#adaptation is hard because unlike novels

[thegayfromrulid]

weridest a1 picture decision in sao tourmanet arc skip! granted I didn't read it either but

I got into this a bit with other fans back when it happened way back in, what, 2018? But I genuinely have some mixed feelings about this decision because I do get kind of why it may have been skipped over. Spoilers for the LN ahead, be warned.

So, the tournament arc in the first half of Alicization was fairly enjoyable and provided a bit more context for the closeness that Kirito and Eugeo grew to have between leaving Rulid and going to the Swordcraft Academy in North Centoria, but it worked better as a written format.

Certain sections of this part of the story are written from Charlotte's POV; if you recall, Charlotte is a spider, and her identity as a spider is revealed in the novel in the same place as it was in the anime—in the library with Cardinal. A large part of pulling off an adaptation of the tournament in Zakkaria would have involved making sure that the animators could adequately conceal Charlotte's identity while still preserving a few key details that she was involved in.

I ran over this part with my dad, who has a degree in animation, and the conclusion was that some scenes would either have to be changed or they would have to choose to do the reveal earlier for the audience than for Kirito. The latter very much could have worked! We would have had a lot more context for why Kirito heard a voice in the garden, or why Kirito's hair randomly stood up running from Eldrie and Deusolbert in the rose garden.

On the other hand, though, I think the animators mostly wanted to keep Charlotte's identity as hidden from the audience in the anime as the books did, and to do that while animating the Zakkaria sub-arc would have been...a challenge. Charlotte is seen from the start to be performing some wind arts to take care of Kirito's upturned shirt, which could have been fairly decently concealed, I think. The true problem is that some narration is done by Charlotte during the selection process for the brackets in the tournament. Charlotte is the key element that keeps Kirito and Eugeo from sparring one another and knocking each other out of the tournament. Without her intervention, this looks like random, lucky chance.

Now, why does that matter so much to an animator, perhaps? It's easy to change the visual perspective of scenes to not be from eight little eyes peering outwards from Kirito's bangs, and it's not like stories haven't relied on bullshit random chance before. I think, however, the animators knew that people would call it bullshit that Kirito and Eugeo oh-so-randomly pulled opposite fighting blocks, even when this is still statistically possible. It gives the story a bit more credibility to the audience when we can preserve something like this, because Charlotte obviously felt the need to tip those odds due to them being bad.

I think another problem is that the animators likely knew the episode count from the start and had to make decisions on what to cut and where. The second cour dealing mostly with Cathedral climbing took up a heavy amount of space, and we see like, a one-battle-per-episode thing going on. Places where possible cuts to the story were most likely: cutting an entire episode dedicated to Zakkaria, which was more for character development than story progression; cutting maybe what brought Kirito and Eugeo to be Elite Disciples, which was short and all but introduced Incarnation; or perhaps shorten the battle between the group and Quinella, which likely held a lot of the battle-heavy appeal people want to see in an anime with "swords" in the title.

Making these decisions is by no means easy for a group of animators, as they are given a specific budget and episode count. I don't know how easy it would be to ask their boss for more episodes or whatnot, because a lot goes into confirming you get those slots. A-1 has to confirm that television stations have the timeslots to air these episodes in; when SAO was given permission for four cours' worth of timeslots, this was already pretty generous on behalf of the stations airing SAO. Those stations were taking a gamble that SAO would get them viewing hours, and four cours is a hell of a gamble when it comes to hoping people stick it out until the end. SAO could have benefitted from a fifth cour or maybe even a slight handful of extra episodes, but the animation company does need to negotiate as much screentime as stations will permit.

SAO was also aired split-cour, which means that cutting something like the anime-only bits in War of Underworld would not have mattered in the long run for something that happened back in the first half. Perhaps you might be thinking "well we didn't really need anything dedicated to Eiji and Yuna here" and you're allowed to think that! But it wouldn't affect the lack of Zakkaria any more, because the animators cannot just leave you hanging mid-story when there's several months between Eugeo dying and picking back up with the aftermath and a timeskip to Alice in Rulid. It's just not a good business plan.

To conclude, there's a lot of reasons why the studio may have decided to cut Zakkaria, some of which I can definitely sympathize with. While I will also state that it's 100% okay to be frustrated when an adaptation does not look exact or does not meet our expectations as novel readers, I think it's also important to remember why these changes are made. Think about this before jumping into being angry at the studio for these decisions. Some decisions are far more logical than others!

#ask me anything #sao #sword art online #kirito #sword art online war of underworld #sword art online alicization #kirigaya kazuto #eugeo #sao spoilers #animation #sword art online light novels #sao light novels #sao light novels spoilers #discussion #stalkerkyoko #like man i do get being sad or upset about the changes #but I went through a lot of school teaching about these things #adaptation is hard because unlike novels #you are given very specific limits when it comes to TV #and words do not always translate well into visuals #it helps to be a bit more critical of media and see how its made #understanding and sadness at changes can and should coexist #long post

[ampleappleamble]

haven't seen this on here yet so:

in case you don't want to slog through the shitscape that is the bird/letter website, take a peek beneath the cut (shamelessly copied from the something awful forums dungeon meshi thread)

- Her first memory of video games was watching her father playing Wizardry on Famicom, also Dragon Quest, Ultima, and Fire Emblem among others.

- She was a difficult child so her parents didn't let her play. Wizardry is a boring game to watch, but the monster illustrations on the walkthrough evoked her imagination and made her keep watching.

- She only started becoming a serious gamer after the serialization of Dungeon Meshi was locked, for research purposes. Before that, she read fantasy novels such as The Neverending Story (Michael Ende) and The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien).

- The international title for Dungeon Meshi: Delicious in Dungeons was decided by her editor.

- D&D popped up a lot when she researched the history of video games, so she read the rule books, replay novels, and games inspired by D&D.

- One of the first games she studied was the Legend of Grimrock (game's 80% off on Steam atm). Originally, she wanted Dungeon Master (FTL Games) which was famous for "RPG with meals" but hunting down the game and machine was too much.

- She didn't like games other than turn-based RPGs at first, but she decided to stop being picky and play anything that piqued her interest.

- She played Zelda: BotW and TotK on a borrowed Switch from her editor due to the console's scarcity at the time.

- She enjoyed Red Dead Redemption 2 and God of War for their stories. RDR2's incredible attention to detail had Kui engrossed so much that she asked her editor and other mangaka to play it so she could discuss it with them.

- Kui praised The Witcher 3 localization as something only possible with full support from the developer. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of her all-time favorites.

- Papers, Please was her first taste of indie games.

- Disco Elysium is the perfect game for her due to the lack of fighting, intriguing story, charming character interaction, and top-down perspective. She tried playing it in English at first due to an unlikely chance for JP loc, but it was out of her ability. Thus she is forever grateful to Spike Chunsoft for localizing it.

- Kui played Baldur's Gate 3 from the time it was in Early Access. Again, she's grateful for Spike Chunsoft's JP loc. She hoped BG3's success would bring the possibility of JP loc for other titles too, such as Pathfinder: wotr

- She likes games with top-down perspective because they have narration text for monologues and scenery description. Even if the graphic is lacking, the texts show the atmosphere and each character's behavior and psyche. Also, characters that react to your choices.

- She praised Unpacking and House Flipper for being able to tell what kind of person lives there only through their belongings, and that there's no right or wrong for the placements; she would make the best arrangement and then enjoy her hard work while sipping tea.

- The biggest inspiration for Dungeon Meshi was the Cosmic Forge pen from Wizardry VI. With improved graphics from its predecessor, now it could show broken farming tools in the background and many more details that made exploration so much fun.

- At the time of the interview (Dec '23) she still hadn't watched DunMeshi anime, but she attended the recording sessions. She's embarrassed that the dialog she wrote now acted passionately by professionals. Marcille's screaming was wonderful but also made her want to flee.

- Kui was anxious about the CP2077 anime adaptation, but she was relieved it was the Night City she knows and loves.

- Other than minor adjustments, she left it to TRIGGER as to how to adapt

- She's happy that Mitsuda Yasunori was chosen as the anime composer, as she used to play Chrono Cross and rewatched the opening many times.

- Her anticipated games in 2024 are Cloudpunk, Nivalis, and Avowed.

- DunMeshi would be hard to adapt into a game because in the first place, what Kui depicted in the manga are parts that are omitted in games for the sake of brevity.

- If DunMeshi game was Wizardry-like, it'd be told through Laios' perspective and eating was essential not to die

#dungeon meshi #she only started playing video games after dunmeshi got picked up???? damn #that's dedication to the craft #i would *so* play a dunmeshi video game... #likes top-down perspective and strong narratives and character reactivity... she's just like me fr

[coraniaid]

It’s always very odd to me when I read criticism of A Song Of Ice And Fire online (by which I mainly mean: on Tumblr) which takes for granted that this is some sort of obsessively dark and edgy and mean-spirited fantasy, because ... that's not what the series is actually like at all?  

I mean, yes, some awful (and graphically described) stuff happens in these books, but this is at heart a deeply optimistic and almost embarrassingly romantic story, full of a very obvious sympathy and tenderness for the unhappy and the hurt and the powerless.  The weird gritty-for-the-sake-of-it books that the series's detractors describe wouldn't have recurring POV characters like Sansa Stark or Tyrion Lannister or Davos Seaworth or Samwell Tarly or Brienne of Tarth.  They certainly wouldn't obviously empathize with and respect these characters to the extent the actual books do.  They wouldn't be so obsessive about the importance of hope and kindness and understanding in an otherwise uncaring world.  Whenever the text suggests the world isn't fair or kind there's always an unspoken "but it should be,and I wish it was". You are clearly not meant to think that characters like Roose Bolton or Twyin Lannister are being held up as role models to emulate!

I mean, maybe the TV show is more like that -- I gave up on the show after only a couple of seasons, it was a terrible adaptation of the source material, even before the final season that everyone apparently hated -- but so much of the open disdain for ASOIAF I come across on here reads like the people writing the posts haven't even read a single one of the books. Yes, the popularity of ASOIAF inspired a lot of "dark" fantasy novels that actually are bleakly nihilistic and seem to revel in their characters meeting pointlessly sad and violent ends, but Martin's books are just not like that.

Yes, lots of the world-building for ASOIAF is patently ridiculous, and yes, key parts of the plot are just cribbed from the War of the Roses (or, rather, from historical novels like Sharon Penman's The Sunne in Splendour)  and yes, Martin has said some very stupid things in interviews while busy not writing the series.  And no, I'm not sure I could actually bring myself to recommend the books to anyone who's not read them before (especially when it's so unlikely that the series will ever be finished, let alone in a satisfying way).  I haven’t reread them myself in years.

But honestly, back when I was a quietly miserable teenager these books really meant a lot to me, in part because they are the opposite of the caricature often discussed online.  Yes, they acknowledged that sometimes the world was awful and unbearable.  It is!  But they also suggested that it was still important to try to be fair and kind and to appreciate the moments when things were better.  They are books about trying to do the right thing even when it’s so hard as to seem impossible and nobody else will even know that you tried, written in a way that takes for granted that “the right thing” is also the just and the optimistic and the quietly heroic thing; that doing the right thing when you afraid is more praiseworthy than never being afraid at all. And it is baffling to me how often I see people talking about them now who don't actually seem to have ever even skimmed them but are still vocally passionate in their hatred of something that, as they describe it, simply doesn't exist.

#asoiaf #I would recommend The Sunne In Splendour though

[yuurei20]

So how many people do we know the circumstances of how they got their unique magic now? Like Riddle apparently studied really hard and got it, Idia was born with it, and Deuce and Epel's were both shown in game.

Hello hello!! Thank you for this question!

As you say we have confirmed Riddle's unique magic manifested when he was 10 through sheer effort (at his mother's behest), which was also confirmed in the novel.

"‘Does that mean that you cannot discover your unique magic without studying?,’ Yuuya asks. With a contemplative look, Riddle responds, 'That is not always the case, but it was for me.'"

"Riddle learned ‘Off With Your Head’ when he was only ten years old. According to Trey, it was the result of Riddle’s devotion to his studies and his mother’s strict supervision."

Riddle is particularly interesting because it is insinuated during Book 6 both by Idia and Riddle himself that he was maybe never meant to have the power that he does, but his mother decided she was going to birth a powerful magic-user and brute forced it into happening, artificially enlarging his magic pool to ensure he'd "be an exceptional mage, starting from when (he) was in the womb."

Deuce is our first time seeing a unique magic manifest on screen in an interesting example of how it can happen without the user even realizing it before, during, or after the process.

Like Deuce, Epel's magic also manifests from his efforts to protect others from harm, but it was a slightly less confusing experience as Epel had Rook on hand for advice (and Rook seems very comfortable with the role of "unique magic manifestation coach." Was this possibly not his first time being present for the initial appearance of someone's unique magic?)

In both the (original) game and the novel, it is mentioned that Leona was born with his unique magic:

"Unique magic that is inherited at birth has nothing to do with the person’s will, but humans wrapped up in their own superstitions are ignorant to common sense. Or maybe they think this is a power that I desired, and fought to obtain."

The situation is a little vague but I don't think this means that he was turning people and things into sand as an infant, but rather King's Roar just manifested naturally around the time he came into his magic, instead of being something he studied for, fought for, or even wanted in the first place (in contrast to other mages).

We technically see the process of Azul crafting his unique magic through sheer effort via a flashback: unlike Riddle, who worked for his UM to please his mother, Azul seems to have been motivated by a desire for revenge.

He says that he spent years "studying everything (he) could get (his) hands on," but while Azul seems to have designed the spell himself, it's possible that he didn't know he was creating what would be come his own unique magic at the time. He might just have wanted a spell--any spell--to take talent from others, and it becoming his unique magic was possibly an unintentional bonus.

(Which really makes me wonder what it was that Riddle was doing when his UM manifested at 10 years old. Was it born from a conscious or subconscious urge to stop someone from using magic, like Azul, or did it adapt to the situation he was in at the time, like Epel and Deuce?)

As you say, adding to the list of ways that Idia and Leona are curiously similar, Idia was also born with his unique magic.

He seems to have inherited it directly from his father, who inherited it from Idia's grandmother, Aidne, former head of the Shroud family.

