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Speaking of meh, Wild Strawberry chapter 4 is really cementing it as the To Have and Have Not to Chainsaw Man's Casablanca, only without the charm of Bogie and Bacall to carry things. You know what worked about Chainsaw Man, besides everything? It got going fast. Chapter 1, origin story, including joining the monster hunter organization. Chapter 4, we've got the whole main crew assembled and officially working together. Here, we're four chapters in and the hero joining the monster fighting organization is obviously going to happen, but it's being put off as if there was any real tension to it just because that's what you do in manga. It and Jiangshi X kinda have a cargo cult shonen feel to them, following the templates because they're the templates rather than because there's something the author wants to play with available when taking that route.
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Aug 12, 2023 02:44
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The Black Stones posted:I’m getting big “Detroit” vibes from Shojo Null where the author is turning a dial that says “Racism” and looking back for approval. You eloquently put my thoughts Into words. The whole slavery and mistreatment is so hilariously over the top it’s impossible for it to have any sort of actual comment on the situation. chiasaur11 posted:Speaking of meh, Wild Strawberry chapter 4 is really cementing it as the To Have and Have Not to Chainsaw Man's Casablanca, only without the charm of Bogie and Bacall to carry things. I was disappointed that we’re suddenly in powerlevel beat me to show your worth bullshit. I was hoping for more horror vibes
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Aug 12, 2023 10:33
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The Black Stones posted:I’m getting big “Detroit” vibes from Shojo Null where the author is turning a dial that says “Racism” and looking back for approval. Yeah, seconding Darth here. You really hit the nail on the head with the issues I'm having with it so far
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Aug 12, 2023 17:30
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chiasaur11 posted:Speaking of meh, Wild Strawberry chapter 4 is really cementing it as the To Have and Have Not to Chainsaw Man's Casablanca, only without the charm of Bogie and Bacall to carry things. I think your overall conclusion is a bit harsh, but you’re right that they might as well show him in a special flower funeral force uniform on the front page it’s so obvious that he’s going to join up with them. Which makes this particular fight feel kind of pointless/dumb. The page where his perspectives suddenly tilts sideways because he just got cut in half is pretty neat though. I don’t think it’s generally slow paced either. In the first 3 chapters the guy gained super powers, died and resurrected, escaped a disposal facility/lab and the manga set up a boss monster that’s the source of all the others. That’s a fairly brisk pace. It’s just this 4th chapter didn’t really advance the plot at all.
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Aug 12, 2023 17:48
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The Black Stones posted:I’m getting big “Detroit” vibes from Shojo Null where the author is turning a dial that says “Racism” and looking back for approval. It's almost always an issue when anime/manga try to tackle prejudice where the bad opinion is just so over the top you can't take it serious that the character would actually believe it.
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Aug 12, 2023 19:55
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Kinda hoping Wild Strawberry sticks with the hint of racing to Tokyo Tower instead of any corps joining. Also, if chapter 4 didn't advance the plot it's because it was too busy hyping up a violent schoolgirl, SJ's secret biggest protagonist.
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Aug 12, 2023 20:26
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Elite posted:The page where his perspectives suddenly tilts sideways because he just got cut in half is pretty neat though. I had something sorta like this happen in real life a few years ago, when I was walking to get lunch and for some, mysterious reason (still don't know why - I didn't even trip or anything) my legs just decided to stop holding up my body. I remember being like "wait, what" as the ground suddenly rose up - it felt like I was shrinking. hosed my big toe up, because my muscles were completely relaxed due to how sudden it was and it just bent super far backwards.
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Aug 12, 2023 23:06
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My Girlfriend Gives Me Goosebumps!: That was extremely cute and lmao, the protagonist is falling hard for her, just in case the last chapter didn't showcase it enough.
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Aug 13, 2023 18:01
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Lt. Lizard posted:My Girlfriend Gives Me Goosebumps!: That was extremely cute and lmao, the protagonist is falling hard for her, just in case the last chapter didn't showcase it enough. Oh, 1000 percent. Ayakashi Triangle: yup, looks like things are wrapping up. Finally History's Mentalist:  Red Cat Ramen: cat people are annoying to cats, confirmed
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Aug 13, 2023 18:28
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Jinrui-shoku: The Blight of Man  A boy with a powerful sixth sense and his troubled friend have a run in with a mummy; one of a recent epidemic of mysterious deaths where families suddenly find members of their household as desiccated corpses. What follows becomes a morbid and ever twisting situation revealing itself to be spooky invader of the body snatchers with a side order of the MC loving dying (and coming back) It runs bi-weekly and mangaplus is promoting it as well as other horror manga on the banner so I figure I'd do the same. Lt. Lizard posted:My Girlfriend Gives Me Goosebumps!: That was extremely cute and lmao, the protagonist is falling hard for her, just in case the last chapter didn't showcase it enough. Now it is his time to be the crazy one 
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Aug 13, 2023 23:41
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Brought To You By posted:Now it is his time to be the crazy one He always was
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Aug 13, 2023 23:50
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New Zatch Bell 2 I cry, you cry, everyone cries
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Aug 14, 2023 01:11
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Balache404 posted:New Zatch Bell 2 there's also a thread for this now!
