#to others who appreciate the current arcs then good for you

[lulla-bee]

with how jjk is currently going, i hope gege is thinking that itadori defeating sukuna and yuuta defeating kenjaku would be one of the best possible endings and reclaim yuuji's position as the "main character" and to make sense of yuuta's declaration of killing kenjaku in place of gojo

[woodchoc-magnum]

idk. i'm annoyed.

i realise i am a fandom old at this point

and i have seen some shit in this fandom; witnessed the discourse.

and i don't post meta or spec or much of that stuff; i usually put all my ideas into fics.

but guys seriously. seriously.

eddie's current arc is not about buck.

buck and eddie are not currently dating.

buck is eddie's best friend and vice versa.

eddie is not cheating on buck.

eddie is lying to buck by omission, yes, but that is not a friendship ending offence.

eddie is on the very cusp of cheating right now. he went on a date with another woman, yes. he has not kissed her or slept with her. we are at a tipping point. we do not know what is going to happen next.

he only went on a date with another woman because she reminded him of shannon, who he is not over, who he has spent seasons trying to replace.

the point of this show is that none of the characters are perfect - and especially not buck and eddie. they all make mistakes. they have all made mistakes and will continue to do so because in real life, people don't always make the right decisions 100% of the time.

this black-and-white, morally righteous way of thinking, like eddie is suddenly evil now because he's on the cusp of cheating; that it's going to end his friendship, that buck is going to be angry at him for lying - do you have friends in real life? like, i am genuinely asking.

because if my best friend suddenly started cheating on her husband, i wouldn't be mad at her - i would be worried. am i alone in this? like i would be genuinely concerned and trying to help figure out what's going on.

all the shit i'm seeing in the fandom today, all of the spec posts and commentary about the episode and what might potentially happen, just feels like, once again, an attempt to paint eddie as the villain in the story to prop up buck. let's make eddie so terrible that buck has to have custody of christopher, right?

clearly none of you understand how a will works. it's for after you're dead. not for when you're alive.

but the main issue is this - now that buck has tommy, the people who tolerated eddie can stop pretending to like him. there's another option for buck now, so you guys don't need eddie anymore. right? am i fucking right??

i love drama as much as the next person, but in what world would buck turn on eddie because of this? in what world would the 118 shun him? he is their friend! they love him! they care about him! they are a family!

my god, nobody shunned hen when she cheated on karen. nobody shuns bobby and he indirectly killed 140 people!

eddie is a good person who makes mistakes, just like every single other character on the show.

that is the fucking point.

and the way ryan was talking in the interviews - isolation could mean any number of things. we know eddie has a tendency to isolate himself when he's feeling stressed out - does anyone remember season 3? season 5? buck literally broke down his door!

i'm just fucking tired of this bullshit.

eddie's not a bad guy because of this. he has done shitty things, yes. they all have. that's the fucking point of the show, and if you can't understand that or appreciate adult story-telling, then fuck off and watch riverdale.

[macabr3-barbi3]

Entanglement (Sub Vox x Reader)

A request from the lovely @jurijyuu for a tentacle malfunction Sub Vox 💕📺

Tags: Restraints; Light Bondage; Sub Vox; Teasing; Begging; Dom/sub Undertones; Tentacles? Sort of? are Vox's cable/wire things tentacles? the world may never know

💙❤️💙❤️💙

Who could have guessed that trying to do something nice for his doll could have resulted in something like this?

Vox had been waiting for you to finish up with Velvette for the shoot that was happening this evening. He knew after hours of the fucked up poses that Vel forced you into to get the perfect shot you would be sore- she had had you hanging by your knees from the fucking chandelier on one occasion, insisting that the slight sway to the fixture would result it a cool shot from your camera (it did; that wasn’t the point). Her favorite photographer, Velvette was always fucking stealing your free time away from him. It was good for business, but bad for his plan of simply keeping you naked in his room at all times for easy access.

He had been laying in the bed, lazily stroking himself just in case you showed up, when the idea struck him to run you a hot bath and light some candles around the room. It shouldn't have been too much longer before you arrived so the candles wouldn’t burn out, and you always enjoyed it when he ‘set the mood,’ whatever that meant. He could probably sell you on fucking before your bath, too- even more deep aches and sweet bruises for the hot water to soothe.

He was too lazy to get up though, so he had snaked out a few of his cables from the back of his head, long and prehensile, a few pairs of them diving into the various drawers in the room searching for the candles and matches and two slithering across the floor towards the bathroom. Had he thought to check the floor for water from his shower a few hours prior before sending two very much electrical tentacles into the room he might have had better luck.

Currently though, his luck was shit. The water found its way into his wires and shorted them out, electrical current traveling all the way through to the base and fucking up the other cables as well; they whipped and snapped across the room in wide arcs and twisting wriggles, and his attempts to grab them from the air and cease the destruction to his room only resulted in his wrists getting tangled up in the mess.

So here Vox had been for the last fifteen minutes or so, restrained by his wrists in the bed and still achingly, frustratingly hard. His cables didn’t so much as twitch when he tries to send some power to them to reverse the entanglement, or when he tugged his arms a bit. His cock does though, and isn’t that something interesting that he doesn’t want to think about right now.

And then like an angel, there’s the sound of the door opening and you coming home. “Baby,” he shouts from the bedroom, and he hears the telltale thump of your camera bag on the kitchen counter. “I could use your help in here!”

“What did you do now? If you cracked your screen off the stand again-” Your voice trails off when you enter the room and see him- he’s sure he looks fucking ridiculous, spread out like he is, and he feels the spread of pink pixels over his screen in a blush.

“I was trying to do something nice for you,” he says, “and got some water in my wires. Everything went haywire, and, well, now I’m here. Be a doll and help me get loose?”

The way you’re watching him is a little disconcerting- not bad by any means, he loved having your eyes on him, just a little unusual. You slide your jacket off your shoulders and toss it on the armchair, sliding your hair out of its bun that you wear to keep your hair out of your eyes while you work. When you go for the button on your jeans he clears his throat.

“I appreciate the strip tease, sweetheart, but there’s more pressing matters at hand here.” He lifts his wrists in demonstration, the wires brushing his skin in a way that makes him suck in a harsh breath, dick twitching in his boxers. “Come on, help me.”

You work your jeans and panties down your legs, his eyes trailing the whole way before settling on the space between your legs. Then your shirt comes off, perfect tits on display as you do a rotation, let him take in the visual of your body in front of him before running your hands down your skin and back up- one hand plucks at a nipple while the other dips down between your legs.

Vox’s mouth is hanging open, pixelated lines of drool coming off his mouth as he watches you, cock throbbing out of his reach. He tugs at his makeshift restraints, a little breathless when it sends a bolt of arousal through his body- seriously, what the fuck? “I am in no mood to be teased right now,” he tells you, but the words are a little reedy and almost whimpered. He clears his throat and tries again- “Seriously, help me.”

You come closer to the bed, climb onto it and settle yourself between his legs. “Come on, Voxxy,” you murmur, and the low, dangerous tone to your voice goes straight to his straining erection despite the use of that fucking nickname that he hated. “Tied up all pretty for me and not even going to say ‘please?’ That’s not how you get what you want.” Your hands run up his calves, up his thighs, and your thumbs brush into the dip of his pelvic bone. Your touch sends electricity crackling through him, static sparking between his antennae. “That’s what you always say anyway- you wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite, would you?” You drag the waistband of his boxers down, and he’s half-mortified when his hips automatically cant up to make it easier for you, his dick slapping heavy onto his abdomen when it springs free.

“What the fuck are you doing?” He can feel the manic grin on his face- confused by the turn of events, by his sweet, perfect doll not simply doing what you were told and, what? Trying to get him to beg? As if- even if it was hot as fuck (and it was, Christ). “Baby, I- ohhhh, fuck-” 

Your head ducked down to lick a stripe up his cock, tongue curling around the head- his hips buck up, try to sink into the wet cavern of your mouth but you pull back with a soft smile. “Say please.”

“Fuck you.” Vox says this affectionately- he was the one in control in the bedroom, this was cute and all, but he wouldn’t plead with you for it.

“Not with that attitude, you won’t be,” you snap back with a wicked grin on your face. And you’re gone again, bent over to lick and suck at the hard length of him with your ass in the air, just the way that he likes.

Again, when he tries to thrust into your mouth you pull off, and he tugs uselessly at his restraints, head falling back against the pillows when you bring a hand up to cup his balls, thumb running gently over the sensitive skin. “Haah- you’re going to fucking kill me.” He’s a little embarrassed by that whiny moan that had escaped him, but you’re not even looking at his face, head resting on his thigh to gaze lovingly at his fucking dick while you stroke and kiss and generally tease him.

Vox thinks he might be losing his mind, just a little. But fuck does he want it, want to lose himself in the wet heat of your mouth, sink deep into your slick cunt and watch you bounce in his lap. He could still do that with his hands restrained, right? He wouldn’t be able to grip your hips the way he wanted to, or get his fingers on your clit and revel in the way that always made you clench tighter around him- but he could make do if you wouldn’t release him.

And there’s the thought that does him in- that maybe you wouldn’t let him go, would keep him tied to the bed with his own goddamn wires to tease him endlessly, unable to do anything about it himself, evidently unable to convince you to do anything for him. He was at your mercy here, the thought making him dizzy with arousal and an unprompted whine falling from his lips when he notices you working your fingers between your legs while you finally let the head of his cock slip past your lips, suction on the tip that makes him see stars.

“P-please,” he breathes out, and you release him with a pop, such excitement lighting up your eyes that he wishes he had given in sooner- you were so beautiful when you were pleased and excited, what would you look like when he gave in to you like this?

You move up the bed, legs on either side of his, and slide your drenched folds against the length of him. Leaning down so your face is next to his, you press a deep kiss to his mouth, slipping your tongue alongside his before you pull back and whisper, “again.” Your hands press into Vox’s chest as you slot him against you, rub the head of his prick against your clit and groan in ecstasy.

His hips jerk at the sensation. “Please, baby,” he says darkly, “let me fuck you.”

“Hmm, not quite what I’m looking for.” You lift off of him, slide back and out of reach again. “Try again?”

“What? Come on, I can’t-” He pulls at his restraints again, and the way your eyes go half-lidded at the sight gets the message through. “You wanna keep me trussed up, is that it?”

“Is it so wrong for the photographer to want to keep a pretty picture on display?” Your fingers twitch between your pretty thighs, grinding tiny circles into your clit while you wait for him to give you what you want. “I wish I hadn’t left my camera in the kitchen; I would love a shot like this. I’d have to get some different lighting…” Your hips stop moving for a moment as you look around the room. “Maybe candlelight would work? I think that would cast a nice glow on your skin, so pretty- fuck, should I go get my camera?”

“No!” The word breaks past the dam of his lips when you use one of his own tricks against him- the threat of ending the pleasure when you’re so fucked out and cock drunk, on the brink of cumming. “No no no, doll, don’t leave- fuck, please, alright? Please touch me, fuck me, ride my cock. I’m fucking begging, I need it-”

A shudder rolls through your body, and finally, finally you sink down on him, a slow, delicious slide that has his fingers clenching uselessly where they’re held, wishing he could hold you, dig his claws in like he usually did.

“I didn’t say stop,” you moan, watching him through narrowed eyes. “Come on, Voxxy, tell me what you want.”

“I want you to stop fucking t͖͖̠̬͛ḛ̡̰̳͓̥ͬ͋ͪͧa͔͔̜̗̦ͩ̅̎s̨̞̞̰͎͎̪̩͕̈́̀ͯ̍ͧͅi̧̻̻͉̜͑ͪ̾͟n̫̫̘̗͕̲̲̎ͥg̬̬̱ͩ͋͟͟ me-” Your hips slow and Vox bites his tongue, rephrasing- and this time, to his chagrin, the stream of words doesn’t fucking stop. “Please, baby, don’t stop- f̰̰̯͕͊̃̊͞͞͞ụ̴̴̾̀͟͡c̨̨̣̮̝̈́̔ͯ̀͂k̼̼̞̦̞̼̔, so fucking good, I w-want- I wanna cum, please, keep going, you f-feel so f̰̰̯͕͊̃̊͞͞͞ụ̴̴̾̀͟͡c̨̨̣̮̝̈́̔ͯ̀͂k̼̼̞̦̞̼̔i̧̻̻͉̜͑ͪ̾͟n̫̫̘̗͕̲̲̎ͥg̬̬̱ͩ͋͟͟ g̬̬̱ͩ͋͟͟o͙͙̙̘̙ͤͫ͞o͙͙̙̘̙ͤͫ͞d̶̵̯̯̼̘ͨ̓-” An honest to God whimper comes out of him, so invested in both of you cumming that he can’t even find the sense in him to be embarrassed by what was happening. His screen is glitching out, his vision broken when he goes full static every couple of seconds, but the glimpses he’s getting in between of you with your head thrown back are going to fuel his jerk-off sessions when he can’t spend the night with you for the rest of his afterlife. You felt fucking perfect around him, your swollen pussy walls squeezing him just right as you rode him.

“Say please,” you command, fingers working between your legs, the back of your hand brushing against his abdomen and causing the muscles to flutter under you. “Ask me to make you cum- ask for permission and I’ll let you cum in me-”

And didn’t that just sound like the perfect end to the evening? He doesn’t even question it, couldn’t stop his traitorous tongue if he tried. “Please, doll, oh my fucking- please please p͔͔͚͉̬̋ͩ̾͗l͖͖̰̝ͭ̀͘ḛ̡̰̳͓̥ͬ͋ͪͧa͔͔̜̗̦ͩ̅̎s̨̞̞̰͎͎̪̩͕̈́̀ͯ̍ͧͅḛ̡̰̳͓̥ͬ͋ͪͧ, p͔͔͚͉̬̋ͩ̾͗l͖͖̰̝ͭ̀͘ḛ̡̰̳͓̥ͬ͋ͪͧa͔͔̜̗̦ͩ̅̎s̨̞̞̰͎͎̪̩͕̈́̀ͯ̍ͧͅḛ̡̰̳͓̥ͬ͋ͪͧ, let me do it, cum with me-” He feels the tension in his entire body, from his suspended arms to the tips of his goddamn toes- he might actually fully fucking short out, he thinks deliriously, processors overloading in his brain at the sights and sounds and the feel of you sucking him into your greedy body. “- p͔͔͚͉̬̋ͩ̾͗l͖͖̰̝ͭ̀͘ḛ̡̰̳͓̥ͬ͋ͪͧa͔͔̜̗̦ͩ̅̎s̨̞̞̰͎͎̪̩͕̈́̀ͯ̍ͧͅḛ̡̰̳͓̥ͬ͋ͪͧ let me, baby- oh f̰̰̯͕͊̃̊͞͞͞ụ̴̴̾̀͟͡c̨̨̣̮̝̈́̔ͯ̀͂k̼̼̞̦̞̼̔, I’m gonna-”

You hit the peak of your orgasms together, your body jerking in his lap like you’ve been electrocuted while your cunt wrings him like a fucking towel, tensing and rippling around his cock as he spills into the slickness, long pulses of cum as far inside of you as he can get and its not enough- he can never be close enough to you to feel complete so he settles for filling you with everything he has to give.

