#after quite literally bombing us and kill thousands of us | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

noicevibes · 1 year ago

Text

𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐚 𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐳𝐨𝐧

pairings -> suguru getou x reader

warnings -> sfw, fem bodied reader w fem pronouns used; mentions of alcohol consumption; main character death; talks of death, depictions of depress & grieving, etc.; non-sexual nudity; satoru x reader if you squint

wc -> 5.8k

notes -> this was repurposed into a reader fic, but if i've missed anything, please let me know. enjoy, and uhhh, here's some tissues...

Death is strange.

As a Jujutsu Sorcerer, you don’t tend to think too hard when it comes to it. Curses aren’t human, after all. They’re barely even ghosts. The only thing human about them is that they’re born from the negative emotions of them. It isn’t like it’s murder. It’s an exorcism.

But it’s when those Curses begin to involve humans that it becomes something ambivalent.

There’s a little less than two gallons of blood within the average human body, and a few over two hundred bones. Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels, six hundred muscles, nearly eighty organs, thirty-two teeth, ten fingers, ten toes— humans are so, so fragile. They die so easily, and even easier if someone or something else happens to be the cause. In their own hands, hesitation at least exists, if just for a moment.

But death caused by a Cursed Spirit is messy. It’s tactless. It’s instinct. Because suddenly there’s human remains everywhere, and now someone has to clean it up. So isn’t it ironic that even though they’ve been “blessed” with higher intelligence, it’s still just mindless killing?

Suguru used to stand above the scenes where this thoughtlessness took place. The body, or sometimes, bodies, had already been recovered, so at least he didn’t have to see them. Most of the time, anyhow. Like staring at a black dot in front of a white background at one of Tokyo’s libraries’ computer labs, and then looking away— the unfortunate times that one of his missions either began or ended with some human dying also ended up with the image of their bodies imprinted behind his eyelids.

For a while, he’d been lucky not to be forced into those chance opportunities too often. But even if only once, it’s one time too many. It’s usually just the investigation, maybe a little “cleanup” if that Cursed Spirit decided to stick around.

Death is strange.

And maybe for the longest time, him not “thinking much about death” was the problem. It’s why it built up like some bomb, finally exploding from within the blood vessels buried beneath his flesh by the end of his second year. It’s why it drove him away from any semblance of a peaceful rationality.

Did Cursed Spirits consider their own deaths? Those with enough of a consciousness did, perhaps, though it wasn’t for a fear of death, itself. Most definitely, they feared powerlessness; Suguru remembers like a recent memory, the amount of Curses who’d scramble to escape him and his power, because they hadn’t been able to face him, because they faced the same mortality they shared with the humans they’d been borne from.

Death is strange.

And it’s odd that he can’t find himself as angry as he thought he would. Shouldn’t he be angry that his plans were never fully fleshed out? Or angry that he’d never gotten his hands on that Special Grade Curse he’d desired? Or angry that he never got the chance to—

As much as a wraith like him can, Suguru freezes. The space around him feels ambiguously full, and yet, he perceives nothing through his eyes. The space is empty, and he free floats within it, eyes open and processing absolutely nothing and everything at once. It’s frustrating not being able to use any of his five senses, nor even detect Cursed energy. Such a loss of control, a loss of power, he’d only experienced it once or twice, and only back when he was still a child. It’d been different. He’d held so much in the palms of his hands, and now, quite literally, he has nothing. All around him— nothing.

The flesh behind his ear suddenly aches. In the nothingness, Suguru jolts, limbs swimming through a peerless black sea. Were his senses returning to him? It wasn’t a painful sensation, but after experiencing a loss of touch, it’d been startlingly foreign.

Raising a hand to where he’d pinpointed the sharp pain, he rubs it, and warmth swims through his fingertips, rippling down through his forearm and past his elbow and into his chest, into his apparently twisting gut and chilled toes. Even without any experience in death, he knows this sensation to be wrong; simply, incorrect. He shouldn’t feel warmth.

Despite the darkness of nothing around him looking to be an infinite space, with his physical sensation returning to him, he learns it’d only been behind his closed eyes, like he’d been asleep. With much difficulty, they flinch a thread’s width open— light from the other side of his skin filters in and sends a pulsing ache through his irises and to the back of his head.

Light? he thinks gratefully, only to wince, suddenly able to “hear” his own thoughts. And so, he tests his voice, too, a murmur escaping past dried lips; the taste of blood follows quickly along, and Suguru grimaces.

The one sensation that has yet to return, the most frustrating of them: his ability to sense Cursed energy. The light around him is mostly white, and blinding enough that Suguru finds his bloodied sleeve curtaining his vision.; it takes time, but eventually, the white fades into familiar scenery. And, if he weren’t already dead, the sight alone would stop his heart.

Death is strange.

Because whether or not the concepts of Heaven and Hell exist in a physical, material sense, it didn’t really matter. Suguru’s first instinct had been to dub that dark, nothing space as Purgatory; whatever gods or higher powers existed, they were busy making a determination on his soul and stuck him there. It didn’t take much to convince him that what scene laid before him was truly of Hell. He’d already been condemned; finally figuring out how to see again was his subconscious acceptance of it.

No, in Hell, there’s a matching living room set, the lacquered coffee table with trash strewn across it; an area rug with crumbs set deep into each space of mesh and yarn; a kitchen with counters full of dirty, moulding dishes, at least a week’s worth; empty liquor bottles; a seven-foot-tall half-decorated plastic pine tree—

Maybe this is my personal Hell, Suguru wonders, head turning slowly to take in the familiarity of the apartment before him. But why is it so familiar?

A choked noise alerts him; Suguru spins one-hundred-and-eighty degree mid-air, feet unable to touch the floor and hovering several inches above it. It’s impossible for him to be winded, but a feeling of trepidation rests heavy atop his lungs. Because this must be his personal Hell— if the grief-shrunken woman were anyone else, he might not have thought so. But it isn’t.

Suguru crouches before you, lips parted and hand outstretched to brush a finger along your cheek— instinct. That’s what it is. His instinct to comfort you begets the truth of his death, and a gasp escapes him when his fingers simply pass through your face.

Calling out your name does nothing, he learns. You suddenly stir, but not for the reason Suguru had hoped. Flexing your fingers, it looks like your arm had gone numb from where it’d been tucked and curled against your chest. He calls for you once more. Nothing.

You let out a soundless breath, and Suguru frowns, desiring nothing more than to hear your voice once more. His teeth grit in sudden determination, and he reaches for you again.

“Get up,” Suguru insists of you. Please. His hand, meant to rouse you as he’d pleaded with a shake to your shoulder, only passes through your bicep; you shiver, and tuck into yourself even further.

This hellish scene makes sense now. The dirty dishes, the garbage everywhere, and even you, sitting before him, with your makeup only partially removed. Black cradles the soft skin beneath your eyes, and even stains the inner corners of them.

They’re open, at least, Suguru thinks, relieved. If he can’t hear you, at least he can look into your eyes.

Even in death, his chest aches. With guilt, with anxiety, with that same frustration from before— he’d accepted defeat so easily, and ended up being put down. Suguru wonders if you know what Satoru did. Knowing him, he wouldn’t have mentioned it.

But Suguru knows you too well. Knew you. With everything that’s gone on, everything that she’s seen in spite of Suguru’s efforts to keep you away from certain truths of the Jujutsu world— you’ve always been a “clever girl”. Even if you don’t have much Cursed energy yourself, even if you can’t see Curses too clearly, the walk of humanity’s ignorance and that of a Jujutsu Sorcerer’s duty is one across a rotting wooden bridge.

You’d insisted. Both he and Satoru knew early on how difficult it would end up being to say no to their friend. You insisted, and so, you learned— perhaps, a little too much. To take in the amount of horror that lay behind a thin, “magical” veil, had been a lot. Once, Suguru thought it a mistake to even bother. But if not you, then who? Who would have been the one to insist on having their arms wrapped around him at nearly all waking moments?

While there’d been an attempt at giving him advice and guidance from those within the Jujutsu community, despite your knowledge of it, you’d yet to experience anything it could throw your way; all along, your Jujutsu Sorcerer friends had done well to ensure that stayed the case— no Curses would touch you, not even a single hair on your body.

And so, as an outsider with an outsider’s perspective, as Suguru began to spiral, you did your damnedest to distract him, to pull him away from the thoughts that filtered into his head. What he would whittle out at you, either absentmindedly or purposefully, quite frankly, frightened you. For humanity’s sake, and, for his.

That was not the Suguru you remember coming to know. Whatever had happened in between your first meeting, and during that escort mission from ten years back of his and Satoru’s, had been enough to send him so askew as to defect from being a simple Jujutsu Sorcerer, and to become a mass murderer. All those thoughts lingered and festered like the curdling inside an abscess until it popped in a most horrifying way.

It… didn’t improve. Ten years had been quick to pass. The contact between you and Suguru and you and Satoru and your other friends made through the college persisted. It’d been difficult not to say anything about the other to them, and you made sure not to let a single word out, no “Suguru said”’s or “Satoru told me”’s whatsoever.

Of course, they knew. They could sense each other’s Cursed energy on you each time. It was a bitter sting, and you, a sweet reminder.

It hurt. For years, it hurt. It hurt when you would, on your bi-annual, month-long visits, spend half of the time with Satoru and those at the college, and the other half with Suguru, minding your steps and your entire being, really, when you’d been under the same roof as his fellow Curse Users (who, if not for the threat of Suguru’s presence, perhaps had half a mind to take care of the “little monkey” that had shown up).

Oh, but the pain, the stress, the fear and the anguish, none of it spent over the past decade, even the past nearly thirty years, could even begin to compare to this. Never to this.

How long had she spent out here? Suguru had been quick to float through the rest of your apartment— some spots remained untouched, while the rest were scathed and scorned by neglect. Upon closer examination, some of those dishes had begun to mold. Your bedroom door was shut, and quite obviously slammed shut by the way the latch piece suddenly overlaps the wooden frame. It hasn’t been budged, not even once, the splinters still in place.

How many days has it been since he’d passed? Suguru recalls the calendar hooked on an up-curved nail next to the desk in your bedroom, and moves to grab the handle, only to sigh when his hand passes through the door entirely. Right.

It’s a strange sensation, to pass through a solid object as a ghost. A ghost? Somehow, it’s even stranger to call himself as such. But he slips in easily; a depressing thought.

Your room is different than how you typically leaves it. The duvet’s been shoved to the foot of the bed as if in a hurry, slippers flung almost six feet from the other; something’s broken near the entrance to your bathroom, where the light had been left on— oh, it’s the toothbrush cup. Something pinches in Suguru’s still heart when he sees his toothbrush lying next to yours.

Suguru suddenly understands why the door had been so aggressively shut from the outside, as if the dozens of photos of the two of you that litter the walls wouldn’t have brought him to a much faster conclusion. Even if he’d noticed how, atop that same skewed duvet, even more photos sat, these ones framed behind glass, some shattered and some having survived being thrown there. The disarray and discord shut tight behind the broken door, out of sight and barely out of mind, was to put him out of your mind. His death out of your mind.

The twenty-fifth of December has been circled almost too enthusiastically, by several circles of red and green; even a couple of glossy, gold adhesive stars had been place around the date. Christmas. As opposed to its box, that of the twenty-fourth, and the rest of the last week of the month, every other day had been crossed out, already lived through. The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons was set for the twenty-fourth, the same date Suguru had been bested by a fifteen-year-old; the same date Satoru ended his life.

Anguished, Suguru is quick to shift back into the hallway, thoughts racing while he raced back to you. You haven’t budged in your settee, no less a part of the furniture surrounding you. How long had she been sitting there? He feared to learn the answer. Assumedly, you’d only gotten up to use the washroom. Unfortunately, by the state of you, it hadn’t looked like you’d managed to make it into the shower for a couple of days, at least.

So then, it’s been at least that long, Suguru decides, swiping a hand down his face. It curls to the back of his neck to massage away the phantom tension built there.

If he had a say in this, in any of it, you’d be sitting in his lap right now. His arms would be wrapped tight around you, or he’d be smoothing a large hand along your muscles, and your favourite blanket would be draped across your body. He’d be speaking softly, you’d be trying to listen without dissociating.

He wouldn’t be deceased, is his point.

There’s few things Suguru can find himself regretting right now. But you, having to leave you, is his biggest regret.

When your cell phone rings, he startles. The ring itself is loud, but the rattling of the vibration against the coffee table is drilling. He turns to see who’s calling, bent and crouched on his haunches, and finds the screen lit up with a photo of yours’ and Satoru’s faces. He’s pinching your cheek between his thumb and forefinger, expression amused by your challenge where your own fingers had sunken into his thick white hair to pull it from its roots.

The quality of the photo isn’t so perfect— if Suguru had to guess, he’d say it might’ve been taken a good almost ten years ago. They look younger, after all. It isn’t difficult to guess that the photographer of the scene had been Shoko, what with the smoke floating past the lens when the shot was taken. And despite the scene captured, they looked happy. You look happy. Happy enough. A stark contrast to your currently sunken visage.

Either way, seeing it irks him.

You barely look to your phone long enough to register the name on the screen; your blurred, untrained gaze only allows you to see that someone is calling, and leaves it at that. The calling screen fades to your locked screen’s screensaver, and it’s a rather flattering photo of Suguru, himself, despite being one taken candidly. He remembers he’d lightly scolded you for it, and insisted that you take one of the both of them. Suguru’s sneaking suspicion now is that you’d set that photo as your home screen, instead.

It’s only a moment or two later than it begins to rings once again— Satoru, of course.

The noise you make is choked. It’s a mixture of frustration and detest, but you make it, all the way up until you reach through Suguru and grabs it. There’s a moment of hesitation, but you press the button to answer, lifts the phone to your ear, and listens, wordless.

Suguru rises onto a single knee and shifts closer to eavesdrop. Mostly, it’s Satoru speaking. This is the first time in the six days since the event that you’d answered your phone, apparently, meaning that the current date must be the thirtieth, or the thirty-first. He asks if you’d eaten, if you’d bathed, if you’d called any of your family back home (since you hadn’t contacted anyone from the school). He asks why you won’t speak, why you won’t answer his questions. There’s a gentle four-tone knock at the door that pairs with the four sharp sounds that echo from Satoru’s side of the line, and you flinch— somehow, Suguru’s finds relief in your reaction.

His voice calls opposite the front door, and the phone. “Open up.”

You stir, but not enough to satisfy Suguru.

Both he and Satoru chorus your name. He swallows, and watches your expression shift between the phone and the door with a trembling lip. More frustration? Or is she about to cry?

“Go open the door,” Suguru pleads. “Let him help you. Please.”

He reaches for you again, for the hand gripping your phone, and suddenly, you jolt with a gasp, drawing your hand into your chest, tired eyes widened—

“Are you okay?” Satoru calls.

The phone slips through your fingers, sliding off your lap when you go to catch it, only for it to clatter onto the floor.

With a frantic shout of your name, the door suddenly bursts open, making both you and the incorporeal, non-physical man next to you, jump. In the doorway, Satoru huffs, clearly anxious by the downturned lilt of his lips. He’s quick to slip out of his shoes, minding the bags ruffling in his hands when he moves toward the kitchen, pausing to take in the sight of it through the wrappings over his eyes, and whatever words he’d been about to say, dies in his throat at the look on your face.

It’s akin to lividity; your feelings have only been strangling you since hearing Satoru’s voice. Rage fuels your adrenaline. The tears streaming down your flushed cheeks do not accompany the sound of your grief, and instead, drowns it. You’d been avoiding Satoru on purpose; this, of course, neither he nor Suguru knew, and Satoru only thought you were avoiding everyone.

The gangly man crosses into the living room in only few steps. You bristle like a cat, your shoulders rising and arms wrapping around yourself as if shying and shielding away from Satoru. He pauses once more, lips parting as if to speak, but they firmly shut a moment later.

Instead, he sets the bags down — some are filled with easy-made non-perishables, and the others, pre-made bentos and a bag of melon pan — and moves toward the bathroom with a broom in hand. The sound of rushing water fills the apartment, accompanied by the clattering of porcelain into the dustbin. Suguru watches from afar as Satoru then begins his search for a towel and a facecloth, finding it in the hallway cupboard just a door down, and sets them on the counter next to the sink before moving back into the living room. In an attempt to regale you, he tears the blanket covering up to your knees away, draping it across the back of the cushion, but it only worsens your fury.

Suguru presses his chin into his palm, floating midair a few feet away to watch the scene unfold. He should know better than to do something that stupid.

Your attempt at keeping out of Satoru’s hold quickly and easily fails. Once the blanket came off, you’d been an easy target, all four limbs exposed and easy to seize, thanks to your lethargy. His movements are simple, but quick— he’s got an arm around your waist like you weigh nothing, keeping you dangling by your middle on his way back to the washroom. Depositing you on the closed toilet seat, he then crosses his arms.

Nose upturned and crinkled, he regards you from up high. “You stink.”

You stare at him, gaze lidded by fatigue. It doesn’t take you long to realize what he’s just said— nor would you have to speak the same language to understand it. The look on his face says it all, anyway. You smell.

Six days since you’ve left the house, six days since you’ve showered, six days since you’ve eaten anything remotely healthy, if anything at all. The past week’s been such a blur, you can’t even remember when you’d brushed your teeth last, though a quick swipe of your tongue across them becomes an easy tell.

The morning of the twenty-fifth was quite possibly the most terrible day of your life. Not only were you told that Suguru passed away, you had to hear it twice— first from Satoru. Then, from Nanako and Mimiko. You’d only wished the whiplash their very different reactions gave you had been enough to numb your mind, but you felt everything. It wasn’t until you’d been alone in your apartment again, phone battery dead, that you’d been able to register what they’d said.

“He’s gone.” “Master Geto is dead!”

You don’t remember charging your phone. You don’t remember using the bathroom, let alone getting up off of that couch on your own. Sensations only came rushing back midway through this last phone call with Satoru, and then hit you with full-force, as he’d done with your front door. Now, you find yourself in front of your bathroom mirror, regarding your emaciated self, the only thing likely ingested besides alcohol being the bit of water you’d forced yourself to drink each day, but you hadn’t touched any food.

Hand over your abdomen, you wait a moment to tell if it feels properly empty enough to stomach a few bites. Maybe. For now, you’ll brush your teeth until the coating disappears from them, and take care of any matts in your hair. You’ll strip out of the clothing you’d last put on since slamming your bedroom door shut, and avoid Satoru’s gaze amidst all of this until you begin tugging off your flannel pajamas, where he shuts the door behind you.

Sparing Satoru a glance as he passes, Suguru pokes his head through the bathroom door. In spite of your obvious beauty, the longing that he stares at you with is one being the simple desire to stand beside you. To be the one to help undo a particularly nasty knot of hair found at the back of your hair, to have even drawn the bath for you himself and to help you lower yourself down into the water and to sit tub-side to keep you company. Seeing you in such a state has distracted him from the frustrations of not seeing his plans to fruition; that’d stopped being important from the moment he recognized your apartment.

You don’t move once you’ve lowered yourself into the bathtub. Head tilted back, your legs extend as far as the length of the tub allows for, and you shut your eyes. The heaving breath you take through your nose is held for a few extra moments until you release it with a cough and a massage to your throat.

Suguru’s gut twists when you’d yet to turn off the water, and he sticks his head out the bathroom door to find Satoru sat on the floor with his back against it, face pressed into his palms.

“Seeing you like this…” It shocks the man to hear him suddenly chuckle. “And yet I still can’t bring myself to curse you, Suguru,” he murmurs.

When Satoru still hears the bath running after it being few minutes later, he’s glad he doesn’t find himself having to break another one of your doors, and manages to turn off the faucet a few centimetres before it would overflow.

He calls for you again, eyes trained away from you. In your ears, the sound is dull. You opens your eyes, staring at where the bottoms of your feet press up against the end of the tub. “Can you sit up?”

With a little help, you do, Satoru having sat himself down on the toilet lid to push you into a ninety-degree angle. Finding yourself uncomfortable with the position, you gather your legs into your chest and rests your chin on your knees.

Satoru doesn’t ask for permission when he begins sudsing up your hair with vanilla-scented shampoo. At the rate of things, he’d easily suspected not getting a proper response from you, anyway. You’d be in here all night if he hadn’t decided to intervene.

Your feelings are still fresh. It hasn’t been a full week yet, not that there’s a limit on how long one is supposed to grieve. The last thing he wants to do is impose when it’s quite obvious that his presence isn’t entirely welcome. Deep in your subconscious, you know he knows you know that him being here might be the only thing to keep you out of the hole you’re unwittingly digging yourself into. If not him, then maybe Shoko or Nanamin— at the very least, someone would be here.

And certainly, it would’ve been more appropriate for Shoko to do this, to be helping you to bathe, but her time isn’t her own, nor are her hands. Even now, she’s still tending to the wounded. And with Nanamin assisting with the clean up out there, it’d only made sense for Satoru to be the next person to check up on you— it made more sense, considering whose hand it was that turned the restless tides into a tsunami.

Carefully, Satoru cradles the back of your head and carries it into the water, only up to your hairline, and begins to rinse. The process gets repeated for your conditioner, but when it comes time to soap up the face cloth, his body seems to stutter. Mostly dissociated, you still sense the change in Satoru’s rhythm. Glancing slightly over your shoulder, you note the cloth in his hand.

The relief that floods him is overwhelming when you raise your arm to stick your hand out for it. Suddenly a little more self-conscious of your position, Satoru averts his eyes, swivelling himself to face the opposite direction of the bath. Probably the first time in days, if he can recall correctly, but the smile that appears on him is genuine. The relief is knowing his friend still has the will to go on.

You finish quickly. When Satoru asks if you’d want to stay in the bath a little longer, maybe make it into a bubble bath, you supply him with the smallest of shakes of your head.

The water was warm. The soap smelled nice. The sound of rushing water, pleasing. Even hearing Satoru’s voice, despite your obvious reservations, soothes and mends one of the many cracks in your heart. A large part of you had been content to grieve into your couch for a long while more, even with Satoru breaking your door down.

How much… did you know? You became aware of Suguru’s plan thanks to the twins blurting it out, and spent the entirety of the twenty-fourth spun into a panic, no updates, no word from the girls, from Suguru, nothing, until Christmas Day. The build-up, the lack of contact, knowing how dangerous Suguru’s plan would be and what it could result in, even with the little knowledge you had on the Jujutsu world, learning that his plan failed, learned that Suguru was killed, it was just too much, too much, too much, too much—

The water around you sloshes violently against the sides of the tub, spilling over the sides and soaking Satoru’s pant leg. He jerks in place, quick to grab your biceps to keep you from slipping any further.

“Don’t touch me!” you suddenly spit at him, angrily twisting and contorting yourself to get out of his grip. He barely flinches — he’d expected it eventually, anyhow — and pulls you upright onto your feet. Suguru, however, is quick to float between them, instinct carrying his will to intervene.

“You’ll fall,” both he, and Suguru with his hand outstretched, tell you. A large stone settles in his throat when you shudder, his fingertips having already passed through your flesh when he’d caught himself, and he retracts his translucent hand away from her.

This is the second time she’s reacted to me like that, Suguru notes with a frown. He backs away into the corner of the bathroom, floating cross-legged over the sink, and watches as your struggling dies down into protestant whining and trembling. Sorry. I’m sorry.

Satoru waits until you’re calm and still enough before he starts helping dry you with a fluffy green towel, ruffling the ends of your hair and patting down your body with the least amount of jostling, before wrapping it snugly around you. Once more, he sits you on the toilet lid and begins combing tending to your hair. When he’s finished, you surprise him by taking the comb from his hands, to fiddle with the thin, plastic teeth of it on the pads of your fingers, gaze seemingly locked onto the repeated gesture.

Tone hushed, gentle, he speaks your name. You sniffle.

“I… really loved doing his hair,” you whisper. You lowers the comb. “He had… the softest hair.”

Satoru chuckles, and gently takes the comb away from you to return it to the drawer.

“Remember when it was short, that one time?” he asks. You adjust the tightness of the towel wrapped over your chest, nodding.

“I told him I’d never forgive him for letting it get cut off like that,” you answer. “Even… if it wasn’t his fault… I’m glad it grew back.”

“Mhm.” He steps away from you to squeeze a line of toothpaste on your brush before handing it to you. “Here.”

You hum, a dry, single toned note that expresses your disinterest, but you take it from him anyway, and wet the head of it under the tap.

It would be easy for Suguru to deny it, to look at your situation and see you to remain as lost as you’d looked when he’d first appeared in your apartment— he hadn’t been wrong to fear the worst and assume you might not be able to pull yourself out of it, but he had been incorrect to not think that the others wouldn’t try their hardest to keep you out of it, themselves. Knowing Satoru, well, he probably decided he owes it to you. Not just because they’re friends, either.

He doesn’t lead you toward your bed once you’re finally finished, figuring that you seeing all those photos still laying there wouldn’t do you much good, and instead guides you to the larger of your two couches, sitting you down once more and propping your back against a couple of throw pillows.

“I’m going to make you food, okay?” he tells you. The promise of it clearly comes with the fact that he’d have to wash your dishes first, but he doesn’t bother to tell you the obvious. Despite his speediness, you manage to fall asleep in record time, slumped into the back of the couch cushion and the pillows and snoring softly.

Suguru leans away from you, floating upward from where he’d been kneeling at your side. He could, very easily, watch you sleep for hours, has watched you sleep for hours. But the more his conscious and subconscious intermingled with each other, the more the notion of your eventual recovery had turned fact. You would move on. Eventually. More than anyone, Suguru could understand how healing takes time; he’d experienced it for himself, seen it happen for Mimiko and Nanako, and for his allies. You would have help, have your friends with you to help you mend.

“Satoru.” The white haired man lowers a freshly washed ceramic bowl into the dish rack right of the sink. Eyes trained on a bead of water sliding down the neck of the tap, he finally sighs when it drops back into the sink, and braces himself against the counter with his forearms. “Satoru.”

“Suguru.” He flinches. “I’ll take care of her.”

Despite already floating, Suguru suddenly feels much lighter; his body already so translucent, he watches his hands start to fade with his acceptance. You would be alright. You’d survive this. You won’t be alone.

And, dead or alive, he would always be with you.

#suguru x reader #suguru geto x reader #geto suguru x reader #suguru x you #suguru x y/n #suguru geto x you #suguru geto x y/n #geto suguru x you #geto suguru x y/n #suguru geto #geto suguru #jjk x reader #jjk x you #jjk x y/n #satoru x reader #satoru gojo x reader #gojo satoru x reader #✦ nc vb.

53 notes · View notes

emotionaldisaster909 · 1 year ago

Text

Oh, joy))

Just had a fight with my father

Who’s completely lost to the propaganda, because he is extremely easily influenced

So i showed him those videos from Kyiv

And he says

“Answer this: Why won’t Zelensky sign a peace treaty?”

And I ask him

“Answer me this: Is this an excuse to kill innocent people???”

On which he says that every day everywhere people die whether you like it or not

So I ask him

“Are you serious??? Are you insane??? Are you fucked up????”

And he spilled alcohol on me))0

And called me a piece of shit

Who doesn’t understand anything

And who’s opinion doesn’t matter

Now))

This is exactly how our government looks on it’s people

He speaks their words

Because he listenes to their propaganda every single day from every device

From multiple devices at once even

Has been for years

Now.

How am i supposed to change minds of thousands of brainwashed people in my country

If I can’t even change my father’s mind

What am I to do

I can’t even hate him

Because I know that he literally has an official mental disorder

Which made him believe all kinds of liars - cultists, medical frauds - for as long as I remember

What am I to do?

What am I to do when people say that it’s not just Putin’s war, that russians must pay, that Russia must be bombed in return

Aside from the fact that the majority here is agains the war

But, just as in Hitler’s Germany, we are forced to keep our tongues shut

Which we don’t

And we get beaten up, arrested for bigger sentences than rapists and murderers

Used to instill more fear in people’s hearts

And to tell stories about “foreign agents” who were sponsored by “The West”

Should we start a civil war?

Should we kill people who are just too naive and bombarded by all sides by levels of propaganda Goebbels would look up to?

And

As a journalist

Believe me when I say that this propaganda is WICKEDLY smart

It uses all the methods known to history of information in a rapid fire speed

It even turned around my own desire to not see things “one sided” into the decision not to see anything at all in fear of being lied to

Which is dumb

But should i be killed for this?

I just kept listening and talking to people

Different people in my job

And a funny thing about a tattoo artists’ job

Is that there are many soldiers getting tattoos

Good thing is, many of them come and tell us that they quit, that this war is pointless, that it’s just our government making money from it

But some don’t

Yet when I talk to them

They

Talk like

People

Not some monsters

Just people

But they truly believe

That they’re doing a good thing

That they’re fighting to free the oppressed

That they’re fighting to protect their people

Or to avenge their fallen comrades

I might be just too naive and empathetic myself

But

I don’t want them killed either

I don’t want any deaths

Haha

I want a third path

Hahaha

Yeah, I might be too influenced by the ideas of a fictional character who is also called stupid and naive for his views

But

I don’t know

The only people I want to be punished are those who rule this machine of war and hate

And not only from our side

But

Maybe it was also told to me by propaganda

But i don’t think that American government wants this to stop too

I think I saw it in english media as well that US government is known for profiting on wars all around the world

Forgive and correct me if I’m utterly wrong

But in that same post that said that the entire russian population supports war

Was said that we could’ve stopped it

Tried.

Before the arrest of Navalny and soon after our opposition had the biggest rise in this century

We had so many mass protests

They were all brutally suppressed

Young men, women, literal kids and, I shit you not, literally VETERANS, GRANDPAS AND GRANDMAS who ALREADY LIVED THROUGH ONE WAR were BEATEN AND ARRESTED BY POLICE FORCES which are supposed to PROTECT THEM

After the arrest the oppression of opposition has strengthened

We lost our leaders and organisation

Protests began to lessen

Yet with the declaration of “The Special Military Operation” people ROSE AGAIN

And the same thing happened

But worse

So many brutal laws were adopted

All to ensure not a single negative word or movement against the government

So yeah me and my family might be soooo fucked for what I’m writing right now

I’m really not so sure if tumblr is safe

I’m riding on sheer hope for a fluke

But

I just

I am so sorry for keeping my eyes closed for so long

This app and talking to people here is what made me open them

What let me express my rage and made it boil to the point where I couldn’t shut up anymore

I don’t know if I should post this or not

I don’t know.

I might not

Will it make a single change?

I know a way of doing this safer and for a longer time

Actually

It would even be more influential

Yeah

But I wish there will be time

When I can no longer be afraid

And when my words will be heard loud and clear

Along with all the voices of those

Who stand with the free world

For peace and love

And

Hualian)

#tgcf #hualian #WELL I’M SORRY FOR SPAMMING THIS TAG #BUT THEY ARE THERE I MEAN .D #and pls i need people to see #please reblog if you can #please just #never stop spreading awareness #politics #russian propaganda #russian ukrainian war #war in ukraine #stop war

39 notes · View notes

starlightshadowsworld · 1 year ago

Note

as if hamas wasn't the one to break the original ceasefire on oct 7

Original ceasefire?

Do you mean the 2021 ceasefire?

Which came after 11 days of conflict and occurred in response to Israel's actions.

Because they lead planned force expulsions of Palestinians from their homes, and attacked peaceful protesters in Al Aqasa mosque?

Leading to a conflict that resulted in 12 Israeli's being killed, 2 being children.

Which pales in comparison to the 248 Palestinians being killed, 66 being children.

And than even after the ceasefire, Israeli drones were still in the air.

A ceasefire Israel didn't even want and had to talked into by the US and the United Nations.

And on that same day Israeli police beat up an AP photographer.

Because of course they did.

Or do you mean the ceasefire in 2018?

In which the conflict began because Israel fired on 121 unarmed Palestinian protesters.

Who had gathered by the fence separating the two, demanding their right to return to their homes that Israel had expelled them from in 1948.

A ceasefire that Israel denies ever agreeing to, by the way.

Or do you mean the 2014 ceasefire?

A conflict that lead to 2251 Palestinians being killed, most of which were civilians.

While 66 Israeli soilders were killed, as well as 6 civilians.

There's no language on earth that makes these numbers comparable.

Also the ceasefire to this was one Israel broke within minutes.

I could go on but we'd quite literally be here all day.

These ceasefire agreements mean nothing to Israel.

They never have.

Why? Because Israel sees any kind of resistance against their illegal occupation of Palestine, as terrorism.

It doesn't matter if that resistance is peaceful or violent, Israel treats it all the same.

As a threat.

Prior to this year, they have displaced 70% of the indigenous Palestinian population in 2 of the most catastrophic displacement events in human history.

With the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa. All of which were committed against innocent Palestinians, way before Hamas was ever created.

And who created Hamas in 1987?

Oh yeah, Israel.

And who denies that fact because there seen as a threat to their control and occupation of Palestine?

Oh yeah, Israel.

Same people who treat the indigenous population of Palestinians as second class citizens.

Imposed an illegal blockade in Gaza for 16 years.

Encourage settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, where again Hamas ain't there.

And have openly said they want to wipe all Palestinians off the map.

Along with many, many other shit Israel has been up to.

That's not just limited to Palestine.

Jee I wonder why people would retaliate against this and not at all want to follow the tyrannical regime being forced onto them.

Heck, their wouldn't need to be a ceasefire if Israel didn't invade and settle illegally in Palestine in 1948.

Palestinians were doing a lot better than than before Israel showed up.

They've done literally all they can to reason with and peacefully protest against these tyrants.

But you can't expect an illegal occupation that's committing every war crime in the book.

Violating every international law and treats the Geneva convention like a checklist, to be expected to care for the suffering of innocents both Palestinians and their own civilians.

Given both the Israeli forces, the Israeli government and Israeli civilians have admitted that Israel has been firing on their own civilians on October 7th.

On purpose.

And continue to bomb Gaza, despite knowing their own civilians could be killed.

Israel can't be expected to follow any kind of law or agreement.

Because how else will the state of Israel go on if its not profiting the suffering of Palestinians.

Free Palestine, from the river to the sea.

For in our thousands and in our millions, we are all Palestinians.

#free palestine #anti israel #anti zionisim #free gaza #free west bank #palestine #gaza #israel #settler violence #settler colonialism #israel is a terrorist state #israel is an apartheid state #israel is committing genocide #israel is a war criminal #benjamin netanyahu is a war criminal #from the river to the sea palestine will be free

36 notes · View notes

sakebytheriver · 1 year ago

Text

Here's the thing about Oct. 7th

Any analysis of the situation that does not acknowledge that the IOF itself is responsible for most of the casualties is incomplete and pretty close to straight up propaganda

I have no love in my heart for Hamas, I agree that it is an extreme fundamentalist religious movement founded on the most radical platform the Palestinian revolution could have had and even as the secularists have taken positions and done work to move the ideology in a less radical direction as they saw that with only Hamas in power they only had one option but to try and change the organization from the inside, that doesn't mean they don't still have extreme views or tactics and nor does it mean that they are not also mistreating the Palestinians in Gaza as any ruling government party mistreats their citizens, remember they only received 44.5% of the vote and then promptly ended free elections there after, not even to mention how many Gazans were under the voting age when that election was held. Their extreme views and tactics for liberation are quite literally why Netenyahu himself funneled money into their operation to ensure that they were the international face of Palestine to make it so that public international opinion would be against them and further destabilize Palestinian liberation attempts

But it has literally been reported by Israel's own media and journalists that the IOF are the ones who shelled Israeli homes which led to those horrific burning deaths of Israeli babies Ben Shapiro won't let the internet forget about, it was reported by the Israeli media itself that the IOF fired at their own citizens fleeing from the music festival, it was reported by Israeli media that the IOF shot and killed hostages with their hands tied behind their backs, and it has been confirmed by Israeli citizens who were taken hostage by Hamas insurgents that the insurgent's main goal seemed to be to keep them alive and relatively safe in order to be taken hostage as leverage for the Palestinian hostages Israel has locked in their prisons while the IOF soldiers and the people who gave them their marching orders were indiscriminate in who they killed, driving tanks through residential areas, shooting citizens, and bombing houses with families, the elderly, and infants inside

This is not to say that Hamas didn't kill anyone, I'm sure they did, but from Israel's own media and their own citizen's reports who were taken hostage we have been told the number of casualties were so high on Oct. 7th because the IOF had absolutely no qualms killing their own people

And nor is this to say that Hamas is some kind of humanitarian freedom fighting militia that will always treat Israelis nice and respectfully, the reason why they've been so nice to their hostages is because they are playing the optics game that Israel won't

They are doing the wartime optics game correctly right now while Israel has all but abandoned it, they are keeping the hostages safe and well looked after so that when held up next to the cruelty and the indiscriminate violence of the Apartheid state (which has over 10,000 Palestinians held hostage in their prisons as of now) they look better in comparison to the international eye, that is the whole point of fighting an asymmetrical war, you have to use asymmetrical tactics, especially in an age where public opinion can mean the difference between life or death

Ultimately, my point here is that the idea that Hamas are the ones who are soley responsible for the massacre of over a thousand Israeli citizens is just false, and that is confirmed by the Israeli media itself. It was the IOF response to the attack that killed so many, Hamas does not have the technology available to them to be able to shell someone's house, the people who crossed the Gazan border were only armed with the guns they could carry in their hands, that doesn't lead to the kind of damage done in these Israeli neighborhoods that we have seen reported on (just check NPR's ig page it's full of videos of the Israeli neighborhoods destroyed after Oct. 7th) but a tank driven by an IOF soldier who has been given the greenlight by his superiors to kill as many Israelis as he deems necessary in the hopes of killing any single Hamas insurgent they can get, definitely will

Innocents died on Oct. 7th, I will never deny that, but most of them didn't meet their end by a Hamas insurgent. They met their end by an Israeli soldier who was supposed to be sent there to protect them and if you don't acknowledge that fact, if you simply say that it was the attack by Hamas that killed so many people then you have not done any research into what actually happened that day and you don't get to use it as some kind of gotcha against the people who support Palestine

#ignore me #free palestine #israel #palestine #saw someone who called themselves an israeli leftist reblogging inflamatory posts about oct 7 from accounts that #were very much NOT israeli leftists and in fact very hardline zionists #so yeah.#im all for calling out antisemitism but you guys sure do like to conflate antisemitism with antizionism a lot #and you know a lot of diaspora jews have suffered because of your conflation of those two things #also unrelated but like the way this one israeli was crying about how a work friend reached out to ask how they were but didnt respond when #their answer was full of them being like well my family is going to be fighting with idf pretty soon and ive been feeling sad because peopl #are yelling at me for supporting a genocide #and they conflated this with antisemitism as if it wasnt some aquaintance trying to be nice #and then backing off when they found out you were a genocidal fuck

42 notes · View notes

jbuffyangel · 1 year ago

Text

Best Friends: Arrow 1x19 Review (Unfinished Business)

“Unfinished Business” takes a hard look at Oliver’s friendships with Tommy and Diggle, as one relationship crumbles and the other finds stronger footing – after a few missteps.

Prepare yourselves. I might write about the flashbacks this week because Shado provided an information download which was sorely needed.

Let’s dig in…

Oliver and Tommy

Oliver revealed his true identity to Tommy three episodes ago and it feels like their friendship has been a bomb waiting to explode ever since. A girl who partied at Verdant dies from a Vertigo overdose, which puts Quentin hot on Tommy’s trail and Oliver hot on The Count’s. This poor girl sadly is the catalyst for the explosion between Tommy and Oliver we’ve been waiting for.

The “evidence” that convinces Quentin Tommy is dealing Vertigo isn’t exactly irrefutable. The girl texted Tommy before she died, which Tommy easily explains because he receives texts from hundreds of people every night trying to get into the club. Her request for a “hook up” is not for Vertigo as Quentin believes.

The second piece of evidence raises the eyebrows, but Tommy has an explanation – albeit a shady one. There is ten thousand dollars missing from Verdant’s operating budget. Quentin believes Tommy used it to buy Vertigo, but he used it to bribe the zoning commissioner into skipping their inspection. Bribery isn’t great, but it’s a far lesser crime than dealing a deadly drug. L*urel could drive a truck through all that room for reasonable doubt.

This episode is another Merlance highpoint. L*urel believed in Tommy one hundred percent and he called her baby. Just leave me to my grave to die a happy woman.

After Tommy refuses Quentin entry into Verdant without a warrant, the detective comes back with one and it leads to a heart stopping moment. He wants to specifically look at the sub level not listed on the inspection’s floor plans. Ever the dutiful detective, Lance pulled the county records and knows it exists.

In my mind, I know this is not the way Oliver’s vigilante hideaway is getting discovered, but the panic in Oliver’s eyes always sends me to Stressville USA. Especially when he types the code!!! He’s shooting those panicked looks at Tommy who is as cool as a cucumber.

Quentin enters the The Hood's bunker and there’s no bunker! How Tommy moved all that equipment and replaced it with bottles of booze I will never understand. We simply have to believe in the magic of television y’all. Tommy is not going to rat Oliver out and he quite literally saves his ass.

Something Oliver should have known, but his lack of faith in Tommy is evident. It’s something Tommy cannot tolerate, not after everything that’s happened between them. He cannot believe Oliver thought he was dealing drugs out of the club.

Oliver doesn’t understand why Tommy wasn’t honest about the bribe. Oliver loses me right off the bat. Team Tommy all the way. Let’s list out the things you have not told Tommy, Oliver and we’ll see who has the longer list. YOU HID YOUR SECRET SUPERHERO LAIR IN THE CLUB YOU OPENED WITH TOMMY AND NEVER TOLD HIM ABOUT IT. A bribe is chump change in comparison to that lie.

Tommy: Let me ask you a question, pal. What have I done in the last six months since you’ve been home that would lead you to believe that I would sell drugs?

Oliver: In the last six months? Nothing. But before I left you played hard. You played with bad people who were into bad stuff.

Tommy: So, did you Oliver. But I changed just like you did. Now you put arrows in people who do bad things.

Oliver gets owned in this argument, because Tommy is right. He refuses to see that Tommy has truly changed, but still expects Tommy to understand he has.

Source: @htbthomas

Oliver’s changes are a tougher pill to swallow. Tommy cannot understand how Oliver can kill people so easily and, quite frankly, wasn’t one hundred percent sure he wouldn’t end up with an arrow in him if he told Oliver about the bribe.

Is this insane for Tommy to be wondering? No, I don’t think so. We know Oliver doesn’t kill easily. We know he’s fighting a nightly war and there is a steep cost to this mission.

However, Oliver has not opened up to Tommy about what happened the five years he was away and he’s not Mr. Joe Here’s What I’m Thinking about being The Hood today. Killing is something Tommy cannot understand, but Oliver expects him to accept it with little to no explanation. Then he has the nerve not to trust Tommy? Seriously?

Source: @htbthomas

What Tommy thinks of him is a verbal gut punch to Oliver, but he deserved it. Unfortunately, this fight is not one Oliver can fix with a simple apology. Tommy has reached his limit and who can blame him.

Tommy: This club is important to me, but to you it’s just a front. You want me to keep your secret, help you be this thing you’ve become, but you refuse to see me for what I’ve become. I’ve got just a bit too much self-respect for that. I quit.

BOOM. YASSS MY SON!!! Way to stand up for yourself Thomas. I was so proud of him telling Oliver where to stick it.

Tommy: I’d prefer we skip the I-told-you-so’s, but the nightclub wasn’t really working out. I guess I need something more boring, stable… I guess what I’m saying is - I need a job.

TOMMY WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!! WORST. DECISION. EVER.

Tommy is back in the arms of the Big Bad Malcom Merlyn. For one brief shining moment, Tommy stood tall on the moral high ground, but not five seconds later comes plummeting back down to work with the sludge of the earth.

Source: @fogsblue

Tommy has every right to be pissed at Oliver, but his father is not the answer. That man is a hellscape. Whatever positive changes Tommy has made he is in real danger of a serious backslide. Now that Tommy is on the outs with Oliver, Merlyn can lead his son right to his very own villain origin story. And Tommy may lose sight of who he really is.

Oliver and Diggle (Felicity)

Oliver is firing on all cylinders tonight with his bros. After accusing his best friend of being a drug dealer, Oliver pitches a hissy fit over Diggle not being available the second he’s needed.

John is distracted because he’s consumed with avenging his brother’s death and killing Deadshot. While Oliver was trying to stop a hostage situation with a man high on Vertigo, Diggle was handing over information on Deadshot to a friend from ARGUS.

Hello Lyla! This is her very first Arrow appearance. These two had more chemistry in this single scene than any scene with Diggle and Carly. I don’t know what obsession this show has about siblings dating the same people, but it’s enough already. I have to deal with this crap on The Vampire Diaries.

Oliver is furious Diggle ignored Felicity’s phone call. John hilariously tells Oliver not to get his panties in a twist. He’s completely fine. Oliver pretty much puts his hands on his hips and says, “You couldn’t have known that!” They sound like an old married couple.

John is a little put out Oliver is not more understanding. He thought Oliver would understand his vendetta against Deadshot, since Oliver is walking around with a whole damn list of names from his father! But that’s right. It’s a mission. Not a vendetta. Where’s Helena? We need her around if we’re debating this again.

Diggle chooses to be more specific and reminds Oliver The Count almost killed Thea, so his fervor over getting this drug and criminal off the streets may be a little personal too. Oliver says nothing because it’s true.

Diggle: I can’t move on with my life knowing that he’s still out there. I thought if anybody got that it’d be you.

Oliver doesn’t say anything here either because that’s true too. #TeamDiggle.

Felicity and Oliver discover there’s a new antipsychotic drug added to Vertigo, which makes Oliver believe The Count didn’t break out of the asylum like he thought. Maybe he faked his escape like he faked the crazy.

Close, but no. The Count really is three paper plates short of a picnic. It’s his DOCTOR and a very burly orderly who are manufacturing Vertigo. Honestly, I did not see that one coming.

It’s a Vertigo episode, so Oliver is getting drugged, but this time Diggle does show up to save him. He takes out the horse sized orderly, and Oliver kills the doctor with three arrows. It’s not often The Hood requires more than one to get the job done, but his vision was a bit wonky, so he used three just to be on the safe side.

Both the orderly and the doctor had to die because they knew Oliver Queen was The Hood. Those are the rules. The interesting choice Oliver made was not to kill the Count, who is babbling like a toddler on a telephone.

Arrow uses this moment to draw a very important distinction between Diggle and Tommy. After the boys return home, Oliver wants to know if Diggle is ok. He’s the killer in this family, not John.

Diggle: I’ve killed before Oliver. It’s just been a while.

There is no judgment from either man. It’s just quiet acknowledgement that killing is necessary sometimes. But that doesn’t make it easy.

Tommy’s anger towards Oliver makes him blind to his humanity. Oliver is not a psychopath. He does not kill for the enjoyment of it. He is doing what is necessary to save the city from some really bad people. Tommy takes it too far believing killing is easy for Oliver. He’s furious Oliver doesn’t see the change in him, but the truth is Tommy doesn’t see the change in Oliver either.

This is something Oliver never had to explain to Diggle. John does see the change in Oliver. He stood by quietly as Oliver grappled with killing The Count. Diggle didn’t make any speeches. He simply left space for Oliver to make that decision on his own.

If Oliver chose to kill The Count, John would’ve understood that choice as well. He wouldn’t call him a murderer. John encourages Oliver to make different choices, but he also meets Oliver where he’s at. Maybe Oliver would open up more to Tommy if he offered less judgment like John Diggle.

Diggle is curious why Oliver didn’t kill The Count and he tells him the truth. There just didn’t seem to be a point with the Count chained up and lost to madness.

There are two things Oliver is not saying. He was convinced earlier in the episode that he made the wrong decision allowing The Count to live and was just a teensy bit mad.

Source: @lucyyh

But he couldn’t fire the arrow in the end.

Felicity’s gentle reassurance that locking The Count up was the right call hit her intended mark. If killing is truly a last resort, then Oliver has to utilize other methods of dealing with criminals. Oliver has shown more restraint ever since Felicity joined the team. He hasn’t stopped killing, but he does listen to her.

Source: @lucyyh

The second is Oliver believes killing an unarmed man in that condition would be wrong – like stabbing someone in the back. He’s not a threat in that condition and The Count truly didn’t have anything to do with the Vertigo being unleashed on the city again. There are rules to war and those rules keep his humanity intact.

John Diggle has Oliver’s back, so in return Oliver will have his and is making Deadshot a top priority. Couldn’t we have just done that from the beginning and skipped their couples fight?

Neither Oliver or Tommy can see the other for who they truly are. Yet, people Oliver met barely a year ago have more faith in him than his childhood best friend and vice versus. Sometimes history stops us from allowing change in the people we love.

You can see why Oliver is keeping his identity secret from his family and L*urel. It's not just about their safety. He's afraid they will all react like Tommy.

But there's no baggage with Diggle and Felicity, so Oliver has a clean slate. They can see Oliver for who he truly is. It's becoming clearer with every episode that Diggle (and Felicity) are Oliver's best friends.

Shado

Like Felicity, Shado is a breath of fresh air to Team Island. She is beautiful, kicks ass and knows a thing or two about a bow. Oliver has been helpless majority of the time. I am not expecting him to become a super secret agent man like Slade Wilson in a couple of months, but he does need to perform a function on this team other than dead weight.

Shado takes it upon herself to teach Oliver how to shoot, but she does not start with the bow. She begins by telling Oliver to slap a bowl of water. Like the idiotic American he is, Oliver is annoyed, but doesn’t really have anything better to do, so he slaps the water in the bowl. By episode end, his hand is strong enough to pull the bow string. This woman accomplished more in a day than Slade Wilson did in months.

She also provides some much-needed Yao Fei backstory. He was general in the People’s Liberation Army (the Chinese communist army). The military committed a massacre and chose Yao Fei to take the blame. They sent him to Lian Yu for the rest of his life. Fryers knows this and wants Yao Fei to take the fall for whatever he’s going to do.

And we thought The Count was nuts.

Source: thearrowgifs

As for Shado, she spent years searching for her father. A man told her he knew where Yao Fei was, but kidnapped her instead and brought her to Lian Yu as leverage over Yao Fei. It took nineteen episodes to get that information. Yeesh.

Shado: I’m worried, this island, what he must have had to do to survive. That it changed him.

If this sounds ominous it’s supposed to. Not all change is good. That’s true for all of us - even Oliver Queen.

Stray Thoughts

“You could’ve just said he was nuts.” I like sassy Quentin.

Maybe it’s my whole Buffy history, but Shado and Slade sparring felt very sexually charged.

Budget cuts and the CAMERAS are the first to go in jail?!!!

This will always be one of Diggle's best lines.

TOMMY HAS FELICITY’S PHONE NUMBER. Oh, the fics this detail launched.

What did we ever do in the bunker without this perfect gumdrop of a human being?

“What’s happening now isn’t your fault.” Felicity should’ve tattooed this on Oliver’s arm. It would save a whole lot of time.

“My mom does yoga.” Ollie is just so… Ollie.

1141 is the passcode to the bunker. The Green Arrow was created November 1941 (11/41).

Listen to the Watchover podcast reaction to 1x19!!!

If you’d like to support the blog, please buy me a cup of tea!

Disclaimer: Any gifs on the blog are not mine. If you would like a gif removed from my reviews, please message me

21 notes · View notes

danganronpasurvivoraskblog · 2 years ago

Text

HELLO.

FUCK YEAH! The Monokubs are back with a vengeance! Hold your applause!

Um...I don’t think they’re applauding...

...Ok...Everyone’s going to need to take two steps back for a second.

...

*Monotaro literally takes two steps backwards.

It’s a figure o’ speech, moron! She doesn’t mean actually do it! And why’re you listenin’ to ‘er anyways!?

...Just trying to be polite...Yeesh.

Demands aside...ain’t she kinda cute? That long silvery hair’s givin’ me a ROCK HARD RAAGEEERR!

...Lovely...Care to introduce me, Shuichi?

Why me...?

Because you clearly know these creatures.

“Know” is puttin’ it lightly! Last time we saw this bastard, he got us all blown up by pops!

Don’t make me out to be the problem! You made me watch all my friends die, then had the AUDACITY to beg for your life when it was put into question!

There’s no Killing Game rules to protect you, so if I wasn’t tied up, I’d rip you all apart myself!

Yikers! Where’d this savage come from!? This is way ouuta character!

They’re from your world then?

They’re the Monokubs. I think I told you about them before. They were umpires of the V3 Killing Game and Monokuma’s children/assistants during it’s duration.

They all got destroyed after Tsumugi was exposed as the Mastermind. She must have rebuilt them somehow.

Heck yeah she did! We’re back, and we’re better than ever!

Shirogane’s gonna make the world BURN! And we’re gonna be there to see it! Count on that!

*Monokid strikes a riff on his guitar excitedly.

Yes, yes. Now, with introductions out of the way...here, may I ask what the 5 of you are doing here? I was under the impression I had assigned you all your own tasks.

Oh yeah! Well, I WOULD tell you why we’re here...but I actually kinda forgot.

Ugh! Montaro never changes...Monodam, YOU do it.

*Monodam approaches Dr Ando, carrying a weird ball-shaped object.

THIS-IS-THE-LAST-OF-THE-BOMBS, DOCTOR. MOST-OF-THE-BATCHES-HAVE-BEEN-COMPLETED. THERE-SHOULD-ONLY-BE-ONE-MORE.

Excellent work, all of you.

Bombs...!? What for?

For the parasites of course! Organization Zetsubou plan to contain the parasites in special test tubes, then insert them into a large amount of bombs.

Once all the bombs are loaded, they’ll drop them on multiple countries around the world, and then-

They’ll mind control thousands...!?

!!?

MONOPHANIE! They ain’t supposed to know that, you fucking dumbass!

Oops!

No, don’t worry. It’s quite alright. No doubt they would have come to that conclusion sooner or later.

*Ando does basically what Monophanie just describes. He takes the parasite from before, places it into the test tube, and slots it into the bomb. He then hands the bomb back to Monodam.

Take this away, and make sure it gets back with the others. And tell the clones of your father to come down here for security reasons.

Okie-dokie doc! No promises I’ll remember, but promise that the others will!

All: So long, bear well!

*The Monokubs begin to leave.

You won’t get away with this! Mark my words, you’ll never get to take away people’s free will like that! We’ll do whatever it takes to stop you.

...

*Monodam, carrying the bomb, turns around to stare at Shuichi.

Wh-What?

FREE-WILL-IS-NOT-IDEAL. THE-FREE-WILL-OF-HUMANITY-IS-WHAT-PREVENTS-PEOPLE-FROM-GETTING-ALONG.

ACTING-IN-FREE-WILL-AND-TO-YOUR-DIFFERING-GOALS-AND-IDEALS-IS-THE-VERY-REASON-FUTURE-FOUNDATION-AND-ORGANIZATION-ZETSUBOU-ARE-FIGHTING-IN-THE-FIRST-PLACE.

WITH-THAT-IN-MIND, ARE-HUMANS-NOT-BETTER-WITHOUT-IT?

...!

...

*Monodam says nothing more and leaves with the bomb.

#danganronpa survivor #danganronpa #danganronpa 1 #dr1 #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #danganronpa another 2 #sdra2 #kyoko kirigiri #shuichi saihara #hikaru ando #monotaro #monosuke #monophanie #monokid #monodam #ask #rise and shine arc

8 notes · View notes

denimbex1986 · 1 year ago

Text

'This weekend’s anniversary of the end of World War II, coming at a time when we continue to talk heatedly about the film “Oppenheimer,” reminds me of how long I showed images of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud to introduce class lectures on wartime Japan. They were dramatic; they evoked power; they were horrific. And students loved them.

I could have used other images. I might have shown a photo of a man I met in 1979 at the Hiroshima bomb memorial. Standing with his daughter in front of thousands of peace cranes, he told me she was 34 but had the mind of an 8-year-old — because she was born on the day the bomb was dropped. Her mother died, and she survived.

Or I could have talked about Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, who saw a flash on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, after a night’s work in a Hiroshima hospital. He jumped up to go outside and find what caused the flash. When he looked down, he saw that his clothes had vanished; he was naked.

But I preferred the cloud image because it attracted students.

In later years, my attraction to that image waned, however, as I saw how it over-simplified the bomb, capturing its power but not its tragedy. I largely stopped showing it.

After seeing “Oppenheimer,” I have become more certain than ever that we must begin looking at the bomb — at all nuclear weapons — in a more nuanced and honest way if our world is to remain livable.

When we hear the father of the atomic bomb say, “All war becomes unthinkable,” when we see him grapple with what he produced, we should be warned about the danger of accepting the easy-to-chew narratives that still shape our understanding of Hiroshima — and of nuclear weapons today.

The decision to drop the bomb was not, as President Harry Truman suggested, a simple one. Nor did it represent any consensus that 1 million American GIs would die if an invasion of Japan were necessary. Estimates of how many Americans would be killed in fighting on Japan’s mainland varied greatly in discussions about whether to use nuclear weapons, but most military experts then put the losses in the tens of thousands. The million figure became “truth” only when Secretary of War Henry Stimson introduced it in a 1947 Harper’s magazine article.

There also were disagreements about whether the bomb should be used at all. The debates were fierce, with Stimson expressing doubts and Secretary of State George Marshall opposing the use of nuclear weapons against civilians. Fleet Admiral William Leahy called them barbaric.

And there was sharp disagreement about whether atom bombs even were needed to make Japan surrender. Today’s historical consensus is that Japan would have surrendered by the end of 1945, regardless. After the war, President Dwight Eisenhower said he had argued against dropping atom bombs because Japan’s defeat already was assured. We already had killed enough Japanese with regular bombs — nearly 90,000 on a single March night in Tokyo, for example — to make continuation of the war next to impossible.

The decision to open the nuclear age was understandable. Wartime invites costs-be-damned thinking. But such thinking in this case unnecessarily opened the door to the possibilities that frightened Oppenheimer — possibilities that could quite literally end human civilization.

That being the case, we must look at the war-driven language that saturates our discussions of Europe and Asia today.

We continue to be told that Ukraine has no choice but to fight until the Russians are driven out yet hear almost nothing about the more honest and complicated truth: That the only way to avoid endlessly continuing deaths and destruction is through negotiations.

On the other side of the globe, our officials toss around confrontational language about China, labeling Xi Jinping a “dictator” and threatening to employ “all” military options, with no discussion of the devastation that would result if we stumbled into war with nuclear-armed China.

People are right to condemn Vladimir Putin’s aggression and Xi Jinping’s threats against Taiwan. But the short-sighted, war-fogged thinking that brought us Hiroshima still dominates our discussions of Ukraine and eastern Asia. This time, however, it is a world stocked not with two small bombs but 10,000 massive nuclear weapons.

One only wishes Oppenheimer had been right when he pronounced war unthinkable in a nuclear-armed world, a world that could be destroyed before climate change even gets its own chance to do so.'

#Oppenheimer #World War I #Hiroshima #President Harry Truman #Henry Stimson #President Dwight Eisenhower

0 notes

grailfinders · 2 years ago

Text

Fate and Phantasms Viewer's Choice #11: Ritsuka Fujimaru (for real this time)

today on Fate and Phantasms we’re building Ristuka Fujimaru, technically for the second time. the first was more the nameless master though, this one’s the true blue Ritsuka, with all the mystic code stuff to match! like, all of it all of it. we put anything that boosted a card type down as just general attack improvement, but there’s still so many things Ritsuka can do with those funky outfits.

(also, just like the servants we’re only using the codes available in NA, so that’s Chaldea Pathfinder at the latest!)

anyways, they’re a Spirit Bard to summon some spirits and be the most friend-shaped motherfucker you’ve seen in your life, as well as a Clockwork Soul to be chosen as the protagonist in a videogame and get a little of their own magic out of the deal.

check out their build breakdown below the cut, or their character sheet over here!

Race and Background

as mentioned many many times in FGO, Ritsuka Fujimaru is a Human, but I want that feat so we’re using variant rules. that gives you +1 Dexterity and Charisma, as well as a feat and skill proficiency of your choosing. grab History proficiency so you have some idea where your party came from and the Lucky feat to not die in the opening cutscene. you get three luck points, and whenever a d20 gets rolled and its outcome direct affects you, you can spend one point to roll another d20 and use either one.

speaking of the bombing, it made you a Haunted One, giving you proficiency in Arcana and Survival, as well as a thousand-yard stare.

Ability Scores

your highest ability should be Charisma. you are so friend-shaped you can bend the will of literally all evil in the world to your side, and you also need that for multiclassing. after that, Constitution. they walked from one end of the US. on foot. in a few days. also, they’ve survived a lot of bullshit that frankly should have killed them by now, and they’re tough against poison. third up is Dexterity. none of your mystic codes so far have been platemail, and you fight living nukes for a living. best to not get hit in the first place then. after that, your Strength is slightly above average. I wouldn’t call Ritsuka strong, but they’ve gotten plenty of exercise and have been getting trained by the greatest warriors ever. that means your Intelligence isn’t great. they usually have some understanding of new servants, but thankfully Mash is always around for the exposition. finally, we’re dumping Wisdom. they were unhinged before, but I doubt killing multiple realities has helped any.

Class Levels

1. Bard 1: starting off as a bard gives you proficiency in Dexterity and Charisma saves as well as three skills of your choice. pick up Persuasion to get everyone on your team, Deception to survive kiyohime, and Athletics for a little bit of muscle tone.

aside from that, you can use Bardic Inspiration to give a d6 to a friend using your bonus action Charisma times per long rest. they can then use that d6 and add it to any d20 roll they make in the next minute- that’s a saving throw, ability check, or attack roll! a d6 isn’t quite enough to count as a mystic code skill in my book, but it’s nice.

speaking of mystic codes, you can start putting those on by using some Spells which you cast using your Charisma. pick up Friends, Animal Friendship, and Charm Person to just be real friendly. none of those are mind control, but you will be best buds for a minute, a day, or an hour respectively, and regardless of spell they will know you charmed them after the spell wears off. also Friends specifically mentions you might get attacked, but you’re normally getting attacked before you make friends, so it’s not a huge difference. you can also use True Strike to make an attack that pierces evasion next turn! all physical attacks ignore evasion, it’s only for dex saves! basically, it’s bad, but it’s not like Ritsuka was good at fighting directly.

you can also use Disguise Self to swap mystic codes mid-adventure, which is canonically the reason why guda can wear a bikini in the Russian Lostbelt, because she isn’t. you also get Heroism for some recurring healing, giving them your charisma modifier in temporary HP each turn, as well as making them immune to being frightened. boom, there’s debuff immunity too, we’re on a roll! three down, like 13 more to go!

Ritsuka has so many outfits

2. Bard 2: at second level we’ll pick up the spell Cure Wounds for direct healing, as well as gain Magical Inspiration so your allies can add that d6 to one instance of their spell’s damage or healing! that’s an arts up buff!

you also get a Song of Rest you can perform on short rests for a d6 bonus to healing, and your time in Babylonia has made you a Jack of All Trades, adding half your proficiency bonus to all checks you’re not proficient in, including initiative! which is really good, since your entire battle strategy is not being directly involved.

3. Sorcerer 1: before you can start summoning, we’ve got to get your heroic destiny underway. I was really tempted to go Aberrant Mind to play into Verse’s whole “the player is an eldritch god” thing, but while I headcanon that Ritsuka’s the scion of an outer god, there’s no denying that they’re a videogame character, a.k.a. a Clockwork Soul. with this you gain some Clockwork Magic, giving you extra spells as you level up. if you don’t like the official listing, you can also replace them with another spell from the sorcerer, wizard, or warlock spell list of the same level if it’s an abjuration or transmutation spell. we do that once, but I’ll mention it when it happens.

you can also Restore Balance as a reaction, turning a roll with advantage or disadvantage happening within 60’ of you into a straight 1d20 roll. you can do this proficiency times per day, but thankfully you’ll probably only have to deal with near death experiences once per chapter.

as I insinuated with clockwork magic, you get another Spell List, though this one also uses Charisma to cast. check the PHB to see how many spell slots you have at a given level, and know you can use your slots to cast either class’ spells whenever you want.

it’s long overdue for us to grab Mage Armor. you probably could spin the space suit as leather armor, but now you can use any mystic code in a fight without fear! with less fear!

you can also use Shield to give yourself invulnerability, adding +5 to your AC for the rest of the round. or use Blade Ward for a defense boost. Shocking Grasp is this build’s Gandr, dealing a little lightning damage while also keeping whatever you hit from taking reactions that round. use it to escape or keep a meddlesome wizard from countering your party’s NP, either works great!

We’re also picking up Create Bonfire for the Pathfinder’s Survival Kit skill. I know that’s not what it does in-game, but you’ve been in enough survival situations to know a campfire is super useful.

Mending as well as your clockwork spells Alarm and Protection from Evil and Good have no mystic code connection as far as I can come up with, but they’re nice to have. if your power comes from clothes, you’d better know how to sew.

4. Bard 3: even when we’re being serious, we still can’t escape from the gacha. as a heroic Spirits bard, the Guiding Whispers of your allies gives you access to the Guidance cantrip, and it gets a longer range to boot! for a minute afterwards, your target can add a d4 to a check of their choosing. it takes concentration, but it’s a cantrip so there’s no reason to always have this up outside of combat. a servant always fights a bit better with a master.

you also get a Spiritual Focus, helping you channel historical figures and fictional archetypes oh hey what a coincidence that’s what we’re here for. you get an expanded spell focus list, and if you use your spiritual focus to cast a spell you can add a d6 to one instance of the spell’s damage or healing.

but that’s not what you’re really here for, is it? no, you’re here for the gacha. and you get that with the Tales form Beyond. spend a bonus action and some inspiration, and you can roll on the tales table. you learn a tale until your next rest, and you can use an action to tell it to a creature nearby. afterwards, you’ll have to roll again for another heroic spirit.

on a 1, you summon Hessian Lobo, the Clever Animal. after you choose a creature, all their intelligence, wisdom, and charisma checks for the next 10 minutes get your inspiration die added to the roll.

on a 2, you summon Chevalier D’eon, the Renowned Duelist. you make a melee spell attack against your target, dealing 2dInspiration+Charisma mod force damage to them on a hit.

on a 3, you summon Anne Bonny and Mary Read, the Beloved “Friends”. your target and a creature of their choice both gain temporary HP.

on a 4, you summon Miss Crane, the Runaway. your target can react to teleport up to 30’ away, and can give other creatures the chance to make the same reaction. yes, we got the plugsuit in this build!

on a 5, you summon Angra Mainyu, the Avenger. anyone who hits your target with a melee attack takes your inspiration die in force damage. if you’re fighting him, don’t hit him while he’s a dog, simple as.

on a 6, you summon Mash Kyrielight, the Traveler. your target gains temporary HP, and while it has them it gets increased speed and a +1 bonus to its AC. even if no-one is playing as her, she’s still your shield.

one more thing- ring in the new year with your new spell, Aid! it increases your party’s max HP by five, and an additional five points for each level you upcast it. don’t sleep on this one.

Finally, you gain Expertise in two skills, doubling your proficiency bonus with Persuasion and Survival checks. You are very friendly, and you’ve been through quite a lot.

5. Bard 4: fourth level bards get your first Ability Score Improvement. bump up your Charisma for a friendlier face and stronger spells.

you’re also enough of a mage now to use Prestidigitation, or cast Invisibility on a party member to give them Evade until they attack someone or cast a spell.

6. Bard 5: fifth level bards can cast third level spells, and your Inspirational Speech finally gives your party a direct attack boost against anyone who hits them. they gain temporary HP, advantage on Wisdom saves, and have advantage on their next attack against anyone dumb enough to take a swing.

you’re also a Font of Inspiration now, so your inspiration comes back every short rest rather than every long one. that’s more help, more magic damage, and MORE GACHA!!!!!

speaking of more gacha, your tale pool improves as your bardic inspiration die increases to a d8. I guess you’re stuck with the story gacha this time, sorry.

if you roll a 7, you’ll summon Mephistopheles, the Beguiler. if your target fails a wisdom save, they’ll take psychic damage equal to 2 inspiration dice, and they become incapacitated for a round.

on an eight, you summon First Hassan, the Phantom. your target becomes invisible for a turn, or until it hits a creature with an attack. if it hits something, that something also takes necrotic damage and becomes frightened of the creature who hit it.

7. Sorcerer 2: second level sorcerers are Fonts of Magic, giving you sorcery points each day equal to your sorcerer level. they’ll be fun later, but right now it’s just giving you an extra spell slot per day. that’s not a bad thing tbh.

speaking of spells, pick up Absorb Elements. it adds elemental damage to your next weapon attack, but we’re more here for the elemental resistance. that’s right, we’ve got sunscreen now baby! yes that’s literally why we’re taking this spell.

8. Sorcerer 3: third level sorcerers learn some Metamagic, helping you customize your spells further. grab Extended Spell to really make your buffs stick and Heightened Spell to give one creature disadvantage on their first save against that spell.

neither of those really help when you cast Air Bubble though, but now you’ve got a proper space suit! it lasts 24 hours, so make sure you don’t sleep through that alarm!

you also learn Knock (replacing Aid) and Lesser Restoration from your clockwork spells. that’s some debuff removal and opening doors! the latter isn’t a mystic code power, but if you’re already in space at least it’ll be quiet!

9. Sorcerer 4: fourth level sorcerers also get an ASI to max out your Charisma for all that good stuff we mentioned the first time. you can also use the spell Shape Water to add some funky flavor to your next beach episode, and this also checks off box two of the swimsuit mystic code’s abilities, so there!

once again, I must remind you that your entire fighting style is getting others to fight for you. so if you do get surrounded, make sure you use Kinetic Jaunt to get out of there, giving you extra speed, letting you ignore opportunity attacks, and you can pass through other creatures’ spaces without using extra movement, though if you end your turn inside someone you bounce out and take damage, so don’t do that.

10. Bard 6: sixth level spirit bards get Countercharm, but better than that they also get to put on Spirit Sessions, and hour-long ritual that can be done while resting. you hang out with some catalysts for a bit and temporarily learn one spell of your choice with a level equal to or lower than the number of participants, and it has to be Divination or Necromancy. you’ll know this spell until your next long rest, and that’s also how long you’ll have to wait to do this ritual again! it’s kind of like the GSSR, but you can straight-up pick what you get!

11. Bard 7: seventh level bards get fourth level spells, like Charm Monster. Servants aren’t quite human nor beast, so this will be helpful when you try to convince a rogue servant to join your party. They’ll likely fight you anyway, but it helps.

12. Bard 8: You can use this next Ability Score Improvement to increase your Dexterity for a better AC and better skill with a knife. Geronimo hasn’t been teaching you in vain after all, it seems.

You can also use Chaldea’s translation runes whenever you wish with the spell Tongues, letting you understand and be understood no matter what languages you can speak.

13. Bard 9: Ninth level bards have a more powerful Song of Rest, granting a d8 of healing each rest. You can also cast fifth level spells, like Greater Restoration, for a more powerful Debuff Cleanse effect.

14. Bard 10: At tenth level, you quite appropriately gain a d10 for your Bardic Inspiration, unlocking two more possible tales.

On a nine, you will summon Spartacus, the Brute. your target will force a strength saving throw on every creature it wishes near it, and on a failed save they take thunder damage and are knocked prone.

On a 10, you will summon Jeanne d’Arc Alter, the Dragon witch. The creature of your choosing makes a breath weapon attack in a 30’ cone, dealing fire damage to creatures in the area.

Just as thrilling, you gain access to Magical Secrets, two spells you can learn from any spell list. We have assumed your “servants” for this build so far have been other players, but if you would like to go it alone, make sure you pick up some summoning spells like Conjure Elemental and Summon Celestial. You won’t be able to concentrate on most of your buffs while summoning a servant this way, but sometimes an extra body is just as valuable as any spell.

You also gain the Mage Hand cantrip, signifying you have been truly accepted by mage society. Whether that is a good thing or not is up to you.

Finally, you get another round of Expertise in Deception and History, making lying to Kiyohime easier, and also alerting you to the need to lie to her ahead of time.

15. Bard 11: Normally, an 11th level bard would gain a sixth level spell, but we don’t care for any of them. Instead, you can use Dream to slip into one of your servants’ dreamscapes, helping them with their inner turmoil. Or you can enter the dream of a foe and torment him, causing him to lose the benefits of that long rest and possibly turning him to your side if you play your cards right.

16. Bard 12: Use your last Ability Score Improvement to improve your Strength, looks like all those lessons from Leonidas have finally paid off!

17. Bard 13: Thirteenth level bards have an even stronger Song of Rest, but you are more likely here for the seventh level spell. I actually lied about not wanting a sixth level spell earlier, we just wanted to slow down Ritsuka’s spell progression even further than it already is. This time, pick up Mass Suggestion to sway entire groups of servants to your cause at once! You should have ninth level slots at this point, so if you suggest that twelve servants be your best friends forever and they all fail their wisdom saves, they will come back to Chaldea with you for a year and a day, or until an ally damages the creature. But that will still be more than enough time to win them to your cause, I am sure of it.

18. Bard 14: At 14th level, you gain a Mystical Connection, allowing you to roll twice instead of once on the spirit table and take either roll. If you roll the same number twice, you can choose any effect instead. This both improves the usefulness of the story gacha, and gives you access to the last two tales without having to improve your Inspiration Die.

If you choose 11, you will summon Brynhildr, the Angel. The target you choose regains HP, and you can end one condition they’re suffering from.

If you choose 12, you will summon Abigail, the Mind-Bender. This forces an intelligence save on your target, or they take psychic damage and become stunned for a round. On top of that, you get another round of Magical Secrets for two more spells of your choice.

Conjure Volley will let you temporarily summon an Archer-class servant to dish out a volley of arrows, water, bullets, servants, or swords, dealing damage in a wide area. Death Ward finally gives you access to a Guts-like ability, preventing a creature from dropping to 0 HP or instant death once in the next eight hours.

We are now almost done collecting mystic codes, but we will have to move back to sorcerer for two final abilities.

19. Sorcerer 5: Fifth level sorcerers can use their Sorcery Points to gain Magical Guidance, rerolling a failed skill check. They also gain third level spells such as Dispel Magic and Protection from Energy, though we are here directly for Haste to reduce allies’ cooldowns. It will also give them doubled speed, advantage on dexterity saves, increased AC, and an Extra Action with caveats. Also, they will have to take a turn to recover after the spell ends, making it all the more important that you stay safe!

20. Sorcerer 6: Sixth level clockwork souls become a Bastion of Law, letting you spend sorcery points to create a ward around you or another creature. When the warded creature takes damage, they can spend ward points to roll that many d8s to reduce the damage. It isn’t quite invincibility, especially at level 20, but it is still very useful.

We are also here to pick up one last mystic code ability, Counterspell. With this, you can counter enemy magic, blocking their buffs. Or their Noble Phantasms, if you don’t mind breaking character.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

as a caster, you have a little bit of everything. summons, healing, buffs, abjuration, damage, utility, and even mind control! if something needs doing, odds are you can at least lend a hand. and that’s all before we even bring in your bard tales, giving you even more leverage and random little ways to help.

you also bring all that and more to skills too! you have at least half proficiency with everything, the ability to ignore disadvantage on command, and then you can add advantage back in with luck, and even if that fails you can re-roll with magical guidance too. You turn disadvantage into rolling three times and picking the best number. let that sink in.

we also have to give a shoutout specifically to your charisma skills as well, with double proficiency in deception and persuasion, as well as a maxed-out charisma score and all those bonuses we went over in pro #2? it would be weirder if you ever manage to fail a check again.

Cons:

you’re not exactly a powerhouse damage-wise. it’s a good thing you’ve got some superfriends to back you up, because if you had to take on anything by yourself, you’d be a little bit screwed.

most of your abilities have decent reusability, but since we spend so much time as a bard you don’t have a lot of Sorcerer Points to go around, and those are useful for your skill checks, extended magic, and of course your Bastion of Law. Thankfully, you can burn higher spell slots for extra points, but that’s only because…

you don’t have any high-level magic since we multiclassed. don’t get me wrong, I love this build, but Wish blows everything else out of the water. (And we certainly didn’t help by deliberately keeping you from a seventh level spell.)

But of course, Ritsuka isn’t supposed to be the powerhouse here. ascend your servants and let them do the heavy lifting while you frantically search for a way forward. I mean, strategize. because you definitely have a plan.

#fgo #fate grand order #D&D 5e #DND #ritsuka fujimaru #sorcerer #bard

57 notes · View notes

zhanyes · 4 years ago

Text

Tianshan dating headcannons because i also love these two dumbasses too

Also dedicated to @el-mundo-real who requested tianshan headcannons 🖤

. . .

- Literally no one knows whether they’re dating or not. Not even themselves because they don’t talk about it

- Jian yi thinks they’re dating already and Zhengxi says they’re still getting there (somehow they’re both right) and they make a bet

- He tian likes staying over at Mo’s and he’s gotten pretty close to mama Mo

- Mama Mo teaches him how to knit !! He tried to knit a scarf for Mo but it came out a little messy and tangled. Mo still wears it anyway saying it’s a waste of yarn if not used (He’s actually really touched)

- He eats dinner there about 5 times a week and sleeps over thrice a week. He’s a permanent fixture in the house now, he has his own plate and mug, utensils, toothbrush, a spare key, and more than half of his closet migrated to Mo’s closet

- Sometimes Mo “accidentally” wears He tian’s sweaters and He tian dies a little bit every time

- Sometimes He tian deliberately wears Mo’s clothes and it’s always tighter and a bit shorter on his body so when he moves his arms the shirt rides up. Mo guanshan shouts at him to change and to stop contaminating his clothes but his ears are red anyway

- They bicker A LOT. Over the smallest things because He tian loves riling him up and Mo gets riled up too easily

He tian, for the 7th time in 5 minutes: “What does this thing do?”

Mo guanshan, losing his mind: “THAT’S A FUCKING MICROWAVE WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK IT DO?!”

- There are times when homicide is the best option

Mo Guanshan: “I acknowledge that I can be mean sometimes-”

He tian, in the bathtub: “Sometimes?”

Mo Guanshan: “Shut the fuck up. So I brought you a bath bomb as a peace offering.”

He tian: “That’s a fucking toaster.”

Mo guanshan: “Exactly. A bath bomb.”

- Contrary to what his actions say, Mo guanshan is actually relieved that He tian spends most of his time in their apartment. He tian never told him but he can see how lonely the other teenager is

- Mo guanshan tries to teach He tian chores because He tian knows nothing about cleaning or doing everyday things

Mo guanshan: “How the fuck do you not know how to wash dishes where the hell do you eat?!”

He tian, drinking milk straight out the carton: “Obviously on plates, Momo. I just throw them away after.”

Mo guanshan, sputtering: “WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU THROW OUT PLATES?!”

