#some have only drawn her a few panels compared to others but I hope they get to draw more of her in the future

[bunnymajo]

Surge the Tenrec’s different charm points from artist to artist

Mauro Fonseca: Feral animal, TEETH, Peak swagger, the coolest girl in school, stout and cute to fit in your pocket 10/10

Thomas Rothlisberger: Her face is beauty & grace defined, expressive, youthful, Banana Bunch hair, the Surge you hang out with on weekends 10/10

Aaron Hammerstrom: Perfectly shaped quills that are always ready to slay, big on body language, “it’s not just a phase mom”, 10/10

Adam Bryce Thomas: La Creatura (affectionate), Funky poses, Kill Bite Maim, Meet her behind the Denny’s at 3am for an ass kicking 10/10

Natalie Haines: Moe eyes, I-I’m not doing this for you b-baka!, soft long quills & round ears 10/10

Evan Stanley: Glamour Girl, On point eyeliner, Maybe she’s born with it. “I won’t hesitate bitch”, Tenrec’s next top model 10/10

[frobin]

Okey serious question here. How much do you actually believe that Oda ships Frobin? Like do you think he actually have like doodles/sketchs of them in a pairing kind of way? like for the strong world film riding the motorbug? (Personally i would love it to be true but he has stated one piece isn't about romance in that way)

Hey there anon! Thank you so much for your question and I hope I can answer it seriously enough. Also once more sorry for the late response. I felt like a question like that needs some research and that is what I did these last few days.

So... I think I'll start with the tl;dr because that way people can read that and ignore the rest.

So, long answer short: I 100% believe that Oda has one or more sketchbooks with drawings of his characters that are absolutely self-indulgent. I am 98% sure that he has drawn Franky and Robin in a romantic way at least once (and supported the ship). I am 80% sure he still is shipping FRobin.

Little disclaimer: I actually have no idea if any of this is true. I pull everything in my arguments out of my own experiences and knowledge and since I'm not a 46 year old Japanese Mangaka my perspective might be WAY OFF.

argument - reason- example - conclusion... behind the cut (or in the google doc)

So, why do I think that Oda has a secret sketchbook?

Simple answer is that he is an artist. He is drawing a lot and no artist will publish everything. That can have multiple reasons like imposter syndrome or because the artist thinks it’s not good or interesting enough or they just forget. There are even more reasons I forget and every person has their own.

For Oda I can imagine two big reasons as to why he would keep secret sketchbooks.

First: He is a horndog. You can skip this part if you don’t want to read about it, to the second reason.

Anyway, we know thanks to answers in the SBS, the way he likes to draw big-breasted women and how some of his characters are classified as perverts that he can be considered one too.

Let me show you a few of a few lewd SBS questions he likes to answer in a funny way:

Chapter 228, Page 46

D: How are ya, Odacchi? I know how much you like getting butt-naked, so this must be a favourite season for you. <3

O: Yes, yes. I just LOVE getting completely naked. In the summertime, after I take a bath I just run STRAIGHT OUTSIDE!! And when the girls' softball team running on the sidewalk looks over at me, they say, "Yup, it's really summer now!!" ... AS IF!! I'D GET ARRESTED!!!

(x)

Chapter 433, Page 68

D: If Lady Robin can use her Hana Hana Powers to make any part of her body sprout somewhere else, does that mean she can do it with her ample bosom as well? "Nyurin-zaki" (Breast Sprout) Boy, I'd like to take a hit from that sometime... P.N. Ero Ero no Mi Devil Fruit User.

O: "Ichirin-zaki" (Single Sprout) "Nirin-zaki" (Double Sprout) "Nyurin-zaki" (Breast Sprout) Very clever!! NO IT'S NOT!! STOP THAT!! I'm sure she CAN do it though ♡

(x)

Chapter 798, Page 64

D: Oddachi, I'll give you a pornographic book, so please answer my question. Sanji won't allow anyone to waste food, but what will he do if a woman does so? P.N. Smoker's Cigar

O: I think he would grab the plate and eat it up. Now please give me the pornographic book.

(x)

Nowadays I’m sure there is a focus on those lewder questions compared to the beginning because that is what 13 year old boys laugh about and we all know that is Oda's main demographic (of course).

I think a very good picture of that is given by Tekking101 in his breakdown video of SBS Volume 100.

“Let’s get diving into these questions (...) now, this is a huge moment. I mean, not many Manga manage to reach 100 Volumes, Okay? Now I know Oda usually starts these off with questions relating to boobs and things that don’t really… you know, aren’t really relevant but you know, this is a big celebration so we’re gonna dive right into it. I bet the most important things that we need to know about the One Piece Story are right here in these pages, okay? I printed them out. That is how important this is. So let’s start off, shall we? Epic voice, Barry!

‘Mister Oda, there is a UFO over there with huge big-breasted beauties on it. That memorable 100 Volume of the SBS is about to begin.’

[pause] Yeah, like the first five of these are all related to boobs in some way. You know what Oda? Sticking true to your guns! Godspeed, Sir Oda. Godspeed.”

(end at around 2:30)

So, Oda is a man who likes beautiful women and who draws.

Coming to the conclusion that he will draw his own characters in suggestive poses, naked and even doing adult stuff is not hard.

Obviously he would not show these sketches just around. He would probably keep them in a secret sketchbook that he keeps at a safe location. Maybe his wife and some close friends know about it? Maybe it is his and only his little secret.

I don’t think it would be unlikely to learn about this years into the future, maybe the next generation of Anime Fans will hear about this.

And it would not be the first time that something like this happened.

Not that long ago the daughter of Osamu Tezuka - groundbreaking Mangaka, known for his works of “Astro Boy”, “Kimba the white lion” and many more - found his adult Furry art. Source; Japanese article;

It’s a fact that many Mangaka did indeed start their career with art of the more risque kind and/or as doujinshi artists.

So again, I have no doubt that Oda, a known pervert, has one or more secret sketchbooks with „the p0rnography“ in it. Is there only hot stuff in there? Not necessarily.

The second reason to keep a secret sketchbook would be to collect information in there, that could be considered canon but he is not willing to use it in the Manga. Maybe they are not important enough or will be used later.

What am I imagining here? Anything that could be considered too weird for the normal sketchbook but isn‘t too risque. Funny things that might still not be „appropriate.“

Like a sketch of the male Strawhat ding-dongs with the sizes beside it. All the lewd jokes the fans did about Luffy's stretching qualities? I’m sure Oda thought about them too and drew that in the past if he had the time and it made him laugh enough.

But also maybe there are scenes in there that never made it in the Manga. The Strawhats interacting with each other in their daily lives, ideas for colorspreads and maybe chapter-titles. Oda probably has noted/sketched down a lot of unofficial stuff somewhere.

Another example, even an artist like Oda himself would have needed to exercise drawing two people kissing. Why not use Characters he thinks that might work out together?

Why not Franky and Robin? I would imagine he sketched up a few panels of Franky and Robin having a romantic date, going shopping together in Dressrosa, having a conversation that we never got to see because it was too on the nose.

Which brings us to the second point of me being very sure that Oda had drawn FrankyXRobin at one point.

I’m sure in those sketchbooks there is at least one drawing of them doing anything couple-related together. Again it does not have to be downright nasty but it could be them holding hands, kissing or even just Robin leaning onto Franky while reading, like all those fanarts that exist out there.

It’s not hard to imagine. Even for other Characters I think that is possible

And there might even be proof for that idea. The sketch of the Strong World movie you also mentioned, anon. The one movie that can be considered canon is Strong World. It was basically written/directed by Oda. Shiki the antagonist had an appearance in the Manga.

This sketch is drawn by Oda. Robin is holding onto Franky.

Can it be read as romantic? Yes. Can it be read as Robin holding onto Franky because there is nothing else to hold onto? Also Yes. But couldn't she just have used her power to keep herself secured on the bike without holding onto Franky? WELL YES. Could Oda never have thought in these circles like I do right now? I hope he did not because I hate it and I don’t wish it upon him.

In the movie Robin is NOT holding onto Franky. Now the really interesting thing - that is neither proof pro nor anti FRobin - is that we can see the sketch provided by Oda as a “between the scenes”.

In the movie Strong World the old trio is collecting information at the Pirate assembly. The next time we see them they use the Batta GT-7000 to slowly approach the destroyed village, which had been ravaged by the animals, and start to look for their friends. No need to hold onto Franky and no need for Brook to lean back. They are looking around.

The sketch is clearly not the same scene as the one we see in the movie.

In conclusion the drawing is indeed a between the scenes drawing. And yes if there exists one, who is to say there aren’t more?

Talking about Animal-Bikes...

Is there any meaning about the fact that in the opening scene (that is part of the talked intro after the opening ‘We Go’ - a huge thanks to antiherofangirl, ccb0nnet, JFL_Estudios and Maems, over at twitter!) Franky and Robin build another grasshopper-based vehicle? Maybe not but I still feel like it’s quite a callback.

Where did the idea to put this in the beginning come from? a) an editor had the idea inspired by Strong World; b) maybe it’s another sketch that Oda provided.

Neither seems very far-fetched in my opinion.

So yes, I am very sure that Oda has drawn things that we would consider FRobin.

Now to the last point (the first being Oda having a secret sketchbook, the second me arguing that Oda might have drawn FRobin).

As I said in the beginning I’m very sure that at one point Oda did and kinda that he still does ship Franky and Robin. Because even though every Interaction of two characters can be depicted as romantic or platonic, Oda used ROMANTIC TROPES with Franky and Robin.

They have never kissed on screen but we had

finishing each other's sentences

coordinated clothes

one using the others lap as pillow

hand on cheek caressing

and we can’t forget that Robin had answered Franky's invitation to ride on another animal-themed bike with a heart.

Edit: I didn‘t say anything about „no romance in OP“ so ask again if you want me to talk a bit about that. Sorry!

Those are things an author of Oda's level would not write or draw without being aware about how teasing this is. He has to be aware that every single line he draws will be analyzed to the end of the universe and back. People earn money by saying their opinion and interpretations about the Manga on Youtube.

These interactions are not something outlandish like “There was once an Anime Scene in which Robin was wearing something blue and exactly 28 episodes later Franky was wearing something violet and then 39 episodes later they both stood beside each other for exactly 69 seconds.”

Whenever I think about these facts, things that are not about interpreting but are factual, black ink on white paper but also about the little things, about how Frank and Robin help each other to become better, how they support each other… I want to say YES! ODA IS 100% on board! While in reality I’m 80% sure and 20% of me is wondering if I’m not actually analyzing too much into it. If maybe he really is abandoning ship. Maybe I will become the person who will curse his name and throw my Mangas and fanfictions in an active volcano?

I don’t know and it’s impossible to say what is going to happen.

And with that I've concluded this answer, and it only took me around 2k words and four days.

[everythingsinred]

Let's Talk About NatsuMikan: Natsume (pt.7)

Well, Natsume's really in it now! Today we'll be talking about what lengths Natsume will go to in order to protect the people he loves. He's not a normal boy with a normal first crush, after all. He has no intention of wooing her or flirting. In fact, his instinct is to distance himself, and going forward we'll see that instinct is motivated by more than just a low self-esteem.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Natsume has some major character flaws. He’s kinda a jerk in general and is rude and abrasive. He’s chronically selfless and seems to be drawn to situations where he can sacrifice himself for others, which is a very unhealthy way to be. He’s also terrible at keeping his word.

Natsume only made this decision on his own, but he’s pretty bad at carrying through with it. He’s the one who told her to stay away, but Natsume will have more and more trouble staying true to such an agreement.

At first, he makes an effort: Mikan is being bullied for her stupidity and sees Natsume. He glares at her, another discouragement from coming any closer. He doesn’t argue with her or join in on the bullying.

But in no time at all, the whole class is riled up in study mode because of Mikan’s example, and for many kids in Class B, the best person to turn to for tutoring help is Natsume, who is actually quite smart when he actually does the work--though he’d prefer not to. And he does help, though not with any kind or supportive words. He’ll leave that to Mikan. Maybe to him it feels a bit like a cheat, like he can afford to give in a little bit. He later walks alongside her after an exam, like he’s part of her circle, and although he’s not really engaging with her like the rest of the kids are, it’s enough that he’s near her.

And it’s enough for the ESP and Persona to notice.

We can see the ESP looking down on them from his headquarters room, still covered in shadows to maintain his mystery, but his figure is familiar enough for a reread. Natsume has been caught and he will have to face the consequences.

Persona subs in for Makihara-sensei (and we must wonder if Makihara was really unable to proctor his exam or if he was ordered to stay away so that a point could be made to Natsume), and despite his disguise, Natsume can tell it’s him instantly. After all, he was supposed to recognize him. Natsume looks horrified.

So far, Natsume has had to more or less balance two very different parts of his life: a more light-hearted life in Class B and his life as a spy and black ops agent. They’ve been difficult to juggle because of how different they are, but they’ve been pretty separated. Here, the lines are blurring. Was there really any divide at all or was that just an illusion? Persona can invade on his happiness any time he wants, on a whim, and nobody else will notice that anything is amiss. Only Natsume will be bothered, and that’s enough.

Natsume later catches up to Persona, asking him what the hell all that was about.

Permy and his fans aren’t the only ones to notice that Natsume has been softer lately--he and the ESP have noticed as well, and he’s been ordered to put a stop to it. He mentions a “kitten of a different color” who has been of interest to the ESP too, and Natsume plays dumb, his last-ditch attempt to protect Mikan from being drawn into this.

Persona comments on the strangeness of seeing the infamous Black Cat that he trained himself, who he’s supposedly only ever seen in action, sitting and taking a test like a normal kid. He reminds him that he’s not a normal kid. There’s no point in trying so hard. He won’t make it to ever see his family again, so why even bother?

And then Persona makes a point to discourage Natsume from getting close to that “kitten of a different color”. Natsume argues that they’re the ones who made them partners in the first place! And he might as well be giving himself away. Again, Natsume seems convinced that the partners thing was a decision from pretty high up, but I don’t think it was. Here, it seems like Persona is trying to clean up the mess Narumi made before it gets too out of hand. Natsume is a perfect tool and anything messing with that is inconvenient. They can’t unmake them partners (yet) so the most they can do is threaten Natsume.

And now we can see what kind of alice Persona has. It's a real threat, killing that plant. It's a reminder to Natsume what he's capable of, that his friends and loved ones could end up just like that plant.

And so Persona does.

Natsume is anguished here, because he’s been trying his very best to avoid this situation, but he should have known that Mikan was already in the academy spotlight and his feelings would be quickly caught. It was too late from the start and he was doomed all along to add Mikan to the list of people he will do anything to protect.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The next chapter opens with Mikan being confused and hurt by Natsume’s sudden new coldness. She has no idea what’s brought this all on, but we do. Natsume has no choice now but to completely try and cut her off. It’s for her own good, after all. If he’s not careful, she could get hurt. Protecting her is worth it, even if it means he has to be even more of a villain than usual.

We don’t see a lot of Natsume in this chapter, actually, because he’s trying really hard to stick by his word this time. We see him trip up a little, staring at her in class. When she catches him, he turns away coldly, but from this we can see that Natsume really doesn’t want to be leaving her alone like this. If he had it his way, in an ideal world, he’d be much nicer to her. Unfortunately, Natsume doesn’t waste his time thinking about his ideals, so he keeps at it, pushing her away.

The next time we see Natsume, it’s after we’ve been thoroughly introduced to the concept of the life-shortening alice. This is one hint of many that he has such an alice, several chapters before we get a real confirmation.

The scene where Natsume struggles on a bed full of pills is perhaps more dramatic in the anime, but it’s no less potent here. It’s like a sucker punch. You don’t want it to be true. He’s ten years old, for heaven’s sake! TEN YEARS OLD! And he’s suffering, hunched over, face red, gasping for air, clutching his chest, next to the biggest bag of medicine I’ve ever seen. It’s the biggest hint we’ve gotten so far, especially in the context of Kaname’s illness.

It's heart-breaking to imagine that most of the time, Natsume is simply pretending like he's not in absolute physical agony.

Kaname stays at the hospital for long stretches of time, staying for weeks and sometimes months at a time. He’s hospitalized more than he’s able to walk around free. There’s a lot to consider when that treatment is compared to Natsume’s. Natsume is the DA favorite and is sent on many missions. His trips to the hospital are never for weeks or months at a time, not because he doesn’t need the rest, but because the school can’t stand to go so long without their prize fighter. Natsume might be in even worse condition than Kaname, but there’d be no real way to tell unless we got it from him, because he has no choice but to put up with it and pretend like he’s not living in constant agony. And on top of being terribly and terminally ill, he gets physically beaten somewhat regularly… this school beats sick children and then threatens them when they find any inkling of happiness.

There is a bittersweet tone about Kaname’s story. He’s already sick anyway but he will probably die if he keeps using his alice, but he wants to, because he wants to bring people the same happiness that making Bear brought him. It’s tragic and heart-breaking, but it’s touching too. That sweetness is missing from Natsume’s appearance. His situation feels miserable and helpless in comparison, because not only does he have no way out, but nobody even knows the extent of his struggles.

He only lets himself feel this level of pain when he’s all alone in his bedroom. He’s been having a horrible past few days, having to ignore Mikan when she’s all that’s made him happy in recent memory. All that together, and we know that this night was a rough one for him.

The next day, we see everyone saying good-bye to Kaname. Once again, Natsume is completely separated from the rest of them, all alone in the classroom, sitting and looking as miserable as one can expect. It’s strange seeing him now after we’ve seen what his nights look like and just how painful they can get.

I just want him to be okay. Why is that too much to ask?

There’s some text on his panel: “I want the future I spend with the ones I love to last just a little longer.” Yet another hint that maybe his illness is more than just that. He has very little time left, and very little time to spend with his loved ones, but even worse: he can’t even spend time with Mikan because doing so would put her in danger. Even with Youichi and Ruka the amount of time he can spend with them is limited. They have their own lives and he doesn’t want to hold them back or hint in the slightest that there’s something up with him. He doesn’t want to worry or burden them. And so he sits alone in the classroom, looking despondent and lonely.

And now we know more than ever that this was never his choice: he has to be like this.

No, he’s not the asshole he makes himself out to be, somebody who doesn’t care about others and cuts others off because he thinks himself above them. All he wants is to protect people from getting too entrenched in his dark life. Natsume being this level of a jerk is a method to protect people, a method an adult would have to take.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I’m quite relieved to have finally passed the point where the anime adapts the manga. From now on, I can focus entirely on the manga. I passed 22k words on this essay too! This whole thing will be sooooo long. I hope it’s an enjoyable read so far. It’s quite fun for me to write.

This chapter is the beginning of a long and dramatic arc. There’s been incidents of people losing their alices. The academy is withholding information about the gravity of the situation, lying that the students have not been affected so far.

But even with the little information the kids have, Class B is full of concern. Everyone is discussing these incidents, debating whether losing one’s alice would even be a bad thing. After all, they’d be able to go back home and see their families. Nonoko brings up a great point, that her alice is a part of her identity, something she loves about herself. It’s not something she’d ever willingly part with. Furthermore, she doesn’t want to leave all her friends at the academy either. Ultimately, the kids all agree that they wouldn’t want to lose their alices.

At this, Natsume stands up and leaves the room. He’s heard enough.

Natsume doesn’t just have complicated feelings about his alice--he feels hatred for it. After all, if it weren’t for his alice, he could live to a ripe old age. He could still be with his family. He could be happy, not used as a weapon by the academy to fight until he dies. He can’t relate much to the conversations about fondness for an alice. From what we can see, he’d be over the moon to be rid of it for good. This is a concept brought up now, because it will be incredibly important later on.

Not to spill about my personal life or anything, but I’m an English major (in an anglophone country so my focus is literary analysis and writing). Writing literature papers in school was a love of mine that I translated to my other interests. I’m writing what I can here about general themes and even visual parallels. I want to write as thorough an analysis as I can. Unfortunately, I can’t effectively pick apart word choices and phrases when they’re translated from another language and when so many conflicting translations may exist.

I’m saying all this as a disclaimer because I want to analyze word choice now and I am aware that this might not carry to the original Japanese or even to other versions of the English translation. (For reference, I’m using the TokyoPop versions for my analysis for the first 15 volumes and then I’ll be using whatever I get my hands on for the rest. The pics I use are from scans, but the main source I use for now is TokyoPop.)

"Nowhere!".... hmm let me read way too much into this.

Natsume leaves the room and Ruka chases after him, asking where he’s headed. Natsume responds, “Nowhere.” This might be a nothing point to make, but it stands out to me whenever I read this part. It’s a reassurance to Ruka, sure, but there seems to be more to it. On the surface, we can tell that Natsume doesn’t have a destination in mind; he just doesn’t want to be in the classroom anymore, listening to all that upsetting talk. Deeper than that, he really is heading nowhere. He’s stuck there, at the academy, unlike the rest of them who will eventually leave to go back home once they’ve graduated. Natsume will probably die at the school, trapped within its gates. He will probably never see his family again. He is, in that sense as well, going nowhere.

