#AWOL One

[votava-records]

The Cloaks (Awol One & Gel Roc) - Hold Your Breath feat. Sir Beans

Raps by Awol One and Gel Roc Beats/production by Awkward Scratches by Sir Beans, Dj D-Styles, and Roach The Dj Featuring: Aceyalone, Brevi, Demrick, Dose One, Megabusive, Mestizo, Pawz1, Quaesar

[radiophd]

awol one and mike nardone ft. abstract rude -- eye am

[da-ill-spot]

New Music: 2Mex - Hang On Alex LP

Salute to the fam 2Mex for steadily putting out quality music through 2 plus decades. This brotha is one of the first artists I can remember seeing when I started attending shows. It was at either Elements or Unity around 97 or 98.

From there on I followed his career as a solo artist and with his crew, Visionaries. I have so many recordings of them from my days of being everywhere with a camcorder. By the way, peep the YouTube channel, and please subscribe if you have not already!

I am pleased to have gotten to know 2Mex over these years, as well as have him perform at multiple shows of mine, most recently our 13 year anniversary two years ago.

Alex is his real name, and by far is one of the most genuine people you will ever meet. 2Mex has dealt with major health issues in recent years, and I’m sure his music is just the therapy he needs to stay positive and motivated.

Please check out the new release, Hang On Alex. It’s one hell of an album, featuring Ozomatli, Will.i.am, Ceschi Ramos, Stacey Dee, Shapeshifters, Barfly, and The Visionaries.

2Mex executive produced the album himself and the artwork was done by AWOL One. The Will.I.am assisted “Los Angeles Underground” is my favorite track, and one of the best odes to where we come from that I have ever heard.

Stream the Hang On Alex above and support 2Mex with a purchase. You can also find it l on all DSPs!

[liugeaux]

Greatest Songs Ever - Part 21 (Off the Rails)

Never has one of these been as off-the-rails as this one seems. I promise it’s not on purpose. With Part 20 being much more close to home, naturally, part 21 veers the opposite direction. 

Some of these you might not know, and I encourage you to check them out. here’s your link to the ongoing playlist. Let’s do this!

2011 “Lock Down (feat. Leo the Lion)” -  Adam Skinner & Dan Skinner

We kick it off with the bop of the century. Maybe that’s an overstatement, but “Lock Down” crept into my life through the Giant Bombcast. The duders over there stumbled on this track in AudioNetwork, a royalty-free subscription music service. They played it during live stream downtime and their community ate it up. It became somewhat of an inside joke, while simultaneously being a banger. It’s categorized as “new-soul,” but its got a funk and a groove to it that gets your feet moving. I know nothing about Adam or Dan Skinner, and even less about Leo the Lion, but accidentally stumbling on such a fun track is kind of what this list is all about.  

1983 “Sharp Dressed Man” - ZZ Top

ZZ Top is a mood. I always feel like ZZ Top songs only have words to make them more marketable. If they could get away with a career full of songs like “Tequila” by The Champs, then they would’ve probably done that. Alas Billy Gibbons had to use his singing voice to entice the masses. With a sound like sandpaper on bone, Gibbons gravelly delivery is the perfect compliment to the almost sludgy guitar riffs on “Sharp Dressed Man.” Given how grimey and raw everything about this song is, the title feels like tongue and cheek irony. It’s a song whose guitar lick is so good it doubles as a chorus. A chorus that slices you in half everytime it churns back to the speakers. I like a lot of tracks in the ZZ Top library, but “Sharp Dressed Man” has a swagger that’s universal.  

2009 “TiK ToK” - Kesha

When my grand kids ask me what the late aughts sounded like, my answer will be “Tik Tok” by Kesha. This song is 100% a product of the pop music culture surrounding it. While Kesha’s talents as a songwriter eclipse this track exponentially, “Tik Tok” captured an energy and moment in music that cannot be recreated. Sanitized club beats, auto-tune, party-girl vibes, a hint of female empowerment and an odd Mick Jagger reference “Tik Tok” is hella weird. Even at the time I got a collective feeling from music fans, like we were looking at each other and saying “are we really doing this?” “Take On Me” is to the 80s what “Ice Ice Baby” is to the 90s, and “Tik Tok” is to the 00s. I’ve flirted with putting later Kesha songs on this list, but to do so before this seminal classic is an insult to an entire generation of music.   

1969 “My Way” - Frank Sinatra

Southerners don’t listen to Sinatra. Growing up I understood Frank Sinatra was a big deal and even had movies referred to me, but I couldn’t name a single one of his songs. My childhood wasn’t filled with Sinatra tracks, crooner numbers or Rat Pack hits, it was Elvis, The Beatles, Classic Rock and country. I purposely reached for “My Way” to see what the big deal was. I’d heard an American Idol contestant or two sing snippets of it, but I wanted to know why the song is so revered. Upon first listen, I thought it sounded much older than it actually is. I would have pegged this song as a track from the 40s. The sound quality of the backing symphony is reminiscent of much older Hollywood scores like The Wizard of Oz, so to learn that its newer than most of The Beatles’ library was shocking. As a celebration of individuality, it’s message isn’t too dissimilar from that of the US as an idea, and the lyrics’ acknowledgement of his “way” being imperfect is subtly beautiful. “My Way” is an anthem for the proud, and sadly I feel the rigidity of its message has been used to justify rejecting compromise. As one man’s celebration of himself and as a booming showtune, the song is outstanding.  

2021 “Sunroof” - Nicky Youre

Whenever I pick super-recent songs I know I’m rolling the dice on how time will effect this list. I have no idea who Nicky Youre is, but he knows how to capture the energy of youth. From the initial drop of “I got my head out the sunroof...” this song drips of innocence fueled youth. The freedom of your first car, having no worries and being consumed by the energy of a potential partner, it’s the magical spark of youth. Even the “La da, la da da, la la la“ part is laced with an envious carefree attitude. We are all longing for the feeling “Sunroof” is advertising, and that’s why it works so well. It’s like freebasing the idea of potential, “Sunroof” is a drug we should all be addicted to.  

2001 "Rhythm” - Awol One & Daddy Kev

For an oh-so-brief moment in community college, I brushed against being cool enough to know someone who knew this song. My bud Austin, a worldly brain of a person who, to my knowledge has never been bad at anything, at least not anything he put legit effort into, turned me onto this track. He played a lot of music for me back then and not much of it stuck, but “Rhythm” burrowed in like a tick. The stand-out on the track is the flute in the loop. I’m gonna do my best to avoid making a flute-loops joke, but I promise nothing. I don’t know anything about the production of the track but it strikes me as a song birthed from the tightness of the loop. Once that was established, I’m sure everything else fell into place. The rapping isn’t stellar, but it knows what it is, and stays out of the way. Awol One’s drawn out delivery feeds the stoner vibe the track carries, while never feeling scummy. Laid-back, groovy, and raw enough to feel like the underground gem that it is. “Rhythm” was never at risk of being a radio hit, but that’s kind of a badge of honor here. If one more person hears this song because of this write up, I will have done my job.

1993 “Chattahoochee” (Extended Mix) -  Alan Jackson

Look at that, yet another 90s country song gets added to the list! “Chattahoochee” is a country fan’s country song. It’s as story-telly as the fans demand, and Jackson’s delivery is exactly what you would expect from a pillar of the genre. However when you dig deeper, the lyrics are much more universal fro the casual listener. Like “Sunroof” there’s something inherently youthful about “Chattahoochee.” Youth, as a concept, is ripe for creative mining and Jackson chose a hyper specific venue for his slice-of-life story. Because the innocence of youth is so universal, even if you didn’t grow up on a river, you just get it. Your Chattahoochee river might be a drive-in movie theater, or a Sonic parking lot, or the pool tables at the local bowling alley. Calling a song shallow is only an insult if it doesn’t have a wide appeal. “Chattahoochee” is as shallow as that river probably is, and that just means everyone can relate. As for the (Extended Mix), it doesn’t add too much, but it does make the song feel more like an event. It’s got an extra breakdown or two that probably work well in a live setting. It’s just a better paced version of the same song.   

1970 “War Pigs” - Black Sabbath

When you Google “Who invented heavy metal” you get a passage about historians believing it was Black Sabbath. I like to think all metal songs share DNA with tracks like “War Pigs.” Loud, brash and with something to say, the track alternates between an Ozzy show-piece and a Tony Iommi guitar rocker. Its quiet moments are as important as its loud guitar solos, a practice almost lost to time I modern metal. “War Pigs” may not be as relevant today as it was in 1970 (I’d like to think humans have learned a lot from past wars), but it serves as a creative benchmark for commentary on socio-political statements in art. Let’s not forget about the slimy and iconic guitar work here, traces of thrash can be heard in the solos and that wouldn’t rise to prominence until the 80s. Sabbath is WAAAAAAAY more important than most realize and “War Pigs” is their masterpiece.  

2018 “Responsible Ver. 2″ (feat. Stan Taylor) - DUX

I really don’t know what to say about this one. DUX is a DJ, Stan Taylor is a vocalist, and “Responsible” is one of their collaborations. Due to their relative obscurity, they are oddly hard to Google. DUX seems Brazilian, and Taylor looks to be from Cali, but I don’t know if any of that matters. “Responsible” hovers between soul, techno, funk, and jazz, pretty cleanly. What initially stood out was the absolutely chewy bassline. The bass however, only gets you through the door, Taylor’s big soulful delivery hooks you, and the horn-filled bridge finishes the job. A beautiful melding of several reliable pillars of American music makes this into an unexpected modern classic buried in obscurity. “Responsible Ver. 2″ (definitely better than Ver. 1) would play well anywhere from a local pub to the biggest sporting event. If you check out any of these songs individually, please let this one be one of them.   

1969 “Haute Couture” aka “Temptation Sensation” -  Das Orchester Heinz Kiessling

There is so much to unpack with this choice. Yes, it’s the Always Sunny in Philadelphia theme, yes, that seems cheap, and no, I don’t care. I’ve always loved the simplicity of the theme and found its whimsy quite-heartwarming. Prior to last year, I had not heard the original track, or knew anything about it. This song is by a German composer named Heinz Kiessling, and its taken two different names in its release history, “Haute Couture” and “Temptation Sensation.” For what its worth, I prefer the latter. The song itself is an orchestral mushroom trip. Somehow, like “My Way” it was released as recently as 1969. Nothing sounds more like a 1942 instrumental as much as this track does. To put this in perspective, it was released a year before the almost modern sounding “War Pigs”. Was Germany so far behind America in sound production that “Temptation Sensation” just felt super old, or was that on purpose? Who knows. The internet doesn’t say anything about him being a Nazi, so there’s more good news. The song itself is so full of whimsy, and fluff, that its hard to hear without feeling like a burden has been lifted from your shoulders. As the theme from It’s always Sunny, it works stupendously because of the thematic dichotomy.

That was an exceptionally weird list of songs, but I promise next time will be a bit more mainstream. That is, unless my plans change, then, anything is on the table. *Insert excited emoji*    

[mikonez]

the cold calculated demeanor of someone not to fuck with

(no text ver under the cut!)

[duckiemimi]

[ollierachnid]

danced myself into the tomb

[votava-records]

Dday One feat. Awol One, Subtitle, Existereo & Metfly - Unstable Material

[radiophd]

awol one and mike nardone -- kiss yourself destruction

[da-ill-spot]

New Music: AWOL One & Kool Keith - Aponia LP

Ch-check it! The new collab LP by the legendary artists AWOL One and Kool Keith has arrived! Aponia is 9 tracks long, all produced by Kool Keith.

It includes features from Xzibit, Myka 9, Gel Roc, Pigeon John, Ceschi, Quangou, DJ Hoppa, and Nicnack.

The album is currently only available on Bandcamp and will release on all other platforms on February 14. Stream it now and support with a $10 purchase!

Act now to pre-order your copy of the limited edition picture disc vinyl!

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

pez dispenser debris for the fic ask thing? 👀

As much as this is my “kill no darlings you will get EVERY flashback” fic, there’s overarching sociopolitical backstory explaining why Izuku and the rest of class 3A exploded in the public eye that I don’t think I’ll ever fully fit in.

It’s a combination of it being more of a meta analysis than anything and also requiring information from a perspective that I know will never appear in the fic. Like, the fic still gets the different moments that make up this analysis, but there’s no explicit connecting thread to show how they all locked together to create this sort of global cult following of class 3-A. I almost put in a little fake news article opinion piece that was meant to sort of walk the reader through why society is Like This, but I decided it was too heavy handed and deleted it.

Everything that I’m going to reference has already appeared in pez dispenser debris to some degree, and none of it will ever actually materially impact the plot. They may receive a little more detail down the line if they’re mentioned in passing in the fic, so out of an abundance of caution, I’ll stick it below the cut so people can avoid this, but I don’t personally consider any of this spoilers.

Izuku and the rest of the class are famous in pez dispenser debris in a way that’s pretty much unprecedented for students. Canonically, not even all might had a name for himself until after his graduation. Pretty much everyone from class 3A are public figures, with Izuku specifically being considered a major global figure.

In my mind, there was this perfect storm right during their second year that catapulted them into fame. The class personally has varying levels of awareness of why they got so popular, but there was this perfect cross winds of societal unrest and fear that made them household names.

There was an approximately one month span in their second year where they were just hit one after another with a major firestorms of events: The UA Sports Festival, the Sidekick Strike, and the Tartarus Prison Break/Desertion of Yokohama.

