the kind of monstrous murderer Gardar has become and is afraid of him so she’s ready to leave him to his fate and protect her own now that, get this, she’s fucking pregnant with Ketil’s kid (I’d fucking laugh if this story were different and she carried to term and the Ketil welcomes the kid and it comes out with Einar’s bright red hair that’d be fucking hilarious). But yeah, except all of that or at least part of it was a fucking lie because after everyone goes to bed Arnheid’s gonna sneak out and see him anyway. Sverkel tells her a contrasting story about how not going to war caused him and Ketil to lose everything they were avoiding fighting for in the first place, so moral of the story is fight or don’t, world’s fucked up and everyone ends up broken in the end so you gotta pick the kind of brokenness you can live with. And that seems to finalize Arnheid’s decision as she walks into the night in a way dramatic enough to ensure me she is definitely not coming back.

[the-apocryphal-one]

Come to think of it, Hiyoko's not the only one who Dangan Ronpa never calls out on her attitude. Togami never really faces consequences for his spite except when Aoi slaps him, and she's portrayed as wrong for doing it. Komaeda and Ouma manipulate the class, and get to die as martyrs like Hiyoko. Genocide Syo cuts Aoi, but again Aoi's the one scolded. The DR franchise has a massive problem holding toxic people accountable or having them face any meaningful consequences.

True enough, although I believe Hiyoko is the worst of the lot. Byakuya’s a dick, but that’s it–he’s not as manipulative as Nagito and Kokichi, or as violent as Genocider, and unlike Hiyoko he gets better about it. Kokichi does die a martyr, but he’s not forgiven by his classmates or remembered with fondness. Tbh I don’t remember too much about Genocider’s fight with Aoi, but I think the “serial killer” aspect is at least addressed (what with FF’s reluctance to trust her and Toko/Byakuya trying to make her stop). As for Nagito, I have problems with him being insta-forgiven without ever developing or showing signs of change, but at the very least his extremism is presented by the series as wrong.

Hiyoko’s bullying is just brushed off by the plot AND other characters, repeated for comedic value, and sometimes even presented as “it’s how she really cares guys!” in the side-material. And you know, I could buy her being an Asuka-type character, who does care but is too psychologically screwed up to show it in anything but toxic ways, except the franchise doesn’t go into detail about her behavior or do anything with it. She’s a bully who simply is a bully, whose bullying is shown as either funny or “really affection”, and that’s why I hold her in lower esteem than the actual serial killer and the guy who tried to blow up his school!

*end rant* Yeah…sorry, but Hiyoko really grinds my gears. She’s not just a terrible person, she’s a terrible character too, and that combination is really damning in my eyes. At least everyone else here was either acknowledged as in the wrong, changed, or unforgiven, even if the degrees of how well it was written varies.

[asktheshslmarshmallow]

DR Kids As Bo Burnham Quotes

(Some of the language and themes are a little mature, and for some of them, I don’t even know what the joke I’m trying to make is. Enjoy!)

Makoto Naegi: I’ll vote for whichever presidential candidate promises to release Dunkaroos back into the market. 

Kyoko Kirigiri: I like to call everyone that I find slightly annoying a 'sociopath'.

Byakuya Togami: If you like Talking, you might also enjoy Shutting Up. It’s like talking except you don’t fuck up everything all the time forever and ever. 

Junko Enoshima: Whenever I feel like my life sucks, I remember all the people less fortunate than I and it makes me laugh and I cheer up immediately. 

Mondo Owada: My mom said I can be a tough guy now if I want to. HELL YEAH!!!

Mukuro Ikusaba: I just ran over my dog with a shopping cart. April Fools! I don’t know whose dog it is!

Kiyotaka Ishimaru: If you don’t give a fuck about the law, let me hear you say fuck the police! If that seems oversimplified to you, let me hear you say it’s a really tough job and they’re doing their best!

Aoi Asahina: When life gets you down, make a comforter!

Chihiro Fujisaki: Why is there a young boy living alone down the lane? Who signed this boy's lease? Am I the only one concerned for this little boy?

