#I’m gonna say it does

[sad-emo-dip-dye]

Akutagawa saying the line ‘unfortunately for you, I keep my promises’…………………

[lillyorlyracat]

Conversation I had with myself earlier

[peculiar-potato]

I feel like they’d get along

[swampthingking]

andrew’s definitely gotten in trouble with his pr manager for tweeting things along the lines of:

“no mania inducing medication will compare to the euphoria i will feel the day donald trump drops dead”

[mxmarsbars]

WOAH what’s this?? even MORE clock duo art?? I am spoiling you guys today wow (I have many more ideas for them and none of them are happy)

anyways tik tok on the clock but the party don’t stop no oh oh oh ohh

(he’s going through it)

[mattodore]

i circle around you, a wild animal near a fire

[demonicimagery]

you know now that i’ve finished gomens s2 i could probably write an essay on my mixed feelings. what about when a work is - especially so in some parts - very fucking good. thematically interesting and consistent, characterisation that is so painfully human and told in a fascinating manner. but due to a lack of conclusion - inherent because of the format (tv series) - it feels an inherently different sort of narrative to the original. i do not think good omens season two is bad - not at all, but what i do think is it is now a very fundamentally different type of story than that of the book. not because the events of the show don’t happen in the book but because the style of storytelling is altogether different. it’s inherently going to be the case when one of the original creators has sadly passed on, and it doesn’t necessarily make it bad - however it does make it not what personally made me love the book of good omens in the first place. maybe it’s because i came in with certain expectations given that i have read a lot of sir terry pratchett’s other work and basically none of neil gaiman’s, but it’s just a different format of story. like the difference between an epic poem and a serialised story.

[halfratsalready]

Saw this and it made me think of Wander and the Traveler so here we are

[botlabyrinth]

the percy jackson tv show is actually great when there isn’t a little shit in your ear telling you it’s not “book accurate”

[inumbrapugnabimus-maybe]

Behold some very messy sketches of @margindoodles2407’s Star Wars High Fantasy AU Ahsoka design!!!!

[anna-scribbles]

h-how do you ever finish any of your work? genuine question because you seem to be productive despite your agreste syndrome and I need to learn your ways. but also how do you ever finish any of your work

unclear. last night i stayed up and finished a report worth 25% of my grade at about 5am, arrived on time for my 9am lecture, and spent about half of it zoned out while thinking about seventeen year old emilie agreste. and i was one of the most active participants in the class discussion

[crismakesstuff]

everytime I see someone bitch and moan about “the animation in invincible sucks” “they should treat the animators the same way MAPPA does”

i just ,,,,,

maybe we should sit YOU down in front of the computer and id like to see YOU animate smoothly and cleanly at 12-24 fps since y’all want that so bad !

[sokkas-therapist]

Ok so I decided I am going to post that “atla live action hot take” I mentioned

Click below the cut if you’re interested in hearing my take on the whole “taking away sokka’s sexism” thing

1) nobody is glorifying sokka’s sexism by saying it should be kept in the show. It’s quite literally the opposite. The original series did a great job using his sexism as a lesson; any time sokka made a sexist remark in the first 4 episodes it was made abundantly clear that he was wrong, and as soon as Sokka was proven wrong he admitted that he was misguided, apologized, quite literally bowed down on his knees to ask for forgiveness, and even asked to learn from the kiyoshi warriors, and excepted wearing their traditional uniforms, further surrendering his flawed perspective of societal gender roles. A wonderfully executed example of writers using their characters to teach viewers a lesson: which was, in this case, that sexism is wrong. Sokka’s sexism was not left unresolved, so why take away a valuable lesson in the show??

2) if you take away a character’s flaws…then they don’t have development. A character can’t learn and grow from their mistakes if they never make mistakes.

If a charecter starts off perfect and unflawed then they are surface level and lack depth or the ability for an arc.

And no, this is not saying that Sokka didn’t have many other admirable qualities like his intelligence and adaptability etc.. He 100% had those qualities. But one of the coolest things about the original atla series was their ability to flesh out side charecters and give them depth. A charecter who is simply smart then becomes smarter, or adaptable then becomes even more adaptable, lacks depth and internal conflict.

Sokka’s sexism was the starting point for his internal conflict. Sokka wasn’t just sexist to be sexist, or because the entire southern water tribe was misogynistic (and we know for a fact they weren’t, because if they were misogynistic, then Katara wouldn’t have been shocked when the North denied her waterbending training). He was misogynistic because being seen/accepted as a “man” and a strong warrior was all Sokka wanted after his father left him behind. In reality, we know his father was only trying to protect his son from the horrors of war. But to a young and impressionable child, Sokka internalized this as him not being “man” enough, so he dedicated himself to becoming the person he thought would make his father proud. He was always reaching for this unattainable standard he set for himself, which lead to him having a skewed and toxic view of masculinity that he took out on the women around him. He associated being a worthy warrior with being a traditionally masculine man, and leaned way too far into fulfilling the gender roles men and women are told to play in society in hopes of gaining his father’s approval. We see him do this by suppressing his feelings of inferiority as a nonbender, along with all the aspects of himself that he thought could be seen as “weak” or “feminine” (ex: his love for shopping and poetry and art that we see develop up until the literal end of the series).

