Naruto Manga/Anime Discussion IV

[The Drunkard Kid]

Eh, IY is half human and more attached to his human half than his youkai half.

Sesshoumaru, OTOH, would not be too out of place in the Faerie Courts of the Dresdenverse, possibly as an unaligned Lord/King of Summer with a focus on Dogs and poison, especiallyafter coming to terms with Tenseiga and purifying the souls of the damned. Not actively malicious, but inhuman, very dangerous to annoy and incredibly powerful.

I dunno who is behind the modern concept of faerie as cute little Tinkerbell pixes, but when you read a story that deals with them in their classic roles as inhuman, often amoral beings with odd/immense power and a tendency to wreak generally randomized havoc and often lethal mischief while going about their day to day affairs, it's hard to say that the Fae are anything less than completely terrifying. If Peter Pan had a faerie from the Dresdenverse's Unseelie Court or a Discworld elf following him around, suicide might be a good idea (though there are some that aren't so bad, and the original Peter Pan was kind of psycho himself and the Fox Peter Pan was basically a very low level Fae Lord to Neverland).

Demons are scary and all, but they tend to seem too organized and specialized towards stuff about Hell and souls to accurately encompass youkai. If anything, Demons could arguably be considered a subset of youkai, like the various youkai of Hell from Inu Yasha.

[Guy1]

Eh, IY is half human and more attached to his human half than his youkai half.

Sesshoumaru, OTOH, would not be too out of place in the Faerie Courts of the Dresdenverse, possibly as an unaligned Lord/King of Summer with a focus on Dogs and poison, especiallyafter coming to terms with Tenseiga and purifying the souls of the damned. Not actively malicious, but inhuman, very dangerous to annoy and incredibly powerful.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/839/581350.jpg/
Like that?

[Robotech Master]

Yu Yu Hakusho occasionally translated Youkai as Demon in the dub, most notably in translating Makai as "Demon World," but it was actually quite common for them to use the term "Apparition" instead. Apparition sounds more ghostly, but does lead to a situation where Youkai = "something supernatural in general."

[Len Ikari145]

Dammit. This is gotten out of hand! Damn you, TG and HS! Damn you both for throwing us this far off course! And even though I know he had nothing to with it, SCREW YOU TOO, MIBURO!

[Omegastorm]

Great issue of Naruto. I loved that Naruto can talk to the other beasts.

o

[The Transient Guest]

Dammit. This is gotten out of hand! Damn you, TG and HS! Damn you both for throwing us this far off course!

I'm sorry Len, and to make it up to you I'll leave one last comment on why putting every egg in one basket with these title things really muffs my muffins.

A sinner has a future, a saint has a past.

Now then, let's get back to what I was talking about before all this happened.

How do we feel knowing that all the.....physical explorations of their bodies that the jinchuuriki...jinchurikey.....that the hosts experience is directly watched by tailed beasts.

I bet the slug one knows some tricks........

And even though I know he had nothing to with it, SCREW YOU TOO, MIBURO!

Hoping that Miburo posted something is one of the things that brings me back here. So yeah, he's partially to blame.

[flashdisk]

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/839/581350.jpg/
Like that?

Yep, he looks like an elf with those pointy ears of his. Oberon and Titania would be jealous.

Vampire Hinata? Hmmmmm.......

.............

.............*blood gushes from my nose*


No, no! It's too damn sexy for the imagination!

Yep, Hinata is already sexy. But if she becomes a vampire.... Yep, yep. :D

Now then, let's get back to what I was talking about before all this happened.

How do we feel knowing that all the.....physical explorations of their bodies that the jinchuuriki...jinchurikey.....that the hosts experience is directly watched by tailed beasts.

I bet the slug one knows some tricks........

Eh,...... its too bad the host for the six tails is male. But I guess a lot girls would be happy..... maybe.

[nervmeister]

So Kishimoto is now directly following traditional Japanese myth and making four-tails and nine-tails the legendary Son Goku and Yoko Kurama. Kind of a splendid twist if you ask me.

[Hazard]

So I am watching the last filler episode before they start with the plot again.

A mist ninja is opposed the alliance, because he wants revenge on the Stone Village.

Messengers of the Mist and the Stone are going to talk, and the guy plus followers are going to interfere.The episode even has Chujuro, Akatsuchi, and Kurotsuchi.

It occurs to me they could have made a whole arc of this instead of using those weird filler episodes.

[Dark Soul # 7]

Damn swedish time difference for making me miss most of a fun discussion. Jumping into bits of it anyway.

Hiei's a demon too and he's mostly a good guy.
Hell, look at Yusuke.
Oh and Sesshomaru.

Not to mention Raizen who pretty much decided to starve himself because he fell in love with a human.

sadly, i have no religion to really call my own. i started out as a baptist but i've seen too much of the dark side of Christianity that i cant call myself a christian because of it. dont get me wrong. i do believe in god and jesus was a prophet but my view is more open to the various ideals of other religions, mostly Buddhism, if you want to call it that.

Personally I'm much to sceptical to really believe in any religion, I can't really say that one is any better than the other. I have the utmost respect and a bit of admiration for the people that do honestly believe in a religion. It's just not really for me.

I am open to the idea that there's something bigger than any logical or scientific method could explain so I can't call myself an atheist. Without going into the finer details I'm more of an agnostic.

Look, I know it's fiction and if the writer wants a demon to be good he can make a demon good.

If he wants to call a hammer a sword then..... a hammer is now a sword regardless of what it actually is. He's the writer.