Sakura Ogami: I know it’s bad, kid. I got your back, kid.

Yasuhiro Hagakure: Art is a lie, nothing is real.

Celestia Ludenberg: Poetic talent is really easy to fake when thy sentences doth no fucking sense make.

Leon Kuwata: There’s something about her, I just can’t describe it...tits.

Sayaka Maizono: I love all of you in a deeply vague and shallow way.

Hifumi Yamada: I wanna have a daughter...I wanna have a daughter...so I can finally have someone around the house who can fit their hands in a Pringle can!

Toko Fukawa: When I tried to hit puberty I swung and I missed.  

Genocide Jill: Why is it that when a woman wears revealing clothing, she's labeled a “slut”; yet if I were to wear her skin as a jacket, I'm a “murderer”?

Hajime Hinata: Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth.

Chiaki Nanami: I know very little about anything, but what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.

Nagito Komaeda: I masturbate ‘cause I’m the only one whose standards are low enough to FUCK ME.

Akane Owari: I'm bored way too easily. I'm staring at screens half the day. I need to be overstimulated.

Kazuichi Soda: Good girl in a straw hat with her arms out in a cornfield....that is a scarecrow. I thought it was a human woman. Sorry.

Sonia Nevermind: Who needs a thousand metaphors to figure out you shouldn’t be a dick?

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu: I can’t grow a beard. That one’s not ironic, that one’s just...sad.

Peko Pekoyama: The world is not funny. We are all dying. The world is not funny. 12% of the world’s population does not have access to clean drinking water. The world is not funny. Guy Fieri owns two functioning restaurants. The world is not funny. 

Gundham Tanaka: You’re afraid of sharks? Really? They don’t even have bones! They have cartilage. Are you afraid of ears too?

Ibuki Mioda: I met a homeless man named Rich. He wasn’t. Isn’t that terrible?

Nekomaru Nidai: Be brave. Be yourself. Never change. Never learn. Never take any criticism. Die alone. Go to heaven. Don’t let god tell you shit.

Hiyoko Saionji: Hey, if you guys are having a good time, make some silence!

Twogami (SHSL Imposter): We think you’ve changed, bro. We know best. You suck.

Mikan Tsumiki: Laughter is the best medicine, y'know, besides medicine.

Teruteru Hanamura: I saw a gorgeous.................dick. 

Mahiru Koizumi: You think your dick is a gift, I promise it’s not!

[sichore]

what's the misconception with rukia??

That because Ichigo changed her world that it means that they revolve around one another to the exclusion of literally everyone else unless they serve a supporting role in their developing dramatic romance, ignoring the fact that canonically they do not and never have had a romantic connection*. There is a criticism to be made about Rukia’s story laregly involving men, but Ichigo isn’t one of them; Byakuya, Renji, and Kaien are the three most important men in her life. 

Furthermore, she’s best friends with Orihime and it’s a very important relationship that is flagrantly ignored by fandom. Orihime is pointedly her first female friend and really the first/only real close friend she’s had since Renji, which is why Orihime was the first one they announced their marriage to. It’s widely accepted that Rukia only tolerates Orihime and otherwise ignores her which is a MASSIVE contradiction to what happens in the story. Like, yanno, taking Orihime with her to SS for a month for one-on-one training (lesbireal, that cemented them as More Than Friends), or dragging her broken, bleeding and dying body across the floor trying to save Orihime in Las Noches.

She’s often characterized as this stone cold yet pristine and pure ice princess which she’s absolutely not, she dropped the cold facade once she was kidnapped. She carries herself nobly but speaks bluntly like a man (EVERYONE FORGETS THIS) and she’s goofy and whimsical as shit and still kind of awkward around people after isolating herself emotionally for so long and people act like this is ~because of Ichigo’s love~ when no, they were never in love. Instead, by meeting him she learned how to let people in again and what having friends is like and how important that is.

