- Pronouns
- They/Them
Now if only Omega explained properly what the fuck the Tiger's Vessel is meant to be, huh...
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Capitalism ho! Let's Read Kengan Asura
- Thread starter Manic Dogma
- Start date
- Discussion Manga
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I assume the Tiger's Vessel is a vessel for a tiger.
How a big cat is supposed to drive a boat is beyond me; maybe that's another part of Kengan Ashura's heightened reality.
How a big cat is supposed to drive a boat is beyond me; maybe that's another part of Kengan Ashura's heightened reality.
- Location
- [REDACTED]
The thing that really fucks me off is that at the start, Omega had promise; it really did! We had a fresh protagonist- not an instant champion like Ohma, but a promising newbie fighting his way up the ranks. He gets a rival- definitely linked to Ohma, Niko and the Worm/Tiger Vessel mystery, but his own person with his own strengths and flaws, instead of just Ohma 2.0. The Kengan Organisation itself gets a rival to deal with! There could have been a great throughline linking the two stories together: The struggle to STAY at the top, after reaching it. Yamashita trying to stay afloat as his company slips down the rankings without Ohma there to carry him, while Nogi fends off corpo-fuckery from both the newcomer and his own side. They could have made something good out it.
BUT THEY BLOODY WELL DIDN'T.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
A fresh protagonist who's not an instant champion? Surely you don't mean Koga, instant specialist in any fighting style that is taught to him in under three days who every single fighter we've known so far has praised as being just the utter best!
I am just gonna drop that spoiler because it's funny and some here likely won't care about having an Omega revelation ruined.
It's eventually revealed that in the Kengan-verse specialized ASMR techniques can overwrite the listeners's consciousness with the speaker's. A martial arts master has been using this to achieve eternal youth and designed Ohma to be a future body.
Manic Dogma
This, I can't deny.
- Location
- The far side of tired
- Pronouns
- Whatever
Not to encourage a tangent, but that's kind of unfair on Omega.
During as much of the manga as I've actually read (up to the early sections of the Inside Arc) Koga at best generally scrapes wins by the skin of his teeth, completely fails to measure up in time to join the tournament against purgatory, and during the Berserker cup it's very clear he hasn't managed to actually master the basics of the Niko style yet after what I think was several months of learning with some of the best teachers the Association has to offer.
Koga certainly has the potential to become one of the greats, but a big theme of his presence in the manga's early arcs is "you aren't that guy yet, kid". He's insanely good by normal standards, and grasps normal martial arts super quickly, but that just puts him at the starting line for the tier of fighter the series actually gives a shit about, and honestly I find Koga kind of compelling in that way? He's cocky, in that big fish in a small pond way, but earnest in his efforts to become as much of a big shot as he thought he was starting out and much less of a shithead than he makes himself out to be. He's one of the reasons I find Omega so disappointing, he had potential as a protagonist, I feel.
Koga certainly has the potential to become one of the greats, but a big theme of his presence in the manga's early arcs is "you aren't that guy yet, kid". He's insanely good by normal standards, and grasps normal martial arts super quickly, but that just puts him at the starting line for the tier of fighter the series actually gives a shit about, and honestly I find Koga kind of compelling in that way? He's cocky, in that big fish in a small pond way, but earnest in his efforts to become as much of a big shot as he thought he was starting out and much less of a shithead than he makes himself out to be. He's one of the reasons I find Omega so disappointing, he had potential as a protagonist, I feel.
Now, for something actually on topic, @Kymme I genuinely didn't know about that translation of Niko. Some panels of this chapter probably hit real different if you're reading it in Japanese and pick out that wordplay, huh?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I do apologize for the tangent. Didn't mean for that one to spiral.
Peanut-007
Hat or Hair? America decides.
- Location
- Maryland, United States of America
The imagery of the second ghost in his head stealing his veins as it pops out is so cool. It's whole appearance here is gross and neat.
- Location
- Leeds
Tiger's Vessel was the japanese translation of Life of Pi.
Peanut-007
Hat or Hair? America decides.
- Location
- Maryland, United States of America
Omega has explained this, finally. The problem is that the answer is extremely stupid.
A pair of immortals who keep themselves alive by Kung-Fu AMSR hypnosis soul transfer want to enter Ohma (and his clone brother, Ohma is a clone btw ) so they can have a Kung-Fu match with each other.
This isn't the dumbest thing I. Omega but it's pretty fucking close.
This isn't the dumbest thing I. Omega but it's pretty fucking close.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Now I can't help but imagine some ASMR streamer accidentally stumbling onto this technique in the course of her work and unwittingly overwriting the consciousness of thousands of her fans worldwide. Or since it's an accidental, imperfect form of the technique, maybe just partially overwriting them, afflicting the unlucky listeners with an unfamiliar taste in music or extensive trivia about the acoustics of the human voice or something.
worth mentioning that
these two ASMR immortals currently exist in a single body, which somehow caused the guy to have weird double irises...that somehow still see normally, in fact probably better than anyone else, actually, since the dude is maximum bullshit at everything.
This is still arguably less stupid than some of the other physiological stuff this dude can pull off XD
This is still arguably less stupid than some of the other physiological stuff this dude can pull off XD
Chapter 134 - Exorcism
Manic Dogma
This, I can't deny.
- Location
- The far side of tired
- Pronouns
- Whatever
Raian's blow flings Ohma back, he flips a full 360 degrees as he sails through the air before crashing limply once more to the harsh concrete. Skidding a further dozen or so metres. Ohma's heart slowly quiets.
Then the Advance fades.
It's followed by a trio of faces. Karla we expected. She's silent and tense. Probably still processing what she's seeing. Agito is…strange? He's curious about Ohma, certainly, but I didn't think he had enough attachment to be part of this little roster of reactions. Setup for the final match, maybe? The third face is another one everyone saw coming. Kiryu Setsuna, looking distinctly like he's about to shit an entire three story building's worth of bricks, with accompanying mortar. Then the camera turns to Ohma again, tiny and crumpled in a white void, as Kiryu denies what he's seeing, immediately shifting to bargaining, begging him to get back up.
Then he screams with incandescent fury and a fountain of spittle, demanding Ohma return to his feet, as his mind insists that God cannot be defeated. Yamashita drops his phone in shock.
The ref is ready to call it, and almost does, but then Raian fucking threatens the man's life to shut him up. And just…I'm going to drop some compliments on the part immediately after this, but god damn what the fuck. Like, this isn't the first time the Referee's life has come under explicit threat, but in Akoya's case it was more akin to a hidden bomb that Hiyama was warning other people about. There was no pretence that if he actually went off like that he'd survive doing it. But of course, Raian is Sandro's specialest little blorbo, who is the scariest and coolest guy eeeeeeveeeeer so he gets to just threaten to twist off the ref's head like a bottlecap and it's fine. Noone even questions it. At best, I can imagine noone notices, but I can tell you for a fact nothing happens as a consequence of this afterwards after the ref is safely out of Raian's reach. So yeah, ridiculous. Moving on.
Then, Raian deactivates his Removal. Put a pin in that. As he looks down on Ohma, Raian pauses to compliment him. Talking him up in pretty unambiguous terms, and explicitly noting this might be the most fun he's ever had in his life.
I don't know if it's intended like I'm reading it, but this smacks to me as another actually Good Raian Moment. Specifically because it's so…confused. Raian's compliments to Ohma's strength, the claim to have enjoyed himself, I buy that that's sincere. But I don't think Raian actually respects Ohma, even if a part of me feels like he believes he does. He's smug, glorying in his triumph, is the crucial part. Over the next few pages he swaggers slowly at Ohma, we see what actual respect in victory looks like in later matches, and it isn't this. Rather, it's the way a fundamentally narcissistic person reframes everything around the way they feel. He's satisfied, so he's going to close this out in the way that indulges him without being actively spiteful, and call it respect. Much the same way a similar sort of person might call a slap on the wrist "tough but fair" punishment for a severe misdeed, or consider themselves magnanimous for not actively interfering with someone's goals. Because, well…what he's doing here isn't actually any different than what he did to Mokichi. He's just not purposely being a cock about it.
But yeah, Raian begins his slow, sweaty swagger over to Ohma with intent to Respect his neck into an overstretched slinky. Yamashita, beside himself with panic, begs Ohma to get up, begs him to not die. But Ohma doesn't move. His cries go unheard. And Raian moves ever closer.
Hell yeah, baby, it's Yamashita's turn to contribute!
He pauses, processing sudden, maddening feelings of comprehension as it all clicks into place for him. This isn't right. He's been watching this whole tournament, he knows what sort of shitbag Raian is. He finds his pleasure in one-sided desecration, not anything that could reasonably be called a fight. Cruel excess is his calling card. He goes as hard as he can without actually utilising any skills.
So why undo the removal, if he wants to kill Ohma with everything he's got?
So hey, take that pin back out. Remember what I talked about toward the end of last update? That little aside about how Raian is panting? Seems a little tired? Yeah, it all comes crashing home for Yamashita in this moment. And he screams once more, but this time it's not in fear.
My mans is dead on, look at that glance of concern on Raian. Yamashita continues, pointing out that just because Removal unleashes a Kure's latent power, doesn't mean their endurance improves. Or their ability to take hits. Raian's just been completely tanking Ohma's strikes this entire time, but if there's one thing we all know about Kengan Asura, it's that it's sexist as hell. And if there's a second thing we all know, it's that damage accumulates. Attrition is real in this manga, and Raian doesn't have enough steam left to keep up full tilt.
Raian's just as on the ropes as Ohma is, he can win this.
And yeah, Yamashita's fucking right as hell, and he should say it. The thing with going all out is that it's fucking exhausting. There's a reason Olympic Sprinters aren't expected to cover the same distances as Marathon runners, it's completely unfeasible. And no matter what objectively stupid people trying to sound smart on the internet might tell you, throwing out your strongest moves right from the start and then doing it over and over isn't a good idea. For all the reasons we've already covered in this Let's Read, but also because it's fucking exhausting. Now imagine doing the same, but you've got a supermode active that means every part of your body is tapping that stamina reserve even faster, going even harder. It's like you had a tap pulling water out of a barrel, except now you've taken a fucking sledgehammer to the valve and smashed the whole thing off. The water is pouring the fuck out, in a great noisy torrent! Right up until the last pathetic dribbles begin to drool out from the spent wood.
