#mac mutters

Bee's had a hysterectomy!!

Hello everybody!! Sorry for the silence, it's been a busy summer for me. I have seen by the results of the poll that we should keep going, and I am gathering killer bee merch/graphics to queue, but it may be a little longer before I get on a schedule again. Thank you for your patience, there will be plenty more Bees soon!

thank you to @super-kame-love and @full-frontal-lotus for not only asking abt my thoughts on this, but for also supporting the blog <3

for context, this is the scene where ay and tsunade stop bee and naruto on their way onto the battlegrounds. bee is making his case that him and naruto are needed and capable, but ay is fighting back Hard.

this is the part where we get bee's backstory as well, which is super important to keep in mind with the way ay fights back. because the third raikage could not have another child to be raised as a b (to be a battle partner for ay), the third raikage and ay went to what seems to be an orphanage to adopt a compatible child. ay is in his 20s, but he seems to lower his strength so it's possible one of the children could meet the goal.

bee is adopted not so he'd have a family, but so he could be formed into a perfect battle partner for ay. throughout the flashback, you can see how bee overachieved to meet this expectation. another detail that i think is important to look at here is how ay since he was little had instilled fear in bee.

quick aside, i'm not trying to paint ay as a bad person; i imagine given the way shinobi stuff is, he was similarly raised. the narrative enforces that despite him meaning well, there absolutely are things he needs to work on and unlearn, and this is one of them (because if you remember with the end of the first kisame fight, ay still grabs him by the face like this). "i'll win when we play", considering the context and what is happening in the present in this scene, means that he'll one day be allowed to assert himself without the threat of... punishment and death.

that may seem extreme with the past three caps, but in the present confrontation ay is directly saying that if bee does not back down, he's ready to kill him and start from scratch (find a new gyuuki host, assign a new b). the only reason he hesitates is because he's a "greater military asset". later in this confrontation, even after bee almost seems to get through to him, ay continues to disregard bee as a person, instead pushing him aside as an obstacle (to test naruto, the one he does for sure have less of a connection to but yknow. gotta pass as "a savior" and whatever).

we should also consider that blue b, the previous gyuuki jinchuuriki, died from having gyuuki removed/sealed away after its last rampage. it is not clear whether the rampage occurred before or after there was decision made to replace blue b with bee as the gyuuki's host, as blue b had suspicions there were plans to (orochimaru being the reason is anime-only, and so is blue b being edo tensei'd).

sorry for cap spoilers up ahead, but they're important for this discussion too. at the third raikage's funeral, ay decides to retire bee as an active shinobi and instead assigns him as border control.

(sorry, i got totally forgetful with work and all this weeeek)

hello, everyone! I’ve decided that I’m going to be posting more than one cap per day, scheduling so there’s one posted at 8 pm EST and another at 8:30 pm EST. we’ll see how this goes!!

after some help from some friends, I have gotten hold of a reliable higher-quality source for my screencaps. thank you for waiting! starting 8 pm today, the queue will be back to regularly posting. just so we’re caught up, here’s what the previous two caps look like with the new source: