Dandadan - Chapter 226

you know. i keep trying to tell myself to wait on reading so that more chapters come out and i can read them all at once without getting myself all worked up about it, but here i am…like clockwork on a monday. this might turn into a short essay.

so many crazy developments suddenly? i hadn’t even considered that momo’s powers would have already been taken??? (or even zuma’s for that matter…so nasty that saint germain has people everywhere apparently.) but like there’s a specific combo of powers that makes the fairy tale card even more powerful? i’m not totally sure how the powers correlate to the fairy tales but…i guess we’ll find out eventually.

it’s. so totally cheap and momo would call it cheating to trick her into “yielding” like that. SO CHEAP. these guys suck.

but now. i keep trying to puzzle out what saint germain is actually doing? why would he give momo a whistle to keep her safe if he already got her powers? what’s his angle here? he told old heavy smoker to not use lethal force? he doesn’t want them to get hurt but also wants to make the ultimate yokai??? his motivations are still so unclear to me…

and i CAN’T STOP THINKING about the fact that okarun also technically “yielded” before in chapter 169, but something in the way sanjome reacted just still doesn’t feel right to me. i know okarun gave turbo granny her powers back, but. it was weird. it’s still weird to me! artistically, there was something strange in the way tatsu-san had that illustrated! do you have to say “i yield?” was “you beat me.” not enough??? are the kozuki knives bound by semantics??? i’m losing my mind.

because ALSO it’s obvious (to us, at least) that something is still up with okarun? like he has the ability to use that little oni club to make a big chi club but seemingly no one else can…at least not momo or manjiro. he has SOME sort of powers, clearly. if sanjome had a clear shot, even under the impression that okarun still had turbo-g’s powers, why would he have not taken it? he’s clearly not the kind of guy to hesitate.

on a technical level. i find that tatsu-san is frustratingly good at writing chapters that get me feeling super bad (223-224), then satisfied (225), then bad (226) again and so on and so forth. i’ve experienced this cycle several times now since starting reading while the danmara arc was going. and not like. in a negative way for me, because i like media that makes me feel. am i too invested in this series? maybe. but i will be here, once again, for the next chapter.