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stxleslyds · 3 years

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Who do you think should be a love interest for Red Hood/Jason Todd?

Oh, Anon, you sent me a very difficult question. I have been wanting to talk about my thoughts on love interests or ships when it comes to Jason but I always end up getting scared and don’t do it. But because you sent me this ask and I want to give you an answer, I will actually speak (write) my mind.

I like ships, I enjoy romances within stories, the name of my blog is based on one of my favourite ships from a tv show that I liked. I have also reblogged content that is about another ship that I like from an animated show but when it comes to the DC comics characters that I like (Dick Grayson and Jason Todd) I actually dislike romances and the idea of love interests, a lot. In Jason’s case, I actually hate the idea of him having love interests.

And that’s because of several reasons, but I believe they can all be enclosed into one thing, Jason doesn’t seem to be into romantic relationships or established romantic relationships. Every time they put him in one of those things start to make less sense, I will explain it more in detail because I will be going through every single relationship that was, hinted at, teased or official for Jason in the last eleven years. (Yup, I have found every single relationship that Jason has had forced and/or out of place).

This is, of course, what I think, you are allowed to think otherwise.

JASON TODD AND LOVE INTERESTS.

New 52.

Essence, Jason’s first kiss and some other things.

Essence was, as per New 52 onwards, the first person that Jason had a relationship with. (RHatO vol.1 #7). They met back in the All-Castle and with her, he said that he felt, for the first time after being resurrected “alive”. Yeah, it is a little bit weird, let’s suppose that Jason was 17 when he first met her, and when I say “other things” I do mean it, the panels are never explicit but there is enough information given and shown that tells us that Jason shared a lot of firsts with her.

But here is my first complaint, Lobdell didn’t need to tell us all that, in fact, he could just have told us that they were friends back in the All-Castle because when Essence is introduced in the story, Jason already thinks that she betrayed him and the All-Castle and he repeats several times that he either: wants to kill her or should have killed her in the past already. (RHatO vol.1 #7)

So, the first person that Jason had a love and/or sexual relationship with is now an enemy through betrayal, or so he thinks. After some back and forth and some other truths getting revealed, everything gets solved, Jason and Essence suddenly don’t interact much with each other.

We get another peek at their current relationship when she shows up in Roy’s hospital bed to help him recover from his injuries. There Jason says that she was his first kiss and that even though they have chosen different paths and they have tried to kill each other a few times they are still there for each other.

Wow, what a lovely message Lobdell, two people who have tried to kill each other and have an overall nasty/manipulative relationship, are still there for each other, which is what truly matters. Give me a break Lobdell, what is this? I understand this book is old by now but this narrative is not cute or special. They barely trust each other and they have been more than willing to kill each other but they are still on good terms, yay! Shut up.

Isabel, the flight attendant that may be a little too pushy at times.

Us and Jason met Isabel, the flight attendant when Jason is travelling along with Roy (RHatO vol.1 #2). Her introduction is very sexualised and Jason and her flirt a lot, he “checks her out” but he is also thinking that Isabel is better off not crossing paths with him anymore, but apparently that isn’t what she thinks because she leaves her number along with Jason’s drink. He is very surprised about that fact.

Jason had been struggling with the idea of calling Isabel because he didn’t want to mix his vigilante life with his normal life, that’s why when he calls her, he hangs up as soon as she answers the call. (RHatO vol.1 #7).

But that insecurity is thrown out of the window (apparently) because he does go on a date with Isabel even though he is doing everything possible to hide his double life (RHatO vol.1 #10). Isabel seems to be having an amazing time and as they reach Jason’s hotel, he offers to call her a cab, which means “date is over I want to go home”, but Isabel has other ideas she starts pushing him and saying maybe I don’t want to leave just yet and Jason is a little uncomfortable but Isabel just kisses him. Yeah, non-consensual kissing happens and this is the first (but not last) time it happens. The kiss is interrupted by someone else and the whole thing ends up with that someone (Orc), Kory, Roy and Jason talking.

Jason was so ready to make Isabel go at the end of their date earlier that he barely notices her when Kory and the others show up. She is literally on the floor asking what is going on and Jason doesn’t notice her until after they are teleported to a spaceship. Jason was so out of it that he didn’t notice her up until Roy pointed her out. How insane is that? What are you trying to say, Lobdell, Jason is an asshole? Or was Jason so uncomfortable on that date that he forgot that the date was still going on?

After they all realise that they are all stuck in space in the middle of an intergalactic war Isabel and Jason talk. Isabel lets Jason know that she thought that their date was boring and bad because Jason was trying to hide his real life, she also asks Jason why a vigilante asked a flight attendant on a date and he deflects that question like a pro. (RHatO vol.1 #11-12). You see, I think that Jason decided to go on a date with her because he thought that’s what he wanted or to prove himself that he could have something “normal”.

When they finally go back to earth Jason kinda acts like a jerk towards Isabel at the beginning but at the end of the issue, we see that Isabel invited Jason to stay the night at her apartment in Gotham, happy times happen and while Jason is in the shower Isabel gets attacked by Joker. The Joker made it seem like Isabel overdosed while Jason was in the other room which destabilised Jason a lot. He calls the cops and she is taken to the hospital after Jason leaves the apartment. (RHatO vol.1 #14-15) The last time we see her she is in the hospital recovering.

A long time passes by and we only see Isabel again when RHatO changes writers for a few issues, the author of Isabel’s comeback is Tynion. We see Isabel entering her home after a date, when she goes inside, she notices some weird robots and those things were put there by Jason who wanted to invite her to a private resort as a date. (RHatO vol.1 #28). Isabel decides to go and when Jason gets too wound up and is ready to kiss her, she tells him that he needs to slow down because a long time has passed since they last saw each other and she is quite mad that because they went on one date and she ended up on space for days and then got attacked in her own home. Jason is a bit taken aback by what she says but he doesn’t get to say much because a fight breaks out. Talk about signs… maybe they shouldn’t get together at all, you know what I mean?

After the fight was over, Isabel told Jason that she can’t do this (their “relationship”) any more, but that if the fight ever ended that he could go back looking for her. So, she “breaks up” with him but still kisses him before leaving. If you are leaving someone because you don’t feel like things are going right why on earth will you kiss them goodbye? It’s not like they were on a five-year-long relationship, they only went on two dates! Maybe this is not that big of a deal but come on…

Kory, this one wasn’t a “real” relationship but the idea of it was forced.

Although Kory appears in the first issue of RHatO we didn’t know then how Jason and Kory had met. That story is told later on and it begins with Jason appearing on the shores of an island where Kory’s ship was stuck. He is in and out of consciousness but we do see Kory taking care of him as he recovers, we also see that Kory has a little bit of heart eyes for the mysterious man, but that was because Jason looks like Dick Grayson (someone who she had dated and actually remembered even though she said she didn’t).

After Jason finally wakes up, he goes to her and she gives him clothing that used to belong to Dick, Jason knows those clothes are Dick’s but when he asks Kory who they are from she says that she doesn’t know (she was lying). After Jason gets dressed, he decides to tell Kory who he is and his story, so he tells Kory “Hey, there is something you need to know about me” and Kory kisses him. Ah yes, more non-consensual kissing, how wonderful! Jason is taken aback and Kory tells him that her people assimilate the knowledge that way, Jason doesn’t make a big deal out of it but I will. Lobdell, you knew that Kory didn’t have amnesia, and you know that Kory has been on earth for quite a long time, there was no need for that kiss. As the reader, I know that that’s how Tamareans learn stuff but I also think that Kory shouldn’t kiss people just to know new stuff! It baffles me that they are still doing this, it was silly then and it's silly now, stop the non-consensual kissing and then excusing it because of fictional alien traditions or whatever, just stop.

But I didn’t put Kory on this list for the kissing, I put her here because even though it was never explicitly shown that Jason and Kory had any type of interaction, there were some hints about it, like that time that Roy asked Jason if he was mad because he had slept with “his girl” to chich Jason answered something along the lines of “she is not my girl and she can sleep with whoever she wants”. (RHatO vol.1 #2)

But that’s not all because Lobdell gave us yet another moment in which Kory kisses Jason without his consent and Jason is written once again alarmed, this time even Roy is present and he is a little bit mad because his girlfriend is kissing someone else in front of him. At that point, Jason and Roy both knew that Kory wasn’t new to this planet and that she had been in a relationship with Dick Grayson previously. Because of all that, Lobdell passing yet another non-consensual kiss as Kory trying to tell Jason that he wasn’t alone in his fight doesn’t sit right with me, it’s even worse when you reach the end of the issue and Kory leaves both Jason and Roy on their own. (RHatO vol.1 #32) Yikes, Lobdell, yikes. (This is no hate to Kory or the other women on this run, this is pure hate towards Lobdell, please don’t get me wrong, he is the one being nasty).

Rose just appeared so Lobdell could tell us that she and Jason slept together.

Poor Rose, so many female characters being dragged into this mess by Lobdell, she really didn’t deserve this. She appeared in the last two issues of this run, two! Only for Lobdell to set up the idea that she and Jason had some fun nights in the past, honestly, who let this man write women?

Their interaction went like this: “Hey Rose, love that mask” “Yeah, I’d considered a heart tattoo that said ‘Jason’ with an axe hacking it in two” “I’m flattered, but I think you made the right choice” after Jason said that last part, he continued with this, “You want to explain what you’re doing here trying to kill us? I remember the last time I saw you; you had a big, satisfied smile on your face”. (RHatO vol.1 #39)

Really, Lobdell? She appears in the last two issues; you have them have that conversation and then in the last issue they are the only ones left (after the outlaws disband, RHatO vol.1 #40) but we never see her again, Rose isn’t mentioned in Red Hood/Arsenal or RHatO Rebirth, she isn’t mentioned any other time. Lobdell just thought that Jason didn’t look like he had fucked enough in the past so he decided to let the reader know that he had had some action. I hate him.

Barbara, this pains me, poor Babs, she didn’t deserve that.

No, Lobdell wasn’t the one who wrote this mess, it was everyone who wrote Batman Eternal. I mean, what was this group of men thinking? Where they playing darts and they had all the batboys’ pictures up on the wall and in whichever the dart got stuck, Barbara will get stuck too? Is that what happened? How often do they play this game, can they stop?

I don’t remember having read Batman Eternal and quite honestly, I didn’t want to put myself through that after I made myself read New 52 RHatO twice because I had forgotten to take notes of what had happened in each issue (I hate myself). So, I will only talk about the absurdity that was Batman Eternal #19 and #28.

All of the “relationships” that Lobdell came up with, were forced or out of place or both but this one takes the cake. It’s so simple and short, but oh, so annoying!

The phrase “You will never be Dick Grayson” coming out from Barbara’s mouth and it being directed at Jason should tell you just how many levels of wrong we are working herewith. Their whole interaction in this book seems to come from that phrase, how on earth do you build up a romance from that? Am I going crazy? Am I missing something? Come on, be honest with me.

Jason being the one who makes Barbara shake off mind control because he told her that he “only remembers what’s important, like the day he met Batgirl”, I am sorry but what? I really don’t have the words, he had even said before that he thought Babs liked him because she looked nervous, what is this writing? Since when does Jason care about Barbara? They met once when Jason was Robin and she was significantly older, what are these writers on, crack? (Batman Eternal #19)

But that’s not the worst thing, later in the book, they switch roles and Jason is apparently no longer interested in Barbara but she is all like “maybe you should stay this time, Jason. Help the family. Save Gotham” and Jason says “Gotham’s never been enough for me Barb” and I am not kidding, she tells him “What if there was more…?” That was hilarious, my gods, they must have been high when they wrote that because that is just too wild for me.

And Jason, the absolute beast that he is, says, “No. Because Barb, it’s like you said… I’ll never be Dick Grayson” (Batman Eternal #28). Jason, you dramatic little shit, what is going on? Why did the writers put us through all that just to end up being like “Babs is thirsty for Jason but he has already moved on”, what was the point of these interactions?

Yeah, that’s all I can say about that, let’s just move on to the mess that was Rebirth.

Rebirth.

Artemis, a new player enters the game.

While we did meet her in the first issue Jason isn’t seen being flirty with her up until they are in a bar and Jason is really drunk, he tells her that she has beautiful green eyes and Artemis is like, “if you are hitting on me, I will punch you in the head” (RHatO vol.2 #8), Lobdell back at it again with that mix between flirting and violence that I hate so much, lovely. But I guess this meant that Artemis was setting boundaries.

Boundaries and kinda thrown out of the window when later in the book we have something like looked like the start of a kiss that didn’t really happen because they were interrupted (RHatO vol.2 #11). Jason also acts a little too cheeky in two instances in another issue, one of them was a bit funny the other one no so much because Artemis was talking about how she had let only three people into her heart and one of them was now dead and she might have been losing another one, at that moment all Jason has to offer is “about that third person… does his name rhyme with Rason Rodd?”, which was a bit out of tune of him. (RHatO vol.2 #13).

The big surprise though is that out of the blue we have an issue called ‘Date Night’ where Jason and Artemis seem to go out on a date! What? We are moving on so fast! (Spoiler Alert: Jason thought it was a date, Artemis only wanted to talk about how weird Bizarro was acting at the time). One of the things that really caught my attention was how differently she was characterized in the issue and that within the story Jason hadn’t realised that Artemis wasn’t really acting like herself either. It could have been a cute date if not for the fact that Artemis wasn’t acting like herself because she wasn’t “really” on a date with Jason. Also, Lobdell does love to hint at Jason’s sex life, before they went on the date Bizarro said “use it (the teleporting door) all night if you need” and Jason responded, “I don’t think we will be needing it all night. I mean, if we do that’s okay, but I’m not, like, expecting anything”, it was kinda funny but yeah, come on! (RHatO vol.2 #19).

From that issue, we jump to the great finale (or not) of this “epic” “love” “story”, the so awaited kiss between Jason and Artemis, oh yeah baby! A couple of issues with flirting, a date that wasn’t a date but maybe if Bizarro wasn’t going insane at the time (who knows?). This kiss obviously comes with the separation of this team of outlaws, Jason is left alone on earth while Artemis and Bizarro are swallowed by a portal of sorts. Jason finally gets the kiss that he so desired, but at what cost? (RHatO vol.2 #25). Brutal issue for Jason, it was also like a special edition because it was bigger and that makes me laugh because all Jason did in that issue was suffer, how unlucky can this guy get?

We don’t see Artemis for a while but when she does come back, she is being controlled by something and it’s making her want to kill Jason, so to shake whatever was controlling her, Jason kissed her and hoped for the best (it worked). See, Lobdell can change! Before it was women forcing Jason into a kiss, now it’s the other way around! Yay! (RHatO vol.2 #41).

After all that we see Jason and Artemis spending some time together, it looks very friendly, they even have a very nice moment when Artemis hugs Jason as he lets himself grieve the loss of Roy. Jason also seems aware (this time) that Artemis is acting a little off and he gets her to talk about how much she missed her axe. It feels like they are taking it slow, they are figuring themselves out after so long, they probably won't kiss and make things complicated, right? Yeah, no, they do kiss, but they each pretend that it was like kissing a sibling. In the end, Jason does say that he lied and that he knows that she lied to him and that was okay with him, my only critique with this is: Why did they have to kiss? They could have waited instead of kissing and then lying about their feelings, what is this, Wattpad? (RHatO vol.2 #42)

Their relationship comes to a halt and we end up seeing them together (in a messy bed, twice) at the end of Lobdell’s run. But even though those two had their fun and Jason almost told Artemis that he loved her, things weren’t really meant to end with them as a couple because at the very end of the issue Artemis says her final goodbye to Jason. She says, “This is it. The end of us. I’m not being mean. I’m genuinely happy for you Jason. You have grown so much since you started the outlaws. But you don’t need us anymore. You don’t need me. Tell me I’m wrong” to which Jason responds, “I can’t. But if I ever needed anyone, it would have been you, Princess”. (RHatO vol.2 #50).

All in all, this was the best-developed relationship that Jason had, but so much about this, one could have easily been transformed into a friendship between the two. You will see better what I mean after I talk about Isabel’s presence in this run. Maybe it is just me, but a solid friendship between these two could have been spectacular, mostly because of what had happened in that one annual that had Dick as a guest.

In that issue Jason was very jealous of Artemis having the most obvious heart eyes for Dick, she was very flirty with him and he was a real gentleman with her. When she offered to take him back to his trailer at the circus he said yes and there, as they were walking towards his trailer, Lobdell wrote the best piece of dialogue in his ten years writing Jason. Dick asked, “So, are you and Jason… together?” to which Artemis responded, “Me? And Jason? Anyone and Jason?”. How is Lobdell so blind to his actual interesting takes on Jason Todd. Aromantic Jason was right there Lobdell, but you had to push your shitty version of “romance” every step of the way! (I am fine with Jason having a fantastic sexual life but listen, Jason being aromantic was still possible).

Essence, first Jason accused her of betraying him but now *Uno reverse card*

Do you guys remember that Essence and Jason’s last interaction in New 52? Jason said that even though they were always fighting or willing to kill each other they also will always be there for one another? Well, when Essence comes back in Rebirth she plans on killing Jason because apparently this time around he was going to betray her. Their very first interaction in this run (RHatO vol.2 #35), consists of Essence saying, “I don’t know if I should kiss you or kill you” to which Jason responds, “why do you have to choose?”. Lovely, Lobdell is back at it again with his shitty version of quirky “romance”, if he is trying to write them as sarcastic, he needs to do a better job at it because it’s not a good look, and not everyone has read his New 52 run so introducing these two in this book this way is kinda not good. But then again, maybe that’s just me.

As a fight ensues after they said those things, we are shown panels of Jason and Essence when they were together in the All-Castle, they would be cute panels if not for the fact that they are currently fighting to the death. It is an insane contrast, and Lobdell also has Jason think “I was the first human trained by the All-Castle. She was the only heir to a throne she never wanted. It was never going to work out between us.” But the thing is that it did work out between each other until Jason left the All-Castle, when they met each other again they had both been fed lies about the other and neither of them seems to want to look for clues to make sure that those rumours of betrayal were true. One will think that now, one of you might not feel so confident when they think the other will betray them again, you went through this already losers! But I don’t blame Jason or Essence for their stupidity, I blame Lobdell.

The fight lasts a few pages but it will end with Essence stabbing Jason with her ‘Blood Blade’ (not to be confused with the All-Blades, those are Jason’s), but here is the thing the Blood Blade comes with a curse if you draw blood from someone innocent your soul will be trapped inside the blade. This is what happened to Essence because Jason was innocent of what she was accusing him, just like she was innocent in New 52 when Jason accused her of betraying him and the All-Castle. Boring.

Now here is the thing, Essence might be dumb or she didn’t know how the Blood Blade worked because later on in the book, the blood blade is teleported by Essence (she was still inside of the blade) to the front door of Isabel’s home. The very next time that we see Isabel she is unconsciously sharing a body with Essence after touching the blade. She possessed her because at that time she still believed that Jason wanted to “destroy the world” (RHatO vol.2 #45). It wasn’t long until she realised that she was wrong and then teamed up with Jason once again. (RHatO vol.2 #46).

Lobdell, why must you recycle stories all the time and make women look stupid? Why would she still believe that Jason was up to no good after she got trapped in the blade? But my point here is that this is supposed to be Jason’s first love and their relationship consists of, flirting, remembering the good times, and almost killing each other every time they see each other because *betrayal*, it’s so tiring and annoying. Do better.

Isabel, aw, shit, here we go again!

Lobdell really had ladies ready to appear in Jason’s life when another had just left. This is one of my major problems with the way Lobdell writes all of Jason’s relationships. It would be lovely if DC and Lobdell just outright said that Jason is only interested in having sexual relationships that aren’t meant to last a long time. Because the way they had him involving himself with women seemed a little sketchy, in #25 Artemis finally kissed him and he seemed pretty happy about it, but then she was gone and now that Isabel appears in Jason’s life again, he acts as if Artemis didn’t exist.

Isabel shows up at the Iceberg Lounge after Jason made public his comeback and his management of the place. One would think that given how things ended up in New 52, Isabel would like to take things slow, after all, she had told him that he could go back to her if he stopped living his double life, but no, she talked to him for a few seconds and then proceeded to kiss him out of the blue. Lobdell’s favourite type of kissing makes a comeback, how nice, I didn’t miss it at all!

