#Hard-Working Protagonist

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy one year anniversary to In Stars and Time!

[kacievvbbbb]

Honestly despite my feelings about how the last arc of MHA went down I really love Deku and his story.

I just feel like a lot of the time we get these protagonists whose whole philosophy is it doesn’t matter what you were born as everyone can achieve greatness. But then the series goes on and it turns out that actually it DOES matter because the protagonist has this really great lineage and these really great powers you can only have through birth they were actually born born, predestined if you will, to do this.

But MHA actually sticks to its guns. Midoriya wasn’t revealed to have some great connection to all might that the universe had put in place. He wasn’t defended from some great lineage that makes him uniquely suited to this. Hell All for one didn’t even turn out to be his father, there was no hidden powerful quirk he was always meant to have. He was just Midoriya Izuku a boy who was in the right place at the right time and simply decided to act while the world did nothing. And that’s what really made him a hero.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I believe him a bit more when he goes anybody can be a hero if you just decide to act

[canisalbus]

I say this in the best way, but your characters feel like they're from an obscure but really good piece of media, and you feel like the artist who always draws the two main characters as ghay lovers

.

[lloydfrontera]

sometimes i do feel for the adaptation team of tged when it comes to the relationship between alicia and lloyd because like. they were fighting a losing battle since the very beginning.

either they respected the source material and got crazy people (me) pointing out that the protagonist has more chemistry and relationship build up with his best friend than he does with his supposed romantic interest.

or they change it in the adaptation to make alloyd have more interactions and build up and get crazy people (me) upset and questioning why they're omitting or changing scenes that make lloyd and javier's relationship deeper in the novel to make them seem less close than they truly are.

there's just no winning for them because this is something that is inextricable from the source material

in the novel lloyd and javier's relationship is the core of the plot. whatever they have going on is the heart of the entire thing. and either you accept that and the fact that there's bound to be people who will see it as something romantic and be disgruntled when lloyd is unceremoniously married off to someone he barely knew and did not want to marry for 90% of the novel. or you change it and completely destroy the core of the plot, ruining what's probably the best part of the story.

it's an impossible choice,,,, if you're someone who can't stand the idea of having a protagonist who's a little fruity with his best friend that is lmao

[wewere-here]

it’s cool and all that we got more maps added to Just Dance+, but WHERE ARE TRAVELER & SI’HA NOVA’S MAPS 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Been thinking a lot about characters who don't have tragic/complicated/lore-filled Backstories cause I just finished Neverwhere and Richard is just like some guy. Neil never explains why he's special and he can see door, he just does.

Tolkien never explains why Gandalf chose Bilbo. I don't even think we ever find out what career Bilbo had before going on his journey. He has no Backstory at all.

Rose Tyler was just a totally normal girl. So was Arthur Dent. So was... Another example, sorry I'm tired, I already gave you four.

Look, I'm not saying elaborate/tragic/mythic Backstories are bad, my WIPs are chock full of them, I just think writblr sometimes acts like they're mandatory and they don't have to be.

[embraceyourdestiny]

Love characters who are small and have a terrifying unflinching nerve will and determination to the point where the people around them call them unstoppable beasts with an insatiable gluttony and desire to improve and prove themselves against anyone in the world who doubts them

Also they peace ✌️ (*^_^*)✌️

[moonsidesong]

the ceaseless cycle of being an unfortunate danganronpa enjoyer

[starrytect]

ohmygod i never posted this here

[thetismcave]

I really want to read at least one fic that addresses sojiros early treatment of akira (and the fact that he basically said he thinks it would have been the right choice to ignore a person who needs help), the protagonist’s authority/adult related trust issues, and/or sojiro earning the protags trust because I want the development of found family

I want fic recs because I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for >:(

[whetstonefires]

I hope you're having an excellent day 😊😊😊 What about Wei Wuxian as Naruto?

Thanks! It was pretty good. I organized my embroidery floss and took advantage of being alone in the building to dance around like a maniac for about 20 minutes. My cat hated it. My knees aren't sure they approve either.

Wei Wuxian as Naruto has a lot going for it right out the gate. Orphaned sunshine boy protagonist types, now we're cooking with propane. They're even both fox coded!

However, at the risk of stating the obvious, if Wei Wuxian were Naruto he wouldn't be Naruto anymore. That is. Fundamental to Wei Wuxian is that he is brilliant and talented and he damn well knows it. He would excel without effort in ninja school--not as much as he did in Jiang Sect unless he unlike Naruto was still getting personal mentoring in honor of his late father, but still.

Difference is, when this Wei Wuxian slacks off in class and the teacher tries to embarrass him, if he reels off the correct answer and then reinvents senjutsu from first principles in a creepy-sounding way for a lark just to show off, the teacher is not going to think that he's just like his annoying late mother. (Though he'll still have one. Kushina and Cangse Sanren are fairly similar Dead Mom archetypes too.)

The teacher is going to think things like, no real child would say that shit and I'm expected to teach the monster fox that killed my family basic ninjutsu I hate this I hate this we're all gonna die.

So basically this Wei Wuxian gets his Yiling Laozu reputation mod as part of the starter pack. I don't think he'd handle it super gracefully! But not the worst, either.

Not even as badly as he did in the actual version, probably, on account of he doesn't know his own dark secret. So he can't self-isolate to protect it. Though him pulling away from people once he does learn would be cool.

He'd probably have forged slightly stronger social ties rather sooner than Naruto did, even if he was just as neglected and radioactive; Wei Wuxian doesn't care what people think of him nearly as much as Naruto does, but in some ways he's a more genuinely social person, and he's got much better social intuition, so it's easier for him to figure out what people want and either do that or not do that on purpose.

He'd have at least a bunch of casual friends. Mostly civilians, and other kids from ninja school whose parents told them not to play with him but they did anyway.

Wei Wuxian cannot do therapy no jutsu. He does not have that ability to confront and exist with emotional discomfort or that intensity of interest in what is going on with other people.

He does however have some level of Friendship Beam Attack (the plot to some extent hinges utterly on how effectively it hit Wen Ning) and it would presumably be more effective, in a shounen context.

But that's the thing, Wei Wuxian isn't really built to confront shounen manga style problems. Or, well, he is, but he's overbuilt for them; they're his bread and butter. One of Naruto's key motifs, early on at least before we got into the heavy power creep, is not being a genius.

Wei Wuxian, by definition, is a genius. He is the kind of guy who walks up to shounen manga sorts of problems scaled to what ought to be his level, handles them, and goes 'what, like it's hard?'

Wei Wuxian is designed to be destroyed not by external threats but by his own loyalties, politics, and lies. (Which was a point of confluence with Itachi I didn't really touch on because the flow was so different lmao.)

He's also, otoh, designed to be destroyed. Naruto is designed to start off artificially low and climb steadily up toward heaven. (Ymmv on how this worked out but he sure did escalate.)

You have to pick which schema to apply when performing the fusion--I mean, it's not either-or, the whole deal with Wei Wuxian is he goes through the entire arc of a tragedy and then comes back to life and stars in a romcom. These things can superimpose and stack. But there are structural decisions that have to be made early.

So anyway, Wei Wuxian as Naruto is not going to enter the Genin Team phase of life with the same priorities, even if he has largely conducted himself about the same way hitherto. 'Proving himself' so 'people will accept him' is not a motive that works for this character--you basically have to give him actual precious people earlier just to get him to care about attaining ninja rank at all.

Otherwise he would probably much rather loaf his way through his teens stealing jutsu and making trouble. Which is the well-adjusted reaction to the idea of becoming a child soldier, like. He likes recognition but 'showing off' is a reason he does dumb fun things, not difficult high-commitment ones. He's like if Shikamaru had ADHD and no parents.

Being twelve is going to make him dumber, but I can't see it making him not the kind of person who stops caring about his marks in school if the teacher is hostile.

If Wei Wuxian here isn't acting out of appreciation for the Hokage raising him, or something like that, you have to give him a practical motive to enter military service like 'Konoha stops supporting orphans out of the public purse at thirteen so he's got to get some kind of job and ninja is the least boring option' which. Is significantly less like either Naruto or Wei Wuxian in terms of reasons to do anything, and starts getting into solidly OC territory.

The whole fact that Konoha's worldbuilding centers around an attempt to move away from decentralized clannish social organization and promote the idea of shared, communal social institutions and (in theory) civil society, and the ways this does and does not work out for people especially considering it is still a relatively small military dictatorship, honestly interfaces super interestingly with how, in Mo Dao Zu Shi, one of the underlying challenges backstopping all character choice is that there is no feasible alternative to the clan system, and you have to pick a family-faction to depend upon and submit yourself to, or face the world with no safety net.

Like. Huh.

.....Kishimoto is honestly unusually-for-shounen well-grounded in the genres he's riffing on tbh, for all my bitching there were some very good reasons his work found such success; I would have liked to see what kind of story he produced without the insane pressures of the Weekly part of Weekly Shounen Jump. I wonder if he'll ever publish again. For all I know he already is lmao.

So anyway, however we manage it we get Wei Wuxian on his genin team with like. Lan Wangji and Mianmian or whoever. Actually that's hilarious. Yeah, make it lwj and lqy, both of them so done with his shit.

Setting up some wild role-reversal here--Lan Wangji being the one to go Away and Wei Wuxian asking him to stay? Or Naruto-person leaving into the dark, and Sasuke-person remaining and calling for him to come back? Either way. Getting some inversion. Tasty.

Where does this leave Jiang Cheng, though? Because in a lot of ways Uchiha 'Deuteragonist by Editorial Mandate' Sasuke is straddling both roles.

In many ways Wangxian is much more like if Naruto had an endgame romance with Neji. Which is a great ship tbh, I saw very little of it back in the day?? In a series with a smaller cast or with less Sasuke Creep (not sasuke being a creep, it's like power creep) it would probably have done numbers.

...Naruto going away for that timeskip really limited his opportunity to make connections in the village huh.

I guess it depends on the kind of narrative you're trying to put together. On one hand, you can do Jiang Fengmian as the rather-more-involved Third Hokage, with Jiang Cheng as an aged-up Konohamaru kind of figure. And then Jiang Yanli is standing in as both Iruka and. I know I know the ramen guy's name. Ichiraku. Soup! XD Emotionally significant soup!

But with a different backstory than either lmao. Kurama very possibly killed Yu Ziyuan in this universe, though I can't visualize her as a midwife.

[[[Why do I have so much Naruto lore on tap, there is no life value in knowing Sarutobi Hiruzen's wife was at ground zero of the Kyuubi attack because she was the expert overseeing Uzumaki Kushina's childbirth a;kdj;lafdks. I do not remember the things I was actually studying in high school nearly this well.]]]

(Actually Jin Ling is Konohamaru and Jiang Cheng is aged-down Asuma. But whatever.)

And in this case Wei Wuxian's genin team is Lan Wangji and Mianmian under idk who. Lan Qiren, possibly, although he seems more the Ebisu type. Lan Xichen? (It's not like he can serve as a plausible Itachi. Can you imagine.) Actual Kakashi, possibly; we can't replace everyone with mdzs characters; the cast sizes don't square.

Kakashi training Wei Wuxian is very funny to think about. He deserves this.

Or on the other hand for a different pacing and focus, the genin team is him, Jiang Cheng, and Jiang Yanli under Jiang Fengmian, who dies sometime after or probably during the climax of the chuunin exams. And Sarutobi stays Hokage, and probably doesn't die during the chuunin exams. And we aim for a Naruto/Neji kind of romance storyline lol.

What is the Lan Wangji equivalent of Neji exposing his caged bird seal in front of god and everybody and ranting (it is very unclear at what effective volume though you'd think the proctors would have shut him up if he could be heard from the stadium seating that shit was sedition) about his traumatic backstory and the deep injustices in his family's system of hierarchy? I'm gonna say Not That.

Wei Wuxian versus Lan Wangji important ideological-conflict bonding duel in the Chuunin exam finals sounds excellent though.

Either way Wei Wuxian is going to get much more thoroughly involved in the ugly ninja politics than Naruto ever did, and he's going to hate it so so bad and at least temporarily lose so so so hard. A likely story element is he becomes troublesome enough he winds up having to flee the village ahead of a scheme by Danzou to (fatally) rip the Kyuubi out of him and implant it in some thoroughly conditioned ROOT kid.

Maybe Wen Ning?? Idk. I'm mostly saying this because Wen Ning 1) canonically gets Victimized and Transformed and 2) shares some notes with Sai. And this means he's leaving, in part, for Wen Ning, which ties into some plot and character stuff from their original narrative. You could make it work.

Also him taking the replacement human sacrifice with him when he books it would be hysterical.

Anyway he's branded a missing nin and it is, canonically, illegal for him to tell anyone who doesn't already know about the kyuubi thing, so both Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji are appropriately what the fucking fuck and receive no adequate answer. This is a workable plot element.

Either the Jiangs or the Lans are the Uchiha, here, which has its own story value, lots of fun to be had. Gotta engineer a way he's protecting Jiang Cheng--does Danzou want to make him the jinchuuriki? Is Orochimaru or his replacement making a play for Jiang Cheng's bloodline limit, whatever it is, fun if it's eyeballs, and Wei Wuxian bargains to give him a jinchuuriki instead? Hmmm.

You want an inside and an outside threat, the obvious viper and the political spider, so you can silo information and make sure nobody entirely knows what's going on.

If it's Jiang Cheng who's assigned the role of bloodline limit macguffin, I have the very wicked urge to cast Yu Ziyuan as some combination of Itachi and Obito. Very Vader kind of effect.

Jin Guangyao as Kabuto, excellent, I need that innocent smile and those torture skills. This may require making Jin Guangshan much smarter than he really is just to fill out the ranks, or again you can keep Danzou as himself.

Tsunade is amusingly enough occupying an overlapping Baoshan Sanren and Wen Qing position; given one of them impersonated the other that time you'd have to do something with that. She's also got some Yu Ziyuan vibe up ofc. Tsunade just contains an entire franchise's supply of girlboss tbh.

Who could possibly stand in for Jiraiya, nobody, but at the same time. Wei Wuxian (with internal sapient asshole nuke) apprenticing under Jiraiya of the Sannin sounds like enough problem-creating goofy jackass genius clown energy in one place to open a singularity. That's too much. No narrative could survive.

Anyway someone please feel free to write this, I am intrigued but also will 100percent never ever put in the time it would take to realize any version of this concept.

[awakefor48hours]

Thinking about Inside Job again and I just got so sad. I think if there's any show out there that really shows how much streaming services have failed the modern TV experience, it's Inside Job.

Inside Job was very popular, had 79% on Rotten Tomatoes/91% audience score, already had more seasons green lit but then out of nowhere, yet Netflix cancelled it and didn't even have the decency to share why.

Aside from that, Inside Job had so much potential. It's a show that's not only a satire about conspiracy theories, it's also a great commentary about racism and sexism in not just the workplace but in the government. I acknowledge that that show had problems but it was only one season and still has so much more room to figure itself out.

[you-can-be-what-you-want-to-be]

I think the reason trans girl mob goes off so hard is because… the show is inherently about a kid who’s an outcast learning to be his best most happy self. Like people always say be yourself yeah but that usually doesn’t actually mean anything.

Mob psychos thesis statement is you are NOT special, and that is beautiful because it means you can be anything. Just because you’re a good artist and a shit singer doesn’t mean you should do art instead of singing, you should do what makes you happy and strive to be as good at it as you can, because mediocre is an achievement when you aren’t special, it’s about self improvement, not being the best.

And then you get a kid, who’s constantly terrified of his own emotions and how they effect others and is seen as naive, who doesn’t fit the stereotypical masculine world well (weak as hell, cares a lot about emotions, pacifist) and doesn’t fit the stereotypical feminine world well either (reserved usually, in the body improvement club, horrible fashion, not able to read a room) and you say part of being the best, happiest possible version of yourself is realizing your gender, and it’s not a sad thing, and it’s not about anyone else, it’s about being the best you possible.

I don’t think mob in show is trans or would be any better or worse at being a girl than he is at being a boy, because it isn’t about that. It’s about the idea that when people do the things that are important to them without regard for what other people might think and only focus on being who they want to be (not who they think they should be, not on who they are, who they WANT to be, who would be both a good person and make them happy) that that is the best, happiest, most successful version of them. And I think that’s beautiful.

[prismit]

dead cells show looks sooo ugly but aside from that it does look fun to watch ngl.... i feel so conflicted

[violetlunette]

How most writers write redemption arcs (namely males in romance): I know he’s a murderer, a tyrant, a possible rapist, and more, but you have to understand that he was sad in the past. Therefore, I will make the protagonist a sweet, naive young thing whose purity and love make him act lovingly to her alone. And once he admits he cares about her, we’ll just forget all those nasty little things he did. At most, I'll have him do little things like not kicking a puppy to show he's "changed." And if anyone calls him out or tries to hold him accountable, I’ll have the story treat them as a villain and try to make them worse than the hero. Happy ending for the couple/family!

OR

Okay, this guy is horrible, but I like him. Therefore, I’ll make him an asshole, but I’ll play up his love for the protagonist and have him do the awful things he does for her, so it’ll all be okay. We'll just hand wave that nasty stuff that any sane person would go to an abuse hotline for.

How I write redemption arcs: Yeah, this fucker has work to do. His past will explain why he did the shit he did and will show where he needs to change and how. It will NOT be used as an excuse or justification for what he did. He will be held accountable for his actions and will have to face them head-on and realize what ass he was. HE will have to make amends. HE will have to do the work to make up for his crimes. (And I mean WORK. None of that bare minimum crap.) And no, no one will be considered an asshole for calling out the bastard for the shit he did. And the protagonist will NOT be the one solely responsible for his change. That is NOT her job, especially if she is a child. She may choose to guide him, and if he strays, she will not tolerate it or go, “Oh, poor baby’s past made him commit heinous crimes.” Nor will she go, “If I act cute, maybe he’ll love me,” as that is a horrible lesson to present about abusers. And loving just the protagonist will NOT be enough as he has to come to care for people in general. The lead will just be the first to open the door. This person WILL change and, while he may not get the fairy tale happily ever after and may even die, he will be a better person by the end.

OR

Fuck it, I like him as an amoral guy. However, I won’t waste everyone’s time pretending he’s not. His actions will be shown as heinous and that, even if he loves the protagonist, he’s not a good person. Speaking of the protagonist, if she falls into the trap of thinking she can change him by being supportive even when he’s awful without consequences I will write her as a tragic person unable to see the red flags or escape. Or I will show how her willful ignorance and unwillingness to do something is wrong. Regardless, this romance will NOT be glorified in any way.

[arcticmist0324]

One thing that is difficult about writing historical fiction is when you’ve set your story up in the same time frame as major historical events, which you KNOW would be on your characters’ radar yet they don’t impact the plot. What is too much? What is too little?