Quote 1: "Almost Christmas means it wasn't Christmas!" - Phoenix Wright, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Quote 2: ""Trust your partner"... And I do. I can't forgive you, but I trust you." - Neku Sakuraba, The World Ends With You/Subarashiki Kono Sekai

Propaganda

Quote 1: Top tier line. There is a reason why AA fans reblog this each year - Submitter/Mod Chaos, parts taken from the propaganda submitted

Quote 2: This isn't the LAST line of the game, but it's close, and it's a key line of the closing monologue. Neku has gone from one of the most insufferable misanthropic edgelord 15-year-olds in human history to a caring person looking at his home and the people in it in a new light. He has done so as a direct result of a three-week series of brutal death games played in the afterlife for the chance to come back to life. He's been forced to team up with three different people, partners who challenged his view point and forced him to grow. The second one, Joshua, was an EVEN MORE INSUFFERABLE misanthrope who nonetheless seemed to get Neku better than anyone else... and was also incredibly suspicious to the point where Neku accused him of being his killer... and sacrificed himself for Neku at the end of their week, along with Neku discovering Joshua apparently DIDN'T kill him after all. Emphasis on "apparently". At the end of the third week, Joshua comes back, completely unharmed, and drops a series of reveals where "I never said I DIDN'T kill you, tee hee" is arguably not the worst part of the murder alone. (He's also planning on destroying the city. Oh, and he's directly responsible for the brutal death games.) Then he challenges Neku to a shootout for the fate of the city, where Neku finds he can't shoot the guy. Joshua doesn't have the same problem... But then Neku wakes up on the street, alive for the first time in weeks, and the city hasn't been destroyed. We cut to a week later, where Neku addresses Joshua, pointing out how incredibly traumatizing the whole experience was, but also admitting that even so, he's grateful to have met his partners. He can't forgive Joshua for putting him through this shit, but he still trusts him. He closes the monologue by telling Joshua that he's meeting up with his new friends for the first time in a week, and asking to see him there. And then those friends call over to him, and the credits roll, and the player SOBS. - Submitter (Shout out to this person. Not only did they write these GIANT paragraphs for both of their submissions but they told me how to tag them. Thank you so much <3)

TWEWY sprite edit commission of Akane Kurashiki from Zero Escape for @lapinparka !

I used NEO TWEWY Shiki’s sprite for most of the base, but I used Konishi’s torso for the torso here as well! I also drew the wings completely manually, which was rough but was an interesting challenge! I had a lot of fun with this edit!

neku doodles 👍

10/10 fist bump to big bro Beat <3 !!!!

Happy birthday sewer jesus 🚽😇

Sir pls upgrade your wardrobe in the next game (if it happens), hard to look good in cosplay when you dress like ass 💩

📸 @alucahawk

[A story only Hachiko knows] long comic strip and birthday gift for @areiml​. This is my imagination of a story set during the 3 years between OG and Neo, featuring a short meeting between Eri and Beat as they talked about how everyone was coping with Neku’s disappearance and moving on with their own lives. 

This comic referred to several comic strips I made before, sorta intertwined between canon game lore, my thoughts on the unexplored potentials of Eri’s role in the story and my friend & I’s BeatEri fever dream. I imagined it would be set at around 3-6 months after Neku’s disappearance and shortly before the gang entered high school. I never thought it was gonna be this long as it all started out as a few whimsical panels. While the comic has mentions of NeShiki and BeatEri, you can read it as general friendship if that’s your preferred interpretation (save for the bonus piece below). 

I actually have zero confidence writing Beat’s dialogues, tho I’m pleased with his design - which I put together by imagining Beat without his knitted cap, plus changing to some of his favourite WildBoar threads. My friend joked that since I’m used to draw sparkly Composers, I made Beat so handsome that even his parents won’t recognise him. Eri is canonically pretty, so I wanted to depict her as TV-star-pretty. Another trivia is that Beat generally isn’t a dessert fan, he also tends to dislike fruit-flavoured desserts and only enjoys chocolate-flavoured ones so it was a surprise that strawberry is his favourite boba flavour lmao. Now who does strawberry boba remind me of? Guess.

With this done, I’m one comic strip away from having enough materials for an anthology. The “final” strip was already drafted along with the Composers strip. If we’re lucky, I might get to draw it next year.

