Both Yukine and Yato are trying to focus on building new lives–for Yukine, at high school, and for Yato, at college–but when Yato’s father shows up as his professor and a mysterious girl starts tailing Yukine at school, they find that it might not be so easy to escape their demons after all.
I think Dabi walking towards the light might have a two-fold meaning, actually. The common belief that it’s a hint toward his redemption/atonement/healing is super apparent. I mean, literally heading into the light is such a clean, clear-cut way to symbolize redemption. And I fucking love redemption stories.
But also … (and this is not supported, this comes from my own feelings and my own experiences as an abused kid)
I hope it symbolizes exposure. I hope it means that Dabi is Touya and in Touya stepping back into the light, everything that Endeavor has done comes to light. Now we know that Dabi’s actually a pretty private person. All the Todorokis seem to be this way. Honestly if he truly wanted to ruin his father, he shouldn’t have thrown up his ring of fire. Let the media overhear whatever he was intending to say in that orchestrated chat with dear old dad. But he didn’t. Because he’s a pretty private person. He’s not the type to openly air out that dirty laundry.
But it’s going to happen. Somehow. I have a feeling that Touya’s grand reveal is going to unintentionally be seen by many many people and it will be a biiiiig scandal.
(this isn’t a great meta, but it’s some ramblings i put together; the students are back and I’m drained but I loved this chapter and so wanted to talk about it!)
So the title of chapter 78 of Noragami is fittingly called “Want.” And in this chapter we see the three main ships this story is aiming for (Yatori, Kazubisha, Yukinora) all receiving focus. What everyone in this series wants is intimate connection with people, but this chapter highlights that there is no connection without pain, without breaking rules, and without risk.
Yukinora
Like Nora said last chapter, all she’s ever wanted is to be wanted. To have a family, but Father doesn’t love her–he uses her–and Yato doesn’t trust her.
She says it’s silly of them to behave like the living, but that’s what she does want. She wants to return to pretending to be an ordinary living family with Father and Yato, complete with cooking for each other and playing house with Yato. This want has driven her to extreme lengths to try to get it back, and it isn’t solely because of Father’s manipulation. It’s because she really, truly wants this as well.
When Nora tries to leave, Yukine tells her not to head into a situation that would be risky (talking to Ebisu). He puts on a bit of an overly enthusiastic act, but instead of annoying Nora, she seems to understand that he truly does care, and she give the first genuine smile we’ve seen from her in the series and agrees to eat with him, i.e. connects with him.
Nora and Yukine are both shinkis, and they’re both dead and want to be alive. Yukine’s developed so much from his starting place though: he is content with being dead, so long as he has people he loves around. He wants to show Nora the same kind of love and acceptance that Yato and Hiyori showed him, as it is what Nora’s been craving but has never had. But Yukine’s taking a risk in talking to Nora because she hasn’t exactly been trustworthy in the past, and it isn’t even entirely up to her since Father’s always been controlling her.
As for whether this is a trick or not, I don’t know (I think Father’s up to something but I don’t know if Nora is in on it; it’s more interesting to me if she isn’t) but I don’t think Nora’s smile here is faked, and I don’t think her misery is faked either. This is what she wants; it’s been obvious in her arc since the beginning. When Father will inevitably ask her to betray Yukine (even if he’s thrown her away, I’d bet anything he’ll do that at some point), she’ll have to choose between someone who gives her what she really wants, and the family of three she’s been desperately trying to get back. If she really wants to connect with Yukine, she’ll have to let go of trying to get back the past (with Father and Yato). Notice how the three acorns (family of three, as a friend pointed out to me last night) are behind her right now while she and Yukine (in a yin/yang design, no less) face the light.
In other words while Yukine is currently having the most positive development, he’s not out of the woods and obviously neither is Nora. Loving Nora and wanting to help her is good, but it comes with risks that he may not fully comprehend just yet.
Kazubisha
Kazuma is currently behaving pretty much just like Nora used to. It’s not a coincidence that he’s asking Yato to become a nora this chapter, something he previously stated he’d never do.
Kazuma’s always been a foil to Nora. Right now, he’s lashing out at Hiyori because he doesn’t want to feel alone. For him, he wants Hiyori to feel how he feels–being in love with someone whom he can’t believe loves him back–for Nora throughout… most of the story so far she’s been trying to get Yato to return and does so for the same reason she gets so many names: because she also doesn’t want to feel alone.
