I am called Siren. He/him or they/them. This blog is for random OC posting and OC-ified pinklings and such. It’s mostly roleplay inspired doodles. I am a hasemura enjoyer but mostly I just like them as individual characters, since I’m not super big on romantic dynamics. My favorite characters are Toshi, Akinori/Hiroaki (specifically my OC and not how his character inspiration appears in Tetro), Ken/Naoto, Miki, and Akari/Mai (specifically friend OC and not how her character inspiration appears in Tetro).
I prefer not to interact with minors because I am an adult and because of the content I post. Please keep that in mind. If you know me, no you don’t. All ships depicted are between adults.
If you identify very strongly with either proship or antiship you probably won’t like this blog very much.
Poorly looked-over ramble on why Tetro Blue’s writing of Shintoism was stupid beyond belief
(Note: I have not watched chapters 4 and 5 of Blue. I couldn’t stomach any more after 3. This is all based on hearsay and I would not trust my word on what specifically happened in Blue. Feel free to correct me on any plot inaccuracies and bring up any extra pieces of information I missed. That being said, I am base-level academically educated on East Asian religion, and I also have a personal connection to it. My word doesn’t hold more water than a Shinto practitioner or a native Japanese person, but I certainly know more about this than v*n ever bothered to learn. If I get anything wrong, please correct me. I just haven’t seen many discussions around this topic that touch on what I have learned in my classes and what I personally hold as beliefs as someone of East Asian descent.)
First of all: an important thing to know about the vast majority of religious practice in Japan: Shinto and Buddhism are not mutually exclusive religions. Most Japanese people practice a mix of both in their everyday lives. You can see this in an example of one family maintaining a butsudan (a Buddhist ancestor home altar) and simultaneously visiting a shrine every year to pray (a Shinto practice). Most East Asian religion, as far as I’m aware and have personally experienced, does not shun mixing religions. In fact, mixing religions is the status quo. Certain people, such as devout Shinto practitioners like Shishikura, would not practice anything related to Buddhism or another religion. That doesn’t mean they shun it either. So the important thing to establish here is that religious beliefs and practices are generally fluid in Japan, as they have been throughout history in East Asia as new religions spread to different countries and were subsequently absorbed into indigenous practice (such as with Buddhism being exported to Japan and absorbed into daily life).
Almost all the characters in Tetro, Blue and Pink, would practice Shinto in some way or another through rituals and customs like visiting shrines and preparing and attending seasonal festivals. Many would also practice Buddhism in some way or another through customs such as maintaining a family butsudan and typical funeral rites. Therefore, the cast and the creator treating Shishikura as if he’s the only practitioner of Shinto is just a projection of defined western religion. In the West, it’s usually the case that someone is either religious or they’re not. Religious status is defined by black-and-white faith or non-faith. This concept just doesn’t exist in East Asia unless you’re talking about an imported western religion—someone isn’t either atheist or theist because religious status is not concrete and is based more on the practice of customs rather than direct faith. Someone like Hama is the only practitioner of Catholicism in the cast. Shishikura is not. Almost every character, including Hama, would logically practice Shinto in some manner.
This leads into the big gripe I have about Shishikura’s character which (I have heard) happens in chapter 5. Monomoko’s existence makes him question his faith and turn to the Tei cult for solace?
First of all, Shintoism is literally polytheistic and Monomoko’s existence as a deity would fit in perfectly well as some form of kami. It has literally happened with bodhis being incorporated into Shintoism as kami. Moko’s existence has no reason to make Shishikura go back on his faith because he wouldn’t need to “switch out” an undefined singular God for Monomoko! It’s just more projection of monotheistic Christianity on v*n’s part!
Second of all…what I said earlier about religion mixing. Even if Monomoko’s existence ran completely counter to Shinto beliefs, Shishikura would not feel the internal need to justify his own religion in place of Mokocult, or abandon Shintoism to turn to Mokocult. Because he can think both are true. Because every student would have the capacity to think both were true. There’s no this or that with Shinto vs. Christianity or anything.
