#it’s fitting since he recently popped back up in the manga for whatever was that nanami moment

[lavenderjewels]

big fan of all the jjk ino appreciation lately

[meliaaizawa]

MOUNTAIN RESUCE

The long-awaited part 2 to “Hot Springs Trip.”

Word count: 2,185

*Yamada’s POV*

“Not gonna lie… I’m pretty disappointed our vacay getaway is gonna end soon,” I said to Oboro as the two of us sat in the hot springs together. “Same here, dude… I can’t get enough of this,” he said, sinking down into the hot water even more. “Guess Shota’s had enough of it though,” I commented, as he didn’t come with us this evening. Oboro smirked at me and said, “dunno… maybe he just wanted some alone time with Mei,” as he winked at me. “Speaking of Mei… I had one final idea for Operation: Meizawa: Vacay Edition,” I said.

Our goal of getting Meiya and Shota to confess their apparent love for each other has been… unsuccessful to say the least. And with one more day left in our vacation, we were running out of time, so we had to come up with one final plan. “When we go on that hike tomorrow, the two of us could somehow get ‘lost,’ leaving Shota and Mei alone together on a romantic hike,” I explained. “Hmmm… not our best plan yet… but we’re on the final leg of our journey, so this is our last shot,” Oboro replied. “Desperate times, desperate measures,” he added with a shrug.

Once we had our fill of the hot springs for the evening, the two of us headed back to our room. As we approached the door, I put a finger to my lips and said “shhh,” as I quietly opened the door and peeped in. I wanted to see if we could catch a glimpse of Shota and Mei alone together. As Oboro followed suit above me, he lost his balance and fell forward, swinging the door fully open and causing us to fall into the room. We looked up from our position on the floor to see Shota with a volume of manga in hand, sitting alone on the couch with the usual judgmental glare as he looked at us. Oboro and I both nonchalantly stood up, looking at Shota, who simply rolled his eyes and continued reading, not even wanting to ask why we were on the floor when we came in.

“Heya, Shota!!” Obo said, looking around the room, seeing the door to Mei’s room was open. “Where’s Mei?” he asked. Shota shrugged and said, “don’t know.” Obo and I looked at each other with a look of disappointment. Guess they weren’t getting their one-on-one time like we were imagining. “Guess she wanted one more dip in the hot springs before we head home,” I commented. “Still not too late for you to take one more soak,” Oboro added, speaking to Shota. “No thanks,” he replied, still looking down at his manga. Just a few moments later, Mei walked through the door that was still open behind us. “Oh, hey guys,” she said, sort of taken aback by us standing right in front of the doorway still.

“You enjoy the hot springs?” Oboro asked, to which she nodded. “It was sooo relaxing, but now I’m ready for bed!” she replied with a yawn, coming into the room and closing the door behind her. “Truueee, go on and get some beauty sleep… not that you need any, of course,” I said with a wink to her, side-eyeing Shota to see if he would have any kind of reaction (which he didn’t). Mei looked at me with a furrowed brow and shook her head. “Whatever, I’m going to bed… night, guys,” she replied with a small wave before she disappeared into her bedroom and shut the door behind her. “Guess we should turn in too, huh?” Oboro said. “Because I know at least one of us definitely needs the beauty rest,” he added, looking straight at me, trying not to laugh. “Don’t talk about Shota like that!!” I joked, knowing he was referring to me.

We ate some breakfast in the morning after everyone was awake, and then headed towards the hiking trail once our food settled. So, as far as physical fitness goes, the three of my companions are way ahead of me, so I tend to fall a bit behind on excursions such as this… but today my physical un-fitness would come in handy to provide a window of opportunity for Oboro and I to get lost. The trail started off easily, but the further we got, the steeper it got, to the point where I began lagging behind. I finally reached the point where I was out of breath, so I stopped to take a break. “Ahem,” I coughed to get Oboro’s attention. He turned to me, and I made a face as if to say, “fall back with me.” He nodded to me and then spoke up. “Hizashi needs a break… so I’ll stay back with him, you two can go ahead,” he said.

As Shota and Mei stopped and turned around, I acted like I was exhausted (well… I really was exhausted). “Oh, we could all take a break, if you’d like!” Mei said, looking concerned over my exhaustion. “JUST GO ON WITHOUT ME, I DON’T DESERVE TO LIVEEEE!!! LET ME DIE IN PEACE!!!!” I exclaimed, as animatedly and obnoxiously as I could. “Let’s keep going,” Shota said in a deadpan response to my extra-ness, which was exactly what I was hoping for. Not surprisingly, Mei said, “ok!!” and followed Shota like a lost puppy as he walked on ahead. “Ok, you can stop acting now,” Oboro said with a laugh once they were out of sight. “Ha Ha, riiight,” I replied, really trying my best now to catch my breath.

*Meiya’s POV*

Shota led the way in silence as we continued walking up the hiking trail. It was a beautiful day, and the scenery around me made me so very happy… trees, greenery, and birds chirping... We made it to the end of the trail, which was at an overlook at the crest of the small mountain. The only way down was back down the trail we had just conquered. I climbed up a tall rock that was above the overlook and looked out at the valley below, sitting down and just admiring the view. Shota followed suit and found another rock to sit on. We sat like this for quite some time, with no sign of our two companions. I looked at my watch… Nearly an hour had passed of us sitting in a comfortable silence.

“I wonder if something happened to Obo and Zashi,” I said, breaking the silence as I looked down the path we had just come up. “Maybe they got lost,” Shota said. “The path is a straight shot though!” I replied. “They still get lost at U.A.” he commented. “Ok, fair… well, we should go and look for them then,” I said, standing up from my seat and jumping off the tall rock. As we treaded down the path silently, I pulled out my phone. *No service… great* I thought to myself before sticking the phone back in my pocket and picking up my pace slightly to keep up with Shota.

Since the path was all downhill, it didn’t take us very long to make it back down the mountain. There was no sight of our friends at all on the trail, nor at the trail entrance, where we were at now, looking all around. I pulled out my phone again, thinking maybe they came back down and went to the inn. I called both Obo and Zashi, but both calls went straight to voicemail, as if their numbers were in an area with no service. Shota observed all I was doing, and I turned and gave him a worried look. He shrugged and replied, “it’s probably one of their idiotic pranks.” “But it’s been hours… I think we should look for them. They must still be in the forest somewhere,” I said.

Shota sighed deeply and said, “fine,” before heading back up the path, with me close behind. We stopped where we had last seen Obo and Zashi. There wasn’t anything that immediately gave us any indication of where they went, so we began to walk off the trail around the area. As we searched for them, I was sure to keep Shota in my sight, so I didn’t get lost or anything. We walked through the forest for quite some time when I remembered the provisional hero licenses that we had gotten a couple months ago. “This would be more efficient in the air,” I commented. “Good point,” he said, as I created a cloud and hopped onto it. Shota watched me for a moment, as if waiting for me to fly off.

“Wouldn’t it be smarter to have two pairs of eyes in the air, though?” I asked. Shota simply nodded and hopped on the cloud with me, holding onto my shoulders securely as I tried not to blush. We took off, and I flew us in a sort of spiral path outward from our original spot on the trail, flying high enough for us to see, while not flying above the trees. I felt one of Shota’s hands tap my shoulder and he pointed at a small cliffside towards the left. I nodded and flew us in that direction, landing on top of the cliff, which was around 15 feet tall. As we stood on top of it and peered over the edge, which looked like there was a recent landslide down the cliff.

As I looked down through the rocks and dirt from the landslide, I recognized two familiar heads of hair- one light blue and one blonde. I sighed smally in relief before jumping off the cliff, creating a cloud under my feet right before I landed, to break my fall. I looked up at Shota standing on top of the cliff, looking down at me, and nodded at him, causing him to jump off as well. With perfect timing, I created a cloud underneath him right before he landed to break his fall. My attention then went to the two heads that were popping out of the dirt. I went over to them and leaned over, causing them to look up at me. “Mei!!!” Obo said, relieved. “I’m so glad you’re here… my nose itches like crazy,” he said with a laugh, as his body was buried up to his shoulders. I chuckled and shook my head. “What’d you get yourselves into??” I asked, giving his nose a scratch.

“We were standing on top of the cliff, looking at the view, when it suddenly collapsed and slid us down, burying us in the process,” Obo explained. “Hizashi tried to use his quirk to call for help, but before he could, a bee stung him on the lip,” he added, motioning towards his friend with his chin. I looked at Hizashi and noticed his bottom lip was swollen and red. “Don’b worrby, we’re nob hurb, bub we can’b geb oub,” he mumbled, as I tried not to chuckle as his struggle of speaking normally with his swollen lip. I stood up from my crouched position and looked at Shota, who was assessing the situation. “Well… we can’t dig them out ourselves,” he said, looking up at the sun that was beginning to get lower in the sky as evening was soon approaching. “Should I fetch the rescue squad?” I replied. He nodded and sat down on a nearby rock.

I flew into town and found the rescue squad, leading them to where I knew my friends were trapped. The rescue squad was efficient in digging our friends out of the landslide. As they did so, I explained what had happened to one of the officers, with Shota standing beside me silently. “You two did exactly what you were supposed to… so, well done! Are you studying to become heroes?” he asked. I nodded with a smile and said, “yessir… oh, and I do have a provisional license, but it’s back at the inn we are staying at,” remembering that I used my quirk in public. The officer grinned and said, “and you know the importance of keeping the law! I’m impressed… The two of you are going to make a great hero team someday,” looking at Shota and me. I blushed slightly at his comment, but neither of us said anything.

Obo and Hizashi approached us, both covered in dirt, but thankfully uninjured. “How in the world did you manage to get this far off the trail?? And what made you think it was a good idea to stand on the end of an unstable cliff??” I scolded them as they approached. “We weren’b exacbly bhinking” Hizashi replied. I rolled my eyes and said, “yeah, you two rarely think!! It could’ve gone a lot worse… but I’m just glad you’re both safe.” I playfully punched each of them in the arm and added, “just try to be more rational going forward,” side-eying Shota, who nodded smally in agreement. As I turned back to the two troublemakers, I could’ve sworn they were smirking at each other for some reason.

[kaoarika]

I rarely do written posts in Tumblr anymore because I am still figuring out how this new UI works in general (and there might be still be some bugs about writing posts + leaving them on drafts + publishing them accidentally as well), and tbh, between the past two months have been sorta chaotic and very mentally draining (besides some work I have been doing) and me attempting to think around some of my few active fandoms... well, haven’t had an eureka moment where I sit and write what I think about stuff.

So, let’s talk about some “stuff”.

Some days ago, I accidentally noticed by PURE CHANCE that some of the completed webtoons I was going to “eventually read” in LINE were going to get “locked”/converted  for Daily Pass. I mean, tbf, I knew that they were going to stick to this plan since past October, but it seems they really went full force this month (they only “locked” like a couple of series back then). And it’s exactly how I thought they would do so - popular series that have been already completed, old and recent.

I’m not going to complain about “Daily Pass” because I do have some thoughts about that and the fact they could use another model than just readers farming/buying coins, but, what do you do, especially since lots of these series are PRETTY long (140+ chapters long)?

My complaint does come from that, as a web user, I found this by pure chance, despite them saying they would announce what series would be locked in a 30-day advance notice. Because there’s no apparent indicator in the main page about THIS (The only Notice/News detail you see down below the page is about Canvas creators). Heck, I don’t think they even tell you about it in their mail newsletter, which kinda suck :))).

So, anyway.

I checked and, yes, a couple of VERY old series I was interested in reading were/are going to get locked. Problem, like I mentioned? THEY are pretty long! I know I can binge read as much as I want, but I cannot make miracles like reading over 100 chapters (if one series, try thinking about 2 or 3 -  I WAS NOT GOING TO DO THIS) in less than 12 hours! ESPECIALLY if those series were going to get locked THIS WEEK.

FML.

...anyway crisis was averted when I had to let go some interesting series that I may would get my way to read them (if there is a new buying/rental model they would apply) in the future... BUT I did read stuff I was curious or wanted to read... and mainly old stuff that I was willing to eventually finish one day.

Opinions on those series?

Okay, as brief and spoiler free as possible:

Untouchable: A story about modern-day vampires that instead of drinking blood, they have evolved to absorb the energy of their preys. This one is a romantic series about Sia, a vampire model and this human guy who has a very deep microphobia, and she puts her eyes on him when she realizes that his energy is like none she has tasted before. But, again, dude has microphobia (that is more or less controlled as time goes on).

I stopped reading this one for a while because  I was sorta smelling love triangle from a jealous friend of hers that OBVIOUSLY didn’t want to be looked as “just a friend”, lol. Like “how would this get solved”, kind of thing in your typical romance stuff. But then, last week I retook it... and it wasn’t as bad... but it leaks typical shoujo stuff/problems that become a newer obstacle as time goes on and on (misscomunication, lack of trust, overprotective family ANNOYINGLY hurting their own offspring, sudden deux ex machina...?). So, I think it finished fine... But man, I was so pissed off in how some stuff was managed at the end, lmao. Especially the way a “villain” was redeemed? I know that they say “karma is a b*tch”, but, DUDE KILLED PEOPLE BEFORE!? and you redeem him in a “lol, you will find out how love will make you feel” LIKe, DUDE, WHAT THE HELL. DON’T REDEEM HIM LIKE THAT.

Ghost Wife: I started reading this series in an unofficial manner a long while ago, but I supposed that the first chapters are pretty slow and it didn’t catch me on in the first place. It’s about a girl that starts seeing ghosts/spirits, and there’s this one that becomes WAY too attached to her, that offers her two options: either been eaten/killed or agreeing to be his wife. Given the title of thise series, you might wonder she accepted the second one

My lesson? Should have kept reading. The story picks up when other ghostly creatures are introduced and they start interacting with the main female character and her “ghost husband”, especially since this ghost cannot really imitate human interaction and his solution is “hypnotizing” everyone so he can “normally” fit. And the interaction between those two becomes more gracious and natural. You can feel that she likes being with him, despite the dangers of attracting ghosts that might kill her and all that. Heh.

Other lesson I had is that: the artist isn’t EXACTLY well into action scenes and some other details (but their ghostly creatures’ designs are TERRIFYING), so, I thought “well, I know there are other artists like this in the webcomic/webtoon environment, I shouldnt be too worried about my art once I get done with mine, right?

Also, some details started to make sense later on. And I cried like a baby in some moments, as well. Don’t have too many complaints, though. Perhaps more obvious “falling in love” moments... but then I realized that some actions speak lots better than words.

About Death: And speaking of “crying like a baby”, this one. This is a very old work, and it’s a gem, and it’s short, to top! And HECK, the art was AMAZING. Very touchy, and it makes you think. There’s quite a lot of South Korean webtoons that have made me cry because... they really make you think a LOT about stuff... especially about life and death.

