#(but this is really just. one of many variations their past might have looked like)

[kandyrezi]

Kurotsuno + Sullivan + Kcalb [thesis + general observation]

I know there have been a lot of speculations before about how the three of them could possibly be related to one another, but I was thinking about this while washing the dishes and it wouldn’t leave my head until I gave it my own two cents & wrote this all down. I’ll probably come back to this post in… five or six years when we finally get a TGG prequel/any Obsolete Dream chapters past the 9th, so I can check case by case how spot-on this was or how many mistakes I made.

This is mostly just for fun, so read this with an open mind, and pardon me for any potential inaccuracies - if that’s the case, then I implore people to point them out so I can… try and fix any inconsistencies there might be.

This is partially a theory post, partially a headcanon post, because there are just too many big gaps in the events to make one, straight, linear timeline to tie everything - from cryptic hints to subtle signs - together from beginning to the end, so a lot of it is really just my charitable speculation.

(rest of it is under the cut, 'cus this is quite long, trust me~)

So, Sullivan has some obvious relation to Kcalb, as they do share noticeable physical similarities (eyes/black sclera + horns), though it is unclear if Kcalb is a blood-related parent to Sullivan (because then, y’know, who is the other parent?), if they are very distant blood-relatives, or if Sullivan is just one of his creations - much like how Ivlis created Vendetto/Poemi from his flames - though I’m not certain how far his capabilities in terms of creation go, because of this line Kcalb says at some point in The Gray Garden.

‘Repair’ is kind of a subsection of ‘creation’. Either way, Kcalb clearly has more than enough loyal subordinates, so how did Sullivan even come to be?

"His upbringing was way too complicated." is one of the sentences used in this specific art to describe Sullivan, so that's enough of a hint already that he isn’t that 'ordinary' in the slightest.

If he was created by Kcalb or born from someone else, the devil would, either way, have required the involvement of another individual (’Raven’? AKA The mysterious figure speaking to him on the train in the ‘bonus room’ video? The red-eyed figure “Fate” who appears in Etihw’s memories of the past in the ‘Normal End’?) in order to do so in the first place. If we assume Kcalb even knew of his existence or was with him at any point, then Kcalb would have used Sullivan for his own gain; a kind of a host or placeholder body if his powers were to be diminished or taken from him, his fundamental connection to Sullivan would allow him to ‘borrow’ his powers back, or someone to lead the war if he would be gone.

Whether or not Sullivan actually possesses the same abilities as Kcalb is unclear, though similarly to Kurotsuno, he is seen with the exact same asymmetrical symbols (the same ones visible when Kcalb renders Ivlis powerless) in some artworks.

Addressing one of the many elephants in the room first and foremost; I don’t believe Elena is Sullivan’s mother or has anything to do with him at all, for that matter, considering she is Zigzag’s sister and doesn’t really seem like a special being - meaning she doesn’t stand out from any of the other demons from the Pitch Black World/Ne-No-Kuni in her art LOGs. She hasn’t been hinted in any way to have possible connections to the Gray World either. The physical similarities (blond hair, black/green retina) are likely just re-used design choices. A very ironic statement considering I used this exact argument with the aforementioned Kcalb/Sullivan’s relation to one another, but their relationship actually has more than just one subtle similarity connecting to one another.

The reason Sullivan might look sickly in a lot of his artwork is because he doesn’t handle these devil-given powers well mentally or physically, since they were thrust onto him forcibly and he has been described as ‘weak’ by many of the characters.

He might be Kcalb's descendant, but he clearly isn't as powerful as the devil is, with his poor physical health and all. Whatever Kcalb’s plans with him might’ve be, it ended up fruitless (for now). Kcalb was quite terrible during the war era, so he probably didn’t treat Sullivan very well. At some point, Sullivan might have been whisked away by someone (possibly ‘Raven’ from the ‘bonus room’ video), or he himself escaped the Gray World to go and live in Neo-No-Kuni.

He’s seen wearing a gyakuan and has been classmates with Gyakuten since their school years, so his departure/upbringing already happened over there when he was quite young. [1]

In the distant future, he meets his wife to-be at some point and they get married, but she dies due to unknown causes [2] when Olivia is at a young age, so Sullivan is left to raise her by himself.

I am, personally, a big fan of the “Olie is Kurotsuno’s mother” theory for many reasons which are stated below. They do indeed have some notable similarities, which have already been brought up before by some other people, such as:

• Similar hair + eye color

• Similar sounding names (+ Olie's last name used to be Kurokuro)

• Olie has been seen interacting with Reina, meaning she’s in the Obsolete Dream universe

• Kurotsuno’s mother was stated to be dead, and Olie correspondingly has strong ties with death/mourning

• Olivia is clearly stated to be human (or at least, partially [3]), so she would need a human parent, and Olie looks quite human enough

• Olie used to be listed in the ‘dead’ category in the funamusea(.)com/characters/ page, not with the youkai (Reina & Jianshi) she has been seen with thus far, despite the fact Olihana is also based off of a youkai. Before DSP changed the layout of the character page on the official website, Olie was actually placed within the ‘undead’ category, which supported the theory of her being dead--

[Image retrieved from the internet archives!]

--but now she’s been put into the ‘youkai’ category (which is visible on the new design of the website), so I don’t know if it’s a retconned idea DSP previously had, or if it’s to hide Olie’s true identity for now, but we also don’t have a lot of information about the youkai characters to begin with, where they reside, where does the youkai world connect with Neo-No-Kuni, or what their role is in the overarching story.

[1] if Sullivan has been in Neo-no-Kuni since his school years, then there is a distinct probability Kcalb has never even met Sullivan face-to-face, and Sullivan may have been raised by someone else from birth/creation.

[2] alternate possibility is, she might not have died and is currently residing in the youkai realm as Olihana?

[3] Olivia might not even be fully human, considering her father is a demon, so there’s that chance she might be a cambion (half-human/demon hybrid, which originates from as far back as 19th century European mythology).

There is very little known about who Olie is, but she is an interesting character and there seems to be more to her than meets the eye, judging from some of the deleted official artwork of her. I want to look at them a little bit further, see if there’s anything interesting to be found.

Oh, hey, would you look at that! Olivia & Olie together in the same pic! The kanji above them is just their names. (Kurotsuno, Kurokawa, and Olie’s old surname - Kurokuro)

Translation: “The grief of the deceased does not reach.”

Is the “deceased” in question alluding to herself, or someone else?

The most interesting picture of her so far, if not the most cryptic and somewhat confusing. It’s worth at least mentioning them; do these objects in the image hint at her character, or backstory - or are they just meant to be decorative? It has a clock stopped at 3:00, a painting, unknown letters scattered about, and a gramophone with many different items (flowers, masks, a radio) inside of it.

The closest visually similar flowers like the ones in the art I was able to find is the Morning Glory.

It has a lot of different allegorical meanings, depending on its color. A blue Morning Glory, in particular, usually alludes to feelings of trust and/or respect - which might be a connection she shares with her other self, Olihana.

Buried in the flowers are two masks. One is the Hannya mask ( 般若 ) which is usually worn by Olihana in artworks, a mask representing a female character drawn to madness by jealousy/resentment. The other one closely resembles either the Wakaonna mask or Ko-omote mask ( 能面 小面 ), which is mostly worn by young girls, and meant to convey the idea of innocent beauty. The latter mask could in theory belong to Olie.

Any connection I could find with the painting in the background is the fact it is a little reminiscent of Mori Ippô’s 1871 painting, “White Fox”. It might just be there in DSP’s art for aesthetic purposes though, so I’ll leave it at that.

And now, onto the timeline.

((A lot of text below is heavily headcanon/speculation based, while trying to stay true to currently known canon information as much as possible.))

Olivia and Sullivan have a big fight at some point, which ends with Sullivan losing his temper and possibly locking up Olivia into her room. She would have either snuck out, or Hanten would have shown up at Rapunzel’s Olivia’s window and helped her out of there. This is Sullivan and Olivia’s last meeting for a very long time.

When she meets up with Hanten and tells her what had happened, the latter would definitely know of the ‘reason’ behind her ‘rebellious streak’ - as the many characters in OD point out is prevalent in her behavior.

Hanten even makes a remark about Sullivan in chapter 4.

The implication seems almost emphasized here; the second panel is zoomed in closely to Hanten, and she's posing somewhat of a rhetorical question with the "Right, Kurotsuno?" as if the latter would know about this first hand. Kurotsuno is seen being physically violent with Sullivan or verbally degrading him in nearly all of their artworks together, yet not once have we seen him losing his temper with her for her behavior, so he might feel some guilt over his past actions and keeps his temper under control, as sort of a vow because he knows what happened last time he didn’t listen to her.

Olivia might have chosen to run away from home altogether, and Hanten might or might not have gone with her, but I won’t mention her too much in this post for the time being.

Either someone takes her back to the Gray World, or she goes there on her own.

She meets Kcalb at some point and the two of them develop something of a friendly bond. Kcalb likely didn’t know about Oliva being Sullivan’s daughter since she’s a human and looks quite a bit like her mother, bearing almost no similarities to her father.

At some point, a bigger war breaks out and Kcalb has to leave, so he doesn’t see Olivia for quite some time.

It’s during this time when ‘Raven’/��Train Guy’/’Fate’ from Etihw’s memories swoops in and finds Kcalb to tell him about Olivia’s relation to Sullivan, making the devil to a complete 180 and come to the conclusion of using her for his own gain to turn the tides of ongoing war in his favor.

Both Kurotsuno and Kcalb have a connection to the moon [1], so it’s during the full moon when he goes back to Olivia after a long time of not seeing her, she’s likely excited to meet him again, except Kcalb will only use her for his own benefit, with Olivia possessing Sullivan’s blood, and to that extend, also Kcalb’s.

Etihw drained Kcalb of his powers, but he can use Olivia to activate them, but since Olivia’s powers are essentially useless/non-existent as a human, Kcalb turns her into a demon, which was (as canon seems to allude to this) a very painful, agonizing process.

Hanten might have found Olivia and gone into a state of grief to find and think her to be dead, only for the latter to finally wake up. When she does, all of her memories are gone and she doesn’t remember any of her time spent in the Gray World, or whom Kcalb even is, or why is she laying in a barren wasteland.

Except for the argument and how he locked her up – then it’s everything else in between is a blackout in her memory – up until the point when the agonizing pain Kcalb put her through begins to take form.

Because of their outward physical similarities, she concludes it was Sullivan who had hurt her in such a painful way.

Oliva decides her name is no longer ‘Olivia’ but Kurotsuno, which is a name she chose to give herself, because of the asymmetrical, mismatched horn on her right side of the head. She wants to cut ties with the past and what had happened, hence the new name.

It’s likely Hanten did not go through the same transformation Oliva did at that exact time, and became a lookalike with Anten at a later point, hence this image here.

Hanten’s arm is cut off and it’s transforming into the black one she has currently, instead of the normal, beige colored one with red nails she did before. Also, not to mention, the horns are also becoming different - as such; both Kuro & Hanten’s transformation took place at different times and different places, Hanten’s not until much later on.

Haten & Olivia both had their memories erased, hence why Hanten has no bitter memories of their time, whereas Olivia (now Kurotsuno) does, considering Hanten doesn’t take Kurotsuno’s hatred of Sullivan seriously and refers to it as “rebellious phase” much like the other characters, such as Maekami. Otherwise she would actually know the real reason why Kurotsuno is in her demon-equivalent of a ‘rebel phase’ and moody all the time?

Sullivan probably went looking for Olivia at some point during when all that took place but couldn’t locate her since he had no idea where to look, that’s why there’s a note in Mogeko Castle and his reasons for being there in the first place.

[1] Olivia’s transformation might have happened during the full moon. That’s why Met says this, because that’s when her memories of that time become more vivid.

Kcalb has a conversation about the distant past with Yosafire when they’re looking at the moon, in one of the bonus room videos. Here’s a transcript of it:

Kcalb: “There are some people I’d like to meet again. The first would be difficult to meet now. As would the second. The third... I’ve never met face-to-face.”

Yosafire: “Why not?”

Kcalb: “I’m simply not worthy of meeting them.”

Yes, he could be talking about his former-now-dead subordinates, but surely he’s met all of them face-to-face. Surely. An alternate interpretation of this speech is the possibility of the first mentioned person being Sullivan, and the second one being Kurotsuno/Olivia. I don’t really know whom the third person might be. Place your bets in my askbox now! The winner gets… nothing, except crippling, soul-crushing depression, sorry.

Also, you kinda need eagle eyes for this, but look at Sullivan holding that black/white diamond handkerchief in chapter 7.

Coincidence? I think N—

...actually, who knows. might just be a coincidence after all this thorough analysis after all.

Okay, now, THERE IS A LOOOTTTT MORE which I did not deep-dive into, such as Kcalb’s conversation with the unknown ‘Raven’ on the train, the ‘???’ bonus room video dialogue, “THE PAST” official artwork with the smiling guy with the knife and the bleeding-from-mouth Olivia, the flashback images that Ivlis shows to Yosafire, etc etc. Because this post is quite long already, I think I’m alright to leave it as it is.

Haha, If you made it this far…. wowie thanks for reading my new and improved thesis! <3

(I also named this ‘daddy issues the theory babey’ as a word document on my computer... u _ u

[jiskblr]

Tumblr Rules for Redditors

Hello, fellow redditors! Many people are trying to tell you rules about how to Tumblr properly. Many of them are wrong, or assholes, or both. I am also an asshole but I’m going to not be one for a minute to give you some advice:

“Reblog this or you’re a bad person” and any variation on that is a violation of intergalactic law. Don’t do it. Also, refuse to comply if someone else does it.

Generally, people can see what you reblog, but cannot see what you ‘like’. A like may seem like an upvote, but it is much less significant than one, since it doesn’t affect visibility in the slightest. A like will be visible both to the OP of the thread, and to the person whose reblog you put the like on. Like promiscuously! It feels good to get likes and there’s no downside. (Unless you are a space alien AKA influencer.) There’s a setting for like visibility, but it’s still somewhat hard to find even if it’s turned on.

Tumblr nominally has the ability to browse global tags (e.g. seeing the entire site’s posts and reblogs tagged #superwholock or #reddit exodus) and to search the site for things. No one uses them and they don’t really work.

You are probably less surprised by this than denizens of literally any other website on the internet, but there’s mostly no algorithm here. Chronological order only. This now defaults to being on, but you can and should turn it off. (If you’re using the search or global tags, they might have an algorithm, but if they do, it doesn’t work. We don’t know because we don’t use them, because they mostly don’t work either.)

Anyone can have absolutely any conversation in the notes of your post that they like. This is how the website works. You are allowed to complain about it, but don’t expect anyone to humor you. I think it’s possible to make posts unrebloggable and disable replies, but this is essentially refusing to use Tumblr. If you want to do that... go ahead, I guess?

Many people have ‘DNI’ lists in their blog descriptions. This means ‘do not interact’ and indicates that they don’t want you to message them, reblog from them, reblog any posts they are OP of, or even, sometimes, ‘like’ their posts. It is good manners to respect these, if you know they exist, but in normal use you probably won’t look at blog descriptions very often so it is entirely okay to violate them by accident. (When the lists get very long, it becomes impractical to check whether you violate them. Generally, just skip it. You probably don’t want to interact with those people anyway.)

Notes on posts you start will go to you no matter how many intervening hops there are on the reblog chain. If you get a post with an enormous amount of notes, this can get overwhelming. Whatever the current incarnation of Xkit (basically RES for Tumblr except we’ve switched names and maintainers seven times) is, will have a setting to deal with this. If that’s insufficient, the suggested course of action is to reblog your OP to your own blog so that you have a copy for posterity’s sake, and then delete the OP. This silences the notes.

If you and another user both follow each other, you are ‘mutuals’. This makes it much easier to have conversations with each other, which is ordinarily sort of hard since everything is purely chronological. Frequently your mutuals are your friends; if not yet true, they may become your friends.

When you reblog things, you can write words both in the word part and in the tags, Modern tumblr norms are to write long rambling tags in full sentences rather than put words in the main body. Unlike some other norms, violating this one and putting your response in the body of the reblog is not particularly rude. The worst it does is make a reblog chain long. Probably don’t reblog things and just say “This.”, though.

Tags can be subjected to peer review, by which we mean someone copy-pastes your tags and/or screenshots them and adds them to the main body of their reblog. Generally this is a compliment. The alternative is to say “#prev tags”, and this makes everyone hate you because it’s hard to find which tags were ‘prev’. Please just peer review properly if they’re good.

If you want to search your blog, consider Siikr. Don’t overuse it, it’s one guy’s project.

Be verbose! This ain’t Twitter, no character limit. (Not even the really large character limit of a reddit comment.) Write a 3000-word story in a single reblog if you want, that sounds awesome. Use ‘read more’ if you do, though. Posts can be very long, one of our oldest memes is about this.

Infinite scroll is the default, but you can turn it off. Actually, check all the settings, many of them will improve your experience.

On queues: Go nuts. Some people put everything in the queue, some people almost nothing. Some queue specific aestheticposting (personally I do #too smol) and post other things normally. Most people who queue a lot add a queue-specific tag like #the mighty queue or #this queue shall pass, or at least I notice them more than poasters with untagged queues.

You know how Reddit lets you buy Gold and people go 'thanks for the gold kind stranger'? On tumblr we spend money on Tumblr Blaze, and it is considered the PvP section of Tumblr. Though sometimes people actually use it to spread posts they like, such as people attempting to evangelize Christianity (no, really, that happened a lot) or the, I hope, actually-kind stranger who blazed this OP. You can turn off PvP with one of the many settings.

Everybody be excellent to each other!

[hibiscusseaart]

huge ass post with MadaTobi Babies

its finally done, its almost 1 am, I started at 7 pm

OK SO HERE THEY ARE

So a little lore and then I'm gonna introduce them.

As you may remember from my earlier post, Tobirama (they married when he was 19) after the marriage, decided to create a child to tie Madara to him and the village stronger just in case Madara would try to leave the village. He couldn't destroy the village if there's his kid running around, right?