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Aug 14, 2023 01:26
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Dandadan 118: 
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Aug 15, 2023 00:27
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Marriagetoxin: I don't know why, but I always love those wacky minor henchmen that are always defeated within 2-3 pages. You will be missed, Missile User. 
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Aug 15, 2023 16:55
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muscles like this! posted:It's almost always an issue when anime/manga try to tackle prejudice where the bad opinion is just so over the top you can't take it serious that the character would actually believe it. To be honest I'm genuinely coming around to the viewpoint that this criticism doesn't really work. Like I'm not defending this particular story so much as I don't think the criticism of "do you really expect me to believe people would be so cruel and callous and uncaring in such an absurdly evil way" stands on its own without justification, especially since the point of a lot of those stories is just to present real-world things that are happening with just enough of a barrier that you don't inherently shuffle it off into your blind spots. Like I'm not going to say Null in particular is well executed but if the complaint is "Why are these people being cruel, shortsighted and malicious and doing terrible things to human beings by convincing themselves the victims are subhuman" is answered by "because people act that way." Like you can point to 'people empathize with a Roomba" and that's true, but it's also true that people find it incredibly easy to do horrific things to other human beings because society doesn't really call them out on it or empathizes with it. Like we have real-world examples of this, this isn't theoretical. People will torture, maim, mutilate and kill people they consider lesser than they are because they think it's funny or justified or don't empathize with the pain it causes. People like to default to the criticism of "Why are the people in this story about slavery so evil" when the answer is "because people who engage in real world slavery are provably that evil." We've been trained by years of media to expect our villains to be sympathetic or understandable but honestly the real evil isn't the poor hurt guy who wants to do the greater good, it's the guy who thinks it'd be really funny to maim an innocent person because of the color of their skin. I think there's a reason a lot of stories are shifting towards just The loving Worst and it isn't because of bad writing, it is because to a lot of people in a lot of cultures that kind of evil is becoming a lot more easier to connect to. I think we're going to be in for a lot of that in the future because that is the kind of evil that is gaining traction worldwide. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 17:18
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Lt. Lizard posted:Marriagetoxin: I don't know why, but I always love those wacky minor henchmen that are always defeated within 2-3 pages. You will be missed, Missile User.  hmm!I love Marriagetoxin
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Aug 15, 2023 17:32
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MarriageToxin: are we gonna get unicycle vs. bicycle?
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Aug 15, 2023 17:37
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Marriagetoxin is incredibly good, and I'm forever grateful to the person who posted the shark dance panel in the Manga Panels You Like thread for introducing it to me.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:38
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I can only assume that missile users are a branch family of some more general "weapon user" main family.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:41
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SpacePig posted:Marriagetoxin is incredibly good, and I'm forever grateful to the person who posted the shark dance panel in the Manga Panels You Like thread for introducing it to me. Same except the person who posted the "Here comes a sound attack!" pages. Hope sound guy comes back Sound vs. Wind seems like a fun matchup
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Aug 15, 2023 17:47
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ImpAtom posted:To be honest I'm genuinely coming around to the viewpoint that this criticism doesn't really work. Like I'm not defending this particular story so much as I don't think the criticism of "do you really expect me to believe people would be so cruel and callous and uncaring in such an absurdly evil way" stands on its own without justification, especially since the point of a lot of those stories is just to present real-world things that are happening with just enough of a barrier that you don't inherently shuffle it off into your blind spots. I think the thing that you’re overlooking, which I think the creators of these works are doing as well because it’s a fine line to miss, is that while things get bad and people certainly do acts of wanton cruelty, the world doesn’t mostly tune this poo poo out. People react to it, and there’s always been pushback. Playing something like Detroit was just a bunch of poo poo to me because you would see people treating the robots like absolute poo poo, there’s drat landfills of broken and absolute horrifying half working robots and everyone is content to go “ah, because these are things and not people this is a perfectly fine problem.” “Oh, the robots just did a huge March down the street for rights, but every single human is simply debating if they want rights.” I’m not saying that an over the top villains is bad, what I am saying is that people don’t simply look at the villain and go “well, what are you going to do about it?” And then just let the villain do whatever they want. If your goal is to go “Wow, society really needs to evaluate how we treat others/things/ourselves.” There needs to be some exploration of all the ways people react to this. Operating on extremes like Shojo Null has done doesn’t serve a purpose beyond going “This are messed up! Things are bad!” and it’s really saying the majority of people don’t give a poo poo. I think it’s a shallow and lovely cynical look at the world. What’s the purpose? It’s not a racial allegory, but hell, look at Pyscho Pass for a work that clearly had something to say but didn’t beat its audience over the head with “this is how you should feel right now.” Shojo Null is just telling its story in a bad way. Yes, people are evil, yes extremes happen, but yes you can address these without moustache twirling characters and exaggerated plot gimmicks.
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Aug 16, 2023 00:09
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Re: Shojo Null, there is an obvious mitigating circumstance here for most of the humans, namely, they presumably genuinely believe that the meat-robots aren't sentient (because of the government conspiracy). This is itself stretching credibility pretty far in a few ways, though; the more I think through the world-building implications, the more likely it seems that the average 23rd century Japanese person is willfully blind in much the same way the average person in Nazi Germany was.
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Aug 16, 2023 00:33
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Actually, the more I think about it, the less sense the setting makes. It’s the 23rd century, but there’s no apparent technological change other than the meat-robots, and although Japan has become a horrifying police state, there’s no real sense of social change either. To be fair, it’s only two chapters in, so there’s plenty of room for more worldbuilding, but the general impression is that someone took the “setting” of Me and Roboco and decided to take it in the most grimdark direction possible instead of it being a joke.
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Aug 16, 2023 01:09
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Electric Phantasm posted:MarriageToxin: are we gonna get unicycle vs. bicycle? This didn't occur to me until you said it and now I desperately want it to happen. Also, Missle User's crumpled pompador at the end of his scene was a perfect touch. Silver2195 posted:Actually, the more I think about it, the less sense the setting makes. It’s the 23rd century, but there’s no apparent technological change other than the meat-robots, and although Japan has become a horrifying police state, there’s no real sense of social change either. To be fair, it’s only two chapters in, so there’s plenty of room for more worldbuilding, but the general impression is that someone took the “setting” of Me and Roboco and decided to take it in the most grimdark direction possible instead of it being a joke. Wait, it's supposed to be the 23rd century? I must have missed it when they mentioned it. Yikes... that's pretty bad
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Aug 16, 2023 01:42
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I mean I find it completely believable that a stage directer would straight up sacrifice bots one after the other for shock value and gravitas. All in the name of art. We’ve seen people turn roomba’d and kitchen appliances into “works of art” so why not this. The problem for me however it comes after the kami kids who were jerks and after the father of one of the kami kids who straight up doesn’t give a poo poo apparently more concerned with killing everyone involved. Maybe there’s a good reason and the police chief is in on the conspiracy. But for now the series just goes a little too hard to fast causing it to become more meaningless shock than commentary. Not everything needs to have commentary though, but again it’s currently hard for me to sympathize either way because of the conga line of people framed as clearly villainous. The only none dick human has been our doormat of a leading human.
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Aug 16, 2023 10:07
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Darth TNT posted:I mean I find it completely believable that a stage directer would straight up sacrifice bots one after the other for shock value and gravitas. All in the name of art. We’ve seen people turn roomba’d and kitchen appliances into “works of art” so why not this. My problem isn’t that there’s a person doing this. The problem is that the work presents this as everyone else going along with it and as far as we’ve seen only our protagonist has any problems with it. I just don’t see the same society that these authors do where we create incredibly realistic representations of humans and then we all go “ah yes, this is just like a roomba, so we can now destroy this in what really just looks like murder at this point” and the majority of people shrug and go “yeah I guess.” However, the work really wants you to show how treating this way is super bad according to our protagonist so of course people need to act this way.
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Aug 16, 2023 13:17
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https://twitter.com/WSJ_manga/status/1691781456979259877 Yeah, Kill Blue is probably fine for now, that's kinda crazy.
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Aug 16, 2023 13:31
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The Black Stones posted:My problem isn’t that there’s a person doing this. The problem is that the work presents this as everyone else going along with it and as far as we’ve seen only our protagonist has any problems with it. To be fair, we saw a bunch of people with problems with it in chapter 1.
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Aug 16, 2023 13:40
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The Black Stones posted:My problem isn’t that there’s a person doing this. The problem is that the work presents this as everyone else going along with it and as far as we’ve seen only our protagonist has any problems with it. This is like just a half step or so further than how people, who are othered in their society are being treated right loving now in various parts of the world.
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Aug 16, 2023 13:53
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Hypocrisy posted:To be fair, we saw a bunch of people with problems with it in chapter 1. We see a secret underground that seems to have few members, which begs the question, why a group that’s simply advocating for robot rights can get destroyed and killed by cops and this is seen as perfectly fine? (Yes, I know cops in our world have a lot of power and do outright murder people. No they do not have the extremes seen here) I think I need to point out. I don’t think Shojo Null is necessarily bad. It’s better than other Shonen Jump stuff I’ve been reading and I’m going to keep reading because while I don’t agree with the depiction I am interested enough to see what they do with it. I just think it’s worth acknowledging that yes, this is not a very nuanced tackling of an idea. They’ve very clearly went with a style and that’s their choice. If it works for you that’s fine, but for those that have an issue with the work and are struggling to think of why. I’m saying that’s why this work doesn’t connect with me and feels a bit hollow. Again, not a bad work, just misses the mark that makes it actually engaging. Detroit is still a lovely game though.
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Aug 16, 2023 13:54
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Dexo posted:This is like just a half step or so further than how people, who are othered in their society are being treated right loving now in various parts of the world. Please point out where this is happening and where the majority of people in the world are fine with this. Edit: Again, not pointing out people do bad poo poo. I agree! I 100% agree with you. I do not subscribe to this weird view where the majority of people have simply said “yes, this is perfectly fine.” Please point out where this is happening.
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Aug 16, 2023 13:57
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Justin_Brett posted:https://twitter.com/WSJ_manga/status/1691781456979259877 Tenmaku Cinema is higher up than expected, which is good. Honestly, Cipher Academy being where it's at still surprises me. The translation might be part of it because of how dense it is in English, but I end up skimming over a lot of the word salads it throws at us, and it might be much easier to read in Japanese
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Aug 16, 2023 14:01
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The Black Stones posted:Please point out where this is happening and where the majority of people in the world are fine with this. I mean, Israel and how it treats Palestinians, just off the top. Texas' Governor currently putting up death traps to kill refugees. Seperating Refugees from their kids, putting them in camps and adopting the kids off to rando people(usually evangelical christians). Not to mention the rampant Federal and State Agents raping and/or killing refugees in these camps. Read up on poo poo that happened during the Partition. The Rape of Nanking. poo poo that is happening in Saudi Arabia. And like yeah, there are generally a number of people who are against it, and like maybe in your and my circles we have people who think and care about this stuff, but the world at large especially the groups who are doing the oppressing, tend to largely condone this poo poo until it no longer does, where people then go and say that they were always against it etc. Like drat all the human rights abuses that the United States/Saudi Arabia/China does, yeah it sucks, but man it'd sure suck to lose that Money/Oil or whatever so we are just gonna look the other way or grandstand and not use any actual leverage to make things better. Like, it takes a while, but once something becomes common place and taught that "this is just the way things are" it is trivially easy to get people to move on with their life and go back to ignoring/not caring about increasingly larger injustices. Like white folks in the south would walk to church/school or where ever in their towns with loving mob lynched black people hanging from trees. Please do not tell my black rear end that people won't look past or ignore massive injustices because it is either feels bad to think about/or they have fully bought into the propaganda. My Mom has stories about poo poo she experienced growing up in Mississippi. She was a child when Till was murdered and lynched. Like obviously the Manga is a step or so further than this, but like it's just that, one step further on what being an other in a society is. Dexo fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Aug 16, 2023 |
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Aug 16, 2023 15:53
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witch-watch being #1 after the colour is most surprising to me, I was looking through the hottest tag on manga plus and was surprised to see it all the way down at #60. I like it well enough because I like shinohara’s work but would personally put it in like, top 20 of actively-publishing works on the platform
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Aug 16, 2023 15:58
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I'm glad Kill Blue and MMA seem to be doing well, but lol that Nue is next after them as far as new stuff is concerned. Rip Fabricant, I guess, being behind Gill.
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Aug 16, 2023 16:08
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I'm interested to see where Kill Blue is going, because not gonna lie, I really didn't want him to even temporarily transform back into an adult anytime soon, so I'm not the biggest fan of the end of the most recent chapter.
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Aug 16, 2023 16:12
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Dexo posted:I'm interested to see where Kill Blue is going, because not gonna lie, I really didn't want him to even temporarily transform back into an adult anytime soon, so I'm not the biggest fan of the end of the most recent chapter. Yeah, best case scenario it becomes a temporary power-up for when he runs into an assassin kid him can't deal with, and it rarely happens. I think it'd be interesting if he absolutely hates being able to transform back. He's pretty happy being able to actually learn in school and do all the things he missed out on the first time he was a teen, and having to go from that to being a middle-aged man again would kinda suck. Even if he wants to go back to normal, it doesn't mean he wants to go back now
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Aug 16, 2023 17:16
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i hope he gets control of it and only uses it to beat up on small children as a full sized adult assassin man
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Aug 16, 2023 17:30
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It's interesting to me that it's the first time he hasn't been in danger or, like, doing work, and that's when he transformed back. Maybe that'll be the whole thing, and to go back to normal he has to learn to chill. But then knowing that makes him too nervous to chill.
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Aug 16, 2023 17:33
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