#rakuyou

[rotkinshock]

New Home Crash chapter!

[fruit-punks-obsessions]

Kamui is my top character now, favorite boi! Even tho the Rakuyou arc is over, hope to see him again soon! Before the series ends atleast. First conclusion that brought a tear to my eye. :')

Will definitely rewatch the episodes that focus more on him

[raccoonclty]

some casual oboro scribbles i didnt feel like refining

[short-circuit-the-great]

Throwing canon out the window for this fic because these days I care less and less about canon compliance and more and more about testing really cool alternate scenarios

[teatitty]

Completely obssessed with thinking about Katsura and Gintoki being a duo in so many episodes just creating chaos together and how it would've fucking rad as hell if Sakamoto and Takasugi were a space duo consistently ending up on the same planets and getting into Shenanigans as a result

[xostrawberry-milkyox]

Shiroyasha

[hydrangeawrites]

In a post canon AU where everyone lives, Bansai would have definitely been adopted by the Joui 4. Sakamoto likes him because Bansai’s steadfastly loyal to Takasugi and they’re both the designated negotiators for their respective organizations (also because he’s fun to mess with, like Kintoki is), Katsura likes him because they can talk for hours about philosophy and the profundity of life, Gintoki likes him because Bansai’s proven himself in his eyes but also because Sadaharu likes him, and Kagura likes anyone Sadaharu likes, and Shinpachi would not stop screaming after he found out Bansai is Otsu’s producer, and Takasugi would be trying to fight all of them off because he found Bansai first and like hell he’s going to hand over his manslayer so easily

[redmondcorneliusramsbottom]

Shoyo ran such a cursed school, his top students end up fighting each other one way or another

[tsukimirecs]

nekoma // fic recommendations

note: remember to read the tags! + i do not own any of these works + the synopsis for each fic belongs to the author who wrote the fic

kuroo tetsuro

taste test - kaientai

synopsis: when you taste the same thing as your soulmate, things get interesting

red all over - meldve

synopsis: you are trapped in an elevator with your work rival, kuroo. what else could go wrong?

your name - tsukisemi

synopsis: kuroo finds you really cute, too bad you keep giving him a fake name every time you come into the coffee shop he works at

public transit - orphan_account

synopsis: your heart pounded, knowing you were being touched, and he was watching you.

but when he loves me - sweetcandyliar

synopsis: there are so many ways that kuroo tells you he loves you.

somewhere only we know - wanderwithme (wanderlustt)

synopsis: four times kuroo proposes to you - and the last time he does

meeting the boys - orphan_account

synopsis: in which no one really believes kuroo could get a girlfriend as incredible as you

落葉 | rakuyou - deltachye

synopsis: maple leaves are most beautiful in which they have died, falling slowly, waiting patiently to be reborn

riverbank - itsleese

synopsis: you're reminded of the little boy you loved way back then, the riverbank you played at together. maybe you should go see it?

caring cats - haikyuu_philia

synopsis: nekoma is family

disrupted meetings - sansos

synopsis: dr. tetsurou kuroo’s research group has transitioned to hosting meetings online. what could go wrong?

cat ears - just__j

synopsis: kuroo approaches you, captain of the girls club, with a proposition of a bet for the losing captain

kozume kenma

change the channel - alkale

synopsis: "i want to buy your game from you"

kodzuken does not have a girlfriend - bunnytime

synopsis: it has been a running joke that kodzuken lies about having a girlfriend for years now. needless to say, his fanbase is convinced he doesn’t really have a girlfriend

second place - yourqueenhasarrived

synopsis: kenma forgets your anniversary and once again pushes you aside for his gaming career. how much can you take?

an inconvenient crush - the_only_iris

synopsis: kenma has had the biggest crush on twitch streamer, (y/n). what happens when their paths cross?

learning process - nomazee

synopsis: you and kenma always had an interesting dynamic. kuroo found it nice for everyone involved

thank you for being a friend! - heichoe

synopsis: ”if it helps: when you gave kuroo head in high school, he said it was great"

yaku morisuke

who dares speak aloud these words (intended for the heart to speak) - sunmoonstarsrain

synopsis: yaku bursts into her life like a hurricane, even whilst akaashi lingers on like the memory of a summer breeze

artists eyes - teapots_and_teacups

synopsis: yaku was used to being ignored on the court

if only i were selfish - this noodle writes

synopsis: yaku was anything but a selfish man, but being selfless had cost him you once before. so, when he gets the chance to see you again, will he finally be selfish enough to try?

note: as you can tell, i'm trying a different recommendations style- what do you think? do you think i should switch back to the first one or is this one better? would love to know your thoughts

[rotkinshock]

New work of mine!

