maybe a more learned utena scholar than me can qualify this but i’m inclined to believe anthy (and akio) are NOT supernaturally immortal or from centuries long ago or whatever, obv it’s a very symbolically dense work where not everything is diagetic so i can’t exactly point to certain evidence like it definitively proves anything, but like. there’s a fax machine in anthy and dios’ barn, and utena & anthy are the same age when they meet for the first time as children (extra important to me bc despite the disparity in their situations it means they’re equally vulnerable to akio’s/the narrative’s retroactive patriarchal framing of this moment). i think the other more fairy-tale-like elements are still used in the barn flashback to develop this anachronistic tension that symbolizes anthy’s torment as feeling eternal… because she’s a tremendously jaded 14yo girl, rather than literally being eternal. that’s not meant to downplay her pain in any way at all (and tbc, the actual distinction does not matter too much anyway bc the way anthy perceives it remains unchanged and that should be the big takeaway) but to have it better cohere with what rgu also has to say about cyclicality/memory in general. imo.
What’s your opinion on 03 Raph? And do you feel canon should have given him and Mikey a bonding episode? Like how junklantis was about Mikey and Don
thanks for the fun questions anon! sorry for forgetting to answer them for over a year. </3
yeah i love 03 raph a lot and after having stepped out of tmnt fandom space a bit i can def say i have settled with raph as my fav. something about the way he's written as highly reflective, introspective, and generally emotionally intelligent without the narrative having to underline it, instead leaving it as more subtle, elegant characterization, and avoiding the trap of going too far in the other direction & making him feel too preternaturally mature. it is infact his emotional disregulation that results in him constantly turning inwards and seeking so much to find his place in the world! he is just so fifteen in a way that feels rlly grounded to me (and erm not to peddle my fanfiction but i wrote about this a while ago and it's pretty good imo). i know a lot of people say the 03 turtles feel like adults but because of raph's characterization i can't rlly say i agree.
i also personally get a lot of mileage out of the somewhat understated parallels between him and splinter, in many ways they are like fundamentally the same person without the show ever needing to spell it out, and just. augh. 03 overall shows a lot of respect for raph's intelligence that other versions just don't, and through him, 03 also shows respect for itself and its ability to imbue a certain delicate touch in areas where it typically doesn't, if that makes sense. even its more obvious statements about his character (him crying in tales of leo comes to mind) end up feeling nuanced and meaningful. when speaking towards the actual quality of the show, people often point toward's leo's seasons-spanning character arc, which is really good obviously, but imo raph is where 03 is at its best. or at least, at its most appealing to my personal tastes
hmm. i feel like the second question is a little leading. ;p i certainly wouldn't have complained, but if we're talking about how 03 might have strengthened the bond between raph & mikey (and indeed i do think the writers could have done more with it considering that them being best friends comes up multiple times in supplementary material--likely a holdover from mirage--but the show itself doesn't lend as much support to their friendship as it does for other duos), i wouldn't personally think of a junklantis-type episode to remedy it. maybe i'm biased because i just don't like that one (the fatphobia is unbearable, amongst other things), but generally, 03 is structured such that characters receive one-on-one episodic focus, rather than the show spending a lot of time deeply exploring a certain relationship with intention. i think this is why the brothers' relationships feel (allegedly) healthier in 03, because barring a few significant exceptions, the narrative is focused on external conflicts with the boys as a unit, and doesn't have time to give conflicts between the boys as much weight as they would require.
