Rereading Noragami, I am constantly awed by Adachitoka’s masterful crafting of the character relationships. It reminds me of the early days of Bleach. You see the relationships contains layers upon layers of parallels and foils. The primary one I want to talk about, being this one here:
In the above, you have a trio of a human, a god and a shinki. Below, you have a trio of a shinki, a human and a god.
It’s so interesting to see the contrast between Baby!Yato’s relationship with his father figure and sister figure and that of Yukine with his relationship with Yato and Hiyori.
Yukine-Baby!Yato
Both did questionable acts at the time of their ‘birth’, but while Yato never learned right and wrong from his ‘Father” who also often showered him with praises, Yato tried his best to teach Yukine about morality, even as he called him childish insults (but ultimately he also refrained from punishing Yukine, not because he wanted to enable his bad habits like Father did to him, but because he sympathized so much with him)
Yato-Father
It’s pretty clear, the differences between their parenting styles. @echodrops illustrates the dichotomy beautifully in their essay.
Hiyori-Mizuchi
It’s easy to forget, but Mizuchi is actually Yato’s older sister, and Yukine sees Hiyori as an older sister figure.
Mizuchi enabled Yato’s bad behavior (but then again this is also because she didn’t develop a proper moral framework), and to an extent Hiyori did too in regards to Yukine by failing to reprimand him early on. But as Yukine put it, if Hiyori didn’t scold him (and if Yato didn’t find him), which she did later, he wouldn’t have become the person he was today. Yes, just like:
The parallels between Sakura and Hiyori are so interesting ok? Especially with respect to their relationship with Baby!Yato and Yukine.
Ok, I kid. There are serious parallels too, like how both Sakura and Hiyori tried to stop Baby!Yato and Yukine from stealing, and how both boys ended up betraying them (Yato in using Sakura to kill people, Yukine in stealing from Hiyori). Also Sakura acted as both a mother-figure and sister-figure to Yato in the same way Hiyori is sometimes motherly towards Yukine.
And then you can also compare the family Yukine’s found now with Yato and Hiyori to that of his family from when he was alive. I mean the manga has already shown us hints of this:
Yukine has overlapped his sister (presumably) with Hiyori before and now his dad with Yato.
It comes full-circle as his former life also parallels with Yato’s former life (father issues, abuse etc.). But here’s the thing, while Yato and Yukine were in similar situations (likely to face physical abuse), someone else was more appropriate to act as the foil to Yukine.
Mizuchi was the sibling left behind to an abusive father while Yato, through Sakura’s influence, gained more independence (in the same way, Yukine’s mother took her sister away; admittedly this is speculation since we don’t know how canon the anime-only scene above is).
I REPEAT, MIZUCHI/NORA, LIKE YUKINE, WAS THE SIBLING LEFT BEHIND.
So, if you pity Yato and you pity Yukine (if you belong to the Noragami fandom, the answer to that would be a resounding yes), then you should pity Mizuchi as well. Don’t be fooled by her smug smiles and creepy-ass dark panels. Underneath all that, she’s a tragic character.
Yukine may think he’s become more like Nora, and Nora already thinks they’re a lot alike, but the both of them don’t really know how deeply the similarities run.
This is a great post! Thank you for tagging me in it so I got a chance to read it!
HEY GOYIM YOU KNOW THATS NOT HOW JUDAISM WORKS AT ALL RIGHT??? like HELL DOESNT EXIST in judaism. we do not believe in hell. and jewish philosophy ENCOURAGES questioning god.
i think the thing ur thinking of is ummmmm Just Fucking Christianity lol. stop trying to lump us in with christians when you clearly dont know the first thing about judaism and assume its a clone of christianity.
