all the rise boys get done dirty on characterization by fandom in different ways i think. (not ALL the time every fanwork etc etc these are just like, trends i tend to notice?) every fandom suffers from losing character nuance.
- leo i’ve talked about plenty on this blog, how some of his canon traits (genuine belief in his skill and cockiness, capacity for joy, his manipulativeness whether for good or ill) seem to get watered down or wiped off the board and supplemented with generic sad boy. his struggles with purpose and identity and not wanting to fail somehow morph into “he hates and completely holds no value for himself”
- donnie’s canon personality gets blurred out and largely replaced with whatever list of Neurodivergent Traits. and i think there’s such a fine line to walk between exploring a character that’s been word of god confirmed as on the spectrum and overwriting what’s canonically there. it’s a hard needle to thread. it also feels like a lot of his canon emotiveness gets left off the table for some reason. bc he does have his moments of flat/deadpan delivery, but a lot of the time he’s honestly very emotive. he has the passion of a theatre kid and the vindictiveness of... also a theatre kid. and the mind of a scientist.
- raph loses so much of his rowdy teen boy energy it’s kind of wild? like interpretations sand off that he’s also impulsive and can be reckless and dumb and LOVES fighting and roughhousing and isn’t the most eloquent person. suddenly there’s this pitch perfect soft boy big bro who would never hurt a fly and always says the exact right supportive thing and singlehandedly raised his 3 brothers (which simultaneously sands off all the nuance of splinter’s issues emotionally connecting with his sons and how that affected all of them). and like i LOVE raph, he’s so full of love and care and anxiety, he clearly has learned to put a lot of work into being aware of his strength and size. but there’s a difference you know?
- mikey is like. where raph gets overparentified by fanon, mikey gets over “family therapist”-ed IMO. the impulsiveness, the goofiness, the powerful emotions including a VERY powerful temper, the flat-out dumb teen boy choices... they get ignored. suddenly there’s this only very sweet and earnest boy who has read a hundred psychology books and runs group family therapy weekly or something. he is crying in his room bc leo and raph are arguing about something. which is so. he IS very sweet and can be very earnest and is full of love! he HAS come in with his opinions and unsolicited advice a couple of times and life coached for the greater good. but there’s a difference between what he does in canon and the role he gets in fanon.
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Something I think fiction does sometimes is make sex represent the end goal for relationships so often that if two characters sleep together it causes readers to automatically see them as truly in love / that it would solve all problems for the pair to be together forever, even when that isn't necessarily what the narrative is trying to say / depict otherwise.
I am thinking about this because of Guts and Casca... to me they sleep together initially almost as an act of friendship? A way of experimenting with each other and learning about sex, perhaps of distracting themselves from the person they're both more actually into, and of course also because they do care about each other and maybe are attracted to one another on some level, and want to see what it would be like to try to get even closer together. But I think the story also makes it pretty clear that Guts is more emotionally invested in his relationship with Griffith than with Casca, in what you might call a narratively romantic sense... and Casca is shown sort of seeing the futility of her feelings for Griffith and eventually growing apart from him that way pre-Eclipse, even though she still cares for him the most out of everyone she knows (though I don't think he ever feels nearly the same way about her). So getting with Griffith isn't end game for Casca (and she herself eventually realizes that), but I also don't read Casca as a character for whom getting with Guts is the end game character arc-wise, either. I'm not sure Miura even had a concrete end-game character arc in mind for her, to be honest. I feel as though unfortunately she was written mostly as something to be used between Griffith and Guts rather than to end up having her own fully realized narrative journey in the same way that Guts (and maybe also Griffith) will. I want to see her and Guts as friends and at peace more than I want to see them live happily ever after together as a couple, because I feel like that's actually more how they really feel for one another than anything else. Granted, there's a bit of an interesting ironic twist in the story that happens during the Eclipse, where Griffith (unintentionally?) drives Guts and Casca closer together than I think they might have been otherwise with the trauma that he causes them both (even though I think their relationship is probably something he'd be jealous of and read as more romantic than it actually might be and wish to destroy, simply due to his own insecurities and his own possessive feelings for Guts). But I also didn't really read Guts' reactions in the Eclipse scene as Guts being jealous and possessive over Casca in a sexual / romantic sense - I read it more as him feeling empathy for her pain and desire to protect her from harm / from the darker side of Griffith he maybe knew about a bit better than anybody else. I DO care about Guts and Casca's relationship a lot, and find it one of the most emotionally compelling things in the story. But I don't think shipping them together for a happily ever after is really what I'd want for them, nor something that the narrative was actually trying to work towards / suggest to be the best ending for anybody involved? I don't know if I think shipping Guts and Griffith necessarily is either, particularly because of how irredeemably awful Griffith behaved during the Eclipse... but I DO think the story intentionally hinges more around the Griffguts relationship and their emotional journeys / character developments than it does about any other pair/relationship in the series, and that both of them have intense unresolved feelings for each other that come off much more suggestive and stronger than ones of just simply wanting to be friends. And I think all of these characters are pretty explicitly aware of that themselves even in the story as well.
Haha I don't even know what I'm trying to even say here except to work out some of my own thoughts about the main 3 that I care about, I suppose!
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I think, in a lot of ways, Monika and Sayori are reflections of each other.
Really, I think all of the girls are similar in a lot of their issues (self-esteem, anxiety, etc) and that's something emphasized in a lot of the stories, and a big part of why they all gravitate towards each other and work to create the club as a safe space for all of them, but I think Monika and Sayori in particular are just very much alike.
I think Trust really emphasized this similarity in the reveal of Sayori's poem, Become the Flower.
