#It's definitely the amount of rendering that it can't handle.

[screwpinecaprice]

AT with @dragonuva!

This absolute unit, Imp Steven. 😁 I super love drawing himmmm!

Just some more rambling about the possible future of my regular commissions under the cut.

As my laptop got (fixed?) adjusted recently, I've used this opportunity to try out if it can now handle regular commission work. It started to show something's up on the mild rendering process but the lag and laptop heating didn't actually got that bad until a bit further in the full rendering process. Still has a limitation it seems. I'm planning on testing it a second time on a different piece, then I'll decide whether regular commissions will be fully back the next month or not.

[kremlin]

could you explain for the "it makes the game go faster" idiots like myself what a GPU actually is? what's up with those multi thousand dollar "workstation" ones?

ya, ya. i will try and keep this one as approachable as possible

starting from raw reality. so, you have probably dealt with a graphics card before, right, stick in it, connects to motherboard, ass end sticks out of case & has display connectors, your vga/hdmi/displayport/whatever. clearly, it is providing pixel information to your monitor. before trying to figure out what's going on there, let's see what that entails. these are not really simple devices, the best way i can think to explain them would start with "why can't this be handled by a normal cpu"

a bog standard 1080p monitor has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, each comprised of 3 bytes (for red, blue, & green), which are updated 60 times a second:

~3 gigs a second is sort of a lot. on the higher end, with a 4k monitor updating 144 times a second:

17 gigs a second is definitely a lot. so this would be a good "first clue" there is some specialized hardware handling that throughput unrelated the cpu. the gpu. this would make sense, since your cpu is wholly unfit for dealing with this. if you've ever tried to play some computer game, with fancy 3D graphics, without any kind of video acceleration (e.g. without any kind of gpu [1]) you'd quickly see this, it'd run pretty slowly and bog down the rest of your system, the same way having a constantly-running program that is copying around 3-17GB/s in ram

it's worth remembering that displays operate isochronously -- they need to be fed pixel data at specific, very tight time timings. your monitor does not buffer pixel information, whatever goes down the wire is displayed immediately. not only do you have to transmit pixel data in realtime, you have to also send accompanying control data (e.g. data that bookends the pixel data, that says "oh this is the end of the frame", "this is the begining of the frame, etc", "i'm changing resolutions", etc) within very narrow timing tolerances otherwise the display won't work at all

3-17GB/s may not be a lot in the context of something like a bulk transfer, but it is a lot in an isochronous context, from the perspective of the cpu -- these transfers can't occur opportunistically when a core is idle, they have to occur now, and any core that is assigned to transmit pixel data has stop and drop whatever its doing immediately, switch contexts, and do the transfer. this sort of constant pre-empting would really hamstring the performance of everything else running, like your userspace programs, the kernel, etc.

so for a long list of reasons, there has to be some kind of special hardware doing this job. gpu.

instead of calculating every pixel value manually, the cpu just needs to give a high-level geometric overview of what it wants rendered, and does this with vertices. a vertex is very simple, it's just a point in 3D space, for example (5,2,3). just like a coordinate grid on paper with an extra dimension. with just a few vertices, you can have models like this:

where each dot at the intersection of lines in the above image, would be a vertex. gpus essentially handle huge number of vertices.

in the context of, like, a 3D video game, you have to render these vertex-based models conditionally. you're viewing it at some distance, at some angle, and the model is lit from some light source, and has perhaps some shadows cast across it, etc -- all of this requires a huge amount of vertex math that has to be calculated within the same timeframes as i described before -- and that is what a gpu is doing, taking a vertex-defined 3D environment, and running this large amount of computation in parallel. unlike your cpu which may only have, idk, 4-32 execution cores, your gpu has thousands -- they're nowhere near as featureful as your cpu cores, they can only do very specific simple math with vertices, but there's a ton of them, and they run alongside each other.

so that is what a gpu "does", in as few words as i can write

the things in the post you're referring to (V100/A100/H100 tensor "gpus") are called gpus because they are also periperal hardware that does a specific kind of math, massively, in parallel, they are just designed and fabricated by the same companies that make gpus so they're called gpus (annoyingly). they don't have any video output, and would probably be pretty bad at doing that kind of work. regular gpus excel at calculating vertices, tensor gpus operate on tensors, which are like matrixes, but with arbitrary numbers of dimensions. try not to think about it visually. they also use a weirder float. they're used for things like "artificial intelligence", training LLMs and whatever, but also for real things, like scientific weather/economy/particle models or simulations

they're very expensive because they cost the same, if not more, than what it cost to design & fabricate regular video gpus, but with a trillionth of the customer base. for every ten million rat gamers that will buy a gpu there is going to be one business buying one A100 or whatever.

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[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XXI-B + Conclusion, Final War-B: The Hospital Attack)

To preface before I start documenting these final four chapters, there’s been a lot said (not least by me) about how wildly out of touch the resolution to this plotline is.  While I didn't set out to rehash all of that again, it turns out I can't actually talk about how the series portrays heteromorphobia without talking about how it resolves it—if I'd wanted to do that, the place to stop would have been with the last post. This whole piece is also destined for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be readable for those who don't follow me on tumblr. Therefore, if you've been following my #heteromorph discrimination plot posts for a while, there are portions of this post that will be pretty familiar territory!

If you're new and want my full breakdowns, you can find them in my Chapter Thoughts posts or in this pair of posts rounding up the asks I’d gotten on the topic.  Here, I will simply say that I don’t think Horikoshi’s fumbling of the plot can be read to mean that all the stuff I’ve documented thus far was just me reaching too hard, reading stuff into the manga where nothing was intended.  While I’m sure some of it is—I definitely went out on a few limbs!—I think the main answer to, “How can heteromorphobia be such a well-thought-out depiction of a logically foreseeable form of discrimination while also having such a terrible resolution?” is, “Because the mainstream opinion about how best to handle discrimination is wildly different in Japan than it is in progressive American circles.”

That doesn’t mean I’m willing to wave the wand of Cultural Differences over this resolution and forgive everything—there were plenty of Japanese fans critiquing it as well![1]—but it does somewhat modulate my feelings about it.  In any case, let’s get to it.

1: Most of what I saw was on Twitter, but there’s a Japanese site called bookmeter that’s kinda goodreads-esque, and which had several critical reviews posted for the volume, including one that felt like every point laid out was something I’d complained about as well.  Super validating, but a shame it was necessary!

(I'll be changing up my formatting just a bit in hopes that I can find a way to present sub-sub-bullet points that tumblr won't choke on in this 13K post. Pray for me.)

Chapter 370: 

O We open with a scene which we’re led to believe is about Spinner but which the end of the chapter will reveal to be about Shouji.  It’s shockingly open about the extent of the discrimination Shouji faced, and there’s worse yet to come, but here we find people throwing stones at him, telling him to die, saying he has dirty blood that will defile the land, that he should stay inside the house, and that no matter how much time passes,[2] they will never accept “his kind.”

2: Viz renders this as “no matter how much society progresses,” but the word jidai means something more like “the times”/”the age,” and the progression term used can mean improvement, but in the circumstances, probably just means forward movement.  I think the intention is more like, “No matter how much the times march on,” if only because it would be very odd for the people yelling this vitriol to frame it as themselves resisting progression.  After all, bigots don’t typically think of themselves as “regressive” compared to everyone else’s progressiveness; they think of themselves as normal or valuing tradition compared to everyone else’s moral laxity/perversity.

So, remember how I talked about the spiritual/religious charge to the language the CRC used to talk about their “sanctuary” and the League/Spinner’s presence in it?  Here’s the full scope of that.  It’s about kegare, a Shinto concept of uncleanliness associated particularly with blood and death, and while that’s normally something that can be purified simply by undergoing the proper ritual cleansings, when something is, in itself, intrinsically unclean, no amount of purification will fix it; you can only keep it sealed away.  Hence the yelling at Shouji not to leave the house.

The spirituality-based discrimination calls to mind the burakumin, originally an outcaste group of people who made their living working with all the aspects of life Shinto considered kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners and the like.   They were made to dress and cut their hair in ways that identified them on sight, barred from entering temples or schools, and lived in their own villages.  The laws mandating much of this were abolished in 1871[3] and urban sprawl gradually rolled over burakumin villages, turning them into slum areas.  While today it’s not uncommon for people to not even know they’re descended from burakumin lineage unless they’re specifically told,[4] more subtle discrimination does endure.  While it’s clearly not the only inspiration, there���s a lot about anti-burakumin bias that’s reflected in heteromorphobia.

3: Albeit not without considerable and violent protests against the liberation of the burakumin/the idea that they were henceforth to be allowed to hold other occupations and become ordinary citizens.  Arson, destruction of villages, attacks and deaths—all things considered, the anti-Kaihourei riots are probably a decent place to look for inspiration on the historical massacres Spinner’s #2 will be talking about shortly.

4: Or find out because someone who knows the significance of those old neighborhoods finds out first and they’re suddenly on the bad end of some discriminatory act or another.

O We find out that the group Spinner’s leading consists of fifteen thousand people, that number split between PLF remnants and ordinary civilians who support the PLF’s cause.  It’s unknown exactly how that split breaks down, but based on how the rest of the attack goes, I think it’s probable that the group is mostly civilians—if it were more PLF, it probably wouldn’t be so wholly defanged by Shouji’s big plea for peace.  So that’s what we might call a “bad look,” that fifteen thousand ordinary civilians feel so incredibly hard done-by that they not only flock to join a known terrorist, but that they do so for the purpose of attacking a hospital.

O They’re opposed by about two hundred police and heroes, the relevant of whom for our purposes are Present Mic, Rock Lock, Officer Gori, Shouji, and Koda.  With the exception of Present Mic, who will in any case be heading inside very shortly, they’re all minorities of some sort, with Rock Lock being very visibly, obviously Black, and the others being heteromorphs.  None of them are immediately thinking about the composition of the crowd, but rather about how difficult the crowd is being to handle.

O Rock Lock yells out that the rioters are too organized to be some random mob, a dismissiveness that gets him shouted at by the Spinner fanboys—tragically their only appearance in all of this!—that, “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!”  I have to assume that putting Rock Lock in this scene is no accident, but rather is there to make the rioters come off as short-sighted, so deep in their own pain that they lash out at someone who, if HeroAca!Japan is anything like present day Japan, almost certainly understands better than they think!

The phrasing, in any case, points towards the dehumanization that heteromorphs, especially animal-associated ones, are subject to.  After all, as Re-Destro might point out, in the post-Advent world, isn’t it the case that any given heteromorphic human’s face, no matter how strange it may be, is de facto a “human face”?  Yet the vitriol from the Spinner fans clearly reflects how internalized it’s become for them, that they don’t look “human,” despite the fact that “looking human” means nothing at all in the time of quirks.

O Koda gets called a traitor by an elderly beaked heteromorph from, apparently, a rural area, underscoring what’s been alluded to a few times prior to this, and which will be laid out explicitly in a few pages, that heteromorphobia is far, far worse in the countryside than it is in the cities.  Mr. Beak assumes—correctly, it seems[5]—that Koda’s a city kid, because why else other than ignorance would a fellow heteromorph stand against them?

5: Koda’s from Iwate Prefecture, which is only above Hokkaido in terms of population density; a bit of research suggests that its largest city, Morioka, is considered to be a mid-sized city.  So that’s definitely the hard upper limit on exactly how “big city” Koda could reasonably be.  That said, Shouji also identifies Koda as someone who grew up in a city, for which I assume he must have at least some basis.

O Spinner’s #2 fulfills the promise of his early shorthanded characterization of being a fiery, well-spoken zealot by standing on top of a building over the mob and exhorting them onward with revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric.  And boy, does he bring up a lot to talk about!    

Demagoguery for Fun & Profit

O Quirk counselling and quirk education?  Phony nonsense, he says.  That’s a fairly confusing grievance to bring up in this context, so let’s consider what he might have in mind.

• For quirk education, I would contend that BNHA has shown very little of it, in spite of having Academia right there in the title.  The academics in question are about Heroics, after all, not quirks in and of themselves.  Here’s the complete list of what I would say the reader has seen that could be qualified as actual education about quirks:

Aizawa telling the kids(/low tier villains at USJ) some broad generalities, things like a very basic explanation of how quirks work on the genetic level or how they’re classified.  Most of this is delivered in the context of how his quirk works; the only outlier that immediately comes to mind for me is his explanation of how quirks are like muscles, and can be strengthened via training.    

Mirio and Tamaki’s middle school class doing “quirk training,” which is framed as a P.E. class and is specifically aimed at finding ways for each kid to be “useful to society,” not about them learning anything about quirks in a broader sense.    

Endeavor’s recent reference to Nedzu’s alleged “quirk morality education,” about which I have already registered my skepticism.    

The bit in Re-Destro’s monologue to Shigaraki where he mentions he was taught not to judge others by their quirks.  It’s hard to judge how applicable this is to normal society because Re-Destro was raised in a cult, and the book shown during this sequence was released by Curious’s publisher.

So of those options, what is #2 talking about?  I’d say the last one is probably closest to what he means: don’t judge others by their quirks.  But of course, people judge others by their quirks all the time.  Family, classmates, teachers, people in the same neighborhood, heroes and police—we see examples from literally the first page of characters who are being judged by their quirks or lack thereof.  While that judgement doesn’t apply only to heteromorphs, they are, by dint of their visibility, going to face it everywhere they go, regardless of whether any given situation—say, going to the grocery store or on a date—involves quirks or not.  So, whatever lessons people in this society are getting about quirks and judgement, they clearly aren’t absorbing them.

It also bears pointing out, of course, that #2’s personal affiliation is with the Metahuman Liberation Army, and he definitely shows signs—as I’ll get to in a bit—of the quirk supremacism that group is so unanimously painted with in the endgame.  So while the supremacy he’s preaching is about heteromorphs rather than quirks more generally, he could well be saying quirk education is phony because he’s all for judging people on their quirks!  However, his criteria for that judgement differs from both forms of judgement taught by the society he’s railing against—what they practice and what they preach.

• Then there’s quirk counseling, a practice the story most prominently associates with Toga, who’s barely a twitch of the needle away from baseline (though her abuse is not wholly without reference to her appearance, in that her natural smile is repeatedly branded as scary or deviant).  So why bring it up in association with heteromorphs?  My suspicion is that a heteromorph—especially a heteromorph with an animal-associated quirk!—being visibly “different” in some way makes the people around them hyper-sensitive to behavioral “deviations.”

For a start, you see that hyper-sensitivity brought to bear against Toga.  Curious contends that Toga’s sense of “admiration” was a perfectly normal thing, but it was the tie to blood that made it wholly unacceptable.  It’s notable that, before she snapped, Toga was never shown to actually want to hurt people: the bird was already injured when she found it, her friend got a scrape the way any child might, Saito was involved in a fight Toga had no hand in.  She hurts people now because a lifetime of rejection and dehumanization, but Toga’s admiration of blood was not intrinsically indicative that she’d grow up to be violent; people treated it that way because of cultural attitudes towards blood and blood-attraction.

So, might the same sort of thing be true of e.g. animal-associated heteromorphs?  That they might exhibit behaviors which would, in different circumstances, be totally fine, but which they’re judged for unduly harshly because of cultural beliefs about the animal they resemble?  Let me just spitball a few possibilities:

A cat heteromorph who, as a child, showed affection by nuzzling.  That’s fine when a literal kitten is doing it, and funny and cute when a baseline child sees a cat doing it and imitates it for fun, but when the cat heteromorph does it, he makes people uncomfortable, makes them wonder if he lacks self-control, comes off as weird and too-forward.  So his parents rebuke him and bring him to a quirk counsellor to break him of the habit, leading him to feel ashamed and alienated from a harmless natural impulse.    

A snake-headed girl is the first heteromorph in her family line and the way she stares at people so fixedly, never blinking, creeps them out, makes them feel like she’s dangerous.  She isn’t and has no intention of being so, but she’s sent to quirk counselling anyway and the lesson she learns is to just never look people in the eye at all.    

A condor heteromorph develops a morbid interest in corpses in middle school.  He doesn’t want to eat them, he’s not some kind of cannibalistic animal—at least that’s what he told himself before quirk counselling, where his counsellor, like his teachers, assumed that his interest had to be tied to animal instincts.  He wanted to be a mortician, or join the police and get into crime scene investigation, but when he told people that they just looked at him like he was already holding a fork and knife.  (He ends up getting into photography, and just has to live with the fact that now people have two excuses to call him a vulture.)    

Two children—one with a plant-based emitter quirk, the other an eight-eyed spider heteromorph—are caught in the act of killing some insects by a local police officer.  It’s the sort of innocent childhood cruelty you might find anywhere, and, indeed, when the officer calls their school about it, that’s what gets decided about the emitter—he was just a child who didn’t know any better.  But the heteromorph gets recommended for quirk counselling instead—after all, spiders kill insects.  What if this is an early warning sign for instincts towards predatory behavior?  It’s important to nip these things in the bud.

That’s all off the top of my head or taken from some conversation with friends on the topic, and maybe it’s a reach, but it’s also a very plausible explanation for why a heteromorphic idealogue might bring up quirk counselling as a specific grievance—because, like the Villain-designation for criminals, it’s unevenly and unfairly applied.

O The next point #2 makes, and definitely the one that made the biggest splash in fandom at the time, is his invocation of a pair of historical incidents, possibly both but at least one of which was a mass murder targeting heteromorphs, carried out by a bunch of baseline types.  He names them as the 6/6 Incident and the Great Jeda Purge.  These are both stealth Star Wars references, though the former is disguised a bit better by being in the same format that Japan sometimes uses for naming events like attempted coups.[6]  Given the image we see, it’s fair to assume the event in BNHA was similar.

6: See for example the May 15 Incident or the February 26 Incident, called the 5・15 Incident and the 2・26 Incident respectively in Japan. You see this in China as well, with the Tiananmen Square massacre being referred to there as the 6/4 Incident.

Notice that the perpetrators here are mostly holding weapons.  Were they quirkless themselves, or were they avoiding using quirks such that they couldn’t be branded as Villains?  Knowing the answer to that would give us a timeframe for this.

He goes on to declaim, on the basis of these events, that the history of the paranormal is one of persecution and oppression of those with “differing forms.”[7] The term in Japanese there is kotonaru katachi, 異なる形, which uses a different reading of the kanji in igyou (異形) and muscles in a verb conjugation, which has the effect of softening the harshness of 異 somewhat.[8]  This would be a great catch-all term for those with heteromorphic bodies who might or might not have heteromorphic quirks[9] if it weren’t for the fact that literally the only person we ever hear using it is an anti-social zealot.  No one on Team Hero ever makes this kind of distinguishment.

In any case, #2 is obviously over-simplifying to play to his audience—recall the baseline woman we saw back in that shot of Persecuted Early Quirk-Havers back in Chapter 59—but, as I’ve discussed extensively, being more visible does make one a more ready target.  Also, of course, the presence of the CRC in the story lays the groundwork for this sort of historical horror story even long after the worst days of the Advent.

7: I provide my own translation here because the Viz one, “those who don’t fit the mold,” is vague to the point of uselessness.

8: The koto reading, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty rare, often tagged as archaic in words including it.  The i reading is far more common, in words that denote wrongness, divergence, abnormality, and so on.  But it may be less about the reading and more about the fact that adding the verb conjugation makes the term more of a descriptive phrase than a direct noun.  As ever, take my talk about Japanese language minutiae with a grain of salt.

9: “Differing forms” is broad enough, however, that it could also be read as covering, say, people with amputations, congenital anomalies, or other sorts of non-quirk-related disfigurements from accidents or disease.  As in real life, navigating the linguistic space between specificity and Othering can be tricky.

O Next, #2 rhetorically demands what excuse was given by those who perpetrated these slaughters?  He answers his own question with the quote, “They give me the creeps.” Note how this ties in with my earlier suppositions about the likelihood of discrimination worsening the farther one is from baseline, as well as those about the necessity of putting up a good, positive, appealing front.  It’s a perfectly intuitive leap, that more extreme variants of heteromorphy, or those who evoke negative associations—animals tied to rot or bad luck, people made wholly out of green ooze—are going to be more likely to be found “creepy” than those who look like e.g. sexy bunny girls or straight-laced guys who just happen to have pipes jutting out of their calves.  Of course, that’s on something of a sliding scale; the more biased an area is against heteromorphs in general, the easier it will be to find oneself on the wrong side of that line.

O #2 presents the idea that society has reflected on their actions and made amends, or at least that’s how society’s narrative goes.  Illustrating this, we see two of the three heteromorphs in the police force, as well as Nedzu.  Interestingly, the panel does not include any heteromorphic heroes!  I might guess that this is because heroes are meant to use their quirks to serve others; they’re really just enforcement tools, lacking any particular authority beyond a quirk-use license and some admittedly broad soft power courtesy of the social contract.[10] Conversely, a school principal and a police chief (Gori remaining the outlier here) have actual authority, such that the average heteromorphobia-denier can point to them as evidence that heteromorphobia doesn’t exist anymore.

10: Which is to say, I don’t get the impression civilians are required to take orders from heroes, such that they would actually get in legal trouble for disobeying.  The fact that people do typically follow those orders speaks more to the power heroes wield via their association with the police force, as well as the general tendency of people to assume that someone in a uniform giving orders during an emergency is probably a professional whose orders it would be safe and wise to follow.

In the same panel, we also see a baseline guy palling around with a vaguely murine heteromorph dude (he looks more like a mascot suit mouse than an actual mouse, but he’s certainly nowhere close to baseline!), illustrating another way society wants to pretend it’s moved past heteromorphic discrimination.  I can’t help but note, in regards to this specific pair, that the manga uses faces the readers know to illustrate the point about heteromorphs in positions of authority, whereas to make the point about baseline/heteromorph friendships, it has to make up a new pair to show us because the series hasn’t made the time to actually build any (heroic) relationships that actually look like that!

Now, one could argue that using familiar faces to underscore #2’s speech would imply that he’s aware of those faces, and while that’s fine for figures of authority, there’s no reason for him to be aware of e.g. Natsuo and his mousey girlfriend.  However, the same would apply to anyone placed to demonstrate a random urban friendship crossing the “differing forms” line, including those two strangers.  Who are those two, after all, that #2 is any more familiar with them than he would be of Natsuo and mouse gal?

Honestly, I think the best relationship candidate we have—a pair who would both communicate what the panel needs to communicate to the reader and who would feasibly be enough in the public eye to get pointed at for rhetorical purposes by an in-universe speaker—would be Kamui Woods and Mount Lady.  Unfortunately, they don’t work because Horikoshi has never seen fit to actually reveal Kamui Woods’ real face, so they’re much less visibly “a baseline person being emotionally close with a heteromorph” than the random two Horikoshi made up.

O The oratory continues into discussing the divide between city versus rural views on heteromorphs, and this is, to me, the first clear sign that the series is beginning to lose the thread of this plot.  Taking #2 at his word asks us to concede the heteromorphobia has been completely wiped out in cities, eradicated with that wonderful antidote called “education.”  But discrimination very much does exist in cities!  It may be less violent, less extreme, less vocal, but in the form of things like law enforcement bias, housing discrimination, microaggressions, the quirk counselling #2 himself brought up, it’s very much still there!  Now, it could be that he’s just downplaying that discrimination to focus on the really ugly stuff you don’t see in cities, but I don’t know what his reasons for doing so would be?  Not when there’s so much else he could say that would be equally inflammatory without alienating urban heteromorphs by dismissing their still very much present, modern suffering.

O He then brings up the talk of “light”—echoing Skeptic’s earlier rhetoric—and it not reaching those gathered at the hospital, so they must make their own, for people who’ve never once regretted the quirks they were born with can never be their heroes.  What this primarily puts me in mind of is Hawks’s background with heroes prior to his father’s arrest—that heroes were only on TV, not present to save him in his actual life.  Keep that in mind for Shouji’s response later on.

O Towards the end, #2’s speech finally tips over the line from what could plausibly be read as protesting unequal treatment to an outright call for supremacy.  Notably, he doesn’t call for quirk supremacy, but rather for heteromorph supremacy—for the tables to be turned, the cards reversed, for them to not merely be equal, but rather to be superior.

It’s unclear how much of this he’s sincere about and how much is just convenient rhetoric disguising views that are more quirk supremacist in actuality.  For many reasons, I want to read him in good faith: because the MLA originally struck me as being written in good faith throughout MVA and the first war arc; because #2 never once uses his quirk in this mini-arc, casting doubt on him having such an amazing quirk that he’d benefit overmuch from quirk supremacy anyway; and especially because it would be incredibly bad faith on Horikoshi’s part to make a character delivering a speech like this a total bad faith, manipulative outsider.  Unfortunately, #2’s inner monologue in later chapters will make a good faith read all but impossible to sustain.    

O Halfway through his speech, #2 unmasks himself, revealing both his face—dominated by four pairs of pedipalp-esque mouthparts, though the markings on his head are pretty eye-catching, too—and his scar.  We’re never told how he got it, but the implication is certainly that he was attacked for his appearance.  That may just be a conclusion it serves him to let people make, given his bad faith elsewhere, but thankfully the manga doesn’t go so far as to say that explicitly.  In any case, his deliberate reveal turns his wound into a form of performance art, drawing attention to it, forcing it to be a part of the conversation—the polar opposite of Shouji covering his scars because he doesn’t want them to be a part of the conversation about him, and those scars being revealed because his mask is torn off against his will.[11]

11: This also fits a larger pattern of villains, by and large, choosing their expressions of vulnerability, making deliberate shows of agency in how their weakness is perceived by the broader world—Shigaraki taking his hand off for the first time, Dabi’s video, Toga approaching heroes with genuine questions, and so on.  There are certainly exceptions, but generally if a villain shows his “true face,” it’s because they’re making a conscious decision to do so, and may be actively manipulating how that reveal is going to land.  Conversely, heroes want to present a powerful, confident, untarnished image to the public, so their shows of vulnerability all have to be forced out of them after pitched battles or acts of violence.  Heroes don’t make themselves vulnerable to the public on purpose, which feeds into the way the public then treats them when they are forced into vulnerable positions.

O Spinner’s a mess at this point, and the reason he’s a mess is all tied up in his faith in/desire to help Shigaraki.  It’s not explicitly about heteromorphobia, but on the other hand, given that the thing that drove Spinner to be here at all was his horrifically low self-esteem caused by heteromorphobia, maybe it’s not so irrelevant after all.  It may have taken Spinner longer than the Tenkos, Touyas, and Chisaki Kais of the world to reach the “fall victim to a dark influence due to the neglect and abuse you faced at the hands of Hero Society” plot, but he certainly got there in the end![12]

12: I call this The Sekoto Peak Problem, and it’s a big criticism of mine about how the final arc is framing all these conflicts as being solely brought about because Bad Faith Villain Men like AFO are scooping up vulnerable people and driving them towards violence, without acknowledging the much worse circumstances those vulnerable people might be in if they were just left to their fates.  Touya, for example, if not for AFO’s timely rescue, would likely have simply died on the mountain long before Endeavor was able to find him.

O Shouji takes the mob to task for attacking a hospital without ensuring the safety of the uninvolved innocents within, a laughable bit of sophistry[13] that accurately foreshadows how disastrous his reasoning will be throughout the rest of these chapters.

13: It’s laughable sophistry firstly because the heroes knew this mob was coming but chose to leave Kurogiri at a hospital anyway; one can mount a very reasonable argument that Kurogiri’s teleportation power qualifies him as a military objective, which would make stashing him at a hospital an actual war crime in an international conflict, as well as negating the hospital’s protected status as a civilian object.  It’s laughable sophistry secondly because it criticizes a Villain-led mob for failing to evacuate the building, as if said mob had exactly the same social cachet possessed by heroes, that they could freely walk in the front door of a hospital and start shouting evacuation orders with reasonable confidence that they’d be obeyed.  Finally, it’s laughable sophistry because Shouji is quite simply wrong about the order of the actions he’s describing—the heroes’ evacuation of Ujiko’s hospital was concurrent with their invasion of said hospital, not precedent to it.

   

Chapter 371: 

O Shouji accuses Spinner of taking actions that will set them back thirty years, which is just a really egregiously victim blamey sort of thing to say, placing the responsibility on heteromorphs for the crimes of those who hate them.

O Koda’s perspective gives us a flashback to Shouji telling his classmates about his history—his town and his scars and his reason for wanting to be a hero.  It’s all material that works in the context of all the set-up we’ve gotten—the CRC and the religious inflection of their specific brand of hatred, the rural heteromorphobia, the hints about Shouji’s own discrimination, the attack on the Ordinary Woman, and so on—but that would have been far better served to have been integrated into the story more naturally.  Koda has no specifically established relationship with Shouji (seriously, there is absolutely nothing; it’s shocking how out of nowhere his sudden deep dedication to Shouji is), nor does the scene he remembers have any specific flags for when it might take place,[14] leaving the memory feeling less like a natural extension of their arc than it is a graceless sequence muscled in to attempt to rouse some emotion in the audience when Koda has a quirk awakening he is not otherwise remotely in dire enough straits to have rightfully earned.[15]

14: Shouto and Bakugou being missing might suggest that they’re off at their remedial license course, which would put the scene somewhere in late September up through December (stretching from the aftermath of Overhaul to the introduction of the MLA), save that there are several other students missing as well—Sero, Iida, Sato, and Aoyama, none of whom where in the remedial course.

15: Nearly every other inarguable quirk awakening[※] we know of in the series has as a chief component serious physical injury: Bakugou, Ochaco, Toga.  Geten’s is the only exception, and his is tied to the strength of his feelings for Re-Destro, which are clearly and overridingly his most significant character trait!  Shouji is not anywhere near that central to Koda’s life, and he sure as hell isn’t injured enough to have gotten it that way.

※: By which measure I exclude stuff like the change in Shigaraki’s Decay or Mina’s acid attack against Gigantomachia.  Shigaraki was explicitly just breaking through a mental block to access power he already had.  Meanwhile, if Mina’s Plus Ultra moment had been a sudden quirk evolution, she wouldn’t already have an attack name picked out for it, nor would her horns have gone back to normal after it.  Acidman: ALMA is an Ultimate Move, not Mina having a quirk awakening.

O The flashback itself calls for another subsection.    

