Text: No one can breathe blue water. But down deep enough, where no light reaches, black water runs through your lungs like silk. 

Just watched the last episode of AoT, and man it's wild that I started reading the manga and watching the show when I started high school and now it's finished as I graduate college

Anyways, here are my shower thoughts:

Attack on Titan is a tragedy. Obviously. Eren is young, foolish, and emotional, as many tragedy protags tend to be, ala Hamlet.

But what I think a lot of people take issue with is that a lot of people tend to view the story thru a shounen lens of the main character is the good guy and is always fighting for what's right, and once he wins, everything will turn out great - which is ahem not aot in the slightest

And I think that's how you get all those people showing their support for one side or the other, especially with the jeagerists. Cuz Eren's the main character and ofc he's in the right, he's the mc!

But that's not what a tragedy is about. It's not about the epic fights or about defeating a single opponent and then everything turning out dandy. It's about the consequences of your actions, no matter your intentions, and the cycle of anger and violence that keeps ever turning. And Aot is a really well written tragedy in my opinion! It really spells across how hopeless you are in the face of war and violence and how this violence can create people who believe they're doing right but are actually just causing more death and destruction (really my mind is just going crazy with the Hamlet/Eren parallels here). Eren is 19, angry, traumatized, and trapped by all this crazy future and past knowledge that can't be good for his psyche obviously. He's not the same as a shounen protag, you can't expect him to be in the right, and for everything to turn out okay after what he's done, basically. Tragedies end in tragedy unfortunately

Anyways tldr: Aot is a tragedy and Eren is a literal 19yo who was not gonna make the right decisions and that's the point - and not enough people view it this way. I haven't seen people's reactions to the anime finale yet but I feel like quite a few people might not like the ending, or who knows maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised

Attempted to do X-Files for spooktober but got sidetracked

“If The X-Files was a 90s anime.”

credit: MabooCraboo on imgur

Rewatched the Howl's Moving Castle movie (fantastic animated movie, definitely inspired by more than an adaptation of the book) while doing something else and I was struck this time by the fact that the Prince (Turniphead the Scarecrow) says that he intends to go tell his king to call off the war, but THEN he intends on COMING BACK to Ingary to shoot his shot with Sophie again because (as he says to the flirtatious Witch of the Wastes) "hearts change".

And maybe he will come back to make Sophie an offer of marriage and then leave again when he's turned down, but I imagined for a moment that the Prince (who is possibly the movie's version of Prince Justin, so let's call him Justin) might just... move back into Howl's house without asking and stay there. There are several cases of precedent for this. Also, as Turniphead, he's shown several times helping Sophie with laundry, or playing with Markl, or helping the Witch of the Wastes move around, and Sophie deserves that kind of help around the house! Howl isn't going to reliably do chores.

And you know what? I think Howl would be into that shit. There's something very Wynne-Jonesian about it all still. It's tempting to write a post-canon fic about this situation from the movie with an extra dash of flavoring from the books. Like:

This is the infamous wizard Howl Pendragon/Jenkins, a vain draft-dodging flirt who likes to build moving castles to evade taxes too. The beautifully angry young woman with the silver hair over there is his wife, Sophie Hatter, who may or may not be an extremely powerful witch, but right now she's dusting and do not get in her way. This is Calcifer, the fire demon who used to have Howl's heart and is arguably his other life partner and also might be in love with Sophie, and this is arguably kind of actually his house. The old lady smoking a cigar over there is Howl's ex-girlfriend and former nemesis, the Witch of the Wastes, who now lives in their house. This is Markl, Howl's apprentice, kind of his kid, and there is no explanation of where he comes from or what happened to his parents. The dog used to be(?) the Royal Wizard's spy (Howl used to be her apprentice and potential successor) but now he also just lives here. And that's Prince Justin of Strangia, Sophie's house-boyfriend. Don't listen to the propaganda, he wasn't kidnapped by a heart-eating wizard; he used to be a cursed scarecrow and now he wants to be here to help Sophie do laundry. He's trying to homewreck and Howl thinks it's both funny and hot.

