#I have stupid numbers of characters

[veinsfullofstars]

🌅 MetaDede Week 2024 Day 5 & 6: AU & Secrets 🌅

(ID: Kirby series fanart comic of a moment in King Dedede and Meta Knight’s youth, when - during a trip to the beach with their friends - the teenaged penguin realizes that he might feel more than just friendship for his little winged buddy. Transcript in Alt Text. END ID.)

Oh.

Previous Day | Next Day | Prompt List (made by @/mtddweek)

Started 08/20/24, finished 08/24/24. | Childhood Friends AU Masterpost

[foundfamilywhump]

see like the thing with 'carewhumpers' as a concept to me is it just like... i know this is prrrrobably not really how it's meant but something skeeves me out about the idea that kindness or caretaking mixed in with hurting someone can somehow meaningfully complicate or dilute the harm done to the point of making that character no longer a 'whumper' whereas someone doing the same 'bad' things but not ever being gentle or caring for them would just be a straight-out whumper. when like... that's how 90% of irl abuse dynamics work? so i just... don't really get the point, i guess. like to me it implies something about the 'care' provided somehow mitigating or combating the harm done that. i just do not personally appreciate or enjoy.

[sharkneto]

what about five made him ur blorbo…

Man, what made Five my guy.

There’s the surface level stuff – he hits a lot of tropes I love. Asshole with a heart, competent in everything but people, an assassin who gets cool fights to good music, teleports, last man in the world, has a fucked up wife situation. He’s a fifty-eight-year-old man who looks thirteen, that concept right there has so much to work through, all by itself.

All of that is really fun stuff, but under all of that, I think I can sum up why Five hit so hard with just that he has heart. The show could have gone the route of comic!Five – unredeemable bastard of a tiny man. That would have been fun, I love comic!Five, but he works better on a comic book page, where things can be more 2D. The change the show made – maybe on accident – is that show!Five loves an incredible amount, and that’s what hooked me hard. Sure, some of this is fan interpretation, but I think it’s got moments in-show to back it up. One of his first moves he made, when stuck in the apocalypse, was to make Delores – he has her within a few days of landing there. She says so much about him the second we meet her in the show - shorthand to tell us just how bad the apocalypse was, and that, when faced with nothing, Five makes a person he has to take care of. With that, he survived four decades as the last person on earth in dystopian hell before he could get back to save the world – so he says, at least, but he has always prioritized his siblings. They're his world. He’s not great at saying it, but he’s a man of action and his actions speak very loudly.

With all that love, comes a lot of grief, which is actually what keeps me going with Five. I’m pretty open that I’ve had a lot of grief in my life. I’m doing better, it’s been a number of years now, but grief doesn’t go away, and Five is an incredible vehicle for playing with and processing grief. Experiencing it, growing from it, moving on with life around it. And Five has so many layers of grief to play with. There’s the grief for his family who he found dead when he was 13, grief for the world because it all ended, grief for the life he lost, grief for the life he had to live, grief for what he’s had to do, grief for his body and his situation. How do you keep going and move on after experiencing such loss? I find it both cathartic and motivating to think about and sit in that space.

He's a walking tragedy and I adore him for it. Character of all time.

[sing-me-under]

I just spent like twenty minutes rambling about 80s-90s Booster Gold, and then I accidentally deleted the draft.

Anyway, to summarize, he’s such a fascinating and complex character who’s just constantly suffering. Please please please look into Booster Gold and his goddamn life support mech suit. He lost a whole arm and is constantly at the edge of the death. Even before, he’s just a ball of anxiousness and imposter syndrome buried in spades of Charisma.

Also, his characterization in Blue & Gold feels kind of flat, and I know it’s because it’s like sitcom and comedy and all that. I also know it’s a disservice to Ted Kord to kill him for the sake of Booster’s character development, but his death does renew my interest in Booster’s character. From the moment Booster embraces being the Greatest Hero You’ve Never Heard Of, he is my favorite.

[grechkathekasha]

bonus:

my favorite part of secret invasion is when in 1ep maria revealed that she has a gf and in 2ep it was their wedding!! y’all also loved this, right? it was so nice of marvel to do this finally!!

(dedicating this to @blackhillverse )

[cerealmonster15]

haikaveh... save me haikaveh...

i KNOW it's been talked about to death but. the haikaveh research project. it literally haunts my mind. i cannot get over the implications. alhaitham going through his school life as someone that most people dont even really know about because he keeps to himself and doesn't socialize, with kaveh being the one exception to that, finding his way into his life as his Best Friend, and then leading to alhaithams one and only time he participated in a research topic. his bio says he only ever did ONE joint project!!! one!!! the one with kaveh his best friend and i think also his only friend at the time!!!! and then it ended in not only the project falling apart but also alhaithams only friendship. kavehs best friendship. they were each others closest person. they had no family around - alhaithams parents having died when he was young and his grandmother dying before he joined the akademiya, and kaveh's dad dying when he was young and his mom having moved to fontaine. like even if you dont look at it through a romantic lens it's still undeniable how important they were [and are] to each other..........

i'm getting off track but my point is very specifically for alhaitham, the one time he got close to someone, made a friend, even agreed to join one(1) group project ever, it ended in disaster. it led him into a fight so bad that his one and only friend said he regretted that friendship!!!! it was so bad alhaitham left the project and he and kaveh didnt speak for ages until they just happened to run into each other again at the tavern!!!!! like obviously it has to be incredibly awful for both of them but i just think how this probably had alhaitham in the cynical mindset that friendships and collaborations like that might just never work out for him because the one time he let someone into his life, it blew up on him and he was all alone again. even though alhaitham never seems to care much if people dont like him, that clearly cant still apply to someone he was exceptionally close to. like if he didnt care he woudlnt have been the one to take his name off the project and mutually not speak to kaveh...... kavehs words are the ones that hit the most significantly to alhaitham.......... kaveh is said/implied to have had at least some other friends while at school / people knew who he was, but not so much alhaitham. people didnt know him and the ones that did just knew he didnt socialize/he was not easy to get along with. he only had kaveh and then, for a while, he lost him too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[thatscarletflycatcher]

"In Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854) a girl who is dying of tuberculosis accuses her master of refusing to invest twenty pounds in a ventilator which would have made the air much less harmful to breathe."

Reader, I'm slamming my head on my desk.

[silver-horse]

Why is there an empty space next to Dark Urge???

They could have placed the custom Tav option next to Dark Urge. Or adjust the 3 portraits in the second row so that they are in the middle.

Do you also find this aesthetically strange? Why make it weird looking? Am I just fixated on symmetry? lol

I don't know. I am still wondering if there will be surprise origins revealed.

[evildeerboy]

i dont respect the opinions of people who refer to bisexuality/pansexuality in videogames as "playersexual"

[triglycercule]

some sort of au where mtt are like famed serial killers in some random ass city or whatever idk but dust's got a little gaming theme going on because of his whole LV and EXP thing and his name is serial number. because. because its a play on words. serial. SERIAL killer. number. like like numbers that need to increase for better stats. and he could go after people in games that have the highest lvl or whatever because serial numbers are "unique identifiers used to identify an item usually assigned sequentially or incrementally." like. like. incrementally like the increment of video game exp or something WHATEVER THE IDEA IS THERE OKAY THE IDEA IS THERE

[gorillaxyz]

people on death note tiktok are so stupid. i dont like that ship either because its extremely out of character NOT BECAUSE ITS TOXIC????, DIE

[sharkneto]

maybe a weird question, but have you ever thought about how lila might slot into the JT/HIT universe? she might be an awkward fit into the SM universe proper but seems like she'd have fun being a complete menace with number!

Have I? Have I!? Yes lol

The main version I rotate is Lila is with our Hargreeves and thus lands with them for the events of HIT. It's fun for everyone! Rob gets the brief joy of "Five has a friend!" before being hit with their fucked up history between Five killing her parents and his weird relationship with her abusive adoptive mother (@non-plutonian-druid has made art of this HERE). Lila has fun meeting Number, I think they hit it off, too, to Number's bemusement. Number has a personal crisis about the fact Diego is going to be a father. Good times all around.

For a larger picture of how Lila fits in the JT-HIT multiverse, @non-plutonian-druid had a great line of logic, that I will now share here like it is my own: Lila only exists in Five's timeline, because she was pulled out of it before it branched into Number's (and Shifting Mirror's) timeline. Because she grew up outside of time, with the Commission, she wasn't there to be "duplicated" by the branch point. She can jump between them fine, and if she jumps to the branch point (arguments can be made for if that's November 2002 or January 2013), she'd become duplicated and have to watch out for Paradox Psychosis and whatnot, but as long as she stays away from that exact point, there's only one of her (in these timelines).

[multiimistakes]

zombies fear him, women fear him... and men also fear him and he doesn't like fish

[blujayonthewing]

well I just spent an hour digging through my own dnd notes and social media and also almost cried because I mentioned, in passing, something justin had said about one of his NPCs and he, completely lightheartedly, was like '?? I don't remember that at all. [I mean I'm not making it up?] I think you might be making it up 😏'

[5hrignold]

Gerbug

[bluerosesburnblue]

I voted kh3 because I didn't play DDD, Sora seemed stupid compared to in 2 imo, he also came across as whiny at points, like the scene in Olympus after Pete mocks him, he felt more so 10 than 15

Ahh, that is interesting! I hadn't considered the idea that KH3 Sora would look different to someone with no knowledge of how DDD's story is all about tearing Sora down. How his good nature and desire to help people is ultimately how Xehanort draws him in and leaves him more vulnerable than he's ever been, ultimately causing him to lose in the end with Riku being forced to bail him out

Part of what I appreciate about KH3's portrayal is how it manages to recover from DDD. It's actually one of the few times I can think of in the series where Sora is allowed to carry over some development from a previous game, in this case having him carry over how much DDD shattered his sense of self-worth, especially when compared to the other Keyblade Wielders. Of course Sora is testy when Pete mocks him in Olympus, because Pete is directly calling out what happened in DDD! Sora failed spectacularly, lost most of his abilities because of it, it's so obvious that even Pete sees it, and because of it he's getting shafted from the "important" duties with nothing he can do about it other than run these side missions while Mickey and Riku do the saving

But if you don't have the context from DDD, that won't hit. Because you don't know that Sora feels like he let everyone down by being tricked by Xehanort and KH3 to him feels like he's trying in vain to catch up to Riku. You're missing the entire point of his characterization in KH3 without DDD

And if you thought KH3 Sora was stupid, you prooooooobably shouldn't touch DDD