Sunshine Riptide

my first concern was that when Arthur woke up and discovered his blindness, a voice in his head and the corpse of his dead partner, he like. had no issue brushing any of it off. He got over his partners' death shockingly fast and had zero qualms or hesitation over immediately shooting and killing another man, who wanted him dead for like... a little bit of lip? But the way he spoke about it made it seem like that kind of "shoot first ask questions never" was not an attitude he ever had? he brought up the incident maybe twice with a "well that was super fucked up huh lol" kind of attitude.

He figured out how to navigate the world newly blind with an irritable voice in his head guiding perfectly him like. immediately. John himself had no clear personality- he was INCREDIBLY inconsistent, sometimes pliant and understanding and sometimes raging over the smallest things. Like the same things that would have made him angry at other times he had no problems conceding to. He also seemed to know a lot about the world Arthur lived in despite not having been there for what I'm guessing is a few hundred if not a few thousands of years and never had any issue navigating it. Like if he had no access to Arthur's memory how would he know that you need to flag down a taxi to get it to stop. or what a car even was. He has zero questions about the world he found himself in.

Arthur was a detective, right, but he never seemed to ask the right questions or have any kind of organization about his method of finding out what's going on with him, and he was immediately trusting that John was honest with him about the world around him while also rarely ever taking his actual advice or listening to him or his experience at all. Like he was extremely hard headed about following assumptions rather than leads despite the fact that he was literally and figuratively blind about what was going on. Like I guess you could explain it away as "he was lead down a specific path that marked him in specific ways because there were forces following John around" but it just came off as lazy and careless writing.

The encounters with the various monsters were like. Incredibly long-winded. They never provided any actual reasoning or explanation for why they went where they went (why did you take a baby from a random sick woman in the woods. How did you even survive a car crash unharmed. also why was the baby in the story at all.) Like I would buy the monsters following Arthur around but it seemed more like Arthur was actively chasing them down to where they lived which seemed entirely inorganic and not even in the 'he was compelled' way. It felt like the authors wanted an encounter with a cool monster and manufactured a scenario for that encounter to happen without caring too much about an interesting way to get Arthur there. The monsters themselves had like... little to do with the plot other than "they were scary and had tentacles and were coming for you!"

I couldn't ever get a grip on Arthur's temperament either. The same things that would scare him meant nothing to him in other scenarios. Things he was patient about he lost his head over like a scene over. You could also make a drinking game out of this podcast with the amount of times John said "I don't know" (KILLING THE VIBE OF THE STORY ENTIRELY) and "ARTHUR. WAIT." The amount of times John's only contribution to a bad situation was "zoinks scoob, we gotta get outta here!" was sooooo BORING!!! it was BORING

Writing 和風細雨 (he2feng1xi4yu3; gentle breeze and light rain) with a cat's tail on a water-writing mat.

Water-writing mats turn black when wet and return to their original colour once dry, so they are often used to practise calligraphy with water. The black colour allows you to see your writing clearly, and the mat can be reused as soon as the writing dries and disappears.