So clearly, the vast majority of sokka’s charecter development that deals with internal conflict stems from the toxic view of masculinity and gender roles that he adopted after being left behind by his father, which caused him to outwardly lash out toward katara and Suki with misogynist comments. So taking away the sexism we see in the first few episodes eliminates important context that makes sokka’s character development throughout the entire series significant, not just an “iffy unnecessarily bigoted message”, because it was quite literally used to show that sexism was wrong.

I wasn’t going to say anything about this at first but seeing so many people display a fundamental lack of understanding for the premise of character development and the usage of charecter flaws to promote positive messages in media set me off. Just…WTF????

(Also I know I wrote a summarized version of this in the tags for another post but I wanted to expand upon it more and make this a separate post)

[sweetest-honeybee]

Eddie’s VA is genuinely so great like? They’re all great and Frank especially has a sort of drawn out sassiness that I love but Eddie’s voice clips were just insanely good quality. I’m such a fan of all of the more subtle sounds, one of the ones I can really picture

[mattodore]

you belong to me and i belong to you and so on

[hopefull-mindset]

Finally understanding Beast Mori (as Asagiri intended)

Hello everyone, I am hoping you’ll be nice about me talking about Mori for two seconds and express my thoughts about such a guy like this. This isn’t going to be some fancy analysis picking apart stuff like I’d usually want to or even me addressing every trait he has because I definitely don’t go into everything. This is me finally being at peace with Mori’s humanity.

Before you say anything, I’d just like to share my own peace of comprehension. So if you were similarly confused the way I was, I think you’d appreciate this (Or if you’re looking for a different approach on Mori).

Im sure most of you have read the manga adaptation, so just to let you know, I am going to be using passages from the official Light Novel translation and if anyone needs it, I can send it to them!

For anyone who’s decided to read, hello! Nice to meet you. I’m sure we’ve all shared the same confusion when confronted with Beast Mori’s difference in personality and approach. Thoughts like “Why is he so much nicer?” Or “Why does he care much more about how kids are treated, when he himself has treated kids the same way he describes in the past?”

How could this person be the same guy who was Mori the Port Mafia Boss? The war veteran who used Yosano the way he did? So we came up with many idea of why he’s different to justify it, but here’s the thing: Mori is the same person he always was, this is a universe where everything is the same, but different where Dazai chooses to intervene.

After a few days, I was able to recognize it but I couldn’t hold myself to acknowledge it. It’s hard to see a man who represents the dark, the Port Mafia, to the Armed Detective Agency’s light. I couldn’t wrap my head that such a controlling, manipulative man could have humanity like the rest of the characters.

Why was this so hard for me to see? Well two reasons— the fandom and how the anime cuts down Mori’s emotions when adapting canon material. This happens to Dazai too, but people are much more willing to talk about it compared to Mori. Now the fandom really does love blaming everything on Mori and that’s not the most constructive thing to do when talking about abuse narratives. I can’t blame anyone for taking this route when it came to Mori because of Asagiri’s poorly thought out choice with him…. we all know what I’m talking about. Elise.

However, I need some of you to understand that abuse narratives are never as simple as “oh, it’s all this persons fault because they’re a horrible person, so [character] is resolved from any guilt or responsibility”. This not only dumbs down the situation and seriousness of it, by mischaracterizing the abuser, you’re also mischaracterizing the victim as well and what they’ve gone through. You’re putting their story in jeopardy.

Bungou Stray Dogs is a story about human beings, morality, and what it all means. Mori, and in turn Fukuzawa, are important to understand Bungou Stray Dogs because they are in two pinochle positions that start this discussion of Morality. I am baffled that a story like this, one that approaches these topics with so much appreciation for humanity and nuance, has a fandom that doesn’t want to talk about what it has to offer.

Asagiri’s poorly thought out writing decision of a joke is going to have lasting effects with how Mori is going to be approached forever and I see this, but I think the little girl jokes are the least important thing to talk about because they have as much impact as the Tanizaki siblings do. He’s also written to be not a good person either, so you can dislike him easily, but how many of these characters are traditionally good people? Kouyou, for example, is not a “good person” and emotionally abusive in example to how she treated Kyouka. That doesn’t stop people from liking her friendship with Chuuya and making content with her.

So this attitude toward Mori had me lost when it came to him because I could see how much thought Asagiri puts into writing him the same way he does with so many, but I’ve seen so many disregard his humanity that I had no way to express any of my thoughts to sort out what to think about through anyone else when faced with Beast Mori. Everyone was as lost I was, and the people that weren’t never explained it in a way I could break that barrier.

So what finally made me wrap my head around Mori? It was exactly one conversation I had with a friend and it wasn’t even about Beast Mori in particular, it was just about Mori and his poor humanity while navigating how to lead. Everything just clicked with that.

