#its been almost a year since i read the majority of the manga. so. uh. yeah | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mokisano · 1 year

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Osuke Neko-Kun | Yarichin Bitch Club x Male reader [Chapter 1]

cw: Threesome, male sex, blow jobs, creampies, hate fuck, mating press, possible polyamorous relationship, mostly Ayato Yuri x Reader, Platonic relationships, oral sex, fingering, anal, BDSM, gangbang, sex toys eg. vibrators, pegging, rough sex, fluff, mentions and light descriptions of abuse

Summary: The new transfer student, [Name] [Last Name], has been moved to study at the 'great' all-boys boarding school Morimori Academy and has been quite excited to meet his best friends from middle school Yuri Ayato and Tamura Yui, especially Yuri, thinking nothing has changed from the year they haven't seen each other but oh boy is he wrong. Everything he seemed to once know about them has changed once he joined the school's Photography Club.

He's in for a hell of a ride. Literally.

People who identify as Female and minors DNI! This is not for you! If older female readers are looking for a Yari-bu x Reader I suggest reading 'That Girl' by @mozumon! This story will also have major spoilers for the manga so read with caution! I don’t own the characters, all were originally made and written by Ogeretsu Tanaka.

Everything felt so warm and soft as if your bed was just hugging your body as you rested quietly. Well until one of the cleaners busted into your room thinking you were ready and already down stairs getting your shoes on.

"Oh my! Master [Name]! I'm so sorry! Goodness-" She stuttered as she fumbled with the cleaning equipment in her hands as you sat up quickly from your bed half asleep but somehow had adrenaline in your veins.

The poor woman kept going on as you rubbed your eyes and combed your hair back with your hand as you glanced around you almost 'empty' room since you'd already done your packing which were only essential items "I, I thought you were already gone- or getting ready to leave!"

"Wait-" You then said, sleep still evident in your voice, the way your voice sounded almost scaring the poor cleaning woman alone, "What time is it?"

"U,uh...8:10 am I think young master-"

"8:10?!" you suddenly shouted as you grabbed your phone from charge and checked the time for yourself as the middle-aged woman looked like her soul left her body from your sudden outburst.

"I'm going to be late! Really late!" You shouted, since your home was a couple of minutes away from the academy, as you got out of bed and the poor cleaning woman slowly backed out of your room to give you space as you messily shoved your uniform onto yourself and brushed your hair. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to be on your phone late last night.

Once you looked presentable you grabbed your things you ran to the door but suddenly stopped and glanced at your electric guitar that was placed neatly next to its case, contemplating if you should bring it before groaning and running out of your room to brush your teeth and get to the front door at a good time, leaving a dazed cleaner leaning onto the wall as she watched you run down the stairs.

You were tugging at the back of your shoe to make sure it was on properly before seeing the cleaning woman near the stairs, about to go back to cleaning before smiling and waving at you.

"Dōmo arigatōgozaimasu!" You thanked the kind woman before leaving the house in a rush causing the woman to shake her head and laugh.

You were almost out of breath as you got to the car that was waiting for you for almost an hour and a half, the driver's face full of stress and annoyance once you got in. You couldn't blame him.

"I'm so sorry sir! Please hurry!" You managed to breath out as you caught your breath.

"Alright alright! Just stop breathing so loudly.."

"Gomen!"

You bowed deeply to the driver once you arrived at the school gates, the time was just fine leaving you enough time to run to get your information and get to your homeroom and not look tardy on your 'first' day of school.

This was technically the other first year's have been their much more longer than you since your father was home-schooling you because he thought letting you go to a normal school was messing with your brain. Which it didn't but thank the heavens he gave you a chance.

"Enough already, just go." The driver then said with a small smile as he waved his hand outside the window of the car at you while you nodded. Making your way quickly down the empty halls of the school and reaching the place where you were given your things, hoping your things were already in your dorm.

"Come in!" a gentle voice would call from behind the door as you knocked before you opened it to show a kind-looking man in his early 20s, he had dark hair and ocean blue eyes and a welcoming smile as he sat behind a desk and computer.

"Ah! Good morning you must be Mr [Last Name] [Name] yes?" He asked, his voice as sweet as honey, a small smile on his face as you nodded. His fingers typed quite quickly as he searched for your information on the school's database.

"Alright, your homeroom will be 1-D, this will be your dorm key and this will be your schedule!" He then continued as he handed you your things, handing you another pair of the keys since it was normal for some first years to misplace their first set. "Now you should hurry off now. You don't want to be late."

You just nodded before leaving the room like your life depended on it, you really wanted to get this over and done with. Introductions are one of the worst things about the first days. It would've been so much easier if you came in on the actual first day...

As you got closer to the classroom door you could hear some faint voice before seeing the teacher at his desk before making eye contact with you, causing you to flinch ever so slightly. God why did his head move so quick...it was like he knew you were there.

The man soon got up, which none of the students cared about as he went to talk to you. God...let's pray this goes by quickly.

"Ah..." You mumbled out on impulse as you glanced at everyone in the room, your nerves getting the best of you before your teacher cleared his throat, as if telling you to go on.

"I am [Last Name] [Name], I recently transferred to MoriMori Academy. I like making music and playing guitar. Please take care of me." you said, a small blush coming onto your cheeks as you fiddled with your sleeves, all their eyes making you uncomfortable, as you did a small bow.

"Thank you [Name]-san, please take a seat next to Toono-san." the teacher said with a nod as the brown-haired boy called Toono raised his hand and gave you a smile. You returned and quickly sat next to him while the teacher started to talk as you did a little victory scream in your mind for successfully surviving the introduction.

"Hi, I'm Toono Takashi, I'm also a transfer student but you probably already know heh." The brown-haired boy that sat next to you greeted you with the same kind smile, his eyes were a beautiful emerald green and his hair looked soft and like you could fall asleep from just touching it.

You just chuckled softly behind your hand as you took in his features and nodded "And you probably know who I am. It's nice to meet you Toono-"

"Toono-san, [Name]-san you both can get to know each other AFTER, thank you." the teacher then said causing some chuckles and laughs to come from the others while Toono's face started to turn red while you sighed and looked to the side, embarrassed that you were caught.

You both apologised softly before looking at each other and laughing it off quietly. It's nice to know there is someone you know in your homeroom you could talk to. And not long after your other classes began, joy!

You had your head on your desk with a groan as the class ended and the students got ready to leave to have lunch with their friends while Toono got up and went over to you with a empathetic look and tapped your shoulder.

"Are you okay [Name]?" He said with a awkward smile as you raised your hair from the table, your bangs getting messed up in the process, letting out a hum before seeing a orange haired boy walk up to you both with a small skip in his step. And you could just tell that he was VERY well liked.

"Toono! Wanna have lunch with me?" the ginger haired boy asked with one of the most sweetest smiles you've ever seen, not seeming to notice you.

"Ah- Well I'd love too!" Toono replied with a small blush on his cheeks, but hey! you don't judge, as he talked to him while you just sat there akwardly looking to the side as you fixed your hair until you heard the orange haired boy say something.

"Ah~! Sorry! You must be the new transfer student right? I'm Yaguchi Kyousuke. But you can call me Yacchan! I hope we can be friends." Yacchan said with angelic smile, his chocolate brown eyes having a golden glow in the sunlight. Now you understood why Toono was blushing, this man wasn't just kind and popular...HE'S AN ANGEL!

"Ah- I'm [Last Name] [Name], but I think you already know aha...It's nice to meet you." you said awkwardly once again as you rubbed the back of your neck as your started to admire his features once again.

"Have you decided on a club you're going to join?" Yacchan then asked making Toono turn to you with a odd expression but you just ignored it for now.

"Well... I heard there was a Photography Club in this school but if there is a music club I'd love to join tha-"

"MUSIC YES!" Toono then said loudly with a shaky smile making you both look at the brown haired boy. "I mean, music club sounds like a perfect club for you [Name]!" he'd then say clearing his throat after that random outburst while you laughed it off.

"I'd agree with Toono if it wasn't full already..." Yacchan then said with a soft tone as he looked at Toono then you, smiling apologetically, "But I'm sure the Photography Club is in need for more members-"

"NO! I mean-" Toono then paused realizing he shouted again, causing the poor boy to blush embarrassedly and laugh to himself.

"Aw do you not want to be in the same club as [Name], Toono?" Yacchan said in a teasing tone as a small smirk grew onto his face, leaning closer to him while Toono tried to find the right words. The scene in general making you laugh.

"What no! It'd be great to have [Name] in my club it's just- there are so many other clubs that can work with music!" he said as you looked at him with a deadpan expression "Yeah like what?"

"..."

"That's what I thought, plus it doesn't sound that bad!"

"Are you really sure? It's just...never mind but are you sure?"

"Toono...Plus I'm sure next year there will be a space in the music club." You sighed out, leaving Yacchan to giggle at the little conversation, while Toono just nodded in a defeated way.

"And since we'll share the same club soon you've gotta help we register for it!" you said in a childlike manner as you got up from you seat as playfully punched Toono's shoulder to which you internally shouted at yourself for while Toono nodded again but more willing to help you, his smile less shaky as well.

"Oh yeah! Would you like to sit with us too [Name]?" Yacchan then invited you, tilting his head slightly making you think of a cat.

"You really should! We're having Yacchan's cousin join as well!" Toono then added, Yacchan looking to the side with a unreadable look on his face once Toono mentioned his cousin but who were you to pass up an opportunity like that? "Sure! It's better than walking around the place alone!"

"Great! Cmon~" Yacchan then said, seemingly going back to normal as he held onto your sleeve gently, making you blush as the unexpected act but it made you smile either way.

'This is going amazing~ I'll see you soon Yuri!'

ᴍ✿ʟɪꜱᴛ! | Previous Chapter <☆> Next Chapter

#yarichin b club #yarichin b club x reader #x reader #smut #toono takashi #yuu kashima #yuri ayato #tamura yui #toru fujisaki #itsuki shikatani #keiichi akemi #itome koshiro #x male reader #yarichin b club x male reader #Yaguchi Kyosuke

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kingdaddydaichi · 2 years

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⚯ title: muse

⚯ pairing: k. akaashi x f!writer!reader

⚯ wc: 3333

⚯ warnings: nsfw, mdni, (mention of) nihilism, dry humping, almost no foreplay (unless, like me, you count engaging akaashi's mind), clothed sex, oral (f receiving), akaashi being charming af

⚯ notes: my first akaashi fic, y'all. feedback is greatly appreciated.

The very first time you saw Keiji he was standing in one of the aisles at your favorite bookstore with his nose buried in Beyond Good and Evil. With one arm crossed and the opposite elbow propped against it, he pored through its pages. His lips were pursed in concentration, eyes narrowed behind black, rectangular frames. He appeared to be too young to be a professor of philosophy, but he certainly carried himself like one, unwittingly captivating you with his quiet, uncontrived confidence. So much so, in fact, that you almost didn’t hear him when he spoke to you.

Taking a step back away from the shelves, he said, “My apologies, am I in your way?”

“O-oh. No, not at all. I was just wondering…” The intensity of his dark green eyes laser-focused on you threatened to turn you into a blubbering mess, but you managed to keep it together. “...do you find it difficult to read Nietzsche?”

The corner of his mouth twitched as he pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “Sometimes. For me, a lot of it depends on the translation and the subject matter. Obviously, the more interested you are in a topic, the easier it is to read, generally speaking. What do you think?”

A nervous laugh bubbled from your lips as you averted your eyes, a bit embarrassed to admit the truth. “I haven’t tried, actually. For the last few years I’ve been sorta interested in nihilism, but I’ve always heard that his works tend to be a bit boring and dry.”

He closed the book, its pages coming together in a whisper as he tucked it under his arm. “If you’re interested in nihilism, you might try reading The Will to Power.” He reached out and pulled a book from the shelf before handing it to you. “It’s also one of his easier books to read, in my opinion, so it might be a good place for you to start.”

You reached for the book, his warm fingers brushing against yours as he handed it over. The subtle smirk that played on his lips made you wonder if it was intentional. Smiling, you glanced at the cover before looking up at the raven-haired man.

“Okay, I think I will. Thank you so much for the recommendation, …umm…”

“Oh.” He transferred the book under his other arm and extended his hand. “Keiji. Pleasure to meet you.”

You slipped your hand into his, noticing for the first time how long his fingers are while the softness of your skin filled his thoughts. “Nice to meet you, too, Keiji. I’m (y/n).”

He nodded and looked at his phone. “Well, (y/n), I’ve still got about half an hour to kill. Would you uh-” There was a fleeting crack in his confidence and a light dusting of pink on the apples of his cheeks. “Would you care to join me for coffee in the cafe?”

You smiled. “I’d love to. I walked by there on my way in and I’ve been craving a matcha latte ever since.”

A small smile graced his lips in return. “Let’s go get you that matcha latte, then!” he insisted, making you laugh.

He found the fact that you thought he would make an excellent philosophy professor both amusing and flattering. At the same time, you were surprised and fascinated to learn that he was in fact an editor for a major manga publisher, though he was still working towards his dream of becoming a literary editor instead. When you told him that you write fiction in your spare time, he was floored. “Shut up, no fucking way!” From that moment forward, he knew he was a goner for you. Your conversation flowed effortlessly and the half hour was tragically over much too soon. You tried to argue with Keiji when he paid for your beverage, but he was having none of it.

“It’s the least I can do for you after allowing me to enjoy your company. A penny for your thoughts, as the saying goes.”

Your cheeks warmed at his charming words. “Thank you, Keiji, for the matcha latte and the reading material,” you said, holding up the book he’d given you. “The pleasure’s been all mine. Shame we can’t stay and talk longer.”

“Do you think maybe we can get together for coffee again another day when we both have more time?”

You tucked a strand of hair behind your ear and smiled. “Yeah, I’d like that a lot.” You were playing it nice and cool, but squealing like a schoolgirl on the inside.

As you created new contacts for yourselves in each other’s phones, Keiji said, “Tell you what. If you wanna hold off on buying The Will to Power, I have a copy at home you can borrow if you want? Like a ‘try before you buy’ type thing?”

“Oh, that’s a great idea for sure!”

“Cool. I’ll be sure to bring it with me next time we see each other.”

Less than an hour later, once he’d gotten back to his office, he texted you. “How about this weekend? Maybe dinner first, then coffee?”

You had to fight back the scream that threatened to erupt from your throat. “Absolutely, that sounds amazing!”

The text that he responded with damn near did you in. “It’s a date then.”

A couple of weeks and a small stack of his books sitting on your coffee table later, he’d texted late one afternoon to let you know there was a deadline for a big editorial project coming up and he’d have to work late for the next few days.

“Can you come by my place after work one night? I wanna see you…”

“As long as you’re sure it won’t be too late. I don’t want you staying up past your bedtime on my account.”

“Keiji. I’m a writer. I don’t have a bedtime lol.”

“Tsk. That’s not good for you though. We’ll have to remedy that.”

“So will you come over tonight?”

“Yeah, it’ll probably be close to nine but I’ll let you know when I’m on my way.”

“K, I’ll be here waiting for you.”

“Can’t wait to see you again.”

“Same. Miss you, Keij.”

You sat with your knees pulled toward your chest and your face buried in your hands, watching Keiji through the slits between your fingers as he sat next to you on your sofa, reading your latest draft. You’d been too embarrassed to show him any of your writing before now.

He’d told you on your first date that he’d love to read some of your work sometime, but he also understood better than most how apprehensive writers can be about letting people they know read their stuff. Something about the way he never pressured you though made you decide that it was probably safe to share it with him.

So, when he came over that night, you offered it up to him and watched his eyes light up. “Really? Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I think so. Just, please…do be gentle?”

He chuckled and pecked you on the lips. “Of course, I will.”

From the first time you saw him, your soul lost its balance and fell in love with watching Keiji read - the way his eyebrow quirks when he reads something interesting or unexpected; the way a puff of air escapes his nose as a small smile plays at the corners of his lips when he finds something funny or amusing. You loved the way he’d mindlessly run a fingertip over the corners of an open book’s pages as he read. There was something soothing about watching Keiji do what he loves most.

This time, however, you were anything but calm.

“Well,” he exhaled, pulling his glasses off.

