#nokkers

[emilegrace22]

Posted a Fumetsu fic!

Relationship: Gugu & Fushi (Platonic)

Summary: Fushi has a nightmare where its attacked by a nokker, it decides to go with Gugu, its big brother, for comfort.

[cathrt1c]

fushi is so fucking adorable I love him so much, top tier character

[spookyscarysnails]

i am the one who nokks

[agrust-art]

[diseaseriddencube]

a collection

[fionnalovesanimeboys]

The most heartbreaking thing right now is that March is actually alive 😢

[rinarin-karimel]

I want to know what's wrong with the left hand in this uniform: is there a scar where the nokker was, is there just a swelling in the form of a nokker, is there a normal hand?

[diseasedcube]

i never thought i'd be missing fushi this much

[nick-das-wolfsherz]

[greatwyrmgold]

You know that anime about a white-haired immortal with immense magical power and how the short-lived (mostly human) people they meet on their globe-trotting journey change them? I am, of course, talking about both Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and To Your Eternity. But despite their superficial similarities, Frieren and Fushi are very different.

Fushi starts his journey as basically a shapeshifting infant, moving forward on instinct more than anything else; one of the first people he meets is a four-year-old, and she has to teach him a lot. Luckily, Fushi's good at learning; he changes a lot in his first few years of life, and changes at that speed pretty much any time he isn't being a nokker-slaying hermit.

Frieren, on the other hand, is mature and stagnant. She's been around (and not hermit-ing) for well over a millennium, and the Frieren we see in flashbacks to a thousand years ago is almost identical to the one we see at the start of the series. Frieren barely changes at all, compared to someone like Fushi; the changes she undergoes are remarkable only because she's not used to any change.

I bet a story where the two of them met and decided to travel together for a while would be neat. They're similar in some ways, but they're fundamentally very different in ways I think would make their interactions quite entertaining.

[kafkaoftherubble]

把死人给带回来？ 难道...?！

// If They Are Bringing Back the Dead...

This post contains spoilers for Chapter 184.1 of To Your Eternity.

It also contains speculations galore. This is NOT a meta essay.

Shoutout to my homie branetheory in Discord!

Thanks to them, I was reminded of what Parts of My Brain had wanted to talk about:

Bruh. I can't believe ToFu made me so high last night that I forgot to talk about this.

Honestly I regret nothing Okay, memory water.

A little Kafka Aside: I'm gonna have to consciously ignore how... not-there the scientific backing for this is. Honestly, this Memory Water thing reminded me of the New Age/Pseudoscientific idea of "water memory" or Masaru Emoto's "water consciousness" thing or DNA teleportation. However, this is a story where weirder shits have happened, so suspension of disbelief willingly and gleefully granted. I just need to get this out of my head first.

To reiterate, Kaibara's experimental procedure involves

Extracting cells from a person's body

"Turn" it into water (how?)

Make a "clone" drink it (who?)

-----------------------------------------------------

Who could these clones be?

The only clones we know so far are the Mizuha clones. Their existence seems to imply a similar purpose to Hayase's descendants—they are supposed to inherit Hayase's Will, which is 95% "get injected with a tumor we call the Left Hand Nokker."

But Nokkers have long become invisible and fully integrated into this ecosystem. In the Future Era, they are embedded in tag chips, and they grant the bodies they possess all sorts of abilities and augmentations.

What would an inheritance of Hayase's Will even look like here? At first, I thought it would be similar: a tag chip with the Left Hand in it. Mizuha's, uh, possession (for the lack of a better word) manifested through the same mechanism other Nokkers used, after all.

However, the story gradually told us that the clones had all been massacred via an unknown operation for yet-untold reasons. Why would they do that?

Were these clones failures?

If they were failures, then it would make sense why Kaibara treated them as disposable; after all, in the past, the Guardians always exalted Hayase's Descendant(s) no matter how incompetent they were at their mission. Failure to secure Fushi's seeds I mean love never made them disposable enough to be killed, right?

