#first chapter is just the introduction. the setup. it establishes where they are and how they fit together

[nestavadavat]

Nests "Oh god how to get my long fix actually plotted" Guide for the Damned

If you’re someone like me who’s wanted to write a long-fic but has had a really hard time this is the guide for you.

So the main problem I encountered while trying to plot out fics was that I didn't know what plot points I should meet! When we’re young y’know you’re taught the beginning-middle-end type of story structure, maybe a basic version of the hero's journey. If you don’t already know that follows the;

Exposition > Inciting Incident > Rising action > Climax > Falling action > Conclusion

Now at least for me it was kind of hard to use this for fics! Mostly because this isn’t a structure built for romances! The structure I’m showing you I found from this article which I built on! Feel free to just go wild with this structure honestly!

(PS you can also use the hero's journey as outlined by this article but I don't particularly find that layout helpful!)

So here’s your rundown! Long read ahead!

(BIG TEXT) The Hook

Meet the protagonists, give your story a theme, etc! Now because I’m adapting this for fic, you actually have less work to do here. But let's say you’re doing an AU, you need to establish to your readers what situation your characters are in! What's their everyday like, what's the new change in their life that makes your story relevant?

You’ll also want to set up your issues! Maybe you’re writing about Dean Winchester, you’ll want to establish his daddy issues to come up later. If you have a twist in mind this is where you’ll want to lay your little crumbs.

Inciting Incident

Whats changing? This is where your characters should meet properly. Now’s when you establish their dynamics.

Are they enemies at first? Maybe they’re instantly making heart eyes at each other. The article I’m basing this on says it should be about 9,500 words, but you may not want this, so generally it should probably be in the same chapter as your introduction to the character/s. Maybe have it continue into the second one. This is your setup!

Plot Point 1

Our article talks about how your characters should be “stuck” together. You can do this literally or figuratively depending on how quickly you want them together. This just means you want to give your characters a reason to be together. Maybe they’re roommates now, they’re trapped in an elevator, or they’re working together.

At this point personally I’d want to have your characters starting to be attracted to each other if they aren’t already! You want to start giving your readers those swoony type moments where they want the characters to get together! Also define what the characters want, or give hints. Do they want a relationship or are they focused on something else? (Already have in your mind whether or not they’re going to get to that goal or change their mind)

“Pinch Point” 1

Now’s when you start getting into conflict. Now this could be internal or external conflict.

Is someone keeping them apart? Is one character too afraid to go into a relationship? This is also when you maybe want their first kiss, or a semblance of something building between them. They should start falling in love/being drawn more to the other character.

Maybe they share a moment, or complete that work project, maybe they carpool home together after something! Just give them reasons to be together and reasons for that established conflict and goals to come up.

Midpoint

Boom something new just happened. Our article tells us that this can be formed in a false-high or false-low. This should be when at least one character solidly admits (even if just to themselves) that they’re in love with the other character.

A false high means that it seems like everything is going super good, trick your readers! Maybe your characters sleep together or they have a touching moment. You definitely want this route to seem like an endgame where they're all happy.

A false low means that your readers should be thinking “oh my goodness how are my blorbos supposed to come back from this”. Maybe that love confession goes poorly, or they get in a big argument, or something goes poorly with one of their goals!

“Pinch Point” 2

More problems!!! This relates back to your characters conflict you set up in the beginning. Maybe they need to make a big choice related to their goal or something from their past comes up. Maybe your characters are getting closer still but this conflict should be brewing.

Your character should be nervous about their relationship because of these conflicts. This should blend into the midpoint, so these conflicts are starting to arise during for false-high or false-low and maybe creating a strain on this newfound love.

Plot Point 2

More stakes! Your characters really can’t catch a break! This is when that thing your character was afraid of actually does happen! Maybe there's a misunderstanding, or their plans fall through. The article says that this is the moment when your character should be going “i knew better than this”.

This is when your readers should really really think that there's no way the characters can come back from this. Maybe they call it off or split up because of all this not-so-sexual tension created. The characters have to chose between wanting the relationship or being afraid (and its super heartbreaking and compelling when they chose fear btw)

The Crisis

Now your characters need to choose. Is it worth it? The answer to this for your main character is usually “yes”. This is when they should start looking for their solution to their big problems and start learning and changing. (Character arcs <33)

The Climax

Yay they got back together! Your theme has been explored, and their problems are solved/being solved. Usually this means a big gesture like a love confession, a proposal, something big and dramatic that makes your heart ache. Your readers should go feral rn!

The End

Now’s when everything gets tied together. All of your characters big plans come together. You may want to timeskip forward to show us their lives. Happily ever after and all!!!

———

Thank you for reading all this! Just as some ending notes, a lot of these points probably blend into each other. Also feel free to mix these around, this was mostly a way for me to really get this into my brain so I can practice it more but I hope this also helps other people who may struggle with finding a plot structure for longer romance oriented fics!! :)))

[orcelito]

Vibrating I NEED to get transAction au done or else I will die

[gascon-en-exil]

Who Can Say if I've Been Changed For the Better?: Ferdibert Does Wicked

This concept has been a bit in building. It started from a much-loved cover by Hubert and Ferdinand’s VAs inspired by their support line and the broad observation that these two are a musicals couple who absolutely would sing their feelings in all manner of theatrical AUs. It continued through my later observation that there’s ample material to carry that idea even further, albeit with a shift outside of Crimson Flower for a better tonal match. Still, I’m not quite sure what to call this project; it’s not really a headcanon nor is it fanfic by any means. I’ve written a handful of longform character/narrative explorations before, although when it comes to FE I’ve previously been inspired to do so only for Jugdral characters. That setting is somehow both underdeveloped and deceptively dense - and I suppose in a way you could say the same of Three Houses as well, insofar as it’s been incredibly popular for fan content of all sorts.

Regardless of what this post is in terms of my fandom output, the following isn’t exactly a Wicked AU as such. Rather, it’s how I would envision a hypothetical blend of the non-CF routes of FE16 centering around the Eagles trio and set to the structure and songs of the musical as organically as possible. There are no 1:1 analogues with characters and plotlines from Wicked, because few if any would exist without a lot of tweaking; to use the VA cover example, Ferdinand might be a decent proxy for G(a)linda, but the mere presence of Edelgard substantially complicates Hubert’s claim to the Elphaba role. The similarities only unravel further from there, but I did my best.

Writing this out gave me the opportunity to play around with Edelgard’s character as a way of addressing what I and many others in my circle have long considered to be some of the major problems with her canon presentation. For Ferdibert meanwhile I got to make use of my headcanons for how their relationship would develop outside of their support line, in a way that mostly preserves Hubert’s delightful evil wickedness. Add some ruminations on how one would splice together the non-CF routes in a dramatically satisfying fashion, some snark directed at the non-character of Byleth, and a bit of background Dimidue/Lions OT5 for spice and that just about sums it up. Enjoy this…whatever this is.

Act I

“No One Mourns the Wicked”

The show opens on the citizens of Adrestia celebrating the death of their emperor and the end of her bloody war. Ferdinand rides in, resplendent on his steed, and is hailed as the new Duke Aegir as he relates to the crowd the news of Edelgard’s death at the hands of the combined army of liberators. The “Are people born wicked?” flashback sequence is replaced with a summary mostly in pantomime of Edelgard’s backstory: the Insurrection, her being taken to Faerghus and then returning, and then being experimented on by the Agarthans before agreeing to work with them. Notably Hubert is not named or referenced anywhere in this song, appearing only as a boy at Edelgard’s side at appropriate times during the flashback.

“Dear Old Shiz”

Someone in the crowd finally brings up Hubert, the emperor’s vile and murderous minister, and accuses Ferdinand of having been his friend. With Ferdinand even more flustered than Glinda since his “It depends on what you mean by friend” definitely carries sexual undertones, so begins the flashback to Part 1. There’s an equivalent intro of Garreg Mach, so one may feel free to insert any headcanons for school songs here. The following dialogue scene establishes the student body in general and the dynamic of the Eagles trio in particular: Ferdinand pompous and eager to one-up Edelgard at any opportunity, and Edelgard and Hubert cold and dismissive toward his antics and just about everyone else for that matter. Edelgard is instantly enamored of the quiet new professor, of course. Because the room assignment conflict doesn’t make a lot of sense with the monastery’s setup, instead Ferdinand is incensed that Edelgard is chosen as the Eagles’ house leader over him even though it’s been ages since a Hresvelg has attended. Neither Nessarose nor Morrible has an exact equivalent (although Seteth can act in Morrible’s role as the academy’s main authority figure), so the segue into the next song ends there.

“The Wizard and I”

Now alone together, Edelgard and Hubert have a brief dialogue outlining their villainous plans for the school year. This establishes Hubert’s hypercompetency but also how detached and professional Edelgard is around him. Then comes the song, now “My Lady and I,” which serves as Hubert’s character introduction. In tones more sinister than Elphaba ever reaches - you know he’d have fun with “When people see me they will scream” - he outlines his history with his lady, that he delights in serving her because she validates his work ethic and gives him an outlet for his ruthlessness and cruelty. Where Elphaba fantasizes about the Wizard removing her green skin, Hubert instead goes full Nice Guy, believing that once he’s given Edelgard her continental empire and crushed all her enemies she’ll be so grateful that of course she’ll put out for him.

“What Is This Feeling?”

You could rip the tone of this one directly from the Ferdibert C support and change nothing - homoerotic subtext included. I like the thought of Hubert replacing Elphaba’s deadpan one-word summation of Galinda with a mocking imitation of Ferdinand's most memetic line: "He is Ferdinand von Aegir!". The chorus can be made up of any number of other students excluding Edelgard, who’d happily agree that Hubert is ugly, creepy, and downright unpleasant.

“Something Bad”

The content of this song and surrounding scenes would have to be completely altered, but they work as a necessary reminder that the plot of Part 1 is still going on in the background of all the school drama. Seteth runs through the major events up to Chapter 9 of the game, including the bandit threat, Flayn’s kidnapping, and the experiments on the Remire villagers. The audience/accompaniment for this exposition dump ought to be Dimitri and Claude with Byleth as a silent observer (more on them later), with Edelgard brushing off the news and eventually being the one to shut down the song as Morrible does. There could be some small side character moments in here as well particularly involving the Lions and Deer since they get so little focus in this story.

“Dancing Through Life”

Speaking of which, this was an awkward sequence to place. It matches up chronologically with the ball in Chapter 9 and the main part, Fiyero’s, is a dead ringer for Sylvain and his flirty, hedonistic nihilism (“Nothing matters / but knowing nothing matters!”), but it’s hard to tie into what’s going on with the Eagles trio particularly with the Ferdibert timeframe preserved, i.e. unlike Elphaba and Galinda they don’t become closer until after the timeskip.

As such I see this song as an opportunity for little vignettes with the other students: Dimitri angry over how Dedue’s talked about and hoping they can share a dance (fitting contrast with the coldness of Edelbert), Felix prickly between Dimitri’s recent outbursts and Sylvain’s showboating, Claude hinting toward the bigger picture with Hilda flitting between her excitement over the dance and knowing more than she's letting on, Dorothea casually taking note of Edelgard’s fascination with Byleth (see just below), Bernadetta as a wallflower who doesn’t want to be disturbed (a setup for Act II), etc. Thanks to one of the Forging Bonds events in Heroes I had the thought that the "You/we deserve each other" through line that later gets attached to Nessarose can become one for Dimitri's relationships, with Felix initially throwing it out at him and Dedue and the two of them then turning "We deserve each other" into a romantic line...and then an ironic one and finally a triumphant one come Act II, by that point with Felix et al included as well.

I’m not sure that the following scene of Galinda and Elphaba bonding on the dance floor really needs an equivalent, although it could be altered to something Edeleth-related. In any case Ferdinand ought to get a dance scene of some nature, so he can try to show up Edelgard as he brags about in canon.

“Popular”

It would be a travesty to have a musical starring FE16’s cast and not give Dorothea and/or Manuela a solo. This song works quite well for the former, and it doesn’t intrude on the Ferdibert development with the aforementioned timeframe and how the lightly sapphic vibe doesn’t translate well to two guys. Dorothea has taken note of her good friend Edie’s crush on their mysteriously wooden professor, and she senses the opportunity for a makeover. Not as exaggerated as Dorothea trying to make over Hubert, naturally, but I still think this works out well. Also, Galinda’s observation on leaders, “Did they have brains or knowledge? / Don’t make me laugh! They were popular!”, is darkly comedic when said to Edelgard.

“I’m Not That Girl”

This song comes with preceding dialogue scenes for setup, so those first. Edelgard emerges fresh from her makeover (given her general hot for teacher fixation, I’m thinking she’d lean pretty hard on the naughty schoolgirl look) to Byleth silently grieving Jeralt’s death - bad timing there. She’s as callous about it as she is in canon, only now with more clumsy flirting, and while it’s impossible as always to tell if Byleth notices or cares Hubert most certainly does. The scene segues into the Eagles trio together, with Edelgard alluding to the upcoming events in the Sealed Forest and indicating that Hubert should meet up with her later for some more villainous scheming after he’s ditched Ferdinand. Ferdinand, indignant about being left out of the loop as he is in canon, grumpily points out that he was a much more splendid dancer at the ball than Edelgard, makeover or not. To his utter surprise, Hubert acknowledges that this is true before leaving. This leads into the actual song, altered from homoerotic via triangulation of desire to an outright sexual awakening for Ferdinand. He realizes that part of his jealousy toward Edelgard is that he wishes Hubert were devoted to him instead, and tells himself not to get his hopes up because he’s, well, not that girl or even a girl. We shall of course leave aside how anyone could be attracted to someone as repulsive as Hubert; that’s part of the inherent comedy of this pairing.

“One Short Day”

This was the hardest song to place in this whole project. The touristy trip to the Emerald City just doesn’t have an analogue in the story of Three Houses, especially not late in Part 1 when tension is mounting toward the upcoming reveal and war. It took me a while to realize that it works wonderfully as an Edeleth piece: Edelgard invites Byleth to Enbarr for her coronation, but that scene is left offscreen in favor of a light romp through the city that further highlights Edelgard’s crush as well as her emotional immaturity in spite of everything she’s about to do. She just wants to have a fun day out and take in the sights and eat sweets with her beloved teacher, and it’s all very “Edge of Dawn”-esque where Edelgard knows she’s about to do terrible things that will change everything forever and hopes to prolong the time until she has to take that step. Adjustments to the lyrics could even work in reference to that song to make the similarities more apparent. An awkward/funny issue here is that I envision Byleth to be totally silent throughout this musical with no sung or spoken parts, which would naturally make them having a duet impossible and make Edelgard’s fascination with them even weirder. Even their gender should be left ambiguous throughout, somehow never confirmed if it’s m!Byleth or f!Byleth. It would take a lot of reworking, but I can see the value in it.

“A Sentimental Man”

The core of the Wizard’s character is not all that different from Rhea’s. Both were thrust unexpectedly into positions of authority that required them to enact a large-scale deception to maintain their power/safety, and both are driven somewhat by parental feelings. The tone of the Wizard’s songs doesn’t align well with Rhea, but once you cut out the vaudeville and do some rewording I could see this one working as Rhea addressing her child (among other things) Byleth at the Holy Tomb just before the Flame Emperor reveal. Of course the dramatic irony hits differently; Rhea knows who and what Byleth is whereas the Wizard doesn’t learn about Elphaba until the end of the show. Nonetheless this would still establish Rhea’s character and motivations as well as set the stage for the impending betrayal.

“Defying Gravity”

Said betrayal being Byleth’s, who decides to stand by Rhea and condemn Edelgard as the Flame Emperor when she arrives with her army. This is another song in parts that would need to be broken up. Edelgard gets the bulk of it, but the middle sections between Elphaba and Glinda could work as a kind of separated duet with Edelgard and Hubert attempting to convince Byleth and Ferdinand respectively to join them. Because of Byleth’s silence only Ferdinand can reply in song; only he and Edelgard add the “my friend” bit to the end of this segment, to illustrate the unevenness of Edeleth and Ferdibert at this point in the story. Then things turn to full bombast, albeit darker than in Wicked proper. Edelgard does the belting, Hubert’s sinister laughter reverberates below her (would it be too tasteless for him to be leering up her skirt the whole time?), Ferdinand has Glinda’s mournful “I hope you’re happy!” toward Hubert, and through this and the reprise of “No One Mourns the Wicked” the major events of the timeskip are enacted in pantomime or silhouette. Byleth tumbles off a cliff, Rhea is taken captive as is Dimitri but Dedue rushes after him, and Claude makes a tactical retreat. Side note: “And if I’m flying solo, / at least I’m flying free” is classic Edelgard fixating on Byleth and forgetting that Hubert exists.

Act II

“Thank Goodness”

A surprisingly tough one here. The core of the song, pivoting around the double meaning of “I couldn’t be happier,” suits early Part 2 Ferdinand perfectly, second-guessing his choice and, outside of CF, melancholy about fighting his homeland. In terms of plot it’s an easy translation too, with the crowd announcing the terrible things the Empire has been doing to win its war - persecuting believers, abducting civilians and turning them into Demonic beasts, consorting with inhuman shadowy figures who can disguise themselves as ordinary people - and the assembly working as a way to bring together the leads of the three routes: Byleth, Dimitri (who had Dedue always at his side and thus never had a full psychotic break), Claude, and Seteth, with Ferdinand representing the Adrestian resistance. It’s only the wedding announcement that’s hard to pin down, and I toyed with a number of ideas including Dimidue making yet another public declaration of devotion to one another or Ferdinand planning to follow through with his arranged marriage to Bernadetta they have in their supports (which makes more sense in light of the following sequence). In the end though I don’t think the marriage element is strictly necessary, leaving the song as a means of catching up with the cast five years later and seeing them united against Edelgard - with Ferdinand’s private regrets the only sour note.

“Wicked Witch of the East”

More a dialogue than a song, but still important. Bernadetta is arguably the Eagle other than Hubert most comfortable supporting Edelgard, because all Edelgard has to do is put Count Varley under house arrest for Bernadetta to sing the emperor’s praises. I can also see her as the same sort of self-centered, negligent ruler that Nessarose becomes in Wicked, not because of an unrequited attraction but because of her reclusive desire to be left alone. I see this scene playing out as Hubert surprising Bernadetta at her estate, angry about rumors that she may be helping the rebels and/or engaged to Ferdinand if going with that plot point after Edelgard has done her the favor of locking up her father. He’s fully prepared to, ahem, “persuade” Bernadetta, but before he can break out the torture implements Ferdinand arrives asking for her to support the rebels’ cause.

Farcical, sure, but it gets the two of them together again after five years and underscores how strong their UST has become in their time apart, with Hubert too flabbergasted to attack a known enemy and Ferdinand expressing how happy he is to see Hubert again despite everything. Each learns that the other isn’t as happy about his chosen path as he’d hoped, in Hubert’s case because his lady has grown ever more distant from him as the war has dragged on. Bernadetta cuts through the tension by bringing things back to the song (sort of) and blurting out that she knows both sides are marshalling their forces near Gronder Field. Ferdinand is too caught up in the fraught romance angle to do more than leave with this new information, but Hubert recovers enough to condemn Bernadetta for her flagrant misrule (venting by inference his frustrations toward Edelgard in the process) and resolve to set her on fire for her treachery.

“I’m Not That Girl (Reprise)”

The Gronder rematch happened offscreen - and Bernadetta was indeed set on fire - and on the Imperial side Edelgard is left increasingly frustrated over her losses and hurt that Byleth still refuses to listen to her and continues to fight her regime. You may notice that I’ve shuffled around the middle of Act II, necessary at this point in order to better line up with FE16’s story and Hubert and Edelgard’s separate narrative climaxes while also ensuring that those climaxes don’t overlap too much. This song is only a brief reprise, but it’s a significant one; Hubert finally realizes that Edelgard will never love him. It’s also kept gender-neutral, because Byleth.

“As Long as You’re Mine”

That segues naturally into this moment. Ferdinand sneaks into Enbarr using his unexpected stealth powers (I usually talk about Dedue having them, but Ferdinand shows he’s no slouch in his Mercedes supports) and encounters Hubert. Their UST boils over in a furor of awkward, impassioned sex and also this song. I like the idea of rewording some of Fiyero's lines to incorporate Hubert's acidic snark: “Maybe you’re brainless, / maybe you’re wise.” It’s all very desperate and sensual, ending with Ferdinand taking Elphaba’s line about feeling wicked for the first time - which will have a dark reverberation two songs from now.

