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hirazuki · 3 years

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Ooo I'm curious about your hot takes on the Inuyasha reboot after reading your tags 👀

Ahaha, where to start XD Idk if they are hot takes, but here are my thoughts in bullet point form for coherency, I couldn’t figure out how else to organize them. Under a cut, as usual, because it got lengthy... as usual :D

We are 13 episodes in, and I still have no idea wtf is going on or what the series is actually about. And yes, I’m aware that we didn’t know of Naraku’s existence or of the overarching plot until at least episode 16 of that series either and Inuyasha was still very episodic in nature at that early point too, but here’s the thing: Inuyasha did not build upon a pre-existing series. For better or for worse, Yashahime has certain expectations to live up to that the original anime didn’t, by virtue of its being a sequel. Unfair? Maybe, but tough; that’s what happens when you make a sequel. Additionally, despite us not knowing The Main Plot™ of Inuyasha until later, the basic framework for it was laid out clearly by... episode 2? I think? Find and collect the Shikon Jewel shards. Boom, done. Were there distractions or fillers? Sure, but you never got the sense that the characters simply up and forgot about the shards. Even in fillers, the shards often made some kind of appearance. With Yashahime, there’s like three potential storylines going on: 1. The most obvious: most of our main cast from the OG is missing; where are they? Apparently no one in-story cares! :D Inuyasha, who’s that lol. I’m all for a sequel focusing on the new generation with cameos of the old crew; after all, they already had their own series. But this is like... no one cares about them? No one talks about them? And the more characters go about not mentioning them, the stronger their absence is felt. Like, for instance, Kaede knows Moroha is InuKag’s daughter. Moroha grew up on her own, doesn’t know her parents. Kaede doesn’t mention them to Moroha, doesn’t even spare a passing thought about them for the audience’s benefit, Moroha doesn’t ask. Kagome’s family in the present day meet Moroha, recognize her as Kagome’s daughter and... say nothing??? Souta shows Towa Kagome and Inuyasha’s old photos, but doesn’t say a word to Moroha?! Like. It makes no sense. By people not even acknowledging their existence, it makes the fact that they are nowhere to be found even weirder. Also the new gen girls don’t care about their parents or finding out who they were/are... like, okay, it would maybe be in character for one or two of them, but all three don’t give a fuck??? 2. Kirinmaru/the rainbow pearls: Idk how familiar you are with the story, but similar deal with Naraku and the shards here. Kirinmaru is being set up as the villain, still a mysterious figure; our new gen trio is supposed to collect the rainbow pearls that... some of his henchmen have? Or he is after them? Or is that Riku? Unclear. ANYWAY the new gen girls often forget all about the pearls’ existence :D 3. Setsuna’s memories: Setsuna’s dreams have been stolen by the dream butterfly and they need to get them back, because without her dreams she has no memories and is unable to sleep. Cool! Finally a solid, easy-to-follow plot line! Except wait! Towa, who supposedly made it her goal to get Setsuna’s sleep back, forgets all about it! All the time! Like, none of them make an effort to look into this other than being like “oh yeah, know anything about the dream butterfly?” to random folks every now and then. The Inugang back in the day was putting some grad school level research towards their goals, just saying. It just feels like everything’s all wishy-washy and there’s nothing really solid tying the series together. People just remember shit exists when it’s convenient.

Character development is MIA. I’m not expecting ground-breaking char dev in 13 episodes (though I do know 12 episode series that were phenomenal in that regard), but like... I do expect the series to focus on building the dynamics between the main three characters. So far, the series is more focused on teasing the audience with glimpses and promises of the OG cast instead. The creators are using nostalgia and bait (esp of a certain pairing) to drive interest in the series, rather than developing the new characters as fully-fledged characters for their own sakes.

Moroha is was the only thing I actually liked about the series. She is a little spitfire and you can somehow instantly see both Inuyasha and Kagome in her, while she also remains very uniquely herself; I have never seen such a successfully developed main pairing child in any series. She featured quite prominently in the first few episodes -- and unlike both her parents, she’s got a great memory and knowledge of lore -- where she balanced funny moments with badass fighting moments and being the token supernatural encyclopedia. It was great! And then... they’ve like... forgotten her. She’s been left behind so many times by the twins. She’s the butt of every joke. She’s become the type of comic relief that’s, well, insulting. More like a buffoon than anything else. And it’s basically all for the sake of giving the floor to Towa :/

Setsuna is okay. Not offensive, but unremarkable. She’s got her dad’s personality but like way toned down due to her different growing up circumstances, which is nice, but like... I feel she isn’t given any room to grow or breathe or anything. She’s also basically there as a device to enhance Towa’s development.