Oh! Holy: Story about a shy and lonely loveable dork that is in love of his childhood friend, and that they eventually find each other in high school. Said childhood friend is idolized in school (but she is... hmmm... a dork as, well). Oh, he sees ghosts. OH, and she dies within the first three chapters accidentally :3. Shenanigans happen.

I HAD A LOT OF FUN WITH THIS ONE. SURE, it’s another shoujo but WAY less dramatic than Untouchable, because this was comedy (so, a rom-com!). And this one made me want more and more to read it. The characters all had an amazing personality, chemistry and their interactions were FUN AS HELL. The author seems to have my my sense of (dumb) humor, and the art was too attractive and knew where it should bright.

I don’t think I have too many complaints about this one. I may have felt unsatisfied in some minor stuff, but everything else felt “okay” to me, in general. 

A couple of things, though: localization and some quality stuff relating to translation in this series. I cannot judge the translation, but I do think it could have handled more quality checking on this one or proofreading, I’m not sure. I know that these (licensed and translated) series come in a weekly basis, but they REALLY need to pay more $$$ to their own staff to not let this stuff happen THAT frequent.

Localization is a bit of an issue I do HAVE though, and it is the same as in “Ghost Wife” and some other recent Korean series they have licensed in the recent past: Why using English-localized names, though? SURE, they retain their original last Korean names... but... why don’t keep their FULL NAMES, I wonder? I mean, weren’t we supposed to be over that kind of stuff already (videogames, JPN anime, manga other foregin stuff)? Is it because marketability? And/or because some names are “puns” that couldn’t easily be translateable in other languages? 

If it’s the latter, I think the same is applied in other regional language localization, like, in Spanish, original English language “Axed” is called “Natacha la del Hacha” and you cannot wonder how it crawls over my skin. I know this series is BUILT ON and is full of puns (as I am following it)... but... “Axelia” is a much more cooler name than “Natacha”... :I or so I THINK? Don’t take me too seriously...

In “Ghost Wife” I get it, you have spiritual creatures... their “human” names are puns of what they really are, and these words MAYBE don’t have too much meaning in English or Spanish or whatever... but... its a bit... glaring... when the main cast has English first names... and then you have a side character called... I dunno, “Soyeon” :I. or Haetae (a creature that didn’t have a human character name...) or, heck, characters that never appear again like... there was this “Damien” dude that for some reason, his name is slipped a couple of times as “Suho” (I wonder, his original name). But, then, you have people named “Liz”, “Drake”, “Sarah”, “Nathan” ????

I suppose that in “Oh! Holy” that might be the case, too. The original Korean name of the series is “오!주예수여” that is translated as “Oh! Lord Jesus”, because Holy in Korean is named “Yesu”. And, *sigh* I think that says enough. The pun STILL works... but :’))

But at the same time, I think my thing with the English localized names in “Oh! Holy” is that they are... blatantly boring and I don’t think they fit their faces. At all. But, maybe that’s me? (I mean, the “ultimate” reaper is called Norman. NORMAN.) Like I said, they still keep their original Korean last names... but... ugh.

(this is coming from someone who gave two of her characters very not obvious Spanish names given that they are Mexican, but I do have some valid cultural and VERY obvious explanations about those...)

Also - I don’t get LINE Webtoon’s selectiveness in this localization decision. Some of the South Korean series they bring, they do KEEP their original full names (see “A Good Day to be a Dog”, “Ghost Teller”, heck, the afforementioned “Untouchable”), but then you have stuff like “Oh! Holy”, “Ghost Wife”, “Scorching Romance”, “Mom, I’m Sorry!” or “Lookism”... ?????

And, this is very blatant annoying because a) K-Pop is HUGELY global mainstream nowadays and you can hear/read fans screaming their NAMES?! And 2) K-dramas are also pretty popular these days??? 

?????? 

*LONG SIGH*

There’s a few series that I want to check out, but I still have some more days for that to happen (heck, even a bit of more than a week). But, it SURE DOES suck that most of the interesting series I had my eyes on all were going to get locked this WEEK. :))))

[momestuck]

Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim - volume 10!

We’re over the halfway mark. Nineteen friends. This time, Of Faraway Lands and Nearby Pals.

Our trolls are going to be...

These two.

Incidentally, I haven’t commented, but every troll select screen has a different drawing when you mouseover the troll. Usually they’re just the same troll with a light shining on them, looking more enthusiastic, but you gotta see Tegiri’s one...

In addition to the Jojo-like art style, that’s the katakana character ゴ ‘go’ repeated. For some reason, katakana is commonly used over hiragana for sound effects in manga, such as laughter. So yeah. We’ve finally found the mall katana guy mentioned waaaaay back in Polypa’s route!

Oddly, while ‘Tegiri’ would be valid romaji (although not, I checked, on lists of Japanese names I could find... I wouldn’t want to guess at a pseudo-’translation’, there’s a few possibilities), ‘Kalbur’ is decidedly not, and would be turned into something like ‘karuburu’ if it was transliterated into Japanese. That might be significant...

But that’s as far as my rudimentary Japanese knowledge can take me. We’ll come back to Tegiri shortly. First of all, it’s...

...beloved The Magic Roundabout character, Zebedee!

I really hope that’s not a coincidence.

Zebede

Zebede is the third and final troll by Magdalena Clarke, author of Vikare and Elwurd. Well, I enjoyed Elwurd, so that’s a good sign... hopefully...

This begins with getting a chittr notification. God, push notifications, am I right?

The name suggests we’re going to deal with the bees that made Sollux’s ‘mind honey’, granting goldbloods fantastic powers. (The game seems to have decisively chosen ‘gold’ rather than ‘yellow’, so I will defer to this.)

Who is this new friend? It seems to be someone who knows Cirava...

Their speech quirk seems to be using z in place of s, but not always.

Zebede invites us to download a video chat app...

Surprisingly, this does not result in our phone getting inducted into a botnet. Apparently the app we downloaded is called ‘grype’.

It’s weird to have so many Skype jokes given that Skype has pretty much given way to other messaging apps, at least in my experience...

He’s really excited to hear about how we know Cirava, and we tell him. He lets on rather unsubtly that he’s lonely and would appreciate a visit. Apparently he lives a long way out, for the sake of the bees.

We get our first choice...

Honestly no idea which one is the instant death option here. Probably asking if it’s really fine, but the ways we die are so random in this game, who knows?

Let’s go with asking where he lives.

We mention we went out to visit Skylla in the countryside, which leads him to... more self-deprecation. Wow, this guy sure is insecure.

And he decides like... we’re not really interested in visiting him. ‘A wall has been raised’, as the game puts it.

Dude, no wonder you don’t have friends.

OK, well, that was a short branch. Let’s try asking about his living situation and his lusus, whether it’s really fine.

Ah yes, play on his feelings of resentment. Get him to complain and wheedle in that way. That’s our narrator.

This guy’s face is so... pointy... I don’t have much commentary to add.

This leads us to a non-choice of saying we’ll go visit him immediately. This seems like a really healthy, non-manipulative friendship we’ve got going on here.

Apparently Zebede’s got some of whatever concentrated loneliness and fetishisation of friendship our narrator is suffering.

The narrator goes through a few friends to try and figure out who to get a lift from... and after rejecting Tagora, Amisia, Zebruh (oh god no), taxis and public transport, they decide the only option is to do crimes. Hey, I can get behind it.

By crimes they mean, finding an unlocked car and nicking it. Unlike Konyyl, they can’t punch locks off.

Apparently we know how to turn on the auto-pilot in a troll car. Not sure when we figured that one out!

Fittingly, Zebede’s hive is full of bees.

Inside, too, it’s a nice rustic bee farm.

We get a text message from... Cirava, it turns out. I wonder what they want...

We have the choice of ignoring it or letting it go to voicemail. Wow, we’re getting a lot of phone calls in this episode! Let’s try chatting with Cirava, maybe we can invite them over and all chill here...

It’s nice to see Cirava again. The protagonist’s weird obsession with collecting more friends instead of spending time with the ones they’ve made is highlighted...

What’s up with that?

The matter of Cirava’s clothes comes up.

Oh right so that’s what happened to Cirava’s clothes... I honestly forgot.

Anyway, Cirava’s a little worried when we say we’re hanging out with Zebede, who they know by chittr handle if not by name. They are worried that we’re tight, and we say we’re working on it.

Called out!

Anyway, Cirava warns us about getting too close to Zebede, and links... his fanfiction. OK, sure. It turns out to be... RPF. Of Cirava.

Oh dear, we’re gonna get into the RPF discourse in this episode, huh? That is something I generally want to stay a long way away from.

Anyway, Zebede comes back while we’re reading one of his fics.

That sure is an expression.

Anyway, when we explain that Cirava linked this, Zebede decides we’re not prioritising him after all, and clearly Cirava is more important than him.

I’m really not sure we want to be this guy’s friend.

He breaks down crying at the perceived slight of mentioning that we have other friends.

The protagonist starts feeling like a dick. There’s a poke at the blurry line between inner monologue and spoken dialogue on the protagonist’s part...

But anyway, that’s that for Zebede’s route.

So, how do we actually befriend this guy? Trick seems to be to pretend we care about literally nothing other than him, I guess. So let’s go back and ignore Cirava’s grype call.

Instead of answering the call, we work on our chittr profile. God, that’s hard enough irl, let alone when you’re on an alien planet...

So, we assure Zebede that we weren’t about to take a call in the middle of a hang sesh, and he starts showing us some pirate films. Then, switches to space pirate films. Poor guy’s really thrown for a loop by our indecisiveness.

The narrator is sympathetic, but unhelpful. Honestly narrator, just pick something. Fake some enthusiasm. If you really want to be friends with this kid...

We suggest watching the last thing he watched on grubtube. Which... seems like a shitty suggestion to me, since like, if it’s the last thing you watched...

But to Zebede, that seems to be something much worse.

You promise you absolutely won’t judge him. We may regret this.

Mostly, it turns out to be videos of Cirava. Yeah, we get it, he’s got a crush.

He shows us some music videos of a group called hatched2dance. I’m guessing this is a KPop (or perhaps JPop) parody, especially given the whole RPF angle...

Honestly like I probably couldn’t stand this guy in real life but I have some sympathies for his whole awkward gay teenager reading fic thing.

Anyway, seeing themselves reflected in Zebede prompts some reflection in the narrator.

The narrator has kind of a freakout on realising how offputting they’ve been - that they’ve been ‘a big phony’.

We’re saved from an existential crisis by someone showing up to reclaim their scuttlebuggy.

The narrator decides they should probably go out and face the music before this troll carves their way into the hive. This wins over Zebede even harder.

We learn that Zebede’s psychic power is... controlling bees. Using the bees, they drive off the troll outside.

And so we chill with Zebede, and the protagonist takes notes on ‘not being such a desperate piece of shit’.

We’ll see if this whole change of heart actually lasts.

The Alternian text in the picture says ‘ALTERNIA K-POP ALL-STARS’ in the Hiveswap version of the alphabet. Just in case you had any doubt what videos he’s into.

Tegiri

And now... time for things to get anime. This is the debut of David Turnbull.

The protagonist notices the edges of sunrise, and concludes they need to make a friend before daybreak. At that moment, someone accosts them.

Tegiri also gets chiptunes, in common with our other anime troll. I think it’s a remix of one of the tracks elsewhere in Homestuck. But it could easily fit in with a genuine 8-bit game.

Reassuringly, Tegiri concludes that since we’re an alien not a troll, he doesn’t have to cull us.

His typing quirk is that he replaces the letter ‘L’ with slashes.

And his character trait is, sure enough...

HUGE WEEB. Though, glass houses, stones, etc....

Naturally, the initial instant death choice is...

Unusually, we get three choices.

I can assert with 100% confidence that if I click anything other than ‘subs’, I will be executed by katana. So let’s try... both are good.

He casts us out for our indecisiveness.

The Alternian text here reads ‘PATHETIC.’ The drawing here recalls a particular anime meme... after some digging I was able to identify it as a screencap of Asuka from eva:

Think this is probably from End of Evangelion? But I can’t really recall.

...god I’m not helping my case for not being as much a weeb as Tegiri here, am I?

OK, let’s try subs now.

...lol, I’m wrong. He prefers dubs. What kind of weeb is this guy?

However, even though we’re wrong on the Most Important Question, we get to come back to his hive.

We can see body pillows around his recuperacoon, an improbable number of katanas, a bunch of figurines... the text above his bed says OPPAI, which is, well... Japanese for boobs. Yeah.

If you look closely at the anime figurines, I’m sure you can identify a few.

But except for Luffy in top right, I’m not sure about the rest. Someone who knows more about anime, feel free to fill me in. Bottom right might be a machine lifeform from NieR Automata, but that seems too recent, and wouldn’t 2B be a more in-character one for him to have?

Anyway...

I like how this casually assumes that the reader knows what an otaku is, but then again who reads Homestuck without knowing that I guess.

The narration says Tegiri has sorted his merch by blood colour, which is like... contradicted by the illustration which clearly has a bronzeblood troll at the top, but who cares I guess.

This guy is just too quotable lol.

Anyway, we get to meet a lusus again. This time, the lusus is actually drawn, not just a filtered stock photo!

It’s also mildly terrifying :D

It’s called Tadashi Inu, which means... well it kind of doesn’t mean anything (‘however dog’???), but if it was Tadashii Inu, it would mean Correct Dog.

Anyway, naturally what does an anime club do but watch anime?

He’s presently in the middle of watching ‘Philosopher’s Half-Iron’, which I’m guessing is a joke about Fullmetal Alchemist? Instead, he proposes Schoolfed Heroism (BNHA maybe?) and Kismet:Stuck Morning (no guesses for this one... I’m a fake weeb).

It’s also interesting that we’re watching on DVDs. If they wanted to go full weeb, they could put in fansub jokes here... but then this guy prefers dubs to subs, so maybe he likes to buy official releases.

Naturally, we run into translation issues.

He wanted the first edition and ‘paid extra for it’. So rather than enjoy the rest of the episode, we set off to have a word with the importer...

I have to ask... how does the troll economy work? There’s hints at a capitalist economy, money is mentioned and we had the guy running the club just now, but none of the trolls seem to have jobs. They seem to just get issued money according to their blood colour?

Speaking of which, we get some comments on troll retail...

So yeah, we’re gonna find another weeb I guess.

If that’s the billboard in the background, it's too small and blurry to work out what it says, unfortunately.

He seems pretty opposed to any ‘rebel sentiments’. Which of course he discusses with the weebiest metaphors. Alternia balances on...

He goes on about katanas for a while, like he’s going down a checklist of orientalist tropes. Naturally it’s a prelude to a challenge to ‘dance’.

