Return of the Naruto Community Derail Thread: Part Two!

@Lore & Lu-tama Well that sucks to hear. Hope the two of you get well soon.

>Trying to have a conversation with someone on forums but their English is so bad you can''t understand what they are trying to say. :/

Try speaking in their native language. You both need to put in the effort to make this relationship work.

A bit of personal gushing: Hotline Miami 2 is finally out for Pre-Order; it's a wonderful day not to be in Australia. Hotline Miami is one of my favorite games ever, so I might replay it in preparation for the sequel. Plus, I never did pay close attention to the story.

So apparently Leonard Nimoy died today. He's finally been beamed up.

This actually hits me on a personal level since I actually met him at a convention that my father took me to when I was eight years old where I only wanted to meet Luke Skywalker(Mark Hamill)since I had just seen the first Star Wars movie, but my father thought I should say hello to the nice older man sitting at another, less crowded, table also since I had just learned how to say "Hello, my name is Oscar" in english.

I'm feeling really down now.

He was the best Master Xenahort. T_T

And here I though this day couldn't get any worse.

Cross post from Absent People.

Noooooooooooooo, Saiga-tam don't eave us! What will we dooooooooooooo

Party Hard?

See you in a few days, Saiga.

So Lu's losing her maid for a week?

Will be missing you, Saiga!

Good luck surviving the week without internet!

Oh, and hey there, Saiga from the future. If you're reading this now, that means you made it. Enjoy your brand spanking new internet!

Hmph! I notice no one complained when I was unexpectedly gone for a month due to no internet.

Yes, well, you didn't announce it, so you really have no one to blame for that but yourself.

I can blame the service provider.

Sorry for not noticing. It's probably just a joke, but that sort of thing can leave a person feeling a little left out, which sucks.

There's also the no internet thing. A real trooper, you are.

Unrelated: I'm rereading Aku No Hana, now that I saw the last chapter. It's fun how a perspective twist changes everything. It changes one of the strangest, and scariest characters I've ever seen into a sad, almost pitiable mess. It also makes this rollercoaster ride into an insanely twisted "Boy Meets Girl" story, which is slightly funnier.

As much as I love this manga...Goddamn, at times things get so intense and hit so close to home that I want to look away but can't. It doesn't hold back when it comes to showing the ugly side of the mind. The midpoint also boiled so hot that the entire second half is one big breather.

edited 2nd Mar '15 2:06:24 AM by mrsunshinesprinkles

I completely agree, Nakamura is frankly the best part of the story, a rather unique character that doesn't give a crap about what others think of her. And that midpoint was super intense, but as you say, it changed pacing for the rest of the story by a lot.

Nakamura is what makes the series memorable, yeah. A lot of her scenes are some of the most tense and frightening moments in manga, yet after reading the final chapter, you can feel a sense of innocence to everything she did. I couldn't hate or fear her anymore, all I felt was pity. Kasuga sort of grabs me just as much as her, and horrifies me for completely different reasons.

Mostly because I see a bit of myself in him. And I mean in all the worst (and best) ways. When I first read the series, it was a lot easier to make fun of him. The second time around, and it's like I'm looking at a demented fun-house mirror. Finding a sense of superiority and defining your identity by the fiction you read, as well as falling in love with the idea of being in love, rather than with the actual goddamn person... Kasuga makes me feel sick because he acts on these shallow thoughts and our basest of impulses, with almost no restraint.

Nothing encapsulates this better than chapter 17, in which Kasuga pulls out his "I am hollow" speech. And man... I have nothing to say about this chapter, unless I really wanted to get personal.

Aku No Hana is basically a study of the muckiest side of man, though, so you can't blame it for not doing its job.

In a way, the post-Festival Aku No Hana was just as tense as the first half as it was being published. By the time you reached that point, you had set expectations. If felt like the series was just mocking you; as if the author was just calmly setting up the dominoes, before kicking them and stomping on them, but then it sinks at the very last chapters that this change is for real, and the relief is beyond compare.

edited 2nd Mar '15 9:12:25 AM by mrsunshinesprinkles

So I'm back to The Wheel Of Time. This obviously had to happen during Saiga's absence.

Egwene now runs around in dreamland and meets an old lady in Callandor's room. Silvie? I bet on Mat's imporobable luck that it's Lanfear. Of course, Min has still not told anybody the most dangerius yandere alive is roaming free cause....reasons.

The pacing is really slow. I've lost count of how many chapters we've been playing around the White Tower, even though the mystery is intriguing. I wish we saw more of the girls' training though.

Don't worry, it was a joke.

Whoops...

Does what you've read of Wheel of Time so far have a habit of fannying about a bit, or is the White Tower like a Namek of sorts?

I finished Aku No Hana once more. The final chapters were absolutely beautiful. The series didn't delve into making things more grimdark, and depressing. It didn't make any sharp turns into the festival of crazy that defined the first parts. Our hero didn't repeat the same blunders to drag out the drama, he learned. It stuck with this road of recovery and redemption until the very end, and while they will never become totally unbound by the Flowers of Evil, all the characters have finally found their own other side; one beyond the mountains, and happiness that's more than "grey". Nothing is standing in between them and a brighter, more promising future (At least that's how I choose to interpret that last dream sequence).

It's sort of a testament to the manga's writing how the transition from "Digging yourself deeper: The comic" to something slow paced, melancholic yet ultimately hopeful, doesn't feel jarring.

Sorry for another long gush post, but I've enjoyed the manga even more, the second time around. Maybe I'll look back and take this claim back, or maybe I'll find something I like even more, but for now at least, this is pretty much my favorite manga ever.

Jojo's has always been a gay old time, that never fails to make me go "what", but it was never my absolute personal fave (Part 7 came close though). That one was Fullmetal Alchemist.

edited 3rd Mar '15 1:25:08 PM by mrsunshinesprinkles

Even moreso then Jojo?

...who are you, and what did you do with Eternal Noob?

edited 3rd Mar '15 11:48:00 AM by SaintDeltora

FMA is my favorite as well. I consider it to be one of the finest stories ever written.