The rest of their conversation is just as packed with meaning. Ruka can tell something is up and he wants Natsume to talk to him, to let him in, but Natsume knows that Ruka has made a pact not to smile if he’s not smiling. So even though Ruka is asking and wants to know what’s wrong, Natsume won’t give anything away. Being miserable is one thing, but letting Ruka know that something is worse than usual would only make Ruka miserable too, and he can’t have that. The bottom of one page has him frowning, maybe steeling himself, and then at the top of the next page, he turns around with a grin to tousle Ruka’s hair.

Don't mind me. I am simply crying.

“It’s nothing,” he says with his smile, looking so gentle, and Ruka still looks concerned, but he can’t argue anymore.

In reality there’s a lot going on with Natsume. Later, when we are introduced to Tono, he mentions being concerned about Natsume’s health, having heard that he was making frequent visits to the hospital. We already know he’s sick and going on ceaseless missions, and on top of all that he has to ignore and be cruel to the girl he likes. It’s a terrible situation. But Natsume can’t tell Ruka any of this without worrying him, so instead he will keep it to himself. After all, it’s nothing that can be helped or changed. It’s something he feels he has to cope with on his own. To him, spilling his secrets would be selfish and only cause suffering.

Chapter Thirty

Iinchou has finally returned from his visit to his hometown. He’s brought gifts and anecdotes and everyone is quite happy to see him, until Iinchou attempts to use his alice and finds himself unable to.

It’s a shock to the whole class that a kid at their school has lost his alice. They had been so relieved that at least it wouldn’t affect kids like them, but now one of them is a victim too. It makes the fear much more real. If it could happen to Iinchou, it could happen to any of them.

Things get tense when Iinchou returns to class and says that this might have been the fault of a woman he encountered outside of the school, someone who was probably affiliated with Z. Everyone who was involved with saving Natsume when he was kidnapped is shocked to hear about Z again, but none more than Natsume himself. He gets up and leaves, just like he did last chapter.

He’s thinking about the proposal Reo gave, that Natsume should join Z and fight against the academy he despises. But he’s not alone with his thoughts, because Ruka followed him again, and so did Mikan this time.

She tries to ask him about Z, see if he has any more idea about what’s going on. She’s confused and he knows more than anyone what happened during that incident, but he’s refusing to acknowledge her presence, let alone answer any of her questions. He’s keeping up his charade of cruelty to keep her safe, but it’s driving Mikan crazy. She finally breaks, screaming at him that he should pay attention when people are talking to him, and further that if he has any issues with her he should just say it to her face.

Just like last chapter, we see a panel of Natsume steeling himself, ready to do the selfless thing to protect the other person. Only this time the next panel has him glaring at her, saying he doesn’t like anything about her. He hates everything about her.

Natsume has no choice but to lie all the time about how he's feeling, because everyone else must always come first.

It feels different, but in reality this is the same thing he did to Ruka last chapter. He can’t be honest about his feelings when he’s feeling upset, and he can’t be honest about his feelings when he’s actually starting to fall for a girl. He always has to hide his true feelings, repress and bury them, lie about them in order to protect everyone around him. It’s hard for him to do, but he thinks it hurts him more than it could hurt her, so he manages it.

What adds even more layers to this is that Ruka is observing the whole thing. He sees Natsume’s actions as selfless but misfires on the motive a little--but only a little.

He recalls eating strawberries with Natsume and Aoi, with Aoi cheerfully discussing her newfound love for the fruits. And so Natsume gives his to her. Aoi is surprised, because strawberries are his favorites. He responds easily, “I hate them now.”

"For you," Natsume says.

Ruka knows what kind of person Natsume is, that Natsume would reject something he loves so that his loved ones can be happy. They’re both aware that they like the same girl, and Ruka can’t help but put the math together and assume that perhaps Natsume is doing this for him, hurting himself and bringing himself pain so that Ruka can be happy and pursue a girl he has a crush on guilt-free.

He’s even more convinced of the theory with the tiny panel that reminds us of when Natsume shoved Ruka into Mikan so they could dance. Natsume loves Mikan too, but he wants Ruka to be happy, so he will give up and even ruin his own chances to help out his best friend over himself.

When I say it’s a misfire, I mean that Natsume has a lot of other things going on, including Persona and his imminent death. It’s not that he definitely isn’t doing this for Ruka, it’s just that it’s not as major a factor as other things. He’s mainly doing it because of the threats from Persona. If Ruka is involved in his thought process, it’s mainly a bonus. Ruka’s theory is definitely not unfounded; just not completely accurate.

In any case, it does add extra substance to the dynamic between the three of them, where they all walk away from the moment with completely different kinds of misery.

Before any of them can sit with their sadness, though, they receive word that an intruder from Z is at the school.

Conclusion

In this section, we explored how Natsume has no choice but to distance himself from everybody, and even how the methods he uses to distance himself look different depending on the person. Ultimately, despite the fact that he isn't the sweetest kid you'll ever meet, Natsume being cruel to this extent isn't a quirk of his personality: it's what he has to do. If he didn't have so many things being held against him, he might be much kinder to Mikan, or more honest with Ruka, but he has no choice in the matter.

In the next edition, we're getting more involved in the Z Arc and going into how come Natsume goes from telling Mikan he hates her to backing her cause and going on a dangerous mission with her.

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[stillness-in-green]

Spinaraki Week Level 2, Day Five: Rain | Steampunk

I don’t know anything about steampunk but take this anyway and I hope it’s not TOO obvious that I’m a huge poseur.  I promise I did at least some research.

———–      ———–      ———–      ———–

The brass city fell.  It didn’t even take Gigantomachia, in the end, just Shigaraki and the change in his disyncrasy: steel to rust, bone to dust. Anyone within half a kilometer of the epicenter had gone up like so much ash, give or take some lightning-fast limb-cutting, and that had been that.  Case closed, except for the evacuations to somewhere the Hero Corps wouldn’t be sticking their noses while Shigaraki’s new army figured out the new status quo.

The Liberation Army had airships on hand—it was the easiest way to get into Deika’s isolated mountains—so that was where the League wound up after the initial flurry of medical care, piled into the nicest cabin of the nicest airship Spinner had ever set foot in.

Not that there was a lot of competition on that front.  Spinner had been in exactly one airship in his life, and that was the one he’d taken to get to Hosu.  He’d shared with two others a third-class berth that had reeked of sulfur emissions the entire trip.  Blankets had been request-only, for a surcharge.

This place was huge, an apartment of rooms in the upper galleys, all mirror-polished oak floors and white linen sheets in the beds.  Every room had a glass door that lead out to a railed deck you could walk all the way around the stern, as long as you were the kind of person who had no fear of heights whatsoever.  Shigaraki’s was at the very back, a sitting room with the standard door and a ridiculously well-appointed bedroom with its portion of the deck walled off from the rest, turning it into something more like a private box.  Spinner had seen whole kitchens smaller than the bed.

Shigaraki—who’d rolled his eyes at Spinner’s hovering, but Spinner didn’t trust that automaton of Skeptic’s enough to let Shigaraki walk around alone with it—looked around, ambivalence in every line of his face, then turned back to Spinner and grinned.

“Want to break the bed in?”

They didn’t manage it, not for lack of intention or for absence of Spinner’s sputtering, but just because Shigaraki was asleep two minutes after he hit the mattress, and Spinner, despite his best intentions, wasn’t far behind.

-

He woke hours later to a shift in the sound of the engines’ dull rumbling.  Nearby warmth confirmed that Shigaraki was still with him, but dead to the world, unresponsive to Spinner’s tentative nudge or careful edging out of the bed (once he found the edge of it, anyway).

The only light in the room came from a yellow glow seeping in from the door to the balcony.  When Spinner crept over and tilted his head way back, he could just make out the bottom edge of the huge lantern hung above the deck, lit up so bright he had to blink away spots when he averted his eyes. Outside, any sign of the land below was obscured by the balcony railing; above it, a ribbon of sky tumbled behind them endlessly, empty but brilliant with stars.

The future looked a bit like that for all of them now.

Spinner shook off the half-formed thought, heat in his cheeks at the naked romanticism of it, and turned back towards the bed.

He didn’t know enough about airship engines to know what the change in sound meant.  Maybe they were changing directions, maybe they’d hit a headwind, maybe they needed to refuel; he had no idea, and he wasn’t going to leave Shigaraki to go find out.

He pulled a chair over to the side of the bed and arranged himself in it, the last of his knives recovered from the pile of their gear on the floor and resting over his lap. Resolved to stay awake in case someone came, he fixed his stare on the door and waited.

-

He woke up again, this time to gray light and the sound of rain on the window.  The bed stood empty, and the cane the medics had given Shigaraki (that on top of a leg plaster, an arm brace and a jar of laudanum the size of Spinner’s fist) was gone.

Hissing a curse under his breath, Spinner stumbled to his feet and swept the room.  The balcony was obviously empty, and there was no answer to his knock on the bathroom door, nor was Shigaraki passed out in the wood-paneled bathtub.

Just as he lay a hand on the door to the sitting room, he heard the laugh from inside—Toga.  Spinner sighed in relief, giving himself long enough to pick out Shigaraki’s voice before he doubled back to the bed to throw on his coat and loop his sword belt over his shoulder.

When he pushed into the other room, it was to find Shigaraki and Toga perched in the pair of chairs positioned in front of the doors to the outside deck.  Toga was wrapped up in Shigaraki’s tattered greatcoat (which definitely looked like it was sporting a few new patches), her legs drawn up into the seat and her skirt tucked close enough around her feet that it was obvious she wasn’t wearing shoes.  Shigaraki, lacking a table to kick his legs up on, sprawled sideways in his chair, bare feet dangling in the air over the arm nearer the doors.  Both of them looked over at his approach, Shigaraki craning his neck back over the other chair arm and Toga shooting him a suspiciously satisfied grin.

Unlit and gloomy, the room was bitingly cool, and Spinner levelled a reproachful look at the both of them.

“There is a radiator in here.  We don’t have to sit around being cold anymore.”

“It’s a nice atmosphere!” was all Toga had to say in response to that.  She’d upgraded to an eyepatch from the gauze packing of the infirmary, a dark swath of leather over her right eye that made her skin look almost white. Given the amount of blood she’d apparently lost, she was probably supposed to still be in bed just like Shigaraki, but the gods knew the two of them didn’t exactly have the best self-preservation instincts in the League.

“We’re supposed to get to the new hideout in a few hours,” Shigaraki weighed in.  “You can go sleep some more if you want.”

“Everyone else is,” Toga added, in the tones of one who’d checked.

“It’s fine.”  I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep right now anyway, he didn’t finish, instead just arranging himself in a cross-armed lean on the wall.

Shigaraki and Toga looked at each other, silent for a beat, then went right back to the conversation they’d presumably been having when he came in.

“So?” she prompted.  “How’d it feel?”

“Terrible,” came Shigaraki’s answer, flatly candid, but then a snide grin teased its way over his face as he went on.  “At first. Felt pretty good by the end, though. Real liberating.”

“Mine didn’t feel bad at all,” Toga replied, drawing out the last word in a dreamy gratification.  Something seemed to strike her, sharpening her previously unfocused stare.  Her wide smile drained away for just a moment before twisting itself back up into a smirk, taut with a spite he hadn’t seen on her face since the whole thing with the Shie Hassaikai.   “I can’t wait to try it on someone I actually like.”

“What are you talking about?” Spinner asked, bewildered.

“She unlocked it,” Shigaraki said shortly, then his lips hooked up into an anticipatory little smile as he watched Spinner’s jaw drop.  “Her disyncrasy.”

“I can change shapes!” Toga announced, her expression melting back into eagerness.  “Not right now—that’s what I need blood for—but that’s what I’ve always wanted it for!  I figured it out when that reporter lady wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Spinner’s mind reeled with the possibilities.  They’d been out of contact with their supposed spy since Shigaraki’s master was taken, but with that kind of infiltration capacity on the table, on top of Shigaraki’s rust now affecting everything, not just metal…

“You too, right, Spinner?”

Toga’s coy voice clipped off the unspooling ends of his thoughts and he looked up into barn-owl yellow eyes that saw straight through him.  “Wh-what?”

“You changed too.  I can smell it.”  The assertion made no sense, but her smug certainty drove heat up into his cheeks anyway, because damn, she was right, even if there was no way for her to have known about it.

“It’s really nothing,” he muttered, not daring to look at Shigaraki, though he could feel the stare without even needing to.  “Not compared to—”

“You an’ me’ve read a bunch of the same serials, Spinner,” Shigaraki interrupted him dryly.  “If you unlocked something, there’ll be a way to use it.  What’d you get?”

Spinner closed his eyes and bit back a groan.  Rubbing at his face did absolutely nothing to alleviate the weight of their attention, though, so he gripped his hair and pulled his own head up enough to glare back at Shigaraki, hollowness chewing at his stomach.

“Climbing on walls.  Like a—” and he broke off to gesture at himself with his free hand.

“That’s fun!” Toga chimed; Shigaraki just looked thoughtful, which was—well, it was a better response than Spinner’s gnawing anxiety had been expecting, anyway.

“Yeah,” he said at length. “I can come up with ways to use that. Who looks up at ceilings, anyway?”

“What were you thinking about when you figured it out?” Toga asked, and grinned completely unrepentantly when Spinner moved his glare over to her instead.  “I bet I can guess.”

“Leave him alone, Toga,” Shigaraki said, an off-handed defense that still filled the emptiness in Spinner’s guts with sudden butterflies, the blush now for a wholly different reason. “That’s five of us.  Just one more to go.”

Toga moved her fingers for a moment, frowning down at them.  “…Five?”

“Dabi’s holding out. He’ll tell us when he wants to.” A beat, then a huff.  “Hell, Compress might be, too.”

They went on talking, and Spinner let them, watching Shigaraki with a tingle in his mouth that felt like a promise trying to make itself known.

[6ix-dragons]

My Overall Impressions of the Edens Zero Anime

Originally, I wanted to do an initial impressions post of the Edens Zero anime, for the first few episodes. Then, it changed to cover the first 12. However, with the 25th, and final episode (of the first season) having premiered on Saturday, I felt like I wanted to give my overall impressions of the anime, instead. I’ve seen all 25 episodes, including the final one—and, there are a whole bunch of things I wanted to talk about. So, let’s get started!

ART STYLE AND ANIMATION

First, let’s talk about the art style, and the animation. Before the first episode came out, I honestly had a bit of reservation in my mind, having known beforehand of what animation studio is in charge of the anime adaptation, and the previews of the character designs. However, when the first episode came out, I was quite surprised at how well it was, when it came to both the art direction, and the animation.

While the character designs aren’t as exact, as what they are in the original manga, they are at least much closer to them. Where the art style/direction is best found, happens to be in scenes that involve the environment around the characters. Shots of landscapes, like the buildings in the planet of Bluegarden, and the Ether pillars in Norma, are the better examples of how great the art direction is. Even the shots of outer space, especially with the planets (despite how different they looked compared to their manga counterparts), are another example of it. It just makes the world in the anime more lively.

However, there can be some parts in every episode, where the art style is inconsistent. Of course, there will always be characters, and other objects that are off-model in far-away shots. For the most part, ‘though, the art style is pretty much consistent, from scene to scene, on every episode. Colours are used appropriately, with duller colours used in the more serious parts of the story—such as the latter-half of the Sun Jewel arc.

When it comes to the animation quality, it’s about as good as the art direction that i covered above. The quality of the animation doesn’t vary all too wildly, but, much like the art style, it can get inconsistent in certain parts for every episode. Where you’ll find the best animation, however, is in the chase and battle scenes. An example of that can be found in the first episode, when Shiki took on Lord Castellan. Even more examples I can think of, includes: The part where Shiki and Rebecca are being chased by Sibir, in Norma; the first time the “Leaper” ability was activated, in Sun Jewel; and, when Shiki took on Madame Kurenai, in that same arc.

Now, I’m going to dedicate this part of this section to talk, rather briefly, about the CGI used in the anime. I was actually surprised to see it being used, in certain scenes—with the titular battleship seen in space, for instance. Another example I can think of, is Sibir’s Knight Gear, in Norma, as well as Kurenai’s, in Sun Jewel. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with CGI being used in any visual medium (whether it be live-action shows, movies, or even anime)...as long as it’s done well. That wasn’t the case here, with this anime. I would rather see something like the battleships be hand-drawn, rather than in CGI, where the results would look out-of-place, instead.

Issues with the CGI, and inconsistent animation, aside, we can at least attribute the better parts of the art style and animation, to the team at J.C. Staff—particularly, with two key members of that team: The chief animator, Kenichiro Aoki...and the director of the anime, himself, Yuji Suzuji. It’s rather unfortunate to know that Mr. Suzuji had passed away, last month, knowing that he had made his contributions to the team, as the anime’s director. I tip my hat to him, and to all the other members of the entire team responsible for making this anime adaptation.

VOICE ACTING AND AUDIO/SOUND

Alright, let’s talk about voice acting, and the audio/sound. I was also a little concerned, before the first episode even came out, when the voice actors/actresses were first announced. However, after watching the previews—and then the first episode, my concerns were put to rest. I feel like all of the characters featured in the anime sounded much like I thought they were, and that the voice actors/actresses really nailed down their parts quite well. 

I also thought the same for the voice actors/actresses, in the English dub version (when the anime came out on Netflix). It’s only the first 12 episodes, so far, but I was genuinely impressed at their performances. While it isn’t the same as the original JP version of the anime, I thought they all sounded as close to their other counterparts. 

The rest of the audio/sound was also impressive, too, with proper mixing in certain scenes that feature intense action, as well as in quieter scenes. Furthermore, the music used in the anime also helped add to the impact of those scenes. There’s a mix of orchestral music, and guitar rock that’s featured in the anime—although, given the sci-fi and tech elements featured in it, too, I would’ve liked the inclusion of EDM, techno, and dubstep (I’m partly-serious about those).

Finally, let’s talk about the songs used in the first opening intro, and ending...as well as for the second opening intro, and ending. I know that T.M. Revolution does make music that gets used in anime (Gundam SEED and SEED Destiny, for instance), and “Eden Through the Rough” is a real banger. The song featured in the first ending—”Bouken no Vlog”, by CHiCO with HoneyWorks, conveys the lighter tone in the first cour of the anime.

For the songs featured in the second intro and ending, however...I’m actually inclined to agree with some who argue that both these songs are appropriate for the second intro. What I will fully agree, however, is that both these songs also convey the darker tone of the second cour. Regardless, I thought all of these songs, as well as the entire OST, are perfectly-suited for the anime, as a whole.

CONTENT COVERED

As far as the content covered from the manga goes, I’d say the anime does it well, for the most part. In terms of the arcs that the first season covers, it covers the introduction arc, all the way to the end of the Sun Jewel arc. 

I did notice that there were some changes made to the anime, from its source material. And, I would say that these changes are being made, for better or worse, depending on what you prefer. Already, I’ve seen a few instances of this, in the first episode, where they cut out the part in the manga where Rebecca discovers they are being taken by hostage robots on Granbell Island. There was also a part in the manga, during the Digitalis arc, where Rebecca yells at everyone about their sleeping habits. That was never present, at all, in the anime. 

When it comes to blood and nudity, however, the former is more inconsistent than the latter. With blood, first of all, it is present where you’d think it would be (especially so, if you’ve read the manga first). Examples of this, would be the flashback with Rebecca and Happy being involved in a traffic accident, and when Shiki punched Kurenai’s Knight Gear with only his bare fist. However, you also have scenes where blood should’ve been present, like when Spider/Jamilov was shot dead by Seth. In the manga, he was clearly bleeding out, unlike in the anime. 

For nudity, I did mention it is more consistent than blood—but, only in that it is consistently censored out. While, yes, the original manga does block out full-frontal nudity, the anime adaptation takes this much further. One glaring example of this, is when Rebecca is changing into new clothes, in the Sun Jewel arc—just before taking on Nino. In the anime, we only see her from the shoulders up, while the panel in the manga reveals more of her upper torso. 

Now, I can understand the decisions made to censor/tone down the blood and nudity. However, as the anime is aired on Japanese television late at night, it doesn’t make much sense to do so. In spite of all this, however, these kinds of changes haven’t really taken away my viewing experience of the anime.

As Edens Zero is made by Hiro Mashima, you can expect easter eggs from his other, previous works, much like in the manga. You have your standard Fairy Tail cameos, such as Team Shadow Gear in the Shooting Starlight guild, the usual Natsu and Lucy appearance—and, the triumphant return of the “Wow!” sound effect.

So, yeah, for the most part, the anime adaptation does follow the source material. There’s changes that some may or may not want, as well as a few additions to certain parts: I believe the scene where Shiki gets chased around by Kurenai’s Knight Gear was extended a little bit, compared to what happened in the manga.

CONCLUSION

Before I give my overall impressions on the first season of the anime, I just wanted to mention the preview for the second season—for those who have watched the final episode. I’ve read the manga beforehand, and from what I’ve seen in the preview...I can’t wait, until the next season comes out. I just can’t wait for what they will pull off, in that upcoming season.

Overall, I’m impressed with the anime adaptation, from start to finish. I do recommend this for anyone else, not just as a fan of Edens Zero (and Mashima’s works)...but, as someone who has watched anime, in general. It does a more than decent job at covering the story arcs from the manga, in spite of the issues it has—art style, animation, and censorship. 

Is it a flawless, excellent anime? No, but it certainly is alright enough to give it a peek, if you’re interested. Again, I just can’t wait to see what they have in store, for season two. Here’s hoping, with the next season, they will improve from the first.

[miscellaneousramblings]

The world is cruel and unfair. My thoughts about the end of SnK.

This is a post about my feelings re: the end of SnK. I try to mix a bit of analysis and express where, in my opinion, it went wrong.

I’ve only read the last chapter once for now. Managed to avoid every spoiler until the official release. What can I say? I think this ending is disappointing and unsatisfying, despite not being The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Read. It’s serviceable at best, which by default is underwhelming in a work that has almost always tried to go above what we usually see in comparable pieces of fiction. Over almost 140 chapters, SnK offered its readers genuine emotions, either positive or negative, and, until this final chapter, managed to stay true to its themes. But this final chapter is basically a 4/10 or 5/10 ending in an overall 9.5/10 story.

I hope that, after the initial shock of the ending, I’ll be able to look back on it, not fondly, but with a bit more appreciation for some of its (too few) genuinely good moments. I also hope it won’t sour the experience of reading SnK too much for me. Of course, I accept the ending, I accepted it literally the moment I read it even though I saw it go further and further from my expectations and understanding of the story by the second. And obviously, I respect Isayama as a writer and genuinely cherish some parts of this manga.

But I won’t ever think this ending was good, and am going to try to explain why.

First, something quite subjective. I think the chapter lacked genuine emotion. I didn’t feel much of anything, except a crushing sentiment of sadness and a bit of anger when I saw Mikasa alone by Eren’s grave at the end. A lot of what happened felt either incomplete or forced, and often both. For example, I had imagined the moment the curse of Ymir broke would be the most beautiful moment in the manga, but instead it just... happened? This was supposed to be the peak of this story, the miracle that all these terrible sacrifices were made in the name of. I keep thinking about the moment the curse breaks at the end of Fruits Basket (a great read btw) and how genuinely emotional this chapter is even though the genre is different from SnK’s. Considering Isayama’s talent when portraying emotions, I can’t help but feel terribly underwhelmed by his version of this moment, which should have made us feel like everything was worth it, but didn’t.

Second, the pacing in this last arc (and especially post 123) was messy. I know it’s easy to criticize as a reader, but objectively, spending 7 chapters on the alliance going from point X to point Y and not giving the main character the spotlight he deserves is a major mistake. I kept holding hope that all of the buildup since chapter 130 was going to amount to the last 2-3 chapters slapping extremely hard (like, say, the Grisha-centered chapters in return to Shiganshina, or the Reiner-Eren conversation in Marley), but for the first time, Isayama disappointed me in that regard.

While mostly uninteresting fights got dragged out, some plot points were almost forgotten. Some setups never got a proper conclusion. Eren barely got the time to explain his motivations or what he saw. Historia’s conversation from chapter 130 never got an ending. The parasite and Ymir literally disappeared even though they were the focus of the last two chapters before this one. Some memory shards went unexplained. We never got to see Grisha’s death even when this panel exists?

Regardless of the actual things I don’t like in the ending, I think it would have been more palatable if this last stretch of chapters had been given time to breathe, if only to expand on the characters’ motivations or give us more interactions (for example, Eren’s talks with Annie, Reiner, Connie...).

Third, characterisation and themes. Oh boy. My favourite character is Eren, and my other favourites are Mikasa, Armin, Reiner and Zeke. I think that among these five, the only one who got a true, complete character arc was Armin (and arguably Zeke as well, though the lack of resolution between him and Eren is a hate crime towards me, specifically). Reiner had a great character arc overall but his last appearance in the manga was distateful and a regression. I won’t expand on it.

Mikasa... my poor girl. My most charitable take about her ending is that Isayama wanted to portray her inner strength, the fact she can always live on in the face of adversity and cherish her own life despite the setbacks while remembering those she loves. Well, I guess he succeeded. But in a weirdly unsatisfying way, because this renders her character arc entirely cyclical. Those qualities have characterised Mikasa since the start. It’s established since the very first arc that she’s prideful, brave, and that she has the inner strength to live without Eren if he ever disappears from this world. But the way Isayama made it happen? Having her kill him and then cry next to his grave in the final panels of the manga is what her arc amounted to? I had always hoped that Mikasa could actually save Eren from himself and show him how to live and share his burdens with him (all things that have been foreshadowed in the manga itself, btw). I thought her tattoo would hold some significance, either by

A/ being transmitted to her potential child with Eren were he to survive (didn’t happen)

B/ foreshadowing a future political role for her as a bridge between Hizuru and Paradis (didn’t happen, and furthermore she’s the only alliance member living in Shiganshina and is deliberately separated from the rest of them)

C/ having some kind of supernatural power that would allow her to change the game, were she to enter paths or reach the coordinate (didn’t happen).

So what? In the end, Mikasa’s Big Choice amounted to giving up on her love (but also not really because she’s never going to be able to move on and isn’t allowed to feel anything else but pain), resulting in her losing her family for the third time and never being able to welcome Eren home. This is horrifyingly sad. I’m also frankly disturbed by the sort of ~parallel Eren establishes in this chapter between Ymir and Mikasa, about the topic of love. So the message of SnK was that... love is a chain? Everything happened because Ymir was too attached to the King and couldn’t leave this world, so Mikasa had to show her that she could give up on love for the greater good by killing Eren? I wish I just misunderstood this but that’s what I got from the chapter and I hate it. Also, I really thought Isayama was above the traditional “female character who sacrifices everything and never reaches happiness but stays quiet and endures for the common good” trope. I was wrong.

Mikasa might have been the centerpiece of the story, but she got the short end of the stick. At this point, the writing pretty much does the opposite of what it is supposed to by inadvertently justifying the validity of Mikasa and Eren’s “selfish” dream in chapter 138. Initially, I thought that their dream was wrong and not something truly enviable because in it, they led a life of guilt and regret while knowing full well that Eren would end up dying anyway, leaving Mikasa behind, alone. Naively, I thought that surely choosing the responsible path would be more rewarding for Mikasa, one way or the other. But as it turns out, the path of selflessness also led her to a life of solitude, except now she carries her burdens all on her own without having tasted happiness. Amazing. I genuinely do not know how I am supposed to root for this.

Finally... Eren. Oh boy. Oh, good lord. I’ll admit I wanted him to live, but I was also ready to accept an ending where he dies. But... not like this. I already said I don’t like the fact Mikasa killed him, but what I like even less is the lack of general resolution his character received. He’s the MC for god’s sake! But post-chapter 123, he has received second, if not third-grade treatment, save from chapter 131, which was brilliant.

Overall, his motivations are a mess, which I get. Him getting confused because of all his powers and memories is understandable. Him having conflicting motivations is actually appealing to me. He wanted to save Eldia, but was also disappointed in the outside world (when he says “I would have done it anyway”, I thought about what he said to Ramzi and the "scenery” in 131) , and wished for his friends to become heroes. I get it, it’s fine.

But Isayama went too far with the tragic aspect of his character. As in, there is no catharsis, just crushing pain. Isayama deliberately went overkill by stating that Eren killed 80% of humanity (what the hell), and, even worse, actually drove Dina to Carla. I literally couldn’t believe this. I have seen people theorize about this months ago and immediately discarded it by thinking it was ridiculous and amount to character assassination. To make things clear, I’m not discussing Eren’s actions in the last arc from a moralistic point of view, because this would be another topic entirely, I’m talking about what makes sense in the narrative that has been presented to us since the Paths chapters started and Eren’s plan was revealed. For example, however awful the contents of the scene was, Eren manipulating Grisha to kill the Reiss family was not only amazingly written and drawn in chapter 121 but also narratively motivated by the fact he needed the Founding Titan’s power. This scene also had other functions, such as revealing the Attack Titan’s premonition powers or making Zeke interact with Grisha and understand the truth about his father. Compared to this, the “moment” we have in 139, this abrupt, absurd revelation about him indirectly killing his mother is rushed and nonsensical. Even if this was to kickstart the whole story by awakening his hatred for the titans, I can’t help but feel shaken by how... gratuitous a “plot-twist” it is. What does it say about the attachment Eren had to his mother and her words to him? (”because he was born into this world”). This nullifies one of the most impactful scenes of the manga, because the ending makes it clear that in the end, existing as a human being by the simple virtue of being born wasn’t enough for him. It just couldn’t be, for some reason that I’m yet to fully understand. Instead, he endured and endured, and never got to experience the simple, humane existence Carla wished for him. So were these beautiful words a lie all along? Why did Isayama go to such an extreme with Dina? The only conclusion I can come to is that it’s because he needed Eren to be absolutely, totally irredeemeable. Eren needed, storywise, to be this unstoppable extremist who would get burned to ashes by his uncontrollable desires.

Because yes, apparently, Eren had to die. There was no escape. Worst of all, Eren died a slave. A slave to his desire for freedom. A slave to the destiny he saw at age 15. A slave to his titan powers. This is what I truly can’t forgive about this ending. I won’t stand for the “but he chose this” answer, because it was a choice made out of despair, and all the alternatives are presented as non viable by the narrative (are they really though? or is it just a cope-out to justify the last arc of the manga unfolding as it did?). In short, Isayama justifies this “choice” that was forced on Eren by telling us: his life was destined to be short, he had a violent side he just wouldn’t repress, Mikasa didn’t give him the answer he wanted, he was overwhelmed by what he saw, and their enemies were zeroing in on them. Canonically, all of this made him start the Rumbling. Fine. But I always thought that, at the end of it all, even if Eren were to die, this narrative would be challenged. That Eren would at least have a big cathartic moment, and that he would make another choice upon realising that the freedom he looked for was illusory, and that he would fight to the bitter end for what was right, what he truly wanted, before finally either going to rest or living on with the burden of his actions but the support of his loved ones. I wished for the perfect blend of bitterness and hope. The tragedy of irredeemeable actions completed by the powerful liberation of free will. The idea that change is possible.

But what did we get instead? Eren reaffirming that the Rumbling would have happened anyway while feeling tremendous guilt, as usual (living a life with regrets, and consequently, a death with regrets), refusing the support Armin was ready to lend him (refusing to even try to defy what he thinks is his destiny and pushing others away again) and erasing the memories of all his friends after having manipulated them into ending him against their wishes (going against the most basic concept of freedom). And because we as readers and he as a character have to suffer until the very end, Eren finally clearly expressed his wish to live, to stay with Mikasa and his friends. Only to die 5 pages later, for good.

The main character of this story truly died as a disembodied head, in a titan’s mouth, killed by the person he loved the most before being buried in a nameless grave. One of his mottos was “fight”, but in the end, he didn’t. He let fate happen. In a story about freedom, this is unfathomable. This is beyond the realm of sadness for me, and I’m leaning more and more towards indignation. Where was his dignity as a character? I know that Mikasa, Armin and the others know “the truth about him” but I’m sorry, this isn’t enough. Now, if I ever get the strength to re-read SnK, I won’t be able to look at Eren without thinking about all the things he sacrificed: love, friendship, happiness, humanity, morals, principles, justice, freedom, the lives of countless others, the peace of mind of the person he loves, and his own life. A sacrifice so great should have gotten us a reward as great, if not greater. But we only got the end of the titan curse, without even an apparition or a word from Ymir, the one who actually started all of this, and now Paradis is ruled by the Yeagerists or something. The wings of freedom defaced by two rifles. How great. How satisfying.

In the end, I can’t really fathom what Isayama wanted to say with this chapter. The story itself, the 138 chapters that preceded it seemed clear to me. The world is cruel but also very beautiful. But after having read 139, I don’t know where the freedom the characters chased is. I don’t know why love was portrayed as something so precious but also something that in the end was predestined to be discarded. I don’t know why characters such as Mikasa went against fate only to be crushed by it further down the road.

I never thought that SnK would go into this almost grimdark direction, but it did. I can barely find the beauty in this chapter. Mikasa’s last panels are heartbreaking, but even the strength of her love can’t shine through the countless sacrifices the characters - and especially she and Eren - made, for the sake of a future that already seems extremely compromised. I guess that all in all, the world’s cruelty overshadows everything, and those who make the greatest sacrifices also are those who never get repaid. The world is unfair. I know that, but it was my naive wish that reading a piece of fiction would help me take my mind off this reality by showing me there is also more to it.

PS: the best moment in the chapter was those panels:

Finally, even if it was too little and too late, someone showed Eren he wasn’t alone, and didn’t need to be. RIP, my beautiful boy. You truly did deserve better than what this story allowed you to be.

[yet-another-saberface]

Interim Headcanons: Fuyuki -> Orleans

This is the first in what’ll be a series of story posts that are ‘Interims,’ or what takes place in between singularities! (Other than the eventual events.) They have less heavy story content but are still necessary because they do contain character stuff.

This one has a fic section roughly in the middle of the post! It’s around 1500 words & in the first person POV, which is actually what I’m most experienced with writing, so I hope everyone can enjoy that! There should be another short fic post coming out before I start on Orleans that’s less story and more slice of life stuff, but I’m still figuring out what exactly I want to do with that and had everything else done, so I decided to post it now!

We’re summoning some people, so get ready!

Between Fuyuki and the first real singularity, Eva practically refuses to have any downtime. She’s told that she should take it easy, let her leg heal, and wait for them to pinpoint the appropriate rayshift point. At some point they’ll help her set up the summoning circle for backup, but until then, she doesn’t need to be doing anything.

Instead of following those orders, Eva essentially ends up doing the work of multiple people herself. She hangs around the command room, usually standing the entire time, and will rush over to help anyone that seems to be having any difficulties. One of your numbers seems off? She’ll double-check it for you and if it’s correct she can explain exactly why. Tech isn’t working? Not her area of expertise but she’ll troubleshoot it until she can’t anymore, at which point she runs off to find Da Vinci. Something weird happening magically? You better bet she’s all over it and probably pushing you out of your workstation to handle it herself.

After a day or two, Roman notices what’s going on and takes her aside. She’s promptly banned from the command room unless someone asks for her to be there.

She tries to hide her disappointment… Which is surprisingly easy when the only emotion you can really convey at the moment is ‘tired?’ She heads back to her room, takes her boot off, and collapses onto her bed trying to figure out what else she should do, falling asleep in the process.

She wakes up around a full day later with a brilliant idea.

She’s gonna set up the summoning circle and perform the ritual herself. She forgets about the boot and immediately rushes off the Chaldea’s library with the intent of double-checking her memory.

She actually ends up spending a lot more time in the library than she intended when she finds out just how expansive it is. There’s all the books on magic she’s read before, along with literally everything else she could ever hope to find. This is how she finds herself filling a crate with somewhere upwards of 15 books and dragging it back to her room after leaving a note so people know who took them.

Mash catches her as she’s heading back with the books, glad to see that she seems less tired. When Mash offers to help with the books, Eva tries to say no, until Mash notices that she isn’t wearing her boot anymore. 

“Senpai, did Doctor Roman say your ankle is okay now?” “Uh… Wait. Right. My ankle is injured. Still. Crap.”

It’s only then that she starts to notice how the pain is coming back from all the unsupported weight she’s been putting on the injury, and finally accepts Mash’s offer to help with the books. When they finally get them back to Eva’s room, Mash makes sure that Eva actually puts on the boot this time. Afterwards, Eva is posed with a question she’s not sure if she should answer.

“What are you planning on doing with all of these books?” A pause. “I was just going to refresh my memory! I’ve done a lot of research into servants and stuff in the past, but I’m not sure how much of it I actually remember…” “That’s a wonderful idea, Senpai! Do you mind if I borrow some of these?” “Oh… No, go ahead! Just uh… Not this one, I was gonna start here!” She conspicuously grabs the book on rituals.

She spends the rest of the day reading up on how summoning rituals work, and later that night, when the fewest people possible are awake, she sneaks off to the summoning room that was pointed out to her earlier… 

        I open the door to the summoning room to find darkness. It’s unexpected, unsettling. Darkness is not something easily found in Chaldea, where everything is lit up with screens and fluorescent lights. It’s fitting, I guess, that humanity’s last hope should be constantly illuminated. But if that’s the case… Then why is it here, of all places, that I find darkness? Doubt creeps into my mind, as it always does. Millions of questions spring from that first one, slowly weighing me down, and looming over me like a shadow. Is this really a good idea? Maybe there’s a reason they said I should wait for their help setting this- No. I can’t just not do it. I need to prove it. That I’m capable of being the Master that saves humanity. And this is the first step. The light from the hallway illuminates just a bit of the room, but it’s enough that I can see that a circle has indeed already been drawn on the floor. Good. Now I just need to take care of… Everything else. I feel around on the walls by the door for a light panel until I finally knock my hand against it. The room lights up in blues and whites, unlike anything else in the facility, leaving me in awe. This is definitely the place to be doing magecraft. Glancing around a bit more, the room appears to be empty… With one exception. Tucked into the back right hand corner, there’s a small stack of white crates. Okay, then. Let’s start there. I make my way around the edge of the circle that takes up most of the room, ducking my head a few times as I try not to disturb any of the floating bands of light throughout the room. I don’t know exactly what they are, but I can’t afford to take any risks. When I reach the boxes, and carefully remove the lid of the top one to find it full of prism-like stones, each one containing every possible color. They’re big enough that I can only fit one in the palm of each hand, and are lighter than I expect. I set the one I’d been holding back down in the box, rummaging for the book I’d stuffed into my pocket before coming over here. I skim through the pages for just a second before landing on the one I’d marked earlier. Stones, stones… Gems, maybe? Why are these here? I’m halfway down the page when it hits me. They’re probably catalysts. I have no idea if they’re meant to summon anyone in particular, but there’s little chance they’re anything else. Summoning’s supposed to be easier with a catalyst, right? There’s several boxes of these… Surely using a few wouldn’t be noticed. And besides, most catalysts stick around even once the summoning is complete. Most of them. Hopefully that’s how these work. Given that I’m unsure what exactly they are, I grab 3 just to be safe after setting my book down on the floor. With one in each hand and a third tucked against my chest by my upper arm, I carefully inch a toe into the summoning circle. Nothing happens. …Okay then. It’s probably not activated yet. That’s good. I set the stones down in the very center, one at a time, so that they’re arranged in a triangle formation, before walking out of the circle as quick as I can. Still, nothing happens. Good. No surprises. I put the lid back on the box, grab the book, and then walk back around to close the door for good measure. Something tells me I don’t want anyone walking in on this. Circle, catalyst, mage… There’s no way this is as easy as it seems, is there? There’s gotta be a catch to it. But… If there is one, it’s definitely not mentioned at all. So all I can do is hope that what works in theory works in reality, like always. So I set my book down and stand my ground in front of the door, facing the circle. Don’t screw up the incantation. Remember how you changed it. Remember your theory. This is all gonna work out just how it’s supposed to. I take a deep breath. I blink. And before I speak, I picture it in my head. A drop of ink hitting paper, spreading a deep blue color across the white page. With that, I can feel the familiar hum and warmth of magic circuits spread through my body, giving me focus. I can do this.

“Let silver and steel be the essence. Let stone and the archduke of contracts be the foundation. Let my own hope and faith in humanity be what allows it. Let a wall rise against the wind that shall fall. Let the four cardinal gates close. Let the three-forked road from the crown reaching unto the kingdom rotate. Know this; I am all the good remaining in the world. I stand against all the evil threatening our world. And it is I that shall come to have dominion over that evil. Heroic Spirit, attended to by the three great words of power, Come forth from the right of restraint, keeper of the balance!”

As I progress through the lines of the chant, I can feel more and more magical energy building up in my body, desperately trying to be released. But that heat, that feeling of everything building up, cannot compare to what happens as I end the spell. All of the energy is pulled from my body at once. I can feel each and every individual nerve fighting against it, to no avail. It’s like my heart has stopped beating, yet is also beating too fast. I’m hit with a sudden migraine, yet the next second, it seems like it was never there in the first place. And all the while, I’m forced to close my eyes because the room, once dimly lit, is now full of a blinding white. And while they’re closed, images flash through my mind. Fire. Death. A silhouette, unidentifiable. And finally the back of a boy, my age, in a Chaldea uniform, standing at the ready. I hear something incredibly loud, some sort of boom, though maybe that’s not the best way to describe it, followed by a much quieter cracking noise, as the light behind my eyelids fades away. My hearing starts to recover, but I’m scared to open my eyes. I have no idea what just happened. Did it work? Was all of that meant to happen? The book hadn’t mentioned any of that. So I stand there, listening and breathing. Hoping against hope that everything is okay. Until I hear someone speak. “I ask of you, are you my Master?”