We say swords are cool and this gets a little rant about bushido. You know, that self-serving horseshit some guy in the late 1800s fabricated as nationalist mythology...

We arrive at the anime store.

More text to transcribe, oh joy. At the top of the store it says the name of the shop, mentioned in dialogue, ‘SUPER TOPATO IMPORTS’. Above the door behind the counter it says ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY’.  On the bookshelf full of manga it says something too squished to easily read.

Anyway, we’re having a look around, but Tegiri starts kicking up a stink.

It’s basically the navy seal copypasta, slightly modified to be more trollish.

Meanwhile we’ve accidentally knocked some anime and manga out of someone’s hand.

Still not getting these references, unfortunately.

The troll with a pink sign is apparently against troll law - ‘depiction of nonstandard hemological attributes’.

This is all going over my head at this point. The references, I mean. Obviously the text - that Tegiri is an entitled douchebag - is clear enough.

Oh, this one I get - Ace Attorney, of course.

Anyway, this is where we get a choice. Do we stop Tegiri straight up murdering someone for peddling the wrong kind of anime?

Obviously we will try. Even though this seems like a great way to end up dead ourselves.

We speak up for the shopkeeper, and manage to convince Tegiri not to straight-up kill him. This leads to... a story, of a previous time he showed mercy, in contradiction to the law.

Of course, we know who this baby - who should have been culled for lacking a lusus, by troll law - would have been. God, I’d sure rather be hanging out with Polypa than this guy.

The narrator, of course, has one thing on their mind...

We suggest that the law, and what is right, are maybe not the same thing...?

The hard decisions such as ‘do I murder this baby?’

The narrator decides they know something about bad ways to manage loneliness...

The narrator manages to divert his rant by asking about his eyes. Which are... any guesses? Contact lenses. For cosplay.

Before we can make the error of accusing him of breaking the law by cosplaying a nonexistent blood caste, who should show up but...

Oh thank god. Save us, Polypa.

Of course he says 何 nani instead of ‘what’. And as for 後輩 kōhai, that’s basically the counterpart to senpai, the junior partner in an informal hierarchy within an organisation, dictating the use of certain honorifics. If my reading of the wiki article is right, he’s using it quite incorrectly.

Polypa lets on that we’re moirails. This causes Tegiri to be a little taken aback. The narration has some fun.

Tegiri claims - despite his huge stack of body pillows and figurines - that he has no time for quadrants.

‘Were it not for the laws of this land’ is most commonly associated with a meme from a Ghanaian film, not anime, but the sentiment surely fits.

Polypa tries to talk some sense into him.

So we end up doing an anime sleepover...

The dog is saying ワンワン (wanwan), which is standard Japanese onomatopoeia for a dog barking.

The text in this screen says... ‘Ore wa kaizoku-ou ni naru otoko da!’, which is a One Piece reference, meaning ‘I'm the man who will be the pirate king!’.

So, Tegiri may be insufferable, but at least with Polypa around we can keep him more or less under control.

There’s a few more options to explore. What if we’d picked dubs, not subs, near the start? He praises our choice, but otherwise, the story proceeds in the same way. I think that’s actually the first time we’ve had branches merge.

Now, what if we let him kill the shopkeeper?

Shockingly, he’s not as much a swordsman as he makes out. And the shopkeeper, it turns out, is psychic, and zaps him before legging it.

I was under the impression that psychic abilities were rare in goldbloods, but what do I know?

We ask like... was that really necessary?

Well, he’s certainly a tool, he got that part right. (Sorry.)

We go to report the shopkeeper’s terrible crimes to the drone, but unfortunately... it seems that the protagonist has a rap sheet themselves!

They can’t pin it on us! We’re innocent!

God, the ‘everything happened’ approach to continuity is still fucking with me. Did we make friends with Remele? Did we not? Earlier, the narration mentioned making ‘between 1 and 19′ friends. What if someone didn’t obsessively explore and replay every branch? They’d be so confused!

But despite his ineptitude with a sword, our attempted escape over an overpass leaves us...

Dead.

I’m sure this shot is also an allusion to an anime meme, but I can’t say which one, so yeah.

That’s Zebede and Tegiri. Not the best friends we’ve made, but I enjoyed the chance to be a huggggeee neeeerrrd in this post. (>implying that I could be anything other than a huge nerd on my homestuck liveread blog)

[rnufharose]

Love Yourself (Bangtan and EXO fanfiction/SehunxOC)

Chapter 19

A/N: Arabella belongs to LeopardstarSilver!

The calls from that anonymous fan wouldn't cease, and I was growing anxious. A week had passed since the idols arrived in Yunokawa and the award show was just a few days away. Despite the death threats and tight security, I continued to practice with Jungkook, who helped my further improve on my rapping skills, and on this bright warm day, the idols were invited to attend a street festival in the town. There was a shrine up ahead for the people to pray and make wishes, and the night Kagura would be performed before the fireworks show. I figured this would be a great distraction from the stress I was feeling.

"Waaaaa!" Taehyung exclaimed as he looked around, eyes wide as he looked at the cute Japanese girls giggle and pass by. "We're in a manga, guys!"

"So what should we do first?" Jimin asked, looking between the three groups. "Play some games? Drink?"

"Let's save the drinking until the fireworks show," Kai laughed, slapping his shoulder gently.

"Good, Namjoon and I don't want to carry you drunkards later, so please behave," Suho smiled widely and Namjoon doubled over, laughing uncontrollably.

"Ne, Eomma!" Baekhyun let out an exaggerated sigh of disappointment. "Kkaebsong..."

Hoseok began to laugh as well before pointing outward, "Ya! Let's play that game over there!" He looked to one of the stands.

"Right behind you," Joy linked arms with him, dragging him along, and Namjoon added.

"Remember! Don't wander off!"

I watched everyone leave, smiling to myself as they spread out, trying food and whatever games their yen could afford. I didn't notice Sehun standing beside me, hands tucked into the pockets of his skinny jeans as he smirked crookedly, "Should we have some fun too?"

"If you want," I shrugged. "what should we do first?"

"Bubble tea," he answered quickly. "We can't have fun without bubble tea."

I rolled my eyes playfully and began to walk ahead with him trailing behind me, looking for a stand that sold said beverage. Eventually, I found a stand where several girls dressed in school uniforms were drinking their iced coffee with tapioca bubbles. I walked toward the stand and spoke to the barista, "Sumimasen? Futatsu no ocha onegaishimasu?"

"Kashikomarimashita," the barista bowed before me before turning to make out bubble tea.

"Arigatou gozaimasu," I nodded and took a step back.

"Oh ho," Sehun stared at me in amazement. "Your Japanese is impressive..."

I smiled up at him. "I can teach you if you teach me Mandarin."

"Deal," he grinned.

I grabbed our bubble tea and handed the barista the right amount of yen before we continued down the street, listening to the people as they talked and laughed, wind chimes dancing and shimmering above us against the bright gold lanterns. I sipped my bubble tea before looking to the wind chimes, and I truly felt like I was in a shojo anime.

"They're very pretty," Sehun commented and I nodded in agreement.

"I've always wanted to stand underneath the lanterns and wind chimes," I said. "During high school, since we don't have these kinds of events, I would watch anime and imagine myself as the heroine dressed in a pretty yukata to surprise my tall, handsome, and otherwise brooding boyfriend. Then the two of us would attend this festival."

"I didn't know you were the dreamy type," he remarked with a chuckle. "I take it you've never had a boyfriend before?"

"Ani," I shook my head, facing him. "You're my first. I've never had a boyfriend in high school or university."

"Oh, jinjjah?!" he asked with excitement. "I'm truly your first?" He laughed proudly. "You're my first too, which means I'm the hero and I get to stand under these wind chimes with you."

"I couldn't ask for anything better," I smiled and we gazed at each other for several moments before continuing our walk. "You're tall and handsome, and you only act like the brooding type on stage, so you fit the description rather well."

"Should I deliver some cheesy romantic lines then?" He pressed on. "We can turn this anime into a drama."

I found myself laughing, and he joined me in laughter as well. This man truly amazed me and I can see why his hyungs love him so much. He's the light of their lives, always bringing a smile to their faces, and in return, they baby and pamper him like the baby brother of their family. His laugh was adorable and contagious, that wide eye smile spreading across his face and adding to his boyish charm. We wandered from stall to stall playing games, taking selfies together, and engaging in the most fun of conversations, and it felt like we could be a couple without having to worry about a scandal. It must have been the sugar from the bubble tea but we were both hyper now.

"Yehet! Cotton candy!" He sang, holding up a pink cloud of fluff on a stick in his hand. "Let's share, jagi!"

"Maybe you should cut down on the sugar," I suggested with a giggle and he shook his head.

"No way. I got my braces off months before and I couldn't even eat sweets," he walked beside me now. "I'm eating tons of candy from now on and I deserve it, especially red bean candy."

"Alright, you puppy," I patted his arm and I could feel his long fingers lacing with my own small ones, holding onto my hand. I raised my brows and looked up at him once more. "Oppa, are you sure it's okay to hold hands like this in public?"

"Of course," he pulled me closer and he placed the cotton candy in front of me. "Have some!"

I glanced at the treat before ripping a piece and popping it into my mouth, the fluffy cloud of sugar dissolving into my mouth. "Mmm!" I squealed happily. "It's good. It's been a while since I've had this."

"Right?" Sehun asked before having some himself, walking together and holding hands once more before he spun and pulled me closer, his lips finding mine effortlessly. I hummed into his mouth, kissing him back and tasting bubble tea and cotton candy on his lips.

The cotton candy was all but forgotten, and his fingers laced through my hair, deepening the kiss before I pulled away for some air. I laughed breathily, meeting his dark gaze as my arms rested on his broad shoulders. "We should have been more discreet, don't you think?"

"I don't really care right now," he smirked mischievously. "Besides, I wouldn't be the evil maknae if I didn't steal at least one kiss from you, right?"

"No, I guess not," I agreed.

"I want to kiss you again, jagi," he leaned down, pushing his forehead against mine, his soft black hair brushing against my eyelids. "No, actually, I want to give you a thousand kisses."

"Maybe when there aren't so many people," I took a step back, my cheeks flaring at his words. He's always so sincere. It's hard to believe he was very shy when we first met. He's become so much more lively and I found myself adoring this Sehun—the guy who is always being spoiled by his hyungs and acting childishly, just so he could gain some attention.

Suddenly, the sound of screaming came from the haunted house up ahead and out came Jin, running and flailing his hands. "What's this?! What?! What?!" He screamed.

The eldest member of Bangtan fell on his backside, screaming hysterically, and I wasted no time running to his aid, Sehun right behind me.

"Oppa!" I called out and Jin breathed heavily, holding his chest in an attempt to calm his racing heart.

He looked up, "Ha-Neul-ah! Sehun-ah!" he was hyperventilating now. "Th-There was a man with a scalpel! A-And another with a chainsaw!"

"Gwenchana, hyung?" He knelt before Jin, extending his hand and helping him to his feet. "Aigoo, did you go into that haunted house?"

I sighed heavily, my hands pressed to my hips before I saw Chen and Xiumin running out of the house as well, completely unfazed by the fictional horrors within.

"You just went screaming," Chen laughed a bit. "Gwenchanayo?"

"Are you serious?" I asked firmly. "Why did you let him go in there? If he's afraid of cute dogs, he won't be able to survive a haunted house!"

"Oh, we didn't dare him to go in," Xiumin raised his hands, eyes wide in denial. "Jin-ah said something along the lines of, 'I'm not afraid, you know?!'"

"Never believe him when he says that!" I said with exasperation, then Joy came out, a pout on her face.

"Did you get scared too?" Sehun asked, furrowing his dark brows with concern as she raised a hand, whimpering.

"Sehun oppa," she spoke like a sad younger sister. "The doggy didn't like me! He bit me!"

"W-Wha...?" I was utterly confused until I remembered their most recent song. "Oh right... she's into werewolves. Gotta remember that!"

"Jinjjah?!" Sehun exclaimed before holding the bridge of his nose. "Aish... that was a man in a costume!"

She sniffled and walked toward me, holding me tightly, "Ha-Neul-ah!"

"Aigoo," I chuckled tiredly, patting her back.

"Aaah, how can you like that werewolf?!" Jin cried out in horror. "Girls have weird taste in men!"

There was no denying that. I'm actually glad Sehun is... mostly normal.

"I think their recent song is still stuck in her head," Xiumin muttered to Chen, smirking.

"Definitely," he agreed, crossing his arms.

"I think that's enough horror for today," I spoke, my hands holding Joy's elbows as I looked between my friends. "The night Kagura should be starting soon. How about we meet with the others and get a good spot at the shrine to watch?"

"Good idea," Jin said, still fidgeting. "D-Don't tell anyone I was afraid."

"They'll know anyway, Eomma," I replied.

******

The night Kagura was about to begin and the people attending the festival surrounded the open area of the shrine, where the Shrine Priestess was to perform. I noticed a camera crew was setting up their equipment for the performance, and there was a photographer present as well.

She had lustrous silver hair, and she was in an oversized black t-shirt and denim shorts, her fedora put to the side with her camera as she adjusted her appearance before a mirror. She wore looped earrings and had a nose piercing as well, a slim choker wrapped around her neck with bracelets on each wrist.

"Ready, Bella?!" One of the crew asked and she put her fedora on her head, changing the lenses of her camera.

"Ready!" She said, beginning to take photos of the stage. Her booties clicked against the pavement as she took more pictures.

"Wonder where the Shrine Maiden is," Jimin looked around and then he found her seated on the side, wearing an elaborate kimono embroidered in different-colored flowers.

"I'm glad I'm back here," Kai held his hip and smiled. "I didn't have a chance to go to Kyoto when I was filming a drama here. I would have loved to the Kagura back then."

"The Kagura is a ritual dance used to exorcise evil spirits from shrines," I explained. "Shrine Maidens take their jobs seriously. They're very different from the priestesses you see in anime."

"I bet," Irene nodded as she looked over the woman's kimono. "Just look at how much detail is on her attire. It's beautiful."

"Maybe we can use this time to incorporate some aspects of the Kagura into our choreography," Jungkook suggested. "That is if any of us are singing in Japanese."

"Maybe the flow of her dance can be in our choreography," Yoongi droned.

"Guys, it's starting!" Hoseok watched the Shrine Maiden walk toward the center of the Shrine, the bells in her hand chiming as she walked. She came to a stop, and a geisha began to play her shamisen, and the Kagura commenced.

Sehun took out his phone, filming a small amount of the dance before posting it on Instagram, and Chanyeol watched in astonishment as she moved along the pavement, the banners at the end of the bells flying with her dance.

"She has no emotion on her face," he muttered as he observed the Shrine Maiden's visage. "You can tell she takes this seriously."