The UA Sports Festival is the one that the kids attribute this most to, because so many of the news articles that followed referenced their performance in it. But it probably gave them less mileage than what the other two events did.

What the UA Sports Festival did was showcase their skills to the world in a venue designed to show them off. The public was already on edge. All Might had retired, crime rates kept going up, and people were rapidly losing confidence in existing heroes. Class 2A made such an insane showing of skill in the second Sports Festival that it made the public rave about them for weeks after. It was extremely reassuring to Japan that they had such powerful heroes in the barrel and would soon be on the streets. But that attention probably would have died down had it not been for the Sidekick Strike and Yokohama.

The Sidekick Strike actually had nothing to do with them. But it undermined the public’s faith in heroes at just the right time.

The Sidekick Strike is just one of those things that I have no POV that would even tangentially be involved in it so we’ll get a few passing references in media clips and it’ll never be discussed in depth. Which is a shame because it’s such an interesting conflict to me.

The Sidekick Strike was heavily inspired by the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Effectively, it was the height of the labor rights movement, and police officers got together and went on strike to get the police union recognized. They had tried to negotiate and negotiations failed, and so they all walked off the job. The city descended into lawlessness, the national guard was deployed, it was a whole thing. Famously, Calvin Coolidge fired the entire police force over it on the grounds that there was no striking from public safety.

I thought it would be really interesting if there was something similar that happened with the sidekicks. The thing is that the heroics structure as it stands really incentivizes abuse towards sidekicks. We have a society where there’s a decent amount of heroes who are only in it for the fame. A not insignificant amount of money must come from marketing deals. And it’s a ranked system, so they’re all in competition with each other.

Heroes wouldn’t be incentivized to showcase their sidekicks—they’d be incentivized to take advantage of them and take credit for their work.

Like, think about the work-study experiences. Momo didn’t even officially work for the hero she studied with. She wasn’t getting paid. An adult woman used her for a shampoo ad. Who wants to bet whether Momo saw a dime from it? It’s probably very predatory because the nature of the system incentivizes predation.

I thought the underlying legal issues would be interesting and complex. Who owns a sidekick’s image—the agency or the individual? Who gets the proceeds of their brand deals? This all would be governed by their employment contracts, and sidekicks just starting out have very little leverage compared to big name heroes. And those heroes would want to keep their sidekicks names small and theirs big. The rankings are competitive, after all.

It’s a situation where I do think that like. The sidekicks would have a point in unionizing. The use of their image, appropriate compensation, and proper credit for their busts would all be like, very legitimate concerns in a normal employment context.

I see agencies like Idaten settling immediately with the union and having their sidekicks back on the street before the day is out. In my mind, idaten is considered the gold standard for sidekick jobs already, and their employees mostly did it out of solidarity with the people they worked alongside of. Like, Idaten was already doing most of the union’s demands and signed off very quickly on the remaining ones. If it was just about the Idaten sidekicks, none of them would have gone on strike, but they had a lot of colleagues who they depended on in the field who were in terrible situations. What were they gonna say, sorry, sucks to be you, I got a great gig though so condolences? These were the people keeping them alive. They went on strike because they knew Idaten would publicly settle before the day was out and set an example for the rest of the agencies. Hopefully it would help other agencies follow their lead.

But that didn’t happen. Some agencies, like Endeavor’s, fired everyone immediately. And I think a lot of agencies spent a long time picking over every line item in prolonged negotiations. It dragged out.

And that went over fucking terribly.

All Might just retired. Crime is up. And their sworn defenders are bickering over who gets what cut of the action figure line. Like I think the public would have fucking hated this in a post-All Might world. It would have seemed like the only real hero just medically and irreversibly retired and the rest of them are squabbling about whose turn it is in the spotlight.

I also think that the villains would have taken advantage of it.

The Tartarus Prison Break in pez isn’t the one that happened in canon. Here, the League of Villains attacked Tartarus and set everyone loose. In the process, they made a very clear stance: they are going to leave with All for One, and they are not going to attack any civilians. They won’t fight at all unless attacked first.

All of the horrible and sadistic villains they just let go have not made the same promise.

They chose to do this now because of the Sidekick Strike. All their heroes don’t give a fuck about protecting them, so they’re strapped for staffing. So they’re taking back their leader and going back to ground, and the heroes are free to immediately go after and contain all those bad bad villains who just escaped. And those guys are headed to the heavily populated mainland, so better be quick.

The whole world knew that was their explicit reasoning and promise. Because Himiko fucking lived tweeted the escape.

