#i can't get over this novel and its reception

[vaguelyaperson]

Murasaki Shikibu's classic novel "don't create the torment nexus," specifically, 'men stop forcing women into your ideals of romance, you're literally killing them' challenge, misunderstood. Centuries of Japanese women now expected to adhere to the feminine standards of the torment nexus.

#the tale of genji #murasaki shikibu #sorry lmao i'm not done #i can't get over this novel and its reception #a literal groomed child is upheld as the standard for a perfect wife #jesus christ y'all #the literary scholarship by Japanese women on this classic is INSANE #absolute tell all

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The (open) web is good, actually

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight (Monday, November 13) at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

An enshittified, platformized internet is bad for lots of reasons – it concentrates decisions about who may speak and what may be said into just a few hands; it creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that creates a new oligarchy, with all the corruption and instability that comes with elite capture; it makes life materially worse for workers, users, and communities.

But there are many other ways in which the enshitternet is worse than the old good internet. Today, I want to talk about how the enshitternet affects openness and all that entails. An open internet is one whose workings are transparent (think of "open source"), but it's also an internet founded on access – the ability to know what has gone before, to recall what has been said, and to revisit the context in which it was said.

At last week's Museum Computer Network conference, Aaron Straup Cope gave a talk on museums and technology called "Wishful Thinking – A critical discussion of 'extended reality' technologies in the cultural heritage sector" that beautifully addressed these questions of recall and revisiting:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful

Cope is a museums technologist who's worked on lots of critical digital projects over the years, and in this talk, he addresses himself to the difference between the excitement of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector over the possibilities of the web, and why he doesn't feel the same excitement over the metaverse, and its various guises – XR, VR, MR and AR.

The biggest reason to be excited about the web was – and is – the openness of disintermediation. The internet was inspired by the end-to-end principle, the idea that the network's first duty was to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. That principle made it possible for whole swathes of people to connect with one another. As Cope writes, openness "was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all." But because it was "easy and cheap enough to put something on the web," you could "leave it there long enough for others to find it."

That dynamic nurtured an environment where people could have "time to warm up to ideas." This is in sharp contrast to the social media world, where "[anything] not immediately successful or viral … was a waste of time and effort… not worth doing." The social media bias towards a river of content that can't be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.

This is an important way to understand the role of algorithms in the context of the spread of ideas – that without recall or revisiting, we just don't see stuff, including stuff that might challenge our thinking and change our minds. This is a much more materialistic and grounded way to talk about algorithms and ideas than the idea that Big Data and AI make algorithms so persuasive that they can control our minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

As bad as this is in the social media context, it's even worse in the context of apps, which can't be linked into, bookmarked, or archived. All of this made apps an ominous sign right from the beginning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Apps interact with law in precisely the way that web-pages don't. "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

Apps are "closed" in every sense. You can't see what's on an app without installing the app and "agreeing" to its terms of service. You can't reverse-engineer an app (to add a privacy blocker, or to change how it presents information) without risking criminal and civil liability. You can't bookmark anything the app won't let you bookmark, and you can't preserve anything the app won't let you preserve.

Despite being built on the same underlying open frameworks – HTTP, HTML, etc – as the web, apps have the opposite technological viewpoint to the web. Apps' technopolitics are at war with the web's technopolitics. The web is built around recall – the ability to see things, go back to things, save things. The web has the technopolitics of a museum:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct

By comparison, apps have the politics of a product, and most often, that product is a rent-seeking, lock-in-hunting product that wants to take you hostage by holding something you love hostage – your data, perhaps, or your friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

When Anil Dash described "The Web We Lost" in 2012, he was describing a web with the technopolitics of a museum:

where tagging was combined with permissive licenses to make it easy for people to find and reuse each others' stuff;

where it was easy to find out who linked to you in realtime even though most of us were posting to our own sites, which they controlled;

where a link from one site to another meant one person found another person's contribution worthy;

where privacy-invasive bids to capture the web were greeted with outright hostility;

where every service that helped you post things that mattered to you was expected to make it easy for you take that data back if you changed services;

where inlining or referencing material from someone else's site meant following a technical standard, not inking a business-development deal;

https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

Ten years later, Dash's "broken tech/content culture cycle" described the web we live on now:

https://www.anildash.com/2022/02/09/the-stupid-tech-content-culture-cycle/

found your platform by promising to facilitate your users' growth;

order your technologists and designers to prioritize growth above all other factors and fire anyone who doesn't deliver;

grow without regard to the norms of your platform's users;

plaster over the growth-driven influx of abusive and vile material by assigning it to your "most marginalized, least resourced team";

deliver a half-assed moderation scheme that drives good users off the service and leaves no one behind but griefers, edgelords and trolls;

steadfastly refuse to contemplate why the marginalized users who made your platform attractive before being chased away have all left;

flail about in a panic over illegal content, do deals with large media brands, seize control over your most popular users' output;

"surface great content" by algorithmically promoting things that look like whatever's successful, guaranteeing that nothing new will take hold;

overpay your top performers for exclusivity deals, utterly neglect any pipeline for nurturing new performers;

abuse your creators the same ways that big media companies have for decades, but insist that it's different because you're a tech company;

ignore workers who warn that your product is a danger to society, dismiss them as "millennials" (defined as "anyone born after 1970 or who has a student loan")

when your platform is (inevitably) implicated in a murder, have a "town hall" overseen by a crisis communications firm;

pay the creator who inspired the murder to go exclusive on your platform;

dismiss the murder and fascist rhetoric as "growing pains";

when truly ghastly stuff happens on your platform, give your Trust and Safety team a 5% budget increase;

chase growth based on "emotionally engaging content" without specifying whether the emotions should be positive;

respond to ex-employees' call-outs with transient feelings of guilt followed by dismissals of "cancel culture":

fund your platforms' most toxic users and call it "free speech";

whenever anyone disagrees with any of your decisions, dismiss them as being "anti-free speech";

start increasing how much your platform takes out of your creators' paychecks;

force out internal dissenters, dismiss external critics as being in conspiracy with your corporate rivals;

once regulation becomes inevitable, form a cartel with the other large firms in your sector and insist that the problem is a "bad algorithm";

"claim full victim status," and quit your job, complaining about the toll that running a big platform took on your mental wellbeing.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/18/broken-records/#dashes

The web wasn't inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee's decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as "branded communities." The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn't even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since. After three or four attempts to replace the web with various garbage systems all called "MSN," Microsoft moved on to trying to lock the internet inside a proprietary browser. Years later, Facebook had far more success in an attempt to kill HTML with React. And of course, apps have gobbled up so much of the old, good internet.

Which brings us to Cope's views on museums and the metaverse. There's nothing intrinsically proprietary about virtual worlds and all their permutations. VRML is a quarter of a century old – just five years younger than Snow Crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

But the current enthusiasm for virtual worlds isn't merely a function of the interesting, cool and fun experiences you can have in them. Rather, it's a bid to kill off whatever is left of the old, good web and put everything inside a walled garden. Facebook's metaverse "is more of the same but with a technical footprint so expensive and so demanding that it all but ensures it will only be within the means of a very few companies to operate."

Facebook's VR headsets have forward-facing cameras, turning every users into a walking surveillance camera. Facebook put those cameras there for "pass through" – so they can paint the screens inside the headset with the scene around you – but "who here believes that Facebook doesn't have other motives for enabling an always-on camera capturing the world around you?"

Apple's VisionPro VR headset is "a near-perfect surveillance device," and "the only thing to save this device is the trust that Apple has marketed its brand on over the last few years." Cope notes that "a brand promise is about as fleeting a guarantee as you can get." I'll go further: Apple is already a surveillance company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The technopolitics of the metaverse are the opposite of the technopolitics of the museum – even moreso than apps. Museums that shift their scarce technology budgets to virtual worlds stand a good chance of making something no one wants to use, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that museums make a successful project inside a walled garden, one where recall is subject to corporate whim, and help lure their patrons away from the recall-friendly internet to the captured, intermediated metaverse.

It's true that the early web benefited from a lot of hype, just as the metaverse is enjoying today. But the similarity ends there: the metaverse is designed for enclosure, the web for openness. Recall is a historical force for "the right to assembly… access to basic literacy… a public library." The web was "an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally." Museums were right to jump on the web bandwagon, because of its technopolitics. The metaverse, with its very different technopolitics, is hostile to the very idea of museums.

In joining forces with metaverse companies, museums strike a Faustian bargain, "because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone."

The GLAM sector is devoted to access, to recall, and to revisiting. Unlike the self-style free speech warriors whom Dash calls out for self-serving neglect of their communities, the GLAM sector is about preservation and access, the true heart of free expression. When a handful of giant companies organize all our discourse, the ability to be heard is contingent on pleasing the ever-shifting tastes of the algorithm. This is the problem with the idea that "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach" – if a platform won't let people who want to hear from you see what you have to say, they are indeed compromising freedom of speech:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Likewise, "censorship" is not limited to "things that governments do." As Ada Palmer so wonderfully describes it in her brilliant "Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet" speech, censorship is like arsenic, with trace elements of it all around us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMJb3AxA0s

A community's decision to ban certain offensive conduct or words on pain of expulsion or sanction is censorship – but not to the same degree that, say, a government ban on expressing certain points of view is. However, there are many kinds of private censorship that rise to the same level as state censorship in their impact on public discourse (think of Moms For Liberty and their book-bannings).

It's not a coincidence that Palmer – a historian – would have views on censorship and free speech that intersect with Cope, a museum worker. One of the most brilliant moments in Palmer's speech is where she describes how censorship under the Inquistion was not state censorship – the Inquisition was a multinational, nongovernmental body that was often in conflict with state power.

