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& what if i popped back in here just to add montgomery "lightning" mcqueen

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see the great thing about not growing up watching a lot of dubbed anime means i can throw on a full playlist of nothing but songs from the original beyblade series' dub & my mom will be there, in the kitchen with me, wondering out loud who a man singing a song is, shrug cluelessly when i tell her, & then laugh when i show her she's heard 6 beyblade songs in a row & go "i was just thinking 'this is a really good selection of grunge-y music'; turns out--"

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kai is the legal heir to hiwatari enterprises, a dispute between his father & grandfather leading to the former being functionally disowned & thus taken off all contracts & documents that could lead to susumu taking over the company in soichirou's stead ; his custody of kai is the only thing susumu was able to maintain ( though only on paper, as kai never acknowledged this custody beyond not arguing his father's decision to send him to a boarding school, going so far as to refuse to call him "father" ) .

the rights to the seat of ceo are solely kai's, but, as he's currently pre-occupied with, to him, more important things, he's yet to take this seat after soichirou's arrest, & the company is currently directionless & unable to make any big decisions due to the lack of a hiwatari signature, not to mention the intensive investigations it's been enduring from the top down & back up, — as far as kai's concerned, the company can slowly crash & burn for all he cares ; he's in no rush to take over anything connected to his grandfather's legacy. monetary inheritance, as well as the hiwatari mansion, have also gone to kai, though he signed off the estate to his father when he returned to the world of battling, having no intention of going back.

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kai: in the second final's match we lost our dear friend rei rei: quit telling everyone im dead kai: sometimes i can still hear his voice

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it was only in hindsight that kai realized that the way he had run the shell killers gang was no different from how vladimir ran borg at the abbey. intolerance of the smallest of transgressions, destroying the equipment of members deemed failures before their very eyes & in the most violent way possible followed by banishing the ex-members from the grounds ... of course, kai had no memory of his experiences at the abbey at the time, he could not recall the punishments doled out to weak battlers there. but when he remembered ... when he truly & completely broke free from borg & his grandfather ... when he connected the two things, realized what he had been doing, even as the gang had long since become another fragment of his past, he felt sick. he felt absolutely disgusted with himself, for internalizing borg's brutal teachings &, subconscious though it may have been, exemplifying his grandfather's & vladimir's mentalities. for him it became just another example of him being tainted & corrupted to the core, yet another source for shame & self-hatred.

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" [sergei]'s obviously stronger than me. before all this, i would have chosen power, even if it meant becoming [my grandfather's] toy. but i'm not like i used to be. i have my friends now. even if the battle ends ... for my friends. with my friends ... i choose to fight. "

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been shuffling around my original team ideas for kai's pkmn verse & have landed on this for the first season,,

leading up to reaching the masters eight his team consists of talonflame, persian (alolan), houndoom, zoroark, absol, bisharp (shiny).

upon being retaken in by borg his talonflame gets replaced with moltres & he throws talonflame's pokeball away to takao.

before the finals, thus before facing them in an official setting, he calls out his former teammates & challenges them on lake baikal ; takao uses kai's abandoned talonflame in the process of defeating moltres.

talonflame returns to kai's lineup after the defeat. kai uses moltres to unleash havoc upon the abbey & releases it in the heart of borg, letting it rain its revenge as he leaves borg behind.

borg still have their claws in moltres so they're able to extract the energy it stole from other pokemon, but it breaks the tech keeping it bound & it flees borg for the first time in nearly a century.

in the intermission of kai's first finals battle, soichirou offers up a clone of the moltres borg had kept under lock & chain. it's unstable. kai takes the ball. he does not use it in battle. ( he never uses it in an official battle. it is never officially registered among his pokemon & thus he breaks the max-6-pokemon carry rule. )

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exploding soichirou & vladimir with my mind over " an organization aiming to give birth to the ultimate sacred beasts & beybladers — that is borg. [..] by raising them to think of nothing but battle from a young age, we polish their offensive capabilities. at the same time, by developing unshakable spirits, we can bring about beybladers who have it in them to be the best. the abbey is a facility made to administrate raising said subjects. [..] even kai hiwatari is a beyblader that's come from borg!! lacking any shred of compassion, he is a superb beyblader that never falters in pursuing the top. he is the very definition of a warrior created & perfected by borg. "

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My most vivid Beyblade memory from being a kid is that one episode where Kai is being haunted by the ghost of the kid he let failed and he finally gets pissed at his opponent for mocking him as the song Underdog kicks in

GENUINELY iconic

i've only seen bits & pieces of the bblade dub, & it's mostly been of g-revolution, but god yeah the whole psykick n yuya n digital bird thing was. fucking wild. as if kai didn't have enough trauma.

