#But it would be so nice to have the animations to pull base poses from.... hrgh | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shemarmooresfedora · 3 years

Text

Protective of the Princess

Summary: Jo comes home with some unexpected news and Spencer isn’t a fan. (This is a stand-alone one-shot of my completed ‘Rebuilding Family’ series)

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Content/Warnings: mentions of little kids kissing, spencer freaking out, fluff

Word Count: 1.3k

A/N: based on this ask from @reidsbookclub and this ask from @samuel-de-champagne-problems

Masterlist

Spencer made it clear to Jo she could be anything she wanted to be growing up.

She would change her mind about her career path quite often but Spencer was always supportive. When she wanted to be a vet, she had a bunch of different stuffed animals to practice on. When she wanted to be an astronaut, you all built a rocket ship out of a cardboard box. When she wanted to be a scientist, Spencer got her a book set of kid’s science books.

One afternoon after school, Jo hopped up on the kitchen counter as Spencer was making her a snack and you were playing with the twins on the floor.

“Daddy, I can’t go to work any more,” Jo stated.

“Why not, Princess?” Spencer asked, sliding apple slices and peanut butter in front of her.

“I have a baby and husband now,” Jo explained.

“You got a baby and husband in one day?” you questioned.

“Thomas kissed me and then we got married under the slide at recess and now we have a baby. I don’t have time for work, Daddy,” Jo sounded exasperated.

“Thomas did WHAT?” Spencer gaped.

“He kissed me like you kiss Mommy every morning before work,” she demonstrated the little peck on her baby doll.

Spencer’s eyes widened, “Y/N, please help.”

You stood from the blanket where the twins were having tummy time.

“Jo, how about you wait until you’re a little older to start kissing people? A hug or high five can show love to. You can try that next time,” you suggested.

“Daddy says kissing is safer than handshakes though,” Jo reminded you.

“Nope! I lied! Kissing is very dangerous,” Spencer shook his head empathically, “Don’t kiss.”

“But we have a baby together,” Jo held up her baby doll.

“I see that. What’s their name?” you asked.

“This is Derek,” she informed you.

“You named him after your uncle? That’s very sweet,” you smiled.

“I want a real one so I can name it Penelope. I want to have a big belly like Mommy used to have. How are babies made?” she questioned.

Spencer grasped your hand, looking very pale, “Y/N, I need to lie down.”

“One second, love,” you squeezed his hand before turning back to Jo, “You can’t have a baby until you’re much older. Then, I’ll explain it to you, okay?”

Jo nodded.

“I need to take Daddy to bed. He’s feeling a little sick,” you told her, “You can play with the twins.”

“Actually,” Spencer slipped his hand out of yours, “I’m going to go for a drive. I’ll be back in a bit.”

You looked at him curiously as he leaned in for a kiss but then retreated under the watchful eyes of Jo.

You followed him into the entryway as he laced his converse up, “Where are you going?”

“I’ve never heard of a Thomas before until now. I need Penelope to check this kid out.”

“Check this kid out?” you laughed, “What are you expecting to find? A nine year old with a criminal record?”

“I need to make sure my daughter is safe,” he looked up at you seriously.

“Okay,” you relented, “You’re a great dad albeit very protective,” you kissed him goodbye.

“Are we going to start having to only kiss in private now?” you smirked.

“I don’t want her seeing and copying it at school,” Spencer sighed, “The last thing I want is to get a phone call from her teacher that our daughter needs to stop kissing people.”

“Okay, sneaking around could be fun anyways,” you smiled, giving him another kiss, “Tell the team I say hi.”

“Who does this Thomas kid think he is?” Spencer grumbled to himself as he was in the elevator, “Kissing my sweet little precious daughter. I should have him arrested. Maybe I don’t have the grounds for an arrest but I can show him my badge and scare him off.”

His ranting stopped as he knocked on Penelope’s door.

“Who is it?” she chirped.

“Spencer,” he replied, “I brought you a croissant.”

“It’s open!”

Spencer opened the door and handed her the paper bag.

“And it’s still warm!” she squealed, “You must really love me.”

“I do but I also need a favor,” he spoke.

“Name it, boy wonder,” she readied herself at her keyboard.

“I need you to look up a boy named Thomas in Jo’s class.”

“Is this kid bullying her?” she gritted her teeth, “I swear to god, I will reign hell down on this kid if he is.”

“No, it’s the opposite actually. He kissed her,” Spencer sighed.

“She already got her first kiss?” Penelope gasped.

“I know! I didn’t even have mine until 25,” Spencer replied.

Penelope clicked away at her keys, “We’ve got two Thomases in her class but according to the attendance record, Thomas Jacobson was out sick today meaning Thomas Bennett is our guy.”

“What do we know about him?” Spencer asked, crouching down to look at Penelope’s screen.

“Plays on the town soccer team, has an allergy to shellfish, good report card,” Penelope stated.

“Anything else? Any visits to the principals? Sketchy friends?” he questioned.

“I guess the sketchiest friend he has would be his imaginary friend named Robby the cowboy according to his mom’s facebook. He’s got a squeaky clean school record.”

“Let me see what this kid looks like,” Spencer desperately demanded.

Penelope gave him a look.

“Please,” he added.

The group class pictures of the past 3 years popped up on to Penelope’s screen. Each year, Jo and Thomas were standing next to each other smiling and laughing in various poses.

“He doesn’t look like much of a threat to me,” Penelope stated.

“Why hasn’t she ever asked for him to come over on a playdate?” he asked.

“She was probably scared her dad was going to embarrass her,” Penelope chuckled.

“She’s in 3rd grade! No boys!” Spencer crossed his arms.

“That rule is setting you up for a rebellious stage later in life,” Penelope rolled her eyes.

“So I just let this happen?” Spencer sighed, dropping into the chair next to Penelope.

“Yes, you’re supposed to protect her but not from nice boys who make her happy.”

“But she’s just my sweet little girl,” Spencer started to tear up.

“And she always will be but you need to let her live her life,” Penelope explained.

“I know. Thanks Penelope.”

You heard the car pull in while you were making dinner. You lowered the setting on the stove and made your way over to the door.

“Hey,” you greeted him, wrapping your arms around him.

“Hi,” he snuggled into the crook of your nest.

“Did you find Thomas on the FBI’s most wanted list?” you joked.

“No, he’s a good kid,” Spencer sighed in defeat, “I just don’t like the thought of her growing up. Then, she’ll eventually have to leave us.”

“That’s what being a parent is,” you whispered, “You love them, care for them, and prepare them for the world as best you can but then you have to set them free. But, I have good news for you,” you smiled.

“What?”

“You’re stuck with me forever,” you grinned.

“Thank god,” Spencer squeezed you tighter.

“Daddy!” Jo ran into the room, “Lion King is playing in theaters tonight! We need to go!”

“Okay, Princess,” he looked to you for support and you squeezed his hand, “Do you think Thomas would want to come?”

“Yes! He loves Lion King!” Jo exclaimed, running to go get ready.

“You’re a great dad,” you reminded him once again.

“I’m still going to be watching this kid like a hawk,” Spencer admitted.

“As you should,” you grinned, kissing him.

Soon enough, Jo came home next week saying she wanted to be a congresswoman and they were back to their old adventures.

main taglist (just ask to be added/removed): @samuel-de-champagne-problems @ssacalumsg0lden @spencerreid9 @averyhotchner @coldlilheart @k-k0129 @ickleronniekinsemotionalrange @harrystylesandthegoobs @cmily @jswessie187 @hoodpankow @mochionly @spencerreid-187 @babymetaldoll @fics4arainyday @ssavanessa22 @all-tings-diego @idonotexiste @beepbooptoop @tvandfanfic @mggsprettygirl @big-galaxy-chaos @navs-bhat @spencerreidsmommy @this-is-doctor-and-its-calm @mggs-sidehoe @rexit-mo @hufflepuffhaze @thisismynerdyself @xoxospencerreid @wifeyprentiss @reidsbookclub @spencersrose @pinkdiamond1016 @muffin-cup @a-little-bit-of-everything19

one-shot only taglist: @strawberryspence @fbivestreid

#spencer reid fluff #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid x fem!reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fic #spencer reid one shot #dr spencer reid #spencer reid #criminals minds #cm fic #cm fanfic

376 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 3 years

Text

MVA In Memoriam (2/5)

The Comprehensive Account of the Butchering of My Villain Academia

(Introduction and Part One, Episode 108: My Villain Academia)

Part Two, Episode 109: Revival Party

Chapter 224 – Revival Party

• Mr. Compress’s side comment about how the distance Re-Destro wants them to travel means he must know they have warp capabilities. Also shortens his subsequent line, removing the bit about how their position has been locked onto, leaving only the marveling about the dude on the phone being the kind of person who has access to a satellite camera. Not a major cut, but it did strip out a bit of reiteration on how very Seen the League is. The warp line is another nod to how the MLA’s been doing their research—in particular, it ties in nicely with RD’s observations about the Noumu. He talks, there, about something Dabi said after the High End fight, which means he must also know that Dabi was warped out by an “Ujiko-san.”

• Also Mr. C’s observation that they haven’t broken Machia yet, and his posed question about what to do. Mr. Compress, I’m so sorry that you’re so wordy and lose so many quips and asides because the anime was set on brutally scything out every line of non-essential dialogue it could find.

• Ujiko’s extremely hilarious, “Listening to Villain Radio is my new favorite hobby,” line. Why would you cut this; this line is hysterical.

• The bit where Mr. Compress has the bright idea to use a High End Noumu like the one Dabi used, Ujiko rejects the suggestion out of hand, citing production woes, and Shigaraki says that he wasn’t going to ask for one of them anyway. Aside from being more cut Compress content (or “Comptent,” for short), it helps center the timeline somewhat at a point where the manga is jerking it around all over; it also shows that the League has been keeping up with news from the outside world. It also shows that at least one of them thought about using the Noumu—and since we know Re-Destro did some rationalizing on that scenario too, it’s good to see that it is at least briefly on the table. Further, Ujiko provides a few rare details about the Noumu creation process. Firstly, that AFO is normally involved, so his absence makes the procedure much more difficult (though not, apparently, impossible). Secondly, that Hood-chan was the only Noumu who’d actually reached the testing stage. This will be important later, for Ujiko’s agonizing about unleashing them early/Mirko having to fight four of them at once. Also, I just miss Mr. C’s funny little head wilt when Ujiko immediately turns down his “use some Noumu” idea. Ditto Shigaraki’s blasé shrug and little grin. Again, not to harp on the art too much, but man I wish the anime had kept all the fierce little grins and tight, incensed smirks Shigaraki has through the majority of this and the phone call sequence.

• Spinner’s line, “Without knowing squat about what we’re up against?!” A minor cut, as these things go, but it reiterates that there’s a chance RD is bluffing and the League has no way to know one way or the other, and demonstrates that the League can give Shigaraki some pushback on his decisions without having to worry about getting dusted for the temerity.[1]

• Takes one of Spinner’s lines—“Wait. I get it. Wherever you go, Shigaraki, he’ll sniff you out and hunt you down.”—and gives it to Shigaraki instead. Because fuck Spinner’s growing understanding of Shigaraki and the way his mind works, I guess! It’s especially notable that Spinner figures this out when Mr. C had completely the wrong idea about Shigaraki’s intentions—it demonstrates the way Spinner is gradually aligning himself with Shigaraki’s way of thinking, which we’ll see even more clearly during the War Arc. Also, again, it’s good to see the moments where the League weighs in on Shigaraki’s plans.

• The visual of Twice lashing out at Dabi with his razor-edged tape measure over Dabi’s dismissal of Giran, though all the relevant dialogue was there. Possibly this is because, having cut the CRC bit, the audience has no way of knowing that Twice’s tape measure is razor-edged, so why bother raising the question, “Why is Twice trying to attack Dabi with a tape measure..?” Possibly it’s because showing that attack would require animating movement, and MAN ALIVE, did Episode 109 ever want to do everything it could to avoid animating movement.

• Slidin’ Go’s line about how Deika isn’t usually his turf, but today is a big exception. This makes the hearty affirmative with which Trumpet announces himself a response to Shigaraki’s half-phrased observation about the reason behind the city’s emptiness, rather than a response to Slidin’ Go. It works, more or less, and probably even flows more clearly, all things considered. I’m always sad to lose lines from the vanishingly few named/characterized MLA members we have, though. I like, too, that it hints at the machinations that have to have been involved with setting things up for the Revival Party, and the way those plans were carried out with confidence that Re-Destro’s “bait the League into coming for their broker” plan would work despite the total absence of a response from the League in any of the time Giran was missing/his fingers were cropping up on the nightly news reports.

• A few shots of cameras in the city, which foreshadow Skeptic’s watchful eyes and ability to track the League through the city. In retrospect, this isn’t surprising, since the anime went on to cut basically any indication of Skeptic’s entire plan re: the footage of the League attacking, so why bother keeping the cameras? (Oh, right. Skeptic’s whole thing is cameras and information/disinformation. Skeptic for second-most screwed-by-the-anime MLA member.)

Additions

• Showed Toga having stood back up somewhere during Shigaraki’s explanation of their throw-Machia-against-the-MLA plan. A simply appalling choice. In the manga, she stays crouched down by Twice the entire time Shigaraki has his mask pulled off, because Toga cares about reassuring Jin-kun when he’s in a bad way.

• Rephrased Compress’s dialogue somewhat, also giving him a new line about the MLA’s forces in Deika when the League was still in the hills looking down at the city: “The so-called Meta Liberation Army has a force of 110,000 here.” I assume it was because the scene falls in a different episode than the tactical discussion did (in the manga, they’re the same chapter), so the anime was reminding the viewer of the stakes, but it’s potentially awkward because, er, no, the MLA categorically did not bring their entire army to Deika. We’ll find out as much for sure later, with the note that the regiment advisors weren’t in attendance because they were occupied at the bases they command, but even with only the knowledge we have here, Re-Destro’s statement about his numbers is that they’re scattered all over the country—hence the shot of Japan with a bunch of lights scattered across it to represent said numbers. That said, to be (briefly) charitable, there’s no particular reason for the League to assume that, and they did discuss the possibility that there were going to have to fight 110,000 people. So it makes sense that Mr. C might state as much when recapping for the audience.

Chapter 225 – Interview with a Vampire

• Re-Destro talking about Deika’s geography and why they chose it strategically. The anime dropped so much about the MLA’s planning and information-gathering beforehand; it really made the MLA look ludicrously overconfident. And while they don’t lack for that trait, certainly,[2] this is also an organization that has meticulously grown its membership for generations right under Hero Society’s collective nose; you don’t get to where they are by being unduly foolhardy. Erasing so many scenes demonstrating their caution and forward-planning undercuts the threat they represent to both the League and society at large. Also too, the descriptor of Deika as a nice, quiet, isolated little town in the mountains gives us some hints about how the MLA has avoided notice for so long, when you consider how the Hero business works: because so many people who get into heroism want to make it big, like celebrities, they don’t want to stick around small-town beats, and so the rural areas are understaffed.[3] That’s presumably why groups like the CRC and the MLA grow their numbers out in the boonies: much less attention from the Powers That Be. You can guess at some of that from how Spinner describes the place—“not too small, not too big”—and what Trumpet says about the percentage of the population that’s MLA, but RD adds that key “isolated” descriptor, and says that it’s a place where they “lay low.” That gives us some potential insight into how many—likely the majority—of the MLA came to their beliefs: by being raised to them, because their hometown was infiltrated by the MLA generations ago and they have literally never known anything else.

• RD’s phrasing, “Counter to point one,” when he makes his second point about the Noumu. He acknowledges that it’s counter-intuitive to his first argument, that he knows it would normally be an argument against that opening point, not in support. It’s just conversational padding, really, but “conversational padding” like that does a lot to distinguish character voice, so that not everyone talks the same way.

• A panel showing a trio of unnamed MLA warriors strategizing about how to divide their forces now that the League has split up. It’s the little cuts like this that gradually remove the agency of unnamed characters, such that they’re left looking like unthinking puppets instead of real people with the ability to register and respond to their circumstances. It also points towards the truth of what the MLA warriors are and one reason they’re so dangerous (for all that the manga itself will neglect this most egregiously later on): they’re trained in regiment tactics and accustomed to working in groups. This contrasts them both with villains, who might group together, but certainly don’t usually fight that way, and heroes, who are so unaccustomed to working in groups that it’s cited as part of the reason to have named super moves.

• Curious’s little pageboy-cut middle school kid line telling Toga to back off when Miss Curious is on the job. This is an early example of how defensive the MLA are of people above them in the hierarchy, an important thing Spinner will pick up on and attempt to use against Trumpet. Again, it’s little moments like this that both add some welcome notes of individuality to the MLA warriors (if only by virtue of Horikoshi and his assistants’ traditional talent for distinctive character design) while also fleshing out who the MLA are as a group, and contrasting them with the League.

• Deleted Toga’s line IDing her “on-the-go suck-suck mask,” but did insert a nice little bit of her expression shifting when she whipped it out. It lost a bit of the self-conscious silliness of her support item name in exchange for a cool little animation beat. I don’t dislike it, particularly, but I am, as previously stated, very leery of edits that make the League more polished in their villainy at the cost of their human foibles.

• Curious’s line about having come prepared to counter Toga’s moves, which was supposed to further reiterate that the MLA has done their research on the League; they didn’t just decide out of the blue to target the most notorious Villains in the country without studying up on them first and planning accordingly!

• Curious’s line about how she’s going to get started with some background info while her people use their meta-abilities to keep Toga and her buddies on the ropes. A marvelously characterful line! It speaks especially to that edge of formality the MLA brass observe that even as she’s ringleading this attack, Miss Curious is still set on going through her interview process step by established step.

Framing Shifts

• Made some of Curious’s lines spoken dialogue instead of internal monologue. That’s probably fine for when she’s waxing enthusiastic about Toga’s lack of hesitation in committing murder or how she’ll use Toga’s story to further the MLA’s agenda. It’s less fine when she’s rattling out the entire name, brand and patent status of her support item for no particular reason when Toga is already halfway through trying to knife her (that’ll be next chapter).

• The anime implied pretty firmly that Curious’s bombers died. And like, yeah, that’s always made more sense than the idea that anyone could survive something like that, but I hate it anyway. For one thing, it makes it even harder to credit the idea that Toga’s still on her feet afterward if Curious’s supposedly not-very-lethal explosions merk all her own people. People in this series survive ludicrous amounts of damage, and these random MLA devotees are no exception! For another, it leans into the narrative that the MLA higher-ups throw away the lives of their minions without the slightest care. It’s a lot harder to make that case when it’s explicit in the manga that Curious’s people survive the blood explosions—the blonde in the tracksuit is unharmed enough to snicker about it, and the noodle chef is even doing well enough to continue attacking! I’ve always been of the opinion that the MLA are, yes, willing to spend the lives of their underlings on attaining goals, if that’s what they think is necessary, but that is not at all the same as gleefully throwing them onto the pyre to watch them burn.

Additions

• Some individual shots of Mr. Compress, Dabi and Twice fending off or fleeing from various MLA types. A nice try on getting the group split up, but it feels kind of budget save-y, when we could have gotten actual animation of those fights instead.

• Inserted a quick shot of a headline about Toga’s first attack as Curious was rambling on about why she’s interested in Toga but not the League in general. Actually a fairly reasonable insertion, given how much text is crammed into her talk bubble in the manga while the dude standing next to her is already getting a knife in the neck.

Chapter 226 – Bloody Love

• A panel of interviewees talking about Toga’s first victim being sociable and popular. It gives a bit of context on what he was like, what people thought of him, but given that we know enough about Toga at this point to know that his popularity was entirely incidental to what she liked about him, it’s not a huge loss.

• The detail of the broadcasted interviews censoring Toga’s name. Considering how Japanese media normally treats minors accused of crimes, this is an eyebrow-raising change—the manga censors it because Japanese media outlets would have done the same. No idea why the anime didn’t, unless it’s another of those places where it would feel too “real,” to have something that so closely mirrors real life treatment of criminals?

• Everything about quirk counseling, and whoo boy, that is a loaded cut. There is exactly one other mention of quirk counseling anywhere in the manga, and, curiously enough, it also comes up in relation to a villain: in the U.A. faculty meeting after the USJ attack, Midnight muses that maybe Shigaraki never received quirk counseling in elementary school. It’s a weird little non sequitur there—exactly what sort of program did she expect could single-handedly make the difference between a well-adjusted adult and a gleefully murderous manchild with aims on killing Japan’s Number 1 Hero? Just over two hundred chapters later, we get a hint: a program designed to fit people “neatly into society’s little boxes.” Quirk counseling, then, is not about helping children find healthy ways to process their quirks, but rather, about teaching children what is and is not acceptable in terms of quirk use—and as Curious says, Toga’s admiration of blood was never going to be acceptable.[4] This explanation doesn’t just tell us a lot about Toga—that she wasn’t only failed by the hysterical condemnation of her parents, but also by a society that had no interest in helping her if it didn’t see a use for her—but also provides some insight on the viewpoint of the Meta Liberation Army vis-à-vis mandatory state-funded programs that dictate what “normalcy” looks like to impressionable children. Curious is, of course, not a particularly trustworthy narrator in this, as one might expect of someone who uses language like “society’s little boxes,” but it does track with Midnight’s earlier musing of, “Maybe the anti-social dude never took the program intended to make sure he was a functioning member of society.” That kind of statement—“State-sponsored educational programs are there to program children into becoming unthinking cogs of society, actually.”—is one that it’s all too easy to imagine the people with an eye on broadcast standards taking issue with, even coming as it does from the mouth of a villain.

• Curious’s line, “Let’s turn your death into a legendary tragedy, shall we?” and its accompanying visual of two different papers with imagined headlines. The dialogue doesn’t strike me as crucial—Curious’s fervent belief in Toga’s story is amply demonstrated elsewhere and her intent to turn that story into a legend reiterated in the line immediately following—but it is a shame to lose the headlines. They tell us, in Curious’s own words, exactly the tack she was planning to take in telling Toga’s story to the general public, without the constant namedropping of the Liberation Army that she does when talking about it in person. One headline in particular—The Price of Suppression: A String of Bloody Murders—is an especially useful reference for discussing whether the MLA actually wants, as is popularly claimed, completely unhindered quirk use, even for people like e.g. Muscular who want nothing more than to murder people with their quirks.[5]

• Curious’s initial wait what response to getting Floated, and her people’s focus shifting away from Toga and onto Curious instead. On a surface level, that focus shift helps explain why Toga’s able to zip around the ground and touch nearly twenty people before they even react: because they’re afraid for Curious. It also hurts the ongoing characterization of the MLA rank and file as being fanatically devoted to their higher-ups which, again, is something Spinner is supposed to notice later. It’s the worst kind of plot device if that devotion is completely told to us rather than consistently shown!

• Toga’s internal reflection that she’s seen Ochaco use her quirk, and knows how to use it. It’s obvious from the panel that she knows how to use it, but the manga implies that Toga transforming doesn’t automatically grant her an understanding of peoples’ quirks; it’s only in observation (and possibly love) that she can reach this particular unlock. Leaving out that information leaves open the possibility that she can just do this all the time now, with anybody she transforms into.

• The reaction from the surviving crowd to Curious’s death. See above re: STOP FUCKING ERASING HOW MUCH THE MLA CARES FOR EACH OTHER.

Framing Shifts

• When Toga bolts, Curious in the anime sounded serious, her expression alarmed, like she was actually worried that Toga might escape, even though her dialogue said just the opposite. Maybe you could say that she was afraid Toga would die before she got her statement, but given that she tried to kill the girl herself moments later, I’m skeptical of that claim. Regardless, in the manga, she never loses her smile, and she flashes a Liberation salute as she stands up to give chase. It’s a characterization note, that she’s so wildly confident about this that she never stops being completely enthralled with whatever Toga has to show her.

Chapter 227 – Sleepy

• The last of Toga’s conscious dialogue, about how she’s lost a lot of blood, is fading out, can’t move—but more notably, the way that this state of things makes her feel closer to “them,” that it’s “the same sensation.” And who is “they” here—her victims? The people she loves? More alarmingly, why does the line sound like she’s been this beat-up before, and remembers the sensation? Does that tie into e.g. her comment during the training camp that she doesn’t want to fight too many hero students at once because she doesn’t want to die? Has she actually been subject to this kind of violence before in the past? Does that tie into her still-unexplained ability to erase her presence? It’s an interestingly loaded little line, for being so vague, and illustrative of Toga’s mentality on becoming the people she loves. Which also lets the scene segue nicely into Re-Destro’s observation that, in Toga Himiko’s world, there’s no such thing as “other people.” On which note, guess what else the anime cut?

• The entire fucking scene where Re-Destro actually reacts to Curious’ death, the motherfuckers. This lost: 1. RD’s talk about the way Toga sees the world and how that led to society casting her out, which he points to as evidence of said society clinging to old ideals even though the nature of humanity itself has changed. It calls back to his methodology with Detnerat, marrying his lines from the commercial to his overarching ideals; it also shows that he understood very well what Curious saw in Toga, and demonstrates that he can express that understanding and empathy even in the face of losing one of his closest allies. 2. Skeptic’s reaction to Curious’s death, which is pretty sparse, but at least present. He says she never should have been on the front lines—an excellent reminder to the people who’re always going on about how the MLA brass thinks themselves so above their followers: Curious was on the front lines, against the wishes of some of her peers!—and calls her a valuable resource.[6] You can theorize about Skeptic not caring for her beyond her usefulness to the cause, or just that Skeptic is a huge autist who processes his emotions differently than most, and isn’t going to stop to do that when there’s still a battle going on, but either way, you need this scene to do it accurately. 3. Speaking of people who process their emotions in unusual ways, as I said above, this scene also shows Re-Destro openly crying over the deaths of Curious and each and every warrior diving into battle with their hopes for the future. They’re not crocodile tears, either. As was the case with Miyashita, there’s no one in this room that Re-Destro would need to perform grief for: Skeptic clearly doesn’t see a use for tears right now, so I don’t see him expecting them from Re-Destro, and the only other person in the room is Giran, a hostage who the MLA—very probably Re-Destro himself—maimed! It’s not like RD’s tears are going to change Giran’s mind about him (indeed, Giran gets a comedic reaction beat at the absurdity of the dude who started all this up here crying about it)! But RD says life is precious and he cries anyway, briefly, before he ruthlessly turns it off. RD’s valuing of human life—especially his own peoples’ lives—crops up in roundabout ways twice more, both leading the fight with Shigaraki (“It angers me.”) and ending it (“Any more would bring about meaningless death.”). This, though, is when he’s most open about it, to the degree that—as with Machia’s grief—it’s kind of off-putting and strange. Cutting it makes it that much easier for people to get entirely the wrong impression of RD as a character. 4. The delightful scene where Skeptic berates Giran about asking brainless questions and then answers his question anyway. Fuckin’ hell, why cut this?? So much of Skeptic’s character is in this scene! You get moments of his neuroticism later on, but never in so concentrated a burst as this (there’s one other sequence that could compete, but—spoilers—the anime cut that one, too). The exchange also explains the cameras placed throughout the city—which are visually referenced early on—and what the MLA is planning to do with their footage. Without that explanation, the audience has no idea how, exactly, the MLA was planning to use wiping out the League as a springboard for their grand return to the spotlight. That footage is the crucial part of how the rest of the country reacts to Deika in the Endeavor Agency Arc, and the anime never even mentioned it! The audience was just left to assume that all the media came in afterward, not that there was the slightest whiff of footage from the battle itself. 5. Once again brings up Re-Destro’s belief in the power of the heart to move other hearts. We get a bit of that in Curious’s flashback, but here he says it in his own words—as he will also bring it up to Shigaraki. Once again, Shigaraki is going to be challenged about his conviction, which ties back into what Spinner and Ujiko demanded from him earlier in the arc. With so

many people set to be grilling Shigaraki on this front, it tells us again what the arc is for: Shigaraki’s conviction, and him demonstrating it to the people who think he lacks it.

• The panel of Spinner asking how long they’ve been at it and Mr. Compress responding. This line helps manage the pacing, giving the audience an idea how much time is passing as we cut around to different places. It’s also, you know, more cut Spinner dialogue, and shows the beginnings of Shigaraki and Spinner getting split off from the rest by Shigaraki’s sleep-drunk staggering angling him off in a different direction. The rest of the scene is moved to after Toga’s fight with Curious, but not otherwise tampered with.

• The other big reaction to Curious’s death, which is Trumpet using it to rile up the crowd. The group that attacks Shigaraki isn’t just some free-roaming mob—they’re coming at him in a grief-stricken frenzy, which they’ve been goaded into by one of their leaders. This sequence also introduces the campaign van—a vehicle that will have several more appearances—to events, and hints at Trumpet’s meta-ability. Further, it’s one of the scenes that outright states that the MLA is less an army than a religion, in Mr. Compress’s line about how Trumpet is like a preacher rallying his flock. That understanding—that the MLA may style themselves as an army, but what they really are is a cult—is key to the way the MLA members act, from the very bottom to the very top.

• Trimmed Shigaraki’s flashback down, cutting—among other things—the very first lines Hana speaks, and her namedrop. This moment is the first one Tomura gets back, and the very first thing we find out is that he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. The anime also failed to identify Shimura Nana’s relation to Tenko/Tomura and Hana—helpful to remind the audience of a plot thread they haven’t heard about since Kamino. It also cut out the silhouette of chubby baby Tenko and Tenko’s first line, asking why Hana’s showing him this, a line which clues us in that Hana was the impetus here, not Shigaraki as he was back then. Still not satisfied, it also cut the phrase, “Daddy said all that stuff,” which is a clear and ominous warning that there was some conflict going on between young Shigaraki and the Father whose dismembered hand he now wears on his face.

• Left the dialogue but cut the silhouette of an airborne Geten with his enormous ice fists coming in hot behind Dabi when he was smarming about it not being his style to take the pacifist route. It’s not crucial, since we see the fists again shortly (it’s the end of the chapter page, whereas the anime rolls right on into the continuation of the scene), but it’s a shame, since framing Dabi from below with this sudden presence behind him is a much more fun, dynamic angle than the dead-boring medium shot the anime used. Also too, it’s good foreshadowing for the fact that Geten can fly, since he certainly didn’t get that kind of air by jumping off the roof of the mini-mart across the street.

Framing Shifts

• The crowd attacking Tomura came at him from the back of the shot, whereas in the manga, they’re surging forth from the front; that is, the anime had Shigaraki between the crowd and the POV of the viewer, whereas the manga has the crowd interposing between the viewer and Shigaraki. It makes a huge difference in the impact! Running up from a nebulous background distance, the crowd looked small and futile. Crossing directly in front of the viewer as they attack Shigaraki makes them look like the crashing human wave that they are. But, you know, coming in from the front would mean they’d have to be animated with more detail, and again, Episode 109, more than any other episode in the arc, clearly didn’t have the budget to spare on such things.

• The moment Shigaraki first uses the spreading Decay is horrifically clear in the manga. It’s full of speed lines, Shigaraki moving so fast he decays a dude mid-word, but the impact itself is spread over two pages. We watch his hand literally cleaving through the leading attacker’s face, and then are encouraged to linger on the oversized panel below, the intricately drawn crowd, full of individual faces, still intact on the left, scattering to dust on the right, all fully lit, with Shigaraki—still drawn with speedlines to emphasize his movement—the focal figure in black at the center. The anime rendered this moment in two stills—Shigaraki’s hand about to hit the lead attacker’s face, and then the crowd already decaying. There was virtually no movement to it, the crowd was so heavily silhouetted against a glare of daylight that it was difficult to tell what was going on, and the moment stayed on screen for only two seconds before Shigaraki landed and threw up, both actions favored with more animation than one of the signature moments of the entire arc. Hell, it even left the walls on either side of the alley intact, when the manga shows them dissolving into ash as well, decay traveling through the ground in a deadly, destructive radius around Shigaraki’s attack. The anime ever-so-graciously allowed Spinner his line to explain to the audience what just happened, but I think that’s mostly because it would be genuinely difficult to parse if he didn’t. It also gave him a flashback to what we had literally just seen, except this time it wasn’t silhouetted for some reason, so at least the audience got another chance to look at it, I guess? “Am I seeing things? Just now, his decay effect spread to people he wasn’t even touching!” Well, I guess we’ll have to take your word for it, Spinner.

