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#which you could totally interpret as like a creative way to say ‘go die’ but no she doesn’t mean it like that
diasdelfuego · 1 year
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That post of yours about 1.01/1.05 paralleling in that way... I wonder how you would include Jacob saying if Lestat had not offered vampirism Louis would have killed himself that night into the picture? Bc I agree with your post a lot and I think it's very intersting to look into these parallels that aren't that apparent and yet apparent enough, but in the end, I also don't believe in stripping 1.01 of its context? What would it have mattered to Louis, how to die, by his own hand or Lestat's (maybe he would have preferred Lestat bc that way he wouldn't be ~going to hell~ etc or maybe he wanted to do it himself to "join" Paul in hell, either for that reason or also (most likely imo) bc he considered himself already damned, but who knows)? But that's not what Lestat does (as in, he could have killed him but he doesn't, and I don't believe he would have even if Louis would have refused but don't quote me on that) and while I recognize the parallel in hindsight, I do also believe that it was one of Lestat's most genuine moments and one of Louis' most genuine moments as well. I do honestly believe that Louis was in love at that point and that Lestat was too and for 1.01 to end up paralleling 1.05 is fucking tragic in the end bc I don't care to strip Louis of choice? Yes, the choice from his pov was death or dark gift, but if the plan had been to choose death by the end of that night anyway, the choice remains real imo. Ofc Lestat "convinces" (manipulates) Louis by saying the right things but they are said, manipulatively but still, in response to Louis' own thoughts. And I don't think it's even... fair to take the consent he gives away from Louis? To pretend like he is so blind all these years later still? It obviously doesn't take away from the abuse he suffers in the coming years or makes them in any way "his" fault, but it helps understand Louis' stance on things imo? IDK it's complicated but anyway, would love to hear your thoughts!
anon, first of all. can we kiss. second of all. i am sorry in advance for how long this reply is, and for any parts that turn out to be completely nonsensical. your thoughts are so interesting and i really want to reply before i leave for pride. and last but not least. you are so right.
like, i totally agree with what you are saying! about louis' feelings and about lestat's and about reading the parallel as, say, diminishing louis' version of events. i interpret much of it the same way, and i don't think what you are saying necessarily clashes with what i was mentioning before. i believe that a lot of this was more-or-less intentionally put in by the creative team to provoke these thoughts, and that even if some of these reactions we are discussing seem contradictory, they all cohere with the story being told.
so, let me back up, and try to go over the threads that may tie into the church scene, and maybe we can figure out what role louis' suicidality plays into the scene, and what's packed in this parallel with s01e05.
first i was having a vague thought about louis' introduction to vampirism here being more gruesome, but also having him consenting way more explicitly. i didn't really dwelve into what the changes may mean, i just found them curious. now, with the last two episodes in mind, plus some input and discussion from other people, i started thinking about it again, and i realized that there are some lexical parallels (just say/just say), some genre parallels (very horror/gore atmosphere) and some parallel narrative beats (which i was made aware of actually line up with the honeymooning / escalation / explosive violence pattern found in domestic violence) that make the s01e01/s01e05 scenes read as mirrors, or even bookends. and i realized that, even though the bite-wedding isn't framed that way, there's still a threat lingering there —a violence that louis was unarguably vulnerable to, regardless of whether he felt coerced or not, but that we as audiences are made to ignore because it's all so goddamn romantic. (what's interesting for me about both s01e01 and s01e05's final scenes, is that they very effectively mix the genre languages of horror and romance. a bloody massacre and a church wedding, that gruesome villain-dragging-victim's-corpse shot followed by a cinematic embrace among the clouds. i'll go back to this later.)
so, then lou brought up something key to the whole scene, two of the reasons why louis does accept the proposal: ambition and righteousness. to quote from the original ask, hunger for justice: "he wanted power because he was victimized by society and by lestat (...) louis said yes out of self-interest". and this is so true! from the moment lestat shows louis his power at that card table, louis completely ignores the danger in favor of befriending this powerful man to get his secrets. he may not have understood the true monstrosity of vampirism until that scene, but he knew he was walking into something dangerous and he did so willingly, because lestat offered him things nobody else did —power, yes, and praise from someone with that power, and using that power for louis' benefit, but of course everything else: the trust, lack of judgment, respect, friendship. love.
so, yeah, i agree with what you are saying as well! louis was profoundly in love with lestat, and lestat with him. and louis was seen —lestat knows the depth of louis' feelings. and yes, the mind-reading obviously implies a degree of manipulation akin to reading someone's diary and using it against them (‍💫😵‍‍💫) but it doesn't mean that what lestat says isn't a genuine reflection of how he feels.
i don't think the show is trying to get us to question that love by paralleling the two scenes —actually, i find it very interesting that their discursive line appears to be "it doesn't matter if he loves you, it's still abuse", as opposed to "if he abuses you, it can't be love". this is a story about oral history, reconstruction, memory, "truth and reconciliation" —to me, it feels that the narrative gives a lot of weight to survivors' own perception of our experience, as opposed to some idea of perfect truth. invalidating a survivor's feelings about and interpretations of their own experience in favor of some clear cut narrative meant to fit all abusive relationships doesn't actually help heal from trauma or prevent further abuse. there is no perfect story, there is no all-encompassing meaning, trauma happens to us and we make what we can out of it. when daniel challenges louis' version of events, this isn't the show saying victims are liars —a moment later louis reminds daniel in his own words that we are all unreliable narrators. if abuse shreds the tapestry of memory, the act of putting our experience into word is what allows us to thread it back together.
which is how we arrive at suicidality, right? because now, in s01e05, just before we learn of the true extent and brutality of lestat's abuse, we learn that rashid considers louis' current actions to amount to suicide. louis is reweaving the thread of his own story, maybe for the last time. and we will have that in mind during the entire next episode, while in the story, louis spirals again towards sucidality.
now, this is more the vibe i get and my interpretation from the books, rather than something i can say for sure the show is doing, but he definitely read louis' suicidality as being primarily passive —more of the 'i wish a truck would kill me by accident right now' than 'i am going to jump off this ledge'. and i think his religion has a lot to do with it —wanting to die by his own hand is too blasphemous, so he desperately seeks for either something to occupy his mind and also tether him to life (lily, religion, claudia!) and even his most actively suicidal actions are... fairly passive. let's go backwards:
if he really is 'committing suicide' in the present, he's doing so by inviting external violence upon himself. when he talks about his past suicidality in s01e06, he describes it as staying on that bench and waiting for the sun to take him. is s01e03 louis is suicidal (implied in the narration, confirmed by… i think jones?) and walks into the ongoing race riots, flailing at doing something about it but also putting himself in the path of danger.
in s01e01, jacob says he would have actively harmed himself if he hadn't accepted lestat's offer. i don't know if he's elaborated further, but i'm curious about whether he has any thoughts as to how. in any case, if he really thought suicide was his only path forward, if the church confessional really was one last attempt at staying his own hand, i think the church scene invites a very layered read.
so this is something that plenty of people have mentioned, but let me elaborate on the thread of religion/suicide/sexuality/vampirism that's woven through the first episode:
louis leads 'a life of sin'. louis' family is religious. louis' family believes in witches and that they are of the devil. louis hasn't confessed in a long time. louis' religion is at odds with his sexuality. his sexuality is something he actively represses. enter lestat, who may as well be a witch (i had some thoughts about this), who admits to being estranged from religion, who finally seduces louis. louis cuts contact —staves off damnation. suicide is against louis' religion, paul commits suicide, louis is blamed for it. after avoiding confession for whoever knows how long, he desperately makes one last attempt to save his soul: i laid with the devil, i laid with a man (they are one and the same thing!) and i want to die. the text already suggests it, but jacob's comment supports the reading that by this point he has accepted that he is doomed to eternal hellfire.
i think this is one of the most effective parts of lestat's 'wedding vows', actually: i can give you that death you crave for, but i can do it joyfully. i can take away the shame. i think the way lestat thinks about it, he'll be freeing louis from the shackles of his faith, and from the weight of a racist society as well. of course, we will see that louis won't be rid of his catholic guilt so easily, and that structural racism is much too powerful for individual empowerment to chip away at it.
like lou says, this also plays into louis' hunger for justice. he has been trying to play by the rules —white society's and christian religion's rules— for so long, and at every turn the world reminds him that there's no place for him in it. he has given up on this life that won't have him, he is seeking a way out. and lestat is saying no, wait, there is another path. you think the only options are ruin-shame-sorrow, or suicide-damnation, but look at what i can offer you: freedom. power. love. understanding.
it's not surprising that he grasps at this one alternative. it's pretty textbook behavior for people struggling with suicidality —and also my personal experience lol— and it's consistent with his characterization: in s01e04 he begs lestat to turn claudia, knowing that he's condemning her to the same monstrous existence as him, to assuage his own guilt —the rescue from the flames almost feels like an echo of the fire at the church. (sidenote: in s01e06, knowing louis is suicidal, lestat drags claudia back to tether louis to his life —just like he originally turns her in the book to guilt-trip louis out of committing suicide. which to me suggests that lestat really understands louis' thinking/feeling in this regard.)
now, when we take all of this into account, we are compelled to ask ourselves some questions. would louis have so willingly consented to being turned if he hadn't been suicidal? were lestat's actions spontaneous or strategic? did louis perceive lestat's monstrosity as a threat in that moment? would lestat actually have harmed louis if he refused? what does louis' refusal to call what happened to him abuse mean? does he really believe the version of events he is presenting? the motivations he ascribes to lestat and to himself?
i don't think these are questions we can really answer, and i don't think answering them is the point, but i do believe that the parallel between s01e01 and the overarching abuse cycle from the pilot to s01e05 is prompting us to ask these questions!
louis doesn't delve into why he ignored the threat that lestat's vampirism presented, and he doesn't call his experience. the arc of louis' being turned parallels the arc of his relationship "turning" abusive. a structurally disadvantaged person gravitates towards a more powerful individual who offers them comfort and safety they can't find elsewhere. maybe it's not "ignoring the red flags", maybe the same things that the abuser later leverages against them were traits that seemed attractive, maybe the abuser purposefully hides the true extent of the imbalance (lestat hiding the cloud gift, we would have never been equals) to lure the victim into a false sense of security. maybe the parallel is meant to tell those in the audience who don't really understand the cycle of abuse: see? you think you would notice, but you were seduced as well. in retrospect anything and everything is a red flag, but you didn't see any of this the first time around.
and the thing is, i don't think louis not framing these things as red flags means he is blind to them! like the fact that he doesn't call what happened to him abuse, it doesn't mean it wasn't, and it doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't see the gravity of it. but he makes it clear that he doesn't want to be labelled a victim, and is he wrong to hold onto that? another thing that i find interesting is that, while i have mentioned that i think louis' interpretation of the affair in s01e06 is more for his benefit than an accurate reflection of lestat's motivation, none of louis' actual narrated parts have... excused lestat, really? i feel like i need to go over it again to get a real sense of how louis talks about the topic but i never get a sense that he's being exculpatory. i think i'm losing the plot here, but anyway.
let me wrap up.
i think all of these aspects have a role in the original church scene, and into the parallel at play here. however, i don't think the parallel is meant to read as "louis didn't actually consent to being turned" (imho that reading in turn creates an implication that the only 'real' victim is the one that was violently coerced from the get-go), nor as "louis willingly ignored the red flags" (and so he deserves what happens to him). particularly contrasting it with claudia likening lestat to her rapist and then lestat comparing himself to him in s01e06, i think all of this is trying to convey that there is no good or bad victim, no good or bad survivor, no scale of evil to differentiate among people who get off on holding power and exerting control over others.
(likewise, i think that the fact that the show has so carefully established that louis abides by lestat's abuse of claudia is also another intentional layer of nuance that in no way is meant to demonize louis, but rather to show how complicated and fraught the dynamics of an abusive household can become.)
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zoophagist · 2 years
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Wait you have a Penny Dreadful verse? I kinda liked their Renfield. Would have loved to see the show do anything interesting with him, but nah, off to the Bedlam you go toad-boy.
i do! as i mentioned in the tags there i rarely get to use it anymore because the rpc has dried up, but yeah! i was very into the different interpretation (and loved samuel barnett in the role). was SO disappointed that he'd finally become Peak Renfield right as the show ended :/ sam made a remark in an interview post-finale that has haunted me to this day too, saying that there had been cut scenes that advanced a renfield & jekyll rapport:
“What you didn’t see in the final episode of Penny Dreadful because it was cut was [...] Renfield is left in Bedlam and is given to Dr. Jekyll, and there is a scene where Dr. Jekyll has perfected his serum —which is what they were gonna use on Lily — he’s perfected this serum and he walks up to Renfield and goes “Are you ready to change into your true self?” and Renfield goes “Yes, master!” And that was gonna continue into the next season. There was gonna be some weird kind of bonding between Jekyll and Renfield.”
and i'm, what? supposed to NOT think about that for the rest of my life? not pine for a PD jekyll blog to annoy? (also fascinating because it goes against what the creatives all said after that rushed finale, which was that the show ending was definitely, totally, completely planned and not because they were cancelled. not sure if sam got in trouble for insinuating otherwise...) oh, and in addition, the comics that followed the end of the show do include renfield as a servant (maybe a butler?) to jekyll, and the implications of the serum and what it could have done to docile him fascinates me to imagine because in PD canon... renfield is turned; he needs to consume blood or he will die and that is not a psychosomatic thing as readings of his novel counterpart may interpret it. it's a real need, so even if jekyll's serum alters his disposition enough to be socially acceptable, renfield would still have a material need to kill animals or humans for blood, and with a new, medically-stabalized conscience to make him feel guilty about that, that would be SUCH a tasty moral dilemma to untangle in my writing.
anyway yes, PD renfield is so interesting to me. in some key ways he's unlike book renfield at all, but there's something so excellently, evocatively renfield-esque in the acting and all that endears me to it, divergences notwithstanding. it definitely seems to be tapping into more of the dwight frye vein than the novel, and i think the those mannerisms are what make him read so obviously renfield in spite of other plot/character changes. he's also one of the few renfields that arguably becomes a real, fully turned vampire, so good for him, you know? he's a nasty little toad-man and i love him. i'd write him more if people requested it!
i don't have a catch-all tag for anything to do with PD, but if you want to see specifically more of my writing in that verse, check out this tag !
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Quick guys I need a funny post for my Hetalia ask blog
#not actually#I just really wanted to chat with myself in my tags#by chat I mean talk about my grandma lmfao she’s the best I just wanna express it somewhere ya know?#it’s very nice#I like it a lot honestly but I haven’t been doing it a lot which makes me upset because as soon as I post it I think of things for the tags#sucks to be me then but still#my grandma and sister made bread today#and my grandma is always like ‘shush we’re making bread’ and I think I’ve mentioned it before but she’s very strong In her belief in that#so obviously we do too (we being me and my siblings lol)#she’s the best honestly#I love her so much man I could never fully express to her how much I love her with words because that would do it an injustice#did you know she had 11 siblings? I didn’t up until a week or two or three ago#she also used to live in Chicago! it’s very cool#she makes very good food which is delicious every time everybody I know likes my grandmas cooking mmm very good cooking#i like the soup she makes it’s very good#she’s very religious too#every night when I go to say goodnight to her she reminds me to pray and tells me to sleep with angels#which you could totally interpret as like a creative way to say ‘go die’ but no she doesn’t mean it like that#pfft I’m her favorite too ✋😌 she gave me a full starburst candy thing and my brother got so jealous#try being the favorite like me smh 🙄#she even says I’m her favorite lmfao#I’m just flexing at this point but still#in like a few months or later this year she’s going to move out of our house though#she’s going to move 4 hours away to where I was born and where my grandpa is buried#though I’d be sad about it it’s alright becuase I know she’d be happy because she’ll have her brother and sister there with her :DD#we used to visit there every like month but then we stopped because of Covid yk#it’s also kinda dangerous but Oh yeah I was gonna talk about my bed ok so#I took everything off it right? ok we put two blankets down then a giant pillow#then this one Chewbacca squishmellow I got then normal pillow on the side for my cat to lay on#then pillows at the side of my bed too (it’s a corner bed) and I put all of my stuffed animals right in the middle
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diminuel · 3 years
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Today I’m thinking about the Supernatural ending again because I will never not think about it. (Cursed. We’re all cursed.)
I still cannot comprehend how we got the finale we got and I have issues with it on multiple levels. What I’ve seen often as an explanation why the finale was such a mess and a narrative break from all that the show had been doing before that is that there was network interference (some people are mean enough to suggest that you must be an idiot if you don’t realize that it was so fucked up because the network meddled. Which is definitely not the way to convince others to subscribe to your interpretation...... but that’s just background noise.) They also say that the messed up finale was full of hints that Dabb wanted to do something else and what he ended up putting into the last episode was a subtextual fuck you to the network.
Now, I like speculation (if it’s not delivered in a ridiculously condescending way) and I like various interpretations. But to be honest, Mr. Dabb has made some comments during his showrunner career which have rang the “oh no” bells in my head. But let’s ignore that for the time being.
Let’s assume that the network interfered with Dabb’s creative vision and that the finale was a “fuck you” to the network... Doesn’t that seem like an overblown author ego to you too...? Why would you intentionally write a ridiculous episode just to show your displeasure? Don’t the fans deserve better? Shouldn’t the finale have been for us, the viewers? Shouldn’t they have put in all the effort they could despite the circumstances to make something satisfying? Instead of it being a big middle finger parading as a worthy finale of a 15 year old show?
I don’t know. I’m struggling with this and would welcome input.
As an aside, I sometimes think that there are very few (male) authors creating or wrapping up series at the moment that I actually trust. Because sometimes it doesn’t seem to be about delivering the best story or the best entertaining that will please the fans. No, it just has to be shocking! Killing off my main character when he was finally going to be able to live his life freely? The whole “yeah, you can fight all those battles and win, and still die a random, senseless death. Shit happens, real life is tragic~!” mood that goes along with the finale just rubs me the wrong way. That’s the kind of stuff I did to my characters as an edgy teenager. And there have been a lot of people who cited that real life was unfair and to watch something for children if you expect happy endings to those who were upsets because SPN seemed to promise them one thing (a hopeful ending) and then did something else entirely. I feel it’s not the hopeful viewer’s fault that the show totally missed tonally preparing for what was to come. (I’d argue they did the opposite. I feel like the marketing beforehand had a different tone. So maybe Dabb and co really fundamentally misunderstand how the story they’re telling is received by the audience, maybe they too are still edgy teenagers in their writers’ hearts and think that tragedy especially if it’s random and pointless must be superior to basically anything happy and hopeful........)
Anyway. This is the conclusion of my midnight ramblings about the Supernatural finale that I still haven’t digested (though I’ve only seen it once - and I was looking away for parts of it - so at least the mental cinema isn’t replaying it all the time.)
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ingravinoveritas · 3 years
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I think it's somewhat amazing that David did happily play Lump. I watched this yesterday and went through a process of unbelieving delight. Ever since Doctor Who he is in the position to turn down every role offered to him, he can choose from a large number of projects, he has that standing now and has had it for years. And then he gets this absolutely ridiculous script, reads these lines, and thinks 'the voice of the naughty and shameless heart of a lesbian who doesn't want to die a virgin and tries to get it on with her nurse? Sign me up'. This isn't something he got a lot of money for, this isn't something that's going to get a lot of attention, this isn't, without meaning to disregard the creative process, a piece of big artistic value, it's really only fun. Do you know what I mean? I don't know how to phrase it better and in a way that doesn't sound too derogative, because that's in no way how I want to come across, I just think I'm not the only person who wouldn't have watched this by reading the premise alone, if it weren't for David's name in it? I also think I only enjoyed it *because* of David's voice acting, which really had me giggling a lot and made the whole thing so funny and charming in the first place. The fact that this role wasn't something he turned his nose up at/that this script wasn't something he thought of as too ridiculous... that's just so amazing to me, in the best way? Although I don't know why I'd even be surprised, seeing that David has never been scared of doing comedy and that he's always been willing and able to put on silly costumes and say the most absurd lines, all the while still managing to absolutely sell it. It's just never awkward with him. Somehow it's always art and high level acting, even if we're talking about an indecent, lewd, glaswegian vital organ. Incredible.
Hello, Anon. First of all, “Lewd Glaswegian Vital Organ” is totally going to be the name of my new punk band. Point blank, period. So thank you for that glorious turn of phrase. I completely get what you are saying about David taking the role of Lump, and if I may offer my interpretation: It’s the fact that he doesn’t think the role is beneath him. Like you said, he was in Doctor Who and has had his pick of parts ever since then. He’s done Shakespeare, for crying out loud, and I’m sure we could list at least a few Shakespearean actors who would consider “lowbrow” humor to be beneath them.
But it is a testament to the kind of actor David is and the kind of person he is that he has never thought of himself as being “too good” for a comedic role. It makes me think of the joke in the movie Galaxy Quest, with Alan Rickman’s character Sir Alexander Dane:
“I played Richard III. There were five curtain calls. I was an actor once, damn it! Now look at me. Look at me!”
Another example is the Tony Awards several years ago, when it was hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, and the epic opening number he did where several celebrities in the audience were part of the act. He bounced over to Al Pacino at one point and joked, “Al Pacino. You’re way too famous to participate in this bit!” And that is the exact antithesis of David, who has never acted like he is “too famous” for anything.
The other thing, too, is what you said about David not being scared to do comedy. He doesn’t write it off as a “silly” thing or give it less weight and/or attention than his dramatic roles...he actually takes it seriously. A wonderful example of this is his role as Davina. While that was before he was famous, the role existed in the context of a comedy show, yet David played it seriously. He didn’t play her as a caricature or a mockery of trans women, but as a fully realized character. David made Davina funny because of how she was able to fuck with the other characters and be better/smarter/wittier than them, not because of her being trans.
He also did the same thing with Crowley. David never made Crowley’s genderfluidity the butt of the joke, and made Nanny Ashtoreth a real character. The humor in Nanny wasn’t from David being dressed in drag, but from singing a lullaby about pain and death. He is a talented actor because he is dedicated to every role he plays, to understanding those characters and turning situations into humor, rather than people.
So yes, I agree with everything you’ve said here, Anon. We are so fortunate that David is as wonderful as he is, and we are lucky to have him...
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zabiume · 3 years
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i would love to hear more about your orihime thoughts! particularly on her characterization in fanfiction. what to do and what not to do. i love my girl, and i feel ya-- when an ichihime fic does her dirty, sometimes i'll try to slug it through to see if it gets better, but that's not really a guarantee. i love how you treat all the characters with such care, especially the karakura six. so please indulge us with more of your wonderful thoughts and brainworms!
Ahh, I love the main six so much, they’re such great characters and they all have really lovely interpersonal relationships with each other, so I’ll never get sick of talking about them lmao, but Orihime and Ichigo especially are two of my favorite characters and I think they’re just neat! I don’t want to be like,,,an authoritative voice on what people should or shouldn’t do because everyone has a different interpretation and the fun in fanfiction is having that creative freedom to do what you want, so do keep in mind these are my opinions and observations and in no way reflect any sort of scale on what is Objectively good.
TLDR: Me and my trashbag opinions under the cut ✨
I think one thing Kubo really excels at is writing Orihime with nuance, and some of the things he did with her really elevated my own view of what good characters can do in a story. He made so many mistakes with her, but reducing her to “Nice Girl, Big Boobs” was not one of them. The Hueco Mundo arc is really as much her arc as it is Ichigo’s, because it’s where she’s confronted with her own flaws and Kubo uses them as a baseline to develop her further in the next two arcs. Jealousy, weakness, dependence, stumbling over herself to stop Ichigo from getting hurt -- these were the four hoursemen of Orihime’s flaws early on and Kubo tackled every single one of them over the course of FB and TYBW arcs. Could he have done more for her? Sure. Am I happy with the screentime/focus we already got? Hell yes.
Now, I’ve read a lot of Orihime fics, from IchiOri, to TatsuHime to Ichi/Ruki, to RenHime, and even the less popular ones like ByaHime, Shuuhei x Hime, Shinji x Hime and RiruHime, and each ship tends to put different spotlight on her various canon traits, but for the sake of analysis, it’s generally agreed that she is 1) quirky/weird, 2) gentle/kind, 3) emotional and 4) a pacifist
The extent to which these traits are exaggerated usually depends on the ship. IchiOri writers like to work with her gentleness/quirkiness a lot as a complement to Ichigo’s own hardheadedness/rationality. In small doses, this works really well. Good IchiOri writers play on the goofy back-and-forth, light teasing dynamic that they have in canon where Ichigo plays the straight man to Orihime’s quirkiness, like the infamous Bread Scene, or Drainpipe scene, or the Post-battle Piggyback scene. In excess, you have the dreaded Little Blue Men. I don’t know who started this trend, but it’s seeped into the mainstream IH consciousness and there’s nothing we can do about it. The best kind of Orihime writing is when the writer embraces her weirdness in tandem with her intelligence. Orihime’s weird food, or her weird imagination or her weird jokes aren’t ironic because she’s a dumbass, they’re ironic because she’s generally very smart. She’s a Smart Dumbass. She scores cent per cent on her math exams but can’t think to use the stairs instead of flying down a drain pipe. She’s the kind of girl who would pour salt in her coffee on accident and then try to convince her friends she did it on purpose to gain extreme and hilarious reactions from them. I bring up IchiOri fics because they’re usually the ones who write this element of her character more, but it really applies to her in all pairings because she’s Like This with everyone. In canon, the other characters are exasperated by her but they don’t actually believe she’s stupid, just silly. In fanfic, characters think she’s serious, which has a way of painting her as very disconnected from reality/dumber than everyone else. A good rule of thumb to write her humorous elements would be to just emulate the atmosphere of a room when a friend makes a bad joke and you’re just Done With Their Audacity.
Orihime’s gentleness/kindness has its place and purpose in canon, too. Orihime isn’t forgiving to just about everyone. Think about how she treats Ulquiorra when he talks shit about Chad, vs how she treats Loly/Menoly when they talk about her. Think about her reaction when Ginjo was going to attack Ichigo vs when Grimmjow was choking her. Orihime isn’t forgiving to a fault, she just had really low self esteem in Hueco Mundo and had resigned herself to the possibility she might die. She only forgives enemies when they’re no longer a threat or when they’re on the literal verge of death and in need of closure. Orihime excels at reading between the lines for ‘what characters say‘ vs ‘what they actually mean’. This is why she’s good at reading closed-off characters like Ichigo, Uryu, and Riruka. The one time she fails to read someone is Urahara, but that was when she’d convinced herself she was useless, and no one really understands him, anyway, so who can blame her? TLDR: Orihime is tough and gentle and the nuance of writing her involves understanding what situations evoke her anger and what situations evoke her sympathy.
Ichi/Ruki fans & Non IchiOri fans like to play up her emotional aspect a lot, especially with how they deal with doing the legwork in making her move on from Ichigo and fall for the intended pairing instead. TatsuHime fics do this well-- very true to her character--where Orihime gravitates slowly from Ichigo to Tatsuki and no losses are borne to anyone, just as she would want. One thing I’m deadset on as an Orihime fan (and obviously, you’re free to disagree) is that she would never, ever consciously confess to Ichigo, regardless of whether her feelings are requited or not. I think this is why I have a hard time reading fics where she asks him out and he pity-dates her because a) she would never ask him out and b) she would know if he’s not into it because, like I said, she can read him really well. This is up to interpretation, but the reason I think so is because of how Kubo wrote her feelings for him in the manga.  If Orihime’s Five Lifetimes speech was supposed to be indicative of his feelings--requited or not-- for her, he would have been awake. Ichigo’s feelings for her have never been a factor in whether or not she loves him, because he’s just a good guy and she will always love his shonen protagonist ass. People tend to write her feelings for Ichigo as source of suffering, but the reality is that she likes being friends with him, and being by his side makes her happy. She doesn’t see her relationship with Ichigo as “just friends” because their friendship is so wholesome and complete in and of itself that there’s nothing “just” about it. Orihime would totally love reading fics where she’s evil, though, because she’s just Like That. Imagine if Kubo had done a breaking-the-fourth-wall omake with her, like they did in Deadpool. Peak meta comedy.
(Part 2)
Bonus:
I will forgive any IchiOri fic if they make Ichigo blush AT LEAST 2-3 times during,,,,you-know,,,,because that dude does not know what a cl*t is and you cannot convince me otherwise
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I would like to present (extremely briefly; it's more of an invitation to their thoughts rather than anything else) two approaches that touch on a creative technique used by Przybyszewska, which has been spotted by some of her scholars, albeit each in its own way. Ewa Graczyk maintains that Przybyszewska did not write a historical drama in any way, but rather described a completely different reality, an universum in which the same events happen, but which doesn't take place on Earth, with us in it. She describes, then, something which I call The French Revolution', taking after mathematics' nomenclature. Kazimiera Ingdahl, on the other hand, spots traces of gnostic and manichean ideologies in Przybyszewska's writing, which, as we all know, are based solidly on the contrast between Heaven and Hell, knowledge and numbness, soul and mind. I mention them here solely to point out there is a dualism in her works, it is important and easily recognizable.
I have nowhere near the amount of erudition these scholars do, so I will constrict myself to some more visible matters. In my previous post about Antoine, I've made a remark that stuck with me for far longer than I had expected, and so I decided to elaborate on it.
The passage I'm talking about is this: because it could potentially reveal Saint-Just as another Danton-like minded individual, looking for power for himself through sacrifices of others. I want to explore whether Przybyszewska really did construct both of them alike?
To me it appears very probable, as crazy as it sounds. First of all, ALL of the personages are created in some reference to Robespierre. He is the only singular, original mind amongst them all, not to mentoin an axis around which other revolve, and so all of them, whether we like it or not, are somewhat similar to each other. Second of all, she clearly went in the direction of mirroring certain scenes, ideas, expressions (which I personally love to track down and compare them later), and it's exactly the same when talking about certain individuals. The two pairs (Robespierre – Saint-Just and Danton – Desmoulins) come to mind right away. They are constructed as parallels at least in some aspects and at least to some extent.
Wouldn't that, however, put Saint-Just and Desmoulins on the same/similar level, aren't they the ones who creat a parallel pair? Well, yes and no. I think they are a unit when it comes to personal matters, for rather obvious reasons. But I also think they are both put in similar situations, and yet their thinking is polar opposite of each other. They are both allowed to Robespierre's most personal sphere, and yet their reactions are completely different, which is one among the reasons as to why one of them meets a sad end by all accounts, and the other can die somewhat happy (as I will always mantain: if Przybyszewska managed to finish Thermidor, I am one hundred percent sure she would depict Antoine as one dying boldly and proudly, if only beause he died for a great cause and alongside Robespierre). On the other hand, spiritually and mentally, Camille resembles Maxime way, way more than Danton. They are both... maybe not exactly soft, but emotional. The main difference between them is Maxime is able to rein his feelings in when necessary (again, not always, not completely; vide his late night visit at Desmoulins', vide his attempt and saving him from the Luxembourg Palace), but as far as differences go, this one is actually minor. They are put in different positions, but their reactions are similar.
I would also wager to say Saint-Just and Robespierre don't have that much in common with each other in the plays, leaving out their political stances and their relationship. They are very different in terms of character traits: Maxime is more forgiving, calmer, quieter in all aspects. Antoine is more of a quicksilver, and also is regarded more as a tool in Maxime's hands, which I mean in the best way possible. While he has his own opinions, sometimes quite different to that of Robespierre's, he only entertains them in Maxime's presence, so that no one can put a splinter between them and turn them against each other. When they are turned against each other (during their quarrels, yes, but also during Thermidor, which is a beautiful study of such a case), he defers to Maximilien humbly and holds no grudges against him. This is pretty much the only soft side he ever presents to the audience, for when facing any other characters, he is sarcastic  if not downright hostile, the only exception I can think of being Eleonore. He's not gentle, not even with Robespierre whom he respects so much.  (I cannot get over how badly Wajda interpreted this in his movie, where in his very first scene Antoine brings Maxime an apple-tree branch in full blossom; while a sweet gesture, it made little sense, for the director not only didn't establish their special bond in any way, cutting their very important scene in Act II and a lot of their exchange of words in Act V out, but completely ignored the fact that in the play they did talk about trees blossming, but it was Maxime who pointed this out to Antoine. Honestly, it would make much more sense if in the movie he was the one giving Antoine flowers; altough I don't trust it would be executed well, so perhaps the best scenario would be to drop it altogether.)
This leaves Antoine and Danton as the unlikely pair. Here I wouldn't necessarily say they are put in different positions (following my train of comparison), because – depending on if you believe the confrontation between Danton and Robespierre to be honest or not – there is enough evidence in the play to mantain both of them want to  establish power over nation through Robespierre. Danton is the villain of the play, but he isn't blind, he too wants to use Maximilien as a face of the dictature, as a tool to obtain more "normal" power for himself (normal power here would equal to money, respect, high office; the "abnormal" power is what Robespierre sort-of-dreams-of, an influence over people to direct them into doing what is necessary for the good of the whole of the nation, or better yet, the world). And Antoine wants more or less the same thing, the exception being he doesn't care at all for personal gains. He doesn't necessarily believe in Robespierre's visions of the future, one could even argue he doesn't understand them (this is clearly shown in Thermidor, where he reacts with a headache once Robespierre unfolds his plan in front of him: Stop it, Maxime. I can't keep up with you anymore.); he does, however, see the neccesity of establishing the dictature or some other extraordinary mean to obtain the total power over the state. Both he and Danton are blessed with a far-fetching political vision, the only thing differentiating them from Robespierre is that he's a much more brilliant chess player than any of them, when they can see few moves forward, he's already seen all the possible outcomes of the match. And all of these outcomes are bad, for Maxime is characterised as a pessimist, while Antoine and Danton are, generally speaking, optimistically inclined. Youthful foolishness indeed, except Antoine is not foolish! He's just optimistic. In Danton, the optimism takes a form of boldness and bravado, in Saint-Just it manifests as an unwavering faith in the one he considers to be so much more superior to himself, and also a certain amount of contempt for the ones he considers to be inferior. This is another trait he shares with Danton, and we have to admit, Przybyszewska did a really good job at presenting the same trait in them both in such different ways, that we like one, hate the other.
There is also the matter of how they treat Camille and what they think of him. Here, both are jealous, I think. Jealous of the special place Camille has in Robespierre's heart, scornful of his abilities as a politician and a journalist, disinclined to him as a person. Danton cares for him as far as his utility in being a leverage on Robespierre goes, but I don't think he hoards any warm feelings for him personally, and I don't say it only because he was willing to sacrifice Camille purely out of spite. A much better example to show what I mean is that Danton seems to have a much better functioning, more honest and professional relationship with Delacroix than with Camille, whom he keeps in the dark about absolutely everything from start to finish. I don't know if it was meant to be a symbol or not, but in their very last scene in the jail cell, Camille has to beg Danton not to snuff out the candle, which Danton does, albeit very reluctantly. In turn, Saint-Just talks about Camille in language dripping with contempt and jealousy of purely personal kind, offending him left and right, right to Robespierre's face – not to hurt Maxime, but to "open his eyes", so to speak. In one particularly harsh sentence he compares Camille to a dog, a child and a prostitue all in one breath. He not only doesn't regard him as an opponent, but barely recognizes him as a human being worth respect, in which he is sadly very similar to Danton.
Weirdly enough, they both regard Maximilien as human, which I think is interesting to notice. It would be really easy to write them in such a style that leaves way for them to see Robespierre as something more, something almost extraterrestrial, somebody who posseses abilites greater than normal humans do. And yet:
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The first image is from The Last Nights of Ventose, my own translation, and it's directly from Antoine's compassionate speech. I didn't include Robespierre's response, because he just deflected, but deflection does mean he doesn't fully agree, so it's yet another similarity.
One more thing that comes to mind in a comparison like this is that Danton threatens Robespierre with the ultimate power. He doesn't think that Maxime will be able to live with it, with himself, if he ever decides to go this one step futher and become a dictator. Is this is because he wouldn't be able to live with himself, or does he truly underestimate Maxime, or he simply wants to make sure Maxime would not go in this direction precisley because he knows he would then be ustoppable? How very telling then, that in Antoine's mouth the very same thing is not a threat, but a promise! This ultimate power is born out of necessity, and it's a grace for the whole nation, because no other person could bear the weight of this "crown", but Maxime.
The main difference between Saint-Just and Danton, I think, is something which we have to believe, it's not written clearly anywhere, and this is also the thing I briefly touched uppon in the aforementioned post: we have to believe that Antoine has pure intentions, because we sure know Danton does not. These were the embers fueling the suspiscion in Maxime when he couldn't understand why Antoine would possibly push for the dictature so much – is his heart pure? This sounds overly dramatic, perhaps, but I think this dramaticism aligns perfectly with Maxime's overall characterisation. I think all readers believe in his good intentions, and the parallels constructing the characters help immensely in this judgement, for if Danton is rotten to the core, Antoine is as steady and pure as a marble column. Robespierre even calls one a pig, while the other deserves to be named an Apostle of liberty.
There is, however, another similarity between them, too. Both Antoine and Danton are willing to be dishonest in order to achieve their goals. This is this one thing that's hard for Robespierre to swallow, for he – like Camille – values honesty really highly and if he could, he'd always act honestly. Saint-Just, not to mention Danton, has no such scrupules. He sees the greater necessity as something erasing all other circumstances, and for this greater picture he is willing to sacrifice some of his integrity as a human being. With Danton, the situation is even less complex, for I don't believe he would be sacrificing his integrity in any way – this dishonesty lays at his very core and comes natural to him.
The arguments Saint-Just presents, and which differs from Robespierre's point of view, are also different from that of Danton's. Danton's vision of the present is filled with contempt for the people, for the masses who are less brilliant than him and few others are. It is worth noting that Przybyszewska really did think like this, this is something she believed in and while reading Danton's speeches in Act II Scene 3, what we actually hear is her own train of thoughts. The only difference is that she didn't disdain the people they way he did. She thought that being a mass, an unnamed pulp of flesh is not a bad thing (it was perhaps unfortunate, and I am sure thinking she was a genius like Robespierre helped her in maintainign this view). Base material is a nourishment for those who will lead these masses. We – the lesser people – are absolutely necessary for them – the greater ones – so that they can lead us out of the night and into the new epoch of enlightement, and there is nothing humiliating in being this nourishment/tool/base. Danton understood it only partially, for he wasn't ready for the greatest sacrifice of all: to be a genius, one has to get rid of everything personal, all needs and desires must be kept aside, and never again spoken of. Robespierre understood it, and I think Antoine did too. I think the best evidence for it is that he said, that he doesn't consider himself to be Robespierre's equal. Recently I hoped to prove it was a silent declaration of love; now I want to point out it is one because it showed Robespierre that Antoine understood this great sacrifice one has to make in order to be a leader, and in his own way, he has already done this. He has brushed aside personal vain and glory, his amour-propre, he degraded himself in order to magnify Maxime's importance. Danton may say: It's you whom I adore, but it is Antoine who shows it through his actions as well as his words.  
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steve0discusses · 3 years
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S4 Ep40: Fixing Dartz By Not Actually Fixing Dartz
Yo Merry Christmas, I’m quarantined as hell, so I’m just streaming and playing video games until my problems get vaccinated away.
So lets just write about Yugioh because hell a lot didn’t go as planned this year (can you believe my 2020 goal for this blog was to finish ALL OF YUGIOH?) but although my goals were halved and quartered--With this blog I don’t freakin care anymore, and somehow...that’s how it’s one of the few creative bastions I have left standing.
Wild.
I’m so done with the internet, I’m not even updating twitter right now.
But hell yes, lets update the Yugioh blog.
So onward, with the last episode of this season. We last left off with Yami getting devoured by a hate tornado which is just...a lot of 2020 energy. This whole season, in a nutshell is just...2020 energy, honestly. And this tornado is just twitter. It’s just twitter incarnated.
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Rather than try to save himself and consequently fix his ghost problem, Yugi has decided to keep himself haunted by fixing Pharaoh’s inner emotional problems. Really is something, isn’t it? To do low key therapy for the ghost that basically...put you in therapy? Yugi can help fix his problems but like...he’s still a mess of problems because of it. Now Yugi shouldn’t walk away, of course, that’s effed up, but it is a little irony there.
Pharaoh, of course, has decided to submit to the hate tornado, and sees it as a manifestation of his own anger and bad vibes.
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Isn’t that’s the real problem we have when we have to confront the feelings we don’t want to confront? Where we tend to feel guilt and hate for being upset, which is just sort of a thing humans naturally tend to do--instead of actually working on controlling what you do with those feelings so that way we stop lashing out and setting everyone on fire in the burger restaurant?
Like Pharaoh should be learning to count to 10, not trying to just remove his anger. This has sort of been his problem for a while--he assumes he can just...delete his rage. That’s not a thing. You can’t do that unless you have very specific medication through a doctor, and that’s why he keeps failing at it.
And this goes back to S1 when he “fixed” Kaiba and like nothing really happened. Pharaoh’s decided to wipe himself and like...it’s up to your own interpretation but like...in my book that Pharaoh brand clean cycle does freakin nothing. It gets reversed like constantly.
(read more under the cut)
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So Yugi decides to hit up Plan B, which is, honestly? Not a great message. But it’s the anime trope that we keep going back to because it’s the catch-all to make any anime protagonist into the good guy.
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Like...
...
.......Yeah I’m gonna talk about it.
this is a trope that is so common it’s sort of ubiquitous with the genre. You gotta have the protagonist give up on their own strength, and be lifted up by their pals at the very last second--it’s like the anime hero’s journey.
But I really don’t like it. I don’t like the power of freindship. I’ll say it.
Because there’s some things you have to handle on your own. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have your main character show strength and show character development by doing things by themselves at the last minute. We already know that Pharaoh’s a good pal and believes in his friends--but like...does he believe in himself?
I can’t tell you if he does by how this episode goes, that’s for sure.
The whole point of this tornado is to see Yami discover his own strength and overcome his weaknesses...and yet he still relies on that good ol chestnut, friend powers.
Like last episode I feel like they did this already and it was way better--other people offered their help willingly, then Pharaoh got to have a big ol fight solo in the clouds to prove he was strong on his own as well. We finished the whole season last episode, so what are we accomplishing now other than a last minute secret boss fight?
Why would Yami doubt himself now? It’s weird. Yugi’s right to have mentioned “yo didn’t we figure this all out in desert hell???” because...we did. Yami is retreading old territory.
And that’s a thing that happens when you write, PS, when Yugi was saying “we already did this!” Yugi was reminding the writers of the show “we did this already. Like guys. We did this.” and sometimes when you’re writing, your characters will do that to you, and you should always be paying attention to cues like that.
Anyway, he vanquishes the hate tornado by thinking fondly of all of his buddies, and then the storm that should have been over the Atlantic Ocean, as according to the dub, parted in the sky above California.
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GEOGRAPHY, the secret final boss of this season of Yugioh. And they failed. In a big way.
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Yugi holds out his hands in real life, and pretends to hold a ghost that isn’t there. Now I want all of you to do this position IRL. Like that. OK. It looks like Yugi is holding onto a pair of ghost boobies.
Meanwhile, actual and very literal ghosts with very real bodies show up and start picking up Dartz and like...
...The ending of Dartz’ storyline is a TRIP! Lets just get into it!
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This cursed dog. I can’t stand how this dog is drawn. I hate it so much that I actually love it, and if I saw this in a thrift store I would impulse buy it and hang it over my fireplace mantle in a golden gilded frame.
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AHHH????
WHAT????
He electrocuted you with LIGHTNING! He killed your...everyone! He killed EVERYONE!
Also girl, how are you HERE? Like Physically??? I saw you die! TWICE!!
Yugioh is on SOMETHING with this one, and I think that “something” is called “we weren’t allowed to give you a PG-13 sad ending.”
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This is just the freakin weirdest thing. We have a character who is worse than Darth Vadar, and this show has pulled so many dark things in it’s history, but it just...
...it can’t punish Dartz at all, and I don’t know what they were thinking.
They have been poetic before--Pegasus got his eyeball gruesomely ripped straight out of his face, nearly got murdered by Bakura, and was not able to resurrect his wife. Noah hella died, had to give up his plan to rule the world and be a real boy, and had to murder his own Dad even, the moment he finally made a bond with his brothers. Marik had to lose all control of his body, live helplessly inside Tea’s bod for an entire season and accept the fact that he murdered his Dad and now has to live on without any of the magic that ever made him powerful in a broken world and a broken family he will never understand.
Dartz though?
If he does get some sort of poetic retribution, it will be off-screen because we don’t have time for it.
And that’s kind of a bummer because this is usually something Yugioh is kinda good at! I enjoy when this show goes dark, this is a great opportunity to do it...and they didn’t.
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It was just the wettest fart Yugioh has ever played on me.
Just the wettest. Nice knowing you, Dartz. Glad you were here to murder everyone on Earth and then totes get away with it because we’ll just pretend like the Orichalcos was a totally different person--although it’s not. Because Yami JUST told us that it doesn’t work that way. Yami JUST told us that the Orichalcos was using his own pain and his own hate against him.
It’s not a separate person, it’s the same!
And to suggest that Yami vanquishing that hate tornado somehow cured Dartz of all his sins, is some upper level Jesus stuff that I don’t think this show would normally want to tread on. Straight up. Yami is a pretty poor stand in for Jesus Christ, and I feel I can straight up say that because it’s Christmas.
...what HAPPENED in the writing room with this one? Did they just run out of episodes? There are less episodes this seasons than other seasons have been.
Was it edited for the English version? Because I...kind of doubt they could edit that much to make it that drastically different.
I’m just boggled. Like usually I’m of the opinion to let the writers do whatever they do because I do not know what was going on behind the scenes, and I’m still of the opinion that they did the best of what they could do with the resources they were given.
BUT, this episode just feels...hella sus. I feel like they just had to make an ending. Any ending. Get an ending on there and finish the season before the power goes out and then run away with whatever paycheck you get (because in entertainment--you might not get one).
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Seto and Joey made it completely back to the KaibaCopter before Tea was like “I mean it’s been 15 minutes, guys, you really didn’t hear him behind you? You really lost his tiny pitter patter of his little shoes? The little shoes that make a little tinkly noise like a kitty cat’s collar? A little kitty cat collar that he also wears around his neck? His neck that has a golden pyramid held by a tow chain that makes a little clanky clank when it hits his two belts covered in metal rivets that makes a little singsong clippity cloppity noise every time he so much as breathes? He’s a walking talking Bell of Notre Dame, you lost him?”
and Seto was like “Oh damn it, I know he’s the same size as Mokuba, and so I should be really good at not losing this kid but also have you noticed how many times I’ve lost Mokuba???”
Joey just looked into the distant tomb hut and said “......You’re kidding me.” and decided to immediately run back because Joey Wheeler knows what’s up.
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Had Joey Wheeler actually made it back to Atlantis, he would have seen Dartz and his entire family hugging it out and would have immediately socked the guy straight in the dick and it would have been a great way to finally give Dartz just one single consequence for murdering everyone on Earth but you know, I did not write this episode.
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I’m really glad that in the same episode that Yami called upon the powers of friendship, his friends hella ditched him to vanquish in a watery grave.
This is wild!
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Seto’s words were “Good riddance” as the island went down, and you could not tell if he was talking about the island or about Yugi.
That and Kaiba Really Hates Islands. LOVES watching an island go up in smoke (or underwater, in this case). Loves nothing more.
Seto, your powers of friendship were just used to save the world.
Apparently the standard for friendship power is...not much. But they did just make Yami, of all people, do a literal Jesus in Gethsemane so...the bar for morality is just not very high in this anime.
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Did the Great Leviathan stitch Weevil Underwood’s body back together or something? This is...
...Yo Weevil are you immortal now? Are you the big bad in S5 that comes out of nowhere and kick’s Bakura’s ass back to the Shadow Realm like Marik in S2? Because I’ll accept that.
I won’t like it, but I’ll accept that.
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MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
look at those toddler shoes worn by a full adult! Weevil Underwood is so over-designed for a super low-level miniboss and I low key love that they love Weevil Underwood this freakin much.
Of all people, Weevil Freakin Underwood.
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Listen, listen, listen.
If Mikey was still alive, he’d be older.
He’d have been older in that Leviathan tummy, he’d be Alister’s age but he’s not. He’s uh...
Yo show that got real dark. Show this is what you should have done to Dartz. I love this sort of dark ending for a rude asshole who is going to try to put his family back together although it’s completely impossible--this would have been a good Dartz ending. But...whatever. It’s fine.
We’ll...let Dartz have his family back, it’s fine.
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Meanwhile, in the first actual picture of California that really feels like California, Valon immediately accepts the fact that Mai left him.
This is also a great dark ending for Valon. To accept that the people in your life have moved on and that you, too, must move on, even if it’s alone. This would have been an excellent ending for Dartz.
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And then Mai just bounces. She does not seek out Joey Wheeler, because she’s like “I have to fix some stuff, I have some serious problems, and it’s going to take a really long time before I can get over my toxic past.” and just freakin leaves us. Sorry, anyone who was hoping Joey and Mai would smooch at any point, it’s uh...it’s not legal yet.
And TBH I don’t even know if Valon is legal either, and the show decided to not reveal that to us, or allow them to smooch.
And as for Raphael? Uh...
They didn’t bother, I think. I didn’t cap it, at least. But we did get at least one person washed up on a beach.
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It would be Kuribo.
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I talk about 2020 energy a lot in this season but like...wild 2020 energy here, to be so freakin chill and can I say--delighted--to be stranded on an abandoned island.
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The show does not elaborate any more on if the cards are dead or alive, or if the games we are playing are with actual people forced to play these horrible games for us. It’s best that they don’t tell us. Just like Mr Mime. No one wants to know.
Mr Mime as in the Pokemon Mr Mime, PS, I just realized that there is a mime in this universe and he’s just...I don’t really want to know about that guy, either. All mimes honestly, I don’t want to know anything at all about all mimes.
Luckily, for Yugi, Kaiba didn’t fly very far from this island, and so we don’t have to have some sort of weird season cliffhanger where we guess how long Yugi can live off of coconuts (2 hours. he would last 2 hours on this island)
Although it would be such a cliffhanger to wonder what Yugi’s hair would look like after that. the same, right? Like it’s the same amount of grease and nasty stuff? He’d just have his roots growing out?
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And there they go--goodbye Dues Ex Machina Cards. Either the show can’t keep you on board because you’re hella broken, or the three dragon warriors died, or retired, or whatever it is when a card is like “I’m done with humanity, please leave me alone and never call me again.”
Did Seto low key just break up with his side piece just now? Tragic.
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Remember that time that Yugi was so bouyant he was armpits out of the water in S2? It’s crazy how bouyant Yugi Muto is. Like if someone did one of those anime cross-sections of his anatomy, he needs like 3 or 4 duck shaped pool floaties in there.
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Now, full disclosure, I have written the ending to this post 3 times because tumblr keeps deleting this post out of my drafts folder (I shouldn’t be writing this in my drafts folder, being real, it’s been really buggy lately, and I’m gonna have to make a different solution to this) So I’m just...
...gonna end on this note. This exciting note that Bakura is next. Finally, Bakura (JK of course, because apparently Bakura doesn’t show up for half the season. Bro told me this and offered that we should skip that filler and of course I told him that is not the point of this blog and we will be watching all of that gruesome filler piece by piece. Because for someone, out there--that filler is their favorite episode. I don’t know who you are--but get ready for filler.)
Now Yami could just...call up Bakura at any point at his house and make an appointment to end the world...but maybe S5 will go a different direction? We shall see.
Anyway, that’s it for this Season! Thanks all for sticking with us when I just...didn’t have an upload schedule for this entire year. It’s been a YEAR. But, I’m hoping for good things in the future, and that things will adjust back to a normal upload schedule and that...hopefully tumblr won’t die or something weird like that.
I’m gonna finish the Full Metal alchemist Live Action movie next (we’re like halfway through) and then after that--onward to to S5! See y’all there!
Stay safe!
(and here’s the link to read these in chrono order if you’re new here:
https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono
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lokigodofaces · 3 years
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thoughts on loki ep 2: the variant (spoilers)
under cut to not disturb your scrolling
Overall I enjoyed so that's good
Uh frick my mind blanked so sorry if things are completely out of order
I don't know, I expected the renaissance fair to be 2012 or 2021 or 2024 (Loki's time, our time, current time in the "sacred timeline"). So I was genuinely surprised when it was in 1985.
Ok, i really like the title card thing. And how the year scrolls around. It's a nice aesthetic touch there.
I wonder why the female Loki variant chooses her locations? Does she have a thing for renaissance fairs, French cathedrals, and Oklahoma?
1985 is when Back to the Future came out. And it's y'know, one of the most popular time travel movies ever. So I think they chose that year as a reference.
Again, not liking that the minutemen only have numbers, not names. It is giving me lots of Clone Wars vibes. If you don't know anything about Clone Wars, the clones are given number identifiers by the Kaminoans. Things like CT-7567. The clones would give themselves names (CT-7567, for example, names himself Rex). A really good sign throughout the series that someone is a sketchy person is if they call the clones by their numbers. The clones don't want to be known as numbers. They are people too, they deserve names, so they come up with all sorts of creative names (Rex, Fives, Cody, Tup, Hevy, Hardcase, Echo, Waxer, Boil, Wolffe, Jesse, Kix, Fox, Hunter, Wrecker, Crosshair, Omega, Tech, Matchstick, etc). The jedi respect this, and the only jedi that i can think of that called clones by their numbers is Krell, who fell to the dark side. the Kaminoans and other sketchy people all call them by their numbers and the clones don't like it. A big focus of the show is on the clone's agency (at the end, they all have brain chips that take away their agency and force them to kill jedi), and how the clones need to be respected. So for me to see in another series that people are only given numbers is bad. What's worse is that the minutemen are fine with this. They don't see it as dehumanizing or belittling. They are brainwashed into being okay with it. Which says a thing or two about the Time Keepers.
did. did the renaissance fair really have Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero" for their renaissance themed fight? Is this normal? Was it normal in the '80's? We saw later that the female Loki can do electronic stuff. Did she rig it to play it? For the vibes?
Also the stuff before the song was about fighting for a princess, and in the end she kidnaps C-20.
Okay, btw, I'm just gonna say Lady Loki for a while because no one has explicitly said Sylvie yet, so I'm going to refer to di Martino as Loki until she or another calls her Sylvie. Cool? Cool.
I was thinking the "Holding Out for a Hero" fight would be the roomba fight or something. It is such a good song that has huge potential for this genre. Why did they use it in a lame fight as that one?
When Lady Loki did the spell on C-20, it looked similar to what Wanda and Agatha can do. As in, it had similar visuals.
Loki reading a random magazine he finds while sitting with his feet on the desk bored out of his mind because he has to learn sh*t is a MOOD.
What is Miss Minutes? She can jump around anywhere, and pop into computers. But she can't be just a projection. She took the effort to dodge Loki swatting at her, so that may mean she was corporeal. She also could be something similar to the Kree's Supreme Intelligence?
So, did Mobius give Loki the shirt, tie, and slacks, but really didn't give him the jacket until they had to call him in? What? That makes no sense? Did the TVA not have any jackets with the variant label? Did someone have to custom design a jacket for Loki?
What is up with this show giving me things I wanted to see only in holographic form? First we saw Coulson's death, and now Loki in his Jotun form in a holograph of another variant.
Okay, Loki being someone the TVA has to constantly deal with is very on brand. Loki is a creature of chaos, of course he's going to unknowingly rebel against the sacred timeline.
Also, headcanon that the Jotun Loki we see is king of Jotunheim because that would be epic.
Also, for personal reasons I choose to believe there is a Loki variant that defeated the Avengers and immediately went queer rights.
Loki's reaction to there being many Loki variants. He's seen what his life is supposed to be. I think he is even more upset that the TVA often deals with him, that there are so many things that could have been instead if it weren't for the TVA and the "sacred timeline."
Also, I totally think Mobius was waiting for another Loki to show up to help him defeat Lady Loki. They get them so often, it makes sense.
Loki explaining the difference between illusion projection and duplication was great. And very helpful to me personally understanding lore. Also, Mobius, get your crap together. If you're a Loki expert, figure this stuff out.
Loki calling the TVA out on propaganda, we love that.