"Such a beautiful dance," Wendy hummed. "She's focused on the technique as well as the spiritual benefit of being cleansed."

"This could work for our choreography!" Yeri chirped. "We should make a full movie and study her dance!"

"Good idea," Seulgi pulled out her phone as well, making a movie of the show.

I watched the priestess spin gracefully before the sound of a camera went of beside me. I looked at the silver-haired woman who looked into the viewfinder before snapping more pictures.

"Simply breathtaking," she smiled. "And the lighting is perfect, don't you think?"

"I agree," I said and the woman turned to me, smiling kindly. "I noticed you were with a bunch of good-looking guys and girls. Do you happen to be celebrities?"

"Well," I chuckled nervously before shrugging. "Something like that." I couldn't really say anything or else it would stir some unwanted attention. There was already enough trouble with that anonymous fan. "I'm Ha-Neul."

"Arabella, but you can call me Bella," she said. "Seriously though, I feel like I know you and your friends from somewhere... a movie, or a magazine perhaps?"

"Ah, the bells are chiming again!" Taehyung squealed as he pressed against Baekhyun, who threw his arms around him and giggled.

"Right?! They sound so pretty!" He beamed with delight and I noticed Bella's dumbfounded expression, her eyes wide as she stared in Taehyung's direction, then toward Baekhyun before the rest of Bangtan, EXO, And Red Velvet. She nearly dropped her camera but I was quick to catch it.

"Whoa there!" I said, and she still didn't look away. I laughed and placed the camera in her hands. "This looks pretty expensive. Wouldn't want it breaking while you're doing your job, now would you?"

"You guys are," she pressed a hand to her mouth. "Bangtan... EXO... and Red Velvet..."

I feared she would scream and alert the people around her but instead, she kept it inside, her intense gaze staring into my own.

"Don't worry, I promise not to say anything," she whispered. "I seriously didn't think I would ever run into the biggest groups in the KPOP industry!"

"I take it you're a fan?" I smirked.

"A big fan," she giggled. "Congrats on your debut, by the way. Bangtan is lucky to have you."

"Thank you," I looked back at the performance.

Unsuspectedly, someone stood out from the crowd and walked into the middle of the shrine, and the Shrine Maiden slowly stopped dancing, irritation in her eyes as the person stepped up.

"Just what are you doing?!" She asked her, and one more closer look and I noticed the woman that came out from the crowd was Eun-jae. "The Kagura is sacred! It cannot be interrupted!"

"Save your breath," Eun-jae scoffed before looking to the audience. "What are you all waiting for?! The show's over! Get out of here!"

The crowd murmured as they eyed Eun-jae and she exclaimed again, this time at the top of her lungs, and I never suspected she would have an unfavorable side to her. She happened to be rather sweet when I first met her. The audience decided to listen and they thinned out, leaving our groups, the priestess and Bella in the shrine now.

"Eun-jae," I began. "What's going on? Why are you acting this way?"

"Do you really think studying an ancient dance will help you guys win some stupid award?" She asked and this definitely wasn't the bubbly stylist I ran into back at the modeling agency.

"The hell's your problem?" Namjoon asked her. "No need to act all hostile. You could have just waited until it ended."

"Then I wouldn't be able to do this," she gestured. "Gather all of you here. Now, I could care less about your groups, but I have a big problem with one of you?"

"And who might that be?" Suho narrowed his eyes. "Because the last time we checked, we don't know you at all."

"You don't," she admitted. "but Ha-Neul does."

I furrowed my brows, "What are you talking about...?"

"You really are a dense country bumpkin, aren't you?" She groaned in annoyance. "I'm the one who sent you those death threats. I'm the supposed yandere fan that wants Jungkook."

I released a gasp, pressing my knuckles to my mouth as I met her eyes.

She was definitely the last person I expected to do something like this. All of that hate was coming from her because I found a place among Bangtan and Jungkook is my friend. Halmeoni, this is the first anti-fan I've ever met and I believe it's going to be very difficult to deal with her. I wish I knew what to do because the last thing I want is for her to give my friends a hard time. These award shows are important to them and they shouldn't have to deal with this hate. I wonder what you did when you faced hate like this.

MASTERLIST

[tigerlover16-uk]

Some good things about Dragon Ball Super

So, yeah. After the recent bit of controversy over the stupid manga and Toyotaro’s weird hatred for Goku, I decided I needed a break from tumblr and the Dragon Ball fandom on the internet in general for a few days. I checked in a few times to see if I got any asks or such, but otherwise I’m not going to be back here like normal until Friday. Maybe Thursday, but I have other priorities at the moment.

Honestly, sometimes the negativity of this fandom really gets to me. Whether it’s the Goku hate, the shipping wars, the angry anon’s, the unfriendly and outright hateful people who can’t let fans enjoy elements of the franchise that they personally don’t without insulting and belittling them, or the general negativity towards the franchise, by the same people who claim to love it usually. It can just get a bit over whelming for me personally since I haven’t been doing so great lately. I’m not a person that handles a ton of negativity well.

But, I thought I might pop in to encourage a little positivity for a change. Specifically, since we’re all really ticked off at the manga right now, I just thought now might be a good time to celebrate all the good stuff about the Dragon Ball Super anime. Everyone feel free to reblog with whatever else you think is really good about the show, whether it’s a fun moment, your favourite episode, a new character or concept you like, anything you think is good about the show. Feel free to go off on a tangent gushing about it, or discussing what you think makes those things work. You can do the same for anything I list here, I might go back and add some description for my choices later but I have work to do soon.

The general point here is: Life’s too short to wallow in negativity all the time. Sometimes we all need to take a step back and appreciate the good things in life, and that includes in the media we consume and enjoy. So, without further ado, let’s get started below the cut.

Farmer Goku. A great source of funny moments, and even some genuine character development for Goku here and there.

Krillin's character development

Android 17 is perfect

Baby Pan and Bulla are the most adorable babies ever!

Also, Marron is precious too.

Uncle Pikkoyo

The interesting world building that opens up boundless story potential. Including ELEVEN new universes and a huge pantheon of Gods.

Mr Satan

Gohan and Mr Satan playing with baby Pan

Super Saiyan Blue Kaio-Ken

A lot of good humour

Jaco is a recurring character now

Frieza is at his absolute best in the current saga.

Hit is the best new DB character in years

Vegeta the family man

Beerus

Whis

Vados and Champa

Zen-oh the Omni-King

Goku being a loving and supportive father whenever he's in a scene with Gohan and Goten

That epic fight in episode 57

Magetta

Cabba and Vegeta's interaction

New Saiyans

Caulifla, the first official female super saiyan!

Kale, the first offical female LEGENDARY super saiyan!

Toppo and the Pride Troopers

Ribrianne

Kakunsa and Vikal, the first canon lesbian couple in Dragon Ball and the best LGBT rep the franchise currently has (Not that hard, considering the only other notable example is general Blue, who's a villainous pedophile...)

The Trio De Danger

Plenty of adorable shipping moments for all the couples

Tien has his own Dojo now

Goku Black is awesome

Goku Backhanding Zamasu

Future Mai

Majin Buu vs Basil

Gohan vs Lavender

Goku vs Basil

The God energy dragons. No i don't care if there wasn't an explanation, they looked awesome!

Goku vs Android 17

Goku and Android 17's great interactions in general

Krillin and Android 18 finally being a proper battle couple in the tournament of power. Also, that awesome energy volley ball attack is one of my new favourite moves in dragon ball.

Krillin vs Goku

The Great Saiyaman two-parter

The Hit two parter

The baby pan episode

the second opening is one of the best openings of any dragon ball series.

The first one is pretty nice too.

Ending 1, 2, 3 and the latest one are all pretty good

Future Trunks and Gohan episode

I don't care if it didn't make much sense, Spirit Bomb Trunks looked awesome and that episode looked gorgeous

Great Dr Slump crossover

That amazing Goku vs Gohan fight in episode 90

Gohan is currently awesome again.

Videl being the best wife ever in episode 74

Two new namekians

The Tournament of Power features over twice as many female fighters as Dragon Ball and DBZ combined.

Great slice of life moments.

Fit Buu

Yamcha got his own breather episode

Bulma is fun and proactive

Goten is adorable

Vegeta trying to cook.

Briefs family vacation episode

Gowasu

Dyspo

Obuni

Piccolo vs Frost

Goku vs Hit

Tagoma

Piccolo got to beat someone in the Tournament of Power

That scene where Krillin and family meet up with Android 17 on his island

King Kai being King Kai

Zamasu’s “I’m just being self absorbed” line. Funniest villain line ever.

The Super Dragon Balls and super shenron

Future Trunks and Kid Trunks interaction

The English dub is fantastic and a joy to listen to.

@angelrin89 @bulma-laboratory @no-discourse-onlywrites @breezytealy @dragon-ball-meta anyone else want to give this a try?

[oakmd]

professor oak’s rp plotting cheat-sheet!

Want new-and-exciting plots for your character? Long to reach out to more of your followers, but don’t know where to start? Fear not! Fill out this form and give your RP partners both present and future all the of juicy jumping off points they need to help you get your characters acquainted.

Be sure to tag the players whose characters YOU want more cues to interact with, and repost, don’t reblog! Feel free to add or remove sections as you see fit. Template here.

Mod name: :v OOC Contact: Tumblr IM; but if we’re mutuals I’ll give you my discord! I have Skype too, but I don’t really use it much. 

WHO IS HE:

 Professor Oak is a renowned Pokémon Professor most notably known for his invention of the Pokédex, his Welcome To The World of Pokémon! lecture / documentary and his extensive research surrounding the relationships between pokémon and people. He’s a very recognizable icon in the pokéworld; it would be impossible not to know who he is. 

Alternatively, while he’s mostly known for being a scientist, he has wide recognition for his Pokémon poetry. He also does regular recordings with DJ Mary at Goldenrod Radio Tower. 

The Professor resides in Pallet Town, Kanto, in one of the world’s most impressive laboratory reserve - stretching across acres upon acres of land, built entirely to replicate all types of pokémon’s natural habitats and terrains. 

As a former pokémon trainer ( as well as Kanto Champion ), he has one grandson, Gary Oak, who is also former pokémon trainer, but is now currently on the path to becoming a Scientist himself, specializing in fossil revival.

Points of interest:

My portrayal of Professor Oak is mostly anime-based. This means I do not consider game function as canon or as character trait (ex. Professor Oak forgetting his grandson’s name. I have heard this joke enough to last me a lifetime, please Don’t™.) However, I include some elements of the manga/game, I guess, but usually only to fill in the many gaps untouched in the anime. With that being said, Green / Blue / Red and even Daisy do not exist. I have exceptions of interactions with some people, but it does not fall under my Main Canon and is more of some weird, blended AU, lol. 

Professor Oak is a 50+ year old man. On top of that, a parent and a grandparent. Because of this, most of the time ( not always ) he will naturally be more intuitive and perceptive to situations than a younger muse might be. He has had many, many life experiences to draw from that he applies to current context; empathizing and offering advice comes easy. With that being said, please communicate with me if I’ve crossed a line with this; I won’t take offense!

Professor Oak has interacted with legendary Pokémon. See: Celebi, ft. Suicune. Professor Oak is not immune to... strange occurrences. He’s interacted with the legendary pokémon Celebi ( and Suicune ) when he was a young boy. However, I portray this muse as someone that has seen much more ( of the unexplainable, not necessarily legendaries ), yet appreciates them within the comfort of his own privacy. 

Professor Oak has very high public status! While the man certainly lives his life as a regular person, his life is anything but. Hailing from Kanto and living peacefully in Pallet Town, Samuel’s demeanor is very humble, but his Net Worth is one of the highest, given his important influence, multi-faceted popularity and on-going relevancy among the citizens of the poké-universe. It goes without saying that he has made some of the most important contributions to the field of science and world of pokémon, but he is also sort of a pop culture “idol”. His name is attached to hundreds of awards, recognitions, lifetime achievements, entertainment achievements. Whatever there is to do, Professor Oak does it all: Scientist, Writer, Artist, Humanitarian, Pokémon Professor, TV Host, Radio Host, University Lecturer, Motivational Speaker, Activist, League Advisor, Parent. There is nothing he won’t dive into if it’s for the greater good.  List of Awards: here. 

What they’ve been up to recently:

*POST-CANON. Same ol’, same ol’. Professor Oak has many years left in him yet! You can still find him on his happy little hill in Pallet Town doing what he does best: giving trainers their starters, and babysitting those same 9482536 kids under his care. Including, but not limited to all the 3948357927682294 pokémon he and - everyone’s favorite personal assistant son - Tracey Sketchit share responsibility for. His life will pretty much be the same, as it has been; the perks of being old and well-adjusted.  *I use ‘post canon’ loosely. My default timeline is ongoing with the show itself, but since time never seems to progress, I’ve taken it upon myself to lazily assume some years have passed since S1E1 ( hence why I say Oak is 50+ rather than actually 50 ). 

MULTI-VERSE. If you are a non-pokémon muse, Professor Oak will happily accept that you’re simply not someone from his universe. As mentioned above, stranger things have happened to him. Because of his own experiences, he’s very open-minded about the possibilities the universe has up it’s sleeve. I like to think of his corral and his lab are portal spots for the unknown to materialize. Maybe a point deep in the mountain and forest terrain. Or perhaps from the forest ( between Kanto and Johto ) where Celebi dwells. This concept isn’t necessary to follow for the multi-verse, just a suggestion! TL;DR Let Professor Oak be your away-from-home grandpa, he has lots of Experience™.

Where to find them:

DEFAULT VERSE. There are a lot of places to find the ever-active Professor Oak. However, the top three most common places are: his research lab ( corral included ) in Pallet Town, Kanto, Goldenrod Radio Tower, and Celadon University. Because he is so famous, he can be anywhere, though. Whether it’s doing charity work, raising awareness, doing lectures, being a guest at internships, working with media across regions, visiting other pokémon professors, being on a much needed vacation, traveling for work. Pretty much, wherever your muse is, I can find a reason for Professor Oak to be there. 

POST-COLLEGE. I don’t actually have a ‘verse’ for this but it takes place shortly after Samuel finishes grad school and takes position as Kanto’s Pokémon Professor. He’s the first one to reside in Pallet Town. The lab itself is still under renovation; he’s moved back home after being away for years at school, and still trying to mourn the loss of his fiancé. He’s a single father, struggling to balance work and parenthood, but he gets by. ( Further down this timeline, about thirteen years later, he suffers the loss of his children, and becomes the guardian of his grandson, Gary Oak. )

To find Professor Oak is the other ‘verses’ from the Offered / Desired sections, just ask. 

Current plans:

Keeping busy. Professor Oak is a very goal-oriented person and although he finds relaxation necessary, he also prefers to be active. His hands are always full running the biggest pokémon lab, but he’s always throwing himself into new projects of all kinds of varieties.

