#[ this silly manga series has done So much for me and means a lot that i get to be silly w/ characters i enjoy n explore them in more depth

[pirateborn-a]

     19..........

[user-needs-new-hyperfixation]

Hello, can I ask what do you mean "in canon it's impossible for Sherlock to settle down with a woman"? Like, as a fan of Holmes and always read the books since middle school, I'm kinda confuse here, I don't mean anything negative. Sorry, do you think Poirot (from Agatha Christie) is also queer?

Maybe because I grew up with very religious mother and lived in anti-LGBTQ country, I'm kinda slow in picking up subtext. Like until now I'm still kinda confuse with my friend who have ships from any fandoms (but I still love to hear and read her headcanons or fics about those characters)....

I really agree with you, I've seen many Holmes' adaptations (cartoon, tv series, manga) but Yuumori is clearly the closest to Doyle's works. Do you think the mangaka also love to read Holmes' books?

Story time! (Welcome to "Hyper answers asks like an old lady going on an hour long barely-on-topic tangent at the slightest prompting.)

I totally get where you're coming from, I was raised in like...knockoff Southern Baptist churches. Growing up, homosexuality was presented to me as a sexual perversion incapable of involving real love. It's kind of silly, but it's true: a ship was a big part of changing that for me. I read Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle as a teenager, and Kurogane and Fai had something that was inescapably romantic and beautiful but never strictly sexual (tho the potential is certainly there). Between that and an online community of LGBTQ+ adults who were incredibly patient and kind towards me even when I was suuuuper ignorant, I started to open up towards queer relationships as...well, just relationships. Relationships that can encompass sex and also encompass love and friendship and communication and partnership and all those other things I'd been taught were exclusive to monogamous straight people. And then, even as terrified as I was, I was eventually able to face the fact that I'd always had crushes on girls just as often as crushes on guys. So yeah, there's a reason Kurofai is my ship of all ships, the actual One True Pairing for me. Because it cracked open a door just enough that I could slowly lever it open the rest of the way. There seem to be quite a lot of anecdotes like this: women enjoying BL/mlm ships is often seen as fetishy (which can certainly be part of it) but for some reason I can't fully articulate it also seems to sometimes be a means for girls and women to explore their own not-straightness.

ANYWAY. SHERLOCK HOLMES. Tbh I'm not gonna go too in-depth because I would bet good money that there are a bunch of scholarly articles on Holmes' queerness. People have probably done their doctorate theses on this! Much smarter and more well-read folks than I have already covered the topic. For me, it really boils down to: he never outright expresses sexual or romantic interest in anyone (we must resist the urge to assume his respect for Irene Adler is romantic just because he is a man and she is a woman). He's almost certainly on the asexual spectrum. But when he does exhibit symptoms one might associate with romantic and/or sexual interest (particularly romantic, imo), it's always towards men (usually Watson, of course). For example, notable flirt John Watson saying that Holmes blushes at his compliments the way a girl does is...suggestive.

The whole thing is complicated by Watson being (in my opinion at least) an unreliable and sometimes downright petty narrator. He keeps going on spiels about Holmes being cold and heartless, only to turn around and describe him greeting his friends warmly and being emotionally moved by music and baby-talking puppies and charming old ladies. It makes Watson sometimes come across as one of those allo people who are so unable to conceive of a life without romantic and/or sexual desire that they start dehumanizing those who don't experience it. Alternatively and maybe more charitably, he just has a big ol' crush on Holmes, is understandably alarmed by it given the time period, and gets bitchy and defensive when he feels it might not be reciprocated.

But ultimately...do I think Arthur Conan Doyle sat down at a desk in the late 19th century/early 20th century and was like "I am going to write some ace queer representation for the tumblr girlies (gn)"? Obviously not. 😅 I do think he might have set out to create a character who very deliberately did not need to have the otherwise almost obligatory straight romantic side-plot. Holmes is never in any way set up as having a life headed towards marriage and children, in spite of how typical that was for the time. The companionship he does express a need and desire for comes in the form of another man. He's "lost without [his] Boswell." He sneakily buys Watson's practice out from under him so he'll be free to move back in and go on more adventures with him. He threatens violence when Watson is hurt. Etc etc. I think it's very fair to interpret it all through a queer lens, the quibble would be more in whether that queerness ever manifests sexually.

I definitely think the Yuumori creators have not only read ACD but also other fiction based on the stories, possibly even including some very old pastiches like this one. I love how seemingly nerdy they are about it haha! The series is full of easter eggs and callouts to other Holmesian works.

As for Poirot, I know very little about the character beyond a few episodes of the show I watched as a young'un, but that is not the mustache of a straight man (I'm joking I'm joking I have absolutely no opinion on that one! 🤣)

Thanks for the ask, and for actually reading this ramble if you got this far! 😅

[alexissara]

My Favorite Movies/TV/Anime of 2023

Going into 2023 I've done a lot more taking in art then in previous years and this section is all about the audio/visual/auditory art I've taken in this year and enjoyed. In fact it's a content and clickable top 10 list! Wow so engaging, much content, please enjoy. This is gonna be inclusive of movies, cartoons, anime, TV shows, etc because I don't engage any one of these mediums alone enough to make a nice little list, at least not this year.

These are roughly in an order by how much I enjoyed them but these are different pieces of art that hit you in different places for different reasons and no one piece of art here is like "Better" than the other. Ask me at a different hour let alone day and this list could be all scrambled.

Adolescence Of Utena

So I finally watched some Utena, I mean I watched a little but of Utena before, just a few episodes with some friends but I watched the full ass movie now so that counts for something. The anime is really artful and it's a very compelling queer coming of age story with all the messy trauma and feelings attached. It's a weird movie, a girl turns into a car, and that's amazing, 12/10, another girl can also turn into a car, we're really just living the dream here. Finally true lesbian representation is when a girl can turn into a car and I am here for it. It's a really great piece of art and I am glad to have finally got to take it in and enjoy it.

Glass Onion

So this is probably the biggest surprise on the list for folks who follow me but one of my girlfriends really loves mysteries and so a Glass Onion I did watch with her. It's super funny and fun, it's just good. The cast has good chemistry, the jokes land, the mystery has fun twists, and it's just a good experience overall.

One Piece Film Red

I am not a One Piece fan, I do not care for One Piece, It's like fine Shonen. However, this movie fucking slapped, it was a good fucking time. Uta is One Pieces best character and she should show up and take over the final arc of the manga because she is so good. The music was fucking killer with Ado slaying every single fucking song and it really just hit. Every song is so good on it's own and in it's context. It's what you want from a truly killer musical experience and every song being from "the villain" is just extra fun. The power of friendship and bounds is really great here, it's just good and well animated even if the women all have the same exact body.

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

I finally watched this movie after all the hype had died down and well, it was worth the hype, it isn't my favorite movie of all time but it's a good movie. It's funny, amazingly acted, well shot, silly and just in general a good time. It touches on a lot of good themes of family, trauma, homophobia, expectations, and parental relationships. I think the queerness coulda been better in the movie and have complaints on how that is displayed here but I mean it was at least a little bit queer and that's more than most movies. As a former actor who really loves the craft I envy everyone involved too for getting to be in such a fun film, I can only imagine what a blast it was to see the final product of what I am sure was a ton of hard work to make something so fun.

Gundam The Witch From Mercury - Season 2 

Gundam ended on more of a whimper than a bang to me. Which is both not uncommon for a Gundam series to have a shitty ending but also not shocking given this series was given it had a much shorter run time. Regardless of me thinking this half of the anime is much weaker than the first half it still undeniably striking in it's animation, stunning visually, engaging to watch with a cast of very endearing characters to watch in the dramatic stakes of it all. The very end was not terrible but the time we spent to get to the final epilogue moments were questionable. Regardless, this show did not kill off Prospera, Chuchu, Secelia or Rouhi and they all were in a lot of these episodes so like an 8/10 cuz their all fucking brilliant and I really like Sulletta a ton too, I am just probably Mio's weakest solider among lesbians preferring my sweet little nervous lesbian settle down with a nice earthian girl or make use of her second hand to be polyamarous.

Kakegurui Twin

I never have and likely never will watch Kakegurui's main series but the twins series female focused cast and yuri energy captured my attention and so I turned it on. Wow, what a fucking ride. This over the top gambling game is Jojo's bizarre adventure, is sports anime, is card game anime, it's the raw spirit of these things radiating in the horny submissive lesbian factory and served back in animated form. The fucking faces these women get to make as they smugly battle in bounts of gambling is just so delicious and the tension they manage to put into each of these games of chance as the fucked up students try and cheat each other and win is just brilliant.

Harley Quinn 

HarIvy is a ship of all time for me, it's hard to have the concept of a show be "HarIvy comedy" and me not to at least kinda enjoy it and I enjoyed it a lot this new season. At the start of the season I wasn't click with it, it felt weird and forced for Harly and Ivy to be placed in these really binary hero and villain roles but in the end that's what it was really about. Neither of them are traditional heroes or villains and the show actually recognized that and let them trying to fit into the strict mold of the universe as an active issue for themself, their sense of self, their relationship, the world and more. From time to time they felt fairly out of character but I am just happy to see this arcs over all themes and the work they put into that.

I’m In Love With The Villainess 

While I would have rather had a tighter pace that went through the first two books of the series rather than one and some tiny jumps into the second book I'm In Love With The Villainess still managed to be one of my favorite things to watch this year with me viewing it multiple times. Rae's Isekai fantasy of being bullied by a hot rich woman and the eventual need to confront her own internalized homophobia and self pity as blocking her path to happiness are fun to see. Rae is really good in the anime adaptation and in it more than any other adaption it feels like everyone is friends and cares about each other which fits the light hearted comedy tone better than the light novels Rae will kill anyone for Clair, she has no friends mindset.

Scott Pilgrim: Takes Off

This was the biggest surprise of the year. I had grown out of Scott Pilgrim, while I was a fan of the comics before the movie was even a thing, I watched the movie before it even released, I even at some point was collecting the colored editions, I eventually soured on the series and sold everything I had of it. I wasn't excited about the anime and felt more like "let it go" then "OMG thing from when I was young" but hearing the good things I heard about it and about the Scott twist along with seeing the great animation in the OP I decided, fuck it why not give it a shot. So I did and wow, it's really good. It's a great take down, commentary, adaption, whatever it is of the original work. It is Scott Pilgrim having grown up alongside me, funnier than ever and a lot better about everything. I really loved all the changes and it still felt very true to the heart of Scott Pilgrim which is messy adults trying to fix their fucked up selves and relationships.

The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady

This certainly sits among my favorite anime of all time and very highly if not number one. MagiRevo mastered a light novel adaptations tempo perfecting how to make one season of what would be a nothing slow burn with no pay off at the novel and mangas pace into an exciting action packed yuri with more gay kisses in it than the rest of the years anime put together. It's funny, charming, fun but it also captures some really hard emotions too, I'll never forget the scene with Anis being pressured by old men to have children and stuff and the utter disgust she has at being treated like a piece of meat as she attempts to fill her role to the kingdom. It is devastating and heart wrenching and it just makes all the joy feel so strong.

If you want to help me enjoy more art then consider checking out my Patreon or Ko-fi and giving me a little bit of cash so I can do more of this kind of writing but also like make lots of my own art, art is hard to make and costs money and like maintain my chronically ill and trans body also takes money so anything helps, thank you. If you want more details on any of these I do have reviews for many of the pieces of art above but you can also let me know you want more and maybe I'll write more.

