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Europe (yur·uhp) is an exotic peninsula in the extreme westernmost reaches of Asia with many fascinating cultures and landscapes and home to many of the world's last remaining feudal kingdoms, offering a glimpse back into a more simplistic way of living.

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commissioned @/gong-oh on bsky (@/ssj058 on twitter) to draw The Real Reason for the Triangle Symbol

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The gang's all here! (mostly)

Had to split poor Brian in half so the image quality wouldn't get all crunchy lol. Was only really intending to draw Rachel but she looked too lonely so I gave her some pals.

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Worm? Worm.

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Back on my "what if the Animorphs comics had different art styles corresponding to each narrator" agenda

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Everyone’s favourite little freak and her know-it-all gf

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Do you have a personal ranking of the 7 main Medaka Box antagonists. Basically every arc has a main “bad guy” except the Shiranui arc having Iihiko and Fukurou.

Immediately, I'm left drawing a blank to this question because the Jet Black Bride Arc doesn't actually have a specific antagonist

Yes, Momo ends up being the final confrontation of the arc, but she's not the driving antagonistic force

Bukiko, as the representative of the Gehyoukai and organizer of the Jet Black Wedding, is set up as that force, but ultimately she participates so little in the actual story that she can't really be called the antagonist. She doesn't even get any comeuppance for literally killing Hitoyoshi, she basically just facilitated Momo having leverage

In a sense, I would argue that Fukurou was the true antagonist of JBB because he was the one actually pulling the strings, and it was because his plan more or less went off without a hitch there that the Unknown Shiranui Arc happened at all, where he acted as the antagonistic force until his plot was turned on its head by trying to manipulate Iihiko who simply could not be manipulated

All of this to say, I assume you're including Momo as the antagonist of JBB, so I'm going to proceed as if you are, though I want it to be know that I personally would not otherwise

7. Momo

For exactly the reasons listed above, Momo simply isn't an arc antagonist, she's merely an enemy within a greater arc that happens to be the final challenge of it. While I have managed to deep dive into her characterization before, she easily gets the least depth and development of all of the antagonists despite setting up plot threads that imply she could have been so much more (i.e., "why do you know my Project Name?")

6. Fukurou

Fukurou is the classic "mastermind" villain, the one with secret ties to the protagonists that allowed him to orchestrate their entire life even prior to their own birth. I can't think of a ton of examples of this archetype off the top of my head, but Bleach's Aizen was the most notable one at the time, to the point that Fukurou almost felt like an explicit parody of Aizen himself. He had so many contingencies that affected everyone in some way that it felt like if Iihiko hadn't shut him up he would have just kept listing off threads in his complicated web of subterfuge forever Because everything he did was in the shadows, though, he actually manages to feel like less of an antagonist than even Momo did - while Momo was only present for one arc and ended up being the final battle, Fukurou's influence can retroactively be seen through the entire story, and yet even in the arc that he was finally present for, he didn't get to do anything. Despite the best efforts of the protagonists, no one actually thwarted his plan, his plan simply failed because Iihiko's entrance onto the scene was a tad dramatic and he happened to get caught in the crossfire This is both Fukurou's greatest strength and weakness as a character. Fukurou's death being a freak accident when he had planned everything else in the entire story out so meticulously is both hilarious and fitting, as it demonstrates that his way of life was objectively wrong. He tried so hard to make everything go his way that he actually didn't live his life at all - he hid himself from society and his family, and then died in obscurity without ever achieving anything of note. This makes Fukurou a thematically strong antagonist, but a narratively weak one because he basically just shows up, takes credit for everything, and then dies. Compared to the rest of the antagonists, who are both thematically and narratively strong, he just doesn't hold up