Towa... oy. I tried to like her, I really did, but she just doesn’t work for me. They set her up having a very Kurosaki Ichigo type deal with beating up bullies and getting into trouble at school and shit -- I’m fine with that. That’s cool. Esp if it’s linked to not feeling like she fits in bc she’s a hanyou? Awesome. Except once she travels back in time to the feudal era it’s all “Oh killing is bad you shouldn’t kill people” and “even though they attacked me I can’t possibly hurt them” and “you need to empathize and talk things out” and “friendship is magic” and shit. It feels like she had a personality transplant, it literally makes no sense. Her design is totally nonsensical too -- out of everyone at her school, she’s the only one dressed in a bright white suit? Do protags not wear the school uniform? Someone should tell Kagome lmao. She’s a pro at hand to hand, and she can absorb demons’ powers and fling them back at them like a personified Tessaiga, and she has a lightsaber sword, and she’s immune to miasma, and -- like... you get it. It’s too much. It’s way too OP for the type of universe that Inuyasha/Yashahime is set in. She’s hanyou for fuck’s sake; remember all the training Inuyasha had to go through? When he couldn’t lift his sword? When his sword attacked him? Sango, Miroku, Kagome, even Sesshomaru all had trouble with their weapons and had to work to become stronger. But Towa? Nope. Towa is straight out of the Yas Queen/Girl Boss manual, so she gets a free pass on everything.

UGH they are doing the VLD/bad writing thing where things happen (like, BIG THINGS) and none of the characters actually react to them. Or stuff happens and there are no consequences. No one ever talks about anything. It’s wild.

Everyone has amnesia!! :D People either don’t know or don’t remember anything or anyone. People who absolutely should know things all of a sudden magically don’t know them. Like, Kohaku -- traveled with an undead priestess, spent years in the company of demons, traveled with Sesshomaru... and yet had NO CLUE that Setsuna is Sesshomaru’s daughter or that she is hanyou, despite her living and working with his team of demon slayers all this time. Like... how, man. How. And Kaede! Don’t get me started. Since when does she perpetuate random demon-boogeyman type stories as facts? Demon children will kill each other in the nest so that only the strongest one will survive, therefore Setsuna must have killed Towa when they were infants. O_O What are they, sharks? Has she been hanging out with Kisame? Wtf?? And she’s speaking about Sess’s kids as though she doesn’t know him or anything about him, when she has had Rin under her roof all these years. It just makes. no. sense.

Things that happened in the original series are happening again now! Because that’s the best we’ve got, recycled plot elements wooo! No, but really, characters that died or things that were resolved in Inuyasha keep coming back. Why? What was the purpose of bringing back Kinka and Ginka? To have a foil for Towa and Setsuna as twins? Someone please tell Sunrise they can just create new characters. Like, it’s one thing to have call backs to the original or cameos, references, whatever. But like... this is entire (dead) characters and interactions.

No one knows how long it’s been since the original series ended. Fans initially heard 20 years from promo material, then “over 15″ and “10 years since” in-series regarding two different events, and now in a future episode summary we’ve gotten 18 years since Hosenki II gave Inuyasha the black pearl. But like, which black pearl? Because the one in Inuyasha’s eye doesn’t exist anymore, but Hosenki II had told Inuyasha that it would take 100 years for him to produce one. So, are we retconning that or where the fuck did it come from? Also, this doesn’t help one bit, it just confuses things even more. Back to the point, though, we have no coherent timeline or real frame of reference whatsoever, and I’m betting it’s in large part to keep the mystery of who is Sesshomaru’s wife going, as it keeps Rin’s age very vague. Everything is vague and mysterious in Yashahime, to the point where no one knows what’s going on, in fandom or in-story even. It’s kinda like how too much plot twist/shock reveal ruins a story, too much mystery does the same. It’s insane that both shippers and antis of that ship can lay equal claim that the “18 years since” announcement works in their favor.

tl;dr: Idk man, Yashahime is a clusterfuck of a series. Even if the mother of Sess’s twins is either of the characters I ship him with, I will still not like the series. There’s no saving this writing. Every episode feels like this:

#baked-hylian #i've been wanting to rant for a while about this series thanks for enabling me! :D #i'm actually not upset about this sequel which is amazing; i thought for sure it would impact my love for the OG but nope!#it is so wild and out there that my brain literally cannot comprehend it as part of the same material #i'm just watching it out of the kind of morbid curiosity you'd watch a horrifying experiment with #and watching the fandom drama too ofc #popcorn in hand #so it's a win-win all around ¯\_(ツ)_/¯#talk: yh