As I finally open my eyes, another girl stands before me in the center of the circle. The stones are gone. (Dammit.) As she looks at me expectantly, her green eyes seem to see right through me. I can’t tell if I’m being judged or not. But as I take in the rest of her, I do my best to offer a response, however quietly. “Yeah. I… I’m your Master.” It’s barely more than a whisper, riding along a shaky breath. So much for seeming confident. We stand in silence for a few more seconds as I catch my breath. It worked. It really worked. That’s a Servant. Right there. In front of me. That I summoned. This time when I look at her, I begin to notice things without trying beyond her physical appearance. For starters, she’s a Saber. Wait a- That’s not any Saber. That’s. “You’re King Arthur.” “That… Is correct, Master,” she replies, showing slight confusion. “Holy… Okay. Um.” As I’m pausing to take a breath, the door behind me slams open. I jump a bit, and when I land, pain shoots through my leg. My boot broke during the ritual. I glance behind me to find Mash, Roman, Da Vinci, and a few other staff members staring. “Senpai, what did you-” “IsummonedaServant,” I blurt out, trying to shift as much weight off my right foot as possible. When everyone keeps staring, I add on a halfhearted “...Sorry?” There’s a collective sigh from the group, none of whom really seem to know what to do. “You do realize we told you to wait, right?” Roman asks. “Yes, but I thought I could handle it, because I’ve studied this a lot, and clearly I can handle it, because it worked, so-” “Chaldea actually has an alternate summoning system-” Da Vinci starts, but I cut her off. “...Oh. Of course! That… Makes a lot of sense now.” I find myself looking towards the ground. “Why’d I go and do this?” I add at the last second, quieter than the rest. “Don’t worry, this is nothing I can’t handle!” Da Vinci responds. “Just make sure to let us know before you summon anyone again, okay?” “Okay,” I respond, still quiet. When no one else says anything, Roman speaks up again. “All right then, everyone else should get back to what they were doing.” He glances at the leg the boot had broke off of, even more worried than before. “Mash and…” “Saber,” the other Servant answers. “Right. Mash, Saber, can you help Eva to the infirmary for now?” The two of them nod before stepping over to me and adjusting so that each of my arms is over one of their shoulders. I cringe a bit when I have to adjust my right leg, and soreness is slowly starting to spread through the rest of my body. This idea is continually turning out to have been way worse than I thought it would be.

So, as it turns out, Eva continually doing things that put strain on her injury has set back the healing process, and even when it does heal, it’s likely still going to be weaker than it was. She won't need a cane or anything, but she should still be wary of it and avoid relying on her right leg too heavily from now on. Running and other simple physical activity is fine, but should she need to say, kick something, she should absolutely favor her left leg unless she’s made the necessary precautions and given her right ankle the support it needs to prevent more injuries. 

They get her a new boot and she’s essentially grounded for 2 days, not allowed to leave her room. They also start cutting the lights in her room on a schedule for as long as she’s grounded so that she’s forced to sleep.

She emerges, somehow, both less tired and more grumpy. Everyone catches on pretty quickly that she’s getting antsy because she’s not allowed to do anything, so they decide to set up the summoning system and let her try out a summoning that won’t make her injuries worse.

She’s initially hesitant to try any summonings with the more tech-heavy system, but she eventually agrees to go ahead with it after Da Vinci spends over an hour explaining every intricacy of how it works and how it differs from normal summoning. It’ll work, according to magical theory, so she doesn’t have anything to lose by trying it out.

This time, instead of just a single servant, she actually manages to summon several, those being Medusa, Caster Cú, Archer Emiya, and Saber Alter.

The tension between the 2 Sabers is pretty obvious, so Eva does her best to make sure that they aren’t forced to interact much while still spending time with and attempting to understand each of them. Since they’re both pretty reserved, it’s a slow process, but at least she figures out pretty quickly that they both really love food.

Cú is still salty that he’s not a Lancer, but is still glad to have at least been summoned again. He’s actually rather surprised by just how much Eva immediately puts value in him. She starts carrying a notebook around with her, and will write in it whenever she notices something new about Runes she didn’t know before. He actually tries to help her use Runes at one point, but it ends up blowing up in both their faces because Eva was focusing more on her anxiety than on the effect she wanted to achieve. 

Eva knew literally nothing about Emiya, so more than pretty much every other Servant that’s around, she tries to seem professional around him. That completely collapses when he catches her in the kitchen at 3 in the morning halfheartedly making grilled cheese. From then on she’s a lot more casual and every once in a while she pesters him incessantly about Reality Marbles. She’ll probably eventually figure out that he knows more about the Sabers than he lets on.

Medusa actually surprised Eva a bit. While Eva knows a lot about her from mythology, it took awhile for her to figure out anything about her as a Servant, other than what she could discern from practice battles. The first real bit of progress she makes is when she finds Medusa reading in the library. Now they just kinda have one of those “sit and read in silence together” type friendships.

Eva isn’t exactly all hyped up for whenever the next singularity is identified, but she promises herself that she won’t be scared to go and do whatever’s needed in order to correct it. After all, she has more allies this time, and it seems like her magecraft is getting better by the day. Now all that’s left is to save humanity.

New Servant Log:

Artoria Pendragon (Saber)

Artoria Pendragon (Alter)

Cú Chulainn (Caster)

Emiya (Archer)

Medusa (Rider)

I actually have an excuse to tag people and that makes me happy

@contractgreen​ @panyum​ @withanina​ @campanulabell​ @delfinaschiffer​ @princessaslan​ @armageddon25​ @patproductions​ @xviicprc​

[kdtheghostwriter]

SNK #133 - There They Go

No one:

The 104th:

The plane’s engines as our heroes hurtle toward certain doom:

Levi: Okay, but really, if I could get a spare moment to skewer Zeke like a kebob that’d be pretty cool.

Not that we needed a reminder, but Captain Levi is not allowed to beef it until he has confirmation of Zeke Jaeger’s cooling form. I don’t know if Hange actually thought that killing Zeke would end the Rumbling. They’ve made observations like this before. Not that it matters. Eren soon confirms what Reiner surmised in the plane. I’ll get to that later.

 I’ll be going out of order because the B thread takes up a small amount of panels comparatively and I want to get it out of the way so to speak. Annie, the kids and Kiyomi are sailing to Hizuru, presumably with the engineers in tow. We get confirmation of something that’s been hinted at to the point of it being more meme than meta. There was a Flying Titan, and the character named after a bird is the key to seeing it once again. Funny that.

Also, the Female Titan isn’t the ‘female’ Titan. At least, that’s what I gathered. Annie remarks that her Titan form didn’t have any special trait like the others so they conducted numerous experiments. One of their findings, apparently, was that this Titan form imitates the abilities of a Titan by eating part of it. So, it’s not the Female Titan, it’s the Kirby Titan. I mean, technically all Shifters are Kirby Titans but this one is specifically.

Anyway, because he ingested Zeke’s spinal fluid, young Falco was able to get a peek into the memories of a former holder of the Beast Titan. That holder was flying and Falco surmises he can, too. Annie not incorrectly points out that they’re on a literal boat that would surely capsize if he transformed. Kiyomi, feeling guilty for helping to arrange the initial meeting between the Jaeger Bros, says that she doesn’t care if the ship sinks. That’s all well and good but uh…hello? There’s mad people on this boat that probably don’t like the idea of sinking.

Anyway. Back to PATHS.

Okay I jumped the gun a bit. First some exposition by Reiner cleverly disguised as introspection. It’s a little of both, to be fair, but Reiner here is a vehicle for setting the table for our protagonists. Armin and more specifically Mikasa have a serious choice to make. Eren or the world. Reiner all but tells Armin that he’ll have to nuke Eren with his Colossal transformation. What’s more is that Armin agrees. Mikasa does not but it’s quickly revealed that she may not have another choice.

The line has, metaphysically, been drawn in the sand. No more words! I guess Eren got the memo of how little story is left. He even answered Armin’s question of why he didn’t turn off their Titan powers. All of them are free: he is free to destroy the world and they are free to stop him. The only way to stop him is to kill him. We suspected this but shout-outs to Eren for removing all doubt. Now it really is Eren or the world for Armin and Mikasa. Granted, we did see a flicker of the old Eren before the influence of the Founder took command, there’s no turning back to Eren now; it’s his own skin in the game. I’ve noted this before but the fact that he’s got no body inside the Titan head and this massive exoskeleton is jutting from his vertebrae says to me that this is his final act either way. Remember that Gabi decapitated him with an anti-armor round. If he wanted a new body, he could have just made one but no, it was this monstrosity that flew out of his evacuated neck.

I do wonder about Founder Ymir after this is over. Will she finally get her rest? She’s no longer bound by royal blood. Technically, she never was to begin with, only her obligation. Eren removed that obligation. He is now her vessel. Targeting Zeke is not a bad theory but he ultimately was not the one to give the order.

No, wait! I take that back because if you’ll remember he did give the order and Ymir ignored him. Eren is the one who started the Rumbling. Killing Zeke would do nothing except make Levi and his fans very happy. I think Reiner is on the right track saying Eren wants them to stop him but I’ll amend it a bit and say that he believes they can stop him. The two outcomes for Eren here are: he accomplishes his goal or is freed from his suffering. I don’t think it matters much to him which it is. Perhaps the biggest reason why the Alliance can still use their powers in the first place.

Oh, and Annie’s dad is still alive. I figured he was. With a few exceptions, Isayama usually doesn’t have dramatic deaths occur offscreen. Reiner’s mom has escaped along with them and dozens of other Eldians displaced by Eren’s apocalypse. They’re on a train, speeding up a plateau toward a hangar of spare airships. I say spare because most of them have taken off. They’re going on a bombing run with The Usurper and his front line in their sights.

It’s difficult to say how effective this will be. It won’t work, obviously, because none of our protagonists are in those airships but we will get some nice double spreads of wonton environmental destruction as tons and tons of explosives are dropped on tons and tons of monster. It’ll be a spectacle at least.

I will say as a minor critique that having Reiner wax poetic yet again on how he and Eren are the same and his squad and the 104th were the same is a bit redundant. I feel like we got that loud and clear on the night of the raid. It felt like sitting in IT: Chapter 2 when we were building up to killing the evil clown [slash] eldritch horror from space but we stopped right before the climactic battle to go through the Spook House again. It was much more egregious in the movie because the movie was over two hours. At least here I can read at my own pace but those panels felt superfluous.

I honestly have no idea how this ends. I know how it could end. For the first time in years, though, I’m not sure which direction we take. There are multiple different outcomes and at this moment it seems we are in a race to find the path that’s least depressing. The situation seems overtly bleak and barring some PATHS-fueled Deus Ex I don’t see that changing soon. The Alliance is flying to Eren. Falco will soon be flying to Eren. Armed warships are flying to Eren. Multiple combustible elements are converging on one spot. All according to keikaku.

Stray Thoughts

- Annie misses Armin and it makes sense when you recall that he talked to her almost every day for four years. They’re practically dating already. I hope she sees her dad again, but I also hope she and Armin get a chance to live quietly together in a place that hasn’t been flattened.

- Falco continues to be the goodest sweet boy. Annie was comically abrasive in return but that wasn’t unexpected either.

- Reiner was seconds away from telling Mikasa that she has to kill Eren, and I guess he must have sensed it, as he interrupted to tell them himself and remove all doubt. He doesn’t want her backing down from this and she won’t.

- Levi is in a near catatonic state. Being transported to the PATHS dimension doesn’t even phase him. Everyone else is heaving deep breaths and he barely registers being back. It joked earlier but I do hope he sees his mission through. It’s tough to see him this defeated.

[rubbishrobots]

I wrote a Doctor Who story for Christmas

It's been a funny old year. High highs and low lows. My brain processes everything in terms of Doctor Who, so I thought I'd write a little story about a crap Christmas.

Doctor Who - “The Best Of it”

The drop in air pressure was first detected on December 24th. About 3% approximately every 5 hours, which might not seem like that big of a drop, but when you’re in a big research base right down at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, any air pressure escaping is a bit of a big deal.

And so I found myself, on Christmas Eve, in a big clunky OxySuit, lumbering around upon the sea floor at the deepest point in the Earth’s Ocean. I moved around the outer walls of Cameron Base One with great difficulty, pushing my limbs forward through the high-pressure water, the headlamps on either side of my helmet providing minimal light.

Reaching the West Wing of the base, the first thing I saw were the cracks in the floor. It began right where the wall of the base touched the ground, and then snaked out and broke off until the ground in front of me looked like a shatter pattern. This was an alarming sight, to say the least. It meant that the ground which Cameron Base One sat on, that the crew walked across, was unstable. I would have turned around immediately and gone to raise the alarm. But I didn’t.

Because the second thing I noticed was the tall, blue phone box. With a lamp on top and two square windows that sent wavy shimmers of light wafting through the ocean. It was right at the furthest reaches of the cracks in the floor. I wondered how the hell it had got there.

Of course, then I was plummeting through one of the cracks that opened up at my feet, so there wasn’t much else I could do except fall.

I only remember bits of my plummet, so it’s hard to describe now. But it was like being on a pitch black water slide that you fully expected to die at the end of. Something had struck the lights on my helmet almost immediately so I couldn’t see a darn thing, but my stomach twisted and turned, which told me I was being tossed to and fro. Then I remember a tiny bit of light approaching fast, and an impact. Then nothing.

Nothing until I was blinking awake in a dimly lit cave, and there was a woman peering down at me.

“What size shoe do you take?” she asked.

I stared at the fractured image of her through the cracked glass of my helmet. She had short yellow hair, a long pale blue coat, and a t shirt with a rainbow stripe across it. She waited expectantly for me to answer.

“I’m Ellie Tyson, Chief Engineer at Cameron Base One,” I said, unsure what else but name and rank was appropriate in this conversation.

“I’m the Doctor,” the woman replied. “I just knock about space, really. You alright?”

She helped me to my feet and out of my OxySuit. I was bumped and bruised, and the jumpsuit I wore beneath the suit was a bit scuffed, but I was otherwise okay and able to survey my surroundings. The cave was not spacious. There were small tea light candles dotted about, and a steady drip of water coming from the breach in the ceiling that I must have fallen through.

“Right! Welcome, welcome,” said the Doctor. “Let me show you around. I’d say this is the living area over here.” She gestured to the left side of the cave, where a fireplace had been drawn on the uneven rock wall. “But to be honest, it’s a bit of a studio apartment situation.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked, eyeing the crudely illustrated roaring fire and wondering if this was the sign of stir craziness.

“About a week. Been surviving on rations.” She held up a box of dried raisins. “And a few bits I had in my coat pockets to keep me busy.” On the floor of the cave, there was the aforementioned candles, a pack of crayons, a pair of knitting needles and some wool, and a tourist pamphlet for the Blue Man Group. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any food in that big clunky diving suit?”

I shook my head no. The only thing in the utility belt section of the suit was some bandages, medical tape, and a flare. None of which struck me as particularly edible.

“No hope of escape?” I asked, fearing the answer.

“Well, not until now.” She started walking to the mouth of the cave. “Come on, then.”

I followed. There were no candles in the long, narrow passageway she crept down, but the Doctor had a metallic remote thingy that was giving off an orange glow, and she rooted around her pockets until she found a small torch she could toss to me.

“So full disclosure,” said the Doctor, “I got knocked silly on the way down. Consequently, I was half unconscious for like the first 3 days, but as soon as I was able to, I did a bit of exploring. Didn’t get very far. There’s a massive wall just up ahead that proved to be a big fat dead end for me.”

I frowned. “So why are we bothering?”

The Doctor waved a hand impatiently. “You’ll see in a min. Anyway, I knew someone else was bound to fall down the same hole I did, it being next to a massive human science-y base thing.”

The word ‘human’ got caught on some filters in my head, but I moved past it. “Nobody else knows. They sent me out to see why we were having air pressure problems.”

“Exactly, so I knew it was only a matter of time till I had a mate. That reminds me, what size shoe did you say you took?”

“I didn’t, and we have much bigger problems. If the ground up there is this unstable, the whole crew of Cameron Base One could be in real danger.”

The Doctor pulled a face. “I’m working on that! Give us a chance.”

“Except you’re not working on it – you’ve been down here a week and you’re no closer to escaping. Now I’m stuck down here too. The whole base could collapse any second and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“You literally just told me the only passageway leads to a dead end!”

“No,” the Doctor corrected. “I said it was a dead end for me.” We came to the huge wall she’d spoken off. It was about twice our height, but it did not reach the roof of the cave passage. There was a sizeable space at the top of the wall, and beyond that some source of light could be seen blinking on and off from out of view. In the torchlight, the Doctor grinned with great satisfaction. “See? All I needed was someone to give me a boost. I’ll go first and pull you up after. Don’t worry, I’m dead nimble in this body.”

The brain filter picked up that last weird comment too, but I didn’t have time to question. I laced my fingers and let the Doctor put her dirty boots in the palm of my hands, whereupon I heaved her high enough for her to grab something to hold onto and pull herself, and then me after, up onto the raised ground.

Wiping the muck off of my knees, I stood up and looked at where we’d ascended to. The sight before me made no sense. For at the top of this ledge, in this cavern deep down in the Earth’s crust, were a large pair of steel doors with a blinking control panel next to it.

“Oh, brilliant!” said the Doctor. She rushed towards it, aimed her metallic torch thingy at it, and I was amazed to see the doors rumble and draw themselves open. There was a great cloud of dust as they parted.

“These doors must have been sat closed for a good amount of time, then,” I coughed, as I followed the Doctor through the doorway.

On the other side, the Doctor stood dead still. “A very long time,” she said.

If the sight of steel doors had shocked me, it was nothing compared to the room of cryogenically frozen lizard people I was looking at now.

In this laboratory the length of a football pitch, there were rows and rows of pods, half metallic, half rock formations, and each of them contained a bipedal, human-sized lizard. There was frost on the glass of the pods, and they were cold to my touch. The creatures inside had not stirred a bit during our entrance or my examining of their containers. Astonished, I turned to the Doctor, hoping to gain some comfort in a shared vibe of ‘not knowing what the hell was going on.’

So imagine my surprise when I found her gazing at the cyro-pods in delight. “This works out perfectly.”

Silurians, she called them. I dropped to a seated position, probably going into some form of shock, while she paced around the room and ranted about the civilisation that walked the Earth eons before humans evolved (“Eons,” she paused to grin at me. “Love that word. Eons!”). Apparently they saw an asteroid approaching, and evacuated deep underground, putting themselves in stasis until such time as the damage from any impact would have passed. She’d moved over to a raised console built into a slab of rock and had been tinkering with the controls for a good minute before she realise I still hadn’t spoken.

“Soz, that was probably a bit of an overload, wasn’t it? Which bit did I lose you on?”

“The lizards who ruled the earth before humans,” I said softly.

The Doctor’s nose scrunched up in confusion. “Really? That bit makes sense, if you think about it.”

“In what universe does a secret society of Lizards frozen beneath the Mariana Trench make sense?!”

“Well that’s where all those daft stories about the Illuminati come from. It’s just people stumbling across all the different Silurian hibernation chambers and letting their imagination run wild.”  

That did actually make a little bit of sense, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of saying so, so I just stayed silent.

“Anyway,” she said, turning back to the controls. “Cheer up, this means there’s probably a way out of here.” That got my attention. I leapt to my feet and came to her side, staring at the panel of strange, unlabelled controls. “The Silurians tunnelled all the way down here, and they were obviously planning to return at some point. So logic says there must be a way out. A lift, or a teleport, or something.” She gasped. “Could be a massive ladder!”

“I’m not climbing a ladder out of the Mariana Trench, Doctor.”

She looked about to respond, but then a shrill, angry bleeping noise erupted from the console. The Doctor stuck her tongue out thoughtfully, the pressed some other buttons, only to be greeted with the same angry bleeping noise. She then tried pointing her metallic object at the controls, but the bleeping noise sounded again. The Doctor glared at the console panel. “Well, now you’re just being difficult.”

“Doctor,” I said, pointing to a small indent in the bottom corner of the console, that looked something like a fingerprint scanner. “It must need, I dunno, authorisation or something.”

I should have noticed the Doctor’s falling expression as she stared at what I’d pointed out. “Oh,” she said, and I should have noticed it was without her usual pep. “That’s a blow.”

Maybe I didn’t want to notice any of it. I was already looking around at which of the Silurians was closest. “So will we need to fully wake them up, or can we just sort of drag one over and then put it back?”

The Doctor turned to me. Her expression was grave. I turned my back on her and marched quickly over to one of the pods so I could pretend to be having a look. “And can it be any old one or does it need to be, like, a Boss or a President or a Mayor? I don’t know what the Silurian political hierarchy was like, was it like ours?”

“Ellie…” said the Doctor. “We can’t. The Silurians wouldn’t understand. They’d want to come back to the surface with us, and they can’t. The Earth isn’t ready for them yet.”