You watched and waited with bated breath. “Is that a good ‘well’ or a bad ‘well’?”

“Do you want my personal opinion or my professional opinion?”

“Both?”

“Professionally speaking, it’s engaging and well-written. I think your audience would definitely get sucked in. I almost forgot I was reading, which is always a good thing.”

Your hands dropped to your chest to clutch your writer heart as it leapt at his praise. “And personally?”

He opened his mouth and dragged his hand down his face as he laughed quietly. “That was fucking hot.”

Your hands flew to your mouth, muffling your voice. “Really?”

He nodded, his green irises darkened by his pupils. “Let’s just say I’m really glad I’m sitting down right now because otherwise, this would potentially be pretty awkward,” he said, glancing at his lap.

Your mouth fell open in a gasp, eyes widening. “Keiji! Did it make you…are you…hard?”

He shifted against the back of the couch, keeping his arm strategically placed over his thigh. “I can lie to you if it makes things less weird.”

“It doesn’t make things weird, but I’m not sure I believe you. How do I know you’re not lying right now?”

He raised his eyebrows at you. “You want me to prove it to you?”

You nodded. If he was lying, you were calling his bluff.

He shook his head. “All right…” He situated himself lower in his seat and leaned back, relaxing to let his long legs fall open. Sure enough, there was an unmistakable bulge at the top of his left thigh. The distinct shape of his erection pressed uncomfortably against his khaki-colored slacks.

You mumbled the first word that came to mind: “Impressive.” Before you had a chance to think about what you were doing, your body moved on its own as if by primal drive. Keiji watched as you edged closer to him, resting his arm against the back of the sectional as a welcoming invitation.

With your knees pressing against the same leg as his chub, his dark gaze read the flicker of fire and curiosity in your eyes. He raised his hand to cup your cheek, bringing your face ever closer, searching for any hint of hesitation on your part.

Before he could make his move, your lips were on his, softly pressing into them. He let out a low chuckle and kissed you back, his thinner lips slotting perfectly between yours. Both of you opened your mouths at the same time, your tongues meeting halfway to push over each other. Keiji’s teeth grazed your tongue; you responded with a soft suck on his bottom lip, making both of you smile into the kiss.

Your knees trembled beneath you, too weak to maintain your position. Just as you placed your hand on his shoulder to steady yourself, he grabbed you by the waist and pulled you onto his lap. Straddling him, you could feel his hard length pressing against the back of your thigh.

“M’sorry,” he breathed. “Am I being too forward?”

“No.” You pressed your lips into his next kiss. “Please, Keiji. Don’t stop.”

That was all the encouragement he needed. His large hands slid down to your bottom, squeezing the flesh there between his long, slender fingers. “I’ve been meaning to tell you what a great ass you have.”

Your laugh whispered against his lips. “Yeah? Think so?”

“Oh, hell yes. Been dying to grab it like this,” he said before teasing your tongue with his teeth again.

“Grab it all you want. Mm…feels good.” Your fingers massaged the back of his neck before carding through his shaggy black locks.

“Yeah? Y’know what feels good to me?”

“Tell me, Keiji. I wanna know everything,” you moaned as he pulled you closer, creating friction against his cock and groaning as his warm pre oozed out onto his thigh.

“Mnnfuck, (y/n), that…that feels amazing,” he murmured against your lips.

His hands slipped underneath your shirt to massage your tits through your sports bra. He was rewarded when another moan spilled from your lips, followed by a short gasp as his kisses blazed a trail along your jawline. You squirmed on his lap, craving the sensation of his hard cock against your soaking slit.

“Mm damn,” Keiji whispered, his head falling back against the couch as you rode him, his hips rolling to dry hump you right back.

“Keij? I’m sorry,” you said, raising up from his lap.

Concern began to swirl in his lustful eyes as he opened them to check on you. “(Y/n), what’s wrong? Too much?”

“No,” you breathed. “Not enough. I need-” You hesitated, worried that you were going to come across a lot sluttier than you intended.

His hands cupped your face as yours roamed his chest and shoulders. “What is it? Tell me what you need, (y/n).”

You worked your bottom down towards his knees as your fingers got to work on the buttons of his shirt. He helped, freeing you up to start on his belt as you looked him in the eye. “I don’t want you to think less of me for this, but…” His belt now undone, you worked to get his pants open, fingers shaking with anticipation and need.

“Tell me, (y/n),” Keiji said. “I won’t think any less of you for being honest with me.”

“I need you. Now, Keiji.” You reached into his pants and pulled his straining cock out, stroking it and spreading his precum along his shaft.

“Oh fuck, (y/n)...” he moaned, his mouth hanging open as he watched you pull your tiny shorts and panties to one side and position yourself at his tip.

“Need you inside me, Keij,” you whined as you started sinking down around the head of his hot cock.

His pretty eyes rolled back as your heat encased him, so tight he thought he might pass out. You cried out at the blissful agony provided by the burning stretch of his cock as you worked him in, slowly easing yourself further down his thick shaft a little at a time. You’d only taken about half of him when he felt your slick leaking down the underside of his cock.

“Ohh…mm…take what you need, baby. Fuck, you feel so good…so damn tight.”

“Oh god, Keiji, your cock feels amazing…stretching me open so perfectly.”

“That’s it, take your time…” he whispered, gritting his teeth to keep from giving you one hard thrust of his hips to wedge himself all the way inside you at once.

You bottomed out around him, his full balls twitching against the crack of your ass. He kissed you slow and deep, still feeling a little light-headed at the way your hot, gummy walls clenched around him, waiting patiently until you were ready to start moving.

You raised your hips off him, drawing a sigh from his lips as you slid up and down on his cock a little at a time. Pretty soon, you were gliding along his shaft with ease, gasping and moaning his name as your hips rocked against his. Keiji’s hands gripped your butt, pulling you along in time with your thrusts and whispering words of praise and encouragement in your ear.

“Mmfuck, Keiji?” you whined.

Without another word he began thrusting up into you, his fingertips gripping your butt and thighs with bruising pressure as he built up his speed and intensity. Something about the way he moved hit different and you let him take control, swearing about how good his cock felt.

“Yeah, baby,” you whimpered. “Fuck me, Keiji…”

“Shit, baby, hang on…”

You tightened your hold around his neck as he leaned forward. It only took a beat for him to pick you up and lay you down across the couch. Without pulling out, he managed to work his pants and boxers further down his thighs but was too impatient to take them off. His now naked hips flexed between your thighs as he rutted into you with more force. Your cries became more desperate and he knew he needed to get you off soon because he was getting dangerously close.

He swore and pulled out, leaving you whining and reaching for him.

“Don’t worry, baby, I’m not done. Just need to get these fucking shorts off you…”

You eagerly lifted your hips to let him pull your shorts and panties down together. You got one leg out and he huffed, “Good enough,” before lining himself up and plunging back into your wet heat, forcing loud moans out of both of you.

He continued his ravenous pace, pushing one of your thighs back, then the other; angling his hips until he could feel himself bumping against the rough texture of your sweet spot.

“Ohfuck, Keij, ohgodfuck…” He planted his hands on either side of you, keeping your knees back with the crooks of his elbows, skin slapping against wet skin as he drove you closer to the edge. “Hmm…you’re gonna mm- gonna make me…fuck, Keiji! Gonna cum, baby!” Your whole body went rigid as your cunt convulsed around his pulsing cock.

“Shit, baby, me too,” he whispered urgently. “Where?”

“Inside me, Keiji…”

He grunted as he forced himself as deep as he could go. “Fuck, I’m cumming, (y/n)...” His hips stilled and shook. You could feel the force of his orgasm; his cock twitched inside you, releasing long ropes of his creamy, white seed against your walls until he was spent.

Neither of you wanted to move as your chests heaved together, your arms wrapped tightly around Keiji’s back as he breathed against your neck, planting lazy kisses there.

“Promise you don’t think any less of me?” you asked breathlessly, the oxytocin flooding your system putting you on the verge of tears, scared that maybe he’d be put off by your neediness and eagerness to have sex with him.

He lifted his head up to meet your eyes with his emerald hues. “I promise,” he whispered, kissing you softly while running his fingers through your hair. “You were just being honest about what you wanted. I think it’s sexy.”

You bit your lip and smiled, admiring the way his messy hair had fallen forward as he looked down at you. “I think you’re sexy, Keiji.”

He smiled one of his rare toothy smiles. “Thank you, I’m glad we were able to reach a consensus about our findings on sexiness.”

“Ohmygod, yes. Talk nerdy to me, baby,” you teased, both of you laughing.

You both stayed like that a while longer, still mostly dressed with his softening cock nestled inside your sticky cunt, exchanging sweet proclamations of your mutual desire to be together.

“What do you say we take this to your bedroom and get the rest of these clothes off?” He pushed himself off you and helped you up before pulling his pants up so he could walk.

“Keiji, I swear your mind is teeming with so many great ideas,” you said, reaching for him.

He had you jump up so he could loop his arms under your legs as you wrapped them around his waist. “Think you’ll ever write about us?” he smirked as he carried you to bed.

You threaded your fingers into his hair and kissed him. “Who said I haven’t already?”

He hummed as he lowered you down onto the bed. “I’d love to read it sometime,” he said, lifting your shirt over your head.

You pushed his button up off his shoulders as he let his pants fall to the floor with a clatter of his belt buckle. You eyed his slim but cut torso and licked your lips just before he kissed you. Opening your eyes to meet his, you said, “You already have.”

He groaned and smirked against your lips. “Well, as your muse,” he started, slipping his hand between your thighs as his hardening cock bounced in its freedom. “I’m honored to give you all the inspiration you need.”

He lowered himself between your open legs and kissed your clit before licking and sucking your combined spend, cleaning your pussy with a lavish tongue bath just so he could make a mess of it all over again.

feedback and reblogs are greatly appreciated!

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kirishibi · 4 years

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Kindred Spirits | Bubaigawara Jin (Twice)

My contribution to the BNHArem flowers collab!

Flower: White Chrysanthemum, meaning loyalty and devoted love

Summary: you were born with a quirk that allows you to temporarily take other peoples’ emotions, though it makes it nearly impossible to create your own. every day, you sit out on city sidewalks hoping for people to let you borrow their unwanted emotions. Used to only feeling things like guilt, shame, and disappointment, you find yourself pleasantly surprised when a kind stranger comes along and donates happiness

Pairing: Bubaigawara Jin (Twice) x Reader

Warnings: No manga spoilers! jin smoking a cigarette, light cursing, pining, brief angst (hurt/comfort), sickeningly sweet fluff

Word Count: 4.1k

a/n: this is officially the longest single piece i’ve ever written and my back is feeling it. i’m so excited to have been able to participate in this collab, especially since I got to write one of my all time favorite characters! thank you so much @jojosmilktea for making the masterlist - you did a great job!

You sat against the brick wall of a quaint boutique in one of the busiest areas of the city, a frayed cardboard sign in your hands and rusted tin can beside your feet. The neat, permanent marker words on your sign read, ‘will take unwanted emotions for $’.

Your practice wasn’t entirely legal since you didn’t have a license, but with villain activity rising rapidly in the area, you were the least of the local authorities’ worries. Your tin only held enough change for a protein bar from the corner store and your muscles ached, stiff from sitting in the same spot all day, yet you told yourself to wait a little longer. Maybe you’d get lucky.

A bus rolled by, on its side an advertisement for some hero school at the edge of town, the tagline: ‘You, too, are destined for greatness!’ plastered in bold letters beside a photo of comically fake, smiling heroes. You couldn’t help but scoff as you watched the bus round a corner and disappear from sight, remembering the vain hope you held as a child seeing similar advertisements on T.V. Back then, you truly believed you would become a hero once you got your quirk - in fact, most kids your age did, excitedly awaiting the day they’d discover their unique “super power”.

On your fourth birthday, your quirk came in and tore away any hope you had for the life of a hero. That day, you discovered that you could steal whatever emotion someone was feeling with the touch of your fingertips, taking it for yourself and leaving them without until your quirk wore off. The catch, however, was that it became incredibly difficult for you to feel any emotion without stealing it from someone else.

Your quirk had a habit of activating involuntarily, so at a young age you began to wear gloves. It wasn’t long before rumors spread around your school that you were secretly a witch, or cursed, and you were bullied relentlessly from afar for the majority of your early life.

The treatment only worsened as you grew to adulthood.

In your world where heroes and super powers were commonplace, if your quirk was problematic or - god forbid - nonexistent, you were nothing but a stain on society, a weed in need of pulling. As a kid, you were reluctant to learn this fact, so life beat it into you. You learned a harsh reality very quickly - emotions became addicting once you were unable to feel them by yourself, and in desperate times, even the bad ones were better than nothing. Anything was better than nothing. Hardships hit you in waves until you had nowhere else to go, finding solace in a ramshackle apartment in the middle of the city, begging for unwanted feelings with a side of cash during the day, spending all night searching for a job on the web.

Without a useful quirk, wealthy upbringing, or a desire to turn to villainy, this was your place in society.

After around half an hour, you stood from your spot on the pavement with a disappointed huff, stretching your aching muscles for a moment before crouching to collect your things. “Excuse me!” A gruff voice called out from behind you, the words “Hey, bitch!” following closely after, without pause for you to respond. You thought you heard the person whisper a quiet ‘sorry’ before you whipped around, startled.

You found a tall, blonde man standing at the edge of the sidewalk, his hands shoved in patched jean pockets and his broad shoulders hunched sheepishly, as if he wanted to occupy as little space as possible. The man shifted nervously while you looked him up and down. A large, vertical scar ran up the center of his forehead to just shy of his hairline, and dark blond stubble dotted his sharp jaw. The faint frown lines bordering his lips and creasing the space between his brows told you he’d likely endured a life similar to yours. Most people who spent their time on these streets had, and after a while the signs became easy to spot.

You cocked your head slightly to the side, raising a brow. “Can I help you?” You responded curtly. Living in such an unpredictable area had certainly not made you any kinder.

“You have an emotion quirk, right? I, uh, saw the sign. ‘was wondering if I could donate.” His gaze evaded yours even as he spoke, the man instead opting to watch as his frayed sneakers anxiously toed the ground.

You bent down, grabbing your change-filled tin from the sidewalk and jangling the coins within, wordlessly telling him your service wasn’t free. He stepped closer, huddling at the inner edge of the sidewalk with you, hugging the wall so as not to block the path of those trying to pass by. He pulled a crumpled two thousand yen bill from his pocket and handed it over with a timid smile. To any of the businessmen who walked by, the cash would have been no more than pocket change, but to you, it was a fortune.

Your expression must have shown just how much his payment meant to you, as the man's smile grew wider, stretching to crease the corners of his eyes. He didn’t say anything, only watched as you stuffed the bill into your pocket for safekeeping, slipped off one of your tattered, cotton gloves and held out a bare palm. “Can I see your hand? It only works through touch.” As he slid a hand out of his pocket, you recited the same speech you gave to all of your customers: “Bring forth whichever emotion you’d like me to take from you - really make yourself feel it. I don’t get to choose what I take, so whatever’s at the forefront of your mind is what will be transferred. Effects can last anywhere between three to four hours. Oh, and no refunds. Any questions?”

He reached for your hand, but hesitated, his fingers hovering just shy of yours as he timidly asked. “Is any emotion okay, good or bad?”

You sighed, “Yeah, I don’t judge. Whatever it is, it’s better than nothing.”

He nodded and laid a heavy, calloused palm atop your own. You braced yourself for what you had grown used to - feelings of disappointment, shame, anger, hopelessness; the most common feelings of the dejected businessmen who worked in the area and passed your spot regularly.

As your quirk took effect, however, you didn’t experience any of those things. You felt the corners of your lips pulling into a grin entirely on their own, a joyous giggle bubbling in your throat and spilling from you before you could halt it. Your hands flew to your face, feeling your cheeks as they flushed pink from excitement. “Wh-what?” Was all you could manage in your surprised, giddy state. It had been months- no- years since you’d felt this way.