[bun-haired-nutjob]

I'm gonna go on a dumb rant but this means a lot to me because it just hurts so much thinking about it. I feel stupid and silly and immature getting this worked up over it but also entirely justified and valid in my feelings and I need help (more under the readmore)

so I've been reading the manga for Bocchi the Rock after having finished the anime (no spoilers in this rant, don't worry) and even before having started reading it, I had come across all the major 'gay Bocchi' meme panels and i was definitely keeping an eye out for them as i was reading

(also i was reading it at https://bocchitherockmanga.com/ which for reasons i will get into I do NOT recommend AT ALL. all the issues i'm about to talk about aren't there in the mangadex version)

i've gotten through most of the series with no issues whatsoever, until I got to chapter 58. These latest chapters were being scanned by someone new to scanlations as a whole, and in particular bocchi stuff (I won't name names because that's not what this post is about, you can find who to blame just by reading it yourself from anywhere that isn't mangadex)

I was very keenly on the look-out for this panel, because for very obvious reasons it's become a very popular bocchi meme:

...but reading the version i was reading, not only were there very blatant grammar and spelling issues, but when i finally got to the panel-

what the fuck. what the fuck is this bullshit

"I've it's been popular nowadays..." doesn't make any fucking sense and had i not read the other version first i might not have understood what it was trying to say, and all of the text is so horrendously scaled and placed so awfully

but the real issue is in that "fine print":

"I already know the scope of the test, and it seems I'm going to be that one big-breasted popular girl on the exam!"

what.

the.

fuck.

this makes ZERO FUCKING SENSE given the actual illustration, i know bocchi has big boobs in the manga but WHO'S THAT GIRL WITH THE BIG BOOBS, HUH??? WHAT'S HER SIGNIFICANCE???

it doesn't take an expert to realise that what bocchi's saying here doesn't even make any sense if she's not even the one with big boobs in her fantasy of what will happen if she repeats a year

now i always lean on the side of never attributing to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, and i was ready to just assume this was a piss-poor translation

but i found the scanlator making a post on the MangaDex forums about the situation, and in it they said this (reminder that the panel in question comes from chapter 58):

so it was intentional. it was a person actually trying to censor the original intent of the author because they didn't like that there was gay representation.

...

i'm done. i'm so fucking done with this.

"i have given up on the lame goal of censoring bocchi the rock" yeah that's a little too late pal. the damage this guy has done is still apparent because in almost all of the places online, including the TOP RESULT for searching "bocchi the rock manga", they still use this guy's awful, rushed, and - let's be honest - homophobic scans instead of the new ones that are actually good.

oh and of course only one guy in the thread actually calls out OP for censoring it in the first place, and then another guy backs up OP and that's the end of that.

these things are small, but it feels like being queer is just kinda not possible nowadays. everyone tries to take it away from us and it's inescapable, even in the places we go to in order to get away from all the bullshit and awful stuff happening in the real world.

stuff like this seems minor but it sends a very real message to queer fans of stuff like this:

we can't have anything.

[theclearblue]

Love you blog, thanks for your posts. I'm kinda tired with "war-fandom", where each side like "Mine are better, yours are suck" (especially in twitter). Like, when I said that now I love JJK, some of my anime/manga moots like, "Why love that? One Piece & Hunter x Hunter are waayyy better?" or "CSM > JJK" And I was "Why can't I love all of them? All things have strength and weakness...." (in the end I block them). And don't get me started with shounen vs shoujo fandom, like why people love to spread hate just to say what they like are better.....

Sorry for my rant, just want to say, love your blog.... 🤩

Also, what are your opinions about shipping in fandom (especially shounen & seinen)? I don't really have a shipper heart, but even I get it (the power of bromance)....And yes, I'm so happy about Kenjaku/Takaba, I'm surprised that even in the end, Kenjaku did not blame Takaba.....

Thank you anon this message is so nice, I'm happy you enjoy my dumb ramblings here🤧 And yeah I get what you mean with this competitive nature in constantly comparing shonen, which on one hand I get and I do to a certain extent as well, these series are in the same genre and can share a lot of similarities. And I think each series can have different strengths and weaknesses while still being good (an example being if I were to compare JJK and One Piece, generally I think JJK has way better fights while I think One Piece is a little bit more consistent in fully fleshing out most/all characters we see. I still like both a lot). I think it's partly facilitated by the this culture of having a "big three" shonen series, both in the fighting of what's better between naruto one piece and bleach but also where a lot of people are trying to create a new big three with recent shonen. Which. It's fine but ultimately a little silly in my opinion lmao. Unfortunately being a fan of a lot of different shonen, at some point you kinda just have to accept the people who treat the genre as a dick measuring contest and not much more. And oof don't get me started on shonen vs. shojo (which as a big fan of both...let's just say it's not typically the shojo fans who are being terrible...).

And oh, what an interesting question about shipping, I guess I hadn't thought about it too much before but I'm quickly realizing I have Opinions on the matter the more I think on it lmao. Generally I'm pretty positive on shipping, where I don't think it's the end all be all in any series, but it is a tool one can use to put a new lens on character dynamics, and I think that's fun and interesting! Taking a pair like Takaba and Kenjaku, I think this is a really good pair to look at because it's clear they have a connection, right? They fundamentally understand each other at a level nobody has, maybe ever (and isn't that insane on Kenjaku's part?! He's been alive for a 1000 years!) And I think you can color the dynamic in different ways and get really interesting yet different results, are they like brothers? friends? lovers? soulmates? Is their connection platonic, sexual, or an actual love? It's up to you! This kind of analysis has been done since literally ancient times (Greek concepts of love with Eros, Agape, and Philia), so I guess I get a little confused when shonen fans are against shipping entirely?

A series that features Big Fight with BIG Punch can still have layered and complex characters that hold love for each other, and people interpreting it as romantic is not weird or gross or even fetishizing in my opinion (that's a whole can of worms that might warrant an entirely new post lmao). I think a good example is Satosugu. They certainly aren't explicitly romantic, but there is a lot of subtext within JJK that imply they might have romantic feelings for each other. But some JJK fans are just so weirdly disgusted by this concept of...gay people existing in their media? That they SCREAM from the rooftops that "they're like brothers! 100% straight!" And it's like...we could have a good conversation here! Interpreting them as brothers is just as valid I think as shipping them, but you gotta explain why. And I've seen some fans say "Hey their relationship reminds me of my relationship with my brother/best friend or there's Scene A and B that makes me think they're platonic and that's how i interpret it, with no romance." And as long as they aren't shitting on people who ship Satosugu, this is completely respectable to me. But I'm going to respect a shipper who just thinks they're both hot when they stand next to each other way more over someone who clearly is just uncomfortable with the idea of two fictional men or women being interpreted as having a romantic relationship lmao.

Shipping culture is certainly not perfect, but generally I think it's just a harmless fun hobby that can inspire people to make really cool art in all different forms, and, speaking as someone currently studying history, shipping has probably been going on since at least 4000 years ago when the Epic of Gilgamesh dropped in ancient Mesopotamia with Gilgamesh/Enkidu so I just think people, particularly shonen fans, are wasting their breath throwing a fit about it and acting as if shipping is this new evil gay phenomena that's poisoning their battle action series.

[yvesdot]

Hi! I saw on your Drac Daily posts that you read Ooku last year- what did you think? I thought it was a really interesting look into what feudal Japan was/mightve been like under a woman Emporer

Halloa! I'm so glad I'm not the only reader of Ooku. (Ōoku? Oooku? I sound like a fool trying to pronounce it out loud.)

Strangely, it made me sympathize more with Lin Manuel Miranda in creating Hamilton. (<- Everyone in the world is welcome to stop reading right here.)

It's kind of a doomed endeavor, because it's trying to make empire feminist, and you just... cannot do that. When I come at the text more diagonally, poking through for evidences of how you cannot do that (e.g. the way the female shoguns treat their male concubines; much of interest suggested there re: gender, sexuality, power, etc.), I enjoy it a lot more...

...because it's not that much of a political text, perhaps? Every time I snarked or read it harshly I wondered whether I wasn't simply misinterpreting a historical drama. To be clear, I don't know what Hamilton is trying to do-- I've never watched it-- but there are points in Ooku where it seems clear to me that Yoshinaga is here for drama, dress, and all those lovely things implied by a historical manga like this one; perhaps I'm the rude one for expecting deep political thought just because she's won some feminist SFF awards. Frankly, maybe she's not even trying to make empire feminist; maybe she just wanted to write this premise.

And that premise binds her pretty tightly to a variety of ideas: e.g. that female shoguns could and would have acted exactly as the male ones did; that is, that there is no difference in perspective or experience which a female emperor might have which would necessarily lead her to an alternate conclusion. Obviously, that's the point of the series, as it tries to metatextually convince you that real life Japan really was run by women, and here's how that was possible... and I don't think that's a bad thing; it's a lot of fun to write something you know can't be 100% correct or perfect. That's why it made it to the top books of the year list! I think it was one of the best at doing what it wanted to do, and it was certainly a defining series of the year for me. 2022 Roundup still coming, um, whenever it comes.

Also! Under-Glass (the idea I explored in my plotting-a-short-story livestream) was inspired by the fact that I simply thought more could have been done with how terribly ashamed all those men feel to get dressed up as women and be concubines. What's so shameful about girlclothes, hmmm?

So you can tell I quite liked it. I tend to be very charitable with books I've enjoyed in any way (to everyone's chagrin), and I think Ooku has a lot to positively say for itself. I'd also like to have a more robust English-language manga criticism community (<- do these words mean anything?), so we could get more into the meat of it.

Admittedly none of this tells you anything about my awareness of feudal Japan, which is... nil. I'm sorry. I like learning about Japan, and I'm doing it bit by bit, but history and geopolitics have always been my weak suit. I think Dracula is a particular exception because it's so in-your-face about a lot of the things I point out; it's also worth noting I know nothing of Dracula and hardly anything of vampstudies as a whole. I'm just chatty.

(And, yes, it took me a really long time to get into the faux-Shakespeare dialect. But then, I'm no @butchhamlet.)

P. S. Thank you so much for reading the DracDaily commentary! It's so silly I've not been advertising it all too consistently; I'm very happy it's beneficial to people.

[linkspooky]

In your opinion what is the main difference between superhero comics and battle shonen manga? Not saying both are identical in every way, but I find interesting that when you think about it Battle Shonen is essentially Japan’s version of superhero comics, so what do you think is the main difference between the two?

Hello, this is a very interesting topic you've posed me, and I would say a lot of differences spring from the medium of storytelling that these stories come from.

Manga is written by at most one author and one artist, but usually author and artist in the same, published in one magazine on a weekly basis. Creatively, it comes from one or two people at the most, whereas superhero comics as a whole are a collaborative medium, the characters are owned by one company, are passed around by multiple authors and an editing staff that tries to manage the takes of multiple authors into one shared universe.

Before I begin I think people tend to dismiss one medium of storytelling over the other, without realizing there are strengths and weaknesses to both storytelling formats. For example, there are people who are like "Comic book continuity is super confusing and impossible, manga is so much better because it's straightforward" but like without reading a single comic.

Which is silly, because comic book continuity isn't that hard to untangle unless you are an insane completionist, you can usually just pick a series, or an author's run on a series for a more famous comic or a story arc and read from there. At no point is the comic going to quiz you like "You won't understand what's going on here unless you've read batman's #156 from 1955. I mean comics is good because as a collaboraitve medium, authors tend to build on each other's work, but for the most part when an author is handed the series a good author will try to make their work stand on its own.

There are also people who will be like "Shonen manga is worthless and immature, and every single shonen manga ever punished is just a battler about FIGHTS and battle shonen manga are just FIGHTING with no THEMES."

Anyway, the point I am making is it's reductive when talking about these mediums comics/shoen as a whole and dismiss them for their perceived flaws without really looking at them as storytelling formats that have strengths and weaknesses.

One of the strengths of comic books is that as a collaborative medium, there is always a wealth of material you can draw from. I think this is something that shonen manga, and in particular superhero shonen manga fails to do. Because it is from multiple authors over the course of years, a lot of material has been built up for the many, many characters in a comic book's library.

Comic books tend to do ensemble casts well, because they can rely on the characters having appearances in other material outside of their book and therefore because they are working with characters who have pre-developed personalities that everyone reading the book probably already knows about, they can better share screentime amongst those characters because they don't have to waste time establishing them. It's sort of like how in fan fiction, the fan fiction author doesn't really need to introduce whatever characters or world they are writing in... because whosever is reading has probably read the main source material. You've read it here, comic books are basically just fan fiction.

In comparison you have these very large shonen casts that are done by one author, instead of a collaboration by many different authors, and they are all fighting to share screentime within the same story. Here's a quick example for comparison here is a shot of what is essentially the main cast of MHA.

And here is a shot of the main cast of X-Men Evolution. Which is a cartoon adaptation of the X-Men comics.

