#b ichi

[bytepilled]

unserious post of crona in their twin’s outfit

[soul-dwelling]

I want to figure out what led from Tool’s ability to communicate with the souls of things in B Ichi, to Ohkubo taking that idea and applying it, albeit in a much different way, to souls in Soul Eater. 

I don’t really have any bigger point to make. I was listening to Thom Hartmann (21:25) talking about a book, The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent (2021), that traces the idea of the soul, even in inanimate objects, from Plato to Aristotle to philosophies and ideas across cultures and sciences. And I wonder how much of this was on Ohkubo’s mind when coming up with Tool, then how that led to “soul studies” taught by Stein (and how that all fell apart by Fire Force). 

Granted, talking about Tool and the souls of things would lead me to get into “thing theory” discussions, and I’m not up for getting into that discussion…again. 

[bichiwikia]

Signas501 submitted to bichiwikia:

[elliotthezubat]

10 MANGA I WANT TO HAVE AN ANIME ADAPTION!

1 Fire Brigade of Flames

2 Oumagadoki Zoo

3 Voynich Hotel

4 Scuro (most likely will be an OVA series)

5 Case Study of Vanitas

6 B.Ichi

7 My Hero Academia Vigilantes

8 MORE SEASONS [servamp season 2, soul eater season 2, Pandora hearts season 2, blue exorcist third season, my hero academia season 3, bungou stray dogs season 3, etc]

9 ‘doubt’ series

10 Hyde and Closer

[soul-dwelling]

Do you considet b.ichi to be better than fire force? Or that fireforce was once bettet but just got way worse around a certain point?

I don't know which one is better.

I know which one I like more right now, and that's B Ichi--but it's not as if that series did not have the same problems that make me dislike Fire Force (poor Mana and Tool, reduced to that ridiculously obnoxious set of gags).

B Ichi feels more inventive and eye-catching than Fire Force. I'm sure some of that is either by design or just inescapable.

When B Ichi is a setting where almost anything can happen, that allows for such a variety of locations, character designs, and personalities--but that can be overwhelming, it doesn't always let an audience latch onto one idea and see it through. This is a problem we've seen with a lot of manga that get cancelled way too early and have to rush to do something that will either bring back an audience or wrap up the story before the final chapter. B Ichi had so many ideas in front of it, but I don't think it ever got to address any one of them fully. If the series had been more successful, I would hope later chapters would bring back side characters for new adventures, especially as it was a "road trip" kind of story, so you don't need much justification to re-visit previous locations or happen to run into previous characters again.

Fire Force is limited by location and structures: it's largely confined to just a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, and the characters are militaristic and hence largely in matching uniforms. That bores me. The series in many ways tries to be the opposite of Soul Eater, but losing that globe-trotting aspect, and putting so many characters into the same outfit, seemed dull. I also think the uses of fire in the series gets stale. All of that being said, the series obviously resonated more with its readers than B Ichi did, and those limitations in some ways help move the plot along rather than getting stuck in diversions where you're not sure how it will tie into the larger narrative.

I do think Fire Force was better before the anime was announced. And I remember that day it was announced was the first day that one chapter of Assault and Tamaki came out online--and I had enough with the series at that point. As soon as it got an anime announced, I had a bad feeling: if they know they now have an anime, they think they can do no wrong--so they are going to double down and get worse, and they did with how bad that Tamaki chapter was and, sorry, having caught up on the current chapters, that resolution to her overall story in this series sucks. There are so many ways to handle empowerment, and as one cishet guy talking about another cishet guy, I don't want to read Ohkubo on this, I want to see people who aren't cishet men tackle this kind of a story about body-shaming, slut-shaming, and the placement of sex, fanservice, and provocative dress in our current moment, not another cishet man.

[soul-dwelling]

Do you think B. Ichi influenced soul eater in a negative way? I have a theory that the reason why Crona in the manga turned in the specific way they did is because in B. ichi Ohkubo did not get to finish the arc with the charachter Emine and than recycled ideas from him onto Crona, even though they did not match with Cronas established charachter and arc.

Submitted January 22, 2021

...Wow.

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot, and I’m disappointed I hadn’t had this idea earlier: the short answer is, yeah, kind of?

It’s pretty obvious from design and role in the story that there is a lot of Emine in Crona, so it’s not unbelievable to see some of the darker aspects of Emine’s story from the ended-too-soon B Ichi now played out through Crona’s story.

(Slight aside: I’ve seen some fanfic trying the reverse--applying Crona’s redemption storyline onto Emine’s so that Emine is redeemed and reunited with Shotaro, similar to how, after betraying Stein and Marie, Crona is redeemed and reunited with Maka.)

But what’s weird is that Crona has that period in between the Kishin revival arc and their disappearance from Death City that is totally not like Emine’s storyline, a moment of calm where you hope Crona gets out of this bad situation and doesn’t fall back into Medusa’s clutches--and then, they still do. Why take a break from Emine’s story if we’re then just going to go right back to it? It’s an odd bit of re-using material from a previous series, assuming that you’re onto something that Ohkubo was drawing upon stuff he didn’t get to use in B Ichi. 

Maybe I can take from this story the idea of relapses and toxic parenting, but it still stings that we see Crona back with Medusa, largely without actually getting to see it happening to know how Medusa got away with it. Maybe Crona was just that intimidated; maybe Medusa was still able to exercise power through madness over Crona--I’m not sure. 

So, I can see your point that maybe Ohkubo is using Emine’s progression and pasting it onto Crona, although I’m not entirely convinced that storyline doesn’t match Crona’s established character arc if, again, we think of Crona’s return to Medusa as part of a larger narrative about parental abuse.

I wish I could say that the anime giving all of this a different spin helps to alleviate some of that frustration, in that we see Crona redeemed. But the anime also has its own flaws, with a rushed story and new characters wedged in at the end to set up the final battle, as well as rushing how Crona is injured but miraculously healed. The anime’s ending is a feel-good conclusion but maybe falls apart on logic, while the manga is tackling a really complicated idea to try to be more realistic when it comes to the cycle of abuse but largely fails because of Ohkubo’s inability to be mature about something serious for a moment (again: the ending should have been about the concept of love, not...whatever the hell Chapter 113 was).

[bichiwikia]

Project B.Ichi

Signas501 submitted to bichiwikia:

For the past few months I’ve been reading through B.Ichi, and I’ve been doing a lot of depictions of the characters based off of the source material that can be found through Okubo’s work, such as the Soul Eater Art Artbook, and from minor cameos from the Soul Eater anime. As of now, I have several characters completed, and intend on creating several more using models from the manga as a base in order to help promote the characters of B.Ichi.

Excellent.

[soul-dwelling]

The funny thing is that the work that Ohkubo (if rumors are true) sees as a failure - B.ichi - in a way was more mature - because it delt with a topic that is more rarely discussed and has more resonance with the average reader - growing apart from a childhood friend. Even if one says a real adult would have delt with that on their own, it still is mature in the way that it takes maturity to recognise it as a problem that children will deal with and to deal with this topic in writting. Ofcourse tragic deaths of family happen in real life too, but still less few kids in 21st century japan deal with that, compared to the reality of the first bond, before any first romance, breaking apart do to circumstances. Or maybe I'm giving this topic too much credit do to personal bias

That’s the thing, though: sometimes the simplest message is the most effective, and shows how that message and that kind of a story works regardless of the age of the intended audience. And yes, that idea of losing contact with a friend is something that works for any age group, so it works for both the younger readers in the audience and still holds up for older readers. It is a classic story structure that we see in enough other shonen texts, so at worst it is a cliche--but it’s a cliche that works. 

(I can quibble about the more immature aspects of B Ichi, but they are no different than the immature aspects in Ohkubo’s other works. In other words, I agree B Ichi is more mature, or maybe the word is sincere, in addressing that topic, whereas Soul Eater tended to be less sentimental or delay the actual ramifications until the final arc when Crona sacrifices themselves, and whereas Fire Force was all over the place until it ended as a farce.)

I haven’t read enough that Ohkubo has said about his own works to know whether he saw B Ichi as a failure. I personally think it was a prototype for what Soul Eater would become, in terms of visual details, character dynamics, setting, and world building. I’m disappointed those characters didn’t pop up in other content: they have the kind of slapstick routine that could work in short form, like the very few “Larry and Jagi” stories Ohkubo included in Soul Eater. There are few pieces of those characters in his original artwork--few in color, too.