The trip back to the cave was awkward. I walked ahead, in silence. I heard the scuff of the Doctor’s boots behind me, and I felt her worried gaze on my back. And when we got back to the cave, I sat in the corner and didn’t look at her.

I was going to die down here. At Christmas. And everyone in that base above us had no idea they were walking and working on ground that could crumble awake at any second.

And worst of all, the only company I had, the person with which I was to perish, was a buffoon. At a certain point I had to break my sulk and look up at the Doctor, because I could sense her constantly moving and wondered how the hell she could be finding so much to do in a tiny little cave at the bottom of the planet.

Watching her, I still didn’t know. She was rummaging inside her coat pocket for a while, eventually fishing out old Quality Street sweet wrappers of red, green and gold. At one point, I heard her squeak with delight and drop down to examine something in the dirt and soil of the cave floor. When she began to draw more cave paintings and hum merrily to herself, I could take no more. I briefly considered digging the medical tape out of my suit and using it to seal her mouth shut.

“What on earth are you doing?” I asked instead.

She glanced at me over her shoulder. “I’m making the best of it!” she said, and moved aside so that I could see. Next to her 2D fireplace, she had scrawled a Christmas Tree on the wall, with scribbled baubles and doodled tinsel. And now she was humming White Christmas. “We might be stuck down here with no hope of escape. But it’s still Christmas.”

I stared in disbelief. “Are you for real? It is not Christmas.”

She did that nose-scrunch thing again. “I mean, it sort of is.”

“It is Christmas on a technicality!” I yelled. “It is Christmas only in the sense that the date is December 24th. Our current predicament, that being our impending death, takes precedent. And, for that matter, negates all circumstantial Christmas-ness.” I realised that tirade had come off oddly formal, so I added: “So stop being a dope, you big blonde-haired nutter.”

The Doctor, annoyingly, did not look hurt. Or offended. She just shook her head, like I didn’t understand. “That’s not how it works. It doesn’t matter what’s happening. Could be right in the middle of wartime, could be disease and pestilence sweeping the globe, you could be separated from everyone you love. The Titanic could be falling out of the sky! But if any of those things are happening in December, you get to press pause on them for a little bit, and be happy. Because it’s Christmas, and Christmas is magic like that.”

Nice speech. It didn’t work. “You’re a child,” I said, turning back around.

We didn’t talk again for a while. I sat and sat and sat, and at some point I lay down, and at another point I fell asleep.

Hours later, I awoke to a veritable Winter Wonderland.

The Doctor had been busy through the night. She had gone all around the cave, drawing holly and garlands all over the walls. Three tiny knitted stockings were stuck to the hand drawn fireplace. She had carefully placed the different sweet wrappers around the candles, creating a fairylight-like effect of flickering red, green and gold all around. And as I sat up, she was in front of me, beaming.

“Happy Christmas!” she bellowed, and thrust a folded piece of kitchen roll in my face. I took it from her delicately, realising that it was only obscuring something folded within. “Sorry, no wrapping paper. Best I could do.”

I did my best attempt at a smile, given the still pretty awful circumstances, and opened the gift. I had expected to find some random object standing in as a gift. After all, there was hardly a Henrick’s or Magpie Electricals to pop to down here. So when I opened the paper and found two carefully knitted socks, I took me a second to put the pieces together. Finally though, I looked up at her in wonder.

“Is this why you kept asking for my shoe size?”

The Doctor grinned. “Got it in the end. Took a tape measure to your footprint.” She pointed at what I’d seen her messing with on the floor the previous night, an indentation in the mucky ground from my shoe.

That broke my Scrooge-ness. I could continue to be a misery no longer. I thanked the Doctor genuinely, pulled on my new socks, and allowed her to lead me around the cave and tell me in great detail how she had thrown together every single makeshift Christmas decoration. We played snap and charades, and then gathered around the illustrated roaring fireplace to tell ghost stories (the Doctor’s were better than mine).

“I wish I had a gift for you,” I lamented after our Christmas Dinner of raisins and half a Wham bar. The socks really were quite cosy.

The Doctor waved a hand and tried not to look bothered. “No worries. It’s not the getting at this time of year, it’s the giving. That’s what my Mam used to say.” She paused though, then added “But also, if you happened to pack a toothbrush in that suit, I’ll love you forever. It’s been a week.”

A thought struck me. I stood up and wandered over to my discarded OxySuit, and reached into the utility belt. “No toothbrush, sorry. But in the spirit of the season, I gift you the one thing in my possession and pray it brings you happiness and good fortune.” I produced the small roll of medical tape, and tossed it to her.

She did not catch it. She did not even make an attempt. The Doctor had gone dead still since the moment she saw me pull the tape out of the suit. The roll bounced off her tummy and then fell lamely to the floor. Here, she stared at it, eyes wide.

“Doctor?”

When she looked up, there was the biggest smile on her face. “Ellie Tyson, this might be the most important Christmas gift I’ve ever been given.” Then she rushed across the distance and flung her arms around me. “Do you even realise what you’ve done? You’ve saved our lives, you daft little human.”

I had no chance to question her further. The second she let me out of her death-clutch hug, she snatched up the roll of tape and went sprinting out of the cave. I followed her through the narrow passage as best I could, but she was faster than you’d think, and by the time I reached the wall at the end, she was bouncing up and down impatiently. “Come on, come on, come on,” she begged, and I quickly boosted her up onto the ledge and let her heave me up after her.

Back in the Silurian chamber, the Doctor rushed over to the nearest cryogenic pod and started messing with the controls.

“But you said we couldn’t wake them up!” I shouted.

“No time to explain,” she shouted back. “Try and find some sort of powder or talc, any type will do.”

As she pointed her metallic thingy at the pod, I searched all over until I found what was probably the lizard equivalent of baby powder in what was probably the lizard equivalent of a medicine cabinet. I came back to the Doctor to find one of the pod doors open. The Silurian was still completely unmoving, and the air coming from the pod was predictably ice cold.

“What are we doing?” I asked, handing her the bottle.

“Spy stuff,” was her reply. And then, teeth chattering from the cold, I watched her crouch down to be able to coat one of the Silurian’s finger tips in the powder. Then, taking my Christmas gift, she pressed the scale-covered finger into a piece of tape and applied pressure. “That should do it,” she said, and stood up straight again.

“Do what?” I said. Except, no. That wasn’t my voice who had said that. And it wasn’t the Doctor’s either.

It was the Silurian. He was blinking awake, groggy like he’d overslept. “What are we doing?” he asked, then squinted at what was surely a blurry sight of two strangers in front of him. “Who are you?”

“Nobody,” the Doctor squeaked, pressing a complicated sequence of buttons on the panel next to the pod. “We’re nobody. Go back to sleep. We’re just… ghosts. We’re the Ghosts of Christmas Yet To Come.”

The Silurian frowned. “…what’s Christmas?”

“Shush,” said the Doctor, and she quickly closed the door and zapped the controls with her metallic remote, and the Silurian was asleep again.

The Doctor pressed the borrowed fingerprint on the tape into the scanner on the console and it worked perfectly. We were directed to an area at the back of the chamber, where a steel compartment took us back to the surface with frightening speed. We emerged into sparkling daylight, finding ourselves on an island in the Philippines. Well, there are worse places to spend Christmas Day. The Doctor helped me find a phone, which I used to contact central command, who in turn got in touch with Cameron Base One and ordered a speedy evacuation. The Doctor made friends with an old man who had a submarine, and he said he would take her down to retrieve her Blue Box after he’d had his Christmas dinner.

While we waited for the old man to finish his afters, the Doctor and I sat on a beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I thought it to be the bluest blue I’d ever seen, but the Doctor said she’d seen blue-er.

“It’s going to be mental down there,” I said, thinking of Cameron Base One. “Everyone loading stuff into boxes, shutting down all the experiments. Must be chaos.”

The Doctor smiled, looking out at the point where, miles and miles below the water, there was a whole base of people packing up and heading home. “It won’t be that bad,” she said. “It will still be Christmas. They’ll make the best of it.”

[tarithenurse]

Stolen - 4

Pairing: Loki Laufeyson &/x fem!gifted!reader Content: Nothing bad as such ;) A/N: HUGS! Just because I miss hugging people. Tags are open: just ask or reblog.

4. The Speed of Pain

…   Reader  …

Sitting on the bed, you’re completely absorbed by the gorgeous light show outside the window where gazillions of stars are drawn and condensed into a rim brighter than anything you could have imagined – at least compared to the orb the width of your thumb inside. A black hole. The term is familiar but that’s almost the only knowledge you have of the phenomenon, and most astronomers would probably kill to be in your place right now under the guise of “knowing more” or for the sake of “research”.

With a view as mesmerizing as that why would you bother turning when Loki enters and leaves by the whoosh of the door? You don’t.

Minutes drag by until a detail registers in your mind. Did the locks activate? Torn between hope and the nauseating confidence that you’re imagining things now, the few steps to the access panel are further away than ever before. Hands shaking, breath superficial, you reach up to poke the dark screen.

What the -?! It takes all your strength to keep standing as a couple of blue symbols present themselves, each with an obvious option. The reasonable thing would be to expect that it’s a trap and Loki it waiting just on the other side of that door to catch and punish you for trying to leave. On the other hand...maybe luck actually exists.

It’s unreal when the door slides into the wall to reveal a way out. Never has painted metal looked more inviting or as liberating, and you almost admire it for too long, barely slipping out as the gate to freedom begins to close.

The interior of what you since have learned to be a space ship had appeared dismal and claustrophobic when you arrived.

“Freedom.” The shakingly whispered word is all you can muster for now.

Looking around, your minimal knowledge of space travel tells you that you’re in a sort of cargo hold with cabins lining the sides towards a metal staircase leading up to the right at the very end. To the left is...nothing. Well, there’s a sort of ramp slanting up against a wall but even though you instinctively know that’s the real way out you also know it’s usual considering that thing called “space” outside, reducing the options to just two.

“You’re not ‘sposed to be out.”

The warbled, deep voice makes your cheek sting with the memory of pain. It doesn’t take long before the cool metal stops your frantic backpedalling, making Arox-or-whatever-he’s-called grin. Like a hyena just without the sound. The only way is around him.

“See’f you can catch me, then.”

As stupid as he’s repulsive, the man charges headfirst towards you, leaving you just enough time to slip out a piece of song that conjures a dense fog. Judging the distances by the sounds only, you press yourself to the wall just in time to avoid a collision with him – it does sound like he collides heavily with the metal you’d been backed against just a second ago: first a hard smack and a grunt, then a sound like a sack of lour hitting the ground.

Move, c’mon legs! Thankful for the support of the wall, you pass the closed door to your former confines as you aim for the edge of the fog and a clear view. At least there isn’t much to trip over, but you know you have to move fast or the mist will start spreading before dissipating as the magic fades, so your hands slide along the wall, feet gingerly probing the metal grate of the floor for fear there should be an unevenness.

In the haze, the blue lights of a door panel are eerie, ghost-like, and you can’t help but be comforted by the clear view as you access the room despite what you actually see. The layout is identical to yours the place is still less spartan thanks to the pile of leathery, inhumanly big clothing in one corner and the neat array of weapons on the table. What must be guns of the space variety flank some vicious knives with jagged handles and symbols etched into the blade. Tempted to take one, you also realize that they’d be as big as swords for you...not to mention that you have no idea how to fight with a weapon of that kind.

Quickly deciding to move on as the fog is thinning, the next two cabins flanking the staircase are empty which brings you to the one at the very end of this level. This gotta be Loki’s. Already, the little hairs on your body are standing, your feet itching to move away and you have to force yourself to walk up to it. Let him be upstairs. Or something. Blue lights glare accusingly at you, but no one complains as you have a look inside the place. Empty.

A few steps, the brush of a finger, then the door slides shut and you lock it behind you before getting to work. Confident that you don’t have much time, you ignore the muzzled, silk sheets on the bed and the clothes dangling from hanger in an open cabinet. No, it’s the personal trinkets and the row of old-looking books that are of interest to you – at least until you realize you can’t read a single word and the thingamabobs are nothing more than writing tools, pretty drinking glasses, and something akin to a chess set.

“If I were an insane killer alien...where would I hide anything personal?” you mutter as you keep searching, now head deep into his closet.

“Tsk tsk.” The sound makes you freeze with the fingers around a leather belt. “Haven’t we learned our place yet, little pet?”

...  Loki   ...

Green and black shimmer in the shadows as [Y/N] straightens her back. “Leaving the door to my prison unlocked wasn’t an invitation?”

“A test.” He can’t help chuckling at the sight of muscles working in her shoulders and arms as though she’s wringing her hands.

Her breath trembles. “One designed for me to fail if I did anything.”

From your point of view. Loki, however, has learned much more about the stubborn creature now than during the last fortnight by watching her actions. Unseen at the top of the stairs, the scene between the attempted escapee and [Y/N] played out to reveal more of the nature of the magic in her blood and her tenacity. It had even surprised him when the weapons were left untouched.

“As fun as this has been,” he smiles, “it’s time to return to your own...cell.”

A lesser man, a mortal, would not have seen the leather belt whipping towards his face as she turns around but being a god, Loki catches it in the air even before the air cracks at the force behind the attack of the insolent girl. It stings his skin, but the eyes widening with fear in her face is a balm to soothe the worst of wounds.

“Pray tell: what did you intend to accomplish with that?” He tugs sharply and secures the entirety of the belt, and still she doesn’t answer. “Was it a blunt attempt to prove your strength of spirit even under less than favourable circumstances? A, shall we say, display of force of will?” Stepping close to her, the Jotun slips the leather around her neck – spicy, cold fear fills his nostrils immediately. “Or did you simply not...think?” One wrong word and Loki will cut it short.

Pupils have dilated with fear. The lips caught between her teeth. Still the jaw is set stubbornly as if to prove that regardless of every thought (if any) before the rebellious action has a strong foundation in which to grow. Loki will savour the thrill of breaking her slowly, watching her crumble to be rebuild in his image. Or to die.

“Do as I wish, mortal. Heal the priestess and I may let you go home.”

[Y/N] hesitates, brows furrowing as she tried to determine the odds and figure out where the catch lies. “Liar.”

“So you’d rather let the priestess suffer a slow, painful death than have a chance at freedom?” He can see the protests boiling within her even if she stubbornly refuses to retort. “I suppose we’ll see in a few days’ time.”

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Alex ze Pirate Mini Review 2: Underappreciated and how Sam should deal with an abuser.

Last time I gave a general overview of how Sam is treated by his “friends”. Now I want to give a more specific example, that will also show how Dobson’s storytelling abilities are not really all that good, particularly when it comes to pacing or building up any sort of conflict.

You see, for the most part Alex ze Pirate is just a collection of stupid artwork (not even concept art, just random artwork Dobson makes of his characters dressed as something random) and one page strips with a stupid punchline, with Sam most of the time being the receiving punching bag.

There have however been a few individual, short stories over time. And when I say short stories, I mean short. As in 15 pages for a very cheap set up, a few jokes and a punchline. Those include stories such as All that Glitters (where everyone except Alex breaks into a fortress to steal something), The Wish Fish (the only halfway okay story of them all because it is just meant to be comedic) and Best Laid Plans. However, near the end of the initial run of AzP, Dobson did a three part story (partly) focused on Sam in that format, which started off with the chapter I want to talk in this post: “Underappreciated”.

As you can see, the chapter starts off following some basic rules of storytelling in comics. Two establishing panels for the location at which the story takes place initially and showing what Sam’s duties are. Nothing really bad yet. The only thing that sticks out being just the fact that a) Sam does not have his own bedroom and has to sleep in a useless outlook and b) he sleeps in his regular clothes. But hey, nothing to get upset about initially, perhaps he just prefers it like this at the moment. But with the next two pages…

The problems start to show. Page three establishing that Atea herself is just a cunt who can’t even have the basic decency of wishing her “friend” a good morning or giving him a thank you for bringing a morning beverage as she has other selfish priorities on her mind. Like wanting to lick the shower water of Alex’s skin.

Also, go fuck yourself Uncle Peggy. As in, get both your arms ripped off, shoved up your butthole with those hooks and then get hanged on those stomps like a chandelier. I wouldn’t even mind the fact here that Peggy left a mess, if the face he makes in the last panel was not obvious of the fact he left the bathroom like this on purpose and that he is rather happy of making Sam’s day extra miserable by the fecal matter he left behind. Combined with any previous strip of the comic showing that Peggy for no reason likes to get the boy in trouble and even wants to see him die, this just shows once more of how much of an asshole he is. If the last panel just showed him with a groogy hangover look, obviously unaware of how much discomfort he brings unintentionally to Sam, that would be one thing. But intentionally making Sam’s day miserable despite the obvious fact the boy is the first one to do anything around here, while making one of the worst drawn “HAHA, I am such a rascal faces” I have ever seen (and I have seen shitty anime en mass) makes me hate the character more than Dobson intented.

And then there is page 5…

And it is in my opinion the saddest page in the entire comic arc, even compared to the “heartbreaking” stuff Dobson wants to pull up in the last third of it. Because though it is meant as a joke, the general execution is too cruel, crossing into “dude, not funny” territory and showing just how little the crew cares for Sam. Talus, Sam’s “best friend” not even aware he is around, everyone stealing Sam’s food with that stupid “Yoink” sound (seriously, I wish the characters would get punched in the vaginas each time they make this sound in any of Dobson’s strips) and then leaving Sam behind with smug faces, ready to do whatever they want to do, while he, likely stinking of feces and not even having showered properly, has also to clean up after those pigs, who can’t even eat in a proper manner ( hey Atea, use a fork instead of holding the bowl) and silently. I mean, they are pretty much pigs when the noises they make are loud enough, they make the font of the writing change randomly into whatever Dobson has on his computer with every sound. Not to forget the mess they leave behind. And they call Sam the Slob?

Anyway, on to the next page…

And who the heck left their Hello Kitty toy in the bathtub? Also, I hate the way Alex’s face is drawn in the lower left corner. Something about the eyes in relation to the shit eating grin just looks off. Less “smug” and gleefully awaiting whatever she plans next and looking more like Dobson when someone tells him his opinion and reasoning for it is bad, but he can’t yell back at them because they are part of a minority and so he has make a “good face” to a bad situation, while internally he is already imagining how to strawman them in some fake news worthy facebook post.

And then we get to page 7. Which features the WORST addition to the “Alex ze Pirate” canon Dobson has ever thought up. An embodiment of what is wrong with Dobson when it comes to inserting internet culture related stuff into his own work. Ladies and gentlemen… the lolcat pirates

Yeah, those Hello Kitty rejects who ironically look still more like a proper cat than Spot in Danny and Spot, are essentially one of the worst jokes Dobson has ever created. Because they are a joke without a punchline. See, all there is to them is that they are sentient cats, that speak in a manner associated with lolcat posting. And that is the “joke”. Their speech pattern being based on a dumb internet meme that was popular at the time Dobson drew this page. It is like if you portray an Asian by making them talk with a shitty racist accent and that supposedly counts already as comedy. It is not funny, because there is nothing really done with it in context of the story. Like no one addresses the weird way they talk. Also, with the font Dobson uses, it is just an eyesore to any reader and the text gets aggravating the more the captain of the cats talks. It shows why lolcat pictures only had very short sentences accompanying the pics, cause reading more than 8 words written in this manner tingles a part of your brain that makes you want to shout “English motherfucker, do you speak it”?

Don’t get me even started on how the joke would get lost to anyone unaware of lolcats and how dated the joke already was back when the page was posted, which is one of many reasons why comic artists should just in general avoid memes in their work, if they hope for it to pass the test of time. Instead let me just point out the fact that though Alex said “All hands prepared for casting off” on the previous page (which is also a very unnatural way to give the order “Everyone get ready! Take off in 10 minutes”) not all hands are on board, seeing how Uncle Peggy is missing on this page (and spoilers) many pages of this afterwards. Weird. I thought he would be onboard the moment Alex mentioned they are going to hijack a ship full of pussy. Lastly, this is Alex being a “badass”? Taking over a ship full of little furballs you can defeat with a laserpointer, a squeaky toy and catnip? Sam, this is not just “almost” embarrassingly easy, this is literally on a level similar to stealing candy from a baby. That is mentally handicapped. And without supervision. In a candy story.

At least it turns out there is genuinely something worth stealing on this ship. Otherwise all Alex would have accomplished on that very day would have been animal abuse for the sake of entertainment. Though now it also gets me thinking: A place called Katsville, the revelation that the captain is supposedly the child of a high ranking military feline within the sea force of an entire species of sentient cats… how exactly does the world of Alex ze Pirate function? Look, I do not want to get into too much detail about this point here yet, because it is a bigger issue with the worldbuilding (or rather lack thereof) of this series in general, but what is the “consistency” when it comes to races and species in this world? See, One Piece for example is overall a very “cartoonish” and fantastic world (more cartoonish than what Dobson creates on average) when you think of the fact there are fish men, giant seacows and seamonsters, sentient furry creatures, islands in the sky, sentient weather phenomenons etc next to humans. And while Oda does not really spend time elaborating in very high detail how his world works, the sheer abundance of those elements and how they were established pretty early on in the story and are revisited constanly, with the cartoonish flavor and humor of One Piece on top of it, makes those oddities feel organic and a part of the world.

