I Have Held Back No Water In Its Season

Bleach: *fans self* Oh my. Aizen has met his match for top contender in the “badness is hot like fire” sweepstakes. Who knew Urahara could be sexy as hell?

Naruto: *slaps desk* There, now that is a fine issue! Why can’t you write like that more often, Kishimoto? Just the right balance of heart-rending and hopeful, with good, stark shading to complement it. Ditch all these fights with characters who take ten freaking issues to die after being gut-stabbed and write like this more.

Eyeshiled 21: … InaMura, you want to kill us, don’t you? What was that? Three reverses in one issue? My heart won’t take another three months of this!

All in all, a darn good week.

Well, the break seems to have made for some nice turning points.

( Bleach 206 and 7 )

( Eyeshield 21 265 and 6 )

( Prince of Tennis 373 and 4 )

And as for Tsubasa… *makes disgusted hand-waving gestures* Yeah, whatever.

Once more, because it seems to bear repeating, we cannot gauge the strength of shounen sports characters by comparing their performance in matches if there has been any time at all between the matches in question. The name of the game, whatever game it may be, is “evolution”.

( ES21 and PoT manga spoilers ensue )

A big part of keeping shounen from being deathly boring depends on that passionate motivation of the characters to advance over the course of the story (and, in extreme cases, over the course of days or hours) and keep the balance of power uncertain.

We already know my opinion on TRC is “will you get on with it already!”. Moving on.

( ES21 242 )

( PoT 341 )

( Naruto 263 )

… okay, am I smoking something, here, or are there hints that Shin may have been the Japanese Eyeshield 21 that Kakei met? The speed and power match.

And Panther says he “knows” Shin, not that he “knows of” him. I’m having to trust the translation, there, but it’s one of the issues done by a good group.

And we really don’t know everything that happened during his middle school career; there’s room for it.

This is probably just a hallucination brought on by too much lactic acid, but… it seems so much like something Inagaki would do.

So, in Eyeshield 21, first issue of the second volume, Mamori and Hiruma’s first big confrontation over Sena, after the Koigahama game.

There seems to be some division on what, exactly Mamori says to Hiruma.

She yells at him, and tells him she won’t let him get away with bullying anymore.

He smirks and says, what, is she going to request the disbandment of the club, and fishes out his blackmail book (though not in her sight).

And then she says no, of course not, and… what?

I’ve seen it as “that would disqualify you” (implication: and I won’t go that low), and also as “I’ll have you disqualified” (implication: it’s war to the knife, don’t fuck with me).

After which, he stops smirking and lets the book drop back in his bag.

And she goes on to say, but anyway, Sena isn’t his business anymore, and pulls Sena off, cue Sena’s first moment of Determination.

Does anyone know for sure what she says, or have the raw Japanese so I can poke at it? Because it makes a big difference in how we read both her character and Hiruma’s.

Or pretty darn close. So that shot in 218, when Shin tackles Sena? I went ahead and edited the two pages together and cleaned them up, because, really, Shin is too hot to be legal. And Sena has a nice ass.

Full size pic which I’m not even going to try including in an entry

Normally, when the anime is sketchier than the manga on details, I’d say to watch the anime first, so you can go on to the richer source and not be disappointed. This one is… kind of weird, though. The anime leaves out huge numbers of details and background action to focus exclusively on the game and training (which is very distressing, because we see so much less of Hiruma’s magnificent wickedness), but every now and then a detail crops up out of place, without the background action to explain it. Eg, the Apollo-chicken Hiruma’s holding at the start of the match in the anime, which does not appear at that point in the manga, but which makes no sense at all without the foregoing story about the chicken video, which the anime did not give us. It makes me think that maybe the anime was planned or drawn to cover everything the manga does, and then clipped later.

On the other hand, having a seiyuu to do Hiruma’s Ya-Ha! really adds something. And I think the anime artists went to some trouble to make both Hiruma and Shin sexier (though this took some serious work, with Shin).

So, curiously enough, I think this is a series where watching the anime and reading the manga work equally well in either order. And possibly best of all when you do both simultaneously.

I think Hiruma might be a bastard.

And illegitimate, too. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) In fact, I think he’s the child of someone high up in whatever his walk of life is, possibly even someone known colloquially as God (“Devils don’t ask favors of God.”).

It would explain why, in a story that takes some trouble to include parents and homelives, we see /nothing/ of his; the way his father seems to be pleased with him but knows Hiruma won’t want to hear it; Hiruma’s choice to engage, not just in delinquency, but actual criminal activity; the way he’s paralleled with Kid; the amount of ready cash and capital he always has; and possibly even his taste for blackmail–maybe he learned that tactic first with dear old dad.

If this is the case, I expect his mother is either dead or very embittered.

I have hopes we will find out one way or another, eventually.

It’s Ryouma, Copy Ninja!

(No, I’m not bitter at all, really.)

Fortunately, I finally have enough down time and downloads to start on Eyeshield.

And…

I. Love. Hiruma.

Oh god. I cackle madly whenever he does something (else) crazy. I love him to death.

And it’s not just his collection of things that go kaboom. No, as if that wasn’t enough, there’s the pointy teeth, too.

Two lines can explain perfectly everything I love about Hiruma:
Otowara: We’re not here to fight our opponents; we’re here to defeat them!
Hiruma: We’re not here to defeat our opponents. We’re gonna kill ‘em!

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3