Katekyo Hitman Reborn - Yamamoto/Gokudera - Preposterous and Reckless
Title: Preposterous and Reckless
Author: Tylesti
Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn
Pairing: Yamamoto Takeshi/Gokudera Hayato
Spoilers: General series themes, specifically til about 170ish
Word Count: About 2500
Disclaimer: Not mine
Notes: Thank you Hikaruno5 for the beta.
Series Review
I'm going to be as honest as possible: Katekyo Hitman Reborn (hereafter abbreviated as KHR) is a painfully generic shounen manga series. There is very possibly not a single story element/plot twist you won't find mirrored in at least a dozen other shounen series, and the elements that do make it "original" (the creepy hamster babies seem a nice example) are neither entirely convincing nor very well explained.
That being said, I am indeed writing a manifesto for it. These two points are not as entirely disconnected as you might think.
The basic story of the series goes something along the lines of: useless, weak, Japanese hero-character (Tsuna) discovers he is actually next in line to be head of the Italian mafia clan the Vongola. It's all very "Princess Diaries." Tsuna's Julia Andrews is the Infamous-Hitman-Cum -Magically-Cursed-Baby™, Reborn, of the title, and the first seven volumes or so is spent gathering together a merry band of young, enthusiastic Japanese schoolboys to recruit into being a part of the Mafia. There is more subtext up the wazoo than…..what usually…. goes up… wazoos. Er. Right.
This is the manifesto for two of these schoolboys, Yamamoto Takeshi and Gokudera Hayato.
Gokudera Hayato (aka The Storm Guardian, "59," that angry emo kid with the white hair)
Gokudera is Tsuna's first loyal follower, and his first scene involves him defending the Vongola clan against the foreign insurrection Tsuna's rise to power would pose (ok, not in those words exactly, but gimme something). He tries to blow the both of them up in order to prove some sort adolescent point about determination and pride. Needless to say, Tsuna prevents the explosion and rather inadvertently wins Gokudera's confidence and love by the end of the chapter. This first scene is rather demonstrative, I think, of Gokudera's basic approach through life. He's the quintessential "all or nothing" personality, willing and capable of giving everything he has and more or less demanding everything in return.
As in the case of most characters like this, Gokudera is the product of a decently fucked up past. His father was a mafioso who hooked up with a half-Japanese pianist in a very brief affair. Nine months and some days later, Mommy Gokudera gave birth to illegitimate little Hayato. This illegitimacy doesn't deter Hayato's father from claiming him. His baby-mama's contact with her son is limited to one visit a year on his birthday, but those soon stop after he has her killed. Gokudera grows up in his father's household officially as the younger child of his legitimate Italian wife, but really, no one's fooled.
Hayato becomes a stand-offish, unaccepted child by his peers and by mafia society. This is important. At the beginning of KHR, he's eventually ended up in Japan and even though Tsuna is somewhat scared shitless of him, Gokudera finds some degree of acceptance from him and his subsequent groupies.
Being the perpetual outsider throughout his childhood, Gokudera has developed a very prickly, flamboyant sense of defensiveness. He is an almost nerdy kid naturally. He's drawn as almost ridiculously skinny (there is an obscure fandom joke: "Mission Feed Gokudera a Sandwich") and, despite his spiky jewelry and badass image, he's very studious and excels at school and, later, strategic planning.
It makes sense that, back in the day, when he picked his weapon of choice (because this is a shounen manga, and everyone must have weapon specialization), he chose dynamite, a middle-range weapon that is basically a bombastic, flashy way of basically making himself look bigger than he actually is.
From the lack of acceptance he's had in Italy, Gokudera is starved for affirmation and validation. After Tsuna saves him from his own bombs, he instantly embraces him as the true heir to the Vongola….throne…. and enthusiastically begins calling him by his proper title, the Tenth, pretty much to exclusion of any other name. Tsuna represents to Gokudera a chance at the acceptance he never got as the weird looking "son" of a mafia man and also a figure of authority who, once Gokudera is able to convince him to give him his confidence, will give him a position and a purpose in life. Thus, he is incredibly combative with the other "Guardians," who, in his mind, threaten to usurp this potential position and purpose by stealing the Tenth's attention and favor.
