#Either way there can be no legitimate way to get to this kind of position LMAO

[adhdo5]

o5 council consisting of just guys who either faked their way into the position or were coerced into it (by outside forces or their predecessors)

In a way isn't this every O5 Council

[lu-is-not-ok]

A Narcissistic reading of Hong Lu

Yup, I'm actually doing this.

To lay down some facts first: I have NPD, alongside a bunch of other things that coalesce into a nuclear concoction strong enough to kill every dark empath in a five mile radius. If I find you ableisting it up, I give myself the permission to smite you. This is a threat and a warning.

Now, let's talk about Hong Lu. Because as it turns out, he might just be the most difficult literacy check in Limbus Company according to what I've seen.

I could just say "I'm a narcissist and Hong Lu is just like me fr fr so he's a narcissist too" and end the post, but honestly, where's the fun in that? There are, legitimately, things I want to yap about, so I'm going to yap about them, and no chucklefucks can stop me.

So, to start this off, let's make one thing clear.

Hong Lu is not only a good actor, but also a skilled liar. The way he navigates conversations and the methods he uses are just as important to analyze as the actual words he says, if not more so. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that trying to understand him based Only on what he says and not how he uses the things he says would result in an understanding that's not only incomplete, but potentially outright wrong.

Now, this isn't really tied to why I think Hong Lu could be very reasonably read as having NPD, at least not directly. Narcissists aren't inherently evil liar manipulators, and if that's what you take away from this post, that's more of a you problem (and you can go ahead and block me considering I'm one of the evil liar manipulator narcissists according to you).

However, there is a reason why I have to bring it up. And it's because almost all of Hong Lu's narcissistic traits become a lot more obvious once you look at the exact ways he takes control of conversations.

With that out of the way, what exactly are we even looking for?

NPD, in my experience, primarily affects one's sense of self-worth and self-esteem. I personally found that the analogy of a pendulum makes the most sense to me - a narcissist's sense of self-worth can swing between massive highs and massive lows, almost never staying in a middle "balanced" position, with even the tiniest things being able to throw it to one side or another.

The ways this can present outwardly are. Quite frankly, way too fucking many to count. But there are some common threads we can keep in mind:

High sensitivity to criticism

Need for an external source of validation

Tendency to seek out ways to make oneself feel more special, important, or powerful

So, does Hong Lu fit those criteria?

Well. Yeah. This post wouldn't exist if he didn't.

Let's talk about the first point, high sensitivity to criticism. And, immediately, I would like everyone to remember Hell's Chicken, specifically the scene where Meursault begins to verbally roast his team's dish, and in the process laying down a verbal smackdown on everyone involved. That scene ended like this.

Curious, isn't it? The moment Meursault was about to start criticising Hong Lu, he just jumps in and distracts Meursault with a change of topic - something even Dante's narration points out.

Mind you, this isn't an isolated event. This is just the most obvious example of Hong Lu exhibiting this kind of behavior.

Don't believe me? Just look at these.

These are all examples of Hong Lu either backpedaling, changing the subject, or otherwise trying to avoid the acknowledgement of something that criticizes his status, thought process, or (in the last example) which would reveal an emotional vulnerability.

This is a fairly consistent pattern for him, and that's not even getting into the fact that the line he says when hovering over him before a skill check he has a Very Low chance at succeeding in has him suddenly try to excuse himself and leave.

Hong Lu is absolutely highly sensitive to criticism, it's just that his primary emotional reactions aren't ones we're privy to. Instead, what we get to see is how he acts to try and minimize the impact of those criticisms, if not outright find ways to never let them leave someone's mouth in the first place.

Next up - need for external validation.

This one doesn't have as many examples as the previous point, as Hong Lu is a generally closed off person who keeps a certain level of distance from most other Sinners. However, that doesn't mean I don't have any.

One such example comes from Canto 4, where soon after acting out his part in the play, Hong Lu seeks validation from Yi Sang.

Then there's this moment in Canto 6, where Hong Lu, once again, seeks validation for something he's done.

And then there's also these lines from Hong Lu's various Identities.

Aaaand then there's these base Identity voice lines, which, if you ask me, feel a bit like fishing for compliments.

This point is a lot harder to say is a definitive one, mainly due to Hong Lu's more closed off projected personality. That being said, the fact that one can find examples of it despite that is pretty notable.

And for the final one - trying to make oneself feel more special, important, or powerful.

This is one that's a bit harder to provide exact examples for, as again, Hong Lu isn't someone who talks about how he feels often, and when he does it's not always exactly trustworthy. He's not like Rodya, who while still putting on a facade, is pretty open and easy to read about how she actually feels.

But, there's still some non-mutually exclusive interpretations I want to posit here. Two, in fact.

One - I believe that for Hong Lu, the thing he sees as power is control.

See, avoiding criticism isn't the only time Hong Lu steers conversations. In fact, it's something he does All The Time. He's often the one asking questions to get the group moving, trying to gather information that might be relevant to him, and generally taking over the direction a conversation is going in. Chances are, if Hong Lu speaks up, it's likely to alter the conversation he joins in noticeable ways.

This, I think, is one of the ways Hong Lu makes himself feel more powerful. After all, it's not that hard to guess from what little bits of his background we have that Hong Lu lacked agency for most of his life. So, wouldn't it make sense for him that having that agency, that being able to be socially in control, would be the exact kind of thing that would boost his self-esteem?

In fact, the only times we see him rendered completely speechless, seemingly stripped of that confidence in conversations he usually exhibits, are in Canto 7 - specifically in scenes where he's Not In Control of what the others are talking about. Those scenes being when the other Sinners start shit-talking Xichun in front of him, and when Xichun actively tries to bother Hong Lu by alluding to the way he's been treated back at home.

Extremely confident until something external happens that utterly strips him of that confidence... sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Then, there's the second interpretation.

See, with NPD, there are two ways a narcissist can try to make themself feel more deserving of attention. One is the one most probably think of when they think about narcissists - setting out to fulfill extremely high goals to feel amazing when one reached them and then feeling utterly crushed in the case one doesn't. This would be someone like Rodya.

However, there is also another way, one which I personally have much more experience with - to undersell. To set extremely low expectations, so that it's as hard as possible to fail reaching them, and to feel way better upon surpassing them than one would with higher, more "regular" expectations.

This, to me, is exactly the kind of narcissist Hong Lu is. Think about it. He's constantly putting out this image of an extremely sheltered person that barely understands the outside world, with notable moments where it's made clear he's Just Making Shit Up at points. Wouldn't making one seem unable to do anything, only to then proceed to do things you've led people to not expect of you, make it feel like you're much more exceptional than you really are?

The underselling goes the other way too. When the other Sinners point out something odd about Hong Lu in a more positive way, he's often quick to point out how it's Nothing compared to what his Family expected of him. Wouldn't that make one feel exceptional, to make it seem like whatever effort you're putting in to do well is but a fraction of what else you can do? That you don't even have to try to be able to be special?

...So, there. That's all the analysis and interpretation I find important to do to get my point across.

Just to make it clear, I don't think that the only thing wrong with Hong Lu is the narcissism. There's definitely a lot more shit going on in that head of his. But, I'll be honest, the NPD reading felt so obvious to me that it genuinely took me by surprise that other people don't see it.

Though... maybe I shouldn't be shocked. Some fuckers out there still think Faust is a narcissist when she's literally just autistic.

[the-bi-space-ace]

Clone Cuddle Headcanons

Wrecker is the biggest cuddle bug idk what to tell you. He does run hot however. The amount of times whoever he’s cuddling with wakes up sweating and a thousand degrees is unbelievable. He’s real great to lay on top of though. Right on top. Get up there.

Crosshair is a surprising confusing individual and I keep looking at him in disbelief. He’s not averse to touch but he does want to be the one to initiate it. Especially cuddling. He will sit by himself in silence and then randomly walk up and just plop on top of whoever he’s chosen. They then have to lay there and let him choose the position, the blanket situation, the temperature, etc. otherwise he’ll leave. Cat rules.*

Tech isn’t huge on cuddling either but is willing to not be the initiator if they also respect whatever activity he is doing. If he’s sitting working on a project he will allow one of them to lay their head in his lap or wrap around him as long as they aren’t in the way. He may even play with their hair or rub their backs absentmindedly.

Echo goes through phases. He wants to be touched but not all the time and sometimes he really hates it and other times he really craves it. It’s mainly important to either ask first or let him ask. He likes to sleep near another person and will choose someone to latch on to if he’s in a cuddling mood. Sometimes he literally can’t get enough physical contact to feel comfortable and it drives him up a wall. (Can I please suggest that part of the reason Hunter touches his shoulder so often is bc of those moods where Echo legitimately can’t get enough physical touch. I just think that would be a nice thought.) He feels best when he gets to hold someone else and he is especially partial to Wrecker who not only keeps him warm but also is pretty willing to switch the cuddling up at any point. Good man.

Hunter! Hunter here! Really enjoys a good cuddle! Loves his back scratched or his hair played with! He has passed out on top of the other batchers before and woken up two hours later not knowing where tf he is. He also appreciates a good weight on him so his preferred position if he’s holding somebody is on his back with the other person laying their head on his chest. He runs warm so he’s a good option for the cold nights.

Fives loves everyone’s personal space. Especially Echo’s. He is a cuddle while sleeping type of guy. No need to feel weird about asking him for a cuddle he’s down for it. If anyone sits on the edge of his bed while he’s trying to sleep he rolls over and wraps his arms around their waist and hugs them. Had so much practice at comfort when he was a cadet that it is second nature for him. When he joined the 501st he got real protective of the shinies so they sought him out often when they needed support.

Rex does like a good cuddle but only with specific people. Doesn’t really want to be touched by people he doesn’t know well. Is honestly more accustomed to touch if it’s playful but again. Usually with people he knows well. Likes to lay his head in people’s laps or let them fall asleep on him. Is not too hot or too cold. Got used to the dominos crawling into his bunk while he was asleep and had to adapt to them being clingy on bad days. Got used to it and ended up missing when they weren’t there. Cody calls him a softie. Says they ruined him forever. He gets so grumpy back.

Cody. This man. Idk why but I always headcanon him as a physical touch kind of guy. Doesn’t like overly fond affection in public spaces but is real affectionate in private. Like Rex he’s more comfortable with the playful affection but there’s always a spot in his bed if someone needs it. He’s rarely sleeping through the night anyway. Might as well be the support system for those who need it. More accustom to holding hands honestly. It’s quiet it’s easy he can still use his datapad while he holds someone’s hand.

*I have a cute addition which is that the first time Crosshair plopped down and decided Echo was going to be his cuddle target Echo was in the middle of something and Crosshair just threw whatever Echo was working on aside and laid his head in Echo’s lap while this man just looked at the rest of the batch like ‘help?!? He’s never done this before am I in danger? What do I do!?!’ And everyone else was just like ‘you’re fine just be normal about it’ and after a few minutes of silence he just plopped his hand on Crosshair’s head and that’s how they both accidentally took a three hour nap and woke up disoriented with aching necks.

[readerswritings]

In the Damn Kitchen - Poolverine 1/2

Smut will come in next chapter I promise, just needed to get this part out into the world first to see if people like it. (AO3)

Warnings/tags: roommates, first Kiss, idiots in love, eventual smut, canon-typical behavior

Wordcount: 1224

Summary: Logan and Wade are some weird kind of roomates, and one morning Logan tries to figure out how to make Wade shut the fuck up without getting blood in his breakfast.

Logan has been staying with Wade on his shitty pull-out couch for three months. Something that was meant to be somewhat temporary is feeling less and less like that these days.

They still fight physically, stabbing each other and making a mess (that Al complains about later), but they also just hang out.

Which Logan isn’t used to.

Not anymore.

Haven’t been for a good while.

Wade has grown on him, even with all the touching. And talking.

All the goddamn talking.

It rarely stops.

Wade talks on the inhale and exhale.

Not even when he eats is Wade quiet, talking with his mouth full of food. He has been doing it less lately, after Logan stabbed him with a fork a few times so he wouldn’t have to see that shit.

Wade is only quiet when he’s sleeping.

Logan has returned late from a bar or late-night walks a few times to Wade asleep on the pullout. Seeing him quiet and still had been odd. Wade’s ADHD filled ass never being still when he’s awake. 

Wade also sleeps like he’s dead. Logan had discovered this when he tried to wake him so he would move the first time. It was legitimately difficult to wake him up. So after that first time where it took an eternity to get him conscious enough to move, Logan either goes to sleep in the armchair he had gotten off the street the first week he was here, or tips Wade onto the floor with a pillow if he is in a bad mood. 

When he doesn’t give a shit, he’ll just crawl onto the pullout with Wade. He tends to wake up before him anyway. The few times he doesn’t, a few claws to the guts makes Wade shut up, or at least talk about something else.

Another thing he hasn’t quite gotten used to, is how casual Wade is about touch.

Sure, Wade had been touching him a bunch when they first met. But that had been to rile Logan up, to get a reaction, even if it was all negative. (The Honda doesn’t count in any positive way, the intent behind all of that had been hate and adrenaline. Even if the end result had been good.)

Now though, it’s a hand patting his shoulder as they pass in the kitchen. A thigh bumping against his own as they watch shitty reality tv. Feet kicking him under the dinner table if he says something too blunt or rude. A shoulder bumping against his as they walk that damn ugly dog together.

It makes his skin crawl, mostly with how used to it he has become. And how he kinda, not that he will admit this to anyone but his own thoughts, likes it.

It’s all become routine, a weird kind of domestic, (Logan hates that word), that works for them.

Speaking of routine, Logan often makes breakfast for them. Wade can barely cook, Al is blind, and Logan doesn’t mind that much most of the time. He needs to eat a lot anyway, and getting something into Wade that is somewhat healthy and not just all sugar makes him a little less irritating to deal with during the day.

Wade of course likes to tease him when he cooks. Stealing bites before it’s ready. Logan has become quite adept at fighting just with a spatula, smacking hands away with a grunted ‘fuck off.’

He’s off his game this morning though, as Wade manages to snatch a piece of bacon, straight from the pan where it was almost finished. Logan knows it must be burning his mouth and tongue, but Wade crunches on his price with a grin on his face. 

He’s wearing Deadpool pajama pants, bunny slippers, and a pink long sleeve with Hello Kitty on it, and frankly looks ridiculous leaning on the counter, extra so next to Logan who is fully dressed for the day in his flannel, t-shirt, jeans, and boots.

“Haven’t had enough coffee yet peanut?” Logan grunts, smacking Wade’s hand as it tries to go for another piece. 

“Fuck off.”

“Oh you know I love it when you talk dirty to me, even this early in the morning.”

“It’s 10 am dipshit.”

“Oh you know the saying, it’s always 5 am somewhere.” Logan snorts, shaking his head. He grabs a plate to put the finished bacon on, putting some more in the pan. He lets Wade take a piece from the plate.

“Besides, I kept waking up because my dreams were being haunted by this sexy lumberjack looking figure, and I woke up with a raging hard-on that I had to take care of every-” Logan tunes him out, a necessary and learned skill by now. He flips the bacon, then stirs the eggs in the other pan where he’s keeping them warm on low heat.

There’s a hand in his hair, and that makes his focus snap back to Wade and his yapping. 

“You know, I always wonder if you roll out of bed with these little tufts.” Logan pushes his hand away, letting the claws out just enough so he knicks Wade’s skin. 

“Ouchie, someone’s a grump this morning. You’ve clearly not gotten enough caffeine in your hot bod yet. We should get that coffee that has a fuckton of it, the one with the skull or whatever, that lethal shit. Wonder if that would actually kill you, do you think your heart could give out on you? I think they even make you sign a wai-” Logan tunes him out again and wonders what it will take to shut Wade up. He is right, Logan has not had enough coffee for this. (Or booze, but he’s trying to do a little less of that.) 

Logan absentmindedly notices one of Wade’s scars on his cheek looks kinda almost like an H, and his mind drifts to the Honda. Unintentional, though not unwelcome

He’d rather not get blood on his bacon right now, so he goes for another component of all that shit.

He steps to the side and turns, leaning forward, pressing his lips against Wade’s. It’s a brief kiss, but Wade doesn’t immediately say anything as Logan leans back just enough to gauge his reaction. He's enjoying the silence as Wade's eyes are flickering all over his face.

Wade’s mouth is gaping like a fish, opening and closing before his brain is booting back up. It makes Logan snort as he leans back all the way back.

The silence lasts for maybe thirty seconds.

“What the fuck peanut? You interupted me mid-monologue, that was fucking rude you-”

“Thought it would shut you up, but I see that didn’t work.” Logan takes a step back, but is hauled back by hands twisted in the collar of his flannel.

“Oh no, you are not going anywhere until I get an explanation, or more.” Logan arches a brow, hands at his side, not touching Wade. The urge to punch or stab him is rising. 

And the urge to kiss him. 

Again. 

He knows all of the options would work for Wade.

“I gave you an explanation.” 

“Grew tired of the claws old man? Don’t wanna stab this supple fle-”

“God you are desperate.” Logan doesn’t know if he means it as an insult or a compliment, but kisses Wade again anyway.

[ryuichirou]

I apologize if it is too personal but how do you deal with "antishipper" and the way they make callout posts and harassment campaigns against you ? It’s legitimately so scary and it makes me hesitant of posting my own art

Anon! I am very sorry you are going through this horrible feeling of hesitation and anxiety; knowing that people get targeted like that could not only stop you from posting, but stop you from creating altogether, and this is the worst part about this whole thing.

It’s not too personal, and I don’t mind talking about it at all. I’ve talked about our position and our relationship with fandom policing a bunch of times already, so I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself.

I used to be worried about posting certain stuff too. Well, when I was a teen/in my early 20s I wasn’t worried about anything: we had so much juicy stuff posted here lol But then the nsfw ban happened, and the social climate of this app and internet in general started shifting, the first stories about people driven to end their lives because of the hate they received started to come out, and we stopped posting completely. It wasn’t a huge loss to us back then, and this situation wasn’t the only reason why we stopped, but still, it clearly became much more difficult to just appear out of nowhere, throw problematic stuff in your blog and run away again.

I vividly remember us wanting to post my Shingeki no Kyojin drawings and comics based on our AUs and stuff, but not knowing what to do with Ereri – there was no way for us to be “unproblematic” (which was never a concern to us, we just didn’t want to get tons of hate lol) and still post Eren with a man twice his age. So we started posting them without a tag, starting with a drawing that wasn’t too shippy, and then miraculously the world didn’t end. That made us bolder, and we started to post them openly, and posted them for almost two years pretty regularly, alongside some of our other problematic ships + problematic themes. Of course we did get hate, we got a lot of hate while we were posting SnK stuff from all kinds of people, but what we also got a lot of people who found our content refreshing and interesting, even if it was weird and uncomfortable at times.

We weren’t the only people who shipped Ereri (let’s ignore my petty thoughts about the difference between Ereri and Rivaere for now), and we weren’t the only people in Twst fandom who liked Shroudcest, which is another ship that we were super hesitant about posting or even mentioning at first. But with all the hate around I was so certain the world was going to end the moment we post them, and that didn’t happen. The end of the world never happens, but what does happen is that people either get introduced to a fun new dynamic and get invested, or get happy that someone finally posts for the ship they were too afraid to post for. Somehow, when you see some other person being ballsy, you don’t feel as scared anymore – it happened to us with other people’s posts too. Yes, I still say this even though it spawns a bunch of callout posts and harassment, as it did with us. Were we cancelled? Yeah, somewhat. There’s so much you can say about an acc that states “problematic stuff, 18+”, right? I was super relieved and happy, actually, that a lot of people left/blocked us just because they’re the people I’d never want to interact with my art.

I’ve been yapping for a long time already lol so I’ll give you some pieces of advice instead… These are things that legitimately help us.

Surround yourself with people who support you – if not you personally, then at least your ideas (i.e. other proshippers). Luckily, nowadays it’s easier to find them… But also, having a friend who you can vent about these things to helps a lot! It’s cheesy but it’s a fact: when you’re not alone, it’s not as scary.

Always ignore comments/asks from antis and block them on sight, block anonymous asks too. Even if you really want to sass them, it’s much more effective to ignore them: when you give them attention, it invites more engagement from them.

Block people you get bad vibes from. Block those who like or comment bad takes or support harassment of others, block all of their alt accounts. It’s tedious and takes time, but it really helps to keep you hidden from them, at least to some degree. I look up Shroudcest sometimes just to block new people. They try to make fun of me for that, but who cares if it works? You can’t block everyone, but these people usually flock together and it’s usually just a bunch of friends, so taking several posts on these topics from people from the fandom and blocking everyone involved will obliterate the majority of harassers.

In terms of your safety, having multiple accounts in case you main one gets mass-reported helps + I would advice to keep irl stuff away from your fandom stuff just in case.

This is going to sound stupid, but please keep in mind that this isn’t about you. These people are very miserable and not very smart. Even if they try to paint you like a bad person, they don’t know anything about you, so don’t let their judgment affect how you feel about yourself. This is exactly what they want – to have power over you.

Stay strong and take care of yourself, i.e. lock your acc and/or take a break if you feel overwhelmed. Don’t worry, it will pass: it’s very rare for these clowns to keep focus on one person for a long period of time; they have like 5 different dramas per day. There are some absolutely batshit crazy rapid assholes who won’t leave an artist alone for years, but those are super rare and special cases altogether, I don’t think you need to be worried about those.

Keep in mind which fandom you want to do this with, btw. It’s usually okay for the most part, but if the fandom is just a bunch of kids, it’s more likely not worth it or deserves an empty account, at least. Twst is surprisingly good despite anything it might look like! Thanks to Yana being a shotacon and a creator of Kuroshitsuji, I guess. There are many great and supportive people in the twst fandom, it’s been a pleasure to be here, even though, once again, it’s the first fandom where I got a bunch of callout posts and nasty stuff in my ask (SnK fandom usually harassed me for other things).

TL;DR: it is scary, and you could easily get callout posts about yourself, but guess what, you also get to be yourself. Because realistically, callout posts can’t stop you from creating art. They want you to believe that they have power over you, but this isn’t true. Your life online won’t end after some random callout post – mine didn’t. They also don’t understand that each consequent callout post affects the person being called out even less. We do have a minor panic attack for the first hour or so, and it does involve more extra blocking, but mostly it just sours our mood for the day and drops our morale. I still draw, though, out of spite a little lol Oh, and do try to report these types of posts if you get them, there’s nothing wrong with that.

People had been persecuted for their art and ideas for centuries, so what happens now is really nothing new. Without diving into specifics, there are way worse things they could do than writing callouts, but they aren’t super likely to do those. Luckily.

Take care of yourself, but also please don’t doubt yourself; when it comes to your art being way too fun for lovers of censorship to handle, you’re in a very good company. I’m referring to all the artist and writers of this world btw and not just me and Katsu lol but us as well!

[ceasarslegion]

By the wishes of a few people, here's my advice post about living alone. Keep in mind I'm speaking from the perspective of a canadian urbanite, so this will not apply to absolutely everybody in every kind of culture, economy, living situation, those in rural areas, etc. This also is not assuming wealth disparities are a matter of personal attitude, i KNOW it's complicated. Get back with that shit right now, you know damn well this advice assumes you are able to achieve the financial means to live on your own and is not disparaging anyone who legitimately can't.

Let's cover the basics first.

Source of income:

This seems rather obvious, but your income should be regular and reliably the same or similar on a monthly basis. The most obvious way to achieve this is with a job, and I'm sorry but minimum wage is not going to cut it on your own anymore, which means you're going to have to swallow your pride and accept that you'll likely have to work for some industry or corporation with a dodgy moral record. Get used to it. There is no point in self-flagellation, the world is complicated, just take the 50-60k a year office job, no one actually expects you not to and nobody will hold it against you when the "moral" option is soul-crushing retail. The real world really doesn't give a shit what you have to do to afford a comfortable lifestyle as long as you do what good you can within your abilities, no one in the real world expects you to sacrifice your own wellbeing for a cause.