Travel and meet new people. Ever the social butterfly, the Professor is always welcoming new faces to his growing list of companions. Although his reasons for traveling are no longer for becoming a Pokémon Champion, he finds that there are plenty of things he hadn’t quite noticed or appreciated before. It’s interesting to see how some things have changed, and for others, how they’ve stayed the same. It’s all for business purposes of course ( mostly ), but coming full circle provides closure for memories he’d only reminisced about for years after he graduated from college. 

Supporting Gary. As his grandson begins his journey in the field of science, Professor Oak prioritizes helping him adjust and giving him the support he needs.

Otherwise, the plans depend on what your muse brings. :O

Desired interactions:

Retired Oak! Literally everything is the same except he’s wearing tropical shirts and jorts. B^) Alola cruise, anyone?

Alzheimer’s Oak! LISTEN, I KNOW.. ... .. Game-mechanic jokes aside, lmao - I have no real excuse. It just hurts so good. ;^(

Grandpa Oak. I’m sure raising Gary and Ash was nothing but and Experience™.

TRACEY. MY PURE ASSISTANT SON -

College. What goes on in college, stays in college. College timeline: here.

Celebi, Again! Starring... Professor Oak! B^) Swapped into the body of his younger self. How does he fix this? Calamity ensues.

Dr. Fuji, Who? No, Professor Oak isn’t part of Team Rocket but he did get roped into helping them create MewTwo with the desperate attempt to also bring his family back to life. Did I rip that from Dr. Fuji? Yes I did, and I don’t care, let me live -

Team Rocket? Or, alternatively, he does work for Team Rocket with this ridiculous concept that he was blackmailed into working for them post-grad because of his unremarkable intelligence and promise. While his public face is the friendly Professor Oak everyone knows and loves, his lab holds darker secrets, the darkest being that he could no loner resist their persistence in making him comply, after they staged his children’s death as an innocent car accident. : ) ... Anyway, 

Persistent Press. Be annoying and invasive. Start scandals. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unrequited. Get rejected by the notorious man himself. He will be gentle.

Agatha. How dare you,

CROSSOVERS!!!

Offered interactions:

Are you a Pokémon Trainer™ or some other kind of pokémon-specializing person ( pokémon watcher, photographer, breeder, ranger, etc. )? Ring up your Professor when Officer Jenny arrests you for something he told you not to do in the first place so he can judge you with a proper scolding. For the others, show him your talents and skills! If you’re not a Kanto Trainer, I’m sure one of the other Professors can send you his way, either to drop something off / pick something up / for general help, etc. and he’s always excited to meet his colleagues’ kiddos. Also excited to see others contribute to the world of pokémon in some way! He loves pokémon and humans interacting! 

Are you a Pokémon Professor? Doctor, Nurse? Let’s gather ‘round and be stressed about Ash our reckless trainers. But also drinking and karaoke! Pokémon Discourse™. Camping retreats. Boring, obligatory conferences. Peer Review. Or maybe you just need a little advice from one of the pokéworlds more experienced Professors! Unless you’re Professor Rowan - in that case you’re BFFs that get into shenanigans nobody would ever believe. 

Are you a Science Major? Limited internships available for college students.

Do you live in Pallet Town? Hi, neighbor! B^) Professor Oak ( and Tracey ) most likely talk to you in passing, should it occur. ( Please message me about pre-established relationships first. ) Common places include, the mart, post office, movie theaters, etc.

Summer Camp? Boom, Professor Oak has summer camp for the kiddos at his corral. 

Are you a big idolizer of Professor Oak? Lucky for you, there’s more than one way to be a fan! You can reach him via fanmail, @’ing him on social media, finding his personal phone number from some sketchy fan forum, hogging up the radio show hotline, stalking his schedule to make each appearance panel, hovering outside around his lab, stealing candid photos, bombarding him in public with intrusive questions, shoving your notepad out for an autograph... You can even be one of those weird people who try to proclaim your love to ‘celebrities’ too old for you that you know little about. Who knows what this poor man will do?

Are you into Traditional Kanto / Johto? You may share the same passions if you’re into calligraphy, ikebana, haiku, tea ceremonies, etc. 

Are you a Celadon University Student? Feel free to talk to your Intro To Pokémon ( or Pokémon Sociology 101, etc. ) Professor about anything unclear about assignments, to offer questions or concerns... or try to make excuses for not turning in homework and being late, you lazy student. :T Doubles as an Unofficial Guidance Counselor to said students even though that’s not his job - but he can’t help it, he’s a parent before he’s a Professor.

Are you a child associated with Make-A-Wish Foundation? Professor Oak offers terminally-ill children the opportunity to choose their starters, and spend time with their favorite idol. : (

Are you affiliated with the media? All press can inquire about guest speakings, giveaways, promotions, advertisement deals, interviews, volunteer work, hosting/co-hosting, etc. and Professor Oak will get back to you at his earliest convenience. This INCLUDES those working at Goldenrod Radio Tower!

Are you a business person? Politician? High-Profile Celebrity / Figure? Meet Professor Oak at a Gala! Or any other formal event. Feel free to offer business negotiations, inquire about his residence, or other sketchy things. :v 

Are you affiliated with Kanto’s Pokémon League? Albeit not as recently involved as per usual, he’s an advisor, so he and your muse are at least associates, if not more.

Are you one of the developers that helped with the Pokédex? Nerds will be nerds.

Do you know Samuel from his days prior to being Professor Oak? Whether it be from childhood, training days, or college, they all matter. ( I’m aware this is highly unlikely because nobody RP’s old pokémon muses, but with that being said, I’m open to interacting with kids / grandkids of the aforementioned. )

Are you Team Rocket a villain? Have you reached your Kidnap-A-Scientist quota today? 

Current open post/s:

I had very few, but I’m too lazy to look for them. Plotting is probably better. /gestures to this post

Anything else?:

Threading is not limited to this list. I’m always open to more ideas!  

I’m not sure what the huge difference is between the Desired / Offered interactions -

You don’t need a pokémon verse to interact with me! 

Your muse does not need to idolize Professor Oak to interact with him.

CROSSOVERS.

Tagged by: i stole this from @undinaes

Tagging: Whoever sees this!

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Tokyo Ghoul :Re Season 1

I just finished rewatching this, so I figured now was a good time to make a big post about it, especially because of how the manga also recently ended and so it’s a lot easier to look back on the story as a complete product.

As someone that’s already read the manga, it’s basically impossible to discuss this season without taking about the entirety of :re, so this is gonna have some casual spoilers for later stuff. It’s also mostly just gonna be me talking about how the anime feels as an adaptation, because of that.

My non-spoilery TL;DR is that I think this was an imperfect but surprisingly great adaptation of a very flawed manga, and I honestly think I prefer it to the manga already. If season 2 can go anywhere near as well as I hope it will, at least now that we have confirmation it’ll cover the rest of :re, I would probably just suggest people watch the anime instead of reading the manga. It’s a shame that the anime side of the franchise doesn’t quite stand on it’s own because of how Root A went, but that’s not super relevant to the :Re anime.

Anyway, more detailed and spoiler-y thoughts under the cut, including some more of my speculation for season 2. [As a fair warning, this got really long, and there’s a fair bit at the end that could be taken as being anti-Tou//ken, even though I don’t mean anything malicious or ship hate-y by it]

It’s interesting to look back at this season of the anime, after having read the ending of the manga, and after having seen how disappointed people were with pretty much the entire second half of :re. People complain about the anime in general cutting out ‘important narrative details’, mainly to do with backstories and worldbuilding, but I feel like those things ended up being a double-edged sword in the manga that ultimately got people’s hopes up, and made them more annoyed at the ending than they should have been.

For instance, the anime didn’t go into Saiko’s backstory, and they didn’t show the fact that Shirazu’s father had killed himself, but it’s not like those things came up again [aside from Saiko’s family being mentioned in an off-hand bit of exposition in the finale], so I can’t exactly say that it took away from the story in any meaningful way.

In general, I feel like anime-only people would mostly just be confused as to why the manga side of the fandom developed such increasingly complicated theories about certain things, and why it disappointed them so much when, for example, Uta ended up just being some regular quirky dude and nothing more. Which I think says a lot about how it’s probably a good thing in the end that the anime glosses over the sorts of details that got people making theories as they read the manga.

The part of the manga that this season covers is definitely the most well-written part of :Re, but overall the series is a bit of a bloated mess, so I’m glad that the anime ended up being almost like a second draft of a novel, that just trims things down to a more reasonable size and pace. The effect should be a lot more apparent in season 2, though, since they’ll probably start cutting out entire story arcs, whereas with season 1 it was mostly just a matter of them shortening scenes a bit and being less repetitive in general with their storytelling.

There’s definitely some small parts where I think they cut a bit more than they should have, though, like how much they heavily gloss over Matsuri’s backstory and reason for being at the CCG, and then the whole Rose investigation. It’s not a huge deal though, since the audience can still basically understand what’s going on. It’s also made a bit better by the fact that those writing issues pop up during the part of the show that was best overall, so it’s easy to just focus on the good parts.

Other than that, I really had no issues with them cutting out story material. For the most part, as I said before, it was just a matter of the anime being less repetitive, and in general it came across like it didn’t need to spell certain things out to the audience as much as the manga did.

One of the more important elements that were cut was how they removed a lot of Akira’s warmer moments with Haise, and in general the whole framing of her being a mother figure to him. But honestly, after sitting on it for a while, I think I prefer it to how she was portrayed in the manga. It feels more in line with her characterization in the first series, and I think it just makes more sense and is more interesting for her to basically hold him at arm’s length most of the time. It’s also just a bit sad how, in the manga, she acted as a mother figure toward him because she was ordered to in order to manipulate him. On a more subjective and broad note, I think the manga slowly got more and more off-putting with how it handled familial or psuedo-familial relationships, in a sort of . . . Freudian way, almost. The stuff with Haise and Akira was a pretty minor example of it, but it ended up being part of a larger whole, so I’m not exactly upset that they just cut that little bit out.

I also think it gave it a bit more weight later on, when she awkwardly tried to comfort him during episode 10. Since it was the most overt act of affection that she’d displayed toward him until that point, and because it had so many conflicted emotions behind it. And in general, they kept her warm attitude toward him during episode 7, so that was nice.

While I remember, I should say that the whole house party scene in episode 7 was a great example of the anime editing down the manga into something more concise and less overwhelming. Changing it so that it was just about Haise, the Qs, Arima, and Akira, made it feel a lot more cozy. It was a little overwhelming to have like twice the amount of characters involved in that scene in the manga.

Anyway, back onto the topic of cut/condensed material, the other more blatant parts are how they gloss over some of the details of the Torso and Nutcracker investigations, which I think was fine. The manga mostly just dropped that police procedural-y tone pretty quickly, so it just feels a bit more consistent with the story’s overall tone, for them to not worry so much about the details, and to focus more on the action. And for episode one in particular, they didn’t really have much choice in terms of how to adapt it, since the end of chapter six was the first good stopping point they had. Anything before that would have made the first episode feel insubstantial, like it was lacking a meaningful hook. So I think they did the best with what they had. I appreciate that they took the chance to actively change how the Torso arc was structured and paced in order to make it fit more reasonably into one episode, instead of being slavishly 1:1 with how the manga did it.

One of the big changes that happened early on which I think got people off onto the wrong foot with the anime, so to say, was the whole taxi scene with Mutsuki and Torso in episode one. Hoo boy, that one sure caused a lot of complaints from people. Personally, I thought it was fantastic. Overall, it feels like the anime treated Mutsuki with more respect and dignity than the manga ever did. Which is one of the big reasons why I disagree with the idea that the anime ‘lacks heart’. In a sense, I feel like it reflects the strict love of an editor, rather than the obsessive love of a fan. But for this in particular, it really does just feel like the people writing the anime care more about Mutsuki than Ishida does, to be honest.

They actually kept like 99% of the content related to Mutsuki and Torso, but just reframed things slightly to be less in-your-face and shock-value-y about it all. The anime already explains how Torso exclusively preys upon ‘women with bodily scars’, and shows him being very specifically obsessed with Mutsuki’s body later on, so really they had no need to actually show Torso ripping open Mutsuki’s shirt and exposing his binder and whatnot. I’ve seen a lot of people accuse the anime of being too blunt with it’s writing, but it’s moments like that which feel like they respect the reader’s intelligence and their ability to put two and two together than the manga did.

Similarly, they kept the part where Mutsuki has social anxiety in the night-club because of people staring at him, but they just left it at that. Which was fine. And during the auction raid, they very bluntly make it clear that he ate parts of those dead investigators to heal himself, and just presented it as a pragmatic choice on his part, whereas I’m pretty sure the manga was less clear about it, and eventually tried to frame it as a ‘big shocking twist’ later on that was meant to play into the whole emerging theme of him being a crazy serial killer or whatever. Yet again, another way in which the anime treats him with more dignity, and isn’t just trying to manufacture forced shock value to surprise the audience.

On the note of the auction raid, it’s kinda amusing to me how that was the part of the story that was probably the most faithful to the manga, and cut barely anything out, but I think we can all agree that it was the worst part of it. To me, it mostly just suffered from the inherent flaws of the source material. The manga could at least somewhat coast by on flashy art and fight scenes, but the general opinion from manga fans has always been that the auction raid was a pretty messy and kinda uninteresting arc. It has good moments in it, but for the most part there’s just not a lot of emotional weight behind the fights, and to be quite honest, Takizawa in this arc is one of the more overtly edgy and over the top parts of the entire series. As a whole he’s a really good character, but man, that first impression of him being a minor character who comes back as a crazy half-ghoul with white hair and scary eyes, and who starts eating people and rambling about fruit sure is, uh . . . something, alright. If anything, the anime’s more subdued art made him come across as being less ‘overwhelming’ and over the top, which was nice.

Although they were just minor cuts to a few lines of dialogue, the auction raid did cut a few things though, which I also think were for the best. During the Mutsuki-Urie hug scene, Urie’s sentence just gets cut off as ‘you’re a . . . ‘, which is honestly way less clunky than the ‘you’re a wo(man)’ way it was phrased in the manga. On the one hand, it’s a very overt indication of how Urie still views him as a man even after figuring out about his biological sex, but on the other hand it’s so awkward and clunky in it’s delivery that most people didn’t even take it that way in the first place. I think it was just fine how it was in the anime, although I do sorta wish that during episode seven they could have included the detail of Urie continuing to refer to him with male pronouns even in his internal monologue, but oh well.

