#picket ramble

[okultraoldmanyaoi]

how it feels to make trans hcs for characters commonly viewed as cis (and trans hcs for characters that are commonly headcanoned as trans, but not in the same way)

[okultraoldmanyaoi]

with characters like tsurumi that are demonstrated to be capable of such unreal levels of violence and evil with no remorse whatsoever, sometimes giving them a tragic backstory can weaken the blow that the character had before by overriding feelings of fear and indignation with some level of sympathy or understanding. however, in something that i haven't seen executed in any media as well as it is done in golden kamuy, once you learn about tsurumi's backstory he goes from menacing to genuinely fucking terrifying.

i think it might be the leads we were given on tsurumi beforehand - textual comparisons to the devil and a god of death, an underlying feeling that everything he does must have some cunning edge to it. he feels unreal; an enigmatic force with witty characterization and just enough smarts to keep the protagonists on their toes rather than a character of his own. it's as the story progresses and we flit between points in his life that we pick up the scraps of personhood and history that he left behind, that we come to the slow realization that tsurumi isn't a flat caricature of a villain. he isn't comically evil with no true motive outside of that. he isn't even the devil.

he's a man. he's a man with remarkable power that has devoted his life to imperialism and specifically tearing apart an entire ethnic group due to his own personal injury. his grief is what makes him terrifying. it is so very real but it is so MONSTROUS, it's a grief that we as the readers can understand but NEVER sympathize with due to the bodies it left in its wake. after pages upon pages of playing along with and finding amusement in tsurumi's cartoonish antics, the most horrifying reveal is that he is nothing more than a gaping wound.

[okultraoldmanyaoi]

yes tsurumi is a good spy insofar as the trickery, lies, manipulation, forging of so many identities that you can never say with certainty which is real and which is not, etc etc. but i am sick of people gassing up tsurumi like he's the best spy that ever lived. he FAILED as a spy, remember this. the bonds that he forged - the family he made to 'play up his act' - those things became real. he could not hold himself detached from them, he could not follow one of the most central tenets to being a spy. his entire motivations are driven by visceral grief for the loss of a family he was never meant to love.

[okultraoldmanyaoi]

do you guys ever think about that 1 q&a where noda said there was a time where usami called ogata to the training grounds & stood him up. and he specifically goes out of his way to specify that ogata ended up waiting there alone for "a long time". I do. god i do

like. idk . im tormenting myself thinking about it i'm having an awful time. you'd think if he didn't care, he wouldn't go. or if he didn't care but went anyways he wouldn't be sticking around that long once no one showed up. but no. he was so desperate for the chance to Connect w someone that He Stayed. WHY ELSE WOULD HE HANG ONTO THE HOPE OF SOMEONE SHOWING UP FOR THAT LONG

[okultraoldmanyaoi]

vasio, internally: By keeping the distance between us as short as possible, I’m effectively paralyzing him. A sniper’s greatest boon is distance from our enemy, and he knows as well as I do that he could never get a shot in when we’re this close … Better yet, if he decides to turn and run, he knows he’s giving me the vantage point to shoot him in the moments he doesn’t have his eyes on me. Hah. We’re at an impasse, then …

the kind of shit everyone else is seeing:

[okultraoldmanyaoi]

(ogata voice) I'll be your wife too

[okultraoldmanyaoi]

ive hinted at romantic/sexual relations between vasio but honestly thats not what their relationship is at all to me like neither of them would care ... maybe this is too friendshipmaxxing of me but i DO think there is a platonic explanation for how vasily acts. i think if you consider him as an incredibly lonely man that thinks of himself more as a weapon than a person it is totally believable that his obsession with ogata doesn't come from a place of genuine attraction to him but just wanting to Know someone like him. i think they would be friends first and foremost, although ill admit i think their relationship might include romantic/sexual aspects solely because they think that's what they're Supposed to do to show each other that their relationship is 'real' ro whatever .... anyways this is my QPR aroace4aroace vasio propaganda listen to me now

[okultraoldmanyaoi]

i was turmoiling over this page (a common habit of mine) and i had a thought

most people know this (i think) but the song tome is singing to ogata here in the middle panel is 'tōryanse', a traditional japanese nursery rhyme. to put it simply (and how i understood it), it's a conversation between a person trying to go to a shrine to make an offering in celebration of their child turning 7 years old and a guard manning the entrance to that shrine/at the very least a checkpoint on the way there.

i feel i should clarify that this song is extremely popular and well-known, used pretty often in pop culture for one reason or another (and is even sometimes played at crosswalks). but i still feel that noda chose it for a Reason, i don't know if it'd be thrown in just because it's popular. one possible idea i had is that it's meant to refer to ogata's arc as a whole - especially considering the specific segment of it that we see tome singing here.

translations differ for obvious reasons but it follows the idea of 'going in is easy, but going back is scary/difficult', which i feel is pretty reminiscent of ogata's downward spiral. it was easy to do the terrible things he did, but as soon as he was on that train and had a moment where he was forced to look back and confront all that he had done, he was so overwhelmed by his mistakes that he chose to kill himself rather than attempt to mend anything.

but another idea (based on pretty flimsy evidence ill admit) i had was that, since this song explicitly refers to it, she could be singing it in celebration of hyakunosuke turning 7. it would explain why she's so lucid here - tome's neglect notably stemmed from the fact she considered hyakunosuke's future more than she considered him in the present, so it makes sense that she would focus a bit more on him for what is essentially him stepping closer to the future she planned for him (by growing older). this would, in turn, also explain why she sees the need to bring up him becoming an officer in the future at that moment specifically. sure he's only 7, but tome is still not all there and might see him growing even the tiniest bit older as a sign that he's ready to carry that kind of burden. (also of note is that if she was sold to a geisha house like a lot of people theorize, she would have started work incredibly young as well ... so that could also be another factor impairing her logic)

and like. i don't know thinking about this is just fucking me RIGHT up. what do you mean it's plausible ogata poisoned tome when he was seven years old