#suikotsu is just wolverine ???

[5-pounds-of-carrots]

in exciting news, i have replaced frantically reading entire books in a night to frantically trying to finish all of inuyasha before i start my new job next week 😎

[cynthiaandsamus]

Custom Toonami Block Week 107 Rundown

Inuyasha: We continue the “Suikotsu is totally not sketchy except when he is” arc and Kikyo’s doing some snooping around the village and apparently this village was just like “Hey this guy has the same name and looks kind similar to the dead guy that murdered all those people, huh, weird oh well he’s nice so it’s no problem” I mean they’re essentially right because this Suikotsu is a full split personality but still, we’ve seen superstitious villagers kick people out for less in this show. Kagome senses Suikotsu’s jewel shard and since Inuyasha JUST got done with Renkotsu doing the same ‘oh I’m an innocent guy’ deal, he’s not buying Suikotsu’s schtick and ends up just punching the crap out of the town doctor. We have the awkward situation where Inuyasha pushing Suikotsu too hard may actually trigger his alter ego but luckily before that can happen Renkotsu and Jakotsu come up riding Tank!Ginkotsu to do it for him. Honestly almost no one comments that Ginkotsu’s a tank now, it just seems like they’re barely surprised that he’s alive and also a tank. They fight for a bit and Kikyo almost kicks Jakotsu’s ass for a minute there, but Jakotsu cuts Suikotsu while he protecting the kids and that unlocks his Dark Hollow Nine Tails Wolverine persona and we’re kinda fucked again, I mean not really because Suikotsu is like C-tier in strength but it sucks that these kids lose their doctor.

Yu Yu Hakusho: It’s the Prologue of the Finals and Kuwabara’s training with his new spirit soul katana thing and is super happy about whatever kind of sword he got, but before he can get too excited he sees Yusuke legit turning Super Saiyan out by the ocean and Kurama and Hiei come up with the creepiest ninja entrances they can. They make a big deal about Yusuke not being able to admit to anyone that doesn’t already know that Genkai’s dead because he’s hoping to Dragon Ball her back to life which is a distinct possibility given the show but idk bro she died specifically because she wanted to accept her mortality and show that aging and passing on knowledge wasn’t the end of the world, sounds like bringing her back would be kind of a slap in the face, like I don’t think she’d turn it down but seems kind of counter-intuitive to go through a whole character arc about accepting death just to reverse it. Anyway everyone rests up and we get to the finals and neither team has five people, which yeah for Yusuke’s team that makes sense, one of their guys died, but why doesn’t Team Toguro? They apparently win this thing all the time, I get the feeling Toguro himself was planning for the leader dude from the last fight to join them but Elder Toguro killed him to be extra which that guy probably REALLY would’ve come in handy considering they almost lose because of it, but Sakyo and Koenma become the fifth members which idk I feel like literally anyone else would’ve been better, like anyone that can fight at all would at least be a tie breaker if you go 2-2 in this fight, pick out a demon from the crowd, make it an event idk. Setsuna and the girls have a fun little romp about stealing tickets from a scalper and it made me laugh quite a bit, prolly the best part of the episode honestly and I’m like 80% sure it was filler. Apparently the teams would be allowed to have less than five if they’d already used up their alternate but since Yusuke’s team hasn’t used their alternate they can only let Koenma play if Genkai has died which we’ve already established Yusuke doesn’t want to admit, but before he has to confront his problems, Sakyo says he’s on the damn committee and he’ll allow it because Yusuke’s team won’t have Koenma fighting anyway, so once again we’re saved from facing mortality thanks to the power of evil businessmen trying to build a highway to hell. Anyway first match is Kurama vs Karasu, the showdown of “MURDER OF CROWS” vs “EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THOOORN” emo mentalities, this’ll be fun.

Sailor Moon Crystal: It’s the final finale for real this time until the anime comes back or whatever. Sailor Saturn’s gonna do her apocalypse thing until Chibi-Usa shouts for Sailor Moon which wakes her up and it’s like “Oh yeah, the thing, the thing I was gonna do with the holy grail” and it sorta kills Pharaoh 90 but not really and then Sailor Saturn takes him up to his home galaxy and Sailor Pluto is the Master of Unlocking because she just makes a door to close up that place which you think would’ve been useful before. So yeah Pluto’s a baby now and she’s gonna be raised by her three lesbian aunts and hopefully the next time she grows up she’s not gonna end the world for once. Sailor Moon randomly becomes Queen Serenity for a minute because hell if we’re gonna clean all this stuff up ourselves and I guess… none of the civilians remember the earth being destroyed for a third time, like we never get reaction shots of normal people while this is going on so these could be deserted cities for all I know. But yeah for some reason Sailor Saturn’s sacrifice does hit pretty hard even though she’s immediately reborn and she knew Chibi-Usa for a lot shorter than Pluto did and it’s basically the same character arc again but idk, if you do something over and it’s better who am I to complain. Also now that everything’s fixed and Chibi-Usa learned how to go Super Saiyan they’re like ‘okay training’s done’ which idk how that works since she can only go Super Saiyan with the grail filled with her friends’ power which we don’t even know if she can do that in the future because she only did it once under stress in the past but if Future World says that’s good enough they probably don’t have a lot of bad guys that aren’t banished to demon planets to fight so it’s probably fine. Also everyone’s in high school now and we have an admittedly funny little bit about everyone’s plans and how Usagi is still a potato brain that barely scraped by. Also also there’s an eclipse and something bad happens but oh well, show’s over, guess that’s a movie thing or something.

Now that it’s over I do have some complicated feelings about Sailor Moon that I’ll try to unpack. Like I said in an earlier post, seeing Sailor Saturn accept her and as the start of a new beginning did hit hard because of my friend that died recently having Sailor Saturn as her favorite character (which I totally get now, even if the arc wasn’t great Sailor Saturn herself is a BAMF and probably just under Sailor Uranus in my favorites). But as for the series itself, it doesn’t make a god damn lick of sense. Like going through this I tried to use DBZ as my point of reference for how little sense anime could get away with making at that time which does kind of forgive some of this stuff but honestly the story beats are so weird and character turns happen so fast which is much worse in an introspective show like this than it would be in a show like DBZ that doesn’t actively focus on character as much. You have like one half decent villain per arc and the rest I couldn’t keep track of if you paid me to spot the difference. Overall Season 3 was better than the previous two but I’m still left baffled like with the whole problem of wanting to kill Hotaru just kinda dissolving and Haruka and co. just joining up with Sailor Moon like ‘yeah we’re friends’ without addressing any of what the actual fight was about, The power-ups are so random and they just get an extra accessory and say they’re more powerful, like Sailor Moon still just one-shots everything with whatever power she has without the previous threat really testing the limits of her previous ability. Like when Goku goes Super Saiyan it’s after twenty episodes of Frieza punching his face in and then he dominates Frieza the whole time. When Sailor Moon does it it’s because she’s kind of sad her friends are being mind controlled to fight and then she gets a palette swapped versioun of the power she already has and blows them away like she has everything else thus far. It’s a very pretty anime and with a little more room to breathe I feel like the comedy would be very fun, kind of gives me Bleach vibes where it’s kind of clear the author just wanted to draw cool outfits more than tell a story, I don’t know how much of this is specific to Crystal and if the original does a better job fleshing this out since this is the first time I’ve watched a Brotherhood version of an anime I haven’t seen the original of. I don’t regret watching it, having a general perspective for the story of a franchise that literally defined a whole subgenre of anime is very helpful and getting a better handle on the characters is nice it’s just… god some of this is really dumb. And like I said, I recognize I probably would say that more about something like DBZ if I hadn’t grown up with it but it feels like the ways Sailor Moon is dumb sabotage itself more than the ways DBZ is dumb do to it. It’s not ‘fun dumb’ in the same way DBZ can be, it’s ‘why is this happening’ dumb, but still the aesthetics and character dynamics are a lot of fun and I see why it got popular at the time it did but also why it survives mostly now on aesthetic appeal and nostalgia rather than more of the full force revival stuff that a lot of shows are getting now (though ironically the ‘Protag has a kid’ sequel series thing a lot of anime are doing now obviously wouldn’t work here because… that’s Season 2, it’s already been done, already happened brah, though if they wanted to go full force with a Neo Tokyo spinoff and maybe tone down the sparkly dystopian vibes and tweak up the character motivations a bit I’d be down for that)

Durararax2: This is the “How Izaya Orihara got his groove back” episode, aka “How Izaya formed the Legion of Doom” and it’s pretty fun seeing as we seem to be getting some sort of Izaya arc coming up. This basically explains how he got all those random followers we saw in the last episode, basically asked by the Awakusas to spy on this gang running a gambling ring that’s also feuding with a third gang so Izaya gets captured which is kinda funny because he really does a good job acting like it’s not him under the potato sack which is part of the plan, because it even goes meta as the Awakusas even plant him in front of Akane to see if she recognizes him which she doesn’t meaning he used a proxy to deal with her so we know he does that and the last thing we expect is that he actually got himself captured and is acting like a doofus but that’s exactly what happened. Basically he dodges all the death threats and blackimals and has his own gang smash down both their doors to tell them ‘hey guys, work for me’ and also all their henchmen are Saika’s Children and Haruna is back and apparently has her own Saika hive separate from Anri’s which idk how that works anymore. It’s just kinda funny that this is a Izaya posse forming episode and the answer ends up being “yeah he already knew half those guys” because Haruna, Mikage from the dojo and Izumii from the Blue Squares are already working for Izaya when he busts down the doors on Heaven’s Slave and Amphisbaena and basically absorbs them, all in all a return to form for Izaya manipulating Celty and no less than three gangs into doing what he wants, always fun to have him Joker his way into a situation where nobody knows they’ve lost until it’s too late.

So yeah, now that Sailor Moon’s done and there’s only three shows left on the block I’ll be taking next week off and the week after that I’ll restructure the block and add some new shows in and we’ll see how it goes, there are still some shows I wanna see but I really wanna think about how I want to keep this fresh going forward, thanks!

[alfea]

suikotsu is so funny to me because he’s like if someone went “what if wolverine was also just like the worst possible depiction of dissociative identity disorder you can imagine”