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Hello everyone, it is I, forums poster Xibanya, known for very long ramblings about Dragonball and Jojos, back with longer ramblings still. ITT: I bring you my impassioned defense of the Chapter Black arc of Yu Yu Hakusho, which, according to reddit and people I keep running into IRL, is the least popular story arc of Yu Yu Hakusho, and which also happens to be my personal favorite, because I have terrible taste.  I will first start with a thematic analysis, before proceeding with a more formalist critique. (In other words we're getting on the same page as far as the story goes before we get into the weeds with the inconsistent quality of work done by the various studios these episodes were farmed out to.) Please also note that my thematic critique applies only to the anime; the manga is different enough that it does not support all of the same arguments. Chapter Black, known also as the Sensui arc after it's villain, spans episode 67 - 94 of the anime. is delightfully dark and has some of the show's best fights. Its principal antagonist, Sensui, is a fascinating villain. Gentle, soft-spoken, and shockingly cruel, with the twist that he used to be a heroic Spirit Detective just like Yusuke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOg-Ae5ATo Sensui once ardently defended the human realm against supernatural threats, until something terrible happened that caused him to snap, driving him to seek the death of all humans. So what is his supervillain origin story? (warning, unmarked plot spoilers follow)   What broke the sanity of Yu Yu Hakusho's darkest villain is that he got subjected to just too much stupidity from the show's resident goofy mascot character. He was driven mad by a malproportioned cartoon gremlin. Shinobu Sensui is less resilient than Elmer Fudd. Here's aforementioned cartoon gremlin. This is Koenma, (really 700 years old, naturally) judge of the dead, de facto ruler of Spirit World, and Yusuke's boss, who drives the plot by giving Yusuke missions to defend the Earth from various baddies and by delivering copious exposition.  Anime mascots play by different rules than the rest of the cast. Physics? Don't need 'em. Shapeshifting? Sure. Hammerspace? Go hog wild.  He exhibits the sort of over the top assholery typical of such characters, but holding him to it would be like trying Bugs Bunny at the Hague. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QljftN6bDC8 Christ, what an rear end in a top hat. But what I really love about this bonkers premise is that it not only works, it makes one of the most nuanced explorations of personal agency and moral complicity I've seen in any young adult fiction, and it does so via the antagonist's conflict with basically a loony tune.  A footnote on terminology: I am writing with the assumption that like myself, readers are from a Western culture, and I will be using Western name order and the EN localization's translation for most terms. However, I am making a deliberate choice to use "yokai" rather than "demon" because I feel strongly that the word's strong associations with Christian religious concepts make it unsuitable as a translation for what is really meant, which is "supernatural apparition." If I had to pick a single English word to use in place of "yokai" I would probably use "fay", but justifying that merits an effort post of its own. I will also be using "Enma" rather than "Yama" because the enmeshment of the identities of Enma and Koenma will become relevant. Part I: Exposition about the Exposition The story arc begins with Yusuke getting an assignment from Koenma as usual: Yusuke is charged with stopping bad guys attempting to create a magic passage between Human World and Demon world, allowing powerful yokai to run rampant and cause the extinction of the human race  As Yusuke fights these bad guys it becomes apparent that they have been brainwashed by their mysterious ringleader into wanting to kill all humans.  Their leader has done this by showing them Chapter Black, a magic VHS tape that contains footage of the worst human acts in history.  Chapter Black drives the humans who watch it insane with guilt, but a god like Koenma can watch it no problem, apparently. In fact the tape itself is a smuggled Spirit World document. So only a human uncommonly familiar with Spirit World would have known of it or how to steal it. The heroes realize that Koenma has been withholding information about the leader, whose identity he already knows. This prompts Yusuke to demand answers, leading to one of the most cherished lines in the entire dub.  (can you believe people skip this season??) Plot twist, the bad guy was the Spirit Detective before Yusuke, Shinobu Sensui, once the apple of Koenma's eye. The way he talks about him you'd think it was his son instead of his employee.     (For those not familiar with the series or who didn't make it past the first half of it and are wondering what's going on with that last screencap there, Koenma takes on the corporeal form of a normal-looking man when he wants to directly interface with the Living World, and his persisting in his weird cartoon behavior while attempting to pull a "how do you do, fellow humans?" is a recurring source of humor.) The last mission Koenma sent Sensui on was an assignment to take down a yokai trafficking ring by neutralizing its leaders while they were all gathered for an event. He failed to mention to Sensui that the event was a yokai rape orgy.     When Sensui accidentally stumbled upon the "feast of human vices" he flipped out and killed every human present. He then broke into the Spirit World vault, made off with the Chapter Black tape, and his whereabouts remained unknown for the next 10 years.  But ya didn't, did ya? Part II: Whose fault is it anyway? Chapter Black's Unreliable Narrators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPvnbAJFMk Koenma states that since before they met, Sensui held a moral absolutist stance against yokai on account of the numerous attempts on his life made by yokai in his early childhood. He claims that Sensui had a strong sense of justice and disliked moral ambiguity, maintaining a strong “humans are good, yokai are bad” stance.  He goes so far as to assert that Sensui's "mind wasn't big enough" to handle rudimentary moral ambiguity. On giving the order that led to Sensui's breakdown, Koenma thinks: “It was my fault; I was too eager to close the case. How could I not have known how you would react…?”  As he tells it, his moral failure was not accounting for the possibility that Sensui might stumble upon the event, which he speculates was such a powerful rebuttal to Sensui’s moral absolutism that it broke his mind. Had he done so, he would presumably have opted to have his agents take down each individual member of the trafficking ring separately even though that would have prolonged resolving the matter considerably.   Koenma remorsefully tells Yusuke et al. how in hindsight it was incredibly careless of him to allow Sensui to go anywhere he might see a human behaving badly. In this version of events, Koenma's mistake was treating Sensui as having more than a child's grasp of right and wrong. The poor lad's mind was so fragile 😔 If the boy were sensible like Koenma (noted cartoon gremlin) none of this would have happened.  Now this is a fun bit of narrative sleight of hand, because as Koenma's function in the series is to be a vehicle for heaping out lumps of exposition on the reader, we've been primed to take everything he says at face value. Where this story arc gives this character heretofore unknown sophistication is in having him use prior function as a storytelling device for delivering statements which must a priori be assumed to be accurate as a means to deflect the viewer's scrutiny from what is, frankly, incredible bullshit. Throughout the arc, Koenma acts shifty and evasive on account of his guilt over whatever it was he did, and when he cops to being the one who made Sensui into a supervillain, Sensui agrees, “you have no idea how right you are…” but they have very different ideas about what his moral failure actually was. Itsuki (Sensui's partner, a yokai) claims Sensui’s moral absolutist stance wasn’t broken when he saw humans committing evil but rather on the night he defeated Itsuki when he discovered he and a yokai could both have the same TV show. It was then, not the night of the raid, that he started to process that yokai were also beings with thoughts and emotions.  According to Sensui, the horrible truth behind his breakdown wasn’t the discovery of moral ambiguity, but realizing that all along in carrying out Koenma’s orders, rather than always acting in defense of the helpless, he had in many cases been committing politically-motivated murders and assassinations. Sensui alleges that he was knowingly shaped into a remorseless killer, was discouraged from questioning orders, and had his youth and naivety exploited to make him a more effective tool for carrying out the agendas of someone else -- implicitly, Koenma.  That's...wow...those are some very serious charges. Sensui, babe, are you sure we're talking about the same dipshit cartoon gnome???  This Sensui, he's a smart cookie. Having serious grievances with Koenma, deity-in-residence, he has hatched a plot not to attack and dethrone god but rather to kill all humans.  Can't get anything past this guy. Now here's the real brilliant part, which I think isn't appreciated enough. The series has pulled yet another narrative sleight of hand to take advantage of our expectation that of course the crazy shonen manga supervillain wants to end the world for reasons that make no logical sense. I've read a lot of posts by fans on reddit and tumblr which discuss the series from the point of view that we can take everything Sensui says at face value, but he's being no more honest here than Koenma. His side of the story is equally incredible bullshit. As they say on twitter, buckle up motherfuckers, because we're not even close to going off the rails yet. We haven't even gotten to the cartoon baby's attempted murder-suicide. Part III: Moral Failures of a Cartoon Manchild Koenma is a magic babyman who cannot be held to real standards because he's not a "real person" in the sense of bearing moral culpability either in-universe or extra-narratively. Yusuke, Kurama, et al, are animated characters, Koenma is a cartoon. His closest Western analogue is probably Chief Quimby from Inspector Gadget.  His morality can't be judged the way Toguro or Hiei's can; Koenma exists in an entirely different class of expectations! Until he decides to join the plot.  https://i.imgur.com/jOj5Dhw.mp4 Since bringing Yusuke back to life, Koenma's never actually directly participated in the story, he's mainly just given orders and exposition. Even his participation as a member of Team Urameshi in the Dark Tournament was only as an observer.  https://i.imgur.com/E2cpgZ2.mp4 And though the Chapter Black arc has the novelty of him being shifty about it, that's still all he's done so far. The show itself presents Koenma as a fellow audience member, and he spends most of the show...watching the show. There's never an explanation for why he cares so much about Hakusho's humans when their fate doesn't affect him, but then, it doesn't affect us either and we're still watching.  https://i.imgur.com/RptyJMW.mp4 Once he has skin in the game something interesting happens. He starts being framed by the visual storytelling as a real person. And if we must consider him a real person (in the sense that Yusuke, Kurama, et al are real people) then that completely changes the moral calculus of his actions to date. And they have not been nice.  https://i.imgur.com/bYbPC7H.mp4 To be clear, we're nowhere near "Koenma was evil all along." He's undeniably emotionally invested in the safety of humanity, despite the fact that there's nothing that can happen in Living World that would pose an existential threat to him. In The Dark Tournament he bets his life on Yusuke's victory, but if Yusuke is killed by Toguro in the tournament final, that closes the book on every character, because in that event there's no longer a plot. In real terms, Koenma has as much to lose or gain from the outcome as us. In fact the only thing Koenma fears is angering his father, great king Enma. His authority rests on the premise that he is acting on behalf of his father. Lack of oversight gives him some latitude to pursue his own agendas but opposing his father is the one line he will not cross  The lives of humans are of little interest to Enma; he will apparently cause earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other disasters out of temperamental caprice. But he has a vested interest in keeping yokai out of the human realm because it is part of his sovereign territory.  Koenma's actually pursuing three objectives at once: being humanity's moral arbiter, consolidating dynastic power, and protecting the living (optional personal project). And he isn't doing any of these three very well.  What's more, his conflicting obligations cause him to elide exactly which policy goal any of his orders to his Spirit Detectives are in service of. And so, Koenma is the moral arbiter of the universe, but his moral failures make it impossible for him to bring about the outcomes stipulated by the very values he judges others by. It's not that his moral principles are bad. He has never demonstrated any prejudice against yokai. There's no way he encouraged Sensui to hate yokai. There's no way he had yokai ethnic cleansing as a policy goal. These things happened but he didn't mean them to…  When his actions have negative consequences, he’s always too busy, too distracted, too absent to look deeper, because if he did, he would have to change course or be fully cognizant of the fact that he is choosing to cause pain and suffering for the sake of his own convenience.  Sensui’s radical ideology was convenient and Koenma did nothing to disabuse him of it, and then was too distracted to address Sensui's mounting emotional distress until it was too late to do anything about it. And it's not like it was hard to notice.    Koenma did some combination of denying, minimizing, and justifying to himself the signs that he was sending Sensui to commit acts that Sensui, had he an accurate understanding of yokai personhood, would have found morally objectionable. He did it because it was easy. So what really happened? What did Koenma really do to Sensui? When things seemed uncomfortable, rather than face the source of his discomfort, he looked away. Koenma's failure to recognize the person Sensui was becoming was the inevitable result of his own moral laziness. https://i.imgur.com/KwaV6SB.mp4  ＬＥＧＳ Part IV: The Death Drive and Futility of Moral Nihilism  Things get REALLY interesting here because if Koenma is a cartoon remaking himself into a real person, Sensui is a real person remaking himself as a cartoon. He magically turns his own arm into a gun! The man has hacked hammerspace by sheer force of will.  Sensui even has an answer to Koenma's dodging culpability by being narratively categorized as a loony tune-- he blames everything bad he's done on alternate personalities. Our man Sensui has actually gone loony tunes  wait a sec. Did I post that image already?  ah. And so we have two half-man-half-cartoon characters on a collision course, and Koenma makes his final judgment of the series: he sentences himself and Sensui to death and this time he also plans to be jury and executioner.  Okay his plan is to bind Sensui and himself in eternal torment rather than literal death, but in terms of narrative function, the stakes are death. This is wild. At the start of the arc I'd have expected this about as much as I'd expect DBZ's Oolong to commit suicide by cop.  Koenma has decided he deserves to die for what he's done to Sensui, but for Koenma's considerable moral failures, we really can't lay all of Sensui's trauma at his feet. Don't be taken in by Sensui's innocent victim routine. Because Sensui is guilty of moral laziness as well.  https://i.imgur.com/melkyPR.mp4 Can it really be possible that when regularly hearing yokai beg for their lives, it didn't occur to Sensui at all that yokai were people? Or did it not matter until he met one he was attracted to?  Yusuke questions orders constantly and usually Koenma relents after only token resistance. Can it really be possible that Sensui thought some orders were terribly wrong but feared the consequences of questioning the authority of Koenma, wacky cartoon gremlin and notable dipshit?  Sensui accuses Yusuke of being a tool of Koenma. He must believe so or he'd have to admit that if Yusuke has a choice, then he too had a choice but passively obeyed and ceded culpability, because it was easy. In fact Sensui never acknowledges that Yusuke is his opponent, he acts like he is in a chess game against Koenma the entire time. And though the elevator pitch for the story arc is "Yusuke vs his dark mirror", Sensui is really the dark mirror to Koenma.  Koenma recruits youths to pursue his agendas, and so does Sensui. Sensui felt he was coerced and treated as disposable, he coerces and treats his subordinates as disposable in turn. Koenma compartmentalizes, Sensui needs 7 personalities for all his compartmentalizing.  https://i.imgur.com/eiofDeP.mp4 Koenma judges humanity, Sensui likewise. Koenma watches his subordinates from his brightly colored office, so Sensui watches his from a dark spooky office.  Perhaps this is the only model of leadership Sensui knows. There's definitely a "no you shut the gently caress up dad" feel to the execution.  We even discover that Sensui was never really pursuing human genocide as an end to itself, the death of all humans is just acceptable collateral damage. Koenma never pursues yokai death as an end to itself, but even trying to redeem himself he finds it acceptable collateral damage. Yusuke is gobsmacked to see what his seemingly incompetent boss is really capable of, but the only difference now is this time Koenma's getting some fresh air.  Sensui is terminally ill and since death approaches regardless, he wants to die on his own terms: his goal all along was to be killed by a yokai in Demon World. He wants to be at peace with the yokai he killed, and if he has to he'll kill every human to do it. And Sensui does eventually make it to Demon World as he planned. But far from absolving himself, all he really accomplishes before dying is killing even more yokai. Also, donning some goofy organic armor, progressing along his transformation from man into stupid-looking cartoon.  This is the same death drive that motivates Koenma in his attempt to end both Sensui and himself. They both have the idea that self-annihilation will absolve them of their moral laziness. But this just replaces their moral laziness with moral nihilism.  https://i.imgur.com/sQE9opJ.mp4 It invites comparison with Toguro the Younger. After failing to protect his students from being murdered by a monster, to purge the pain of his guilt he becomes as evil as he feels. The common thread here is that unchecked guilt is worse than useless: it is a moral dead end.  wow, interesting analysis, Koenma, tell me more.  well, it's not like the cartoon gremlin's any stranger to hypocrisy. I will pause for now; next is Part V: Abdication of Responsibility and the Damaged Self EDIT: I went back and replaced some of the massive gifs being used as citations with embedded imgur videos which should take up less local memory on your device. You can watch 'em with sound by right clicking them, selecting "show all controls" and unmuting them, or by opening them in a new tab/window which will take you to imgur whereupon you can unmute them there. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Dec 16, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 04:34
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Chapter Black is good but the final fight goes completely to poo poo the moment Sensui starts switching personalities. The dynamic of Sensui being way more skilled then Yusuke but Yusuke being physically stronger was rad and it just gets tossed in the garbage when true Sensui comes out and he also becomes a lot more boring then his original personality we're introduced to in the arc.
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Dec 13, 2022 22:11
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RevolverDivider posted:Chapter Black is good but the final fight goes completely to poo poo the moment Sensui starts switching personalities. The dynamic of Sensui being way more skilled then Yusuke but Yusuke being physically stronger was rad and it just gets tossed in the garbage when true Sensui comes out and he also becomes a lot more boring then his original personality we're introduced to in the arc. I don't even mind the personality switch but yeah "true sensui" is a boring character and the sacred energy armor is probably the most bullshit thing in the entire series, even moreso than Yusuke coming back to life shortly thereafter. The chapter black arc is overall pretty good, but the ending definitely feels like a fumble.
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Dec 13, 2022 22:15
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I never watched it op and I'm more of a manga head anyway. I've been thinking about reading ruroni kenshin but it doesn't look to have enough pregnancy scares or tearful wedding scenes to be my cup of tea
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Dec 13, 2022 22:15
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I think part of the reason the ending feels like a non-ending is because, more than average, it feels like a transition into the next arc rather than a proper conclusion to the Sensui stuff boy i sure do love yu yu hakusho tho
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Dec 13, 2022 22:37
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RevolverDivider posted:Chapter Black is good but the final fight goes completely to poo poo the moment Sensui starts switching personalities. The dynamic of Sensui being way more skilled then Yusuke but Yusuke being physically stronger was rad and it just gets tossed in the garbage when true Sensui comes out and he also becomes a lot more boring then his original personality we're introduced to in the arc. Yeah, this is exactly how I feel. The fight devolves into dumb nonsense and Yusuke's three friends power up to do basically nothing but stretch out the already too long fight. Other than that the arc is really good, I was not aware people didn't like the non-finale parts. Reading all this makes me want to rewatch the series again actually. "Forty years for seven personalities is only six" is the dumbest line ever and I still think about it to this day though Momomo fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Dec 13, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2022 23:13
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Larry Parrish posted:I never watched it op and I'm more of a manga head anyway. I've been thinking about reading ruroni kenshin but it doesn't look to have enough pregnancy scares or tearful wedding scenes to be my cup of tea There's a manga you dumb rear end.
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Dec 13, 2022 23:45
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OnimaruXLR posted:I think part of the reason the ending feels like a non-ending is because, more than average, it feels like a transition into the next arc rather than a proper conclusion to the Sensui stuff The entire final fight is more a set up for the final arc than anything else. Like you can like or dislike the demon turn but it was obvious that’s was going somewhere.
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Dec 13, 2022 23:58
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I'm not reading all that but im happy you enjoy anime
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Dec 14, 2022 00:41
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Pewdiepie posted:There's a manga you dumb rear end. I'm aware but it doesn't have enough people drawn with ultra sparkly eyes
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Dec 14, 2022 02:12
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chapter black is all really good arc and anyone who says it's their least favorite probably did not finish the series because the final arc was rough
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Dec 14, 2022 03:41
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they stopped airing the Chapter Black saga on TV for some reason and just started over from the beginning so when I was a teenager I downloaded the rest of the series to finish watching it. the last arc was weird
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Dec 14, 2022 03:45
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Jon Irenicus posted:they stopped airing the Chapter Black saga on TV for some reason and just started over from the beginning so when I was a teenager I downloaded the rest of the series to finish watching it. the last arc was weird They moved it to 5am Saturday morning. I remember because I set my alarm to watch it and .Hack//legend of the twilight bracelet 
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Dec 14, 2022 03:56
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Kuwabara wanted the spirit sword to get longer and hell, I'm glad he did This arc lost me despite sounding really interesting when it started.
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Dec 14, 2022 04:14
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Anime Three Kings is way better then Manga Three kings and the YYH dub loving obliterates the sub its one of the best dubs of its era
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Dec 14, 2022 05:46
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Chapter black kicks rear end because Kuwabara got to shine for a bit. He only really had the one fight but his act of mercy after disproved sensuis argument. The three kings arc was the worst arc simply because Kuwabara didn't feature at all.
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Dec 14, 2022 06:10
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Deki posted:Chapter black kicks rear end because Kuwabara got to shine for a bit. He only really had the one fight but his act of mercy after disproved sensuis argument. nah it rocks bc Hiei ends up with a waifu
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Dec 14, 2022 07:50
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I enjoyed this arc a bunch and still really prefer it as the final arc of the series over literally everything that came after it.