This poses several questions, such as whether or not human-Ortho had also been born with this magic but died before it had been able to manifest, what will happen to the Island of Woe if it is ever left without a blood-relative heir, do cousins count, etc.

I don't think there has been too much information yet about how/when Idia's magic manifested, but it may be a similar situation to Leona, much like how Azul's situation seems similar to Riddle's.

And I think that may be everyone we have heard of thus far! Trey, Cater, Ruggie, Jack, Jade, Floyd, Kalim, Jamil, Rook, Vil and the others have all been fairly quiet about how their unique magics first appeared.

(I am dying to discuss the various magics of Book 7, but this blog pretends that nothing from the main story exists until it is released on EN. Hope to revisit this topic again as EN progresses through the ongoing story! Exciting!)

#twstask #twisted wonderland

[paragonrobits]

a random thought but i think its really great that we as a society have realized two things about the novel Dracula, based on the most common reactions from people reading it through Daily Dracula:

Dracula himself is the least interesting character in the novel, is almost a textbook sexual predator (and at the very least reads as one) so its kind of hysterical realizing that the trend of vampires being more sympathetic more or less started with this book

Jonathon Harker is BELOVED BY ALL and that is such a massive upgrade. He has, by far, been hit incredibly hard with being demonized or unfairly characterized in adaptations as a stiff and unlikable jerk, or even written as abandoning Mina because she was bitten by Dracula and is now Defiled Forever. No!! i say, no!! this man is a wife guy! He is THE wife guy!! he is the archetypal guy so devoted to his beloved that he outright declares he will be damned with her so she won't suffer alone, this guy survived the centuries in a game of literary telephone that completely forgot his character but by god he comes out being very good in the modern day and you know what friend jonathon deserves it!!

#dracula #daily dracula #queued #jonathon harker

[rawmeknockout]

Can I request a breeding kink for Vos and a human s/o? I'm thirsty for that man 👁️👁️

Vos doesn’t like Tarn’s new pet. It blubbers and whines in its high-pitched mammalian sounds, crying like a dying mechanimal during every klik of the orbital cycle. It requires far too much attention, or else it’s likely to be crushed in one of its pathetic escape attempts. Too many times Vos has been tasked with crawling through the vents to pluck up the skittering thing. Every time, it bawls its little organic optics out and kicks at him. Were it not for Tarn’s fondness of the thing, Vos would have squished the little insect by now.

There’s truly no use having it around, and yet Tarn has affection for it all the same.

Occasionally, Vos, with his audials set to maximum, will hear its distant whining and it’s… Softer. Drawn out and mournful. Everyone knows why Tarn keeps it alive, but Vos has no taste for it. Laying with the thing, even if he were desperate enough, would be like laying with the Pet. Primal and repulsive; an act of a mech who is truly without dignity. He tries not to juxtapose this judgement with the idea of his leader.

And yet, the creature is soft in his servos. It trembles but Vos keeps a sure grip on it. Easily. He’s unused to being so large next to another. He’s known of humans for a while, but has never had the misfortune of meeting one before Tarn’s pet.

It… You squish and yield beneath his claws. The next time Vos has to pull you from the vents, he looks at his digits for a long time. A creature like you shouldn’t even survive. No outer shell to protect you, inner structure like the flimsiest steel, mesh that is not mesh. It bends and flexes and gives way readily when punctured. Vos can… imagine what Tarn sees in you. If he truly were to give you a grace you don’t deserve.

You are small, yes, but your body gives way. It bends and adapts readily. Part of what makes carrying so unviable is the rigidity of Cybertronian frames. A species meant to, built to, colonize and conquer. Frames made to withstand and last. Frames that don’t produce life as easily, because reproduction is not the first method by which they survive. But for organics, mating like petrorabbits is the only way to thrive. The idea was disgusting to him at first, novel in a way that looking at a scraplet’s innards might be, but the idea sits in his processor for too long. Festers like an open wound. Vos has always been seen as more primitive, treated as such by his peers. It’s not something that bothers him anymore, but it has certainly shaped him.

He can’t rationalize why he does it. Perhaps he is truly sick. His job makes that obvious to any other, but Vos knows he has limits. Assumed he did, at least. You are snug around his spike, warm and wet. Your insides writhe in a way that is unnatural to him, unlike the grind of cable and gear. You do not coil like metal. It’s not unpleasant in the slightest. Part of him is still repulsed by the slip of your body against his, the way your organic flesh presses oil and sweat to his armor, but Vos revels in the disgusting. He would gladly coat himself in another mech’s viscera, and pushing his spike into you feels like the same sort of satisfaction.

You would look endearing filled to the brim with sparklings, your body molded around what he had given you. His coding hard at work in a body that is designed to bend and morph. Just as your body yields, you make room to fit him. You bend your desires out of the way to curl into Vos’ arms, to wrap your small human legs around his hips and pull him close. Your animal sounds are light and lovely, no longer a grating keen for mercy or freedom. Tarn could never pull such sounds from your fleshling vocalizer, too large and too rough no matter how he tries. His frame made to bully through others with little regard. And yet, compared to you, Vos is the same. It pulls a raspy chuckle from his intake, a moan like rusty metal grinding.

Vos will make sure it takes. You are eager for his touch, your body more than able to carry, and he has all the time in the world to see it will.

#asks #txt #transformers #reader insert #reader imagine #transformers idw #tf idw #transformers mtmte #tf mtmte #smut #dubcon #valveplug #tf vos #vos #mtmte vos #idw vos

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

So my inbox currently contains over 1,600 messages. I am getting Very Overwhelmed, apologies to everyone who is waiting for me to get back to them.

Something I have spotted, though, is that far too many of these have a common theme. Of the top thirty currently sitting at the top of my inbox, 19 are questions about haircare and the CGM. Of those, 12 are exactly the same question - namely, "Is co-washing just washing with conditioner instead of shampoo?" - which I have answered multiple times in multiple different posts, all of which are in my "Hair" tag (the answer is yes, please stop asking).

The other 7 are different hair questions - but, all but one is something I have answered before, in most cases more than once. Again, in my "Hair" tag.

Babes. Loves. Silly rabbits.

I did not sign up to be customer support for CGM.

Listen; I love you all! And I don't mind people asking me novel questions, even, within reason (although I am about to come to that)! But it is not my job to provide this information, and it is absolutely not my job, obligation, responsibility or anything else to keep writing out the SAME INFORMATION again and again and again. It is certainly absolutely not my pleasure to do so, either. I have explained how the method works now. I have explained the sorts of things to avoid. I have recommended CG friendly products. I have tagged all of this.

If you're going to ask me about this stuff, for the love of all that's holy, would you PLEASE look through my damn hair tag first and save me the increasingly stressful task of opening my inbox and seeing another five variants of the exact same already-answered question in a single day. I am not here to provide you a service. I'm here to do you a favour - PLEASE do me one, and check you aren't very literally wasting my time first. As I say, I am more than happy to answer novel questions on this! I'm also happy to clarify if I've worded something in a confusing way! But identical process questions for the seventeenth time in a week is starting to feel disrespectful.

But, I have to also say:

I am just Some Guy on the internet. I am not a professional. I have joked that I am not a Hairxpert, and you've all gone "Lol, yeah, not a Hairxpert, we get it - anyway, what products in America are good? What's your advice for <hair type you don't have?> If I live in an area with hard water (unlike you), what should I do?"

I am Not A Professional.

If you need specialist advice, YOU NEED TO GO AND FIND A SUPPORT GROUP. Buy the handbook, like I did! Go and find one of the hundreds of CGM websites that are free to use! Find a sub-Reddit! These will be full of people who actually are professionals, and will be able to answer these questions. I cannot tell you how best to adapt the method I use for type 4 curls, because I don't have those; you need a professional, or a support group with people who have type 4 curls. I cannot tell you the best styling and drying techniques for pixie cut curls, because my hair is down to my ass; you need a professional, or a support group of curly people with pixie cuts. I cannot tell you the best products to use on a remote island nation I have never even visited; you need a professional, or at the very least, a neighbour.

In fact, as an addendum to that last one, I have now been asked by six different people on separate occasions what my advice is for them because they live on "an island" and can't get the products I use and also can't get Amazon, and... guys!!!? How could I possibly answer that??? You haven't even told me which island, for one, but for quite another, if I'm not a hair expert, I'm certainly not an International Shipping To Remote Islands expert!!! What do you want from me?? I'm just some guy. Who uses a method. I can tell you the basics of it (which I have, extensively), and I can tell you what I personally do (which I have, extensively), and that's it. I have zero expertise beyond that. Anything else is information I would have to try and get from a support group of other people to report back, at which point, you bloody do it. I am not CGM customer support.

To reiterate - I truly, honestly, don't mind getting novel questions that I haven't already answered, or clarifying things that might be confusing; to be honest, it's not like I even massively mind someone going "I live in a desert, how could I combat dryness?". But if you ask me, a Welsh woman, a question like that, you're going to have to accept that my advice is, at best, going to be guesswork or second/third-hand information I once saw someone else mention online somewhere that I have now mostly forgotten if I ever truly saw it at all. Because I do not live in a desert, and I am not a professional.

ALSO A NON-HAIR POINT

I said at the start of this post that 19 of the top thirty messages in my inbox right now are hair questions. Five, though, follow a different pattern.

I imagine this is part of my follower count still exploding (I gained another three thousand of you since August, to give an idea; where the fuck are you all coming from?!? Really like grilled cheese adventures, huh), but I've started getting A LOT of messages from people who blatantly want to use me as a billboard to get their message out. Sometimes a serious message about a vital global issue, sometimes a relatively trivial one about a piece of media they want people to see, and anything in between.

I sympathise. I do understand. But I am not a billboard.

Apart from anything else, I just don't have the time to go fact checking and researching everything to make sure I'm being a Good Billboard, and it would be incredibly irresponsible of me to avoid that step and just blindly go "Sure, yeah, signal boost" and hit publish. If you send me one of these, I am unlikely to do anything with it, I'm sorry. It might put something on my radar, and make me more likely to pay attention when I see the issue being posted organically - when the Iranian protests began someone sent me a message asking me to reblog a particular user's post about it (not their own, it was a separate user). I didn't post that ask, but I did go and manually check the user in question's blog, found a good infographic post there about the protests, and I was able to reblog that. That was fine. But even then, if I hadn't had the time to do that (my life is very busy), that ask would have been buried.

Anyway, I don't want to discourage asks in my inbox generally, nor is this me yelling at anyone or telling anyone off. But with the hair thing in particular, I cannot go on like this pls take pity T_T

#long post #hair

[suzuran777]

Revisiting Gakuen Handsome: Backstory + short review

I think every BL fan has seen something related to Gakuen Handsome at some point in their lives, it's a parody BL visual novel with quite the legacy. It was originally released in 2010 by Team YokkyuFuman and it also got its own OVA and anime adaptation in 2015 & 2016. The protagonist, who is an unnamed seventeen year old boy, moves back to the city after a seven year absence. He enrolls into Baramon High School, a prestigious all-boys school which takes pride in being the best of its prefecture. From now on, his life will be changed forever...

First of all, the developer team's backstory is probably one of the most unique ones. In 2008, eight film students from the Tohoku University of Art and Design formed Team YokkyuFuman (チーム欲求腐満). Their blog mentions that a year later, they attempted to submit the Gakuen Handsome opening movie to the 9th edition of the Niconico Film Festival (their submission was completely ignored). After that, the opening movie was uploaded on NicoNico Douga, where it was quite well received. The description of the video mentions “to be released in 20009”, as they originally probably had no intention to create a full game.

After it became a hot topic on NicoNico Douga, their university gave them permission to organize an official exhibition: Gakuen Handsome Matsuri (or just Gakuen Handsome Festival). Visitors could watch the opening movie, learn more about the characters and take pictures together with the life-sized cardboard cutouts. The exhibition also featured rare merch: A drama CD which would be released in "20009" and canned bread.

This exhibition was apparently not only held once, but many times according to their blog. The game was finally released in 2010 and many fans were happy to finally play it, supporting the team that created it. Togo Mito, who many of you know as the creator of (in)famous BL game Hadaka Shitsuji, also collaborated with them. These are some pictures I found on Togo Mito's old blog, Mizoguchi and Juro drawn by Togo Mito and the Hadaka Shitsuji cast drawn by Team YokkyuFuman.

Even after graduation, it seems like they would occasionally invite some of Gakuen Handsome's creators. In 2014, the university tweeted that they would not be able to host the exhibition that year due to renovations, but visitors could take pictures with the cardboard cutouts. There's also an interview from 2016 on the university's website, in which they talk about how things have been after graduation! I absolutely love how the university supported all of this.

Now about the game itself... Where to even start? You'll have to trust me, but the game is actually good. Many parody games can be quite a hit or miss, but this visual novel is something I still catch myself laughing at years later. The inconsistent art, pointy chins and strange jokes really create an experience unlike anything else. I don't think any commercial company would be able to create something like this, even if they tried. One detail that the anime adaptation doesn't really show is that many different artists worked on this, whose styles widely vary from each other, making absolutely no attempt to create one consistent artstyle. Most characters have at least 2 ~ 3 sprites that often look completely different from each other. For example, sometimes Saionji sensei looks like a clean-shaven teenager/young adult, but in the CGs he suddenly turn into an older looking man with a stubble.

Yes he's talking about eating paint in the screenshot above, why not. Anyway... the voice acting in this game is something else I wanted to talk about, because it adds so much to the game. Of course it's not professional, but I think that's what makes it amazing. You can sometimes hear the voice actors trying really hard not to laugh, and they will occasionally completely mess up their lines. Of course all of those lines are kept in the game and they didn't re-record them. I also loved it when they started swearing in English for seemingly no reason. Also, instead of just avoiding the name of the protagonist (who you can give any name you want) they pronounce it... by improvision. Just imagine how one would try to pronounce a "adfgdf" keysmash and you'll get an idea what it sounds like.