The wolf quote is actually very nice, I quite like it.
Okay, the TVA doesn't even bury or cremate or do any sort of ritual for their fallen minutemen, they just reset the timeline. Which to me seems like another way to show how little the TVA actually care for their workers.
There are statues of the Time Keepers in Ravonna's office. The camera pays extra attention to it. Keep reading for more about Time Keepers and cinematography choices.
What. What sort of relationship does Ravonna and Mobius have? What is going on there? I am really confused.
Who is this "analyst on the side?" What is going on there?
Ravonna is MEGA SUS. Along with that, the Time Keepers are mega sus.
She signs R. Slayer. Yeah. Slayer. Not at all subtle, Marvel. Letting us know that she'll do the deed if needed.
Mobius you are sending me mixed signals. What do you want?
Okay, Mobius saying Loki was a "cold, scared boy" and an "ice runt" and stuff was totally a jab at Loki being Jotun.
Mobius saying Loki is insecure because of Lady Loki is...probably true.
With the elevator, the camera stops and focuses on the Time Keepers.
The Creation of the TVA, the beginning of time, the end of time, all classified. That is sus.
Loki almost crying over Ragnarok was good. Let him cry over the destruction of his home.
Loki being the one to discover something the TVA had no idea about after a day is on brand for Loki. And it shows how the TVA really are vulnerable.
Mobius: Really? In front of my salad?
No but the object lesson was well done and actually did help me understand what Loki was talking about.
Casey! Casey drinks grape juice! Imagine how confusing this is for Casey though. Loki is captured, threatens to gut you like a fish (whatever that means), and now he's dressed like an analysist, stealing your juice box. Does Loki get Casey more juice?
Honestly, Loki looking at everything logically and scientifically is fantastic. Adds to the science = magic thing Marvel's got going on, since Loki is a sorcerer.
Loki saying volcanoes are cool is fun. I agree. Volcanoes mean the planet is geologically active, which means we won't die. Also, there is a volcano named Loki on one of Jupiter's moons. I wonder if the creators knew that and put Loki in Pompeii because he is already linked with volcanoes.
Mobius telling Loki to start off small and Loki completely disregarding that felt very personal to me.
Loki being absolutely chaotic and telling everyone they were going to die while speaking perfect Latin was iconic. I want more of that content. Let the man be buckwild.
Again, Loki finding something out after a day that the TVA never knew about is on brand.
"Be free, my horned friends, be free!" I love that way too much.
Mobius being obsessed with jet skis wasn't something I expected, but I'm down for it. Heck, even Loki admitted they were cool.
The discussion on beliefs is going to lead to saying the Time Keepers are bullcrap. Hopefully.
Grapes and nuts are "candy" on Asgard. So, when Loki was eating grapes in Ragnarok, we can interpret that as him eating M&Ms. Second, this might add to something I've seen around here. I've seen things about a book somewhere with Loki saying chocolate fountains are mythical (which is really funny to me). So, I guess Asgard really doesn't have chocolate.
Oh my gosh, so many apocalypses between 2047 and 2051...hopefully none of those happen in real life.
Roxxcart is probably part of Roxxon, something that has been around in Iron Man movies.
Lady Loki got the shovel thing from Roxxcart that she left in Oklahoma! The minutemen said it was from the early third millenia, which is where we are now! 2050 also fits that category!
I saw something about the file saying Class 8 hurricane...there are only 5 classes...which means this is a crazy storm.
Does B-15 want Loki dead? This is a legitimate question, because I think she does. Dead or pruned.
Loki looking around at the storm, I love it. This could be him loving science, or him missing Thor, since Thor creates storms. Also, at this point Loki probably things Thor dies shortly after him in the sacred timeline, so Loki would be particularly sentimental about Thor.
I love Loki drying himself off and not anyone else. And B-15 yelling about his magic. And Loki's motions are so fluid, it's so aesthetically pleasing, I love it.
Dudes, I thought B-15 was going to try to prune Loki when they were alone.
Okay, was Lady Loki bsing about the azalea sale, or does Roxxcart actually do that? I want to know.
Wunmi Mosaku did a really good job as Lady Loki, I loved it.
Loki being annoyed at Lady Loki and saying he understood how Thor felt, does that insinuate Loki can do what Lady Loki was doing?
B-15 and C-20 were both very shaken after being possessed by Lady Loki. I wonder how that felt for them? We've had different explanations of mind control/brainwashing/similar from Clint, Bucky, Daisy, Mack, Fitz, and Monica in the MCU (including AoS). I wonder what is specific to Lady Loki's possession.
C-20 kept going on about something being real. What was that about?
C-20 revealed the location of the Time Keepers to Lady Loki!
Lady Loki not wanting to be called Loki could be a sign she is Sylvie.
There's something weird where Loki's voice echoed around while the camera focused on Lady Loki. Maybe she's telepathic?
Someone needs to keep a tracker on people telling Loki this isn't his story in a show literally about him.
But, that does add to themes for his life, and how everything was always about someone else in his life. He was always a supporting character for Thor, for Odin, for Thanos. Now, even in his own story, everyone insists he doesn't matter.
I was wondering what the reset charges would be used for. I wasn't expecting a massive bombing of the sacred timeline! Wow! That was unexpected and I loved it!
Okay, this isn't from me, this is from New Rockstars. But to list all the places mentioned on chronomonitors, either bombed or not: Knowhere, Barcelona, Niflheim, Dartford, Phong Nha, Lisbon, Vormir, Thorton, Cookeville, Asgard, Rome, Sakaar, Barichara, Porvoo, Ego, Titan, New York City, Tokyo, Hala, Kingsport, Xandar, Beijing, Madrid, Portland, Jotunheim. Bolded are other planets. Those are almost all the planets visited in the MCU. So fun easter eggs there!
I like Lady Loki's aesthetic. The fingerless gloves, the cloak, I love it. And YES SHE ISN'T SEXUALIZED. So many genderbent characters are excuses to sexualize women. But Lady Loki is just as covered as the male Lokis.
Lady Loki just...left the time door open for Loki to follow...for a really long time...I'm worried he's running into a trap.
What is Loki going to do now?
Theory time y'alls: Lady Loki bombed the sacred timeline to flush the minutemen out of the TVA, leaving it defenseless. And she's gonna go after the Time Keepers themselves. We know she gets into the TVA from trailer footage, and that's what I think we're gonna see next episode. I think she (like the Loki we are following) is upset over the lack of free will, and she plans to change that. That's why she wasn't interested in helping Loki "take over" the TVA, because she doesn't want to become the leader of a new TVA, she wants it destroyed.
Alright, back to the Time Keepers stuff. They keep focusing on the middle Time Keeper. Even in the end credits they have a weird cut to focus directly on his face. I'm not 100% on this, but I like this theory. That face is similar to Jonathan Major's, the actor confirmed to be Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Kang is a well known time travelling villain in Marvel. Maybe he is Kang, and is using variant versions of himself (that's a Kang thing in the comics) to mess with the timeline, and no one expects that from him. Also, Renslayer was his S/O for a bit in the comics, and they keep framing her in front of that one Time Keeper's face. I feel like this would be a good way to set up Quantumania and to show how sus the Time Keepers are.
Also, Loki was absolutely adorable the entire episode. And he got to sleep! Yay for him!
Again, I enjoyed, and can't wait for next week!
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lastsonlost · 4 years
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All this over the Japanese liking a game they don't like...
Ghost of Tsushima opens with a grand wide shot of samurai, adorned with impressively detailed suits of armor, sitting atop their horses. There we find Jin, the protagonist, ruminating on how he will die for his country. As he traverses Tsushima, our hero fights back the invading Mongolian army to protect his people, and wrestles with the tenets of the Bushido code. Standoffs take advantage of perspective and a wide field of view to frame both the samurai and his opponent in something that, more often than not, feels truly cinematic. The artists behind the game have an equally impeccable reference point for the visuals: the works of legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa
“We really wanted to pay respect to the fact that this game is so totally inspired by the work of this master,” director Nate Fox said in a recent interview with IndieWire. At Entertainment Weekly, Fox explained how his team at Sucker Punch Productions suggested that the influence ran broadly, including the playable black-and-white “Kurosawa Mode” and even in picking a title. More specifically, he noted that Seven Samurai, one of Kurosawa’s most well-known works, defined Fox’s “concept of what a samurai is.” All of this work went toward the hope that players would “experience the game in a way as close to the source material as possible.”
But in embracing “Kurosawa” as an eponymous style for samurai adventures, the creatives behind Ghost of Tsushima enter into an arena of identity and cultural understanding that they never grapple with. The conversation surrounding samurai did not begin or end with Kurosawa’s films, as Japan’s current political forces continue to reinterpret history for their own benefit.
Kurosawa earned a reputation for samurai films as he worked steadily from 1943 to 1993. Opinions of the director in Japan are largely mixed; criticism ranges from the discussion of his family background coming from generations of samurai to accusations of pandering to Western audiences. Whether intentional or not, Kurosawa became the face of Japanese film in the critical circles of the 1950s. But he wasn’t just a samurai stylist: Many of the director’s films frame themselves around a central conflict of personal ideology in the face of violence that often goes without answer — and not always through the lives of samurai. In works like Drunken Angel, The Quiet Duel, or his 1944 propaganda film The Most Beautiful, Kurosawa tackles the interpersonal struggles of characters dealing with sickness, alcoholism, and other challenges.
His films endure today, and not just through critical preservation; since breaking through to the West, his visual ideas and themes have become fodder for reinterpretation. You can see this keenly in Western cinema through films like The Magnificent Seven, whose narrative was largely inspired by Seven Samurai. Or even A Fistful of Dollars, a Western epic that cleaved so closely to Kurosawa’s Yojimbo that director Sergio Leone ended up in a lawsuit with Toho Productions over rights issues. George Lucas turned to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress in preparation for Star Wars; he’d eventually repay Kurosawa by helping to produce his surreal drama Dreams.
Ghost of Tsushima is part of that lineage, packing in action and drama to echo Kurosawa’s legacy. “We will face death and defend our home,” Shimura, the Lord of Tsushima, says within the first few minutes of the game. “Tradition. Courage. Honor. These are what make us.” He rallies his men with this reminder of what comprises the belief of the samurai: They will die for their country, they will die for their people, but doing so will bring them honor. And honor, tradition, and courage, above all else, are what make the samurai.
Except that wasn’t always the belief, it wasn’t what Kurosawa bought whole cloth, and none of the message can be untangled from how center- and alt-right politicians in modern Japan talk about “the code” today.
The “modern” Bushido code — or rather, the interpretation of the Bushido code coined in the 1900s by Inazō Nitobe — was utilized in, and thus deeply ingrained into, Japanese military culture. An easy example of how the code influenced Imperial Japan’s military would be the kamikaze pilots, officially known as the Tokubetsu Kōgekitai. While these extremes (loyalty and honor until death, or capture) aren’t as present in the myth of the samurai that has ingrained itself into modern ultranationalist circles, they manifest in different yet still insidious ways.
In 2019, to celebrate the ushering in of the Reiwa Era, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party commissioned Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano to depict Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as a samurai. Though described as being center-right, various members of the LDP have engaged in or have been in full support of historical revisionism, including the editing of textbooks to either soften or completely omit the language surrounding war crimes committed by Imperial Japan. Abe himself has been linked to supporting xenophobic curriculums, with his wife donating $9,000 to set up an ultranationalist school that pushed anti-Korean and anti-Chinese rhetoric. The prime minister is also a member of Japan’s ultraconservative Nippon Kaigi, which a U.S. congressional report on Japan-U.S. relations cited as one of several organizations that believe that “Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers, that the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and that the killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 ‘Nanjing massacre’ were exaggerated or fabricated.” The Nippon Kaigi, like Abe, have also pushed for the revision of Japan’s constitution — specifically, Article 9 — to allow Japan to reinstate its standing military.
This has been a major goal for Abe as his time as prime minister comes to a definite close in 2021. And from 2013 onward, the politician has made yearly trips to the Yasukuni shrine to honor the memory of war criminals, a status of which his own grandfather was accused, that died with the ethos of the modern Bushido code. Abe’s exoneration of these ideals has continued to spark reactionary nationalist sentiment, as illustrated with the Nippon Kaigi and their ultranationalist ideology. These traditionalist values have encouraged xenophobic sentiment in Japan, which was seen in the 2020 Tokyo elections with 178,784 votes going to Makoto Sakurai, leader of the Japan First Party, another ultranationalist group. Sakurai has participated in numerous hate speech demonstrations in Tokyo, often targeting Korean diaspora groups.
The preservation of the Bushido code that was highly popularized and utilized by Imperial Japan lives on through promotion by history revisionists, who elevate samurai to a status similar to that of the chivalric knight seen in Western media. They are portrayed as an honor-bound and noble group of people that cared deeply for the peasantry, when that was often not the case.
The samurai as a concept, versus who the samurai actually were, has become so deeply intertwined with Japanese imperialist beliefs that it has become difficult to separate the two. This is where cultural and historical understanding are important when approaching the mythology of the samurai as replicated in the West. Kurosawa’s later body of work — like the color-saturated Ran, which was a Japanese adaptation of King Lear, and Kagemusha, the story of a lower-class criminal impersonating a feudal lord — deeply criticized the samurai and the class system they enforced. While some films were inspired by Western plays, specifically Shakespeare, these works were critical of the samurai and their role in the Sengoku Period. They dismantled the notion of samurai by showing that they were a group of people capable of the same failings as the lower class, and were not bound to arbitrary notions of honor and chivalry.
Unlike Kurosawa’s blockbusters, his late-career critical message didn’t cross over with as much ease. In Western films like 2003’s The Last Samurai, the audience is presented with the picture of a venerable and noble samurai lord who cares only for his people and wants to preserve traditionalist values and ways of living. The portrait was, again, a highly romanticized and incorrect image of who these people were in feudal Japanese society. Other such works inspired by Kurosawa’s samurai in modern pop culture include Adult Swim’s animated production Samurai Jack and reinterpretations of his work like Seven Samurai 20XX developed by Dimps and Polygon Magic, which had also received the Kurosawa Estate’s blessing but resulted in a massive failure. The narratives of the lone ronin and the sharpshooter in American Westerns, for example, almost run in parallel.
Then there’s Ghost of Tsushima. Kurosawa’s work is littered with close-ups focused on capturing the emotionality of every individual actor’s performance, and panoramic shots showcasing sprawling environments or small feudal villages. Fox and his team recreate that. But after playing through the story of Jin, Ghost of Tsushima is as much of an homage to an Akira Kurosawa film as any general black-and-white film could be. The Kurosawa Mode in the game doesn’t necessarily reflect the director’s signatures, as the narrative hook and tropes found in Kurosawa’s work — and through much of the samurai film genre — are equally as important as the framing of specific shots.
“I don’t think a lot of white Western academics have the context to talk about Japanese national identity,” Tori Huynh, a Vietnamese woman and art director in Los Angeles, said about the Western discussion of Kurosawa’s aesthetic. “Their context for Japanese nationalism will be very different from Japanese and other Asian people. My experience with Orientalism in film itself is, that there is a really weird fascination with Japanese suffering and guilt, which is focused on in academic circles … I don’t think there is anything wrong with referencing his aesthetic. But that’s a very different conversation when referencing his ideology.”
Ghost of Tsushima features beautifully framed shots before duels that illustrate the tension between Jin and whomever he’s about to face off against, usually in areas populated by floating lanterns or vibrant and colorful flowers. The shots clearly draw inspiration from Kurosawa films, but these moments are usually preceded by a misunderstanding on Jin’s part — stumbling into a situation he’d otherwise have no business participating in if it weren’t for laid-out side quests to get mythical sword techniques or armor. Issues like this undermine the visual flair; the duels are repeated over and over in tedium as more of a set-piece than something that should have a component of storytelling and add tension to the narrative.
Fox and Sucker Punch’s game lacks a script that can see the samurai as Japanese society’s violent landlords. Instead of examining the samurai’s role, Ghost of Tsushima lionizes their existence as the true protectors of feudal Japan. Jin must protect and reclaim Tsushima from the foreign invaders. He must defend the peasantry from errant bandits taking advantage of the turmoil currently engulfing the island. Even if that means that the samurai in question must discard his sense of honor, or moral righteousness, to stoop to the level of the invading forces he must defeat.
Jin’s honor and the cost of the lives he must protect are in constant battle, until this struggle no longer becomes important to the story, and his tale whittles down to an inevitable and morally murky end. To what lengths will he go to preserve his own honor, as well as that of those around him? Ghost of Tsushima asks these questions without a truly introspective look at what that entails in relation to the very concept of the samurai and their Bushido code. This manifests in flashbacks to Jin’s uncle, Shimura, reprimanding him for taking the coward’s path when doing his first assassination outside of forced stealth segments. Or in story beats where the Khan of the opposing Mongol force informs Shimura that Jin has been stabbing enemies in the back. Even if you could avoid participating in these systems, the narrative is fixated on Jin’s struggle with maintaining his honor while ultimately trying to serve his people.
I do not believe Ghost of Tsushima was designed to empower a nationalist fantasy. At a glance, and through my time playing the game, however, it feels like it was made by outsiders looking into an otherwise complex culture through the flattening lens of an old black-and-white film. The gameplay is slick and the hero moments are grand, but the game lacks the nuance and understanding of what it ultimately tries to reference. As it stands, being a cool pseudo-historical drama is, indeed, what Ghost of Tsushima’s creators seemingly aimed to accomplish. In an interview with Famitsu, Chris Zimmerman of Sucker Punch said that “if Japanese players think the game is cool, or like a historical drama, then that’s a compliment.” And if there is one thing Ghost of Tsushima did succeed in, it was creating a “cool” aesthetic — encompassed by one-on-one showdowns with a lot of cinematic framing.
In an interview with The Verge, Fox said that “our game is inspired by history, but we’re not strictly historically accurate.” That’s keenly felt throughout the story and in its portrayal of the samurai. The imagery and iconography of the samurai carry a burden that Sucker Punch perhaps did not reckon with during the creation of Ghost of Tsushima. While the game doesn’t have to remain true to the events that transpired in Tsushima, the symbol of the samurai propagates a nationalist message by presenting a glossed-over retelling of that same history. Were, at any point, Ghost of Tsushima to wrestle with the internal conflict between the various class systems that existed in Japan at the time, it might have been truer to the films that it draws deep inspiration from. However, Ghost of Tsushima is what it set out to be: a “cool” period piece that doesn’t dwell on the reasonings or intricacies of the existing period pieces it references.
A game that so heavily carries itself on the laurels of one of the most prolific Japanese filmmakers should investigate and reflect on his work in the same way that the audience engages with other pieces of media like film and literature. What is the intent of the creator versus the work’s broader meaning in relation to current events, or the history of the culture that is ultimately serving as a backdrop to yet another open-world romp? And how do these things intertwine and create something that can flirt on an edge of misunderstanding? Ghost of Tsushima is a surface-level reflection of these questions and quandaries, sporting a lens through which to experience Kurosawa, but not to understand his work. It ultimately doesn’t deal with the politics of the country it uses as a backdrop. For the makers of the game, recreating Kurosawa is just black and white.
