Ninth Complains About Gosho

@mirrorfalls said: Bruh, talk to us about all the ways Gosho - as a writer - frustrates you.

…How long do you have?

 

No, really, disclaimer because I’m not a fan of the Discourse, I do like some things Gosho does, or I wouldn’t be here.  But I do fandom by analyzing the heck out of things, and there are so many things that Gosho could do better.  Just…keep in mind that if I didn’t like this series I wouldn’t care enough to complain so much.  We are all in the same fandom.

 

I will probably forget some things, but here we go!

 

Gosho doesn’t write women well.  He has the kind of ideas about women secretly needing rescuing by the men in their lives you’d expect from a guy his age.  He also tends to hijack their arcs for romance.  Like, god forbid Jodie or Sato get to be awesome on their own, Akai has to upstage Jodie and Takagi has to at least help!

 

He shuffles emotional arcs offscreen, ignores them completely, or if they have to happen onscreen, he rushes through them.  There are so many cases and heists that should have had a coda involving the characters reacting with some sort of emotion, maybe even talking about feelings (oh horror), and it never happens.  Like, KID just flies off after the Nightmare Heist.  Or Heiji gets hurt badly onscreen and it immediately turns into a joke about how everyone was overreacting (Naniwa Serial Murders).

 

Related to that, he’s fantastic at setting up those emotional arcs and then he doesn’t follow through.  Like, why did a person who barely likes to admit his main characters have emotions besides “justice” and “mischief” get the ability to set up something as brutal as Nightmare. That frustrates me on a visceral level.

 

He’s also really good at writing cases at least sometimes, but other times, heavens, they’re terrible. DC has ridiculously inconsistent quality and it makes me sad.  I know some of that is his schedule being brutal and the sheer output expected of him, but at the same time…he’s got assistants, too, and enough money to hire a lot of them. 

 

He underuses the side characters.  He’s got a lot of really cool ones, and a lot of the best cases IMO have Heiji or the Nagano trio in them, but most of the cases still end up with the main cast only.  Hakuba rarely shows up, Eisuke got put on a bus.  It’s been almost 1000 chapters and some characters still haven’t met–take advantage of untapped wells of character interaction!

 

Gosho’s handling of romance also tends not to be terrible deft.  Like, we can agree to disagree, definitely, but he’s been drawing out Heiji and Kazuha’s romantic out to an awkward degree, if nothing else.

 

Related to that, Gosho’s awkward incorporation of his probable teenagerhood desire to see girl’s underthings into his children’s manga is unprofessional.  No, really, the perverted jokes stopped being funny a long time ago, especially as a girl, honestly.

 

He’s so inconsistent with how reality works in his universe.  People might be able to sense murderers and also rocket skateboards work but you can tell who was the murderer by whether they’ve got the muscle mass to lift the murder weapon.  Everyone fudges physics a little once in a while but he really could do better.

 

One of my biggest complaints is that he really doesn’t seem to realize that he wrote a bunch of dysfunctional families.  Like, Shinichi grew up going to crime scenes and started living alone before high school, Ran’s half responsible for her alcoholic dad, Kaito and his mom vary by canon but there’s always the phantom thief secret looming between…and Gosho never seems to think this might be a formative thing for any of the characters.  Ever.

 

On that note, Gosho almost never writes anyone having lasting trauma unless they’ve killed someone over it.  No one’s upset by seeing the dead bodies unless the plot requires it.  Shinichi is very rarely upset by his near death and when he is it’s because we need to lead into a flashback; while it’s implied that Kaito must be messed up over his dad’s death, this is something we only learn through his decision to become KID, since we don’t really see him mourn at any point.  Ai is the one exception I can think of to this, but I have to go back to the above thing–most of her emotional arc gets shoved offscreen, though I’ll admit what is on screen is actually pretty great. 

 

That’s the thing.  When Gosho does bring himself to write feelings, and people having trauma, and relationships that aren’t built on stacks of lies, it’s often amazing.  (Okay I’m thinking about Fuurinkazan here.)  But he never does it.

 

The timeline.  IT HASN’T BEEN HALF A YEAR GOSHO FIGHT ME.