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"however, ladies & gentlemen, there is something we cannot possibly forget. anger & hatred will never win beybattles. passionate friendship & everlasting bonds borne from heated battle, a benevolent spirit... that itself is the essence of beyblade. beys are a symbol of love & friendship. beybattles are peace & co-operation working as one. may god bestow divine protection unto all bladers!!"

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:(

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as the grandchild of the man behind borg, kai had certain privileges at the institution that none of the other children there were allowed. while he trained under the same conditions, ate the same meals, slept in the same dark & cramped room with a dozen other kids, & received many of the same punishments, the rules of borg were far more lenient on kai. the dress code of uniform was not enforced upon him as on the others, he was allowed to roam the halls outside training hours ( provided there was at least one staff member accompanying him ) , he was punished on the spot instead of being sent into solitary if he spoke out against any of the personnel or vladimir, & in fact was the only person, personnel or child of borg, who could talk back to vladimir, though even he did not always get away with it unscathed.

in addition to this, he was the only child allowed any contact with family, even if said family was solely soichirou & this contact was for purposes of monthly training updates which for the majority consisted of vladimir providing a progress report & kai standing next to him in silence until the end of the call when his grandfather would finally address him & kai wouldn't even have to say anything when a sharp nod was always enough, though eventually even a nod went without saying.

aside from these spare "privileges", kai's life within borg was much the same as that of the other children. he would spend hours each day relentlessly training his stamina, his body, his battling, being merciless in his training matches, even as he was aware of what could happen to the children that lost. ( kai only ever lost once in his time living in borg's walls, spending a week alone in a dingy cell as punishment. he was five years old & had been at borg for two days. )

new victims battlers arrived every few weeks, & they always cried &/or screamed during their first few days there, breaking down from the sudden pressure & the intensity of the training, few holding out long enough to contain their distress until they were sent to their rooms, the only places, aside from the cells, where they were safe to cry & scream ( some children didn't stop for months before breaking in ) . kai was no exception, being the one of the few, but he was one of the ones that learned fairly quickly the new rules that would govern their lives for a long, long time.

the first rule was that it may have been an abbey, may have been called a monastery, but the only gods they were to serve there were borg itself & vladimir ; no gods capable of mercy would hear their prayers while in the confines of borg's unholy walls, no matter how they screamed.

the second was that borg's word was law, & if you argued with any of the staff, or worst of all vladimir, it would surely be the last time you ever argued with anyone. ( while kai's privileges spared him the true extent of punishment for back-talk, he very quickly understood to never argue or disagree with any of the adults. )

the third was that any emotion aside from anger was useless in the eyes of borg & there was no place for sorrow or joy in their regime. as such, it followed that there were no friendships formed. it was every child of borg for themselves, & anyone caught helping the battlers deemed too weak was punished as an accomplice.

there were many other rules, made explicit by the staff & reminded of often, but these were the unwritten ones that the children learned on their own & which guided them in following borg's actual rules. the essence of them burrowed its way beneath kai's skin, & haunted him even upon losing memory of the abbey. it still haunts him, & likely always will.

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im in russia

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kai only started putting on his now iconic war paint when he started running the shell killers & it was like a small way of having agency over himself, yes because his grandfather was massively controlling but also because kai??? trans. & he always felt like the only reason his grandfather "supported" him was because it was a gateway to molding kai into what soichirou wanted in an heir, an excuse to shove susumu even further out of the picture because kai could now be the perfect obedient son soichirou wanted. so while kai got to feel more comfortable in his skin because he had every resource for seamless transition, something always still felt wrong, like he didn't belong to himself anymore in any way.

so, in becoming the leader of the shell killers, he saw an excuse to fuck with his image. the war paint was something he knew his grandfather would never think of, so it was something entirely his, & putting it on gave him what felt like the closest thing to uncorrupted pleasure he'd ever had.

one time kai got into a massive fight with soichirou, ran off for two days, & came back with his fringe bleached to shit, & then kept bleaching it to shit because it gave him that little more sense of agency. years later, a while after rebelling against borg, he got into a fight with his father while forced to stay at his estate before being sent off to boarding school, a stupid screaming match over face paint not being part of the school's dress code, & he ran off again, for a week this time, & came back with both his ears pierced ( "nothing in that shitty dress code against earrings, was there??" ) . ( it was honestly a coin flip between the piercings, & just lying about his age & getting his war paint turned into face tattoos out of spite ) .

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"i told you to stay out of it!! do you want me to be indebted to you!?" "i didn't think it was that special..." ripping my hair out tbqh

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kai & his fucked up & evil birds