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I guess the thing about the Loki show, and the whole reason I’m feeling equal parts excitement and something very much akin to terror, is like... [cut for length, not spoilers, because there are no spoilers in this post, just me trying to talk about something that might very well be kind of silly to begin with, I don’t know--and it’s also not actually negativity about the show, just me being worried about things and trying to work out what I’m afraid of, so there’s that too]
look, I love this character. I love this character a lot, probably more than any other character ever. I’m not sure if it would be totally accurate to say Loki’s my special interest, but it’s also...not inaccurate, you know? he’s has been my favorite character for about a decade, for a lot of mostly very personal reasons, and in that time I’ve assembled a pretty massive collection of Loki stuff, met a lot of wonderful people, found stunning fanart, and read an enormous amount of mostly incredible fanfic--but more importantly I’ve written a lot of fanfic, way more than what I’ve actually finished and posted. all that creative work is hugely important to me for a lot of different reasons, and it’s all heavily dependent on an understanding of Loki’s characterization that I’ve developed over--again--almost an entire decade of films, fic, meta, discussions with other fans, and a lot of just...thought and time and caring. I’ve put an enormous amount of myself into my attachment to this character, to be perfectly honest, nearly as much as if I’d created him from scratch myself.
and the thing is, I guess, I’m afraid to lose that. because my emotional investment into all of this is mine, and so it matters to me.
I don’t think it’s...particularly likely that the show will, say, so heavily retcon Loki’s characterization that it retroactively ruins everything for me and I can’t bring myself to return to my many, many WIPs (which would also mean I would stop writing almost entirely, at least for a while, because Loki fic is virtually all I write), or even that it’ll show me a Loki I still like but who is so different from the concept of the character I’ve built up that I just feel stupid about...everything, to much the same effect. for starters the other films will all still be there, with everything that built my concept of Loki’s character, and I have issues with automatically assuming I must be wrong if someone else has a strong opinion that contradicts mine but I also think it’s completely possible for people to arrive at multiple, equally valid interpretations of a text by engaging with it in good faith.
more likely is that I’ll be bummed if the show doesn’t hit on some things I really want and disappointed the more it pursues stuff I actively don’t want, but chances are very good I’ll end up liking most of it. might well even get inspired, by the show itself or by the fan response (as long as I can avoid most of the discourse, I guess). I will, probably, find ways to reconcile things I don’t like with existing canon and my almost-decade-long understanding of Loki’s character. I probably won’t lose a character that means a lot to me, and the show probably won’t be a reason to lose friends I’ve made through the fandom.
but. well. it’s not super fun knowing that it’s possible, you know?
I mean, shit, anything’s possible, I could die in a car accident two days from now on my way to the grocery store or something. but I could also lose something intangible that means a lot to me, and that’s an upsetting possibility.
anyway. I could make a disclaimer here about how this is probably all very silly and I’m putting way too much emotional investment into a dumb superhero canon, except that would also go against a lot of things I firmly believe about how much stories matter as a general principle and a universally human experience, and also I'm trying to stop feeling guilty/ashamed about completely harmless stuff, so I’m...going to try not to do that any more than I already have, and I’m going to go to bed and tomorrow I’ll get a much better idea of, I don’t know, where things stand.
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holycow99 · 3 years
Text
石田お寿司 12/9/21 stream translation Part 13
This is not the full translation of the stream. I only translated the parts I could understand & interpret or parts I found interesting/important. I’m still a beginner in Japanese, so the translations may not be accurate. If you want to repost, please repost at your own risk.
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(t/n: ** means translation may not be accurate.)
C: Is Tonari no Young Jump an app?
I: It’s a website. It’s like Jump Plus. It’s not well-known. Choujin X is being serialised there. It’s in Tonari Young Jump. I wanna change the name… Why is it Tonari (neighbour)? Even though I’m doing this with so much pride for Tonari no Young Jump. Even though I’m prepared to work for Tonari Young Jump for the rest of my life. It’s just a neighbour?! It’s not even Young Jump. Young Jump is like a younger version of Jump. It’s still a Jump. It’s Jump’s neighbour. Is Tonari no Young Jump the neighbour of the neighbour of Jump, then? So, I wanna change the name into something cooler! Something like Crazy Jump. Hahaha! Doesn’t that sound marvellous? Crazy Jump. Miracle Crazy Jump.
C: CraJump.
I: Isn’t CraJump sounds nice? Hahaha!
C: In the end, it’s still Jump’s neighbour.
I: That’s true. If we remove Jump, it’ll only be crazy. Tonari no Crazy. That sounds a bit lame. Crazy Jump is better. Haha. Seriously, doesn’t it sounds good? I like that name. Crazy Jump. Hahaha! I wanna serialise my work in Crazy Jump! It’ll only have stories that are banned. It’s for the crazy people who have nowhere else to publish their works. Haha. There is such magazine. Do you know Garo magazine? But Garo isn’t one maybe. We do have Garo magazine, where the writers are kinda like nonconformists. This one’s gonna be like a revival of Garo. Crazy Jump! Where lunatics, and not mangaka, gather. The concept is ‘Welcome to the end of the world’. It’s not ‘Friendship, Effort, Victory’, but ‘Slaughter, Irrationality, Futility’. That’s the motto for Crazy Jump. I wanna think about this thoroughly. It’ll be about fear instead of dream. Slaughter will be the theme.
C: I really wanna read it.
I: I know right! Not a manga like this, instead, you wanna read that kind of magazine. “Welcome to the end of the world. This is the place for people who have given up on all kinds of entertainment.” This isn’t an entertainment anymore. It’s a harassment. Creative Harassment: Crazy Jump.
C: Are you gonna publish Choujin X there?
I: I wanna do it in Crazy Jump not Tonari no Young Jump. I wanna go against OPM. Which one is stronger? Tonari Jump’s OPM vs Crazy Jump’s Choujin X. Crazy Jump is definitely stronger. But Choujin X probably doesn’t fit the criterion for crazy Jump. It’s hard to publish it there. I want the Great Master, Egawa Tatsuya sensei to publish his work in Crazy Jump. I want One sensei in Crazy Jump too. OPM will stay in Tonari Jump, but I want One sensei to publish another work in Crazy Jump. I’ll be the chief editor. I’ll look for people and I have them publish their works there. As long as you’re crazy, you’re in. I’ll hire any nutcases who’re good at drawing.
(Egawa Tatsuya is a mangaka & film director. His known for his work ‘Golden Boy’.)
I: You guys are mistaken. I’m gonna do it for real. I’m seriously doing it. The characteristics that Crazy Jump’s looking for in a writer is firstly, someone who definitely won’t follow the deadlines, but upload a bunch in the spur of the moment. I want the magazine to be random. No one knows what stories are gonna be in the issue. There might be times where there are no stories at all. I want to make it a thrilling magazine. The drawings for the all the stories will be done outside the frame. Hahaha. I wanna create it!
C: Have Togashi sensei publish his work there.
I: That’s absolutely. Togashi sensei has high common sense, so I wanna take that away from him. Crazy Jump is only for lunatics. It’s for people with no common sense and those who doesn’t even realise they don’t have one. Do you understand what I’m saying?
C: The editors must be crazy too?
I: Hmm…It feels like the stupid vibe will be overused. Still, let’s make the figurehead editor wears only brief. Make Mr. Matsuo wears brief.
C: Even the readers are crazy.
I: Probably, only good-for-nothing people will read the magazine, so no. The writers probably hate their own readers. They’d say something like “I don’t wanna draw for this kind of people!”, “I only have cuckoos as my readers!”, etc. “A chain of hatred, welcome to Crazy Jump. That’s why fighting will never stop”. This is the concept.
C: This magazine will make somebody’s happy.
I: Hmm…Maybe it’s better to just gather people who’re good at drawing. Then, I’ll give them welfare payment since the magazine won’t sell. I’ll take care of them. They’re free to draw as they like and money will be given too as long as they make Crazy Jump crazy.
*Nobody’s gonna vote for the survey.
I: You have to vote for 3 series, right? What survey should I do? Pick 3 series that you wanna cancel and they’re gonna be cancelled for real.
C: Yomu Dokuyaku. (t/n: Op was referring to a book called Yomu Mayaku which literally translates as Read Drug. There’s no eng title for the book so I kept it in Japanese.)
I: Hahaha. Not Mayaku, but Dokuyaku (poison). That’s a good one. Yomu Dokuyaku. A poisonous disease. That’s Crazy Jump. I really wanna make Crazy Jump. I wanna read it. I’m gonna drag writers to the darkness. They’d be like “I wanna quit.”, “I started drawing because I wanna write manga like One piece!”, “I liked watching anime at first, I wanted to create a manga that’d become an anime one day. I thought I was able to achieve that.” This is how Crazy Jump’s gonna be. Let’s make a Crazy channel. We’ll broadcast the anime version there.
*Someone commented that Crazy Jump is the going to the opposite side of the classic approach in magazine.
I: It’s not even the opposite. It’s going nowhere. It’s not heading or moving towards anywhere. It’s not heading forward or backward. It sees and hears nothing. I want this kind of magazine to exist…The stories must be crazy. If they’re too crazy, the stories will be discontinued.  
C: Animal Rap can easily be serialised there.
I: Why? Animal Rap isn’t crazy at all. It’s totally NHK vibe. It’s even watchable for kids. Animal Rap has wholesome contents, you know? Everyone can watch it.
C: If I won a prize, I’ll report to you. (t/n: OP possibly referring to them winning manga award as they’re aiming to submit their work to Young Jump.)
I: You mean Crazy Jump’s Award? Crazy Jump has no award.
I: Now for the scouting part, I’d scout them like this, “Do you know about Crazy Jump? How about it? Do you have the courage to be crazy?”, “Would you like to serialised your work in Crazy Jump?”. All of these would be conversed through private message. It’d be a secret deal.
I: It’s time for me to scout people now. I wanna do that kind of business too, scouting business. I’ll gather any reckless youngsters, middle-aged men, and old men as well to work in Crazy Jump.
I: I wanna scout housewives too. I’ll make them write crazy mangas. Isn’t that a totally good idea? A housewife writing a crazy manga. In between taking care of children and doing chores, they write such manga. It’ll be a profound work. We need to unseal the hidden craziness lies within housewives.
I: Don’t you feel intrigued by it? You’d be shocked if people who are close to you or someone who you sympathises with create something crazy. The smiling old man that you often see is actually writing such insane manga. What’d your reaction be? You might think he’s lunatic.
I: Crazy Jump will even scout the readers since there’s always be a shortage in human resources.
C: Will I get scouted if I sent an eccentric letter to Crazy Jump’s editor?
I: No, you can’t. Insane people don’t realise that they’re insane. Those who can judge that they’re crazy can be external employees. It’s time for geniuses to step aside. This magazine will only be for madmen. Every writer is a lunatic.
*He’s taking about what if it’s Criminal Jump instead of Crazy Jump?
I: Aren’t you interested to know what kind of stories the magazine would have if all the writers were criminals. They might write heartwarming or fantasy genres. If they did that, you’d have some sort of love-hate relationship with the authors.
I: If Criminal Jump was issued, people would start commit crimes just to have their work serialised in the magazine. That’d be another problem. Suddenly, people would start killing others because they wanted to be like the authors in Criminal Jump. This is definitely a bad idea. Crime is a big no-no. Crazy Jump is the coolest, after all.
C: The heroine definitely dies in Crazy Jump.
I: I wonder… She’ll die when it’s time. Let’s make clams as heroines. Ms. Clam. There’s no explanation for that. This way, the heroines won’t die. (t/n: He really did say clam as in the food clam.)
I: But to create a true mad story, it has to be natural. The story for every heroine will be about reincarnation every time. Ultimately, the stories will be about reincarnation. The story will start off normally, but it’ll end with the protagonist getting reincarnated.
*He continued expanding the reincarnation ideas.
I: If every ending will have a reincarnation setting, then it’s gonna be a common concept and not abnormal anymore. Everyone will expect the same ending. But I wanna try writing that kind of story as a mangaka. I wanna try write it once. On the other hand, when there’s no reincarnation happened in the stories, people would start wondering.
*Ishida mentioned TG.
I: I realised TG was a bit crazy when I reread it. I conceitedly told few people that they had few loose screws in the head. Seemed like I was the same too.  It was fun reading it after a long time. It kinda had a crazy vibe.
C: How about making the stories use coined/new words, but they never explain what the words mean till the end?
I: Hmm… That’s considered as crazy in a way. Final fantasy 13 did that kind of stuffs, with the term ‘falcie’ and all. It was quite a rumour. I didn’t play it though.
C: The Falcie’s Lacie purge Cocoon. (referring to FF13.)
I: You’d maybe understand what they mean if you played the game. Rather than crazy, the game was just being not user friendly. It’d be better if they slowly explained what the words meant throughout the game.
I: Everyone must be tired already. Should we stop talking about Crazy Jump now?
C: Has your work progressed?
I: I don’t know. Is it?
*Reading comments.
C: Aren’t you gonna sleep?
I: I woke up at wrong hours. So, I’m still not sleepy.
I: Should we end the stream? I’m already satisfied. Let’s end it.
C: In the end, what are we gonna do for 30,000 subscribers’ commemoration?
I: The most likely one would be a ‘Thank you’ video. I’ll just scream “Thank you!’.
C: Are you satisfied now?
I: Yeah.
I: It’s been a long time since I streamed, so I got carried away. Okay then. Thank you. Who just joined in, please watch it in the archive. I’m gonna upload Animal Rap. Thank you.
Part 1
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zv5x · 3 years
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honestly, when it comes to mitski songs you can interpret it however you want since she says her songs can be interpreted any kinda way to the listener?
"When you listen to an album, it's yours. It's no longer the artist's, so you can do what you want with it."
another quote from the interview tells us her thoughts behind "Me and My husband" but never out right tells us what's it's about
[Interviewer] which brings us on to "Me and My Husband", which seems destined that it will become an anthem for married couples - because people don't always pay attention to the details, like the big sigh at the start of the track - so how earnest is this song?
[Mitski] "I mean, I'm not married, so… I think a lot of marriages are like that because that's what it is; it's no longer about being in love. It's really hard to stay in love and keep the spark. When you get married and you're with someone for years and years, it no longer becomes about infatuation or having your heart aflutter. But the song is just about "you know what, this may not be love anymore, and I may be unhappy, and I'm going to die one day and this is just going to be my life." But then turning around and saying "this is the decision I made, and you're the person I chose, so I'm just going to stick with you. We have our problems, but this is our life and we're going to live it." And that's what it’s about."
Mitski explains a story about a wife determined to live the best life with her husband despite the love fading but the point is! it literally could be anything! could be interpreted as anything!
A wife in denial about abuse, a lovesick wife that feels grateful for her partner accepting her flaws etcetera
I feel slightly angered though. as even if it wasnt their intention, the way the asks are worded it makes it sound like there should only be one correct meaning to a song, when I feel like that's not the case and can limit creativity
Anyway! I'm sorry if this is too long or seems rude to send I just wanted to add my thoughts before heading to bed. I apologizes in advance
Hey!!! Thanks so much for giving me such a detailed response, it means a lot to me! Don't worry about this being too long, I actually like getting long messages in my inbox teehee ♥ I totally get what your point is, and thanks so much for giving me the Mitsiki interview for reference! Once again, don't feel bad at all! I love it when Anon give their thoughts on things happening on my blog! Stay safe, and stay well!
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pastelwitchling · 4 years
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Guess who’s back... back again...
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to understand what’s happened to the fandom. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s noticed, but things have gotten... eerily quiet after season 2. It’s not that people aren’t commenting or aren’t reading fics, they are, and it’s a weird kind of silence to describe... but it is silent.
“But Rin,” you might be saying, “we’re in hiatus now, isn’t it normal that the excitement of the fandom has died down a bit?”
Well, you’d think, but not when comparing it to the post-season one fandom. After 1x13 aired, I’d say there were even more posts and fics up, at least for the first few months. Things didn’t really die down in the fandom until around November. I was posting every single day, I never needed a rest period to figure out what I needed to figure out, but more on that in a bit.
And that question kept coming back to me; why are things different? It should be better after all, shouldn’t it? There’s hope for Malex, They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is over, there’s jealous-Michael potential with Forlex... and yet things have definitely degraded instead. Last night, I understood why, and it can be summed up in one word; satisfaction.
Grab some tea and biscuits, folks, this is going to be a long one.
Bluntly put, season 2 was not at all satisfying in any regards. The season one finale sucked -- hell, the last couple of episodes where they tried to shove They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named down our throats sucked. But, at the very least, after season one, you knew what you wanted to see happen. Nothing was really resolved (Michael not dealing with his mom, Maria not talking to Alex about Michael, Alex waiting outside the airstream), and so, afterwards, the fandom was able to get together every day and talk nonstop about everything we wanted to see unfold in season two.
We wrote countless fics in which Alex confronted Michael and Maria, we wrote metas and tried to hope for better, and we still wrote a wide collection of fluff pieces because we hoped (on our really good days) that things would unfold for the better for Malex.
What happened with season two? Well, the Alighting, which I’m sure we all expected to be the central plot this season, ended up being mentioned -- what, twice? -- in the first episode then never brought up again. Memory loss serum? In a throwaway line. Possibly the coolest villain in the show? Shot by a son to whom he said two lines. (The wasted potential there on scenes we could’ve had with the whole family or just Greg and his father -- don’t get me started.) They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? Which -- I kid you not -- I walked around my room before the finale thinking that there was no possible way CAM could mess up their breakup. In the end, broke up in a totally unsatisfying way filled with our need to interpret and analyze instead of a straightforward, You don’t love me like you love him. Alex and Greg’s ending for the season -- unsatisfying. Greg had shot Jesse for Alex, and they don’t even have a small scene of them together following that, not even a second’s moment of Alex’s hand on a silent Gregory’s shoulder -- nothing. What the hell?
Michael and Alex’s end? Not at all satisfying because everything they learned about talking to each other went down the drain as Michael wouldn’t even stick around for the end of a song because of some crap excuse (that objectively still doesn’t make any sense to me). And even Forlex -- yes, I will say even them -- got together in an unsatisfying way solely because Michael had left the bar first. I still think Alex would’ve gone to Forrest regardless of Michael being there, but to see Alex actually presented with those choices and choose for himself -- for once -- would’ve been so much more satisfying.
So where are we left now? After season one, as I said, nothing was resolved, but there was potential, so we got to make our own resolutions. We got to hope and assume. We awaited season two eagerly because we wondered how Michael and Maria would have to deal with the consequences of their actions. CAM’s solution? The only person that has to take responsibility for anything is Alex. And then, somehow, Max. Don’t know how, but he’s at fault.
