Dynasty Reader » Forum › Otherside Picnic discussion (2024)

kinseijoshiUploader

Suimasen Scans

joined Feb 8, 2024

Not just that, she's an unreliable narrator for narrating any feeling. A lot of the time she seems trustworthy but then even for basic stuff like fear, her ability to describe the degree of feelings or any sort of nuance is very shaky. For example, she describes the beach at the end of the world in a way that sounds relatively "standard" for Otherside encounters, but they ended up so traumatized that they stayed in Okinawa until they stopped having very literal PTSD attacks. She explicitly claims to have no real problem with shooting threats that look and act completely like real humans, and then goes on to have nightmares about them for a week.

My favorite subtle thing about this story is the Otherside appearing whenever Sorawo starts to get intense feelings. There's the Otherside appearing the moment Toriko drops the bombshell in this chapter, but there's stuff like wandering into the interstitial space when Toriko leaves, or attacked by a Self-blinding monster right after wondering whether she told Toriko about her history, or having the ghosts of her dad and grandma appear right after she has an emotional moment about her future with Toriko. The Otherside seems very much related to Sorawo's terror at encountering normal parts of life she doesn't have a script for. It's almost like she's generally un-selfaware, with anti-cult mode being a comforting state where she's purely acting in self-preservation, and Otherside mode being slammed with too much information about herself at once. Cringe is also a form of continuous attachment.

The mannequins here are a nice symbolic thing. What better to complement the feeling of your body being objectified than a tool to sell clothes. What better way to highlight being kinda okay with Toriko being the one to ogle her than contrasting her against a faceless crowd doing the same?

Gabinomicon

joined Apr 10, 2023

Not just that, she's an unreliable narrator for narrating any feeling. A lot of the time she seems trustworthy but then even for basic stuff like fear, her ability to describe the degree of feelings or any sort of nuance is very shaky. For example, she describes the beach at the end of the world in a way that sounds relatively "standard" for Otherside encounters, but they ended up so traumatized that they stayed in Okinawa until they stopped having very literal PTSD attacks. She explicitly claims to have no real problem with shooting threats that look and act completely like real humans, and then goes on to have nightmares about them for a week.

My favorite subtle thing about this story is the Otherside appearing whenever Sorawo starts to get intense feelings. There's the Otherside appearing the moment Toriko drops the bombshell in this chapter, but there's stuff like wandering into the interstitial space when Toriko leaves, or attacked by a Self-blinding monster right after wondering whether she told Toriko about her history, or having the ghosts of her dad and grandma appear right after she has an emotional moment about her future with Toriko. The Otherside seems very much related to Sorawo's terror at encountering normal parts of life she doesn't have a script for. It's almost like she's generally un-selfaware, with anti-cult mode being a comforting state where she's purely acting in self-preservation, and Otherside mode being slammed with too much information about herself at once. Cringe is also a form of continuous attachment.

The mannequins here are a nice symbolic thing. What better to complement the feeling of your body being objectified than a tool to sell clothes. What better way to highlight being kinda okay with Toriko being the one to ogle her than contrasting her against a faceless crowd doing the same?

The mannequins also highlight the distance Sorawo feels towards most people who aren't Toriko. :) especially for young neurodivergent people with other shit going on like queerness and trauma, meeting another person who is on the same level as you can feel like finally meeting someone who's the same species compared to the alienation of every other "normal" human. Same with moments like representatives of humans in the "interstitial" space talking unintelligible nonsense compared to Sorawo and Toriko being able to communicate and understand each other.
The timing of the mannequins appearing here lines up not just with Sorawo feeling intense feelings, but also Sorawo and Toriko getting close to being on the same wavelength wrt being gay for each other, unlike all the heteros around them. I think it's worth noting they never see a mannequin Kozakura here :P

last edited at Nov 8, 2024 5:12AM

Random Wanderer

joined Dec 3, 2016

rainbow8

joined Jan 14, 2020