#aaaaaa literally sobbing oh my god ONE OF MY FRIENDS. THE MOST OBVIOUS IF THEM ALL AND I THOUGHT HE WAS JUST BEING SILLY

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@ the aroace community

Girl help. How do we survive?

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OH MAN HOLY SHIT IM FINALLY GETTING TO READ THE NEXT VOLUME OF SHOULDER-A-COFFIN KURO

man it was really fucking sweet that  bunch of friends the travellers made in earlier chapters helped nurse Kuro back to health after [the spoily bad thing] happened

and I TOTALLY FELL FOR the misdirect in the opening chapter! this series often has out-of-order flashbacks just casually thrown in, so i assumed this was them taking a break from the sad ‘will kuro be okay’ stuff to show us one of her pas adventrues, especially cos she was alone without nijiku and sanju. But NOPE this is her dream while she’s sleeping, and all the people she just helped move on to their next journey are actually all already dead and she was giving them hope for stuff they never really managed to achieve. Like HOLY SHIT when the last person she saw was a glimpse of an actual alive person and then she steps off the train and wakes up?? And you only realize it cos she says ‘But I thought his eyes were getting better’ about the last guy Kuro met, who had that head injury from the war, and its like ‘but he’s right there? why are you saying ‘I was too late’- OH GOD HOLY SHIT’. Like seriously, was he on the way to go home and died on the train and then she was there at the station and had to see it, after she’d waited for him for so long and just AAAAA. And like, if Kuro is briefly visiting the afterlife and having a choice to take the death train because she’s in this paralyzing moment of depression, is that why the lady was there too? Did Kuro accidentally save her from comitting suicide to be with him? Its really fuckin’ good luck that they were able to cross paths in this dreamworld and she could pass on his last words. But also its REALLY DEPRESSING that her telling him to ‘take the train home’ is like.. thats what he was trying to do when he was on the brink of death, and being unable to do it is why he stayed here waiting in this afterlife train station, hoping against hope that he’d somehow be able to actually see his hometown and his girlfriend again, when the only option he had was a far more depressing journey to take. So even though its good that kuro helped him be able to pass on instead of being in pain, but still, would he have actually been able to talk to his girlfriend if he’d waited just a few minutes more??? god this mysterious dream is so confusing and tantalizing aaaaaa it would be a really good way to kill my heart if we actually meet the girlfriend character in the real world later on and see how she’s getting her life back together after his death or if we meet more relatives of the dead folks we saw in that dream

ALSO its really good that Kuro is battling her suicidal inclinations now and actually feeling like she wants to live, because of these lil kids but at the same time its tragic cos she’s still got this deadly plague thats gonna kill her anyway, and its like.. having hope makes it hurt more and OH GOD the line about how she’s decided the new purpose of her journey is to ‘make a new path for them to follow when I’m gone’ she’s decided that instead of having to choose between them and her goal, its just gonna be that if she fails and ends up dying she just wants to have taught them enough to survive on their own afterwards. she could still feel her story was completed if it ends with her having given these kids a new life, even if she never finds out who the witch was or how to stop the curse. OH GOD I CRY SO MUCH FOR THIS WEIRD LITTLE FAMILY

and then OH MAN the mysterious flashback too! that was a good misdirect without even being a twist, sorta?? there’s no big revelation moment and knowing the thing doesnt really change anything, and honestly it makes me feel a bit ‘whoops i should have figured it out straight away’ lol Its a really cool way of delivering a stealth backstory for Sen! Cos we never saw his face in human form before, we kinda were expecting it to continue being shadowed or at least be revealed in some sort of actual reveal scene. but nope, we just get introduced to apparantly some new character who’s a loner prince everyone thinks is a vampire, and then WHOOPS it was sen all along! (also LOL DUDE YOU’LL BE A VAMPIRE IN LIKE FIVE SECONDS, DONT WORRY) And its so obvious in retrospect, we even see that he has a lil girl as his apprentice and he's like ‘just call me sensei, i dont want you to get attatched to me’. But she looks completely different to Kuro so at most I just thought ‘oh it’ll be some sort of analogy or moral to the main story or something’. And then seriously there is NO INSIGHT TO ANYTHING and no explanation of what happened to them or why, its just horribly shocking both to them and the audience. We just get some disconnected cute 4-koma adventures of flashback kuro and sen, revealing a little of how they first met, and then literally kuro just turns around the corner and the panels dissolve into horrifying shadowy hands that tear her apart as she begs sen not to touch her or he’ll be cursed too. AND IT JUST ENDS Like seriously, there wasnt even a STORY to the witch cursing them?? she just appeared in their house one day?? she was fuckin lurking in the library and cursed the first person she made eye contact with???? and sen got dragged into it too cos he was trying to save the poor kid, after all these panels of him being cynical jerk saying he doesn’t care about her, and just.. *SOB*

But actually, I’m wondering why his curse was so much different compared to the formula we’ve seen for every other case of it? its always been this one same disease that makes you rot apart into shadow stuff until you die. Why did he turn into 1000 bats instead? A random theory: maybe he actually did die, and this isn’t really the same curse as kuro’s, this is something that happened to him to save him. The first time we saw the curse in action was from that kid who innocently talked to the witch and wished to use magic too, so maybe it like.. actually is that? Maybe this curse is a literal granting of the wish, maybe this is how she passes on her powers and it just kills people who arent worthy, or something. So i dunno, maybe Kuro has some degree of witch magic locked away deep inside her rotting heart now, and she subconciously used it to save Sen’s life by cursing him with this different curse? that could be A Good Depressing Twist later, cos it could mean that if Kuro gets cured, Sen will die. And I mean, it would explain why Kuro doesnt know she has witch powers, maybe the constant upkeep of maintaining Sen’s spell is taking up all her energy, or something? We never get to see if Mo actually got her wish for magic powers in that terrifying flashback, we just see how she started dying of the shadow plague and then how Kuro found her on the last day of her life and they became friends and then HER LEGS FUCKING FELL OFF AND CRUMBLED INTO DUST AND HER EYE FELL OUT OF HER HEAD and then kuro’s last scrap of optimism died and she decided to carry Mo’s coffin forever out of certainty that the curse would indeed kill her, her quest would fail, and she’d better be prepared for her own funeral And like, when i first read that chapter I thought that this was where Kuro got the curse?? I thought it was contagious from touch or something and by giving Mo a bit of peace on her deathbed she’d picked it up from her. (Though that wouldnt explain why nobody’s ever got infected from interacting with kuro throughout the rest of the story, so it was a bit confusing.) But now we know that apparantly Kuro got the disease way earlier and Mo was just the closest clue she’s ever got to finding the witch again, and a horrible vision of the future that will await her when her curse finishes its course. It makes the whole chapter way more depressing, cos you know the whole time she was suffering from the same disease and she just didnt wanna ruin Mo’s hope that she’d met some cool traveller who was totally gonna go on and live a long life of all the adventures she wanted to have. GODDDD THIS SERIESSSS

and okay seriously THE WORST BIT THAT DESTROYED ME is that we find out the evil witch who did this to both of them is actually the same person as the apaprantly good witch we saw in an earlier chapter who befriended those kids and had a badass retort to the asshole guy and just was really cool?? And its even more depressing if she isnt really evil at all and maybe somehow thinks what she’s doing is helping? she was really innocent in that first chapter and didnt seem to know much about humans. So like.. who did she meet? What did she do? Who taught her something very VERY wrong in the time between that flashback and now? is this just the result of some small shred of her old self left, her wanting to ‘help’ more children...? Cos actually it was kind of a big hint in that chapter, she said ‘i will give you one of my voices’ when she taught that kid how to read as ‘payment’ for him helping her learn what a ‘witch’ is, and that she can be a good one if she wants to. So I mean.. is this just her trying to more literally give part of herself to others to help them, not knowing that it’s hurting them, or maybe being so twisted now that she doesnt even care? ITS SO DEPRESSING! Its funny how I loved and trusted this literal eldritch abomination I saw in this chapter goofily dressing herself up in people clothes and practising pick-up lines, and how terrified I was of what I assumed was a perfectly normal human witch who hurt these poor children. But now its even more depressing if we have this strange nonhuman creature who everyone treated as evil, who was good at heart, who made her first friend, who had so much futrue ahead of her, and then just SOMETHING has happened that sent her down the path of becoming that evil thing everyone said she was in the beginning...

Oh and also i really like the theory I saw that she’s another alchemy experiment of the professor who created Nijiku and Sanju? Cos people call her ‘Hifumi’ and thats a name that can mean a number, same as those two. And it might maybe explain why the professor died in the first place. We just hear him saying he has to finish something before he can allow them out of their cage, and then he never comes back down that staircase ever again, and kuro sees some other empty cage next to his body... Oh and also WHY DONT YOU JUST FUCK ME UP, FINAL CHAPTER IN THIS VOLUME, HOLY SHITTTT It actually fits A LOT with this theory... The last chapter has Sanju accidentally horribly injuring a kitten she was trying to hold, and being terrified because it cant just be stitched together like a toy, or.. well, like herself. We see a flashback of how the twins would break a lot back when they were first created, and the professor would just stitch back Sanju’s one arm that kept rotting off. And they’re like.. kinda terrifyingly eldritch too, more than just simple lil kids who can shapeshift into animals. There was that earlier flashback about how they took a long time to adjust to having physical bodies, and used to phase through walls like ghosts until the professor explained how a cage is supposed to work. Like... only being limited by the laws of reality once they hear them spoken aloud. And apparantly they sat sleeping in those alchemy tubes for a long time and might have even like.. slowly developed into humanoid forms, they might have been some sort of visually terrifying thing in their newborn state. We the audience know that they’re just the same as any other innocent kid in personality, that they’re good kiddos no matter how they were born. But then sometimes we get reminded of their actual origins, and how they’d be potentially VERY dangerous in the wrong hands. And like.. even now we’ve just had a really sad reminder how they can be dangerous even when they’re being raised as normal kids by our kind protagonist, how just forgetting that they lack something that normal humans have can lead to this traumatic experience of one of them killing a small animal and not understanding that it cant be fixed, gAAAAAAHHHH :( Also the associated flashback was REALLY FUCKED UP, holy shit! you see the professor talking about redesigning their next beta with a sense of pain, so they stop accidentally breaking themselves, and apparantly he only managed to finish that modification to nijiku before he died. or, perhaps he only intended to give it to one of them, and is having this creepy detatched view of them where he can think ‘hey I’ll deliberately leave one broken to act as a test case’. that would actually fit a lot with the subtle stuff we know, like how apparantly when they were first born they’d randomly grow and de-grow and fluctuate everything between humanoid and animallike. And he notes how Sanju’s hair always returns to a long length whenever its cut, and just... like, he didnt fix that in her but it seems like Nijiku doesnt have the same problem? Does this mean that he actually did give nijiku a bunch of extra features and not fix mistakes that were hindering sanju, that he’s been doing that from the very beginning? I just thought it was maybe that nijiku never had the same hair problem, but I mean it seems like they started off identical in every other way. God I hope its not gonna be revealed that the prof never loved them at all and he was an abusive dad :(

GAHHH THIS MYSTERIOUS GODDAMN MANGA WITH NO ANSWERS FOR ANYTHING AAAAAAAAAAAAAA