Also, she’s not the warrior princess second main character of Bleach. Yeah, she was the first character conceptualized, but ultimately it’s Ichigo’s story, and Rukia’s importance was mostly overblown advertising because of popularity. She really wasn’t that central after the SS arc as the main female focus officially shifted to Orihime and stayed on her until the series ended. And Rukia’s specialty isn’t swordplay, it’s kido, and her martial prowess is not an important or huge factor with her.

tl;dr the most common misconception of Rukia is that she’s the actual hero of Bleach whose prize dick was Ichigo and who was so much better than every other woman and that interpretation has been around f o r e v e r and is deeply rooted in internalized misogyny and really fucked up standards for how a woman “should” be (esp. when compared to all the unwarranted criticism and utter shit flung towards Orihime for absolutely no reason).

(*sidenote here about the nonexistent romance between Rukia and Ichigo, because it would look like all the images and the anime and stuff would say otherwise right? it’s all advertising by the publisher and several color illustrations Kubo did of them were by request (and to the point that he got tired of it and was running out of poses lmao, as noted in “All Color But the Black”). The director of the anime was horribly biased and changed several scenes early in the anime to make it seem like it was Ichigo and Rukia’s love story and that they were going to have the kind of belligerent romantic tension that other popular couples had at the time when, again, they really didn’t and were never intended to by Kubo; and he said several times that they didn’t have a romantic relationship. It set up a false idea for what actually happened in canon, in manga, and frankly cheapens the fact that the two had the kind of platonic yet poignant relationship many claim they wanna see more of instead of forced romance.) 

[saranel]

My question is not entirely bleach related. So don't know if you'll answer. Well..which pairing of the novel, 'pride and Prejudice' do you like out of the main 4 pairings? If so, do you find similarities between those pairings and bleach ones?

Ooohhhh gosh, it’s been over a decade since I read the book, anon, so you’ll have to forgive me if my memory of events is somewhat skewed by the movie/TV adaptations (what do you mean Darcy doesn’t take a dip in the lake at Pemberley? IS THIS NOT CANON???).  I’mma tag my pal and Pride and Prejudice expert @kisukke to correct me if there’s anything I got wrong. 

First off, I’m not sure which four pairs you’re referring to?  Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bingley are the obvious ones, but aside from those two pairs, I don’t know which other two I’d classify as ‘main.’  There’s Charlotte and Mr. Collins, Lydia and Wickham and then maybe the Gardiners and the Bennets themselves? Oh and Louisa and Mr. Hurst, I guess.  Unless of course you’re talking about potential pairs like Elizabeth & Collins andElizabeth & Wickham xD   

At any rate, with the exception of Elizabeth and Masaki, I can’t really say I find many similarities on a character level.  Maybe Ryūken and his mom with Darcy and Lady Catherine, but not a perfect comparison as in this case Ryūken and Masaki aren’t meant to end up together.  Still, the spirit of the novel, i.e. marrying for the right reasons, does apply greatly to many of the past canon and some of the implied pairs. 

(more under the cut)

Because this is basically one of the main themes of Pride and Prejudice, isn’t it?  To showcase the difference between the relationships built on love and respect, and the forced ones that resulted from impulse/convenience/social pressure etc.  Which, of course, isn’t such a common issue with modern marriages (at least not in the same way; marrying for the wrong reasons is still very much a thing), but was a revolutionary concept for Austen’s time, when women didn’t have much of a choice.  Take Charlotte, for example, whose marriage we do get to see in action, but we cannot really fault her for following the status quo of the time.  

Elizabeth took a great gamble when refusing to marry Mr. Collins, and we see how her mother uses the family’s future to pressure her into accepting, but as the heroine, it makes sense that she’s the one who rebels against this system and ends up not only marrying a man she loves, but also affecting the circumstances so Jane would also marry for love.  In that sense, Masaki has the same role in the EBTR story; by making her own choice and refusing to marry Ryūken, whether knowingly or not, she grants him the freedom to marry the one he loves as well. 

