Martin Buxbaum

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

— Oscar Wilde.

— Franz Kafka // Richard Siken

(this isnt to shit on Miura. his work has endlessly inspired and meant a lot to me, but that doesn't mean that it is exempt from constructive criticism)

i love Casca but damn it if she isn't the most misused character ever. I can understand what happened to her in the Eclipse from a narrative standpoint (Miura really didn't need to draw that scene in titillating angles though. It was fucking disgusting already). I can understand Casca loosing her memories. And as much as I despise it I can even understand her going into a zombie child-like state.

But what I can't understand is her being in this state…for what is essentially almost the entirety of the main story (20+ real life years) and GET 0 CHARACTER DEVELOPEMENT IN BETWEEN.

Don't get me wrong, arguably the best scene in the story is when she finally "wakes up" in Elfhelm. But they couldn't even give her a single thought, a short internal dialogue of the conscious part of her brain in between all this time? Nothing for who is essentially the tritagonist and supposedly the main heroine of this story, to who is at her core a really interesting and beautiful character with tons of wasted potential?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gentle Spirit

I firmly believe that some stories can never be translated into a different medium and that's okay

i feel like some ppl aren’t gonna like when we get more of asa’s savior complex moments, i see ppl now say ‘i want her to have a goal that doesn’t involve denji’. don’t twist my words, i want that too but as of rn her behavior makes sense and tbh, this whole savior complex is self fulfillment in a way. asa had no one from the beginning and gets thrust into this world of devils bc of yoru, we see their dynamic is rocky but at times she does confide in yoru. she does not have yuko anymore, and when asa was at her lowest, she lost her will to live until denji showed up in the falling arc. we literally see her basically say ‘if a piece of crap like him gets to live so should i’.

anyways, she's not even attracted to denji because of this savior complex neither. she liked chainsawman and denji before fami planted the idea that he needed to be saved by her. so i don’t like ppl saying ‘oh she has this idealized version of denji in her head’ bc of this panel. when really this panel doesn’t support that opinion. if anything this panel show how she sees herself, and lets be fr as of rn she has seen denji’s worst moments.

Berserk 1997

Kentaro Miura