There are 6 characters in this game who you can romance. The protagonist's childhood friend Takuya, who is a bit obsessed with the protein bar Calorie Mate (which is censored in the new version of the game, so you just hear a BLEEP sound), outlaw teacher Saionji, school principal Juro who basically only functions as a save point, student council president Kagami, chuunibyou transfer student Shiga, and last but not least, the captain of the soccer team Mitsurugi, who also murders people with his chin sometimes. The protagonist's sister also has a (non-romantic) ending, which you need to play in order to unlock the extra scenario (which... is a ridiculous murder mystery story for some reason). I also could not find the guide I used a long time ago, so I just looked at some videos on NicoNico to see what others were doing and that worked pretty well...!

My favorite scene is probably still that one scene in Mitsurugi's route, in which he stabs people with his chin. It's also one of the scenes that gets referenced the most in fanart. The context makes it even more ridiculous, Mitsurugi gets really upset that some people like the chunky variant of red bean paste (tsubuan) and decides they should die. After stabbing his teammate and multiple other people he runs outside. The protagonist however, isn't safe either and also gets accused of being a "tsubuan supporter". If you survive though, you get a chance to marry Mitsurugi!

Honestly one of the reasons I wanted to write about this game is because many people only know the OVA and/or anime, but the game is so funny I think everyone should play it if they're interested. I also think the team behind it has such a funny backstory and I love seeing how supportive their university is. Right now the team is still active on their Twitter account and they sometimes create new content. Last year they released Gakuen Handsome Fighters, a short fighting game featuring the Gakuen Handsome characters.

If you are interested in purchasing it, I recommend getting the "Special" edition which can be purchased on DLsite! I couldn't find a working download link anymore of the older version, but I think the creators deserve the support, so I don't regret buying it (it was about 15 USD). It includes the original game and 5 shorter stories which were originally released as smartphone apps. While I think the original game is still the best one, it's fun to explore some of the extra scenarios as well. One of the shorter games takes place in an alternative universe in which the boys live in the Heian period, and for some reason some of the sprites are animated... yeah.

#gakuen handsome #blvn #blvnreview #visual novel

[thequeenofsastiel]

My thoughts on Red, White, and Royal Blue the movie(spoilers for the book and movie)

I'll start with the good parts:

The casting was very good. I loved Uma Thurman as Ellen Claremont-Diaz.

The main characters had excellent chemistry, and the scenes in which they were intimate were well directed. They genuinely seemed to desire each other.

Building on that last point, I appreciated the fact that the movie didn't dial down the fact that they were extremely sexually attracted to each other. It didn't try to desexualize(yes that's a word now) them in order to make it more palatable for people who are still homophobic. Granted, it's unlikely that very homophobic people would watch the movie, but I can imagine people who are at least somewhat homophobic getting persuaded to watch it by someone they love. This movie didn't cater to that audience, and I think that's great.

The movie did a good job at showing us their texts and emails in a way that's more enjoyable than just having us see their texts. It effectively made them cinematic.

It was very funny when it wanted to be, and moving when it wanted to be.

The score was excellent.

Now onto things I didn't like:

They shouldn't have gotten rid of Alex's sister, June. She was a significant part of his life and I think the movie suffered for not having her there.

While I understand changing the fact that Ellen got divorced made things simpler, and wasn't relevant to the main plot in any way, I still would have preferred it if that had stayed the same.

I wish they hadn't gotten rid of Rafael Luna. I totally get it, he was an expendable character, and the movie was already two hours long. They didn't need him figuring out that Richards was spying on Alex and Henry to win the election. That plot point could be tossed aside. I still didn't like it.

I absolutely hated the fact that Alex didn't fly to England asap to see Henry the way he did in the book, and emotionally supported Henry for quite a bit.

I also disliked the fact that Henry's mother wasn't there to support him. It was inspiring to see the way her son's distress drove her out of her depression so she could be there for him. The way she stood up to her mother to protect Henry was one of my favorite scenes in the novel, and I was crushed that they just tossed that to the side.

I detest that Alex gave a speech confirming their relationship without consulting Henry. In the novel they made that decision together and Henry was right by his side. The movie made it seem like he was outing Henry without Henry's consent, and that's a big no-no in the queer community. We don't out each other. Ever. For all movie Alex knew, Henry was planning on calling the emails a hoax. The movie did Alex dirty.

"History, huh?" In the book, that was something that got said in one of their emails, and people took that quote and made shirts about it. It made me cry. I hate that they changed it.

I also feel like they should have included more emails. In the novel, Henry and Alex grow more and more verbally affectionate with each other even before the "I love you," so it felt a lot more natural in the book when Alex was ready to say it.

It's hard for me to grade this movie, because I'm comparing it to the book, which I know is very often a bad idea. But still. This movie was a lot of fun. I think I would have enjoyed it more if it didn't feel like I was watching the book on fast forward with some of my favorite scenes cut out. If you haven't read the novel, I do recommend it. They did a good job adapting it to the screen, despite what they cut out. For the most part, the things that got cut weren't crucial to the plot, so the movie didn't feel incomplete. My biggest gripe is about Alex giving the speech without Henry. It made him look bad. In the novel, Alex was very, very cautious about making sure that Henry was entirely ready to come out to the world. He was encouraging without being overtly pressuring. So to have him confess to the world without talking to Henry first...it was deeply upsetting.

Still, overall it's a good movie. I'll probably rewatch it at some point, though if I do it with other people I might be the obnoxious person going "ACHTUALLY, IN THE BOOK--"

I will say, I think the movie was too short for the novel. It should have been three hours long, so they could have included all the events and people that were cut out. But honestly I tend to think that in general movies are too short. It's probably why I prefer television series.

Thanks for reading!

#red white and royal blue #red white and royal blue the movie #movie review #my reviews #alex x henry #firstprince

[faintingheroine]

@tis-the-fiction-fanatic

Of course I can :)

The book is a Turkish novel first serialized in 1899-1900 and it is set in 1890s’ Istanbul.

Bihter is from a formerly rich family fallen on relatively hard times. Her mother Firdevs is a woman from a family known for its loose moral character and she herself allegedly cheated on Bihter’s late father and caused his death. Now 22-year-old Bihter hates her immoral mother and wants to escape via marriage and to lead a honorable life but because of her mother’s reputation she has no suitors. One day a 50-year-old widower with two children, Adnan Bey, proposes marriage to her. He is extremely rich and Bihter doesn’t have any better prospect, so she accepts and they marry.

The novel basically is the story of this marriage. Bihter is seemingly the protagonist and is the driver of the novel’s plot as she embarks on an affair to escape her sexually unsatisfactory marriage with the middle-aged Adnan, but at least half of the novel is from the perspective of Bihter’s young stepdaughter Nihal who is deeply jealous of her stepmother. The novel can be said to be the story of both Bihter and Nihal and their rivalry, and Behlül, the young man who is involved with both of them, also gets chapters from his pov.

The novel is generally known as the ��Turkish Madame Bovary” or “Turkish Anna Karenina” both because of its adultery plot and it being a pioneer of Realist Turkish novels (it is sometimes called “the first accomplished Turkish novel”) but I think it also has a genre-defying edge in its descriptions. I sometimes think that it shares more with a fairy tale like Snow White than with a book like Madame Bovary. Here is how a well-known thesis on this book describes the use of paradisical imagery in it (below) and @literatureismyentirepersonality had written an interesting meta about the aesthetics of this book.

The book doesn’t have a professionally published English translation but it has an English translation on the internet:

The English translation does have the occasional mistake, especially in swapping pronouns. Turkish doesn’t have gendered pronouns and thus you have to know which character is being talked about to know their pronouns. The translator mistranslated some of the pronouns in the text, presumably because they translated the book sentence by sentence. And the sentences are long and descriptive, this is the book’s style and it doesn’t always flow easily in English.

But plenty of my mutuals have read this translation of the book and enjoyed it, so I think the translation is still enjoyable to read and I am grateful that it exists.

Still, if you know German, Dutch, Croatian or Italian you could get an official translation in these languages too since the book has been published in these languages.

Can I guarantee that you will like this book? No. You might love it but you might also most likely think it is just an eh okay typical 19th century novel. While it is unlikely (since it is not a book like Wuthering Heights that invites very extreme responses) it is also possible for you to hate it. I did get one hateful Anon hating on the book and my posts about it back in July. Fiction is very subjective, not everyone will see the depth I see. But I would recommend giving it a chance. I genuinely think that it is a very good novel and that it is at least worth giving a chance. You can always stop reading it if you dislike it.

And yes, it has a soap opera adaptation but it takes place in the 2000s and doesn’t have much to do with the book beyond the very basic outline of the plot.

#aşk ı memnu #aşk-ı memnu #translation

[tiredspacedragon]

BIONICLE Retrospective

2002: The Bohrok Swarms

Part 1.4: What Lurks Below

*ahem*

Anyway.

What I'm learning as I go through these comics is that, unlike the novels, which are written to be satisfying reads on their own, the Bionicle comics are not meant to be looked at in isolation, one issue at a time. At least not when they are portraying the events of the main story.

See, exactly what the comics cover is never consistent. Some years, the comics stick closely to the main beats of that year's story. They'll cover all the main battles and important scenes from the books or movies, they'll have much of the same dialogue, and so on, like a visual summary of the year. But other times, the comics stray away from the main plot to tell unique stories not found anywhere else, and in my opinion that's when they're at their best. That's why I liked To Trap a Tahnok so much, while I feel I have to come down hard on What Lurks Below.

To be fair, these comics are the first depiction of the events in the Bohrok Nest. The story they tell is not adapted from any other media, it was written for this medium. So it is, technically, an original story. So maybe what I'm really getting at is that the comics aren't the ideal medium for conveying the central plot in general. There's just not enough space to pace everything properly.

Case in point, this issue has really big Part 1 Energy. It doesn't feel complete. There's no clear narrative arc to it, it's just a series of "and thens." The Toa escape the lava by passing through an illusory wall, and then Tahu joins them by blowing up the Tahnok nest he was trapped in, and then they fall into the chamber the Krana are meant to be placed in, and then that opens then door to the Exo-Toa armour, and then the battle with the Bahrag starts.

Now, it's worth noting that this kind of narrative structure is not inherently bad. In fact, it's a structure often used in myths and epic poetry. Ancient stories, particularly ones that would have been transmitted orally, of gods and heroes and monsters, didn't always have clear causal storylines, often they were just series of adventures, sometimes with clear morals, sometimes not. And given how Bionicle itself is often portrayed as a legend, this kind of structure does seem somewhat appropriate.

And if that was the point, I would say it's actually rather clever. But I don't think it is, because if it was, more of the comics would be like this, rather than just this issue. No, what I think happened here was just a case of janky pacing. This issue could have just been about the Toa's journey through the tunnels, and left the discovery of the Exo-Toa and the confrontation with the Bahrag for the next issue. Or, it could have saved time and skipped the tunnel segment completely to focus on the main conflict. As is, it's all setup and no payoff, which is what I mean by Part 1 Energy. It feels more like the first half of the issue that follows it, and less like its own entity.

On the other hand, I do suspect that's actually intentional. The point is to build suspense and keep readers excited for the next issue. And fair play to Greg, as an issue of a bi-monthly comic, I have to commend What Lurks Below for doing its job well. But as an instalment of a story, a chapter in the tale of the Bohrok invasion, I have to say it does not hold up so well upon revisiting.

Now to stop being a major downer for a moment, stepping away from the big picture and looking at the little things shows that What Lurks Below does have merit to it. We have the first appearance of Makuta's belief-based illusions, which, while they go unexplained here, have always been a plot device/mechanic I've found fascinating.

And we get some good character moments from the Toa as well. Lewa saying "There's nothing [Pohatu] and Onua can't bring down," is unbearably sweet, that unshakeable faith in his brothers only feeling more powerful in light of Lewa's own current vulnerability. Not to mention the display of cleverness from Lewa in figuring out the illusion, and from Tahu in using his power to heat the air and cause an explosion, blowing himself out of the Tahnok nest he'd been sealed in last issue. I think that moment where he explains what he did, his speech notably slowed, is the first time, and one of the only times, we've actually seen Tahu visibly weakened and exhausted. So points for expanding the Toa's characters.

...Unfortunately, looking at the little things also means seeing the little downsides, and there's plenty to nitpick here. Why is there lava out of nowhere, and where did it come from? Why are all 48 Krana required to open the doors to the Exo-Toa, which are supposed to be a failsafe? What are Cahdok and Gahdok even doing in separate rooms when they're nigh invincible together, especially since they've been together every other time we've seen them anyway? And, what stuck out to me most, why is Gali the narrator of this issue? Her specific perspective doesn't add anything to the story, and actually gets dropped around halfway through the comic anyway. It's just...odd. This whole issue is a series of odd decisions. Some understandable, some not.

Anyway, on to Part 2!

Next up: The End of the Toa?

