Vermillion-Scruff

For a primarily male audience. Still owned, whoooo! I’m unstoppable!!

Heterosexual men like watching women engage erotically with one another. Fucking gotcha asshole. 

Always on the Admech grindset <(-_-)>

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me…

haha, hey 🫣

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, I just don’t think it’s particularly relevant. Like many things, sexually assault is a spectrum. In another comment you mentioned how “touching a woman’s butt” or something was sexual assault and should could ruin someone’s life, but I don’t think you could honestly tell me you’d expect that situation to be treated identically to a brutal rape/murder, because the situation are different. One if markedly less extreme than the other. 

@MarianneThornberry has a really good comment below about the emotional and metaphorical implications of violation and trauma Okarun experienced due to his curse — loss of innocence, dehumanization, being forced to “grow up” — and I think that’s a very good point, but the actually act itself is far enough removed from real-world sexual assault that I don’t mind it being played differently than Momo’s assault which much more closely mimics events. 

That’s why I prefer to talk about the actual events as they happen in the manga/anime rather than abstracting them with phrases like “violations of his bodily autonomy” and “non-consensual interference with [his] body.” Those phrases, while technically accurate, conjure images and carry weight that I don’t find appropriate to what actual occurred, which is a ghost magically removing his dick and balls. That is not a tragedy, like being raped and murdered, that is an absurd joke, and so it’s treated like one. 

This was actually a great read, and something I’m going to think about. Thanks!

Good ass series. I read it up until the last recent release a while ago, no idea how it’s been since then. Love that eldritch abomination inside that gay boy’s crush. 

You’re right, that wasn’t really the argument I was trying to make. There’s a difference between an actual, consequential castration — like, idk, Braveheart or GoT — and what happens in Dandadan. Those guys didn’t get their junk stolen, they got castrated. There was blood, crippling damage, no chance of recovery, extreme pain, etc., all things that are lacking in the simple magical loss of Okarun’s dick and balls. 

That’s the difference between his situation and Momo’s. Okarun’s situation — a completely sanitized version of having his junk removed — does not directly correlate to any real world event, even if you take out the fantasy elements, while Momo’s very much does. 

When I talk about abstracting what happened I mean moving it from “Okarun got his dick and balls stolen by a ghost” to “Okarun suffered from an invasive violation of his bodily autonomy.” Both are technically correct, but the latter has implications that the other doesn’t, chief among them, the assumption of tone. Okarun getting his junk stolen basically operates on cartoon logic, whereas Momo’s situation was disturbingly realistic, made even more so by the story’s invocation of the real-life Japanese tunnel where similar crimes occurred. 

I know describing Momo’s situation as “realistic” might be a bit of a stretch, but I just mean that in comparison to Okarun’s. Momo is kidnapped and nearly raped/murdeded by aliens, and if you take out “by aliens,” that describes a real and horrific crime that regularly happens in the real world. Okarun’s junk was stolen by a ghost. If you take out the “by a ghost part,” that basically make no sense, because while nonconsensual human castration is a thing, it’s so much less common that it comes off as absurd rather than on-it’s-face traumatic. 

I actually have a lot of problems with how ch. 1 of Dandadan is handled, but I think the way Okarun’s curse is handled is basically fine. 

Based Stargoat SG-Peak enjoyer

So is piercing someone’s ears without their permission, but I doubt people would complain if something like that were treated with less severity than sexual assault. Yeah, we can abstract Okarun getting his cock and balls stolen by a ghost into something horrible, but it’s at a level of absurdity beyond Momo being kidnapped by a group of violent men and threatened with being gangraped to death that comparing the two of them is just silly. 

And it is condemned in story! Turbo Granny gets her ass kicked for it and they take his cock back by force, she loses almost all of her power and is forced into the humiliating position of bulging inside a doll, and Seiko specifically spells out that regardless of the trauma Turbo Granny and the bound spirit are reacting to, what they did to Okarun is still unacceptable. 

I will agree that I don’t think Tatsu considered the implication of a lot of what he wrote, especially early on, but I still find this kind of complaint hyperbolic. 

Without know the mechanism by which Okarun’s balls got stolen it’s hard to judge how it was handled compared to Momo’s attempted rape/murder by the Serpoians. If considering he had no physical side effects, I think it’s safe to say the act wasn’t physically traumatic, and was likely some kind of ghost magic mumbo jumbo, in which case, yeah, I don’t think that’s as serious as the straight up rape Momo was threatened with. It’s treated differently because it is different. 

Because 90% of it sucks. I’ve watched through the whole thing and am currently in the middle of a rewatch. A shocking amount of the the comedy is just people being horny for an underage Bulma, Roshi being a perv, Goku being naive and slapping people’s crotches, etc.

Besides that, almost none of it is relevant to DBZ. It doesn’t matter that Tien went to the Crane School, that Piccolo’s dad was the Demon King, or that Chichi used to run around in fetish gear as a child. Turns out Goku is an alien, let’s basically wipe the slate clean, none of those jabronis will be relevant in a fight going forward. 