Gokudera does this thing where he goes around screaming things that basically go "blah blah blah THE TENTH!!" in which he promises, well, everything. This is Gokudera putting all the resources he has into sucking up. Gokudera sees himself as having nothing to give but himself -- therefore he will give ALL of himself, invest EVERYTHING he has to gain some sort of acknowledgement and validation from TSUNA THE FIGURE OF AUTHORITY. Unfortunately, this level of intensity is not something Tsuna (who is, ffs, 14 years old) is prepared or willing to deal with. Every evasion from Tsuna however just convinces Gokudera he isn't trying hard enough, that there is still something he can scrape from the bottom of the barrel to offer up. It is central to Gokudera's system of belief that one day something he does will warrant (essentially) a pat on the head AND HE WILL FINALLY BE GOOD ENOUGH.
Yamamoto Takashi (aka The Rain Guardian, "80," the dumb jock)
It's really hard to talk about any of KHR's support characters without putting them in relation to Tsuna, who is not only the main character but seemingly the only reason any of them have a reason to even look at one another. Yamamoto is one of Tsuna's schoolmates; they have known each other presumably since grade school and has Tsuna always, vaguely and at a distance, admired Yamamoto for his affability but mostly for the fact that he is socially successful and universally liked. When Yamamoto first appears, it is in a man-crush-ish reference by Tsuna to how awesome it would be if he were good at sports like Yamamoto.
That's basically the depth of Yamamoto's characterization. He's a regular kid, friendly, happy-go-lucky, bad at school but good at sports, athletics, anything physical. He is recruited into Tsuna's mafia gang/group/thing when Tsuna saves him from jumping off of a building after he broke his arm during baseball practice and thought he had no reason to live.
Where Yamamoto becomes interesting is in how he is presented as fairly clueless but at the same time very perceptive (see conversation below), usually in a subdued, back-seat sort of way. He is characterized as thinking Tsuna and Reborn's mafia recruiting/training shtick is just a mafia RPG while at the same time showing bursts of incredible insightfulness about other characters' motivations and that are hard to brush off as spontaneous observation. The most empirical answer to this he is not as stupid as he presents himself to be.
Riding on the same train of logic, Yamamoto, though enthusiastic in ways that would exhaust cheerleaders, is bored. After Tsuna saves him, he almost abruptly dumps baseball, his team, his fangirls, in favor of a "mafia game." He eventually goes off baseball - which had previously been his life in every literal sense, given his suicide attempt - completely in favor of his new group of friends and their bizarre and comically, potentially deadly adventures. He is bored silly with conventionalism, being well-liked and routine.
Yamamoto likes Tsuna; he gives him an alternative to baseball that he's still good at and (cheezily) is able to like him back. However, Yamamoto does not know what to think about Gokudera. Gokudera throws Yamamoto for a loop. Unlike Tsuna, who is entirely freaked out by Gokudera's classically un-Japanese demonstrativeness, Yamamoto finds someone who not only doesn't instantaneously like him, but who also demonstrates no interest in ever liking him and who seems bent on treating him like a rival. Yamamoto, the all-star all the time, has never really had anyone who has treated him with either open hostility or as an equal. Even Tsuna, though his self-professed friend, stands in unabashed awe at Yamamoto's sheer athletic ability. Gokudera is just pissed off at him and is intent on measuring his success with Yamamoto's.
A case for 8059
Yamamoto has not had anyone else so fully test his patience, his gall, or his worry quite so much as Gokudera. Yamamoto, though calculating beneath the mindless affability, is a genuinely nice person. Gokudera starts off in Yamamoto's brain as "the really interesting guy" and "Tsuna's other friend," mostly distinguished as the guy Yamamoto can't understand. He can't quite win him over and yet he sees Gokudera's devotion towards Tsuna so he knows that he's capable of it. Yamamoto is a naturally curious kid when things provoke his interest. Here is an anomaly who is frightening and intelligent and self-sufficient and yet still follows a disgustingly less capable boy around like a lost puppy. Yamamoto can already see what inspires this confidence; he was saved himself. What he doesn't understand is what Gokudera is getting out of it. What he sees is what I've pretty much already described above: a boy who is convinced of his own lack of worth, who looks for salvation but is unwilling to be saved. Yamamoto can see in him the color of himself -- someone reaching for worth through passion -- but also someone who is of a different shade altogether -- mournful but alive.
Gokudera is incapable of seeing very far, neither within himself nor within other people. All he sees is what he wants to see, what he expects to see, and only rarely the reality behind it. So what he sees in Tsuna is his savior, everything he needs to pull himself out of anonymity and into a circle of warmth. He sees in Yamamoto an unnecessary obstacle to this salvation, someone who is taking his chances unappreciatively and who is drawing his savior's attention away from himself. So it startles him every time Yamamoto proves to be more than trash, every time he casually earns the acknowledgement Gokudera so desperately grasps for, every time he is so carelessly embraced with familiarity. Gokudera hates Yamamoto with the same intensity that he envies him, with the same insistence that this obstacle, like any others, is nothing to him, and whose only use is to be tolerated for appearances and then ignored.
