Oh man we might be in for some Snk time travel shenanigans. So according to some of the translators who released chapter 109, Mikasa’s Eren flashback is very strange in terms of dialogue. Basically, Eren’s speech is eerily like that of an adult addressing and comforting a child……which has some far reaching implications given what Kruger said about Paths and his knowledge of Mikasa and Armin years before they were born.

I don’t know about that implying time travel, but I do think the titanization has some weird time thing to it because we already know Eren dreams a dream that the titanization would seem to have caused in chapter 1. What I’m thinking is that Eren when killing might have had one of those memories or something, and not realized it for what it was, and Mikasa might be remembering that now in light of Connie’s insistence Eren is not himself anymore (I don’t quite buy that he isn’t himself, but I can see Mikasa thinking along those lines). 

I don’t buy a time loop in general for the story, but I’m hardly unbiased, and that’s because in general I hate time travel in fiction. It’s like, my least favorite trope ever. 😛 I can take the serum having some weird beyond-time properties but a time loop, I’m out. I think it’d be extremely hard to pull of given the themes of choice in the series and implies they never had a choice anyways. If it ends nihilistically I would like it to at least be because of their choices, like Ymir’s choice. (I still don’t think it will be nihilistic.) That being said it’s possible to pull it off but I think it’d be very difficult. 

So basically, Eren was clearly affected by the dreams and memories before he was even injected, so it’s entirely possible that dream is not even his memory (especially given that Mikasa’s hair just does not match up with the girl in his dream). I’m personally leaning towards that being a memory of Eren Kruger’s… and possibly Kiyomi (this theory was suggested by a friend and I think it makes a lot more sense and explains some of Kiyomi’s actions in assisting Paradis). 

The Fall of Icarus

cutiesableye:

and the rise of a villain? maybe? Theorizing on Hawks

image

I know I was going to do a character analysis on Hawks but something came up. Ahaha, this. This came up. I had a feeling from my first reading that Hawks wasn’t gonna have much of a happy future. Birdyboy fits the bill for a classic Greek hero and he’s clearly a shoutout to Icarus. 
(The analysis of Todoroki Touya’s name, provided that Dabi=Touya Theory is true has me fuckin’ shook lads. I mean … Hello Apollo!!)

But let’s just get on with my mad banquet of darkness.

Keep reading

” reads hamlets opinion on tg and cries ” well I have to say it makes me sad to hear you felt that way about tg after all its thanks to tg that I even found you at least you found other fandoms you can enjoy and I can’t blame you for not wanting to be involved anymore the fandom becoming toxic plus the final arc Its understandable .

I’m very grateful to TG for the time and entertainment it gave me! I still like the people I met through it and am so profoundly grateful to have met all of them, including you, friend!! I have no regrets about all the time I spent stanning the series. 

this chapter was interesting because eren has achieved an almost cult-like following and from Gabi’s recent behavior in this chapter, I think she’s heading for a breakdown where she’ll have to decide what she really wants to do. what are your thoughts on the chapter and Gabi’s future?

I LOVED this chapter. A really powerful, thematic chapter with lots of character moments. (This isn’t a proper meta but is more my ramblings.)

It really gets at the issues between two groups of people who have been taught to hate each other, and to self-hate as well in the case of Gabi and Falco. It is not easy to just nod and say “I get it now.” Brainwashing is really hard to overcome, and especially when you’ve been pushed to such limits, are only 12, have killed for this cause you believe in–what if that cause was wrong after all? Gabi just wants to believe she matters, that all she’s been through hasn’t been in vain. It’s a childlike coping mechanism, but it’s relatable. 

The thing is, Isayama isn’t even issuing that challenge to Gabi yet. He’s just asking her, as Kaya is asking her about her mother, to see Sasha as a person. Because that’s actually the best way to overcome that kind of brainwashing: to see a person. To empathize. Kaya’s kindness I hope touches her. Gabi must have heard Sasha’s name on the airship, so I’m hoping the name drop rattles her to the bones and causes her to rethink. But it won’t be easy, but I think she can do it.

As @harostar​ was saying last night, the story really comes down to Gabi and Falco. Will they break the cycle? Falco is perhaps willing to. But Gabi needs to be willing to as well. Or will they repeat the cycle that everyone seems to be repeating right now? Hange having to arrest people for information (she’s very sympathetic and I’ll fight people coming for her), Floche becoming exactly what he once criticized (yelling at Eren and Mikasa for trying to save Armin and not following orders, and now he’s the one not following orders–I don’t like the guy but I see what Isayama’s doing with him), Mikasa remembering that for all the beauty of her relationship with Eren, that incident that taught her to live also introduced her to violence, and seeing that Louise has been introduced to insubordination and violence as well… (like the comment about Mikasa having been in that cell or not wasn’t subtle), the reminder that Historia is unhappily pregnant just liker her mother, etc. 

I think breaking the cycle fits better with the themes, but we will see. Hange needs to break away from trying to be Erwin and try to lead as Hange, Mikasa needs to realize that fighting worked in the past but fighting may look different now, and she needs to address her feelings for Eren. Historia needs to remember what Ymir told her, and I have no hope for Floche–he’s pretty clearly going to lead a coup and it will end poorly. Gabi needs to see the Eldians, including herself, as people. 

The story is asking the characters to see everyone, including themselves, as people. Because that’s the only way to break the cycle. 

harostar:

Okay, but I really loved this chapter. 

Floch is a traitorous piece of garage, who has been working with/for Zeke for at least several months. And represents the voice of Extremism and Nationalism in the story. That he is becoming more and more influential is very concerning.

 And god just……the entire part with Gabi and Kaya confronting each other. Their entire argument strikes me as very much leaning into Religious elements. Gabi’s world view sounds a lot like the concept of Original Sin, and the idea that humanity deserves to suffer to atone for their sins. Even so, we’re starting to see her cracking under the pressure. Just like Reiner before her, she’s seeing how wrong everything she was taught actually is……when that has literally been the only thing keeping them going since the beginning.

I loved Kaya essentially echoing back what Gabi had said several chapters earlier. Gabi was angry because she didn’t understand why Liberio was being destroyed, and why her loved ones were being killed. She didn’t believe they had done anything to deserve it, because she’d never seen it with her own eyes.

Now she has. Now, she’s been taken to the ruins of a village destroyed by Titans and heard a survivor’s story. Kaya demands to know why her mother, who never hurt anyone, deserved to die such a horrible death. 

We see the classic argument being presented again. Does the current generation hold responsibility for the actions of their ancestors? Should people living today be punished for something that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago?

Gabi has only been able to understand her world through the framework of Atonement. Just like people have looked to Sin and divine punishment as a way to explain their suffering, Gabi needs to believe that her suffering and the suffering of her people has a PURPOSE. She needs to believe that they DESERVE what is happening, and that because it is Atonement, it will eventually end. Someday, someday they will be free and not have to suffer anymore.

But we know that isn’t true. We know that the Warriors have been raised on lies, and fed a false hope. Marley is simply exploiting them, and will simply kill them when they are no longer useful. 

Kaya challenges Gabi’s world view in a way even Falco could not. 

She rejects the idea that ancient crimes of their ancestors justifies her mother being eaten alive. She rejects the idea that she deserves to suffer, for what someone else may have done long ago. She rejects the idea that suffering is righteous, and atonement is necessary for things that happened long before your birth.

She challenges Gabi to see her suffering as what it actually is – Cruelty and Hatred. Just people doing awful things to each other, when they can choose to do better. 

Just wondering because I saw on sentrakk blog, do you still care about tg or the last chapters were not what expected and now you don’t want to blog about it anymore?

@sentrakk​‘s post essentially says everything I think about TG and TGre, including my overall thoughts on the series. Just about every sentence she wrote is what I think, as well. 

So this is probably going to be my last TG post, unless I think of something new and exciting to say, something that I will really enjoy writing. Which is always possible! But I want to write about things I enjoy, not things that make me upset. 

I’m going to say what I really think about Tokyo Ghoul below this. Be warned. 

I have ratings on my blog in my fandom page now. I put TG as “through the Rose Arc, 9.5 Post Rose Arc, 2.” I still really do love the series’ themes and beautiful moments through most of Rushima. 

It’s really after the OEK that I personally felt the series’ flaws cracked open. It’s fine for people to enjoy it still and again I’m genuinely happy for you if it hit the right notes for you, but for me the changes the series underwent post OEK and reinforced with the ending made it not just unenjoyable, but deeply upsetting. I don’t think Ishida like, maliciously set out to endorse anything remotely harmful, but you can have the best, most beautiful of intentions (as he clearly did when he said in the interview he cared about minorities), and still do harm (actual real life minorities/ marginalized people didn’t get treated so well in TG). 

I don’t like TG’s perspective on abuse victims. 

I don’t like how it treated orphans/unwanted children.

I don’t like TG’s perspective on sex, on LGBT issues, on race (Mutsuki being the one dark-skinned character), or on gender.

I do consider what it offers in the themes around these distasteful. It’s fine if you didn’t interpret them the same way, but this is what it is for me. I also realize I have life experiences the vast majority of the fans who are from first-world countries (for lack of a better term) do not, and this has affected how I view those kinds of issues. That doesn’t make me a better person or a worse person than anyone else, but it is my reality. 

Child death can be extremely triggering and traumatizing to read about, and TG endorses it being NBD, as evidenced by how literally to this day people are insensitive about it and mock people for being upset about the Oggai. Ishida clearly did not understand the gravity of what he was writing about either, just like he didn’t understand the gravity of sexual abuse since none of those incidents mattered in the ending of the story… and that was upsetting. That made those horrors feel gratuitous, for me. It’s probably a removed issue, killing orphans, for most people in the fandom. It’s not a removed issue for me, and so I was horrified by how TG treated the Oggai. 

I firmly believe Ishida has a good heart, but TG is a narrative and thematic mess, and unfortunately the mess primarily affects the themes and issues that deeply mattered to me.  

I’ve also blacklisted on Tumblr and Twitter certain key terms, like the main characters and ships involving the main character. I still like many characters and have no regrets about my time with TG. But I’m not interested in actively producing content for the fandom anymore. I enjoy seeing cool art from time to time, so I’m not unfollowing anyone, but I don’t really want to be a part of things anymore. I wouldn’t enjoy it; it would just make me grumpy and sad. 

I would rather focus on the fandoms I really do enjoy. I’ve got metas I want to write on Nora-Kazuma’s foiling in Noragami, Mikasa and her headaches and their connection to violence, Gabi’s challenge this chapter in SnK, why Soma is awesome in Black Butler, etc. Plus HxH is returning, so I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to meta about for that. 

Could you summarize why you like Rey from Star Wars? Most people I know dislike her saying she’s a mary sue, I am indifferent towards her, so I am wandering.

Haha okay!

Soooo the Rey=Mary Sue thing really is a… sore spot for me because it is so clearly gendered sexist and baseless criticism. She’s no more overpowered than Luke, and she has an arc. Firstly let me discuss her arc, and then the definition I’m using of a Mary Sue, and how Rey doesn’t come close to fitting that definition. 

Rey has flaws that matter for her and for the story–she’s angry, all the time. She lashes out at Finn, at Kylo (she did not have to scar his face, that’s clear), at Luke. She’s traumatized by her abandonment and the idea that Luke could do something so wrong to his nephew he was supposed to love–it triggers her and she flips out, running away to naively try to save Kylo. Because Rey has always tried to be enough, honing all her skills, doing what she can, but it wasn’t enough for her parents. She’s deeply afraid of worthlessness and a lack of love, specifically. Rey’s unable to let go of the past/of the hope her parents will return and that keeps her in a desert, leads to her being abducted, and she clings to the first people she meets who show her kindness. 

When she goes to meet Kylo, like I said above, she wants to save him. But she can’t. It’s not a lacking quality in her that can’t save him; it’s that at this point he isn’t ready to save himself (and he will in IX, I’m sure, but right now he made the wrong choice). That’s why her moment in the throne room with Kylo was so powerful–she and Kylo love each other, but she refuses to be with him even though all she’s ever wanted is for someone to come for her, because she at this point knows that what he wants to do is wrong, and she can’t do that. Rey at the start of TFA almost certainly would have gone with him. She’s learning to expand her world from Rey living on Jakku waiting for her parents, to the entire galaxy which she might have to play an instrumental role in saving. 

Anyways. All that to say: Rey has an arc. Now let’s talk about the concept of Mary Sues, and I’ll give an example of a character I do think of as a Mary Sue from a manga. 

When I think about “Mary Sues” (a term I inherently don’t like because it’s often used as sexist criticism), I think it’s important to keep in mind that the definition varies widely. Generally it’s seen as a self-insert character, an overpowered character, a perfect flawless character, and a character everyone loves for no discernible reason, but the reality is characters can have one or so of these traits and not necessarily fit what I consider to be a Mary Sue. 

I consider a Mary Sue character not so much something that comes down to character traits, but comes down to their framing and what their role is within the story. Like you can have a character that everyone revolves themselves around, but if it’s framed as a negative thing (think Mikasa with Eren in Attack on Titan, though does anyone think Eren is a Mary Sue? He’s not lol) then it isn’t necessarily what makes a character a Mary Sue. You can have a character who is largely flawless but whom the others don’t revolve around, like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (Rey has more flaws than he did). You can have an OP character like Junko Enoshima but if they have flaws they aren’t a Mary Sue. Self-insert is hard to prove anyways, and tbh, we all write ourselves into characters, so eff that definition. Kind of the perfect example of someone who is a reader insert though, and also OP, the world revolves around them, and doesn’t really have flaws is Twilight’s Bella Swan.

Actually, Bella is one of three characters ever I’ve called a Mary Sue. I’m hesitant to use it because of it being a somewhat loaded term. That being said if I do feel it applies I will use it, like for Bella. One of the others is James Bond (but he works for the kind of story he’s in), and the other I’ll discuss below.

Continuing on the topic of defining a Mary Sue, I like this video’s definition of Mary Sue and its role in the story, and agree with it, from about 3:20-6:00. Here’s the best quotes from it (if you watch the full thing, they actually do discuss Star Wars!):

The Mary Sue is the center of attention at the expense of basically everything else… The Mary Sue is the center of everything, and that’s not really going to be a compelling read, no matter how interesting her character is… It takes more than a cartoonishly traumatic backstory and a laundry list of positive traits to make a character compelling. Now to be clear, there are stories with a character at their center where the character isn’t a Mary Sue. The distinction is that a Mary Sue warps the way the world works around them. Glorifying the Sue is prioritized over maintaining the established characterizations or the straight-up rules of reality. A hero might be the center of the story, but they won’t be the only important character.

A Mary Sue isn’t a character; they’re the artifact of an overly-centralized story. … That’s what a Mary Sue is. Not just the center of the universe, but everything in the universe. Everything has to lead back to the Sue. In any situation where that’s not true, you don’t have a Mary Sue… the Sue-ness is built on the fact that the story is sacrificed to make the character look good.

That’s literally not at all what happens with Rey.

Now to discuss an anime/manga character I think exemplifies this almost to a freaky degree of accuracy. I know most people won’t like this but it is something I don’t want to argue about as I firmly believe it.

Kaneki Ken of Tokyo Ghoul, post OEK.

I think Kaneki was an incredibly well-written complex character up until around then, and then basically turned into exactly what you see described above in the video. So many of these excellent, complex characters–Mutsuki’s arc, Hinami’s arc, Touka’s arc, Saiko’s possibility of an arc, Hide’s possibility of an arc, Urie’s arc, Ayato’s arc, Tsukiyama’s arc–all came back to their relationship with Kaneki. Forget them working through their own established in-universe issues: they became defined increasingly only by their relationships with Kaneki. I mean the entire world came together to save Kaneki after a century of conflict but didn’t do that for Rize, whom the narrative endorsed the death of in the exact same circumstance as Kaneki was saved from because… Kaneki felt like he needed to kill her. The themes of “live, even if it’s not stylish,” the complexity of the communication, empathy, building a new world–these were all sacrificed to make Kaneki’s journey work. Touka being someone who confronted Kaneki and called him out on his bullshit–a defining trait of why their ship was so beautiful in part one, even if the way she did it was flawed–was erased. Tsukiyama’s growing resentment with Kaneki pre-Dragon was forgotten. The Q’s struggles with Kaneki as a father figure went nowhere. 

And before people are like “but he’s the main character!” Sure, but this isn’t the case for Luke Skywalker, Monster’s Tenma, HxH’s Gon Freecss, SnK’s Eren Jaeger, Noragami’s Yato or Hiyori, nor even for BNHA’s Deku. So it isn’t a trait typical of MC’s.

Anyways, rant over. But let’s bring it back to Rey. Finn in TLJ does start out orbiting around his desire to be with Rey again. However, what I like about this is that the story shows us that this desire, while we love where it came from and don’t think of it as a terrible thing, is a narrow-minded mindset. Like Rey, Finn’s world is expanding. His worldview via his adventures with Rose and his budding relationship with Rose show him that Rey is a vital, important part of his world, but she is not his sole world. And he has others, too. 

But legitimately no one else orbits around her. Kylo won’t change for her. Luke refuses to train her and when he does he never shows her any kind of affection. Leia treats Rey no differently than she treats the others. Poe like just met her. Rose hasn’t even met her and she wasn’t gushing over this mysterious girl with the force and hero-worshipping her. She was gushing over Finn. Poe, Holdo, Leia, Rose–they all had arcs that had nothing at all to do with Rey. Luke’s didn’t have much to do with her either, to be honest. It was more about him overcoming his own failure not via Rey, as you might have gone into the story expecting, but instead by facing the nephew he hurt and the sister he hurt. 

The story’s themes affect Rey just like everyone else. She fails in TLJ, because everyone fails, but she is able to go on as a part of something greater than herself. 

So yeah hahaha. Sorry, that was very long. But Rey is the epitome of Not a Mary Sue.