so 03's relationship development ends up happening in the background of other, broader plot threads, or within the context of larger issues. which is ultimately to say, raph and mikey DO have a "bonding" episode/arc, grudge match. it's actually one of my favorites because it says a lot about both of them individually and their relationship w each other, and it shows the two in conflict without it overtaking the episode or feeling catastrophic (like inter-brother conflicts have felt in other arcs like city at war), because it's genuinely funny. another example of 03's effective relationship building is in notes from the underground (or is it return?), where the little bits w mikey and donny trying to figure out the crystal rlly succinctly encapsulates their differences in thinking & how they interact. it's cute! meanwhile, junklantis doesn't do anything for me, tell me anything new about the characters, or feel grounded in the aesthetic of this world. the premise of "pluck up two characters and stick them in an isolated situation" doesnt fit 03's mode of character development. so if i had to pick a way the show could have developed raph & mikey some more, i'd rather it be in little pieces sprinkled throughout. i think this is a strength of--or at least something unique about--tmnt03 that i'd prefer to preserve in this hypothetical world where i have control over its writing :p so all in all, i agree with the sentiment, but the lack of a raph&mikey-centric episode doesn’t really pop up on my radar as a shortcoming of the series. sorry for the yap sesh. ^-^;
me: during the nana and ren scandal nana k and nana o are isolated from each other but have taken to professing their love for each other not just through interpersonal proxy but by interrupting modes of public discourse with their secret language, where they can continue to uphold the idealized concept of their relationship and each other and the idealized selves that they know exists within the other without actually interfacing in the tangible intimacy they had early in their friendship, before they know how fragile it was. when nana k finds hateful graffiti about nana o, in spraypainting over it with “love nana”, she is reciprocating nana o’s love confession to “hachiko”, perpetuating the pattern of their relationship where they can only express their desire to commit to each other by hijacking tangential social objects, and like many memories of queer love in eras when it couldn’t be spoken, nana k’s confession is deeply significant yet as impermanent as the season and will be painted over by city cleaners in the same breath as the initial hate
i’ve been thinking about your bfish meta ever since i read it 😫 do you have any thoughts on blanca &/or his relationship to ash?
YAYY i’m honored!!! lmao when i finished (like a week or two ago) i had no thoughts on bfish at all but sitting w it has rlly stirred up my brain since then. anyway yes ofccc i have blanca thoughts he is so fucking interesting though i think they are all somewhat surface level observations, so bear with me :p i think it’s interesting that we can see him as this legitimately positive force in ash’s life, but also as the person who maybe most severely “failed” him as he had the most power to meaningfully help ash and actively chose not to. while ofc also understanding the flaws in the concept of “failing” itself here bc in reality blanca successfully performed exactly the role he was meant to—as both a mentor hired and constrained by the parental golzine, and as the semi-paternal figure he becomes (as much as he seems to superficially resist that dynamic or prioritize professionalism). and as bfish seeks to explore found family dynamics so critically, i love the understated “dad who didn’t step up and didn’t come back” vibe here to blanca’s relationship w ash, not just as blanca’s personal failure but also as a natural function of family. bc one of my fav things abt bfish was that it DOES understand rlly intimately how the socially constructed family functions as a system of control. but i think ive probably mentioned that by now or somethinf.. 😅 (guy who’s only seen utena this is really giving me critique of the family vibes)
so yeah blanca is def the most interesting of ash’s little lineup of father figures to me bc he kind of encapsulates the problems with all of them. golzine literally being called papa and later trying to adopt ash is very unsubtly talking abt parenthood as a system of control over children both socially and legally, max is so very sincere but kind of unprepared & helpless in the face of ash’s trauma and how it intersects with his own, ash’s biological dad is…. you know i don’t even want to get into it i have more thoughts abt him outside the scope of this ask but. you know what i mean. that alongside ash and yut-lung’s “brothers of different mothers but from the spirit of the same womb” thing (the brutus amv is fully formed in my mind) makes blanca as a fatherly figure literally so crazy to me. GET YOURSELF A MAN WHO CAN DO IT ALL (and by all i mean be an ineffectual but well meaning father in all its iterations). while also rlly starting to articulate WHY bfish is so interested in proxy familial roles as symbols of the tension between fearing and being desperate for connection in a world where souls cannot truly touch.