And yeah, Raian confirms it. Only in his head of course, but he curses that Yamashita noticed, musing that he's not just a piece of shit deadbeat after all. His exact words there, actually, I guess the contempt in chapter 128 was actually genuine. Come to think of it, we don't actually know shit about Raian's parents, just his great grandfather and sister. Wonder if his deal is actually just a massive case of daddy issues?
Anyway, out loud Raian congratulates Ohma on the job his boss is doing, and asks if he has the strength to actually live up to that belief. Which isn't a question you'd ever expect to be valid based on the first dozen chapters, but I guess that's what happens when you run into an even bigger author's pet.
It's questionable if Ohma even hears him. Not because he's entirely unconscious…but because he's listening to someone else.
Niko is back, or at least Ohma's memory of him, and he's packing none of the irreverent sass he showed in the past. No, he just mournfully apologises to Ohma, for getting him caught up in "our" fight. Ohma doesn't question the phrasing, and just leaps instead to telling him not to apologise. Ohma made his choice. Niko doesn't respond for a moment. Then changes the subject. How ironic it is, that Kiryu Setsuna would be the one to undo the shackles he placed on Ohma. He was a teen when Niko put those on him, and they'd been coming loose anyway as he grew, but still.
And yeah. It's done. Ohma remembers it all now. Who "he" is. Why Niko died.
What Ohma did, that day.
So hey, not a conclusion to that arc, but I guess we'll get this shit seeded right now to see it explored fully after the fight. At some point. Going full bore with the advance like that, or maybe more being forced to, seems to have shaken things loose and Niko theorises as much. And, his smile returning with all that said, Niko decides they should take a little look at Raian. Apparently Niko fought the Kure a few times when he was with Ohma (possibly outside that, but given this Niko is just Ohma's memories of him, there's no way to know) and he knows their deal. Still, Raian's a cut above the normal Kure, who are themselves stronger than any normal person in raw power. It's put matter-of-factly enough that it doesn't ping my masturbation detectors as hard as the previous wank, and he's actually doing a thing here, so I'm perfectly fine with it. This moment, the one about to happen, is the fulcrum around which this whole fight spins. The beating heart of the fight it is, and the fight I wish it was.
Ohma admits it. He knows Raian is a physical monster far beyond him. He hates to admit it, but he doesn't think he can beat him no matter what he does.
Technique exists to defeat someone stronger than you. That's what he passed down the Niko style for. Now, come on, haven't you had enough sleep? Wake the fuck up Samurai, we have a dumbass to burn.
I love this bit, but also it's a little frustrating, but also I'm pretty sure I see the angle. The first thing we saw in the manga, when Ohma defeated the Deva King, was how skill can trump raw physicality. But then, as the manga went on, we saw the crack in this, at least as it relates to Ohma. Several times Ohma found himself physically outmatched in ways his skill couldn't account for. Both times he fell back on sheer physicality, burning his own lifespan to compensate for how his training is lacking. The Advance, a cheap trick to make weak fighters stronger…and the most self-destructive crutch. Because that's what Ohma used it as. He'd flex with his Niko Style, but if that didn't cut it, it's right back to the Advance to just overwhelm the opponent. And in that process, after his techniques failed to achieve much against Raian earlier on in this very match to boot, Ohma just kind of forgot. His final trump card was just whaling on people with a cast-from-hp buff for so long that he forgot what his techniques were for.
It's inelegant, roughly executed outside this moment, and suffers from both Ohma's lack of screentime and Raian's flaws as a character. But I can't say I hate this.
Lifted up by hope, and the exhortations of his middle-aged friend, Ohma pushes laboriously to his feet. In the privacy of his mind, as the process goes on, he tells the Niko in his memories that he's been living to avenge him. Niko rolls his eyes. Dumbass. How many times has he told him not to sweat the small stuff? Ohma goes on, and as he pants with blood streaming from his nose, admits he thought he might as well die after his vengeance is done. Niko, Ohma's memories, tell him straight to his face that he's lying. "You can't stand that there's anyone stronger than you," right? It's fine. You should be fighting for yourself. Ohma protests, it's using Niko's Niko style. It doesn't seem right to him.
It's your Niko style now, he says.
Martial arts, even traditional ones, are living things. In a way. As they're passed down from master to student they mold and conform to each person that wields them, and the context in which they live. Indeed, this is part of why traditional styles in both the east and west have such an edge of identity to them, they're a legacy, they're part of how a person lives their life. The student really does become the master, in time, and their generation will define what the martial art is in the years to come as they carry it with them.
This is a posthumous mentor death. It's such a fundamentally ludicrous notion, and yet as I sit here writing this it's kind of affecting me. Not in a super sad kind of way, but it feels like a kind of release. And it is, in a way. This Niko doesn't actually exist, as he pointed out himself in previous chapters, it's all just Ohma. And what an honestly interesting way to resolve the internal conflict and odd sense of obligation and apprehension of an otherwise stoic character. In a way, it's also kind of an admission of how immature Ohma's early writing is, now that he's truly coming into his own as an independent person stepping out from beneath his mentor's shadow.
And you know what, just like with Cosmo, I appreciate the nonjudgemental regard for a genuinely simple, unheroic motivation. Ohma feels a lot of obligations, he's a pretty earnest guy when it comes down to it, but deep down his truest motivation really is the kind of silly one he claimed it was at first glance. He wants to be the strongest. The rest is all hangups and trauma.
We return to the real world alongside Ohma, as Sayaka and Jerry holler their shock to the far stands. He's back on his feet, and it almost doesn't seem real. Kure Erioh and Yamashita are both watching intently. The latter of course delighted to see Ohma back on his feet. The former's expression is curiously stoic and even, as he compliments Ohma as a worthy adversary. Probably still confident in Raian's victory. And fairly so, given Ohma's shaking like a leaf and Raian seems to have caught his breath already. And in that vein, Raian is similarly confident, simply grinning and expressing his own sort of happiness at this. How much more interesting it'll make things. And it's not one of his stupid distortion grins either, but a sharp thing that remains faintly feral within human proportions.
Time for the climax, Ohma! He screams, as he charges.
He doesn't know how right he is.
Now, we don't have much reason to believe this, we've seen Raian sell hits like this before only for it to mean nothing. But, well, pacing is pacing. We know what part of the fight we're in now. Act 4, falling action, roll the cameras baby. End chapter.
This being an end-of-volume chapter, there's an extra, but it's just Erioh and more stupid jokes about how obsessed he is with Karla. Feel free to ignore it.
See you all next time, for the climax of the most frustratingly mixed fight in the tournament so far.
Then the Advance fades.
It's followed by a trio of faces. Karla we expected. She's silent and tense. Probably still processing what she's seeing. Agito is…strange? He's curious about Ohma, certainly, but I didn't think he had enough attachment to be part of this little roster of reactions. Setup for the final match, maybe? The third face is another one everyone saw coming. Kiryu Setsuna, looking distinctly like he's about to shit an entire three story building's worth of bricks, with accompanying mortar. Then the camera turns to Ohma again, tiny and crumpled in a white void, as Kiryu denies what he's seeing, immediately shifting to bargaining, begging him to get back up.
Then he screams with incandescent fury and a fountain of spittle, demanding Ohma return to his feet, as his mind insists that God cannot be defeated. Yamashita drops his phone in shock.
The ref is ready to call it, and almost does, but then Raian fucking threatens the man's life to shut him up. And just…I'm going to drop some compliments on the part immediately after this, but god damn what the fuck. Like, this isn't the first time the Referee's life has come under explicit threat, but in Akoya's case it was more akin to a hidden bomb that Hiyama was warning other people about. There was no pretence that if he actually went off like that he'd survive doing it. But of course, Raian is Sandro's specialest little blorbo, who is the scariest and coolest guy eeeeeeveeeeer so he gets to just threaten to twist off the ref's head like a bottlecap and it's fine. Noone even questions it. At best, I can imagine noone notices, but I can tell you for a fact nothing happens as a consequence of this afterwards after the ref is safely out of Raian's reach. So yeah, ridiculous. Moving on.
Then, Raian deactivates his Removal. Put a pin in that. As he looks down on Ohma, Raian pauses to compliment him. Talking him up in pretty unambiguous terms, and explicitly noting this might be the most fun he's ever had in his life.
I don't know if it's intended like I'm reading it, but this smacks to me as another actually Good Raian Moment. Specifically because it's so…confused. Raian's compliments to Ohma's strength, the claim to have enjoyed himself, I buy that that's sincere. But I don't think Raian actually respects Ohma, even if a part of me feels like he believes he does. He's smug, glorying in his triumph, is the crucial part. Over the next few pages he swaggers slowly at Ohma, we see what actual respect in victory looks like in later matches, and it isn't this. Rather, it's the way a fundamentally narcissistic person reframes everything around the way they feel. He's satisfied, so he's going to close this out in the way that indulges him without being actively spiteful, and call it respect. Much the same way a similar sort of person might call a slap on the wrist "tough but fair" punishment for a severe misdeed, or consider themselves magnanimous for not actively interfering with someone's goals. Because, well…what he's doing here isn't actually any different than what he did to Mokichi. He's just not purposely being a cock about it.
But yeah, Raian begins his slow, sweaty swagger over to Ohma with intent to Respect his neck into an overstretched slinky. Yamashita, beside himself with panic, begs Ohma to get up, begs him to not die. But Ohma doesn't move. His cries go unheard. And Raian moves ever closer.
Hell yeah, baby, it's Yamashita's turn to contribute!
He pauses, processing sudden, maddening feelings of comprehension as it all clicks into place for him. This isn't right. He's been watching this whole tournament, he knows what sort of shitbag Raian is. He finds his pleasure in one-sided desecration, not anything that could reasonably be called a fight. Cruel excess is his calling card. He goes as hard as he can without actually utilising any skills.
So why undo the removal, if he wants to kill Ohma with everything he's got?
So hey, take that pin back out. Remember what I talked about toward the end of last update? That little aside about how Raian is panting? Seems a little tired? Yeah, it all comes crashing home for Yamashita in this moment. And he screams once more, but this time it's not in fear.
