he should've said something a while ago. probably when the other had first started talking, back when there was still time to remedy things / still time to stop before all those mistakes were made. but the gift of hindsight had failed him, with the words dying almost peacefully along the top of the tongue. there was just —— nothing left to do but sit and wait. ❛ kostyan.. ❜ his tone was too serious, no doubt a dead giveaway. but maybe that was for the best.. he never liked lying, anyways! ( and @gonchayas didn't feel like the kinda person who liked liars. ) ❛ i’m really sorry. i have NO idea what you've been talking about. could you repeat the first part again? ❜
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Any number? 23 and saïx :)
couldn't count all the ways that i've died for you
[ID: a digital drawing of saix from kingdom hearts. He is shown from the hip up, his body in 3/4's and his face in profile. He is shadowed in warm tones. He has a neutral expression, and he's standing straight.
The background is transparent except for a circle that lays from the middle of his shoulders and upwards, with three sections that have a slightly bigger circumference where one to three, seven to eight, and eight to nine would be on a clock. All scenes are blue tones with a noise overlay. these three are all from saix's perspective.
In the first, there is a cloaked figure shown from the waist down, the tip end of young xehanort's keyblade leans forward and some of it goes out of bound, tiled floor as a background. The second one is saix's hand reaching for kingdom hearts. The third is his hand reaching towards Lea, who lies on the floor of radiant garden's lab.
The rest of the circumference is a labyrinth wall in keyblade's graveyard, with a harsh diagonal line of light on the upper half. Most of the circumference is lined black, except from nine to one o'clock, lined white. /End ID.]
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okay, last post about the tank top (for now, until we inevitably get more photos) but setting aside the flailing and thirsting and excitement and everything else for a moment here
more than anything I am just SO happy that Brian felt comfortable enough to wear that tank top out onstage again without anything else over it
because he's obviously been using tank tops as his undershirt for the entire tour so far but even with everything being posted from soundchecks and hotels and his stationary bike we haven't seen him in just the tank on this tour before. he's wearing these constantly now, nearly daily, and until Halloween every image of him from this tour had been with an overshirt on or wearing a different t-shirt entirely.
and we know that Brian had(/has) body image issues and if you look at his entire wardrobe over the entire course of his life it's pretty freaking obvious that at least some of those issues are with his torso and shoulders. yes he's allergic to buttons but how many photos do we have of him actually shirtless compared to, say, Roger or Freddie?
more than that, how many times has he performed with Queen while wearing a tank top? I'll tell you right now you can count it on one hand and it's never been during a Queen concert specifically. the closest he's ever gotten has been rolling up his sleeves during the Q+PR years, or the handful of times he did the same in the 80s.
"we was glam!" Brian once said, and honestly that's probably a large reason why he's never worn tanks onstage with Queen before. because Queen's aesthetic is very different than that of his solo tours, and Q+AL is very different from Q+PR in that the glam vibes that Adam brings allow Brian to return to some of his own stage costume roots. Brian has a wild number of shirt and/or outfit changes during the show, and even the "street clothes" he wears on stage are sparklier than they ever were during the Q+PR years - not to mention that he's actually wearing costumes again, with the borhap solo outfits and the military jackets and everything else he does.
Brian may not be "fashionable" in the sense of being into fashion, following trends, etc. but he has always been extremely aware of how to follow the fashion in Queen specifically (and one day I'll write up that post about how Brian and Freddie continued wearing "costumes" onstage long past the point where Roger and John stopped....). it's really obvious when you look at Brian on the Magic Tour, where his stagewear is mostly just street clothes that vibe with what Roger and John are wearing, but he still pulls out those fabulous coats towards the end of the show to match the grandeur and spectacle that comes with a Queen finale.
Brian is clearly comfortable wearing tank tops in general but it's a very different matter for him to a) wear them publicly, where there will be photos and videos of it on the internet forever and b) wear them during a Queen show in 2023 when they match nothing else going on with his stagewear for this tour.
and I don't want to spend a lot of time on Point A because I am sick to fucking death of trying to get this fandom to understand that cracking "jokes" about the visible signs of natural aging (like the shoulder hair) isn't actually funny, especially when people are doing it on platforms that Brian himself is on like instagram
but with regards to Point B, like... there was just no reason for Brian to do this. there's no reason he couldn't have worn the Frank mask with the mirror ball suit, or if there was a reason he still could've worn an overshirt like he did when they had timing issues and he couldn't do his quick-change a few shows back.
but clearly Brian wanted to do this. he wanted THAT to be his Halloween costume specifically - not the mirror suit or his stagewear with a mask added, but a full outfit that was specifically unique for that moment in that show even if it was pulled from other clothing pieces he already had on hand.
it's a choice that, for about 20 seconds, made him completely visually different from anything anyone else had worn during that show. it's a choice that doesn't fully match Queen's aesthetic, either then or now, and it's a choice that's already generating some questionable "teasing" at his expense.
Brian has always had his physical appearance put under a microscope. from his height to his hair, the clogs to the unbuttoned shirts, by sheer virtue of the fact that he exists in the public eye Brian cannot wear anything without getting comments and critiques on it to some degree. and as he's aged those comments have naturally shifted to be about his aging - about his decision to dye or stop dyeing his hair, about how much skin he shows and how appealing the rest of the world finds that, how much body hair he now has and the small belly he's gained and everything else that comes along when you're a human being who's been alive for 70+ years.
but despite all of that, Brian wore that tank top on stage.
despite the dozens of reasons why this could have been a bad idea, despite the wildly varying opinions I've already seen, despite the aesthetic of Queen and this tour, despite the routine they already have for his outfit changes, despite the fact that this was always going to special because of the green lights and the Frank mask...
despite everything... Brian stripped down to that tank and stepped onto the raising platform without wearing any of his glam overshirts or special-made costumes, knowing that the thousands of people in that venue were waiting to get pictures and videos of that solo, and that he'd be opening himself up to very specific criticisms about his appearance by doing this.
and Brian was still confident enough, comfortable enough, in himself to do that during possible the highest-stakes moment in the entire show.
so yeah, I'm excited because there's new tank top content and I'm not above admitting that I personally find this sort of confidence very sexy even on a man of Brian's age
but I'm also just happy FOR Brian with this - happy that it went off without a hitch, happy that it has mostly been well-received by fans, happy that he seems to have had fun with it and, above all else, happy to see that any lingering self-doubts or body image issues aren't enough to stop him from giving us a moment like this.
