ninthfeather: Waist-up image of Louise Halevy from the anime Gundam 00. She is a white woman with green eyes and long, straight blonde hair. (Default)
@tomanynames said: Can we hear about the Blush Mermaid Heist please!!

 
I’m tagging @mirrorfalls because they asked about this too! I have…feelings about this heist, which is to say I disliked it. Detailed spoilers for the trick follow, so I’m putting this under a cut.

Read more... )
Look, I’m not a real hardcore animal rights type most of the time, but honestly? The real victim of the Blush Mermaid Heist was the turtle.
 
It’s not safe to glue something to a turtle’s shell, especially for an extended period of time. If the glue is something toxic and goes through the cracks, it can make the turtle sick. If the turtle is still growing, you run the risk of stunting its growth.
 
Then KID put iron dust in the poor little guy’s food and stuck him to a magnetic plate.  Again, we are not seeing a lot of concern for the turtle here.  On a meta level, I think Gosho researched synthetic diamonds more than he did aquatic turtles, which are fussy, easy-to-injure animals when kept in captivity. I don’t know if giving a turtle enough iron fillings to supplement the magnetic properties of the fake diamond on its back and make it stick to a metal plate is safe. This isn’t something you can easily research on the internet, and I’m sorry, but I don’t have enough invested in this to ask someone outright. But Gosho did, and he could have easily called a pet store about the matter. The way the scenario is written suggests he did not bother doing this, especially as there is no effort to reassure the audience that KID’s trick didn’t hurt the turtle.
 
Gosho is usually nicer to animals than this–puppies and kitties get to be cute and remain unhurt, and the doves get looked after too. But apparently turtles aren’t special?
 
Also, okay, everything about the Masumi disguise situation was stupid. KID crossdresses almost constantly. Assuming gender based on clothing is a complete rookie mistake that Gosho had him make because it was funny. Except the gag regarding Masumi’s chest was off-color when he introduced it and it’s only gotten worse.  Masumi kicking KID was funny, but it would have been just as funny if she’d gotten to do it for him trying to steal her clothes. Also, it felt like a cheap way of making sure that Conan, not Masumi, took the lead in the heist investigation. I’d like to see a proper face-off between Masumi and KID.
 
(Frankly, speaking as a woman, you can tell that a man is writing something when a teenage girl is restrained and unconscious in a men’s bathroom for an extended period of time and this is basically handwaved as “no big deal.”)
 
Basically, this was the kind of heist I’d expect to see in MK, where Kaito doing poor heist prep and making mistakes has a payoff–it increases suspense and makes the readers worry about the protagonist.  For all that I personally am a big KID fan, when I read DC, I generally try to read the chapter from the perspective of the narration, so I was trying to read from Conan’s point of view. From Conan’s point of view, this was just a particularly ill-thought-out scenario and the humor/Kaito’s mistakes felt distracting, rather than like something that added to the tension.
 
In short, I’m not a big fan of the Blush Mermaid heist, and I hope to goodness the upcoming heist is a bit better.
ninthfeather: Waist-up image of Louise Halevy from the anime Gundam 00. She is a white woman with green eyes and long, straight blonde hair. (Default)
@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.
ninthfeather: Waist-up image of Louise Halevy from the anime Gundam 00. She is a white woman with green eyes and long, straight blonde hair. (Default)
 image
Least Favorite Case: The Billing Fraud Case (Anime 585-586, Manga 491)
 
AKA that moment when you realize that, while trying to figure out what exactly Hondou Eisuke’s deal is and get to the fun bits with FBI agents, you have instead spent 20 minutes of your life on an animated/manga PSA about a type of fraud that was very common in Japan roughly 10 years ago.  Which, if you are a Japanese time-traveler, you might find engaging, but if you aren’t–it’s just Conan being uncannily smart for a tiny child for, like 15 minutes, while no one really questions it.  Sonoko draws incorrect but logical conclusions and gets shot down, there’s useless suspense, it’s just such a poorly executed case, and it doesn’t have the excuse of being an anime original or during down time–it’s lead up to the Clash of Red and Black.  You’d think Gosho’d be bringing his A-Game.  You would be very wrong.

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