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kat-of-seventy-seven-roses · 2 days

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Homestuck Mythical Creature au / Cryptid Au

Very tempted to make an ask blop :p need to see if anyones inch rested

thought processes under the cut (bc some choices are wild)

Johns a pooka, an irish fae trickster who shapeshifts into animals. his favorite form is the bunny. john and jane are both fae, so their pranks range from harmless to mentally scaring to life altering. absolute chaos grimlins. dirk is also an irish myth, so he knows them well and is often trying to get them to not ruin the local population of humans. so they do pranks on him insted. john loves to steal dirks head and hide it places.

rose speaks to the eldritch horrors and is slowly becoming one herself. she wants to become a litch.

Dave is a harpy! a very chill one who doesn't tend to sing with his full chest, so people dont start crashing into his doorstep. dave dies in some magic accident that caused davesprite to rise up from the ashes. but dave harpy is ALSO fine no ones really sure how. may have been roses doing.

Jade is a werewolf obv. but shes also a witch and has formed a coven with rose and roxy.

Jane is ur avrage fae faerie/sprite. her favorite fae rule to get people to break is "dont eat their food."

Roxy is both a cat who is also a wizard i need not elaborate

Dirk is a headless horseman. not to be confused with THE headless horse man. thats another dullhan with a well paying halloween gig. dirk is often subject to losing his head, so he made a magic pumpkin to pilot the body when this happens. he does have a very large and scary but beautiful horse.

Jake is the bigfoot. and one of the most well hunted (and well travled) cryptids. thus, his friends often make jokes of not ever seeing him except in blurry images. its not his fault hes very large and loves to travel! and is also not very photogenic...

Aradia is a monthra!!! however she made a deal with a devil and became a ghost... not sure WHY yet or why it kills her. but it does. its all in her plan or smth, but that doesnt stop sollux from being very upset that hes the one that has to take and keep her soul. she is reserected later by the coven, still soulless but it doesnt matter bc her soul is in good hands and thus she still feels it. shes much happier now.

Tavros is a minotar self explanatory he is a small minotar, tho. a mini minotar if u will.

Sollux is ur run of the mill soul for potato chip demon. an excuse to give him twin tails and horns. him an kitkat gave me the most trouble! but then i went with a solkat devil angel motifi and im kinda attached t9 it now. even if its sorta a cop out. i simply couldnt find twin creatures that werent gods or children of gods. nor any crab creatures...

Karkat is an angel. he WAS human notably he was human for awhile even good friends with kanaya before he died. he never found love but helped so many with theres that he became an angel that was a lot like cupid. thus he was a small angel incharge of match making and also likened to a baby and hes very much NOT happy about this. it pisses him off, solluxs often gives him a hard time. about it. (extra angst is that kitkats also really fucked up about never knowing what love felt like but having to give it to others. and he has it in his head that that means he never will know, bc no ones matchmaking the matchmaker. but theres a song he hears everyonece anwhile by a stray harpy that makes him feel a lot lighter.)

Nepeta is my go to cat creature a nekomata. a two tailed cat yokai.

Kanaya is a vampire. obviously.

Terezi is a dragon! still blind! still licks. but can now transform and has wings, very scary. shes basiclly just her lusus lmao.

Vriska is a spider lady. i have arachne here bc its similar, but shes not arachne the myth proper. shes just a spider with the top part of a woman at the head. A Jorogumo a spider lady yokai and is basically actually what im picturing.

Equius is a centar and fuck if i ever have to draw him....

Gamzee is a clowwwn, just a clown, just a silly lil guy. What do you MEAN clowns arnt mythical creatures??? what do u mean u saw him under ur bed when you were a child? u must be mistaken. as a nod to ICPs boogieman. when gamzee is not high as a kite and is just a clown, he is one of the most terrifying and unkillable creatures known to children kind.

Eridan is a selkie. basiclly a mermaid but part seal. personally, I'd like to make him part seahorse. but not in the hippocampus way. i chose this bc he can shapeshift, thus he pretends to be a high elf sorcerer, yes he does get dunked on about this.