The man’s kind smile remained, though it no longer spread to his eyes. Like you, he seemed used to faking it. “I knew a kid with an emotion quirk growin’ up. He was a total loser. Uh- it made it harder for him to feel stuff on his own, so I wanted to...” He paused for a moment before timidly continuing, his next word hanging in his mouth as if unfamiliar to his lips “help. Just in case it was the same for you, ya ugly hoe.” With his joy depleted, embarrassment quickly took its place. The man’s teeth found his bottom lip as if to keep himself from saying more, and you thought you could see a faint blush spread along his cheekbones as he turned to leave.

You were startled by the way his tone shifted so quickly, yet his actions had been kind. You couldn’t help but think, maybe his quirk knocked a few screws loose in his head, too. Much to your surprise, you found yourself wanting to talk to him more, or at least pay him back in some way, but the man had donated joy, not courage.

“Thank you, sir!” was all you could manage as he made his way deeper into the city, the distance between you growing with each step.

He waved in acknowledgement before pocketing his hand once again and turning off into a darkened alley.

---

For the first time in as long as you could remember, you awoke the next day feeling refreshed. You felt a slight bounce in your step as you made your way to your typical spot, treating yourself to a cold drink from the cafe along the way. Thanks to the kind stranger from the night before, you could finally afford a refreshing beverage to fend off the ever intensifying heat outside.

You didn’t quite know why, but the sun seemed to shine a little brighter as it rose along the horizon, the colors that sunrise painted across the skyline more vibrant than previous mornings.

Your day went by fast, and soon enough dusk began to fall. The street lights surrounding you kicked on, signaling that it was once again time for you to pack up and return home. You stood, gathered your things, and turned to begin your journey back to your apartment when a vaguely familiar voice caught your attention, “Hey, wait up- get outta here!”

It was him.

You turned on your heel toward the sound of his voice, almost as surprised as when he showed up the night before. “You’re back?”

“Yeah, is that okay? Got a problem with me or somethin’?!” You watched him wince as the second set of words passed his lips. He gritted his teeth, shoulders tensing. Like before, he preferred to watch the ground between you rather than meet your gaze.

“It’s fine.” He glanced back up at the sound of your voice, and you flashed him a reassuring smile. The tension in his shoulders seemed to fade if only for a moment. “My regulars just tend to be angry white-collar businessmen, not, ya know...” You let your words trail off, unsure how to finish.

“Not people like you?” He filled in the blanks with ease, and you nodded in agreement.

A comfortable silence spread between you for a moment before he cleared his throat, pulling another creased bill from his pocket. You realized your hands were too full to take the cash and moved to set your things down on the pavement, but the man reached out a tentative palm, “I can hold your sign for ya. I don’t wanna. I won’t take it. I will. I- I just don't want it gettin’ all dirtied up if it’s your only one.”

You hesitated, “You don’t have to be so nice. I’ve lived here long enough to handle myself.”

“I believe you. Doubt it! But what kinda guy would I be if I didn’t try ta help out a sweet lady like you?”

His genuine kindness was entirely unexpected, but you saw no reason to be distrustful. After all, what use could he have for old, water damaged cardboard. You looked him over once more before handing him the already filthy sign and taking his payment with a newly emptied hand. You stuffed it in your pocket, slid off your glove, and held out an open palm like before. “Need me to debrief you again?”

“Yes, please!” His words betrayed him as he shook his head ‘no’. “I got it, thanks.”

Suddenly, you were grateful that you had figured out which of his voices to listen to, and which to ignore. He rested a large palm against your own. A second later, you felt sparks of joy ignite a fire within your chest. The blond’s touch suddenly felt pleasantly electric on your skin, and you allowed your hand to linger in his, reluctant to pull away.

Glancing back up, you realized that he had been watching you. The tender warmth in his gaze never left as he slowly, hesitantly slipped his fingers from yours. He reached into his jeans’ back pocket, revealed a half empty pack of cigarettes, “Got time for a smoke?”

You began to refuse on instinct, but the words caught at the tip of your tongue. Again, you found that you didn’t want to part with him quite yet. Something about him caught your interest, generous donations aside. A finger tapped your chin as you pretended to ponder your decision, then shrugged, “Yeah, I think I’ve got some time.”

Shoulder to shoulder, you propped yourselves against the boutique’s wall. He offered a cigarette, to which you declined with a slight shake of your head. When you reached to take your sign back so that he could focus on lighting up, he simply swatted your hand away and tucked it under his arm. “Aye, let me be a gentleman. It’s mine!”

Your chest felt fuzzy, heart fluttering. There was something beneath your good mood, something heavy and intoxicating that you’d never felt before, but you didn’t dislike it. Quite the opposite, in fact. “You’re weird” you teased.

“You’re weird” he responded without skipping a beat. There was another brief pause as he lit his cigarette, then spoke again “So, what’s your name, weirdo?”

You giggled, playfully jabbing an elbow to his side at the title, and he laughed with you. It had a deep, melodic timbre to it, hearty, disarming, and beautiful. You wondered how sweet the sound would be under normal circumstances, without your quirk draining him. “(Y/n). What’s yours?”

“None o’ ya business!” He rolled his eyes at himself, frustrated, then took a long drag from his cigarette. “Bubaigawara. You can call me Jin, though.”

“Jin Bubaigawara” You repeated his full name slowly, savoring the way it felt on your tongue, and grateful to finally be able to call him something other than ‘sir’.

“Sounds prettier coming from you, but yeah that’s it.”

At his words, warmth crept up your neck, dusting your cheeks a rosy pink, and tugging the edges of your lips into a shy smile.

Jin felt different from the people you grew up with. He looked at you with eyes entirely void of judgement or distrust, and even if only for a moment, he made you feel like someone understood -- like someone cared.

Hours passed as you talked about everything, yet nothing in particular. The two of you took turns just chatting, occasionally asking questions back and forth. You told one another of how you discovered your quirks, shared stories from school, spoke of your families, or lack thereof. He didn’t explain the scar on his forehead, nor his split speech, but you didn’t think to ask, either. They were a part of him, made him who he was, and you realized that night that you really liked who he was.

---

For the most part, your days passed as they always did, with little business in the mornings and a few agitated corporate underlings stopping by around lunchtime to rid themselves of the bitter frustration their coworkers gave rise to. However, during your long periods of downtime, your thoughts began to wander.

Typically, they wandered to Jin.

Often, as you got bored, you found yourself scanning passing crowds for a tall blond with tired yet kind eyes, sighing disappointedly when you couldn’t find him. As much as your quirk numbed you to most things, you weren’t entirely immune to simpler feelings, like the soft pang of missing someone or the nervous quickening of your heartbeat when you finally spotted him at the end of the day. You couldn’t deny that your draw to him only grew with each nightly rendezvous and slowly, butterflies began to appear in your chest even long after the effects of your quirk had worn off. You found yourself counting the minutes until he came to see you at the end of the day, and feeling melancholy when you parted ways late in the evening.

You had never been able to feel something without taking it from someone else first, but bit by bit that began to change.

---

One night a little over a week after you first met, Jin was ten minutes late to meet you - concerning, considering how punctual he’d always been until then.

When he did show up, he seemed agitated as he tried to make conversation, and the moment his eyes met yours, you knew something was wrong. “Jin?” You questioned. Though he’d been slowly breaking the habit as you got to know one another, his gaze once again glued itself to the ground. He gnawed on his bottom lip as he desperately tried to avoid eye contact. You moved closer and bent down slightly, forcing yourself into his line of sight though he tried to evade. Only then did you notice he’d been biting his lip so hard it had swelled, threatening to bleed. “Jin, are you okay?”

For the first time in your life, you felt genuine concern.

“Back off, bitch!” He clasped a hand over his mouth the moment the words flew past his lips, his eyes brimming with tears. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I-” His voice broke as he repeated the words over and over again. “I can't help it. Yes I can. I don’t mean it. I’ll hurt you. Gah- damn it, shut the hell up, wontcha?!” He yelled at no one in particular.

You took a cautious step back to give him space, though you had no intention of running. You knew how it felt to find yourself stuck in a losing battle against your own mind. No matter what he said, you weren’t about to leave. Not like everyone else had left both of you.

Without a second thought, you reached out, entwining gloved fingers with his and tugging him down the sidewalk. He followed without hesitation, clutching your hand so tightly you thought it may break. You pulled him into a narrow alleyway for privacy, and the moment no one else was around, he hurriedly reached into his pocket, fishing out a two-toned mask. “Shit, I- I’m splitting up! I’m fine! I’m splitting all up- I love it!” Hot tears streamed down his cheeks as his bloodshot eyes finally found yours. “I’m splitting, (Y/n), you don’t understand I’m sp-!”

You put two and two together fairly quickly and swiped the mask from his trembling grasp, roughly tugging the skin-tight material over his head and down onto most of his face. You rattled off a stream of apologies as you helped him unceremoniously slide it the rest of the way on, certain you were pulling tufts of hair along with the fabric.

The moment his mask was fully in place, Jin exhaled a sigh of relief and dropped to the ground. You pushed away the countless questions racking your brain, instead forcing yourself to focus on the man before you. You lowered to sit beside him and placed a gentle hand on his back. Your thumb lightly rubbed the space between his shoulder blades as you sat together on the damp asphalt, barely noticing as small droplets of old rain periodically dribbled onto your shoulders from an overhead windowsill.

You didn’t have to wait long before he turned his attention back to you, shifting so you were face to face and cupping your cheeks with calloused palms. “You’re an angel! Marry me!” he excitedly exclaimed. You leaned into his touch despite the confusion clouding your thoughts, and suddenly you found yourself grateful your quirk only transmitted through your fingertips.

You didn’t know exactly what you were feeling in that moment - worry, adoration, compassion, panic - the lines between them all blurred together in your head, but it didn’t matter. The feelings were there, and they were yours.

Without a second thought, you threw your arms around Jin. He gladly reciprocated, nearly knocking you off balance as he wrapped you in a tight hug. “Sorry, that musta’ been real scary for ya, huh?”

You shook your head ‘no’ against his strong shoulder, “You’re gonna have to do a lot more than that to scare me.” He chuckled weakly at your words, and you reluctantly pulled away to meet his gaze once more. “Are you okay? I mean-” you sighed, “that was a dumb question, but you know what I mean, right? Do you need anything? Water, juice?”

“Juice! Stop stressin’! I’m fine now - when the mask is on, I become whole again! Good as new, see?” He flexed a bicep theatrically. The mask obscured his smile, but the slight squint at the bottoms of his eyes told you he was grinning from ear to ear. You nodded, letting out a breath that you didn’t know you had been holding in.

Hesitantly, you asked the next question on your mind: “Does that happen often?”

The man in front of you shrugged much too nonchalantly for the situation. “Most of the time I’m wearin’ the mask, so I don’t really gotta worry.”

Your brow furrowed. “I’ve never seen you in it before.”

“Duh, I always take it off to visit ya!” You cocked a brow questioningly, and he took the hint to elaborate further. “First time was an accident. You just caught my eye when I was on a walk without it, and I wanted to help ya out a bit ‘cause of that one guy from school.” He shook his head slightly, still smiling. “You’re so pretty, though - especially when you’re happy - I just had to come back. But you’d already seen me without the mask, so I jus’ took it off when I went to see ya.”

Whether his intention or not, Jin’s words forced a smile onto your face. The butterflies in your chest buzzed to life as he locked his fingers with yours, squeezing happily when he saw the blush on your cheeks. “The mask wouldn’t have changed a thing about how you make me feel, dummy!” you confessed before you could talk yourself out of it. “You’re still you-.”

Not willing to let go of your hand, Jin dragged it along with his as he raised an index finger to halt your statement. “Did ya just say ‘feel’? You’re feeling things now? An’ you didn’t tell me?!”

“I didn’t want to interrupt what was going on with you!” You argued, giggles dampening your fake-serious tone.

“Silence, woman! That’s amazing!” He leapt to his feet, pulling you up with him and twirling you around in a circle. The happy tune of your combined laughter bounced off the brick alley walls, only serving to make you laugh harder before he halted you with an embrace. “Good job, you!”

“Good job, you!” You chimed back.

---

Your routine continued normally the next day. The street lamps flicked on at dark and, like clockwork, you spotted Jin in the distance. Unlike previous nights, though, this time he seemed to be carrying something. As he neared, crossing under the bright spotlight of a streetlight, you realized it was a flower - a white chrysanthemum, to be exact. You bounded toward him, meeting halfway down the sidewalk and practically tackling him in a delighted hug.

Jin’s free hand found yours as you separated, so that he could keep holding onto some part of you as you spoke. His other hand slipped the stem of the flower behind your ear, making sure it was secure before pulling away and taking in the view. “Ug-lee! You’re so pretty!”

You blew a playful kiss, “Thanks, to both. How did you know I love chrysanthemums?”

“I just hoped, ‘cause I love ‘em too. Do you know the meanin’ behind ‘em?”

You shook your head ‘no’.

“Devoted love, apparently. I’m pretty damn devoted to lovin’ you!”

You knew Jin was about to nervously ramble, apologizing after his second statement, so you halted him with a finger to his lips. When he fell silent, you detangled your hand from his, much to his displeasure. Working slowly so that he could stop you at any point, you hooked your thumbs under the hem of his mask. His breath caught in his throat as you carefully tugged it up, just enough to expose his mouth.

You found yourself grateful for the desolate streets that late evening provided as you stretched onto your toes and pressed your lips to his. His hands found their way to your waist, pulling you flush against him as you deepened the kiss. After a few sweet moments, you pulled away just enough to whisper against his lips, “Good, because I’m pretty damn devoted to loving you, too.”

#jin bubaigawara #twice #twice bnha #twice x reader #jin x reader #jin bubaigawara x reader #twice bnha x reader #twice fluff #lov fluff #league of villains #lov x reader #league of villains x reader #kiri writes #server collabs #bubaigawara jin #bubaigawara x reader

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anime-philosopher · 3 years

Text

Reincarnation Love Stories: It’s All Sorts of Wrong

The age old troupe of “true love” reincarnating time after time is, in its most simple nature, not a horrible one. Where it takes a turn for the . . . . worse(?) is when only one of those individuals is being reincarnated and the other is, generally, immortal.

Just a warning for this particular short essay since it does touch on topics which are sensitive such as: p*dophillia, uh- Seven Deadly Sins is a warning in and of itself, as is Meliodas. Also, this does contain spoilers for the series as a whole, you have been warned!

Okay for starters, I have many, many personal issues with Seven Deadly Sins as a show and I shall air them now so that any bias is known straight off the bat. Personally, having watched anime and read manga for the majority of my life the pervert troupe is one that is . . . not unique, boring, and uninteresting. It’s also always executed in an extremely, let’s say, predatorial way (in my opinion).

Now that that has been said to put it simply: Meliodas fell in love with Goddess Elizabeth, *cue the forbidden love thing* and Goddess Elizabeth is cursed to reincarnate as a human without her memories. Which is, I’ll admit, absolutely tragic for them. What starts to get my alarms blaring is that Meliodas, for the next 3,000 or so years he finds each reincarnation and they fall in love over and over again.

Honestly, since each incarnation is technically a different person, an individual, it makes me uncomfortable with the whole idea that each Elizabeth is supposed to be just like the Goddess Elizabeth. While it’s true that the memories return they aren’t that individual reincarnation’s memories. Elizabeth Liones is drastically different from Liz who’s different from Elizabeth of the Savage Clan who’s different from the Goddess Elizabeth. Each of the 107 (or so) reincarnations are different, with different life circumstances, personalities, while their appearances are all similar or pretty much exactly the same (save for Liz) everything else is different. It almost feels, at least to me, that Meliodas forces this on them simply because they can regain the memories of the Goddess Elizabeth and he can have his first love back. I don’t know why exactly, but in watching and reading I never got the feeling that he loved any of them because of who they were individually but simply because they would, eventually, become like Goddess Elizabeth.

That expectation is, simply, not a healthy one. Though I think that is a bit obvious. Also, there is a complete disregard for the psychological effects of having your sense of self and identity altered by force.

Next is the fact that during the series Elizabeth Liones is sixteen. I’m not great at math but something doesn’t add up about that. While Meliodas most certainly does not look like a 3,000 year old man he certainly looks and acts like he may be in his twenties even with his short stature. So that alone is just pedophillic. I know that the whole ‘ancient love interest’ is a complicated conversation within fandoms and the like but there are some important things to note. Meliodas was the one who gave baby Elizabeth to the King and Queen of Liones, which is weird. To make things worse Meliodas was Elizabeth’s bodyguard during her childhood, he watched her grow up and they were close.

