#gs asks

Yeah, chapter 44. It’s a lot. I’m with you, it wasn’t fun to read. It would take a whole thesis paper to write up all the elements and implications of what’s been going on in the manga lately, so, as always, I’ll TRY to say something brief here. 

If I had to pick one issue from the chapter I would go with the long haired blond guy (whose name I currently can’t remember). Am I a fan of Kensuke? Hell no. Do I take issue with the author deciding to use childhood molestation as an explanation for Kensuke’s violent homophobia (or his brick-headed sexism in general)? Completely. But at least he’s invested. At least he’s recognized that he’s caused problems and has acknowledged that he can’t change “right away,” which leaves the door open to the possibility that he thinks he might be able to eventually. 

Blond dude was more frustrating. It’s aggravating to sit there and listen to a high school student be fake-deep about “haven’t you ever considered that you’re anti-homobpobia is just as prejudiced as homophobia?” The only leeway I’m willing to give him here is that he’s friends with both Toma and Kensuke and he’s sticking up for both of them even though on a political level you can’t be an advocate for both gay kids and violent bigotry. Basically I think that blonde dude was being such an ass as a way to defend Kensuke from a bunch of girls who he felt were approaching the subject too casually and inconsiderately–that they were more interested in dumping on Kensuke and making him admit he was wrong than on being ~fair~ or considering others’ points of view. I think that’s mostly bullshit and it’s frustrating, but that also doesn’t mean that isn’t something there. I just think that something, that ode to a shallow interpretation of the absolute importance of neutrality, isn’t jack shit compared to the weight of recognizing the intense gravity of, again, violent homophobia. 

Okay this took me a long time but in my defense I was giving it serious thought! So here’s what I’ve got so far. 

Tropes I love:

Characters who are adorable and tiny and also unreasonably powerful

Shark teeth. Allow me to repeat myself. SHARK TEETH!!!!!! I fucking love characters with shark teeth.  

Cat ears. I’m not gonna lie, I like cat ears. On boys and girls. Cat ears for everyone (everyone who is cute).

Characters who are really nice but who look super scary. I’m not talking about delinquents who are secretly softies. I’m talking full Angel Densetsu–characters who are super nice and don’t even try to be scary in any way but unfortunately for them they come across as so intimidating that they can go “Excuse me you dropped your pencil” and ppl freak out because they think they’re about to get stabbed

Giant, terrifying, massively powerful man with super scary face!! ….and a tiny adorable child on his shoulder who loves him.

Misunderstandings used for comedy. (You know, like the school delinquents all becoming terrified of a character who is actually a total softie)

Your standard 4 Heavenly Kings style overpowered groups. Like the Student Council or the neighborhood delinquent crew.

I do kinda like tournament arcs. They can be a lot of fun.

Super hot androgynous characters who more often then not are evil. Is it bad representation? Yes! But they’re cool and hot so like… yeah

Super buff giant women. Are there enough of them? Hell no. But I love them when they are there.

Local girl is dumbass but boy does she try her best with a whole lot of aggressive enthusiasm! (Think Little Witch Academia)

Smug evil women. The real powerful ones who the main characters try to yell at and defy but she’s just still there grinning smugly and talking about how cute they are for thinking they can stop her.

Tropes that should die:

Female characters who are supposedly super strong and powerful but never fucking get to do anything ever. 

Sexualized earlier mentioned tiny, cute, and powerful characters (”they may look like a 10 year old but they’re actually an adult or thousands of years old!” doesn’t make it any better) 

Incest subplots… which is a different but kind of related topic since it’s usually younger sisters who are in love with their older brother or vise versa)

Perverts who never shut up about saying gross things and harassing every single woman around them but are still core members of the main group and will never fucking go away or die. And like 5 year old boy characters who are perverts and are used to creep on women in a secret and ~non-predatory because they’re just a child~ way

I really could just say fanservice as a whole. I mean, take your pick. The female character who just ~loves~ telling the MC to feel her giant boobs? Dudes tripping and falling face/hand first into a girl’s boobs? A group of boys peeking on the girls in the hotsprings episode but getting yelled at and slapped so it’s all okay b/c the girls can stand up for themselves (or not)? Female characters constantly talking about each others’ boobs and groping each other? Female characters being kidnapped and stripped and chained up naked and possibly tortured so that 40 year old animator and manga artists can get off on it? Burn it all. Sex and sex appeal and all that isn’t inherently bad, but jezus anime and manga cram a lot of it into inappropriate situations and in super sleezy, gross forms.

