#MORE TAGS LATER

[frosty-tian]

“My lovely, lovely princess Anya.”

(Small phone drawing to celebrate the princes Anya post gaining 100+ notes, thank y’all a lot again!)

[stillness-in-green]

Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 423: One For All vs. All For One

At the request of a few asks, have some chapter thoughts. I will warn everyone in advance that some portions of this post are extremely bitter. This is less salty than it is bile-flavored. It's also not quite as thorough as other posts have been, as my disillusionment with the material limits my willingness to comb the chapter for details to muse about beyond the ones that jump out at me.

None of which is to say that this post is short.

CONTENT WARNING: Confrontational rhetoric about irl prisons and the hypothetical of committing suicide to avoid them. I have strong personal feelings about some of the language I've been seeing from defenders of this chapter and I'm in no mood to prevaricate around them.

o Danger Sense continues to be some real bullshit.  My initial response to the leaks was that it was yet another dumb contrivance to make things arbitrarily harder for the villains than equivalent things would be for the Heroes, but reading the official release, I actually just think it's dumb that AFO thinks Danger Sense would have alerted him to his/Shigaraki's failing body at all.  Why would it?  Danger Sense nominally (nominally) activates based on hostility, and where's the hostility in super-regeneration failing?  If it were the remnants of Shigaraki/OFA attacking him from within his own body, that'd be one thing, but that doesn't seem to be what the first few pages are getting at. 

Rather, it's just that the power of OFA is being too much for his body, in the same way it was for Deku at the beginning.  As if, you know, Shigaraki hasn't already been surgically modified to handle both AFO and, presumably, OFA the whole time.  Ujiko only mentioned the former specifically, but given that the plan was always for AFO's new vessel to be able to steal OFA, why wouldn't that also be accounted for?  The best I can think is that AFO and Ujiko didn't know that OFA would put such strain on the body, but it's not like AFO couldn't have observed that the quirk's been growing stronger over the generations.  If he and Ujiko just failed to calibrate the body correctly, it's a failure of Ujiko's warped genius as a mad biologist and quirk scientist—which again takes us back to dumb contrivances that make things harder for the villains than they would be for the heroes.

    

o The Kurogiri scene would be very touching if it, you know, actually amounted to something.  If it didn't apparently end with Bakugou coming in to murder him.  Except we don't even quite get that level of commitment because Kurogiri was falling apart already, so you get the impression that he would have collapsed with or without Bakugou's intervention.

    

o This in turn makes Bakugou's intervention really silly and pointless.  My god, I don't care.  I do not care!  I do not care about Bakugou pushing Deku two steps forward past a barrier that was already failing.  I do not care about Bakugou getting one last stupid victory lap when he's already dramatically endured a severe beating and emotional assault, stood back up from the stupidest heart surgery in the history of fiction, and faced down everything AFO could unleash on him, far outstripping that same villain's climactic efforts fighting All Might in Kamino in what remains AFO's only semi-emotionally resonant battle in the whole manga.  As it is, this is just one more ludicrous handwaved magical cross-country teleport like every other one the Heroes have been enjoying through this whole fight.

    

o Yoichi paying attention to AFO now?  Man, imagine if we could have just skipped a bunch of bullshit and gotten this way back in Chapter 368, when Yoichi first told AFO that it was over.  Imagine if Vestige Yoichi had something like this when his actual for-real flesh-and-blood brother died, rather than having zero reaction to it whatsoever, not even looking over Deku's psychic shoulder and making a sad face about it.

o It actually kind of offends me that Horikoshi thinks he can get away with taking a stab in the direction of making AFO "sympathetic" now.  Now, after he's spent the entire endgame portraying AFO as a two-dimensional Demon Lord who was literally Evil In Utero.  And, you know, I'd buy AFO as being Evil In Utero but also capable of loneliness, sure. And I'm even more than on board with interpreting AFO as a man who's spent the last century working 24:7 to convince himself that he's heartlessly evil to deal with the loss of the only family he ever had. But the fact that this statement has been put in the mouth of Deku, who has never indicated the faintest trace of sympathy or understanding, much less compassion for AFO?  Fuck off.

