#I love headcanons/concepts that are like. the leaders meeting at some point in their childhood

[sekai-headcanoning]

i like to headcanon that kohane and tsukasa did a gymnastics/tumbling class together when they were kids. neither really remembers it because they were pretty young.

tsukasa was struggling to learn how to do a cartwheel and kohane explained it to him in a way he could understand. they were buddies in that class but tsukasa left when saki so they didn’t keep in contact.

(unrelated to the rest of the ask but the hair edits you do for the icons look really nice!! i like them a lot!!)

✮

(Thank you‼️ It’s my favorite part of editing, so I’m very glad people like it🙏)

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Thanks for doing my other request!! I loved it! So this time can i request some falling in love headcanons for Azul, Lilia and Malleus? What kind of s!o is it gonna take to get them interested? And will they ignore their feelings or embrace it? Some confession headcanons as well please! Thanks a lot:)

[This requester is referring to these jealousy headcanons!]

I hope you enjoy this set of headcanons as well.

***Warning: some spoilers for Azul’s backstory, Unique Magic, and relationship with the twins.***

Curiouser and Curiouser...

Lilia Vanrouge...

...hopes for a S/O that will keep him guessing, and is willing to both give and receive love.

Lilia-chan is pretty old (but don’t point that out to him, he’ll get grumpy!), so it stands to reason that he wants someone that is able to keep him entertained and keep up with his shenanigans.

He’s great at taking care of others (look at how Silver and Malleus turned out), so he’d be all for a S/O that likes to be pampered and taken care of.

He expects his S/O to be someone that is okay with touch! Lilia loves to cuddle, poke, prod, and spook people, after all.

If there’s one thing he knows from his many years, it’s that a relationship is give and take! Lilia wants to be hugged back, and surprised with random acts of physical affection.

It’s not a requirement, but a big plus if his partner can somehow stomach his cooking (or at the very least is able to keep it down).

Lilia is a “go with the flow” type, so if he happens to fall in love, then he will happily embrace it, but he’s also fine if he never finds love. Whatever the world throws at him, he takes in stride.

When he confesses, it will be during a private cuddle session.

Depending on the size difference, Lilia may either be on his crush, or his crush may be on him. Either way, he will be close to them.

He will make a vague comment about how they can stay like this forever if they wanted to before going in for the full confession. He’s surprisingly smooth for an ancient being!

Azul Ashengrotto...

...doesn’t quite know it yet, but in the depths of his heart (yes, he still has one), he wishes for a S/O that is kind and will love him unconditionally.

He’s not the type to fall easily. He has his hands full with running the Mostro Lounge, assisting clients with their troubles, and keeping the twins (mostly Floyd) in line.

Azul has had a pretty tough childhood--and a lot of trust issues, to boot.

Because of the nature of his powers, he has come to think that everything in life, including relationships, are business deals, and that the idea of someone who would give their everything to someone else without expecting anything in return is just silly.

Even his closest “friends”, the twins, outright tell him if he stops being interesting, they will betray him and fight him for his position of being the dorm leader, so Azul feels like he can never fully “trust” anyone and leave himself vulnerable to them.

He’s also still very sensitive about his octopus form and fears being bullied about it again!

Even if he does start to catch feelings, Azul will deny it to himself and bury his growing fondness under soul-crushing piles of paperwork.

But like the waves lapping against stone, Azul’s defenses will wear away over time. His ideal partner’s kindness and open mindedness will really get his ice cold heart to melt.

He’ll struggle with addressing his newfound feelings, and it will take a good deal of egging on from Jade and Floyd before he works up the courage to confess.

Azul will invite his chosen partner to the Mostro Lounge after hours--he will have a fancy meal and a romantic ambiance prepared. The twins are in the background playing Kiss the Girl instrumental music.

He will try and stall for as long as he can throughout the meal, but at the end he whips out a contract and hands over a pen, asking for a signature if they enjoyed the evening and want to have many more like it in the future with him.

Yes, Azul really did play the “do you like me? check off yes or no below” move.

Malleus Draconia...

...wants someone quiet, demure, and introverted.

Malleus is pretty introverted himself, so he would like a partner that has a similar vibe.

He’s sick of being painted as the bad guy, so he’s always had this fantasy in his head of being the one to whisk a princess off her feet instead of some prince or knight that wants to pick a needless fight with him.

Malleus thinks it would be lovely to fall in love, and he readily embraces the idea. In fact, he really idolizes the concept and dreams of the day when he can meet his soul mate (yes, he believes in the concept of a soul mate).

He’s a huge romantic, to be honest...!

Malleus totally daydreams about his future with his S/O, be it their wedding day or married life. He wants everything to be perfect, so he has a little notebook where he writes down his ideas.

When he confesses, he doesn’t want to scare away his potential partner or rip them away from their friends, so he lurks around and waits for the right moment to try and talk to them.

He’ll invite them to go on a walk with him during the night--why the night, you ask? Because it’s more romantic.

Malleus will confess under the moonlight, his voice a sweet whisper. He will wax poetics, waiting with bated breath for his dream to come true when his chosen one says “yes”.

[overrcharged-blog]

So i just recently bought Monster Hunter World, and I just knew that Nora would be a good fit in that game though in here Nora is much older than her RWBY counterpart, since i think that the time line of MHW has long adjustment period per monster you encounter, such as it took months of preparation for them to plan and capture the Zorah Magdaros or making a camp since they need to clear the area out of monsters first before setting a safe camp.. 

So here’s some MHW HeadCanons for Nora : Nora is part of the 5ft fleet... so yeah :)

1. Nora was only 17 when she become a hunter and was sent to an expedition to the New world. Quite a young age, since most people that are sent in new world are around early twenties but due to the need to research and travel the new world, the age limit to become hunter becomes younger and younger. 

2. When Nora had first become a hunter, the first weapon she had chosen was Switch Axe, due to the concept of thinking that intense damage can take down monsters easier and quicker. This leads her getting into danger most of the time due to her attacking the monsters head-on and recklessly. Eventually, it had changed to a hammer due to an accident involving with the first mission to capture Zorah Magdaros. The battle against the mysterious monster (Nergigante) at the back of the elder dragon had hurt her badly, causing for her left side of her body to be fatally damaged and loose her left leg permanently. 

3. Nora can’t accept that she can never hunt and fight monster again, this caused her to look down on herself, only staying on her cabins and never going out. To the point that the leaders thought of sending her back to the old world, where she can recover, fortunately. The blacksmith and the 3rd fleet had enough research on how to do mechanical arms and legs. 

Nora had accepted the offer to be their testing ground for the prosthetic leg, at first it was hard to adjust but eventually after 2 years of trial and error, she manages to get back on her two feet.

4. She meet Ren at the 3rd fleet base, he was one of the hunters who had helped her create the prosthetic legs, they had become close as well since Nora stays seated or laying most of the day with Ren only to talk with . ( Childhood friends is to cliche already lol)

5. 2 years of being a lab rat, and half a year of doing easy missions in Ancient Forest, Nora is finally allowed to do dangerous mission and hunting again. Though with the guidance of her palico and another hunter Ren.

6. During her training and rehabilitation, Nora had decided to try new weapon and she found that she liked the movement style of Hammer, and since she was too weary that carrying extremely heavy  weapons would damage her prosthetic leg along the way.

7. Nora loves to hunt Tobi Kadachi, Paolumu , kulu yaku and Kushala Daora

8. Nora’s palico’s name is fufu cuddly poops (yes i know. and you know why)

[nardaviel]

after the fire: an analysis of kinshirou with borderline personality disorder

The headcanon that Kinshirou has Borderine Personality Disorder has been going around for a while, often with little explanation to follow it. This is probably partly my fault, since I’m one of the first people who voiced it, back near the end of season 1. So it’s time for a post explaining the reasoning for my headcanon that Kinshirou is heavily coded as BPD, and the reasons why this headcanon is so close to my heart, even compared to my other slightly self-inserty mental illness headcanons about my faves.

First off, a disclaimer: I’m far from an expert in the field. I’m not totally ignorant either, I don’t think? I’ve been diagnosed with BPD by a psychologist and done a fair amount of reading about abnormal psychology, as well as taken a class, not about BPD, but about a different personality disorder. Still, that doesn’t take the place of a degree in medicine or psychology.

People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement. —Marsha Linehan

To start out with, let’s define Borderline Personality Disorder.

...is how I’d like to begin this post, but it’s hard to do. BPD can be a nebulous disorder, and it has a lot of overlap with other mental illnesses, most notably PTSD. As well, it has a history of being poorly understood and stigmatized, even within the healthcare field. Calling a patient “borderline” in conversations between those in the field often really means “uncooperative patient I don’t like to work with”. Outside the field, it gets real bad, real fast. I myself have been shocked by an otherwise wonderful loved one spilling anti-BPD vitriol to my face after hearing my diagnosis. It’s to the point where there’s some confusion with diagnosis; difficult non-borderline patients are diagnosed as borderline when the psychologist is at their wits’ end, but conversely, people who have the disorder are often not formally diagnosed in order to avoid having that stain on their medical record.

I’m telling you all this because the concept of stigma will become important again much later in the analysis. Remember it.

Even if it’s hard to define BPD, we have to start somewhere. Since there’s nothing better that’s easily available to us, we’ll just go with the DSM-5.

Borderline Personality Disorder Diagnostic Criteria

A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. (Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.)

A pattern of unstable and intense personal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.

Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). (Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.)

Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.

Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).

Chronic feelings of emptiness.

Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).

Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

As well as the diagnostic criteria from the DSM, I should note that factors that are thought to lead to BPD include genetics, brain abnormalities, and childhood abuse or neglect.

Now that that’s done, we can start talking about Kin-chan, which is what you were really here for all along. I’ll just say up front that I don’t believe Kinshirou shows signs of all nine symptoms, but that’s okay. He doesn’t need to.

“Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment” can be generalized here to overwhelming abandonment fear, a key facet of BPD. It interacts unpleasantly with the black-and-white thinking mentioned in criterion 2, also known as splitting, and the extreme emotions in criterion 6. The effect of all those symptoms mixed together is that a slight rejection, real or imagined, is seen as the final, inarguable abandonment, the borderline’s worst fear but one that they knew would inevitably become real. The despair, anger, and sense of betrayal overwhelm the borderline. Idealization turns to devaluation; in other words, the loved one that they idolized and saw, perhaps, as unrealistically perfect is now perceived as a shameless traitor, the worst person to have ever lived. I’m not exaggerating.

From the outside, this might look like, for example, your friend refusing to talk to you for years because you got food with someone else, and in doing so, broke the solemn oath of eternal friendship that you didn’t actually make. It’s a bizarre experience. People can be forgiven for being taken aback.

So that’s what happens to Kinshirou. Atsushi doesn’t even intend to slight him, but he sees the curry incident as a total abandonment. He must, in order to think it amounts to breaking their oath.

His devaluation wavers a little in season 1, episode 7, when Atsushi offers him a hand while he’s lost and disoriented. But when En speaks up, it flares back, as strong as ever. Then, at the end of season 1, when Atsushi makes it clear that he still wants Kinshirou’s friendship, you can almost see the switch flipping back to idealization. Kinshirou yells at him, sure, but it’s more along the lines of, “Why are you so kind? Why weren’t you meaner to me, like I deserve?” Self-loathing is another common element of BPD, by the way. It’s a possible manifestation of the unstable sense of self-image.

You can also check out Kinshirou’s reaction when he thinks Atsushi hasn’t showed up at the airport. Could he be late? Could it be that he was delayed by something? It doesn’t matter. The meaning of Atsushi’s new promise is enough to make the scene poignant even without the BPD diagnosis; Kinshirou has trusted Atsushi to keep the promise, even though his faith was broken before, and as far as he can tell, Atsushi has failed again.

But he looks for all the world like he’s starting to believe that he was wrong, and Atsushi didn’t bother to come because he doesn’t care about Kinshirou and never did, and Kinshirou should just give up on all this friendship stuff he’s been trying to learn, &c. He has literal tears in his eyes when he sees Atsushi outside his window. Again, that’s in line with the emotional extremes and reactivity described in criterion 6. In general, Kinshirou tries to seem very stiff and composed, but at this point I don’t think any of us are fooled. He has a lot of feelings.

So that’s criteria 1, 2, and 6. Three of five, and probably the most obvious ones.

On a more subtle level, there are elements of Kinshirou’s personality that shift, either abruptly or gradually, in response to major events. Criteria 3 and 7 are intertwined in much the same way as the three others I just discussed. A borderline often feels empty, as if they have no personality of their own. In response, they latch on to whoever they’re around and take on those people’s characteristics. They therefore seem to others to have a flighty or insincere personality, when on the inside, all the different, contradictory selves are genuine at the time.

So, Kinshirou. In the ep4 flashback and in the beginning of the ep11 one, he seems sweet enough. He’s anxious and a little clingy (again, abandonment fear), as shown by his wish and way he just wilts when Atsushi says he’s not coming over. Also, the way he watches Atsushi from behind a post, and the fact that Atsushi didn’t even feel like he could say where he was going. Why not? How did he think Kinshirou would react?

He’s the follower in their friendship, not the leader. We can infer that Atsushi is the one who took them out to see the stars, since Atsushi is the one who says, “Meteor showers are cool, huh?” as if to say, I told you this would be fun! Kinshirou tells Atsushi his wish is childish, which is itself a subtle sign of anxiety when it comes from a tiny child. But even though he doesn’t think there’s a point to wishing on stars, he does it when Atsushi does. He molds himself around Atsushi’s action, discarding his previous idea in favor of being like Atsushi.

All that vanishes when he decides Atsushi has abandoned him. Atsushi was his favorite person, or FP, an important concept in BPD. The FP can be a friend, a romantic partner, whoever. They receive the greatest part of the borderline’s devotion and affection, which are considerable, but they also bear the brunt of the borderline’s instability and abandonment fear. And to all appearances, Kinshirou only had one friend. There’s nowhere for him to turn, no new person to latch on to. He’s completely alone, with no one to fill the emptiness he saw inside himself.

At the end of the episode 11 flashback, Kinshirou radiates fury. But more than that, there’s a contempt to the noise he makes when he turns away from Atsushi that seems out of place for the Kinshirou just a day ago, before their split. Within that one day, he’s started to collapse in on himself and become the boy we meet at the start of season 1.

And that boy has his own issues with identity. For a person with such a high regard for his own sense of morals, Kinshirou is shockingly morally flexible. It’s always important to note that while we know that the student council’s plot is laughable, they believe in it. We know that the monsters will be defeated in the end, and that in any case they’re sort of silly. And now that season 1 is over, we know that the whole thing is a charade anyway. But each time Kinshirou makes a monster, he hopes that this one will be able to defeat the Battle Lovers and...

...and do what? Destroy the world? Bring order to it? How? Their plan is incoherent, and seems to rely largely on Zundar’s ability to goad Kinshirou into cruelty. And that’s a lot easier than it should be, until you consider that Zundar plays an important role in Kinshirou’s emotional life for a while. He listens to Kinshirou and validates him, and is probably the closest thing he’s allowed himself to have to a new FP; it seems that he can’t bring himself to trust the student council with overt friendship in season 1.

But despite Zundar’s encouragement, when Kinshirou first begins to act as Aurite, he needs Zundar’s explicit instructions, and he seems a little uncertain of himself. The uncertainty fades over time, and he becomes able to discern promising victims on his own. By the end of the series, he wears a cruel smile as he watches Rui run by or turns Uriya into a monster. He doesn’t grow as a character through most of season 1; instead, until episode 11, his arc is one of rapid moral decline.

When he finds out that Zundar has been lying to him the whole time, he doesn’t fly into a rage, as many of us expected. He refuses Zundar’s order with admirable composure, but there’s a hollowness in it, as well. And then he just stands there, empty. But then! His FP crashes back into his life, and he becomes a blushy, awkward tsundere.

That is an oversimplification. He still has a lot of issues, and he needs to work hard to change his negative patterns of thought and behavior. It’s a process that’ll continue past the end of the series. But, like I said earlier when I discussed splitting, it’s incredible how quickly much of it happens. With Atsushi back in his life to anchor him again, his personality undergoes another rapid change.

That’s 3 and 7 down. With 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7, we’ve hit our requisite 5 criteria, all of which are some of the strongest indicators of BPD.

So let’s talk about 8. Let’s talk about Kinshirou’s temper. On the whole, he controls himself, although sometimes it looks painfully difficult. You don’t see the frequent flare-ups of destructive temper that people usually associate with BPD. Instead, "constant anger” might be the closest descriptor. Kinshirou is an irritable person, particularly in season 1.

But then, of course, there’s Dark Aurite. I still think it’s up for debate how much control he had over his actions as Dark Aurite; he seems a lot like a sort of semi-monster to me. But that’s a topic for a different post. My point is that that entire scene is an example of destructive temper. He transforms into Aurite in a fit of anger, probably in order to intimidate, and then blows up Atsushi’s curry because Atsushi says the wrong thing. In the most generous interpretation, one where he has limited control over himself as Dark Aurite, he still chooses to become Dark Aurite, presumably knowing that it’ll grant him increased power to attack Atsushi. And in interpretations where there’s no alien technology affecting his mind, the entire battle is one long example of destructive temper.

Impulsivity for criterion 4 is a tough one, because he keeps such a tight rein on himself. That’s the opposite of impulsivity, really. But there’s a glaring example that has to be mentioned anyway: He goes around the world to Japan in about fifteen minutes because Atsushi didn’t answer a text message. That’s one area, then: impulsivity in his role as Aurite, which at one time was a source of comfort to him. Impulsivity in borderlines is typically just poor attempts at self-soothing. It probably helps Kinshirou to feel like he’s powerful and can control things that frighten him, such as Atsushi’s impending death.

Incidentally, that’s also another example of splitting, and, in a way, brutally suppressed fear of abandonment. It can’t be that Atsushi just lost his phone, no. Kinshirou is trying his very best to trust Atsushi, but true trust (or perhaps just reasonable, nuanced thinking, free of a borderline’s extremes) would take into account the possibility that Atsushi left his phone at school, or is in the middle of a tense conversation but will get back to Kinshirou as soon as he can, or whatever else might be the case. But in Kinshirou’s mind, Atsushi definitely won’t betray their friendship now, which means answering Kinshirou’s fake-casual texts unless his very life is in danger.

In the end, I’m not sure there’s enough evidence to say he qualifies as impulsive by borderline standards, but it’s worth noting that he can have tendencies in that direction.

Now I’m going to take just a second to cross off the criteria that I don’t see in Kinshirou.

It’s entirely possible to headcanon suicidal ideation or even self-harm in Kinshirou. I have some sympathy for that headcanon myself. But in this post, I’m talking about canon Kinshirou, and there’s no canon evidence to suggest anything listed in criterion 5. Nor is there any sign of transient psychosis or dissociation, as in criterion 9. There is that time he stands there, frozen, up on the roof at the end of season 1, but he snaps out of it pretty quickly when he’s in danger, so it doesn’t read as dissociation to me.

So if BPD is so strongly linked to childhood trauma, why would Kinshirou have it?

Well, he could have a genetic predisposition, you know. If you have that, sometimes it doesn’t take much extra prodding. But honestly, this is where it gets into headcanon territory. I can explain how he fits the diagnosis, but as for the causes, there’s not much to say one way or the other. The only hint we have is in chapter 9 of the seifukubu manga, where he and Arima seem to connect. Arima, certainly, is miserable and lonely, and there are worried little creases under his eyes that Kinshirou shares (and that Atsushi notably does not). So does that mean Kinshirou faced a childhood of abuse or neglect? No. Not necessarily. It’s not nearly enough evidence that we can decisively say anything like that. I have my own opinion, but I can’t support my BPD headcanon by just citing another headcanon. So it doesn’t really matter what I think.

Okay, that’s fine, Libby. But why does it matter so much to you?

Remember that stigma I was talking about?

Here is Wikipedia’s list of BPD examples in fiction.

Common cultural tropes associated with borderline personality include the “crazy ex-girlfriend,” “crazy mother,” and pretty much every “crazy woman” stereotype out there. ( x )

Look at all these tropes about love, rejection, and “craziness”. Look at the tone they generally take towards the woman in question—because let’s be real, it’s usually a woman. No one wants to be thought of that way, and yet those stereotypes all echo BPD, or popular perceptions of it. Borderlines see ourselves in these tropes and these stories of unhinged, typically irredeemable characters.

The second segment of this video discusses the inescapable “crazy ex-girlfriend” trope, and mentions the way studio audiences changed the ending of Fatal Attraction because they disliked an ending that was more sympathetic to Alex. Society is actively hostile towards sympathetic portrayals of the crazy ex-girlfriend. Maybe that’s why our representation is so bad.

The segment also features this quote: "There are no male equivalents [to this trope], are there? Can you think of a single film where a man would behave in such a way?" There are probably some examples, but generally, it's a trope for women, the same way BPD diagnoses are skewed along gendered lines for various unfortunate reasons that you can read about at length elsewhere. All I want to say about them here is that it’s lovely that Boueibu included a character who fits the crazy ex trope so well. It’s genuinely heartwarming to me to see representation for BPD men, especially those who present more the way people expect BPD women to act.

But the real reason I love this headcanon so much has more to do with the treatment and the fate of borderline-coded characters. Our representation in media is more or less what you’d expect, if you’ve read those links about how people see us. That is to say, it’s about as bad as it gets. Even when the character isn’t intended by the writers to have BPD—as I’m sure Kinshirou himself is not—the borderline coding shines through in the general crazy ex-girlfriend stereotype and its various relatives. Irrational, prone to taking things out of context or far out of proportion, often hysterical, sometimes dangerous... oh, and, without much actual personality. The role of the borderline-coded character isn’t to be a person. It’s to lose resoundingly, so that the real characters and the real people consuming the media can feel pleased and satisfied. 

Kinshirou fits the borderline-coded crazy ex trope, but he isn’t like that. He’s humanized, not dehumanized. He’s a person, with his own wants and hobbies and favorite foods, and a past trauma that we get to see and understand, even if it seems weird to a lot of us. He has friends, people who love him. Atsushi loves him, even though he’s been awful to Atsushi. Atsushi is willing to forgive him and give him another chance. And when Kinshirou finally gets that through his skull, he gets up off the ground and declares that he’s going to do better.

And then he does. He does start to do better. He’s capable of it. And even though it’s awkward and it doesn’t happen all at once, he’s accepted as he is, while he’s still a work in progress.

That’s so, so, so rare. I don’t want to say it’s never happened before, because there’s nothing new under the sun and so on, but I’d certainly never encountered anything like it before the end of season 1. Nuanced, ultimately positive borderline representation in a character I already loved, from a show I already adored. It’s probably the best thing Boueibu has given me, beating out such contenders as my first-ever period of normal mental health function. It's that important to me.

(And yes, by the way, I'm aware that there are stories out there about borderlines, written by borderlines. I think that they're valuable. But it means more to me when it comes from people who aren't actively trying to write about sympathetic borderlines, and the story probably reaches more people as well.)

On a less maudlin note, it’s important to everyone, the same way all representation is important. It gives borderlines hope, even if they aren’t consciously thinking in terms of representation or seeing themselves in the media they consume. It shifts non-borderlines’ perception of people who act like Kinshirou, hopefully in a positive direction.

That’s it for this post! Thanks to @vashtijoy for all her help, and thank you for reading this enormous wall of text, wow.