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#they’re like yin and yang basically

huiyi07 · 9 days

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hey so do you guys ever think about how often Diluc is referred to as the ‘uncrowned king of Mondstadt’ since he’s like the only male heir to the noble families and like it or not, where Jean is the authority of the nation, he’s pretty much the symbolic face of Mondstadt and the values the nation projects— and despite his temperament, Diluc has learned to embrace it wholeheartedly. He’s charismatic, extremely righteous, and he blazes bright and gives the people of Mondstadt a fire that guides them in the dark, quite literally. Like he’s literally Bruce Wayne lmao

But he doesn’t want this, no, and here’s the proof- maybe he did, once upon a time, before everything happened— but he doesn’t really care about wine, he only cares about the winery because of the people in it and his father. He’s righteous but doesn’t give a damn about the rules and the knights of favonius. After what happened to him, he’s clearly a rebel at heart now, not some charming superhero who does everything expected of him, unlike before. In summary, Diluc was someone who was quite literally ready to become an (uncrowned) prince, pretty much royalty in every way except title- and on surface level, he still is, but he throws that mantle away in secret whenever he can.

And then look at Kaeya, his brother who’s always lived in his shadow. It’s easy to see that now, people don’t really project Mondstadt’s values onto Kaeya the same way they do onto Diluc, since lots of people hardly even remember that they’re brothers. And yeah people still think kaeya is reliable and nice, but also because of how Kaeya built his image after Diluc left— an excessively over the top personality that pretends to be sadistic, mean, and at the same time dripping with false charm. So despite that people still find him approachable and nice as expected of a knight, hardly anyone would call him befitting of a prince.

But Kaeya is actually so painfully and authentically ‘princely’ and kind, deep down— the way he deals with children, his fierce loyalty and willingness to protect people at all costs, his self sacrificial tendencies that most often appear for Diluc’s sake. Even the tidbits of lore we get about him scream aristocracy- his ‘ceremonial’ bladework, Alberich family secrets that reveal just how central they are to the kingdom of khaenriah. This is kinda obvious to any player who’s bothered to learn anything about kaeya, but to the characters in game, there are very few that know that side of him.

And whereas Diluc is forcibly projected the title of royalty and secretly rejects it, Kaeya was actually born into it- his family is very important to Khaenriah, and much like how he does with anything related to his past and heritage, he loudly and outwardly rejects it. Diluc outwardly rejects what Kaeya shows (a darker, more ‘means justify the end’ nature), and Kaeya tries to hide what Diluc projects (a sophisticated and kind upbringing).

Honestly? It’s as if they were swapped at birth. Kaeya’s real hidden nature, even after everything that happened to him, remains to be so unwavering and people-oriented, while Diluc’s true personality changed drastically over time. Not that Diluc isn’t unwavering or whatever, but Diluc mostly actively rejects relationships and prefers to do everything alone, obsessed with the idea that he doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, whereas Kaeya always, always yearns for companionship and for people to be by his side- solidarity.

Diluc is the poster image of royalty, but his brother who hides in the shadows is a real king. They complete each other, balance each other out, represent the parts that the other hides. I don’t know if hoyoverse always meant them to be that way, but damn they basically represent each other’s parts of themselves that they lost. Yin and Yang, two halves of the same whole.

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358jours · 1 year

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Yanqing x GN!Reader⎢But I’m so ‘eepy

Word Count⎢1300

Genre/Tags⎢SFW, fluff, Reader is a big introvert and is sleep deprived, shopping dates, PDA, written and posted before game launch⎢Crossposted on AO3

You stifle another yawn as Yanqing drags you around. You’re holding hands, fingers laced together. He walks ahead of you, loud joy in his steps. He’s almost always sporting a smile in public, but the happiness radiating off of him right now is something else. He forced you out of your room today, and though you love his presence, your social battery can only last so long. At this point, you’re practically dead weight he’s carrying on his own.

Yanqing is an energetic young man, extroverted, optimistic, though perhaps a bit naive. He enjoys anything that has to do with swords the most such as taking care of them, training, competitions. He’s also a big spender on his hobbies, always ending up begging his father –or even you– to finance his basic needs. Many people are aware of who he is due to all that, and also the fact he’s the lieutenant.

You are the opposite. An introverted soul, sleep deprived, fond of staying inside. You tend to stay up far too late into the night, kept up by good video games, and bad decisions. “I can still play, like, fifteen minutes more”, cue three am beeping on your alarm clock after hours passed unnoticed. You could count on one hand those aware of who you are too. First General Jing Yuan, the leader of the Luofu himself, then an unnamed accountant, whose existence only matters for a single reason (your pay), and Yanqing himself. Perhaps Marshal Hua might count as well as she knows about everything, but you never met her personally.

Yanqing is the only person able to drag you out of your room for more than an hour, and the only person able to drag you out outside at all. Perhaps ‘drag you out’ is too strong a word as you always consent to going out with him, but your mood is a bit sour from your dead social battery and the fatigue in your body. As far as you’re aware, everyone on the Luofu market street has dubbed you “Yanqing’s sleepy partner” (You can’t really blame them, it would be quite awkward to ask “so what’s your name?” while your self-proclaimed knight in shining armor is right by your side). You have a very “cat and dog” personality contrast that makes people laugh, opposites attract or so they say.

Yanqing pulls you forward amidst the crowd. “Finally, we’ve arrived at the Artisanship Commission!”

You take a moment to take in the sight. The sun is high, barely two in the afternoon, and illuminates the red city radiantly, this shop as well. The view is beautiful, yes, but honestly your mind is so jaded, it’s hard to grasp reality. Hopefully this is the last stop for today, Aeons know you won’t survive if you don’t get your afternoon nap. You hear Yanqing's voice and– oh he’s talking to a vendor, nevermind. They seem to know each other, by the way they laugh at least.

You look over to the swords on display. They’re all impressive, a vast range of different colors and sizes. The one you like best is mainly clear blue and has a yin-yang on its guard, it looks pretty though perhaps a bit heavy for Yanqing? The second one is thinner, it’s mainly black with white and blue accents. It would look good in his hands. The one beside it is ew full-gold yellow, and though the color is less than attractive, the details forged on it are stunning.

You don’t notice the vendor handing Yanqing a sword. He lifts the hand you’re holding, and looks at you curiously. You let go sheepishly to which he only smiles. The vendor giggles. Ah, embarrassing.

You space out once more while Yanqing listens with grand attention to the explanations about the ki-controlled attacks the sword can perform. You’re kind of staring at him as he tests the sword through different movements, touching the blade with the tip of his finger. It looks alright, but the swords on display are prettier. He hands it back, the vendor leaves for a moment, and comes back with another. The same happens, and again, and again, and you feel your legs more and more. Trying not to yawn becomes harder and harder.

Your interest is peaked when the vendor brings him the sword with the yin-yang guard. They talk about the features again, he moves it a bit. He hums, does bigger movements, it seems he likes this one too. You rest your head against his shoulder “I like this one.”

He shifts his head slightly. “Really?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty and it goes well with your outfit. You should take a dark gray scabbard to go with it.”

Yanqing hums. He looks at the sword one last time before handing it back. “Alright, I’ll take two, and two dark gray scabbards.”

The vendor looks very surprised, but happily obliges. They shuffle, occupied in preparing his purchases. Your partner sports a smile on his face, his happiness showing through his proud stance. You don’t fight your yawn this time, and close your eyes. You open them soon after at the sound of a pathetic whine and your name however. Yanqing’s face is contorted in dread. You’re a bit confused about what is wrong, your mind foggy— oh.

His wallet is completely empty.

You laugh loudly, which makes him even more embarrassed. “Hey, come on! How am I supposed to pay now? And I already said I was taking it home too…” But it only worsens your fit. You grip onto his arm to not fall. The vendor comes back, and Yanqing hastily hides the hollow pouch. He looks at the vendor worriedly as you continue laughing against him.

“You two are adorable together. Mind repeating your joke?” The vendor smiles at you both.

“Yeah, thank you. Uh.” Yanqing let out an embarrassed laugh as he scratched the back of his neck.

You recover enough to hand your credit card to the vendor. “He forgot his money at home.” Yanqing stutters as the vendor snorts. You’re handed back your card, and your partner receives his new swords. He carries them with his left arm while his right hand is occupied, as he refuses not to hold hands with you whenever you are out.

You walk together for a bit, saying nothing. He’s not dragging you everywhere like before anymore, thankfully. The sun is still high, but at least forty minutes have passed, if not more. Yanqing is the first to break the silence, “You should name it, the sword. But it’s important so you should think deeply about it, yeah?”

You hum, your mind occupied by other priorities. You pull him in a direction. “Nap time.”

“What?!” He’s taken aback, clearly confused and in shock. “No way I’ll let you name it that!”

You pull him again and— push him to sit on a bench? He’s still lost, looking at you for clarification. He’s by the far side while you go sit in the middle. He’s about to ask more when you suddenly lay down. Your head goes to rest on his lap. “Nap time, wake me up in one hour or if it starts raining.”

Yanqing opens his mouth and closes it, still confused although now flustered. “Really? Right here, right now? I thought you disliked being in public.”

You hum a bit, shifting, making yourself comfortable on the hard bench. It would take longer than one hour before getting sunburned right? So this is probably fine. Between the sun high in the sky, the soft breeze, and the comfort of Yanqing, you don’t think you’ll have much trouble resting in public. “Bed is too far, and I’m so ‘eepy.”

He huffs, although there’s a smile on his face. “Alright.”

#yanqing x reader #HSR Yanqing x reader #hsr x reader #honkai star rail x reader #star rail x reader #honkai x reader #x reader #nekonohanashi

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writingwithcolor · 11 months

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Running Commentary: What is “ok to do” in Mixed-Culture Supernatural Fiction?

Dear readers:

Today we are trying something new. To give you some insight into our process in the Japanese moderator section, we are presenting our response in the form of running commentary to show you how we dissect and answer long asks. We hope this makes clear what points are useful and not useful when sending us a query. As always, this is for learning purposes, not callouts. Be prepared: this is a long one.

To summarize: the asker is looking to create a comic drawn in Japanese manga style, and has provided a long summary of the story and worldbuilding which involves a mix of “reimagined” Japanese yokai mythos and cultural symbols from many other sources. They have questions with respect to cultural appropriation, coding etiquette, and “what is and isn’t ok.”

Opening Comments

I know a common advice when it comes to the thing I am about to ask is to talk to people involved in __, but I struggle with opening up to strangers for reasons I'm uncomfortable explaining.

Marika (M): This is already a red flag. If you want to engage with another culture without talking to people from that culture, then research is going to be very challenging. You won’t have members of that culture to guide you towards sources and perspectives they feel most accurately represents public opinion. If I were in your shoes, I might start with tackling my discomfort when engaging with other people, if only to improve my work. If you aren’t ready to engage with a culture and its people directly, then I think you should wait until you are.

