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This week's Tsubasa: Chapter 219
To-do list:
1. *Selectively* scan the Temari Matsumoto KKM artbook for PDK. 50% done.
2. Scan the everloving shizbit out of the Soul Eater illustration Mook. 30% done. (I just love the word Mook. Thank you, Japan. Thank you.)
3. Tear The Manga Guide to Statistics a new one on Sequential Smarts. Almost done.
4. Recap Tsubasa chapter 219.
Siiiiiiiiiigh.
Might as well get that last one over with.
Okay, so: Frontpiece illustration. It's Yuuko in her butterfly kimono... still. Um, okay. Look, I know that the butterfly kimono is both Incredibly Beautiful and Deeply Symbolic, but I do rather miss the old Yuuko, who would wear a different crazy outfit in like, every panel. Or at least she would get a different outfit between every scene change. And there being a lot of scene changes in the average chapter of xxxHolic, that amounted to a lot of crazy outfits.
I guess that CLAMP was too busy drawing all of the AWESOME MAGICAL SWIRLIES in this chapter to bother with designing a new outfit for Yuuko.
So! It's MAGICAL SWIRLY TIEM.
Last week! FWR was hurling a fireball at the Syaoran/Syaoran doubleteam. This week! The fireball hits the Doublemint Syaorans and explodes! Fay, Kurogane, and Mokona look on in horror! FWR smirks triumphantly! But then the smoke clears and...
The Doublemint Syaorans are perfectly fine. Well, DUH. Papa!Syaoran is protecting them both with his signature magic circle.
Then Papa!Syaoran is like "WIND FLOWER!!" and I guess this not-so-badass-sounding spell somehow manages to send some seriously badass-looking Magical Doom Swirlies hurtling toward FWR.
FWR gets this great oh, for fuck's sake! look on his face. He counters Syaoran's WIND FLOWER with some more fire magic. FWR's fire-swirlies meet Syaoran's wind-swirlies, and it appears as though both spells are evenly matched.
But here comes Fay to tip the scales in Syaoran's favor! "SYAORAN!!" he shouts. He draws a small version of his own magical circle with his finger, and then suddenly a HUGE version of Fay's magical circle is spiraling around Syaoran's wind magic, which...
Well, logically, this should win the battle for both Fay and Syaoran. But for some inexplicable reason, FWR's fire-swirlies suddenly surge with power. FWR smirks again, as Fay and Syaoran are blown away by his fire.
The magical bubble that the Doublemint Syaorans are floating in, as well as the Fay/Kurogane/Mokona magical bubble, are destroyed by FWR's spell. Papa!Syaoran and Fay collapse. Everybody falls. Oedipus!Syaoran grabs his father's hand, but they're still falling. Kurogane wraps his arms around Fay, and Mokona clings to Kurogane's sword, but they're all still falling.
BUT THEN...
A mysterious magical circle appears beneath everyone. The Doublemint Syaorans are caught by the NEW magical swirlies, and appear to float gently to the ground. The same happens to Kurogane (and Fay and Mokona). Mama!Sakura, meanwhile, still holding her own corpse, looks down at the new magical circle with a genuinely surprised expression on her face.
FWR is shocked. "?!" He stares at the enormous new magical circle, which has formed new bubbles around our floating protagonists. "That magical circle is... Clow's...?! No! It is Clow's very magic itself! How?!" FWR stares in open-mouthed shock at the Doublemint Syaorans. (Oh hey look, Papa!Syaoran is awake again, I guess.) "How can it be that you are using that magic?!"
Wait, is he talking to Papa!Syaoran? I think he's talking to Papa!Syaoran. Papa!Syaoran is holding his hand in a way that vaguely indicates that he's generating the magic in question, or at least that he's generating some magic. But I don't understand how that makes sense. Wasn't Papa!Syaoran KO'd when Clow's magic circle appeared? Maybe he was playing possum.
Now I turn the page and HOLY SHIT IT'S THE ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT YUUKO
SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS THERE'S LIKE A GIANT, GIANT YUUKO LOOMING OVER ALL OF THEM
AND EVERYBODY FLOATING AROUND HER IN THEIR MAGIC BUBBLES ARE TINY TINY TINY COMPARED TO HER
LIKE KUROGANE IS SERIOUSLY THE SIZE OF ONE OF HER EYELASHES
LIKE SERIOUSLY
And the GIANT YUUKO is like, "Because Clow passed on his magic to this child."
And FWR, again, is like "?!?!?!?!"
And I'm like... Well, huh.
Was that supposed to be a shocking revelation? Am I supposed to be as surprised as FWR is?!
Maybe FWR should have read Cardcaptor Sakura. If he had, he would have known that Syaoran's ability to rock Clow's magic is already an established plot point in that series.
I mean Jesus, CLAMP. Jesus. This is nothing new, here.
Now, what IS surprising about this "revelation" is two things:
1. If Syaoran can bork around with Clow's magic circle, why didn't he do that EARLIER? Why was he sticking with his own magic circle when he could have Clow'd up and blown FWR out of the water?
2. Wasn't it a really, really, really big deal in Cardcaptor Sakura that it was SAKURA who inherited Clow's most powerful magic, NOT Syaoran?! Like, wasn't that one of the driving conflicts in the plot?! So what's with Yuuko declaring that Syaoran got the big guns from the big guy, all of a sudden? Is this yet ANOTHER example of CLAMP pushing Sakura aside so that Syaoran can be the Big Damn Hero while Sakura just floats around looking pretty and being totally helpless?
Answer to myself: Why yes, I believe it is.
Moving on.
I turn the page and OH HEY. Yuuko is holding a magical crystal ball (or whatever) in her hands, within which all of Our Heroes are floating. Um, is that why she looks like a fifty-story-tall giant to them?
I dunno, and I never get the chance to find out. Because in the very next panel, Yuuko's crystal ball (or whatever) is gone, and she's floating in a black, background-less void. Hellooooo, artistic laziness. I guess all of those dramatic Magical Swirlies splattered all over the previous pages really burned out CLAMP's artistic abilities. So anyway, now we're in a black void, for some reason. And pieces of shattered glass are floating all around Yuuko. The floating pieces of glass begin to knit themselves back together, forming the shape of...
Oh hey. Remember back a couple months ago, when Cloney died, and his body dissolved into broken fragments of glass?
Well guess who's back.
Heeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!
Cloney opens his eyes, and looks up at Yuuko. "Where... am I?"
"Inside a dream," Yuuko answers. Now, instead of shards of broken glass, sakura petals are swirling all around them.
Cloney looks down at his hands, which have not yet fully reformed. Oh, creepy. "But I... died..."
"Yes," Yuuko says. "Fei Wong attacked you, and smashed you apart."
"So... how...?"
"Because you are an artificial creation," Yuuko answers. "You cannot die, you can only disappear. Like her."
Cloney turns his head, and sees Sakura - the Sakura that he killed* - floating in the void. Her eyes are still closed, and she still looks very, very dead. As Cloney's body appears to be only half-formed from shards of broken glass, so too is Sakura's body partially formed by the sakura petals floating around her.
*Well, him and Fay. This was the clone!Sakura that got split into body and soul, remember? Fay shishkabobbed the body, then Cloney shishkabobbed her soul. Good GOD that sounds ridiculously stupid when I type it out like that. And it IS ridiculously stupid. It really, really is.
"Sa... kura..." Cloney says.
"That is why, before you could disappear completely," Yuuko says, "I brought both of your bodies here. In your case, I was able to bring your heart as well."
WAIT.
Yuuko brought Sakura's body into the dream world?
But! BUT! Didn't Kyle steal her body and deliver to FWR?! And then FWR later merged that body with the seven-year-old frozen!Sakura. It was Sakura's soul, not her body, that Cloney killed in the dream world. How does this make any sense?!
OH WAIT IT DOESN'T.
"The soul, and the memories, of the Sakura-hime that turned into flower petals," Yuuko explains, "as well as the body of the original Sakura that Fei Wong duplicated."
Wait. Wait.
Wait.
Is this... an explanation that I'm hearing?
A SENSIBLE explanation?!
"Fei Wong believed that the body of the original princess was destroyed during the cloning process," Yuuko says. "But he was mistaken."
A - H A !
So CLAMP didn't forget about the Sakura-that-was-cloned after all! Turns out that waaaaaay back in chapter whatever-the-fuck, when FWR said that the body of the original Sakura was destroyed, he was WROOOOOOOONG. Yuuko must have sucked up that body into her dimensional void (helloooo DEUS EX MACHINA), the same way that she sucked up clone!Sakura's murdered soul (HI THERE AGAIN), and clone!Syaoran's soul and body (YEP STILL PRETTY DAMN DEUS EX MACHINA OVER HERE).
This still leaves the question of what happened to the soul of the Sakura that was cloned, but we're going to let that slide for the time being. Asking for *everything* to be tied up neatly in a way that makes perfect sense is clearly asking far, far too much of this manga. I, for one, am not getting my hopes up.
Cloney asks Yuuko, "Why did you bring us here?"
Yuuko stares at him, and proclaims dramatically, "Because you must choose."
And then the chapter ends.
Oh for FUCK's sake. How many dramatic "choices" is Yuuko going to force all of these stupid Syaoran to make?! First we all had to make a HUGE FUCKING DEAL out of Oedipus!Syaoran's "choice", then it was all about Watanuki's "choice," then back to Oedipus!Syaoran's new "choice" to reset time, then we got more blah blah blah about the "choice" that everyone has to make for the sake of "both futures," and now we're back to Yuuko dramatically ordering a Syaoran to make a CHOICE. But by this time we've had this exact same scene repeated like fifty times already, and it's pretty much lost all of its impact and meaning.
I just don't care anymore.
Somebody give Yuuko a new outfit, quick!
Next will be a three-week break. Oh, the suspense. Or not.
1. *Selectively* scan the Temari Matsumoto KKM artbook for PDK. 50% done.
2. Scan the everloving shizbit out of the Soul Eater illustration Mook. 30% done. (I just love the word Mook. Thank you, Japan. Thank you.)
3. Tear The Manga Guide to Statistics a new one on Sequential Smarts. Almost done.
4. Recap Tsubasa chapter 219.
Siiiiiiiiiigh.
Might as well get that last one over with.
Okay, so: Frontpiece illustration. It's Yuuko in her butterfly kimono... still. Um, okay. Look, I know that the butterfly kimono is both Incredibly Beautiful and Deeply Symbolic, but I do rather miss the old Yuuko, who would wear a different crazy outfit in like, every panel. Or at least she would get a different outfit between every scene change. And there being a lot of scene changes in the average chapter of xxxHolic, that amounted to a lot of crazy outfits.
I guess that CLAMP was too busy drawing all of the AWESOME MAGICAL SWIRLIES in this chapter to bother with designing a new outfit for Yuuko.
So! It's MAGICAL SWIRLY TIEM.
Last week! FWR was hurling a fireball at the Syaoran/Syaoran doubleteam. This week! The fireball hits the Doublemint Syaorans and explodes! Fay, Kurogane, and Mokona look on in horror! FWR smirks triumphantly! But then the smoke clears and...
The Doublemint Syaorans are perfectly fine. Well, DUH. Papa!Syaoran is protecting them both with his signature magic circle.
Then Papa!Syaoran is like "WIND FLOWER!!" and I guess this not-so-badass-sounding spell somehow manages to send some seriously badass-looking Magical Doom Swirlies hurtling toward FWR.
FWR gets this great oh, for fuck's sake! look on his face. He counters Syaoran's WIND FLOWER with some more fire magic. FWR's fire-swirlies meet Syaoran's wind-swirlies, and it appears as though both spells are evenly matched.
But here comes Fay to tip the scales in Syaoran's favor! "SYAORAN!!" he shouts. He draws a small version of his own magical circle with his finger, and then suddenly a HUGE version of Fay's magical circle is spiraling around Syaoran's wind magic, which...
Well, logically, this should win the battle for both Fay and Syaoran. But for some inexplicable reason, FWR's fire-swirlies suddenly surge with power. FWR smirks again, as Fay and Syaoran are blown away by his fire.
The magical bubble that the Doublemint Syaorans are floating in, as well as the Fay/Kurogane/Mokona magical bubble, are destroyed by FWR's spell. Papa!Syaoran and Fay collapse. Everybody falls. Oedipus!Syaoran grabs his father's hand, but they're still falling. Kurogane wraps his arms around Fay, and Mokona clings to Kurogane's sword, but they're all still falling.
BUT THEN...
A mysterious magical circle appears beneath everyone. The Doublemint Syaorans are caught by the NEW magical swirlies, and appear to float gently to the ground. The same happens to Kurogane (and Fay and Mokona). Mama!Sakura, meanwhile, still holding her own corpse, looks down at the new magical circle with a genuinely surprised expression on her face.
FWR is shocked. "?!" He stares at the enormous new magical circle, which has formed new bubbles around our floating protagonists. "That magical circle is... Clow's...?! No! It is Clow's very magic itself! How?!" FWR stares in open-mouthed shock at the Doublemint Syaorans. (Oh hey look, Papa!Syaoran is awake again, I guess.) "How can it be that you are using that magic?!"
Wait, is he talking to Papa!Syaoran? I think he's talking to Papa!Syaoran. Papa!Syaoran is holding his hand in a way that vaguely indicates that he's generating the magic in question, or at least that he's generating some magic. But I don't understand how that makes sense. Wasn't Papa!Syaoran KO'd when Clow's magic circle appeared? Maybe he was playing possum.
Now I turn the page and HOLY SHIT IT'S THE ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT YUUKO
SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS THERE'S LIKE A GIANT, GIANT YUUKO LOOMING OVER ALL OF THEM
AND EVERYBODY FLOATING AROUND HER IN THEIR MAGIC BUBBLES ARE TINY TINY TINY COMPARED TO HER
LIKE KUROGANE IS SERIOUSLY THE SIZE OF ONE OF HER EYELASHES
LIKE SERIOUSLY
And the GIANT YUUKO is like, "Because Clow passed on his magic to this child."
And FWR, again, is like "?!?!?!?!"
And I'm like... Well, huh.
Was that supposed to be a shocking revelation? Am I supposed to be as surprised as FWR is?!
Maybe FWR should have read Cardcaptor Sakura. If he had, he would have known that Syaoran's ability to rock Clow's magic is already an established plot point in that series.
I mean Jesus, CLAMP. Jesus. This is nothing new, here.
Now, what IS surprising about this "revelation" is two things:
1. If Syaoran can bork around with Clow's magic circle, why didn't he do that EARLIER? Why was he sticking with his own magic circle when he could have Clow'd up and blown FWR out of the water?
2. Wasn't it a really, really, really big deal in Cardcaptor Sakura that it was SAKURA who inherited Clow's most powerful magic, NOT Syaoran?! Like, wasn't that one of the driving conflicts in the plot?! So what's with Yuuko declaring that Syaoran got the big guns from the big guy, all of a sudden? Is this yet ANOTHER example of CLAMP pushing Sakura aside so that Syaoran can be the Big Damn Hero while Sakura just floats around looking pretty and being totally helpless?
Answer to myself: Why yes, I believe it is.
Moving on.
I turn the page and OH HEY. Yuuko is holding a magical crystal ball (or whatever) in her hands, within which all of Our Heroes are floating. Um, is that why she looks like a fifty-story-tall giant to them?
I dunno, and I never get the chance to find out. Because in the very next panel, Yuuko's crystal ball (or whatever) is gone, and she's floating in a black, background-less void. Hellooooo, artistic laziness. I guess all of those dramatic Magical Swirlies splattered all over the previous pages really burned out CLAMP's artistic abilities. So anyway, now we're in a black void, for some reason. And pieces of shattered glass are floating all around Yuuko. The floating pieces of glass begin to knit themselves back together, forming the shape of...
Oh hey. Remember back a couple months ago, when Cloney died, and his body dissolved into broken fragments of glass?
Well guess who's back.
Heeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!
Cloney opens his eyes, and looks up at Yuuko. "Where... am I?"
"Inside a dream," Yuuko answers. Now, instead of shards of broken glass, sakura petals are swirling all around them.
Cloney looks down at his hands, which have not yet fully reformed. Oh, creepy. "But I... died..."
"Yes," Yuuko says. "Fei Wong attacked you, and smashed you apart."
"So... how...?"
"Because you are an artificial creation," Yuuko answers. "You cannot die, you can only disappear. Like her."
Cloney turns his head, and sees Sakura - the Sakura that he killed* - floating in the void. Her eyes are still closed, and she still looks very, very dead. As Cloney's body appears to be only half-formed from shards of broken glass, so too is Sakura's body partially formed by the sakura petals floating around her.
*Well, him and Fay. This was the clone!Sakura that got split into body and soul, remember? Fay shishkabobbed the body, then Cloney shishkabobbed her soul. Good GOD that sounds ridiculously stupid when I type it out like that. And it IS ridiculously stupid. It really, really is.
"Sa... kura..." Cloney says.
"That is why, before you could disappear completely," Yuuko says, "I brought both of your bodies here. In your case, I was able to bring your heart as well."
WAIT.
Yuuko brought Sakura's body into the dream world?
But! BUT! Didn't Kyle steal her body and deliver to FWR?! And then FWR later merged that body with the seven-year-old frozen!Sakura. It was Sakura's soul, not her body, that Cloney killed in the dream world. How does this make any sense?!
OH WAIT IT DOESN'T.
"The soul, and the memories, of the Sakura-hime that turned into flower petals," Yuuko explains, "as well as the body of the original Sakura that Fei Wong duplicated."
Wait. Wait.
Wait.
Is this... an explanation that I'm hearing?
A SENSIBLE explanation?!
"Fei Wong believed that the body of the original princess was destroyed during the cloning process," Yuuko says. "But he was mistaken."
So CLAMP didn't forget about the Sakura-that-was-cloned after all! Turns out that waaaaaay back in chapter whatever-the-fuck, when FWR said that the body of the original Sakura was destroyed, he was WROOOOOOOONG. Yuuko must have sucked up that body into her dimensional void (helloooo DEUS EX MACHINA), the same way that she sucked up clone!Sakura's murdered soul (HI THERE AGAIN), and clone!Syaoran's soul and body (YEP STILL PRETTY DAMN DEUS EX MACHINA OVER HERE).
This still leaves the question of what happened to the soul of the Sakura that was cloned, but we're going to let that slide for the time being. Asking for *everything* to be tied up neatly in a way that makes perfect sense is clearly asking far, far too much of this manga. I, for one, am not getting my hopes up.
Cloney asks Yuuko, "Why did you bring us here?"
Yuuko stares at him, and proclaims dramatically, "Because you must choose."
And then the chapter ends.
Oh for FUCK's sake. How many dramatic "choices" is Yuuko going to force all of these stupid Syaoran to make?! First we all had to make a HUGE FUCKING DEAL out of Oedipus!Syaoran's "choice", then it was all about Watanuki's "choice," then back to Oedipus!Syaoran's new "choice" to reset time, then we got more blah blah blah about the "choice" that everyone has to make for the sake of "both futures," and now we're back to Yuuko dramatically ordering a Syaoran to make a CHOICE. But by this time we've had this exact same scene repeated like fifty times already, and it's pretty much lost all of its impact and meaning.
I just don't care anymore.
Somebody give Yuuko a new outfit, quick!
Next will be a three-week break. Oh, the suspense. Or not.
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But for some inexplicable reason, FWR's fire-swirlies suddenly surge with power.
I don't really know, but maybe if the power of the "wind" magic is increased = more wind = more oxygen = the power of the fire magic increases?
oh my, don't really know why I'm trying to give an explanation when nothing makes sense anymore for me xDUUUU
Thank you very much, your comments are better than the chapter without doubt xDU
Scan the everloving shizbit out of the Soul Eater illustration Mook. 30% done
.___. Can I ask how many pictures? I think that you are having too much work doing this o_oU
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That's actually exactly what I was thinking.
Didn't that happen in CCS-- Sakura tried to catch Fiery with Windy, and Fiery was all "LOL U SO DUMB! FWOOOOOSH!" But combining Windy with Watery took it down.
FAY, you should've added water to the mix, silly! You and FWR both need to sit down with a copy of CCS. For that matter, so should CLAMP. ( ﾟ ヮﾟ)
I'm sick of the massive area-effect magical swirlies. They make no sense whatsoever to me. I can't figure out who's doing what, or even what effects are actually happening. My brain has come to the point where it sees the pages and goes, "Oh, more rough, erratic scribbles around the circles. Huh. *dismiss*"
...Is it
disturbingsad that I currently find Franken Fran more entertaining than TRC?no subject
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I found it online but it would have cost me about $100 AU(inc. postage) so I hesitated on getting it. Is it worth buying? (I do have the other KKM and Temari Matsumoto artbooks.) Do you have an idea on a cheaper place online to get it? (It was almost $40 USD where I saw it but that seemed to be upped from the Yen price I saw.)
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I'll wait and hope it's still around when I can afford. Thanks! I'll check out those sites.
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But seriously, though, your last paragraph REALLY made me laugh a storm. Keep it up! (though I totally agree with your last line -_- )
Toodles~