While I won’t go as far as to claim that Meliodas was ‘grooming’ Elizabeth, as we really don’t know the motive behind his actions or behavior and could truly read it either way, it’s still unsettling. Sure, one can attempt to wave it off that it was simply “destiny” for them to fall in love; it still comes off as all sorts of wrong. Not to mention, Meliodas (when they’re reunited when Elizabeth is sixteen) promptly sexualizes Elizabeth (agan, she’s sixteen). Yes, while Elizabeth’s body is developed she’s still very much a child and even with the way she is depicted dressing it doesn’t make it okay by any means.

To put it simply, a 3,000 year old demon “falling in love” with a sixteen year old who he knew when she was a toddler & child simply because she’s the reincarnation of his first love is, in my opinion, everything that is wrong with reincarnation love stories.

#anime-philsopher #anime #Seven Deadly Sins #meliodas #elizabeth liones #opinion peace #andie

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geometricalien · 4 years

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oh dear i'm super duper late but I have a lot of questions about your wips!! I wanna know more about sick Akashi, nekoma pirate crew, BoKuroo/BokuAka midsommer, Pining + Jacket, The truth burns and destroys, feeling good, Punk Noya, Strawberry Blonde, sunspot and the merman au!!! Thanks babe <333

Hi Vee!!! This is it, I spent wayyyyy too long on this, I think my finger is cramping from typing. But thank you for asking, I love sharing my ideas, sorry if it’s incorherent.

This is super long so it’s under the cut, saving people room

Sick Akashi

So, it’s based off of a line prompt “I’d like it if you’d stay” and as the title suggests, 3rd year Akashi gets sick, sorry Vee it’s not fatal, Furihata comes to Rakuzan to check on his friend after he doesn’t answer his phone. The entire premise is Akashi works himself sick with his various responsibilities he takes on as “perfectionist who can’t show any cracks at all”. I don’t want Bokushi Akashi showing up so it’s minus the mental break elements. (also technically in canon terms it's after they have merged so yeah) I feel like they deserve a cute little “nurse” the other from a sickness ficlet. And… maybe… sick Akashi confesses…….. It’s almost a writing challenge for me because Akashi has a more polite sophisticated way of thinking and speaking, so cough yep

The rest are Haikyuu aus so buckle in

NEKOMA PIRATE CREW

Admittedly this is more loose, less of a solid idea. It’s Yaku centric, and how he went from a merchant from his grandfather’s company searching for lost merchandise and became the first mate who keeps track of the ship's finances and keeps their captain Kuroo on track. Other things of note, he meets Kuroo first as a pirate on another ship who stole his merchandise, Kenma is a sea witch (is that science or magic? That's always the question), and about halfway through the adventure they get Lev on board as a new member. So yeah! Kinda a fetch quest but on of my favorite fanfics is legitimately a fetch quest so it's okay fjdkaljf

BoKuroo/BokuAka Midsommer

This is based off of a fanart by desdelasombra my friend Shayla showed it to me and we threw this idea around together, we really don’t want to write it but it's also spectacular. So it's the movie Midsommar, right? Bokuto is a “gatherer” bringing his friends to come join in his village’s rituals. But we didn’t want anyone to die (except for Kenma sorry he’s dead as the substitute for the main character’s sister), so a grieving Kuroo comes with his boyfriend Bokuto, joined by their friends the smart studious and jaded Oikawa and bright bubbly Hinata. Obviously the three react badly to the first ritual and Bokuto doesn’t understand because for him it’s always been a joyful experience and he wanted to share it with his friends. A Lot of things happen, but most important is Akaashi and Kuroo dancing under the may pole together. BokuAka was in the past when Bokuto was home so part of this is them coming together as poly and escaping the final scene of the movie. Again this is very painful but that art is beautiful and the world is better for it being created

Pining + Jacket (KuroLev)

Again this is a line prompt about lending a jacket because it’s cold and it had so much potential for pining and who is the most pining bastard that I know? LEV and Shayla told me about KuroLev and somehow this happened. It’s currently going to be a sequence of drabbles of Lev pining after Kuroo, what else could you ask for? Uh? Lev confessing to Kuroo and them going out??? Sorry I can’t hear you over the exquisite angst and pain of one sided love that I want to explore

The truth burns and destroys

GOOD CHOICE, I began this on saturday night and it has earned a very special place in my heart. Sometimes I fear that my writing is like a lazy pool, sure it's nice and easy and smooth but there isn’t an intensity or raw emotions, BUT THIS this accomplishes what I want. And I’m really glad, its metaphor and imagery heavy but it really captures their emotions and thoughts without it sounding like I’m a 7th grader writing my first fanfiction glances to my abandoned wips from that time. Okay, Vee, I am a glutton for punishment and angst and I choose to pursue cheating fics. But specifically where and how they build the relationship up again after finding out. So, I was reading a KageHina cheating fic and how the character’s reacted felt off somehow so at midnight I wrote this snippet to fullfill my craving, you know what they say the best fanfiction is self indulgence. Here is a short excerpt,

He wants to brush this aside and continue their lives. He wants to wake up next to Tobio and still be seen the same way. He doesn't want anything to change.

Tobio is his favorite book. He has read it time and time again. Highlighting, underlining, cherishing. So Shouyou is able to read the silent begging in his eyes. The right clenched fist.

"Shouyou," a deafening pause "What is this?"

Please lie to me.

…

It stretches on. The eternity of silence. They sit together holding on to the last hope they have. Shouyou memorizes those beautiful hands, each crease and bump. Hands that helped shape him become who he is and that reached out unwaveringly.

Tobio sighs a world ending sigh.

Shouyou was the one who created their world, it's only fitting that Tobio is the one who destroys it.

In summary I like angst, I want to feel something

Feeling good

AAA, okay uh, This is a BokuAka pop star au. Akaashi sings “feeling good” at a big charity event hosted by Akashi (... yes I am AkaFuri trash and I can and will sneak them in anything and everything I write) while he is singing he walks down a big staircase remembering moments in his relationship with Bokuto, how much they have grown and how much he loves him. I love the concept! But I tried to write smut in the beginning of it and OOF THATS A NO. I actually have the majority of it written but I do want to add more emotions and thoughts (the lazy pool writing) and make it Ao3 friendly because I have all of the lyrics for feeling good in it as “post signs” for what he sings and that’s against their rules. 1 major aspect of this fic is it's all leading up to the point where Akaashi says “I love you” for the first time to Bokuto after finishing the song, on stage, in front of everyone and on every screen broadcasting it.

Punk Noya

I have a love for feral boys, especially feral alternative punk boys (and girls and humans) so this whole idea is that Noya goes to another school for high school, embraces more punk aethsetics, and on the first day of the preliminary tournaments he hears the rumors about a high schooler in a gang, getting up to nasty things, and he decides to confront them. He finds Asahi, rants him out and leaves. The plot then follows canon, at the winter tournament Karasuno faces Dateko, Karasuno loses even more badly because Noya isn’t there. Asahi quits volleyball, BUT Asahi and Noya run into each other at the store and talk leading to friendship which leads to romance. Idk man, I want more punk haikyuu characters, it gives me life. Alt Yamaguchi is my favorite but onwards we go

Strawberry Blonde

!!!! So this is Mitski’s song and to give a vague idea this is a pining Kageyama fic where he tries to pull away from Hinata and that back fires. (I do have more to say but I’ve been typing this for over an hour and I’m getting really tired fjkdaljl) There is one paragraph that I love, so here it is! Kageyama and Hinata are practicing by themselves outside of school and they are playing pepper (its a volleyball warm up practice routine where you partner up with someone pass, set, and spike the ball to each other sesquentially) Hinata goes to spike the ball and for a moment Kageyama sees it,

They are at nationals and they made it to finals. The crowds are screaming, but everything except the court is thrown into shadows. They are at match point of the final set. Everything is at peak intensity and at the center is him. Flying in the air. Orange hair waving with the momentum. His loud take off echoing in the gym. Arm poised for the kill. Eyes sparking with ferocity and passion as he aims. And finally, tipping the world over is the loud slap of his hand, sending the ball to the far side of the court-

This was actually going to be finished and posted in time for Haikyuu season 4 coming out and the manga wrapping up.... clearly I failed my goal fjdaklfj

Sunspot

You don’t know this about me but I love royalty aus, and this is BokuAka Prince Akaashi and Knight Bokuto. This was a short snippet of this grand idea I have for them where they run away from Akaashi’s inherited destiny together. It has potential to be really wide and expansive with the differnet teams as different kingdoms (AGAIN ILLUSION OF CHOICE, that fic really influences me doesn’t it fjdskalj) But this was a short glance at Akaashi taking a break from studying and watching Bokuto and the other knights practice duel. The title comes from the fact that Bokuto is a sunspot in Akaashi’s life, and his day is substantially better basking in his golden shining light.

Merman au

I’m so glad you asked about this and its technically the one I’ve written the most for since it's actually the one I posted on my haikyuu writing side blog. But brief recap, long term it’s a BokuAka little mermaid au but instead of a sea witch it’s an underwater deity who makes “wishes” (it's a deal) with every royal who is born. And Akaashi has a lot of siblings: Ushijima, Oikawa, Suga, Terushima, and Hinata, and its in that order. So I have information on every sibling’s deal, what they wish for, what they give for it, what happens to them in the future, romantically and otherwise. But, this is the one I haven’t updated in over a year, I am working on it!! I’m currently on Koushi’s (suga’s) wish/deal, its just taking forever. If you want to learn more about it I’ll link it in parts 1 2 3 4

BUT I will work on Suga’s part and then Terushima’s and then to the meat of the idea with Akaashi.

If you have made it this far, thanks, you are cool as always. My brain and fingers is ded.

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ghostmartyr · 6 years

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Hi Immi. I'm new to the fandom--joined around the drop of ch107. Since then there's been a big buzz about historia, regarding her sexuality, her character regressing and her relationship with ymir. i'd seen snk s2 and honestly never occurred to me to ship yumikuri because i hate ships but being on tumblr, well, it's everywhere. I see people get hate on shipping her with males but i'm not sure where i stand. Is she explicitly lesbian? If not then why is it so bad? Is the tumblr fandom just toxic?

Hi.

Uh.

Hell, dude, you pretty much summarized all the reasons I stopped checking the tags. I’m not exactly in the fandom anymore. I do my stuff, but I am actively avoiding mostly everyone, and that’s just because of the immediate aftermath of the chapter. So uh, welcome, I guess, I’m not here.

I answered–well. No, I covered a bit of what I’m going to go over here in my chapter post, aka the unfun section of it. Making this a bit of a rehash, but most things I type are anyway.

The most obvious thing is that people should not be getting hate. That is a general statement, disconnected from anything that’s going on. It is applicable in every fandom, in every situation. Even in the cases where someone is doing something that poses a very real danger, the solution is not sending hate. Sending hate is exactly what it sounds like, and people should behave themselves better.

Where you end up standing on any of this does not make the behavior magically okay.

And again, I basically left the fandom. I have no idea what’s going on, and frankly, I do not want to, so none of this is based on anything that’s happened in the past three weeks.

My perspective on fiction is that it is entirely selfish. People want what they want from it. While I don’t like most of what other people like, the fact that they’re capable of enjoying things should be celebrated. Go them.

That doesn’t mean I think stories are beyond reproach, or what happens in fiction can’t be offensive or damaging.

Fandom is not the same as canon. A personal pet project is very different from something being consumed by millions of people. Fandom currently has a very black and white style of thinking, and so it neglects that difference.

For an easy and relevant example, Kurt and Rachel from Glee getting it on in a fanfic is not equal to it happening in the show. One is someone’s random fantasy, the other, unless it’s handled with the kind of respect Glee has never dealt in, is going to be very inflammatory.

(See: Blaine and Rachel (for different–-but still relevant!-–reasons))

A lot of people do not agree that the difference between fanon and canon is relevant to some of the things people end up enjoying. The reason being that stories never feel that different to the individual experiencing them. Who creates it, or how wide its reach is, is not automatically something that matters to the emotional experience. It will hurt in roughly the same way, so often the argument that one is excusable and the other isn’t is done before it starts.

I’m meandering a little because I do not really know how to handle this delicately. So far this is all just foundational. stuff.

I guess I’ll go with blunt.

yumikuri is a canon romantic bond. Ymir is implied to be a lesbian because one character says she looks like one, Historia is a complete blank slate outside of that relationship because Ymir is her sole love interest.

The status of Historia’s sexuality is that she is romantically interested in Ymir, a girl. That is the entire sum of what the manga’s covered.

107 heavily indicates that Historia is coerced into having sex.

That should never have opened up a discussion into what her sexuality is. Someone being forced into sexual intercourse is indicative of nothing except that they are being forced into it. That is the exact opposite of desire.

Yet it opened the door to people reminding everyone that it is absolutely okay for a character to be bisexual.

That is a true statement.

(Editing in emphasis, because it really is.)

I do not know how to adequately describe why the context makes that statement so tone deaf and infuriating.

The manga has been running for almost ten years. In that time, there has been no indication of Historia having interest in anyone outside of Ymir, a girl. That could cover a lot of different sexualities, and there’s nothing wrong with someone wanting any of them.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t incredibly insulting ways of going about introducing them.

Historia’s first major appearance after her girlfriend is killed off-screen (if you believe that, which all but three people reading this and the person writing this do) is all about forcing her to fuck a guy to make babies.

Even in some hypothetical where her pregnancy is the result of a happy relationship, it would be insulting. As far as we know, it isn’t, so we are dealing with the full brunt of how disrespectful that summation is.

There is this common thing that happens in stories, where you have the gay relationship, one dies, the other lives on to go have a happy life with someone of the opposite sex. The subtext is that this weird one-off sexual thing may have happened, but don’t worry, they’re still normal.

I don’t know how to say that convincingly, because it’s a subtext that I’ve picked up on throughout hundreds of different stories. I don’t know how to cram that history into one post.

Girls liking girls is seen as an aberration, even in stories about liking girls. The relationship will be an exception. The more femme character won’t really like girls, just this one. The concept of a girl liking another girl as a normal facet of her sexuality, which exists outside this relationship, is commonly disregarded, or given to the non-POV partner.

This should be a problem that it’s easy to agree on. Lesbians like girls as a rule. Bisexuals like girls as a rule. Not exclusively, but Likes Girls is still very much a part of the identity (unless we get into discussions of bi covering multiple genders but not necessarily binary ones).

Then there’s fandom.

I can’t count the number of times I have seen the argument that Historia only sees Ymir as a friend. I have been invested in her character and that relationship for five years. Barring the last month, which I don’t want to know about, probably at least once a week, someone would make the case that okay, maybe Ymir likes Historia, but Historia doesn’t like her back.

Many, many times before I left the tags last month, people were saying that Historia’s pregnancy isn’t an LGBT issue, because Historia’s interest in Ymir was never canon.

I get twitchy when people are staunch supporters of her being bisexual. Because as much as I want to trust people, and as much as I know that every marginalized identity is desperate for scraps, the conversation about Historia has always felt like, “it’s important to remember you can’t prove she doesn’t like men.”

When it’s not full on, “it’s important to remember her liking a girl is in your imagination.”

Because she’s the pretty one in the girl on girl couple.

I want her to be gay or ace. Nothing disproves that, but I feel like an idiot for wanting that, because the classically pretty one isn’t going to be a lesbian, and years of consuming anime and manga should have taught me that. Beyond the first sentence, none of that perspective is particularly healthy.

Queer fandom can be really complicated to navigate, because some of the things people want to see–-which are fundamental to their identities, and that’s why they want to see them–-run exactly counter to what other people want to see.

There’s a post from Yuri on Ice fandom that I think encapsulates this. I don’t know the background, or what has been shouted back and forth since I saw it, but here’s the gist. Someone suggests that one of the figure skating gays could be ace. Dozens of people go, “bad post op,” and it’s treated humorously.