“Wonderful”

Again, axe the vaudeville and it’s a solid Rhea song. There’s just the small problem of Rhea being captured at this point in the plot; I thought about moving this number toward the very end at first before reconsidering. While Hubert and Ferdinand are rolling in the sheets, a distraught Edelgard confronts Rhea in prison. Rhea responds to Edelgard’s frustrations with Byleth with her backstory in song, much more somber than the Wizard but, like him, still willing to rehabilitate her estranged listener. The bits of this song about the nature of history are especially relevant to what Edelgard falsely believes about the church and what she views as her own legacy, so I could see this as an interesting character study on what Edelgard actually wanted with her war apart from dragon genocide. There’s a lot that could be done here in the dialogue surrounding those revelations.

“No Good Deed”

However the interrogation of Rhea turns out, Edelgard takes a leaf out of SS Dimitri’s book and visits Byleth alone at the monastery, only to be as harshly rebuffed as is possible to be without the rebuffer speaking. Then comes this song, which was incidentally the one where I realized that Edelgard would need a major role in FE16-does-Wicked even with the Ferdibert focus. Hubert fully embraced his evil wickedness long ago and wouldn’t think twice about being wicked or being perceived as such, but Edelgard is a different matter. Here she breaks down, admitting that her good intentions were largely selfish and that she regrets that her war has cost her any relationship she could have had with Byleth (continuing the joke at his expense, Hubert goes unmentioned when Edelgard names the people she’s lost/failed). It ends with a foreshadowing of her Hegemon form, the sign that she’s abandoned all pretense of goodness and become truly wicked.

“March of the Witch Hunters”

Another ensemble/vignette piece, checking in with the various members of Byleth’s army as they prepare to storm Enbarr. Dimitri hopes for the chance to forgive his stepsister, Claude has big plans for the continent and wants to remove the threat Edelgard poses, Seteth is desperate to find Rhea, and Byleth…is there. As in many of the songs, the self-righteousness of the crowd here rings more sincere and less hypocritical than in Wicked given Three Houses has actual villains, but it still works.

“For Good”

The song that inspired this whole thing, now with many paragraphs of context to set it up instead of only some fluff based on the Ferdibert A+ support. Ferdinand sneaks into Enbarr (again) ahead of the battle, and their second love ballad is more somber as they resign themselves to their fates. As in the VA cover, Hubert refuses to ask forgiveness for anything and Ferdinand is fine with that.

“Finale”

Wicked reduces the final battle from The Wizard of Oz to silhouettes backed by sections of “No One Mourns the Wicked,” and that’s what comes here: Ferdinand and Hubert facing each other in battle, Edelgard becoming the Hegemon before being defeated and then dying as in AM’s final cutscene, and Dimitri taking the throne with Dedue at his side and proclaiming his intention to do all he can to restore both the Kingdom and Duscur - and that his first act as king is to announce that he and Dedue have decided to open their marriage up. This is met with much manly cheering and stripping and someone (Ashe?) saying incredulously that he didn’t even know they were married. End silhouettes.

The final scene with the Wizard and Morrible becomes Claude, Seteth, and Byleth rescuing Rhea. Rhea names Byleth her successor as leader of the church and says that she will go into quiet seclusion and do what she can to correct her mistakes. This all suits Claude just fine, who tells everyone that he’s off to take care of some other business and that Byleth will make a great archbishop - and also they can have the Alliance, no big deal. As with the King of Faerghus’s gay orgies, the King of Almyra’s grand ambitions are too large for this story to do more than allude to.

Next, Ferdibert does a version of the Elphaba/Fiyero scene, with Ferdinand revealing that he had Hubert spared on the condition that he help root out any remaining Agarthans and that he remain under house arrest at the Aegir estate. Ferdinand was also required to assume governance of the Empire, because Dimitri wasn’t getting that dumped on him as well. They can be together, but the general population can’t know that Hubert survived lest Ferdinand’s reputation and basic ethics be compromised…which in a darkly funny hypocritical twist then segues to Ferdinand pontificating before the crowd at the beginning of the show, reprising “For Good” with Hubert until they’re drowned out by “No One Mourns the Wicked.” Thus the story concludes on one of my favorite things about Ferdibert: perhaps even in this non-CF continuity Ferdinand wasn’t changed for the better by falling in love with the Most Wicked Man in Fódlan, but they’ve both been changed….

[blue-likethebird]

Shimizu Kiyoko: A Meta

Recently, Haikyuu finished its last match and ended an 8-year run in Shonen Jump. I love Haikyuu. It has so many unique characters with complex motivations, a plot that had me invested for 4 years straight, good pacing and a fanbase full of talented creators. It had a big impact on my style as an author and even motivated me to try out for my school’s volleyball team back in middle school (but I ended up getting hit in the head with a serve and cut after the first tryouts ended rip.) But like every story, Haikyuu had a few flaws too.

Shimizu Kiyoko is without a doubt one of my favourite characters after Michimiya and Suga. But when I reread the series following the manga’s end, I had the uncomfortable realization that as much as I love Kiyoko, the way her character was handled fell into a few -kinda misogynistic- pitfalls. Well, this is me taking a closer look at that. Below the cut is the full meta, which contains spoilers for the final arc of Haikyuu!! You’re free to add your thoughts, argue that I’m wrong, or call me a bitch and block me at your own discretion!

In fairness, Haikyuu is a series about a boys’ volleyball team, and that premise doesn’t leave much room for girls outside of the supporting cast. At the very least, Furudate did a good job making the female characters in his series likeable individuals with distinct personalities who have lives of their own outside of the guys. Even characters like Michimiya, Kanoka and Mika -who are comparatively minor characters serving romantic roles in the story- have identities not revolving around their relationships with boys. I’m glad that the girls were allowed to express ugly emotions, have supportive relationships with one another, and weren’t solely defined by what guys they were in love with. On that level, Haikyuu is leaps and bounds better than a lot of other shonen mangas ie Boruto’s Dad.

Unfortunately, Kiyoko’s arc fell slightly short of the mark. In the grand scheme of things, she really didn’t have much to do and her identity as a character is comparatively murkier than others once you strip away her relationships with the men in Haikyuu. Given her potential, popularity, and the higher standards Haikyuu set for its ladies, it’s a bit disappointing.

“But blue!” Someone in the back row pipes up. “You said yourself that Kiyoko isn’t a main character! Authors don’t develop the supporting cast nearly as much as the protagonists!”

Well yeah. If authors expanded on every character to the extent they expand on the lead, then it would be impossible to get to the actual plot. But hey, Oikawa appears less frequently than Kiyoko does and his motivations and interests are given time to develop. Heck, Yachi only joined the cast in chapter 73 and the series explores her interest in art and relationship with her mother really well during her introduction. We don’t know Kiyoko’s family situation, or why she quit track, or what drives her to put so much of her own time into the volleyball club. And the scenes where she has an impact on the story, or the game going on, or Hinata’s quest to become a great volleyball player, or another character she interacts with are few and far between when stacked up against other members of Karasuno’s volleyball club. The only exception would be Kinoshita and Narita, who have the bad luck of being Haikyuu’s version of “those two guys” so that’s not exactly the best demonstration of what Kiyoko has to offer.

Then there’s my beef with the pedestal she’s dropped on: Both in canon and out, Kiyoko is presented as a perfect goddess who can do no wrong. This setup has so much room to expand on and deconstruct, which dozens of stories have done incredibly well. Even Haikyuu itself has done a similar thing through Kageyama’s relationship with the other Kitadaii alumni and the “king of the court” storyline. Yet Kiyoko never gets a chance to explain her feelings on being held to such a high standard, nor is it ever brought up as something that could be uncomfortable for her. It’s briefly implied that she’s somewhat out of her element when she’s the centre of attention in the “do your best” scene, but that’s not really touched on further. Given that haikyuu has acknowleged being held to unreachable standards is damaging, it would have made sense to acknowledge Kiyoko’s perspective too. Is she insecure about being considered flawless? Is it something that brings her confidence or boosts her ego? Idk, because it’s never explained clearly. It’s like a porcelain doll: Kiyoko is perfect, but by keeping her up on a high shelf to maintain that perfection, we miss the chance to get a closer look that could help further our appreciation of her.

It’s not that being one of the less dynamic characters is inherently a misogynistic pratfall, since there are plenty of male characters out there who could give a cardboard box a run for its money in terms of complexity. However, given that Kiyoko’s character is already floundering among all the unaddressed idealizations around her, to have so little opportunity to address that and how damaging it can be, well it’s not great to say the least. She’s also one of the only characters in the whole series to suffer from this particular burden. It’s kinda difficult to handwave that as just a weird coinky dink that Kiyoko’s not given more development while the arrival of Lev at Nekoma warranted a dissection of how this affects their dynamic. 

This all builds up to a defining moment. The one that made me realize how Shimizu Kiyoko had never quite escaped the trap so many other shonen manga ladies since Sakura and Orehime had fallen victim to.

The reveal that she and Tanaka got married between the end of nationals and the time skip. That was when I realized that for all I loved her and the series she was a part of, the writing surrounding her was misogynistic. 

I have a... variety of emotions about this particular relationship’s road to becoming canon, and they’re not especially positive emotions either. I could prattle on for ages about the execution or buildup, and a whole other post could be written about why I always interpreted her as a lesbian, but that’s best saved for another time. How was Kiyoko falling in love with Tanaka a weak point?

To put it bluntly, it’s because she didn’t.

We’re shown over and over again that Tanaka has feelings for Kiyoko. That was established in basically the first scene they appeared together in. What irks me is that she never gets the same: that the ‘hints’ that Kiyoko returns those feelings barely qualify as hints at all. Yet, with one scene where Tanaka carries her bag, we’re supposed to believe that the few scraps of interest she’s shown throughout the 300+ chapters of the manga they’ve both appeared in is a strong enough end point to lead to them getting hitched. Come to think of it, is there ever even a scene outside of the bag carrying where they spoke one-on-one about anything meaningful? Did Tanaka ever get to see her as more than her pedestal that we saw? The scene they ended off on is where most romance arcs start for heaven’s sake, and it ultimately disservices both characters. 

Once again, poor Kiyoko got screwed over by the series denying her a chance to express her feelings, and the marriage bomb came off as less of a satisfying conclusion to either of their arcs and more like a one-sided “wear the girl down” pullout where the girl in question is treated more like a prize than part of a healthy relationship. That kind of “romance” is more at home in a cliche action bland-com than Haikyuu, where the relationships are written with more complexity. This would have so easily been avoided with even one throwaway line. But since Kiyoko never got to express her own feelings, a crucial building block to a satisfying romantic arc was left out and the whole relationship toppled over like a jenga tower.

To wrap this up, lemme say that Haikyuu is one of my favourite series and one of the strongest shonen or sports manga I’ve read. I love both Kiyoko and Tanaka both a fuck ton, and I’m incredibly grateful that Furudate gave us such a powerful series these past eight years. None of this is me trying to bash the author, story, or any of the characters and I’m definitely not trying to argue that they’re in any way problematic. This is merely one interpretation of the series and an examination of a relatively minor part of the genuinely enjoyable whole. My goal in writing this longass meta wasn’t to condemn. But, in a manga whose biggest strength is having such well-rounded characters, it’s still somewhat of a shame that so much of Kiyoko’s potential stayed just that: potential. Haikyuu is a series that’s well-known for giving complex personal stories to all its cast from major player to one-chapter rivals. Why is it that Shimizu Kiyoko -who’s been a regular presence in the story since the very first chapter- couldn’t get the same?

[gold-pavilion]

Red’s Complete Guide to the SDR2 Stage Play

The following is a sort of walkthrough/summary of the SDR2 stage play, mostly focusing on what’s different in this shorter but also highly expressive version of the story than the game, and what extra content is in it. 

It’s mostly aimed to help non japanese speaker friends (or not fully fluent ones) enjoy this amazing play even without english subtitles available; in general terms, just having good memory of the game’s events will allow you to watch and follow it just fine, but anything else you could be missing, this guide will point out for ya! That being said, you can either read this all on its own, or keep at hand to check as you watch. I’m dividing it in parts according to what would be the game’s chapters, so you can easily find your place. Hope it’s useful!!

PROLOGUE / INTRODUCTION

The beginning is quite the same as the game: Nagito waking Hajime up on the beach, memory gaps, no one knows why they’re there when they should’ve just been at their entrance ceremony, etc. The minor differences would be that they’ve already separated and had a look around, thus cutting out the island exploration from the main POV. They’ve all warmed up pretty fast to the place too. The setting of it being a fun class trip is established and everyone’s excited to go to the beach, minus Hajime of course. 

More small changes: as you’ll notice, Hiyoko being unable to tie her own kimono sash, getting help offered by Mahiru and getting attached to her happens at this point (‘cause of the swimsuits they want to put on) instead of in chapter 2, so their relationship gets established this early. Also, Teruteru and Kazuichi are caught trying to sneak in to where the girls are changing, ahem.

As in the game, Hajime’s hesitating a lot about just relaxing like that. We get a cute little new moment where he sees that even “Byakuya”, though claiming it’s to “research the way to leave this island” is prepared to go play at the sea, and with some prodding from the boys overall, he gets convinced to join in and have fun too. All super sweet, before Monokuma hijacks the scene. The killing school trip begins!

The opening and character introduction sequence is absolutely amazing and stunning, but since the intros and the comments Hajime and Nagito exchange as they go from character to character together are pretty much the same as in the game, there’s nothing to note from me. Just how amazingly it was put together! 

After that, along with the basic intro to the killing game, there is an added rule for the students to see: the one/s who earn/s the right to leave the island will be given back the stolen memories of the last 2 school years. So, the amnesia period is immediately established, and Hinata’s own amnesia about his talent is taken as proof that it could be true. Teruteru is openly agitated about the possibility of having that two-year blank, more than anyone else, and while revealing there’s a restaurant waiting for him on land he tries to get reassurance from the others. He’s much more transparent here.

Monokuma gets the group under control with a different method than his monobeasts: he makes lightning shoot at them. Real lightning, no tricks, as Byakuya says. Here, he reveals he can control the weather so that’s what he uses to keep the students intimidated. Different, but easier for stage representation than robots and achieving the same purpose. After all is done and Byakuya has sent everyone to rest for the night, there’s a small added scene of Hajime and Nagito staying behind, and having the following exchange that I thought best to translate directly:

Nagito: “So it turned into this kind of despairing situation…”

Hajime: “Why would that Monokuma guy do something like this?!”

Nagito: “It’s unforgivable, right?! That killing game…! It’s absolutely...!

That’s it… we… we have to join our forces and stand against this despair!”

Hajime: “I’m glad that the first one to call out to me here was you, Komaeda.”

Nagito: “Yeah... me too, I’m glad to have [met] you, Hinata-kun.”

CHAPTER 1

The next day, Byakuya announces the party and the group accepts his proposal without suspicion. The old building is suggested as the place, cleaning duty is required, the straw game comes out and Nagito ends up chosen to do it. So far, no news. But on the party scene, we do have several differences:

From how they explain it, the old building consists of just the dining hall and the great kitchen. With this simplified setup, everyone is closer together, so there’s no messy deposit room, no office to guard, no fire door to take into account and Byakuya isn’t checking anyone for dangerous objects. Also, no guard outside and no Monomi, since she’s been locked up by Monokuma. The scene with Hajime speaking to Byakuya privately is preserved (though it doesn’t take place in the kitchen and he wasn’t dragged off to it, but rather, approached Byakuya himself to raise his suspicion that the party was planned for everyone’s wellbeing) and his mysterious dialogues are the same.

When the blackout occurs, they’re able to find the breaker and turn electricity back on their own. Only when the body is discovered do they get told there’ll be a trial, and how it will work. Investigation time!

When everyone scatters, they’re mostly talking about having things they want to check out or thought were weird, with a very active attitude about it. The times when the sound effect rings and the spotlight is focused on Hajime, is when he’s established a key clue, a class trial bullet, so he’s naming/explaining them out loud. Not much else to note, but isn’t the whole investigation scene SO dynamic and enjoyable? Such brilliant staging!! For the trial too!!

Not much is different in the trial until its very end, in fact it goes faster than in the game with all the complication factors that were skipped, so it reaches Nagito’s breakdown quickly. As I’m sure many people will want to know what the dialogue is in the famous getting-touchy-touchy-on-Hajime scene, I’ll note that it’s Hajime saying “is that your true nature?! Have you been deceiving us all this time?!” to which Nagito replies “that’s… wrong.” Quite sure the writing is the same as in the game, it’s just the acting that carries it differently.

After that, in the end, the way they figure out the culprit is from the existence of a passage to get under the floor that they’ve concluded the killer used: since it’s clearly not in the dining hall, it must exist in the only other room of the building, which is the kitchen, where only Teruteru was. Case closed in a much more brief, yet complete manner.

During the reconstruction of how it happened, the conversation Nagito and Teruteru had in the dining hall is very different from the game. Instead of the monologue focusing on his love for the ultimates and how he wanted to see them display a bigger hope, his words are much more manipulative. He asks Teruteru: “hey, Hanamura-kun… could it be true... we’re missing 2 years worth of memories? 2 years is a long time… if it were true… what then?” and insistently “Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to go back home?”, playing from the worries he was displaying earlier. He is also more straightforward in remarking that Teruteru wasn’t his victim nor acting in everyone’s defense, that he could’ve said something when he realized he had killed Byakuya instead of him, but kept quiet to save himself (a dialogue that, in the game, is said by Monokuma instead). He also claims to love that hope Teruteru had of going home, a hope so strong that Byakuya and everyone else could’ve died for it.

You’ll see that the execution is also very different, as almost all of them will be (personally, I love them even better than in the game). As Teruteru dies, his last words are: “momma… I’m sorry”.

Post trials comes another surprise: the group gets a freebie for their effort, which is a new piece of info. They’re told there is a traitor among them. Of course they suspect Nagito, but then, as they’re confronting him, we get this:

Hajime: It’s your fault! That Hanamura… and Togami...

Nagito: Ah, right, about that… that wasn’t Togami-kun.

Gundham: What are you saying?

Nagito: During the investigation, I found this.

Hajime: Togami’s e-handbook?

The name’s… different.

Ultimate… imposter.

Ibuki: Daaaaang! That Byakuya-chan wasn’t Byakuya-chan, then?!

Nagito: But what an amazing talent! Because, out of all of us, no one even thought it wasn’t Togami-kun! He sure got us! 

But… since he’s dead now, it’s not worth caring about, is it…

Akane: I’ll beat ya up, you bastard!

Hajime: Not worth caring about? 

The fact that he was a wonderful leader, who protected us with all he had, didn’t change.

That he’d tried to protect us till the very end… and not allow the killing game to happen… he was a proud, worthy leader.

Chiaki: Yes… that’s true.

With that very early revelation, the chapter closes.

CHAPTER 2

Shortening matters, through the night Monokuma already gave to everyone a piece of their past: the envelope containing the pictures of the girls in their Hope’s Peak uniforms and of Fuyuhiko’s sister’s body. They all have seen it by morning, but naturally don’t know what it could all be and don’t discuss it. As in the game, Nagito is being kept away, tied up, though here Akane helped as well; she intended to beat him up while she was at it, but Nekomaru stopped her claiming the strength of her muscles wasn’t meant for stuff like that.

It seems Peko is getting a few more added interactions with Fuyuhiko as well, mostly since she can be closer and take more physical actions in this medium. As she tries to stop him from breaking away from the group, she tells him “if we’re together, it’s certain you’ll be safer”, with this same nuance in English where she could mean together with the group, or together with her. Neat stuff.

Moving on: everyone knows Nagito’s situation. Mahiru suggests taking breakfast to him in front of everyone in this version instead of privately to Hinata, to which everyone reacts complimenting her kindness. No one actually goes to give Nagito food tho (ouch), since everyone starts taking off to the beach and to mess around, doing their own things. Also, Sonia’s interest in Gundham is already made noticeable. A fun little addition:

Hajime (to Gundham): Sonia wants to invite you though, so… will you come to the beach too?

Kazuichi: Hinata…

Hajime: What do you say, Tanaka?

Kazuichi: HEY…

Of course, everyone agrees and will be meeting at the beach house in 1 hour. So it’s not a girls-only meeting in this version, but for everyone who didn’t have other plans. Under Hajime’s advice they’ll try to stay together as much as possible to be safer.

The stage skips to what’s happening at the beach house not long after. We proceed to the murder, conveniently obscured, and body discovery.

As for differences in how the case unfolds, during the investigation, it’s Gundham and Sonia who notice the beach house has another exit: the small window set pretty high up. Then, as Komaeda joins in, he takes special interest in checking whether Hajime’s remembered his talent yet or not. He finds it pretty amazing that even without that, he’s out there solving cases, and expresses looking forward to Hajime remembering. He remarks that he’ll always be on the side of hope to clarify his position.

