#PLEASE NEVER STOP TAGGING ME IN THINGS

[glassedplanets]

i cannot believe it's taken me this long to do a destiny AU but wow better late than never

playing very fast and loose with both canons here - pirate crews = renegade clans, marines/world gov't = vanguard (sorry actual vanguard whomst i love). the one piece is the traveler??? who knows. anyways:

luffy, human lightbearer

subclass: yippee!

loadout: wahoo!

ghost: mugi, one-of-a-kind shell given to him by shanks as a kinderguardian. the shell seems to change when he supers. What's Up With That!

all prismatic all the time, basically a dark age guardian. zero boundaries between class and subclass. just does whatever is fun. doesn't care until he Does and then you're fucked.

regularly wears (steals) class items from clanmates, it was a little alarming at first but they all feel whatever about it now

should not be trusted with raid mechanics.

zoro, awoken titan

subclass: strand

primary: breakneck (OG roll)

secondary: ergo sum (void/caster/wolfpack)

heavy: falling guillotine (OG godroll, WWB/relentless)

exotic: stoicism (inmost/star-eater or inmost/synthos)

ghost: wado, received from kuina after her death (don't think about this too hard. jaren ward/shin malphur situation. whatever). wado's shell was cloven by mihawk in a duel.

wears sanji's old bond looped into his mark, will not answer questions about this

specced hard into banner for a fuckoff insane melee loop, rotates melee buffs with luffy and sanji

mostly DPS/add clear, uses that ergo roll so that sanji/luffy/franky (haz prop) can get wolfpack, if the boss can't be meleed then Why Is He Even Here

flat-out banned from participating in the mechanics of several raid encounters on account of going to the wrong fucking place (vault, gatekeeper, sol inherent, totems, etc.), if he gets torn between dimensions or anything but first in queenswalk then everyone just has to desperately pray for the best.

ran vanguard bounties regularly until he eventually refused to cooperate with the then-head of the cosmodrome's operations; luffy found him with kuina's ghost bound and freed them both. The Rest Is History.

distributary-born but doesn't know (or care), kept being greeted weirdly by people in the dreaming city (which i guess is where we have wano's events......... kaido is literally a dragon, so)

VJ-G-66-03 sanji, human (?) warlock

subclass: prismatic, solar super

primary: fatebringer (OG fatebringer roll™)

secondary: tarrabah

heavy: apex predator (recon/B&S)

exotic: solipsism (assassin/synthos)

ghost: mignon, received from zeff after voluntarily giving up his light for sanji

wears zoro's old mark tied below his bond, will not answer questions about this

specced into Burn Motherfucker Burn, solar buddy + snaps, frontline add clear alongside luffy and zoro, also part of the "if the boss can't be meleed/snapped then why am i even here" gang

CAN be trusted with raid mechanics but is often better utilized keeping adds off the other half of the fireteam

sanji's body is riddled with vintech implants that don't seem to do anything. they're most definitely new, and sanji wasn't rezzed that long ago, but vintech was lost in the collapse along with everything else and the only thing that really survived is a bunch of muddled records found at old vega collective sites.

sanji was the vintech patriarch's one failed experiment; his consciousness refused transfer to an exo body and after many attempts, he was discarded but managed to survive through the kindness of dark-age guardians until he was taken in by zeff.

he has three vertical black facial markings; each experiment has a number of markings corresponding to their order (and color) in the sequence.

and other straw hats! i have a little less about them, but:

nami, human hunter

subclass: arcstaff (Throw Stick/well of bad/i don't remember its actual name)

primary: patron of lost causes

secondary: riskrunner

heavy: stormchaser

exotic: liar's handshake

ghost: zeus, stolen from big mom (tangerine shell)

(was tempted to do stormcaller unlimited power but arcstaff is... you know)

usopp, human hunter

subclass: solar, precision goldie

primary: succession

secondary: trinity ghoul

heavy: scintillation

exotic: nighthawk

ghost: merry (sheepshead shell)

can and should be trusted with raid mechanics along w/ nami

and the rest of the crew i'm not 100% set on buuuuut:

chopper: exo warlock (well of radiance)

robin: awoken warlock (strand? void?)

franky: exo titan (thundercrash)

brook: exo hunter (stasis)

jinbei: awoken titan (stasis? arc?)

misc others:

law: awoken prismatic hunter, blinky knife

reiju-0: exo void hunter, tether + smoke bomb, le monarque

ichiji-1: exo solar hunter, blade barrage

niji-2: exo arc titan, striker, ACD/0

yonji-4: exo strand titan

and textless, glow-less versions if you got this far!

[dismas-n-dismay]

Over and Over - Rio Romeo ur not telling me she didnt think of the first time she met falin and her beauty as she recreated her in that same image of purity and kindness, piece by piece get out of here

[canisalbus]

I'm sure you get this a lot but because my cousin and I love that one Danny Trejo action comedy, I always have to snap my brain into the right position when I read Machete's name. Maybe I should draw them both chilling

.

[corviiids]

sparknotes for chapter 9 of as you like it because a very kind commenter asked for a breakdown and if theres one thing im good at it's breaking down

(spoilers for the fic obviously)

tihs chapter gave me so much trouble. i sat on it for so long i literally hated it by the time i posted it but im starting to forgive it now. it was, as ive said, originally way longer, and the next part of the fic was supposed to be the second half of this one... but it was starting to get absurd and i realised that neither part would have the weight i needed them to have if they were lumped in together. (with some relief, honestly, because i kind of had wanted them to be separate initially but didn't think they'd be long enough. i dont know myself very well.) anyway, the next chapter should be a bit of a doozy now although hopefully not SO absurdly long.

this chapter picks up where the previous cliff hung off, which is to say, after the 'shadow' akechi reveals that he's actually just the real ass guy. akechi in the palace what will he do. the chapter doesn't immediately kick off with ren's reaction though and that is because ren is the most repressed man alive and does not know how he feels about it.

so, akechi disguised himself to enter his palace, which is significant for a few reasons:

1. he's disguised as himself

which i think is ironic in a fun way, but it's also just a very basic nod to the fact that akechi pivots between which of his personae is his default. this isn't necessarily super meaningful, but he does later refer to the black mask suit as

a costume, instead of an outfit. i mean, don't read into it too much, he's just talking, but i did think that probably points to how he feels about his appearance generally.

2. more importantly, his disguise involves taking off his mask.

so he's disguised, yes, and he's disguised as himself, yes, but that disguise is a literal unmasking, which is also kind of ironic. in presenting himself this way he has literally and figuratively made himself vulnerable. they're inside his heart, and the entire time he's in the palace, he is exposed... again both literally and figuratively because he also starts sharing more with ren than he ever has. look, i just think it's fun to have a character who has so many layers that he has to lie so hard that he becomes himself again.

i only want to point this out because (this is also part of larger meta about mona lol) akechi knew about the metaverse, but there is no way to intuit the method of stealing hearts without guidance. it's such a specific and involved process. thje most akechi could work out on his own was that if you killed a shadow, that person would have a mental breakdown. no way to guess that if you send a calling card and then go in within the next 24 hours and take a physical manifestation of a thing that you didn't know existed (process) would lead to that person ahving a change of heart (result). so even if akechi had a palace and knew about it, even if he wanted to do something about it, he would have assumed there was nothing he could do about it - i also have no idea what the process would be for sending yourself a calling card, even if he DID know about the process. so basically in this fic akechi found his palace and just assumed that was it. he was like, fucked up lol. anyway

this just straight up isn't true HAHA so i put in the silly little dichotomy of akechi gently taking ren's arm to protect him from slipping on the ice while telling him that he lied about caring about him. i think in this chapter as akechi begins to openly explain more and more of his thought process, this is probably the first truly clear glimpse you get of exactly what akechi's distortion is and how deep it runs.

the things akechi says with total conviction in this chapter are just... not true, not a fair or founded way to view the world (or the art of performance haha), but he says them with total conviction, and hopefully it should show off how unreliable he is as a source of exposition. one commenter asked about this moment of akc's eyes going yellow and if it was somehting that happened in canon - not really, i was just thinking about those little moments in the game after you send a calling card where the game cuts from the person to their shadow to do a little oneliner about their distortion.

akechi's IN his own palace, so i thought it would be fun to kind of make it a physical thing that can happen to him where he sort of merges with his shadow for a brief second in the moments when the distortion is strongest.

OKAY this is one of my favourite bits of the chapter HAHA the deep soda lore. i dont expect anyone to remember all the way back to chapter 3 but:

literally nobody asked about this but i love the phantom thieves!!! i dream of all the little silly moments of being a team that they must have that we don't get to see in gameplay, for obvious reasons of it wouldn't really work in a game, but i can imagine them in my brain. i can imagine their trickshot contests that get their asses kicked. i can imagine them chanting at each other to chug while joker and oracle compete to down an entire bottle of brand neutral mountain dew baja blast. i can dream.

soda lore is gay.

i dont honestly think it's inherently a bad thing necessarily but this part does kind of set up like... you can see akechi very early on in life forming this worldview that the truth isn't always what you want, you know? this was a 'lie' he and his mother both bought into, they both knew what the truth actually was, so it wasn't real dishonesty, but they just had this little fantasy. i just thought it would be fun for akechi to have a way to bond with his mother and feel closer to her, and that way is by buying into this white lie. idk

akechi's mother isn't really a character and i don't want to form her into too much of one because i think it's very much the point that, like... he made this point in an earlier chapter but having lost her at a pretty young age i think it's quite crucial that akechi doesn't really have a fully formed image of who his mother is outside of what she was to him as a child. so i actively don't want her to feel too real or defined. im not interested in making an oc out of her because i think it defeats the purpose. that said, this line exists to maybe gesture very vaguely at the notion that akechi's mother was a very bright person who similarly was stuck in circumstances that didn't serve to foster her real potential. just the image in my mind of a person who's clever enough to get across algebraic notation in chess by flipping through a book in a few minutes, but was never exposed to the opportunity to learn chess until this moment in someone else's house, and also the particular situation of learning this skill WHILE at someone's place as a call girl, i dunno . i hope im treating this with the grace it deserves but i wanted to build just this particular image in vivid colour while also keeping the reality quite blurry and vague, just to give the reader a sense of where akechi came from while still preserving his limited pov.

my thoughts on the phantom thieves' methods (and how they compare to maruki) are definitely too long and involved to put into a post about this fic chapter specifically, but maybe one day. i also wanna stress im not like... strictly anti-phantom thief or anti-heartstealing lol but i do have thoughts about the philsophy of it and the thieves' hypocrisy WHATEVER that's not for this post. i bring this up only to crow about finding a way to bring up the experience machine (ie maruki's reality) in this fic without it being royal compliant and have it be... hoepfully... sufficiently relevant to the plot. wa hoo! the experience machine came up for the first time back in chapter 4 and im just delighted that i finally got to close that loop. by the way, that experiment is also called the lotus eater machine after the lotus eaters in the odyssey! i dunno that it's actively my favourite thought experiment but it's definitely up there and i think about it a lot.

TITLE DROP

i think i spoke once about what 'as you like it' means. it's obviously the name of the shakespeare play from where 'all the world's a stage' comes, but it has a couple more layers to it as well - akechi's palace is a place where he performs to what he believes other people want or need to see from him - so his appearance is as you like it. and his accusation of the thieves' heartstealing methods is that they twist a person's internal reality to suit their vision - that's the meaning he's taking here, claiming that joker is turning akechi into an unfamiliar new thing, as [joker] like[s] it. you get it.

this running joke of ren really hating vents wasn't something i planned but im attached to it now. prayer circle for his knees

ive basically given up on making sense of samerecarm, which is par for the course for any rpg or video game really where reduction to 0hp/revival are mechanics. like, im inclined to think 0hp is more equivalent to unconsciousness, because... well... otherwise it's pretty cold that they left akechi dead in the engine room without even looking for a way around the wall. lol. but one of mona's revival lines is 'being dead isnt easy!' or something like that, so i kind of just give up and assume it's video game logic you'r enot meant to look at too hard lol. the way i reconcile it for my purposes is to say it's a sort of metaverse-exclusive state of being which is not quite dead but sort of in a limbo state wher eyou can be brought back with specific revival magic, which i refer to as being down. that's uhhh, that's different from the battle status of down... which you get after being hit with a crit/technical/weak skill... look, don't think about it. joker in crow's arms.

this is literally meaningless i just wanted to include a cameo of my very favourite persona q2 battle theme.

