holding out the night

My mom's STONE my friends are BRIMMED CAPS my master's a TREE

stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.

My feelings about how the female cast in jjk is written are very complicated but the thing that gets me is that it genuinely would've merely taken bringing Nobara back a bit earlier and elaborating more on Yuki's Whole Deal to take the whole thing from "A lot of the female characters are interesting and there was clearly an effort put into avoiding misogynystic shonen tropes and even trying to tackle in-universe misogyny, but a lot of it falls short because almost none of those characters get prolonged attention within the narrative" to "maybe not a Feminist Manifesto but that's a great fucking female cast, both counting the main characters and the side characters"

Yuki Tsukumo makes me feel insane. She's one of four special grades. She was a star plasma vessel who refused the merge. Her conversation with Geto was a big factor in him defecting, which is The event that started the domino effect the entire series is built upon. Despite being one of the most powerful sorcerers out there she refused to go on missions and instead dedicated her life to researching to eradicate curses once and for all instead of just having people constantly risking their lives. She's the foil to one of the main villains. She can hear the voices of the other star plasma vessels when she's near Tengen. One of the people who did the most for Yuji's growth was her mentee. Her influence is Everywhere in the story. I have no idea how one doesn't feel the need to elaborate on all that