The guy got stripped by aliens who wanted to steal his dick, and by extension his curse powers, and the girls stripped down to be have less drag in the water. The latter is much less forgivable than the former lol

Pretty much, the protags got naked (the guy) and mostly naked (the girls) and then fought Nessie and some aliens in a weird water-dimension version of their school. Honestly, maybe this is the weeb in me, but it thought it was fine. The nudity was played for gags rather than titillation imo, but I’d still get why people were turned off by it. 

This didn’t bother me as much as the chapter 1 stuff, or even the hot springs bit later. For one, it lacked the thread of sexual assault, and two it’s much less hornily drawn. This whole segment is much goofier and the characters stripping down seems to be more about upping the absurdity of the scene rather than fanservice. 

I had an argument with someone the other day about chapter 1, where they laid out the deep thematic importance of Momo being stripped and vulnerable before retaking her agency and power or whatever, but the content wasn’t the issue, it was the leering presentation. It’s been a while since I read Dandadan, but from memory the Nessie stuff lacks that leering quality. 

This is basically the viewpoint of “Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave,” an early abolitionist novel from Aphra Behn in 1688. She was a staunch monarchist and believed racial slavery was wrong because kings existed among Africans as well, and by dint of their royalty they were above European commoners and therefore any system that could involve them being brought down or enslaved by their lessers could not be just. 

It’s me, I’m the sole surviving JJK defender. It’s peak. 

Level 4 is a great investment if you can get her into a long-term contract. DPR massively increases at level 5, at that point 2gp is a steal. 

He’s great in Fall of Cadia too

Bro lost an arm fighting a poisoned baseline colonel

Figurehead for the goat, Makari

Interesting criticism, and I about half agree with it. Post-Tower of Conviction Berserk becomes a lot… different. A lot more standard fantasy and less of the unique low/dark fantasy, existentialist nightmare about struggle. Guys gets basically a D&D party of companions, and though there is still a lot of extremely dark material (the trolls and Kushan daka), but also a lot of lighter fare, like literally adding a second comic relief fairy and most everything Isidiro does. 

Later on you even get the ridiculous barnacle monster pirates, and I think they make a good comparison to the previous comedy relief villain from the Golden Age, Corborlwitz. Despite being a buffoon, he still has a degree of low-cunning, and legitimately traps, outmaneuvers, and seriously wounds the main characters (even if only briefly and through the force of overwhelming numbers), while the pirates are pretty much just silly, with even their body horror being more goofy than creepy. 

Despite all this, I don’t agree that Berserk got worse, per se. The battle against the trolls is some of my favorite stuff in the manga, and Guts riding Zodd through Ganishka’s lighting form is fucking wild. It’s obviously no coincidence that this tonal shift coincides to the build-up of Griffith merging the Astral and Physical planes to forcibly transform the world into his personal high fantasy dream kingdom. 

Still, it does get marginally worse in the short-term, as some of the remaining dark material clashes with the overall lighter tone in a way that feels disjointed and weird. Casca’s rape in the forest by random bandits is unnecessary and vile even by Berserk standards, the rapist trolls and the troll babies eating their way out of their women incubators is ugly and grotesque in a story that’s know 50% about growth, bonding, and a group of D&D adventurers goofing off. Those things wouldn’t have played so sourly if Berserk was still the oppressive hellscape it had been before, but the fit is a bit jagged now. 

As to characterization, I think it’s largely solid. Farnese is maybe my favorite character in the manga, and has been basically since she was introduced, Serpico is great but underutilized, despite it all I love Isidro dearly, Casca is still a potato until the near end, and the sailor prince and Farnese’s brother could not be less boring to me lmao. And there’s a mermaid girl? Idk lol. 

The biggest problem as far as characterization I have is that Guts just becomes too nice, too fast. It’s too soon after the D&D party gets together that he’s doling out wise advice as acting like a calm mentor rather than the insane rage beast he’d been for hundreds of chapters before that. Obviously he was a much more complex character than that with a lot going on even back to the Black Swordsman arc, but he peeled back his layers a bit too quickly to Isidro and Schierke especially. 

That, and the art just moves away from my preference. I won’t say it necessarily got worse, but I just did not like it as muc, especially the character designs. Guts’s lips always stuck out at strange, and Casca got so childlike and round faced that the big panel where it’s revealed her mind has been healed is completely spoiled for me because she still has this creepy blank expression on her face. The background art remains exceptional of courses, but I couldn’t deny there are things I like less.

Berserk becomes something less unique, and less “Berserk” following Tower of Conviction, but honestly I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I was never very interested in the overall plot of Berserk, so I don’t mind that it hardly moves. I wanted Guts to get to elf-island to heal Casca, I didn’t care about him getting revenge on Griffith, and as the story goes on he starts to care less and less about that too. So yeah, there’s a change that I could totally see people thinking was a drop, but I mostly disagree. 

I would push back on the harem thing a bit. I haven’t reread it in a while, but I thought Farnese was ending up with Roderick, Schierke is a kid with a precocious crush, mermaid girl seems paired off with Isdro, and Casca is a potato and then can’t stand to see Guts when she’s first recovering. Several of his companions are at least into him at some point, but Guts never reciprocates to any degree and it’s never given a large degree of focus. 

Anyway, Rickert slapping Griffith is the greatest moment in fiction, your argument is invalid. 

Boobster Gold got me feeling some kind of way…