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Dec 14, 2022 08:12
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oh sweet I'd been avoiding using imgur to host the video citations because it looked like they wouldn't embed with sound, but turns out you can right click the videos, select show all controls, and then unmute them? so I don't have to upload five second videos to youtube or embed like 20MB gifs?? will wonders never cease??? https://i.imgur.com/xB0c7bS.mp4 Part V: Abdication of Responsibility and the Damaged Self So back to the murder-suicide...  I'd like to see ol’ Shinobu Sensui wriggle his way out of THIS jam! *Sensui wriggles out of the jam easily* Ah! Well. Nevertheless,  Koenma has little in the way of offensive abilities but his defensive abilities have proved to be quite effective — against yoki (the spiritual power of yokai.) Not only is he implied to have had something to do with the existing barrier, we see during the Dark Tournament that he can deflect the spectator-melting energy coming off of Toguro with ease. But while attacking Sensui he confesses that he's only cast this particular spell twice before, and this is his first time casting it on a human*. Koenma personally carries no anti-yokai prejudice, yet the result is the same as if he had: his resources for solving problems, be they via policy or via combat, are entirely oriented towards yokai. Now that the enemy is a human, he's caught completely flat-footed. *EN replaces this with him once again asking Sensui to back down. I've been letting differences between EN and JP scripts pass without comment but this one I'm calling out because I think the JP dialogue is thematically significant. And indeed, Sensui smugly tells Koenma that his spell would have worked if Sensui were a yokai, but Sensui’s spiritual power, seikoki, is so holy it can't be contained by Koenma's run-of-the-mill reiki. Sensui is literally pulling holier than thou on a god.* Building off of how Sensui had been explaining to Yusuke earlier that he can no longer be contained by Koenma's values, we see that Koenma can no longer restrain him figuratively or literally.  https://i.imgur.com/KnaPLVK.mp4 *As an interesting counterpoint, the EN dub does not go into the vagarities of different flavors of ki (that is to say, spiritual power) so it replaces this dialogue with one in which Sensui savors Koenma's visibly being upset. Although the dialogue is very different, one could say this is a clever workaround for the ki problem, since the ultimate result either way is Sensui's crowing about Koenma's loss of any sort of claim to moral authority.  Later, after being defeated, Sensui explains that even considering seikoki, Koenma really was powerful enough to one-shot him, so he deliberately arranged for Amanuma to die on Koenma's route, knowing his guilt would compel him to revive the child on the spot, drastically reducing his quantity of stored reiki.  Koenma compromises his ability to stop Sensui from killing all humans to revive one child because the sight of it makes him feel too bad. His failure to emotionally separate consequences in his control vs consequences that are not makes him fundamentally incapable of creating the outcomes that his moral values are meant to achieve. Kurama and Genkai are Yu Yu Hakusho's model adults: their actions and attitudes are almost always presented as correct; their choices reveal the story's argued moral imperatives.  (irrelevant, but lol) And when presented with impossible choices, they proceed with fully realized agency. During the Dark Tournament, in preparing Yusuke to take on Younger Toguro, Genkai weakens her own combat power understanding that this does not remove her obligation to Team Urameshi; she chooses to uphold her commitment to fight knowing she is at greater risk of being killed.  Koenma's relieving his distress over Amanuma's death caused him to face Sensui also having weakened combat power but unlike Genkai he compromised his ability to fulfill his prior commitment. Sensui kills Yusuke immediately after thwarting his attack. Koenma didn't mean to choose Amanuma over Yusuke but by ceding agency to his guilt he lost control of the outcome.  Kurama faced the same choice. Though Sensui engineers the circumstances, Amanuma's death comes at Kurama's hand. He chooses killing Amanuma over allowing the end of the world. Yusuke, seeing how Kurama's upset tries to assure him that it wasn't his fault. Kurama coldly tells him that he has no regrets.  Koenma has control of the fate of all human souls, but Sensui slips through his fingers here as well. Sensui chooses to let his soul disintegrate*, removing himself from culpability and consequence altogether. His transformation into a cartoon is complete. *This isn't stated explicitly but it seems to be the conclusion we are meant to draw given that what happens to a soul that isn't guided to Spirit World is explained so thoroughly earlier in the arc we even get a diagram and this topic otherwise never comes up again.  Yusuke remarks that even though Sensui has died, it feels like he won anyway. Itsuki departs with Sensui's body, but not before reminding us one more time that Koenma was complicit in everything that's happened here and getting off one last sick burn.  