Yuta Okkotsu 2024

Okay no I need to talk about the book version of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the movie but the book has such a different vibe and you, yes you, should read it.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

In the movie, the fourth and final location that the magic door connects to is some sort of black void / mindscape / time portal dealy. In the book the fourth location is Wales, in the UK, on Earth, so that Howl can visit his family, because from Howl's perspective this is an isekai story.

do you guys ever like forget you're interested in something until you start engaging with it again and you go "oh wait i'm like crazy crazy about this yeah"

wip - plan gone wrong

:(

everyone meet gojo "if i cannot be wanted i will be needed and if i cannot be needed let me be used until there's nothing left of me" satoru

Baby Megumi whose mom died at a young age, whose father abandoned him and sold him to the Zenins, whose step-mother ran away with the money they got from the Zenin clan. I wholeheartedly believe that kid would have grown up with serious abandonment issues. That little boy who only wanted the best for his step-sister because in the end she didn’t abandon him like the rest of his family so that’s why he has to protect her, her kindness, he has to become a jujutsu sorcerer so he can be strong enough to save her. That kid meeting another kid who is kind, compassionate, silly enough to eat a curse object, but he loves that kid now and that means he needs to save him too. This boy who only wants to save his sister and this new kid he befriended but ends up harming them both, killing his elder sister with his own technique and unable to do anything as the curse residing in his body harms the pink-hair boy he loved and wanted to save while his soul sinks deeper and deeper. So…he gives up…he gives up fighting because who else is left, there is no one, no body that wants him around anymore.

That little kid hearing the words “it’ll be lonely without you around”….i can only imagine the feeling of being wanted, being needed that would have rushed into him after hearing that. The feeling of ‘I am not alone’, ‘there is someone that wants me for me’ coming from that one boy that he needed from the most.

satosugu doodles

Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies

NOAH LYLES pulls out the Blue-Eyes White Dragon and Exodia the Forbidden One Yu-Gi-Oh! cards before winning all of his 100m races at the 2024 Olympic trials

kissu:3