Remember That In This Scene Dazai "lives On Canned Crab And Whiskey" Osamu Has A Three Gunshot Wounds

Something so profoundly fucked up between the inverse ratio of shrinking middle class and ever increasing aggression of advertisement

Shepard correcting Clerk Bosker to call Nirali’s body “her” parallels Miranda calling Shepard’s an it and no one correcting her

dont talk to me if you don’t know that this, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed! It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb! That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton’s First Law?

Again

adhd paralysis sucks bcuz im just sitting there and my brain is like

YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME

no work done no rest gained. literally no point of this at all

I made a mistake

This. This is storytelling done right.

The thing is, if Shepard acts all paragon-y throughout the series then you don't get that admission from Mordin because he can just fall in line behind Shepard. Don't get me wrong, Mordin sacrificing himself in order to spread the cure is still an amazing act of repentence and a fantastic, if tragic, ending of his arc.

BUT the thing is, he doesn't have to admit that he was wrong, he can just agree with Shepard while still maintaining that his initial decision to modify the genophage was correct.

Doing the right thing, the heroic thing, the noble thing is something different entirely than admitting your were wrong and fixing your mistake.

His modification of the genophage was the one thing that defined Mordin's career like nothing else. Amazing work, from a scientific point of view, but morally questionable even when seeing "the big picture", Morally reprehensible and ultimately inexcusable when seeing "the little pictures".

It's clear that after his loyalty mission in ME2 and meeting Eve, he's already changed his mind. But he can't admit it, not really. It's easier to keep making excuses, to explain himself, to rationalize. The great Mordin Solus does not make mistakes.

And it's only when Shepard takes the other route that Mordin has to step up. If Shepard won't be paragon, then Mordin has to. And that's much harder and it's the most amazing, the most heartbreaking thing. And when Mordin yells at a Shepard who takes the pragmatist appprach - which is what Mordin did for most of his life - he's actually yelling at himself.

Mass Effect did a lot of things brilliantly. This was one of them.

If only Shepard's ultimate ending decision had come with the same depth and weight, characterization-wise.

yesssssssssssssssss i haves it

Are fedoras really that bad?

YES YES THEY ARE

I like the show version of Chishiya, and here’s why.

I love manga!Chishiya, but he always felt pretty one-dimensional to me. His backstory is one of parental neglect, similar to Arisu. Chishiya basically fails to develop a sense of empathy (unlike Arisu, who just has ye olde Main Character Syndrome). He decides to enter med school because he thinks that a profession where he saves lives might actually help him grow a Give-a-Shitter. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

Manga!Chishiya is an emotional flat line. He doesn’t care about other characters because he can’t. I remember thinking that he had a lot of the same traits as a serial killer. He viewed the world through nothing but intellect, and other people were either nonexistent or pawns to be used to further his own ends. Even the idea that maybe being responsible for the lives of others will help him grow some empathy is a chilling one.

That’s cool. I actually really like those kinds of characters. I also think there are enough characters like that in the story. Characters who you look at and think, “Okay, yes, you are terrible.” The big problem is that it makes his weird self-sacrifice with Usagi absolutely senseless. Like, it came out of nowhere. There wasn’t any sort of satisfying build-up where I felt like, “Okay, yeah, this makes sense.”

His updated backstory adds a dimension that wasn’t present in the manga version. Rather than simply lacking empathy for other people, you can actually see the moment in which he makes the conscious decision to turn it off. He has this light bulb moment where he realizes that the world is a cruel and unfair place. He realizes that allowing himself to feel for other people is only going to hurt him in the end because he’s powerless to change the systems that are actively harming them. It’s better to protect himself and survive.

Chishiya is a selfish character, but the idea that his selfishness stems out of a desire to protect himself from pain gives his character some actual depth that was always missing for me. It also makes the King of Diamonds game a lot more meaningful. Kuzuryu went through the same exact thing, but instead of turning off his feelings, he paralyzed himself with a moral dilemma. Where Chishiya chose to treat all human life as equally worthless, Kuzuryu couldn’t stop looking for some value to assign, whether that was to ease his conscience or to inform a sense of justice he was desperately trying to find.

I really, really like how that dichotomy played out.

I also think it’s interesting that Chishiya feels a lot more psychological in the show. He’s clearly highly intelligent in both the manga and the show, and maybe it’s just Murakami’s performance, but there’s something more sinister to him. He’s clearly developed some sort of friendly relationship with Kuina. He displays an ability to be playful and seems to genuinely be extending an offer of friendship to Arisu (up until he sells him out for one corn chip). Seeing how he can make these connections that feel genuine to the people involved (unlike his manga self who is pretty universally despised) and still be willing to fuck those people over for his own survival makes him feel a lot more menacing to me.

This ability to flawlessly manipulate and betray also means he has a deep understanding of human emotion, which is illogical by nature. In the manga, Chishiya says outright that he isn’t suited for Hearts games, but show!Chishiya feels tailor-made for them.

It’s also interesting that in the manga, he seems to get harsher and more isolated. By contrast, in the show, he feels to me like he softens episode by episode. It really struck me in the Jack of Hearts game when he said something about his partner dying because he was too kind. On the surface, you could take it as a typical judgy Chishiya comment, but there actually appeared to be a glimmer of sadness, or envy, or regret. Or all of the above. Or maybe it’s just Murakami Nijiro’s face that made me think that. Either way, I think it was smart of the showrunners to throw him in that game.

In the end, the King of Diamonds game pushes him to the realization that he really is envious of people who have the ability to be kind. He’s envious of people who can make the selfless choice. And it’s not because he can’t be. It’s because he’s closed himself off to the vulnerability that allows a person to make that kind of decision. You can’t truly save others if you’re always protecting yourself.

So, he saves Usagi to try to become that person. And I don’t feel it was out of character at all.

DID THEY JUST FISHEYE HIM IN THE MANGA