Similarly, during the scene where Suzuya kills Big Madam, the anime just had him say ‘Farewell’ instead of adding ‘Dad’ onto the end. To be blunt, I have no idea what the fuck Ishida was thinking when he wrote that line in the manga, and it’s stuff like this which is why he comes across as having Really Weird hang-ups about LGBT people. That line in particular in the manga was basically just an act of deadnaming, in essence, since Big Madam is obviously a trans-woman who clearly presents and identifies as female. So yeah, cutting that part of the line out in the anime was entirely for the best.

Some people complained about the use of Unravel during the Takizawa fight as being kinda nostalgia bait-y, which I get, but I think it was fine. It was surprisingly fitting, since that whole scene focused so much on Haise grappling with the identity of Kaneki that lives within him. I’m mostly just glad that they didn’t try and use it a second time, since that would have been a bit much.

Though the auction raid was a bit dull overall, thankfully episodes seven through ten were fantastic, and overall the peak of season 1. I really appreciated that they took the time to spread the material from volume four across three episodes. The anime’s definitely at it’s best when it focuses on character interactions/development, and that part of the story had a whole lot of that. Even though I think that for the most part this season was better than it’s respective part of the manga, these episodes in particular were just great. With the rest of the anime, you could definitely say that the manga’s fight scenes are superior, but when the story isn’t focusing on fights, the anime just feels fundamentally better. Episode seven in particular was very nicely structured, and felt a fair bit more fleshed out and cohesive than it did in the manga. I already talked about how the house party was way better than in the manga, but I also preferred how they handled the scene at the cafe, though I’ll wait to talk in detail about the scenes involving Touka and Kaneki until later, since I have a lot to say about that.

Oh, and the visual changes they made for the ED in episode seven were great, and got me kinda emotional, given that I know where things end up, lol. I’m really happy they inserted that one panel of Kaneki and Arima walking together during it, in particular. It really sets up the emotional weight that comes to fruition during the Black Reaper arc.

Although I still think episodes seven to ten were the best part of season 1, as I said above they do also have some of the more unnecessary story cuts. It’s just really easy to not care much for that when it’s surrounded by so much good material.

The final two episodes weren’t quite as great, since they were so action-heavy, but they were still really good, and I think I enjoyed them slightly more the second time around. Episode eleven in particular really nailed all of the emotions surrounding Tsukiyama and his servants. But it was in these episodes in particular that I also really noticed how the anime is a lot more gore-y and explicit than I expected it to be. It’s kinda surprising how often they just outright show characters getting stabbed through their stomachs, and so on. There’s also a lot of limbs being cut off in that whole arc in general, and even though they silhouette Kijima when he gets chainsawed, there’s at least one cut that just outright shows him with the chainsaw sticking into his head with no real censorship.

In general the only real censorship in this season was how some stuff like Hairu’s decapitation was strategically placed out of frame, and also that one scene where Yuma’s tongue was pixelated. But that’s about it. There’s certainly nothing like what we got in the first season of the anime, where obnoxious shadows and black bars got put over the screen during action scenes, or the colour scheme got all weird to try and obscure the gore, or whatever.

A lot of people disliked the overall pacing of the finale, but I thought it was great. It’s easy to unfairly compare it to the previous season finales we had in the anime, but those were largely the products of Morita’s directorial vision, and how much he heavily fleshed out the source material. This was just a more straight-forward adaptation of how these chapters played out in the manga, so it feels kinda mean to bash it for not being as interesting as some of the previous season finales. Though even then, I kinda prefer how certain things were done visually in the anime. Like how heavily they used the checkerboard room thing during Haise’s dream sequence, how they fleshed out the child abuse memory scene to be more than just a single static panel, and in general how they portrayed Haise’s memories of the ‘underground garden’. That place always looked nice in the manga, but I really like how the anime portrayed it. It might seem jarring to some people that it was so bright, but I think it worked really well. For one thing it makes sense for it to be a well-lit area, and it has an interesting contrast against the violence that goes down there. The haziness of it all, and some of the visual effects, also made it more apparent in a neat way that the flowers were a hallucination of his, and not actually real.

I also thought that the scenes with Kaneki after he regains his memories were very well-done. I think some people misinterpreted him as being more hot-headed and angry than he actually was, since I remember there being some complaints about how blunt and monotone he was. It seemed perfectly fitting to me.

Eto’s voice-acting in general was also pretty damn superb, and really added to the experience. She was clearly having the time of her life with that one.

I liked that they waited until the finale to show Eto’s kagune talking. It gave it a bit more impact when it finally happened.

I honestly don’t really have much to say about Karren’s part in it all, but I think it was done pretty well. In general, the anime cut out a lot of her more repetitive scenes that just hammered in things we already knew, so that was good. I also liked how they were a lot less blunt and on the nose with how they revealed that she’s a woman. I still can’t help but roll my eyes at that one panel where Ishida basically goes ‘hey isn’t it such a neat coincidence that the kanji used for Kanae’s name looks like a female symbol :^)’. In general, her whole story arc is mostly just a kinda old-fashioned Mulan sort of arc, but it’s executed pretty well.

Oh, and the anime handled the scenes of her being tortured by Eto incredibly well. The garish purples and reds mixed with the oppressive clock noises were a really nice touch that made those scenes even creepier than they already were.

Before I forget, I should mention that, in a similar way as how I felt about Akira’s character in the anime, I quite liked how they handled Hairu. I get why people were disappointed by her, but I enjoyed the way that they toned down her airhead nature, and how they only really showed how she idolized Arima right before she died. In a way, it just made her seem more professional and self-motivated.

Now that the manga’s over and I’ve had time to look back at it as a whole, and to think about how season 2 will adapt it all, it’s been really interesting to see exactly what the anime kept versus what it cut, and how they reflects upon how they’ll probably handle the next season.

Firstly, they kept pretty much everything that sets up the Black Reaper arc, to the point of even ending the season off with a teaser preview of the big Kaneki-Arima fight. But they also kept details like Shirazu’s corpse being stolen, Okahira getting killed, Hinami getting taken into custody, Akira finding out that Takizawa’s alive, Amon getting teased at heavily, Scarecrow being shown in the auction raid [and even in the OP], Torso becoming obsessed with Mutsuki, etc etc. So it seems pretty clear to me that they won’t really cut much of anything out of that arc when the next season comes around.

One thing they cut, which I haven’t even seen many people comment on since it was pretty subtle, was the detail of Kaneki’s rapid aging and how it affected stuff like his vision and regeneration. The anime never showed Haise wearing his glasses [at least from what I remember], didn’t show him having headaches, and during the finale we didn’t see his weird kagune hand thing. So I think they’re just completely removing that whole detail from the story, which I’m fine with. But it does have some interesting implications for how season 2 will go. Overall, it was a pretty irrelevant plot point that ended up getting hastily resolved anyway, but in practice, it was mostly just relevant to add some more tension to the Goat arc by making it look like Kaneki was at risk of dying, and it helped give a reason for him to become Dragon, since it ended up curing him.

I think the main implication of them cutting it from the anime is that it’d make it a LOT easier for them to just not bother having Kaneki become Dragon, since they wouldn’t need to bother with using it as a way to magically cure him. I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’d help streamline the story immensely if they just have Rize be the one to become Dragon in the first place, and this would help facilitate that.

As I’ve said, from season 1 it looks like they’re being more respectful with how they’re portraying Mutsuki, so I wouldn’t be surprised if season 2 is much kinder toward him than the manga was. They might even more or less cut out the whole subplot of him becoming an antagonist, which would be good since that was just a dumpster fire of bad writing that didn’t even go anywhere meaningful.

One interesting addition they made was explicitly showing Eto delivering the Hangman’s McGuffin book to Haise. That’s a REALLY interesting detail, since in the manga, we found out much later on that Hide was responsible for sending it. I don’t think this is a retcon or anything, though. I think this was how it went in the manga, too. I’ve talked before about how I think Hide had been working with Eto since around the end of the first series, and that for some reason or another Ishida was unable to get around to explaining that, and this makes it seem like the anime might be a lot more open about their connection. It makes a lot of sense to me that Eto would deliver the book on Hide’s behalf. It makes me very excited to see how Hide will be handled in the next season. With the manga, it really feels like Ishida had to scrap a lot of his plans for his character, and so when he finally came back into the story he felt like a bizarre tacked-on remnant of a previous draft, so it’d be great if the anime ends up handling him in the way that Ishida might have originally intended. And on the note of Eto’s involvement in it, I wonder if she might drop a hint to Kaneki about how she sent the book to him. That’d be neat.

They also added in a shot of a missing poster for Hide at the very start of the season, but that’s pretty minor. It at least helps immediately remind the audience that his official status as of that point is ‘missing’, not ‘dead’, though.

Oh, and judging by the scene we got of him during the auction raid, he seems to still have the same injuries as in the manga. I really liked how they just outright showed him having a wheezy, broken-up voice. But either way, it goes to show that they seem to definitely be keeping that detail from the manga. It makes me wonder how they’ll handle things later, especially with the part where Kaneki remembers having eaten him. I wonder if they’d keep it as-is, or try and integrate it into the way that the scene played out in Root A. Overall, it definitely seems like they’re pretty much ignoring the story changes made in Root A, but we’ll see. I hope they at least flesh that part out a bit, since I still feel like the flashback we got to it in the manga just raised more questions than it answered.

It’s pretty difficult to judge the anime as it’s own thing since I’ve already read the manga, but I still think it did a really good job with getting across the emotional thrust of the story, and the character arcs, and whatnot. The Qs in particular were handled fantastically. I got the impression that anime-only people actually liked them, particularly Urie and Mutsuki, slightly more than manga readers did by this point. Probably because they heavily cut down upon the quantity of Urie’s more shitty bits of dialogue, and because they were less overtly weird and obnoxious with how they framed Mutsuki. I distinctly remember that the Mtusuki Discourse [tm] was already a thing by this point in the manga, but nobody watching the anime has any real reason to be all weird about him. So that’s been nice to see. 

Haise’s character arc was also handled really well. It really reminded me of how his whole arc was by far one of the best parts of the manga. At least in terms of :re. It’s just a really effective, tragic arc about how he’s stuck living in and clinging onto this fake life, and slowly being chipped away at and replaced by somebody that he effectively doesn’t know. Seeing him be a happy dad taking care of his surrogate found family of misfits is still endearing no matter how many times I read or watch it, and it hurts just as much to see him get ‘replaced’ by Kaneki and immediately abandon the Qs.

Tsukiyama’s part in the anime was also great in general, and also reflected the strengths of the manga. It’s pretty insane how much more interesting of a character he is in this part of :re than basically anywhere else in the franchise. It really helps that they spend like half of the season with his whole story arc being in the spotlight. They really did him justice.

Before I forget, I also wanna say that, even though the animation wasn’t much to talk about [but also wasn’t anywhere near as bad as some recent production disasters I’ve seen], the art itself, especially in terms of character designs and backgrounds, were consistently fantastic. In general, ‘consistent’ is definitely the word I’d use to describe the overall art direction of the anime. On the other hand, the manga is a lot more uneven in terms of it’s art quality, varying from hyper-detailed fight scenes or individual expressions to silly chibi reaction faces or some really sketchy fight scenes, and so on. The anime smooths things out to a nice, consistent mid-ground, which I appreciated. The manga has always been a bit too bombastic and over the top at times, especially with how it handles action scenes, so I kinda prefer how the anime handles it, even if can come across as being more boring.

I also kinda feel like it took Ishida a little while to nail exactly how to draw a lot of the new characters in :re, so them having consistent, clean designs from the start was pretty nice. Similarly, I get why people were annoyed at how the anime slightly changed Touka’s hair-style, but it just makes it more consistent with the rest of the series. In the manga, she ends up going back to her original hair-style and hair colour anyway, so it makes perfect sense to just have her design be consistent from start to finish, rather than making her hair blue and fluffy for a while and then going back to how it used to be. And judging by the s2 key visual, it looks like they might just keep this design for her for basically all of s2 as well, instead of literally just going back to exactly how she styled her hair in the first series. So I’d also appreciate that.

And on that note, I should finally get around to discussing my thoughts on how Touka was handled in general in this season, and her whole connection to Kaneki in particular. To put it simply, I had absolutely no issues with it. I really loved how she was handled in this season, and I think it has interesting implications for how she’ll be handled in season 2, but at the same time I get why some people have frustrations with it.

To start off with probably the most minor thing, they cut out the scene where she was visiting the hospital, although they still showed her flower basket being left on Shinohara’s bedside table. I’m fine with this change, since it felt like such a long-running mystery in the manga that I couldn’t help but feel disappointed when we found out about what was actually going on. And also, since they stilled showed her flowers there, it’s entirely possible that they’ll touch upon it sometime during season 2, and possibly have a flashback or something to reveal that she was the one sending them. So ultimately it might not even be cut at all, just handled slightly differently.

Just to cut right to the chase, it sounds like some people are annoyed that the anime cut out/toned down upon the romantic set-up between her and Kaneki, but that’s actually a big part of why I liked it, haha. Though they didn’t even technically cut much, if only because they barely have any scenes together in this arc of the manga to begin with. But they did cut stuff like that scene where Kaneki wonders to himself if she’s out on a date, and they cut the part where she talks to Tsukiyama about how the :re cafe is a place for Kaneki to return to if he wants to in the future.

I get why that bugs people. I’ve seen a few people complain that because of those sorts of cuts, it’d seem forced and out of nowhere when they get together in season 2. But, well, what if that’s the point? What if they’re NOT going to have them get together in season 2? I haven’t seen anyone really talk about this possibility, understandably, but I think it explains the choices they made with handling Touka as a character in this season.

The biggest point worth considering is the insert song they made for the cafe scene in episode 2, where Haise and Touka meet again for the first time since the original series ended. The soundtrack composer put out an official AMV for it on Youtube that uses that full version of the song. It’s a really wonderfully made AMV, and a very pretty song, so everyone should check it out. Put simply, it’s a song about the bittersweet process of letting go of an old crush, and moving on with your life, even after you have a random chance encounter with that person later down the track.

The lyrics are pretty blunt and unambiguous about it. The chorus is about how Touka kept dreaming that Kaneki would return to her side as if he’d never left her, but the song starts out with ‘I’m waking from this dream. Returning to reality is so bittersweet. I open my eyes, and the illusion is fading, slipping away’, and ends with ‘Although I’ve found you, I know this meeting will not last. I have to let go. Continue finding your own way, though I will miss you. It’s time to wake from this dream’. Especially since :Re already uses the motif of ‘waking from a dream’ to describe how Haise eventually has to give way to Kaneki, it seems very noteworthy that they so overtly used the same motif to describe how Touka wanted Kaneki to return to her, but slowly she comes to terms with the need to let go of that dream. They even play those last few lines during the scene in episode 2 itself, just to make it even more clear what it’s referring to.

