#They choose to deem it irrelevant (Out of logic and possibly emotional protection)

[kidokear]

Peak Gabv1el development (for me, at least) is when someone calls V1 an object and it's Gabriel who go off on this someone, like, he will not allow anyone to entertain that notion. This angle will defend V1's autonomy and sentience with his life.

I think it's sweet and it's a great way to show how far their relationship and bond (romantic or platonic) has gone. Gabriel going from calling them a thing to not letting anyone to call them that and even taking offence (probably more than them) to someone thinking of them like that? How can I not love this? He's the king of fast character development. XD

[mittensmorgul]

it’s been six days since i watched 15.19 and i will never be over this

for Chuck, the ultimate punishment, the worst thing they could do to him-- far worse than instant death-- was to render him utterly powerless. he’d cosplayed as a human for a very long time, superficially exploring his creation while retaining complete control over it. a snap of his fingers could still alter reality (he gave himself the ability to play music, he experimented with human relationships and still utterly failed to grasp the concepts of human joy and love and care). he did all of this while still fundamentally seeing his own creation as a playground for him to dominate, and the beings he’d created with with the ability to love and choose for themselves were merely his personal playthings. every instance of lucifer referring to humanity as chuck’s “toys” was spot on, all along.

and now that he is human himself, it’s irrelevant if he ever grows into this realization for himself. he’s been rendered entirely superfluous to the narrative he’d sought to control and eventually obliterate on a whim. sure, we can hope that he will grow to see the beauty and wonder and potential joy and love that humans are capable of, but it doesn’t matter. if he does, then good for him. if not, we are the bodily incarnation of the shrug emoji. that’s his problem now, basically. it’s the ending he deserved.

but for cas-- the ONE element of the story that he could never fully eliminate or bend to his will, the SINGLE incarnation of this character across all his universes to simply fail to do what he was told and bugger off back to heaven with the rest of the mindless angels-- cas is the SINGLE angel who actually fell in love with humanity. he’s the one who let humanity change him, because of the love he saw in dean winchester-- a man who spent the last 15 seasons believing he was broken, poison, nothing more than a weapon or a killer, who ruined everything he touched including this angel.

love never ruined anything, hon.

cas has been dipping his toes into humanity since his first season on the show. he’s been blowing apart the doorways to doubt, feeling more and more human emotions despite repeated attempts to program that humanity out of him and restore him to proper angelic obedience. and because of the love he began to understand only after he did fully fall and become human, when he had to give up his humanity because of necessity to save the world yet again, in an act he deemed “barbaric” and only chose because he felt he had no other choice, he’s never felt that was a viable option for him to choose again, for himself.

he’s needed to be “prepared” to go to war at every turn. there’s never been a time when he felt he could lay that magical armor and sense of duty to the universe of being an angel down. it’s... horrifying, actually. knowing that he carries so much love, and the one thing he wants he feels he can never have, because instead he would have to choose to sacrifice any chance of it to be ready at all times to pick up his arms again and fling himself in front of the cosmic bullets the universe kept firing at them. he held on to it all as a shield-- both for his own fear of his feelings not being reciprocated from dean because we have been told over and over for years that angels are like “marble statues” and are incapable of true human feelings (and even in more mundane ways like how cas mourned the flavor of pb&j once his grace was restored... nothing really hit the same, like the grace itself was a shield in the same way cas described dean’s demonhood as a shield that protected him from feeling his feelings), but in a very literal way cas used his grace to shield dean from danger, ready to stand between dean and death at every turn, regardless of the consequences, and regardless of how DEAN would react to losing him. Some sacrifices just aren’t worth surviving, you know? which dean proved out to us in early s13... and which cas has no IDEA about...

but back to the point...

in a post-chuck world, where TFW’s sacrifices of raising jack to believe in the beauty of creation and the power of human love and joy and wonder and beauty and balance have restored the natural order and changed the entire stakes of the game from saving the world to saving themselves and finally having total freedom to make their own choices in life without a risk-reward calculation on whether they can save the universe from the current round of existential threat imposed on them by a malicious god, is there any other logical choice that cas would make than to finally be able to lay his shield down? there’s nothing more to fight for, except themselves and the love they’d never felt was possible.

for chuck, humanity was the ultimate punishment. but for cas, the angel who broke the mold, it would be the ultimate reward.

and for all of us humans down here in the muck who chuck would’ve just as soon seen stomped back into the mud for the rest of eternity? i don’t think there could be any greater affirmation of OUR humanity and the validity and power of our own lives, our own love, and our own choices than demonstrating that humanity itself isn’t and should never be a punishment to anyone who truly loves.

this is my story, and i’m sticking with it.

[dabistits]

im super conflicted abt hawks atm but i was thinking abt his parallels with shigaraki and i was wondering kinda why there's a difference between wanting 'redemption' (i dont think this is the right word but i cant think of a better one 'want better' maybe?) for shigaraki but not for hawks? is it bc he made a permanent decision to kill twice as essentially an agent of the state?

Just to preface, I don’t think I’m objectively right for just wanting Hawks to eat shit immediately in the next chapter. I’m just complaining because a lot of people who “love both Hawks and Twice” and “think Hawks was wrong, but…” are hard to get away from without going in the other direction toward a group of people who have shitty fandom behavior, whose opinions about the Hawks/Twice situation are (unfortunately) much closer to my own. I don’t think there’s necessarily a “correct” way to feel about Hawks, but I feel differently than a lot of people I see around (who, ironically, are the ones insisting that there’s a “correct” way to feel about Hawks), and that’s frustrating. I want to be done with Hawks. I don’t want him to get any more focus in canon, I don’t want to see more posts about how Hawks committing murder is an indication of inner turmoil instead of him choosing a side, I don’t want to keep running into posts that tack on “but Hawks is also sad/a victim” in discussing what’s pretty clearly a tragedy for Jin and the LOV that Hawks was completely and 100% solely responsible for.

But, yeah, sure. I’ll also explain what I think is the difference between Tomura and Hawks:

1. Part of it is emotional and not logical for sure. I love Jin a lot. He embodies the person who has faced incredible adversity, and still comes out on the other side ready to love and open his heart to others, moreover to protect others. I’m not like that at all, but I think it’s very admirable. So in that sense, it hurts on a personal level to lose him over anyone else, and I can’t not associate that with Hawks, since he’s the killer.

2. Jin is a significant death. The nameless minions that Tomura has killed (many of whom were active “Quirk supremacists”) don’t mean anything to me compared to Jin, and?? Through the lens of narrative, I think that makes Tomura more forgivable, because I genuinely have no interest in there being any plot “resolution” with, like, the dead anti-mutant cultists, because I just do not care about them.

3. Tomura, especially early Tomura, has threatened to go places that are unforgivable, like leaving All Might’s students dead and forcibly bringing Bakugou over to their side (whatever terrible procedure that may have entailed). The difference is that the narrative never actually allowed him to cross that line by actually killing the kids, who we do care about as characters, so while the intent in itself is pretty awful, he was never allowed to complete the action that would take him over to the point of no return. Hawks, however, did cross the line by killing someone who we care about and who is narratively established as a “good person,” who even Hawks concedes is a good person.

3. a. I don’t like the MLA ideologically and I don’t like the decision to have the LOV team up with them. But, again, their takeover plan has been stopped in its tracks, which I’m actually fine with to prevent the LOV from crossing the moral event horizon, but that’s, like… completely irrelevant to me thinking Hawks shouldn’t have killed Jin.

3. b. Though there’s still a chance for Tomura to cross the moral event horizon, and I’m not going to convince myself that it won’t happen. If it’s going to happen, I think it’s highly possible that it might happen in this arc, because now Jin is dead and we know how Tomura and the LOV have historically responded to their friends getting hurt. I, and many others, have called Jin the “heart” of the LOV (his name is also literally written with the kanji for “benevolence”), and now without him, there is no remaining heart nor goodwill.

4. Although both Tomura and Hawks are, on one level, fighting on behalf of the ideals that they were “raised into,” their fights happen in very different ways. The MLA arc in particular made clear that the villains are, in part, fighting for their very survival in ways heroes just aren’t. The threat that the LOV were living under was constant—when it wasn’t heroes or other villain groups, it was trying to find money and shelter and essential upkeep. Hawks may not be “free” from the HPSC or the occasional villain attack, but he’s free from those constant material struggles. He’s not an “underdog.” 

4. a. Tomura is also, in part, fighting to protect his marginalized friends. It’s for sure not on behalf of every marginalized person, but it’s certainly more than we’ve seen any pro hero fight for. The people Tomura is surrounded with are people who have never been protected nor cared for before, because they were not deemed “innocent” enough to deserve that care and protection, and Tomura continued to care for them even when it was troublesome for him to do so, when they disagreed with him, when they threatened him, and when they fucked up very, very badly. 

4. a. i. Eri is an example of a victim who the heroes fought for, but she’s an easy case to want to love and protect: Overhaul was inarguably an abuser who wanted to elevate the yakuza, she was being used in extended torture-experiment sessions, she killed her father on accident, she’s a child, she’s innocent, she’s selfless, she’s well-behaved. It’s basically not even a question whether or not she “deserves” help.

4. b. It’s people who are difficult who get overlooked. Hawks and hero society are completely unprepared to protect and care for people who don’t behave as they’re supposed to. Hawks did not care for the LOV who didn’t personally befriend him. For the one he did, when Jin didn’t cooperate the way Hawks wanted, he went for the kill. It’s either being easy and “manageable,” or die.

4. b. i. Tomura has specifically spared two people who tried to kill him or actually succeeded in killing his ally, people who he explicitly hated or did not care for. So make of that what you will, I guess.

5. From a leftist perspective, it’s just impossible not to account for the fact that Hawks helps maintain a social structure that creates so much suffering. The question isn’t really whether AFO’s teachings to Tomura are better (they’re not, and I want Tomura to break away from them), but it can’t really be ignored that Hawks is enforcing an ideal that’s wildly popular. Why this matters is that Tomura doing the wrong things will be roundly condemned, and he’ll probably be “punished” for them; but heroes are very unlikely to be punished or held accountable for committing murder, especially if it’s “justified.” 

5. a. This is problematic because it allows heroes, and the state, to define what a justified “emergency situation” is, and who can die in those emergencies. The people who are deemed killable “in an emergency” are usually those who are already marginalized; hence heroes can wait until those marginalized people get desperate enough to commit villainous acts, and then they can swoop in to arrest or kill them to widespread public acclaim.

5. b. Heroes (and law enforcement IRL) don’t address the roots of crime that lie in overarching oppressive structures like misogyny and capitalism. They don’t prevent theft by bringing people financial stability; they arrest people who were desperate enough to steal, and use those people to send a message to poor people everywhere. They make these conditions of desperation more permanent by punishing the most vulnerable people when they slip up, while doing absolutely nothing until the slip-up happens.

5. c. Heroes are punching down, and villains are punching up. That may not be the case with AFO, but I believe it with the LOV specifically, and I believe this matters because it’s exemplified between Hawks and Twice. Hawks targets someone who reached out to him, despite being hurt over and over again by types like him, who has dealt with poverty and fantasy mentally illness completely on his own, and kills him in defense of the very society that allowed all those things to happen to Jin. Hawks was given a choice: sympathize and relate to Jin, and acknowledge his well-founded grievances toward a dysfunctional society, or prioritize the safety and security of that dysfunctional society by permanently removing Jin from the equation. The choice he believes in is the choice he made.

5. d. In order for Tomura to make the same choice with the same implications, they’d have to be living in an alternate universe, in the Kingdom of AFO, where Tomura is a respected noble who infiltrates a rebel group who were going to “commit atrocities,” kills the one person who offered him a way out of AFO’s control, and possibly screws the rebels altogether, but everyone is happy that the rebels are gone. Even if you think Tomura is capable of that, it’s irrelevant because canon!BNHA has completely different power dynamics. Because Tomura’s violence will always be unpopular and persecuted, rather than justified and glorified by the state, he physically cannot replicate a choice like Hawks’. Tomura can approximate it, but even if he does, he’ll be hunted down by heroes for doing so. The circumstances and consequences for making such a choice are totally different.

So. That’s why I don’t think Tomura and Hawks can be equated. Suggesting that this is a level playing field is essentially believing that criminals and law enforcement exist on level playing fields, and they absolutely do not at all. Hawks is particularly abhorrent because he’s already followed through with his choice. He holds power by being part of the policing class, and regardless of how he came into it, he behaves exactly the same as everyone else who “freely” joined, and in his position of power he made the choice to eliminate someone who was socially powerless.