They are both ensemble casts of characters in an academy setting meant to train up these children as superheroes while also preparing them for conflicts in the world outside their school. However, I can name every single character: Beast, Kitty Pryde, Storm, Nightcrawler, Jean Gray, Scott, Wolverine, Rogue, Quill, Professor X. You could not pay me to name every hero kid in that picture above. I don't think the problem is that MHA is necessarily bad at character writing, but rather it's not using its storytelling format to tell its story well.

Number one, X-Men Evolution is an adaptation of the X-men comics, so they have a huge comic library to draw on, and also people kind of already know who Cyclops, Jean Gray, Wolverine and Professor X are. The showmakers are working with characters that have lots of material to draw from, and so the focus is more on highlighting these characters and making them work together in a cast because they don't really need that extreme individual focus. Whereas, there is only one author making the MHA characters, there are about a hundred of them and they need to split screentime all in one manga, and Hori's focus is not on the interactions of the whole cast but rather individual character arcs for a select few of the more important kids.

The thing is you can't tell a superhero story with one author, the same as the many authors working together in the DCU. You just can't. And yet, manga imitating superhero comics will just create casts stuffed with superhero characters who are just a name, and a superpower and that's it. This is a problem for both One Punch Man, and My Hero Academia which are the two biggest hero manga I can think of (Tiger and Bunny actually does its character development well if you want a more positive example, because the cast is very limited) rather than trying to adjust for the medium and tell a more focused story they just invent loads and loads of characters to imitate the sheer volume of characters that exist in western comics.

But the thing is if I'm reading Teen Titans and I think that Beast Boy is a really interesting character, I can look up other comics that Beast Boy is in that give him more screentime and eventually find out his origin as a doom patrol character.

The strength of battle shonen then is this singular focus they have in their narratives. Everyone says continuity is easier, but on top of that a series created by one author is always going to have a clearer vision of what it wants to tell than stuff that is bouncing in between multiple authors and an editing staff.

I think a lot of battle shonen tend to fail to take advantage of that ability they do have, to hone in and focus on their narrative because they're not really thinking of how to use the tools of their medium effectively. Good shonen and good works of literature in general tend to be... concise. Comics with their long sprawling continuities and huge open worlds are not concise, but with a manga you have a chance to tell a direct and hard hitting story by choosing how and where to focus. Jujustu Kaisen I think is a story that uses its assets for storytelling much better than MHA, because instead of having a lot of excess fat like way too many characters who hog screentime but are never going to get develoment, Akutami Gege at least seems to have an idea of what he wants to use these characters for and the way he gets those points across tends to be hard hitting. He's clear, concise, and precise, no messy bits, no flab.

I think another thing shonen manga have over western comics in general is better worldbuilding. Dc for example is interesting because of how wide and varied the world is, but everyone knows the rules and logic in comic books don't make sense. It's very inconsistent in general. As someone who's read like every single Zatanna comic and like a thousand john Constantine ones the magic in DC makes no sense, it's basically whatever the author at the time feels like the rules should be.

You could say that worldbuilding isn't really necessary for a story. That a story can function without it. You could also say characters aren't necessary for a story. You can say words aren't necessary for a story. Maybe, the real story all along was just a blank sheet of paper. I think worldbuilding like everything else, if you decide to build a world for your story, and then just half-ass it, it's noticeable.

Which is why I bring up Jujutsu Kaisen again as a well told shonen story, the rules for how the world operates, and the details for both the super power system and the various parties in control of the world jujutsu high, where curses come from, why only certain characters can use jujutsu techniques are all clearly established. In fact, Gege devotes a non-insignificant amount of time to trying to explain the rules of individual cursed technique so that they make sense to the audience. Because it is just one author making the rules for these worlds, we have a very clear and non-contradictory idea for how the world operates.

However, and this is probably going to surprise everyone I think what comics does a lot better than shonen manga ever will is character development. I have heard a lot of people's belief that comic book characters stay stagnant forever, and do not go through arcs because as they are marketable characters they're not allowed to change that much from their original blueprint. This is wildly incorrect. If you've ever read a comic it's like a soap opera. Things happen in comics, in fact, there are so many things happening it is often hard to keep track of.

There is a clear character progression in good comics, for instance in DC the sidekicks of the heroes grow up eventually and we have been through many generations of younger heroes growing up. The first Robin is now nightwing, the second one Red Hood, the mantle passes on and the young kids grow up out of their identities and into new ones.

I think characters in shonen manga tend to remain stagnant, and that has less to do with the authors ability to write characters and more just how the manga itself is sold and marketed. Basically, most manga especially the ones in shonen jump have to keep up a regular audience from week to week and mangas that aren't like gangbusters popular are often in danger of getting cancelled. The thing is with DC, yes authors and new series often get cancelled earlier but the characters will still be there. If NIghtwing's solo series ends, he will still exist in the grander DC universe until someone decides to pick him up again. Whereas, if MHA were to end tomorrow we would get like a really rushed three chapter ending and epilogue and that would be it. So, existing with this permanent threat of cancellation every week I think alot of manga tend to play it safe or write chapters in a way that will always keep readers waiting for next week.

So, a lot of manga end up being written with like the promise of character development that is coming eventually once they have gotten these characters established and marketable, but for the most part we don't see a lot of progression towards them because these stories are being told week to week in a very compettitive environment where if a decision on the authors part causes the numbers to fall then they won't even get the chance to tell their story. So like, comics are insane, near constant drama, things are always happening whereas after shonen manga estalbish a certain status quo a lot of them coast. Which I think is once again, not having to do with the individual quality of the writers, but instead writers for manga failing to adapt to tell stories that suit this medium well, like stories with smaller casts, and a greater sense of focus and purpose for what the author wants.

Battle shonens have much stronger fight scene choreography though. I mean, this only matters to me, but like every comic book fight is just the characters posing in dramatic positions while they use their powers. There are very few extended fight scenes in comic book like there are for shonen manga. "The fights are cool" sounds like a meathead opinion but listen, if I am here to see dudes with super powers fighting and the superpowers aren't interesting and the fight is not compelling to watch then that's an element of a story that's not working properly. Once again to use Jujutsu Kaisen as a positive example, it has thrilling and tense fight scenes with realistic choreography that makes these fight scenes compelling for the viewer instead of just a chore to watch. Once again this is where I'm talking about using the singular focus of the meidum well, comic book fightscenes are often confusing because they have to draw in like five hundred characters at once in huge splash pages. Shonen manga are more focused, so you can devote time to a long drawn out fight between say Yuji and Mahito and make the readers feel the ups and downs of that particular fight, make it matter to the story.

And that's what it comes down to, tropes and conventions within a genre are just tools. They are completely neutral tools to be used effectively and used poorly. If you see a piece of genre fiction that is bad, that doesn't speak to the quality of all the fiction in tha genre, but rather how the author has failed to use the troops and the tools fo their medium to tell an effective story.

[ciaossu-imagines]

Yogi had my heart from the start ! After getting the context from his past I loved him even more ! I still laugh at the scene where the cat stole his underwear!

Something I really loved about Karneval was how the villains were played. They always had such a clear purpose,and they were all so different. I just loved that. Some of them really surprised me with the acts they committed (I really hope more people read Karneval and refuse to spoil anything).

I would really like to know what you liked in Karneval!

O and I forgot last time , but I also watched The Royal Tutor. It was such a silly anime ! My favorite was Kai, and although I haven't been up to date on the manga, I still remember it and enjoy whatever I see of it .

Yogi is just…FREAKING ADORABLE!

Yogi is Yogi and the show/manga would not be the same without him. It really wouldn’t and I have so, so much love for him. He was the character I walked in knowing I would love – I actually only ever started Karneval because an old roleplaying friend used him as a faceclaim once upon a time and I loved his design so much that I wanted to try out whatever source material he was from (like, can I just say – the character designs in Karneval?? The art alone in Karneval, especially the manga?? Fucking gorgeous, without a single doubt). And he definitely didn’t disappoint, though Gareki surprised me by being such a huge favourite of mine. I feel they easily could’ve gone bland bitch protagonist #40280 with him, but he’s really well done in that I don’t often feel like he falls into all the classic ‘main character’ traps that you see in a lot of anime and manga. And you have such a solid point on the villains. I mean, I think all my fandoms have amazing characters, obviously, but Karneval, Psycho-Pass, and Black Cat were the mangas with some of the more memorable villains to me, for various reasons. I’m not as nice as you in that, where I write headcanons and such taking into account their pasts, present and all the various things that influence them, my blog can be heavily spoileriffic, but I do try not to spoil if I can help it!

And I love that someone else watched The Royal Tutor! I’ve read the manga, but honestly kind of prefer the anime because you’re so right in how it’s silly and fun. It makes me laugh and is just something fun and mindless to veg out to, plus I really do find it has a fantastic cast of characters! And while I love all the characters, I do have two favourites and one of them we do share! I feel like it’s just impossible to end up, by the time the series really gets going, disliking Kai because he’s just so soft and sweet and lonely and boy deserves all the goddamn hugs in the world!

[animehouse-moe]

D-Frag! : Near Limitless Fun

Yes, this is an old series. Yes, it can be hard to find physically because of that. And yes, it is fun as all hell. I recently managed to get my hands on all but 3 volumes of the series so I've done a re-read from scratch on it, and it really is just incredibly hilarious. It can be a little formulaic with the whole straight man routine, but it gets both incredibly meta and off the rails with it. I mean, the sheer amount of jokes that they break out in relation to it always keeps it fresh. Getting tired of Kazama making comebacks? There's probably a joke or a remix on the horizon for it. And personally speaking it always gets me, whether it's one volume in or 16 volumes in.

Anyways, let me backtrack a little. What is D-Frag! ? Well. Well.... It's a high school comedy taken the max of what can be weird, with lots of other little bits mixed in. Kazama is a young delinquent who comes to Fujou high believing he'll be able to take it over and make a name for himself. Too bad he gets suckered in by the curious ongoings of a video game club and gets tortured into joining them. From there, his high school career of insanity and infamy as the king of comebacks (and second fiddle to the most fearsome people around) begins as they galivant and explore and in general cause mayhem and headaches.

Oh yeah, and there's 17 volumes and it's still not been a full year in real time in D-Frag! Yeah, that's right, this thing is stretched out, but you don't even think about it. One could only imagine how experiencing all of these moments one after the next would affect a young high schooler. Moving on, some art to break up my monotonous explanations of what D-Frag! is!

I don't think words could really explain what's so appealing to this manga. It's got such a classic feel to it and is so incredibly true to itself. No matter what trope it brings up, it'll subvert expectations and find a way to turn it silly and diffuse any and all tension. It builds things up and up and up, and just as it's about to place the final piece on top to complete it, Tomoya Haruno (the author) comes swooping in to topple it in the most satisfying way possible.

Not to mention, it's running jokes are absolutely top notch. There's definitely some that are rather cliched, but also more than a few that are fresh and enjoyable within the overall approach of the series. Like the constant jokes about the envy and fear that Takao's (one of the characters) chest instills in fellow women and girls.

It's really hard to talk about how D-Frag! is so much fun and such a great read without spoiling because I could talk on end about how refreshing, unique, and interesting redacted was. Or how the entire redacted arc was a wild card that was incredibly fun. Maybe this. Parents exist in D-Frag!, they really do. We see both Kazama's mother and father, we see Roka's mother, Takao's mother, Chitose's older sister, and a handful of others. Oh yeah, and just for effect, Sean Connery is a teacher at Fujou High.

And who totally could would forget the unique side characters of D-Frag! ? There's , and there there's , and of course you can't forget about . Jokes aside, the side characters have a real thing for being bald and weird in general and I'm all for it. It's so out of left field and random that it feels like two series collided to form this single one.

I swear, at least one chapter every volume has these ridiculous battle shounen introductions and interactions, and no matter what they get me every time. And they're so detailed? Haruno sensei absolutely put a good amount of effort into designing them and adding random throwaway details just to make them seem more absurd.

I don't know, I fully admit that D-Frag! isn't some foundational, groundbreaking series that has incredibly well timed or apt and effective humor, nor is it something super relatable or anything that really stands out by critical metrics. But to me, it's just plain dumb fun. One stupid thing after the next, one ridiculous escapade followed by another, guided by Haruno sensei's incredibly odd sense of interest and direction. It's something I don't know I'll ever grow tired of because Haruno sensei has stumbled upon a golden formula for D-Frag!. We're going to hit 15 years of publication this year, so here's to many more. (Also, check out the anime, it's loads of fun for what it adapts from the manga).