"Home Crash"

Genuine Family fluff, comedy and a bit of angst

Another wave hit the beach, pulling her mind back to thinking and acting as she grumbled.

"Vista, why must it always be you? For fucks sake…"

Or Rakuyo and Vista have a chance to meet their nephew faster than they thought.

[takami-takami]

thinking about post-war!Keigo where everything remains the same. Except his wings don't grow back. Everything repairs itself, everything changes back gradually to what it was before but his wings remain the same. Don't remain, rather. It's funny how slow he is, still not adjusted to all of this, given the very purpose of his existence lies in his ability to be fast. Doesn't matter that the reason for his speed is non-existent now. He's a hero, right? Heroes don't cry.

Heroes don't sob over their now-gone cause of existence.

Heroes don't just randomly forget they lost their wings one night, too busy staring at their lover's back with lost, blank eyes. Unaware of his woefully blank amber eyes, you lay beside him in his bed, which feels uncomfortably large now. Another form of failure that hurt his eyes if he didn't already have enough tears streaming down his ugly, scarred face silently, every time he had to begrudgingly look at himself in the mirror. Your attempts and pleas at spooning him tonight were hushed by his silent gaze. Please let me be useful, they pleaded. You gave up. Now gathered in his arms, both of you felt safe.

So safe that he forgot his empty back for a second. As instinct would have it, his back muscles flexed to move his wings to wrap around you. Closed amber eyes and a fuzzy head full of comfort hampered his worries and woes. His mind was too far gone in your soft to register the fact that he had been trying to do this for quite some time now. Unsuccessful attempts forced him to come back to reality. Body writhing, his eyes opened suddenly, wide and full of shock. His hands froze. Keigo slowly comprehended his actions. His eyes felt wet. Awoken by his movements, your body shifted in a frenzy as you turned to face him, eyes open but vision foggy from residual sleep. Out of pure instinct, you cupped his tear-stricken face as you tried hard to understand what the fuck was going on, the best your foggy mind could. His posture and expression worsened.

"Kei', honey, you okay? Kei', talk to me. Wh-" He fell to your chest hard. And bawled like a fucking child. Fists gripped the fabric of your shirt as he sobbed and cried, for god knows how long. You held him with equal force and gently rocked his body, despite a slight understanding of his sudden breakdown. To an extent, you were aware it was because of his wings, with the way he clutched your backside and felt it like it was his own. Whispering soft coos and sweet nothings into his hair continued for a while and near screaming and sobbing turned into silent cries. Eventually, he calmed down. Sensing his discomfort and heavy breathing, you combed your hands gently through his blond locks.

"I love you Kei', you know that right?" No response. Just faint nodding. You suppose that would do for now. uhh hey there V! Call me Rakuyou. This is my first time writing something like this. I've always admired people like you who can express their feelings in words so seamlessly and perfectly. I find Hawks' character quite admirable and well-written, and I most definitely don't gush over the boy every fucking moment. And as for this piece, I'd love to know some tips to write him well and some writing tips that you may wanna share. This might be a Wattpad-level fic at best, but I gave my best. Lemme know your thoughts on this one. I love Keigo and your work!

-Love, Rakuyou. (Crawls into a black hole and dies.)

I ... I do not have words for this. This knocked on my heart like it was a door and said "actually nevermind I'm coming in anyway" and smashed it to pieces on the way in.

[cicadadust]

Sorry, anyone who was a fan of Takamui, probably gunna to go with KamuOki for now 🫡

But just my fave ships I wanted to do something fun with.

Heart broken. I can't find anything with Umibozu and Abuto, especially after watching the Rakuyou arc a million times. I've never made a ship name before.... but I guess I shall declare them as Umibuto!