I want to be honest with you, maybe I am being too harsh, maybe these are all “surprise” kisses but in a way, it still doesn’t feel right, this is not the first time that someone kisses Jason when he doesn’t expect it (Isabel has done it multiple times already), but he is written as if he didn’t care, and that is not good. Men can feel pressured into kissing someone or can feel like they are being harassed. Lobdell and everyone on this creative team seem to think that being kissed by someone you haven’t seen in very long out of the blue is romantic or cute or sexy or whatever but it has repeated itself so much that I only find it uncomfortable and annoying to read and see. (RHatO vol.2 #33). Maybe it was just me because in that issue where Isabel goes to the Lounge they get attacked and she is not at all bothered by it, this time around, Jason even tells her that her safety is his first priority which is quite funny because the first time they were in a date Jason forgot she was present and only realised that she had been teleported alongside the outlaws to a space ship when Roy pointed it out, but I guess Jason is a different man now. I guess he wants to cultivate a relationship with her now.

And he might because your boy asked Isabel on a date in Paris. They just happened to both be around Paris at that time but here is where Jason says something that makes me speculate as to why he is actually dating, he thinks this, “Isabel Ardila. A flight attendant. Maybe the only normal person I’ve ever allowed in my life. Don’t ask me why.”

Well, Chonky, I won’t be asking you anything, I will actually give you the answers as to why you are letting Isabel into your life. You do it because you equate dating to normalcy, but I am here to tell you that it's fine if you don’t want to date and form romantic bonds, it's not something normal, it's just something some people do. If you like going out with her because of the sex or whatever then that’s fine too, but if you have to question why you are doing something, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it at all.

Jason looks a bit uncomfortable, and we also see that he is feeling sad and lonely because he misses Roy. He even thinks, “sometimes, she even makes me feel normal”. All of this normal talk really speaks to me about Jason trying to have friends outside the job but he doesn’t know how to approach that so he dates women because it makes him feel normal. I can relate to that feeling in a way, and I just think that Jason is confusing friendly love with romantic love, I don’t even know if he knows of the existence of platonic love. A reader that understands those feelings can see that maybe Jason is struggling to feel normal when he realises that he doesn’t love the same way as others. The thing is, I don’t really think that is what Lobdell intended to do, he just wanted to push two of his agendas, Jason has an active sexual/love life and Roy Harper was Jason Todd’s best friend and the only one who is allowed to suffer his death is Jason. In fact, back at the time, Jason was actually one of the few people (or maybe the only person) allowed to mourn Roy.

When the date is over and Jason’s walking Isabel to her hotel, they have a chat where it’s revealed that Isabel thinks that Jason isn’t still living that double life, she actually thinks that Jason is only working as the owner of the Casino, Jason doesn’t correct her. And then there is this very weird line that Isabel says, “The airline picks up my tab. This way you know I don’t love you for your money”, Jason is very taken aback when he heats Isabel say that she loves him so he manages to say “did you just…?” but Isabel stops him with a kiss and a simple “nope”. Jason moves on and goes to work because he is still doing the vigilante gig, the double life, that Isabel thinks doesn’t exist anymore. (RHatO vol.2 #34).

Isabel and Jason’s relationship has always looked forced to me, in rebirth, it was even weirder because Jason had just kissed Artemis and when she was gone, Jason kind of acted as if it didn’t matter that much to him and moved on easily with Isabel, but now Jason is acting kind of sketchy too because he is hiding his double life and the last time he did that Isabel ended up in a lot of trouble. I really don’t know if Lobdell remembers his own shitty writing but he should remember this stuff.

We move on too, and now Isabel has come to visit Jason at one of the events that the Iceberg Lounge has got going on, once again Jason is acting a bit strange because he was having trouble at the time with the idea of his biological father actually trying to contact him before he was killed and he was also having trouble because he was in Gotham after his adoptive father beat the living shit out of him and “banned” him from stepping foot in Gotham again. Jason seems to open up a little to Isabel but just as he starts doing so, she tells him she has to leave. Jason looks hurt for just one panel and then he moves on with his (double) life. (RHatO vol.2 #35). This is the issue where Jason also comes across Essence and traps her in her own blade.

Because everything falls apart in what was one of the best arcs written by Lobdell, Jason sends Dog (Jason’s dog) to Isabel, so Dog can be safe. (RHatO vol.2 #36).

We see Isabel after some very long time, and she is described as “The on-again/off-again girlfriend of Jason Todd. Currently off-again”, at this point in time Artemis was back to being herself and Jason had kissed her and all that. I am just saying, Jason obviously isn’t comfortable in a established romantic relationship. Lobdell dances around that idea a lot, every time with all these women.

This is the issue where Isabel finds the Blood Blade outside her home. (RHatO vol.2 #43).

As you can see, I have problems with Lobdell not handling the relationships very well, there is no concrete information being told to the reader or the characters within the story about how Jason wants to date, we never know if the women in the story know that Jason has been dating/flirting with other women. I am not saying that is bad but it would have been nice if Lobdell just used his words to tell us what he is doing.

I feel like saying that Jason is the kind of man that looks for sexual relationships without commitment isn’t something that will break the world in two. All the “romance” is incredibly forced, just say that he isn’t into romantic relationships my dude… unless Lobdell really thinks that the “romances” that he came up with are actually well written.

Anyway, Jason didn’t know that Essence who he has been fighting against and then alongside was actually Isabel, so, when Isabel and Essence get separated for a moment Jason is surprised. After Isabel tells him that they are in the middle of a battle so she is going to let Essence control her body again, Jason tells her that he “loves her”. (RHatO vol.2 #49). Does he love her for doing that or does he love her because he likes her? Hmm, that’s a good question, it is never actually answered in comics because we don’t really get to see Isabel or Essence after that happens and in the following issue (Lobdell’s last) Jason and Artemis seem to have been having a very fun night and they also kiss, Jason had even kissed with Artemis before he told Isabel that he loved her.

As you can see, its all very messy, Lobdell really said “Jason can’t be directly or indirectly single but I won’t really explain what is going on to the readers or to the characters within the story”, and that speaks volumes about how bad Lobdell’s writing is. This man simply cannot remember the things that he writes, he literally had Artemis say that she didn’t think she could see Jason dating anyone and then she wants to date him and Jason had already been dating people before that statement was made! It was all so messy! It makes all these side-romantic plots pointless; Jason was lonely because he constantly lost his friends, then give him friends! Friends are nice DC, stop making it about romances when you can just give your characters solid friendships.

Barbara, this time the pain is brought to us by Geoff Johns

I put Three Jokers as part of rebirth because I still don’t know if that garbage of a book is supposed to function within actual canon or not but it came out while Rebirth was going on so that’s why it’s here.

Now, the whole book was bad, we can all agree on that but Johns’ handling of Jason and Barbra’s “relationship” made me sick. This is another thing that writers love to do to Jason, write him as the kind of man that cannot take rejection and continues to be pushy about his feelings. Please, DC, don’t ever let Johns write another comic for you, it’s embarrassing at this point.

But in this book Jason wasn’t the only one acting weird, Barbara also did some weird stuff. In this run, Barbara thought of Jason as an unhinged criminal that needs to be locked up but Jason had heart eyes for Barbara every time they saw each other, their whole dynamic was wonky and weird. They even fought before and after Jason killed one of the Jokers.

But that’s not the real problem, the problem was that Johns decided to make Jason get tortured by the remaining Jokers while naked, this man was found naked, injured and mentally unwell by Batman and Batgirl after Jason and Batman had a fight, Barbara decided to take Jason to her home so he could recover.

Jason has just come out of the shower, he was clearly mentally and physically exhausted, and also very vulnerable. When Barbara came into the room Johns had them have a conversation while Barbara was fully clothed and Jason was just in a towel, and he was talking about how lonely and not cared for he felt, he was opening himself up to Barbara and apparently, Barbara (Johns) thought that the best she could do was kiss him, you know, to offer support.

Honestly, what the hell do male comic writers smoke when they write? You don’t show support to someone that has clear feelings for you with a kiss, to then pull away and say that “we committed a mistake”, we? Girl, come on, you made a mistake and a huge one! But one will think that Jason realised that Barbara did make a mistake when she kissed him and he also accepted the fact that she didn’t feel the same way as he did… well, not really, Jason is actually written as the kinda guy that doesn’t take well rejection and the kind of guy that keeps pushing for something between him and the other person to happen.

This man asked Barbara three times if she could give him an opportunity after the first rejection and he kept getting rejected! But that is not all because we all know that at the end of the book Jason left a letter (that thankfully Barbara will never see) in Barbara’s door when he asked again to give him a chance and that he would change who he was for her, he would actually stop being the Red Hood for her! Was Johns on crack? He had to be! The levels of wrong that are being messed around with here are out of the charts! Jason Todd, who has different values and morals than Barbara Gordon would stop being Red Hood just to get a date? Boy, don’t be dumb! Do male writers think that we are going to swoon over this kind of writing, do they expect me to applaud? I won’t!

This “relationship” was forced and incredibly out of place and out of character for everyone and it pissed me off even if it doesn’t affect canon because the writing is bad and the narrative is worse! If you love someone you shouldn’t change everything about yourself to be with them AND if someone says no or rejects your advances then the only thing you should do is back down!

This shouldn’t have to be said!

Future State

Rose, if you know me then you know that this is just a big no for me.

In the Future State: Red Hood story we are shown in the first panel of the first page that Jason is sharing a bed with someone else. We get to know pretty early that someone is Rose. The setting for their relationship is awful, both of them are working for the magistrate, they hunt “masks” otherwise known as heroes or vigilantes.

Jason hates his job and is known for bringing his “masks” alive, Rose on the other hand seems to have adapted easily while working with the magistrate and she is known for bringing the “masks” dead.

First red flag, why are two people who have such different ideals in a relationship together? Let me remind you that the Magistrate is not a good corporation or idea for Gotham, they are basically domestic terrorists and Jason is bringing them people that are like him (he is there undercover). Jason is going against everything that he is in order to infiltrate the Magistrate, Rose seems to be having fun. She brings the subject between them without care and seems to not really understand that Jason doesn’t like the work that they are both doing and that he doesn’t want to talk about it as if it were a normal thing that every couple does.

The second red flag in just a couple of pages is Williamson having Rose say “This is why we make sense. Daddy issues”, wow, are we really doing that, Williamson sat there and said Rose and Jason can make a good couple because both of them have unresolved problems with their parental figures, how wonderful. To me shared trauma isn’t a deal-breaker but sure, if you want to make one of your characters revolve her relationship with her partner around trauma, then that’s on you.

Jason also had a big problem with Rose attacking people who are hiding from the Magistrate because they are actually giving food to the “masks” and to people who don’t have to eat. Rose doesn’t seem to care and that makes the relationship a bit tense. So far, there are not many positives for this couple.

Things only get tenser, people are going around wearing those red pill looking helmets that Jason used to wear in Batman and Robin (2009), the funny looking ones, and those people are just normal people that are stealing food so they can eat or take them somewhere else. Jason is following one of those people and telling them that he doesn’t want to hurt them, just talk but Rose shows up and kills them. Jason is angry and Rose goes on a rant about how being a “mask” is against the law so she had a right to kill him.

Together they figure out that those people were being controlled so they go looking for whoever was behind those helmets.

They are tense and Jason is very cold with her even when she tries to lighten up the mood, but shit gets worse when they both receive an alert to go hunt another mask: Jason Todd.

Rose wants the money. Aw, nothing says healthy relationship more than murder.

The apparent reason why the Magistrate put a target on Jason was that he had the helmet that he took from that boy, when he realises this he puts it on and hopes that Rose finds him through that, so she can help him if he gets in trouble.

Jason gets mind-controlled through the helmet and is forced to fight rose, they fight for a while and then Rose breaks the helmet. Jason says “knew you would find me” and Rose responds “you are lucky I have a crush on you”, ok, is Jason okay with Rose wanting to kill him a few minutes ago when the alert on him came out? That’s not a big deal for them? Ok.

Jason seems to be in love with Rose even though they think differently and they are written with as much chemistry as a history book, he cares for her and does everything to save her when they get attacked by the Magistrate.

When they escape the initial attack, Rose grabs Jason and tells the Magistrate’s drones that he will take the bounty for Jason but that she will deliver him alive. Jason is surprised and angry but then the drones just leave. And we are left with Jason and Rose on a rooftop alone after Rose seemingly tried to betray Jason.

Do you know what Jason does next? He tells Rose that they should go on a holiday. He cares and keeps wanting to protect her from the Magistrate. Are you kidding me? This is so messed up; I want to remind you that these were the only two issues for this story. This is all the information we had for a long while and it is disgusting. DC really let this thing be published!

Rose betrays him twice; he is willing to harm him on some level and he still wants to be with her? Am I understanding that correctly? Later on, he keeps wanting to protect her from the Magistrate after he has evidence that they are hyper corrupt.

The point I want to make is that Jason and Rose shouldn’t have been introduced to us in this book as a couple or as people who have been sleeping with each other for a long time. I don’t know why this needs to be said but having a couple where one of them can think of killing their partner is absolutely awful. And then they make it worse by having the “victim” act like it doesn’t matter and that they should work on protecting the person that wanted to betray them.

I understand that there is a Future State: Gotham run going on with a Jason story in it written by Williamson but I don’t want to go near it. Future State: Red Hood made me uncomfortable and it made me cry out of frustration. How did this story get a pass by the editor? It’s disgusting, and it’s that because of this absolutely forced “relationship” that Williamson wanted to put in.

My point with all of these “couples/love interests reviews” is that writers need to be more conscious about what they write and about how some readers might perceive some messages.

Non-consensual kissing, harassment and all those things shouldn’t be part of the dynamic of two people that you are trying to put together. If there is some non-consensual kissing you can simply put a panel where the person apologises for their actions, but not even that is shown in these cases.

Comic writers need to be more aware of the way they write relationships. Yes, these are fictional worlds, people and situations but you are still playing with real-life interactions. Making some things appear in comics as normal things that you do to your crush/partner or whatever has an impact on people and writers need to become aware of this.

Lobdell was dying to let us know that Jason had a very active love/sexual life, great, but you need to show healthy relationships or make things clear about the relationships that Jason had. So many interactions that Jason had with women were overlapped with each other and the reader doesn’t know how to take it, is Jason a player or is he into open relationships, to me, it didn’t look like that but hey, maybe the writer would let us know? No, he won’t, because all he wanted to do was make Jason “date” more women.

Here is the thing, I have always felt like Jason was Aromantic, he likes having sex and having fun, but established romantic relationships aren’t his thing. It is what feels right (to me) with this character. And that’s (in part) because of all these messed up relationships that he was forced into. The two times that Jason seems to “be in love” are in Three Jokers and Future State: Red Hood, those two books are horrendous when it comes to Jason and love interests, in one of them Jason acts like the kind of man that cannot and will not take well a rejection and in in the other Jason acts as if he were blind to the abusive actions his partner does to him.

None of those two concepts are healthy or nice. Writers need to do better about that, they just have to.

So, to answer your question, I don’t think Jason Todd needs a love interest. Not as the main plot or subplot, maybe as a vague mention but nothing else, because comic writers suck at writing healthy and well-developed relationships. And because I really see Jason as the kind of person that wouldn’t involve himself in a romantic relationship with anyone.

I know this answer is more a rant than an answer but this subject is one that I have thought about a lot and it really made me nervous to bring it up. To everyone who thinks differently about these relationships, I understand and keep doing you, these are all just my thoughts and they are not worth more than yours.

Anon, thank you for the ask, sorry for making you wait so long and I hope that you have a wonderful rest of the week!

#jason todd #red hood #rhato #red hood and the outlaws #three jokers #batman eternal #dc comics #love interests #asksss

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redsector-a · 3 years

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AO3 Ask Game

I was tagged by @themarshalstale which, thank you so much! I feel like I always get missed on these (I know why, it’s been 84 years since I published anything but still). 1. How many works do you have on ao3?

46 it seems. Which...look I’m slow man so that’s not surprising. lol Also crippling depression does not make for much production, at least for me.

2. What’s your current AO3 wordcount?

309662 according to the stats.

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

So do I could only AO3 or in like life? lol I suppose it should only be on AO3 since this is an AO3 ask game. Hrm. Basically AO3 can be summed up as: Marvel (in several iterations - all Avengers related) Torchwood Highlander But isn’t it more fun to consider my entire fandom life, which, I’m sorry, I’m old so...yeah. Not all of this is was published and beyond that a lot is not available anymore...which is likely for the best. Highlander Star Wars Babylon 5 Ronin Warriors/Samurai Troopers Marvel (again, several iterations also of note Avengers and X-Men both count) Torchwood Star Trek LOTR Stargate (SG-1, SGA) Mortal Kombat I dabbled with the idea of Potter fic but never got past the ideas stage.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1: You rearrange me till I’m sane Clint finds himself spiraling into a deep depression after the Battle of New York...until the Winter Soldier ends up saving him and inadvertently giving him a new purpose – to save the man that the Soldier had once been – Bucky Barnes. Not one to be outdone, the Soldier decides that his new mission is to ensure that Clint remains alive himself. Protecting a blonde man with a self-destructive streak is somehow very familiar to him. Through the back and forth of who is saving whom they cross the country and learn more about themselves and each other – and perhaps find a reason for living. 2: Five Dates Bucky Didn’t Realize He Was on And the One He Planned Himself To say that Bucky was surprised when Clint kissed him was an understatement. But it was nothing compared to the shock he felt when he learned they'd been dating for months without him realizing it.Clint gets whisked away for a mission before they have time to talk and Bucky is left to figure things out on his own - hindsight being 20/20 he can't help but wonder how he missed things the first go around.

3: Puck Luck Bucky Barnes is used to the ups and downs of an NHL season. He's used to the unpredictability of the game, knows that bounces don't always go your way, but that doesn't make a broken hand in the final third of the season any easier to deal with. Especially not when he ends up with an impromptu roommate/personal assistant in the form of one Clint Barton - his agent, Natalia Romanova's (rather attractive) friend he hadn't known existed before his injury.

It's just for six to eight weeks - what could possibly happen in that span of time?

4: Loose Lips Launch Ships

Based on the following prompt: “We go to school together and I think you’re cute and apparently you’re also the pizza delivery guy and my little sibling opened the door screaming hey sibling! you know that kid you’re in love with? you really weren’t kidding when you said his jawline could cut steel holy shit-” Bucky is the pizza delivery guy. Clint's younger (foster) brother has a big mouth.

5: Indelible Bucky Barnes has a pretty decent life – a good job, good friends, a cat that adores him - but something is missing. He’s always found body art to be beautiful and inspiring, and on a whim (and with the hope that maybe he can find what he’s missing) he decides to take the plunge and get a tattoo. That's how he meets Clint Barton. Clint's talented and compassionate and there is an instant spark between the two of them. It's not long before Bucky finds himself wondering and wanting more from the relationship despite the ghosts of the past that crop back up. Because Clint makes him feel normal in a way he truly hasn't for years...

(this was pre-Alpine so I was totally chuffed when canon confirmed Bucky’s status as a crazy cat lady (affectionate).

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not.

I really really really want to do it but I often times don’t end up doing it. There are a few reasons. First, I am akwward AF and bad at interaction adn I feel like just saying thank you would be...not enough? Second - I often times tend to like...turtle (aka retreat into myself) when life gets Too Hard/Busy which happens a lot to me (sigh) and then I miss the vague window in my mind in which it would be okay to respond and then it’s even more weird. I do love and cherish all of them. Like there was one months ago that made me go “hmm...I didn’t think I was going to do a sequel to that fic (You rearrange me till I’m sane), timestamp glimpses sure but a sequel hadn’t come to mind” but then the comment made me think! So...who knows? lol Anyway, I literally have been rereading some in an effort to try and get myself going again. Know that if you have commented, I love you.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

At the moment? Probably: Look at you look at me Bucky's in love with Clint - problem is he's really not supposed to be. For Winterhawk Week 2019 - Forbidden Love (I really don’t want to give away the spin in the fic but...if you’re familiar with the Secret Avengers Vol 2 run circa 2013ish (aka when SHIELD initially ‘took control of the team’) that’s a bit of a hint as to the spin). Were it done, Torch Song would be up there. ;) Torch Song Clint is sent back in time, via an alien device, to 1938. While he tries to figure out how to get back home, he takes up singing and entertaining to make ends meet and does his best to not disrupt the timeline.Then he meets a 21 year old Bucky Barnes. --- A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, either where one party is oblivious to the existence of the other, where one party has moved on, or where a romantic affair has affected the relationship.

7. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve ever written?

Does *wanting* to write crossovers count? lol I want, so badly, to do more crossovers and fusions (which...are kinda deeper versions of crossovers in a way). The only one I do have posted is a crossover between Highlander and Torchwood -

The Immortal Mr. Jones A series of vignettes (some long, some short) in the life of the newly immortal Ianto Jones. My most ambitions project that I have been working on since late 2011/early 2012 is a fusion of the Avengers with Stephen King’s the Stand. I will get that done at some point *shakes fist* The Stand, for those who don’t know it, is an epic 1000+ page novel about a flu epidemic (I know) that wipes out over 99% of the population and then two figures representing Good and Evil pull the survivors in two directions for a showdown. So basically it’s a non-powered modern AU set in that universe. It’s a passion and comfort project. lol

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yes. Well, minor bitching back when I was in a prior fandom because I tagged a pairing in a fic but it was pre-slash and not labeled as pre-slash. I got hate on...I think it was Torch Song? And I’ve gotten hate on tumblr re me and my fic in general as well. Fandom! *jazz hands* Oh! And I’ve also been hit by those reviewers within Winterhawk (among general Clint pairings actually) who like rate you on either number scales or the “meh” scale. Which isn’t hate exactly but...it’s passive aggressive bullshit because I can’t believe none of them realize at this point that the authors can see their bookmarks - you know?

9. Do you write smut?

Yes. Do I write it well? I have no idea. lol

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I am aware of. Well...there was, I think, one of those reposting sites that had a few fics on it but I don’t think it was being passed off as someone else’s? I can’t quite recall. It’s why I have a note on AO3 about reposting my work anyway.

11. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not entirely, but sort of. Let me explain - I am part of a PBEM game; which for those unfamiliar since it’s a term that was most heavily in use 15-20 years ago, in which you basically do a round robin type writing thing but rather than everyone writing the same characters you write your own characters and you play off what other people have done. Another way of looking at it is it’s basically DnD without dice and written down rather than done out loud. You also don’t have to all be around at the same time. It’s a lot of fun and yes I have been in it for 20 years even though there aren’t many of us left but they are some of my dearest friends and fabulous writers. Wins all around. One of the other writers and I have actually toyed with the idea of doing a co-written fic actually, mostly because we work super well together and keep getting ideas for things but can’t really do them as rpgs since the pbem style isn’t used much anymore.

12. What’s your all time favorite ship?

Winterhawk probably. Though, let’s be real - Han & Leia are epic and amazing as are John & Delenn (from Babylon 5).

13. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Does wanting to expand The Black Stallion books as a wee child count? lol Not much of that was written save for world building ideas but there was a great oral tradition of telling stories to my friends. Otherwise...maybe a tie between Star Wars and Highlander. Star Wars was a love since I was super young but the writing bug didn’t hit me until around the same time Highlander was a thing as well.

14. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written? You rearrange me till I’m sane for sure. Though Torch Song, if it were finished, would be tied I imagine (I suck at picking favorites). Honorable mention to Puck Luck and Indelible. Tagging: I have seen this like a million times (okay 5) so I feel like everyone has been tagged already that I know. But...I guess... @vexbatch @crazycatt71 @heartonfirewrites and @disruptedvice sorry if anyone has been tagged before.

#icyredfics #writing #winterhawk #long post

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beneaththetangles · 3 years

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Otaku Reader’s Corner: One Piece, Cutie Shikimori, and a Detestable Demon Falls in Love

Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, Vol. 1

Shikimori seems like the perfect girlfriend—cute, sweet, bashful. But Izumi knows that’s only half her personality. Like some moe Jekyll and Hyde, in moments where her boyfriend needs her most, she becomes a super cool and dashing young woman, and it’s especially that part of her personality that Izumi loves so much. Volume one of this fun series doesn’t just play around with this unique personality switching, it also introduces a really fun dynamic. Izumi is lovable but clumsy accident prone, and the sudden transformation of Shikimori into a suave, athletic girlfriend who comes to his rescue time and time and time again swaps traditional gender roles, with Izumi playing the “girl role” and Shikimori the “boy one.” While it’s a source of laughs, there’s a lot of sweetness there, making for a compelling and cute read. Just as importantly, the art style of mangaka Keigo Maki really stand outs, especially in how he places his characters within their surroundings. I found it far more artistic than the usual manga romance. All told, I’m excited to continue with the read, as it hits all the pleasantness of Komi Can’t Communicate, to which Kodansha is comparing it, while featuring a little more depth and greater creativity than that super popular like-minded series. ~ Twwk

Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, Vol. 1 is available through Kodansha.

Why Shouldn’t a Detestable Demon Lord Fall in Love?! Vol. 1

Anima is the most powerful entity in the world, feared by commoners and demons alike—all flee before his mighty power, which presents a little problem since all he really wants is a wife and family! So how does one solve such a conundrum? How about a kind-hearted and beautiful maiden summoning him by her side to her own world! Sol Press’ release oozes lovey-doveyness even beyond what you’d expect from the above summary. When Anima arrives in a new land, he immediately falls head over heals for the lovely Luina and takes on the mantle of caregiver and “daddy” for his newfound family. It’s a bit heavy-handed, and I don’t mean the saccharine sweet tone, which is just fine—the conversations, however, are often inane and repetitive. Worse, Anima loses his personality after the first handful of pages and becomes quite a boring character. However, there is hope for the series. Despite how OP Anima is, there are hints of dread on the horizon, and though this sweet series may never go totally dark, there’s opportunity here for the author to earn the love he’s created between his leads through the deeds of the story’s villain and the mechanics of summoning and magic. The best parts of volume one involve foreshadowing and world-building, so here’s hoping those strong elements continue to develop in future volumes. ~ Twwk

Why Shouldn’t a Destestable Demon Lord Fall in Love?! Vol. 1 is available through Sol Press.

Unnamed Memory, Volume 1

Billing itself as “an epic fairy tale,” this new light novel from Yen Press surprised me. It felt unexpectedly reminiscent of western fantasy (as opposed to the sorts of fantasy stories more common to anime and light novels). I can’t quite put my finger on why I get this vibe, but it’s there, and I enjoyed it. Perhaps the capriciousness and danger of the story’s fantastical elements evoke western fairy tales. As the story opens, Prince Oscar, cursed by a witch to be unable to continue the royal line, seeks a boon from the world’s strongest witch, Tinasha. When she can’t break the curse, Oscar sets his sights on marrying her, which would effectively circumvent the curse. I’m tempted to call this a fantasy-romance-mystery story, since secrets and intrigue abound. There seem to be multiple, separate antagonists or factions at work, and there are also indications that time travel is involved. Besides hinting at various mysteries, this volume serves to introduce the the romantic leads, Oscar and Tinasha. The two are quite stubborn and have some good rapport…but they also might totally kill each other. I look forward to the next volume. ~ Jeskai Angel

Unnamed Memory is available through Yen Press.

One Piece, Vol. 1

So, recently I decided to do something ridiculous. I told my Twitter followers that if I was able to get my follower count back above 3,000 I would start reading the One Piece manga. It’s a huge fandom and one of the biggest manga series in the world. It took my followers less than 3 hours to get me back above that threshold. So, true to my word – I started reading it. So, at the time I wrote this I am finishing up the first volume’s worth of chapters. My thoughts so far? I’m really enjoying it. The story kicks off with kid Luffy and introduces you very quickly into the entire world setting Oda has created. From the widespread piracy to the corrupt government to the magic fruit that gives Luffy his stretchy powers, it’s all explained in those first few chapters. I’ve read a lot of short lived manga series that gave us an oversized first chapter that tried aggressively to shove the reader into the plot and world setting too quickly. One Piece brings us into the world masterfully without any of it feeling forced. Instead, I felt immersed in the new characters as they were introduced and enamored by Luffy. I think I’m going to like this series, so feel free to follow me on my journey. ~ MDMRN

One Piece can be read at Shonen Jump or purchased through Viz.

Harem Royale ~When the game ends~, Volume 1

From the creator of Higurashi and Umineko comes a manga with quite the twisted concept. Asunaro is a high school boy who fantasizes about having a harem but has no desire to try to get a girlfriend in reality. When he releases a demon from a sealed bottle, though, said demon decides to “grant his wish for a harem life”… by dragging the girls he fantasizes about into a deadly game of seduction. A number of girls must compete in various tasks to appeal to Asunaro, with the goal to be the one girl he chooses at the end, and any girl that fails will be subjected to being repeatedly killed in Hell. It’s an absolutely vile setup designed specifically for grief and suffering, which is why I’m glad the story at least focuses more on the efforts of four girls not to try to destroy each other or indulge in the whole “harem” romancing thing, but instead how they can try to work around the rules of the game so all of them can survive, while watching out for outside forces trying to sabotage them. As such, it reads less like a sleazy harem story and more like a thriller with mind games and strategizing. With Asunaro himself out of the loop that this death game is happening, though, it does mean that he has no real characterization worth speaking of, and the girls also don’t have much characterization beyond how they are trying to survive the game. Overall, it’s not my type of story so I probably won’t read any more of it, but if “harem death game” with a focus on mutual survival sounds good to you, this should serve fine. (Content warning: there’s a few depictions of detailed upper-body nudity.) ~ stardf29

Harem Royale, Vol. 1 is available from Sol Press.

Fushi no Kami: Rebuilding Civilization Starts with a Village, Volume 1

The latest reincarnation isekai light novel centered around using modern knowledge to improve lives, Fushi no Kami is a solid entry for those who like that kind of story. The premise might be very familiar, but the execution works well on many fronts. For example, the protagonist Ash not only has to learn how to read the language of the world he’s now in, but also gets to put some linguistic knowledge to use in order to try to decipher ancient languages. Likewise, the story goes fairly in-depth with what sorts of developments are needed to improve life and how to actually execute said developments. However, it is with the characters themselves where the story particularly shines; the narration not only gets into Ash’s head and his thoughts about everything but also switches viewpoints frequently to those of other characters, which helps with understanding and developing all of them as they start to grow to accommodate Ash’s newfound passions. The only downside is that, for as bright as Ash can be with improving the quality of life, he’s rather dense when it comes to romance. Overall, this is a nice, more down-to-earth isekai story that I certainly would like to read more of. ~ stardf29

Fushi no Kami, Vol. 1 is available from J-Novel Club.

Shirahime-Syo

Shirahime-Syo is a single volume series from CLAMP filled with tales of romance and loss in the winter. Interconnected through each of the stories is that the winter itself is living component of the story as the Snow Goddess. Each of the 5 chapters of this single volume set is in ancient Japan during blistering wintery conditions and tell about different tales of love. Some of the stories are tragic, while others are more bittersweet. CLAMP’s art style in this set of folktale style stories were completed with a brush and ink. This gave the art a more traditional flair than more modern pen inking. This was, apparently, done as a cost and time cutting measure; however, the choice to complete the art with a brush and ink helped fit into the setting very well. It entirely felt like you were being told some traditional folktales and I really enjoyed it. ~ MDMRN

Shirahime-Syo is available through Viz.

Keito Koume Illustrations Spice & Wolf: The Tenth Year Calvados

One of the attractions of both manga and light novels is the illustrations—even in the age of video, still images can remain compelling, especially when masterfully drawn. Keito Koume is certainly a master, and has been the mangaka for the Spice & Wolf manga adaptation for the last 10+ years. To celebrate the decade of his work, a lovely artbook featuring many of the manga’s illustrations, as well original pieces and those from other materials, has been released. The work also has a lovely monochrome illustrations section, a new short comic, and a thumbnail gallery of all the illustrations, including references and Koume’s own commentary. The Tenth Year Calvados is a must-have collector’s item for fans of this classic franchise, and worth checking out even for those who aren’t. Though a bit of warning: Just as with the other platforms, this artbook features heavy doses of a mostly and occasionally fully nude wise wolf. ~ Twwk

Keito Koume Illustrations Spice & Wolf: The Tenth Year Calvados is available through Yen Press. Watch our video review of this artbook on YouTube.

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Thank you to Kodansha, Sol Press, and Yen Press for providing review copies for some of the materials reviewed above.

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yurireview · 5 years

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Whiterose Masterpost

Hello dear followers, here is a new review of RWBY and I must say that I am going to make this new review based on a small debate that is forming online after this season.

First of all I really like the Bumbleby but I am very objective in the subject, they will be aware that the BB is about to be canon or probably already is and this was confirmed by Kerry in the last RWBY Review.

But what about Whiterose?

Lately I was reading that the Bumbleby was planned "from the beginning" But what about Whiterose?

Do you remember Monty video about LGBT characters and relationships?

Look, he did not refer to characters like Ilia, Terra etc. Do you know why? because those LGBT characters that were established did not have "development" they were simply there ... because the LGBT characters that Monty referred to were from the main caracther someone they were going to develop and their response reveals a lot:

"Sure, the best part of that ... is that maybe they are already there, because they are children (Lol what Ozpin said) ... they are on a way to try to help themselves discover themselves, not even we have to make the decision quickly because as we write these characters we learn from them, so they discover it is very real for us, there are many cast members who say that these couples would be great ... but we can not push it, but it has to be won and that's the best way to do it, we try to see more of his gender ".

Basically in those moments the Staff and Monty of all the things that they planned were debating. What would the "LGBT Couple developed" be? (Whiterose or Bumbleby) because it is obvious that this does not refer to the "secondary" since those are not developed yet, while the other principals Jaune was already hooked with Pyrrha, Ren and Nora either (so there is no debate in which he refers to the protagonists)

Although seeing everything rwby apparently they are developing both ship

Weiss x Ruby and Yang x Blake

If I'm honest, I think they both had signs although it's impossible not to see how in the first 3 volumes the Whiterose surpassed the Bumbleby.

Why do I affirm this? the reason is that in the first volume the approach that the Whiterose received is too much compared to the Bumbleby.

In fact the greatest dynamics of the first volume was Arkos and Whiterose

The meeting of Weiss and Ruby was much more important than the Bumbleby and that is a fact

The dynamics of them were so funny because they were so opposite, but it is obvious that Monty liked to address every aspect of his dynamics.

The phase of accepting as partners was great

is the classic dynamic of silly-adorable girl with noble girl-tsundere

As I said before in this volume the Bumbleby was not even focused on any measure.

But instead the Whiterose already presented us with a new stage (the leadership) the fact that Weiss did not accept Ruby as a leader is quite important... because when the conflict is resolved gives Ruby a unique confidence and development as a protagonist

I think the next scene is one of the most tender and emotional ... The first thing we see is that Weiss is surprised to see Ruby asleep from studying so much

It's great how they approach all kinds of dynamics and if there is a problem it is solved in a brilliant way ... Ruby's smile towards Weiss is undoubtedly one of the sweetest and at the same time the kindness of Weiss stands out a lot.Ruby's smile when Weiss says something about her pass is a very nice detail

As they saw their team dynamics was developed and they have many funny moments and the one that stands out the most

Vol 2

Even at the beginning of Vol 2 in the middle of jokes always Monty put the Whiterose ... in fact that scene inspired a famous gag of the manga, I must say that it is logical (it is almost a Japanese cliche yuri)

Again in the food fight instead of pointing out the Bumbleby, the Whiterose sticks out, what makes me laugh is that Ruby treats Weiss in a more "special" way

again there is almost no focus on the Bumbleby, instead the Whiterose:

The difference between the rival ship of WhiteRose and Bumbleby

For example, the scene in chapter 3 where the girls have their infiltration plan but the handsome boys appear.

Ruby automatically joins Sun-Blake and Neptune-Yang ... but Neptune is flirting with Weiss and she wants to go with him, the funny thing is that Ruby does understand but her reaction was "Fuck you come with me"

His tsundere attitude is always nice, even when she is upset with Ruby because of what happened with Neptune ... she was disappointed that Ruby left her because of Penny.

I love that narrative of how she would have preferred Ruby to be there

something that makes me laugh at that scene, is that Yang does not say anything about Blake and Sun that contrasts with the other dynamic ... to be something "Planned from the beginning" this was weird

Did you see the difference? Is very evident

In fact part of the function of Neptune was that Jaune stopped trying to conquer Weiss, that's why Neptune personality never really changed and it was not going to be anything important for Weiss

Even when Neptune returned to the party with Weiss because of something that Jaune told him, this did not help them to develop them or anything, in fact they do not do anything.

they did not even bother to focus it

Again many elements that the Bumbleby owns appeared with the Whiterose such as the "Secret Language"

To summarize things at the end of the Vol there are scenes where you could say that all the "pairs" of the series are together and it is obvious that the Whiterose is included

It was a great volume for the Whiterose as always

Vol 3

Whiterose chapter 1-4

I must say that the vol 3 is one where there are very few moments of "ship" whatever your ship ... but I think the Whiterose highlighted on the others (even though the Bumbleby was planned from the "Start")

I love that Ruby always wants to be aware of how Weiss perceives her and the writers do a good job in that.

As mentioned before the Whiterose really did not have "rival ship" because as seen in chapter 2 of Vol 3 instead of even joining them so that the audience says "hey there is a possibility" they show us that they will not be together.

It even contrasts with Sun and his friendly flirting with Blake

Even before the chapter ends, the writers make Ruby stay close to Weiss as an advancement that both will see the "mentor" of Weiss.

It is an irony that a chapter after the ship of Weiss and Neptune failed, the Whiterose took a very big step to make Ruby meet the only family to whom Weiss has great appreciation and respect

I always laugh at this scene, the way it is written is phenomenal: Weiss presents Ruby, that Winter says "you took interest in my sister" is an interesting selection of words ... besides that the attitude of Ruby all uncomfortable is parallel to that of Sun when he is with Blake parents

The fact that the role models of our girls fight in that scene says a lot

Chapter 5 was about an interaction between Penny and Ruby that is basically an advance of the future misfortune, in addition to the team fight of Yang and Weiss

Chapter 6 was about Phyrra decision and Yang duel against Mercury

Chapter 7 was a Flashback to understand the situation

Chapter 8: After 8 chapters recently, they give us a little Bumbleby moment, but even so it was a group thing, although if it counts, the other part was occupied by Pyrrha and Ruby, each one following their story separately.

Chapter 9: Cornered Ruby, Cinder plan and Penny death, Grimm attack in addition to Roman release

Chapter 10: Battle of the hunters against the Grimm, Ruby goes to meet Roman and the meeting of Blake against Adam

Chapter 11: Battle of the hunters against the Grimm, Clash of Ruby against Roman and Neo, death of Roman, then the Adam-Blake-Yang moment (Bumbleby's biggest moment so far) ... Cinder gets the powers of one of the Maiden.

Chapter 12

What can I say about this chapter? Apart from the obvious, the Whiterose interaction is very good

It's always funny to see how Weiss dedicates that little smile to Ruby is something exclusive of both

It's funny how in that chapter in the middle of the chaos of the battle the "couples" stand out, although I think the most obvious is that at that moment Ruby and Weiss made a parallel opposite to Jaune and Pyrrha

As you saw here the Whiterose was a pretty complete ship and was really following a slow development, I mean compare it with the Bumbleby:

-It was not just a ship that had more development -It has the same number of important moments -It had 3 times more time on screen

Whiterose crisis (Vol 4 and 5)

After the great development of Ruby and Weiss in the first 3 volumes, what could go wrong?

Monty unfortunately died and his friends continued with his legacy ... but it is not the same, something that many began to notice was that Ruby lost a lot of prominence and of course they squandered the opportunity to develop it in parallel with Jaune

This being honest is a volume that I like very much except for the development that Ruby was given ... in general Ruby in the first chapter was more joking with Team RJNR and that's fine but the moments in which it should be used in develop Ruby as a character were wasted

In chapter 2 of that Vol, do you remember the scene where Ruby looks at Jaune sad about Phyrra? That was a great moment for Jaune as a character, but it could also have been for Ruby ... but nothing was done and it was left to the air.

Literally the most I saw of "Development" is when I attack Tyrion aggressively to save his uncle ... but it was a short scene.

One of the biggest complaints of that Volume was that Jaune stole everything that should be the development of Ruby questioning, the grief and basically the elements of the protagonist ... in addition to his connection with Weiss that is quite focused on the previous ones volumes

the last scene where Ruby character could have been given more depth before focusing on Ruby made Jaune give him a 1 minute speech and then the whole end of the season to be focused on Ren and Nora ... basically Ruby's development It was a total crap .., in fact Jaune had to say this is so stupid.