#bionicle #bionicle retrospective #what lurks below

[sabaramonds]

the intimacy of possession: a glimpse into hyde-brand formative yaoi

hello, everyone! i mentioned once or twice here on tumblr and several times over on twitter, but my good friend @tshirt3000​ organized a zine among its friends with the topic being yaoi. specifically, formative or otherwise largely influential yaoi in our lives or what yaoi means to us. a few topics came to mind when this was presented before me. one of those topics was murder or violence as a love language and the overlap between joshneku (twewy) and akeshu (p5). however i would have had to replay both games because its been so long and i didnt have the time; luckily someone else discussed joshneku (which made me super happy to see) so thats another essay for another day. instead i ended up writing about - you guessed it - possession, and not of the material kind. in my entry i discuss how i view it and use several ships that impacted me greatly enough to definitely qualify as ‘formative yaoi’. the following will contain spoilers for: yu gi oh (the manga), kagerou project (the light novels), and season 1 of the kekkai sensen/blood blockade battlefront anime adaption. you can find the full zine, all 81 pages of it!, over here. the digital pdf is free to read, so please enjoy it at your leisure. so, lets talk about possession

there is an unavoidable intimacy in possession. no matter the circumstances, no matter how the characters feel about one another on a personal level, there is an intimacy that simply cannot be denied. no matter how hard you try to maintain a distance between you and the one you share a body with, there is an inevitable overlap, a bleedover of information, of self. who else could ever know you as well as the one who has cradled your soul, your mind, your heart, within their own vessel; who else could ever know you as well as the one who fit themself within your body, within your heart, as if it were their home? CASE ONE: TENDERSHIPPING. in YGO, ryou and his spirit, the thief king, are not often shown together despite acting as narrative foils for yugi and his spirit atem. in fact ryou is scarcely shown at all: he fades into the background like a ghost more often than not and we are very rarely afforded a glimpse into his life outside of his introductory arc, at least in the manga. we know he is socially isolated from both friends and family: he has himself and his dioramas and his ghost. so i think his possession would be a relief for him; instead of having no one, he always has someone, even if that someone is zorc-pilled, prone to violence, and repeatedly puts him in dangerous situations.

unlike yugi, ryou, is for the most part cut off from his spirit. they do not visit each other in their soul rooms; the thief king actively excludes ryou from his plans despite piloting his body to achieve his goals. and yet, towards the end, it is ryou who constructs a diorama at the thief king’s behest as the battleground for his revenge plot against atem. this must have required extensive communication, with the level of detail it had. i imagine ryou glad to grasp the opportunity to know the one who has haunted him all these years, both hurting and protecting him, especially knowing with confidence that yugi and his friends have defeated the king of thieves once before and that they could surely do so again. after all, if he was bothered by the thief king's anything, he wouldnt have stolen the ring back from yugi after it was taken from him in the wake of battle city. the thief king is HIS shitty roommate from hell to evict if he so chooses!! there is also, of course, the thief king: one who hurts more than he helps, one who cannot care for ryou the way he might have if it werent for his zorcpilled grief and thousands of years of a festering grudge to fuel him.

he manages to care anyway; there was no reason for him to trap the soul of a teacher who had harassed ryou in a figurine, or to keep ryou alive during the battle city arc, either, when it risked his working relationship with malik. its hard not to care for the boy whose body you have lived in for years, no matter how zorcpilled you are; a boy who you have been alone together with for a long, long time; a boy who does not forgive you for the way you hurt him but keeps letting you in anyway. we dont get to see any resolution between them, by the way. at the end of it all, when yugi is saying goodbye to the spirit of his puzzle and the millennium items are being taken away for good, there is nothing for ryou and the ghost who has been with him since childhood; the ghost who has been, for the most part, the only company hes kept for many years. i like to think that at the end of it all, de-zorc’d, the thief king might have let ryou in the way ryou has always let him in. just once, just for a moment. an honest goodbye. we dont know, though. i guess thats typical of ryou and his thief king. we never get to see them during such private, pivotal moments. CASE TWO: HARUKA, KONOHA, AND THE SNAKE OF CLEARING EYES. kokonose haruka has known he was going to die for at least six years by the time shintaro, the protagonist, meets him; by the time the story itself begins in volume one, he is already two years gone.

kagerou project, the series he’s from, contains the daze: a world which ‘devours’ pairs of people close to death. to help them survive, its creator began to give some of these people parts of herself and her power, via her snakes. a caveat: the power given has to suit the human. can you guess what harukas most earnest wish might have been? this is how konoha was born. konoha was not a person, not at first; he had been harukas oc for a video game he played with his classmate and friend, takane. he was harukas idealized self: not only healthy but inhumanly strong and capable of being of use to those he cared for. konoha is who and what haruka was meant to be, yet haruka, who rejected this body, was stuck within the daze, in an endless white room and his hospital bed, only able to see the outside world in glimpses of konoha’s eyes.

he resents konoha. konoha is living a life that was meant to be his—although that, too, is a life haruka was not meant to have. hes always been on borrowed time.

konoha, himself instead possessed by a fragment of the daze’s creator’s power in the absence of haruka, is barely aware of haruka beyond his understanding that he resembles someone his friends have lost. 

the snake of clearing eyes is a parasitic entity constantly recreating a series of events that will lead to him being able to possess a physical vessel, however briefly, before one of the other protagonists—mary—forces time itself to loop back several years in a fit of grief over those she has lost. he’s the one who actually created konoha, having secretly been the one to meet haruka instead of the daze’s creator. he finds konoha convenient and ultimately takes him over, having told haruka when he created the body, “i am very glad this was your wish for me [...] if you do not wish for anything, i cannot ‘fulfill’ anything.” it’s only in the act of fulfilling the most ardent wishes of others that he is capable of action, and only then: only when he is doing what others beg of him. so he spends timeloop after timeloop brutally murdering a bunch of teenagers to get the perfect body for himself, even knowing mary will, in her grief, rewind time itself. and then he does it all again.  so much work. years and years of effort expended over and over again in loop after loop—just for a taste. is it worth it? we know after the series ends, haruka is alive. but it begs the question of how he lives. i like to think he took the snake of clearing eyes into his actual flesh and blood body to act as that substitute life. but why do i find that so compelling? because he sees himself in the snake of clearing eyes. kokonose haruka is a boy who has always known he was going to die no matter how desperately he wished otherwise. if he resents konoha for living, it stands to reason that he would empathize with the snake of clearing eyes, so desperate for a life of his own, even if the rest of those around them would not think the same. he can give the snake of clearing eyes a lifetime to live. his own lifetime, shared, and maybe that could be enough to satisfy him. i think the snake of clearing eyes would hate him for this kindness. a shared lifetime that isnt on a timer that leads inevitably to repeating the same several years, again and again: a gift he does not deserve and did not ask for. its a punishment as much as it is a gift, anyway, given that it isnt truly a life that is the snake of clearing eyes alone. i think thats funny as hell. CASE THREE: THE KING OF DESPAIR AND WILLIAM “BLACK” MACBETH. kekkai sensen takes place in the city of hellsalems lot (fka new york city) in a world after an apocalyptic event called “the collapse.” 

now let me talk about william ‘black’ macbeth. black spends his whole life repressing his immense power both because his twin sister mary ‘white’ macbeth was born without it and because hes afraid of it. during the collapse, his parents give up their lives to turn his sister into a piece of the barrier that keeps the effects of the collapse from spreading, and he embraces despair both literally and metaphorically. the king of despair is…well, nobody really knows who or what he is, but where the thief kings motives were rooted in grief and vengeance and the snake of clearing eyes motives laid in a desire to live, the king of despair wants one thing: to die. towards the end of episode 11, he monologues: “...how fragile a thing eternal life is, a fate of endless wandering; without death in mind one cannot be said to be truly alive. and so, forgotten by death, the despair that i am shall at least take my foolishness to bed with me.” he says this very dramatically on a live broadcast to the entirety of hellsalems lot by the way. right as he kickstarts the collapse 2: electric boogaloo! it is uncertain who or what the king of despair is, but we know hes been ‘a silent observer’ since ‘rome’. prior to meeting black, he was a shapeless fracture of blue light, having presumably lost his physical body in one of his many previous suicide attempts. guy really just wants to die. im especially fond of him because despite his behavior, he is actually the sort of guy who cares a whole lot about other people, specifically at the very least, black. during their fight in the season finale, another character says: “as long as you crave the light, you cannot kill him. It is precisely because you desire hope that you sought him out, is it not?” the him, of course, is black.

this enrages despair. despite that, despair does eventually admit—in a breathless, wavering voice—that actually, he had not taken blacks body by force. “you came to rescue him from me, but i didnt take him by force. he welcomed me.” top 10 most haunting lines in all of anime. to me. the tenderness in his expression, in his voice, the raw ache of it: and then, when the protagonist leo arrives with white, the fear and hope. black wants to live, despair wants to die, and even if despair didnt want to kill black alongside himself he was willing to do it. he doesnt, of course. its not the right choice. but despair wants to die and black wants to live, so until despair stops trying to kill them both, hes got to leave.

ive talked a whole lot about these ships now. whats their common denominator? I’d have to say the friction in each relationship. theres something so incredibly gripping to me about two (or, um, three if we count the haruka situation?) fundamentally different people (or entities) sharing a body. the thief king and his millennia of grief and rage, worsened by zorcs proximity. ryou and his passive detachment from himself,  his relief at knowing someone will always, always be with him: he is not as alone as he thought. the snake of clearing eyes and who knows how many centuries or millennia spent desperate for a life of his own, grasping for it no matter what the cost, no matter how repetitive. haruka and a lifetime spent knowing he was living on borrowed time, that he would die young just like his mother—younger even than she had. konoha, caught between them, a vessel of both hope and rejection. the king of despair and his yearning for death. for that final, eternal sleep. caring despite himself, hesitating in the face of the young man who had welcomed despair into himself. black and a lifetime of repressing himself and fearing everything, but mainly his own power—but not despair. not really. so i want to ask everyone who read this a question. do you think its gay to possess someone and be possessed in turn?

#my writing #um. i guess. #should i even tag the fandoms #ygo #kagepro #kekkai sensen #thank you again to tshirt for organizing this #the real yaoi truly was the friendships we made along the way

[evelhak]

📚

Since some people have evidently found my books through Tumblr despite of me not being very active on the Finnish side of it, I thought: why shouldn't I post about my books? It doesn't matter they are not available in English (yet, anyway) because I would be curious enough to read about stuff my mutuals do even if I couldn't read the actual material.

So, I plan to make a post about every book I write, do cover art for, or am otherwise involved with. Best case scenario is someone finds something new to read, worst case scenario is someone is bored.

This time, I'll introduce you to my debut novel:

☁️ Unitytöt ☁️

(dream girls)

Published: 2021 by Nysalor

Genre: New Adult, Fantasy, Slice of Life, LGBT+

Certainly not the first book that I wrote but this is my first published novel and my first cover project. ✨ I wrote this book in 2017 when I was about to graduate university, trying to juggle a full-time job as a mail carrier, nearly daily ballet training and writing both my original work and fanfiction which I also started doing the same year. The schedule turned out to be too much for my autistic brain and physical conditions. Regardless, I'm so happy I wrote this book!

It's a story about a technically bodiless creature, Venna, and a human, Aiju. Venna's species lives in people's heads or musical instruments because they need music to live. Venna is an outcast, and has been living in a wind chime to avoid people and their overwhelming array of feelings, which Venna's kind experiences directly in the human brain they are living in. Circumstances force Venna to move into the head of a young woman, Aiju, who is starting her studies at a temple (=a magic university). Unlike Venna's previous humans, Aiju can hear and feel Venna and is curious for, rather than scared of a new friend in her head. Aiju is also able to control and create elaborate dreamworlds where she and Venna can meet in their own separate forms. The two begin to live their life together, studying, enjoying music, maybe even falling in love when an older student is intrigued by Aiju's peculiar behaviour. It's a story about sharing a body and partially a mind, about merging, sense of self, neurodiversity and particularly sensitivity, and also abuse and healing. It's a slow love story, a fantastical exploration of the subconscious, a fantasy focused on characters and dreams that also touches on the larger context of the universe and existence.

I wrote this book because I had read many body sharing stories and was dissatisfied with the lack of portrayal of the ordinary every day experiences that would come with it, as well as I was with the ease with which body shifting creatures always seem to adapt to their new circumstances. I wanted to see more of the reality. I wrote this book because I had briefly introduced and later edited out a music eating demon in another fantasy story of mine, who possessed a girl and made her dance in a tavern until she fainted. I was curious what a story about a similar but gentle creature would be like. I wrote this book because themes of merging and separating your sense of self were relevant to me and I wanted to explore them through a fantastical world but also reality based concepts.

I was so much more nervous about the cover project than I was about actually publishing the story. I had zero experience apart from my personal cover doodles, no graphic design studies, and had only recently started learning Photoshop. Thankfully I'm still pretty happy with the cover, although there are technical details I would do differently. The most glaringly obvious one is the ginormous bar code. It was hard to tell how big it would actually look and my publisher had warned me not to make it too small, so I overdid it. My publisher is small so there are no resources to make test copies of the books, and it's due to the smallness of my publisher that I even had the opportunity to design the cover myself despite having no experience, just some visual skills.

I still like the cover art itself, the only problem which I did suspect back then too, is that in an attempt to make the cover dreamlike, it turned out a bit like children's literature. I was the only one who was worried about it, but in some libraries people have clearly thought this is aimed at 12-year-olds. I'm sure some of them would enjoy this, but it's a bit off. A lot of people have told me not to underestimate children, but it's not that I'm doing that, I'm simply aware that this book is not written in a way nor does it contain themes or life events that are relevant to very young people. It's a very psychological story and its issues are the most relevant to people in their late teens and early twenties. It's not that there's anything in this book that a 12-year-old couldn't handle, it's just going to be boring for most of them because it would be a lot to ask from a child's attention span to be interested in stuff they can't relate to for 400 pages. Even if many 12-year-olds still like to read about characters older than them, characters they can look up to, this book is written with people in mind who can relate to 20-year-olds. Of course there are exceptions. I probably would have loved this book as a 12-year-old. But I'm sure 90% of my peers would not have cared enough to finish it.

The cover seems to have done some of its job well too, because I know some people (adults) bought this book because they thought the cover was pretty, so that's good at least. Most of the feedback I've received has been really positive, the book seems to have found some of the readers it was clearly meant for. Some relevant criticism has also come my way and I believe I've learned some things since writing this book. The only really negative review I came across so far contained so many factual errors that it seemed the reviewer had been too busy to actually process the book. From that perspective it seems like the cover has also worked well enough to draw mostly the intended people towards the book.

The most memorable experience in its publication process was probably how it was chosen for an interview at the biggest national book fair by high school presentation/communication students who hold interviews on one of the stages there every year. It was such a good interview because the two students interviewing me clearly loved the book, related to it, and were excited to talk about it with me, and asked really thoughtful questions. I couldn't imagine a better first interview as an author. It was also the day the book officially came out. It was also my first time at that book fair (I don't often visit the capital) and I was the first author from my publisher to land an interview there, so I was really very nervous at first. I was unfortunately a COVID debut author so this was the only place I was able to present my book physically that year, which obviously affected its already marginal distribution. But it was such a lovely event for me that it is the more memorable for it.

I wish this book would find more readers who love dreamy, character driven and fairytale-esque fantasy. It's not without plot, mystery, or danger, but it's definitely not the best pick for someone who needs an epic, fast paced and world-shaking chain of events from their reading experience. This is for the other sensitive dreamers out there who just love to drown in characters, experiences and subtle magic, and would rather stop to contemplate it than to rush forward at all times.