Not all intermediaries are bad for speech or access. The "disintermediation" that excited early web boosters was about escaping from otherwise inescapable middlemen – the people who figured out how to control and charge for the things we did with one another.

When I was a kid, I loved the writing of Crad Kilodney, a short story writer who sold his own self-published books on Toronto street-corners while wearing a sign that said "VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR, BUY MY BOOKS" (he also had a sign that read, simply, "MARGARET ATWOOD"). Kilodney was a force of nature, who wrote, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and sold his own books:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-late-street-poet-and-publishing-scourge-crad-kilodney-left-behind-a/

But there are plenty of writers out there that I want to hear from who lack the skill or the will to do all of that. Editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers – all the intermediaries who sit between a writer and their readers – are not bad. They're good, actually. The problem isn't intermediation – it's capture.

For generations, hucksters have conned would-be writers by telling them that publishing won't buy their books because "the gatekeepers" lack the discernment to publish "quality" work. Friends of mine in publishing laughed at the idea that they would deliberately sideline a book they could figure out how to sell – that's just not how it worked.

But today, monopolized film studios are literally annihilating beloved, high-priced, commercially viable works because they are worth slightly more as tax writeoffs than they are as movies:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/coyote-vs-acme-shelved-warner-bros-discovery-writeoff-david-zaslav-1235598676/

There's four giant studios and five giant publishers. Maybe "five" is the magic number and publishing isn't concentrated enough to drop whole novels down the memory hole for a tax deduction, but even so, publishing is trying like hell to shrink to four:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Even as the entertainment sector is working to both literally and figuratively destroy our libraries, the cultural heritage sector is grappling with preserving these libraries, with shrinking budgets and increased legal threats:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

I keep meeting artists of all description who have been conditioned to be suspicious of anything with the word "open" in its name. One colleague has repeatedly told me that fighting for the "open internet" is a self-defeating rhetorical move that will scare off artists who hear "open" and think "Big Tech ripoff."

But "openness" is a necessary precondition for preservation and access, which are the necessary preconditions for recall and revisiting. Here on the last, melting fragment of the open internet, as tech- and entertainment-barons are seizing control over our attention and charging rent on our ability to talk and think together, openness is our best hope of a new, good internet. T

he cultural heritage sector wants to save our creative works. The entertainment and tech industry want to delete them and take a tax writeoff.

As a working artist, I know which side I'm on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Mimara,_Zagreb,_Croacia,_2014-04-20,_DD_01.JPG

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

#pluralistic #ar #xr #vr #augmented reality #extended reality #virtual reality #museums #cultural preservation #aaron cope #Museum Computer Network #cultural heritage #glam #access #open access #revisiting #mr #mixed reality #asynchronous #this is for everyone #freedom of reach #gatekeepers #metaverse #technofeudalism #privacy #brick on the face #rent-seeking

[sunny-mercya]

Given

03. Sensitivity

Heiji Hattori x Male Reader

Fandom -> Detective Conan/Case Closed

Masterlist | Previous / Next |

Back in your hotel room, you got down from Heiji's back—limping in slow waddle motion like a penguin towards the bed, too exhausted to change (besides the shoes, which you kicked off) out of clothes and into more comfy ones, laying down onto the bed—moaning out of pain and frustration as your legs still aching and the once dulling pain, from the icepack, flaring up again—wanting nothing more than to sleep, even when it would be such a few hours—migraine already pounding and adding to your burden of current health issues.

»Where did ya put yer medications?« asked Heiji, taking off his jacket and cap, crouching down to your open luggage already.

»In that...uhh...tiny thingy....that bag with the first-aid logo...« you mumble out, eyes closing every so often—seeing your boyfriend only in a slight blurriness, glasses laying somewhere on the bed next to you.

Heiji searched through your clothes—noticing its mostly his clothes, which you never had given back when he had lend them to you, always finding it cute whenever you would wear them—and the few books, mystery crime novels and mangas, you brought along—having found the neon-green bag quickly and zipping it open.

»They ain' in here.« Heiji had looked in your medical-bag twice and besides the other various pills and medications—antidepressants, anti-anxiety, pills for insomnia, painkillers and so on—you had to take more than often, the ones for migraines weren't in there though.

»No! That can't be!« you cried out in disbelief, sitting up instantly—moaning out from the upcoming pain again—crawling off from the bed, letting yourself tumbling down onto the floor and moving to your luggage.

You rummaged through your clothes, tossing the books and everything bulky looking outside and doing a double check again—but nothing, absolutely nothing.

»I had them packed! Heiji! I swear I packed them! I couldn't just forget them!« emphasising your words, you looked at Heiji with a stressed expression and wobbly lips—raking your hands through your hair, gripping it tightly.

Besides the few times, in the very beginning when you had freshly started with your medications, you had never dared to forget them—double-checking twice whenever you pack your bag, making sure they all were there when needed.

So getting told one kind of your pills aren't packed in the bag—as they should be though—makes you questioning yourself with some doubt about your still remaining capacity of independency.

You let yourself fall down into the pile of clothes, burying your face into the fabrics, doubling over from the next upcoming headache wave—and damping them with your tears.

»Hey, hey, my sunshine it's gonna be alright. I'll go to the pharmacy real quick and get ya some of yer painkillers,« assured Heiji you, rubbing your back in comfort.

»You....can't. All my medications....they are....prescriptions...« you shook your head, knowing that Heiji—even when he meant well—wouldn't be able to receive them, not without an official authorisation permission from your Doctors.

»Nah, Imma get ya some painkillers. I promise. Just, stay here, I'll be quick.« Heiji leaned down, kissing the top of your head and throwing his jacket—like a blanket—over you.

~~~

When Heiji had reached the Central Pharmacy—a far bigger one with much more logistics than the smaller shops—the sun had completely disappeared down the sky by now, making space for the night—and although the night had started, the streets are still crowded as if it was midday.

Stepping inside, Heiji was greeted with the cool breeze from the AC—an stark contrast to the still warm air outside—walking up to the reception, greeting the Lady politely and stating his kind of problem.

Heiji hoped, despite him not having the needed prescriptions or permission papers, they would be understanding enough to gave your medications out to him—otherwise if not, he would have to buy you some low dosed cheap ones and those kinds wouldn't be strong enough to relief you from the pressuring pain.

Heiji knows—from first hand experience, during the time when you both had freshly started to date—just how strong your migraines could be, how painful they are for you—remembering well that one time, where you collapsed all of sudden—withering and doubling over in pain—almost crushing his hand, when you had to endure the pain for the rest of the day without any painkillers. 

»Of course. Do you have perhaps any other sort of authorisations ID with you? Otherwise we have to clarify check any information of the patient with what you know and if you can't get a score of at least 85% we have to decline your request.«

Heiji took his wallet out, getting his own ID and the Emergency Card—which he had gotten from your Parents, after your kidnapping—hoping those were sufficient enough for clarification.

»Aah. You don't need any official authorisation documents from the doctors, if you have the Emergency Card with you as it serves as a permission clarification just as well and is more easily to scan and grand access.« explained the lady, chuckling a bit in amusement.

~~~

After unlocking the door with the keycard, getting inside and closing the door with a slight kick of his foot—Heiji sat the bags down onto the nightstand.

»[Name]? I'm back. I got ya painkillers and brought us some snacks and drinks too,« 

When Heiji didn't saw you laying on the bed—forgetting that you had decided to stay on the floor, instead of moving back—he checked the bathroom and when he found it void of your presence too, Heiji felt a minimal panic rising up—till he remembers where you were and sighed in relief.

Kneeling down to you, Heiji shook you gently awake—had you really fallen asleep in your open luggage—droving his hand through your hair and caressing your cheek.

Stirring awake, you looked at Heiji with squinting eyes—that bit of sleep, which only seemed to have lasted for nothing more than 30 minutes, was clustering enough for your eyes.

»Hey Sleepyhead, ya think ya can get up?« asked Heiji, already turning your body sideways slightly—sliding his hands under your back and knee pit, picking you up.

You only mumbled an »Nuuh« out, rubbing your eyes.

»Thought so,« Heiji placed you down onto the bed and you sucked in a breath once you felt the softness of the mattress—holding back an moan of pain, when Heiji stretched your legs out.

Fairly awake now, you sat up a bit. Taking the bottle of Cola from Heiji—hands shaking slightly as you popped in two pills and gulping down half of the bottle.

»How did you.....«

»Emergency card.« 

»A what?«

»Emergency Card, got it from yer parents, after.....ya know.....and it serves like a permission slip too, apparently way easier to scan and grand access«

Nodding, you took another sip of your Cola. Must be something new as you never heard of it and neither Mrs.Tanaka or Dr.Akiyama had mentioned this so called Emergency Card before.

»Look what I got ya from the pharmacy as well! The pharmacist says it will help sooth the pain and cramping in yer legs.« Heiji fished out a tube from the bag, showing it to you before unclasping it. 

Pouring a good amount of cream-gel onto his hands, Heiji started to smear it on your leg and you didn't know what caused it—the icy coldness of that cream, Heiji's hands alone or the flaring sensation of pain—but your leg jerked up and crashed almost with Heiji's face, if he hadn't moved away quickly.

»Waa...whaa....what are you doing?!« stammering, feeling a rush of heat in your face, you looked at Heiji as if he was out of his mind.

»Massaging yer legs?«

»I– why? You–you.....you don't need to!« 

If it weren't for those stupid cramps and that horrible pain, you would have moved your legs away in an instant and hiding them in the blankets.

It's already bad enough that your legs are bare—so naked—but that's your own stupid fault though as you had decided to wear shorts after wall, simply because you never were a person for jeans or any long pants.

And it wasn't because of your naked skin that you didn't want Heiji near your legs, but because of all those scars you had now—which you had received during your survival fight with Daiki and they were a constant reminder—especially your silted wrist scar—of how weak (and what failure) you are—which you didn't want Heiji to see.

Because you couldn't stomach those thoughts, that Heiji—the man you loved so much with a love so deeply rooted in your heart, which collides every so often like a wave within a wave and crashing onto the land, sending you skyrocket high like ecstasy would do—found you ugly and unattractive.

You're ugly—had known this ever since—never believed in the delusion that you're pretty or even remotely close of being attractive in the slightest—not like all those other boys and girls and sometimes you wonder why Heiji dates you, when there are other people out there which are much more attractive and better match for him.

Such thoughts alone brought the tears welling up in your eyes and as if you weren't already an emotional wreck beforehand, you now felt even more like a burden of deadweight—sniffling, you rubbed your eyes in a desperate attempt to make these damn tears stop.

But they didn't stop, flowing more and more like a waterfall—the first sobs coming through your wobbly lips, clamping your mouth shut to hold them off—because dear god, these fucking thoughts alone of Heiji frowning upon you with disgust and judgement would send you into self-loathing and resentment

If strangers gave such stares and scrutinising you with their eyes of judgment and trash talking gossip, you wouldn't give a fuck and walk around with confidence—but Heiji is no stranger, he's your boyfriend and his opinion—how he views you as a human being—about you does matter.

»Hey, hey, what's with the tears? Is it the pain? Are yer migraines coming back? Ya want another pill? Hey, c'mon talk to me, Sunshine,« Heiji grabbed a tissue from the nightstand, wiping his hands off.

He wasn't sure what caused the sudden sensation of tears in you—there are too many reasons for it to be, to discerns the right cause—but whatever it was and even when it would be a dumb reason, Heiji wanted to make it stop—taking the cause of your tears away from you.

With the intake of your medications there had come a certain amount of emotionally sensitivity with it and on some days even a simple „Thank you“ or just seeing the sky above brought you to cry.

Heiji had taken ahold of your wrist—feeling the bumpy scarred skin beneath his fingers and a beginning of a thought as of why you seemed in tears crossed his mind—prying them in a gentle manner from your face. 

»Hey, hey, c'mon what's the matter? Ya can tell me, ya know?« Heiji tried to coaxed it out from you, wanting to hear it from yourself—with your own words of voice—that you're feeling insecure, but you stayed silent and perhaps he have to approach this minor bump with a bolder take of action.

You glanced up at Heiji, just for a moment—already expecting an expression of disgust, but were met with nothing of the sorts—a soft smile gracing his lips and your poor heart soared at such sight.

Heiji leaned down, ever so slowly coming near and nearer towards your face, till his lips collided with yours—his hands coming up to hold your head, stabilising—and closing the proximity between the two of you.

Eyes fluttering shut, lips moving along the motions and butterflies—no, fireworks sparkling in your stomach and your heart burned like a flame.

Once the kiss had ended, Heiji pecked your lips once more before moving away—the both of you looked at one another.

»[Name]. There's no need to feel insecure or ashamed of yer scars. Ya might not believe me, but there ain' a thought crossing my mind of me finding ya ugly. I could never stop lovin' ya and if I ever shoulda do, a lightning shoulda strike me into deaths arms! And ya know why?«

».....why?« 

»Because, silly, I love ya for who ya are and not for how yer look. Simply as ever isn't it? I love ya and only ya.«

Heiji had engulfed you into a hug, pulling you close and let himself falling down to the spacey side of the bed, bringing you along—the both of you forgetting momentarily your cramping legs.

You wanted to laugh, hiding your face in the crook of Heiji's neck, that's a similar thing what you have once told him—when he had asked you, why you never got mad at him for mostly standing you up on dates and choosing crime solving over you.

»How 'bout we both take a nice hot bath together and then I'll massages ya legs till these nasty cramps are gone, does that sounds good?«

