Report karumina_danza's Profile

Yeah I have definitely played the Judgment games <3
They're in my top 5 RGG games actually haha

Hello ^^ Indeed they're kinda rare around these parts as far as I know
Yup sure did. Played all of the mainline games :) Still working on Ishin and FOTNS though

Based Kiryu pic on your About Me. Just finished Infinite Wealth yesterday haha.

well, i personally find stories that deal with mortality to be necessary to hear because on a whole i don't think we get enough of that in popular media. Sure there's action and people get killed, but that's not the same as coming to terms with the finiteness of our existence. Pancreas at least puts the viewer in a headspace to think about that finiteness through Sakura's sickness. Seeing how Sakura tries to exist despite it all is an important lesson for Haruki and a proxy for us the viewer (in theory).

But I do feel like she was used more as a plot device than anything else, like some of the ways she initially acts seem to just play into otaku sentimentalities (unless you want to read into her actions in a very specific way). Because of this I actually liked how Haruki dealt with a majority of these actions, because his behavior felt more believable, he was just like ".... no, stop".

Additionally her illness seems to be hand waved, like sure she does have to go to the hospital but for the most part she's out there having the time of her life, like if it's pancreatic cancer... (cause we're never really told, at least i don't think) you're not acting like a spring chicken or rather eventually you find a new normal, and that takes work and acceptance.

My issue with the illness is that the only thing it seems to affect is her behavior in how forward she is. Like "hang out with me I'm going to die". Well if the story was really about "living with dying" or potentially more specifically, "living with terminal riddling sickness", well then there are some legit consequences to that you shouldn't gloss over. Like there is tough ugly stuff that comes from being truly sick and we never see that here and that stuff needs to be aired out to have something more meaningful. Therefore I was confused what this movie wanted to teach me and therefore I felt like the writer cared more about Haruki than Sakura.

Especially with how they decided to wrap up her arc. In short, through the twist that happens, one way to read it is that sure, life is maybe even shorter than you even thought, but to me it's a double edged sword because it cuts short the nastier stuff that comes along with truly dying from sickness out of the equation. We never have to deal with it. She then becomes almost a martyr that allows us to fetishize the sentimental aesthetic of being sick.

So as the audience I think we're pushed into accepting that this has to be a story for Haruki more than Sakura, because our experience of her sicknesses is necessarily relegated to an outsider perspective (visiting her in the hospital, seeing her fanny pack of medicine) granted her diary does give her some needed characterization, but what was the goal of that characterization? well to get Haruki to feel things. To make him sad, to make him care, to make him be even more invested in living.

So in short I just feel like Sakura exists so Haruki and by proxy we can learn to want to be more engaged in the world. And while I feel like that is an important lesson to learn, I wonder if there could have been a better way of going about it. That didn't sell short her dilemma.

The subtextual way to read Sakura (bc she said she had her eye on him for awhile in her diary) is that she was a manipulator, potentially purposely dropping her book, forcefully pushing herself into his life because she wanted to get to know him before she died (bc she was interested), forcefully toying with his emotions and boundaries bc why not she's dying and maybe deep down she has slight sadistic dom tendencies, etc. This seems more believable to me lowkey than she felt secure in talking to him bc all he could say was sorry that she was terminally ill and didn't immediately start pandering to her bc of that.

While that subtextual reading paints her in a darker light, dealing with death is a legit hard concept that can mess with real people in different ways. At least with that reading she feels more like a person with issues dealing (maybe not well) with the issues of being sick, rather than a plot device.

Now I will admit by the end I did like the chemistry between the two (extroversion and introversion can make a great pair) and I almost feel like we could have started the movie from there actually. But arguably, more importantly than that, I don't think it was fundamentally flawed if you view it through a lens as a story not for Sakura but for Haruki (and people like him), I guess I just take a lil issue with that. But imo it would fundamentally fail if viewed from the lens of a "sickness story".

idk maybe i just got lost in the weeds tho too.