棚から落ちた本

I libri cascati dallo scaffale | Mainly an Akatsuki no Yona / Natsume Yuujinchou / Yatagarasu blog | I personally don't mind spoilers, but here they are tagged | In order not to take the world too seriously, humour is always my welcomed friend | She/her 🇮🇹

[sinitsavbarhatsah]

[llucart]

Meeting outside of prison

[ana--pudim]

Evening 1987

[ana--pudim]

Early morning, 1987

[littletigerburningbright]

There's so much foreshadowing in "Banana Fish" for Ash's death. It's why I'll never understand people who complain about the ending or act like it makes no sense. It makes absolute sense. I could list endless examples where the story is essentially telling you that Ash is going to die in the end. But I wanted to highlight this one in particular, because it also captures the brutal tragedy of it so well.

Eiji convinces Ash here that he needs to relax, and questions why he's so nervous, why he feels the need to get up and go when he's clearly past his limit. All Eiji can see is that Ash needs to rest and recover, and he believes they have time for that because Sing and Cain and everyone else have been preparing for this very scenario.

He ends up convincing Ash that it's okay to relax, to rest, and we know, as a result, things end up going to hell again.

Eiji is shown throughout the story as a distraction to Ash. He lulls Ash into a sense of safety with his friendship. He makes Ash let go of the instincts that have kept him alive for years, simply by virtue of his kindness and compassion. It isn't something Ash is used to, and in a way, he becomes seduced by it. By the feeling of safety he gets when in Eiji's presence.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Eiji, unintentional though it was, had a direct hand in Ash's death.

The thing people don't understand, though, is that it's not meant to be thought of as a bad thing.

Ash was living a brutal and lonely existence before he met Eiji.

Nobody in his life treated him as human. Not even his gang or Shorter. Everyone treated him like he was either something more or less., and they saddled him with the weight of that expectation. His gang relied exclusively on him to keep them all safe, to fight their battles for them, to represent and lead them. Even Shorter thought of Ash as a kind of angel, something otherworldly and superior. Then there's all the adults in Ash's life, who treated Ash as a commodity or an object, or even feared him at times, like Max. Or someone like Yut-Lung, who wanted Ash to serve as his foil, as something to define himself by. None of these people ever truly saw Ash for what he actually was.

But Eiji did.

It's why Ash felt safe around him. And why he let his guard down around him, too. Because Eiji never expected anything from Ash. Never wanted anything from him. Never burdened him with any sort of preconceived notions about what he was or what he should be.

He just accepted Ash as he was.

Ash dying is unspeakably tragic, there's no denying that. His whole life was unspeakably tragic.

Just like there's no denying that his friendship with Eiji is, ultimately, what led to his death.

But I think we're meant to understand the value of that friendship to Ash through the brutal and bleak reality of his life.

Eiji served as a light to Ash in an otherwise dark existence. He gave Ash a sense of comfort and safety in a life otherwise totally devoid of those things. He allowed Ash to just be himself. Not an angel or a demon. Not a genius or a prostitute. Not a leader or a boss. But just a boy.

In the moments Ash had with Eiji, he was finally able to escape the loneliness and sadness of his life. He was able to let go of the constant, unending misery of always having to watch his back, of always "expecting the worst", as Ash says in the panels above. Around Eiji, he was finally set free from the pain of struggle. From the agony of trying to survive in a world that tried its hardest, day in and day out, to destroy him.

If you were to ask Ash which he would choose, to go on living the life he was without ever having known Eiji, or to have known Eiji for the brief time they had together, but die in the end, is there any question as to what his answer would be?

So while Eiji's friendship was, ultimately, the thing that led to Ash's death, something that's alluded to again and again throughout the story, the thing is, to Ash, it was worth it.

Getting to know Eiji, getting to be his friend, to feel Eiji's love and care for him, to Ash, that was worth more to him than the life he was living. A life he would have continued to live after Eiji was gone.

That's why Ash dies with a smile on his face.

Because he would rather have known Eiji and died as a result, than continue living the tragic life he'd been cursed with without ever knowing Eiji at all.

