#Shounen Ragu Ep 9

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YES! We love seeing this kind of tension, this way of offloading Shin’s own mistakes onto Bon, relitigating their entire childhood together and noting where he felt that he wasn’t as special as Bon, that no matter how talented he was, he wasn’t the special boy. Man, I live for this stuff, these conflicts of where outside perception ruins the moment between us. What is it that makes some people like one person better than another? 

I mean, I am not removing Shin’s responsibility for his own stupidity here. His being expelled is 100% his own damn fault and I don’t feel particularly inclined to feel all that bad for him given everything. BUT ALSO, it can be true that he always felt Bon was the special one, and maybe in a way because the master didn’t expect things of him, he came to never expect them of himself.

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She is all of the dialogue here.

Love this. I love that I think (think) the narrative is making it pretty clear that every ounce of love she is acting out at Shin is actually rage toward Bon. In a way, she’s made it so they are fighting over the same man, though I don’t think that’s how she would think of it. We love it!

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Yes! I think it’s easy to see Shin’s challenge of rakugo as a lack of love for it, but it isn’t that at all. He truly loves rakugo. He wants it to survive. He sees the writing on the wall, and he wants to fix it. He wants to protect it. He’s doing it in a way that has change written all over it. Adapt or die. But it’s coming out of a place of intense love.

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LITERAL LAUGHTER ALOUD. Amazing. Thank you.

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But at the end of the day, even with that between them, they are still two lost boys. They were both abandoned, and whatever it is, they are bound to each other and to rakugo. Bon, I think, sees Shin differently now, sees the cracks in the walls and the weaknesses in the footing. He never felt he had to tell Shin to be better at his rakugo, to be stronger. And yet, here we are.

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SCREAM. I think this is my favorite moment of the entire show, at least thus far.

Shin is so easygoing and goodnatured that it’s easy to imagine that nothing bothers him. And truly, he is one of those people who doesn’t really let it linger. He shrugs things off.

But this obviously hurts him. We can argue all day about how factual any of this is--I think all siblings quietly imagine that they are not the favored one and that they were specifically cheated--but Shin definitely feels that Bon was treated with love, and compassion, and like someone worth training up, and that he was basically an afterthought, a pity case taken from the street. That he was never, ever going to be worth as much as Bon, so why try?

Bon is the serious, talented, golden child. That’s the way it is, and Shin felt there was nothing he could ever do about it.

Besides this just being, you know, MY SHIT, I love how when Shin shakes him off, we see Bon falling and falling, but it’s not the violence of a moment, it’s the idea that Shin is slipping away from him forever, that the crevasse between them continues to widen until it is impossible to bridge.

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See, and all the sympathy I might theoretically have for Shin goes out the window when he says this kind of shit. Sometimes, you have to swallow your pride, and sometimes you have to admit that you went about something in a really terrible and also stupid way. That is upsetting and I also hate it, but that is life.

Grow up! Life is all about holding fast when you can but compromising when you need to. There is NO REASON to hold fast here.

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“Nothing I’m just crouched outside your door like a weirdo because I thought it would be a cool fun time”

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ANd, you know what? I’m also not surprised by this! I love that she has cast herself in the role of villain, suddenly, and no one is going to talk her out of it. She has been wronged and now I look forward to her using that as justification to wrong EVERYONE.

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I already knew about this because, well, we met their daughter, but oh my god I still recoiled with such violence and also my eyes widened in the delight of what a terrible fucking idea this is.

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Oh BOY do I love this. It says so much about her that this is how she thinks of herself, but also how little she cares about Shin’s fucking opinion that she’s basically telling him, “Oh yeah, whatever, I put on an act for Bon, and I’m putting on an act for you, and I’ll put on an act for the next guy.” Shin and Bon act like they know everything about performance, but fucking TRULY, Miyo has them beat for the close watch of an audience.

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AHAHAHAHAHAH amazing, no notes, I was about to make a comment in this direction but SHIN DID IT FOR ME.

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Oh good, we’re going with the theory of “We can make each other worse”

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Even in the middle of his rakugo, it’s all he can think about, is Shin, out there in the world, wandering, and who the hell knows what he’s gotten up to in the past months or however long its been since he got kicked out. But Bon can’t toss it to the side, and who could blame him? Sure, Shin is the cause of 90% of his own goddamn problems and I will say that all day long and on into the night, but also that doesn’t mean Bon can’t feel for him, and even I can have some sympathy for him. I GENUINELY wish someone had beat his ass a little bit when he was younger because I think he would be having a better time of it now.

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HER GREATEST REVENGE YET PERHAPS.

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WELP. I mean this was essentially inevitable, unless he was capable of keeping this under his hat until he was a master himself (he is not). But I mean, depending on how things go, this COULD be an opportunity for him. I have a feeling the rakugo we heard being said on the radio is going to be in part at least because SHIN is going to try and get on the radio, try to remake rakugo int his new image. This might be one of the better things that ever happens to Shin or to rakugo, thought it certainly would be nice if he LEARNED something from the experience.

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