#eve's books #cover art #unitytöt #finnish books #nysalor #author life

[joyce-stick]

Adachi and Shimamura's Second Season

An essay by Audrey of the joystick system

Revealing and analyzing the plot of Adachi and Shimamura's never-yet-released second season of anime.

TL;DR

Adachi and Shimamura, the yuri light novel series by Hitoma Iruma, is extremely good. The currently serialized manga adaptation by Yuzuhara Moke is also good. The anime is good too, but not finished.

The novels go some rather surprising places, and this essay is about those surprises and how Adachi and Shimamura, quite unexpectedly, proves itself a very unique series quite unlike many others in the yuri genre.

Mainly because it's secretly also science fiction.

Video version:

Text version under the cut. Feel free to watch or read or read along while listening to the video version!

[cohost version]

Future video essay/transcript: Audrey's Best Girls Winter 2023

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Prologue: Triviality & Psychology

Despite not having read a single word that Hitoma Iruma has written, I think I’ve been convinced, with relative certainty, that he’s probably a pretty good writer.

The English versions of his work that we have read, which are written by other people, based on his novels written in Japanese, that we haven’t read, give the impression that his novels are pretty good.

Of course, the specific work we’re here to discuss today is Adachi and Shimamura, but of what little else we’ve read of his work, mainly the first chapter of the Bloom Into You spinoff novels, there’s a consistent focus on introspection and careful characterization and articulation through all sorts of details, both trivial and otherwise.

This may sound arrogant, but I knew early on that I was talented.

When I say “talented,” I mean that I can get results when I work really hard and that I can maintain those results, too. I think I understood the value of those two things much sooner than the other kids.

Thus, I didn’t mind that my after-school schedule was full of lessons. There were ikebana classes, calligraphy school, piano, cram school, and once I was a third year in elementary school, swimming lessons, too. I was considering taking on English speaking classes next. I pretty much took anything available to me. As a kid, I felt lucky that I was even allowed those choices.

Even a child could see that that my house was a respectable one. We had a lacquered gate, a side door for the help on the left side, and many tall trees in our garden. The surrounding walls were tall enough to prevent anyone from peering inside. Our house was bigger than the entirety of the light-green apartment complex across from us. In addition to my parents and I, my grandparents on my father’s side and their two cats lived there. It was quite a lot of space for so few people.

Growing up in that house, I knew I had no choice but to be talented. No one actually said as much, but I knew instinctively that it was true. As long as I kept moving with purpose and produced good results, my parents never seemed upset. What parents wouldn’t be happy to have an exceptional kid?

[Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Vol. 1 by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Jan Cash & Vincent Castaneda

Published in English by Seven Seas in 2020]

The first pages of the Sayaka novels open with Sayaka describing her school curriculum and extracurricular activities, her awareness that she’s a gifted student, and that she’s incredibly committed to being one, so much so that she rarely quits something. She is devoted.

And this characterization informs the rest of the work quite readily, as Sayaka finds herself first annoyed by another girl at her swim practice, who to her, appears not devoted.

Devoted perhaps, not to swimming, but to Sayaka herself. And then her first lesbianic encounter with that same girl results in panic, in her running away, in her quitting.

Quitting for the first time she can remember.

And her quiet surprise when her parents just accept that.

All this is told to us, in prose, in monologue, it’s delicate and psychological and intriguing and it leaves us wanting to know more.

And yet somehow, we read all this, were fascinated, and then our attention span burned down around it and we forgot about it for a year or two.

So, yeah, that happened. And we also forgot about… until one day very recently I, Audrey, decided to wrangle this mess of a brain and have us settle down to read it… Adachi and Shimamura.

Part 1: The Adashima-daptations

1.1 Anime vs Manga vs Light Novel

Most of y’all know Adachi and Shimamura for being an anime. And, that’s fair, I guess, it is an anime after all. But it’s also an adaptation, as most anime are. And specifically an adaptation of a novel, or a series of novels, the first four of them at least.

Those four novels are only the first act of the story. There’s now ten, with at least two more planned, and we’ve read eight of them, and I have opinions. So you’re going to hear them, because someone has to. Unless you don’t want to, and then you can leave, I guess. We are fine with people leaving. Anyway.

Concerning the anime, we have some feelings about it. Our overall opinion is that it’s good. It’s a pretty good anime, it’s a competent adaptation, and we don’t really have a lot of complaints as to its quality in either of those respects.

It’s not a particularly lavish production, nowhere near as technically impressive as Bloom Into You (which is one notable example of “probably about as close as you can get to a KyoAni level work without being from KyoAni”) but it’s pleasantly storyboarded, elegantly scored, and overall perfectly watchable.

It’s good enough to recommend as an entry point into the story (although the Moke manga is the far better adaptation), but woefully insufficient as a substitute for it. Partially for the obvious snag that it ends before the relationship gets going, and there’ll likely never be a second season.

But there’s also some speedbumps that have, somewhat unavoidably, arisen from adapting the story to a visual medium.

1.2 Shimadensity

When the anime aired, the thing I most remember is people being confused as all heck why Shimamura was so… dense.

That is to say, blind. A blind blonde, an unnatural blonde at that, being blind to the obvious homosexual before herself, being extremely homosexual towards her in her presence and drinking mineral water, which, as anyone who’s seen the film Heathers knows, is a universal signifier of homosexuality.

And, well, you see, there is an answer to that. Shimamura is not blind whatsoever.

She knows something is up with Adachi, and it’s not as if she’s not pretty nearly drawn the conclusion that Adachi is attracted to her, but she’s just sort of averted her eyes from it.

She’s decided, albeit somewhat subconsciously, that thinking about Adachi being gay is troublesome. Answering the question of “why Adachi wants to hold my hand, wants to be so close to me,” and all that, isn’t a path she’d like to take, and so she just ignores it.

Shimamura’s gotten through life this way, by not thinking too hard about it. Just going with the flow, letting everyone around her take her wherever, putting up a path of least resistance through life. She finds forming genuine, lasting connections with people difficult, and doesn’t really feel very strongly about most of her peers.

But she also feels that she needs people, anyway, so she masks through it, politely smiles, and lets her relationships just happen, come and go like the waves. This does bother Shimamura, if for no other reason than that she finds it tedious and tiresome, but she just kind of rolls with it anyway.

Meanwhile, Adachi is explicitly an introvert to the extreme, and not in the Bocchi kind of way, where she wants to make friends but can’t; no, Adachi straight-up doesn’t want friends. She finds friendships burdensome, to the point of being soul-crushing.

An anecdote in the novels has Adachi describing how, in elementary school, she made an honest attempt towards being more socially active, but found that each new friend she made felt like another chain on her soul.

But these forced friendships weighed down on me, suppressing my emotions, erasing all my imperfections. Whenever one of them spoke to me, I had to craft a fitting response and keep the conversation going. No part of this was genuine; I just parroted whatever I heard other people saying.

Every time I repeated this process, I grew restless. And every time I gained a new friend, I boxed myself in further, closing off my exits.

But then one day I threw it all in the trash and walked off without them…and that was the day I noticed just how freeing it felt. All I needed was a single breath of fresh air to finally realize that I was meant to live my life alone.

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 4 (Chapter 3: The Moon and Courage) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

Eventually coming to accept that, at least in her view, she was not built for close relationships with other humans.

To put it simply, it’s not a skill issue. She just doesn’t care for the grind.

1.3 They Who Don't Remember Your Name

In middle school, she comes off towards her peers as an ice queen, and there’s this really really interesting chapter- the first chapter, in fact, in the fourth novel, where Adachi is described from the perspective of someone else. An unnamed fellow student, with whom she is delegated to work the school library counter, who tries and fails to form a connection with her.

And this student’s description of Adachi is fascinating. Adachi is described as someone who, in step with her desire to eschew friends, is seen by the student body as seemingly unattainable. And this student is startled, then elated, to have the opportunity to even sit near this person.

But Adachi, unconscious and undesiring of her semi-celebrity status within the school, deflects all attempts to break her shell, and so there this unnamed student stays, stays looking, stays admiring.

And then one day this girl, this unnamed student who we never again hear of, who has no significant characterization to speak of, no importance to this story other than to be a lens through which we see Adachi- happens to run into Adachi once again at the beginning of their high school’s second semester, and takes the opportunity to say

“Thank you.”

For something that Sakura Adachi didn’t know. Didn’t see. Couldn’t feel. Didn’t realize. Something so incorporeal to her, yet so powerful to this one peer of hers, as having been allowed to be in proximity to her, to have a memory of her that none else can claim to have.

And Adachi doesn’t get it, and can’t possibly have it explained, and it’s just… that’s it, really. That’s just that chapter.

It was gut-wrenching to read, because it tapped deeply into a specific desire that’s been stuck within us for a long time, that we’ve previously found it… really hard to articulate without sounding weird, or creepy, or wrong.

The desire to know how we were seen, the impact we’ve made on people we crossed paths with whose names we don’t know, whose faces we’ve forgot, or whose lives just briefly overlapped with ours at one time or another

to know if they’re okay, to know if they even remember us, or, the person who we used to be, whoever that was, to be able to affirm that those connections, however tenuous, were important.

And just like… yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if what I’m saying even makes any sense, but those many little encounters, those small moments that made us who we were

have left us conscious of dozens if not hundreds of possible branches in this life, that could have butterfly effected us somewhere completely different from where we currently are, and we can’t know, and we can’t say

but it’s just it, that basic feeling of I wonder how you’re doing, I wonder how life could have been if we’d followed after you, I wonder if you think about me too.

And that desire to achieve closure, something articulated, actualized, in this unnamed girl saying thank you, and at the same time, saying goodbye. To another Sakura on the wind.

1.4 Adachi Recollection

These events are not adapted in the anime. They are not adapted in either of the manga adaptations.

But there is such significance to this anecdote, such immense weight that is given to this random no-name and her view of Adachi, a story about Adachi to which Adachi herself was nearly entirely oblivious.

But then later in one of the most pivotal moments of Adachi’s character arc when a shady fortune teller convinces her to do something about her friendship with Shimamura before they drift ever further away, and she remembers that girl,

Every now and then, I thought back to this one time in junior high when I worked as a library assistant. There was this girl—I couldn’t remember her name or even what she looked like, but she asked me if I had any friends. At the time, I told her I didn’t, and that I was fine with it…but looking back, I couldn’t help but wonder why she asked me that. Was she going to offer to be my friend?

Even then, my answer would have remained the same. I would have told her I didn’t need any friends. But part of me regretted how that interaction played out. Part of me felt that we should have talked it out first, like actual human beings, instead of me one-sidedly slamming her with rejection.

With that in mind, I didn’t want to add to my list of regrets. I couldn’t keep sticking my head in the sand. No, I was going to take action. And if I ended up regretting that, then so be it.

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 4 (Chapter 3: The Moon and Courage) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

And this is such a hugely emotional payoff. Adachi did remember. That girl did affect her life. Even despite Adachi’s efforts to refuse connections, still, such a trivial interaction still made her who she is, still contributed to altering the course of her life, and that’s just… y’know, like, gosh.

This is so fucking cathartic to think about, y’know? Even if that person you remember, you wish you could have known, isn’t thinking about you, barely remembers you… you still were there. You still did something for them. Even if it was just being there, even if your feelings didn’t reach them right then, even if even if even if.

The fact that you crossed paths with them, alone, is significant.

It’s that affirmation of that fact that I see in this small, insignificant seeming novel-only plot beat, from which I feel so much meaning is exuded, and, why it's a shame it was excluded.. It may have seemed trivial, seemed unimportant, and seemingly that’s why every adaptation adapted this out,

but that triviality is precisely what is so important about it.

I cannot exaggerate enough when I say that I feel something essential is lost by this piece of story being discluded from every other version.

And that’s really the curse of adapting Adashima, in general. There are so many other details of the characters and story, too numerous to list, that the prose takes time to explore and develop and clarify, that would be tedious to elaborate on in an anime or a manga, and are thus cut.

And rightly so, for the sake of telling the story economically in those mediums, but what is lost as a result is the essential psychological depth of this narrative. And yes, it is a psychological narrative. A cerebral one, even.

Yes, it’s true. Adachi and Shimamura is a calmer, gayer, Kaguya-sama.

And that’s why

Shimamura is so

fucking

dense.

And why Adachi and Shimamura, is so, fucking, dense.

Part 2: A (mostly) calmer, gayer Kaguya-sama

2.1 Cold War of Gay Panic

Once you’ve read deep enough into Adashima, there is absolutely no way around it, this is a deeply psychological conflict. The characters’ mental states and attitudes, the things they won’t say, say so much more in this story than anything else. Which is why I think, although the adaptations are pretty good:

The Moke manga adaptation is actually really good, it does a much better job visually illustrating the psychological aspect of the story than the anime does, and, I think, if you’re really allergic to prose but really want to read Adashima, you should read the Moke version.

It’s not a perfect 1 to 1 recreation of the story, no adaptation ever is, but it’s pretty damn up there. Nonetheless, the adaptations are still limited in how far they can go in elevating their versions, and Adachi and Shimamura, the anime, is good.

Just good.

It’s a competent slice-of-life anime and an incomplete romantic drama. And it’s nice to have a visual companion to the story. But as a standalone piece of media, it’s not all that much more. It doesn’t get the time to develop things further, or to get to the things that make Adachi and Shimamura, as a story, something truly unique.

So, I mentioned earlier that Adachi decided she can’t do relationships, of any kind, and you might be thinking, well that sounds like a terrible protagonist for a romance story, and oh gosh you have no idea. Adachi is a total disaster of a human being. And just to drive that point home quite clearly, I want to read this particular quote from volume 5:

Besides Shimamura, the current me had nothing. I was empty.

Were you to peel back my skin, you'd find not flesh and bones, but her. Shimamura.

And yet. And yet. I felt like I might start tearing out my hair soon. Simply allowing my mind to wander caused my eyes to grow wet with tears.

The fantasies I'd indulged in were not based on anything. I knew that. Even so. Even so.

Was it really that wrong, wanting to be rewarded? Wanting your efforts to pay off?