(idk much of anything abt islamic philosophy, muslim followers feel free to add on!)
hell in islam is reformatory and never permanent unless you’ve done some irredeemable evil, but ultimately, if your good deeds outweigh your “bad” deeds (even if it’s just one (1) thing that’s big enough to outweigh your entire life) then you go straight to heaven. islam rests on “do good unto others and on yourself” and not “don’t do this”…..when will people learn to read. i’m so sorry, op, for people.
we have a ton of stories about the prophet muhammad (pbuh) where he talked about or talked to people that were textbook case ‘sinners’ but still went to heaven because they either never did anything bad to others or they did some enormous good deed. at the end of the day, we believe that only Allah can decide who goes to hell/heaven, even temporarily and who doesn’t, and we are actually forbidden to say things like “you’re going to hell!!!!” because we don’t know which good deed of ours shines so bright in His eyes that all our bad deeds are immediately forgiven.
and there are so many tiny ways to have bad deeds erased? fast once and your past bad deeds are gone. smile and spend time with your parents and Allah builds a house for you in heaven. save someone’s live and you’re good. refuse to talk bad about someone and Allah smiles down on you……hell is mostly just cautionary for the average person because even if the average person does something bad enough they could end up in temporary hell, they will probably do something to redeem themselves before that time comes.
if you think men should be admired for crying, showing affection, wearing make up or fulfilling the BARE MINIMUM of being a proper s.o dont look at me
gonna add some shit before someone accuses me of hating gays and gnc men for the 2nd point lol
first of all its not gnc bc its such a western perspective from which youre looking at it. in my (west/southeast asian) family the men DO cry and they DO show affection towards each other like hugging and kissing on the cheeks is entirely common and accepted behavior and guess what? they still hate women. they still treat their wives and daughters like shit and show just as much ‘toxic masculinity’ as every other man
and honestly even if wearing make up is gnc why should we celebrate men for that? women get called fake, superficial and dumb for putting so much effort into their appearance (remember the “take her swimming on the first date” meme) but when a man does it it’s suddenly admirable? literally no one is stopping men from crying anymore or judging them for it (ive witnessed a fair share of grown adult men crying btw) but women are still seen as overreacting hysterical bitches when they show any negative emotion? i see.
tldr; women getting thrown under the bus to uplift men when both are doing the same thing is nothing new, its just repackaged misogyny under the guise of being ~open-minded~
This is not history we’re talking about. This is a modern book, written by a modern author, for a modern audience. Modern norms are perfectly appropriate to use here.
Speaking of actual history though. Acknowledging that in the past people used a certain intellectual construct doesn’t mean that Ihave to recapitulate it at every turn when discussing the period. I do not have to accept it as good or right; I have to accept that it was. I have to be able to understand these concepts and how they applied to the social issues of the day. Good practice would involve situating the actions of contemporaries within that context. I’m under no obligation to share those beliefs or to repeat their premises as fact, not in my analysis of the situation. I should also be aware of my own biases in approaching that analysis.
There’s also room for other historians to disagree with my approach, because there’s no one way to conduct the study of history. Ideas about ethics and the role of empathy in the profession differ.
I thought about this a lot in the course of my PhD in history. My dissertation centred around a concept and a cause I strenuously disagree with.
Hmm people always forget that Bail and Breha also were responsible for building the rebellion. Bail also planted seeds for the rebellion, and Breha made sure her planet was fully involved. But no one ever mentions them. Guess that’s what they get for not being a skinny, white and an attractive brunette woman.
Found this reddit post. This kinda makes me feel better. And it’s something I think about sometimes because I always feel like regardless of how hard I work on something I don’t get anywhere.
hey asking for a friend but uh. what’s it gonna take for fandom to relearn the difference between “canon” and “word of god”?
★ canon = the text itself; the show/movie/book/comic; the actual up-on-Netflix content; anything a casual fan would reasonably interact with ★ word of god = anything else, i.e. interviews with cast/crew/showrunners; DVD commentaries; comments from the crew on social media or at cons; literally any written or verbal remarks about the text made by writers or showrunners or actors
word of god does not equal canon, and yet i increasingly see fandoms conflating the two and acting like word of god comments from The Powers That Be count as canon and are equivalent to canon footnotes to the text and i’m. NO. listen. it’s not. that’s not what canon means, and word of god comments should not be treated as part of the canon text. this isn’t just me being a pedantic text purist, this has actual negative consequences for shows and fandoms and people’s experience of the stories, i mean:
it privileges the creator’s interpretation of the text as the only “correct” one. death of the author? no one’s heard of her. writers and showrunners get to tell fans how to interpret the text, and a solid 80% of fandom is going “okay, if you say so!”