My mans is dead on, look at that glance of concern on Raian. Yamashita continues, pointing out that just because Removal unleashes a Kure's latent power, doesn't mean their endurance improves. Or their ability to take hits. Raian's just been completely tanking Ohma's strikes this entire time, but if there's one thing we all know about Kengan Asura, it's that it's sexist as hell. And if there's a second thing we all know, it's that damage accumulates. Attrition is real in this manga, and Raian doesn't have enough steam left to keep up full tilt.
Raian's just as on the ropes as Ohma is, he can win this.
And yeah, Yamashita's fucking right as hell, and he should say it. The thing with going all out is that it's fucking exhausting. There's a reason Olympic Sprinters aren't expected to cover the same distances as Marathon runners, it's completely unfeasible. And no matter what objectively stupid people trying to sound smart on the internet might tell you, throwing out your strongest moves right from the start and then doing it over and over isn't a good idea. For all the reasons we've already covered in this Let's Read, but also because it's fucking exhausting. Now imagine doing the same, but you've got a supermode active that means every part of your body is tapping that stamina reserve even faster, going even harder. It's like you had a tap pulling water out of a barrel, except now you've taken a fucking sledgehammer to the valve and smashed the whole thing off. The water is pouring the fuck out, in a great noisy torrent! Right up until the last pathetic dribbles begin to drool out from the spent wood.
And yeah, Raian confirms it. Only in his head of course, but he curses that Yamashita noticed, musing that he's not just a piece of shit deadbeat after all. His exact words there, actually, I guess the contempt in chapter 128 was actually genuine. Come to think of it, we don't actually know shit about Raian's parents, just his great grandfather and sister. Wonder if his deal is actually just a massive case of daddy issues?
Anyway, out loud Raian congratulates Ohma on the job his boss is doing, and asks if he has the strength to actually live up to that belief. Which isn't a question you'd ever expect to be valid based on the first dozen chapters, but I guess that's what happens when you run into an even bigger author's pet.
It's questionable if Ohma even hears him. Not because he's entirely unconscious…but because he's listening to someone else.
Niko is back, or at least Ohma's memory of him, and he's packing none of the irreverent sass he showed in the past. No, he just mournfully apologises to Ohma, for getting him caught up in "our" fight. Ohma doesn't question the phrasing, and just leaps instead to telling him not to apologise. Ohma made his choice. Niko doesn't respond for a moment. Then changes the subject. How ironic it is, that Kiryu Setsuna would be the one to undo the shackles he placed on Ohma. He was a teen when Niko put those on him, and they'd been coming loose anyway as he grew, but still.
And yeah. It's done. Ohma remembers it all now. Who "he" is. Why Niko died.
What Ohma did, that day.
So hey, not a conclusion to that arc, but I guess we'll get this shit seeded right now to see it explored fully after the fight. At some point. Going full bore with the advance like that, or maybe more being forced to, seems to have shaken things loose and Niko theorises as much. And, his smile returning with all that said, Niko decides they should take a little look at Raian. Apparently Niko fought the Kure a few times when he was with Ohma (possibly outside that, but given this Niko is just Ohma's memories of him, there's no way to know) and he knows their deal. Still, Raian's a cut above the normal Kure, who are themselves stronger than any normal person in raw power. It's put matter-of-factly enough that it doesn't ping my masturbation detectors as hard as the previous wank, and he's actually doing a thing here, so I'm perfectly fine with it. This moment, the one about to happen, is the fulcrum around which this whole fight spins. The beating heart of the fight it is, and the fight I wish it was.
Ohma admits it. He knows Raian is a physical monster far beyond him. He hates to admit it, but he doesn't think he can beat him no matter what he does.
Technique exists to defeat someone stronger than you. That's what he passed down the Niko style for. Now, come on, haven't you had enough sleep? Wake the fuck up Samurai, we have a dumbass to burn.
I love this bit, but also it's a little frustrating, but also I'm pretty sure I see the angle. The first thing we saw in the manga, when Ohma defeated the Deva King, was how skill can trump raw physicality. But then, as the manga went on, we saw the crack in this, at least as it relates to Ohma. Several times Ohma found himself physically outmatched in ways his skill couldn't account for. Both times he fell back on sheer physicality, burning his own lifespan to compensate for how his training is lacking. The Advance, a cheap trick to make weak fighters stronger…and the most self-destructive crutch. Because that's what Ohma used it as. He'd flex with his Niko Style, but if that didn't cut it, it's right back to the Advance to just overwhelm the opponent. And in that process, after his techniques failed to achieve much against Raian earlier on in this very match to boot, Ohma just kind of forgot. His final trump card was just whaling on people with a cast-from-hp buff for so long that he forgot what his techniques were for.
It's inelegant, roughly executed outside this moment, and suffers from both Ohma's lack of screentime and Raian's flaws as a character. But I can't say I hate this.
Lifted up by hope, and the exhortations of his middle-aged friend, Ohma pushes laboriously to his feet. In the privacy of his mind, as the process goes on, he tells the Niko in his memories that he's been living to avenge him. Niko rolls his eyes. Dumbass. How many times has he told him not to sweat the small stuff? Ohma goes on, and as he pants with blood streaming from his nose, admits he thought he might as well die after his vengeance is done. Niko, Ohma's memories, tell him straight to his face that he's lying. "You can't stand that there's anyone stronger than you," right? It's fine. You should be fighting for yourself. Ohma protests, it's using Niko's Niko style. It doesn't seem right to him.
It's your Niko style now, he says.
Martial arts, even traditional ones, are living things. In a way. As they're passed down from master to student they mold and conform to each person that wields them, and the context in which they live. Indeed, this is part of why traditional styles in both the east and west have such an edge of identity to them, they're a legacy, they're part of how a person lives their life. The student really does become the master, in time, and their generation will define what the martial art is in the years to come as they carry it with them.
This is a posthumous mentor death. It's such a fundamentally ludicrous notion, and yet as I sit here writing this it's kind of affecting me. Not in a super sad kind of way, but it feels like a kind of release. And it is, in a way. This Niko doesn't actually exist, as he pointed out himself in previous chapters, it's all just Ohma. And what an honestly interesting way to resolve the internal conflict and odd sense of obligation and apprehension of an otherwise stoic character. In a way, it's also kind of an admission of how immature Ohma's early writing is, now that he's truly coming into his own as an independent person stepping out from beneath his mentor's shadow.
And you know what, just like with Cosmo, I appreciate the nonjudgemental regard for a genuinely simple, unheroic motivation. Ohma feels a lot of obligations, he's a pretty earnest guy when it comes down to it, but deep down his truest motivation really is the kind of silly one he claimed it was at first glance. He wants to be the strongest. The rest is all hangups and trauma.
We return to the real world alongside Ohma, as Sayaka and Jerry holler their shock to the far stands. He's back on his feet, and it almost doesn't seem real. Kure Erioh and Yamashita are both watching intently. The latter of course delighted to see Ohma back on his feet. The former's expression is curiously stoic and even, as he compliments Ohma as a worthy adversary. Probably still confident in Raian's victory. And fairly so, given Ohma's shaking like a leaf and Raian seems to have caught his breath already. And in that vein, Raian is similarly confident, simply grinning and expressing his own sort of happiness at this. How much more interesting it'll make things. And it's not one of his stupid distortion grins either, but a sharp thing that remains faintly feral within human proportions.
Time for the climax, Ohma! He screams, as he charges.
He doesn't know how right he is.
Now, we don't have much reason to believe this, we've seen Raian sell hits like this before only for it to mean nothing. But, well, pacing is pacing. We know what part of the fight we're in now. Act 4, falling action, roll the cameras baby. End chapter.
This being an end-of-volume chapter, there's an extra, but it's just Erioh and more stupid jokes about how obsessed he is with Karla. Feel free to ignore it.
See you all next time, for the climax of the most frustratingly mixed fight in the tournament so far.
whoops, can't show that in a Christian manga
It's such a funny but somehow appropriate choice to give Niko the Dead Anime Mom hairstyle.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I appreciate that Manic is willing to analyze the fights with Raian and point out places where his character works, instead of just going "Ugh, not this guy" like I did when I read Ashura.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So hey, take that pin back out. Remember what I talked about toward the end of last update? That little aside about how Raian is panting? Seems a little tired? Yeah, it all comes crashing home for Yamashita in this moment. And he screams once more, but this time it's not in fear.
now this
this
this is cinema
Ohma's journey is the heart ( 
) of Kengan Ashura but Yamashita growing a spine and realizing he's found something he's genuinely great at is so nice.
Also, going back over this chapter made me realize how many parallels this fight has with Takamura vs. Bryan Hawk from Hajime no Ippo; the two monsters going blow-for-blow, the protagonist running out of steam, then retaking control of the fight because he actually put in the effort to learn technique and have something to fall back on when raw physicality can't cut it.
That also made me consider Bryan relative to Raian and why, though Hawk is a one-dimensional sadist at times, he's so much more compelling an antagonist than Raian. Beyond Hawk being explicitly treated by the narrative as loathsome from the get-go, I think it comes from their origins.
Raian is a jock bully, the naturally gifted high shool quarterback whose dad donates five digits to the school per year. His cruelty is the cruelty of the privileged, someone who sees it as their God-given duty to lord over their lessers. If treated sympathetically, as Sandrovich does in what's among his weakest character-writing moments, it's just fucking obnoxious. We deal with the powerful getting away with everything by virtue of being powerful every day.
Hawk, whose trainer outright regrets steering him towards a profession that rewards his cruelty, grew up on the streets and clings to his newfound wealth and status as a champion out of raw desperation. His entire world starts crumbling around him when he can't just demolish Takamura outright, and when Takamura fully retakes control of the bout after his gas tank gives out halfway through, the only thing that keeps Hawk upright is the terror of going back to being a nobody.
That's proper villain writing. It doesn't have to be sympathetic to be compelling. There's depth there that there just isn't to Raian, far beyond the simple comeuppance of "bad guy get face punched."
) of Kengan Ashura but Yamashita growing a spine and realizing he's found something he's genuinely great at is so nice.Also, going back over this chapter made me realize how many parallels this fight has with Takamura vs. Bryan Hawk from Hajime no Ippo; the two monsters going blow-for-blow, the protagonist running out of steam, then retaking control of the fight because he actually put in the effort to learn technique and have something to fall back on when raw physicality can't cut it.
That also made me consider Bryan relative to Raian and why, though Hawk is a one-dimensional sadist at times, he's so much more compelling an antagonist than Raian. Beyond Hawk being explicitly treated by the narrative as loathsome from the get-go, I think it comes from their origins.
Raian is a jock bully, the naturally gifted high shool quarterback whose dad donates five digits to the school per year. His cruelty is the cruelty of the privileged, someone who sees it as their God-given duty to lord over their lessers. If treated sympathetically, as Sandrovich does in what's among his weakest character-writing moments, it's just fucking obnoxious. We deal with the powerful getting away with everything by virtue of being powerful every day.
Hawk, whose trainer outright regrets steering him towards a profession that rewards his cruelty, grew up on the streets and clings to his newfound wealth and status as a champion out of raw desperation. His entire world starts crumbling around him when he can't just demolish Takamura outright, and when Takamura fully retakes control of the bout after his gas tank gives out halfway through, the only thing that keeps Hawk upright is the terror of going back to being a nobody.
That's proper villain writing. It doesn't have to be sympathetic to be compelling. There's depth there that there just isn't to Raian, far beyond the simple comeuppance of "bad guy get face punched."
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TheFoxsCloak
Professional Otaku
Quick trivia bit about this line, the "Martial Arts" being emphasized here is 武 (Bu), a deceptively complex term that the anime subs translates as "inner tactics". That confused the hell out of me until I looked it up, but both are equally valid in that the root idea is essentially to fight smart to overcome the enemy. Another double meaning that can't really be translated.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Composition, actually. But they're pretty similar; cinematography is basically composition in motion.
Chapter 135 - Raian
Manic Dogma
This, I can't deny.
- Location
- The far side of tired
- Pronouns
- Whatever
We begin in the past, amidst a ruined cityscape. A much younger Ohma stands among the ruins in his ratty clothing, next to his proud master, whose cloak billows in the dusty wind. Niko is teaching Ohma the combination technique, Flashing Steel: Blast. Or rather, as part of the process, he's teaching Ohma application. It's a powerful move, this. But its a very static, planted one. An opponent who is on the ball, even in getting hit, can simply move back with the blow to deflate much of its impact. But against an opponent who is charging, used as a counter? That's what it's made for. It's a wall of pikes against a cavalry charge, lethal against an aggressing opponent.
What possible technique could be better for opening up a fighter like Raian?
You know, I kind of feel like a part of Sandro or the artist might be aware of the problems they created, having Raian tank every hit no problem before, because in all fairness this does read as a significantly more telling hit than anything else Ohma has landed. Blood spattering everywhere from the central point of what looks like a divot in Raian's chest as he reels, teeth gritted in pain. Doesn't necessarily mean anything of course, but it's an effort. Real strong lines of action in Ohma's attack too, for what that's worth.
Ohma having apparently forgotten how his moves are actually supposed to be used is kinda funny, especially since this is actually how we first saw this move get used. Remember, all the way back in chapter 28? It was indestructible's introduction, but the posture used for the way Ohma annihilated Jerry's hands and face were exactly the same as Flashing Steel: Blast. That weirdness aside, I suppose it could be explained as muscle memory applied without much thought so it's not stuff accounted for in future battles. Or we can assume there was no Flame Kata element in that fight, since Jerry was doing all the moving and Ohma just stood his ground. It's not the strangest beat, given the prior setup of Ohma's memory damage and his use of the Advance as a crutch, and I do like it. But it does clash weirdly with certain moments.
Anyway, Ohma isn't done adapting, and one more lesson of Niko's stands out in his head. Don't be satisfied with hitting your opponent, always follow up so the momentary advantage isn't wasted. This moment is 100% kind of fucky, because well…just look at what Ohma was doing earlier in this very fight. If that isn't followup, capitalising on every bit of advantage you make, I don't know what is. Technique into technique into throw into football kick to the mush. It just arbitrarily didn't work then, and does now. The tank is suddenly not made of metal anymore and his punches function. Like, this isn't how attrition works, it's like Ohma has just emptied his HP bar so now he's taking actual wounds rather than the accumulation of bruises and cracks we see in fighters like Cosmo.
Remember kids, always be aware of the rules your story is setting, even unbroken ones. Or you get something like this. And just for context, I like the ideas at play here, imagine if it were something I wasn't as invested in!
This time Ohma's Ironbreaker followup is chased by a sweet little move, darting behind Raian's reeling body and catching his neck right under his jaw with his hands, hoisting Raian's whole body over his back and stretching the fucker out like an accordion. Water Kata Guillotine, this is called, and Raian's really feeling this one. Coughing up a cloud of blood with an expression of genuine pain. Of course, it doesn't last. He coils himself up with a grin, and with the strength of his whole body throws himself forward, landing back on his feet and throwing Ohma by the grip he had on Raian's neck. Ohma lands flat on his face, and crawls up to his hands and knees as a blood-drenched Raian charges him once more.
Right into a bitchin' counterattack.
Holy shit look at this, it's so cool. The little afterimage at the bottom, showing us how Ohma launched from basically a crouch. The immaculate posing, with Raian's fist skating over Ohma's shoulder with those little cloud effects like a Phantom Pace. The Motherfucking sonic boom blastwave of blood around Ohma's fist. I don't think it's actually a sonic boom, but that's the words I had to hand and god it's cool.
Niko's lessons continue to rattle off in Ohma's head, this time warning him not to let his attacks be predictable. Switch it up every time, hard to soft then soft to hard, then hard into hard into soft, and so on. And yeah, he's right, that's exactly the shit that took Okubo to prominence in MMA. Ohma probably isn't on the same level in that skill, but even just applying the principle makes you an absolute pain in the ass to fight. You can't defend against hard and soft attacks in the same ways, and especially if you're trying to predict what specific expression they'll take it can be an absolute nightmare. And, well, Raian's fighting extremely linearly. Pure fundamentals driven by insane physicality. It's an especially effective strategy against opponents with limited options.
Well, theoretically limited. We'll see what happens when he pulls out some Kure Specials other than the removal, I guess.
Ohma's next pivot goes into soft, as Raian tries to retaliate with a roundhouse to the midriff, he pulls out the classic. The first named technique we saw Ohma use, Redirection Kata: Weeping Willow. He throws Raian off balance, then pitches him to the floor, catching him in a funky arm lock he calls the Water Kata's Screw Cutter Jizo. Jizo being a reference to an extremely benevolent bodhisattva in buddhism, who for the purposes of this technique decides he's tired of being nice and wants to go apeshit, I guess. Ohma has Raian's arm held in both of his, twisted around, with Ohma himself sat on Raian's shoulder and upper back. It looks painful as hell, even before we get cracking sound effects and a close look at the Kure's eyes bugging out.
Of course, it doesn't hold him long, he throws Ohma off with brute force, but he doesn't do it easily. He's shaking as he strains against Ohma's grip, and when he breaks free it's with a scream of effort. He's hunched over and panting afterwards too, at least for a moment the grin has been wiped off his face and he's completely exhausted as he seethes and malds over how good Ohma's technique has gotten.
…you know what, honestly a fair question. Ohma looks absolutely fucked the hell up, right on the edge of just fucking passing out. It's the eyes that really sell it, I think, half lidded in sheer exhaustion.
And yet, he stands strong. With a firm exhalation he pulls back once more, raising his arms into stance. Niko must be so proud.
This is Ohma's Niko style.
Raian continues to seethe, stood in place hunched over like an ape, panting with gritted teeth as Erioh demands to know what the fuck is wrong with him. And everyone else cheers Ohma on. Yamashita, with tears in his eyes. Akiyama and Kushida with sincerity. The Peanut gallery, tense as hell, Okubo inadvertently strangling Kaneda in the process. Karla, who is certain he can do it.
And then we pivot. For a moment, we discuss Raian's history, and take an extremely ham handed peek into his mindset.
"He was always the strongest," the manga tells us. Anywhere he went, any time, he was the most powerful individual there. That position, that acclaim, being the Strongest wasn't a title to seek for him but a given. A Promised inheritance, his divine right. Not a single person Raian had ever fought rivalled him in power. But today, stands Tokita Ohma, the first significant obstacle Raian has ever encountered. Defiant, even after Raian has expended so much energy he can no longer use the Removal.
And yet, the man smiled. And we have one more moment of aimless stupidity left before this fight is done.
Not so much physically, he rushes in for another exchange with Ohma, and it's pretty sweet. Well drawn and brutal, two men on their last drops of stamina trying to squeeze out everything they have left for the win. It ends with Raian catching Ohma's head and headbutting it, but then both of them topple over. Heaving and wheezing. And then the clincher. Hands on his knees Raian grins, and we see a sidebar. Even now, he fights with Brute Force alone.
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Kengan Asura you were SO CLOSE. You almost had something special for a moment, and you completely fumbled it. Why, in this moment, with this display of monumental hubris, are you still so unwilling to frame Raian as anything less than peak, untouchable coolness.
Fucking hell. We'll come back to this soon, don't you worry.
Let's end this.
The two of them lunge at each other one more time, but this exchange is different. The punch Ohma lands leaves a visible dent in Raian's neck, leveraging the battering he'd already given the abused organ over this match. Raian can't just shrug it off, can't just tense his muscles and absorb it, he feels the full impact. For just over a tenth of a second, Raian passes out. This is Ohma's one shot at truly ending this.
He catches the falling Raian's arm, hooks his leg around his knee, and trips him. Raian is falling backwards, his head hurtling toward the Arena floor.
And Ohma's arm cocks back.
Fuck yeah. It's done.
One tiny, defeated curse escapes Raian's lips, before Ohma just goes to fucking town on his face. Until he's pulled off by the ref.
End chapter. But not the update. I promised you all an essay, didn't I?
So. Let's talk about Raian, and this match.
The thing about Match 2-2 is that it's a million miles from being good. But at the same time, it's right on the cusp of being fucking amazing. All the pieces are there. Ohma's developing arc of memory and its complications, Ohma's mechanical arc around his shallow use of Niko style techniques and overreliance on the Advance, the mystery of the person who taught him it, a powerful and dangerous foe with a theoretically compelling flaw, a drawn out fight with a lot of twists, turns and swings of fortune, Yamashita getting a significant role and immediate source of investment. Even the structure of the fight is theoretically really good.
And it all comes to almost nothing, because of one crippling flaw. Kure. Raian.
