Mental Illness

mental illness

Hi! I saw your Suo martial art anaylisis and it is such an interesting analysis!!

I know Nothing™ about martial arts, so bear with me for a moment if I make any stupid questions 🥲 but I'm truly curious!!

Would it do any difference whether the arm or the elbow was grabbed (and/or stopped(?)) before one another 🤔? Ex.: the first manga panel, we see how Suo takes hold of Kanuma's elbow (?), would it be enough strength (withou fucking up your joints aksbakd) to swiftly divert the punch?

If it would, I wonder if the animation was trying to convey the movement more slowly and ended up chunky, but honestly, because the fist is the first thing in the manga panel, we can safely assume that was what happened first (in which case, rip joints).

Uhm, minimal spoilers (I am at 88 rn) it seems like Satoru Nii is learning about what not to do™ in martial arts because I don't think Suo has tried to pull that out since so... Maybe Satoru Nii didn't know or learned about it later and it was too late to change previous chapters (we creators have a vice with cool poses without thinking about realism aksbkadb) but implemented the changes later.

Anyways sorry for the ramble!!! Thank you for the analysis, it was very cool 🥰

omg hiii! i hope this hasn't been sitting in my asks for too long. now let's get started!

first of all, curiosity is like the best thing ever. it's wonderful, it's awesome, and im happy to help so don't worry about stupid questions!

"Would it do any difference whether the arm or the elbow was grabbed (and/or stopped(?)) before one another 🤔?"

well, what you grab first is usually what's closest, so not really? if you're doing it properly then it's fine. you don't really want to hold on to your opponent, tbh, unless you're a lot stronger and you know they can't break the hold, so you can/want to prove a point.

usually, the tactic is

1) deflect incoming hit by grabbing (the grabbing isn't mandatory, tho, you can simply deflect. ppl tend to grab when they want to stay close, usually to attack back, so keep that in mind)

2) hit as much as you're planning on

3) let go & depending on the context, run or wait for the opponent's next move. in a mock fight in a dojo, you don't really want to run for the hills, lmao, but in a street fight, i don't see why you shouldn't run like a bat out of hell.

(for reference, after the cut, there are minor plot spoilers for up until ep 4/ch 8 and spoilers suo's fighting style which you first see at ep 5/ch11-12)

"Ex.: the first manga panel, we see how Suo takes hold of Kanuma's elbow (?), would it be enough strength (withou fucking up your joints aksbakd) to swiftly divert the punch?"

i'm not really sure what panel you're talking about, cause suo largely deals with wrists and punches, not elbows/elbowing, especially in his fight with kanuma. but assuming suo at some point in his fight with kanuma grabbed kanuma's elbow here's my commentary.

scenario 1: kanuma starts with a punch, suo tries to get his elbow.

first of all, boooo!!! if someone is about to punch you, suo, darling, then how did you end up not deflecting the punch and going for the elbow? 0/10. if you have an incoming punch, your first thought is to deal with the incoming punch. don't make it hard on yourself. just slide to the side and knock away the punch with your forearm or your open palm. This doesn't really require any crazy amount of strength. Of course, the more built you are the easier it is, and if you have any issues with your muscles or nerves, it'll hurt more, but that's the basic disclaimer always (or at least, near-always) there in martial arts.

scenario 2: kanuma attempts to elbow suo, who goes for said elbow

okay, look, grabbing the point/tip of the elbow with his hand would hurt more than doing what I recommend and it's just so unnecessary. so assuming, that kanuma tried to punch suo and suo like deflected/ducked/moved away/wtv. and then kanuma used the punching arm that's extended to elbow suo. here's what suo should be doing right about then. he should be putting his hand(s) up to stop the elbow. his forearm(s) (blocking with forearms is super recommended, it's the greatest!) should end up on kanuma's bicep. and then suo should just side-step in a deflection (suo likes them, and so do I) and then keep the fight going (or alternatively, he could sucker punch kanuma in the face cause they would be very close in the sequence I'm describing!).**

"If it would, I wonder if the animation was trying to convey the movement more slowly and ended up chunky, but honestly, because the fist is the first thing in the manga panel, we can safely assume that was what happened first (in which case, rip joints)."

Now, since i'm not really sure what scene you're talking about i can't comment much here. What I can tell you is that, I agree in general. The animators are trying to make it look smooth, cool, and impressive in slow-mo, but without some research, they obviously ended up making a bunch of mistakes. The technique is easily seen in slow-mo, but they don't know the proper technique(s) so yeah, ofc it had me ranting lol.

"Uhm, minimal spoilers (I am at 88 rn) it seems like Satoru Nii is learning about what not to do™ in martial arts because I don't think Suo has tried to pull that out since so... Maybe Satoru Nii didn't know or learned about it later and it was too late to change previous chapters (we creators have a vice with cool poses without thinking about realism aksbkadb) but implemented the changes later."

Don't worry about spoilers, I'm at chapter 144, lol. So I can safely tell you that he doesn't get that much better, unfortunately😭😭😭

He avoids some super blatant mistakes like the palm thing with suo, from what I remember, but he's drawn other iffy moves. And like, it's not his fault that he doesn't know! I'd just appreciate it if he looked into martial arts a bit before making a whole-ass manga about it, from where I'm standing😭

I do love it that they look cool generally, like I'm a writer so I also write unrealistic stuff for the coolness factor. this just doesn't look cool to me when they're doing the weirdest stuff ever when fighting--

anyways,,,, sorry i ranted back at you!! i just wanted to address everything! hope this answers your questions!!

and hey hmu in the asks with thoughts on the manga, if you want! i'd love to talk about it with more people<33 (no pressure tho!!) [this stands for anyone rll lol]

**honorable mention to my bsf @fifteenth-entity who had to get up and help me choreograph a fake fight sequence to figure out the details of kanuma & suo's moves (noel: i have excellent elbows) (dee: he really does, super pointy, glad they weren't actually hitting me)

OP can my ladybug tattoo jam to your jazzy catterpillar's tunes?

and by this I mean do the groceries, go to the park, go to the café, etc

extra points if you say your country in the tags

Every time I read a poem that describes something to the extent of "You and I are mortal but I will write about you/us so you/our love remains eternal" I get emotional

Like yeah, I -in the far future- am reading about you, you did immortalize your other half, you succeeded

Hellppp some transphobe found my posts about getting surgery and is yelling in my asks about how I mutilated my ‘perfect feminine body’ . I got my wisdom teeth removed.

Arc Purgatory: The one (and only) major flaw of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies

-oh, hiii, just a note, this post is super uncleaned and kinda messy, you can see points where my ADHD patience wore off. sorry bout that, ill come up and clean later, for now, i gotta recharge-

I think I speak for most PotC enthusiasts when I say that the PotC trilogy (franchise? Wym theres more than three movies?) is one of the best written trilogies I’ve ever seen. Amazing choreography (they just don’t make swashbucklers like this anymore!!), amazing set and design, amazing writing, the comedy is peak, the world building is great shit, but by far, the best and most hooking part of the series is its characters!! You have the elusive trickster captain Jack Sparrow, you have the naive but headstrong and well-meaning Will Turner, the cunning and crafty Elizabeth Swann, and an array of amazing villains to boot! Barbossa and his excellent character arc, Davy Jones and his excellent character arc, the excellent dynamic between Commodore Norrington and Cutler Beckett and who being a villain when and why, the whole shtick. With how well the villains are written, it’s no surprise that a lot of them hold a spot in many fans’ top favorite characters - I’m no exception, Barbossa has always been a favorite of mine and upon a rewatch later on in life, Davy Jones is up there too. And while all of the characters are iconic, memorable and loveable (most times), Ive noticed a sort of… pattern in who places at the top of people’s favorite characters. Namely, I’ve seen the villains and Jack Sparrow. I’ve never seen Will or Elizabeth be explicitly placed high up, or higher than the villains/Jack  Sparrow. And even when I see Jack Sparrow be high up, I always see him be high up because he’s “iconic”, while I’ve seen the villains be high up because they’re “compelling”. That discrepancy really meant nothing to me when I rewatched the first two movies; they were, after all, an incomplete story. The third movie would bring it all together and cement these characters as excellent. Right? … Well… wrong. Now, before I go on, what I said before still stands. The trilogy is still impeccable in all the ways I’ve listed above. Great characters, plot, world building, choreography, score, cinematography… but there is only one area it falls short on: character development. But the peculiar thing is that it falls short only sometimes. So I wanna examine where it doesn’t fall short, where it does, and why I think so.

As previously stated, the character development falls short only sometimes. Where it absolutely doesn’t fall short is with the villains. For at least the first three movies (cuz i have not and refuse to rewatch 4 and 5), the villains have excellent, fully rounded character arcs, with memorable story beats. Barbossa going from bloodthristy merciless captain of the black pearl to hesitant co-captain of the black pearl, leaving behind his lonesome ways and instead choosing to make alliances if not for his own benefit. Davy Jones going from a terrifying force of power to blah blah blah, we've watched the movies, we remember what happens, we all get the gist. The villains have complete character arcs, they develop from one thing to another, either by way of actually becoming a decently better person and improving in some of their qualities, or by digging in their heels and dying as a consequence (or in Norrington’s case, becoming a better person but dying anyway because his narrative foil is cutler beckett and hell hath no fury like an 18th century british twink in a position of power). Even the side characters which are related to them have fully fleshed out character arcs of their own to complement them, namely Tia Dalma, who develops from a mysterious bogwitch to a lovestruck goddess. From this section, I want you readers to remember that the people who insofar have complete character arcs are the villains, who mostly switch up every movie. Now let’s talk about the lame ducks, shall we?

A few characters dont get any character development; namely, the side characters whose name you don’t really remember, or cannon fodder (i am counting Sao Feng as cannon fodder, I take no further questions at this time). However, there’s three other characters in the series that don’t get compelling character development and that’s the three protagonists. I’m gonna start with Will and Elizabeth; both of them do develop in a sense! They become more mature and more tolerant of piracy as they learn about the fallacies of the state. They are forced to mature rapidly thanks to their turbulent circumstances, namely as only-dubiously-pirates and only-dubiously-free and legally pronounced enemies of state unless cutler beckett decides otherwise. Thats a lot of Circumstance. No matter who you are as a person, that forces you to grow in one way or another. But let’s not forget that becoming pirate king and abandoning high society/abandoning citizenship and becoming an undead pirate are only half of Elizabeth and Will’s character arcs. Why do they get into this entire mess in the first place? Well, love! They love each other so much that they’d literally uproot their safety to be together, and the only thing keeping them apart is Circumstances™ . Naturally, this then means that their character arc would involve them triumphantly overcoming the circumstances and finally being together, either by abandoning pirate life or pilfering together as captains! Or alternatively, they discover it was never meant to be either by way of death or by departing tearfully. Yeah, neither happens. Instead they leave off movie 3 right back at square one; pining and yearning from a distance. But instead of the distance being lord vs peasant dynamics, it’s a time gap of 10 years. How is this any different from what the problem was 2 movies ago? This is their wrap up? Same circumstance with a different name and an outfit change? At best, this is incomplete. I can’t even count it as full circle if I wanted to; normally, here would be the beginning of a spin off or something, because this development is something penultimate. A darkest hour at best. Not a climax, and definitely not a conclusion; again, it is incomplete. And, sadly, the same can be said about Jack Sparrow. The movie goes out of its way to point out where Jack is flawed: he fears death so much that he refuses to see the pain and drawbacks of immortality, which leads him to do all his tomfoolery. Which is great character motivation! But it never changes. He is constantly afraid of his own mortality, so he will constantly hold himself back from going guns blasing, and it will always lead to him chasing the promise of immortality. Even when he sees what that does to Barbossa and Davy Jones, he digs his heels in and goes “la la la”. even when the plot of one of the movies was that he died. He died and came back to life. At this point, he has gone face to face with his greatest fear and come back a victor. But by the end of the movie, whatever happens, happens because he is still mortally afraid of death. Even after he comes back to life, people point out that all he wants is to be immortal, and he affirms that. So like… did the death… not happen? Because even if this is happening because Jack refuses to process it, then that gives us new motivation. And that’s not the only way for Jack to continue his adventures; one alternative could be that Jack, after conquering death, instead turns to life to see how he can maximize his limited fun, and starts pilfering and pirating to the nth degree, purely because of zero inhibitions. But instead like with Will and Elizabeth, with him, we are right back to square one.

So… why is this happening? Why are we having these fake character arcs for the protagonists? In most media and most cases, the answer is “because the writers suck” in one variety or another. Time constraints, budget constraints, bad writers, the works. But I firmly believe this is happening not because of the writers, but because of one mouse that keeps ruining everyone's fun.

(if i could add sound bytes, i would, but please imagine the intro song jingle thing of disney playing here)

Obviously we all know Disney; they want to milk their cash cows until the bitter end, which means that in order for that to happen, they need to keep an avenue open for Will and Elizabeth’s story in case they need to milk that for an extra buck, and obviously, Jack needs more motivation to keep doing his silliness. Now, as stated above, there are multiple ways for that to happen without keeping the same motivations that kept us going for 3 movies, but it has been proven time and time again that Disney will take the easy way out instead of the interesting (and potentially more costly) way out. Now, I refuse to watch star wars, so I cannot validate this point by myself, but according to a friend (thank you for your service @greetings-humans), when “somehow palpatine returned”, the franchise was owned by disney. Star wars fans, and even people with a brain, recognize how much of a cop out this is, and having seen the above cop outs happen in PotC, i am now firmly of the belief that the protags of PotC dont have character arcs because Disney believes this is the cheapest way of keeping the franchise going. This, btw, delightfully, ended up making disney shoot themselves in the foot; not only were movies 4 and 5 poorly received, but because of the way they were written, it wouldn’t make sense for any of the protagonists to suddenly have a change of motives and resume character development, which would be especially detrimental since we are talking about the PotC franchise; famously adored for its writing. They could mask the cash cow before, but now they cannot. So it’s no surprise that instead of continuing a story that is continuously shooting itself in the foot thanks to Disney’s executive decision to take the easy way out of creating a continuous cash cow, the 6th movie is rumored to be a remake of the first one.

But yeah, this is pretty much my analysis. I dont have much more to say. The key take away here is: write your own fanfics of the ending, or engage with the series however you like. I think if the series had different producers and was just left at a trilogy, then it would’ve been perfect. I don’t really have much more to say here;; this is pretty much it. I’m just glad that PotC’s one major flaw wasn’t due to incompetence and was due to the mouse being the mouse.