#m akabans

[marsreds]

my god.

what do you mean they're alike and he clocked it immediately??? what do you mean he was okay with waiting this long???

what do you mean he's devoted still and sees that they're on opposing sides of a divide but he's content with waiting for her??? still??? he's content to still wait for her??? because they're two of a kind???? what do you mean he loves issho just like akane loves shiguma and he sees it and he understands it and is saddened by it?????

what do you mean he's willing to see it through no matter what bc how else could they??? what do you mean that he's dancing this line between akane's weird-ass revenge story and real life with real life problems???? what do you mean god of death duel duet?????

[marsreds]

some vague thoughts about a thing that i find very interesting in Akane-Banashi, which is the way it manages illustrate the importance of idgf-ers in a story soooo caught up in legacy.

what i mean is that we have the Hikaru-Akane-Karashi rivalry, which is crucial for Akane's growth as a character because they're her peers who started their journeys into professional rakugo at more or less the same time as her. Hikaru and Karashi are both (in different ways) more intense in their rivalry—both with each other and with Akane—than Akane is with them. this ties into the kind of rakugo that they do: both Karashi and Hikaru are modern rakugo performers.

this means two things:

they incorporate elements from other disciplines or play with narratives in a way Akane does not. this is talked about more re: Karashi, but Hikaru's background as a voice actor very much informs her rakugo, and it's a rakugo that would be deeply frowned upon in a more conservative narrative. they're shaking up the world of rakugo in a way that Akane, who had been steeped in it since an early age simply cannot. and,

they aren't burdened by the huge legacies of their schools, neither of them feels any kind of (additional, emotionally-loaded) obligation to their masters and they're very much just taking everything they learn and making it their own, something Akane struggles with just by the nature of her relationship with all the performers she interacts with (it's not an accident that the only people we meet through their rakugo first are Hikaru, Karashi and Kaisei—her rivals. all of the people she learns from we first see in interpersonal settings. her relationships with them are very loaded in ways her rivalries are not. also, Issho needs his own post on this topic, but some other time.)

So Hikaru and Karashi are there to keep Akane in check and challenge the scope of her rakugo, even though they cannot compete with the depth of her rakugo—neither in immersion in the art, nor in the emotional investment.

this is where Kaisei is waiting for her.

Kaisei is the only person of Akane's peers* who has both the deep emotional investment in rakugo, and the life-long entanglement with the artform. This is a level on which Karashi and Hikaru simply cannot match her.**

but the thing is, without people to push her from the sides, Akane would simply get lost in the heavy, emotionally-loaded traditional rakugo. without Hikaru and Karashi, Akane would get swallowed by the weight of Shiguma's legacy and fall over. Hikaru and Karashi don't care about that. They don't know about it, and they'd brush it off at best, mercilessly mock it at worst if they did. i think even Akane herself isn't aware just how much she's gaining from Hikaru and Karashi's presence in her life.

*i use "peers" loosely here, he's her senior but considering that AkaBan works on a scale of people up to over 90 years of age, the ~two year difference in their debuts is nothing

**this is also something that Kaisei seems to have clocked in on almost immediately, while Akane is still a bit suffering from "can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees"-ness and doesn't fully recognize him as her true match and the person she's actually chasing. like. rakugo is a life-long commitment. there's a 50-50 chance that Issho will drop dead of old age before she gets her "revenge". Kaisei's sticking around for a while.

[marsreds]

choose violence ask game:

1 for Akane Banashi (since you already did one for the Magiks of ITW)

8, 9, 10, 18, 19, 22: Your choice of Ichi the Witch and/or Akane Banashi!

(ask game)

hell yeah!!! (i'm gonna talk akaban mostly)

1) the character everyone gets wrong:

hahahahah, man, i assume you're talking abt this post abt majiks? really didn't mean it as harsh, just a general observation. as for akaban, i'm gonna be real with you, i don't really mingle with the akaban fandom that much? but! from what i've seen ppl are actually like. trying to meet the characters where they are? maybe folks are a bit taking issho too seriously, like it's a guy who read about existentialism in youth and decided he's just gonna roll with it and make it everyone's problem. he exists as a character in his world and he doesn't think of himself as a real person, nor anyone else tbh. it's all for the bit! the fact that (almost) all other characters in the story (except akane and maybe kaisei, jury's still out on him) are like. real people with real lives and real problems is a minor inconvenience that he's not dealing with and that's why no one in-universe likes him but it's not a reason for the audience to take him seriously. the opposite i'd argue even.

8) common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about:

again, akaban fandom is both small and chill (we'll see what happens after the anime's out) and i'm not much involved plus people are mostly like. paying attention (bc the story doesn't give you a choice) so the product of that is that i haven't seen an uniform take? like. people actually believe in nuance? it's great. i guess i'll say that if you don't hear "primadonna girl" by marina and the diamonds every time issho does anything you're taking him too seriously

9) worst part of canon:

there's only one dark-skinned character and she's subservient and we know nothing about what kind of artist she is. and the "evil idiot monkey" as well as all of his students have curly hair. both of these make me go, "hm."

10) worst part of fanon:

again, not much akaban fanon going around and i'm not really involved so i can't comment on this one.

itw however? the fucking Age Discourse™. fuck off with the age discourse. it doesn't matter!! stop applying real world metrics to fictional characters in a fantasy setting!!

like. the simple reality is that, within their world, none of them are minors. they're all employed, they all have full autonomy, they don't have parental supervision, they have social and political power!

they're also too young to be in the sort of situations they are in. it's almost as if there's something the author is trying to say about what lack of proper familial support does to children by forcing them to grow up too fast and become adults before they're ready. very difficult to grasp apparently🤔🤔

18) it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

kaisei is finally getting his time in the sun so i can't complain about this anymore. i'm very glad i got into this series when my pretty pink princess with a disorder got to be a major player. genuinely would've kept chewing drywall if people had continued to not see that he's The Rival™ that eclipses all other rivals. orbiting black holes moment. love that for them

19) you're mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like...

i don't have that kind of relationship with fiction. i like what i like and i have fun with it. i just keep my [hungry] stuff elsewhere for privacy reasons.

that said. hitsugi itw. they make me so angry. they make me so angry. i'm so angry i wanna put them in a bread mixer. i wanna punt them down 7 flights of stairs. i wanna turn them into a smoothie and drink them up through a straw. they make me so mad. so mad!!

22) your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores:

kaisei-akane parallelisms getting their time in the sun i have no complaints anymore!!!

thank you so much for these!!