I decided to gather some thoughts about Tanaka Strike new manga ODAROKU. Thanks so much Claudia for summaries!
The setting seems to be Japan, modern age but, as far as I can tell, an alternate one, not only because of supernatural creatures and magical objects, but also due to the larger influence and presence of criminal organizations. I'm really interested in how this world's built, what role the government and the mafia play. To what extent will this system influence the development of characters' personalities, their motivations and actions. Why will some be "good" and others "villains"? How broad will be the moral spectrum? What could make someone change? Well, it's too early to ask such questions, as it's unclear how much Tanaka plans to explore the theme of morality in this manga. Maybe it'll be something relatively lighthearted, who knows.
Considering the main theme so far... well, I don't really disagree with the statement that as long as you keep on trying and don't give up on yourself you're not done and may win but I still believe where're obstacles one can do almost nothing about but to compromise and adapt at best. And there're always many situations where one'd better shut up their mouth to not lose their health, freedom or life. But whatever, I don't think art should relate to reality in every point. Servamp sometimes used to be realistically dark (not only in specific situations but in human behaviour and habits, pain and weakness), sometimes more like a modern fairytale so I wonder how it gonna be here.
Speaking of designs, I like Kotohito and Yukiura the most so far. I love Kotohito's details and how elegant the overall look is. Yukiura's beautiful too. And they both seem amusing (that woman is so chill lmao).
I couldn't help but like Rokurou at least a bit because I have a soft spot for struggling characters. And like, I see a nervous dude who doesn't think much of themselves and I immediately recognize them as a bro, lol
Both Orihime and Neko Aki are cute~
Honestly, I've a lot of personal and specific wishes that are entirely my problem since I'm a guest here. But I'm still interested in what ideas Tanaka will incorporate into her new work and how she'll develop them. After all, even the same questions can be answered differently under different circumstances, or the same conclusion can be reached by different paths.
For example, Mahiru had Akira and Toru as his role model, but what inspired Rokurou to want to become a better person? And what "better" means to him?
Here comes a rambling personal chatter.
Well, maybe "inspired" isn't the right word, or at least not for everyone. I remember myself whining and muttering, "I just want to be a good person," but I can't pinpoint what first sparked that desire. I'm not sure but it was probably something warm I experienced from others or read somewhere that piled up and made me want to be the same. Now I remember that there was no understanding of what "steps" needed to be taken to become good but I don't remember the moment it became clear that "being good" is a choice you make every day. Even though the pinnacle of my ambitions now is to not hate myself too much I still feel an interest in the topic. Perhaps in a somewhat dark form? Because I'd like to see a character make mistakes and fail. Without the comforting and reassuring "you're already good". No, you're still bad. But there's still hope for sure. I guess the theme of guilt and shame haunts me too. Like, "I wanted to be better", "I wanted to build something good but something went wrong".
But that doesn't really matter and I'll follow story to see what it has for us
I feel so stupid: Tanaka's new manga has only started, and I already wish 👉👈 to see a guy (who literally flashed by a couple of frames) as a blast from the past terrorizing main character.
Other people from the gang(?) seem interesting too, so I guess they may have a chance to appear in the story. But that's just my delusions, please condemn me
It's been a long time since you've been around,I miss the drawings you made of Kuro and sensei(/ಥ_ಥ)/
I'm sorryyy, my studies and mental (un)health took the best of me. Thank you for still remembering my arts 💚 I hope to manage it somehow sooner or later and come back to drawing and other things
The new Mononoke movies brought me back to the Ayakashi/Mononoke fandom after many years — and in my hype, I translated the Q&A from the official Twitter/X account and compiled the current lores/trivias in one document for easy reading. ╰(*´︶`*)╯♡
MONONOKE Q&A (Updated: 04 April 2025) This is a fan translation from the Q&A posted on Mononoke movie trilogy’s official Twitter/X account
There’s an article I wanted to translate a long time ago but have done it just now. I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to anyone or if something similiar was already written, but well, what done is done.
I'm going to talk about the name given by the Count – The Mother. As we know, servamps' names have different meanings in kanji and furigana (reading) (like "The Silent Demise" and ‘Sleepy Ash’, ‘The One and Only’ and ‘Lawless’ etc.). As for Freya, her name in kanji is 母なるもの (haha naru mono) and in furigana it's ザ • マザー (The Mother).
Literally, 母なるもの means 'the one who is a mother', i.e. it's like some image or title is assumed. Like in the sentences ‘she acted like a true mother’, ‘the mother archetype in psychology’ or in names ‘the Mother Nature’, ‘Goddess the Mother’. Freya's names therefore are almost identical and the kanji version clarifies the furigana version only a bit.
Anyway, ‘the Mother’ reminds how some characters mistook Freya for their mothers or at least her appearance made them remember their mothers. Let's call it an illusion, just for convenience. However, that didn't happen to everyone, e.g. nothing like this ever happened to Mahiru (we would've known, most likely, if that was the case). For now, that illusion has worked with Tsurugi, Toma, Shuhei and Gilbert. And I want to say that at these moments all of them were similar in their mental state.
Tsurugi doesn't know his real mother, thus instead of memories all he could have is his expectations and assumptions about what a mother is. It also seems that he considered Junichiro's mother a mother figure and built that image upon her.
During events in C3 Tsurugi was pushed over the edge. He confessed that he had enough. When Freya hugged him like a real mother would, he didn't see, but felt the image of the person he never met.
Although it's hard to say precisely whenever it was an illusion or his damaged mind. Even when Tsurugi understood who Freya was he continued to call her ‘mother’.
It isn't 'the Mother', which is her name, but 'mother' – how a child address to a parent.
There also was a moment in ch.60.
Here Tsurugi offers Freya to become Toma's servamp, but the word ‘servamp’ is written in furigana, while the kanji reads as ‘mother’. I understand it as if out loud Tsurugi says that he says but for us, readers, Tanaka adds different meaning that Tsurugi puts into his words: ‘you can become a mother for Tai-chan’. No comments.
Many things can be said about Toma. He considers the world as a threat and that reflects in his inner world. And the first threat in his life were his own parents.
Parents caused hatred, disgust, and also wild fear. Toma wanted to protect himself from them, and then came to the conclusion that he had to get rid of them. After the death of his parents, neither hatred towards them personally nor fear in general went away. Toma calls fear a fortress that protects from dangers.
He isn't a born villain, but is filled with anger and hostility. So, rather, here the external resemblance only helped to transfer the appearance of Toma’s mother onto the woman in front of him, and the first thing that came to mind was a vivid memory of her.
Gilbert died at war, and dying he understood that he wouldn't be able to say goodbye neither to his friends nor to his family. Although it may seem that his mother was already dead and Gilbert imagined that he saw her ghost. Maybe he thought that she had come to pick him up and lead him to the next world.
Next is Shuhei with his overflowing thirst for revenge. The illusion didn't affect him immediately, probably because Iduna's arrival and her contract with Wrath unsettled and distracted him. But gradually Shuhei began to feel angry at his own helplessness again: he should be able to protect his loved ones and not leave those who harmed them unpunished. In this state, watching Freya, he remembered his mother and her words, which resonated with his feelings most of all at that moment.
All in all, it can be said that some were overcome with regret and thirst for revenge, some didn’t find peace even years later. Be it fear, despair or anger – first of all it’s pain. And pain always seeks consolation. Through tears, prayer or, yes, anger.
The demon of Wrath spoke about approximately the same thing.
Thus, the illusion works on those who are under the influence, experiencing acute symptoms or are chronically soul-sick, when pain serves as the most important motivation and doesn’t let one breathe freely. Therefore, the illusion didn’t work, for example, on Iduna, who was terrified and confused, but didn’t give up, or on Mahiru. The fear of loneliness and trauma indirectly affect Mahiru's actions but don’t remind of themselves every day, leading to agony.
Thus the Mother, the servamp of Wrath, becomes the mother of all the inconsolable, angry and offended.
From Lily's words and Freya's memories, we see that in her early life as a servamp she agreed to be a weapon, essentially turning her masters into slaves of Wrath, since without her help some of them might not have dared to start a fight. But in the present, she contacts people not to make them submit to their pain and inflict it on others, but to guide and comfort them. The compassion with which Freya treats people proves more than anything that she isn’t a soulless tool, as Lily still sees her, but a human being.
Even though Freya is doomed to become a monster in battle, destroying everyone in her way (possibly due to the imperfection of servamps), now her contractor is the eve who won’t allow her to kill left and right.
Was this the meaning the Count had in mind when he named his creation? Was Freya supposed to go through this path to realize some plan, some special role in this creature's plans?
If we return to the ability of the Mother, I still believe that first of all it influences emotions, creates a sensory image, which evokes memories (if any), and only then, and not always, deceives the sight.
