Woah! I almost didn’t realize that Furuta was probably aiming for Kaneki’s eyes with his sword when the latter evaded it.
This time, unlike when he was fighting Arima during the Cochlea arc and appeared to be held back by some fear
he manages to face it head on and avoid it/ bite down on it.
It’s so good!
When he is fighting Kanae on the rooftoop there it is again
Thanks for the addition! Yup, it shows up there as well.
It’s pretty cool how Kaneki has, since that point in the story, not only managed to answer Arima’s question of “would you like to die again?” with:
but in another similar scene towards the beginning of :re:
Arima mentions that he must be faster and Kaneki manages to achieve that too! Although he still gets pierced through his cheek, in addition to refusing to yield, Kaneki is quick enough (and strategic enough!) to wait for the perfect time to avoid that blow to his eyes from Furuta in :re 173.
I’ve always loved the poem that Count Olaf recites to Kit just before he dies in The End, and by love of course, I mean I bawl my eyes out every single time I read it. He only reads the last stanza aloud, but here is the poem in its entirety:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
– Philip Larkin
Obviously, we can understand why Handler didn’t want to include explicit profanity in a book written for middle grade children, but I really do love the fact that the first two stanzas are left unsaid and the reader, if interested actually has to go and research them and find them out for themself, because that is one of the points of the poem and one of the points of the series – that people don’t tell you the whole story and that things are always much more complicated than they seem – even things that seem like black and white morality are always so much more complicated.
Yes, your parents mess you up and ruin you, just like the Baudelaires find out in The Penultimate Peril and The End that their parents were not perfect and possibly even are the reason why all this horror has been happening to them, but the story is more complicated than that and the Baudelaires (and the readers) are left for themselves whether or not they want to leave it be – just read the last verse – or they want to explore for themselves and maybe not like what they find.
Ever since The Austere Academy, the Baudelaires have been told that the VFD was a noble organization and filled with volunteers that will help them, but the noble side of the VFD also produced lots of people who did horrible things: the Baudelaire parents, Jerome Squalor, Lemony and Kit Snicket. The VFD taught them to follow blindly and so they blindly followed and they accepted authority at its face value and as a result they became corrupted by those in power.
Ultimately, this poem is about the cycle of abuse and misery in this world. “Man hands misery onto man”, we inherit our trauma from each other and we create our own demons out of the demons that have been fed to us, and we tell ourselves that we won’t do the same, but we indubitably will. To be human is to be messed up, and the kindest thing you can do in life is to not bring any more people into the world.
But particularly interesting to me is Count Olaf’s recitation of the poem. Because in the passage, he’s not reciting it to to the Baudelaires, he’s reciting it to Kit, as she gives birth on a coastal shelf. On a personal, theoretical level, I have always used this as evidence that Beatrice II was Count Olaf’s biological daughter, but also it acts as a symbol of Count Olaf’s journey – he is an awful, awful man who has hurt the children put into his care time and time again and probably messed them up on some psychological level for the rest of their lives, but he too was messed up and turned out by the world by the people who raised and shaped him, and ultimately the root of evil goes back much further than we’d like to think. We’d like to think that Count Olaf is just a cruel, uncaring man who acts the way he does out of cold-blood, but the world doesn’t work that way and he’s trying to tell Kit that he is the way he is because of his history, that he was jaded by the world young and he never managed to escape, and that he’s not actually a bad man. But even as he recites the poem, he laughs, because he recognizes his complicity in everything – he has handed down his misery as well and he has brought a child into the world against all warning. It is him recognizing his crimes and his irony, something the Baudelaires and Kit never thought he would do.
It also serves a larger purpose in that Count Olaf has always been described as unintelligent and dismissive of intellect and reading and the orphans have always maintained that if a person is well-read they must be a good person and that reading is what makes people good. Because Count Olaf is not good, and yet he is able to recite an obscure poem – written by a librarian, no less – in the blink of an eye. Throughout the entirety of The End, Count Olaf has defied his stereotype by proving to be intelligent and capable of empathy and eschewing everything we thought we knew about him. Things are always more complicated than they seem and go back further than you’d like to think, and the world itself is a messed up place – a conundrum of esoterica, if you will – and defies any pithy explanation you might try and force upon it.