»Yeah, that sounds about nice,«

~~~

When Heiji awoke in the middle of the night—the TV, which played now some sappy love dramas on the channel instead of the movies they watched before, being the only light source—the first thing he did was to check on you.

Knowing that you're well and next to him—safe in his arms, where he could hold you close and not fearing you might would vanish forever into nothing—gives him a feeling of relief and happiness, builds him up with confidence and strength to not give up so easily whenever he felt like he wasn't enough.

You had your own load of insecurities and so does Heiji—because sometimes he felt as he wasn't a good enough boyfriend for you, that you deserved way better, that's he nothing but a failure who couldn't even keep his vows to never let you get hurt—but your sole love and how much faith you had in him was enough.

Oh baby I can't stop my love for you,

because this heart belongs to you and only you

#male reader #x male reader #anime #fanfiction #manga #malereader #xmalereader #case closed #fluff #detective conan/case closed #detective conan #dcmk #heiji hattori x male reader #heiji hattori #heiji x male reader

[annlillyjose]

Dairy Whiskey – Update 03

[image description: on a background of dark green leaves with water droplets, a white serif font reads, “dairy whiskey – update 03”. / end id]

hi again! after what seems to have been ages, your girl is back with yet another dairy whiskey update, the third of its kind.

if you ask me how the project is going, well, it’s been stagnant, but i’d just like to call it a marinating piece of literature. there’s about ten thousand words to go and i know exactly what to do, but it’s just not been working. i’m hoping that i can get back to working on it during camp in july.

but for now, here’s an earlier chapter from the draft which i’m posting for three reasons.

i love sharing my work with y’all

i’m desperate to find some means to get back into the book, so i’m going to rely on a tumblr update to dive into chapters i had finished two months back

any and all hype motivates me to write, so please be kind to me <3

i think that’s all. let’s go to the update!

excerpts and taglist under the cut.

disclaimer: this is an original work of fiction. plagiarism of any kind will not be tolerated.

TWs: this novel deals with themes of childhood and religious trauma, sexual, emotional, and substance abuse, mental health issues, self-harm, abortion, suicidal ideation, etc. so please be kind on yourself and read ahead only if you’re comfortable. while the excerpts i share may or may not touch on these, the themes are very prevalent. please be kind on yourself and read ahead only if you’re comfortable.

a lot of the plot is kept private for now because i intend on publishing this book, so please excuse the lack of context. i hope you can enjoy the prose, though.

chapter five – rose in the plain, lily in the valley

here’s the opening line, where we look into dinah’s childhood with her mother.

When I was a child with neat pigtails and crunchy, sequinned frocks, mother took us to the hills of Vagamon.

in the next excerpt, dinah, along with her mother and ephron, is at a textile shop in town to pick out an outfit for a wedding reception to come. dinah wants a skirt that twirls but she can't find any. this is the scene where she finds it.

When she emerged from the godown carrying a pile of five or six sets, I spotted a squash-orange. It was the only one I wanted to try on. “The orange one,” I told mother. She took it from the salesperson and she guided us to the trial room. Mother helped me into the skirt, beaded and jewelled at the edges. The blouse was sleeveless with a square neck and an open back, with a string looped criss-cross down and tied at the bottom. The front of the top was embroidered with orange jewels in the shape of flowers, leaves, and small doughnuts. “I love this,” I said. Mother smiled at me and helped me out of it. She handed it over to the salesperson and paid the bill at the counter. We went back home in another auto.

honestly, congrats girl! i was so happy for little dinah that i almost shed a tear or two writing this scene. but, as we all know by now, she can't have one good thing thanks to her family. the grandmother is displeased with the colour of the set because it, apparently, makes her look darker than she really is, and hence begins her insecurities with skin tone. thanks, grandma.

Grandmother held my chin in her palm and wiped my tears. “Oh, don’t cry, angel. It’s only the colour. You look darker, like a crow. If it had been some other colour, then maybe…” “Stop it!” mother shouted. “Don’t talk to her like that. My daughter can wear whatever she wants. She looks beautiful in this dress. She always does. Stop telling my daughter she is not pretty. Stop lying to her.” I had been crying more intensely now, tears wetting my school uniform. “She would have been so much more beautiful if she was fairer. I told you to give her saffron milk but you never listened to me. Because of your arrogance, your daughter will have to suffer.” “She’s the prettiest little girl I’ve seen,” mother said. Her voice cracked like a twig in her throat. She looked at me, and then at Ephron. She told him, “Go inside with your sister.”

and hence, he takes her to their room and they have a really sweet moment there, which i'm depriving you of because plot...

moving on, the next chapter begins with dinah remembering how ephron saved her from dying and how he had taken care of her all that while. and then, she says she's going out the next day (with austin, but she leaves that part out).

and this party is where i'm going to cut it off because, again, too much plot that i can't reveal. but, here's a heartwarming scene where dinah sees her mother as someone beautiful and feels better abut herself.

But it was on that day that I noticed – mother was darker than I was. She always had been. And she wore red and orange sarees through the house, with her oiled black hair and household sweat. And she looked beautiful. She had always looked beautiful. She had given me something so beaming and radiant – her skin. She had also given me her eyes. And her teeth and bones and eyelashes. She had given me the form I occupied, and when I looked at her, I saw where I came from. I saw where my body was heading and forgot about the squash-orange long skirt making my skin too dark. I saw mother and saw the house of my blood, the vessel that had carried it for years, and forgot about everything and wanted to dance. So, when the bride and groom got on the stage and began to dance to their choreographed dance routine, I grabbed Ephron by the arm and we danced at the back of the hall. He ran to the front, holding my hand, and twirled me around until I felt dizzy.

again, i shed a tear writing this. she was too innocent to have been broken like that. i'm sorry, pal. i'm sorry about all the trouble i gave / am giving you.

vignette five – vineyard secrets

in this episode, we discover something that had been too obvious to begin with – dinah is not straight. everybody please welcome veronica to the party.

here's the opening line:

Dinah remembers Veronica by her face – plump and glossy with a berry flush at all times, her skin the colour of almond milk.

if you're wondering who she is and where she's from, here you go.

She was her roommate at the hostel to which she had moved for higher secondary, hoping that she would go unnoticed like she had at boarding school. But Veronica, who had lived in the UK her whole life with a Malayali father and an Italian mother, had found her intriguing.

the day veronica moves into hostel, dinah had already been there for a week. she helps veronica, who insists on being called nic, settle in and shows her around. in the evening when she shows dinah pictures of her family, dinah gets sad and tells her about mariam. it was at this moment that they kiss.

yep, i'm not that cruel. i give her good times too.

Like lightning to the night, they had crashed and collided. The rumbling would come after. There would be no fire, no wounds, no burns. They would leave their secret to ripen between them, like a juicy orange – sweet and tangy. They would see each other until they left school two years later, and after that, their secret would be buried in the ground.

and here's the last line, mirroring the first.

Dinah remembers Veronica by her face, but also by her breath, laden with mint.

so, that's it for this update. hope you enjoyed reading my no-context-whatsoever excerpts. tell me what you've been up to, how writing's even going, what your plans are for camp in july, and how you are in general.

thank you for reading. i'll see you again in another update.

– ann.

general tagist (ask to be added or removed)

@shaonsim @heartfullkings @vnsmiles @dallonwrites @sienna-writes @violetpeso @flip-phones @rowansghost @ambidextrousarcher @zoe-louvre @writing-with-l @magic-is-something-we-create @femmeniism @frozenstillicide @wizardfromthesea @rose-bookblood @coffeeandcalligraphy @rodentwrites @saltwaterbells

#dairy whiskey update #writing update #dairy whiskey #writeblr #wip update #literary fiction #wip tag #aljwrites

[twstinginthewind]

I actually wonder what some of your ocs would think of Eiji, not knowing he is a serial killer because most people don't know but its rumored he is sketchy.

He may not have had much opportunity to meet with all of my OCs, but I can give some highlights from his fellow third-years!

His Octavinelle dormmate Lorne Ibsen is not the smartest merman in the sea. Although the pianist acknowledges Eiji is a hard worker and maintains good grades, Lorne never really felt any urge to get to know his classmate better, preferring to maintain a bit of a distance between them. He's a bit put off by Eiji's macabre jewelry tastes, and the look that Lorne got from him when he asked if he made any "happier" designs gave him the jibblies for a week.

Sweet Sia Sealponte often wonders how somebody who crafts such fine, intricate jewelry wasn't sorted into the Pomefiore dormitory. It can't be the boy's looks; he's striking enough, with those violet eyes and his intense gaze. Since she transferred in for her third year, Sia may not have heard the rumors that have been passed through NRC about Eiji over the past few semesters, and might find some of them frankly unbelievable. She may approach him for assistance if she ever decides to create designs with a more gothic/memento mori element to them, but how well the conversation goes may depend on whether he would be receptive to that sort of collaboration.

Jon Littlebear is a man who trusts his intuition, and likes to think he can get a good read on other people. He's been avoiding Eiji since their freshman orientation, and has been trying to make sure that his own friends keep their distance as well. He's never actually seen Eiji do anything wrong, but a bad feeling is a bad feeling, and Jon trusts his bad feelings. It's kept him out of trouble so far. He might make an exception in the case of a fight, though. If he needed someone really ruthless on his side, Jon would absolutely make a temporary alliance with him. But he'd also watch his back.

... and off-campus, bookstore owner Zayn Weatherwax has mixed feelings about his infrequent customer. Sure, the boy does buy an awful lot of very niche books he might not otherwise sell, and that's always a welcome treat. But that kid keeps looking at Zayn's hands in a way that makes him want to invest in a pair of heavy-duty gloves. Yes, he goes for manicures, he's proud of how nice his hands are. But the appraising look that Eiji gives them during his visits? Oof. Go take your anatomy manuals and horror novels and scoot, young man.

#trotting out some of my lesser-used darlings for this #friend's oc #eiji hiranori #twisted wonderland oc #lorne ibsen #sia sealponte #jon littlebear #zayn weatherwax

[neomedievalist]

Defending Shirou Emiya Being Sexist Mental Gymnastics

hi everyone. did you think i was going to post an extremely long analysis post defending my favourite character being a misogynist today? no? thats what you're getting! the reception to this post could genuinely either be "What the fuck are you actually talking about" or "i thought this was obvious?" i truly do think this is the intent behind all of this writing it just can be very easy to well...see it for what it is, which is incredibly fair.

first of all. fate is a product of its time. it is a 2004 japanese visual novel. it is astonishingly progressive in some aspects but it really, really isnt in others. so going in, the sort of. blatant Vn Protag Behavior from shirou really surprised me and made me uncomfortable and dissapointed at first. it felt out of character. until i thought about it a bit more.

its easy to get annoyed at him for being literally sexist because... he is. or rather, he is a character that exists in a sexist society, written by an author who also exists in a sexist society. but the one obvious thing about shirou is that all of his actions are based around projecting. forgive this text dump as i didnt screenshot it when i was first playing:

"That again? It is only natural for a Servant to fight. How about you, Shirou? Why are you, a Master, telling me not to fight?"