So Tobirama started learning biology pretty early in their marriage + Itama (@oh-no-its-bird 's one) helped a lot too. Mito helped with the seals to make an incubator. Tobirama didn't want a surrogate mother just because he was afraid that Madara would get attached to the mother of his children and he didn’t want that (plus he's jealous but doesn't realise it 🤭).

He created some sort of very real transformation jutsu that would trick his body to think that he has ovaries and he'd get the eggs that way! But he couldn't keep uterus and ect for 9 months, plus this jutsu is HARD to keep on for very long periods of time. It's easier to make a few organs from chakra that could produce real eggs than a whole new system. Plus Tobirama really didn't want to get pregnant and he wasn't sure he wouldn't fuck up his own body. Tobirama, with as gray morale as his, could just scrap failed embryo and start anew. He can't do that with his own body.

Anyway, incubator it is!

At first he did all of that in secret, stealing Madara's sperm (that's... a thing now) for his first experiments while they had sex. (Tobirama fucking Madara real hard that he’d pass out after and then take samples) ANYWAY

So he announced about his plans when the first stable and pretty healthy embryo was ready.

The first baby, Motoko! The melanin quee. She got all of it. Nothing left for her brother or sister. Ofc she's not THAT dark skinned, but she is for an Uchiha who are mostly white as a paper in canon.

(Tobirama is 21 for reference)

Her name literally means "Experiment seed first". Tobirama named this project this way for secrecy if someone would overhear his talks with Itama and Mito. It’d be Uchiha clan head’s child so hush-hush.

The name meanings + kanji! Hope I got them right, I have no japanese knowledge

oh and there is flirting with past and time in general in this name so it might be Tobirama reminiscing his first timeline. Like Motoko didn't even EXIST before.

So when he presented the embryo to Madara and Hashirama, they were ecstatic of course.

Madara almost cried. Hashirama became a river of tears.

Madara never really hoped for his own children since he married Tobirama cuz, well, they're both men. Doesn't really work that way. But Tobirama made it work and Madara is in love all over again.

Madara refuses to leave their future baby for a long time, just looking at them in the incubator. But the baby doesn’t need much there so Tobirama makes him leave and live a life while they’re waiting when the kid is ready.

Oh and Madara was SO against the name that basically means “experiment seed 1”. But when Tobirama asked if he got smth better, he ran away to his compound and tried to find the PERFECT names. He got lost in so many variations and never really decided. So when the kid was “born” (Tobirama just… took her out of the incubator*) and medics checked her, Madara took her in his hands, started crying and while he was having “A moment” Tobirama wrote her name as Motoko, cuz they needed it for administration and Uchiha clan.

*come to think about it, wouldn’t it fuck up a kid a bit? i mean, children develop under pressure of their mother’s organs and they’re in tight position. maybe test tube kids don’t really like to be wrapped in cloth? as i know ppl do that with newborns to imitate feelings like they’re in the womb.

But this name also can be read as “Festival child” so its kinda cute? Madara def told her that that’s exactly what her name means. No seed 1.

Interesting thing, when Tobirama made the baby, he thought he’d make a boy first, a heir. But something went wrong and the kid developed to be a girl. Tobirama was confused why. But technically, the kid is a boy with XY chromosomes but bc of their development and being a genetic experiment something went wrong and they developed as a female (its a real thing btw).

In the long run it didn’t really matter except that Motoko can’t have her own kids bc of all hormonal weirdness. And I don’t think that Tobirama would figure all of that out. He’d think he made some mistake when choosing gender, but kid was born healthy after all. Ofc when they found out that Motoko can’t have kids Tobirama will blame himself, that he ruined his daughter’s life. But she’s would be ok, she had her little siblings growing up and other clan kids so she’s done babysitting.

Okay for her personality! I think she’s kinda like Shisui? Very happy kid, spoiled rotten by her uncles (Hashirama and Izuna compete who is THE BEST uncle) and Tou-san (Madara). Btw Tobirama refuses to be called Kaa-san or any motherly terms. He’s barely holding a kunai in his pockets when Madara calls him wife.

But she’s also very Uchiha with temper and protectiveness. She was trained to be very much Uchiha cuz she’s the future clan head so her jutsu’s are strongly fire natured. Oh and her secondary nature is eath! She took it from the Senju side :)

Good sensor, but not as strong as her other siblings. Have really good chakra reserves and vicious on the battlefield.

Surprisingly looks really like Madara and Izuna’s mom. Her face is all that. Has soft dark hair and soft features. Considered to be very beautiful among Uchihas.

Oh and as you can see, I wrote that she has the Mangekyo. She got it when she was around 14. She was already really strong and cuz of her family, she got cocky. So, you ask me, who died? I think it’d be her female teammate (maybe from Hatake clan? idk I take suggestions) who she was in love with.

So yeah, she got a reality check. Because she got Mangekyo, Tobirama didn’t want her baby to lose her sight, so he improved his own seals that helped him with his albinism. Seals improve his sight and protect from the sun. So he drew Motoko tattoos on her face, like his. Years later it’d be a new feature of the main line.

But before that, when Motoko is 12 and Tobirama is 29, after 8 years of research (and possibly sealing/killing Black Zetsu in the meantime) he decided to try to make another kid. He still wanted a boy.

And he was successful. Meet Akemori! The Music King

The name was suggested by Hashirama. It means “red forest”. Red eyes, plus he sensed that the kid has a bit of mokuton!

But on the downside, Akemori was born an albino. Tobirama himself was really lucky, cuz he had a strong health and I hc that he still has healing abilities, but not as strong as Hashirama’s. But it still helped him in his childhood.

Not for Akemori tho. He was a sickly child, almost blind and burned on the sun easily. Tobirama had to put seals on him when he was about 3 years old. But even then his eyesight was still poor. Seals can’t fix everything.

Tobirama, once again, feels guilty that he didn’t notice any mistakes when he was creating the child.

And being born almost blind in Uchiha clan of all people wasn’t really nice. Though he is still clan head’s child and has a whole bunch of very powerful adults to protect him. Plus his older sister who loves him very much and wants to protect him from any harm.

But because of health issues Akemori was never really trained in shinobi arts. Well, he was trained (his fathers are literally… them) just that he could protect himself, but no one expected him to go on missions or even become a shinobi at all. Uchiha elders treated him as a potential political marriage pawn (even though Madara and Tobirama would never let them do that). Akemori caught on that and never had the motivation to become a shinobi at all. He was offended and said that he’d NEVER become a shinobi.

Madara was a little mad at that, cuz they’re SHINOBI clan, what the hell. But he shut up the second Tobirama sent him The Look. Tobirama was ok with Akemori’s wishes, like his twin and himself are shinobi by necessity, but they finds more joy in research.

Akemori was trained in Mokuton by Hashirama of course, even though Senju elders bitched about him selling clan secrets to Uchiha. But Hokage does what he wants.

Akemori’s mokuton isn’t as strong as Hashirama’s, plus he never really wanted to fight. But he was good with plants so he joined Itama-oji in his research a lot! Especially since Hashirama is busy with Hokage stuff, Itama was delighted to get a new helper.

Akemori is also a really good sensor because, like Tobirama, he had to compensate his bad eyesight. Basically, Akemori is a very Tobirama’s kid.

Surprisingly, he awakened the Sharingan! He was 6 and some foreign ninja (prob Kumo) thought it’d be cool to steal a kid with the Sharingan. Because of his naturally red eyes Akemori got stolen. Ofc when Tobirama felt his kid out of Konoha bonds, he sounded the alarm in the whole Uchiha clan to check on their kids whereabouts and was first to chase the kidnappers.

Kumo nin were killed by a very mad Tobirama and bc of the stress Akemori awakened the Sharingan. It wasn’t much of a use for him, since he’s not a shinobi. But at least Uchihas acknowledge him as a fellow Uchiha and not just Tobirama’s carbon copy.

(btw noone outside immediate family actually KNOWS where the kids coming from. They don't see any pregnant women in the main line house or anyone in the clan with the same time who gave birth these days. Tobirama himself or god forbid Madara aren't ever seen pregnant. Where the fuck kids are coming from? Do they just spawn in the house or what)

(they basically do spawn)

Sharingan helps Akemori to actually see! At least he could see something and could read. But stll, its not really strong, cuz not trained enough.

Basically Akemori is a perfect mix between Senju and Uchiha with Sharingan and Mokuton, but he was nerfed by albinism.

Being almost blind boy who can navigate only with his sensing, doesn’t gives him much hobbies. Ofc he helps Itama and he studies plants and medicine a lot with him, but he still needs a hobby. Books don’t work for him, any type of handicrafts too cuz he can’t just use Sharingan all the time, his head hurts and sometimes he doesn't want to remember a whole book perfectly. He’s also not very interested in training as a hobby.

So in his tweens while Itama and he were traveling (with Uchiha escort (prob Motoko) just in case) to the near town for some medicine and plants, he noticed (heard) a group of musicians and he fell in love.

Itama immediately bought him an instrument (maybe Biwa?).

And now the second son of Uchiha Madara became a musician! Isn’t it fun. Elders are furious.

Madara was baffled but “You do you, son. When you learn, show us? Oh and maybe you can copy someone else’s playing, but be discreet. They may not like that you’d try to copy their music. Shinobi don’t really like when we copy their jutsus too”

With age he learned to play several instruments (I take suggestions on which ones). Some people even thought that he’s trained to become geisha (he's not, he's just a pretty boy who plays music for fun).

When he grow old enough, Itama started to give him weed for inspiration and to relax. Akemori is prone to quiet anxiety attacks after he was kidnapped.

Okay, the final kid. She was born 4 years later after Akemori.

Nari! The pout queen

Madara finally got to name his kid. Her name means “Calm, harmonic village”. Yeah he decided to name his kid after a village. It's still better than Konohamaru

And she’s the final kid, because Tobirama finally got it and produced a “normal” healthy kid. Plus he's not sure how many kids (3) and students (another 4 and Kagami) he can actually handle.

She has very Uchiha coloring, but Tobirama’s facial features. She also inherited his stare.

She’s the baby of the family, but she grew up slightly strict and serious cuz she stayed a lot with Tobirama, cuz he decided he won’t spend another maternity leave out of the Tower. The first two times were a disaster when he came back.

Tobirama left on maternity leaves just cuz he needed to monitor his kids health, especially Akemori’s. Idk about Konoha maternity leaves, but they should be really short, since well shinobi are needed all year long and they can’t wait for mother-shinobi to spend a whole year on that. Though on the other side, mothers need time to recover or they won’t be able to perform good on their missions (plus they probably have a milk smell lol). Who knows, maybe Tobirama was the one who drafted a law about at least one year maternity leave. He got very popular among kunoichi (can you believe that I just remembered that this word exists)

Nari is really like Izuna, but got her temper under control. Maybe think of teen Kakashi but without dead fathers and angst. But also brat.

Her chakra is water nature and she has 0 affinity with fire. Still she did produce great fireball as their traditions dictated, even though it took her many trials and errors. After that she decided that she hates traditions like that. Got really rebellious in her teens, about 13 and even tried to challenge her sister (25) for the clan head position. She didn’t win ofc and was bitter about it.

Also because her sister and brother both have seals, she always dreamed of the same, cuz as a baby she thought that it’s something special for their family. But Tobirama doesn’t think she needs them cuz her sight is perfect and her skin is pale, but it doesn’t burn like Akemori’s.

It triggered interest for seals in general cuz “FINE if you won’t give me seals, I’ll just make them myself!”

Tobirama was completely okay with it. He always strives to encourage kids when they want to learn something new. So he sicked her at Mito. Though his aunt was quite happy to teach her niece sealing art.

also idk why i write evil near her. she's just a brat. though she has the potential to become Azula ish

And that’s it!

I will write more about them later cuz im tired. I have some other ideas I wanna expand. Like Tobirama introducing his pups to his Hatake aunt (did i tell you that i LOVE Hatakes?),

Oh and fun little sketches close ups for a treat

i love this Hashirama with the kids, ugh he's so father

if you have any questions you can send them to my ask box!

[trans-axolotl]

hi! saw your recent posts and wanted to ask for some advice, if that's okay. I'm a wheelchair user and I really want to get more involved in protests, but I feel pretty out of my depth. A lot of protests seem inaccessible and I just have a lot of questions about how things would work as a wheelchair user. I guess, do you have any tips about protesting as a wheelchair user and how you deal with inaccessibility?

Thank you!!

Hey anon! completely okay to ask for advice about this--I feel very passionate about this topic and am happy to share some tips! disclaimer that not all of the tips I share here are going to be applicable to everyone's situation--even among wheelchair users, we have so many unique situations, types of wheelchairs, health variations, other medical devices, etc etc. and many of us are multiply marginalized, which can also shape our experiences pretty significantly. so i'll share some general tips, and feel free to take what works for you and ignore the rest! most of this is based on my experience in the type of protests I go to in my city, so I also understand that this advice might not be applicable to every type of protest in every location. i've been involved in many types of protests for the past 9 years, from marches to die-ins to encampments, and have dealt with many situations including tear gas, riot cops, police brutality, fascist agitators, getting arrested, and many different types of high risk tactics. i don't want to position myself as an expert or anything, because i'm always learning and growing, but I do just want to share that for context!

I think the first thing I want to say is just to affirm that it is absolutely possible for wheelchair users to get involved in all kinds of protests, including higher risk and escalated protests. I'll focus on actual on the ground protests in this post because that's what you asked about, but know there are many many ways to get involved with organizing if protesting in the streets is not accessible for you. There are many of us involved in these type of actions already and figuring out ways to make it work for us, so you are not alone in that. I won't lie that it can be complicated, there's a lot of inaccessibility, and some shit might not be possible, but a lot of stuff can be made possible if we get creative.

Before the Protest

For me, one of the most helpful things is trying to find out as much information as possible before the protest, so that I can have a really good plan going in. Sometimes this might be more difficult, because there might be legitimate security culture reasons that a march route can't be announced publicly, for example, or specific tactics aren't posted about on social media in order to keep people safe from police surveillance. But when it is possible, this is the type of information I like to figure out:

What is the location? is it a stationary protest like a sit in or an encampment? is it a march? what is the route? how long is the route? are there obstacles in the route? are there curb cuts? is there hills? construction? other barriers? are there easily accessible exit routes? is there pavement, grass, gravel, etc? are there accessible transit stops nearby? are there accessible bathrooms nearby? if it's indoors, are there elevators and ramps?

A lot of times, to find out this information, I look through google maps street view, ask friends, or go in person if i can beforehand. for me, as a manual wheelchair user, I can deal with a lot of of nonideal circumstances such as hills, curbs, rough terrain, especially when I have a protest buddy who can help push me when needed, but it helps to know if i'm going to have to deal with those situations. Often times, protests are held in pretty inaccessible locations. Sometimes, this is because organizers are not considering accessibility which pisses me off, but sometimes, there are legitimate strategic reasons that we might need to protest at an inaccessible location because of the specific circumstances of the protest. (maybe we're even protesting at it because it's inaccessible!) You'll know best about what geographic features are inaccessible deal breakers for you and having that kind of information can help you make a decision about whether it's possible to attend.

What is the risk level? What tactics are being used? Are people intentionally risking arrest? What patterns of repression and brutality are most commonly used by cops in your city? How high is the risk of chemical weapons?

This can be really hard to predict--there's no way to ever say for certain how cops are going to respond and we can't see the future. But paying attention to how cops in your city have been responding to protests and learning the patterns of what types of protests are more high risk can help us make more informed guesses. We can reasonably estimate that a silent vigil in the daytime is likely going to be lower risk than a occupation of a building, for example. And for some of these things--there's no real way to make getting tear gassed an "accessible" experience for anyone, but for some of us, the consequences might be more severe than others. I have a comrade who uses a ventilator who cannot come to protests where we think there's a risk of chemical weapons, so that can be really important information to try to figure out beforehand.

What do I need to practice? Do I need to teach my comrades how to de-arrest a wheelchair user? Do we need to practice lifting me and my wheelchair over a barricade? Do I need to teach my comrades the safest places to hold onto my wheelchair if we're locking arms and moving as a line? Do I need to practice wheelies to get over curbs? How will I plan to protect the electrical parts of my wheelchair from chemical weapons? etc.

For higher risk protests there might be a lot of different tactics that we can use to navigate things like barricades, arrests, facing down a riot line of cops, etc. It is so, so helpful to be able to practice these skills with your protest buddies before a protest, so that when these situations start happening in a chaotic, fast moving environment, you and your comrades are prepared to navigate the inaccessibility that can come with a lot of these situations. You'll know what is possible for you and be the expert on what feels important to prepare for before an action.

2. At the Protest

Navigating a Crowd. To be honest this can be one of the most frustrating things for me to deal with while at protests. A lot of people are not aware of their surroundings, areas will get very crowded with little space to navigate, and people will block my view. The main ways I try to deal with this are by trying to be in the front of a march or on the sides of a march when possible, to try to have the most space to navigate. As we move, I continually scan our location to find the closest accessible exit route, paying attention to where cops are, curb cuts, etc. My protest buddies know that if we're in a middle of a crowd, they need to provide me with updates about cop movements or any other information that I can't see. I get loud and tell people to get out of my way when I need to. I try to stay near other mobility aid users, bike marshals, or people with wagons because they often leave more room for me to navigate.

Roles. There are lots of different roles we can take on at a protest that might make it easier for us to navigate. I sometimes like to join the bike marshals and help block off roads and intersections. Maybe you have medic training and you act as a street medic. Maybe it's more accessible to act as a scout and communicate police movement to your comrades. Other roles could include leading chants, handing out supplies like water and masks, acting as a legal observer, filming the cops, organizing art builds beforehand, etc.

Community. It's been super, super important for me to always go to a protest with a protest buddy so that we can watch out for each other and keep each other safe. Oftentimes, situations can change rapidly at higher risk protests, and we might end up in an inaccessible situation that we didn't plan for. If I don't have a protest buddy, I usually just turn to the nearest person next to me and start saying loudly "I need you to help me exit this situation/grab my handles and get me up this curb/tell me what the cops are doing etc." It can feel really scary and vulnerable to have to rely on complete strangers in these type of situations, but I've found that a lot of people are really willing to help if I tell them exactly what I need from them.

