Warning! Spoilers ORV Side Story chapter 685.
.
.
.
About the last chapter (where lhh has to kill a fragment of Kim Dokja to survive), the two best next developments I could think of were:
- Either Lee Dansu, who doubts that his daughter is really still alive, will choose to sacrifice himself and find a way to make lhh kill him, for example by physically coming too close to lhh and his story. As the first reader he met and that is there since the beginning of the story, it would be really tragic. (Or it could be lhh’s editor could sacrifice herself instead as his most beloved reader but I’m not sure if she’s around and even though she cares about lhh and knows his kind personality, she still has to help him in the future scenarios/is realistic/should know the impact of her death on lhh/doesn’t seem like a person who would throw away her life like that or at least near when lhh has killed most kdjs, so I’m not less sure.) Then the current '50 minutes' dilemma will be temporarily solved but he’ll still need to kill the other readers.
- Or he gives the role of injecting memories to yjh to his editor (since she’s the first apostle) to guarantee her survival and tells Killer King to kill him since if he doesn’t then him and his sister will have to die. So, Killer King, since you want to be yjh, then kill kdj (lhh) like yjh! (Then, he’d resurrect in some way—since it’s only the beginning of season 3—thanks to dkos’s skills, accepting a nebula’s story or some other way.)
But since they’re about to depart in 1 hour and the crisis coincidentally lasts 50 minutes, I think it could be both (option 1 then next scenario then option 2, so it’d be Lee Dansu that dies in option 1). Or maybe hsy (or her avatar) will suddenly pop up to show that she’s still alive and sacrifice herself or somebody else for lhh again).
I don’t know if lhh will choose to die instead of sacrificing all his beloved readers or find an unexpected way to get rid of the current dilemma (most likely options), or hesitate to live to not let hsy’s sacrifice go to waste and because he still has to save the readers.
Anyway, there are so many possibilities for the next chapter, I look forward to Monday.
18 notes
·
View notes
The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.
If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!
If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!
If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.
After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.
But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.
All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.
And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.
The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.
The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!
315 notes
·
View notes
I’d love to know about Yulma and how important it is to representation in shounen manga
This has been sitting in my askbox for a couple months (because I am incapable of punctuality), but anon sent this to me back when I was talking about Yulma over on my vnc blog. For those unaware, Yulma refers to Yu Kanda and Alma Karma from the manga D.Gray-man.
So the thing is, to be honest, I don't know if you can say Yulma is/was important for representation. They don't tend to get brought up as an example of representation (except by diehard d.gray-man fans like me, lol) in shonen, and their whole thing is complicated enough that I feel like the queerness of it all flies over a lot of people's heads.
However! They're very important to me personally, and I do think it's kind of remarkable their story came out in like 2010. Because even though their queerness gets overlooked a lot, it's like. really there no matter how you interpret it.
The short version of their very complicated story is that Kanda and Alma are a couple who were resurrected into new bodies. Alma was a woman when they were originally together in their past lives, but is physically male in the present. Kanda is still very much in love with them by the end of their story, which, depending on the reading, makes Kanda very bi and/or Alma very trans.
This sound like something you want details on? If so, let's talk about how D.Gray-man's fan favorite edgy badass toughguy character briefly became the star of his very own heart-wrenching tragic queer romance.
Here's a brief crash course in Yu Kanda and Dgm for the uninitiated:
D.Gray-man is a manga about a group of exorcists (in the loosest and most anime sense of the term) in the 1890s fighting a holy war against mechanical demons powered by the souls of the dead. There are two things you need to understand about this plot for me to explain Yulma:
The Black Order, the secret branch of the church that exorcists work for, has a long history of committing horrific human experiments to further the war effort.
Due to complications of world building, only a tiny number of people can become exorcists, and tracking down new ones is extremely difficult.
Yu Kanda is one of the exorcists, and though not the actual main character (that's the lad in my icon), he's a very important secondary character. Arguably he's the most important secobdary character, since he's the main guy's biggest foil and the first character to play deuteragonist in a major story arc. He's also a huge fan favorite. The character popularity polls that Jump used to do always had him and the mc going back and forth over who won #1 most popular.
Kanda was also a classic edgy toughguy character. His first two scenes are him almost murdering the main guy because he thinks he's an intruder, then complaining about people grieving for their friend too loudly. He never smiles. He argues with the righteous mc about wasting time/energy protecting civilians. He threatens (and delivers) violence on anyone that annoys him. He looks like this:
TLDR; Kanda was an adored-by-fans mean badass archetype in a 2000s shonen manga. Not generally the guy you peg for starring in a piece of queer romantic storytelling.
And for the entirety of the original anime adaptation's 103 episode run, for the first 188ish chapters of the manga, you do not learn a single thing about his early life. You learn he joined the Black Order very young, and you meet the mentor that took him in at that point, but although there are little hints, a couple cryptic mentions of him searching for a certain person, his early origins remain a complete black box.
