#chapter thoughts
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Chapter 143 thoughts!
Alright so I skipped my thoughts on the last chapter, but I wanted to say that I don’t have especially negative feelings about it. It’s nice to see Ruby’s character taken seriously again after so long, and the framing of the chapter with the specific language and horror-esque directing was very pointed. It’s just frustrating that this matter seems to keep getting pushed off and unresolved after so many chapters whereas other major plot points (such as Ruby learning the identity of her father) are being off screened entirely.
Enough about two weeks ago, my thoughts on THIS chapter
We open where we left off, Aqua is clearly brushing Ruby off and she is being insistent. She tells him (as Gorou) that he listens to her selfishness
Aqua, having some of Gorou in his nature, calls for a compromise. Unfortunately that just fuels her on more.
It’s interesting how he “becomes” Gorou in this way for her. It’s very performative, an act he’s doing to appease her. It reminds me of how different Taiki seems when he’s acting vs when he’s not.
Small note, but does he just carry those glasses on him? Like Ruby’s popsicle that disappeared last chapter.
This is what I wanted all this time! There is a significant difference in how these two view their past lives that is finally getting addressed here. Ruby feels like Sarina, she sees her second life as an extension of the first, a New Game+ where she gets to do everything she always wanted.
But Aqua isn’t Gorou, he hasn’t been for a long time. He’s an 18 year old boy who has been shaped by the (mostly traumatic) experiences he’s had in this life already. Gorou appears to him as a manifestation of guilt, and unfinished business when he tried to move on with his life, but that’s no longer his identity.
Also ow this panel
I also think the feeling guilty about being alive comment hits so much with Ruby because that’s how she felt in chapter 121 after seeing Marina Tendouji.
To her, Aqua revealing his previous identity saved her, gave her what she needed to carry on. Which is why she does the same for him here.
Ruby right now is very “I can fix him” which makes sense for her character and experiences. It’s naive and selfish, but very in character for her. Considering she’s also avoiding her own hardships in life with love it makes perfect sense for that to be her advice to him, and forcing a kiss on him -while not a cool thing to do to someone- also lined up with that.
My biggest complaint comes afterwards, or rather the lack of afterwards. Aqua’s expression in the kiss panel is of shock, but it’s hard to gauge exactly what he’s feeling after that without the following scene. It leaves it up to interpretation in an arc rife with “all subtext no text” writing already, prolonging this arc even further.
That said, it’s an interesting transition. Ruby, the initiator of the first kiss parallels the placing of Aqua/Hikaru in the second. Outside of the movie Aqua is the one in Ai’s position.
With that in mind, Ai’s “I can’t love you” set up at the beginning of this arc holds much more weight.
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thoughts on the new chapter? you said before spinneraki is a pillar in the story and i think this chapter continues to be evidence of that
For these two anons who asked for them, have some Chapter Thoughts, 411-version. Herein can be found two big chunks of musing about, respectively, OFA & Shigaraki and the Shigaraki+Deku+Spinner confluence, as well as the usual handful of stray thoughts.
(I'm also going to throw in a few last minute thoughts about plot events between here and the last chapter I had a post on, Chapter 392. They'll be off-the-cuff and not comprehensive; feel free to send an ask if there's anything specific you're curious about, though I can't at this time promise e.g. the twelve thousand word essay on why the AFO vs. All Might fight sucks rocks.)
Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 411: History's Greatest Villain
OFA Vestiges vs. Shigaraki Tomura
Shinomori remains my favorite OFA bearer by a large margin; I enjoy how his quirk allows him to be the one bearer with his act together this chapter. I also like that him being the vestige that actively chooses to sacrifice “himself” for the good of the rest of One For All makes a nice bookend with my preferred headcanon that he was the bearer who had the power forced on him against his will.
That said, it is a bit ironic that Danger Sense surely had to rank right up near the top of OFA quirks that it’s most dangerous for Deku to lose to Shigaraki! Like, throw Shigaraki En or something; Smoke Screen’s not going to let Shigaraki do anything Deku can’t counter with Danger Sense! Sacrifice Nana; Deku and Shigaraki both already have ways to keep aloft enough.[1] So I appreciate both the display of Shinomori’s instinctive heroism and the dramatic choice to deprive Deku of such a key component of his defense, after god knows how many chapters of dramatic choices I pretty much hate across the board.
1: That said, it does look like the person Shinomori shoved most directly out of the way was Banjo, his own successor, which speaks to their bond and also spares Deku losing a crucial quirk, as Black Whip has been his main way to exert any control at all over the battle with Shigaraki and is also helping keep his arms braced. As someone who wanted those humerus consequences after the first war, I say, “Go, Shigaraki, go! Get the Sixth next!”
My god, the rest of them are such a mess this chapter. Very funny, actually. Shaking my head at them in there talking about how to “bring down” Shigaraki, who they know good and well Deku wants to help. “Our entire reason for still existing!” No, Bro Bro, you existed solely to take down All For One, which Bakugou et. al. have neatly taken care of for you. The only other purpose ever given to you was to save people, but I guess you’ve already forgotten that.
Seriously, I love the discord this chapter, the panic and fear, particularly from the youthful En—watching that unified will crumble in the face of Shigaraki’s hatred is a wonderful balm to all the times I had to suffer through seeing commenters elsewhere on the internet blithely taking it for granted that One For All could never be stolen just because All Might said it was so, laughing it off when Ujiko promised Shigaraki otherwise. My villain fan agenda aside, though, it’s also a rare highlight for Deku that I like, which I’ll circle back to.
Regarding Shigaraki with Danger Sense, I know there was some discussion of whether he’d be able to fully utilize it against Deku when Deku wants to “save” him. As giving Deku that out would have been the story yet again undermining the villains’ fairly won victories (and as Danger Sense has been so wildly inconsistently written that Horikoshi could have gotten away with practically anything), I’m pleased to see it’s working as intended! That said, you probably could have some interesting discussion of exactly whose “intent” Danger Sense is picking up on. Deku may want to help Shigaraki, but e.g. Banjo, Bruce and Kudou certainly don’t seem to want that! Given how explicitly Kudou was synonymizing quirks and wills back in Chapter 369,[2] and particularly given that Shigaraki can perceive the vestiges now, it wouldn’t surprise me if their wills are bleeding over into Deku’s usage of their quirks.
2: I.e. the “gaslighting the readership about the historical usage of meta-ability terminology” chapter.
I do wonder if this is set-up for Shinomori—and potentially other quirks as well, including any more OFA vestiges Shigaraki manages to snag!—giving us a tired retread of the “quirk vestiges mount a resistance against their unrightful bearer at a critical juncture” moments we saw with AFO, but I suppose that’d be what Shigaraki gets for trying to steal bits of OFA after saying previously that he didn’t care about it. (Sigh.)
Deku, Spinner, and Shigaraki Tomura's "Personhood"
I appreciate Deku pushing back against Shigaraki’s dehumanization, though it does not escape me that he directs that pushback to Shigaraki himself, not any of the voices inside Deku’s head calling Shigaraki calamity and ruin incarnate, and certainly not any actual humans on his side in the real world. It smacks of the same pattern heroes always fall into of leaping to castigate villains for things they tacitly ignore in their own allies. Still, it is at least spoken aloud, and to Shigaraki’s face, which is a pleasant change.
I swear to Christ, if after all this time Spinner becomes a bridge between Shigaraki and Deku after all, I am going to be so damn smug. Albeit in different contexts, I called that years ago, and lo and behold, here we have Shigaraki, accused of having no friends, self-dehumanized, and depersonalized by Deku’s allies, immediately refute the point by bringing up his best friend of his own volition, tying his destruction to someone outside of himself.
While Deku hasn’t connected the dots on-page yet, he certainly can’t have missed it, though it remains to be seen how much about Spinner Deku actually knows/remembers from their encounter at the training camp—that encounter long being an important part of my reasoning that Spinner could, via his and Deku’s shared respect for Stain and desire to help Shigaraki, find some common ground.
Moreover, we get Deku flashing to Uraraka—as well he should! Since Uraraka is the only one who managed to unearth some empathy for her designated villain foil without a familial or fated connection to them, she deserves to feature prominently in Deku’s attempts to connect with his own opposite number.