Surveillance. A lot of us really can't bloc up or hide our identities, because our wheelchairs are easily identifiable. This might shape what tactics we use, and also means there might be added surveillance concerns after a protest. When thinking about your own risk tolerance, grappling with the fact we are visible in a crowd is a really important consideration. This might mean we need to be even more careful about security culture, use encrypted messaging to communicate, avoid cameras, stay in a middle of a crowd to block visibility, and other things like that.

Unique advantages. There can be advantages and skills that we bring as wheelchair users! In flat locations and downhills, I'm much, much faster than my comrades who are walking--I can easily pass messages or get in front of a line of bike cops. I can usually carry a lot more supplies on my wheelchair backpack without getting tired. In my city, there's only one cop van that has a wheelchair lift, and at a recent protest where there were multiple of us in wheelchairs, I heard a cop say on their radio that "There are too many people in wheelchairs and we don't know how to arrest them all." In situations where it's logistically difficult to arrest us or the cops think the optics are bad, that can allow us to cause a LOT of logistical delays, act as a front line, get in between the cops and other people, and just generally make the cops lives a little more difficult.

3. After the Protest

Arrests. If we're risking arrest, there's a lot of wheelchair specific information we need to know. Theoretically, under the ADA, cops are supposed to arrest us with our mobility aid and let us have access to our mobility aid in jail. In practice, this doesn't always happen. Cops might arrest us with our wheelchair but then take it away from us in the holding cell, make us use the jail's standard transfer wheelchair instead, or just completely take away our mobility aid altogether. Cops might zip tie our hands so that we have no way to independently move. The cops in your city might have a van with a lift, or might try to get you to fold or disassemble your wheelchair and put it in a standard car. If they don't have a van with a lift and your wheelchair doesn't disassemble, they might have a contract with a wheelchair van company. Once we're taken to a holding cell, there's a lot higher chance we might get put in solitary. We often won't have access to wheelchair accessible restrooms. We might get separated from all of our comrades--at my last arrest, all my other comrades were taken to a location that processes mass arrests, while I was taken to a separate, wheelchair accessible location and held in solitary. It's super important that whoever's running jail support knows these things and can advocate for us and also track us in the system, especially if we're taken to a different location. If your area has a chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, they often have a designated person running a hotline. It can be super important to memorize that number, and also to reach out beforehand and explain your needs as a wheelchair user if you're risking arrest.

Overall, there are a lot of considerations for protesting as a wheelchair user, and you are going to be the expert on what is important for you! My general approach is that I want to have as much information as possible so that I can make an informed decision about if I want to attend a particular action. Then, when I'm at an action, I expect my comrades to respect my autonomy and support me in making sure that I can participate and that all of us can stay safe.

Also, for any abled people reading this post, I want you to read this very carefully and understand just how many barriers there can be at protests for wheelchair users. You have a responsibility to your community to whenever possible, mitigate these barriers, choose accessible locations, communicate with your disabled comrades, and support us in the moment. If your excuse is that "oh there aren't any disabled people at our protests, so we don't need to think about these things," you're wrong, and this attitude ensures that no disabled people can show up to your protests. and if that's the case, you're missing out on so much meaningful experience and knowledge that your disabled comrades could bring to the table. "We keep us safe" means that we actually work to meet everyone's needs, including the needs of your disabled comrades.

anyway, this turned into a very long post, but any other wheelchair users feel free to add on your own advice! love to share as much community knowledge as possible, especially advice from people who have different access needs than my particular situation.

anon, please let me know if you have any other specific questions that i didn't cover, and best of luck!

[omaano]

SW Hades AU July Update

Other updates: May - June - July - August

I've made a lot more progress with my Star Wars meets Hades AU project than I'd imagined - and absolutely none in other aspects, so let's see how the past month has been!

I have finished the character illustrations both for Maul

and Omega, (look how cute she is in her pocket sized version! ^^)

and I have also finally rounded out my Din collection, so that I now have 6 variations on his character art (helmet on and off, with Grogu and the darksaber, and with and without Grogu and the beskar spear in hand).

Aphra has lines and flat colours too, as well as the very basic lighting layers on her!

I'm real hyped to start working on her! I'm very proud of the dynamic pose I picked for her, too. I'll likely up the red in her jacket and gloves for a bit of a pop in colour, because all this brown everywhere is growing a little boring tbh. Like with certain other characters...

There has been some progress with Obi-Wan, but it's going suuuper slow, and I continue to preemptively worry about how I should completely redraw him for after his reunion with Cody, too. (Iirc Patroclus is standing with his spear in hand after he's reuinted with Achilles in Hades, and I also very badly want to draw him with his lightsaber ignited, but I feel that wouldn't be very good for him just, you know, hanging out in front of his little house on Tatooine...)

And now I'm going to add my first ever poll for the next month in case anyone wants to weigh in on the order in which I add characters to this project:

I'm making no promises, but I thought this could be fun :)

This post is growing a little long, so I'm putting the rest about Obi-wan's background re-draw, and some musings on picking colours for Omega under the read more ->

There was no room for it in the previous update, but I'd fully redrawn one background finally for Obi-Wan's chilling spot!

It is the same setup as where you can find Patroclus in game, with the walls and the chasm and the doors out, but I added Obi-Wan's hut and a desert envisonment. (I've watched so many videos on how to draw in an isometric grid, because there was always something that just wouldn't work... I'd thought there was a trick to drawing squares and circles in this grid that I just couldn't figure out for the life of me - and it turns out that I was just careless and my grid wasn't tight enough so I had to eyaball distances and the width and length of things too much lol.) And now I'm faced with the difficult task of picking colours and figuring out if the character shading tricks also apply here or not.

For now these colours are more for just to block in certain elements in the background, but I have some more desert/desolate looking backgrounds saved from other Supergiant games (they've got some really vibrant and dark colours, like wow!) as well to hopefully help me out moving forward.

I'd redrawn those bulbs you can find over the door leading out of various chambers in-game, because I might as well go in full re-design mode bit by bit, and after some deliberation and googling I picked the Mandalorian Crusaders symbol as inspiration for it.

And now back to Omega for a bit:

While I was working on the character illustration for Omega and Batcher I became very aware of how weird it is to pick colours for me. (I very heavily rely on preexisting colour palettes; I have multiple saved just for the Hades project like for Rex, Ahsoka, Cobb...) I'd been working on Rex and Cody last (Maul doesn't count because he doesn't have very human colours, so picking reds and purples and browns for him wasn't so shocking tbh), and aside from the armor paint and hair colour they very much share the very same colour palette. That was easy, I'd picked the skintones off Boba and the little portrait icons already, upped the saturation a bit because seeing the base skintone laid down scared me, and off I went.

(Laying down the first layer of flat colours is always super scary because they too often seem too dark and too grey/green, which I know will change after the complete shading is done but it still looks very off putting...)

So. The way the colouring in Hades made sense for me is that it works with pretty desaturated colours, there is a lighter shadow colour that's a bit more desaturated and the hue is shifted cooler but is still pretty cool to the original base colour (so much that I'd often have to turn it darker so that I'd see it laid down if I'm not sitting right), and another darker shadow layer that is a tad more saturated and warmer in tone. And there is also (a possibly slightly cooler shifted) and lighter highlight, and another more saturated colourful highligt (in the skin that is the bright, peachy orange for example). (and the little super bright pops of colour at the very very end. I hate adding them so much, but they are very important!)

But while I could pick the skin tones off of Rex, the problem I'd tumbled into was when it came to shading her hair (it's very important to me that Rex and Omega shared all these colours). Omega has a lot more hair (shocking, I know), and so shading that required a lot more than Rex's simple two-tones, and the "shadow" colour from Rex just didn't work, it was too saturated and warm in a larger quantity. So I tried to find another blond character in Hades, picked some colours off of Theseus... and those didn't work too well either, because those colours looked too pale and washed out compared to how lively her skintone was. There had been a lot of adjusting - I'd colour picked all of Theseus' colours and watched like a hawk where my colour marker moved both in hue and saturation a couple times in every which way and tried to mimic that in comparison to my base colour... and then you already saw how she ended up.

Here is the visual representation of the process:

I do a lot of these swatches.

You can see them there next to Omega with the blues and the gold/metallic detail colours (the latter of which I'd ended up using in her crossbow), and up above with the Obi-Wan wip as well (I needed to pick a lot of colours from Chaos and Aphrodite to figure out how to go about his pale skin), but I also worked like this with Din and Achilles in the beginning, as well as trying to pick the greens for Boba's armor. Usually the first and biggest hurdle I run into is choosing my base colours... that's something I really need to work on; but after that this method really helped me feel a lot more comfortable with cell shading.

I hope it made sense to you, and it was at least a tad bit entertaining (or if I'd ruined the word "colour" for you for a while, I'm sorry XD, I know I'd used it a lot). This was really the first time I'd truly seen how I changed around the colours I worked with in a piece, and also tried to go a bit more consciously about shifting them around here (that's why I have all the screenshots XD) and thought I might as well share them here in this monthly update.

I've also switched over to using CSP and a display tablet, in the hopes that I can familiarize myself with them without the pressure of needing some fancy or very specific brushwork and work process. No texture, little need for pressure sensitivity - I hope to slowly pspsps my brain into accepting working with these, and build up some success and good experiences before I try sketching and drawing on it and maybe trying out some new unfamiliar brushes as well ^^;

[thewrothode-if]

Has this been abandoned?

Short answer: No!

Long answer: My relationship with this IF resembles that of a toxic ex-partner. I've been on and off with my baby girl (the IF) for the past few months. There have been moments where I ended up writing more than I planned to, and then the next day, I lose that motivation to keep going. So, I simply stop writing for a week until I find that passion again.

However, it's not abandoned! I just suck at keeping that consistency. I tried to stay off Tumblr because, honestly, it contributes to my lack of focus. When I use Tumblr, I become fixated on the idea of my IF, my characters, my story, rather than the actual act of writing.

But I feel so crappy for keeping you all in the dark. So, I apologize for that! I wanted to post this when I was actually finished with the first chapter, so you guys actually had something to look forward to. But MAN, this is taking so much longer than I thought. I really never imagined just how much 1,000 words is to write.

I have planned a few new things for the prologue as well. I plan on editing that after I finish the first chapter (or going back and forth between the two until both are finished, hehe). As of now, the first chapter sits at around 49k, the prologue at around 19k. In total, around 68k.

But trust me when I say this: it is not yet finished and I have so many other variations to add, so much flavor text to include.

Pray for me, ya'll.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I actually added a minor RO.

He is a male. I apologize to the ones who wanted more female RO's. Right now, I have a minor female RO that I have floating around in my head, and that I actually need to think about before adding her in.

Anyway, you will meet the minor RO in the first chapter, but never see him again (since you go to England, poo), at least, not until the second book. He will be A LOT more present there.

The reason he is a minor RO is because he will only have two endings, and for another reason I feel like might be a spoiler.

So get ready for that!!

[terresdebrume]

"Charles. You promised."

Charles, sprawled on the ground with his feet up against the walls of the office, lowers the cover of his current volume to send an apologetic smile Edwin's way.

"Well I didn't know you meant right away, did I?"

Edwin cannot help a sigh. They have had some variation of this conversation at least once a year since they met, and Charles has yet to actually submit to any sort of schooling. This time, however, Edwin prepared for the inevitable.

"That was also your argument the last time we had this conversation," Edwin sighs, crossing his arms over his chest. "As well as the previous time. And as I recall—"

"Look, Edwin," Charles interrupts, looking up at Edwin again with a half pleading look, "I just really don't like the idea of fighting."

"Sometimes, fighting is the only way," Edwin points out.

He himself has bitterly regretted his avoidance of combat sports as a living boy on many, many an occasion. Who knows how things would have changed, if he had known then a fraction of what he knows now? Perhaps he would have lived. At the very least, he might have died fighting, and avoided Hell altogether. Of course, that would have meant never meeting Charles, but he would not have known that. He would have been blissfully ignorant of what true suffering feels like.

Edwin sighs, then makes himself blink. There is no point in dwelling on the past, especially if it makes Charles look at him with his worried frown, book forgotten on his chest. Edwin attempts a smile, though the look Charles sends him in response does not speak of success.

"I know," he sighs, hard enough to jostle the cross in his ear. "But you'll be there to defend me, yeah?"

Always, Edwin thinks. He is, however, cruelly aware that things do not always happen the way one plans for. Sometimes, students who may have had a very satisfying academic career die and must learn to fight to escape literal Hell. These things are unfair, but they happen. And the thought of Charles, trapped defenseless as Edwin once was... It is unbearable. It does not bear contemplating.

"Charles," Edwin pleads, hearing the touch of despair in his voice. "I will protect you as best as I can for as long as I exist here with you... But there may be times when I am not enough. I might be away and need some time to find you, or—any number of things could happen to keep me from your side. It would ease my mind to know that you have the skills to keep yourself alive until such time as I am able to take up the task again."

For a moment, Charles says nothing. He stares at Edwin, with his bright brown eyes the color of rich soil, with that smile he gets when he thinks Edwin is being particularly chivalrous. Edwin sustains his gaze, sweat filling his palms...and sighs in relief when Charles takes a deep breath and stands up.

"Alright, mate," he says, softly. "Fine. What am I learning then, how to throw a punch?"

"That would be the more sensible choice," Edwin admits around his own smile. "However, since I know very well how distasteful you find any of these activities, I thought perhaps I would appeal to your other sensibilities."

Charles makes an inquisitive noise as Edwin rummages in the coffer he prepared for this exact purpose earlier. He finds the tricorns first, handing one to a bemused Charles before donning his own. The way Charles frowns is as endearing as ever, and Edwin smiles as he reaches back into the coffer to find the sabers.

Charles gasps.

"Get out! You're not seriously teaching me how to be a pirate!"

"I should think you have seen ample evidence to belt that sentence," Edwin points out with a roll of his eyes.

Charles, of course, ignores the barb entirely.

"Can you say 'Ahoy, matey?'"

"Do take this seriously please." Charles sobers up, although his grin remains. As a reward, Edwin makes a point to demonstrate an old fashioned salute before he says: "En garde."

Charles smiles as brightly as if Edwin had told him Christmas would come early.

(Reblogs make the world go round! Consider sharing this if you enjoyed it!)

[turiluvr]

Could I request something (anything) with venti or lyney? 🥹🥹 only if you have time ofc no pressure!!

moonstruck

Swallowing his doubt, the words lodged in his throat finally got out.

— lyney x gn!reader

Lyney recalled that Inazuma had an old phrase that was commonly used in the past to profess their love. It was a piece of trivia he came across after talking to a traveling merchant in Fontaine. He couldn't help but think they were romantic in nature despite their roundabout way of declaring their love. It was a gamble anyway, it all depended on whether or not the other person knew the meaning behind those seemingly meaningless words.

People from Fontaine were romantic in their own way—they often found ways to romanticize any sort of situation and it wasn't difficult for them to come up with their own ways of declaring their love. As a magician, Lyney found himself liking things that were more indirect and roundabout. After all magic was all about misdirection and he was a master at it.

Lynette often told him to just go out and say it without anything veiling his feelings and words. Coming from someone as straightforward as she is, Lyney can only chuckle and remind his sister that it didn't come to him as easily as it did to her. He went out of his way to mention that perhaps even Lynette will have a hard time being forward once she falls in love; they are quite similar, after all. She might find herself tongue-tied the same way Lyney is right now.

But the moon was out and it was shining so brightly to the point where it took his breath away. His mind wandered to the words the merchant told him that time. It was the perfect opportunity to say it—gazing into the sky side by side, the moon was waiting for the words to be uttered and to bear witness to a long awaited confession.

But it's more difficult than he thought it would be. The words are already on the tip of his tongue, begging to be released but the voice is stuck in his throat and suddenly he's having second thoughts about this whole confession attempt. It was laughable, really, he was usually smooth with his words but he can hardly get a word out when it came to you. Especially during times where his words mattered the most.

Then, when he finally looked at you and mustered up the courage, “The–”

“The moon is beautiful tonight, isn't it?” His lips parted slightly in surprise, his eyes widening when he realized that you took the words right out of his mouth and made it your own. A part of him felt that it was a little unfair for you to steal the spotlight from him, now he's left speechless and wondering if your words carried the same intent as the one inside his head.

He'll take the chances in the end. He didn't know if your words had any meaning—were you declaring your love to him or were you just simply saying the moon looked beautiful? Despite his questions, his mind was already searching for answers he could give you. There was no time for pondering. If you meant it in a way that made his heart leap with joy, then perhaps you'll react just as strongly once he gives his response.

“The moon has always been beautiful.”

*Note: It's a famous phrase in Japan to say "The moon is beautiful tonight" as a substitute for saying "I love you"

There are many variations of responses to the saying however in this case, "The moon has always been beautiful" means "I've always loved you"

[the-wip-project]

SloMo WriNo: The Writing Habit

You’re going to get tired of hearing me say this, but when it comes to finishing your writing (or getting pretty much any long term project accomplished) habit is everything.

A solid writing habit will get you through those days when writing feels boring, when you’re tired, uninspired, lost. Habit is the magic that makes the writing train go— more often than most people want to admit.

That said, establishing a new habit can be fiendishly difficult— especially if you have a neurodivergent brain. (This is coming from personal experience, as someone who took literal years to establish the habit of brushing my teeth before bed. (I still frequently have agonies about washing my face at the same time.))

So. How to establish a solid writing habit?

Step one is finding the time.

Your writing does not require large blocks of time. You can write productively in as little as fifteen minutes a day (yes, really!) but the only way that gets accomplished is by making it fast and simple to get into your writing headspace.

How though?

By making it a routine at a similar time and place each day, by creating rituals that cue you that it’s writing time, or by attaching your writing to another established habit. Ideally your writing habit will combine all three.

Yes, flexibility is important, because every routine has variations in it, so being able to write even when you don’t have everything just right is important. But if in the past you’ve struggled to keep writing as a consistent part of your life, then creating a routine is the best first step to creating a habit.

Connecting your writing to another, enjoyable habit is good first step. Writing while you take your morning coffee break, or during your headphones on commute time, or along side your lunchtime treat might be all you need to create a positive association. You want writing time to be something you look forward to, not dread.