Additions

• A quick shot of a camera, there and gone almost too fast to register. I want to compliment the anime for adding a camera back in, since it removed the shot of the cameras earlier, but honestly, given that it cut all the scenes about how and why the MLA was gathering footage, I really don’t know why it even bothered. Also too, the camera was gone so fast it felt more like a marker for a scene change—which it also was, segueing the scene from Toga collapsing (only to cut back to her later staggering down an alley) to Spinner and the rest still trying to hold their own—than it did something the audience was supposed to really notice.

Chapter 228 – Wounded Soul

• Twice in the opening pages left out scattered members of the MLA that were around for the start of the Dabi/Geten fight. Leaving them out raises the question of where all the people attacking went, but it’s also the first demonstration that Geten is a danger to his own allies. We don’t see any of them dying on-panel or anything, but we do see them having to dive frantically out of the way because Geten demonstrates no care to the collateral damage of his attacks.

• Cut a small flashback, presumably from Twice’s perspective, of finding the site where Toga and Curious’s fight concluded. You can see the ground covered in blood, and a body that looks a bit like Curious if you squint (distinguishable by the sleeves of her jacket), as well as a small group of people kneeling on the ground in various poses suggesting mourning and a paying of respects. Yet another shot demonstrating the depths of care these people have for their leaders, that they’ve completely let the battle fall by the wayside in favor of their grief.

• Drops the “those zealots” phrase from Twice’s, “I’ll rip those zealots limb from limb for this!” line. Damn, the anime really was determined to erase everything that even hints at the Liberation Army being something much creepier and more damaging than just an underground militia, huh?

Framing Shifts

• For all my complaints about the material, I generally like the voice acting quite a bit. I don’t love the first exchange between Dabi and Geten, though. It’s not a fault of the voice actors themselves, but rather the delivery. Geten was very cool and level-headed throughout, which is all right to a point, but he’s a gremlin under that troll parka, and this fight is where we hear him as close as we ever will to how he is before the multi-layered humbling he’s subject to over the course of this fight. It’s a bit of a shame to play him totally straight, without any of the snark he’s so clearly capable of—and without the tick upwards in vehemence his talk bubbles indicate in his last lines. Meanwhile, it’s fine for Dabi to get more heated as the scene goes along, and indeed he does, but he also plays it pretty cool at first. You can tell in the shape of his talk bubbles that he’s completely unruffled during his delivery of that, “Consider this a freebie, just for you: ice melts,” line. The anime had him raising his voice for it, and it just loses a lot of the humor of Dabi’s own snark to have him yelling it instead of just laughingly stating it, voice barely raising enough to give his talk bubbles some straighter lines instead of being all undisturbed curves. (For comparison’s sake, it’s about the same level of angular as Geten’s, “You’d best not think your little campfire can melt my ice!” line, but the anime had Dabi shout his line, while Geten continued at the same unperturbed volume he’d maintained since the beginning.)

• As with Shigaraki’s first mass decay, the shot of Geten’s ice dragon did not make the impact on me in the anime that the manga did. I think it’s mostly the way the ice was colored? The claw’s pretty good, but the head looks blobby and indistinct, more like blue soft-serve than the shifting, sharp-edged, brilliantly bright sculpture-in-motion of the manga.

• Twice’s voice actor did his best to sell the scene of him finding Toga, but I wish they’d kept that tight close-up on his mouth when he says, “Give it up. The girl’s dead.” They animated him leaning closer to the camera, but that doesn’t have the sharpness of that sudden cut to being right there on his lips, like some malevolent thing is using them to speak words so terrible that they can’t even be associated with the rest of his face.

---

Come back next time (and hopefully in less time) for Part Three, Episode 110: Sad Man's Parade.

FOOTNOTES

[1] We would, of course, have an even clearer idea of that had the anime not cut the scene of Spinner shouting in Shigaraki’s face.

[2] It seems particularly strange to me that Curious and RD both mention quirk evolution as a thing they know can happen in extreme circumstances, but didn’t predict that backing the League into a life-or-death corner might provoke one or two members to undergo exactly that evolution.

[3] Mount Lady is the obvious example, but you can look to places like the island in Heroes Rising, too: one hero, and when they retired, a group of high school kids had to go sub in for a while until a replacement could be arranged. It’s not like retirements just happen overnight; the Commission had to have known it was coming. Still, they had to scramble to find someone. It doesn’t suggest they had anybody just champing at the bit to take the post, you know?

[4] In Chapter 140, we see a young Tamaki Amajiki in a class called “quirk training.” It’s uncertain how connected this P.E.-like class is to quirk counseling, but Toga wouldn’t have been getting much help there, either, seeing as it’s all about figuring out how to use one’s quirk in a way that’s “useful to society.” I can think of some ways, but nothing that I expect would be very popular or liable to be explained to a grade schooler in a country with as long a history with ritual cleanliness as Japan. To a Shinto mindset, Transformation isn’t just off-putting or unhygienic; it’s spiritually unclean.

[5] The answer there being, no, obviously not, or Curious wouldn’t, in all apparent sincerity, be trying to characterize Toga using her quirk to murder people as an undesirable outcome, a cost society is paying for its current stance on quirk use. Yes, you can gather that much from her calling Toga a tragic girl, and Re-Destro concurring later, but listen, I will take every line I can get that I can use to push back against the wretchedly widespread idea that the kid whose name means Apocrypha is the be-all-end-all source on MLA ideology, somehow more reliable and trustworthy than every other MLA character combined, including Destro himself. I would very much like it if the anime had not deleted a bunch of my talking points while making good and sure to leave all Geten’s most damning lines intact.

[6] Not that an anime-only person would fully understand why some random reporter was all that valuable a resource, since the anime cut the explanation of what Curious actually does for a living.

#my villain academia #bnha #bnha meta #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #my writing #stillness has salt

39 notes · View notes

framecaught · 3 years

Text

Cataloguing Homestuck’s Art Styles

Hussie deploys a number of distinct art styles throughout Homestuck, each serving different purposes in the narrative. A number of these, especially those mentioned in the published book series’ author commentary, have been catalogued in the Homestuck wiki [1]. These officially named styles are well-known enough to appear in quora answers. However, Homestuck employs a much larger variety of stylistic manipulations than explicitly mentioned in the book commentary or wiki. While scanning through the comic again for this project, I wanted to catalogue the rest of them!

This post constitutes a working list of all distinct art styles present in Homestuck. I’ve chosen not to include the distinct styles of the fanartists/outside artists who contributed to the comic; that will be a project for another day. As far as I know, this list only comprises the different styles Hussie develops throughout the comic. I have tried to bring a degree of specific formal analysis (also known as art-historical language) into my description of each style.

1. “Classic” Style

Page 1 of Homestuck

Page 1349 of Homestuck

Page 4227 of Homestuck

The “Classic” Homestuck style appears on the first page of the comic. Although not officially described by the wiki, it is widely understood as the comic’s typical graphic norm. Characters have simplified faces and clothes, and they frequently lack arms. Elements are often outlined in a black stroke, especially to differentiate them from other adjacent, similarly-colored elements. In more colorful panels, scenery may be made up of solid blocks with bright colors. Sprites (base character illustrations) and elements are repurposed from panel to panel in new combinations. Homestuck even takes up the repurposing of sprites as a gag, as in page 1349 above where the ability to flip one’s sprite allows Noir to regain his lost wrist barcode.

This style obviously shares characteristics with Hussie’s style in Problem Sleuth. General characteristics that frequently appear in Hussie’s art are present, such as circular faces and rounded edges on quadrilaterals. The Classic Style umbrella actually covers the broadest range of visuals out of any style catalogued here. The uber-simplistic sprites, such as John on page 1, have typically been lumped in with, for example, the illustration on the cover of Homestuck Book 1, or the two other examples I pulled for this post. So, in the Classic Style, characters can sometimes appear with arms, sometimes without, and in outfits of varying detail, but they retain the same facial features and simplistic quality. The circular facial shape is especially characteristic of this style, along with the lack of a neck. The neck-less quality, static poses, and simplistic detail chiefly differentiate some instances of Classic Style from Hero Mode, though there are still some grey areas.

2. Scribble Mode

Page 1931 of Homestuck

Page 1937 of Homestuck

Page 1798 of Homestuck

Page 3140 of Homestuck

This style is recognized by the Homestuck wiki, which describes it as emphasizing “a particularly silly/stupid moment in the story, particularly those to be imagined by a character.” That is to say, this style often denotes imagined scenarios which do not actually occur in the comic but instead in a character’s imagination, and especially those which form the butt of jokes. It is also employed simply to highlight silliness. This style is constructed to appear as if the author has “scribbled” rapidly between the outlines of forms to fill in color, creating gaps in those forms. Generally, strokes are made to seem more careless, and less detail is used. While the style is meant to mimic a scribbling motion, it does not always end up crude or parodic. For example, in this “charming vignette” (in Hussie’s words) depicting the Mayor’s dream, the scribble style actually illustrates a remarkably beautiful and almost impressionistic series of panels. Although the dream vignette has certain obvious scribbley elements and certainly depicts an imagined scenario, I would argue that it combines aspects of both Scribble Mode and Hussnasty Mode (#4 in this post) throughout.

I have also identified two distinct styles within the Scribble Mode umbrella. One always uses a thin, apparently single-pixel-wide black line to outline forms, while the other uses a thicker stroke for both its filling and outline. You can see the difference between these in the four examples I’ve pulled; they are sometimes even combined within one single Scribble Mode panel.

3. Hero Mode

Page 1815 of Homestuck

Page 2063 of Homestuck

Hero Mode was officially named as such by Hussie. The Homestuck wiki page describes it as cropping up to “emphasize a particularly epic moment in the story.” Hussie originally called the style “action panels” before hitting upon the current name, emphasizing the link to action scenes and dynamic poses. Along with dynamic posing, characters are drawn in greater detail and tend to have elongated limbs. Some crossover can be seen between Hero Mode and Hussnasty Mode. I would argue that characters in Hero Mode usually retain the original style’s characteristic lack of a neck, while Hussnasty Mode often adds one. Compared with the Classic style, Hero Mode always adds arms. The degree to which Hero Mode drawings include the “hatching-type effect” characteristic of Hussnasty Mode varies from panel to panel. The difference between Hero Mode and Classic Mode can be observed clearly on these two pages, where Damara shifts between the two styles at the behest of Scratch, who asks her to “render [herself] in a more symbolic manner.”

The wiki asserts that “Hero Mode dispenses with the black outline that typifies sprite-style animation and scribble mode,” but I don’t think it can actually be characterized as the only lineless style. Scribble Mode and Hussnasty Mode also sometimes feature a lineless graphic style depending on which part of a character is being depicted, or the need for a line to differentiate two features of a similar color. A willingness to move between lined and lineless blocks of color characterizes Hussie’s art as a whole.

4. Hussnasty Mode

Page 2805 of Homestuck

Page 2976 of Homestuck

This art style is also named by the author. In his commentary on page 2805, he writes: “Someone asked me what I called the style, and I replied by naming it "Hussnasty Mode" myself, because well… it's a bit nasty, isn't it? Kind of raw, a little over-illustrated, and making use of a lot of jagged aliased pixel edges for a hatching-type effect. It was sort of the point to make it a little nasty, kind of aggressively incongruous with the other styles previously established.” This quote sums up the style’s characteristics pretty well. Hussie also describes how this style is more naturalistic, or less symbolic, and was meant to work in direct contrast to the extremely symbolic RPG Sprite Mode. He writes that “drawings like this are introduced in contrast with this simple RPG sprite mode, which was also established very recently as something that Homestuck was "allowed" to use as a stylistic presentation of characters and settings… Every time HS does something like this, it's widening its own umbrella in terms of what it's allowed to do stylistically, which includes dramatically simplifying and abstracting its forms. Which implicitly asks another question: Can HS "allow" itself to go in the other direction? To render characters with higher degrees of definition, regardless of congruity, and freely navigate this full artistic palette at any time, resulting in sharp stylistic contrast and a certain amount of visual thrashing? The answer to that question, almost immediately after it's asked in the form of dropping RPG-sprite Rose into a standard panel shot, is yes, HS can do that, and clearly it WILL do that.”

5. RPG Sprite Mode

Page 2804 of Homestuck

Page 2824 of Homestuck

Despite being officially described by the author, RPG Sprite Mode hasn’t gained much representation as a distinct style (it does not have a wiki page, for example). This style appears after Homestuck’s first walk-around game, now incorporated as a style for static or gif panels. After their joint introduction, this style is juxtaposed against the Hussnasty style. The quotes pulled above in the section on Hussnasty Mode nicely describe the contrast between these two styles and their greater impact on Homestuck’s graphic norms. RPG Sprite Mode always shows characters from an aerial view, mimicking the style of the first walk-around game, which in turn mimics a wealth of RPG sprite games (such as the original Pokemon games). Sprites from these sorts of early games can be characterized by their almost pointillistic use of individual pixels to carefully construct forms.

6. Terezi’s Perspective

Page 2756 of Homestuck

Page 2128 of Homestuck

This style hasn’t been officially described yet. It only crops up as a representation of Terezi’s perspective, conveying some of her experience tasting and smelling colors. While it only appears a few times in the comic, I think it is uniquely visually interesting, and it includes “blurring” techniques which are only rarely employed in the rest of the comic. I’d guess that the effect is created by layering low-opacity strokes over one another and then sliding the different layers’ opacity up and down.

7. SBAHJ Style

Page 8 of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff

Page 3451 of Homestuck

The SBAHJ comic, featured both within Homestuck and as a spin-off, has its own recognizable style. In the first few pages it has a lot of commonalities with Homestuck’s two versions of Scribble Mode, but later takes on distinct characteristics. It can be characterized in part by its image clipping, an effect where an element is made to look like it has been selected within a square box (in MS Paint or Photoshop) and dragged around the page with little care for the size and accuracy of the selection box. Commenting on page 3451, Hussie describes this effect as follows: “In the SBaHJ comics, one of my cool tactics—which I'm almost positive I invented as a sequential artist—was to elaborately render someone ‘turning around’ by taking one shot of them and gradually altering the pose by crudely rectangle-selecting pieces of their face and nudging them around until they're facing the other way in a totally unconvincing and utterly hideous manner.” Different from Scribble Mode, the SBAHJ style also frequently features blocks of color that appear to be filled with the “paint bucket” tool. When the paint bucket tool is used to fill anti-aliased stokes, it creates a small transparent space between the filling and the original outline, visible in the SBAHJ graphics. Finally, SBAHJ comes to include image compression and glitching, created through “deep frying” compression techniques. Overall, the breadth of manipulative techniques made apparent to the viewer in SBAHJ is much greater than any other style. SBAHJ panels are reproduced wholesale or hyperlinked in Homestuck, but on these two pages Gamzee is also drawn in the SBAHJ style.

8. Caliborn’s Styles

Page 5075 of Homestuck (hyperlinked in pesterlog)

Page 6259 of Homestuck

Page 6929 of Homestuck

Page 6864 of Homestuck

While Calliope’s in-world art was contributed by Shelby Cragg, Hussie gives Caliborn has three styles of his own. The first is his “angular” style, which Calliope aptly characterizes on page 5109 as containing “inscrutable squiggles” and demonstrating a “penchant for arbitrary, completely baffling straight lines and right angles, almost as if trying unsuccessfully to begin constructing a grid.” The second is the style he uses in Homosuck, which retains elements of his original “baffling right angles” but generally takes on the black outlines characteristic of Homestuck’s Classic style, while employing even cruder detail. Finally, after reading a “How to Draw Manga” book, he develops his “manga” style which uses black strokes, somewhat messy coloring (usually with the paint-bucket tool), and shows an attempt at naturalistic representation despite a complete lack of understanding of human anatomy. This style is specifically meant to emulate manga styles, so it features the characteristic white dots as highlights in the eyes, among other features.