Weiss in Volume 4

As with Ruby, weakening the great dynamics between Ruby and Weiss made the Weiss saga a bit lower than it would have been ... do not get me wrong, its part in the volume is very good but it could have been exceptional, in that Weiss volume has 24 minutes of screen

Something I noticed in Vol 4 is that even if Weiss was very dissatisfied with his situation, there is really no scene where she misses his teammates or anything like that..(although he left it understandable in a scene I think it was better to execute it in a better way)

Chapters where Weiss appears -Episode 2 -Chapter 6 -Chapter 7 -Chapter 9 -Chapter 11

The only thing that we can appreciate of this arch was the idiots that are the rich, the crisis of Atlas touched by General Ironwood, the rules of Weiss father and his general discontent since she does not want to be like his father ... but in if it was a regular arc and what I highlight is that he learned to invoke ... although the consequences of the writing of Kerry and Miles affected Weiss in Volume 5.

Vol 5 (Weiss the Bumbleby Shipper)

I think it's no surprise to anyone that the Staff had a taste for Bumbleby in fact in Vol 4 they put quite subtextual scenes between them even though they were separated ... but they forgot the Whiterose a lot and this is reflected in this volume (which as you know it was the worst of all)

Ruby narrative at the beginning of the volume literally does not exist...I mean, she is there with her friends and everything. But does something relevant happen? Does she question something? She have any development? unfortunately she does not have it ... The only thing she did was to become friends with Oscar and even if that is not possible, it could be considered a "protagonist" action since in the end everyone did it

One of the things that really bothered me in this Volume is that they decided to have Weiss approach Yang so she can be a builder of the Bumbleby plot. What do I mean?

When Weiss is captured (for no reason) because she should be with Yang and then have more confidence in having the "talk" with her.

I remember the scene where they both embrace and I said "what a nice scene" but then I said to myself, really? ... if some in the fandom keep saying

"But Yang does not have many scenes with Blake in the first 3 Volumes" which part this is true ... but now ask

How many had with Weiss? The truth is that their interactions were very vague. In fact, Weiss interacted more with Blake because of the White Fang incident, the only time they had a long interaction was in a Vol 3 combat but more of that I did not understand because they decided to make that scene between those two.

but is fine

What bothers me about that scene is that when Weiss meets Ruby, instead of making a more intimate scene between the two of them it was something group and again that's not bad ... but:

Why did Miles and Kerry prefer to make a lonely scene of Yang and Weiss? he is too stupid as if Pyrrha revived but Kerry and Miles put a very significant scene with Ren ... but when she meets Jaune (There is only a group hug)

Makes sense? Obviously not ... but I'm going to say the reason why this narrative bothers me a lot.

While Ruby is still relegated in this volume, our beloved Weiss with no apparent reason was much closer to Yang, while relegating his interactions with Ruby many say "What is the problem" well this is simple.

Not only this is the reason why Ruby lost a lot of prominence in this Vol in particular ... but the reason for bringing Weiss and Yang closer was only for it to drive the Bumbleby and it is like ignoring past volumes

In this scene basically Yang is doing his drama for Blake of how he "needs her, who was there for her and blah blah blah" that parallels Ilia ... well it's good writing if you want to push the Bumbleby ... now that I think it even when I love the Bumbleby the only thing that irritates me that thanks to this we lost good interactions between Ruby and Weiss ... that for some reason they refused to offer us, I mean after the Phyrra did neither of them have a talk? although the damage was already done from Vol 4

In that scene Weiss shares something very intimate with Yang, but as I said it's a bit empty that the writers decide to do this with the two of them ... it's as if Jaune did this with Nora (something fucking weird and the worst thing is that it would be for boost another ship) ... literally the narrative relegated Ruby too much.

Continuing the narrative of Weiss and Ruby, we can appreciate how in the conflict against Cinder not only is not something of great impact on Weiss and Ruby but it is decided to make one of the most stupid scenes of all RWBY (Make Jaune the protagonist) ... make a drama between Cinder-Jaune-Weiss where the narrative focused on Jaune's emotions when Weiss is wounded.

Where was Ruby? pulled out of the plot when they were about to kill Weiss.

The importance that they gave to the interactions between Weiss and Yang was very strange if not forced, those of giving focus to those of Jaune with Weiss were much rarer and literally the dynamics of these is the least developed of all. But do you know what is the worst?

That Yang does not do so much "drama" for what happened with Weiss I'm not saying that she does not "worry" but really did almost nothing with that dynamic...Vol 5 is supposed to have made them "closer"

Why not keep focusing on them? ... Because obviously give more prominence to Jaune and of course since Weiss was not going to boost the ship of Yang and Blake ...why give them more scenes with Yang?

Weiss is one of my favorite characters and I mean it but in this volume it was crap.

The worst climax of Vol 5 is that literally Weiss neither thanks Jaune nor has any "link" with him after that, not even a small gratitude scene (I made a meme of that) ... but going back to matter, Blake comes back and that just happens

(Weiss remembers that Ruby exists) For what reason? because it is no longer necessary to boost the Bumbleby xDD ... I mean it's hilarious how Miles and Kerry destroyed what could have been a big volume for these two but obviously it was the turn of the Bumbleby ... shit like I hate what they did in this volume, even when I'm happy for the BB (it should be done differently)

the looks that Weiss gives Ruby are the most loving in all rwby (a pity we had to wait too long for this)

The way in which Weiss looks at Ruby in that scene is the same as that of Yang to Blake and that can not be denied

Weiss and Ruby in Volume 6 (The rebirth of Whiterose)

Do you know one of the main reasons why this Volume was great?

If you can not guess, I'll tell you that the Whiterose came back stronger than ever, even though the Staff was going to focus the Bumbleby ... the Whiterose narrative was not going to be affected.

The scene of both in the opening is so cute (besides that it is literally a cliche yuri) I love that the opening also shows us that Weiss is the closest person to Ruby and his greatest support

Many focus on the teamwork of Yang and Blake but I think the most remarkable thing was the dynamic of Ruby and Weiss was simply a genius.

All this in the first minutes (as a bonus)

I loved the scene in which Weiss dedicates that smile that only has reserved for Ruby ... a pity that those hunters interrupted the moment

Besides, I want to remind you that again the Staff brought Neptune who was still the same idiot as always, besides the fact that they do not bother to spend a moment between him and Weiss.

Many talk about the Bumbleby moments of chapter 5 ... but I think the Whiterose moments are just as good.

Weiss feels tired, sad and wants the company of Ruby and our foolish protagonist does not even notice it, it's just cute

I like the fact that while the Bumbleby there is a lot of "drama" the Whiterose is developing without needing that focusing as both complement each other

I like how Narrative makes Weiss the first person to appear after they tell Ruby to think about the people who love her

this also happened in previous chapters, in the same scene where Yang focuses on Blake and Blake focuses on Yang ... Ruby first thinks of Weiss and Weiss only focuses on Ruby (a great parallel)

Again in chapter 8 Weiss is full of insecurity and Ruby is there to give her support ... Weiss dedicates that little smile again, to be interrupted by Qrow

Vol 6 chapter 11-13

What can I say about this? I just loved it, there were Renora moments, team work ... but the scenes of Weiss and Ruby stood out

The scene where Ruby almost claims that she just wanted Weiss to be by his side in the battle was great

more scenes of dynamics together

Although the most significant scene was in which Ruby almost died and Weiss rescues her.

The expressions of the "ice queen" are great, her fear that something happens to Ruby is tender and even more so if we consider that she still does not let go of his hand ... Ruby makes a joke to relieve attention to the once showing his absolute confidence in Weiss with "I knew you would"

Ruby expression at Weiss discomfort is very funny but I liked the fact that Weiss is still angry about Ruby imprudent actions.

It's almost a couple fight

Although the thing does not end there, the next scene next Ruby is together with Weiss separated...but for some reason the Staff decided that both are clinging in a tender way in the middle of the fight when it was not necessary.

It is obvious that they were put together and I must say that I love it (besides that it is more suspicious when this chapter stood out the ship of the series)

I saw some post about how in the memories of Ruby the Bumbleby focused, it is debatable ... but really the same thing was done with the Whiterose

The memory of Weiss and Ruby from Vol 1 was one of the most beautiful and coming back to the scene is really quite significant

The Vol 6 can be considered correctly the saga "Bumbleby" for all the necessary development between Yang and Blake ... but this Vol also had a lot of Whiterose but in preparation for the Weiss arc that directly involved Ruby ... it was a great volume for the Whiterose

Bonus

Something that I always noticed that the Bumbleby had a lot of external support from the Staff ... but in the additional material the support was regular. How does the Whiterose compare?

The Whiterose is the third most popular ship and still has a great focus on all the Anthalogias and in fact the element "yuri" is stronger than with the Bumbleby in these adaptations

Many talk about the flirtation that Yang does to Blake ... but it does not compare to the flirting that Ruby does to Weiss in these sleeves

It's not to say anything, but the Japanese understand the yuri signals of this ship

RWBY official manga

If this is not enough, I think you should see the adaptation to RWBY manga in the Shonen Jump.

The focus of that manga is directly on the Whiterose even though Bumbleby and Arkos give more obvious signals ... but the Whiterose stands out above all of them

also it should be noted that Monty liked Whiterose a lot, I still remember his art of both and clearly retweeted several fan art from this ship

Conlusion

It is evident that the Whiterose was established as "End game" as well as the Bumbleby in fact a little more, so Whiterose companions do not get discouraged because the Bumbleby is canon, since when opening that door ... it leaves a world of possibilities and thanks to the Vol 6 that left many things to develop between Ruby and Weiss as the Vol 5 left many things pending for the Bumbleby.

That said, I'll finish the review with something obvious to everyone "Whiterose best ship"

#rwby #white rose #ruby rose #bumbleby #weiss schnee #rwby manga #whiterose #rwby ship

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consecotaleo · 6 years

Text

BNHA Light Novel Vol. 3 – Chapter 4: “UA Hyakumonogatari” (Part Two, Final) – Eng Translation

T/N: Here’s the rest of Chapter 4, the ghost story chapter.

Make sure you read Part One first.

Feel free to link to or screenshot my translations outside of Tumblr, but please provide a direct link.

Other BNHA Light Novel Vol.3 Chapters

See /translations for the full list. Light Novel Vol. 3 has been completely translated.

Chapter 1: “Cheers!” // Chapter 2: “Dramatic Makeover” // Chapter 3: “Crisis” (Part One, Part Two, Part Three) // Chapter 4: “ UA Hyakumonogatari” (Part One, ***Part Two) // Chapter 5 by aitaikimochi) // Chapter 6 by royaljellybeans// Fantasy AU by aitaikimochi

Fan works relevant to the light novel

Useful Manga References

Class 1-A students

Color illustration scanned by aitaikimochi:

Chapter 4: “UA Hyakumonogatari” (Part Two, Final)

(Part One recap: Some of the 1-A students decide to barge into Tokoyami’s room to tell ghost stories. They make Tokoyami join in, and he tells a really scary story about a blond-haired ghost woman. Everyone is super creeped out and they decide to stop.)

That night, Mineta tosses and turns in bed. Every time he’s about to drift off, he remembers Tokoyami’s story and becomes wide awake again. Not only had Mineta been unable to get his desired contact with girls earlier… now he can’t even sleep! He really shouldn’t have gone at all.

As Mineta is wallowing in regret, he hears a small beeping noise.

Mineta freezes. He nervously tells himself it must be the building structure creaking from changes in air temperature, but that sound is clearly different. And the sound isn’t coming from Midoriya’s room next door, but from the hallway.

“An illusion, just an illusion!” Though Mineta repeats this to himself, he can still clearly hear the noise. It seems to be getting louder.

“Damnit.” Mineta approaches his door, equally terrified and reluctant. It’s probably just someone from the 2nd floor playing mobile games in the hallway. He opens the door.

No one is in the hallway. Mineta stares for a moment, then quickly slams the door shut and dives under his blankets. Though he chants to himself that it’s just an illusion, the sound doesn’t go away. It just gets louder and louder.

“Oh god, it’s getting closer! It… it’s probably the dorm ventilation ducts? Right?!” But the air ducts never made a sound like that before.

What can he do? He covers his head. The source of the sound has almost reached his door. Just about… now –––

Something raps against his door. And then, “… … Mineta… is…” A female voice calls from outside the door.

The next day in class, the group discusses the strange beeping sound they heard last night. It wasn’t just Mineta – Tsuyu, Sero, Ashido, Kaminari, Tokoyami, and Shoji all heard the same sound.

“Hold on, why did the voice only call my name? Tell me it’s a lie?!” Mineta panics when he learns that he’s the only one who heard his own name. “Midoriya, you really didn’t hear anything…?”

“Sorry, the training was so tiring yesterday that I slept soundly through the night!”

“Only we heard the voices… then isn’t it the curse of Tokoyami’s story?” Sero tries to joke, but his smile is forced.

“Eh? What kind of story?” Kirishima wedges himself into the conversation. As Kaminari opens his mouth to speak, the seated Bakugou and Todoroki suddenly move.

Bakugou stands up with a clatter. “So fucking loud! Stop staying strange things around other people!” He kicks the door open and storms out.

Izuku re-analyzes Bakugou’s actions in his head and wonders, “Could it be… he’s afraid?”

Jirou, who’d been silent the entire time, admits a little timidly, “Um, actually I heard it too. A weird beeping sound that went on until dawn.” Even Class 1-A’s top expert on sounds could testify! The other students fall into a panic.

Iida forcefully cuts into the chatter; this matter should be set aside for now. Since there are several witnesses, there must be some sort of problem. As class president he’ll take responsibility for figuring out the true face of the mystery voice.

(Later at night, in the hallway outside Iida’s room)

Iida sits in the hallway, wrapped up in a fluffy towel and fighting off sleep**. The girls had given him some coffee earlier. But Iida keeps a very strict daily routine and is usually in deep slumber at this time of night. Even coffee can’t ward off his drowsiness.

**与睡魔作斗争, literally to fight off the Sandman

Just as Iida is nodding off, a small beeping noise startles him awake. He immediately looks around but nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. A few moments later, the other boys on the 3rd floor (Kaminari, Ojiro, Kouda) come out of their rooms.

“You guys are still awake?”

“After hearing the story in class earlier there’s no way I can sleep!”

“What on earth is that noise?”

Kaminari and Kouda peer around nervously, but they don’t see anything strange. The four boys look at each other uneasily.

Just then, they hear a small, shrill voice. “Aa-aa-ah!” That’s definitely Mineta. Iida and the others rush down to the 2nd floor, where they find Mineta shaking like a leaf and clinging onto Izuku. Aoyama and Tokoyami come out into the hallway as well, looking pale.

“What happened?!” Iida asks them.

“T-the voice is calling my name again!”

“I heard it too,” Izuku confirms. “Someone knocked on Mineta’s door.” Aoyama and Tokoyami nod their assent.

At everyone’s grave expressions, Iida mutters, “Just what is actually happening here…”

That night, all the 1-A members hear the mysterious beeping noise.

In the morning the sky is dull and overcast.

Aizawa-sensei stares at his class, a little surprised. The atmosphere inside the classroom seems to be just as gloomy as it is outside.

Apparently there will be a thunderstorm tonight. As the day goes on, the wind gets stronger and stronger. Outside, tree branches sway and shake.

The sleep-deprived students can’t concentrate on Aizawa-sensei’s lecture. And it’s not just one or two students – strangely enough, the entire class is in low spirits.

“What happened?” Upon hearing the story, Aizawa-sensei hums a little. “Hmm, a noise… But do you guys really believe in something as unrealistic as that supposed curse?” Of course no one in the class wanted to believe it at first, but how else could they explain last night’s events?

Class president Iida hopes they can get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible. Then everyone can properly focus on their studies again.

“N-no! Every night the voice calls my name and I can’t sleep! If I hide under the covers I can’t sense anything… but what if she comes into my room. I’ll be cursed and killed! Wait, what if she’s not wearing anything? … Ah, but…!!” Mumbling to himself, Mineta holds his head in his hands.

“A curse, huh…” Aizawa-sensei deliberates for a moment. “Now that I think about it, UA has one too. One of the Seven Mysteries of UA went something like this…”

** Seven Mysteries is a common trope for Japanese school settings

“There’s a bitter soul of a UA graduate that couldn’t become a pro-hero. It often wanders around the forest surrounding the school. And if you see it, you’ll be cursed… Ah. Now that I think of it, that forest is near the new dorms.”

For a moment the entire class is silent. Then it erupts into chaos.

“If the ghost came into the dorms…!”

“Oh god, no!!”

Fuck, Aizawa thinks.

This sort of story should obviously be taken as a joke, but the 1-A students are already on edge. Aizawa hadn’t meant to scare them, but ended up inadvertently adding fuel to the fire.

All the students are panicking. Usually they quiet down with a single word, but it’s ineffective now.

“… You guys. Behave yourselves.” Aizawa’s low, dangerous voice finally reaches his students’ ears, penetrating to their very bones. The students immediately suppress the fear in their hearts, shivering in front of an even greater terror. The room falls silent.

Seeing his students like this, Aizawa lets out a sigh. “If you guys care so much about this noise, I’ll stop by for inspection tonight. There’ll be a storm anyways, so might as well. I’ll be taking roll call so you better all be in your rooms.”

“Sen-sensei…!” At their teacher’s evident concern, the students tear up a little.

The afternoon rain turns into an evening storm. The wind blows endlessly, and the dorm windows rattle and shake.

Aizawa-sensei arrives at the Class 1-A dorms for inspections. Outside the 1st floor windows, the trees bow and sway. Every crack of thunder is accompanied by a blinding streak of lightning.

There might be a power outage in this sort of weather. Aizawa-sensei considers the best course of action in that scenario. There’s an emergency power generator, but he should confirm the location of the power switch and acquire a flashlight.

“But what I’m most concerned about is the kids, after all.” Aizawa-sensei furrows his eyebrows. Earlier in class, the students had honestly acted like they’d regressed into preschoolers. If there’s a blackout… it’s a headache to even think about.

But Aizawa is also concerned about the mysterious sounds. The entire class heard something, so it clearly wasn’t just a figment of someone’s imagination. “Just what could the sound be?” he wonders.

Aizawa looks around, alert – he suddenly has a feeling that something is off. Amidst the sounds of the storm, there seems to be some kind of mechanical noise. Aizawa holds his breath and scans his surroundings. The sound isn’t coming from a fixed point. Whatever it is keeps moving.

“Something living…? It shouldn’t be…” Tracking down the sound, Aizawa arrives at the dining hall.

“Seriously…?” Seeing the source of the sound, Aizawa’s eyes widen.

As the storm rages on outside, Iida shows up to Mineta’s room. He’s accompanied by Todoroki and Satou. The scheduled time for roll call had passed, but Aizawa-sensei hadn’t appeared. They’re checking to see if anyone had seen him.

“He hasn’t been here. Maybe he started from the top floor?” Mineta fidgets nervously. Is the mysterious voice going to call his name again today?

But Satou lives on the 5th floor and hadn’t seen Aizawa-sensei either.

“That’s really strange,” Izuku mumbles. “For someone like Aizawa-sensei to not show up at the appointed time… did something happen to him?”

“Don’t say scary things, Midoriya!” Mineta responds nervously. “Maybe some other pressing matter came up, so he couldn’t come here?”

“Let’s look around for him,” Iida decides.

When Iida and the rest of the group check the ground floor, they find Aizawa-sensei collapsed next to the dining table. He’s unconscious and won’t wake up.

Kaminari examines Aizawa’s prone form. “Hey, isn’t that a strand of hair around Aizawa-sensei’s neck? … Blond hair…?! Ah, it’s my own…”

“Now’s really not the time to say that sort of shit, dumbass!” Bakugou snaps like usual, but even his voice sounds strained.

The class speculates on how Aizawa-sensei got knocked out. Either it was the ghost-story curse, or it was a villain attack. Both options are terrifying. Ever calm, Tsuyu suggests that they find another teacher for help. Iida immediately backs her up–

A huge bolt of lightning strikes. The entire building is suddenly shrouded in darkness.

“What?!”

“For a blackout to happen now, what timing…”

“Calm down, Dark Shadow!”

Sero yelps. “Wait, Tokoyami! Don’t let Dark Shadow out!”

“Uwaa– Who’s going to protect me from getting cursed now?!” As always, Mineta simpers and worries only about himself.