:))) well, honestly the plots are hardly what you’d call particularly innovative on first glance: lots of common themes and tropes as with everything, but it’s the way they’re executed through the writing that makes it all super captivating. It’s mostly details, but sometimes details are what make a story so great, you know?
+ it’s hyper realistic in a way that I’ve never found in any other series. Monster by Urasawa Naoki is close on this aspect, but the plot is too centered around Johan, when this crossover is really more about an international scale for some parts of the different plots.
Basically this crossover is made of 3 series that are happening in the same universe (overall the timeline spans 10-12 years) and because the plots are related to some extent, recurring characters show up in every part of the crossover.
(long read under the cut)
The first series is about this guy
and he’s my fave the only one who’s appearing in all 3 series of the crossover. You’d think he’s a mercenary seeing his gun, but actually:
An example of a similar series would be Onizuka-sensei, except it’s a bit more deadly and complicated. Basically the teacher job came up randomly for a reason related to drugs and revenge, but it unexpectedly grew on him.
The problem is (and that’s what I find super interesting about this character and his story) that when you’re a killer who targeted many criminal organizations, killed important people, stole tons of drugs… Well, if you start wanting to live a more normal life, it seems easier to try hunting you down & make you pay through whatever means necessary.
So basically he’s getting hell for all the hell he unleashed previously on others
and that is the reason he appears in all 3 series of the crossover, because it’s hard for his story to ever be over. This series is really not about who deserves what though (even if imo the guy deserves to go back to the place he sees as his home), but rather about sticking to your beliefs.
You’re never going to hear from this guy that maybe it’s best for him to stop killing, that he feels remorse, or that he doesn’t understand why so much shit happens to him. It’s more that, even if he doesn’t question why, he’s just beyond tired of it and he wants to settle things so that he can finally go home.
So, based on his actions he can’t be
called a good guy and his enemies definitely aren’t either, which means it’s all kill or be
killed.
The other nice part of this series, although more secondary, is the way romance is addressed. It’s canon and in the background most of the time, but it’s still primarily relevant to his character development + it’s tackled in a rather unique way.
You ever read a manga in which both characters clearly know about each other’s feelings, but one of them just has 0 idea if he’s even allowed to act on them, precisely because he’s hardly ever done anything right before and he doesn’t know how to not fuck this up? She was so cute tho’, both her and others teasing him sometimes and him being like (@#;?!)
Personally I really enjoyed that it wasn’t directly about having a shit ton of blood on his hands, or the fear of her being targeted, just that he’s aware he spent his life killing around and can’t be sure how to make this right for her (it doesn’t matter though because she’s awesome and takes the matter in her own hands at a crucial moment and they address the underlying issue eventually).
The second series is about these guys:
and this time it’s more specifically about revenge.
Long story short, Tate lost his family and his right arm in a terrorist attack that targeted him directly and obviously he wants to off the guy who did that. Until he can do that though, his skills as a protector are for rent if someone believes their life is in danger. He doesn’t come cheap tho’, because he needs to maintain that super prothesis of his that can deflect bullets and the like.
As for Anna, she’s internationally targeted for reasons that are too complicated to explain quickly. xDD She was his first client so to say and, well, because her story is complicated, they stayed together.
Personally the reason I like this series as much as I do is because
the cast and addressed themes are big: because of his job, he’s got a lot of different clients/enemies and there are a lot of amazing and interesting recurring characters
because of ambiguous morality: Tate’s not supposed to/doesn’t like to kill but it’s kinda implied it happened a few times + should he meet his arch-enemy he would attack even a child standing in his way + he’s living only for revenge so it’s implied he might as well die once it’s over
and also because the main duo’s dynamic is rocking everything.