Prior to shifting focus onto the poem, Monika talks to herself about her real vision for the Literature Club. I think here, Monika points out what Sayori actually meant when she said that Monika was "trying to make the club [she] needs the most, out of anyone", even if she doesn't actually realize that yet. It's pretty clear that when she says that literature is a window to the real self underneath the person who's "forced to always smile and blend in", and is "forced to be perfect", she's really talking about herself.
I think that a lot of Monika's character throughout Trust is expressed more subtly, often in a roundabout way like this. A huge part of the story is centered around Monika's own personal struggles expressing herself, and that trait is pretty well exemplified in this indirect way of talking about her own struggles. I think that the reason why Monika's characterization here is so subtle overall is reflective of this.
And I think it's pretty blatant that this is statement is also meant to be reflective of Sayori, given that we immediately move from this statement onto the poem which reveals to Monika that she's been hiding her own problems. In this way, I think Team Salvato wanted to explicitly point out how similar they really are, and draw your attention to it.
I think that the way that Trust as a story is put together is meant to really emphasize just how similar they are even in their differences; spending a great deal of time focusing on Monika's own problems, to then showcase Sayori as the mirror to them.
I think the two of them make a very interesting pair in that respect, because a big similarity they have is that they very much place others above themselves, so they both end up individually building each other up while they put themselves down. It creates this strange back and forth where they each insist they suck and the other is great, when the reality is that they're both pretty fantastic.
In the statement Monika made to herself about her vision of the club, while it's clear she's talking about herself, she frames it in the context of somebody else getting those benefits out of the Literature Club, rather than herself. Throughout the entirety of Trust, she speaks dismissively of her efforts and her problems alike, while pointing out that Sayori is providing a lot of help. Sayori by contrast spends most of her time hyping her up and points out, explicitly, that Monika doesn't give herself enough credit. She also dismisses her own efforts, pointing out in most things she does, up into the climax, that Monika is a lot better than her at whatever she's doing. And when Sayori's problems are actually revealed, she explicitly says that she doesn't want Monika to worry about her, and that she doesn't want to have this conversation.
I think this all really shows that both of them are averse to tackling their own problems head-on, and I think this comes out of a fear of being vulnerable, since that's directly mentioned several times in Monika's issues openly expressing herself.
I think what makes Monika's particular brand of self-negging quite so disheartening is that she dismisses it out of hand as her being silly and dramatic, and in that way, she doesn't actually address the fundamental problem underlying it, nor does she actually address the statements themselves as incorrect. The amount of time she spends talking down her own problems as something trivial and silly, particularly in comparison to Sayori's problems, are a manifestation of her own desire to avoid the vulnerability of even having these problems, and it's just...heartbreaking. Sayori's denial is its own can of worms, but Monika's ability to so consistently minimize her issues when they are clearly still impacting her is so uniquely troublesome.
I think a big difference between the two of them in that respect is that Monika wears significantly more of her heart on her sleeve, so Sayori finds it a lot easier to directly target Monika's problems than Monika does in the reverse, but their individual habits of avoidance are coming from the same place.
I'm traveling a bit aimlessly in this essay, trying to tie things together nicely as I see them, but there are just a lot of similarities I notice between their actions and the way they think that showcase that they have a lot of the same problems, and a huge theme in Trust is expressing oneself, which both Monika and Sayori struggle to do, in much the same way.
I think a key similarity between the two of them is their tendency to catastrophize over a situation when left alone, mostly revolving around seeing the worst possible scenario for how they could've personally messed up the situation. I'm just rewatching Trust for this little essay, so there are two major moments I see Monika doing this, but I remember Sayori doing this...a few times, actually, throughout the side stories.
I think the spiral Monika goes into after reading Become the Flower is particularly important, as it exemplifies the habit of dismissing her own problems fantastically; in this case, she has an excuse. It's true that Monika's issues with her perfectionism seem silly and trivial in comparison to Sayori's, but that's exactly the thing: She shouldn't be comparing them in the first place! Her problems are real, and they clearly cause her distress, but because Sayori's own issues appear so much more serious than hers, she dismisses them wholesale as her being dramatic and silly. Because Monika's problems seem so small, she doesn't see them for the problems they really are. In the same way, because her own accomplishments and work seem so small, she doesn't see them for the accomplishments they are.
This spiral showcases Monika's biggest problem, the reason why she has such trouble expressing herself, and conversely, the exact same problem Sayori has. She doesn't want to be the center of attention.
Put another way, she doesn't think she deserves to be the center of attention. Her problems are so trivial; her accomplishments menial. Her fear of vulnerability isn't a fear that others will hurt her; it's a fear of being selfish.
Sayori is very similar, in that the reason she actively works to avoid showing any possible sign that anything is wrong is because she doesn't want anyone to worry about her. She doesn't want other people to dedicate time and energy to her.
I think that for both of them, this comes from low self-esteem. Sayori is self-explanatory I think, but I'd say Monika's perfectionism makes it exceptionally difficult for her to really feel accomplished in anything she does, which, coupled with her constant preoccupation with how she appears to other people (I think Monika places very high expectations on herself. I mean, Trust literally starts with her frantically apologizing and saying "I normally don't ever do this!" when Sayori finds her napping) makes it very difficult for her to feel confident in herself.
The fear both Sayori and Monika have in being vulnerable isn't that people will use that vulnerability to hurt them.
It's that people will try to help them.
And I think that's a really big part of why Sayori feels like she can trust Monika with her darkest thoughts, because she understands that they're the same in a lot of ways.
Monika created the club which she needed the most...and it was also the club Sayori needed the most, for the exact same reason.
I think it's kinda easy to overlook a lot of this because of the sheer amount of focus placed onto Sayori and the more explicit issue Monika has (insofar as the plot is concerned), but I think Sayori is exactly what Monika needs just as much as Monika is what Sayori needs.
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