coquelicoq - Tumblr blog

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(inspired by this one for the sake of full transparency)

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Hugo keeps telling us that Valjean has told people something , or said something Often, or was Often Heard to Say X . Given that Valjean is a pretty isolated person who barely speaks about the past even to Cosette, who does he keep talking to??

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“what’s the song of the summer” ?? it’s DANCING IN THE DARK by bruce springsteen for the 40th year in a row

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Glass Staircase at the Go'o Shrine (2002) Designed by: Hiroshi Sugimoto

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I could NOT be in feudal Japan. Here are some reasons why

I wasn’t born then.

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Kind of hilarious to me how poorly the title "Mob Psycho 100" localized to English-speaking areas. To someone whose first language is English, it scans as:

Mob (Yakuza, Mafia)

Psycho (violent person with "crazy" behaviors)

Thus: a particularly violent member of organized crime.

But in Japanese it scans as:

Mob (background characters in crowd scenes in manga or anime)

Psycho (short for psychic)

Thus: a psychic who looks/acts like someone you'd never pick out of a crowd scene in a comic.

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interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume?

me: mhm so that’s called a lacuna. it refers to when manuscripts have missing parts, lost to time. for example, the epic of gilgamesh has

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#see this is why that ''it's what I owed the Jiang sect'' is so much fun#like this is an obviously batshit nonsense claim #you have to have had your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears throughout the whole plot to believe this #BUT it will work on JC because he is neurotic as hell and has self worth issues coming out his ears #and does have the potential to convince himself he hallucinated their entire relationship #meanwhile WWX is busy conflating JC's actual anger with him with his own guilt into a sort of personal bogeyman and projecting it onto JC #so they go off with JC half convinced that's all it ever was #and WWX convinced that's more than it could ever be again #all while both of them continue to be exactly as unhinged about each other as ever #the drama potential is UNREAL (@fairandfatalasfair)

No, but to suggest that Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng only ever had the relationship of a master and servant and that the only thing that held them together was debt and obligation on Wei Wuxian's part is such a wild take considering how absolutely unhinged the both of them are when it conscerns the other.

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equal and opposite version of kuromisa fake dating natori is my deeply realized scenario in which clara needs to meet up with kuromisa to buy some rare item and gets her phone number at the auction while they're looking at the six-eyed mask and something something they stay in touch and become best friends. someone looks over seiji's shoulder at a meeting and wonders who is this woman he's texting??? the gossip mill is in shambles. the aunties are kind of glad he's moved on tho.

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I actually think the orv webtoon pretty much fails as an adaptation. In the novel you're meant to identify with kdj and relate to him heavily, it's even written in first person for this: it's not "he did smth", it's "I did" ("You did"). This works right into the ending which wouldn't hit half as hard without it. And in the webtoon he's only a character. A protagonist. There's no identifying with him like this. The way he's drawn there doesn't help either...

i would definitely have to agree that the orv webtoon just absolutely does not have the same feel the webnovel does, and that it's much harder to get in kim dokja's head. but i would have to agree in that it fundamentally fails as an adaptation.

for starters, i think the idea that you can't identify with/project onto a character unless the narrative is actively holding your hand in doing that is a pretty baseless claim to make. there is quite literally nothing that could stop a person from looking at any kind of fictional character and saying 'wow hes literally me for real' no matter how much distance the narrative puts between you and them. it may take a little bit more active desire from The Girl Reading This but I don't think it's nearly as much of a stretch as you're making it out to be, especially as the story progresses and we get to the arcs that serve to make kim dokja feel a little more believably 3 dimensional than he does in his early epic isekai protagsweep cringe behavior.

also, even if what you were describing was true for every webtoon reader - that kim dokja is just A Protagonist, and not as much of a vessel for projection - i think that's genuinely an adaptation of orv that has a lot of merit and a very interesting meta-relationship to the source material. when you consider the webtoon's publishing schedule, webtoon readers are going to be operating on a timeline much closer to that of KDJ reading the original wos updates. He essentially is yoo joonghyuk to everyone who has begun reading it now, a sort of impossibly resilient protagonist they could choose to lean on for the better part of the next decade. and i think that's super interesting. kim dokja has never been more yoo joonghyuk than he is in the orv webtoon. that's not a bad adaptation at all! that is in fact very interesting to me!

the thing about adaptations that's really tricky is that it is 1. physically impossible to 'accurately' adapt a story from one medium into another. the medium is so intrinsic to storytelling that by necessity things are lost, changed, and gained in switching from one to another. and 2. considering the wide range of opinions people have about a source there really is no consensus about which exact things about a text have to be 1:1 translated in order for an adaptation to be 'faithful'. im very far behind on the webtoon but everything i have seen so far i think has done the best job it can translating it into a comic.....

.... except for the art style

i really do not like the way this person draws people, yeah. the same face is so rampant that it's genuinely difficult for some people to tell the characters apart. it's got super uninspired character design which i think is a crying shame that does a lot of these characters a huge disservice. i wish they had picked something less generic looking. but in many ways, generic looking exteriority fits orv. i can aaaalmost appreciate it from that angle, and im sure it's helping orv gain traction with the kind of people who regularly read webtoons (i am not one of these people) but. yeah. i find the way sleepy c draws people to be pretty ugly, if we're being honest.

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i think that all stories are about consumption, performance, and/or narrative, and the best combine elements of all three

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this reread ive been thinking a lot about the dichotomy of like. i have been struggling so much to phrase this. how the first scenario of orv, for your story to start you have to want to live enough to kill someone and obviously this is meant to parallel kim dokja killing his father. and then a story must have a sacrifice to continue and this is obviously meant to parallel kim dokjas mother sacrificing herself for him. and idk ive been thinking a LOT about the line orv draws between someone sacrificing themselves for you and having to kill someone to survive and where that line blurs. especially in the demon king arc where kim dokja earns his demon king of salvation title through letting his friends kill them.

i dont think the story is intentionally trying to blur those lines in kim dokjas childhood story, i dont think they want you to think of kim dokjas father dying as a type of sacrifice he willingly made. maybe they want you to think about kim dokjas mothers sacrifice as a type of murder. maybe they just want you to think about what a sacrifice really is. its working on me at least. by god have i been thinking about it

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one of my favourite details in orv is that it says, over and over again, that free will definitely exists. your characters will become their own people beyond your control. your avatar will gain sentience and turn against you. the world is a novel and time is a circle but you made every choice that lead you here on your own. the only time fate comes up it is seen as a despicable violation, something forced upon you, and not an inherent part of reality

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the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

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No, but to suggest that Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng only ever had the relationship of a master and servant and that the only thing that held them together was debt and obligation on Wei Wuxian's part is such a wild take considering how absolutely unhinged the both of them are when it conscerns the other.

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sometimes i like to think about Jiang Cheng using Zidian as a bug zapper when there’s a fly or something