"Well, that's――" I unconsciously hesitate to reply. …Well, battles are inevitable as long as I've decided to fight as a Master. I know I'm contradicting myself by telling Saber not to fight. But still… I can't let something like that happen again.

"Then I would like to ask you instead. It seems that you dislike battles, but do you really expect to survive the Holy Grail War like that? It seems that we will only be defeated by other Masters if we follow your policy."

――Of course not. I will repel dangers that come at me, and I don't intend to get killed helplessly. But completely aside from that, I don't want Saber fighting.

"No. I don't hate the fighting. I just, um――" It must be much simpler than that. In short, I…

"――Um, girls can't get hurt. As a guy, I can't let that happen. So if I'm going to let you fight, I'm going to fight myself." "Wha――you are saying you will not let me fight because I am a woman…!?"

this entire conversation is blatantly because shirou has run out of excuses to throw himself into danger. if you only take the most surface level reading of this, he's just being obnoxious and sexist for literally no reason, but that's not what's actually going on here. note the parts i bolded. first of all, he's struggling to come up with something to deflect rin and saber's confrontation. keep asking yourself questions. okay, he doesn't want girls to get hurt. specifically, he doesn't want saber to get hurt. why does he not want saber to get hurt? he wants to protect her, as he wants to protect everyone, and in turn, make himself the target instead. he wants to be the one getting hurt protecting someone else because he sees himself in moral debt. this has nothing to do with gender, he's just using it as a cheap tactic to deflect, it makes saber and rin angry, which works because they're no longer talking about him being psychologically fucked up. right after, this conversation follows:

"…! Are you not the one getting worked up over insignificant things…!? Are you saying you do not want to be protected by a woman!? My body is that of a heroic spirit. Forget about such trivial aspects!"

"It's not trivial at all! Geez, it's not okay for me even if it's okay for you! It was a mistake from the beginning to have someone fight in my place. I can't――"

I can't allow someone to get hurt, In place of saving me. I should be the one doing the saving. I have been working hard to become a person who can help others like my father, so――

"doing the saving" here is interchangable with "getting hurt". i'll make a full post about this later but shirou views himself getting hurt protecting someone as inherently positive, as using his body as a meat shield is one of the only things he can actually do to "help". in other words, hes fighting against his own sense of worthlessness here.

"…I am saying that you are mistaken. I have never thought of myself as a woman, and I have never been treated as one.

Saber's comment stops the conversation. "―――――" As I use the kitchen knife, I feel irritated by Saber's comment.

"…I've been wondering for a while, but just what does she think she is?" For some reason, I'm getting annoyed.

shirou isn't getting mad here because of some misgivings about gender identity. he's hearing 'woman' and interpreting it as 'person'. frequently shirou will say things like "i'm a guy, so this is normal." this always felt to me like he was trying to reassure himself more than anything. he's trying to convince himself he's normal, just like any guy in his class, and still has normal emotions, just like any of his peers. just like he says right at the beginning. his body survived, but everything else about him burned up into ashes. to keep his body alive, his heart died. Can you still believe this post is about him being sexist? the POINT here is that "being a guy" and "being a girl" to him always has the invisible word "normal" before it. being a normal, ordinary guy, who goes to school and has friends and doesn't have something severely psychologically wrong with him. to him it means being young and innocent and having fun without all of the trauma he faced and the baggage he has. like an ordinary high schooler, having crushes, going on dates and stuff. he excludes himself from that, and yet he can't help but cling to it and insist he really is just like everyone else, especially in the prologue.

in the end, like everything else, it all comes back to him projecting on saber. because he sees her firmly deny being a woman, which is to say, being an ordinary person, like he does, and he sees it uncomfortably reflected back on himself, because he thinks he cant really live normally but at least SABER should be able to right? because that's what it means to protect someone. so when he gets upset that saber doesn't see herself as a woman, he's upset that she doesn't get to live as a person, and he's also upset at himself that he also doesn't have that.

#data #fateposting

[nadineeb]

CRAZY RICH ASIANS -  MOVIE REVIEW

Hi dears! It’s me again. After my tech review, I’m navigated to this 2016 movie -  Crazy Rich Asians which came from the first book of its trilogy novel. This is always at the top of my list and my favourite movie. Hope you’ll enjoy this movie review as it feels like you’re watching it when you’re really just reading. All credits goes to the owner of the photos and GIFs. Thank you so much!! Enjoy it as much as I do. 

- XOXO, Nads <3

New York City - Rachel Chu, a young, lovely, part-timer economic professor who dates for over a year now, a hunk, eye-turner, history professor, Nick Young, at New York University. Rachel already introduced Nick at their family dinners but since Nick's family are from Singapore, he hasn't presented Rachel formally to them.

Nick's closest female cousin, a double - heiress in her family, an icon in the fashion industry, had already chatted with Rachel. She's the only one that has known her cousin's girlfriend. Astrid was always busy with the Paris' fashion week, shopping spree every week, buying ancient jewelries that costs a fortune and building her own family with her only son and her husband who's also busy gaining investors in his technology business. 

(Astrid down below)

Being that it's Araminta and Colin's wedding, Colin, who happens to be Nick's bestfriend and cousin since their diaper days. Colin wants him to come home for he is his bestman in his wedding. He wants to take this chance for Rachel to meet his gigantic family and have her experience his childhood in the country where he grew up. It's also a great opportunity for her to visit her college bestfriend, Peik Lin , who always asks her to come to Singapore where she lives.

Excitedly, Rachel asks his mom for help with what dress will she be wearing when she meets his boyfriend's Ah-ma (grandmother in Chinese) during the family dinner to welcome the guests of the wedding. She forcibly agrees when her mom tries to get her wear the red dress. Her mom says that red is a color of good luck in Chinese traditions and also a little bit more of a plus point from Nick's Ah-ma though she also got a pure Chinese blood but grew up in America which promotes an entirely different culture.

Amazed by their First Class seats and soft silk pair of pj's given by the airlines, Rachel couldn't contain her happiness while sipping on their glass of champagnes on their flight to Singapore. Astonished as she seemed, she nags Nick on why he can afford the First Class tickets to a country miles away from them while Nick uses her Netflix password. He admits that they are living "comfortably" which what exactly a member of a crazy rich family says.

As soon as they land in Singapore, Araminta and Colin, the soon-to-be wedded couple was there at the airport with balloons in their hands and joy in their auras. After introducing them to Rachel, they plan to eat Newton Food Centre, a place where they serve delicious street foods especially laksa curry and satay bowls from street food vendors which gained Michelin stars.

Right before the Nick's family welcome dinner, Rachel visits Peik Lin in her house which everything is brilliantly gold-plated and was inspired by the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. While catching up over their food for lunch, Peik Lin's mom interrogates her about her coming to Singapore. When she said that it's for the wedding of his boyfriend's bestfriend Colin, Peik Lin's family were shocked, they said that it is the wedding of the year and even them having that rich, they aren't invited to the wedding. It seems like Rachel didn't do a research at his boyfriend's family!

Peik Lin also warned Rachel that the Youngs are kind of snobbish that would belittle a commoner. She would not let Rachel wear that little red dress to the dinner so she gathered all of her fancy clothes and choose the best for Rachel to wear.

The Youngs - migrated in the 1800's to the small island of Singapore from their main land, China  with a vast amount of fortune. They started real-estates business until this family became most probably the landlords of Singapore.

Nick escorted Rachel and Peik Lin to his Ah-ma's house which is the largest, most beautiful house that Rachel didn't expect to see. A house that Nick and Astrid grew up in. A house that has lots of wings that you'll probably get lost once you enter the wrong one.

Finally, Nick introduces Rachel to all of his cousins. Nick's mom, Eleanor, is busy in the kitchen scrutinizing every detail of the food to serve to their guests. When the couple went down to the kitchen, Rachel thrillingly hugs Eleanor which made Eleanor uncomfortable around Rachel. That is why Rachel immediately concluded that Eleanor doesn't want her for his son.

In the middle of the garden, sits a fragrant Tan Hua flower which usually blooms fully once a year, a great opportunity for the guests to see this once in a year. While waiting for it to fully bloom, Nick introduced Rachel to his Ah-ma, surprisingly, she likes Rachel the moment they talked in Chinese. She said that Rachel should come back to the mansion when there are no more craining necks so that she can teach Rachel how to make their family's traditional dumpling recipe which was passed to generations.

The Bachelor and Bachelorette's  Party where Nick and Rachel's love was tested. The Bachelor's party is located literally in the middle of the ocean, filled the cargo-like ship with sexy girls and men that is enjoying the scenery. As they are talking about anything under the sun and with the influence of alcohol, some men questions Nick on Rachel's details. Though the men want to know more about Rachel, Nick went hot-headed as the men start to sexualize his girlfriend. He decides to leave the ship that day with Colin, the bachelor, to an island with a small wooden floating house and a raft.

On the other hand, Rachel met Nick's ex-girlfriend, Amanda, in Araminta's Bachelorette party at a private island. She did not know that Amanda wants to be friends with her so that she and her mean friends can pull off their plans and that Rachel would want to leave. Their plans succeeded, while crying Rachel went to her villa to get her things and leave, she bumped into Astrid. They two found that Rachel's bed was covered in tuna's blood with a tuna head at her headboard.

That incident led to them to the seashore talking about why Amanda is like that. Astrid also opened up to Rachel how she found out that her husband is not really busy going to business trips but rather he is busy having an affair with a woman she doesn't know. It seems like the two found comfort in each other.

Dumpling day comes and also another day to test their relationship. While making dumplings, Rachel found out that Ah-ma doesn't want Eleanor for Nick's father way back then and she doesn't have the heirloom engangement ring of the Youngs since Ah-ma didn't approve of her. Ah-ma arrived at the dining table exactly after Rachel knew the backstory of Eleanor and Nick's father. Ah-ma was pleased after seeing Rachel again. She adoringly expressed her interest in Rachel's face features which made Eleanor jealous of Rachel.

On her way to the toilet, Rachel's lost in the mansion and was shocked that Eleanor found her. Eleanor talked to Rachel and frankly told her that she will never be enough for her son.

(Rachel and Eleanor Scene)

The wedding of the year came, famous business elites and the royalties attended. Rachel wore a pretty blue elegant dress paid respects to Eleanor and Nick's aunties though Eleanor doesn't want her to sit with her.

Princess Inta, who demanded a whole row of the front seats to herself so she would not be bothered by anyone, approached by Rachel who doesn't have seats, she talked about the princess' book about economics and that they have the same stand. They immediately been comfortable with each other. Escorted by Astrid, Ah-ma came and everyone was shocked at her presence. They said that Ah-ma never came to such events.

Not long after Ah-ma arrived, the grand wedding started which left everyone in awe on how beautiful the oriental, Gothic-themed was.

After the ceremony, the program continued at the Gardens by the Bay, a reception for the wedding. It was filled with laughters, everyone is having a great time dancing and enjoying the beat. In contrast with this, stands Rachel and Nick called by Ah-ma and Eleanor for the truth behind Rachel's identity. They said that they cannot let Rachel join their family for the fact that she lied to them about his father after they hired a peivate investigator. Little did they know that Rachel only found out then that her mom's husband, which all throughout her life she believed wa sher father, isnt really her biological father. Rachel walked out for she is deeply hurt by their actions. Ah-ma later then gave Nick an ultimatum. Once he leave, he can't come back. Who will he choose? His family or Rachel?

After a few days of crying, Rachel's mom found her in Peik-Lin's house and not eating. Her mom admitted that she left her husband because she was impregnated by Rachel's father and that her husband was not kind after all. She flew all the way to America to start a new life with her baby, Rachel.

Before leaving Singapore, Rachel wanted to talk to two people; Nick and Eleanor. She ended her relationship with Nick and declined Nick's offer to marry her and start a new life in New York as he will cut his ties with his family.

Rachel meets Eleanor at a Mahjong Parlour where they had a mahjong game along with two deaf players. She told Eleanor everything that had happened before she met with her and that she knew that Nick loves his family so much that even though Nick decided to leave his family for her, she couldn't stand to see Nick away from them. He is the only son that would inherit their wealth. She decides to let him go.

Also broken-hearted with her cousin Nick, Astrid decides to leave his husband for she cannot be blinded by her husband's affair. She decides to take their son with her.

Rachel and her mom are boarding the aircraft when Nick chased her to fly to New York with her.   She don't want to listen to Nick at first but when she realized what Nick's doing, she decided to  clisten to him and is completely speechless when Nick get down on one knee. Her face brightened when she saw the small box with the emerald stone ring embedded in diamonds that Eleanor wore on their engagement with Nick's father is vividly shining right infront of her eyes. She said Yes!

Them three left the aircraft to celebrate their engagement with their friends at the top of Singapore's most popular hotel - Marina Bay Sands. Ended as Eleanor genuinely smiles at Rachel as Rachel shows her engagement ring.

This movie taught me that you can’t choose who you’ll love. If you're looking for someone with the same wealth level as yours or even the same race as yours, you may never find your true love. Given the circumstances of Rachel and Nick, they don’t want their wealth status to be a hindrance in their relationship.

Though family always comes first, if it's a matter of going through what your family wants for you or going through what you want for your future family, always choose the latter. I only get one chance to live and I don’t want any regrets, so for as long as possible, if my decisions don't violate a person's right, i’ll do everything and whatever it takes.

This part below, where Rachel met Eleanor at the Mahjong Place where they talked about why Eleanor didn’t want Rachel for Nick the second she arrived in Singapore. Eleanor said that there is a Hokkien phrase “Ka ki lang” which means “Our own kind of people.” This is why the Chinese people tend to want to marry the same ethnicity as them because they want to preserve their traditions and would want to keep it going for as long as possible, which Rachel is not. Not because she is not wealthy, but because she is a foreigner, an American, although the Chinese blood runs through her, she grew up in America and Eleanor doesn’t want that.

One of the Chinese’s cultures is that they are taught to build things that last and not to feed in what they want, but in what they need. I understand Eleanor in this part because as an Asian, we are taught by these things - to prioritize our needs and build connections that will benefit us in the future. But for me, we should give respect to other cultures and not close our circle entirely. We all have different perspectives regardless of our race, that is why we should not judge one’s personality based on their race.

Rachel said that Nick proposed to him the day before and she turned him down, though Nick stated that he will stay away from his family for good. She said that if Nick would choose Rachel, he would lose his family, and if Nick would choose his family, he might spend the rest of his life resenting Eleanor.

Eleanor shows her Mahjong tiles which she thought she won, but Rachel looks at her, sighs, and says,

“ I’m not leaving because I’m scared, or because I think I’m not enough, because maybe for the first time in my life, I know I am. I just love Nick so much. I don’t want him to lose his mom again, so I just wanted you to know that one day, when he marries another lucky girl, who is enough for you, and you’re playing with your grandkids, while the Tan Hua’s are blooming, and the birds are chirping, that is was because of me. A poor, low-class immigrant nobody.”

Then she showed her Mahjong tiles and she won to Eleanor. She left the table and fetched her mother with a smile at the other table to leave the place. What a queen! Powerful. That is the best scene ever. The feels, the script, the emotions, they are just so perfect.

Astrid, my favorite character, not just she is stunningly beautiful but among all the cousins, she has the purest heart. She doesn’t want the people around her to feel that they are left out when they are with her. She wanted everything to be perfect when it comes to her family. Though her shopping spree every time she’s going to Paris fashion week is a bit overwhelming to commoners, she deserves all of it.

Astrid and I have similarities in our personalities. I’m also calm when there are problems that are coming my way. I can remain composed and I buy my time until I can find solutions to it. I remember the time when the man I loved cheated on me just like when Michael (Astrid’s husband) cheated on Astrid.

I can relate to her when she said that she’s wrong when she’s turning down jobs because Michael might feel lesser than her. I used to lower myself when I’m with him because I worry that he might feel that I’m the superior one between the two of us. But when he cheated, I realized that it shouldn’t be like that. It will be his fault for being insecure in me. Just like what Astrid said,

“It’s not my job to make you feel like a man. I can’t make you something you’re not.”

#crazy rich asians #astrid leong #rachel chu #nick young #movie review

[ouyangzizhensdad]

Hi!! just here to say I love your metas and your analysis of mdzs/cql,, also i've seen some of your posts about anti-mxtx discourse and i thought they were very interesting!! It's very hard to find people who actually love mxtx work AND mxtx herself as a writer. Most people here will consume here work and then hate on her which I don't understand, like...then just leave?? but anyways, I can't also believe there's people here who can't process the idea of loving both mdzs and cql 😂 I love the novel and I think the adaptation was good! I don't see why hating one or the other but oh well. Keep it up with your banger metas!! I love reading them <3

Hi there anon, 

Happy to know you find that my analysis and my meta are bangers 🤘.

I think (part of) the reason why it’s difficult to find people who love both mdzs and cql equally is that they are at the end of the day different stories told through different mediums, and they seem to appeal to different type of fans (at least in the EN-language fandom, I am guessing the situation is different in the CN-language fandom, for instance). While I think CQL is perfectly Fine, I am critical of where it fails as an adaptation and at the end of the day it doesn’t have what truly appeals to me in the novel (its exploration of themes, its humour, the storytelling techniques, the more complex journey for Wangxian, etc.). Conversely, a lot of purity culture/anti-fujo types seem to be really into the type of content that CQL ended up being due to censorship (take from that what you will). Otherwise, I think a lot of CQL-main people who might not have the same arguments against the novel as the aforementioned group might be the kind of viewers who are used to relying on visual language to bridge the gap of a lot of stuff that is not found explicitly word-for-word in the narration or dialogue--and might thus not be really receptive to the kind of storytelling favoured by MXTX. 

Also, let’s not kid ourselves: another part of the reason that there is a lot of people who have only watch CQL is because they end up reading posts written by people totally misrepresenting the novel and think: woah, that’s bad! I won’t read it! sounds so bad!!!! My favourite posts of this kind are those where the person writing them directly acknowledges that they “hated the novel so much” that they barely read it/speed-read it/skipped entire portions/don’t remember much of it. And you know when *I* want to have an opinion on a piece of writing more complex than a YA novel I always make sure to rely on someone who admits to not having the full context of the story or to not having taken even a second to reassess their initial opinion of elements in the novel. Saltiness aside, I don’t blame people for relying on other people’s opinions to decide what to consume or to make their minds on something, but I think people could try to question more whether that people whose opinion they are taking as truth is giving a fair or credible assessment. Quoting the abstract of a journal article you haven’t read is a thing undergraduate kids do but you're supposed to work up to actually looking through the arguments and methodology before deciding whether the author of an article really has a point and if their thesis holds up to scrutiny.

I don’t think MXTX is anything close to a perfect writer. But I think she has a lot of merit as a storyteller, and a lot of her strengths are those that I personally enjoy seeing in stories, which makes it easier for me to get over the parts of her stories that are not as strong or well-executed. But I trust her skills enough to be interested to see what else she will write in the future. 

#anon ask #anti-mxtx discourse #mdzs #brine corner #okay this is very salty but i am tired and mean #Anonymous

[goldenlie]

(This is in response to Qnf-Enjoyer! I can't stop laughing in your post on my screen the emojis are taking up half the screen holy shit. I had issues posting it please tell me if it looks like that for you I kind of hope it is bye. If you don't want it up lmk and I can delete, idk if my wifi is collapsing or if Tumblr really got the last laugh on us gn)

HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY!!! It's really a late birthday wish now gn but I'm glad you got to spend it with friends! I'm honestly dreading the change from that nice, gentle and easing zero into a more official 1 😍 21 looks like you've gained a lot of experience and now considered an official adult worldwide. I wish you well with the transition all the same . I hope the year brings a lots of fond memories. I also need to say I think it's funny that you're an Aries as a lot of my friends past and current are Aries?? something in the way fr. I don't believe in like horoscope compatibility or anything at all like that but that's kind of funny.

I was truly expecting Moriarty back again as well, for good reason, and honestly immensely disappointed we didn't get him, despite his fleeting presence in the show (being alive that is) he was top tier. Ok re-reading that really brought back my memories of the show what on earth was the thought process because they completely lost their backbone with Marys character development / exploration. The writing was really, really lacking on occasion- maybe not the writing per se but the plot and how linear / seamless it flowed. The way you broke it down on how their marriage was falling apart but oh what's this?? Mary and Sherlocks bffs arc with a steel chair? The easy way out fr and they really sealed off any potential hope of something more arising from it for good. It was anything but satisfying, nobility and shock value aside it felt like an extremely boring conclusion to a character that could've literally broken the mold on shows like this. I had no fucking idea there was proper logic and reasoning behind the tea is gay etc. shirt (I hope your book goes balls to the walls on breaking down eating / food imagery I need to hear about it in respect to this) because that paints a chunk of her video in an entirely different light. That's genuinely interesting and raises good points but it was just used as a device to "prove" the fandom was talking shit. You're so right about Tumblr coming together collectively to draw together theories / conclusions regarding shows etc. and if it's all whittled down to the doings of one singular person it's not entirely fair nor accurate. I really thought she was one of the girls, a tumblrina if you will but she's going out of her way to make the people who were fans at the time look senseless 😭 and profiting 🙁 It literally just gets the more I read. Documenting Tumblr is a hefty challenge especially over such a long period of time, you're bound to miss critical aspects somewhere from lack of memory or simply not knowing about their existence, but outright and knowingly forgoing information?? It's making sense why she went denying others help / statements 🥴 I can see why people were opposing the creation of the video, clearly it was quite lacking in the unbiased information department, just giving an overview- an unbiased rundown would've been an interesting documentary style vid but she seems to have skewed the narrative to suit her. On an absolute side note I've not seen Hannibal but I've really considered starting it for like two years (more like every time someone references it on my dash). Besides the real obvious plot line I know literally nothing about it nor its reception in the public but lmk if you enjoyed it / found it worth! Purr on the hobbit being a little lost in translation of media, I think it might be a complete knock out for me if I were to attempt the books though. Every time I start reading or even glimpsing sideways at a fantasy novel there's just so much worldbuilding down to the slang language they use I lose track so quickly.

