Well...shit.

damn... okay

so a post to anyone who might be wondering why ive been losing my mind about d gray man all of the sudden, this is a series ive been keeping up with for the past 20 years. chapters have been slow and coming at about 19 pages every 3/4 months bc of the author's health, but the key thing is that she seems to have most things planned out over 2 decades ago

and in the recent chapters its come to be revealed that the main character is an amalgam of 2 dudes among many other things

these two. one of them whom outright said 'i'll protect you with my life' and then bad shit starts happening immediately on the next page leading to their fusion

oh and the fusion is depicted like this

yknow thats just like. a human egg. theres a lot more eyebrow raising stuff before the Ball appears but. thats. thats just a fucking egg, right. you seeing this, right? thats an egg.

and then a child pops out. you know. as eggs tend to do.

but yeah, right? thinking that it was on shonen jump for the first, like, half of its current volumes is so insane to consider given this twist. she plotted this stuff before publication. she was sitting on this reveal for 2 decades, the madwoman

fwiw i think theres a lot of ideas the author's had that matured over the years. 2 decades is a long time for plot points to stay in stasis from a creative standpoint imo.

i think a lot of what we have is because katsura hoshino took 2 decades and wrestled her series out of shounen jump's hands to jump square. SJ has been going through a period of extreme growing pains due to a culture of heavy handedness with editors and ridiculous ROI pressure. if a series doesnt do the SJ formula well they get axed.

afaik she still has to deal with editors but they arent as extreme as SJ's

2 decades later and theres a shift in LGBT sentiments too. i suspect if this series were to continue in SJ's publication theres a non zero chance a lot of what we got now would be axed. there wouldnt really be a ftm plotpoint with alma or an eyebrow raising gayer than gay sex human egg cell orb moment.

Totally, I’m sure she changed her mind on a bunch of stuff in the years. Something like kanda coming back after the alma arc wasn’t planned at all if I remember correctly. In the end we can’t know how much of this flashback (including the gay subtext) she had in mind from the start for sure unless she says something on the matter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just personally, If I’m forced to take a bet it seems less probable to me that she got a lightbulb moment that this kinda foundational plot point about the protag had the potential to be a bit gay only after a while during publication? Idk, there’re a bunch of small things that just makes me feel like the possible implications of this must have been a possibility on the table for a while

Of course, even then, from knowing that it was gay material in theory to deciding that she’d actually try to publish it as such is another story, yeah. Even if she was sitting on it for 2 decades she might not have thought she could have the chance to do anything with it, until she found herself out of SJ (and it really wouldn’t have been surprising if it didn’t pass on sq. too)

But whatever, in the end even if she did realize it later it was clearly the best thing she could have done here, and it works so well she might as well have planned it from the start. So either way it’s some good shit 👌

I checked in which volume hoshino said dgm moved away from SJ and it was 19, right before the alma arc (I did my math wrong, it’s 2/3 of volumes on SJ lol). So yeah, it’s a very interesting coincidence that right after this we had the queerest arc up to that point lol. I totally agree with you, if dgm stayed on SJ I doubt she would have had the freedom to do it as ‘explicitly’ as she did, if at all.

Thank god they didn't straight up axe it and just moved it. SJ must have been a nightmare to work with, especially given what I’ve seen on how insanely particular she is with so many details. Her own high standards couldn’t have mixed well with the insane crunch and rigid guidelines she must have had to work with. She already butted heads with SJ even before publication started, trying to wrestle them into letting her have a trans girl protag with robin for a good while iirc. She clearly didn’t win that fight and I doubt anyone could today, never mind in 2004 lol

paying respects to a legend

i wanna also say there's almost a 100% chance she published doujinshi before she landed on SJ publication since it's the best way to get experience and networking. lots of mangakas started out that way especially if they didn't take the university route. (notably a lot of big name artists got their start in this scene. like the creator of Guilty Gear. and Trigun)

but this doesn't mean it's BL, id imagine it might be harder for her to get her foot in SJ if that was the case. at the very least she must be familiar with fannish work and interpretations of that kind to at least do a doujin.

after writing this i was able to confirm she did in fact do a gen naruto doujin the past wowee

anyway SJ has always been deathly allergic to queer characters and trying to take them seriously on a protag level. even more so in the past where their core demographic was boys.

now there's a shrinking population problem and more competition so they've loosened on that somewhat after 2015. but, dgm would still absolutely not have arrived to us in its current state under SJ. even Gintama got chewed up.