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aspoonofsugar · 6 months

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what do you think of the recent chapter of oshi no ko?

Hi!

You can find my thoughts on chapter 134 here. As for chapter 135, my thoughts have not changed to be honest. I like the focus Ruby and Kana's friendship is having! For Kana, it is the chance to explore her own darkness, while for Ruby it is a way to empathize with Ai. There are 2 thematic points to this movie:

For the real Ai to come to life > it is a meta way to explore Ai and what she means for all the characters. Ai is the ultimate idol, so nobody really knew her. Not her friends, not her family. Throughout the movie every character is facing this ghost and coming up with their own interpretation of her. The end product (the movie) will probably answer the question: "Who was Ai Oshino?"

For Ruby and Aqua's story to have a different ending than Ai's. This is the final goal of the series. Thematically, Aqua and Ruby are Ai's second chance, so they should re-live the same story, but change the ending.

The current chapters are clearly conveying this ideas.

On the one hand Ruby is empathizing with Ai:

On the other hand Ruby and Kana's relationship won't end up like Ai and Nino's:

Other than this, the current chapter sets up two other ideas.

1 - The idea of growing up

The Director still sees Kana and Ruby as the children he tried to care for:

Still, they are already grown up:

Aqua choosing to take a step back instead of meddling with them is in itself an aknowledgement of their growth. In the beginning, Aqua would always insert himself in the narrative, manipulate things from the shadows and help others. For example, he protects Ruby from the idol industry and helps Kana shine. Right now, though, he chooses to trust them.

2 - Aqua is the one who sees Ai the least (probably)

Ruby (thanks to Kana) is able to see Ai as a normal girl. Aqua is instead idolizing her. This means that deep down he doesn't see Ai as her own person, but as an idealized image. Of course, this has a double meaning:

Aqua is Ai's fan, so he puts her on a pedestal like her other fans (including characters like Nino and Hikaru, who hurt her)

Aqua is Ai's son, so he doesn't see her objectively, but as a perfect person

This final point is important because to grow up a child needs to break their parents' pedestal. Ruby is slowly doing it:

While Aqua is still far away from it.

Thank you for the ask!

#oshi no ko #oshi no ko meta #asksfullofsugar #ruby oshino #kana arima #aqua oshino #onk #onk 135 #onk spoilers

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aihoshiino · 6 months

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chapter 135 thoughts

Akasaka seems to have heard me bitching about other characters not getting involved last week because pretty much this entire chapter is focused on outsider perspectives on the RubyKana conflict, which I actually really appreciate. Not knowing how everyone else was responding to this felt really weird and while I ultimately am glad in hindsight Akasaka used the last chapter to focus exclusively on Ruby and her feelings about Ai, it did still feel really weird in the moment. And there's still no Miyako… girl where did you go…!!!

It's also really nice to get a bit of Aqua and Gotanda time, too — I feel like it's been forever since we've had any time focusing on that relationship and it's one of my quiet favourites in the series so revisiting it now was a nice surprise. We're still pretty locked out of Aqua's head but I feel like his dialogue here speaks for itself without us needing to peek in there. And whether or not he means to, I think Aqua says something really, really revealing here about how he's been dealing — or abjectly failing to deal — with Ai's death.

A running thread through OnK that Ruby is finally starting to come around from is the way the twins have both struggled with their idolization and objectification of Ai and ultimately failed to treat her like a human being. Here, Aqua doubles down on that dehumanization, rejecting the idea of Ai ever having complicated emotions about any of the things that happened to her. He flattens her into a caricature of herself, carefree and avoidant and specifically says that he personally never saw Ai crying. Not even once.

Except… of course he did. Because Ai cried as she told the twins that she loved them as she was dying. The anime even takes this a step further by having Ai break down into sobs during this moment and having her tears literally fall onto Aqua's face as he gazes into her eyes. In denying the existence of these tears, Aqua is also to some degree, erasing those words of pure love that Ai poured out with her last breaths. It feels like a confirmation of something I've been suspecting for a while: that in his fucked up attempts to 'grant her wish' Aqua is even willing to desecrate and erase the real Ai.