By keeping the session short (Somehow setting a timer for a number less than thirty makes even the most scary tasks feel approachable for me.) and adding something pleasant and relaxing to the mix you can start to build that positivity. I think this is why so many writers like to write with a cup of tea, or in coffee shops. Adding a delicious beverage habit cues your mind that this is writing time, and what’s more, that writing is a pleasant time taken just for one’s self.

It also makes a huge difference to write at a time when your brain feels good.

I have tried writing later in the evening, and every moment feels like work. My brain is tired, and all I want to do is relax, not think. It feels like I’ve already used up all my energy and motivation.

Instead I like to wake early to write. This might sound like torture for all you night owls, but for me, (and plenty of other people) writing has become a keystone to healthy morning habits. Knowing that I’m going to wake by 5am in order to write is an incentive for me to be in bed by 9:30, (instead of staying up late to doom scroll, eat junk food and make other poor decisions) which helps me wake up with the right level of brain activity to write, which then makes me energetic enough to head out on my morning run directly after writing. Which means all the ideas from my writing session float around in my head in a pleasant soup, distracting me from the monotony of feet hitting ground. It’s a string of positive associations that keeps me happy and healthy.

For you the opposite might be true. Perhaps you find yourself in a peaceful writerly head space after the rest of your household is asleep, or while taking a break at work or school. The key is to find a time and/or place that’s low friction, when the obstacles to writing are less, when getting to your keyboard (or notebook if you’re old-school) feels less like work and maybe even like a reward, and then build out other positive associations around it.

If you’re used to viewing writing as something painful and difficult this might seem alien to you. So let me just add this: your words are not worth more because you were miserable when writing them. It’s not only okay to enjoy your writing time, it’s preferable. Sure you’ll connect a bit less to the writing is misery memes, but it’s worth it, I promise!

So, here is your assignment for the week: Take a look at your schedule and figure out what times might be convenient for regularly scheduled writing. And then try them out and see if you can find a time and place where writing feels good. You might have to move some other activities around to find that sweet spot, (like me, moving my bed time to allow morning writing time) and expect some stalls, some fails and lack of consistency. It’s not going to feel good all the time immediately, and you will need to will power your way through at times. But overall, once you can start forming that positive habit, the writing will become far easier to get to. And much more enjoyable when you do.

—Maree

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[bloodiedrogue]

IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE, MAYBE (2)

SUMMARY: It's always been hard being the sibling of a superhero. Lately though, it feels next to impossible.

PAIRING: Miguel O'Hara & Female Reader

WORD COUNT: 5,136

WARNINGS: Angst, enemies-to-lovers adjacent, descriptions of a panic attack/dissociate behaviours, inappropriate use of medication/alcohol consumption.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Okay, first of all, the amount of love I've received from this fic has been insane??? Like, y'all really knocked it out of the park, both here and on AO3 and I'm absolutely astounded? Thank you so much! You guys have literally motivated me so much so hopefully this chapter lives up to the hype of the first? :)

CHAPTER LIST / LAST CHAPTER / MASTERLIST

-

“God, I am never drinking again.” 

You stumble into the living room with your hands against your eyes, palming the sockets roughly. It’s morning, maybe even early afternoon, and already the sun is pushing through the blinds, coating the apartment in enough light that it makes you squint. On the couch Miguel grumbles under the covers as you walk by, pulling the fabric over his head as he readjusts his position, directing himself away. 

You’re surprised to see him there but say nothing, opting to wander into the kitchen to pour yourself a glass of water, noticing a fresh sticky note on the fridge: Call me when you’re up —Pete!

Hm, he must’ve gone over to MJ’s for the night.

Peeling the note away, you continue your trek for hydration, grabbing a glass that you fill and chug down twice before feeling satisfied enough to continue. Or at least, enough to survive considering just how sore you are. From your knees down you can feel the leftover aches from walking home; the many miles you’d managed to travel in your drunken state now heavy on your mind. There are at least one or two blisters on each foot thanks to your poor choice of footwear while the muscles surrounding your shins feel like they might actually be burning through your flesh.  

As you walk back through the living room you try not to groan at the pain, turning your attention to Miguel who’s now reluctantly awake. 

“Morning, grandpa.” 

You walk over and press the sticky note to his forehead, ignoring the way he swears under his breath and looks at you with narrowed eyes. 

“It’s not nice to assault people with sticky notes before they’ve had coffee.”

Shrugging in response, you walk back to your bedroom to grab your phone, listening to the creak of your couch as Miguel shifts out of place. 

It’s weird that he’s still here. After everything that happened last month, you were certain you’d never have to see him again. Being Peter’s boss and not much else, he’d become nothing more than a disdainful memory as time went on. A poor impression from the past that Peter never talked about. If you were honest, you weren’t expecting to hear about him so soon, much less see him, especially without his mask. 

So seeing him here, sitting so nonchalantly on your couch is a bit strange. Off-putting in a way that leaves you emotionally winded as you sit on the edge of your bed, staring at your notifications. 

There’s about half a dozen apologies from Peter alone, each variation more extreme than the last. Mixed between there’s a few memes and a picture of him pretending to cry on MJ’s floor with the caption sorry for being the worst brother, which you immediately save for future use. There’s also one from Harry asking you to send him a work email that you ignore and another from Gwen once again asking you to come for brunch. 

You glance at the time, noticing that it’s nearing eleven. She and Harry are probably already at their usual spot, munching away on overpriced, organic eggs and inhaling mimosas. (Something you'd normally enjoy but can’t quite fathom doing thanks to the pain currently rippling through your body.) 

Groaning, you curl further into the bed, feeling your head shift like an ocean wave that sends you flying across the room. In response, you shut your eyes as tight as possible, hoping that if you roll with the movements you’ll get used to them faster. 

Immunity through the power of will and all that. 

“I see you’re still alive.” 

You refuse to open your eyes. You need to focus on getting better —on pushing through the swirling motions that attack your brain because if you don’t you’ll be stuck here all day, helpless and in pain and way too dizzy. No longer will you be a person, but instead a shell. A fragile casing of sensitive flesh stretched over bruising bone that will slowly but surely deteriorate over time. 

“Are you always this dramatic?” 

The urge to argue persists, flowing through you just quick enough that you find yourself opening one eye, noticing his stance. 

He’s standing nonchalantly in the centre of your room; hands placed neatly on his hips. On his face, the tiniest of smirks pokes out of the corner of his mouth, prompting you to lift your head, blinking at what feels like a rare sight.

“Are you always this hostile?”

“Only in the morning.”

“Even towards complete strangers?”

“Especially to strangers.”

“Makes sense why you don’t have many friends.” 

“And how would you know that, stranger?”

He’s got that teasing tone that Harry always has. The one that sounds so condescending that it borders flirtation. Immediately it makes you roll your eyes and direct your attention back to your phone, realizing just how little you want to continue this conversation. You’re too hungover. Too sick and tired to do this whole back-and-forth thing, so instead you call Peter, putting the call on speakerphone with a sigh.

It rings twice before the other end clicks to life, a very joyful and awake Peter greeting the both of you. “Good morning friends, how are we doing on this beautiful morning?”

Almost in unison both of you grumble out a quiet fine that makes Peter laugh, prompting you to look at each other with shared disgust. 

“Are you hungover?”

“What do you think?”

“Gwen called me this morning,” he says, changing the subject. “She wants to go for brunch.”

“That’s nice, but I will not be attending on the account of the fact that I’d rather die.” 

“So dramatic,” Miguel chimes in.

Ignoring him, you place your phone onto the pillow next to you and tighten the covers around your throat.

Your head is still spinning but less so, the waves feeling more like lakeside tides than oceanic swells, leaving you thankful. There’s nothing worse than the spins after a night out. You can handle the stomach aches and even the vomiting but the second you can feel that mental drift you’re a goner. 

“Okay well, MJ and I are going to go if you change your mind. Miguel, you're welcome to come too.”

“No thanks,” he says, unsurprisingly. 

There’s a pause after that. One that lasts a solid five seconds but feels like a lifetime longer thanks to the way Miguel continues to stand there, staring at your pathetic frame tucked haphazardly beneath the covers. 

“You know staring is rude, right?”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, and weird too considering I barely know you.”

“You saying it’s weird for strangers to stare at strangers?” 

“A little, yeah, so knock it off.” 

He gives in, his eyes diverting towards the window before they move to the door, motivating his body to leave the room without another word. Once he’s gone you let out a sigh of relief and listen to his footsteps, hearing the way they move through the living room and into the kitchen. 

It makes you wonder why he’s even still here, taking up space in a home he isn’t really welcome in. You figured it was obvious from the beginning that he was nothing more than an overnight guest. A protective stand-in meant to slip away in the dead of night with no word or note. He was never meant to linger the way he is now and a part of you wonders if he already knows. If instead of picking up and applying said social cues, he’s opting to ignore them for some higher purpose. 

It wouldn’t make much sense but then again, you don’t really know Miguel so maybe he’s just a lingerer. Maybe he’s socially awkward and doesn’t understand that when you’re being mean to him it means you want him to leave your house so you can vomit in peace. 

“I see you guys are getting along.”

“Swimmingly.”

“Did you two have a good night?”

“Yes, oh my god it was amazing!”

“Really?”

You offer a fake laugh that Miguel walks in on, raising his brow in confusion. “No, we had a terrible time. Your boss is mean, Peter.” 

Offended, Miguel opens his mouth to speak but quickly closes it, watching the way you smirk beneath the covers, watching his brows knit together.

“How am I mean? I walked you home didn’t I?”

“Sure, begrudgingly.” 

He scoffs, his palms moving to encompass his hips again. “I didn’t realize I was supposed to enjoy walking you home. I’ll remember that next time.”

Next time?

You narrow your eyes and stare directly at him, noticing the way he mirrors your expression. It’s subtle at first, the way the crinkles of his eyes sort of deepen to match the lines across his forehead. His skin is rough —aged looking most likely due to the fact he probably slept terribly— and the bags beneath his eyes are the heaviest you’ve ever seen, even rivalling Peter’s on some of his rougher days. Like you, he looks more like a corpse than a person, his face devoid of anything other than the sickened frustration of having to deal with your attitude.

“I’m gonna be honest if you’re ever running late again, please call someone else.”

It’s obvious you’re talking to Peter but as you speak you continue staring at the man in front of you, glaring at the way his weight shifts beneath your gaze.

You hope he’s uncomfortable. You hope he’s embarrassed or at least feeling a little self-conscious for acting like such a child in a space that he hopefully never feels welcome in. If you were him you’d certainly be.

“Yeah, so, anyway, is that still a no to breakfast or…?”

-

You’re beginning to regret ever wanting to get involved in Peter’s double life. Or at least, its most recent developments. Up until last month, everything was fine. Simple and controlled and not at all hectic like it is now. Back then, everything was smooth sailing when it came to helping. Your only responsibilities being lie to May and make sure the window was always unlocked before you went to bed. Two very mundane tasks you could practically do in your sleep. 

Nowadays, it feels like an endless loop of stress. Kind of like when you were eighteen and just finding out that your brother was a superhero for the first time. Everything is complicated again. The stakes feel higher than ever before knowing the truth that there’s a world out there just like yours, endlessly repeating. That instead of just one Spider-Man there’s probably a million variations doing the same thing Peter’s doing. 

You’d be lying if you said it didn’t make you look at everything differently —intensively. With each new person you pass you wonder what their version is like somewhere else. Are they still male or female? Are they younger? Older?

As you walk into brunch alongside Peter and MJ, it’s all you can think about as you stare at Gwen, remembering her counterpart. How she looked so familiar but you couldn’t quite place it. 

You realize now that it’s because she’s your Gwen, but not. A direct copy but a good decade younger. They have the same hair colour and eyes and that little gap between their front teeth and upon seeing her it makes you wearily shift into your seat, putting on your fakest smile. 

She’s already a bit tipsy when you arrive, you can tell. Her eyes are half closed and the grin plastered across her face is hazardously wide. 

“Oh, my god, hi! I’m so glad you came!”

If it weren’t for the table between you she’d be pulling you in for a hug, tightening her grip around your shoulders until the air inside you was gone. You inhale nervously at the thought, wondering if other Gwen would do the same. 

It’s hard to tell what traits transfer over. Considering she’s a spider person in her universe it’s more than likely she’s completely different, right? Perhaps relating more to Peter. It’d make sense that all spider people kind of have the same vibe. Perhaps like your brother, they’re nerdy and into photography and have partners with nicknames that double as their initials. Like him they'd live double lives, trying their best to find the balance between being crime-fighting arachnids and regular civilians with the help of their sisters. 

Or brothers. You figure in other universes you’re probably a guy too. Hell, maybe even in some you're the spider person having to navigate through life with the help of your brother. 

“Sorry we’re late,” Pete grins, pulling out the chair beside you so that MJ can sit down. “Somebody had a bit too much to drink.”

You shoot him a look as he sits at the head of the table, sticking out his tongue for good measure. 

You hope in the universe where you have superpowers you give him a hard time. 

“It’s fine, we overdid it too,” Gwen says, looking at Harry who rolls his eyes and looks at Peter, the two of them sharing a knowing glance. 

“Hope you wore a condom,” you say, at which MJ and Gwen gasp, both of their mouths curling into cheeky grins that you can’t help but share. 

Its always been obvious that the two of them are together, even though neither of them would ever admit it. It’s weird but Gwen says it’s a part of the intrigue, having this unlabeled relationship that she can just ride without the responsibility of making it a bit deal. 

Both you and MJ think it’s because she secretly likes the drama of it all, but knowing how she’d react to such a claim, neither of you says that out loud. 

“Did you make it home okay?” Gwen changes the subject before anyone can even join in, making you sort of sad because you love to tease. 

“Relatively. Threw up on the walk home but that’s New York, baby.” 

“Walk home?” Harry questions.

You freeze, remembering Miguel. He doesn’t exist in this world. At least, not to anyone other than you and Pete and maybe MJ. You’re not entirely sure what he’s told her but you figure she knows in some capacity because he wouldn’t have called you otherwise. 

“I mean drive, sorry, drive home. I’m still hungover.” You try to laugh it off but Harry and Gwen share that look. The familiar one where they think you’re lying but know better than to actually bring it up. It’s the same look they give you sometimes when you’re covering for Peter and you hate it, feeling your chest tighten every time it’s shared right in front of your face. 

It reminds you of how you felt having Miguel around. Something about the way he looks at you every time you talk fills you with that familiar twang of insignificance. Like whatever you say isn’t good enough. 

With your friends you know it’s because you’re insecure about your lying capabilities. With Miguel though, it’s different. Yes, it feels the same physically but emotionally it’s an entirely new set of feelings. Ones that have you second-guessing their origins, remembering the way your stomach would twist each time he’d insult you. Each time he’d look at you with those dark eyes and pouting mouth. 

Thinking about it now, he reminds you very little of Peter. Aside from the moniker of Spider-Man the only similarities (so far) you can confidently say that they share is the art of sarcasm and deflection. The way their voices can become so monotonous at the drop of a hat is unparalleled, even with all the tension, and it’s frustrating. 

It makes you wish you didn’t wear your emotions on your sleeve. Like Peter and Miguel, you wish you could box it all up in the form of calm words so that nobody even got the chance to look at you the way Harry and Gwen still are. 

Secretly, you wish you were the spider person of this universe. Not because you want to save lives, selfishly. No, you mostly just wish you were stronger like them. Less like yourself and more like your brother who sits at the head of the table holding MJ’s hand with the biggest smile you’ve ever seen. 

And not so secretly, you want what he has. You want to be confident and to have people look at you in a way that’s filled with adoration. To have them survey you and conclude that you’re decent rather than picking out your flaws. You want May to look at you with fondness. You want her to be proud of you in the same way she’s proud of Peter and to affirm your belief that you’re doing alright for yourself even without filling her desires for grandkids. 

You want Harry to look at you with respect. To stop looking through you just because you’re Parker’s sister who just so happens to be smart too. You want him to take him as seriously as he takes Gwen without the sex. Without the implication that to be valued, you need to provide him with something worthwhile. 

You want Gwen to appreciate everything you do for her. To stop taking advantage of you at work and in life —to provide you with the comfort of an actual friend. 

You want value, you decide. Whether that’s through the gain of superpowers or not. All you want is a little bit more than you’re given and you wish you could express that as you sit at the table, watching everyone talk and laugh as if you’re not really there.

Beside you, MJ leans into Peter as he talks, resting her chin on her hand in longing silence while the two across the table sit, completely engrossed. You try your best to listen in too, picking up that the story involves his boss over at the Bugle. Something about how his last few pictures of Spider-Man were so good he nearly fell off his chair. 

You fight the urge to roll your eyes and pull out your phone, scanning the screen mindlessly, clicking on apps and profiles over and over again until the waitress shows up and asks for your order. You get a mimosa regardless of your hangover and a bagel breakfast sandwich with all the extra fixings, knowing you need it. Then you wait. Wordlessly exhausted, wishing that instead of deciding to tag along you’d stayed at home under the comfort of your covers.

-

Once you step over the threshold of your apartment you let out a sigh of relief and sink into the couch alongside Peter who rubs his face. By now your social battery is running at a negative ten, making your mind fill with nervous thoughts that have you frowning as you curl into yourself, clutching your knees to your chest.

You shouldn’t have gone, you decide then. Regardless of the extended invitation, it was obvious you were only invited because Gwen was drunk and felt bad. That’s usually how it went nowadays. 

“They’re a lot, aren’t they?”

Peter’s always known how much you struggle with people —how you overthink every interaction after it’s happened. It’s how it’s always been and he’s used to it. 

As you nod, you feel his hand against your shoulder, tightening. It’s a gesture of understanding but at the moment it feels like pity so you brush him off, frowning even harder. 

“You okay?”

You aren’t. You’re overstimulated from the amount of interacting you’ve done in the last twenty-four hours. From Harry and Gwen to Miguel and back you haven’t had a break all day and you can feel your mask slipping. Physically, your chest is aching for a breath you can’t quite get, the realization of your interactions pushing you over the edge and all you want to do is scream.

You were such an asshole today. Sure, you’re always kind of mean but this morning specifically felt like a step above the rest with the way you argued with Miguel as if you knew him. As if last night was just another night between you, adding to countless others. You were brash and unwelcoming and rude, and despite how you feel about him sometimes, you still feel pretty shit about it.

