it is funny though how kids' shows are so so so careful about death, no one's ever killed except MAYYYYBE the big bad, all those random side characters are fine, here have a quick shot of them before we leave just so you know they really did survive that 50-foot drop into a stormy sea,
and meanwhile kids' books nearly all agree that it's not an adventure until it has a body count.
whoever edited that bsd official art to make it look like chuuya is holding onto dazai’s arm will be put on trial for irrevocably changing my brain chemistry and making me so much worse
the original and the edit in question. this artwork really makes me crave a mid to late 19th century historical au where Chuuya is a swordsman struggling with changes to his job due to the meiji restoration and with Dazai as a detective/private investigator who hires Chuuya as his bodyguard when a seemingly harmless investigation turns dangerous. they kind of hate each other (as per usual) but Chuuya needs the job and Dazai, while he proclaims to dislike chuuya, is also very smitten with chuuya’s fighting style and temper (as per usual).
if we should protect children because they are vunerable, this means you would protect cruel children who bullies people who different than them then. the children who responsible to trauma for someone else's entire years
You're assuming that "protecting" children is the same as absolving them of responsibility and that's not what I said. All children are vulnerable, because all children are children; they don't come out of the womb with a perfectly working moral compass anymore than they come out of it waiting to hurt people--they're vulnerable because their understanding of the world is entirely at the mercy of what we, as adults, consistently tell them and show them. Children behaving cruelly aren't exempt from that--they learn that cruelty from somewhere, or someone. Your job, as the adult, is to make sure they understand that it's unacceptable so it will not happen again--but your job is also to ask why someone that young is behaving this way to begin with, so you can ensure they become better.
"Protecting" kids is not ignoring when they hurt or torment others, it's not refusing to teach them consequences or right from wrong, it's not "zero tolerance" policies in schools that treat a child being bullied and the child bullying them as equal instigators, and it's certainly not protecting them from recognizing, and atoning for, the pain they have caused someone else. You don't have to make peace with the now-adults who hurt you when you both were kids, but you cannot let the horrors of your own childhood impact how you treat or respond to the children living theirs around you right now, either.
You don't protect kids so they can get a free pass for bullying or tormenting another child. You protect them because kids are impulsive, emotionally reactive, and profoundly social (which means deeply impressionable) human beings who are still learning & processing insane amounts of information every day about what it means to be alive, to be alive as yourself, to be alive as yourself with other people. Protecting them is realising that you can't isolate the responsibility of a 10 year old from the bigger responsibility of the literal grown adults around them, adults who are in charge of teaching them about the world and how to behave in it. Whether you have children of your own in the future or not is completely irrelevant to this; we all become those adults eventually--no matter what happened to us as kids.
that scene in season 1 where teruki hanazawa exorcises ekubo mid-sentence... and shigeo's eyes widen in shock?
i really want to talk about it, specifically the explosion meter accompanying it.
normally, when the teenager's emotions aren't obvious to the audience, that meter relays to us a sense of what he is actually feeling. but we cannot trust the meter here. we see it jump up a few points at teru's 'psycho wave' sending the sleazy ghost to the shadow realms, and remain steady at 50% upon shigeo's recollections of the spirit's unsavory nature. the boy outright tells teru that he isn't bothered. and it's funny!
but shigeo isn't being honest with himself here either.
his face briefly gives his feelings away before resettling into its normal flat affect. (to be fair, what he's really feeling isn't teru's business. this kid is trying to provoke a fight out of him, after all.) after he's basically tortured into exploding, shigeo spends three hours in the pouring rain, searching everywhere for ekubo.
three. hours.
these are not the actions of someone who isn't bothered. letting himself get drenched to the point of sickness,
even though he literally holds the power to shield himself from it,
reads to me like unconscious self-punishment for allowing all this to happen.
after a large chunk of his short life spent denying and fearing them for good reason, shigeo's first impulse is often not to use his psychic powers -- even after his integration at the story's end. i wish this was discussed more, because many watchers cannot fathom why this boy with world-breaking psychic abilities would ever refuse to use them.
also: the explosion meter lying to us / representing shigeo's detachment from his own emotions alexithymia may occur elsewhere in the series as well, especially when he's not close to an explosion; i'm reminded of the tiny dent ritsu's provocation of him makes in it a few episodes later.
I think it matters a lot that a) everyone who has seeming offered to help Karna has done so *after* she needed it. And b) was in some way using her and therefore needed her.
In the eyes of a child, if you weren’t there when she needed you, and can’t even help yourself, what good are you to her?
Short Moderate Length List of Small(ish) Things I Appreciate About The Wettening
Dib being conspicuously absent from the opening pan of the classroom, only to cartoon-teleport into existence at Zim’s desk the second Zim starts expressing mild apprehension at the sight of unfamiliar weather. This kid spends his time just hanging around staring at Zim, waiting for him to show the slightest sign of discomfort, confusion, or unease in order to immediately taunt him about it—and the surrounding chaos, if anything, is just an opportunity to come watch even more closely. We all already knew this, but it still kills me to see it in action.
Also, he’s animated popping up from below, and like… were we meant to interpret this as him just chilling underneath Zim’s desk? No, absolutely not—but is it funny (and, to add to the hilarity, miraculously somehow not completely unbelievable within the context of the show) to imagine that he was? Yes. Yes it is.
Zim confidently walking out into a downpour he has already confirmed to be acidic just because Dib implicitly dared him to—no one’s looking, Dib hasn’t even said anything or made a claim against his humanity, Zim just can’t stand to give Dib the satisfaction of seeing him vulnerable or afraid of something (which backfires pretty spectacularly, since I’m pretty sure ‘writhing on the ground shrieking in indescribable agony’ is a significantly worse look in terms of appearing vulnerable, but all’s well that ends in Victory For Zim, I guess).
Also Zim's little baffled gesture right beforehand like he's silently asking Dib to confirm he's not hallucinating the rain dance (he does not receive an answer)
Gaz presumably seeing Zim sneaking up behind her brother, saying nothing and making no reaction that’ll tip Dib off… only to immediately be made to regret her choices when she gets caught in another splash. Shows her for trusting Zim to be at least a little bit cool about tormenting Dib (honestly, we see her exact fitting justice on Dib at the end of the episode, but I cannot imagine she wasn't still planning to do something equally petty to Zim).
The faucet drip scene and the underlying awareness that this is just what Zim and Dib do to each other during class. Every day. It is, in fact, probably one of the least disruptive forms their constant warfare takes on a routine basis. Suddenly I understand a little bit of why their entire class hates them.
Also Dib’s happy face while he's terrorizing Zim into a shell-shocked stupor is absurdly cute and heartwarming. If I cropped that picture no one would ever guess what he's smiling about. This kid? A sadist? Impossible.
“I don’t even feel good about winning this one,” and it's said with his hands clasped together, practically vibrating with glee, his expression vaguely reminiscent of a teenager in the throes of hormonal infatuation (the hypothetical object in this case not so much being Zim himself as a personified abstraction of Zim’s suffering). If someone hit him with the Return of Keef happy goo in this exact moment, I am completely certain it would kill him. His statement is only true insofar that a more accurate term for his current state of being would probably be euphoric. I take back everything I’ve ever said about Zim being unreasonable in this episode—he was merciful.
Also this face the moment Zim gets up and starts threatening him. Zim still isn't even all that intimidating at the moment, but Dib knows he just fucked up. Maybe he's getting flashbacks to Dark Harvest.
Dib’s ridiculous water balloon device. Seriously. I feel like it gets (reasonably) overshadowed by the sheer absurdity of Zim’s entire operation, but it really is so amazingly stupid and pointless in a way that is… not dissimilar to the ultimate Irken water balloon. Not only is it really not necessary for the task it's meant to accomplish, it's actively detrimental in that it slows Dib down, blatantly telegraphs his attacks, and reduces accuracy by a significant degree. The only actual benefits I can think of would be the exponential increase in force and range and the instant accessibility of a water supply—the former of which is totally unnecessary in this scenario and the latter being possible to accomplish with a much simpler device (or even just… a water tank). To summarize, it is an incredibly impressive feat of both skill and creativity in design that is also completely and utterly useless! Which is just the perfect demonstration of what I mean when I say Dib really does share nearly all of Zim’s flaws, just to a less obviously ridiculous degree—he comes off just calm and clever enough to pass as moderately reasonable at a glance, and in some ways, that makes him more of a potential flight risk than Zim. At least that's a lunatic you see coming.
i made a rough timeline for the clone^2 au, just for my own convenience sake when dating things. some things might be out of order from the episode date, and thats also for my convenience.
September 3rd: Danny, age 14, has the accident in the lab that turns him liminal
September 10th: Danny is discharged from the hospital and given two weeks leave from school
September 24th: his sick leave ends, and Danny returns to school
October 14th: Danny sneaks into his parents' basement and releases the ghosts they have trapped in cages. Official birth of the vigilante, Phantom
November 27th: Danny fights Pariah Dark, and wins
December 24th: the Ghost Writer torments Danny
February 12th: Danny's 15th birthday
March 3rd: its been six months since Danny's accident
March 7th: Danny fights his evil future self
May 8th: Danny meets Ellie [age 15] and they become twins
December 14th: Danny finds out from his parents that he's a clone
February 12th: Danny's 16th birthday
Early-Mid April: Danny meets Damian [age 6] :)
Mid-Late April: Damian runs off for the first time, damages Danny's hands the first time
May: Damian runs off two more times in the span of three weeks, he damages Danny's hands both times.
Early June: Damian runs off one more time, damages Danny's hands again, resulting in permanent nerve damage.
Mid-Late June: Damian finally gives up on the League coming to get him and joins the Fenton Family.
July: Damian finally coaxes Danny into letting him come along with him on patrol: Wraith is born.