I do wonder if we will yet get a flashback to the mall scene. Honestly, Deku could have kickstarted his connection to Shigaraki all the way back then, when Shigaraki functionally laid his damage out in front of Deku like fine china, only for Deku to grab the first excuse anyone gave him to write it off and forget about it. The story could probably get away with not reminding the readers of that—after all, Shigaraki hasn’t really changed his grievance since then, just expanded his invocation of blame! His monologue at Jakku is just a refined version of what he said at the mall encounter, so the only reason to flash back to the less developed take is to have Deku vocalize that he could (and should!) have been wondering about Shigaraki as “a person, too” this whole time, instead of only coming to do so after their mindscape encounter.
Acknowledging the gaps in Saint Deku’s Miraculous Saving Instincts would go a long, long way towards softening me on the narrative BNHA’s been trying to sell me on its main character.
Anyway, three cheers for Spinaraki; they never fuckin’ lose, do they? It’s particularly gratifying in light of the way people on Twitter were speedrunning the shift from dismissing Spinner as unimportant to criticizing him as “toxic” as it became more and more clear that saving Shigaraki was going to be more complicated than just dealing with AFO. People really thought that if Deku could just lay all the blame for Shigaraki’s anger at AFO’s feet, then he could just wipe it away, eradicating “Shigaraki Tomura”—who was never really a person anyway, just fifteen years of grooming and coping mechanisms—and leaving behind only sweet, innocent, undemanding Shimura Tenko.
But if Shigaraki was carrying anger for others, blame for wrongs that couldn’t be attributed to AFO, suddenly that narrative got messier. Suddenly the League needed to be Bad For Each Other, needed to be separated for their own good, redeemed by the grace of their designated student foils—and nowhere was that trickier than with Spinner, who didn’t have one, and whose every flashback post-war made it clearer and clearer that he had a relationship with Shigaraki that went beyond the League’s stated purpose as an alliance of Villains to bring down Hero Society.
The tidier version of the story would still be salvageable if Shigaraki didn’t really care about Spinner more than anyone else in the League, if Spinner’s devotion were one-sided, if Shigaraki didn’t determine to share Spinner’s grievance. If Spinner’s problems aren’t Shigaraki’s problems too, then Deku doesn’t have to address them. And but so, the mad scramble to invalidate the connection by any means possible.
But then here comes Shigaraki not just mentioning Spinner, but mentioning something Spinner wanted that Spinner never even told him about on the page, meaning either Shigaraki was paying close enough attention to Spinner to simply intuit it, or he and Spinner had an off-page conversation about Deika where Spinner in all his insecurity was able to admit to Shigaraki that he thought his horizon was beautiful. And not only does Shigaraki remember this, he dedicates his destruction of Mount Fuji to Spinner and the horizon.
Not so one-sided after all, is it?
That all said, of course it’s also worth asking if Spinner actually wants the horizon anymore. Judging by his tormented inner reflections when striving to reach Kurogiri, that doesn’t really seem to be the case. At the end of Spinner’s strength, what he truly remembers and treasures is the time he and Shigaraki spent just dicking around talking about video games—just being friends. Spinner wants Shigaraki to get what he wants—but if they’re both just crediting That Beautiful Horizon to each other without realizing it’s not really about what they themselves want anymore, where does that leave them?
One suspects that was one function of the possession plot—keeping them from talking to each other freely and being able to figure that out themselves. As it is, with the possession plot seemingly off the table, at least for now, that brings us back to Deku and his resolution to reach the humanity in Shigaraki Tomura—a humanity that Shigaraki just helpfully signposted by referencing his friend Spinner.
So how long until we cut away to find out where the Rooftop Trio and Spinner have gotten off to?
Stray Thoughts
Re: Mount Fuji, Horikoshi’s grasp of travel times remains as totally unhinged as ever. Someone who can make rudimentary animations needs to use that battle map volume extra to demonstrate exactly the distances that would have to traversed by All For One, U.A., All Might and especially Lady Nagant and her bullets in this final arc for them to keep arriving where the story needs them to be.
I see the artistic indication is very much that Shigaraki can just spread Decay wherever he walks now. That’s both wonderfully evocative for the embodied destructive divine impulse he’s nominally become and also a bit amusing, because if you can unlock a touch-based quirk to spread through your feet, maybe Overhaul’s not out of luck just yet after all. XD
Good riddance to the mask! As others have pointed out, it’s modelled on All Might’s smile, and is therefore the last thing Deku should be wearing right now, given that Shigaraki has specifically expressed, to Deku’s face, that he hates All Might’s fucking smile, “As if there’s no one he can’t save!” Hope Shigaraki gets that damn cape next, such as is left of it.
Events Up To Now (Chapters 393 - 410)
The resolution of the Ochaco vs. Toga fight is very solid emotionally, though hampered by yet more nerfing of Toga's power set to make sure she can't do all the damage she should logically be capable of doing, as well as a lot of incredibly tiresome shoehorning in of mentions of Deku just to make sure everyone gets how Not Homo it is for Ochaco to tell Toga she's the cutest girl in the whole world. But I love that Toga remains unrepentant and faithful to Shigaraki to the end. I will turn a lot less nice about this if Toga turns out to have actually died here, however.
(She should have gotten to stab fucking Hawks.)
The All Might vs. AFO fight sucks rocks. The mech suit makes a nonsense of All Might's primary arc post-Kamino, it's flatly irreconcileable with his characterization throughout the Edgy Deku arc, it leans on a bond with the 1-A students that he has entirely failed to earn, and it parades their identies and power sets out in front of the world with absolutely zero indication that he ever asked them if they were okay with that. As an answer to the "quirkless hero" question it is purest sophistry, laughably detached from reality.
The world's reaction to the All Might vs. AFO fight sucks rocks. The return of Wishing Energy is the obvious point of note, but I prefer to focus on how patently ridiculous it is that across the multitudinous barriers of age, language, culture, politics, national attitude, wealth level, and views on heroism, everyone in the world who watches the battle and gets into it enough to really pay attention is magically able to intuit that the man in the black military hardware suit injecting acid into the underclothed twelve-year-old is the "Hero."
Kunieda is a delight and he and Aoyama should have had history going back to AFO's sway over the family.
Shigaraki is great when he's getting actual attention, but as part and parcel of the AFO vs. All Might fight sucking on such intergalactic levels, it made Shigaraki awful, too, reducing him to generic last boss counting-his-evil-chickens-before-they're-hatched gloating. Praying we see no more of that going forward.
It is extremely headshaking in retrospect that the Heroes actively acknowledged during the planning process for all this that they would prefer to engage with the AFO persona in Shigaraki than Shigaraki himself, the Heroes then find out during the battle that AFO is trying to get to Shigaraki with the specific aim of reawakening said persona, and yet the Jakku team, All Might and Bakugou still blow interminable fucking chapters on preventing AFO from doing the exact thing that would get them back the persona they explicitly stated it would be preferable to deal with.
Edgeshot continues to be Just The Worst, not even having the decency to wait until the endgame to confirm what I predicted back when the nonsense about repairing Bakugou's heart first came up: that, "You won't be able to come back from this," is a bald-faced lie intended to ratchet up tension, one that would be rolled back the instant the danger was past and Bakugou could be gotten to a proper hospital room.
AFO's backstory is the laziest of lazy dreck. The new information soundly deprives Yoichi of the marginal amounts of agency he had previously managed to suggest he exercised, conflicts with what's been previously implied about the brothers' personal history, fails to reconcile the child AFO with the man we met in Deku's dream prior to Joint Training, and reduces all of the interpersonal drama between AFO, Yoichi and Kudou into nothing more than a reason for Bakugou to inspire fear and distress in BabyFO. (See @robotlesbianjavert's post and Nal's tags on it here, and @codenamesazanka's post here.)
Omni-Factor Unleash is a retread of Kamino AND Overhaul's minion forms AND Akira-fied Shigaraki. You guys, I think maybe Horikoshi is Bad At Coming Up With Final Boss Attacks.
#bnha#chapter thoughts#bnha 411#and some other chapters as well#amazing how much more tolerable these chapters are when shigaraki's properly in the driver's seat#based on prior performance i don't expect it to last#but it's nice to have for now#and the spinaraki vindication is indeed sweet#my writing#stillness answers
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new chapter thoughts
Once again, just a few quick thoughts. I’ve not forgotten that I mean to review this along with the chapter before, but not just yet.
So, we know from the previous chapter that Saitama’s robot-destroying antics happened two days ago. And here’s what he’s done with his precious pets:
No food, water, shelter? Shame on you Saitama -- this is why Genos didn’t want him to take on a dog.