Like Yusuke says, this is somewhat unsatisfying. But we have some indication as to the life Sensui might have led if he hadn't gone off the deep end. We see a glimpse of it in the household of the Spirit Detective before him: Kuroko Sato (nee Sanada), whose approach (and appearance!) is more like Sensui's than like Yusuke's.  Kuroko, the first ever spirit detective, was a morally upright, responsible teen and did her job well, quitting on good terms to start a family. It seems likely that since the experiment was a success, Koenma sought to replace Kuroko with someone as similar as possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ThphkYiNT4 Kuroko, like Sensui did, also holds a hardline anti-yokai stance, and has raised her children to kill any yokai on sight. She lives in a remote location and is constantly on guard. Frankly, it seems like a dreary life. Is this the destiny of the well-behaved spirit detective? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQILlNiamPQ I wonder if Kuroko has doubled down on her conviction that all yokai must die for the same reason Sensui believes to the end that his real duel was with Koenma. Because if these things are true, then they did nothing wrong. One wonders how it weighs on them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPn4RLZdS_g Unlike Kuroko or Sensui, Yusuke seems unburdened by his actions as Spirit Detective. But then, most of his missions start with him criticizing the task until Koenma or Botan (Koenma-by-proxy) obtain his buy-in. (except that one time they bribed him w/ martial arts tourney tix...)  They show us that acting out of ideology rather than genuine compassion will result in harming real individuals in favor of hypothetical ones, as it is easy to cede responsibility when obligated by the "greater good," a concept that can be tortured to justify pretty much anything.  Mitarai has used his all-jocks-bad belief to justify hurting Kuwabara, who looks an awful lot like a jock, when he doesn't even know Kuwabara at all. By acting according to his ideology rather than critically thinking, he hurts people he would otherwise have liked.  Not coincidentally, Chapter Black begins with Genkai emphasizing to her heir the importance of critical thinking. Genkai, the wisest, most self-actualized character in the show, is the authority figure Yusuke respects most, and she is intentionally teaching him to question even her as well.  https://i.imgur.com/9sxTBOP.mp4 Ceding agency has prevented a full formation of, even damaged, Kuroko and Sensui's sense of self. Kuroko's self is damaged so she hides herself away from anything that could hurt it. Sensui's self is damaged so he destroys anything that could hurt it.  if "just following orders" is a form of moral laziness, one that stunts the growth of the self, then questioning authority and thinking critically are moral imperatives, ones necessary to becoming a fully-realized adult. And a damaged self repeats the acts that damaged it in turn.  https://i.imgur.com/u8D6SLt.mp4 Next time: Part VI: I learned it by watching You (Yu Hakusho)  https://i.imgur.com/3Pgt8D5.mp4 Shinjobi posted:This arc lost me despite sounding really interesting when it started. the pacing gets hosed once the fight gets taken to Demon World. It sux that the least interesting fight in the arc is its concluding one. I'm trying to avoid editorializing while doing my thematic criticism but once I get past that, boy do I have opinions... Deki posted:Chapter black kicks rear end because Kuwabara got to shine for a bit. He only really had the one fight but his act of mercy after disproved sensuis argument. 33% of the show's humor is Kuwabara being an ignorant goofus, 33% of the show's humor is Koenma being an upper class twit, and 33% of the show's humor is Yusuke pulling faces at the antics of the prior mentioned two. Three Kings arc ejects the first two, leaving Yusuke only those boring bald fuckers to pull faces at. I'm gonna have more to say about this once I'm editorializing the storytelling but I think Togashi wrote himself into a corner by using this arc to dismantle the core storytelling loop he'd been using until then. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Dec 16, 2022 |
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Dec 16, 2022 07:52
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Xibanya posted:ITT: I bring you my impassioned defense of the Chapter Black arc of Yu Yu Hakusho, which, according to reddit and people I keep running into IRL, is the least popular story arc of Yu Yu Hakusho, and which also happens to be my personal favorite, because I have terrible taste. stopped reading here op. since you yourself said you have terrible taste i dont see why i should listen to your opinions on why something was good. anyway the multiple personalities thing was dumb. it could have been good but wasnt and felt like a total asspull. peace
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Dec 16, 2022 19:37
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Stexils posted:stopped reading here op. since you yourself said you have terrible taste i dont see why i should listen to your opinions on why something was good. thanks for ur contribution
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Dec 16, 2022 19:49
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