This class trial is also cleanly shortened without sacrificing anything important. As you’ll notice from the proof collected, the whole thing with the fake Sparkling Justice doesn’t happen. After concluding it couldn’t have been Hiyoko and the killer set her up, the point is made that the killer actually used the window to leave, which only one person could’ve possibly done: Peko. So that’s that.

Once again, it’s rather the reconstruction of the incident that changes. Hiyoko and Mahiru are talking about their friendship, how they’ll continue to be friends even after regaining their old memories, or might’ve even been friends before, when Peko knocks Hiyoko unconscious. The discussion continues. 

On the 2nd part of the case reconstruction, Fuyuhiko openly threatens to kill Hiyoko right there to get Mahiru to talk about the pictures and his sister’s death. You’ll notice the image on the screen is the other one, of Sato’s body, but since it was the only picture of a live actor, they used that one as though it were the sister (please be understanding)! Plus, the story about bullying and how they were both killed doesn’t come up, so there’s nothing to be confused over in this version. All we know on the play is that Mahiru took the picture, because Monokuma said so, so Fuyuhiko believes she did the killing too. Mahiru argues that she must’ve taken it as proof. “Us photographers… can tell the meaning of a picture we took ourselves”, she says, but it’s too late.

The debacle of whether Peko is the killer or Fuyuhiko counts as it for using her as tool is, of course, maintained. Enjoy the actors’ amazing representation and another great execution scene!

The rewards for winning the trial this time: 1. The info that the traitor definitely came to the island with them. 2 The traitor belongs to a world-destroying organization called Future Foundation. (Which, in a fun dialogue I believe is new, Nagito calls a pretty hopeful name for something like that.) 3. Those who have talents will be given a present related to their talent. Nagito leaves to check that out, and with Hajime musing “will I be able to… remember my talent?”, the chapter closes.

CHAPTER 3

From here on, the stage play’s scripts starts to differ from the game more and more.

The gift Nagito received for his talent was the gun. Upon finding that it’s loaded with only one bullet, he understands it’s for playing russian roulette, a test for his luck aside from a present. I have to say, I find it insanely cool that he goes for 5 out of 6 shots instead of the 1 shot he did in the game, like holy shit??? But anyway, his reward for the game is the binder with the info on Hope’s Peak and the students.

As for the others, the gift Ibuki got is an electric guitar, Chiaki got a game system, Kazuichi got the communication/camera set that he would make at this point in the game, the one that plays an important role in the 3rd case, and so on; everyone got something related to their talent, except for Hajime. He already suspects it might be that he has no talent, after all, but the others comfort him, doubting that’s the reason.

Enter the despair disease. In this version, Nagito doesn’t get the disease; only Akane and Ibuki do, plus Mikan, who catches it from the start as well unbeknownst to the rest. The set up is like this: Mikan will be caring for the sick at the island’s hospital facility, Hajime volunteers to be there with her, and Kazuichi provides his comm set to link the hospital with the hotel lobby to stay in touch without spreading the illness. 

From his position at the hospital, Hajime sees the transmission which he supposes is taking place at the hotel, so he runs over there. But from the hotel, when checking the comm system, the transmission comes on again so everyone thinks it has to be taking place at the hospital now. On the road from hotel to hospital is where they run into Mikan and Akane. Once at the hospital, the bodies of Ibuki and Hiyoko are there.

This investigation process differs A LOT from the game’s. For starters, everyone is far too discouraged by now from so many of their friends being gone and Kazuichi doesn’t even want to investigate anymore. To top things off, when Nagito arrives...

Hajime: Komaeda… where have you been?!

Kazuichi: Mioda and Saionji died! Do you get it?! Both of them at once!

Nagito: Who kills, who gets killed… I don’t care about that anymore.

Hajime: What did you say?

Akane: You asshole… if you say that, I’ll kill ya!

Sonia: Owari-san!

Nagito: Hey, Hinata-kun… did you remember your talent? Did you get any present from Monokuma?

Hajime: … no…

Nagito: Then, this is true…

Hajime: What does that mean?

Nagito: Hush! A reserve course level guy like you… could you not talk to me like we’re equals?!

Hajime: Reserve course?

Nagito: I got this from Monokuma… documents from within Hope’s Peak. You… have no talent, you were a reserve course student!

After explaining what the reserve course is, leaving Hajime destroyed, Nagito steps away to do his own thing.

With Hajime totally out of commission from shock, it’s the other characters who do the investigating on their own this time, without the protagonist’s lead we’re used to. Pretty painful to witness, honestly, but a very clever, impacting and well-handled modification. Everyone lets him have his time. In fact, when Fuyuhiko asks what’s wrong with Hajime, Gundham replies “Do not ask… it is a trivial matter.” for him, and when Chiaki talks to him, it’s only to ask case-related questions, no personal prodding. They only get to go over the causes of death, how the monitors worked (the hotel one showing a feed of the hospital, the hospital one showing a feed of the hotel) and as soon as Fuyuhiko finds a bit of the pillar-wallpaper-thing, investigation time’s over with no more evidence pieces than that. On to the trial.

Like it would happen in chapter 4 in the game, Nagito’s undermining Hajime in the trial, but no one else minds that he’s from the reserve course. Hence the physical attitude you’ll see him taking throughout. Understandably, though, from how the set up was, Hajime looks very suspicious, so the first part of the trial is on the possibility of him having committed the crime. Once that’s cleared and they’ve got it down that Hiyoko’s body was already there when he woke up, hidden under wallpaper, it’s concluded that the transmission was a trick from the killer, who had to be female and at the hospital at the time: Mikan.

Her breakdown follows pretty much the same script as in the game, as well as how she finally gives herself away by mentioning specifically the camera angle. As for the reconstruction of the case, it shows that Ibuki was already healed at the time, that Mikan used some sort of injection to kill her. As for Hiyoko, all the same, except… well, you’ll see. “I’m sorry for being a disgusting, pervert woman…” is what she says, which kinda... adds a layer of to consider in their behavior to each other.

Just as in the game, Mikan reveals what the despair disease did to her, talks about her past and her old lover before she’s executed. No additions or changes on any of that.

CHAPTER 4

… well, kinda. Chapter 4 of the game pretty much doesn’t happen in the stage play. Instead, we get the scene we can see immediately after the execution:

Angry and at her limit from everything that’s happened, Akane challenges Monokuma, like she would go off on her own to do in the game. With everyone being right there in this version, Nekomaru, Fuyuhiko and Gundham are quick to back her up, while Hajime and Kazuichi keep the more physically frail members of the group safe, and Nagito simply stands aside from everything, commenting how awesome everyone is. Do note that he takes a spear from the Monokuma army for his own purposes.

While the whole Funhouse ordeal doesn’t happen, the main points and the weight of the game’s chapter 4 are preserved, with the self-sacrificing role Nekomaru and Gundham take during the fight. All the information we get from the game chapter has already been given in the previous parts of the play, the tensions and relationships between characters were also already set up, and the victim and culprit roles kept a last-effort, self-sacrifice spirit; it’s true that it’s less morally complex and takes exposition away from Gundham, but everything is still basically covered. Even the message to “not give up on life”. So, with their noble deaths, this chapter closes.

CHAPTER 5

Here the play realigns more faithfully to the game’s order of events.

Now knowing they’re Ultimate Despair, Nagito no longer has sympathy for the group or their dead friends. Since the binder he got has info about everything except the traitor, his aim is to uncover them through his bomb threat now. Here he’s immediately revealing his aspiration to wipe out despair from the island and become the Ultimate Hope, and as Hinata asks him to stop before he kills someone, Nagito tells him: “Hey, Hinata-kun… I believe… in my Ultimate Luck!” Words that will be very important.

Here, Fuyuhiko steps up to establish what to do with the situation: Hajime and Chiaki will be staying behind to go through the documents Nagito gave, while he and everyone else will go search for the bombs. “It’s got nothing to do with talent. I’m doing it because I trust in you… so leave that up to me,” is more or less what he says, like the cool heckin bro he is. Very neat modifications. What Hajime and Chiaki have on their hands, then, is the info about the deaths of the student council, Kamukura Izuru, the most despair-inducing incident in the history of mankind, Junko, the group that constitutes Ultimate Despair… pretty much what we’d be getting during the chapter 6 exploration of virtual Hope’s Peak.

Continuing, Nagito has been spotted going into a building, which would be the factory warehouse, so the group get all back together and chases after. The discovery of his body plays out just as in the game, the case itself has the same elements too, from the stuck door to the fire to the bottles. Enjoy the amazing and chilling staging!

In regards to the investigation, even the group recognizes it was too short this time around and that they have no leads. Chiaki already recognizes that “this might not be a trial to find the culprit”.   

Once again, the trial is more agile and short. Given that everyone was together most of the time and no one went in or out of the warehouse after Nagito, Hajime proposes it was suicide very quickly. A trick pulled to throw them off… and get them all executed? Although most of the others are ready to accept that as the conclusion, Hajime himself is quick to pause things and question it. Because Nagito said that he would expose the traitor, not kill everyone, so that shouldn’t be what he’d try to do. The trial goes on.

Hajime’s effort to understand the reasons behind Nagito’s actions is comes in the form of a truly fantastic change here, a new scene annexed to the case reconstruction. I’ll translate that conversation between the deceased Nagito and him:

Nagito: Hi there, Hinata-kun.

I really didn’t think you from the reserve course, of all people, would be the one to finally reach the truth.

Hajime: It wasn’t just me… it’s because everyone worked together!

Nagito: Hey, did you find the traitor?

Hajime: ...

Nagito: You haven’t found them, then. I’m glad.

Hajime: You, who obsessed over hope... 

Why would you go this far to get us killed?

Nagito: To make despair into a stepping stone for hope. That’s all it is.

If I were able to overcome this despair, then I’d surely become the true hope. The Ultimate Hope!

Hajime: So what… if you die it’s meaningless, isn’t it?

Nagito: Oh, no. [The next line, I’m unable to translate at my level, due to how fast the actor is speaking I can’t make it out properly. There is an “isn’t it natural” there, but that’s all I can catch. Apologies.]

Hajime: I… 

I was happy you’d called out to me at the start… when you were telling me I’d remember my talent someday… I was happy... 

I… with you…!

Nagito: That’s… that’s wrong, Hinata-kun.

You the reserve course student, and me with the Ultimate Hope…! You, as someone without talent, have no reason to be talking with me, do you?

Hajime: Komaeda!!

Nagito: I’m hope… I oppose despair! And hope… moves forward. 

Through this scene, Hajime has realized Nagito’s intention to save the traitor and kill the rest.

Now, quite similarly to how it goes in the game, Chiaki confesses and the nature of Future Foundation as the good guys is revealed through her. Plus, Monokuma delivers the reason Nagito wanted to save someone from that organization, the revelation that everyone else is Ultimate Despair. Why they were taken on the island is established. 

It is with all that already on their plate that Chiaki asks them to execute her. Trusting both Nagito’s talent and Chiaki’s bravery, Hajime makes the call to vote for her as blackened.

Chiaki’s goodbyes are the same as in the game, but damn, does it deliver differently on stage… 

CHAPTER 6

As soon as the execution is over, the graduation for the remaining students begins. It’s very confusing for me to pick apart the fine detail of what’s just like the game and what’s different, since it’s all small things all over the place, so I’ll just be thorough in summing up this whole part.

The survivors are immediately presented with the first choice, which is what appears on their e-handbooks and the stage screen: graduate and leave the game world, or don’t and stay in it. This is the first time anything about the island being a simulation comes up, so the explanations for that are due. Junko’s presence is revealed.

She explains that the group wouldn’t be allowed to graduate until a point where the Future Foundation member was dead. Now, they can. And if they graduate and wake up, their friends who died through the killing game will also go back to life (except Chiaki, of course). Hajime is unsure, so to convince everyone, Junko brings the simulation of the others back, who also pressure Hajime to choose to graduate. But he denies it, because that’s clearly not their friends. How does he know? Because Nagito just said to graduate too, and he’d never share that opinion, he wouldn’t agree in any way with the designs of Junko, who is despair. Therefore, it’s all an illusion!

The truth of that choice is explained: they WOULD all come back to life, but all of them would have Junko’s mind. So uh, yeah, that’s why they act and pose as you’ll see, and MAAAAN how I dig those once again incredible performances!! 

When Monomi appears, it is to reveal the other option: the emergency shutdown command, which will take the survivors out of the program without Junko (and of course without the others). No, Naegi, Kirigiri and Togami do not appear in this version, so she is giving that information on her own and without the 11307 code. But, the Junkofied classmates explain that would also cancel everyone’s progress in the program and return them to how they were before entering it, as Ultimate Despairs.

The two options are summed up: the “hope” option that Nagito is signaling is the emergency shutdown that sacrifices the survivors back to despair but doesn’t let Junko out into the world, and the “despair” option that Imposter is signaling would be the graduation that allows the survivors to wake up with their memories from the program, but also lets Junko out occupying the mind of each of their dead friends. 

On top of that, as everyone is physically restrained to pressure them into the final choice, when Hajime’s trying to talk back to Junko, she reveals he’s the one who brought her to the program to begin with. Since he has no memory of it, she goes ahead and tells him that he’s the legendary Ultimate Hope, Kamukura Izuru. “You are Kamukura Izuru,” she makes everyone chant repeatedly, to get it through his head. So, the shutdown option that reverts everyone to their despaired state, would also make Hajime return to being Izuru. And his current self? The chant is then “disappear”, which gives him the answer to that.

Just as in the game, Hajime is paralyzed. Retreating within his mind, he monologues about how he can no longer choose between hope and despair, themselves or the world, just can’t choose a future. And in much the same conversation, Chiaki hears him out and reminds him that he is himself, that he’s acted undeniably as himself within the simulation and, most importantly, that life isn’t like a game where the 2 options given are all there is; that he can create any other options he wants, create his own path. “You’re not doing it for anyone, but for yourself,” she says, before giving him a hope fragment.

It’s with that mentality, that decision to create his own future, that Hinata returns and convinces the others to do the emergency shutdown. Trusting each other and what should be a new beginning instead of their end, they press both buttons together which begins the process.

The final scene is a perfect replica of the game’s, as far as I can tell. With the digital world falling apart around them, everyone prepares for what may come after, hoping they won’t forget each other and what they went through, a bit scared, but happy to be together and determined to carve out their future. 

With that, the stage play ends. Enjoy the outro!

I hope you’re able to have as much of a great time as I did watching the play. The actors truly awed me with how much life they breathed into their characters, and I strongly recommend watching the play more than once through, ‘cause you can always notice new details, other characters doing their own things in the background when the main spotlight wasn’t on them, characters slipping into poses that are so much like the game sprites, etc. The modifications were also brilliantly done to make things shorter without messing anything up, keeping the plot perfectly together; something admirable and, in my opinion, the work of a very skilled writer. The stage work was just unbelievably amazing to me too. Wanting to show all this, so that other people could appreciate how well done it was, is a large part of why I made this long-ass thing.

Have a cool time reliving the fantastic story that SDR2 was!

[heyktula]

Fic Breakdown for Closer, Chapter One (aka, the DVD Extras)

So, chapter one of Closer, the first installment in Somewhere in Canada (the Terror kink AU)... went up today! And let me tell you what, I am hype because this is my very first longfic in the Terror fandom, and it's centered around a subject very near and dear to my heart—BDSM. It's a love letter to power exchange, the sheer joy of kink, conventions, and sex education.

Like other fic breakdowns I've done, this'll be in three parts—technical notes (like POV and stylistic choices), story notes (like characterization and kink info), and then, instead of the editing section I usually include, I'm going to talk about specific lines at the end.

I blame Edward for the line notes, tbh. I love him, but he's a himbo, and many things went unobserved in the course of this story.

(Okay, fine, it's not entirely his fault. Some of it is that he's just so steeped in kink that he doesn't think twice about a bunch of the stuff going on.)

Technical Considerations

Inspiration: So this fic is a love letter to kink, and kink education, and conventions, which in my experience can be life-changing opportunities to meet people with similar interests, and also to be able to do some exploration of your own and figure out what makes you tick. I'm pretty sure there's an AU version of me that makes their living off kink education and the convention circuit, but (un)fortunately, in this particular universe, I am a fic writer (and, occasionally, a paid one as well).

Closer is also a love letter to rough physical play. I remember sitting in my very first workshop on the topic, and just being wide-eyed that a) this is a thing, b) it looks fun. (It is, actually, fun.) There's a ton of reasons I love it—and hopefully, after Closer concludes, you'll be able to see some of the reasons why—but I also love that physical play doesn't have any financial barriers to entry. (The irony of Edward "rich boy" Little being heavily into it has not escaped me.)

Timeline:  Hilariously, I actually started this verse for a Fitzier fic—it takes place six months from Closer, at the winter version of the conference—but while I was working my way through the Fitzier setup, I was like 'fuck it, I should write a quick one-off joplittle to establish the verse', and lo and behold, my "quick one-off" turned out to be sixty k, and it runs parallel to a Tozer/Irving that I  have yet to write, but which is visible in Closer if you squint. So, uh, oops.

So this story fits into a very specific space in the timeline—that is, it's prior to Fitzjames and Crozier having met, but it's after the (second) Cracroft/Crozier breakup. (If you were wondering if that's why Francis isn't running his own damn booth, yes, that's why. He's very likely depression drinking in London at this very moment.)

Setting: I wanted to stay true to the spirit of the whole, you know, boatload of white men going to Canada and being confused, but I wanted them to go for better reasons. It's so rare that we get shows set in Canada, you know? And I feel very passionately about our winters here, in that I complain about them while they're happening, but I do also kind of enjoy the challenge, in a really fucked-up sort of a way. So I set the fic in Canada too, and then, because I was explicitly setting it here, I also got to lean into a bunch of Canadian stereotypes (like Goodsir living his best life in plaid and denim and the inevitable Tim Horton's jokes) and I actually had a lot of fun doing it, so I guess that was something I learned about myself.

Story Considerations:

Primary Kinks: So most people involved in BDSM have a "thing"—you know, the thing that they care about more than they care about any other things. And one of the most fun things for me about creating an AU like this is going through the characters and figuring out what everybody's niche is. Like, it makes sense to me that Hickey would be that edgeplay asshole that's in the kink scene specifically so he can fuck with people. Tozer having a military fetish (and also being a bit of a kink snob) totally fits with his whole "now what the bloody hell do people think that means?" speech.

If you've ever been to a fetish convention, you've seen guys like Blanky, who have been in the scene forever, and made their name handcrafting BDSM gear. They're easy to talk to, and will totally tell you about that time they ran an entire scene using only items found in their kitchen. You've seen women like Sophia Cracroft, who have a cluster of people surrounding her at all times, and who is never short of someone who will bring her tea if it looks like she's thirsty. And you've also seen guys like Ross, who are reasonably famous in their areas of expertise—the kind of guy that you see across the hall, and you're like "shit, is that James Clark Ross?" (And it is! Holy shit!)

Canadian Kink: So! I live in the prairies, and it's as conservative as hell out here. That means there's some specifics to kink culture that I'm not sure translate to other parts of Canada—and they definitely don't translate back to England. For example, every public event I've ever been to (by which I mean every event that wasn't being held in someone's house) has mandated that penetration cannot occur during the event. No toys in orifices, no bits in other bits, no mucous membranes touching, no oral, no fingering, no handjobs, no intercourse, all that kind of stuff. I'm not convinced that you couldn't have sex in a dungeon in, say, Vancouver, or Toronto, or any of the other bigger centers—but that hasn't been my experience in the prairies, and I kept those restrictions for plot purposes in Closer. (Sorry, Jopson. I promise I still love you.)

Canadian weapons laws being what they are also means that some of the gear that's totally okay in other places (like butterfly knives) is totally illegal in Canada (sorry, Tozer. No apologies for you, Hickey.). The sap gloves that Edward is mourning are, unfortunately, one of the items that get lost in the shuffle. Sap gloves are pretty neat—they're leather gloves which are weighted with lead on the knuckles/backs of the hands. They make your punches harder, but they also protect your hands—and, for somebody like Edward, who does a lot of punching when he plays, that protection is definitely beneficial. Plus, they're a bit of a signalling thing—having a set of sap gloves hanging off your belt makes it very clear what kind of things you're into, and I think Edward is a bit bereft not having that this weekend, because he's not used to having to make those introductions cold.

Edgeplay: There's sort of a, er. Spectrum of what is and isn't considered to be "acceptable" kink, even within the kink community. Some kinds of kink are seen as more publicly acceptable, and some kinds are relegated back to the fringes and the dark corners. In the context of Closer, that means Tozer, Hickey, and Little are our resident edgeplayers. This isn't a judgement on the type of play they do (well, it is a judgement on Hickey, but we don't have time to go into *gestures* all that), but it is a statement about the way that type of play is perceived. Sophia Cracroft can, with very little finessing, put photographs of her in rope suspension onto her various social media accounts, and as long as she's clothed, it's perfectly acceptable content to just have out there, and people are going to call it artistic and Instagram-worthy. Tozer, on the other hand, ain't getting any recordings of interrogation scenes he's run posted anywhere except to Pornhub.  (The less we say about Hickey's knife-play, the better.)