Grandma got run over by a reindeer, Millennial Edition:
The banality of evil on display. I have a lot more to say about this, but the guys selling Psykos down the river aren’t out to enrich themselves. They just see themselves as pragmatists ensuring that the Hero Association has its much-needed money. In a real way, that’s scarier than people who are actual evil-doers.
Psychic Sister Battle? OUT.
New Enemy Battle? IN. This moves the narrative forward nicely!
Sealed With A Kiss (literally). Hoo yeah, canonically gay!
And of course, Flashback Battle!
All I can say is that I’d love it if Murata cared to relent and give us another chapter to round out the year, but damn, if anyone’s earned a rest after a long year, Murata has!
#OPM#manga#chapter thoughts#Fubuki#Psykos#Hero Association#Saitama#Forte#poor Forte#no Saitama can't be trusted to take care of a dog#Fubuki and Pykos's story is even more tasty!#yup Fubuki was as much as an egoist in the manga as she was in the WC#the only difference is that she's had more happen to her to change#If this Tsukuyomi guy has anything to do do with 'eleven' mentioned in the WC we may not see Tats this arc#no good to have her ultimate enemy killed off too soon#Summarily killing off dread threats appears to be a privilege reserved for Saitama
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My current reaction to the chapter. Am I the only one who felt a bit uncomfortable with the whole force-young-boys-to-dress-in-short-skirts-and-look-like-nuns-thing?
Like, firstly, the whole speech by Artie was WAYYY anachronistic, so I think that should've been toned down a bit (we're still in 1889, right?).
And secondly - yes, fair, I'm fine with this orphanage teaching boys how to cook, sew, etc., all VERY important skills - but can we just let these boys dress how they want (which I highly doubt is frilly miniskirts and nun headdresses)?
Like, there was a weird loli quality / hazing kind of feel to the whole scene that just...didn't need to be there and totally distracted from the important punch line at the end.
I dunno...it just...annoyed me.
Also, I'm ready to move to the hotel with Sebastian & Ciel, as these side stories are getting quite draggy...
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NORAGAMI CH 100 THOUGHTS
guys I'm crying I'm genuinely crying actual tears. I was gonna make a "surprise, bitch. I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me" joke but it's no time to jokE. TOO MUCH IS HAPPENING.
And as a lot of people saw coming this appears to be the final arc🥲 it's sad but I'm glad that the story seems to have been allowed to run its natural course and adachitoka got to tell the story they wanted to tell (and boy, what a story). Bittersweet, but let's all enjoy this final arc together! I'm terrified!! What on earth is going to happen!!! How do all the loose ends get tied up????
anyway we're here and I am back on my bullshit under the cut...! Be warned: This is a long one.
(I went off about Father and his children again please someone take the keyboard away from me)
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Sakura is the tree of spring, huh?
as you may imagine I AM UNWELL
fast-moon dropped this one while I was on a date and when I saw that notification I had to stop, process it and explain to my date what was going on because that is how much despair it caused me. (And I hadn't even read the damn thing yet)
Why is it only now clicking for me that there is a CLEAR OBVIOUS MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIP between the names Yuki / Haru / Sakura.
Smarter people than I probably have and will speak more (and better) on everything going on with names and wordplay and Yato fighting and being nearly killed by Yuuki on the same hill where he buried his body and letters, but I will just say that it hurts and it made me cry ambiguous, confusing, sad-happy tears.
That entire section looked so pretty and Yato and Yuki looked so tiny and I'm just🥺
Yato with the GRAVE TALK. He is dangerously close to fucking around and finding out. (O como decimos en mi rancho, a dos de acabar muerto por jugarle al vergas)
SHIIGUN IS BACK BABY BOY IS HERE I LOVE HIM LOOK AT HIM GO
why are those dragon ayakashi so cute i want to keep the tiny one as a pet.
BISHA
SHE
WHEN SHE AT THE
WHEN SHE
Nyappy's Kuraha theory is gnawing at the edges of my sanity again it would seem (please will someone bully me into finishing that damn ficlet wip before the manga literally ends)
"The same as me not wanting to use Kazuma" Oh boy. Oh man. Oh honey you got a big storm coming.
OH NO NOT IMMEDIATELY
Kinuha beloved I missed her<3
Kitty cat. Kuraha prefers to be a lion than a human confirmed.
Ah yes, finally some good, old-fashioned, straightforward punches directly to the gut. (also that panel is just beautiful, man)
Oh don't come now with the "you'we impowtant two me" shut the FUCK up, old man. Boo fucking hoo your child you abused doesn't love you:( too bad so sad suck it up worstie<3
Ok now that that's out of the way. He makes a valid point- from his point of view, at least. From what we have seen of his backstory, Yato was created by a wish born of his deep feelings of injustice, of being left behind to die by the world and the gods ("You were my prayer"). TO him, Yato has always been a tool he had a right to, he deserved, to "cull the herd", to take back the power he believed was for him and taken away. Yato was Father's lifeline in a similar fashion as Father was his. He was his precious means of justice until he wasn't anymore. And he loved him in the same sick and twisted way he loves Mizuchi for very similar reasons. Again from what we know up until now, I fear it might be all he knows, love for someone as a means to an end; but I'm afraid we just won't know that until we learn more about his relationship to Kaya (vibrating with excitement As We Speak).
Oh no. Ohhh no. There is so much to unpack from Nora and Kazuma at the end oh NO.
Hey yeah remember that old theory I had that got debunked a bunch in the last couple of years where I talked about hafuri being immune to GGS and roped Kazuma into my examples? well lookie here guess we'll find out sooner rather than later won't we? :)
I mean, Kazu is like double-sealed though so it should be fine, right?
Right, guys?
Nora baby honey child PLEASE I'm so sorry you have been made to feel this way. It hurts my heart that it's all she knows as well. She only knows how to be a tool, and that's the entire meaning of her life- the only way she understands love, just like Father. Her father gave her a name and a purpose, and that is the most important thing to her; she will go to the ends of the earth and betray everyone and everything else because that's her father. He basically made her. But child, please, that's not it:( I want her to go back to Hiyori and learn what unconditional care and love is please:(( Get yourself an older sister like Yuki did I prommy there's more to existing than just being used and thrown away every time:(((
So yeah! i leave you with your monthly(!) reminder that trash dad is uh. huh. maybe leave father and son be for the time being actually they seem to have some issues to figure out.
#noragami#noragami 100#yato#nora#once again sorry if this makes 0 sense i passed out for an hour and it was done#but hey! i'm back and better than ever! ... I think!#the spanish bit says the same as the english part of the bullet dw about it#Every chapter brings me closer and closer to the side of the Father apologists and I don't like it (/hj)#but also I kind of love it his whole character is extremely appealing like. as a person he's a piece of shit but as a character?#*chef's kiss*#poor little meow meow material. I want to study him i want to poke around inside his head#so many thoughts so many feelings#yes you read correctly i have a ficlet wip I need wrung out of me like water from a rag because I really like the idea#kuraha theory my beloved#shoutout to nanna for being big brain#if u see this- didn't know if i should tag you but lmk if you want me to it just made me really anxious sorry💀#chapter reaction#chapter thoughts#lextpost#noragami spoilers
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Sage of Swords Chapter 3/4
Author rambling on the third and fourth chapter of my TotK AU fic, Sage of Swords. You can read the chapters here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48501826/chapters/124258795
So, sort of neglected to do my thoughts for chapter 3, so here’s a compilation of my thoughts on chapter 3.
*twenty-three and a half minutes of muffled sobbing noises*
So, chapter 4 huh?
Just kidding, I’ll sort of combine the thoughts together, since I feel like the two are pretty parallel to each other. In chapter 3, we get to see Link go as low as she could to make it to the promise of better days. Meanwhile, in chapter 4, Zelda begins her descent into what I’m calling Hero Syndrome, which is the disease where you neglect your basic needs in the mistaken belief it will make you a better Hero of Hyrule.
On the flip side, in both chapters we get to see Sonia and Rauru at the opposite ends of their journey. In the past, they try their best to help Link stop being a soldier, while in the future… yeah. I tried to stress that they don’t want to inflict what happened to Link onto Zelda (mostly because she doesn’t need much help to fall into the same trap), but their hands are also very tied if they want her to have a chance against the Demon King.
I’m working more and more on getting Sonia’s and Rauru’s voices just right. With Rauru, it’s pulling on a lot of the old englishisms I attribute with early FF14 dialogue, where they’re just a touch overplayed. A lot of “thou must needs,” and similar, along with a complete absence of any contractions. Meanwhile, Sonia gets to be a bit more feral than canon, and gets to have some opinions about the horrible way she was treated by the story, and gets to express how much she cares about these kids. And she does care, which makes doing what needs to get done hurt.
Also, something that I want to make clear, since it wasn’t super clear in-game, but neither Sonia or Rauru know about Link’s fate at the moment.
And Zelda! Zelda is taking all the wrong lessons from those around her. I wrote it so she wouldn’t quite realize what’s happening, even as she’s consciously making the decisions.
One of the things I’m gonna enjoy is writing my weird headcanons about the various species of Hyrule. I started with Rauru in chapter 4, making him a bit more animalistic in his voice, tried to describe it as being too deep and rich to be a human’s. I think this makes sense, I imagine zonai and zora would have naturally deeper voices due to their larger size. And Rauru doing his best to keep from openly displaying more feral actions (growling, snarling, baring his teeth) because he is projecting a “civilized king” persona.
#personal#fanfic#sage of swords au#chapter 3#and also#chapter 4#chapter thoughts#Vivina Rambles#loz totk
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As requested, I wrote my personal thoughts and the process of how I wrote the first chapter of the Scribe of the Gods during my study break. Anyways, here you go guys!
I wanted to begin the chapter right when steven wakes up in the netherland anf first finds Arthur.
Of course when Steven sees his librarian he is confused and I wanted to have the audience have little background information about y/n
Sort of share the same confusion that Steven has
y/n is obviously serious about this scene as it was the first instance that djehuty told them to go after steven
Can you imagine thoth being like “Khonshu’s avatar is on his way to the netherlands. Go after him.”
Meanwhile y/n is head deep in books for their upcoming exams and are like “fuck you” but do it anyways because they can’t tell the god no.
This explains their attitude with steven, they were pissed at even being there in the first place but even more pissed that Marc wasn’t fronting to make their job easier.
Also, when steven’s like “where’s your license” and they mention that they have twelve and are working on paperwork for the IDP
As a scribe it would be natural that they have gone to other countries to check up on avatars that surround the globe
Paperwork is definitely needed to get their job done
Originally they were fine with working on all of the paperwork but after some time they got tired of having to repeatedly file renewals in so they decided it was time for some sort of upgrade with the IDP
And because they travel to so many countries for their job, they do their best to learn some of the language to maintain communication and travel smoothly
I can’t give too much away, but let’s say with the amount of time they’ve been working for Djehuty they've been able to master fluency in multiple languages.
After the cupcake van incident I decided to take an approach of following steven’s perspective for this chapter
It seemed fitting, given he is beginning to discover Marc’s presence that we should follow him as he discovers the true identity of his librarian
I chose for y/n to be a librarian for several reasons
One, steven has no family he is in contact with so it would be extremely hard for him to have a teen/young adult in his life
Not in a way that seemed appropriate or made sense for the sake of the story, i like to write as realistically as I can for relationships
Two, seeing as Steven barely goes out there wasn’t many choices as to how they would meet
When I rewatched the episode, I noticed the amount of books there were in his apartment. And that’s when it hit me, he had to have gotten those books from somewhere.
After some research, I’ve found that the london library was only a couple blocks from the national gallery where Steven works
Which seemed so fitting
I was adamant about having Thoth be y/n’s god. There was no changing that.
And where better than the London Library, which is so full of archives with history and an abundance of research resources and books
That was how I wanted Steven to associate y/n. It was a good thing too, because it made watching over Steven and Marc easier on the young avatar
The chapter continues in steven’s point of view and I took advantage to give insight on how the reader is from his perspective
Honestly, I didn’t want to write too much about y/n because I was still working out details about their backstory and character
I tried to be vague too since I wanted to see how Moonknight continued world building in regards to how the avatars and their gods worked together
Flash forward to when Steven is about to be attacked by the Jackal
y/n had already been following him around for the night, they were extra watchful of the man after the events that occurred in the netherlands
Also because thoth was barking up their ear about it
I didn’t give them any specific suit because at the time I wanted the reader to do their best to convince steven that whatever was going to happen that night was just another dream or blackout he had
Also because I had no clue whether other avatars got their own suits
Like yes, Marc and Steven get one but that’s because their god Khonshu has a task that makes this ability specific to his needs
But let's say Hathor, does she get a suit? Why does she need one if she’s the goddess and patron of music and love?
Thoth doesn’t particularly need a suit, his scribe is solely meant for documentation and presencial purposes.
So no suit for y/n at the time
Sorry guys
I liked this section of the chapter because it was one of the few times that i could begin to show hints of the abilities that y/n has
I haven’t said any explicit abilities, hinted at it. Do you guys have any guesses as to what they are?
Their weapon of choice was a mace, inspired by how thoth uses a headstaff
After taking a swing at the jackal and fin themselves in the bathroom y/n was fed up with how Marc had yet to appear
They know about Marc’s DID. They had to when they did their personal research on the marine
So they knew exacgtly what they were doing when they were berating steven to get Marc
Although they didn’t handle it the best way that they could
Threatening steven with the mace in order to get marc out
They weren’t bluffing either
Now that all of the episode’s are out, I look back on this chapter and can see that this can trigger steve and Marc
But since I didn’t know their backstory, obviously their reaction is off
Looking back, marc would most likely have forced himself into control and be SO PISSED at y/n for even trying to look like they were about to hit steven
But that’s not how it had gone in my story, so let’s just look over that inconsistency please
y/n doesn’t know how steven and marc communicate with each other
I mean how could they
So when Steven begins speaking in the mirror they kind of just decide to let him to his own thing?
They weren’t really sure how to respond to it
Plus the jackal was there and it was gonna get through the door at any minute
I think that they were experienced in combat
I don’t see how they shouldn’t
Every avatar is under some sort of threat, whether it's from outer worldly means or their own personal lives and the jobs that they do
And with the places that they have to go, knowing how to fight is a must
But they were genuinely concerned that steven were going to get hurt
At this point, they sort of accepted that Marc wasn’t going to show up
He barely was there when they were in the netherlands
But he did show up at some points, and because of that they had some sort of hope that he would come
So when they ask steven for Marc one last time, I wanted to point out how they had their back turned to the door
If you watched the show you’ll know that door was genuinely deteriorating with the jackal
I wanted to show this moment of vulnerability that they had
The trust that they were willing to put for just a moment
And that’s where i end the chapter
I am proud of this, i think I consider it a great setup for the story itself while leaving room for questions
Steven’s 3rd person pov?
Acknowledge how he gets the books he reads at the local library
One of the librarians is a younger adult, y/n
They always seemed to know exactly what book would be perfect for steven’s all nighters
Strangely enough they entailed egyptology
Steven appreciated them because they were one of the very few people who actually engaged in conversation about egyptian mythology
Brief talks to each other about the Ennead and y/n having to cut conversations short bc steven unknowingly would keep up the checkout line
Note how y/n is very well versed whenever steven talks to them, almost as though they’d lived several lifetimes.
Every now and then you would show up to the museum and purchase the same dark chocolates from the gift shop, but it was at the library where he saw you most
y/n was actually there to keep an eye on london and keep records of all of the activities deities and their avatars were doing in London, as there was some traffic due to the amount of stuff from egypt there
So, when Thoth commands y/n to keep a closer eye on Konshu’s avatar, you were a little skeptical and had a feeling that you were about to get yourself in deep shit
And you were right
Thoth eventually assigns you to assist Marc as he attempts to stop Harrow from continuing his plan
Unfortunately, neither of you want to do it but have to go along with it
You were good at keeping distance, so steven did not notice you until slowly things started going strange for him
So when Steven finds himself in Harrow’s village, running from the bodymen, he is stunned to be dragged by the young librarian into the cupcake truck
Taglist: (sorry guys I didn't know if this was tag worthy or not)
@daughterofthequeen @allynplays @raylan-c @lourecovette
@dheet @xennityxen @mothperson666 @kickassattorneyy @nerds4life246 @samanthacookieone @thekaibabes @kiara-is-gay @pcotato @sagedgeek @blustalker @atzlena @xiernia @dheet @astrobuzzsstuff @lourecovette @fezlvr @wanderingmaximoffs @jay-alison @dweeb-central @theseawakes
#moonknight thoughts#moonknight episode#moonknight fic#moonknight x reader#thoughts#chapter thoughts
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dumping my notes/feelings here. don't take all of it as serious analysis, ive been half bed ridden and sick all day LMAO so I'm still processing the TLs
-i think feelings, even if one sided, were there. also fubuki definitely did not mind kissing a woman because that pose and hand. plus the "smallest speck of hesitation line". no denying fubuki got her """little""" problematic side. queen still though. (please dont take this seriously again this isnt serious analysis of her)
-you know, I've actually quite liked these past few chapters. i mean despite my mixed feelings on time travel like most people, even in the end i liked those chapters and think we'll see longer term effects. but these ones, I dunno, i just have found veryyy interesting with manga editions, cohesive mostly even. and i felt are getting us back on track where we need to be with pacing and such. not holding back any shots either.
