Fish Stuff

Harbourmaster Hell Is Empty page 109 is up.

Start at the beginning of the arc.

Start at the beginning of the series.

I'd like to know what this series is supposed to be about before I start reading, please.

About Ohbas opinion on Lights love life

1.月の異性関係 (Raito no isei kankei) "Light's opposite gender relationships"

2.大学時代の彼女は、カモフラージュを含め, 五, 六人います。 (Daigaku jidai no kanojou ha, camofuraaju wo fukume, go, roku nin imasu) "During university, regards his girlfriends they ARE grouped in five or six as camouflage."

3.でも彼は女性を好きになる事はないでしょう。(Demo kare ha jousei wo suki ni naru koto ha naideshou) "However, he very likely doesn't like any" = 〜事はないでしょう is used for a strong assumption (=most likely it wouldn't happen)

4.対等に付き合える人間はいないし (Taitou ni tsukiaeru ningen wa inaishi) "Equally said, CAN'T date anyone (=any human, as Ohba uses) and..."

5.月も“馬鹿ばかり”と見下しているからです. (Raito mo "Bakabakari" to mikudashi") Light also looks down at everyone thinking they're all stupid (からです= explaining another reason for the above)

6.ただ家族愛とか、人間に対する愛情はあります。友達も結構多いです (Tada kazokuai toka, ningen ni taisuru aijou ha arimasu. Tomodachi mo kekkou ooi desu) But au contraire, with things like family, there are feelings of affection. He also has lots AND LOTS of friends (結構多い).

I've tried to make the translation as close as possible, Japanese is kind of hard because there are nuances you can miss but, they way Ohba uses "human" instead of sometimes "girlfriends" (6) doesn't imply any gender (for light is gay or bi stans). Keep in mind this was written in 2003 Japan, a country that still didn't support feminism and let alone homosexuality (which is still kind of taboo).

Especially Ohba's kind of mysoginistic nature when writing characters so...what HE DID try to say is that he sees girls or anyone as merely humans, something below HIM. Which goes along with the way he's describing KiraLight! instead of YotsubaLight! (which would be a more appropiate way to answer how he truly sees romance).

For some reason he used present tense (1) and I still really can't figure it out, probably has nothing to do but it is kind of curious.

I'D LIKE TO MAKE A SPECIAL POINT ON NO 3

"However, he very likely doesn't like any" = He's using it in present tense, implying that out of those 5 or 6 girlfriends he very likely didn't truly like (or have romantic feelings, not specified).

The fact that he chose that wording says a lot: just because the probabilities are low doesn't mean they're 0.

In 4 he also says he CAN'T, meaning: if he could he would but, depends on who:

Light IS totally capable of feeling love (family), or even developing feelings (I'll make another post about Light regards this, when he first met Misa), although the later is less possible. The reason is just as Ohba stated: he finds the rest as stupid.

Therefore for him to actually consider dating someone it'd have to be at least similar to his level of smart, interesting, someone to keep up with, who challenges him, who teaches him, who makes him doubt...and most importantly, that make him feel human, because he's used to people praising him for being the best and he FEELS like that's his only facade in life, and wants someone to treat him normally without that.

He could also date someone who doesn't meet those standards (see his realtionship with Sayu and Yuri??), although this one is very very unlikely, whilst the other is very much what could happen. At least a 68%, and that's kind of high when it comes to Light.

WK 1 · Sept 1 · Apple / Eye WK 2 · Sept 8 · Ideal / Monster WK 3 · Sept 15 · Memories / Possessed WK 4 · Sept 22 · Flight / Preening WK 5 · Sept 29 · Lies / Unspoken WK 6 · Oct 6 · Rules / Broken WK 7 · Oct 13 · Loss / Addiction

Alright, I couldn't help myself. After @purplink8 agreed to co-mod, the event grew to seven Tuesdays — the community prompts were too good to cut when read straight through, the seven weeks make a recognizable Terraito arc.

How it works: send your terraito media the weekend before a given prompt Tuesday, and it gets promoted that Tuesday.

If we had tool libraries/libraries of things we could all consume less. We wouldn’t have to cram all of the tools for our hobbies into our house, and we would be free to dabble without consequences.

If we had functioning public transportation, safe bike paths, and walkable cities, we could drastically cut down on the number of cars. We would save money and lives, and improve quality of life by reducing commutes and creating more opportunities for socializing.

If we replaced consumptive hobbies like shopping and collecting with sustainable, productive hobbies that benefitted our communities like gardening, mending, etc., we would not miss plastic trinkets or cheap unethical clothing. We would have beautiful items that were meaningful to us, and we would feel fulfilled as we grew in capability.

If instead of buying fruit from around the world we grew more seasonal fruit and ate more local meat, we wouldn’t have to promote unethical labor practices just to eat. We could connect with our own regions, and delight in what wonderful, unique food they produce. Imagine visiting a friend across the country and the table is laid with venison, milkweed cordial, foraged greens with edible flowers, with acorn muffins topped with green walnut syrup for dessert. How cool is that fr.

Marcel Roux (1878–1922), “La Visiteuse (la Mort)”

In A-Kira the king who has done nothing all of the canon timeline save for send other gods to warn Ryuk he’s out of line (again) creates an entire new rule to prevent Ryuk from making a host of Minoru style occurrences happen. You can’t sell the death note for money. Why? Not for any reason save our most problematic shinigami in the realm finds it funny enough that he most certainly would have kept recreating that scenario.

Of course Ryuk wants to recreate another Light. Problem is he found an ultra rare counterbalance to his rulebending since Light’s stubborn use of multiple rules for self benefit are seemingly what kept Light alive a long time while holding and using the note. The same note which regularly drives people to immediately off themselves.

Light refashions the rules like an armor. Ryuk views them as his boring cage and is thrilled beyond belief when humans smarter than him can see a way to play an invisible game with them. Any game.

Our man found a person who could play that ‘we threw the board and the die out’ style of game for a meaningful length of time but eventually got HIM killed too and also threw him under the bus at the end then has the audacity to be like, “damn. miss that guy.”

It endlessly fascinates me too, on this topic, that Ryuk successfully coasts in Light's moral blind spot for the entire series. Like, Light is closer to him and talks to him more and spends more time with him than with anyone else, but we never see him morally challenge or interrogate Ryuk about anything Ryuk says, implies, or might in the past have done, despite the fact that Ryuk is so obviously treating everyone's suffering as a sideshow the whole time. Even when Light finds out Ryuk stole Shidoh's notebook - with the implied potential death sentence to Shidoh! - he's only pissed because of the impact on his plans and he forgives Ryuk in a heartbeat, never commenting on the moral aspect at all. Even though "Kira", if he was even paying lip service to his own principles, should not be okay with Ryuk being Ryuk.

And yet Light is, always. I do wonder what loophole he carved out in his mind for that. Does he overlook Ryuk's sins because Ryuk never actually kills anyone innocent in front of him and Light can just tell himself thought crimes don't count? Is it because Ryuk is always so openly admiring of him and goes along with all his schemes, and therefore is hiding under the same umbrella of "it's fine as long as it's for the greater good" that Light uses to protect himself from his own hypocrisy? Is he using some kind of "it's his nature, he's a shinigami, he can't help it" internal excuse?

Or is it just that Light can't bear the idea of passing judgement on his emotional support monster, and so he just Will Not Ask about Ryuk's moral standing or past sins? I kind of think it's that last one tbh. (I do love the idea of Rem, in the brief window where she has chance, trying to warn Light about Ryuk. Like, "you shouldn't trust him so much, do you know what he's like?" ...but, of course, Light would never listen.)

But yes one of my favourite things about Ryuk is that he's so good at being absolutely evil but not in any of the stereotypical ways you'd expect for someone with his appearance and backstory. His claws are always clean. He doesn't really push boundaries or threaten or ever take anything by force, he never stands on his pride or dignity (except, like, that one time with Matsuda which I think in itself says something lmao). He does a perfect job of playing the mostly submissive, compliant, friendly pet monster, and nothing can ever quite be blamed on him because he never told anyone to do anything and indeed is always the first to ask "are you sure about this?"

Providing they are still in a relationship where they… you know… regularly chat.

i always feel like Ryuk was the one to be like you sure about this in that way that felt comfortable to Light he’s rubber ducking with someone only slightly brighter than an actual rubber duck. it does make Light consider things further than he would have naturally because think of how crazy this man got if someone explicitly told him he couldn’t do something. even teasing at “I don’t think you maybe should” will make him justify himself six ways from Sunday.

Ryuk was probably two or three are you sure abouts from changing the whole of Death Note with Light But final arc Kira self-isolated and shut off even that bit of input. Ryuk has a closer relationship with Misa than Light by the end of the story and he was Light’s giddy number one fan.

this is what trust no one type behavior got Light Yagami or maybe he didn’t stockpile enough apples

We cannot talk about Ryuk in the last quarter of Death Note without referencing the Narita International Plot Fracture. When the plot moved back from LA to Tokyo, Ryuk basically disappeared until the Yellow Box. He does nothing, says nothing, is absent except for crowd shots - he was written out.

Which is especially bad when we consider the three-way conversation where Mikami calls Takada while she's on her date with Light, while the task force are monitoring them.

Ryuk has to be in one of three places: with Rem's death note, that the task force have; with the human he's bonded to, i.e. Light, in that hotel room; or with Gelus' death note and the person attached to that, i.e. Mikami.

And he's NOT THERE. He's not with the task force, he's not with Light and he's not with Mikami. He literally *disappeared*.

However Ryuk only keeps a couple stated and proven motivations and his top one was… I want to see what Light Yagami does. It should be fascinating. (Insert Shinigami particular brand of unsettling laugh track)

So the narrative point that’s a failure to me isn’t that Light would try to shuffle the god back into his larger playing deck for later, of course he would, it’s Kira.

What doesn’t check out to me is that Ryuk would ever consent to haunting anyone other than Light for more than a couple days. Everyone else is boring by comparison. I feel genuinely like Ryuk would have been like if you do this I’m writing your name.

My fave recent headcanon for the Ryuk-has-disappeared period has been that perhaps he was off on back to back apple runs. He's got a three day window to visit the realm and a supply nobody else in S-Realm has access to. I like to imagine Ryuk being 'rich' by his kind's standards for a bit. Now that would be fun for him.

(Thanks zombiejesus for pointing the apple runs bit out. Only not tagging because she's on fandom break.)

Shinigami have to stay with the human they're bonded to. Ryuk can't be off in the shinigami realm if that's true. Ohba just fucked up, especially with the three-location conversation. Ryuk has to be with one of the humans he's bonded to, or maybe Rem's note in the task force office. He isn't. Ohba fucked up.