Similarly, because the rough physical play that Edward does looks fairly intense from the outside (and is pretty intense from the inside), he gets to live in the not-that-publicly-acceptable area of kink. The area of kink where they usually put the crash mats at the far end of the dungeon, because that way, if you don't want to watch two people whaling on each other with their fists, you don't need to see it. This "stigma" is important in Edward's conception of himself, because on one hand, we see in his conversation with Goodsir that Edward absolutely knows his shit and, hero-worship of Crozier aside, has the knowledge base to be a fantastic educator in his own right—but we also see the subtle kinkshaming coming from both Hickey and Tozer about where Edward's place is in all this. That is to say—Edward's place is with them, in the dark shadowy spots, and not in the "socially acceptable" circles that Crozier's circle of people (Jopson included) are perceived to be running in. (There's a sense, coming from Tozer, that there's no point in Edward pursuing getting onto the org committee for the conference itself, because they won't want someone like Edward there—but, again, that's some pretty insidious kinkshaming coming from Tozer, and we could all just let that go and be better for it. Goodsir clearly doesn't feel like Edward's presence would be a detriment.)

So, yeah. I'll excuse Tozer's kinkshaming bullshit temporarily, as he needs to sort himself out. I don't think he's trying to drag Edward down so much as he just thinks Edward's being a bit delusional, and wants to save him the disappointment when Jopson invariably rejects him for being way too kinky and intense. (If Edward is moping around all weekend, he'll be in the hotel room, and how's Tozer supposed to get his dick sucked by random hookups then? "Yeah, come on back to mine, don't mind my roommate, he's a moody bastard and won't participate even if we ask." Not winning any prizes there, lads.)

I won't excuse Hickey's kinkshaming; he's definitely trying to make Edward feel like shit on purpose. I could speculate as to the reasons, but they're probably gross. (I mean, I know the reasons. Hickey's gonna Hickey.)

(There's a whole entire essay I could write about incorrect assumptions that literally everyone is making about the type of play Thomas Jopson must be into, based on his nice hair and nice eyes and nice smile, but I'll just let Jopson handle those corrections on his own, as he's very capable of doing so.)

Concerning the Chapter Title: If you were gonna take a risk, Neddo, the social was the time to do it—and you done fucked that up, sweetheart.

Tomorrow is another day. Give it another shot then, yeah?

Line Notes:

Edward looks across the hall again, cringes. “No, fuck, that’s—no, I think that’s Sophia Cracroft, Sol, I’m not—Christ. Sophia Cracroft, Jesus.”

I will never not find this introduction to Edward Little fucking hilarious, because he comes off as so competent from Jopson's POV when he's arguing with Hickey in the parking lot, and yet the moment we see Edward in his own POV, he's just a mess. I love him very much, but he's a mess. This was one of the deciding factors in the dual POV as well—I knew going in that the brunt of the story was going to be from Edward's POV, but weaving in those occasional Jopson bits lets us see how Edward looks from the other side.

(Also, Tozer three hundred percent knows exactly who Sophia Cracroft is, because he demonstrates that, like, two sentences later, meaning that he’s literally just winding Edward up here, and it goes right over Edward’s head. God.)

It’s the older guy across the hall that’s laughing his ass off, but the cutie is standing right next to him, looking down at his phone, his ears charmingly pink. 

As a reminder, Edward is wearing a white tank, and just stretched his arms out behind his back. The nipple piercings are very obvious, Jopson was three hundred percent staring, and Blanky definitely caught him and is laughing his ass off about it.

“…I know what this is about,” Tozer says, tying an orange bandana around his left bicep.

The orange bandana is a hanky code thing—which, yes, it's dated, and it's not really in use anymore, but Tozer seems like the kind of guy that would tattoo his kinks on his forehead just so everybody could see them if they would all fit. Failing to find any way to gracefully do that, we instead have the orange hanky ("anything goes") on the left arm ("top").

(Older guy, thankfully, is wearing a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. Cutie isn’t. So there’s no obvious problems there.)

Jopson not wearing a ring indicates literally nothing about whether or not he's available, but I guess whatever makes Edward feel better about himself is fine. He's right with his assumption about Jopson, in this case, but it's literally nothing more than a wild guess, and the mental hoops he's jumping through only exist to make him feel better about himself.

(Esther usually attends these events with Blanky—but somebody needed to hold down the fort in London this time, and so she's in London at present. It's for the best, she can check on Francis every so often.)

[Hickey] sticks his hand in the pocket of his latex cargo shorts...

I won't take criticism on this fashion statement, constructive or otherwise.



So, that's it for this week! Chapter two, Aware, goes up next Friday! See you then! And if you have questions or anything in the meantime, you can always drop me an ask on tumblr or Curious Cat!

[mobu-time]

Read the tag and out of curiosity, how would you pacing the broccoli arc for season 3?

lmao I'm sorry you probably weren’t asking me to go so hard on this but uhhh this is my favorite arc and I've got some opinions

Here’s how I’d love the arc to be paced

Episode 1: Youkai Hunting

-Chapter 93

-probably include and end with the Has It Begun? My Era? panels from Chapter 92

Episode 2: Future Prospects + Carried Away

-opening from chp 94 (the youkai getting pulled into the broccoli)

-Chapter 92

   --skip right over has it begun bc it was in ep1 and go straight into next scene

-Chapter 94

-end with dimple leaving after the “eat shit, dimple” smackdown I guess

Episode 3: The Psycho Helmet Cult Part 1(things start to get weird)

-Chapter 95

-if they wanted to, this would be the episode to add in a new scene with Tsubomi or remind the audience that takenaka was a character at one point

   --basically as just a bit of prep for the other two arcs

-either ends where vol13 ends (teru setting out for the broccoli) or ends where the teru fight cuts off (just after dimple reveal)    

   --I think ending with the dimple reveal is the way to go, plus this way there’s a fight scene in this episode and not two in the next one       

Episode 4: The Psycho Helmet Cult Part 2 (things go wrong fast)

-Chapter 96 and 5-6 parts of Chapter 97

-The quest to destroy the broccoli

-The teru v mob fight

-probably end just before or after dimple actually shows up

Episode 5: Dimple and Mob

-The rest of it   

   --@bones pls do go ham with the dimple v psycho helmet fight

Here’s how the episodes fit into your mp100 season patterns, which are Very Correct btw      

I big agree with you about having the youkai hunting as the first episode. It’s a super solid way to start the season. It’s also especially funny bc this chapter starts with a parody of the show’s usual introduction to psychics, replacing “psychics” with “youkai hunters”. It’s a good piece of mob growth+slice of life, at some point Amakusa wonders if the broccoli is attracting spirits that want to use its life energy or whatever (foreshadowing), plus inukawa (who plays a bigger role later in the season) is in it.   

For the second episodes, I would def say it’s just fun stuff for most of the ep, but I think another thing the second episodes do is that they end with something that sets up the third episode and is usually the start of a big chain of events. S1: join BIC, S2: reigen puts up the website, S3: dimple leaves      

Future Prospects is important to include here bc it’s an easy way to reintroduce mezato and the psycho helmet cult plot. It’s also some of Serizawa’s only screen time this arc and we can’t let it go to waste.  

Ep3 is still mostly a mob character study, bc a lot of the chapter is mob dealing with being (or suddenly not being) recognized as the psycho helmet cult leader + reacting to the spread of the cult’s influence in general.

Ep4 is the beginning of mob’s concrete The Broccoli Must Be Removed quest, which continues into Ep5      

Ep5 -Dimple was a friend r.i.p.

Side Note: I desperately want the omake adventures of Hoshino and Asahi to be referenced in some way. Maybe when the shiratori brothers show up they can have a “what are the other awakening kids up to rn?” 10 second bit.  

And now here’s the reason WHY I organized things the way I did, but it’s under a read more bc this post is already too long

So full disclosure: the reason I paced the broccoli arc the way I did is entirely bc it’s my favorite arc and I want them to take their time with it. It’s also an arc that requires a LOT of setup before getting to the payoff, so I’d like the arc to be more like 4-ish episodes instead of the 3-ish episodes you predicted. This isn’t an arc you can just kind of start. Part of why the separation arc worked as well as it did was because they were subtly setting it up all season with little comments here and there between reigen and mob. It wasn’t something that just happened one day. They had to lay the groundwork and build off of it, and this arc isn’t much different. 

Another thing is that the vibe of this arc is one that will take some effort to establish. The slow, creeping influence of the psycho helmet cult is unsettling, and then suddenly getting caught up in the effects of the widespread brainwashing is even worse, but in order for those feelings to really come across we have to spend time with them. Slowly realizing that something is very wrong and then being horrified by it is something that, unsurprisingly, has to develop slowly. And by ‘slowly’ I mean spreading it across two episodes (3-4) instead of shoving it all into one. 

This arc, more so than most of the others, is driven by a complicated combination of emotions that can very easily be misunderstood if they aren’t displayed fully. I know this because when I was reading this arc for the first time I read through it too quickly, and had to start over because I didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on and confused myself. One of the only weaknesses, imo, that the anime has is that they have to cut stuff out. This is usually fine, but sometimes it can have a significant impact on the audience’s understanding of a character. It’s something that happened with ritsu’s arc. It wasn’t really That much different in the anime, but a few lines were cut here and a few shots were skipped there and the result is that ritsu’s fall is a bit harder to actually understand. At least for me, somehow the manga only has a few more lines and yet it makes ritsu’s character and his whole character Arc much clearer. 

I feel like something similar happened in the anime with dimple. There isn’t much aside from a few cut omakes and punching Suzuki in the face that’s significantly different, but a decent amount of time his lines get cut or altered a tiny bit over the course of the series and ultimately the result is that manga dimple is a slightly different, and slightly fuller, character than anime dimple. Idk fam I just watch people’s reactions and I worry that the fact that dimple actually has feelings that can potentially be hurt isn’t something the anime-onlies are prepped for. 

If the anime doesn’t take its time in this arc, and decides to cut some things here and there the way it has in the past, it runs the risk of 1. Being all around harder to follow, 2. Feeling out of character, and 3. Not hitting nearly as hard. Feeling out of character is the riskiest part of all this because mob and dimple ARE acting out of character. That’s the point! They both get carried away and they fight and they do and say things they shouldn’t and usually wouldn’t do, but if it isn’t clear that that’s what’s happening then their behavior can feel confusing or even disappointing. 

One more thing. I love mob psycho fight scenes. I really do think they’re some of the best I’ve seen, and there are a lot of fights in this arc I can’t wait to see animated. It can kinda become a problem though if emotional content screen time is sacrificed for action content screen time. Not to beat a dead horse (or cat in this case), but, uh, *cough* mogami. I’d rather they go ham with the animation in the confession arc and spend more time in this one on the other stuff. 

There’s just a fuck ton of shit that happens in this arc and fitting it all in before episode 6 without rushing anything is gonna be a process. It’s possible, but it’s really gonna take some planning.                

[silyabeeodess]

Thoughts on “The Promised Neverland” Season One

So... Yesterday, I binge-watched The Promised Neverland.

It’s amazing.

I’ll write down individual points I liked and disliked about the series below the cut, as there will be some spoilers; however for those who haven’t seen the show yet and don’t want to have anything ruined for them, I’ll just say here that I highly recommend it.  I’m not a big fan of the horror genre due to certain issues with story that tend to be commonplace in it--specifically in film/tv--but this series is near perfection.  You’ll be left on the edge of your seat at all times, placed in the constant unease and unknown that the main characters feel as they try to survive their situation.  In the very least, give episode one a watch: Fair warning though that you might not be able to stop.  

Jumping right off of that last note, let’s get to pacing. In short, it’s great!  In many cases with an anime’s first season, especially when they’re based on an ongoing manga series as intense as this one, they can fall into a trap where it seems that the creators just want to be sure to give the show a satisfying conclusion in the limited number of episodes they’re given at the start.  As a result, you can have a great manga series that gets rushed through in its anime adaptations.  Instead of pushing through a whole manga and/or giving the show original plot points to patch over the holes the former hasn’t touched yet, Season One of The Promised Neverland focuses on a selection of chapters in which to tell its story. I don’t know enough about the show behind the scenes to know if they’d already been given a second season, but either way, this was a wise choice.  Even though the season does end on a--in one sense, literal--cliffhanger, the conclusion is satisfying enough that it could’ve ended there if the anime didn’t gain enough popularity to keep going or couldn’t be finished for some other reason.  More importantly though, there isn’t anything regarding story or characters forcibly cut to makeup for adding in points that are important to the greater story overall.  Effectively, Season One was able to take its time introducing/developing the characters and setting in a self-contained story.  There are some time-skips, as the events occur over the course of a few months, but this never affects the greater points concerning the characters actions/end goals.  It’s only an issue regarding physical growth as the children work to build up their strengths in secret--and you see plenty enough on-screen action taking place over the course of the season to make this growth overtime apparent.   

This is largely a nitpick, so I figured I’d put it here even though it’s kind of out of place.  (Honestly, I wouldn’t know where to place it on the list beyond this anyway.)  There’s a point brought up in the show that you think would be a little more important to the story, where the kids bring up that winter is also on its way so they’ve got triple the urgency to leave while they have the chance. (Not only would they have to deal with the cold, but also a lack of food to forage as they survived on their own.)  However, you don’t see the weather change in the story despite time’s passing, so you don’t see the problem either with why they need to go before winter beyond Ray’s birthday in January.  Everything pretty much always stays green, which is weird because you know the place can get snow as seen from Norman’s flashback to when he was sick as a little kid.  It just seems like a silly point to bring up since it’s only mentioned once and even the setting fails to depict it.

For the characters, I’ll split this into a few points.  One thing that I enjoy is that no one character is painted as being solely in the right.  You can argue that Emma is the main protagonist we’re meant to follow, and I’d agree there, but we’re not meant to take everything she says or does as gospel as some shows like to depict their heroes/heroines. It’s stated early on and repeated at points later in the show that her idealism and naivety, while good, can also lead to tragic results if she allows them to get in the way of rational thinking. This creates a nice balance between the other two main protagonists, Norman and Ray.  Ray is pretty much the opposite of Emma, thinking of their situation from a “survival of the fittest” mindset and willing to go to whatever extreme to save his friends and secondarily himself: He’s critical and always willing to consider the worst, capable of tackling some of their hardest challenges as a result, with the others able to reign him back and show him what things he’s allowed to have hope in despite how impossible things may seem, never allowing him to give up even when that may be the only “rational” option. Norman can admire these strong aspects of both Ray and Emma, understanding Ray’s rationale while also working to meet Emma’s ideals, with both catering to his planning.  He can, however, also take too much onto himself--to the point of leaving others in the dark to some of his plans and martyrdom.  Granted, much of his use of controlling knowledge in this way is effective, but he can also assume what’s best without really consulting anyone else.  He assumes what he thinks others can or can’t handle, not entirely accepting their input and adding more onto himself than necessary. This is what makes decisions like Emma’s choice to tell more of the other kids the truth so important whereas Norman can keep even Emma in the dark, as much as he likes her, about some of the issues that arise with Ray following his reveal as the “traitor.”  They make for a very dynamic and engaging trio to follow.  

Even the antagonists, who both the heroes and the audience is made to fear, are given this treatment.  We all know about how a lot of stories try to make their villains “sympathetic,” for better or worse, and The Promised Neverland certainly does that--just never to the point where you’re willing to dismiss their actions.  Mama Isabella and Sister Krone can be as monstrous as the demons over them, and the show depicts this from their condescending treatment toward the children, to their willingness to kill without remorse for the sake of their own lives and positions, to their chilling facial expressions.  We’re just also given a glimpse as to how such monsters can be created.  Their actions are neither justified or ignored, but rather grimly understood.  Mother’s Basement on YouTube covered this in more detail on Isabella in particular, so I’ll link his video here for those interested.

One thing I will say negatively regarding characters though is that I don’t really like how Sister Krone was utilized.  Beyond shuffling through each chapter’s synopsis after the point where the anime ends because I really wanted to know what was over the wall and couldn’t wait, I haven’t read the manga; however, from what I’ve seen, a lot of people seem to be in agreement that Krone wasn’t used properly. Just compared to the treatment the other characters received in the anime, I have to side with them.  Krone’s appearance in the opening immediately interested me, and her polar behavior in her introduction to that just as much.  From that point on though, she remains kind of static.  We see a lot of interactions with her and this old doll that could’ve added to her character, but the dialogue and body language taking place then really only focuses on how creepy she is.  And that pretty much sums up her entire character for the longest while: She’s creepy.  She incredibly open about her goal to become a Mama to the audience, so there’s not much mystery there.  The softer, friendly façade we see her wear in the opening is hidden in the bulk of the show--to the point that, when she engages with the kids in a friendly manner that would actually make them think she can be trusted, she’s only shown as a silhouette and so we can't see her face.  When we do see her try to pretend to be amicable and on the kid’s side, she’s either taking them down in a “game” of tag like a berserker or grinning like a titan from Shingeki no Kyojin.  We already know the main children aren’t going to trust her, but it just doesn’t make her believably deceptive regarding the others.  There’s even some weird moments where her actions seem contradictory, such as trying to turn Isabella in despite--at least as far as Krone believed at the time--getting moved to be a Mama at another plant.  I get that she didn’t like Isabella, but there was just no point to continue going after her or anything to indicate that Krone would after getting what she wanted by becoming a Mama herself.  Why would her hatred of Isabella outweigh her main objective?  The one time we see Krone really develop as a character, sadly, is when she dies and we’re given a true first glimpse at how young girls are selected to be Mamas and Sisters beyond a scar and retelling.  I would’ve liked to have seen more exploration into her mindset and character, even if it could only be done in subtle actions. 

It’s rare to have a horror story without death, so let’s talk about how The Promised Neverland uses it.   Well, anyone who simply wants to see a bloodbath will be incredibly disappointed, but I’m certainly not!  The setup, showing, and aftermath first death in the very first episode is all that’s needed to establish the overwhelming threat of the demons and immediate threat that is Isabella.  It was orchestrated in a way where that horror seeps in slowly, even without actually seeing a character die onscreen and instead just the body.  You immediately know something’s wrong when the camera focuses on Isabella leading Connie away in near-complete darkness, without bg music, as Connie innocently tries to talk to her and only receives a bare smile in return.  The presentation of the corpse wasn’t a gorefest, but instead Connie’s greyed face--drained of life and lying in an awkward pose--looks as if her body was left abandoned for some time. This was a great artistic direction, not only nodding to the use of the flowers protruding from the body, but also to the cold manner in which she was killed as “cattle.”  This isn’t a bloody, aggressive killing, nor is any real respect shown to her remains: She’s a number, thrown away by Isabella and left to wait until the demons ship her off in a tank.  Krone’s death was orchestrated in a similar but different way, with flashes of the kids--unware of what’s happening--eating dinner happily as she fights for her life against a demon that hardly even seems to register her lashing out and approaches her steadily.  Again, a character is killed in a methodical fashion, the same flower piercing her in the chest with a slow and almost delicate as it is precise movement.  The fear seems to stem less from threat of death itself and more in the manner in which they’re conducted, not just in the treatment of humans as food, but the detachment of their killers. 

Now to the animation.  Personally, I really like it.  I’m a big fan of all of the subtle movements and expressions that were given focus, from a shaky hand to the crinkle of an eye.  This attention to detail can make the viewer almost hyper aware of how the characters move and react to things, which is pivotal to this show in particular given how much the characters themselves need to read one another’s body language in order to figure out what they’re hiding from each other.  This is brought up too at different points, such as Norman telling Emma to keep smiling and act normal, later paying off when Isabella tries to interrogate her about not being her “happy self” in the hallway, and Sister Krone recognizing that the kids know about the tracking devices based on their lack of a response to her telling them about it despite their playing dumb.  These explanations serve just as much as a way to tell the audience to pay attention.  

People sometimes bring up the CGI as a bad thing, but I actually like it.  Yes, it’s a little weird to look at, but I think it’s so off-putting that it actually adds tension to the scenes, especially during key moments when the characters are just walking through the House and the camera focuses on them doing simple actions like opening a door: The environment is supposed to feel uncomfortable.  You don’t know who’s around the corner listening in to your conversations.  You don’t know who’s going to come into the room while you’re in the middle of planning or hiding an important tool for your escape.  The House isn’t safe: If the whole area is a farm, the House itself is a cattle pen.  Everything just looks normal.  Therefore, using CGI as a technique serves as a good way to cater to those unnerved, off feelings than changing that environment itself would have.  It feeds into the perspective of the main characters, how they know how wrong everything is despite the illusion of a comfortable home. 

