bottlecap or chicken wing?

as an Astral lover, genuinely curious about people’s take on this

cause to me, I am kinda baffled by the sheer audacity of Astral pulling this insane manipulative lie ( no matter how “good intentioned”, it was still a lie, and a manipulation. Cause we learn later he it was just a trick to ensure Yuma dueled him and got his “kattobingu” spirit back )

It just seems so??? Out of character???

There are two kinds of Astral Beings- the ones who are born into that world, like Ena and the civilians

And the ones who were created to serve a purpose, like Astral, Eliphas (and Don Thousand too by design)

But by the time we meet Eliphas, he isn't just a simple tool like Astral is. Astral World created him to execute their ideals, to rid chaos of their world and act as their representative.

It's obviously true that Eliphas took the mission programmed into him to the extreme, harming those around them and, in all honestly, probably is the reason as to why Don Thousand turned out the way he did.

But a part of me wants to think that past doing his mission, it was also a matter of ego as well. This is what he's supposed to do, but he clearly has usurped even Ena's power and Astral World seems to unable to prevent him from doing what he wants even though they all seem to have changed their minds over excommunicating chaos.

He and Astral are so alike that it's easy to interpret them as family.

They were both made by Astral World. They were both made to complete a mission. They look so similar, two of very few who look like they do.

Except Eliphas hides it well.

Astral isn't given any clothes to wear while Eliphas wears brilliant golden armor. Astral is treated as expendable while Eliphas represents their world as a whole, and he isn't even named after their world like Astral is.

Astral wears his distinctive markings for all to see, and Eliphas hides his markings.

He hides proof of their similarity because he may believe himself better than his inception. He serves his world but he has also been deciding whats best for it all on his own without listening to the opinions of it's citizens. It's likely, even more than Ena, that Astral's mission was his decision as well.

And I like that after we see Eliphas accept that he was wrong and acknowledge the existence of Zexal that we see that he was just like Astral the entire time.

I love the Astral World characters so much aaa

was the godforsaken door this entire time……

its been 11 freaking years man.

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.