[contagious-watermelon]

if i hear one more person unironically identifying themself as afab or amab I'm gonna start biting

[smoshingatut]

I'm kinda tired of dungeon meshi fans blatantly misinterpreting Kabru's goals, motivations, and character so they can ship him with Laios...like obviously it's awesome if you enjoy Laikabu but can you nooot twist Kabru's intentions for involving himself with the guy who constantly triggers his monster trauma and pisses him off so bad he gets brain damage so that he turns into "the guy who wants to suck Laios's dick" as his entire character? I've even seen people cut off Kabru's words to make it seem like he is admiring Laios because it would disrupt that narrative

[syn4k]

im experiencing emotions this evening so i made an important message for every single person who has ever hesitated before thinking about creating something due to their perceived or actual level of technical skill relating to the medium

[crossbackpoke-check]

the deweys photos are from this video: https://youtu.be/5xTwJho44ao?si=bPw8MZZ327lCogVZ aren’t they just everything

kissing you and the minnesota wild official media team (with consent) full on the mouth, THANK YOU THIS VIDEO IS EVERYTHING 🥰🥰 i have seen pieces of it before i think (connor petting a shark 🥹) but the entire video start to finish is such a delight, 10/10 would recommend

[memento-morri-writes]

This is far from my best work, but it's 1:30am, and I needed to get this down before I slept or lost my mind. So here, take a snippet of Rook seeing Zara again for the first time in 3 years.

Trying, and failing, to keep his voice from shaking, [Rook] said “Hello, Captain.” Mouth still open in surprise, [Zara] replied “Well, hello yourself.” The reality of what she was seeing seemed to hit her as she rounded the desk. “Rook, is that really you?” He nodded. “It’s me.” Zara ran towards him, stopping just short of touching him, and said “What did she do to you?” Rook’s heart stuttered and he had to brush his fingers together to confirm Sigmar’s ring was still in place. Could she possibly see through its illusion? But then he remembered what Lanny had said. She knew where you were. His throat clenched and he choked out “Two years.” A wave of grief swept across Zara’s face as she said “I’m so, so sorry.” Rook shook his head vigorously. “It’s not your fault.” Zara ignored him. “It is my fault. I failed you. As your captain, it’s my responsibility to keep you safe, and I failed you.” Rook wanted to say something, to reassure her, but she pushed on. “She sent me letters, told me all the terrible things she was doing to you. I… I let you down.” Those words hit Rook with the force of a dozen cannonballs. Lanny had said that Zara knew Wolf had him, but knowing that Zara had been aware of what Wolf was doing to him… somehow that was more painful than any wound Wolf had ever inflicted. He barely managed to force his next words out around the lump in his throat. “Where were you?” And why didn’t you come? “She said she’d kill you if I came to get you. Or if I hired anyone to get you. You’re standing here because I stopped sailing.” 

(honorary one-time tag for @space-writes bc I remember you enjoyed my other bits about Rook and Zara.)

[introspectivememories]

everyday i wake up and i think about carlos reyes anc his relationship with his sexuality and his parents. what do you mean he came out to them when he was 17 and he's still waiting for them to say something? what do you mean he's still waiting?? what do you mean his father didn't want him to be a cop because he thought carlos was too soft? what do you mean he came out at 17, scared and nervous, and they smiled and told him it was okay only to turn around and spend the next, what, decade?, never talking about it?????

[acourtofquestions]

“He'd deceived her, had lied to her. This man who she'd believed held no secrets between them. She didn't know why it made her want to shred everything within sight.”

— cause um… as you just said Miss Manon YOU CARE (& it’s even giving Chaolaena vibes in the I CARE way)… so like all I’m saying is you love him duh?

[cosmobrain00]

did anyone think about kid keith td🙂 do u want to🙂

[james-spooky]

this is a test

[starbuck]

Real Emotional Labor Hours

[snivel1]

You know that you are a human…

You know that you are a human.

You know that, or do you not?

That smile of yours is unique to you,

That torment of yours is unique to you,

Your eyes no other person has got.

Tomorrow you won’t be here present.

Tomorrow on this blessed land

Others’ll be running and laughing,

Others’ll be feeling and loving;

Good people and bad ones, my friend.

Today all the world is for you:

Forests and hills, valleys deep.

So hurry to live, please, hurry!

So hurry to love, please, hurry!

Don’t miss out on it, don’t oversleep!

‘Cause you on this Earth are a human.

And whether you want it or not,

That smile of yours is unique to you,

That torment of yours is unique to you,

Your eyes no other person has got.

Author: Vasyl Symonenko

Translator: Kyrylo Snizhko

[deus-ex-mona]

such is the tale of a ✨chronically online hypocrite✨