slip with caution

it would be nice of me if i fixed the errors in the subtitles before handing them out to non japanese speakers but there are so many and i didnt write down when they happen...

someone i know is having a birthday party on the same day that i planned to go to a cool museum with other people i know and it's on the other side of the countryyyyy. i know i always wanted to have more friends and contacts but it's so difficult to manage aaaaa

isn't it crazy that all of that stuff happened for real

before the timeskip where kondou gets more hair I thought "he's being a bit TOO bright-eyed and idealistic, they're trying to make him such a good guy it's unrealistic" but now i'm like "i kinda miss that dude"

the worst thing FGO ever did was making Okita a woman but not Hijikata. i already don't care for Okita/Hijikata and now I have to deal with the STRAIGHT version of it

idk, if u fuck with the ages, it's still a messed up and "tragic" story, but it does take away the aspect of man all of these people really threw their entire adult life away by committing violence all for a failing tokugawa shogunate

i do find it really annoying when shinsengumi media casts a bunch of old ass guys even if they are really good actors bc it gives you this warped idea that they're experienced established men when they were just 20 and (early) 30 year olds. there were even teenagers in there

saitou hajime himself only died a few years before my own grandfather was born and iirc the longest known surviving member was alive for a couple years after his birth

One big reason I like the drama adaptation is that it makes the world feel more lived in than in anything else. The people whose houses they stayed at are characters they interact with. The merchants they visit or extorted money from are real. Their hometowns, the ones they always talk about when they want to emphasize they come from humble origins, are real. They meet with shogunate officials. They are rejected by shogunate officials. They eventually find some reluctant support from shogunate officials. We meet their enemies. Their enemies are given relationships among each other. When people from the Choshu clan are driven out of the city or killed we wonder "what makes them so different from our guys?" In the games I've played and manga I've read all of these things happen off screen. At most we will get a few famous bakumatsu figures show up so they can be antagonists. But the authors usually don't want to create characters for various people in the Aizu clan, or think too hard about how Yagi or Maekawa feel about the whole situation. Or show regular Kyoto citizens to give people an idea of what the Shinsengumi's reputation is. And the end product feels like more of a vague fantasy for it. Not something that happened to real people in the real world not really that long ago.

hakuouki was a great vehicle for getting me interested in this history and i still love some specific characterizations from it. it probably has my second favorite hijikata and some all-timer scenes (some i missed while watching the drama, while knowing they wouldn't happen because the dynamic is different there). I think the fantasy lore is cool to the extent that it's just a metaphorical representation of both their moral erosion and their legitimization as warriors. how getting closer to being the "real" thing also comes at a great cost. it's clever for that. but when the in-universe lore takes itself too seriously as a literal thing or when it becomes too much about romance i just get bored.

why the fuck is there a hakuouki prequel about demons in europe, i don't care, make 500 bootleg hijikata games where he yells at the aizu han people

the next episode is immediately a silly comedy one to lighten the mood gjkdlfgd