Not "I can fix him (romantic)" or even "I can fix him (platonic)" but "I can fix him (with an air of soul-deep weariness, taking on a great burden)"

Zuko was wrong, actually. (I think.maybe.) Because juice, like, comes from the moisture in thing thing and then you remove the non-liquid bits, whereas in (most?) tea, you infuse the leaves with water instead of relying on the inherent water. True hot leaf juice would be if you extracted liquid from a couple leaves and heated it up, which would be expensive and probably bitter but a fun way to do it

Uh… I think I’ll pass on answering this one, thanks…

movie howl: that's my girl! sophie you're hair is so pretty, i want to protect you and love you forever

book howl when sophie wants to clean his room:

Ghosts seriously missed out having a whole episode purely from Mike's perspective. I know we got to see a few scenes where it looks to him like Alison is talking to herself but imagine like we never see the ghosts for the entire thirty minutes and then another Bump In The Night scenario where he has to try to communicate to them without her but we don't see them so it's just how it looks to him, could've been really fun as a one off.

I'm still thinking about chapters 19 and 20. howl is absolutely terrified of the witch. she is one of very few people who match him on talent, power, and wit. she's already taken out the second most powerful wizard in ingary. howl's backup team currently consists of one fire demon with a metaphysical hand tied behind his back, one 15 year old boy, and a bespelled elderly woman who doesn't know how to direct her magic. all of them he has the misfortune of caring about, and all of them are vulnerable.

then sophie absolutely loses it on him. like, almost irredeemably angry. AND she threatens to leave just before he's supposed to fulfill the prophecy that may very well kill him. I would go get drunk too

Inktober 2021: Part (1/5)

Ongoing Illustrations of "Howl's Moving Castle" by Diana Wynne Jones.

I took a Goliath project this year and I'm glad I'm close to finishing it.

Tumblr Sexyman Of The Day #156

The Medicine Seller (Mononoke, 2007)

List Of Archetypes

Androgynous

Animal Theming(?)

Deadpan Snarker

Distinctive Voice

Duality(?)

Eye Imagery

Intellegence

Monster Features

Pale Twink

Tall

Religious Imagery(?)

Well Dressed

Submitted By Anon!

Something I really appreciate about Grave of the Fireflies is that the film doesn’t antagonise those who were more fortunate in the war. (I’m referring to the women returning to their house which overlooks the lake where Seita and Setsuko’s shelter is, remarking on how nothing has changed, how nice the view is, etc.).

In Western media at least, there’s often this rhetoric of wealthy/well-off = automatically arrogant, spoiled, selfish, and impoverished/needing to struggle = automatically good and hardworking, just on the status of their wealth or wellbeing alone. It can definitely apply to some people, but not all.

It would have been easy to have these nicely-dressed girls return to their house and remark on how disgusting the starving people on the streets are, or how ugly the bombed towns they passed on their journey back home were, but the film doesn’t do that—because how these people experienced the war isn’t good or bad. It’s just fortunate.

And yes, this luck may lead the characters to take the war for granted off-screen, but the film doesn’t go out of its way to blame them for the fact that they can afford to take it for granted, which I find moving, because it shows these women as people. Not antagonists because they haven’t suffered as much as some others: they’re just happy to be home and enjoy the view, and who wouldn’t be in their position? They’re people whose situation in another world may have been exchanged with Seita’s and Setsuko’s.

The film does depict people who are better off and directly faced with suffering which they choose to ignore or even insult, such as the opening scene in the train station, but these people are (quite rightfully) shown as dislikable due to their actions, not the fact alone that they’re getting by fine.

I just appreciate how the film doesn’t try to make any moralising out of those who happened to suffer more/less than others. In war, it’s a lottery. Any horrible person can die or survive as peacefully or painfully as any good person, because war doesn’t care about the individuals and doesn’t serve any justice towards those it affects. It’s the actions of people who can help which matter, not whether or not they’re able to help in itself.

bro my sister is actually so smart

so yknow how Zuko’s scar is worse directly around his eye?

and there are a lot of reasons that could be but also consider this (and this is what my 12 year old sister came up with)

Zuko was sobbing and refusing to fight his father when Ozai burned him

his tears literally became boiling water against his eye.

it is genshin! it’s a ship between a wandering samurai with a dead friend (top guy) and a god’s discarded and depressed puppet (bottom guy) in a racer au (as said in the post).

uh racing au??