Café Leningrad

eva only ever wanted to be with tenma because he had a promising career and we all know that BUT the relationship was transactional for tenma as well. ofc he had every right to throw her away because of how she treated him after he went against her fathers wishes, but that doesnt mean he wasnt in the relationship for the sake of status as well. pls look at the show. why would urasawa introduce martin if he couldve made a point about the strength the love thats romantic can also hold with a couple we had already seen? we assume that since tenma is a good man she wouldve had a comfortable and "happy" life, but in later episodes we get to see a couple of flashbacks and see that theyve both always felt lonely in their relationship.

and imo thats legit the point of that relationship and why martins sacrifice mattered so much in evas story. she got to see that a man can truly just love her without wanting anything from her. even if its not explicitly stated we can see that her father wanted her to be a daughter who suited him. no man in her life had ever given her anything without wanting smt in return. so its obvious that she held a grudge against tenma and wouldve ruined her life over it if she hadnt met someone like martin who just adored her for her and didnt want anything in return. just like with johan, someone needed to break her misguided worldview and martin was the one to do that for her just like how tenma did it for johan.

we see in the last episode that the possibility that she can be loved helps her move on and have a productive life. ofc this is not a v progressive character arc, but I believe that the point of the story is that negation of love creates monsters and urasawa used eva and martin as an example of how romantic love as well can triumph darkness.

So I think post-rurenheim johan whose body language just SCREAMS "don't look at me, don't blink at me, don't even breathe at me right now." would translate in real life and make people less enchanted with him compared to before. Also, I think since he's not trying to charm every single person he meets before with his carefully crafted persona, this comes out in his physical looks too: less silky and slightly uncombed hair, subtle eye bags, slightly less upright posture, you can actually find a few wrinkles on his blazer coat now.

Before the scene he meets 3 girls, one of them asks for pills and another sits there with a bunch of balloons. After the scene, he has some peculiar interactions with them. I was wondering what you make of those

Hello anon,

I reread the whole scene and here are some thoughts.

Generally speaking, I think that Johan’s interaction with the two women (he does not interact with the woman with the trumpet) is a very minor detail and I do not think it has far reaching implications.

That said, we can try to give an interpretation of it :)

Blue Sophie is in the red-light district and the manga spends some panels to convey its atmosphere. In particular, the more Johan approaches the “Red Hindenburg”, the more shabby the whole atmosphere becomes. In the beginning the boy is in a street full of lights, which is made to tempt people into sex. Even the first girl he meets is a prostitute, who immediately tries to seize him. She is outgoing and direct and her personality seems extrovert.

However,  the street full of lights is nothing, but a facade that hides people like the three girls Johan meets in the backstreets. The first one is a drug addict, the second one plays a trumptet and laughs. Finally the third one sits with her balloons, without speaking. They are al less functional than the first girl Johan meets. They are people, who are desperate and who have been hurt by the world they live in. They are the truth behind the inviting appearance of the district.

Now, in a sense, this is true also about Johan. Johan appears beautiful and fascinating, but  he is a ruthless individual, with a tragic past. Because of this, I like to see the two women as two different parts of Johan.

All in all, Johan is both “the devil” and a “child” and the interactions with the two girls convey this duality. On one hand Johan asks for a balloon. Balloons are objects associated with children and it is peculiar that he wants one. The fact that the girl sits there with a bunch of balloons in the first place conveys vulnerability and childishness. On the other hand Johan gives the drug addict money to fall deeper into her addiction. This can be read as him enabling her and it is what a devil would do.

In conclusion, the whole district and the two women can be read as a physical representation of who Johan is. He is a mess behind an inviting facade and he is both the devil and a traumatized child.

@nachocity asked: Favourite antagonist?

moodboards: Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet

alys; the witch queen

aemond; the black prince

cregan; wolf of the north

how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?

Distinguishing features of moral beige:

The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.

The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.

The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.

The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.