    

o All that Yoichi hyping up Deku's incredible finesse in attacking Shigaraki with the stored-up OFA quirks makes me think is, "Welcome to My Hero Academia, where the stakes are made up and the past doesn't matter!"  I am so abominably weary of the endgame's—and the series in general's—willing to just baldly lie to the audience's face about what is actually happening at any given point in the story.

That was the moment when we should have had a response from Yoichi, what with Shigaraki having apparently torn AFO's vestige limb from psychic limb and Bakugou overseeing as the real man rewound out of existence.  That Yoichi didn't respond back then just made him seem like he'd written off his brother generations ago; it makes his sorrowful-yet-grateful act in this chapter incredibly unearned.  Of course, the actual reason we didn't get a beat like this back then wasn't for any reason consistent with Yoichi's feelings about his brother, nor because Yoichi was too far away to know that the brother he has a psychic bond with was dying.  No, it was because Horikoshi was already writing towards this beat instead, so he didn't need to bother.  The last time Yoichi looks the real AFO’s way was the chapter-ending Bakugou blast of 409, when it takes the first eight pages of 410 for AFO’s Rewinding death to finalize itself.  The Hawks vestige talked more to All For One in his last moments than AFO’s own brother did.

    

Internal monologue is placed where internal monologue cannot possibly exist.  Characters' plans are backdated to points in the story which are completely irreconcilable with how those characters were behaving at the time.  Surprise and dismay are pantomimed from characters who are revealed to have anticipated and planned for the very eventuality they're acting so shocked about.

The main character, a kid who was once characterized by his tendency to mutter his thoughts out loud, who had a running gag of tightly packed, densely worded speech/thought balloons, has been reduced to an empty marionette, devoid of internal monologue, scoured of thoughts more complex than the multiplication tables of his quirk combinations.  The story can retroactively say that Deku did—intentionally and willfully!—anything it wants and not have to worry about belying its phony stakes and made-for-Twitter cliffhangers because it has deprived Deku of his own capacity to reflect.  He can't spoil twist reveals of his own true intentions if the narrative completely locks us out of his head!  Nevermind how much of his final battle has occurred inside a shared goddamn psychic space.

All of this has made it totally impossible for me to read the story as a story.  Not only do I see the strings, the strings have become all I can see.

Of course the vestiges are back one last time for a dramatic punch, despite multiple chapters swearing up and down to us that we were seeing a big emotional sacrifice play.  Last chapter we witnessed the word vomit that was Horikoshi trying to justify Star's pilots surviving their planes blowing up, because that's how determined Horikoshi is that no one on Team Hero actually die.  Of course the vestiges came back.

Who cares?  Truly, who the fuck cares?  I don't care about them; I don't care about whether they'll be back again in the epilogue; I don't care about why Vestige Might and Shinomori are missing from the punch; I don't care about the story finally trying to pretend that anyone in its pages has ever given a single starving river rat's ass about All For One's humanity.

—NOW ENTERING FULL-FLEDGED RANT ZONE—

I care about the only characters who have ever been facing actual stakes in this war: Shigaraki and his followers.

    

o Even though I care, I don't have it in me to weigh in much about Shigaraki's seeming death here, and especially not his last words.  I'm far too jaded about Horikoshi's cliffhangers to think that anything I say now about Shigaraki dying and what it means for both Hero Society and the people Shigaraki leaves behind can be assumed to still be accurate two weeks from now.

I hope it's a fakeout.  I hope a chunk of Shigaraki's body fell through Kurogiri's last portal and the hyper-regen can kick back in once he's no longer being assaulted on all sides by the allies of the kid who was trying to “save” him.  I hope Horikoshi has one last stupid asspull up his sleeve.  I hope for a complete Karma Houdini ending for Shigaraki and the rest of the League.

If we don't get that, it's gonna suck, and it's gonna turn Deku into a fraud and a liar.  I don't care if the story wants me to think Shigaraki was saved; I don't care if Deku is satisfied with having saved "that crying boy."

I have not forgotten that "that crying boy" gently refused to accept Deku's "save" when the bell rang to go home. He wanted to go back to his friends, instead; he reiterated his desire to be a Hero for the Villains.  The crying child returned to the form of Shigaraki Tomura and then AFO devoured him.  Deku didn't save the child then, and he hasn't saved him now.

Remember how Eri didn't count as truly saved from Overhaul until the first time she could smile fully and freely?  Guess what stops you from doing that?  Right—being fucking dead.

And those touching last words of Shigaraki's won't do Spinner much good on account of him still being brain-damaged from a bunch of extra quirks no one can remove, because the only people who could are, again, fucking dead.

Unless, of course, the theorists are right and Deku is going to be not only not quirkless in the epilogue (meaning all that drama and emotion about sacrificing OFA is going to be another fucking lie), he's going to have the "unified" OFA+AFO quirk via Shigaraki's fistbump.  Meaning Deku can remove the extra quirks, presumably just before telling Spinner that Deku saved-via-killing the love of Spinner's life.

Solidarity among outcasts is false and toxic.  Everyone should just rely on Heroes more, no matter how much Heroes have failed them in the past.

o One last thing I want to address, less about the canon and more about the reactions I've been seeing elsewhere to the prospect of Shigaraki (and any combination of Dabi, Toga and Spinner) being dead: the idea that being dead is the best possible outcome for them because if they don't die they'll only have to spend the rest of their lives "rotting in jail."

Great job, team; nice message to take home.  Everyone pack it in.

    

Firstly, and to get this out of the way, that is a false binary that totally ignores the long history of Shounen Jump villains getting absurd Karma Houdini endings where they walk off into the sunset free as birds because they've changed their minds and resolved to be better, or at least have decided mass murder is no longer worth their time and effort.  (Vegeta wasn't the first mass murderer a Shounen Jump story rewarded with freedom and friendship, nor was he the last.)

But more importantly, that false binary is one that could only be presented by someone who truly does see prison as a fate worse than death.  No rehabilitation is possible.  No supervised release or house arrests in the care of assigned guardians who want better for them.  No lenience can be granted in recognition of the League's mental states; they can be admitted to no mental hospitals focused on therapy.

The "better death than prison" line is the product of a perspective that has never had to seriously consider the prospect of living behind bars.  It's a childish imagination of prison as a nebulous Bad Place where Bad People go to be Punished For Being Bad, or a self-righteous fantasy of a cold hell where sinners are sentenced to suffering eternal.

People can tell that the League have suffered too much to sentence them to Forever Bad Times, so they comfort themselves with the idea that at least they died happy, instead of living forever in a pop-culture-informed crayon doodle of concrete and solitude.

I’m not here to tell these readers that there aren't people in the world who would rather die than live under watch for the rest of their lives.  I won’t deny that Japanese prisons are bleak and there’s every chance that the prisons in Horikoshi’s fictionalized Japan are even worse.  But I am asking people espousing the view that death would be better than incarceration to seriously consider all the angles on what that sentiment means.

If it were you facing the life sentence, are you so sure you would prefer to take your own life?  If it were someone you loved who would rather die than face imprisonment, would you help them—hand your older brother the gun, or your younger sister the knife?

Or would you want to hope that they could get some help instead, have an opportunity to connect to something meaningful—find religion, take up reading classic literature, connect with someone inside or via letters?  Would you want them to accept the lawful punishment for what they'd done rather than evade it by ending their lives?  Would you want them to hold on in case their case could be reassessed someday, that they might eventually finish serving their sentence or be moved to someplace that would focus on helping them rather than punishing them?

Would you want a glorified cop in a cape making that decision for them—or you—based on that cop's ability to "forgive"?

If you think prison is a fate worse than death, why is it okay that people like Gentle Criminal or the Shie Hassaikai Trash Trio have to endure it, while mass murderers, serial killers and insurrectionists like the League get to escape through death?  Think of every purse snatcher who gets paraded in front of cameras with their arms bound and their face muzzled; think of Twice at sixteen; think of Mr. Compress now.  Do these people deserve to suffer in the kind of torment you're imagining prison must entail?  Would it be better for them to die rather than endure it?

If prisons in BNHA's Japan are so terrible as all that, isn't that something the kids should try to fix?  Shouldn't that be a part of the mass societal improvement project people are swearing up and down the kids will have nicely sewn up in the epilogue?  If the kids aren't going to fix these prisons—these places that take suicide risks like Ending and spit them out worse than ever; these places like Tartarus where the wardens call the people in their charge monsters and animals—then why should I believe the kids are going to fix literally anything else?

Or is it simply the case that it's perfectly fine that prisons should be this way; shitty prison conditions are only bad when it's the villains whose sympathetic backstories we know who're facing them?

"It's a shame, but the League has to pay for their crimes."  But why does that “have to be”?  Isn’t it because no one involved—not the characters, not the author, not the people who accept this ending—can envision a world where the “has to be” could be otherwise?

That's the problem with, "Killing someone can be a way of saving them," and, "They would have just spent the rest of their lives in prison anyway."  It's a stunted mentality that leaves no room for the radical reforms and systemic improvements that are necessary to stop this whole cycle from repeating.  Worse, as I very much suspect we're going to see in the epilogue, it's a mentality that says the system is actually fine as it is—the only real problems were caused by a tiny handful of bad actors, and now that they've been removed, everything else will self-correct, and things will go back to normal.

    

That precious, perfect status quo that Deku swore to return: this is the way he brings it back, it and everything that comes with it.

    

o In summary: if this ending sticks, then what we have in My Hero Academia is thus:

A world that played at being grounded, but which turned out to run on arbitrary rules, magic thinking and Evil Babies.

Characters that were presented as radically kind, but whose endgame resolutions represented a cruel underlining of the status quo, in which only those who suffer in silence deserve not to have to.

A story that wanted to be staunchly idealistic but which ultimately entrenched to hollow, meaningless platitudes.

o P.S. So like, Nana’s vestige saved Shigaraki off-screen, right?  So even after all her fear that Shigaraki would have to die, even after all the efforts she and Deku made to help Deku break him down, at the very last moment, she wanted to save him.  And she did so in the only reason she could, as one psychic scrap to another: she held his soul together when he was shattering apart.  But when Deku comes to the very last moment, when Shigaraki’s body is shattering apart, does he do anything to try to hold Shigaraki together?  Try to tell Shigaraki how to use Black Whip to hold his body together, call for Sero and his tape, Aizawa’s Erasure, anything like that?

If it doesn't stick?  That I'm less sure of.  But I'm pretty sure Deku's fucked as the Symbol of Hope no matter what.  There’s no way, at this point, to fix his portrayal as the kid who has a drive to save that eclipses all common understanding.  Every part of the story, before and after that declaration of Yoichi’s in Chapter 287, has served to undermine that claim.  This is just the last nail in the sky coffin.

    

Nah.  Instead, he just administers one last punch to finish the job.  The boy with the drive to save that eclipses all common understanding, everyone.

[whitehartlane]

EVERY ROAD TAKES YOU BACK TO WHITE HART LANE. ↳ "I had always thought I would come back to Tottenham."

Danez Smith, 'From "summer, somewhere"' / The first ever match played at White Hart Lane, 4 Sept 1899 / Supporters invade the pitch after the last match played at White Hart Lane, 14 May 2017 / Gareth Bale after his retirement from professional football upon visiting Spurs / Dele in front of Spurs supporters / Dele is applauded by Spurs supporters upon his return to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium after transferring to Everton / Coldplay, 'The Scientist' / Gareth Bale on returning to Tottenham on loan from Real Madrid / Ryan Mason comes on for Gareth Bale, early 2010s / Gareth Bale comes off and clasps hands with interim manager of Tottenham, Ryan Mason, early 2020s / Harry Kane in front of the infamous Ledley King quote / Djo, 'End of Beginning' / moonlitgarden on ao3, 'waiting room' / Gareth Bale scores his first goal for Tottenham, 2007 / Gareth Bale scores his first goal for Tottenham after coming back, 2020 / Julien Baker, 'Go Home' / Angel Olsen, 'Go Home' / Men repair the golden cockerel at White Hart Lane, 1934 / The golden cockerel at the top of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, AKA New White Hart Lane / ticketgum / Son Heungmin on staying at Tottenham / Spurs supporters at the first game at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium / Harry Kane, 2016 / Son Heungmin on his return to Tottenham after going away to the Asian Cup and his reception from Spurs supporters as he came off the bench, 2024 / Sue Zhao / Harry Kane in his goodbye message to Spurs supporters, 2023 / boygenius, 'True Blue' / Tottenham legends line up at White Hart Lane at the last game to be played at the ground to say goodbye, 2017 / Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Initiation Song from the Finders' Lodge / moonlitgarden on ao3, 'waiting room' / Eric Dier on where he wants to be buried

[eggfruitart]

The final esim for Valentine's card!! Thank you to my buddy Wix @plaguedbylove for donating an esim to Gaza :D They requested a Tinker Knight card <3

[mepad-daily]

[nocakesformissedith]

can I say something

[whumpfish]

Got a mobile EKG today... technology has come a long way since I had one of these 8 years ago!! My old one had like 5 electrodes and a monitor I had to carry around like a purse. This has one (1) electrode and a monitor legitimately the size of a Square attachment to a smartphone that sticks on like an electrode and weighs nothing.

[eggs-can-draw]

First, I bring the sneak peek

this master post is being made by a person who has a monster energy drink cans hung above their bed as a pride flag (the 8 colors version), I get to make it an eyesore (would make anything rainbow if given the opportunity to do so)

I am going for chronological events over chronological posting, definitely not done adding subcategories there, I know The Horrors will include Live Parents Reaction section and the alt ch 3 section. Speaking of which. I have an oumatsu question, I mentioned in the tags while reblogging the fic you wrote for Shuichi and Kokichi. Or more like multiple, is the alt ch 3 canon to the AU timeline or is it a what if? In the fic that I will be writing, would you rather I be evil and made their confession during a very emotional (crying & more crying & hugging) ch3 moment or be nice and do it after Kokichi wakes up in a soft kind of tender moment with a proper conversation (the Shuichi plan) they're going to have either way happening as part of the confession? Unrelated question, but did you reblog the outfit kitties just bc they're cute or are you doing the drawing meme? I just think Raspberry has Kaede vibes all over it, Kokichi would look good in Lilly Pilly Berry and Shuichi could match them in being pink as Strawberry or Pine berry, but like, I already visualized them in my head so no pressure if you weren't going to be taking requests on that. If I could get one request of them, I'd rather get this one I've had since last night, it's something I am going to put in the fic so it'd be an illustration basically.

post-game cuddle pile, Kokichi's old cat (10 years old at this point) sleeps above their heads, Kokichi himself is sprawled on top of the two of them, basically on Shuichi, would be listening to his heartbeat if they weren't asleep, but with an arm and a leg thrown over Kaede, who's snuggled up to Shuichi's side, it's Summer and they're in a sunbeam, so the blanket is nearly fully kicked of, tangled between their legs. They weren't supposed to have that sleepover, but Shuichi had a nightmare and when they checked on the groupchatTM after he calmed down it turned out Kaede was awake too, so they texted her to come over, knowing that none of them would be able to go back to sleep on their own.

It doesn't have to be today or under this ask, if you don't have time for drawing when you see it, I need answers for questions more.