Vox doesn’t black out, but its a near thing- the explosion of sudden voltage to his circuits actually jump-starts the core of his cable tentacles and they spring to life, his wrists finally coming free and falling to the bed so he’s spread out like some fucked up crucifixion. They’re numb, he realizes, but before he can get to doing anything about that you shift, reaching for them and massaging feeling back into his limbs. There’s some light bruising, but nothing crazy, not any worse than you had whenever the pair of you occasionally delved into bondage. 

The heavy breathing of you both evens out, and you bring his hands to your mouth to press light kisses to them. When you’re satisfied you release him, and his arms wrap around your back. You press a gentle kiss to his screen and rest your head on his chest. 

“You know,” you mutter into his skin, “technically I didn’t give you permission to cum. That’s gotta count for… something. I’m not sure what.”

He snorts into your hair. “Doesn’t count for shit. You cheated, waiting until I was right on the brink to say that shit.”

You hum, and snuggle closer. “You liked it though? Maybe a repeat in the future?”

His instinct was to say no, but he couldn’t deny that he had enjoyed it- you were a dangerous force in control, something he would maybe have to mention to Velvette so she would let you direct your own goddamn shoots. “We’ll talk about it,” he settles on, still a tad embarrassed by his reaction to the whole thing. “I do think you should have to draw the bath now, though- for both of us, since I think you rode me so hard my thighs have bruises.”

“Oh fuck off,” you laugh into his chest, but you still roll off of him and disappear into the bathroom- the sound of running water fills the room while Vox tries to remember how to make his legs work.

“I better not see that camera in here, either!” He shouts, and your responding giggle brings a smile to his face.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/56081230

[poppitron360]

Ok so in another post I talked about all the reasons why Valzhang is better than Caleo, and I wanted to do one on Valgrace as well (lmk if this should become a series).

Bear in mind I am only on HoH- I haven’t read all of the Caleo bits yet, but I know she ain’t gonna treat him right.

I was originally SUPER sceptical about Valgrace (“I ship them platonically” “Jason is the Token Straight Friend”) and while I don’t think it was ever cannon I 100% THINK IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN.

Seriously, my eyes have been opened to Valgrace, to the point where the fanfic I’m writing about them currently clocks in at around 5,934 words.

I am OBSESSED. It is a PROBLEM.

And some of the fanarts/fanfics of them are SO CUTE I COULD DIE- it was hard NOT to ship them after reading some of y’all’s stuff. Keep up the good work.

Anyway buckle up ‘cause I’m ‘bouta write a whole dam essay on this.

1. The whole appeal of Jason Grace’s character is that he sees through your insecurities and lifts you up because he is too pure for this world. So narratively speaking, why is he with the most stable character? Yeah, Piper’s got issues, but compared to the others? She’s doing pretty well for herself. I mean, her parents are ALIVE!! Wouldn’t it just make more sense, narratively speaking, to put Jason with the MOST insecure character??? He can support Leo, help him in his arc, and it would give Jason a time to shine by highlighting his best qualities.

2. Throughout most of the books, Jason is the ONLY ONE who actually consistently sees through Leo’s mask. Everyone else’s POV of Leo is “Haha Leo said something funny and goofy and we’re all trying to be serious here, Leo. Gods, he’s soooo annoying!”, whereas Jason’s POV is like “Jason could see that Leo was desperately trying to keep it together for the good of the group, and he thought that was noble and brave and good and kind and awesome.” Like I said above, he’s able to lift Leo up because he sees him, and knows him. Something Calypso never did. There are several interactions, during TLH particularly, where Jason is just like “Hey, Leo? You are great. You are awesome. You have saved our lives multiple times. Whatever just went wrong, it wasn’t your fault. Stop beating yourself up about everything. You are a valued and respected member of this team. I love and appreciate you.” And Leo still puts up those walls with the jokes and the sarcastic remarks, and Jason is nothing but patient with him. Calypso was never like that.

3. I can’t find the line in the book, but there’s a bit in HoH where Jason’s worrying about the “To Storm or Fire, the World must fall” line in the prophecy, and he says words to the effect of “I like living, but I’d rather I die than Leo, anyway horses-” and seriously?? Rick missed a trick by not making them a couple. There is WAY more potential for angst if there’s that romantic feeling involved, knowing one of them is going to die, and both being willing to sacrifice themselves for one another like this is “Merchant of Venice” or something (I will explain the obscure Shakespeare reference in the comments). Calypso would never give up her LIFE for Leo, and Leo would only give up his because she’s hot.

4. Okay, most of this is copy-pasted from my post about Valzhang, but it still applies, and it applies to them maybe more so. They get so much more time together to establish a meaningful relationship. Their arc carries over all five books, and we get to form connections as a reader to them both, so the payoff is a lot more satisfying. Unlike Calypso, Jason is his own character separately, and not just an add-on to Leo’s arc. Their friendship is a key focus in their chapters, and a key point in their character development, as Jason is the first person Leo ever opens up to about his mom. When Calypso showed up, Leo had already gone through that journey of letting down those walls, so it was a lot less meaningful. They had little to no time to develop a relationship, and we never get a chance to care about Calypso as a person. She’s just kind of a plot point for Leo/Percy’s own development, and never her own character.

5. What separates Leo and Calypso from the other relationships in the series is that they were not written for each other. Frank and Hazel? Written for each other. Jason and Piper? Written for each other. Percy and Annabeth? FUCKING WRITTEN TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER. Cal was brought in during BoTL to cockblock Percabeth, and then Rick realised Leo “needed” a girlfriend, so picked her. But you know what two characters were written to be best friends right from the get-go? Like literally it’s established in the first couple pages of the first book? Jason and Leo. Much like how Valzhang were always meant to be rivals, Jason and Leo were always meant to be best friends.

6. Like I said in the last post, Leo doesn’t NEED a girlfriend. He can heal his trauma with friends and found family, learning to love and accept himself, learning that he doesn’t actually need the attention of a hot girl to be valid. Jason is the best person to help him on that journey, seeing as how his character thrives in uplifting others. The only person who ever loved Leo unconditionally died when he was eight. His blood relatives abandoned him, and he clearly wasn’t treated very well in the foster homes. He constantly feels like he has to work to prove he’s earned his place among the Seven because for him, family has never been a guarantee. Jason cares for Leo even when he’s fucked up, even when he’s a crying mess on the floor, even when he feels most like he doesn’t deserve to be cared for. Leo thinks he needs the attention of a hot girl to give him validation. What he really needs is to find a place among his brethren- and Jason offers him that place.

So, kids, that was it for today’s edition of “Why Literally Any Ship Is Better Than Caleo”. Tune in next time for our fav ✨trauma twinsies✨ Valdangelo!

[kazucinth]

My favourite alchemist <3

Varian

Stuff for my favorite alchemist💞

💞before you guys got together, Varian sure tried to be suave with his pick up lines.

💞I know that he will name his BEST chemicals after you ofc🙈

💞Just know that this boy won’t STOP with his alchemy when he becomes to engrossed to him, so kindly drag him and cuddle with him because I sure know he won’t be listening if you tell him to take a break.

💞Ruddiger loves you, it took so time for this racoon to trust you but nonetheless he grew to love you the way Varian does.

💞lots and lots of forehead and cheek kisses!!!

💞He would draw you quite a lot, he was embarassed to show it to you but once you got together he is still embarassed, but I feel like he wouldn’t mind you looking.

💞doing alchemy together💕

💞I bet you that during his villian arc, while they sang ready as “ ready as I’ll ever be “ he WILL add you as a part to that song if you joined him

💞Would think about you while he was still in jail😭

💞WILL AND WOULD SING YOU TO SLEEP IF YOU HAD ASKED HIM

💞He would be interested to your likes as you do with his

💞singing duets!!!!

💞or if your not good with singing and more preferable with instruments, thats fine! You both could duet instead with your instruments

💞or if your like me who can’t do both, no worries! He will still add you as a part of any songs he sings

💞Varian falls incredibly INLOVE with you, he appreciates the fact you care for him and don’t leave him the way others would be disgusted by him

Inbox for varian is open!!

IM SORRY GUYS I HAVE THIS HABBIT OF SWITCHING IN-BETWEEN FANDOMS, but hands down I am currently inlove with Varian and sadly there’s only a few oneshots or hcs of him, but I can’t promise I’ll make a part two😭😭

[delzinrowe]

Aftermath - Kento Nanami

WORD COUNT: ~4.2K WARNINGS: Some minor & major alterations to Shibuya Arc! No Culling Games in this fic. Otherwise no serious warnings. F!Reader SUMMARY: Three days after the Shibuya Incident in the midst of the aftermath Y/N is trying to sort out her emotions and deal with what happened. A/N: Feedback is always appreciated! If you want to be tagged in upcoming fics/drabbles, please let me know!!! Thank you, and enjoy <3 Considering there are alterations to Shibuya: PLEASE, keep your replies/comments spoiler free, to ensure the unaltered enjoyment of other readers. Thank you!

Curses had claimed Shibuya. Half the district was gone, reduced to ashes and debris. Thousands of human lives were eradicated, leaving nothing but pain and emptiness in the hearts of those who miraculously survived the tragedy.

The remaining sorcerers tried their best to evacuate those who lived too close to the newly created wastelands of Tokyo. There was no telling how long it would take to get rid of all the curses, if that was even possible. Therefore saving and protecting all non-sorcerers had priority.

Within record time Y/N had scouted through the rackages in search of any survivors and brought them to Shoko for treatment. It was a tiring task, not only physically but mentally. Seeing the devastating destruction caused by Sukuna, Kenjaku and the countless curses truly took a toll on everyone.

All it took was a few hours to save all the survivors. But this small win was overshadowed by the carnage left behind. Every sorcerer had returned to the Tokyo Jujutsu High grounds, even the ones from Kyoto decided to stay. Considering the immediate threat posed by the countless curses roaming the streets it was the most logical decision for everyone to stay and aid the Tokyo sorcerers.

Many of the sorcerers made it their daily mission to eradicate as many curses as they possibly could, it was their way of dealing with the losses. Among those was Y/N. After the incident she focused all her attention on the vile creatures, spending every minute on the battlefield. As one of the teachers at Jujutsu High she had always made it her priority to keep everyone safe. If going on a rampage and killing curses left and right was the only way for her to ensure no one else would be hurt, so be it.

Just after killing the last of the evil spirits in front of her she fell to her knees. The exhaustion of the past few days took over her body, but she fought against it.

“You can’t keep going like this, Y/N.” Nanami Kento’s voice sounded from a bit further away, as his feet slowly carried him closer to her kneeling form. The blonde sorcerer seemed exhausted as well, carrying scars and injuries from the massacre days ago.

“Sure I can. I have to.” She responded, but her words didn’t hold as much strength as she had intended. And when she stood up she realised how much her body trembled.

“When was the last time you slept?” He inquired with this slightly disappointing tone that made her feel aggravated all too quickly.

“For your information I slept last night.” By now he was standing before her, watching with eagle eyes as she brushed the dirt off her clothes.

“How many hours?” His question earned him an eye-roll in response. Why did he feel the need to act like this right now when he knew the current situation better than anyone.

She refrained from answering, knowing fully well that in her agitated state she might say something spiteful or mean that she’d regret later on.

“You cannot keep this up.” His voice now held a more stern tone as he tried desperately to get through to her. However, the more he tried to reason with her the more she resisted.

“I’m not a child, Kento, I can take care of myself. Thank you.” She had never raised her voice at him like this before, but his nagging really was not what she needed right now. While she knew that it came from a good place, it fell on deaf ears. She had lost too many people, had watched close friends be slaughtered like pigs in front of her.

“Obviously you can’t!” He yelled back at her when she had already turned on her heel.

“You’re a teacher, don’t you think you should be a role model to your students?” Y/N couldn’t see it but she knew that he wore a pleading expression on his face, simply with the way his voice sounded almost desperate to get through to her.

“I am!” Was all she shouted back at him before walking further away, out of his field of vision. She had to get away from him right now even if she knew that he only meant well.

Didn’t he understand that she needed this? That she needed to exorcize as many curses as she could? That she needed to make these streets safer for everyone?

Nanami knew her better than anyone. And he knew that she needed this, but not ‘to make the streets safer’. Not because Exorcizing curses was the simple job of a sorcerer.

No. Y/N needed this for herself more than anything.

Once she had walked further away, when she was out of earshot, she once more collapsed, physically and mentally. She dropped to her knees, not caring that the tiny stones on the ground would leave marks on her knees even through her pants, and balled her hands into fists. She made no attempts in stopping the tears that started filling her eyes, eventually rolling down her cheeks and dropping onto the ruined ground, which once was a bustling street filled with life.

Minutes passed in which Y/N cried without a care in the word if anyone saw her. The overwhelming guilt she felt caused her chest to tighten and burn as if it was on fire.

“Survivor’s Guilt”, is what Shoko had called it when she patched up Y/N’s injuries. “It’s the belief that you did something wrong by surviving when others didn’t.”, she explained it further. Y/N knew that it wasn’t rational to feel like this, but what did that help when she was convinced on a deeply emotional level that by surviving she truly did do something wrong.

“It’s not fair. So many talented and skilled people died, but I survived. Why? It’s just not fair…” She had argumented, but Shoko was quick to smack the back of her head, effectively capturing her full attention. The healer had made it clear to her that she didn’t survive for nothing, that people still needed her. It was enough to give Y/N at least some mental strength, but as soon as she had left Shoko’s infirmary she fell into the habit of not eating, not sleeping and using all her time to hunt down every cursed spirit she could find.

Y/N wasn’t sure how much time had passed, it couldn’t have been more than half an hour, considering the sun was pretty much still at the same spot in the sky. She frankly didn’t care all too much about it either way.

After wiping lazily over her face she finally stood up, skillfully ignoring that her knees felt like dough and her legs trembled. It simply did not matter, she felt as if nothing mattered. At the same time everything mattered.

By now she deeply regretted snapping at Nanami, he was the least person to deserve that. He had always been some sort of role model to Y/N. His moral code in keeping children safe and not letting the youth experience any misery greatly inspired her to become a teacher at Jujutsu High.

She decided to apologise when she saw him next. He’d understand her, she was sure of it. For now she just wanted to get out of here. Her strength was decreasing due to lack of sleep and nutrition. As skilled and talented as she was, she wasn’t arrogant enough to believe she could take on multiple high grade curses in her current status.

Her walk back to the next operating public transportation wasn’t short, giving her plenty of time to think of the exact words she wanted to tell Nanami during her apology and how she’d explain herself. Even though she knew that his maturity wouldn’t expect her to explain anything. He surely knew how she felt. She guessed that he was ridden with the same form of guilt that plagued her mind and heart.

