This scene was cut out of the anime:

Now, I’m not saying we were robbed…but, yeah, we were robbed.

Bonus: The bottom panel of this page was also cut from the anime, which was the setup to Akemi wearing the babydoll

references!! subject to change bc character design is my death sentence. also some sillies bc is it really fma if ed doesnt get called short/kid at least once

idiot who doesnt realize how much theyre gonna have to draw cowboy hats: uhmmmm scifi western fma au

8/10夜トデー

★ 【Ayataka】 「 一花 」 ☆ ✔ republished w/permission ⊳ ⊳ follow me on twitter

A Silent Voice I 2016

Bocchi the Rock episode 5 insert song: Guitar, Loneliness and Blue Planet

Anime: Steins;Gate

Scene: baaaaaad English

Dana Iclucia ~ Ys VIII Lacrimosa of Dana ★.｡.:* ☆::★.::.☆.:｡.★.::.☆.:｡. Artwork by me! Please use credit if/when using!

GUYSSSSSS LOOK I GOT THE REST OF MY COSPLAY AND LOOOOOK

on akechi's four-hour swan dive to oblivion

So yesterday I was looking at this post by @lokiarsene about Akechi's line in his "undesirable child" monologue:

Let's take a look at this monologue and the events that surround it, leading up to the engine room shitshow.

the timing

Akechi's entire downfall happens on the same day.

the "unwanted child" TV segment happens directly after you get the letter from the TV executive. When this happens, he has three to four hours to live.

the phone call from Shido happens directly after you get the letter from the IT executive.

(incidentally, note the sad sprite there. His opinion of Shido is weirdly high, despite everything, and anxiety does not mesh well with it.)

Lastly, the Akechi fight itself happens directly after the fight with the cleaner. This leads to Akechi's death, of course. or does it

It's really easy to overlook how quickly all of this occurs. Akechi has gone from sitting in the TV studio soaking up the adoration of the crowd, ruminating on the interrogation room and telling himself it was all worthwhile, to that unsettling confrontation on the phone with Shido, to his actual death, and it's all happened within "After School" on the same day!

Akechi realises in the studio that Joker is alive (when the phone rings); he realises on the phone to Shido that Joker and the Phantom Thieves are active in Shido's palace (from Shido's behaviour); and he runs straight there to confront them and finish the job. Note that—he doesn't hesitate. He may have spent the last days consoling himself with attention from others, and reassuring himself that it was all necessary, but when Joker returns from the grave, Akechi is straight back there to kill him. He runs back there with the same speed he used to kill the SIU Director. And then ... yeah.

See, Akechi has the privilege of looking back on Joker with a bit of regret, perhaps—once he's murdered him. You can contrast the way the Phantom Thieves talk about Akechi—after he's safely dead. "We still have to carry out our end of the deal we made with Akechi", Morgana says. Ann and Yusuke speak up for him before Shadow Shido. Haru repeatedly states that Akechi "entrusted [them] with an important task". Yet what happens when he's back in the third semester? Everyone's embarrassed, and Akechi is both dangerous and unpleasant to have around, and it becomes "We did it for Joker, not you".

The whole thing plays out in the time it takes you to gather those five letters—yeah, you can leave and come back the next day when you play through it, but in-character IMO this is a very tight sequence that they would almost certainly do in one day.

shido's acknowledgement

While I'm talking about this sequence, there's another little detail I want to point up, that sends Akechi off to the engine room. This is an example of Shido manipulating Akechi with praise:

... does that sound familiar to you? It should.

Let's look at the original. Here's Akechi's declaration of what he wants:

"acknowledges me"? Y'all, come on! Acknowledges me? Akechi literally says, ore o hitsuyouna migiude da to mitometa. What does that mean? "once he acknowledges me as his indispensable right hand". He wants Shido to admit he couldn't have done it without him!

You can see why the line has been cut down—look at that overflowing textbox. But still, what a thing to omit. And just before Akechi runs pell-mell to the engine room, what has Shido told him on the phone, and what was Akechi's response?

(Before anything else, note the little pause on Akechi's acknowledgement: the Japanese text has an ellipsis. These pop up at the start of a number of Akechi's lines ("total waste of my time" in the third semester is another), and they're usually stripped in the localisation—which is a bit of a pain, since the pause indicates that we should be thinking about that line—that it's important.)

The second half of Shido's line is also cut—masa ni nininsankyaku datta na, literally "you and I have truly been like a three-legged race". In translation "we've worked as one, we've worked in tandem, we've worked hand in glove".

This is high praise. This is what Akechi has been living for. This is what he wants. This is his confirmation that, when he installs Shido as prime minister, the rest of his plan will follow like night after day.

So what's going on in his head? He knows Joker is alive. The rest of the phone call confirms Shido is under attack from the Phantom Thieves. He gets a sharp confirmation that he's at the threshold of his triumph. And he runs to remove the threat to it as fast as ever he can.

Also, of course, Joker being alive is a personal threat—Akechi has failed to kill him, Akechi has failed to come out on top in their epic rivalry, Akechi has been tricked. Did he have regrets? Did he feel remorse? Is he haunted by the interrogation room, or was he just going over and over it, trying to see what he knows he missed? Either way, Shido's line of praise there confirms Akechi in his intent to make sure Joker stays dead—assuming he was wavering at all, which is a big assumption.

so what's that line of akechi's

So to address the question, finally:

First of all—note that he's using the sad sprite for that entire little monologue. He even has a headshake just before this line. Why is he sad? He's not performing sadness here, he's talking to himself. Why are you sad about this, Akechi?? It's not even the only sprite he can use here—he switches to his ordinary straight-to-camera sprite for "All that remains is to tell him".

What about what he's done over the past two-and-a-half years, or indeed the past two-and-a-half weeks, might make Akechi sad? It's not necessarily a nice sadness—it seems self-pitying, if anything. "Oh, poor me, never mind all the people I've maimed and murdered"—though that lack of concern for his victims is highly on-brand for Akechi, the most self-centred boy who ever walked.

Let's leave this one as an exercise for the reader. Does he feel sad about any of his victims?—Joker would qualify, and Wakaba. Is he feeling guilt, or remorse? I think he can, and does, but IMO there are other scenes that sell that better. Or maybe not.

can we look at the speech yet

So this isn't actually one textbox—it's essentially a single line that stretches over three textboxes. Let's take them one by one.

Slight modifications here—Akechi, of course, has two personas rather than one, though it's perhaps not out of the question that he thinks of himself as having only one, most of the time? I do think that you na ("seems like") is important. He's not saying "the gods gave me my power", he's saying receiving his power was miraculous.

Of course, he has that line later about "maybe a god, maybe a demon"—but that comes when he's properly off his head. It may be something he comes and goes on, and of course it's safe to say that in the engine room, he finally lets his freak flag fly. Note that Shido certainly thinks he's been chosen by the gods, and his shadow, at least, makes no secret of it at all. And Akechi does tend to follow where Shido leads.

Here's the key line. First, note that this is another place where, as with Cognitive Akechi's "you wanted him to love you", there is no pronoun given—Akechi never says "those who stood in my way"—but the translator has inserted a likely pronoun. The original does not state outright who Akechi's victims were in the way of.

Of course, Shido's targets are all also in the way of Akechi's revenge. That makes them his targets. So this line is intentionally ambiguous, both in the way Akechi puts it and in the way he thinks, which makes turning it into "in my way" or "in his way" both a bit inappropriate IMO.

katazukerareta is the past-tense passive of katazuku. You might recognise this one because it means "tidying up"! But of course, you can tidy up people, not just objects, and so katazuku is also a slang term meaning "to kill"....

kono te de is often lost in translation—it can mean "using this method" or "in this way", and be redundant. But in a context like this, it can often mean something like "with my bare hands" or "with my own hands", so I've retained it. Could it be that the method, the "hand" he's using is the persona he mentioned? Possibly. But then Akechi doesn't use his persona for many of his victims—he shoots them.

The interesting one, and the one this whole post is to highlight, is jamamono-tachi. This is used a few times in the script. Sometimes it's innocuous, but most of the time it's talking about a person in the way—Futaba's relatives treat her as a jamamono. ALC provide us with the delightful translation "a spare prick at a wedding"!

And this word pervades the conspiracy's scenes. Here's Shadow Shido:

So there's a high likelihood here that Akechi, looking back on what he's done (with the sad sprite, don't forget), is referring only to the people he's eliminated for Shido. I thought for a while that this line meant he must have made significant use of Call of Chaos on his own behalf, to advance himself, and I still think he must do at least a little of that, just to know what his powers are? He can't possibly show up on Shido's doorstep, newly awakened, without a fair weight of wrongdoing already behind him..?

... or maybe he really does. Planning is not his strength, it turns out, certainly not as a furious fifteen-year-old boy. Maybe he really does get his personas, see his chance that hell and heaven have given him, and go to Shido saying "hello, I have these powers, and I'd like to use them on your behalf".

And that makes it all so, so much worse. An Akechi who shows up not even knowing what his powers can do, innocent of anything so far but being corrupted by his circumstances and family background, open to whatever Shido wants him to do with them, is so much more awful—and so much less culpable, which kind of annoys me.

Anyway, here's Wonderwall the last textbox:

youyaku typically means something like "at long last" or "finally". I don't ... see anything here that's talking about time? It may be to do with how you complete the sentence. Because a pretty common way to complete that sentence would be this:

So does he really want it to be over? I'm not sure that he does—I'm not sure this is how he's felt all along, or all the time; we can speculate, of course.

I wonder what recently happened that might have made him decide he's ready for it to be over, though—until he's reminded to change his mind. It seems like he always has these little moments of self-pity, these moments of introspection—that, in the end, never matter to him, or make a difference, and can't save him. The only thing that saves him is understanding that others care about him, at the end, and that comes far, far, far too late.

"I can't give up just yet!!!"