mouthporn.net
#art – @littorella on Tumblr
Avatar

your love was gift to me

@littorella / littorella.tumblr.com

Alli, 嵐 | artist + writer
Avatar

Happiness Writes White

a fic about how love gives meaning to even nihilists

Yuuri falls asleep after his first day in St. Petersburg and wakes up in a strange hospital room. To his dismay, the last year of skating has all been a dream simulation designed to wake him from a long coma. Viktor Nikiforov is, in fact, not a figure skater at all, but the creator of the program, and this real world Viktor is nothing like the one he knows. 

Avatar

After almost 30 years, here we are back again with Tokyo Babylon.

This manga is super personal for me. I read Tokyo Babylon (and X) at a time in my childhood when I was hyper aware of how different I was than everyone. It gave me a way to understand myself. Well, better than my previous self identification with HAL9000 lol.

My teachers and friends’ parents used to constantly comment that I was unusual, cold, that I had a deficiency of feelings. What kind of kid didn’t get scared or homesick or guilty? I was a person encased in a jar: I could see all these feelings everyone was swimming in but only extraordinaryly intense ones could reach me. Reading a character like Seishirou was a gift—how easily he blends in but is always never anything less than himself. He’s unapologetic for his lack of feeling but at the same time hungry to know what he’s missing. I, too, wanted to know.

Rereading it as an adult is a completely different experience. I recognized not the longing, but the fear and intensity of when Seishirou reckons with finally feeling something. People, even those close, often feel like entities I happen to share space with. They are pleasant in the way air conditioning is pleasant. But then there are moments when you suddenly understand their love for you or the precarious nature of their choice to be with you and your heart feels close to exploding.

It’s why he is so bothered by Subaru’s injuries in X. It makes him understand. It is a frightening and deeply unsettling thing to go from feeling no fear your whole life to the sudden all consuming storm of it. I get on this level maybe once a year. I don’t know how anyone functions with all these feelings all day long. Subaru, how do you function?!

And I think that’s the most interesting part of Subaru/Seishirou—they can’t be together because they are too different in canon. They fundamentally don’t understand each other. Their love is like trying to divide by zero; it combusts to infinity or withers into nothing. Either way, all is destroyed. They can only drift so close. We all have those people who have defined our world views, who we can’t live with or without.

Sei-Chan, I’m glad we’ll meet again. Maybe in this adaptation the equation solves differently.

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
mouthporn.net