Y/N paid it no mind to the unamused glares and frowns of disapproval she received from strangers on the train. She knew that the blood stains and tears in her clothes were bound to attract the attention of non-sorcerers. Sometimes she’d even jump at the chance to horrify some particularly judgmental bystanders.

“Don’t worry, it’s not my blood.” She’d muse in an assuring tone of voice while showing a smile that seemed far too friendly. Every time, without exception, it would earn a wide-eyed stare.

However, today she was not in the mood to provoke anyone. She settled for mindlessly watching the passing landscape, it was all a blur to her unfocused eyes. Only when the mechanical voice announced the next stop was she ripped out of her thoughts. Due to a quick message she had sent when she stepped into the wagon she was greeted with Ijichi’s soft smile.

The tone between the two had always been kind and casual, almost friendly, which was something Y/N deeply appreciated. Other assistants sometimes didn’t dare to pursue a friendship with sorcerers, especially higher grades. They claimed it was due to professionalism, but the truth was that the assistants didn’t want to get attached to someone who’d end up dying well before their time.

Ijichi, in his gentlemanly behaviour, held open the car door for Y/N. Behind his nervous smile was a wave of worry when he glanced at the countless cuts and bruises that littered her body. The dried up blood as well as the torn clothes only added to his inner turmoil. Yet, every time he brought up his concerns for her wellbeing she shot him down with a lazy attempt at reassurance. It never worked.

“Has Yuji-kun already talked to you?” He asked with an almost cautious tone after he slipped into the driver’s seat and ignited the engine. Through the rear view mirror he could see how she furrowed her brows in confusion. It was enough of an answer for him.

“He mentioned that he was looking for you.” Ijichi explained further but Y/N only shook her head.

“I’ll find him when I’m at Jujutsu Tech. Thanks for telling me.”

After these words the remainder of the drive was spent in silence. It wasn’t unusual for rides with assistants to be quiet. Most trips with Ijichi however, were spent chatting about missions and the current state of affairs. 

This time the assistant kept quiet. Perhaps because he wasn’t fully well yet either. Shoko had only allowed him to operate the car he was currently driving. Everything else was strictly off limits to prevent him from overworking. A trait shared by seemingly everyone and their mother in the sorcerer society.

The two of them reached the school grounds quickly and while absent-mindedly muttering a “Thank you.” Y/N stepped out of the car, heading straight towards Shoko’s infirmary to get her wounds treated.

The eerie silence in her mind, surrounded by the noise of nature in the form of birds chirping and leaves rustling, were all that filled the air, but not for long. Before she even made it halfway to her destination she was suddenly stopped by a voice yelling her name from a bit further away. It was a voice she had come to know well.

“What’s up, Yuji?” She asked as she turned towards him. The boy stopped a few feet away, despite seemingly running he was barely out of breath.

“Y/L/N-Sensei, you’re not forgetting about later right?” The pink haired boy almost seemed timid and hesitant but Y/N didn’t read into it. There was no reason for something like that at a time like this.

“About the little get-together later? I won’t forget, Yuji.” She had to force a little smile onto her lips as she reassured him. It seemed to be all the young student wanted to talk about as he quickly nodded and shot her a smile, that seemed far too out of place for the mindset she surrounded herself with at the moment, before he turned around and disappeared into the direction he came from.

Y/N didn’t like that Gojo was throwing a get-together at a time like this, just days after a devastating tragedy that caused pain and loss to so many people. Yet, another part of her could understand it somehow. Even though he acted like an idiot at times, she knew his heart was at the right place. She figured quickly that he wanted to bring them all together to strengthen the bond of the remaining sorcerers, ultimately making it easier to rely on each other. Perchance he even had a plan to deal with the curses, and most of all, the curse user formerly known as Geto Suguru.

With all this in her mind she finally made her way to Shoko. The breeze, that was far too warm for this time of the year, went by her without any recognition. All she could do was try not to get lost in her thoughts, her planned apology to Nanami still lingering in the back of her mind.

“You’re looking great again…” Shoko’s voice was filled to the brim with sarcasm.

“Thanks, always a pleasure to see you.” Y/N attempted to respond with the same level of mockery as she rolled her eyes, but her tone sounded more annoyed than anything else.

“Is that why you’re making it a habit to visit every day with new injuries? Y/N, you can’t keep doing that.” It was uncommon for the (now again) heavy smoker to show this level of concern for others. She was well aware that her fellow sorcerers could handle themselves well.

“Damn, I heard that before.” This time Y/N’s words were dripping with sarcasm. There was no ill-will in her voice, but Shoko immediately realised that she had more luck getting through a wall than her patient’s thick skull. With a sigh she simply decided to drop the subject.

Only mere minutes later all of Y/N’s injuries were healed, or at least taken care of and she left Shoko’s infirmary after voicing her gratitude.

“Should I pick you up later, or..?” Y/N didn’t answer the question that was yelled after. She heard it, but she wouldn’t acknowledge it. Why would it matter if Shoko picked her up for the stupid get-together? It came as a surprise that Shoko even cared about one of Gojo’s plans.

The sky had cleared up within the past minutes, allowing the sun to shine down on the scenery and dipping the landscape in a plethora of orange hues. However, the colour spectacle went unnoticed by Y/N, whose feet carried her to her assigned room. Out of courtesy, or rather practicality, the higher-ups had decided to offer the empty dormitories to the remaining few sorcerers. Considering the school was protected by barriers, this served as a means to keep them safe more so than goodwill.

Time passed by quickly, or maybe it didn’t, but Y/N was simply too caught up in her own thoughts. She could feel herself being dragged down once more, spiralling into the depths of her sorrow. She thought that maybe as soon as she reached the room the thoughts would dissipate, but nothing of that sort happened.

Seemingly like a zombie trapped in her own mind she undressed herself, showered, dried herself off and changed into a set of clean clothes. She settled for the only black dress she wore. Taking into account the circumstances it felt fitting to wear black, even if Gojo would possibly find a way to bring colour into everything.

Maybe this get-together was exactly what everyone needed right now. Maybe this was a chance to reconnect and move on. Maybe, just maybe, Gojo’s idea wasn’t too bad.

After checking the clock on her phone for the nth time Y/N to get going. Arriving early was always fashionable, wasn’t it? Besides, she knew that Nanami, as much as he disliked these gatherings, would most probably be there early as well. She’d simply take the time to talk to him and apologise. This way she had a chance of enjoying the rest of the late afternoon, possibly even with Nanami next to her.

And wouldn’t you know it, just like she had predicted, the blonde sorcerer stood outside the venue, glancing at the watch on his wrist. To no one’s surprise he wore the same white suit as always. He likely owned it multiple times to make dressing up in the morning easier, a simple fact she had never cared to think about before. Now it almost seemed hilarious to her. Nonetheless there was a frown on her lips. Knowing that she had to act like a responsible grown up and apologise for her earlier outburst left a bitter taste in her mouth.

“Kento! Hey.” She greeted him almost hesitantly, if he noticed the nervousness in her voice he didn’t show it. He simply greeted her back while turning towards her.

“Can I talk to you about earlier this morning?” What a stupid way to have phrased it. Of course she could, she evidently had the ability to do so. Internally she scolded herself instantly over her choice of words.

“If you want to apologise, there’s no need for it, Y/N.” Here he went again, being the ever considerate and thoughtful person she knew him as. The expression on his face was almost soft, something he only showed around a small number of people, which she considered herself lucky to be a part of.

Before she even had the chance to respond to him he spoke up once more, prompted by the uncertainty shown on her features.

“I’m serious. It’s a difficult time for everyone, we’re all on edge. It’s alright.” Nanami uttered with a tone so full of understanding that it almost blew her away. Then again, despite him being the youngest of the adult sorcerers, he had always been the most mature one and the voice of reason.

For a few short minutes a comfortable silence was shared between the two, until Y/N glanced over his white suit and remembered her train of thought from before.

“You decided to keep wearing that same white suit? Don’t you have anything different to wear?” Y/N’s almost playful glance revealed the nature of her words, there was no malice or ill-intent. She prided herself on being the only one who could get him to engage in conversations in a light-hearted manner.

“Why? Don’t you think it looks handsome?” Nanami’s response came quickly, eliciting a chuckle from her.

“Oh, it definitely does.” She replied back, unable to help herself from chuckling once more as she saw the slight smile forming on his lips. At this very moment it almost felt like nothing bad had ever happened.

“Y/N, there is one thing you have to do for me.” Nanami spoke up once again. Y/N didn’t pay too much attention to his somewhat more seriously sounding tone, that was simply his nature.

“You can't keep me from getting absolutely shitfaced drunk.” If this get-together was anything like Gojo’s previous festivities there would be an unlimited amount of alcohol provided. Even if the host of these gatherings never drank an ounce of it himself.

When Nanami didn’t respond or smile at her quick remark she straightened her posture and looked at him expectantly.

“You have to forgive yourself for everything that went down the other day.” He continued then, judging by his tone it was clear as day what exactly he was referring to.

Without any sort of warning a wave of guilt washed over Y/N. Her chest tightened at the reminder of how many lives were lost, how many people she couldn’t save. The destruction was terrible. But it wasn’t the source of her pain. Involuntarily her mind wandered to the corpses which had littered the grounds of the Shibuya station. Her lips started to quiver but she was determined not to give in to the tears. No other word was needed, no clarification or elaboration. She knew what he meant.

Nanami didn’t rush her in her response, instead he gave her all the time she needed by waiting patiently. Something she was thankful for, even if he was the only reason she needed time in the first place.

Y/N hardly noticed when the index finger of her right hand started to scrape at her thumb’s cuticle. Her head was turned away, gaze averted from him. A part of her knew that she had to forgive herself. In fact, she knew that there wasn’t anything to forgive herself for since she had done everything in her powers to save as many people as she could. She had done enough. But her heart did not agree with her head. In her heart she had failed the people of Tokyo. She had failed her fellow sorcerers. She had failed herself.

“You can be really annoying sometimes.” She responded after what seemed like forever, allowing a deep sigh to leave her lungs. ‘Mostly when you’re the voice of reason’, she added in her thoughts bitterly while turning her gaze back to him.

“Yes. Maybe.” His words of agreement were simultaneously out of place and so very typical for him, at least when he was with her. It was enough for her to crack an unwanted smile.

She breathed in deeply, once, twice, and another time.

“Okay.” She finally answered his previous request. Both of them knew that Y/N needed more time to actually forgive herself, but it was a step in the right direction. It was an unspoken promise that she’d attempt to do this for him.

Nanami only responded with a proud nod, barely mouthing the word “Good.”

The quick change in atmosphere had almost caused her heart to beat irregularly. A silence hung over them, but this time it was heavier than before.

Y/N needed to shift the mood again, she needed to uplift not only his spirit, but also her own. She knew that otherwise she’d be glum and gloomy during Gojo’s get-together. There had been too much tragedy within a short time, a killjoy was definitely not what any of the sorcerers needed.

“Since you’re forced to attend this get-together, when are you gonna start complaining?” She chuckled, a little forced anyways, as she asked the blonde sorcerer.

“Complaining about what?” It was Shoko’s voice that sounded from behind Y/N, making her turn around and face the healer with a smile. Although Shoko was never full of energy and happiness, she seemed even more dispirited than ever.

Y/N shrugged her shoulders, “You know, about Gojo’s obnoxious attitude, about our tone deaf singing when we get drunk, about music that’s way too loud. The whole thing, really.” It seemed obvious to her that Nanami wouldn’t enjoy any of these things.

Shoko’s brows furrowed, her head tilted ever so lightly and her lips pursed.

“Where do you think we are?” She asked Y/N. A question like this would usually have resulted in the female sorcerer chuckling and replying in an amused tone. However, something about Shoko’s tone made her hesitate.

Y/N turned around towards Nanami once more, ready to smile at him.

Except, he wasn’t there anymore.

In a split second Y/N’s entire world came crashing down on her as the realisation set in that he had never been there in the first place. Images of her fights in Shibuya flashed before her eyes. Imagines consisting of sorcerers dying in front of her because she had been too slow.

A ringing set in her ears, intensifying with each memory that surfaced. The sound became stronger when she remembered finding Nanami again amidst the chaos and rubble of the destroyed Tokyo district. She had watched him fight, she had yelled after him, she had attempted to reach him and aid him.

Y/N swallowed hard, slowly turning towards Shoko again. Her chest tightened enough to leave her breathless. With a bitter smile on her face she lowered her gaze. Reluctantly she forced herself to walk, taking one painful step at a time towards the row of outdoor chairs that were neatly set up in front of the closed casket.

She had saved lives and exorcised many curses in Shibuya. She helped search for survivors and consoled the ones that were left behind after the losses.

Alas, the only thing she would forever remember about that night was how she witnessed Nanami dying right in front of her, when she had been too slow to save him.

Without any form of communication she sat down on one of the chairs in the first row, right in front of Nanami’s picture.

She was soon joined by Shoko who sat down next to her, placing a warm hand on her thigh and rubbing it assuringly. The gesture went unnoticed by Y/N, whose eyes were focused on all the little details she could make out on the picture atop the casket. Details that blurred more and more when her eyes filled with tears upon realising that it was all an illusion.

The arguments, the smiles, the quick light-hearted banter she shared with the blonde man during these last few days. It was nothing more than a beautiful hallucination.