Kazuma, you loser. I love you. Get help.
He talks about pretending to be a family, and how the pretending isn’t enough. He wants everything, really, with Bisha, because he loves her. He wants a full committed relationship, a family they cannot have because she’s a goddess and he’s dead. The question for Kazuma is if he’s willing to take what he can have with Bisha, who does respect and care about him despite Kazuma not fully realizing it. Because to do that he’d have to get over himself.
The problem for Kazuma is that he idolizes Bishamon too much, refusing to truly see her and how she sees him because she’s a goddess and he feels extremely unworthy (hence the glasses: they’re symbolic. That’s why he takes them off when he starts to confess to Yato).
Yato and Kazuma are both currently paralleling each other too, in that they’re avoiding their love interests ostensibly to protect them, but also because neither of them feel worthy of them.
Yatori
Well, we finally had acknowledgement that Hiyori has feelings for Yato.
(it’s yin/yang toooo it even looks like the shape)^^
Kazuma seems to believe forcing Hiyori to face her feelings will sow the same sense of unworthiness and guilt in Hiyori, but I’m not sure it will work out that way. We’ll see. But currently Yato is the one being an edgelord and unable to face her, because Father is clearly going to go after her again in his quest to retain Yato. But avoiding her is only hurting her.
Either way, whether he’s with her or not, Hiyori gets hurt. The question is whether he’d rather be hurt with her, or hurt her by leaving her alone.
And Hiyori herself stays in denial because it’s easier for her that way, but now she can’t stay in denial anymore. (She’s risking her life and her family to find Yato.) Thanks for that, Kazuma, I guess? (Not.)
That’s where Kazuma is almost certainly wrong, and again this goes back to his idolization and his principles. Yato does care for Hiyori, and Bisha cares for him (okay he’s a shinki but a shinki is a dead human). Hiyori is able to see that (she tells him Bisha would want him home with her), but Kazuma cannotcurrently.
Daikoku/Kofuku
The opening of this chapter is super interesting in light of Kazuma’s statement and further proves that he’s really, really wrong, and his issues have to do with himself and his own self-hatred and not with some fact.
We know that a shinki and a goddess (of poverty, no less, who causes misfortunes wherever she goes) have the relationship of a married couple. It’s no coincidence that the chapter opens with them being domestic.
But we also know Kofuku and Daikoku’s relationship hasn’t come without pain. They can’t have kids because of what they are, and their attempt to adopt a child shinki hurt them both deeply. But they love each other and stay together, and Kofuku wants him to care for her if she reincarnates. In this way we know that Kazuma’s declarations are flat-out wrong.
What’s holding Kazuma back from a relationship with Bisha is himself. Same as it’s Yato for being with Hiyori. Yukinora seems to be doing the best currently, but we all know the shoe named Father is going to drop eventually since he was spying on them last chapter. It’s not what they are or what the people they love are, but rather their fears about themselves, and the chains those fears lash around them (cough, Father for Nora, cough). It’s fear keeping them from pursuing what they want and/or seeing what they truly want.
Shocked. To me when it becomes clear Kataang is going to be endgame is “The Headbend”.
I’m afraid of opening a can of worms here, lol! But in my opinion (aka if you disagree cool you don’t need to yell at me please–not you anon but tumblr in general):
The
reason I presumed they were heading for Kataang was because Aang
vocalizes his crush on Katara quite a few times, and in season 1 Wu
tells Katara she’ll marry a “strong bender” which Aang is then referred
to. Logically if you’re introducing a romantic element it should pay off
in some respect even if it doesn’t become canon.
But besides the
other characters/Aang himself telling us to view them romantically
statements, there is nothing to hint at Aang having special feelings for
Katara. They don’t share a unique emotional energy or thematic
struggles that are separate from the ones the entire Gaang shares
together. I think Kataang would have been better written if the writers
made Katara
and Aang’s dynamic more unique, as the writer of the meta I reblogged earlier stated.
Aang and Katara’s dynamic wasn’t necessarily unique from Aang and Toph,
or Aang and Sokka. Again, the Gaang shares thematic struggles, but none
of these struggles uniquely concerned Katara and Aang besides his
stated crush which came up like once a season until the last few
episodes.