There is a Japanese version of this comic on Twitter in case you need it. And lastly, here is the bonus piece which is a redraw of my friend’s comic strip. Happy Birthday! (have fun being at the same age as Asa while I’m Tougou’s, teehee)

🎄💗Merry Xmas Eve & Happy Birthday to Coco! Our favourite stylish and bad-mouthed girl 💗🎄

=>repost from an older artwork for TWEWY/NTWEWY anniversary♥

it’s been this long since the release of NEO and what happens to Neku is still like. the Hardest thing to swallow in the story. it’s so bad from both a character writing and thematic point of view

the first thing people think about when they meet Neku again is that he is seriously OOC, but it’s not that simple. it goes deeper than that. It seems like he’s behaving this way for a reason but the reason That seems to be is ALSO an alarming turn for his character with no apparent explanation. What i mean:

Stage One is thinking Neku is OOC because he gets along with everyone pretty easily and isn’t grumpy and doesn’t seem to have a lot of thoughts about being stuck in the ruins of a dead city for three years straight

Stage Two is realizing that we don’t see Neku’s internal monologue in this game except a SINGLE exception in Another Day. Suddenly, he seems like Neku again. So on top of the character development we can know and assume he has had, he’d probably sound really normal to us in his head. Things like his characteristic snark, his internal logic for doing things, and his feelings about being isolated from everything he cares about for three years must simply be hidden away from us and the other characters.

Stage Three is remembering how much disdain Neku originally had for insincerity or fake-ness.

That brings us back to just... how much our current Neku exists and bends to suit the story of NEO, as opposed to being an extension of his previous self. Before, Neku hated how people would pretend, and pretend to be friendly (though he’d conflate the two.) Now I have to assume that Neku is pretending himself. There was supposed to be middle ground here related to opening up, I thought.

Now is it possible for someone to do a 180 like that? Certainly! But it’s another form of development we can’t actually look at the source for, in NEO. We don’t have the evidence to know Neku is this way through any natural, watsonian means. We only have the doylist side, the things we can see. We can only feel the author’s hand, and it pushes us towards trying to write Neku’s actual character ourselves. Do the work to make it make sense ourselves. If you’re still around, that’s what you’re doing.

Because no one understands NEO. This extends beyond Neku, but it’s really severe with him because sometimes when you see a characterization mishap like this you can at least interrogate the story for what good it did. If you do that for Neku in NEO there’s not much to come back with. What’s one of the themes of NEO? Oh, like being proactive, and self determination, and thinking for yourself and that stuff right? Then surely it makes sense for our beloved previous protagonist who we dragged back into this story to return to a life he actually had no active part in building for years. He’s been written for NEO’s convenience, not NEO’s good.

Maybe the worst part is that even when acknowledging that we can only put bandaids onto this situation, none of them can really be satisfying. Sure, I can try to make this cohere with Neku’s existing character arc, but the answers that make the most sense are always going to be the ones that suck. You take what we have for Neku and all you get for working with it is like. Fret’s arc about bein real? Minus the narrative resolution, minus the foundations in the narrative for resolution, plus more narrative baggage. Or a story where Neku feels more at home in the UG than the RG. Or a story about coping with the nitty gritty unreality of reality rewriting, or imposter syndrome, or trying to make up for a time in your youth you can never really get back.

I’m rambling at this point but it makes it really painful to look back at where og TWEWY left off, doesn’t it? Enough that i lost count of how many times i thought about writing a post like this. It’s the kind of thing that’ll bum you out no matter how interestingly you spin it.

I’ve low-key seriously been considering making a TWEWY fan website on neocities to archive fanfic, theories, headcanons, artwork, and all that other good stuff. Don’t know if anyone would be interested in something like that, but as a programming fiend who’s obsessed with TWEWY right now, it’s a project I think I’d really like to take a shot at! If anybody has suggestions to make I’m open to hearing ideas.

Dragon and Phoenix, Yin and Yang

I'm sure some of you have already noticed this in the game. In this post, I wanna talk about the chinese mythological background in the game and how the dragon and phoenix, being literal symbols of Yin and Yang, connect to Joshua and Haz. As I replayed the games again and analyzed their characters a little more, I found some interesting stuff with Joshua and Haz. Did you notice that Haz' jacket has two phoenixes? Or that Joshua likes the brand Dragon Couture a lot?

These small details were quite interesting. Then I remembered that all reapers resemble animals when they transform into their noise/boss form.

As you can clearly see, Higashizawa turns into a sheep, Sho turns into a lion, Konishi into a tiger... the list goes on. This game generally makes a lot of references to chinese mythology and integrates these aspects into its characters. While Joshua and Haz were never actively seen transforming into their noise form, there are many clues hinting at the fact that they both also have noise versions of themselves. Let's start with Joshua.

I mentioned before how Joshua likes Dragon Couture. If you didn't know already, the second japanese character of his last name, Ki-ryu (桐-生), can mean dragon in English, the meaning of his last name making a direct reference to a dragon again. When he fuses with Kitaniji in TWEWY, Anguis Cantus ("singing snake" in latin) in result turns into Draco Cantus ("singing dragon") instead. With all the hidden clues here, we can definitely deduce that Joshua's noise form is a dragon.