[invertebrates]

bug toys!

alright, here’s my mini-guide to getting into the world of Weirdly Articulated, almost entirely Japanese bug toys.

some caveats:

1) most of these toys aren’t great for kids. they have a lot of small lose-able, breakable, poke-able parts and can fall apart pretty easily. 2) i’m in the US, so i’m not quite sure how to acquire these things if ebay and Buyee don’t work for you 3) ‘bugs’ for the purpose of this guide (and entire blog tbh) is any invertebrate why would i want fake bugs when i can get real bugs? 1) fake bugs don’t die and can be neglected forever. they will never bite, sting, poop on you, or be stinky (unless you make them stinky) 2) fake bugs can be handled constantly, they will not get stressed out or pick up any germs from you 3) fake bugs can be much larger than real bugs, or be species that would be impossible or unethical to own or breed. they can even be fun made up creatures 4) fake bugs don’t require any kind of tank, substrate or food, and they will not breed uncontrollably (or at all) 5) they cannot escape and become an invasive species 6) buying them doesn’t support shady or unethical ‘breeders’ who just take bugs from the wild (not saying all bug breeders do this, but it’s definitely a problem with certain kinds of bugs)

this is not to discourage any responsible bug-culturing you might want to get into, but for me, as a pretty depressed person without a lot of space, these are all big plusses!

onto the fake bugs

ikimono encyclopedia

unfortunately these photos will be some dark toys against dark backgrounds because i am a goth bastard and everything i own is black. sorry.

so, these being Japanese toys, I’m not entirely sure of the correct terms for them. these are pretty much just the search terms I’ve discovered over time that work to find them. as far as I can tell, Japan LOVES bugs and has a very enviable appreciation for them, they don’t seem to be considered nearly as gross or weird or bad as they are in the west.

these are a series gachapon or capsule toys. you can get all kinds of awesome little toys, which are often strangely detailed and often high quality, from vending machines in Japan.

here are some current listings from ebay to give you an idea of the variety and prices:

they also have a lot of cool fish and reptiles in this series. prices can be a bit steep, but you’re usually buying the whole set of toys pictured, not just a one-off. they’re usually a few inches, pretty well painted and articulated, and come as individually wrapped kits you have to put together. i will say, sometimes it is hard to snap the legs into place, so if you have hand/joint issues you might need some help putting them together. usually, a lot of these toys might be the same model but repainted, and sometimes there’s duplicates. the two mantises in my photo are from a set of 6, and there were 3 sets of 2 identical boys, so I could display one with the wings out and another one folded. they’ll also sometimes come with a little piece of clear plastic and a stand you can pose them on top of.

just from the sheer variety they offer, and relative affordability, this would probably be my first recommendation for getting into bug toys. they have beetles, mantids, caterpillars, wasps, ispods, crabs... i’d love some myriapod sets but we’ll see!

i usually grab these guys off ebay. they’re also available on Buyee and there may be more, cheaper options over there, but I’ve noticed with the import/holding fees, buyee and ebay come out to be about the same most of the time. (for anyone confused, Buyee is an English import service that lets you buy stuff off Japanese sites and auctions, since a lot of Japanese sites only want to ship inside Japan)

these are also just the gachapon bug toys from one specific company. there’s OTHER companies making other sets of really good bugs but I’ve had so much luck with just this one term I haven’t branched out much yet.

Fujimi Living Thing Arc

these are slightly bigger models made out of slightly harder plastic (well, the mantis is bigger; beetles are about the same as the ikimono guys) that are a bit more intricate to put together. they come with assembly instructions, but of course they’re in Japanese. you can pretty much follow along with the pictures though. the painting details aren’t quite as nice, but they have a bit more articulation. not as many choices with this set, though they do have a crawfish I wanna snag. they also have some goofy JP style monster dinos.

i bought these guys off hlj.com but it looks like they’re on ebay(and buyee as well I’m sure)

Revoltech RevoGeo

you’ll probably recognize this name if you’re into transformers or other toy collecting. these guys are gonna be by far the most expensive ($90-$120+) but they are extremely large and high quality. this one is super articulated, the individual leg joints and mandibles move, wings move, about the only thing that isn’t articulated are the individual little tarsomeres/feet segments or the abdomen segments. not as much choice here either, I think they have a beetle, ants, crab and a scorpion plus this wasp. these also come mostly assembled, you can usually just snap the wings on or maybe swap out a few parts (iirc this gal’s stinger can be removed)

i got her off bigbadtoystore.com, though they may be available cheaper elsewhere. BBTS is infamously a bit pricier than other toy stores but they’ve always been very reliable and quick for me.

this BIG isopod

this one won’t be as helpful. these may be part of the same series as the ikimono (they were just labeled bandai gachapon) but they are much larger, this guy’s like 5″, came fully assembled and is pretty articulated. they can even roll into a ball! all their little legs move! i’m pretty sure they’re meant to be one of the large deep sea isopods and man, a 1:1 revoltech model of one of those would be a dream.

completely fake bugs!

had to share my little starship trooper warrior bug collection :^) the big one and the one directly under it are 90s kenner toys I believe, the bottom-right one is a funko, the red one is from a tabletop set, and the guy on the left is a figma model that is unfortunately ridiculously expensive nowadays.

one nice thing about fake real bugs: there is not a crazy collectors market for this so this stuff should stay pretty affordable. unless real normal bugs somehow become a huge pop sensation i think it’s just us weird nerds that are into them.

other search terms to try: bandai insect insect gachapon (or gashapon) nature gachapon

that way you may be able to track down listings for individual toys that should be a bit cheaper! here’s a sample what bandai insect got me on ebay:

happy fake bug collecting!

you may noticed I haven’t mentioned one form of bug that has a lot of the same advantages as plastic bugs: dead pinned insects in shadowboxes. i do have some of these, but i am reluctant to support places selling them nowadays because few are ethically or responsibly sourced, and the same sellers often kill and sell endangered bats and other vertebrates for display. plus mites got into half the ones i had and turned them into dead bug dust. if mites ever develop a taste for plastic i will be sad about my collection but the world will be saved from a lot of nasty garbage so it would ultimately be a Plus.

so unless you personally know the person that pinned the insect, i would be very cautious about buying dead things from random online stores or dealers at ‘curiosity’ or ‘oddity’ shows and things like that, since it’s all sourced from alibaba and whatnot anyway. i swear i saw like 5 different people selling the same dead octopuses in orbs at the last curiosity show i went to. they are cool, but i have no idea where those octopuses came from and i doubt the people selling them did either.

[cursedvibes]

I know you like tenken, takaken and sukume but what are some other relationships or dynamics do you like in jjk and why? Could be romantic, platonic, familial, antagonistic or just plain toxic and fucked up, anything.

Thanks for the interesting ask! These are my favourites at the moment.

Mahito & Yuuji

I think it's the best antagonistic relationship Yuuji has in the entire manga. I like them both as a ship and platonically for what we get in canon. Although considering the scene in the anime where Mahito tries to murder kiss Yuuji, you could say it's one-sidedly canon.

I miss Mahito a lot lately and come to only appreciate him more and more with time. He was very good at building up a sense of dread and he has a viciousness to him that's lacking in the current Shinjuku fight for me.

He mirrors Yuuji without literally being related to him (so far, who knows what else Gege will reveal to be in Yuuji's gene cocktail). Yuuji learns something from him, reflects upon himself, his actions, who he wants to be and why he fights. They are both still figuring each other and themselves out. Both of them grow during their fights and become more dangerous, desperate and feral any time they meet. I love how Mahito is not only able to break Yuuji, but also to break him. Yuuji's hatred for Sukuna is smouldering, while for Mahito it is a raging fire. Yuuji has nothing to learn from Sukuna and no interest to engage with him anymore, while for Mahito it was raw and personal and resulted in Yuuji embracing the disgusting and ruthless side of himself that makes him so cold against Sukuna.

It's been great to see how even now Mahito still influences Yuuji. He was the first one who really taught him about the soul and what it can be capable of. Any time the soul is brought up, Yuuji's first thought is how Mahito was able to manipulate and contort it. He is able to hurt Sukuna so much because of what he learned from Mahito. As much as I miss Mahito and his personality, it wouldn't make sense to bring him back now, so I'm glad to see his continued impact on Yuuji this way. Overall, what I like about the two is how "juvenile" their conflict is. Cruelty of a child and innocence of a child clashing and both of them improving, growing and maturing through it. I also think it's very fitting that Yuuji never got to exorcise Mahito because the message is that Mahito represents a different side of him and he shouldn't ignore or destroy that side, he has to embrace it to be able to stomach what lies ahead.

Maki & Mai

If done right, I'm always a sucker for twin relationships, especially the codependency in it. I wouldn't say Maki & Mai are my favourite example of them or the best written one, but I still like them for what they are, particularly everything in Perfect Preparation and the Sakurajima colony. It could've been better and more consistently set up, but the payoff is still emotional and impactful and that's what I like them for.

Both of them need each other, wanted to help each other in their own way, but they never saw eye-to-eye or managed to communicate properly until after Mai's death. They were holding each other back through more than just the jujutsu consequences of being born a twin. Mai wanted Maki to give up and live with her at the bottom and Maki thought she had to shoulder all responsibility and could only go on and pave a way for them alone. Even after the have "become one" in a jujutsu sense and Maki unlocked her Heavenly Restriction, they don't immediately work together and have to learn how to communicate with each other and lift each other up, make up for what the other can't do. And through understanding Mai better and learning to hold her and fight together with her, she also begins to understand herself better.

I wish we got a more in-depth look at them, their past and relationship while both were alive before the Perfect Preparation arc. I hope Maki's arc will have a satisfying end and she will find something meaningful to do with her life.

Hakari & Uraume

Every time the leaks come out, I'm hoping for at least a glimpse at these two. There's been setup for some really interesting exploration of the themes of humanity and strength here. They are also just such a funny duo and it gets more and more hilarious the more chapters pass by and we don't see them. While Sukuna plays whac-a-mole with the main group, Hakari and Uraume have been "fighting" for 20 chapters now without seemingly getting anywhere except gossiping about what happens over at the main source of action. Wouldn't be surprised if we skip back to them to see them eating ice cream while watching the others get beaten up.

On a more serious note, I really hope the little speech Uraume gave in ch 245 gets picked up again and explored upon because it was the most interesting commentary we got so far on the source of sorcerers power, what it means to be human when you are so strong and also Uraume's background. Uraume's view of humanity and strength seems to slightly differ from Sukuna's and they also seem to reflect upon it more. They say forming relationships and fear of losing said relationships is what makes you weak and yet they have no problem following Sukuna and worrying about him. They are even open to forming bonds with others like Kenjaku or even Hakari. Hakari is actually the person we have seen them be most relaxed and friendly with so far. With Sukuna there is always a remaining formality and Kenjaku annoys them, but with Hakari they chat like a normal person. They make fun of him, but it's very colloquial. It seems like they actually came to see him as a true equal. There is no binding vow or old history binding them together, they simply want to keep Hakari from interfering with the fight and through that they got to engage with him without any pretence.

I just wish we actually got to see how their relationship developed over that now pretty significant amount of time and to see more of Uraume's worldview and maybe Hakari's too. He broke away from Jujutsu Tech and was left to build up his own independent existence together with Kirara. Very similar to Uraume and Sukuna. Now if we could only explore that connection between them more. On page. Not off-screen. I would've taken that any time over the pointless intervention from Geto's cult members or Kusakabe sacrificing himself.

Kusakabe & Yaga

I think this is Kusakabe's most interesting relationship and what actually gives him some depth beyond Exposition Guy. It's also where we see Yaga's more overtly caring side beyond his interactions with Panda. Unfortunately, it gets overlooked a lot, in part because Gege doesn't linger much on it beyond one or two chapters and Kusakabe's last words before getting cut down. There is literally nothing about this ship in fandom spaces. Probably because for some reason people think Yaga isn't hot enough (he's the literal definition of a dilf what more do you want?)...

Chapter 147 is interesting because it shows us the closest relationships and most hidden secrets both Kusakabe and Yaga have. We learn that Yaga not only makes autonomous puppets, but he actually has a whole Hundred Acre Wood-type of retreat full of the souls of dead people, children in particular. They aren't weapons like Panda, they don't fight, they are just allowed to live there. Protected by Tengen interestingly enough. She probably just doesn't care what he does or thinks it mildly interesting/quirky. This is also where we find out that Kusakabe has a sister (Usami?), who has been severely traumatized to the point of being catatonic and lost her son, Kusakabe's nephew. Despite the taboo, both Kusakabe and Yaga are willing to raise the dead not only to help her, but also to give Kusakabe something of his family back. It's the most vulnerable moment we've gotten of him and it speaks of their deep bond that Yaga was willing to do this. Doubt he would do this for just any jujutsu teacher (who doesn't even work for him). Creating that kind of cursed corpse isn't easy after all. But nothing strengthens a bond like necromancy. Kusakabe's last words about Yaga in ch 254 are also interesting. He fights for Yaga, knowing he wouldn't force him to do this, but reflecting on how they used to be able to fight together. They must have known each other for a long time. Kusakabe tells himself multiple times to not linger on the dead, but any time he does, it's because of Yaga.

A very interesting relationship with much potential that goes underexplored. I would've much preferred for his relationship with Yaga to be highlighted more in his fight against Sukuna than that out of place "interview" where people who barely know Kusakabe explain his character to us. If they could bring Gojo and Nanami back from the dead, they could've shown Yaga too. If you really want me to believe that Kusakabe is a kind person, show me more of how he acts around the people he actually cares about, i.e. Yaga and Miwa. He's a very different person around them, particularly Yaga and that's when he allows himself to be vulnerable.

So yeah, I think they explored each other's bodies to help each other through their grief.

[so-bitya]

Soma and Whitewashing in Anime:

Avoiding "Brown"

Here is an image of Soma comparing his skin tone from the first season of Black Butler and the current season airing now. As you can see, Soma's skin is noticeably lighter than it was in the past. I considered the lighting and took shade from his hand that looks relatively mid tone. However, that's not really a fair excuse if the anime continues to lighten Soma's face this way.

I also compared his skintone from the Book of Circus season which is relatively more recent, and chose images where he's clearly in good lighting. Soma is still noticeably lighter this time around.

Whitewashing is an incredibly common phenomenon that been happening a lot lately in anime, especially with reboots. A great example I can think of off the top of my head is One Piece where they lightened nearly everyone's skin color in the anime, despite some of the cast being characters of color?

(^^^this character is canonly black according to Oda, the mangaka.)

"Oh but Oda gives Usopp pale skin in all his color illustrations"

One, he should know better. Two, if Oda said Usopp would be African in real life, and chose a brown, Jamaican-american actor to play him, then yes, they have been ridiculously disrespectful in how they've been portraying the character's racial features so far.

In that sense, it's actually relief that anime studios in the past weren't afraid of giving their characters darker skin unlike mangakas who were terrified of even the lighest shade of brown.

For instance, I am happy that A-1 studios made Soma, Agni, and Mina, who are all the same race, slightly differ in skin tone. Mina's skin is cooler toned compared to Soma and Agni's warmer hues.

HOWEVER, and other fans pointed this out, Soma and Agni's skin leaned so far from being golden brown to straight yellow in many scenes, that they were walking around like they have jaundice which is so... Of course A-1 studios found some way to mess it up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another thing, do you guys honestly think being accurate to Yana's art style is always the best thing to do in adaptions? Angela Blanc, the secret villain in the anime original first season, pretends to be an abused maid and gets whipped in her very first scene. And according to Yana's concept sketches, she was originally brown. I'm actually glad the anime whitewashed her in that instance.

I'd like to point out, Sebastian's skin tone has also changed in the new season, and he's noticeably tanner than his previous anime appearances and yana's illustrations. So why is this okay for the anime to make creative changes for sebastian's skin tone, but have to stay accurate for Soma? (whose dark skin been established in anime viewers' eyes for decades now).

To be fair, I did a comparison of the anime grayscaled and Soma in the manga during the Weston arc. I checked the values and while I will say that his skin is relatively in the same as the manga, only few degrees lighter, whitewashing isn't only about skintone.

Colourism in Features

We could argue whether its just different anime styles or the way Yana draws noses, but its not a great look for Soma's nose to be made noticeably sharper compared to his flatter/rounder nose in the manga/earlier seasons of the anime.

Talking about the Mandela effect and cognitive dissonance as well... there's also something about how manga readers seen Soma with brown skin and pure black hair years in the manga, only for the anime to lighten those features.

It doesn't help that Soma canonly has purple hair and yellow eyes (if anything, I do appreciate the more natural tones they gave Soma this season. No more highly saturated purple hair/yellow eyes and skin!)

Yes, Kuroshitsuji is a fantasy story, and YES artists of color like to play with fantasy features with characters, me included! But my point is that black/brown representation in media is so little already, character artists are also averse to drawing any defining racial features.

Yana has designed brown-skinned characters in the anime with straight white hair and light-colored eyes about three times now (ie. Agni, Angela, and Hannah). The only Indians with dark skin and hair are a bunch of homeless thugs that Soma and Agni stop from mugging Ciel, proving they're "one of the good ones", and Mina whose treatment in the manga/anime is abysmal.

Discussing Racism in Fandom

Alright, so over the past few days, I've seen some fans disappointed with Soma's skin tone change and I hope my post illustrates why they would be. But I've also seen some angry and frustrated reactions to those fans! And I want to ask, why?

Why is fans bringing up racism in anime considered "discourse" but reacting harshly towards those fans is not?

Why would fans expressing disappointment about whitewashing gets you more angry than the whitewashing itself?

Why is being disappointed that an anime lightened a character's skin tone, a character who both anime-only watchers and manga readers alike saw as dark-skinned, stupid to you?

How come the fandom gets a good laugh out of the usage of "fag" potentially canceling the anime, but talking about race is a "risk" to getting a new season?

And if you disagree with my points and believe the anime is only being accurate to Yana's work, why not just say "Soma's skintone is more accurate to Yana's color illustrations, but I understand the disappointment and shock," without being condescending towards us for being concerned in the first place?

I'd be pretty happy if the anime was just using intense lighting and that Soma is darker than he appears (in fact, if that happens I'll reblog the good news to this post!) Because this post isn't "discourse" to me, I'm discussing race regarding one of my favorite characters in the fandom. Discussions like these don't ruin the fandom, but actually help it become a more welcoming place for fans of color.

[satirates]

One thing I think we don't talk enough about Q!Forever is that he has a problem-solver personality.

I used to be like that and I struggled a lot when I was a teenager because of that, and I think it's give a pretty good explanation of where his character is going lore-wise and why he's doing it that way.

Firstly, we could see pretty easily that he's always trying to solve every problem he's facing on the server as fast as he could.

Bobby died and the eggs are in danger of the same? Ninho was ready in a few days

The code shows the players that the only way to access the Nether is to go by train? He built a gigantic contraption to bring everybody's there.

Foolish wanted an eternal banana? Say no more !

And there's a ton of more pertinent examples of that I'm sure

People has said in the past that q! Forever is impulsive, but for me, it's more that he can't just stand there when things are bad. He needs to find a solution, he NEEDS to act. This is part of who he is.

But the thing that can be annoying when you're constantly in problem-solving mode, it's that everybody around you aren't necessary like you. How many times has we seen q! Forever doing stuff hastily to makes things work when other players were in the backroom? A lot. And when you experience that on a daily basis, you may start to get frustrated.

(I just want to add that it isn't a way to bash other CC! Characters. Everybody has their own way to play and have fun on the server, and they are ALL VALID! I'm talking about the characters in role play only)

About Forever arc

I think a lot of is current arc has to do with that feeling. The feeling that he's doing too much and people are not appreciating it, not appreciating him, enough. But he can't stop. He can't just let things happen without trying to help. Because it's how he is. The problem solver. The helper. The good friend.

So, how do one manage in this kind of situation? By becoming even more controlling. People won't help him make a better Island? Then he will impose thing that help the resident. He will do everything he can to protect and help everybody, even against their will. Him getting the president job is actually an interesting thing for his character because it gave him the control he needed to feel like he's making positive changes. He can now try to solve every problem on the Island...

But, as someone that "been there, done that", I can tell you it willn't work. Tensions are going to continue to rise between him and other because being a problem-fixer usually made you forget something very important in life: Not everything need to be fixed.

It took me years to realize that. Something you just need to... let go. If you try to always carry everybody on your shoulder, you are just going to die of exhaustion. And fixing everything is impossible. So you are just becoming more and more exhausted. People around you are growing more distant because you are constantly trying to fix their life instead of just... being there for them.

I think this is where q!Forever is right now. His need to help his conflicting with other Islander needs to be imperfect and the constant conflict made him feel lonely and underappreciated.

This is so interesting in terms of role play because there are several routes he could take. Will he continue to hold, with his resentment growing deeper and deeper? Will he learn to let go and accept that thing sometimes suck, and it's okay to not take responsibility for it?

Will he succeed in making players enjoy the Island?

[chaoticmultifandom28]

What I love about luffy’s crew is that each member has some level of obsession for luffy.

First, we have Zoro, who imo has the biggest obsession, he was ready to die and never fulfill his dream so that luffy could fulfill his. He also became ‘king of hell’ because of luffy. And him being first to sabaody (this might be a headcanon of mine but I think he was first because he was worried about his captain and needed to be there asap to ensure everything was okay, even if luffy wasn’t there yet).

Then there’s Nami, who I think has the second biggest obsession, Luffy literally went and fought her oppressor because he made her cry. Luffy was the first person she could depend on after bellemere died. He’s a steadfast rock in a raging storm. He’s there to protect her and the rest of the crew and she will do whatever it takes to help him achieve his dream (I love her character development)

Then there’s Sanji. His obsession is pretty big but you wouldn’t tell because until WCI we hadn’t known sanji’s complete backstory and so we didn’t know just how much luffy impacted him. But once we get the full backstory we totally understand why he would be willing to put up with luffy’s insane stomach and antics to get food. Luffy would eat sanji’s food and give it the full appreciation it deserves no matter what and sanji’s food makes luffy smile. (I’m still catching up. I didn’t have access to one piece for a while and missed a lot and when I got access I didn’t want to be spoiled and so I started watching the [at the time] current episodes coming out [which was wano episodes] and also watching where I left off, but once I get through the entirety of WCI I can be more specific)

Then I would go with Robin as the next one. Which like nami, it makes sense. Luffy looked at her and told her to tell him she wanted to live. Robin had always been running and accepting of her fate and luffy went up and punched fate in the face and said ‘not today, bitch’ and was ready to fight the world government to save Robin.

Then I think Brook would be next. He was alone for 50 years and was a skeleton. Most people would be afraid and luffy took one look at him and said ‘you’re gonna be my friend now, you have no choice’. He wasn’t scared and he wanted Brook in his crew. There’s something about someone taking one look at you and thinking ‘you’re mine now’ when others usually take a look and say ‘nah’

Then I think Usopp and chopper are tied. Much like Brook, chopper became obsessed because luffy was like ‘so what if you’re a monster, you’re mine.’ That blatant acceptance is so strong and steady, how could chopper not be obsessed. Usopp became obsessed because luffy listens to his stories and lies and doesn’t even question the validity. Others listen and pretend to believe or indulge him or don’t believe him. But Luffy doesn’t give him that fake indulgence or pretend to listen. Having someone who just listens to you is refreshing.

Franky and Jinbei are also tied. Jinbei is new to the crew and doesn’t have the same level as others (I believe that will change in time) but he still has that obsession because he knows luffy has a good heart and doesn’t judge others on stuff that they can’t control. And this is the same for Franky. Both aren’t exactly human but Luffy would do anything to protect them because they are his friends. Luffy shows he’d do anything to protect his friends in the sabaody arc when he punched a celestial dragon because he shot hachi and in marineford he went against the whole navy for his brother and then in the fish man island arc he was so severely wounded (needing a blood transfusion) helping the island against Hody Jones. Even though these two are ranked last doesn’t mean that their obsession is small, it’s just when I thought about it they aren’t as strongly obsessed as others.

Wow I didn’t mean to make a mini essay about this, and I might have been wrong on some of the stuff, but it’s like 4 am when I’m writing this

[13thdoctorposts]

Because of all the recent asks about the current series I thought I'd send one about 13 to give you a break. So, in 13's era what are your favourite episodes and what themes or ideas did you find particularly compelling? Just feel free to gush essentially.

lol, I appreciate all asks but I do love to gush about 13 era so let’s do it.

I think many of us love Doctor Who for the theme of found family. What I liked about the 13 era is it shows found family in different ways.

You have Ryan and Graham. With Grace gone and Ryan being 19, they could both choose now to go their separate ways. But they don’t. By joining Yaz and the Doctor, they fix their relationship and become as close as any grandfather and grandson. Joining Yaz and the Doctor helps this, as the four of them become fam. It’s not about blood but actions.

Yaz comes from a stable, loving family. It's not broken. She and her sister clearly rib each other a bit, but they also have a caring relationship. But, what Yaz lacks is making her life have more meaning. By joining the boys and the doctor, she finds people to do that with. They are people she would risk her life for.

The Doctor has no one. She has just lost everyone and is still devastated by the loss of Bill. She has regenerated and is truly alone. But, she falls into the middle of these people’s lives. And while she has something to offer them, all of Time and Space they have something to offer her: companionship. She doesn’t have to be alone. She can see things again with new and excited eyes. Though she tries to keep her shadows hidden from her fam, they are also the rock that keeps her moving forward.

I think the era has many strong arcs. Graham and Ryan get through grief and choose each other. Ryan's relationship with his Dad. Ryan finds confidence in himself and is not let down by his disability. In the end, confidence and friendship on earth lead him to be ready to take on the world on his terms and help his planet. Also, Graham gets his grandson and gets through his grief of Grace, and is able to continue honouring her by looking after Ryan.

We have 13 with all her issues, particularly identity and letting people in. While she deals with her identity, her time is cut a little too short to fully deal with opening up. But, she does open up to Yaz about her feelings for her. I think that’s very vulnerable for this Doctor. And it's far more important for Yaz than knowing the Doctor's past.

Yaz we have mental health and confidence. We have her coming out and Thasmin. But, my favorite arc for the era is Yaz’s Doctorfication. It's really the end of all her arcs and time with the Doctor.

If we think of the kid we meet in TWWFTE she wants to be doing more to help, but she also wants to stick to the rules. She ultimately lacks confidence. She follows the Doctor (which is good for the story) because she doesn't have all the answers and doesn't want to sound crazy to her superiors. Theres a bit about worrying about how she'll be taken here. But, she was also willing to try to stand up to the Doctor. This showed the Doctor her leadership potential, even though she wasn’t there yet. And in a lot of stories she was essentially the 2IC of the team it wasn’t Ryan, Graham or Dan. And that 'flat team structure' was often more aspirational than anything else, lol. At the end of series 11, we know she’s had issues with depression. But, she’s also ready to follow the Doctor no matter what happens. So, even if she dies. 

In series 12, we dive deeper into the mental health. We see the way she reacts in Spyfall when she thinks she’s died. We see her story in Can You Hear Me. Through the season we see her step up and go off in her own, especially in Praxeus and TTC. Graham’s asking who’s going to go through first the force field to Gallifrey first. But, he hasn’t finished his sentence and she’s already walking through. She’s now the one telling people it’s dangerous and they don’t have to come. And we also start seeing those hints of her falling for the Doctor thought the series.

Then, in Revolution, we see her in what looks like a possible men brake or some sort of manic state that lasted 10 months. She slept in a sleeping bag on the floor trying to find the Doctor. When the most logical conclusion is that the Doctor is dead. Losing the Doctor breaks her. So, we see her mental health issues return. We also see how much she cares for the Doctor. The Doctor's friends have moved on, but Yaz clearly loves her and can't. This is after a season of watching her step up more. It's like a great mix of Yaz stepping up to find the Doctor. But, it's fruitless. And, it's also going backwards mentally at the loss. It's really quite interesting to watch the positives and negatives come together. Yaz might be having a mental break. But, she also has enough confidence to think she can still find the Doctor. 

Then we get to Flux and the specials. We open with married couple Thasmin bickering. It's my favorite scene of the whole show. But now we have a Yaz who isn't just letting the Doctor push her away. She's calling the Doctor out while also adventuring by her side. It's the most equal we have seen them. It's probably the most equal a Doctor and regular companion can be, one that's human. If you look at Series 11 Yaz and Flux Yaz we really have gone from a kid to a grown woman. She calls things out and speaks her mind. But, she also does good and helps the universe. In ways TWWFTE yaz could have only dreamed. We start to see more obvious signs of Thasmin and Yaz's feelings. This happens as she leads her own team through the early 1900s. She is now essentally the Doctor of this team. Then we have the specials. She has to confront her feelings. In LotSD, 13 confesses her feelings but says they can't be together. We see Yaz's confidence now ask why, not just accept the Doctor words. Then we get to the beach. It's pure heartbreak. There, we see a mature woman. She knows their feelings are real but they are doomed. Loving the Doctor is always doomed. and Yaz loves her enough to leave it.

Then in The Power of the Doctor, we see peak Yaz. She flies the TARDIS and catches Ace jumping off a building. She takes on the Master and saves 13 many times. She gets everyone home safe, just like 13 would do. We see her lose the woman she loves but in that episode we see her Doctorfication arc complete. But it's a healthy one. She has taken the best parts of the Doctor with her. She isn't burdened by the morally grey aspects. So she is as much the Doctor as a Human can be. She is the true successor of 13 to me. She was The Doctor's best student. She left the TARDIS without being morally compromised and with all the best lessons from 13.

You said to gush... probably didnt think it would be this much. lol

I'm terrible at picking fav eps so I'll do top 3 for each series... this is always subject to change. lol

S11 The Woman Who Fell to Earth, Demons of the Punjab, It Takes You Away

S12 Fugitive of the Jadoon, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, The Timeless Children

S13: Flux War of the Sontarians, Village of the Angels, Survivors of the Flux

Speicals: All of them 

[coquelicoq]

hmmm for the shipping meme! matonato and hankim or yoohankim?