but re: professionalism, the way he acts with yut-lung (which … that whole relationship is honestly even more interesting to me like yesss u can see exactly how blanca & ash’s relationship might have happened bc the way blanca treats yut-lung makes it clear he is a v caring person who chooses to suppress that instinct for a whole concoction of reasons yet kind of fails to do so and ends up fostering love there anyway) rlly shows to me that he uses it as an emotional distancing tool, ljke i don’t think it’s something he values on its own, but he can use it to pretend he’s not as intertwined with these kids he can’t stop animal pack bonding with, bc blanca & ash & yut-lung are all connected by this desperateness for human warmth… ok srry not to be wuthering heights posting about it but he’s so nellycoded…. TO ME.!!! i love when people are hired to mentor/care for kids in bad situations & they do care abt them but internalize their own powerlessness real & imagined, actively in denial about their tangible involvement on a person-to-person level/their complicity in those kids’ continued misery. yay <3
but also thinking abt how blanca’s narrative relevance centers on ash & yut-lung as extremely traumatized disenfranchised children, obv it works out this way bc the story is about those two and blanca is meant to deliver like the thesis statement of the story and all, but likkeee the fact that blanca’s interiority is articulated so much by ash & yut-lung being almost co-opted as mirrors of blanca’s observations about love & the world is. kind of a wtf moment for me.. GUY WHO HAS A SUPER NORMAL RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS NOTCHILDREN. i’m not sure how immediately intentional it is and i wouldn’t die on the hill of this take but: it reads a bit uhh vaguely subliminally emotionally metaphorically incestuous (guy who’s only read umineko voice…….) that ash in particular reflects both blanca’s memory of his wife AND of himself. ITS. AM I CRAZY OR IS THIS ACTUALLY CRAZY. like he very clearly does see ash as his own person in a way that very few adults in his life do (and i think blanca asking ash to come with him to the caribbean at the end represents him finally dropping some pretenses and allowing himself to see ash as what a son ““should”” be rather than as an extension of himself, which ofc ash immediately challenges bc parenthood itself is so problematized and a healthy version of it is made mythical/maybe impossible within the series’ logic). and the love there is very genuine, but like everything else warm about their relationship, it is sharply contrasted by the realities of how blanca actually, like, literally sucks
blanca’s introduction into the story was genuinely so gamechanging to me i think none of what ive said here is like a super deep cut but he just brings in a rlly necessary complexity to bfish’s themes & assertions about like, what it means to care for someone, to be responsible for them, especially someone you have like structural power over, and how all that can be subsumed into or expressed by the desire for eternal familial love. man bfish is kind of stupid sometimes but it IS a really fucking good interpersonal drama & tragedy with a lot of complexity & thematic ambition. yay blanca
i was thinking abt how the ending of banana fish is so unpopular w people for understandable reasons but how i personally rlly like it & thought it was the best (or at least the most thematically interesting) path forward in the story. major spoilers under the cut
bc ofc the main tension with ash as a character—aside from the obvious moment-to-moment repression-release cycle everyone say thank you yoshida akimi for whumping that boy so hard—is in the idea of crossing between worlds, whether ash is capable of living differently from how he does now, whether it’s framing him as a ln escaped zoo animal or a wild beast resisting domestication (both ideas play out with him often simultaneously). bc the gap between him and eiji isn’t just imagined, as much as ash is unnecessarily teenage boy tormenting himself, it is like very reasonable to worry about whether ash can “live normally” with eiji, especially as his relationship w eiji is projected on top of ash’s relationship with his brother, who of course represents an ideal that can never be returned to. & as i mentioned in another post the contrasting animal motifs seek to complicate this ideal of domesticity. which is not to say i don’t think ash is capable of healing or whatever but like it would be disrespectful to say he just have to get over his fears about himself and his supposed fundamental evil in order to be happy as if those fears just came out of nowhere. but throughout the majority of the story, the “different worlds” analogy seems pretty accurate. it doesn’t make him a different more twisted class of person like he thinks but there is a very real logistical and emotional boundary there.
so the manga is obv raising this question and asking us to consider what a “happy” future with ash and eiji in japan would look like & if it’s possible. and i think where ash’s death feels thematically appropriate isn’t in its denial of his capability for happiness but in its denial of the dichotomy itself as smth that can create or deny happiness. & i think having asheiji yaoi goggles on here does a disservice to the story bc the stuff happening with lee yut-lung and sing soo-ling is kind of acting as the capstone to this narrative question. how do you stop being a wild animal/tamed pet? ash and yut-lung both conceive of their tension as a binary—you’re either one or the other. escaping my father/brother’s abuse means being monstrous and cruel. escaping my evil nature involves a sort of “rescue”, being spirited away into an idealized world by someone who loves me and who i love like a dog. but sing, being the classic random-14yo-moral-center of the story, literally slaps yut-lung out of this somewhat fatalistic mindset. there is no world separation that makes you fundamentally different from me. we exist in the same world, with different places and circumstances of course, but it’s possible for us to interface, to synthesize the idealistic future and the traumatic past.
