NinthFeather's Meta Archive

 

 

…I like angst.  And occasionally I am truly awed by Aoyama’s ability to make creatively horrible things, and for me this heist is probably the pinnacle of that.  You still get a lot of what makes a normal heist good, including Kaito out-thinking his opponent and Nakamori’s ridiculous security measures.  Heck, you even get Aoko at a heist in riot gear, Kaito invited to a heist as a consultant (the irony, help), and a rare appearance from Hakuba.  Of course, everything goes to perdition in a handbasket in the last ten minutes of the episode, but, well, I also have a certain respect for how skillfully Aoyama set that up to hurt.

 

 

This was actually kind of hard because I’m usually pretty ship and let ship–there’s a lot of pairings I don’t ship or write but completely get why other people ship them or write them.  Even the pairings that I don’t ship in canon I might be able to see in an AU where they have less shared baggage.  But for me, Kogoro/Eri is never really going to be an appealing pairing.  They both want different things from a relationship, they can each only find some of those things in one another, and their protracted separation is hurting them both.  I can understand that other people might enjoy the little bits of romance that crop up between them from time to time, but, honestly, to me, those parts are just sad.  It’s like watching a non-supernatural Groundhog Day Loop.

Biggest OTP: Yamato Kansuke/Uehara Yui

 

The only couple in this show I am emotionally attached to enough that I will actually be upset if there is no canon follow-through.  I can headcanon other preferred couples becoming official after the series, I don’t care what Gosho does or doesn’t do about them, but these two…I need some actual canon, or, failing that, a heck of a novel-length fanfic.

 

They’re just absolutely the right balance between a pair of actual adults with lives and jobs and adorable dorks who don’t know what to do with their feelings.  They are my favorites.

 

This is actually a case I watched really recently, and I feel odd putting it as my favorite, but, at the same time, I think it’s one of the most enjoyable combinations of character development and actually interesting mystery that I’ve seen from DC.  A problem I have with naming a favorite case is that I actually kinda hate locked-room/limited-suspects-type setups–I understand why Gosho does them, but they’re so predictable, heavens.* So the addition of Koumei as a possible suspect made things more interesting.  So did the amount of emotional investment that the characters had in the case–to me, at least, it’s more interesting to watch cases where the characters are at least slightly compromised. Plus, between the introduction of Koumei and his interactions with Kansuke and Yui, I got all sorts of fun character information–heck, Ran even got to be the smart one for a few episodes, which was lovely to watch.  Finally, the actual meaning of the red wall was pretty clever, and the way they caught the culprit was…well, it was sure something.  It wasn’t a perfect case, but it’s probably the one I’ve watched that I enjoyed most, for reasons most related to the actual mystery.

 

 

 

*Yes, I know, why do I keep with the series if I don’t like locked-room/limited-suspect setups?  I’m here for the overarching Black Org plot and the sporadic bits of character development, that’s why.


(updated 2/24/18 with correct episode numbers and a better picture. Also, this is still my favorite case three years on.)

 

…This is the part where I pretend it’s not just because I have a ridiculous crush on him, right?  No, really, I enjoy hardboiled detectives, he and Yui are adorable, and while I love the Tokyo MPD as a whole, every time Kansuke shows up, he does something awesome, and/or something extremely cute (read: the stupid half-kill misunderstanding, which resulted from him using cooking slang that he learned from his grandma).  He and his sword I mean totally-never-a-weapon-only-a-mobility-device cane need to show up more often

 

Since I already used Hakuba for my favorite male character…

 

In all seriousness, I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve been enjoying about Heiji’s appearances since I’ve started watching more recent episodes he’s appeared in.  I love the friendship between him and Conan, and I love his brutal honesty–both the comedy potential, and when it shows up seriously in the narrative.  Mostly I love the fact that this guy just wanders around Japan, calling a little kid his older cousin’s name, lying badly, accidentally insulting people and being almost scarily single-minded in his pursuit of crime-solving, and after a while everyone just rolls with it, because it’s still less weird than whatever the heck Sleeping Kogoro is.

 

I know it’s ridiculous. I know he’s almost never in canon. But I came here through fanfic and this guy is such an interesting puzzle that the best of us have been throwing our best explanations at his contradictory behavior and incomplete backstory for literal decades.  He’s half-British and by the book, overly formal at some times and almost unbelievably rude at others.  Exactly how he goes from completely intolerant of all criminals to willing to help KID with Chat Noir is never really explained.  The time obsession is never given any context either.  He’s fascinating because, unlike a lot of other characters in the series, Gosho never really built all of his oddities into any sort of coherent backstory—he just sort of left them all there.  The result is a character who never really got tied up in a neat bow of “and this results from this” and who might not ever be—and that’s something that’s interesting to me as a reader, and downright irresistible as a fan creator.