[sayaka19fan]

In a way the premise of this story is that people like Ash have to choose between living a successful life without love (like Dino, Blanca and Yut-lung) or chasing after love even knowing it would definitely lead to their death.

Like Achilles could have stayed chill at the court of Lycomedes, king of Skyros, instead of following Odysseus to war. However, he couldn't give up entirely about claiming glory for himself. He left despite being informed by his mother Thetis that he wouldn't have come back alive.

Love was Ash's deepest desire like glory was Achilles'.

The reader too is prompted to ask himself which cost they would pay for real love when life isn't so kind not to bother you with this question.

[spyromancy]

Ash Lynx | April 29th — Denim Day

[silima]

what a fucking relief to be the one kid in this family without a blue name

[literalliterature]

[ID: An excerpt from a Wikipedia article, which reads, "Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had four children: one son, Orestes, and three daughters, Iphigenia, Electra, and Chrysothemis. Menelaus..." The words Orestes, Iphigenia, and Electra are highlighted in blue, indicating that they have hyperlinked articles, while Chrysothemis does not. End ID.]

[sayaka19fan]

She's mentioned in Il 9, 142 and then forgotten. In that family it is a blessing. Sophocles gave her a role in his Electra, though.

[animentality]

[sayaka19fan]

Medalist S2EP07 is out and I really really love it! I was waiting for this episode since they announced season 2. Tou can appreciate it even knowing nothing about the series. It is wonderful storytelling and it works as a stand alone.

[slippersandsand]

one of the most beautiful things i’ve read in a while. the use of cactus as a metaphor for loneliness is one of my favourite metaphors ever.

[hotwaterandmilk]

The news about the Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori anime is fantastic. It’ll introduce a whole new generation to the series and to this fascinating period of history!

I have to admit, though, it feels surreal to see Shinohara’s incredible historical epic finally adapted for the screen, 30 years after I first discovered the manga in Sho-Comi as a kid. It’s not my personal favorite among Shinohara’s works (just because she has so many incredible series), but it is one that has had a lasting impact on me. It’s a powerful and important piece, especially to Shinohara as an artist with a deep interest in the history of Anatolia.

While we haven't seen how the animation itself will look, I really hope the project enjoys broad support. It’s a strong series, and if you’re an English speaker who hasn’t read the manga yet, the VIZ Media rerelease is currently in print. Definitely check it out before the anime premieres.

All the usual news sites have write ups based on the press release noted on Natalie, so if you want those details then head to the usual haunts (or the official website here). This post is simply me, as an older fan, expressing how happy I am to see this project finally take shape. Even though we don’t know much yet, a Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori anime is something I never expected to witness in my lifetime. So, as a longtime reader I just wanted to mark the occasion. Truly feeling overwhelmed in a positive way right now!

[sayaka19fan]

Great news! I am looking forward to it!

[angofwords]

Timeline Discrepancies in Banana Fish (manga)

Ooof. This is a big one. As many of you know, I write fanfiction. A lot of my stories (most of them, actually) attempt to be canon compliant. When I get something wrong, time-wise, it bugs the hell out of me, and it's happened in DOZENS of my fics. A lot of that was my carelessness, but some of it was due to a serious difficulty in sorting out the timeline. A couple of folks have done the hard work of building a timeline, but I'm not 100% satisfied with any of them. Heck, I'm not sure I'm 100% satisfied that Yoshida herself didn't mess up in some serious ways.

The idea that we got the timeline wrong has been percolating in my head for literal years, and I've finally embarked on a project to sort it out for myself. I'm currently in the midst of volume 9, and when I'm done, I think I'll do a few pinned posts here with the results of my work. (Pinned because I'm doing this, largely, for myself, and I'd like to have a place to easily refer to it when I write.) So far I've seen some minor issues and one MAJOR issue.

MINOR:

Griffin's leaving for Vietnam/Ash's pumpkin story:

It's easily verified that Griffin attacked his squad in Dong Tham, Vietnam on June 30, 1973. (v 1; p 6-7). Now, in the 1970s, the army was spending 5 to 6 months on training before anyone was deployed to their eventual units in the war. Also, Griffin had time to become close friends with Max, so he'd probably been with that unit for several weeks at the minimum. That would mean he'd have to have joined up (at the very latest) at the very end of 1972. However, he met Abraham Dawson in his PREVIOUS unit (v 3; p 171), so that suggests an even earlier sign-on date.

In Ash's pumpkin memory, he says he was "about five" years old (v 7; p 24). Given that he was said to have been born on August 12, 1968, that would've been Halloween of 1973, months after Griff went missing. So let's say Ash misremembered, and he was actually only four? That puts it in October 1972.

He says that he hid "around the time my brother came home from school." That suggests that Griffin was still in school in October. That doesn't align easily with the fact that he'd be joining the army in a couple of months. And if he really had been deployed in another unit before Max's, he woud've already had to have been enlisted.

It's far more likely that he graduated high school in June 1972 and enlisted right away. So maybe this was a final military leave between training and deployment and Ash is misremembering both his age and the fact that his brother wasn't at school? Completely possible, given his very young age. Or it was a timeline error. Who's to say?

Ibe's terrible sense of time:

I think Shunichi Ibe is a doll, but I also think he may not have a reliable calendar in his head. Either that, or Yoshida lost the thread of the timeline herself.

When Eiji and Ibe first arrive in New York, he tells Eiji that he met Max Lobo, saying that his publisher introduced them "last year." (v 1; p 73) To be generous, that can be any time in 1984 or even 1983, because he's telling Eiji this in early March and human brains have a lot of lag.

It should be noted, however, that in March of 1984, Ibe had a photography exhibition in Tokyo that Eiji attended, and he first photographed Eiji in the summer of 1983 (Fly Boy in the Sky). As this was considered Ibe's big entrance into photography (he was rather listless before), I think this suggests that he came to New York and met Max sometime after March in 1984.

However, when they get to Los Angeles and meets Jessica, he tries to diffuse the violent situation in her lawn by letting her know that he's there, reminding her that "you and Max took care of me in New Jersey three years ago." (v 4; p 70) This is, at the earliest, late August of 1985.

Three years ago would have been 1982, while Ibe was still in college and well before he indicated earlier that he'd even MET Max. I'm willing to chalk this one up to a quirk with Ibe, but who knows?

In addition to this, I'm finding evidence of a huge timeline problem centered on Ash.

MAJOR

Was Aslan Callenreese born in 1968? Or was it really 1967?

We have documentation of Ash's birthdate. It's plain: August 12, 1968, both in the manga (v 16; p 6) and in Private Opinion (p 34). But throughout the manga, they all keep getting it wrong!

Jenkins tells Ibe and Eiji that Ash is "about seventeen" (v 1; p87) when they first talk about photographing Ash, in March or April of 1985, and a few days later Ash tells Max the same thing when they meet in prison (v 2; p 79). In both cases, if he were born in 1968, he would have been only sixteen.

Later, in October of 1985, after Ash burns Golzine's mansion to the ground, Jenkins, ordering his men to find Ash, still refers to him as being seventeen. (v 7; p71). He has files with Ash's birthdate listed (even though the manga panel cuts it off), so it's unlikely that's just Jenkins making a mistake. Ash had a birthday in August. If he were born in 1968, he would indeed be seventeen at this point. However, if he was seventeen earlier, as Ash himself already said, then he would be eighteen by this time.

This is CLEARLY a timeline error on Yoshida's part, unless you want to believe that Ash is lying about his age when he talks to Max (which, I guess is valid, if weird).

But then on November 2, 1985, less than a month later when Ash is in the hospital after killing Arthur, Jenkins mentions that Ash is now eighteen, and Ash doesn't dispute it. (v 9 p 103) What the hell, Jenkins? Didn't you JUST tell people he was seventeen?

Other timeline creators explain this with a time skip, saying that it's now 1986 and a year has gone by since Shorter's death. I scoured those volumes and can find absolutely NO PLACE where a time skip could've occurred. A hell of a lot happens, jammed into about two weeks, but I'm 100% convinced that it was exactly that: only two weeks.

When I post my timeline, I'll show all my work (and the manga panels that back me up). In the meantime, I'm leaning toward Ash really having been born in 1967.

I'm having a lot of fun with this project, even though it's making obvious the PLETHORA of timeline mistakes in my fanfiction. But hey, if Yoshida screwed up the birthdate of her own main character, what does it matter if I celebrated Ash's birthday a few weeks too late?

I'm looking forward to finishing the timeline and unpacking it for clarity. I hope I don't find too many more serious conflicts, but I expect I will. In the meantime, let me know what you think of all this. I'm curious, especially, about the time-skip faithful. I'd love to understand what led you all to see that.

[sayaka19fan]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

I'll try to address at least one point: Griffin.

(Book 6 p. 42) we know that Griffin was 19 in June 1973. Last forced draft to Vietnam was on the 7th of December 1972, so (assuming he wasn't a volunteer) he had to be of age at least by then. He was born then between July and December and was drafted in his last year of high school. We have two options regarding the Halloween accident:

1. Since Ash says "around five", he could have been 3 or 4 because it wasn't relevant at the time of his speech, It was more like saying "I was very young". I don't mind either way, but my headcanon is that Ash was four and that the reason why Griffin didn't come back that evening was because he got his calling in that day. He left in November, met his first unit in April and was almost immediately transferred to Max's unit. Instead, if Ash was three, it happened in 1971 Griffin had the time to graduate from school. For this scenario to play out Griffin had to be one year ahead in school, though.

[angofwords]

Griffin wasn't drafted, though. The last draft was indeed at the end of '72, but they only took men who were born before Junly 20, 1952. Griff was most likely born in 1954. That means his leave date isn't set in stone.

Your timeline definitely works, but it does rely on Ash getting his age wrong, which I acknowledge is entirely possible. It also relies on Griff getting switched out of his first unit immediately. I'm not saying that can't happen, but that it's another less-likely scenario.

I'd put my money on Ash being four AND being born in '67 instead of '68, which puts the pumpkin story in October of 1971. Given that Yoshida kept saying Ash is a year older than he was in the manga, this is less of a stretch for me than the idea that Ash went trick or treating unsupervised at 3 years old.

[sayaka19fan]

I see. When I and BlakRabbit were working on the timeline, we set as a guideline not to discard as a mistake what was written in the manga unless the discrepancy was impossible to reconcile. And Ash's birth date appeared twice on documents.

As a side note, I personally believe that Ash's original age was seventeen, but then it switched to sixteen mid-course during serialisation because he was older than the stereotypical protagonist in a shoujo manga. Just recently the same thing happened in the currently airing anime adaptation of Tamon's b side: the female lead is 17 in the manga, but she is 16 in the anime without an apparent reason.

I feel less upset by the serendipity implied in some sequences of events than by declaring something a mistake, so I wouldn't change Ash's birth date, even if I think that it was rewired.

I also believe that there isn't any timeskip in the manga and the whole story lasts only 1 year. At a point Yoshida stopped including date captions in her panels probably because she decided to abandon the journalistic style and tracking the events is more difficult after that.

But, again, the timeline we made had to reconcile the existence of Eiji's photos of Ash taken in 1987, so we couldn't avoid a timeskip.

[angofwords]

Is this your timeline, then? If so, it's completely gorgeous. I'm in awe of the time and attention it must've taken.

I definitely understand that it's better to accept serendipity than assume a mistake. I'm just finding so many when it comes to Ash's age that it's been hard to ignore. I suspect you're on to something with your suspicion that it was changed mid-stream. That's the most likely scenario. But as I work on my timeline, I'll note when any more discrepancies come up.

I figure, if there does end up being a time skip, or at least things taking longer than it initially seems, I'll be later. Maybe after the mental health facility and before Blanca? I haven't gotten that far yet, so I'm just going off of memory here, but there seems to be a pause and maybe even a change of seasons around then. I guess I'll find out.