[carriagelamp]

I’m legally obligated to try to read at least a few queer lit choices in June, so here’s what I’ve got! Not a lot of Full On Novels because this has been a crazy month, but I got lucky with some really cute ones

Bad Boys Happy Home v1

This was a yaoi that, so far at least, was significantly more domestic than anticipated. Akamatsu has been getting into fights with a man he met on his way home at a local park as a way of blowing off steam, even if he hasn’t managed to beat him once yet. However, eventually Akamatsu learns that the other man, Seven, is homeless and has been living at the park — rather than risk his sparring partner getting displaced, he invites Seven to come stay at his apartment until he gets his feet under him…

Bad Guys v1

Well, they finally put a movie out so I finally bit the bullet and read the first book of this series. I read it in French but there’s hardly enough text to make any difference. I can see why kids enjoy it, it’s fun and silly and the art is very accessible. It really holds zero interest to me though, it’s really more of a picture book like Elephant and Piggie than a graphic novel.

Demon Slayer v1-2

Another book I got talked into reading by children. I thought it looked like agonizingly generic shonen, another Naruto knock off or something similar, so I was surprised by how much I actually enjoyed it so far. The art is really appealing, it reminds me of old-school 90s Inuyasha art? Kinda? It’s about a boy whose family is slaughtered by demons while he’s away, and who returns to find his younger sister, the only survivor, turned into a demon  herself. Together they band together to find a way for her to be cured, as he fights to become a demon slayer who can protect the both of them, and she fights her new, violent nature. I love sibling stories, honestly.

Dragon Girls v1-2

Jeez. I am 90% sure this was Scholastic’s attempt to capitalize on Wings of Fire with a younger audience and a budget of two dimes to get it done. It’s about a group of three girls who find out that they can travel to a magical forest where they’re dragons that are tasked with protecting the forest and the tree queen from an evil shadow. I don’t think anyone can enjoy this unless they’re actively a seven year old girl, and even then I have my doubts. It’s generic to the point of ennui and the art is so bad that even I could have drawn the dragons better.

Earwig and the Witch

The final novella that Diana Wynne Jones ever wrote. After what a botch Ghibli did of the movie version, I’ve been avoiding it, but finally decided to give it a chance. It was actually pretty enjoyable, it very much had a quirky Dahl vibe to it. Earwig, a young orphan who is good at getting her way, is adopted by a witch who intends to use her as labour. Earwig, however, isn’t about to take that lying down and teams up with the witch’s familiar to find a way to once again control this odd situation.

Girl Friends complete collection v1

A cute enough little yuri romance. Not as good as something like Failed Princesses, in my opinion, this one felt much more… tranquil, I suppose? It was sweet but didn’t have a lot of plot happening. Still, if you feel like a very gentle sapphic romance, it’s not a bad one to breeze through.

In Deeper Waters

Gay Little Mermaid! Hell yeah! Pirates! High sea adventures! Magic! This was lots of fun! It took me a little bit to turn my brain off enough to enjoy it at the beginning, but once I realized out this really is meant to just be a queer fairytale I was able to stop overanalysing and just enjoy the ride. Very fun, summer read, scratched an itch I was having after Our Flag Means Death.

Jackass!

This was something. Not as bad as I expected, a childhood friends to unexpected lovers sort of story, and definitely a story that knew its kink and ran with it. Side romance was, simply put, vile though and was rather hard to ignore to get through the rest of the book. Almost enjoyable. There’s better queer manga to read, this made me think more of the trash I read as a desperate teen in the aughts.

Kase-san and Morning Glories v1-3

Now this sapphic romance was absolutely 100% the best thing I’ve read this weekend. It was incredibly cute, and the art is so charming. It’s about “slow pace” Yamada, a quiet girl on the greenery committee, developing a crush on Kase, the school track star, and the very blushy cute romance the two of them fall into.

Lily To The Rescue // Two Little Piggies

Last year I had read A Dog’s Way Home by Cameron and really enjoyed it, so I was excited to see that he had some children’s novels written in a similar style. This is a chapter book series about rescue dog Lily who now lives with her girl and helps at the family’s animal rescue centre. In these books she helps find, protect, play with, and support various animals that are found and brought to the centre. It’s just charming, with some of the loveliest art.

This Wonderful Season With You

Another really cute one, despite the comically generic title that I keep forgetting. This manga is about ex-baseball star Shirataki who ends up being talked into joining the programming club by short, shy, nerdy Enoki. While the other club “nerds” are intimidated by Shirataki, Enoki admires him and the two form an unlikely friendship which grows from there…

Witch Week

Another Diana Wynne Jones book because I was in the mood. This is one of my favourites of hers and I reread it every few years. Witch Week takes place in a world where magic is illegal, at a boarding school for “witch orphans” (the children of witches who have been burnt at the stake) and other “undesirables”. It’s a rather dull, unpleasant life in the school, until one day a note is found in one of the books that a teacher is grade, accusing someone in the class of being a witch. This is a serious accusation, and everyone seems to be trying to get to the bottom of it, as more and more magic seems to be cropping up.

[asuka--langley--soryu]

Hey! I’ve watched all of the show, the nge movies (rebuilds included) and the nge manga and I was wondering if you know of anymore canon/offical nge stories or content. I’ve seen some light novel series at my local bookstore but in general idk if there’s more Eva stories and series out there and what’s actually worth reading. Thanks! I love your blog!

short answer: there is SO much (too much) nge spin-off content and for the most part all of it is both non-canonical and unnecessary. off the top of my head the only thing I wholeheartedly 100% rec is khara’s ‘until you come to me’ animation (amv?), which is really beautifully done and, also, free.

also ive drafted this post like uh......4 times now and kept accidentally losing it so VERY sorry for the wait!! if it seems a lil slapdash i was tired of writing the same stuff again and again lol

extremely long answer under the cut (and links will be in a rb). somehow this became a fully fledged field guide to nge spin off content bc i am physically incapable of brevity so w/o further ado or whatever:

ok so i’ll try to make this as comprehensive + comprehensible as possible but,as I said, there is a loooot of content and I, shockingly, have thoughts on most of it. let’s organize by categories

Manga:

Every single nge spin off manga is bad in shades and variations, ranging from ‘just kind of uninteresting’ to ‘genuine human atrocity’. Raising Project is probs the most well known and is one of my least favourite pieces of content that has ever been put onto this earth. it coalesces all of the worsts parts of both evangelion and evangelion fans and can’t even manage a decent art style on top of that. there is nothing redeemable about raising project.if you see a copy out in the world please do me a favour and tear it apart w your teeth <3

Aside from That, the other big ‘alternate universe’ manga are probably Angelic Days, Campus Apocalypse, and maybe Petit Eva. I do not care much for Angelic Days or Campus Apocalypse but they are definitely not as deeply repellent as sirp. Petit Eva is, as far as I’ve seen, kind of your usual chibi comedy stuff so if youre looking for something extremely lighthearted that might be for you? I havent interacted w Petit Eva pretty much at all frankly so I’m not exactly sure whats going on there.

Shinji Ikari Detective Diary is another AU manga which I have actually been meaning to read for like......ages but have never gotten around to. It’s (as you can probably guess) a mystery series, which I’m usually into, and I havent personally heard anything bad about it, so I’ll cautiously rec looking into it. if you do and find some good scans feel free to send me way <3

finally, there’s Tony Takezaki’s parody manga, which is just like...a bunch of parody/satire comics. I do actually own it (bc I loooovvveeeee genocyber) and the art is great and its genuinely funny (given you like takezaki’s weird, kind of raunchy humor). He has a comic making fun of fan service that ends w fuyutski beating the shit out of gendo as ‘real fan service’ so like. I do genuinely recommend this one.

Novels:

Not a true ‘novel’ but Eva 1 + Eva 2 is an anthology featuring some essays, as well as comics and illustrations. It is a lot of silly shitty fanservice though, so ymmv. I dont own it (yet) but its on my radar literally exclusively because of Obata’s fucking incredible cover art.

The actual ‘novel’ that youre probably talking about is ANIMA, which is a canon divergence exploring a future where Shinji managed to completely circumvent Instrumentality. I haven’t picked up the last volume since it came out last year, so I can’t speak on it as a whole, but I like ANIMA well enough to recommend it. It reads kind of like an extremely dedicated sci-fi/cyberpunk fanfic, frankly, with that same kind of wildly convoluted but entertaining plot and much more of a focus on idealised character interactions and the ‘wow cool robot’ of it all. Actually, its kind of entirely ‘wow cool robot’ tbh, or at least the best parts are, but Ikuto Yamashita (the writer) was nge’s mech designer so that’s no surprise.

the writing is nothing stellar and it can get fanservicey in a very eyeroll kind of way, but if you go in w reasonable expectations it’s pretty entertaining. like i said, it feels very fanfic but in a ‘200k wordcount crazy worldbuilding fix it fic’ kind of way.

ANIMA expands waaaaaAAYYY more on the evas, which can be cool but does definitely indulge in some ridiculous mecha shit and, i cannot stress this enough, a lot of deeply convoluted and absolutely fruit looped sci-fi plot shit. it does actually literally feature something called ‘Super Eva’ and iirc mari is a cat girl who pilots some kind of wolf robot so yknow... ymmv

theres a buuunch of illustrations included and all the concepts for the evas are very cool and the concepts for the kid are very bad. probably it should be illegal for him to draw asuka ever again

Video Games:

there are too many nge video games. way too many. did you know about the typing game??? what about the multiple STRIP mahjong games???? or the pokemon/tomogatchi game where you hand raise an angel from birth while playing as KAJI???? the detective game where kaworu straight up fucking human murders gendo???

they wrung nge for everything it was worth in the 90s, though ig having a million fucking titles was probs super useful for all that tax fraud

some highlights:

Battle Orchestra: this is the only one i’ve ever really played and it is very fun and very of its time. a pretty straightforward fighting game but ft a big combat polygon

Second Impression: this is the second nge game to be released and i am fucking obsessed with it. what i would not give for there to be a translation available. as far as I have ever been able to tell its sort of a vaguely canon ‘side story’ about joining a band and also befriending a new girl who eventually transforms into a giant fucking horrifying bug angel. its a kind of proto kaworu storyline but gross and i want it so SO bad.

rei ayanami raising project: this is I guess basically a pet raising game except the pet is pre-series rei ayanami. you get to choose what clubs and hobbies she has and the coordinating pictures are genuinely incredible and ill 100% be posting some later. nonsense but there IS a dress up portion so like. might be worth.

Girlfriend of Steel 1 & 2: GOS 1 has the rando brunette that you see all over the place and so like idk shout out to her i guess and if you want to know the context behind that feel free to check it out, but it frankly seems extremely fucking boring and also has GOD awful asuka characterisation so. pass.

GOS 2 is the one where you can kind of date kaworu and afaik thats the only notable thing about it

Angel Rising: this is the pokemon/tomogatchi kaji game and despite how baffling it is conceptually i do actually love the artstyle and am deeply considering playing it myself. also, it does apparently give some good insight into Kaji. a new english translation came out last march so its like actually one of the most accessible of all of these somehow.

Evangelion 2 has the ‘Classified Files’ which is a tenuously canon supplemental info dump, but god is in his heavens and thats all fully available + translated online so we do not have to bother playing Evangelion 2

Secret of Evangelion: I actually know almost nothing about this but ive heard it may have some interesting info on instrumentality? it is very VERY much On My Radar and may be worth checking out 

there are so, so many others but i am just so tired.