[lotus-tower]

okay so. i've always thought it was obvious that yoshiwara in flames arc's main relevance to gintama's overall narrative is as the prelude to rakuyou. like it's not thematically very interesting on its own, right? but it exists mainly for kagura and kamui's sake, establishing the sort of parallelism that gintama lives off of. it isn't really that connected to the red spider arc even though at first it might seem to be.

but i had no idea about the meaning of the name "rakuyou" until i saw @suchira 's post about it earlier today. and before that i also hadn't thought about utsuro's connection to the sun, which they've also talked about.

given everything that happens in rakuyou, this has expanded my thoughts quite a bit! i'm going be thinking through this as i go, so this is going to be me rambling.

housen is one of the few big arc villains who don't feel related to gintoki. jirocho, jiraia, oboro, takasugi--these kinds are obviously meant to be foils to gintoki. isaburo functions differently as a character, but even he gets directly compared to gintoki by nobume. but housen isn't really there for gintoki--he's there for kamui. he isn't a particularly interesting character, nor is his death very satisfying because of the wishywashy writing about hinowa showing kindness to him at the end. previously i'd thought that his thing with the sun was just a weaker example of craving something that would destroy you, and/or running away from one's weaknesses and vulnerabilities to the point that you become a sort of husk.

that's probably still a thing, but the introduction of the sun motif on the much more meaning-dense end of gintama adds so much more. because now the pre-existing thematic framework of gintama can do the heavy lifting for housen (who is, again, a pretty uninteresting character), hinowa (who is cool, but suffers from both Woman and Mom in shounen), and tsukuyo (who is very cool, but suffers egregiously from Woman in shounen).

so what is housen, really? he's the guy kamui chose to go with when making his very bad life decisions, the end result of the path he decided to pursue. for simplicity let's call him kamui bad end, though they aren't very comparable in canon itself because housen doesn't come across as nearly self-destructive enough. but the basic logic is that housen is one of those characters who gave up everything in single-minded pursuit of power--he's a flat character because he already "emptied himself out", as kamui says, before the series started. (but then he got scared and lonely, and all that.)

what's funny is that if housen is a bad end, then the guy who he considers his rival automatically comes to mind as an opposed route. i think it would be a serious stretch to call umibouzu the "good end" for kamui, and that's definitely part of the point in how the yato are written. but in any case, kamui clearly looked both ways (insert roads leading to two castles meme) and saw housen stereotypical villain bad end on one side, and his dad on the other. so obviously he chose housen.

rakuyou is a planet where it's always overcast. you could say that kamui chose to leave that "safety" in order to pursue something that shone much brighter to him, even if it would disintegrate him in the end. or, since rakuyou's name invokes the sun, you could say that he chose to flee the place of his weakness and pain, where his family was, like housen deciding to flee the sun and build an underground paradise.

when i go over my gintama cast tarot assignments, i always hesitate over hinowa. is she the Sun? or the Empress? how can i choose? and i think this is essentially the same conundrum. and i think the fact that she's both (thankfully, actual gintama storytelling isn't restricted to 1 character = 1 arcana) also provides us with the best answer here. hinowa is the object of yearning of both housen (as the sun) and of seita (as a mother). obviously, as i said before, the whole seita-hinowa thing is meant to lay the groundwork for kamui's motivations, and is also why he's introduced in this arc in the particular way that he is. but kamui is both seita and housen. he's the child yearning for his mother, but also the warlord who fears the sun so much he'll lock not only himself but countless others into the dark forever. but housen also desperately longed for the sun. kamui looks down on seita for being weak, and he looks down on housen for choosing to drown himself in vices at the end of his life. in the end, he doesn't kill either one of them.

if the sun is what kamui yearns for, he wants to leave rainy "rakuyou" behind--and/or he misses his home, his childhood, his family, even if these things feel like they will destroy him. or, if the sun is what kamui seeks to avoid, he wants to turn away from "rakuyou", all the things that hold him down so that he can throw himself into single-minded pursuit of self-destruction--and/or he's afraid of the weakness and pain that the sun inflicts on him, and desires to be strong enough that he won't feel them. see, a whole lot of words to say the same thing over and over.

i've always assigned housen the Emperor arcana. and i've often wondered, should it be umibouzu instead? should it be utsuro? and that, i think, is another illumination. thank you tarot for being an icon. it's so effective here because gintama is predictably built on parallels, and overlapping arcana assignments are bound to make you think: why?