I should note, reaching out to the Japanese mod team at WWC does count as engagement, but WWC should not and cannot be the only point of contact because there is no single, legitimate cultural perspective.

Rina (R): Also, you don’t need to “open up” to strangers or talk to them in person to get perspectives. Asking specific research questions anonymously to a forum or on social media requires very little vulnerability. You managed to do it here on WWC. So give it a try!

Anyway, my question basically amounts to the what is and isn't ok [sic] in terms of depicting fantasy creatures and concepts outside of their respective culture.

R: So, the reason why we turn away rubber stamp questions by that ask “is XYZ okay?” is because “okay” & “not okay” 1) is vague and 2) creates a dichotomy where there isn’t one.

When we say something is “not okay,” do we mean:

It’s offensive to the general majority of XYZ group?

It’s contentious among people who ID in the group?

It has a potential to be interpreted in a certain negative way, but may not be a red flag to everyone?

Insetad try asking:

What are the reasons this subject is offensive?

What makes cultural appropriation bad?

When might it be “okay” to intentionally discuss a difficult or controversial topic?

What is your reason for including something that may be interpreted as offensive and can it be sufficiently justified?

What stereotypes or tropes might it be consistently identified as or associated with, and why?

When might it be justified to bring up these tropes?

With That In Mind...

Let’s get into the rest of the ask below.

…a story I've been working on in recent times is largely inspired off the Japanese yokai, and the setting is basically Earth in the far future, as far as when the next supercontinent may form. These yokai, although portrayed differently here, do retain their main characteristics [...] Included in this world are two goddesses of my own creation, primarily representing the sun and the moon. [...] There will be thirteen nations, named and based after the Chinese Zodiac, and the life force found in the living things in this world, called qi, comes in two forms that are always opposing each other but can never fully overpower the other, this being based off yin and yang. They're even directly named this; yin qi and yang qi.

M: This reads more like using Japanese and Chinese culture for the “aesthetics”, not the cultures themselves, which I personally feel falls under cultural appropriation. From a world-building/ coding standpoint, the actual use of concepts is workable, and, dare I say, typical, given how Chinese cosmology influences Japanese culture. However, naming a concept “yin qi” or “yang qi” is the equivalent of naming something “- charge” or “+ charge”, respectively. That you don’t seem aware of this tells me you are pretty early in your research phase. In that vein, we’ve covered translating terms and names from foreign languages in fantasy before. See the following article linked here for our recommendation against using RL terms outright but instead encouraging people to create their own conlangs.

R: Worldbuilding-wise, I think you would have to figure out the chicken-or-egg of the zodiac nations. Did the nations come first, and the zodiac later as an origin folk story (which you would have to rewrite to serve the nation-building narrative)? Did the zodiac come first, and the nations named (most likely re-named) by a political entity? What is the justification? Otherwise, again, it’s a shoehorning of aesthetics.

There is also a third, lesser known god based off of fox spirits and trickery and I imagined he's the patron deity of a family that honors and worships him, but his influence on them has transformed them into Kitsune-tsuki, which I depict as fox-like anthros.

M: Not related to this ask directly, but I have jokingly ranted about how often non-Japanese people prefer using imagery related to kitsune-tsuki in Japanese coded world-building (link). This makes me feel the same level of petty irritation. See my troll answer below for a similar experience.

R: Same. It’s boring tbh.

M: Troll Answer: I get that kitsune-tsuki are very sexy furries, but Japanese folklore has other sexy furries too! These underrepresented demographics also deserve recognition and appreciation!!

The plot of the story is this; modernization has left the goddesses neglected of their worship and forgotten, something that is necessary in this world to stop them from fighting each other. The Moon Goddess awakens first, punishing the humans by unleashing the yokai. Then the Sun Goddess wakes up to fight in humanity's defense…

M: This could feel rather like Shinto-like coding (Ex. the myth of Amaterasu and the Cave, or Tsukuyomi slaying Ukemochi), but something about this scenario feels a bit too binary in terms of themes of good v. evil, light v. dark to be Shinto. The plot also feels more Gaelic/ Nordic in influence for me as a person raised in a Japanese Buddhist and Hindu household. I imagine this dissonance could have been fixed with better guided research.

…but their fighting has caused a perma-eclipse and this world is in danger of ending. The yokai have run rampant; some are loyal to the Moon Goddess, and some aren't, and it lies to the main characters to bring balance back to Midgard. Yeah... the name of this future Earth is Midgard. I debate changing it since it and some other things I will mention sorta feel out of place.

R: Marika, looks like you were right on the Gaelic/Nordic influence /j

Also, worldbuilding question: if the Earth is in the far geologic future, how long has it been since modernization (19th-20th century)? Centuries? Millennia? How long has this fighting gone on for? What triggered the perma-eclipse, and why now? Why is this time depth necessary?

One of the main characters in question is a humanoid woman with wolf features named Ling, and she is a descendant of the dynasty that had first ruled the one of the nations, particularly the one based off the dragon zodiac. She accidentally summons the other main character to this world as she's praying at a shrine, a humanoid with dragon features--I call them drakon--named Angelynn.

[on the names of characters] is it appropriating by not having the world entirely based on [Chinese, Japanese, and Indian] influence? it's a little weird to me how worldwide the creatures are referred to as yokai, implying a strong Japanese influence not unlike how it is today with Western culture being so dominant, yet there are still names like Keith and Kiara.

M: I will give you credit for recognizing you have unconsciously veered towards white-washing/ race-bending: either presenting European cultural influences (drakons, Angelynn, Keith, Kiara, Midgard) as default or utilizing general E. Asian cultural influences and aesthetics for a Western-style story (Ling, qi, Chinese zodiac, yokai). I agree with you that this creates a sense of cultural dissonance. At this point, I’d say you have a clear choice: write a Western-style high fantasy using a background with which you have more familiarity, or get some better guidance on research with East Asian cultures so you can code the story more effectively.

The focus of this story is centered around meeting all these yokai and showing that there's more nuance to them than Ling believes, all while saving the world. But I worry if I'm appropriating these concepts and creatures by 1, drawing from more than one culture--I initially imagined that there would be a mix of Chinese, Japanese and Indian influence because according to a website I am getting the info on yokai from, the yokai in question already draw inspiration from or have been based on something in Chinese mythology or Hinduism [...]

R: Sure, some yokai have Chinese or Hindu parallels as that tends to happen with folk tales. But not all–some are unique to Japan, and some are more modern. Sometimes it’s very political–some people consider the Ainu Korpokkur as being a “Yokai of Japan” despite it belonging to the indigenous culture. It’s up to you to research, untangle, and understand these influences.

The fact that you bring up that the Asian continent has seen a lot of cultural exchange is not a sufficient reason to randomly combine influences for the sake of visual appeal or “coolness.” That is appropriation. These influences must be understood in their historical context so that you know how/why certain things combined or morphed into another, and what makes sense to combine/morph.

M: This also indicates that the character views the yokai as evil/inherently bad, which I would argue is not a typical stance for much Japanese folklore. Again, this shows a deficit in research.

2, reimagining these yokai in a new context even though I have done the research on them, because one thing I kept seeing in regards to cultural appropriation is that it's bad to do that […]

R: Refer above to my note on “okay” and “not okay.” The thing with folklore and fairy tales is that every–and I mean every–folk tale is reinterpreted with every new iteration of it. Reimagining in a new context is what people do every time they pass on a story or tell a story with the same plot or characters. Do not think of folklore as an “original” that is altered and rebooted, but rather a living document that gets added to. Reimagining is not the inherent issue. HOW you reimagine something matters.

So I suppose my question is...if someone were to do research upon the creature they want to use, given they are allowed to use it, and gained an understanding of what the creature or concept stood for, are they allowed to pick it apart and reimagine it? Alternatively, is it ok if it's explicitly pointed out that it is derivative of the original?

It has actually become my biggest fear that I may have internalized something that could both continue to do harm long after the fact and attract the wrong people to me work. I don't wanna let people down!

M: As Rina has noted several times, I think the problem is in trying to ID a set of specific variables and circumstances that make a thing “okay” or “not okay.” I want to recommend that you read my joking response about writing in secret rooms while wearing a disguise (Linked here). Who can you hurt if no one knows what you are doing? There’s a difference between creating for oneself and creating to share.

You have internalized a message incorrectly, but not the one you cite. The goal of many recommendations against cultural appropriation is to avoid causing direct harm to people who have seen their cultures demeaned, discredited and devalued, especially in shared spaces. Assessing cultural engagement, whether we are talking about appropriation, appreciation or exchange is not a measure of personal virtue or a collection of commandment style do’s and don’t’s. Rather, I believe engaging with other cultures is the state of mind of acknowledging that when using these cultures’ in one’s own work, there is value in consulting members of that culture and giving credit where credit is due. This will be challenging if you are only comfortable engaging with all of these cultures in a distanced, minimal capacity.

FWIW, I’ve written stories that probably will offend people from other cultures and backgrounds, but I don’t show them off. I don’t think writing these makes me a bad person, but I also don’t see the need to give unnecessary offense, so those stories are just for me, to be written and read in my own secret room. However, I’m not ashamed of having written them, and I’m also comfortable to “let people down” provided that my own shared work reflects my personal principles of what I consider to be sufficient research and engagement with other cultures, As a creator, my work wouldn’t be mine if I didn’t first please myself. I think the trick to the creator role is deciding what to keep private, what to share and what constitutes sufficient engagement.

P.S.

We’ve referenced the need for research multiple times in this ask, and in some of the other asks that have gone up this week, so we thought this would be a good place to plug a beginner’s guide to academic research created by the mod team.. Look for it soon under WWC’s pinned posts!

#japanese #chinese #fantasy #cultural appropriation #coding #worldbuilding #names #mythology #folklore #fairy tales #asks #running commentary #writeblr

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icyhottodo · 1 year

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MHA BOYS WHEN THEY HAVE A SHY S/O

characters: midoriya izuku, todoroki shoto, bakugo katsuki, denki kaminari, kirishima ejiro

✩ MIDORIYA is also a pretty shy person if the conversation isn't about hero stuff. but i feel like he would take the bigger shoe so he can be your "hero". when collaborating with class 1b or meeting new people, you would hide behind midoriya while he would introduce the both of you.

"oh hi! i am midoriya; you can call me deku!... oh the person behind me? this is my significant other (y/n)! they’re a bit shy at first, but they’ll warm up soon. don’t worry."

✩ TODOROKI there aren’t many situations where your shyness may even become a hindrance when dating todoroki. todoroki prefers to be alone with you inside at home, instead of going out and meeting new people. but, of course, you two had to meet in order to become each other’s partners.

when todoroki first met you, he thought you were the cutest thing ever. hiding behind your friend and shyly introducing yourself. he would just coo at you whenever you did anything on your own.