Animation:

There are a few Petit Eva OVAs which are all in the same silly slice-of-life style and seem mostly whatever except for an episode which is, as far as i can tell, entirely about up-skirting asuka so like. yknow what actually fuck petit eva

MORE IMPORTANTLY in like 2015ish Studio Khara had the ‘Japan Animator Expo’ where they released anime shorts made by a bunch of different people. it’s actually where me!me!me! came from, and plenty of other very very cool shorts were put out during the expo’s run. Another Impact and until you come to me were both part of the Expo and are extremely fucking good. Another Impact got a lot of hype, which was well-deserved but DID briefly spark a whole ‘live action nge’ thing which is, actually, my manchurian candidate sleeper cell trigger phrase. until you come to me is much less ‘flashy’ and didn’t get as much attention, but its so so beautiful and you should all go watch it immediately.

if you have managed to bear reading through this whole thing just know that you are my favourite and im giving you a lil kiss on the forehead

[chidoroki]

TPN - “Dreams Come True”

What better way to cheer up the TPN fandom after the second season’s final episode than with the special exhibition chapter finally being fully translated. I caught glimpses of a few pages here and there over the past couple months but seeing all the children live happily together in the human world in their own little village that they made close to Emma and Alex warms my heart. Of course I would’ve loved if we got to see more of the GP Resistance (because the anime denied us of them) but following the GF kids around the world as they experience their dreams is fair enough. We started the series alongside them so might as well finish strong with them too. I really loved seeing everyone grow up but no matter how old they get or how much time passes, I’ll probably never get used to seeing Emma without her iconic “63194.” It’s a bittersweet feeling for me, but her smiles bring me so much joy and I’m beyond happy that she accepted everyone into her life as they accepted her without her memories.

I haven’t a clue on how much time passed since everyone found Emma in ch181 to now, but seeing her call out everyone’s names is a little detail that I love so much considering she had no idea who anyone was at first. Trying to remember 60+ names doesn’t seem like an easy task to me. No doubt I was just as shocked as our girl upon learning these mere children bought a goddamn plane! We learn in a couple pages that it’s because of Norman’s company that they can afford it, but still, he’s like 15 or 16 now? He’s still a child! And I’m impressed! Not only at him, but that Oliver and Violet became pilots as well! It’s especially cute when you remember that Lucas gave Oliver a little toy plane during their time at Goldy Pond.

Speaking of GP, is it just me or does Emma’s current outfit resemble her GP one just a little bit? Sure we have no idea what color scheme this one has but come on, the short jacket, the dark shirt and jeans.. just imagine it! Jemima, Yvette, Alicia and Mark remade Gillian’s original GP outfit sometime before the Grace Field Raid arc (ch137 extra page) so I don’t doubt they could’ve done the same for Emma. Of course that’s just me being completely hopeful and missing the Goldy Pond arc to death but yeah! I’m also so happy to see Chris up and moving again! Seeing him wake up briefly in ch181 was nice but this is so much better. I imagine he and Emma have a lot to catch up on in terms of stories, with him being unconscious since ch105 and Emma not remembering anything.

But here we go, the original 15 escapees plus Norman, Phil, Sherry, I believe I saw Carol somewhere and a couple other random kiddos ready to see the entire world. They get to accomplish so much.. and in a single day too I believe? At least that’s what Phil and Alicia say a bit later about everyone’s wishes, but aahh what a lucky bunch. Hell, I’ll say we’re lucky readers too to be able to see such a great story. Can’t thank Shirai and Demizu enough y’all. I wish we got to see more of Alex though. He’s such a kind soul but I’m sure he’ll be just fine staying behind with everyone else.

This entire page where we learn about Norman as a CEO is gold. I still can’t believe this child successfully built up an entire multipurpose company not only to help their search for Emma but also because he didn’t want to live off the Ratri clan. I wish I knew about this last week when writing out Norman’s birthday post because hell yeah this deserves some praise! AND he managed to graduate school as well during all that! Well, by skipping grades which totally makes sense. I mean, if he managed to pass all the Grace Field and Lambda tests effortlessly I’m sure normal human world school was a piece of cake for him. Holy shit dude, keep on impressing me why don’t ya. Not only him but Nigel and Sonya too! I’m not surprised that Vincent helped out but I’m glad those two got a tiny moment to shine as well! Ray is another obvious choice when it comes to helping Norman, as they’re best friends and he’s always been good with machines.. but boy, I can’t take you seriously when you’re just sitting there unamused and eating chips! Hahah I love him so much! And the fact he replies to Norman’s idea with just a simple “kay” is an eternal mood.

Okay boys aside, can we talk about our fabulous girls now? Because oh my god, they’re so darn beautiful! They’re more fashionable than I’ll ever be and it’s so cute how they drag Emma along to take advantage of the 3-for-1 deal. But our girl pulls off that sporty look so well! (r.i.p. goldy pond outfit ver2.0). I’m not at all surprised that Nat wanted to go see the opera. That's perfect for him and I’d like to think the anime did something similar with that one shot we see of him in the human world. We don’t see him in a theater like this but to me it looks like he’s on the streets of Broadway? At least that’s the vibe I get from it. I’m sure there was something music related on one of those signs.

I can’t get over how adorable all the children look and how happy they are fulfilling their wishes, even if some of them aren’t as extravagant as others. Like eating a fluffy pancake and a ton of ice cream? We can do that whenever we want. But for these kids, it means everything and they absolutely deserve to experience such simple joys like that after all the harsh nonsense they’ve been through. I also love how Ray continues to be such a great older brother by still looking out for them too. The fact he remains completely unfazed by the haunted house is perfect. This boy has been haunted by his own nightmares and demons his entire life, there’s no way a couple of lousy jump scares are gonna spook him. Though I do find it funny that Alicia and Rossi still manage to get scared while Yvette is having the time of her life. I can’t help but laugh at Thoma’s “Shirai face” as well.

I find it interesting that out of all the different kinds of exhibits they could’ve shown us while Rossi visits a museum, they give us dinosaurs.. like that seems so silly to me. Y’all have seen several demons in your young lives already and yet dinosaurs manage to amaze you too? God these kids are precious. And then our boy Phil finally gets to see and ride a train! Just look how happy he is! The poor kid can’t even sit still he’s so darn excited and I can’t help but smile with him! Thankfully the anime showed us this too.

We eventually get to Ray’s wish and guys.. oh my fucking god. Tell me that this is not the absolute best and prettiest smile we get to see from him!! It honestly leaves me speechless okay? Ray never imagined he would ever get to see the outside world, let alone live past the age of 12, and yet here he is, seeing such a beautiful sight such as this, right in front of him instead of from inside a book. You can’t believe how happy and proud of him I am right now. Did you see how ecstatic I was when the anime kept Isabella alive? Multiply that feeling by ten and there ya go. That’s my level of happiness upon seeing my favorite boy smile like THAT! AAHHH!! That panel is gonna live rent free in my head until the end of time. I can’t get over how damn perfect it is. His smile is so pure and how he looks like he’s in complete awe is beautiful. He’s about to burst into tears and I swear I might do the same because I’m making myself emotional over this fantastic boy. Someone hold me.

No seriously, hold me because we’re about to get into some angst as we move onto to Emma’s wish. We all know that ever since 2039 her one dream was to ride a giraffe once they got outside, so here we are, about ten years later and the animals in question are within reach. Our girl should be totally excited, right? Ha, not quite.

That wish was something the old Emma wanted, but since demon god had to be such a bastard, this Emma doesn’t know what to think, let alone what to even feel. She hasn’t experienced the same hardships as her family. She hasn’t gone through hell and back while holding onto that one wish that would make all the suffering worth it. The amount of joy everyone else felt upon living out their dreams, she wonders if she would be able to feel it too.

They brought her here to make her happy, but is this truly want she wants as well? This is old Emma’s wish after all. What about her and what she wants? Could this wish make her just as happy as her old self? She knows her family is only trying to help, but seeing her doubt herself does a number on my heart. Even without her memories, she’s still the same Emma deep down, as she doesn’t want to disappoint her family. She spends so much time worrying about living up to her family’s expectations, to try and be that Emma they all love so dearly.

Little does she know that she acts the exact same as usual, almost as if nothing has changed when she finally expresses how much she wants to ride a giraffe. And that’s great considering when they first arrived at the giraffes, no on had even mentioned riding them. She came across that feeling all on her own and everyone else can’t help but laugh and feel relieved. Her mind may have forgotten but her heart remembers everything. There is no “old Emma” and “new Emma” to her family, just “Emma” and words can’t express how wholesome that is because they love her regardless. All that matters to them is Emma’s happiness because if anyone deserves to feel and experience that, it’s her.

I just made myself tear up, damn it. I started this series with season one okay? I heard about this precious girl’s dream within the first minute of the first episode and here I am, a little bit over two years later, finally reading about it coming true and seeing that bright as hell smile on her face. Do you know how amazing it is to come full circle like that? My heart feels so full right now. I’m beyond proud of her and love her to death. Say what you want but I believe this to be the true manga ending in my eyes.

(damn this series for always getting me emotional)

[deltaengineering]

Spring Anime 2021: Embarrassment of Riches

So this current anime season absolutely stinks, which just makes the last one look even more impressive. Well, maybe not all of it...

Zombieland Saga Revenge

First off, you don't need to tell me that the following is a severe outlier opinion. We good? Ok. ZLSR is, in a word, subpar. I liked S1 back in the day, but it was already in the process of getting lazy towards the end. S2 continues this trend and is basically just another idol show. And as someone who actually does watch other idol shows I have to say that it's not a particularly good one of those either. The zombie gimmick has mostly stopped mattering and we're just doing what every idol show does, only with the odd occasional sight gag. The alleged subversive qualities mostly amount to a flashback for Yuugiri, which is admittedly the best part of the show but feels like it barely has anything to do with anything. Apart from that, it's a bunch of generic idol plots, rehashed character beats, shoddy attempts at twists (while not connecting to any setups from S1), and the obligatory "idols give us hope" ending, which is terribly hackneyed and flat out bad. Tae gets further memed into the ground, because of course she does. And there's stuff that was simply never good to begin with, like Kotarou and his comedy schtick, which gets truly insufferable now that there's no qualities to distract from it. It really makes me think that S1 wasn't even all that good to begin with and seems like an attempt to turn this surprise success into an easy money longrunner with no edge and no ambitions. "The idol show for people who don't watch idol shows" indeed, but not the way you mean it. 4/10

Bakuten

But not to dwell on the failures, with the second show we're already above the cut — barely. This one got my attention with its really impressive performance scenes early on and it totally sticks to that, which is even more impressive. But besides that? Well, this is by far the most predictable show in a season where I watched an unambitious Kiraralike and put ZLS on blast for having no ideas. The characters are a mixed bag, some are cool (Shida, Asawo), some are very annoying (Mashiro), but those are the supports. The main cast is extremely one-dimensional, which is fine until they try to heap a ton of pathos on their lead, which doesn't go well. But I guess execution matters, and Bakuten is slick enough to get by. Writing this down in stark daylight I feel like I overrated this show somewhat (I actually put it over the next one originally, which definitely doesn't hold up when thinking about it), but I was indeed mostly entertained. 6/10

Yakunara Mug Cup mo

Yeah. Of course Mug Cup definitely doesn't invent or subvert anything either, but it's a pretty good Kiraralike that's always entertaining to watch. Explaining the qualities of such a nothing genre is as difficult as ever, but it mostly comes down to me liking the characters and it having nothing to annoy me. It's shorter than normal, which is a plus for slim shows like this. And yeah, you can make an excessive amount of dick jokes with the clay fondling. That helps too. Looks are just fine, pleasant but nothing out of the ordinary. Comfy low-effort anime. 6/10

Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song

This one is decent, but sadly still a major letdown. Because the first few episodes of Vivy were excellent and kicked ass, but then it became increasingly clear that the writing can't cash the checks the ideas wrote while the action starts running into severely diminishing returns. Vivy just keeps slowly getting worse and worse as it goes on, not by a huge amount each episode but by the end there's a pretty sizeable gulf between potential and result. Going into detail would probably be a little much for this venue because there's a lot, but from the top level view the issue is that while Vivy has good fundamental ideas and steals at the right places, it just isn't a smart show — it's schlock, and by the end, poorly thought out schlock that tries to smooth out every problem with liberal application of the big feels hammer and le epic twist at that. Yeah, couldn't tell that the Re:Zero dude was aboard here, for sure. That said, it still works pretty well as entertaining schlock that is not to be taken too seriously, and the characters are generally just very fun to watch even when they're doing stupid things. Still, I can't in good conscience rate this higher than Beatless, a show that looks like butt but properly executes on its ideas. 6/10