So, as branetheory (crediting my homie even though they might not see this ahahhahah) also thought—

Could it be that Hayase herself has been successfully reincarnated in the body of one of these clones? (8)

I assigned this hypothesis an 8, or "80% confidence level."

Is she who you're gonna see, Bon?

Why would Kaibara need so many Mizuha clones in the first place? They only need one Descendant. They only have one Left-Hand Nokker...

Unless these clones were made specifically for bringing back Hayase. They were all experiments. Few experiments ever go right at the first trial. But this? Experiments this challenging and important as "recreating our legendary progenitor, Hayase?"

It will definitely require a lot of trial and error. So these clones were made to be expendables.

Honestly, who would name their offspring with numbers if they weren't meant to be seen as expendables?

----

There is an interesting point to note: Memory Water only works if one has a Nokker implanted in them. Remember how Abel can't drink it and instantly know the answers to their stupid-ass questions?

So do all clones have Nokkers implanted in them? They all own a tag chip, after all. But there is only one Left Hand Nokker, and that bitch seems deadset on possessing only Hayase's appointed heir (or in this case, Hayase herself).

Does that mean

all the clones have their own Nokkers, but none of it is the Left Hand, until the Experiment? (3) OR

all the clones have empty tag chips until the Experiment, in which the Left Hand Nokker is then implanted inside before the subject drinks the Memory Water? (6) OR

other hypotheses I could not think of at the moment? (1)

------------------------------------------

Doro and Her Sisters: Were They Trying To Stage a Rebellion Against Kaibara's Highest Echelon? (7)

Assigned (7); "70% confidence level"

Could this scene actually depict a failed experimental result, where #32/Doro was the subject? After all, she didn't look like she died in a massacre. She looked like she died alone, leaving her sisters behind..

Doro liaisoned with Fushi in secret. So secretly, Tonari didn't know it happened.

Why would she do that? Way back then, me and the Discord gang had speculated some sort of clash between Doro and the rest of Kaibara. At that time, I think our speculation was that it had to do with the Wish-granting Orb specifically.

But now, with this new information in mind...

Could it be that the liaison was part of the clones' planned rebellion? (6)

Assigned 6; "60% confidence level."

It could be that, in addition to passing vital information about Kaibara to Fushi (who is still not exactly forthcoming about what they know so far), Doro was also trying to ensure that the Wish-granting Orb will never fall into the Highest Echelon's hands.

Was her conviction formed out of concerns about what Kaibara might do with the orb?

Or was her reasoning more pragmatic—she didn't want Kaibara to have the power to crush her rebellion?

----

Back to the number-as-naming convention. What if these weren't names, but the assigned turn of each clone for the ultimate experiment (6)? If that's the case, then Doro is the 32nd experiment that failed.

That's a lot. And the fact that she failed would mean the experiment will keep going. The clones will keep being bred to be used for these experiments. It's a conflict ripe for seeds of rebellion, right?

And so, there are extra hypotheses as to why the clones were massacred in the first place:

Hayase has been successfully reincarnated (8)

The clones' rebellion plan has been found out (7)

Hayase has been successfully reincarnated AND the clones' rebellion plan has been found out (5.6; 8/10×7/10)

----------------------------------------

Dolly's Purpose(s)

While Doll's original purpose might have been for amusement and fun—Doro rescued it from some trash heap and just engineered it to be a playmate—I had always found its ability to dish out powerful punches suspicious. Why would a playmate be good at granting people concussions in the first place?!

And it was good enough to take out mercenaries, right?

I'm quite confident that Doll's punch is a defensive ability to guard whatever's stored in its memory (9).

I should review what Previous Me had speculated:

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves or consciousness

Doll holds the Left Hand Nokker within it

Doll is a combination of Doro's consciousness/brainwaves and its original AI

There is also the speculation that Doll is the Wish-granting Orb itself, but I think the confidence level for that hypothesis has gone pretty low... at least to me, personally. It sits at less than 10%.