[From Adachi and Shimamura, volume 5, "Shimamura's Sword"

Written by Hitoma Iruma

Translated and published unofficially by sneikkimies]

To be quite exact: This particular bit of text is from the fan translation of Adachi and Shimamura volume 5. I do not know what the original Japanese says. I do not know what emotional connotation the original Japanese carries. The official translation from Seven Seas, meanwhile, rather says:

Outside of Shimamura, I had nothing. Cut me open and I would bleed Shimamura. So how could she do this to me? Every time I let my guard down, tears welled in my eyes. I knew my feelings were one-sided, and yet…was it so wrong to want her to return them?

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 5 (Chapter 4: Shimamura's Blade) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

The official translation is quick, concise, sharp. It cuts thick, as it says, like the slashing of a knife across skin. In this version, Adachi hardly lingers on this emotion, her mind races, her thoughts tear through her.

But in the fan translation, the feeling is mulled over, gradually peeled away, as it says, revealed slowly, with intense deliberation.

The chapter from which this comes, Shimamura’s Sword- or, Shimamura’s Blade in the Seven Seas translation, is perhaps the most psychological chapter contained within the entire series. It is a chapter that, knowing Adachi, you know is coming from the very first few pages, when this illustration of one of the upcoming chapters is shown.

It is Shimamura and Tarumi, her childhood friend who has tried to rekindle their connection after years apart, and Adachi, working a food stand, watching as Shimamura goes out with a girl- a girl who she doesn’t know, a girl who isn’t her.

We knew this was coming from this very moment, and yet, it still smacked, it hurt, when we got to this chapter. Adachi pondering, stewing in this jealousy, after days of depression, as her mental state reaches a boiling point, before erupting straight into the receiver of her cell phone, in the form of her screaming crying voice, transmitted straight to Shimamura’s ears.

Our pulse had steadily begun to quicken as we read this on our own cell phone, our heart in step with Adachi, as she began to speak these words, and we stopped reading, almost too afraid to turn the page.

We did eventually go back to it, of course.

It was not too long after that I realized why this chapter had tripped us up like it did. We saw ourselves in this. No, it’s quite accurate to rather say that we were worse than this.

We too, when we were Adachi’s age, had a crush who saw us as a friend, to whom we had limited access. We too, grew depressed and jealous and angry at being away from them, as a result of us having few other friends and no one else particularly on our mind or in our social life. We too, were bitter about our negative home life.

But we didn’t stop quite at where Adachi stopped, at airing our grievances, at assaulting our crush with our undue anger- no, we made a specific threat.

I won’t be repeating that here, but needless to say, we never followed up on it. It’s been nearly a decade since then, and we haven’t ever not regretted it whenever that memory resurfaces.

While the things we said up to that point, the emotions we aired, were probably not as bad as the things Adachi says here… the threat kind of compensated for that. I’d say, in the end, we were just about as bad as Adachi at her age.

We were not ready for a romantic relationship with anyone, at that age. We probably still aren’t, and personally, I don’t want one. I have doubts that it’ll ever go well. My headmates feel different, but, they’re not talking right now, so…

Anyway. Shimamura is annoyed, doesn’t even follow what the fuck Adachi is on about, hangs up, and Adachi thinks she’s thrown away their friendship.

But then she works up the courage to call Shimamura again, or, perhaps more accurately, lacks the emotional maturity to let it go, and they reconcile.Although weirdly, Shimamura doesn’t seem bothered.

And then, although Shimamura tries to get Adachi to make more friends, it doesn’t really work, one of the most FUCK YOU I’M AUTISTIC AND I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS scenes ever, happens

And then the next volume, Adachi tearfully confesses to Shimamura for a second time after a first time blundering it and passing out while gripping her close in the bath while they’re both wearing swimsuits, gosh that’s also the most fucking hilariously cringe scene, just imagine how embarrassing it must be to pass out from telling your crush how you feel about them, and

THEN Shimamura accepts Adachi’s feelings, and then they are officially girlfriends.

2.2 "Problematic" Yuri

And the whole time I was reading this. The whole damn time, I could not stop thinking. I can fucking see it. The thinkpieces, the ones going, “How Adachi and Shimamura exploits queer teenage girls, by depicting queer teenage girls realistically.”

The twitter threads going, “is Shimamura right, for not taking Adachi’s shit right then, or was she being an asshole, instead of, y’know, it being revealed that her patience has limits but also she later feels like maybe she was a bit too cold and made a mistake…” or like, “is Adachi a womanizer, or a yandere, or a dangerous abusive codependent manipulator”.

Were the arcs of volumes 4 through 8 to be adapted to a second season of anime, there’d be plenty of fuel for opportunistic media criticism weirdos such as ourselves to say… “is Adachi and Shimamura problematic?”

And, no, it’s not. It’s dramatic. This is a psychological romantic drama about a deeply emotional neurodivergent teenage girl who has human flaws. Like, yes, Adachi is jealous and controlling and even a bit mean, and she knows this.

And we’ve seen these articles and twitter threads about Adashima, about Yagakimi and about other queer media in general, floating around, that are just like, is this lesbian relationship between two mentally ill teenagers dangerously codependent or abusive?

We sometimes even floated around to that idea ourselves, reading all the yuri stuff we read- we read a lot of yuri stuff, and, a lot of the time the answer is just, yeah, maybe.

Is that wrong? Is it wrong to depict these things as part of a normal story with stakes and drama? Don’t these people need to have issues in order for the story to have somewhere it can move up from?

There seems to be a subset of the queer leftish internet and hell, pop cultural media criticism internet in general, that just doesn’t want things to happen in narratives

And like, Joyce sort of had this phase herself, in reaction to her breakup last year, where, she wanted to believe that the fact that she was a fan of Love Live was the problem. The fact that Love Live occasionally features shots of teenage girls’ legs, that would’ve been the issue, not that she had a difficult personality or overinflated expectations of her partners.

She just stopped reading yuri for a while, because she just thought, maybe the fact that I was reading yuri stories that just pretend these issues don’t exist, maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe the fact that these stories have male gaze, because they’re targeted at men, is the problem. Maybe I’m actually a man, is the problem. And y’know, this is all just bullshit. This is all just self-directed homophobia as an excuse for happening to be a bit of a fucked up person who is queer.

And that’s really all that is. People don’t criticize straight romance stories for characters having realistic relationship issues. People don’t even criticize straight romance stories for being exploitative or fucked up or weird or anything.

Well, some people do, but y’know. No chance would the average online anime fan be having such takes on like, I don’t know, oregairu. But even the most like, reasoned takes on Yagakimi from very smart people online, have to acknowledge, oh yeah some of these characters check off all the boxes for the “predatory lesbian” trope.

That sentence says everything, doesn’t it? There is a predatory lesbian trope. Is there a “predatory heterosexual” trope? Is there heterosexual shipping bait? We sure could pretend there is one, as a bit, but like, no. The answer’s no.

And like, yes, the depictions of queers as uniquely specifically unhinged and dangerous by straight people is a thing that is a thing because of queerphobia, itself, and maybe it makes us look good or better somehow to paint ourselves as not having awful personalities or issues with relationships so that bigots have less rhetorical ammo against us.

But somehow the more I think about all this the more I think that, maybe, the predatory gay tropes in straight media aren’t just straightforwardly to make queer people look bad, but to make us afraid of ourselves. And to make us afraid of art that depicts us as human beings and not just soft uwu girls.

Maybe the reason was to make us afraid of Adachi.

Anyway. I’m just going to say it. There is no problematic media. Fictional, and especially animated or drawn media, cannot be declared immoral simply on the basis of what it chooses to depict. And it’s high time we stopped deluding ourselves into thinking it can be.

And I know this is all very much an extremely online discourse, and most normal people offline don’t tend to think of media quite that way, but it still pisses us off, y’know? It pisses us off that this stupid problematism bullshit around fictional media had us brain poisoned for like half a fucking decade. So we’re really rather ticked off by that.

…That’s not the point of this essay. Maybe it’ll be the point of another one.

2.3 Drama Lesbian Queens

So, yeah, to sum it up, a lot of yuri things that the average concentration of yuri fans like tend to be free of too much conflict, and quick to gay. And Adachi and Shimamura fulfills the former requirement, most of the time, at least, and especially in all the material adapted by the first season.

Past volume 4, however, things start getting more intense, because, well, Adachi, first of all. Adachi is a whole person. Tarumi is also a whole person, although we don’t get to see too much of her, it seems pretty clear she’s going through her own general turmoil away from the center of the story, and yeah.

Yashiro also. What the hell is with her? Well, it turns out, she actually is an alien, or at the very least her being an alien is a much more plausible explanation than anything else. We’ll get to her in a bit, maybe.

The relationship happens, with Adachi and Shimamura, being girlfriends, and that’s just adorable the way that works out. Shimamura isn’t a hundred percent certain she loves Adachi, but she doesn’t dislike Adachi, she’s certainly not indifferent to Adachi, and she’s open to trying Adachi out, so, she accepts.

Adachi is at first her usual jealous self, taking this as license to be even more aggressive about not wanting Shimamura to speak to or even look at any other girls in the world. Adachi’s literally never had any other relationships, not even with her own mother, so, that just makes sense, she thinks of being together as special itself.

Which prompts Shimamura to try to think of ways to raise Adachi’s bar for things being special, by such things as… making Adachi lunch. Kissing Adachi’s forehead. And that’s where that stays for a little while! The third base of lesbian, homemade lunches and forehead kissing.

And that’s all really cool and satisfying, cause there’s not a lot of yuri stories, hell, not a lot of romance stories, period, that actually depict the work of the relationship. Most yuri just rush to have the girls kissing, and that’s that. It’s a lot of casual fluff, with not a lot of particular focus on how the relationships develop, or anything.

In devoting her time to doting on Adachi, Shimamura neglects Tarumi, and the distance between them widens again. She one night thinks in a dream, ominously, that Adachi, in her quest to have Shimamura all to herself, has ruined Shimamura’s relationships. But Shimamura’s not sure that bothers her.

And Adachi continues to have her personality issues, but, she and Shimamura are both happy for now, and so not too much active drama ensues- just anxiety, just tension, just slow development.

And this continues through volume 7 and 8, but Iruma makes a very interesting creative choice to capture the totality of the narrative. Starting in volume 5, certain alternate contexts for the beginning of Adachi and Shimamura’s relationship are depicted.

In the first chapter of that volume, Adachi and Shimamura first meet as small children in preschool, during which Yashiro introduces the basic concept of an alternate timeline to us readers.

Then in volume 7, we get vignettes where Adachi doesn’t decide to close the distance between herself and Shimamura, and instead continues hiding on the second floor of the gym. Where Adachi and Shimamura never meet in high school, and instead find each other as adults. Where Adachi and Shimamura encounter each other at the end of the world. Where Shimamura is an alien- or perhaps, I should more accurately say, a foreigner from space, whose language Adachi spends years learning just so that they can talk.

And all of this is written from the perspective of Adachi and Shimamura feeling as if this is random chance, a simple coincidence, luck of the draw, the one twist of fate that changed their lives forever.

But then in volume 8, Iruma skips ahead a decade.

2.4 Ending the Second Season

Adachi and Shimamura are now living together, both 27 years old. Is Adachi still clingy and jealous? Less so, apparently, but, it’s not explored fully. How are Hino and Nagafuji- I’m just realizing I’ve barely if at all mentioned them in this entire essay. How’s Tarumi, is she okay? I don’t know.

But regardless, adult Shimamura goes and says hello to Yashiro, the small child-shaped alien who’s taken up an unofficial position as the Shimamura family pet, and Yashiro says something very interesting.

Shimamura and Adachi meeting is not chance whatsoever. It is in fact, destiny. According to Yashiro, anyway.

In every timeline and reality, she says, they are fated to encounter each other- not because they’re special, not because the universe is eyeing them closely or anything, but simply because they are. Because, apparently, reality likes being consistent, or perhaps finds it too exhausting to get particularly creative. Adachi and Shimamura just meet each other because, the code for reality gets copy pasted. Or something.

Yashiro has no answer for this, particularly, other than that it just is, and she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Shimamura doesn’t think too much of it either, and then she and Adachi go off on their overseas vacation and reminisce as a framing device for the rest of the novel, which is about the school trip they went on in their second year.

And, about how Adachi is horny, but, doesn’t know what the hell to do with that. And about their classmates who are grouped up with them for the trip noticing that they’re a same-gender couple, and surprisingly, supporting them! At least, one of them does.

Well, it was surprising to us, and surprising to Shimamura, who expresses in her internal monologue that she was afraid of facing a much less nice reaction after Adachi, in her lack of care for how she’s seen by others, basically outed them.

But it’s also not that surprising, because in the Reiwa era of the yuri genre, it’s pretty normal for there to be more straightforward acceptance of homosexuality and less “just a phase” framing, that there is.

This is a thing that our friend @studentofetherium went into in a tumblr post, well, volunteered to go into it rather, after they mentioned this fact to us and I told them that I was writing this. Also, they take credit for coining the term “reiwa era yuri” so if there’s another term I guess someone might tell us, but otherwise we’re just gonna continue using this one.

So, the school trip happens, things happen on the school trip, and the whole time Shimamura is wondering, do I really love Adachi? Is this relationship going to go okay? Will we have a future together? And when her classmate asks her these things she just… doesn’t really know.

And then, in a twist of an ending to the eighth volume that feels custom fucking made for the hypothetical second season of the anime to end here, Shimamura has an epiphany. As she’s stumbling through the fog that’s emerged around their school trip bus, she realizes that she’s looking through the fog… for Adachi.

Because Shimamura really does love Adachi, really does care about Adachi, want to live with Adachi, and they find each other and meet each other’s eyes and it’s just this entire love magic cinema moment

and then that night they sleep together.

By which I mean, they just sleep. The idea that one or both of them want to have sex is floated, but neither of them are emotionally ready for that. So they just lay down, and they chat about how their future is going to go, how they want to one day go even farther than there- and the last chapter cuts ahead to them, in the future, again, going home from their overseas trip, from whence they've gone farther.

And it’s just like.

Huh. Neat.

Part 3: The Trouble With Life

3.1 The Improbability of Endings

Most yuri, most romance, stories just kind of end at, they dated, they kissed, they’re together now. The end.

Even Bloom Into You, a romance story that we like so much that Yuu Koito literally infected our brain, just gets its two leads together, has them fuck, and has an epilogue going, “yeah, so they got married, they’re fine now.” And it’s not out of a lack of care, or consideration, or laziness, or anything, that so many romance stories end this way, it’s more that human relationships are kind of metal as fuck.