-and of course shoutout to the humor. we all waited for That. rip forte. also have enjoyed saitama being saitama, crocs are amazing
-"""new guy""" is just a note in himself. really like the design personally. and hey third eye stuff of course
-I saw it pointed out in another post but we learn more about what child emperor probably saw. and jesus christ poor isamu. fuck HA. a lot. goes without saying atp though
-insane place to leave the year off, buttt leaves us with a strong place to start next year off. i think whatever murata is talking about on twitter might be something else?? he's working on marvel stuff right? but also has always been doing various stuff on the side. either way definitely last chapter of the year and he could just be getting a head start if hes talking about sketches for OPM...holidays art though?! couldn't imagine him not doing some.
- art was just Fine, i dont feel the need in these chapters for anything crazy to be done anyway. end of the year and save it for the fight itself. the art with younger fubuki with the eyes and shadow made it all the more unsettling though, I liked that choice and others throughout
-genos
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I love dragon btw
#my sketches#one piece#monkey d luffy#monkey d dragon#jokes aside hes my little guy i truly love him#these latest chapters are only giving me more reasons to hes so !!!!!!!!!!!!#also the thought of newborn luffy in 2.5 meters tall dragons arms………….#Delightful
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why is his smile so radiant
#my art#one piece#luffy#nami#zoro#OKAY JUST ONE MORE OP ART (FOR NOW)#original is from nichijou chapter 177#i thought it fit them well#zoros deranged smile always cracks me up when it appears
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Chapter 146 thoughts!
OKAY SO-
Would I seem sadistic if I said I’m so glad we got to see this scene? With the confirmation that filming was chronological, I was giving up hope that we would get it.
I said it in an earlier chapter and I’ll say it again, Frill’s acting is a one of the best parts of this arc. She steals every scene she’s in like a grotesque horror creature. Major props to Mengo for how she’s able to capture the feelings of these scenes so perfectly through her art.
We have to still take everything we’re seeing with a grain of salt since I can’t see how Aqua would have the source for all of this unless it’s all in the dvd (including the parts Ai wasn’t there for) but it does fit well with both the movie narrative and potentially even the real events.
That said, Airi using Taiki to manipulate Kamiki is foul, and her setting him up with a sense of insecurity and abandonment that seems like gasoline to Ai’s spark of her own issues. It really just makes one big fire.
It reminds me of Ai’s scene with Nino, there are all these expectations and demands from her. At such a young age, she needs to be what these people -these people who are CLOSE to her even, not just the fans- need her to be. With Nino, it’s entitlement, but with Hikaru it’s desperation.
Ai is out in a similar position to Aqua a few chapters ago, though unlike Aqua, who accepts the position he’s put in, putting Ruby’s needs above his own (as she even addressed) Ai chooses honesty. She admits that she can’t give Kamiki what he needs, or at least she’s not sure that she can. It’s a difficult decision steeped in kindness, but it also shatters any hope Hikaru had.
Here’s the confirmation that (at least in this movie) Kamiki pushed the murder suicide into happening. I wonder how Taiki feels about it.
My heart breaks for Taiki, acting this out. This is such a fucked up situation for all three of the siblings to be acting out. (Side note I do wish we spent more time with Taiki and his thoughts about all this as it was happening but considering I was losing hope we’d even get this scene, I really can’t complain)
Another note about the ordering of events, we have substantial reason to believe this is rearranging of facts, to some capacity anyway. Ai was all but confirmed to be broken up with Hikaru prior to the twins birth. Hikaru was implied to have been behind Ryosuke’s presence at the hospital (and indirectly Gorou’s murder) after all.
The movie timeline having him and Ai together after the twins are born is very strange to me. I can’t see Hikaru being the chillest about having children, considering Taiki. I’ve always interpreted her having his kids while not being able to love him as being a sort of betrayal to him, like she was using him. Obviously the situation is more nuanced, but from Hikaru’s perspective she isn’t too different from Airi.
This does answer my confusion two chapters ago about that incident being cut, it wouldn’t make sense to include with this new interpretation of the timeline. My guess is that this was constructed this way as a basis for establishing a clear motive, even if it still seems to go out of its way to make Hikaru as tortured and sympathetic as possible.
I love Kana I love Kana I love Kana I love Kana. Another top tier character of the arc (and of my heart always) is Kana, her relationships with the twins have been one of the beating hearts of this series since the formation of new B Komachi.
She cares so much about Aqua, even beyond her feelings for him, and she’s able to pick up when something’s wrong, get it out of him, and then comfort him about it.
He’s promised to live now, the tide of Aqua is turning.
Was that giggle the first time he’s actually laughed? It’s so cute how she’s being so goofy to cheer him up, she cares so much.
Also from a shipping standpoint I am cheering, but not too loudly yet. Aqua is in no place for a serious relationship and I don’t see the endgame ship (this) getting together until closer to the end.
You know, I had jokes that Kamiki has twice now been the dramatic punchline of a chapter (Nino talking to him, Kaburagi talking to him) and I’d said that rule of threes meant his next one would be a big one, but damn.
Not worried he’s going to kill her tbh, it doesn’t seem like she meets his victim profile tbh (superstar women at the height of her career) and he is too calculating in all this to do any kind of impulsive killing, having previously used proxies or opportunities where the victim was entirely isolated. If he was going to be a sloppy killer, he’d be caught already.
That said, this is the arc of everyone having convoluted unspoken plans, so I’m expecting something much more elaborate in this. Maybe he’s planning on doing or saying something that will influence her performance of Ai in a way that affects Aqua’s plan (whatever the fuck that even is), or maybe he’s beginning his own series of falling dominos.
Either way Ruby doesn’t die, especially not before the final arc, so I’m much more excited than worried in this situation. Last week I asked for more to chew on and this week they rolled out a full buffet.
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Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 387: Congealing
Howdy, everyone, guess who had an unusually high amount of research to do for this post? Next chapter's should be up faster, between being extra short and largely Todo-centric.
Content Note: I will be talking quite a lot about the Himura inter-family marriages below. An enormous chunk of this post is going to be dedicated to dispelling some of the most frequent misconceptions in the fandom response to the Himura situation, which I don't think is anywhere near as drastic as a lot of people are making it out to be. That's not the same as saying there's nothing wrong with it at all! However, I want to be very clear on what I believe Geten is describing before I talk about what we can gather from it.
(Spoilers: A lot of people don't have the first clue what the phrase "branch family" indicates and good lord, does it ever show.)
Hit the jump.
On Geten and the Himura
O Wow, you guys. Wow. Okay, so, obviously, lots to cover here, and I know I’ve said before that I try to make these posts with minimal reference to Bad Takes I’m seeing out there in the wilds of the fandom, but holy shit, people, the takes are SO INCREDIBLY BAD. I should have known better, I guess, than to expect the fandom to be remotely reasonable about a reveal that intersects with both the MLA and the Todoroki. So, first things first:
Please, please, please, knock it off with the inbreeding jokes and the screeching panic about Rei’s only choices being an abusive arranged marriage or a cousin-marriage. Geten specifies in nearly every translation we have that the intermarriages within the Himura clan were between distant relatives. And I strongly, strongly suspect that the majority of people who are making banjo jokes or fretting about the deleterious effects of inbreeding on their faves have not the faintest idea what Geten is talking about when he says “branch families” and “main family.”
As an illustrative example, let’s talk in brief about the Fujiwara clan.
The most dominant clan throughout virtually all of Japan's Heian Era (794 – 1195) was the Fujiwara clan, whose whole shtick was marrying their daughters to Emperors and then relying on the practice of raising the future Emperor in his mother’s household to take advantage of filial piety traditions—which applied even to in-laws!—to secure the loyalty of the Emperor/future Emperor to his Fujiwara father/grandfather. Even after they fell from the heights of their influence, they still monopolized powerful positions as imperial advisors and regents all the way up to the Meiji Restoration in 1868!