5. Iihiko

Iihiko only really loses points because he doesn't have a very personal attachment to Medaka or the rest of the cast. Symbolically, he's the ultimate version of how the rest of the cast views Medaka - an absurdly broken monster, what Medaka would have become if she'd continued to be put on the pedestal that the rest of the world made for her as "the Main Character" and never made any attempt to integrate herself into "human" society. However, this is never really brought to the reader's attention, as the Shiranui Village isn't stated to be trying to preserve Medaka as they did for Iihiko, and even Fukurou's plan for creating a false iteration of a loved one is for Hato, not Medaka It's very easy to see how Medaka herself could have been slotted into that storyline, but because Nisio Isin didn't choose to analyze how "the strongest Main Character in history vs. the strongest Main Character of today" would stack up beyond just having them fight, Iihiko doesn't get to make the kind of connection that everyone past this point on the list does. However, he still beats out Fukurou and Momo because we can make those extrapolations ourselves - while Nisio didn't go into detail on Iihiko's past, we can still dissect his character based on how the world reacted to his placement in the same role that Medaka now occupies (a post which I've been meaning to make for a long time, hopefully I'll be inspired to do that soon)

4. Unzen

As the first major antagonist, Unzen isn't exactly meant to be Medaka's greatest foil, but he does manage to introduce the concept quite elegantly. As this was the early game when Medaka Box was still a slice-of-life centering around the challenges of high school life and Student Council bureaucracy, the Disciplinary Committee was a natural source of ideological conflict as an alternate governing body within the context of the school In much the same way that Iihiko is what Medaka could have become as the Main Character, Unzen is what Medaka could have become as the Student Council President, specifically. Both Medaka and Unzen had the capacity for might-makes-right style tyrannical rule, and while Unzen embraced that, Medaka actively tried to temper that instinct. In the end, though Medaka did overpower Unzen with force, it wasn't the fact that she physically beat him that changed his methods - it was the fact that Medaka's friends allowed her a moment of clarity to spare him. Unzen decided at the last moment that he would be a martyr, to live on in Medaka's memory as someone she couldn't reform, but then suddenly found himself with a second chance, the very thing he never gave any of his own victims and never expected to get himself The dynamic between Medaka and Unzen is easily surpassed by the remaining three antagonists, but because it's developed more effectively than the previous three I listed, he fits quite comfortably here in the middle

3. Oudo

Since Oudo and Unzen are both Abnormals, Oudo acts as a natural extension of the themes that Unzen presented, specifically building on the idea of "tyrannical rule" by explicitly positioning Oudo as a "kingly" figure. Oudo elevates the concept by not simply being absurdly strong, though, but by also introducing the Abnormality power system with his Weighted Words If Unzen merely showed what Medaka could be as a person of influence within the school, Oudo showed what Medaka could be as a Skill User, someone with supernatural abilities that Normal people can't contend with at all. The threat of Medaka's capabilities suddenly no longer apply just to running a school, now we can see how she'd be a threat to society at large if she were to embrace her own ego This also gives us the opportunity to further examine her own superego, though, or more specifically how her relationship with Hitoyoshi developed her moral code. If Medaka had simply continued to be praised by adults for her talents, eventually her ego would have inflated to the point of Oudo's if not beyond Like I said, though, what really elevates Oudo above Unzen is the introduction of the power system, as it allowed their fight another dimension of thematic layering as well as much more interesting visuals in the battle itself Though of course, the presence of a cool fight scene isn't the be-all-end-all of a good antagonist