So yeah, I feel like that whole insert song helps make it clear that the writing changes made with Touka might just be rooted in the possibility of the anime committing to this idea of her moving on from Kaneki. It’d certainly explain why they cut out the scene where she says that the cafe is a place for him to return to, if she’s already resolved to let him live his own life, while she lives hers. It’s worth noting that, even though it’s technically about the same as it was in the manga, these writing changes put a different sort of twist on what Touka says to Uta in episode seven about how, in response to him asking if she plans to just wait for Kaneki to return, she says ‘I’m going to continue doing what I’ve already decided on’. In the overall context of the anime’s writing, it mostly comes across as her talking about how she’s not just waiting for Kaneki to return to her, but has chosen to move on from him. It’s worth noting that one thing the anime did change about that scene was that they had Haise visiting the cafe and getting served by Touka, shortly before she talks to Uta. The way that we see her, for a second time, treating Haise as just a regular customer, also helps emphasize the overall point.

On the note of Haise’s involvement in that scene, it’s also interesting to me how in episode seven in general they added some original scenes with him that went a long way to emphasize the idea of him being nostalgic toward Anteiku as a whole, more than anything else. He doesn’t even seem to have much of a reaction to Touka the second time around, and as I said above, they cut out the part where he wonders if she’s out on a date, so it comes across a fair bit less like he has a crush on her. And while I remember, I should say that the original scene with Haise remembering Anteiku but not knowing what it really is was incredibly good. 

And in terms of the scene between them from episode 2, I still just think overall that it was way better than the manga version of the scene was. It was so good and emotional. In particular I love how the anime really highlighted Touka’s shock upon seeing him again, and the way that she quickly adjusts herself and just treats him as a regular customer. It’s really effective, especially in conjunction with the insert song playing in the background. Haise’s line about how she looked sad, and at a loss, also has even more weight to it if she was resolving in that moment to finally let go of him for good.

So yeah, I honestly think that the anime might just not have them end up together at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have them hook up anyway, to be faithful to the manga, but it does feel like the only real explanation for why they’d make all those subtle but important changes to how they wrote her parts in season 1.

To begin with, I still think that even if they did include their whole romance in season 2, they wouldn’t really have the room to include ALL of the stuff between them from the manga. For one thing, I doubt they’d be able to animate the sex scene because of broadcast regulations and whatnot, and since I feel like the whole 24th Ward arc is one of the first things they might cut in order to fit the rest of the manga into twelve episodes, it might be difficult to include their wedding, or Touka’s whole pregnancy drama. And if they avoid having Kaneki become Dragon, they wouldn’t need to use his wedding ring as a plot device to have everyone find and rescue him. Plus, in general, even if they did include stuff like the sex scene, it’d probably have to happen in the same episode as when Kaneki starts living at the cafe, or the episode directly after it, which would probably feel a bit rushed.

Though even then, it would be possible for them to just imply that they hook up after the anime ends, or for them to just have them have sex off-screen and basically leave it at that until the epilogue. So it seems particularly interesting to me that it seems like the anime might be outright moving away from the idea of them hooking up at all, rather than just having it be that the anime doesn’t show as much of their relationship.

To be blunt, I feel like the only real reason why they’d actively shut down the idea of them getting together at all, rather than just reducing the time spent on their relationship, would be if the anime plans to have Kaneki end up dating a different person instead, in which case it’d obviously make sense for the anime to cut the romantic ties between him and Touka as neatly as possible. At the very least, I think we can all agree that they’re not just gonna have Kaneki be single in the anime forever. That’d just piss off everyone for no good reason, lol.

Basically what I’m saying is that the anime might have Kaneki end up dating Hide instead of Touka. At the very least, he’s Kaneki’s only other real romance option at that point in the story, so it’s either him, Touka, or nobody. But I think it’d make a lot of sense for Kaneki to end up dating Hide. We know for a fact in the manga that Hide is in love with him, and going by stuff like the whole Hide hallucination scene in the Cochlea arc, or him talking to Touka about how his desire to be with Hide again is paralyzing, it’s not exactly hard to believe that Kaneki could have feelings for him as well. It’d barely require any real changes or additions to the story to make it work. Just have Hide directly confess his feelings to Kaneki rather than having him awkwardly tell Amon about them. And unlike with Kaneki and Touka, there’d be no real expectation for them to include a whole sex scene or marriage scene or pregnancy plot-line with Kaneki and Hide, so they could easily get by with just leaving their relationship off at a mutual confession/kiss scene, until we see them together in the epilogue. And given that Hide already narrated the whole epilogue chapter of the manga, it’d be pretty natural and easy to have it end in the anime with him going out on a date with Kaneki or something.

I don’t want to get too, like, conspiracy theorist-y about this, but part of me still wonders if one of the reasons why it felt like Ishida handled Hide so poorly in the manga’s final arcs was because he might have originally planned to have Kaneki end up dating Hide. It’d certainly be a good explanation for why things got so out of whack with him, and Hide ended up feeling so out of place and unnecessary in the manga. It’d also explain why we conveniently only learn about Hide’s feelings for Kaneki when he talks about it to Amon, and why the intensity of Kaneki’s feelings toward Hide seemingly got thrown out the window when they actually got to reunite.

Either way, I don’t mean any of this in a ship-hate sort of way. I have very . . . complicated feelings about how Ishida handled Kaneki’s relationship with Touka in the manga, but these are just the observations I have about how the anime seems to be handling it, and what it might be setting up for season 2.

Anyway, that went on for way too long, lol. To sum it all up, I thought that season 1 was surprisingly good, in spite of it’s flaws. I honestly had very low hopes for it before it aired, since it seemed impossible to adapt properly, but I ended up being very surprised by how it went, and I’m very excited to see how season 2 wraps it all up. I was apprehensive about season 2 when it was first announced, but the more I thought about it, the more clear it became that with some strict and careful editing, it could easily adapt the meaningful parts of the rest of the story into 12 more episodes. Either way, if it goes well in the end, I might even end up buying both seasons on BD when Funimation eventually releases them.

[perfectackeracy]

considering what you've already written on the topic of eren's behavior during chapter 84 up until recently; what do you think of him as a character in general?

Eh, I’ll give my judgement when the story will be over. He is the main character after all and I feel like giving a judgement now would be too premature, despite us nearing the end of the manga. I’ve got the beginning but the end is absolutely necessary for me to answer your question properly.

Still, if you want something partial, but still long, follow me under the cut (too bad for mobile users because screw the interface right).

It truly depends of how Isayama writes him at the end, if he really intended him to be some normie who tried to be a hero and change things, but failed, or… something else. Indeed, the end heavily relies of what’s presented to us at the beginning:

“No… But I feel like I just had the longest dream.. What was it? Now I can’t remember…” - Ch.1

Flashback? Future vision? We all thought till chapter 89 came that future vision was bull. It took a whole chapter to suddenly invert the perspective. While there isn’t many chapters left, there’s still facts that are going to pop up that might suddenly change our perception of the characters forever.

…Just like mine with Eren in chapter 84.

I’d actually like the normie one because it would fit what Eren did at the beginning: joining the Survey Corps on a whim because he hates being confined and ended up inheriting a power considered absolute, realizing he made a huge mistake from the start.

It seems Isayama, who previously had a vague idea of what he wanted to do with him, found something more defined. If I recall correctly he felt inspired by Yuki Kaiji, the voice actor from Eren. He even told Araki to make him more pathetic than in the original manga, implying Eren was never meant to be the literal version of a hero, a character with admirable traits.

Usually, the typical shônen protagonist is a character who has a dream, since they were little and do almost anything in order to accomplish it, whether it is becoming the strongest, becoming somebody important, solving a mystery, finding somebody from your life who has gone missing, etc… Their personality vary from manga to manga, but it’s often the cheerful teenager, naive or hot-blooded, capable of being a simpleton due to his lack of experience but also the one who motivates people, is surrounded by his nakama and clashes with rivals and enemies.

The vengeful protagonist also exists, but they’re mostly present in dark shônen or shônen trying to deal with more mature themes without being labeled as a seinen. Eren registers in this category, while building the development of a typical shônen protagonist without exhibiting its qualities: he’s not full of dream and ambition, something a shônen MC should inspire in the heart of young boys. Instead, he’s described as being selfish, having a complex or no ambition at all.

As extra evidence, his highschool AU describes him as the frustrated normie who’s annoyed “in one way or another”. The fake preview from volume 22 describes him as neither belonging to the nerds or the jocks nor having any dreams or interests (it’s interesting how the formulation here ends in “もない” on the three sentences of the description, almost as if Eren meant nothing), despite the wannabe’s reputation being neutral. That’s kinda sad when you think about it actually, because at his core, he really needs to fuel his blank state.

Still, Isayama doesn’t make him wander around aimlessly in the canon storyline and managed to give him a purpose. He strangely carries themes like the Chosen One because people, specifically Grisha imposed that on him. Carla called her son special for the sole reason he was born into this world, that every human who sees the light of the day is considered special. 

Because he was frustrated about “Humanity’s submission against the titans”, that’s what prompted him to step out and defy the “imposed slavery” on him. He wasn’t always like that, though. Meeting and knowing Armin triggered that complex about him lacking ambition.

Eren and Armin meeting for the first time - Ch. 83

When he first met Armin, he befriended him fairly quickly because of their status as outcasts. Eren already showed signs of not belonging to the other kids, probably because he had trouble sharing the same interests as them and also because he gets irritated quickly and gets into fights to shut them up. Funnily enough, those panels show the first signs of Eren’s prevalent traits: fighting back and beating them or else you’re a loser.

“I had never thought about what was beyond the walls until then… I’d only spent my days looking at the clouds in the sky. Not that it’s anything strange for a kid eight or nine years old to not be thinking about anything… but then you came running to me with a book. Both of us were outcasts, not able to get along with the other kids in town. That’s all we were back then. But when I heard you telling me those things… and I saw the look in your eyes. That’s when I knew for the first time. I wasn’t free. I noticed that I had been living in a birdcage for all this time. And that these freakish things had taken my freedom. The world was so big, but they’d forced me into a tiny cage. And when I realized that… I knew I could never forgive them.” - Ch.73

It wasn’t so much about the ocean or the contents of the outside world Eren was motivated for. Because he was aimlessly starting at the sky, he couldn’t believe someone like Armin could conceive something like… ambition. That’s why Eren was intrigued by the look in his eyes. And because the titans were actually obstacles to his personal space, he held a grudge against them. They were in the way, they were giant-sized bullies, they have to be removed.

Eren’s character song actually fist up nicely with his character: “男はロマンだぜ！たけだ君っ“ by Shinsei Kamattechan (lyrics and translation here) illustrates somebody talking to a certain Takeda, who prompts him to disobey his parents and do whatever they want because they’re free, despite them being children (the song talks about spending money carelessly and buying cigarettes). Eren being either one of the kids, wants his taste of freedom without having any authority telling him not to do it.

“From the day we’re born, there was something special about all of us: we’re free” - Ch. 73

Needless to say, I think that attitude and that grudge against the titans pushed him to idolize the Survey Corps and eventually join them. Because they went as far as destroying his district, making him swear extermination on every person responsible.

Then there was his meeting with Mikasa.

“You see Eren, that attitude is why you only have one friend.” - Ch. 5

Here we have yet Eren’s “normie” attitude demonstrated when it comes to Grisha asking him to get familiar with Mikasa. But then, he certainly wans’t expecting corpses.

Eren ready to begin the chase - Ch. 5

I tend to see this chapter as Eren being triggered by seeing dead bodies on the floor. Him seeing Mikasa’s parents being brutally murdered tingled his sense of justice and frustration: “How dare they kill people? This if worthy of the death penalty and I’m going to inflict that to them!”. The way he got close to these bandits is almost as scary as what they were planning to do with Mikasa: he’s approaching the first one by acting like an innocent child with clear murder intent (He’s supposed to be 9!!!). He then proceeds to pin down the second one before repeatedly stabbing himself over and over.

“I stopped dangerous beasts!! They only happened to resemble humans!! If you hadn’t come here, they would have been gone by the time the military police brigade had arrived!! The MPs wouldn’t have made it in time!!” - Ch. 5

Notice how the justification he brings to kill them is because they reduced themselves to low beasts who kill people, and as beasts, it’s “only natural” they deserve a death penalty. Besides, Eren is motivating Mikasa using the same logic he used for Armin: fight or you’re a complete loser.

Eren “teaching” Mikasa - Ch. 5

Needless to say that Eren wasn’t opposed to let Mikasa live in his house. He came to realize years later his attitude towards the bandits was pure impulse, as he gets lectured by Reiner about the meaning of being a soldier in chapter 17.

In the very first chapter of the series, every trait I’ve mentioned till there transpires into his motivation into joining the Survey Corps, so he wouldn’t live as a “caged animal” any longer. He gets upset when people are talking trash about them because he truly believed they were doing it for great justice. And that day, when the wall has been breached, it just so happens that Eren had a weird dream when he was crying and it was finally the day where Grisha showed him the basement. That day truly changed his life, for the best or the worst.

“I hate the idea of spending my whole life… inside the wall, ignorant of what’s happening in the world outside!!” - Ch. 1

But of course, this “outside” serves mostly as an excuse to give him more space. As he declared later: “They’re our lives! we can do whatever we want with them, right?”

When Shiganshina fell, Eren made his vow to kill every single titan left. During that time, he punched Hannes for preventing him from saving his mom. What was interesting is that piece of flashback before scrolling back to present.

“I’ll never be able… to go home again. Up to the end, all I could do was argue and be stubborn! Mom’s gone!! I’m never gonna see her again… Why is this happening to us? Is it because humans are weak? Is crying the only thing the weak can do?! I’m gonna destroy them!! Every last one… of those animals… that’s on this Earth!” - Ch. 2

The night when Shiganshina has fallen was the night where Grisha passed his titan power to Eren. The part where Grisha stated two contradictory statements in relation with chapter 89.

“Eren, get revenge for your mother. You can do it.” - Ch. 71

“Eren… never let this key… out of your sight. And everytime you look at it… remember… that you have to go to the basement room. The injection will cause damage to your memory… That’s why I can’t explain this to you now… but when you go to the basement room someday, you’ll learn the truth… it will be a hard and merciless road… but you have to recapture Wall Maria and get to that room. The power I’m giving you will be useful then. Their memories will teach you how to use it… if you want to save Mikasa… Armin… and everyone else… you’ll have to… control this power!” - Ch. 10

“Dad… Stop it! Dad! What are you doing?! You’ve been acting crazy since mom died!!”, “Eren!! Hold out your arm!” - Ch. 3

“You will be the one… to avenge your mother!!”, “Okay“ - Ch. 63

This moment was really hard to piece out together because what was thought as a contradiction became a succession of events where Grisha scared his son with the shifter power talk, but riled back him for a short while by settling him as one one who will avenge his mom. Earlier, Grisha made his mind and picked him as the legitimate successor of the Attack Titan. Thanks to chapter 89, it may have been inevitable. In this scene, he went from a sorrowful expression to an angry one, almost swapping memories for a brief instant like what happened with Kruger. In any case he burdened Eren with his shifter power and the Coordinate, thus making him bare probably the biggest sin going by Ymir’s curse. 