————————————————————————

As becomes apparent through Hussie’s commentary, the different art styles employed in Homestuck do more than just emphasize certain moments; they form part of the comic’s visual language and ask us to question our understanding of graphic representation. The scope of this post also illustrates the attention paid to Homestuck’s visual elements throughout the story’s production and within its readership, even if these visual distinctions have received less attention in scholarship. Despite the variety of styles, we can see Hussie’s characteristic artistic tools, techniques, and sensibilities reflected across the comic.

If you find any styles recurring in the comic that I haven’t mentioned here, feel free to shoot me a message! Again, I haven’t included styles from other contributors; only those developed and drawn by Hussie.

————————————————————————

As we approach the close of the semester, I’ll probably be putting out one more post sometime soon! If you liked this post, you can follow the blog on tumblr for updates or, if you don’t frequent tumblr, sign up for the mailing list to receive an email whenever I publish a new mini-essay!

————————————————————————

[1] These include Hussnasty Mode, Scribble Mode, and Hero Mode.

#essay post #homestuck analysis #art styles #art history

91 notes · View notes

remakethestars · 4 years

Text

CABIN 10 — APHRODITE

Headcanons.

❝I want to apologize to all the women I have called pretty before I’ve called them intelligent or brave. I am sorry I made it sound as though something as simple as what you’re born with is the most you have to be proud of when your spirit has crushed mountains. From now on, I will say things like, ‘You are resilient,’ or, ‘You are extraordinary.’ Not because I don’t think you’re pretty. But because you are so much more than that.❞

— Rupi Kaur

Headcanon masterlist.

They’re the camp hairdressers. You need a trim? You want it cut? You want it died? You want to shave it all off? Hit ‘em up.

The type of people that will straight-up chop their hair if it doesn't match their outfit. Somehow, it always works out? I'm looking at Micarah Tewers.

They also run a secret ear piercing — or anything else you need to pierce — parlor.

Okay, but consider: children of Aphrodite that grow up to be models.

They can charm speak the photographers into letting them pick their own poses & not make them do seductive ones if they’re not comfortable with them.

Some create clothing lines that represent sustainable fashion & have big names but small carbon footprints.

Some are spies.

Think about it! They know how to switch subtle bits of their personality to fit in with everyone they come across, when & when not to use their charm.

The hide outfits under other outfits & can slip one off in public to reveal the other & lose a tail.

And they'd probably be great at disguise makeup. Add a prosthetic chin, contour their nose differently, pull off their wig, & they're a completely different person.

Plus, their combat training at C.H.B. makes them the perfect agent.

The floor next to their bunk is scattered with fabric cuttings, pins, needles, their sewing machine, serger, & measuring tape.

The number of times someone's gotten a needle or pin in their foot's a tad concerning.

Will absolutely not wear a top with an overstitched collar. Fast fashion is so tacky! Understitch is the way to go, the staple of a quality garment.

Vintage is better. Not because it's in style (that's a plus, though), but because the seams are big enough for you to let out, & it's made to last.

Experts at thrifting. Not just 'cause it's trendy or whatever, but because they're excellent at upcycling & far too many perfectly good clothes go into the land fill each year.

Make stunning dresses out of Good Will table cloths & curtains.

Or stitch two items together into one better whole.

They iron their clothes; they're not animals.

Really good at getting stains out?

Totally in on the corset bustier top trend, but they're using spiral steel boning in place of zip-ties. Because, again, they want things to last & they're not tacky.

Pass each other tips. Like to tuck your top into your tights to avoid the bulge under your skirt.

Some found big-name, organic makeup companies that don't test on animals. They use packaging that can be recycled or that's biodegradable.

Borrow their clothes, sure, whatever, but double-dip in their makeup & die. The bacteria will give them acne. (Or is it the oils? Either way, you'll perish.)

Happy to drop their skincare routine, though.

You need to cover up that tattoo you got from C7? They got you.

Flawless makeup on a budget. Expensive doesn't always mean better.

They're taking you to the pool for a first date? Take a seat, C10 knows just the stuff. They use what Disney Princesses use.

Can guess the right shade of foundation/lipstick for you on the first couple tries.

A lot of them invest in magnetic lashes because glue's a b¡tch.

Reusable makeup wipes.

Rick says C10 kids just sit around the lake & check their reflection, but consider: working out gets them their dream bod. So, yes, they do, in fact, train.

They just do it with intricate braids/hair gel & stylish sportwear.

And if a potential partner finds it unattractive that they’re “too muscly,” they’re no longer a potential partner.

Weapons disguised as jewelry or chapstick/lipstick.

Thalia had a mace canister that turned into a spear, & I gotta say, I.D.K. how she planned to get that through security. Imagine, alternatively, a tube that appears to be full of bright red lipstick when the T.S.A. agent opens it, but actually turns into a spear when opened by a half-blood.

(I have a headcanon that Riptide would just be a pen in the hands of a mortal. Bounced around for years as random objects until Poseidon nabbed it & took it to Chiron — recall that pen you lost?)

A pink, velvet choker that turns into a kopis with a dove embossed in the handle.

Many choose to train in heels. Might as well wear in training what they’ll be wearing when attacked in the street.

They’ve got no time for internalized misogyny.

“C10′s weak ‘cause they like being pretty!” Good way to lose a kneecap, Annabeth. You’ve grown up in this camp, you knew Selina, & you should know better.

They confront Piper’s misogyny pretty early on after The Lost Hero, but Piper still takes some time to get over her bias toward pink.

Are we not gonna talk about Rick’s fashion choices for Piper throughout the series? “She looks so fashionable.” To whom, Rick? To whom?

You couldn’t’ve done a little internet surfing just to see what was in style? I never leave the house in anything but jeans, Converse, & a graphic t-shirt from Walmart, & even I know she’s dressed like a middle-schooler! Probably because that’s how I dressed in middle-school… That’s not the point.

The point is just because a character likes makeup or fashion or the color pink, doesn’t mean they can’t/won’t fight for their lives & the lives of their friends if/when the time comes. And it doesn’t mean that they’re stupid or judgmental.

I don’t know a lot about makeup. Hades, I don’t even wear makeup — you can’t rub your eyes or scratch your face; it would drive me crazy. I don’t know a lot about fashion either. I don’t understand it, but I can respect it.

❝‘Jesus,’ Sara says as Branley walks past us. ‘Too cold to show off cleavage, so instead she goes for jeans so tight I can see her thong.’ ‘She looks nice,’ I say, and she does. Branley always looks put together in a way that tells me she spends hours in front of a mirror before going outside. And while I don’t understand that, I can respect it.❞

— Alex Craft, Mindy McGinnis’s The Female of the Species

According to The Lost Hero, all children of Aphrodite intuitively speak French. Cool, cool, cool — but consider, all of them also intuitively speak the language of flowers.

They see a red rose, and they just know it symbolizes love & passion. They see an orange lily, to contrast, & they know it symbolizes hatred.

There’s a copy of The Language of Flowers in their cabin, and it’s full of annotations, like, So-and-so gave these to so-and-so for Valentines Day! And, So-and-so gave these to so-and-so after their kiss on the Fourth of July; they obviously didn’t do their research!

They work together with C4 (Demeter) to provide flowers for funerals & the like.

C10 bookshelves also contain a lot of romance novels.

Beaten up copies of Pride & Prejudice & The Fault in Our Stars with faded highlighter over the beautiful lines & annotations in the margins.

The outside walls are a dusty pink, & the wood’s stained a dark brown that goes surprisingly well with the pink.

Inside, the walls are covered in faded wallpaper.

The southwest wall has a bay window with extra storage in the seat. (There’s not a body in there; they swear.)

(That’s an Arsenic & Old Lace reference, for you youngsters.)

The curtains have one chiffon layer closer to the window & a thicker floral fabric for inside. The thick curtains are replaced based on the season & whether or not someone’s decided to make a romper out of them.

They have a real bell jar with a real rose in front of the window. Legend has it it’s from Aphrodite herself.

Said window is a stained glass image of a dove.

The chaise lounge was probably beautiful when it was brought it, but it’s got fingernail polish & makeup stains on it now. Honestly, someone should really have that thing cleaned.

As you might have noticed, I placed a gif of swans at the top instead of a fancast for Aphrodite. This is because I think, as I believe most Percy Jackson fans do, multiple people should play her. I'd cast Arden Cho, Camila Mendes, Candice Patton, Diane Kruger, & Gal Gadot to start with.

Visit my Aphrodite cabin Pinterest board or my headcanon masterlist.

DISCLAIMER ━━━ I know I got a tad political with this one, but I didn’t & don’t intend to offend anyone. ━━━ These headcanons are what I consider to be canon in my fanfictions. They may be others’s headcanons I’ve subconsciously filed away in my noggin. If one’s yours and you want it removed or credited, please send me your post and let me know.

#Aphrodite #Aphrodite cabin #Aphrodite kids #children of Aphrodite #Percy Jackson #PJO #HOO #remakethestars #beauty #makeup #sewing #fashion #headcanons #headcannons #hcs

238 notes · View notes

clonewarslover55 · 4 years

Text

Sev’s first time being pegged //NSFW//

Sev X Fem!Reader

I’m planning on writing all of the Delta’s first times being pegged!! So stay tuned!

Notes: My friend @kyzyner and I had a wonderful idea!! They drew this since I wrote it!! Seeing Sev getting dominated gave me some wonderful inspiration lol. Here’s the sexy art they drew, I based the fic off of this pose.

Warnings: anal fingering, eating out Sev’s ass, slightly submissive Sev, slightly dominate reader, first time at getting pegged, pegging, Sev being stubborn, some fluffy aftercare, Sev growls like a wild animal btw, this is long like Sev’s cock, reblog or I’ll cry,

Sev had just gotten home from a long mission, and he was currently in the shower. You decided to surprise him, so you two could shower together. You were more than surprised when you opened the curtain.

Sev had his forehead resting against the shower wall, one hand wrapped tight around his cock and the other knuckle deep in his tight hole. The sight made your cunt clench tightly, wetness coating your folds quickly.

“Need some help big guy?” You spoke, your voice sensual. Sev looked at you, too focused on pleasure to be embarrassed. He let go of his cock to steady himself under the shower spray, “Yes.” He whispered, a predatory look in his dark eyes.

You stepped in behind him, your cunt fluttering at the sight of him removing two fingers from his hole. Sev steadied himself on the wall with both hands now. You grabbed the bottle of lube, quickly spreading some on your fingers.

Sev gasped when you pushed a finger in, his walls tight. “Why didn’t you tell me you were into this?” You nearly purred, pressing hot open mouthed kisses along his scarred shoulders. It was rare for Sev to be so submissive, but he was clearly too tired and horny to care who was in charge.

“I-I” He couldn’t even get the words out, your finger thrusting into him slowly. You added another, Sev taking you perfectly. He had clearly fucked himself a few times in the past. He moaned loudly, his jaw clenched. You hummed a bit at his moans, your tongue tracing a scar on his right shoulder.

He never liked being vocal, but clearly with anal he was in too much pleasure to care. Sev moved a hand to his cock again, pumping it in time with your fingers. “Fuck.” He muttered as you scissored your fingers.

“You like this a lot, don’t you baby?” You leaned forward, licking the shell of his ear. Sev sneered a little, letting out a breathy growl. “Yes.” You smirked, “After I stretch your ass good and tight why don’t we try some pegging?” Sev clenched around your fingers, he obviously liked that idea.

You smirked and went back to marking up his shoulders. He had to move his hands away from his cock so he could balance on the wall with both hands. His thighs were very shaky, so he needed the extra balance. You leaned forward and turned off the shower, Sev not questioning it.

You picked up the pace with your fingers, dipping your head so you could kiss lower on his back. Suddenly you got an idea. How would Sev react to being eaten out? You smirked to yourself as you kneeled.

“What are you doing?” He questioned, his voice cracking slightly. “You’ll see. Just relax.” Sev had eaten you out multiple times, so he should connect the dots pretty soon.

A beautiful whimper you had never heard from him ripped from his throat when you removed your fingers. You ran your hands along his hip bones to his perfect ass, spreading his cheeks a little. Sev shivered at your touch, his hole fluttering.

Sev cussed in about four different languages when you ran your tongue along his hole. You smirked, your tongue tracing him slowly. Sev made fists against the wall, his breathing aggressive.

You couldn’t see the look on his handsome face, but his breathing and noises said enough. He had clearly never been eaten out before, flinching every now and then from pure surprise. You rested your hands on his muscular ass, squeezing it as your mouth worked.

Sev panted out your name, his head resting against the cool shower wall. His hole clenched around your tongue as he came hard, his legs shaking. You steadied him, small curse words leaving his lips. You stood up and hugged him from behind, reaching around to turn the shower back on.

Sev turned around, pulling you into a fierce kiss. Both of you knew this night would be long and very eventful.

~More fucking and some time later~

Now you were both on the bed, Sev below you on his back, his legs spread wide. You sat between his legs, mesmerized by how hot Sev looked like this. There was a pleased smirk on his face, his tongue licking his teeth like a predator.

He was all spread out, his body twitchy and his hair still wet. His muscular thighs twitched along with his strong stomach muscles. He was obviously sensitive and still worked up, his cock hard. The scars that littered his muscular body made you nearly drool. Later you’d have to trace them all with your tongue.

You stroked some scars on his thighs, “Sev baby you need to relax.” You whisper in a sensual voice. He was stretched out nicely from the shower, but he’d have to relax more to take the strap you owned. It wasn’t as big as his cock, so it wasn’t huge. He could take it.

If he relaxed, that is.

He sneered a little. He did not like being the submissive one. You put on the strap, Sev watching you. “Bright pink?” He cocked an eyebrow, his voice breathy. “Oh hush. If you like this i’ll buy you a red one to match your armor.” Sev smirked, leaning up some so you could press a kiss to his lips.

You pushed him back down after the kiss, your heart rate picking up a lot as well. Once you rubbed lube onto the toy you spread his thighs some more, one hand settling on his hip. You used the other to guide the head of the toy into him.

“Relax big guy.” You mumbled, slowly pushing in. Sev bared his teeth, the stretch burning a little. He snarled, the toy not even halfway in. “I’ll touch your big cock once you take all of this.” Sev growled at you. He played the same teasing games with you. You could be just as cruel as him.

It took a lot of cussing from him, but eventually he took all of it. You looked at the stretch, your cunt clenching. Fuck it was hot. You wrapped your free hand around his thick cock, pumping it slowly in time with your thrusts.

Sev threw his head back, his thighs quaking. Sev opened his eyes that were squeezed shut, looking at you with that sexy predatory look again. You smirked, picking up the pace some. His jaw was clenched tightly, watching as you fucked into him.

He had never looked hotter than he did right then, his arms behind his head. His left arm was supporting his head so he could watch you, his right gripping the bed sheets in a tight fist above his head. His muscles bulged as his body strained, his scars pulled taut along his dark skin. His cock was hard against his stomach, the head leaking some. His ass was stretched, taking the bright pink toy like a champ. You could nearly cum from the sight alone.

You gripped his hip tighter so you could hit deeper into him. When you to first had sex it didn’t take Sev long to find that special spot deep inside of you. You wanted to do the same for him. You angled your hips a different way, watching his handsome face and sexy body for reactions.

He nearly cried out at a certain angle, you had found it! You smirked at him, Sev still looking at you like a predator. He was going to teach you a lesson about not letting him be in charge later, the thought making you even wetter.

You moved quicker, Sev’s cock twitching in your hand. He was approaching his peak rather quickly, still sensitive from earlier. “That’s it big guy.” You ran the pad of your thumb along his sensitive head, a loud moan ripping from his throat.

A few more hard and deep thrusts brought him to his peak. He bit his fist to keep from crying out. He coated his stomach and chest in his load, the sight making you shiver. You helped him ride out his orgasm, only stopping when he let out a soft whimper from overstimulation.

You pulled out, removing the strap on from yourself. You went to get up but Sev stopped you with a hand on your arm. He sat up, blinking rapidly. He was clearly seeing stars from his amazing orgasm.

“I’ll get the damp rag.” You snorted, “Sev honey, you need to lay down and relax. Your legs probably won’t work.” He shook his head, “No no….I’m fine.” You raised your eyebrows, watching the stubborn commando stand up.