Salaried positions are your most reliable because you'll always pull the same amount, while hourly pay comes with the ability to pull overtime pay in exchange for more shifts, but if you run out of sick days you'll have to spend the rest of the year taking unpaid time off when you need to call in. Whichever one you choose depends on what's available to you and what's right for you physically and mentally, I can't make that call for you.

You also need a credit card. That is non-negotiable. If you don't have a credit score, you can't sign a lease. Bad credit is better than no credit. We can argue until the cows come home whether or not credit scores are good or bad, but it's just reality that you're going to need one. The good news is it's fairly easy to build credit from no credit: you just have to pay off your credit card in full on time every time. The bad news is it's equally as easy to tank your credit score, you just have to miss one or pay it too late, and it's very hard to build good credit back from bad credit. So don't see it as free money, only spend as much as you can pay back, and if you don't have credit right now, start with small things like lunch and little treats that you immediately pay off.

Looking for a place to live:

Once you have your regular and reliable source of income, you can start looking for your place. There's a few things you should keep in mind:

-Draw up a budget for how much you can spend on rent and bills. That includes all basic living expenses: rent, utilities, food, internet, phone, hygiene. Compare how much you make per month to what you can spend. 1/3 to 1/2 of your salary is a bit more realistic to expect to spend on rent alone nowadays, so work within that range when you apartment hunt. Think of everything when you're budgeting, like how much do you spend on haircuts per month? You probably didn't think of that, because I didn't either at first.

-Apartment buildings with some/all utilities included often have higher base rents. You have to keep in mind that this is so the landlord can balance out the utility bills of the whole building, which are unpredictable expenses and on them to pay every month. If you don't know how to budget yet or don't know how to do so with unpredictable bills, I highly recommend trying to find a place with utilities included so you know EXACTLY how much you'll need to pay every month and can plan in advance

-Older buildings tend to be both cheaper and more likely to have centralized utility systems, which means they have to include it in the price of rent because there's no way to tell who used how much of something. If it's your first place alone, you'll probably be tempted to get the brand new, expensive building down the road, but it won't actually make much of a difference when you move in. You will love it regardless.

-Never ever sign a lease until you've either seen THE unit you're considering, or one of the show units that is exactly the same layout. The last thing you want is to go off online photos only to move in and find out the building has a mold problem. You can arrange personal tours by contacting the building manager or the landlord directly. Phone calls are the best way to do this.

-If you want the unit after seeing it, you know you can afford it, there's nothing funny about the place, apply IMMEDIATELY. Places are usually on the market for a few days before they're snapped up by a new tenant, you have to strike while the iron's hot.

-If you've decided on the place you want and had your application accepted, read the lease carefully before you sign. Many places require tenant insurance that meet specific policy requirements, have registration rules about long-term guests, outline how the parking works, quiet hours, smoking rules, mail, laundry, all the way down to what kind of barbecues are allowed on your deck in the case of mine (I am in a wildfire danger zone, so any types that produce embers are strictly prohibited for fire safety reasons). Ask any question that comes to mind about the lease. Not everything in a lease is some human rights violation just because you don't like landlords, keep in mind you're living in the same building as dozens of other people, so there has to be ground rules established for everyone's sanity.

-Internet is often not considered a utility so you'll have a hard time finding any place that includes it. You can arrange to have your wifi set up in advance of a moving date on a specific time and date, do this right after you sign a lease so you don't forget. They won't charge you until you're actually hooked up to the network.

-If your utilities are NOT included, get those set up in advance too. The main ones are HVAC, water, and electricity. The companies that do this vary depending on where you live and what's available, so shop around online once you've signed your lease and sign up as soon as possible. The last thing you want is to forget this and then move into a dark freezing apartment with no water.

Budgeting:

After your living expenses are covered, you should have a comfortable amount of financial wiggle room leftover. If you wouldn't, the place you're looking at is either too expensive, or you're being overcharged elsewhere. It's completely normal for living expenses to take up most of your budget these days, you're doing just fine in the same boat as everybody else if that's the case, so don't panic yet. If you have absolutely NOTHING leftover though, then you're out of your price range.

You also need to set money aside for fun and saving. Do not forego fun money, your brain will try to kill you with hammers and knives if you never get or do things for yourself. And if you're on your own, you're the only one providing that for yourself now. And a solid building base of savings will only help you in the future, whether you lose your job, have an emergency, or even need a down payment on a house later in life. Don't be a doomer about your circumstances or the socioeconomic and generational cards that were dealt to you, chip away at it a little at a time. And don't fall for social media's insistence that anybody with anything at all is some bourgeois degenerate or that being fortunate enough to be able to have upward mobility makes you some ultra wealthy shithead, working towards a comfortable standard of living for yourself does not make you a rich elite or a bad person. You're working towards the standard we should all live as, not exploiting the poor or being a class traitor. I feel the need to add that last part since we're on the website of "struggling art students in NYC are bourgeois that are just bad with money and having a gaming computer makes you upper middle class." Don't listen to a word any of those people say, I know it comes from a place of very real hurt and pain for them but that doesn't make it grounded in absolute reality for absolutely everybody.

Social needs:

If you're by yourself, there's gonna be a lot more work you have to put in for your social and entertainment needs. I can not stress enough how important it is to give this the time and work it needs, do not neglect this.

Lots of libraries have clubs you can join that will get you out of the house and meeting new people regularly. They're either free or very inexpensive. This is a great place to start.

Take advantage of technology we have now. Hop on discord calls more frequently, make sure you're talking to your friends on the regular and try to make plans as much as you can.

Also, I advise finding lots of things you can do by yourself. You will be spending way more time alone than you ever have before, so find single-person hobbies. Go thrifting, get into knitting, go explore the city, read lots of books, do puzzles, just don't lock yourself inside all day in your free time. Even if you're doing it alone, going out and seeing that the world is bigger than your apartment and your workplace is very good for you.

Misc advice:

You don't need a conventional coffee pot maker. Single serving will suit you just fine.

Cleaning is easier when you have a routine. It doesn't all have to be done on the same day of the week, but having a regular schedule of what gets cleaned when for non-daily chores will help you keep on top of it. And please, god, don't neglect your cleaning and hygiene just because no one lives with you to see it. On that note, spray bottle all purpose cleaners are your best friend for daily spot cleaning and you should deep clean your washroom around every 2 weeks in my experience since that's where you'll be doing most of your personal hygiene. Also make your damn bed, yes you'll just get back into it at the end of the day but having a major part of your space neat and tidy will do wonders for your mental health.

Don't buy the cheap garbage bags. Some things you really do want the expensive shit for.

If you don't have a car, delivery service/rideshare subscriptions ARE worth it and legitimately economical in the long run. I do wanna circle back to square one and say that yes, most of them like prime and uber do have dodgy moral records, but sometimes you just gotta swallow your pride and accept that. Once again, no one in the real world expects you to spend your entire day on public transit looking for toilet paper that isnt 30 dollars a pack or lugging 50 pounds of groceries back on a bus just for a cause. It's not the fault of someone who needs these services for their quality of life that they do the things they do, don't put that responsibility on your or other's shoulders when the fault lies at the top of the corporate ladder.

When you're budgeting for living expenses, expect your income to be at the lowest and your expenses to be at the highest. I expect 2 call ins per month and to need to spend the max amount i have on groceries every time, that way I never fall short and never have to cut into my savings that I've dubbed my "oh shit, I'm broke" money. Your emergency reserve may look tempting to you, but as someone who has been in a position where they had to drain it to nothing in the past because of an unforeseen financial emergency, you REALLY are gonna want that untouched if and when shit hits the fan. Life is unpredictable, prepare to roll with the punches so they don't knock you out.

A few people wanted to be tagged in this, so here you go @lilsnatch and @kisstheashes <3

[gilverrwrites]

NSFW Alphabet [Lucifer]

Lucifer / GN Human Reader

TW: Somewhat unhealthy relationship/sexual habits

Notes: Pretty sure all angels are like, assigned gender neutral at creation (at least that’s my HC) but I do refer to Lucifer by he/him. All HCs transfer to any vessel excluding physical descriptions.

Self indulgent dom Lucifer undertones, some fluff.

If you enjoy, and would like to see more, please let me know!

Rating: M/18+

I hope you have a great rest of your day.

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex) 

If he legitimately has let his walls down and is viewing this as some form of relationship, then he’s surprisingly soft and cuddly. Don’t talk about it, or he’ll get defensive. Just enjoy the moment for what it is.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s) 

Of his vessel? His tongue. It’s sharp and dirty. He loves using it to tempt you, and loves using it even more on your core, making you wither and moan for him.  

Of yours; your face, specifically your expressions. He just loves watching the way your face crumples or eases, the way your cheeks will blush or drain dependent on what you’re feeling, on what he’s doing to you.  

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically) 

He loves making a mess of you, will pull out and cum on any part of you he can reach. He especially likes cumming on your face, then slowly scooping it into your mouth.  

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs) 

Lucifer is VERY open about his sex life, to literally anyone. He’s an open book with every explicit details, they don’t even have to ask.

He’ll tell them all about the positions he had you in last night, how many times you cried his name, or took his load.

He’s much less vocal about the more tender nights. When you spend hours wrapped up close, rocking together, unguarded. Those moments are just for him.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?) 

Given his distaste for humans, and having spent such a long time in the cage; not particularly experienced. But what he lacks in practice, he makes up for in confidence, energy, and enthusiasm.  

F = Favorite positions (this goes without saying) 

Anything deep penetration: legs on shoulders, the flatiron, and especially the lap dance.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.) 

Lucifer cannot go more than 10 minutes without letting his impulsive thoughts win, and more often than not, those thoughts are humorous to some extent. He may have a big ego, and when it comes to serious matters he will snap necks over nothing, but he’s lived to long to take himself to seriously in moments like these. Additionally, he loves to make you laugh.  

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.) 

I subscribe to the idea that vessels hair stops growing hair and whatnot when they’re being possessed (it’s definitely not just TV convenience). That being said, Nick was too consumed with grief to stay on top of that area before Lucifer came along. And Lucifer does not care enough to trim it up either.  

It’s clean, but it’s kind of a jungle down there.  If you ask him real nicely though, he might tidy it up.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect) 

Flirting comes easy to Lucifer, but romance is a foreign language. He can be vulnerable with you if he allows himself to be, if he feels comfortable enough. But if you want romance, you’re gonna have to be vocal and concise, and even then I wouldn’t expect it often or tactfully.  

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon) 

Alone in the cage, he tried it from time to time, and not just jerking. He really got to know himself, his likes, and dislikes. You’ll do a lot of stuff if you’re bored enough.

He even did it when Michael was locked up with him. It was a cheap shot, and sexually he didn’t enjoy it, but he did it just to laugh at the Michaels disgust.

Out of the cages, less so.

Once he got his clutches on you, never.  

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks) 

100% has a praise/worship kink, tell him you’re ruined for anyone else, tell him nobody could ever make you fell this good and he’ll be riding that euphoria all day. ‘If It makes you comfy:’ Earnestly call him your God, and he’ll cum on the spot.  

Simultaneously he has a degradation kink for you.  He’ll have you on your knees, hands taught in your hair, growling “Beg for it you filthy whore. Beg me to let you worship my cock." 

L = Location (favorite places to do the do) 

No real preference, but he does like the way your eyes get wide, and your heartbeat hammers when he fucks you somewhere risky. Somewhere you might get caught. “What would you do? If they caught us? What would they think of you, underwear around your ankles, spread open for me like the good little pet you are?”  The correct answer is incoherent moaning.  

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going) 

It doesn’t take a lot really. He could just sit back and watch you go about your day, enjoying the sway of your hips, the sound of your laugh. It’s a slow build, but you’re tempting when you’re oblivious to what you’re doing to him.  

If you want him there and then though, give him a reason to put you in your place. He likes the power dynamic when you’re challenging him.  

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs) 

Exhibitionism is a yes for him, that’s for sure, but there’s an invisible line that surrounds it. The look but don’t touch line. You’re his, and only his to play with.  

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.) 

As previously mentioned, he loves putting his mouth to good use. As much as he loves watching you choke and slurp on him, he would happily spend hours forcing wave after wave of pleasure through you, with just his mouth.  

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.) 

He can be slow and sensual, especially during foreplay and oral. Just loves watching you squirm as he slowly inches in to you until he bottoms out. Loves watching you pant and beg as he holds you down, forcing you to cockwarm him for hour after hour. But when it comes to game time, when you’re ready to topple, he will hammer into you like there’s no tomorrow.  

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.) 

Quickies tie in really well with his fondness for risky sex. Oh, your hunter friend is on their way here to borrow that book? I think now would be a great time to pin you to the couch and make you scream. They’re nearly here? They might hear us? You better get me off quick then, hadn’t you?   

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.) 

Absolutely. The real danger with trying something new with Lucifer is just how far he’ll take it, you know? He is not the kind who is gonna spend hours meticulously researching the best and safest ways to explore new kinks. So come prepared, to pray nothing goes wrong.  

He is however, prepared to try and fix things/make amends after the fact. Provided you don’t put all the blame on him (regardless of how much it actually is or isn’t.)

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?) 

The real question is how many rounds can you go? How long can you last? That’s one of the perks to being an archangel. He can keep going until you’re a crumpled drooling mess, and he will. He particularly enjoys the way your legs tremor at just the feel of his fingers brushing near your sweet spots once he’s made you orgasm enough times. He is a fiend for overstimulation. 

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?) 

If you want too, he will, but really, who needs them? Right? He can, and will go all night, and he can make you feel whatever you want with the click of his fingers. I guess the only exception to that rule would be things like role play/costumes.  

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease) 

Lucifer is the king of teasing. He’ll flirt, touch, and rut himself against you, winding you up all day and then pretend to recede his offer when you get him alone. He wants you to beg him for it.

And just when you think you’ve won him over, when he ploughing into you, he’ll tell you you’re not allowed to cum. Not until he says so.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.) 

Not particularly loud, he will make some guttural sounds when he finishes, but otherwise the only times he’ll moan is when he’s mocking your own sounds.

But he will talk, he will in fact rarely shut the fuck up.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character) 

He’ll never admit it, but for all his bark and equally his bite, his favourite part often is the aftermath. You’ll spook him if you talk about it, but he enjoys laying beside you, watching you come down from your high. Pressing his cold hard body against you, all soft and warm and oh so fragile.

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes) 

Nicks a little above average in the night department so I’d overlap what in the penis area. Circumcised, just over 6 inches, a little on the thin side.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?) 

When he’s in the mood, you’ll know he’s in the mood, and he’s easy to turn on if you know how to push his buttons.

However, he has been around a long time. Sure he is demanding in the moment, but in between he can be patient.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards) 

He doesn’t sleep, and he’ll probably be gone by the time you wake up. But he will stay until you fall asleep, just to enjoy the serenity, the calm after the storm.

[bestworstcase]

option 1: tai’s guarding the crown of choice.

pros:

a legitimately important task that recontextualizes his ongoing decision to remain on patch as a personal sacrifice he makes for the greater good.

ozpin would pick the guy named for the god of light to be the gatekeeper of choice, huh.

if any parent in this story is meant to die, it’s him, and narratively this is the most intuitive way to do it.

cons:

realistically, what can tai do to prevent salem / cinder / summer from accessing the vault if they find it? if he’s the gatekeeper, staying on patch alone after everyone else evacuates achieves nothing except, ah, signaling to the enemy that the real vault is under signal academy. bad plan.

it means oz is breaking his promise to be honest and forthcoming, undermining his character growth for the sake of ‘surprising’ the audience with the most obvious answer.

means qrow has either been kept in the dark (see prev point) or he’s also deliberately hiding this information from his nieces after they asked him outright if he knew where tai is; this is so far afield for his character as to border on character assassination, and likewise undermines his positive growth since v7.

honestly makes both yang and ruby seem kind of stupid. they know the crown is hidden somewhere near beacon, that ozpin did something to protect it differently from the others, and that their father hasn’t left patch. ruby was sharp enough to guess that long memory might be a relic hidden in plain sight; yang is just as smart, and she knows tai had “some things” to look after on patch. are we expected to believe that “hey, is dad guarding the relic?” somehow hasn’t occurred to either of them?

tai harbors a whole lot of resentment toward ozpin, and based on qrow kicking him out of ruby’s bedroom to drip-feed her hints on where to go next, he seems to have been on the outer perimeter of the inner circle. why would oz entrust him with the relic’s safety?

glynda—ozpin’s scrupulously loyal second-in-command whose emblem is a crown and whose semblance puts her on par with a maiden—is a far more narratively plausible vault-guardian than tai, and the “sun dragon” makes a damn good red herring.

if he’s guarding the vault, he dies. sorry. but the point of putting the father of 2/4 protagonists in between the two main villains and the thing they want most (choice) is so they can kill him to get it, increasing tension and raising the emotional stakes of negotiating peace. to be clear, rwby is willing to Go There, but i think it’s an unsatisfactory way to close out the rose xiao long family arc.

option 2: survivors trapped under mountain glenn, and tai is taking point.

pros:

a genuinely important, worthwhile thing for him to be doing—even more so than guarding the crown. likely sets up a resolution for him in the vein of “you can be a good huntsman or a good father, and tai picked being a huntsman,” which is an elegant way to balance his contradictions.

gives him meaningful stuff to do in v10; for example, one stealthy huntsman with a bullhead could slip in and out of mountain glenn to get a few dozen people out at a time, and/or run supplies and messages between the kingdoms.

we get to see zwei back in action around mountain glenn :)

introduces a natural segue from playing defense in vacuo to mounting a counteroffensive against beacon as tai’s work clarifies the situation in vale.

easily the most 'heroic' direction for him without contorting the story to arbitrarily lionize tai: he’s a scout preparing the stage for the heroes to take the fight to salem, making him the good counterpart to watts.

cons:

makes no sense to keep it a secret. the emotional beats of B4 can still happen if the girls know this is what tai’s doing: instead of “do you… wonder why he’s not here? i know qrow said he’s on assignment, but what’s more important than here?” yang says “do you… wish he were here? with us? i know qrow said he’s looking for survivors, but how many of them can there really be by now? we need all the help we can get,” and ruby says “maybe we don’t have the full picture” as in maybe dad knows something we don’t and that’s why he hasn’t given up yet. the emotion is the same, and the big "they’re hiding in mountain glenn" reveal is hinted without spoiling.

leaves hanging the narrative thread of what tai has been doing since the fall of beacon, because the “some things” he was dealing with in v4 obviously wasn’t this.

option 3: tai is dead.

pros:

explains the apparent secrecy; qrow knows tai was away “on assignment” (i.e., had taken a huntsman contract that brought him out of the kingdom) at the time salem attacked vale, so he is missing but not yet presumed dead.

might reopen the mystery box of summer’s last mission through the real-deal “left on a mission and never came back” echo.

cons:

raven would know.

it’s a cheap, narratively unsatisfying twist that fails to deliver on the bread crumbs set up in v2-3 (tai starts going on missions again) and v4 (“some things”), and also undermines any serious emotional resolution with regard to yang and ruby’s complex relationships with tai.

option 4: summer’s working with salem, and tai is trying to convince her to come back.

pros:

“some things” being his presumed-dead wife who left him to join the enemy and with whom tai is now having an affair or otherwise hoping to coax back to the heroic side through the power of love whilst also keeping his mouth shut about her being a) still alive and b) a traitor is OBJECTIVELY the funniest answer.

brings forward and interrogates the way tai’s romantic grief informs the choices he makes as a parent: from hiding raven and then refusing to talk about her with yang, to shutting down when he lost summer and letting his five-year-old pick up the pieces, to discovering and then keeping summer’s secrets for the sake of some faint hope that she might finally come back to him.

cogent with the Dead (Absent) Mother / Neglectful Father / Evil Stepmother fairytale paradigm rwby deconstructs with raven, tai, and summer; the father chooses the stepmother over his children.

raises the emotional stakes of the war for summer through direct confrontation with the life she left behind, creating narrative opportunities to develop her character (is she still in love with tai? how does she feel about being his first priority, over their children? does she resent that he has her on this pedestal even now?) and apply pressure to her relationships with salem and cinder (do they know? is summer keeping her communication with him a secret, too? or is he an “asset” she’s using for salem’s benefit?).

consequently, raises the momentum of the narrative toward negotiation with salem; tai still has the coalition’s trust, however strained his personal relationships may be. summer is the obvious ambassador for salem’s side of the war, but she’s also the traitor who needs someone to vouch for her good intentions.

the secrecy needs no explanation: just as summer’s last mission was a summer secret, tai’s "assignment" is a taiyang secret and the girls know everything that oz and qrow do, because all of them have been left in the dark. raven might know, and she has the means to find if she doesn’t, but tai’s whereabouts are entangled with what raven knows about summer, so she can’t explain where tai is or why until she reveals her deep dark secrets about what happened between her and summer that night.

foreshadowing is solid: tai starts to go on "missions" again in v2, after the inner circle becomes aware that salem has infiltrated beacon and just before the breach downtown. when ruby visits summer’s grave in v3, she says "[dad] told me he’s going to be on some mission soon! i think he misses adventuring with you." he’s got to "look after some things" (but he isn’t talking about yang, because he stays home after she leaves). and then with B4 we have ruby echoing what the blacksmith taught her about summer in relation to tai, "maybe we don’t have the full picture?"

juicy

cons:

???

dependent on the unconfirmed theory that summer is working for salem as herself, not some unrecognizable enslaved monster, but i am as confident in that as i was about salem going to vale next and we all know how that turned out :)

taking their mom was not enough salem had to go for the full set APPARENTLY

option 5: secret fifth thing

pros:

???

cons:

???

[stillness-in-green]

sorry, didn't see the answer until today. thank you for that but I mean proving AFO wrong that Tenko is filled with hatred and destroying and no one can accept him. we know thats a lie now but Tenko still dies?

Hey again, anon. So, I went back and tried to fit this follow-up context into your original ask—answered here for anyone who wants to look over it again.  My initial answer was based on you meaning that AFO should have been “proven wrong” in his assertions about human frailty and how, once someone has been rejected by society and become a Villain, there’s no way for them to come back.  Reconsidering your issue (that Deku killing Shigaraki doesn’t prove AFO wrong) with the knowledge that what you meant was him saying Shigaraki is only capable of hating and destroying things…

I guess in the end I don’t think the story believes AFO is wrong about that either? I mean, obviously he was, back when he first told those words to at-the-time-still-Tenko. But now? Not so much, at least in the author's eyes.

Below, if you want to subject yourself to my reasoning again, you can follow along as I talk myself through getting to that quite jaded conclusion.  My apologies if I misunderstand or misrepresent you again anywhere along the way!  Admittedly, based on my experience with the fandom and what names we choose to use in talking about the characters, I suspect we’re coming at them from radically different positions, but my position is the one I’ve got to offer you. Please know that, to whatever extent we might disagree on how much "Shigaraki Tomura" was ever a legitimate persona, we are united in our opinion that Deku should have done more for him if the story was serious about him being the Greatest Hero.

......

So, okay, the biggest issue with asserting that Shigaraki has any kind of moral core or personality independent of his AFO-instilled hatred/destructiveness is that the best arguments for it all revolve around the League and how Shigaraki wants to be their “Hero,” how that’s contiguous with his personality even from when he was “Tenko” because both fit a pattern of reaching out to the outcasts that everyone else around them ignores or mistreats.

I believed that too!  I still do, in fact!  I want to be clear that I think Shigaraki still has legitimate grievances and that his desire to make a world in which Villains will be happier is still, in its own way, noble and true!

But.

But that glorious spread where Tomura says that even if every bit of his hatred is smashed, he’ll still keep going because he has to be a Hero for the Villains that need him?  That spread comes before the montage showing AFO’s involvement in the Shimuras’ lives from before Tenko was even born.  And part of that montage is the absolutely buffoonish reveal that AFO even influenced Tenko’s sense of heroism by leaning on Tomo and Mikkun (the aforementioned outcasts) to encourage him to be a Hero.  I tend to assume that the two of them were from one of Ujiko’s orphanages—I can’t imagine how else AFO would be in a position to give two random children direct orders!—but whatever the case, it means that even Tenko’s draw towards standing up for outcasts is something influenced by All For One.

If you take that away, what else is left?  I could pick a few little traits here and there, but ultimately, what Shigaraki comes back to in the end, in that very last conversation with Deku in the shared mindspace, is destruction.  He pursued it to the end, his last expressed regret is that he couldn’t carry it out, and his final messages to ally and enemy alike revolve around the destruction he sought—telling Spinner he died fighting for it and telling Deku that it’s up to him and his whether any of what he destroyed actually stays destroyed.

To me, that suggests that the manga does believe that Shigaraki Tomura was, ultimately, an existence that could only destroy, and the fact that some of what he targeted deserved to be destroyed doesn’t negate the fact that he was still ultimately defined by the destructiveness that AFO meticulously crafted him to embody.  Even Deku seems to think that, in the end!

Like, really working through the timeline here?  Deku did want to believe that the Crying Child indicated that Shigaraki had some drive other than destructiveness at his core.  One of the (vanishingly rare) times he actually spoke to Shigaraki during their fight was his refutation of Shigaraki’s claims that he’d successfully devoured The Crying Child and thus transcended his humanity.

Running on the desperate certainty that Shigaraki was wrong/lying, Deku smashes his way into Shigaraki’s core and metaphorically uproots his hatred and psychically holds his hands, and Shigaraki still says that even so, the Villains still need him…  And if it ended there, maybe we could say that AFO was “wrong” in the sense you describe—that while the method Shigaraki uses to Be A Hero For Villains is warped by AFO’s influence, his desire to be that Hero is genuinely his own.  But then we get That Reveal, and even the parts of Tenko that seemed to predate AFO are revealed to be just another aspect of AFO’s machinations—Tenko’s heroism, his sense of injustice, even his very existence, all are indelibly stamped with AFO’s mark.

After that reveal, Deku never again pushes back against claims that Shigaraki can only destroy.  He never pushes back on AFO’s claims of authorship of Shigaraki’s life; he never tries to encourage Shigaraki by insisting that his bonds to the League are real regardless of how AFO raised him.  Heck, he never even suggests Shigaraki still has the chance to figure out who Tenko could be as long as he can break AFO's hold and reject his teaching. No, Deku just…accepts AFO's premise, apparently.

And so I come back to the same conclusion I did before: Deku is angry at All For One, but he does not disagree with All For One.

I genuinely think that, as far as the narrative is concerned, the tragedy of Shigaraki’s ending is thus:

Anyone Shimura Tenko was or could have been was overwritten by All For One’s grooming long ago.  Maybe this could have been prevented if things had gone differently—if Nana had beaten AFO, if someone like Deku had been there to intervene the day of the tragedy, if someone on the street had reached out to him before AFO—but as it stands, Shigaraki Tomura is too far gone to save.[See Note]  Deku can end the monster that was behind it all and try to honor the victims that Shigaraki’s actions brought to light by changing the world that created them for the better, but he cannot save Shimura Tenko because Shimura Tenko was lost long before he and Midoriya Izuku ever met.

(Note: One of those "Maybe If..."s the story dangles is Spinner taking some ill-defined step to help his friend, but my opinions are that disingenuous suggestion are just a long string of profanity. Suffice to say, if Shigaraki could still have been "saved" all the way up to the start of the second war, then the Heroes bear way more responsibility for failing to do so than Spinner ever could, and Deku is even more of a fuckwit for not arguing with AFO's assertions that Tomura is nothing but what AFO made of him.)

Of course we wanted more than that.  Of course we wanted Deku to do more than that!  We spent all that time watching Shigaraki grow and bond with the League—why, if the only reason for that growth and those bonds was to prepare him as a vessel for AFO?  We watched Deku resolve to try to save and/or understand Shigaraki’s heart no matter what—why, if everything in that heart was written in someone else’s hand?

The story told us that the best heroes always manage to both win and save, and that we were reading the story of how Deku becomes the best hero—why, if the story was only going to conclude that Shigaraki’s death at Deku’s hand was inevitable because the harm All For One did was impossible for either of them to overcome?

And to me, at least, that’s why Shigaraki’s death and Deku’s role in it feel so wrong: not for the in-universe reason that Deku and Shigaraki don’t disprove/disavow AFO’s claims, but for the meta reason that My Hero Academia lied to us and wasted our goddamn time.  It spent over two hundred chapters building up Shigaraki Tomura—as a villain, yes, but also as a victim, a friend, an enemy, an ally, someone who existed in the world he was rebelling against—only to then turn around and spend its remaining two hundred chapters tearing him back down to nothing and then telling us that’s all he ever was anyway.

All For One killed that crying child a long time ago, and all Deku can do is wipe away his tears and then wave him goodbye. 

By punching him to death.

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker outcome for the “Tenko” that started Horikoshi’s whole career as a mangaka, but I guess that’s what happens when your chosen career brutalizes you so badly that you come to define a Hero as someone who helps people endure their suffering instead of saving them from it.

...…

...Uh.  So, this got pretty bleak itself in the end.  Sorry, anon, everyone.  I write that way to get my point across, and I’m no little bit bitter about the whole thing myself, but ultimately, I just want to remind everyone that the story is over.  I’m not going to try to turn this whole thing into a positivity post all the way at the end, but just embrace that much: your obligation to care about the things Horikoshi wrote—to the extent that that obligation ever existed—is fulfilled.  If you hate the ending, well, so do I.  But now and forever, we and everyone else can go and do what-the-hell-ever we want to do with the characters and world that Horikoshi left us.

I hope we do.  I’ll be rooting for us!

[cozymochi]

Mild vent. Idk. I promise it’s not as bad as last nights utter mental shattering.

I don’t know what it is.

Maybe it’s a U.S centric Gen X mindset, or a remnant Boomer one from that “pull up your bootstraps” individualism thing, and no shade to any of the ones who follow me, my only point of reference are my parents and other older adults in my immediately family, and some friends families who tend to echo the same stuff—

Maybe it’s because a lot of my older family members never got to fulfill any particular ambition of theirs and had no choice but to work in fields they hate, maybe they overestimate how things work these days, and maybe it’s just me being an outlier…

But it’s so hard to discuss jobs especially creative ones of any kind when I’m the kind of person who is just… content working beneath somebody else. Or at least within a group professionally.

I don’t really have the ambition to start any individual practice or “be my own boss” so to speak. I don’t even feel comfortable in positions where I’m in charge of myself.

I don’t disagree that if that were to happen I’d probably be competent. I just feel more at ease and in my element when I’m able to just be given a task or assignment in a group setting and just doing it. Then going home and not think about it.

And if I outwardly say that I’m just… fine in that position I’m looked at weird and getting lectured about it. It’s not like I don’t get it… and I’m sure they just want better out of me or have a positive outlook that I could “be my own boss” in a hypothetical and have my own little business and be successful. As much as I do doubt myself in most cases, I just don’t feel any connection to those proposals at all.

I legitimately do not that any desire to do those things. At least, not now nor ever in the last few years. It just doesn’t really appeal to me.

I’ve never even got my foot in the door in a normal way yet to even know if a leap like that would work or is something I want.

I just know I’m genuinely more content just being given a task, doing it well (regardless if it ever surfaces, most don’t), and moving onto the next thing. I’m usually at my best there.

It’s a weird spot when I’m told that I can allegedly do “anything”, but when I say I just want to remain low key and I’m fine working under someone else, that suddenly isn’t a viable thing to be okay with.

“Oh you don’t wanna do THAT-“ “why dont you do this instead??” “im sure you could do this that and third and have your own —“ meanwhile I know every single one of them wanted that self sufficient whatever for themselves but never got it.

And it’s not like I’m not blind enough to see how hard, insular, exploitative and under-appreciated creative fields can be (and downright abusive, even).

I just… don’t have an urge nor want to do the most “ideal” and individualistic thing ever. I know what they’re saying is out of this idealized positivity, I get it. It’s not like I was the happiest person on earth with my old non-creative 9-5 job, yeah I would rather have been putting my skills to use, but I also don’t have much interest in being some kind of independent art business owner. Whatever that would entail. (the homies were even talking con booths and junk, like, sure hypothetically it sounds neat and shoutout to those who do it, but it’s not for me…)

I’m just… fine not shooting that high, nor being that notable. But I also didn’t hate my old job setup either. I wasn’t always excited to go in (who even is), but I didn’t hate it. I was pretty fine just …working.

Not that it matters. I don’t have a foot in that door anyway.

I don’t know. I don’t remember my point at all.

I’ll be rid of this later.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: hello! thank you for running this blog. i hope your vacation was well-spent!

i am an enfp in the third year of my engineering degree. i had initially wanted to do literature and become an author. however, due to the job security associated with this field, my parents got me to do computer science, specialising in artificial intelligence. i did think it was the end of my life at the time, but eventually convinced myself otherwise. after all, i could still continue reading and writing as hobbies.

now, three years in, i am having the same thoughts again. i've been feeling disillusioned from the whole gen-ai thing due to art theft issues and people using it to bypass - dare i say, outsource - creative work. also, the environmental impact of this technology is astounding. yet, every instructor tells us to use ai to get information that could easily be looked up in textbooks or google. what makes it worse is that i recently lost an essay competition to a guy who i know for a fact used chatgpt.

i can't help feeling that by working in this industry, i am becoming a part of the problem. at the same time, i feel like a conservative old person who is rejecting modern technology and griping about 'the good old days'.

another thing is that college work is just so all-consuming and tiring that i've barely read or written anything non-academic in the past few years. quitting my job and becoming a writer a few years down the road is seeming more and more like a doomed possibility.

i've been trying to do what i can at my level. i write articles about ethical considerations in ai for the college newsletter. i am in a technical events club, and am planning out an artificial intelligence introductory workshop for juniors where i will include these topics, if approved by the superiors.

from what i've read on your blog, it doesn't seem like you have a very high opinion of ai, either, but i've only seen you address it in terms of writing. i'd like to know, are there any ai applications that you find beneficial? i think that now that i am here, i could try to make a difference by working on projects that actually help people, rather than use some chatgpt api to do the same things, repackaged. i just felt like i need the perspective of someone who thinks differently than all those around me. not in a 'feed my tunnel-vision' way, but in a 'tell me i'm not stupid' way.

----------------------

It's kind of interesting (in the "isn't life whacky?" sort of way) you chose the one field that has the potential to decimate the field that you actually wanted to be in. I certainly understand your inner conflict and I'll give you my personal views, but I don't know how much they will help your decision making.

I'm of course concerned about the ramifications on writing not just because I'm a writer but because, from the perspective of education and personal growth, I understand the enormous value of writing skills. Learning to write analytically is challenging. I've witnessed many people meet that challenge bravely, and in the process, they became much more intelligent and thoughtful human beings, better able to contribute positively to society. So, it pains me to see the attitude of "don't have to learn it cuz the machine does it". However, writing doesn't encompass my full view on AI.

I wouldn't necessarily stereotype people who are against new technology as "old and conservative", though some of them are. My parents taught me to be an early adopter of new tech, but it doesn't mean I don't have reservations about it. I think, psychologically, the main reason people resist is because of the real threat it poses. Historically, we like to gloss over the real human suffering that results from technological advancement. But it is a reasonable and legitimate response to resist something that threatens your livelihood and even your very existence.

For example, it is already difficult enough to make a living in the arts, and AI just might make it impossible. Even if you do come up with something genuinely creative and valuable, how are you going to make a living with it? As soon as creative products are digitized, they just get scraped up, regurgitated, and disseminated to the masses with no credit or compensation given to the original creator. It's cannibalism. Cannibalism isn't sustainable.

I wonder if people can seriously imagine a society where human creativity in the arts has been made obsolete and people only have exposure to AI creation. There are plenty of people who don't fully grasp the value of human creativity, so they wouldn't mind it, but I would personally consider it to be a kind of hell.

I occasionally mention that my true passion is researching "meaning" and how people come to imbue their life with a sense of meaning. Creativity has a major role to play in 1) almost everything that makes life/living feel worthwhile, 2) generating a culture that is worth honoring and preserving, and 3) building a society that is worthy of devoting our efforts to.

Living in a capitalist society that treats people as mere tools of productivity and treats education as a mere means to a paycheck already robs us of so much meaning. In many ways, AI is a logical result of that mindset, of trying to "extract" whatever value humans have left to offer, until we are nothing but empty shells.

I don't think it's a coincidence that AI comes out of a society that devalues humanity to the point where a troubling portion of the population suffers marginalization, mental disorder, and/or feels existentially empty. Many of the arguments I've heard from AI proponents about how it can improve life sound to me like they're actually going to accelerate spiritual starvation.

Existential concerns are serious enough, before we even get to the environmental concerns. For me, environment is the biggest reason to be suspicious of AI and its true cost. I think too many people are unaware of the environmental impact of computing and networking in general, let alone running AI systems. I recently read about how much energy it takes to store all the forgotten chats, memes, and posts on social media. AI ramps up carbon emissions dramatically and wastes an already dwindling supply of fresh water.

Can we really afford a mass experiment with AI at a time when we are already hurtling toward climate catastrophe? When you think about how much AI is used for trivial entertainment or pointless busywork, it doesn't seem worth the environmental cost. I care about this enough that I try to reduce my digital footprint. But I'm just one person and most of the population is trending the other way.

With respect to integrating AI into personal life or everyday living, I struggle to see the value, often because those who might benefit the most are the ones who don't have access. Yes, I've seen some people have success with using AI to plan and organize, but I also always secretly wonder at how their life got to the point of needing that much outside help. Sure, AI may help with certain disadvantages such as learning or physical disabilities, but this segment of the population is usually the last to reap the benefits of technology.

More often than not, I see people using AI to lie, cheat, steal, and protect their own privilege. It's particularly sad for me to see people lying to themselves, e.g., believing that they're smart for using AI when they're actually making themselves stupider, or thinking that an AI companion can replace real human relationship.

I continue to believe that releasing AI into the wild, without developing proper safeguards, was the biggest mistake made so far. The revolts at OpenAI prove, once again, that companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. Tech companies need a constant stream of data to feed the beast and they're willing to sacrifice our well-being to do it. It seems the only thing we can do as individuals is stop offering up our data, but that's not going to happen en masse.

Even though you're aware of these issues, I want to mention them for those who aren't, and for the sake of emphasizing just how important it is to regulate AI and limit its use to the things that are most likely to produce a benefit to humanity, in terms of actually improving quality of human life in concrete terms.

In my opinion, the most worthwhile place to use AI is medicine and medical research. For example, aggregating and analyzing information for doctors, assisting surgeons with difficult procedures, and coming up with new possibilities for vaccines, treatments, and cures is where I'd like to see AI shine. I'd also love to see AI applied to:

scientific research, to help scientists sort, manage, and process huge amounts of information

educational resources, to help learners find quality information more efficiently, rather than feeding them misinformation

engineering and design, to build more sustainable infrastructure

space exploration, to find better ways of traveling through space or surviving on other planets

statistical analysis, to help policymakers take a more objective look at whether solutions are actually working as intended, as opposed to being blinded by wishful thinking, bias, hubris, or ideology (I recognize this point is controversial since AI can be biased as well)

Even though you work in the field, you're still only one person, so you don't have that much more power than anyone else to change its direction. There's no putting the worms back in the can at this point. I agree with you that, for the sake of your well-being, staying in the field means choosing your work carefully. However, if you want to work for an organization that doesn't sacrifice people at the altar of profit, it might be slim pickings and the pay might not be great. Staying true to your values can be costly too.

[naamahdarling]

MY medical update:

I am beginning to feel like I will never reach the end of anything. I am legitimately folding like a wet house of cards. My mental health is being profoundly negatively affected as my identity as "a unique and vibrant human being with a meaningful life" is increasingly subsumed into a deeply trauma-adjacent and depersoning identity as "a patient", with all the associated expectations that I will repeatedly and with minimal complaint allow people I barely know or have never met access to my emotions and my traumatized and marginalized body. That is not safe space within which to exist. Medical professionals, even the very kind ones, often forget the toll that "care" can take. (Bad ones disregard it altogether.)

My unusually high degree of emotional awareness allows me to see what is happening, and even allows me to cope with it very well, but "very well" is still not enough to make this sustainable over the long term. I don't actually know where to go or what to do from here.

I am torn between wanting to get all of these appointments out of the way as quickly as possible, so that I can relax without anything hanging over my head, and spacing things out just to give myself room to fucking breathe even though that means I will always have something lurking in the near future, causing me dread. I've run the math in my head over and over and I still can't work it out. There are too many unknowns, and too many variables, and too many ways things could go wrong either way I go.

I don't even know if there is a right choice. I don't know if there is a best answer. I've never been under this kind of pressure for so long before, I have been struggling with one thing or another since before the beginning of the year, and it is genuinely starting to do what I believe could turn into lasting harm.

I had a long and helpful talk with my boyfriend tonight, and while it did not fix much, it did help me to understand that the constant pressure on me is making it difficult for him to be here for me as much as he would like to be able to, and that's obviously distressing to him. That hit me really hard, because that is exactly the position I was in earlier this year trying to get his medication refilled and trying to help him deal with a deeply incompetent dental clinic.

I very much appreciate that he shared that with me, and I probably will try to find a way to slow things down and space things out, because even if I don't know that is what is best for me, if that is what is best for him, that's what I want to do. I've been so overwhelmed trying to manage my own emotional state that I sadly have not stopped to think about the effect this has had on him. I do feel guilty about that, but the important thing is that he let me know and I heard him.

I am very tired, and I'm praying that next week is uneventful. I don't have anything scheduled, but that doesn't mean that something annoying or even actually horrible might not occur.

Right now I'm going to have a snack and go to bed and hope that the pharmacy refills my meds tomorrow so that I can go back to having 30% less ADHD.

[wordsandrobots]

'Real' robot? No thanks

I shan't be wasting time hang-wringing over the idea of a Gundam show from the point of view of the setting's antagonists. This is a well-worn and perfectly legitimate approach, and in any case, Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) goes out of its way to emphasise the humanity of the Principality of Zeon's soldiers. There are scouts who bend their orders to aid to civilians, wannabe special-forces who take the time to gawk at the teen prodigy who thwarted their attempt to blow up the Gundam, pilots who jump ship rather than go down with their mobile suits, and injured grunts who cling to family pictures while bleeding out in the desert. Even the actual *villains* of Gundam 79 – the Zabi family and their hangers-on – are generally presented as functioning people with loves and motivations beyond conquest. Only Gihren is utterly without morals. You know, the guy who took being compared to Hitler as a compliment? Garma, Degwin, Dozle, and even Kycilia all have moments of humanity, in spite of their reprehensible actions.

So yes, of course there are people fighting for Zeon because it's their job, because they believe the promise of spacenoid independence, because they buy into newtype theory, or simply because circumstances force them to. That's the kind of story Gundam is: the tragedy of people enduring a war driven by forces above their heads and beyond their control, who are just trying to make it home alive. If you don't get that, or that the Federation is squarely in the position of 'lesser evil but still a callous nation state doing dubious things to secure victory' from episode one, I don't know what to tell you. You've missed the point. I'm sorry, you just have.

There is nothing wrong with the premise 'wouldn't fighting against the Gundam be like living in a horror movie?' Indeed, I will go further: that is a good premise for a story.

But Netflix's Mobile Suit Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance is not a good story. It is, at best, a serviceable one, trotting from A to B with enough narrative cohesion and character beats to string the set-pieces together. By and large it manages an inoffensive momentum, unfolding a predictable sequence of events with reasonable competency. If I was not hugely entertained, I was not especially put off, either. They even remembered to turn on the contrast for the nighttime battles.

The biggest innovation displayed here is that this production was rendered in Unreal Engine as full CGI, eschewing Gundam's conventional animation style. In my view, that's also the key to its biggest problems. Let's take a quick spoiler break and I'll try to unpack what I mean.

I guess go watch the show before proceeding?

OK, so, there was a point in the middle of Requiem for Vengeance when I found myself questioning the physics of beam sabers. I'd never thought before about why what is essentially a burning stream of energy can be blocked by a bit of metal with a super-heated edge, or indeed by another such stream, because within the animation style usually used to depict such things, they are clearly physical in their interaction with the world. As solid as lightsabers and therefore as capable of acting like real swords.

But Requiem makes the decision to depict the Gundam's saber as, essentially, the jet from a blowtorch. Because that's what this *is*, isn't it? A narrow fountain of plasma? So it looks like fire, you can see the Zaku's heat-hawk through the Gundam's blade, and suddenly I'm wondering – how does that work? Why does the axe stop it instead of passing through? How does this obviously non-physical blade react as if it were a physical object?

There are any number of technobabble reasons you might give for how this works. Forcefields! It's probably forcefields. But what struck me was the beat of 'huh' I experienced, where I asked something I'd never previously *needed* to, even though it always existed as a legitimate question of the sci-fi mumbo-jumbo being deployed, and how that was a direct result of stylistic choices made when the Gundam was reinterpreted through the lens of CGI 'realism'.

Ah, yes. Realism. That elusive quality chased by film-makers and game-developers the world over. Or, specifically chased by a lot of big, mainstream studios who've decided it is vitally important the supernatural and the superscientific be placed within what is recognisably the real world.

In terms of such codifying modern works as 2008's Iron Man, this is primarily about papering over the stitching between what is filmed using actors and what is painted in later. In theory, something rendered entirely by computer does not have to worry about this. However, as many a 'triple-A' computer game has proven, the aspiration towards photographic quality remain. Characters and objects are honed so as to mimic the appearance and texture of real people and objects, with greater verisimilitude to life being a near-universally unquestioned goal.

I won't argue this doesn't have merit as a technical exercise. The results can be impressive. What I will say is: realism is worthless if it removes interest, and useless if it sacrifices coherence. The beam saber example is an instance of what I mean by the latter. Within Gundam 79, we apprehend immediately that the saber and the heat-hawk are of a kind, possessing an energised glow that is nevertheless opaque and physical. Within Requiem's portrayal, however, they no longer adhere to a visual language in which their interaction make sense. You cannot block an axe with a blowtorch flame. A minor illustration, yes, but it captures the tension created by transposing such elements into a more 'realistic' style.

Another may be found in the treatment of Zeon's various military vehicles. These are a bizarre selection of sci-fi objet d'art, from the aerodynamically questionable Dopp fighter jets to Magella tanks that can launch their turrets into open flight. They are strikingly weird designs that make little sense yet function perfectly inside their context. Where another, earlier anime would have had them belong to an alien species, Gundam is the show that pioneered 'what if the bad guys were human too' for the mecha genre, so they merely represent a design logic alien to the Earth Federation, which favours bold, blocky shapes more closely based on extant military hardware.

In Requiem, the Zeonic weirdness is deliberately muted. The Dopps are streamlined, literally flattened into a more traditional jet fighter profile. One Magella does attempt to launch its turret only to be blown apart before it can rise more than a couple of feet. Otherwise, they're just treated as ordinary tanks. And it's easy to see what the artists were doing here: "let's take these weird 70s designs and make them look like real tanks/jets." The result, unfortunately, is a dilution of the clear distinction between Zeon and Federation tech.

If you've watching the original Gundam and its sequels, you'll know how easy it is to tell at a glance which side something belongs to. Looking at them in stills, it is still reasonably clear these are meant to be Zeon vehicles. But in motion, it often took me a good few seconds to be sure I wasn't seeing their Federation equivalents. Visual interest doesn't exist purely for its own sake, after all; it serves to clarify the action. Plus, it seems to me that trying to downplay the wilder aspects of these designs actually draws attention towards those aspects. The Zeonic alienness has its own explanatory power; reducing it raises more questions, not fewer.

Lest you think me some terrible killjoy who doesn't like fun, I'm actually incredibly sympathetic to 'realistic' overhauls of classic designs. Have you seen what I spent years doing for the Daleks? Aesthetic overhauls aren't something I object to, nor do I think 'realism' as practised by the MCU and triple-A game developers is intrinsically a waste of time. What I am trying to demonstrate is Requiem's relation to its source material. It posits a story taking place exactly contemporaneously with episode 25 of Gundam 79, portraying the Battle of Odessa, the great Federation push-back that ejects Zeon forces from Earth. This is what was happening 'just off screen', depicted in a style actively at odds with that of the original

But not entirely at odds with it. Which brings us to another problem: an unwillingness to commit fully to the new style.

The big twist in Requiem episode 4 is that after being chased down by the Gundam and just barely managing to drive it off, Captain Iria Solari of the Red Wolf mobile suit squadron is recruited to go capture an example of the Federation's new mass-produced GM 'suit, so Zeon can identify its weaknesses. The hunted get to become the hunter, infiltrating a Federation base and attempting to hijack a couple of GMs, only for the Gundam to scupper things. All well and good. Not a bad swerve. Enables some useful developments.

Except this plan is delivered into the plot by a Zeon major general who appears to have stepped in from a different production entirely. Specifically, from Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, because this is none other than Major General Yuri Kellerne, he of the Wolverine haircut and unfortunate disagreements with certain scientific officers (that is, it is unfortunate he should have disagreed with a man possessing so few qualms about massacring his own side).

It is truly surreal to have a character who looks like he actually belongs in a Gundam show enter the scene. I was quite impressed prior to this with the depiction of another character, Major Ronet, who captures the essence of a villain-of-the-week Zeon officer using Requiem's style. He looks entirely of a piece with the rest, while still being recognisably a certain type of character.

Kellerne though? For fuck's sake, he's got a full-blown anime bouffant. Juxtaposed with Solari's achingly realistic design, it's just – bad. This is bad. It's a stylistic clash that makes it impossible to take these scenes seriously. Not because either style is problematic on its own, but because they cannot work together.

It's worth pausing to consider Kellerne's native entry in the franchise, because 08th MS represents an older trend of revisiting the original setting. Starting with Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, this saw the release of OVAs with a superior quality of animation and a more ground-level take on events of the Zeon/Federation war. In many respects, Requiem is positioned as the successor to these series, as Kellerne's cameo makes overt.

The thing is, War in the Pocket, Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory and 08th MS are all animes. Yes, they render the action with greater fidelity than Gundam 79. But they don't restyle it the way Requiem attempts to. The Dopp fighter is a great example of this. Compare the 08th MS version to the original and you will see that it merely adds extra layers of detail. It doesn't make it make more sense. Likewise for the character models. They look better than Gundam 79, by certain metrics. They still follow conventional anime aesthetics. You can't drop a design from this line of shows straight into a 'realistic' depiction and expect that to work.

Why does any of this matter? None of these issues exceed the threshold of nit-picking. OK, they're mildly distracting, but is there really a huge problem here?

Well, first, there is a philosophical underpinning to the drive for 'realism' we ought to grapple with, namely the idea only live-action and live-action-alike 'count'. I confess to having little time for this line of thought: the stylistic 'realism' discussed up to now matters far less than emotional or experiential realism. That is to say, whether something presents itself using stick-figures or a hyper-photographic style is not as important as whether it can convey the stakes, pathos, and other meat of a story. Art presents a plethora of options for communicating a message. Deciding one is intrinsically more valuable than the rest is a woefully narrow view of creativity. Traditional, non-realistic animation can be as emotionally arresting as any live performance. Why, therefore, should it be necessary to adapt it into a life-like style?

Second, there is the incomplete commitment to 'realism' that plagues Requiem and, I would argue, the entire concept of approaching works such as Gundam in this manner. Sure, stylistic 'realism' isn't about being strictly 'realistic'. It's about achieving a specific texture to the unreality that is functionally indistinguishable from that of the real elements. Yet doesn't the inclusion of a 17.5m-tall humanoid robot suits automatically grant you a get-out-of-realism-free card? If you have something that wild in play, why go to the effort of making it look like a real-world object? And if you're going to arbitrarily throw out the pretence for the sake of gratuitous continuity, what's the point of trying to begin with?

This circles close to what Requiem is, materially. If I use the phrase 'official fan-fiction', I hope you'll understand that's not necessarily derogatory. What I mean is something primarily homaging and reflecting a pre-existing work, rather than more straightforwardly building off it. 'Fan-fic' because it is bounded by what is already there; 'official' because it has the backing of corporate ownership and thus is positioned as more than merely people playing with the toys they enjoy. It's a category of derivative works into which I'd put previous projects such as Gundam Unicorn's animated adaptation – ring-fenced by an established canon, whatever their individual merits.

General Kellerne's stylistically disruptive presence is one example of the short-comings of such an approach. His design looks that way out of deference to 08th MS Team, whether or not it fits next to the other visuals (a side-effect of trying to cram him into Requiem's style is that he appears off-model anyway!).

Another is the plot. We might grant that doing Gundam-by-the-numbers is a self-contained introduction to the series' themes for a novice, but there isn't anything here those of us who've watched the anime(s) haven't seen a dozen times over. Even Solari's pocket-watch feels borrowed from 08th MS.

Now, credit where it's due: Requiem does not downplay the newtype angle. The psychic powers built up to over the course of Gundam 79 and made central to its sequels are usually the first thing ejected when the franchise tries to be more 'serious' and 'gritty'. It was a pleasant surprise to see them embraced. Solari is explicitly a newtype, with all the corresponding traits (supernaturally good pilot, able to sense threats, experiences predictive flashes etc). This is neatly used to establish some of the philosophy behind Zeon's cause, since most of our characters are already aware of newtype theory (humans moving to space tap into skills not previously needed) by dint of being on the side that uses this as justification for invading the Earth.

As in the source material, newtypes serve as a metaphor for the potential of each new generation. Solari was a talented violinist before the war, able to play near-impossible melodies, and this ability has been conscripted in much the same way OG protagonist Amuro Ray's mechanical genius was turned to murder. Equally, the central tragedy in Requiem resolves into newtype-on-newtype violence, as the pilot of the Gundam relentlessly hunting the Zeon soldiers is revealed to be a frightened teenager, paralleling both Solari's son, to whom she is fighting to return, and Solari herself, as someone struggling for their life in a war-zone.

I watching this straight after binging the original Gundam series (I'd previously seen the more refined compilation movies) and was struck there by how brief Amuro's interaction with fellow newtype Lalah Sune is prior to inadvertently killing her in battle. Then I remembered that's the point. These are two people sharing an identical potential for transforming the world, made opponents by circumstance, who understand one another immediately and intimately in the exact instant it is too late to matter. Amuro's cry that he has done something awful he cannot take back is not overlooking the other deaths he's responsible for; rather it is admitting the unique horror of lost possibility.

Following an encounter on the Federation base, Solari recognises the boy pursuing her is equally scared and out of his depth and thus attempts to talk him down. She even succeeds, reaching substitute!Amuro (hey look another traumatised child soldier who executes wild violence in a berserker-like fashion using a hyper-advanced military prototype; what are the odds?) and evoking his sympathy with her status as a mother (characterisation I'd be more annoyed by if Solari wasn't presented functionally identical to the trope of a father desiring to return to his family).

Then, immediately after saving Solari from being crushed by falling spaceship debris, substitute!Amuro is fatally stabbed in the back by another Zeon soldier.

Here we reach the crux of my dislike for Requiem. It has already muddied the clean Federation/Zeon divide and Gundam's internal physics in service of its chosen style, then compromised that style anyway in the name of slavishness to canonicity. Now, during what is position as the emotional climax, it openly rejects the visual language of newtypes.

Solari's powers are portrayed using vocally-stated unease and emotional connection to other individuals (as is standard), and a pair of dream sequences – one prophetic with respect to the Gundam pilot, another tying into newtypes' ability to draw in the souls of those who die around them. Performing at a darkened opera house, Solari's red dress slowly washes outwards, becoming a bloody wave as the audience is revealed to consist of the dead Zeon soldiers she failed to save. It's an arresting visual, as is the fiery descent into her own pocket watch (a souvenir from her dead husband, who was also conscripted into the war) that marks the earlier dream. We also see a brief shot of the Gundam staring straight back at her as she senses its presence on a distant battlefield. These are all effectively done and I genuinely enjoyed them.

Crucially, however, Requiem does not deploy the kind of over-layering that Gundam 79, Zeta Gundam, ZZ Gundam and the other follow-ups use to show the deep connections developed by newtypes. In the animes, in addition to visions and flashes of awareness, we have full-on mind-to-mind communication where people converse across voids of colour and light. Newtypes appear in ghostly form, too, interacting with the living during and after their deaths. There are also the obligatory glowing auras, cuing the viewer into supernatural happenings.

Requiem's 'realistic' style seemingly does not permit such things to occur in the waking world. That is to say, there is no reason you couldn't depict the standard newtype visuals in CGI, but this show opts not to. If I were to hazard a guess, given the restriction of overt psychedelia to dream sequences and what they did to the Zenoic designs, I would say the aritsts thought it would look silly.

The problem is, how do you then portray newtype connections? In the scene where Solari convinces substitute!Amuro to stop, we get a couple of cutaways to the kid in his cockpit, superposing with his Gundam's movements. That is a great decision, since the point of the newtype visuals is the characters looking past the armour and understanding the person within (not always a good thing, since antagonism can exist despite the link, but the central conceit is always to grasp the essence of somebody else). In these brief moments, we see, as Solari does, the human being, not the mechanical monster.

But the boy's subsequent death is just… the Gundam gets stabbed and keels over, and Solari is grief-stricken. That's it. No manifested ghost, psychic trauma conveyed by voice lines alone, a total absence in this crucial, heart-rending instant of substitute!Amuro's humanity. Just the destruction of property. The death of the monster, not the scared child.

If there had been one additional cutaway to the boy in the cockpit, I think this could have worked. A single shot of him looking at Solari in the second before being stabbed in the back. Something, anything, to imply the connection crucial to this scene. I am honestly baffled as to why it's not there. I feel I'm looking at a picture where a couple of critical numbers weren't coloured in.

To be clear, I don't personally care for the newtype concept as executed in the 'Universal Century' Gundam shows. I'm not annoyed by this because I'm wedded to the idea or the visual conceits. I'm annoyed by the incompetence of failing to land an obvious, even required emotional beat. The finale of Requiem for Vengeance is built around Solari confronting substitute!Amuro. She risks her chance to join the Zeon retreat from Earth – and thus of reuniting with her son – to help take down Federation forces endangering the departing space capsules. She then compounds this by attempting to convince the Gundam pilot to let everyone go, and ultimately abandons any possibility of returning home out of grief over his death. This is a life-changing encounter for her, as is normal for newtypes pushed into fighting each other.

In my opinion, the show does not sell that anywhere near as well as it could have. Further, it betrays the very concept of the newtype connection by leaving substitute!Amuro to be represented by his Gundam rather than his actual self in his final moments. There are cases where other newtypes meet such abrupt ends. Quess' death in Char's Counterattack springs immediately to mind. But that is a moment of a profound lack of communication, which is not what's happening here.

Animes such as the original Gundam shows can move seamlessly between high technology and visual metaphors for empathy without underselling either one. That they are not attempting to look 'real' provides the advantage of absolute coherence. Beam sabers, flying tanks, psychic powers – there are no joins to airbrush away. Everything is unreal, so everything fits together. A switch in medium and style creates the challenge of reinterpreting those disparate elements so they remain coherent. Ultimately, while Requiem for Vengeance has a good try at pulling everything across, it fails, not just at creating 'realism', but at capturing the conceptual depth of what it is assaying.

Being official fan-fic of the Battle of Odessa – being, essentially, 'the Gundam story' in miniature – invites unfavourable comparison with the original work. Unshackled from that, I suspect it could have done more to establish its own visuals, remove incongruities and find better means of conveying its emotional core. As it stands, I have to wonder if there's any sound argument for live-action-alike Gundam. Even the dream sequences don't provide something unique to this style. You could do the same in traditional animation and trivially push it further. So what, precisely, is gained by telling this story this way?

That's the question Requiem for Vengeance has left me pondering. And hey, if you want to answer with 'but it looks cool', fair enough. I'm writing way too much about my personal gripes with a perfectly passable piece of gratuitous mecha porn, simply because I found a more interesting complaint to make than “why the fuck didn't they hire somebody who knew how do facial animations?”

As for Captain Solari, she closing-monologues herself to Africa to join a Zeon remnant group and fight to give children a future without war. Never quite been sure how mecha pilots in these things envision that working, if I'm honest. Oh, and, uh, I guess nobody tell her that if she survives the next seventeen years, there's a decent chance she's going on a suicide run against the Federation spearheaded by a traumatised teenager strapped into a murder machine.

That might put a slight damper on what Netflix's music captions assure me is a heroic ending.

[A note to check you read all the way to the end: obviously the screenshot from Cucuruz Doan's Island shows CGI mobile suit models. But that's CGI aping traditional anime, rather than an attempt at realism. This is why I've been careful to talk about style, not medium.]

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

am I the asshole for sort of accidentally ruining someone's wedding and kind of dooming their marriage?

I know that sounds really really bad but please bear with me because I really didn't mean for this to happen and I still just feel really confused about the part I played in all this and don't know if I'm an asshole for it.

I (23f) used to date this guy in college on and off, over the course of several months. He dropped me out of the blue one day and I saw later on social media he was engaged to a girl we both knew. I'm still unclear if she was aware that he and I were in a situationship deal while he was also, I guess, dating her and playing serious. I just figured okay icky but whatever, we won't be speaking again.

Then I get a wedding invitation. I figured it had to be a mistake, no way she'd want me there so I called her (she'd been my RA at one point so I still had her number saved). She said no, no mistake I was legitimately invited because we'd sorta been close during that year she was my RA and she was so nice over the phone idk I felt bad for wanting to say no so I said yes, I'd be there and also sent the rsvp back. I know I should've said something like hey I used to mess around with your soon to be husband I don't think I should be there especially if you didn't know about that but I just didn't say anything about it.

I continued to feel weird about it up until the day of the wedding. The reception was lovely if a little awkward mostly because I felt so awkward, but nearly two hours went by and I started hearing in chatter that they couldn't find the groom. People in the wedding party were really starting to freak out thinking he just straight up left.

They eventually found him, he locked himself in a room at the hotel where the reception was being held. Eventually someone comes to me saying I need to go talk to him because he only wants to speak to me. I just truly wanted to die and get swallowed up by the ground but I said fine I'll go talk to him and see if I can convince him to come out.

We talk, he says he can't go through with it because he's been staring at me the entire time and not even thinking about the bride to be literally on the other side of the door listening to us. I got a little heated telling him that he's really hurting her and it's extra shitty because that wasn't just about him it's about her too, hes the one who proposed to her, planned a wedding with her, ect. I said call it off if you want but you and I aren't getting back together and you need to go out there either way and talk to her.

After that he came out, idk what was discussed exactly with her or the wedding party but eventually they said the ceremony will go through as planned. I couldn't get out of there fast enough, I felt so horrible that I'd probably ruined this girl's dream day and I should've turned down the invitation and been straight up with her.

I tried to forget about it then three months later he hits me up on a blank burner account on facebook explaining it was him and asking me for nude pictures. I screenshot the messages, did not respond, and sent them to his wife. They both blocked me on everything after that but I heard from a mutual friend that she'd filed for divorce, they hadn't even been married for three full months.

It's not solely because of me that they got divorced, apparently there was a whole slew of girls he'd been messaging and he never really stopped messing around behind her back but I feel like if I'd just said something right away during that initial call maybe she wouldn't have gone through with it and wouldn't have been put in that position as the wife who got cheated on.

What are these acronyms?

[tobiasdrake]

How strong is Mr. Mark "Hercule" Satan in the manga? From what I know, in the anime we see him either vanish or use the afterimage technique (forget which) and I think dodge bullets - is that in the manga too, or he is just meant to be at the peak of real-life human ability (like the guys Kid Goku and Krillin fight in the preliminaries of the World Tournament)?

Peak of human ability. Within human limits, Mr. Satan is the world's greatest martial artist.

Right off the bat, he's identified by martial arts lore guy Yamcha as the martial arts champion of the world. The Cell Games reporter, known in the dub as Jimmy Firecracker, corroborates this statement at the tournament.

The anime hypes him up by pulling multiple buses and ripping phone books in half. However, in the manga, the Cell Games start like right after Mr. Satan steps out on-panel for the first time and gives his speech. Goku and the others have one chapter to wrap up the revival of Shenron and then it's off to the tournament.

The first we see of what he can really do is when he steps into the ring, bringing with him a tremendous demonstration of his power.

Jimmy's right. This is very impressive.

Uh. Within human limits.

It's just that we're a bit beyond that baseline by this point.

Incidentally, a common misconception for Mr. Satan is that he won the 24th Tenkaichi Budokai leading up to the Cell Games. He did not. The Tenkaichi Budokai was cancelled after Piccolo nuked the island it was held on, and wouldn't be revived until after the Cell Games.

That said, he did compete in it after the Cell Games, and he did win the gold.

This is a very easily confused plot point, so much so that even the Daizenshuu gets it wrong and pegs the 24th as having just happened five days before the Androids activated.

But although Mr. Satan was the world champion, he was not the champion of that tournament. Not yet.

All indications seem to be that Mr. Satan won the 24th legitimately. No tricks, no shenanigans, no fooling around. The punch machine records Satan at 137 points of... whatever measurement they're using.

It's just a couple points under the all-time record set at the 24th, also by Mr. Satan.

This slightly lower reading is probably due to the, uh, changes in his workout regimen since the 24th.

We never get to see this tournament, but we get a glimpse of it and its structure through its contestants. A few of the contestants at the 25th are veterans from the 24th, coming back to try and take another crack at the champ.

Satan is the leader of this pack, having won his championship belt in a stunning final bout against Jewel that left the announcer underwhelmed and disappointed.

Goku and his rivals have absolutely ruined this man for standard human-level martial arts. They've raised the bar so high, Mr. Satan couldn't possibly compare.

Though, by Gohan's estimation, Videl's outgrown him too.

Had the 25th not had all these aliens and gods and warlocks cluttering it up, there's a real chance this tournament would have ended in Videl dethroning her father in the finals. Something I would dearly pay to see.

As far as dodging bullets, I think the closest he comes to that is when these two idiots attack Buu.

When he scurries out of the way of this RPG they fire at Majin Buu. Though we don't see how far he got, as he momentarily vanishes from the manga following this blast. Perspective remains on the attackers reloading and firing on Buu some more while Satan makes his way to their position under cover of tunnel vision.

The actual gun that's shot at him in this fight hits its mark. But also it was a shot from behind so he couldn't have dodged it even if he could dodge bullets.

So I'm gonna call that "inconclusive" on whether he can dodge bullets. By battleboard logic, I'm sure escaping the RPG is an incredible feat. Mr. Satan is only peak human but, like, so is Batman. He's within human limits, but "human limits" can be extremely flexible in animation.

This is the same kind of thing as when cartoon characters dodge lasers.

And that's Mr. Satan's career in a nutshell. He's the biggest fish of a small pond (except for his daughter who's outgrown him). Talented and formidable in his own right, supremely impressive within his weight class, but woefully out of his league.

[quinloki]

I was wondering if you could do Ace, Sabo and Koby(if not comfortable I understand, maybe Marco? Or someone of your choice if you'd like ^^)

I was wondering if you could do Begging, Dacryphilia, and cockwarming.

Thank youuuuu!!! I hope you have a lovely day <3!!

I did say over 18 and Koby is over 18. Plus that boy's glow up was something else. The only one I know of that tops it (heh, tops) is - in my opinion - Eustass Kid. Yeah, his pre-ts look was good and punk, but gods and demons he got so thicc.

Okay, my personal thirsts aside, let's get into this. And thank you anon for being preemptively okay with allowing me to pick someone else if I wasn't comfortable with Koby - I appreciate that kind of looking out from peeps <3

Dacryphilia is, I believe, the crying kink - not necessarily distress, but all aspects of it. Okay \o/ let's do this by Kink.

Begging:

Ace - Yes - He's not so sure about this at first, and he caves to your begging very quickly the first couple times, but after getting to think on it a bit he leans into it. How creative can you get? How bad do you want him to just rail you? It doesn't have to be verbal either, Ace is perfectly happy with you begging visually - from rubbing up against him, to holding yourself open.

He's a simple guy who appreciates simple pleasures, and he never makes you beg for too long.

Sabo - FUCK Yes - there's a bit of madness in this boy, and if you want to stoke those flames then he's not going to stop you. Sabo is a little unsure at first, but finds he really likes it. Visually, and verbally, and it's his job to make sure you're doing a good job, so he's constantly pushing you to beg better.

Certainly your vocabulary is large enough to get creative? Oh you kneel so prettily beneath him, but you're smart enough to be more enticing than that, aren't you? It's cute when you blush, like you're not literally begging for this, maybe if you beg well enough you'll be flushed all the way down to your chest.

Koby - Sure? - He might be canonically 18, but he's got slowburn vibes to me, and I think you'd be dating him at least two years before things progressed into a bedroom of any kind. (He's just so heckin' sweet), but once you get there you find he's open to trying pretty much anything. He's pretty solidly a switch, maybe leans a little more toward sub than dom, and top more than bottom, but he's here to learn and see you both satisfied by the end of it.

And he learns well. Koby is a smart, hard working, and dedicated student no matter the material or situation. Whether you're begging him, or he's begging you, the part that makes it good for him is knowing how it positively effects you.

Dacryphilia:

Ace - Yes mostly. - Ace doesn't want to see you sad or in heart-pain. He's okay with happy tears, he doesn't panic regardless of the tears, but once he adapts to you a little he has to admit he likes kissing away your tears, brushing them off your face and reassuring you, smiling with you, being in that emotion alongside you - whatever caused it - and dealing with it.

When you cry specifically because he's teasing you or overwhelming you with pleasure, he really likes those tears. He can't even really apologize for teasing you, there's just something about it that makes his heart thump a little harder.

Sabo - FUCK Yes - Please do cry for him. He doesn't want you crying because he's physically hurting you (he doesn't want you crying because he's legitimately mentally harming you either), but he does love when you cry. Maybe he bullied you, maybe the crop did it, maybe his hand did it, maybe he fucked those tears out of you. Whatever caused it there's just something about your tears that turns things up for him.

Now, if someone else causes you to cry that's entirely different. He's the only one allowed to make you cry, and certainly the one meant to soothe you afterward. Sabo's aftercare game is good too, so there's never anything that lingers poorly afterward.

Koby - No - Tears make Koby panic. Good tears, bad tears, he doesn't handle any of them well. Least of all when they're coming from you. If you cry when you're cumming it's going to take him some time to not panic when it happens - communication, obviously, is key.

Now on the flip side, Koby will let you bully him to tears. He doesn't mind crying for you and is closer to Sure on the subject. He's a little prone to tears anyway, so he's just glad you're not (legitimately) teasing him for it.

Cockwarming:

Ace - I guess - The lack of movement means Ace is prone to falling asleep with this particular kink. He's not against it, so long as you're not going to be mad if/when he falls asleep, but he also doesn't want to fall asleep when he's with you. He'd rather keep things moving so he keeps moving.

Sabo - Oh god you have no idea - He loves being buried deep inside you, and Sabo doesn't often get the chance to just stay still. He's in a busy position, so these moments are some of his favorite. There's so much bundled up into it for him as well - control, patience, will, teasing, pleasing, begging - it's the best when he can have you crying and begging for him to move, for him to let you move, when all your little shifts and twitches haven't been quite enough to tempt him.

You're so close to him the whole time. So touchable, so easy to caress, so delighted as his low voice slips softly into you - even and gentle and undeniably in control.

Koby - Yes - Surprisingly Yes. He almost never outlasts you, and sometimes he just ends up pinning you and taking you and it's about as aggressive as he gets. You teased him for his lack of will once because of it, and he had you begging and crying for him to move and he did. not. cave. He actually threatened to just leave you completely unsatisfied until you apologized.

I... huh.

Kind of broke my brain with that last sentence, that's all I got.

Kinky One Piece Head Canon