More anime randomosity, this time full of speculations
But first, another "Hey, It's That Voice" moment: "Whoa... am I hearing this right or am I just that tired? Rukia's captain sure sounds like a Certain Shinigami Named Kurosaki, if his voice had changed a little more..." (Liam O'Brien, who voiced Hisoka in Yami no Matsuei, only this time his voice is a bit deeper, no doubt because he's not trying to sound like an Unfunny sixteen year old).
Also, I'd like to borrow one of Tsuzuki's twelve shikigami, specifically Touda, the fiery black serpent, to burn the captain of Squad 12 to cinders and beyond, since said shikigami is capable of burning even a death god to the final death and one would think the same would apply to Soul Reapers (Yeah, I yelled "Die in a fire!" at the screen a few times, corrected myself, then realized there was a cross-universe possibility...). I called this guy "The Even More Not So Good Doctor", and I wasn't kidding: he makes Muraki look like a nice guy by comparison. But then again, the YnM manga strongly hints that the Evil Albino may be a case of Love Makes You Evil; Dr. Noh is just plain ghastly and devoid of anything remotely or vaguely resembling humanity. I hope that's the last I see of him in this series; there's hating a villain because he's a bad guy, and then there's hating a villain because the character annoys you and seems two-dimensional and Dr. Noh is the latter case.
But on to the speculations. First: Abel Nightroad's sweet tooth. I somehow came up with the crazy theory that a certain daffy priest's sweet tooth might have a somewhat practical application. Might have something to do with calories being burned like mad when the nanomachines are shifting him from normal mode to Crusnik mode (conservation of mass and of energy and all that). But thirteen sugars in one cup of tea?! Someday I'm going to try and see what happens if you actually put thirteen sugars in a cup of tea (ie. do you really wind up with a cup full of soggy tea-colored sugar cubes as it's drawn in the anime?). I know Crusniks are basically test-tube-grown humans with nanomachines implanted into them, but I'm really curious about their physiology and genetics now.
Speculation the second: Muraki's glass eye. There's quite a bit of Wild Mass Guessing in the fandom. The most conservative guess is that it's a plain old glass eye (or a removable acrylic insert over a permanently implanted core made out of coral, which is how most real-world "glass" eyes are made). The wildest guess is that it could be a cybernetic implant (turns out there was a research team in Japan who really were testing out cybernetic eyes on human volunteers; it failed horribly and they shut down the project); I've even toyed with the notion that if it is cybernetic, it might be equipped with night vision (all the better to stalk his tender prey with...). In a moment of Occam's Razor, it occurred to me that it could might not even be an artificial eye, but a cloned eye, since his mentor and former professor is involved in cloning organs. What's never made clear is how he lost the eye, but I know a Sandman crossover featuring The Corinthian, which was so awesomely written that I've adopted it into my personal fan-mythos.
Speculation the third: zanpaktou vs. wacky female energy vampire armed with an assault rifle retrofitted with a crossbow on top. Or as Mercy Falcone, the female energy vamp in question and my OFC, calls it "my spook-killing little friend". I have to admit, Mercy is a bit of a wildcat, but she's a wildcat with a purpose: she takes pride in protecting people on both sides of the line between life and death, and she has fun doing it, even if that means causing some collateral damage to buildings. For some absurd reason known only to whatever directs my weird sense of logic, I've been cross-pollinating some of my YnM works in progress with elements from Bleach, with the Ministry of Hades operating more like the justice department of the afterlife and the Soul Society as something like the military. Consequently, the Soul Society has a tendency to look down on the Ministry of Hades as a bunch of wusses who rely too much on magic (this has been done in crossover fics) and can't handle combat, while the Ministry tends to respect the Soul Society for what they do, but tend to view them as being a little too "us vs. them".
I get the feeling the Soul Society wouldn't take too well to energy vampires and would consider them to be one step short of being Hollows; thus they aren't thrilled when it comes out that Mercy is admitted into the Ministry's public security division (something like a cross between a SWAT team and the Men in Black: they create the covers when the Ministry has to make its presence known to the mortals and at times they take out particularly nasty preternatural beasties). Also, Mercy likes her firearms and after becoming a shinigami, she rigs herself the assault rifle-crossbow combo mentioned above. I have to admit to being a "guns > swords" sort of person, so I get a bit of a jag out of the notion of her going up against a particularly arrogant Soul Reaper and filling the guy with lead/silver rounds/silver-tipped bolts from the crossbow before her opponent can draw his sword. If she hasn't used her energy vamp abilities to drain or cut through his spirit energy first or used a concussive energy blast to disorient him, though there again, she'd be the first to admit she's not the strongest energy vamp out there and much like Thomas Raith in the Dresden Files, she tends to keep her energy reserves at survival level to keep from sliding into dangerous territory. It's the kind of thing that depends on a lot of variables and I really can't come to a lot of conclusions just yet.
Also, I'd like to borrow one of Tsuzuki's twelve shikigami, specifically Touda, the fiery black serpent, to burn the captain of Squad 12 to cinders and beyond, since said shikigami is capable of burning even a death god to the final death and one would think the same would apply to Soul Reapers (Yeah, I yelled "Die in a fire!" at the screen a few times, corrected myself, then realized there was a cross-universe possibility...). I called this guy "The Even More Not So Good Doctor", and I wasn't kidding: he makes Muraki look like a nice guy by comparison. But then again, the YnM manga strongly hints that the Evil Albino may be a case of Love Makes You Evil; Dr. Noh is just plain ghastly and devoid of anything remotely or vaguely resembling humanity. I hope that's the last I see of him in this series; there's hating a villain because he's a bad guy, and then there's hating a villain because the character annoys you and seems two-dimensional and Dr. Noh is the latter case.
But on to the speculations. First: Abel Nightroad's sweet tooth. I somehow came up with the crazy theory that a certain daffy priest's sweet tooth might have a somewhat practical application. Might have something to do with calories being burned like mad when the nanomachines are shifting him from normal mode to Crusnik mode (conservation of mass and of energy and all that). But thirteen sugars in one cup of tea?! Someday I'm going to try and see what happens if you actually put thirteen sugars in a cup of tea (ie. do you really wind up with a cup full of soggy tea-colored sugar cubes as it's drawn in the anime?). I know Crusniks are basically test-tube-grown humans with nanomachines implanted into them, but I'm really curious about their physiology and genetics now.
Speculation the second: Muraki's glass eye. There's quite a bit of Wild Mass Guessing in the fandom. The most conservative guess is that it's a plain old glass eye (or a removable acrylic insert over a permanently implanted core made out of coral, which is how most real-world "glass" eyes are made). The wildest guess is that it could be a cybernetic implant (turns out there was a research team in Japan who really were testing out cybernetic eyes on human volunteers; it failed horribly and they shut down the project); I've even toyed with the notion that if it is cybernetic, it might be equipped with night vision (all the better to stalk his tender prey with...). In a moment of Occam's Razor, it occurred to me that it could might not even be an artificial eye, but a cloned eye, since his mentor and former professor is involved in cloning organs. What's never made clear is how he lost the eye, but I know a Sandman crossover featuring The Corinthian, which was so awesomely written that I've adopted it into my personal fan-mythos.
Speculation the third: zanpaktou vs. wacky female energy vampire armed with an assault rifle retrofitted with a crossbow on top. Or as Mercy Falcone, the female energy vamp in question and my OFC, calls it "my spook-killing little friend". I have to admit, Mercy is a bit of a wildcat, but she's a wildcat with a purpose: she takes pride in protecting people on both sides of the line between life and death, and she has fun doing it, even if that means causing some collateral damage to buildings. For some absurd reason known only to whatever directs my weird sense of logic, I've been cross-pollinating some of my YnM works in progress with elements from Bleach, with the Ministry of Hades operating more like the justice department of the afterlife and the Soul Society as something like the military. Consequently, the Soul Society has a tendency to look down on the Ministry of Hades as a bunch of wusses who rely too much on magic (this has been done in crossover fics) and can't handle combat, while the Ministry tends to respect the Soul Society for what they do, but tend to view them as being a little too "us vs. them".
I get the feeling the Soul Society wouldn't take too well to energy vampires and would consider them to be one step short of being Hollows; thus they aren't thrilled when it comes out that Mercy is admitted into the Ministry's public security division (something like a cross between a SWAT team and the Men in Black: they create the covers when the Ministry has to make its presence known to the mortals and at times they take out particularly nasty preternatural beasties). Also, Mercy likes her firearms and after becoming a shinigami, she rigs herself the assault rifle-crossbow combo mentioned above. I have to admit to being a "guns > swords" sort of person, so I get a bit of a jag out of the notion of her going up against a particularly arrogant Soul Reaper and filling the guy with lead/silver rounds/silver-tipped bolts from the crossbow before her opponent can draw his sword. If she hasn't used her energy vamp abilities to drain or cut through his spirit energy first or used a concussive energy blast to disorient him, though there again, she'd be the first to admit she's not the strongest energy vamp out there and much like Thomas Raith in the Dresden Files, she tends to keep her energy reserves at survival level to keep from sliding into dangerous territory. It's the kind of thing that depends on a lot of variables and I really can't come to a lot of conclusions just yet.