Casual Vibes with Shark!

What if there was a ghost in the opera house that was killing people?

Requires you to accept the existence of ghosts, but otherwise is a straightforward story.

What if the chief contractor who built the opera house was a deformed circus freak who used his experience building palaces and torture chambers for sultans to keep building secret passageways and torture chambers in the basement when construction halted during the Franco-Prussian War, and then kept living down there working on an opera and killing and blackmailing people who crossed him and also training a pretty opera singer that he wants to marry?

My father sent me a guardian angel from Heaven to guide and comfort me in his absence: "Okay, not something that happens every day, but that is what guardian angels are supposed to do and Dad did indicate something like this would happen."

From a reverse image search, I found the website Show Your Stripes, run by the University of Reading in the UK, which is likely where the above graph originated. It provides temperature data for various regions of the world from approximately 1900-2025. For example, here are graphs for Canada, India, and Papua New Guinea:

Edward and Alphonse Elric sharing the same brain cell.

so often feminine men are solely depicted as white or white passing, and are stripped of their more masculine features in order to seem beautiful or feminine, or their masculinity are at odds with their femininity, which can perpetuate traditional gender roles, racism, and even transphobia and transmisogyny.

in reality femininity and masculinity aren’t competing opposites, but go hand and hand, and same is the case with blackness and beauty

But I think FMA does also does an excellent job choosing when to not let Ed come out on top. We just had the Nina episode and now Ed is in the middle of processing his first "catastrophic failure to save someone" type of failure since attempting to bring his mom back. He's dealing with a low that's absolutely hampering his abilities and the tonal shift hits for me in the way that 1) he doesn't notice Scar's initial attack against him (Al has to pull him away) and 2) Ed absolutely freezes up just thinking "This is bad."

This is, perhaps, baby's first "someone is coming at you with the full, concentrated, explicit intention of killing you" and Ed is so genuinely out of his depth with it. He really does try. He gets immediately bested. He's staring at a situation where Al is directly in harm's way. And Ed just lies down to die like a dog...

Which makes Fullmetal Alchemist so much funnier because Edward Elric very very much does join The Organization. He’s in fact quite famous for joining The Organization. Where The Organization is a hostile fascist dictatorship with immense military power which is good at both giving orders and punishing defectors.

hot as fuck trans men exist

in this world we’re in

Truth is a god in the way that gravity or magnetism is a god. He's just a manifested force of nature. He's sapient on some level, sure, which is a neat trick, but we managed to make meat think and we're not extraordinarily special about it either. He didn't invent humans and he didn't spawn the universe the way that Rose would have expected the god of her religion to have done; he has minimal to no interest in the day to day lives of any creature and only intervenes when someone actively wanders into his grip of influence. He's not a Capital-G God. Truth is to matter what fire is to flammable objects. He's a metaphorical (and perhaps even allegorical) chemical reaction.

Ed isn't an atheist because he saw god and cussed him out irl; Ed's an atheist because he doesn't believe that the brute force of Truth qualifies as a god. Quite frankly, I think that's a hell of a lot ballsier and a much more complete understanding of the situation. This perspective insulates him against idolizing the Truth as an ultimate divine force and makes Truth something that can be reasoned around or through, rather than with, which would never have worked.

Junji Ito: