Killugon meta: 「心中だな」 “A lovers’ suicide, I guess”
Hey everyone, welcome to yet another addition of HXH translation meta with your old pal hunterxhell. This time, I’m taking a look at what I think is, hands-down, one of if not the most important scenes in HXH for understanding Killua and his feelings for Gon. In fact, I’m going to make the case that this scene proves that those feelings are romantic in nature. Unfortunately, the translation for this scene was absolutely butchered (it’s by far the worst translation in the series), so all of the meaning was lost, including the wonderful Killugon subtext.
For the past couple of months, I've read so many Peter Parker in Gotham fics that I can't tell them apart anymore. Whenever I get an update notification, I sit there trying to figure out which one this was. Doesn't help that the subgenre has so many established common beats.
For my own sake and sanity, this is a list of some that do stand out, that either break the mould or use it well enough to be memorable anyway. These are the updates I crave.
And When You Fall by @blackbellabu
Peter in Gotham, but arrives together with a strange little girl he's never seen before.
Die a Little Sweeter by @forestofbabel
Throws the mould out the window entirely. Peter keeps visiting Gotham at different stages of his life.
Existential Crisis Mode by @luciaintheskyainthi
Everyone knows this one, right? No transition via snap, or pit, or universal erasure spell, which stands out right from the start.
Home Sweet Home by @queenisdemilo
This one hits a lot of the tropes, but it does it so well, and has me on the edge of my seat.
The Mime of Gotham City by @lemongrovesandcloves
Peter lands in the hands of the Joker instead of the bats. Longing for the next chapter to this one!
Phantom Liberty by @kpeccati
Skips the orientation, and is set when Batman is just starting his career.
Stuck in a Web by AislinnHeart
The bats are hilariously incompetent when it comes to being reassuring and trustworthy.
The Unsteady Retirement of One Mr Peter Benjamin Parker by aestorian
Peter has had it with hero work and just wants to be Peter Parker, but keeps being bugged by bats.
“In Miles, we have a kid who’s not ready — he’s not ready for school; he’s not ready for this mission.”
Miles Morales, for fans of comic books and Spider-Man, is very well known. But for people outside of that world, he’s not very well known. With Into the Spider-Verse, we’re introducing a character who our audience already knows is going to become a new Spider-Man. But the audience loves Peter Parker, the Spider-Man they’ve got. It’s a challenging introduction of a character: Our movie doesn’t work if you don’t fall in love with Miles Morales.
We open the movie with a montage that introduces the real Spider-Man. The scale of that scene is enormous. It’s like seeing an entire superhero movie in 45 seconds, guided by this very confident narrator. Then we cut to Miles, and things slow down a lot. In an elegant script, everything is deliberate, and everything is a microcosm for something larger: When you meet Miles, we see him singing a song with headphones on. We made a very deliberate choice to spend the first couple of minutes we’re with Miles really just watching him. We wanted Miles to be kind of lovable. We see him drawing and making stickers; we’re establishing that he’s a creative person, he’s an artist, who is able to create without feeling self-conscious or encumbered.
The most important thing for this scene to communicate is that Spider-Man, as a character, is always punching up. In Miles, we have a kid who’s not ready — he’s not ready for school; he’s not ready for this mission. He doesn’t have all the tools, but he has spirit, and we fall for him because of that. We start the movie looking at Miles, and then we end it with him looking right at us.
We needed Miles to score a foolproof laugh at the beginning of the movie, right when you meet him. There aren’t exactly jokes in this stretch, or any clever lines. It’s just what a reasonably clever kid would say. We had this idea that if he sang a song that was out of his register, it would make the audience laugh. It got a big laugh in the preview screening a year ago, but there was one problem: The song we initially used was the Donald Glover song “Redbone,” and we liked the double-layered joke of opening with a Donald Glover song because of his history with Spider-Man. “Redbone” killed … until Get Out premiered.
