now that I've finished the Fontaine archon quest I need hydro fam shenanigans.
This is the vibe in the hydro fam. You got neuvillette babysitting a bunch of unhinged children.
And before you come for me about barbara, barb is one incident away from being completely unhinged. My girl is barely holding it together. And nilou is unhinged, shes just good at hiding it. Girl was ready to go to jail in the sumeru quest.
Headcannons under the cut
Furina, barb, and nilou do shows together I take no criticism about this. Xingqiu wrote the shows. Neuvillette and childe fund it.
Xingqiu needs to be put in Fontaine. My boy is literally FAMOUS over there. (On a side note, love how every hydro character is famous. Only exception here is yelan but that's cus she's an undercover agent.)
Furina, xingqiu, and barb would get along like a house on fire. You got 3 art kids together, 1 that can get away with stuff, 1 that's smart, and 1 that keeps the shenanigans from getting too big and getting them into trouble. It is a weekly occurrence that neuvillette gets a call telling him his kids went and did some shit again and he's gotta clean it up.
Also childe. He's like that cool cousin that shows up at your door randomly and is involved in a lot of shady shit, but they can't complain cus childe brings xingqiu all of these rare books and makes sure he comes to all of furina and barbs performances and reads monas astrology column in the steambird every morning.
Barb makes coffee every morning for mona and makes sure mona has a balanced diet.
They have weekly tea time. Everyone shows up. No one misses it. Sometimes wrio is invited.
kokomi and xingqiu can talk for hours about anything. Books, strategy, anything. No one understands what they're talking about. Except for ayato but that's only when it's about strategy
Barbara and sigwinne will also talk about medicine for hours and it's even more difficult to understand those conversations
ayato will spawn randomly, hand someone bubble tea and then disappear. It's his way of saying I love you.
He also jumps jumpscares everyone a lot. Not intentionally but just bc someone runs into him and they haven't seen ayato in a few days and he's got Gucci eyebags and looks ready to fight the Raiden shogun. Also because he's just really quiet when he moves. You don't notice his presence unless he wants you too.
All of the adults spoil furina, xingqiu, and barb rotten. Mona tries her best.
None if them like Jean. They think that Jean doesn't deserve Barb after everything but if barb wants to have a relationship with her then they won't do anything.
Candace has fought off a crowd of crazy fans before. She will do it again.
Candace and childe fight once a month. "To see who deserves a name that starts with C" childe says. The matches always end in a draw.
Neuvillette is a better dad then all of their canon fathers.
Barbara will start singing randomly and nilou will start dancing
50 notes
·
View notes
I actually finished Monster a few days ago but I will state my feelings on it for posterity's sake: I think Monster, while composed of a number of well written and evocative vignettes, ultimately fails to execute its overall emotional arc well. If the story had been explicitly framed episodically with an overarching B-plot connecting these episodes, I might feel more positively towards it, but the fact that it must nominally develop its "main plot" each chapter while devoting most of its screen time to tangentially related stock characters was extremely frustrating. None of the twists or reveals actually felt consequential because information about the main plot is fed to you so painstakingly and in a way that's so repetitive that its conclusion is largely predictable and almost anticlimactic.
Monster ultimately does not do a very good job of developing any of its main cast. Its story and characters warp around Tenma, who is just not very interesting. I was frankly just fed up with him and the unilateral adoration that every character holds for him by the end of the story. Nina was extremely underdeveloped for the character she should have been and supposedly was within the story and any pathos that could have been elicited by her was neutered by first having her be barely present for the vast majority of the story, and second by also relegating her into being a Guy Who Just Loves Tenma. Eva was probably the closest any character had to a real character arc and her writing was just so absurdly misogynistic for nearly the entire story I couldn't enjoy any time she was on screen. Johan should have been an interesting character, but the manga got so long and drawn out that by the end I was just fed up with him.
The story overall was weirdly saccharine in a way that felt almost childish in contrast to its intended tone, and while that's not in itself a bad thing, its attempts to portray humanity as Overall Good felt simplistic and often cheap. It kinda goes hand in hand with how horribly it attempts to address WWII. "Well, The Nazis Felt Really Bad About It" and "If You Think About It, Japanese People Were The Real Victims" are not, uh. Themes that show a willingness to contend with complex morality or any real belief in human goodness aside from superficial self-reassurance. Also Urasawa Naoki is insanely insanely insanely afraid of sex.
Ultimately I think Monster would have been way, way better if it had just been shorter and had treated its main plot in any reasonable manner. It had a lot of interesting, evocative moments, and a lot of the ideas of the main plot could have been really good to chew on if the main plot hadn't lost momentum long before it was actually wrapped up. Nina and Johan are given very interesting treatment on occasion, and I have been thinking about their characters and relationship quite a bit since finishing Monster, but the plot was so bogged down in the Various Extraneous Dipshits and the need to conform every aspect of Nina's character around Tenma that there's no actual interesting conclusion to be drawn from them.
I think on an arc-by-arc level, Monster is quite well written, and it has a few really strong moments. It just makes such poor use of its format overall that it sours the whole experience.
14 notes
·
View notes