re: Nikolai: nah i get what you mean by earning. There is no clear A->B->C that would course-correct early any assumptions readers may get from one appearance to another. Given having to hash out losing sleep over how legit is anything he says is, on every installment readers run the chance of reasoning their way into a perfectly valid read - only for the author to slap it down with a different conclusion. And yeah, mismanagement of expectations happens 100% because of lack of screentime, but doesn't this sort of look… anthropic principle-esque? i mean, when the reader peeks into the plot, Nikolai can only pop up if he's relevant to it. And for the character to be relevant, they do have to move it forward somehow (= plot device), or do things with the core themes and ideas (which tbh is a blind spot to me, but the vibe i'm getting is: he's only tangentially related, hence short screentime).
...themes of the story... ...endless pursuit of freedom... ...has flawor but it's bad... …trash opinions but poorly writt--
CONDEMNED TO BE FREE
-Jean Paul Satre super rough TL;DR: having any preference at all <=> making a decision. +If the only question in philosophy that matters is suicide (- Camus!!!), then continuing to exist is already a made decision +If one is not free, they would be unable to make decisions. but see above. +as a bonus not making a decision is a decision in an of itself ("living in bad faith")
if one assumes BSD is blasting us with absurdism/theme of "meaning/purpose of one's life" - as many wonderful tumblr analysts point out, of course Nikolai would be [vague hand gestures]! Existentialism is a completely different branch of philosophy/cluster of attitudes, of course he's jobbing! of course it comes off weird; freedom if basically already solved, as a concept! He just circles and circles and circles never reaching this point! And… now that "perfunctory fact check" lead me to good ol' Wisecrack, they bring up an interesting point: "MUH FREEDOM" at it's rawest conflicts very hard with social reality (and thus, goes against the grain of whatever social commentary Asagiri is going for, by the virtue of not giving a shit about any of that; the underdog is the character who disagrees with the author).
…where were we? ah yes, funni comic book about writer twinksonas. As for characters relegated to plot progression units: there is only a limited amount of screentime to be had; if the manga's flavor is unbreakable plot armors, instead of getting killed off characters will be shuffled to the side; it's not plotted too thoroughly (see also: nary a Fukuchi poster in any of the earlier chapters), so naturally the author will flip thru a rolodex for setups and resolutions that don't have to be properly introduced again. For sake of the core idea, why is plotdevicification bad? I haven't actually read Bleach, but didn't Tite Kubo like the characters introduced in anime fillers so much they occasionally popped up in canon later? When you put it this way, the writing style does have that energy. But without the meme/gossip of "the cure to writers block is new characters".
rephrase of previous query: what would be the in-canon proof that Asagiri Gets the essence of Gogol and is in dialogue with it? (and what would be the absolute worst you can imagine him do?) re: roots: On one hand: so what you liked is the introduction/comedy part of a comic before jokes run out and Cerberus Syndrome Serious Businesses-up the narrative. On the other: doesn't it kind of fit the in-story events? up to Cannibalism you could place arbitrary windows of unknown time between most of events. Even between Fitzgerald arriving and Moby Dick infiltration you could stretch it out a bit, as negotiations continue to break down, plans are made to capture Q etc. But with DoA, what ADA interfaces with is the tail end of the plan, where all the rapid, loud plays are backloaded to. As such, pace of the plot mirrors the hurried scramble of the focus characters. This is why demon duo were relegated to the comedy interlude: they're the only ones of the main characters/monster of the week faction for whom time passes like molasses. If played out properly, post-climax of DoA should give space for cleanup of loose threads (being detailed would slow down the perception of speed; i've seen a piece of writing advice that went for slow moments, use long, verbose, descriptive phrasing. high stress is short. fast. punchy.) or to decompress - if only because it wouldn't make sense for the characters to go brr at full speed for this long.
Also i've noticed that the manga gets unpleasant when one tracks details i.e. characters chapter to chapter to chapter. It is best when one vibes with (≠ focuses on) what's happening in the moment within the chapter. As for clusterfucks: doesn't this mean that his initial setups are delicious, but as more details are added all the flaws become more apparent? the mystery of 'what's in the box'; whatever the answer is, it's never as satisfying as the possibility space of all the ways the wave function can collapse, so to speak?
Asagiri researches everything for BSD. You obsess over Gogol alone. this skews perspectives
can we form a coup against asagiri and make you the writer instead? genuinely... I am not taking the Fyodor immortal information well.. please help............................ ( ´，_ゝ` )
Oh, I would absolutely not do BSD well either. I just wish Asagiri had stuck to his roots more. He was a great comedy writer, and the beginning of the story was great for it. It's the action and Death Note stuff he can't seem to get mastery of. But for the immortal part: I'm not entirely sold that Fyodor's immortal, yet. It seems like yet another twists that will twist to reveal oh, shocker, he faked his memories to confuse Sigma/the ADA... or something. Could very well be immortal, but not 100% guaranteed.