"you're just so cute!" todoroki would pinch your cheeks.

✩ BAKUGO tries to hold back on his aggression, especially when he is around you. your presence is his outlet when things are stressful; he would just cuddle with you, and it feels like his worries are being flown away. bakugo is the yin, and you’re the yang. you genuinely help him for the better. his classmates can tell that you’re changing him for the better.

"you’re doing this for (y/n) aren’t you?"

"of fucking course i am."

✩ DENKI will do all the talking for you if you want. this man has no shame socially. heck, he will even embarrass himself in public to make you even a smidge comfortable. you two were out shopping at the mall when you saw a free stage. denki starts going up on stage and randomly dancing. you laugh to the side until denki starts pulling you on stage, which makes you shake your head nervously.

“look at me (y/n)! see if i am doing this, everything is fine, okay?”

or when hanging out with friends,

“(y/n) says that we should go to the park first.”

✩ KIRISHIMA is basically a big ol’ bear that needs love and affection. he’ll protect you no matter what, as long as you are comfortable. you two were at a party, and you were feeling uncomfortable at the number of people in one room. so you tug kirishima’s shirt, making him lean into your height, and whisper in his ear.

“can we leave? i don’t want to be here.”

you can bet that you two will be out of the party in a millisecond.

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nightgoodomens · 5 months

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Crowley is the character who broke away from being stuck in a cult who follows blindly. He has a really realistic view on the world that he loves and protects. He’s very protective of Aziraphale and humans. He’s so smart he’s been fooling Hell since the beginning. He has seen it all and was involved in most important events of the world.

His whole point is freedom. He is the one who introduced free will. He fell because he hated blind following and control. He calls them all toxic.

So, yes, to see the fandom reduce him to nothing, call him degrading names, act like he canonically wants to be controlled and used, is fucked up. It is so fucked up.

And then taking Aziraphale, who Crowley spent 6 thousand years trying to make him see that he is still stuck in a cult and letting himself be manipulated, and that when Aziraphale cut himself away he automatically started reporting to Crowley instead because he needed someone to report to as he still has this mindset, Aziraphale who spent whole season trying to woo Crowley and create a fantasy ball for them - and reduce him to a cold monster who would want to degrade Crowley and have satisfaction in it…

I just can’t. It’s so insulting to both of them.

Everything Crowley does is a prompt to degrade him for it. (He danced once - degraded. We ignore that Aziraphale danced plenty of times before for him before Crowley danced even once. We ignore that it is something they both do. We don’t call Aziraphale a bitch for it, only Crowley.) Aziraphale doing what Crowley does plus so much more does not result in degradation. No, in his case it is seen as boss behaviour. It’s all just fucked up at this point. Crowley follows him once - degraded. Crowley does anything to show his love - Pet. Whore. Slut. Wants to be owned. Wants to be controlled. Pathetic. Cant cope without Aziraphale. Aziraphale creates the ball, gives away precious belongings for him, plays a damsel in distress, doesn’t accept what’s going on around him, his head is so focused on Crowley and looking at him like at a picture - boss behaviour. Master. Owner. Made Crowley his bitch. All sexually meant too of course. Yikes.

I just… what?

If you’re desperate to degrade one then I guess Aziraphale should take the fall. Except… why the fuck either of them has to?

Because I watch the show and see an Angel and Demon in love. Who want to spend time together. I see Aziraphale who loves Crowley with his whole heart but is still stuck in a cult. I see Crowley who loves Aziraphale with his whole heart but he wants to be free and wants Aziraphale to be free too. I see both of them needing to break free from toxic bosses and finally stop being hurt and controlled. That’s the whole point of the show.

I see so much love and marriage behaviour.

The whole point of the show is freedom.

And some in this fandom shit all over it.

And to take Crowley out of everyone and do this crap to HIM?! And think this would be “taking care of him”?! Oh I shuddered. He doesn’t need to be taken care of, not like this especially. That he needs that?! That Aziraphale/Crowley would want that? When they’re finally free you want them to revert and start doing this to each other instead and act like that’s a good thing.

Fuck. We really watched a different show.

Not everything has to be toxic.

At least - Neil, Michael and David - considering their views during interviews (Crowley being clever and he gets it and wanting Aziraphale to open his eyes and how much they’re like yin and yang and adore and love each other) and on Twitter (Michael basically saying Aziraphale is a bottom and how much he adores Crowley and sees him as Thin Dark Duke) - they watched and acted and directed the show I watched. Because I see it the way they do. Which is the opposite of what so many in this fandom are seeing.

#priv

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w1ng3dw01f · 12 days

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So, I got done binging X-Men: The Animated Series and X-Men ‘97 a few weeks/ a week ago and my friend is a few seasons behind.

She just got done with the Wolverine/Storm time travel / alternate timeline episodes and oh boy howdy did that remind me.

Wolverine and Storm are such a good ship??

honestly, both me and my friend we prefer it over the whole Wolverine and Jean situation. Like Jean just feels like a really unhealthy choice for Logan. She has turned him down in favor of Scott on quite a few occasions. He feels almost shoehorned into being in a love triangle with her and Scott in a few different comic storylines. It just feels kinda weird.

Meanwhile, Logan and Ororo share a no bullshit attitude, deeply care for each other and are basically each other’s yin and yang. They’re on similar if not the same emotional levels. They understand each other in pragmatic way.

And Like, it’s cannon to some of the comic runs too and there’s even a deleted scene from the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past where Logan shares a goodbye kiss with Ororo!!

But, unfortunately, I have already read most of the Logan/Ororo fics on AO3 😭. I need moooorrrree.

However, I will admit that Logan and Ororo just being friends is a GREAT platonic m/f relationship.

#xmen #x men the animated series #xmen days of future past #logan howlett #wolverine #ororo munroe #storm xmen #storm x wolverine

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asideofchaos · 4 months

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I’m still a bit stressed out from some drama happening in another fandom, so I decided to write up some more II headcanons to help me relax.

MePhone made both of the Idiotic Islands, and was originally going to send the season 3 eliminaties to them, until Walkie-Talkie and Indefinite Island happened.

Paintbrush once chased Cherries though the entire hotel after they poured glitter into their bristles. Luckily, Hotel OJ had 50 or so fire extinguishers on hand.

Clover is the unofficial therapist of Hotel OJ. She kinda just became it when people started going to her to rant about their problems.

Yin-Yang is an avid rhythm game fan, and they’re among the few things that Yin and Yang can agree on.

Among the glass contestants, Salt and Pepper are extremely sturdy. They claim it’s because of how much they take care of themselves.

After learning about Bot’s fear of anything with 8 legs, Cherries used an old delivery box to hide under and scare them out of their room for almost an entire day.

The Shimmers want to reunite the Egg with Fan and Test Tube so they can get a proper goodbye, but are waiting for Cobs to dealt with first.

Tea Kettle hosts a weekly picnic. It was originally just for The Sinkers, but then The Loony Balloonies and The Armless “Alliance” were allowed, then friends/family of them, and then basically anyone could come.

Lightbulb has the ability to short-circuit the hotel, she hasn’t yet, but she can.

Fan and Yin-Yang both love The Evililous Chronicles, with Yin-Yang having been the one to introduce Fan to it because they thought that he would enjoy the lore aspects to it. (If Miku and Vocaloid exists in II, then a series important to Vocaloid history likely does too.)

While it’s rare, Hotel OJ will occasionally have a karaoke night. It almost never goes well, but most of the contestants have fun anyways.

OJ loses his voice almost every-other month thanks to having to care for the hotel so much. Paper usually has to force him to take a break whenever this happens.

Test Tube has changed the password and has fixed the entrance to her lab, but still gets many people who somehow find their way down there and she is on the verge of just giving up on keeping people out of it because almost everyone knows at this point.

Cheesy collects joke books, he even has a small shelf in his room for them. He can strike fear into any contestant’s heart just by pulling one out, because now the next half hour will be nothing but horrible jokes.

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gojooooo · 5 months

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yuuji’s flashback of wasuke telling him to help others since he’s strong at the beginning of ep17 cutting to sukuna is so good AGHHHH. first of all because sukuna getting glimpses of yuji’s life before him is. certainly something <3 and then because the idea that sukuna was seeing that flashback… and he looked so pensive because he was like “ha so that’s why the brat is so stubborn with his altruism” and that was the moment he fully understood that yuuji could never have been the perfect vessel with those pathetic human emotions holding him back/making it harder for sukuna to emotionally take over (he already knew he had them, but he understood why and how dearly he clings to them). his strong attachment to his ideals is the perfect opposite to sukuna’s own determination, but his goal was to take over his vessel completely, and yin and yang don’t mix. we see characters have fun while fighting against villains or against the strongest, summoning powerful shikigami, finding out just how strong they can be during battle etc. which can be seen as a selfish trait, because what they’re feeling is self satisfaction which is a human trait, part of human’s nature but not the ideal of humanity (kind of like the seven deathly sins? am i making sense here?) and i think that yuuji represents that ideal which is what sukuna and every other ancient sorcerer consider to be limiting. yuuji doesn’t have fun while fighting, he’s always wearing his pain on his face and his fists. he fights to defend, to protect, to avenge… basically he’s always fighting for others. out of love (another big theme) but love for others, never self love. he never indulges in self satisfaction. and i think that sukuna wants him to let go and have a laugh while fighting, to say fuck it, life sucks, but i’m literally so strong and it’s euphoric; but there’s only pain. because if you think about it when they initially sparred in sukuna’s domain yuuji was annoyed but playful and sukuna was always smirking and having fun but at the time yuuji was also too weak to be interesting because he was only starting to learn about jujutsu so he was boring and predictable to sukuna, though the potential was there and sukuna saw it. right now instead yuuji is stronger and could be entertaining if he fought in the right state of mind but he’s blinded by his feelings and can’t free himself from that burden and fight without a heavy heart. and to circle back to the beginning of my rant and shibuya [putting my shipping lens on here] there have been attempts from sukuna to tone down the altruism that yuuji feels compelled to take to the extreme to avoid yuuji ending up sacrificing himself for others (because now that he set him free he also can’t protect and heal him if anything happens to him. love is bittersweet!) idk man idk. in conclusion i want them to learn from each other but without ever changing who they are because that’s what two pieces of a puzzle that fit together are baby! and i want a fight where they’re both grinning so wide we mistake it for their first dance at their wedding

#allow me that self indulgent yin and yang metaphor please #no i’m not obsessed with the miserable condition of being human why would you think that #sukuita #my post

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shanksxbuggy · 6 months

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I'm curious. Why do you relate Shanks to the moon?

There’s already been some talk about the Figarlands having connections to the moon. I believe I saw somewhere that the word Figarland could be derived from a word that means moon, I can’t remember where it was from. Also Grandpa Figarland got a suspiciously crescent moon looking hairdo.

Another point was how the Celestials wear outfits that look like astronauts.

I always wondered about Enel’e trip to the moon. He went up there and had a whole cover story arc, but we don’t know what he’s doing right now? Is he alive or dead?

But I have more. Okay, warning, I’m gonna take this opportunity to go down the rabbit hole I fell into after doing research into Yin Yang symbolism.

So I saw how the current Emperors can symbolize the four Celestial animals of Chinese Mythology. In the past I even saw fans theorizing Yamato would be the next Emperor because they were certain the Emperors connected to these four. It ended up fitting perfectly with the addition of Nika and Buggy. The colors are a clear match for the current bounty posters of the Emperors, and when you look into the whole Dragon and Phoenix symbolism it really fits Buggy and Shanks.

In the relationship, the Dragon represents Yang (Light) and the Phoenix represents Yin (Dark). But when the Dragon is gone, the Phoenix by itself can basically be its own sun and represent Yang.

Yang is associated with light, the known, and powerful, bold movements. It’s just like Buggy, his actions are big and grand and sweeping, it looks daring and manly, which is how he attracts his followers.

Yin is associated with darkness, the moon, the unknown, and more hidden shadowy movements. Buggy’s actions and desires are transparent to us, but the more we see of Shanks, the more we realize we actually don’t know anything about him…what his plans are, or even what his next move is in going after the One Piece.

Just look at the difference in how they both declare they’re going after the One Piece. Shanks does it privately to his trusted first mate while fading into the darkness around him. Buggy makes a big, loud declaration in the spotlight to everyone (one of his followers even comments how blinding his light is).

This screenshot is from a Genshin Impact fan’s analysis on the Dragon/Phoenix symbolism in Beiguang…but I thought it fit Buggy and Shanks.

Infamously public and ultimately secretive sounds a lot like Shanks’ and Buggy’s present relationship. They are two of the most famous pirates of the current era, everyone knows about their connection, but when it comes down to it nobody knows what exactly their deal is. Oden says it, he doesn’t know if they’re enemies or best friends? We know how Buggy is open about his resentment towards Shanks, but deep inside he keeps his true feelings hidden where no one knows.

The union between the Dragon and the Phoenix can also represent a new age, which sounds a lot like Shanks’ words in Wano and his ferocity about protecting the new age. They are famously known as a married pair and symbolize conflict and marriage…they are the union between the Emperor and the Empress…they represent polar opposites and perfect harmony because they make up for what the other lacks.

Shanks feels like the sun and Buggy the moon, but when it comes to Yin Yang symbolism, Shanks is the moon and Buggy is the sun.

Even if Shanks doesn’t have any literal connections with the moon, I think symbolically he’s more closely tied to the moon/darkness/yin like Blackbeard is, while Luffy and Buggy contrast them as the light/sun/yang.

#thank you for bearing with my obsessive talk 😔#i had this whole yinyang rant in the drafts but i was like hm is this too much #i am filled with shuggy conspiracy and obsessed with finding their themes and symbolism

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yamameta-inc · 1 year

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My Orochi Stood Up: A Draconic Response to "eat shit and die"

tshirt3000’s seminal essay, “eat shit and die,” illuminates the fact that in any sillyserious discussion of Gintama, there is a recurring tension–or overlap, or slippage, or push-and-pull–between the motif of the anus and the motif of the phallus. Far from being contradictory, however, this dynamic conceptual tug of war has the potential to be not only meaning-generating, but fundamental to a thematic understanding of Gintama. In this essay, I aim to illustrate how applying a certain homebrewed framework of mine can help make sense of these interwoven concepts and provide symbolic structure to their analysis. I’m talking, of course, about the ouroboros–also known as the snake eating its own tail.

As we all know, Gintama is full of phalluses. The sword is basically a matryoshka doll of motifs all on its own (or, to invoke tshirt invoking Barthes, the beginning of a chain of images, or significants). But the same vulgar toilet humour that leads to Gintama being chock full of dick jokes (and balls jokes, which for many reasons can be conflated with dick jokes, a primary one being that the Neo Armstrong Jet Cyclone Armstrong Cannon, practically a mascot of Gintama in its own right, stands strong, beautiful, and trinitas) also leads to plenty of hole jokes. Guys like Sorachi thinks it’s funny when the protagonist gets something stuck in his butt, or when gay sex exists, or when a guy is a sub. But there’s no need to discuss this part in depth–just read tshirt’s essay.

There’s a saying among my friend group: “all there is in Gintama is head and hole.”

Why do the sages say this? First of all because it’s funny. Second of all because it’s true. You can reduce everything in Gintama to essentially two things. Shouyou and Utsuro. Gintoki and Takasugi. Humans and monsters. Those who swing the sword right and those who swing it wrong. Those who take in and those who are taken in. Those who keep struggling and those who don’t. And then you can also always reduce these two things to one thing: Shouyou/Utsuro are, after all, the same being, even if they’re not; Gintoki; simply people, Gintoki once more; Gintoki yet again; and struggling itself. Because losing is part of struggling too. You can’t pick yourself back up if you never lost in the first place. We know that Gintoki has managed to become “a splendid human” by the end of the series–so what was he before that? Was he really a monster? At what exact point in the series did he become human? Was it while he was on-screen, while we were looking, but without us noticing? Was it off-screen, while we were flipping the page, or in the space between the panels? The answer, of course, is that he was learning to be human every day of his life, and if you were to assign him a static, general status to put on a wiki profile under ‘“species”, it would be: “becoming human.” And so “which one is the head and which one is the hole?” is the wrong question. Even if you assigned one to each half and managed not to be wrong, since they’re collapsible into one anyway, they’ll always be both.

In my ouroboros collage, I used western alchemy to stylize this struggle. This forging of the soul into a precious metal, language used by Gintama itself. Chrysopoeia–the making of gold. Or silver, as it were. But the ouroboros isn’t just a major symbol of alchemy. I chose it because, simply put, it’s the It girl. It does it all. It’s a snake. It’s a dragon. It circles the world. It represents eternity. It’s a loop. And while the ouroboros, alchemically, is a western symbol, the snake eating its tail is not. As I noted in my collage, the ouroboros and the world serpent are images that appear in traditions around the world.

I’m going to state the obvious: yes, the snake eating its own tail is the head and the hole. After all, the snake eating its own is also a symbol of fertility: the snake’s tail is phallic, its mouth yonic. Male and female, yin and yang–these are all things the ouroboros represents, because it ultimately embodies the cosmological interplay of complementary forces necessary to sustain a truly endless cycle. Now, tshirt’s essay could not be more clearly about the anus most specifically. But in this essay? Love is love, hole is hole. Sorry tshirt.

In all sillyseriousness, as tshirt details in their essay, the anus “following hocquenghem, normally stands in for the individuating function which itself gives root to desiring within the social sexual system, and the means by which we might therefore transcend the phallus.” Note the term “individuating function.” In my ouroboros collage, I included the following idea from philosopher Bernard Stiegler about the individuation process: “The I is essentially a process, not a state, and this process is an in-dividuation — it is a process of psychic individuation. It is the tendency to become one, that is, to become indivisible.” Indeed, Carl Jung (yes, that Jung) saw the ouroboros as the ultimate symbol of the “paradox” at the heart of the individuation process. Many of the lines in the second half of my poem are from him. Specifically, they’re from this one key paragraph from his Collected Works, vol. 14:

The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The Ouroboros has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself. The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This 'feedback' process is at the same time a symbol of immortality since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself, and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he, therefore, constitutes the secret of the prima materia which ... unquestionably stems from man's unconscious.

I believe the relevance of these quotes to Gintama is clear at this point. Because as I said, everything in Gintama is reducible to two opposing forces, which is then reducible to one. The ouroboros fundamentally embodies the paradox of Two, Yet One. And through the style and language of alchemy, it turns this paradox into the preeminent human endeavour, the Great Work of human existence. tshirt’s identification of Gintoki as “a reluctant hole” (very queer I agree) positions him perfectly here as the poor, tragic hero who, despite everything, Is Doing It–who is both recipient and victim of his own wisdom about the undertaking he must choose to embark on. It is a task that will last forever, even after he’s already succeeded. (In Gintama, therefore, to be a reluctant hole can denote both a noun and a verb.) And yet, there can be traced a definite “before” and “after.” In its literal shapes and features, the ouroboros forms an imperfect circle–it is a cyclical figure that necessarily depicts a break in the cycle, where mouth meets tail, where there must be an opening. A gap that must despite the snake’s best efforts exist, because a mouth is not a tail at the end of the day. Something that may seem like an insignificant smudge in the great flow of time, but that was nonetheless enough to shatter Utsuro’s “eternity.”

Though in some depictions, including the most iconic one, you can see the gap full well. Look. Does it seem like it’s smiling to you?

(We know Shouyou smiled right before he died–do you think that severed head of his still held a smile?)

There are a lot of other things I could say about hole. Like a hole being a sort of lack, something to be filled–a void, perhaps, one that gets artificially filled with all kinds of detritus as part of the process of person-making in Gintama. Or I could say something about the displacement or potential conflation of one kind of hole with another when your protagonist is male, cis, virile (alleged), and obviously straight in a way that makes anal sex jokes funny, and PIV jokes only too racy for Jump. Alas, this isn’t an essay on Gintama hole theory, so while there’s still much to be said about head and hole, I think it’s time we move on to one of the most important elements of the ouroboros thesis:

The dragon.

Now, the terms ryuumyaku and ryuuketsu were not invented by Gintama. As mentioned in my annotation part one (I now understand why Final Fantasy XV gave out crucial information about its story in disparate chunks spread across multiple mediums instead of behaving normally), the concept of “dragon veins” is part of real life Japanese traditions, and is tied to feng shui. The idea of concentrated life energy, or natural power, flowing through the earth along certain paths, like ley lines, is a rather common one across the world, and thus a basic building block of fantasy worlds. In my poem I highlight the geo-somatic aspect of this, how it conflates Utsuro with the planet that birthed him, effectively turning him into a world snake that walks on two feet. The tendrils of his re-knitting flesh resemble strands of hair, or perhaps the whiskers on a dragon, his blood is a river is Altana is precious oil to be extracted and hoarded by intergalactic powers, his heart is a deep, blood-red stone that denies that his blood was ever liquid, and smoke rises from him when he regenerates as though the fire that Shouyou’s body was thrown into was never truly put out.

What’s notable, though, is the person who delivers the line that draws these comparisons most concretely:

Yes, I’m cannibalizing part 2 of my annotation here. Very sad. But I’ve always said I wished Gintama had more cannibalism. So let’s press on.