“Do you need anything?”

“No.” 

Your tone is stubborn, dripping with an arrogance that has Pete sighing because he knows he can’t do much. When you’re in these moods all he can really do is let you live through your anger —to explore the hate you feel inside in private. It’s how you’ve always done things. So when Peter looks at you with sympathy you can know that’s it. He won’t press the matter further. He’ll just get up and leave and go to MJ’s for the night. Check-in in the morning like he usually does.

As he stands you’re met with feelings of both relief and regret, watching the way he carefully pats your head and steps over your legs. Inside, your stomach drops as he wanders to the doorway, slipping on his shoes and coat without saying a word, knowing that it never solves anything —just makes it all messy. 

Again, like always, you wish you were like him in these instances. Because maybe then you could have a normal relationship that doesn’t rely on boundaries you wish didn’t exist. Instead of pushing everyone away you could sit with them —talk to them. Express instead of repress. Prove to them that the love you want is the love you deserve. 

If you were in any other universe you’re certain you could do it. In this one though? 

You’re too scared. 

-

When you’re alone, it happens, the calm before the storm. 

As the hours move and you lay exhausted on the couch staring at your phone, you find yourself scrolling. Distracting yourself from the inevitable breaking point by watching YouTube video after YouTube video. First, you start with your usual poison, simple documentaries about things like haunted houses or murder cases that remained unsolved. Lazily, you click thumbnail and thumbnail, half absorbing all the names and dates and details as you lie prone, trying not to think about it. 

It takes hours for you to fully accept your emotions and when you do it’s a mess. Now lying in bed, it’s nearing eight and your deep dive on unsolved mysteries has turned into videos discussing the topics of the multiverse. You’re not sure why you decided to delve into all that but regardless, as you do you’re in your head again, clutching a pillow tightly against your cheek as you try to steady your thoughts. 

You bet Miguel’s world has a version of you that’s nicer. One that treats him with respect. They’re probably a spider person too which is why he looks at you with such disdain every time you argue. You’re a lesser version of them —no comparison. They’re better and it drives you insane, thinking that the approval of a man you hardly know is important. 

Aside from Peter, there’s absolutely nothing connecting you. You’re from different worlds both literally and figuratively, so it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter.

Except that it does, doesn’t it? Deep down, regardless of how well you know one another, this man has managed to find his way inside your skin. You’re not sure when or how or why but somehow he’s always there, lingering at the back of your mind like a memory. Like he’s absent until he’s not —until something reminds you that he exists and that he thinks you’re too inexperienced to understand that he doesn’t like you. 

You figure he doesn’t like you because you’re stubborn. You’re sure there are other reasons but that’s the only one that really jumps out. The way he speaks to you is a direct example of that. Changing subjects often, he doesn’t like when you push his pull. Doesn’t like when you defy his authority or pry. He wants complete and total control and when you’re around he knows he doesn’t have that. You don’t trust him enough to give it.

His version of you probably gives him whatever he wants. Probably spoils him by following him around like some lost fucking puppy. They’re probably older than you —experienced— and have the backbone of an earthworm. 

He probably loves it. 

Shoving your face into your pillow you let out a loud groan, letting the tears well and overflow against the fabric of your pillowcase.

It’s sudden, the storm. Erupting out of nowhere over something that shouldn’t matter. Quickly, there’s a rage that fills inside you, quietly creeping from the depths of your soul in the form of breathless gasps and shaky hands. 

You turn upwards to face the ceiling, the tears coating your eyes in a layer of disarray. You can’t see anything but the blurred beige above you. Everything moves like brushstrokes across the canvas, thick and liquidy and not quite good-looking. It makes you blink in annoyance and throw your forearms over your head, trying to stop the world from letting you see or shake or feel anything other than regret. 

It’s painful, the storm. It feels like a deep wound being opened back up again. All the build-up of scar tissue is there, shoved amongst the perfectly good parts. Usually, they linger there together but as the wound is peeled open by your own hand, you can feel the worst of it start to push. 

As it surfaces, you can feel the catalyst begin to wake. The rate at which the chemicals in your brain begin to increase, pushing you over the edge.

It fucking hurts. 

By now your wound is gaping, ripping at the base of your chest. It’s hard to breathe under all the pressure of the damaged flesh. Under all the memories of a life you once thought was good. Decent 

In another universe, you hope to god you feel just like this. Like the world is caving in and you’re the last survivor. At least then you wouldn’t feel so alone —so beside yourself while everyone else so carelessly continues moving. 

It helps calm the storm. Thinking of you —another you. Regardless of if they’re better or worse or completely equal to you, the thought of this feeling extending across the expanse of a place you don’t quite understand fills you with ease.

It closes the hole in your chest —pushes all the tainted flesh back inside for safekeeping. Slowly, it settles into something you can handle again, sewing up the edges that’ll inevitably leave a new scar. 

As you sit up from your bed, brushing past the tears to clear your vision, you feel your breath begin to steady. A slow one-through-five inhale, followed by another one-through-five exhale, each one becoming stronger than the last as you look towards the window, noticing the familiar blue and red spandex standing silently on your fire escape. 

He doesn’t move when you notice him. Doesn’t fly through the air or duck out of sight. Standing there, it’s as if instead of flesh he’s made of stone, unwavering in his attempts to watch you carefully through the window. It’s scary if you’re honest. The way he looks so detached from the world. Even without seeing his face, it’s as if there’s nothing behind the angered design that adorns his features below. His emotions feel completely blank underneath the fabric, making you wonder. 

What’s he thinking about?

As you inch toward the edge of the bed, you see him twitch. It’s subtle. The fingers of his right hand sort of jolt lightly in the air, and it’s over before you can even think about it, so you don’t. Instead choosing to forget as you move towards the window. 

Surprisingly, he still doesn’t move. All he does is breathe, letting the rise and fall of his chest ruin the image of his fixed stance. He’s nervous, like you, you determine. Scared, like you.

It motivates your movements, pushing you through the room until you’re standing in front of the window, reaching for it with shaky hands.

Why hasn’t he left yet?

You push open the window, slowly, watching his body begin to move towards it, his leg pushing through the moment you step away.

“What are you doing here?”

He doesn’t respond. At first, you assume it’s because he’s embarrassed and doesn’t know what to say but then he moves. Lifelessly, he brushes past you and wanders into the living room, forcing you to follow as he drops onto the couch with a groan. 

Seriously, why is he here?

You open your mouth to repeat your previous question but are interrupted by his mask. Almost instantly, it disintegrates before your very eyes, revealing fresh injuries that have you holding your tongue because laying there, he looks like Peter after a rough night. Maybe even worse thanks to the shiner that takes a good portion of his left eye. 

“Do you have any painkillers?” 

You don’t even respond before you leave the room, wandering into your bathroom to grab the usual meds you give Peter. They’re prescription, originally given to you for period cramps, but they do wonders on a battered body.

When you reenter, Miguel’s face is scrunched in pain, struggling to find comfort. Because of this, you practically run to the kitchen, grabbing all the usual items: water, ice packs, scotch, carrying it all in one go. 

“What’s the scotch for?”

You untuck a glass from the crook of your elbow and settle on the floor beside the couch, pouring it halfway to the top before downing it.

“None for me?”

You pour another one. “You’re not meant to take it with pills but Peter always says it makes him sleep better.”

“Okay.” 

You’re no doctor, but you’ve experienced this same formula countless times. If he takes one pill with one full glass of water then drinks the scotch, followed by another water he’ll be out like a light in no time.

“Pill, water, scotch, water,” you instruct, watching him closely as he follows suit, chugging back everything in under a minute.

After it’s done he settles into the couch again, tucking ice packs against his face and chest before glancing your way with a grin. “Stuff’s nice. Goes down good.”

He sounds like he’s been hit by a bus, his voice rubbed raw, scratching your brain in a way that makes you squint as you pour yourself another glass.

“Good cause it cost a pretty penny.” 

“Yeah?”

You nod, opting to sip this one, still feeling the burn of the other radiating throughout your chest. “Ben bought it for me. A graduation present or something.” 

“Wasn’t that ages ago?”

“Your point?”

All he does is grin and close his eyes.

-

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[glitteringcrab]

Why is Evil Morty still next to the Central Finite Curve?

He killed so many people to get out of the CFC and then he stopped running just as he crossed the CFC's metaphorical doorstep...!

Why did he anchor his minecraft base on a CFC universe???

No, they hadn't! The shockwaves had just as much range as they should! And Evil Morty deliberately insulted Rick immediately afterwards, to derail this train of thought and stop him from pondering over the implications or his calculations too much. And it freaking worked. (And might I add that Evil Morty stuttered just a little bit at that point: "l-look at this scan array". Nervous, boy?)

Evil Morty is a lying liar, he lies about everything...! (I still love him with all my heart). I-I-I no longer know how much of what he says or does to take at face value. In season he said he wanted to escape the Central Finite Curve, and it was clear he desperately wanted to do so, but he stopped running immediately after he exited. What is happening?!?! Why?

Theory 1: Home

Assuming he is a clone Morty, there is a universe from which the natural Morty whose memories he got originated. He was therefore created loving this version of his mum, this version of his dad, this version of his sister... Maybe he has not lived there once, he switched 20 Ricks since he was manufactured, and has spent more time in the Citadel than outside it, but in his heart this is were his home is supposed to be, so he anchored his space base on the limits of this one universe, just so he could be close.

Theory 2: Hiding

Since a Rick can hide from other Ricks by being next to a Morty, I'd assume that it also works the other way around: a Morty can also hide by being close to a Rick. And maybe if Evil Morty worries that someone will scour the multiverse searching for him (inside and outside the CFC) then maybe staying close to a CFC universe hides his own brainwaves when someone is doing a really wide (multiverse-wide) scan for him (of course, I doubt it'd work if the scan was more focused).

Maybe this is just a variation of the "Mortys of the Morty Dome thing": he needed a lot of alive Mortys to hide amongst then, he needs CFC universes to hide amongst now.

This could be just a precaution in case e.g. a Rick survivor of the Citadel or something comes after him (which is not so unlikely).

(eh. Would staying near a CFC universe, which might not even have a Rick inside at times, really be enough though?? I just stopped believing my own theory)

Theory 3: Time shenanigans

"Rick and Morty, a hundred years, forever"

...Were you being cute, Rick, or is this literal???

Is there a time loop of some sort? Is this why they say things like "how many thanksgivings have we had" or are they simply breaking the fourth wall?

Is this what the "Rick Experiment" that Evil Morty threatens to blow up if he gets pissed is? Is this why Rick hates to mess with time travel stuff, because it's already an ugly mess?

Does staying close to the time mess allow Evil Morty to stay young for longer or something? (but would he really want that???)

I'm skeptical about Ricks being able to mess with time in that scale because of (a) the existence of a pretty strict time police and (b) Rick apparently had to purchase illegally a small time crystal... whatever time shenanigans are needed for a hundred-year-loop, it'd need a lot more than that.

Theory 4: He likes something in that universe

Like, a friend he made a long time ago, who he plans to visit in the future when he finds the courage to do so (right now he's wiped out).

Or Morty Prime, so he didn't run very far away so that Morty Prime could find him in the future.

Or he's trying to make amends for his past misdeeds and visits CFC universes in secret, batman style, to fix stuff.

(I don't see that theory really playing out. He doesn't seem to be working towards anything, he's just on vacation... And I think he has given up hope of Morty Prime joining him)

Theory 5: THE WORLD IS A BIG, DANGEROUS PLACE

The world outside the CFC is filled with even more dangerous, power-hungry and evil people and governments than those in the CFC. Living in (or near) such a universe is stressful for a lone boy, so he'd rather stay close to the Curve and its brand of familiar, known evil (which he knows how to deal with) rather than face the absolute chaos that reigns beyond. (If there is a specific government or organization Evil Morty is worried about, I can see him considering asking Rick C-137's help... "Maybe I can use that some day"?)

Alternatively, the rest of the multiverse still believes that the CFC is unbreachable, so they keep their distance. Staying close to it is just safer.

(yeah I don't buy my own theory. I think Evil Morty would gladly face whatever crazy evil is beyond the Curve, as long as it wasn't a Rick. Could be he already tried and barely escaped with his life though, so he had no choice)

Theory 6: Not a clue!

I mean, we couldn't have predicted the existence of the Central Finite Curve in a million years...! It might just be a bit of unrevealed lore.

And it's impossible to guess or know what Evil Morty is thinking or feeling almost at any given time. He is always expressionless, always flat-toned, always cautious, always lying, and the way the scenes with him are built, we're not even sure when it's him on the screen half-the time and missing scenes can turn the whole plot on its head. He tricks the other characters, and he tricks us as well.

[alexanderwales]

Book Review: Metropolitan Man

[content warning: sexual violence]

It's been 10 years since I wrote Metropolitan Man, and last night I read it for the first time in almost that long. Since writing it, I've written over 4 million words, and hopefully, grown as a writer. I've also forgotten parts of the story, so was looking at it with as fresh of eyes as possible. These are my overall thoughts.

I should say, before I start, that I've read tons of comments and discussion on this story over the years. I don't know how many of these thoughts are my own, or how much I've internalized things that people have said.

Writing Style

There were lots of changes I thought about making while reading, but people hate change, and this story is about ten years past when I wanted to be making editing passes on it. In many places I kept thinking of little extras I would add, things that would make the dialogue pop a little more, or provide characterization. I had this idea for a line where I describe Lois typing out two letters like she was letting loose with both barrels of a shotgun. There's dialogue to clean just a bit more, a few places where words are repeated or something is just a bit awkward, and where it could have been tighter or more clear.

The biggest thing that stood out to me was how little time got spent on scene setting and how short some of the snippets were, just five paragraphs to get a scene across before we're onto the next thing. I might have webserial brainrot, but those are definitely places where today I would give a little more breathing room and maybe use the same amount of words to describe something in a more oblique and stronger way. One that stood out as a clear example was a private investigator going home with Jimmy Olsen even though she was done pumping him for information, which could have been twice as long and benefitted from it. Another was a brief little thing about a Superman spotter on the roof, where I'd now describe everything he was doing, and only get to the conclusion of "he was a Superman spotter" at the end of the section to let the reader have this mini mystery of what they're being shown and why.

I would describe things more if I was writing this today, trying to get those nicely tight and evocative descriptions and ditch the stuff like "she wore a white blouse", but I often feel that way about stuff that I'm revising from last week, so it's not surprising.

The plot is very tight, which is good. I tend to prefer my plots tight, but it takes work, and webserials aren't conducive to it because it's difficult to know when you're writing a scene whether it's really pulling its weight as far as moving things forward. The initial idea for MM was to move as cleanly as possible through a series of events: Superman -> Superman is invincible -> Superman is Clark Kent -> Clark Kent grew up in Smallville -> the ship is in Smallville -> the ship has a Kryptonite power source -> Kryptonite can kill Superman -> Superman is dead. The only thing that would make it any faster would be if we dropped the Lois Lane subplot, but that's like half the novel.

Superman is OOC

I've gotten tons and tons of comments on this story over the years. If I hated myself, I would go back through my email and count them up, but there are some death threats and "kill yourself"s in there, and I prefer not to reread them. The major thing that people hate is the ending, which I don't care to talk about, but the other major thing is that Superman isn't Superman.

In this, I largely agree, but then, I'm pretty sure I've always agreed. That said, Superman has had a ton of interpretations over the years, and there's a wide range of acceptable behavior from "a Superman", even if we're not counting the really out there variations like Red Son or some of the alternate timelines.

... but I still would probably make him more like a canon Superman if I had to do it all over.

There are a few things that raise red flags at the beginning, which is where I think they're inexpertly placed. Superman takes Lois off the roof and flies her around, making her very afraid, and this is fine, I think, a misunderstanding that might be stronger if we got his insight into what was happening before we got hers to help bridge some of the disconnect there and characterize them both better. But there's a little note after that, where Clark makes a joke about "Superman's girlfriend Lois Lane" that I think is a HUGE red flag, and which probably comes too early in the story. It would be better as a joke someone else made that Clark laughs along with, which raises the red flag to half mast.

The other major moment I would change is when the bombs start going off. Superman pulls back, unsure whether he's actually immune to mustard gas, and I think this is one of the moments that most goes against the character of Superman. Canon Superman would just say "welp, guess I gotta find out whether I'm immune to mustard gas in a hurry". Superman making the argument that he doesn't know the bounds of his powers and so should exercise caution reads as either cowardice or as him being way too bitten by the rationality bug.

This would then obviously have to change the plot of that section a bit, because in the novel as it stands right now, Superman is convinced by Lois Lane that he can't just sit on the sidelines for game theory reasons. Better to either scrap that section or have Lois convince Superman that for game theory reasons he should offer to have testing carried out against him in a way that doesn't harm civilians, which canon Superman might submit to if it saved lives. Then the rest of the plot can proceed as normal, because Superman is immune to everything and that's the whole plot beat anyway.

I'd definitely clean up some of Superman/Clark's dialogue to nail the character voice better, but I don't think it's that bad, and it's mostly a few places where the wording is off. I think in particular the points where he's feeling anger go too far, and are not how someone internally conflicted about the anger might talk.

And then, oh yeah, Superman punches a guy's head clean off, which I think is the biggest sticking point for most people.

I've thought about that scene a lot. I personally like it. But if I were ever trying to sell this story to DC, it's one of the things I would almost certainly change. Superman doesn't kill, except in that one movie that came out just before this story was published where Superman snapped a guy's neck.

The change I am most happy/comfortable with is that Whitman, the governor whose children were [REDACTED], is the one to kill Calhoun. This happens just outside the courthouse with Superman watching and not intervening in the slightest, or maybe catching the bullets as they go through Calhoun so no bypassers get hit.

I don't know, as I type it out, it doesn't have the same weight to it. It's not cool. It's not a watershed moment. Maybe there's a plot thread to pull there, where Superman has tacitly endorsed other vigilantes, and it would be a great time to pull in other mundane street-level heroes ... but that's an entirely different story at that point.

Another option is for Superman to simply fly off with Calhoun and put him away, but that lacks punch too, and gets talky, and ... it's about the rage, right? The feeling of injustice, not just at Calhoun, but at the entire world, and it's not just an unhappy side effect that there's blood everywhere, all over the clamoring press, that's part of the point.