Sightless, no one can tell who or what is around them. Humans have been afraid of the dark since ancient times. Because of the power outage, this primal fear bursts out and overwhelms the already nervous students. Iida attempts to calm everyone down while Yaoyorozu tries to make a flashlight with her quirk. But when she’s nearly done…

“Kya-a-a!?”

“That scream, is it Yaoyorozu? W-what’s wrong?” Jirou tracks down her location by sound. Something soft had brushed past below her, Yaoyorozu explains with a shudder.

A moment later, Ochaco shrieks. She’d just felt something brush past her foot as well.

“So what the hell is it?!” Kaminari is half-sobbing at this point.

“Someone make some light already!” Iida commands. At this, Kaminari finally recovers enough to start up his quirk. Bakugou sets off explosions in his palms as well. There’s finally a bit of visibility.

For a moment, the light illuminates a small, ghostly white figure. It quickly retreats, disappearing back into the cover of darkness. Silence.

“——！？”

“Th-th-th-there’s something there…!”

“A ghost, it’s a ghost! Isn’t that what a ghost looks like…? I don’t actually have a clue, this is the first time I’m seeing one!”

Hagakure and Kaminari have entered a full-fledged state of panic. Near them, Todoroki is beginning to lose his composure as well. He turns to where Midoriya seems to be standing next to him. “Mi-Midoriya… ice or fire, which one is more effective against ghosts?”

“Eh? No, I don’t know. I’d never thought about it before. But the ghost seemed to give off a cold, icy aura. So fire would probably be more effective to counter it? … Ah, but wouldn’t a physical attack be useless? Ghosts don’t have corporeal bodies, right?” Midoriya’s voice shakes, but he remains cool-headed and logical in the face of terror.

Todoroki despairs at his own apparent uselessness. “Shit! Is there anything we can do against it?”

“It’s too late!” Mineta wails. “Everyone will be cursed and killed. Damn it! There’s no way out; at least I’ll be killed by a beautiful lady–”

The front entrance creaks open. Everyone freezes.

Illuminated for just a moment by lightning… is long, golden-blond hair. Water droplets trickle down its length and drip onto the ground. The figure approaches them, stepping closer and closer.

“Hey… you guys––” As if just noticing the students, the figure slowly raises its ghostly visage.

“It’s the blond-haired ghost!!!!”

The entire class shrieks as they launch a full-scale attack. If the enemy had been a villain they would’ve had some combat knowledge to bring to the table, but they have neither knowledge nor experience in fighting ghosts. Battle-crazed, the students simply give their all.

The blond figure is knocked down, its body hitting the ground with a solid thump. At the sound, everyone seems to come back to themselves.

A moment later, the lights finally flicker back on. The students sigh in relief but they’re still on guard.

The combination of Bakugou’s explosions, Todoroki’s fire and ice, and Ashido’s acid had produced a lot of smoke. When it eventually dissipates, everyone takes a closer look at the fallen blond wraith.

“Cl-clearly it’s a ghost, so why didn’t it disappear?” Mineta asks.

His sticky quirk balls had rendered the ghost motionless, stuck the way it’d fallen. The students carefully edge closer to it, trembling. On the blond figure’s visage there appears to be… a small blond mustache? Its body is slim but well-built.

“Eh? Not a woman…” Ashido trails off. “He seems strangely familiar, actually.”

Behind her, Jirou stares intently at the figure. Her face pales. “This blond hair… it’s Mic-sensei!”

“Eh?…… Ahh!!!” Everyone is shocked. Since they’d always seen Mic-sensei with his hair swept up towards the heavens, they hadn’t recognized him with his hair down. He looks like a completely different person!

Jirou uses her earphone jack to check Mic-sensei’s pulse. Fortunately he’s only passed out.

“Did Mic-sensei come here to check on us because of the power outage? Ah, but we did such an unforgivable thing to him…” As the class president, Iida feels responsible for this.

From behind the students, a familiar voice says, “Oi, you guys…”

Everyone turns towards the sound to where Aizawa-sensei stands behind them. He’d woken up earlier when the students loudly attacked Mic-sensei.

“Sensei~!” Fear forgotten, the students cluster around Aizawa-sensei.

“We thought the blond ghost had come to attack us!”

“Sensei, what did you find earlier? Was it a villain, or a real ghost…?”

“A white ghost came into the dorms!!”

The excited students clamor around Aizawa. “Calm down,” he commands. They immediately quiet down – a conditioned reflex.

Aizawa-sensei first moves Mic’s prone form away from the entrance and out of the rain. Then he begins to slowly walk while peering up at the ceiling, clearly looking for something. Confused, the students follow after him. Jirou alerts the group that she can hear the beeping noise from the nights before. Aizawa nods. He points up at a tiny black speck on the ceiling, enlisting Asui’s help to bring it down.

“This is why I got knocked out earlier, and is also the source of the strange sounds you guys were hearing.”

“Eh?”

“I saw it in the dining hall earlier and tried to stand on the table to reach it, but I stepped on a hidden wash-rag and slipped.”

“Ah, that’s mine!” Hagakure immediately confesses. “I had to hurry back to my room to make it for roll call and accidentally left it behind!”

Aizawa raises a questioning eyebrow. “… Well, I’ll let you off this time.” He holds the tiny black object out so that the students can get a good look. Yaoyorozu produces a magnifying glass, and only then can they tell it’s a miniature mechanical device.

“Speaking of machines I hadn’t seen before… it probably belongs with this.” Aizawa heads towards the dorm baths. At the entrance to the girls’ baths, he places the tiny black gadget next to the anti-peeping device there. The black gadget immediately burrows into the larger device like a worm returning to its nest. “Charging… charging…” it says.

They should confirm with the creator just to make sure. Aizawa calls up Power Loader, who forwards the call to Hatsume.

“Ah yes! That’s a super cute device that continuously monitors and inspects the area at night! Since the 1-A dorms seem to have a particularly perverted classmate… who was it again? Eh… well, I forgot his name, but the device only targets him to verify he’s in his own room. Cool, right?”

“Don’t do unnecessary things!” Mineta is furious. But at least he wasn’t cursed; he’s secretly relieved.

Kaminari is still uneasy. “But what was the white thing? Everyone saw that, right?”

“Sorry, it looks like I forgot to close my door.” Kouda bows his head apologetically, his white pet rabbit cradled in his arms. The rabbit seems excited by all the commotion and wiggles around.

“Hah, what the hell? I really thought it was a ghost.” Kaminari lets out a relieved laugh.

** Earlier Yaoyorozu and Ochaco felt something warm and soft running past their feet, and all the students saw a white figure running off.

Everyone else relaxes. All the mysterious happenings had been explained. They chatter and laugh amongst themselves. Thank god, everything’s fine now!

“Everything’s fine now…?” Aizawa-sensei’s voice is a low growl, nearly outside the range of human hearing.

At this, the students finally stop to notice their surroundings. The front entrance looks like it’s been bombed. Doors and windows have been blown away, and the outside storm sends rain and leaves all over the dorm’s ground floor.

“You guys just moved in a few days ago and it’s already like this? Is it because of the kaidan? You were this terrified by some ghost stories?”

Dark hair whipped about by the wind, red eyes piercing and cold… at this moment, Aizawa is scarier than any demon.

“Every one of you will turn in a reflection by tomorrow. From now on, curfew is at 8 o’clock until I decide otherwise. Telling ghost stories is hereby banned in the dorms! Am I clear?”

“Yessir…”

Curses are terrifying. Ghosts are terrifying, too. But the students are currently witnessing the most terrifying of them all –– genuinely angry Aizawa-sensei.

–– End of Chapter 4, Part Two (Final) ––

(Read Chapter 5)

Additional Notes

Aizawa-sensei is such a protective dad; it’s too precious for words. (Poor Mic though).

With this, BNHA Light Novel Vol. 3 has now been fully translated to English – see all chapters here. Thanks to Kohei Horikoshi & Anri Takahashi for the original story and to all of the fan translators for their hard work! This project was time-consuming but fun, and I hope to do more fan translations in the future.

#boku no hero academia #my hero academia #mha #bnha light novel #translation #class 1-a #aizawa shouta

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ayearofpike · 6 years

Text

Magic Fire

Pocket Books, 1999 226 pages, 18 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-02057-9 LOC: CPB Box no. 1726 vol. 8 OCLC: 41501833 Released June 1, 1999 (per Amazon; pretty sure B&N has a typo)

It takes pressure and friction to make a spark. Mark Charm has plenty of both, egged along by the mysterious and lovely new girl at school pushing him for more than he expected in a relationship, and not helped by the death of his mother. Of course, for most people this doesn’t manifest in an actual fire, to say nothing of one that engulfs a major metropolis. And as Mark starts to realize that he has more control over the spark and the flame than he knew, he also learns how he might be under control himself.

We’ve talked about misleading back copy before, but this one goes in so many directions after we meet the characters that there’s just no way it could nail it down. Still, to my mind, it doesn’t even come close. Sure, Mark is a pyromaniac, but he’s burning things to relieve tension in his own mind, not “just ‘cause.” And before I get too far ahead, I’ll just say that there’s more going on than what is in Mark’s own head.

This book marks a MAJOR turn for Pike in terms of thematic content. Like, maybe he noticed just how much of his writing was starting to follow the same patterns and tropes, and realized that it was time to do something completely different. The meditation guided through understandings of Eastern religion is still there, but: no powerful blood, no time travel, no genetic memories, no saviors of light, no burial in one’s own grave, not even ONE fourth-dimensional space lizard. Two books from the end of his contract, he’s finally giving us an entirely new story.

And it’s kind of a choppy one. I mentioned how it jumps all over the place, and we’ll get there in the recap. This was another book that I didn’t remember, that has a tight binding that indicates maybe I only read it once. (Although you may note the bite mark in the corner ... at the very least a dog, probably the puppy my parents got not long after this book came out, was interested in it.) As such, I started to get annoyed about not following the narrative and why it was making so many unexpected and unforeshadowed turns. But slowly, as I read, I started to remember the twist. It’s a big one (but maybe not so big if you were up on sci-fi in 1999) and it does a lot to justify why this narrative arc has so many loop-de-loops, some of which flatly don’t make any sense.

The story takes place in an alternate near-future Los Angeles, which isn’t really specified but we get senses of being out of time through the character’s words and actions. Mark is in a theater watching the new girl, Jessa Welling, star in a play about a witch. She’s such a good actress and such a good fit for the role that Mark starts to wonder if she wrote the play. But that’s not the only reason he hopes to get to know her better. In fact, he’s here at the play’s closing performance to try to talk to her. And he does, and she’s receptive, but he kind of flubs it and leaves too soon. He does want to go see his mom, though, who is sick in the hospital with cancer. And these two events, back to back, create this tension that he has to relieve somehow.

So he fills up a gas can and burns down a house. One that’s under construction — Mark is always very careful to avoid hurting people when he sets fires. He’s been doing it for a while now, as his mother gets worse and he feels his life spiraling out of control. Maybe it’s ironic, or maybe there’s some deeper psychology at play, because his dad was a firefighter who was killed in action when he was ten. But this time Mark lights the fire in the upstairs master bedroom, and realizes as it spreads quickly that he has to get out, only maybe he won’t. But he does ... weirdly, it’s almost like the fire moves out of his way so he can.

Jessa catches up with him at school the next day, while he’s eating a turkey sandwich. (Oh yeah, I forgot that’s a Pike pattern, all the turkey sandwiches.) She’s smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer — ON CAMPUS — so it shouldn’t surprise him that she wants him to ditch school with her and go to the beach. It also shouldn’t surprise him that she has a harder drug to share with him. The drug, MAZE, is a psychoactive hallucinogen similar to LSD. Mark knows this, but doesn’t remember at first until Jessa reminds him. The gap in his memory bothers him, but not enough to not smoke it. Then he starts seeing aliens harvesting brains from humans and putting them in tanks of blue liquid on his TV, but the TV is off. He also has the overwhelming feeling that the world is not what it seems, and that Jessa knows a lot more than she’s letting on, and that she should just be forthcoming and honest with it. She cries and tells him that all she wants is him, and that she wants to tell him her story while she has him.

Mark wakes up in the middle of the night, and Jessa is gone, and he doesn’t remember anything they said or did after climbing into bed, least of all her story. What he does remember is that he hasn’t talked to his mom at all during the day, and so he figures he’ll drop in on the hospital and check on her while she’s sleeping. Only she’s not in her room — the nurse baldly and candidly and pitilessly tells him that Mrs. Charm died that evening. And if seeing her labor to sleep the night before was hard, it’s even worse that she died and Mark wasn’t with her. So now he has to burn something big. And what’s bigger than a city?

He’s thought it out. He knows where to steal a gas truck, where to drive it to cause the most damage, how to get the fire going. But he doesn’t have his lighter with him, weirdly. So he steals a bike and rides it home, where Jessa is waiting on the steps. And she knows he lights fires, and she wants to help him with this one. What happened to not hurting people? Well, if there’s one thing Jessa has said without fail since they started talking, it’s that it’s not possible for either of them or anyone else to get hurt through their actions. How can she know this? We’ll get there.

They drench the bushes along the side of an access road that surrounds his neighborhood, but when he lights the gas at one end the fire stops before it runs the whole trail. He races to the break and lights the next section, but then there’s another break a farther distance away, and now the fire at the first part is threatening the fumes of the empty tanker truck. The pressure is building, though, to keep the fire going, and as he thinks it the fire jumps the gap and races down the whole road. He doesn’t get back to the truck in time to stop it exploding, though. Jessa is thrown clear, but her legs are badly burned and she can’t walk. So now Mark has to carry her out of this neighborhood, which is literally SURROUNDED by fire. He finds a drainage tunnel in a valley and they hide out in it, but she can’t crawl and he can’t carry her and it heats up and they pass out, figuring they’re goners.

But they’re not! Mark wakes up in a fancy penthouse apartment, with windows facing his area of destruction. Jessa is beside him in bed, and they’ve both been cleaned up and bandaged. Before he has too much time to think about it, a man in black walks in and says he’s saved them, for the reason that Mark has power over fire and he needs his help. To prove his power, the man in black pulls out a tube of cream and heals Mark’s burns instantly, saying that he’ll do the same for Jessa once they work for him. So they ride out to the desert, to this nondescript compound two hours from anywhere, where Mark can start to hone his ability.

What do they need Mark to do? Well, apparently there’s been an alien invasion, and the aliens hide among us and are manipulating us, and his fire can burn out their computers and put a stop to it. How can he do it from the desert? Well, the computer is closer than he thinks, everyone says, but also he’ll be able to do it psychically from a distance. He just has to think of the thing he wants to burn and it’ll burn. But how can he think of something he doesn’t know and has never seen? Well, it turns out — as Mark seems to see ahead into the meta-narrative and feels like all of this was already written, like everyone, even he, knew the fire would work because it was so prescribed — that Jessa knew who he was, that she coaxed him into feeling his power, and that she’s now using her own pain to help the Man in Black manipulate Mark. Because she’s been recruited to the cause already, and her power is that not only can she see into somewhere else but that she can take people along with her. And that’s how they’re going to see the computer so Mark can destroy it.

Still, she beseeches, just because she works for this shadowy organization doesn’t mean that she doesn’t love Mark. She tells him a little more about the invasion: apparently it happened ten years ago (or maybe two; she slips a little bit, making Mark think she’s still lying) and the aliens are more all-seeing than anyone could know. And as they get into the alien center to see where they need to be, it becomes clear just how much. The alien center, you see, is a vast complex of blue tanks full of human brains. Our brains. Mark’s brain, in particular, which bobs up next to him and he just knows it’s his. It’s what he saw on MAZE, made painfully real. And this is what Jessa meant in it not being possible for them to get hurt: they have no bodies to hurt and no environment to hurt them.

I talked about Pike predating The Matrix before, with his roof-running helicopter-stealing Last Vampire. By the time this book was released, the movie had been out a couple months, but to my memory it would still take a few more before we really started to appreciate what it had done for sci-fi storytelling. The idea of reality taking place inside our brains certainly wasn’t new, but it’s interesting that these two stories would take such a similar approach to it. Mark quickly learns that yes, by human perception the invasion was ten years ago, but the aliens probably froze us before returning to their planet some 420 light-years away. Now, in what’s probably closer to the 26th century ECE (Earth Common Era) than the 21st, what we know as Earth is what it likely would have continued as if we had corporeality and were still on the planet, but in a simulation that is more controllable by the aliens — who, by the way, planted primitive versions of themselves on various planets to see and study how they might grow and evolve in such an environment. Yes: they are us and we are them.

So if Mark kills the computer, he’s basically killing human society. He is disabling the mechanism by which these billions of brains continue to function as people. Does he have that right? The Man in Black (or should I just start calling him Morpheus?) argues that it’s a responsibility: that we should save our race from being manipulated by these higher aliens because no matter what we might think or feel, our lives are not our own. Jessa agrees, but she also has a plan to overtake the bodies of the two computer techs minding the simulation, so that she and Mark won’t go down with the ship, and they can stay together. There aren’t a whole lot of options, she says — to which Mark responds that it’s kind of like being trapped in a maze.

It takes a little more convincing that I’m glossing over, but Mark eventually agrees to this plan. Jessa’s psychic ability allows her to force the tech’s souls out of their bodies so she and Mark can jump in, and then instead of disabling the computer he uses his fire to boil the tanks, making sure that no brains survive and the aliens can’t keep the experiment going. There’s a brief inquiry, but nobody believes that either of these two highly-placed scientists would have ruined their experiment on purpose, so they’re sent home.

Mark and Jessa do inherit the latent memories of the bodies they occupy, so they know that they’re a couple with a young child. But neither of them really seems to know what that means until she gets home from school. Mark is surprised by the depth of his love for the kid, and taken aback at how Jessa apparently has none. In fact, she immediately starts planning to book a spaceship and fly BACK to Earth, WITHOUT the child, so that they can be free and alone together. It’s going to involve hijacking a powerful science vessel and remote-burning the brains of all the crew to get home, but Jessa is insistent. Mark eventually convinces her that they need to bring the child because otherwise it’ll be suspicious, and another 420 years of extended hibernation later they land on the island that used to be Los Angeles.

It’s not habitable without the tech from the ship, but Jessa wants to make it so, to get to a point where they don’t need “alien” help as soon as possible. In fact, she often goes into the wilderness, where the animals have taken over and become more populous, without any high-tech way to defend herself or call for help. It’s on one of these trips that their daughter dies, slipping and falling into the ocean and being dashed against a concrete pillar by a huge wave. Of course Mark wasn’t with them, so he didn’t see it. But now he’s starting to see more than she wanted him to ... more than he should, even. He sees that everything he’s seen so far has only been what she wanted him to see, even in the desert and on the alien planet and in the spaceships. And how could that be unless she had constructed the very existence around them? And if all of this is a construct, how is it possible to be happy? Is that what Jessa meant the whole time about not getting hurt?

She knows. She acknowledges. But she won’t leave with him.

And suddenly Mark is waking up in a dingy clinic in Mexico in 2010, with wires coming out of his head and his younger sister warning him not to come back too quickly. The clinic, it turns out, is called MAZE: Mental Alteration Zeitgeist Expansion. It’s a technology that allows you to bypass your senses and have information sent directly to your brain, to escape reality and live in a simulation of your mind’s own making. Jessa has been under for a year, and she’s slowly dying, and Mark went into her simulation to try to get her out. Only she wouldn’t come: she would rather die in her fantasy than survive in reality.

So everything we’ve read, this whole story, was constructed by Jessa for the inside of Mark’s brain based on what she already knew about him — not just the narrative arc, but the mother dying (even though his mom is fine), the pyromania and pyrokinesis (because he liked watching fires), the love for a child (that resembles his sister), all of it. Only here in the epilogue do we get Mark’s actual brain bemoaning Jessa’s end and wondering why it was so critical that he not have anyone but her ... but also questioning his own reality a little bit.

And the Matrix goes deeper. I hadn’t seen it at the time I read this — but I HAD read Grant Naylor’s Better Than Life, which posited a similar technology and built the narrative in a similar way, so I wasn’t totally blown away by the twist ending. If I hadn’t read that one, though, I probably would have been super pissed here. Talk about your St. Elsewhere ending, the “it was all a dream” completely wiping out all that came before. Sure, it’s justified once you get there, but Pike doesn’t give quite enough time and description to show how MAZE might be desirable, or ESPECIALLY what it was about Jessa, what happened to her, that made her want to escape into her own mind. And he could have: he teases at her story early on, but it never comes back. Like, this is top-five among his longest YA books, and he only gives five pages (if that) to “here’s what actually happened,” and it’s ALL MARK. (Die Softly, the longest, gives a lot more credence to what the villain thought and where she was coming from in the end.) He's acknowledged the end is rushed, too ... I wonder if we can chalk that up to more publisher politics.

There’s some contextual homework to do to really understand and appreciate Magic Fire. I’m not mad at this book — in fact, it’s quite admirable that Pike wove so many layers into the story of how-deep-does-the-simulation-go in a YA book. Still, this was 1999, and we were already starting to see the effect Harry Potter had on youth literature. There was room to go even deeper and explore more about this climate, context, and rationale that put Mark and Jessa into such a tenuous situation. If Pike had done that, maybe he’d have been able to keep up his presence as an author. But maybe he couldn’t, or maybe he just didn’t want to.

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julijasm · 6 years

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“Welcome, Oniichan!” Hiyori met Yokozawa in the genkan wearing an apron with a rabbit character printed on it and her hair in twin braids. Seeing that he was out of breath from running all the way from the station, she made a funny face. “Oniichan—did you run all the way here? Ah! Did you need to use the bathroom maybe?” “…I hurried because I heard you were here all alone.” Seeing her confused expression, now Yokozawa felt a bit embarrassed. Maybe he’d been a bit over-worried. “Papa said you were headed home first—so you came because you were worried about me? I’m fine on my own you know! I can watch the house and lock up all by myself~ But I’m still really happy you came!” Yokozawa’s expression softened at her carefree smile. “So nothing happened while you were here alone?” “Nope, nothing at all! I was over at Yuki-chan’s place until evening, after all.” “Is Yuki-chan a friend from school?” “My best friend in my class! She lives one floor above here. I had some pudding her mama made for a snack earlier. And then—” Apparently she couldn’t help wanting to babble on about her whole day. Everything that she held back telling Kirishima because he was her father, she spoke to Yokozawa about with abandon. She probably saw him as a friend now. Listening to her carry on with no signs of stopping, they headed into the house properly, and Yokozawa slipped on the slippers that by now had pretty much been labeled his own. Without his even realizing it, the number of items in this apartment that were ‘for Yokozawa’ had started to grow. Hiyori had prepared Yokozawa his own chopsticks and rice bowl, and he even had a designated seat at the dinner table now. “Oh—right right. I brought something for you. Sorry if any of them are broken from running here.” He’d completely forgotten about the bag he held while running here. But even if some of them were broken, these were macarons, so they weren’t inedible by any means. “What kind of candy is this?” “They’re called macarons. Apparently they make them a lot in France. I bought them because they had a lot of pretty colors.” “They’re really cute! It’s almost a waste to eat them!” Hiyori pulled out a clear jar wrapped with a ribbon. Thankfully, despite the way he’d handled it, it didn’t appear that any of the contents were broken. “If you like them, I can always bring more again. So feel free to dig in.” “Then we can have some together later! Thanks so much, Oniichan!” “You’re very welcome.” Maybe the reason she was able to say she was fine and behave this excitedly was because she hadn’t even realized she was lonely. Children tended to put up a brave front so as not to worry their parents. Hiding their feelings like that, they eventually convince themselves that they really feel that way. “You sure are cute, Hiyo.” He couldn’t help the comment that slipped from his mouth when he felt his heart assaulted by Hiyori’s lovable expression.She flushed brightly at his compliment. “Eeh? What’re you saying, Oniichan? Ah!! Papa’s way of speaking has rubbed off on you!” Her suspicion perhaps sprang from the fact that the compliment was even more embarrassing than if Kirishima had said it. “I said you were cute because I think you’re cute, that’s all.” “You don’t have to say those kinds of things, geez!” She was all the more cute with her cheeks puffed out in anger, and Yokozawa let out a loud bark of laughter. It had been ages since he’d been able to laugh like this. “I can’t believe you’d laugh at me!” “Sorry, sorry. I’m really sorry… Ah, you’re wearing an apron—does that mean you’re cooking something?” While it was a fairly obvious change in topic, Hiyori just gasped in surprise. “Oh, right! I’m making dinner! I’m still peeling the vegetables, but you’re going to eat, right?” “What are you making?” Despite her ten years, Hiyori was quite the cook. Apparently she helped with dinner preparations whenever her grandmother cooked for them, too. “Today I’m doing a recipe we learned in home ec—nikujaga! I did pretty well in class, so I thought I’d be able to cook it fine on my own. I even bought meat from the grocery store myself!” “Sounds delicious. Would you like me to help?” She could probably make it fine on her own, but dinner would be ready sooner if they worked together. “Really? Can you cook, Oniichan?” “What’re you saying? I’ve been living on my own for a long time, I’ll have you know. I can make the basics at least. How about I make some stewed pork and bring it over next time?” “Awesome! I want to try some! You’re so lucky… Papa can’t cook at all! He can’t even peel an apple properly!” It was probably the first time he’d heard her complain about her father, and Yokozawa recalled now that he’d never seen Kirishima in the kitchen once except for traveling to and from the refrigerator for a beer. “That’s pretty bad, I’ll admit. But you made curry for us the other night—who taught you?” “Grandma! I help her out all the time. Ooh! Can you make pudding, Oniichan?” She really must have liked that pudding her friend’s mother made for her today. “Pudding’s simple. It’s just a bunch of mixing and steaming.” “Wow! Teach me next time??” While he’d never made pudding from scratch before, he had made egg custard and figured the basic technique had to be the same. Making a mental note to look up a recipe later, he recalled the reason they’d started this conversation in the first place. “All in due time. If we don’t focus on this nikujaga of yours first, we’ll never have dinner.” They likely had the ingredients in the fridge right now, but pudding was far from a proper evening meal. “Oh yeah—I’m getting hungry, too… Ah! Wait a minute, Oniichan!” “Hm?” Hiyori dashed into her room without explaining, returning after a moment holding something red to her chest. “You should wear an apron, right? Here, I’ll lend you this!” “Ah, thank y…” The apron she held out for him was a red frilly piece with white polkadots. It was a cuteness reminiscent of the Emerald offices, and while he could reasonably picture Hiyori in it, Yokozawa himself was another story. The furrow between his brows deepened just thinking about what he’d look like in the thing. “Papa bought it for me for my birthday, but it’s too big for me to use just yet. It might be a little small for you, but it’s all I have right now…” “It would be a waste to get your present dirty, though, right?” “You wear an apron so you won’t get your clothes dirty. It’s a waste not to use it!” She seemed set on lending it to him, so to refuse would be rude. But it wasn’t as if Kirishima was going to see him in it, so after much hesitation, he decided to borrow it without fuss. He finally took the apron from her, reminding, “Then I’ll use it gratefully. But—don’t laugh if it doesn’t look good on me, got it?”

YOKOZAWA TAKAFUMI NO BAAI, VOL. 1 CHAPTER 3

#yokozawa takafumi #kirishima hiyori #yokozawa takafumi no baai #trifecta #yokozawa x hiyori #hiyori x yokozawa #sekaiichi hatsukoi #sekaiichi-and-junjou #sekkoi #junjou romantica #kirishima family

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selfiecharmedlife · 5 years

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RE: Process posting vol 1: Why did this bum me out so much

I don’t have a goal in mind for this post, but I have a starting point and I want to see where I end up. Recently, I saw a movie and anyone in the same discord servers as me is likely aware that I felt a pretty strong reaction to it. I just can’t quite figure out why. Maybe a writing exercise will help me unpack what’s going on in my broken brain.

Background stuff: Hibike Euphonium is a show about a high school band that follows a freshman euphonium player as she goes through high school. Egos clash, characters grow, and they play music together as the main set of characters get older and transition from being mentees to leaders. As a former 1st chair, band was a huge part of my high school experience. Euphonium’s accuracy to what it’s like being in a high school concert band is almost frightening at times. One of the seasons of the TV anime had the main character grilled in front of the band for continuing to fail a part. I’ve been in that position and the tone the band director’s voice actor took sent me back to my high school band days. When the scene was over, I realized I had been holding my breath. As the band performs, you can hear the kinds of mistakes a high school band makes and even minor things like the sound of a tuning slide moving are put front and center. Those little touches mean so much to me. The animation is also stunning. Basically, I highly recommend it and could gush for multiple posts.

As per most of the shows I write about, it’s also got some gay. The protagonist, Kumiko, and the band’s star trumpet player, Reina, are middle school classmates entering high school with distance between them that gradually closes. Kumiko admires Reina unabashed desire to stand out and express her talent. When a trombone player makes it obvious that he’s interested in Kumiko, she doesn’t return his affection and instead keeps developing an increasingly intimate relationship with Reina. Several scenes across the two seasons of the anime suggest their interest is more than platonic so much that other characters comment how comfortable they are with each other.

It’s one of my favorite series so when the movie came to American theaters last week, I got my gay ass together and went to see the gay band girl movie. The first scene has the trombone boy Kumiko had previously shown romantic disinterest toward confessing to her. She has a surprised reaction and the opening credits play. We don’t see her response, but throughout the movie there is a running sub-plot where we find out she agreed to date him after the concert season is over before further ultimately postponing it further at the end of the movie after he tries to kiss her. This was contrasted against other scenes more typical of the series where Kumiko and Reina seem extremely comfortable with each other. Apparently, a third season of the anime is in production so whomst can tell what’ll happen with these characters. As I walked back to my car, I felt myself getting more upset. This was the first time I felt like I had been queer baited. A previous side character jumped in front of two seasons of wlw momentum during the very first scene of the movie and the previously disinterested protagonist is now jealous when he shows attention to someone else.

That’s the crux of what I wanted to process via writing. Why is it that I was having that reaction to this pretty mundane movie? Even now, it still bugs me. Like I said earlier, I was the 1st chair trombone of my own concert band and a lot of the story, characters and sets of this show feel nostalgic for me. The hot summers at marching band camp, the small problems that felt world ending at the time, learning from older students and then finding out you have younger students looking up to you. I grew a lot as part of being in band and I consider it the defining part of my high school career. It was also the only co-ed activity in my all boys high school. The girls from out sister school would take the bus every morning to practice and as they would pack up and leave after morning practice, I’d often wish I could go with them. It’s how I met my first girlfriend who deserved much better than an insecure, dysphoric and jealous adolescent.

Outside of band, high school is where I best learned to hate myself. In the four hallways (and science wing!) of my tiny high school, I transitioned from an awkward and bullied kid that loved anime to basically the same person but more depressed, better at faking manhood and ashamed of liking things. That shame would take years of therapy to start to unwind. One of my classmates would years later describe it as going to school in a locker room.

I didn’t want to go to that school. In middle school, I was savagely bullied by my public school classmates. In grade school, I was the member of my grade that kept being friends with a flamboyant kid in our class through his own terrible homophobic bulling. Eventually, he would transfer to a different school and the I was the new “fa**ot.” In middle school, I would regularly get insulted, shoved into lockers or jumped and beaten up. One time a group of kids even followed me home from school where I waited home alone while they knocked on all the doors and windows trying to get me to come outside. My parents tried to pull me out of the school, but I stuck it out and graduated. Even though I wanted to continue in public school, my parents put me in a private high school to get me away from that bullying.

Maybe those bullies were onto something though, throughout middle school and grade school I would have dreams where I relived my day as a girl. It felt nice. It felt so nice that I felt guilty about it and developed an anxiety disorder. Sometimes I wonder what could have been if I had been able to express myself during those meetings with a therapist. What if I could have trusted that my parents could be supportive? What if my mom hadn’t been in the room for some of those visits? What if the therapist that might have suspected what was up pushed me just a little bit into really admitting what I wanted? Sometimes I feel that there is a near timeline where I was able to express my feelings. Maybe I would have been able to start puberty blockers. I could have started them in middle school and still graduated. Maybe I’d start HRT near the end of middle school and get a few months under my belt before high school. My parents could still have put me in a different school and I would have had a chance to have the high school life of a girl. Maybe they would have put me in the sister school we did band with and I’d still have had that experience.

In my head, I know that timeline isn’t as close as it feels. My parents wouldn’t have supported me then that just like how they don’t support me now. In my heart though, it feels good. It’s when you make a pizza for dinner after skipping lunch and pull it right out of the oven. It’s hot and burns your mouth, but it’s meeting some other need. As much as I used to think I didn’t want to relitigate my history, these fantasies are fulfilling while also extremely painful.

As my old high school world religions teacher used to say, back to the point of departure. I’ve written before about how people connect to media to work out their own issues. People are really good at it and sometimes do it without realizing it. Euphoniums attention to detail on the experience of high school band, the significance of band in my own high school life, the hints of gay and the reality that I can’t have the experience I wanted to all sort of mush together into a ball of pain and feelings that I didn’t perfectly realize was there. An emotional knot rooted from my past that I need to work on untangling in the present. I guess that rounds out why I was having that reaction and gives me some things to work on.

****

I wrote this out Wednesday night and woke up this morning to find out KyoAni, the production studio was the subject of a deadly arson attack. I’ve been thinking about it all day. The works they put out were beautiful, evocative and series I’ve treasured many years after viewing them. They are a standout in the animation industry for treating employees well. As of right now, there is a gofundme up for donations but it isn’t clear when or how that money will get to KyoAni (https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-kyoani-heal/). A more direct way of supporting is purchasing from their online store. There is a guide here: here pic.twitter.com/N8pPN6uo72

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recentanimenews · 7 years

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Bookshelf Briefs 9/5/17

Super mega briefs!

Aho-Girl, Vol. 2 | By Hiroyuki | Kodansha Comics -This is a 4-koma gag comic, so does not really rely on character or plot development. You just need funny gags. In this case, the gags rely on the main cast being absolute idiots. And to the manga’s credit, they are. If the cast were even a tiny bit less dumb, the whole series would merely be tedious. But everyone, especially the title girl, quadruples down on the stupidest possible outcome to any situation, and it just works. We do see a new girl here, who seems to like cute girls but may simply be as eccentric as everyone else. As for Sayaka, even given the fact that every gag comic needs a straight man, you still feel bad she’s in this series. Maybe she can go hang out with Nanase from Book Girl. – Sean Gaffney

Anne Happy, Vol. 6 | By Cotoji | Yen Press – Once again, there are hints that while the rest of the class has some random bad luck, Hanako’s bad luck—as well as her terminal case of Pollyanna optimism—may have a more sinister origin. I also get the sense, given the various hints we’re given in this volume, that their teacher is a former student of the unlucky class. In any case, we get the usual vague mixture of amusing and heartwarming, as Hibari thinks too much, Botan tries a bit too hard, and Hibiki is an absolute mess. I admit that I’m grateful for the hints of an ongoing plot regarding Hanako, mostly as otherwise this series doesn’t quite get along entirely on pure charm. You want it to be going somewhere, and for now I will trust that it is. – Sean Gaffney

A Centaur’s Life, Vol. 12 | By Kei Murayama | Seven Seas – Once again, I get the feeling that A Centaur’s Life is just a thin excuse for the author to do whatever he feels like doing every chapter. We get more action-packed dramatic flashbacks with death and maiming, framed as the cast visiting a natural history museum to look at their ancestors. We get romantic comedy hijinks, with crushes on guys and the like. We get more chapters that examine how typical Japanese events would work in the Centaur’s Life world, such as idol groups and faked ghost stories (or is it fake?). The best chapter in the book involves the cast having a mostly serious discussion on the concept of heaven, and why if you try to dig too deep to analyze heaven it just gets disturbing. As variable as ever. – Sean Gaffney

Chihayafuru, Vol. 4 | By Yuki Suetsugu | Kodansha Comics (digital only) – I love how Suetsugu-sensei uses Chihaya’s continued passion for karuta to get Arata to admit that he still loves the game. When they were kids, he was the one who introduced her to the game, and now she’s the one who brings him back to it, first by sending him updates on Mizusawa High’s progress through the Tokyo qualifiers, which has him refreshing his inbox every ten seconds for the results, and then by moving on to nationals at a venue that brings up memories of his grandfather. We learn more about what happened with his grandpa’s health, and it’s awful and sad, but learning that others look forward to seeing his grandpa’s style through him begins to clear up his guilt somewhat. Perhaps he can honor his grandpa best by continuing to play? I love this series so much. – Michelle Smith

Drifters, Vol. 4 | By Kohta Hirano | Dark Horse Comics – It has been three-and-a-half years since the last volume of Drifters came out in North America. That said, with a series like this I’m not sure it matters much. Sure, I’d forgotten literally everything going on in the previous books, and we don’t even get a ‘what has gone before’ page at the front. But I mean, this is Kohta Hirano. Is there lots of fighting? Oh yes. Some bloody killings? Definitely. Insane grins? By the bucketful. The whole manga is just an excuse for all of those things, and therefore it seems churlish to criticize the fact that the plot doesn’t really go anywhere, or that female characters are either absent or objectified. Recommended if you loved Hellsing, otherwise easily skippable. – Sean Gaffney

Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, Vol. 19 | By Yuto Tsukuda and Shun Saeki | Viz Media – This volume is interesting, but it does give off a bit of a sense of filler, as we slowly advance through Azami’s plan to remake the school in his twisted image. Much to my surprise, Ryo’s battle does not go the way I assumed it would, and this leads to a number of satisfying scenes. There’s also the confirmation, which I think most readers have guessed by now, that Alice was in fact trying to contact Erina all along, and her letters were blocked all these years. The most dangerous battle may be the new one Soma has with #1 seat Tsukasa. They turn out to work very well together, almost like a well-oiled machine… which leads to Tsukasa offering to let Soma join Central. Some, of course, refuses… but will he regret it? Always good. – Sean Gaffney

Giant Killing, Vol. 5 | By Masaya Tsunamoto and Tsujitomo | Kodansha Comics (digital only) – East Tokyo United has lost the first several games of the season, and fans and management are starting to voice their displeasure. Now ETU is facing Nagoya, a team with three talented Brazilian players. But Tatsumi has spotted Nagoya’s one weakness and worked out a plan to exploit it. Seeing the team working together and their defense holding strong is a lot of fun, but their faces when they finally manage to score are the best bit. Tsubaki has talent, but he’s been inconsistent so far. Now, he seems to be playing without hesitation, and when he scores first ETU’s first goal, his expression conveys both his relief and a sense of atonement for past mistakes. There just seems to be more on the line than is usual in sports manga, and I was thoroughly caught up in the action until it was abruptly over. Highly recommended! – Michelle Smith

Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You, Vol. 27 | By Karuho Shiina | VIZ Media – Inspired by Sawako’s ability to honestly discuss her thoughts and feelings, Kazehaya tries a similar approach with his gruff father concerning his university plans. The situation remains unresolved until Kazehaya’s mother tells him about a special drawer wherein he discovers that his father has saved everything Kazehaya ever gave him. “You do make your dad happy. You really do. He just doesn’t show it.” Sniff! I didn’t know I needed to see them achieve an understanding, but apparently I did. After Sawako makes her decision about where she’s going to school, the focus shifts back to Ayane and her heartache over Pin, who she is convinced will never look at her romantically. It’s great to see her feeling love, after she doubted that she could, whatever the outcome. This is still such a great series! – Michelle Smith

Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl, Vol. 3 | By Canno | Yen Press – Shiramine and Kurosawa have entered their second year and evidently still aren’t a couple, despite the occasional smooch that transpires between them. Shiramine is still not particularly likable, but she’s a bit more tolerable this time around, and has managed to defeat Kurosawa by one point on an English exam. There’s some question about whether she herself is special, or whether Kurosawa would take anyone who could make her feel like a regular girl, but this question is answered when Kurosawa is roped into the gardening club due simply to sheer proximity and not for her talents. She ends up staying, and dragging Shiramine into it, but mostly the second half of the volume deals with the other two members of the club. Although it’s still not as good as some schoolgirl yuri I’ve read recently (Bloom Into You), I think this series might be improving. – Michelle Smith

Kuroko’s Basketball, Vols. 13-14 | By Tadatoshi Fujimaki | Viz Media – Seirin vs. To-Oh is the main thrust of this volume, and it’s just as exciting as you might imagine, even if it’s tough to find words to describe it. As with most sports manga, you tend to define it as “good sports happens in these pages,” so even in an omnibus I struggle to say much more than “wow, he really got stronger!” or “did you see that shot?”. There is a hot springs section at the start of the book, which gives the teams a chance to casually taunt each other before the game, and also some primo fanservice, exactly the sort that young boys will want to see. There’s also some flashbacks to Kuroko’s middle-school days, mostly to give more depth to Aomine. Basketball happens. But it’s really good basketball. -Sean Gaffney

Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, Vol. 25 | By Shinobu Ohtaka | Viz Media – Well, we do get some Morgiana, my wish from the previous brief, but not a lot. Instead, Harukyuu is the focus of this 25th volume, which is both good and bad. Bad in that he turns to darkness, letting his anger rule him, mind-controlling soldiers and deciding murder is the best solution. Good in that the way this is handled turns out to be some of the best writing in the series, and a highlight of the volume. And honestly, if you’re going to try to murder someone, it’s hard to go wrong with his mother Gyokuen, who is smug in the best possible way, and even gets a few Higurashi faces here. (That’s her on the cover.) As for Alibaba, well, he’s headed over there, and I expect he and Harukyuu are going to clash horribly next book. – Sean Gaffney

My Love Story!!, Vol. 13 | By Kazune Kawahara and Aruko | VIZ Media – There are many shoujo romances that end with a reunion after a long separation, but My Love Story!! tackles this a little differently, showing us how tough the time apart was for Yamato and how hard she and Takeo are working to be able to get into the same college. Their romance stuff was nice, but honestly, the hero of the volume is Sunakawa, who keeps Takeo on track with studying, personally taking charge of his tutoring, and making good on a promise to smack Takeo if he ever does something really stupid. I loved that the creators took the time here at the end to emphasize what a special friend he is. I’ll miss this series, but Kawahara-sensei did say “it might be nice to write more of this story someday” in her final author’s note, so make of that what you will! – Michelle Smith

Pandora in the Crimson Shell: Ghost Urn, Vol. 8 | By Shirow Masamune and Rikudou Koushi | Seven Seas – Not as many amusing cameos this time around, and wrapping up one plot and starting another means there’s a lot of awkward transition in the middle. Also, we get more than one “activation” sequence, because kids these days can’t get enough of faux vaginal fingering. Still, I would hope kids these days would not be allowed anywhere near Pandora. The main cast does get to show off, and Nene in particular shows that she’s really something special even among this cast that seems to have a lot of special people and/or machines. Oh yes, and we also get a glimpse of the big bads, who combine Nazi imagery AND Illuminati imagery. If you like saying “wtf?” a lot, Pandora is for you. – Sean Gaffney

Vampire Knight: Memories, Vol. 1 | By Matsuri Hino | Viz Media – I will grant you that Vampire Knight left some open endings, and it’s nice to see those gone into. Still, when you see an author’s next series after their huge hit cancelled after two volumes, and then they return with a spinoff of that old series, it’s hard not to cringe. The best part of this book, even if it’s really bittersweet, is between Aido and Wakaba. It’s clear they both have deep feelings for each other, but it’s also clear that Wakaba does not want to be a vampire, and therefore this romance just isn’t going to happen. It’s an interesting look at the issues semi-immortality brings. The chapters with Yuki interested me less, mostly as they deal with her post-vampiric personality. VK fans will like this, most others will find it superfluous. – Sean Gaffney

By: Michelle Smith

#Anime #News #Manga Bookshelf

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mokkoriness · 7 years

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Show Interview in Town Work Magazine

Our theory of work vol.10

Artists from the Visual-kei band who continuously charm fans with their refined melodies and rhythm. Although they are active as the forefront of the scene now, they have many stories about hardships and things which helped them grow. In this series, we dig deeper into events from their past and about their part-time work experience, which is not something they talk about everyday.

A9, who are welcoming their 13th year anniversary. Their variety of songs which don't put them in one genre and Show's resounding, high-pitched vocals are their charm. Completely different from their brilliant stage performances, this is a must read interview with Show, who gives off the impression that he is well-mannered, which talks about the way he approaches his work now after doing part-time jobs, and the "rule of persistence" he gained during his days in a sports club during school.

What was your first part-time job?

Show: My first part-time job was in my first year of high school, where I was a mover. I started working part-time because wanted money to buy CDs, and all my friends said they were working part-time.

Working as a mover is quite tough.

Show: Usually, the veteran workers would be giving instructions, and us part-time workers would be moving according to their instructions...... But when I had to carry a refrigerator in an apartment building without an elevator, I regretted choosing being a mover as my part-time job (laughs). But you can get your pay right away.

You get paid on the same day.

Show: Since you get paid on the day, you can really feel that "I've gotten some money!". I remember being really emotionally moved at first. After that, I did a variety of part-time jobs, but mainly, I worked at a karaoke place, at a second-hand clothing shop where I was even entrusted to do buying, hall staff at a restaurant, a contract employee at a mobile phone shop, and then when I was working at a select store1, I had joined a Visual-kei band before A9, and now here I am.

Second-hand clothing shops and select shops are about fashion, which is closely related to music, and working at a karaoke place is something that many people who like music choose as a job.

Show: At the time, I had been attending a vocational school related to music, but I had wanted to become a recording engineer. I thought that I would be in a band only as a hobby, so to me, working part-time wasn't something I did in order to find employment in the same field, but a way for me to obtain money to invest in my hobbies. But I thought that if I were to work, it should be in something that would make me interested in it, so I chose those kinds of jobs.

Since you were clear in your goals, it seems like you could be able to take on the job with sincerity.

Show: That's right. No matter what the job was, I was serious about work. When I worked at a second-hand clothes shop, despite the fact that I was new, I was allowed to be in charge of the largest area in the store. While I was feeling pressured and apologetic since a amateur like me was able to do that, even though there were seniors there who came from proper vocational schools like Bunka Fashion College, it was fun.

Among all the part-time jobs you did, did you ever meet anyone who left an impression on you?

Show: Yes. At the second-hand clothes shop, I had a senior who looked like Hideaki Takizawa and he had a really amazing personality. He kindly taught me things from how to fold clothes properly to how to order, and it is the case that I was able to keep working there because he was there. Also, there was a period of about 2 years where I worked two jobs at the second-hand clothes store and hall staff at a restaurant, and the assistant head chef was someone whose hair was in pompadour style and wore a rider's jacket, he even had tattoos and would go home everyday on his Harley-Davidson, so his aura was really cool. But during work he would quietly carry on with food preparation. From that person I learned about devoting yourself to your work without showing one bit of your personality or ego.

It's "meeting people" that is yet another valuable treasure you can gain from working part-time jobs. But it must have been difficult working two jobs at once.

Show: That's right. In the day I worked at the part-time clothes store and after that at night, I worked in the restaurant. Honestly, there were times I thought "I don't want to go" (awkward smile). But thinking about it now, I want to give the people currently looking for part-time work this advice: rather choosing a job only based on the rewards, it would also be better to choose based on what you can gain from that job, and the kind of things you would like to achieve.

That's something you can only say after experiencing it all. Also, it was a little unexpected that you had chosen to work at a mobile phone store, and it's surprising that it wasn't a part-time job but you were a contract employee.

Show: To me, it was just the natural follow-up to working part-time, and I was attracted by how well the hourly wage was, but when I actually went there, I often had to do study groups or research sessions and I had to wear a suit to meet customers, so I was a lot more proper than I expected I would be, taking out all my piercings and making my hair short and black.

From the store's point of view, I guess they would have wanted you to one day become a proper employee someday.

Show: It was apparently a shop that would only allow the kind of elite people who were all high-achievers in sales, and I was only employed because at that time they happened to be short of staff (awkward smile). At first I was really lax in my thinking, and when I went to work wearing transparent piercings, thinking that it would be okay, I was scolded. In order to stand in the store and attend to customers, they taught me many things, from how to stand, how to talk and how to greet people.

You must have learned and realised things from doing many different jobs. Are there times where you feel that you are making use of those things now, in your band activities?

Show: I make use of those things all the time. For me, my parents weren't that strict in raising me, so all the things I needed to learn about going out into society was taught to me through part-time jobs.

There is the image that the senior-junior relationships are quite strict for bands, but if it's you, Show, who is polite in the way in your tone of voice and manners, it doesn't seem like you would make anyone angry.

Show: That's right, I've never been yelled at during my time in a band. But when I was working part-time, I've been told "You don't have to come anymore" twice before. Once was when I was working as a contract employee at a mobile phone shop, I answer the phone not according to how I was instructed, and on top of that I exchanged the wrong phone for them. I was reprimanded quite harshly for that.

Since it was a job you started to save money for your hobbies, I don't think it would be strange to think that you would quit after experiencing something unpleasant......

Show: It's because my mind and body was strictly trained during my high school days when I was in the basketball club. I thought that if I got scolded and was given the chance to redeem myself but it still didn't work out, then I would quit. When I kept my head down the entire time and apologised, I was forgiven. The other time was when I was working as hall staff at a restaurant. I went to the interview with black hair, but I was naive in thinking that anything would be okay once I got the job, so on the first day I showed up with light brown hair and my piercings, and as expected, they said "You don't have to come anymore" (awkward smile). But I refused to back down.

This steel mentality, where you won't get beat up over a small thing!

Show: I thought that was important. Even my voice trainer was apparently astonished at first, like "What kind of talentless guy is this" (awkward smile), but no matter how unskilled I was, I didn't back down half-way through. If you aren't afraid of being denied and try something for at least three months, you'll be able to imagine what you want to be like in 1 years or 2 years time, so the importance of continuing has sunk into my body.

You have been active on the forefront as A9 for 13 years since debuting and with the same members, so your words really are convincing.

Show: With bands, there were too many times I felt vexed when we tried doing it seriously, but I didn't back down. The feeling of "I want to prove them wrong!" is what moves me. And because we formed A9 and I was blessed with members that I can trust, I think we can keep on chasing our dreams. I'm rooting for those people who are working hard part-time while chasing their dreams, and those people who are working part-time hoping to discover their dreams there!

1 A store that sells a wide-variety of things from many different brands

All photos belong to Town Work Magazine / A9

Link to original article: https://townwork.net/magazine/serial/c_oretachi/41535/

#a9 translation #alice nine translation #show #town work magazine

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iamcarriesoom · 7 years

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5ast 5ive

I watched this directly after Fast & 4ious and honestly it was one of the best choices I’ve made in my life. Also these movies are starting to get good so it’s harder to make fun of them.

This one picks up literally the very moment that the last movie left off: Brian is driving in with Mia and the gang to hijack the bus taking Dom to prison. I was in the middle of typing “I am so excited to see how they do this” when the bus swerved and then just started rolling down the street.

Obviously Dom or Letty must’ve been in charge of making their other schemes stealthy and graceful, because this was some clumsy shit. Enter PERD HAPLEY to say there are miraculously no fatalities. Do those buses even have seatbelts?? Also obviously Dom is missing after the crash because he’s run away to live his best life.

Apparently the gang splits up, because the next thing we see is Brian and Mia (who is FINALLY being styled like a Hot Girl) being almost shot by a bunch of people in Rio. They get saved by Vince, who now looks more like Frank from How to Get Away With Murder than Jamie Dornan. Vince has a girlfriend and a kid now, and from the way Mia looks at that kid she is very obviously pregnant.

Vince asks them for their help with a “straightforward” heist, and since Dom isn’t there to do it, they agree, kicking off an insanely badass stunt. Sincere sidenote, Justin Lin’s commitment to practical effects is probably the best thing to happen to this franchise, as one of the things I laughed out loud at in the first movie was how terrible the effects were.

They CUT A HOLE in the side of a train, pull cars out, then drop them off the back of a truck to drive away. It’s honestly very impressive, as unrealistic schemes go. Brian notices they’re seized property, which I don’t understand the significance of at the time, and somehow in there they figure out they’re going to be betrayed or something and they all start punching/shooting each other.

Brian leaps onto the truck, punches some more guys, crashes the truck into the train, and Dom gets away in the last of the cars. The guy they’re fighting also murdered a bunch of DEA agents. This all ends with Brian leaping off the truck onto Dom’s car before he hits a bridge, then they drive off the cliff like Beyonce and Lady Gaga and leap from the car into the beautiful water that is the same color as Paul Walker’s eyes. It’s so ridiculous that I literally laughed out loud.

Vince disappears, and then comes back, and then gets sent away for attempting to betray everyone? I think? The Rock finally shows up as some sort of cop who has the type of jurisdiction that allows him to just snap peoples’ necks, apparently. He’s trying to catch Dom and Brian, but the drug cartel who they were working with on the heist also want to catch/kill Dom and Brian. There’s a lot of gunfire (I mean A LOT) and all the main people escape unscathed but I can only assume about 100 henchmen are killed. The Rock’s partner is Elsa Pataky, who is troubled in some way based on the death of her husband I think? I’m extremely unclear on her character motivations, to be honest.

Dom wants to split up and run, still carrying the chip they stole out of the car that the drug cartel wants back. Mia tells them she’s pregnant (CALLED IT) and that she doesn’t want to lose her family, so they figure they’ll just steal all the drug cartel’s money and disappear to somewhere without extradition. Then they say the 5 words I’d been waiting for: “We’re gonna need a team.”

Since this is the Ocean’s Eleven of F&F movies, we bring in all the best & brightest from the previous films. Tyrese is retconned into being a charming fast-talker instead of a hot-tempered violent misogynist. Ludacris is basically a one-man CSI. Wonder Woman is back, which surprised me a little because I didn’t think she was all that interesting in the last movie and also she was working for the bad guy there. Han is back, being a cutie pie as usual.

Those two guys who helped hijack the gas tanker in the last movie are also back, exploding bathrooms and stuff (my notes literally just say “shitsplosion” with the wailing emoji.)

They go through all the standard heist-planning plot points. Surveillance, putting trackers on the cop cars so they can move without getting caught by The Rock (who was able to find them via facial recognition even though they had masks on, which is a stretch even for fictional law enforcement.) The drug lord moves all his money into a safe inside the police station.

One of the last things they need is a handprint from Reyes, the drug lord. Wonder Woman goes to the beach with Han and flirts with Reyes, and they PULL THE HANDPRINT OFF THE ASS OF HER BATHING SUIT. I’m going to pretend that this is a thing that’s possible because it’s just too funny.

It’s finally heist day, but uh oh, The Rock shows up to arrest everyone. I feel like this movie is like one of those nature specials where a polar bear is trying to eat a baby seal and I can’t decide who to root for.

Can’t Hobbs and Dom just get along? No[t yet]. Hobbs is finally a reasonable foe for Dom, who’s been beating people up in really easy fights for the last few movies. Eventually they get arrested and the whole gang gets carted off in armored SUVs (including Vince, who’d disappeared for most of the movie but was allowed to come back because, say it with me, he’s family).

The drug henchmen fire some sort of bazooka at the armored vehicles (honestly it’s weird that they care that much about getting the stolen chip back considering they’ve already moved all the money?) and a firefight even bigger than the one in the first part of the movie starts. As all the drug henchmen close in on Hobbs, the gang comes out of nowhere with a bunch of guns they must’ve stolen off of dead bodies and save his life. Poor Vince gets a bullet to the gut in the process and eventually dies.

Somehow, Hobbs is totally cool with them being like “We still need to complete our mission,” and even helps them by crashing through some police station walls in that armored truck. In a twist I didn’t see coming (though I later found out it’s in the trailer, which kinda sucks) they pull the entire safe out of the wall and drag it behind two cars for the final chase of the movie.

Now, I know that most of the stunts in these movies aren’t “plausible” by most definitions, but this one really takes the cake. They pull the safe behind them for SO LONG and for a lot of the time it’s not even throwing sparks. I also feel like speeding around a turn with the safe would mean that it would yank them backwards as it kept trying to go straight. Statistically there must also be a ton of civilian casualties.

In the end they use the safe to clobber basically everyone to death, Dom tries to play solo hero but Brian comes back to shoot Reyes (my notes say “of fucking course”) and save Dom’s life. Hobbs is like “You get a 24 hour head start but then it’s back to jail, and also you can’t have this money.” Well if they can’t have the money why the hell did you just help them steal it, HOBBS??

Double twist: they swapped the safe at some point so the gang DOES get the money. Dom gives a sack of cash to Vince’s lady, RIP Vince. Luda uses his loot to open his own garage so he can do what he loves (didn’t he already have his own garage? It’s unclear.) It’s very endearing. Dom, Brian and Mia escape to somewhere beachy and beautiful and Mia is pregnant AF. I’m normally very cynical about most tv/movie relationships but damn they’re cute together. Elsa Pataky is also there for some reason. I still don’t understand her deal.

(epilogue: TRIPLE TWIST- Eva Mendes shows up to bring Hobbs a file, and it’s got a picture of Letty in it. She’s FINALLY coming back from the dead!)

Unrelatedly, a thing I learned from this movie that I forgot about until right now is that drug dealers measure money by the pound? That’s can’t possibly be a real thing, can it?

Previously:

Vol 4: Fast & Fourious

Vol 3: What’s even the point of driftng?

Vol 2: 2 Furious 2 Quit

Vol 1: The Fast & the Curious

#the fast and the furious #fast five

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shadowtearling · 7 years

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January is over! I’m both glad and surprised it came and went so quickly. I feel proud of myself for reading as much as I did this month!!!! I think the new year is always a good motivator to read read read. I love it. I’m doing a better job so far this year of reading whenever I can and taking advantage of my spare time in between and before classes. PLUS the long commute helps. Last year, I constantly found reason to NOT read, and this year, it’s like I can’t get enough! I also apparently can’t get enough of the exclamation point. Is it too much? Also! Do you all like this new banner? Any font suggestions? I’m clearly terrible at picking fonts; too indecisive. :( Anyway! On to the books!!!

Rating system: 2017 is the year of reading critically if I want to add diversity to my list of priorities for the kind books to be reading. This means also being a little more stingy with my ratings. (I don’t feel bad about this actually. I found I feel guiltier giving out five stars willy nilly, so this is an improvement!). This rating system is still arbitrary, so three star ratings don’t always have the same weight to them. As always, I rate based on my own thoughts and feelings, and as always, these are my opinions (unless I’m speaking about my marginalization(s). Don’t argue lmao).

Rating Scale: 🌟 - 1 whole star ⭐️ - ½ star

Nichijou: My ordinary life (Vol. 1 & 2) by Keiichi Arawi - 🌟 🌟 🌟 = 3/5 (for both) This is a manga series about high school everyday life, but with a twist! (she said with sarcasm) There are a bunch of girls in high school and one of them happens to be a robot who just wants to fit in and be human (and her child scientist companion). One of the girls also happens to love making puns, one of them is the typical deadpan-type of characters, and the others are the normal ones. Some jokes were funny, most of them were not. I love puns, but this just had really terrible ones. The characters were supremely uninteresting, and I really don’t care about any of them. That said, while I was reading this, I guess I was entertained for the time being. This helps pass time quickly, but not the greatest manga I’ve ever encountered.

Sweetness and Lightning (Vol. 1) by Gido Amagakure - 🌟 🌟 🌟 = 3/5 What’s better than food-related manga? Nothing! Except, I can find better food-related manga out there than this lmao. This was fun to read, but I found all of the characters were bland. I couldn’t find myself too invested in their stories. I also feel like this is going in the direction of student-teacher relationship (younger me would have loved that, but me now is absolutely creeped out by the idea of it). The child is adorable, though. I also do really love the positive relationship between the child and the dad, so that’s one redeeming quality. I don’t think I’ll continue with this series, though, unless I find copies of this for cheaps.

Orange (Omnibus Vol. 1 & 2) by Ichigo Takano - 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 = 5/5 (for both) Out of all 12 books I’ve read this month, these are the only two five-star reads! I’m stingy lmao. Anyway, this was soooooooo good! Basically, this series is about this girl, Naho, who on the first day of her junior year (I THINK... don’t hold me to this), she receives a letter from future her telling her what will happen on those days and what she needs to do versus what she should avoid doing. She dismisses that letter until the contents come true! So this series then entails what happens with those letters and Naho & her friends. I cried so many tears and felt so many feelings. I related so hard to Kakeru even though our struggles were not the same. I also really loved the ending (even though I know a lot of people didn’t like how open-ended it was). I appreciated that aspect of the story because it feels true to the kind of tale it’s telling. It perfectly depicts how friends first react versus how they should react to other friends’ struggles. I really love the dynamics between every person, and I can only wish this series was longer to explore the different friendships we were introduced to. I HIGHLY recommend this series. Please go read it! (And then tell me so we can binge-watch the anime together!)