it stifles fandom debate and analysis, because fan analysis of the text at hand is rejected outright by other fans on the basis that “well the showrunners said it’s like this”
it contributes to fandom bullying, in which word of god comments are used to harass people who have the audacity to want to interpret the work differently, or who disagree with the powers that be, or just don’t want to consider those comments at all in their understanding of the story
word of god comments may be confusing; they may change over time or contradict earlier statements; they may even contradict the text itself. all of which leads to fans frantically trying to reconcile word of god comments with actual canon, rather than going “okay fuck this, it doesn’t make sense so i’m disregarding it”
again: this only creates more arguments in fandom; if creators say x at one point, and y at another, you end up with more fandom slap-fights over which comment was the ‘correct’ one and which interpretation ‘wins’
it encourages lazy and unsatisfying storytelling. if fanon will accept word of god comments as canon, showrunners develop an attitude of “it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense, we can just handwave it in an interview”
this results in poor writing, or important plot points being explained in word of god comments rather than in actual canon
this in turn makes the story confusing and incomprehensible to anyone who’s not knee-deep in fandom. casual fans, kids, someone bingeing the series 5 years from now on crunchyroll… they’re not reading the interviews or tweets or watching the comicon panels. those viewers still need to be able to understand the story, and we are slip-sliding towards a creator-fandom model in which they won’t be able to, because word of god comments run the risk of becoming required reading for understanding the story
this has serious implications for how stories handle representation: if fans start accepting word of god as equivalent to canon, it means shows can keep canon rep (particularly queer rep) vague and ambiguous, and prop it up with word of god comments that “confirm the representation”. there’s no incentive to actually commit to unambiguous, clear canon rep if stories can lean on word of god to compensate for the utter lack of actual diversity in the canon text itself
the canon text has to stand alone. word of god should serve as a trove of fun trivia or behind-the-scenes tidbits about the writing process; it is not supposed to be a substitute for clear, concise, and comprehensive storytelling. a story that doesn’t make sense unless you’ve read 8 different explanatory interviews by the writers is badly written. showrunners who treat interviews as a place to offload all the character development or plot explanations they didn’t bother to include in the actual text are lazy hacks who are bad at their jobs.
word of god can be handy and fun and informative, and for people who are interested in creator comments or interviews there’s no harm in paying attention to that stuff. but it’s not canon. the canon is the text itself. anything else is supplementary to that, and fans are absolutely allowed to disregard anything not in canon if they choose.
and with anything published by a corporation – such as all tv shows ever – there’s likely to be pressure put on writers and actors to say things that the corporation thinks will appeal to the mainstream. or, as OP says, to use offhanded mentions in interviews as a substitute for actual representation, because joe random trump voter needs to be able to say dumbledore isn’t really gay or they might organize a book burning.
the fact that the book burning would be great publicity, and trumpkins have this weird tendency to buy things to destroy as a poorly thought out protest, does not seem to have occurred to mainstream media moguls.
We’re getting pretty close to having adults who weren’t alive during 9/11, and we really need to admit at this point that the overemphasis on 9/11 in the US is just a propaganda machine to indoctrinate the younger generations into nationalism and to justify all the horrible war crimes the US committed in the Middle East, and the continued mistreatment and distrust towards refugees.
Also remember when we were told that “They” attacked “Us” because they “hated our freedom”? That was some of the most blatant and transparent propaganda that was churned out of 9/11.
Canada’s “Universal Healthcare System” is one of the worst universal healthcare systems in the world, ranking only above France and the USA’s private system:
It does not cover prescriptions, dental, visioncare and access to mental healthcare is sparse. For some procedures there can also be lengthy waits.
People in Canada right now have to make decisions on whether they should eat or buy prescription medication.
It only looks good compared to the US because the US’s healthcare system is a trash fire.
There are however some politicians (i.e. The NDP) in Canada that are trying to make our healthcare system better by covering prescriptions, dental, increase funding, etc
It also does not help that Liberal and Conservative governments have been cutting funding for healthcare for decades.
I am grateful that I don’t have to pay out of pocket to visit a doctor or hospital, but our system could be a lot better than it is.
Stressed, Depressed, and Story Obsessed 