Not so much in AzP. Here over 90% of the time any character not related to the crew is some generically drawn human, in a very generically human setting with jokes just not cartoonish enough. So the world of AzP feels more “realistic” and less oddish, making then things like Talus, the lolcat pirates and once a giant sea dragon that looked like Elliot’s rejected cousin

Stand out like a sour thumb that looks like this

But I digress. Lets see what makes Sam, who just seems bored and wants to end his miserable life/drink his sorrows away, throw the cat captain against the wall.

Okay. Sam’s overall reaction makes it clear, the locket is important. So “kudos” for establishing this and in doing so also create within a moment a bit of intrigue for the reader. After all, why does this locket get such a reaction out of Sam, who we know so far as more happy go lucky or deadpan in parts, instead of looking genuinely distraught. Heck, the fact he even tells Alex to shut up when she commands him around should highlight how out of character finding this locket truly makes Sam.

Then there is Alex’s reaction to being told to shut up, which she takes with as much dignity as someone telling Dobson to just stop fawning about underaged lesbians in a toddler show.

Jesus Christ, she faces being told she looks like a guy with more grace than that. I mean, isn’t she used to being told to shut her trap? Cause if I were her parents, I would have told this entitled redheaded whinner a few times over the course of her childhood to shut up.

Scum sucking cabin boy… said by a butt ugly whore who would genuinely suck scum off if it means she can finally get laid instead of being mistaken for a man. By the way, with that angry face she makes in the first panel, I can totally see why others would mistake her for a dude. She just looks unpleasant and not in a funny way like that red panda girl from Aggretsuko. See, when she gets angry, it looks hilarious and cute because of the contrast to how the character looks ordinarily. This is just Alex looking even more unpleasant as usual.

Now, before I continue with the next pages, I like to point out the face Sam makes in the upper panel and Sam’s overall body language in the last one.

It is obvious that Sam is meant to be in a state of mind where he knows for what he is getting yelled at and where he genuinely reacts in a hurt manner. His body shaking, his head tilted down, not saying even a word. You would expect that the next page of this comic would be a follow up. Seeing Sam, who is pent up, lashing out in some way. Either for example by justifying why he said it, getting sad, angry, perhaps even violent in that situation. After all, so far the way this story has been structured, a lot of emphasize was put on the fact that Sam is treated not well and that finding this locket actually has an uncommon effect on him. Heck, even the title of this chapter hints on the idea, that we should get some sort of huge reaction out of Sam now on the next page, as this is supposed to be Sam’s story.

Instead it is just Alex grumbling and grinding her teeth, unable to comprehend that someone finally told her something every reader with more than 20 braincells said when reading this comic series. And this in my opinion is from a structural point, one of the biggest missteps in this story. Obviously, this is supposed to be a comic about Sam, based on title and him being the one character in it with the most emotional aspects so far. And it is also obvious that this is not just meant to be a silly gag comic but supposedly one with emotional weight. So, where is that weight so far, aside from the panels showing Sam being miserable because he gets the short end of the stick by his friends? Sorry to hijack this thing here now with my own ideas, but if I had writen this story, page 12 and 13 would have actually been an immense turning point for me in the dynamic so far. Why I would have let Alex shout at Sam for insubordination, I would have made it more than one panel of Alex calling him scum and also end likely with Sam, who obviously reaches a limit the longer she goes on about it, end punching her in the face, perhaps even knock out. Show truly just how far Sam is pushed emotionally at this moment, keeping it however ambiguous if he hit her because of her words hurting or because of something else, in doing so focusing also the attention to the reader back on the locket.

As an aftermath of this, Alex would (if not knocked out) hit Sam back, much to Atea’s and Talus horror, later implying additionally that Sam left because of being hit by whom he thinks is not just his captain but a “friend” (oh yes spoiler, Sam is gone in the next chapter)   or the next page would be of Alex waking up back in her hideout from having been knocked out. Atea and Talus informing her what happened, her deciding to deal with Sam later on after recovering (who accompanied everyone back on the island temporarily) only for the last page showing Sam deciding that he is leaving the island, ending the chapter on Sam in a small boat slowly drifting away from the island. You know, something to give the chapter the feeling that the “shut up” moment is an emotional turning point in this story and that there might be something bigger going on that resulted in Sam deciding to leave, without having him however go full Meg Griffin as in the Family Guy episode “Seashell Seahorse Party”, chewing Alex and the others out for the way they treat him. Cause honestly, as much as I like for Alex, Atea and Talus to be chewed out and face consequences for their actions, doing so would likely just be (like in that Family guy episode)  a pointless fillerbuster in the bigger picture of things, as no real consequences would come out of it.

Well that and just like the writers of Family Guy, Dobson is just equally loathsome and thinks he can write whatever sick joke he wants and can on his characters, basic decency or consistency in writing be damned.

But back to the comic, where things just “end” as shown here instead of any real emotions boiling up and a cliffhanger that may genuinely beg the question what is going to happen next to anyone involved in this thing.

 Cause really, by the time it is night and Sam says it is time to go, you are not surprised he wants to go, even if he did not have a genuine emotional outburst within this chapter. After all, who wants to stay with “friends” like this, with Talus and Atea not even trying to cheer him up and instead ignoring his obvious need for comfort in this uncomfortable way, as if they are a bunch of racists trying to look away as someone beats a black person in front of them into a pulp. The only question you may ask yourself by the time the last page is hit, is who that generic looking girl is, whose picture has been photoshopped into the locket.

 Something we may not find out by the time the next chapter and part of this review hits, but will get to eventually. Until then guys, in order to end on something happier, funnier and just genuinely more pleasant than what this story presented to us so far, have something silly and Super Sentai related here for the sake of childish entertainment.

[whispersafterdusk]

Lost in Time - ch 2

When Sam came back she had Dr. Xu with her along with a sack of food and water, a lantern, a couple blankets, and had even thought to include a set of playing cards; Arlo had gone to find Selene and wasn't back yet but Remington felt safe enough to climb back down and deliver the supplies to Dawa.  Once Dawa had eaten there wasn't much to do except sit and chat and play cards as they waited for Selene and Arlo to make their appearances.

It was an hour or so before they heard footsteps coming down the hallway, and then the two of them appeared like ghosts in the light of the lantern.  Both were carrying toolboxes and Selene had an additional duffel bag strapped to her back (it couldn't have been easy to get that down the vine-choked shaft).

"This place is huge," was Selene's greeting as she stared around the room.

"What're we looking at?" Arlo asked.

Remington folded his hand and tossed it on the discard pile - he'd been losing this game anyway.  "There's an old elevator back here somewhere that looks intact but needs power. If we can get Dawa higher up we can climb out of here no problem." ((Continued below cut))

Arlo nodded and looked Dawa over.  "-good to see you're all right.   Do you want to wait here while we go find and fix the elevator?"

"If I can.  The less I walk on this ankle the better."

Arlo nodded again, then returned his attention to Remington.  "Selene and I will go looking for the elevator.  You should stay here just in case.  Since no one even knew these ruins were here there's no telling what might be wandering around in here."

"Will do," Remington said.  "We haven't heard or seen anything but I guess that doesn't mean nothing's here."  He looked back to Dawa.   "Where's that elevator at?"

Dawa dropped his hand into the discard pile too and brushed his palm off on his shirt before pointing toward the back of the room.  "You see that door back there to the left of that counter-looking thing?  Through there is another hallway - not as long as the one you just came through but it leads right up to the other elevator."

"Got it.  Let's get moving," Arlo said, gently nudging Selene with his elbow to get her attention.

She jumped a bit at that but nodded all the same and followed Arlo off toward the rear of the room.

Once they were almost out of range of the lantern's light Remington scooped up the cards and began to shuffle.  "And now I can blame any losses on paying less attention to the cards and more attention to what might be out there waiting to jump on us."

Dawa snorted.  "Like I'd believe that.  Deal."

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

They'd found the elevator easily and had managed to yank a neighboring wall panel free to give themselves access to the wiring within; Arlo stood guard with a flashlight in hand while Selene examined the inner workings of this section of wall.

"Think you can fix it?"

"Looks like it's just a burnt out fuse and some melted wires...shouldn't be too hard to fix," Selene mused.  "There should be a roll of wire and a ruler in the box you carried down, and the snips too.  Start cutting me ten strips of wire about fourteen inches each, please."

Without giving him another look the builder woman began to dig through her second toolbox until she found a pair of pliers and what looked like an awl; whatever she intended to do with them Arlo wasn't sure but rather than watch her work he turned to the task she'd given him and carefully measured out and cut the wires she'd asked for, only looking up briefly at the sound of a very tiny amount of glass breaking -- it seemed she'd used the pliers and awl to pop the ruined fuse out of place and the force of it breaking loose had sent the tiny component bouncing across the floor to shatter against the opposite wall of the hallway.  Selene did little more than shrug at that before pulling out fuses of various sizes from the toolbox and comparing them to the socket the burnt fuse had just been pried out of.

Once he'd gotten the wires cut he left them piled within Selene's reach and then waited there, squatting on his heels and listening; he swore he could hear something thrumming - it was a deep sound, and far away, but unmistakable if he sat and made no noise.

"-do you hear that?" he asked into the silence after several minutes of listening.

"The hum?  Yeah.  This place has power.  I just have no idea where it is and what it's running to - can't tell from here."

"Is that a good or bad thing?"

"A bit of both.  That this place is still powered somewhere SHOULD mean I can reroute power from whatever the source is to wherever we might need it - that's the good thing.  The bad thing is I would need to find a place to tap in AND we also don't know what's being powered - if it's a security measure we might have trouble on our hands."  She paused as she leaned into the wall and went up to her elbows in wires and pipes; when she came back out she had what looked like a battered and worn cloth toy in her hand but then she dropped it to the floor and Arlo could see it was actually an old, dead rat of some kind with blackened fur around what remained of its face.  "--well this explains the shorted wires, poor thing.  Its final mistake was biting something it had no business biting."

Arlo grunted in response - not really a lot he could say to that - and peered around them; he'd been on guard since they'd left Remington and Dawa behind but aside from the distant hum he'd not heard anything in this area.

'Wonder what this place was for, to be buried so far underground,' he thought to himself.  It seemed rather bare bones for a ruin - the walls were a faded out blue, the carpet (what was left of it) had been brown.  There were light fixtures shaped like bowls spaced evenly along the walls just below the ceiling, mirroring one another across the hallway, and the ceiling tiles above them he guessed had once been white and looked to be bolted in place much like the wall paneling was.  It gave off more of a warehouse vibe than anything he could picture people inhabiting or working inside.

His attention was drawn back to Selene as she prodded him with the toe of her boot; when he looked to her she reached out to take the flashlight and sat it on top of one of the toolboxes, aimed in at the open panel on the wall.  "-keep looking anywhere but at me until I say otherwise, all right?  I've only got one pair of these."

The 'these' she was referring to was a pair of goggles with thick, black lenses, and in her other hand she had a small flame torch - currently unlit but he knew both were welding tools and that he shouldn't be looking at that directly.  He shifted to put his back to her and soon the hallway was flickering as she began replacing the bad wires with the bits he'd cut; the flickering light made the hallway a bit spooky as the shadows stretched and "moved" in strange ways, and Arlo hoped nothing would choose this instant to jump out at them since he didn't think he'd trust his own vision at first.

"There we go..." he heard Selene mutter; he stayed facing away until he got a tap on the shoulder then turned as she began connecting plugs to the device she'd carried along in that duffel bag. Finally, with a faint whine and a whirring noise, the elevator's button panel came on -- it wasn't exactly impressive looking with its single button but the fact that it had lit up at all was heartening.

"All right.  Now we get to see if the elevator can move."  Selene dropped the goggles back into her bag and pushed the button.  There was a quiet ding and the doors slid open, with a grinding noise sounding out at the last few inches before the doors slid into the wall and revealed the dimly lit car interior.

Selene carefully poked her head inside and looked to each side and even up at the ceiling, then pulled back to frown at Arlo.  "-this only has buttons for floors below us, nothing above."

Arlo sighed, pushing himself to his feet.  "I doubt there'd be only one elevator that goes up for a place this large.  Maybe we can go down and find another one that links to the upper floors."

"As good a plan as any.  It does sound like the humming is coming from below us so at the very least maybe we'll find that power source and can use that instead of having to wire and pray."

Selene carefully moved the duffel bag against the wall (the device powering the elevator was still tucked inside it) then picked up her toolbox and the flashlight, with Arlo picking up the other toolbox; they both stepped inside and Selene pushed the button for the next floor down.

The elevator groaned a bit then began to go down (slowly, as it was supposed to -- good to know they wouldn't be taking a fall of their own).  "If we can't find another way up I can always run back to my shop and figure out a way to attach one of my spare motors to a pulley system -- actually, that'd probably be the easiest part.  Harder part would be figuring out how to anchor it up at the top of the sinkhole."

"Let's see what we find first."

The elevator came to a surprisingly smooth stop and with a ding the doors slid open...to reveal that the outer doors on the floor's landing itself hadn't.

Selene huffed.  "All right - guess that means this floor isn't powered."

Arlo let out a chuckle and tried to wedge his fingers into the gap between the doors; the door was rusted and didn't seem inclined to budge, and even with Selene shoving the claw end of a hammer into the space to try and help pry it open they couldn't manage it.  Finally, with a shrug, they gave up and pressed the button for the next floor.

Again with a ding the doors slid open at the destination floor and to their surprise the outer doors did as well -- there were dim red emergency lights on in this hallway and Selene grinned at the sight of them.

"Now we're getting somewhere.  Let's-"

Arlo held out a hand to stop her from leaving the elevator, and wordlessly pointed ahead of them.

This hallway was identical to the one they'd come from but ahead he could see one of the nearest doors was open, and sticking out of it laying on the floor was what looked like a skeletal hand.

Selene wrinkled her nose.  "...at least it doesn't look recent?"

"Not promising.  Stay close."

Arlo stepped from the elevator and carefully walked down the hall, keeping to the middle of the hallway and scanning ahead of them for any signs of trouble; when he got to the door with the hand he bent down and could barely make out an entire skeleton wrapped in ragged clothing attached to the hand on the other side of the door -- it looked like the person had collapsed and their arm had kept the door from sliding shut.  After a moment he carefully shoved the door back into the wall and took the flashlight from Selene, shining it into the room.

This looked to be a dormitory room of some kind; he could see a bunk bed, a desk and chair, a computer terminal, and a small kitchen area attached to a larger sitting area off to his right.  On the back wall was a door marked with a symbol he assumed meant bathroom and there were shelves and what looked like a closet door visible as well.  Everything was coated in thick dust and along with books and things on the shelves there were small items here and there - coffee mugs, pens, some plates near the sink, the remnants of a jacket tossed over the back of the chair, a pair of shoes near the bunk...all small details confirming that this place had indeed been lived in by actual people.

There weren't any other skeletons inside, at least.

"Let's have a look down the hall but be careful - we don't know what killed this person."

They continued on; the hallway eventually dead-ended, and not at another elevator.  None of the other doors were open and despite the red lights indicating some kind of power was running through this area they still couldn't get any of the doors to open (not that they could see how - there weren't any handles or panels on the outside that they could find).

"Maybe the next floor?"

"Guess we'll see."

They headed back to the elevator and went down to the next floor, and both Arlo and Selene gasped as the doors opened to reveal another red-lit hallway almost identical to the others save for the sheer number of skeletal remains scattered up and down its length.

"What in the world..."

Arlo took a few steps out onto the landing and shined his flashlight ahead.  A few of the skeletons nearby looked to be wearing the remnants of some kind of body armor, and laying near at hand were long objects that vaguely resembled the rifle Selene had once shown him.  There were a few other armored and armed skeletons further down the hall but the plainsclothed skeletons outnumbered them three to one.  Their clothing, as it had rotted away, hadn't done much in the way of keeping the skeletons intact so most of them where just heaps of bones piled here and there, but several looked to have fallen in a way to suggest that these people had once been running both away from and toward the armed skeletons.

Selene moved past him and bent down near a pile of bones that must have, at one point, been two separate people; she carefully reached down and picked up a shattered skull -- there was a large and jagged hole through the temple area and the eye socket on that side had crumbled away.

"...what happened down here?"

"Something awful," Arlo replied, voice low.  "Some kind of fight.   The civilian-looking ones I can understand being dead - they look like they got gunned down.  But I don't understand why there's the armed ones still here too...I don't see any weapons aside from the rifles."

Selene stood turned over one of the nearby helmets with her foot; there weren't any bullet holes or similar damage to it, and the matching armor also looked relatively intact aside from the ravages of time.   "They don't look like they took any return fire, and it doesn't seem like they were here to protect everyone else from something."

"Let's...keep moving.  It doesn't look like we'll find anything here."  Arlo spun on a heel and returned to the elevator, waiting until Selene joined him before slapping the button for the next floor.

The next hallway was similar to the one they'd just left, just with fewer bodies in it.  They didn't even bother leaving the elevator for that one and moved on to the final floor available from the elevator's panel.

When the doors opened they were shocked to find the area was fully lit -- harsh white lights glared overhead and the faint humming they'd heard up above was much louder down here.  This floor's elevator doors opened to reveal a sort of sitting area; there were armchairs and a few small tables all falling apart with age, and several large pots that must have held plants at some point.  The far wall looked to be made of frosted glass with a set of double doors (with handles, for once) in its middle; Selene walked to the glass and scrubbed a hand across it -- a faint glow from the room beyond this one peeked through the caked on dust.

"This floor is fully powered, I'd wager."  She inhaled and exhaled slowly, then went to tug one of the doors open.  It didn't move an inch, and still didn't move when she tried to push it open instead; she wrapped hands around the right door's handle and planted a foot on the left door for leverage in an effort to force it open, huffing and struggling as she tried to pull again.

Arlo watched her for a moment or two then walked over and tugged her back; he flipped the flashlight around and smashed the butt of it into the glass and the door immediately shattered.

"...one way to do it, I guess.  But also a good way to set off any security systems."

"We've only seen skeletons so far - with the firefights above us I think we'd have seen traces of AI-based security measures by now if any of them had been active back then or were still active now."  He tucked the flashlight back into his belt and carefully stepped through the frame of the door, being mindful to not brush up against its jagged sides.

Immediately noticeable about this next room was the abrupt temperature change -- it was much, much colder in here compared to the rest of the facility.  This room was lit brightly and was a very spacious rectangular shape but the far right corner from where they stood had collapsed inward; dirt and stone had flowed in and piled around strange glass tube structures that reached from floor to ceiling.  Each had wide metal rings around their tops and neat lines of insulated wires incorporated into the floor that were arranged in almost a sunburst pattern radiating from the bases of the tubes that all met at a large, blocky computer console situated on a dais on the wall to their left.

"What are those things..." It wasn't so much a question as Selene musing out loud, having stepped in through the broken door a few breaths after Arlo.  "I've never seen or even heard of anything that looks like that."

Ceiling tiles and some of the lighting fixtures had fallen and left the floor something of a minefield of debris; Arlo picked his way across the room to get a better look at the glass tube things.

They were big enough to hold a man and he could count seven visible (based on how they were evenly arranged and on the wires running out of the cave in in the corner he assumed there were more of these things buried under all that dirt), and as he circled around one he came face to face with yet another skeleton - this one was falling out of the broken back half tube.  Inside the tube Arlo could see more wires, a pair of fishhook-shaped padded metal prongs, and tubing that disappeared into the metal cuff that ringed the topmost "roof" of the tube.

All of the tube structures on the outermost row - the ones closest to the cave in - had all shattered, and their inhabitants were spilled out unceremoniously into the floor.

"Arlo..."

Arlo spun at Selene's call - she'd sounded unnerved and he'd half expected to have found the security measures she'd just chided him over but instead he saw her standing near the tube nearest the computer console.  That one looked entirely intact and sported wide patches of frost across its glass; unlike the hallways above this room had just one skeleton in it (that wasn't falling from the tubes, anyway) which was splayed out on the floor at the base of this intact tube, with some sort of filtering mask slipping off the grinning skull.  Selene was standing with the tube between her and the skeleton, and had her hands braced against the glass and her face pressed to her fingers, peering in at...whatever was inside, which from where Arlo stood looked to be nothing more than a substance the color of pea soup.

"What's wrong?"

"I think there's a body still IN this one."

Frowning he came over to stand next to her; the tube radiated cold and he could see smears where Selene had wiped away frost and grime off the glass surface.  Selene shifted out of his way and Arlo bent to peer at the clean area she'd made -- there was a shadowy shape just barely visible through the liquid, and it DID look full and vaguely human-shaped.

"Awful..." he muttered, huffing out a sigh.  "We'll have to figure out what to do with all these remains once we get Dawa back to the surface.  We can't just leave them here now that we know about them."

"Yeah...they should be buried.  It's only proper," Selene replied, backing away from the tube and its inhabitant.  "All right, let me see about this computer.  Maybe I can pull an old map of this place..."

Arlo stayed near the tube as Selene headed up the few steps that led to the computer; it both bothered and baffled him to have found all these skeletons and then an actual corpse presumably preserved in a tank of...goop.

"Hey - can you go check that door over there?"

"Hmm?" was his response as he tore his attention away from the tube.  "Which door?"

"See that one over there?" Selene pointed and he followed the tip of her finger to spy a door on the same wall as the cave in -- the cave in hadn't quite reached it fully so if it was unlocked they could probably get it open, and wouldn't have to move much dirt to get through it.

He headed over to the door and again found it was one of those handleless ones, the same as the ones in the hallways above.  "I don't see a way to open it."

"Let me see then...  I pulled up a security log that has a bunch of locks listed but I don't know what goes to which door, hang on a second."

Arlo leaned his shoulder against the wall and rubbed his hands together - this room wasn't quite so cold as it was outside but it was still chilly.  Leaning as he was he could see the whole room and could watch as Selene did whatever she was doing over on that ancient console, and then finally beside him in the wall he felt a vibration and heard a click.  "Hey, I think that did it--"

He was interrupted by a booming robotic voice that echoed through the room:

 ACTIVE USER DETECTED. AUXILIARY POWER AT 3%. EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS INITIATED: AWAKENING SEQUENCE ACTIVATED.  PLEASE SUMMON MEDICAL ASSISTANCE TO SURGICAL LAB 3948A9-Z1.

The door beside him slid open unnoticed as now Arlo, in full alert mode, scanned the room.  "What the heck was that?  What did you do?"

Selene still stood at the console, frozen in place.  "I didn't do anything!  I mean I did SOMETHING but it was just unlocking the doors the system would allow me to unlock!  I didn't tell it to initiate whatever it was it just said it was doing!"

There was a rumble in the ceiling followed by an incredibly loud hissing noise as all the tubes - both the broken ones and the single intact one - all began blowing air out of the top metal rings as previously unseen vents all slid open together.  Barely audible over the hissing was a grinding noise as small sections of the floors slid open at the base of the tubes revealing drains -- the one intact tube began to dump the green fluid inside it, which was a lot less thick than it had seemed while it was still inside the glass, and the fluid flowed neatly down into the revealed drains.

Arlo watched with a sort of nervous fascination as the tube steadily emptied, and the more it emptied the more of the body it held was revealed.

First there was the crown of the head - its brown hair clung to the head as the fluid drained, and the person's face was barely visible through the mess of diodes, sensors, and a breathing mask secured to their face.  Soon the shoulders were visible and Arlo could see how the person was hung by the armpits from the hooks; breasts and then the entire torso were revealed, all just as covered with sensors as the head, and then finally he could see legs then bare feet.

With a shrill beeping the hooks inside the tube lowered several inches to place the woman's feet on the floor inside the enclosure, then the glass began to lift up and slot into the ceiling.  As the tube lifted the sensors and diodes across the body were yanked loose and left to hang in tangles; Arlo found himself moving toward the tube and its inhabitant without really realizing it, accidentally kicking a foot into the skeleton that lay there and sending bones scattering across the floor. Selene must have started moving at the same time as they both reached the tube together to catch the limp body as the parts looped under the arms suddenly gave way and dumped the woman out.

Whatever the green fluid had been had left an oily, slick residue all over the woman's skin, and even with the two of them reaching out to grab her as she fell they still only managed to keep the head from slamming into the floor.

"What the heck-"

Arlo fumbled to get his hands under the woman's armpits.  "Come on, lay her down-"

"Lay her down WHERE?  There's broken glass all over the place."

"Computer?"

"Maybe."

They carefully made their way over to the dais the computer console sat on, struggling to keep hold on the body that was slicker than anything they'd ever encountered.

Once they had the woman carefully laid out on the narrow bit of walkspace behind the console Arlo and Selene stared at one another wordlessly.  Neither had expected to have a corpse pop out of a tube of goo today, and he absently scrubbed his hands against his thighs and tried not to think about how the fluid on his hands felt a lot like runny snot against his skin.

"-oh man.  Arlo - I think she's breathing."

Selene pointed a shaky finger down at the woman; he dropped his glance but looked away just as quickly - the woman was completely nude and he couldn't bring himself to look too closely at her if there was a chance she...  He sucked in a breath and dropped down to press fingers to her pulse point at the neck.

...and yes, that was a pulse.  Somehow, this woman's heart was still beating.

"She's alive." He yanked his coat off and began to awkwardly wind it around the woman's upper half; a moment later Selene had hers off too and was trying to get the sleeves tied around the woman's waist.

"What do we do?"

"We need to -- first, we need to get out of here since it's cold and she's soaked.  We left Dr. Xu at the top of the shaft with Sam.  I say we backtrack to Dawa and Remington and get Xu down here ASAP.  He can check her out, we can use those blankets to get her dry, and then we uh--"  He stopped and looked around - there was that one door Selene had managed to get unlocked and open but now with an unconscious woman...   "-then YOU go and get a motor and winch.  No more searching for elevators."

With the pair of jackets forming a barrier between his hands and the slippery green gunk Arlo was able to pick the woman up and follow along behind Selene who in turn picked up the flashlight and tool boxes and led the way back to the elevator.  It was a bit tricky to maneuver himself and the woman through the broken door, especially when the lights in the room flickered and abruptly died and momentarily left Arlo balancing awkwardly within the door's frame in total darkness while Selene fumbled for the flashlight so they could see their way back to the elevator.

'What a day this turned out to be...'

[theanimeview]

Aniplex Online Fest - How to Produce an Anime - Notes!

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM (PDT) | Aniplex Live Stream | Sunday 5 July 2020

Panel Description: Anime producers will talk about behind the scenes of anime production. Master of Ceremonies/Host: Hisanori Yoshida Guests: Shizuka Kurosaki (Aniplex, Producer) Masami Niwa (Aniplex, Producer), Atsushi Kaneko (A-1 Pictures, Producer), Toshikazu Tsuji (CloverWorks, Producer)

_

Credit: Casea Mhtar | @madamekrow & Peggy Wood | @peggyseditorial

How Do You Produce An Anime?

Here’s the process for an anime: first proposal, the script, the storyboard, the key animation, painting, compositing, editing, and recording and that’s when it’s ready to be shown.

Step 1: Planning

There are mainly three different ways that proposals tend to come in during this planning stage. The first is when the publisher tells us about one of their hit products (games, a manga, etc.) and they ask us about adapting it into an anime. The second is when we find a series we like from a light novel or manga we’re reading already. Like, “Hey, this is cool!” Then we ask the publisher/get their permission to make the anime. The third is when a producer from an anime studio, or a director, or a staff member brings us something that they personally want to do. These are the most likely ways we come to a proposal for a new series and, of them, the third probably happens the most often.

Next comes the decision stage. A few more patterns emerge when we’re discussing whether to adapt or create an original series.

With originals, you are starting from scratch so the project is much more involved and time-consuming. Generally, a lot of staff members are involved and all of them want different things and, on top of that, the producer’s job is to make sure it does well. That it sells well, that it’s received well, that the team feels good or great about the project, and so on. So we have to find a way to respect everyone’s vision, while also guiding the project to profitability, which is pretty demanding. This also includes what I want to do as a producer. It’s fun to create something from scratch, but it also comes with so much risk. For example, originals don’t have a built-in fanbase, they don’t have the same support.

Shizuka Kurosaki provides an anecdotal example of a series he started 8 years ago that he is still working on from time to time. According to him, the series is still nowhere close to being produced. It’s just a sign of how hard it is to get it all to come together, especially when things change as time goes on.

Adaptations are different but still tough and demanding. First, you have great source material. Naturally, there are fans of the source material with what they want for the original. When we depict it through anime, there are things that were fine in the source but have to be changed for animation. We are pretty sensitive about how the original’s fans would see the results of our decision-making. Needless to say, that is a struggle that we don’t face when creating an original anime.

One of the hardest parts about adaptations is that novels and manga, which are largely still images and text, as opposed to anime, which is video, all have different rules of depiction. And when the time comes for us to make changes, we’re presented with options. Depending on what the scene is, certainly, some viewers will say, “Why couldn’t you just stay faithful to the original?” However, there are also times when changing it to be more anime-like gives it a shot of energy absent from the printed version. There's really no right answer so the process is like groping around in the dark and hoping that you find what works.

Producers don’t tend to have a lot of free time and when they do, like Masami Niwa mentioned, it’s mostly spent on things that will help at work. For example, reading what’s trending in novels or manga, watching movies, and even other animes from other companies. While it may seem like entertainment and is often enjoyable, these all serve one’s work as a producer in the field.

Step 2: Scripting

Generally, a “scenario meeting” or script meeting is held first. It’s when we look at what a writer has come up with and plan out some “book reading time.” For adaptations, it means reading the source text(s). Additionally, the planning producers and animation producers hold these meetings where the discussions start with talking about the potential series and gathering the team/assembling our staff. We already have a director in place by the time we have the first script meeting. The script is only done once the staff, including the director, gathers and is written.

Live-action scripts have hardly any screen direction when compared to anime scripts. Anime scripts are packed full of exposition. In the case of live-action scripts, if it’s like an ordinary office story. You pretty much recreate normal life. Whereas in an anime script, even if it’s an ordinary office story, there might be an employee with mind-blowing supernatural abilities. To depict something that doesn’t exist in real life, you need screen direction. And in the eyes of someone from another industry, I think it would seem like a really complex script because of the sheer amount of detail regarding action, layout, and such.

Step 3: Storyboarding

The storyboard is drawn from the script. Normally, the director draws the storyboards. But since the number of episodes keeps increasing for TV series, lately we’re seeing several storyboard artists dividing the labor.

Here are some samples of storyboards from Saekano the Movie: Finale, one of Toshikazu Tsuji’s past projects shared with the panel:

Envelopes like these, sometimes referred to as “shot envelopes” contain the layout drawings and artwork that become the key animations and in-betweens of individual scenes. By the end, all the materials that make up each scene and the finished ones are all inside one of these envelopes.

This is what storyboards look like:

This is an excerpt from the live performance scene at the top of Saekano the Movie.

Using Saekano the Movie as an example--it was a tad difficult to associate the “live scene” of the script to the animation. In the script, the directors and team have endless discussions of what they want to see within however many seconds of the animation. This is described to the animators, the people who is actually drawing the actions/storyboards/etc., who only remember parts of the conversation or only get a few words and they have to create these complex drawings after hearing the phrase “live scene.” Sometimes there is a lot of direction in those discussions while in the original novel it may just say, “they fought, they won,” but the battle leads into an epic space war.

Producers are always excited to see the storyboards. They know it must be a lot of work, hard work, to get them but they’re amazing. Animators sometimes get mad at the scripts and the different “grammar” of the adaptations between the novel and the anime script, but they do great work. To the producers, it's almost the same feeling as a fan seeing the anime for the first time.

Back to the Saekano the Movie example, in the live performance scene above, the animator that was asked to draw the scene knew how to use the instruments being played. That experience is indispensable in some cases as it helps make the movements more accurate and realistic. In the worst case scenario, producers sometimes go with motion capture or use recordings of live performances that are then 3-D rendered for the key animations.

Step 4: Key Animations

Key animations are a part of the storyboard. They are often more detailed images used to depict specifics in individual scenes, with other frames used for movements happening in between. They are often discussed and detailed during and post conversations between the animator, director, super director, and the producer.

The above is an example of a key animation. It’s not something that stands on its own, rather, they’re made out of multiple drawings. This is where she utters the “meee” from the lyrics (Saekano the Movie). This key animation is to clarify that she’s saying “meee” from the lyrics as the shape of her mouth changes. The words on the page are helpful, but not necessary.

Next we see a sample of timesheets (image below).

Time sheets are like a blueprint. This is a 3-second shot described in a timesheet and it contains all of the information going into that 3 seconds.

At the top of the timesheets are numbers and that’s where they write where they want the key animation positions to be. Since this is a live performance scene, it ends on a unique shot, and for normal shots, they’d insert some dialogue, or time a movement there. There are also instructions for Compositing. The timesheet is filled with all these details.

There are all kinds of key animations, and a key animation that’s cleared every step in the process is what we call an in-between.

Step 5: In-Betweening

In-betweening is creating the materials that fill up the spaces between the key animation positions. Since anime is all about movement from point a to point b, we have several pages to make characters and items move in-between the two points.

(Image from: https://boords.com/animatic/what-is-the-definition-of-an-animatic-storyboard)

The above is an example. On the left, you see and anamitc--which is essentially a storyboard shown in order to create the story. The frozen frames make up the key animations prior to details. On the right, you have the fully animated piece. All of the movement seen in-between those key animations seen on the left, come together to create the moving animation seen on the right is an example of the in-betweening discussed here.

Going back to the time sheet--if you look closely you can see numbers going vertically which say 1-2-3-4 etc. Those are key animations. And the tiny dots you see in between, those are in-between animations. So drawing between the first and second key animations is the job of the in-between animator for this scene.

Step 5: Painting & Compositing

Next comes painting and composition--it’s where all the colors are applied. Years ago, this used to be done with real paint. Today though, this process is usually done digitally and it’s done for every frame (all of the in-betweens, key animations, etc.). The painting process includes Compositing. It’s not until after it’s been Composited that it’s truly finished.

During compositing, all of the different piece of paper shown in this panel so far are transformed into the animation you later see. Compositing gets the timesheet you just saw, with the materials for the backgrounds and cells, the animations and such, and then they work from that blueprint to create the full animation.

In the images seen above from the Saekano the Movie example, what you’ve seen is less than a single second but it took that much work to get there. As the producer, sometimes it’s your job to step in and help if the animators taking on that workload get overwhelmed.

Animators probably leave their personal mark somewhere on the key animations they create, something that only they know about. So if that storyboard can be thought of as a blueprint for drawing, then the key animations have their character settings, and they’re drawn by diverse people with unique intentions. That’s what we try to go for, and it’s really great to be able to see it all before anyone else as a producer. Like a character who’s never made a gesture like that in such a situation in the original story, but then when a certain animator draws that character, you’ll see that gesture and it will bring life to the image. If you start looking, it’s pretty endless. But seeing all these personal stamps is what makes it so intriguing. As long as it doesn’t stray far from the story, it’s not usually a problem for the producer. It what makes anime adaptation so enjoyable for one of the panelists.

Final Step (6): Recording & Editing

After the visuals are done, comes the sound production and voice actors. Once you find the people for the roles needed, they move onto recording, and then background music is added, and finally you get the finished product that viewers see. Editing happens then too, though it also happens throughout the process as things are added and taken out over the course of production.

An example of the finished product: 

The producer can change the whole feel of the show as they often make executive decisions on music, editing, marketing, etc. They have to oversee the process, as we’ve seen throughout the panelists’ discussion on the production process. It’s worth understanding from an analytic point of view as you see how their styles, focuses, and insight can influence the creation of a series.

[aethelar]

The shooting star that careers through the night sky and crashes, quite spectacularly, into the muddy lake is not, in fact, a shooting star. The man that pushes open the emergency hatch and hauls himself, gasping and wheezing, onto the ruptured ship is not, in fact, a man. And the emergency response comm he aims at the stars and swears at in a harsh and alien language is not, in fact, working.

Graves would like very much to know which utter dipshit in Transfers had managed to screw up his warp jump quite this badly and whether Graves was allowed to throw them out of an airlock when he got back.

Then the heavens open and Graves discovers that the delightful little planet in the middle of delightful fucking nowhere has a working water cycle, one that brings with it a great deal of cold, a side helping of misery, and a whopping dollop of wet.

Oh, and apparently when he crashed he broke several ribs, fried the electrical connections to his left knee, and rolled in a pile of broken glass. Grand.

He retreats into his broken spaceship and cannibalises a control panel to fix his knee. It… mostly works. That done, he digs through enough old textbooks to identify where he is (backwater, uncivilised, and uncontacted - glorious), what language he needs to program into the translator (there are a ridiculous number to choose from, more than any one planet should reasonably need; he goes for the first seven in the list and hopes that’s enough) and what basic field-notes he needs to add to his mental database (far too many, most of them gathered from a distance, at least half of them marked with question marks and sounding blatantly ridiculous). And, because he’s currently hurting and light-headed, he says screw it to health and safety and just uploads the whole lot at once. The resulting headache has him staggering into the wall, missing the wall and tumbling through the breach in the hull, flailing and half drowning his way through the lake, and fetching up somewhere on the bank. And he’s still getting rained on.

“Fuck this planet,” he coughs through a mouthful of lake-water, and faints.

He manages, somehow, to survive undrowned until morning and it’s Newt that finds him, sprawled unconscious in the mud. Well, Niffler that finds him, Newt that scrambles after Niffler and almost trips over him in the process, but that’s just semantics, really. Newt’s the one that asks, hesitantly, if he’s alive; when he doesn’t get a response, Newt’s the one that manhandles him into the case and cleans his wounds as best he can.

When Graves rejoins the land of the living, Newt’s the one who stutters to a halt, blushes lithium red, and throws a sheet his way while backtracking pronto out of the room.

“I’ll get clothes!” he squeaks from halfway up the suitcase ladder. “There’s food in the kitchen, see you soon, don’t let Niffler out thank you bye!”

Graves blinks. “Illgetclothes,” he repeats. “Thankyoubye.” Then, switching back to a more familiar language, “Identify and translate. Please.”

Whirr. Beep. Whirr whirr. Ding! English, the text across his vision reads. Activate real time translate Y/N

Feck it. The headache can’t get worse. “Activate,” he agrees. “Yes, that means yes. Yes. Activate - Y. I want the Y option.”

Activating real time translate. Target language: English. Please note minor vocal edits required for accurate pronunciation.

“Minor vocal what now - glerk.” Graves lifts a hand to his throat, frowning the disturbed and confused frown of someone who’s just had their voice box rearranged without sufficient warning. And, from the feel of it, the back of his throat as well. Maybe? He opens and closes his mouth a few times to get used to the new sensations. “That will never not be weird,” he mutters to himself. It comes out in English and translates itself back into real words by the time his ears pass it back to his brain and the double-overlap does exactly squat for his headache.

Graves predicts direly that he’s going to hate this planet and distracts himself by turning his attention to what’s around him.

The room is soft, muted colours with strongly yellow-orange tinted lighting. The basic set-up is surprisingly familiar - he doesn’t need the fieldnotes ticking over in the back of his mind to identify that he’s on a bed, or that the primary building material is some kind of local plant matter. The assorted objects strewn around the room are less familiar and Graves takes a minute to run through the new words that flash up for each one (chair is obvious, but what’s book or slippers and why does the door have handle is that the keypad? There’s no control panel on it, and this place really doesn’t look advanced enough for motion sensing so what?)

Bored with the room, he turns back to himself. He’s wearing a clean bandage, wrapped tight around his chest, and part of him wants to unravel it to see how his back is doing underneath. It hadn’t seemed so bad, but he had passed out so there was a potential that one of his internal systems was wonky; based on what he’d seen so far of the planet it was doubtful the Earth-inhabitant who found him had known how to fix them. On the other hand, he feels surprisingly fine for a ship-wreck survivor.

He rests a hand on the neatly tucked end of the dressing for a long moment before shaking his head. “Food,” he says instead. “Food, kitchen, no niffler.” They seem simple enough instructions to follow.

Error, the translator warns. No entry for “Niffler”. Update dictionary when possible.

Error, the fieldnotes warn. Nudity detected. Local customs require nudity to be dealt with before proceeding.

Graves groans.

It takes some trial and error to work out what, exactly, the nudity problem entails, but he finally narrows it down to his lower back and the tops of his legs. That sorted, he winds the sheet round his waist and shuffles his way out of the bedroom into what is either a kitchen or a health hazard, or quite possibly both. The field notes haven’t yet given him the intricate understanding of Earth culture he needs to tell the difference, but there’s something about the haphazard way pans and bottles and jars are stacked on the shelves that seems a bit unstable to him. He proceeds with caution.

After about five minutes of careful study he slumps down on a stool and confesses to himself that he has no idea what he’s looking for. The small four-legged creature that had followed him around the kitchen hauls herself onto the table and tips her head with a curious chirp, and Graves decides, somewhat desperately, that she looks like she might know.

“What,” he asks her, “What, precisely, is food?”

She chirps. It’s not English. Life wouldn’t be that simple.

“Identify,” Graves says tiredly. “Translate. Please.”

Language not supported. Download new language Y/N

“Screw it, why not.”

Four and a half minutes later, with a headache to rival a nova-shot hangover, Graves repeats his question.

Lots of things, the creature answers with a series of drawn out squeaks. Things that smell nice. Things that look nice. Things you want to eat.

Ah. Fuel. Graves reaches for the nearest bottle of thing that smells nice. He thinks. He doesn’t have much to compare it to, not of Earth smells, and it’s very different from anything he’s familiar with. It looks nice, that at least he’s more certain on, but wanting to eat is a stage he and the unfamiliar food-fuel haven’t yet reached in their relationship.