Last, but not least, we get to my absolute favorite thing about the show: The camera. I absolutely love the shots taken in this series.  My favorite thing is how often the camera will show characters with some kind of frame, be it the leaves of a bush or around the edge of a doorway.  This use of framing places the audience in the perspective of a spy, someone lurking behind the next corner and listening in on the kids’ plans of escape. It makes you feel like, at any minute, they could get caught during what is otherwise a still moment of dialogue.  Then, when they do actually get caught, it’s when the camera tends to be the most normal, catching you off-guard.  It’s just beautifully done.  

[kalico-to-the-letter]

REVIEW // RWBY | 6.8 | “DEAD END”

AKA additional cashews are no joke.

Welcome in to my review of Volume 6, Chapter 8, entitled “Dead End”.

In this episode: Atlesian arrogance makes a long-awaited return. A boy gets blamed for the transgressions of a bitch-ass grown man. A leader seeks guidance.

Such wit. Such tenacity.

YOU AIN’T GOT THE ANSWERS, QROW

Hindsight is a wonderful thing in the context of these reviews. Something seen in the middle of a week-to-week run is something completely different in the wider context of a season bloc. I think that I would appreciate this episode more if it were part of a Netflix-style simultaneous release – if we could go from last episode, straight through this one, and then immediately to the next one.

Because while there isn’t much to particularly dislike about this episode – that’s to say that there isn’t really anything bad enough to drag it down below the average – it’s still the weakest and thinnest episode of the season.

I’m not that concerned about it, though. Two mediocre weeks isn’t enough to derail the season’s early momentum to the point where I’d be really worried. And I see how much early setup is still there to be paid off throughout the rest of the season. And and this episode reintroduces the issues between the heroes, which is only a positive. So I’m staying positive too.

I really enjoyed the first act of this, mainly from a comic standpoint – the introduction of Caroline Cordovin and how the scene used her and the two camp guards was hilarious to me. That particular execution of humour is always something that makes me smile, no matter where I find it.

It’s a very Atlesian thing, that owned air of superiority and authority that people like Cordovin have, and we’re now used to it after seeing everything that’s happened to Weiss. It’s quite stark, the difference between these two representatives of the same “order”, so to speak, and if anything, it just continues to show where Weiss is at in her own journey, and how deeply she’s separated herself from the wrappings of Atlas that she was carrying all the way back at Day One.

I digress. This scene didn’t really go anywhere unexpected, but I think it missed an opportunity to tie in a possible subplot with Jaune’s sister’s family, since Saphron mentioned being in a dispute with this military camp. Maybe it will come up later. But the scene achieves what the episode needs it to – shut the door on the Gang, and push Qrow even deeper into his funk. Everyone wants him to have the answers, but the only answer he knows right now is at the bottom of a bottle.

The other obvious function of this episode as a whole is to get JNR up to speed on everything that happened with Ozpin. And it largely plays out as one would expect – wth Jaune the angriest of the lot – but I’m glad that we saw really clear emotion from each of them. We’re used to blocking out Jaune and ignoring him, but when Ren and Nora are sharing his emotion, that really crystallises the moment for me and makes the intended sentiment impossible to ignore.

Where Jaune takes it further is in his aggression towards Oscar. One knows that Jaune is being unreasonable, questioning the kid’s trustworthiness, and it reminds us that he really is just an innocent party in all of this, who didn’t ask for anything that happened to him in Volume 4 and since. It’s understandable that he would run away, even though I think there might be something else in play. If anything, it gets the fires stoked about Ozpin again, not that I had ever forgotten how much of a bitch this season has turned him into.

It all ends up dovetailing into the third and final act of the episode, which is Ruby’s voicing of her crisis of confidence. We’ve seen her all season, struggling as her burdens of leadership have been renewed and expanded by the reunion of her original team, but she hasn’t spoken about it until now. And it was nice to see her doubts over her ability to lead be tied in to her questions of her power. I think, right now, she sees learning more about this power as a kind of proxy or shortcut for her leadership overall. Right now, she feels like she doesn’t understand enough about the things that matter, and even understanding something like this could be enough to satisfy her.

And the explanation of the Silver Eyes power itself is pretty straightforward. It’s very much information that one could have interpreted by considering each instance of Ruby using the power. It’s nevertheless interesting that the power came directly from the God of Light, and therefore is not necessarily exclusive to a bloodline.

I am really interested to see how all to this Argus material comes together. What happens with Oscar? How does the Gang overcome the local military? What comes of the Cotta-Arc family? And how much do all of these real and potential threads intertwine with each other? This episode runs organically from point to point, and there’s not too much to raise an eyebrow at. The issue is that there just isn’t a whole lot of anything at all in this episode.

OBSERVATIONS:

Imagine you’ve got the RWBY Volume 6 DVD, and you put that shit in and watch the entire season as a movie. Out of the five-act structure, this episode takes place squarely in the middle of the third, and it won’t be any more memorable than that.

If you’ve ever travelled in Australia, then the idea of bringing banned foods over the state borders isn’t something to sniff at.

Once upon a time, Weiss and Blake were at each other’s throats. Now, Weiss defends her from other people’s judgement without a second’s hesitation. I love all four of these girls, and Weiss has just been amazing for such a long time.

When the guards mentioned that the leader of the camp was a “she”, I had a brief thought that Winter might show up. Of course, that would be ridiculous, given her stature. I do wonder when Weiss and Winter might see each other again, though, and if there’s a possibility of it happening in this Atlas-focused season.

I wonder when the penny will drop for Ruby about Cinder’s adjacency to the Grimm, seeing as the Silver Eyes can only be activated against Grimm.

Would you like to see a superteam of Silver Eye-d Hunters? That would be crazy. I guess it’s important for the show to have established that Salem has been wiping them out, but still, just the thought of that group is a lot of fun.

GRADE: C

In terms of plot progression, “Dead End” is perhaps the least active episode of the season, and the most transitional. There isn’t anything to particularly dislike about this one, and it runs smoothly as a whole, but there isn’t much about it that can be called new or all that different, aside from getting JNR up to speed and an issue with Oscar. While the transitions achieve what they intended, and the weighty moments are sufficiently cared for, this is still the weakest episode of the season so far. – KALLIE

[gascon-en-exil]

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Conquest Part 1

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Chapters 6-14, in which if you squint really hard there might be a plot in there somewhere.

Chapter 6

But let’s not be unfair right from the start. Conquest offers what I consider the best version of Chapter 6, both as a narrative introduction to the route and as a gameplay challenge fitting the difficulty of what’s to come. Birthright is basically just Ryoma soloing Xander and Revelation throws you against generics, but here you have to make use of all the Nohr royals to defeat all but one unit on the Hoshidan side - and being able to take care of Ryoma quickly enough nets you a prize of sorts in that you don’t have to beat up an unarmed Sakura. The chapter also sets up the tense undercurrent of Conquest that Corrin chose wrong, that the Hoshidans (except Takumi) think they’ve been brainwashed and that their love for their adopted siblings is meaningless. On the one hand it feels rather spineless that what is supposedly a villain campaign is hesitant to allow Corrin to own their choice and makes it sound like blatant railroading by the player, but on the other there’s something to be said for the contrast between how Xander and Ryoma deal with Corrin’s decision. After two refusals in Birthright Xander is happy to label Corrin a traitor and becomes determined to kill them for their choice, whereas Ryoma persists in his brainwashing theory and in so doing denies Corrin’s agency completely. That actually works fairly well as setup for an antagonist - if we allow that Ryoma is one, of course, and the game itself seems uncomfortable with the concept.

Chapter 7

...And all my goodwill toward this story dries up almost immediately. There’s flat villainy, there’s a bunch of self-doubt from Corrin over their choice, and there’s foreshadowing that only adds to the confusion if you already know what’s going on. It’s kind of a mess, and it’s pretty much all downhill from here.

I have little to say about this chapter as it stands, except that it’s appropriately difficult and that the conflict feels fitting in terms of tone and atmosphere...even though it only exists because of the aforementioned flat villainy. I instead want to zero in on the moment pictured above, in which Garon “prays” to Anankos to deliver unto him the plot of the next few chapters in front of Corrin and Iago and the Nohr royals. Bizarrely, it’s Iago who goes furthest in calling Garon out on how absurd this is, though not even he bothers to ask who or what Anankos is or if he’s the same entity as Nohr’s Dusk Dragon.

Ok, I know I might be the only person in the fandom who regularly complains about the absence of pseudo-Catholic elements in Fates when they’re present in every other game in the series, but on a fundamental level I do get it. The priest -> sage/war monk class line from Awakening was given to Hoshido, so it makes perfect sense that those classes would be shifted over to the blend of Shintoism and Buddhism that comprises Japanese spirituality. It’s also not unheard of for a nation or group of people in FE to worship a dark dragon/god in lieu of the main organized faith, ex. the Lopytrians from Jugdral, Rigel’s Duma Faithful, and Plegia’s Grimleal. As seen with Salem from FE5 and Tharja and Henry from 13 it’s even fairly common for playable dark magic users in the games to come from the ranks of those faiths. I therefore don’t have a problem with the theory that there’s a theological element to Nohr’s dark mages and that it ties into the Dusk Dragon - who may or may not also be Anankos - in some way. The problem is that we never see any definitive evidence that this is the case, not even enough to understand how unusual it is in this scene to see Garon praying to Anankos. When Iago sounds like the closest thing to a voice of a reason you know the plot’s got some problems. For all we’re told Nohr’s clergy are just bookworms moonlighting as strippers with a crow feather fetish.

Chapter 8

It’s strange how easy it is to forget this guy exists since he only appears in Conquest in this one chapter, but the Ice Tribe maids do indeed have a father. Where was he during Chapter 17 of Birthright?

This brings up an interesting - or as some would probably call it, lazy - quirk of Fates’s map design. The early and midgame sections of all three routes are full of maps that get reused across routes, or different maps of the same location like the previous one and Birthright Chapter 18. I’m feeling rather charitable about this decision personally, for two reasons:

1) In most cases the reused maps are approached from different angles and feature different, sometimes opposing gimmicks. The Ice Tribe village map, for example, sees you racing to visit as many villages as possible in Conquest but encourages you to avoid them in Birthright, and the function of the Dragon Veins in the middle of the route differs depending on the route.

2) Fates’s worldbuilding needs all the help it can get, and visiting the same locations in multiple routes adds a degree of continuity that the story on its own often struggles to display.

See, cost-cutting measures don’t have to be a bad thing if you use them creatively! 

This chapter also deserves some praise for having a more plausible point of conflict than its Wind Tribe counterpart in Birthright. Instead of Iago’s shenanigans Elise grabs the conflict ball because no one taught her basic diplomacy, and Corrin saves the day through their first of many acts of pacifism on this route. It is a bit strange to have the characters talking about how Corrin’s army spared everyone just after you’ve finished mowing down a bunch of generics, but not unlike Niles I can use my imagination.

Chapter 9

A wild loli appears! Ugh...Nyx is one of several characters in Fates who could have been interesting with better execution. As it is, her best use is as a punchline or somebody’s fap material of course.

This chapter has nothing to do with her though really. Instead it’s just a set of contrivances - how did a Hoshidan force make it so deeply into Nohr so quickly (for comparison, Corrin’s army reaches the same location in Birthright by Chapter 20), and why did they bring Azura all this way with them if their only plan was to kill her? I do appreciate the reminder that Nohr and Hoshido are actually at war now as the rest of the Conquest’s early plot is more concerned with putting down rebellions, but some kind of logical reason for Azura’s reappearance would have been nice.

Still, this chapter goes further than most at showing an explicit example of Hoshidan racism, even if Azura is quick to absolve the royals (except Takumi, I assume) of any wrongdoing. I genuinely have no idea if we’re meant to interpret this as Stockholm Syndrome, or if the writers couldn’t bear to vilify all of Hoshido even for one chapter.

Chapter 10

Like a number of other defense maps in the series, this is the most infamous chapter of its game, and depending on who you��re using and how it can indeed live up to its reputation. I don’t care for how this makes for an uneven bump in Conquest’s difficulty curve, but with such varied chapter goals and mechanics on this route that was likely inevitable at some point.

For all that it’s a memorable piece of gameplay though there’s not too much to talk about in terms of story. Takumi is established as a strong and motivated antagonist right from his first reappearance after the route split, and as I said back in Birthright it’s a good look for him. He and Oboro are among the few Hoshidans who really make more sense as antagonists than as allies, and even though it devolves into yet another round of possession in the end there’s something very real to Takumi’s feelings of betrayal and inadequacy, to say nothing of his grief over his mother which unlike in Birthright barely comes up otherwise.

Also, Camilla is here, but with only a bit of retainer banter to flesh her out she’s more or less the same as FE10 Haar in Chapter 2-E of that game: overleveled flying death, with only a few stray bits of effective damage to worry about.

Chapter 11

The Sevenfold Sanctuary appears again, this time with tricky skill combos to contend with like archers with Counter and ninjas with Lunge as well as more of the by now common enemy pair-ups and a boss with an unfair enemy-only weapon. Does anyone else find it strange just how many such weapons exist in Fates?

In this route it’s the Hoshidans who get to troll Corrin, dragging the Rainbow Sage up Mount Sagesse for no real reason and doing their best to not sound like they’re invading a sovereign territory and kidnapping its most venerable inhabitant who also happens to be an ancient dragon. Granted the Nohrians’ mission feels a bit confused as well, as dialogue vacillates between Garon wanting to conquer Notre Sagesse and everyone else wanting the Rainbow Sage’s power. The two sort of come together in the end with Iago ordering the Sage’s death, though if there’s a logical explanation for Garon/Anankos’s continued desire to see Corrin suffer but not die it’s beyond me. That Corrin gets an eventual sword power-up out of the deal feels almost accidental on this route.

Incidentally, while he doesn’t get the gravity of a potential death scene in this version I do like how Kaze joins up with the Nohrians. It conveys the subtext of his connection to Corrin while not coming across as a weird obsession like his approximate counterpart Silas does in Birthright. Speaking of which, I’ve noticed that Silas gets a decent amount of the protagonist chorus roles in Conquest even when some of the royals are available. Eh...they are supposed to be BFFs.

Chapter 12

Now that’s just not as funny as the version of this picture with Takumi.

Elise comes down with a case of the plot, and as a consequence we bear witness to Ryoma’s most infamous act of dickishly non-heroic behavior. I’ve seen it argued back and forth that Ryoma withholding medicine from Elise in an attempt to coerce Corrin into returning to Hoshido constitutes a war crime, but regardless of semantics it is a surprisingly underhanded tactic for someone like him. Now that I think about it Birthright shows off this side of him as well, when he disguises himself as a Nohrian soldier at Cheve to ambush Leo. Not exactly becoming a shining exemplar of heroism here awkwardly forced into the antagonist role...but then he goes off about how his retainers have a more righteous cause than Xander’s and suddenly I lose what little sympathy I had for him. Sure, one of the retainers he’s insulted is Peri, but on the whole that’s an eminently hateable level of self-righteous posturing.

This chapter is quite fun, if a bit chaotic with all the random effects from the pots. For some reason I always forget about the turn limit, which can become an unexpected source of stress when there are shrine maidens spamming status staves to slow you down and such. Fates (and Conquest specifically) is the one game other than Thracia that frequently turns enemy staff wielders into serious threats, and this chapter combined with Azama’s Hexing Rod in the previous one show that off thoroughly.

Chapter 13

Pictured: a subtle and nuanced depiction of villainy.

Aside from his sudden reappearance and this one still, Hans is actually...not that bad here though? Corrin points out how weird it is that they (and the player) are expected to forgive him after he attempted to kill Corrin at the Bottomless Canyon, and the worst atrocities of Hans’s army - particularly Scarlet’s death - are effectively gruesome because they’re left for the player to imagine. It’s comparable to how FE8 handles the ghastly presence of Orson’s wife. It is pretty silly how much is made over Hans clearly enjoying his work when Peri was recruited in the last chapter and Reina is also in this game (in this chapter, even), or that explicit bloodlust among the playable cast has shown up before in past FEs in characters like FE7 Karel. Player-centered morality, yay!

In any case, there’s also a good deal of genuine character complexity on display in this chapter too. Takumi is still consumed by grief and rage and lashes out specifically at the bond Corrin shares with the Nohrian sisters, calling attention to his increasing isolation from even his own siblings. Between taking an arrow in a cutscene and last chapter’s illness Elise just can’t catch a break, can she? Camilla too gets to show a rare bit of character for this route, encouraging Corrin to keep their head down and go along with Garon’s orders because self-centered pragmatism is how she’s learned to survive in situations where she can’t solve problems with violence and/or sex. 

Chapter 14

What an incredibly effective disguise. No one would ever recognize her. 

Ok, ok, the audience at the opera is seeing her from a distance and obscured by all the water effects, but it’s still pretty dumb that Corrin of all people can’t put two and two together here.

Honestly, as much as I enjoy the opera house setting and praised its appearance in Birthright this chapter all falls into that same generally silly vein. There’s again no logical explanation provided for Garon’s trip to Nestra, the enemy combatants on this map are a random squad of Hoshidans unrelated to the unfolding story, Keaton’s recruitment has even less buildup than Kaden’s did, and everything culminates in Leo teaching Corrin the obscure and arcane art of lying and in so doing bequeathing him with a sword upgrade because that’s what passes for (anti)heroism on this route. There’s not even much in the way of gameplay to discuss, which is disappointing when contrasted against the Birthright version. 

I would however like to close this post by reiterating the point I made at the start: so far, this route is severely lacking in an actual plot. All of Corrin’s movements since returning to Nohr have been directed by Garon (and Anankos by extension, though his motives remain vague even if you know the full story). In a way this helps to reinforce the feeling that the Nohrian royals are trapped in abusive situation, though that would be an unusually deep psychological reading of what is in reality an unfocused plot. The following chapter and what comes of it ought to be proof enough that any similarities between Conquest’s narrative structure and the familial issues of its main cast are purely coincidental. 

Next time: Conquest Chapter 15 - 20

[creative-type]

Building up to Arlong Part II

 In my previous post I started my analysis of the East Blue Saga, looking at the arcs leading up to Arlong Park to see how Eiichiro Oda grew as both an author and an artist in those early chapters as he built the series slowly towards the first “epic” moments of One Piece. 

I ended that post with Orange Town and how Buggy managed to do something no villain before him had done (be memorable and interesting). It’s interesting to see how Oda follows up on this breakthrough with...well, this guy

I don’t really have much to say about Gaimon’s arc...chapter...whatever the heck it is. It’s completely random and doesn’t fit well with the rest of the East Blue chapters.To be fair to Oda, he does  cut loose and show off some of his wacky creativity, and there is some world building as the Red Line gets its first inauspicious mention.

There’s also something to be said about Luffy and Nami getting to know one another better and further insight into Luffy as a character, but it’s not anything that isn’t accomplished better in other places

I will admit this made me laugh, though

Syrup Village

Moving on, we jump to Usopp’s recruitment arc. This one is one of the more intriguing of the East Blue arcs (intriguing not equaling good) in that I liked a lot of the individual pieces but found the overall product to be a little lackluster. 

I think part of this is the setting. One Piece is at its best when it’s exploring wild and crazy new places, but Oda hasn’t gotten to that point in the series yet. This arc’s supporting cast is also pretty generic. Usopp’s Pirate Gang aren’t the most annoying little kids I’ve ever seen, but they are annoying little kids. Kaya is...okay. She shows some real gumption after Kuro shows his true colors, but I’m not sure that makes up for all the time she spent being boring early on.

Usopp himself can be hard to like, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Usopp is the everyman of One Piece. He’s not a power fantasy like Luffy or Zoro nor supernaturally talented like Nami. He has the greatest personal flaws of any of the Straw Hats, and his dream is the only one in the crew to be internal rather than external. With that in mind, firmly establishing Usopp’s foibles and his weaknesses makes his victories - both in this arc and later in the series - all the sweeter, even if it makes these chapters a bit of a slog to get through.

This arc does manage two things that would later become staples of the series, and once again we have our villains to thank

There are some very specific trends in One Piece’s villainous organizations. Most are headed by the main antagonist of the arc and are fought by Luffy. Below the leader there’s usually an annoying, but decently strong character taken out relatively early on (think Pearl, Mr.5/Miss Valentine, Satori, etc). This character acts as both hype and a teaser for bigger fights to come, but also carry some narrative weight by giving insight into the plans/mindset/priorities of the enemy organization as a whole. 