Ignoring the Difference Between the Personal and the Systemic for Fun & Profit

O The big thing here the description of the whole town coming out for a “blood cleansing” whenever Shouji touched someone.  This is depicted as Shouji, probably a preteen in this sequence,[16] being savagely attacked with farming tools, the most visible of which is a pitchfork.  This visual, as well as #2’s invocation of historical slaughters, is the darkest heart of heteromorphobia: a child being ritualistically assaulted in the open street as a matter of course, as a consequence for touching someone.  This is the image you should hold in your mind as The Problem through all of the potential answers and responses that get trotted out through the rest of these chapters.

16: Visibly older/bigger than, say, Kouta, but also visibly younger/smaller than middle school Deku.

Before moving on, I do want to examine this image in just a bit more depth.

This is, firstly, the moment that Shouji got those scars, and it’s very important to note that what we’re being shown is likely not a random, representative sample of what the town “coming out in force for a blood cleansing” looks like.  The strong implication is that this is in the immediate aftermath of the sequence we’ll see shortly of Shouji saving the girl from the river: he’s wearing the same clothes and shoes,[17] he’s the same size, and there’s a spray of blood from where he’s being struck across the mouth where he didn’t have his distinctive scars when he saved the girl.  Does that mean the blood cleansings were typically not this violent?  That’s hard to say.  On the one hand, we don’t see any other scars on Shouji, and he wears his arms pretty bare!  On the other hand, we never see any part of his body bare except his neck and arms, and since he can regrow his arms,[18] they’re not exactly conclusive evidence that he’s never been scarred there.  Also, he does say talk about his situation—the scars he bears—as something other children in the country have to bear, suggesting that the norm is rather worse than a little symbolic gash across the palm or something!     17: In fairness, he may not own very much different, as I’ll discuss shortly.     18: The duplicated ones, at least.  I seem to recall reading once that he could regrow the base set as well, but I’m still working on tracking down a citation on that.    

Secondly, as was the case with the image of the historical massacres, the adults here are using tools/weapons in the assault, not quirks.  As I mentioned in a footnote last time, them not using quirks to carry out this attack makes them merely criminals, not Villains, and therefore not nominally a Hero’s job to deal with.  While I can’t imagine any Hero in the manga these days would stand back and let this go on, the absence still stands out—no Hero is participating in this, nor observing from the sidelines, nor trying to intervene.  Heroes simply don’t figure into this picture at all.    

Thirdly, we can see a few children in the background, both there with adults, I assume their parents.  The child on the right is a passive observer, clinging close to their mother and simply watching; their father has one hand supportively on their shoulder.  Neither parent seems distressed, insomuch as we can tell from their somewhat indistinct features and rather clearer body language.  The child on the left is being actively held back by their mother, who’s standing with her back to the violence, her body interposed between it and her child.  The kid is reaching out towards the scene, but it’s unclear what the intent is.  Are they trying to intervene or do they want to join in?     Neither child appears to be the little girl Shouji saved—the one on the right is dark-haired, and the one on the left—the more likely prospect just going by the body language!—is wearing a long, dark T-shirt instead of the little girl’s overalls.  I suppose the left one could be the little girl if we assume she was hustled out of what she’d been wearing by her parents, eager to get her out of now-tainted (and also soaking wet) clothes and into something dry and warm and, in more ways than one, clean.  However, that seems like the sort of thing that would take longer than what looks to have been a pretty impromptu, disorganized bloodletting, unless everyone just held off on assaulting Shouji right out on the street until the “victim” could be present.    

Finally, there’s the pair of adults right at the center of the background.  If anyone in this picture is actually related to Shouji, I’d put money on them being here, watching but not attempting to intercede.  I don’t think it’s conclusive, though; the woman is thin and hunched, making her look older—I’d guess Shouji’s grandmother before Shouji’s mother.  That hunched posture and her hands being raised to her mouth do give her the most obviously distressed appearance of any of the adult, though, to the extent that the person with her is focused on supporting her rather than watching what’s going on in the foreground—and forward attention is what I’d expect if the dark-haired figure is related to Shouji.

So that’s the image we have of the crowd—actively taking part or observing with varying degrees of reaction running from distress to indifference to, potentially, enthusiasm.

O Next, let’s talk about Shouji’s parents.  He implies they were baseline—at the least they were significantly more baseline than Shouji himself, as they lacked arms “like his.”  That makes it quite telling that Shouji’s parents are nowhere to be seen in his story beyond the simple mention of how they were different than him.

Now, I don’t want to suggest here that Shouji’s parents are completely irredeemable people.  While I would imagine that—at least initially—they shared their town’s bigotry, having a heteromorphic child themselves would have exponentially increased the hardship of their own lives.  In a town like that, I’m sure that many if not all of their neighbors must have come to regard them with suspicion of wrongdoing or transgression—recall the first page of the last chapter, where Shouji is accused of tricking the town in his having brought dirty blood to it.  Hie parents almost certainly lost friends and likely became ostracized themselves, and ostracization in a small Japanese town can be a horrifying thing to deal with.

And yet, even with all that being the case, they didn’t abandon Shouji or give him up; they didn’t commit family suicide with him.[19]  Assuming he wasn’t removed from their custody after the incident, they’re presumably paying his school and living costs;[20] likewise, unless he just ran away from home or is carrying out an incredibly elaborate deception about what school he’s attending, they almost had to support his desire to attend a hero school to begin with.  In his situation, parents who support his desire to be a Hero is a big fucking deal.  After all, between the winning and the saving, heroes will de facto be touching people all the time!  If Shouji’s parents still live in his hometown, how do you think those people will take it when someone first realizes the Shouji family sent their kegare-riddled monster off to be a Hero?

19: The history of honorable suicide in Japan casts a very long shadow, and when it’s combined with the meiwaku culture, you get an underreported epidemic of things like parents who can’t see their way out of a bad situation taking their lives and their children’s as well, so as not to leave messy loose ends that others will have to bear the burden of dealing with.

20: I won’t get into whether or not the U.A. students’ parents are paying for any given thing on the following list, but here are some potential costs to consider, assuming that Shouji, like Uraraka, was commuting from an apartment prior to the dorms being implemented: tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, school meal plan, food not served at school (e.g. breakfast and dinner or meals when the school is on break), non-uniform attire, personal care and hygiene, housing and transportation costs, a measure of spending money for unanticipated expenses or culturally expected gift-giving, etc.

All that being said, it’s obviously not a glowingly loving relationship, either.  Think back to Shouji’s absolutely barren room in Chapter 99 and consider it in the context of the information we get in this chapter.  Is he really so ascetic by inclination, or is he just used to making do with as little as possible?  After all, it goes without saying that if him coming into contact with someone called for blood purification, anything he himself was in regular contact with was also to be considered incredibly impure.  That includes his clothes, personal belongings and living space; even setting aside his parents’ view on it, who in his hometown would even want to provide or sell things to the family that they think will go to the child with the dirty blood that’s defiling their land?

Shouji’s parents’ absence is also glaring in other ways.  For example:

They’re either not in the beating scene image above at all or they’re that central background couple hanging back and just watching; whichever is the case, what they’re assuredly not doing while their son is being beaten so badly he will still have glaringly visible scars years later is “trying to stop the violence or take the blows themselves.”    

Shouji says he has one single good memory about his body, but his parents are nowhere to be found in that memory.  Ergo, his parents have not given him a single moment of positivity about his heteromorphic form.    

Parents of U.A. students were evacuated to U.A.—not just the ones near it, but even ones like Uraraka’s parents, who live at least a two hour drive away, in a wholly different prefecture with a third prefecture in between them and U.A.  Every student we see in the departure scene in Chapter 342 is shown with their parents except Shouji.

To sum all that up, Shouji’s family situation is not maximally bad, but it’s certainly proximally bad.

O Next, we get Shouji alleging ignorance on the part of heteromorphs raised in cities, that there are still parts of the country in the modern day where stories like his happen.[21]  It’s a milder version of the same assertions made by #2 and the beaky heteromorph last chapter, in that Shouji doesn’t suggest heteromorphobia doesn’t exist at all in cities, simply that there are extremes of violence that can only be found in the country.  It still feels off, however, to suggest that absolutely no one else in Shouji’s class might ever have heard of this through any channel at all: being from similarly small towns, reading about an attack in the news, reading about factors that impact the public approval ratings for Heroes, going through a morbid phase in middle school and researching it, being talked to about it by their parents, etc.

21: The suggestion of the Viz translation of this suggests that city-raised heteromorphs do know this, but only because they’re read about it in textbooks.  My sister-in-law, who does professional translation, tells me this was a subtle mistranslation of the original text, however; the textbook framing is supposed to imply a remove of time, not merely of distance.

It’s not as unrealistic a story beat here as it would be in an American comic, as Japan does tend more towards using silence as a weapon against bigotry—children won’t learn what they aren’t taught, and similar reasoning.  Still, to portray the class as so unanimously ignorant reflects a deep incuriosity, be that in the kids themselves about the world around them or in their author about how the knowledge/perpetuation of discrimination spreads.

This is particularly the case when you consider the story’s handling of the Ordinary Woman—attacked in her own town because people were suspicious of a heteromorph out after dark, turned away from multiple shelters because of her heteromorph status.  It’s certainly true that things got worse for heteromorphs after the first war arc, but for discrimination in that specific form to emerge, there needed to be something for it to draw on.  The fear of villains and the association of villains with heteromorphs are the foundation for the upswelling in anti-heteromorph sentiments in cities.

O Mina’s reaction to all this is one of rather theatrical anger.  That is, no one around her takes her broad declarations—that the world would be better off without the people who hurt Shouji—as anything more serious than hyperbole.  This is, it would seem, the only sort of anger that’s acceptable to show in response to hearing a story like Shouji’s—empathy to the wronged, sure, but no real intent to confront the wrongdoers.

O Mineta stares into space for a second before emphatically apologizing for calling Shouji an octopus once—a call all the way back to his microaggression in Chapter 6!—and asserting that it wasn’t his intention to say Shouji was gross or anything.  Shouji responds gracefully, saying it’s “only natural” that his arms would make people think of octopus.

He doesn’t go on to say, “But that doesn’t mean people have to say it out loud,” but it’s possible that Mineta’s apology is meant to suggest that regardless.  At least, one certainly hopes this isn’t the author’s way of quietly absolving his more popular characters of all the times they’ve done the same thing!  It’s notable, however, that none of the other Class 1-A kids that have done this are in the scene.  Shouto and Bakugou, who have both used that kind of language in anger (and in the latter’s case, also just with no provocation whatsoever) are the missing elephants in the room, and even Sero, who was the actual person to call Shouji an octopus, is, in his absence, Sir Letting The Gag Character Handle This Apology So I A More Serious Character Don’t Have To.

O Shouji brings up the Heroes Who Look Like Villains rankings.  We know the Number 1 on that list is actually Endeavor, per a movie bonus booklet, but bringing it up in this context does implicitly confirm that said rankings have an unseemly slant towards heteromorphs, and what did Skeptic say about Villains and heteromorphs again…?

O Shouji says he wears the mask because he knows that if people see his scars, they’ll wonder about them, and fear he’s out for revenge.  He doesn’t want people to think that, so he covers them up.  He’s praised for this by Tokoyami, and the narrative pretty clearly also thinks it’s admirable and cool.  I have serious issues with this—chiefly that it’s prioritizing the oblivious comfort of the baseline citizens over the fellow feeling and affirmation of other persecuted heteromorphs—but I’m also curious to see if the mask will come back now that its meta-narrative purpose of hiding Shouji’s scars from the reader has been fulfilled.  I note, for example, that Shouji is not wearing the mask in the color spread for Chapter 394, and the color art does have some precedent for being an early predictor of stuff in the body of the manga.[22]

Incidentally, while I’m talking about Shouji’s mask, I do wonder how effective it would even be for him to cover his scars up?  I have my doubts for two reasons.  First and most obviously, heroes are such celebrities, all over the news all the time, such that if Shouji really does get as popular as he intends to, there will be people who want to know what he looks like.[23]

22: The big one is Aizawa’s eyepatch.  It showed up in two pieces of color art (the popularity poll results spread for Chapter 293 and the new art announcing the BNHA Drawing Smash Exhibition) before it was revealed in the manga.  Both pieces released within days of each other in early December, 2020, three months after Shigaraki raked his hand down Aizawa’s face during the war and almost two months before the latter showed up in bandages in the hospital, with another two months to go beyond that before the eyepatch itself made it to the manga in late March.  In a more stealth spoiler, the same popularity spread revealed Shigaraki’s blackened, burned face-hand two chapters prior to Spinner digging it out of Shigaraki’s pants.  The 394 spread is also my basis for asserting that Mina’s horns have gone back to normal after her attack against Gigantomachia, compared to Shouji lacking his mask and Koda having his new horn in the same spread.

23: Edgeshot’s character profile page notes that his fans are split into two factions: those who’re mad to see his real face and those who think the mask is what makes him cool.

O More importantly, though, heroes have to be licensed, and Hero Licenses are photo IDs.  Photo IDs don’t typically allow face coverage because not being able to provide a visual reference to what the bearer looks like defeats the whole purpose.  While we don’t know what full-fledged hero licenses look like to say if they’re taken in or out of costume, we do know the provisional licenses the students carry showed them in their school uniforms, despite the fact that they definitely had working costumes by then:

Pardon the sudden screenshot. The manga has this shot, too, but the anime fills in the details of the text a bit more.

It seems probable to me that the photo on a Hero License must show the bearer’s face, so that if they’re tooling around a crime scene and a cop who hasn’t seen them around before asks for their license, it can reliably be used as a form of identification.  (I wonder how Hagakure manages?)

Also, think back to the press conferences we’ve seen in the story, most recently the one post-war: at every one, the heroes are in serious, solemn black suits, not their costumes.  So at any press conferences Shouji ever has to speak at in the future, he’ll have to show his face there, as well.

O We see a direct flashback to Shouji saving a little girl from drowning in a choppy, swift-flowing river as he says in voiceover that he’d rather cling to the single good memory related to his body than dwell on the bad memories.  He very much uses his quirk to do it, with his right set of limbs used to hold onto the bank while his left ones reach out to the girl, extending out another few “nodes” of arm-length when he at first can’t keep hold of her fingers.  As they sit and catch their breath afterward, the girl clings to one of his tentacles and cries.  This is not quite what his entry in the Ultra Analysis databook was hinting at[24] when it said he wears the mask due to his scary face making a little girl cry; that’ll be next chapter.

24: My apologies for not bringing this up before; it’ll be covered on AO3.  The gist is as detailed above; the databook came out circa the Endeavor Agency arc, so this was a known factoid about Shouji by the time this chapter came out three years later.

O Wrapping up the flashback, we’re left with Koda’s memory of Shouji saying that he knows it’ll take longer than a generation to tear down a wall that’s stood for over a century, so, just as previous generations have done, he’ll keep paying it forward, being the coolest hero the world’s ever seen, “to give good memories to generations to come.”  Which sounds really nice when he says it that way, as opposed to the broader implication that people whose children have been or are in danger of being maimed by bigots should just keep their heads down and “keep paying it forward.”

The whole “be a cool hero and give good memories” bit is particularly egregious to my eye, for a few reasons.

How much good did cool heroes do for Takami Keigo when they were just on TV?  Which is where Shouji will be, because in order to be “the coolest hero the world’s ever seen,” he’s going to have to be at the top of the rankings, and being at the top of the rankings means prioritizing cities, which means all those heteromorphs out in rural areas are never going to see him in person.  And anyway, what’s stopping all those bigots from just changing the channel or going on a rant about Woke Mutie Agendas every time a heteromorphic hero crops up on TV?    

How much did the visibility of previous generations’ cool heroes do for Spinner?  Does Shouji think Spinner was super inspired and uplifted by seeing e.g. Gang Orca on TV using the emitter-like hypersonic waves his quirk gives him to beat up Villains, an undue percentage of whom are also heteromorphs?

It’s certainly nice that Shouji was inspired enough by heroes on TV to want to emulate them, but he is demonstrably not the norm when it comes to wildly disadvantaged and victimized heteromorphs.  Also, I have to wonder how much his admiration of TV heroes would have done him if he’d gotten to the girl just a little later—say, in time to get her out of the river, but too late to be able to save her life without knowing CPR.  As bad as it was for him when he saved a little girl but had to touch her to do it, can you imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d touched her and then failed to save her, being found or having to walk back into town with her body?

I realize that's incredibly dark, but it's the kind of question that presents itself when the story is so insistent on Shouji's exemplary behavior being the model for heteromorphs to follow in their own lives.

   

O Exiting the flashback, when Shouji calls out to the heteromorphs, we finally get a straight-out look at how disastrous this conclusion is going to be in the way he shouts that no, the people who hurt them weren’t justified, but that there has to be a better way, that they should think about how to use their rage—but offers exactly zero suggestions himself for what that better way might be, or what they should be using their rage to do instead.[25]

25: I have seen the argument put forth that Shouji is one (1) teenager, and one (1) teenager cannot fairly be asked to Solve Bigotry.  To this, I would counter that if Shouji doesn’t have even one (1) single idea to offer, why is the camera lens holding him up as the hero who quelled a fifteen-thousand-strong mob with only words?  He doesn’t have to Solve Bigotry, but if he’s going to be used as a counter for other peoples’ misguided but at least active attempts to address the problem, he needed to be better than a mere white knight for the status quo.

Spinner’s #2 calls Shouji out on this directly, saying that if the situation were that easy to resolve, it wouldn’t have come down to this, and accusing Shouji of having no feasible solution to offer, just childish and naïve egotism.  And call me a hopeless MLA Stan and you’d be right, but truly, where’s the lie?

His efforts in this regard, however, wind up pushing Koda to what certainly has all the markings of a quirk awakening because it upsets Koda to see Shouji being “mocked.”  Man, sure is a good thing quirk awakenings are just a dime a dozen and definitely don’t require life-threatening injuries and/or incredibly severe emotional distress over someone who means more to you than your own life, right?

O In a last little stroke of ugliness for the chapter, Spinner calls Shouji gross.  Just to, you know, make it really obvious that the villains are all totally bad faith representation for this cause and thus can be safely dismissed.  (Christ, I hate these chapters.)

   

Chapter 372: 

O We get the flashback of Shouji and Koda asking All Might to assign them to the hospital defense group.  Points of note:

Neither Shouji nor All Might can be bothered to use the Ordinary Woman’s real name, instead just referring to her by her size.  Seriously, I get the intent behind insisting that she’s just an ordinary woman, that there’s nothing in particular stand-out about her in the current age; it’s pretty much the same deal as Shinomori saying that OFA can no longer be wielded by an “ordinary” person, with that phrasing being used to ironically emphasize that quirks are now seen as ordinary, while those without quirks are the unusual ones.  However, it obviously wouldn’t work in-universe for characters trying to specify who they’re talking about to say, “That ordinary woman,” with the end result being that they have to grab for what stands out about her if they want to be understood—in this case, her obviously unusual height.  In trying to emphasize that she’s normal, Horikoshi forces his characters to define her by what makes her stand out.    

Koda says that if Shouji’s going, he is too, a moment that would really land much better if they’d had literally any interactions of note at literally any point prior to this exact moment.  Frankly, even last chapter’s flashback is pretty thin on that front, since Koda is not one of the students who gets speaking lines when cuddling up to Shouji to comfort him.  (I’m not even convinced it’s very in character for Koda to be one of the kids diving in for cuddles—he’s usually pretty shy!)    

Shouji says that he could never call himself a hero if he were to stand back while the hospital attack plays out, implicitly emphasizing the role his reaction to his own oppression plays in his heroic motivation.

O Another flashback[26] gives us Koda’s mother discussing the possibility that he might get horns like hers someday, and what those horns can do, as well as mentioning that she used to have to put up with considerable mistreatment herself, and, lastly, telling her son to grow up into a man who gets angry when people mock those dear to him.

26: The sheer number of them crammed into this mini-arc really says a lot for how rushed it is, but complaining about the structural problems of the last few arcs would be a different essay.

Breaking those down, we’ve got:

The fact that Koda’s mom says he might grow in horns like hers suggests to me pretty strongly that her own horns are a quirk evolution she just doesn’t have the language to name as such.  If it were just a matter of maturation, something that came in with puberty, there’d be no “maybe” about it.  Given what we know about the context of quirk evolutions elsewhere, this in turn suggests that she did not exactly get her horns under peaceful, wholesome, uplifting circumstances!    

This is backed up by her mention of the “real cruelty” she faced.  Interestingly, this kind of raises some questions in relation to Shouji’s assertion last chapter that people like Koda who grew up in cities lack an understanding of the extremes of heteromorphobic violence that endure elsewhere.  Did Koda’s parents move to the city from the country at some point when Koda was young/before he was born, and the “real cruelty” was out in the country?  That might track with the overalls she was wearing.  And of course, Koda’s mother was a younger woman then, so maybe it’s just the fact that heteromorphic discrimination was worse at the time.  Either way, Koda’s mother is clearly open with him about the fact that she was mistreated because of her appearance, though she may have downplayed the severity of it.    

The idea of Shouji being “dear to Koda” is immensely frustrating for how utterly groundless it is, based on absolutely no prior grounding within the story other than the general bond among the 1-A students.  That’s just me complaining, though—more pertinent for this essay is the problem with how this moment frames anger.  Like, the whole mini-arc has the same problem, but this chapter is particularly rotten with it.  To preview: Koda’s anger is portrayed as righteous, as was his father’s, because their anger is about protection, about defensive reaction, about intervening with harm currently in progress—basically all the stuff Heroes are supposed to do.  It is notably not about action based on past harm or proactive attempts to prevent future harm.

O Koda’s bird attack knocks Spinner’s #2 off the roof in one of the most egregious examples of, “I can’t come up with an actual counterpoint for his arguments, so I’ll just shut him up through force,” I’ve ever seen.  Sure, there’s something to be said for not engaging bad faith parties in good faith arguments, but like…  That guy already had a platform of his arguments—he was standing on the roof of a tall building!  The author gave him several pages to make his pitch; the argument’s already out there in the readers’ minds!  The only thing getting rid of him does is guarantee that the person the taciturn Shouji actually has to argue with is…Spinner.  Who is not exactly a born orator at the best of times, and he’s very far from even that level here.

Now, #2 will get a few more lines next chapter, but they’re against one of the people on his own side.  No heroic character has to argue #2 down; instead, they get to match wits with the literally drooling Spin-zilla.  Which is a bit like stepping into the wrestling ring with someone who’s had a bag thrown over his head and his hands zip-tied behind his back.

This confrontation is, woefully, not the only place in the endgame where a heroic character gets all the time and freedom in the world to make their big pronunciations while their opponent gets shut down by some outside factor—interference from other villains, psychological decay, literal possession—but it’s in particularly stark relief here.

O Shouji contends that the crowd is letting their pain be exploited, which is a fair cop, but will become difficult to square with his praise of them next chapter.

O He says that these peoples’ children might be the next targets, presumably because of their actions here today.  This is particularly maddening because it’s coming from someone who was, himself, already targeted as a child!  Not because of anything his parents did, and certainly not because of anything bad he did, but simply because of the bigoted, backwards views of his town.  Children already and still are being targeted!  Shouji’s backstory is all wrong for this stand, and there’ll be another angle on that next chapter as well.

O Here we finally fulfill the promise of Shouji’s databook entry and see the Little Girl Crying Because His Face Was Scary.  She wasn’t crying because she was just scared of his face in isolation, but rather because she sees his face being scary as her fault, directly correlating his wounds to her rescue.[27] Those wounds stand in marked contrast to what happens when other people save small helpless children from danger, and underlines the biggest problem with this whole resolution: the idea that simply Being An Hero will create change.

27: My big question is, “Given that him being in contact with her was so bad it got him scarred for life, how did she even sneak out to see him again to give him this tearful apology?  Did young Shouji even want this apology, or would he have preferred she not risk the two of them being seen together again for both their sakes?

Now, it’s certainly likely in Horikoshi’s world that this little girl will, herself, grow up to be different from the people around her, that she won’t think heteromorphs are tainted.  And like, that’s at least one less person being awful, right?  And doesn’t every one count?

Sure, of course—but what happens when she runs up against that prejudice herself?  Will she try to intervene the next time she sees a blood cleansing?  Will she simply abstain from such action and teach equality in her own household without trying to change the village around her?  Will she simply move away and leave her hometown worse for her absence?  If she does stay in that town, will she herself become an outcast for her views—a form of silent, passive harassment that can be absolutely life-wrecking in those small Japanese villages?  If she gets married and has children, will her husband have her back in trying to raise those kids free of hatred?

For that matter, isn’t there a chance that, being surrounded in people who think heteromorphs are tainted, that she’ll just internalize something like, “It was my carelessness that got that poor heteromorph boy beaten so badly.  He was trying to help, and it only got us both hurt—him for the beatings, me for being in contact with his filth.”  Like, she’s so young in that scene; she’s got a whole lotta years of having the anti-heteromorph narrative reaffirmed at her before she’s old enough to do anything different herself.  It feels to me like the kind of thing that she could easily fall back into as she grows up, only to have a huge spiritual crisis about it once she hits her late teens to early twenties.

In any case, it's just a lot to put on a single child—on her and Shouji both!

O Spinner rallies enough to yell out a message of his own, but it’s just a quote of what he told his followers when he first sent out the call, not anything new to rally them, nor tailored to respond to what Shouji’s saying.  This has been the danger of the plotline all along, and here it comes to fruition: in putting bad faith villains with ulterior motives[28] up against an underdeveloped character who’s hidden the evidence of his mistreatment from Day 1, someone with no apparent intention to ever speak up for others like himself, no one comes out looking good.  Truly, heteromorphs deserve better rep.

28: #2 is the obvious one, but Spinner’s here in bad faith, too.  While I’m sure he’s not totally indifferent to the matter of heteromorph rights, it’s self-admittedly not his current priority.

O That said, if what Spinner says is old hat to the crowd, it is new to the audience, and it serves to sharply up the ante on from what we knew previously about the persecution he faced in his hometown!

But it would have gotten better if he’d just put on a mask and dealt with it, amirite?

Recall that Spinner has previously only said that people in his town called him names—this is self-evidently many steps worse.  Note, though, that it’s another example of the violence heteromorphs face not involving anyone using quirks—that is to say, nothing that’s a hero’s jurisdiction to deal with.  That being the case, how much could Spinner get away with fighting back or running before the “it’s okay to use quirks in self-defense” stops holding?  After all, is it still self-defense if biased cops[29] can accuse him of “escalating” the conflict?  How far away can he get by climbing on walls before it becomes, to some small-town local Hero, unlicensed public quirk use?

29: If policing in HeroAca Japan still works basically the same as it does in IRL Japan, then in truly backwater areas, ones too small to afford the upkeep of a police department, an officer would be sent in from another area to live in a home attached to the police box.  That being the case, it’s not a given that the officer would share the locals’ bigotry.  That’s where we come back to the whole “what percentage of Villain-designated criminals are heteromorphs” statement and what it implies about bias in the law enforcement system.  Also too, building a strong relationship with the community is absolutely essential to rural policing, and there are, oh, so many stories about what happens when someone new in a small Japanese town gets between the inhabitants and their “traditional spiritual practices.”

O Pig Nose Guy starts making an impression by noticing the doctors—most prominently Dr. Yoshi, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a baseline nurse—forming a human chain in front of the hallway leading to the Inpatient Ward.  This drama is undercut on both fronts by the fact that Spinner is not looking for the Inpatient Ward, and in fact barrels right on past that hallway without even glancing in its direction.  So, the mob stops because they’re struck to hesitation by a group of people protecting a part of the hospital that the mob was not even intending to assault in the first place.

O As part of stopping, Pig Nose Guy seems to have some sort of flashback to a time he saw Dr. Toad caring for an elderly baseline man.  This raises a lot of questions to my by-this-time hyper-critical eyes.

What past circumstance brought Pig Nose Guy—presumably fairly rural, as most of this crowd is implied to be—to Central Hospital, the most technologically advanced hospital in the entire country?    •  If Pig Nose Guy is not rural, but was still so fired up about heteromorphobia that he joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital, wouldn’t that suggest that a lot of people in the story have been misleading us about the extent of anti-heteromorph sentiment in cities?    

If the person in the bed is someone related to Pig Nose Guy—perhaps someone with a rare illness that requires specialized treatment?—why is the guy entirely baseline?  If it’s just a friend, then they must be very close, given that PNG was willing to take a trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area to visit him.  But if PNG is that close to a baseline guy, why did he ever believe that baseline folks are such a lost cause that he, again, joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital?    

Why is this important, impactful memory one of a heteromorph in a caretaker role instead of being taken care of?  To elaborate on why that question matters, a common issue you’ll see minority groups raise when talking about representation in media is the role any given minority character performs in their narrative—the gay best friend there to give the straight female lead advice, the Black person there to help a white person self-actualize, that sort of thing.  This is not so much a critique of any given, specific character as it is criticizing the restrictions on of what demographics are allowed to be portrayed as full, rounded individuals in popular media versus which are relegated to stock stereotypes or supporting cast.     This isn’t something BNHA addresses explicitly, but I do think we have some precedent for suspecting heteromorphs in this world have similar problems—think of the image for Class B’s play in Chapter 173, Gang Orca playing the Villain at the license exam, and, most egregiously, the Hug Me Corporation and its all-baseline-all-the-time image of bystanders and victims.  That being the case, it really gets to me that Pig Nose Guy’s memory here has the man in the hospital bed being baseline while it’s the doctor who’s the heteromorph.     Like, what does that communicate about his mindset, exactly?  “Oh, I remember this time I saw a heteromorph who’d managed to actually kind of Make It in society and he was nice to the baseline guy in his care.  But the spider guy leading us, he didn’t sound like he wanted us to be very nice at all.  Is that what I am?  Not nice?”  On the other hand, if the whole point of this memory is to remind PNG that there can be peace and support between heteromorphs and “people with human faces,” why in heaven’s name isn’t this a memory of a heteromorph being cared for and supported by a baseline person?  Why does the person doing the labor in this picture have to be of the oppressed class?

I hate this panel so much.

   

Chapter 373: 

O The last conversation plays out between Pig Nose Guy, #2, and Shouji, revealing #2 to be a bad faith idealogue who thinks of Shouji with microaggressions and his followers as meatshield patsies.  It’s real bad.