In a lot of ways, Aqua is deeply stunted in comparison to Ruby. Honestly I kind of get the feeling that Aqua… doesn't want to humanize Ai? Not out of cruelty but out of seemingly necessarily self defense; if Aqua lets himself love his mom as a human person, if he lets himself love her properly and with empathy then he will necessarily have to finally mourn and grieve for her as a human being and I think that would be the start of breaking him.

What's exciting about this talk as well is that it sets up Aqua and Ruby to be in opposition on something extremely central to the movie arc: Ai herself. This sets up the potential for them to come into conflict and maybe even for Ruby to really lay into him about the exploitative way 15YL is making use of Ai's image.

Final note before I move on: whether this was intended or not, I can't help but see a lot of parallels between Aqua's insistence that Ai would never cry over her treatment in B-Komachi and Nino's rant at the end of 45510 in which she reacts with revulsion at the idea of Ai wanting to connect with them. Aqua/Nino parallels aren't what I was expecting for Christmas but the implications are pretty (discord eyes emoji)

Gotanda's response is interesting, too. He claims that he wrote the script by 'listing the events that actually happened' when we know for a fact that there is a huge amount of dramatization and fictionalization at play just out of the necessity of recreating the events in the life of a person no longer here to give testimony. But he also betrays something here: his own lack of real care towards Ai herself. He dismisses the idea that it's worth trying to understand her feelings after her passing and admits that he isn't really making the movie out of empathy but out of a sense of wanting to capture something he failed to before. This movie is his revenge.

And like… fuck, man. It's just so miserable. There has always been this really ghoulish undercurrent to the entire idea of the Movie Arc, of digging up Ai's corpse again, slicing up her private and most personal self and her painful history that caused her so much shame and dressing it up into something pretty and consumable for the public to salivate over. Even in death, Ai can't rest in peace. Even in death, nobody can just leave her be. She has to be bought and sold and swapped and traded until all the value has been wrung out of her. Nobody making this movie really cares about understanding the real Ai at this point, apart from Ruby; not even the director who wants to be able to film her.

That said. man. the scene that followed was pretty sweet. The idea that Gotanda pulled Aqua into his project not just to give Kana a bit of a wake up call but because he was actually looking out for her and genuinely wanted her to have some friends is a really lovely idea and his sense of relief in seeing her having found a place in B-Komachi was also really good. In a lot of ways, the second generation of B-Komachi may be echoing the mistakes of their predecessors but they're also learning to correct them.

kana's face when she takes a bite out of ruby's parfait is like the hardest i've laughed all week btw god bless mengo yokoyari

The Gillian Cut of Gotanda talking so warmly about RubyKana's friendship to the two girls still being cold with each other is framed as a joke but I do think it's supposed to be read as a reassuring moment for the audience. While Aqua puts forth that his rose-tinted idea of fights making friendships stronger only happens in fiction… Oshi no Ko is fiction. Literally the very first words of the story are that verbatim and it constantly uses in-universe fiction as metatexual commentary on its own nature as a story. More than a joke, this feels like a sort of reassuring pat on the back for the reader that the girls will emerge from this rough spot stronger than before.

Aqua's sense of trust for both Kana and Ruby is really sweet, too. They're two of the people he cares about the most in the world — often to the point of him not being able to trust them, out of fear of the supposed repercussions — but here, he not only steps back to let them handle things themselves but reassures Gotanda that he can do the same. Aqua has been pretty cruel to both these girls in a lot of ways over the series so it was nice to see him express some warmth.

And that's the final chapter of this year…! Jesus I can't believe I only got back into the series back in April lol I really feel like I've been following the weekly chapters for longer. Admittedly, I'm starting to get really fatigued with the Movie Arc with how long it's been going but I'm hoping that we'll start to see some more progress on it when we return in 2024 and that Kamiki will do. Something maybe. can you even imagine.

#oshi no ko #onk spoilers #oshi no posting

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