Asexual representation sucks. An episode of House, noteworthy for using the word and having someone quote the statistic occurrence of asexuality, ends with one half of an asexual couple having a hormone imbalance, and the other lying about her interest in sex so she could date him.

Yeah.

Gay guys also have a hard time with their sexuality being policed. Holding hands is okay (sometimes), but kissing? Sex? The dirty homosexuals are depraved for enjoying such things. Gay women can have degrading sex because it’s hot.

People want their identities respected.

That is not an unreasonable thing.

What tends to happen on Tumblr is that people forget that they aren’t the only ones being treated like crap. There are layers of pain and anger they bring to every fight, and over and over again, people who should know what that pain is like, and help each other through it, sharpen theirs until they can use it to chop off someone’s head.

107 is insulting in a lot of ways. The aftermath was worse for me. From what little I saw, many people were very eager to say that the part where a queer woman was dealing with a coercive pregnancy shouldn’t be judged for the queer part. Because there are people issues, like war and tragedy, and then social justice issues, which aren’t about people. They don’t really matter in a war story with internment camps and genocide.

I’m being glib, but… that’s what it felt like. That’s what a lot of people I liked shrugged and agreed with.

I want Historia to be a lesbian (or ace), but for right now, we do know she’s queer. That is a part of her character, and it is one that people have been talking over for years. Having post after post reminding everyone that her being queer does not matter to the story? That her being queer is not a lens worthy of being looked through when it’s clearly not about that?

I don’t agree with… basically any of the fandom behavior I’ve seen touching this. I think people should behave themselves better, and treat each other more kindly, and pain is no excuse for bleeding all over everyone.

But where that pain comes from has been repeatedly dismissed, and where it comes from is not insignificant, no matter what route you want canon to go.

…And as far as Historia’s character goes, this is a regression, and the writing should be ashamed of itself. It violates the themes of her arc with such direct intent that it’s painfully easy to believe there’s a twist to it, but for now it’s just infuriating, because the girl who fights fate has been made its tool, and Ymir, aka her love interest, is very relevant to the whole arc where we covered this. 107 is bad and should feel bad, and I am extremely not happy that I think that is exactly the feeling I am intended to have, because being emotionally manipulated is much more annoying when it works.

Hopefully that gives your questions an answer.

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #SnK 107 #attack on asks #an educational romp through maddening things

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teacoffeeandwhatnot · 6 years

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The Gay Agenda - Chapter 5

Look at me, actually uploading when I said I would oml! Chapter 5 is here, and its Jren.

Please keep in mind, sentences written in Italic is what is being said by the panel, or people in the studio. Normal text is what is happening otherwise.

As always, also available on my Ao3!

(if you want me to tag you every time i update, please dont hesitate to message me and I’ll add it in the next chapter)

“Our next contestant is Choi M-“

“Holy shit, is that Minki?!” Jeonghan interrupts Holland, jumping out of his seat to get a better look at the screen in front of them.

“Uhh, yes, do you know him?” Holland questions.

“Yeah, shit, he’s my cousin. I don’t know why I didn’t think of him for this show, he’s like a lover of all things gay. Also, he already works here so it’s perfect.”

“Well then, I guess I can save myself the introduction,” Holland laughs. “Do you happen to know what his type is?”

“Oh yeah, for sure. He’s into like super nerdy guys which is kind of ironic because, even though he works in the freaking comic book store, he could not be less interested in them.”

“Ah, well then it should be easy to find someone that’s his type then, I guess. Let’s see how he gets on.”

He knows he should really be spending his money on better things as a 23-year-old, but Jonghyun can’t help himself, so he finds himself on the bus for his weekly visit to the comic book store. It also has nothing to do with the pretty shop clerk whom he has successfully avoided talking to for weeks now, nope. Nothing at all. He totally doesn’t spend half his time there staring at him, and not the comic books. Definitely not.

Ever since the new guy has started working there, his visits to the store have become significantly more nerve wracking and he finds his hands sweating a worrying amount every time he pushes the door open. He really needs to get his shit together.

He walks straight to the Haikyu section, deliberately not looking towards the counter, where he knows the beautiful boy is. He knows his name is Minki, having glanced at his name tag out of the corner of his eye last time, when he had been busy ringing up another costumer.

Even though he only glanced in his direction for about half a second through the glass door before entering, he is still hyperaware of Minki, slouching over the counter, looking bored out his mind, sucking on a goddamn lollipop. He also belatedly realizes that Minki seems to be the only employee here, which means that, if he wants to buy something, he will inevitably have to talk to him. Which is generally a good thing, forcing him to finally have a conversation, but he’s also scared shitless. He knows he gets all stuttery and awkward when faced with pretty people he may or may not have a small (massive) crush on, so there is probably a high chance he’s going to embarrass himself. For a second he considers just not buying anything and high tailing it out of the store, before he realizes how stupid that is. He gives himself a short mental pep-talk before finally deciding to get his shit together, picks up the book he wants and makes his way towards the counter. Previously he had always waited, sometimes agonisingly long, until Minki was busy or went on break and his co-worker took over, before he went to the counter, as to avoid the situation he was in now.

He placed his book on the counter, finally managed to look up and made direct eye contact with Minki for the first time. He was frozen for a minute, lost in the man’s eyes before he was shaken out of his stupor.

“Only this then?” Minki asked.

“Uh, y-yeah.” Jonghyun mentally cursed at himself for the little stutter and cleared his throat. “Just this one today,” he managed, trying to sound a little more confident and not like his legs were about to give in any second.

“So have you finally decided to stop avoiding me then?” Jonghyun’s head snapped up from where he lowered it again, staring at Minki with a panicked expression, who was smirking at him with a knowing smile.

“What? I was not- I’m not- I didn’t…,” he stuttered, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation.

“Dude, literally every time you’re here you stare holes into the side of my head but you never come up to the counter when I’m here and always wait till Minhyun is at the counter or I’m busy. I feel a little bit offended to be honest, what do you have against me? I don’t bite.”

Minki says all of this with a smirk on his face, so Jonghyun knows he isn’t mad, (and mortifyingly probably knows why Jonghyun was staring) but he can’t help but feel faint.

“I wasn’t staring at you.” Minki cocks his head, giving him a ‘you’ve got to be shitting me’ expression. “I just admire those posters behind the counter.”

“Sure you do, my dude, sure you do.” Jonghyun doesn’t think his face will ever return to its natural colour, destined to stay permanently crimson at this point. He realizes that Minki is almost done ringing up his book and with that his time actually talking to him will be over soon. Scrambling to keep the conversation going, he asks, “Uh, so I’ve been looking for a new series, preferably something similar to Haikyu, so like sports and rivalries, etc. do you have any recommendations?”

Minki shrugs, “No idea, dude, I’ve never read a manga in my life. I can ask my colleague though and let you know?”

Jonghyun belatedly realizes his mouth is hanging open in shock and quickly closes it.

“What do you mean you’ve never read one, you work in a comic book store?”

“Yeah, because my cousin, whether he admits it or not, is a sucker who would do anything for me, and he knows the owner so he got me the job. I’m a broke college student, I take what I can get. ”

“Fucking brat,” Jeonghan mumbles under his breath.

Up until this point, Jonghyun had been convinced that Minki was perfect and most definitely the love of his life, but this could not be overlooked. This was a major character flaw that needed to be corrected immediately.

“Ok, but like that’s unacceptable. I’m sorry, but you have no choice, you have to be educated. I will sacrifice my precious time and be your teacher, out of the goodness of my heart.”

(Minki honestly couldn’t believe that it could’ve gone any better. Whether he knew it or not, the cute customer had done his whole job for him, and he didn’t even need to come up with some bullshit excuse to spend more time with him. He was going to win, for sure.)

“I’ll let you educate me under two conditions.”

“Ok? And those would be?”

“One, we go find a café and have a drink while you tell me all about your little… books.”

Jonghyun made a face. For one at the comment about his ‘little books’ and secondly out of confusion. Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to educate Minki in the comic book store, so he could provide examples?

“Uh sure I guess, I mean here would be better, but if you want. And the second one?”

“You have to tell me your name,” Minki grinned. “So far I’ve only been calling you Onibugi in my head.”

Once again, Jonghyun felt his face heat up. Minki had been calling him a nickname in his head? For how long? Did this mean that he would also think about him? This was lowkey too much information for him to handle all at once.

“O-onibugi? Why?”

“Cuz you kinda look like one, don’t you think?” Minki squished his cheek and Jonghyun was ready to die then and there.

They decided to go to a little ice cream parlour on the second floor of the mall, since Minki said he was craving a milkshake, and who was Jonghyun to deny him. The entire 3 minute walk there, Jonghyun could help but sneak glances at Minki’s side profile. His long hair swished gracefully back and forth as he was walking and Jonghyun really had to fight every nerve in his body to not give into his urge to run his fingers through it and see how soft it really was. The first time Jonghyun had seen Minki, he had thought that he was a girl, quickly proven wrong when Minki had called out to his co-worker in a voice too deep for a girl and called him hyung. Now, Jonghyun had never really thought about his sexuality in depth, so he probably would’ve fallen in love with Minki no matter if he was a girl or a boy, but he was kind of relieved that Minki had been a boy, since in his opinion, girls are even more terrifying to talk to than guys. Or so he had thought. Minki seemed intimidating no matter what, hence the long time it took him to start talking to him.

Arriving at the café, they quickly found a small table for two in the corner and scanned the menu.

“You want to share a milkshake?” Minki asked.

Considering Jonghyun could barely get through a conversation with him, he doubted he would survive sharing a drink with the other.

“Uh, no, I’m good, you get your own drink. I’ll pay.”

“Aww Jonghyunnie, that’s not what I meant, but thanks! So generous.”

The obvious flirting that Minki sends his way completely flying over his head, Jonghyun launches into a speech about Haikyu as soon as they get their drinks.

“Ok so, I don’t know where to begin. Let me just tell you the plot first, I think that’ll help you understand how awesome it is. So basically it’s about this guy who joins the volleyball team of this formerly prestigious high school and he’s like obsessed with this other player who is like the star player of this team and was basically like a jump god for them, so he trains all the time to try and become like him. He ends up…” Jonghyun trails off when he looks up and realizes that Minki doesn’t seem to be listening to him at all, but is rather just staring at his mouth. Self-consciously he rubs over his lips, thinking he might’ve gotten some of his milkshake somewhere on his face.

“Minki, are you even listening to me?”

“Huh? Oh yeah, sure I am.”

Jonghyun isn’t completely convinced, but continues trying to convince Minki that comics are the best thing in this world and that he is missing out.

“Ok well he ends up clashing really hard with this setter – how much do you know about volleyball by the way? Actually it doesn’t really matter – so anyways he clashes with this setter is also like a really good player so everyone calls him king, but he’s more like a tyrant, I guess? And yeah –“ Suddenly, there are lips on his. He was so engrossed in his speech he hadn’t realized that Minki had gotten closer, lifted his chin up and just planted one on him.

It was over way too quickly, Jonghyun hadn’t even closed his eyes and he just ended up stupidly blinking at Minki when he pulled back, with his mouth slightly open.

All of a sudden, all the pieces in his head seem to align. Holy shit, Minki had been flirting with him this entire time.

“Holy shit, you were flirting with me this entire time.”

Minki let out a loud laugh. “I’m glad you finally caught on, I thought I couldn’t make it more obvious. I mean I flat out told you I have zero interest in comics and yet I still listened to you ramble for like an hour. I felt like I had to help you along a little bit.”

Jonghyun scratched the back of his head sheepishly. “Yeah sorry, I get really into it when I talk about comics… also like… you’re beautiful? I thought you’d never go for someone like me. I mean, you could have anyone.”

“Not go for someone like you? What, you mean a cute, nerdy, hot guy with a deep voice? How the fuck could I not go for you?”

Before he could blush and stutter some more, Minki leaned in again and this time Jonghyun was prepared. He managed to close his eyes, kiss back and even cup the side of Minki’s face. He couldn’t believe that this was happened and inwardly cursed at himself for not talking to the cute clerk earlier.

Later, when they’re walking back to the comic book store hand in hand, Minki’s phone goes off.

“Oh hey Jeonghan, how are you?” “My cousin,” he mouths in Jonghyun’s direction.

“Sooooooooooooooo?”

“So, what, Jeonghan?”

“Soooo does it live up to all your day dreams and on a scale of 1-10, how good of a kisser is Jonghyun?”

“WAIT, WHAT? HOW THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW?”

Pt. 4

#bts #suju #shinee #wanna one #stray kids #seventeen #nct #exo #nuest #got7 #monsta x #history #day6 #teacoffeeandwhatnot #the gay agenda au

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astoundingbeyondbelief · 6 years

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Fifty years ago, Japan’s Kaiju Boom was at its peak, with Ultraman and Ultraseven on TV and films from four of the country’s five major studios in the theaters: Toho’s Son of Godzilla and King Kong Escapes, Daiei’s Gamera vs. Gyaos, Nikkatsu’s Gappa, and Shochiku’s The X from Outer Space. Wouldn’t you know it, in 2017 there were five kaiju movies and two Ultraman shows too, as the transnational Kaiju Boom rolled on with no end in sight. Let’s take a look back at all that transpired.

1) Kong is King

If cinematic universes are the future, then the world’s greatest kaiju are lucky to have Legendary Pictures in charge of theirs. Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island, the second entry in the MonsterVerse started by Godzilla in 2014, hit theaters during a busy March to rave reviews and respectable box office. Packed with monsters, helicopters, talented actors, and 70′s hits, it kept the action contained on the giant ape’s home; a restrained blockbuster by today’s standards. If the film’s post-credit scene ate up the conversational oxygen a bit too much, well, that’s the price you pay for teasing Godzilla, Rodan, Ghidorah, and Mothra in one scene.

But that wasn’t all for the Eighth Wonder of the World this year. BOOM! Studios’ Kong of Skull Island comic concluded with its twelfth issues. It was succeeded by a one-shot, Kong: Gods of Skull Island, and a strangely apt Planet of the Apes crossover, still being published. Legendary got in on the act too with Skull Island: Birth of Kong, a prequel/sequel to the film.

I have proposed a moratorium on Kong titles with “Skull Island” in them. Unfortunately, this confusing trend is set to continue, with Jonathan Penner and Stacy Title currently writing a King Kong Skull Island TV show for MarVista Entertainment and IM Global Television.

2) Godzilla is King of the Whole Stinking World, What Now

Another year, another new Godzilla movie. It’s been a while since we could say that, hasn’t it? Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, the first in an animated trilogy by Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita, was released in Japanese theaters this November. A worldwide Netflix release will follow on January 17th. The next two are coming this year, presumably so Toho can atone for not releasing one in 2015. Godzilla: The City Mechanized for the Final Battle (or however it’s ultimately translated), due in May, will feature the return of Mechagodzilla.

Shin Godzilla, meanwhile, made kaiju history earlier in the year, becoming the first film in the genre to win Picture of the Year at the Japan Academy Awards. (It also netted prizes in six other categories.) On the American side of things, Legendary finally started filming Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), and Godzilla vs. Kong (2020) found a director in Adam Wingard.

On the home video front, Shin Godzilla hit DVD and Blu-ray around the world, and Criterion picked up the rights to almost every film in the Showa series, plus Rodan and The War of the Gargantuas. Physical releases have yet to be announced -- they’re currently streaming on Filmstruck -- but seem inevitable.

3) Sturm Organs, Chaiyo Vanquished, and the Phantom Channel

I could have made this post the 2017 Ultraman Year in Review without changing the format of the photoset one bit, although the tone would have been a shade more bitter.

Ultraman Geed, starring the son of arch-villain Belial, ran for 25 episodes. Ultraman Zero and his mild-mannered salaryman host Leito ended up stealing the show. (It also gave us the phrase “Sturm organs,” which I never want to read again.) Cruchyroll, as is tradition now, announced it was simulcasting Geed about eight seconds before the first episode aired.

Ultraman Orb: The Origin Saga, the prequel to last year’s series, concluded on Amazon Prime Video in Japan. A promised English release never worked out, although the fansubbers picked up the slack.

Ultraman Orb the Movie arrived in Japanese theaters on March 10. It wasn’t very good, but Ultraseven made a hell of an entrance.

Keeping the Orb train rolling, the 24-minute Ultra Orb Fight aired over the course of eight episodes of Ultraman Zero: The Chronicle, another one of Tsuburaya‘s compilation shows.

Ultraman X the Movie and Ultraman Ginga S the Movie played in a handful of American theaters, with English dubbing from William Winkler Productions. Winkler also dubbed the three Zero movies this year; no word on when they’ll be released, nor what happened to the physical/digital releases of the X and Ginga S movies.

Tsuburaya Productions uploaded scores of Ultra Fight episodes to its YouTube channel. Unfortunately, no subtitles were provided; the show’s narration was significantly more intensive than Redman screaming attack names.

Toku, a ludicrously obscure on-demand channel, picked up the rights to a ton of Ultra shows, most of them without official releases in the U.S. -- Leo, 80, The Ultraman, Neos, Nexus, an English dub of Max, Ultraseven X, both seasons of Mega Monster Battle, and Neo Ultra Q. No one has recorded any of them. The channel is affiliated with Amazon Prime, but only 80 (free on Crunchyroll) and Neos (already fansubbed) are available through it. go90 also has Neos and Ultraseven X (also already fansubbed).

In November, Tsuburaya finally regained the international distribution rights to the first six Ultra Series from UM Corporation, setting the stage for more abrupt Crunchyroll additions in 2018 and beyond. Before the ruling came down, UM licensed Ultraman to a Chinese company, BlueArc Culture Communications, for three years. Dragon Force: So Long, Ultraman was released in Chinese theaters in October. I thought this ruling would make it rather difficult to see, but, uh, it’s on YouTube already.

The Ultraman manga by Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi reached Volume 11 in Japan, with a 3DCG film adaptation by Production I.G and Sola Digital Arts due in 2019.

4) She is Colossal

Director Nacho Vigalondo and Voltage Pictures survived a Toho lawsuit to bring us a bizarre tale of alcoholics in an upstate New York town who have the ability to summon and control giant beings in Seoul under very specific circumstances. Kaiju are often metaphors for issues that are accordingly massive in scope, like nuclear warfare or environmental devastation. Here they embody more personal problems -- not a totally novel concept, but one handled with far more depth than, say, Ultraman 80. The movie was a thud at the box office (the producers apparently ordered an upgrade to the VFX after rave festival reviews), but will hopefully find a second life on Hulu.

5) What Do You Find Between a Dragon’s Teeth?

Based on a 2014 short, The Dragon Dentist is an anime film (well, a two-part TV special that’s 90 minutes long) in which dragons and humans have reached an unusual agreement: the humans clean the dragons’ teeth, and the dragon rain down destruction on their enemies. If that sounds strange, well, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Unless Planet of the Monsters pulls off a miracle, it has my vote for best kaiju movie of 2017. Section23 released it on Blu-ray in October with an English dub included.

6) A Jaeger is You Times a Thousand

Pacific Rim Uprising, the sequel that refused to die, is mere months from release, and its trailer made a big splash at New York Comic Con this year. Mysteries abound about the plot, but we have details on an art book, prequel novel, prequel comic, novelization, and plenty of toys. (Still waiting on that tabletop RPG and the return of the Create-a-Jaeger site.)

7) Reddo Continuation, and Other Printed Works

IDW may be finished with Godzilla, but Matt Frank is far from finished with kaiju comics. He sold The Last Hope, his Heisei Gamera prequel doujinshi, at G-Fest this year, and announced in October that he would be writing and drawing a comic about Redman, the murderous Seventies “hero” of recent YouTube fame. Phase 6, the same company reprinting Godzilla: Rulers of Earth in Japan, is the publisher. Other kaiju comics this year: Season 3 of Xander Cannon’s always-excellent Kaijumax (which I need to finish reading), Greg Pak’s Mech Cadet Yu (which I need to start), and Marvel’s crossover event/miniseries Monsters Unleashed (which I am too intimidated to start).

And in the realm of prose: Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski published their long-anticipated Ishiro Honda biography, providing a comprehensive look at the legendary kaiju director’s life and career. Raffael Coronelli threw his hat into the authors’ ring with Daikaiju Yuki and Y2K: Yuki Conquers the World, post-apocalyptic epics about the Pantheon Colossi and the human heroes who join with them to protect the world.

Oh, and some guy named Michael Callari announced he was writing a book on the Gamera series.

8) Every Monster Has a Country

The movie-mockers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 have been linked with giant monsters since the beginning, and this year’s Netflix revival saw them taking on two more: Reptilicus and Yongary, Monster from the Deep. The former led off the season, and the novelty of a monster from Denmark led to one of the show’s greatest songs.

9) In Memoriam

As I wrote in August, “Monsters, of course, live forever. The people who bring them to life are never so lucky.” 2017 saw the passing of four giants of the kaiju genre:

Haruo Nakajima (b. 1929) -- Suit actor and fight choreographer for Godzilla and countless other Toho/Tsuburaya monsters from 1954 to 1972.

Yoshimitsu Banno (b. 1931) -- Director and co-writer of the Godzilla vs. Hedorah, assistant director and co-writer of Prophecies of Nostradamus, executive producer of Godzilla (2014).

Yoshio Tsuchiya (b. 1927) -- Eccentric actor with a long tokusatsu filmography, including the titular role in The Human Vapor, the Xian Leader in Invasion of Astro-Monster, and Shindo in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah.

Chikara Hashimoto (b. 1933) -- Suit actor for Daimajin in Daiei’s trilogy and Daimon in Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare.

#godzilla #ultraman #king kong #kong skull island #godzilla planet of the monsters #ultraman geed #mst3k #colossal #the dragon dentist

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Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 5 Transcript

Episode 5 of Crunchyroll's Anime in America podcast is here, this time exploring the world of manga and how closely tied it is to the anime industry in Japan. Read on for the full transcript!

The Anime in America series is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

EPISODE 5: MANGA IN AMERICA

Guests: Rachel Thorne, Nick Rowe

Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

[Lofi music]

Manga, the section of Barnes & Nobles you had to walk all the way around because the floor was covered in teenagers, or maybe you were those teenagers. Once a vanishingly small piece of a market completely dominated by Marvel and DC, these black and white comics all the way from Japan have eclipsed domestic publishers to represent what might be the largest foothold Japan holds in any U.S. industry. How did we get here? Well, let’s start with the first manga in America, which you might be surprised to learn was actually made in the United States.

[Lofi music]

So this podcast is about the history of manga in America and for such a podcast you’d probably want to start at the beginning and, of course, stuff like this is extremely hard to track down since very little before the invention of the internet can be proven to have happened at all. One man I spoke with seems to think he has the answer.

The Four Immigrants Manga was illustrated in the home of Crunchyroll, San Francisco, California by a Japanese immigrant by the name of Henry Kiyama way back in 1927. Written in both English and Japanese the comic would be indecipherable to anyone who couldn’t understand both languages, making it custom-tailored to the bilingual community of immigrants in the city. What might have been a cultural artifact lost to time can actually be bought today, lovingly translated and heavily annotated by a man named Frederick Schodt, who is going to be pretty important in this podcast.

Fred is a writer, translator, and interpreter who’s received a number of awards for his work including the Order of the Rising Sun in 2009 for “distinguished achievements in international relations, promotion of Japanese culture, advancements in their field, and development in welfare or preservation of the environment.” But for our purposes he is a member of a group of manga enthusiasts in Tokyo who came up with the crazy idea of translating manga to English called “Dadakai.”

Back in 1977 a group of friends working in Tokyo including Fred Schodt, Shinji Sakamoto, Jared Cook, and Midori Ueda decided to try translating manga and, through one of Sakamoto’s connections, actually managed to secure a meeting with Tezuka Productions where, to the group’s surprise, they met with Osamu Tezuka himself. Always searching for an international audience for his works, Tezuka agreed to let the group translate his manga Phoenix, a personal favorite of Fred’s.

This might have been a landmark moment but, while the group had the jump on translating manga for the U.S. market, they were also a bunch of bilingual idealists with no means of their own to distribute their work. The group translated the first five volumes of Tezuka’s Phoenix in 1967 but couldn’t publish it, so they turned their work back in to Tezuka Productions with the hope it’s leaders’ enthusiasm would translate into a release. Ultimately it sat in Tezuka’s archives for 25 years before finally being published in the U.S. by VIZ, who brought Fred and Jared on to translate the remaining seven volumes.

The first manga to receive an official translation and distribution in America was Kaiji Nakazawa’s semi-autobiographical recounting of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atomic bombing, titled Barefoot Gen.

[Barefoot Gen music]

The english edition was actually translated and printed in Tokyo by a group of volunteers called Project Gen, of which our friend Fred was a member, and then was distributed in New York City in May of 1978 by the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization that had been around since World War One and still exists today, as a cautionary tale against nuclear proliferation.

Unfortunately it was not popular and the run was cancelled after two volumes, but the cultural importance of Nakazawa’s work would result in two more attempts to put Gen in the American market. The second was a heavily Americanized version in 1988 by New Society Publishers titled “Barefoot Gen: The Cartoon Story of Hiroshima,” again unsuccessful, before finally receiving a fully released translation between 2004-2010 by Last Gasp Publishing, a very ironic name, this time backed by the famous cartoonist Art Spiegelman who himself penned the comic Maus recounting the experience of Polish Jews during World War Two.

[Lofi music]

After that not so successful 1978 attempt, it took eight years before someone gave manga in the U.S. another go. In 1986, Taiko Saito had an English edition produced from his long-running story of a one-shot-one-kill assassin Golgo 13. The volume, called Golgo 13 Graphic Novel Series No 1: Into the Wolves’ Lair was shipped to the U.S. and distributed by American Books Nippan. You may have noticed so far, all these attempts have originated in Japan.

It wasn’t until 1987 that American publishers began releasing licensed and localized manga published in the U.S. In May of that year, First Comics began releasing its run of the bloody samurai epic Lone Wolf and Cub, which is basically the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda in Edo period Japan. It’s print was strange for the time, coming out in monthly issues that were square bound and included anywhere from 64 to 128 pages with covers illustrated by none other than Frank Miller, a.k.a. the man you can thank for turning Batman into an edgelord thanks to his “Dark Knight Returns” series. Frank’s 1983 comic Ronin had been heavily influenced by Lone Wolf and Cub, although he couldn’t read Japanese and had just looked at the drawings before its official release.

In a two month period afterward, a variety of publishers would release Mai the Psychic Girl, Speed Racer, Area 88, and even Astro Boy, translated by Fred Schodt, and released almost 20 years to the month after the anime first aired on American television [end of the Astro Boy opening plays]. Fans of the heavily localized animation were, ironically, disappointed that the manga showed a lack of familiarity with the story concepts of the TV anime. The TV anime that was, as I said, heavily localized.

The next year even Marvel Comics got into the game, beginning their print of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and a guy named Toren Smith would start a company called Studio Proteus which specialized in acting as the middleman for American publishers looking to license and localize manga. Among his achievements were getting the majority of Masamune Shirow’s works such as Appleseed, Black Magic, and even Ghost in the Shell (translated by Fred Schodt) brought over to the U.S.

At the time Shirow had a dedicated fandom in Japan, but his work proved to be much more popular in the West. His high concept, high violence science fiction titles found a real following in the U.S. and Europe, and this would eventually turn around and boost his acclaim in his native country when Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film adaptation, itself a co-production funded by the UK-based Manga Entertainment transformed the IP into one of the most well-known works of science fiction in history.

By the end of the 80s, manga had gained a small but powerful cult following.

That said, most of the stuff they were printing in the U.S. in the late 80s and early 90s would be unrecognizable as manga compared to what we see today, the little roughly 200-page novel-sized black and white volumes popularly known as tankobon in Japan or digest size in the United States. Publishers went to great lengths to ensure that manga would feel familiar to the American comic consumer. So just about everyone in the industry was printing their manga in the style of American floppy, those 32-page single issue comics that have the stapled spines like Amazing Spider-Man or Batman… whatever you- what have you.

Essentially, in the same vein as much of this chronicle, these publishers were trying to sell manga as American comics and to that end, they also flipped the entire thing over so it could be read from left to right rather than the original Japanese format of right to left, either reversing entire pages or painstakingly reversing the order of panels on the page. This was just how manga was until the early 2000s with only a few exceptions which we’ll go into later.

Other localization efforts were “colorizing” manga, which sounds uh… bad, when you say it out loud. Most manga are black and white, and black and white comics just didn’t sell well in the American market, so to avoid falling in that pothole, they’d hire artists to professionally treat manga like coloring books. Publishing manga was a risky venture back in the day and publishers did everything they could to lower the barrier of entry for American comics fans to get into manga.

I will go ahead and tell you now that all of these were bad ideas and that will become more clear as we continue on. In fact, the number one mistake all the comic publishers made trying to sell Japanese comics was marketing them toward American comic book fans.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say the biggest mistake ever made by publishers was ever putting manga in comic book stores to begin with. Working out of comic book stores actually prevented manga from finding a wide audience for three reasons. The first is that comic shops are a small market with limited customers who… ah, I’ll just say are of a certain type. The second is many stores had no interest in carrying manga at all either due to prejudice against or unwillingness to accept the risk of carrying an unproven foreign medium. The third is that the comic shops who were interested had to order their manga through a company called Diamond Comic Distributors.

If you haven’t heard of Diamond, they’re a distributor that comic shops almost universally are forced to work through to stock their shelves. Diamond has been around since the early 80s and have become notorious To. This. Day. for… I guess forgetting what they have in stock? Just entirely forgetting. After the initial order of an upcoming manga, titles tended to disappear from their catalog forever, even when the publisher can confirm there should still be volumes in stock. How and why this is is anyone's guess but it leaves retailers in a position where you can either take a risk and over order an upcoming manga or play it safe and miss out if you want to restock. Guess which option most of them chose?

Manga publishers were leaning into a small existing comic reading demographic through unreliable distribution which, unfortunately, prevented manga from breaking into the mainstream.

It wasn’t until the 90s that manga would begin to find its legs in the U.S. And for that we can probably thank none other than a small (at the time) company called VIZ Media. Although far from the first to publish manga in the U.S., VIZ, which was founded in the anime and manga mecca of San Francisco by Seiji Horibuchi in 1986, was the first to make a real footprint focusing primarily on publishing manga.

Now they had one major advantage that other startups did not. It was a subsidiary of Shogakukan, a major Japanese publisher that founded the Hitotsubashi Group, a major partnership of Japanese publishers including Hakusensha and Shuiesha… two publishing companies ALSO founded by Shogakukan. This is important because these three companies were then and still are three of the most successful manga publishers in Japan. Shuiesha in particular is notable for one of their almost 30 manga publications, one of which you may already have heard of called Weekly Shonen Jump, a weekly collection of manga chapters that has featured titles such as One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Naruto.

Blessed with the most direct pipeline to a Japanese license holder that would exist in the U.S. for the next few decades and no small amount of seed capital, VIZ was able to be strategic, limit their costs, and ride out fluctuations in the comics industry. They were publishing manga as early as 1987 but wouldn’t find major success until they began their first print from the mangaka who would become VIZ’s #1 money maker for years to come, Rumiko Takahashi.

[Lofi music]

In 1992, VIZ began publishing Takahashi’s second major long running shonen hit, Ranma ½, a romantic comedy martial arts series about a boy named Ranma who falls into a cursed spring and turns into a woman every time he’s splashed with cold water. It would also be the first anime licensed by VIZ, released in 1993. At the time, the manga became the greatest success in the history of manga in America. You see, the manga was sold in comic shops but the dubbed VHSs made it onto the shelves of video stores like Blockbuster, which was a thing that once existed.

Thorn: At the time, video rental stores were becoming a thing, and yet the major producers of content in the U.S. were really cautious about putting things on VHS, because they thought that it would be pirated. And so you had these rental shops, but they didn’t have a lot of stuff to put out, so they would put literally anything that wasn’t pornographic on their shelves.

Meet Rachel.

Thorn: My name’s Rachel Thorne, I teach about manga and comics at the Kyoto Seika University, and I’ve been doing so since 2000. And I’ve been translating manga into English for… about 30 years.