He gripped the bed to support his shaking legs, “S-see?” You shook your head, letting him take the toy to the bathroom so you could clean it later. He walked slowly, his legs making him look like a newborn animal trying to walk.

He came back a bit later, handing you the damp and warm towel. “Stubborn ass.” Sev only yawned in reply, collapsing onto the bed. He laid against the pillows, watching you shake your head smiling.

You cleaned the cum off of him, his cock twitching when you cleaned it up. When you gently cleaned his hole he whined, flinching a little. “Easy...I got you, big guy.” You smiled, pressing a kiss to a scar on his stomach.

“I’m going to get you back for this.” He mumbled drowsily. You tossed the rag off the bed and crawled up beside him. “And I can’t wait.” You pressed a soft kiss to his lips, Sev already half asleep.

Tags: @leias-left-hair-bun @ollovaemisc @cherry-cokes-world @iamassbuttkingofhell @catsnkooks @mxndalorians @colorfulloverbatturkey @ahsokatano-thetogruta @peacefulwizardfox @jedi-mando @julyzaa @strangebroadwaykinks @feathersforclones @chr0nicbackpain @jedi-nila-rhyn @fyrepen33 @mistflyer1102 @kamino-mermaid @commanderrivercc-3628 @ct7567329 @thealluringsink

#delta squad #sev #Sev x reader #sev x fem!reader #walon vau’s boys #boss #scorch #fixer #Republic Commando #walon vau #republic commando novels #republic commando game #republic commandos #repcom #repcomm #repcomm novels #repcomm game

180 notes · View notes

phoenotopia · 4 years

Text

The Last Phoenotopia Blog Update

(Date 2021 MAR 01)

I debated how to open this blog post, but perhaps the main crux of this blog post is the best place to start. The blog is being retired.

The purpose of this blog was to be a "development" blog for Phoenotopia, and well, Phoenotopia's development is done. I'll still be doing bug fixes and maintenance on the PC and Switch versions, and playstation and xbox ports are underway (by a publisher). But I'm not going to be making any more major changes to the game. At some point, you put the paintbrush down and say it's done. Blemishes and all.

Recent Events

The game launched on Steam last month, and like any launch, it was hectic. Bugs Galore. This is our first commercial PC launch, so it was a real baptism by fire. Unlike Switch's one configuration, the PC has multiple configurations and factors to account for. The game needed to be able to handle multiple control schemes, screen resolutions, refresh rates, and more! I had a 60Hz monitor going into launch and didn't know anything about Hz (I do now). There was a troublesome stutter that some players were sensitive to that my whole team didn't notice since our eyes compensated it away. There were a few times where in fixing something at one party's behest, it introduced problems for another party. A few times, due to disorganization, I unwittingly rolled back a fix that was meant to be applied. For some, the game couldn't play at all (really glad Steam allows refunds).

It was messy. It was tiring. I.AM.BEAT.

I think the worst of it is over... I'll still be around to do the last updates and bug fixes, but I'm ultimately ready for what's next.

SO what is next?

What isn't next... is Phoenotopia 2. As you may have heard down the grapevine, the game couldn't be what you call successful. No one's earned even minimum wage on it.

Maybe there's hope in the game's long tail. A year or two down the line... maybe. I won't hold my breath though. At some point in the past few months, I finished processing (or grieving) and it's time to move on.

The game has at least earned enough for us to continue our modest operations. As long as we don't expand the team, and we don't take another monster six-year dev cycle like what Phoenotopia took, we can continue. We'll have to be smarter and faster. Perhaps the most valuable thing we gained from all this is experience.

The Experience

It is a dev blog. Here are some of the lessons I've accumulated from this game's development.

- Have a good menu design. Menus aren't just that in-between fluff before you get to the good stuff. Menus are KEY. Your menus need to be robust, expandable, and *understandable* (to you, the developer). Because once the game's out, you will invariably be asked to add more options. And if your menu design is bad, every time you have to add a new menu option, it becomes a whole new pain all over again. Support mouse from the get-go, etc.

- Focus on features that people will actually care about. For instance, I've never seen anyone praise the camera's zoom feature. In practice, people try that feature a few times and then never use it again. But that feature was a constant consideration factor for every level. Run through it multiple times to make sure the level didn't break, think about which zoom levels made sense, resize rooms because they worked at one zoom level but not the other, and so on.

- Don't do boxes that you can move around. Other 2D platformers avoid movable boxes because they're a huge headache to program and they really complicate the game space. Enemies need to respond to boxes you throw in their path and either navigate around or attack it. When you're moving the box, you have to worry about constantly changing your collision size and reconciling when the box gets snagged on the environment. The boxes were also a constant source of bugs because people can manipulate them to soft-lock themselves and more.

- More focused script. Phoenotopia's 100,000+ word script was panned more for being bloated than it was praised for being lengthy. Long scripts take a long time to write and make the game more unwieldy, increasing the costs of translation and upkeep. Every update we're addressing some textual error or mistranslation. There are some highly renowned games (e.g. Hyper Light Drifter) that do without a script at all!

- Be flashy! A bat and a lightsaber take the same amount of work to program, but the lightsaber will draw a lot more attention and interest.

- Slopes, surprisingly! Six years ago when I started, Unity was ill-equipped for 2D games. If you used the physics that Unity provided you'd have a really floaty character that wouldn't adhere to the slope when going downhill. There were a hundred different tutorials saying different things (use forces, use move position, use translation, etc). You can get rectangular collisions done in a day, but to do slopes took weeks. Meanwhile, games can actually get by fine without slopes. Most people won't even notice. Did you know the Phoenotopia flash game didn't have slopes? Neither does Hollow Knight or Rogue Legacy. You can save yourself a lot of work by avoiding slopes.

(big entities look weird on slopes. Bad slope!)

I could write enough little knowledge nuggets like this to fill a book! But I'd rather just make the next game.

So… what IS next?

As mentioned previously, it's not Phoenotopia 2. Pirate and I are mostly just tossing some ideas back and forth right now. We'll go silent for a year (or two). Our next game's scope will be more modest in some ways, more ambitious in others. It will definitely be more smartly designed. (There will be a map!)

We'll announce it when it's ready for the public. It might be necessary for us to do a kickstarter. I've tried to avoid kickstarters having been burnt on quite a few myself and also because I worry that mismanaging a kickstarter would earn the ire of backers.

But I did keep this blog regularly updated for six years. So I've gained some confidence in my abilities to at least manage a kickstarter well.

Is it really the last Phoenotopia Blog update though?

Okay, not really. There is some news that I'll need to announce, and this blog is one of the game's main outreach channels. Here are the events that will cause me to update the blog:

Announcing the launch of the xbox/playstation ports when they're ready

If a physical edition of the game happens

If a new language is getting introduced into the game (Korean is a high possibility)

When we're ready to talk about our next game

If (BIG IF) we begin development on a Phoenotopia sequel. I do want to do a sequel one day if we have the means and the demand is there.

Those updates will be more on a "when they happen" basis, rather than me reporting in every couple months.

Fan Art

As always, I'm very happy to see fanart of Phoenotopia. Major thanks again to Pimez for collecting all the artwork from the corners of the internet! Since this is the "last" blogpost, Sir Pimez can finally take a rest from collecting the fanart :P

ÆV made a series of pictures that tell a story. A Pooki is humanely sheared of its wool to create a hat. The Pooki is unharmed. Nice! Gotta love Gail’s expressions.

Amagoo Mazeru makes a stunning landscape shot of a full moon and shooting stars. It’s a sharp and clear vector art. I like the faint glow of the moon and the fire and the subtle gradient in the night sky. Very skillfully done!

Hah hah. I got a chuckle out of this one. I imagine this is how Gail's enemies see her by the end of the game. CaESar made this image based on TerminalMontage's famous youtube videos. Nailed it!

CrownStar drew two pictures of Gail. I'm a big player of JRPGs, so the first shot instantly reminded me of Persona 4's art style. (Hmmm... Phoeonotopia as a JRPG... there’s potential there...) Next, Birdy is shown carried off after her defeat. I really like Birdy's expression here - she just seems mildly uncomfortable.

There's a bit of a story behind the first image. As Firanka shares it, she wasn't able to defeat the Big Eye monster at the end of the flash game, so she believed a tall tale that what awaited after was a 6 armed Kobold boss. Hilarious! The second is a rendition of the lonely Anuri elder. A rare subject. The loneliness is portrayed well here. I feel lonely just looking at it!

Koo_chop draws the clash between Gail and Katash at the top of the towers. I really like this interpretation of the game's art style. It’s faithful to the in-game graphics. And the lighting, from the glow of Gail's bat, to Katash's sword, and the lightning in the background... Amazing!

Lime Hazard shows Gail with a salute pose. Very appropriate for this occasion. I also like how there's a slight tilt in the angle that Gail is portrayed. Those dynamic angles are always hard to get right, and Lime Hazard pulled it off very skillfully. See you next mission!

Lyoung0J with a digital painting of Gail posed sitting on a rock. I like how it almost seems like she was caught in a candid moment - she’s smiling, but also feeling self-conscious. Cute! The art style really pops, and I like how Gail is sporting what I call the old anime style nose.

MyUesrNameIsSh*t with a sketch of Gail performing a skillful slingshot. I like how Gail is depicted with her tongue out in a mischievous manner, the way all mischievous people with slingshots do.

Niitsu Kentaro returns with a 2021 Happy New Year picture. That happened didn't it? A New Year... Gail's pose gave me a chuckle with how she seems to be waving the bat around as casually as one would wave hello. And "Phoenotopiyear"... Well said! One day we'll have our Phoenotopiyear...

Ochan Nu breaks all records with a stunning NINE pictures in one session :O

There's so many goodies here. My favorite would be the one with Gail staring intently at the screen - it's like she's looking directly at you. You almost feel uncomfortable.

Next, there's an Animal Crossing villager dressed as Gail and sporting her pink hair. It even looks like a house Gail would live in. Gail is a connoisseur of the arts and likes Mona Lisa. Yes :)

There are various comics of Gail pointing out Gail's weird food habits. A picture of Fran looking really cool, and even Gail rocking a bathing suit. (bathing suit image linked here in case NSFW). Wow!

Pimez didn't just collect the arts, he creates them as well! This one, which he aptly named 'The Year 175' is a depiction of when the dragons invaded the towers as told by an elderly Daean woman. Great pixeling skills! I got a good chuckle from the ice dragon leaving with its stuff slung over its shoulder.

Quo made a stunning picture of Gail playing the flute surrounded by the 5 musical notes and the Phoenix logo behind her. The theme seems to be "fire" and it works really well. Gail herself looks awesome depicted in her red suit - it's like she's leading a marching band!

Rai Asuha depicts Gail in the late game with her red suit, and night star bat, and holding a lamp. She looks ready for adventure! I really like the white outline here and Gail's poofy shoulders here - the art style feels reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics.

Seri also draws Gail bearing her late game equipment. Unique to Seri's drawing is how all of Gail's equipment is accessible from a pocket on her shirt. I also like how Gail is depicted with her lucky earrings - that accessory is often forgotten.

Treedude depicts Gail with a bat and wearing a funny smirk. She looks like she's ready to hurt someone!

Warotar returns with everyone's favorite Great Drake, Bubbles! It seems so happy to be featured!

I'm really grateful for all the fanart this game has received. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!

Closing Notes

Pirate drew a picture to mark the occasion. It shows Gail enjoying a hot chocolate with marshmallows and a pumpkin muffin. A rest well-earned...

Goodbye! Until next time!

#phoenotopia

97 notes · View notes

the-pallid-king · 2 years

Note

He nods. “Me too. It doesn’t matter. I’m not upset. I wouldn’t know how to do it anyway. And I really didn’t want pet play to end up as part of my search history.” He gives you another little nudge, not to tease you about food, but because he wants you to know he’s there. “I’m pretty sure the collar thing is more about possession and submission anyway. We can scrap that too. All that extra stuff doesn’t really matter when you just like being with someone in any situation.” That’s what he thinks. But he doesn’t want to to be disappointed or bored. And new stuff is exciting. Like adding new flavors to food you already know you like.

He tilts his head when you get quiet, but you have that hungry look you get, so he knows where your mind went. He’s kind of relieved, because a lot of what they’ve done is based on the idea that you could enjoy him and food at the same time. He’s not sure where he'd go from here if that was wrong. “Alright. What if I get the hollow? Would it be better if I hunt one down? Or maybe just…” Holy shit, he’s just going with it and trying not to think about it all too hard. “Almost kill one, but extra messily.” Which might amount to rolling around in a half dead hollow and then coming to find you.

He stands with the ticket, then points to your glass. “You want the rest of that? They can put it in a cup and you can take it with you.”

"Oh." Actually, that makes him feel a lot better. It's nice to know you weren't really entertaining the idea of pretend animal sex, he wasn't very on board with it, and knowing you're not upset makes him feel less guilty about ruining it. "Ok. We'll just have to find something else to add to our list in its place." That seems like a good alternative. He looks up at you when you nudge him. His nose wrinkles a little. "But we kinda-" He motions between them, "You know. Have." He can't just say they own or poses each other. "Each other. It's mutual. Would we both have to wear one?"

He's not convinced by the first idea you offer up. As soon as he had possession of the hollow, it would be his and therefore officially off limits to any touching because it's his. Just because you did the hard part probably wouldn't keep him from getting all guardy about it. "Eh... Might be a good midway point, maybe not a starting point." If it wasn't his though... You're on to something. You just can't give up claim over it. Your second idea, though, sounds much more achievable as an earlier stage. It doesn't actually involve any eating at all, except the nibbling he's sure to do all over you. "Ok." He perks up a little. "I could make that work." He's confident when he says it.

He pauses mid- sliding from the booth to look down at his glass for a moment. He looks back over at you and nods, maybe a little excited about that, and pulls the glass over as he finishes standing.

#ask #icxhgo #Shiro with a caffeine buzz

2 notes · View notes

yandere-daydreams · 4 years

Text

Title: Caged.

Word Count: 2.0k

Written for an anonymous commissioner.

Synopsis: Yaoyorozu’s always loved your wings. She takes care of them, grooms them, keeps snow-white feathers clean and undamaged and just perfect... You just wish she took care of the rest of you, too.

TW: Graphic Violence, Broken Bones, Kidnapping, Captivity, Dehumanization, and Delusional Mindsets.

She’d said it hadn’t been because of your wings.

That was all she said for the first few weeks of your captivity, really. Momo was many things, but she wasn’t subtle, nor did she make an effort to watch her tongue around the civilian chained down and (more often than not) unable to respond to her one-sided conversations. She said everything a kidnapper could have to say about their hostage. She claimed that she fell in love with your personality, that she’d spent months dutifully noting down your interests and your hobbies and every piece of information that could be gleaned from careful surveillance. She told you that your wings were just a bonus, that they didn’t really matter, but they just made her precious, darling songbird a little easier to find.

But, for every second she spent singing your praises, she spent two gritting her teeth or crossing her arms or making it clear that she’d love you more if you were obedient, if you were affectionate, if you were different. Your hobbies faded into the background, considering how few opportunities she gave you to indulge them, and unless she was bringing home a gift to make up for the night you’d spent trying to cry yourself to sleep, she didn’t seem to pay your interests any mind. But, she gave your wings the utmost attention, keeping your snowy-white feathers pristine and taking far too much time to prune and pluck anything she didn’t deem ‘befitting’ of you. She adored your wings, she loved your wings, and she never hesitated to tell you that.

As much as she claimed they weren’t her motivation, she cared for your wings. She couldn’t deny that.

That was more than she could say for the rest of you.

You supposed it wasn’t so bad, having her focus on one part of you so heavily, she tended to overlook most of your minor shows of rebellion. You were allowed to drag your knees into your chest and cling to the idea of safety as she looked over your wings, the appendages outstretched to their full length as Momo hummed and pulled at anything loose, anything bent, anything that wasn’t perfect. While she was perched on the edge of her bed, you were left to settle on the cold, barren floor and fight the chill your thin clothes did little to keep out. The basement - your bedroom, as she called it - was sizable, but the space was lost on you, considering how Momo chose to use it. After your last escape attempt, she’d declared furniture a ‘distraction’, something that took your attention away from her. You had a cot, just enough blankets to sleep, and whatever Momo thought was necessary for your basic survival. She’d said that you’d be able to earn things back, but that’d been weeks ago, and she seemed to like the way you were forced to look forward to her daily visits. She liked knowing she was the only thing on your mind.

She liked making sure her pet had nothing better to do than beg for her attention.

“What’d you get yourself into?” She asked, drawing you out of your thoughts. The question was more for her than for you, posed under her breath, and yet, you couldn’t help but feel like you had to answer when every other word was accompanied by another tug, another feather at her feet. “It’s worse than usual, today.”

A dozen excuses played on your tongue. Last month, you’d told her it was molting season, and you’d managed to quell her worries by saying that this kind of damage was normal for avians in new environments before that, a trick that worked for longer than either of you would like to admit. You doubted she’d forget so quickly, so you settled on something simple. “It’s just the stress,” You explained, the statement only half untrue. “It makes maintenance harder than it has to be, but it looks worse than it is.”

That earned a pause, a more careless jerk to one of your primary feathers. “You’re stressed?” Now, she was talking to you, expecting an answer. Paying attention to the way your hands twitched at your sides every time her fingertips brushed a tender spot of lean, thin muscle. A hint of something playful traced the edges of her tone as she continued, and you weren’t sure whether to relax or reinforce your barriers. “Don’t say it’s because of me, angel.”

A pet name. Pet names were good. Pet names meant she didn’t see you as human, right now, making you another one of her infallible, unblamable creatures. It didn’t mean you could be honest, but you wouldn’t have to lie, either, not really. Not as much as you’d have to, otherwise. “It just happens,” You admitted, giving a noncommittal shrug. “Animal-based quirks are complicated, like that. When I’m inside for too long, or… like, when the room I’m in is too small, my wings tend to notice before I can.” You allowed yourself a breathy laugh, loosening your hold on your legs. “When I moved into my first apartment, my roommate had to start complaining before I--”

“You think I’m not taking care of you.”

If her words hadn’t been enough to silence you, the feeling of her fist closing around a handful of something downy and sensitive did the trick. Reflexively, you went rigid, stretching your wings out to their full length and bowing your head, but Momo’s threats were never hollow. With one strong, steady pull, a patch of your left wing was on fire, bare and blazing and burning as you slapped your palm over your mouth and tried to stifle the shriek that threatened to escape. You kept it there, for a moment, attempting to suppress the tears building up in the corners of your eyes, but Momo took your silence as resistance, a low growl reverberating through her grit teeth as she took hold of the base of your wing, the length of exposed bone between skin and feather. She didn’t squeeze, didn’t shatter, but the idea of the pain was worse than the eventuality, forcing your breath to hitch in your throat, your whole body to go stiff. Forcing her to hold you tighter, her irritation more than apparent in the sternness of her grip alone.

"It’s such a shame,” She started, a patronizing lilt weighing down the simple sentiment. You couldn’t see her, not when you were abruptly incapable of even turning your head, but you didn’t have to. You could practically hear her shaking her head, her expression somewhere between a frown and a pout as she lamented over whatever mistake her poor, stubborn little captive made, this time. “I really do try to be patient with you. There’s such a nice nest waiting for you upstairs, but it feels like I can’t let you out of your cage without having to worry about my baby bird trying to fly away.” There was a click of her tongue, a tap of her manicured nails against your shoulder blade. You felt her eyes prying into your skin, flitting across all the places your wings rooted themselves in place, as if she’d be able to tear them out with her gaze alone. For a moment, you wondered if she could. “Maybe if you stopped trying to get yourself into so much trouble, you’d wouldn’t have to be locked up. You’d be able to accept all the wonderful things I have to give you, and I wouldn’t have to watch you throw your tantrums and pretend I wouldn’t do anything to make you happy.”

“That’s not what I meant,” You managed, curling your nails into your palm as you willed yourself not to raise your voice. Yelling at Momo was never a good idea, and playing dumb would only make her more determined to remind you of your offenses, even if you couldn’t name the incident she seemed so focused on, today. “Please, Yaoyorozu, please, I didn’t mean to--”

“This is why I have to be so strict with you,” She sighed, her free hand falling to the arch of your wing, spreading the appendage to its full span. No longer giving you the chance to refuse. “You’re so quick to lie, and so slow to regret it. You don’t even know what you did wrong.”

You flinched, your lips parting, but your mind going blank as soon as you processed the accusation. Your stupor couldn’t have lasted for more than a few seconds, but a few seconds were more than enough for Momo to come to a resolution.

It wasn’t that she was stronger than she looked. She was, technically, but it wasn’t just that, it couldn’t have been. She’d done her research, she’d prepared, she’d practice, and you could only be thankful her new skill had been refined, polished into an undeniable talent, albeit a grisly one. There was a minute of pressure - crushing, awful pressure - and a snap, and then the pain.

Always the pain.

It was a clean break, halfway between the base of your wind and the bend, shock provided little comfort, adrenaline flowing in-time with the throbbing, the tight ache now coursing through your left wing, joints loosening in their sockets and tendons contracting in an effort just to keep something so broken where it should be. Resistance wasn’t an option. It was an animalistic instinct that had nothing to do with your avian features, you were struggling before you could think to hold yourself back, willing your injured wing to fold against your back as you flailed, kicked, clawed, doing everything you could do to get away from the predator that was so content to watch you writhe in agony. Fighting was pointless, though. Momo didn’t try to restrain you, didn’t try to hold you back. Why would she? All the doors were locked, the windows nonexistent, and it wasn’t like you could actually hurt her.

There was nowhere for you to run, nothing for you to do.

In the end, there was nowhere to go but up.

It was difficult to get off the ground at the best of times, but you were desperate. As soon as you were on your feet, you were in the air, struggling to gain elevation without momentum, without an upward draft, without a single factor in your favor. It was hard, but it wasn’t impossible, even if every muscle in your back strained at the effort, your lungs burning and your uninjured wing taking up a frenzied speed just to get you a handful of meters off the floor. It must’ve looked pathetic, one wing struggling to keep you aloft and another, crooked and weak, twitching in an attempt to keep up with the pace its twin set, and it hurt so, so much, but you didn’t care. For a few seconds, Momo couldn’t reach you. For a few seconds, she couldn’t touch you and pull at your feathers and hurt you and…

And then, you hit the ceiling, and went plummeting back to the cold, unforgiving floor, as if you’d never left it at all.

Your shoulder took the brunt of your fall. It wasn’t far, but something in your arm still cracked as you collided with the solid cement, pulling a ragged sob from your chest that came out as broken as it was pitiful. You weren’t sure when you’d started crying, but suddenly, it was all you could do to curl into the tightest, smallest ball possible and hide your face, if only because you doubted you’d have the strength to wipe away the tears now blurring your vision. Momo didn’t seem to mind, though. She hadn’t taken a step since you’d gotten away from her, but that only meant she was still calm and collected and so, so composed as she kneeled at your side, barely nothing to brush your hair away from your face before her hands trailed back to your wings, always so eager to make sure her favorite parts of you weren’t more damaged than they had to be.

To make sure her favorite toy wasn’t beyond repair, after she’s had her fun.

“I hope you got some of your energy out,” She said, her tone sweet, but her voice devoid of all warmth. You’d say devoid of all love, too, but you were beginning to think Momo never had any to lose, in the first place. Not when it came to you.

“It’s going to take me hours to take care of all this damage. The least you could do is sit still, especially when I take such good care of you.”

270 notes · View notes

imaginaryari · 3 years

Text

Welcome to the Show

Part One

The prisoner looks up as her least favorite cop comes into the interrogation room. Officer Warren has awards for rounding up the enhanced, people like Silver. He walks and talks like a man the people respect and fear. Talks to the enhanced like they’re close on first name bases and revels in the fact that he put them in their cells. What she would give to lay one finger on him. That’s all she needs. Unfortunately, her hands are gloved and bound because officer Warren also knows that.

“To what do I owe the pleasure officer.” She asks.

“How would you like to get out here?”

It’s a trap. Silver knows this. The enhanced don’t get second chances especially not from officer Warren.

“Wasn’t I supposed to rot in here? Just as you said?” Silver asks.

Officer Warren gives her a sick grin. “I thought you would be interested in parole but if you aren’t...there’s plenty of you in here. “

The promise of seeing the outside world again would sway anyone.

“How can I trust you?”

Officer Warren beckons one of the guards. “Remove her cuffs.”

“Sir?”

“Now, please.” Warren orders.

Silver immediately rubs her wrists when the cuffs click open. The relief is almost overwhelming. She quickly reminds herself not to do anything stupid, no matter how satisfying it would be to knock Warren’s lights out.

“There’s a group of enhanced kids going around and robbing people. Messing with their heads. You’re fond of doing that so I thought this would be the perfect way to end your sentence.” Warren had said as he escorted her out.

Silver squints. Nothing about that story adds up. Robbing civilians while common isn’t a team effort especially if you can mess with minds and memory. A group would actually draw more attention and a tight knit one wouldn’t take the risk of losing a member to officials.

Unless your Silver’s ex. Hm. Things are starting to make sense.

“You’ve tried to catch them before.” Silver states.

Warren doesn’t even look ashamed admitting his failure. “Physical powers are one thing. Mental ones are harder. But from my experience you can catch ‘em with a little trust.” He begins to walk away, leaving Silver at the gates. “You have three weeks.”

—

It’s no fancy hotel, barely a motel, but it’s a place and it’s furnished. Officer Warren had said it was hers for as long as it took her to finish her task. Silver won’t complain, before she was arrested, she was constantly couch surfing. Never out staying her welcome and never spending too long on the streets. She had made friends this way but contacting them was out of the question. Getting caught means getting blacklisted. A means of protecting themselves. Well, Silver had been thrown under the bus. Semantics. She won’t see them again and hopefully they’re doing okay.

She shakes her head, never mind that. She has a job to do and extraordinarily little to go on.

The neighborhood is different. She didn’t expect it to be quite the same after lock-up but the changes are more than jarring. New buildings going up, less of the spots her old friends used to hang. Silver is so sure the neighborhood has been purged of the enhanced until she decides to hit up one of the cafés. She stares at it; upset she can’t remember what it used to be and then enters reading the weirdly named drinks on the menu.

“Are you new around here?” another patron asks.

“Not exactly,” Silver says with a shrug, eyeing the stranger. He’s handsome even if he looks like he should have taken a sip of his drink before speaking. The bags under his eyes scream exhaustion but he still sounds awake. And happy about it. “It’s just a while since I’ve been round here.”

“Ah, try the mint hot chocolate. It’s a crowd favorite.”

“Is that what you’re having?”

He chuckles. “No…this is way too caffeinated for the masses.”

“Is the inevitable crash worth it?” She asks.

“Always.” He says as Silver is called next to order. “See you around.” The stranger says exiting. She thinks about the encounter for hours afterwards. The enhanced were still around even if they were muted.

—

She finds what she’s looking for the next day, right before the sun sets. It’s a large tent set up in a nearby park. Big enough to draw attention but lacking the actual necessities to pass as a real circus. No animal trailers, no confection stands. To anyone paying attention there’s no possible way it could have been set up so quickly. Definitely the work of the enhanced.

Civilians flock to the tent with the promise of entertainment. Silver by-passes the line and taps a potential viewer on their shoulder. “You don’t really want to see this show, right? I can take that ticket off you.” The man blinks and then hands over his ticket. Silver quickly takes it and makes her way to her seat.

The spotlight lowers, illuminating what has to be the ringleader. He’s barely dressed for the occasion. Top hat donned but instead of a blaring red jacket, a black T-shirt with a tuxedo print and black jeans contrasting nicely with white sneakers.

“Hello everyone. Welcome to your wildest dreams. I’ll be your guide. Whenever you need me you can shout More!” Silver snorts at the corny introduction but still applauds with the crowd. It takes a moment but she recognizes him. The man from the café with the over caffeinated drink. Interesting. So far he’s just the host, maybe the leader of this whole operation, but Silver can’t place an ability just yet.

“Please give a round of applause to our first act, Mirage, master of illusion.”

Silver is willing to bet he’s the one responsible for the tent. His set isn’t too extravagant; he just has smoke and card tricks. It’s what he does with them that counts. Shifting the smoke to look like a bird that soars over the crowd. It lands ever so gently on the empty seat in front of one of the viewers. The spotlight shifts to them, a young boy, and he offers a nervous smile, not prepared for the attention. The guest looks to Mirage who gives a cocky smile. “Blow it away.” He instructs through his mic. With a shrug he does. The smoke dissipates to reveal a real bird. A stark white dove. The young boy reaches for it face lit up in wonder, but it takes off landing right on Mirages shoulder. He pets it to prove its real and the dove seems to love it. However, it then dissipates into smoke after Mirage blows on it. That confirms it for Silver, the dude simply makes illusions.

“I need a volunteer for my next trick.” Mirage says.

He and More look around at the audience and More locks eyes with Silver. There’s a connection, a shock of understanding, and something else she can’t quite place before he says, “You, cutie with the hood. Would you like to help Mirage?”

Silver nods unable to break eye contact.

“Don’t be nervous, it’s just a simple card trick.” Mirage says, a deck of cards pulled from his pockets. Silver keeps her head down and her hood on as she walks into the ring. She wasn’t supposed to draw attention. More finally backs away giving Mirage the stage.

It is a simple card trick, with a lot of flourish. Silver selects a card, memorizes it, puts it back in the deck. Mirage is skilled making the cards seem to dance, shuffling and tossing them even pulling some from behind Silver. Sleight of hand can be learned, however,

“Is this your card?”

“It sure looks like it!” Silver says, and the audience applauds. Her choice in words don’t go unnoticed by Mirage. He smiles, like he just learned a juicy secret and gestures for Silver to return to her seat.

More passes her on his way back to the stage and gives her a similar smile to Mirage’s. She can’t help but feel she shouldn’t have done that.

“Our next act goes by Charlie. He doesn’t say much but he’s loads of fun!”

Silver immediately understands how the next act earned his name. Charlie dances out, encompassing Chaplin’s energy. He dons a similar top hat to More, and shirt except his is white instead. More comments on this with a laugh. “Clearly one of us has to change!” As corny as Silver finds More, she can’t say she’s not amused. Charlie looks More up and down, and then gets into a stance. He’s posed like a batter on home base and leans back and forth on his toes. He swings and More ducks, his top hat flying across the ring as if a real bat had hit it. The trick ears them impressed gasps and amused giggles from the audience. From Silver it earns a disbelieving stare. She’s never seen an enhanced like Charlie yet.

Charlie continues, his set like any traditional mime. Tripping over objects that aren’t there, pushing invisible walls, overexaggerating his facial expressions. Except Silver thinks, knows, he isn’t. There is a wall the audience can’t see. Silver can’t prove it, and wouldn’t even know where to begin explaining Charlie to officer Warren.

“Give it up for Charlie everyone!” More says shaking Silver from her thoughts. Charlie leaves the stage with the same comedic swagger and a wave.

“Now our next act is unfortunately our last. But we always go out with a bang! Please welcome to the ring, Star!”

With the snap of More’s fingers the lights go out. Another snap and they’re back, along with a woman sitting on a trapeze. She’s beyond beautiful, it could be the lighting, or the slight shimmer she has, but she’s captivating all the same. Her hair is pulled into two puffs and her smile dazzles the audience. Silver notes that there is no apparent netting beneath her, that should be concerning.

The music starts, a haunting melody punctuated by a bass that Silver feels in her chest. Star is flying above the audience on her trapeze. She hangs by her legs and lets her arms hang. If Silver focuses, she can see what looks like dust, her charisma spills off of her, entrancing the audience. She makes another mental note, three out of four isn’t bad. Maybe she wrong about him being enhanced. He could just be the fall guy if this all goes to shit. Authorities like Warren wouldn’t keep a powerless civilian. It’s smart. The doubt lingers. She knows what she felt.

Silver almost misses the end. Stars trapeze returns to the ring and she waves before letting go and falling to the ground. The audience gasps bracing for an impact that never comes. Star vanishes in a puff of smoke that settles all over the ring. The applause is stuttered out, the crowd is impressed and worried.

When the smoke clears the applause picks back up as all the performers are safe, taking their bows.

“Thank you all for coming!” More says. The lights go out. When they come back on the group is gone. Well, that’s one way to end things.

“Like the show?” A voice comes up from behind Silver. She’s just as dazzling up close and silver can see how she captivates the audience. The charisma wisps around her like smoke.

“Sure did. Wasn’t expecting to be part of it though.”

“Yeah, More can be a bit impulsive,” Star says apologetically. She steps closer to whisper. “But his guess was right! You are like us.”

“All of you? Special?”

“Yup!”

“What gave me away?”

“You didn’t immediately fall for my charm.”

“...really?”

“That and More caught you using your gift to get a ticket.”

“Also caught her struggling to order at the café,” More says rounding on them. “We should stop meeting like this.”

#mine #short story #circus story #writing #a story in 3 parts #its rough idc

40 notes · View notes

kaypeace21 · 4 years

Note

Do you think that the hellfire club is a D&D group or some sport team or what do you think it is? (BTW big fan of your theories)

I think it’s a d&d club. I talked about it in past posts.I think being about d&d makes sense since the game would foreshadow future plot points- like it did in prior seasons . And the “hellfire club” is even an X-men group relating to the dark Phoenix which was referenced in s1 by Will . And I think they’ll take inspiration from that comic book arc for future seasons too . (So it’s an eastergg) . But, also , being called “the hellfire club” is probably an inside joke with the club members- since in the 80s, adults claimed d&d was about devil worship.)

In Bts photos- one of the members has a ‘Wasp’ pin which is a heavy metal band formed in 1982 -so the club is not so shockingly confirmed to be into rock.Along with d&d (if the leaks are legit) . Makes sense since both things are part of counter culture that was demonized by the “satanic panic” in the 80s. In the 80s. D&d (similar to rock music) was believed to be satanic - so the club name (for the club members)is a joke making fun of these people who think that’s true . But also (as a show is) another dark Phoenix ref . One of the s4 movies ‘paradise lost’ (was about a real life case) of small town teens who were into punk music, horror movies, stephen king, wore black, into wicca, and accused of being gay. They were unfairly blamed for ‘ satanic child m**ders (in the woods & near a river). They weren’t guilty . But, because ‘satanic panic’ was still alive and well ...the town’s people used their hobbies/ punk look/ and perceived sexualities as ‘proof” they were guilty. The case was later described as a ‘witch hunt’. Meanwhile the other (more likely suspect) at the time was John “Mark” Byers- who was a hunter, had a thing for hunting knives, religious, admitted to hitting his kids, and was accused of s**ually abusing his son, shot pumpkins (s2 ref), and sang a song about creating a portal to another world without light , that you could enter via a tree (s1 ref). Years later-after the doc- it’s implied he wasn’t guilty either. But, one of the other victims’ fathers - Terry was assumed to be guilty - he was also was accused of m***esting his son and daughter (by his own family members). Admitted to hitting his wife and kids. And had a police report filed on him - describing breaking into a women’s house , while she was in a tub and trying to attack her. He was also formerly charged for m*rdering one of his wife’s family members- but got away with it claiming self defense). Heck if the names John byers/Terry being in the film/st wasn’t crazy enough- the victims were named Steve, Michael, and Chris byers (luckily ours don’t have that same horrible fate/back stories).

I kind of assume - the d&d club will be looked at suspiciously as teens go missing/ kidnapped/ or maybe found k*lled in the woods/quarry. And the cops/others think they’re “satanic k*llings” and rumors about the d&d club insue. And maybe our teens suspect it’s the demogorgan again. But as a subversion- it isn’t and it’s a human . A human that by ab*sing Will- caused Will to unconsciously create many things including the demogorgan (which in d&d is called the “deep father”) . Also, in s3 they called Will “the devil’s baby” (Aka lonnie is the real “devil” ).And such incidents in the woods/ near the quarry would connect back to s1 demogorgan & Will being found in the quarry. And if paying attention you already noticed s1 demogorgan paralleled Lonnie a lot! So s4 would start bringing things to the surface- in regards to how evil Lonnie really is.Not to mention more hints (I previously posted) that hinted they’ll go with this “ch*ld serial ki##er plot line...

But then again I think it may not be literally Lonnie. My guess: Brenner (who I think was created/based on lonnie) is possibly doing failed experiments of teens to open portals (in the basement of pethurst -like in hellraiser 2) . And dumping failed experiments in the woods/water. A few movies had the d*ad victims have numbers carved in them. And then El/kali team up and maybe sneak into the facility (like in ace Ventura people posing as siblings investigate a m*rder and one fakes being ‘crazy’ to sneak in and find a murderer) . In ‘peanut butter solution’ 2 kids - 1 of them is goth/not american teams up with a girl to find a man named ‘senior ‘who is kidnapping kids. 1 of them also sneaks in and is captured on purpose to investigate. Kali already busted Dottie out of a psych hospital and lucas referenced El being there in s1. Alexi (like el-another alter of Will) watches roadrunner- in that papa bear throws him in a psych facility. And assasains creed/dream warriors - the psychiatric facility was similar to the lab with sensory deprivation tanks, cameras, solitary confinement in dark rooms. We already know 1 new character is against the mistreatment of people at the facility. Also the real pethurst (in Pennsylvania) -known for human rights a*use issues- wasn’t a psych facility (but a place for people with intellectual disabilities). So El being at the psych hospital version in Indianna (and maybe having id herself like I mentioned before -would be a nice ref). And in assasains creed- when the character starts sneaking around investigating - the dr reveals how the character is actual the reincarnation of their ancestor ( brenner tells el she’s an alter of Will’s ). And before that the dr was making that person relive the traumatic past of their past life/other person -which they couldn’t change (sort of like el seeing Billy’s past in s3). Also kali said her and El should team up to face their father- which I think they’ll do. And I’m excited about it!

I still think brenner was created by Will and based on Lonnie so he could be responsible and connected to Will/Jon’s backstory with Lonnie/the Woods. In an abstract way. Like how brenner/Lonnie forced their kids to k*ll animals. Brenner threw El in a dark room/ Lonnie threw Will in a trunk. Brenner’s name being associated with the woods and Lonnie being a hunter , etc.

Also we know s4 involves this dark-storyline involving c**ld m*rders cause of foreshadowing

* Also, mentioned here how in s4 rolling a 11 isn’t actually a good thing and that it’s a callback to Will rolling a 7- in s1. Before things go array.In “paradise lost” when blaming the innocent goth boys someone asks the chief “on a scale 1 to 10 how confident are you? You have the right men?” And he laughs and says “11.”

*And , just for historical context of how ‘metal ‘ and ‘scary ‘ d&d was to nonplayers (in the 80s).

“In 1985, 60 Minutes dedicated a full hour to the supposed connection between D&D, Satanic rites, murders and su*cides . 2 years earlier, Patricia Pulling formed Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) . She described D&D as ‘a fantasy role-playing game which leads to demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, r*pe, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, pr*stitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings.’ In 1987, Peter Leithart and George Grant published The Catechism of the New Age, a pamphlet where they introduced the idea that D&D was immoral because roleplaying allowed too much freedom for critical thinking, which might lead to heretical ideas. That same year, Chris Pritchard and two friends conspired to murder Pritchard’s stepfather in his sleep, the media ignored the obvious financial motivation and instead focused on the men being in the same D&D group.”

( I think quite a few of those themes will come up in s4/5 - although d&d isn’t the actual cause). It’ll just be a subversion.

#stranger things #el hopper #kali prasad #will byers #stranger things theory #s4 theory #d&d #st s4 #s4 bts #DID theory

91 notes · View notes

bluejaytaco · 3 years

Text

What up? it DND wit Jay!

(We return to the realm where we are standing in front of a giant gold gate. There's a dwarf standing in front of it with a clip board in their hand, just flipping through.)

Alabaster: (walks up) H-Hail and well met, my friend.

Dwarf: Names?

Alabaster: Oh! Um, I'm fine.

Dwarf, flipping through his clipboard: Fine.... Fine.... Nope, not seeing any "fine" here.

Art: (Walks up)....What about Ebony?

Dwarf, flipping through: Uh, yeah. We got an "ebony".... He's an orc. And considering none of you are Orcs, I doubt any of you are Ebony.

Art: Uh, that's racist.

Theodora:... Quite a detailed guest list...

Koejin: (Walks up and points at a random name) That's me.

Dwarf, looks down at the name: Your Grenadine Ceriph? High priestess in Calor? (Context: Calor is a Tiefling city. Koejin is human... well... was)

Koejin: Yeah, that's me.

Dwarf, getting sick of us: Look, I don't have tie for you people messing... (looks up at Koejin and goes silent).... You're not supposed to be here. This isn't your realm.

Koejin: Uhhh... Well, I have business with the man in charge.

Dwarf: I'm gonna have to call Pelor.

The entire group: (various ways of saying, "You do that" From "yes, please do" to "yeah, get that fucking bitch here! I wanna speak to the manager!")

Dwarf, mumbling into a sending stone before looking back at us: Is one of you named Theodora?

Theodora: Uhh.... Yeah.

Dwarf: You guys can go in. That's all I needed because now I know your names. But thanks for lying to me!

(The gates open and we all walk through. It's less blinding, but only slightly less on the other side of the gate. We see people walking around and just enjoying their afterlife. In the far off distance, there is a silhouette of a giant castle. We can also see the opening to a large garden where Pelor is standing with his arms crossed. Some of us see Alabaster's daughter, Eris, stomping on the flowers.)

Pelor, voice booming towards us: Everyone, front and center!

(All of us go with different levels of reluctance. Hennessy leads the way while Art and Jaquine kinda trail back.)

Pelor: So, what is it you need from me? (He's still standing over us while Eris continues to stamp through the flowers.)

(For a moment, we're all silent.)

Theodora: We want to speak to Thia.

Pelor: Thia is not in a place to speak. She is in my castle now, practicing her abilities for the Cleanse.

Hennessy: Is she okay? You don't have her locked up somewhere, hurt, right?

Pelor: Hennessy, my dear boy. Would you lock up a tiger in a small cage? No, you would respect the animal. Thia is in a place of comfort and has free reign.

Hennessy: She's got free reign? So she can go smoke in every room of the castle?! Even your room?!

Pelor: uhh....yes...

Hennessy: Ohh that just won't do. That smell of recreational drugs gets into the fibers and it can be a bitch to get out.

Pelor, suddenly giving off the impression he would like to hurry this along so he could go clean: It doesn't matter. She is my key to cleansing the world and making it all light. And I can save you all, if you kneel before me and accept me as your true god.

(No one kneels but Hennessy does raise an eyebrow at the "kneel" comment.)

Koejin: So how do you promise our safety.

Pelor: Well, you are excluded from this. Your friends, however, are protected because my followers will all survive.

Art: Don't you need the dark to have the light?

Pelor:... You would think that. Ticket Master would have you think that. And you, specifically, reek of him.

Art: Uh, rude?

Pelor: You know what he wants, don't you? He wants me dead so he can be the god of light. His best friend being the god of darkness would mean the two of them would take over everything. The two of them would rule all.

(Art was trying really hard to not say how he didn't see this as a bad thing, considering his bias. But somehow, as everyone was arguing against the cleanse, it was returned to the subject of Art and Ticket Master.)

Pelor: I think we've had quite enough of this talk.

Art: Yeah, let's stop talking about Ticket Master and the guy who may or may not have had sex with him.

(Pelor reacted in disgust which just turned into Art shouting "Sex with Ticket Master!" at the god of light. The tiefling was really aiming to make the god throw up.)

Koejin, joining in: There were definitely tentacles involved!

Art: Lots of tentacles! Sooooo many tentacles!!!

Pelor: Enough! All of you! (grabs Eris by the hair) If none of you will take this seriously, there is no longer a reason to speak with you.

Eris, punching at the hand: Let go! (turns to Alabaster) Daddy! I don't wanna go!

(They walk through a wall made of marble that Hennessy tries to reach through to grab for Eris. He just barely pulls his hand back before the wall solidifies again and he loses his hand.)

Vincent, rushing up to Hennessy: What did you think you were doing?!

Hennessy: The girl didn't want to go with the man! And when the girl doesn't wanna go, you don't let her go!

Vincent: You're gonna make such a great dad!

(behind the garden and before the castle there was a massive labyrinth. We walked up to see two different entrances. Koejin ends up smelling something familiar but can't really pick where it's coming from.)

Art: Hmmm (turns to Red) think you can turn into a dragon and fly up? maybe we can see where to go.

Red, not all that enthused by the idea: Uhh, yeah, I guess. Step back.

(Everyone stands back to give her enough room to transform. She flies up to the edge of the maze, but once her talons hit the edge, they shoot up another hundred feet and knock her back down.)

Red, turns back into her base form and glares at everyone: Well, that didn't help!

Art: (shrugging) well, my plans aren't ever without fault.

(Hennessy casts detect magic and, aside from nearly having his brain explode from all the god magic around, he discovers on direction is dark magic while the other is light.

We end up going towards the dark side because we figure that's where Thia might be hiding.)

(First stop is a room with a sword in a stone. Hennessy can sense that the magic is dark, but it isn't the source.)

Koejin: (climbs up and pulls the sword from the stone and holds it up in the air. She then hears the sounds of us screaming in agony.)

What we see: Koejin pulling the sword out and standing with it like she's posing.

Art: Uhhh.... what is happening?

Theodora: Koejin? You okay?

Koejin vision! Art: (melting away and falling apart) You killed us!!!!

Koejin vision! Theodora: (Also melting) You let us dieeeee!!!!

Koejin, turning to see all this: No! No, I saved Art's life so many times! (Turns to Theodora) I'm sorry! I'm sorry!

Art: Koejin.... we're fine!

Koejin: (runs up to start trying to put Art's face back together. To everyone else, she'd just smooshing his face while still holding the sword.)

Theodora: (dispels the magic from the sword and a little imp pops free)

Koejin: (can now see that everyone's okay and it still just kinda groping Art's face.)

Art:....uh, Koejin?

Koejin: Yeah.... sorry. You were melting just now.

(We talk to the little imp briefly to find that he is a prisoner in the maze. He asks if he's free to go but as soon as he does, he's struck by lightning.)

(We continue down the path for a little bit before Koejin figures out that we're going the wrong way because she can no longer smell the "smelly smell that smells." In that time, Hennessy incinerated some talking furniture which the DM disappointedly let us know that we wouldn't be seeing the IKEA Lich. I have a feeling the IKEA Lich might pop up in a future one shot.

But also, we got this exchange.)

Theodora: (casts a spell in attempt to sober Koejin.)

Koejin: (starts screaming as her skin starts to burn) Stop!

Theodora: (stops immediately) I... I was just trying to help..

Koejin: I'm the God of intemperance, Theodora! You can't just sober me up!

Theodora: What?!

(This starts into a fight about how this isn't the weirdest thing we've been through while she continues to talk about how she wasn't expecting to hear her daughter was a god.)

Red: If I may, I can see where Theodora is coming from here. Be it the weirdest thing or not, finding out your child is involved in some affair with the gods can be surprising. (Shoots a look at Art) Like your son being intimately involved with a tentacle monster god.

Art:.... you weren't supposed to know about that....

Red: You were shouting about it just before while I was standing there.

Art:... right..... forgot you were there....

Red: Either way; something for us to talk about later, Sweetie.

Art rolling his eyes, sarcastically: But Mother, I love him.

((Koejin's Player: And I have to remember to write proper notes about what everyone knows and doesn't know.

DM: Eh, it's all out now))

(We head from the dark part to the light part and find ourselves walking down a hall for hours. It gets to the point where Mrs. Red starts to complain.)

Red: Ugh... when is this fucking thing going to end? Doesn't anyone have a way to move this along faster?

Art: It's going to feel like longer if you keep bitching.

Red: I don't even wanna be here!

Theodora: None of us want to be here!

Art, agreeing: Yeah, and yet, here we are! So, how about you shut your mouth for a bit while we figure out how to get home and make sure there's even a "home" to go back to!

Red:.... Actually, Art. Considering that, I think this might be a good time for you and I to talk....

(Art is pulled off to the side by Mrs. Red, Reita following. Theodora tries to usher everyone a respectful distance away to try and ensure privacy. She does her best, but pretty much everyone is still eavesdropping.)

Red: I know I haven't been the best mother... In fact, I might be the worst... But know that I will try to make this all better and I'm just looking for your forgiveness.

Art:.... you might remember us as a nice, happy little family, but let me tell you what I remember.

Koejin: You tell her, Art!

Art, ignoring her and pretending he doesn't know people are listening: ....you slicing off Reita's face, blowing up Thia's bar, threatening the lives of my friends, destroying the lives of countless different people; I could go on! You barely get to claim the title "mother!"

Red: I did what I thought was best!

Art: You entrusted your children to the God of Death and Deceit!

Red: I didn't do that! (long pause)....I did do that.

Art: Yeah, you did. So, this is how things are gonna go. We're going to go through here and make sure there's a world to get back to, we're going to go to Calor and you are going to fix this. Then we can talk about forgiveness.

Red: ....That's another thing I wanted to talk to you about. I would love... to return to our people. I know I'm a tiefling, but I still feel the rage... of a red dragon. Someone would need to take care of our people.

Art:.... the people that treated me like a pariah....

Vincent, butting in: Like Hell I'm gonna let that happen! (storms over to them and looks at Art) Look Art, I'm willing to admit you are not evil. But do you really think you can run Calor? As soon as everything gets hard you run away! Hell, you abandoned your own sister-

Reita, with a surprising amount of clarity: He didn't... abandon me. He thought I was dead.

(The remaining three tieflings turn and look at her.)

Reita: And you're not exactly one to talk; you created weapons for a tyrant and turned a blind eye to the problems in Calor. We've all done things we regret, but we learn and grow from them. How can you stand there and judge him from running from a bad situation when he was a kid? Hypocrite (shoves a slug into her mouth)

Art, smiling and a little misty-eyed: I'm so proud of you! (hugs Reita)

Reita: Uhhh, yeah. Sure.... (doesn't push him away, though)

Red:.... You're not supposed to be talking like that... how are you doing that?

Art, pulling away: Yeah, that was going to be the next part. You feeling okay?

Reita, shrugging: I feel good.... Like, really good.

Red: (grabs Reita and rips open the back of her cloak to see the stone in her spine is not glowing) This.... this isn't working. It should be working.

Art:....We should keep moving. Put a pin in this for now.

(We keep moving ahead with different twists and turns leading into random encounters. One of which is a growing garden gnome that we put Wreybar on top of so she could see over the walls. She tries to say what she sees, but speaks in a way only Wreybar understands.)

Theodora: Okay, but now how are we gonna get her down?

Red: I could probably fly up an-

Wreybar, jumping: Catch me!

Hennessy: (rushes to cast feather fall on her.)

(She floats down and lands nicely on the ground as we hear Thia's booming voice "Giant garden gnome? Goodbye giant garden gnome!" And the gnome just vanishes.)

(Wreybar starts talking in her gibberish and Koejin asks for a translator. Reita steps in and kneels down to her, nodding along by what she's saying.)

Reita: Wreybar says there's a latter coming out of a hole on the other side. It's right next to the castle. How do you guys not get that, she was speaking clearly.

Theodora: Maybe to you. Not all of us can speak Wreybar.

(We ended up getting into a few more shannanigans. At one point, Art attempted to use mislead in attempt to move through faster only to have Reita get impatient and run ahead. Art and Reita had a quick little spat about that along the lines of "by the time we find her, she'll have destroyed everything already!" "We can't find her at all if we're dead! No running ahead!" There was also a bit with Hennessy and Koejin teleporting out of the maze where they met a murder horse and a weird inky blob creature.

At that point the latter was the literally the next turn. But possibly the worst moment.)

DM: You guys come to a dead end. The smell is still coming from over it.

Koejin: Shit....

(We all check the wall to find no traps. But then... Alabaster touches it and a had grabs hold of him. It pulls itself out with his resistance and Alabaster is looking at a marble version of... himself.)

Alabaster: O-oh! Hail and well met... uh, me!

M! Alabaster: Oh! Hail and Well Met! How are you, my fine friend?

Alabaster: I'm quite well, thank you! How... who are you?

M! Alabaster: Oh, I am what remains of you. The you left behind when you left the Pelor faith!

Alabaster: Oh, I see.

M!Alabaster: Have you killed your daughter?

Alabaster: oh, no. That is.... no longer apart of the plan.

M! Alabaster: (grabs hold of Alabaster) I will do it then. I will kill your daughter. She is born of darkness, thus she must die!

(Everyone around him tenses up, but he somehow knows if he looks away, the creature will fade from his sight and go to kill Eris. He can only stare at it to hold it in place.)

Alabaster: (puts his hand to the copy's mouth and uses Create or Destroy Water)

M!Alabaster: (starts to crack and burst under the pressure. The amount of water forced inside kills the creature.)

((Create or destroy water has been a running gag in the campaign. It's been used a few times, but nothing really dark. Not like this.))

Alabaster:....(Still holding his marble copy with a stunned look.)

Art:....(walks up and pats him on the arm) You did what you had to do... Eris is safe now.

Theodora, nodding: Think of it as... you made the right choice.

Alabaster: (nods to both of them and closes the creatures eyes)

Koejin:.... we should destroy it. Just in case.

(They then proceed to break the thing into dust and we continued on our way.)

( We found the latter that brought us up to the castle. As we walk around to the entrance, Pelor stands by the door with his arms crossed.)

Pelor:.... what are you trying to accomplish here? Do you really think you can stop any of this?

Theodora: We're here to talk to Thia. Where's Thia?

Pelor, sighing: Look, last chance before I wipe you out of existence; kneel before me or leave my land and accept your fates.

Red, arms crossed(as is usual for her): Yeah, I'm not one for bowing to people. People bow to me.

Pelor: This goes for all for all of you?

(All of us agree. There will be no bowing.)

Pelor:....then so be it.

(Before he can move in to fight us, he is turned inside out and sucked into a little stone. Thia then drifts down, takes the stone, and crushes it.)

Art: ....hi, Thia....

Thia, glaring: Shut up, Art.

Art, nodding: Hmmm, mhm.

Thia: (turns to Theodora) Go home, Theodora.

(for a moment, her powers work on Theodora, but all of us stop her. This turns into a conversation about why the wipe is unnecessary. Koejin leads the conversation, then turned and asked for someone more "charisma based" to lead.

Art couldn't speak. Probably for the best. He and Thia have never really gotten along.)

Theodora: If you wipe out all existence, we won't be learning from our mistakes. Everything will end up being repeated! The war will be repeated!

Thia: Not if I don't allow free will.

Theodora: And then what is life? that's not a world; that's a simulation.

Thia:... better that than allowing a kid to grow up in the woods all alone.

Theodora:.... Thia, we can make this world better. Create a place where something like that doesn't happen. But this.... this isn't the way.

Thia:....Do all of you agree? Should I.... give up my power?

(This was a major turning point in the story. Because this is where the end boss was decided. And we told Thia to give up her power.)

Thia, nodding: Alright... let's go back home. No reason to strand ourselves here. (she opens a portal)

(We walk through to find ourselves in the tavern Thia owns. She wills away her power, but it's no big ta-do.)

Koejin: Did it work?

Thia:.... I don't know.... Art, give me some money.

Art:..... no....

Koejin: It worked!

(We all celebrate before we all notice the portal hasn't closed. When we turn and look, we see Pelor's face.... on Ticket Master's body. He throws it away like a mask and grins at us.)

Ticket Master: Guess who's the new God of Light? (smiles and waves as the portal closes)

(Outside, we hear loud banging. When we run out, we can see darkness and light bouncing off of each other before they begin to swirl and spread. They head for us.)

Theodora: (hears the voice of Bahamut and an open blue portal) Everyone! We have to go!

(Everyone dives into the portal. Art takes a moment before diving in with the group.)

(There will be one last session and we can all really feel it now. I'm kinda sad that Ticket Master is now the BBEG, but we all saw that coming. There's just a lot to figure out here.)

#adventures of art the bard #tiefling #dnd #dnd bard #dnd barbarian #dnd druid #dnd paladin #dnd cleric #dnd ranger #dnd wizard #homebrew gods #dnd gods #Art and Reita had a Blitzo and Loona moment and I don't think it was on purpose #That contract on Art and Wreybar's gonna screw them #Well... also Art's gonna be kinda heartbroken by all this #I'm feeling bad for my boy if you can't tell #shut up jay

10 notes · View notes

some-dr-writings · 4 years

Text

Gundham’s and Kazuichi’s mangaka S/O wants to draw them

Gundham Tanaka:

· Though you were the Super High School Level Mangaka you specialized in historical fantasy! You absolutely adored doing research and finding new mythical beasts and species to sketch and incorporate into your work. It was no surprise that Gundham became your muse the moment you two met!

· Gundham would allow you to visit his creatures and draw them to use as bases for cryptids and monsters of all sorts in your manga. The four Dark Devas often acted as your pose models given how unusually animated they were for hamsters.

· Having asked the Overlord of Ice to allow you near his animals so often you spent much time together and eventually started dating.

· “My Queen, the Stringer of Fates, what curse dares to plague your soul?! You’ve not touched the pages with which you create and destroy worlds, as if it were deadly to do so! You’ve yet to search out a demon to immortalize. Not even have you greeted the four Dark Devas of Destruction as you always have.” You huffed lazily watching the rabbit Gundham was currently grooming. “Artists’ block. I can’t seem to draw or write anything. Either I just stare at a blank page for hours, or I start something which quickly dissolves into an incoherent mess!” Rubbing your temples, you grumbled at the clogged feeling fogging your mind. “I did pull a few all-nighters last week. Maybe I’m just drained. But if things keep going like this, I’ll miss my deadline! I already asked for an extension on it last week, I can’t keep doing this!”

· Gundham watched as you picked up the sketch pad and pencil. There was this stiffness in your movements. Your hand which once flowed about gracefully like a bird in flight now paved plain straight lines. Your eyes darted about unable to focus on anything. “UGH! I can’t even draw a proper circle for the rabbit’s body!” Sinking into your seat you tossed your sketch pad and pencil aside. “Perhaps a day of respite is in order.” “No, I already took a day off yesterday. I feel I’m even worse now than I was two day ago.”

· The Devas quickly scurried over to you, hopping into your lap, or climbing onto your shoulder to nuzzle your cheek. “… thanks.” Gently petting the two in your lap you sighed in defeat.

· It was at that Gundham abruptly stood up. “Where is my Queen, and what have you done with her, villain?!” “… Huh?” “MY Queen would never rot away so quickly into a decrepit state such as this! She’d fight and claw till her final breath! She’d never faulter so easily!” “I Am, your Queen.” “Hmph! No, you are not. Now, tell me where she is.” You marched right up to Gundham glaring at him. “I’m right here! I am your Queen, the Stringer of Fates!”

· It started as a chuckle which boomed into uproarious laughter! “There you are. That determination, your will to live has returned to your eyes. I am glad to have you back.” Surprisingly, you did feel like you had more energy than before. “So, shall we be off? A piece of you is still missing and we must search it out less you start to fade away once more.” “… Yeah, a date sounds nice right now.”

· As a bright blush dusted his cheeks, the Overlord of Ice took your hand into his bandaged one, the other taking your bag of sketch supplies, he led you out of the school grounds into the great beyond!

· The day was filled with fun and laughter as you raced from place to place, doing anything you could think of. A walk in the park, a trip to the arcade, lunch at a café, shopping at a bookstore, and anything else you could have dreamed of.

· As the sun began to set, Gundham and you found yourselves at the clear beach, dancing around barefoot, not a care in the world. “… Gundham. Thank you, today was amazing.” His entire face instantaneously flushed hearing his true name being called. In that moment he just looked so beautiful to you. His sheepish smile, those tender eyes, just, everything about him.

· “May I draw you?” “… Of course, my Queen.”

· And thus you drew, having completely forgotten that morning or the past few days, you were struggling.

· “Ah! Your depiction captured my true form! I should have known you could see through my mortal guise!” He so happily admired your drawing with sparkling eyes.

· While he was distracted you worked on another piece, one of a dark king holding his queen close on the soft shores of the beach.

Kazuichi Soda:

· You never held much interest in machinery till you came to Hope’s Peak and met Kazuichi. It seemed just about every time you saw him, he was tinkering with something, from a small robot toy to a monster truck engine. Often times the parts of whatever he was working on were spread out, and then seeing how they all fit together fascinated you. Without realizing it you’d end up just watching him work for hours and sketching out the pieces and tools he was using.

· Quickly this fascination bled into your own work, incorporating steampunk-esque elements into it. And the more elements you added, the more references you needed. At first you tried getting some on your own, but you’d just end up injuring your hands and fingers in some way or you’d break the pieces.

· “Look, you got me into this mess and now you have to take responsibility.” “W-what!?” Before Kazuichi could panic you placed an old, rusted pocket watch before him. “How do I disassemble this!?” For a week or two after you’d bring some new item to Kazuichi to disassemble and reassemble. You eagerly sketched out the pieces you needed the references of and more.

· Quickly you and Kazuichi became friends. You would chatter away as you did your own things. Before you knew it the two of you ended up spending time together just to be together, no drawing and no tinkering.

· Kazuichi would go to you for advice for his unrequited crush on Princess Sonia to which you’d try your best to help, even if it did hurt a little given your crush on the mechanic. She wasn’t the only thing he spoke of though, so you had plenty of other conversations.

· Kazuichi certainly liked chatting so when one day he was quiet you got a bit worried… Then you remembered something. “Oh Soda. You’ve never been on a school trip before, right?” “Hmm, uh, yeah. I skipped out on the only one I got a chance to go on.” “Because of financial issues, right.” “Yeah.” “Well, I happen to be going on a trip all over Europe for background references and I was thinking who better to take along than my best friend and best mechanic I know!” The news certainly perked him right up, and he excitedly chattered on about traveling! Quickly the news spread, and it ended up becoming a class trip! Honestly, though a trip alone with Soda sounded lovely, you more enjoyed seeing how ecstatic he was to be going on an actual class trip with everyone.

· The trip was fantastic, it seemed to be nonstop fun. Often you’d forget that you were being payed to go on this trip for work and that you needed to get reference materials, thankfully Mikan took more than enough reference photos for you.

· Though during the trip, you noticed how Kazuichi, though still friendly, was a bit more reserved than usual. When you asked him what was wrong, he said he appreciated the concern, but it was something he had to work out on his own.

· Eventually your trip took you all to France the city of love. The place was certainly an artist’s dream, you found yourself drawing nonstop there. It was amazing!

· At one point in your trip your class wanted to get to a restaurant at the top of a rather large hill, but the only way to get there was via a thin road by car. So, you, Kazuichi, Sonia and your driver were the last to get to the restaurant.

· Then the car broke down. Kazuichi immediately went to check the engine while Sonia stood at the edge of the road, looking out at the sunset. It was a gorgeous sight, her profile, the sunset, the city lights, everything. You had started sketching out the scenery when a though struck you.

· You elbowed Kazuich, gaining his attention. You then leaned in real close while still looking at Sonia, not noticing the blush spreading on his cheeks as he kept looking to you. “Hey Soda, now’s your chance. This view is absolutely romantic, and you’re in the city of love. Don’t you think this is the perfect time to ask out the girl you like?” This hurt, it really did, but seeing how happy he was to be going on a school trip without worry like he always wanted, you could hardly imagine his joy if Sonia got together with him at a time like this. It hurt, but you just wanted to see him happy.

· “… Ask out the girl I like, huh…… Okay.”

· Turning to you he placed his hands atop your shoulders. “Y/N I have a crush on you. Please go out on a date with me.” “… Wait? I thought… what about Nevermind?” “I, well, yeah, I do like her, but… I really like you… I… That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out lately and... so I... You get it, don’t you!?” “… Soda, please let me draw you!” “Huh?” “Well, if we start going out, we’ll be boyfriend and girlfriend, right? I’d like to have something to commemorate the moment by.” “S/O!” He pulled you into a tight hug, giddy out of his mind.

· You ended up drawing him at the restaurant. He loved the drawing so much he took a picture to use as his phone’s lock screen. From then on you often drew him for references for poses and though all great, his favorite would forever be the first one you made of him. It was made to celebrate you getting together, it was always so special to him.

181 notes · View notes