Body hair on women is totally normal and natural. A woman having chest hair is okay. Women can grow a beard or a mustache. Women can grow hair on their forearms. Women can grow body hair. Body hair on women is totally natural. Not just the hair on your legs and armpits but the hair everywhere.
OoT zelink is complicated because they are constantly doomed by time travel.
ALttP zelink is complicated because Link didn’t realize he had feelings for Zelda until after falling in love with a dream version of her that he had to magically erase from existence.
I started replaying Sea of Stars and a funny detail is that one of the people working at Zenith Academy says that Moraine “finally” took Valere and Zale in for training, which implies that the people around him thought he should have started earlier and was delaying it until he couldn’t anymore.
This is interesting because he does steadfastly hold that Valere and Zale need to be trained once he’s started training them. Considering Valere and Zale are the first people he’s taken in to train (Erlina and Brugaves had already started before Moyara’s death), it’s possible that subconsciously he didn’t want to put more people on the path.
It’s not surprising he fees like Valere and Zale forced his hand can be true - their exploration into the Forbidden Cavern put both their and Garl’s life in danger because they couldn’t wait anymore to start.
As a traumatized person who never wanted the responsibility of Headmaster, he handles raising the future generation poorly. He pushes Erlina and Brugaves hard because he knows they are the last hope as Solstice Warriors and he doesn’t want them to die, he says Valere and Zale need to be trained because he can’t defy the Great Eagle when it’s clear the immortal wants future Solstice Warriors.
But at the same time, the people in Mooncradle thought it was time and that Moraine was holding back. Maybe not consciously, but it’s an interesting line of dialogue to include when much of the opening directly questions Moraine’s decision to train Valere and Zale.
I think Hinamori’s “Shiro-chan” was Kubo showing that Hitsugaya and Hinamori were going to be okay. The tail-end of the manga was definitely rushed due to Kubo’s mental and physical health worsening and I do hope we get a short reunion or something in the last cour of the anime to get real closure on their relationship.
But Kubo’s use of the nickname specifically makes use of an ongoing motif in their subplot, where the name that Hinamori uses for Hitsugaya shows both the intensity of the scene and also how close the two are in the moment. Kubo makes full use of how honourifics show connection between characters throughout the series.
Their subplot starts with Hinamori calling him “Hitsugaya-kun”, which captures their connection as she doesn’t use his full honorific, but also doesn’t capture how deep that bond is. She calls Renji and Izuru by their first names at the time, two of her peers and closest friends.
And this absolutely makes sense! Hitsugaya is a young captain with way too much responsibility dropped on him at such a young age, so he’s actively trying to prove himself as equal to the other captains. So of course he asks her to call him the right thing. He’s also switched from calling her by her first name to her last. And she’s actively being groomed by Aizen and has for several years now, where he is actively trying to make himself the center of her world.
But as the arc progresses, we see just how deep their connection is and it becomes increasingly relevant to the plot. And as it progresses Hinamori reverts to use their childhood nicknames.
But then in the beginning of the Arrancar arc, when she’s still confused and processing everything, showing signs of PTSD and how horribly she was groomed, she switches back to “Hitsugaya-kun”. There’s still space between them where they don’t quite see eye-to-eye on the current state of thing.
And in the battle at fake Karakura town, where their dynamic reaches its most dramatic, she calls him “Shiro-chan”.
But in the TYBW arc, Hinamori is healing. She has a healthy relationship with her captain and is regaining her sense of self. And for our first moment seeing them interact since the stabbing, Kubo gives them a big panel of them making eye contact. He has her still use her nickname for him, instead of the title used when they had the most distance between them.
Their bond is healing, and they are going to be okay.
The Forsaken Fortress in Wind Waker serves the same structural purpose as Hyrule Castle within A Link to the Past, but with more narrative and thematic payoff.
In both Link breaks into a place overrun by Ganon’s power twice, where Link breaks in the first time to save a girl while physically weaker than those around him and the second time absolutely destroys everyone in his path and to defeat the person who took said girl from him, only to still be set back by another issue that pushes him into the second half of the game.
In Wind Waker, this is where the game shifts from being a story about a brother saying his sister from a kidnapper to story about children being haunted by a kingdom that is long gone from adults who cannot move on.
From an emotional perspective, Ganon isn’t the villain of the first half of the game - the bird is. By defeating the bird and rescuing his sister from the fortress, Link gets what he first set out to do. But really Ganon was pulling the strings the whole time, all to regain a time long past.
Wind Waker is fundamentally a game about moving on from the ghost of the past. Ganon covets what he never had and will never have. His foil is the King of Red Lions, who is literally a ghost of the old kingdom that wants it all gone. Tetra and Link are forced to play the roles of Zelda and Link, but they aren’t really Zelda and Link.
The Forsaken Fortress is where all of this really comes to light and we understand that our heroes’ happy ending is children finally being free of the past that has been haunting them for generations and the king finally able to rest after centuries.
Honestly, the more that I think about it, the more unsure I am that I’d want an Escaflowne sequel. I struggle to think of where you could realistically and naturally take Van and Hitomi’s characters in a way that fits their respective character arcs established within the original series.
One of my biggest praises for the Vision of Escaflowne is how well written Van and Hitomi are. Hitomi especially, it’s really rare that you see a female character who is written with such human flaws. I just don't see a lot of directions to take their characters in a way that feels natural. If there is a sequel, I think it would have to focus on Millerna and Dryden, as they have the most open ending and directions their characters could naturally go.