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semercury · 4 years

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thoughts on death of the author vs. authorial intent

if you’ve spoken to me about literature to any length, you know i am a huge supporter of death of the author, but i realize that sometimes that gets misinterpreted, or perhaps i am more middle of the road than i originally thought. creations do not exist in vacuums. to try and interpret them as such does a disservice to both the work itself and the consumer. you can never have a piece of work that does not have history behind it.

what i mean when i say that i support death of the author is that i believe once an author has placed a work out into the world, they no longer have control over how it is interpreted. i feel like many people use death of the author as a way to excuse problematic things in fiction, and for me, i actually see it as the opposite.

with the way i interpret literature, if i can look at an author’s history and the context of their life and pull something from their work that maaaybe doesn’t look the greatest in certain lights, the author has no power to say “no ha ha don’t think i’m racist, i didn’t mean it ha ha” because.... honey, your work is out there. and it smells kinda funky. if you didn’t want people to interpret this as being a racist caricature, maybe you shouldn’t have written a racist caricature.

my big issue with authorial intent is retconning things. i cannot stand it. twitter is a bane on society and i think we should delete the entire website. you don’t get brownie points for saying “no ha ha i included progressive things, please love me” because... no you didn’t. if people cannot get that from your work alone, you don’t get to say it exists. just like you also don’t get to defend your work when people start criticizing it, because if you wanted people to interpret it a certain way, it’s on you, the author, to make that clearer in the first place.

let’s move on to a neutral topic. let’s say an author writes a morally ambiguous character with little to no backstory. let’s say this character dies partway through the novel/series/show/whatever, and this character’s death is also ambiguous in the sense that they could have died as a sacrifice for the good side and truly changed their ways, or they just fucked up. if readers/viewers/whatever can find evidence to support either theory, then they are both valid. let’s also, for the sake of this, say that the author does not have a weird history with, idk, evil groups of people who lie and are always bad. this author is not a nihilist nor are they a pollyann-ish “i believe everyone can change” kind of person. they are neutral. in this example, if the author were to come forward and say “oh, no, actually i meant for them to be evil the whole time. their death happened bc they messed up” since that was not made clear in the canon text itself, it does not matter to me. if people can find evidence that this character was truly trying to change and become a better person and they redeemed themselves through a sacrifice, that is valid in my opinion. sorry author, try again next time.

that is what i mean when i say i support death of the author. trying to retcon your own text because you fucked up is bullshit. be a better writer. retcons not valid. fuck you.

what i do not mean is viewing things in a vacuum. because let’s face it, knowing lovecraft was a horrible racist does influence how we read his works. it makes certain things in his works make more sense. we cannot divorce that from his works, as it does go into interpreting his works. if lovecraft were alive today and had a twitter and was like “no ha ha i didn’t mean it” uhhh no, sorry buddy, that’s set in stone now. you don’t get to change how we interpret your work post publication.

this is not to say authors cannot give insight to their works, only that what is said cannot be considered canon, and any added behind the scenes info about characters or motivations does not invalidate or strengthen interpretations.

this is also not to say that you should never engage with works written by problematic people. no unproblematic person exists, and no unproblematic piece of fiction exists. rather, i believe we should look critically at everything we enjoy. looking critically at something you like does not mean it is bad or that you are bad for enjoying it, rather simply that you are a human being with a brain and you have thoughts.

so basically... keep liking harry potter. drop harry potter. it doesn’t matter. but read it critically. jkr doesn’t get brownie points for her twitter shit, and she also doesn’t get to be like “noo i wasn’t being gross in my books ha ha” either, bc knowing her beliefs and where she comes from does open up new interpretations. knowing her thoughts and beliefs pre-publication does shed light on certain characters and groups.

authors cannot retcon things in their books, but learning new information about their beliefs and values does shed a different light on things. with this being said, this also does not mean that authors cannot apologize for previous oversights or insensitive content, only that it doesn’t get rid of the problematic content. an author very easily could say “hey, i used to be kinda scummy and i wrote some less than great things. i promise to be better with my upcoming works.”

because that does not retcon, that moves forward.

authors can only move forward, not backwards. once they put something out, they are dead to that world. you want to fix it? make a new one.

thank you for coming to my ted talk.

#stuff sarah says #@ colleges: plz let me be a lit/creative writing major for free #i have brain cells sometimes plz

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