Now, I want to add new hypotheses and rearrange them from most confident to least:

Doll's memories include Kaibara's top secret: key infrastructures, their real master(s), their experiments, whatever information they have gained about the Wish-granting Orb, their master plan to counter Fushi, and the like. Things that could give rebelling clones an edge. (8)

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves/consciousness integrated within its original AI (7)

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves/consciousness AND it is Doro's consciousness/memories that possess knowledge of Kaibara's top secret (5.6; 8/10×7/10)

Doll holds the Left Hand Nokker (less than 2)

The first (and by extension, the third) hypothesis can be supplemented by the fact that Kaibara really wants the Doll. Why, if not because the Doll holds vital information regarding the entire company?

They could go after it for Doro's consciousness, sure, but the priority would drop a lot more, wouldn't it? ...Unless the third hypothesis is true!

The second hypothesis can be partially supplemented by Abel's dedication to possessing the Doll; he really cherished Doro, and to him, the Doll could lead him to her again. He also claimed that Doro "is still alive," though when pressed, he gave no evidence.

Was it wistful thinking, or could he have been privy to Doro's experiment to transfer her consciousness into Doll? Did he really know nothing about Doro's death?

There is also the "Now I am human" line Doro uttered while blindfolded. Given we now know what the clones are used for, Doro might see her existence to be inhuman/subhuman because of her real purpose. Maybe, to her, she could feel more human by being a doll than in her human body.

Hell, who knows? Doro might secretly envy Abel's humanness—a guy who was likely born from normal copulation and couldn't fit in with the rest of the Tagged society, yet all the more a genuine human being than the rest of them.

-----------------------------------

What is the nature of Doll's Brainwaves?

Could it have been a digital transfer, or could it have used a similar mechanism to the Memory Water?

----------------------------------

Miscellaneous Implications of Memory Water Bringing Back the Dead

Bruh I swear if they reincarnated the Nameless Boy to torment Fushi I will fucking sever my friendship with Left Hand Nokker and nuke their Paradise. Oh hi Left Hand, nothing over here.

----------------------------------

And that concludes my hypotheses round-up, updated to only Chapter 184.1. Remember! Y'all are always welcome to reblog and add your own thoughts to it!

Fuck, I will be so honored if y'all Fushi-fied my writing by adding absolutely anything.

Thank you for reading my ramble. Rest assured, I have prepared just the right image for the moment I clown myself by having most of my hypotheses come out spectacularly falsified:

(Hi everyone this is Kei from Ajin)

[kodanshamanga]

NEW Kodansha Print+Digital:

🕯️To Your Eternity, Volume 19🕯️ By Yoshitoki Oima

🐺After Mizuha is recovered and the false Fushi is defeated, the tightly-knit group returns to live out their days of peace. Still, the world is teeming with Nokkers.

[kafkaoftherubbles]

Does Fushi's Ability to Revive People Ruin The Story? // 不死的复活能力是否崩坏了故事的世界观与主题？

I wrote a whole essay by accident while musing about someone else's question on Discord. I decided to post the stuff here, too, as a record for future versions of me.

I think the revival ability introduces new contemplative angles to a story about life, death, rebirths, and living forever.

The theme of immortality, as well as death and grief, are not new. A lot of them ended up being cautionary tales, and a lot ended up being about the inevitability of death and mourning, too. 

Though many of these stories are also interesting and thoughtful, I also think they are very thoroughly explored. It's hard to spin new ideas out of molds that have existed as long as humans had begun telling stories to each other. What can you say that hasn't already been said?

So I think that's where Fushi's revival power really works. Instead of the themes and ideas most of us have likely gotten used to, Oima added a rarer angle to her exploration. In fact, she kinda subverted the idea that Fushi was "just an immortal being who could kinda create things" and revealed to us that they had always meant to be a Creator-in-Training. Immortality is just one aspect of his "conditions". 

On the other hand, I think one of the reasons why a good few people don't like this revival/resurrection thing is because it betrays a certain expectation of the story--at least, according to what I've seen from detractors.

Seems like a lot of people hopped into the story because it started out "tragically beautiful." It's got this thing about life and death from the eyes of an immortal, and so it's easy to immediately assume certain expectations based on previous similar stories: the pains of being an immortal, the tragic cycle of life and death, the loneliness of those left behind, etc.