O Shouji says that the feelings that led the mob to come today are neither useless nor wrong, and that their willingness to keep thinking about everything makes them look like a bright and shining light to his eyes.  However, he carefully does not engage with the fact that those feelings, which were previously aimless and directionless, were only stirred up and stoked to the point of “coming today” by the villains.  It’s the same sort of thing the villains always get told, really—you may have a point, you have suffered, but when you act on that point, that suffering, then you’ve gone too far.  All you’re really supposed to do with that pain is—what, exactly?  Thinka bout it and choose to Nobly Endure?

O The last little bit of insult to this chapter, to my eye, is #2 getting an apology from some anonymous hero we’ve never seen in our lives, who says, “We’ve heard your voices loud and clear today.  Sorry for not realizing sooner.”

Remember the bit where the person who apologizes to Shouji for the octopus comment is Mineta, the gag character, instead of Sero, the serious character who brought it up in the first place?  Remember the conspicuous absence of Bakugou and Todoroki, who have actually used that language with conscious demeaning intent?  This apology is the systemic version of that absolute unwillingness on Horikoshi’s part to let his sympathetic/popular/important characters look bad.  It’s the same thing that led to none of the heroes who retired after the war being heroes the readers know and care about, the same thing behind the total collapse of the series’ critique of All Might.  Heroes are allowed to be ignorant, but they are not allowed to be complicit.

Notice, too, what this random hero does not say, what Shouji does not offer, the absence that damns this resolution: any promises of concrete change.  We’ve finally gotten to the crux of Horikoshi’s point, as delivered by Shouji, and it really does all boil down to this:

And I can’t overstate enough what a terrible resolution this is, especially given how Shouji’s own experience puts the lie to it.  Remember, Shouji saved a child from drowning, one of the absolute most prototypical actions someone can do and get called a Hero by the bystanders/victims/evening news.  The only thing he could have done that would have been more stereotyped would have been saving her from a burning building!  He saved that little girl from drowning and the townsfolk attacked him with farming tools for it.

How much more heroic would he have needed to be?  How much more of a shining light could he possibly have been?  In what universe could someone with that backstory possibly think that the answer to systemic bigotry—violence that goes wholly accepted by the community and wholly unpunished by the broader society—could be this Model Minority bullshit?

Ultimately, for Shouji’s backstory to realistically have given him the motivation he professes, his actions needed to have changed the people in his village for the better.  If the reader is meant to believe that Shouji’s “answer”—the premise that selfless heroism can change the hearts of bigots—then we have to see it.  And, you know, even if that had been what we got, there would still be grounds to criticize it!  It would still be a perhaps-too-idealistic depiction of fighting oppression; it would still put too much responsibility on the victims!  But at least it would justify Shouji’s own stance.

As it is, we have Shouji choosing to believe in the changeability of people who specifically shouted while throwing rocks at him that, no matter how much the times advanced, they would never accept him.  His answer does not entail a single non-heteromorph working to bring heteromorphs living in the darkness a light; it entails them kindling their own.  As with Pig Nose Guy shutting down in the face of a memory of a heteromorph doctor, this resolution asserts the life-changing power of…being told that heteromorphs have to do all the work to make baseline people feel better.

   

Conclusion

Do I think that this terrible resolution means heteromorphobia was poorly set up or retconned?  No, I don’t.  I just think it means that Horikoshi is a Japanese man writing a Japanese story from a position of demographic privilege in Japanese society.  I think he’s fully capable of setting up a detailed, intelligent, thoughtful discrimination allegory, a logical, internally consistent extension of the discrimination in the world around him to the alternate future he’s created—and then coming to a completely different resolution than I would because his context led him to different answers than I wanted or found acceptable.  Compared to the U.S., Japan as a culture is more communal, more collectivist; they have less history with successful protest movements, more history with protest movements turning violently extremist or just being ignored by those in power.  The idea of “not making trouble for others” is an incredibly deeply engrained value.

I have a decent idea why this resolution is what it is.  I can try to make myself view it through the more generous, forgiving lens of Cultural Differences; I can fail to do so and instead conclude that this is portrayal is much less about Cultural Differences than it is yet another in a long chain of Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Author Writes Discrimination Allegory, Fucks It All Up Because of His Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Centrism.  That doesn’t mean I believe heteromorphobia came out of nowhere, and I hope this essay has at least demonstrated that much, whatever you might think of its resolution.

——————————

Thank you so much for taking this journey with me, all! At 42,000 words and 93 pages in Word, there's definitely more I'd like to do with this, chiefly taking a spin through the Vigilantes spinoff, which I've always found to be very good at grappling with practical questions and concerns BNHA Core largely ignores. The character of Kamayan is particularly relevant to this topic.

However, for now, I'm going to take a break on this subject and turn my attention to something else. I'm not sure what it'll be quite yet, but meta projects that have moved towards the top of my list concern the ridiculous series of nerfs Toga has been subjected to in this endgame, arc thoughts on everything I hate about the stupid, stupid All Mech fight, and an organized argument for the endgame being chock-full of retcons that are obvious if you look at them for more than the five minutes it takes to read a chapter each week.

You may notice that all of those are pretty negative-sounding, and you would be right. Given that the whole reason I stopped doing my chapter posts is that I was weary of the constant negativity, the actual next thing I do will probably be to get back to one of my neglected MLA fanfic projects.

'Til next time, all!

[viridiave]

❤️💚💀 for the ask game 👀👀

Hi Sly!! Thanks for the ask!! Gonna assume this is about the 8path games lmao

❤️: Which character do you think is the most egregiously mischaracterized by the fandom?

I'm not sure tbh - rather than mischaracterized I think Ochette tends to be handled carelessly? And it kind of frustrates me that this isn't COMPLETELY the fandom's fault, because canon doesn't really treat her much better despite having good potential. There's a lot about Ochette's character that I wish was explored on a deeper level, like her general philosophy on forming ties and using her love of food for something deeper than a quirk of her character - they ALMOST had it with how her Chapter 3 ended, but to me she didn't amount to being much more than like. The Christian kid in Filipino movies who tells the adults to stop fighting because it's silly (if you know, you know).

Other than Ochette I think Ogen gets bad credit sometimes too. Like I get that logistically speaking his license should be revoked but honestly looking at Alfyn's Chapter 3 and what he's supposed to represent to Alfyn, he WORKS - he's a jaded man whose ideals were shaken and this drove him down a morally complicated route, using his talents to render judgement as he sees fit. He's someone who clashes with Alfyn (who would beat the hell out of thugs if he really needs to but still ultimately turn the other cheek and heal them once he gets everything he needs) on a fundamental level - something that Alfyn was bound to face EVENTUALLY. I don't think Alfyn's Chapter 3 (and really. Alfyn's story in general) would have worked nearly as well without him and Miguel together.

💚: What does everyone else get wrong about your favorite character?

Damn I can't even pick who my favorite is. But I guess if I REALLY had to say something, I think how Crick's devotion to Temenos tends to be portrayed misses the mark on his relationship to him. Vice-versa too if I'm gonna be particularly nitpicky about things. As much as I enjoy Temenos and Crick's dynamic, there's a lot more broiling underneath the surface between them both - one such thing is like. The deeper implications and meaning behind Crick's devotion to the Sanctum Knights and why he's so quick to defend its name. We KNOW he wasn't raised in faith, faith saved HIM - and this does a LOT of mean things to his psyche. What Temenos does to him is cruel and tough but ultimately NECESSARY. I'd like to see more turbulence between them, that's honestly what makes their relationship so interesting to me - not because Temenos is some forbidden unknown that enters Crick's life, but because Temenos plays an active part in SHATTERING everything that was keeping Crick afloat in the years following him abandoning his old life.

Edit: on the Temenos doing cruel things bit I mostly refer to his subtler attempts at breaking Crick's rose-tinted view of the Church - starting with himself and the role of Inquisitor. Temenos is kind of the beginning of Crick's existential destruction and the catalyst for his rebirth and growth, if I had to put it to poetic words

💀: If you had to choose one major character to die, who would you choose?

Okay damn this is a hard question. Am I allowed to think about this in a postgame context. Because my honest answer would be either Cyrus or Temenos - like don't get me wrong, I love both of them to bits, but in my brain it just makes sense to me that out of their respective parties, they'd be the first ones to kick the bucket? It's hard to explain but if I was gonna kill anyone off in a fanfic they'd definitely be the easiest ones to come up with a reason for.

Cyrus I'm picking because I just think that regardless of how selfless anyone else in the party could be, in a life or death situation - he'd be the quickest one to make the hard decision, if he thinks that's the best solution to the problem at hand. Temenos more or less has the same reasoning for me but for him it'd also just be so much meaner to have him watch everyone ELSE die first, so I feel like in a script he'd die first just to spite my expectations.

[lollytea]

please please my dear tell me a story of one of Willow's murders

I'm gonna copy and paste down some of the idea from the DMs from a while ago. I'll only steal the messages I wrote, which is why they might look disorganised. Cuz I'm replying to something another person said. Anyway forgive it for being sloppy, you know how it is with DMs:

- We had the hc that having a galdorstone for a heart might tamper with Hunter's blood. Like the liquid would be imbued with an unstable amount of magic.

Its considered extremely dangerous to work with grimwalker blood. Raine and the rest of the lab experimented with a literal DROP that Hunter donated once and it made shit fucking explode. Its just WAY too much to handle.

But obviously, that's not gonna stop some people from trying to get a hold of it. It's considered extremely valuable. It will sell for SO MUCH at the night market.

Obviously anybody who's willing to risk everyone else's safety to get hold of an absolutely lethal substance and possibly harm/capture Hunter to bleed him dry, would obviously be an absolutely depraved awful person. Just vile.

However, people do not go after Hunter as often as one might think. It definitely happens every once in a while tho.

Willow is up early tending to her garden, letting Hunter sleep in an extra few hours before he has to go to work. She's taken the baby from her cradle so she doesnt cry and wake up Papa and now has her sleeping in a sling against Willow's chest, soothed by the sound of Mama's heartbeat.

Willow's whole garden abruptly shifts in a way only she can notice and she lifts her head, alerted to the apparent disturbance. She recognizes the signal. It means there's an intruder.

Willow approaches the back yard where there is a man who tried to break in by their window but was immediately snatched and restrained by vines.

Willow quickly deduces who he is by rooting around in his pockets and discovering his identifications, weapons, vials, ropes and sleep potions.

"Let me guess," Willow says softly. "You're here for my husband,"

Said husband continues to sleep on peacefully, as does the baby curled up against her breast. The baby doesn't wake because Willow's heartbeat remains steady.

The Boiling Isles doesn't have Coven Scouts anymore. There's no longer a police form. Meaning, it's easier to get away with crimes. You won't go to jail. However you might get slaughtered in cold blood if you pick the wrong target.

Willow thinks about strangling him until his organs pop but she decides against it.

She won't kill him.

Instead she smothers his mouth shut in vines so he can't scream. (The two loves of her life are sleeping ssshhhh)

She sprouts the plants that Hunter was always deeply fascinated with. The ones that sizzle and boil and devour flesh.

She has it slither up the intruders body, leeching against his left leg, his right arm, his back, his collarbone. The acidic spit stings like a nightmare. It takes chunks out of him.

He'll live. He's in immense pain and no healing magic will ever fix that but he'll survive. He'll never forget the mistake he made in threatening her family tho.

Willow lets him go and sends him off. She gives him very firm instructions.

"Your friends, partners, whoever put this stupid idea in your head, you go back and you tell them I went easy on you. Consider yourself a warning to them. You will never attempt to touch that man. Do you understand me?"

- I like the thought she wouldn't have tortured him quite so severely if they didn't have a baby. Like No. You won't touch her husband. You won't touch her baby's Papa. They're starting a family together and she will melt you from the inside out if you try to get in their way

- As soon as she fucking renders a guy to a gasping wreck because of the excruciating pain she put him through, she calmly strolls back into the house, into their room and sits down by her husband.

She pecks his lips and she hears him groan.

"It's about time you woke up," She says, tenderly brushing back his hair.

Eyes still closed, Hunter raises a hand and searches around for hers. He finds it and presses her palm against his cheek.

"Okay...I'm up...I'm up...." He mumbles, still half asleep.

He has no idea. And he probably won't. He's not adverse to his wife *handling* problems like these. He just asks that she not tell him the details. Makes him nauseous

- It's the reason she has absolutely no mercy. Her methods are not only ruthless but strategic. There are people who want to harm her husband and she wants them feeling just as helpless, haunted and traumatized by her actions as she was in that graveyard all those years ago.

She needs them scared of her. She need them to shit themselves in fear over the IDEA of ever going near Hunter again. She kills some intruders. But mostly she mangles them and sends them running so people understand the kind of pain she could put them through too.

She wants them scared. Because *she's* scared. She's scared of being the princess who loses the prince. So she becomes the fire breathing dragon instead.

She often wants to hold him in her arms for a very long time. Even if he's reading or carving or typing some fanfic on his laptop she'll cuddle him from behind. He doesn't always know what she needs comfort from but he's familiar with how she acts when she needs it. So he let's her hold him

Its when Hunter is holding their baby in his arms, talking softly to her, allowing her to seize hold of his finger, that Willow is like "We are going to have a happy peaceful future together if it kills me"

- Willow gets no joy out of killing people but it doesn't make her uncomfortable in the way that it does to Hunter.

When Willow was little and her powers were out of control, she always worried that one day she could seriously hurt somebody and not mean to.

But that's not the case anymore. Sometimes she kills somebody. And she *does* mean to. Everything that's keeping Willow sane and stable and in control of herself are her friends and family. Meaning she will do whatever it takes to strike down any threat to them. She doesn't CARE. She realizes that some people are beyond redemption and if she kills, she kills.

Hunter, meanwhile, has reservations about killing, no matter how vile the person is. Like he is absolutely capable of it. He's strong and tough and powerful. HOWEVER the grimwalker trauma is rooted deep. Its a really troubling thought to shake off, knowing you were literally *constructed* to slaughter witches. It's an act of defiance that he never sheds a witch's blood *once.* If he's ever forced to, it would probably send him spiraling. But like. He's not all "nooo Willow everybody deserves to live." He understands killing as self defense. He just doesn't want to be the one doing it. If he's ever around when Willow has to do it, he turns the other way so he doesn't have to see.

[shereen1]

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[veliseraptor]

i wanted to click the ask button and i accidentally unfollowed you. easily one of the most webbed sites i've ever! ANYWAY i have yet to catch up w/ your 2022 yi city whumptobers;;, but what kind of torment is the most fun/interesting to inflict on each of the yi city squad member? lol this sounds bad but i mean, for xy it's obviously delicious to bite into his issues w/ his body, its weaknesses and the way it's not just 'what makes a xue yang' but also, if not primarily, a tool/weapon. but there's definitely more! and then there's xxc and sl, and a-qing...? i feel they're a very diverse buffet lol

this is a tasty tasty one and I'm sorry it took me so long to get to it ahhhh

going to take this one person at a time!!! for organizational reasons. I love thinking about this kind of thing because for me a lot of it is like. "what would this character hate most, on a level of 'what experience would most undermine their sense of self/emphasize their specific neuroses" and that's a fun way of exploring character.

whump! it's not just about the satisfaction of beating up characters, it's also about the flaying away of emotional shields to reveal the squishy internal bits of your faves. or something like that.

xue yang: you've definitely hit on a big one in your ask, which is, yeah...physical incapacitation that he can't in some way power through, that somehow does render his body...not in his own power, not usable, not capable of what he wants it to do. it's supposed to! it should do whatever he tells it to do! it's not supposed to fail him!

I've talked a lot about the way xue yang sees his body as, in some ways, his enemy, in a way I don't think he's wholly aware of. his body is a problem because his body can take damage, can hurt, and those are things that xue yang would really, really like to avoid happening to him, ever (again), and while yeah, that happening is the fault of the person who hurts him, on some level he feels betrayed by his own body for allowing it. it's not doing its job.

xiao xingchen: for xiao xingchen it's psychological for sure. he can bear a lot of physical pain, I think! he can take that, it's expected, physical violence is a part of the life he chose when he came down the mountain.

what I think he expected less was the psychic damage he can take, and I don't think he can bear it as well (I mean, we know he doesn't). it hits him harder and he's less prepared.

but also. hurting other people and making sure xiao xingchen knows it's because of him. xue yang hit that one right on the head several times (with song lan, with the fake night hunts, with song lan again), and used it to nail xiao xingchen right into his coffin.

song lan: oooh this was an interesting one to think about and made me realize that I have not spent a lot of time making song lan suffer anything but emotional damage, though I have made him suffer a fair amount of emotional damage.

I think with song lan...hmm. I don't know how to articulate this exactly but what gets to him I think is things that undermine his sense of self and his certainty. I think of song lan as someone who doesn't just like stability and routine but in some ways relies on it; it keeps him steady and grounds him. so losing that, or having it yanked out from under him, really throws him off balance.

I'm thinking about how song lan would handle being in a psychological horror narrative and I feel like it would really fuck him up in a way above and beyond anyone else on this list, is kind of what I'm saying? if that makes sense. the...unreliability of his surroundings, and more than that of his own head, his ability to make sense of the world and ground/center himself in some kind of certainty...I think song lan would go downhill fast.

a-qing: I think what it comes down to with a-qing as far as "what's the best way to make her hurt worst" is anything that would render her incapable of defending herself, but more specifically vulnerable in a way that she couldn't even play for sympathy (as is one of her tricks; playing weaker than she is so people underestimate her or even are generous with her).

so like...actually what xue yang does to her on this level is pretty brutal not just on the surface level of, you know, physical agony but also on the level of...by blinding her and removing her ability to speak, and then making her a ghost or...whatever she is in cql, he renders her something that people will perceive as monstrous, and therefore she can't ask for help, can't seek out support, can't communicate what she wants to communicate in order to get what she needs.

what I guess I'm getting at here is the removal of her self-sufficiency. a-qing is someone who is resourceful and clever and very good at getting out of tight spots, and who has had to fend for herself for a lot of her life. removing that in some way, undermining that, is the thing that's most going to get to her - something that makes her for real and inescapably the small, relatively weak girl with nobody to help or protect her that she pretends to be.

[deadpanwalking]

this is big stupid, but can you rec any books or websites on cooking with adhd, where it's not just reminding me to be organized (aka have you tried not having adhd) or assuming that i have a huge kitchen or telling me to spend $ on very nifty but useless containers?

Sorry I've been sitting on this for 10 weeks 😬, but it's a really good question. It's been a while since I checked, but I don't know any books like that. The thing is, organization is something that can actually be so personal! Moreover, being disorganized isn't a fixed character trait—you only believe that because you got forcefed the one-size-fits-all prescriptive Container Store ass definition that never worked for more than one week at a time before your locker/backpack/room started looking like shit again. The fact is that any organizational system that's designed with the neurotypical person you want to be in mind will be rejected like a mismatched organ transplant every fucking time—and you'll only realize after it's too late to return all that crap to the Container Store.

Listen to me. It's in your self-interest to stop hating yourself long enough to prioritize making daily life (which includes but is not limited to cooking) easier. No amount of medication, therapy, or products will rewire your brain into working like another kind of brain. I know self-acceptance can feel like giving up, but the alternative is paying $3000 a month for a shithole where your kitchen is booby trapped so you can't even make shakshuka for your ladyfriend.

A small kitchen is a great place to experiment with accessibility as a practical form of self-care because it's a low-stakes high reward way for you tweak your environment, and the results are quantifiable—easier to focus, things take less time, you sustain fewer cuts and burns, you cry 23% less.

In my specific case, visual-spatial stuff is a huge problem—and it's something that's an issue for lots of folks with ADHD and NVLD, not to mention those who have strokes or neurodegenerative illness. You know how some people have a cluttered aesthetic that they can navigate, because their brain will automatically process visual input and filter out unnecessary detail? With me, too much visual input causes the neurological version of poor rendering and lag in a video game.

The solution? I slapped labels on all my storage boxes, drawers, shelves, and containers. Yeah, it is big stupid and my kitchen looks like Memento (2000) but my brain can handle verbal input like a dream, so I no longer have to create the universe in order to bake an apple pie. But like, before that? I spent decades (and $$$) trying to make it look and function like a Normal Kitchen™, messed up a lot of basic shit, and didn't even have fun doing it.

Anyway, if someone does have a bookrec that fits the bill, they should drop it in the fishbowl comments, but until then, think of specific challenges that you keep running up against when you're trying to cook, and move shit around.

[my-writings-and-musings]

Answering these two asks in a post so all the content can stay in one place!

The original post in question can be found here!

Drift

·He's delighted to have a whole group of young humans on board to foster diplomacy, and he fully intends to do whatever is necessary to make them feel safe and welcome. Though his introduction is polite, the small crowd immediately takes note of his ever present swords, and to his delight their reaction is purely one of innocent awe at his impressive weaponry. Always happy to encourage responsible sword use, he explains the significance of each blade and is incredibly careful when showing the very tiny and very delicate humans what they look like up close. Their delight is so simple and pure some part of him is reminded of his long gone naivety, and his promise to protect them becomes a vow he never intends to break while his own spark still flickers.

·When he casually mentions time on earth one day the group is surprised and effusive in a sudden burst of questions. When he's actually able to recall a surprising amount of pop culture facts their little minds are nearly blown, and from then on they seem to seek him out just to socialize, something that quite surprises him for a multitude of reasons. Even after all his time with the Autobots, many still don't fully accept him as one of their own, so to be seen as a companion by beings so young and innocent... If absolutely touches him, while also making him determined to ensure they never discover that aspect of his life. He tells himself it's for their safety, and that the young shouldn't be troubled with burdens not their own, but he knows that losing the simple delight of their company and respect would hurt him deeply.

·Due to his need for frequent training to keep his skills sharp, it's no surprise that his little fans one day stumble upon him dicing up training dummies in one of the many gymnasium inspired practice areas. Upon seeing them in action he's soon surrounded by a group of very eager wannabe sword fighters, and while he's still recovering from the idea that he's wanted as a teacher a casual mention of Spectralism prompts a new wave of curiosity and interest that he can barely handle. It takes all of his willpower just to keep from letting on how impossibly touched he is by each and every one of them. They're just... interested in who he is? They look up to him just because they think he's cool and want to learn more about his faith, his skills, and his passions...

·The simple goodness of the relationship is all brought to what he thinks to be the end when his past is exposed by accident. He's not even with them when they find out, but he's devastated, and can't bring himself to face them now that they know who he used to be. It's only through sheer determination on behalf of the whole group, and what he thinks is bad luck for him, that the young liaisons manage to find and speak to him once more. For an instant he breaks and can only apologize effusively, begging their forgiveness for... well, everything from the secret to letting them down to allowing them to believe he was what they thought he was. It takes all of them working in tandem to speak over him and make one thing clear; no one is angry.

·His little group of fans makes it abundantly clear they don't see him as "Deadlock" or a Decepticon or anything but the bot they've come to respect. He's not his past in their eyes, and his present has been nothing but kind and welcoming to each and every one of them. Their little hands take hold of his in a gesture of affirmation, and in the strength of their compassion he can't help but feel dwarfed by each of them. Somehow, the experience brings them even closer, and they can frequently be heard referring to their "older brother" when heading off for the training sessions he painstakingly caters to their size. When some of them begin to show him Spectralist greetings and goodbyes he has to take the time to shed a few tears in private, but they definitely notice how affected he is regardless, and each of them make a point to show him how important he is to them every day.

Rodimus

·It was his own genius diplomatic skills that got these little humans secured on the ship in the first place, so he's quite eager to welcome them on board when the day finally comes. The fact that he stresses about impressing them for hours beforehand is something he keeps entirely to himself though... Yet it turns out he has nothing to fear, because each human is rendered speechless merely by the size of the Lost Light when they first see it, and he can't help but be made giddy as a result. He doesn't need to fake any of the enthusiasm he shows as he takes them on a tour, speeding through the hallways and alternating between giving them lifts in vehicle mode and bot mode, the latter of which has him carrying the group on his shoulders and in his arms.

·It's impossible not to be shocked as he sees the humans all... like and respect him immediately? Everything from his altmode to his jokes, they just... their little faces light up and they compliment him and they all want to hang out with him again as soon as possible?! What is this?! Despite having no idea he happily throws himself into this new and strange relationship with these tiny humans. So many of the interests and hobbies he's been told are "unfit" for a bot in his position are met with fascination, support, and requests for him to teach them all he can. It quickly goes from pleasantly surprising to absolutely touching. The whiplash of suddenly having so much positive attention spurs a change in him, namely one of uncharacteristic levels of protective instinct towards these precious visitors.

·Though he's entirely casual to their faces, behind the scenes he's checking on absolutely everything to ensure they're all taken care of. Are their rooms comfortable? Is the food to their liking? Does the crew make them feel welcome? Can he do anything to make their stay better? The various bots he checks in with to ensure everything is running smoothly quickly grow irritated with his constant pestering, though this new side of him is refreshing to most, particularly because he hasn't ever been this responsible about anything in the past. He even checks in with Magnus on the regular! And submits reports in a timely fashion! All to make sure he's doing everything in his power to keep these young liaisons as happy as he can.

·To the humans themselves though, he's the ultimate fun uncle, introducing them to the entire crew and showing them all the fun things there are to do around the ship. If he hears even a rumor that one of them is missing something about their home or wants to try something they don't have the ability to make happen, you better believe he is going to do everything in his power as captain to get things going. But of course he keeps all this work to himself, he wants to be the most effortlessly cool bot they know, and also doesn't want to concern them with all of the details. Unfortunately a slip up for one particularly epic movie night at Swerve's reveals the many sleepless hours he spent arranging it all, and in his rushed reasurances it comes out that he's been working himself ragged taking care of their every need.

·The entire group is shocked by his dedication, but also his incredible talent. He's funny, charismatic, friendly, and he's also been doing so much for them? The entire group brings him into an impromptu hug of appreciation, and he very nearly tears up in front of them. Somehow, these young aliens have become everything he didn't know he needed. They're his friends, but they look up to him, and his new honorifics of "Fun uncle" and "big brother" are there to prove it. But from then on they refuse to let him do all the work of arranging things himself. If someone has an idea to improve the ship, it gets done as a group, with one very happy bot surrounded by his ever present posse of humans ready to help the coolest captain in the galaxy. They're even kind enough to pretend they don't see the happy tears misting his optics from time to time.

Rung

·Not having ever been to earth, along with never seeing humans outside of their media, means he really didn't know what to expect of the incoming humans. Hearing that they were all exceptionally young just made him concerned, especially after a quick bit of research made it apparent that humans are quite emotionally turbulent in this protoformesque stage. He's not concerned for his sake though, even the tallest human is tiny at his side, he's worried they made need a little extra assistance adjusting to life after such a big change. Thus, he makes quite sure to be present when they're brought on board to introduce himself and extend his services. A small part of him can't help but be delighted upon meeting them; so small, yet so exuberant! They're all polite despite their wide eyed wonder at... everything, but his description of his proffesion really catches their attention for a group exclamation; Cybertronians have psychologists?!

·Having prepared to offer help, he's blindsided by their interest in simply... learning about his career? They want to know about the places he's been and the ships he's served on, particularly when they learn he has models of each, and they're so small he's not at all worried when he brings a couple collectibles down for them to see up close. Watching these little beings clamor to see something most of his own kind finds boring makes the protective feelings in his spark strengthen into a promise to keep each and every one of them safe. He takes note of each individual human's traits and personalities while memorizing their names, being quite aware of how much it means to simply have one's designation remembered, and also commits to guiding them all through their unique interests and goals.

·Spending time with the liaisons in their group as well as one on one, it doesn't occur to him that they don't follow the same pattern as every Cybertronian he's ever met until one of them brings it up; why do the other bots always get his name wrong? It's only in that moment he realizes none of them have ever forgotten, mispronounced, or even hesitated to say his name. The surprise is enough that he can't even reply to them initially. When he does manage to find words they're quite insufficient, and he tries to explain that even he doesn't know, but he's always just assumed his small stature and quiet demeanor simply meant he tended to fade from memory rather quickly. Nothing else beyond his "historical constant" theory really explains it, as far as he knows.

·Ever able to defy expectations, the little liaisons react to his indirect self depreciation with emphatic reasurances that he's not at all forgetable, and are so intent on making sure he knows that they speak over one another in an emotional gaggle of supportive youngsters. It's all more than the quiet psychiatrist could have ever expected. Of course he never enjoyed being forgotten, but he's become so accustomed to dismissing those feelings he has no way to process this sudden outpouring of support. The humans are all around him in a kind of embrace, which is made difficult mostly due to the number of them and the size difference, but the affection in the gesture is still quite clear. It's all he can do to hold them in return as they all promise to never forget him no matter what happens.

·He keeps his tears private, but that doesn't stop them from coming when he's behind closed doors, though he just lets the happiness brim over into the few that run down his cheeks after he removes his glasses. The irony of it all doesn't hit him until he and the group are present at a movie night, and as he listens to them all gush in turn to the cinema selection of the evening it occurs to him that his initial intent to help them has been flipped quite completely around. These little ones have helped him, helped him feel worth remembering, helped him feel like he belongs, helped him find a family... Watching them gather around him almost protectively from a forgetful world, he isn't quite sure if he's been adopted or if they have, but he can't bring himself to care about such details. Neither can any of the liaisons who vowed to each other their new friend would never feel lonely again.

[thekaijudude]

How do you think the STORAGE Robots would fare against a Belial Fusion Monster?

It depends which specific Belial Fusion Beast you're talking about here

(I mean even Chimeraberus and Atrocious are considered Belial Fusion Beasts but of course I assume you're not including them in this discussion)

And also I'm assuming you're referring to the Belial Fusion Beasts as accessed by the Geed Riser rather than Ultra Fusion because as of now, we only know that the latter is weaker, but we don't know just by how much so I'm just gonna sidestep that point for the time being

Tbh I don't think Sevengar nor Windom stands a chance against a single one of them in a 1v1 cause they simply lack both the firepower and durability that's needed to match them

However for Thicc Joe, I can definitely see him taking out Skull Gomora considering just how agile we've seen he is compared to the relatively slow moving Skull Gomora. And even if there was physical grappling, I'd say that Thicc Joe ain't no slouch in that department either.

And I'm fairly convinced with thicc joe's agility coupled with the firepower of the Pedanium Particle Cannon, I'd say Thicc Joe would take this mid diff

For Thunder Killer tho it's kind of a mismatch cause he can produce large amounts of electricity, but can that amount be enough to overload and render thicc joe, a mech, to short circuit?