Thank you for your beautiful work, though. That timeline is really inspiring!!

[sayaka19fan]

Yes, it's ours. The last time Yoshida gives a complete date is October 11, 1985 10:16pm, The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. After that we have the duel with Arthur and Jenkins mentions that Ash is now 18. To make it work with his birth date we need to put the time skip here.

Be aware that Yoshida said that his characters often wear light clothes because they are easier to draw, so we shouldn't assume seasons from that.

[angofwords]

Timeline Discrepancies in Banana Fish (manga)

Ooof. This is a big one. As many of you know, I write fanfiction. A lot of my stories (most of them, actually) attempt to be canon compliant. When I get something wrong, time-wise, it bugs the hell out of me, and it's happened in DOZENS of my fics. A lot of that was my carelessness, but some of it was due to a serious difficulty in sorting out the timeline. A couple of folks have done the hard work of building a timeline, but I'm not 100% satisfied with any of them. Heck, I'm not sure I'm 100% satisfied that Yoshida herself didn't mess up in some serious ways.

The idea that we got the timeline wrong has been percolating in my head for literal years, and I've finally embarked on a project to sort it out for myself. I'm currently in the midst of volume 9, and when I'm done, I think I'll do a few pinned posts here with the results of my work. (Pinned because I'm doing this, largely, for myself, and I'd like to have a place to easily refer to it when I write.) So far I've seen some minor issues and one MAJOR issue.

MINOR:

Griffin's leaving for Vietnam/Ash's pumpkin story:

It's easily verified that Griffin attacked his squad in Dong Tham, Vietnam on June 30, 1973. (v 1; p 6-7). Now, in the 1970s, the army was spending 5 to 6 months on training before anyone was deployed to their eventual units in the war. Also, Griffin had time to become close friends with Max, so he'd probably been with that unit for several weeks at the minimum. That would mean he'd have to have joined up (at the very latest) at the very end of 1972. However, he met Abraham Dawson in his PREVIOUS unit (v 3; p 171), so that suggests an even earlier sign-on date.

In Ash's pumpkin memory, he says he was "about five" years old (v 7; p 24). Given that he was said to have been born on August 12, 1968, that would've been Halloween of 1973, months after Griff went missing. So let's say Ash misremembered, and he was actually only four? That puts it in October 1972.

He says that he hid "around the time my brother came home from school." That suggests that Griffin was still in school in October. That doesn't align easily with the fact that he'd be joining the army in a couple of months. And if he really had been deployed in another unit before Max's, he woud've already had to have been enlisted.

It's far more likely that he graduated high school in June 1972 and enlisted right away. So maybe this was a final military leave between training and deployment and Ash is misremembering both his age and the fact that his brother wasn't at school? Completely possible, given his very young age. Or it was a timeline error. Who's to say?

Ibe's terrible sense of time:

I think Shunichi Ibe is a doll, but I also think he may not have a reliable calendar in his head. Either that, or Yoshida lost the thread of the timeline herself.

When Eiji and Ibe first arrive in New York, he tells Eiji that he met Max Lobo, saying that his publisher introduced them "last year." (v 1; p 73) To be generous, that can be any time in 1984 or even 1983, because he's telling Eiji this in early March and human brains have a lot of lag.

It should be noted, however, that in March of 1984, Ibe had a photography exhibition in Tokyo that Eiji attended, and he first photographed Eiji in the summer of 1983 (Fly Boy in the Sky). As this was considered Ibe's big entrance into photography (he was rather listless before), I think this suggests that he came to New York and met Max sometime after March in 1984.

However, when they get to Los Angeles and meets Jessica, he tries to diffuse the violent situation in her lawn by letting her know that he's there, reminding her that "you and Max took care of me in New Jersey three years ago." (v 4; p 70) This is, at the earliest, late August of 1985.

Three years ago would have been 1982, while Ibe was still in college and well before he indicated earlier that he'd even MET Max. I'm willing to chalk this one up to a quirk with Ibe, but who knows?

In addition to this, I'm finding evidence of a huge timeline problem centered on Ash.