The Sidekick Strike took the hit for a lot of the blame, but I do see all the sidekicks breaking strike lines to go respond to the crisis. But response times were severely handicapped by the fact that most if not all of them were cut off from their agencies. It was just a complete systemic breakdown.

And then there became the question of what crisis do you respond to: All for One’s escape, or everyone else’s?

I mentioned in one of the little fake tumblr posts that the Tartarus Prison Break was seen as Endeavor’s greatest failure. And part of that is because he chose to sacrifice the nearby area, Yokohama, to contain All for One.

I am one of the biggest haters of Endeavor’s later arc, specifically because it required going back on the nature of the abuse he had subjected his family to that was already established in canon, but that’s a different rant. This is not canon endeavor. I hate what they did with canon endeavor.

That being said, I do think that the self doubt weighed on him once he became number one. And this was the moment of his career where it really crushed him.

All for One had escaped. So had every other villain from Tartarus. He should go after the most immediate threats. He knew this. It was basic triage.

But they would never have a better chance to stop All for One.

Prisoners in Tartarus aren’t exactly hitting all their macros and micros or training daily. They are not adherents to the Bakugou Katsuki Fitness Lifestyle. All for One was coming off spending the last few months drugged up to his eyeballs and strapped to a chair in a straitjacket with at least fifty guns pointed at him at all times. The man has not scratched his own nose in weeks. He’s weaker now than he’ll ever be again.

It was their best chance.

If he escaped, and he went back to ground, he’d have the time and space to get as strong as he wanted, and then he’d come back for real. And he’d be coming back for everything.

Stopping him the first time had cost them All Might.

And Endeavor simply was not All Might. And he still wouldn’t be All Might when the next fight came.

It really was the hardest decision of Endeavor’s life. He had to admit to himself that his own inadequacy was going to cost them countless lives. But he thought it was a hard decision he had to make. He was losing the battle for the barest chance at winning the war.

So he made the call that all heroes were to respond to All for One. They had to hit the league of villains now with their full force if they were to stand a chance. They could not afford to divide their already sparse forces. They’d respond to Yokohama when AfO was contained.

He was also the one who made the call to broadcast the warning message that we hear in the Twitter post. He thought it would give civilians their best chance. He didn’t want them to act with the expectation of the heroes being en route.

Of course, that meant that the entire city got fucking sirens going off and a message telling them that the heroes were not going to save them. Which, as you can expect, did not do a lot for public morale.

In my head, Tartarus is like, the equivalent to Gotham’s Arkham. It’s borderline an institute for the criminally insane. You don’t end up there unless you did something super fucked, are super dangerous, and have extreme violent tendencies. It’s exclusively for the most dangerous and indiscriminately violent criminals in the country.

The entire world was watching in real time while the tragedy unfolded. A lot of people were livestreaming after the emergency broadcast dropped, because they didn’t want the government to be able to handwave away how terrible their death was, or because they didn’t know what else to do, or because they just didn’t want to be alone. The full expectation was that it’d be a massacre.

But it wasn’t. Because Class 2-A responded instead.

The Class 2-A defensive efforts were discussed in one of the silly little fake tumblr posts and in the fake twitter post. In those, we find out that 1) Class 2-A, along with Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire responded to the scene; 2) the entire class rolled out of Mirio’s fucking mom van and tamaki and nejire’s cars like they were fucking clown cars; 3) the HPSC claimed it was a legitimate operation blessed and coordinated by them; and 4) a lot of people think this was a lie, in part because videos leaked of Aizawa bitching them all out in the street afterwards. We also see Izuku’s green lightning at the end of the twitter video, showing him responding to the scene just as the first villains hit the mainland.

This fight has a lot of names in the backstory that lives in my head. It’s called the Tartarus Prison Break for obvious reasons. It’s also been called in some circles the Desertion of Yokohama, because of the call Endeavor made.

But it’s also called the Battle of Yokohoma. And it’s ranked alongside the Battle of Kamino as one of the finest acts of modern day heroics. And that’s because of Class 2-A. If it hadn’t been for them showing up, it would have gone down in history as the Massacre of Yokohama.

Like. It kills me that I can’t include the full details of what happened, but there’s just too much to make in a flashback. It’s a fic in and of itself. But it really was the fight that made Class 2-A.

It was the first fight where they were really the only heroes that could be counted on. Granted, they’d had to fight for their lives alone, but this wasn’t just their lives. These were thousands of terrified civilians who all thought they were going to die.

It was the first true test of them as heroes in the world. And they actually rose to the occasion. They didn’t just fight the villains—they realized that they needed to get emergency services working throughout the city if everyone was going to make it. Momo and Tsuyu conducted a mildly hostile take over of the emergency call center so they could coordinate relief. They had fucking Tokoyami and Dark Shadow single-handedly holding the line on the hospital while Kaminari, Shoji, Jiro, and Sato all learned to drive for the Very First Time while commandeering the city’s fucking ambulances. They were fighting and containing villains, performing emergency aid, putting out literal fires, everything. It was the hardest fight of their lives.

There was a hot second where Class 2-A was The Moment. Like. The entire world was watching them during this fight, and they had no fucking idea until it was over. People lost their minds when the first footage made it out of Yokohama of a bunch of teenagers showing up and immediately throwing hands with S-Class villains.

It was global news. Think of the kind of media attention that was received by the search for the Titan, the Tham Luang Cave Rescue, the Suez Canal getting blocked by the Ever Given (rip queen you will always be famous to me), that kind of thing. Class 2-A was fighting for their fucking lives and then found out three days later while they were all still in the hospital that there was a prayer vigil going on in Portugal for them during the battle and CNN had 24 hours live coverage of the fight that had so many viewers it outnumbered the population of Finland. Like what do you even do with that information.

The world expected a massacre. They didn’t expect a bunch of footage of high schoolers kicking the shit out of superpowered murders and personally ferrying the injured to the hospitals they were also defending.

The other part about this fight that really made them permanently part of the public consciousness is that it was not lost on everyone that every single person who responded to that fight did so at the risk of their license.

All of them had provisional licenses, save Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire, all of whom went AWOL from the explicit directives ordering them to respond to the fight against All for One. The operation could not have been less authorized. They had to steal their gear and jimmy the UA fence to even get out. The explicit plan was to steal one of the UA buses and have Bakugou fucking drive them to the fight (he also did not know how to drive but he seemed the most likely of them to break literally every single motor vehicle code to get them there but still be naturally talented at it enough to not kill them) but Izuku told Mirio what bullshit they were up to and Mirio, who was with Tamaki and Nejire when the news broke, immediately decided he would be on that bullshit too and pulled up in his mom van.

In my mind, there were strict rules around provisional licenses and how they could be used, and they broke pretty much all of them to respond to Yokohama. It would have been grounds to revoke their provisionals and permanently bar them from heroics. Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire could have all lost their licenses for helping them and for going AWOL.

The HPSC fucking fell over themselves to legitimatize the entire operation. They knew they were utterly fucked if they didn’t. These kids already had murals being painted of their faces in other fucking countries. There was a little old lady in Kyoto livestreaming herself working overtime to embroider Iida’s face onto a cushion because that lovely young man saved her darling granddaughter from *checks notes* horrible and painful death directly caused by the failings of the current HPSC administration. There were multiple trending posts online agreeing to fucking riot if those kids got in trouble for this.

Every single actual hero in the immediate vicinity of this disaster had responded to fight a villain who wasn’t actually attacking anyone. And then they fucking lost. They publicly broadcast a message saying Good Luck Champs Because We’re Not Going To Save You. It was an actual PR nightmare that they had a bare chance of salvaging if they just latched onto these kids like an aggressive parasite and that is exactly what they did.

They totally knew. Actually, it was a joint operation coordinated by and between UA and and the HPSC. Why would the kids be in trouble?? They had responded because the HPSC told them to.

UA gave it a week of dead silence and then issued a short statement praising the bravery of their students in a recent HPSC approved mission, and then they never said another word about it. They didn’t have any choice but to go along with the HPSC’s story. If they contradicted them, all of class 2-a would find their licenses pulled by the end of the day, and lord knows they wouldn’t wait for the court of public opinion to work its magic and would just all go out and become fucking vigilantes, because why not. Aizawa has aged 100 years since he got this class. Every single day he thinks of how it was a 50/50 shot between him and Vlad.

No one in the class is fully aware of just how famous they were in the immediate aftermath, because the school bent over backwards to try and shield them from it as much as possible. Like, they have an idea, but none of them saw the full explosion firsthand because of just how hard the school worked to keep it from them. Aizawa confiscated the internet router and told them it was punishment for whatever the fuck they did to the buses (thank god Mirio was just as crazy as them because they were NOT GOOD at hotwiring cars) but really it was to try and insulate them from it a little bit. Like. Japan’s Imperial Family wanted to do an official visit. The White House offered to host them. They received interview requests from every major talk show on the planet. Buzzfeed wanted to do a puppy interview with them.

Right now, Aizawa’s terrified for Midoriya’s graduation, but in the aftermath of that, he was breathing into a paper bag about all of them. Society had sort of latched onto them like they were the last life raft on the titanic. All for One was back, and All Might wasn’t, and the heroes had publicly broadcast a message saying they were useless, but don’t fucking worry, fifteen year old Iida Tenya is on the case. Society will be upheld by Kaminari Denki, currently viral for driving a real life city ambulance one hundred miles per hour down the street while screaming “WEE WOO BITCH.” And don’t forget the pillar that will be Mina Ashido, who rushed over to him earlier that day to show him her extra sparkly pink nails. And if you have a major fight that needs to be won? Don’t fucking worry, just send out bone-breaking boy wonder Midoriya Izuku and his equally reckless brother Toogata Mirio, because their dumbasses managed to take down an S-Class villain team that only All Might could defeat the first time around. Don’t worry about the multi week hospitalization they needed after, because that’s an acceptable burden to put on children.

When Aizawa started this job, he promised himself he would never send a student out to die. Some of them would die. But it would be tragedy, not damnation. He’d have given them their best chance. Part of the reason why he made that promise was because he sort of felt like his teacher sent him out set up to die, and it’s only luck that he made it through his first couple of years.

He has gone to the funeral of every single student he has ever had who did not make it. He goes back to their graves every year.

He was fucking petrified after Yokohama that society would push these kids too far too soon. Every single one of his classes before them had gotten the benefit of being practically unknown their first few years. They didn’t have the world talking about them like they were already the top heroes. He was terrified they wouldn’t have the space to learn and grow when they started.

A lot of teachers would have tried to mine the notoriety of Yokohama to hard launch their students’ careers. Aizawa told Nedzu point blank that he would quit tomorrow if he did not help him quash this thing as much as possible, and nedzu agreed.

This world killed its real heroes. It sucked them dry and left them like All Might, and he just needed fucking time. He needed fucking time to let them be kids and maybe they’d survive.

Izuku ended up being the one who escaped the aftermath of everything the least. His Quirk was too much like All Might’s for the world to let go of him easily.

And then Stain got fucking dogpiled by idaten in the aftermath of the Tartarus prison break and implied he considered Izuku the only true hero in the absence of all might and everyone started asking super inconvenient questions like “how does stain even know you exist” and “no really he called you by your actual legal name how does he even know that” and it just. It didn’t help things. Izuku’s suffering.

So yeah. There was just this absolute collision of a total lack of faith in current heroes combined with a huge swell of public trust in class 2-a that led us to being in the landscape we are now. All of the currently licensed heroes said that they wouldn’t be there to save the public, and then Class 2-A immediately hit back that they would be there. Actually, they’ll risk everything to be there. They’ll die to protect the public and they’ll risk the entire future they had been trying to build and they will fucking be there to save them.

There’s a lot of people that never forgave the heroes for deserting Yokohama. And there’s even more people who have absolute faith in Izuku and his classmates because they didn’t. That’s why the world is watching them so aggressively. These kids are the most trusted heroes in Japan right now.

I wish I could fit in more about what happened, because I love this backstory so much, but 1) some of it absolutely requires POVs like Endeavors, which we won’t get in pez dispenser debris, 2) there’s no one POV that could tell the full story via flashback and 3) it’d just be too long of a divergence. Like. It really is a whole fic of its own. I’d love to write it one day but I probably won’t have the time

[always-a-joyful-note]

what makes me absolutely inconsolable and insane about alien stage is that yeah sure maybe they didn't love each other in the way the other wanted them to but it's so clear that at least ivan, till, sua, and mizi all loved each other. maybe it was messy and complicated but maybe in the end they all loved each other and never wanted the other to die. maybe the love they received was not the kind they wanted but it mattered so much and now they're gone

[johnnystorms]

When Peter was seven, Mrs Kanowski wrote in his report card that he always has something to say. Uncle Ben had found it quite funny. Aunt May had elbowed him in the side and murmured something about it not being a compliment, a word Peter didn’t quite grasp until a year later, when Gwen Stacy socked him in the shoulder then said, “I like your socks.” (They were covered in crossed swords and skulls wearing pirate hats, much to Aunt May’s dismay. Harry thought they were cool, though, and so did Peter, kind of, and now so did Gwen. So there.) “Thanks,” Peter had said, and that had been that. Not his first friend, but one of them.

He doesn’t know why he thinks about that now.

They’re on the roof of the Baxter Building. The sun is setting, spilling red and pink and orange all over Johnny, over his golden hair, the planes of his face, the brightness of his grin. The grin in question: the remnants of laughter, left over from Peter telling him about the time Harry keyed his dad’s car in a fit of six-year-old pique and Peter had tried to take the blame, only for Norman to dismiss the attempt with a brisk you’d have chosen more sensible places to do it, which had made Johnny absolutely howl with laughter.

“Really, Pete,” he says, still grinning, “what kind of six year old gets told they’d commit vandalism sensibly?” He snorts, shaking his head, looking out over the city.

Mrs Kanowski was wrong, it seems. Peter is tongue-tied, watching Johnny’s eyes crinkle in the corners, the slope of his nose as he looks out over towards the Chrysler Building. It swells in him, the way Johnny looks right now, the way he feels, loose-limbed and relaxed and happy. Peter likes Johnny a lot of ways, but this is maybe his favourite, when it’s just the two of them, and Johnny has that smile that looks like it put the stars in the sky, instead of the one he flashes at people in corridors, at the press when they get in too close, at ex-girlfriends and maybe-boyfriends – everyone who wants a piece of him.

It’s a nice smile, don’t get him wrong. Peter is mostly immune to Johnny’s charms, but that one still makes his chest feel a little warmer. It’s just got nothing on Johnny when he’s like this, bright and open and beautiful.

“I wonder what you’d have been like if you’d known me back then,” Johnny says, still not looking at Peter. His voice has gone thoughtful, smile fading until all that’s left is a soft tilt to his lips. “What I’d have been like.” He’s quiet for a second, and then: “I’m a little jealous, you know.”

Peter can’t work the words out of his mouth. His tongue feels too thick. Still, there must be something questioning enough in his gaze when Johnny glances back at him that it gets conveyed, because Johnny blinks, then smiles ruefully.

“That they knew you back then – Harry and Gwen and even Mary Jane, though I know she was a little later. They all got to know you so early… It kinda feels like I was missing out.” The way he says kinda is like an inside joke, the type where you’re the only one in on it, where you’re laughing at yourself. Peter’s heart aches.

Johnny’s smile goes crooked as he looks back at Peter again. “You’re my first real friend, Peter. You know that, right?”

And, like, maybe. Maybe Peter knew that, logically, if he ever really thought about it, but he didn’t – he doesn’t – because Johnny is bright and handsome and funny, charming and charismatic and wildly popular even though he has enough personality defects to fill a dictionary. Everyone likes Johnny, even some of his exes, and the ones who don’t usually have a grudge to pick with his brother-in-law, or they think Johnny is just like any vapid, handsome, rich, famous type. And it’s not that he’s not, but he’s also so much more than that. Sometimes Johnny is so much that Peter doesn’t have words to contain it.

But that’s a lonely thing too.

So maybe Peter knew, on some level, that this is what he is to Johnny, this is the space he occupies. But he’s never really thought it consciously, never really framed it that way, and certainly never heard it out loud before.

He swallows. Hard.

Johnny just blinks again, then grins. It’s not that crooked one, small and quiet and delicate enough to make Peter wish he could fit it in his pocket. It’s a sudden blitz against the sky, against Peter’s fucking mental stability, because it is so gorgeous that it is utterly devastating. Peter is devastated and Johnny is beautiful. Status quo.

Mrs Kanowski was definitely wrong, Peter thinks, as he slides a little closer to Johnny, nestles up against him so that their thighs are pressed close and their shoulders are knocking together. Because when Johnny looks at him like that, he can’t think of a single thing to say.

[hummingjay]

@lynxfrost13's Awol! She paints and she may or may or may not have committed a murder.

[lynxfrost13]

I need to make more human AUs of my replikas so far I’ve got:

Holt as a nurse in a hospital and Wanze having a serious injury and being her patient with the two of them eventually falling in love after Wanze recovers (they get to have more fun together here thanks to no Eusan Nation), only for Holt to later on get cancer and not be able to recover from it :(

Kosmos and Dorredt as astronauts on a space station going from reluctant coworkers to best friends with Kosmos being more data/science oriented and Dorredt taking care of maintenance and repairs

I also have one with Feuerkröte as a military dropout but I don’t have a whole lot else apart from she has fire tattoos on her arms because she thought they were badass (they are but she kinda sucks about it)

[wildstar25]

Todays miqomarch was the almost 40 entities took over 4 hours to pose gpose btw

It was only the day after that I realized I missed master matoya BUT tbh I don’t think she’d show up to the beach even if Arsay invited her.

I also wanted to be sneaky and put in motek and Mira even tho they aren’t really canon I wanted them in at least one pose this month.