This Is Beautiful, The Light, The Flowers, AH Amazing

This had me cackling, the fourth one is literally the most iconic roast in the series, and qi rong’s cannibal bed and breakfast is one of the most hilarious scenes, god I hate that guy but every scene with him is so fucking funny

small moments from tgcf i think about a lot

◇mei nianqing calling xie lian "His Little Highness"

◇pei ming tenderly holding a severed leg wondering what beautiful woman it used to belong to, only to toss it aside the second he's told it belonged to a man

◇xie lian's cooking almost killing he xuan. who's you know. a ghost. a dead ghost.

◇"you sure know a lot" "no you just dont know much"

◇shi qingxuan beating qi rong after he called them a tramp

◇ling wen being accused of fathering cuocuo

◇hua cheng noticing xie lian looking at that bowl of yuanxiao and getting him some

◇"you're alive?" "i'm dead!" and "i swear to die following your Highness" "you're already dead"

◇mu qing talking about his feelings once in his 800 year long existence and immediately trying to jump into lava

◇pei ming slapping xie lian's mouth with eming

◇qi rong's cannibal bed&breakfast

◇xie lian going Well its okay none of us is normal anyway :D after seeing the 10k statues

◇that one 5D chess scene with ling wen and xie lian in the brocade immortal arc that was reminiscent of death note shennanigans

◇shi wudu making fun of pei ming and ling wen being depicted as a couple, only to see a play about him and his sibling being in love like 3 mins later

In my crying over beefleaf era where every couple weeks I will reread sections of the Black Water arc (in which I find some new line I somehow missed before that hits like a gut punch) or a beefleaf fanfic and end up sobbing because I love both Shi Qingxuan and He Xuan so much, mxtx why did you have to do them like that

This art is INCREDIBLE they’re so cute 😭

Happy (Late) Anniversary to the anime that literally changed my life <3 Gonna be re watching it today, haven't seen it in about 2 years ^^

time for my annual yuri on ice rewatch

Ahhhh my poor beefleaf-loving heart 😭

This idea is so painful but so sweet at the same time, but isn’t that just beefleaf in a nutshell?

Every year, for the mid autumn festival, the crown prince of xianle is undefeated in the number and grandeur of thousands of glittering lanterns lifting to the sky in his honor. All the doing of crimson rain sought flower - and the god's growing number of believers.

But it seems that, without explanation, every year, 523 lanterns are lit for a god that has fallen. The number is always exact, but the god it is offered to has long disappeared. It is a great mystery.

"Palace of the Wind Master... 523 lanterns."

There is nobody to rejoice about it.

From a dark patch of sea, of grief, loss and bitterness, every year, 523 lanterns rise to the skies.

Thank you, I wholeheartedly agree with this. Like you’ve said, Ash’s death to me speaks more to the tragedy of the abuse he suffered so young. It’s not about whether he deserved to die, it’s about whether he was able to live under the circumstances. And it’s unfair and horrible, but when you become as entwined in that kind of life as Ash was, there sometimes isn’t a way out.

Does that mean Ash deserved to die? Of course not. He deserved to heal, he deserved to be happy, he deserved the world after what he went through, especially when his heart remained pure in spite of everything. But as the OP put it, the abuse he suffered forced him into a life of crime, and that life of crime was not so easy to escape.

I still wish it would have ended differently, because I love Ash. The amount of pain he suffered in his short eighteen years of life is unfathomably horrific, and more than anything I wanted to see him happy. But I will not say that Yoshida’s decision to end the story that way was bad, or that it means she believes Ash deserved death. Ash’s death is not narratively insignificant in any way. Do I hate that it ends that way? Yes, with every fiber of my being, but the fact that I hate it so much, the fact that I shed so many tears over this fictional character, exposes the tragedy inherent in Ash’s story. The prolonged abuse that forced him towards gangs and the mafia is also what prevented him from leaving it behind. In that I find a powerful message about the resounding echoes of this kind of repeated, sickening violence.

When Ash dies, we are forced to confront the horrors of his life. Sure, it can be argued that all of Banana Fish forces us to do that, but when we receive the shock of his death, we immediately start creating a chain of events in our head to figure out how he ended up at that point. And through that process, we internalize the ways in which the violence done to him stretched beyond any single moment to touch every aspect of his life. That creates an endless, soul-rending stream of grief because we are left with a deep sense of injustice—he only ended up dying because his life was so irreversibly shaped by his trauma, and no one deserves that. No one deserves to have the ability to choose the course of their own life taken away, but that is the tragedy of Banana Fish. Ash lost that ability so young, and that is a very painful reality to face.

If anything, I would say the only one believing Ash deserved to die for the blood on his hands was Ash himself. I won’t go into detail about this because honestly, I’m not sure whether that was truly what was going through Ash’s head when he made the decision to go to the library. What we do know is that he did struggle with a lot of self-loathing. He often saw himself as a monster because of the people he had killed, the things he had done to survive, and so he could never see himself as Eiji did, or as we did through Yoshida’s story. The people who hurt Ash did so to the point that he believed he wasn’t worthy of healing, that he believed he was only hurting others by being around them, and that is once again an effect of that consistent abuse.

That is what saddens me the most about Ash’s death, that he might have believed he didn’t deserve better, when he did. But we all saw it—we all knew, from the very beginning, that Ash was a kind soul whose life was cruelly domineered by his abusers, and he did deserve to live and heal.

What people seem to constantly misunderstand about what Akimi Yoshida said regarding how Ash couldn't have just gotten away scot-free from his life of crime is that it ISN'T Yoshida saying Ash "deserved" to die. Yoshida frames Ash as a hero from beginning to end. He's shown to be a genuinely good and kind person, that goodness remarked upon again and again by multiple characters, and his death is seen as a tragedy. That should be enough to convince people that Yoshida didn't hate Ash or think he deserved to die. The fact she frames him in such a positive light shows she understands that Ash is a good person that was forced into doing terrible things for his own survival and the survival of others. So this insistence that she thought he deserved to die because she said in some fan-translated interview that he couldn't just walk away from his life of crime, or that there's a price to be paid for murder, is ridiculous. It relies on nothing but assumption about the character of the author.

It's also a problem in fandom, in general, where interviews with authors, in which they're often giving on the spot and half-baked answers to random questions without any prepreation, are given greater credence in interpreting the author's intent than the actual, published work itself. How about letting the work stand on its own and interpret it as is? I've seen so much hate lobbed at Yoshida for supposedly hating Ash or thinking he deserved to die, when the actual story itself does nothing but portray Ash as deeply sympathetic and tragic. Again, no one could read "Banana Fish" with any level of reading comprehension and come away with anything but the impression that Ash is the hero and a good person who's life and death was deeply unfair and unjust. That fact alone should override any answer Yoshida gave in any interview, especially when it's obvious how much Yoshida hates giving interviews and very obviously, intentionally gives half-assed answers that she doesn't put much thought into. It's clear from the work itself that Yoshida has a great love for Ash as a person and as a character. She based his design off of River Phoenix, her favorite actor, she shares her birthday with him, and again, the way she frames Ash and his actions is as that of a hero, from beginning to end. I don't know, maybe it's because she sees Ash as a hero herself?

Ash dying only demonstrates the point further about how child abuse ruined Ash's life. He was led into a life of crime because of the abuse he suffered, and the fact it was that life of crime that led to his eventual death, with it basically being a gang dispute that got him in the end, only further drives home the point of how devastating and ruinous child abuse is. Ash wasn't a criminal because he was a bad person, he was a criminal because the abuse he suffered drove him to become one, and then, eventually, that life of crime he'd been forced to lead came back on him in the form of Lao stabbing him, which is what I think Yoshida actually means when she says Ash couldn't just walk away from the life of crime he'd lived. That inability to walk away further demonstrates the tragedy of the abuse Ash suffered, because it shows how it forced him into doing things which eventually came back to haunt him, things which he couldn't "escape". Lao stabbing Ash was in consequence to his being a gang leader, and his being a gang leader was a result of the abuse he suffered. The two things are interconnected with one another. It's not about Ash deserving to die because of the lives he'd taken, it's about how the life Ash was forced to live as a result of his abuse eventually led to his death. That's where the whole notion of "you live by the sword, you die by the sword" comes from. It's not necessarily a moral condemnation of the person committing acts of violence, but an acknowledgement that violence begets violence. That violence is cyclical. But the fact of Ash's death as a result of his life of crime only further demonstrates the true devastation wrought by the abuse of children, and that's the ultimate point of "Banana Fish's" ending. It's meant to force us to face, through the tragedy of Ash's death, the tragedy of his life in turn.

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

Perfection

:))

Victuuri adorable as always, but can we talk about how this acknowledges the strain figure skating at their level puts on their body and feet especially, similar to ballet I’d imagine

[Lvl 30 Patreon reward] This art is part of this great viktuuri fic Short Programs, by @neutronstarchild

Go read!! :D

[Patreon]

Awww they’re so happy ❤️ and yes just look my way pulls at the heartstrings fr

Being silly!