Super Cub

So this is 100% a Honda commercial, and I got really mad a Yuru Camp last season for being a blatant shill. Yet I'm feeling this, what gives? I think the main difference is that Super Cub is specifically a commercial for one product (and a very iconic product at that), while Yuru Camp is so all over the place that it ends up mostly a commercial for consumerism in general. And when Super Cub goes too hard on the product (which it does), it's at least pretty entertaining. That's something about Super Cub in general: It goes hard. Your regular Kiraralike this is not, because it's uncommonly slow, focused and moody - yes, it almost measures up to Yuru Camp at its best and demolishes it at its worst. Also, it's just extremely amusing to see sadblob Koguma grow a huge grizzly biker beard and become a badass outlaw dad to her goofy wife and cute daughter, all thanks to the power of afforable personal transportation. Needless to say, that can get unintentionally silly, but Super Cub has so much charm that it doesn't matter — it's great when it's good and still funny when it's not. 7/10

Shadows House

Shadows House turned up with a lot of potential, and I have to say it at least delivered on most of it. It has some problems; notably I'm not a fan of how the entire middle turned out to be a tournament arc of sorts that seems curiously inspired by Resident Evil memes, crest-shaped intentations and boulder punching included. I also think that this is a show that would be perfectly fine without explaining much, but I guess it is a shounen manga after all so we got dumped on eventually anyway. At least that came late - close relative Promised Neverland didn't show that much restraint. Shadows House is generally well written though, with great characters, interesting interactions and a great hook. But what really makes it memorable is that it's exceptionally good at the cute/creepy contrast, something that is often tried but rarely works as well as here, with great character designs and very appropriate production. I hope this gets a sequel, because it seems like it's just getting started. 7/10

SSSS.Dynazenon

Coming in with a fondness for Gridman, Dynazenon didn't have to do much to convince me. The surprise though is that it's not a rehash even if it's basically the same show, a character drama where occasionally huge and goofy fights break out. Dynazenon is Gridman done better, and the interesting part is how it accomplishes this - mainly by being far more conventional. I do appreciate that Gridman went for something weird and almost experimental, but that only really paid off towards the end while most of the show was a distraction/holding pattern. It just didn't feel like there was enough material for a full series there, more like a movie maybe, if even that. Dynazenon fixes this by just being a TV show, with an actual cast of characters that each have their own arc. And by spreading the material this way, Dynazenon ends up having a lot more nuance than its intensely focused predecessor, while having the same themes and not actually being any deeper. In a way, Gridman ends up looking like the spinoff in retrospect, while Dynazenon is the full package. 8/10

Thunderbolt Fantasy S3

So how good was this season? So good that Thunderbolt Fantasy doesn't end up at the top, that's how. And all the elements that made Tbolt such a sure thing are still there, big hammy puppets doing stunts and scheming never gets old. However, I do have to note that at this point, the writing appears to have gotten too comfortable. I don't expect it to ever top the amazing S1 ending, but at this point it's like Tbolt has stopped trying to deliver on endings at all and seems in the process of retooling itself into a longrunner instead. Barely anything gets resolved in S3 (the climax is that the climax of S2 is resolved again, for good this time... maybe), and everything else is just setting up plotpoints for the next season. Tbolt is truly lucky that it doesn't actually need to resolve anything to be a great time, but at this point I have to say that I'd appreciate it if they wrapped it up with S4. 8/10

Nomad: Megalobox 2

Speaking of sequels to shows I liked, Nomad doesn't so much improve upon its predecessor but steamrolls right over it. This is a tall order, since Megalobox was surprisingly good for a sports shounen and had a real nice, heartwarming ending that Nomad instantly negates for purposes of drama and everyone being extremely miserable. That sounds like a pretty terrible idea - and it would be, if Nomad wasn't as excellent as it is. To call it not the same show would be an understatement, because it's a true sequel, not just the same characters doing their thing some more, or new characters doing the same thing as the old ones did. Indeed my biggest problem with Megalobox was that it still closely adhered to its genre template and was very predictable; Nomad fixes this issue thoroughly. Nomad is about questioning what being a hotblooded shounen protagonist eventually leads you to, and how to fix everything you screwed up by being one. You could call it a deconstruction, but that term has been so abused for cynical, edgy "thing you like actually sucks" takes that I feel like it doesn't really fit here. Nomad isn't cynical at all, it's just a character drama about some boxers past their prime, and it being a sequel to a show that is indeed rather formulaic just enhances the experience. My biggest issue with it was that I really like what they did with Joe in this story, so the big focus on Mac's backstory felt like a distraction for a long time. But in the end that turned out to be absolutely necessary to make the ending work. The ending's just great, by the way, and I shall say not more about it. 9/10

Odd Taxi

Yeah boy, here's the show that has apparently become somewhat of a "greatest show you didn't watch" meme, which I can feel smug about because I don't need YouTubers to tell me what's good and followed this from day one. Anyway, Odd Taxi is indeed great, the greatest show in a few years even. What starts out as seemingly a relaxed hangout show in the vein of Midnight Diners quickly turns into a psychological murder mystery while never losing its quirky humor. The character writing is outstanding, with even small bit players being on a level that the average anime wishes it could have for leads. And the rollout of the mystery is exemplary, with answers given and new questions raised every episode with a satisfying and logical payoff in the end. This is also the rare anime that has rock solid production from the first to the last second; it's never really flashy but excellently done and highly consistent nonetheless. And the music just owns. I have a few complaints, mainly that there's a few logical weaknesses in the story (which wouldn't even register in a lesser show, but sticks out here since the rest is so immaculately constructed) and that the ending overextends on the emotions when the rest of the show is so reserved and dry in comparison. But those are only the reasons why I didn't give it perfect marks, and I almost did that anyway. 9/10

[butterfly--empress]

So About BnHA…

Man! I don’t participate much on here but it sure has been an interesting popcorn eating time, lurking through the good, the bad, and the annoying posts in the spoiler chapter tags. For this week’s chapter, especially!

Not gonna rant (I save those for close friends on discord) 

I do notice that lines within this crazy ass fandom have been drawn, tears have been shed and righteous fury has been felt. And no matter wtf Mister Horikoshi has in stored for chapter 320, it’s going to be a make or break chapter for a lot of folks. I did try my best to keep this post Bakugou neutral grounds. I don’t think I’ve bashed nor favored the character just fyi.

But the most inconspicuous opinions can be taken too serious these days…

The Silly:

For chapter 320 onwards, I am and have ALWAYS BEEN 100% Team: The Legend, The Myth, The Champ, Izuku ‘Feral!Rabbit-Cryptid!’ Midoriya! Win or Lose, I ride or die with Midoriya, hands down! ON GOD!

While everybody yelling into the tumblr void over whose gonna win or lose.

I’m sitting here thinking about two things: A) Has no one thought that maybe some of Class 1-A might side with Deku? *coughsUraraka/Iida/Todorokicoughs* *coughsmaybeevenMineta/Asui/Yaoyorozu???coughs* *coughs maybe even a surprise Shinsou/class1-b reveal even though class 1-b don’t know deku that well* B) Did everyone forget in all the excitement that uhh my boi has yet to unlock the 2nd OFA user’s quirk???

I mean, I’m not saying if it does come down to a bawl of drama and angst, that Izuku’s gonna win.

But I am saying, if it does come down to a bawl of drama and angst, that Izuku’s gonna win…I regret nothing with this bet! If my boi loses we just gonna take that L but…ya know…*shrugs*…Baby, beat their Bakugou’s collective asses.

The Serious:

Personally, I honest to god really love this shounen series with all my heart. It is the anime that reignited my love for shounen after my fatigued of constant disappointment with two old shounen favorites. 

Now, having said all that: I truly have not had a serious issue with the writing choices made by Horikoshi. Yes, I have my…gripes…(it’s complicated) but considering what I got compared to the stuff I’ve watched/read in the past, it’s definitely better to me. Having read/watched a lot of anime/manga and shounen, (I haven’t watched them ALL, srsly after my great disappointment and real life I sort of had an anime dry spell if you must know. Watched some stuff here and there when I could/in the mood but not as frequent as I’ve done like yrs ago), I’ve come to learn to just…begrudgingly accept/expect certain; I suppose you can say, writing choices or ‘tropes’ that I can just easily ignore them, roll my eyes when I see them, and still enjoy whatever I’m invested in at the time. 

The only real frustrations I have is with a certain character. Yes, I mean Bakugou. I have come to tolerate him, I have come to begrudgingly like him, especially after a second rewatch of the series, I could see and accept that in a very typical shounen way, Bakugou did change, though very little, and it’s subtle and undeniably frustrating how it’s happening but it’s there. However, I do question Horikoshi’s writing choices when it comes to him at times. I see the character development, I know it’s there but….*sighs*

Now I’m one of these people who do believe that the creator of this universe, actually knows wtf he’s doing with his own story (even if rabid/hormonal younger fans loudly disagree but YMMV). One thing I’ve noticed, for the most part, he doesn’t just write/draw things for the hell of it, even if a certain plot or a certain character’s development takes a snail’s pace to get to the point. The conclusion of building up to arcs do have a pay off. (And I 100% understand that for some people, moving at a snail’s pace just don’t cut it. Everything cannot please everybody all of the time and that is FINE!)

Katsuki Bakugou…I know the crumbs and very subtle ways he’s changed have to lead somewhere and to something huge. When Bakugou admits to All Might he bullied Midoriya when they were kids, I had an ‘ah ha!’ Moment. The fact that a very prideful guy like Bakugou was finally starting to admit just that much, (even though, we the audience knows it runs way deeper than he’s admitting here) even in his frustrating roundabout way I like to think this is progress, is very in-character and cannot just be for the hell of it. It has to be leading up to something else other than Bakugou jumping in to take that hit for Deku during the war arc. There is unresolved tension still between Bakugou and Midoriya that is not going to just go away because they will it to.

Which brings us to Chapters 318 and especially 319. It’s the perfect set up for all the dirty skeletons to come out of the closet that both Bakugou and Midoriya have been avoiding/trying to pretend doesn’t exists between them, because it’s been a long time coming. The honest to god truth? This is actually how I always thought this confrontation will go, with a showdown that forces Midoriya into a corner where all those repressed negative feelings he’s bottled up inside is bound to come out; Because I Honestly think Izuku would take what Bakugou’s done to him to his grave if he had it, his way. (Boy can be very frustratingly stubborn when he wants to be).

It’s just, after saying all this, I don’t hold my breath that Horikoshi will take it there…The opportunity is there, I want it to go there, it NEEDS to go there! In order for both characters to come out for the better. But will Mister Horikoshi ‘DO THE THING?’

Remains to be seen. A little bit of me is hopeful, another part of me is resigning myself to feeling dissatisfied with what little we got for Bakugou’s character development and by proxy, Izuku’s getting stuck in limbo. I’m not kidding, Bakugou being a very contentious character within this fandom doesn’t just come from nowhere. But this post isn’t about me ranting into the void about Bakugou. (I don’t even think I can muster up the rage I felt the first time watching MHA blindly to rant to high hell about the bullshit Bakugou’s done now.)

I suppose I will just have to internally scream for 1,000 yrs over half baked character development if Horikoshi doesn’t do the FUCKING THING in giving a satisfying pay off to Katsuki and Midoriya’s history. I’ll just frustratingly chalk it up to old freaking shounen logic and just continue to enjoy the series because I’ve been here for Izuku Midoriya since ep 1 and I am not about to let Bakugou or Horikoshi’s unwillingness to do something with him derail that. And there’s always hoping that someone is writing some really good Bakugou gets actual Consequences fanfic out there because ooh boy…I like Bakugou but mofo can catch these hands…and I’m not even a fighter, but Bakugou…this lil shit does make you want to choke the hell out of him at times. 

I haven’t been this emotionally frustrated over an anime character since…maybe fucking Louise from Zero no Tsukaima and it takes a LOT to make me actually dislike characters, good or bad. 

All in All: Regardless of how the story goes from here on out, we are all about to lose our collective shits. No matter how you feel about which characters…

It’s about to go down!

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 278: MOMO IN CHARGE

Previously on BnHA: Deku and Kacchan were all “SIR, THAT’S OUR EMOTIONAL SUPPORT SENSEI” and got really ferocious and made a very passionate attempt to blow Tomura up and it was great. It basically did nothing, but it was still great. AFO was all “COME HERE LIL BRO”, and Tomura was all “silly Sensei, you can’t just take over my mind and body just like that”, and he was very confident of this despite there really being no evidence to back it up, but okay! Gran was all “time to make the fandom mad at me” and grabbed Tomura by the collar and yelled at him about Nana a bit, and then Bakugou and Endeavor made an even MORE passionate attempt to blow up Tomura, which may or may not have done some actual damage. The chapter ended with Gigantomachia battling Mt. Lady, just kinda out of the blue, which is FINE, but she had better be all right, though!