Then came the Alma Karma arc.
This is the point where I start getting into spoilers.
To make a very long story short, the Alma Karma arc reveals that Kanda is one of the Black Order's human experiments. The Order ran a secret project 9ish years before the start of the series in which they essentially tried to re-use dying exorcists (since finding new ones is so hard). They took the bodies of dying or recently deceased exorcists and harvested their brains, implanting those brains into new magically grown child bodies.
Key to this project—the second exorcist project—is that these newly grown second exorcists were not supposed to remember anything from their previous lives. Kanda, however, recovered a few hazy memories from his past self. Most importantly, he can recall an unclear image of the woman that his past self was in love with. This memory gradually becomes Kanda's reason to live. He wants desperately to find and meet that person.
Now, aside from Kanda, there was one other successfully revived second exorcist. This was a boy named Alma Karma.
Over the course of their brief shared childhood, Kanda and Alma become extremely close. However, due to a series of horrible events that I'll spare you the details of, Alma is eventually driven to murder-suicide. He wants himself and Kanda to die together to spite the Order, and Kanda almost lets him do it.
The one thing that keeps Kanda from letting Alma kill him, the thing that drives him instead to kill Alma, his most beloved and only friend, is that he can't bear to die without finding that woman again.
Have you figured out the twist yet?
9 years later, in the present, Kanda discovers that he didn't actually quite kill Alma. The Order kept Alma secretly half-alive in order to do more dubious experiments. And, more importantly, when they meet again, Kanda discovers the truth. The woman that he's been searching for his whole life, the woman he's in love with, the woman he tried to kill Alma in order to find, was also killed and made into a second exorcist. And her brain was placed into the body of Alma Karma.
After quite a lot more violence and tragedy, Kanda and Alma end their story arc by running away together on their deathbeds. Alma dies, for real this time, in Kanda's arms, and his last words are to tell Kanda he loves him. These words are presented as something Kanda hears from both the boy and woman versions of Alma's soul.
So! At the end of a very long and complicated story, one thing holds true: Kanda and Alma are in love. As passed down from their past selves, they are specifically in romantic love. They were a couple. And to speak as a fan, the sheer absolute devotion to how Kanda's love for Alma is presented is seriously intense and moving.
Now, given the absolute hell that is Alma's life, gender identity is frankly the last thing they have time to worry about, so it's hard to say how the whole "literally a woman's brain in a male body" thing might have settled for them if given time to think about it. But that is inherently a pretty trans narrative. And given the whole Alma gender situation, there's simply no reading of their whole situation where neither of them is queer.
If you take present day Alma as a guy, which is more or less how he's presented in canon (though again, who knows how he would've felt about that male body in different circumstances), then congratulations! You've got mlm in your shonen manga. They were straight in a different life, but now one of them's a dude, and they are still deeply in love with each other. They've even got not one but two "let's forget it all and run away together" scenes, just as every mlm couple seems to have.
On the other hand, if you go with the angle that Alma's still a woman based on her mind/soul, even in her new body, then Kanda may not be canonically queer, but Alma is inarguably trans. Again, literally a woman's brain in a male body. It may not be how most people end up trans, but that doesn't change the facts of her situation.
You see what I mean about how they're undeniably queer, but also kind of easy to miss? There's so much other insane shit going on in their story that Alma's whole gender situation can get passed over. Plus, you can look online to this day and find people arguing that Kanda's not "technically" explicitly in love with the present day male version of Alma, since he doesn't 100% unambiguously say as much. I love reading comprehension.
Also! As a possible extra reason for why people don't talk about them much, the official English translation of the manga translated Alma's final "I love you" very differently. There's always a lot of nuance and argument when it comes to translating "大好き" into English, but given the full context of their relationship and the scene it's in, Viz's handling really sets off the censorship bells in my head.
Here's the different versions (Japanese then fan then official), if you want to compare:
Nothing more classically queer than censorship by way of questionable translation 🙃.
At the end of the day, Kanda and Alma are in kind of a strange middle ground. They're each in love with the other one, but the whole second exorcist brain transfer situation makes it complicated enough that people argue their feelings aren't explicitly romantic (and thus not gay) in the present. Alma is literally a woman's brain implanted in a male body, but we don't have time to dwell on the gender complications of all that because of the hell that is the rest of their life. They're canon but not canon—queer people whose stories don't have space for them to be queer.
However, given that all this messy, tragic ambiguity was published in a fairly popular shonen manga back in 2010, it still feels kind of remarkable to me. Alma is somewhat an antagonist (it's complicated), and he dies at the end of his arc, but once again, Kanda was/is the fan favorite! And when he re-enters the main story after Alma's death, he's more important than he's ever been, and his history with Alma continues to be a huge part of his character.
Katsura Hoshino took the much-beloved edgy toughguy character from her long-running shonen series and, after keeping his origins secret for such a long time, confirmed that his whole life has revolved around love this entire time. Almost every facet of his character can be traced back to his love for his lost best friend or his yearning for his past life's missing partner. And then she reveals that the best friend and the partner are one and the same.
You can go back and forth about the degree to which they work as representation, but in any case, I think their story is something people ought to know about. It's romantic and it's heart-wrenching and it's fucking wild, especially given the context in which it was published (a Shonen Jump spinoff in 2010). I never see anyone besides the few remaining hardcore dgm fans talk about them, and I think that's a shame.
So anyway, that's tale of one of the most insanity-inducing romances I've ever seen put to paper. I love queer people.
Here's some choice pages if you want to cry with me (the last two are a sequence):
194 notes
·
View notes
-- > should've at least listened til ep 67? tho brief mention of spoilers for s10 also
If you asked any O.V.E.R. employee what they thought about Hunter Jeremiah Hartley, the most common answer would probably be friendly. Welcoming. Warm. Simply a very nice dude.
Jam would tell you about the time they lost their childhood dog and Hunter Jeremiah Hartley comforted them, even though they barely knew each other. Ryan would tell you about how Hunter was the only one to not keep speculating about his relationship with Chris behind their back, and said Chris would let out a tired sigh and nod in angreement.
(Marissa would go into a tirade about how she deserved to get the Tier 2 spot instead of him. Maybe you should not ask Marissa.)
So when Hunter Jeremiah Hartley first met Mike Walters, he was friendly, welcoming, warm and simply a very nice dude - like he always is. Mike was neither of those things, since he still believed he could somehow "win" woe.begone. Poor thing wasn't even aware of the Flinchites or the Security System or, well, anything. It is almost comical in hindsight, almost as much as it is tragic.
Like most security guards in a top secret facility, Mike Walters is not exactly...social. If you asked any O.V.E.R. employee what they thought about Mikey Walters, the most common answer would probably be prickly. Or maybe that new dude that keeps reappearing with increasingly worrisome injuries. Or that guy that always looks like he is about to have a mental breakdown and hasn't slept in a week. Or, most probable, that one unlucky dude who got mauled by a bear and miraculously survived. Gay employees would probably also follow that last remark up with a joke in rather bad taste.
And yet, they still hit it off.
Hunter Jeremiah Hartley became Mike Walters's best friend, and Mike Walters became Hunter Jeremiah Hartley's.
(When Mike is around Hunter Jeremiah Hartley, he almost feels comfortable, something he didn't think he would ever feel again ever since he started that wretched game.)
Hunter was the first person Mike called on his cabin phone. (Or well, he was actually the second. But his intention HAD been to call Hunter, so he doesn't count the misdial.) Hunter was the gateway to Mike's social life in O.V.E.R. Without Hunter, Mike and Chris and Ryan mostly stewed in awkward silence or painful smalltalk.
Hunter is the type of guy you just feel like you can trust. He and Mike talk about movies and the patch of grass that looked kind of suspicious on their patrol route yesterday or increasingly ridiculous theories about what O.V.E.R. is really hiding.
(Both will become fully aware of what that really is, one day, but it is still fun to "guess". In the future, when they will be openly walking around in Tier 2 or even 3, they will sometimes think about those stupid conversations again and have to remind themselves that they are enemies. Traitors. Evil.)
Hunter will tell Mike about the entire life story he invented for the last spider he set free instead of killing and they will both ignore each other's very suspicious behavior. True friendship.
It is also not uncommon for Mike and Hunter to visit each other's cabins.
It is a night like any other when Mike Walters knocks on Hunter's door in the middle of the night. Hunter is wearing gray sweatpants and an Old Brush Valley 24h Diner shirt. It is a bit odd that Mike should appear without any warning or plans, but it is not uncommon either. Hunter opens the door. He and Mike Walters are best friends, after all.
The man that enters the cabin is not the Mike Walters that Hunter knows and loves.
In another timeline Mike will sneak into Tier 2. In another timeline, he will accidentally transport Edgar into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and call Hunter in a state of panic. And Hunter will want to help, of course he will, he is Hunter after all. Hunter and Mike may not be best friends anymore - a distance growing between them that neither can bridge nor stop - but they still care deeply for each other. In this other timeline, Hunter will live, and Hunter will kill everyone.
But this is not that timeline. And so Hunter Jeremiah Hartley is killed by a stranger wearing his best friend's face, in the knowledge that he would will have had going to murder Marissa and Charlie and Edgar and Chris and Ryan. (But not Mike, not his best friend.) (His acquaintance? His former friend? His... enemy?)
In yet another timeline Hunter dies in a white room with no doors and no windows. Alone.
It is hard to believe, but Hunter and Mike used to be best friends.
40 notes
·
View notes