That’s over a thousand years of first marrying into the imperial line and then being the only family who were even eligible to be chosen as regents for child Emperors or Empresses Regnant. They certainly didn’t achieve that by being a single family for a thousand years! Rather, there were branch families under the clan umbrella, four of note—
—Well, actually, it was four during the Heian Era. Once the Kamakura period rolled around the most powerful of those four further subdivided into five. So eight families total—
—Well, wait, those were really just the most important and chief of the families. Actually there were five more cadet branches, too. So thirteen families total—
—But actually, those five cadet branches were subdivided even further as well. According to Wikipedia, the total number of subfamilies in the Fujiwara clan, families that were specifically aristocrats in the Imperial court (the kuge class) or higher—is…
Uh. Ninety-seven.
Now, I don’t know how many of those families existed concurrently, but with numbers like that, I hardly think it matters. All those families—and they are families, not individuals—fell under the broad umbrella of the Fujiwara clan. So, you know, if some of them intermarry, it’s not exactly on the same level as you marrying your first cousin! Or your second. Or your third or fourth or fifth.
Obviously I don’t think the Himura were anywhere near that big or influential, but I hope it illustrates my point: Japanese clans that have had a few hundred years to develop can be fucking enormous. Please banish from your mind the idea that the Himura have been marrying their direct cousins this whole time. When Geten says they created multiple branch families, and started marrying distant relatives, the plural on "branch families" and the adjective "distant" are giving us crucial, meaningful information, not just superfluous clutter.
Truthfully, I think a lot of this panic is due to the fact that most people aren’t very into genealogy and thus have no idea how quickly you can become very distant indeed from people with whom you share a common ancestor. I mean, how many of your third cousins can you name? For me, that answer is zero. Heck, I can’t even name any second cousins. The best I could do would be to tell you of their existence in broad strokes—the son of one of my mother’s cousins, whose name I don’t remember but who I know exists; the hypothetical children one of my father’s cousins might have had at some point after the last time I heard anything about him, well over twenty years ago, at which time he was still single.
Now, it’s a little easier to look down the family tree rather than across, in this case. To wit, you almost certainly know your cousins much better than your parents’ cousins—your children and your cousins’ children will be second cousins. That’s probably much closer feeling, right? But put yourself in the shoes of those kids—unless you live in the same town as your cousins, and see each other pretty frequently, your children and theirs will probably meet only a handful of times before they grow up and head off to live their own lives. After all, look back up—how well do you remember your parents’ cousins’ children?
And, again—that’s second cousins, the outer periphery of what people who study this stuff class as “close relatives.” [1] Geten specifying distant relatives means we’re talking farther removed even than that. Your second cousins once removed, for example, would be either your second cousins’ children (that is, your parents’ cousins’ grandchildren) or your grandparents’ cousins’ children. Your third cousins, meanwhile, would be your grandparents’ cousins’ grandchildren.
Have you ever met family that far removed? Have you seen pictures? Do you even know if they exist? How many members of your extended family do you know of, generally, perhaps because your parents brought you along on visits a few times as a child, but you’ve long since forgotten their names or their specific relation to you?
Now, in a situation like Geten is talking about, you probably would be able to positively answer some of my questions above, because you’d be mid-level ruling class; your parents would be talking about marriage to someone (hopefully) your age in a branch family. But that doesn’t mean you would have met them. They’d probably live in a different part of the country entirely, your common ancestor married to some outside group before the Advent of the Exceptional. The branch families of, for example, the Tokugawa shogunate lived in four strongholds, each a hundred or more miles distant from the next.[2] You can track descendants of Queen Victoria through royals from England, Spain, and all three of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
What all this boils down to is that, no, it really is not that strange for a widely spread clan to do a bit of intermarriage now and then to consolidate power. People in power want power to stay in the family. Duh.
However.
That all said, I am not saying the situation Geten describes is 100% fine and cool. Obviously if it were totally normal and unremarkable, there’d be no point to even bringing it up, much less having Mr. Compress disparagingly comment on it! But look at the timetable here. The Himura began as village leaders a long, long time ago, and even after the land reforms, they still went on creating branch families, enabling them to maintain their wealth and pride.
It’s after the Advent that the marrying between the families starts. And even this, done a handful of times and then abandoned, would not be a damning thing—as I said, those big families in power do have marriages across branches sometimes. The real trouble is carrying out such marriages repeatedly, across many generations, within a small group. Some research on the Habsburgs, for example, surely the most famous inbred royals in the Western hemisphere, turned this up:
From 1516 to 1700, it has been estimated that over 80% of marriages within the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty were consanguineous. In other words, they were marriages between close blood relatives. Most often, these unions took the form of marriages between first cousins, double-first cousins, and uncles/nieces.
Nowhere does Geten suggest that things with the Himura got this bad. In fact, I would argue that the text is quite clear that the family slowly stopped intermarrying, and this is what led to their demise! Consider the following points:
The Advent happened in modern times. The glowing baby is delivered in what is very clearly a modern hospital; the very next panel shows a geeky dude levitating a volume of manga, which didn’t even exist in the form we know today until after WWII. Technology stalled in the wake of the Advent, but the characters now still have cellphones and laptop computers—the Advent was modern. My rough estimate for how long it’s been since then is a bit over 150 years.
Because the Advent happened in modern times, the Himura family would have known about the dangers of excessive intermarriage. This isn’t something they’ve been doing since the Stone Age and refused to change their minds about until the last twenty-five years!
Because the Himura family would have known about the dangers of inbreeding, look at what happens: they do inter-branch marriages to “distant relatives” for about 125 years and then they stop. Over the course of that time, the clan shrinks and wanes, for one reason that is immediately self-apparent and a few others that we can guess were probable.
The self-apparent reason is that, even though the families started out as distant relatives, the divide would get shorter with every wedding that produced children. Thus, the pool of marriageable candidates for those children gets smaller and smaller as the families become more closely entwined. Avenues close off, marriages become unavailable that would be illegal under Japanese law (which allows marriage between first cousins, but not between uncle and niece/aunt and nephew), or which would have too high a concern of congenital defects—which, remember, a modern family would be aware of.
We can hypothesize plenty of other reasons for the clan’s diminishment. Once it became clear that quirks were there to stay, entire families might have broken away rather than go along with an inherently doomed endeavor. Some marriageable candidates likely ran away or otherwise abandoned the family rather than continuing along the path the family had laid out for them. There would probably have been otherwise acceptable candidates who became unacceptable due to developing quirks that were undesirable to the bloodline.[3] And so on and so forth.
Eventually, Geten says, the head family—presumably the one Rei’s from—started selling off their children to outsiders, and that was the end. If the head family threw in the towel on preserving the bloodline, the branch families certainly weren’t going to be bound to do it anymore! And so the remnants of the clan shattered.
So, no. Rei’s choices were not, “Marry Enji or marry a cousin.” Rei’s parents were looking for someone who could bring money to the family; by that point in time, I don’t think they would have let her marry within the family even if she’d wanted to!
By the same token, Dabi and Geten are not cousins—not in the way people have been using the word, at least, to mean “someone I am imagining to be as close to me as, like, my first cousin, ew.” While the repeated intermarriage would indeed have reduced the distance quickly as the generations passed, if the common ancestor (that is, the family founder) was from, say, eight generations ago, two and a half centuries prior to the point at which the intermarriage began, and there were at least five or six branches of family at the start,[4] it would have taken more than just one or two generations before the only options available to wed were close relatives!
And, to reiterate, that’s exactly what we saw happen—the Himura kept it up for a few generations, shrinking all the while, but fragmenting for good four or five generations after the Advent. I would guess that, while Geten would have been more closely related to any children Rei had borne via intermarriage, Dabi and Geten are third or fourth cousins at best. The Himura were in denial about the new state of the world; they weren’t idiots that managed to forget everything history has ever demonstrated about what happens when you keep marrying off first cousins in a closed environment.
That all said, what else have we got this chapter?? Because make no mistake, the fact that I’m pushing back against reductive cousin-marriage takes in no way means that I wish to shy away from examining the darker implications here!
O I love how ambivalent about all this Geten is. Given that Rei was married to an outsider over twenty years ago, if the branch families scattered around that time, Geten must have been very young, so he’d have been profoundly impacted by it. This is especially apparent given the harshness of the language he uses to describe the event: the families don’t merely admit defeat and grudgingly set to integrating; they “scatter.” The main line doesn’t just start marrying outsiders; they start “selling their children.”
This suggests incredibly bitter feelings in the family, and no wonder! I imagine there were a lot of people, especially in the branch families or among younger members, who’d hated the clan’s insularity, and they would have left the moment they had an excuse to! Conversely, though, there would also have been people who’d been indoctrinated into the clan’s worldview all their lives, people who’d quashed their doubts or discomfort down long ago, who would be clinging to sunk cost fallacies with all their strength because change would be terrifying to them. Those people, I think, would be particularly likely to have complete breakdowns (or meltdowns) when the main family surrendered.
Whatever happened, it must have been quite dramatic, given the way Geten talks about Re-Destro having found him. Counter to a couple of, just, woefully awful takes I’ve seen around, Re-Destro did not buy Geten; it doesn’t even sound like he found him via any official channel. It was the main family members who were being “sold off,” remember; the branch families, which Geten explicitly associates himself with, were “scattered.” It sounds, then, like Geten was basically an orphan, and not one living in any kind of facility or home. He clearly had family, but whether he bolted on his own, was abandoned,[5] or whatever, that family’s no longer in the picture. This despite the fact that, again, he would have been a very, very young child at the time.
On a similar note, because of that youth, it’s also probable that his view on the family tragedy is colored at least in part by whatever Re-Destro’s reaction to it was when he got Geten’s story upon taking him in.
Re-Destro, of course, is all for radical quirk acceptance, but he’s deeply entangled with issues of bloodline himself. Although he uses some pretty flowery language to talk about his inherited blood from Destro, he also views that duty as a huge burdensome responsibility from which he is deliriously happy to be freed by Shigaraki. So we might suppose that he himself is pretty cold on chaining children to bloodline purity politics, especially in absence of a Worthy Cause. And rejecting the glorious future of everyone using their quirks to become who they were meant to be is the very opposite of a worthy cause!
O Gee, I wonder what Spinner would have thought about this. What a shame we didn’t have a three-month period where the League and the MLA were living together to explore oh wait.
O Congratulations to everyone who ever ventured to suggest that the Todoroki microaggressions against heteromorphs might stem from Rei, with her old money, traditionalist family, rather than New Money Endeavor, who went whole scenes being mad at Hawks and never called him anything dehumanizing even in his own mind. Guess there was something to Natsuo not bringing up his mouse-eared girlfriend in the hospital scene after all!
I’m mostly being facetious about this, but you can check here if you want my thoughts on who in the Todofam uses animal insults, who doesn’t, and some analysis as to why. I'd add two observations in light of new information:
First, Natsuo's girlfriend isn't at the shelter with him and the others, despite having a far better justification for being with him than the Masegaki kids have to be hanging around Fuyumi. It's a small absence, but noticeable in the context of the Himura being specifically described as heteromorphobic by Compress.
Second, while a lot of people say that heteromorph discrimination is a recent retcon, it's got a lot of early evidence. In that same vein, it's notable that Rei brings up bloodlines and obligation to them all the way back in Chapter 39—Shouto's Sports Festival flashback—where she reassures baby Shouto that he isn't a slave to his blood as the two of them watch All Might on TV talking about quirks being passed on from parent to child.
It's a little obscured by both Shouto's fears of coming to resemble his father and All Might's (frankly pretty contradictory) claims about what his, "I am here!" catchphrase is meant to indicate, but even back then, Rei's comfort is phrased in terms of being free from obligation to one's blood. If Horikoshi already knew what the Himuras' deal was even back then, one can easily imagine that he already knew the sorts of people the Himura were rejecting.
On the Todofam Reunion:
I love all the information packed into Geten and Compress scene, but I do wish it felt less arbitrary. Indeed, it’s the second scene we’ve gotten of the incredibly specific “captured villains sit in their cells and randomly, with no apparent prompting, talk about something relevant to the Todoroki situation” scenario. But then, this whole confrontation in the Todofam is wildly arbitrary. Which is frustrating! The family had that great scene in the hospital where they all talked about stopping Touya together and then did absolutely nothing to actually make that happen, and it really does not reflect well on either them or this whole scene.
Consider:
Dabi is only in this location, confronting Endeavor, because of spill-over effect from other villain actions (Spinner, Kurogiri). This was not planned in advance because the villains didn’t plan for being split up. Likewise, Endeavor confirms this chapter that he was trying to lure Touya away from the fighting at the Villa, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have intentionally led Touya towards one of the evacuation routes if he’d known there was a stalled box in the danger zone. (Why exactly didn't one of the people at police HQ tip him off about that?)
There are many, many other transports Rei and the kids could have gotten onto; they’re on this specific one rather than any others by total freak coincidence, not active choice.
The transport only stops where it does because of outside villain interference (Skeptic, and, as of next chapter, AFO’s spies). This interference was obviously not intended to stop the transport in the specific location it did because Skeptic was already interfering with them long before Dabi was warped in, and the AFO spies ought to value their own lives too much to willingly try to get themselves killed in a blue flame inferno. (More on them next week, because my god, does their scene in 388 annoy the hell out of me.)
So, taken all together, the Todofam’s vow in the hospital has amounted to absolutely nothing, and the fact that they’re being reunited now is a result of villain actions at best, random chance at worst. At no point have any of them been seen to make an effort at facilitating a full family action. While, yes, it is the case that the rest of the family are civilians, why even talk about “dealing with Touya as a family” if they’re going to do nothing of the sort? When did “deal with Touya as a family” become “allow the planners of this combat to move us all to different locations, leaving only Shouto—who knows the least about Touya of anyone in the family!—to try and talk down the brother who resents him more than anyone?”
It's just another point where Team Hero talks big but takes no action to back that talk up.
On Enji and Touya:
O The, “Watch me!”/”I don’t want to watch you die!” exchange is good stuff—all that telling people to watch him, and now Enji’s on the other side of that. Even better is that ludicrously delightful panel of the two of them with hands and flame-hands entwined, Enji’s arms wide open as Touya comes in[6] for a landing. As ever, Dabi’s dancing imagery is on-fucking-point. Good work getting your dad to dance with you in hell, Dabs.
O As to Enji’s actions here, I’m torn. On the one hand, it’s extremely telling that Endeavor leaps straight to, “Guess we’ll die together, then,” when he fails to talk Dabi down, and that’s emblematic of the flaws of the hero mentality, which is so drastically bad at dealing with nuanced situations in which they or their society have failed.
On the other hand, Enji does try to talk to Touya here and gets nowhere, not necessarily because he’s saying the wrong things (though you could argue that he is) but because Dabi’s frying his own brain. This is uncomfortably reminiscent of Spinner’s mental decay, and, as others have said, I’m Very Not Here for the villains being so damaged mentally that they can’t even articulate their own grievances, allowing heroes to get the last word by default even though their “solutions” are wildly insufficient and ultimately in support of the demonstrably failing status quo.
Anyway, Enji is obviously taking the wrong tack here, but I can’t help but feel like the writing has put him in a no-win situation by stripping Touya’s ability to reason from him, rendering him unable to even attempt to respond to Enji’s attempts at engagement. Enji’s still ultimately to blame for this, of course, thanks to all his many, many failures to engage with Touya at literally any point prior to this, but it’s just an ongoing disappointment to me that we continue to be deprived of a proper intellectual back-and-forth about this society’s ultimate worth because, at all times, either the heroes are unwilling to engage or the villains have been rendered unable to.
O Travel times in this series continue to be unbelievably whack. Endeavor has gotten 800 meters from the Villa ruins? 800 meters? That's less than half a mile! AFO is most of the way to U.A. by now! All Might has driven even farther, going all the way from the police HQ, which is probably in Tokyo near Central Hospital, past Kamino and every other active battlefront, to far enough out from U.A. to intercept AFO's flight path. That's well over a hundred miles, traveled in a matter of minutes![7] But Endeavor, even on injured legs, couldn't make it one single mile?? And Dabi couldn't have caught up to him if he was moving that slow?
God save me from these arbitrary fucking travel times!
Stray Notes:
O The “land reforms,” not “the agricultural revolution,” jfc C.Cook. There's a pretty huge difference between a family sustaining their power through an agricultural upheaval in 1947 vs. 10,000 BC!