Social Justice

I really enjoy how wide-ranging the novel is, and how many things it touches on. Good job me. There was a line I had completely forgotten about where Lois asks "Why doesn't Superman stop abortions?" that I had completely forgotten I had ever written, and which brought a big smile to my face (but no wonder some Superman fans hate this story).

There are a few other things that I raise my eyebrow at a little bit, at least sitting here in 2024. There's a particular line that Superman gives when talking about this whitewashed mural of the past they're walking by, and he says "It's easy to forget that slavery ever happened, you know?" Now, I will grant you that this is a part of a conversation where he's saying that maybe he should have been a better student of history, and is saying this as a white guy in 1934, but I wanted him or someone else to tear that statement apart. It never really happens.

"It's easy to forget that slavery ever happened [if you and your people have not been affected by slavery]". The novel takes place ~70 years after the end of the Civil War, which means that when Clark was growing up there would have been freed slaves who were in their fifties, probably many of them in Kansas, though Smallville is (notably) small. I don't know, it wouldn't have been historically accurate for them to have a discussion of privilege, but there's way more meat on that bone, and it's all left as subtext.

Also probably the case that if I were writing it now, I would pay more attention to race in general, but that I'm less sure on, because it would mean some major structural changes to be done well. There's a single black guy in the whole thing, who is barely a character and has no speaking lines: the farmhand Ma Kent has before he gets lured away with the promise of being an actor. I have never felt that any novel needs racial balance to it, but if you're going to be talking about slavery and whether Superman would have done anything about it, you start to make black people look like props, which is not a good look.

I mean look, I think it's fine for a given story to not actually take a stance on political issues or have a diverse cast, but this story goes from abortion to the Equal Rights Amendment to Prohibition to Nazis to the death penalty, and then despite being set in 1934 sort of talks around the subject of how shitty race relations were. As a white guy, I never feel comfortable talking about race, but I think it would have been appropriate to have here in more than the cursory way it was handled. But the cast is just not that large, and the way that modern Superman stories handle that is usually making Jimmy Olsen black and then not actually talking about the fact that he's black so it's just a palette swap, which I don't think would work here, especially since Jimmy is such a bit character, and also it's 1934.

Sexual Violence

Alright, I will say it: there's too much sexual violence.

Chapter 7 is when the two Whitman kids get kidnapped. Their driver gets his throat slit, the boy gets dismembered, and the girl gets raped. I knew it was coming and I was still horrified by it.

I would not remove this part. I would foreshadow it better with a few scenes with Calhoun, the brutes, etc., and I might change some of the details to be a bit less awful and gruesome, but I don't think I would remove it. There are a few core ideas here that I think all work:

The better class of criminal has left the city now, and all that are left are the worst of the worst, the people who will not respond to incentives or symbols or rational thought.

If you cannot strike at Superman's physical self, you strike at his mind instead, and one of the ways to do that is psychic damage. In Calhoun's case, this is irrational, a pure desire to hurt Superman in any way possible while his empire collapses.

The amount of evil in the world is enormous. The pain and suffering cannot be comprehended. I love what Superman says, that this isn't really unique, that these things happen to children all the time. He's upset about not being able to save them, but they're a drop in the bucket.

I think you have to be careful with sexual violence, whether it's depicted or hinted at or just briefly mentioned. There are tons of people who are not on board with that in their media, and even of those who are on board, it has to be handled carefully and can feel very cheap, as though you're just going to the worst and most transgressive thing you can think of for the shock value. People will see it as lazy and trivializing and making entertainment out of this horrible thing.

I think the world is shit. I think terrible things happen. I have always felt both oppressed by the weight of evil in the world and powerless to stop it. I think that's the thing that I'm gesturing at here, and it feels weird to me that sexual violence would get put on a pedestal as the one thing too horrible to mention, even though we're mentioning all the most horrible things.

How do Superman comics and shows and movies deal with this? My impression is that they don't. Surely Superman must be stopping rapes from happening, but I cannot think of a single time I've seen it happen. I'm actually having trouble thinking of a time it was implied to happen. I think this is probably a good idea on the part of the people who make these bits of media, but it's absolutely not realistic if you're thinking about how Superman would operate in the "real world". Sexual violence happens, child abuse happens, and I guess we just sort of assume that these things are dealt with by Superman off-screen.

Though ... I mean it impacts the characters, right? Does Superman not have a trauma response? Does he have a superpower where he can bottle it all up? He's definitely too late to stop certain crimes, and he definitely can't make things better for some of the victims, and I guess in the comics when he shows up to a burning building he generally has a 100% success rate and people come out with only minor injuries, but ... alright, this is definitely the sort of thing that led me to write this fic in the first place.

It's a question that the fic doesn't have an answer for: how do you go on living when you know that there's so much evil in the world?

I think dialing that particular scene back is, maybe, fine. But it's the sort of thing that would feel like I was being less authentic in a way, as though I wanted to grapple with the big questions but not that one, wanted to consider ethics and morality but silo myself away from things that actually are on my mind. I see the point of blunting that scene, and I rebel against it because I don't want to be blunted, I want to be sharp.

I would, however, remove a lot of the earlier references, or blunt those, because they didn't need to be sharp. There are, before the Whitman stuff, about five references to sexual violence, and maybe even just using "sexual violence" would be enough, rather than "rape". One of these references is to what crimes Superman is statistically most likely to stop, another is to a plot to besmirch his name, both can be massaged or they can go.

I don't know if I think about these things differently because time has passed or I've had a bunch of discussions about these issues, or whether it's just having the outside view. It's weird to think about what a conversation with myself would look like, if we were working on the story together.

Retrospective

I understand why Superman fans sometimes hate this story. There's the Superman OOC stuff, sure, but there are also a lot of questions about Superman that apply to canon equally well, and people hate that. Superman is a fantasy, maybe the ultimate comic book fantasy. He stops crimes and bullets bounce off him! You're not supposed to think about his stance on abortion rights. You're not supposed to look at the Clark Kent mask and say 'huh, that's strange'. I mean it's media, you can do whatever the hell you want, but if Superman is a fantasy, then there are a lot of questions that are fantasy-ruining.

I stand by the story as written about 80%, which is higher than I thought it would be, though there are certain things that I stand by more than others. There are certain structural changes and many line-by-line changes, and I'm glad that I didn't have the story open in edit mode, because it would have taken me three times as long to read and when I hit "save changes" people would grumble about archives or bad changes or whatever, because you can't please people.

About five years ago, I started writing A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good, which was meant as a companion piece to MM. It ended up being all mechanics, no plot, and the plot that I wanted it to have was divorced from the center questions it wanted to answer. It didn't feel as grand, I guess, and the cats were out of their bags a little too quickly.

One of the Answers that MM gives is that the thing you should do in the face of overwhelming evil is to grind relentlessly, grind until your bones are scraping the grindstone and there's nothing left of yourself. The story does not believe this answer, but it's one of the places I ended up ten years ago, and am still sort of at now. The other answer is to live as best you can, be aware of the evil and do what you can against it without letting the idea of it (or the battle against it) consume your soul.

When I was finished reading, I kind of wanted to write an uncritical Superman comic. Something where Superman can be as his most loyal fans see him, someone who is Good and doesn't often have to grapple with what Good means, where the thorny edges of moral quandaries never come to light and the hero is always there in the nick of time. Where Clark Kent is a bold and noble expression of humanity rather than a deception and a mask. Maybe I will go do that.

[offshore-brinicle]

see now i'm wondering if his ring ID is the kind of person yi sang could have become if he didn't join limbus company. like he internalizes the thinking pattern of "i'm a fool and not worth a damn and everything i do only hurts people" and expresses that self-loathing via his art. eats drywall

OK SO. I TOOK SOME TIME TO ANSWER THIS ONE BECAUSE I WAS TRYING TO GET HIM FOR MYSELF. I don't even really play the game anymore and keep up with the story via YouTube but. Y'know just to prove a point basically and Virtual Yi Sang Collectionism while I find myself with too much free time again so you might have gotten to see it by yourself by now but. Still.

Actually looking into this with his story and all of his dialogue they really did just give him an actual Bad End ID like Nclair, Ahabmael and G Corp Gregor (with some variation of Erlking joining eventually? but I have no idea how that will work taking in count the plot aspect) since Spicebush Yi Sang doesn't really Qualify as one of those and is even framed as being empowering in a way for him taking in count its release was timed so it could be used in the Farmwatch fight instead of waiting for the end of the Season like the others. I believed that W Corp Yi Sang was this spiritually; since it depicts him at his lowest point imaginable following on the track he was on already and the themes of Canto IV perfectly though not related to it, but now Ring Yi Sang has shown us a much more connected, and much darker potential path for him. So I'll take this post as my chance to analyze this:

In regards to his self-loathing it's very interesting that he actually seems to feel a sense of pride not seen in any of his other IDs, talking about "what he deserves" and disregarding everything that doesn't cause him a reaction. He now uses creation itself as a way to fill the emptiness inside of him, while in the main story, Yi Sang's resolution was that his impulse to create was his way of connecting with others.

You can see that in these lines, where he has completely disregarded everything about life and other people, pretty much all of his dialogue revolves around wanting to create and he has only interest in what can inspire him, to the point he nonchalantly kills civilians for failing to make him feel that way.

I feel like this is even expressed in the Sins for this ID compared to base Yi Sang, the set-up is the exact same; S1 Gloom and S3 Sloth. However, the one that changes is S2. Regular Yi Sang has S2 Envy while Ring Yi Sang has S2 Lust. Added this to Ring Yi Sang's passives even being fueled by Lust as well while base Yi Sang's are fueled by Gloom. I take this as a representation that he has taken this Lust, an obsessive desire, as being what will drive him forward throwing away all the self-loathing and regret, with many of his lines calling the past meaningless.

Now I'll tackle his story and do a rundown on it while giving my observation, as it ellaborates into this and what his mindset is (and frankly, it's utterly fantastic). First of all, we get a unique, dissonant track that so far seems to have never been used in any other instance in the game to my knowledge.

Yi Sang's approach to his scientist position is very...unique, because he does so as an artist rather than more proper scientific people like for example Faust, Dongrang, Aseah and Gubo. People who simply want practical application and results, means to an end. Dongbaek seems to be the only person who shares this approach he has which is why their bond is treated as unique compared to the other League of Nine members. At his core, what fascinated Yi Sang so much about technology and sciences was simply the euphoria of discovery itself, finding new things. Which is tackled immediately when Ring Yi Sang's story begins as I am showing here.

With science, you never truly "create" anything, you go through right and wrong answers until finding something that works or causes some effect, he even says so himself in Canto IV. And he goes on to criticize his prior fascination with technology with this particular aspect in mind. Even more shockingly is that he calls the League of Nine's conferences a "waste of time" now, each of their creations predictable which could tie into him being a one-of-a-kind genius, which is also somewhat tackled in Dongrang's observation log. To him, everything else his friends made was child's play.

So instead, he looks towards what made him so fascinated with The Mirror in the first place, echoing this particular point he makes during his log for Dongbaek, both of them are driven to reach something abstract and inconcievable and ended up using technology as their path to that vague destination that can only be described in poetry.

And finally, he completely foresakes his past at the League. He even he believes he finally has his wings but calls them fabricated, and there is something obviously wrong with the entire thing on multiple levels. They are fabricated wings because he was guided to this conclusion by the hand of another, rather than the introspection throughout IV. His chapter title is "The Unchanging", and it's the only chapter where the trait assigned in the title to the focus Sinner is a positive; him staying true to himself and his ideals was the key, but he needed to actually move past his apathy and actually grasp them, but here he has completely changed beyond recognition. Turned arrogant, callous and utterly irrational, discarding all of his self-loathing by divorciating himself from the self that he hates, yet the Sloth—the apathy remains, instead of moving past it, fighting it back with his Lust in an endless cycle of dopamin chases while growing numb to everything else and even destroying it if it fails to satisfy that Lust so that it will, as shown as he kills failing students to take delight in their shock and agony.

But at the same time it frames that portrait of the League in his background art a completely different meaning. It is most likely that this portrait is a mockery of all of them, regarding the past and the life he lived until now including his past self with the same condescencion he does examinees that fail to impress him. Specially when you take in count how his own face is much more well-painted than the childish erratic strokes he assigns to the other, making them look ridiculous. But at the same time, Yeonsim is there under them, but flipped to its underside, he still held onto it but as far as we know it might be completely broken and only keeps it as part of his insulting work going by another of his idle chatter lines.

This dark inversion of Yi Sang's journey even before Limbus and Canto IV is also emphasized by Pointillism in particular being chosen as the subject for this ID, this was first pointed out by this Korean Twitter user (and fellow irl Yi Sang enjoyer going by the layout) in the original announcement for this ID:

Of course, this theme compliments Yi Sang's resolution in IV pretty well. He loved the League and grew to love Limbus because they were his resting place. I can't find any translation of Jochunjeommyo however, so I can only rely on summaries and posts put through machine translation. But from what I can summarize, the story is about an artist who can't find a place to breathe and simply exist due to the materialistic, capitalistic nature of the city he finds himself in, which fits pretty neatly with Yi Sang's story as a whole.

I'd also like to point out how a less overtly unhinged variation of this kind of development is shown in his Dieci ID story (which I wanted to make a post on for a while because it really feels like it was preliminary to this and not enough people talk about how messed up Dieci Yi Sang actually is) and how he comes to adopt a mentality just like Ryoshu's, with her already being linked to The Fingers and knowing about their workings personally to the point she might have been affiliated at some point though we cannot confirm, however I will instead link to this post by my friend on the topic since they already did a dissection on how Yi Sang and Ryoshu act as ideological foils and they pretty much said it better than I could: https://www.tumblr.com/ishcliff/743271628518129664/so-any-thoughts-of-well-the-blade-lineage-itself?source=share

So that's all I've got for now! Honestly I am so over the moon with this ID and the potential implications going forward as you can imagine.

[sonkitty]

The Sideburns Scheme Post #100

(For reference: The Sideburns Scheme)

Crowley, Good Omens 2, Episode 6, Every Day, partner

...

I will be covering Maggie and Nina talking to Crowley, then the little bit that happens afterward before the argument scene of the bookshop.

...

Sideburns Check

The sideburns are still a medium length.

...

Brighter Red Streak Check

The more saturated red streak of hair can be found.

...

Hairstyle Changes

The top hair looks to have smoothed some and rises up a little taller.

...

Earthly Objects

(For reference: Earthly Objects)

Both Maggie and Nina touch the doorknob, the rug, and the steps into the bookshop.

Nina has a question and number with, "Where's the other one?"

Crowley is shown as having his feet crossed with his touch on the chair.

Both Maggie and Nina sit down on a couch. Each of them has some variation of a statement of place, which is often used as an extended form of Hello, but we seem a little past when a Hello should happen.

Nina points out, "You and your partner..."

Maggie claims they are not a game. They're real people.

Both of these characters are in a game as game pieces and not real people, but I guess that's a thing fictional characters do and say. The story is real enough to them.

Crowley has a question with, "Why are you telling me all this?"

Maggie says Aziraphale's "Mr. Fell" name.

Despite the weight of this conversation that Maggie and Nina want to have, neither one of them have any respect or care for using Crowley's name during this conversation. It might be that they can't, but we at least know for certain that they don't.

Crowley shifts his touch on the chair by crossing his legs.

...

Time to pay attention to the pockets.

At the start of when Crowley appears on screen, his tassel tips are on his belt. Put another way, that's the thumb tips of his Tied Hands on his Belt Head.

In my looking to see if the Tied Hands retie, a clasp might be at an edge of the lapel when Crowley shifts to cross his legs differently. The face of Crowley's watch is visible. He has an extended index finger when pointing at them, talking about Maggie crying and Nina needed rescuing.

I can't seem to find any thumb joint alignments with the jacket edges though Crowley's right thumb tip does such a thing when he moves to shift how he crosses his legs.

Crowley doesn't seem to be making many pockets with his body. I can mainly find a couple involving his right arm and the rest of the body when he moves around in the chair.

His Belt Head is visible at the start of the scene and when he shifts how he crosses his legs.

I can't find any Overhead Lights for him.

...

Story Commentary

In the part before cutting away to Aziraphale and the Metatron, I think this scene sucks.

The bookshop is closed. The door is not locked, but the bookshop is closed and has the sign saying so. Maggie and Nina show us that they do not care. They don't bother themselves with being invited. They don't even have the decency to knock, like Gabriel and Muriel did. They just let themselves in.

Based on what we've been shown of the story, they shouldn't do that because angels were on the verge of turning them into pillars of salt.

We have been given no indication that they know who is actually inside.

But they still go in, lacking basic human decency to a closed bookshop.

Receiving the news that Aziraphale is out and it's not a good time, they, again, show us they don't care. Nina says, "I wasn't asking. There are things you need to hear."

These two do not give a fuck about Crowley in this scene. They really don't.

I can understand the whole, "We're not a game," thing. Earthly Objects itself isn't exactly easy to find, play, or understand. It's a very interesting (but frustrating) part of a very strange story.

So, fine, okay, the sooner they tell the supernatural being to back off, the better and maybe that's their sense of urgency.

Up to that only though, in my opinion.

The part that really bothers me is mainly Maggie thinking she has any grasp of the relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley.

Maggie and Crowley have barely spoken to each other the entire season.

Aziraphale never even mentions Crowley to Maggie in the two main conversations they have in Maggie's record shop.

We didn't see her invitation, so we don't know what she knows of the relationship in something that simple.

Her argument is that they don't talk to each other. Then when Crowley points out they've been talking for millions of years, her argument shifts to Crowley never says what he's really thinking.

Maggie has no way of knowing that because nothing in her or Crowley's characterization says she is familiar enough with the relationship to make that call.

Even if she did have some twisted way of having spied on Crowley and Aziraphale during the season, she'd still be wrong. Crowley was quite forthcoming in his thoughts about taking Gabriel in during episode 1. Before he had that argument, he was quick to ask about what the problem was because he knows Aziraphale's Something's Wrong voice. He said so himself. Crowley had his own special way of responding to the idea of loaning his car. He made his opinions known about Aziraphale making changes to his car while it was borrowed. And so on.