Lastly, Oda usually adds a lovable, quirky villain who, if not the second in command, is one of the strongest fighters in the arc. These characters humanize the Straw Hat’s enemies, add levity, and are generally really fun - so much so that more often then not they return later in the series as a recurring character.

The Nyaban brothers fit into the annoying but decently strong category, but Jango steals the show as the first lovable, quirky minion of the series (I think Oda tried with Buggy’s crew, but they lack the necessary charm to pull it off). Heck, the first thing we see him do is accidentally hypnotize himself after moonwalking down the path to Usopp’s village. Later on it’s hard not to feel at least a little bit sorry for the guy when we see the hopeless position Kuro has put him in. Jango may be an antagonist, but he’s fun and likable and honestly having him join the marines through the power of dance is amazing.

Gin, Hatchan, Betham, and Kaku all fit to one degree of another into this mold, and it wouldn’t have been possible without Jango.

Secondly, Kuro is the first cerebral villain of the series. Alvida and Morgan relied on brute strength, and while Buggy exhibited a certain amount of cunning he, too, was focused on overwhelming firepower and his Devil Fruit to win the day. 

Kuro of a Thousand Plans. His epithet says it all. Kuro is conniving, sneaky, underhanded, and without a shred of honor to hold him back as he meticulously plans to murder a sickly girl for nothing more than his own peace and comfort. 

All of Oda’s most memorable villains have this Machiavellian mindset. Crocodile, Doflamingo, and most of all Blackbeard are all chess masters to one degree or another. Though their end goals are completely different, you can see a lot of Crocodile especially in how Kuro built up an unshakable reputation while biding his time to strike. They even share a penchant for breaking speeches

It’s such a little thing, but the words “I suffered” elevate Kuro to one of my favorite East Blue villains, well above even Buggy. It’s so needlessly cruel, twisting the knife right where he knows it will hurt most, just because he can, and I freaking love it.

As a side note before moving on, Oda’s attention to detail is also to be commended during this arc. The way Kuro adjusts his glasses makes for an excellent and chilling re-read bonus, and connecting Morgan’s past to Kuro’s gives the former a little more depth than before.

The Baratie

It’s interesting to compare the Baratie to Syrup village because in many ways these arcs have opposite strengths and weaknesses. Where Syrup village had strong antagonists and a weak setting/side characters, the Baratie is the most memorable locale of the East Blue Saga and has an extremely strong secondary cast.

The Baratie as a concept brilliantly fits into the world of One Piece. The idea of a floating restaurant in a world that’s 90% ocean makes perfect sense, and it’s one of the times that Oda integrates the setting with his characterization. It’s not creativity for creativity’s sake, and unlike Gaimon’s sub-arc...chapter...whatever that was there’s a method behind the madness. 

This excellent setup is the backdrop to some superb character writing. Sanji is by no means my favorite Straw Hat, but his strained relationship between Zeff and the rest of the Baratie is done extremely well. It’s one of those situations where no one is 100% right or wrong and you just wish they’d all enter counseling or something so they could figure out how to talk to one another without resorting to violence.

It doesn’t hurt that this is when Oda figures out how to properly use the power of Tragic Backstory (tm) to its most devastating effect. While no (named) characters die, Sanji’s backstory is raw, painful, and emotional in all the right places. It’s in expressing these extreme emotions where Oda’s cartoony style is at its most effective. Oda’s characters don’t just cry, they cry ugly, and that’s so important when setting the tone of these heavy moments.

I don’t have much to say on Kreig or his crew because he’s boring and I despise Pearl with every fiber of my being, but once again we get some fun fight choreography. I especially like the sequence when Sanji spits his cigarette into Gin’s face before kicking him halfway across the deck, only to get a tonfa to the ribs for his effort. 

Also this happens, and it’s soooo satisfying to see Kreig get punched in the face. 10/10, would watch again

But the one thing that the Baratie does best of all the East Blue arcs - better than even Arlong Park - is world building. The entire series people have been telling Luffy and co. that the Grand Line is super dangerous and that he shouldn’t go, but it’s only here that we see that we see that played out in real time with Mihawk’s introduction to the plot. The Straw Hats have thus far been presented as invincible badasses when they’re nothing more than a big fish in a little pond.

All the stuff with Mihawk is big-picture storytelling and one of Zoro’s best moments. I don’t think that anyone who follows One Piece needs to be told how well Oda does at developing his world. More important to the build up to Arlong Park is Oda’s use of immediate foreshadowing. Right about the time Mihawk shows up Johnny and Yosaku catch Nami checking out bounties, specifically Arlong’s though he’s never named and we don’t see his picture. Immediately after Nami steals the Going Merry so she can run away, and we see her facade start to crack a little under pressure. Note especially how utterly exhausted she looks in this panel here

This all happens in the same chapter Zoro challenges Mihawk, and the action cuts between the swordsman’s pre-fight banter and the story of how Johnny and Yosaku lost the Merry. Zoro’s fight is the more immediate concern, but when constructing the chapter, instead of going out on that high note Oda cuts back to Nami a second time, this time sailing alone on the open ocean

If it weren’t already obvious by the whole rest of the series, this scene proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s more to Nami than meets the eye. This is the first time we see her truly vulnerable, almost to the point of being broken, and it puts a completely different meaning to all her actions previous and what we’ll see coming up in later chapters.

I do think there is some significance to putting the Nami scene last over Zoro’s, because as the last thing the audience reads it’s what tends to stick in their mind longest week to week. We don’t see Nami again for a long time, and when we do all her defensive walls are firmly back in place. This is the Nami Oda wants us to remember when she’s going around Cocoyashi village telling Luffy to leave her the hell alone.

The Conclusion

What really stands out to me when going over these early chapters leading up to Arlong Park is Oda’s vision for the series from the word go, even when his execution isn’t as consistent as later on in the series. The whole East Blue saga exists to do two things 1) build the core of the Straw Hat Pirates 2) answer the question Who is Luffy.

Each antagonist from the lowly Alvida to Arlong himself has a weakness in their leadership ability that directly foils Luffy. These chapters show us what kind of pirate, what kind of captain, and most of all what kind of man Monkey D Luffy is, and what values he will and will not stand for. 

Arlong Park is the emotional peak of the East Blue saga, and it works because Oda has taken the time to build up to that peak. The impact would not have been the same if it had been placed earlier in the series because it would not feel earned without seeing Nami interact with the rest of the crew for as long as she did. Nor would it have worked if Oda hadn’t placed the breadcrumbs of her story for the audience to pick up along the way. 

It’s impossible for every arc to hit all the high points that Arlong Park does, because not all arcs are designed to do so, nor should they. That being said, there’s a steady increase in quality seen even in these early chapters as Oda gets his sea legs and figures out exactly what story he’s trying to tell.

[marcanthony]

How to Setup a 52 Week Membership Site in 7 Days

Membership sites are AWESOME because you make a sale once and get paid over and over again. But… Membership sites suck because you have to create a never-ending stream of content. It’s kind of like being chained to your content stove, cooking up new and exciting dishes every week without duplication, forever. Can you really create 3 years, 5 years or 10 years’ worth of fresh content? And for that matter, do you really want to create that much content in the first place? There’s an easier way, one in which you can set up your entire membership site in just 7 days if you put in the effort. Day 1: Realize you’re going to make a finite membership site of one year. This means you only need 52 weeks of content, versus, say, 520 weeks of content for a 10-year site. If you prefer, you can even use an autoresponder to send the content, rather than building an actual membership site. Because there is an end to the membership, people tend to stay members longer – often for the entire year. With conventional membership sites, people tend to drop out faster. This means you’ll make more money up front. You’re not going to create the actual content yourself. Instead, you’re going to use PLR content. If possible, buy one big package of PLR so that you have enough content for all the lessons, and the lessons stay consistent. Today you’ll choose your topic and shop for PLR. The types of PLR you find might even dictate your topic to some degree. You’re looking for a large amount of QUALITY stuff, not junk. What if you find the perfect content, but there’s only enough for a shorter period of time? It’s okay to adjust the length of your membership accordingly. Maybe it’s a 16-week course on how to write sales letters, a 6-month course on how to drive traffic using social media, or a 9 month course to help people lose the weight and keep it off forever.  Day 2: You now have your PLR content and a good idea of how long your course will run. Today you’re going to break your content up into the appropriate number of lessons, placing those lessons in the correct order. The size of lessons should be consistent, if possible. If you have a really big lesson, you can often simply break it into two (part 1 and part 2), as well as combining a couple of small things into one lesson. Each lesson should build on the previous lessons and lead to future lessons. Without this continuity and clarity, people will get confused and leave the membership early. Once you’ve got the lessons in order, check one more time to make sure it all makes sense. Day 3: Create bonuses. You can create these out of the PLR you already have or purchase additional PLR. These might be reports, checklists, worksheets, videos or anything else that compliments and improves upon the course itself. Plan to send out a free valuable bonus at least once a month to improve member retention. Day 4: Write your own introduction and conclusion for each lesson. The introductions should whet your member’s appetite for the content to follow. The conclusions should get them anticipating what’s to come in the next lesson. For example: “Watch for next week’s lesson, where I’ll finally reveal the simplest and fastest way in the world to lose those final 10 pounds and look like you’re ready to win a bodybuilding contest.” As you’re going through the material, change the chapter titles as needed. Add in subheads throughout the material to break it up and make it easier to read. If you choose, you can tweak the material to add your own voice and use your own writing style. You can also add in your own examples, tips and stories if you like. Consider adding pictures and graphics to make it even more interesting and valuable. Proofread everything, even the content you don’t change. Day 5: There are two things to do today, one of which is easy, and one might take more time, depending on your experience. First, create the emails that you will send each week with the latest membership installment. This can be as easy as copying and pasting the lesson’s introduction into the email, along with the link to the membership site or to directly download the issue. Second, write your sales letter. It doesn’t have to be long, but it does have to capture their interest, overcome their objections and answer their questions. If you’ve never written sales copy before, you might consider hiring someone to do this for you. Shortcut: If you chose a PLR product that includes sales copy, you might be able to use that sales letter with just a few tweaks. Day 6: Choose backend offers to increase your income. These are offers related to your membership’s subject matter. You can insert these offers… Within the emails you’re going to send via autoresponder announcing each new lesson Solo emails sent out between lessons Inside the pdf lessons as full page ads Inside the pdf lessons inside the content Inside the membership site itself, if you have one. Ensure your backend offers are highly related to the content of your membership site, and that they are high quality and truly useful to your subscribers. To make these offers convert even better, offer “member only” discounts and time-sensitive offers. You definitely want to sell these offers, but you don’t want to appear pushy. Your members have already demonstrated they trust you by subscribing to your site. Recommending products to them is a natural extension of this mentor/mentee relationship you’ve established, so don’t be afraid to enthusiastically promote products that will truly help your members achieve their goals. Day 7: Set everything up. Depending on what you have in place already, this might take longer than a day. For example, if you don’t have a website yet, or you don’t have an autoresponder, then there’s going to be a learning curve as you discover how these things work. Things to do: Save your lessons as PDFs. If you haven’t already, do market research to determine how much to charge for your monthly membership. Get a domain name and web hosting. Try to choose a catchy name that matches your content. Choose a payment processor for recurring billing, such as Paypal or ClickBank. Set up your sales page. Upload your PDF’s to your website. Upload your weekly emails to your autoresponder. If you take one day at a time, you can do this. Of course, if all of this is new to you, it might take you longer than 7 days, but that’s okay. Just set a deadline for yourself and then be sure you’re making progress each and every day to reach that goal. And keep your eyes on the prize. Once you have this membership site set up and ready to go, you and your affiliates can sell it for a long time to come, reaping the residual income for years. ...Marc Anthony Read the full article

[arkus-rhapsode]

Comparison: Endless and Acnologia

So this is something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while, as well as something I’ll possibly do more of in the future. So this was something I thought of doing after reading @ac-fairytail post Your Villain is Broken (or, the real contradictory villain is Acnologia, not Zeref) , which raised some points that really make me scratch my head, because a lot of these negatives and inconsistencies, aren’t present in Hiro Mashima’s previous final villain, Endless. So this is a straight forward comparison piece, comparing certain aspects of these two characters.

The first thing that should be brought up is the origin. How did these characters come into being and why might they have become the final villain? First we’ll start with Endless, Endless has a lot of time devoted to how it exists, though it takes a long time to get the full picture. It was created when Aciela Raregroove used Star Memory to alter time and create a timeline where the earth isn’t on the brink of extinction. While there was a new world made, Star Memory also made a way to erase this timeline and restore the original. This actually blends in pretty well with the first explanation of Endless, it being made because man sinned against time. Acnologia also is given a lot of time to explain how he exists, there never is a clear answer. There are multiple thrown around, Arcadios says Acnologia was turned into a dragon by Zeref, while there is the accounts saying he fought in the dragon king festival and then became a dragon. The clearest definition seems to be that Acnlogia, became a dragon slayer to participate in the dragon king festival and then after dragons destroyed his home, he turned on them and gained the power to become a dragon.

Next is motivation, Endless has the goal of destruction, but not because it wants to, but because that’s all it exists for. To destroy the current dimension and restore the previous one. Endless also seems to have another goal, though we’ll get into it later and it helps explain why he doesn’t just destroy the world. Acnologia has two motivations as well, kill all remaining traces of dragons and destroy the whole world. Now Acnologia’s want to eliminate all dragons makes sense in the idea that dragons killed all those he loved and he seeks to rid the world of them. He seemingly achieved that when the dragons entered the eclipse gate and only resurfacing on tenrou. His other goal, really doesn’t have an explanation. He wants to destroy the world... for some reason... It seems that destroying the world is how he interprets being a dragon and being only a creature of destruction, but this is really only inference.

Next up is first appearance! Endless got a good amount of foreshadowing. First when Saga Pendragon the fortune teller said Endless was coming in the mermaid peril arc, as well as the foreshadowing when a dream Haru and Lucia had mentioned Endless. When Endless first shows up, he appears from under star vestige, a place where star memory existed millennia ago and where it was sealed (Most likely lured there by ancient people who knew Endless could only be destroyed in Star Memory, but couldn’t destroy it because they didn’t have etherion) then awakened by Haru and Lucia. They say later on that this was foreseen years ago he would arise, but there also seems to be another reason. Acnologia didn’t have any real foreshadowing until the tenrou island arc where he appears on Tenrou Island because Grimoire Heart’s wicked thoughts attracted it, but this seems odd as if wicked thoughts and intentions attracted it, then Acnologia should’ve appeared around Tower of heaven or nirvana. So I tend to believe the explanation that Natsu’s lightning fire dragon roar attracted Acnologia, and made him realize that dragons are still around.

Lets get into the big one, roles in the story. Both are set up as the final villains of their respective series and do make occasional appearances in other arcs to remind the audience that they will be a future threat. Though for creatures who’s whole motivation is destruction they surprisingly don’t do that much. Endless is released in the star vestige arc, but only starts becoming the absolute trigger to destroying the world when it merges with Sinclair right at the end of the first rave master arc. Given that time active should be about a month, Endless doesn’t end the world. Now we see he is fully capable of doing so, but for some reason he doesn’t. Now I’ve been saying we’ll get into that reason and it seems to be, Endless can’t end this timeline unless he is returned to his true form. Endless’s true form is Dark Bring Endless and it achieves that state when merged with Sinclair, the mother dark bring. Endless seems to be able to just fade out and then reappear when something attracts him. The thing that attracts him is the pieces of the mother dark bring as it’s revealed that dark bring and Endless together is their true form, but it’s never really described how they split in the first place. Endless is first released because of Haru and Lucia’s battle, but this could be because it was near Lucia’s dark mother and Doryu’s Vampire dark brings. We see Endless appear again in the mystic realm and they say it’s because of Hardner’s evil, though as we see later, it’s more attracted to Hardner’s Anastasis. Finally we see it become one with Sinclair, attracted to all of it’s pieces in one place. It’s only when they all merge does it begin the end of the world. While Endless is a natural disaster with no personality, it isn’t all that much of an active disaster, only seeking out Sinclair and destroying anyone who attacks him. Endless exists to be a way to destroy the new timeline created by star memory, it doesn’t have a personality, but we only see it talk when it and Sinclair become one, but all it says is that they must restore the original timeline through destroying this one.

Acnologia is also a villain hell bent on destruction. He wants to destroy the world, and mentions it many times when questioned on his motives, but for all his talk of destruction, he doesn’t do it that often. Endless was sealed away, but Acnologia was active since his creation. 400 years and he didn’t kill off all the world. He only really starts destroying the world near the end of the alvarez arc, where he eats the space between time. Now like Endless, he seems to pop up when it relates to their goals, Endless’s are more intertwined, finding Sinclair will give it the absolute power to destroy the timeline, where as Acnologia shows up to kill the dragon slayers and dragons, but only after says he seeks nothing but destruction. Acnologia is humanized, he has a personality, a drive that comes from actual ambition, unlike Endless. But, Acnologia’s reason’s aren’t all that explored. It really seems more cookie cutter explanation than full answers are given. Endless does have a simple reasoning, but it works as it’s not really anything but a force of nature. Even when Acnologia’s reasons are explained it’s mainly about why dragon’s should die, not just the whole world. Being a more “Human” villain, there should’ve been more time given to relating him to the other relevant characters, but it isn’t explored.

Finally like all villains, let’s talk about their downfall. The way to defeat Endless is established right after his introduction, he needs to be destroyed in Star Memory, which can only be opened by the five rave stones, and then he needs to be destroyed by etherion. Etherion can only destroy it in star memory, anywhere else and it’ll just be able to restore itself. This is established and set up as the main goal of the characters as well the final way to kill Endless. It pretty much follows that chain of progression when it comes down to the final battle. Acnologia is a bit all of the place. His defeat is setup as the 7 dragon slayers will kill him together, but then it adds on he can’t be hurt by magic. Now that isn’t too bad. It creates a reason why only a dragon slayer can kill acnologia and that’s because he’s immune to all forms of magic, but then NOPE, even dragon slaying magic he’s immune to. The other idea how to defeat him was to shove him into the space between time, a portal that basically will trap and compress acnologia into nothingness. But this also fails. Eventually Acnologia is killed by a ticker-tack plan made 5 chapters before his defeat and voids a lot of the handicaps set.

Anyway this was just a look at these two villains. I do think Endless was a better executed villain, but Acnologia was a lot more interesting villain.

[masterdetectivexx]

Rum Arc Discussion Series: Update #1

This is my first update on my thoughts regarding the previously discussed characters and plot. I’ll be going in order of the discussion series.

Wakita Kanenori

There’s something that I have noticed about the setup and order of the cases that leads up to the characters’ introduction. What I initially realized was that the “Soul Detective” case(File 951-953) is seemingly setting up Wakita’s introduction(File 975-977) and his purpose in the story(File 977+). Indications of that was first of all the cliffhanger with Gin, where his suspicion towards Kogoro grew strong enough for him to wanna take action(File 953), which fits with the development where Wakita becomes Kogoro’s apprentice(most likely with the intention to verify Gin’s suspicion)(File 977).

Another one is the “Kid Killer News” reference and the reminder that they can be read in the papers(File 951), which fits with the moment where Wakita is reading the papers about someone he refers to as “quick-witted”(most likely referring to Conan)(File 980).

This idea was further supported after realizing the potential link between Wakita and Mary. This link is found through the clues in the “Ripples” series(File 972-974). In that flashback series, we get to see the aftermath of Mary using her knife-hand strike on Akai(File 972). Mary left a mark on Akai’s left eye as a result of that strike, which fits directly with Wakita’s damaged left eye(most likely as a result of her defending herself from him)(File 975).

Taking my previous speculations about Wakita into consideration, this is heavily implying that before he set his eyes on Kogoro, he had a confrontation with Mary at some point, that lead into a fight. Another setup towards Wakita’s introduction, during the Ripple series(File 972-974), even indicates that Wakita is the one responsible for Mary’s shrinking. This happens at the end(File 974), where Conan is asking himself about Mary’s circumstance and who caused it, which is right before the introduction of Wakita in the following chapter(File 975).

This is also probably another one of Gosho’s introduction foreshadowings, that indicates that Wakita drugged Mary, and considering that the Soul detective case(that sets up Wakita) heavily focused on Mary, and how she could have been drugged, it further supports this interpretation. In other words, Wakita, who’s the “closest subordinate” of the boss, attacked Mary and fed her Sherry’s prototype drug. Only high-ranked/code-named BO members have so far been confirmed to have access to the “incomplete detective”(prototype), so it makes sense for Wakita to have access to it if he’s the closest subordinate to the boss. If this is the case, then it’s highly likely that the reason why Gin and Mary used the same quote(“It’s like encountering a demon in the darkness”) is related to Wakita as well. Since Wakita is the only potential tie between Mary and Gin, this quote could be something that Wakita frequently uses.