There is nothing to Gokudera which is not impenetrable, and Yamamoto, through steadiness and very little pressure, manages to insinuate himself as a constant in Gokudera's life. The thing then is that they become friends of sorts, from Gokudera's view, revolving around Tsuna, but what he doesn't realize is how while Yamamoto never presumes to talk him down, he has learned to handle him, or placate him, whichever the situation calls for. Yamamoto never ceases to be Gokudera's rival in the sense that Gokudera will always look for Yamamoto next to him, in his mind to assure that he is not falling behind to the idiot's skills (like right hand and left hand pulling at each other until they reach THE HAND OF GOD!!!). But this is the end of it; as soon as Yamamoto becomes an integral part of Gokudera's social dynamic, he becomes someone who matters, suddenly, someone whose opinion matters. He becomes someone who cares about him, and whether or not Gokudera wants it to, this means that voluntarily, someone who he wasn't even sucking up to decided he was worth attention and protection and camaraderie.
One of my fics is titled 'Mutual Manipulation' (haha self-pimp) which really is what this relationship is: Yamamoto working behind his pleasantly clueless face to distract Gokudera from his interminable melancholy and Gokudera falling into unpredictability to move Yamamoto to interest. It's not a particularly healthy relationship as it stands right now, but, (gag and vomit) the closer they get to caring about each other, the closer they get to dropping the faces maybe that will be enough, finally getting what they've been looking for.
Personal History
This was actually the exact panel upon which I started shipping these two. I actually didn't begin to read KHR until my friend essentially blackmailed me into doing so, and spent the first two volumes or so bored witless. And then I noticed that these two characters in there kept showing up everywhere together, even though they were being cast as very archetypal rivals (slashtastic in it of itself) and, well, hell, how else do you want me to explain it? I thought it was cute, if implausible. Maybe they pick each other up and walk over to Tsuna's house together. Maybe Gokudera lives in Yamamoto's attic. Or maybe the mangaka is too lazy to introduce separately characters into scenes
But I realize this might not be enough for most people. I therefore present you this rough summary of a fight scene-
Gokudera: I hate you! You're useless and I don't need you!
Yamamoto: *angry* Fine!
Gokudera: *is beat up and electrocuted*
Yamamoto: *grim*
Gokudera: Oh shit, I'm gonna die!
Yamamoto: *intervention!! and hits him*
Gokuder: Hey, wtf???
Yamamoto: *manly, serious dialogue* (Let me take care of you!!)
Bad guy: *is creepy*
Gokudera: I can't let you die! The Tenth would kill me! (I love you too!!)
Yamamoto: Gokudera....
Bad guy: Ready to die?
Gokudera: "We'll die, one after another."
*Gokudera and Yamamoto win*
Yamamoto: We're so badass
Gokudera: *smug, flirty face*
Bad guy: I'm not really dead!
*Gokudera and Yamamoto get beat up*
After
Gokudera: Omg Tenth, Yamamoto got killed, and it's ALL MY FAULT
Reborn: Oh, he's not dead. "He also said many good things that he said not to tell Gokudera"
Gokudera: OMG YAY!
Yeah. Theirs is a repressed love.
Fandom Guide
- Hitman_Reborn The main comm. Manga discussions, downloads, fanworks galore. No ship specific but slash friendly (honestly, when your cast consists entirely of nubile schoolboys, you're going to be hard pressed to find a KHR comm that isn't slash centered)
- YamaGoku One of the ever multiplying number of 8059 comms. It's, as far as I know, one of the older ones. Lots of fanwork.
- Fanfic Recs List #1
- Fanfic Recs List #2
- An explanation to the fandom "counting" system i.e. "Wtf does 8059 have to do with anything, you freak?"
Specific Fics and Art
I have a rather obscenely large folder of stuff for this pairing, but in a rather illegitimate format.
Download here defunct
Mediafire mirror expired
FileDropper mirror UPDATED: 10 March 2013.
Post script:
The title for this manifesto comes from one of the translations (I can't find the original source) of the YamaGoku theme song Our Joy!. Lyrics are included in the mp3 file. Basically, they're so gay, even the seiyuus know it.
This manifesto is pilfered from my much more extensive, much less n00b friendly meta found here
Author: Tylesti
Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn
Pairing: Yamamoto Takeshi/Gokudera Hayato
Spoilers: General series themes, specifically til about 170ish
Word Count: About 2500
Disclaimer: Not mine
Notes: Thank you Hikaruno5 for the beta.
Series Review
I'm going to be as honest as possible: Katekyo Hitman Reborn (hereafter abbreviated as KHR) is a painfully generic shounen manga series. There is very possibly not a single story element/plot twist you won't find mirrored in at least a dozen other shounen series, and the elements that do make it "original" (the creepy hamster babies seem a nice example) are neither entirely convincing nor very well explained.
That being said, I am indeed writing a manifesto for it. These two points are not as entirely disconnected as you might think.
The basic story of the series goes something along the lines of: useless, weak, Japanese hero-character (Tsuna) discovers he is actually next in line to be head of the Italian mafia clan the Vongola. It's all very "Princess Diaries." Tsuna's Julia Andrews is the Infamous-Hitman-Cum -Magically-Cursed-Baby™, Reborn, of the title, and the first seven volumes or so is spent gathering together a merry band of young, enthusiastic Japanese schoolboys to recruit into being a part of the Mafia. There is more subtext up the wazoo than…..what usually…. goes up… wazoos. Er. Right.
This is the manifesto for two of these schoolboys, Yamamoto Takeshi and Gokudera Hayato.
Gokudera Hayato (aka The Storm Guardian, "59," that angry emo kid with the white hair)
Gokudera is Tsuna's first loyal follower, and his first scene involves him defending the Vongola clan against the foreign insurrection Tsuna's rise to power would pose (ok, not in those words exactly, but gimme something). He tries to blow the both of them up in order to prove some sort adolescent point about determination and pride. Needless to say, Tsuna prevents the explosion and rather inadvertently wins Gokudera's confidence and love by the end of the chapter. This first scene is rather demonstrative, I think, of Gokudera's basic approach through life. He's the quintessential "all or nothing" personality, willing and capable of giving everything he has and more or less demanding everything in return.
As in the case of most characters like this, Gokudera is the product of a decently fucked up past. His father was a mafioso who hooked up with a half-Japanese pianist in a very brief affair. Nine months and some days later, Mommy Gokudera gave birth to illegitimate little Hayato. This illegitimacy doesn't deter Hayato's father from claiming him. His baby-mama's contact with her son is limited to one visit a year on his birthday, but those soon stop after he has her killed. Gokudera grows up in his father's household officially as the younger child of his legitimate Italian wife, but really, no one's fooled.
Hayato becomes a stand-offish, unaccepted child by his peers and by mafia society. This is important. At the beginning of KHR, he's eventually ended up in Japan and even though Tsuna is somewhat scared shitless of him, Gokudera finds some degree of acceptance from him and his subsequent groupies.
Being the perpetual outsider throughout his childhood, Gokudera has developed a very prickly, flamboyant sense of defensiveness. He is an almost nerdy kid naturally. He's drawn as almost ridiculously skinny (there is an obscure fandom joke: "Mission Feed Gokudera a Sandwich") and, despite his spiky jewelry and badass image, he's very studious and excels at school and, later, strategic planning.
It makes sense that, back in the day, when he picked his weapon of choice (because this is a shounen manga, and everyone must have weapon specialization), he chose dynamite, a middle-range weapon that is basically a bombastic, flashy way of basically making himself look bigger than he actually is.
From the lack of acceptance he's had in Italy, Gokudera is starved for affirmation and validation. After Tsuna saves him from his own bombs, he instantly embraces him as the true heir to the Vongola….throne…. and enthusiastically begins calling him by his proper title, the Tenth, pretty much to exclusion of any other name. Tsuna represents to Gokudera a chance at the acceptance he never got as the weird looking "son" of a mafia man and also a figure of authority who, once Gokudera is able to convince him to give him his confidence, will give him a position and a purpose in life. Thus, he is incredibly combative with the other "Guardians," who, in his mind, threaten to usurp this potential position and purpose by stealing the Tenth's attention and favor.