In many ways, as I've come to realise over this match and its leadup, Raian is much the same as the match itself. Possibly the most singularly irritating character in the roster, a million miles from fun, but simultaneously so close to being awesome. He has all the elements in place to be a great heel, even better than Akoya without the elements of ACAB man that make him viscerally unpleasant to read for some people. But just like this match, there's a thousand individual cracks in his execution that all spread like a spiderweb from one central blow to his credibility.
Sandro is far, far too excited for this guy, and has no concept of how to moderate how he's written.
With that in mind, I'm going to separate out the ways this manifests into several sections, and discuss how each undermines his credibility and weight as an antagonist. This is not necessarily an exhaustive list, just what strike me as the biggest factors.
1. Kure Raian breaks the visual language of Kengan Asura
One of the many revelations I've had about Kengan Asura over the course of this let's read is that Kengan Asura is a shockingly well constructed Manga. Just, serious props to both Sandrovich and Daromeon for the work done in most matches. It is, at almost all times, incredibly clear what's happening, who's at an advantage, and how a fight is progressing. None of the usual shonen shit where characters get absolutely styled on for thirty minutes straight but it all means nothing because the protagonist lands one beam or basic punch that is just arbitrarily functional now. When characters get hit it's immediately obvious what it's doing and why, and characters almost never just no-sell hits completely. Even with the highest level fighters, even the characters who specialise in tanking hits safely, like Sekibayashi. This stuff is established and then carried forward consistently over the course of the manga, informing how the audience reads every exchange.
To quote @Walter in their genuinely excellent post several updates ago (please read the discussion between each update, my readers are so clever I love them), I don't know if Raian can beat an army tank. Everything I said above? Only applies to Raian some of the time. He spends a significant amount of both of the matches he's involved in getting absolutely mollywhopped, just picked up and used to wipe the arena floor like a fucking mop. And crucially, in these moments, the art sells the hit. They're all powerful blows, Raian's face gets made two-dimensional at one point by Mokichi, he recoils, grimaces and deforms in ways that the manga has already established as signifiers that a hit actually means something, that progress is being made toward victory or defeat.
Except…no, it doesn't. It doesn't do that at all, not here. Raian takes these hits, so many of them, without any evidence of any active defence or any suggestion they're anything less than telling, and then like pages later is just "Nah. Didn't count bro, everything-proof shield." He's just suddenly fine for no reason, nothing more than scuff marks. In a series where getting the shit kicked out of you fucking matters, where even blocking isn't something you can do forever, this is a serious blow to the audience's ability to read the match. At any given moment it's unclear what, if any, progress is being made. And when Raian finally does actually start to take meaningful damage…well, why the fuck should I believe it? The better part of two matches have already passed with this bullshit guys, the ship has fucking sailed on that one. The entire basis of Match 2-2's pacing has the legs cut out from under it because the audience has been taught not to trust the art when it says Raian is being beaten up. At best it's a source of confusion and suspicion, at worst readers are made consciously aware of the hand of the writer reaching down and fiddling with the dials.
It's not just this match, either, Raian fucks up things said by and in service to other matches as well with the shitty way the manga uses him. The entire point of Mikazuchi Rei's match in the first round is to establish his speed, right? Fun swerve, the match lasts a fraction of a second, come back next time to see how other fighters actually deal with it. Except then, not even ten chapters later let alone the next round, in comes Mr Shitface himself and just catches Rei's punch without any apparent effort after the art hard sold Rei's speed. A feat, I should note, that Raian doesn't come close to repeating in his match with Ohma. It's unclear why he's even in that scene to begin with, beyond suggesting some history between their assassination styles, and that's not even nearly worth undercutting the basis of Rei's visual identity as a fighter.
And it's a bit of a tangent here, but let's not leave it unsaid that a character spending a significant proportion of his onscreen fights being used as a dishrag by his opponents does a fair amount of damage to the audience's ability to take him seriously as a top shelf shitkicker. Another thing this manga's visual language establishes is what skilled fighters look like in this setting, and while they aren't matrix-dodging through literally everything, it does generally involve people needing to be more unpredictable than this to actually land a hit.
How powerful is Raian? Can he, in fact, beat a tank? Who the fuck knows. The art certainly doesn't.
Now, this is not to suggest that a character being an Outside Context Problem and breaking the series' established rules is inherently a bad thing. In a way there's several characters who do just that, and indeed by express intent that's kind of what Julius is all about. Hell, to reference other manga, Bleach's Kenpachi and Dragonball Z's Vegeta both do this to a degree, and wield similar kinds of resilience in their fights with protagonists. But, well, all of the branches off of the core problem of Sandro's careless love of Raian feed back into each other in ways just like this, and Raian's arbitrary invincibility is just extremely clumsily used. Especially since there was ultimately no answer beyond just hitting him until he starts feeling it, rather than being the direct result of growth on the protagonist's part or cooperation between allies. Ohma grew over the course of this fight, yeah, but it had nothing to do with why Raian suddenly lost his God Mode buff.
Speaking of Vegeta, put a pin in that boy. We'll be coming back to him.
2. Kure Raian is always validated at every opportunity
Now, this one's a little more complicated, because it's not as simple as "everyone loves him," a la the classic flavour of mary sue. People do in fact usually react negatively to Raian. The audience shouted him down after his first match, Karla was mad at him, Rei is On Sight with the dude. But, well, the specifics of what the individual reactions are isn't necessarily the important part of this judgement.
It's always a tricky balancing act, when writing a character everyone has an opinion on. As someone in the process of writing a character in that sort of position, I sympathise with the struggle. It's not just a question of balancing positive opinions with negative, it's also a process of attaching each opinion to the appropriate characters and their Voice, even one character reading as weirdly invested or uninvested or in strange ways can put a crack in things that distorts how other characters come off to the audience. It's something you need to especially take care with when the character is your favourite, or in a position of unusual importance or strength in the cast. Raian is, arguably, all three.
And not a single mote of care is taken with his presentation.
No matter what the context, Raian almost always gets the reaction he aims for, or characters will simply talk him up in ways he'd like without his input. When the crowd was heckling him after Mokichi? He's revelling in it, he loves calling out their hypocrisy. Rihito's visceral hate? An active, intentional result of Raian's trolling, and fundamentally rooted in Rihito's fragmenting ego. Agito, framed as the most powerful individual in the tournament? Speaks of him with absolute respect in the same breath as characters like Wakatsuki, another one of the tournament's front runners. Metsudo does the same thing, using the Kure as a flex on Prince Rama. Rei's hostility is accompanied by talking up Raian's strength, all but stating outright that if he wants any chance of victory over Raian he needs to escalate straight to lethal blows.
Let's not forget that Raian also gets a lot of the most high-effort stylisation in the manga backing up its attempts to hype him up. Panels have been turning up since his introduction, some of them among my favourite artistic flourishes in the manga, that use many of my favourite visual tropes, that exist solely to sell how fucking cool and scary Raian is. A focus and extravagance that no other character in the manga gets, really. And it fucking stands out when even people like Agito and Gaolang get less frequent and extreme hype panels than this loser. Not helped at all by the previously noted problems with where Raian's actual performance onscreen places him in the manga's strength hierarchy, based on its established visual language.
It is so, so deeply aggravating for a story to treat a character like this, and it only gets worse when you're doing it for a heel. There are ways for it to become more acceptable, particularly in media aimed toward a younger audience, but generally if a character has no flaws, if they always get what they want and the narrative never questions them, the audience will start to get suspicious. Less so, and more slowly, for a protagonist, but still. And Raian isn't a protagonist, he's just a more significant than usual point of friction for the actual protagonist. Or, well, one of them. Just like in point 1, this sort of fuckup is a fundamental crack in the audience's ability to take a character seriously, and a stark exposure of the hand of the author. It doesn't take long for this sort of almost masturbatory attitude to settle on a reader's mind, and once that's happened you're done. Cooked. There's no coming back from an audience who makes a wanking motion with their hand every time you talk up a character, who are actively aware of your favouritism and looking for moments when you warp the story in their favour.
Now, here's the funny thing. In a sad way, Sandro has proved he knows better. There was a character before now who also existed in a similar position, and was treated in similar ways. A uniquely powerful and skilled man, always validated by the manga in everything he cared to have an opinion on, who largely no-sold what damage he took and steamrolled the competition with basic fundamentals anyway. Can you guess who I'm talking about?
Pre-Sekibayashi Ohma.
The first 13 chapters of this manga were a fucked up time, I tell you what. I'd say based on this that I hope Sandro can learn from his mistakes with Raian just like he did with Ohma, but…well. Not to spoil, but I'd be lying.
3. Kure Raian is never, for any reason, anything less than the coolest dude
This one's a bit esoteric, but I feel like it's the most important reason this match never properly cohered. It has to do with what Raian actually is as a character, what his actual traits are, what the story of this fight is, and how the way the manga presents and frames him clashes horribly with both.
So, pull out that pin, because I have a case study for you. The Prince of a group said to be born and bred for battle, overweeningly arrogant and powerful in equal measure, who coasts on that raw strength to overwhelm lesser fighters. A man who, after entering the story, is brought low by a fighter he sees as beneath him but who manages to keep up via a forbidden technique that juices him up in return for inflicting horrendous damage. Am I talking about Kure Raian…or Prince Vegeta?
Trick question, it's both. These fights are structurally extremely similar, and work based off essentially the same kind of antagonist. The crucial difference is that Akira Toriyama knew what Vegeta is, and leveraged that in the story, and Sandro did neither.
The core principle that the Vegeta stretch of the Saiyan Saga was built around is the fact that Vegeta was not anticipating, and has seemingly never really been involved in, a fair fight. Vegeta absolutely has the main cast dead to rights at various points through the arc, if he'd just kept his cool he'd have won pretty decisively. He keeps tanking the Protagonists' biggest hits and coming back for more, he could handily have outlasted them. But, because he's a loser nepo baby coasting on sheer power, the instant he encounters any kind of friction in his conquest Vegeta loses his goddamn mind and starts doing stupid shit. Escalating beyond his ability to sustain. The protagonists seize on these temper tantrums and take every opportunity for all it's worth, the only reason Vegeta even gets out alive in the end is because Goku is just as much of a self-absorbed idiot in different ways.
So, just for a point of comparison in terms of hubris, later on when we see Raian again the point is raised that he's struggling to use the Kure Techniques because it's been so long since he trained or used them that he's basically forgotten them.
Can you imagine how fucking amazing it could have been if that had been an element of this match? If, at the end of it all, it finally sank in for Raian that he's actually going to lose, he finally decided to use a Kure technique and he fucked it up? Because he's an arrogant manchild who didn't keep up his training?
Just to be clear, I'm not working off headcanon or anything here. By the actual text of the manga, the events that happen in story, Raian is a fucking moron so high on his own supply that he goes into a tournament explicitly full of the strongest employees money can buy and expects to just steamroll on pure stats. A dangerous idiot who actually manages to get pretty deep on those stats alone. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing! This could have been an amazing turn, the perfect obstacle for a protagonist who's gotten lazy about fighting in his own way, the perfect punchline to the sort of character Raian is. If Sandro had been willing to compromise on Raian's coolness, to allow Raian to be less than impenetrably rad, to let Raian's actions speak for what they actually are…
But he didn't. And so, this spherical frictionless idiot in a vacuum bounces through the story refusing to engage with any other element of it in good faith until the instant he actually loses. The framing of the story is, at every moment, acting like we're supposed to be pissing ourselves in fear of this guy or gooshing in our pants at how cool he is. Just this update we had the moment I foreshadowed this very point over, where instead of simply letting the sheer fucking hubris of persisting in trying to Stat Check Ohma right to the last moment be itself, the framing instead leans on trying to emphasise Raian's implacability to the exclusion of all else. Be Impressed, the manga demands, as the stupidest man in the running pisses into his own breakfast cereal. And, well, that moment kind of stands as a microcosm of Raian as a character. How he could have been so much more interesting, and honestly could have been cooler, if there had been some willingness to let him be kind of a loser. Have the other Kure shittalk him in good faith, have Agito acknowledge his raw power but emphasise how Ohma is going to lose to this shitkid who doesn't even use techniques, have the way Raian flexes on Rihito be an actual insight into his deal and his flaws foreshadowing how he's going to lose.
This is what I mean when I say it was so close. You don't need to make many massive changes, in some cases all you need to change is the tone of the narrator, and you could make this at least a passable fight to overcome Hubris and Thoughtlessness both within and without. A thousand tiny cracks ruining the foundations of what should have been one of the highest impact matches in the tournament.
In conclusion, there's no one thing that ruins this match, really. It's a lot of problems, both in the leadup and the match itself, that compound on each other to break it. The way he breaks the series' visual language wouldn't be felt as badly if we weren't already sick of the story tongue-bathing him with hype all the time. Raian getting all the hype wouldn't be so bad if he'd been acknowledged as a hubristic moron for the stupid things he objectively did. And the series failing to find the potential for true resonance and fun in this match wouldn't have stung so hard if the action had actually read properly and I hadn't spent the whole match questioning if any given hit really meant anything. It's a fucked up ouroboros of ill-conceived ideas and poor execution, and honestly I'm glad to see it behind me.
Because, guys, gals and nonbinary pals, it is time. Shit's about to get fucking real, and I'm hyped as fuck for almost every match left this round.
Next time, tune in for Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla.
What possible technique could be better for opening up a fighter like Raian?
You know, I kind of feel like a part of Sandro or the artist might be aware of the problems they created, having Raian tank every hit no problem before, because in all fairness this does read as a significantly more telling hit than anything else Ohma has landed. Blood spattering everywhere from the central point of what looks like a divot in Raian's chest as he reels, teeth gritted in pain. Doesn't necessarily mean anything of course, but it's an effort. Real strong lines of action in Ohma's attack too, for what that's worth.
Ohma having apparently forgotten how his moves are actually supposed to be used is kinda funny, especially since this is actually how we first saw this move get used. Remember, all the way back in chapter 28? It was indestructible's introduction, but the posture used for the way Ohma annihilated Jerry's hands and face were exactly the same as Flashing Steel: Blast. That weirdness aside, I suppose it could be explained as muscle memory applied without much thought so it's not stuff accounted for in future battles. Or we can assume there was no Flame Kata element in that fight, since Jerry was doing all the moving and Ohma just stood his ground. It's not the strangest beat, given the prior setup of Ohma's memory damage and his use of the Advance as a crutch, and I do like it. But it does clash weirdly with certain moments.
Anyway, Ohma isn't done adapting, and one more lesson of Niko's stands out in his head. Don't be satisfied with hitting your opponent, always follow up so the momentary advantage isn't wasted. This moment is 100% kind of fucky, because well…just look at what Ohma was doing earlier in this very fight. If that isn't followup, capitalising on every bit of advantage you make, I don't know what is. Technique into technique into throw into football kick to the mush. It just arbitrarily didn't work then, and does now. The tank is suddenly not made of metal anymore and his punches function. Like, this isn't how attrition works, it's like Ohma has just emptied his HP bar so now he's taking actual wounds rather than the accumulation of bruises and cracks we see in fighters like Cosmo.
Remember kids, always be aware of the rules your story is setting, even unbroken ones. Or you get something like this. And just for context, I like the ideas at play here, imagine if it were something I wasn't as invested in!
This time Ohma's Ironbreaker followup is chased by a sweet little move, darting behind Raian's reeling body and catching his neck right under his jaw with his hands, hoisting Raian's whole body over his back and stretching the fucker out like an accordion. Water Kata Guillotine, this is called, and Raian's really feeling this one. Coughing up a cloud of blood with an expression of genuine pain. Of course, it doesn't last. He coils himself up with a grin, and with the strength of his whole body throws himself forward, landing back on his feet and throwing Ohma by the grip he had on Raian's neck. Ohma lands flat on his face, and crawls up to his hands and knees as a blood-drenched Raian charges him once more.
Right into a bitchin' counterattack.
Holy shit look at this, it's so cool. The little afterimage at the bottom, showing us how Ohma launched from basically a crouch. The immaculate posing, with Raian's fist skating over Ohma's shoulder with those little cloud effects like a Phantom Pace. The Motherfucking sonic boom blastwave of blood around Ohma's fist. I don't think it's actually a sonic boom, but that's the words I had to hand and god it's cool.
Niko's lessons continue to rattle off in Ohma's head, this time warning him not to let his attacks be predictable. Switch it up every time, hard to soft then soft to hard, then hard into hard into soft, and so on. And yeah, he's right, that's exactly the shit that took Okubo to prominence in MMA. Ohma probably isn't on the same level in that skill, but even just applying the principle makes you an absolute pain in the ass to fight. You can't defend against hard and soft attacks in the same ways, and especially if you're trying to predict what specific expression they'll take it can be an absolute nightmare. And, well, Raian's fighting extremely linearly. Pure fundamentals driven by insane physicality. It's an especially effective strategy against opponents with limited options.
Well, theoretically limited. We'll see what happens when he pulls out some Kure Specials other than the removal, I guess.
Ohma's next pivot goes into soft, as Raian tries to retaliate with a roundhouse to the midriff, he pulls out the classic. The first named technique we saw Ohma use, Redirection Kata: Weeping Willow. He throws Raian off balance, then pitches him to the floor, catching him in a funky arm lock he calls the Water Kata's Screw Cutter Jizo. Jizo being a reference to an extremely benevolent bodhisattva in buddhism, who for the purposes of this technique decides he's tired of being nice and wants to go apeshit, I guess. Ohma has Raian's arm held in both of his, twisted around, with Ohma himself sat on Raian's shoulder and upper back. It looks painful as hell, even before we get cracking sound effects and a close look at the Kure's eyes bugging out.
Of course, it doesn't hold him long, he throws Ohma off with brute force, but he doesn't do it easily. He's shaking as he strains against Ohma's grip, and when he breaks free it's with a scream of effort. He's hunched over and panting afterwards too, at least for a moment the grin has been wiped off his face and he's completely exhausted as he seethes and malds over how good Ohma's technique has gotten.
…you know what, honestly a fair question. Ohma looks absolutely fucked the hell up, right on the edge of just fucking passing out. It's the eyes that really sell it, I think, half lidded in sheer exhaustion.
And yet, he stands strong. With a firm exhalation he pulls back once more, raising his arms into stance. Niko must be so proud.
This is Ohma's Niko style.
Raian continues to seethe, stood in place hunched over like an ape, panting with gritted teeth as Erioh demands to know what the fuck is wrong with him. And everyone else cheers Ohma on. Yamashita, with tears in his eyes. Akiyama and Kushida with sincerity. The Peanut gallery, tense as hell, Okubo inadvertently strangling Kaneda in the process. Karla, who is certain he can do it.
And then we pivot. For a moment, we discuss Raian's history, and take an extremely ham handed peek into his mindset.
"He was always the strongest," the manga tells us. Anywhere he went, any time, he was the most powerful individual there. That position, that acclaim, being the Strongest wasn't a title to seek for him but a given. A Promised inheritance, his divine right. Not a single person Raian had ever fought rivalled him in power. But today, stands Tokita Ohma, the first significant obstacle Raian has ever encountered. Defiant, even after Raian has expended so much energy he can no longer use the Removal.
And yet, the man smiled. And we have one more moment of aimless stupidity left before this fight is done.
Not so much physically, he rushes in for another exchange with Ohma, and it's pretty sweet. Well drawn and brutal, two men on their last drops of stamina trying to squeeze out everything they have left for the win. It ends with Raian catching Ohma's head and headbutting it, but then both of them topple over. Heaving and wheezing. And then the clincher. Hands on his knees Raian grins, and we see a sidebar. Even now, he fights with Brute Force alone.
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Kengan Asura you were SO CLOSE. You almost had something special for a moment, and you completely fumbled it. Why, in this moment, with this display of monumental hubris, are you still so unwilling to frame Raian as anything less than peak, untouchable coolness.
Fucking hell. We'll come back to this soon, don't you worry.
Let's end this.
The two of them lunge at each other one more time, but this exchange is different. The punch Ohma lands leaves a visible dent in Raian's neck, leveraging the battering he'd already given the abused organ over this match. Raian can't just shrug it off, can't just tense his muscles and absorb it, he feels the full impact. For just over a tenth of a second, Raian passes out. This is Ohma's one shot at truly ending this.
He catches the falling Raian's arm, hooks his leg around his knee, and trips him. Raian is falling backwards, his head hurtling toward the Arena floor.
And Ohma's arm cocks back.
Fuck yeah. It's done.
One tiny, defeated curse escapes Raian's lips, before Ohma just goes to fucking town on his face. Until he's pulled off by the ref.
End chapter. But not the update. I promised you all an essay, didn't I?
So. Let's talk about Raian, and this match.
The thing about Match 2-2 is that it's a million miles from being good. But at the same time, it's right on the cusp of being fucking amazing. All the pieces are there. Ohma's developing arc of memory and its complications, Ohma's mechanical arc around his shallow use of Niko style techniques and overreliance on the Advance, the mystery of the person who taught him it, a powerful and dangerous foe with a theoretically compelling flaw, a drawn out fight with a lot of twists, turns and swings of fortune, Yamashita getting a significant role and immediate source of investment. Even the structure of the fight is theoretically really good.
And it all comes to almost nothing, because of one crippling flaw. Kure. Raian.
In many ways, as I've come to realise over this match and its leadup, Raian is much the same as the match itself. Possibly the most singularly irritating character in the roster, a million miles from fun, but simultaneously so close to being awesome. He has all the elements in place to be a great heel, even better than Akoya without the elements of ACAB man that make him viscerally unpleasant to read for some people. But just like this match, there's a thousand individual cracks in his execution that all spread like a spiderweb from one central blow to his credibility.
Sandro is far, far too excited for this guy, and has no concept of how to moderate how he's written.
With that in mind, I'm going to separate out the ways this manifests into several sections, and discuss how each undermines his credibility and weight as an antagonist. This is not necessarily an exhaustive list, just what strike me as the biggest factors.
1. Kure Raian breaks the visual language of Kengan Asura
One of the many revelations I've had about Kengan Asura over the course of this let's read is that Kengan Asura is a shockingly well constructed Manga. Just, serious props to both Sandrovich and Daromeon for the work done in most matches. It is, at almost all times, incredibly clear what's happening, who's at an advantage, and how a fight is progressing. None of the usual shonen shit where characters get absolutely styled on for thirty minutes straight but it all means nothing because the protagonist lands one beam or basic punch that is just arbitrarily functional now. When characters get hit it's immediately obvious what it's doing and why, and characters almost never just no-sell hits completely. Even with the highest level fighters, even the characters who specialise in tanking hits safely, like Sekibayashi. This stuff is established and then carried forward consistently over the course of the manga, informing how the audience reads every exchange.
To quote @Walter in their genuinely excellent post several updates ago (please read the discussion between each update, my readers are so clever I love them), I don't know if Raian can beat an army tank. Everything I said above? Only applies to Raian some of the time. He spends a significant amount of both of the matches he's involved in getting absolutely mollywhopped, just picked up and used to wipe the arena floor like a fucking mop. And crucially, in these moments, the art sells the hit. They're all powerful blows, Raian's face gets made two-dimensional at one point by Mokichi, he recoils, grimaces and deforms in ways that the manga has already established as signifiers that a hit actually means something, that progress is being made toward victory or defeat.
Except…no, it doesn't. It doesn't do that at all, not here. Raian takes these hits, so many of them, without any evidence of any active defence or any suggestion they're anything less than telling, and then like pages later is just "Nah. Didn't count bro, everything-proof shield." He's just suddenly fine for no reason, nothing more than scuff marks. In a series where getting the shit kicked out of you fucking matters, where even blocking isn't something you can do forever, this is a serious blow to the audience's ability to read the match. At any given moment it's unclear what, if any, progress is being made. And when Raian finally does actually start to take meaningful damage…well, why the fuck should I believe it? The better part of two matches have already passed with this bullshit guys, the ship has fucking sailed on that one. The entire basis of Match 2-2's pacing has the legs cut out from under it because the audience has been taught not to trust the art when it says Raian is being beaten up. At best it's a source of confusion and suspicion, at worst readers are made consciously aware of the hand of the writer reaching down and fiddling with the dials.
It's not just this match, either, Raian fucks up things said by and in service to other matches as well with the shitty way the manga uses him. The entire point of Mikazuchi Rei's match in the first round is to establish his speed, right? Fun swerve, the match lasts a fraction of a second, come back next time to see how other fighters actually deal with it. Except then, not even ten chapters later let alone the next round, in comes Mr Shitface himself and just catches Rei's punch without any apparent effort after the art hard sold Rei's speed. A feat, I should note, that Raian doesn't come close to repeating in his match with Ohma. It's unclear why he's even in that scene to begin with, beyond suggesting some history between their assassination styles, and that's not even nearly worth undercutting the basis of Rei's visual identity as a fighter.
And it's a bit of a tangent here, but let's not leave it unsaid that a character spending a significant proportion of his onscreen fights being used as a dishrag by his opponents does a fair amount of damage to the audience's ability to take him seriously as a top shelf shitkicker. Another thing this manga's visual language establishes is what skilled fighters look like in this setting, and while they aren't matrix-dodging through literally everything, it does generally involve people needing to be more unpredictable than this to actually land a hit.
How powerful is Raian? Can he, in fact, beat a tank? Who the fuck knows. The art certainly doesn't.
Now, this is not to suggest that a character being an Outside Context Problem and breaking the series' established rules is inherently a bad thing. In a way there's several characters who do just that, and indeed by express intent that's kind of what Julius is all about. Hell, to reference other manga, Bleach's Kenpachi and Dragonball Z's Vegeta both do this to a degree, and wield similar kinds of resilience in their fights with protagonists. But, well, all of the branches off of the core problem of Sandro's careless love of Raian feed back into each other in ways just like this, and Raian's arbitrary invincibility is just extremely clumsily used. Especially since there was ultimately no answer beyond just hitting him until he starts feeling it, rather than being the direct result of growth on the protagonist's part or cooperation between allies. Ohma grew over the course of this fight, yeah, but it had nothing to do with why Raian suddenly lost his God Mode buff.
Speaking of Vegeta, put a pin in that boy. We'll be coming back to him.
2. Kure Raian is always validated at every opportunity
Now, this one's a little more complicated, because it's not as simple as "everyone loves him," a la the classic flavour of mary sue. People do in fact usually react negatively to Raian. The audience shouted him down after his first match, Karla was mad at him, Rei is On Sight with the dude. But, well, the specifics of what the individual reactions are isn't necessarily the important part of this judgement.
It's always a tricky balancing act, when writing a character everyone has an opinion on. As someone in the process of writing a character in that sort of position, I sympathise with the struggle. It's not just a question of balancing positive opinions with negative, it's also a process of attaching each opinion to the appropriate characters and their Voice, even one character reading as weirdly invested or uninvested or in strange ways can put a crack in things that distorts how other characters come off to the audience. It's something you need to especially take care with when the character is your favourite, or in a position of unusual importance or strength in the cast. Raian is, arguably, all three.
And not a single mote of care is taken with his presentation.
No matter what the context, Raian almost always gets the reaction he aims for, or characters will simply talk him up in ways he'd like without his input. When the crowd was heckling him after Mokichi? He's revelling in it, he loves calling out their hypocrisy. Rihito's visceral hate? An active, intentional result of Raian's trolling, and fundamentally rooted in Rihito's fragmenting ego. Agito, framed as the most powerful individual in the tournament? Speaks of him with absolute respect in the same breath as characters like Wakatsuki, another one of the tournament's front runners. Metsudo does the same thing, using the Kure as a flex on Prince Rama. Rei's hostility is accompanied by talking up Raian's strength, all but stating outright that if he wants any chance of victory over Raian he needs to escalate straight to lethal blows.
Let's not forget that Raian also gets a lot of the most high-effort stylisation in the manga backing up its attempts to hype him up. Panels have been turning up since his introduction, some of them among my favourite artistic flourishes in the manga, that use many of my favourite visual tropes, that exist solely to sell how fucking cool and scary Raian is. A focus and extravagance that no other character in the manga gets, really. And it fucking stands out when even people like Agito and Gaolang get less frequent and extreme hype panels than this loser. Not helped at all by the previously noted problems with where Raian's actual performance onscreen places him in the manga's strength hierarchy, based on its established visual language.
It is so, so deeply aggravating for a story to treat a character like this, and it only gets worse when you're doing it for a heel. There are ways for it to become more acceptable, particularly in media aimed toward a younger audience, but generally if a character has no flaws, if they always get what they want and the narrative never questions them, the audience will start to get suspicious. Less so, and more slowly, for a protagonist, but still. And Raian isn't a protagonist, he's just a more significant than usual point of friction for the actual protagonist. Or, well, one of them. Just like in point 1, this sort of fuckup is a fundamental crack in the audience's ability to take a character seriously, and a stark exposure of the hand of the author. It doesn't take long for this sort of almost masturbatory attitude to settle on a reader's mind, and once that's happened you're done. Cooked. There's no coming back from an audience who makes a wanking motion with their hand every time you talk up a character, who are actively aware of your favouritism and looking for moments when you warp the story in their favour.
Now, here's the funny thing. In a sad way, Sandro has proved he knows better. There was a character before now who also existed in a similar position, and was treated in similar ways. A uniquely powerful and skilled man, always validated by the manga in everything he cared to have an opinion on, who largely no-sold what damage he took and steamrolled the competition with basic fundamentals anyway. Can you guess who I'm talking about?
Pre-Sekibayashi Ohma.
The first 13 chapters of this manga were a fucked up time, I tell you what. I'd say based on this that I hope Sandro can learn from his mistakes with Raian just like he did with Ohma, but…well. Not to spoil, but I'd be lying.
3. Kure Raian is never, for any reason, anything less than the coolest dude
This one's a bit esoteric, but I feel like it's the most important reason this match never properly cohered. It has to do with what Raian actually is as a character, what his actual traits are, what the story of this fight is, and how the way the manga presents and frames him clashes horribly with both.
So, pull out that pin, because I have a case study for you. The Prince of a group said to be born and bred for battle, overweeningly arrogant and powerful in equal measure, who coasts on that raw strength to overwhelm lesser fighters. A man who, after entering the story, is brought low by a fighter he sees as beneath him but who manages to keep up via a forbidden technique that juices him up in return for inflicting horrendous damage. Am I talking about Kure Raian…or Prince Vegeta?
Trick question, it's both. These fights are structurally extremely similar, and work based off essentially the same kind of antagonist. The crucial difference is that Akira Toriyama knew what Vegeta is, and leveraged that in the story, and Sandro did neither.
