I haven’t forgotten about this month’s release of the latest chapter. Just spent the last two days studying it and organizing my thoughts so far. Based on what I saw of this chapter, we have more exposition of what we saw in the first two chapters followed by a last-minute twist.
Of the things introduced and explained in the chapter, Boruto expands on what the Uzuhiko technique. The basics are that it’s tied to the planet’s rotation. If hit with the Jutsu, the afflicted will be hit with a semi-permanent sense of “the spins,” so to speak. It can run for as long as the Jutsu caster (read: Boruto) desires, or until the afflicted (read: Code) dies — and this new teenage Boruto seems to be happy with the latter.
A technique that causes whoever’s hit by it to nearly infinitely spin in some manner… that sounds familiar…
Honestly, not the first time the franchise made a JoJo reference.
So let’s backtrack a bit in regard to the Rasengan. So far we have the following users:
Jiraiya
Minato Namikaze
Konohamaru Sarutobi
Naruto Uzumaki
Boruto Uzumaki
Sasuke Uchiha*
Kakashi Hatake
For Sasuke, he used it as a demonstration before asking Boruto if he could develop it himself. After that, he went through an intense and heated training session from Konohamaru before revealing to Sasuke the results of admittedly three days of training. Before him, Naruto worked on the Jutsu with Jiraiya’s guidance for little over a week, and before him, Minato developed the Jutsu over the course of three years.
Furthermore, Minato’s direct legacy has accidentally or deliberately put their own spin on the Jutsu, no pun intended. Naruto developed the Rasenshuriken, a powerful Jutsu that was unfortunately shelved as a double-edged sword, at least until the Akatsuki brought Pain to the Leaf Village.
For Boruto, the first of several variants had come in the form of the Vanishing Rasengan, though he didn’t acknowledge it until he, Sasuke, and the Gokage fought Momoshiki in the other dimension.
So this Jutsu keeps Code immobile yet conscious to answer a question on Boruto’s mind: the location and status of the Ten Tails. Keep this nugget in mind, it’ll be important toward the end. Just as the interrogation gets moving, Leaf ninja respond to the rogue ninja in their village, among the responding party is the object of Boruto’s vengeance: Kawaki. Speaking of Kawaki, he was in contact with Shikamaru who gives him the go-ahead for a kill order, but the opportunity is missed when Code summons a claw grime to escape through.
Earlier I wrote that Boruto was asking about whether Code knew the location and status of the Ten Tails. Out of concern for the safety of the world? Well, let me clarify: the tone of voice suggested by the panel was less of a desperation and concern and more of a boast, as if to say that after 2.5 years of training and keeping an eye out for Code, Boruto is finally one step ahead. This is where that twist comes in: before Code could get away, Boruto planted a mechanical toad on Code’s person.
Kawaki lost his chance to deliver the final blow and will most likely blame Boruto for allowing him to run off, but the last panel reveals why he allowed him to get away. Observe:
So now we wait for the week of November 20 to learn how this happened to the Ten Tails. Was it Boruto’s doing? Borushiki? Did he learn it from Sasuke? However we get to that answer it will likely be over the course of the next few months. As far as this chapter goes, it steadily creeps back into the trickle down expositional method that seems to be more emblematic of Kishimoto than Kodachi who seemed to employ what I believe was a healthy zigzag pattern of storytelling.
Clearly, I’d like to see more of this from the succeeding chapters, but it’ll probably be until at least January or February when we get more of these types of answers, and while this is largely fantasy, some of the answers to be revealed may ironically be less fantastical than whatever theories are out there proposing. But we’ll get them soon enough.
If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you may recall months ago when I wrote about a manga where select people get random powers of negation, as in what would normally happen to someone else doesn’t happen to the negator themselves. Lots of luck? This person gets none. Mortal? Not gonna happen. Approachable? There’s a literal barrier that keeps you from getting close. This manga is known as Undead Unluck. Created by Yoshifumi Tozuka on January 20, 2020 (the events since, my god), it’s up to 18 volumes as of writing this with 11 currently translated for an international audience. It was recently picked up for an anime adaptation in August 2022, and it’s first episode debuted on October 7, 2023 on Hulu with weekly releases to follow.
It’s too early to tell whether it’ll run for 12-13 episodes or 24-26 episodes, so this post will be a first impression of the first episode and whenever the first season ends, I’ll review it in bulk with comparisons to the manga. If the title, didn’t give it away, I’m gonna spoil episode 1. So go watch the first episode if you haven’t already, then come back when you’re all caught up.
Speaking of which, the first episode is already markedly different from the first chapter. Being early 2020, no one could predict the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic then. On a side note: I first read about it in December 2019 and said to myself, “That’s unfortunate, but as long as it stays there [in Wuhan], we have nothing to worry about.” My words were delicious, thanks for asking.
Anyway, no one knew about the pandemic’s global impact in January, news was still getting out back then, and I bring this up because the manga starts in August 2020, deep into the pandemic with lockdown and travel restrictions in place across the world. This is reflected in the anime as the first scene shows the protagonist Fuuko Izumo set to self-delete from atop a trainline with only Andy, a.k.a. Undead watching from the other side. In the manga, she was surrounded by bystanders who were attempting to bring her back to safety but were stopped when she produced a knife.
Andy still walks into the blade and touches Fuuko’s face hoping to catch some of her Unluck ability, and like clockwork, the platform collapses beneath him, causing him to fall onto an incoming train. In the manga, they show the disruption of service due to the fall, but the anime skips past that and immediately shows Undead sprouting a new body from his head.
In the anime, members of an antagonistic agency (revealed later in the manga, I won’t spoil too much) show up to apprehend Undead, but he takes Fuuko with him and flees. In the manga, with the world still being populated, a civilian witness attempts to alert the cops on an out-of-context scenario involving a naked man and a young woman in public (honestly, much of the manga is just “Out of Context” the series; it’s unbelievable).
In both the manga and the anime, Undead and Fuuko stop at a building rooftop with Undead dangling Fuuko over the edge until she explains her Unluck ability. She explains it and although it was given a single page in the manga, the anime elaborated further on this. It starts with scenes alternating between Fuuko’s last connection with her parents before the accident, and scenes from the romance manga she was reading.
The anime had introduced them early, but by this point in the manga, after being saved from an accidental slip and fall from the rooftop, the antagonistic agency, represented by men in black suits observes their target making a run for it to an abandoned site. At the site, Fuuko’s jacket snags and she loses her beanie which kept her hair under wraps for years since no hairdresser or stylist could cut it without dropping dead. At the same time, Undead is maintaining as much skin contact with Fuuko while he cuts her hair so that he can test a few hypotheses, mainly is the impact influenced by duration or surface area?
Well, he doesn’t really get that answer since this agency of black suits tracks him down to his hideout and lops off his head. They put the head in a container and handcuff Fuuko, but the Unluck comes in clutch to save the two as one of the black suits gets zapped. Undead regenerates everything below the neck and removes the card he keeps in his head as a restrictor of sorts to cut them all down to size. Between the manga and the anime, this scene is a mix of gore and action.
The main guy in a black suit holds Fuuko at sword-point and threatens to behead her too if Undead doesn’t surrender his own head. Neither of them agree to that and when Fuuko breaks free and kisses Undead on the cheek, a meteorite decimates the abandoned hospital. With just a single cell of him left, Undead regenerates full and takes the black suit’s sword as a keepsake. Putting two and two together, he realizes that neither duration nor surface area have anything to do with the Unluck reciprocated and that it may be more connected to feelings of affection. Working with that as the going hypothesis, Undead, now christened “Andy” as a play on words (works better in Japanese) by Fuuko, half-jokingly proposes that they’ll both get their desired death if they have sex… which Fuuko is clearly not keen on as they both just met. And that’s where chapter 1/episode 1 leaves off.
For my impression, I say that if follows the manga as best as it can with a few nods to real life changes. Then again, for obvious reasons, the COVID pandemic and probably by extension the year 2020 aren’t going to be referenced very heavily in media unless it’ll be for alternate changes to reflect real life or for an alternate timeline of sorts. I liked what they did in just the first episode. This being, David Production, the people who brought us JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, I didn’t worry all that much about how it would look or turn out.
This studio tends to live up to their reputation and they made Undead Unluck look pretty good for the beginning. I didn’t think they’d expand further on the origin of Fuuko’s Unluck ability with the plane explosion, but from a narrative standpoint, it’s cool to see what we’re expecting going forward. The same goes for the scenes of Fuuko’s romance manga. This is connected to the plot many chapters into the manga, but without spoiling this again, DP seems to be playing the long game of adaptation with the foreshadowing in just this episode and likely more to follow.
If the anime is 1-cour running for 12 or 13 episodes, then the last episode should air on December 23 or 30 of this year. Alternatively, if it’s 2-cour running for 24 or 26 episodes then it should wrap up its first season by either March 16 or March 30, 2024. Whichever of those comes first, I’ll save a spot in my schedule for that and cover it in a post in the future.
Call me biased in favor of the series, but I’m glad to see something I cheerlead for in the beginning get one of its dues and I hope I can say the same for The Elusive Samurai when it releases in 2024.
Tomorrow I’ll be covering a media company that is on a slow and steady decline. Stay tuned. Here’s a hint:
Regular readers know the nature of this blog: obscure, unheard of, niche unsung series; and occasionally something popular that’s ongoing. Following that trend, I bring to you a manga that not only had a small fanbase for its duration, but was also cancelled before it could spread its wings and take proper flight: Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki
I caught onto this quite early in 2017. It’s first chapter was included in a manga published by Viz Media about upcoming series at the time, and fun fact: this same manga showcase series had the first chapter of Demon Slayer in it.
Black Torch is about a young man named Jiro Azuma, a street punk who has the gift of Eliza Thornberry — talking to animals. One day, he meats a Mononoke taking the form of a black cat called Rago who tells him (with a cynical tone) that there are many more Mononoke like him who exist to cause chaos in the world. One of them mortally wounds Jiro and Rago possesses the boy, bringing him back to life and they defeat the Mononoke that killed him, only for he and Rago to be subdued by a special operations unit trained in shinobi martial arts for the purpose of tracking and eliminating evil Mononoke.
There’s some nuance to the plot. In Japanese folklore, Mononoke are perceived the same way as demons here in the West; wicked creatures who lurk in the dark and take possession of the innocent. The concept is similar in Japan, though in Black Torch, as seen in Rago and one or two other characters, not all Mononoke are pure evil. And for Rago’s case, well, he’s a cat and I think cat owners can relate to this aspect.
So let’s rewind and assess that for a bit. A demon that takes the shape of a household pet takes possession of an adolescent after he dies in a violent manner, and both the demon and the young man are recruited into a special division of demon hunters whose mission is to destroy the evil demons, sometimes working with the good ones or those not powerful enough to be a world-ending threat. Where have I heard that plot before?
You can chalk this up more so to coincidence than an outright ripoff of sorts. Black Torch ran for five volumes between December 2016 and March 2018. CSM debuted December 2018 and is still running today. No doubt you’ve seen what the community regards as season 1 of the anime. I know I did. 12 different ending themes; imagine being the accountant for MAPPA.
It’s easy to make it look like I’m jealous that a manga that tried this first failed while another one succeeded, but delving deeper into the Black Torch manga reveals why. It was more than just the framework of the manga. Yonks ago, I learned that a dispute between Takaki and the publisher were why his manga was axed so early in its run. In my research for this post, I found that online discourse has its own opinions for why the manga suffered. In animanga spaces around forums like Reddit, some believe that it was trying to copy Bleach but was about a decade late and a yen short. Others thought it was a case of style over substance. And a third opinion, by this blog called Tower City Media Video, proclaims that the second biggest killer was pacing. I’d like to go over these points, though I won’t be talking about the publication issue since most of the time that stuff is handled away from public eyes, presumably to keep the press from ruining an ongoing process.
It’s not like there’s no market for edgy manga. Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, Chainsaw Man and even Black Torch have that approach among others, but they all do it differently. Chainsaw Man does it by having the protagonist be an orphan with missing limbs thanks to his deadbeat dad’s irresponsible debt to the Yakuza, and when the boy can’t make a dent in that he’s chopped into pieces until best boy Pochita possesses and revives those pieces. Black Torch goes more for a rug pull of sorts. Jiro lives with his grandfather who generally has the strength of other old men in manga like Golden Kamuy’s Youichirou the Manslayer or Naruto’s Third Hokage. In fact, there’s a scene in the manga where Jiro is forced to fight his grandfather who plans to kill him and then end his own life for failing to protect his grandson from the Mononoke as well as letting a Mononoke possess him, only to walk it back as a test of conviction when Jiro fights back just as hard, as explained by this Screen Rant article.
As for style over substance, this one is a bit of a stretch for me personally. There’s no shortage of good looking series that don’t have a lot beneath the surface, but that’s not a problem I recall from Black Torch in particular. Really, without the space needed to take flight, the hints that there was a deeper story than we realize are mostly lost. I mentioned earlier that it shows that this unit of shinobi is willing to work with some of the Mononoke so long as they’re harmless, but that may also hint at a sort of mutual exchange between unlikely partners. But now that the manga’s been long cancelled, who knows whether that’s the case?
The final one by Tower City Media about turtle pacing was something I didn’t notice at first, but after reading that article and looking back, if the manga could’ve done better to pick up the pace, it probably wouldn’t have been cancelled so soon, if at all. Rago the cat isn’t the only animal Jiro talks with. In the beginning, he used to have a dog that he often spoke with while washing her, and I recall in the third volume that while he was traipsing about the woods, he spoke with a snake.
I joke, but Orochimaru wouldn’t look all that out of place in a manga like this.
If any of these points are true or there’s another factor contributing to Black Torch’s cancellation, then what may have helped Takaki would’ve been to trim the fat, get a move on with the pacing, and add more character to the characters. Jiro Azuma does well enough to make himself interesting, but he couldn’t carry the manga by himself, and going back to coincidences between Black Torch and Chainsaw Man, both had their own version of the super serious stoic type, but thankfully for CSM, Aki wasn’t copy-pasted twelve times over.
For all of Black Torch’s faults, it was at least able to end with a whimper as opposed to a bang. At least it didn’t run around like a headless chicken trying to end with an overdue bang. When I bought the manga during college, Viz charged $10 per volume up from $8 from around 15 years ago, and at five volumes, $50 plus tax is cheap for a cancelled series compared to the 20-something box sets of Demon Slayer or the 72 volumes in triplicate box sets for the Naruto manga. But of course, if you want the story that did it better, it’s not too late to catch up on Chainsaw Man.
It’s a month divisible by 2 and for this month’s recommendation is Escapist Magazine.
Beginning as a video game journalism site by Nick Calandra in 2005, The Escapist has branched out into general media with classic series like Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation, Jim Sterling’s Jimquisition, Movie Bob’s the Big Picture and many more. Although they have a YouTube channel (linked above), they also have a website where their series are hosted before being made public on YouTube.
Back into the fold with a manga that I genuinely tried to research reviews for but this time I came up short. Google helps with pages of individual reviews on different sites, but video reviews are what’s lacking. A quick search on YouTube (as of this writing) brings me to about seven or eight videos that don’t really have a great audience number collectively, only a few cracking a thousand views, at least on English YouTube; Japanese YT has more to talk about it seems. On the one hand, I want to see that change, but on the other hand, the subject matter of what I’m about to talk about in this post may highlight why this is for the best.
The manga I bring to you is called Rokudenashi Blues, known alternatively as Good For Nothing Blues.
I’ve made a small mention of this manga in earlier post (can’t remember which one), but here I’d like to elaborate on what it’s about. Created by Masanori Morita, it ran from May 1988 to February 1997 in Shueisha, spawned several OVAs, a couple of films and TV dramas with the most recent one listed having run for the summer of 2011 in Japan on the Nippon TV network.
It’s about a highschooler named Taison Maeda, a bullheaded delinquent who dreams of becoming a world-class boxer, racking up a gnarly fight count along the way. In Japan from around the late 1970s to the early 90s, the delinquent subculture is more of a lifestyle than an indicator of anything more sinister; it’s not like Japanese delinquents have ties to the Yakuza or anything else organized crime-like. Some do or did, but they’d be the outlier, not the standard. For an idea of what a delinquent is in media, look no further than Jotaro Kujo or Yusuke Urameshi.
The first discernable aspect of the delinquent is to compare them to any other student. The delinquent’s hair is loose, long, messy, or sometimes combed into a pompadour; their uniforms are loose-fitting and scruffy with unfastened buttons, and in some cases they’re elaborately decorated with kanji or any other lettering or symbolism. I’m not sure if there’s a meaning behind it; some depictions I can see relate to luck or strength, so that might be a theme with select individuals who partake.
It should also be highlighted that it wasn’t exclusively a boys thing to engage in delinquent culture — girls did it too. In contrast with their more studious counterparts, girl delinquents, or sukeban, wore longer skirts, down to the ankle, and also tended to have their hair as messy as their male counterparts. Of all the examples of a sukeban in media, the best example comes from the movie Sukeban Deka, a Shoujo manga that has climbed to popularity thanks to its live-action adaptation.
If this aesthetic looks familiar, there was a bit of a crossover between the greasers of the 1950s in the US and the punks of the 70s and 80s in the US, UK, and Australia. So keep this in mind when you come across Japanese media from the 80s or 90s; it’s a classic. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, delinquents have fallen to the wayside while gyarus and by extension the kogal has taken over with media featuring the subculture still slated for release in the near future.
But I think nostalgia will either bring the delinquent back, or put the archetype side-by-side with the gyaru.
In Rokudenashi Blues, the protagonist Maeda and at times his friends, Katsuji and Yoneji clash with rivals first within the school and then in different parts of the Tokyo Metropolis as the series progresses, sort of like the huge fight between different middle schools in Mob Psycho 100.
The clashes with these numbskulls are weekly, if not daily, and the popularity of the delinquent’s outfit makes it easy to lose among the scuffle, but in both a character design and personality sense, there’s a few that stand out from the mold: Wajima and Hatanaka.
Wajima’s designed to be a physically imposing character. Think of your typical brawler or weightlifter body type from a beat ’em up video game. He leads one of the groups known as the Cheer Squad in the school and these guys have fought with Maeda and co. at times. Personality-wise, he’s as bullheaded and shortsighted as Maeda, at least in the beginning. I’m still reading the manga so it remains to be seen how he grows as a character.
Another one who mirrors Maeda in looks, but succeeds him in overall intelligence would be Yutaro Hatanaka. These two have clashing goals and in classic Shonen Jump fashion, he’s set up as the rival to Maeda, but unlike him, Hatanaka has a clear plan that he can recite with steps toward his final goal. Basically, what I’m saying is, he seems to be more studious and articulate with his thoughts, though when it’s time to play rough he can do it in stride. He’s a bit like Sasuke though far less brooding and more laidback compared to the energetic Maeda. It also remains to be seen how he grows over the course of the manga. I have a few ideas on the trajectory, but I want to see the surprise for myself.
The art style of the manga may also be familiar to fans of Fist of the North Star/Hokuto no Ken, and the reason for that is because the mangaka, Masanori Morita, previously worked as an assistant for the creator of Fist of the North Star, Tetsuo Hara.
This art style became the face of 1980s action manga with several mangaka taking elements from Hara’s magnum opus. It was a ground breaking inspiration for many creators over the years and according to some accounts serves as the main inspiration for characters like Jonathan Joestar and Dio Brando. Several more characters of this caliber would follow over the years, but it’s hard to say how many were developed in a vacuum or took on the shape of Kenshiro in some capacity.
I stumbled upon this manga after I remembered an article that mentioned other underrated series a few years ago and went to explore some of those suggestions for myself. In fact, on another blog, I talked about one of those series after watching it from start to finish on YouTube; it was the series House of Five Leaves/Sarai-ya Go You by Natsume Ono.
I plan on redoing it on this blog one day as I wasn’t all that proud of what I said in the last one.
Even if you’re not one for boxing or sports in general, I still give Rokudenashi Blues a solid recommendation. It’s got a lot of heart and it’s not exactly the most complex sports manga ever, but the manga focuses more so on the characters and their lives as they go (read: brawl) through school and later, as I’ve been told, through other schools. I may return with an update once I’m finished with the manga, though that’s not a fixed and consistent schedule so it remains to be seen.
I promised myself that I’d release more Boruto-related news on or after the day of release and to live up to that promise, I have one for September. Sticking with the monthly schedule of its previous part, Vortex released one on September 20, with the third chapter releasing the week of October 20. From what I’ve read, it’s sticking with the drip-feed/cliffhanger method of storytelling not seen since Dragon Ball Z.
In that regard, Omnipotence is still in effect, and like select Boruto fans and many critics who at least try to read the series, I stand with them in voicing a flaw that sites like CBR and Screen Rant seem to be ignoring. There are several minor details that eagle-eyed viewers can’t help but consider that average readers don’t. Under Sasuke’s mentorship, Boruto was given his old scarred headband which now has the new scar given by Kawaki prior to the Omnipotence. Kawaki himself has been confirmed by Amado and Team Konohamaru to be genetically enhanced with the Scientific Ninja Tools, all from Kara’s (read: Isshiki’s) dime. When the Omnipotence happened, everything we knew about them had been reversed as far as those affected by it are concerned with only Sumire and Sarada learning the truth, so why does the village accept that Kawaki–an Uzumaki–doesn’t have the headband while Boruto the “Traitor” has it?
The Vortex manga explained the first time around that Omnipotence gradually does that, but doesn’t specify how that becomes working from the fumes of “trust me bro.” Even Himawari isn’t so sure about the situation.
Credit: @hinatahyugamzng
Then again, I might be jumping the gun expecting an explanation yesterday. Amado lore dumped on the audience over the course of a few chapters and that may just be what’s going on next. Be that as it may, everything that’s been established up to now is a reversal makes the circumstances all so tenuous. Boruto didn’t mind Mitsuki calling him the sun all the time, but Kawaki takes notice asks him to knock it off. Boruto grew up with an entire village expecting the best and the most of him, but Kawaki was born a vessel, used and seen as such until Naruto showed himself to be the only caregiver to actually give care to the boy who needed it the most.
Whatever happens, the village is gonna be rightly confused when their preconceptions about Boruto are challenged.
For Chapter 2, Code recovered from getting a face full of Boruto’s foot in the last chapter whereupon the latter advised Sarada to help out the rest of the village by taking out Code’s claw grimes while he and Boruto had a talk about the Ten Tails. Along the way, we also learn that Boruto claims responsibility for scarring Code’s eye and while he admits there would be no issue in killing him, but the information he has on the Ten Tails and the Chakra Fruit is too precious to resort to that. As for individual shinobi’s performance, as far as we know, Hima’s lessons came straight from Inojin, Shikadai, and Cho-Cho and we mostly have scenes of her training in action so far. The new generation of Ino-Shika-Cho surely has kept up its regimen as well; their parents wouldn’t let that slide especially with two mutually deadly enemies nipping at the heels of the village leadership.
We haven’t seen anyone else emphasize proof of concept though. Sarada got to use her clan’s trademark Fireball Jutsu and herself use Chidori on some claw grimes, but that’s about it. From what I remember, spamming Chidori puts undue strain on the shinobi, something she’d never be able to surpass even with her Mangekyou Sharingan and a curse mark like that of her father’s would be out of the question. On the flip side, Boruto seems to have learned swordsmanship quite well, downing several grimes himself in no time.
Actually, having Googled a reference picture just now, I was brought to a post on the Naruto subreddit about other swordsmen/kenjutsu users in the Narutoverse, among them Orochimaru.
We’re likely to see more of Boruto’s moves in the coming chapters, so we’ll likely see some more posts between the Naruto and Boruto subreddits or even Twitter comparing the fighting styles across all of those who’ve used it over the course of the series. For my definition, I’m not counting the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist because all of their swords are abnormally shaped and mostly make use of Chakra in some form or another. We’ve also hardly seen individual members wield anything close to a normal sword long enough to try something fancy against an enemy. So I doubt we’ll see a comparison to this guy.
Code’s grimes have been shown to use the same transportation technique that he uses: traversal through the claw markings, not necessarily limited to a nonliving object. The latter chapters of Boruto original boasted a grime count of six figures, equal to the number of enemies deployed on the shinobi during the Fourth Shinobi War–and most of them were made of the dead and reanimated.
This time around, Code’s crusade is even more faceless, an amalgamation of beings made from an imprisoned Ten Tails from another dimension. Which reminds me; in the movie, the DLC for Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, and even the anime, it was shown that Sasuke was on a mission before to investigate anything Ohtsutsuki related, including Kaguya’s old temple where he was ambushed by Momoshiki and Kinshiki.
His absence for the first two chapters might be in some way related to that. Before the timeskip, Sarada only asked that he help Boruto and get him to safety, never specifying what else would happen, but the Uchihas trust each other dearly so whatever was up Sasuke’s arsenal (it’s a long list of jutsu, combined with all the other stuff might not have seen) would have been partly passed on to Boruto over the course of those three years.
Credit: u/BarlasLewis
Now that they’re both outcast cyclopes, they can connect even better than Naruto and Jiraiya did. I’ve only got speculation for what Sasuke taught him and where they trained, but one thing that closed off the chapter was the new technique Rasengan Uzuhiko or Rasengan Vortex. It’s not uncommon to joke that Rasengan is the number one technique Naruto defaults to, but the twist this time is that the swirl engulfs Boruto’s body than just the palm of his hand.
It might be in some way related to the sparingly-used Vanishing Rasengan. In the anime and the game, Boruto showed off the new technique to Sasuke who began unimpressed, but before he could close off his honest thoughts, Boruto through the miniature Rasengan at a tree where it dissipated… or so you think because a few seconds later the impact was seen on a nearby tree.
It was explained later that the Lightning Release had an affect on the shape and impact of the Rasengan itself. Further working with speculation in this case, Boruto might’ve convinced to some degree that he’s the one who can use the jutsu like that of Naruto and Minato before him, enough for Sasuke to take full advantage of that and enhance what exists while throwing in something new.
Gotta wait till October to see what the Vortex looks like, but for something we have data on now that the chapter’s out, it looks like Boruto TBV is hot on the heels of another popular manga.
Never thought I’d see the day where a somewhat new series would catch up to an established quarter-century long manga series. If you’re curious what was in third place, it’s Chainsaw Man.
Surprise Post: Boruto’s time-skip has finally arrived
When I say the time-skip was a long-time coming, I mean it. The anime’s first episode in Spring 2017 dedicates the opening scene to a flashforward between Boruto and Kawaki battling on the destroyed Hokage Stone Faces. So does the first volume of the manga.
As an out-of-left-field scene, it was one of the most vague scenes in anime/manga. With almost no prior context, newcomers to the series would have to piece together the preceding events as the manga went on. As the chapters released, fan theories and articles arose attempting to contextualize the scene better, the most popular one that I’ve seen being Ohtsutsuki possession.
It’s become even stronger with the exposition provided by Amado about both Kara and its leader, Jigen. The karma seals on Jigen, Boruto, and Kawaki are the marks of Ohtsutsuki vessels and the series has introduced a couple of ways to get the seal. Boruto got his after defeating Momoshiki with one of the largest rasengans ever seen at this point. Kawaki was one of a number of candidates to survive having his implanted by Jigen himself. And Jigen interestingly was a vessel for one of the strongest Ohtsutsuki seen: Isshiki.
Further evidence to turn this theory into a fact were the different times that both Boruto and Kawaki have either been possessed or activated their seals in some manner. The opening scene of the series suggested that they’d both found a way to do so on command, but Kawaki’s own anecdotes and Boruto’s performance reveal the curse that the karma seal really is, especially if a vessel’s chakra level is near-depletion.
Fortunately, Amado has developed a medicine that can help keep the symptoms down long enough so that karma could be studied without any further surprises. Speaking of which, Kawaki’s solution to the Ohtsutsuki/karma problem thus far has verged on the extreme side with an attempt on Boruto’s life… that failed.
When Momoshiki emerged to explain the circumstances of Boruto’s “death,” he explained that the karma was supposed to convert the vessel into an Ohtsutsuki, similar to what had happened to Jigen who, before his encounter with Isshiki, was a monk, and Kawaki who was in the middle of becoming a vessel for Isshiki to migrate to. But when Boruto was killed, the Ohtsutsukification had accelerated to revive him. As of recent, the manga has made it clear that Kawaki’s mission is to kill Boruto and prevent Momoshiki from coming back, but the first time this happened, Boruto specifically requested it. But now that Boruto is officially 100% Ohtsutsuki, Kawaki hasn’t stopped and a few of the answers to the questions about their time-skip appearances among others have been found in the latter chapters of the manga.
First up: the line about Kawaki having sent the Seventh Hokage somewhere. Nothing about that line suggested Naruto was dead, and even if Naruto was under threat, he’s always found a way to bypass it. From Naruto original to the Boruto manga, he’s had close calls but hardly ever died as I can recall. Kawaki followed that trend by sparing Naruto and Hinata. After declaring that he intends to finish off Boruto for good, he anticipated the resistance from his parents and sent them away to another dimension with the space-time ninjutsu leading directly to this part.
Number two: Without the strongest ninja in the Leaf Village to stop him, Kawaki makes a beeline for Boruto for an assuredly fatal round two. Sarada is standing in his way though and in a nostalgic repeat for those who remember how Kakashi got his scar, Boruto got his while protecting an Uchiha with aspirations for higher office. Not content with this outcome, he attempts once again to do it the right way, but fails to consider the rest of the Hidden Leaf Jonin and other shinobi on standby. Shikamaru, Sasuke, Konohamaru and others all witness the aftermath and get an update as to Naruto’s and Hinata’s whereabouts. With no other options, he flees the scene with Eida in tow.
Scene three: Kawaki’s on the ropes after learning about the immediate kill order on him for threatening/maiming the Hokage’s family. In desperation, he confesses to Eida who inadvertently activates her Omnipotence ability. Immediately after, Kawaki’s and Boruto’s roles are literally reversed. To all but a handful of ninja, Boruto is now remembered as an ungrateful outsider who seemingly killed the Hokage while Kawaki is remembered as the Hokage’s son. Now Boruto’s the one with a kill/capture order. With Sarada and Sumire being the only confirmed individuals who know what happened before the Omnipotence event, Sarada makes a desperate plea to her father to protect Boruto from harm, culminating in her awakening the Mangekyou Sharingan.
Part Four: Reluctantly agreeing to honor his daughter’s wishes, Sasuke helps Boruto escape. This doesn’t mean he’s unaffected by the Omnipotence — he very much is. But Sarada’s Mangekyou Sharingan and Boruto holding Sasuke’s old headband was enough to convince him to protect and train Boruto, even if it means risking his life and the ire of the ninja villages again.
Now that Two Blue Vortex has recently debuted, it opens with everyone’s new designs. Boruto, Kawaki, and Sarada were all seen before this, but some others were missing. Mitsuki, the new Ino-Shika-Cho trio, Himawari, Code, and even Shikamaru and Honohamaru in probably the last positions I was ever expecting them to be.
Make no mistake, I’ve never doubted Shikamaru’s intellect. His old sensei, Asuma Sarutobi, said himself that Shikamaru’s wit is unmatched. With an IQ level at 200, Naruto was wise to make him an advisor. Yet, for a lot of people that’s arguably the best position for him and nothing else. Since Kawaki’s been in the village, he’s been skeptical of his motives, practically pleading with Naruto to put him literally anywhere else besides under his own roof. It’s possible that he knew Kawaki wouldn’t be a threat as he was just a kid, or even if he was, there’s no getting past a Hokage who’s both a Jinchuriki and a master of Sage Mode, but the series has made it clear that Naruto saw him as a guest, then a son, and a possible reflection of himself if he’d gone down a darker path. A familiar sentiment to another shinobi in the series.
Talk no jutsu jokes aside, Naruto does have an innate ability to connect with people and subvert expectations. If you told a random villager that that demon fox boy would soon become Hokage, you’d probably get laughed out of the room if not sectioned for such bonobo babble. Over the course of the series though, the boy who had nothing eventually gained a vast wealth of friends which morphed into wide respect from the village. It was only natural that he’d ascend to the level of Kage, especially with the high-level ninjutsu that comes with being a Kage.
Shikamaru’s a master tactician, but we haven’t seen him use a lot of high-level ninjutsu. As a Nara clan member, his specialty has always been Shadow Possession along with other conventional shinobi tactics. These would be fine for, say, a Chuunin even one who’s up for promotion, but considering the threats that have come close to killing some of the Kage, sometimes successfully, Shikamaru has to come up with new strategies to battle someone as dangerous as Code and his army of claw grimes.
As for Konohamaru, this felt a bit like a slap in the face to me. Of all the characters I could see becoming Hokage, despite getting bodied in nearly every battle, I a least forgave Konohamaru for trying his best as a teacher, as a team captain, as a protégé of sorts to Naruto, and as another user of the famed rasengan. Maybe I can blame this on the writing.
For character trajectories, there’s a few interesting changes that I can get behind, one of which subverted my expectations though in a positive way.
Details don’t exist yet, but I have a theory based on Himawari’s appearance in the debuting chapter. Since she’s shown to be training with the Ino-Shika-Cho trio, and has admitted that she thinks Boruto is innocent, I think she’s another one who was largely unaffected by both Eida’s Omnipotence and her charm. Moreover, Eida’s brother Daemon said he could detect something powerful within her. Whatever it could be might also explain why Daemon felt so intimidated or why she feels the Leaf Village is wrong about Boruto for the most part.
If my theory has merit, then along with Sarada and Sumire, Himawari may stand as another player in the crusade to prove Boruto’s innocence and unmask Kawaki. She probably doesn’t need to do much against Code the walking L, but just in case, she has innate knowledge of the Hyuuga clan’s Gentle Fist technique to go with her Byakugan, if the rest of the cast allow her or anyone else to get a hit in at all.
This is the most recent Code L to take the cake. I saw on the Boruto subreddit that someone drew comparisons between Boruto’s trajectory and that of Dragon Ball Z with Code being compared unfavorably to Cell, a hilarious if misleading statement considering what’s above. But to entertain that theory for a bit, if Code is functionally similar to Cell than I’d hate to see what happens when he reaches perfection.
Finally, there’s time-skip Boruto.
With as many introductions, fan theories, articles, fan art pieces and more about time-skip or, according to the Naruto Wiki, Vortex Boruto, he really doesn’t need anymore intros. But what he does still need is context. In 2017, the introductory scene came apropos of nothing and put as much as it could on display for us to watch. Over the course of the series, though, we’ve been given gradual clues as to what’s become of him during the series’ run. Curse mark? Karma. Scratched headband? A gift from Sasuke. Scar? A parting gift from Kawaki himself. And this only covers his appearance.
His performance on the field remains to be seen and the next chapter might explain piecemeal what he learned from Sasuke. Clearly, he was influential enough for Boruto dress in a cloak and bear a sword. He’s also been shown to have a talent for certain chakra natures, the most important ones for Boruto being Wind, Water, and Lightning; all of which Sasuke also knows very well. Whatever he learned from Sasuke might incorporate one or more of those.
As it stands, the follow-up is on the same level as its predecessor and will likely release the second chapter after September 20. This gives me an idea. On the one hand, surprise updates are a highlight for me and the blog, but on the other hand, honestly speaking, squeezing it into my schedule and rearranging things gets to be tedious. The 20th day of the month isn’t also guaranteed to land on a Friday in accordance with this blog’s schedule. So instead, whenever I get more Boruto news, manga or anime related, I’ll make a post on or the day after as they release.
I still hesitate to call myself the Boruto guy as I personally consider Twitter user Abdul Zoldyck to hold that honor for their largely spot-on news and leaks. This is also an experiment of sorts before I try it with other series from different mediums. Who knows? I might be there in time to watch the first episode of Hokkaido Gals. And by the way, yes, I do still have a topic for Friday.
As much as I’ve written about not wanting to be the Boruto guy, I honestly don’t mind such a connotation just as long as I’m allowed more topics to cover and in that regard on this blog, I’ve succeeded. But to circle back to the topic of this week’s post, Boruto’s timeskip arc has an update. Last week, third party sources brought news to the Boruto community concerning the upcoming timeskip arc. The next chapter is expected to release on August 21 under the new subtitle, Two Blue Vortex, and joining Kawaki and Boruto who both have future redesigns is Sarada Uchiha.
Consistent with trends, there’s already fan art of the new design. Here’s a personal favorite of mine:
And no, the Bayonetta comparisons aren’t lost on the community. Simultaneously, the reveal debunks previous predictions made years prior while also shedding some light on existing concepts. For starters, rather than follow the Naruto convention of the subtitle Shippuden with Raiden and the associated kanji for lightning (雷), Two Blue Vortex deviates significantly from the formula used to craft Naruto and Naruto Shippuden as further proof that Boruto is simply not that kind of guy. Naruto had Sage Mode, was a Jinchuriki, shunned by the village for being the host of the Nine-tailed fox and fought tooth and nail to be seen as more than just the sum of his parts. Boruto, in contrast, was designed with nearly everything handed to him on a silver platter, largely because his parents either had none of it or weren’t allowed all that much to enjoy what they got. And seemingly overnight, he eventually loses it all.
When the story starts proper, Boruto is pretty much a spoiled little brat with a legacy over his head. Naruto was inaugurated as the Seventh Hokage, following a lifelong dream that everyone said was impossible, and his grandfather Minato Namikaze, had the distinction of being the Leaf Village’s shortest serving Fourth Hokage. Considering the negative connotations associated with the number four in East Asia, the Four is Death trope is a time-honored tradition. Guido Mista was right to worry.
Boruto being spoiled is a direct consequence of the shaping of the Ninja World in both his father’s and grandfather’s times. From Minato’s time period, it was expected and tacitly accepted that ninja would have enemies. Constant warfare meant friends were made as fast as they were lost and often from a young age. Minato’s ninja cell were the equivalent of child soldiers during the Third Shinobi War. Even after becoming Fourth Hokage, the peace was tenuous at best, and the ninja villages would essentially shift from fighting organized militaries to disorganized terror cells. This problem didn’t really begin because of anything Minato did, but Naruto’s adolescence was where it got worse.
The Akatsuki, close to achieving its’ goal under false pretenses, and with only a few members left, outright started the Fourth Shinobi War, by way of necromancy and cloning. Initially, through desperation and gradually through teamwork, the ninja villages set aside all differences to combat a worse threat: Madara, Obito, and soon Kaguya Ohtsutsuki. After their defeat, it was a time to rebuild a better world for the future. Naruto’s tenure as the seventh led to many gifted children, some of them directly from the old Konoha 12 of before. They essentially lived so that Boruto’s generation would have it easy, but the down side to that is they don’t see what others are lacking in until it’s missing from them. Which does happen to Boruto gradually. Starting with the seal on his hand and the control that Momoshiki is always threatening to take away, though for the most part he doesn’t have to as long as he leaves things up to Kara, Isshiki, or Kawaki.
With Kara in tatters and Isshiki soundly defeated, Kawaki and Code are the last enemies Boruto has to face in the timeskip. How that comes to pass will be revealed after August 21 when TBV debuts properly so for now, here’s what I know and what I see from the reveal. It’s been confirmed from years prior how Kawaki and Boruto would look. Kawaki would wield a staff/rod-like weapon in the future, and aside from a change in attire, he wouldn’t differ all that much from the Chapter/Episode 1 teaser. In the redesign, he sports longer hair and a tunic and haori that bears a striking resemblance to what Isshiki had.
Boruto meanwhile had a scar over his eye, a headband with two perpendicular scratches, slightly longer hair, a cloak, a sword, and better control of his Jougan. The updated design stays true to what was seen in the manga in 2017, but with a few noticeable changes. The cloak is similar to how Sasuke wears his, the scar is shorter, and the hair is almost the same if not shorter than his current look. We haven’t seen the sword yet, so it’s not known if he’s using one of his own or if Sasuke has an arsenal and let him have an old relic.
From what we saw of Sarada’s design, with all the talks and fanart depicting her with longer hair and a longer tunic similar to what Sakura had in Shippuden, but the Bayonetta-style design immediately tosses that out of the window and calls back to when fans of Naruto thought or expected Naruto himself to have longer hair as he aged.
Additionally, Sarada’s presence on the cover may suggest that the new chapter will include her somewhere in it. As I recall, a beginning scene in Shippuden shows now-genin Konohamaru running into Teuchi. We’ve already made clear that Boruto as a character and as a manga is not the same as Naruto so the tone may be a bit more sullen or serious compared to this classic Shonen slapstick.
Some on the Boruto subreddit also noticed the symbolism in this preliminary design for Sarada, with Uchiha clan earrings, the ring on the choker, and the cloak she seems to be donning. If it’s a cloak she’s wearing, then it may be paying homage to Sasuke. If it’s a jacket, then it could be an homage to Boruto. Or both, but with everyone under the shinjutsu and believing Boruto to be the traitor, everyone’ll think it’s only to remember Sasuke who seemingly abandoned the village once again.
Speaking of shinjutsu, Eida, love her or not, still has a critical role to play in the plot. The shinjutsu she subconsciously used to reverse Kawaki’s and Boruto’s lives has yet to be fully explained. The same goes for her Senrigan.
All we have on both are what was shown in the manga and Amado’s exposition. According to Amado, shinjutsu, like omnipotence, essentially make facts out of fiction and as Amado has surmised, all ninjutsu are humans’ best attempt at recreating the shinjutsu. If that’s the case, then the Omnipotence that kicked off this predicament would function at an even higher level than that of Madara’s or Kaguya’s Rinnegan/Rinnesharingan. Whatever has been the most powerful genjutsu shown in canon or in filler, Omnipotence is even more broken than that.
As for the Senrigan, since it literally translates to “clairvoyance” Eida essentially knows everything that’s going on anywhere in the world and what has happened. Like a very powerful librarian or historian.
As powerful as the Senrigan, it’s not like Eida will know what’s going to happen next in general or to individual people. Again, it’s more like reaching into the past than it is about the future. So far, it’s served as a means of communication between Eida and Shikamaru, her and Amado, and whoever else she likes or can tolerate. Circling briefly back to the Omnipotence, of all the people affected, Sarada remains unchanged which appears to be linked to how much Eida liked being with her and Sumire. As such, it was also shown that Sumire was unaffected by the shinjutsu.
I can’t promise anything on accuracy for this next chapter as shown by my track record thus far. Any predictions I make are going to play it fast and loose until the chapter proper comes out. Having said that, there are some things I can’t see with any degree of accuracy. There are three that are, as of writing this, anyone’s guess: Sumire, Himawari, and Daemon.
Starting with the most significant one plot-wise:
The extent of Daemon’s abilities are that just thinking about harming him is reflected in real time back at the would-be attacker. For instance, there’s a panel where Boruto and Kawaki both think about teaching the little runt a lesson only for it to literally backfire. So they both need to put up with his silliness to keep Eida from running off until further notice. For what can be said about him going forward, the only level of development seen was that he sensed an energy from Himawari, and we don’t know for certain how well the manga will follow up on that until then. Speaking of which:
The latter episodes of the anime put her in an academic setting with Kawaki going in as well on an undercover mission. For Himawari’s abilities, the Byakugan emerged in her the same day as Naruto’s inauguration and she’s shown to attack with the signature killing intent that each ninja knows about in battle. But for the most part, it’s been depicted as subconscious and while she was shown to be effective during this late anime arc, it remains to be seen if it even gets a reference in the manga if not an accompanying light novel.
Finally, there’s Sumire Kakei, who admittedly got a more generous treatment in the show, despite her starting out as a spawn of a former member of Danzo Shimura’s Foundation within the ANBU Black Ops. The show and the children accepted her with open arms and since the students graduated, she took on an apprenticeship with Dr. Katasuke Tohno. As far as a prediction, this will likely continue unabated, save for the subject area of their study being Boruto instead of Kawaki, but on the side she might be keeping in touch with Sarada on her progress to the best of her ability. And this is just the Hidden Leaf Village. The anime might bring the Sand Ninja back into the fold, but for what or how I can’t foresee. Even if it feels like Shinki et al don’t impact the story much, they’re not unaffected by the events thus far, and are at the mercy of the Sand Village’s moves as shinobi as well. Even a short filler or catch up for the audience to remind us they exist would be acceptable to me.
No matter what happens, Code is still a problem and it’s all up in the air how they choose to address that. Either way, I’m eagerly awaiting the manga’s and anime’s return.
Before I start off proper, I want to say that I had a draft lined up for a hypothetical compare and contrast post between God of War’s Kratos and Grand Theft Auto V’s Michael DeSanta/Townley, based on some throwaway lines that I looked too into, specifically Thor lamenting that Kratos wasn’t the same as the Ghost of Sparta that physically deconstructed Mt. Olympus the hard way; and Trevor refusing to let Michael forget that he was a bank robber, a thief, a career criminal like he is and trying tooth and nail to bring him back into the fold. As you would expect, the comparison was very apples to oranges. RockStar doesn’t hang onto most of their cast from previous games. There’s a balance there between old nostalgia and new characters, and RockStar has a rotating body of protagonists compared to SCE Santa Monica. As a result, most RockStar characters have self-contained arcs while Kratos spent the better part of about nine games growing from pride to mournful to determined to vengeful in a manner of writing that whether by accident or on purpose mirrors the story structure of ancient Greek epics and recently Norse epics. One is a parody of American pop culture and the other is loosely inspired by Greco-Roman tales of adventure. If there’s a grain of truth to something like infinite monkey theorem, then I could probably produce a Shakespearean comparison between these convincingly, but until then I’ll keep it on the backburner.
So let’s get to the topic of podcasts.
I’m writing this from the perspective of a listener, not a seasoned podcaster. But I’ve spent a pretty long time listening to several so I figured I’d throw some pennies into that fountain. How I started was with Rooster Teeth Productions’ namesake podcast. It began around 2009 as the Drunk Tank, but at the time needed to switch names at a later date if it hoped to attract sponsors. I think, after a few years, Drunk Tank as a name would’ve been great for a podcast.
I found this out a few years ago on YouTube thumbing through the old videos because I wanted to see how much they’ve grown over the years. The first episode of the Rooster Teeth Podcast/Drunk Tank was much, much shorter than anything that had been produced after nearly a decade as an active podcast. An hour and ten minutes in 2009 compared to about three hours or more after 2014. Incidentally, the podcast wasn’t what made me an active subscriber of Rooster Teeth’s website or their YT channel. There were honestly different opportunities for me to become a subscriber early on that were brushed off. The first time was in 2013 around the Halloween season when I was 20 videos deep into a Dead Space 3 Let’s Play video, and RT’s gaming division, Achievement Hunter, bought ad space for an admittedly creative Halloween costume to show off. Almost fifteen-year-old me wanted to get back to the sci-fi action horror. I subbed to RT in 2018 after catching clips of their anime-style show RWBY in a WatchMojo.com video, and have since discovered their network of content in the Rooster Teeth podcast and Achievement Hunter’s Off Topic podcast, both of which I listened to while in college and during the pandemic.
As of writing this, they have several more podcasts that they produce, including Red Web, Black Box Down, F**kface (yes, really), and a few others, some of which I’ve listened to or are still listening to to this day. Halfway through the pandemic and in the leadup to my enlistment in the Army, I was somewhat spoiled for choice and bounced around podcasts like I bounce around YouTube channels.
A podcast I was tuned into briefly was the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Weird story for that one, select media outlets had mentioned Joe Rogan’s name before but in a negative light. Naturally, I took to listening to some episodes myself and the context of the conversation about Rogan was out of a concern that he’d been inadvertently promoting then-unproven COVID-19 precautions as cure-alls by allowing controversial practitioners to speak on his show. When I thumbed through his episodes, I found that as an entertainer and commentator by trade, there’s no shortage of eccentric people. Rogan knows this and going back to WatchMojo.com, they have different videos detailing Rogan’s many different guests, some of which have gotten “interesting.” Here’s one video:
The sensationalism seen in modern media tends to lift firebrand personalities and ideologues to a point where a full story isn’t guaranteed. Personally, I put the blame on sensationalism around horror stories and reports, but an unintended benefit of that is wherever I see this type of outrage media, I’m at least patient enough to keep an ear to the ground and wait for every detail to be discovered before I pass judgment.
For the JRE itself, I like to think of it as a catch-all type of podcast. There’s no single point of focus; every guest is unique and brings many individual takes and opinions with them. This rotating body of personalities makes for a unique experience for each episode. Political outlets would make me believe that he’s made his platform a home for fringe ideals and beliefs, but that’s not what I found. Individuals of this stride do come on the JRE but so do many others. All in all, my conclusion is that outrage bait in modern media is very ineffective as expressed in this video:
For Joe Rogan, it’s also very misleading. Talking heads in American media can make you believe the wrong thing about a person, but then you see more of what they have to show for themselves and in my experience I’ve shaken my fists at demagogic rhetoric for lying to me and I’ll continue to do so. For more obviously political podcasts, Tim Pool is more consistent in that field, among others who were also guests on the JRE. I also think he was dealt a bad hand, especially during the height of the pandemic. All things considered, the U.S. at the time had a frustrating response to the pandemic, and I think some journalists really wanted to vent at the time. I’ve no horse in that race, so I won’t comment further on that.
As for the rest of the podcasts I’ve listened to or subscribe to regularly, the ones under the RT umbrella do have a singular focus most of the time. Red Web is hosted by Achievement Hunter personalities Trevor Collins and Alfredo Diaz and delves into unsolved mysteries, some of which have a criminal element, others tend to be centered around modern phenomena like cryptocurrency or strangely placed architecture or local abnormalities and cryptids. I emailed them once in 2021 to see if they had plans on doing an episode about the Toynbee tiles which I have seen in Lower Manhattan when I was in college.
They do have an episode on these mysterious tiles, though I can’t claim to have been the inspiration for that episode. Black Box Down is all about aviation incidents throughout history. From the early days of Wilbur and Orville Wright to modern airline industries and carriers, there’s always a story surrounding an aviation mishap of some sort. One thing I’ve noticed during a filler episode (don’t remember which one) was that most of the audience had either never flown, rarely flown, or held some irrational fear of flying in some capacity. But when they learn more about aviation and planes, the fears are alleviated somewhat.
Personally, we never made enough to fly continuously growing up. Other family members have taken me flying twice to Miami and Orlando for Disney World and Universal Studios theme park respectively, so I never had a fear of flying or aviation. Nor have I really had as much of an interest in flying. So what’s the draw for me? Well, I also wanted to know the secrets behind why planes fall out of the sky and whatever you think that may be, a lot of times it comes down to luck. It may have something to do with terrorism in a post-9/11 world, but flashy articles about aviation are likely to be older than that. You’d be shocked to learn that air hijackings were common during the Cold War era and most of the time the planes landed safely.
BBD’s hosts are also Rooster Teeth personalities, Gus Sorola and Chris Demarais. To my knowledge, this podcast is going to cease production soon as one of the hosts, Gus, has plans elsewhere, but if you want to catch up, the Rooster Teeth website and podcast apps have all the episodes.
F**kface is hosted by three more RT personalities, Geoff Ramsey, Gavin Free and Andrew Panton. The premise behind this podcast is a series of personal stories of the three guys being idiots. Funny and embarrassing stories from childhood, school, work, etc. It’s the podcast equivalent of “if you ever feel like an idiot, remember [insert overlooked example of stupidity here].” F**kface is one of my favorite podcasts, partly because its relatable and also because I’m not always in a learning mood like with Red Web and BBD. Sometimes I wanna turn my brain off.
Speaking of which:
Trash Taste Podcast is the crown jewel podcast that I subscribed to back in 2020 during the pandemic and haven’t looked back ever since. Of all the podcasts I’ve looked at (and they aren’t that numerous honestly), TT is the one that I could forget about for a while and come back to, which was what happened after I was medically separated from the Army.
Trash Taste started off with the goal of being the prime anime podcast and has gradually morphed into a slice of life experience about living in Japan, specifically the Tokyo Metro area which might itself be a city-state like Singapore. Just sayin’, I’d love a manga series at least that took place in Matsuyama or Fukuoka or something. I won’t stop ’til I find that series.
If the name is familiar to readers, then you may recall that I recommended Trash Taste and the three hosts’ YouTube channels all the way back in February of this year. The three hosts are the anime YouTubers, British-based Connor Colquhoun or CDawgVA and Garnt Maneetapho or Gigguk, and Australian-based Joey Bizinger or The Anime Man. All three of them began their journeys on YouTube mostly independent of each other, but with a soft spot for anime.
Garnt’s first videos were reuploads from 2007 reviews he did of series like Bleach, FLCL, Lucky Star, and K-On! as examples. Early on, the inspiration of Zero Punctuation was strong, but similar to what befalls many creators, Garnt eventually found his footing and got to reviewing anime his way. So if the first video is titled “Bleach Review,” a review of Chainsaw Man or Call of the Night would be something along the lines of “Manga’s Newest Best Boy,” with Pochita in the thumbnail somewhere. Additionally, with many anime getting slated for adaptations in a year, a smart move on Gigguk’s part was to quickly summarize the anime of the season.
Connor’s early videos were made up of prank calls while impersonating the star character of the Black Butler anime. He also briefly hosted a podcast based around voice acting, which is what the VA in his online handle stands for. Connor’s content doesn’t really separate himself from his hobbies; he makes himself quite clear that he’s a gamer, a JoJo fan, a Hunter x Hunter fan, a Black Butler enjoyer, and a voice actor. As an added bonus, he mentioned a few times on his channel, in collabs and on the podcast itself that initially, his audience was 93% female, hence the moniker on the associated subreddit “The 93%.”
Finally, Joey. Unlike the other two, Joey the Anime Man has a closer connection to Japanese pop culture being half-white, half-Japanese, or in Japanese law, a hafu. He’s very in tune with his Japanese side to the point where his articulation is better than most Japanese people in Japan. Much of his older content, from my point of view, was rather short form. He started off with anime-centered content (read: hot takes), but was also doing a bunch of other stuff as well. Anime news, manga recommendations, and also gameplay videos, which he has long since moved away from.
All three do still make content on their individual channels, stream on Twitch and upload the VODs for those who are unable to tune in on Twitch live. All of these are recommendations all their own if you’re capable of supporting their content.
The reasons for choice in podcasts are all complex and varied, but I remember listening more closely to the Rooster Teeth and Off Topic podcasts so that I could have non-distracting background noise for homework assignments. I had the radio in the background tuned to my city’s classic rock radio station perpetually since around middle school. It relaxes me. But around the time I was in college, I wanted more. So I turned to podcasts, which admittedly was rough around the edges in the beginning. Only now have I realized after trial and error that you don’t exactly need to put all of your undivided attention into a podcast episode 100% of the time. You can, but all in all, I like to think most podcasters expect a healthy mix of active and passive listeners.
I should also mention that years before Trash Taste debuted in 2020, Gigguk had an anime podcast on his own channel known as Podtaku, a portmanteau of Podcast and Otaku, but as explained in this video, that podcast ran into a whole host of problems surrounding direction and timing:
I’m certain there are OGs who remember these days, and thanks to these experiences, the anime community arguably has one of the best podcasts to date, even if it’s more about living in Japan then just anime alone. And I think that’s for the best — Podtaku practically walked so Trash Taste could run.
Reorganizing my list is sometimes a blessing in disguise.
Over the course of this blog, I’ve put sneak peeks at the end for the next week’s topic, and I did that last week in light of some recent news. The manga Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable (alternate name: Dosanko Gyaru is Mega Cute) has been greenlit for an anime adaptation in January of 2024.
I believe I’ve also made it aware that more often than not manga series I champion just sit in the back of the class unnoticed and unsung by handful of devotees while popular manga that I don’t pay a lot of attention to are the ones that get a greenlight relatively quickly. This is a rare instance of another manga I happen to enjoy getting the anime treatment, and soon. I recall reporting about adaptational rumors in late June concerning the My Hero Academia spinoff, but so far, no further reports on that have surfaced as of this writing, sadly. But at least you have a complete arc to round out the picture of the MHA franchise.
For Hokkaido Gals, let’s catch up to speed. In Japanese pop culture, the gal (or gyaru) is a subculture of usually teenage girls engaging in fashion trends. The typical gyaru is seen normally with a sweater (wrapped around their waist or actually wearing it), a bright-colored mini skirt, thigh socks or leg warmers, a blouse with the top few buttons undone, often light or even blonde-dyed hair, makeup, jewelry, and an attachment to her cell phone. Derisively, gyarus are said to also have a stigma of being loose and promiscuous. Call it fanservice or a mean-spirited inside joke, but of the gal-focused series I’ve seen or observed, in all but demeanor they give me the impression of Hollywood’s idea of the popular girl/cheerleader archetype.
All things considered, I think these tropes were the writers’ best attempt at therapy for an unresolved wrong. But between Galko-chan, Hajimete no Gal, and even Dosanko Gyaru among others, I’m finding that this negative stereotype is getting debunked as we go on, though its replacement isn’t all that much better.
Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable does a few things differently than previous gyaru-centric series. The typical trope is that it’s centered in Tokyo, the male MC is from elsewhere in Japan, and the gyaru MC is a native who knows her way around the Tokyo Metro. In reality, it’s a statement that means she can navigate the tens of millions of citizens, residents, and tourists who coalesce around the main hot spots of Akihabara and the famous Shibuya crossing. It’s really no different from highlighting any given tourist-y spot in any major city like NYC or L.A.
So to turn this trope on its head, the main MC is himself a Tokyoite who comes up to Hokkaido. This teaches me the power of a popular thing physical or conceived, so there might be an equivalent in other parts of Japan. The male protagonist of this manga is Tsubasa Shiki, the rather upper-class sheltered Tokyoite who has moved north to Hokkaido with his grandmother. On the way to school, he runs into gyaru and female protagonist of this manga, Minami Fuyuki, and while he attends the high school up in Hokkaido, Tsubasa meets other gyaru characters in the form of Sayuri Akino, Rena Natsukawa, and interestingly, Fuyuki’s mother.
When I say Tsubasa’s a sheltered upper-class guy, I mean it in the sense that he grew up comfortably and averagely enough to openly declare his main attraction to a very average type of Japanese woman; dark hair, composed, reserved, prim and proper — none of which are inherent in Fuyuki. As a matter of fact, she’s the type of gyaru I described earlier in this post. As for that stereotype that seems to have replaced the derisive promiscuity one, Fuyuki is also somewhat ditzy and short-sighted. In the early chapters of the manga, she’s shown to struggle with studying and even test-taking as Tsubasa and Sayuri make strides when all of them study together while Fuyuki struggles to catch up. It would be more accurate and charitable to say that she doesn’t have the kind of academic intelligence. Honestly, for all the sightseeing done in the manga, she’s a shoe-in for Hokkaido tourism, especially in a place like Sapporo or Hakodate.
Sayuri combines two tropes into one, but also comes with several surprises of her own. In appearance, she’s exactly Tsubasa’s type of girl and in fashion she dresses like a gyaru, even if only slightly. For the surprises, early in the manga, there’s two and they have an uneven connection. Sayuri has a condition known as hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating, and thus she refrained from intense physical activity. Instead, she’s become a hardcore gamer goth girl, probably the type to skip over cutscenes and 100% a game. Sounds like someone else I know of.
Rena Natsukawa is a third gyaru character, but is also a hafu, meaning that she has one parent who isn’t ethnically Japanese. She’s also a high-achieving student who just so happens to have near-unrestricted access to the library and is a tutor to her peers. Moreover, she’s admired by Fuyuki herself, so if Fuyuki ever needs help with her studies, Natsukawa-san is not too hard to find.
What’s interesting about this manga is the common tropes that are broken down. It borrows from series like Hajimete no Gal and Sono Bisque Doll, while also carving something new for itself. Call it for what it is, but with so many series alluding to or stating that they’re set in Tokyo, it’s nice to see other parts of Japan get the spotlight they need. It’s something I welcome personally when someone outside the U.S. goes to a place that probably doesn’t have a strong tourism industry, though on the other hand, the isolation tends to suit places like this better. No outside disturbances to ruin what makes a certain place unique.
The gyaru characters come into stride in their own unique ways. Since I’m only about twenty chapters in with the manga clocking in about almost 100 so far, I can’t say with certainty if there are more gyaru characters who show up down the line, but keeping the cast so small thus far does a lot to flesh them out evenly and gradually as the series progresses. Most of what I described of the characters thus far is in the chapters they each debut in with more to be revealed, but again, I’m not that far as of writing this so even if I wanted to spoil, I couldn’t. I really want those who’re interested to catch up to the manga in time for Silver Link to start distributing the anime next January.
Once it airs, if there’s nothing else taking my time away, I’ll report my findings as it airs.
While my hopes are up, some poking around in associated forums on Reddit leave me with a few concerns. I refrained from spoiling myself, but I’ve heard through the grapevine, that the most recent chapters haven’t been as good in regard to characterization, seemingly undoing the character development since the beginning and, to my interpretation, trapping Tsubasa in a needless love triangle. But I’m regarding these observations as rumors until I see it for myself, and I advise anyone to do the same. As for where to read the manga, it is getting released in volumes here in the west, but to catch the chapters as they release, my source has been the Manga Plus website and app run by Shueisha themselves.
Alternatively, there’s pirate sites, though it’s best to use caution. I recommend Manga Plus for this series specifically, because every chapter is available without subscription if you’re short of cash yourself. It’s a fun series overall and I hope it makes a seamless transition to anime. Still, holding out hope for Vigilantes though…
And now to turn your attention to a series that needed to be moved to the first week of July to make way for anime rumors: Mob Psycho 100.
This series was started by the mangaka One of One Punch Man fame as a contrast of sorts to both his previous manga and its central protagonist, Saitama. The protagonist of Mob Psycho is middle schooler Shigeo Kageyama, a boy who possesses the power of telekinesis but is remarkably restrained with their application. In fact, when we’re first introduced to the boy, at times he activates these powers accidentally.
Growing up, Shigeo, nicknamed “Mob,” is well-aware of his abilities and how much it makes him stand out. His main goals are to fit in with the rest of his peers at school and hopefully tell his crush his true feelings unimpeded, but there’s a bit of a snag: the boy has trouble reading social cues. Being an introvert is one thing, and it tends to overlap a lot with social anxiety and/or awkwardness, but they’re not the same thing. In summary, introversion in practice means that while the introvert has no problem interacting with folks, they don’t always favor having a rotating body of friends. In my experience in high school, in college, and in the Army, as much as I interacted with most of my peers, I stuck around with the same five or six people I always had, and that was fine for me.
Mob is generally similar, starting small and having, by my count, around ten people he talks to the most, over half of them outside of the school they all attend. Whereas Saitama from One Punch Man looked and often behaved disinterested in his job as a hero due to every single battle ending in a single punch and somewhat ruining the fun, Mob may look disinterested in a lot of things, but this is a trademark of his personality.
He has trouble expressing himself physically or verbally and often falls back on short sentences and responses in contrast to these hyperactive classmates of his. You could argue that this is a tell that he might be on the autism spectrum as noted by this Tumblr post:
Keep in mind, the opinions expressed in both of these are those of the creators based on their own observations and are meant to be points of debate rather than absolute truth, so read and watch with an open mind, but take these opinions for what they are.
To achieve his goals, Mob shacks up with a fitness club at his school. In context, this is a direct snub to the club that had originally requested (read: begged) for him to join their numbers: the telepathy club. This club, started by student Tome Kurata is focused mainly on paranormal like that of telekinesis and extrasensory perception or ESP, which is applicable to Mob’s physical traits rather than something more personal. As another example of Mob being treated differently, the club tries to get him to join based on that alone, and was more of an excuse for a bunch of nerds to eat snacks and hang out compared to the body improvement club that actively works out every day.
When I say being treated differently based on a single trait, it’s easy to look at that as being dismissive or distracted by that single trait instead of treating it as part of a whole and think of bullying or teasing, but on the other end of the spectrum is parading that difference as though it’s the most amazing thing in the world when the reality is markedly different.
Largely by virtue of possessing such powers, Mob’s difficulty with others is that he wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with his peers, but his inability to read the atmosphere holds him back. Conversely, others want him to be able to react to the environment of a situation, but can’t understand themselves why he’s unable to do so. In the scene I described where he joins the fitness guys instead of the paranormal folks, the student council president in a somewhat hostile tone of voice doesn’t chide him for his indecision, but emphasizes that Mob should neither be pressured nor judged for his choices. It all needs to come from within, and so his decision to join a body improvement club may seem random at first until you recall that he wants to impress his crush. He didn’t let the telepathy club pull him in, instead he chose the team that would yield positive results, and one where his powers could reliably take a backseat.
Having said that, as the series goes on the paranormal finds him one way or another, sort of like Stands in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, he turns out to be a huge ESP magnet. Most of these people start off highlighting these traits as the be-all, end-all and expect Mob to follow suit, but as I’ve noticed, he’s not that kind of kid. As much as he doesn’t want these abilities to be hindrance, he doesn’t want them to be a highlight either; Mob wants them to be seen as regular as anyone who, say, has double-joints or light gray eyes or a scar or blemish–it’s a part of him, not all of him. And while a few characters learn to see him as they see themselves — a kid who wants to fit in no matter what — others, mostly antagonists, zero in on that aspect because it worked for them and they hoped to accomplish similar success after pairing or using Mob for themselves.
Outside of Mob’s immediate family, another person who shows him respect no matter what is his boss and mentor: Arataka Reigen.
In contrast with the boy, Reigen is an extrovert who can read people so well, if humans came with a manual, he could convince you that he co-wrote it. Note that I said “convince” as this is a part of Reigen’s character. While Mob is honest and kindhearted for the most part, Reigen is a con-man with all the confidence of an old west snake oil salesman. I jest, but these are lines referenced in either the manga or the anime. Reigen is fully aware of the scam he operates at his paranormal consulting firm Spirits and Such Consultation Office, where Mob works part-time after school. The name of the business doesn’t take itself all that seriously, and he knows that he’s more or less a glorified masseuse who markets home remedies as foolproof methods against ghosts and hauntings, but what makes him such a draw for many in the series and even people reading/watching the series is that in the face of adversity he can think on the fly.
Only some folks can stay composed under pressure and Reigen belongs in that camp. He consciously uses lying and exaggeration as a tool in almost every aspect of his life, professional and personal. It doesn’t work all the time, but it gets him quite far when it does. Mob though tries his best to fit in as honestly as he can but finds more difficulty in this aspect than Reigen, who can stumble his way into fame if he could. And this is largely the point, they’re opposites in personality but neither let’s that get in the way of what is portrayed as a fruitful mentor-pupil relationship.
Reigen is knowingly duplicitous to everyone, but doesn’t want Mob to become a shady individual like he is. Mob is honest and pure, but largely because he’s just a kid, he’s also somewhat naïve to how people really behave. Mob, above all, wants to fit in and have friends, and Reigen wants him to be kind, but also smart, which is part of what I love so much about the series. Mob’s a quiet boy, who wouldn’t hurt a fly unless pushed to do so, but still his a lot of growing up to do. Reigen will gladly help him out in this aspect, but doesn’t really throw him in at the deep end.
In regard to Mob’s telekinesis, it’s in line with his emotions. In response to different situations in the series, there’s a counter from 0 to 100. The more stressful a situation, the higher the number climbs and when he reaches his limit, his powers go into overdrive. How he’s feeling when he gets there also plays a factor and his powers are proportional to his emotions. On a good day, Mob can pass the telekinesis off as the parlor trick he would want it to be, but extreme feelings of rage, sadness, compassion, or even ecstasy results in great and, depending on the circumstances, dire consequences.
I’ve watched all three current seasons of Mob Psycho 100 and only recently did I discover the theory that he may be autistic. The two sources I pointed to at the beginning of this post hold a lot of weight, but I’m not sure how I feel about the theory. Both the sources provided are stating their own opinions, but I’ve heard similar theories thrown around for different characters in manga and anime, often as a joke due in large part to the overlapping of autism and similar disorders like Asperger’s, social anxiety, or just plain old introversion. The two prime examples that have taken residence in my head as of late are those of Chainsaw Man’s Asa Mitaka and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’s Jotaro Kujo. Even if it’s also a joke, the CSM fanbase has some more evidence of Asa’s traits than the JoJo base does regarding Jotaro. He just doesn’t like loud and boisterous people, and even wants his own mother to lay off a bit.
But it’s not like Jotaro is careless. Just rough around the edges.
For Mob though, the theory does highlight the complexity of autism and similar disorders, but most internet theories throw terms around like darts on a dartboard. And I think the only way to be certain is to ask One himself, but then again, these are just theories so I’ll just leave them be. It is interesting viewing for those who are interested. But of course if you wanna form your own conclusions, you can watch the anime or read the manga for yourself.
Before I leave, I want to preview next week’s topic in light of more anime news.
As far as I’m concerned, we’re getting a good serving.
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