Rachel was the translator for VIZ and the original translator for Ranma ½. She also translated Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa manga and is basically the only person allowed to translate the works of the woman considered to be the “founding mother” of shojo manga, Moto Hagio.

Thorn: So you got all kinds, back in like 1990, there was just all kinds of weird stuff in video rental stores. Obscure documentaries and things, just anything, they would put it out there. So- and yet, everybody had a video deck and they wanted to watch stuff, so they would go to the rental store and they would say “oh, what’s this with big eyes?” And it’s like Speed Racer [laughs]. Because I think back then, people would see the big eyes and they would think “Go, Speed Racer!” And that’s how Ranma took off, and I think that’s how anime in general took off was that they were getting on the shelves in rental stores, and rental stores were being visited by just ordinary people and not some, not some narrow group, and then that fed back. And then, you know, of course the success of the anime then helped promote the sales of manga and then people became aware that manga was a thing and we started to gradually grow from there.

Finding an escape from the limited comic market, Ranma earned fans through its anime that drove interest in the manga. This just so happens to be the formula anime was essentially invented for, driving fans to buy the comics and associated toys. Ranma ½ sold so well that they did the exact same thing with Takahashi’s next long-running work, Inu Yasha, which they began publishing in 1998 and put the anime out on Adult Swim in 2002 and which recently found its way to Crunchyroll in December of 2019.

The formula hit critical mass when Pokemon finally hit the U.S. in 1998 and VIZ’s concurrent manga release, issue #1 of Pokemon: The Electric Tales of Pikachu, would hit an industry first of becoming the best selling comic in the U.S. With manga now handily kicking Marvel’s ass you might be wondering how that formula works with the MCU being the biggest movie series in the history of cinema. Well…

Rowe: The movies are very different from the comics, and that has to do a lot with Marvel, the way Marvel markets and sells their comics. The connection between the comics and the movies is nonexistent. When a movie comes out, they don’t have any kind of concurrent themes or relevant themes or you know, connections to the movies, it’s all its own continuity. And stuff that’s the storylines that they pull for the movies are out of print and trade when the movie drops, and for six months after the movie drops. I mean, it’s a complete disaster. So yes, people have been coming in saying “hey I saw Into the Spiderverse! Where’s the comic?” And our answer to that is “uhh…,” because there is none. And that’s just a fatal mistake on their part. So it’s a very different beast.

Basically when it comes to anime. What you see is what you’re gonna get in the manga, which usually has a straightforward single chronology. If you liked Ranma ½ the anime, you could just pick up issue one of the manga instead of sorting through everything Marvel has ever done to figure out which run of Spider-Man featured the Vulture as Mary Jane’s father. That was Nick Rowe, by the way…

Rowe: So my name is Nick Rowe, I’m the manga guy at Dr. Comics Mr. Games in Oakland. I’ve been doing it since 2007-8, ish? So I started, I took over this section right at the beginning of the crash in ‘08. But I was also here through the Tokyopop boom and even here during the single issue stuff back in the early days. So I have a lot of experience slinging manga in a comics store.

He’s been slinging manga at Dr. Comics Mr. Games, Diamonds’s #1 manga account west of the Rockies for the past 10 years. Basically, they move more Japanese comics than anyone outside of the East Coast, making them an aberration among comic shops. Nick himself has been in the industry since manga was coming out in flipped floppies, the versions trying to look like Western comic books, 20 page, staplebound, with all the panels rearranged to read left to right, you were listening earlier, I hope.

Speaking of which, VIZ takes credit for printing the first unflipped manga in the United States. Their original Neon Genesis Evangelion run in 1998 was promoted as being released in “authentic Japanese right-to-left format” in response to popular request by their readers. But just as likely it was the result of a request by the author Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. It was followed shortly after by Dragon Ball which also went unflipped, this time DEFINITELY because the creator Akira Toriyama requested it. You don’t say no to him.

[Dragon Ball Z, Goku Pushes His SSJ Form to its Limits!]

It made Goku. And you don’t say no to Goku. Unless you’re Frieza. I gue- okay, okay, I guess you can say no to Goku, but you get the point.

Both, by the way, were still sold in those stapled leaflet 32-page floppy formats. You can’t win every battle. I’m sorry.

In the midst of their early 90s success, VIZ was operating on a tried-and-true business model with popular Japanese properties. They had no reason to deviate from their course but for some reason, but still they asked themselves what would turn out to be THE question that would shape the future of sequential art storytelling in the United States…

What if… women… also read comics? Crazy.

Thorn: There was no plan to do any kind of shojo manga at all. Of course, I suggested it almost as soon as they hired me. I suggested it and they said “oh no, girls don’t read comics in America, and the comic book shops would never carry it.” And as I said, the Editor-in-Chief at the time who was Sotoru Fuji and he said that at the time that he really wanted to do Bananafish. We ended up finally doing Bananafish, but that was before then, before then. I don’t remember how I finally managed to convince them to do it, I think I had started doing a column for Animerica about shojo manga and I guess they just decided to give it a try because I pestered them so much. And so the first thing we did was something that was easy to get the rights to, that was short, and not too like flowery and not too girly and that was a couple of short stories by Keiko Nishi, The Promise and Achieving the Bond. And that was the first title released, I believe, onto the Flower imprint. I’m pretty sure they used the Flowers imprint. It’s a goofy name for an imprint, but it actually comes from at the time VIZ was a wholly owned subsidiary of Shogakukan, and now it’s Shogakukan and Shueisha both, but at the time it was just Shogakukan. Shogakukan has used the title “flower” or “flowers” in their shojo manga for decades and decades, so that’s where that came from. And so Keiko Nishi’s Promise was the first, I believe, Flower imprint, in fact I’m sure that was the first Flower imprint. And then after that we did- they thought that it would, we could take a chance on science fiction, so we did Moto Hagio’s They Were Eleven, which is a classic science fiction shojo manga and that was well received. And then it sort of gradually snowballed from there.

In 1994, VIZ started out a new imprint of comics called VIZ Flower Comics focusing on shojo manga, starting with romance Promise, following high schooler Reiko’s struggles with her mother remarrying with the help of a childhood friend, and including titles like They Were Eleven from the aforementioned manga luminary Moto Hagio.

The relative success of this run could be considered a miracle. Since these were being sold in comic shops, an arena historically resistant to any kind of content meant for women, the fact that they were moving these manga at all almost seems like they were succeeding in spite of themselves.

VIZ was so close to the right answer, which would eventually be discovered by a new company who would become the biggest name in manga for the next decade. In 1997 a new name appeared in manga publishing.

Tokyopop.

Originally known as Mixx Entertainment which got into the manga industry with a manga compilation magazine called MixxZine that had several titles arranged by chapter much like a traditional Japanese manga magazine. Now you can go on Wikipedia and find a laundry list of attempts to print Japanese-style manga magazine anthologies in the U.S., and they generally fall into three categories. Ones that last two, five, or 10 years before going under. Most of them don’t make it to 10. The format just didn’t really catch on with American consumers. So what made MixxZine different?

Uh… basically they had Sailor Moon.

Sailor Moon had a rocky history in the U.S. Originally airing in 1995, the show basically bombed. Lack of confidence in this cartoon meant for little girls caused the network to place Sailor Moon into “dead” early morning time slots, which is what we in the industry call a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, the series was doing well in Canada and after 12,000 fans went to the trouble of signing a petition to have it re-air, the show was brought back on USA network in 1997 and then the golden land of all anime airing in the U.S., Toonami, in 1998. Obviously, the series took off and Tokyopop, having grabbed the manga license before the anime became popular, was suddenly sitting on a gold mine. Lucky them.

Where VIZ was backed by Shogakukan, Tokyopop established a sweet deal with Kodansha, which is one of Shogakukan’s main competitors, during their golden era and they started cranking out manga. They leaned heavily on shojo titles like Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket, CLAMP’s Rayearth and… also everything else by CLAMP. If you ever went to a Borders in like 2002 or 2003, you’re probably VERY familiar with that name. Focusing on manga for girls had never been done before in the U.S., but Tokyo had a strong recipe for success.

Cutting their costs, and ignoring comic shops entirely.

Thorn: What made the difference was the price, and they were able to make their books so cheap by just cutting corners everywhere, they cut corners on everything. The translators were paid terrible, terrible pay rates, and I’m sure the editors were poorly paid. There was not really, as far- they just had really bad production values. But since their readers were like 10 years old, the readers don’t really care so much about the details, so that really worked. They got the price down to low dollars, which was almost like dumping, in a way, in the sense that they had- they HAD to have been losing money at the start with that. Because that’s a big risk in house, to make the per unit price that low when you know that there’s a chance that only like 1,000 people will buy it. You know, our VIZ graphic novels were expensive because we had low print runs, and that’s just the way capitalism works, you know? You can only make an item so cheap if you know it’s not going to sell that well. And of course manga, paperbacks in Japan, are really cheap because they know that they’re going to sell huge quantities of them, so they don’t have to make a lot of profit per unit.

When it came to cutthroat cost saving, Tokyopop was second to none. Although VIZ was the first to print both collected volumes in 1993 and unflipped manga in 1998, Tokyopop was the first to make it the rule rather than the exception. The 5-inch-by-7 1/2-inch “digest size” volumes pretty much synonymous with the word “manga” today were a Tokyopop standard print.

Much like VIZ, they marketed on the authenticity angle, calling it “100% Authentic Manga” most similar to Japanese tankobon. Turns out if you don’t need to hire anyone to flip the pages, reformat the art to American comic size, source full color art covers for each chapter rather than one per 10 chapters for a collected volume, and you hire most of your translators out of college campuses for record setting low industry rates, you can save a lot of fuckin’ money on authenticity. This let Tokyopop undercut their competition by a devastating margin. Most manga sold anywhere from $12 to $18 and Tokyopop delivered this line at around $10. 10 dollars.

Up until that point producing a quality product had been the emphasis on most publishers like VIZ and, it turned out, this may have been doing more harm than good. Sure Tokyopop’s volumes yellowed and fell apart at record speeds, but if your 8-year-old daughter tugs on your sleeve in Borders and asks if you’ll buy her something that looks suspiciously like an actual book priced for just $9.99, how do you say no?

[Lofi music]

Did I mention Borders? ‘Cause that brings me to the ignoring comic shops part.

Tokyopop was one of the first manga publishers to score a wide distribution deal with a big box bookstore, Borders. Comic book stores were (and often still are) a place that a lot of women don’t exactly feel welcome. Not the best place for a publisher printing metric tones of women’s comics daily. Selling manga at Borders not only put Tokyopop’s manga in front of a massive new potential audience instead of the usual comic shop regulars, it also put them in front of real, breathing women!

Thorn: Now our approach was to kind of like try to shoehorn shojo manga into the existing comic book fandom, which was, you know, a difficult task because it was almost all guys, and it was all technicolor long johns and macho men beating each other up and it was all in color and it- those people hated manga, they hated manga particularly, but they even hated shojo manga even more than that. And I have to admire Tokyopop for having the guts to just like totally ignore the whole comic book market and go straight to paperback.

Borders became a cultural touchstone of manga in the U.S. The image of entire aisles becoming impassable for all the teens and pre-teen tweens sitting on the floor quietly reading manga that they may or may not intend to purchase became known even outside the manga community.

This was a period of huge prosperity for the manga industry. The seemingly impenetrable western market that Japanese publishers had been trying to secure for decades broke like a collapsing dam and Tokyopop was riding the wave. Seeing Tokyopop’s success, VIZ leaned even more heavily into shojo titles and manga sales exploded in the U.S. The secret all along had been to find new readers and especially. Especially. Women. All of whom, or most of whom, were new readers. And they’ve stuck around. Nowadays even male-focused magazines like Weekly Shonen Jump estimate their readership at about 50% female.

At Tokyopop’s peak, perhaps getting bored with publishing, founder and CEO Stu Levy began to use the business to fund his own vanity projects, pushing his own DJ Milky persona and engaging in some questionable collaborations. In 2004 Levy cowrote the manga Princess Ai with Courtney Love, yes that Courtney Love, featuring illustrations from the famous NANA mangaka Ai Yazawa… because “ai” means “love” in Japanese. These behaviors would compound the problems that Tokyopop would run into further down the line.

Manga was rocketing toward its 2007 peak, having grown by 350% in 5 years. where it would capture 200 million in sales with 267 new titles entering the market. Turns out this was the highest manga sales would ever reach. 2007 was a peak that turned into a landslide, with manga sales plummeting uncontrollably every year before finally leveling out in 2012.

These dates just happen to roughly coincide with the death of Borders Books. Huh. Imagine that.

In 2006, Borders began to lose profits. Amazon was on its stratospheric rise and Borders just couldn’t figure how to make the online sales thing work. It floundered for the next 5 years, losing over a third of its annual profits in steep decline, before declaring bankruptcy in 2011. This was bad news for all manga publishers, but most of all for Tokyopop. Borders represented ⅓ of their manga sales right up until its demise and their wide distribution deal turned back on them when Borders began to crumble...

Rowe: The reason Tokyopop was so heavily stocked by Borders stores was because they signed a contract. It was something absurd like a 70% returnable contract. So Borders could essentially order books from Tokyopop for free and just line their shelves with as much stuff as they wanted. And that’s why when Borders folded, they folded owing Tokyopop like millions of dollars. Because they over expanded, they stocked all their stores with tons of Tokyopop books, and they didn’t have the money to pay Tokyopop. I don’t know if they’re actually returning the books and taking part of that, but it was a terrible deal, I don’t know if other publishers signed a similar contract, but it’s- I mean, that’s why Tokyopop vanished before the crash.

Keen eyes and ears in the industry noticed that Borders decline wasn’t Tokyopop's only problem in the late 2000s. Tokyopop had ceased printing new Kodansha releases for a few years. With the founding of Kodansha USA in 2008, the writing was on the wall. In 2009 Tokyopop announced that Kodansha was letting their licensing agreements lapse without renewal. The same year, Kodansha USA began their Kodansha Comics imprint, gobbling up the lapsed licenses along with Del Rey Manga.

Rowe: I called Tokyopop about a week before they announced they were closing, because I just got fed up. So I looked their number up and just called them and was like, I was ready to yell at them. And I talked to them and I was like “what is going on? What’s happening?” And the person who spoke with me just dumped all this information on me, and I was like “wait a minute, Kodansha’s recalling all these licenses?” I mean, that’s what I considered to be like the major event of the crash, is the Kodansha recall. Yes, Borders closing and Tokyopop going under was a big factor, but the Kodansha recall is a huge turning point. And so seeing that happen and all of a sudden our manga sales were like really solid, and then… it was a black hole. Almost overnight.

With no new Kodansha licenses on the horizon and Borders sales decaying, Tokyopop lost 47 of its roughly 100 employees in two rounds of layoffs in 2008. This massive blow would mark the beginning of a long period of floundering as the company tried to find its feet in other media, attempting to leverage TV adaptations of their remaining properties and originals.

In summer of 2010, Tokyopo began recording its ill-advised AMERICA’S GREATEST OTAKU, a reality show featuring Stu Levy a.k.a. DJ Milky himself, touring America on a bus covered with anime characters along with six college age anime fans competing in challenges for a chance to win a trip to Japan.

[America’s Greatest Otaku Tailer plays]

Among the judges was, somehow, acclaimed anime director Hiroshi Nagama who, at the time of this recording, was recently announced as the director of the upcoming Uzumaki anime on Adult Swim. I don’t have anything clever to say about that. That’s just cool.

In 2011 Borders would declare bankruptcy, prompting another round of high profile layoffs at Tokyopop for which Stu Levy placed the blame on unremunerated debt from the former retail giant. The next month, Tokyopop shuttered its Los Angeles headquarters.

After spending nearly a decade on the top of the manga industry and representing a major force for delivering content to a female audience, it seems a shame today that Tokyopop is best remembered for preying on private artists.

Their “Rising Stars of Manga” program that began in 2003. What became a series of annual competitions where aspiring manga artists, mostly north american, could submit their work with the top 10 winning a cash prize and their work published in an anthology. The grand prize winner would be able to pitch their manga idea to be published by Tokyopop. This was followed up by their Manga Pilot program which had a contract that was hugely controversial.