[ID: A graph with the x-axis labeled "makes sense" on the left and "doesn't make sense" on the right and the y-axis labeled "compels me" at the top and "doesn't compel me" at the bottom. points labeled MN for matonato, HK for hankim, and YHK for yoohankim have been situated on the grid: MN in the top left (makes sense, compels me), HK at the top and to the right of MN (makes some sense, compels me), and two points labeled YHK, one slightly above and to the left of the center (makes some sense, compels me some) and one in the bottom right (doesn't make sense, doesn't compel me). /end ID]

wow this threw me off because for some reason i assumed that makes sense would be on the right instead of the left! so hopefully i made all the necessary corrections to what i originally wrote lol.

matonato: makes sense, compels me. probably obnoxiously obvious to everyone at this point. do they get a happy ending? i mean it's very fun to think about and i love me a good actually-together-matonato concept, but probably the most compelling thing about them is the star-crossed aspect. it's not will they won't they, it's why they why not they. why do they want this and why can they never have it? it's, how can i make this about natori's self-hatred? it's, who is matoba if he quits the exorcist business? (EXTREMELY JUICY AND COMPELLING QUESTION 2 B ASKING.) it's, what changes in their individual priorities and self-conception would be necessary before they could get together? asking myself these questions and understanding why they in their current forms can't be in a relationship helps me to better articulate who exactly they are and what motivates them and gives me avenues for thinking about possible character development. but like i said i do really love thinking about matonato endgame, and even though i know it's never going to be canon (which it doesn't need to be, obviously! we are in our sandbox making our own dreams come true), i'm reading the homura arc like girl why did you do that. where are you going with this??? fellas is it gay to stalk your homoerotic rival's enemies and the answer is a resounding YES. they are a good ship because thinking about each of them in the context of the other expands my understanding and appreciation of their individual characters, but also because it would be sexy for them to mash their mouths together. both are very important elements of shipping 2 me.

hankim: i want to say this is one of the most compelling relationships in orv but they are all compelling, it's actually insane. however hankim is definitely tied for first (with twenty other relationships). her love for him is the beating heart of the story. like the entire plot hinges around her loving him so much she would [redacted], but also the central themes are exemplified by how she feels about him and what she does about it. and he trusts her in a way he can't really trust anyone else, because she knows enough about the world that he can be open with her about things he can't tell others, and because he trusts her to be competent and able to achieve his objectives. mostly to me though their relationship Is About her love for him because of how badly he needs it and how little he can understand it, and how central it is to his entire character that he needs but cannot understand receiving that kind of love. i have not yet succeeded in imagining any kind of compelling sexual relationship for them, except the somewhat indirect one where he gives her permission to make a kim-dokja-looking avatar with which to fuck yoo joonghyuk while kim dokja is elsewhere minding his own business, but that's fine, they don't need to be having sex to have a compelling relationship, obviously. so yeah it's compelling af and it does make sense, but i'm taking some sense points off because the kdj-to-hsy direction is pretty standard shipping material while the opposite direction is like the entire point of the book. it's a lil unbalanced.

yoohankim: this ship fascinates me because i definitely never would have come up with it myself. hankim? see above. yookim? see below. but yoohan - DESPITE THE WHOLE DEAL AROUND WHO YOO JOONGHYUK IS AND HOW HE GOT THAT WAY - are just like. Only Here For Kim Dokja. any relationship they have with each other is a proxy for a relationship with kim dokja, mediated by their feelings for kim dokja, and put through the sieve of who the other person is to kim dokja. i think they have a very psychosexual thing going on where they're having a lot of sex with each other but mostly in order to feel close to kim dokja, who is not involved lol. which is its own kind of compelling, certainly. i guess you could say yoohankim is the ONLY way that yoohan makes any sort of sense to me whatsoever, so in that regard yoohankim is squarely in the northwest quadrant. but at the same time i feel like if kim dokja is actually present, their relationship with each other is more like in-laws than anything else. it's indirect. they don't have divorced energy…they don't even have metamour energy. i don't know. they're like this is my sister's mailman and i have no idea what he's doing at my nephew's piano recital, which is insane to me because they should have (nonsexual) parent-child energy if nothing else. so i also have to put yoohankim in the southeast quadrant. so far this is where most yoohankim fic i have read falls, but probably i just haven't yet found the one that would unlock it for me.

to close the loop i gotta talk about yookim (joongdok). the most enjoyable thing about it to me personally is that yoo joonghyuk so clearly wants kim dokja to hold him down and it's very fun to see kim dokja have to shift his entire paradigm to make that make sense. i mean, i think all of kimcom wants to hold kim dokja down (most of them nonsexually imo), but yoo joonghyuk is the one guy who's like "if you would just stop trying to kill yourself for two seconds then i could let you out of these handcuffs so you could have your way with me. you bastard." they make me crazy because they work together SO well and trust each other SO implicitly while also being like, wow this idiot has terrible priorities and so i have to manipulate him into furthering my agenda (keeping him safe) instead of his agenda (keeping me safe). they're also that evergreen combo of guy with low self-worth who's oblivious to other people's love for him/guy who loves so hard but never uses his words about it that makes me wanna read about them getting together 100 different times. in a slightly different sense than with matonato, thinking about them as a twosome better elucidates aspects of their own individual personalities and worldviews, which makes for a compelling shipping experience.

[theheirofthesharingan]

"Moreover, the people "praising" Itachi are:

Naruto. Naruto has a naive and very simplistic view of the things in which the village is always the priority. He sees his village as the flawless entity and anyone who is pro Konoha is good according to him. That's what he's been taught and that's what he believes in too. He sees Itachi stopped the war by taking the blame of the crime? Good. However, even then Naruto doesn't do anything to clear Itachi's name, despite becoming the Hokage. More than a decade later, Itachi is still a renowned criminal in the Shinobi world, not very different from the other criminals. Naruto's praise is hollow."

None of this is true....? Naruto's priority especially at the point when he learns about the truth of Itachi's actions are to stop Sasuke from hurting himself. Naruto's ideals are the promotion of "peace" "self-sacrifice" and "the greater good", but they aren't based around Konoha literally. There is a reason he doesn't wear his hitai-ate for a significant part of time before and after hearing Itachi's truth. There is a reason he doesn't respond to any of Sasuke's threats to destroy the village and why he doesn't entertain the notion of killing Sasuke over it. When Edo Tensei Itachi and Naruto meet, Naruto recognizes Itachi's suffering and tells him that Sasuke can't get over that. He isn't glorifying Itachi's actions, he's just talking about Sasuke's response to them. Furthermore, he tries to tell people the truth multiple times. The first time Kakashi stops him, and then the second time Itachi himself stops him because he doesn't want the Uchiha to look bad. Even Sasuke on the bridge says he doesn't want the Uchiha name to be attached to the shinobi world anymore because that's how it got tarnished and they were forced to suffer because of it, and he never takes that back. So, why should Naruto go against the wishes of the two people directly involved? The only time Naruto says anything remotely praising Itachi is when he tells Itachi he can stop worrying because he's done enough for the village, but that's after Itachi explains he was going to brainwash Sasuke so it feels like Naruto telling him he doesn't need to interfere anymore because he will handle it. There are also multiple ninja he respects and appreciates, like Nagato, who are not "pro Konoha". They're simply ninja who helped him grow and learn about his philosophy.

You're right that the only people that overtly praise Itachi are people trying to manipulate Sasuke (and exploit will of fire/curse of hatred dynamics), Naruto isn't one of those people and it shows by the fact that he doesn't praise Itachi beyond thanking Itachi for helping him.

I would agree with you to some extent, but my comment constituted of the whole arc from the truth reveal to the time elapsed until the current generation in Boruto. That's why I said the praises are hollow. A lot has changed. The characters, their dynamics, maturity attained from fighting in the war, and new world order would have given everyone new insight into what went wrong previously.

Naruto, as a Hokage, who loved Sasuke, even if he didn't feel anything for Itachi, could have done something more than the lip service. It's not about Naruto immediately taking an action or declaring to the world Itachi was used by the government, rather doing something afterwards. Although that criticism is more directed towards Kishimoto than Naruto himself, because when you're creating a sequel with the dangers and threats similar to (or greater than) the main series, you choose to keep the system the same as it was in the beginning. And in the process you lose what you wanted to change in the first place.

I tackled this bit in my fic, and in it, while Itachi's name was never cleared, Kakashi and Naruto made sure the clan's honour was restored. No one forgot about them, they were respected, the Uchiha district was merged with the rest of the village etc. Hiruzen and Danzo's truth never came out, but the two elders were punished. Naruto and Sasuke (especially Sasuke) made sure a tragedy like that never happened ever again.

I would have loved to see something like this happen in Boruto as well. But since I don't watch it, I'm not sure what's going on.

[joyce-stick]

Suzume Isn't Gay, But We Liked It Anyway

Despite not being as gay as Shinkai might have tried to make it during its development, Suzume is still quite a good film which we enjoyed immensely on account of its characters, compelling narrative, visual beauty, thought-provoking themes, and the improvements observed over Shinkai's previous two films. So this an essay about Suzume, about why it's good, what its themes are, and our glowing recommendation.

Transcript under the cut.

Previous video essay/transcript: Audrey's Best Girls Winter 2023

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Citations!

Baron, Reuben. “Director Makoto Shinkai on the Anime Artistry of Suzume - Exclusive Interview.” Looper, Static Media, 12 Apr. 2023, https://www.looper.com/1254434/director-makoto-shinkai-anime-artistry-suzume-exclusive-interview/.

Brzeski, Patrick. “Makoto Shinkai on How Anime Blockbuster 'Suzume' Reflects the Current State of Japan: ‘the Most Honest Expression I Could Put on Screen.’” The Hollywood Reporter, Penske Media Corporation, 7 Mar. 2023, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/makoto-shinkai-interview-suzume-anime-berlin-2023-1235329404/.

Pulliam-Moore, Charles. “Makoto Shinkai Wants Suzume to Build a Bridge of Memory between Generations.” The Verge, Vox Media, 15 Apr. 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/15/23678724/makoto-shinkai-suzume-interview.

Jackson, Destiny. “Director Makoto Shinkai on the Tender Resonance and Maturity of Making 'Suzume': ‘I Think about How to Dig Deeper so I Can Emotionally Move People in My Vicinity.’” Deadline, Penske Media Corporation, 15 Apr. 2023, https://deadline.com/2023/04/suzume-makoto-shinkai-japanese-anime-weathering-with-you-your-name-1235325691/.

https://twitter.com/ao8l22/status/1513116464210919425

https://twitter.com/moogy0/status/1592346490315640836

I had a few good reasons to assume I would hate Suzume.

We've seen three of Shinkai’s films. Yes, those three. We liked Your Name quite a bit when we saw it in theaters, but its flaws became apparent on a rewatch a few years later. We did not like Weathering With You, which made its flaws apparent to us rather immediately. Never watched it since watching it the first time, but, I don't know, maybe we'll go back to it.Still, thinking about that film had us pissed off for a little while, although we're less pissed off now, for reasons we might get to later. So, when we went to watch Suzume, I was reasonably expecting to hate it, or, even worse, enjoy it, while seeing some intractable flaw in it that ticked me off immensely about it.

And… I found none! I mean, maybe I'll think of one later, but my current opinion of Suzume, as I write this hours after having seen it, (and speak it, 'bout a couple days after having written this) is that it was a pretty good film with a lot of breathtaking visuals, funny moments, some emotional bits, and no real huge flaws to speak of. In fact, not only does this film lack the biggest flaws of its predecessors, it's also got a few things about it that I appreciate more.

First thing I liked immediately: Girl. I mean, her name, is the title. It's no secret that we of the joystick system appreciate beautiful anime girls, and this particular such beautiful anime girl is good, both as the protagonist of the film who does all the proactive things to save the guy, which is different from the last two movies where the guy did all the stuff. I'm not gonna pretend like Shinkai is suddenly some kind of feminist icon now for correctly giving a female character some goddamn agency, but: it's a nice touch for us personally, given that… we like girls. It helps that Suzume is emotional and interesting and funny and has a pretty good arc through the movie and her voice actress does a good job- no, we did not watch the dub. I'll probably talk a bit more about her later, but I think she's good.

I think it's important to mention with regards to this girl, that she was, apparently, supposed to be gay. This information came to light in the English speaking anime community after a Japanese entertainment journalist tweeted a tweet sayin’ as much, and then professional translator Moogy went and tweeted about it in turn, citing this journalist as a source. I can’t find that this chain goes back any further than that, although I tried to out of personal interest, because, if I had, then I would’ve been able to write that into the Wikipedia page- which, I DID CHECK, and it briefly mentions that -

Okay, so, since writing that, another, Wikipedia-admissible, source, in the English language, emerged, in which Shinkai is interviewed, and confirms this to be true. So as such, I added that information to the article, with that source. Look. There it is! And it’s still there, probably, unless someone removed it while I was making the video.

In this interview, the interviewer asks Shinkai directly about this, and he says, “I’m surprised you know it! I’ve only told Japanese interviewers about it!” Clearly Shinkai is unaware of the power of Moogy. So, he goes onto say, that, yes, it was his initial idea for a companion, and that the theoretical character who Souta replaced would’ve been Suzume’s onee-san crush; that’s how I’m taking this whole ‘sisterhood romance’ thing. He thought he’d done enough with the boy meets girl thing, and he wanted to try doing something else.

His producer rejected it, because, in Shinkai’s translated words, “You may be tired of these romantic stories, but your audience loves it,” which, I believe, is a polite way of saying “I don’t think a gay film will sell.” The chair thing was chosen to “not make it too much of a romance”.

Shinkai further says— and this part kinda gets me— that he doesn’t think the story would’ve changed if it had been gay, or if Suzume had been a boy or non-binary or whatever. Quote:

“It's not necessarily the context of male/female; it's about a human overcoming something. In my future films as well, I want to focus on that human story as opposed to too much commentary on gender or sex.”

So, my reading of this response, and, take this with a grain of salt because it’s only my personal interpretation, is that while Shinkai was interested in making a gay film as a change of pace, he did not consider it important enough to insist on. There were other things he wanted to make the movie about, and he didn’t want to die on the gay hill.

And, y’know, that’s a shame, but I think it’s fair enough. I would have liked to see the alternate timeline where no one stopped him from making the film gay, but if it wasn’t already clear, I like the film that we got, and I don’t fault Shinkai for having other priorities as a director, like, for instance, getting his film funded and keeping his job. And honestly, I can halfway see the merit in not making it a gay film, because then it’d be a lot harder to, y’know, address the themes, without addressing whatever gay discourse there’d be that overshadows the themes.

I don’t say this to be like, “ooh, the film would’ve just been gay and that would’ve been bad,” it would’ve been good for the film to be gay, I just mean that a lot of the time people are more concerned about there being representation rather than the quality of the story in which the representation exists and it becomes the gay thing, rather than, the thing that happens to be gay, and that’s not always great. I mean, I guess we are getting a little bit of that just off of the knowledge that the film could have been gay, but at least I don’t have to think about talking about it too much past this point, because it’s, y’know, not actually in the film.

Shinkai said other stuff, too, I guess, about the animation and how the characters have different color palettes for daytime and evening and night scenes, which explains the very convincingly presented amusement park scene, that happens at night! So that was interesting.

Anyway, that’s the addendum I have about that, I’m gonna go back to the rest of this:

I have no idea if this would've been good for the film or not, but we have a different video being written about gay pandering, so, let’s move on then I guess!

The second thing that we liked was the film's opening minutes. And to explain why this is, I need to give a bit of context, I think. So, in short, after the 2011 nuclear meltdown and earthquake that irreversibly forever changed Japan and the life of all the people living there (and also delayed Madoka Magica's finale), Shinkai apparently decided that he wanted to make a bunch of films about it. About three so far, to be exact. Which, y'know, is not a bad motivation for making films. It's certainly a better motivation than I had to write this video

So, as such, his last three films are a novel fusion of wacky comedy, coming of age romantic melodrama, and disaster film. Your Name and Weathering With You had really slow buildups to the disaster part of the disaster film, to the point that mentioning it is almost a spoiler, but I'm going to assume it isn't because everyone has now seen those films. So they have a whole first half where it's just kind of weird supernatural romantic comedy slice of life hijinks but then it abruptly tone shifts in the second half.