2. Ajimu

Much like Fukurou, there's never really a final battle between Medaka and Ajimu, but there is a final confrontation of their ideologies. While Medaka Box does cover all three facets of Friendship, Effort and Victory, Effort is undeniably at the forefront, being present from the very beginning and bleeding through into the remainder of the story Case in point, despite the fact that Ajimu spends her entire tenure as antagonist musing on the nature of Victory and meticulously figuring out where to set the goalpost for declaring Victory over Medaka, her core motivation is to find a challenge that won't just be handed to her on a silver platter: something that will force her to exert Effort Medaka's ideology is that anyone can achieve anything with enough Effort, but Ajimu's lived experience is that she's never needed Effort to achieve anything in the first place, and in a sense...neither has Medaka. Medaka's Abnormality made skill acquisition a breeze her entire life - martial arts, language arts, athletics, mathematics, everything that took years of practice for everyone else took mere moments for Medaka to master. As a cosmic entity, Ajimu didn't necessarily acquire "skills," but she did acquire capital S "Skills," supernatural abilities that allowed her to overcome challenges just as easily as Medaka did, though perhaps on a vastly different timescale Once again, Ajimu is Medaka - the Medaka who realized that she was Not Equal to everyone else, who didn't simply have one amazing power that elevated her above her peers, but every possible power that removed her from being judged on the same scale in the first place. If not for her own ideals, Medaka would eventually just start making up powers on her own and elevate herself to godhood On the flipside, Medaka is Ajimu - the Ajimu who realized that life is boring without exerting yourself, and deliberately makes every attempt to make the most of life by diving straight into it rather than finding shortcuts. That's who Ajimu wants to be, why she keeps throwing herself at the wall that is the Main Character, because experimenting with different approaches to this puzzle is the only thing that helps her pass the time and genuinely have something resembling fun anymore In the end, Ajimu is only number 2 because their conflict doesn't actually end with either of them proving the other wrong or right - they both had the right of it the whole time, that life is more fun with Effort, Ajimu just needed to learn that she was missing one other key ingredient: Friendship. It was Medaka's promise to become a new challenge for Ajimu, the promise that she would always be there to thwart every one of Ajimu's suicide attempts, her Friendship, that finally made Ajimu realize that she had something worth living for. She was never wrong for trying to solve her puzzle, she was just missing a piece of it

Kumagawa

Kumagawa has absolutely everything going for him that the rest of this list does and more. Not only is a hypothetical version of Medaka (a Medaka who grew to resent the world around her), he's also her narrative foil, representing everything that she isn't His dynamics with other characters, his power set, his ideology, even his narrative function as the antagonist, he stands juxtaposed to Medaka in a way that absolutely no one else does. This is heavily thanks to his continued presence in the story past his own arc, but even just within the confines of the Minus Arc, Kumagawa is such a constant presence that always has a finger in the pie that he actually pulls off the manipulator role better than even Fukurou In much the same way that Medaka is always there to cheer on Hitoyoshi in the earlier arcs, Kumagawa is always there to egg on the other Minuses in the Minus Arc, even when it's not his fight. When Shibuki is about to lose to Naze, it's Kumagawa who tells her to accept the loss and take down everyone else with her. Not only that, but Kumagawa personally raises the stakes by positioning Naze's victory as a bad thing, as he would withdraw right then and there and continue his villainy elsewhere, unchecked by Medaka. Kumagawa is the only antagonist who consistently turns his own losses into everyone else's problem I could say so much more about Kumagawa and what makes him easily the best antagonist in Medaka Box, but none of you need me to. Everyone who read it week-to-week back in the day saw how much influence he had on the narrative, the fandom, and arguably how readers perceive villains in Jump as a whole going forward, even if only slightly. He completely redefined my own metrics for what makes a good antagonist, and I'm willing to bet he had a similar effect on just about everyone reading this post right now

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There are pieces of science-fiction/fantasy media where you can basically project what the cast dynamic would look like in an AU that strips out the explicitly supernatural stuff, because the underlying emotional beats in canon were either disconnected from the supernatural stuff, or fancified versions of a comparatively mundane dynamic. For example, Steven Universe has an enormous number of AU fanworks predicated on the fact that the core cast consists of a queer friend group trying, with mixed success, to take care of the son of one of their deceased members while wrestling with the shape of the group dynamic in her absence, and dealing with the fallout of said deceased Friend’s dirty laundry. This is true well before you get into the fact they’re also aliens and the kid is space Jesus, and I think you could get a fair distance into rewriting the whole show into a mundane slice of life thing like Clarence without hitting serious problems.

On the other hand, you have a lot of science-fiction/fantasy media where the cast dynamic in a No-powers AU is extremely difficult to extrapolate because the fantastic elements of the setting are baked into their characterization at a deep enough level that trying to extricate it is like trying to get the chocolate chips out  of a cookie. Anakin Skywalker comes to mind. Child-Slave-turned-space-jesus-slash-military-commander while being groomed by Space-Hitler-Satan. An extremely specific, non-fungible, totally-over-the-top set of life-circumstances, consequentially somewhat difficult to transpose into a more mundane context. You can model facets of it, sure. But the whole of his situation is so suffused with 20s-radio-play melodrama that it’s harder to capture the arc with stakes lower than those in canon. Canon Anakin is the most distilled possible version of Anakin.