And finally, Feferi is a siren! who happens to be able to become very VERY **VERY** BIG. she doesnt lure people to drown them but she DOES love to keep live captives in cages :)

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joelletwo · 2 days

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wrestling with the 4devas bitchslap again to convince myself its fine if graveyard wins the best ep tourney: it's not the other bloggers who are wrong, it's me

not a complete response to but definitely in conversation with and asking some of the same questions again as @reductionisms's 4devas essay, which tries to square gintoki's "life doesn't need to be fun, i just need you to live" being a series-sanctioned message he's given to villains as an arc-concluding moral continuously up until 4devas with it here being an incorrect worldview that needs to be (physically) corrected by shinpachi, the straightman tonal signpost of gintama

a conflict i have been perplexed by ever since i got to this line on my first watch a year or two ago, since i've seen this line before! all over fandom! as part of the general "dont [bottom text] kill yourself" motivational messaging of gintama that i love!

and, briefly, when i hit 4devas i was also in the middle of being really frustrated by the new arc pattern i was seeing crop up: i loved the villains-turned sympathetic-turned someone worth saving by gintoki tune of the first half of gintama, but it fell massively flat for me in Yoshiwara in Flames, where i was never convinced to be on housen's side but had to watch him get a heartwarming redemptive death at the side of the woman he abused anyways.

then shortly after i had the same exact experience in Red Spider with jiraia, and i thought, if this is what gintama is gonna do with its shitty dudes from now on im gonna quit the fucking show. and then shortly after that i met jirochou and saw him cut down otose the woman he loved (under a raining sky!!! the fucking sky motifs!!! the signpost im about to watch a dude be shittily violent to women and be expected to feel sorry for him about it) and saw too much red to really take in the rest of the arc level-headedly or care about anything in it lol.

so it was written off in my mind as the 'otose almost gets fridged' arc until i rewatched it this week. then i had to remember, oh yeah, there's a ton of political maneuvering fakeouts in this arc that i never actually squared back with how the plot presented itself prior to the reveals, so i'd still been thinking about the "fakeout" plot. then i read the manga version with all the "truths" in mind from the start, and finally i felt like i could understand what this arc is doing a little better.

(way) tldr (4.4k words. sorry): do i love this arc? eh. do i still hate it? eh. but it's doing stuff!

first, i was able to see an echo in all the "actually i was planning to betray you the whole time" "actually i was working to help you the whole time" plot beats of what sorachi does with the larger edo/universe story further into the back half of the manga. if i ever sound like i didnt enjoy or wasnt convinced by the execution of these "reveals," it's because i didnt and wasnt, lol. but it's fun that he had fun with them i guess.

the arc starts with pirako ingratiating herself into yorozuya, then having a classic "bump into you and pretend to be injured to extort you" encounter w her dad's gang. to resolve this without escalating into violence, gintoki... does it back to them, which is really funny. but thus the tone is set for the arc of: DISHONEST APPROACHES TO CONFLICT.

pirako isnt honest about her overall intentions the, like, seven different times that she "admits her real ones." kada plays at peacekeeper in the devas while being the ultimate person scheming to get the upper hand over everyone else in the end. (she's also secretly harusame, evil amanto outsider who acts as a unifying force for the kabukicho fighting itself to band together against and expel: sorachi's favorite move! the problem was never internal, it's the shadowy REAL antagonists who infiltrated us)

jirochou and otose are ultimately doing a pantomime of conflict to try to keep temperatures down and escalations from breaking out, so no one they care about has to get hurt. gintoki doesn't know this until the end, but he follows in their footsteps after his encounter with them in the graveyard: he plays at having given up to the rest of yorozuya so they'll leave and escape the coming kabukicho war, the same thing otose was trying with him. it fails both times. i'm really not sure why gintoki and otose thought it would work, honestly. they should know their kids are stubborn as hell.