And in the end of season 2, everything was resolved so poorly that it feels as if no proper thought has been given to any of these characters whatsoever. It feels like CAM really didn’t want They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to seem like they’d been together for nothing and based on nothing, so she ended them in a way where no one confessed to it. No one confessed that it had been a terrible idea, that Michael had never felt for her what he felt for Alex and never could, that Maria had committed a betrayal against Alex (had raped him essentially, but I’m not getting into 2x06 now), and so it was ended in a completely unsatisfying way.
Alex couldn’t possibly choose Forrest if Michael was an option -- CAM could never have allowed that, not to her precious cowboy -- so they ended and forlex started on an unsatisfying note. It feels to me like CAM was trying so hard to do something original and -- by her own sick and twisted definition -- “mature” here that she ended up with a story that pleased no one, and did none of the characters any justice.
After season one, I never needed a break. I was fired up, I was pissed -- sure -- but I had many brilliant moments to base my Malex fluff and fics on. Every time I closed my eyes, I thought of a new scene, mostly angst but sometimes also fluff and smut, that I wanted to write down. After season two, I needed that break because, try as I might, I could not think of anything to write. It was impossible because everything had ended in season two in such an unsatisfying way that I couldn’t help but think, “Where do I go from here?” Where was the emotion, the passion of season one? Where was the decent storyline?
I don’t do fix-it fics, I can’t change canon and it depresses me to do so because I know what the reality is, and for someone like me (hell, not just me, but for anybody whose writing is affected by what happens in canon), writing became difficult. We can write metas, but about what? There are way too many problems with this season, too many storylines and ideas that went nowhere or were explained away in a throwaway line. If we were to write metas, the anger and resentment and exhaustion would never end -- there’d be no letup! -- because there are no real good moments to go to afterwards like there was in season one.
I’m tired, and this season was beyond a tragedy for many more reasons than the ones mentioned above, but mostly for the fact that it stripped a lot of us away of any creativity and passion that should’ve been on overdrive, not so severely depleted. I will give CAM this though; it takes a special kind of talent to take the infinite potential of these characters and plotlines, and write them so ridiculously poorly.
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amphtaminedreams · 3 years
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Spring/Summer & Haute Couture Week 2021: Whoops, I’ve Missed a Loooot
Hi to anyone reading,
Where TF has the time gone!?
After experiencing the longest January of all time (when your birthday is right after New Year, you get that between Boxing Day before NYE slump like a couple of weeks after everyone else), February has gone by in, like, 5 minutes and already we’re well into the throes of the F/W 2021 collection presentations. Meanwhile, I’m here like! Surprise! Here are my reviews of the S/S 2021 collections if anybody still cares! I mean I’m mashing it up with corresponding haute couture week reviews to fool everyone into thinking that doing it so many months later was intentional and it was totally working right up until this sentence, right?
In all fairness, I originally thought that I wasn’t going to bother reviewing S/S21 because it seemed kinda redundant given the circumstances and I wasn’t keen on the idea of collections being showcased via photo sets which is the route so many brands chose to (understandably) go down. Buuuut, the more I saw of what designers had put out there, the more I was tempted to put this post together and now here I am. The fact that designers are even able to churn pieces out during a pandemic when I’m out here like 0__0 no thoughts, head empty...it’s impressive to say the least, especially the way so many used the circumstances to inform their designs. In a way, it would be a disservice not to do a post on the season, and yeah it’s late, but given that it we are actually about to enter spring and the shows are kind of the deciders of what’s going to be “in” and “out”, they’re more relevant than ever. With plans for our way out of lockdown materialising-now is the perfect time to add that I don’t want ANYONE suddenly developing selective amnesia over how our government has failed us now that Boris has announced when the clubs COULD reopen-let this post serve as a roundup of every bit of inspiration available for our spring fits. I also want to use this opportunity to disclose how irritated I am at myself for starting the previous fashion week reviews post by declaring I was going to work through the designers in chronological order when I meant fucking alphabetical because I now can’t go back and change that. So this time, let me start properly. I’m going to be reviewing the collections in ALPHABETICAL order. Now that’s out the way, let’s do it. First, Acne:
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It’s so great to start on a high, it really is, and fortunately Acne is reliably good. It’s still got that deconstructed, minimalist feel that the brand is known for but for the summer season; we can see creative director Jonny Johansson and his team moving away from the heavier pieces we saw last time round, away from upcycled bohemian curtains and towards a breezier, more season appropriate aesthetic, boujee kaftans and swimwear rebelliously hacked up and artfully rearranged, and it feels correct. The net pieces, the beachy colour palette, the oil spill-esque print (though this represents an intruder of the marine ecosystem, as a print I loveee it and 100% want more!) and the accessories, reminiscent of shells, coral and anything else you might find on the seabed, give me a hipster mermaid washed ashore vibe which completely fits with that rugged, mysterious sense of Nordic folklore references and adventure the brand has established as its foundation. If it’s a nod to some kind of new age cult that Johansson was going for, which apparently is the case, I’m guessing said cult worship sea goddesses and perform pagan rituals on the beach by moonlight, and though indoctrination doesn’t sound at all inviting, it's a party compared to scientology.
The chiffon trousers here are actually chic and seeing them styled under a blazer makes me realise done right they CAN be more than just a PrettyLittleThing summer sale piece, so I’ll store that away for outfit inspo when the time to get rid of some layers comes around. The glasses, too, are very Gucci. Flip flops with socks I don’t think I can ever come round to but-
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Whilst it was a favourite of mine last season and it sticks to that same bohemian vibe with a lot of the elements I love, Ferretti lacks a little oomph this time round; it’s more stripped back, neutral, easy-going, and it is lovely, but for those same reasons it doesn’t grab my attention as much as the past couple of collections have. If you’re an influencer wanting to shoot a Joshua Tree desert lookbook this is sublime, but compared to the flair I saw in their last winter show, for example, there’s something lacking.
I’m very glad to see neutral coloured boiler suits on the runway, however; I snagged myself one off Depop the other week so I might be unintentionally ahead of the curve for once! The crochet detail dresses are nice too but very much remind me of past Zimmerman collections, or an Ermanno Scervino grab for the most high street friendly parts of Erdem SS2020, something along those lines. What I’m trying to say is that it’s definitely been there done that, even by Ferretti themselves and not in a continuity kinda way, in a kinda…this is basic and pretty so we know it will sell kinda way.
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Eurgh, I wanna be one of these Alessandra Rich girls so bad.
I end up repeating myself every single time because I always love her collections but really, this is what a high fashion novice thinks Chanel is. Alessandra Rich outsold. As much as her dresses have looked amazing on people like Kate Middleton and January Jones, I’m just waiting for one of the modern it-girls to take the nostalgia-tinged femininity of her pieces and put some kind of daring, street-style twist on it; if that doesn’t happen I’ll gladly take 5 minutes of fame so I can do it before fading back into obscurity. Let me fulfil my modern first lady fantasy, reenact the croquet scene from Heathers, drape myself on a chaise lounge whilst smoking with a cigarette holder, and then throw me back into the trash where I belong. I can die happy. Also, can we once again appreciate how much more iconic the Alessandra Rich two piece made the already moment Dakota Johnson singlehandedly brought down the Ellen dynasty?
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Dakota knew exactly what she was gonna do and the energy that she was gonna channel when she wore that piece and I admire it. Alessandra Rich, if nothing else, will go down as a key moment in pop culture history, and you know what? It’s what she deserves.
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Whilst I do wish she’d branch out a little and try and get back in touch with the dark drama of old McQueen collections now and again, Sarah Burton has made a very recognisable Alexander McQueen silhouette and it’s beautiful; this season is gorgeous as always. A leather biker and tulle affair that’s perfect for a grunge ballet, it’s easy to avoid lamenting the excitement and theatrics of old collections when Sarah creates such consistently sophisticated pieces. Stunning.
Now, a quick haute couture detour with Alexandre Vauthier:
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Compared to other haute couture collections, this is pretty toned down and by appearances alone (I know haute couture is more about meeting technical requirements more than anything else but there is a level of grandiose you expect to see) is more like a RTW collection than its counterparts. That being the case, I don’t have a huge amount to say about this one, though I do really like it-the ruched metallic boots especially. The Studio 54 vibes and the glam rock influences are clear and a lot of these pieces could definitely make it into Lady Gaga’s AHS Hotel wardrobe which is a compliment of the highest order, so there ya go. Plus, if a collection IS gonna be presented through stills, a format like this is preferable to some of the others I’m gonna talk about. There may be more exciting ways of doing it but simple allows us to see the clothes properly and at the end of the day, that’s what I care about the most!
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Heading back to good ole’ RTW, we have Altuzarra; I wasn’t hugely keen on their last collection but this is definitely a step up for me and justifies keeping them on my radar. Though in some ways this seems like less of a summer collection and more of a late winter/early spring transitional one on the basis it can’t seem to decide which temperature its catering to, there’s a lot to like: a colour palette that reminds me of a Dion Lee collection, harnesses evocative of those sprinkled throughout the last few Alexander McQueen shows, and more of the utility wear trend that I’m still very much into nicely contrasted against lighter, airier pieces for an overall fresh, modern vibe. The interpretive dancewear style pieces are interesting and the woven platform sandals are the shoe of the summer but the white shirt with the cape incorporated is definitely the high point of this show and I absolutely adore it.
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Anna Sui was actually pretty cute this time round. Her pieces have always been kooky, but in the past a little too lairy and occasionally cheap-looking for me. This collection, however, is kooky in more of a Melanie Martinez styled baby doll kinda way, as opposed to in an eccentric Bjork loving aunt whose idea of heaven is an all-must-go Primark sale kinda way (I know some people are going to vehemently disagree with my aesthetic preference there) and I love that. There seems to be a lot more creative direction going on, a much clearer vision of what Sui wanted to achieve, and yes a few of the looks went a bit too hard on the cookie cutter vibes but on the whole, they were more edited than usual; it seems Sui actually paid attention to the “take one thing off before you leave the house” rule this time. The staging is the perfect compliment to the doily style bucket hats and the sandals paired with frilly socks, and really adds to the whimsy of the collection, and as a whole, it really reminds me a lot of the way my mum would dress me as a toddler but styled up for a grown adult. Cute AF.
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Armani RTW I was pleasantly surprised by, considering I don’t usually rate it. It’s a cool, androgynous take on retro shapes and styles that’s simultaneously fit for the hustle and bustle of the modern world. Strong 2021 Peggy Olsen vibes, and a bit muted Lacoste-I can 100% imagine Elisabeth Moss as Peggy swanning around in one of those huge minimalist houses with the floor to ceiling windows after a long day at work, though we’ll switch the cigarette for a vape because...you know...welcome to the future. And sure, maybe the vision is slightly influenced by THAT scene from Us, but whatever. As for the men’s wear, if I have to look through an endless gallery of straight white men in plain ass suits every time I do some kind of red carpet fashion review, I at least hope they’re wearing Armani. I need me some impeccable tailoring to soften the blow.
I do wonder, however, how the clothes would look on plus size models. I feel like it’s a collection that’s very catered to a person who is straight up and down, and it feels like a bit of an easy cop out not to have any kind of versatility. Say what you want about Christian Siriano but he caters to all body types very well.
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I actually quite liked Armani’s haute couture collection too; the pops of colour and the intricate embroidery give me what I’ll later talk about missing from Valentino haute couture. There were still some of the frumpier pieces that I usually associate Armani with but also a lot of Great Gatsby-esque looks that I really enjoyed.
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Returning to RTW, Ashish was amazing. I LOVE that there’s always some kind of unique print (this time round, kitschy illustrations) and whilst a whole maxi swan print dress may not be the most wearable for the majority of us, Ashish Gupta does bold and innovative really well. There were a few boring striped pieces in there but I adore the one shouldered butterfly print dress and I NEED that Hail Satan jumper; it reminds me a lot of something by sustainable fashion brand Minga, which is one of my absolute fave websites to buy from when I’m treating myself to some new clothes.
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Azarro’s haute couture collection is full of supreme awards show afterparty fits, and I was shook to find out that Olivier Theyskens is the brand’s creative director! My newfound obsession with his pieces really had me like :O when I realised he was behind Azarro too. I loved their collection last time round, though this I’m finding a bit harder to give much analysis on because of the way it’s shot; whilst it could be a YSL perfume Vogue ad, which is obviously far from a bad thing, it comes at the cost of lacking visual clarity. That being said, from what I can see, Theyskens once again masterfully channels the wardrobe of the effortlessly cool, messy haired, smudged eye make up rock ‘n roll girl, and I think that’s someone we all want to be.
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Balenciaga RTW was an interesting one for me-on first inspection, I was kinda disappointed. Without the usual drama of the bold, exaggerated silhouettes and the theatrical production of their shows, I felt it was missing a bit of the magic I’ve come to expect from them. The streetwear elements infused throughout, a departure from their typical pieces, was very hit and miss; the shearling slip-ons in particular were not my thing at all. I’d be admiring some beautiful gothic dress and then my eyes would slide down and see those monstrosities and it would bring the whole thing down a notch or two, despite bad shoes being something I can typically overlook if I otherwise enjoy the rest of the outfit. My initial conclusion: that the Balenciaga Myrtle Snow would choose as her last words this collection.
However, upon re-evaluation when typing this post up properly and knowing what to expect, I like the collection a lot. I’m getting a bit of a Seoul streetwear vibe from it, and I can appreciate that although it is a lot more trend focussed, it’s got an edgy, daring quality to it, with a lot of androgynous, utility wear elements on show. I loveee the Balenciaga chokers too and in my wildest dreams would get my hands on one before it goes the way of the Gucci belt and gets overdone and flaunted by social media influencers as a show of wealth to the point of tackiness.
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At Balmain the sculpted body armour made a comeback but on this occasion, not in a way that I liked, and there war far too many neons for my taste too. No matter how many times it rears its ugly head, I find it hard to get on board because as a colour palette I can’t help but associate with Claire’s Accessories circa 2007-it has to be SO well done to avoid looking cheap, imo, and these Balmain pieces weren’t good enough for me to go against that gut aversion. A collection with 100+ looks isn’t usually a good sign and expecting Olivier Rousteing to achieve the impossible and manage to do both quality and quantity is a recipe for disaster; it’s a shame because his last collection was so original and yet this one feels like a cheaper looking rip off of other brands. It was just a bawdy display of 80s overkill IMO and if I can only find 8 outfits to include out of 100 that’s clearly not a good sign.
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Bottega Veneta is a brand that the high fashion side of the internet loves that I can never 100% get on board with; I get it, they’re behind the gorgeous square toed heels, but other than that none of their collections have ever really wowed me. The chunky knitted pieces are very Miu Miu style futuristic grandma chic and as someone on the cusp of being either a millennial or gen Z (depending on which website you visit) it’s got me outfit planning for my retirement years. Utilising so much wool for a summer collection, however, seems like a choice because can you IMAGINE wearing a heavy knit in blazing sun; I almost didn’t include the collection to be honest but then every so often something really cute came long, and one of the signature crisp, classic BV pieces would be done well and so I felt I had to. Am I missing something given all the hype here? IDK tbh.
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Burberry? Meh. You could also call this collection how many ways can I do a trench coat, with results of differing quality; occasionally the mix match of styles worked and I saw the deconstructed outerwear concept that Ricardo Tisci was presumably trying to go for, though it can’t come as much of a surprise that the combination of a trench, denim and leather jacket was mostly just messy and came off as a last ditch attempt to make the classic coat more interesting by just chucking other fabrics at it and seeing what stuck.
One thing I will say is that there were some really sick prints going on-the snakes in particular-and it was those prints that were really the saving grace of the collection; as I said with regards to Ashish, I like it when you can tell a brand has gone out of their way to experiment with patterns and actually incorporate illustration and graphic design into their pieces. Prints notwithstanding, though, it wasn’t a memorable collection and I really can’t wait for the day we put this whole multiple denim jean waistband trend to bed once and for all; in the wise words of Regina George “stop drying to make multiple waist bands happen. They’re not going to happen.”.
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Carolina Herrera was just as I expected. Whilst Wes Gordon was a little more daring with the structure of the pieces than usual, you can still he’s still committed to designing for the wealthy, modestly dressed socialite (yes I’m talking about Tinsley Mortimer and yes, I have recently become obsessed with Real Housewives) and her insatiable need to collect more charity gala gowns than she’ll ever possibly have opportunities to wear in her time on this earth. Sounds like a great life, sure, but it’s not like it gets my heart racing when I see the looks on the runway. The most memorable piece for sure was double breasted blazer w the asymmetric ruffle; I haven’t seen anything like it in a RTW collection in recent memory.
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Now onto the fucking train wreck that was Celine RTW.
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It’s not even bad for a runway fashion show, it’s just like…straight-up bad. Like Hedi Slimane went back in time to 2013, took a bunch of models into my local Topshop (and I have to clarify my local Topshop rather than the flagship Oxford Circus store-RIP-because to do the same in the latter would produce far better results), picked up some cheap basics, switched the lights off, and then, finally, dressed them in the dark. There’s very few positive comments I can make so I’m just going to move on.
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Chanel RTW I actually didn’t hate as much this season; maybe it’s because coming from Celine, my standards are like, on the floor, but it’s slightly better than usual. Whilst most of it was same old same old, the opening 10 or so looks and then from 40 onwards were alright. The colour contrast pieces were classic Chanel in a good way, that is to say somewhat modernised and appealing to a younger clientele as opposed to the elderly women who still see a boucle jacket as the height of fashion. The mini chiffon capes were also cute, and if it weren’t for COVID putting pause on everything I can see the Chanel headband being duped ad infinitum.
The worst part of the collection was without a doubt the pieces with the neon logo print, which I wish I could erase from my mind. At this point, with Virginie Viard seemingly refusing to make any attempt to reinvent the brand, Chanel is best when it’s subtle; that way it appeals to those regular customers who rely on the prestige of the garment and the new generation of consumers who are further branching out into experimenting with their personal style and want a quality base. But who I ask are these tacky ass pieces aimed at? Because though it appears to be an attempt to infuse a kind of youthful spirit into Chanel, it is very out of touch with what gen Z actually like, and I can’t imagine any rich old white ladies buying them either. Big shoulder shrug.
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Whilst I tend to find Chanel’s haute couture collections a bit better than their RTW, this is probably on par. Still rather meh and frumpy at times, but there were some pretty, whimsical pieces in there that were definitely elevated by the staging which, I must say, was very dreamy. I’ve enjoyed the last couple of haute couture shows a lot more (the one with the library set was v cool), which were comparatively restrained with the frivolous details and the chintz, so this seems a step back. The dresses with the 50s Audrey Hepburn for Miss Dior style silhouette are lovely but obviously, as per the reference, nothing new.
