Gunsmith Cats/Headscratchers


 * I ... I think I just had a brain aneurysm from reading the end of Gunsmith Cats Burst. The manga expects us to believe that Goldie is honorable and a 'good' kind of mafia don (despite doing things like drugging a young boy to kill his mafia father), that Misty was 'persuaded' by Goldie by using a good argument that stood up to scrutiny once the 'high' wore off (despite the fact she drugged and kidnapped her before, did horrible things to Rally, turned girls into sex slaves, etc), that Misty really is fine with Goldie (despite being an obvious Replacement Goldfish and the fact that Goldie is fucking evil), and that Rally was perfectly okay in letting her go despite HAVING NO SANE REASON FOR LETTING HER FRIEND GO OFF AND LIVE WITH A TOTAL MONSTER. What the fuck are you trying to pull here, Sonoda!? You can't create one of the most evil and depraved villains ever, going to lengths to show just how much of a horrible human being she is, and have this as an ending to your manga. I just ... I ... *headasplode*.
 * Yeah, it's a pretty crazy case of the author falling in love with the character. But at least he does try to justify it - sort of: Goldie suffers that bit of amnesia, and although it gets cured later on, she no longer has emotional attachment to all the depravities she committed; emotionally she is closer to the girl who lost her grandfather to plotting rivals than the Ax Crazy killer she became in avenging him. But the idea that Misty could actually enter to a relationship with her is beyond the pale if you consider the disturbing rape-implications from the first time she was in her "care."
 * No kidding. Even if you forgot about all the horrible things she did, and all the things she did to Misty (because Goldie was introduced as someone who was after Misty), she is still a thirty-something Mafia Don having a relationship with a naive 18-year-old. Can you say 'power imbalance'? It'd be goddamn near impossible to have an equal relationship without manipulation or control in that sort of situation, even if Goldie was a decent and honorable Don. Heck, this is even driven home by the fact she's screwing her maid, which is even worse, and she's got a thing for young girls, which means she likes easily-manipulated girls. She uses drugs on her rivals, cops, and her own men to ensure total control. Not someone you can have a relationship with.
 * I can believe that Goldie would be excellent at keeping a local underworld under tight reigns (even earlier in the manga she showed a lot of disdain for "unprofessional" criminals), especially since she'd rely on her drugs to do it. Her dominatrix-heavy overtones help with the whole controlling leader image too, but I completely agree with the Goldie-Misty relationship thing being weird as hell. I can see Misty needing some kind of emotional investment from a partner (as opposed to the friendly-but-uncomfortable distance Rally puts between them, as apparently she's never even hugged Misty until that scene in the finale) but that's still not a good basis for a relationship. As far as I can tell, Goldie is using Misty as sort of a stabilizing influence on her underlying craziness. The things she was shown to do early in her career, though creepy, weren't really that much worse then any Mafia Don (murder, extort, deal drugs), but she seemed to grow increasingly insane as she chased after Rally. With Misty as sort of an emotional crutch she can remain stable, especially since Misty seems strongly in need of SOME kind of emotional connection. I've seen relationships like that before: they're not....what I'd call healthy, but they're functional. Of course I like the other likely explanation better: Rally is such an amazing marksman she literally shot away Goldie's insanity when she shot her.
 * The ending was a horrible piece of shit. First, it was extremely rushed and tries to cram as little information as possible while still maintaining the façadé of a resolution. Second, even after Goldie regains her memory and becomes less evil than she was before, she still has a couple of people murdered, and she also drugged two women with a brainwashing concoction and then slept with both of them, which means that she raped them. I noticed that the characters who spoke well of Goldie (the old lady who analyzed the drugs, and Minnie May) acted in much the same way as the manga's brainwashed characters did, but we see neither of them injected with any sort of drug; this would have gone a long way to explain some of the last two chapters, but I've ultimately come to the uninteresting conclusion that they were not drugged. So the final result is that Goldie is still evil, but not quite so depraved (yet still a rapist), and that makes her being Misty's forced lover ok? And on top of that, the Sonoda rushes the ending when it needed at least several more chapters to resolve? Bullshit. Black Lagoon's better.
 * It seems like a case of Draco in Leather Pants affecting the original author rather than fanfiction authors.
 * And Misty says she chose to be with Goldie because Rally didn't want her. What? Is Goldie the only other lesbian in Chicago?
 * The only other lesbian Sonoda cared to write about, anyway. Let's face it, the last few volumes of Burst are just... fucked.
 * Why did Rally actively try and bring Goldie's memory back after the shootout with Black, even though Rally had stated that she didn't want to bring Goldie's memory back and Dennis had altered their deal so that Rally wouldn't have to try?


 * Why is it that the majority of the time there is "fanservice" (and I use that term very loosely) it's involving May or another of the criminally-underage looking girls?
 * Because the author's a weirdo?


 * Rally has trashed her very expensive car enough times that every auto insurance company in the state refuses to give her collision insurance. She isn't old enough to drink yet. If she's been in that many accidents in less than five years, why does she still have a driver's license?
 * Friend On the Force?