It's a bit more subtle with Haz, but it's definitely as recognizable as Joshua. We know that Haz' jacket has two phoenixes adored on its chest area. The final boss in NEO, Phoenix Cantus ("singing phoenix"), was created by him, again, implying the ties to Haz and the phoenix.

Both of the games and their final bosses' noise form have parallels to both Joshua and Haz.

Now that we have this established, did you know that the dragon and phoenix symbolize auspiciousness and in the literal sense, a perfect couple, in Feng Shui?

Dragon is "yang" while phoenix is "yin" and they compliment each other in yin-yang balance to harvest a successful marriage. It is said that they are the ultimate symbol of everlasting love and marital happiness.

Very interesting indeed. Wonder if they did this on purpose or unintentionally.

If you want to read more about this interesting topic, check out these websites: x, x

TLDR: Joshua's noise form is a dragon and Haz' a phoenix. In Feng Shui, it is said that this combo symbolizes a perfect couple and auspiciousness.

Yoshiya Kiryuu (Subarashiki Kono Sekai The Animation)  » November 1

Quote 1: "That's it. I'm not paying one cent of my taxes!" - Ema Skye, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Quote 2: ""Trust your partner"... And I do. I can't forgive you, but I trust you." - Neku Sakuraba, The World Ends With You/Subarashiki Kono Sekai

Propaganda

Quote 1: Underrated line said by my favourite character. She was so real for that - Submitter

Quote 2: This isn't the LAST line of the game, but it's close, and it's a key line of the closing monologue. Neku has gone from one of the most insufferable misanthropic edgelord 15-year-olds in human history to a caring person looking at his home and the people in it in a new light. He has done so as a direct result of a three-week series of brutal death games played in the afterlife for the chance to come back to life. He's been forced to team up with three different people, partners who challenged his view point and forced him to grow. The second one, Joshua, was an EVEN MORE INSUFFERABLE misanthrope who nonetheless seemed to get Neku better than anyone else... and was also incredibly suspicious to the point where Neku accused him of being his killer... and sacrificed himself for Neku at the end of their week, along with Neku discovering Joshua apparently DIDN'T kill him after all. Emphasis on "apparently". At the end of the third week, Joshua comes back, completely unharmed, and drops a series of reveals where "I never said I DIDN'T kill you, tee hee" is arguably not the worst part of the murder alone. (He's also planning on destroying the city. Oh, and he's directly responsible for the brutal death games.) Then he challenges Neku to a shootout for the fate of the city, where Neku finds he can't shoot the guy. Joshua doesn't have the same problem... But then Neku wakes up on the street, alive for the first time in weeks, and the city hasn't been destroyed. We cut to a week later, where Neku addresses Joshua, pointing out how incredibly traumatizing the whole experience was, but also admitting that even so, he's grateful to have met his partners. He can't forgive Joshua for putting him through this shit, but he still trusts him. He closes the monologue by telling Joshua that he's meeting up with his new friends for the first time in a week, and asking to see him there. And then those friends call over to him, and the credits roll, and the player SOBS. - Submitter (Shout out to this person. Not only did they write these GIANT paragraphs for both of their submissions but they told me how to tag them. Thank you so much <3)

TWEWY sprite edit commission for @addictedtocustomcontent !

TWEWY sprite edits are so fun man I love doing them 💖 I used Shiki’s and Yoshiya’s sprites for these two!

Apparently it's Rindo's birthday???????? HAPPY BIRTHDAY BEBI

20/10 !!!!!!!!!

Happy Birthday Joshua 😇 So I hear 1 Nov is All Saints' Day... /snicker tbh rather liked how close this full-body shot got to the game sprite hahah however stylised the art is. Only regret that my eyes were gazing in the wrong direction OTL

I think it’s really cute how people started digging out my 2021 Josh bday art again on this day. So as to not let you down, here is 2022 Josh birthday art and a very special request from me to you on this special occasion: I'm looking for someone who can help me translate my Composers comic strip into Japanese. 

I know the strip is very text-heavy, my Japanese level is certainly not enough to work on it and it’s gonna take effort regardless. I promised the friend who got me into twewy to at least ask the fandom for some help. While my entire fanwork body is not monetized so I do not have a budget for this, I will be very happy to draw you any of your favourite characters from the franchise (up to two). I know it may not sound like a deal, it may be a long shot - which is why I've forever hesitated to ask but well, here is to a maybe.

Josh’s birthday 1/11 by the way, falls on Samhain festival - a festival to celebrate the darker half of the year during the time of which dead souls can visit the world of the living, along with a few other... things that will sneak through the gates.  It's believed to be the origin of Halloween and All Souls' Day, though opinions may differ. The biggest sight for Halloween celebration in Japan just happens to be, none other than Shibuya.

And last but not least, happy birthday? (HOW OLD ARE YOU ANYWA-)