Despite what it may look like, Anna is not Tate’s sidekick, or his boss (what you may think at first) and they certainly do not have a father-daughter bond => really important because it’s addressed in the story by a few characters and…
Tate makes it clear several times that he’s voluntarily not moving on about his dead family until the terrorist who offed them is dead too (an argument that’s also used when women make a move on him)
yet interestingly enough, they’re not always a motivation to survive either since they’re dead, which is the whole point of the other (alive) allies he has
her father is still alive (and the most ??? character of the whole story), so it’s textual that she doesn’t need or want another father figure.
the story spans 7 years iirc, meaning we meet her when she’s 10 and at the end she’s 17, but not at any point is there a hint of them having a father-daughter dynamic or wanting one.
tl;dr they’re partners and it’s the real deal, meaning that it’s taken seriously and respected by everyone else (so if someone wants to take him down, they might as well take her down too).
As his (young) partner, what’s also interesting is that Anna has 0 qualm about not stopping Tate from getting his revenge. In fact she supports him, even if that means him leaving her behind while he goes in search of answers in America (or maybe it’s just that she knows that she can’t stop him so she might as well help; regardless it’s the same thing).
Obviously she’d be happier if he could just move on (since it is implied that he doesn’t want to think about a future after his revenge), but she’s pretty extreme about doing whatever he needs her to. Like threatening a high-ranking police member with a gun so that he can escape; or even putting a killing order onto her own head when she realized that Tate’s arch-enemy was going to use her to get to him. You just don’t fuck with Anna. xD
Finally, about the whole part of the plot centering around the big bad, it’s really nice because it’s happening on an international scale since Tate is not the only one who’s got beef with this guy, yet that doesn’t mean people will work well together in order to stop him either.
The thing that I really like is that, while the killing of Tate’s family was definitely personal, whatever the big bad did/does otherwise is hardly ever related to Tate himself (unless it’s to fuck with him from time to time). In fact he’s an old enemy of J too, the main character of the first series. That’s why it often seems that Tate’s revenge is far out of his reach: it’s not that he doesn’t know who his enemy is, rather that it seems impossible to stop him.
(no canon romance in this one, although I find it’s very easy to ship him with one woman in particular + there is an ultimate brotp that is him and his still alive brother-in-law)
And then the third series called Until death do us part (by a different set of author/illustrator than the previous two), but since it’s completely available in English, I won’t spoil because you can read it if you’re interested. 🙂
Honestly I don’t know which series I love more? I do like UDDUP a tiny bit less overall, even if it’s still an amazing read, because the main characters seem to have so much to learn compared to the main characters of the two previous series (but then again it’s natural, they are presented to be newcomers to this in a way) and the plot too is on a less big scale.
The first series is amazing because of all the development the character goes through. Like, he’s really got a horrible life at the point in the timeline when the third series starts, and he’s trying to make it right for all the people who got involved, because he knows that everything happening is because he did tons of bad things before. So you can’t help having a lot of feels for him (+ background but meaningful romance is
👌).
The second series is the biggest in terms of plot, cast and settings overall (it’s also the longest in volumes), but unlike the first series that is about one man and the third series that is about one duo, the second series goes way beyond the two main characters, because eventually the whole point is to stop a terrorist who’s starting fires (literally and figuratively) everywhere in the world.
Sure, Tate’s got his own revenge to think about, but at some point in the series, you
understand
(and Tate does too) that the stake is just bigger than that. There is a super meaningful moment, when Tate finds out about the plan of his arch-enemy and decides that “if [they] want to attack the whole world, then he (Tate) will become a shield to the whole world”. Even Anna’s story (why she’s targeted internationally and the whole thing with her dad) never reaches an end, because the series is not just about the two main characters’ respective issues.
So it’s like… I love the first series’ main character (J) the most, but the plot is incredible by how international it goes in the second series. The third series is overall a good mix because it has great characters and a cool plot too. 🙂
Hope it satisfies your curiosity, friend! 😀 I know I mostly rambled because I wanted to write all of this down, but hopefully it can prove to be an interesting read to other people. ^3^ Have a nice weekend!
midnight-in-town 