Snowflake challenge days 3, 4 & 5
Day 3
In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc.) and explain why you love it so much. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I'm late mostly because I couldn't figure what fandom to talk about. Last year I did the fight scene at the beginning of Hannibal season 2...
And for this year I finally decided to talk about Hunter X Hunter by mangaka Yoshihiro Togashi, which has been my favorite manga ever since I was 13 years old and a friend of my little brother lent us a few books. (Said crafty little brother later got me the first tomes as a birthday present so I would buy the rest... which I did.) To this day I still buy faithfully every new tome when they come out in French, which is not that often. (This incredible hiatus x hiatus chart shows the rhythm of chapter publication over twenty years... 2018 has been the best year since 2010.... which is both a bit depressing and heartening I guess.)
One of the things that explain this enduring love for HxH is that it's actually not the basic shonen it seems to be: a young boy wanting to get stronger to find his father and going on a quest and finding friends along the way... Only Togashi doesn't go the obvious road and isn't interested in drawn-out tournaments or unchecked power-ups. More often than not, fights in HxH are resolved because characters have been clever and either managed to think outside the box, or to use the complex constrains and rules of the situation at their advantages, or even because wining wasn't actually what they were after.... and physical victory is almost never the point, or at least never the way things exactly end, even when the set-up makes you think the plot will unavoidably go one way or the other. You can see it even in tome 1, when to get to the beginning of the Hunter exam the characters have to answer a riddle, and the way they react is also a great feat of characterizations because it tells you exactly who they are from the start.
The thing is the riddle isn't even a riddle: it's a choice. "Your son and your daughter has been kidnapped and you only can get one back. Who do you choose?" No "but", or "if". You have to give an answer. If you don't you are disqualified.
Obviously there is no right answer: Leolio points that out and get angry and promises to beat up the old lady asking the question, Kurapika uses his knowledge and observations skills and figures not only that the correct answer was silence (and also that a previous participant that gave an answer to a similar question and was told to pass and go one way hadn't actually *passed*). And Gon takes it seriously and keeps on wondering what he would do if faced with such an impossible choice.
Another thing with HxH is that different characters react in a different ways to things, and sometime it can be a strength... but sometime it can lead them to a dark path. Gon's orange and blue morality is there early on, but it gets in play in different ways, as well as his bone-headed stubbornness that in later arcs will get him and his friends into trouble, and damage his relationship with Killua... And it's also already hinted at in tome 1.
This only the beginning of the journey of course, but it starts as it goes on, even if later on the choices will be darker, and sometime the thinking and analyzing a situation can become overthinking and over explaining, but everything that the series become later is already in the early tomes, including the way things never turn out the way you expected them to. And that why I keep on loving HxH, even when I sometime enjoy it less: it keeps on being surprising, and true to its characters even when they evolve.
Day 4
Comment to someone you haven't ever interacted with before or introduce yourself to someone you've interacted with and friend/follow them. Afterwards, leave a comment in this post with the equivalent of "I did it!"
I often comment on fics so the first should be easy, but I'll try to do the second as well with someone I follow and have interacted a bit with, but never did the full introduction thing.
Don't hesitate to introduce yourself in the comments over here if you want to! \o/
Day 5
In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
On DW I love:
fancake : a thematic multifandom reccing community that gave me some of my best reads those last years. It got me into reccing fic much more often as well, even if some themes are more my jam than other (I wanted the 'interspecies story' round to never end! ^^).
drawesome : a traditional art community that I joined one year and half ago and where I found lovely peoples. They hold challenges every month. :)
fictional_fans : is a place for multifandom fans to gather, ask questions or discuss. The idea is that many fandoms don't have the critical mass for a community to stay alive, while a multifandom community may.
I also spend a lot of time on a French writers discord, where we talk about all sorts of things not always related to writing. ^^
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