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Onto something much more exciting, we have Charlotte Knowles’ RTW collection, whose work has made her one to watch. I’m not as huge a fan of this as her last instalment, but Knowles’ (who I recently found out only just graduated from Central Saint Martins, making her achievements all the more impressive) continues to create clothes for a girl far cooler than myself; I know, that wouldn’t be hard, but we’re talking like, miles cooler. One of those women who can literally pull anything off and immediately make you want to try it yourself even though 9 times out of 10 that would be a bad idea-I could probably take, like, one piece and make it work but anything more would most likely just be me embarrassing myself. You wouldn’t think San Fransisco psychedelic summer of love motifs would mesh with futuristic Mad Max style biker vibes but Charlotte and her partner Alexandre Arsenault make it sexy AF, like a combo that was always meant to be. They are a dream team.
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And lastly for this post, we have another collection I really liked: Chloe. Sadly Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s last collection for the brand, she truly went out on a high note, with a reliably gorgeous iteration of her sophisticated take on bohemian style. Who now, will we look to when we want to cosplay as one of the Jessas from Girls of the world? When we want to pretend we’re a rich, party girl socialite backpacking across Western Europe (along the foothills of Mount Tibidabo…) on a commissioned trip to “find herself” for the fashion magazine column she’s writing, whilst we’re actually on a budget family holiday in Spain? When we can’t decide if we’re dressing like a modern day Rachel Green or Phoebe Buffay and say fuck it, I’m gonna do both? I mean sure, I could never afford Chloe anyway and sure, I’m interested to see what Gabriela Hearst can do with the brand, which despite its loveliness is quite predictable, but it’s definitely sad to see Ramsay-Levi go when she has become a reliable source of elegance and class each season. She brings a quietly confident brand of femininity to the fashion world where the high profile design houses are increasingly dominated by men who are sometimes too focussed on being bold and brash enough to be hailed as the newest design visionary, and I have huge respect for that. She will be missed.
Now it feels right to end the post here, given that I just finished with a kind of dramatic memoriam for a woman who is very much still alive and given that I would really be playing with fire by trying to push Tumblr’s edit post feature any further, so I’ll wrap it up for now. In part 2, which will hopefully be out over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be looking at a surprisingly strong haute couture collection from (can’t believe I’m about to say this) Maria Grazia as well as some of my faves, Etro, Dion Lee, Gucci, and of course Iris Van Herpen’s haute couture. In the meantime, I’m hoping to get a post out on my favourite sustainable clothing brands and to shoot my take on the “what I would wear sat front row at X” video trend that’s been going around lately on TikTok and Instagram reels, which I know I am kinda late to the party with.
I’m also looking at starting “photo dump” posts where I basically just substitute what I would be putting on my Instagram feed as photo posts on here, all the way back to when I first started my fashion Instagram account. I know this is hardly a hot take, but Instagram has really gone to shit, and once I’ve moved all my photos from there to here, I’m probably going to be deleting my account and just keep my private personal one. I’m sick of the endless scrolling past photos of people edited to the point of being unrecognisable and of seeing faces that all conform to that exact same Eurocentric beauty standard with the exact same surgical procedures to the point that even I, as a thin, white cis girl feel disgusting (so god knows how others without my privilege feel) because I don’t have a fucking fox eye lift or whatever it is that internet famous surgeons are telling us we need for our faces to fit the “golden ratio” at the moment. I am OVERRR all the promoted posts from people who preach social awareness and equality and authenticity and kindness making money off promoting companies that rely on slave labour rather than those who make me feel uplifted and inspired. And I am VERY MUCH done with scrolling through share for share and like for like pages because I am embarrassed by the fact that my likes don’t match up to my follower count since that must mean that NOBODY LIKES ME AND EVERYONE HATES MY FACE, right!? Even though I’d like to think that mentality was something I grew out of a long time ago. Instagram, much like Facebook before it (which is no surprise since the latter now owns the former), has just become another cesspit of an app which exists solely to convince you to buy new clothes and follow the latest filler trend and blow money on holidays you can’t afford to convince everyone you’re living the good life. Like many others, I have finally come to the conclusion that the way Instagram operates now is nothing but detrimental to my wellbeing. So, all that being said, I’m moving my feed over here, to a place where I can just arrange my silly little photos into silly little collages and not care if I’m shouting into the void by doing so because they’re just a screenshot of my life that I can look back on in however many years time and think Oh, Cool! That’s What I Was Interested In Back Then! That Outfit is Timeless! Or That One Was a HUGE FUCKING MISTAKE! Because I do love the creative element of Instagram, turning your feed into a collage, picking out which colours compliment each other, posting your favourite art and your outfits and the makeup looks you’re proud of, the beautiful sights you’ve seen-I just hate how unbridled capitalism and unrealistic social expectations have once again destroyed a good thing, and caused it to stray so far from its original vision of connecting people. Here, I don’t care if I get 0 interactions on those kinds of posts, because I am putting stuff out there I am proud of that expresses who I am and that interests me, and when I put a lot of hard ass work into something that’s actually important or that benefits others in some way as opposed to indulging my own vanity, it does get some circulation and I hope that it does make a positive difference, regardless of how small. I hope it doesn’t bother anyone too much seeing my initial photo dump posts on their dashboard as I try and catch up to where I am now; you’ll probs see a mini influx of 2015 fashion and I’m sorry about that! But I don’t *think* it will be too long until I’m up to date and then the photo dump posts will be much less regular.
Anyway, sorry about the Instagram rant there at the end! If you read all the way til the end, this is a  huuuuge thank you! I hope you enjoyed the post and I will get the next one out ASAP, potentially with a few posts in between. As always, feel free to inbox me if there’s anything you wanted to talk about or suggest and make sure you stay safe. There may finally be some light at the end of the tunnel:D
With a cautious dose of optimism, and the acknowledgement that I will most likely regret saying this: bring on June the 21st UK gals!
Lauren x
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xenoredux · 4 years
Text
The Legend of Silver Fang - Episode 1: The Birth
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Alright, first part of the GNG rewrite aaaaayyy! As with the last rewrite, the major story beats and overarching plot are the same. This is written under the supposition that, in fantasy land, this is a mini series with episodes that run about 2 hours in length each. 
Some things to be aware of going in:
This story is violent as shit!!! CONTENT WARNING FOR: Firearms, various kinds of physical trauma, injuries to people and animals, the deaths of people and animals, search and rescue missions, self harm, animal and child abuse, and just a whole lotta spilled blood. Basically if any form of violence upsets you, it’d be a good idea not to read ahead
I was trying to achieve a decent adaptation that combines the strongest elements of the anime and manga. It will not be precisely like either and will occasionally totally deviate from both
This isn’t meant to be “better” then the canon. It’s just the way I’d go about rewriting the Akakabuto arc if I had that level of ungodly power lol
Character designs made to represent several mentioned characters can be found here and here. Others will be left up to the reader’s interpretation. A link to the next episode will also be provided at the end. If a link isn’t available, the next episode just hasn’t been posted yet!
THIS ALSO MARKS THE 34TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ANIME SO HAPPY BIRTHDAY GNG LMAO enjoy
In the year 198somethingidk in the forests of Japan, a white Akita Inu named Shiro ("white") is tailing behind an unusually large Ussuri brown bear dubbed "Akakabuto" ( "red helmet") by the nearby village's populace due to the unusual red tuft of fur trailing down his back. Shiro is followed by his owner, a crotchety old fart named Gohei Takeda, renowned bear hunter and the world's least called out animal abuser (hint: this will become relevant later.)
Before the old man can take aim with his rifle, however, the shadowy mass from the winter darkness barrels towards him. As the dog tries to leap to his owner's defense, Akakabuto smacks off a good portion of Grandpa Point-n-Shooty's face, sending a severed human ear flying into a bloodied patch of snow. Shiro takes this as an invitation to do his best impersonation of Lassie and dives at the monstrous beast, grasping hard atop his muzzle to avoid his claws. From a nearby hill, a small red puppy watches the horror unfold.
While Shiro baits the bear, as is his job as a bear-dog, Gohei fires a bullet into the massive animal's right eye. The eyeball bursts in the bear's skull, but it also stops the bullet from traveling through his brain, instead lodging it into his grey matter and jostling around his nerve centers and pituitary gland. Understandably pissed at Gohei taking the shot, Akakabuto swipes madly at him until both himself and the dog stumble blindly off the edge of a cliff, resulting in what is surmised to be their deaths. Gohei faints in a snowbank, his vision running red with blood, as the unseen red puppy runs back to civilization to bring help.
Five years pass. Gohei continues to raise, train, and hunt with Akitas, but now it's for more then the sake of bringing home bear skins. He believes Akakabuto is still alive, and he wants revenge. The massive scar on the left side of his face is explanation enough for anyone to understand why. He continues to explore the forest near his home, now aided by several new dogs, including one of Shiro's sons, a powerful red Akita named Riki ("power" or "strength") and the same puppy who had saved Gohei's life all those years ago.
Riki has comfortably begun filling his father's shoes, enough so that he's established a reputation as one of the best bear-dogs in Japan. With a title like that, it wasn't long before Riki had been mated to an equally powerful and very pretty red brindle Akita named Fuji, and the buns he'd so kindly plopped into her oven were fit to enter the bakery of life and this analogy sucks
Fuji is not Gohei's dog. She belongs to the Fujiwaras, a neighboring nuclear family who own and operate a ski resort in the mountains. Daisuke Fujiwara, a young boy with a heart of gold and a nose of snot, has been tending to his dog during her pregnancy, and she's finally delivered what is universally understood as The Best Thing Ever: a litter of roly poly puppies! Daisuke is especially taken with the smallest of the babies, a handsome silver brindle boy, because Daisuke is a stuck up dog fancier who believes silver brindles, or Tora-Ges ("tiger striped") make the best hunting dogs. He ever-so-creatively dubs the puppy Gin ("silver") and decides the infant will do him proud someday.
But all is not well in Skiiertown. Gohei's hunt of Akakabuto isn't just motivated by vengeance. The village mayor is currently trailing behind Gohei and his dogs, discussing how the town needs money from tourists and that Akakabuto's alleged presence would surely make some of them go "yeah, no" and leave. Gohei doesn't care about the economy, but he does care that a man named Genji from the neighboring town has been mauled under """mysterious""" circumstances.
As the two oldies argue about which is more important, money or human lives, Riki scents and points out the mutilated remains of two wayward tourists, a young man and his girlfriend. He also runs defensively to Gohei's side, snarling wildly. Everyone looks around, confused. Suddenly, a flash of black and red drops from the tree branches above onto the men and dogs. As the men's screams and dogs' cries fill the air, so does a fountain of their blood.
Soon after, forest rangers in helicopters are dispatched to locate and rescue the missing persons and - if they can manage it, no pressure at all - kill the illusive demon bear before he slaughters more innocents. Daisuke watches the helicopters pass overhead and leaps onto his snowmobile, incapable of not getting involved in anything.
He makes a beeline for Gohei's now abandoned camping tent. Finding it empty, he's about to drive off elsewhere when paramedics emerge from the wall of trees beside him. The mayor, bloodied and broken, is being carried on a stretcher. Daisuke runs up to him and asks what happened to Gohei and Riki, to which he's met with a simple "Akakabuto" as the man slips from consciousness.
Daisuke rushes back home to break the news to Fuji and her puppies about what happened to their doghusband and dogdad. Daisuke holds Gin close and insists Riki can't die until he's seen his shiny Pokemon of a son, to which Gin, being literally like a day old, merely whimpers and wiggles. Gazing misty eyed at the puppy, Daisuke changes his mind. Gohei can't be dead. Riki can't be dead. No mere bear could kill a man like Gohei or a dog like Riki.
Ten days pass. Neither Riki nor Gohei's bodies have been found, but the bodies of Gohei's other dogs, Riki's eldest son Aka ("red") and friend Don, have been located by lodge personnel. The animals were mauled so severely that everyone begins giving up the ghost on this whole "finding Gohei alive" business. Besides that, the cacophanic cries from Akakabuto have frightened everyone into leaving the forest, afraid of becoming the next victims. The bear is greatly distressed - his brain damage leaves him unable to rest for more then an hour at a time, let alone hibernate, and being awake during winter is disorienting him. He runs madly around the forest, roaring and swinging his massive claws at anything that moves and also most things that don't.
While the bear plods around wreaking havoc in the night, Daisuke is dreaming. He dreams of the old man and his dog languishing somewhere in the woods, starving to skeletal husks. He dreams that Gohei, in an act of desperation, raises his gun barrel to Riki's head. The old coot, overcome with hunger pangs and a desperation to survive, murmurs an apology to his dog, explaining a dude's gotta eat. He fires off a shot in Riki's skull, killing his closest companion, before tearing savagely into the dog's flesh with his bear hands. And I do mean bear hands, as Gohei begins to turn into Akakabuto, ripping the dog's flesh, then the Earth itself to pieces.
Daisuke awakens beside a sleeping Fuji a moment later. He's absolutely covered in sweat. He laments on how fucked up his dream was as he reaches out and caresses first Fuji, then Riki's puppies, praying that at least the first half of his dream, the half in which Gohei and Riki are still alive, is true.
Unbeknownst to everyone but Daisuke's subconscious, Gohei and Riki are in fact still alive! The two managed to struggle into a ravine just out of the bear's reach, and they've been holed up ever since. Riki's back has been shredded badly, and Gohei's right leg has been broken, mauled, and rendered useless. Gohei has begun to get sick of sitting on his ass incapable of doing anything, and with an ominous glint in his eye, raises the hatchet he had been carrying in his pack above Riki's head, murmuring something about home cooking...
In a twisted, eerie parallel to Daisuke's dream, the old man brings the weapon down, but not on the petrified dog in his lap. Instead, he's sliced through his own injured leg! Having severed the useless limb from the knee down, Gohei demands Riki eat his flesh, regain his energy, and seek help at the village just as he did when he was a youngster. Riki is understandably not for this, and his resistance in the form of wailing and vomiting is loud enough to catch the attention of the red helmeted hellspawn himself. In an effort to protect his even-more-fucked-up-now owner, Riki does indeed gather the last of his energy to throw himself at the bear.
Daisuke's dad begins leading a patrol back into the forest, saying that even if they're dead, Gohei and his dog's bodies can't be left to stink up the woods. Daisuke cuddles a quickly growing Gin as he asks to go, but he's told to stay home with the puppies. After all, Fuji is coming with the crew to find her doghusband and his owner's corpses.
Diasuke pouts for the 5 minutes it takes the men to be entirely out of sight before shoving Gin into his coat and plopping himself into the seat of his snowmobile, once again refusing to be left out of the excitement. Meanwhile, Riki continues his dual with Akakabuto, experiencing the slicing and dicing of a lifetime at the hands of the fiend.
The battle between bear and dog rages on, and fresh blood from both animals spatters the fresh fallen snow. Daisuke, having vroomed on over, catches sight of this historic event from atop a hill, and without a second thought begins driving down towards the bear. He tells Gin to have a look at his father, and once Gin realizes that his dad isn't the big red bear, he's awed at his old man's strength and resilience. This thought is interrupted by Daisuke screaming a one liner and driving over an incline, sending the snowmobile flying right into the bear's face. Daisuke and Gin both bail from the vehicle, and Gin tumbles out of Daisuke's jacket.
Akakabuto appropriately gathers his bearings before lunging at Daisuke, pissed off that a child has bitchslapped him with a small car. Diasuke screams for help as a bloodied, super manly arm yoinks him quickly into the ravine. It's (obviously) Gohei! He's (as we've established) still alive, and frankly very surprised to see Daisuke here! But Riki's still in unsafe territory outside, as is...
Gin! The puppy has tumbled into the bear's path, and he's too slow and uncoordinated to run to safety. Thankfully, Riki has already thrown himself at Akakabuto to save the little lad he's only just met. Daisuke and Gohei watch helplessly as the dual continues, as does a spellbound Gin.
Riki manages to break away from Akakabuto and snag up his son, but the lack of food and the constant stress on his body have taken everything out of him, and he collapses to the forest floor, Gin clutched in his teeth. Daisuke and Gohei call out to him, encourage him to come just a bit further, begging him to save himself and his son, but he just can't do it, even with the knowledge of the puppy's lineage in mind.
In a final heroic act, Riki works every muscle he's got one last time to leap forward just enough so he can yeet his son into the ravine. His effort works, and Gin finds himself safely landing in Daisuke's trembling arms, but it's too late for Riki. As the dog gazes helplessly at his master, his friend, and his child, Akakabuto delivers a final blow to his side. The red bear sends the red dog tumbling off a nearby cliff, and Riki disappears into the black snowy depths below, followed by a trail of blood and Gohei's cries of anguish.
Pissed beyond words, Gohei drags himself out of the ravine, hatchet clenched in his fist. He's just about to tell Akakabuto to 1v1 him scrub, but then everyone hears something. It's the search party come to call, all armed with guns and thermoses of hot cocoa. Akakabuto takes one look at all those shiny boom sticks and high tails it, leaving a madly wailing Gohei behind.
Daisuke emerges from the hole with Gin in his arms, much to his own father's surprise. As the men gather to take the boy, puppy, and old man to safety, Gohei drags himself to the cliffside and weeps openly for the loss of his beloved dog and closest friend.
In a short while, Gohei finds himself on a stretcher all his own. He congratulates Fuji on her litter and Daisuke on his silver brindle puppy, assuring him that Gin will make a fine bear-dog someday. Diasuke is understandably feeling glum as Gohei is carted off to hospital, but he's emboldened by the old man's words, as is his puppy. Gin is too young to speak or even truly understand what's happened, but he knows something lifechanging has taken place.
Several weeks pass. Gin and his siblings grow larger, large enough for Daisuke to initiate training them for their futures as hunting dogs. The boy has masterminded only the most exhausting, trying test of ability for the young animals today: cross a snowy field to get to him. While his siblings flop through the ice like suffocating fish, Gin's intuitive sense of laziness takes him onto the clean-driven road, where he easily makes his way into Daisuke's admiring arms. Daisuke decides that Gin is a veritable puppy prodigy, and he refuses to ever let him go.
Before he can heap more praise onto the puppy, here comes Shinji, one of Diasuke's classmates and closest non-canine friend. Shinji comes bearing news: Gohei has left the hospital at long last. Not because the doctor cleared him to, but because the impatient inpatient insisted he couldn't wait around with his thumb up his ass (or up the wound in his leg) any longer. Akakabuto has only continued to terrorize and traumatize the village folk and their visitors.
This doesn't surprise Daisuke, who is, at anything, glad that someone still has the gumption to do something about That Asshole In The Woods. Gumption doesn't benefit everyone, insists Shinji. Given Gin's a silver brindle and demonstrably the most protagonist-y out of the whole litter, Gohei will surely come to take him someday. He's Riki's son, after all, and now that Riki is gone, someone will have to fill his pawprints.
Daisuke is preemptively heartbroken, remembering back to the first time he saw the elderly man come back into town with his dogs. Gohei had taken a blunt stick and smacked Don around with it for some unknown insolence that transpired during their last hunt. The memory sends Daisuke's stomach and emotions reeling, and he clings to Gin.
Or perhaps his heartbreak was not so preemptive, because Gohei began chugging along towards the ski lodge the moment he left the hospital parking lot. The old man barges in on the boys' conversation and snags Gin up by the scruff of his little neck. Diasuke's dad notices the commotion and busts into it, telling Gohei the doctor demanded he get 6 months more bedrest. Gohei ignores him, instead striking Gin across the face for no reason but to test how pussy the puppy is. This only causes Gin to begin chewing in anger on the old man's fingers, to which the weirdass only grins.
Daisuke isn't happy about his dog being slapped out of nowhere, but Gohei insists it proves Gin's got a fighting spirit, an inherent gameness. Not like those worthless siblings of his, who Gohei proves aren't worthy of being mentioned outside of the first arc ever again by bopping them both in the face as well. To a chorus of squealing, crying puppies, Gohei leaves, carrying Gin away.
As Daisuke cries after Gohei not to kill the dog, the old man carries the puppy out of sight. Gohei takes the puplet to his cabin, showcasing his collection of bear skulls and animal hides. He leans back from his crutches and informs Gin that he'll be trained in much the same way his father was.
Gin doesn't understand what this means until Gohei picks up a stick and starts beating the everloving shit out of him. Daisuke seems to have had a hunch this would happen, because he's followed Gohei home, and the moment he sees what he's doing to Gin, he's even more pissed then the last time he lost a game of Fortnite.
Diasuke can't keep himself from whining about "animal abuse" and how "it's not good to beat infants" and other special snowflakery, to which Gohei responds by deadass picking up his rifle. He reaches down towards the battered Gin, lifts him up beside the barrel, and fires off a shot into an ancient bear skull on one of his shelves, shattering it to splinters. The gun is so GODDAMN LOUD that Daisuke falls back from the noise, and yet the tiny Gin doesn't even flinch. He seems more mystified by the gun then scared of it, a level of comfort that Gohei remarks Riki took a year of training to achieve.
Gohei says that Daisuke can leave whenever he'd like, because this dog is too suited for the job for him to ever surrender him. Daisuke unhappily ceases arguing, but he insists on staying and watching Gin train, to which Gohei just shrugs dismissively.
The next morning, Daisuke awakens in Gohei's cabin to the sound of Gin's whimpering. He rushes outside to find Gohei trying to forcefeed Gin bear flesh, a strong smelling meat with the world's most uninviting texture. When Daisuke tries to interfere, Gohei punches the 10 year old squarely in the jaw, making it ludicrously hard for the audience to appreciate his presence. Gohei insists he's doing this to get Gin acquainted with the enemy's scent and prove to him his will to live, but all Daisuke hears is "wah wah wah me like torture children".
At suppertime that day, Gohei offers Daisuke some of the soup he's made. Daisuke says he refuses to eat until Gin does. Gin has yet to have eaten any bear meat, and Gohei refuses to back down and feed him anything else. Instead, Gohei supplements Daisuke's meal for a story about a dog he owned long before Gin was born.
The dog was a Tosa Inu named Rikiou ("king of power"), and he never knew fear, common sense, or self preservation. The first bear he ever encountered was too big for him to fight off, and, unwilling to back down for even a moment, it killed him. His head was crushed like a grape. Daisuke wavers on what this story means, but he assumes it means that if Gin wants to survive, he'll take the most logical route to do so, and that his aversion to bear meat will likely grant him more respect for bears' power in future. Gohei had no moral in mind tbh. He just likes rambling about his dogs (okay relatable)
The next morning, Daisuke decides he's done watching his puppy's samurai-training and goes home. He's back only long enough to greet his parents when everyone hears a scratching at the window. It's Gin! He followed Daisuke back home! Daisuke takes this as a sign that Gin would rather live with him then with Gohei, but he doesn't receive a chance to make this so.
Gohei comes up from behind the puppy and gives him a swift bop in the side with one of his crutches. He then snags a rope around the little pooch's neck. Gin wails miserably as the old timer takes him back to his cabin for another day of bruising and starving.
Three days later, Daisuke comes to call on Gohei once again, mostly to make sure Gin isn't dead yet. Gin isn't dead, but he IS super weak. Gohei states that the little bugger has stubbornly refused bear flesh for the past few days, which means he's had nothing to eat in nearly a week. Daisuke is at the end of his rope with this insolent boomer and starts kicking and stomping the bear meat around the room.
He straight up tells Gohei to fight him if he doesn't like it when he notices the old man looking past him towards Gin. When Daisuke turns, he realizes that Gin is finally, FINALLY eating! Now that the bear meat's been stomped on, it's soft enough for the little dude to sink his baby teeth into.
Several months pass. One day, Diasuke and Shinji are piddlefarting around town. The two become enraptured with the guns inside a weapons shop. Daisuke thinks out loud about how Akakabuto could easily be defeated if the guy who went after him had a rifle as powerful as these. His train of thought is interrupted by a man and his dog, a German Shepherd, entering the store. The man orders his dog to wait outside, and the animal follows his command with no hesitation.
The boys go to have a better look at the pooch, a young, handsome dog in a brown collar. The dog gazes boredly at the two. Shinji is impressed with the dog's obedience, but since he's neither an Akita nor a brindle, Daisuke couldn't care less.
Tired of gawking at a stranger's dog, the two head back to Gohei's place to peep what Gin's up to. "He's up to eating," Gohei basically says. But what he actually meant was "he's up to learning how to swim without breathing so he can eat the bear meat I've put at the bottom of a water basin". Which, by the way, is what Gin's doing. In fact, Gin will continue doing this exercise of his twice a day every day for several weeks, growing in muscle mass and understanding of how to not die via water inhalation.
In the meantime, Gohei sorta zones out while hovering over Gin's personal swimming pool. He mutters something about Riki training just like this to the boys, to which Shinji politely excuses himself and runs home. God forbid he stay behind to hear an old man ramble.
Daisuke, on the other hand, is a nerd who is intrigued by the knowledge Gohei possesses. He asks what it was like hunting with Riki, to which Gohei chuffs and turns away. He doesn't go into detail about his dog - he's still in mourning - but he does detail what it's like to hunt bears. It's all math and muscle memory, he says, much to Daisuke's disbelief.
Gohei asserts that the simplest way to kill a bear is to abide by The Centre Line Rule, a theory among bear hunters that states that all of a bear's weakest points are down the middle of its body when it's standing erect. Fire a shot off into a bear's chest or gut or forehead from dead center, and you'll learn why it's called "dead" center. Daisuke doesn't know if he believes the boomer, but he rolls the idea around in his head as he watches Gin collect his soggy rations.
After a bit of time passes, Gohei comes to visit Daisuke. He brings little Gin along with him. At first, Gin's siblings are very happy to see him. They rush towards him to play, cheering about how their brother has returned, and he instantly kicks their asses. Gin's siblings are no longer very happy to see him. They run to their mother's side for comfort as Gin comes to a heel at Gohei's leg in an insanely powerful flex on momma's boys everywhere.
Daisuke asks the old hunter what he's doing poking around these here parts, and after scolding him for speaking like a cowboy, Gohei invites him along to watch Gin's first hunting trip. Obviously since something's happening, Daisuke MUST be included.
The three head out to a river gorge nearby to blast some ducks outta the sky. Gohei is taking his sweetass time with aiming and firing, which is very uncharacteristic of him. It soon becomes obvious why, though. As soon as he manages to snipe a bird outta the air, he allows it to fall into the ravine below before commanding Gin to go in after it.
Gin is still too full of vim and vigor to be afraid, so he leaps into the foaming snake of water below, his basin training finally showing some use. From somewhere nearby, a man's voice can be heard barking commands in English, which I cannot transcribe here because I don't speak English.
As Gin braves the rapids, a familiar silhouette also comes down into the gorge. It's another dog, and Daisuke recognizes it! It's the pompous German Shepherd from the weapons shop, and before you can learn how to properly pronounce "nagareboshi", he's snagged Gin's bird up and started making off with it!
Daisuke shouts obscenities at the thieving bastard as Gin follows behind him. For the first time, Gin begins to speak to another dog, though all the humans hear is adorable yipping. Gin tells the dog to let go of his master's kill. The dog makes like he's going to say something sarcastic back, but his mouth is too full to speak.
Instead, the dog continues to bolt, finishing his sprint by climbing to the top of the cliffside and leaping to the other side of the ravine. Little Gin tries to follow suit, but his anime protag powers haven't truly kicked in yet, and instead he ends up missing the mark and tumbling back down into the water below. The shepherd snorts in smug amusement before scampering away.
Gin, Gohei, and Daisuke pack up and start heading home. Gohei is visibly annoyed at the loss of the kill. Even Gin looks forlorn about it. Just as Daisuke begins trying to soothe the two of them, a Jeep drives past. Sitting proudly in the backseat is a dog - the German Shepherd from before! Daisuke and Gin both call out to the thief to return their kill, and the man driving the Jeep stops and gets out to meet them.
Daisuke recognizes the man from the gun shop, but only Gohei knows his name. The young man is called Hidetoshi Sekiguchi, and he's the son of the village mayor, the man who was attacked by Akakabuto alongside Gohei.
Hidetoshi apologizes for the inconvenience regarding the bird, but assures them that it was his kill all along. He tosses the bird's carcass to Daisuke to prove it. The bird's head is missing, clearly having been blasted off its feathery shoulders by the force of a bullet. That bullet came from the shiny, new, powerful-looking rifle Hidetoshi had just purchased.
The young man is a doctor by trade but a hunter at heart, and he's come all the way back from the UK with this new gun and his faithful hunting dog John to kill the bear that mauled his father. Gohei tries to tell Hidetoshi that all the fancy equipment and stuck up canines in the world aren't enough to kill that bear, to which Hidetoshi just patronizingly grins and drives away.
As Hidetoshi and John drive out of sight, Daisuke and Gohei begin heading home. Gin trails a little behind, both spellbound by John's achievement and poise as well as frustrated by his stolen victory. He swears to himself that if he ever sees the GSD again, he won't lose to him once more. He scrunches up his little baby face in determination before following behind the others.
A couple more weeks pass generally uneventfully. Gin continues his training and keeps growing rapidly. Daisuke has tried to keep himself involved in Gin's upbringing, but he's been cooped up inside for a few days now. A blizzard combined with the constant looming threat of Akakabuto makes his parents uncomfy with letting him lollygag around in the woods. So tonight he's chillin' inside with his folks when suddenly they hear an erratic banging at the door. Fuji gets up and snarls, looking more scared then aggressive.
Suddenly, the door flies open and its glass windows, frosted from the cold, shatter. A man tumbles headlong into the living room. A large, bloody gash on the side of his head oozes all over the new rug, horrifying the family for both altruistic and materialistic reasons. Daisuke's father runs to the man's side, trying to keep him awake, while his mother runs to call an ambulance.
The man begins gibbering through bloodied teeth about a monster with a red mane and how his friends and son are still in danger. Daisuke's dad sends his son off to retrieve Gohei, which Daisuke does without skipping a beat because oh my god something he can be involved in, SCORE.
Treading through the snow on his shiny new prosthetic leg, Gohei allows Gin to lead he and Daisuke back to the man. Gohei recognizes him immediately - he's an old hunting buddy, a renowned bear hunter named Shigematsu. Gohei catches the attention of the languishing lad just long enough to see recognition in his eyes before Shigematsu succumbs to his injuries, dying on Daisuke's floor.
Gohei knows he can't stand idly by while Shigematsu's crew are at risk, so he gathers his rifle and his dog and heads out the door. As they leave, Gin looks over his shoulder for an instant at his mother. Fuji gazes longingly at her son as he exits the house. Daisuke and his father follow behind Gohei and head off to gather the same dudes who have been wandering around in the forest looking for bear attack victims for the past several months at this point.
As the group enters the woods, they come across an unexpected sight. It's Hidetoshi and John. Word spread quickly through the village about the man dying from a bear attack, and Hidetoshi wants a chance to fire a few bullets into Akakabuto's ass to make up for his suffering. He joins the men in their hike to Shigematsu's cabin, much to Gin's dismay. Gin still isn't very fond of the callous asshole of a shepherd he's forced to walk beside. John sneers at him, fully aware of how bothersome his presence is.
Meanwhile at Shigematsu's cabin, his remaining friends are trembling and sweating, guns in hand. They know the bear is lurking just outside the cabin somewhere, having a merry little picnic of any men who tried to escape. They inch against the wall only to find it crumbling behind them. A gigantic bear with a red trail of fur down its back roars and swings its mighty paws at the men, shattering their skulls upon impact. Their screams ring through the winter air, entangling with the buzzing of the wind.
By the time the group reaches the cabin, the bear is wandering outside. Gin takes one look at it and leaps into action, ready to be the bear-hound he was meant to be, before tumbling into a snowdrift he can't wiggle out of. John makes fun of the stoopid newb xDDD before using his longer, less silly legs to bumrush the big boogieman of a bear. He snarls and snaps at the predator's face, swiftly dodging his swaying claws.
Gin finally manages to free himself from his strongest enemy yet, the snow, and follows John's example. Only he uses a different source of inspiration for his moves: the memory of his father clinging desperately to the upper side of the bear's snout.
It's already been seen that Gin isn't very agile yet, and the bear takes full advantage of this by smacking him away as if batting at a silver striped fly, sending the puppy squealing into the snow, embarrassed but otherwise unharmed. Daisuke rushes to make sure Gin is alright. The men all open fire on the bear, but the fierce blizzard winds prevent them from getting a good hit on him.
The bear makes a break for it only to be distracted by John. Hidetoshi takes aim while his pet busies the big boy and fires his rifle off square in the animal's chest. The unsteady teddy stumbles with a wail of pain, rolling back into the snow.
As the bear tries to get up once again, Hidetoshi lets loose another bullet into the animal's left eye, finally sending it to bear hell where it belongs. In a moment of catharsis, he lets fly a few more bullets into the dead animal's skull, images of his father's mauled corpse dancing in traumatic fashion around his head. Everyone is still for a moment.
Hidetoshi is about to say something about honor and family or whatever when Gohei interrupts the celebration by pointing out that this animal cannot be Akakabuto. Buty Boy has no right eye, whereas this unlucky fucker had two before getting blown away. Everyone gapes. The striking resemblance the animal has to Akakabuto can only mean one thing: the tyrant has been getting laid, passing his powerful and dangerous genes onto a new generation. A feeling of intense terror spreads through the crowd, and about 50 feet away, a single, glassy eye shimmers in the darkness.
The dogs are shaken from their own stupor by the scent of something wicked this way coming. John and Gin snarl at the large black mass watching the crowd, and the men look to see the forest's resident bastard glaring at them. Akakabuto stares spitefully at the men, taking in all of their scents and faces. His gaze also falls first on the German Shepherd, then on the little silver ball of fur beside it. He can't pinpoint why, but the upstart (pupstart?) looks and smells incredibly familiar.
Furious at the sight of his father's murderer, Gin tries to run towards the hulking mountain of bear. Daisuke snags him up before he can run very far, though, and he settles with barking obscenities at the enemy instead.
Again everyone fires, but it's too late. Akakabuto is wicked fast and not nearly as dumb as his offspring, so he's already gotten the hell outta dodge. Hidetoshi swears out loud, blueballed by fate once again. Gohei tells everyone they'd best go home. Nobody who'd wander into the forest to find that bear at night could make it back out alive, not even him in his golden days.
Everyone begins the chilling, chilly hike to the village. Daisuke sulks coldly in more ways then one, distracted from where he's going by his own dark thoughts about the bear that's been ruining everyone's lives. Because of his lack of focus, the boy takes a nasty fall into a sinkhole the snow covered up, and he finds himself screaming, flailing, and falling into a break in the mountain.
Everyone cries out to him, grabbing at him, but soon he's out of sight. Daisuke shuts up for the first time in his life when his head strikes a rock and knocks him unconscious. He tumbles onto a cliff overhang before truly entering the Earth's core, crumpling into a helpless heap.
All the men are losing their minds over what to do, especially Daddy Daisuke upon realizing the hole is too big for any of the men to squeeze into. Everyone's flipping shit except for Gin, who is gazing longingly into the hole, and Gohei, who is gazing thoughtfully at Gin. The old man has an Aha! moment and throws open his pack to retrieve a rope, which he then firmly secures on Gin's collar.
Everyone stops freaking and asks what he's doing. He rolls his eyes as if it's the most obvious thing in the world - he's sending Gin down to drag Daisuke back up, DUH!
With no better options, the crew send the puppy into the pit. Gin's a pretty clever kid, so he understands his mission well enough. He's lucky, too, and finds Daisuke quickly. He tries to lick the child's face to awaken him, but it doesn't work. Daisuke's alive, but he's out cold. There's no hope of him climbing out himself. So maybe, just maybe...
Gin thinks fast and literally runs circles around the unconscious kid, wrapping the rope tightly around his torso and under his armpits. After a few turns of Ring Around The Search And Rescue Victim, the doglet gives a tug on the rope and a bark up through the tunnel. Nothing happens for a sec sans the sound of unintelligible, excitable speech, but then Gin gets some feedback. The men understood, and they're pulling the rope up.
To keep things really secure, tiny Gin is forced to clench his jaws around the rope and support Daisuke's weight with his neck. His collar digs into the baby fat around his neck, drawing blood, but he refuses to let go of his buddy.
The men give one last hard yoink and pull both of the youngsters out of the sinkhole. Daisuke's dad cradles his child to his chest, announcing that the kid is unconscious but still alive. Everyone cheers while Hidetoshi cradles little Gin, who is also fading from consciousness from exhaustion, to his own chest. Hidetoshi wipes some of the blood from Gin's neck as John watches. John's eyes soften for probably the first time in his life as he sees how Gin has still refused to release the rope. Is this what it's like to be humbled?
Daisuke's eyes slowly flutter open, which elicits another cheer from the emotional crowd. His dad hugs him tightly, gushing tearfully about his son's survival and the little dog's bravery. Upon hearing Diasuke's exhausted response back, Gin's own eyes shoot open and he leaps from Hidetoshi's arms into Daisuke's. He licks the boy's face eagerly, clearing it of the tears that have streamed from it.
Gohei comes to Daisuke's side, his eyes even softer then John's. He reaches down and lifts the puppy up just inches from his face. Gin's tiny tongue flicks out to lick the end of the senior's nose. Gohei brings the dog child to his chest and gives him a gentle hug and a pet on the head. Everyone looks on in disbelief. As long as any of them have known him, Gohei has never pet any of his dogs, let alone hug them. Gohei hands Gin back to Daisuke, allowing the child to hold the puppy close.
As everyone gets ready to head home once more, Daisuke declares his eternal devotion to the silver brindle dog, appreciative of his friendship and forever convinced of his bravery.
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End of episode 1, the episode with what’s likely the most non-dog child beating in the series!!! Hope you “””enjoyed””” it!!!
Episode 2: The Invasion
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