And can TK also absorb the Pendanium Particle Cannon just like how he absorbed SB's Strike Boost? It's debatable

But Thicc Joe still possesses the superior speed and agility advantage here, so I suppose as long as he can time his limited number of shots of the Pendanium Particle Cannon and aim it anywhere else on TK other than his chest then theoretically he could take TK out

But it's gonna be extremely high diff since alot of effort is needed by thicc joe here cause he can't afford to be within melee distance and he only has like 2-3 shots with fhe Cannon

For Pendanium Zetton is an utter mismatch, his ridiculous durability coupled with his extremely low cast time of teleportation hax as well as his strength is just way beyond what Thicc Joe can handle

Now against King Galactron is an interesting matchup cause both are rather relative to each other in terms of capabilities. Thicc Joe definitely still has he superior agility here but KG is of course extremely tough and can bring up shields with a very low cast time

Not to mention that he too possess a Pendaium Launcher itself which UFF said is stronger than the normal version

Now can Thicc Joe's Cannon go through all that? It's quite uncertain

But then again this is also kind of the same case like against TK, where Thicc Joe cannot afford to fight KG in melee cause his strength stats are quite insane ngl

So just like in against TK, it's theoretically possible, but extremely high diff for thicc joe here

And of course I can't say anything about Ultroid Zero as of yet so I suggest u ask me this question again when we see him next month

Thanks for the question!

[jdmainman123]

#Report I called exactly what it wasn't

You guys ready for this one

This satellite maker built a tiny a****** crack downtown City with some tiny ass f****** train and tiny ass bus that goes to the airport and comes back downtown like a hundred or like a thousand houses in between

Then he taught all the kids in the city to protect every satellite maker in the world that killed his own daughter? How did the satellite operators find out that your maker has a dead daughter

I called it

The problem is the integration won't allow us to just identify every smart-ass remark with a dead daughter because we feel your satellite operator men and boys are weaker your your men are weaker outside they can't handle or hear a dead daughter to shut off the integration? So they want us to say black mass Justice and blame the little black skin girl and blaming innocent little black skin boy? Just to keep the smile on your dead f****** family's face? When we hear the satellite integration term to turn off? Dead daughter

It's a misstatement here that's what you guys been saying since Dallas but let me remind you guys something you are not in a position to have this entire city wired just cuz someone found out satellite maker killed his own daughter

And forgive me and forget me if not noticing that 100% of the girls that I've seen had been saying the word dead daughter

SO THERE IT IS I CALLED EXACTLY WHAT IT WASN'T WE DIDN'T THINK IT WOULD HAVE GOTTEN THIS BAD FOR SOCIALISM BUT FOR THIS CITY TO HAVE BEEN BUILT AND TO HAVE FOUR SEEN THAT IT'S PROBABLY ONE OF THE WORST SATELLITE MAKER CITIES OUT OF 50% OF THE WORLD AND WILL GIVE YOU ANOTHER NUMBER

For this satellite maker how would he know that his city is the most piece of s*** tiny a****** crack city? For him to know this? And for him to go again with the 3/4 Beach and telling us all the satellite operators accepted having a dead daughter which we don't believe you? And for him to continue this attack IN RENDERING EVERY SATELLITE OPERATOR WITHOUT A DAUGHTER BECAUSE HE KNOWS HE NOT A REAL SATELLITE MAKER HE LOST THE SATELLITE MAKER COMPETITION TO 75% OF THE REST OF THE WORLD HE WOULD BE THE LAUGHING STOCK OF SATELLITE MAKERS THE JOKE OF SATELLITE MAKERS

It's just every f****** corner I get I got a little boy and a little girl with the dead daughter joking they're f****** mouth and they all only say a certain amount of fighting words and it gives me a f****** headache because inside a room there they're targeted and purposely to say the same things almost on accident they would be saying the same things not on purpose because they have a small mind they have a small vocabulary they don't have one school open they would unintentionally be saying the same f****** things and it would literally what we called set a building on fire by itself or the window would break out and the building would catch smoke because they're all unintentionally would be saying the same thing because they're tiny brains and their tiny vocabulary there would be in the same room saying the same f****** things

And again I have to find another satellite maker that will allow these boys to die for him and I'm sick and tired of coming to this gay f****** City it's the definition of gay son my son couldn't come to your city because these men knew they were dead knew they could never get on an airplane and they're all f****** suicidal unaccomplished and they will never be anything with their lives and they want to blame me they want to attack

So gay son is this yacht fish is forced into another city with the boys and men know they're not allowed on an airplane? And all they want to do is attack me with their small-minded words they're not going to school words and they all have the same fight words they all repeat the same thing unintentionally

And it's it's Jason my son couldn't come to your city and work for them because your boys will never leave they don't want to leave no boy would come to the city and work? And these are one of the cities that was red flagged and determined if this continues they're going to be bombed which we are hoping will still happen

IT'S JUST A BUNCH OF MEN'S NEGATIVE ENERGY IN THE SATELLITE FORCING ME OUTSIDE TO DEAL WITH THAT FAT ASS WHITE SKIN BOY BORN SICK FIGHTING WORDS AND THAT LITTLE DEAD WHITE TRASH DAUGHTER FIGHTING WORDS? WHEN SHE KNOWS SHE CAN'T LEAVE? It's just negative energy if if integration antecedent doesn't make more sense that I'm forced to deal with these suicidal f****** men making me look up at them using fighting words at me I don't know what else does but the problem is they keep on asking how the integration and how the antecedent other than negative energy and forced to look at these f****** hateful and jealous men of me use fighting words in their own little head and that satellite pressing the two-way call for electric shock? I don't know how else to explain integration and antecedent other than I'm forced to deal with these f****** men only f****** men and my son couldn't come to your city means you have a dead f****** daughter because you guys provide nothing for the world and your satellite maker new among 75% of other satellite makers in the world he would be the one chosen to be represented a dead daughter so f*** your son and f*** your daughter and f*** your failed homosexual men that I have to f****** continue to look up at and continue to deal with their gay f****** s*** of their f****** few minded fight words that's why I can't speak yeah it's here that's why I can't speak because these f****** kids don't know the other words that I know

I promise I'm not excited about f****** all these murders but this one here MCI Kansas for you to bring gold son back in because he speaks English in a dead daughter words? Mark my f****** words you just signed his daughter's f****** death certificate

P THEY BROUGHT ALL THESE F****** WHITE HAIR WHITE OLD GRANDMA AND GRANDPA TO SAY THE BLACK SKIN PEOPLES ACCENT CAN'T SPEAK THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND I HAD TO DEAL WITH THIS DEAD F****** WHITE TRASH AND THAT F****** N***** WALK AROUND SAYING HE DOESN'T HAVE SEX NOT THAT HE DOESN'T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND HE DOESN'T HAVE SEX

And I promise you f****** n****** when you show up on my beach for he doesn't have sex mark my f****** words I'm going to cut off your tiny f****** dicks

And we called the integration antecedent Boston Utah they would be saying he doesn't have a girlfriend

Not every sunrise has a mother and thankfully I didn't have to use it on dallas? I escaped the fort worth? But here in Kansas MCI fool me once when I came here from Dallas the first time and saw this piece of s*** f****** dead daughter tiny f****** butthole City when I come back here I'm marking your salt your sorry ass City without a mother

Not every sunrise has a mother and MCI Kansas is exactly one of them that doesn't have a mother

Just a mother f****** white-haired girl without a brother and a dog? AND JASON I'M FORCED TO DEAL WITH THESE BOYS NEGATIVE F****** ENERGY NO MAN SHOULD HAVE TO LOOK UP AT YOUR F****** DEAD SON WITHOUT A JOB BEGGING FOR FOOD CURSING AT US AND THOSE F****** BABY KILLER WORDS AND IT'S F****** DEAD CRACKER SHOWERS I SHOWER I SHOWER I'M FUNNY I SHOWER I SHOWER I SHOWER I'M FUNNY I SHOWER I SHOWER I'M FUNNY I SHOWER I SHOWER I'M FUNNY I SHOWER I SHOWER I'M FUNNY IT'S CUT OUT EYES EVERY TIME I LOOK UP IT'S SMILING AND POINTING

So we have a new term for gay son tell Florida 3/4 they have been pronounced dead because you guys thought it was what you did to your black skin girls p**** and we're going to keep that one and keep this one for court when we need to play our card then we'll bring out the boys negative energy the fat white skin one the small white skin one just a shower language and I can curse them out better I shower I'm funnier let me go up to him and tell him to two words that I know that daughter

And for gay son to have been taken off of what you guys did to that little girl's p**** and be reminded of the boys negative energy in the city? That strike two in fish forbid I called exactly what it wasn't your failed satellite maker had to build a tiny a****** crack city to trick everyone on the dead daughter language and unfortunately it happened the satellite operators will be rendered a dead daughter? Just because black skin men can't please women

Well at least that n***** got his dream he gets to die with a daughter and you f****** crackers don't I think that's the funniest thing in the underlining statement that we needed here to go forward it's not for me but it's a gift for me indirectly I guarantee that's what's going to happen to you boys you white skin boys that's what we ever had it satellite operators don't have a daughter they're trying to trick it on my beach but I wasn't having it I got kicked out because of the gay son what you did to that little girl's p****? Turns out it's because of all the boys negative energy in this city and forcing other boys to come in here and look up at the f****** retard that only says two or three f****** language words and all the f****** boys said the same f****** language words they're all saying that the same time unintentionally that's gay son the negative energy and your f****** little fighting words white skin cracker that never has to leave

F*** you

[lalka-laski]

Have you ever said to someone, “Bite Me”? Why did you say that? Nah, that's not me

Are you addicted to Tim Hortons Iced Capps? I don't think I've ever had one tbh. I like Timmy's hot drip coffee.

Did you like the beach a lot more as a kid more than you do now? Why/Why not? I don't remember going all that much as a kid. I definitely frequent the beach a lot more as an adult.

What’s the best way someone can show you they love you? My love language is words of affirmation so any kind of heartfelt letter, note, card or even a text.

Do you like when people give you big hugs? From certain people

Have you ever told someone you fucking love them? Who? Oh yes, I aggressively tell Glenn daily!

Can you tell when someone who was your friend, doesn’t like you anymore? This happened to me a few times in middle school. What bothered me was that these girls never outright admitted that they didn't want to be my friend anymore. They just started acting cold and distant towards me until I took the hint, and when I confronted them about it they played dumb and tried to convince me that their behavior was no different than normal. Gaslighting, much?!

How about when a guy or crush doesn’t like you anymore, can you tell? Yeah, although I still try to convince myself that things are fine even when they so clearly aren't. That happened in a quite a few past relationships.

Exactly how can you tell? My boyfriends just acted distant, the "I love yous" got fewer and further between, the conversations got shorter, the amount of time we spent together dwindled

Have you ever seriously rolled on the floor laughing? What from? YES many times!

Do you and your best friends usually act crazy? Wow... please see footage of the wedding this past weekend to get your answer

If so, do you act like that when alone, or publicly or both? Oh we're not afraid to go buck wild in public

Has there ever been a time where you just couldn’t stop crying? Yeah... plenty of times

“Everyone has someone that keeps them looking forward to another day” To the statement above, do you agree or disagree?   You have clearly never experienced depression

Have you ever experienced a feeling that was just too much to handle? What emotion or feeling was it? Um yes, all the time. Overwhelm is kinda my thing.

Do you think you could win at a hot dog eating contest? I don't eat hot dogs, and I can only assume that's kind of a requirement LOL

Have you ever tried to hold on to someone that was impossible to hold onto? Yes...

What do you think of the word “Forever.”? It's scary but comforting all at once

What’s your least favorite time of day? Why don’t you like that time? First thing in the morning... need I say more?

Do actions TRULY speak louder than words? Yeah, actions can render your words meaningful or meaningless.

If bread was eliminated, would you really care all that much? I simply couldn't live

What if all dairy products were too, then would you care? Again, I couldn't live. No cheese? No ice cream? Just kill me and put me out of my misery. Were you ever a fan of Hilary Duff? Has her music gotten better or worse? SHE WAS AND FOREVER WILL BE MY QUEEN! I love that bitch!

Do you like your lips? Do you enjoy kissing? I don't like or dislike my lips. I do enjoy kissing, though.

Do you like any music from the American Idols? Which ones? Kelly Clarkson is a gem! And I liked Carrie Underwood back in the day but now she just annoys me. Glenn has to mute the TV when her Sunday Night Football song comes on

Are you someone who just can’t get enough of that sugar crisp? Is that a drug reference or something?

Are frosted flakes GRRRRREAT? Why or why not? Nah, they're like one of the lowest tiers of cereal

Are you cuckoo for coco puffs? I like 'em

Have you ever loved a total ignorant egoistic jerk? Do you still love him or have you stopped loving him? Yes, and looking back at that time in my life makes me just wanna smack myself. I can't believe I behaved so foolishly.

Do you agree that whatever’s’ meant to be will work out perfectly? Not perfectly, no.

Are you SURE money can’t buy happiness? I just answered this in a previous survey. Money solves a lot of issues and alleviates a lot of stress which in turn, brings happiness.

Have you ever just thought, “Whatever, screw the calories” ? Far more often than I should

If so, what did you say that about, like what food? Almost always pizza or some sort of fast food

Could your parents handle you and your best friends as sisters? I am indeed best friends with my two sisters so, yes

Instead of dating, would you rather just make out and call it a day? Why? Um absolutely not. I'm in love with Glenn and plan to be committed to him for the rest of my life.

Is there someone that makes you feel out of your element? I disassociate a lot, actually. So, a lot of things.

Are you what they call a “love addict”? Explain. I don't understand what that means?

On a scale of 1-10, how much do you like personal affection? 10!!! Well from Glenn, I mean.

Have you ever REALLY wanted someone to just shut up? Why was that? Uh yeah, like all the time. I like silence.

Is there someone that makes you fall in love all over again every time? Glennie

Do you believe TRUE beauty is found in the heart? Do you swear by it? It's a nice thought. Do I swear by it? I'm not sure.

Has your sarcasm ever hurt someone’s feelings? What did you say? I'm sure at some point

Do you like when people challenge you? If so, in what? No, I'm too sensitive

Do you like to be often reminded that you are loved? I need it often

Do you like when people admit your right when you are? What if they don’t? I'm not really the type of person to get all high and mighty about that. In fact, I often end up feeling bad for the person who was wrong.

“There’s nothing a girl wants more than something she can’t have” To the statement above, do you agree? Have you ever been in that situation? No, that's silly.

Could you even live without your best friend in your life? Absolutely not

Personally for you, is falling for someone way beyond your control? Yeah. I tried really hard not to fall in love with Glenn because I was so scared of getting hurt again. But now I know him and trust him enough to believe that he will never do that.

Do you agree life screws us all over at least one time in life? I mean, yeah

Do your friends completely understand your past and accept it? Yeah, I guess so

Do they also accept and believe in your future? Damn this is deep. But yes.

Spell out the letters I-H-O-P, then say ness. Do you get it? Good one....

Do you think ,dream and worry about love? I think and dream about it, but I don't worry about it anymore. I know Glenn is my soulmate and his love for me is undying.