Today on BnHA: Everyone is all “WAUGHH IT’S GIGANTOMACHIA” and running around freaking out about it. The U.A. alums all kick some ass, and pretty much everyone else not from U.A. does jack fucking shit. Mt. Lady, who I plan on naming all of my future children after, does her best to stop Machia but he keeps flinging her aside. Kamui Woods is all “here I come with Midnight to put Gigantomachia to sleep!” and is PROMPTLY FUCKING MURDERED!? by Dabi because he’s a flammable tree man, and so Midnight falls all the way to the ground and is badly injured. So then she’s all “well I better call the most competent person I can think of to fix this mess” and dials up YAOYOROZU FUCKING MOMO, who proceeds to take charge LIKE THE BOSS SHE IS, and mobilizes the rest of the kids. And honestly I have more faith in them than in any of the adults at this point, so yeah, you know what? Let’s do this.

so I am possibly a bit spoiled on this chapter because I did a “top five predictions” post earlier this week, and someone replied to that yesterday on Thursday saying that they were mostly correct. I don’t know exactly how close to the mark I was though, and in any case most of the predictions were just “so-and-so shows up, probably”, so it’s not too bad. we’ll see how it goes!

OH THANK GOD MY BABIES ARE SAFE

I mean, CLEARLY they’re all about to be in horrible danger, seeing as Jirou is about to inform them of the whole “THE BIG GUY EVERYONE WAS AFRAID ABOUT WAKING UP WOKE UP” thing, but in the meantime at least Kami and Toadette and Honenuki made it back to the group safely

also Kaminari’s use of “Jirou-Jack” here is fucking inspired and I want him to teach a class on nicknames. isn’t he the one who coined “Yaomomo” as well? this boy has a gift and it needs to be appreciated

so Jirou is all “SOMETHING REALLY BIG IS COMING”, and actually she says “INSANELY HUGE”, which if anything is still an understatement, hard as it is to believe

WOW

“A BAD GUY IS HEADING THIS WAY?? SOUNDS LIKE IT’S TIME TO ABANDON THE CHILDREN IN THE WOODS” kjlfakh okay you know what?? fine!! you weren’t even going to do anything anyway so let’s not pretend!!

holy shit it’s like Mt. Lady isn’t even there

look at those speed lines!! goddamn. I just felt this huge rush of empathy for Mt. Lady though. like can you imagine growing up with this super-destructive quirk, and managing to become a hero with it against all odds, and having to put up with the manga making fun of you all the time just because sometimes you have a tendency to DESTROY A LOT OF STUFF, but it’s not like you can help it!! but the upside has always been that when your quirk is on, you are fucking UNSTOPPABLE though. so even though it’s been a hell of a rough ride for you, it’s worth it because you’re a complete badass and the number of people who can beat you out in terms of sheer physical strength is probably in the single digits. and you’re working really hard too, and lately you’ve been moving up through the ranks and actually becoming a damn fine hero if I do say so myself (and I do), and it’s like, about time though?? like finally, finally it is all starting to come together for you. and then this snarling trashrock person suddenly comes stampeding along and you put your all into trying to stop him, and it doesn’t even do a damn thing. like, holy shit. that’s just not fucking fair and YOU DESERVE BETTER, MT. LADY

anyway so she’s still hanging in there for now though so let’s check in with our villain squad riding on his back

lmaooo they’re all “I don’t even understand what is going on here”

YOU GUYS, THIS IMPLIES THAT THEY WERE ALL PLUCKED OFF THE GROUND BY THE SCRUFFS OF THEIR NECKS AND THEY HAD ABSOLUTELY NO SAY IN THE MATTER OMG. like I’m picturing Spinner being held by his cape pinched in between Machia’s thumb and forefinger, and awkwardly trying to lecture him like a mom with his hands on his hips all, “BAD GIGANTOMACHIA! NO! NOOOUAGH -- !” and cutting off with a yelp as he’s dropped onto his back

and I am glad they got Toga some clothes! I like to think Gigantomachia grabbed those for her as well. so thoughtful

wow Skeptic actually wants to go back to Re-Destro??

color me legit impressed. I underestimated your loyalty my dude. and let me also just take this moment to extend my gratitude toward Horikoshi for leaving the rest of the MLA out of it because good fucking riddance to them, goodbye forever hopefully!!

I guess they’ll be needing Skeptic’s quirk down the line for some reason? maybe he is meant to be like a new, less out-of-control Twice. smdh y’all out here trying to replace your dead buddy like a pet goldfish

who is this “they” Dabi is referring to

do you mean the heroes? lol yeah I guess they’re pretty distracted by the literal fucking kaijuu you’re currently piggybacking on

SIGH

“the Jakku team must’ve made a mistake” BOY, I’LL SAY. you know what, don’t even talk to me about that yet. it’s still too fresh. suffice it to say that your suspicions are correct and things in Jakku are not very daijobu right about now

anyway here’s a closeup of this bubble person just cuz

they are everything and I want them to be my friend. also there’s a squid person a few paces behind them who can probably do anything a squid can do. or they might actually be a shark person, actually. I don’t know. either way I love them

GETEN PLEASE GO AWAY

WE ARE PHASING OUT THE MLA!! MOVING FORWARD IT’S ORIGINAL LOV ONLY!! I’M SORRY BUT YOU DIDN’T MAKE THE CUT. we already have an ice character so shoo

OH DAMN MY MAN CEMENTOSS HAS HAD ENOUGH OF HIS NONSENSE TOO AHHHH YESS

1) hey so Cementoss is legit terrifying who’d’ve thought

and 2), did Cementoss always have a mouthful of gigantic perfect teeth each the size of a slice of bread, or is this just something I’m only noticing now because I’m behind the curve. either way, let me just say sincerely, DKJDLKFJLSKJG

RE-DESTRO YOU GO AWAY TOO!!

@waywardfacegarden​ you asked the other day which are the characters I actually dislike, and this is one of them lol. he’s just a big ol’ prick, and on top of that has the audacity to not even be interesting in any way so as to balance it out. anyway so apologies to any Re-Destro stans out there but I basically spend every panel he’s in hoping that someone will punch him in the face hard enough to finally make him shut up

anyway so my man Edgeshot is here though, finally!! but of all the people for him to fight! this is a real predicament for me. the most soothing character in the series contrasted with the character who grates my nerves the most. Edgeshot’s sexy ASMR voice is gonna be drowned out by all of RD’s punching and self-important ranting in the anime and I’m lowkey devastated but I’m gonna pull myself together and read on

SPEAKING OF SELF-IMPORTANT RANTING

Edge, if you can liberate us from having to put up with his insufferable ass once and for all I will be so grateful to you. can you do this. please. for me

and it looks like some other boring MLA villains are following along behind Machia so I’m gonna need someone to kick their asses as well. please

-- YESSSSSS

okay so now I see what that comment on my prediction post was referring to lol. I did indeed have my fingers crossed that these two would show up again, and sure enough! THE GANG’S ALL HERE YAY

and Mt. Lady is being sumoed aside!

anyone want tonight’s lotto numbers. during this brief fleeting moment of having my predictions be actually credible, I would just like to say that Hagakure is the U.A. traitor. thank you and goodnight

OH NO KAMUI IS WORRIED

HE LOOKS SO PANICKED?? OUT OF THE BLUE I SHIP IT SO MUCH?? I keep forgetting they’re on the same team and stuff and wow, I need to calm down

LOL MIDNIGHT IS ALL “NO TIME FOR SHIPS!!”

I wonder if her quirk will actually be enough to take him down? this is something I’ve been itching to see for a long time, actually. just how powerful is she? we know her quirk is more effective on males than females, but is anyone actually capable of resisting it? imagine if she really did just knock Gigantomachia out after all of this buildup. that would be some god-tier shit omg, DO IT

(ETA: I am just going to assume that since Horikoshi had to go to elaborate lengths to take her out of the fight, this means that her quirk really was capable of knocking them all out. another tragic case of Too Badass For The Plot. y’all better respect Midnight.)

YESSSSSSSS

is she stripping. you know what -- don’t think about it. I won’t let you ruin this for me Horikoshi. Midnight’s gonna be a badass because the ladies are fucking ruling this arc and that’s all there is to it

NOOOOOO

DABI GET BACK HERE I JUST WANT TO TALK!!

oh thank god, she’s all right. BUT KAMUI ISN’T THOUGH DLKJSFLKSJDG??!

did Kamui Woods just... die

(ETA: okay but for real, is there an actual curse in effect on the Billboard Top Ten right now, though?? did one of them accidentally disturb the tomb of some ancient king??)

...

( ･ั﹏･ั)

oH MY GOD!?!

NOOOOOOO WHY ARE YOU SO QUICK TO SLEEP ON MAJESTIC, LET’S SEE IF THEY CAN DO IT!! GIVE US MAJESTIC GOD DAMMIT

(ETA: Horikoshi is seriously just yanking our chain at this point. when Majestic finally does show up, he or she better have the coolest fucking quirk of all time, that’s all I’m saying.)

okay how badly injured is Midnight here, though?? she just fell all that way?? DO I NEED TO BE REALLY MAD. I CAN WORK MY WAY UP TO IT PRETTY QUICKLY, JUST SAY THE WORD. I’M ALREADY HALFWAY THERE HONESTLY. WHERE’S KAMUI WOODS

!!!!!!!!!!!

AND JUST LIKE THAT MY ANGER EVAPORATES INTO THE NIGHT, YESSSSSSSSS!! MOMOOOOO

holy shit. “a quirk that can stop that thing,” she says. and goes and calls YAOYOROZU FUCKING MOMO y’all I am barely holding myself back from SCREAMING right now I...

you guys

you guys. if Midnight and Yaomomo team up to take down Gigantofuckingmachia using some sort of MOMO MADE A MACHINE TO SPREAD MIDNIGHT’S QUIRK strategy, or whatnot?? I will fucking die on the spot. you can end the manga right there. Kacchan you can keep your quirk I don’t even care

“IT MIGHT BE AGAINST THE LAW” lmaooooo insert John Mulaney “WE’RE WELL PAST THAT” gif here. holy shit. listen, that is fine. if anything it’s even better

WHAT THE FUCK

DO I NEED TO START GETTING REALLY MAD AGAIN!?!?! FUCKING WHIPLASH, IS WHAT THIS IS, BUT YOU JUST TELL ME WHAT SORT OF OVER-THE-TOP REACTION IS NEEDED HERE AND I’LL GO FOR IT

(((( ;°Д°))))

[GRABS HORIKOSHI BY THE COLLAR] listen, you. if you only just now, for the first time ever, gave us a lady hero actually mentoring another lady hero, which we have somehow NEVER HAD BEFORE in almost three hundred chapters, only for you to then KILL OFF THE MENTOR IN THE MIDDLE OF HER GODDAMN SPEECH TO THE MENTOREE, I will... there’s... I’ll... okay, listen. DON’T. THERE WILL BE A RECKONING. CAPSLOCK SUCH AS THIS WORLD HAS NEVER WITNESSED!!

ヽ(#ﾟДﾟ)ﾉ┌┛

I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO REACT TO ANYTHING IN THIS CHAPTER AND I’M LOSING MY MIND OVER IT

so the other kids are all “what the fuck” and “so Momo’s in charge??” which, YES!!! IT’S THE ONE GOOD PART ABOUT ALL THIS SO DON’T YOU DARE QUESTION IT

MOMO NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO BE CRIPPLED BY YOUR ANXIETY, YOU CAN DO THIS GIRL I BELIEVE IN YOU

hell, it’s not even just an “I believe in you” thing, because it’s not just belief, it’s fact. you motherfucking can do this, you are the most capable and brilliant student in 1-A, you just gotta have faith and let yourself shine!!

so now there are some more panels of Machia running and the villains and heroes fighting, blah blah blah. and Momo screwing up her face as she makes her decision...