This would mean that Wakita said that quote to Mary(who is most likely a former MI6 agent in hiding, as mentioned in the Wakita discussion), probably as a way of acknowledging her as a threat to the BO. Since Wakita could be a BO member, it would be natural for Gin to hear that sentence at least once. However, considering that we have seen an example to the kind of relationship that someone has with someone that they borrow a quote from in Rum arc, through Shuukichi(File 947), there’s a possibility that Gin looks up to Wakita in a similar way. Wakita could be a mentor figure to Gin, which would fall well in line with the fact that Wakita’s character design is based on a coach character from the “Ashita no joe” anime.

Wakasa Rumi

Previously, my speculations regarding Rumi wasn’t set on one direction, since her whole deal was quite ambiguous. At the moment however, recent developments had clues that pointed more towards one direction. Rumi was at first suspected to be Asaka or Vermouth, but after picking up more clues, it’s looking like Rumi is more likely to be Vermouth.

Similarly to Wakita’s introduction, Rumi’s introduction also seemingly has a lot of setup towards it. Just like how there were indications that the Soul Detective case was a setup for Wakita’s intro, the “betrayal” series(File 954-957) has also many hints that it was setting up Rumi’s intro and that Rumi is Vermouth. One of them is the fact that it was a “whisky trio” case(Rye/Bourbon/Scotch), where Vermouth was interested in Subaru(Rye)(File 954-957), which fits with Rumi’s whisky reference and that it’s her favorite drink(possibly Gosho’s attempt to create a link to that case and to also foreshadow Rumi’s person of interest)(File 967).

Another one is the fact that Vermouth found out that professor Agasa is Subaru’s neighbor(File 955), which fits with the fact that Rumi showed interest in Agasa(the neighbor of the man Vermouth is suspicious of)(File 966).

There’s also something else, that I failed to notice before, that not only strengthens the introduction foreshadowing, that Gosho possibly used during Rumi’s intro(as mentioned in my Rumi discussion), but also ties it to the Betrayal series. Gosho established a parallell between Vermouth and Kaito Kid(File 958), and then potentially utilized it panels before Rumi’s intro through DB’s conversation(hinting that Vermouth’s disguise is involved in Rumi’s intro)(File 966).

As for the new developments, the strongest indicator that Rumi is Vermouth is the fact that Rumi triggered Haibara’s BO sense(File 978). When Subaru triggered Haibara’s BO sense, the only living man that was confirmed to have triggered her at that time was Akai. Similarly to this, the only living female character to have done that before Rumi is Vermouth.

Beyond the fact that Subaru and Rumi were setup to be the main suspects of their respective arcs, they are very similar in how Gosho is developing them. For example, both of them were in an Ayumi-hostage-situation where they had to rely on their own experience to create an opening against the culprit. Subaru’s being crime-related knowledge(File 666), and Rumi’s being murder(Which Vermouth has experience of)(File 989).

Gosho is even repeating the whole deal with how one person is suspecting the red-herring, while the other isn’t. In Subaru’s case, Haibara had a suspicion, but Conan rejected it(File 624), while in Rumi’s case, Conan had a suspicion, but Haibara rejected it(File 989).

All of these parallels between Subaru and Rumi are most likely intentional, since Rumi’s story might be leading to a similar development as Subaru’s, where she ends up being a character, that we already knew, in disguise. As I mentioned in my Rumi discussion, when she invited DB to her house(File 978), her goal was probably to get more information on Subaru. Since she bought cups and plates for a group, we know that she was expecting the DB to tag along with Conan to her house. Since she sensed that a crime was gonna happen, by inviting Conan and DB, it is guaranteed that Conan would go and investigate it(like in Betrayal), which would give Rumi an opening to pry on Subaru through DB. If for some reason the crime didn’t happen, then her pre-established plan of dropping them off one by one at their home becomes the opening for her to get information on Subaru(which wouldn’t have been possible in the first scenario, since the police would have taken them in for questioning and then dropped them off themselves). The developments in the latest Rumi case(File 987-989) suggested that Rumi possesses something that is connected to the Kohji case. This seems to imply that she has a personal interest in that 17-year-old case(rather than her just wanting to confirm Conan’s Kohji investigation). During the betrayal series(File 954-957) Vermouth’s actions suggested that she wanted to get involved in Bourbon’s mission in order to investigate Kohji’s dying message. The first indication was the fact that she unnecessarily offered her blackmailer to help with a disguise(which naturally includes getting involved in the mission in order to oversee the disguise, like in File 852), when he could just force it from her if he really needed to(File 954).

The second indication is the fact that she still involved herself in Bourbon’s mission, with a rushed disguise of Asuza, despite the fact that Bourbon was enough for the job(File 955).

There’s therefore a possibility that she involved herself because she was personally interested in the dying message that involves “ASACA”, just like Rumi. The object in Rumi’s pocket has a shape that looks similar to a Shogi piece at first sight, but after taking a closer look at its edges, the object’s shape deviates from a normal shogi piece quite a bit. The object’s shape looks more similar to the missing “U” shard’s shape(that was hidden by Kohji in order to deliver his dying message).

For Rumi to possess that shard, she had to have been in the US and entered Kohji’s room in Juke Hotel(Which Vermouth would have been capable of). Since it’s implied that Rumi is trying to portray herself as Asaka to Conan(As mentioned in my Rumi discussion), it’s possible that she brought that shard with her in order to convince Conan that she’s Asaka if the opportunity arises(since it would at least imply that she was there in the crime scene if she showed it to him). Why is Vermouth interested in the dying message? What we know is that the BO at least can interpret “ASACA” from the dying message(since they involved themselves in the Betrayal case because of that word). For that reason, it’s possible that the BO are trying to find Asaka(if we assume that she’s a woman), who mysteriously disappeared from the Kohji case. Since we know that the prototype drug of Sherry’s parents was involved in that case, and since we have a mysterious disappearance of a character that the BO seems to be looking for, there’s a high possibility that Asaka was also drugged, when Rum attacked Amanda, and instead of dying, another effect of the Miyano’s prototype took place(ultimately leading to her escape). From a narrative standpoint, it makes sense for Gosho to create a character that was affected by the Miyano’s prototype in order to dive into the mystery of the Silver Bullet research(the goal of the drug that Sherry’s parents were making), just like how we have characters that were affected by the APTX4869(Sherry’s research). Since we recently got more details to the “accident” that killed Sherry’s parents, as well as the confirmation that Sherry’s(BO’s) and the Miyano’s research goal were different all along(File 948), it makes sense for it to be relevant in this arc.

If Asaka was drugged, and then survived like Conan and Haibara, because of an effect that doesn’t kill(which isn’t necessarily shrinking), then it would explain why Vermouth is interested in the dying message. Vermouth would have reasons to suspect that Asaka disappeared because the SB prototype didn’t kill her, since she knows that the APTX prototype(that is based on SB research remains) didn’t kill Shinichi and Sherry. Since Vermouth wants to hide any indication of progress to the BO research, it makes sense for her to have personal reasons in trying to figure out the dying message, since it might have something to do with Asaka, who she wants to eliminate(before BO finds out about an effect that doesn’t kill). This would also explain why she reacted towards “prosthetic” in an angry manner, while gripping an object that is connected to the dying message(File 987). Rum, who has a prosthetic, was the reason for Asaka getting drugged and disappearing, and ultimately creating this mess that she has to cover up.

So, by having Conan think that she’s Asaka(a framed witness), she would get the opportunity to use his help to solve the dying message quicker and potentially find the real Asaka. As for Rumi’s suspicious bumping in her introduction(File 966), that Conan suspected was due to her having monocular vision, it is most likely due to her glasses. Adapting to monocular vision roughly takes 1 year(unless the loss was gradual), meaning that symptoms like bumping your head would have been more frequent(If she lost her eye/vision within a year) and not have stopped after her intro case. It makes more sense that what tricked her perception of distance was something that she adjusted to immediately after her intro case, which is her glasses. Adjusting to new glasses takes normally just a couple of days. Glasses has also been a very prominent part in disguises in DC, and since it’s common among teachers, it makes sense that she would complete her disguise with that(like Conan in File 2).

Her interaction with Kuroda didn’t imply any prior knowledge of him, but rather just her trying to verify what he knows about her. Since he treated her like a criminal(by asking for her permission about calling the police)(File 987), she most likely suspected that he might know that she’s Vermouth in disguise. In order to get information out of him, she intentionally tried to push him into a corner until he made a slip-up, which revealed that he only read about her in the news(File 988).

In other words, Rumi was simply overthinking about Kuroda’s knowledge. It’s possible that Gosho was foreshadowing this development during Rumi’s previous appearance. Gosho drew Conan with a reflection on his right lense while thinking “I thought a little to deep this time”(File 979). The glass reflection could have been intentional in order to create a parallell with Rumi(who always has a reflection on her right lense when she’s serious), in order to foreshadow that she’s gonna think deeper than necessary in her next appearance(File 987-989). This isn’t unlikely, since the end of that Golfer case(File 980) was also setting up the events in Rumi’s next appearance(with Kuroda seeing Rumi’s name in the news).

I’ve seen arguments saying that Vermouth would have never tried to corner a Superintendent like that, but considering that we had a scene(specifically addressing the consequences of those actions) in which Bourbon explained to Vermouth that law enforcers can do nothing without proof(File 898), I disagree with those arguments.

During Rumi’s introduction, we had a scene with Teitan Elementary School’s principal Uematsu Ryujiro. This principal has only appeared once in the past, and that was during Kobayashi’s introduction(File 154). This principal is full of words of wisdom, but it’s worth to note that Gosho is most likely using them as a foreshadowing device. In File 154, Uematsu said “All secrets will be revealed somehow”, which directly coincides with Conan’s current circumstances in which Ran’s suspicion was in full effect(leading up to Desperate revival).

Similarly to this, in File 966, Uematsu said “People who commit sins must atone… or they will spend the rest of their lives cowering in fear… or die a dog’s death”. This is most likely meant to coincide with Rumi’s circumstance(who was listening to him). Rumi has shown ruthlessness of a killer at least three times now. She said the sentence of a murderer(File 968), She let a murder happen(File 978) and she even used murder experience as a way to save a hostage(File 989). These instances have all been implying that she’s a killer, a sinner, and with Uematsu’s words, it’s implying that a dog’s death is awaiting her(since she’s neither atoning or cowering in fear). This all once again goes in line with Vermouth’s character, who is a sinner that is expected to eventually die for her treasures(Ran and Shinichi).

The Kohji Case

Haneda Kohji

Something new that was found out was the fact that Kohji was clenching an unknown object, along with the scissor, that left a mark on the middle of his palm(File 948). This fact seems to imply that there’s a missing part to the dying message, and that the unknown object was taken from the crime scene after Kohji’s death. Since Kohji is a shogi player, the likelihood that he was holding a shogi piece is high.

There’s however a possibility that an actual clue was left towards it. Rumi was holding onto what looked like the “U” shard. For Gosho to emphasize its shape in a cliffhanger(File 989), it would mean that its shape is important. Considering that it looked like a Shogi piece at first glance, it’s possible that the “U” shard was intended to look like it. This would mean that Kohji was alluding to that a Shogi piece was involved in the dying message(most likely as a precaution, in case the culprit took that shogi piece from his hand). Because that shard has a “U”, it could be representing the “Uma”(horse) piece. The “Pirate’s Spirit” horse in Wakita’s introduction could have been foreshadowing the importance of “horse” as well, since the “horse” was used as a parallel to “Rum”(as if it serves the purpose of identifying him)(File 975).

This leaves us with the dying message “U MASCARA” and the shogi piece “UMA”. If the “U” shard has the purpose of identifying the missing shogi piece, then from a narrative standpoint, it’s less likely that Rumi has that shogi piece with her(since there’s no point in having a map if you already have the treasure). Some can argue that the shape under the “U” shard, in Rumi’s pocket, is the shogi piece, but that can also be the shape of a fragment that broke off from the shard after Rumi fell to the ground(File 989).

Asaka

A mistake that I did during my Rumi discussion is that I assumed that Hotta Gaito thought Asaka was a woman because she was seen with a hand-mirror. The reality is that he had a separate information about Asaka being a woman(File 953). This increases the likelihood that Asaka is a woman, since it’s possibly based on a source, and not on an assumption.

Something else that was a mistranslation is what Haibara said to Agasa about Kohji’s hand-mirror(File 948). Rather than saying “Perhaps it was given to him by someone”, she said “Maybe Haneda Kohji inherited it from his mother as well”.

Haibara was specifically relating her sister’s experience to Kohji, about inheriting a hand-mirror from their mother. However, since we know that Asaka was seen with a hand-mirror, Haibara’s sentence could be giving an actual clue. Rather than Kohji inheriting the mirror from his mother, it’s possible that Asaka inherited it instead. Since Asaka was most likely seen with the hand-mirror while using it, it probably belonged to her, and was then lent to Kohji and later used for the dying message(as mentioned in my Kohji case discussion). Since Haibara was relating her story to Kohji’s, it’s possible that Gosho was using her sentence to hint that Kohji’s sister inherited it from their mother.

In other words, Asaka is actually Kohji’s sister who, rather than coming with him to the US as a bodyguard, came with him as a sister that was gonna support him during the chess tournament. Following my previous speculations, this means that when Amanda visited him, Kohji wasn’t just offering his trusted bodyguard to help Amanda, but his well-trained sister. If that’s the case, then “Asaka” is definitely an alias, since she would’ve been immediately identified if Kohji had a sister named Asaka. In my previous discussion about the Kohji case, I stated two possibilities to what happened to Asaka when Amanda was killed. The first one was that Rum didn’t clean up a messy room, meaning that Amanda was sneakily poisoned, and because Rum didn’t anticipate that Asaka was gonna be in her room, Asaka was able to bypass him. The issue with this is the fact that Amanda and Asaka were seen outside of the room(which is why people heard Amanda call her bodyguard “Asaka”, according to the website) and therefore makes it questionable that Rum didn’t see her bodyguard. The second one is the fact that Rum didn’t verify his kill before killing Kohji(which should be a standard procedure for the BO). The second alternative however was that Rum did clean up a messy room, meaning that Rum did in fact attack both Amanda and Asaka and fed both of them the prototype, which failed to kill Asaka(and lead to her disappearance). This scenario makes the most sense and also explains Rumi’s motives. Akai Tsutomu According to my previous speculations, Tsutomu interrupted Rum’s assassination and fought against him until Rum had to flee. This theory has further been supported by new information that Gosho revealed in the recent Super Digest Book 90+ Q&A. Gosho revealed that Akai Tsutomu is a Jeet Kune Do practitioner.

This would mean that Tsutomu used Jeet Kune Do to fight against Rum. Since Akai demonstrated the finger jab technique during the flashback, that revealed information about Tsutomu(File 972), it’s highly possible that Tsutomu used that against Rum to blind him, which ultimately forced Rum to flee from the crime scene without cleaning it up.

As mentioned by Akai, this technique blinds your opponent, but it’s only temporary. There are cases where the cornea(eye surface) gets scratched by the nail and ultimately gets infected, which could lead to blindness, and in worst case scenario, getting a prosthetic, but that wouldn’t exactly be called “some sort of accident”(which Haibara referred his eye loss as in File 908).

The Kohji Website’s uploader Another translation error that was cleared up was the fact that Agasa never claimed that the uploader of the Kohji case knew “minute detail”, but was rather asking Conan how he knew that Kohji resisted his killer(File 948). This means that the uploader isn’t necessarily someone that was there in the crime scene, meaning that Tsutomu(or someone he shared info with) and Asaka aren’t the only options. If Asaka isn’t the uploader, then it’s possible that she is the one that took the shogi piece from Kohji’s hand, after surviving the prototype drug(since she wouldn’t have any regards for preserving the crime scene in order to share it online). This would mean that Asaka has the “Uma” piece(“treasure”), and fake Asaka(Rumi) has the “U” shard(“map”), that is hinting to the “Uma” piece. Since the uploader wasn’t necessarily involved in the crime scene, the uploader could most likely be Mary and Sera after all. Since they are clearly interested in Haneda Kohji’s case and Asaka(File 952-953), it’s definitely possible that Mary got a hold of the crime scene photos from James, in order to get help and conduct her own investigation on Tsutomu’s disappearance while in Japan. Since the website keeps going down, Mary would naturally suspect that it’s the BO’s doing, and therefore worry that they might make their move during Hotta Gaito’s case(File 952).

Iori Muga

In my Iori discussion, when I was talking about his age, I mentioned that he was at least 13. That was because we have a precedent in which a fake identity can be younger than the real age. Who I’m referring to is Okiya Subaru, who is 27 years old(File 623), while his true identity, Akai Shuichi, was confirmed by Gosho to be 31-32 years old(SDB 90+).

This means that a character can be 4-5 years older than the number in their name box. Following that logic, Iori might’ve been 17-18 years old, which would’ve made him more suitable to carry out assassinations 17 years ago if he’s Rum. There’s however another incident, besides Subaru/Akai, that happened in Rum Arc. Satami Saya, from the blogger case(File 918-920), was introduced as a 24-year-old, but at the conclusion of that case, we found out that she was hiding the fact that she was 29 years old(5 years older).

The fact that we have a case in Rum arc that reveals that a character is 5 years older(the same number as Subaru/Akai) than what they claimed to be makes it highly possible that it is meant to tell us that the age in the name box cannot be fully trusted in Rum arc. The fact that this happens in a case where a Rum plot character is involved(Kuroda) further supports this interpretation. Following the number that Gosho chose in Saya’s case, if Iori is Rum, then he was most likely 18 years old when he killed Amanda and Kohji(which isn’t that far off from the main red-herring’s/Rumi’s age). Gosho has shown that he is aware that the fans are gonna look at the age for every suspect. An example to his awareness is how he made Rumi emphasize her fitting age to be involved in the Kohji case by saying that she’s 10 years older than Kobayashi(File 966). For him to use the name box as a way to hide Rum’s fitting age makes sense. The fact that Gosho gave Iori a very suspicious and new style of introduction, in which he got a name box with “????”, further makes it look like he’s intentionally highlighting the name box this way in order to make the reader focus on the name box when the identity is revealed(as if there’s something important about it).

Summary:

- Wakita Kanenori is the closest subordinate of the boss and the one that drugged Mary. He might be a mentor figure to Gin.

- Wakasa Rumi is Vermouth in disguise. She is trying to pose as Asaka in order to get Conan’s help in solving the dying message so that she can find and eliminate the real Asaka. Rumi got a hold of the “U” shard from Kohji’s crime scene, which she was planning on showing to Conan when she got the chance.

- Haneda Kohji’s dying message involves the “Uma”(horse) shogi piece, which the “U” shard was hinting towards, and it was taken from the crime scene.

- Asaka is Kohji’s sister, who inherited the hand-mirror from her mother and lent it to Kohji before he died. She was also fed the SB prototype, along with Amanda, but survived. She was the one that took the shogi piece from the crime scene, before she escaped.

- Tsutomu used Jeet Kune Do against Rum, and used the finger jab technique to blind him, which forced Rum to escape and leave the crime scene messy.

- The Kohji case uploader is most likely Mary and Sera, who got the case info and photos from James Black.

- If Iori is Rum, he’s 35 years old and was actually 18 when he killed Amanda and Kohji 17 years ago.

[morshtalon]

My Top 5 Video Game Intros

Since I haven't posted in a while and since I don't have any ideas for full-fledged reviews, let's do something different today and talk about my 5 favorite intros to video games I enjoyed in the past. Please note that this is a very personal, opinionated list; I have somewhat deliberately avoided really obvious picks (consider Metal Gear Solid 3's and Final Fantasy VI's openings, among others, to be hovering around in spirit somewhere around here). Furthermore, I'm not limiting myself exclusively to that very first, usually pre-rendered opening scene of a game (like, the attract mode before you even press start), because most of the time those are kind of devoid of any meaning and without context, I'd just be judging them by coolness or whatever, which isn't very interesting or inducive to commentary. Anyway, without further ado, here are my top 5 video game intros:

#5: Wild Arms 3's evolving opening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvoueEiVyWE

At first, Wild Arms 3's opening is just a standard anime thing. It's fairly animated and stuff, and that's fine as far as that goes, but there are two things I find quite special with this opening; one that was always there from the start and one that was a product of the localization. First off, there are actually four versions of the opening. You see, the game is separated into 4 chapters, each with a different main villain which is somewhat related to the last, with varying levels of directness. In that way, as has been said before, it feels like seasons of an anime, and I think the game struck a good balance of making itself both a cohesive experience and a sort of episodic narrative simultaneously. To reflect that, the opening "evolves" as you progress through the game, changing key scenes to reflect the current "season" villain. I find that to be pretty awesome and an idea I haven't really seen repeated anymore; I believe mostly due to the fact that WA3 has this sort of unique story direction that lent itself to the evolving intro. Still, more games should adopt this style. They might have, I dunno, this is the coolest example out of the games I've played anyway. The second thing that impresses me is how well the localization performer fared singing the english version of the opening theme, Advanced Wind. I think it's actually better than the original. There's a certain sweetness and determination in her voice that is so fitting with the game's main character, I could almost trick myself into thinking it was actually Virginia hollering those lyrics. Pretty good opening, not higher on the list because it -is- just a pre-title opening I guess, but still. Also, Wild Arms 3 itself is alright, check it out if you're a fan of this kind of stuff.

#4: Cave Story's first taste of gameplay

What makes Cave Story's introduction interesting is that it... sort of doesn't exist. You're just dropped straight into the action with no real clue what's going on besides a brief interaction between two characters that makes completely no sense at that point. Every plot detail is up to you to find out in an immersive manner that doesn't barrage the player with endless backstories and setups and information you don't really need. Even Dark Souls, one of my favorite games and the one I perceive to be closest to the ideal of gameplay and story integration, feels the need to weigh down your mind with stuff before you start. Don't get me wrong, I understand why Dark Souls and many other games need it, but the fact that Cave Story -doesn't- is rather admirable, in my opinion. I love games where you start out without knowing what's going on, solving challenges just based on the fact you're playing a game and need to go forward, to only then start piecing together the great scheme of things from in-game data collection. What's even better about Cave Story is that there's no limitation at the start: you're dropped into full gameplay conditions, without bumbling around a peaceful area while the backstory is exposed to you by an NPC or anything "cinematic" like that. You're just left to figure everything out on your own. Pretty cool.

#3: Dragon Warrior II's extended prologue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OlHofpQ7LA

Dragon Quest 2's original Famicom version started out pretty shitty. It was basically only a slight alteration to the previous installment's intro: you're in a throne room (this time you're actually the prince, sitting on the queen's throne for some reason), some guard from the faraway kingdom of Moonbrooke comes along and warns the king of impending doom before collapsing from his wounds, the king gives you some brief words of encouragement and sets you off on an adventure with minimal financial backup and a crap sword (admittedly, a better deal than in DQ1). For the international version, by some divine intervention causing a brief miracle shining in the face of Nintendo's then-oppressive censorship, an extensive prologue scene was added depicting the events that befell Moonbrooke prior to that guard setting off on his journey. What makes this scene special, however, is how brilliantly it expands on the tropes established by the localization of the previous title. Dragon Warrior 1 had this faux-Elizabethan translation for some reason, which was pretty charming but otherwise just a strange quirk they added for the overseas release. The extended prologue added here actually runs with that theme and frames the story as some kind of fairy tale; a narrator intercepts the dialog message boxes to preface each character's next line, there is some opening text that feels as if some elderly gent from Shakespeare times was weaving a tale in front of his audience's eyes, and it even goes somewhat into detail pretty much leaving no room for the player to doubt that the people of Moonbrooke flat out died. Also, the guard that makes the voyage to your kingdom is given a tiny little bit of characterization, just enough to wrap up the scene pretty much as best as they could have. Overall, this makes Dragon Warrior II have the most engaging start of the original trilogy; it was something they didn't have to do at all, but they did it and actually made the game better for it. At least until you get to Rhone and it starts its genocide of the player's happiness, soul, and reasons to live.

#2: Suikoden II - Reminiscence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WLyjRex0ac

Suikoden II's emotional storyline and comparatively grounded narrative offer a nice contrast to the PSX's library of jRPGs concerned with elevating their epicness to ridiculous degrees. The game really cements this approach on the introductory flashback scene that functions as the opening credits. To me, the reminiscence scene is pivotal, serving a variety of functions that cause ripple effects lasting even beyond one's playthrough of the game. The setup is simple: The main character and his best friend run afoul of a ploy to abruptly terminate a cease-fire between two nations; they are pursued by some knights and cornered at a cliff above a river. You and your friend, then, etch a marking on a spot in the cliff wall and jump into the river below, planning to return to the etched spot should he and you get separated. While you are being carried by the currents, the scene itself begins. It's simply a flashback montage showcasing glimpses of the life you and your friend led leading up to your enrollments in the army and departure for the sabotaged expedition, accompanied by a relatively simple piano piece. However, it's a scene that is central to the themes of the entire game. It provides, first and foremost, a contrast between a perceived bright future with an everlasting bond of friendship and the tragedies that will soon occur in these characters' lives. It's a window into the will and emotions of the main character himself in his comfort zone; the life that he will so clamor to return to as the game progresses and things get increasingly more unwieldy for everyone. It sets up everything you need to know about the relationship between you, your best friend, and your sister on a 2-minute scene with no dialog; conveying all it needs only on its fantastic sprite work and score. It lets you know that this is, first and foremost, a game about feelings and about interpersonal relationships, using the war that you expect to happen from having played Suikoden 1 more as a backdrop to explore introspective consequences and how it affects people's visions. Most importantly, however, is that it serves as a reminder of what it was like for you, the player, when you come back from having completed the game. I literally cannot watch this scene anymore without shedding a tear or two. It happens every time. I actually prefer the normal version with the sepia filter, but I couldn't find it on its own like that, so here's the full-color version of it that you get from doing some ludicrous stunt before you jump into the river or whatever. Either one's fine, really. By the way, get the bad ending. The good one completely ruins the message and weight of the entire story, almost making the game meaningless.

#1: Vagrant Story - Climax of the Graylands Incident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4m42OmAczo

Vagrant Story is an odd game in many aspects. Its gameplay is a crossbreed of roguelikes and rhythm games, it has yet another strange Shakespearean localization, the characters are dressed all weird and BDSM-y and showing a lot of skin... Anyway, one of the game's odd quirks is that it has tons of stuff that you can miss by pressing start at an inopportune moment. One of them is the simply amazing opening; an epic 11-minute in-engine "cutscene" (with occasional gameplay sections that transition very smoothly because it's all done with in-game models and graphics) jampacked with plot detailing the events leading up to the game's start, with even the music trying its best to synchronize itself with the cutscene's many shifts in mood and intensity. You can easily miss all this because it starts with a long wall of text that most players would read faster than the time it takes for it to disappear and press "start" because they think they're done with it and there's nothing left to see. A shame, really, because to me this one part of the game almost manages to outshine the entire rest of it. There's just such a density of things happening here; this urban gray rainy moody setting is more fitting to the localization's flowery prose than the things that happen in Léa Monde, and it's all just done so well with the PSX's limitations. While pretty much every other game ever opts for FMVs or an otherwise pre-rendered solution for its openings and important moments, Vagrant Story does it all with the same exact rules (well... excluding the vapid meaningless pre-opening that happens before the title screen shows up but just forget about that one), and the result is that everything feels like it has much more weight to it. Also, as I said, there is the advantage of transitioning smoothly into gameplay, which the game -does- go on to use a few times later on for short "boss appearing at the boss arena"-type cutscenes, but those all lack the juice and meat of this glorious opening scene. It's just a meticulously created, awesome example of Video Game craftsmanship, outside of just being really awesome to watch as well. I absolutely love it.

Here are some runners-up: Wild Arms 2's Disc 2 cinematic (US version); Fire Emblem: Thracia 776's opening (before title screen); That part in Actraiser when you descend into Fillmore stage 1 and go into the statue and that kickass track starts playing; The brief scroll down on the dark forest scene in Tales of Phantasia (Super Famicom) before the title screen shows up (really fascinated me as a kid); Lufia: The Legend Returns (odd pick but it has a pretty charming intro with some nice artwork for the GBC); Probably many others that I'm forgetting right now.

Anyway, from this list you can sort of tell what games I like to play so I can excuse myself from writing a dreaded positive review of something for a while. Also, I noticed that things that are done with the in-game engine tend to impress me more than things that aren't, even though it's technically actually more work to do an anime FMV thing I guess? Well, whatever, I'm a hypocrite and stupid so make sure to share your own opinions too if you want I guess I dunno.

[antialiasis]

The War of the Worlds

So after seeing that live War of the Worlds concert the other day, I started getting curious about the book. I was interested in exactly how faithful of an adaptation the album was, plus just feeling a little uncultured for considering myself a fan of this classic story without being more than very vaguely familiar with the actual book. So I decided to do something about that.

I started by just going on Wikipedia (hence that H. G. Wells quote I posted the other day) and reading the plot summary to get the basic gist of how it might be different. The plot summary featured passages like “Now in a deserted and silent London, he begins to slowly go mad from his accumulated trauma, finally attempting to end it all” and “The narrator continues on, finally suffering a brief but complete nervous breakdown, which affects him for days”, which made me think that aaactually maybe I should just read it, particularly after feeling a great kinship with the author after reading that quote that I posted. And luckily, it’s in the public domain and freely available online.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot, actually more than I expected. The War of the Worlds came out in 1897, and like a lot of people, I can’t help but feel sort of instinctively prejudiced against books written that long ago - I expect something kind of stuffy and unrelatable, rooted in the values and concerns of a bygone, alien era. The War of the Worlds, somewhat ironically, is not alien in that way at all. Human society may have changed over the course of the past 120 years (120 years!), but the basic emotions and instincts of human beings are the same as always, and The War of the Worlds is an intensely human novel - more than the activities of the Martians per se, it’s about human reactions to the invasion, the narrator’s harrowing emotional journey through his encounters with the Martians, how the people he meets cope with the horrors that are happening, the dawning realization that humanity is powerless to stop this alien apocalypse.

In other words, it’s also my kind of novel, and it’s delightful to me to see just how similar this is to the sorts of things modern authors write about analogous situations - the sorts of things I might write. There’s even a bit that presses my buttons pretty hard: The narrator is holed up with a curate (the book equivalent of Parson Nathaniel) who is slowly losing his mind and has started shouting and raving in a way that’s set to alert the Martians outside to their presence. After trying desperately in vain to get him to be quiet, the narrator, “fierce with fear”, grabs for a meat cleaver on the wall and leaps after the curate, then, “with a last touch of humanity”, turns it around to strike him unconscious with the butt of it instead. A man desperate to survive after weeks of unending horrors is driven almost to horrific murder with pure, animalistic terror, but can’t actually do it? Yes, please. This is totally what I would write into a story about a Martian invasion, and 120 years ago H. G. Wells wrote the same thing, because humans and the fascination with the outer edges of human psychology in extreme, horrifying situations transcends time and culture.

That being said, it is of course obvious in the framing of the novel that it’s set and written in the 1890s, and that’s pretty fascinating too. I noticed particularly how much communication has changed - in the novel the Martians have murdered a party of scientists and set a large area on fire days before the news starts to spread that okay, there are Martians and they’re hostile and this is kind of a big deal. A man sends a telegram to London about it, but is dead before they telegram him back to confirm, and when they get no response, they shrug and figure it’s a hoax. It seems incredible to read about people going about their lives normally the day after an alien mass murder, simply because they’ve only heard vague third-hand stories if that and none of it seems terribly real. It’s unthinkable in the modern world to imagine information spreading at such a slow, human pace - it really makes you appreciate how much the world has changed in that respect.

In other places, the novel is simply scientifically dated, in delightfully quaint ways. Everything about Mars in it is of course wild speculation from long before we’d gone to space or knew much of anything about Mars: Wells posits that its red color is the color of its native vegetation, for instance. The Martians themselves have evolved to sustain themselves simply by injecting the blood of other creatures into their own veins, and this completely removes their need for a digestive system, allowing them to consist almost entirely of brain. And the narrator asserts that this (along with their asexual reproduction) is what causes the Martians to experience no emotions - because human emotions come from the digestive and sexual organs, and would simply disappear if we were to evolve to discard those organs! The way it’s described sounds very logical, and it must have seemed totally reasonable at the time, but it’s pretty amusing for a modern reader.

That speculative aspect is often really interesting, though, and it was fun to see how much more of that background the novel has than Jeff Wayne’s adaptation (understandably). I was not at all expecting an explanation for why the Martians would decide to feed on humans specifically rather than other animals, but that’s in there: the Martians brought in their cylinders the corpses of a couple of Martian animals which coincidentally happen to be bipedal and fairly similar to humans in size, and it is subsequently deduced that these must be their primary native food source. They simply regarded humans as the most edible-looking creatures on Earth, the same way we’d probably feel most comfortable eating a bulky, quadrupedal alien resembling cows or sheep than one whose basic form looks more like a human or an insect. It takes a standard weird trope that your average person would just shrug and accept and explains it to make perfect sense - beautiful.

In the musical version there is a moment where the narrator mentions the Martians have long since eliminated bacteria from their planet, obviously in order to set up the ending; I’d often heard the ending referred to as one of the most infamous examples of a deus ex machina, so I wondered if the novel had had no such setup at all, but it actually sets it up even more extensively, in two separate chapters (once when discussing the biology of the Martians in detail, from which the line in the musical is taken, and also in a different chapter where the narrator explains that the Martian red weed would eventually be killed off by microbes).

(Really, the ending is fucking awesome and I will fight you on this. The whole point of the novel is how for all of humanity’s arrogance and what they consider awesome weaponry, they can barely touch these superpowered invaders, but the Martians’ own arrogance and reliance on their superior technology is their downfall in the end - they’ve rendered their own bodies frail and defenseless against these invisible threats that they simply forgot existed and never accounted for (or never knew; the novel also suggests maybe bacteria never even evolved on Mars), which we humans are protected from because of our evolutionary history of struggling with disease and developing defenses against it. It is not an authorial asspull to save the day on any level at all; it’s carefully foreshadowed and exactly thematically appropriate and makes perfect sense within the established premises of the novel and is generally one of the best endings of anything ever. Putting it in the same category as lazy “but then a contrived coincidence/power pulled out of nowhere/conveniently arriving character fixed everything” resolutions is pretty ridiculous.)

Of course, since at the outset I had wanted to examine how Jeff Wayne’s musical version had adapted the novel, I was also looking out for that. The adaptation is all in all quite faithful to the basic story; the actual core storyline of the Martian invasion is pretty much identical aside from being compacted, with most of the narrator’s lines closesly adapted from the novel as direct or near-direct quotes (where changed, they’re usually cutting out detail or slightly simplifying the language).

There are mainly two major changes. In the novel, the narrator never goes to London himself until the end; instead, there are a couple of chapters from the point of view of the narrator’s younger brother, a medical student in London (still written in the narrator’s voice, though, since in-universe he’s writing this account after the fact, relaying what his brother described to him). The brother is there for the panic when (several days into the invasion) the government calls for an evacuation of London, and then eventually gets on a steamer out of the country, from which he witnesses the HMS Thunder Child’s valiant last stand. These chapters feel a little out of place, and the introduction of several new characters to tell this part of the story who then simply disappear is fairly extraneous and doesn’t get the reader terribly invested, so it’s definitely a solid and sensible choice in the adaptation to simply remove the brother and have the narrator be in London and witness the Thunder Child chapter himself. Since he’s obviously not going to be on the boat getting out of England himself, though, to get the listener invested in the fate of the steamer, Jeff Wayne instead puts the narrator’s girlfriend/fiancée Carrie and her father on the boat - with them also providing his reason to go to London to begin with. In the novel, the narrator is married and lives with his wife near where the first Martian cylinder lands; after they turn out to be hostile and dangerous, he leases a horse-carriage to take his wife to safety in the town of Leatherhead and then comes back alone to return the carriage, which is how they get separated. He then spends the rest of the novel worrying for her safety and wanting to get to Leatherhead to find her again. This setup is a bit complex, and all in all I think the musical version made a good call in simplifying it to one that’s easily comprehensible with much less dialogue; it does create an interesting difference in the narrator’s situation during the second act, though, as in the musical version he knows that Carrie made it to safety, while in the novel he believes his wife to possibly if not probably be dead until they both meet again in the epilogue.

The other major change is in the narrator’s dealings with the curate/Parson Nathaniel. In the novel, the narrator meets the curate, a young man, shortly after escaping from the fighting machines and being separated from the artilleryman, and they spend weeks together, first traveling and then trapped in an abandoned house after a cylinder lands on top of it. The curate is cowardly, indecisive and grows increasingly agitated and incoherent, and he is in a constant conflict with the narrator for most of this time. His character is frustrating, pitiful but starts to border on despicable, a man reduced to a gibbering, animalistic mess selfishly hogging food and recklessly endangering the narrator and himself with inane ramblings.

Parson Nathaniel in the musical adaptation, however, is a more genuinely pitiable figure. The narrator only comes across him shortly before the cylinder lands on the house they take shelter in; he sounds much older than in the book, and he has a wife, Beth, who he deliriously believes to be one of the devils here to claim the earth for Satan. His religious philosophy, while deranged, feels much more coherent than that of the curate in the book, and ultimately he comes across as much more of a sympathetic and tragic figure. That’s likely the root of why this change was made - the curate in the book is desperately unlikeable, which mostly fuels the narrator’s conflict with himself and the long, grueling setup culminating in that desperate moment of nearly killing him. Obviously I’m a fan of that part, but it would’ve been very hard to do that setup in a way that would actually work in the musical version, and making the parson’s desperation and misguided faith into the focus for that part instead makes a lot of sense. It helps that “The Spirit of Man” is one of the best songs on the album.

(Interestingly, the outtakes on the Collectors’ Edition include some voice outtakes with a much younger-sounding parson who is much closer to the curate’s character in the book and seems to match his role much more closely, with more direct or near-direct quotes from the book. The change to the parson’s character must have happened fairly late in the development of the album, then - after they started recording vocal work. I’m pretty interested in the story here and how they developed the final version of “The Spirit of Man”.)

The addition of his wife Beth is a less obvious choice, and even before I read the book it felt a little weird how unceremoniously she was disposed of in the musical version. Part of me thinks she may have been added in part just to get one female voice on this album - the book contains basically no real female characters with significant speaking parts whatsoever. That lack isn’t too glaring in the book - there are very few characters with significant speaking roles to begin with - but it’s still reasonable to want to patch it up a little in a more modern adaptation. But her role is also as an optimistic, hopeful contrast to the parson’s apocalyptic ravings, which the narrator probably couldn’t have provided in the same way after everything he’s seen. And the parson’s relationship with her develops him a bit more and adds to his tragic nature - she’s his wife, so they must have loved each other once upon a time, but this alien apocalypse has driven him to believe she’s in league with the Satan himself, and even when she dies he only channels his anguish into his nonsensical convictions. Beth is the only character who remains steadfastly hopeful and urges sanity and reason - in the book, the narrator remarks that seeing the curate’s descent into madness tightened his grip on his own sanity, but perhaps Beth’s genuine hope serves the same purpose for him in the musical version.

(It also occurs to me that theoretically Beth’s optimism could be viewed as setup for “Brave New World” - if one man could stand tall, she sings, there must be some hope for us all, and later, the narrator comes across what initially seems to be just such a man, with a plan for saving humanity and keeping its spirit alive. But I’m not sure I buy that as a reason for her presence - both because it seems a bit backwards given the artilleryman turns out to not actually represent the true hope of humanity and because otherwise these two songs feel very separate and not like they’re supposed to be connected at all.)

I found it interesting that in the book, the way the artilleryman frames his plan is a lot more explicitly eugenicist in nature - he talks a lot more about getting the right sorts of men and women into their underground city and keeping the riffraff out (“We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.”), compared to “Brave New World”’s vague, innocent-sounding “With just a handful of men…” Interestingly, the Icelandic translation of the musical version felt closer to the book in this respect, because there that line was translated as “With just a few chosen men” - definitely getting the feeling the translator had read the book. I suspect this was very intentionally toned down for the musical version because the narrator initially pretty much buys into the plan, which would be a bit jarring with the full implications of the original.

The artilleryman’s character in the book also generally comes across as more of a… well, the sort of nerd who today might fantasize about the zombie apocalypse. He focuses a lot more on how the Martians will keep humans as pets and how most humans will eventually just accept their Martian overlords, relishing the minutiae of how grim things will be and the depths to which humanity will sink and how they must resist descending into savagery, while Jeff Wayne’s version is far more focused on his grandiosely optimistic ideas about what the underground city will be like - banks and prisons and schools! We can get everything working! He sounds enthusiastic at the idea of this underground living, whereas his book counterpart appears to suggest it strictly as a means of survival.

I don’t have much of a big conclusion here; Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds is a good adaptation, its changes are solid, and overall it puts the novel fairly faithfully into an accessible dramatic format, but I still really appreciate the book’s somewhat more complex and nuanced, if also somewhat more cynical, takes. Overall, I think The War of the Worlds is a really good story, and I’m amazed that here I am enjoying its explorations of human nature 120 years on. And if you want to enjoy it in a more accessible form than a 120-year-old novel, go give the musical version a listen, because it is great.