500 MILES - Riddle Rosehearts AMV 🌹
(youtube version)
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@finierude
500 MILES - Riddle Rosehearts AMV 🌹
(youtube version)
500 MILES - Riddle Rosehearts AMV 🌹
(youtube version)
GOOD ROMANI QUALITY:
HIS PATS
Rewatched Blade Works again and I just.
Crying about this
Chp 1 Pt 2 Releasing Wednesday 9/25 10am MDT (GMT -6:00)! 🎉
I still have another round of editing to go through, but the next update will add approximately 61,000 words, bringing the total to ~82,000 words.
(it was a struggle but I’m here somehow)
Ooc art but a girl can dream…..I really love abusing the “add” layer mode lol.
Hope you'll remember me.
Sometimes I read Rising of the Shield Hero Fanfics and read about how the other three heroes are idiots and that it’s better if they were dead or they were punished and I can’t help but think:
Ren is 16 when he’s killed by a murderer to save a friend and sent to another world.
Itsuki is 17 when he gets hit by a truck, either on the way to or from school.
Motoyasu is 21 when he is murdered by the two women he led on.
Shield Hero, despite it’s flaws, is a fascinating way to look at unreliable narrators. We see the narrative through Naofumi’s eyes mostly, and that’s probably why the three other heroes are idiots, or horrible people because to Naofumi, they are. He’s incapable of seeing them in any other way.
But then, you have to think more carefully about the narrative presented then. Naofumi’s appearance in Melomarc is easy, he’s the only one who is still alive when summoned, and then everything sort of clicks into place.
The other three are dead, most likely. The world taking the form of a game and them treating it as a game makes sense - they don’t know any better, this is a situation they’re unfamiliar with, it’s a coping mechanism. The other three heroes are flawed, yes, but they pull their own strengths and weaknesses with them.
Ren doesn’t interact with his party - Did he always play like this, or is it because he’a scared that, much like his friend, he’s going to lead them all to their death?
Itsuki is prideful, a black and white view on justice - Is he really that much of a prideful ass, or was he bullied in his youth perhaps? Is his self-esteem in one world is low, so he reinvents himself in an attempt to be better in a new one and goes overboard.
Motoyasu acts without thinking, finds it hard to frane things within context - Truly an idiot, or is it because the last time the took the time to think his next action through, he’d been stabbed by the two people he did something stupid with?
Maybe the manga and light novels paint a better picture of this, shows them as bigger, badder people. Maybe Motoyasu really is an idiot. Maybe Itsuki is a prideful prick. Maybe Ren is as cold and standoffish as he presents himself to be.
But, I can’t help but think: They were killed in their previous life. And Naofumi is a heavily biased narrator. Who else could they be?
I very much appreciate this post. Fun as it is to find their screw-ups stupid, there’s a lot of things they don’t get credit for.
Like, while the anime cut this, Motoyasu is actively and explicitly affected by PTSD from his being stabbed. When we get to see that event from his POV, you learn that the rationale he came up with while dying at the hands of two girls he’d thought were good people directly leads to him being so unquestioning of Myne. (He suspects he drove them to violence against their better nature, so his treatment of Myne is intended to prevent a repeat of that. Even though in reality both of his assailants were already violent stalkers and Myne is a disaster herself.)
A lot of his idiocy isn’t even idiocy so much as not being able to cope with negatives and trying to rationalize them away. Or just… things he had no reason to expect. The bio-plant incident is caused by him trying to solve a famine by repeating the steps taken to resolve that issue in his game. I don’t think anyone would expect that the real-life seed would be in the exact same location as in the game, requiring you solve a bunch of puzzles as in the game, accessible at the same time as word reaches you of a famine in a town with the exact same name as in the game, but then the plant that solves the famine in the game would randomly turn out to be a monster in real-life, but only after you’re long gone. From Naofumi’s POV its painted as one more example of someone trying to solve things by cutting corners for instant gratification and making more problems as a result, but Motoyasu was following a manual that turned out to have bad instructions. While it does become increasingly apparent over the course of the story that the heroes’ games don’t match up perfectly wirh the world, as far as the reader knows this is Motoyasu’s first encounter with such a situation.
Itsuki is explicitly stated to have a lot of issues he hasn’t worked through to do with an inferiority complex stemming from both bullying and being set up with high expectation that he wasn’t able to meet. Motoyasu played Emerald Online for fun, but Itsuki played Dimension Wave specifically as an escape. He gets taken from that situation and placed in a world where he’s told he’s one of the most powerful and important people around, and is then surrounded by sycophants who act almost cult-like in their praising of him while egging on all of his wannabe heroic antics. He does let himself get swept up in it to the point that he turns around and becomes a bully to one of his own party members, but under the circumstances its not hard at all to see why he would turn out like he did.
Ren… Actually I don’t have as much on Ren. His main character flaw is basically just that he’s a socially awkward 16 year old. As long as you keep that in mind, basically every mistake of his makes sense. The only thing he does that can’t entirely be attributed to that is leaving the dragon corpse. That’s more easily attributed to the fact that he was only hired to defeat the thing and thought other people might also like to harvest materials from it, and even the villagers who should have no excuse to mistake their world for a video game were treating the dragon corpse like a tourism trap. Even the way he handles the spirit tortoise fallout is pretty realistic from the perspective of “this is a decent kid who’s in way over his head and doesn’t know how to cope.”
And that’s all without taking into account that Naofumi himself starts off treating the world more or less like a game. In the LNs, when he’s betrayed, he even mentally berates the other three heroes because being summoned to another world is supposed to be fun and they’ve ruined it for him. Naofumi is given a rougher go of things and has a moment where he explicitly accepts the world as a brutal reality while the other three are sheltered from as many negatives as possible by the king and the church.Even if the intention isn’t to make them particularly ignorant so much as complacent, it allows them to maintain their belief-on-summoning that it’s all a game. The hero meeting (which the anime truncated) even makes it apparent that all of Naofumi’s hard work effectively behind the scenes has played a part in enabling this, as his resolving the wave with Glass, defeating the pope, and resolving their messes fast enough for them to only find out (from him) well after the fact that they even made a mess keeps them from having to feel any meaningful consequences that might end the fantasy for them. Which is why, while they have rationales for how everything is a game when the queen first returns, by the time she’s been in charge for like two weeks they have trouble maintaining their justifications.
And that’s without taking into account that Naofumi, at least when narrating the LNs, is pretty blatantly not emotionally capable of separating himself form the events he’s describing. He’s not the most reliable narrator with regard to himself, much less the rest of the cast.
Big question: do the heroes parties know how old they are? specifically Ren and Itsuki cause they aren't even 18 yet. I don't remember Naofumi telling Raphtalia or Filo his age either, and the story isn't focused on the others enough.
I can imagine Itsuki telling his party he's 17 so he can get "wow you're so mature and heroic for your age :))))" type compliments, Motoyasu will tell any woman trying to hook up, and Ren might purposefully avoid it so he's not treated like a kid(he is).
I can imaging his party asking Nao how old he is, and them just freaking out when they learn he's 16!!! after they freak out to Ren about "why didn't you tell you you are only a CHILD". since i think they are all like complete adults(youngest being 18).
canonically: no clue </3 i DO remember Naofumi mentioning offhandedly in the anime (s2 i believe) that he was 20? but i don't remember the context (let alone which episode; was probably before the Spirit Tortoise arc tho?). and like you said, the story (especially in the anime) isn't focused on the others enough to really give us any ideas? you could make inferences based on the passing glances of their parties, but they'd be a lot of conjecture.
i DO get the impression raphtalia and filo are aware of his age to some extent—raphtalia in particular i feel would be the best bet out of his current (anime s2) party to know his age. that said, it's wholly possible that raphtalia doesn't actually know the exact age either: naofumi seems like the type of person to just not mention much about himself (even before getting betrayed by Myne!)
not that he'd go out of his way to hide stuff about his character (in fact he seems pretty unapologetic about himself mostly within reason), but rather he just wouldn't think to say anything. i am very much the same way where i just won't mention shit about myself, even if it's relevant. i tend to hide my birthday from people for instance because i don't want it to be a big deal—i don't have any birthday traumas, i'm just a tad private like that.
(imagining one day naofumi mentions offhandedly somewhere casual in luroluna that he's 20 while everyone starts losing it to some degree. rishia and eclair thought he was in his 30s. melty thought he was 16, for some reason. filo was actually exactly on the mark, strangely enough—no one expected her to have that good a grasp on the passage of time, let alone its relativity to others. raphtalia, having a skewed perception of human ages, assumed naofumi was either in his late teens or mid-20s], and got cllllose enough frankly)
headcanon-wise: god. GODDDD i can't agree more with the assessments on itsuki and motoyasu it's absurd.