but gintoki is in a bind because of the things he needs to protect, and all of his actions are primarily in service of that, to the detriment of how he'd prefer to act if he were less restricted. he is unsurprised and unoffended to hear saigou is only willing to warn them, not help them, because her son is in danger if she acts directly. all four devas are, seemingly, being mutually restrained this way, holding back even when blatantly manipulated to do so. the other constant of this arc: everyone is dishonest, and no one wants to risk losing what they have.

gintoki understands that! of course! he's had to make that calculus before, after all :)

and this arc is just one big cliff scene echo: the entire graveyard scene pushing gintoki to emotional regression because he thinks he's losing another parent figure, one he's just seen the Gintoki Figure of the arc cut down, no less (takasugi stolen valor when he goes berserk against him and only ends up uselessly bleeding out on the ground about it, honestly). otose goes into this willingly so gintoki can live. he accepts this decision because he values protecting her values (her kids living on) and is briefly broken by it (the story says, before giving him shinpachi to "put him back on track"). prior to the bitchslap, after saying he just wants them to live, even if it has to be without him, he says:

i dont have a good understanding of when we start getting reveals of gintoki's backstory versus foreshadowing because i went into gintama already knowing most of it, but definitely by the recent red spider where we get our first real look at (or really, first listen to) shouyou. but here we actually get some of what gintoki felt about it, which he keeps closely guarded even when the whole truth comes out: he's done his best to survive having lost, but it was so unbearable he can't face losing again.

(also, honorable mention backstory echo, the person calling him a brother sets his home on fire to drive him and his parent figure out of town. as i liveblogged: this one would really hurt gintoki if gintoki cared about anything oboro ever did!)

but with the shinpachi story-rerouting, they get the good end, keep everyone (otose, yorozuya, all of kabukicho, even pirako and her dad - everyone but kada) safe without having to sacrifice a single thing, even keep gintoki hopeful for this outcome. so, as goose points out, we are left to understand that there could have been a good end on the cliff, that something is different here than there, and, skipping a lot of math, that that is the people around gintoki.

which i do find really funny to imagine as a slam on takasugi and katsura. sorry you kids suck too much, your teacher dies bc u were cringefail. but lets look at it.

everyone is dishonest, no one wants to risk what they have: gintoki rallies himself to keep fighting but is determined to do it alone. kagura and shinpachi fight him on this; they can't leave because they don't want to lose their home, they can't let him fight alone because they don't want to lose him. they're just as restricted by what they have to keep safe, but their only option is to act where everyone else's is inaction. shinpachi says:

if i may skip over the bitchslap itself for now, gintoki does consent to let his allies fight with him after it. yorozuya stands alone against saigou, who's heavily demoralized but resigned, strongarmed into fighting them by the threat to her son. but on seeing their resolve to keep protecting their own precious home and family she says:

and, to skip straight to my thought, i think this is what turns the tides back in their favor. there are more twists and turns to the fight. pirako equates what binds saigou, which she herself equates to what binds the yorozuya, to what binds her:

(with an intentional distinction that she's willing to actively destroy the others', as opposed to their purely self defensive fighting, which is echoed at some point in her distinguishing gintoki from jirochou in the same way, that jirochou not only lives to protect like gintoki but is willing to destroy in the process. i don't find that part as interesting, but it's more fuel to the power of having something to protect as a driving force as an arc theme.)

so now all three stand on the same ground, absolutely unwilling to give up what they hold dear, but all their cards are on the table. they aren't dealing in 12 dimensions of tricksy defensive pre-emptive moves anymore. they know it wouldnt work, anyways, since they all know their drives to protect are the same and no one will be talked into backing down. now they can directly duke it out and let the winner be determined that way, on strength of will. even before the actual circumstances change, the fight somehow feels freer seeing how inevitable it is. and with everything out in the open, yorozuya can now protect each other and saigou's son, taking out one side of the conflict.

(and with everything out in the open, the ultimate 4devas villain can become the single person who continues to betray the others, kada, whose further machinations - with everything out in the open! - saigou (and later yorozuya) can choose to protect pirako from. everyone wins! because everything was out in the open! do you see where i'm going)

and so we come back to the question: gintoki is corrected, the arc is rerailed to the better outcome. so is the correction justified?

what does the correction accomplish outside of its moment? most convincingly to me of goose's presented options, i also think it's done as a thematic shift, a, okay, just live was a strategy that worked before but now doesn't suffice, so we need something more.

as to why this is needed now and not earlier or later...tldr bad planning <3 but like.

we have, prior to this, a consistent thrust of arcs where gintoki teaches people to lose. as well, while we meet the harusame and we visit space and we get the barest glimpses of takasugi's weird shadowy background moves there, largely we're dealing with kabukicho characters and kabukicho stories. we see or only hear about the shogun for short comedic moments only. we've largely dropped the series intro focus on things like the shinsengumi or hasegawa acting as foreign diplomats. it's a local series, a hometown series, a kabukicho and not even an edo at large series, a personal story about gintoki making personal connections with his personal experience as a flawed person with a flawed approach to life that has let him, chronic slacker, get by on the bare minimum.

at this moment, chapter 300, we have a slow trickle of gintoki backstory starting to come out to us. we've recently expanded the story focus to include yoshiwara, which gets a callout in this arc by kada to keep it relevant. we have an arc of sorachi testing out plot beats that he'll use again for the endgame, in all the political maneuvering and alliancing and betraying and shadowy outsider space governmenting, where he's also doing a lot of echoing of that backstory that only becomes clear later. so it's possible he's thinking about shifting gears and setting up for the eventual endgame, which means getting out of the episodic cycle so things can stick.

and after this arc, to my opinion and memory, we stop getting the classic gintama flavor sympathizable'd antagonists. a lot of the bigger arcs don't even have clear Big Shot antagonists anymore, being more about the shouyoucore theme of characters fighting against themselves, or if there is one they're always explicitly part of the Shadow Government now, a unified and more daunting force than someone they can win over with an inspiring gintoki interaction.

so 4devas does act as a turning point at least in some way. and it's not possible to say this definitively, since all gintama arcs are ultimately never going to be about gintoki or his friends Actually losing something instead of beating the odds, but it does feel like theres a different flavor to, say, dekobokko with its direct look at how chars lives could be different and better and they will still choose to keep struggling as themselves. and Kintama arc definitely doesn't feel like an early days arc, like it can only resolve the way it does with a gintoki who is now able to face his past and the possibility of losing again and again and again (now with, natch, his faith that yorozuya will by his side when he does).

why now, after 300 chapters of letting it sit ignored in the back of his brain working out perfectly fine except when it doesn't (the very reminder of shouyou in a fight making him go Demon Mode, which is like regular gintoki but worse at fighting, bc he is so unprepared to think about shouyou)? well i personally am in big favor of the "take a decade off" strategy for facing problems. it worked for me too. realistically watsonianly its nice to let things percolate in the brain and do some of the processing behind the scenes until its less immediately painful. and he's made many bonds over these 300 chapters, shown in this arc when the whole town rallies behind him, that are there to support him when he needs it now and weren't there before.

realistically doylistly eh. bad planning.

and so we come back to the question: gintoki is corrected, the series as a result is rerailed to a writing space where things can start changing (leave the episodic, as you guys say, sazae-san format). it's useful in the future. so is the correction justified in terms of what comes before it? was the correction needed?

thinking about the bitchslap leads to thinking about the cliff scene leads to (sorry kagura and katsura, you guys arent really relevant here) pitting shinpachi and takasugi against each other in how they act with something on the line they can't bear to give up.

i don’t need the lesson of 4devas to apply logistically to the cliff scene. once they were set up on that chessboard, frozen in their assigned places as a backstory, it’s not like takasugi could’ve power of friendship’d his way out of being physically retrained if he decided he wanted to. it’s set up as a forced choice, it has to play out as a forced choice.

but we see that even before it’s asked of him, takasugi is willing, prepared, unbothered to give up his own life for shouyou’s. this is, goose lays out in the sequel, the cardinal sin in gintama - a teacher shouldn’t outlive their student. it would have been especially egregious to shouyou, whose whole desired life’s purpose is to raise students who can outlive him and outgrow him, take his lessons and go out into the world and do their own thing with them. takasugi doesn’t expect to do this and doesn’t seem to see a point in the possibility if shouyou isn’t back with them.

though we can also think of shouyou as a little too quickly willing to give up on the cliff - sorry, gintoki, the suicidal guy has thought about it for .02 seconds and decided the best outcome is for you to kill him even though he could get out of this no problem. maybe its no wonder gintoki gave up too. can we ask katsura what he would’ve done?

and is takasugi different from shinpachi there? he rejects the mentor’s attempt to exchange his own life for his. he’s not willing to consider a life without him.

but shinpachi is convinced no one is going to die. because they’ll be there together. incredibly naive - shinpachi and kagura, restricted to one option by what they need to protect like everyone is in 4devas, have acting as that one option because they are still free in a way gintoki and the other adults aren't. they’ve never actually experienced the impossible choice that forces you to give up, so they can act as if there isn’t one - what else would they do? why would they think to give up?

but gintoki is defined by having lived the impossible choice. its built into the foundation of him as a character and leaks out everywhere. he couldn’t have relied on his friends on the cliff because they were quite forcibly removed from the picture as an option, not by his or their choice. its written as an inevitability, logistics we find out later be damned.

if we refocus to 4devas, we can look at the Gintoki Figure for a different angle. jirochou, after he and gintoki resolve the arc conflict by being able to team up because they - say it with me - put everything out in the open, tells gintoki about his impetus for abandoning his family and coming back to his wayward life in kabukicho, the death of otose's husband.

it's, um, another now really obvious parallel to gintoki, lol. characters talk about how jirochou does everything he does in this arc to try to atone for his failure to both otose and tatsugorou, and i guess thats true bc he was written that way but he has an odd way of showing it, but anyways he resolves that, despite his guilt over this, all he can do now is keep living and keep protecting what they loved together. he's come to the usual gintama message all on his own, reinforcing that this is the correct way to live in this series. he had his own unavoidably shitty situation, and he came to terms with it.

so then where did jirochou go wrong, in the narrative's eyes (other than abandoning one woman and their child to deal drugs in the town of his other woman while ignoring her)? was there a point he could've changed how their trio's story played out? but he loved and trusted tatsugorou, and he was happy to step aside and let him be the one by their otose's side. i doubt he would have been happy stealing her away even if it were possible.

but if we look at the resolution tool of 4devas... he never put everything out in the open!!! everyone knows he loved otose, but in more of an open secret way. in classic romance plot, he never confessed for second male lead rejection closure. indeed, in the closest we ever get to a main character having a romantic plot in gintama, the very ending of the arc flirts with him doing just that now that he's made a little progress with the arc message, with the entire cast of the arc expecting him to (and interrupting before he can).

but if he had when they were young. if he had been honest with his friends. could it have opened up other options that weren't available on his own, that they didnt know to offer? i have a preferred one lol. but u can get creative with all sorts of life paths that avoid tatsugorou dying that way or, at the least, jirochou feeling chained to a shameful life (living in a town he doesn't go out in to protect a woman he doesnt talk to and feeling like he doesnt deserve the family he abandoned for this) because of it.

and then if we take this and rewind back to the cliff... we get to grind my favorite ax, "shouyou shouldve told literally anyone literally anything about his deal." if gintoki knew more about shouyou, they could've faced his horrors together, the whole time. he couldve known that shouyou was being literal calling himself a demon and not internalized his own identity as one for life just because shouyou bonded with him over it. i truly genuinely think the logical conclusion of all of gintama's big messages are that shouyou and gintoki should have been more open with each other.

but i don't think sorachi thinks that. and, you know, by 4devas rules, the unriskable precious things he was protecting by staying silent were his students' humanity, and secondarily his own fragilely newly hopeful heart that literally couldnt stand another 10 millionth round of rejection (killed himself and then went on a 12 year rampage over it. girl i would too).

and takasugi really isn't dishonest about what's going on in his head when he tells us he expects to die for shouyou. that's as cards on the table as i could ask. gintoki is, a little bit, by omission. he does what i'd want him to here - tells takasugi try just not dying - but doesn't give him a reason to, and doesn't tell him he has no plans of letting anyone die for shouyou.