Gokudera does this thing where he goes around screaming things that basically go "blah blah blah THE TENTH!!" in which he promises, well, everything. This is Gokudera putting all the resources he has into sucking up. Gokudera sees himself as having nothing to give but himself -- therefore he will give ALL of himself, invest EVERYTHING he has to gain some sort of acknowledgement and validation from TSUNA THE FIGURE OF AUTHORITY. Unfortunately, this level of intensity is not something Tsuna (who is, ffs, 14 years old) is prepared or willing to deal with. Every evasion from Tsuna however just convinces Gokudera he isn't trying hard enough, that there is still something he can scrape from the bottom of the barrel to offer up. It is central to Gokudera's system of belief that one day something he does will warrant (essentially) a pat on the head AND HE WILL FINALLY BE GOOD ENOUGH.
Yamamoto Takashi (aka The Rain Guardian, "80," the dumb jock)
It's really hard to talk about any of KHR's support characters without putting them in relation to Tsuna, who is not only the main character but seemingly the only reason any of them have a reason to even look at one another. Yamamoto is one of Tsuna's schoolmates; they have known each other presumably since grade school and has Tsuna always, vaguely and at a distance, admired Yamamoto for his affability but mostly for the fact that he is socially successful and universally liked. When Yamamoto first appears, it is in a man-crush-ish reference by Tsuna to how awesome it would be if he were good at sports like Yamamoto.
That's basically the depth of Yamamoto's characterization. He's a regular kid, friendly, happy-go-lucky, bad at school but good at sports, athletics, anything physical. He is recruited into Tsuna's mafia gang/group/thing when Tsuna saves him from jumping off of a building after he broke his arm during baseball practice and thought he had no reason to live.
Where Yamamoto becomes interesting is in how he is presented as fairly clueless but at the same time very perceptive (see conversation below), usually in a subdued, back-seat sort of way. He is characterized as thinking Tsuna and Reborn's mafia recruiting/training shtick is just a mafia RPG while at the same time showing bursts of incredible insightfulness about other characters' motivations and that are hard to brush off as spontaneous observation. The most empirical answer to this he is not as stupid as he presents himself to be.
Riding on the same train of logic, Yamamoto, though enthusiastic in ways that would exhaust cheerleaders, is bored. After Tsuna saves him, he almost abruptly dumps baseball, his team, his fangirls, in favor of a "mafia game." He eventually goes off baseball - which had previously been his life in every literal sense, given his suicide attempt - completely in favor of his new group of friends and their bizarre and comically, potentially deadly adventures. He is bored silly with conventionalism, being well-liked and routine.
Yamamoto likes Tsuna; he gives him an alternative to baseball that he's still good at and (cheezily) is able to like him back. However, Yamamoto does not know what to think about Gokudera. Gokudera throws Yamamoto for a loop. Unlike Tsuna, who is entirely freaked out by Gokudera's classically un-Japanese demonstrativeness, Yamamoto finds someone who not only doesn't instantaneously like him, but who also demonstrates no interest in ever liking him and who seems bent on treating him like a rival. Yamamoto, the all-star all the time, has never really had anyone who has treated him with either open hostility or as an equal. Even Tsuna, though his self-professed friend, stands in unabashed awe at Yamamoto's sheer athletic ability. Gokudera is just pissed off at him and is intent on measuring his success with Yamamoto's.
A case for 8059
Yamamoto has not had anyone else so fully test his patience, his gall, or his worry quite so much as Gokudera. Yamamoto, though calculating beneath the mindless affability, is a genuinely nice person. Gokudera starts off in Yamamoto's brain as "the really interesting guy" and "Tsuna's other friend," mostly distinguished as the guy Yamamoto can't understand. He can't quite win him over and yet he sees Gokudera's devotion towards Tsuna so he knows that he's capable of it. Yamamoto is a naturally curious kid when things provoke his interest. Here is an anomaly who is frightening and intelligent and self-sufficient and yet still follows a disgustingly less capable boy around like a lost puppy. Yamamoto can already see what inspires this confidence; he was saved himself. What he doesn't understand is what Gokudera is getting out of it. What he sees is what I've pretty much already described above: a boy who is convinced of his own lack of worth, who looks for salvation but is unwilling to be saved. Yamamoto can see in him the color of himself -- someone reaching for worth through passion -- but also someone who is of a different shade altogether -- mournful but alive.
Gokudera is incapable of seeing very far, neither within himself nor within other people. All he sees is what he wants to see, what he expects to see, and only rarely the reality behind it. So what he sees in Tsuna is his savior, everything he needs to pull himself out of anonymity and into a circle of warmth. He sees in Yamamoto an unnecessary obstacle to this salvation, someone who is taking his chances unappreciatively and who is drawing his savior's attention away from himself. So it startles him every time Yamamoto proves to be more than trash, every time he casually earns the acknowledgement Gokudera so desperately grasps for, every time he is so carelessly embraced with familiarity. Gokudera hates Yamamoto with the same intensity that he envies him, with the same insistence that this obstacle, like any others, is nothing to him, and whose only use is to be tolerated for appearances and then ignored.
