interviewer: Mr. Nikiforov, inquiring minds want to know: what was the final deciding factor that inspired you to move to Japan to coach Yuuri Katsuki
Viktor, flashing back to the day before he left: okay Makkachin, blink once if Japan, twice if no Japan
Viktor, back in the present: ha ha well his skating skills, obviously
interviewer: Mr. Nikiforov, inquiring minds want to know: what was the final deciding factor that inspired you to move to Japan to coach Yuuri Katsuki
Viktor, flashing back to the day before he left: okay Makkachin, blink once if Japan, twice if no Japan
Viktor, back in the present: ha ha well his skating skills, obviously
when guys are like “girls over [relatively low weight] shouldn’t wear [revealing article of clothing]” a lot of the time they are trying to get women above that weight to say “OH REALLY?” and post a picture of themselves looking good in that article of clothing. It’s a creepy power play designed to prey on both women’s confidence and their insecurities and trick them into posting revealing pictures of themselves for the sexual gratification of men who they otherwise wouldn’t have given the time of day. It’s a sleazy pick-up artist tactic. It’s negging. When you see an all-too-common post that’s like “bigger girls shouldn’t wear bikinis” and the response is him getting “owned” because a woman replied with pictures of herself looking beautiful, he’s not getting owned at all, he’s getting exactly the result he was hoping for. They’re basically saying “You sure showed me by sending me, a huge sexist creep, a picture of yourself in a bikini! PLEASE don’t send me nudes, I don’t know if I could take the humiliation!”
The scary thing is that I’ve had a guy admit this to me. He said something about “fat girls always have ugly tits”. I am fat and a girl. I said “no, they don’t.” He said “prove it”. When I made it clear that a) I had nothing to prove, b) why the fuck am I gonna care about some beanpole-in-a-meme-shirt’s opinion?, and c) I wasn’t EVER gonna send him shit, he went crazy. Straight up admitted that the technique always worked blah blah, I must have been a dude pretending to be a girl blah blah, and basically had a temper tantrum till I blocked him.
So 100% guys that do this are garbage and even if they’re not, remember that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone.
“YOU DON’T HAVE TO PROVE ANYTHING TO ANYONE” ^^^^^^^
In Japan, radiation creates monsters (Godzilla) and in America radiation creates superheroes
Shockingly, it’s almost like Japan and America have very different narratives surrounding nuclear fallout. Now, if we all think very very hard, maybe someone could think of why this might be.
hi i need approximately 3k words of content about yuuri being famous in the figure skating community for years as ‘that devastatingly beautiful skater from japan’ and having no idea
Oh hello I heard my siren call and it’s Yuuri Katsuki being beautiful
1.
Yuuri Katsuki of Japan smiles exactly once at Skate America: when he’s on the podium, collecting his bronze. It’s a small, dubious little flick of his lips, like someone’s just complimented his outfit and he’s trying to decide whether or not they’re mocking him.
He spends the rest of the competition looking downcast, shoulders knitted together, biting his lip. Two commentators spend at least three minutes of airtime worrying that he’s been bullied.
“Entitlement,” diagnoses Commentator #3. Endemic among millennials, really. Dozens of competitors would kill to be in his skates, so can’t he at least pretend to be happy about it?
Attack on Titan is and always has been imperialist propaganda written by a Nazi supporter. The idea of the walls and their fragility is meant to criticize Japan’s antiwar policy, and the Titans coming back after 100 years is meant to imply that if Japan doesn’t start having wars and breaking down their “walls” and conquering the East again, other countries will come to terrorize the region. What bothers me most having watched the first season of it is the line about “Living like livestock”. It asserts the notion that to live without imperialism is a form of complacency, like somehow the country isn’t living life to its fullest if it isn’t out pillaging and raping the peoples of Korea, Manchuria, Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, etc. I will say that it’s actually really poorly written, so the ideas the writer has don’t come across super strongly, but it’s still seriously dangerous stuff.
Add to that the fact that so many characters have German names and that the setting seems to have a lot of european and specifically German vegetation and architecture becomes obvious that the writer wants viewers to feel nostalgic for the Axis Powers. It’s really infuriating to me as a Jewish person because it’s supporting a political climate under which the genocide of my people could resume even when we just now have the same Jewish population worldwide as we did pre-Holocaust. It’s fucked up and now that people are talking about it coming back for a second season after so long I want to urge you all to please boycott it.
-Stephen
Lol yes! Unfortunately it’s all true! For instance, the character called Dot Pixis is based on general Yoshifuru Akiyama, a famous war criminal during the occupation of Korea who Attack on Titan’s writer, Hajime Isayama, called “frugal and respectable” on his twitter account. Popular character Mikasa Ackerman is named after a warship in the Russo-Japanese war, a war over which power would violently occupy Korea, according to the show’s own damn official guidebook (Which I cannot link to because it’s a book) and wikia page.
In a separate reply to this post, a friend of mine has also noted that the character called Erwin Smith is named after a Nazi called Erwin Rommel who, despite occasionally defying orders he deemed “unjust”, was still a fucking Nazi and still took part in the Holocaust. I did find a source for this albeit not the best one. But it should also be in the official handbook as Outside Kou apparently claims that the origins of characters’ names are in that book.
And if you don’t find it bad enough that these characters are designed to be nods to imperialist/nazi history, then what ought to convince you the show should be boycotted is that it isn’t for shits and giggles. Hajime Isayama actually does support Imperialism. He named and designed those characters as homages to nazis and war criminals for a reason. Not because he thought the names were cool. He actually worships those military institutions. So I’ll say it again. Boycott Attack on Titan.
-Stephen
EDIT: Tumblr is a fucked website, so the reply that was made by user ramen-catholicism saying “Lol no” that prompted me to make this addition is not showing up on my computer as part of this post. Also some links aren’t showing up underlined in the second paragraph so if you want them you have to hover over my words with your cursor to find them… sorry
Some less-explored aspects of Viktor Nikiforov’s character that I will love and protect until my dying day:
a beautiful morning to remember that yuuri is the world record holder in the free skate, the top jsf certified skater in japan by a mile (the /only/ jsf certified senior man, and even if he weren’t he would have been the only one to receive two grand prix circuit assignments let alone /make it to the final while competing in a field that still included victor nikiforov/), is known as “japan’s ace,” and qualified among the top six in the world before victor ever became his coach
“I just came back from Japan a month ago, and in every classroom, I would just write on the board, “You are living in a poem.” And then I would write other things just relating to whatever we were doing in that class. But I found the students very intrigued by discussing that. “What do you mean, we’re living in a poem?” Or, “When? All the time, or just when someone talks about poetry?” And I’d say, “No, when you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another — that’s a poem. That’s what a poem does.” And they liked that. And a girl, in fact, wrote me a note in Yokohama on the day that I was leaving her school that has come to be the most significant note any student has written me in years. She said, “Well, here in Japan, we have a concept called ‘yutori,’ and it is spaciousness. It’s a kind of living with spaciousness. For example, it’s leaving early enough to get somewhere so that you know you’re going to arrive early, so when you get there, you have time to look around.” Or — and then she gave all these different definitions of what yutori was, to her. But one of them was: “After you read a poem, just knowing you can hold it — you can be in that space of the poem, and it can hold you in its space, and you don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to paraphrase it. You just hold it, and it allows you to see differently.””
— Naomi Shihab Nye on OnBeing