MAJOR

Was Aslan Callenreese born in 1968? Or was it really 1967?

We have documentation of Ash's birthdate. It's plain: August 12, 1968, both in the manga (v 16; p 6) and in Private Opinion (p 34). But throughout the manga, they all keep getting it wrong!

Jenkins tells Ibe and Eiji that Ash is "about seventeen" (v 1; p87) when they first talk about photographing Ash, in March or April of 1985, and a few days later Ash tells Max the same thing when they meet in prison (v 2; p 79). In both cases, if he were born in 1968, he would have been only sixteen.

Later, in October of 1985, after Ash burns Golzine's mansion to the ground, Jenkins, ordering his men to find Ash, still refers to him as being seventeen. (v 7; p71). He has files with Ash's birthdate listed (even though the manga panel cuts it off), so it's unlikely that's just Jenkins making a mistake. Ash had a birthday in August. If he were born in 1968, he would indeed be seventeen at this point. However, if he was seventeen earlier, as Ash himself already said, then he would be eighteen by this time.

This is CLEARLY a timeline error on Yoshida's part, unless you want to believe that Ash is lying about his age when he talks to Max (which, I guess is valid, if weird).

But then on November 2, 1985, less than a month later when Ash is in the hospital after killing Arthur, Jenkins mentions that Ash is now eighteen, and Ash doesn't dispute it. (v 9 p 103) What the hell, Jenkins? Didn't you JUST tell people he was seventeen?

Other timeline creators explain this with a time skip, saying that it's now 1986 and a year has gone by since Shorter's death. I scoured those volumes and can find absolutely NO PLACE where a time skip could've occurred. A hell of a lot happens, jammed into about two weeks, but I'm 100% convinced that it was exactly that: only two weeks.

When I post my timeline, I'll show all my work (and the manga panels that back me up). In the meantime, I'm leaning toward Ash really having been born in 1967.

I'm having a lot of fun with this project, even though it's making obvious the PLETHORA of timeline mistakes in my fanfiction. But hey, if Yoshida screwed up the birthdate of her own main character, what does it matter if I celebrated Ash's birthday a few weeks too late?

I'm looking forward to finishing the timeline and unpacking it for clarity. I hope I don't find too many more serious conflicts, but I expect I will. In the meantime, let me know what you think of all this. I'm curious, especially, about the time-skip faithful. I'd love to understand what led you all to see that.

[sayaka19fan]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

I'll try to address at least one point: Griffin.

(Book 6 p. 42) we know that Griffin was 19 in June 1973. Last forced draft to Vietnam was on the 7th of December 1972, so (assuming he wasn't a volunteer) he had to be of age at least by then. He was born then between July and December and was drafted in his last year of high school. We have two options regarding the Halloween accident:

1. Since Ash says "around five", he could have been 3 or 4 because it wasn't relevant at the time of his speech, It was more like saying "I was very young". I don't mind either way, but my headcanon is that Ash was four and that the reason why Griffin didn't come back that evening was because he got his calling in that day. He left in November, met his first unit in April and was almost immediately transferred to Max's unit. Instead, if Ash was three, it happened in 1971 Griffin had the time to graduate from school. For this scenario to play out Griffin had to be one year ahead in school, though.

[angofwords]

Griffin wasn't drafted, though. The last draft was indeed at the end of '72, but they only took men who were born before Junly 20, 1952. Griff was most likely born in 1954. That means his leave date isn't set in stone.

Your timeline definitely works, but it does rely on Ash getting his age wrong, which I acknowledge is entirely possible. It also relies on Griff getting switched out of his first unit immediately. I'm not saying that can't happen, but that it's another less-likely scenario.

I'd put my money on Ash being four AND being born in '67 instead of '68, which puts the pumpkin story in October of 1971. Given that Yoshida kept saying Ash is a year older than he was in the manga, this is less of a stretch for me than the idea that Ash went trick or treating unsupervised at 3 years old.

[sayaka19fan]

I see. When I and BlakRabbit were working on the timeline, we set as a guideline not to discard as a mistake what was written in the manga unless the discrepancy was impossible to reconcile. And Ash's birth date appeared twice on documents.