Characters acting like they need to dedicate their entire lives to the shit they said when they were 5 years old (aka, fantasies about girls’ physical and emotional purity because they’ve spent their entire lives in love with 1 person only)

Similarly, harems where a ton of girls fall in love with a dude because he’s like… kind of nice sometimes. That, and the reverse of where there’s a million girls all in love with the same guy because he’s emo and brooding and mean (we all know I’m talking about Sasuke and Tobey Maguire in Spider Man 3)

Characters who want to say something important (usually confessing their feelings), starting to say it, and then going, “…No… It’s nothing” *fake smile*

A never ending series of massive villain and hero powerups. Oh, you just beat a villain who could blow up the entire earth? Well this next bad guy can blow up the whole solar system. And then the next guy can blow up the whole galaxy! (cue training arc and/or massive gifted powerup.) Ya can’t substitute good writing and an interesting plot with characters who can destroy an increasingly large number of buildings or planets or galaxies.

Oh, and here’s another related one. Where the main character scarifies his abilities to temporarily gain the power to defeat the bad guy who was so overpowered that there was no other way to defeat him. Aaaaaaand then he gets his powers back 1 or 2 arcs later with no long term consequences for the supposed sacrifice. (Looking at you, Bleach.)

Overly complicated attempts at philosophical depth that don’t actually mean anything and barely even relate to the plot. “This world is but a hollow egg, propped up by a sea of roses with thorns that are built from the hearts of men who dream of honey but can’t grasp the apple before them…” *Followed by 5 more minutes of back and forth debate delivered through abstract symbolism and then the villain and MC sword fight.* Symbolism is real and can be done well and with genuine meaning behind it, but a lot of the time there’s just nothing actually there. Plus, symbolism is something you show. You can’t just have a dude say metaphors about apples and dreams for 5 minutes and have it count. 

This one’s actually a bit more serious IMO. You know the whole Naruto/Sasuke dynamic? The one where person A and person B are friends, and then person B decides to do horrible things and hurt everyone around them but person A still views them as a friend no matter what? Yeah not a fan. Friendships aren’t a contract where once you call someone a friend once you need to be their friend for the rest of your life and tear yourself apart trying to help them. It sets bad expectations to kids about what friendship is when they think that their friends will continue to want to spend time with them and see them as their friend regardless of how shitty they’re being.

Let’s see! 

Angel Densetsu (I’ve been mentioning it a lot lately, but that’s b/c I love it and have over a decade) 

Inuyasha (I grew up watching it on Adult Swim at night and got very invested in Inuyasha, Kikyo, and Jakotsu of all people. I even met my ex fiance via Inuyasha fanfiction) 

The Music of Marie (I cried so hard when I read it back in high school that I haven’t even tried to read it again) 

Teppu (I truly adore it, and its another all time fave) 

Evangelion (Say what you want about it, but it leaves a heck of an impact on me as a 14 year old) 

Lupin III (In college I spent an incredible amount of time diving into the anime series, the movies, the TV specials, the music, and even the manga which I had to order off amazon to get. It’s my problematic fav) 

Fullmetal Alchemist (because of course) 

Sumire 16 Sai!! (The whole manga was super silly and funny, but it was the ending that suplexed me into oblivion and cemented itself in my heart) 

Fourteen (a very odd and random choice, but there’s something about Chicken George that makes me very attached to him in a unique way) 

Ghost in the Shell (more than anything because The Laughing Man made such an impression on teenage me) 

I’m guessing that you’ve seen me talk about how important character designs are to me before (I’ve talked about it a bunch). Anyway… as always it’s hard to say! Giant foreheads aside, they’ve got a lot going for them

Maybe it’s Android 18′s sleeveless vests, or how 17 actually manages to look good with an orange ascot bandana around his neck (I think it helps that his hair and shirt are black so it gives him a Halloween vibe instead of being an assault on our eyes (looking at you, Naruto)). I would say their hair is also great. I think on actual people it would look incredibly 90s, but they’re 2 dimensional so it looks great on them to this very day. Them being hot doesn’t hurt either. I think their cool personalities help too (since personality and character design impact each other), as does that one time they beat the crap out of Vegeta (and Trunks and Piccolo and Tien). 

Absolutely (and I’ve reblogged a bunch of fanart for it). I just haven’t written anything up on it though. Whoops I forgot that I did. 