Worm falls in the middle. On the one hand, it’s very, very easy to extrapolate what the main cast’s lives would have looked like if they’d never gotten powers, if they’d just stayed mundane teenagers- you just have the exact same horrible shit happen to them but they don’t get powers from it. Taylor keeps muddling on through the bullying but without the escape valve of costumed heroism, Brian tries to maintain custody of his sister, Lisa, Alec and Rachel as runaways under pretty similar circumstances to canon. These are setting-agnostic and fairly easy to transpose.

On the other hand, the thing about the Undersiders’ canon dynamic is that they only exist as a group because they were each abruptly made non-fungible- thrust from the no-powers-AU of their own lives into the genre fiction version, where they’re individually powerful and useful enough to be worth bankrolling or taking hostage or whatever else. The book is in large part about how the superpowered runaround monopolizes your “mundane” life and eats you alive from the inside out; it’s a refutation of the once-common superhero trope of being able to keep the two tracks of your life separate for any serious length of time, which in turn becomes an unintentional implicit refutation of the similar logic undergirding mundane AUs, the idea that there’s a recognizable version of a superhero that can be meaningfully separated from all the insane stuff that happens to them. Worm, accordingly, ends with the protag getting actually literally shunted into a No-Powers AU and being somewhat at a loss as to how to rebuild her identity in the absence of the genre elements that swallowed the last two years of her life. Who are you, outside of being a superhero? Well, for starters, you’re the woman who used to be a superhero. Good luck at the coffee shop!

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Round Seven, Match IV

A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine), Subterranean Press 2021. Cover by Victo Ngai.

The Ghost Sequences (A. C. Wise), Undertow Books 2021. Cover by Olga Beliaeva.

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who do you think in the animorphs ended up still being the least close to each other? because obviously a lot of them are best friends, jake and marco, cassie and rachel, tobias and ax, and some of them are dating etc but which pairing do you think never really developed/got closer? or do you think by the end of the series they were all as close to each other as they could be?

To me, the two that stand out as being the least close, and staying that way, are Rachel and Ax. They mention discomfort with each other as early as #5, and Rachel's narration in #7 specifies that she's glad Ax is fighting with them but isn't sure if he's their friend. As late as #51, Ax considers Rachel a potential threat to the Animorphs' cause and goes out of his way to avoid trusting her.

In MM3 and in #37, Rachel's pretty snappish with Ax as she tries to lead the team, because she senses (correctly) that he doesn't respect her as leader nearly as much as he does Jake. In #18, Rachel is the harshest toward Ax about his decision to support the andalites over his own team, and in #46 Ax mentions being worried about Rachel more than any other Animorph.

Part of why I find their friction fascinating: it originates in their being so alike. They're the ones eager for battle at the start of the war, Ax because he's been raised on tales of Elfangor's glory and Rachel because she's champing at the bit of being feminine without being small or weak. They get their hands dirtiest throughout, from together killing the random Hessians in MM3 to advocating for wiping out the nartec in #36. It all culminates when Rachel makes the most brutal kill (Tom) and Ax makes the single largest (the Pool ship) during the final battle. Rachel sees her own darkness reflected back when she looks at Ax, and Ax sees his in Rachel. They're a dangerous combination, hijacking airplanes and boiling noncombatants alive to get their way. And they both need Tobias around to keep them sane.

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Brockton College Girls (2011) (Based on the Smith College Girls photo)

Progress video under the cut!

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Rob Pointon "Vertical Road"

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If you see this post you’re legally required to tell me at least one trans woman headcanons you have for a canonically male character, I never get to see transfem headcanons like that, give me them, and for equality of my own please know estrogen could have saved Insector Haga and Dinosaur Ryuzaki I will not elaborate, also Yuya.

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THE PSYCHEDELIC

by Like Ice Concept art by SHY