As a side note, I personally believe that Ash's original age was seventeen, but then it switched to sixteen mid-course during serialisation because he was older than the stereotypical protagonist in a shoujo manga. Just recently the same thing happened in the currently airing anime adaptation of Tamon's b side: the female lead is 17 in the manga, but she is 16 in the anime without an apparent reason.

I feel less upset by the serendipity implied in some sequences of events than by declaring something a mistake, so I wouldn't change Ash's birth date, even if I think that it was rewired.

I also believe that there isn't any timeskip in the manga and the whole story lasts only 1 year. At a point Yoshida stopped including date captions in her panels probably because she decided to abandon the journalistic style and tracking the events is more difficult after that.

But, again, the timeline we made had to reconcile the existence of Eiji's photos of Ash taken in 1987, so we couldn't avoid a timeskip.

[angofwords]

Timeline Discrepancies in Banana Fish (manga)

Ooof. This is a big one. As many of you know, I write fanfiction. A lot of my stories (most of them, actually) attempt to be canon compliant. When I get something wrong, time-wise, it bugs the hell out of me, and it's happened in DOZENS of my fics. A lot of that was my carelessness, but some of it was due to a serious difficulty in sorting out the timeline. A couple of folks have done the hard work of building a timeline, but I'm not 100% satisfied with any of them. Heck, I'm not sure I'm 100% satisfied that Yoshida herself didn't mess up in some serious ways.

The idea that we got the timeline wrong has been percolating in my head for literal years, and I've finally embarked on a project to sort it out for myself. I'm currently in the midst of volume 9, and when I'm done, I think I'll do a few pinned posts here with the results of my work. (Pinned because I'm doing this, largely, for myself, and I'd like to have a place to easily refer to it when I write.) So far I've seen some minor issues and one MAJOR issue.

MINOR:

Griffin's leaving for Vietnam/Ash's pumpkin story:

It's easily verified that Griffin attacked his squad in Dong Tham, Vietnam on June 30, 1973. (v 1; p 6-7). Now, in the 1970s, the army was spending 5 to 6 months on training before anyone was deployed to their eventual units in the war. Also, Griffin had time to become close friends with Max, so he'd probably been with that unit for several weeks at the minimum. That would mean he'd have to have joined up (at the very latest) at the very end of 1972. However, he met Abraham Dawson in his PREVIOUS unit (v 3; p 171), so that suggests an even earlier sign-on date.

In Ash's pumpkin memory, he says he was "about five" years old (v 7; p 24). Given that he was said to have been born on August 12, 1968, that would've been Halloween of 1973, months after Griff went missing. So let's say Ash misremembered, and he was actually only four? That puts it in October 1972.

He says that he hid "around the time my brother came home from school." That suggests that Griffin was still in school in October. That doesn't align easily with the fact that he'd be joining the army in a couple of months. And if he really had been deployed in another unit before Max's, he woud've already had to have been enlisted.

It's far more likely that he graduated high school in June 1972 and enlisted right away. So maybe this was a final military leave between training and deployment and Ash is misremembering both his age and the fact that his brother wasn't at school? Completely possible, given his very young age. Or it was a timeline error. Who's to say?

Ibe's terrible sense of time:

I think Shunichi Ibe is a doll, but I also think he may not have a reliable calendar in his head. Either that, or Yoshida lost the thread of the timeline herself.

When Eiji and Ibe first arrive in New York, he tells Eiji that he met Max Lobo, saying that his publisher introduced them "last year." (v 1; p 73) To be generous, that can be any time in 1984 or even 1983, because he's telling Eiji this in early March and human brains have a lot of lag.

It should be noted, however, that in March of 1984, Ibe had a photography exhibition in Tokyo that Eiji attended, and he first photographed Eiji in the summer of 1983 (Fly Boy in the Sky). As this was considered Ibe's big entrance into photography (he was rather listless before), I think this suggests that he came to New York and met Max sometime after March in 1984.