Because of that, his whole life changed. So did Eldians’.

The next segment is about Eren joining the military, two years after working in a settlement. This is the time where his attitude sort of... changed.

Eren trying to let his will of dominance pushing him forward - Ch. 15

Chronologically, starting from that point, Eren uses “we” when talking about Humanity. Mostly because, as stated by his dialogue in chapter, he believes in unity against a common enemy. He settled the titans as the enemy “humanity” was supposed to defeat, despite him quickly meeting, and clashing with people who didn’t agree with that notion: it started with Hannes not taking his job seriously, then Jean who outright admitted he’d rather live a comfy life inside the walls. Even much later in chapter 72, when Eren mentions that spirit of unity, Armin internally disagrees by thinking about his bullies. 

Eren’s world was mostly an ideal one, where you loop the first opening of the anime and have humanity fighting against the titans, forgetting not every single human is motivated by rage: Mikasa is fine with living with Eren in a quaint place, Levi “the hero” is mostly motivated by Erwin, Jean wanted and comfy life among the MP, people have a very negative opinion of the SC in general, Ymir doesn’t mind living her life for herself despite knowing much more about what’s happening than Eren does...

His biggest obstacle was the first step for 3DMG training, where Keith sabotaged the equipment on purpose. For the first time, Eren felt like his goal just evaporated in the air, with everybody mocking him for it, followed by an argument with Mikasa, who’s trying to dissuade him:

“You shouldn’t set your sights on that anyway. If you’re not cut for it, what can you do? Because at this rate, you’re just going to die in vain. And all your dreams and efforts will be for nothing. I’m saying you shouldn’t aim to be a soldier. You can always support the human race by being a producer. Laying down your life isn’t the only way to fight. [...] ...Your resolve has nothing to do with it. It’s not your decision whether you get to be a soldier, Eren...” - Ch. 16

Eventually, nothing worked. Eren still wants to pass the 3DMG exam. While talking to Reiner and Bertolt, he declares his will to kill the titans is a need he personally feels: becoming a soldier is a way to achieve this. I’m sure he’d find another way out if he can’t pass the exams, mostly because he has nothing left to make him move.

Parts of his personality have been shaped later by Reiner and Annie: Reiner about the solider mumbo-jumbo, Annie because of her techniques aiming to defeat people quickly. He demonstrated these two aspects during his fight with Jean (with Annie and Reiner even looking!). 

“...I see... he was... just venting his feelings. Like I did before... but I’m different now... I’m... a soldier! [...] I’ll use my skills to finish this.” - Ch. 17

The most important part of his training is reserved for hand-to-hand techniques, skills proving themselves to be really useful once Eren shifts to a titan. Seems Annie was really insistent on teaching Eren these techniques as soon as he reminded her of her father, because Eren’s reality was just as misplaced as his. You can see that insistence if you connect chapter 17 and chapter 44 together.

I think I’d rather break this analysis into several parts because it’s getting way too long. Eren faced different trials in Trost, during the FT arc and so on, where he had to deal with huge losses, traitors, the hard truth and eventually, the coordinate settling in.

[barbosaasouza]

Nintendo Labo: Genius or Insanity?

The French have a saying: Les extremes se touchent. It’s a way of saying that things so far out on either side of a spectrum might actually have some overlap. Some of the world’s brightest minds throughout history, for example, have had a touch of madness. Perhaps some of Nintendo’s designers have this trait too. Innovation requires unique thinking. Nintendo’s newest innovation, Labo, is a series of cardboard construction kits that interact with the Switch platform. And frankly, it feels so mad, that maybe it’s brilliant.

As Nintendo describes it, Labo “combines the magic of the Nintendo Switch system with the fun of DIY creations.” It draws on the appeal of building blocks like Lego as well as the Switch itself, which has already sold well over 14 million units worldwide. Nintendo will begin by selling a Variety Kit and a Robot Kit on April 20th, for $69.99 and $79.99, respectively.

Reactions to the Labo announcement a few months ago were, unsurprisingly, polarizing. Some took to social media to lavish praise on Nintendo for doing something truly creative, something that no other major company in the business would even dare to attempt. Others bemoaned the fact that Nintendo is charging people 80 bucks for pieces of pre-cut cardboard.

Nintendo’s product track record is certainly not flawless (Virtual Boy, Wii U anyone?) but if the house of Mario can legitimately sell cardboard pieces at those prices, it’s hard not to think of it as genius. The margins are going to be substantially better.

As Wedbush Securities' Michael Pachter explained, "The only costs are design (R&D) and marketing. My guess is that R&D is very low, but marketing is around the same as for any other games. So the difference in profits is the difference in R&D spending. That is likely $50 - $80 million total. If they sell 10 million Labo [units], the profit per unit will be $5 - $8 higher than a conventional game."

The announcement and pending launch also serve to fill a marketing gap for the Switch, which is coming off the stupendous release of Super Mario Odyssey last holiday but doesn’t have any major first-party titles on the immediate horizon.

“Labo is a great and novel product that fits well with Nintendo's history and its penchant for coming up with cool accessories,” Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research told me. “Its key value currently is to boost the marketing effort for the Switch. Releasing the Labo footage unexpectedly bought Nintendo a lot of traction on social media, which is clearly a critical component to its overall marketing strategy. By continuing to feed its fanbase, Nintendo keeps its core offering top of mind.”

That said, the analyst was unsure “whether people will buy it en masse and whether it will have a life-cycle beyond a few weeks of novelty before it ends up on a shelf much less relevant.”

Predictions aside, Nintendo Labo is already a hit with one important crowd: creatives. The bulk of the developers I spoke to about the cardboard kits expressed genuine enthusiasm.

“There's something about building the toys you play with that I'm sure will reach a broad audience,” said Jean-François Major, co-founder at Tribute Games, which has released the Contra-like 2D action title Mercenary Kings Reloaded on Switch and other platforms.

“With games like Minecraft, we've proven people are open to non traditional and linear experiences. However, the Labo games will need to be as creative as the cardboard construction.”

Klaus Lyngeled, CEO of Zoink, which just released the platformer Fe, is equally enthused.

“I think it’s an amazingly creative idea,” he said. “I personally really love games that also are toys. A few years back we developed a plush toy for the Wii called WeeWaa. It was a real passion project for me. My kids were quite young then and both played a lot of games and with their plush toys, so I created this cute little character that could eat the Wiimote, and when you moved WeeWaa he would react accordingly on screen. 

“As we designed the game we explored lots of ways to use the accelerometer and IR camera and I can really see how Labo is being very creative with all these features.”

Mike Wilson, co-founder of both Devolver Digital and Good Shepherd, has gotten to know a wide array of developers over the years, and he knows creativity when he sees it.

“I’m pretty sure my response was the same as everyone else’s, which at first was like ‘WTF is this a joke?’ and then soon moved to ‘Wow this is crazy and kind of cool.’ As someone that works with a lot of developers, I don’t think the potential of Labo has even sunk[en] in,” he commented. “... I could see the younger end of Switch players really embracing it. I love it when Nintendo does weird stuff!”

Nintendo, of course, has always had youth in mind when developing its games. That family-friendly image extends to Labo, as well. It’s something that’s targeted at kids, yes, but importantly it’s an activity that can be enjoyed jointly with parents. Anecdotally speaking, my wife does not play games, but as a woman who’s very artistic and crafty, she’s already cut and assembled things for our two toddlers using Amazon boxes. Who’s to say that’s not an untapped audience for Nintendo?

“Since I have kids, I'm already planning on buying some of the Labo things,” John Comes, CTO of indie publisher tinyBuild Games told me. “As someone who was also a mechanical engineer at one time, the entire concept is right up my alley.”

Jeremy Dunham, VP of Publishing at Rocket League developer Psyonix is planning to purchase Labo as well. “I plan on buying Labo for my kids when it's released to see what they think. I'm really excited to see what kind of ideas this kit will spark and how different (or similar) those ideas are to other building sets,” he remarked.

There’s something especially gratifying about learning to build things. You take a certain pride in what you’ve constructed. When I was a boy in 1986, I used to play endlessly with a mechanized, battery-powered construction kit called Robotix. Had I been told that I could hook up my Robotix creations to my Nintendo Entertainment System to control Mario’s jump or Simon Belmont’s whip, I think I would have been ecstatic. Nintendo may be onto something special with Labo.

I feel like this is the first gaming platform that can bridge the gap between 'games' and 'educational games'.

“My son already has an engineering mind, so the STEM learning opportunities will be huge,” Comes said. “I feel like this is the first gaming platform that can bridge the gap between 'games' and 'educational games'. There's such a divide there when you weigh teachings vs. fun gameplay.“

Dunham, too, is optimistic about the educational aspect, but he cautioned that Nintendo must remain open to broad possibilities with Labo.

“If you're only ever relegated to a few recurring designs, or add-on packs are hard to find, or any other number of challenges, it could be limiting,” he said. “I think of toys like Lego and love their concept of giving you blueprints, but still giving you the freedom to make whatever you want. If Nintendo Labo maintains that kind of flexibility, the potential is very, very high. The real trick is making sure that the cardboard itself is the only rigid thing about it.”

I also imagine that a community of Labo hackers will form and we might see some much more innovative designs floating around the internet.

Major added, “Labo is a great opportunity to see what makes something tick… it [could]l be a great parent/kid weekend project. A Labo kit could replace building a birdhouse.”

Lyngeled took it even one step further, suggesting that Labo has genuine classroom potential: “I could see that the Swedish educational system might pick this up and start using it in class -- especially if you can start programming your own toys, which it seems like Nintendo are hinting at in the trailer. I also imagine that a community of Labo hackers will form and we might see some much more innovative designs floating around the internet."

But what about the selection of cardboard as Labo’s building material? Surely, Nintendo has made a mistake by not using plastic? Time will tell how durable these kits can be, but Nintendo explained the reasoning behind its decision in a recent investor Q&A.

Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo Director and Managing Executive Officer, remarked, "I'm sure we surprised everyone with the use of cardboard, but it's not so far-fetched if you consider how familiar the material is, at least to Japanese people who, from a young age, use it for play and as a material for creating things such as fancy crafts.”

Tokyo-based veteran games journalist Justin Leeper can attest to how ingrained the papercraft hobby is with Japan’s youth. His mind immediately turned to Origami upon watching the Labo announcement trailer.

“While a mere novelty in the West - ‘Aunt Carol can make paper cranes’ - origami is a long-standing and beloved art here in Japan. Building is much more than a niche portion of Japanese toys as well,” he told me. “Go to any toy store in Tokyo, and you’ll see beautiful dioramas you can buy and build from scenes out of Studio Ghibli movies, for example, or metal sheets that somehow turn into abstract TIE Fighters. Then there’s Gundam models, train sets, Lego... all based on building.”

He continued, “The Japanese are also big on packaging. A gift isn’t a gift unless its box is put in another cardboard box that’s placed in a decorative bag and wrapped with a few hundred yards of ribbon."

"Cardboard is called ‘danboru’, a word whose origins I’ve never known despite being written in the character set for foreign-to-Japan words. There’s a relatively popular manga character, Danbo, who’s a cardboard robot from the series Yotsuba&. If anything, it shows the acceptance of cardboard in Japan’s pop-culture consciousness.”

For his part, Comes isn’t concerned about Labo’s cardboard pieces. Should a piece wear out, there’s an obvious fix, he said:

“I personally feel like cardboard was the perfect material to use. It's very approachable. I'm not worried about it getting damaged. I mean, it's cardboard. If it breaks, take the last Amazon box you got and cut out the same piece.”

Along with the worries about cardboard longevity, there’s still the very legitimate issue of price sensitivity. Nintendo will have to convince parents that the value that Labo brings justifies the expenditure. Dunham, however, has seen much worse in the hobby industry.

There appears to be a bit of a stigma associated with the cardboard so far, which is understandable, but kids and their parents will tell Nintendo really quickly if the quality and replayability is worth the price once it's out.

“As a parent of two kids myself, I can tell you that most crafting/building/exploration kits are typically a bit more expensive than you'd expect,” he offered. “There appears to be a bit of a stigma associated with the cardboard so far, which is understandable, but kids and their parents will tell Nintendo really quickly if the quality and replayability is worth the price once it's out. “Given that a lot of smart-device-controlled robots are typically in the range of $100 or more, though, I can see the argument that the ability to build the toy first would make the price worth it for some.”

Regardless of how well Labo performs on the market, Nintendo deserves credit for trying something this bold. And let’s say that it does take off, would the one-time playing cards company begin to partner up with outside developers to make unique kits for their games? Nintendo has shown an increasing willingness to work with third parties and especially indies on Switch, but extending Labo feels unlikely, even if it does get developers’ creative juices flowing.

“That would be fantastic [if they did],” exclaimed Comes. “I have a mechanical engineering degree and I've made games for 17 years. So building my own Labo thing would be a great combination of my two life loves. I'd spend hours tinkering with building them.”

Dunham liked this idea as well: “A Rocket League kit would be really neat to see on store shelves, but I imagine that Nintendo wants to see how its initial experiment works out first before opening the floodgates. If it is a success, though, and kids start asking for themed sets based on their favorite properties, Nintendo has shown in the past (in games like Smash Bros. and even our own to a lesser extent) that they have no problem finding ways to make that happen.”

Major went so far as to call Labo “an indie’s dream” and Tribute would love to see Nintendo reach out to indies for more ideas. “A lot of innovation comes from smaller studios. It would probably be a great idea to tap into other studios’ creative minds as long as Nintendo maintains a certain level of quality control,” he said.

Clearly, the developer community is fired up, but from a business standpoint, getting indies involved in Labo would still involve clearing some major hurdles.

“[It] would be amazing [to work on Labo], but unfortunately I don’t think it will happen. I don’t think Nintendo will fund an indie developer to make a game for Labo as it’s too niche,” Lyngeled said. “And funding on our own is too big a risk. We survive because we can sell digitally. Distributing a Labo kit on our own [would be] very complicated. We never managed to get the [WeeWaa] plush out on the market because of distributing.

“One solution could be that people build a construction [kit] out of household materials and their own cardboard. That could be a fun way to make an indie Labo game. Let’s see how well [these] Nintendo kits sell before diving into this.”

April 20 should be an interesting day for Nintendo. It could be utterly inconsequential or it could mark the beginning of a new long-term franchise. “Given how beloved Nintendo is and how much weight their name carries, I think [Labo] will do very well at launch,” Dunham said.

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