so what goes wrong on the cliff - shouyou is happy, gintoki is happy, oboro's even kind of happy, katsura is irrelevant - is that takasugi is blindsided (whoops) by their silent agreement that betrays the one he thought he and gintoki had. and then ruins everyone's party about it and spends the next ten years doing so for good measure.

which is also, basically, what shinpachi is going through that prompts the bitchslap, too. he thought they were a team, that they had each others backs, not that gintoki is a one-way protector of them. he is blindsided by gintoki lying to and tricking them and hiding things from them. he is hurt by gintoki feeling hopeless all by himself when he could share that with them and be encouraged by their endless child optimism.

and would it need to have changed anything on the cliff? in the moment after the bitchslap, what contributes to gintoki changing his mindset is tama telling him, we trust that you're capable bc youve always shown us that, can you trust us this time? when, later in the arc, gintoki seems to regress by sending kagura and shinpachi away, he asks them to trust that he's still trusting them, relying on them to help shoulder his burden, and in return they know he's staying alive, not self sacrificing. maybe it would've helped just to feel on the same team and not shut out, to be able to trust gintoki like gintoki was trusting shouyou?

so. two paralleled instances of gintoki making a bad situation worse by keeping to himself and being too self sufficient. that feels clear cut that feels fine im okay with that as a takeaway. do i think its exactly what sorachi had in mind while writing this, as opposed to just a good series 'hey lean on your friends' moment to read cool and tug at the heartstrings? eh lol. i think theres definitely room to read takasugi into this arc (i still need to refind the takagin 4devas post...) but its not so baked in that i think he was a PRIORITY in the plotting.

but is the shinpachi SCOLDING necessary is the scolding justified... and yes its in response to life doesnt need to be fun i just want you to live. still a confusing framing i can't immediately square. but/and more immediately its directly responding. to gintoki opening up to them about his insecurities!!

which, as said, he doesnt do!! he doesnt talk about his failures! its basically like, here and to hijikata that one time and otherwise even when we know all the facts about what happened we still never hear gintoki himself talk about it. (so he really DOESNT learn the lesson here either. he stays dissociated and triggered every time utsuro comes up. he tries to solve the altana baby problem on his own. he doesnt talk to his new friends OR his old friends. bwah. gintoki. silver soul.)

so this is like. its just in the wrong order!! its just in a baffling order lol. if you want gintoki to share his burden do you need to punch him when he shares it. does it also need to sound like you're blaming him for not being capable of upholding his promise to protect anyone when thats the insecurity thats got him all discombobulated this arc in the first place (a whole set of notes i took on this that i didnt find a place for in this post)?? its so weeeeiiiiiirddd lol i dont liiikeee itttttt. theres plenty of things shinpachi can validly punch gintoki for but this is such a weird one.

so i guess. having a clearer understanding of this arc do i hate it less? YES honestly. i hate fakeout plots generally they irritate me but everything... more or less makes sense by gintama standards now that i have the whole plot in mind.

do i hate jirochou less SORT OF? i enjoy him. in his individual relationships. i like his shitty dad deal i love shitty dads. i like him pining for otose who genuinely likes him but also brings up her husband every sentence she says to him just to keep him down. i like his parallels with gintoki that they both explicitly acknowledge and find macho comfort in. hes still not theeeeeeeee most well-developed gintama antagonist but you know? i at least think otose and pirako would want to be around him after this.

do i feel like i have a clearer understanding of the bitchslap moment. NOT CONVINCED I DO. i feel like its going to be one of those things that slips in and out of my understanding like sand in cupped hands. i have a tentative understanding of it that i dont think sorachi actually had in mind. so i dont think ive solved it lol.

will i be cursed to think about 4devas forever? god i hope not. am i okay with it beating farewell shins in the polls. god i fucking hope it does. in the horrible timeline where i have to see 305 make it all the way and then lose i guess id rather it be to this one than to hijigin. consider this poll propaganda?

#sopping wet gintoki posting

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