However, when they get to Los Angeles and meets Jessica, he tries to diffuse the violent situation in her lawn by letting her know that he's there, reminding her that "you and Max took care of me in New Jersey three years ago." (v 4; p 70) This is, at the earliest, late August of 1985.

Three years ago would have been 1982, while Ibe was still in college and well before he indicated earlier that he'd even MET Max. I'm willing to chalk this one up to a quirk with Ibe, but who knows?

In addition to this, I'm finding evidence of a huge timeline problem centered on Ash.

MAJOR

Was Aslan Callenreese born in 1968? Or was it really 1967?

We have documentation of Ash's birthdate. It's plain: August 12, 1968, both in the manga (v 16; p 6) and in Private Opinion (p 34). But throughout the manga, they all keep getting it wrong!

Jenkins tells Ibe and Eiji that Ash is "about seventeen" (v 1; p87) when they first talk about photographing Ash, in March or April of 1985, and a few days later Ash tells Max the same thing when they meet in prison (v 2; p 79). In both cases, if he were born in 1968, he would have been only sixteen.

Later, in October of 1985, after Ash burns Golzine's mansion to the ground, Jenkins, ordering his men to find Ash, still refers to him as being seventeen. (v 7; p71). He has files with Ash's birthdate listed (even though the manga panel cuts it off), so it's unlikely that's just Jenkins making a mistake. Ash had a birthday in August. If he were born in 1968, he would indeed be seventeen at this point. However, if he was seventeen earlier, as Ash himself already said, then he would be eighteen by this time.

This is CLEARLY a timeline error on Yoshida's part, unless you want to believe that Ash is lying about his age when he talks to Max (which, I guess is valid, if weird).

But then on November 2, 1985, less than a month later when Ash is in the hospital after killing Arthur, Jenkins mentions that Ash is now eighteen, and Ash doesn't dispute it. (v 9 p 103) What the hell, Jenkins? Didn't you JUST tell people he was seventeen?

Other timeline creators explain this with a time skip, saying that it's now 1986 and a year has gone by since Shorter's death. I scoured those volumes and can find absolutely NO PLACE where a time skip could've occurred. A hell of a lot happens, jammed into about two weeks, but I'm 100% convinced that it was exactly that: only two weeks.

When I post my timeline, I'll show all my work (and the manga panels that back me up). In the meantime, I'm leaning toward Ash really having been born in 1967.

I'm having a lot of fun with this project, even though it's making obvious the PLETHORA of timeline mistakes in my fanfiction. But hey, if Yoshida screwed up the birthdate of her own main character, what does it matter if I celebrated Ash's birthday a few weeks too late?

I'm looking forward to finishing the timeline and unpacking it for clarity. I hope I don't find too many more serious conflicts, but I expect I will. In the meantime, let me know what you think of all this. I'm curious, especially, about the time-skip faithful. I'd love to understand what led you all to see that.

[sayaka19fan]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

I'll try to address at least one point: Griffin.

(Book 6 p. 42) we know that Griffin was 19 in June 1973. Last forced draft to Vietnam was on the 7th of December 1972, so (assuming he wasn't a volunteer) he had to be of age at least by then. He was born then between July and December and was drafted in his last year of high school. We have two options regarding the Halloween accident:

1. Since Ash says "around five", he could have been 3 or 4 because it wasn't relevant at the time of his speech, It was more like saying "I was very young". I don't mind either way, but my headcanon is that Ash was four and that the reason why Griffin didn't come back that evening was because he got his calling in that day. He left in November, met his first unit in April and was almost immediately transferred to Max's unit. Instead, if Ash was three, it happened in 1971 Griffin had the time to graduate from school. For this scenario to play out Griffin had to be one year ahead in school, though.

[ana--pudim]

[iluvluvnutella]

Akatsuki no Yona Vol. 47, featuring Hak and Yona on the cover, drops on February 20. An extra chapter (often referred to as a bangaihen bonus or side story) is also scheduled for release in Hana to Yume magazine on the same day.

[barnabyboppins]

YONA OF THE DAWN SEASON 2 LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO