Ele/ile/elu ~ Ume não-binárie que ama anime ~ Multishipper ~ Detesto NaruSaku e SasuNaru ~ Jogo Bandori e D4DJ ~ Mahou shoujo é PICA ~ PT/EN/JP ~ Me siga no Twitter kevyistrans e karinuzulover
i know it's agreed upon that karinhina is wholesome WHICH I AGREE WITH!!!!! but a guy like me loves a storm before the calm (lesbian situationship). also the quality on tumblr is killing me. hello.
i will personally never forgive yenpress for botching the translation because now it's impossible to find chuuya / dazai / yosano takes that do not start with "first off, mori sucks and he's a predator"
mori is the don of the port mafia and has committed several war crimes, but not those ones. yell at him and hate him for the severe psychological manipulation of yosano & for dazai joining the mafia n being his witness. you know, the things he did.
I think an important piece of context that is missing from a lot of the hot takes about Mori and Elise is, well, the legendary 1970s manga Black Jack.
(very long illustrated explanation below)
Written by the famous manga artist Osamu Tezuka, who himself was a doctor, Black Jack is the story of a unlicensed black market doctor who is a genius at surgery and can save pretty much anybody, but has a reputation of charging people millions for his work and "establishment" doctors hate and envy him for his high reputation despite not doing things "legally". He may come across as mercenary, cold-hearted, or even evil, but he's actually extremely principled and hates...parasites on society. He'll do charity surgery for free (after testing that they weren't ASSUMING he'd fall for a sob story) but he will absolutely charge an unscrupulous politician or millionaire tons of money to do save their lives. And even then he might fuck them over.
Black Jack's life companion/secretary/surgical assistant is a little girl named Pinoko (after Pinocchio) who is a sentient tumor that he put into a doll's body; he was hired to take it out of an 18 year old girl but when he realized it had its own separate consciousness, he decided to spare it and made it his companion. (Yeah it's a long story but it's told in one of the first chapters)
He picked a little girl's body because he thinks little girls are sweet, whereas Pinoko herself generally acts like a grade schooler who insists she's a grown-up.
Pinoko insists she's Sensei's wife, and Black Jack, for his part, treats her like his daughter and has to soothe her when she gets mad at being treated like a kid (i.e. he brought her back a toy from his travels and not flowers or something). When Pinoko is mad at him, she kicks his ass, but she also thinks it's unfair that Black Jack does so much good and has a bad reputation:
(He also refuses to put her in adult-sized body even when she throws a tantrum that "she's a big girl" - he's just not interested in her that way. He has other romantic interests, most notably a trans man, actually.)
ANYWAYS so this is a super-famous manga by a legendary mangaka - "The God of Manga" -, so when Asagiri Kafka introduces a black market doctor with a little girl assistant who he calls his wife - it's 1000% a Black Jack joke that the target audience (Japanese readers) would probably understand immediately. It's a joke!
I'm also unhappy with how the YenPress english translation handled some of those lines - I don't think the issue is so much with 妻 (wife) - I think that was meant to be wife! It was a Black Jack joke! - but how they translated 趣味, (hobby, special interest, tastes, etc) in the conversation between Mori and Fukuzawa. People can have "hobbies" (using that same word) that are not creepy, and sure they can have "hobbies" that are creepy (although there are plenty of other Japanese words to pick if you explicitly mean a sexual fetish). The way Fukuzawa's line was translated became an accusation of sex crimes instead of just calling him a weirdo. They were bantering about how they knew each other personally and not just professionally, and it seems odd to reply to "lol do you still talk to cats" with "are you still committing sex crimes". If Mori wanted to throw down like that he could just have asked Fukuzawa if he was still murdering for cash, for example - then the severity of accusations might match.
I like Black Jack a lot and I highly recommend it - it's morally complex and funny and gut-wrenching and it's been translated into multiple languages. Knowing that this reference for Mori's character got totally....lost? mistranslated? misunderstood? whatever? is so annoying.
As an additional reference, one of the early character designs for Mori (included below - I grabbed it from my own copy) had him with an eyepatch. Black Jack's frenemy/nemesis is another black market doctor named Dr. Kiriko, a military doctor who went off to war, Saw Some Shit, came back as a doctor of death, determined to provide euthanasia to the terminally ill instead of letting people die horrible slow deaths. (Black Jack also has military experience - he goes where doctors are needed.) So he and Black Jack run into each other whenever Dr. Kiriko is hired by a dying patient to end their own lives and Black Jack insists that he be allowed to take a final shot at saving their lives. Sometimes one is correct, sometimes the other, and sometimes they even cooperate.
So, you know, there you go. Argh! I've been wanting to just write this out somewhere and the former twtter isn't the place for nuance or paragraphs.
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