Umibouzu is uniquely positioned to make this observation here because he’s the only character to have fought… well, to have come into, shall we say, “fighting range,” with both of the series’ immortals. And as uninteresting as he may be as an individual character, it’s through him that we finally gain access to a straight-on view of Kouka–specifically, Kouka on Rakuyou, before she left her planet to die femininely.

I won’t rehash too much of what I’ve already said in my collage and annotation. The Orochi on Kouan is a world snake much like the blurry dragon-vein-Utsuro-Shouyou package on Earth: a serpent with innumerable heads, both singular and plural, this time in a more literal way than Utsuro’s multiple selves or the image of a river flowing into countless streams. It’s wrapped all around planet Kouan like… well, a world snake. Or… a world tree. Because as much as it’s clearly a serpent of the Orochi archetype, it’s described in both animalistic and vegetative language (e.g., it has “roots” that spread into the planet’s core, where they soak up the Altana… but the planet is its “nest”). Kouan’s dragon is thus a mutated beast that defies easy categorization, part mythical symbol, part serpent, part plant. Kouan, after all, is no longer capable of supporting normal life, its atmosphere and soil too toxic for anything but mutants. The Orochi, then, is an animated, aberrant substitution for the Lifestream, one whose roots have replaced the planet’s veins, one that can express aggressiveness and loneliness, and whose fleshy corporeality allows Umibouzu to…

…make a bad dick joke. Naturally.

Kouka and the Orochi aren’t conflated the way that Utsuro and the dragon veins are. The Orochi is not her body: being its own creature, it appears much more separate from her than the formless glowing green Sephiroth energy does from Utsuro. But interestingly, they are mistaken for each other through the title of “Master of Kouan,” which the Orochi acts as a decoy for before the story “reveals” that it refers to Kouka. And Sorachi makes clear: the Orochi is lonely. The planet is lonely. Kouka is lonely. The Yato are lonely.

Rabbits can die of loneliness, you know, etc. etc. And as Kagura delivers to us early on in the series, the only way out of this endlessly repeating, and yet endlessly diminishing (sort of like reverse infinite tumblr chocolate) cycle, is to change.

Umibouzu’s dick jokes return us to the self-explanatory phallic-ness of the snake. I don’t think I need to explain the overlap between snakes and dragons, especially in an Asian context. So if Umibouzu is the phallus–the new arrival that introduces change to planet Kouan–then does that make Kouka the hole? Well, yes, but no. Because Kouka is the one associated with the Orochi. Kouka is the immortal, living her life frozen in time until she decides to leave the dragon behind. And in the end, when Umibouzu convinces her to leave with him, he tells her: “You and I are the same. No matter how busy a planet I’m on, no matter how surrounded by people I am. Without you, I’m lonely.” A hole, as we said earlier, is a type of lack. And neither Kouka nor Umibouzu at this point have dirt that can fill that lack–the dirt that, as tshirt put it, “marks the permanence of one’s relationships.” Because only dirt can stick enough, can stain enough to leave an imprint.

Now, in another world where Sorachi isn’t a coward and a boring misogynist, here is where I would be digging into juicy insights into Shouyou|Utsuro’s milfhood, the genderisms of being an Altana immortal, the obvious implications of Umibouzu having been a failed parent unable to deal with Kamui’s situation due to living in the same (shall we say, hole-sided) world as Kamui, which loops back around to Kamui inheriting eldest daughter female hysteria his body isn’t capable of processing a la Oboro, and Kouka’s relationship to the phallus-as-transmissive-samurai-spirit–but given that we sadly don’t live in that better world, there isn’t much I can add to this enumeration that wouldn’t be self-evident.

As an aside, it does have to be said: the nature of the snake swallowing its own tail as a simultaneously self-fellating symbol and an established motif of macrocosmic heterosexual (re)creation of the universe perfectly encapsulates Gintama’s relationship to sexual jokes and the linkages it creates using vulgar wordplay. And it’s also the sort of thing my friend tshirt would love to quote Freud on. Another way of looking at it is that the microcosm of the universe in Gintama is a queer human, who is probably a pervert. Which seems glaringly obvious when you think about it outside of the context of this essay for two seconds.

Anyway, as Jung said, the ouroboros is not just self-sustaining, but self-fertilizing. Or perhaps self-sustaining is a potentially misleading term, because by nature it cannot remain static. It can only slay itself, and give birth to itself once more. Utsuro was never the same person twice. But what does it mean to be self-fertilizing? It means, above anything else, that in the end people give hope to themselves. That Shouyou put in the work, and that what Shouyou gave birth to was, in essence, the same as himself.

An endlessly replicating chain of Shounen Determination.

Of course, this goes both ways as well.

Shouka Sonjuku, then, is the embodiment of Shouyou’s self-fertilization–a motif taken up by Gintoki, our illustrious shounen protagonist enacting the genre-typical inspire and change everyone you touch. At the same time–or, you could say, anachronistically–Gintoki is enacting his own self-fertilization, fertilizing his own soul–or tama, or egg–with pieces of everybody that touches him. Because, though the hole is a lack, it is simultaneously where the crux of this self-transformation takes place. As tshirt puts it so succinctly, “the anus—the dirty human things—is the home for the phallus—the ideals we hold, the source of our power.” The scabbard for the sword of one’s soul, so to speak, but that metal for that sword is made up of fragments from many sources–as the Rakuyou arc anime illustrated for us so memorably.

In the Shinsengumi Crisis arc, Kondou (whose status as butt monkey for the crassest of Gintama’s jokes positions him in a unique way for these things) says something similar: nobody is being dyed in another’s colour. It’s hard to even say what colour other people’s souls really are, if everyone’s soul is made up of broken off bits and shards and dead things (positive) from all over the place, like beach sand. What Itto has mistaken as a form of influence over others, as the level of dominance of one’s soul, is really just:

“Because it’s something annoying that you can’t get rid of, in the end it becomes troublesome when you start to care about it.” Or something like that. The translation here is probably at least a little suspect, but you get the gist of it. tshirt’s analysis of gorillahood is potentially interesting and relevant here as well, but I’m afraid I have to move on for the sake of keeping things on track.

It’s worth noting that even as, from Gintoki’s perspective, Shouyou smiled at him right before he died, from Shouyou’s perspective (and of course, from Takasugi’s)–Gintoki smiled back.

Incidentally, the chapter two chapters before this one was named “The Two Utsuros.” Later on in this scene, Sakamoto refers to “the two Yoshida Shouyous.” And on this page, we see two Gintokis. Isn’t Gintama fun?

What of Kouka, then? I think her situation is clear. She created literal children of the flesh rather than of the spirit–and there is unfortunately little else to say, because even this is quite obviously a cliche of the dead anime mom. The context of Gintama’s story is enough for us to assume an implication of her having transmitted something to her children, of them carrying on her legacy in some way… but her character is too woefully undeveloped for me to say anything particularly interesting about that. What little I can say is essentially what I depicted in my annotations. When Umibouzu wants to whisk her away from Kouan, Kouka asks him–why did you remind me of these emotions? At the end of Silver Soul, it becomes clear that Utsuro’s professed “void” is not so empty after all–just like Kouka, he had simply been denying that he felt anything that ran contrary to his driving force, i.e. the power of his great resignation (“eat shit and die” terminology intended). For a long time, Kouka was resigned to staying on her planet–on her dragon–as its heads multiplied. In the end, she chooses to leave the planet behind, willingly sundering her eternity, and the planet watches her go. She dies because she became alive–just like Shouyou. It’s also worth noting that, when Kouka initially tries to disappear from Umibouzu, it’s the Orochi that points Umibouzu to her location, blending them into a sort of phallic comrade-in-arms, even as the Orochi is, as I said earlier, attached to Kouka’s existence. So in this ouroboros reading, Umibouzu simply becomes a device for her self-fertilization. Yayyyyy.

Here we can see the relevance of wordplay and dick jokes to any sillyserious analysis of Gintama. The motif of self-fertilization, in particular, is a rich arena for the conflation of sex and shit that tshirt notes is enabled by Gintama’s beloved [BLEEP]: “connected by dirty things can implicitly stand in for shit, sex, or the penis itself.” In the ouroboros framework, both sex and shit ultimately denote that which gives birth to others and that which gives birth to yourself. Your legacy is made of the same stuff as you, is you, and you are finally brought into being by your legacy, in a process that transcends linear time. The ouroboros is literally connected to itself by its own tail–or head, depending on how you look at it. It’s all one snake, after all. I suppose you could say this is one reading in which Takasugi’s ambiguously alive-yet-dead state at the end of the series makes sense–he was always a shadow that could be folded inside Gintoki’s body. But I don’t like it, so it’s actually very bad.

In any case, the procreation of the universe, yourself, and other people happens interdependently and simultaneously, yet something has to happen first. It’s a chicken-or-egg scenario, an endless cycle that needs an initiating key moment–or, to be Utena-esque for a moment, a shell-cracking moment–for life to exist. If Utsuro’s eternity was an egg, then the moment of Shouyou’s birth as a human, itself undefinable in time, was what cracked it (Utsuro egg cracking moment). Of course, I think all Gintama fans innately understand that the moment of Shouyou’s beheading is the single most pivotal moment in the series. But after speaking of head and hole for so long, I think it’s finally time to address the obvious:

Gintama is about severed heads. A lot of them. (Shoutout to oomf’s severed head collection.)

The importance of beheading as a motif throughout the series interacts in a very interesting way with the ouroboros thesis. Some heads in Gintama need to be cut off. Others resolutely need to stay on. But even for the ones that need to be severed, it needs to be done right–or watch out. Or, as I once said:

“gintama is like. sometimes people die when they are killed. but this is not guaranteed. and sometimes people survive because they are killed. among the cast are people who need to die and people who need to survive. choose wisely” (me, 2022)

Within the stylized aesthetic framework of the ouroboros, this is where the metaphor of the hydra becomes useful. Cut off one head, and two more will sprout in its place. If you don’t swing the executioner’s blade right, the monster will remain a monster–or grow even more monstrous. Even worse, you will have failed to possess a human’s heart while swinging that blade–so what does that make you? Failing at being human in relation to the sword, then, puts you in danger of falling into the neurotic failure state described by Freud described by Hocquenghem described by tshirt.

Gintoki didn’t fail, though. He just wasn’t able to succeed yet, without the rest of his story having unfolded yet. And so, within that paradoxical instant, the very heart of the ouroboros, Shouyou was saved and Utsuro was born. There is a persistent, and I would argue intentional, analytical ambiguity to this moment unless you allow for the paradox within it, represented by the moment of duplication where Sorachi likens Gintoki to Utsuro and presents both as the “one” wielding the sword. If Gintoki killed Shouyou with a human’s blade, then why was Utsuro born? If Utsuro killed Shouyou with a monster’s sword, then how did Shouyou’s humanity crystallize? If Gintoki became human throughout the course of Gintama, then how did he possess a human’s sword ten years ago? If he didn’t have a human’s sword and do the right thing back then–how could he have been the bottomless mirror standing unbreakable and infinitely reflective in front of Takasugi, Hijikata, Kamui, Nobume, and so many others?