3 solid years before returning to a show I don't know if I'm more impressed at your dedication to finishing it or the fact you remembered it existed. I can barely remember the shows I watched last month and if I finished the show then I will be capable of answering nothing about it, it's wiped from memory. Going back to games is way harder too I hope rise of the tomb raider sees you again soon. I actually managed to complete my first game in a while the other day, Corpse Party? Idk if that's a blast from the past for you but I remember watching a lets play of it when I was new to the internet and wanted to play it myself. I was surprised at the scenes I remembered considering it was like a decade ago but it is a horror so maybe that explains it. I will say it wasn't that bad when there were chase scenes the characters moved so slow it was actually funny. I feel like the only habit I can consistently do for a little escapism as a treat in my day to day life is read some random ff on ao3 before I go to sleep. A random fandom, sort by kudos, page 5 onwards and start scrolling, literal gems in there. Currently side eyeing the spn fandom as I've never once read a fic or even watched an episode but there's just so many there's bound to be some good stories. Misha coming out as straight really had some unforeseen side effects, like putting spn into my mind for the first time in a year.

Honestly second season of squid game chances are is only going to leave disappointment in its path here. From the kdramas I've watched, not all but a lot really do just stick to one season and that's it, as much as I can appreciate Netflix trying to shake things up and introduce more long term plans I really think Squid Game was not the one to double down on. We're relating on a lot I'm ngl, the daddy issues too? Can we catch a break 😭 But noted, last episode of Arcane and I'll make sure I don't have any plans to leave my apartment room. You've piqued my interest saying you have a different opinion on said explosion so I'm really looking forward to discussing it! My birthday is actually in June! But I appreciate the kind words a lot ;-; We watched the bo burnham special back near when it came out (kind of) but my birthday is maybe approaching quick? so Bo Burnham (common gnf blog enjoyer, he'll be reading our back and forths no doubt) if you've got plans for another release with love please direct it towards summer so I can recreate my newfound tradition.

Ok next long weekend I get I'll try for a Jujutsu Kaisen binge because the thought of a proper dark arc coming soon sounds like it's worth the anticipation. You've really hit the nail on the head with demon slayer, The main character is just very morally straight and narrow from ep 1 and you're not super attached to him for it. Zenitsu and Inosuke are who I think of first when I talk about the show. Definitely more background from either of their side would be nice. I did hear that it was done, back before I started watching it a friend at the time showed my a major spoiler so I'm going to assume it was set for near completion at that point as well, like a year and a half ago. It is surprising that it's so short but like you said if they had managed to flesh out Tanjiro a bit more they could've milked this cash cow for years. It does make my heart happy that there's a decent Zenitsu fight on the way, something to look forward to and I'll force myself into watching for it. I hope they pour the budget on him, nothing worse than an anime series flopping on scenes you were anticipating for years (haikyuu s4 I hate to throw you under the bus). I too am a big fan of seeing my faves go through their hurt to comfort route, it makes it all the more satisfyingly when things come back around. We need that here, we need hurt increased and I would also like an enforced found family dynamic because what they've got going on is too casual, too purely circumstantial (I don't even remember the plot enough to tell you why they're with each other but it wasn't selling me at the time anyway). They're one level above the avengers tower, it's not nearly enough. Ok the fact I know the exact radio show with Zenitsus va calling the coins, eyes closed, purely based on sound is so funny that was so surprising. Also I had completely forgot Zenitsu was voicing Dabi holy fuck the duality of these guys. My biggest surprise in connecting the seiyuu dots as it were, and this isn't even surprising tbh but I just wasn't expecting the voice of Dazai from Stray Dogs to be the same man to voice fucking Light from Death Note. This shocked me I was floored with this info, I think its because I've seen the va with the cast on stray dogs interacting and he is such a fun, extroverted personality I just would not have pegged this man to play such a sinister role 15 years prior. Either way, love that man (I don't know anything about him) and good for him what a resume. I too am a big Sokka enjoyer so I love that we've gone for the siblings. I loved the fact that he was not deterred one bit by miss katara strongest water bender you could meet in your life, toph metal bender herself, and the literal avatar. He would just roll up with his boomerang and I loved him for it. Yet, then all of a sudden in s3 they randomly gave him an episode where he was doubting himself, his abilities, why he was even there. Like fair and expected if this happened in s1 / early s2 when things were starting to take shape, but it felt like such an after thought of his character, a grab at a spare scene to flesh out an ep. To me it was nothing like his personality, especially after a year of travelling and proving yourself useful time and time and time again, not once hinting at this doubt even on the smallest of scales. Maybe I missed his feelings previously if expressed but it felt half assed to me. The found family ATLA gave us is on the tallest tip of the pyramid for sure, they went through fights and disagreements of all sorts it felt really worked at, it was so good. I haven't seen Voltron, well I have seen the very first episode that I watched 5 years ago but I didn't stick to it? Although kind of wouldn't be opposed to trying it, I keep thinking of this one video I saw where this guy was swearing his life down that the first two seasons of the show were a gift from the heavens and I haven't been able to shake his opinion. I'm sorry to hear that the final season ever was that bad, it's giving GoT disappointment, it's such a shit feeling seeing your favorites get left with mediocrity.

I'll look into Devilman Crybaby, it's been sitting in my Netflix list for probably two years so it might be approaching its time. I'm interested to see what type of ending it has, I am with you undoubtedly that DN was deserving of something better for L and Light, fair enough if the series ended with them but the fact that it didn't. Just give him the win at that point I don't know what to tell ya but I've lost interest like he's just lost his life. I say that but I still enjoyed the show a lot a lot but improvements would go a long way, I'd love to see a remake / spin-off in the future with an alternate ending. Oh really? I didn't know people weren't keen on the animating style in ToG but I really loved it. I haven't read the webtoon yet either despite swearing I would after finishing s1 yet here we are. The betrayal scene took me by such surprise I was expecting Rachel to be not how Bam saw her but I was not expecting that. The Promised Neverland was one of my all time faves when I first saw S1! Lotta lotta love for Ray I'll be honest, he played the waiting game and was suffering mentally for it but he played his cards so right. S2 if you haven't seen I'll confirm for you that it sucked, it was very sub par in comparison to s1 and on checking up the fandom spaces after it looked like the scenes were really rushed as if to fit it into the 12 ep space. Very lacking, I'm sure reading the manga would fulfill some disappointment but again when something you've waited for isn't animated well it's so annoying.

You've really put into words how Dream makes you feel as a viewer, just untrustworthy (and honestly disbelieving) of what he's choosing to tell the viewers because it is ultimately for a gain on his end but it's done in a more under the table, pulling the puppet strings way. Like oh I'll leak the knf kiss and other random pieces of info on my private podcast, people talk about it on twitter and cite my merch discord stream, it gains the reputation for spilling secrets there, merch sales spike because people don't want to miss it (lot of fomo in the twt fandom space), people want to be a part of the discord general chat, have a chance to talk with him one on one, etc. I understand it's working well so stopping isn't going to be considered an option from his pov but it's the fact the secrets he leaks aren't even surrounding him. Fair enough if he was just using his own instances or experiences to get people coming in but using your friends business fr? tbh to me he does seem to see Gnf + Sapnap as expendables that he created in the fucking dream cinematic universe so telling their info doesn't seem to bother him (literally not once ever). I absolutely feel where you're coming from in seeing traits in his friendships that would not be flying if it was happening between you and a friend. Hearing something you told a friend in confidence come back around is shit enough nevermind it coming back 1,000 fold. Not even just the gossip but as you said his live behavior half the time is pulling the piss. I vividly remember Dream once on a basketball stream saying he probably has as much if not more coding experience that he could put on his c.v. than George and he didn't even do the degree. Like what the fuck jerk yourself off harder. Good for you, you've coded projects, you've built a resume, but why are you making it a competition? (and making George's college experience sound worthless 😍) Learn what it's like to not feel the need to constantly put yourself on a pedestal above your friends please it's for world peace. Wouldn't do well to forget him and Tommy's back and forth in the replies of a Philza tweet either because that was so telling on his character but I also love how Philza came to Tommy's defense, good for you king. Definitely can appreciate Georges approach to content creation being (what seems to be) a more amplified version of the parts of himself he wants to showcase. As you said, it's not a massive mask (that was unintentional) or a newly crafted persona, it's just him, just some guy. His backstory or his personal experiences aren't his content, so as you said feels a bit weird getting that layer, it's like been given a piece of a jigsaw for a puzzle that isn't yours. Exactly as you said as well with Bad and Q having a mutual ground of being open on stream, like it goes both ways with them no bother. George on the other hand has yet to go out of his way, at least to my knowledge, to tell something private to thousands about Dreams personal life. If it's not replicated behavior on your friends part then it looks like a pretty good indicator to simply stop.

Ok kind of fun I also used to watch Foolishes streams but bare in mind this was literally like last year so I think I'm out of the loop by a long shot. He was a reliable watch for sure and the builds were definitely what I was watching, I think Kinoko at the time. Don't know how well I'd take to his Gordon Ramsey or valorant plays in the bg as noise tbh but if I'm stuck for something I'll give him a peak. I'll be honest the co-op games are honestly stressful, even playing with my friends one of them takes it serious while my other friend and I like to play anything but the characters intended roles, so it's a bit of an interesting dynamic. It's fun but intimidating starting out, there are times when I was the enemy teams best player and by God was I reminded of it in chat. Playing with enough mutuals so that you have the majority is the way to go. I wish that I could play Genshin soo bad! My laptop is quite a cheap one so Genshin would play at 1 frame a minute it was atrocious I didn't even get halfway in the intro scene. I then used an old iPhone to download it but old is the word I think a 5 se? and it worked but the phone charges once every two months so I threw in the towel. I got about as far as George did in his first sponsored stream. However, I am thinking in investing in a new phone (my current one is incapable of running it) so I'll definitely get it when I upgrade (I was heavily considering an iPhone purchase but they scam their customers so hard with no headphone jack? no wall plug? no money left after purchase? so the decision process will be a time consuming one). Do you play on pc/phone? I'm assuming PC is fun af tbh but I've seen enough tiktoks of people wishing at concerts for the good luck to know its at least playable ahjbdh. Although this won't mean much to me right now who do you main on Genshin? I don't know anyone apart from Paimon and they're not even playable 😭 I also sadly haven't tried BOTW but I'm aiming to soon, it's one of the best games I hear on the switch and honestly the bar is 6 feet under but it does look good.

