I love the imagery. For a long time, Satori could "see" the correct path to a person's "heart". Suddenly unable to see what she has been able to for so long is like being thrown into a dark ocean. The numerous holes represent the many pathways to the "heart". Satori was literally lost in the sea of consciousness for a moment.
One of the things I love in Karaagetarou is that he spends quite some time thinking about how the characters think, instead doing the easy "everybody is a human with a funny hat" route.
For a natural and involuntary telepath like Satori, suddenly having this sense shut down must be a nightmarish experience.
In fact, he's doing an amazing job at showing how alienating Koishi became to her sister. To everybody else, Koishi is just a youkai that goes invisible when she wants. To Satori, a huge part of how she perceives people ceased to exist on Koishi. She's trying to be a good sister and accept Koishi back, but the situation is moving towards a sad end (bittersweet at best).
All in all, this is the kind of story I expect from Sci-Fi, not from a chibi manga :P
Mulambo said: So that's how Koishi feels all the time. Damn, that's scary.
Which might explain why she is so airheaded and not quite "there", not responding to questions directly and clearly, as if she wasn't.. quite present, as it is..
A good artist draws one thing well. A great artist draws many things well. Contrast this with post #436849 to see my point. Especially given that his style is more suited to cute and funny scenes, and still manages to convey Satori's feeling of helplessness, panic, alienation, confinement, etc. after having a basic sense shut off.
I've been waiting for someone to draw something like this for a long, long time.
We can assume that Koishi had a similar experience to this when she sealed her eye and her consciousness slipped away. Except for her, there wasn't anyone to pull her out of it. How terrifying...
Dawnfire said: Which might explain why she is so airheaded and not quite "there", not responding to questions directly and clearly, as if she wasn't.. quite present, as it is..
She also got the ability to read everyone's subconcious, which probably opened a whole new world for her... One no one else is aware of. Koishi is pratically a schizofrenic right now...
Well, I think it was more of an abstraction of the world of the unconscious. When she was in the black, she was drowning, and when she swam up to the white area, she was still drowning. Therefore I think she was still in the unconscious world. In there, she has no idea to cope with the experience and was still drowning.
Kind of like if you were a human that was suddenly turned into a mermaid who can breathe both air and water and then pulled underwater. You still fear drowning and don't know how to use your gills or whatever, and struggle.
Koishi was forcefully thrust underwater when she closed her heart and tore off her artery to her head with no way to come back to consciousness. So she drowned until she figured out how to use her gills, so to speak. If Satori were to be forcefully left there instead of snapping out of it in that burst of fear, I think she would have eventually gotten used to it. But then one can easily get lost there, so the whole experience was that much more terrifying.
Zaku_Zelo said: I dunno. If she's pulling her in, Satori snapping out of it right then seems odd. Or maybe it's dramatic timing and I'm over thinking things.
It's open to interpretation, perhaps. But the way I look at it, Koishi's reason for pulling Satori back in like that may have been because she wanted Satori to know she wasn't alone in the void, like Koishi herself had been when she first closed off her third eye. (That loneliness may, in fact, go a long way towards explaining why Koishi isn't quite "all there" most of the time. It may have driven her mad.) If she had been able to grab her leg in the dreamscape, it might have been symbolic of the sisters coming closer together again after Koishi sealed herself off -- but Satori only knew that she was drowning in a sea of emptiness, and panicked before Koishi could make that final connection to her.
Which then makes this scene even more heartbreaking, as Satori just unknowingly threw away what may have been her last chance to regain her lost sisterly bond with Koishi, in whatever form it would have taken. And of course, for Koishi it's a clear and total rejection of her world, and by extension a rejection of Koishi herself, by the person she holds most dear.