Snowflake Challenge #2
Jan. 3rd, 2026 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soricelChallenge #2: Pets of Fandom
Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!
When I first saw this prompt, I kinda drew a blank, until I remembered Chainsaw, Ronan Lynch's dreamed-up raven from The Raven Cycle, who I love because of the ways she allows us to see the quiet tenderness the otherwise often feral-seeming Ronan is capable of...but mostly I found myself thinking of this sad, sick old cat that Arita, one of the main character in Kemutai Hanashi, finds in one of the early chapters of the manga. I'm not sure if she really counts as a "pet," but I'm gonna go with it.
So Arita finds this cat lying in the middle of an alley during a heavy rainstorm, and moves it under some cover...but doesn't do much else until an old high school acquaintance, Takeda, shows up and asks if he's going to try to help it. The two take the cat back to Arita's place and try to nurse it back to health; Arita and Takeda exchange numbers, they go to the vet together, and Takeda begins stopping by Arita's apartment to check on the cat, who Arita names Oji-san (there's some joke there about Japanese salarymen that I don't get, but anyway). Taking care of the cat becomes the vehicle for their rekindled connection, which will grow into this sweet and complicated queerplatonic relationship, but it also provides this opportunity for Arita to reflect on his younger years, and his feelings about Takeda, then and now.
Arita explains that when he was younger, he saw a cat in a similarly bad condition. He picked it up, but his parents said it was beyond saving, and that trying to take care of it would only cause problems...and Arita, being a little kid, didn't know what to say or do, so he just left it there. Even though now, as an adult, he seems to feel like that might have been the right thing to do, it still seems to bother him...and he imagines that Takeda would have acted differently, would have tried to help the cat, even if there was a chance that doing so would lead to more suffering (for both himself and the cat).
Anyway, I love this episode with the cat because I've also found myself in this situation lots of times, and it's always hard, and I love the way it's treated here. Plus, I feel like it helps establish this theme that feels really important to Takeda and Arita's dynamic: Takeda's sort of instinctual and guileless helpfulness and kindness, which Arita remembers from high school and still admires...but also feels angry about, on Takeda's behalf, for how it's so often received by others. And beyond that, I feel like there's a lot in this manga about how we learn certain ideas about right and wrong when we're kids, and how other ideas get reinforced by adult socialization, and how hard it can be to just do what you feel is right when it goes about all that conditioning and all those norms.
I may not be doing it justice, but I really love this manga, and I hope I can read more of it soon. Sorry if this was sad!
Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!
When I first saw this prompt, I kinda drew a blank, until I remembered Chainsaw, Ronan Lynch's dreamed-up raven from The Raven Cycle, who I love because of the ways she allows us to see the quiet tenderness the otherwise often feral-seeming Ronan is capable of...but mostly I found myself thinking of this sad, sick old cat that Arita, one of the main character in Kemutai Hanashi, finds in one of the early chapters of the manga. I'm not sure if she really counts as a "pet," but I'm gonna go with it.
So Arita finds this cat lying in the middle of an alley during a heavy rainstorm, and moves it under some cover...but doesn't do much else until an old high school acquaintance, Takeda, shows up and asks if he's going to try to help it. The two take the cat back to Arita's place and try to nurse it back to health; Arita and Takeda exchange numbers, they go to the vet together, and Takeda begins stopping by Arita's apartment to check on the cat, who Arita names Oji-san (there's some joke there about Japanese salarymen that I don't get, but anyway). Taking care of the cat becomes the vehicle for their rekindled connection, which will grow into this sweet and complicated queerplatonic relationship, but it also provides this opportunity for Arita to reflect on his younger years, and his feelings about Takeda, then and now.
Arita explains that when he was younger, he saw a cat in a similarly bad condition. He picked it up, but his parents said it was beyond saving, and that trying to take care of it would only cause problems...and Arita, being a little kid, didn't know what to say or do, so he just left it there. Even though now, as an adult, he seems to feel like that might have been the right thing to do, it still seems to bother him...and he imagines that Takeda would have acted differently, would have tried to help the cat, even if there was a chance that doing so would lead to more suffering (for both himself and the cat).
Anyway, I love this episode with the cat because I've also found myself in this situation lots of times, and it's always hard, and I love the way it's treated here. Plus, I feel like it helps establish this theme that feels really important to Takeda and Arita's dynamic: Takeda's sort of instinctual and guileless helpfulness and kindness, which Arita remembers from high school and still admires...but also feels angry about, on Takeda's behalf, for how it's so often received by others. And beyond that, I feel like there's a lot in this manga about how we learn certain ideas about right and wrong when we're kids, and how other ideas get reinforced by adult socialization, and how hard it can be to just do what you feel is right when it goes about all that conditioning and all those norms.
I may not be doing it justice, but I really love this manga, and I hope I can read more of it soon. Sorry if this was sad!