Aang had to tell us multiple times “I have a crush
on
Katara” and a fortuneteller had to tell Katara “you’ll marry a strong
bender.” It’s classic telling instead of showing: it was not shown to
us that he felt anything unique for
her besides that, whereas Zuko and Katara’s relationship was always
unique to them. I was already biased towards angst but that the unique
emotional crux of the story came down to them (like, the most dramatic
scene in ATLA is almost always considered to be the Agni Kai, not Aang
defeating Ozai) as well as my favorite themes… I was sold. 😛
I’m
not going to argue that she should have ended up with Zuko in canon
though, but rather that if the creators intended for Katara and Aang to
end up together, they should have written their romance better. Even the
creators admitted that they’d kinda
forced Kataang in some respects after the ending of LOK, so that’s
something I feel confident saying: that it could have been better
written. The creators agree and it’s fine to disagree–many people like
Kataang and that’s great, and I myself like it well enough–so like,
this is my opinion. Please don’t come at me with a mob.
I don’t have anything against Kataang, to be clear: it was always clear the writers were going for Kataang and I think it’s cute, it just wasn’t my ship because I prefer angst. I love Zuko and Katara’s dynamic, and their emotional energy was really just something that embodied the themes of the series: forgiveness, reconciliation, atonement, redemption, sacrifice. Kataang also did embody growing up in many different respects (letting go, seeing someone as unique, etc.) but Zutara’s themes were simply the ones that resonated more with me. It’s a matter of personal preference.
I am planning on writing one! I’m outlining one about Kazuma and Nora’s foiling actually, my poor children. But I actually might do one on how the three main ships Noragami seems to be going for (Kazubisha, Yatori, Yukinora) are all receiving focus at the same time and are all foiling each other as well, now that you mention it. I’d like to do a more specific gods-human one too, but the chapter was so… shippy that I am inspired. 😛 But if I do the second meta it should touch on that concept.
I’m going to end this discussion with a case-in-point comparing the mega-popularity of non-canon ships against semi-canon ships, and then discuss what this all means for writers, and how examining the popularity of ships in media can actually improve the way you write romance plot lines in your own works.
Pictures taken seconds before disaster
Although I’ve been reading My Hero Academia for a while, I haven’t been an active part of the fandom until recently and so there might be meta and other surrounding the series most popular ships that I’m not familiar with. But I want to talk about this series because it’s the absolute perfect model for the points I’ve been making in this whole discussion: shippers target pairs of characters with high emotional energy/tension, and the “canon” ship will always lag behind non-canon ships in popularity when the emotional energy between the romantic leads is not as strong as the tension between the male lead and another character.
(Damn, look who’s showing up ten years late to this discussion with Starbucks…)
Hey guys, just want to start with a preface here: I’ve recently been in several separate conversations about why certain ships become so popular, what leads people (and woman in particular) to ship so much, why certain fandoms become over-zealous in their shipping, and why so many slash ships manage to appeal to female viewers… And while I certainly don’t have scientific or even very thorough answers for most of these, I came across a line in a scholarly journal article recently that struck me like lightning, because it managed to express in just a few words a very complex idea that’s been slowly ruminating in my mind for months:
Many fans, particularly women, are disappointed by the contrived
romantic story lines that are appended to ‘buddy’ series and movies
in which the real emotional energy is between the heroic male leads (or between hero and villain) (McLelland 2006). [Source]
Emotional energy. There it is, the exact phrase I’d been looking for when trying to talk about the extreme popularity of ships like Klance, Sheith, Soriku, NaruSasu, and even het ships like Zutara.
Why do so many ships that have minimal chance of becoming canon become so beloved in fandoms? Why are so many fans attracted to potential relationships between characters the creators never intended to write romantically (or at least never intended to deliver on)?
I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: there’s no one, simple answer for shipping. People ship for an uncountable number of personal, unique reasons, and any attempt at “explaining” shipping will always be reductive and over-simplified. Nevertheless, once this hit me, I couldn’t unthink it:
Look at where the “real emotional energy” is in a story… And that’s where you’re most likely to find the fandom’s most popular ships.
hamliet 