It's crazy how Dungeon Meshi's manga can feel more cinematic and emotional than the anime to me, even when they're practically the same. Compared to the anime, this moment is such a heartbreaking gut-drop. The way Kui uses negative space and flat compositions to create a sense of horrific stillness is so key.
The way the text (Senshi's monologue) is sequestered to an empty corner of a panel or huddled away from the edge of its text box is not only a great way of showing Senshi's headspace (fearful, isolated, dissociating), but creates a visual representation of pause, as if you hold your breathe after each line. The first panel puts us directly in Senshi's perspective too (compared to in the anime, which puts us as an outside observer over Senshi's shoulder). The detail of the door and bricks so effectively implies that he stared at it for so long, waiting and hoping, that its image is burned in his memory. The wood grain, the brick arch, the number of rivets. The lack of dialogue in the second panel shows a moment of realization too –– "he's dead" (also a great example of the Kuleshov effect). And it's that pause that creates a beat and sets a great rhythm to his headspace, like a music rest: "He never came back." (oh god.) "I'm all alone." Finally, the third panel's negative space, cropping Senshi, shows how truly alone he feels. Without his family, the world ceases to exists. Under shock, he traps himself in a 1-foot radius, too scared to even perceive a world outside its boundaries; a world that can hurt him, kill him, make him disappear with it. There is only his body, the stone beneath his feet and against his back, his thoughts, and that awful bowl of soup.
Even though they're a series of flat images, there's an implicit reading of silence in Senshi's realization and horror. Kui influences your experience to slow down and take your time.
Compare this to the anime, which fills every shot with dialogue. The pacing is fast; we never get to sit in silence like we do with the manga. The horizontal frame allowed the boarders to add Senshi, turning the composition into an over-the-shoulder shot, which takes us out of Senshi's POV. They also added a zoom-out in shot one, which adds unnecessary energy to a very somber scene. The tightening on Senshi as a close-up reaction shot also dulls the moment. In the original panel, Senshi stares ahead at the empty space to his left as a shadow surrounds his mind. It not only shows how Senshi's senses are dulling and his world is shrinking (setting up panel three), but shows how terrified Senshi is of what's in front of him, how the air itself becomes pitch black and opaque, how Senshi is surrendering himself to fear. The pacing is understandable and necessary; this episode packed a lot of story content together. It's just a shame because it really (imo) deflated one of the most nauseating moments in Dungeon Meshi.
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I'm back home now!
We drove all day yesterday, 22 hours to be exact, with only short breaks for food and loo. Covered 1700 km. We saw the sunrise in the mountains overlooking the Black Sea, and the sunset in forested plains of Ryazan.
So good to be home and experience honest to god MILD weather :D
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Something I think ought to be more readily-available and encouraged is simply... taking parental classes. I wish it were more common for people to realize just how hard - and important - parenting is, and indeed, that we all could use help with taking care of young folk. It's really alarming that popular opinion is still that parental classes are only for the "fuck-up" parents, or the parents who utterly failed. It should be seen as a good thing to take parental classes - especially on your own volition. It should be seen as imperative for one to take them, it should be a free, accurate, and scheduled occurrence so that people of any background are able to attend.
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Finished Wuwa's main campaign last night and after sitting on it for, well, the night, I felt compelled to talk about how fantastically they handled the atmosphere of the conflict. All of the playable characters in Jinzhou helping out? Seeing Yuanwu fight alongside Midnight Rangers, or Verina healing the injured soldiers huddled behind weapons and getting healing items from them -- Aalto and Encore seeing the escalating disaster and being like "Okay damn, we'd really love to stick around and help but we need to alert the rest of the world that we might have a global disaster on our hands", the way they used communicators to keep Jinshi, Mortefi and Baizhi in the loop without ever needing extraneous cutaways and decentering the conflict. There was a TON of environmental storytelling that I really appreciated -- Jiyan still seeing vivid phantoms in the Retroact Rain because he didn't take an antidote and is instead saving them for his troop + any unlucky person caught in it, the Midnight Rangers staying at their posts to combat the TDs even when they get super close, the amount of corpses everywhere like!! !!!! Yes!! This is it!!! This what I wanted!!! I love that it FELT like this is a city that's seen a shitton of wars and conflicts, everyone was on the ball and knew exactly where they needed to be and do!! This is how you do crisis situations in games!!! Oh my god yes!!!!
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nott: I don’t really—I don’t really remember my first kiss—
jester: that’s weird. you JUST said you never forget it
nott, weakly: I…I sure did. I sure did just say that
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