thank you ao3 for being an archive and not an algorithm. thank you for letting me like things without consequences, thank you for being free with no ads, thank you for having lawyers to defend our freedom of speech. thank you tag wranglers. thank you to all authors and thank you ao3
after many years i have finally watched the final gintama movie and wow. wow. gintama you are a story about dudes getting stuck in a bathroom bc they ran outta toilet paper taking a shit. but you are also an anime about people. about humanity. about starting over. about trying again. about love. and the monster becoming human, because he is loved, and is capable of love, and that love can find him in the people he meets in edo who think this wavy-haired bum samurai is someone they'd lay their lives down to fight for and beside because he has done the same for them. my goodness. gintama drives me insane. it's such a beautiful story about starting over and enjoying your everyday life for its absurd moments, its quite moments, its painful moments. gintoki sakata i am so glad you lived. i am so glad you chose to keep living. i am so glad you were able to start over. i am so glad you found people to love and be loved by in return. never pay your rent pookie.
[id: It’s two portrait drawings, the first of Geto and the second of Kenjaku in his body. Geto is drawn with tan skin, moles, and long black hair that cascades smoothly down his back. His expression is flat, and he wears his usual robes and Gojo-kesa. Kenjaku is mirrored above him and looks nearly identical. The notable differences are their sallow skin, sunken eyes and cheekbones, the stitches on their forehead, messier hair, and the right side of the kimono is wrapped over the left. /end id]
you know the main thing holding me back from writing gintama fic is the fact that after nearly 300 episodes i still have no fucking idea how Zura's mind works
he's a leader of men. nobody respects him. he's terminally serious. he loves uno. he's the most beautiful man alive. he gets no bitches. he's dumb as a bag of hammers. he was a diligent student as a child. he successfully led a terrorist cell for 9+ years. his only friend is a weird duck. he'll murder a child to further his goals. he loves cute fluffy animals. he has an NTR fetish. he's a turbo virgin. he hates aliens. his best friend is an alien. he's one of the strongest warriors in Edo. he crossdresses at the drop of a hat. he's a rapper with a boombox. he doesn't know how to rent a DVD. he's a master of disguise who has evaded capture for nearly a decade. you can identify him in a crowd simply by shouting "Zura."
ok my actual genuine feeling on Zura is that he's a fundamentally goofy, somewhat socially awkward dude who really just kind of wants friends and a life but he's been Driven by a Cause :tm: since childhood and (I could be wrong but) has kind of taken it upon himself to Become Shoyo in his absence (hence why he looks so much like him, hence his rebel training academy). And that meant spending his post-war years in a weird ascetic isolation, focusing Only on the Cause, hammering himself into the ideal of a samurai he'd built for himself, so that his actual personality gets squashed under all the stuff he thinks he Ought to Be and Ought to Do, and the end result is a guy who's kind of forgotten who he actually is and is unbearably lonely (and grown strange because of it) Basically, he's got so lost in the sauce of his own failed war that he's half drowned in it and he's kind of lost his mind a little. the guy who's been deep undercover for so long that he can't remember where he begins and the cover story ends. that kind of vibe.
was doing a little research into Bakumatsu-era armour to see what exactly the joui boys are wearing on the battlefield and thought I'd put my findings here
Sakamoto's headgear usually gets called a kabuto, which come in such a wide range of shapes and sizes that it's difficult to narrow down what kind of kabuto it might be...my best guess is people think it's this type:
this is an Akodanari Suji Kabuto, named after a type of watermelon...this style was especially popular during the Muromachi period.
However! I don't think he's wearing a kabuto at all. I think it's more likely to be a piece of kusari katabira - a kind of light woven chainmail which was commonly worn by soldiers during the Edo period
To be more specific, I think he's wearing a kusari zukin (a chainmail hood) with a hachigane headband, of the type seen here:
the way Sakamoto's headgear hangs & the mail-like pattern imo has way more in common with this than any kind of kabuto I've seen. So I'm pretty sure that's what he's wearing
I'm pretty sure the cuirass-type things they wear are karuta-gane, a type of lightweight armour known as tatami. The karuta armour (which comes from the Portuguese word 'carta' - playing cards, referring to the square/rectangular plates) were made of leather or iron, often sewn onto a cloth backing. Sometimes they had chainmail between the plates.
Takasugi's coat is notably more Western-styled and he's not wearing karuta, but he is wearing what looks like a manchira - a type of auxiliary armour, which had small iron plates sewn between the layers of fabric. It's presumed to have been inspired by Western fashions and they were often made to be aesthetically pleasing:
the type Takasugi wears is the longer one, which was supposed to be worn as a standalone armour rather than the shorter version (manju no wa) which was usually worn with a breastplate. Perfect fancy armour for the little rich boy lmao
Apart from Takasugi who seems to be wearing more Western style trousers and boots/shoes, the other 3 wear the same kind of footwear and greaves - kōgake (basically armoured socks) worn with waraji (corded shoes)
It doesn't look like they're wearing suneate (armoured greaves) - it looks much more like standard kyahan, which were basically padded cloth leggings worn under the suneate. This was pretty common in footsoldiers apparently. Although Zura could be wearing suneate since his seem to be reinforced:
These could be Shino Suneate, which were lightweight and reinforced with iron strips sewn onto cloth backing. Low ranking samurai tended to favour them for their simplicity and ease of movement
On their arms they seem to be wearing some kind of kote (armoured sleeves) with tekko (metal plates covering the back of the hands) - we can see Zura's most clearly and his seem to be padded or otherwise armoured, so they might be han kote, which were a bit more like gauntlets
Zura, Takasugi and Gintoki are wearing pretty standard hachimaki - headbands with a little armour over the forehead:
Finally, the belts they're wearing are uwa-obi - used to attach the sageo of their sword in order to secure it. When worn with chest armour (dō) the obi would be knotted at the front with a hanamusubi knot to hold it firm
anyway! might come in handy as reference or might solely be of interest to me lol
honestly though I think Sakamoto fulfils a very important role in the joui4 ecosystem in that. he's kind of emblematic of the possibility of leaving shit behind instead of continuing to suffer it. starting over instead of trying to drag its corpse behind you. can't stand watching your friends die? You don't have to. You can leave any time. Can't hold a sword any more? No worries, use a gun instead, you can still fight. Hey guys did you know you can move on from things instead of carrying it around your neck like an albatross your whole life? Did you know you can just forgive people instead of seething with hatred for them? Did you know you can just put the war down instead of wasting 10 years of your life to the sunk cost fallacy? Such is the philosophy of Sakamoto "If It Sucks, Hit Da Bricks" Tatsuma
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