But, honestly, the idea that death is "final" and "irreversible" was already shattered when "rebirth" was introduced. I suspect it was less of a point of contention because rebirth introduces angles that are still congruent to people who wanted to read about "the tragic beauty of life", as well as being somewhat familiar in pop culture. In Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, attachment is what causes reincarnation (former) and rebirth (latter). Hayase's rebirths are basically that—attachment-caused. It also sets up a mortal foil (as opposed to immortal foil, i.e. the Nokkers) to Fushi, and flows into a story of Hayase+Left Hand Nokker's karma/lives intertwining with Fushi's. 

However! When "revival" was introduced, there are a lot more people who didn't like it or are hesitant. It completely breaks any expectations they had for this story. Death becomes less of a finality and more of a choice. The immortal now has a bunch of immortal friends--not even in the rebirth/reincarnation way, but as "themselves." If the story isn't gonna be about Fushi grappling with the biggest philosophical questions on life and death, then what can they still grapple with as the story goes on? It probably feels like a thematic betrayal to the detractors, right? 

Someone on the Discord group also pointed out a real good point: it made some viewers/readers wonder why they shed their tears and grieve when these people came back in the end. Maybe there is a sense of emotional devaluement?

In my opinion, the Present Era answered the question of "What can Fushi still grapple with?". Instead of grappling with issues of death and life's grand tragedies, Fushi is now forced to grapple with life's details. For example: how do you love? The fuck is love?

Do relationships and companionships—no matter how much impact and weight they possess when you have them—still wane and end, even if the people's physical death is out of the question? What happens if people "move on"? What happens when people "don't need you anymore"?

What sort of outlook on life should one form—how does one know if it's right or wrong?

What is a perfect life?

I think the revival ability allowed these newer themes to surface, and be framed in novel ways. It also works well because a good few characters used for these themes are Fushi's revived friends, with all that history entailed. It also makes for an interesting comparison to the latest Hayase-styled rebirth in the Present Era, because she is an extension of Kahaku to the present and inherits all that karmic conditions, and yet unlike Fushi's revived friends who are "themselves", she is also her own slate and not-Kahaku. And of course, the new dance with them Nokkers...

But people who wanted to see TYE for bigger philosophical questions could find these musings too small and banal. I kinda sympathize with them. This ain't what they believed they were promised. 

Ultimately though, I hope the detractors can get to terms with the shake-up and read the story through another lens, or adopt a different idea of what this story is about. The way I interpret it from the get-go is that To Your Eternity has never been (just) about death or "the beautiful tragedy of life". I thought it has always been about the struggles of being human. A Creator, a Creator-in-training, supernatural alien-souls, people who are born in bad times, people who are dehumanized as monsters, criminals and their offsprings, people who are raised in messed-up families, robot dolls... All of them are unified by this same quest.

Hence, I personally don't feel thematically betrayed because it stays true to this backbone. In fact, I'm happy that its exploration diversifies.

Thank you for reading my ramble.

[bestbonnist]

I eenjoyed your meta about Kahaku (avoiding the other ones because i haven't read modern arc at all), but how do you think Fushi might feel about Kahaku? At this point in the anime I really can't tell, though I know he DID think of him as a good friend before the nokkers officially started attacking and the Left Arm started lying

Don't worry I've got you! This topic is covered extensively later in the manga, and if the anime receives a third season you can expect that it'll answer your question better than I can! But basically, Fushi considers Kahaku a friend on the level of March/Tonari/Gugu/etc., someone who they would want to spend the rest of their life with. If anything, Kahaku's actions during the battle of Renryrr only reinforced this.

Fushi asked Kahaku for help. Pretty un-subtly. They went to visit him, dropped a line about how tired they were, and then left. Fushi would never tell their other comrades how fed up they were with their attitude, or rest while there are people dying. Their guilt complex won't allow it. But they're fucking thinking about it. Kahaku is like all of Fushi's darkest, most selfish thoughts with no impulse control. Fushi can't blame him for seeing the truth under the surface and reacting to it.

