it’s so utsurover

Javier Pérez: Carroña (2011)

so gintama pre-Continuous Plot existed in comedy land temporally, with time 'passing' through seasonal markers like summer or new year's episodes but not really. to be kind of reductive, it was cyclical time, but without meaning or progression, and shogun assassination is when the bubble bursts and linear time is (re)established. but gintama was progressively building up to its plot-seriousness ever since benizakura, and in hindsight it feels like a ramping tension that certain characters would have felt. i think gintoki very much needed that not-real forever-time to learn how to live life and figure out how to move on. he fucked around for ten years (not actual literal ten years) wandering in circles but eventually did move forward (which also would eventually take him out of our view)

to me gintama cosmology is inherently anachronistic because it's centered around gintoki in a macro-microcosmic sort of way. i debated also making the shape of the eyeball planet earth because gintoki = world is a motif i use a lot but i decided against it because i thought it muddied the rest a bit. anyway, the rupture at the front from the stab wound. takasugi's eye being pierced is sort of a key lynchpin in said anachronistic cosmology because it's the moment when gintoki Did The Deed, but it's also the moment shouyou died/became human/utsuro was born. i'm going to quote from my first essay here to save on braincells:

"Because the moment Gintoki sliced Shouyou’s head off was the moment Shouyou’s humanity was affirmed, and thus the moment Utsuro’s 'eternity'”' could be confirmed to have shattered. At the same time, it’s the moment of Utsuro’s birth into the world. In other words, it’s where the ouroboros ends and where it begins–a moment isolated in time and space, located, if anywhere, in the time of monsters. And this is mimicked by the Gintama narrative itself, as Shogun Assassination marks the end of the structure the entire series existed in prior. A two-year timeskip would never have been possible previously [...] The moment of Gintoki’s tragedy, finally fished out from within Takasugi’s eye, shattered Gintama’s 'eternity,' too."