There are three more couples I can think of that fit a similar motif, though they don’t make for quite the same parallel. There’s Byakuya, of course, who bucks tradition and marries Hisana.  There’s Renji, who buries his feelings when Rukia becomes nobility so as not to stand in her way, and though this is mostly a headcanon, anyone who reads my blog consistently knows that I believe this is more or less what happened with Kisuke and Yoruichi.  Most signs point to him being either a commoner or a noble of far lower clout, so whether they carried a romance in secret for years or got together shortly before/after their exile, Yoruichi makes a clear choice in abandoning all titles and luxuries (not to mention friends and family) to be with him.  Whether you read that as platonic or romantic, the end result is the same: Yoruichi went against tradition and the status quo when it posed a serious detriment to her own happiness.  

The big difference between Bleach and P&P is that we don’t see any unhappy marriages in action, like the Bennets or Charlotte and Mr. Collins, to create the juxtaposition.  

Some people may make a case for Ryūken and Katagiri ending up together out of convenience, but I think their relationship has been greatly misinterpreted.  For one thing, when Isshin tells Ichigo that Ryūken let Masaki go post-graduation as a way to make a clean break from his own feelings, I’m not really buying it? I do believe Ryūken had some feelings for her, but they were mostly born out of an effort to make the best of a situation he wasn’t happy with but felt he had to endure.  

Masaki was a lovely girl, so I can’t really fault him for trying to make it work; as a member of a slowly dying ‘race,’ Ryūken carried the immense burden of being the head of a prominent, pureblooded clan that was expected to further the line.  But even before Masaki gets infected by the Hollow, we see how Ryūken’s stiffer disposition changes when he addresses Katagiri.  He regards Masaki with a touch of wariness, as though he’s not quite sure what to make of her and trying to picture himself married to her, but with Katagiri, he’s different, and she in turn is clearly very taken with him:        

One of the things Ryūken and Katagiri also have going for them is the Childhood Friends to Lovers trope, which Kubo is undeniably a fan of (confirmed for Rukia & Renji, Gin & Rangiku, plus heavily hinted for both Tōshirō & Momo and Kisuke & Yoruichi). Ryūken and Katagiri may not qualify as friends, strictly speaking, but the scene where we first hear of this, when Katagiri opens up her heart to Ryūken, frames their first meeting in a romantic light:

8Ryuuken: You can go home and tell my mother… // …that her son… / …has no right to protect the way of the Quincy.Katagiri: I will not.Ryuuken: …I said go home.Katagiri: I will not. / I cannot leave you on your own, young master.Ryuuken: Katagiri………!Katagiri: Ryuuken-sama. // Have you forgotten? / It is my sworn duty to dedicate my entire life… // …to serving you.9Katagiri: From the day we first set eyes on one another… // …my life has belonged to you. // So, please… // Please… // …do not be sad. // If you feel sorrow, Ryuuken-sama… // …my heart will be torn apart. // If you shed tears -Ryuuken: Katagiri.

That’s some seriously romantic dialogue right there, plus it has the added cultural element of them sharing an umbrella for the return trip home, a very romantic gesture in Japan.

Ryūken and Katagiri most certainly don’t qualify as a forced pairing, but they do reinforce the notion that marriage should have its basis in love and respect to work.  Ryūken may have cared deeply about Masaki (mostly platonically, with perhaps a hint of romance), but forcing a marriage between them when he loved Katagiri and she in turn had just fallen in love with Isshin, would’ve made them all four of them miserable. 

So in case it wasn’t already obvious, anon, I’m a big fan of pairings that go against tradition in order to be together xD I did very much enjoy the build-up with Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship, especially as it was slowly revealed that he wasn’t the asshat both she and the audience originally assumed he was (I love that an early draft of the novel was called ‘First Impressions’ lmao).  Or rather, that he had a good heart, but had to learn to see beyond the surface, which over the course of the novel, he does.  

Jane and Bingley were also pretty damn cute, but Elizabeth and Darcy, with their faults and their prickliness, are far more relatable than the always cheerful and friendly Jane and Bingley.  The two are obviously very well-suited for each other, they’re just the Golden Retriever to Elizabeth and Darcy’s Grumpy Cat.  And I’ve always been a fan of cats.  

Wickham can go eat a bag of dicks.