This is actually, I think, the source of both of these films' major issues. It's kinda cool to watch them the first time and then see the story's tone shift when the mid movie plot twist happens, introducing the big disaster scenario aspect of the story along with it, but the drawback to that approach is that you have, in essence, a movie whose plot twist is that it becomes a different movie. This both contributes to the odd tonal whiplash and also means that the supernatural disaster part of the film is weaker and not as well fleshed out as it could be.

Suzume, on the other hand, smartly introduces the main conflict of the story in the first act of the movie. This choice is good. The serious existential threat to Japan stuff that the film is about is the immediate focus of the film. This allows for a more balanced tone, as then the movie can comfortably use its comedic parts to add levity to its treatment of that harrowing topic, rather than the existential stuff comin' in like a sledgehammer to break a previously comfortable tone- which, I should say, IS a thing you can do, and IS a valid choice to tell a story, I just don’t think it was necessarily a choice that Shinkai handled well before. The pacing is much improved, as the supernatural aspects of the film are more evenly developed and the story has more time to explain itself. Mostly. There's like one scene I don't get. I’ll get to it?

Anyway, the end result of this choice is that Suzume feels like a much more focused and complete film, rather than two halves of different films. Aaaaaand, I appreciate this! A lot. I can see this choice maybe maybe maybe making the movie less interesting to some people, because it's paced more like a normal movie than Shinkai's other previous two romantic comedy disaster movies, but, hey, I think it's nice that Shinkai seems to be growing as an artist and a writer and a filmmaker, who made a normal movie that didn’t leave us confused, and disoriented, and confused, about what it’s about

Other things I like… I like the visuals. The animations and backgrounds and visual effects and the CG are all pretty fire. Suzume is generally a really beautiful film! We all knew this, but, really, it's really good. I like the chair thing. I like the way that the chair is animated. Apparently the animation of the chair was inspired by Luxo Jr., y’know, the Pixar short that became the origin of the Pixar lamp, and… yeah, I can see it. It definitely does have that old Pixar vibe of “inanimate object moving like a very real human inanimate object” that that has. I just like the way the legs move, and the way it emotes so convincingly with these subtle but credible motions.

There’s one scene involving a roller coaster that- that scene is incredible, that’s definitely one of the most visually novel sequences in all of Shinkai’s films that we’ve seen. I like the character design of the guy, Souta, also? When he’s not a chair, I mean. I dunno. The last two guy characters in the last Shinkai films looked like generic anime boys, but this guy looks like the kind of guy who I can believe a woman would find attractive. I like the look of his hair, I like how grizzled he is, I like his long gray coat, I like that you can look at this tired hunk of a man and immediately see that he’s been places and that he’s carrying some shit with him. Bonus points for that he looks like one of the Monogatari exorcists.

As for Suzume! Well, her design is maybe a bit generic, but… she’s a girl. It’s not like our standards are too high for girls. She’s supposed to be an ordinary girl, and, y’know, in this movie contrasting with this dude and then this chair, that works out well. And also, I appreciate that she rotates her outfits throughout the movie. My headmates and I love to see a woman change her clothes, not necessarily directly. I’m just saying, that denim jacket thing she had going on in Kobe, and when she lost her shoes in Tokyo and then borrowed Souta’s boots? Specifically borrowing the boots, because, the only pair of shoes that we own looks like this:

It’s a small thing, but like, Shinkai couldn’t make Suzume gay. Widespread trans representation in anime is a bit far off. I might well be eating off the floor conjuring table scraps pointing at a woman in a man’s shoes and saying “oi, isn’t it gender?” But like, 1, it’s a woman wearing a man’s shoes, and 2, yes, it is gender. And we like the gender. You cannot stop us! We did get to see the movie a second time with a friend, (thank you for seeing the movie with us, and reviewing our script!) and she insisted that the boots are femme coded, and, we disagree, unfortunately. I’m sorry, we cannot see these boots as anything but gender.

However! It is Shinkai’s fault that Onimai exists. That scene in Onimai is definitely influenced by that scene in Your Name. We know this because Nekotofu said so in interviews. Onimai is very good and based and funny, and this is a fact upon which I, and all of my headmates, equally quite agree. It’s nice to agree on something with all of yourself. SPEAKING, of the opening scene in Your Name:

Shinkai did not sexualize Suzume. So, if you hated that scene of Your Name, there’s none of that! There’s no chair peeping on Suzume or anything like that. So, if that knowledge helps you somehow, now you know.

Long story short. Should you watch Suzume. Well, yes obviously. By the time this video comes out, or, by the time you're seeing it, its theatrical run might be over, but like, if it’s not, then, yes, I recommend going and seeing it, like, today. And if it is, then remember to see it whenever it’s on blu-ray or streaming services or your local cat-themed anime distributor. Shinkai made a normal movie. I hope he makes an abnormally good movie next time. I believe in this man. Again. Somewhat. It’s not like it really matters what I say or think, but I do also hope that his next movie is just gay. I won’t matter, to me, or, to us, if his next movie is just a carbon copy of Suzume, but gay. I mean, he got away with making a heterosexual Your Name once after making the heterosexual Your Name. There is nothing stopping him. Except for the pigheaded businessmen who he may have to argue with.

Anyways, that’s that, I guess I’m going to talk more specifically about the plot now, so, if you didn’t see the movie, then, leave, now, if you care. If you did see the movie, or do not plan to see the movie, then, uh, don’t leave. Please. I’m going to put the Patreon credits here. It is not the end of the video. Please do not leave.

Intermission for extra thoughts and Patreon credits!

Hello everyone. This is Audrey, of the joystick system. The name of the brain that I’m the lead woman of. We’re still a plural system, as I’ve not forgotten, thanks to Luci and all my headmates.

As I already think I said, we saw Suzume a second time with a friend. As of this speaking, it continues to play in movie theaters, at least where we are, although it’s not showing nearly as often and probably not in as many places. Nonetheless, if it’s still playing in your area, I obviously very much recommend it. If you have the time and money to see it a second time after seeing it the first time, I think you should see it a second time. Because it’s good!

One thing I’d really like to change about this video, overall, is the tone of it. I think it came off way too much as “oh yeah, Suzume’s actually pretty good”, because I walked in with muted expectations, and then walked out feeling like it was pretty good but also kind of waiting for it to hit me that it’s actually bad… And, no, no, it’s an absolutely fantastic film and I imagine is probably going to line up with our top 5 movies of the year. Although, it’s not like we watch a lot of movies, so it probably won’t have too stiff of a competition. A different friend of ours saw it, and they absolutely loved it and had a lot of really good things to say that just made us like it more- so, yeah, no, Suzume is fantastic. Please watch Suzume. If you can.

I think I also should say, I disagree pretty strongly with the assertion that Suzume is “the same film” as Your Name and Weathering With You. As I’ve already said, the structure is much more cohesive in how it introduces the plot without the plot becoming the plot twist of the plot, and also there’s just a lot of improvements on writing and characterization and storytelling and the film is generally much more tonally consistent than either Your Name or Weathering With You. Sure, it’s a similar overall plot to both of those films, but I think there’s just as much merit in iterating on old ideas as there is in introducing new ones, and Suzume does a healthy amount of both. Maybe it’s a remake of the same movie, but if that’s so, Suzume is definitely the best version of that movie, and I think the growth Shinkai went through as a director and writer to get there is crystal clear.

And as I hope I’m about to make clear, the thematic weight of the film is much stronger as well. The decreased focus on the romance subplot helped a whole lot in that regard, I think, to bring the themes into greater focus, and like, gosh, is the film REALLY THEMATICALLY GOOD on top of being so well structured and written and visually spectacular. I walked into Suzume expecting it to be bad, I spent like two weeks while writing the script and making the video trying to think of flaws in this movie, and I can really only think of like two, which are one, that it’s not gay, and two, that some minor plot details are maybe a small bit inscrutable.

But neither of those things actively bring the film down! It’s just great! And, if we had the time to watch the film a third time and then do a complete rewrite of the script, I’d probably change the tone I took with it, but y’know what, I gotta say a thing, I’ve left people waiting long enough, this movie won’t be in theaters forever, so, it’s good enough, and good enough is perfectly good enough.

Also. The music was really good. It was a lot less intrusive than in Your Name and Weathering With You. Those two films really love going all ham on their mid-movie insert song sequences? In Suzume, the music is, the musical score, which is really really good and is used really extremely effectively in, specifically the chair chase scene, and the amusement park scene, and the opening of the film, and the big Tokyo scene, and really the whole film. It was just really very good.

And, other than that, I think I mentioned everything I wanted to mention in the script, so, uh yeah, that's that!

So, before we get back to the video, channel housekeeping. I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep doing videos, at least not regularly, as things are going. If you’re not already aware of the disaster life we lead, we’ve been aimlessly floating around quasi-homeless and unemployed, for about our entire adult life, and spent around three years crashing at a friend’s place, for longer than we should’ve been because of executive dysfunction, burnout, and general mental illness. And also money.

Most of the stuff we’ve been making our videos with, including our desktop PC, was stuff we got before we were quasi-disowned by our parents, almost, uh, six (note: four or five) years ago? and the rest of it is stuff we have, very not hyperbolically, emptied our bank account for because we kinda needed it. So, if that stuff breaks, and it’s going to eventually, we’ll be on even more hiatus until further notice. Obviously this is pretty untenable, so, we’re going to have to try to get a job, and I don’t see great odds of that working out for our transgender neurodivergent failwomanchild self, and it’s obviously going to mean we have less time to make videos and write things. Naturally the stress of our unstable situation has already been doing that job, but. Y’know.

So, if you want to help even our odds: Ko-fi or Patreon. That is currently our only steady source of income, and even a little bit extra would make a pretty big difference for us day-to-day. You can send us monthly donations through either, although, they take a smaller cut on Ko-fi, so, there’s that. Ko-fi is also the place for giving us money one time as opposed to regularly.

As for what you get out of this, well, besides the obvious your name here and access to our discord, you will earn our gratitude and also we will feel indebted to you, which will lead us to try our best to keep making things. And also if you ever encounter us in person, we’ll give you a hug, if you want one, as long as you’re not, like, creepy about it.

Is that everything? Um. Yeah. That is everything. Here's all the names of all the important people who...

Thanks to our generous Patreon backers:

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And, that’s that. Thanks to all of you, named onscreen and vocally, and also those of you not named but who’ve been watching, or encouraging us personally, for your support. Now, back to the normal part of the video. Spoilers for Suzume from here on, obviously.

Intermission over!!!

Okay, so, spoilers.

Plot of this movie! I’m just gonna steal bits of the Wikipedia summary, because I don’t want to write a plot summary myself and get waylaid.

Suzume Iwato is a 17-year-old high school girl who lives with her maternal aunt in Kyushu. One night, she dreams of searching for her mother (who, it's inferred later, died in a tsunami) as a child in a ruined neighborhood. The next morning, while headed for school, Suzume encounters a young man searching for abandoned areas with doors. He then is cursed to turn into a chair by a kitty cat who desires love and she runs away from home with him, and he explains that these doors in all these abandoned places are doors to an alternate dimension that occasionally let out supernatural beings called worms that do earthquakes, and they need to do the right rituals to close the door properly. So their journey across Japan to prevent the earthquakes and also get Souta back out of being a chair, thusly begins.

First of all, I think that Shinkai did an excellent job conveying the pain of losing one’s mother. I say this, because, uh, we have also lost our mother, and grieved her loss. She’s not dead, in case you’re wondering, she’s just a worthless piece of human garbage. So, I guess it’s a little perverse to compare our being estranged from our shitty nuclear family as a result of the events of our entire life up until we were twenty to Suzume losing her single mom in a natural disaster when she was four, but I can’t pretend that the former experience did not lend itself to us empathizing with her, in general. Like, we did definitely cry. That’s a thing that we did.

I also like how cleanly the movie conveys this information within a few minutes. Like, you get the opening sequence of the small Suzume searching for her mother in the Ever After, and then she wakes up a seventeen year old, and you hear her address the woman who is her guardian by that woman’s first name, and it immediately clicks, "ohhhh… orphan, got it, got it, got it," and yeah. In contrast to the previous two films where Shinkai took half the damn movie establishing what these characters’ lives and their relationships with their friends and relatives were like, this kind of storytelling efficiency (which, is present throughout the film, in establishing Souta's relationships as well) is impressive.

And like I said, I like the immediacy with which the plot begins, with Suzume meeting Souta, being asked about the ruins, and then going to check them out herself. I like that there's not a whole album of insert songs in this movie, no fancy opening cinematic, no big deal montage, just a smash cut to the opening title card while Souta and Suzume are trying to close the door in the old bathhouse. It's clean. It's real good.

So, then Suzume tries to patch Souta up when he gets injured, and then he gets cursed by this cat to become a chair, and then the movie gets further good! Suzume runs away from home to help Chair Souta capture this important cat that's supposed to be keeping the earthquakes from happening. And this greatly aggrieves her aunt Tamaki, who's just been trying her best her whole life and everything and I will say, um-

I'm going to get to that!

So, one thing I have to say specifically- I had not read any details about Suzume's plot or interviews from Shinkai before seeing it, and I kind of got the whole deal immediately with everywhere that an earthquake comes out of being an abandoned place of gathering. A closed bathhouse, school, amusement park. This all feels very harrowing to see onscreen- as an American! even though it's clearly intended as commentary on Japan's population decline, because, uh, have you heard of dead malls

If they ever do an American live action version of Suzume, it'll be about them visiting abandoned shopping malls, probably. please do not do that

But yeah, like, we live in Portland, Oregon, and compared to having grown up in pre-covid Philadelphia most of our life, post-covid Portland feels like a ghost town. Like, it's not actually, there's obviously still people who live here, and I don't mean that derogatorily because we love Portland and we'd like to keep living here, if possible, not the least because we get easy access to HRT. But like, there's a lot of closed and abandoned places in Portland, so many empty areas and business that have been boarded up and closed to the point that at times, wandering through downtown Portland almost feels like living in an open world video game where most of the buildings don't have designed interiors.

Places that all clearly closed within the last three or four years, with their signage up and everything. Places that are left in stasis to lie disused or else be reclaimed by the homeless until the homeless get chased out by the cops. It's all just really… eughf. It makes us sad to see this place, this whole country really, be stuck in this kind of disgusting degradation while our government fails to provide for us, let alone adapt to the challenges ahead of us, just leaves all these places where people lived, where people are living, now, to stagnate and stand like zombies of a past we can't go back to

There’s a scene in Heathers, one of our favorite movies of all time, where the main antagonist J.D. has a whole emotional reflection on how the stability of this franchised commercial convenience store enterprise has kept him feeling like there’s continuity in his life, and like, yeah, that’s kind of a feeling.