Last bit: them playing house as kids and having all those weird ideas about what a normal family is like because as little kids they have no idea their parents are... pretty unique. Only in funny ways, tho. Like, I just imagined that as opposed to Kokichi's mind blown Kaede's reaction to polyamory was just like "that's how things are, I am going to have that in my future" and she makes a drawing of that future, explaining it to Mikan "this is my husband A, cooking dinner, and this is my husband B cleaning, and I am on tour playing piano like a girlboss", M: Hmm... A girlboss? Did Monaca teach you that word? K: Yes, when I learned playing that pop song to make an original TikTok soundtrack for her last week, it's not a bad word right? M: It's not, but... what song? K: Uhhh, the Boss... girl song. Or like "So which one of you is the one that gets a lobotomy?" type beat

Phwoof this is a biggun get ready for WORMS

YOOOOOO THATS SUPER COOL DUDE!! I like how organized it is that’s so fucking dope my dude <- (is going to be thinking about this for the next few hours)

QUESTION TIME:

✨ The alt ch3 is canon it scratches my brain too much

✨HONESTLY EITHER WOULD PROBABLY MAKE EMOTIONAL

✨ honestly it was a mix of both lol, cute fruity kittties and if anyone wants I can draw fruity blorbos lol

✨ALSO IVE GOT YOUR REQUESTS SCREENSHOTTED AND ILL GET TO THEM ASAP (which means I’ll probably thumbnail it during work and get started after work lol)

ALSO ALSO I LOVE THEM HAVING DIFFERENT TAKES ON WHAT A “NORMAL” FAMILY IS LMAO. I kinda like the thought of Kokichi’s polyamory realization being that you can just have more than one parent lol

They’re silly funky

[maximaxstreasurebox]

UNTOLD STORY

[thatrando13]

Masterlist:

Heathers fics:

Series:

Heathers Shots

Our Love Is God

Slept Like The Dead

Flours & Flour

The View I Hold Of You

Wednesday (2022) fics:

Waiting for the Hurricane

Stranger Things fics:

Stranger Things oneshots:

No Hope In Store

Cobra Kai fics:

Too Close For Comfort

Other:

Book Of Poetry (Ao3 collection of poems)

Atlas' Drabble (short stories, prompts ect)

Frieda Writes (short stories, prompts ect)

Atlas' Poetry (poems)

Atlas Rambles (own posts, text, images ect)

More fics or oneshots are on their way! And let us know what you'd like to see.

[thetrainglesttriangle]

I did a watercolor painting of my star wars oc

I don't have a name for them yet but I love them

[frosty-tian]

Happy Pride Month, stay winning, gays.

[frosty-tian]

Going nuts and have to ramble.

⚠️Warning for talks of SA.:

(Just realized the read-more doesn’t work if you read it in notes, please skip entirely if the aforementioned topic makes you uncomfortable/is a trigger.)

This whole comic is just. Wow.

The hand placement in the first image, ‘I hope these make you fucking better’ implying Jimmy believing Curly deriving pleasure/benefitting from what he’s doing to him while Curly’s in a helpless state. Likely mirroring the sexual assault he had done to Anya, possibly multiple times.

Over, and over.

Anya looking over Curly with an empty, tired expression as she says ‘Guess you know what it’s like now, huh?’, ever so slightly satisfied at him finally knowing at least a smidge of the horrors she went through, but immediately followed by guilt and self-loathing for feeling that way. She’s unable to meet the gaze with his only working eye that’s staring at her because despite how coldly she was brushed off, she’s still a kind soul who doesn’t wish for this to happen to Curly, and her heart still aches for his awful state.

autonomy

[aphel1on]

i have such a love for characters who descend into madness or villainy out of deep, deep empathy. characters who fundamentally cannot cope with the cruel realities they find themselves in and blow up about it in spectacular fashion. fallen angel type characters with tears of outrage in their eyes. characters who break before they bend, and break so badly they splatter blood all over their noble ideals. every variation on it gets me so good

[isjasz]

[Ready for a new game?]

day 11 definitelynottober - heart in your fist & week 1 weeklyhermittober - beginnings

===

IM SO READY LETSGO SO EXCITED FOR THE NEW LIFE SERIES💥💥💥💥💥💥

[chiptrillino-art]

(ID in ALT Text) Happy very, very late Mother's Day!

I am not saying that zuko is sokkas substitute for kya. or they look in any way similar! The whole concept here is that something was happening at the moment, be it how they were laying in bed, how the hair pooled over the pillow, or how sokka was able to hold onto it. It just brought sokka back. It triggered a memory, and suddenly he relived a brief memory. Making him suddenly miss his mother again. hope you enjoy!