in the end, housen builds a city underground in order to avoid the sun, but he also severs hinowa's ankles so that he can hold her, the sun proxy, captive in his grasp. he can't bear to feel sunlight, but he can't bear to let it go either. kamui is much the same, but he's young--he thinks he can let it go, his fears and regrets haven't caught up to him yet, because he still has so much to reach for. housen attained the peak of his strength and notoriety, and then there was little left for him.

what else happens in rakuyou? well, oboro and takasugi fight. oboro is sort of a seita figure in his own right, if seita had burned down yoshiwara in hopes that it would drive hinowa running to him. of course, seita didn't know that hinowa couldn't run; and oboro didn't know that shouyou couldn't, either.

but aside from seita and housen, there's another character in yoshiwara who yearns for the sun--not to possess it, but to protect it, to serve it. tsukuyo is an interesting character heavily let down by the realities of living in shounen jump. from my own understanding of sorachi's character, i don't think the following was intentional on his part. but i do think there are real reasons why these parallels are textually present (mainly through gintoki).

tsukuyo is the closest oboro has in this series to someone similar to him. not in the sense of a reflection in the mirror or hole-sided adjacency, but as in someone who sort of has a similar job and background to him. or had, anyway. as i implied earlier, the few, specific, clearly intentional similarities she has with gintoki (hello red spider) bleed over into her similarities with oboro, of course, because gintoki and oboro are... you know. just look at them.

tsukuyo swore herself to hinowa, but technically she was working under housen. she led housen's paramilitary force--fortunately, the hyakka loved her a lot more than the naraku were probably ever able to have an opinion about oboro. i don't think tsukuyo and oboro would ever get along--but they did have the same job. oboro did it in the heavens, tsukuyo did it underground. anyway, hinowa "saved" tsukuyo by teaching her about fighting from inside one's cage, and so tsukuyo gladly walked into the cage, just like oboro returning to the naraku without shouyou. because they thought it would be worth it. and also because tsukuyo had been groomed from a young age for the Hole (apologies to those who haven't read my ouroboros essay), to give up on her selfhood, and also to kill her sensei (hello gintoki). but hinowa remained around, unlike shouyou. tsukuyo never thought she could really free her--but protecting her, being able to see her, was enough.

oboro's life problem is a bit like if hinowa and housen were the same person. but kamui would see in that pairing only a reflection of his parents. and also, kouka is a bit like if hinowa and utsuro were the same person. but utsuro is already like if shouyou and utsuro were the same person--because oboro's actual life problem is that shouyou and utsuro are the same person.

i've spoken a lot about tarot, but the moon in gintama has little to do with the Moon arcana. in gintama it's the backdrop, the symbol of promises--promises made, promises fulfilled, promises held on to dearly whether they can be fulfilled or not. i don't truly think that the sun as represented by hinowa interacts directly with this. but tsukuyo and oboro share moon-related names, and their promises (or rather, their vows of devotion) towards hinowa/shouyou are one-sided. one-sided promises aren't a problem in gintama--our silver-haired protagonist wouldn't be alive if it weren't for them.

if the naraku, if utsuro, if oboro under utsuro is associated with the sun through the yatagarasu, perhaps it's because of the evaporation of the promise through the eclipsing of the moon. shouka sonjuku, after all, burned down, and utsuro emerged from a pyre. and though i think that the sun is overall a motif much more strongly associated with the yato--that which they avoid, are weak to, and secretly long for--i don't think that's incompatible with the crow-meaning.

rabbits can die of loneliness, you know--or they can die from overheating in the sun. i think the question here is, is this a trick question? are those two the same thing?

[gintama-polls]

Gintama Episode Tourney

Episode 320, "Zura" Katsura lets loose in his fight against one of the Harusame's Mad Stars. The fourth episode of the Rakuyou Decisive Battle Arc.

Episode 316, "Farewell, Shinsengumi" Kondo, Hijikata, and Okita say their goodbyes to the Yorozuya. The final episode of the Farewell, Shinsengumi Arc.

[salty-sleep]

takasugi has this,,,,,,,,THING,,,,,,,, when he puts his hand on his opponent's face before he strikes,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,( in OP5, in SA when he fights gin and fodder in rakuyou) why does he do that,,,,,,,

[soppymilkgin]

i think this is the first time im experiencing all of rakuyou arc again since it aired and wow its so much funnier now

the scene of oboro coughing blood in the hallway sick anime girl style while utsuros like lmao it wasnt even me that gave u that blood. it gave me a laugh

also sakamotos so hot <///3