Something in Between by Melissa de la Cruz - 🌟 🌟 🌟 ⭐️ = 3.5/5 A story with a Filipina lead?! Sign me up! This tells the story of Jasmine who is the perfect student and is set to kick ass in college until she learns that her and her entire family have been illegal immigrants the entire time, and this super awesome scholarship she was supposed to get can no longer help her. I really loved getting to see my own culture reflected in this story (this is an #ownvoices ;) so go check it out). I didn’t appreciate the little jabs at other cultures though I do understand where it comes from. I also think there was so much happening? I feel like Jasmine and her fam were trying to tackle so much all at once (it’s realistic bc what POC doesn’t go thru so much in so little time), but also it made for a messy story. OH! I hated the writing lmao. It was tacky and not my style. I also think I’m just hella tired of YA contemporaries, but as of right now, they’re the biggest source for diversity in any YA category. Fantasy is still far too white lol. I still would recommend this because it is an important story that helps humanize immigrants, but beware lmao.

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli- 🌟 🌟 🌟 = 3/5 I really enjoyed this story, but I was expecting so much more than what I was given. I hear everyone always raving about how fantastic this book was, but I think this was way too overhyped for me, which is why I didn’t like it as much as everyone else. I feel like the tension between friends was either unnecessary or done poorly (I’m talking about Leah here). HOWEVER, I still do like it. Simon was a fun character, and Blue was also really interesting. I also really love the discussion around consent and identity, and I think it was done well.

Welcome to the Shadowhunter Academy (#1) by Cassandra Clare - 🌟 🌟 🌟 = 3/5 Simon felt reaaaaaally out of character in this novella. Maybe that’s bc of what happened at the end of TMI and that’s a valid excuse, but it makes me uncomfortable. Simon was one of the better characters in that series, and I really feel like he got butchered here. With that said, however, I do think that this novella shows improvement in CC’s writing because I still surprisingly enjoyed it. I just don’t think I’ll continue on with CC’s works? I think this is me breaking up with the Shadowhunter chronicles. She’s also highly problematic, so there’s that.

The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi - 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 = 4/5 LOVE This! An #Ownvoices fantasy about Mayavati whose horoscope entails a marriage with death and destruction. I buddy read this one with one of my really close friends (she doesn’t read too often), and we both really enjoyed it. Maya is this really dynamic character that, as the story progresses, really matures in a realistic way. The writing was phenomenal but I do think it was a bit out of place? Idk I always have problems whenever the writing is sophisticated but then it’s first person POV. Like.... I’m pretty positive that my brain cannot conceive even half of those words to describe what’s happening around me. I’d see a tree and I’d describe it as “green and really tall...” So there’s that. I also think that the writing kind of made it difficult to fall in love with the couple. I didn’t totally buy the romance, despite me loving both characters individually. I love the incorporation of different aspects of Indian culture as part of the fantasy elements of the world. I would love more from this story, but as it stands, this is where Maya’s story ends (the next book is actually a companion........). I highly recommend it! (Even though it sounds like I didn’t like it lmao I promise I did).

Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake - 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 = 4/5 I absolutely loved this. First of all, I appreciate that I can tell each sister apart from one another because they have such distinct personalities (Arisonoe is my fave as it turns out even if she has a dumb ass name). It’s a super slow book that basically builds up to the fight to the death (it doesn’t actually happen in this book). I knew that going in which is why I wasn’t salty when it didn’t happen. Basically, we get introduced to the sisters in this book, find out that there are some hella issues going on with their missing powers, and it gave us time to get used to the world all while introducing us to the characters. My number one biggest giant complaint is that I realllllly fucking hate Joseph. He’s an asshat and I hope he dies in book two. Katharine please kill him. There was an unnecessary love triangle lmao like fuck off with that shit maybe. I also hated Pietyr. So basically, the dudes are assholes and the girls are fantastic. Maybe that was the point? This is a matriarchal society so I guess it worked. Highly recommend if you really like politically-driven books and a large cast of characters.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seannan McGuire - 🌟 🌟 🌟 ⭐️ = 3.5/5 The writing is quite calming. Also confusing. This is another one of those far too hyped for me to love in the same way everyone else does. i appreciate the amazing concept and the wonderful conversations taking place in this book about identity, sexuality, gender, and mental illness. However, it was too short for me to really love any of the characters. I certainly failed to connect with the MC and didn’t feel for her anguish. It also left a bad taste in my mouth that the first person to be killed off in the murder mystery aspect happens to be POC when there were like 20 other white kids lmao........ NOT THAT I CONDONE MURDER but why we gotta kill POC for....... Idk. Proceed with caution I guess.

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe- 🌟 🌟 🌟 = 3/5 This was funny as hell. Basically, it’s about this lady whose name we never really know because she keeps changing it to suit her needs. She was born in a prison, so she’s set up to fail in every aspect of her life bc poor and no family. HOWEVER, this is the story of how she eventually says fuck you to everyone and succeeds anyway bc why not. I read this for class, and I highly enjoyed it. Problems: there were literally zero chapter breaks, random ass capitalization (why must 17/18th century authors do this to me), too many much cataloging of goods (though that was literally the point is to be excessive... I get it... pls stop), and the author basically just said to the plot “GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO” without taking a break. If you like classics similar to Jane Austen (but without the romance part bc she just basically scams all her husbands lmao), I think this is a really good one to check out.

Thank you, lovely, for reading through this mess of a post. I love you and I hope you have a wonderful February reading month!

#wrap up #2017 #january 2017 #january #books #book #bookish #booklr #book reviews #read #reading #readingwu #readingwu 2017

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placetobenation · 4 years

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1994 was a big year for video games. Titles released that year on the SNES and Sega Genesis would be all time classics that are beloved to this very day. Sega had the Sega CD add on which had some hits and misses. Sega would release the short lived 32x in November of 1994 to try and keep the Genesis going just a little while long. But before I get into any of that, it is worth noting that the NES was still alive and kicking in 1994, although just barely. Most of my friends and myself has moved on to Super Nintendo by this point. My NES and the games got packed up, put in a closet, and forgotten about for a long time. Some friends of mine went so far as to throw their NES’s away, thinking it to be as antiquated as Atari and something they would never want to play again. That year, according to Wikipedia, there were 12 official releases in North America for the NES. I don’t have much to say about Mickey’s Adventures in Numberland or Mario’s Time Machine. They are both educational games for small children, focusing on math and history lessons. There is not much more to say than that. By this point, developers have figured out just what the limitations of the system were and learned how to make games for it. While not all the games I am covering today are gems, they aren’t the epicly shitty games you found earlier in the life of the NES. Many of these games could be a blind spot for some who, like myself, had moved on to other game systems and were unaware of these titles. Some of them are worth exploring if you are feeling in a retro gaming mood.

Wario’s Woods

I guess I will start at the end. Wario’s Woods was the last game released on the NES in North America. It is an addictive puzzle game with game play elements from Super Mario Bros. 2. In this game you play Toad. The story goes that Wario has taken over a portion of woods in the Mushroom Kingdom called the Peaceful Woods. Wario has cast a spell over the creatures of the woods and are making them do his bidding. It is up to Toad ,with help from a fairy named Wanda and Birdo from Super Mario 2, to defeat Wario and reclaim the Peaceful Woods. Why Toad and not Mario or Luigi or Princess Peach? I guess they were busy that day.

What happens is that Wanda makes bombs and drops them into the game area. As Toad, you lift the various creatures, matching the color of the creature to the bomb. Blow up all the creatures and move on to the next level. Birdo is in the corning doing….something. I think the official explanation is offering encouragement. You are up against a timer. If the timer runs out, Birdo runs off and Wario shows up. Wanda is also replaced by a pigeon which drops monsters into the game area. DON’T LET THE PIGEON DROP MONSTERS INTO THE GAME AREA. Wario also drops the ceiling lower on you to make matters more difficult. Eventually, Wario gets bored and goes away. Birdo comes back and now you can resume blowing up critters with bombs. Unlike many puzzle games of the time, this one has a proper ending. Get to the last level, defeat all of Wario’s critters, and win the game.

The NES was good for addictive little puzzle games, Tetris and Dr Mario being the most fondly remembered. Wario’s Woods fits right into that category. However, I feel like this game gets overlooked . Most likely because it came out so late in the life span of the system. Wario’s Woods has been released a few times and is currently on the Switch NES Online Library. If you have that service, I would encourage you to give this game a try. It’s easy to learn and hard to master. The gameplay is a lot of fun. Getting to the end was a rewarding experience for me. Wario’s Woods is a concept I think would work out quite well if they retooled it and put out a new version of the game in mobile devices. That is the home of puzzle games these days and I could see this catching on if they did it right.

Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers 2

Here is a game I didn’t know existed until I started this project. Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers 2 is a sequel to the 1990 game and is based on the Disney Afternoon cartoon. Developed by Capcom, it has all the elements one would expect from a Capcom side-scrolling platformer. You have a catchy 8-bit soundtrack, smooth gameplay and controls, , good looking graphics, and fun elements added to each stage. Capcom really mastered making this type of game and even with this being a late entry into the NES library, they still lived up to their reputation.

Fat Cat has escaped from prison. While that was happening, Chip, Dale, and their friends are all called away on a time bomb situation as a distraction. With Fat Cat safely on the loose, he steals the Urn of the Pharoh and plans to set the evil spirits loose. Chip, Dale, Monterrey, Gadget, and Zipper all track down Fat Cat to an amusement park to bring him to justice.

If I have any criticism of this game its that their isn’t a lot of challenge to it. It’s a lot of fun. They put some time and thought into the platforming and level design. I breezed through this game without much of an issue. You can find this game on PS4 and XBOX One in the Disney Afternoon Collection along with other fantastic games like Duck Tales, Tale Spin, and Darkwing Duck. Disney and Capcom were on a great run in the early 90’s. Watching these shows after school was a favorite part of my day back then. It is a concept that has been lost over time and that is just the way it is. After school programming was so much fun back then. Get home, catch the last part of GWF on ESPN, then it was Duck Tales, Rescue Rangers, then change the channel to PBS for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, wrap it up with Tale Spin, finally it was time to go outside and play for a while before dinner and homework. Playing these games certainly is a part of those nostalgic feelings. I am curious how the younger people would feel about these games. To me, they hold up as some of the best from the NES library.

Mega Man 6

Speaking of Capcom, Mega Man would see it’s last entry on the NES in 1994, released in March of that year. Like the aforementioned Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers 2 , the game features a catchy soundtrack, fun platforming elements, smooth controls, and colorful graphics. If you liked the other Mega Man games, then you should like this one because they stayed fairly close to the formula. There are eight robot masters each with their own themed stages. Beat the robot master,gain a special ability move on to the next. Once all the robot masters are defeated, storm the castle. Complete each level of the castle, fight the last boss and win the game.

With the world at relative peace since Mega Man 5, the people decide to have an robot fighting tournament hosted by the mysterious Mr. X. During this episode of Robot Jox, Mr. X takes control of the top eight robots and attempts to take over the world. Mr. X explains he was behind Dr. Wily’s plots all along. Dr Light sends Mega Man into action to take down the rogue robot masters. The eight robot masters are Centaur Man, Blizzard Man, Flame Man, Knight Man, Plant Man, Tomahawk Man, Wind Man, and Yamato Man. Once they are defeated, Mega Man goes after Mr. X directly. You will never guess who Mr. X really is.

The focus of this game seems to lean heavily on the level design. Each of the robot masters levels have some unique challenges consistent with each of their powers. Wind Man’s level has you riding over pit traps and spikes with strategically placed fans. Flame Man’s level has rivers of oil that you don’t want to be in when they get set on fire. This time Rush combines with Mega Man to give him a Jet Pack and Power Punch. The robot masters aren’t terribly difficult this time around. In fact, they are painfully easy to beat. For as difficult as Mega Man 1 was, it’s kind of ridiculous how Mega Man 6 is so easy. The thing I will remember about this game is the contest in Nintendo Power where people could enter their ideas of Robot Master. I submitted an entry and got a pleasant form level in return. I was just happy to have had chance to enter my ideas.

It is fitting that the NES would go out with a Mega Man game in it’s last year. This style of game was defining for the system. The first six Mega Man games were so popular that the 8 bit style would be brought back years later for Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10. Mega Man 6 has been rereleased in several compilations, such as the Mega Man Anniversary Collection on the original X Box and PS2 as well as the Mega Man Legacy Collection Vol. 1 on the Nintendo Switch, 3DS, PlayStation 4, and X Box One. Mega Man would have a rough transition going forward. The SNES I will always associate with the Mega Man X series. It was the home of Mega Man 7 but somehow it just didn’t feel right. The less said about Mega Man 8 on the PS1, the better. Mega Man 6 will probably be remembered as one of the best late entries into the NES library and a bit of a curiosity as most people had moved on to the 16 bit systems by the time it was released.

The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak.

If you happened to buy this game in a bargain bin at Blockbuster back in the day and kept it in your closet all these years, I have great news for you. The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak is one of the rarest games in the NES library. As of press time, a copy of this game sells for anywhere from $800 to $2000. There are apparently less than 10,000 copies of this game floating around. It is believed that Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak was an exclusive to Blockbuster in 1994 although there is some dispute to that. Chances are, the only way one played this game back then was to get it from a rental location.

The game is somewhat of a sequel to The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy also developed by Taito. In Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, you switch back and forth between Fred and Barney. They each have different abilities that help one navigate through each stage. The idea is that Pebbles and Bam Bam are stuck on a lava flow from an erupting volcano. The only way to save them is to walk all the way around the volcano to the other side. In an odd scene at the beginning, The Great Gazoo appears to Fred to tell him that he can’t help because teleportation is behind his abilities. (?) No matter. You side-scroll and platform through the various levels and there are bonus stages with cave man hockey and basketball.

Overall, its a good looking game that plays pretty well. They put some thought into each level as well as the cut scenes. Given how few of these carts were made, it really is impressive just how much care and detail they put into the game. It’s not terribly difficult. You can breeze through it without too much of a hassle. I have to think this game would have done better if it had been released earlier in the life of the NES. Movie and TV show license games were notoriously bad. I had the misfortune of owning Back to the Future. A good friend in my neighborhood ended up with Fester’s Quest. The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak is a drastic improvement from those games. The graphics and game play are far superior to much of the early NES library. Fans of The Flintstones will appreciate the references that the game adds in. It is a genuine Flintstones experience. However, if you want to play this game as a curiosity, I can’t recommend paying up to $800 and beyond for a copy. This a fine game but not worth that much money unless you plan on becoming a serious collector of NES games.

Bonk’s Adventure

There is some similarity between Bonk’s Adventure and the game just discussed The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak. They are both fairly expensive games that were released late in the lifespan of the NES and have a prehistoric theme. Bonk is best remembered as the mascot for the short lived Turbo Grafx 16 consoul. While the NES version doesn’t look as good as the Turbo Grafx one, it is a really good looking game for an 8-bit system. The game play is very similar to other side-scrolling platformers. The goal is to go from level to level through this prehistoric world trying to save Princess Za from King Drool. A lot of video game plots back then were inspired by Super Mario Bros. Bonk walks through the world with nothing but a headbutt attack. You have a volcano level, water level, ice level,your typical affair for this type of game. Aside from the rarity, what makes this game remarkable is how faithfully they were able to port a 16-bit game onto an 8-bit console. Much like the last game we discussed, it would have been more fondly remembered if it had been released earlier in the NES’s life. Bonk’s Adventure is better than much of what we were stuck playing when the NES was at it’s peak. Bonk’s Adventure was rereleased on the WII and WIIU Virtual Console if you would like to play it without having to pay the obscene price for the actual cart. It is a must have for serious collectors though.

Alfred Chicken

Alfred is a chicken who flaps and pecks his way through five levels popping balloons along the way. I don’t know that there is a story to the game beyond that. Alfred Chicken is a platformer with puzzle elements added in for fun. In each level you have to find green balloons. Pop the balloons and float to the next level. The bulk of the game is climbing up platforms and reasoning out where balloons may be. Unlike many of the games previously discussed, the graphics aren’t all that good looking. It looks like a colorized version of a Gameboy game. The music is also quite annoying and very repetitive. What it lacks in visuals and sound, Alfred Chicken makes up for in gameplay. The levels are a lot of fun to work your way through if your a fan of platforming. The best I can describe it would be like a combination between Krusty’s Fun House and Kid Icarus. There are a few boss fights at the end of each level which resemble a shooter like Life Force or UN Squadrons. That kind of variety is appreciated. Alfred Chicken got a remake for the PS1 in 2002. That game looks a lot better and has more levels to it. I would probably recommend finding that game rather than this once, give how much some of these later years NES game cost. Alfred Chicken is a fun game to pick up and play but they could have done more with the concept and flushed it out better. My hope is that they did that with the remake and made a better gaming experience. The NES version feels like the playable Beta test for a much better game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters

At this point, I am understanding some of the complaints that the younger generation has about the NES. I have discussed a lot of platformers and puzzle games. If you cut your teeth on these games, then they are great but there isn’t a lot of variety on the system. The NES was a bit too late to cash in on the popularity of fighting games in the mid 90’s, lead by Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II. Neither of those games would be ported to the NES, although oddly they did make their way to the Sega Master System. If you have played those games or own them, then I tip my hat to you. There weren’t many games on the NES that could fit into the fighting game genre. So imagine my surprise when I found Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters. If you have this one sitting in the back of your closet, I have great news for you. It is worth quite a bit of money.

The idea of the game is that you pick from one of six characters. Included are the four Turtles, Casey Jones, and Hothead, apparently a character from the comics. You fight each of the Ninja Turtles then go on to face Casey Jones, Hothead, and a final battle with Shredder to beat the game. Shredder is absurdly difficult so there is a great sense of accomplishment when you manage to beat this one. Sadly, in this version of the game, the Ninja Turtles aren’t given their weapons. There is a little bit of move variety from Turtle to Turtle, mostly inspired by Street Fighter II. Leo does a Tornado Kick similar to Ryu and Raph does a Torpedo Launch similar to E.Honda, you get the idea. In the context of the game, there seems to be no reason the Turtles are fighting each other. The pregame cut scene only tells us that Shredder has challenged the Turtles to a fight in the streets of Manhattan. It doesn’t explain why you have to fight all your friends before facing Shredder. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Tournament Fighter is your run of the mill fighting game. Win the best two out of three and move on to the next fight. The game can get a bit glitchy. Graphically, they are really pushing the limits of what the NES could do. The NES controller really wasn’t made for this type of game. The controls don’t feel smooth at all. If you force yourself to get used to it, the game is playable but it feels awkward. By 1994, The Ninja Turtles and the NES were waning in popularity. There are such better examples of fighting games on the SNES and Genesis, including superior versions of this game. It’s no surprise that this was overlooked. Still, Konomi put a lot of work into a game that few people played. The music is excellent and it looks pretty good. The NES just wasn’t made for this type of game.

Zoda’s Revenge: Star Tropics II.

Star Tropics II can be best summed up as more of Star Tropics. This time though your main character Mike Jones (Who?) and his uncle, Dr. J, are flung through history to collect blocks called Tetrads. You play through nine chapters, each one a different point in time of human history. You meet characters like Cleopatra and Sherlock Holmes, who help you along the way. Like the first one, they combine RPG elements with dungeon crawling, puzzle solving, and adventure aspects. Play through the dungeon, collect the Tetrad, go back and talk to the villagers, proceed to the next chapter. I am making it sound simple but this is an incredibly fun and satisfying game. They improved the controls from the first one, now letting you jump and move in a few different directions and not just hopscotching along. Other than that, they didn’t change much from the first. The game still has a quirky sense of humor. The graphics, enemy design, level design, and gameplay all mirror the first one. I don’t mean to be disparaging when I say it’s more of the same because it’s more of a really great game. This has been rereleased a few different times over the years. Although it is not yet on the Switches NES Library, I expect it to appear before too long. Of all the NES games to come out in 1994, this is the one I recommend most.

So that is the NES in 1994. I hope that I have given you some ideas for different games to play that you may have missed when they were first released. Many of these games are worth checking out. Nostalgia for the NES is alive and well today. For many of us, this was our first game console. When you are out and about, you see t-shirts with the classic characters on them in all their 8-bit glory. I have a pair of socks with NES controllers on them. Merchandising the warm feelings for this system to Gen Xer’s and Millinials is going strong and can be found at just about any retail outlet. Something about the NES will always be special to us.The warm, fuzzy, 8-bit memories never really go away although by 1994, we had mostly moved on to bigger and better things. As will I as I continue to celebrate all that was 1994 as we approach the New Year.

#IFTTT #Place to Be Nation

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