Long story short: SHISHIKURA WOULDN’T NEED TO CHANGE HIS BELIEFS TO JUSTIFY MOKO’S EXISTENCE!!! And to say he would have to is both ignorant, shows an appalling lack of research about the basic idea of kami, and is incredibly disrespectful to Shintoism. V*n took Japanese culture and painted over it with a big western brush in a lot of places (car culture, therapy culture, collectivism vs. individualism to name a few), but the way Shintoism, an indigenous Japanese religion, was handled in this story written by a white Canadian is actually just spreading dangerous Eurocentric rhetoric. And also he had to get his entire religion dismantled on screen (even though as I already said it would literally not be possible with Shintoism). Why? Because his religion has to be wrong to push an edgy “there is no afterlife” message? It’s interesting to note (a friend brought this up to me) that Hama in Pink gets to die without having his entire religion be “disproven” by Monomoko. But the non-western religion, the indigenous religion of the country v*n was writing her characters to be from, has to be completely dismantled. Non-western religion isn’t a plaything to tack onto a character to prove the wrongness of religion as a whole because it’s just not the same.
Again, this is just rambling from me, and I encourage you to look into the topic yourself if you’re interested. I’ll probably update this with references or edit it with more stuff once I got access to my computer again.
Toshi-related ramble about the subjectivity of morality and how comforting it is to just forget it
There are no “good” or “bad” people in the world. There are people who do bad things and never repent, and there are people who do good things and bad things because they’re flawed humans, and there are people who do so much good for a lot of people who are also still human.
Anyway, Toshi doesn’t believe in human morality as a binary of good and bad, or even as an existing concept. Humans are animals. We eat each other to keep ourselves alive, is what he thinks. Rule of the jungle and all that. Being bullied all his life means he is on the bottom of the human hierarchy, and that is just the natural way of things. He hates those who bully him but does not see what they do as inherently “wrong” or “evil” because to kick those below you further down is all that human society has looked like to him.
If he looked at what Okazaki did to him in the killing game, he wouldn’t even say it was unreasonable, or wrong. Excessive maybe. Something cruel that hurt him and made him feel like a small, tortured animal maybe. But it’s just the way things work for him, right? He’s at the bottom and he’s an easy target, so if he was her he’d take the shot too. Her killing him couldn’t be a “bad” thing to do if it was only the natural consequence of his weakness.
(I don’t condone this. Weakness is also a social construct and society only functions as it should when all people are accommodated and treated as full people for whatever they can and cannot do. It’s also impossible to fault him for thinking of the world in “survival of the fittest” terms when that’s how he’s been treated as a disabled person his entire life.)
His perspective, while predicated on a belief system that slots him in as natural prey, also does provide some good benefits. He has a strong intuitive sense for “bad” people because of his job and past experiences, but doesn’t judge people based on subjective standards of societal morality. For example, he wouldn’t judge Ken for having low empathy even though it is seen as a moral failing by wider society because he…doesn’t care. I can’t stress enough how much I see Toshi as someone who just does not care if you as a person are “good” or not.
Goodness is a social construct formed around what society deems to be acceptable behavior and acceptable modes of thought. Goodness has historically and til today not included people with cognitive and/or physical disabilities, nonwhite people, and queer people to name a few. Looking at morality specifically through a Confucian lens (which influences Japan’s culture heavily), goodness does not include children who are so heavily burdened by cognitive/physical disability that they can’t provide for their families. It doesn’t include those that break the mold like Toshi. He’s always been considered a failed cog in society, so of course he doesn’t expect anyone else to function like they “should.” That’s why characters like Tamba and Ken (who can blend in relatively well with normative society) appreciated his company so much. He’s just a relaxing guy to be around if you spend your whole life trying to contort yourself into the idea of morality an inherently ableist society tries to hand to you. He’s not loved in spite of his lack of moral standards, he’s loved because of it. Tamba can be a problematic person with him and he won’t judge her for not “being moral.” Chiba can rest easy around him knowing he won’t care to push the expectations she’s been pressured with her whole life. Hayashi doesn’t need to explain her trauma in a digestible way around him because he doesn’t treat it like it’s not normal. It’s normal to be someone like him, and so his company makes others feel more normal by proxy. If that makes sense.
So yeah, I think Toshi is fucking awesome. End rant.
Edit: I forgot the end song for rants like these! Dropping it down here. Not super duper related but hey, I like the song.
dude i havent looked at anything tetro related ever since The Incident but something this morning possessed me to open the hirogawa tag for old times sake and your art genuinely took my breath away. awesome awesome art i love……. keep it up
I never expected someone to actually like them! That’s really nice to hear, thank you! They’ve been one of my favorite dynamics since tetro exploded, which was ironically around when I actually started getting super hyperfixated on the characters! Duos that have irreparably large differences in their fundamental worldviews are such crack to me.
Those two have in fact been absorbed into my OC universe and have their own funny non-killing game AU going on. And an AI: The Somnium Files AU? Things are happening in akinao central.
I’m seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!
Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.
If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.
Let your likes guide you.
(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)
Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psych