“Is this food?” he asks.

The creature wrinkles her nose. Not for me, she says, and Graves nearly puts it back - but Mummy eats strange things. It could be food.

Mummy, Graves assumes, is the blushing human. He squints at the bottle. It’s labelled, and it takes a second for the unfamiliar script to resolve itself into something Graves can read. Lavender, it says, which the fieldnotes classify as colour and plant. Graves squints further. How can a colour be bottled. Electromagnetic radiation doesn’t listen to cork stoppers. Are the fieldnotes sure about this.

Plant, the fieldnotes insist petulantly, and Graves allows that ‘colour’ may be a translation error - he’s stuffed a lot of data into his brain in the last eighteen hours, he can’t expect it all to go right. Plants, though. Plants are carbon. Carbon is a (primitive, but workable) energy source. Plants are probably food.

“Bottoms up,” he mumbles, and removes the stopper.

Lavender, he decides, is a bit dry, a bit difficult to swallow - and yes, he can now confirm that his throat has definitely been modified to speak English, he’s only glad it didn’t need further modification to speak the small creature’s squeaking language as well - but other than that, perfectly good enough. He toasts the creature with his bottle, and she makes a hopeful gesture at the door and asks if Graves is going out.

“Ah,” Graves guesses. “Niffler. Mummy said not to let you out.”

Mummy’s a killjoy, Niffler grumbles, and crawls her way into Graves lap to curl up and sulk. Graves shrugs; Mummy has also taken him in and, from the feel of his back, poured far too much time and effort into healing him. Even his hastily-repaired knee feels better. He’s happy enough to keep Niffler in the kitchen if that’s all Mummy asks in payment.

He’s two thirds of the way through the lavender by the time Newt returns.

“Hello?” Newt calls from somewhere down a corridor. “Are you in the - oh, hello, potions lab. That’s. That’s fine. Hello.”

Graves smiles. It feels awkward. Are smiles always awkward? Maybe he’ll ask Niffler later. “I found food,” he says, holding up the mostly empty bottle of dried lavender.

Newt manfully holds his tongue about potions ingredients and food and not really quite the same. “I found clothes,” he replies, holding out the bundle. Graves puts the lavender aside and stands up to take them, toppling Niffler to the floor as he does so.

Naturally, she digs in her claws and takes the sheet with her.

Newt eeps, bright red again as he all but throws the clothes at Graves. “Wasn’t sure about your size, hope you like them, do you want tea I’ll put the kettle on kitchen down the hall,” he babbles, and flees.

Graves stares at the empty doorway, completely bemused. “Mummy is odd,” he tells Niffler.

Well obviously, she grumps, wriggling backwards out of the sheet. He’s Mummy. It’s what he does.

Graves absorbs the new information while he struggles his way into the clothes. Unlike the sheet, they don’t seem willing to stay if he wraps them round, and there seem to be too many of them for the number of limbs he has. What, he wants to know, is wrong with skin-tight nano suits. Who thought clothes were a better idea and are they still alive for Graves to explain why exactly they’re not. “Fieldnotes,” he finally says. “Help?”

The fieldnotes give him a barrage of images. The translator helpfully annotates each one; petticoat, gauntlet, jumpsuit, scuba tank.

“Ok. Niffler. Clothes go how?”

She grumbles something about clothes being ridiculous (Graves privately agrees) but manages to talk him through the way Mummy wears clothes until they make some vague amount of sense.

Buttons, on the other hand, do not. Graves admits defeat and gives up. The trousers probably are the right size but without the buttons done up they hang low and almost falling off his hips; as for the shirt, Graves is lucky to have worked out the arm holes but he leaves the front open over his bandaged chest.

The belt, he abandons. No clue. Some sort of restraint, a collar of some kind? The fieldnotes suggest using it to tie his hands to a bedpost which seems highly counterproductive. He’ll ask later.

Niffler paws imperiously at his bare foot until he bends down and lets her climb to his shoulder. Get me a sugar cube, she demands. Mummy puts them in tea. I want one.

“More food?” Graves asks. Sugarcane the translator tells him is another plant, as is sugar beet but there doesn’t seem to be an entry for sugar cube.

You won’t like them, Niffler hurries to tell him. Kitchen is through that door.

Graves hums and follows. He suspects he may have to try a sugar cube for himself before he decides if he’ll like it or not.

“Hello Mummy,” he says politely as he comes into the kitchen.

Newt spins round with wide eyes, takes in Graves’ rather lax approach to getting dressed, and brandishes a teapot in distress.

Graves pauses and frowns, confused. He has clothes. He’s found the kitchen (it’s not much less of a hazard than the potions lab). He’s not yet let Niffler escape. He’s not sure what’s wrong, but Newt is bright red again, and all but hyperventilates as Graves steps nearer to cage him against the counter.

Error, the fieldnotes protest. Data suggests current breathing method is inefficient. Lack of oxygen fatal to earth residents.

“What are you doing,” Newt asks in a rushed, high pitched breath.

Graves presses their foreheads together. Newt’s skin feels hot against his, even moreso than their different biology can account for. Fever, the translator supplies worriedly. Sign of sickness and ill health. Then the fieldnotes chime in with increasing panic: Error: sickness leads to death. Reduce fever where possible.

“I’m helping,” Graves says out loud to all three of them, and modulates his skin temperature to be cool and soothing. It costs more energy than he’d hoped and it’s unnerving to see the proof of how weak he is, but when he leans back Newt’s sudden fever is gone.

He’s still flushed, and now his pupils are wide and his breathing has stopped altogether. The fieldnotes begin to bleep in distress but the translator shushes them. Earth phrase identified: take my breath away, it says soothingly, to which the fieldnotes start shrilling about giving it back. Graves deems him probably not in danger anymore and nods in satisfaction as he steps away.

“Better?” he asks.

“Newt,” Newt blurts (semi-aquatic, pond dwelling, small creature similar in size to a finger), which is an odd thing to answer with, but then he goes on to clarify, “My name is Newt.”

He lies, Niffler says. His name is Mummy. Don’t believe him.

Newt seems a lot larger than a finger, but he was near a lake when he found Graves so Graves elects to ignore Niffler in this. “My name is unpronounceable on your planet and may vibrate your vocal chords to shreds if you tried,” he says to Newt. “But I don’t mind if you call me Graves.”

Newt stares for a long moment. “Ok,” he finally says. “Graves. Ok. Vibrate my - ok, that’s. Ok.”

Graves smiles, and, potentially, it’s less awkward than before. Maybe. Graves is working on it.

Niffler pokes him in the ear and comes dangerously close to short circuiting his auditory processors. Sugar cubes, she reminds him.

Graves scans the table for something Mummy puts in tea and solemnly hands her a teaspoon.

It’s ok, she says, patting his hand. You’ll learn.

[superman86to99]

Adventures of Superman #505 (October 1993)

REIGN OF THE SUPERMAN! The Reign is over, and Superman does what we’d all do after being dead for several weeks and coming back to life: no, not visiting your parents, making out with Lois Lane.

Or more than making out, since the next page starts with a caption that says “Later...” and lets us know that they both had to take a shower. (NOTE: Check Don Sparrow’s section below for artist Tom Grummett’s definitive take on what happened in that scene.)

Their post-resurrection bliss comes to a stop when they remember a little detail: Clark Kent is still presumed dead. How are they gonna explain his return without making the extremely smart residents of Metropolis suspect that Superman and the guy who looks like Superman but with glasses are actually the same person? Superman’s mind immediately goes into “wacky bullshit excuse” mode and he starts spitballing ideas, like claiming Clark lost his memory, or was carried by underwater currents, or was abducted by aliens. Honestly, I’m pretty sure that last one would work, since there have been THREE major alien invasions in the past few years, but Lois thinks no one would be dumb enough to fall for that sort of thing. Really, Lois? No one?

At this point, Superman picks up some supervillain activity with his super hearing, so he gets dressed and goes there (though it would have been pretty intimidating for the criminals if she’d shown up in that shower rug). A bank uptown has been taken over by Loophole, a S.T.A.R. Labs accountant who stole a gizmo that allows him to phase through walls. When Superman shows up to arrest him and his henchmen (are they all villainous accountants?), Loophole literally puts his first through Superman’s chest, instantly killing him. RIP Superman, again.

Nah, Supes just swats Loophole away and breaks the gizmo, causing him to get his crotch area stuck inside a vault door. Now he has to change his supervillain name to “DickVault”.

(I freaking love Maggie Sawyer, btw.)

After that, Superman goes to one of the areas trashed by his fight with Doomsday and helps clean up the junk that’s still laying around there. It’s then that he finally reunites with his best friend and most valued ally: Bibbo Bibbowski. (Jimmy Olsen’s there, too, unfortunately.)

Bibbo also introduces Superman to the dog he named in honor of his home planet, Krypto -- and it’s Krypto who provides the most significant moment in this issue. The little mutt starts barking at some debris from a destroyed building, leading Superman to examine it with his X-Ray vision and find some kids underneath.

Turns out the kids had been trapped there since the Doomsday fight, leading some random passerby (fine, Jimmy) to wonder if Clark could be stuck in a similar situation. Superman and Lois look at each other... giving Superman an idea and providing the premise for next week’s issue.

Character-Watch:

First appearance of Loophole (real name Deke Dickinson, C.P.A.), who would become a running joke in Karl Kesel’s Superman and Superboy comics. While his phasing powers are tech based, he also has the metahuman ability to somehow convince attractive women to be his girlfriends/henchwomen despite being a balding little dweeb. In this issue he’s dating a blonde named Sheila (who wears a mask, so maybe she’s actually hideous), but I’m pretty sure he had other girlfriends in future issues.

Plotline-Watch:

As I said... holy shit, five years ago: no one draws Supes coming back to Lois after an extended absence like Tom Grummett. This scene is almost a remake of the one from that issue when Superman comes back from his time traveling jaunt. There’s also a callback to Man of Steel #25, when Lois hears a tap on her window and thinks it’s Superman, but it’s just some dumb bird. This time she gets it the other way around:

Don Sparrow says: “There’s a cute visual callback to the last time Superman returned after a long absence on page 18, when Superman is reunited with Jimmy. It’s a near identical pose to Action #643, where Superman returned from exile in space (and in that moment, infected Jimmy with Eradicator-based space sickness, womp womp).” I think he’s instinctively throwing Jimmy up in the air, hoping the cold of space will kill him. Unfortunately, both murder attempts were unsuccessful.

As seen above, Maggie Sawyer wasn’t too convinced that “Fabio” here was Superman at first. That changes when he calls her “Captain” even though she was recently promoted to Inspector, and she’s like “only a dead man wouldn’t know all the precise ranks for the local authorities!”

The surviving non-Supermen are seen arriving at S.T.A.R. Labs for medical care after the Engine City showdown. Don again: “There are some mild continuity issues stemming from Superman #82, which perhaps wasn’t completely finished being drawn while Tom Grummett worked on this one, as Steel’s costume is almost entirely intact, when we last saw it a week ago, it was in tatters. Ditto the Eradicator, who was a wizened husk, and now is apparently a scorched Ivan Drago.” Let’s assume Supergirl worked her clothes-shifting magic on Steel’s armor and the Eradicator’s, uh, hair.

There’s a short scene where Superboy is visited by his reporter pal Tana Moon, who tells him she quit WGBS and is leaving Metropolis. Awww. Goodbye, Tana. Or should I say... aloha?

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor Jr. has a scene with Dr. Happersen where he says he intends to control or destroy anyone who wears the “S” symbol. Basically, if he can’t date them, they should be dead. He also instructs Happersen to help Cadmus’ Director Westfield get in contact with disgraced genetician Dabney Donovan. Get ready for a whole lot of clone-related shenanigans in the near future.

And now, more Don Sparrow-related shenanigans after the jump!

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow​):

This issue is another favourite of mine, but I suppose all these issues around the Death and Return are faves when I really think about it.  My copy of this issue had the holographic fireworks cover, and it’s a good one.  I like that Superman and the Daily Planet are in natural colour, rather than holograms.  The cover credit goes Karl Kesel, Tom Grummett and Doug Hazlewood, so I’m not sure what the breakdown was (or if that’s just a handwritten cover credit, just in case?

The story opens with one of my favourite sequences ever, with Lois waking up on her couch, having fallen asleep following the events in Coast City.  I love the detail as she opens the curtain, we see her engagement ring, indicating she knows her real fiancée has returned.  This sequence is followed up by two pages of splashes of the passionate reunion of the best couple in comics.  All beautifully rendered as they float, locked in a passionate, sunrise kiss.  Just lovely (so lovely that I am willing to overlook a small colouring error, as Lois has black hair instead of reddish brown for one panel).  [Max: I can confirm that they fixed that in the collections.]

What follows is a very cute scene, and one of some debate among Superman fans.  There’s no overt evidence of what happened, all we get is a cryptic caption reading “later…”.   Again, I give credit for the subtlety of the writers, as they depict this scene in a way that can be read either way:  maybe Clark and Lois made love, and the “later” we are seeing is afterglow, or maybe Lois had a shower since she just woke up after sleeping in her clothes. Then, after calling his parents while Lois showered, Clark had a shower himself.  I feel like today’s writers wouldn’t feel the need to be so subtle, and might lose the sweetness of this scene.  

In previous posts, I’ve talked about my friendship with artist Tom Grummett, and how as a boy, I would wear him out with all my dumb fanboy questions.  Once I got older, and our relationship became a little more collegial (just a little closer to collegial, since I in no way consider myself anywhere near his level of skill or success) I would really try not to geek out too much when we would visit.  But the one question I had to ask was about this scene, and what their intention, or interpretation of it was, as I was always curious.  Once I had explained to him which issue it was (the guy has drawn hundreds, so they might not all spring to mind immediately!) he admitted that his assumption was indeed that they had sex.  So there you have it!  [Max: Hot damn! Another Superman ‘86 to ‘99 exclusive, folks!]

However you wish to read this scene, the choreography, and facial expressions as they horse around is really sweet and fun, and such a nice, light tone compared to the do-or-die pace the books had been for the last two years or so.   Their easy joking, and back and forth banter really do a great job of showing them as a real couple.

It’s a very nice pose on Supergirl as she lifts off, simultaneously spurning Superboy’s romantic complaints.

I quite like the design on Loophole, and his gang.  Loophole himself kinda harkens back to the silver age villains of the Flash as Loophole has a unique hairline, is an older man, with a pretty average build, which was rare for villains in the 90s. His gimmick is pretty cool, too, though we immediately see its vulnerability.

The tearful reunion of the now-sober Bibbo and Superman is also a great moment—if anyone rose to the challenge of living up to Superman’s example in his absence, it was Bibbo.  I discuss the scene in more detail in the observations later, but the image of Superman whipping away the debris on page 20 is a great visual, with the dust clouds creating great motion and urgency.

On the whole, a great first issue for the return to the never-ending battle, even if it brings us closer to Grummett’s last issue on this title (for a while).

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

Could Superman referring to the Death and Return storyline as a dream, while stepping out of the shower be a reference to Dallas, and their famous about-face after an unpopular season, where Bobby Ewing emerged from the shower, alive and well, dismissing a yearlong storyline as a dream?

A coy semi-reference to perhaps my favourite line in the first Reeve Superman film on page 8, where Supergirl says “Easy steel, we’ve got you, then later adding, “ok, you got me”.  

A little more issue-to-issue dissonance with Superboy reversing himself from the end of Superman #82, where he said clearly that Kal-El was Superman, with Superboy pointing out that legally, he’s Superman and not Kal. [Max: I think he’s talking strictly in the legal sense, since he helps Superman deal with the legal problem on the next issue and all.]

For all the times that Superman has used his heat vision on guns (as he does on page 11), we’ve never seen rounds get burned off, firing on their own because of the heat.  There might be an idea there.    

An odd sorta-cameo by Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon, who Superman apparently defeats in the waterfront district. An eagle-eyed reader asked Larsen about it in issue #6 of Dragon’s own book, and he nixed any proper crossover rumours, saying it was just a shout-out from Larsen’s buddy Karl Kesel.  Eventually they’d meet in Superman/Savage Dragon: Chicago, a so-so crossover in 2002.

A slightly bawdy joke from one of the Loophole gang, on page 14, as the moll of Deke Dickson calls Loophole a “weiner”.  

GODWATCH: A stirring moment when Superman detects the faintest of life-signs, thanks to would-be super-pup, Krypto, and responds “God willing” when someone asks if anyone is alive in that wreckage.  The love and concern in Superman’s eyes when he says he’d “rather die” himself than let little ones perish is a tear-jerker moment for sure.  Bonus points for the cuteness of Superman heaping praise on Krypto, with the line “if that dog could fly, I’d put a cape on him…”

Question:  Does Jimmy know? He comes up with the solution to the Clark problem very conveniently.  Maybe he’s smarter than we (and by we, I mean Max) give him credit for? [Max: It was all Krypto! Okay, I’ll concede that maybe Jimmy is as smart as a dog.]

[thattimdrakeguy]

Young Justice #9 Review!: It’s mostly just kind of meh.

It’s hard to review an issue like this, because for a lot of it, it’s a lack of what’s in it more then what is in it. Most people like to have a lot of meat in each issue to make the individual purchase more worth it, but if this issue was something I seen by itself years down the line, I’m not sure if it’s worth buying by itself unless you’re a big fan of Keli Quintela (Teen Lantern).

Her origin tho, is something I have mixed feeling about, because, her world they set up is something I’m very interested in and seeing more about, but they don’t set up much of a characterization for her by herself. Like most origin stories you learn about the character’s personality and the way they think.

Tim’s origin all the way back in 1989 showed him to being a naive, but brillant kid, who had a strong belief about superheroes and Batman and Robin general, with a talent for noticing details and being a good detective in general.

Keli witnesses a “Green Lantern” get murdered, and after suffering PTSD from the event, goes to check up on the “Green Lantern” were she gets handed her gauntlet.

A lot of people had problems with a child being able to hack into a Green Lantern battery so that problem is solved here, but it doesn’t leave much of a characterization for Keli, which can be solved within a few more issues, but it doesn’t make her character by itself very interesting. Something that’s a bit of a problem currently seeing how we’re nine issues in and she’s one of the main characters.

I love the concept of her character, and the spunk she’s shown to have, but she doesn’t have much else to make her standout to show why they ever bothered putting her in.

She didn’t do anything to earn what she got, she literally just had it handed it to her, and her PTSD went away pretty quick once she got the gauntlet, unless it’s just some weird art.

I suppose though, that within time maybe her characterization will be more clear and we can look back on her origin and see more of her personality stand out.

To describe from the few things we can tell is that she’s over-excitable, naive, and spunky. If they work right with what she has she can be great, but they need to strengthen her up because some of the writing in this issue is just dull. As in, even if she shows hints of some traits, it’s still very thin writing compared to other character’s writing in other comics.

The rest of the story is just more fighting with some progression towards the very end.

Last month’s issue had pretty much nothing but fighting till the very end till Earth 3 Stephanie Brown showed up, which implied some progression.

This month finally has them find the multiverse map and decide to fight Young @#$@$@, but once for all. So I don’t have high hopes for next issue because it’s probably just gonna be a lot more fighting, but if it turns out really good it’ll be a happy surprise.

The art in general is a mixed bag, you can look at it and be pleased with what you see but that’s about it. Tim’s even drawn better except for one panel, but that one panel the only time you see the front of the face. They also seem to draw him weirdly taller then he actually is, but overall the art isn’t bad.

It’s just a very lacking issue. It sort of has a vibe about it were it’s like it was written last minute, like the ideas are there, and they aren’t straight forward bad ideas, but they don’t really put a lot in them, so there’s not like, a lot there.

There’s also no progression for “The Drake” thing, which is good and bad. Good because we don’t have to deal with it here, and maybe that’s a good sign, but also bad because if his supposedly permanent name change is gonna be that abrupt that’s insane.

Also unless I missed them, I didn’t see Conner, Amy, and Cassie anywhere, so if you’re someone who’s only reading for either one of them and don’t already care for the story then you can skip. You can sorta see one of them in the background, but that’s it, but seeing how they had an origin story in this. It’s more understandable so it doesn’t down hold the quality.

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There’s just no reason to buy this issue by itself. It disappoints on Keli’s origin and her character, and there’s barely any story. Keli’s origin goes on to long for what it is, and the actual Earth 3 story barely has anything happened. They wasted about half the issue of issue 8 if not more on fighting, and this, the whole build up is for the next issue. Where they will fight more.

There is nothing to this issue at all barely.

They just found the multiverse key and you find out Keli actually has no idea what she’s doing, and that’s about it. 

Finding the multiverse key just happens too. There is no work to get it. Bart picks it up off screen. The (sort of) big deal of last issue that the bad guys kept bringing up was the multiverse key, and Bart just happens to find it off screen cuz Earth 3 Steph happened to have it.

It’s lame that way.

It is difficult to even think of what was good about it, because they just didn’t do a good job at anything.