- The first and only recipe that He tian managed to cook successfully is instant noodles with boiled egg that’s not quite cooked enough. Sometimes he brings Mo noodles as breakfast in bed and he looks so proud of it Mo has a hard time saying that the noodles are overcooked and that noodles aren’t exactly breakfast food (he eats it anyway)

- Mo sometimes, only sometimes, brings He tian grocery shopping because he needs to learn how to buy food for himself. Somehow He tian always ends up in the miscellaneous section where he has a pack of ballpens he’ll never use, 2 journals he’ll also never use, a couple of scented candles, various dog clothes and leashes for the dog he doesn’t have, a couple’s mug, and a vase in his cart

- He tian stopped trying to barge into Mo guanshan’s bed and sleeps on the futon on the floor beside it. It’s not the most comfortable and he had a hard time sleeping on it at first but he likes being in Mo’s company even while sleeping

- Sometimes Mo would move in his sleep and leave his arm dangling on the side of the bed, He tian grabs it of course and Mo wakes up to sweaty palms. He still leaves it for a few moments before harshly slapping away He tian’s hand

- Mo’s hands aren’t smooth at all because of working all the time and practicing the guitar but He tian loves them all the same. He likes to feel the contrast in textures with his slightly smoother hands

- He tian has a thousand pictures of Mo guanshan sleeping in various angles and poses. He has his favorites framed and keeps it on his bedside table in his apartment so when he’s sleeping there he still feels like they’re sleeping together

- Mo guanshan has a few of He tian sleeping but he swears up and down that he'll never do anything as disgusting as that. He makes one of them his wallpaper.

- Sometimes when they don’t feel like sleeping yet they stay up talking and arguing about random things

Mo guanshan: “Why would aliens be in space? The ocean is definitely the way to go.”

He tian: “But why would they be in the ocean? They’ll drown.”

Mo guanshan: “They’re aliens maybe they have gills or some shit.”

He tian: “I’m telling you they’re not in the ocean, Mo.”

Mo guanshan: “And I’m telling you you’re wrong, bastard.”

- On rare days they would stay up talking about their pasts and about life in general, with the lights closed and the only source of light is the moonlights from the window

- One of these nights, Mo told He tian about what happened to his dad and their restaurant, why they’re in so much debt over it and He tian holds Mo’s hand tightly throughout

- He knew better than to say that he could pay for that debt so Mo doesn’t need to worry anymore (He still says it anyway and Mo blew a fuse) but he swore to help Mo through other means

- The next day he orders a whole carton of mangoes, apples and peaches in his apartment and learns how to peel properly through youtube and Zhengxi

- He goes to Mo’s part time job in the grocery and helps him peel fruits, Mo guanshan doesn’t mention anything when he notices the bandaids on the other’s hands but he does cook him beef stew for dinner

- As expected He tian’s presence brings more customers and the manager asks if he wants to work there permanently but he said he’s only working for Mo so the manager can give Mo a raise instead

- Once, Mo got sick so he missed his part time job for the day (He was supposed to give away flyers on the streets) and got extra pissy because He tian didn’t visit him and wouldn’t answer his phone

- Apparently He tian took over his job for the day and he only finds out when he goes to the manager and the manager asks when his ‘boyfriend’ can come back to work again because the customers love him

- He tian almost never talks about himself but once he talked about the puppy who disappeared after he saves it and then found out that it’s still alive after all these years

- Mo keeps quiet about it the whole time he was talking and the next few days he takes time to knit a small dog plushie and leaves it on He tian’s futon

- He tian didn’t cry, he didn’t (he did), but he hugged Mo and whispered a sincere thank you. For once, Mo lets it happen

- Mo quickly regrets his decision when He tian names the plushie “Chicken sandwich”

- He tian brings Mo in a lot of not-dates (according to Mo) like arcades, ocean parks, festivals, and fairs because he didn’t get to go as a kid and he wants to experience it for the first time with Mo

- They get crazy competitive in every game. Every. Single. One. If it’s a co-op shooting game they would compete on who kills the most enemies, if it’s a harmless crane game it becomes a competition of who can get the most plushies

- They both each have a photobooth strip. Mo keeps his as a bookmarker in a journal, and He tian has his in the back of his phone.

- They go on a double not-date with Jian yi and Zhengxi and it ends up in almost getting chased by a police car at 2 am in pokemon onesies and holding a bag of chips

- Sometimes Mo would visit his dad in prison and just rant to him about He tian

Mo guanshan: “The nerve of that guy to do something like that in front of a teacher urgh.”

Papa Mo: “Your boyfriend sounds like a fun guy, son. I want to meet him soon.”

Mo guanshan: “BO-BOYFRIEND?!”

Papa Mo: “Yes???”

Mo guanshan: “No??? That bastard isn’t my boyfriend??”

Papa Mo: “Are you sure about that?”

Mo guanshan: “...Yes?”

- Enter gay panique because he doesn’t actually know whether He tian is his boyfriend or not

- They don’t call each other boyfriends and they never talked about it so no??? But they’re also not just friends so maybe??? Do they go on dates?? Can grocery trips be considered dates??

- He rings up Jian yi and the blonde just laughed for 5 minutes straight without stopping and he wonders how he’s still breathing

Mo Guanshan, after hearing Jian yi laughing for 5 minutes: “Are you fucking done?”

Jian yi, trying to catch his breath: “Man this is some top-tier entertainment.”

Mo guanshan: “WELL?!”

Jian yi: “Look bro literally no one knows whether you’re dating, fucking, planning each other’s murder OR planning a murder together.”

Mo guanshan: “What if it’s all of the above?”

Jian yi: “Then congratulations…? Please don’t murder me?”

Mo guanshan: “Urgh you’re fucking useless I should have called Zhengxi.”

Jian yi: “Wait don’t, I don’t wanna lose the bet. How about this, there’s a festival upcoming for couples and families, if He tian asks you then you’re probably, maybe, dating?”

Mo guanshan: “That’s stupid. AND WHAT BET?!”

Jian yi: “Ah woops gotta water my dog.”

- Mo tells himself that it’s stupid and there’s no way he’s falling for that...but he feels disappointed anyway when He tian doesn’t ask him the following days

- He tian asks on the last day before the festival, but he asks mama Mo first and Mo guanshan second cuz he wants to celebrate with both of them. He confessed that he’s never actually went to a festival with a family before so he was trying to build up courage to ask

- Mo guanshan is an absolute goner after that

- On the day of the festival, they find Zhanyi there on a date but decide to leave them alone. While they were leaving Jian yi kept throwing Mo guanshan so much winks that Zhengxi thought he got something in his eye

- The festival was fun but Mo couldn’t take his eyes off how happy and content He tian looks

- Queue cliche fireworks scene but it’s He tian being amazed by the fireworks and Mo looking mesmerized at him thinking, “Ah, I want him to look at me like that.”

- The next day, he drags He tian to visit his dad in jail

Papa mo: “Oh this is a surprise, you’ve never brought someone before?”

He tian, trying to introduce himself: “Hello, sir. I’m He tian, Mo guanshan’s fri-”

Mo guanshan, cuts him off: “Boyfriend. He’s my boyfriend, dad.”

He tian:

#19 days #19 days headcannons #19 days hc #tianshan #mo guan shan #he tian #zhanyi #jian yi #zhan zheng xi #am i procrastinating updating my fics and 19 days socmed au by posting random 19 days stuff?#yes yes i am #old xian

334 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 4 years ago

Text

Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Part Three)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

Introduction and Part One Part Two

PART THREE: Ethical Problems

Law Enforcement Conduct

The first thing that jumps out—the thing everyone talks about first and foremost about the raid—was Hawks’ murder of Twice. Murder is a controversial word in this context, I know, but I stand by it: regardless of his guilt or his intent, Bubaigawara Jin was a fleeing man who Hawks made a cold, rational decision to quite literally stab in the back. In that moment, Hawks appointed himself as an executioner of the state and murdered a man without due process—no trial, no judge, no nothing. It was an extrajudicial killing,[26] and while I know many people in the U.S. have gotten kind of jaded about that sort of thing, let me assure you that police brutality is still police brutality even when it’s being exercised against people who have committed crimes.

To illustrate this, allow me to share a few more excerpts from the Penal Code:

Assault and Cruelty by Specialized Public Employees: When a person performing or assisting in judicial, prosecutorial or police duties commits, in the performance of their duties, an act of assault or physical or mental cruelty upon the accused, suspect or any other person, imprisonment or imprisonment without work for not more than 7 years is imposed.

Abuse of Authority Causing Death or Injury by Specialized Public Employees: A person who commits a crime prescribed under the preceding Article and thereby causes the death or injury of another person is dealt with by the punishment for the crimes of injury or the punishment prescribed in the preceding Article, whichever is severer.

The punishments for Criminal Injury are imprisonment for not more than fifteen years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen or, if the injury results in death, imprisonment for not less than three years. That’s really what Hawks ought to be looking at for Twice's murder, save that apparently heroes just aren't liable for this stuff, otherwise they'd be up against it all the time in the course of “fighting villains.” Certainly, Hawks doesn’t seem to have faced any repercussions thus far, beyond having to apologize in a press conference.

Now, again, many American readers of My Hero Academia are deeply embedded in a culture that normalizes police violence, and so there is a lot of callous handwaving about how Hawks did the right thing because Jin was a significant threat. In response to such dismissal, let me provide a few more numbers:

In the U.S. in 2019, law enforcement killed over a thousand people.

In the same year in Japan, law enforcement killed two. Two people.

In the U.S., a major factor in how police keep skating on these deaths is the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which is nominally intended to protect officers from frivolous lawsuits in cases where they’re ruled to be acting in “good faith,” a vague ruling which has made successful prosecution of police brutality and negligence all but impossible.

Japan, and I cannot stress this enough, does not have this doctrine. The significance of law enforcement taking a life is not so casually brushed aside in other places in the world, so please don’t try to tell me that Horikoshi was trying to get across the idea that Hawks did the right thing, easy as that. The critical depiction of heroes and Hero Society dehumanizing their enemies is all over the manga.

When the Tartarus guards discuss what the government is doing about Gigantomachia, one of them complains that the higher-ups can’t use missiles—missiles!—on him because he’s quote-unquote-human.[27] During their battle at Kamino, All Might tells All For One that this time, he’s going to put him in a prison cell—he characterizes his attempt to kill All For One six years ago as a mistake. Even in the spin-off manga, Vigilantes, designated police representative Tsukauchi[28] looks absolutely aghast at Endeavor’s willingness to use lethal force against Pop Step, an innocent-until-proven-guilty minor, even though, at that time, they have all the evidence in the world that she is actively engaged in setting off bombs in populated areas.

Most prominent is the series’ treatment of the High End Noumu. The heroes rationalize them as corpses, monsters, inhuman, all in order to kill them guilt-free,[29] and this rationalization spills over to Shigaraki during the War Arc, as the chasm of understanding between heroes and villains reaches its most stark. Yet, that same arc was proceeded by the reveal of the truth about Kurogiri, which had Tsukauchi directly acknowledge that they may have misunderstood the Noumu as the series dangled the possibility that Kurogiri possesses lingering awareness from Shirakumo Oboro. Earlier, we had Ending, a man who wanted Endeavor to kill him and thought Endeavor would do it specifically because Endeavor killed the High End, and this act set him decisively apart from the non-murdery heroic norm. Even into the War Arc itself, we were getting new information on the Noumu: to wit, we were shown incontrovertible proof—in the form of Woman’s internal monologue in Chapter 268—that the High End Noumu do think.

Even if we assume the government has relaxed its prohibitions about public servants assaulting people in the course of carrying out their duty, it does not follow that Hawks’ extrajudicial execution was totally fine. Heroes are not supposed to kill because police are not supposed to kill, and in Japan, it isn’t assumed that they will the moment they run into resistance.

And look, this is not to say that Japanese police never get away with police brutality. Obviously, the country has its own problems with the issue, typically involving racism and ethnocentrism. But the way that some people in the fandom just brush off Jin’s death does a disservice to the way the series frames Hawks’ actions and what that framing is communicating to a Japanese reader.

Also, even putting aside the matter of his death, openly taunting a mentally ill man about how easy it was to fool him definitely pings me as an act of mental cruelty, though of course there’s no one to sue Hawks over that one, seeing as he murdered the victim and only witness. (Chapter 264)

That all said, there are other issues with the heroes’ actions during the raid. One is called out right in the text: Midnight acknowledges that the use of chemical agents is illegal, but calls upon Momo to engineer knock-out drugs to use against Gigantomachia anyway. Is that an action Momo will face any repercussions for at all? And if not, what does it imply about the setting that she won’t?

Here’s another big one: what’s the legality of heroes using their quirks against civilians? Because that’s what the vast majority of the PLF are, civilians. Oh, they’re suspects, sure, but throughout the manga, “heroes” aren’t set up as people who just fight any and every tiny crime they come across. From the very first chapter, heroes are set up as a specific counter to “evildoers” designated as “villains”—legally defined as people who use their quirks illegally two or more times.[30]

There is a very illuminating scene in the second chapter of Vigilantes in which Aizawa confronts Knuckleduster for his assault of a random businessman and, the moment he realizes Knuckleduster is quirkless, apologizes for the misunderstanding and walks away. If Knuckleduster doesn’t have a quirk, Knuckleduster by definition cannot be a villain, and thus, Aizawa is not authorized to throw down with him.[31] It’s somewhat unclear, not least because a lot of the evidence is in the more-interested-in-systemic-worldbuilding Vigilantes, but there is reason to believe that heroes are not allowed to use their quirks against people who are committing mundane crimes.[32] If anything, I should think that heroes only using their quirks on people who are using their quirks illegally is part of the philosophical scaffolding that gives heroes their moral authority—you see this argument from the first bearer of One For All, who loudly espouses that people not only should not use their quirks selfishly, but that quirks should only be used to help others. This kind of supposed selflessness is what MHA’s current society is built on.