YESSSSSSSSS

my baby girl is all grown up and TAKING THESE MOTHERFUCKIN REINS and MOMO I WILL LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU JUST SAY THE WORD!!

lol she’s all “Jirou use your ears and scientifically calculate how long it’ll take him to get here”, and Jirou is all “I can literally fucking see him, he’s gonna be on top of us in like two seconds” WELL OKAY THEN

thank god there are no adult pros left to fuck this up. is that weird that this is a real and honest and completely sincere thought that just ran through my head? like, at this point if any of the adults were around I’d just be afraid of them dying honestly. but with the kids I actually feel real hope that they’re somehow gonna do this. of course it helps that unlike the adults they’re pretty safe from being killed off

also! way to represent the entirety of class 1-B there Honenuki lulz. sorry, The Rest of Class 1-B

OH MY GOD

MT. LADY I WILL LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU AS WELL!! YOU HAVE MY LOVE AND FEALTY!!

I’M STANNING HER SO HARD I’M GONNA EXPLODE SOMEBODY HELP!?!

JIROU SAYS THAT MACHIA HAS SLOWED DOWN!! YOU GUYS I’M ABOUT TO GET “MT. LADY FOR PRESIDENT” TATTOOED ACROSS MY FOREHEAD

lmao at Shouji using his power of “putting some extra eyeballs on my arms” to inform everyone that Gigantomachia is Right Over There and Very Big

good job Shouji

oh my glob I have so much love for Momo right now that it can’t even fucking be contained. brb wildly flailing my hands around a little to try and release some of this excess excitement

maybe Momo can be president instead and Mt. Lady can be the vice president

NO THE CHAPTER IS ENDING I’M NOT READY

AND JUMP IS ON BREAK AGAIN NEXT WEEK TOO, FML!!

okay!!

Kaminari is so fucking brave right now I just want to crush him in a hug?! we know he’s still scared!! look at his eyes!! and he was freaking the hell out earlier too, and now the situation is much worse! but he doesn’t give a fuck because his friends need him! he is ready to be a hero, my little baby boy is all grown up and I’m so proud??

Mineta’s face in the bottom right corner is everything. I know, I know, boooo Mineta, but that’s still the best face anyone has made in the entirety of this manga

Tetsutetsu’s out here all “I humbly request to also represent class 1-B” and Momo is all “okay fine I guess we can have two of you guys”

can we all just stop for a moment to appreciate how KamiJirouMomo is alive and well. like, we had interactions between all three of them in this chapter, in all possible permutations? do you know how happy this makes me?? I am vibrating with joy??!

I really can’t stress this enough -- I have no clue at all what these little soda can things are (anesthetic, I guess??? you know, like how you sometimes buy cans of anesthetic at the supermarket?? what do you mean you don’t do that??), or what they’re gonna do with them. I have like negative clues. but DAMNED IF I GIVE ONE SINGLE FUCK. the next chapter can be them all fucking hurling them at his face for all I care. THE DETAILS OF HOW SHE KICKS HIS ASS DO NOT MATTER!! GOOD MORNING TO YAOMOMO AND YAOMOMO ONLY!! MY MOMO ACADEMIA

[theclearblue]

Do you mind if I ask your top 10 favorite characters (can be male or female) from all of the media that you loved (can be anime/manga, books, movies or tv series)? And why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before.....Thanks...

I have, but luckily I enjoy gushing about some of my favorite characters aksjdklkgl so I'm happy to answer again! Last time I just listed some but this time I'll 1. Do a limit of one per series and 2. Give an actual description of why I love them. Also I'm so sorry this will be mostly animanga characters just because these characters stick in my head easier for some reason? My memory is truly awwwwful. (Also also this is by no means a definitive list or order, just some that I really really like).

Zoro (One Piece)

I feel like I've talked a fair length about Sanji and Robin and why I love them so much, but I have a little bit of a difficult time with Zoro. Fun fact before I started watching one of the few things I knew was that he was a fan favorite an was determined that I wouldn't like him that much, he's the "cool and badass and broody" one and I thought he was gonna be the kind of character similar to Megumi (JJK) or maybe Bakugou (MHA) both who I like but it's not favorite archetype. But then I realized. He's just a Guy. a Silly Guy. My man is stupid in such interesting and unique ways ajfdklsl. But what I REALLY love about his character is , yeah, he is kind of broody and reserved, but it seems more like a burden he puts on himself in order to protect the people he loves rather than a true reflection of himself. He cares SO much about the people that he loves and it's clear to me that his greatest fear is not being strong enough to protect them. His "I need to get stronger" attitude honestly seems to stem a looot from his anxieties and maybe even trauma around losing Kuina at such a young age. Ok I could talk forever about him and it's actually not difficult to pin down why I love him but I'll end it there.

2. Kenjaku (JJK)

I've kind of built a bubble within my online presence where I don't really see the vitriol, but I know this is REALLY not a popular opinion, and a lot of people are confused as to why I really like them (biggest offender is my sister who gives me shit for this constantly lmao). And I get it! Kenjaku is genuinely vile in what they have done (particularly as Kamo Noritoshi) and what they're trying to do with the merger. By all means he shouldn't (isn't) supposed to be likeable. But they REALLY captured my attention when I caught up to JJK back in August and read the Culling Games arc in full. For starters, silly guy, and I love silly guys (see above example). They're pretty unique where they fall into this "mad yet cold scientist" trope but...they're playful? They're genuinely excited about sorcery and will be kind of annoying where, for the life of them, they CANNOT read the room that everyone just doesn't care or actively hates them (which makes me a little sad honestly lol)? Little bits of information were just constantly intriguing (their relationship to Tengen, being a foil to Yuki, and not to even start on them being Yuji's mom). What really cemented it for me was the Takaba vs. Kenjaku fight though. Kenjaku before this seems driven to keep going for scientific curiosity, but it's clear to me that they're bored, disappointed, and even seem depressed a little bit ("And yet...there must be more to human potential"). But then Takaba comes along. And they honestly have an instant connection while also pushing each other in ways nobody has before. Isn't that insane on Kenjaku's part? They've been alive for over 1000 years!! They find someone who understands them, they might be enemies but they are a duo. Gahhh I could talk about Kenjaku forever they have so many layers and they just fascinate me SO much.

3. Yona (Yona of the Dawn)

One of my favorite protagonists of all time, without a doubt. And I didn't even like her in the beginning (you're not supposed to really). At the beginning of the series, she's honest to god, a spoiled brat. She whines, she complains, she's incredibly weak and takes people for granted. But good god, this is one of the best character arcs I have ever seen in my life. When her entire world is thrown upside down and she's betrayed by her childhood best friend, and has to go on the run with Hak, she just matures and grows into herself so beautifully. She travels around her kingdom for the first time and sees the complexity of the situation where, yeah, she lost her father because of Soo-Won, and that hurts still, but she understands why because it becomes kind of clear that her father was pretty incompetent as a ruler. If I picked one character on this list that just has the best character development, Yona sweeps I'm sorry.

4. Killua (HxH)

Ugh this really should be both Gon and Killua but if I had to choose one it's Killua. Another great example of amazing character development. At the beginning he's already a fun character to watch, he's easygoing and quippy and just cool honestly. But with his upbringing as an assassin he's clearly not very...well adjusted to what a normal life looks like. He's raised to be a cold and ruthless killer and nothing more, and that's reflected in the Hunter exam arc when he swipes a guy's heart from his chest without a second thought. But then he meets Gon, and for the first time in his life he gets to just be a normal 12 year old boy? And as he goes on this adventure you can just see him become more human to the point he can't ever return to how he was at the beginning of the series. And to have that parallel with Gon (particularly in the Chimera Ant arc) where Gon is losing his humanity while Killua gains it?? UGH I want to give this kid a hug so bad I love him.

5. Riza Hawkeye (FMA)

On this list because she sent me into my first gay panic (at least, the first one I was consciously aware of LMAO). God, what a woman. She is incredibly hot but I do love her character as well. It's hard to talk about her without also talking about Roy (and vice versa) because they are just SO intertwined, but god if there were ever soulmates, it's maybe them. Just the level of respect and trust they have in each other is unlike anything I've ever seen, where they both are so haunted by their pasts but they keep each other going and are able to so easily rely on each other? Ugh they're just so amazing, and with Riza seeing how strong she is where her own father uses her to protect flame alchemy, and her just 100% trust in Roy to burn the tattoo?? Wowowowowow she just. She changed me.

6. Anatole (The Great Comet of 1812/War and Peace)

Ok so um. My big secret is that I'm a Musical person. I really don't talk about it much here lmao, but when I tell you I was like. Obsessed with the musical The Great Comet of 1812 for a solid two years that's no joke. Which is just. If you don't know a musical that adapts about 90 pages from the novel War and Peace (stick with me here). And my even bigger secret is that I'm obsessed with Anatole, who is the villain/antagonist. Um he's not even particularly deep I don't think, he just sucks. But he captured my heart by being a silly guy. This man is an arrogant piece of shit man but also kind of a coward, and him singing the line "Just as a duck is made to swim in water, God has made me as I am" to justify him cheating, I-...it changed something in me. Never before or after have I wanted to dissect a character's brain so much in my life. He's maybe the first silly villain that I just really loved lmao, maybe there's a Anatole -> Kenjaku pipeline (this pipeline only exists for me and no one else in this world).

7. Toph (Avatar the Last Airbender)

God choosing between Zuko and Toph was difficult for this entry, but I want to talk about Toph lmao. Just. What a unique and refreshing female character where I still think her writing is ahead of it's time. Just on the surface she's so fucking cool right. What an introduction where she's soloing all these musclehead earthbenders and putting grown men into the dirt. And such good representation of a disabled character where she's clearly not incapable and the things she can do well, she does really really well! But she is faced with the reality of needing help sometimes and she's not ashamed to ask for it, and I think there's this really good balance struck with her character between these two factors. I think she also just blends into the gaang seamlessly while also challenging them in new ways, and vice versa, and they really don't seem complete without her.

8. Eurydice (Hadestown)

Ok oooonnnnneee more musical character and this is definitely more justified lmao. Another big secret is that I love Greek mythology, was obsessed with it as a kid and still am. And Hadestown twisting the Orpheus and Eurydice story into this grim early 20th century industrialist/capitalist setting with jazz elements?? I'm a history major I'm such a BIG nerd for shit like this, and this is the best iteration of Eurydice to me. In the original myth, she gets sent to the underworld because a snake bites her, there isn't any agency to it, it's just bad luck essentially. In the musical, she CHOOSES to go down with Hades to the underworld, and that small thing does wonders for her character. She obviously loves Orpheus, but the fact is, she's going hungry and growing cold, and where before she would run away, she stayed for her love of Orpheus. And then Hades slips in to offer her food and shelter for the exchange of labor, and she leaves to the underworld, not realizing the colossal mistake she just made. She's such a flawed character but you understand why she makes the mistakes she does, and her character is just so incredibly human.

9. Mob (Mob Psycho 100)

This kiiiiiiid. God I love him. Apologies to Gojo but this is just the best instance of an "OP" character. This kid has busted ass psychic powers, powers that people literally worship. Unfortunately this doesn't save him from any of the horrors that middle school presents. He can't talk to his crush, he kinda sucks at sports, and he has little to no social skills. And on top of that he feels the need to suppress his emotions due to the consequences of his powers? GAHHH I just think Mob is maybe one of the relatable characters ever, you can be the best at something but that doesn't save you from the growing pains that being a teenager presents! And just his journey of self acceptance and kindness and love is so heartwarming to see, the way he resolves his insecurities throughout the series just healed something in me too.

10. Sophie Hatter (Howl's Moving Castle)

HMC isn't even my all time favorite Ghibli movie (top 3 though), but it's certainly the one I've gone back to the most and that's in large part due to Sophie. At the beginning of the movie, she certainly isn't in a bad place in life but there is this...melancholy? sadness? to her where it seems life is more happening to her and she has zero self esteem. When the curse is placed on her and then we can literally see her character journey and the ups and downs being reflected in her appearance, it's just so unique and realistic. It's so satisfying to see her start to actually live her life, to gain confidence in all of her various states, and how she helps both her new found family and how they help her as well. Another character where her development is just unmatched.

Thank you for sending this ask, I had a lot of fun rambling here <3