So, when Stu Levy announced his triumphant return in 2015, the community was less than enthusiastic and comic book artists were quick to warn aspiring creators against participating in any Original English Language programs he was running.

But it wasn’t just Tokyopop that fell during the bubble burst...

[Lofi music]

Rowe: There were a lot of other manga publishers that folded at the same time. I mean, Raijin had a very limited run, but they were around the same time that they were in and out kind of in the middle there. ADV was publishing manga for a long time. They had some success but not a whole lot. Bandai even had their own manga line for a little bit. That disappeared. CPM was another one, Iron Cat was the same thing. There were a lot more manga publishers that nobody knows about anymore because they disappeared along with Tokyopop.

Still, many larger publishers pulled through and in 2012 manga sales began to recover on the back of a new movement in the American manga market. With print sales down and local bookstores on a decline thanks to Amazon, manga publishers started going digital. VIZ launched their digital manga service in an effort not only to reach the growing online market but also to combat a growing problem in the manga industry, piracy. That familiar, familiar problem.

By now scanslators (people who scan manga, translate them, and throw the images up on a website that will definitely use your computer to mine bitcoin) were a major force in the manga market and it was much easier to read a new manga chapter a few days after its release than wait for a new volume to come out, get off your computer chair, and drive to a store.

Comixology had already launched their reader in 2009 and began making partnerships with publishers like Dark Horse, Kodansha Comics, and Oni Press to put their manga on their online catalog. In 2014 they were acquired by Amazon who, having launched the Kindle back in 2007, were intent on not being left behind in the new digital age. Nowadays just about every publisher operates concurrently or even exclusively in digital, releasing their newest manga volumes on one of several services before putting out only their tried and true or guaranteed successes out on the print market… which probably also means ordering them for delivery on a website.

Despite this, manga piracy is still… pretty bad.

Anime has reached a point where basically every anime is licensed and released within hours of each episode getting televised in Japan, making official sources the first to distribute videos, but there’s just way too much manga. There’s too much. Along with light novels which are becoming an increasing share of what’s circulating in America, there’s no way all the manga that comes out in Japan could get licensed, much less translated and released in a timely fashion. Which leaves room for pirates to ply their trade.

Compounding the issue is a general apathy by platforms like iTunes to regulate themselves, making it all too easy for pirate apps to not only sneak in but also become some of the top results for searches of the word “manga.” Also, manga is just kind of an expensive hobby. Deluxe prints can run up to $20 a volume and digital volumes aren’t a whole lot cheaper than print. Even with anime now being spread over Crunchyroll, Hidive, Funimation, Amazon, Netflix, and now YouTube, even their combined subscription fees will have trouble comparing to the check an active manga reader can run up.

Nowadays kicking over a rock on Twitter will instantly reveal some anime avatars contorting themselves through logical loopholes to justify their theft, claiming that the authors don’t care who’s distributing their work and that there are no financial consequences to the creators despite all evidence to the contrary.

The most recent development may shine some hope on this problem. In 2018 VIZ released the Weekly Shonen Jump app, probably the biggest innovation in manga since the digest editions. It offers Shonen Jump’s entire back catalog while also releasing new chapters at the same time as they’re released in Japan. Which might sound familiar. All for the low price of 2 dollars a month. Two. 2 dollars. A month! 2 dollars a month.

This is the first time this sort of accessibility has been given to a Japanese catalog and is probably the greatest deal as far as content versus price goes in the history of comics. I swear they’re not paying me to say this, I do not work for them. I don’t know anyone at Shonen Jump. Anyway this roughly puts at least the Shonen Jump portion of VIZ’s output on par with anime simulcasting and, who knows if other publishers start following suit manga may be cheap and fast enough to finally start chipping away at the manga pirates. Assuming the lawsuits don’t...

Now, no podcast about a form of Japanese media in America would be complete without mentioning localization and theft and with manga, it gets real weird, mostly since so much of it is official? Quote unquote?

There have been at least two unauthorized Astro Boy comics that’ve made it into circulation. The first was a 1965 adaptation of the Astro Boy TV show licensed by NBC without Tezuka’s knowledge. He later claimed it was both piracy and horribly drawn. In 1987 this happened AGAIN when Chicago-based NOW Comics started an Astro Boy series drawn by artist Ken Steacy. It was cancelled in 1988. Probably also horribly drawn.

Plagiarism was a big issue in the 2000s when manga was just mainstream enough that people were aware of it, but didn’t think anyone would spot them copying a professional’s work from another country. This being the era where an internet sleuth on Reddit will call you out within 10 minutes of you putting your traced work out there. One of the finalists of Tokyopop’s 2006 Rising Stars of Manga applications submitting a series called “Samurai Zombie” had panels that were pretty clearly traced from Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal. But none of these stack up to the bizarre tale of Incarnate, originally called Skullduggery, a 2009 series printed by Radical Comics by a guy named Nick Simmons. Son of none other than KISS’s own Gene Simmons. Man, this is fucked up.

Early into Incarnate’s distribution, VIZ Media released a statement that fans had notified them that Incarnate had plagiarized everything from plot elements to character designs to exact panels directly out of Bleach and they would be looking into the issue. Needless to say, the series was cancelled shortly thereafter with a public apology from Nick. Apparently even Bleach’s author Kubo Tite caught wind of the situation who, to his credit, tweeted that his primary concern was the fact that Gene Simmons’s son was a comic creator.

The market has been changed forever by digital, but manga is once again a booming industry. Today there are over 50 companies actively publishing manga in the U.S. Years of Shonen hits from the pages of Shonen Jump have VIZ resurfacing as the king not only of manga but all comics, representing about 50% of comic sales in the U.S., dwarfing even the combined sales of Marvel and DC (despite each serving as the source material for series of global blockbuster movies).

It took manga quite a while to build up steam in the U.S., working its way in from the fringes of comic shops and the back rows of bookstores, but films have to enter with some fanfare.

Next up, we’re gonna take a look at the very first animated film from Japan to hit the U.S. and how anime movies have grown from box office obscurity to pulling in millions of dollars opening night… while still getting snubbed at the Oscars.

[Lofi music]

Thank you for listening to Anime in America, presented by Crunchyroll. If you’ve enjoyed this, please go to Crunchyroll.com/animeinamerica to watch the adaptations of SOME of the manga mentioned.

Special thanks to Rachel Thorn, and Nick Rowe, and if you find yourself in Oakland, California, maybe stop by Dr. Comics and Mr. Games to say hi and maybe buy a manga from a nice, independent shop.

This episode is hosted by me, Yedoye Travis, and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is researched and written by Peter Fobian, edited by Chris Lightbody, and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian and Jesse Gouldsbury.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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courage-a-word-of-justice · 5 years

Text

Rolling out the tags soon.

Sacred Beasts 2

“Sissy” always pissed me off as a nickname for your sister. It’s clearly meant as a term of endearment in some cases, but it also is the equivalent of “wuss”, y’know???

I’ve seen mushroom soup out of a tin…that don’t look like mushroom soup in that case.

Uh, random question…she has th same surname as Will, but is Schaal herself adopted???

Y’should’ve followed Hank, Nancy…(is her name Nancy or Schaal? Schaal is her middle name, yet she seems more commonly referred to as Schaal…hmm.)

*sees synopsis* - No one mentioned Nancy’s hometown was called Livletwood Village…

I pause my shows a lot to get down these notes…then Crunchyroll or my internet (or both!) cursed me with regular buffering (that can sometimes play video and subs through it, but generally sets down a few seconds after unpausing and lasts for a minute) and made it a pain in the butt to make these notes. But you do realise I basically have notes for almost every show I’ve ever watched under this system? These notes are special to me, which is why I put up with the buffering. It also means impactful scenes lose their impact, meaning well-paced shows get favoured in my picking process on CR these days.

Astra 2

Yup, the 2nd time we talk about how to scavenge for food this season – gotta remember this…in case I ever get into a situation like that. You never know! (creates “The More You Know” star with hands)

I-awwwwwww…I never thought I’d see the day where the Luca Javelin would get animated, much less Astra as a series. Dang, is this a dream???

Eyyyyy. Nothing like endangering your little sister to really understand why you love her…much less understand that you love her in the first place. (partially sarcastic)

Given 1

This is my second rodeo with BL anime (I’ve only read one BL manga and it was pretty darn mediocre, but the one BL game I tried was okay)…hopefully it’s good.

Was there the ticking of a clock in the background???

…and cut to OP. Yay! I can predict when the OP happens now…(It only took me years of training…okay, I’m kidding.)

I think this OP is like a music video…and I think that’s the point.

Kaji??? Is this Eva (LOL)?

I’m no band person – I was merely a solo pianist in my time with music, although notably I did have to sing for one of the musical pieces – but “Thom Yorke” and “Keith Richards” sound familiar. Why???...Okay, so it seems Thom Yorke is part of Radiohead and Keith Richards is part of the Rolling Stones. I’m familiar with those bands by name, at least.

Lemme guess…this guy (Ritsuka) sucks at improv.

I had to go back and find out what Yayoi said a few lines ago…and love her already because she’s like “You suck”…she’s just like me, to be honest.

Early husbando predictions say Haruki is my dude of the season.

Seeing manly dudes act like blushing schoolgirls is great…!

Yushiro-who???...Okay, Yushiro Ishihara is apparently that’s a singer that’s already passed away, but has a bit of a rep behind him.

Is it just me, or is Ritsuka basically a lesser Bakugo…?

Come to think of it, it would be hard for me to teach someone piano now that I haven’t properly played since the end of 2014…almost 5 years. Geesh, that’s a long time.

Welp, that was…actually pretty good. The only thing that sucks is that this ED isn’t rock, to go with the rest of the show.

DanMachi II 1

Another counterintuitive name for a sequel anime season…this is my last premiere before I wrap them up, or at least until Machikado Mazoku (or whatever) land on CR.

…and of course, it’s back to Big Boobies (aka Hestia). She’s probably the worst part of the show for me.

Why does Bell need an advisor anyway…? I never thought about it when watching s1.

Who’s this Naza-sama, anyway…?...Okay, it seems she’s a doctor from the Miach Familia. I don’t remember her from s1, really.

I’ve forgotten who Asfi is as well…Oh yeah, that blue-haired woman from the Hermes Famlia. Hermes seems like a bit of a loose cannon – the sort who wouldn’t have a Familia if given the chance – though.

I think we saw Freya in s1…just scheming behind the scenes…

Hermes looks like a sleazebag half the time he’s on screen…

I forgot how much I loved Miach’s character design in s1...and to a lesser extent, Takemikazuchi.

Demon Slayer 15

…Zenitsu is annoying again.

I didn’t think Tanjiro was scared of anything…excpt maybe losing Nezuko again.

Oh! I just realised Natagumo has a hint in its name…The “gumo” can be read “kumo”…as in cloud or spider, but it’s given with the kanji for spider so it can only be a spider-related problem on Mt Natagumo.

I’d hate to have Smellovision on this show…(What’s Smellovision, you ask??? Here, read up on it…at least, I was thinking of the Google variant, so read up on the Google version.)

Ukogi appears to be a type of plant known as eleutherococcus and ukogi rice is rice with ukogi leaves.

Dr Stone 2

Episode 3’s title is like “Weapons…of SCIENCE! *cue Bill Nye the Science Guy theme song*”

Ooh, nice angle! (on Senku and petrified!Yuzuriha being protected by Taiju…and not just because Yuzuriha’s butt is showing…)

“You can eat lion?” – No duh, Taiju!

“I want to give thanks to the circle of life…” – Sorry, but can I interrupt with a meme here? *cue ululations that ae meant to imitate the iconic song from The Lion King, y’know, the one that goes “Ahhhhhhh zee bun yah… (etc.)”*

Tsukasa’s frickin’ tall, man! Look at him tower over Taiju and Senku…

Having read the manga before, I just realised Tsukasa is mighty suspicious when he says Senku could be able to rebuild civilisation from scratch. That was harder to recognise in manga format though, I think.

I also didn’t realise, but the shell tale is talking about Tsukasa! Hmm…interesting.

Dr Stone’s ED…never in my life did I think it was going to be a rap song. Unless, of course, it’s a science rap…(There’s hydrogen and helium and lithium, berrylium…uh, I don’t remember the words after that…)

Oh, that next-ep font takes me back…it reminds me of the 90s, where terrible WordArt font like that was everywhere and I had to get by on Lucida Calligraphy.

Fruits Basket 14

Oh, crab meat…these CGI cars look absolutely terrible…

Pay attention to the relationship between Kyo and Kyoko…you people who don’t know about manga!Furuba are in for a real revelation on that front.

Wow, the effects on the flowers are really pretty for the ED…

Cop Craft 2

That OP is just so good…*swoon*

Well…they spelt “Unknown” wrong…on Kei’s phone.

Hmm…I think the insert song was in English.

Astra 3

Oh…something didn’t make sense. It turns out the word the subber is using is “attitude” when it should actually be altitude…

Given 2

Ooh, Haruki does coffee in the OP! I didn’t notice that, since I had to skip it…there’s some kinda suckish buffering on CR, which is why I have to skip as much as I can.

Welp, I’m a pianist. I’m as clueless as any other non-guitar player when it comes to guitars, so I don’t mind the lesson but also don’t need it.

Given this is a BL/yaoi (no pun intended), I think Akihiko and Haruki should pair up…but maybe I’m just going nuts with the shipper glasses here.

“You’re going to have to do something about that soon.”

Aye…I relate, Mafuyu. When you’re younger, you can beg your parents for money, but equipment, books etc. really costs some hard cash. I remember having to go to Hong Kong to find a pearl pink metronome on the cheap…the poor thing isn’t getting much use now. (But still, I think the more I watch and see Haruki in action, the more I like him. Not necessarily as a husbando, but more in the sense of that one cool dude you gravitate towards.)

It randomly cut to Salon Harusame…don’t tell me this is how Haruki gets his money???

I think the comment that said “lolol” actually had 超 in front of it, so that would be “super lololol” or, in my personal way of saying it, “major lololol”.

Oh, so that’s what was in the OP!

I swear Uesama (LOL) should just get a job as a guitar tutor to little kids…well, that would work if he were in college/uni, maybe.

Hey, a girl! Didn’t expect one in a BL work…(LOL, my standards are so low for BL/yaoi, eh?)

Hmm…I get the feeling amateurs get their hands on acoustic models instead. I know a guitar player, y’know (although again, that doesn’t mean I know the first thing about playing a guitar).

I love how the show turned green all of a sudden. The colours match the mood, basically.

Demon Slayer 16

This episode’s titlecard only has a wave pattern…I probably know what the pattern is called, but I’ve…probably forgotten that name.

Hey, a Demon Slayer girl! (My standards seem to have been lowered in regards to seeing gals in leading or even supporting roles…It’s more acceptable for Demon Slayer, given its historical setting, but still, how sad it is to not see many girls…)

(TW: abuse) Why…for some reason, this feels like an abusive household, specifically where the father does evil things to the mother…but this time, the son’s part of the problem.

I find it funny Zenitsu just calls Inosuke “Wild Boar”. To be fair though, I don’t think Inosuke introduced himself to Zenitsu, way back when they were meant to.

This scene where Zenitsu is crying and has his back turned to the “camera”…they clearly used a CGI model for him.

It’s a BODY! Holy s(BLEEP)!

“Chu-Chu chuuuuun!” Oh my glob, Ukogi is so adorable~!

Hey…where was Ukogi hiding before he chose to come out again?

Another CGI model when Zenitsu walks away from the camera. It’s so dark, nobody can see Ukogi…I don’t think he has a CGI model and that’s good.

I had a weird thought, but…I think Tanjiro would be a good breakdancer, if he were living in 2019.

Inosuke, you did it! But I wonder if those stats are correct and Inosuke’s going to call his name properly at climactic moments…?

Cop Craft 3

Brother Kenny…you’re just lewd.

“…O or V or A.” – Aside from OVAs, hmm…O would be (CENSORED), V I don’t know about and A…I don’t know either, but I guess it’s (CENSORED).

Kei Manoba (sic).

Doreany seems to be humanity…Did they already introduce that? I forget.

This show looks pretty bad, but the story makes the stay worth it.

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