instead of either having a server be muted or unmuted discord should introduce a setting called special princess mode where the server is muted except ☝🏽 for one person that is your special princess and the emoji0oo990op09iop09i8o09i8op09iolp-09op-0opyujiko8o9i8ukol9iukolp9i8uki sorry. i got a drop of oil on my keyboard bc i was eating hummus with a little bit of olive oil earlier and i was cleaning that off. anyway and the notification icon is a heart. and they have to to call it that.
I've been obsessed with Kagurabachi lately. I read from Vol one to six and it's so satisfying. No I want to draw all the shinuichi bearer one by one. If you interested buy this art you can find it on my Redbubble and INPRNT (later on my inprnt).
So in the middle of a flashback, which is getting thematically dicey and undermining the narrative but also objectively building to a climax, instead of continuing to build towards that climax we flash to ANOTHER flashback to kill another woman. OK.
Credit where it's due, this chapter was only mid. Chiaki and Kunishige finally actually interacted on panel and have some real chemistry, and we're really getting into the meat of their character conflicts. If not for The Thing That Keeps Happening I'd be remarkably positive on this whole chapter.
It's also very interesting how the sword-nuke eyes are linked to patriarchal violence through Kunishige's father - the belligerent drunk who beat his wife only praised Kunishige for his ability to work violence into the world. Kunishige himself, then, doesn't like being a swordsmith, but becomes typecast into it both by innate talent and by the fact that it's all he's been taught. It's a solid continuation of Kagurabachi's themes.
Been pretty sleep-deprived lately so it took me a while to find the right words. I think this is the distillation of all the yapping I've done, though.
There's 3 things that are going on that make this arc a bit of a let-down to me, same as the Assault on Kamunabi HQ Arc before it:
There's been a subtle shift over time in terms of narrative priorities. Rather than having action scenes service the plot, the plot now exists to justify action scenes.
The cast has expanded (bloated, really) in size since the early arcs and characters are not being used properly.
Action movie story-telling pacing falls short when applied to a long-running manga series; it ignores the strength of the medium and makes the story feel hollow the longer it goes on.
Mostly unstructured ramble with the reasoning not already laid out in the chapter 126 and 127 posts below the cut.
I'm not going to claim Kagurabachi is perfect, but a lot of the most common complaints I see about the current arc really feel like people not having any patience for the story to actually be told.
"Why have we not seen anything of Chiaki except her being nice and self-sacrificial?" A valid question, but the arc just started and we're likely going to see a lot more of her.
"Why are the Makiboshi being portrayed as cut-and-dry villains when the manga has been so critical of the Japanese government's treatment of them in prior chapters?" Because the arc just started and we're seeing them from the government's viewpoint.
"Why do the Makiboshi speak the same language as the rest of Japan? Why haven't we seen anything unique about their culture?" Because the only ones we've seen were high-ranking officials who likely learned modern Japanese before the negotiations and the manga isn't about linguistics so we skipped them doing that. And the reason we haven't seen anything else yet is because *the arc just started.*
"Why hasn't Shiba had any real character moments outside of losing and being a guard dog for Rokuhira?" Because the arc just started.
"This arc really sucks, nothing has happened yet" THE ARC. JUST. STARTED.
This arc has been going for 15 chapters. VS Sojo ran for 18 chapters. Rakuzaichi, the second longest proper arc, ran for 26. SBA ran for 15 (reminder: the number we're at now), Kyoto Bloodshed Hotel ran for 23, and the single longest arc, Kamunabi Invasion, ran for 27 chapters. The arc has not "just started." By all measurements, the arc should be at its halfway mark.
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