Diegetically, of course, the answer is that Gintoki simply did the best he could, lost everything, and then picked himself back up and un-lost everything. Shouyou, too, just lost to Utsuro, because he was a human, and humans lose all the time, no matter how wise and gnc they might be. But he came back; or he survived; or the world survived without him–it doesn’t matter. Of course, I don’t believe Gintama is a series where you can really separate the “diegetic” from anything else (if you tried to explain anything that happened in it that way, the result would be not only very dull but hardly accurate). In a blend of shounen inspirational metaphor and absurdity, the series’ main themes are simply delivered through the mouths of various characters, without care for either subtlety or compromise. This is, after all, the series where our protagonist was given strength to keep going through a little girl telling him, don’t worry, mister, when I grow up I’ll become a splendid executioner and cut your head off for you! You could say that Gintama is full of a sort of “head anxiety” that only Gintoki is aware of. Oh man, I cut my teacher’s head off. Oh man, what if I did it wrong, that was so scary. What about my head, is my head weird? I bet it’s weird. Is it coming off? Is it stuck on too tight? Is this normal? Is my head too small for my body? Man, I can’t show people this. When is it coming off? Asaemon’s words also link the promise of death with the promise of life, or redemption–he must live so that he might die, and it’s only through death that he can truly live. Very ouroboros-esque.

One thing I’d like to point out here is that Gintoki was imprisoned after Shouyou’s death. He hears Yaemon’s crucial, This Is A Surprise Tool That Will Help Us Later speech about beheading only after he’s already gone and beheaded someone. This is both straightforward foreshadowing and also unintentionally funny. But what I’m going to argue here is this: the fact that the Reaper Arc comes before Shogun Assassination for us makes it true enough for Gintoki as well. Because the moment Gintoki sliced Shouyou’s head off was the moment Shouyou’s humanity was affirmed, and thus the moment Utsuro’s “eternity” could be confirmed to have shattered. At the same time, it’s the moment of Utsuro’s birth into the world. In other words, it’s where the ouroboros ends and where it begins–a moment isolated in time and space, located, if anywhere, in the time of monsters. And this is mimicked by the Gintama narrative itself, as Shogun Assassination marks the end of the structure the entire series existed in prior. A two-year timeskip would never have been possible previously, as the series’ time circled on in endless loops, one anniversary after another, one Christmas season after another, without the characters ever aging, even as they grew wiser. The moment of Gintoki’s tragedy, finally fished out from within Takasugi’s eye, shattered Gintama’s “eternity,” too.

I’ve already gone and used the hydra, so I’m going to be exceptionally silly here and invoke another piece of ancient Greek mythology, as a homage to hole and to Gintama’s dedication to bad puns: Uranus. According to Hesiod’s account of Aphrodite’s birth, when Uranus’ balls were cut off by his son, the goddess emerged from the white foam that flowed into the sea. You might be asking, am I really going to compare ball removal to decapitation? (This is a rhetorical question. No true Gintama fan would question this.) As I hinted at earlier, Gintama itself already provides the grounds for this kind of comparison through its ideological commitment to balls. It is, after all, Gintama. Phallic or yonic is largely irrelevant here, as this isn’t really about castration (sorry tshirt). Instead I want to emphasize the “head” in this case being the symbolic object imbued with transmissive and procreative power. This interpretation is, in the spirit of Gintama itself, built on playful punning between tama (ball) and atama (head). In the series, Shouyou and Gintoki are the characters who embody the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm most substantially–with Utsuro’s geo-somatic embodiment of Earth juxtaposed with his dominion over the forces of space, while of course also being the premier “dragon” of the series; and Gintoki enfolding the entire story within himself, both the silly and the sad. And so when Gintoki cut off Shouyou’s head, it was the birth of a universe, the “seed” spilling out from that severed neck and setting in motion the story we know and love.

(Incidentally, the magic sci-fi spark that gives Tama, who ended her introductory arc as a severed head in Otose’s snackhouse, the ability to be human is called “the Seed.” Did you know that Fuyou means lotus?)

(I just thought that was interesting.)

Incidentally, while Japanese mythology sadly doesn’t feature any testicular cosmology, it does offer a rather interesting tidbit. According to the Kojiki, Izanagi and Izanami were tasked by the other deities to create land together using the heavenly spear Amenonuhoko. This is described thus:

Granting to them a heavenly jewelled spear, they [thus] deigned to charge them. So the two Deities, standing upon the Floating Bridge of Heaven, pushed down the jewelled spear and stirred with it, whereupon, when they had stiffed the brine till it went curdle-curdle, and drew [the spear] up, the brine that dripped down from the end of the spear was piled up and became an island. This is the Island of Onogoro.

…I think this account speaks for itself. The island of Onogoro became the first piece of Japan (and thus the world), formed out of briny white water, reminiscent of the white foam that Aphrodite sprang out of. Izanagi and Izanami then erected a pillar on the island and built a palace around it, then moved in and started making children. There’s more I could say about Izanagi and Izanami in relation to the ouroboros, but I think that would be too much of a digression. In any case, it takes little effort to imagine why multiple peoples long ago might have looked at sea brine and seen in it an intuitive symbol for creation and genesis–especially a people for whom the sea was a literal source of life. But what I’d really like to draw your attention to is the translator’s footnote on the translation of “jewelled spear”:

The characters translated “jewelled spear” are [], whose proper Chinese signification would be quite different. But the first of the two almost certainly stands phonetically for [] or [],—the syllable nu, which is its sound, having apparently been an ancient word for "jewel" or "head," the better-known Japanese term being tama. (Unfortunately, the characters can't be displayed.)

And there you have it. Is a “spear” really that different from a sword when you think about it, especially when it’s a spear carrying that kind of symbolism? Or, as tshirt put it, “the pole and the hole.” And I’d like to remind you that Utsuro’s body is likened to the land of Japan itself through the very-much-Japanese concept of ryuumyaku, not just my own artistic derangements. His blood is the life-bringing sea, his flesh the earth of the archipelago. When he fell back into the mouth of the earth at the end of Silver Soul, he was falling back into his own mouth, the serpent devouring itself once again.

Unfortunately for Utsuro, within the confines of this essay the mouth is akin to the asshole. Hole is hole: this I did solemnly swear to you at the start of this essay, and I intend to uphold my vow. Utsuro, then, falls back into Hole, and the earth spits him back out–hydra head clumsily cut off, having sprouted into two once more. You could compare, perhaps, Shouyou only re-emerging after having been thrown back into the dragon vein and shaken around a bit to Gintoki’s soul’s own instinct to fly towards buttholes when knocked out of its proper container. In the bodyswap arc, Gintoki gets hit by a truck and sadly survives, though his soul is shaken loose and part of it breaks off (no wonder, when it’s made up of so many little bits), and ends up entering the asshole of a dead cat. Gintoki is essentially a dead-eyed catboy, so this is an easy mistake to make. Additionally, in one of the most memorable gags of the final arc, Gintoki gets swallowed by Sadaharu and pooped back out, but missing two-thirds of his body that, again, accidentally came apart from him while he was in there. They need to be recombined in Sadaharu’s guts, which through his connection to Altana as an inugami constitutes a makeshift dragon hole, until Gintoki finally exits hale and whole from his dog’s asshole.

What did he mean by this?

Well, first of all, it seems like you have to be gentle with Gintoki, despite appearances. He’s made up of so many bits and pieces and people that parts of himself will break off without him even noticing. Second, these gags link the idea of plurality to dirt to the anus as the site of the reconstitution of the self. Or, as Jung said, the “integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow.” Gintoki’s shadow can be represented by Takasugi. Or it can be represented by a naked, hyper-muscular Hello Kitty monster made up of his memories of war and his gambling addiction. They’re both missing an eye and have PTSD, so close enough. What’s fun is that in the Sadaharu gag, the punchline, “Gin San,” is about Gintoki’s name–the “Gin-san” identity he must take on once more to be able to face Shinpachi and Kagura. The joke faintly echoes the tonally very different scene on Rakuyou, where Gintoki told Kamui that Kagura and the others filled his emptiness, giving him the new name of “Gin-chan.” Asaemon, of course, also echoes parts of this, as her primary narrative role is to not-so-subtly provide guidance for the reader to understand and resolve Gintoki’s thematic journey, a parallel made more digestible through her distance from Gintoki as a feminine, vulnerable, indecisive character whose past is totally illuminated to us. At the end of her arc, she kills herself, and gives birth to her new self, like any healthy Gintama character.

Indeed, Gintama’s moral is to “fight yourself,” so naturally all the characters who haven’t given up yet are constantly in the process of devouring themselves. But this is a different process than emptying yourself, which is what the antagonists are doing. All Gintama villains are hole-sided, desperately trying to destroy themselves while pretending, as hard as they can, that they don’t know that you can’t destroy a hole–only make it bigger. I emptied myself on purpose, Kamui insists. I did it intentionally and edgily, so it’s different and your criticism is void. He truly is an 18 year-old boy. Kamui and Takasugi were unable to accept themselves as the ultimate fruit of Kouka and Shouyou’s transformations–their magnum opus. It’s interesting that in their very last snapshots, both of them are bodily changed, taking on younger forms invoking a sense of renewal; Takasugi literally being pooped out of a dragon hole as an ugly infant. While I don’t subscribe to Altana immortal Takasugi theory, in a literal sense Shouyou died and Takasugi was reborn–or, to be more precise, Shouyou returned to the macrocosm, to the lands and grasses and waters of the dragon’s earthly body, and Takasugi re-emerged in his micro (short joke) place. After all, the ouroboros always gives birth to itself, and Takasugi was never expelled. He has always been a part of Shouyou. As Sakamoto said, it’s only natural.

As for Kamui… I originally had a section here discussing his case, centered on his tag-team battle with Kagura against the Eldest, that one-off Silver Soul villain who is first presented to us almost like a strange, low-budget imitation of Utsuro.

However, as much as this guy does end up being a living dick and balls joke, I’ve decided to reserve this material for a future essay where I can delve into the question of blood more fully. So consider this a teaser. This essay has gone on long enough, I think.

So what can we conclude from it? As tshirt observes, Sorachi cannot resist the phallus (or the balls), even beyond the obvious “sword” metaphor. Viewed from the lens of the ouroboros framework, however, Gintama’s insistence on wordplay enables interesting meaning to be derived from these dirty jokes and their interaction with other motifs in the story. After all, the name of the series itself elevates the spirit of the balls joke, even if unintentionally, to the same level as the other metaphor in the title: “silver.” In “eat shit and die,” tshirt notes the important role that conflation plays in both Gintama’s humour and meaning-making, a role we’ve seen repeatedly in this essay with the purposeful blurring of person and dragon and planet, and its deliberate use of paralleled “other selves.”

But perhaps the singularly most important example is the -tama in Gintama, with its plethora of potential meanings, each of them just silly and dirty enough that you have to take it seriously. Beyond the obvious joke on kintama (balls) and the “silver soul” meaning (which the series could not be more explicit about), we’ve seen that tama is also easily conflated with atama (head), and even with tamago (egg). This is clearly demonstrated with the series’ fixation on beheading leading to the salvation of the soul and the bodyswap arc hinging on the pun between soul and egg, which English translators very impressively retained using “egg” and “ego.” The fact that the characters end up turning into giant turds, likening the soul-egg-balls to an asshole, only drives the point in further. In this essay, I took things one step further in mapping these different motifs onto the phallic and yonic/anal (the holeic, if you will). After all, the tension between the phallic and the anal is fundamental to the ouroboros’ symbolism. It is this tension, and this complementarity, that leads to both destruction and creation, death and renewal. One of the reasons I chose the ouroboros as my stylization of choice is that Gintama perfectly encapsulates that central concept of death as rebirth–while throwing in the seemingly contradictory case of the main villain, who is very much Rebirth, But Bad. The ouroboros, then, supplies the symbolic technology to convert the inherent contradictions and sometimes difficult to navigate ambiguities of Gintama’s thematic structure into a more legible, metaphorically potent form.

As I noted in the beginning of this essay, every character in Gintama is ultimately both head and hole, both the beginning and end of the serpent, as the two belong to a single entity. If the head demands the cold bite of the executioner’s sword, the void inside of people also needs to be filled with the essence of others before they can be properly human. You can’t behead yourself–you need someone else to swing the blade. And yet that person is also, in some way, you. The one restoring you to humanity is yourself, the one slaying you is yourself, the one you give birth to is ultimately yourself.

The serpent eating its own tail’s self-fertilization schema is the key tying together the draconic motif of the ouroboros with the tangle of messy metaphors, tautological themes, and fraught relationships that make up Gintama. Naturally, the throughline running through it all is dirt–of the dirty joke variety, but also dirt as that which clings to others, dirt that fills, dirt that stains, dirt that, in short, remains. If the phallic is what inseminates and transmits (as the sword that releases and crystallizes, as the heavenly spear that leads to genesis), in other words tama as “balls,” then the anal is the scabbard for the sword, the vessel that receives and holds on to the seed that is dirt, the cradle where our soul is fertilized–in other words tama as “egg.” Tama as “soul,” then, is simply the combination of these things, the result of this self-fertilization: it is ourselves. When all is said and done, this is reducible to a rather simple message that Gintama has always had: you cannot make yourself alone, but that is hardly a problem or an excuse, because you are never as alone as you think you are.

Let us end on the question of Gintoki’s wooden sword, or as tshirt put it so insightfully, his “prosthetic phallus.” In the end, in Gintama all souls are artificially–yet organically–created through the process of chrysopoeia. tshirt’s argument that Gintoki’s wooden sword is made all the more transgressive for not being a “real” sword highlights the fact that even in the most surface-level reading, Gintoki’s wooden sword is more sword-like exactly because it invokes the idea of one without the technical reality. The “human’s sword” that Gintoki attains at the end of the series is airy and abstract, but more than readily understood by the reader because that is the kind of sword he’s been wielding all along.

As I noted before, even if Gintoki has become human, his task has not ended. The Great Work will continue forever, even after it’s already been accomplished. If the human is the microcosmos and the stuff inside them is, as Jung says, the prima materia, the formless base element of the universe, then it is not only the fruit but also the process itself that creates the world. And though this essay has not been about queer theory, let it be said that the profundity with which Gintama treats the act of self-transformation, along with the nuances and textures of Gintoki as a “reluctant hole,” make him a captivating protagonist on more levels than one. And of that desperate struggle to produce a human being, of the base substance inside of people that is their only natural material, let me quote the 17th century Theatricum Chemicum, on the subject of the prima materia:

They have compared the "prima materia" to everything, to male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass; it contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals; there is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself.

Emphasis mine.

Appendix A:

#gintama #gintama spoilers #dear god.#posting this on ginpachi-sensei anime announcement day. we are subject to cosmic forces after all

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issacballsac · 11 months

Text

“Being Charles Xavier’s Sibling„

Being the sibling of the world’s strongest psychic has perks! Gn reader

Non-Mutant

Would be a great brother honestly

Always cheated in hide and seek

“No way you found me that fast!”

“I’m simply a great player.”

“You totally cheated, Charles!”

He’s support you in any of your endeavours

Likes to go on weekly walks with you and just talk about life especially when you guys get older and have your own separated lives

Probably goes without saying but you would be an advocate for mutants

Raven is basically your sister as well

Def favours you more than Charles when it comes to talking about her problems

Honestly i don’t think he’d let you tag along in the events of X-MEN first class

He’s so fucking soft

Mfs walk all over him and it’s embarrassing

You def would have to defend him in verbal scenarios

Idk if it’s true but he prob plays pool

He beats you more than not

Before he got his fancy wheel chair you would roll him everywhere

Like a little kid with a shopping cart only it’s two grown adults💀

No offence but his fashion sense is horrendous.

You dress him just for the sake of aesthetics

Mutant

Still a great brother

You’ll most likely have similar abilities to him or Emma Frost

Can’t/won’t read your mind

That’s a lie he probably did/tried to once to get you to clean his room💀

Just sibling things

Y’all were low-key menaces as children

Absolute devious duo

He’s so nice but y’know how siblings get when they’re together

Yin and yang Fr

You still dress him bc his fashion sense is STILL terrible whether ur a mutant or not💀

“Why the fuck did you even CONSIDER putting that on, Charles?”

“That’s rather rude…”

Would def want you to be an Xman but would respect if you didn’t want to be

Plays chess with you like the old man he is

Going back to your sister kinda, Raven!

You guys def would get along more

If you had similar ideologies she probably trusts you/confides in you more

If you decided to become an x-men your brother would be ecstatic

While he wants to keep you safe simultaneously he is happy that you’ll help with his vision to have mutants and non mutants living together in peace

If you’re a teacher at the school for the gifted he’ll ask for your input in certain things involving school policy/architectural ideas

You’d help him with any unstable students and it’d get exhausting but worth it to help someone

Despite not needing to be pushed around in his wheelchair anymore you still do it for fun

Cracks jokes about his new bald appearance

You’ve def bought him wigs but he would decline using them

You guys are still hella goofy even as adults

And no matter how old you get you guys will always fight for mutant kind

“A girl I met once told me, mutant and proud.”

“That’s corny as hell, Charles.”

#x men first class #x men movies #xmen #charles xavier #platonic headcanons #platonic #fanfic #fanfiction #x gn reader #x reader platonic #beingcharlessibling #xmen x reader #xmenxreaderplatonic #charles x reader #charlesxreaderplatonic #xmenxgnreader

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girl4music · 22 days

Text

Xena and Gabrielle sitting on the sand dunes together talking about morality. It’s your frequent intimate campfire scene you get every now and again but this time it’s without the campfire. It feels sort of… empty.

But still heavy because that’s exactly how they feel.

GABRIELLE: "You're thinking of giving yourself up to Bellerophon, aren't you?"

XENA: “It would settle things."

GABRIELLE: “Only for a moment. Then he would turn around and come after us again."

XENA: “That's the thing about vengeance. You’re never really satisfied. You did the right thing about Varia. She doesn't deserve to be condemned."

GABRIELLE: “She was desperate to save her tribe. I know that."

XENA: "It made her do something she never thought she'd do. Just like you're going to have to rally your troops to fight again. Maybe die, Gabrielle."

GABRIELLE: “If that's what I have to do. Why are you looking at me like that?"

XENA: “Just doesn't seem like the Gabrielle I know."

GABRIELLE: “It's not me, Xena. But it is the Queen of the Amazons. That's who I am, whether I like it or not."

This show is just as much about Gabrielle evolving into a warrior as it about Xena searching for redemption.

But it’s when the tables turn… when it has to be Xena being the light in the dark for Gabrielle - that’s when this show becomes so much more significant in what it’s trying to show you because it’s showing you how easy it is to come from a place of inexhaustible light and fall into the depths of darkness out of a necessity to fight and survive for both yourself and others - your loved ones especially - more than it is anything else.

Let’s step into Gabrielle’s shoes for a moment: You started off finding that you had to make really difficult choices that went against what you believed in and then you came to terms with the fact that you had to do that and have to continue to do that as a warrior. But it’s still something you can’t quite reconcile with in yourself. And your partner knows all too well all of this. All of what this is like for you, how it feels for you right now - the entire rollercoaster ride and journey of living the life of a battle-hardened warrior. All that heaviness and emptiness at exactly the same time.

You know sometimes I look at these two characters and just think about what a profound relationship they must have to be able to basically become each other while still being a northern star to and for each other. Meaning how depending on the conditions it is - the situation or circumstance, Yin is Yang and Yang is Yin.

Just the thought of how much more romantic that sounds than the typical romantic connection you get. How much more deep and intense a relationship between best friends can be because of that and then how that can be what informs and progresses such a close and intimate relationship to move into romance and furthermore how that makes that relationship between them stronger and more substantial in friendship and in romance because both aspects to their relationship obviously come and go together.

It’s a really hard thing to explain when you separate the fact that they’re best friends and they’re lovers rather than simply understand its one and the same. Just as it is easier to simply understand that they’re one and the same however distinctly different they may function as. Yin and Yang in constant rotation.

Yeah… It’s jarring when you see it happen at first… it’s even contradictory because their very personalities are so different and so oppositional from each other.

But does it ultimately make sense? Yes. Yes, it does.

Because they’re soulmates AND twin flames. They’re match AND mirror. As one soul in two bodies, they’re two extremes of the same thing. Two sides of a whole.

A different function of it, but the same unit because they couldn’t possibly fit and connect if they weren’t. And you couldn’t possibly get a romance out of a relationship like this if that’s not how it’s meant to be.

Yin and Yang are not always a romantic pairing every time, but they are always of one and the same nature even as a contradictory and oppositional duality. They have to be because that’s the only way they can exist.