Bit of a difference there.

Most, if not all of us, will agree that the so-called sword is in fact a hammer and axe attached by a chain. It's pretty much a fact that we can make fun of.

What a demon is and/or isn't is more nebulous and leads to discussion like the one in this thread.

[Ghost]

Why? I mean faeries are kind of cool. There are the trolls under the bridges, the Tolkien elves, the dwarves, sprites etc. If you watched the Spiderwick chronicles they're quite interesting. And they fit the much better than demons. They aren't all tinkerbell like creatures.

I wouldn't describe trolls and stuff as fairies.* It depends a bit on which mythology you use, but in general I'm pretty sure they are their own type of beings.

*I don't like to spell it "faeries." That feels a bit too close to spelling magic as "magick."

I'm just too used to calling them youkai "demons." It sounds more hardcore to my mind and ears.*shrugs*

Well, thing is, comparing them to anything from Abrahamic mythology doesn't really work. You really need to go all the way back to Norse mythology if you want to see some serious similarities.

Basically, youkai is a blanket term for basically any monsterous "supernatural being." They belong to the same basic type of creature as the kami - you could call them spirits, but that sorta suggests an incorporeal being, which isn't neccessarily the case in this type of mythology.

If you look at norse mythology, you might notice that the "gods", that is the Aesir and the Vanir, are just two prominent groups in a wider class of supernatural beings called "vættir", or wights. In fact, calling them gods isn't quite right because it gives the wrong impression, same way translating "kami" as "gods" isn't quite right because it includes beings who are not really that godly.

Following this line of thinking, I find that Japanese folklore is actually kinda similar to ours. There are being in Scandinavian/Germanic folklore who would fit right in with most typical youkai. For example, the näck (or neck, or nix) is a water creature who looks like an attractive man sitting in brooks playing the violin, causing passersby to drown by luring them into the water with his music. A female variant is the skogsrå (or huldra, in Norway) who resembles a woman but is really an inhuman spirit luring men deep into the woods.

Now compare that to the Japanese yuki-onna, for example.

Thing is, nobody around here would describe näcken as a "demon." He's in the same class of beings as trolls and fairies: oknytt, mystical creatures of nature who are dangerous to humans not out of malice but because they represent things that are dangerous in nature itself, like drowing in a brook or losing your way on a foggy night and stumbling into a bog. I tend to think of youkai sorta the same way.

I dunno who is behind the modern concept of faerie as cute little Tinkerbell pixes, but when you read a story that deals with them in their classic roles as inhuman, often amoral beings with odd/immense power and a tendency to wreak generally randomized havoc and often lethal mischief while going about their day to day affairs, it's hard to say that the Fae are anything less than completely terrifying. If Peter Pan had a faerie from the Dresdenverse's Unseelie Court or a Discworld elf following him around, suicide might be a good idea (though there are some that aren't so bad, and the original Peter Pan was kind of psycho himself and the Fox Peter Pan was basically a very low level Fae Lord to Neverland).

In our folklore, fairies are kinda in-between - they're not quite the kind of really dangerous trixter beings you see in the Celtic traditions, but they're not quite harmless pixies either. They're mostly associated with fog and dancing on fields, and can curse humans with illness and misfortune if offended. Also, they can invite people to dance with them, but that's a very bad idea because apparently time runs faster in their realm so you'll get kind of a Twin Paradox problem once the fun is over.

[Ghost]

Not to mention Raizen who pretty much decided to starve himself because he fell in love with a human.

To the point where Yusuke went: "For the love of God, dad, eat someone."

Personally I'm much to sceptical to really believe in any religion, I can't really say that one is any better than the other. I have the utmost respect and a bit of admiration for the people that do honestly believe in a religion. It's just not really for me.

I am open to the idea that there's something bigger than any logical or scientific method could explain so I can't call myself an atheist. Without going into the finer details I'm more of an agnostic.Bit of a difference there.

I'm pretty much the same. Agnostic, because I find atheism presumptious and kinda vulgar, but I don't have the faith to be actually religious. I think religion is ultimately something nice and wouldn't try to talk anyone out of it.

[Omegastorm]

This just needs to be said. Christians really need to look at their Jewish ancestry a bit more. The development of a demonic/angelic hierarchy and it's forms and cosmology actually date back to the Babylonian exile and even earlier to their occupation in Kemet (Egypt.) Michael, Gabriel, seraphim, Ophanim, chalkydri... demons are all discussed in much broader detail in the book of Enoch, the Zohar and a host of other Jewish texts. There is a whole Jewish Hierarchy and mystical understanding of spirit beings that is left out when only modern roman catholic understanding of such things is discussed.

o

[master of read]

This just needs to be said. Christians really need to look at their Jewish ancestry a bit more. The development of a demonic/angelic hierarchy and it's forms and cosmology actually date back to the Babylonian exile and even earlier to their occupation in Kemet (Egypt.) Michael, Gabriel, seraphim, Ophanim, chalkydri... demons are all discussed in much broader detail in the book of Enoch, the Zohar and a host of other Jewish texts. There is a whole Jewish Hierarchy and mystical understanding of spirit beings that is left out when only modern roman catholic understanding of such things is discussed.

o

a lot of christians nowadays seem to forget that jesus was a devote jew.

[The Drunkard Kid]

a lot of christians nowadays seem to forget that jesus was a devote jew.

Or that Muslims worship the same God and hold Jesus in extremely high regard as the second greatest prophet of God.

At least that lead to some hilariously soulcrushing political rants.