Aqua, Akane and their relationship during his "Freedom" period
I know a lot of people dismiss Aqua's words to Akane in Chapter 97 because he wasn't shown being all smiles during their time together, but I think those people forget that Aqua has a very complex, very difficult, very painful rapport with happiness.
He has lived his entire life, be it as Goro or as Aqua, feeling guilty. Goro quite literally felt guilty for existing: he couldn't forgive himself for living at the expense of his mother. This guilt is accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness: he beats himself up because he couldn't do more for Sarina, and as Aqua he blames himself because he couldn't save Ai.
He assigns no worth to his own life. He has panic attacks when he lets himself enjoy things. Even something as innocent as Ruby reminding him of Sarina makes him think that he is unforgivable because he doesn't deserve salvation.
After living this way for so long, it's only natural that he still struggles with allowing himself to be happy during his "Freedom" period.
To make matters worse, this newfound freedom was born from Aqua running away from the truth and from all his issues. Ichigo said so himself, there is no way Aqua didn't notice the loophole. Himekawa literally tells him what age he was when his dad died, some simple math would've automatically let Aqua realize that the timeline didn't add-up.
But Aqua didn't want to realize it. He blinded himself to the truth because Himekawa gave him the escape he has been desperately yearning for since (at least) the TB arc.
Since Aqua didn't actually solve any of his issues and traumas, it's to be expected that they keep weighting down on him throughout that year. After all, healing takes time.
We see this weight very clearly in his dynamic with Kana, since his Ai-related trauma is the biggest factor in him completely avoiding her.
We naturally also see it in his dynamic with Akane.
Three examples come to mind:
Let's talk about Aqua "using" Akane
So Aqua makes a very big deal about "using" Akane, but I'm of the firm belief that his words are at odd with his actions.
I mean, he makes it quite clear that he is only keeping her close because she's useful, right?
So, what is Akane useful for, exactly?
Aqua's entire premise is that Akane understands Ai better than he does. He can't lose Akane because she may help him figure out Ai and find out who his dad is.
But we never, ever see Aqua asking Akane questions about Ai. At the contrary, most of his time with Akane is spent either on Aqua and Akane helping each other, or on Aqua talking to Akane about himself rather than about Ai.
(Spoilers for the entire manga below the cut!)
Not to mention Akane herself literally said this
Akane herself is willing to be used by Aqua
To the point where she literally said she would do anything for him if he'd just say the word
She made it clear to him that she doesn't mind being 'used' by him—that she's even letting herself be used if that means she could be his strength.
But what did Aqua do?
What did Aqua tell her?
He pushed her away
So that she won't follow him to hell—because he knows full-well she would if he'd let her.
Akane knows that Aqua's feelings of guilt doesn't make sense
And she's aware that her willingness to be 'used' by him only increases that guilt for him
But neither of them wants to let go of each other
Akane wants to be his strength
And while being with Akane makes him happy, it's also important to Aqua that he makes her happy as well
When Akane told him that she's happy that she's going out with him, that hits him. He's got this chance to be happy AND to make others happy as well
They could be happy together—he WANTS to be happy with her, which was why he's so conflicted about the whole 'finding out that his dad is still alive' thing. He wants to be happy, but is he allowed to have that? Is he allowed to be happy? When the bastard who killed Ai is still alive and well as if nothing happened?
Akane's words—her being happy because of him makes him think that maybe he's allowed to be happy after all, since he could make others happy as well.
That's why he was seriously considering forgetting everything and just pursue happiness
((if only he actually choose that but alas))
Let's talk about Aqua "using" Akane
So Aqua makes a very big deal about "using" Akane, but I'm of the firm belief that his words are at odd with his actions.
I mean, he makes it quite clear that he is only keeping her close because she's useful, right?
So, what is Akane useful for, exactly?
Aqua's entire premise is that Akane understands Ai better than he does. He can't lose Akane because she may help him figure out Ai and find out who his dad is.
But we never, ever see Aqua asking Akane questions about Ai. At the contrary, most of his time with Akane is spent either on Aqua and Akane helping each other, or on Aqua talking to Akane about himself rather than about Ai.
(Spoilers for the entire manga below the cut!)
A skurnkle? A skrunkler wunkler?
Scom villun