(Dazai, Chuuya, age Fifteen)

This right here is where Mori tells us what he thinks his position means after the struggling we visibly see him go through. Is it an inherently correct conclusion to make? No, but does it make sense as someone who’s a leader of a huge, dangerous underground criminal organization? Yes, it does.

We have no backstory on Mori, but his poor humanity is easy to explain when he’s been in positions that require him to disregard his own and everyone else’s humanity for years now. As someone who’s seen war up close and a physician, these jobs require him to take control of the other person. Well in his mind at least, he sees these jobs and chooses to the route that’s most efficient.

It’s never positioned to be for himself though, he doesn’t take glee in what he does for self serving purposes, it’s always for the country, the city, the organization. His thought process is never the power hungry yearning we see everyone mistake it for. It’s never that he wants it, it’s that he needs it for everything to go well.

That’s exactly how he treats Yosano because even though it’s creepy to base your abilities looks on a little girl, that doesn’t stop him from seeing her use before her age and humanity.

His clinical utilitarianism is his core trait but also most disliked one from what I can tell in the fandom, and people tend to misinterpret it to make the more non-favorable view of him. But again, he’s not supposed to be the greatest guy ever and you can understand where these traits started forming. And again, to paraphrase another’s words: he’s cunning, but not power hungry.

He’s also not disliked by his subordinates and actually respected, he respectively enjoys the company, but there’s a mixed answer to that and that it is… nobody is going to listen to you if you don’t treat them with decency. Why would you expect a tool to work if you break them? One of his earliest lessons he learned with Yosano and leadership.

(Dazai, Chuuya, Age Fifteen)

For example, we all know this scene is manipulation. He’s baiting Chuuya with information while still treating the teenager with respect and enough honesty to form a bond. Chuuya is perfectly aware that he’s being used in the present and in the past, but he respects Mori as a leader objectively after his own considered failure and lack of control over the sheep, even if he didn’t consider himself one. I don’t think this honesty comes from nowhere because that quote, “only a Diamond can polish a Diamond”, came from Natsume in reference to himself and Fukuzawa.

He sees himself and Fukuzawa in Soukoku fondly, but I tend to rethink this quote time to time because at first it comes off as a quote about partnership and building off of each other’s good qualities to perfect their own, but the way Mori uses it here feels as though it’s positioned to mean that one of them comes out perfected and the other weared down. Pretty competitive if you think about it.

(Bungou Stray Dogs BEAST)

We’re finally at the part you’ve been waiting for guys! So what was my point for analyzing canonverse Mori? So as I said before, these are the exact same guy and all that word jumble? That was an extended version of what was communicated with me to finally get what was going on with Mori in this universe and why he’s suddenly in an orphanage.

Now I couldn’t tell what was going through Beast Dazai’s mind and where this decision came from instead of actually killing him like the rumor’s implied, but I can come close. I think that Beast Dazai recognized this potential of change either from the multitude of universes he was able to witness or recognized it in his own considering canonverse Dazai never does anything against Mori (even if he visibly dislikes him).

Possibility is one thing, the why is another. It was either that he saw potential and good that could come out of this in the long run, Mori’s intelligence and expertise still proves usefulness, less dangerous for Oda in the long run if he let Mori stay there instead of the Mafia, or all three.

I can say for sure though that this is better for Mori because after the years of being in atmospheres that require so much of him intelligently and exempt of any emotion involved for the sake of efficiency, being able to rekindle his humanity where nothing is expected of him except to raise kids in a non-exploitative context sounds really freeing to me. Considering he’s been there for 4 years, I find the development understandable.

Okay I’m hearing what you guys are saying again, “What about him saying he wanted to save Dazai? That doesn’t seem like typical Mori.” And I’m gonna say something really controversial: Well maybe he did.

Really though, I think he did care about Dazai and not because he saw a child struggling (think about Yosano and Q for 3 seconds), but because he saw himself in Dazai, which ultimately changed way more about their relationship than you guys think. There’s a lot of comparisons to Yosano and I understand where they come from because I think there’s a lot you can see similarities in, but Dazai is not purely a tool for Mori the way she was.

The avoidance of letting him die do come from his use and overall importance to the original plan of becoming the new boss, but I don’t think he would’ve left Dazai alone like that for 4 whole years after leaving the mafia if he didn’t care in some way way. What strikes me the most is how Asagiri decided to add “the man who raised Dazai”.

For Beast Mori, I think he’s had enough time to actually feel guilt and regret for Dazai as a person like a normal human being does. Oh I guess Elise is important too. Her aging up just meant that Mori has become less controlling and not like the little girl who he literally sees as a tool since kids are easier to manipulate. Can’t bring that energy to an orphanage, nope!

There’s better stuff out there about Mori that I think if you’re more open to thinking about Mori after this, you should check it out, these are just my thoughts recently. To end this off, here are two links to Asagiri’s own thoughts on Mori.