Category: Character Studies

Kanashimi Yo Konnichi Wa: Farewell Hayate the Combat Butler

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hisui_icon_4040_round On April 12, 2017, the final chapter of Hayate the Combat Butler was released in the pages of Weekly Shonen Sunday. By this point is should be amazingly clear to anyone who reads the blog that it has been one of my favorite manga.Since the manga has concluded I feel I need a bit of ceremony to see it off.

There are practical and spiritual reasons for a funeral but they are also important as a mechanism to help those who are still alive deal with their loss.  I feel this post is mostly just to help me process the end of the series and will also just happen to serve as a tribute to the manga and anime as well. In the last Speakeasy, I mentioned that the fact that Hayate had ended but the finality had still not fully dawned on me. But as I write this post the reality of the situation is starting to sink in. This is how I enter the vital stage of acceptance.

Despite how I began I don’t want this to be a depressing farewell to Hayate and Nagi. Kenjiro Hata provided over 568 chapters worth of hilarious and touching comics. I can’t be depressed about receiving 12 and a half years of content that often brightened my week like nothing else. I want to say goodbye to one of the series that has kept my fandom and passion for blogging so strong. To most people, this was the ending of a random series in Weekly Shonen Sunday but to me, it is the end of an era.

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Mysterious Heroine X Assassination Note: How Many Sabers Are There? (Update #4)

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hisui_icon_4040 I decided to finally do it. I would try to catalog all the various Saber variants there are. The fact that there are more and more variants of Artoria Pendragon has gone from a few different versions of the main heroine to a running joke that has had an official term for characters who look like Artoria: Saberface. In Fate/Grand Order there are units whose whole gimmick revolves around doing more damage to Saberfaced characters, certain characters will target Saberfaced characters, and there was even a whole event centered around Saberfaces.

All of this attention is clearly because Saber is a popular character but it has also engendered an equal amount of resentment for all the focus the Saberfaces have gotten. As a major aficionado of Saber, I decided to catalog how many Sabers there are. I went to all the different version of Sabers as well as the different costumes those characters have.

As always a few caveats on any list I make:

1. I am pretty much purposely invoking Cunningham’s Law here. I am almost surely missing an official iteration or two. I plan to update this list whenever I get the chance so new additions are always welcome.

2. I realize some of these are the same character in different outfits. The main thing is that over time some iterations of Saber in costume have become characters in their own right. Lily Saber and Saber Bride are 100% this case in action. Therefore I have just decided to make all different versions their own thing but readily admit that this list could easily be condensed.

Let’s see how bad this really is.

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Secret Holy Grail Wars

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Fate/Grand Order had a big New Year’s event online event to celebrate the first few months of the game’s release as well as lay out some future developments. But the biggest piece of news was also probably the one that was equally vague. Fate/Grand Order was going to do a collaboration event in February. They did not announce what property they were doing the corssover with but speculation is running rampant. I see a lot of people predicting it will be a crossover with Kantai Collection especially after the 2014 April Fools video with Nero and Tamamo no Mae. But truth be told I know more about Love Live! than I know about KanColle and I know next to nothing about Love Live!

Therefore I thought it would be fun to imagine what Servants would be added to Fate/Grand Order if they crossover with other properties I do know really well. Theoretically the crossovers could be nothing more than some throw away Craft Essence power-ups that don’t do much more than add a little cross promotional art to the game. New servants on the other hand would really shake things up and be memorable. Plus it is more fun to write about that the more mundane reality that is far more likely to happen.

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