Nina says some notably wrong things too, but they are a little more understandable in the full context of the story given. I'm not bothered by them.

She says Crowley's the "can't trust anyone ever again" one.

That is emphatically untrue, but she's not around Crowley enough to know. Crowley does trust. He trusts Aziraphale. He developed a trust in Gabriel. I don't know why he seems to have such a deep trust in Muriel, but that's what I read from the Earthly Objects game and how the two interact overall. I am very curious about him and Muriel.

So, here we have two human beings understandably getting on Crowley's case for interfering with their lives. Then one of them proceeds to interfere with his life by giving him bad relationship advice on a subject she is very clearly very ignorant of. She does that while being either unwilling or unable to address him by name.

Oh, and how about how Maggie finishes it off by saying, "That was all we needed. It's what you two need as well."?

I don't know what story Maggie's reading or thinks she's in, but it's not the same one I'm reading about her. She and Nina have not gotten all they needed. Nina just recently said as much because she needs time to deal with her recently ended relationship. They aren't together. Upon Maggie insisting she'll be there when Nina's ready, Nina took no solace in that and told Maggie that wasn't helping. That signifies problems are already brewing between them.

Like I said, they have not gotten all they needed.

Her advice to Crowley isn't what he and Aziraphale need either.

Crowley and Aziraphale are two different people who love the world in their own separate ways, handle problems together and separately, and who love each other dearly. They are both supernatural beings who have a lot of experience she doesn't. They have a problem specific to their status of being an angel and a demon.

Not only are Crowley and Aziraphale together, they've been playing games this season where they have to work together separately in a story designed to pull them apart by its end.

I have my differences with The Magic Trick You Didn't See theory, but this scene is one where I mean that the idea of possibly intentionally bad writing resonates.

If I'm supposed to find Maggie endearing or this advice worthwhile, that didn't happen. She is clueless, and it shows.

And because I like Crowley and can head canon as I please, I'm going to take his reaction as more of him thinking if there's something more he wants to say before "it's too late," than any merit in anything Maggie actually says.

Despite all my complaining, something this conversation does accomplish is show that these two humans still see Crowley as human enough to think his relationship with Aziraphale is like a human partnership.

That could be why the left sideburn will shorten, even if these two humans probably don't think Crowley is actually human.

Moving onto what happens next...

The story cuts away to Aziraphale and the Metatron. Aziraphale's showing mixed emotions. He looks nervous, sounds flustered, looks happy, then looks nervous again.

In light of looking for a Metatron mistake, the Metatron could be messing up the shoulder-demon role because Aziraphale pulls away while humans end up visually pocketed between the two characters as Aziraphale keeps moving. I have not been going over the matter closely but keeping it in mind ever since engaging with this post about looking at the Metatron as the demon on the shoulder. Most shoulder-angel or shoulder-demon cuts keep other characters out of the pocket between the focused character and the shoulder character.

Another thing I notice with this particular cut is that three relevant humans to the door trickery coming up at the end of this episode pass by. All three are even among those who are my guesses for the magic words.

The woman wearing black, including a black hat, and carrying a bag is my guess for "dash of nutmeg". The guy in yellow and pocketing his hands with a dark gray vest is "banana." The woman with the orange jacket is "shoelace" (later). She doesn't show her shoes here.

To remind us that things are off with these background humans, Banana ends up passing by the bookshop front behind Aziraphale in the next cut.

In any case, Aziraphale makes his way back to the bookshop and shows us his doorknob touch for this episode.

Maggie and Nina are preparing to leave.

In the background, Crowley is shown standing with pocket touches. He's easy to miss and not clear, but from what can be seen, it looks to me like his left sideburn shortened to what is usually found around humans.

Something I certainly don't know and a question I have is if there is any benefit to him having short sideburns there. He should still be able to touch his pockets, and he's done with his silly face touches with the sunglasses. The humans were already able to find him as a demon in the bookshop, and no human is coming back in again for the rest of the episode. So, what does he get out of it, if anything? The sideburns are about to lengthen once the humans close the door.

Something else this glimpse of Crowley accomplishes is to make sure he's in the front bookend to the next Muriel scene.

This part of the episode also shows that Crowley fixed the broken window during his tidying process earlier.

Instead of Maggie or Nina stopping to say they wanted to talk to Aziraphale too, they keep moving. Maggie says they were just going. Nina says she's sure they have a lot to say.

So, again, the story shows us that Maggie and Nina do not actually give a fuck about talking to "them," the plural of Crowley and Aziraphale. They were here specifically to get to Crowley, whether they realize it or not.

Aziraphale smiles nervously as the others leave, closing the door behind them.

Maggie and Nina smile, and I'm generally annoyed with both of them.

Nina walks toward the coffee shop, and the Metatron vaguely follows. He stops and talks to Muriel.

Now onto my next guess for a Metatron mistake.

I've actually mentioned this potential mistake, without calling it that, as far back as Windows Part 2 of my posts.

A complex window scene requires three steps. The looker looks. The window sees. The looker is seen clearly behind the window with some of its window frame visible.

The Metatron looks, but we don't see what the window sees for his Earthly Objects play.

Okay, well, not every character tries for a complex window scene. Sometimes we don't get what "the window sees," which is supposed to be the camera telling us there's a window frame for the window.

But even if we don't get what the window saw, we get what the looker saw in some form because the camera and characters shift us forward to do that. For example, in episode 1, we don't see a complex window scene for Gabriel's arrival. We see Maggie and Nina exit the coffee shop amidst the commotion from other people in the street. They crossed a door threshold instead and give us information about what they saw in the story through their movement and dialogue. In episode 2, Maggie and Aziraphale look at Nina through a window. There's no window frame to indicate what the window saw, but we see Nina to confirm she is the subject they saw.

The Metatron's play does not do that here as the Final Fifteen starts. We will not see him again until he touches the doorknob of the bookshop again. He, as a character in the story, isn't confirming for us that he is indeed looking through a window and what he sees through that window. He never will. His dialogue will do the same thing with him asking, "How did he take it?"

Another factor is Muriel.

Muriel wears all white, and White keeps. That's not going to help with the window look. Muriel does at least two things that probably prevent the Metatron from taking advantage of their all-white attire. They keep their pocket chain hidden from the camera. They are holding a book where the cover is mostly black. Black blocks.

...

That's it for this post. Sometimes I edit my posts, FYI.

...

Main post:

The Sideburns Scheme

[intersex-support]

Something that has been helpful for me when having conversations about what counts as intersex is to really engage in enquiry about what the label means and how we're using it. To me, it's been more helpful to think through questions like:

What purpose does labeling a variation as intersex serve?

In what ways is societal understandings of "typical" changing?

Why was the label of intersex created and has our use of the label shifted?

What ways are we building intersex community? What do we want intersex community to look like?

How do our experiences of oppression impact our understanding of intersex as a term?

What sources are we drawing from when we develop definitions of intersex?

What is the history of the way intersex has been used?

What ways has intersex community been exclusionary in the past, and is that in line with our current values?

Definitions of intersex have always been tied up with what the medical world decides to classify as differences of sex development, but especially in the past twenty years as intersex community has grown more connected, we've started to have a lot more self-determination in our communities. But I think a lot of people still really have a misconception that intersex is a biological "third sex" that is strictly medically defined, and that there are clear cutoffs between intersex and endosex.

Instead, I'd like to bring in the concept of compulsory dyadism to introduce a framework where intersex is an intentional political label used as a way to build community for the people whose variation of sex characteristics are most impacted by the stigma and violence associated with compulsory dyadism.

Sex diversity is not just limited to intersex people. Even within the boundaries of dyadic/endosex bodies, people have variations like different amounts of body hair, penis size, hormone levels, breast size, as well as things like disabilities affecting any of those traits. For example, very few people actually have all the "ideal" traits that line up with this constructed idea of an endosex body that has the exact "correct" amount of estrogen, the right size chest, the ability to bear children, "normal" periods. Many endosex people might have a variation in one of those aspects at differing times during their life, such as during menopause, for example. And this framework can help us understand how diagnoses such as endometriosis are not intersex, but people might still notice overlaps in certain experiences.

But the reason that not everyone is considered intersex and the reason that having a separation between endosex and intersex is important is because of the stigma and violence associated with straying further and further from that dyadic norm, and intersex is a label used to describe people who are the most impacted by that stigma and violence. We have been socially labeled as "deviating" the most from the "normal" sex binary, and consequentially face intersexism both on a systematic and personal level. Our collection of sex variations becomes located entirely outside of the sex binary, and as a result, we often face curative violence, social stigma, and systematic exclusion from many parts of society.

This definition isn't a perfect definition. I think we need to have room to develop more nuance around the fact that many intersex people might not feel like their experience of being intersex has brought them any personal stigma or violence, as well as understanding that there isn't going to be a universal intersex experience. Even when discussing how intersex people are the most impacted by compulsory dyadism compared to endosex people, I think it's important to recognize that within the intersex community, our additional intersecting identities are absolutely going to influence our experiences with oppression and that it's vital to intentionally uplift the members of our intersex community who are most impacted by oppression. In the United States, the creation of the sex binary was an explicitly racist process, and racialized intersex people are subject to additional layers of stigma, violence and scrutiny. (Check out chapters 4-6 in the book Cripping Intersex by Dr. Celeste Orr for a really in depth discussion of how antiblackness and compulsory dyadism are forces behind why the Olympic sports sex testing has pretty much exclusively targeted Black women from the Global South, regardless of whether or not they are actually intersex. Also recommend reading The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Dr Kyla Schuller.) I also have talked with many intersex people who are tired of us always being represented through trauma narratives in the media, and who want us to be able to build a definition of intersex that isn't based around violence or tragedy. And I think that's really important that we also share our stories of intersex joy, and pride, and healing. I think that claiming intersex can be something really radical, and that's super valuable to me.

Overall I think that if we build our discussions around who is intersex on concepts to do with our social and political location, and take into consideration concepts like compulsory dyadism, sex diversity, and disability, we are going to be able to understand why any of it matters better than if our determinations of intersex identity are based solely in medicalized concepts of a third sex.

TL;DR: Although endosex people also have diversity when it comes to sex traits, intersex is still an important label that not everyone can claim. Compulsory dyadism is a force that affects all of us, but intersex people are the most impacted by compulsory dyadism and face intersexist stigma and violence for our intersex variations. As a result, intersex is an important label for us to claim so that we can build community and solidarity around our experiences. I think it is better understood as a sociopolitical label that describes the relationship between our biological bodies and the cultures we live in, rather than as a medicalized term that described a coherent "third sex."

other intersex people feel free to add on to this post-I'm only one person without all the answers, and would love to hear other perspectives!

[twistedtummies2]

Top 15 Vampires (Who AREN'T Dracula)

Something a lot of people seem to misconstrue about me is that I am a massive fan of vampires and vampire fiction. This really isn’t the case: what I AM is a massive fan of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” specifically. I am fascinated by seeing different interpretations of that particular novel, and especially its title character. When it comes to vampire fiction as a whole, I am much less well-versed and interested. SPOILER ALERT: you won’t be seeing TV franchises like “True Blood,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Dark Shadows,” or “What We Do in the Shadows” here, for the simple fact that I have never seen any of them and really don’t have any intention of seeing them. This applies to a lot of other television programs, works of literature, films, and video games: vampires, by default, do not automatically equal my vested interest. HOWEVER…this does not mean I have NO interest in vampires, as a concept. Long before Bram Stoker’s seminal work was published and reached its heights of popularity, the idea of the vampire - an undead creature who rises from the grave to drain the blood of the living - was a fantasy and myth spanning not only many centuries, but many different cultures. Just about every nation, region, and spiritual belief under the setting Sun has had some variation of the vampire legend, and written stories of vampiric characters and events date back much, much further back than Stoker’s time. What “Dracula” really did was bring the concept into the popular consciousness, especially through its renditions onstage and in motion pictures, in a way no written or orally transferred piece of work had done before. That popularity has really only continued to grow over the decades. Being such a widespread idea, and one with increasing fascination for many people over time, it’s only natural that while I may favor Dracula and his exploits beyond all the rest, I have still seen SOME pieces of vampire fiction not necessarily related to the Count of Transylvania. So, I decided it was time to give all of them some attention. Now, I should point out that I won’t be counting characters I already talked about on my Top 31 Favorite Dracula list: even if they aren’t technically Dracula himself, such as with The Count from “Sesame Street,” or Count Chocula, it just seems like cheating to include them here since…well…I already brought them up, and it was in relation to Dracula! With that said, some Dracula-inspired characters WILL be present on this list that did NOT get discussed in the past, because Dracula-inspired does not equal Dracula himself. Also, I will be including characters who are dhampirs - half-vampire, half-human - or might be considered “unconventional vampires,” so to speak. If they have all the hallmarks I’m looking for, they can be eligible. Oh, and if you’re a fan of “Twilight”...firstly, you probably shouldn’t be reading this, and secondly, you’re going to be massively disappointed. :P Now that we’ve established those points…let’s waste no more time. Prepare some garlic and, if you don’t have any crucifixes handy, consider buying a couple: these are My Top 15 Favorite Vampires…Who AREN’T Count Dracula.

15. NOS-4-A2, from Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

Starting off with an unconventional sort of vampire. NOS-4-A2 is Dracula parody character, created by the evil Emperor Zurg. He is a robotic “energy vampire” who detests the taste of blood, instead feeding off electrical energy. This, of course, still makes him a very dangerous threat, especially in a sci-fi styled universe with so many electronic gadgets and gizmos laying around, and with more robots roaming the galaxy than you can shake a stick at. Ultimately breaking away from his creator’s influence, NOS-4-A2 continued to bedevil the heroes of Star Command throughout the show’s run, and was arguably the scariest major villain of the whole show. This is especially fascinating since he was played by Craig Ferguson, of all people; not the most obvious casting to play a vampire of any kind, I’d say.

14. Demetri Maximoff, from Darkstalkers.

These games were inspired by the Universal Monsters of yore, with characters based on figures of fright like the Wolfman, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Mummy, just to name a few. Demetri is effectively the Dracula surrogate of the franchise…but, since he ISN’T actually Dracula, and I have not mentioned him before, I think he can count here. (Plus, in the…very, VERY bad cartoon series loosely based on the games, Dracula is actually present as a character and is Demetri’s uncle, so…there’s that, too, I guess.) Demetri is an extremely vain and power-hungry vampire warlord, who believes himself to be superior to not only all humans, but perhaps all other forms of life. This led to him arrogantly challenging the demon Belial to a duel in a time long past. Demetri lost, and thus was banished to the mortal realm, where he now seeks to find a way to regain his former glory. His greatest rival is the succubus, Morrigan, daughter of Belial. Demetri isn’t particularly complex, but he IS a very entertainingly dark and powerful character. At the same time, there are some humorous aspects to Maximoff’s personality: one of his special moves, “Midnight Bliss,” literally causes him to turn the male characters he fights into comical female forms, because Demetri really, REALLY prefers the blood of women to that of men. Also, how many other vampires will stop in the middle of a fight to spray themselves with cologne?

13. Lady Dimitrescu, from Resident Evil Village.

I could be entirely wrong about this, but I got the feeling that “Village”- much like the Darkstalkers franchise - was Resident Evil’s throwback to the classic Universal Monsters. When the villains include an elegant vampire, a werewolf, a mad scientist, and a mutant fish person, and the setting is a creepy little town with a dark castle? You’ll forgive me if I see certain parallels. Regardless of any influences, I think it’s fair to say that Lady Dimitrescu, a.k.a. “The Tall Lady,” stands on her own two (very long) legs quite well. While all of the villains in the game are different shades of awesome, Lady D. is by far the most popular. She is the first major antagonist the players encounter in this action/horror combination, as we are forced to try and escape from her Gothic castle while facing not only her, but also her equally wicked daughters. Dimitrescu isn’t a typical vampire, but rather the result of scientific mutation, which has transformed her into a vampire-like creature with a humanoid veneer. Still, she’s no more unconventional than NOS-4-A2, I’d say (or a bunch of other characters still to come), so I don’t see any reason she can’t count.

12. Father Abel Nightroad, from Trinity Blood.

Finally, a character who is decidedly NOT influenced by Dracula! There are a ton of vampire-themed anime out there, but I haven’t seen very many of them; again, I’m more into Dracula, specifically, than vampires as a whole. However, there are a few characters and shows on this list, and this guy is the first of them. “Trinity Blood” focuses on the adventures of Abel Nightroad, who is one of only two surviving members of a race known as a Crusnik (also spelled “Krusnik;” not sure which is the more generally accepted spelling): while vampires feed on human beings, a Crusnik is essentially a vampire that feeds on other vampires. Abel works for the Vatican (which, in the alternate reality of the series, has basically taken over the human world…read into that what you will), acting as a sort of ambassador, trying to keep peace between the nation of humans and the nation of vampires. Abel is a classic example of a character type I really love: I don’t know what the name for it is, but it’s a scenario where the character often appears to be silly and goofy and perhaps even a sweetheart, but underneath it all they are made of steel and can be VERY dangerous. Characters like Sans, The Doctor, Disney’s Clopin, Adrian Monk…the list goes on. Abel is one of those types: on the surface, at first glance, he’s a clumsy, sugar-addicted, perpetually-broke goofball who tries desperately to avoid all conflict. When the chips are down, however, he’s quick to remind those who cause trouble why he’s basically the alpha predator of this world’s food chain. It’s the classic “beware the fury of a patient man” concept: when the peaceful priest is also a vampire of vampires, the last thing you want to do is make him mad.

11. Taiga Nobori, a.k.a. Kamen Rider Saga, from Kamen Rider Kiva.

“Kamen Rider Kiva” is a Japanese superhero program - part of the long-running “Kamen Rider” franchise - themed around…you guessed it…Universal Monsters. The series focuses on the titular Kamen Rider Kiva (real name Wataru Kurenai), who uses his powers to hunt down shapeshifting, vampiric monsters referred to as “Fangires.” The Fangires are ruled by a chess-themed group of superiors known as the Checkmate Four. At the time of the series’ start, the current leader of the Checkmate Four is this character: Taiga Nobori, who becomes a rival of Wataru under the identity of Kamen Rider Saga. Taiga is a childhood friend of Wataru, who is ultimately revealed to secretly be his long lost sibling. Despite this, he at first plays an antagonistic role in the story; as the series goes on, he has to struggle with his relationship with Wataru, his love for Mio - a lady both of them love dearly - and his responsibility as the new King of the Fangires. Again, not by any means a conventional vampire (or dhampir), but a very fun character and more than worthy of placement on my personal list.

10. Bunnicula.

This little guy is almost undoubtedly the cutest life-sucking undead creature in history. Why? Well…he’s a bunny. A cute, adorable, fluffy, sweet little bunny with big red eyes and a little widow’s peak marking on his noggin. How can you NOT love this fuzzy little sweetheart? If I weren’t allergic to rabbits, I’d snuggle him to bits! Bunnicula is the mascot of the popular “Bunnicula” book series…however, in the original books, he’s not actually the main character. In fact, there are several short novels where Bunnicula never appears. He is, however, nevertheless, a prominent figure throughout the series. The books typically follow a certain formula: Chester the Cat and Harold the Dog encounter some spooky, creepy thing. Chester - an over-dramatic ham who never likes to admit his true feelings and isn’t as smart as he thinks he is - tries to solve the mystery in the most inept and hilarious way possible. Harold, who is much more practical and reasonable, basically acts as the straight man to hold back Chester’s crazy. Bunnicula is, at first, Chester’s arch-nemesis, as the cat believes the vampire bunny has plans for world domination…but in fact, Bunnicula is completely harmless. He doesn’t drink blood, but instead just drains vegetables of their juices, leaving shriveled, dried-up husks behind. It’s a bit creepy, sure, but he has no desire to hurt people or other animals. And, even though he may be centuries old, he’s still basically just a baby bunny; he’s way too young and sweethearted to even imagine world conquest. The books are highly popular - renowned for their messages of tolerance and looking-before-one-leaps - and have been the inspiration for multiple reimaginings and adaptations. Most of these versions give Bunnicula even more vampiric powers and heighten his role in things. Regardless, however, his basic personality remains the same: occasionally mischievous, but generally just a cuddly little bun-bun…who also happens to be an immortal vegetable-draining demon, but that’s just part of his charm.

9. Lestat de Lioncourt, from The Vampire Chronicles.

I don’t think I’m physically ALLOWED to talk about vampires (that are not Dracula) without acknowledging the work of Anne Rice. She is the author of “The Vampire Chronicles,” an EXTREMELY popular series that many consider to be second only to Dracula, in terms of influential literature. The books focus on the life and adventures of Lestat de Lioncourt: a centuries old vampire, living in 1980s America. Once the son of a nobleman, Lestat was transformed into a vampire by an ancient evil; in the modern day, he is now the head of a vampiric rock band. Rice is often credited with revitalizing interest in vampires as a concept, especially focusing on the sexual overtones of the idea, and the sympathetic qualities of a lonely, eternal life. This reputation is…somewhat dubious; as far as I can tell, these things were popular and noteworthy well before her first book was published. In my opinion, the REAL power of Rice’s work is due to two specific factors. First, the explicitness of the writing: her books are some of the raunchiest and most violently bloodthirsty vampire novels written up to that time. Through literature, she gets away with stuff that, up to that point, not even most films - in a genre that was growing increasingly brutal and randy - could get away with. Second, and I think this is where her reputation really shows its power…Lestat himself, and the way he’s treated. It’s not simply that Lestat is a sympathetic character, it’s that - unlike, as far as I can tell, ALL major, noteworthy vampires in fiction before him - he isn’t treated necessarily as a monster. He is not the antagonist, but instead the main character we follow and learn about, as well as learn from. While he is not necessarily a hero, he also isn’t the villain, and is not meant to be seen as such; he is simply a man who has lived a very long life. And like any man, ESPECIALLY one who has lived a long life, he has done many terrible things…but he has also done many good things. Ultimately, I personally find other vampires and vampire stories much more interesting than Rice’s work, but the influence she’s had cannot be ignored. Lestat is more than deserving of recognition in my Top 10.

8. Vamp, from Metal Gear Solid.

Of all the unconventional vampires on this countdown, Vamp is arguably the weirdest. Rather than a supernatural being, Vamp is what might be termed a “science vampire”: the result of biological experimentation, rather than anything magical or paranormal. Not only that, but despite looking like a vampire, having vampire-like abilities, being of stereotypically vampirish Romanian descent, and even having a literal taste for blood…Vamp’s name has NOTHING to do with him being a “vampire.” (Where does his name come from? Look it up, I find it to be absolutely stupid, so I’m not naming it here.) It’s as if the creators wanted to make a vampire character, yet for some baffling reason didn’t want to make him a “real” vampire. While this whole setup is utterly backwards, it does nothing to harm the actual character, thankfully. Vamp is one of the more well-known antagonists in the MGS series, despite only appearing properly in two games, and a personal favorite of mine (for obvious reasons). He is vicious, mysterious, has a slight flair for the dramatic, and generally is just really, REALLY cool. The most noteworthy thing about Vamp - aside from his superhuman strength and speed, and the fact that he’s REALLY hard to kill - is his skill with knives and daggers. Whether it’s wielding them at close quarters or flinging them about left and right, his abilities with blades make him a particularly frightening foe to take on, and his boss battles are among the more tricky in the titles he appears in. Kudos must also go to voice acting great Phil LaMarr, whose unsettling performance is a big part of the character’s appeal. Whether he’s a “true” vampire or not, Vamp is certainly vampire-themed, and therefore I say still more than counts for the top ten on my list.

7. Seras Victoria, from Hellsing Ultimate.

I specifically credit “Hellsing Ultimate” because I haven’t watched the original Hellsing anime, nor have I read the manga. With that said, “Hellsing Ultimate” is one of my favorite anime programs, as well as quite possibly the single most violent I’ve ever seen. While the main protagonist of the series is Count Dracula-I mean, Alucard (GREAT way to disguise your identity there, sir), I would argue it’s the apparent secondary protagonist of the series who has the most dynamic story arc. That character is everyone’s favorite “Police Girl,” Seras Victoria. At the start of the show, Seras is a young rookie cop whose squad is attacked by a horde of ghouls, controlled by a villainous vampire. Alucard is only able to save her life by transforming her into a vampire as well. The rest of the series has Seras trying to balance who she is with what she’s become: she not only has to discover how to handle her newfound vampiric powers, but also has to learn and accept what it really means to be a vampire. Some people seem to dismiss Seras as pithy comic relief - she is the most lighthearted character of the main cast - but I feel that’s an extremely unfair assessment: while I admit it took a little time for me to warm up to her, I now feel she’s one of the most interesting characters in the show, second only to Alucard. Seras is earnest and altruistic, at times almost childlike…but she is also more than capable of kicking butt, and is as mighty on the battlefield as virtually any of her comrades. It’s that wonderful dichotomy of her being a good, gentle person and a powerful, stalwart warrior that makes her so enjoyable. It’s rare you’ll find well-written, strong female characters who are able to be impressive physical threats while also still being generally good-hearted human beings, as well as very funny to watch. Seras is such a rarity, and earns all the praise she gets and more for it.

6. Carmilla.

If there is a single vampire that has been portrayed as often as Dracula…well, factually, there hasn’t been. But if there is one who comes close, it’s the Countess Karnstein: the titular character of the story “Carmilla” by J.S. LeFanu. Her story was, in fact, an influence on Bram Stoker when he created “Dracula.” The story is most well-known because it is heavily, HEAVILY implied that Carmilla is a lesbian: considering the tale was published in the 1870s, it’s kind of amazing that LeFanu got away with that. Of course, the REASON he got away with it is because he depicted the lesbian character as being a literal bloodthirsty monster, but Carmilla, in the book, is also something of a tragic figure. Her feelings for Laura - a young lady who befriends her, not realizing Carmilla wants to make her into her next victim (and probably has the hots for her) - are ultimately unreciprocated, but from Carmilla’s side at least, they seem to be genuine, or at least very passionate. Once she is slain, Laura doesn’t rejoice: she admits that she misses the person she considered a friend, and still has nightmares about the horrible truth itself. The character of Carmilla has appeared multiple times beyond the story, but sadly I haven’t seen many interpretations: Hammer Horror’s “Karnstein Trilogy” of films follow the book to a point, before veering off into wilder territory. In the “Castlevania” franchise, Carmilla is a recurring antagonist, usually serving as Dracula’s rival, follower, or both. She is referenced in “The Batman vs. Dracula” as Dracula’s former bride. In “Fate/Grand Order,” it’s revealed that Carmilla’s true identity is the infamous serial killer Elisabeth Bathory. None of these have ANYTHING to do with LeFanu’s story, but they are certainly intriguing. There are much more faithful versions out there, if you look, but I have not experienced them…yet. I was very tempted to name Carmilla in my Top 5, but ultimately I think there are just more characters, in general, I like more, so she just barely misses out. Sorry, ma’am.

5. Noe Archiviste, from The Case Study of Vanitas.

If there is a single vampire ALMOST as adorable as the aforementioned Bunnicula, I would argue it’s Noe: one of the main protagonists of the anime “The Case Study of Vanitas.” The show is based on the manga (which I still need to read) by Jun Mochizuki: the creator of my favorite manga (and what SHOULD have been my favorite anime), “Pandora Hearts.” While PH is a reimagining of the “Alice” stories by Lewis Carroll, “Case Study of Vanitas” is an homage to various works of dark period fiction. It contains various references - some more obvious than others - to literary works like “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” classic horror films like “Nosferatu,” and more. The plot is set in a steampunk universe where vampires and humans co-habitate more or less harmoniously. Many vampires in this world are infected with a mysterious curse, which turns them into violent monsters. Noe is a young vampire nobleman, who - while traveling to Paris - ends up becoming a bodyguard for the mysterious Vanitas: a self-proclaimed doctor who uses a magical book to “heal” cursed vampires. At first, the two start off on a very rocky relationship, but as time goes on, they eventually become friends. Noe is wonderful because of the dichotomy of his character: on the one hand, he’s absolutely precious. Seriously. He’s usually friendly, naive, at times a bit dim, tries hard to be polite, loves his pet cat, and is filled with a sense of spellbound wonder at the world around him, showing an excitable playfulness. He’s typically just the most loveable cinnamon bun of a vampire you could ever meet. On the flip side, however…he IS a vampire, and not only that, he’s a POWERFUL vampire. While he’s usually an absolute sweetheart, his patience is not limitless: if Noe is angered, or feels a need to defend himself, he can be TERRIFYING. I really love characters who have that kind of dual nature, and Noe is a great example of it: easily a fine pick for my top five.

4. David, from The Lost Boys (1987).

It’s hard to believe, given the bad rap he often gets nowadays for movies like “Batman & Robin,” that filmmaker Joel Schumacher was actually considered a highly respected and talented movie master. He, in fact, made a bunch of REALLY good movies in his time, and many would argue that this horror-comedy blend is his best. “The Lost Boys” is considered one of the most influential modern vampire stories, alongside the aforementioned works of Anne Rice, but in a different kind of way: the vampires in the Lost Boys are not elegant, glamorous figures, nor sympathetic immortals tortured by their own eternity. These are what I call “punk vampires”: the main villains are basically your standard biker gang of Goth hoodlums, who love wearing leather, smoking, drinking, causing general street mayhem, and swagger around with cocksure pride in their antics. They just also happen to be vampires, and have all the powers vampire have as a result: extended lifespans, eternal youth, flight, superhuman strength, and various other supernatural abilities. The allure of these vampires comes from their vivacity and fun; there’s a certain “wish fulfillment” aspect to the way the vampires are portrayed in “The Lost Boys,” as they represent all the things people sort of WISH they could do…but the cost of having so much power and access to so many thrills is very high. Nowhere is this better embodied than in the main antagonist, David, played by Kiefer Sutherland. David is a charismatic fellow with a commanding presence and charm. He is the quintessential “bad boy”: a sensual, attractive portrait of raw danger. He is also, however, a murderous psychopath, without a shred of compassion left in his soul. Whenever I think of vampires, David is one of the first characters I imagine, and more than worthy of a spot in my top five.

3. Genevieve Dieudonne, from the works of Kim Newman.

I say “the works of Kim Newman” because Genevieve was originally created as the heroine of a series of books by Newman called “Drachenfels.” These books are connected to the highly popular “Warhammer” franchise. I know basically nothing about either of these things. So, how is Diuedonne so high up in the ranks? Well, as it turns out, Newman also used the same character as one of the main protagonists of another series I really, REALLY love: “Anno Dracula.” For those who came in late, “Anno Dracula” is set in an alternate universe where Dracula succeeds in taking over England, ultimately turning a large number of the population of Europe into vampires. In many ways, I think the books succeed in doing something that I personally feel other vampire stories that are perhaps more acclaimed - such as the works of Anne Rice - didn’t quite manage for me: they completely humanize the vampires. Vampires in Anno Dracula aren’t treated as monsters inherently; they may drink blood, dislike sunlight, and have certain weaknesses, but at heart, they’re still basically just people. Some are good, some are bad; it really depends on what is in their heart of hearts. Other universes that have come since have taken this idea as well, but “Anno Dracula” is the first I’m aware of, and in my opinion still the best attempt at the idea. Genevieve herself stands as a testament to this philosophy: she is essentially the “Anti-Dracula.” She is even more ancient than the Count, and presumably just as powerful, if not moreso. However, while Dracula is a self-serving villain who seeks power and glory, Genevieve is a good person at heart, who simply tries to do what she feels is best for not only her fellow vampires, but for people as a whole. She has many of Dracula’s abilities and traits we would recognize - being very dramatic in her own way, very cunning, extremely well-educated, and also an experienced warrior - but she has gone in an extremely different direction as a person. I don’t know how the version in the Warhammer universe compares to Genevieve in “Anno Dracula,” but if she’s anything like the one there, it only cements how much she deserves place in my Top 3.

2. Blade & Morbius, from Marvel.

There are many vampires and vampire-like creatures and characters in the Marvel universe. Dracula himself, as I’ve said in the past, is among those ranks. However, aside from Dracula, two particular vampiric figures stand out amongst the crowd: Blade the Vampire Hunter, and Morbius the Living Vampire. Frank Blade - originally born “Eric Cross” - is a dhampir who has devoted his life to hunting down all the evil vampires of the world, along with many other monsters. His arch-enemies include his “father,” Deacon Frost, and - you guessed it - Count Dracula. He is a brilliant swordsman, marksman, knife-wielder, martial artist, and all-around badass. Michael Morbius, meanwhile, is a sort of “science vampire”: created not by being bitten by a supernatural fiend, but instead mutating as the result of a biochemistry experiment gone wrong. Driven by an insatiable need to consume blood, lest his physical condition - brought on by the experiment - worsen exponentially, Morbius flip-flops between being a sympathetic villain and an anti-hero in the Marvel universe. In the comics, the two have clashed several times; in fact, one particular battle between the pair led to Blade actually gaining some new abilities, as a result of the Living Vampire’s DNA mingling with his own. Outside of the comics, the two have been adapted and reimagined multiple times for other media (with mixed results), though the only time I know of where they MET in other media was the 1990s show “Spider-Man: The Animated Series,” where Blade and Spidey had to work together to stop a rampaging Morbius. Whether you love them together or separately, and whether you prefer the comics or other interpretations, they’re two of the first characters I think of when I think of vampires in general. They are probably the most iconic vampire characters in superhero fiction. That, if nothing else, definitely earns them a high place on my list.

1. Alucard, from Castlevania.

It is perhaps fitting that a list of my favorite vampire characters NOT including Dracula should finish with the Count’s son. Because that is what Adrian Farenheit Tepes - a.k.a. Alucard - is: the Son of Dracula. Alucard is one of the main protagonists of the Castlevania franchise, having appeared in virtually every reiteration of the franchise: from the classic games, to the “Lords of Shadow” reboot trilogy, to the recent animated streaming programs on Netflix. As the series has evolved and changed over the years, so too has Alucard, but the basics of the character have always remained the same. Alucard is the son of Dracula, and a human woman. When the Count is driven mad by the death of his wife, Alucard is forced to take up arms against his father, to stop the King of the Vampires from spreading death and destruction worldwide. Being a vampire himself (or, at least, half-vampire), Alucard is just as immortal as his father, and nearly as powerful, meaning that - better than any Belmont, or member of the Morris family, or other mortal monster slayer - he can keep a watchful eye on the dark lord and his minions. Alucard is my favorite character of the entire Castlevania franchise, and while every version is slightly different, the simple and yet classic conflict between father and son is a big part of the reason why: in each rendition, you realize each side cares about the other, but their philosophies make it difficult for them to co-exist. As a result, he is one of the most fascinating and yet tragic characters of the series, and is one of the first characters I think of when I think of Castlevania. I don’t know how many other people would place him so highly, but for me, it’s almost no contest placing Alucard as My Number One. If anybody can rival the Prince of Darkness best, it is him.

HONORABLE MENTIONS INCLUDE…

Strahd von Zarovich, from Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft.

Not hugely into D&D, hence why I can’t count him on the main list. ‘Nuff said.

Lothos & Amilyn, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992).

I said I couldn’t count the series, never said anything about the movie that inspired it. Played by Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens, respectively, these vampire villains are probably the funniest characters in the film. Reubens as Amilyn, in particular, gets one of the most hilarious death scenes in any motion picture, period.

The Sackville-Bagg Family, from The Little Vampire.

I’ve never read the book series, but I have a big soft spot for the 2000 film; loved it as a kid, still like it now.

Dio Brando, from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

I know basically nothing about Jojo, but I felt I had to include him here simply because people would kill me if I didn’t.

Kurt Barlow, from Salem’s Lot (1979).

I’ve never read the original Stephen King novel, but the 1979 miniseries adaptation is pretty much “Dracula in Modern New England.” Reggie Nalder’s Barlow has barely any screentime, but the impact of his actions and evil presence is enormous. Plus, REALLY cool Nosferatu-inspired costume and makeup for the win!

Vladimir, from League of Legends.

Vladimir technically isn’t a vampire, but a blood mage; however, considering he literally has a Nosferatu-inspired alternate look, I think I’m justified at least giving him an Honorable Mention.