So metal, in fact, that they take years and years and are fickle as hell and, no matter how much work you put into them, will constantly collapse under the slightest pressure, like a run of your favorite roguelike, or some kind of massive long-term jenga tower of social pressures and favors and feelings that you just cannot stabilize.

And this is something Shimamura and Adachi are both very conscious of, that Tarumi is conscious of when she encounters Shimamura again after all those years, that everyone in this story is painfully aware of- human relationships are not built to last. Especially not in a world like this, in an economic system like capitalism that’s seemingly hell bent on tearing us all away from each other at every turn.

Dealing with all that is hard to do within the framework of a traditional narrative. So, a lot of romance stories do end with the couple getting together, because, that’s economical. It’s easy. It’s satisfying. You don’t need to think about it too hard, don’t need to think about how most relationships just kind of fizzle out and fade and everything.

And Adashima does ponder the fragility of relationships so much more than most other romance fiction we’ve read, and it takes its time to try and make the relationship between its leads special, to make it believable that this will last. The fact that Iruma puts so much time and thought and effort into this relationship and its development and strengthening makes it come across, in context, as just a little bit off when the story just

Skips the rest of them.

The reveal that Adachi and Shimamura are literally bound by fate is not handled as cheaply as you might think, or, really, cheaply at all. It doesn’t ruin the story, Shimamura doesn’t really have any regard for it, she’s just kinda like, yeah, well, our relationship happened and it’s fine regardless, I don’t need to understand all the fate stuff.

And its y’know, it’s good. It’s good that it’s working out. But I still have so many questions. Adachi’s personality. Shimamura’s devotion. Is she devoted, I don’t know. She doesn’t seem devoted, so how’s that working out? How’s it going to work out if and when Adachi asks for something that Shimamura can’t or won’t give, and then that’s the point at which the relationship is truly strained?

Tarumi. Do they stay friends? Will Adachi ever meet Tarumi? Will Tarumi be upset that someone else likes Shimamura? How’s Shimamura going to take all that? And everything, and everything else. How are their parents going to take it? It seems that it’s fine in the future, but was there drama, was there difficulty? Or did they just not care that much? I don’t know.

On the one hand, it’s nice to see the future stuff more, it’s nice to see a more thorough exploration of an adult couple’s life in a yuri story than we’ve previously really gotten. We all want that sequel to Bloom Into You. Cause it’d be nice to capture that experience in an art piece.

But the way it’s paced, well, it feels disappointing because I don’t really like the way that it kind of arbitrarily makes the story end, before it, keeps going, but also I can’t really criticize it for that because, well, I can’t think of a particularly better solution. I know we all want answers to these questions, we all want to see more of this, and Iruma would probably like to write more of it, but they have other things they want to write and unfortunately aren’t immortal.

In the eighth of Iruma’s afterwards, which consistently fail to convince us that they are not writing their autobiography here, it is explained that volume 8’s flash forward to the future is the ending. Or at least, an ending. You could say, a contingency, so that if Iruma stops writing the novels prematurely, then there will have been an ending.

There’s currently eleven total volumes, and there’s going to be two more, or so says Iruma, with the eleventh one having come out while we were working on this essay. So, yeah, that’s the reason why this feels so weird, so much like a forced ending to the series at the expense of the larger plot’s pacing. Because this one person can’t spend their entire life writing the life of a fictional cast of characters.

And that’s just the tragedy of our finite lives, isn’t it, that we can’t spend all our lives chilling out, eating food, and making art. Hopefully one day someone’ll have that figured out. But in the meantime.

Reading this, and considering both the conclusive way with which volume 8 ended, as well as the fact that there was a change in illustrators starting with volume 9, and the thought that this would be the ending of the hypothetical second season of the anime… Which is our own original thought, I should clarify. We decided it’d make the most sense to treat it as a clean break in the story, and read volume 9… later.

After reading… the Anime Special Novel. Which is also quite interesting, for some different reasons!

3.2 The Time Lord Cat

Just in case you’ve never heard of this before, I probably need to explain what the hell it is. So, when Adachi and Shimamura, the anime, got a blu-ray release, the publishers wanted to include some incentives for buying the thing even if you’d already seen the anime on TV or wherever.

As such, they asked Iruma to write them something to include as a bonus. And so, four new light novel chapter-sized pieces of writing from Iruma were distributed in the first runs of each of the four blu-ray volumes. And these stories, which, otherwise have seen no official release, got translated into English by the same people doing the fan translations of the main novels.

So it might be more accurate, technically, to describe these as four different discrete novels, but that’s a huge linguistic nuisance. It’s four chapters, that’s only about a chapter or two smaller than the average light novel, so I’m just gonna describe it as a four-chapter novel, because it basically is one. Anyway. The Anime Special Novel is about Yashiro, and how she is an immortal cat.

Did I already explain who Yashiro is? I don’t know. Anyway, Yashiro is best explained as an alien and corollary to Shinobu Oshino, anime’s other mildly famous non-human immortal child, who one day waltzes into town and sweet talks all the humans into giving her food. And we say, “Wait, an alien, really?”

While the anime provides no real answer, the novels eventually get around to clarifying, “Yes, an alien. Really.”

Yashiro is most definitely not a human, and not a documented Earth species, so she’s probably an alien. Her pockets are bigger on the inside. She can read minds. She barely ages after ten, seventy, and then thousands of years. She can apparently time and space travel all by her lonesome, and she loves humans and apparently favors spending time with them far more than her own species, who she is ignoring. She can fold to comfortably fit into spaces smaller than herself.

Therefore, Yashiro is indisputably a Time Lord. Or, Time Lady, Time Maiden. Whatever.

Taken in context, the most questionable claim Yashiro makes is that she is 680 years old. It is later shown that she is terrible at keeping track of the time, so much so that later, she views the difference in time between three thousand years or thirty thousand, as something trivial, that it doesn’t matter if she flubs up a bit. She’s just like that.

Yashiro is an extremely interesting character, who, very curiously, perceives herself as the least interesting thing in the entire world. She claims to have come to Earth for a rendezvous with her fellow aliens, but she never treats this task with any degree of urgency.

While she’s never specific about the details of this plan, my guess is that she, like Adachi and Shimamura, only decided she wanted a piece of their slice of life because she was playing hooky. At least that’s how I’d prefer to think of it. The idea has thematic resonance, so as far as I’m concerned, that’s canon. But the other thing is that, unlike Adachi, Shimamura, and basically every other human in this story, Yashiro has only one emotion.

She is happy all the time.

Yashiro is never bothered by anything, whatsoever. She always has what she wants, and she’s never bothered by not getting what she wants- if she doesn’t make her goal, she moves the goalpost. Yashiro does not seem to have any worldly concerns whatsoever; she eats all the time, not out of an apparent need to sate hunger, but rather for the simple pleasure of doing so.

She doesn’t face much opposition, either, she’s such a cute child that everyone just wants to pet and feed and pamper her, and Shimamura’s family takes no issue with her just chilling at their house for ten years. The only thing Yashiro is ever described as not liking is baths, and even then she’s never really angry about being made to take one. In her internal monologue, Shimamura consistently describes Yashiro as being like a cat.

And she really is, isn’t she? She eats and sleeps all day, she doesn’t like water, and she is happily accepted as a freeloader for years in the homes of human strangers. And that’s just normal, even though Yashiro… is… well, humanoid, at the very least.

But the bizarre factor of Yashiro’s character is increased exponentially when Iruma takes her out of Adachi and Shimamura, and plops her right into Girls’ Last Tour.

3.3 Yashiro's Last Tour

Girls’ Last Tour, if you aren’t aware, is an anime (AND MANGA) about Girls on their Last Tour. It’s a survival kirara where moe blobs have a picnic in a dying world full of remnants of a fallen civilization. It’s all moody and pensive and about small girls who do not seem particularly bothered by the inevitably of their death. One of them is into vore.

Relevant here is that one of these two moe blobs is named Chito. And, coincidentally, the protagonist of the Adachi and Shimamura Anime Special Novel, who is also touring a dying world full of remnants of a fallen civilization, is also named Chito.

Did Iruma do this on purpose? Probably not, but there’s an excuse to recommend Girls’ Last Tour without needing to make a video about it. Go watch it. Uh, probably go read it too. We haven’t read it, but it’s probably really good. Both forms. It’s great.

Anyway, Chito Number Two is also hanging around Yashiro on another planet, not Earth, which we’ve never seen before, that at some point was colonized by Chito’s ancestors, but then it turned out that the planet sucked at sustaining crops and so everyone fell ill and/or starved, and unfortunately died.

Which sucks.

So, Chito is just wandering this basically dead civilization, aware she could be the last human alive for all she knows, but not really caring much. Yashiro is here, accompanying Chito and chatting her up, because she finds it fun I guess. She doesn’t really seem to care very much about the whole humanity dead thing, but she’s very eager to tell Chito this one story she has about these two very nice girls who gave her a lot of snacks to eat some thousands of years prior.

Yashiro tells four separate stories to Chito, which are each set at different points in Adachi and Shimamura’s adult lives together. All the typical things, really. Going shopping, going on onsen dates, kissing- well, no, they don’t directly kiss, but Shimamura does reminisce about their first bloody kiss. And also, Shimamura dying.

Yes, Yashiro confirms, in canon, that Adachi and Shimamura died. But she’s not particularly bothered by it. She’s just as cheery as ever. It’s not like she’s happy about them being dead, but she’s not especially sad, either- no more troubled than she’d be if Shimamura refused to give her candy.

And common sense, common familiarity with tropes about immortal people, says this should be existentially terrifying, shouldn’t it. A living creature that is only ever happy, that never dies or grows old or grieves. This is the basic setup for some lovecraftian horror story or another, or several, isn’t it?

And it is, on a basic level, kind of unsettling to see Yashiro just… not being bothered by living thousands of years, by the people around her dying, and just remaining a child forever, but… It’s not really, is it? Look at her! She’s too cute to be scared of. She’s a human shaped cat! Isn’t it adorable?

Humans typically live longer than cats, I know. But if a cat lived longer than humans, do you think it would give a fuck?

One of the most interesting parts of Adachi and Shimamura is the middle part of volume 6, where, as I think I already said, it’s revealed that up till now, the love of little Hougetsu Shimamura’s life has been not a girl, not even a human, but the other Shimamura family pet.

The dog that lives at her grandparents’ house, Gon. Gon was Hougetsu’s best friend, Hougetsu’s only true friend, the only living creature she ever loved, and for a time, the only reason Hougetsu wanted to come back.

And it’s only just now that Shimamura is really realizing just how strange this is, though, she’s come to accept that she’s really rather strange, that she doesn’t particularly care. And now, she’s coming back for the yearly Obon visit to her grandparents’ house, to see Gon for what is probably the last time.

This dog, who was once young and spry, once quite literally bounced up and down at the sight of little Hougetsu, has now grown old and frail, barely able to walk. This dog, who Shimamura loves more than her own mother, is dying, and Shimamura finds this prospect… What’s the word? Disquieting, perhaps. Disquieting.

Shimamura is disquiet with thoughts of age, thoughts of love, thoughts of death. As she still finds herself puzzled over what Adachi’s feelings are, what Adachi wants out of her, knowing what Adachi wants but not really able to admit it to herself, wondering about her own life, about if she’ll have companions in her future, about if it’ll suck, and it’s just…

I don’t know. Shimamura thinks about a lot, and I don’t have words for a lot of it. The main thing I remember is her speaking to the odd old man who’s her grandparents’ next door neighbor, and it being firstly really funny because he just is walking around with a teacup that his granddaughter made and bragging about how great of a potter she is. Just because he can. Just because he’s a weird old guy, and people will let weird old people get away with these things, and he can.

And he gives Shimamura a fishing rod, as such, so he says, because he can.

Yeah, so just to repeat what I said, Shimamura runs into this weird old dude on a family trip, he says, “hey, my daughter’s real damn good at pottery and that’s why I’m toting her special teacup around, how about you go fishing with this fishing rod,” refuses to elaborate further, leaves. And that’s just great.

Well, he does elaborate a little further before he leaves, says she should enjoy her childhood while she can, and then gives her some fishing advice, I guess. And that’s all very nice of him.

And then Gon shows up, walking all slow like he does, and Shimamura asks the old man,

“Is it tough growing old?”

His answer wasn’t going to affect anything. Things were going to continue the same way as they always had. And yet, despite all of that, I just couldn’t help but ask.

Mumbling to himself, the man shook his head slightly. His turban shook as well.

“I see. So, your questions too have a hint of philosophy to them, huh? I guess that only makes sense, given your name and all.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean…”I hadn’t meant to grumble that out loud. No, it was simply my instinctual reaction to the situation; if I had to call anything here philosophical, it would be his needlessly obtuse answer.

“It’s not tough for me, no. Why? Well, I got this teacup from my granddaughter, that’s why. Haha. Does that answer your question?”

You could see the man’s eyes sparkle as he said that.

“Hmm, I guess.”

It really didn’t. Apparently, I’d picked the wrong person to ask.

[From Adachi and Shimamura, volume 6, "Home Town Dog"

Written by Hitoma Iruma

Translated and published unofficially by sneikkimies]

And that’s just sort of… mellow, and funny, and surprisingly sage. Well, maybe not that surprising. I don’t know. It’s just an entire moment. It’s also a little surprising, just a teensy little bit, because...

This is a kirara, isn’t it? This kind of story doesn’t usually go there. Like, according to Iruma, the editor’s prompt that resulted in Adashima was “write something like Yuru Yuri,” and Yuru Yuri is a stupid and silly nonsense comedy about immortal lesbians violently assaulting each other both physically and sexually, which is really funny, because they’re literally a bunch of gay Looney Tunes.

Or maybe that’s just the anime, I don’t know, I guess the manga might be different, but even still, the manga’s never aged these characters a single day as far as I can see. Really the only kirara I know of (other than Girls' Last Tour) that addresses the fact of the cute girls eventually dying is School-Live, but like, that’s an edgy one isn’t it? It’s literally set in a zombie apocalypse. It’s not exactly subtle.

You don’t really want to think about, say, the keions getting older and dying, do you? I mean, maybe you do, and if you do you’re probably a little weird, and that’s fine. So like, this is just kind of… I don’t want to say weird, because in the context of the story, it isn’t.

But I’m quite sure that people who’ve only seen the first season of the anime aren’t really expecting this, y’know? It’s certainly a place to have gone, and be going.

It’s so comical, so caustic, so casually morbid, to see the cast of Adachi and Shimamura reflect on their life, their future, their love and their relationships and their families and drifting apart from their friends and peers as the rivers of life all take them all the different places they’re going to, towards their eventual deaths, and all these very difficult human things to be thinking about, and Yashiro just… is happily prancing around eating donuts.

But it’s also not… that weird, really. Although Yashiro is so transfixingly childlike as she is, she’s also so pure and straightforward and earnest as any sentient creature can plausibly get. Although she doesn’t share in the complicated feelings of the humans around her, she’s never unsympathetic to their emotions, and to their needs. She’s always happy and childish, but she never forces that on people- she just accepts people as they are, and she does her best to do right by people.

Which is unsettling, not because it’s undesirable, exactly, but rather because it’s impossible. But if it were possible, and, hey, maybe it is possible for Yashiro, a non-human, to be emotionally stable and pleasant and good, but it’s not possible for us humans all the time to be that way, just the same as it’s not possible to live immortal and ageless as Yashiro does…

…

I guess the conclusion that I just came to is that Yashiro IS the part that’s like Yuru Yuri! Yashiro is the immortal gay looney toon! But given new meaning by being placed in a world of actual people dealing with gross human problems like jealousy and unfulfilled desires for affection and burgeoning sexuality and age and work and family and death!

And Yashiro is, Yashiro is just great! Um. She’s a great child, and a great cat. Like, probably the best cat! Okay, and now I have to explain why she’s the best cat.

Final Part: The Lesbians of All Time

So, the last story. In the second chapter of the Anime Special Novel, Chito and Yashiro run into another girl- a girl named Shima, described as having black hair and feeling like Chito already knows her, and then you turn the page and THERE’S THE ADACHI CHIBI THERE IT IS THERE’S ADACHI

and they keep exploring the desolate deserted planet and then in the fourth and final chapter, Shimamura dies.

The story that Yashiro has to tell. Is about Shimamura. And told to us from the point of view of Hougetsu Shimamura, age 85 ish, who describes her relationship dynamic with Yashiro as having gone from little sister to daughter to grandchild on account of Yashiro still not having aged a single day after all these years.

And up till this point, knowing that Shimamura was already dead in the future, I’d been thinking, oh gosh, oh fuck, it’s gonna absolutely SUCK if Shimamura dies first and then Adachi is all alone and miserably depressed for the rest of her life- and thankfully that doesn’t happen.

No, it’s Shimamura who is all alone, and literally everyone else who is dead. Adachi, Hino, Nagafuji, Tarumi, Shimamura’s little sister, everyone she knew is dead now. And Shimamura, now, too, is also dying, of old age.

Shimamura thinks she might be seeing Adachi’s ghost, because she’s evidently gone and introjected Adachi after Adachi’s death, but she’s also not quite sure about that whatsoever, and she’s just tired and lonely and reflecting on all her life up to this point and how fondly she remembers her high school years with Adachi and her only other thought is

Damn. All my friends are dead, and being old is boring.

To relieve her boredom, Shimamura takes her sister’s games console, which, no longer works with modern TVs, because it’s the future, so she goes out to an electronics store and gets an adapter. Also, because it’s the future, there’s been alien visitations and humanity is looking into space traveling more. But Shimamura’s been born too soon to care.

So she goes back to her home, boots up a JRPG on her sister’s old games console and makes a party of characters which she names after Adachi, Hino, Nagafuji, Tarumi, and her sister, and then finds out that video games are good. So Shimamura decides that her life’s goal, for the rest of her life, is going to be to finish Dragon Quest.

Does she finish it? Who knows. No idea. The story ends.

But before Shimamura dies, she asks Yashiro, her immortal alien child house cat, if she will ever see Adachi again.

Yashiro says yes. She will. For it is destiny.

And Shimamura’s dying request of Yashiro, is for Yashiro to make absolutely sure that every Shimamura across the universe finds their Adachi.

Yashiro promises earnestly.

And thus, here, in the present of the future of the end of humanity in a dying civilization Yashiro looks at the two last known living humans on this planet, says, “My job here is done!” And then shortly thereafter fucks off, assured in the knowledge that she’s fulfilled her promise to Shimamura:

Play matchmaker for her most recent reincarnation and her destined wifey.

So, yeah, that’s what happens. It might be just about a wrap on humanity, or at least this particular humanity, but The Lesbians of All Time are still gay.

There’s several Things About this particular chapter.

One, it’s, unintentionally, a particularly stark distillation of the classical American millennial slash zoomer fantasy of having the economic security to retire at an appropriate age and spend your last years in dignity, after a good life of living well with a good partner who you were happy with (or, multiple or no partners, if that’s your preference), and then dying peacefully of old age playing video games.

Yeah, uh, oof.

Two, it’s a particularly stark distillation of the perhaps not as common but particularly appealing fantasy of being assured that you and your partner will reincarnate and get together again, by your cat, who promises to make extra sure that that comes to pass all throughout every time and place and timeline. Because your cat likes you, and is a Time Lord!

Yashiro is good!

And three, um, yeah, it’d be really nice to know that you’re going to reincarnate with your soul mate. Like, that’s just convenient. For some people. I’m sure.

Okay, so, anyway, do I have anything to say about this story? Yeah, I probably do, probably a lot. But I don’t know if I can coherently say very much of it without repeating a lot of what I already said. It’s melancholy as all hell and it’s also just not something I expected at all from this series when we started reading it. Iruma even reflects on that fact directly in their afterward, saying,

“Anyway, yeah. That's the sort of story this became.

Death approaches!”

Heh. I guess it does. I guess it does.

There’s a lot else I feel I have to comment on. If I had infinite time, I’d also add on analyses and comparisons of the two Adachi and Shimamura manga adaptations. I’d read volumes 9 and 10 before finishing this video, and talk about my feelings on however Tarumi’s arc gets resolved- if it gets resolved. I barely even began to discuss or analyze Hino and Nagafuji’s relationship and their additional flavoring of the story as a side couple. And did my tangent on Adachi’s jealousy really go anywhere, did I have an answer? Well, no, but the volumes that I read up to didn’t really have an answer, either. Do I want to try to pretentiously psychoanalyze Iruma and his writing more based on the incomplete information I have from these English translations?

There’s another series, also, Iruma’s apparent debut series, where a girl and a boy who fall in love have childhood trauma about being kidnapped a long time ago and are being retraumatized by a serial killing incident in a small town and that has some HELLA TAGS on the site’s it’s listed at- does this psychological horror crime fiction have some connection to Adachi sometimes thinking a teensy bit like a serial killer? Is the electric child in Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl, another thing I haven’t watched nor read, a proto-Yashiro? Is Yashiro really a corollary to Shinobu? Did the Saeki Sayaka novels contain secret Adashima foreshadowing? Did Iruma say something super interesting in an interview somewhere that someone translated on Twitter maybe? Can I get answers to any of these questions without knowing how to speak Japanese?

Are we just going to have to learn Japanese and read all the rest of the things Iruma has written ourselves?!

And this has now just about broken ten thousand words, and I cannot answer any of those questions just yet. So, much like Iruma and Adashima volume 8, I’m going to arbitrarily force an ending to my unfinished work despite these loose ends and hope it’s good enough in case we never get around to writing a sequel.

In lieu of a better wrap-up, I guess I can just say, and as such,

ANIME GIRLS CAN DIE TOO.

The end.

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[smhalltheurlsaretaken]

A few weeks ago you made a post about bastardisations of Christian faith in popular media (eg supernatural good omens etc etc) and I was wondering if there are any tv show/films that you know of/would recommend that include biblical figures and/or Christian theology in a manner that is respectful?

Heh, that's a hard one. Non-christian stuff with biblical themes/characters tend to be... yknow, blasphemous, and Christian/biblical movies and tv shows tend to absolutely, completely, deeply suck xD The few exceptions are Prince of Egypt and Joseph King of Dreams, which are absolute must see masterpieces, and I'd recommend Season 1 of The Chosen (but nothing after if you want good theology/historicity :/) The Passion of the Christ is a bit ~heh on the theological side, and pretty gory, but it's kind of too big not to mention. I hear Ben Hur is really good but I've never actually watched it. Another GREAT movie I can recommend is Paul, Apostle of Christ (which about Paul's last days in Rome before his execution + the persecution of the early church by Nero).

For more secular pop media, def watch:

Samurai Champloo anime exploring Japanese history and culture through three unlikely allies' long journey accross a somewhat anachronistic Edo era Japan; it takes a while for the Christian aspects to show up but they explicitly do and it's really good)

Narnia the books - the movies not so much. anyway, Aslan is Jesus and all that.

Les Miserables and especially its manga adaptation by Takahiro Arai. the theology is not so overt, but the manga very deliberately touches upon new birth and it's incredibly moving. dunno how far along the english fanlations are but Valjean and Miriel's encounter is all translated. As for the book itself, Hugo's faith is a complicated matter, but it still underlines a lot of the plot and themes

Scrubs not a whole lot of Christian/biblical stuff, it's just a good fun medical show, but there are a few explicitly Christian characters and two or three episodes that really get into it; off the top of my head, 1x11, 5x5 and 6x14/6x15

SoeurThérèse.com a french detective tv show where the main character, Sister Therese, formerly Juliette, is an ex-cop nun who still helps out with cases. it's sweet

Hacksaw Ridge EXTREMELY violent and bloody movie, true story of a conscientious objector who enlisted during WWII as a medic, to save rather than to kill, on the basis of his Christian faith

Pilgrim's Progress has some good adaptations iirc (it's a 1678 allegorical novel about the life journey of a Christian, but today it reads a lot like epic fantasy). It's been adapted A LOT though so take your pick

I'm coming up kind of short because I don't watch a lot of shows/movies, I'm more of a 'deeply invested in one franchise' type of person ah ah.

#ask #starlightandsunshine #movie rec #tv shows rec

[strandnreyes]

jen, i've been trying to think of something super unhinged for nice ask week and i haven't been able to think of anything. so here's my shit excuse for nice ask week and sorry that you might have to look some of these up. please rank these fictional vampires in order from least want to befriend to most want to befriend AND ALSO from not-est to hottest (others opinions are welcome - this is MY ask, MY rules - just kidding pls post this jen, i worked so hard on it):

1. count dracula, dracula (specifically, the 1992 adaptation of the novel in which gary oldman - admittedly, my older gentleman crush - plays dracula)

2. stefan salvatore, the vampire diaries

3. damon salvatore, the vampire diaries (had to ask for both brothers, come on)

4. laurent, twilight (u know i think he is a lil something something)

5. daddy cullen i mean carlisle cullen, twilight

6. dakota fanning looking extremely slay, twilight

7. spike, buffy the vampire slayer

8. count von count, seasame street

9. eric northman, true blood

10. bella swan, vampiric edition, twilight

11. blade, blade

12. me.

THANK YOU FOR COMING

hello, lola. first let me start by saying here is a different vampire ranking without a definition of best, just vibes (you create one vampire au and suddenly this is your whole life). I am not rereading it though, so no promises that I'm not about to contradict myself

I appreciate how hard you worked on asking this, so I hope you appreciate how hard I worked on answering it

Least want to befriend to most want to befriend:

damon - he seems like a walking red flag, he really does

2. dakota fanning - I respect a girlboss but I do think she would kill me after one wrong move. would constantly have a tummy ache, stressed to the max.

3. spike - I have never seen buffy, but google tells me he was a villain. have to play it safe here

4. bella - I'm so sorry bella but I think you would annoy me

5. blade - I really tried looking him up to give an honest friend ranking, but there were so many version?? is it a comic? a movie? a tv show? idk I got confused therefore he defaults to the middle of the list

6. laurent - one of the nicer members of his little posse (unlike that bitch james). might try to kill me but a good sob story would probably get me out of it

7. count dracula - i just read his backstory. that's so tragic, I think he could use a friend

8. carlisle - turning a bunch of teenagers into vampires when they were on their death bed is a little odd, but he had good intentions. and now look at the house he provides for them like I'll move in no questions asked

9. stefan - admittedly have only seen a few seasons of tvd, but he seems to have some kind of morals so that's always a good place to start for a friendship

10. eric - "calculating yet loyal and generally willing to absolve those that aggravate him, unless they have grievously crossed him. However, he is fiercely vindictive towards anyone who harms or threatens those he loves". thank you, trueblood.fandom.com. If I'm befriending all of these vampires, making him a top priority seems like a good choice

11. count von count - he has a cat. I'm using him and abusing our friendship for that. sorry count

12. lola - who shouldn't (?) be on this list (unless you have a secret to tell)

okay hotness below the cut because this is already too long

Least hot to most hot

1. dakota fanning (jane) - default to last because she is a child lmao

2. count von count - he is a cartoon (puppet? I don't know). I feel like there is only one right answer here and it is to put him in the second least hot position (unless that's your thing. you do you)

3. damon - this man creeps me out. I don't know if it's the eyes or what but again, bad vibes. stay away from her (elena), old man!

4. count dracula - willy wonka looking vampire. sorry to your older gentleman crush. you can keep him

5. eric northman - I do not know this man but he is giving 'just some guy' with a little bit of finance bro

6. bella - one too many awkward smiles while tucks her hair behind her ear moments, you know?

7. spike - cheek bones are cheek boning. some may say too much though. hair is giving 90s boy band. although for his time I can excuse it

8. carlisle cullen - not the biggest dilf in twilight, but an important one

9. laurent - unfortunate that you didn't pick the picture where he rolls up with his jacket undone and no shirt underneath. what an entrance. he also gets hotness points because laurent is a very good vampire name

10. stefan salvatore - the objectively better brother based on my limited knowledge. good picture. love a henley moment. look at those forearms.

11. blade - I don't know this man, but I would like to.

*you can't be ranked on the hotness scale because you did not provide a picture. sorry ;)

#ask