It was critical that the song gag landed. We had a feeling it was because people knew the song, and they knew how he was messing it up. We were in big trouble when we couldn’t use it anymore — we needed to replace one of the greatest songs of the year, and we had to do it in time to spend the three months we would need to animate that shot. It turns out “Sunflower” is a massive hit song. We heard it as part of a batch of songs that Republic Records presented to us.
We also liked the metaphor this presents: Miles is singing a song that theoretically he’s a little too young for and he doesn’t know the words yet. That’s the metaphor we’re going to be working with for most of the rest of the movie. He’s going to be asked to step into shoes that he feels he’s not ready for, he’s not going to know the words, and he’s going to feel very self-conscious and nervous about that.
With Jefferson, we need to convey the authority he has in Miles’s life. His lines are delivered from either off camera, or passing. In a very subtle way, there’s a bit of a disconnect between these characters: Miles and his dad talk to each other, but they don’t necessarily look at each other, or face each other. Jefferson is a character who’s searching for a way to communicate with his son. This line — “you’re a grown man now” — was improvised by Brian.
Jeff and Rio are both helicopter parents in some ways. We were always riding a line, we didn’t want Jeff to feel punitive or naggy. We always wanted him to seem like he was a good dad.
We had to have Spanish in this scene. We worked really hard with Shameik [Moore] and Luna [Velez] to have enough Spanish in there that felt credible and that didn’t alienate English speakers when they heard it. It was important that it wasn’t subtitled, that it felt completely normal, and was never presented as foreign or other.
Sometimes we overdid it. And at one point we underdid it. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning that stuff. Even in recording sessions where sometimes Rodney would be on the phone with his mom, and Luna would be on the phone with hers, and we’d be saying, “What would you say if I didn’t do my homework, and you were going to call me out?”
We tried a lot of different versions of this scene, but sometimes the most down-the-middle structure works the best. A lot of these sequences were grounded in conversations we were having about how a lot of the characters in the movie were fighting against inevitable change, and were seeking to go back to a comfortable place in the past that didn’t really exist anymore. That was the intention behind Miles and his old school, and wanting to go back to it. We decided that Miles’s school was around the corner from his house, because it let us say a lot of stuff very quickly.
The initial versions of this scene, in some ways, hit a lot of the same things but in a different order. You saw Miles hanging out a lot with a specific group of friends that we no longer meet specifically. There was a dinner-table scene with the parents, and a lot of the dynamic of that was eventually moved to the scene where he drives to school with his dad. You had stuff about how Jefferson feels about Spider-Man. In those drafts, the movie started with him telling his parents that he decided to quit school.
You don’t get the sense that Miles is Mr. Popular, but you definitely get the sense that he’s a well-liked kid who has history and rapport with the people around him. In some ways we started to draft a lot on Shameik, and his charm. This is just a piece of flavor that popped up, between the writing and the recording sessions. Miles is not in control of his powers; it’s almost like setting up what’s to come. He is a charming kid. He is starting to make connections with other people that may or may not be romantic; it’s unclear. He’s capable of getting the connection, but he just isn’t quite in control of what he’s doing yet.
The stickers that Miles works on came from Bob Persichetti and his rebellious, street-art-skateboarder past. In the initial treatment, we wanted him to have something that was a little lie that he would keep from his parents, because it felt like a good microcosm of the big lie that he has to keep from them, going forward into the next stage of his life. What’s cool with the stickers, too, is that they literally say “My name is.” It very uniquely set up that Miles was someone who was still searching for himself and identity and wasn’t quite sure who he was, and was almost trying out different versions of who he was, graphically, on these stickers.