[Video ID: J.D. (played by Christian Slater), a black haired edgy looking teenage boy of about 16-17 wearing a long black jacket, paces about the convenience store "Snappy Snack Shack", speaking in an affected hard to place accent, to Veronica Sawyer (played by Winona Ryder), a brown-haired teenage girl of around the same age, who is wearing a grey dress that exposes her shoulders accompanied by a blue flower brooch on her chest, and black overalls)]

Veronica: I see you know your convenience speak pretty well.

J.D.: Yeah, well, uh, I've been moved around all my life. Dallas. Baton Rouge, Vegas... Sherwood, Ohio. There's always been a Snappy Snack Shack. Any town, any time, pop a ham and cheese in the microwave and feast on a Turbo Dog. Keeps me sane.

Veronica: Really?

Like, it’s eugh, because, obviously as an anticapitalist, we kinda dislike these sorts of places, the shopping centers, the strip malls, the gas stations, we're against all of this bullshit on principle these places are all kind of intensely hostile to… life, in general.

But also, these places are a part of the world we live in, and they are stable! Relatively. They are kind of the only way we've known the world to be. And it’s sad to see that stability be ever so more greatly upset by the pandemic and the… everything, with nothing on the horizon to replace it. And if and when we see this kind of stability disappear completely, it’ll be sad, even if it’s replaced by something better. We’ll probably miss something about wandering these gross, heavily commercialized disgustingly homogenized nightmare places that’ve been cannibalizing our communities this whole time. Yeah, we hate it, but... it’s where we live, and we’re not immune to nostalgia.

Nostalgia is just a nicer word for grief

And this same very such eughf feeling is very much echoed in Suzume. There’s this deep and palpable grief for these places and the people who used to live here felt in this film, and inherent in expressing that grief is Shinkai’s expression of the, y’know, important stage of grief, i.e., acceptance. Because, to close the doors, Suzume and Souta have to not just, close it, but also think of all the feelings and experiences of the people who used to live in these places, and then… let go.

When the amusement park scene happens, the ferris wheel starts moving, and Suzume is drawn in by the image of the ghosts of the people who once rode it, Souta starts yelling for her to stop, to not go in- not the least because she can’t see what she’s doing and is putting herself in danger, but also because she cannot go back. Those people who used to sit in that ferris wheel, laughing, crying, living, in this place, cannot come back. Suzume can’t go back. This past can’t be gone back to.

Okay, so, one thing I missed when I saw the film the second time. When Suzume was drawn into the Ever After through the ferris wheel door, she was seeing herself of the future in there, and that, was foreshadowing the end of the film. I’m keeping this part anyway because the emotional impact of that scene was still as described even if this plot foreshadowing bit was something I missed the first time seeing the film.

I read a few English language interview articles with Shinkai talking about Suzume right after seeing the film, both because I wanted clarification before I ran my mouth on two things. 1, I wanted clarification on what the cat wanted. I’ll get to him. 2, I wanted to be sure my interpretation of the doors thing was on point, which it was. Shinkai talks in one of these interviews about how when covid was happening and Japan was still trying to have the Olympics happen, it felt really irresponsible and bad, and he did not agree with this. He says, and I quote,

“You were opening this new door and not sure of what’s on the other side without bringing closure or understanding or coming to terms with what’s behind you. I want to say a lot of the Japanese population felt the same way. There was this kind of awkward air about us, and it really wasn’t time to open new doors without first reflecting on what came before us.”

And like, yeah, I agree. I just really, really agree with this. It is indeed what I took away from the film before I read this interview. Suzume spends this entire movie reflecting on the past and trying to grow beyond that and ultimately the one door that she opens, on purpose, is the one that she decides to open intentionally after reflecting on what brought her to this point and deciding what she needs to do and

Eugghhhh

I’m just saying, it worked. It really did work. For us, at least.

Now, to be clear: Japan and the United States are two different countries, and, while there are similarities in how the pandemic left our societies, they're ultimately two different societies, and I don't really know jack shit about Japanese society- I'm just relating, my feelings, of my experience, uh, our experience, as an American, to the feelings that we took away from Suzume.

And... even if I understand this all right. If the people who need to see this sort of message saw it, or, like, took that away, or acted on it when it did... that’d be nice, but ultimately I don’t think that Suzume will move any politician or other person in power making these decisions in Japan, or any country, enough, or in the right ways, to have any impact on policy. But y’know, Shinkai’s just a guy making movies, and I’m just one of the various split personalities of a deranged F-list anime YouTuber, so whatever. Such is life. It’s at least a nice sentiment.

So, the other things, in no particular order. I did cry a bit when Daijin, the cat, got sucked up back into the keystone. He’s hard to like at the start of the film, for, y’know, the reasons why he is, but ultimately when you consider that like… he’s been trapped that way, the same way as Souta spends trapped as a chair, for years? Centuries, for all we goddamn know? Once that clicks, it’s really hard to not empathize with him. And yeah, he might be a god now, I guess, but who knows if he was a person before, or, what even, and just, I think, I think if you spend god knows how long as a sacred relic keeping Japan from being destroyed by earthquakes, you at least, at least, maybe, maybe deserve, if nothing else, a little pet.

[pets microphone]

that was your little pet.

In one of the other interviews Shinkai did, he talked about how Souta becoming a chair, and also a Keystone sealing away the earthquakes, is intended as a metaphor for the experience of pandemic lockdown. It’s not a directly equivalent analogy, but, like, it does make sense! Souta is being forced into a position of being confined, to keep this dangerous and virtually uncontrollable force of nature under control, for the greater good and long-term preservation of society. And when you consider that Daijin was in the same position for gosh knows how the hell long, it makes it a lot easier to empathize with him! He wasn’t being malicious, exactly, not, willfully anyway, he knew that vacating his position was putting everyone else at risk, but, he did it anyway cause he just kinda snapped, like, fuck this, I want to go outside! That does make a lot of sense! Also it sticks out, also, when Suzume screams at Daijin, because that’s, y’know. It’s a whole scene. I feel like I want to say something about this! But I can't really land on anything to say about it? But yeah.

I think the whole thing with Suzume needing to sacrifice Souta midway through the movie is really well done. It’s extremely funny to me that Shinkai apparently thought to stress this point of the movie as how important it is for her to make this difficult choice because of how people criticized Weathering With You for not really being meaningfully critical of the consequence of Hodaka un-sacrificing Hina? And also that Hina never really gets a choice in being un-sacrificed, far as I remember, so... [whispers] that’s a little unintentionally sexist,

but whatever. I’d have to watch the film again, and I don’t feel like doing that right now

Suzume’s aunt, Tamaki. I do like her. She’s a pretty level-headed guardian, as guardians go. I like that when she finds Suzume and Serizawa in the car, and sees that going to this door is important to Suzume, she’s not immediately like, “fuck your feelings, we’re going home”? She’s curious about the child under her care. She’s concerned in a way that she’s willing to not only go all the way to Tokyo, but also to follow Suzume the rest of the way to see what's up because she clearly understands, logically, that even if she doesn’t know what it is that’s compelled Suzume to go this distance, it must be something that she needs to sort the fuck out in order to move on with her life, and that’s kinda good?

Although I should note that while she clearly sees the pragmatic value in not fighting Suzume on this, she’s also pretty reluctant to. She has a line where she’s like to Serizawa while Suzume is asleep, let’s turn the fuck around and go back, she’ll give up. So, y’know, Tamaki’s at least more open-minded than our mom was!

Speaking of that. There’s this one scene in the film, where Tamaki loses her shit at Suzume. Goes on screaming on about how she hates Suzume and wants her life back, and then she runs off to Serizawa being all like “I think I’m losing it,” and it’s a whole thing. On our first viewing, this scene felt a little out of nowhere. It was a whole sudden shock to have this intense scene happen and then also its pivot back into the magical realism aspects of the film with the black cat’s appearance, which confused us a bit cause I don’t think that was really explained at all.

But, watching the film a second time, and seeing the arc of Tamaki’s frustration reaching its peak with the benefit of hindsight, it made more sense that she’d come to a rope’s end and flip out like this. She’s been chasing her niece all across Japan, she’s ridden for several hours in a busted convertible in the rain, she doesn’t even have a proper explanation, her coworker has raised to her that this might be a kidnapping scheme- I get it. It’s a scene that I get.

I still do not understand the role of the large black cat though. Our friend agreed that that part didn’t make a whole lot of sense. So, that didn’t change.

I think the reason why it felt out of nowhere to us the first time is because it was entirely too familiar to our real life experience. In the middle of Tamaki’s rant, Suzume responds by saying, “but you said, ‘you’re my daughter,’” referring to when Tamaki first took her in, and said that. And Tamaki snaps back, “I never said that.” Our mother also did this exact thing, vehemently denying that she said and did things that we definitely remembered her saying and doing. (There's a word for this, it's... it's called gaslighting!) Living with someone who denies you this much, who makes you question your memory and your sanity and your general perception of the world this much, by forcing their own grief onto you like this, is just… really, simply, awful.

Throughout our childhood, we heard our mom say similar shit to us numerous times. That we were a horrible incorrigible child, that she hated us for ruining her family, that she wished she’d aborted us— all those sorts of things. The tone of Tamaki’s unadulterated rage in this dialogue was all too familiar to those memories. So, yeah, on both viewings, we were, very uncomfortable. Even knowing it was coming the second time around, it kinda caused us to actively recoil in our seat, to the point that our friend who we were seeing it with noticed our reaction and held out a stuffed animal she’d brought with her for us to pet.

So, um, yeah, that specific scene may or may not have triggered the PTSD that we may or may not have.

Tamaki does apologize for this later!

And she also, debatably, gets a bit of a pass for this since she’s not Suzume’s mother, and thus cannot reasonably wish that she had aborted Suzume, but can instead wish that she’d not done the unambiguously good deed of keeping Suzume out of the Japanese child welfare system, which, I can’t imagine is a good experience for a child. I don’t imagine any country’s child welfare system under capitalism to be a good experience for a child, but, y’know.  Well, we’re also kind of entirely opposed to the traditional family structure and the basic premise of parents in general, because giving only one or two people total power over a vulnerable young human life is not an ethical tradition to have in any case, but… eugh. That’s something for some other video.

In an interview with Deadline, Shinkai talks about this scene, specifically quoting the “give me back my life” part, and he says that on some level, all parents feel that way to their kids. And that while he acknowledges that it isn’t by any means acceptable to ever say that kind of stuff to a child, it is, y’know, a feeling that is there that he poured into it, and that he wanted to be there, for the parents in the audience who ever felt that way and regretted it. This is how we found out that Makoto Shinkai is apparently not single and does in fact have a child.

He also says, in this other interview with the Verge, that, he wanted the film to provide for an opportunity for people of different generations to emotionally connect with each other. So, in that context, I really understand why this scene is here. It’s serving the purpose of setting up that emotional bridge, that door between Suzume and Tamaki, these characters of two different generations who ultimately come to understand one another, with the hope that audiences in a similar emotional position might come away from the film having felt some sense of healing by way of, y’know, getting that. And also Shinkai talks about how the idealized nuclear family structure is not a thing that’s tenable or possible for a lot of families in Japanese society, and, it’s not very tenable for a lot of people in American society either!

So I recognize the intent of this scene. I think it’s commendable, even. If there is a parent and child out there who saw Suzume together on whom this had the intended impact, I think that that’s wonderful. I sincerely hope that they exist!

Even still… we, were a child, who regularly had this sort of thing said to our face by our real life mother, and tried, in good faith, many times over the years, to repair our increasingly fraught relationship with her, and failed. I am deeply, regrettably cynical about familial relationships because of our traumatic experience with our own family. Our mother is not the sort of person who would come to meaningfully empathize with us through seeing this film.

And we really fucking hate her, so… yeah, this scene is difficult to watch. It’s difficult for us personally to feel any sympathy for Tamaki when she’s saying that kind of stuff to Suzume, and once it was over I could only really kind of feel glad that it was over.

But! It’s not like it’s the film’s fault that our parents were bad. I don’t think our reaction was intended. It just happened! It just happens sometimes that different people other than who the thing was written for react to things differently. That doesn’t make the scene bad, or any less valuable to include. And I do think that Tamaki’s relationship with Suzume is portrayed pretty well and with a surprising degree of nuance! It’s good! Tamaki is a good character and she means well! And I do like what Shinkai said in that Verge interview about wanting to portray other family structures.

However I think that their relationship would work better if she was gay, because honestly, that entire “get out of my life” speech would hit a lot more and probably work a lot better in the context of being directed at a gay teenager rather than an assumed heterosexual one. But, hey, we thought we were heterosexual for most of our life, so, who’s to say much of anything!

Was there anything else I forgot to talk about? Um…

We cried at the end of the film, both times we saw it!

And also, while this film couldn’t have improved our relationship with our mother, it did serve as a very good bonding experience with our friend. I’m really glad we took her to see it. She really liked the scenes where Suzume sits and steps on Souta as a chair, that that was clever, that they took the opportunity to get away with that with him as a chair. And she also agreed that the chair in general was really well portrayed visually. She also cried! at the end. the heterosexual chair film made a lesbian cry. uh, two lesbians, cry. I’m not going to say anything more than that.

Thank you to everyone who watched this entire video. I have an excuse to do a bad job editing it now because there’s not that much footage of Suzume available and it’s all gonna get me copyright striked anyway

To summarize, Suzume Good. Suzume. Watch Suzume. I’ve been Audrey of the joystick system, and I did not hate Suzume. Thank you. Goodnight

[justsomeoneintoomanyfandoms]

Matchup for @karusenka

Hi! Thank you for proposing a matchup exchange, this was heaps of fun! I am currently up to episode 475 (Marineford Arc) of One Piece (but am aware of certain things that happen later) so please keep that in mind while reading.

I had so many ideas for this so it was a challenge to condense them all into just a few points. If you'd like more headcanons, let me know! I've got lots of thoughts about this one...

I hope you like your matchup!

In One Piece, I match you with...

Oh my goodness, you and Ace are such a good pairing! You’re actually very similar in both your personalities and mentalities. And yes, that’s both your positive and negative tendencies.

Ace loves your humour! I see him as someone who’s got a pretty childish sense of humour by most people’s standards so he definitely appreciates your jokes.

You’re both going to need to support each other during periods where you’re hyper aware of the opinions of others. But since you each care about the other regardless, you’re good support.

If he ever hears someone ignoring or talking badly about you, he’s going to jump to your defence. And if you do the same for him? You’ll have a highly emotional boyfriend on your hands. He’s not used to people caring about him so much.

Loves spending time with you doing anything that comes to mind. He enjoys showing you affection and giving you attention so it’s really a win-win for both of you.