this being a tragedy, ash is too preoccupied with the symbolic nyc and japan to make this realization. maybe it is impossible for him to make it since the dichotomy feels so tangible. nobody is here to slap him out of it, but what ash has learned is that being alone does not mean he is really alone. i think of blanca telling yut-lung that ash is more blessed than them because he has love, and while that is something of a thesis statement of the story i think it coming from blanca means we are meant to problematize it a little. ash is not inherently better or more deserving of love simply through the act of loving… but through his death, which literally would not have happened without eiji’s confirmation that they are basically soulmates, ash achieves the exact kind of transformative magical love that blanca and yut-lung romanticize & feel alienated from. but the ideal that japan represented to ash cannot be acquired in this life, in this plane of reality (soulmatism -> eternity -> death). and while it’s def possible that ash could have lived & gone to japan & learned how to love & be loved by eiji while being like, alive, that would be out of bfish’s scope. and i think it’s interesting how it all ties back to the snows of kilimanjaro, with ash both escaping and succumbing to the leopard’s fate. he dies knowing that he is understood and that eiji’s soul is with him and that he is not philosophically & emotionally impenetrable, but he’s still a suicidal teen boy, who can only conceive of escaping his fate through a different kind of death. if the boundary between him and eiji is true and geographical/their connection is marked by a ticking clock, the great pleasure of being known and loved must be transcendent, telepathic, and permanent. life as eternity’s opposite is far more complicated, and is something the narrative never promised to give ash room to grapple with
also if i can just say apropos of nothing. i suppose aesthetically speaking ryuunosuke & susato’s closest relationship analogue (between dgs & aa) is nick & maya, but i actually feel if anything ryuu & susato are more klapollo coded. i don’t mean that in a romantic context (i mean you def can look at it that way but i do generally not vibe with ryuu/susa for reasons beyond the popular discourse) but like both relationships are so defined by professionalism that it would be impossible to extract the characters from lawyerhood and still see them developing a believable relationship (i mean, idr if it’s canon on apollo’s part but both ryuu and apollo could have easily met susato or klavier thru their shared connections, but even if they did, clearly nothing came of it). and like i think the big difference there is that ryuu & susato shape each others’ identities while apollo & klavier uncover & kind of destroy each others’ identities (moreso apollo destroying klav but it think its present in both ways—and ultimately lending to possibilities for rebuilding), but still the point is that you have to understand that the thread that makes both of these relationships work is the mutual workaholic kindof obsession illustrated through arcs of learning to trust one other unconditionally in the midst of horrible corruption 💞
another reason i appreciate ndrv3 even though it’s an objectively bad game is that imo it actually retroactively highlights the best points of thh and sdr2. which i understand is, even beyond v3’s generally controversial reception, probably an especially unpopular opinion due to the batshit retcons, but nonetheless i think it makes clear in hindsight that danganronpa was always interested in metafiction and how narrative interfaces with & influences identity as a tool of power. much of v3’s themes are elements of thh and dr2 carefully drawn out not to critique fans of the series, but to craft a love letter to them that both expresses gratitude for and requests their continued care for the franchise despite its transience and mutability. maybe it wasn’t real or it didn’t stay but it still mattered. or whatever.
i think it’s so so good that hikaru has like five brothers (who all love her soo much) and a dog and yet she somehow has the worst fear of rejection known to man. we have no reason to believe that she’s ever experienced this in the past, but THATS WHAT MAKES IT SO TERRIFYING. in being swept up to cephiro she immediately buys in to her own forced conscription to cope with/repress the fact that this is kind of the worst thing that could ever happen to her, because her safety net is completely gone. her love for umi and fuu is beautiful and strengthens her but it’s the first time she’s ever really relied on a relationship in which she has to Do The Work in order to maintain it. the knowledge that she could theoretically fuck this up is destroying her from the inside. she doesn’t know how to have relationships where rejection feels possible to her. and a lot of that is what makes the show work so well as a coming of age, bc hikaru has to learn how to have relationships outside of the “guaranteed” unconditional love of parents and siblings in your childhood—it’s a part of growing up and leaving the nest. and it’s another way that the show makes efforts to justify the shoujo tropes within its own context. this is why romantic love is so centralized!