There were many versions of this scene, even in its current structure. We tried over and over again to write more jokes for Miles. Beyond meeting Miles, this first scene with him is about mapping out the visual contours of what you’re doing, and the tonal contours of what you’re doing. You’re conveying the overture for your whole movie, and the audience is paying attention. Sometimes if you don’t establish that stuff early enough, it feels jarring later on if you take a sharp turn and do something that you haven’t set up as one of the colors you’re playing with. A lot of jokes just didn’t work. They either felt fake, or written. So we just said, “Forget it.” All we want to do is fall in love with this kid, fall in love with his family, and convey a couple of very simple things. The kid feels a little overwhelmed; he’s not prepared. He’s a regular kid who fibs to his parents, parents who have very high expectations of him because they love him and are trying to do as much as they can to help him. And, of course, we had to do all that in 45 seconds.
Flash being the first person to approach Peter with the genuine intention of trying to comfort him after Uncle Ben’s death + the allusions to Flash’s incredibly abusive home life that manifests at school because he’s a kid who doesn’t know how to handle his emotions delivered all in four words = good fucking scene, great fucking understanding of both Peter Parker and Flash Thompson.
I understand the appeal of wanting every adult hero to instinctively adopt teenage Peter Parker, but can it really beat the hilarity of acknowledging that at 15 Peter was 5'10", unusually buff, went by a moniker with Man in it, wore a creepy full face mask, and had a tightly guarded secret identity and probably a Queens accent thick enough to have come out of a jello mold, and adult heroes reasonably responded to him by going, “Wow, this grown man is an immature asshole for no reason.”
Way funnier to me than adult heroes finding out Peter is a teenager and becoming Concerned is the idea of adult heroes Retroactively finding out Peter Was a teenager because he admits to being like. 22 and they’re like “Hang on you’ve been doing this for like. Seven years.” and he’s like “Haha crazy right? Anyway it’s too late for you to yell at me about that because the statue of limitations on that lecture ran out when I turned 18”
YEAH this trope is instantly more tolerable if it’s fully adult Peter being like, *listen up whippersnappers because I’ve been around the block voice* “I’m thirty, and—” and Tony Stark, who vaguely assumed Spider-Man is maybe two years older than him because he just has that energy and hasn’t reassessed this for four presidential terms, is like, *drunkenly doing math* “You’re how many”
Okay but…them trying to talk about Old People Stuff with him, not realizing that he wasn’t alive to remember xyz thing happening, never used xyz technology bc he didn’t exist yet, not expecting him to agree with the fact that some ppl were saying songs they grew up to were oldies, etc
The thing about Peter Parker is that he was raised by senior citizens the way other heroes are raised by wolves. He has the body of an Olympic gymnast and the soul of a malcontented geriatric. This likely contributed to the perpetuation of the accidental ruse.
It’s when he channels Aunt May so hard he makes it sound like he was personally and immediately affected by McCarthyism that the time traveler fringe theory starts really picking up bets.
I agree here, but Parker is ALSO canonically a science and technology nerd.
Peter ALSO likes to talk, because he’s nervous, and snarky banter is how he copes, but he tries to avoid any sort of identifying information, creating a situation where he just kind of mirrors whoever he’s talking to, and nobody can agree what age he is.
(Marvel characters barely have canonical ages, so I’m making this up)
Tony Stark (Late 30/ Early 40s), Comic book ages are fake) has had heated arguments with spider-man about the Starkphone’s latest specs, while also complained loudly about Oscorp, is convinced that Spider-Man is a 30 something engineer, is similarly convinced that Spider-Man probably works for him, and keeps trying to drop hints that like “You know, I respect you, you don’t have to hide from me because I’m your bosses’ bosses’ boss”.
Hawkeye (Early 30s) Human Disaster/Secret Agent has reminisced with Spider-Man about being a human disaster, is convinced that Peter Parker is, like, 28 at the youngest. He knows Spider-Man doesn’t collect a SHIELD paycheck or anything, so his mental image is a pretty accurate take on most Adult Spider-Man versions. Brilliant kid struggling to make rent on a studio apartment in Manhattan.
Black Widow (Age ???), Professional Spy actually clocks Spider-Man as a Teenager pretty reliably, but doesn’t believe her own assessment, because this is America. American kids play basketball and worry about Prom, they don’t do this stuff. I mean, yeah, it’s possible, since he has powers and such, but no, he CAN’T Be as young. She refuses to believe it.
Captain America (Mentally late 20s, chronologically almost 100 years old) has no idea what kids are like these days. But he’s been studying 20th century history, and Spider-Man has mentioned an Aunt he’s close with who lived through some specific events. Assuming that this “Aunt” is, like, 20-30 years older than her nephew, instead of 40+ years, he believes that Spider-Man is solidly in his 30s.
Bruce Banner (40s): Is convinced Spider-Man is also an Adult, but for opposite reasons. In Bruce Banners mind, Kids are rude, and Spider-Man has always been very polite to him, therefore, an Adult, although perhaps a youngish one. With his knowledge of Science, Banner imagines Spider-Man as a PHD student.
Thor (Age ???? But quite old) Knows that Spider-Man is an adolescent. How old are adolescent humans? 42? That sounds about right. Spider-Man is a 42 year old adolescent who lives with his Aunt. That aunt, who Thor has picked up is quite wise and venerable, is probably somewhere around 500 years old?
He is also almost certainly terrible at socializing with any other actual teenagers. Brings a real “How do you do, fellow kids?” vibe. He’s just an awkward dude who has spent too much time around adults, but it does nothing to beat the “this guy is 30” allegations.
I understand the appeal of wanting every adult hero to instinctively adopt teenage Peter Parker, but can it really beat the hilarity of acknowledging that at 15 Peter was 5'10", unusually buff, went by a moniker with Man in it, wore a creepy full face mask, and had a tightly guarded secret identity and probably a Queens accent thick enough to have come out of a jello mold, and adult heroes reasonably responded to him by going, “Wow, this grown man is an immature asshole for no reason.”
Way funnier to me than adult heroes finding out Peter is a teenager and becoming Concerned is the idea of adult heroes Retroactively finding out Peter Was a teenager because he admits to being like. 22 and they’re like “Hang on you’ve been doing this for like. Seven years.” and he’s like “Haha crazy right? Anyway it’s too late for you to yell at me about that because the statue of limitations on that lecture ran out when I turned 18”
YEAH this trope is instantly more tolerable if it’s fully adult Peter being like, *listen up whippersnappers because I’ve been around the block voice* “I’m thirty, and—” and Tony Stark, who vaguely assumed Spider-Man is maybe two years older than him because he just has that energy and hasn’t reassessed this for four presidential terms, is like, *drunkenly doing math* “You’re how many”
Okay but…them trying to talk about Old People Stuff with him, not realizing that he wasn’t alive to remember xyz thing happening, never used xyz technology bc he didn’t exist yet, not expecting him to agree with the fact that some ppl were saying songs they grew up to were oldies, etc
The thing about Peter Parker is that he was raised by senior citizens the way other heroes are raised by wolves. He has the body of an Olympic gymnast and the soul of a malcontented geriatric. This likely contributed to the perpetuation of the accidental ruse.
It’s when he channels Aunt May so hard he makes it sound like he was personally and immediately affected by McCarthyism that the time traveler fringe theory starts really picking up bets.
Peter has a lot of feelings about the woman that discovered DNA and he strikes me as the kind of person that thinks that distancing yourself from notable figures of history by using their last names is stupid, so he’s going to say something like, “Rosalind worked so fucking hard to have that work snatched from her,” immediately followed by, “I woulda thumped him good,” and inspiring Tony and Banner to frantically look through the 1930s and 40s yearbooks at King’s College and theorize which one was Spider-Man. Captain America tries reminiscing about the good ole days with him. Peter, for his part, has been absently agreeing and making vague “I’m listening” noises about the Rolling Stones and Elton John for the majority of his life, so adding baseball, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald to the list wasn’t that much of a stretch.