O Why is it so cold in there?? Get Mr. Compress a jacket!!! Also, like, Geten doesn’t seem terribly bothered, as one might expect from an ice quirk user, but it’s a bit inconsistent with his wearing a full-length parka during his fights, seeing as the parka would suggest he is, in fact, not totally immune to sustained chills!
That being the case, why is it so cold in there? I wouldn’t think it’s actually just that cold in the prison, since there’s obviously a cold mist drifting into Mr. C’s cell, rather than being ambient in both of them. Does Geten just generate it? His whole thing up to now has been that he controls ice but can’t create it from nothing, so if it is coming from him, that would be—well, not quite a retcon, but certainly a swerve.
Does he naturally generate it but do so very slowly, not in sufficient amounts to use for his preferred Ballistic Iceberg fighting style? If it’s coming from him automatically, can he turn it off? Presumably not, since if he could and isn’t, that would suggest he’s doing this with a goal in mind, something you have to think his jailers would have Opinions about.
So if he can’t turn it off, and this just happens in anyplace he sits long enough, is the parka to protect other people from his chill, rather than to protect him from the cold of the ice he uses? Recall that there wasn’t ice caked on his chair during e.g. the MLA dinner scene. What a fascinating idea, and one that speaks to the need for support items like Detnerat makes!
Well, whatever the case, I certainly hope he’s about to use his ice to decisively break them out of there! Because haha, why wouldn’t he be able to do that if he ambiently creates cold just by sitting there and the prison can’t even be arsed to crank the temperature up?? Surely no one thinks that those restraints on his hands are sufficient to stop him from using his ice? I haven’t forgotten that he definitively does not need to touch ice in order to control it, and it can’t be that hard to find a fire suppression sprinkler system line or the plumbing connected to whatever the toilet situation is for prisoners or something!!
(Sigh.)
O Unexpectedly good of the heroes to let Mr. Compress keep his prosthetic. And a bed, no less! I wonder where Geten’s bed is. (My god, these jail conditions are so inhuman. Get them a damn futon, at least.)
O That hint that Mr. C has been talking to the cops and heroes—Geten asking about the conversation—I wonder if anything will come of that? Because it would be incredibly lame for Horikoshi to promise us we’d see Mr. C again only for this to be his final appearance, doing nothing but weighing in with disgruntled expressions on Geten’s out-of-nowhere backstory drop. It’s a pretty shit final scene for Geten, too, dropping backstory exposition for no reason save to layer in some justification for the ice powers Dabi is about to exhibit.
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FOOTNOTES
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[1] The cut-off between close and distant relatives is made here because, once you get further out than second cousins, there’s little to no difference in the impact of shared blood on the child of two such distant relatives and that experienced by any random person in the general population.
[2] I eyeballed this on a map, so it’s not exact, but it’ll do as a ballpark. Two of them looked a little closer together than a hundred miles, but that’s also a straight overland route from Point A to Point B, which the roads probably wouldn’t have been. Incidentally, traveling a hundred miles in a time before cars would have taken at least five days if you weren’t a military messenger in a hurry and trading out horses at multiple stops.
[3] Given that the characters in-universe still don’t know the origin of quirks, there’s no way to completely guarantee desirable quirks, or even to perfectly guard against the dreaded heteromorphic quirks. Eventually, the Himura would get a kid whose ice quirk is tied to the fact that they were born looking like a snowman, or they'd crop up a polar bear heteromorph or something. And whoops, there goes another viable bloodline.
[4] A very reasonable and indeed conservative estimate. Remember that Geten says “the few remaining families” scattered after the main family gave up; the plural indicates that there were still at least two branch family holdouts even after all the waning and shrinking. In turn, those being the remainder means there must have been more previously. Losing only two over the course of over a century of mandated intermarriage throughout the chaos of the Advent is possibly undershooting quite a bit!
I talked about the Fujiwara earlier, but for an anime example of how ridiculous the branch family situation can get, look at Kakegurui: we’re at ten and counting branch families under the control of the main line, and if we read the kanji of that main line's name literally, there could be ninety more in the wings.
[5] I lean towards some form of abandonment because it makes the Dabi foiling tastier if Touya left his family by choice when he became Dabi, whereas Geten was left alone through no choice of his own. Abandonment also provides more meaningful context on Geten’s attachment to RD and his determination to be useful and strong for him.
[6] Crotch-first.
[7] Maybe he gave Lady Nagant a ride and that’s how she got in range to start taking potshots at Shigaraki at U.A.? It'd be nice to have any kind of explanation for that particular feat, though it would mean All Might didn't leave Tokyo until after Kurogiri was freed, cutting into his travel time even more. But heck, what's a few minutes matter when your car can drive eight hundred miles an hour, right? Christ.
#bnha#bnha 387#chapter thoughts#geten#himura family circumstances#todotalk#bnha culture gap#bnha fandom critical
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“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”
— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)
#dog books#this chapter was very sad reading#when you become aware of punishment#and its use and its prevalence#it's hard not to despair#again this is why positive reinforcement feels like absolution#maybe now my eyes are open I can make up for what I did#what I did because it's what everyone does#because it's more acceptable to punish than to do anything else#I've been having so many thoughts about punishment and society and justice#this book was very validating#another great validating moment in my jumbled thoughts#was listening to the You're Wrong About episode on justice#with Amanda Knox#it helped to ease the despair a little
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#love#love quotes#relatable quotes#heartbreak#heartbroken#spilled ink#spilled thoughts#loss#life quotes#life#quotes#relatable#chapter#next chapter#remanence-of-love#a blog for the heartbroken
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So I’m about to make a completely insane post. Excuse me.
So I got this comment on Peaks and Valleys the other day, on the chapter where Blue is in the airport and has to put all his Pokemon in holding.
Grabs this anon’s shoulders. I thought about this. I thought about this a lot. I went back and forth on it during this chapter so much.
And I actually concluded that the airline security does not necessarily imply this. While a lot of our real-world flight security was considerably tightened and comes as a direct result of 9/11, I don’t think that’s the case here.
I think this is actually much more mundane safety concerns. Even an incredibly well-trained and well-behaved Pikachu, if surprised by a bout of turbulence, might let off some static. That’s going to interfere with the equipment and make things unsafe.
What about the incredibly variable size and shape of pokemon - what happens if some kid releases Mom’s Nidoqueen or Wailord in the middle of a flight? That’s a big and heavy pokemon to suddenly have in an enclosed space where weight of cargo has to be well accounted for.
Even if you bring a small Pokémon, evolution could happen really suddenly - especially due to environmental effects. Imagine someone’s got their cute little Tyrunt next to them on the flight, it sneaks a rare candy or something, and next thing you know there’s a massive 600lbs Tyrantrum to deal with.
What about the effects on the pokemon themselves - moving quickly at high altitudes between different places and weather patterns is probably going to make a Castform kind of sick and out of sorts.
Pokeball locking, enforcing Everstone use, or having specific regulations about what Pokémon can go on flights and what can’t. Those could be feasible solutions but would also require a lot of overhead. There’s hundreds of different Pokemon, the average flight holds about 200 people, every single person could carry up to 6 pokemon with them. That’s a LOT of SOPs and guidelines to write, a lot of things to check, potentially a lot of things for passengers to get done (I didn’t consider this at the time because it was pre-Scarvio, but Everstones can only be bought in ScarVio at 3000 yen a pop - otherwise they have to be found in the wild. That’s an expensive and annoying thing to source for either passengers or the airline).
The most effective solution - short of forcing everyone to put their pokemon in boxes to get on the other end (and box software varies by region potentially causing complication, a lot of people would really resist this, etc), is just to securely hold all Pokémon in the same way apart from the human passengera until the end of the flight.
In conclusion: never think I didn’t excessively think about the implications of Pokemon air travel in my gay fanfic. I am insane and I did.
#clefairy squeaks#I genuinely thought about this SO damn much during this chapter#To point of actually being able to remember it which I normally can’t
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I think this lil guy reminds him of someone
ignore how messy it is, its like 5 am here n i needed 2 get this out of my system
#art#artists on tumblr#digital art#digital illustration#poppy playtime#poppy playtime 3#poppy playtime chapter 3#smiling critters#dogday#catnap#fun fact#i realized mid way through this that the lil guys were the merchable version of the big ones#i just thought they were another brand of toy or smth like that#maybe im just dumb#still love them tho#i need 2 buy them but im broke
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