a sharp panic, panic

okokay okay so, mod pollux (aka tumblr/twitter user @avicebro​) takes this confession as an affront, and i usually do not do this, and well, since you asked, here, an extensive explanation as to why i am thirsty for him:

arrow two, following the sound of singing brings you to one of the spectator boxes with a clear view of the main stage, where phantom is performing an opera for empty seats together with a number of lifeless mannequins - they don’t move or sing like the coloratura, but he acts as if they do. dantes laughs derisively at this pitiful display but something compels you to stay and watch. the song ends and phantom looks directly at you from the stage and thanks and curses you for coming. he tells you to leave because it’d be all too easy to keep you here to himself forever but dantes laughs that someone else’s personal hell isn’t nearly enough to trap you. phantom only now notices that dantes is with you and is furious that someone other than his christine came to this place. coloratura appear from behind every corner to swarm you (battle against like 100 of them scripted to end after ~10 turns) and through sheer numbers manage to separate you from dantes and drag him away, but they all ignore you and dantes tells you not to worry about him and head deeper into the theater because “you already have the key to this prison” as they disappear behind the stage.

you only get to wander a short while before another person shows up - an unmasked phantom. he still talks in somewhat purple prose but doesn’t sing his dialogue and he calls you by name. he explains that this place indeed isn’t a nightmare so much as a conceptual prison where his soul resides, and that the presence of more than one phantom isn’t a split personality thing but merely an inner conflict. he says he can lead you outside to the waking world before you see any more ugly things and the choices are “i want to get dantes back” and “i want to get to the bottom of this” and if you pick the first he tells you sadly to please not look at him with such resolve not meant for him but pick the second and there’s simply a long meaningful pause. either way he agrees to lead you to the basement but warns you probably will not like what you see. 

arrow three, phantom and dantes are staring each other down in your room at night. dantes says not to give him that look, he has nothing to do with this, but then sighs about how their master sure has a penchant for getting caught in these kind of things. phantom tells him off for often smoking around you, because he will never forgive anything that could harm you(r voice). dantes merely raises an eyebrow and says it’s a pretty shoddy prison so with a bit of luck you’ll break out of this one before morning and nobody else has to know you’ve been getting your soul trapped again.

back in the dream you’re making your way through the tunnels underneath the theater. phantom guides you safely past several deathtraps and you note that even though he said this is a prison, the traps seem more intent on keeping others out than keeping prisoners in. phantom is disproportionally taken aback by this observation and begins talking about the events of the end stretch of the novel, where raoul with the help of the daroga makes his way past erik’s torture chambers to save a kidnapped christine. he very pointedly talks as if he and erik are different people, saying that perhaps erik’s greatest mistake was thinking he could be seen without letting anyone approach him. you say “aren’t you erik, though?” and he says no, erik got to see many parts of the world but the phantom only knows the opera. 

unmasked phantom disappears as you enter the room where a masked phantom and a restrained dantes are which conveniently looks like the hall of judgement from prison tower because utena taught us to reuse assets for symbolism. this one calls you christine again and threatens to kill ‘the viscount’ unless you stay here with him and dantes is about to roast phantom to a crisp over casting him as raoul on top of always calling you christine but shuts up real fast when you point out dantes still calls nightingale mercedes. phantom seems to calm down a little from that and rambles about how he knows it’s not right to keep you here and he’ll let you go but after releasing dantes he shifts into a bitter rant. must it end like this every time? must he be doomed by the ugliness of his face - of his soul - to cause despair wherever he goes? even now he would like nothing more than to keep you here forever, christine, even now he feels no remorse over the blood on his hands, merely regret over where it brought him, wanting to do better while believing he did no wrong, knowing but not grasping his mistakes until its too late every time. 

you try to interject with a “phantom…” but only when you call him erik is he cut short. the follow up options are “please sing for me again” and “let’s go back” but both options make him calm down immediately and just say “yes, of course.” you’re not waking up yet though so you walk your way out of the basement with little trouble and dantes comments that it really is a shit prison to be better at keeping people out than in. when you’re back in the theater proper phantom gets on the main stage and begins to sing again but this time the dolls join in. you ask if he isn’t coming outside with you and he says no, he will continue to haunt this opera as is his fate, being asked is more than enough. 

i didn’t expect to fall THIS HARD for oryou-san

The new anime Bungou to Alchemist, Shinpan no Haguruma just aired.

and it’s based on a fantastic game, I have nothing but high hopes for the anime going forward.

BUT

This time around, the characters are tied much closer to the actual authors, and both the writers of the game and the lovely people running the English wiki rely on their works and more importantly, their google search results being clear.

It’s an unspoken rule in the Japanese fandom to Not Tag Posts with Full Names.

Let me say that again.

Tagging posts with the characters’ full names is not okay.

“But Peach!” I hear you say. “It doesn’t do any harm!” It does. It makes accessing information about the actual authors much more difficult, not to mention a fanartist literally dissapeared because of it once.

Well then, how do you tag Bungou to Alchemist posts?

Using shortened forms of their names (Like Dazai -> Dzi or Akutagawa -> Aktgw) is commonly used, or even just tag them with one name (Just BunAl Dazai or Just BunAl Akutagawa)

This series is older than just the anime, and it’s thrived because of the information we can gather. Please be respectful of the people working on Bungou to Alchemist, as well as the authors themselves.

-Quirrel uses sessha, which is a pronoun that’s not just really polite and humble but painfully archaic. It’s super old. In a modern context it’d be honestly very weird to use it. ( Sessha (拙者) is another classical way to a say “I” which literally means “clumsy person.” Samurai used this word, because being humble about their abilities was the samurai thing to do. )

(I think Ze’mer/the mourner uses warawa which is similarly from the same sort of cultural time period as sessha)

Anyway so Quirrel’s a walking spoiler for his own shit from minute one I guess, BUT

- a lot of NPCs use onushi to address the Knight, which probably goes a long way to making Hallownest feel kind of old, so in that wider context someone using sessha isn’t as weird, but it is a nod to how he’s also like a billionty years old

- Grimm uses watashi, which is fairly formal and polite, and apparently his dialogue is also pretty straightforward in Japanese according to a friend (so it’s not very flashy), which is an interesting detail

- Hornet also uses watashi

- Zote uses wagahai because he is a terrible, pompous old man. This is also a weird archaic pronoun.

- Sly uses ore which is fitting because he sure aint polite