There is nothing to Gokudera which is not impenetrable, and Yamamoto, through steadiness and very little pressure, manages to insinuate himself as a constant in Gokudera's life. The thing then is that they become friends of sorts, from Gokudera's view, revolving around Tsuna, but what he doesn't realize is how while Yamamoto never presumes to talk him down, he has learned to handle him, or placate him, whichever the situation calls for. Yamamoto never ceases to be Gokudera's rival in the sense that Gokudera will always look for Yamamoto next to him, in his mind to assure that he is not falling behind to the idiot's skills (like right hand and left hand pulling at each other until they reach THE HAND OF GOD!!!). But this is the end of it; as soon as Yamamoto becomes an integral part of Gokudera's social dynamic, he becomes someone who matters, suddenly, someone whose opinion matters. He becomes someone who cares about him, and whether or not Gokudera wants it to, this means that voluntarily, someone who he wasn't even sucking up to decided he was worth attention and protection and camaraderie.
One of my fics is titled 'Mutual Manipulation' (haha self-pimp) which really is what this relationship is: Yamamoto working behind his pleasantly clueless face to distract Gokudera from his interminable melancholy and Gokudera falling into unpredictability to move Yamamoto to interest. It's not a particularly healthy relationship as it stands right now, but, (gag and vomit) the closer they get to caring about each other, the closer they get to dropping the faces maybe that will be enough, finally getting what they've been looking for.
Personal History
This was actually the exact panel upon which I started shipping these two. I actually didn't begin to read KHR until my friend essentially blackmailed me into doing so, and spent the first two volumes or so bored witless. And then I noticed that these two characters in there kept showing up everywhere together, even though they were being cast as very archetypal rivals (slashtastic in it of itself) and, well, hell, how else do you want me to explain it? I thought it was cute, if implausible. Maybe they pick each other up and walk over to Tsuna's house together. Maybe Gokudera lives in Yamamoto's attic. Or maybe the mangaka is too lazy to introduce separately characters into scenes
But I realize this might not be enough for most people. I therefore present you this rough summary of a fight scene-
Gokudera: I hate you! You're useless and I don't need you!
Yamamoto: *angry* Fine!
Gokudera: *is beat up and electrocuted*
Yamamoto: *grim*
Gokudera: Oh shit, I'm gonna die!
Yamamoto: *intervention!! and hits him*
Gokuder: Hey, wtf???
Yamamoto: *manly, serious dialogue* (Let me take care of you!!)
Bad guy: *is creepy*
Gokudera: I can't let you die! The Tenth would kill me! (I love you too!!)
Yamamoto: Gokudera....
Bad guy: Ready to die?
Gokudera: "We'll die, one after another."
*Gokudera and Yamamoto win*
Yamamoto: We're so badass
Gokudera: *smug, flirty face*
Bad guy: I'm not really dead!
*Gokudera and Yamamoto get beat up*
After
Gokudera: Omg Tenth, Yamamoto got killed, and it's ALL MY FAULT
Reborn: Oh, he's not dead. "He also said many good things that he said not to tell Gokudera"
Gokudera: OMG YAY!
Yeah. Theirs is a repressed love.
Fandom Guide
- Hitman_Reborn The main comm. Manga discussions, downloads, fanworks galore. No ship specific but slash friendly (honestly, when your cast consists entirely of nubile schoolboys, you're going to be hard pressed to find a KHR comm that isn't slash centered)
- YamaGoku One of the ever multiplying number of 8059 comms. It's, as far as I know, one of the older ones. Lots of fanwork.
- Fanfic Recs List #1
- Fanfic Recs List #2
- An explanation to the fandom "counting" system i.e. "Wtf does 8059 have to do with anything, you freak?"
Specific Fics and Art
I have a rather obscenely large folder of stuff for this pairing, but in a rather illegitimate format.
Download here defunct
Mediafire mirror expired
FileDropper mirror UPDATED: 10 March 2013.
Post script:
The title for this manifesto comes from one of the translations (I can't find the original source) of the YamaGoku theme song Our Joy!. Lyrics are included in the mp3 file. Basically, they're so gay, even the seiyuus know it.
This manifesto is pilfered from my much more extensive, much less n00b friendly meta found here