That’s made funnier by the fact that I feel like Steve’s natural assumption would be that Spiderman’s a non-citizen, so him jumping straight to felon is like, Peter just has such strong criminal vibes.
I love that Jimmy Olsen is exactly the type of photographer Peter Parker pretends to be. Just bat-shit insane.
Whenever someone asks Peter how he took a picture he's like "Oh! I uh-, climmed a flagpole. Totally"
And very mortal, normal-human Jimmy is like "See, Clark, is not that weird"
I mean, look at this nutjob.
The world could be ending, lava on the streets and Jimmy would be out there photographing away. No powers, no sense of self preservation. Just khakis, a camera and a dream.
I like to imagine Peter meeting Jimmy and immediately being mortified about it.
Jimmy: –and so luckily I was able to take the picture before the building collapsed on me... Superman was super pissed at me but, photographer to photographer, it was totally worth it.
Peter: Right, no– See, this is actually my first time hearing how fucking insane that sounds. No wonder people at work look at me weird.
nothing on this god's green earth can convince me that peter parker doesn't have an ao3 account where he is elbows deep in a 'rise of skywalker' fix-it fic. like, fully invested in it, been writing it pre-spider bite with ned, who is just as enthusiastic about it. but the thing is, it's really hard to do updates when you are literally spider-man.
every three months he'll post and in the author's note there's some shit like "sorry this took a while, i got shot seven times :/" or "i know it's been a minute, i literally got hit by a bus and then stabbed in the leg, but i'm all good!" or sometimes ned would log in and post with a note "hey i'm a friend posting on the author's behalf, they're healing from severe hypothermia but promised an update, so here it is!"
and the fic just gets increasingly more popular for the author notes alone. a good handful of the comments are something along the lines of "i'm not even in the star wars fandom, i'm just here to see if the author is good" or "every update i cheer for another day the author gets to live at this point"
and any reader who is a native new yorker kind of pieces together that holy shit the author might be spider-man because the timeline adds up, and they just fully embrace it. spider-man will stop a robbery and the guy behind the counter will ask when the next chapter will be up. spider-man returns a stolen backpack to a girl and she'll tell him that he "really got poe's voice down so well, it's really impressive."
ned thinks it is hilarious. mj finds out about the fic from twitter, to peter's absolute horror, and changes peter's contact name to "friendly neighborhood ao3 author". but the worst thing to happen is after an avengers battle where peter took a pretty big hit and ends up in med-bay. and during a press conference, when someone asks how spider-man is healing, tony just drops "spidey won't be down for too long. the star wars fic will be updated within the week, probably."
what’s good gang i have come back on this acc to share my thoughts
since till’s cover of all-in just came out, it got me thinking about how AMAZING the cover choices have been so far. the thing i love the most about them is the fact that the meaning of the songs get completely re-contextualized depending on who gets to sing them. the most obvious example is sua’s cover of ruler of my heart - where luka’s version is meant to mock mizi’s idea of love (repeatedly using religious imagery such as “my god” “my savior”, which are words that mizi associated with sua), sua’s version was a genuine profession of love. in another example, ivan’s version of black sorrow is meant to express the pain of unrequited love, whereas mizi’s version is grieving the loss of sua.
the cover choices also have symbolic meanings directly attached to their characters. luka’s cover of sweet dream highlights the fact that just like all the other contestants, he too his a victim of their cruel system. till’s cover of all-in is meant to be the perfect irony: the guy who willingly chose to stay in alien stage for the girl he loves is singing about being free and living for himself.
anyways, i’m rambling here
what i originally was trying to get at is that i hope that luka will get to cover cure in the future. lyrically, the song PERFECTLY describes his love for hyuna. he loves her even if it hurts her. even if it hurts himself. i feel like the lyrics of cure perfectly encapsulate luka’s feelings for her