The core principle that the Vegeta stretch of the Saiyan Saga was built around is the fact that Vegeta was not anticipating, and has seemingly never really been involved in, a fair fight. Vegeta absolutely has the main cast dead to rights at various points through the arc, if he'd just kept his cool he'd have won pretty decisively. He keeps tanking the Protagonists' biggest hits and coming back for more, he could handily have outlasted them. But, because he's a loser nepo baby coasting on sheer power, the instant he encounters any kind of friction in his conquest Vegeta loses his goddamn mind and starts doing stupid shit. Escalating beyond his ability to sustain. The protagonists seize on these temper tantrums and take every opportunity for all it's worth, the only reason Vegeta even gets out alive in the end is because Goku is just as much of a self-absorbed idiot in different ways.
So, just for a point of comparison in terms of hubris, later on when we see Raian again the point is raised that he's struggling to use the Kure Techniques because it's been so long since he trained or used them that he's basically forgotten them.
Can you imagine how fucking amazing it could have been if that had been an element of this match? If, at the end of it all, it finally sank in for Raian that he's actually going to lose, he finally decided to use a Kure technique and he fucked it up? Because he's an arrogant manchild who didn't keep up his training?
Just to be clear, I'm not working off headcanon or anything here. By the actual text of the manga, the events that happen in story, Raian is a fucking moron so high on his own supply that he goes into a tournament explicitly full of the strongest employees money can buy and expects to just steamroll on pure stats. A dangerous idiot who actually manages to get pretty deep on those stats alone. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing! This could have been an amazing turn, the perfect obstacle for a protagonist who's gotten lazy about fighting in his own way, the perfect punchline to the sort of character Raian is. If Sandro had been willing to compromise on Raian's coolness, to allow Raian to be less than impenetrably rad, to let Raian's actions speak for what they actually are…
But he didn't. And so, this spherical frictionless idiot in a vacuum bounces through the story refusing to engage with any other element of it in good faith until the instant he actually loses. The framing of the story is, at every moment, acting like we're supposed to be pissing ourselves in fear of this guy or gooshing in our pants at how cool he is. Just this update we had the moment I foreshadowed this very point over, where instead of simply letting the sheer fucking hubris of persisting in trying to Stat Check Ohma right to the last moment be itself, the framing instead leans on trying to emphasise Raian's implacability to the exclusion of all else. Be Impressed, the manga demands, as the stupidest man in the running pisses into his own breakfast cereal. And, well, that moment kind of stands as a microcosm of Raian as a character. How he could have been so much more interesting, and honestly could have been cooler, if there had been some willingness to let him be kind of a loser. Have the other Kure shittalk him in good faith, have Agito acknowledge his raw power but emphasise how Ohma is going to lose to this shitkid who doesn't even use techniques, have the way Raian flexes on Rihito be an actual insight into his deal and his flaws foreshadowing how he's going to lose.
This is what I mean when I say it was so close. You don't need to make many massive changes, in some cases all you need to change is the tone of the narrator, and you could make this at least a passable fight to overcome Hubris and Thoughtlessness both within and without. A thousand tiny cracks ruining the foundations of what should have been one of the highest impact matches in the tournament.
In conclusion, there's no one thing that ruins this match, really. It's a lot of problems, both in the leadup and the match itself, that compound on each other to break it. The way he breaks the series' visual language wouldn't be felt as badly if we weren't already sick of the story tongue-bathing him with hype all the time. Raian getting all the hype wouldn't be so bad if he'd been acknowledged as a hubristic moron for the stupid things he objectively did. And the series failing to find the potential for true resonance and fun in this match wouldn't have stung so hard if the action had actually read properly and I hadn't spent the whole match questioning if any given hit really meant anything. It's a fucked up ouroboros of ill-conceived ideas and poor execution, and honestly I'm glad to see it behind me.
Because, guys, gals and nonbinary pals, it is time. Shit's about to get fucking real, and I'm hyped as fuck for almost every match left this round.
Next time, tune in for Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Fun Kengan Omega fact: Raian finally returned to the story this week, after having been away on a tantrum because he lost a fight. We'd been promised an upgrade for him, that he was rethinking the whole way he fights. So he finally turned up with his new upgrade this week.
He has a katana now. He gave it a name and talks about feeding it when he jumps into battle. That's his upgrade.
But anyhow, that's enough about Raian from me for today. Directly. I assume we'll probably discuss him for a while now anyway so instead I want to talk about the match itself.
I like this match. Don't get me wrong, it's probably the second least good match of this round, and it's measurably weaker than an amount of the first round fights too. But on a balance, I like the good elements of this match more than I dislike the bad ones.
It reminds me a lot of Ichigo vs Kenpachi in Bleach, as Manic mentioned it. Granted I read that one as a very young teen, but back then I could not for the life of me tell how Ichigo won against Kenpachi in the end or why I felt something was wrong with Kenpachi, despite thinking he was cool as shit. Something similar happened to me here the first time I read: I kind of just shrugged the issues with Raian off and he became just this regular, bland, edgy antagonist of the week kind of creature, the random bad guy of the arc that the protag has to fight. Which is one hell of an indictment when it comes to Kengan as a whole and Sandro's intended reaction to Raian in specific, but this isn't about Raian, so let's move on from him.
I love, especially in the context of Kengan Asura, that this fight's established theme is just "skill in using martial arts matters significantly when fighting someone stronger". That being the case for the "protagonist" goes especially so. In so many stories like this the protagonists tend to evolve by learning new forms or developing a new killer move they'll use until they have to develop a new, better one. But Ohma's new powerup is just remembering how to use the skills he already has in creative ways to overcome a guy who is, in terms of physicality and even power-up, the same as him (but slightly better). It's a very refreshing thing, to see a protag who has to actually get better at what they're doing and think it through creatively, instead of just learning a stronger hit. Reminds me of how Fullmetal Alchemist did it, where the characters never so much gained new moves as much as they just had new insights into things they already knew and then applied those things when necessary.
So as a construct, I like it. Ohma is faced with a physically insurmountable challenge that makes his power-up pointless, in order to be reminded that his power-up is really not all that useful compared to his actual skillset, which he needs to apply properly and strategically. And it culminating in that beautiful Iron Breaker Revolution spread is fantastic. As much as the fight suffers to get going, this chapter works beautifully as the last part to make us feel the win.
And let's not pretend here, this fight struggles. Aside from the already expounded upon, I feel this fight's biggest issue is pacing. This fight took eight chapters start to finish. Until this chapter everything in this fight felt way overexposed, especially the Advance vs Removal part. Things are stated and restated, and not a lot of advancement is done in actually telling the story. Compare that to the earlier fight: Akoya vs Cosmo takes six chapters, and every single one of them contains a significant shift in the fight without letting any specific part bog it down. This fight could easily have lasted as long without losing much of what matters to it.
Anyhow. Overall I think it's a fun enough fight, though it is measurably the second weakest of the second round. But it's over now, mostly. Next week we'll probably see my actual favorite moment of this fight, and then move on to one of the coolest fights in the round itself. Gonna be a good time.
And hey, no more Raian in this tournament. As a fighter, anyway.
He has a katana now. He gave it a name and talks about feeding it when he jumps into battle. That's his upgrade.
But anyhow, that's enough about Raian from me for today. Directly. I assume we'll probably discuss him for a while now anyway so instead I want to talk about the match itself.
I like this match. Don't get me wrong, it's probably the second least good match of this round, and it's measurably weaker than an amount of the first round fights too. But on a balance, I like the good elements of this match more than I dislike the bad ones.
It reminds me a lot of Ichigo vs Kenpachi in Bleach, as Manic mentioned it. Granted I read that one as a very young teen, but back then I could not for the life of me tell how Ichigo won against Kenpachi in the end or why I felt something was wrong with Kenpachi, despite thinking he was cool as shit. Something similar happened to me here the first time I read: I kind of just shrugged the issues with Raian off and he became just this regular, bland, edgy antagonist of the week kind of creature, the random bad guy of the arc that the protag has to fight. Which is one hell of an indictment when it comes to Kengan as a whole and Sandro's intended reaction to Raian in specific, but this isn't about Raian, so let's move on from him.
I love, especially in the context of Kengan Asura, that this fight's established theme is just "skill in using martial arts matters significantly when fighting someone stronger". That being the case for the "protagonist" goes especially so. In so many stories like this the protagonists tend to evolve by learning new forms or developing a new killer move they'll use until they have to develop a new, better one. But Ohma's new powerup is just remembering how to use the skills he already has in creative ways to overcome a guy who is, in terms of physicality and even power-up, the same as him (but slightly better). It's a very refreshing thing, to see a protag who has to actually get better at what they're doing and think it through creatively, instead of just learning a stronger hit. Reminds me of how Fullmetal Alchemist did it, where the characters never so much gained new moves as much as they just had new insights into things they already knew and then applied those things when necessary.
So as a construct, I like it. Ohma is faced with a physically insurmountable challenge that makes his power-up pointless, in order to be reminded that his power-up is really not all that useful compared to his actual skillset, which he needs to apply properly and strategically. And it culminating in that beautiful Iron Breaker Revolution spread is fantastic. As much as the fight suffers to get going, this chapter works beautifully as the last part to make us feel the win.
And let's not pretend here, this fight struggles. Aside from the already expounded upon, I feel this fight's biggest issue is pacing. This fight took eight chapters start to finish. Until this chapter everything in this fight felt way overexposed, especially the Advance vs Removal part. Things are stated and restated, and not a lot of advancement is done in actually telling the story. Compare that to the earlier fight: Akoya vs Cosmo takes six chapters, and every single one of them contains a significant shift in the fight without letting any specific part bog it down. This fight could easily have lasted as long without losing much of what matters to it.
Anyhow. Overall I think it's a fun enough fight, though it is measurably the second weakest of the second round. But it's over now, mostly. Next week we'll probably see my actual favorite moment of this fight, and then move on to one of the coolest fights in the round itself. Gonna be a good time.
And hey, no more Raian in this tournament. As a fighter, anyway.
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- Location
- Leeds
Next time he loses he'll come back with a trenchcoat and sunglasses.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Oh he already has the trench coat, don't worry. He has stubble too
Somehow every single thing I learn about Omega makes me gladder I dropped it right when Huisheng got introduced. It's an intriguing concept and I'm now confident my imagination is doing a better job messing around with it than Omega was. Not to mention fucking katana Raian. What the fuck lmao.
Please be shitting me holy fuck