Elaborating on the previous paragraph, none of the things Fushi wants are particularly selfish or harmful to other people. They just think that if they're not actively helping others constantly, they're not paying the world back for the pain they inflict on others just by existing. Doing something for themselves is unthinkably evil. The reason I phrased things in that way is to better explain why, from Fushi's perspective, they're still friends with Kahaku. Because he accepts the parts of themselves they hate.

No one has treated Fushi this gently in a very long time. They've been on their own since Pioran died, so it's not that surprising that they folded as soon as they had someone to rely on again. Even though it ended in about the worst possible way it could have, that doesn't negate the fact that Kahaku was able to be that person when they needed it. That still means something.

By the way, all my posts that contain spoilers for the anime are tagged "#fnae anime spoilers" so feel free to block that tag if you don't want to see any stuff beyond what's already aired.

[tonariofjananda]

I think about this moment a lot.

Like. It feels really rude that Fushi’s just brushing Tonari off like this, jerking his hand away as if he’s annoyed she even tried to touch him in the first place. The fact that we don’t even see his expression when he does this makes it feel extra brutal. But I think a lot of people see this scene as if Fushi rejecting Tonari’s ‘advances,’ so to speak, and I’m not convinced that’s what’s happening here.

Like, yeah we see that big love bubble at the corner of the panel while she’s telling Fushi how important he is to her, but Tonari’s just reflected on how she feels about him and ultimately rejected her own feelings. Romantic love is not something she wants to feel for Fushi. So I don’t think she was working her way up to a confession. At least, not intentionally (it’s not her fault Fushi’s an empath)!

Instead I think this scene is supposed to be a parallel of the moment that happens between Gugu and Rean.

Gugu doesn’t tear his hand away from Rean’s because he doesn’t want to hear her confession. He isn’t running away because he doesn’t love her back. Gugu pulls away from Rean because he’s rejecting the concern she has for him and his safety. He realizes there’s something greater that he needs to focus on, something he feels only he‘s strong enough to take care of. And he wants to take care of it to keep her and the people he loves safe. Gugu loves her, it’s just not the right time for him to indulge in it.

In my opinion Fushi feels similarly to Gugu (not the reciprocation part though). He appreciates Tonari’s concern and love for him- that’s why he smiles a little and thanks her- but it’s not the right time for him to indulge in that. He‘s still trying to prove that the world is at peace (something he’s doing because of her, for her), he doesn’t need or want her getting involved in his fight against the nokkers.

I wanna reemphasize that I’m not trying to argue that Fushi secretly reciprocates Tonari’s romantic feelings- he’s already said he’s never felt that way about anyone before. I just don’t think he’s outright rejecting them either.

I think the hands in this scene are also what get people thinking this scene is a little more romantic than it is. It’s a standard cliche where one character stops another from leaving after all lmao. But this to me is what solidifies this as a scene that’s not inherently romantic.

Them grabbing at each other like this is a much older, a much deeper thing for them. Back when they were on Jananda, they’d often grab at each other’s wrists because they could never quite see eye to eye. Tonari specifically would grab at Fushi’s wrists a lot when trying to impose her will on him and drag him along. Once they start understanding each other, however, their hands actually touch (ex. Tonari pressing Oopa’s blow dart to the back of Fushi’s hand).

This scene is a little mix of the two. Tonari’s grabbing Fushi’s wrist to stop him from leaving (imposing her will on him) but her hand overlaps with his palm a little (trying to understand him). Tonari doesn’t know what’s happening completely, but she knows enough to know something’s wrong. In a way, Tonari grabbing for his hand is her appealing to Fushi to open up, to let her in, follow through on this connection that’s always been theirs.

But he doesn’t. Fushi rejects it.

I think the chapter image shows it all pretty well too. They’re both reaching out for each other. But while Tonari’s solid in her attempts to reach him, Fushi's all fuzzy. It's as if these are his emotions. Like, subconsciously he wants to reach out, but he can't. So close, yet so far…

[diseaseriddencube]

someone: the new episode has a disappointing lack of blood in this scene

and now i'm in abject fear as i'm waiting for my download to finish