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@raventhekittycat
hi okay so I've been mulling this one over for the past day or two and I think I have the answer. not to be using hamburger to explain anything to an american but you're my detco mutual so I'm going to try and explain it in detco terms
There's a post going around recently about how if you've read detco and only detco, the first time hakuba shows up you're going to be totally flummoxed, because damn this guy is clearly important, he gets to be even cooler than Shinichi, he's got a half-page shot of him (in such a panel-dense series such as Detective Conan, no less!!) and he's got a fucking hawk. he's CLEARLY important. everything about the narrative is indicating that you need to PAY ATTENTION to hakuba and that he's the coolest guy and he's important!!!! and then he dies in the case lol (not for real. but still.)!! and you're like huh??? what was that. why did aoyama do that.
But with the context of magic kaito this totally makes sense. He's a beloved character that people have been waiting decades to see again. Of course Aoyama is going to hype him up!! It's his big moment after years of being locked in the backrooms!!!
Anyways reading birdmen for me was kind of like that. The author's previous series, Kekkaishi, was pretty one-dimensional at the beginning, and even after the main plot started picking up at around volume 6, it still felt quite understandable. I knew what she was trying to get at, and the spectacular job she did with the anthropocene and climate change metaphor towards the end of that series really made me interested in the rest of her works. That and the way she writes familial relationships is absolutely DEVASTATING. (I mean this with the highest of praise)
But when I read BIRDMEN for the first time, I was probably in... middle school, maybe? And I read it, sure, but I didn't get it. I could see what was literally happening on the page but the narrative choices were absolutely baffling at times. Why skip over the entire part of the plot where they figure out who the birdman that saved them was? She blatantly doesn't care about that. What does she care about then?? I knew I didn't get it, I knew there were parts of it that were important and I couldn't figure out why and THAT'S how it dug its pretty little claws into me. Even after I finished catching up it nagged at me a little bit, not often at all, but enough that every once in a while I go, huh, right, that was a thing, let me go read it again.
For the record this type of story haunting has happened to me twice. First time was the Heart of Thomas, second time was BIRDMEN. I think the thing is that these are both stories which are not what other people say they are and I think I came into both of these stories with a misconception, trying to look too hard for things that weren't important and therefore missing the things that were.
Because sure, BIRDMEN is about mental illness. Yeah, it's about an evil scientific organization growing mutants in a lab. Yeah, it's about what it means to leave your humanity behind. That's all technically correct, on a surface level, and the fandom at large likely agrees with these takes for the most part, but in my opinion none of that really delves into what the thematic messaging of the story is about.
There are cryptic conversations about authority and human extinction and peculiar outfit and ability choices. You can tell these choices weren't made to serve the purpose of "writing exciting shonen manga" because that was what she did for the most part in Kekkaishi and you can tell she wasn't putting her whole pussy into doing that here. So what was she doing? What's like. All of this. Waves my hands at this.
The short answer is that it's really about the interplay between capitalism (represented by humanity) and communism (represented by birdmen), and explores the role institutional white supremacy (EDEN) plays in enforcing capitalism. It is ALSO about queer liberation and the importance of community, but hey, that double-stacks conveniently with the communism metaphor.
But also take this opinion of mine with a grain of salt. As far as I know I'm the only one who really truly deeply believes that it is not only AN interpretation of the work, but one that was fully intended by the author.
So basically, I like it, because I think it says something true and beautiful that I also believe in, even if I didn't have the words for it the first time I read it. But I don't really think that's what people really look for in a media recommendation.
Do I like it? Yes, I love it. Will I recommend it to others? Yeah, sure. But do I think it's deeply flawed? Yeah, absolutely. It's flawed in the same ways as The Witch from Mercury— a rushed ending, too many threads that were opened and never tied together. The pacing and characterization is perfect in the beginning, and too rushed at the end. There are prerequisites you basically HAVE to read in order to understand the story (tempest for G-Witch and the communist manifesto for birdmen). I think a truly good story wouldn't have any of these things so if people don't like it I never blame them.
It's my personal experiences that make birdmen so profound to me. If you are not queer I just don't think Eishi coming out as a birdman to his mom will hit the same, just as an example. Sorry that I wasn't the kid you wanted me to be. I know you love me and you just want the best for me and that's why you're so controlling, because you think I can be saved by conforming to societal expectations. But I can't live like that. I can't be like that. And that's why I must go. etc.
Aesthetically I do love birdmen a lot. If I had to describe it in a few words it would probably be "chilling", "beautiful", and "powerful", which nicely coincides with the type of things I personally like to draw. It's also silly to a small degree but it's so serious and I know Tanabe can be way way way funnier (read kekkaishi for this. kekkaishi and hanazakari no kimitachi he were foundational to my sense of sequential art humor) so that's not really the standout trait of this series.
I can't let it go because I'm chewing this series like a bone. And it's taking me years but I am getting that sweet sweet marrow. By god. We are on year 3 of this shit and I am GOING to understand this series. and I'm going to make 3 video essays about it
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