I touched on them a little in the big post I made after I finished reading the manga like a year or two ago (here), but I don’t think I’ve been specifically asked about them before. Since they’re a convoluted group I’m going to just list off the members as we were first introduced to them. To be honest I don’t have much to say, but let’s see

Itachi: probably the member with the most character depth, by far. Also possibly the biggest emo icon for a generation of anime fans. I wasn’t really that interested in him as a kid, but when I reread it I found him a lot more compelling and all the reveals around his past and true motivations and all that were absolutely a highlight of the series, and was a height that the series after him didn’t really manage to reach again, I think. 

Kisame: I always liked him a lot. Mostly because he was a big cool shark dude. He was also fun too, like his dynamic with Guy and his constant frustration over Guy never remembering him. I remember being very disappointed when I first heard that he died, and I vaguely remember that hearing that made me start reading the manga again for a short while because I wanted to see if it was really true or not. Like with everything in shounen, it takes a while to be sure whether someone is really dead or not so I spent a good while hoping he would actually come back. 

Sasori: never made much of an impression on me. He had a sad backstory but one that was pretty routine for the series. To me his biggest contribution to the series was being a big time enemy that Sakura, with the help of another female character, actually got to fight and defeat. Not something that happened very often in Naruto. 

Deidara: one of my favorites: He’s hot and has mouths on his hands so what’s not to like? His whole artist thing was fun too. I did feel conflicted about him taking down Gaara since at that time I still like Gaara more, but as he stuck around I kept liking him more and more. He was just a lot of fun. 

Hidan and Kakuzu: No substantial opinions on either of them. They were an interesting team and pretty dangerous too, but their role in the series was mostly limited to killing Asuma (which was sad and a big point of development for Shikamaru) 

Zetsu: I mostly remember him as the mysterious and most out-there member of the Akatsuki, which is saying something. He was just kind of there in the background and curious. His role in the later part of the series is too convoluted for me to have any opinions about aside from that it was super convoluted, like much of the rest of the later series. 

Konan: criminally underutilized as a character and the only woman in the group. Cool and interesting power, nice design, good backstory, only had like 1 real fight and she got killed at the end of it. The wording in the Naruto wiki made it sound like she was still alive, so for a second I got my hopes up and now I’m disappointed and slightly bitter to have confirmed once again that Tobi killed her. 

Let’s see here. I’m not even sure I can manage a full 10 characters from HxH, but let’s see what comes to mind

Neferpitou 

Bisky 

Hisoka 

Meruem and Komugi (they go together or not at all) 

Alluka 

Killua 

Kurapika 

Leorio 

Machi 

The first prince of Kakin, Benjamin, is also starting to grow on me, so we’ll see whether he remains a favorite or not as the arc goes on 

There, I managed 10 pretty easily (I was wondering if I could b/c sometimes it feels like I only like a fairly small portion of the cast). It’s not in an exact order because that’s really hard to pin down precisely, but as a general matter the closer they are to the top the more I like them. 

I don’t like talking about OP much on this blog (since this is supposed to be my refuge away from OP), so I tried to find a post where I listed my favorites over on Calgaras so I could link to it. However, after scrolling through 14 pages searching for posts with the word “favorite” in them, I figured it would just be easier for me to make a new list here. 

Hancock 

Luffy 

Wiper 

Enel 

Doflamingo 

Jinbe 

Dragon 

Robin

Nami 

Koala 

I feel you. Female nudity can be a complicated subject. And it’s complicated for a variety of reasons, which are largely b/c of straight dudes being shitty. There’s nothing inherently sexual about breasts, regardless of gender, but because of male instance they’ve been categorized as such and subject to censorship, exploitation, and fetishization. And unfortunately, because of that, any depiction of female nudity is going to connect to societal context. Women shouldn’t have to feel like at all times, any depiction of their bodies is either done for the sexual enjoyment of men, or still achieves that end regardless of intention and presentation, but I think the awareness of that is hard to shake. 

Anyway, about Claymore. I feel the same way. There’s certainly nudity, but overall it did not feel like fanservice or an exploitation of the characters’ bodies for male enjoyment. I feel like the nudity in Claymore was used for other, thematically appropriate purposes, such as conveying the mindless savagery of the Abyss Eaters. I kind of appreciated all the monster boobs in Claymore, because I felt like it served to take something “meant” to be appealing, and instead warped it into something monstrous. Cassandra, my favorite Awakened Being from the series, was the best example of this. She wasn’t just running around with her tiddies out (all 4 of them on her two different bodies), she was also running around with her giant legs spread open. Was this meant to be sexy? No, it was meant to be disturbing and grotesque 

Still, some of the overall nudity, and in some scenes more than others, is simply going to have been because the dude wanted to draw it.