How about do you want love, or looking for it?

Do you randomly eat when your bored? What do you eat usually? Way too much. It's a habit I can't kick...

[sffc-xyz]

Writing a Custom Camera Plugin for PhoneGap

Originally posted on January 3, 2014.

PhoneGap (the brand name of Apache Cordova) is a great tool for writing cross platform mobile applications. With JavaScript and rendering engines getting faster by the minute, we're quickly approaching the time when many apps can be written exclusively on the web platform without needing to dive into Objective-C and Java for iOS and Android.

Like all great things in life, though, PhoneGap has its limitations. For example, the abstraction away from Cocoa Touch means that the UI of your application is not automatically updated with new versions of iOS. But perhaps the most clearly defined limitation is the integration with native components. PhoneGap does a good job of abstracting things like contacts and the accelerometer, but it struggles with native components that require more than just an API.

In this blog post, I will dive into one of these native components: the camera. I will explain the limitations behind PhoneGap's out-of-the-box implementation of the camera, the steps you need to take to implement a custom camera overlay in iOS, and some tips and tricks along the way.

This tutorial applies to PhoneGap 3+. The plugin specification changed with the introduction of PhoneGap 3.0, so you will need a different tutorial if you intend to support older versions of PhoneGap.

I assume that you are competent in JavaScript and Objective-C, and that you are developing on a Mac with Xcode installed. Since the iOS simulator does not have a camera at the time of writing, you will also need a physical iOS device for testing. If at any time you get lost or your code doesn't work, you can refer to a working copy of CustomCamera on GitHub.

Let's get started!

The Default PhoneGap Camera

The default PhoneGap camera plugin has a clean JavaScript interface. From a developer's point of view, capturing a photo is as easy as one command:

$ phonegap local plugin add org.apache.cordova.camera

…followed by a few lines of code:

navigator.camera.getPicture(function(imagePath){ document.getElementById("photoImg").setAttribute("src", imagePath); }, function(){ alert("Photo cancelled"); }, { destinationType: navigator.camera.DestinationType.FILE_URI });

However, from the end user's point of view, things are not quite as slick. On iOS, a modal opens with the same camera overlay as the native UI. They can choose an image from their preexisting photo albums, or they can snap a new one. They are then brought to a screen where they can preview the photo and choose to retake it. Finally, when they submit the image, the modal closes and the JavaScript callback is evaluated.

This is fine for an app where the camera is not a core feature, but for apps where the user spends a significant amount of time taking photos, the default PhoneGap camera might not give a good user experience (UX).

Writing the PhoneGap Plugin

We can make a custom user experience by writing a PhoneGap plugin. The folks at Apache have improved the plugin API and its documentation substantially in the past few months, but there is still a definite learning curve.

I'm going to do my best to walk you through the process of creating a camera plugin for iOS.

Step 1: Create an empty PhoneGap project

The first thing we need to do is to create a new empty PhoneGap project and add iOS support. If you have the PhoneGap Command Line Interface installed, you just need to run:

# NOTE: Change com.example.custom-camera to something else unique to your organization. $ phonegap create custom_camera com.example.custom-camera CustomCamera $ cd custom_camera $ phonegap local build ios

The last line creates the iOS project directory at custom_camera/platforms/ios.

Step 2: Write the JavaScript bindings

It will make our lives easier if we write the JavaScript bindings for our plugin right up front. Make a new JavaScript file at custom_camera/www/js/custom_camera.js. Put in the following code:

var CustomCamera = { getPicture: function(success, failure){ cordova.exec(success, failure, "CustomCamera", "openCamera", []); } };

cordova.exec is an automagic function that lets us call an Objective-C method from JavaScript. In this case, it will create an instance of CustomCamera and call openCamera on that instance. We will write the CustomCamera class in Objective-C in the next step.

Notice how we made our API very close to PhoneGap's camera API. This is optional. At the end of the day everything boils down to cordova.exec.

Let's also create a button that we can tap to run the above function. Modify custom_camera/www/index.html and add the following inside the div.app tag:

<button id="openCustomCameraBtn">Open Custom Camera</button> <img id="photoImg" style="position: fixed; top: 0; width: 50%; left: 25%;" /> <script src="js/custom_camera.js"></script> <script> document.getElementById("openCustomCameraBtn").addEventListener("click", function(){ CustomCamera.getPicture(function(imagePath){ document.getElementById("photoImg").setAttribute("src", imagePath); }, function(){ alert("Photo cancelled"); }); }, false); </script>

Finally, don't forget to tell PhoneGap to copy the new files into our iOS project directory.

$ phonegap local build ios

Step 3: Set up the Xcode Project

If you run the above app on your iOS device, you will get an error telling you that the CustomCamera class is not defined. This is where we get to start diving into the Objective-C.

Open up the Xcode project located at custom_camera/platforms/ios/CustomCamera.xcodeproj. Press ⌘N, make a new Objective-C class for Cocoa Touch, name the class CustomCamera, and (this is important!) inherit from CDVPlugin. Save it in the Classes folder and the Classes group.

In the previous step, we told our JavaScript to call the openCamera method on an instance the CustomCamera class. We need to declare this method. Make your interface in CustomCamera.h look like this:

// Note that Xcode gets this line wrong. You need to change "Cordova.h" to "CDV.h" as shown below. #import <Cordova/CDV.h> // Import the CustomCameraViewController class #import "CustomCameraViewController.h" @interface CustomCamera : CDVPlugin // Cordova command method -(void) openCamera:(CDVInvokedUrlCommand*)command; // Create and override some properties and methods (these will be explained later) -(void) capturedImageWithPath:(NSString*)imagePath; @property (strong, nonatomic) CustomCameraViewController* overlay; @property (strong, nonatomic) CDVInvokedUrlCommand* latestCommand; @property (readwrite, assign) BOOL hasPendingOperation; @end

And wait, what the heck is CustomCameraViewController? It's the class that will handle the UI side of the plugin. Cordova will instantiate an instance of CustomCamera, which in turn will instantiate an instance of CustomCameraViewController as we will see later.

Press ⌘N again, make another new Objective-C class for Cocoa Touch, name it CustomCameraViewController, but this time inherit from UIViewController. I recommend creating a XIB file. Save it in the Classes folder.

The interface in CustomCameraViewController.h should look something like this:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h> // We can't import the CustomCamera class because it would make a circular reference, so "fake" the existence of the class like this: @class CustomCamera; @interface CustomCameraViewController : UIViewController <UIImagePickerControllerDelegate, UINavigationControllerDelegate> // Action method -(IBAction) takePhotoButtonPressed:(id)sender forEvent:(UIEvent*)event; // Declare some properties (to be explained soon) @property (strong, nonatomic) CustomCamera* plugin; @property (strong, nonatomic) UIImagePickerController* picker; @end

Now we need to make the button that, when tapped, calls the takePhotoButtonPressed method. To do this, open the XIB file with CustomCameraViewController.h still open, make a button on the screen, and Control-Drag the button from the XIB file onto the method in the header file.

Gotta say it's a decent GUI that Apple put together!

We also need to add code to custom_camera/platforms/ios/config.xml in order to make PhoneGap see our plugin. Add the following lines somewhere inside the widget tag:

<feature name="CustomCamera"> <param name="ios-package" value="CustomCamera" /> </feature>

With the header files and XIB out of the way, we need to dive into the guts of the Objective-C.

Step 4: Write the hard core Objective-C

The primary API for interacting with the camera in iOS is the UIImagePickerController. We will be instantiating an instance of UIImagePickerController, configuring it to fill the whole screen, and opening it as a modal in front of the web view. When UIPickerController tells us that an image has been captured, we will save it as a JPEG file, tell JavaScript the file name, and close the camera modal. While the details of UIImagePickerController are beyond the scope of this blog post, it should be relatively straightforward to follow along with the code.

Let's start by writing the implementation for our CustomCameraViewController class, in CustomCameraViewController.m. Please read along with the comments.

#import "CustomCamera.h" #import "CustomCameraViewController.h" @implementation CustomCameraViewController // Entry point method - (id)initWithNibName:(NSString *)nibNameOrNil bundle:(NSBundle *)nibBundleOrNil { self = [super initWithNibName:nibNameOrNil bundle:nibBundleOrNil]; if (self) { // Instantiate the UIImagePickerController instance self.picker = [[UIImagePickerController alloc] init]; // Configure the UIImagePickerController instance self.picker.sourceType = UIImagePickerControllerSourceTypeCamera; self.picker.cameraCaptureMode = UIImagePickerControllerCameraCaptureModePhoto; self.picker.cameraDevice = UIImagePickerControllerCameraDeviceRear; self.picker.showsCameraControls = NO; // Make us the delegate for the UIImagePickerController self.picker.delegate = self; // Set the frames to be full screen CGRect screenFrame = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]; self.view.frame = screenFrame; self.picker.view.frame = screenFrame; // Set this VC's view as the overlay view for the UIImagePickerController self.picker.cameraOverlayView = self.view; } return self; } // Action method. This is like an event callback in JavaScript. -(IBAction) takePhotoButtonPressed:(id)sender forEvent:(UIEvent*)event { // Call the takePicture method on the UIImagePickerController to capture the image. [self.picker takePicture]; } // Delegate method. UIImagePickerController will call this method as soon as the image captured above is ready to be processed. This is also like an event callback in JavaScript. -(void) imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)picker didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo:(NSDictionary *)info { // Get a reference to the captured image UIImage* image = [info objectForKey:UIImagePickerControllerOriginalImage]; // Get a file path to save the JPEG NSArray* paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES); NSString* documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0]; NSString* filename = @"test.jpg"; NSString* imagePath = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:filename]; // Get the image data (blocking; around 1 second) NSData* imageData = UIImageJPEGRepresentation(image, 0.5); // Write the data to the file [imageData writeToFile:imagePath atomically:YES]; // Tell the plugin class that we're finished processing the image [self.plugin capturedImageWithPath:imagePath]; } @end

Now let's write the implementation for the CustomCamera class, in CustomCamera.m.

#import "CustomCamera.h" @implementation CustomCamera // Cordova command method -(void) openCamera:(CDVInvokedUrlCommand *)command { // Set the hasPendingOperation field to prevent the webview from crashing self.hasPendingOperation = YES; // Save the CDVInvokedUrlCommand as a property. We will need it later. self.latestCommand = command; // Make the overlay view controller. self.overlay = [[CustomCameraViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"CustomCameraViewController" bundle:nil]; self.overlay.plugin = self; // Display the view. This will "slide up" a modal view from the bottom of the screen. [self.viewController presentViewController:self.overlay.picker animated:YES completion:nil]; } // Method called by the overlay when the image is ready to be sent back to the web view -(void) capturedImageWithPath:(NSString*)imagePath { [self.commandDelegate sendPluginResult:[CDVPluginResult resultWithStatus:CDVCommandStatus_OK messageAsString:imagePath] callbackId:self.latestCommand.callbackId]; // Unset the self.hasPendingOperation property self.hasPendingOperation = NO; // Hide the picker view [self.viewController dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES]; } @end

Of special note is the hasPendingOperation property on the CDVPlugin. This is an undocumented property that, when true, prevents the web view from being released from memory (garbage collected) while the camera view is open. If the web view were to be released from memory, bad things would happen: the app would essentially restart when the camera view closed, and the image data would never reach JavaScript.

Step 5: Test drive

Phew, that was a lot of Objective-C! But does it work?

Hook up your iOS device to your computer. If you haven't yet set up a provisioning profile, do so now. (For more information on connecting your device to Xcode, ask Google.) Build and run the app on your device from within Xcode. Tap the button to open the camera, then tap the button to snap the photo. The camera overlay should close, and you should see your image within the WebView!

The UI could obviously use some improvement, but the guts of the plugin are all there now.

Bundling the PhoneGap Plugin

In a crunch, you could stop right here and write the rest of your PhoneGap code inside your CustomCamera project. But the better practice is to give our plugin some metadata that we can use to include it in whichever project we want with a click PhoneGap command.

Step 6: Write plugin.xml

The metadata for PhoneGap plugins is stored in plugin.xml at the root of the project directory. Make custom_camera/plugin.xml with the following markup. More detail can be found in the PhoneGap docs.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <plugin xmlns="http://apache.org/cordova/ns/plugins/1.0" xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" xmlns:rim="http://www.blackberry.com/ns/widgets" id="com.example.custom-camera" version="0.0.1"> <name>Shopeel Camera</name> <description>PhoneGap plugin to support a custom camera overlay</description> <author>Shane Carr and others</author> <info> This plugin was written with the tutorial found at: http://codrspace.com/vote539/writing-a-custom-camera-plugin-for-phonegap/ </info> <js-module src="www/js/custom_camera.js" name="CustomCamera"> <clobbers target="navigator.CustomCamera" /> </js-module> <engines> <engine name="cordova" version=">=3.1.0" /> </engines> <platform name="ios"> <!-- config file --> <config-file target="config.xml" parent="/*"> <feature name="CustomCamera"> <param name="ios-package" value="CustomCamera" /> </feature> </config-file> <!-- core CustomCamera header and source files --> <header-file src="platforms/ios/CustomCamera/Classes/CustomCamera.h" /> <header-file src="platforms/ios/CustomCamera/Classes/CustomCameraViewController.h" /> <source-file src="platforms/ios/CustomCamera/Classes/CustomCamera.m" /> <source-file src="platforms/ios/CustomCamera/Classes/CustomCameraViewController.m" /> <resource-file src="platforms/ios/CustomCamera/Classes/CustomCameraViewController.xib" /> </platform> </plugin>

Customize plugin.xml with your plugin details, file names, and so on.

Step 7: Specify the JavaScript binding

PhoneGap plugins treat the JavaScript file we made like a module. This means that custom_camera.js will be evaluated in a sandbox, and we need to specifically expose properties in order for us to use them.

Take note of the following lines in plugin.xml:

<js-module src="www/js/custom_camera.js" name="CustomCamera"> <clobbers target="navigator.CustomCamera" /> </js-module>

What this means in English is "include custom_camera.js and bind its module.exports to navigator.CustomCamera". If you've used Node.JS, you are probably familiar with module.exports. All we need to do is to add the following line to the bottom of custom_camera.js:

module.exports = CustomCamera;

Now, in applications in which we include our plugin, we can open the custom camera view with navigator.CustomCamera.getPicture().

Step 8: Deploy the plugin

We are finally ready to include our plugin in our real PhoneGap project!

Installing the default PhoneGap camera was as easy as:

$ phonegap local plugin add org.apache.cordova.camera

Guess what: our own custom camera plugin ain't much harder to install!

$ phonegap local plugin add /path/to/custom_camera

You can also give phonegap local plugin add a path to your Git repo.

$ phonegap local plugin add https://github.com/vote539/custom-camera.git

Conclusion

We now have a very basic, working PhoneGap plugin for iOS!

The next steps would include:

Add support for Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and all other targeted platforms. You would first need to add said platform to your PhoneGap project, then you would need to refer to the documentation for PhoneGap and your desired platform about how to implement a camera. Don't forget to modify plugin.xml once you're ready!

Package your plugin for the community. This might be as easy as plugman publish /path/to/custom_camera. Before you do this, make sure that you use a real reverse URL identifier for your plugin, rather than com.example.xyz.

If this tutorial helped you, let me know by posting a comment below!