***
Before I finish talking about the name of the Mother, I'll tell you a little about the novel with the same name —「母なるもの」by Shusaku Endo.
The protagonist of the novel, also a writer, is preparing to visit a closed village on a remote island and at the same time remembers his mother, who has long been dead, and how he sometimes sees her in dreams and in reality. She appears beside him as an ashen-coloured shadow with indistinct facial features.
The writer first saw his mother’s shadow in a dream about the hospital where he had previously spent three years, undergoing one unsuccessful operation after another.
These dreams repeated many times, and the writer isn’t sure what exactly they mean. At first, it was unpleasant for him to realize that even after years the connection between him and his mother didn’t disappear and continued to exist even in his dreams. Although in his memories there is no similar episode when he, sick, was lying in bed and his mother held his hand. He also ended up in the hospital after her death.
Sometimes the writer doesn’t see his mother, but feels as if she is nearby. Over time, the protagonist began to recognize in the features of the shadow a face of a little statue of the Holy Mother of Sorrows, ‘Mater Dolorosa’ - one of the few possessions he inherited from his mother. In the second year of his stay in the hospital, being mentally and financially exhausted, without much hope of recovery, he could look at this statue for a long time at night. From old age and weariness, the expression on the statue’s face became completely indistinguishable, where the face had once been, only sorrow remained. Her face seemed sad, and she appeared to be returning his gaze. Sometimes this expression reminded him of his mother's face when she died. Gradually, in the writer's subconscious, her face and the expression on the statue overlapped.
But first of all, the theme of the image of the mother is revealed during the protagonist's journey to the isolated village where the descendants of Christian apostates, kakure, live. During the persecution, their ancestors, in order to avoid execution, publicly renounced their faith and continued to practice it in secret, settling entire villages in remote, hardly accessible places. The main theme of their teachings was repentance for their own weakness and shame in front of those who didn’t apostatize and were executed. Over the centuries of isolation, the kakure beliefs deviated from the canons, somewhere mixing with other religions and local superstitions. The writer learns that in the teachings of the local kakure the main place is given to the veneration of the Mother of God. God acts as a father figure, so the kakure ask the Mother of God to intercede for them, as for children, before a stern father. Thus, the teachings about God the Father were gradually replaced by a yearning after a Mother.
The writer saw a part of himself in the kakure who had to live in constant remorse and gnawing guilt, lying to the world and not revealing their true feelings to anyone. He was shown a drawing of the Holy Mother cradling the Christ child before which the local kakure prayed, and it depicted an ordinary farm woman with a child, just like the ones the writer and his companions had met on their way to the village. An ordinary mother who was taking a break from hard work in the fields to feed her child. At that moment, to his side, he saw his mother again, her hands folded in prayer – the same image, but his own, in which his sorrows, regrets and thirst for forgiveness were reflected.
I thought this echoed the way in which, in moments of pain and anger, the characters in Servamp are reminded of their mothers – the people in their lives who, in theory, would understand, empathize, and ease the pain. In reality, this isn’t always the case. Some were terrible parents, some were unable to save the person from himself because they were barely holding on themselves.
I can't say for sure if there is a reference here, but you can consider it an interesting coincidence. These are my impressions of the novel, and if you want to read it yourself, you can find the translation here: https://www.scribd.com/document/388495182/Endo-Shusaku-Stained-Glass-Elegies-Peter-Owen-1984 By the way, the title was translated into English as ‘Mothers’.
Come to think of it, even without reference to the novel, the name ‘the Mother’ for the servamp of Wrath, with a demon that strongly resembles the war demon ashura, doesn’t t seem the most appropriate. But perhaps this is a manifestation of Servamp dualism, where lust and love are sides of the same coin, and anger and compassion walk hand in hand.
REBLOGGING THIS BECAUSE @hello-vampire-kitty posted an update regarding the next drama CDs HERE— which involves… *COUGH* THE AU I’VE BEEN DYING TO SHOVE TO EVERYONE //kicked—- SERVAMP QUEST!!
CAN YA BELIEVE IT?! OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG IT’S COMING TRUE!!! *wipes tears of joy*
You can view all of my Servamp Quest art here, because Tumblr didn’t show it to the recent searches back when I posted it up. It may be because of the high resolution whichTheyAlsoRuined*cough
Yeeeessss!!! Check them out everyone cuz they are awesome! The classes @reimeijennoir assigned are so fitting! Let’s wait and see what roles Tanaka-sensei gave the characters :D I for one still see Mahiru as a witch lol xD