Xena and Gabrielle don’t stay still. They are constantly moving, rotating and evolving within and without each other. Constantly in a dance together. They’re more profound than any WLW ship in the history of TV art/entertainment because they’re friends AND lovers at the same time and you don’t need to separate both these aspects to their relationship to understand how all-encompassing it really is. To understand THEM. In all honesty, what makes Xena and Gabrielle more romantic than most WLW ships is because it’s not just romantic. There is so many more layers to it than that because their individual journeys are intrinsic to it. I understand them so well as Yin and Yang that their relationship means much more to me than romance… but that’s the very reason WHY it feels more romantic to me. It’s because I look beyond the surface of the typical romantic connection or relationship in TV art/entertainment. I think a lot deeper about what ‘LOVE’ is because I have Xena and Gabrielle as the example.

I know for fact I wouldn’t see them as an EPIC love story if they didn’t have the slow burn to them and if they both didn’t have main character representation and development because I understand how all of that combined influences their EPIC love story. They’re the ultimate romantic pairing to me because of all of this.

#xena warrior princess #to helicon and back #xena and gabrielle #xabrielle #xena #lucy lawless #gabrielle #renee o'connor #best friends #lovers #romance #soulmates #one soul in two bodies #the human representation of yin and yang #character representation #character development #wlw representation

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sasukesun · 8 months

Note

I find it so weird when some Sasuke stans act like Naruto can’t live without Sasuke (which is true) but that it isn’t the same with Sasuke because "Sasuke’s character is independent from Naruto’s"…

Like no, Kishimoto made it very clear that they both completed each other. Sasuke’s character doesn’t have the same meaning without Naruto’s and vice-versa. They just don’t work if one is written without the other… Doesn’t mean they don’t have their own personal development going on of course, but it’s still linked to what the other is currently living.

Also why do some Sasuke stans think that Naruto doesn’t have any other development point besides him chasing after Sasuke? Did they just skipped the entire manga where Naruto was struggling with his own hatred, the grief of Jiraiya, the complicated relationship with his father, his bond with Gaara?… Why for them, defending Sasuke is the same thing as bashing Naruto? They’re basically doing the same thing as Sasuke haters

“sasuke is always in the corner of my mind. naruto and sasuke progress as a pair. so when i write about naruto, i always have to think about sasuke. they are on opposite sides of the spectrum, like yin and yang”. it’s not enough that kishimoto himself says that, it’s not enough that kishimoto puts that in his writing and i guess it’s also not enough that sasuke’s final plan consists on him killing naruto, aka the last person in the world that doesn’t make him be alone as he himself states that, so that he would “succumb to darkness” forever to a point he wouldn’t feel human anymore. how does the last one especially give people the idea that sasuke can live without naruto? sasuke might have a more independent narrative going on, but i find impressive how easily it slips off people’s minds the fact that he had to actively distance himself from naruto in order for that to happen. and that’s exactly the point. naruto craves connections, sasuke thinks those make him weak, i don’t get why people think he and naruto should act the same towards each other, they don’t have the same train of thought for that.

#ask #anonymous

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arc-misadventures · 2 years

Note

Nora: So Jaune/Jeanne when you saw the other you did you think about fucking them?

Jaune/Jeanne: NORA!!!

Nora: Did you?

Jaune/Jeanne: ........Yes.

Why Are You Asking Me this?

Jaune: Oh, its you again…

Jeanne: I take it after all that has happened you don’t like me?

Jaune: No, not really. Learning how much people like you in your world hurts… And, since then more people in my world have show their true colours in how they feel about me…

Jeanne: Not good?

Jaune: Ya think?

Jeanne: I’m sorry.

Jaune: Haa… Look, I don’t hate you, Jeanne, but I don’t like you either.

Jeanne: That makes sense. Do you think we could repair our relationship? We are one, and the same person. Well… mostly.

Jaune: I don’t know… Your presence in my life has made it a nightmare. I wouldn’t mind trying, so long as I don’t have to try, Nora’s method…

Jeanne: Her talking about how we should sleep with one another?

Jaune: Oh, she said that to you too?

Jeanne: Yeah, I admit for a second I thought about it.

Jaune: Only because she put the thought in our heads.

Jeanne: Of course.

Jaune: I mean, it would be like I’m sleeping with my twin sister.

Jeanne: She’s basically proposing incest.

Jaune: I’d rather sleep with, Yang than you. That’s basically the same thing, without the weird ethical baggage. But, that’s not going to do after all that has happened.

Jeanne: I feel the same way, about Yin. However, it implies I have some sort of brother-complex if I did. Sister-complex in your case.

Jaune: Yeah, Yang is beautiful, but considering how she has referred to me as of late, it’s not likely going to happen.

Jeanne: She was quite beautiful, like the sister I never had.

Jaune: Same with me, and that, Yin fellow.

Jeanne: Is there anyone you would want to date?

Jaune: Well, I have been thinking about my, Pyrrha, and Nora. They’re really important people in my life, and I would like to become closer to them, romantically… But, I’m scared about losing them if I do. There is someone else in my life, but… That’s not likely going to happen. Honestly, if I could, I would like to date, Rin…

Jeanne: Rin? My, Rin?! You want to date her?

Jaune: She seems like a really nice girl, and really pretty. It just feels nice thinking about falling asleep with her in my arms.

Jeanne: She is really comfy to sleep with…

Jaune: Oh! A-Are you two… a thing?

Jeanne: No… Were were just sharing a bed along with, Nora. The heaters broke so are rooms were freezing cold because of this. So, if I could, I’d wish you good luck with her.

Jaune: I doubt I could get anywhere with her…

Jeanne: Oh, you’d be surprised, she seems interested in you too~!

Jaune: S-Seriously?!

Jeanne: Just if something does happen, treat her well, or I’m coming after you…

Jaune: Ha… Fair. So, what about you, has anyone caught your eye?

Jeanne: No, no not really. I tend to catch the eyes of others, but no one has caught my eye. Evidently I have a fan club of people who like me. But, there’s no one I like. I guess that something you have on me; People to love.

Jaune: What’s better; People who love you, or people to love?

Jeanne: Good question… Haa… Now, I’m depressed…

Jaune: Welcome to my world…

Jeanne: …

Jaune: …

Jeanne: Do you think, Nora asked us this question because she wants to sleep with herself?

Jaune: Do you really need to ask? Of course she does!

Jeanne: Just thought I should ask.

#rwby #jaune arc #yang xiao long #nora valkyrie #pyrrha nikos #lie ren #fem jaune

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lunarharp · 1 year

Text

was bored, realised i care more about orufrey than anyone ever, then decided to work out my top 5 otps of all time and give them awards

(below) then i got drunk on power and judged them on even more categories... canon rating.. colour-coded rating (??) .. and the mysterious.. Fated Rating.

orufrey

-canon rating: 4/5

romantic narrative that can be reasonably assumed at this point to be ��going somewhere” while technically ““not canon”“. i know what she is doing

-colour-coded: 6/5

no words. designed in perfect and homosexual complements. black & white = yin & yang. black hair white shirt black skirt. white hair black shirt white skirt. also they’re fire & water.. elemental coded. qif’s glasses are black & white too... everything about them represents them as a pair. and they both have gold & blue highlights. what is it going to be, white & black tuxes at the wedding or do witches get married in gowns. just skip to that chapter it’s fine

-fated rating: 5/5

The. Tassels. they chose to live together and entwine their lives around each other. it means MORE that it was choice and not fate. nuff said............... p.s. read my fic

ferdibert

-canon rating: 4/5

they can be implied to get married or they can kill each other depending on YOUR choices. 4 points for the chaos of that. would be 5/5 if the pair ending text wasn’t translated in a homophobic way

-colour-coded: 3/5

orange and black. looks good together so points for that. also those colours mean ferdibert forever to me i don’t care about halloween.

-fated rating: 2/5

they used to hate each other. and with slightly different happenstances in life they end up killing each other (with pathos). but that stuff means something in its own way so it’s fine they’re fine.

suipo

-canon rating: 5/5

they basically end up together and kiss at the ending 💗

-colour-coded: 4.5/5

blue & pink. perfect. beautiful. and they match as perfect complements in other ways too. both are named after sweets. suipo 4ever

-fated rating: 4/5

they just met randomly. BUT... they had to meet... they both needed to meet each other to advance their personal narratives. <3 +2 points for dying and ending up in heaven together cause that’s bonkers

wrightworth

-canon rating: 2/5

NOT CANON.....I GUESS.......i literally forget this though. designed by a BL creator or something and a stupidly gay narrative for Friends so how could you say 0/5 though

-colour-coded: 5/5

another pink & blue. or red & blue more broadly. incredible. great. they match in tons of ways. like the wedding rings that capcom made.

-fated rating: 6/5

childhood friends to whatever they are is worth 3/5 in and of itself, but then so many of their choices are literally about each other in such incredibly pathetically gay ways that it’s truly nuts.

joker/akechi

-canon rating: 2.5/5

i don’t know what to say. the narrative and the heartcrushing 7 minute romantic ending song that haunts my waking moments even now are what they are. i don’t know what to say

-colour-coded: 3/5

well... their colours are both black & red... ? kind of? you could say black/red & black/white. i don’t know. it looks good though.

-fated rating: 4/5

(literally loads of spoilers................... !!!!!!!!) they were quite entirely given their powers on purpose to foil each other. but, akechi wants to be free of narratives and doesn’t want to be entwined with anyone else’s life. next time this’ll be his choice. THAT MAKES IT EVEN MORE....WHAT IT IS. also they’re just obsessed with each other and their songs are about each other and no more what ifs, what matters is how you bring joy to life when i said a false happiness would be enough you softly covered my mouth etc etc etc

orufrey: 15

suipo: 13.5

ferbies: 9

wrightworth: 13

j&a: 9.5

WHY ARE FERBIES LAST???? hubert is going to kill me.....that's ok. the fact that i learnt to draw with you means the world <3

P.S. I LOVE BYLITZA!!!!!! from fe3h. but ones like that are so personal that there's no point saying "i love this" like i love the same thing others love. or something

ok bye

#sometimes uve got to have fun online.#i dont know how to draw anyone but orufrey any more. who are these people #p.s. by persona 3p protag i obviously mean the girl one so it's gay.#i doodled this to put it on twt but it would be weird if ppl RTed something so obviously personal & manic #i feel like i forgot some major ship i massively love. there are lots of others i love btw. even a few het ones... (?!) probably.#i didn't used to be much of a shipper cause i didn't use the internet i didn't see fanart i didn't draw. for years of my adult life.#sometimes i get really obsessed with something bc of the time i encounter it. like those two from good omens really got to me #i should do a takarazuka-only version of these. suipo vs everyone else. i've drawn couples interacting and fighting before :')#i like my ferdibert & orufrey crossover comic doodles. for the audience that is me. i like thinking about double date failures.#it really is weird/interesting that i do care about orufrey SO much and draw them SO much but there are ones i dont wanna draw.#^ the commentator (me) watching my award show presented by me for me

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