Working from home is so sexy I literally love it, the pjamma pants set up, work laptop in bed, and a cup of tea in hand, it's ideal. Honestly I find the hardest part of my job (my job mainly being a mix between computer work & running tests) is actually talking to my coworkers 😭 All who I spend most time with are genuinely lovely people but I find it hard to open up as is so when they talk so freely about their personal lives I'll smile and nod, and those are my sole contributions. Luckily(? Maybe not) the topic these days has surrounded the stock market, which I've only ever looked at to see the GameStop graph like a year and a half ago so I'm a little out of depth bye. To be fair I don't think I'll be correlating on many topics with them but I'm at the very least learning a lot at the lunch table. I think my course has it so we'll at a maximum have a choice between two lecturers to work under. One of them would definitely be strict on the deadlines but he's so extroverted and eccentric? Like he's 5'5/5'6 and yet the most intimidating man I've ever met?? But maybe that's what I need, a short king capable of making me fear for my happiness walking into class. For real don't worry about rambling in any direction, I enjoy reading your thoughts always pop off fr and I'm the exact same in favoring typing over actually articulating my thoughts in real time. I'm glad we have a so many joint interests!! I hope to start one of your anime recs this weekend as I've got one episode left of breaking bad 🤒 it only took 6 months but we made it and it was some roller-coaster of a show. I really enjoyed it, I think my favorite ;part was s2 middle to the end because it just stepped up in how deep it was getting. Not like s1 wasn't telling but fuck me s2 just hit way fucking harder. I'm also finally going to watch bbqnf play with Dean something idk who he is but he played Hank, idk if you've seen breaking bad? Either way I hope the upload was fun, it feels very strange to think Quackity secured such a collaboration but also very sweet that he pulled George in after they bonded over breaking bad for so long. Anyway I hope you have a good weekend legend and that you also maintain motivation throughout, we got MCC as a little booster to look forward to at the very least 🥳

(now that I've seen the part again where you say you created your qnf enjoyer blog to send this I'm beginning to think it's been more than 2 weeks since you sent this 😭 the universe can try all it wants to put our chats on hold but ultimately we'll always win. Update as of posting ur ask: we did not win)

[sg2tiger]

Analyzed the fuck out of all meta/magic scenes and whatnot in the prior Episodes (especially EP2) and if i were a person who experienced Umineko as it released, I can see how that would be a little too much of a task to ask your readers to undergo. You can't exactly ask people to spend 10-20 hours of their lives analyzing a novel just to figure out what it really means. Its much easier to do that when its done. (cont)

“You can’t exactly ask people to spend 10-20 hours of their lives analyzing a novel just to figure out what it really means.”

*sweats nervously*

Well, I honestly don’t agree with this, and hope this isn’t what it seems like I’ve been trying to imply when I talk about how upset the sentiment about Ryukishi and EP8 was at the time. In fact, it’s the opposite - people did spend countless hours of their lives trying to analyze the novel. Like, I’ve mentioned this before, but I was only on the Umineko Train for 2 years before it ended because I got in between EP4 and 5. If you think of the people who got into Umineko from the start (mostly people who already loved Higurashi), that’s four years of their lives. And when I say years…I do mean years. Because speaking from experience, I literally did devote multiple hours, every day, over those two years, to doing Umineko stuff. It could be dumb shit like all the Umineko Hell videos I made, or it could be all the times I sat down and wrote up huge pages of notes about various theories, or all the time I spent on the AnimeSuki forums and in more threads on /a/ and /jp/ than I could possibly count. Far, far beyond 10-20 hours, I think most Umineko fans would tell you that all the time spent analyzing the story is where the fun came from to begin with.

The problem was the lack of payoff, and the fact that it felt like our efforts were invalidated. I went into more detail on those issues in this post (the stuff under the Read More that was in response to yasuda-yoshiya), though, if you’re interested, because I’d rather just link that than writing another 10-page essay repeating the same sentiments :P But the TL;DR of it is that the problem wasn’t that making the readers analyze it was ‘asking too much’ - that analysis is what drove most people to the series in the first place. It was the fact that we felt like we came away with nothing to show for the countless hours we did spend analyzing it. 

I think ‘waiting to do that when it’s done’ is the very thing Ryukishi didn’t want fans to do, because that means you’re not actually thinking for yourself and trying to reach an answer - you’re just a goat who wants the truth handed to you on a silver platter. And people like that, who aren’t actually reasoning and trying to understand the story on their own, don’t deserve the truth because they didn’t put in any effort to searching for it. I don’t disagree with Ryukishi on that at all. My problem lies with how dismissive he was to all fans who were upset with the lack of answers, as though all fans were waiting until they could see the answers without even trying to find it. It’s the fact that fans like me, who indeed I feel were the majority (at least in the western fanbase), who actually did struggle our asses off searching for the truth. We definitely weren’t saying ‘thinking is a pain just tell us the answers’, at all. All we wanted from the end was the ability to check the answers we reached after struggling for so long, to have some form of validation that said ‘you got it right’ or ‘you got it way wrong’, so we didn’t feel like everything was a waste of time.

I also think it’s a bit problematic to say that Ryukishi is somehow hindered by being Japanese, and that’s a dangerous line of thinking. I’m sure you didn’t mean anything negative by it, but realistically that’s like saying ‘Japanese authors are not nearly as good as western ones, Ryukishi’s talent is wasted because he wasn’t born in the west’. And well, I don’t think I have to explain why that starts to sound a bit…wrong. 

Ryukishi is Japanese. First and foremost, he’s writing for fellow Japanese. His stories were always aimed at his own culture, and I remember how surprised he was to find out about Witch-Hunt and that Umineko was so hugely popular in the west to begin with. He’s not trying to look down on his peers and say ‘I’m better than you, and because you’re all Japanese, you’d never understand the COMPLEX topics in my stories’. In fact, I’d say it’s very much the opposite - Ryukishi would not be writing these stories at all if he wasn’t writing them for his fellow Japanese. 

If you’ve read the Higurashi VN, you’ll know that the Kai arcs all had a personal afterword written by Ryukishi to the readers (the question arcs had Otsukaresama-kai, which was what Umineko’s EP1 tea party is supposed to remind you of). At the end of…I wanna say it was Minagoroshi-hen? He left a note about the importance of talking to people about your problems, and how this was something he wished could become a more widespread concept in Japan. Because it took so much effort just to get Satoko into child protective services because of Japan’s general ‘mind your business’ attitude, and because of Satoko’s own belief that her brother would come back if she shouldered all of this herself…it showed just how prevalent that sort of idea is in Japanese culture. Rika, too, is a huge example of that, and one of the main messages of the story (and Minagoroshi-hen specifically) was how Rika could have gotten so much further if she had actually talked to her friends about what troubled her sooner. Rena, too, in Tsumihoroboshi-hen. A big theme of Higurashi was trust and friendship, and talking to people instead of bottling up your problems. And it was also to be the one to talk to a friend, and help them, if you felt they needed it, rather than doing the standard Japanese thing of ‘it’s not my business’. Ryukishi was writing about these themes to try and send a message to his own people, to his own culture, and to maybe, if just a little, influence the thinking of his readers to help foster a new generation to break through some of these cultural taboos.

Higurashi would not work as a story if it wasn’t written by a Japanese man, to the Japanese people, as a story about Japanese characters…because these concepts are so important to understanding a lot of the major themes. Let’s say, instead, that Ryukishi had moved to the US and started writing Higurashi here. We don’t have a doujin industry, but let’s say he just published it as a fanfiction online, and it got a bit of a popular following. What do you think the reception would have been about the inherent themes of Minagoroshi-hen? Because I can absolutely envision a western comment section for it. “Why didn’t they just bust into her house and see that her uncle was lying?!” “If I were Keiichi and the others I’d have gone and kicked his ass” “Why would Rika rather keep quiet about Satoko than try to help her? I thought they were best friends?” And so on and so forth. I think a lot of people wouldn’t get why Minagoroshi-hen was such a long, dragged out process…because the western mindset for this sort of thing is so different. We can’t imagine that child protective services would be so passive!! The meaning of their struggle in that arc would just be totally lost - Hell, for all I know, that’s exactly what happened for western readers not super familiar with Japanese culture reading Higurashi for the first time (I say reading because if I recall, like most things, the anime sorta streamlined the whole thing for the sake of time and it didn’t seem like nearly as long of a process as it does in the VN and manga). I bet there were a lot of western fans who genuinely didn’t understand a lot of Higurashi’s themes, and this is no fault of their own. This is because Higurashi was written specifically with a Japanese audience in mind, an audience that wouldn’t need to have this attitude explained to them because it’s an inherent part of their culture.

I won’t pretend to be an expert on Japanese culture myself, of course, but I absolutely don’t think Ryukishi’s stories would work if they were actually written for a western market. Of course they both have a strong western fanbase, but I’d wager that only a small fraction of that fanbase is made up of people who weren’t already anime/manga fans. IE, people who already know a bit about Japanese culture because they’re already exposed to a lot of Japanese media. And while I think Umineko has a bit more western appeal in its themes than Higurashi (which is a very Japanese story in more ways than one), it was still clearly written for a Japanese audience, with a Japanese mindset. Again I go back to the fact that a big part of the issues in Umineko is that the family members never liked to talk about their personal problems. If they had come together and tried to talk and help each other, the tragedy could absolutely have been prevented. Yasu would have been able to come to terms with herself and not be pushed to the brink feeling like her life was hopeless. Battler and Rudolf could have made up much sooner, rather than waiting for 6 whole years. Rosa and Maria could have healed their mother-daughter relationship and try to come to terms with their own psychoses. The list goes on. So much of Umineko could have been prevented if the characters didn’t bottle up their personal problems…which, yeah, is something westerners can relate to and appreciate, but I think would be received much more strongly by a Japanese audience.

Ryukishi is Japanese. He writes for the Japanese. The fact that westerners latch onto that quality of his stories so much is certainly interesting, but to insinuate that somehow his own culture and the very mindset that drives him to write these stories is somehow hindering him…I can’t agree with that at all. I think it’s awesome that his stories are identifiable enough to reach a much wider audience than he could have ever expected…but to think that somehow his work would be better off if he wasn’t Japanese, or writing stories to appeal to his own culture? I think that’s a very mistaken viewpoint, myself.

#umineko #umineko no naku koro ni #higurashi #higurashi no naku koro ni #umineko spoilers #asks #down-the-rabbit-well #umineko asks