To see the relevance here, consider Trumpet. Oh, he absolutely was using his quirk illegally, but can the system prove that?[33] After all, he only ever used it on allies—do you think they're in a big hurry to snitch on him? Do you think Mr. Compress is going to? And if the police can't prove Trumpet used his quirk illegally, then is he even a capital-V Villain? What about all those other rank and file types? Certainly we saw the ones at the villa fighting back with quirks, but what about those supporters at bases scattered around the country? Did they fight back, and if so, did they do it with quirks? If not, was it legal for them to be targeted by heroes?

More importantly, can they mount an argument on that, be it a legal or a moral one?

The Scope of the Operation

The next big ethical problem actually predates the raid itself, and it’s this: how did the Commission know where to target their raids? How did they obtain that information? Specifically, how many privacy violations were involved? It strains credulity well past my personal breaking point to imagine that Hawks and the Commission were able to get every name, every base of operations, especially given the limitations they were under—the fact that Hawks couldn’t communicate openly, the hard time limit before the PLF put their plan in motion, making sure they didn’t tip off someone in the massive secret organization that had people working in heroics, the government, the infrastructure, etc.—but let’s consider the sorts of avenues the HPSC did have available to them.

So to start with, they send in Hawks, who’s specifically trained to extract information from people without raising suspicion about his motives. Doubtlessly, he’s able to get all sorts of names,[34] starting with the higher-ups—not just Re-Destro and his inner circle, but also any of the advisors that e.g. run businesses that they invite him to patronize, MLA heroes, and so on. And with a decent crop of names in hand—let us assume for the sake of argument that Hawks had some way to communicate those names to his handlers—the HPSC can start doing background checks and digging in.

Where do these people come from? Where were they born, and, if they moved, where did they settle? Where do they work? What are their social pastimes? Trace the commonalities, look into publicly available records, use wiretaps…

Yes, the police in Japan can totally use wiretaps if they suspect organized criminal activity—it was one of the powers expanded significantly under that controversial 2017 law I footnoted earlier. One thing to note is that this does require a warrant, or at least the expectation that a judge will grant a warrant.[35] But how far does that go? Can they get a warrant for financial records? How about phone records? E-mail accounts?

Can they wiretap people for no reason save their association with a name Hawks provided? If a PLF member attends a Jazzercize class on Thursday mornings, does every member of that class start noticing a weird little reverb on their phone calls for a week? Does Re-Destro’s hometown have an influx of people poking around evaluating its potential as a place to live? If Slidin’ Go once snatched your dog out of traffic and you subsequently bought a Slidin’ Go keychain, are you and your family now under investigation?

Getting details on people like the CEO of Detnerat and the head of the Hearts & Minds Party is probably pretty straightforward; heck, investigating Kizuki Chitose’s publication history was probably a goldmine in and of itself. That sort of surveillance gets more complicated and difficult to justify—and to make credible to the reader—the further down the chain of command you go, though. Sooner or later, the HPSC would have had to make a call: knowing that they don’t have the time, freedom, and resources to perfectly get only and exactly everyone that’s a real threat, do they overcompensate or do they undercompensate?

You only have to look at Hero Society to know which answer they were going to go with.[36]

To be fair, undercompensating, while it clearly would have been easier on their strained resources, ran the risk of leaving threats out there to come back to bite them later. They likely thought that they’d done enough undercompensating for Shigaraki Tomura, compounded by the fact that apparently there hadn’t been enough done about Destro’s followers back in the day, either. I mean, better to grab everyone and then let the courts sort it out, right? Rather than risk innocents getting hurt?

Well, let’s talk about innocents. Innocents, and the costs of overcompensating.

Pictured: a man who was in daily close contact with the leader of the movement and who was at one point in time in possession of a copy of the movement's manifesto. (Chapter 218)

The problem with grabbing everyone in a group, even the most obviously PLF-aligned groups, is that there are always going to be both people who don’t seem to know anything because they’re very good at living double lives and aren’t particularly active on the recruitment front, and people who don’t seem to know anything because they legitimately don’t know anything.

The Gunga Villa is straightforward enough—on paper, it was probably reserved for a business retreat for four months, because you certainly wouldn’t want some random newlywed couple booked for a nice mountain honeymoon recognizing Shigaraki Tomura wandering around. Same story for the employees; the MLA wouldn’t have put the League up at the villa if there was a chance that anyone there would rat them out. So I think we can assume relatively fairly that anyone in the building the day of the conference is solidly implicated, whatever their claims might be otherwise.

Of course, plenty might well try to claim that they were just there for the vacation, or just started work last week and had no idea the place was a nest for conspiracy, but that was where Hawks spent most of his time, and most of the people at the villa presumably fought back against the heroes. It might be a complicated process, matching hero eyewitness testimony to every person there, but you can at least sort of see the path to it.

Other groups, however, are a lot less straightforward. Consider the following categories:

The Liberated Districts

As I discussed earlier, Deika was presumably a high watermark on societal saturation, but Deika still only counted 90% of the population as “Liberation Warriors, lying in wait.” That leaves 10% unaccounted for. So who are those 10%? Are they children?[37] Some children too young to know anything about the PLF, and some old enough to know but not yet old enough to be considered warriors for the cause? Are they instead elderly people, maybe remnants from when the MLA first started to infiltrate the town that have just never had enough close family or social life to get pulled into the Liberation Army by the usual vectors?

By far the worst option is if Trumpet’s 90% accounts for anyone even remotely connected to the MLA—that would mean one out of every ten people in Deika is legitimately completely ignorant of what the powers that be had brought in. How on earth are you supposed to tell those people apart from the other 90% when the heroes sweep in and arrest absolutely everyone? Or are we to believe that the HPSC had time to get in an agent to flash a covert L-sign at everyone in town and they only arrested people who visibly acknowledged it?

These problems only get worse for our hypothetical town that’s 70% PLF. That opens you up to far more people who have only recently started getting drawn in. Consider the disaffected twenty-something whose family has no idea what’s been keeping him out so late in the evenings. The young mother who met the nicest and most convincing people via the daycare, but whose husband is always out of town on business trips so she hasn’t had time to introduce him to anyone. The working parents who just joined up and whose kid, away at hero school, doesn’t know anything—yet.[38]

Evaluating these peoples’ social circles and financial history for other PLF attachments is going to turn up a ludicrous number of false positives unless the Commission can narrow down exactly when and where such people crossed paths with the ideology of Liberation. So many people would have been raised to it, people whose entire lives are suspect, but mistaking even one new recruit for a lifelong loyalist gives you exponentially more avenues to baselessly suspect people—and as established, the Commission just doesn’t have the time to be overly discerning.

Detnerat, Shoowaysha, and Feel Good Inc.

This is another line of attack that seems like it should be a bullseye, but is actually quite the opposite. Detnerat is a business that is run by the leader of the entire movement, yet the fact that not everyone who works there is a member of the MLA is one of the very first things we find out about them! Miyashita was something akin to a personal aide or secretary to Rikiya, someone Rikiya liked well enough that he was on the verge of introducing Miyashita to his other friends—and Miyashita didn’t know the first thing about his boss’s true affiliations. It’s patently obvious from that alone that not everyone at Detnerat is PLF, and it's likely that the numbers of the faithful are even thinner at Curious and Skeptic's outfits, where they're high-ranked executives but, crucially, not actually in charge.

This is, of course, complicated further by the fact that people who work at e.g. a publishing house are probably there because they agree with that publishing house’s politics, whether or not they know what’s going on behind the scenes. Ditto with Detnerat—certainly there would be people there who just needed a job and could charm their way through an interview without an inner passion for the work, but loads of people probably work there because they legitimately believe in the company’s ethos. So how do you tell people who have relatively radical personal politics without having any idea about the terrorism apart from the people who are absolutely PLF/ex-MLA but who are now lying about it because their organization's cover is blown and the response to that is, “Well, time to go back underground!”

The Hearts & Minds Party

Membership of this party would seem to be a good indicator, but using it that way too unquestioningly is also very flawed. This is because the HMP particularly is probably an excellent recruitment tool for the MLA/PLF. The note above about having radical political beliefs but still being ignorant about the planned acts of terror is especially true for the HMP. The Commission cannot just pull the voting records and arrest all of them because plenty of them are going to be totally ignorant of what was really going on with the heart of the party, only joining up because they believed in the kinds of things the HMP was platforming on—less repressive quirk use laws, prison reform, very possibly issues like the abolishment of the legal category “villain” or greater social safety nets. Just because someone votes for those things, doesn’t mean they know about or would support the MLA’s violent extremism or the PLF’s anarchic goals.

So at what level of initiation does the Commission call a cut-off? How long does someone have to have been voting straight-ticket HMP for them to be considered condemned by that association?

Over and over again, the question arises: how did the heroes and the police distinguish the initiated from the uninitiated? And given that Japan’s legal system at least nominally requires that guilt be proven, what are they going to do when huge numbers of those people claim innocence?

The Presupposition of Guilt

Let’s take a few minutes to circle back to what I talked about earlier, the presumption of guilt and how it relates to arrests, convictions, and the perception of arrestees in Japan. This is going to swerve hard back towards real-life Japan issues for a bit, but it is exceptionally relevant when examining what’s likely to happen to the people arrested in the raids, innocent and guilty alike, so thanks in advance for bearing with me.

In Japan, the rate of conviction is extraordinarily high—if you’re in anime fandom and active in social justice circles, you may have seen the tumblr posts about the country’s famed 99.9% conviction rate.[39] There are a range of explanations for this. Defenders argue that, compared to police in many other countries, police in Japan are very cautious and don't move to prosecute unless a case is all but airtight; thus, many who are arrested may well be released without charge if there is even the slightest doubt that the case will hold up in court. One can easily see truth to this by looking at the numbers on how many people are arrested in Japan versus how many are actually charged: Wikipedia notes (albeit without citation) that in the U.S., roughly 42% of arrests in felony cases result in prosecution, while in Japan the figure is only 17.5%.

Conversely, critics note that a major feature of convictions in Japan is the confession, and confessions can be coerced, particularly in the sorts of conditions that those imprisoned in pre-trial detention are kept—no legal representation, no contact with their families, loved ones or employers, no requirement that they be informed about what they’re being charged with, potential weeks upon weeks kept in isolation, sessions of questioning that can extend for most of the day.

There have also been cases in which confessions have been found to be falsified, for example by having the suspect sign a paper and then filling in or altering other details after the fact.

There are some other factors about confessions to be aware of here:

In Japan, it is not legally permissible for a suspect to be convicted solely based on their confession. The constitutional provision in this regard is something called himitsu no bakuro, the “revelation of secret.” The revelation of secret is something in the confession that is factually verifiable and which, at the time of the confession, only the suspect could have known. Common examples are things like the location of a previously undiscovered body or the time and location where a weapon used in the crime was purchased. The majority of verdicts that are overturned in Japan are overturned because of issues with a confession.

Sentencing is also very lenient compared to the U.S., particularly if the suspect was cooperative with police and admitted guilt (seen as showing remorse). Thus you wind up with a situation in which suspects believe that they’ll lose a case if they go to trial (because practically everyone does) and prosecutors—rather more aware of the weaknesses in a case than a confused and vulnerable layman—don’t want to bring a shaky case to trial, and thus both parties are invested in whatever will get the suspect out with a minimum of effort. The result of this is a high number of people released on “suspended prosecution,” which is an admission of guilt, but with a prosecutor's decision to show lenience while still establishing precedent for possible later offenses warranting more severe punishment. This is a particularly common result for first-time offenders, especially in non-violent crimes.

Note that suspended prosecution is not at all the same thing as being released for lack of evidence; a suspect is conceding their guilt by accepting the arrangement. However, many suspects who the police might not be confident in convicting are known to sign confessions and accept the arrangement regardless, because, along with fear for their livelihoods, it’s known that judges tend to view extended time in detention as a sign of guilt. Also too, if admitting guilt is seen as showing remorse, then maintaining one’s innocence is often perceived as a lack of remorse—leading to fears that fighting the charges will result not only in defeat, but also in harsher sentencing!

All of these factors combine into a problem with perception of guilt that feeds on itself endlessly at all levels. Let me use a run-on sentence to summarize: the general public views anyone who is even arrested as probably guilty, because the police are seen as generally only moving on those who are guilty, because police specifically only prosecute those who they can all but prove are guilty, but guilt can be “proven” by a sufficiently detailed confession, and while confessions are required to have some corroborating evidence, they can easily be falsified and may well be offered up with minimal resistance because the suspect is also convinced that judges will only be harsher on them if they put up a fight because suspects also believe that they will be convicted at trial because everyone knows the conviction rate is unbelievably high.

Japan likes to think of itself as a “safe” country, which is in large part why its deeply concerning arrest and detainment procedures have held up repeatedly in court. These things help keep people safe, after all, and who wouldn't want people to be safe?

Returning, then, to the matter of My Hero Academia and the Paranormal Liberation Front mass arrest, I don’t think it’s overstating things to claim that the dehumanization of villains and the glamorization of heroes has probably exacerbated these problems.

Cruel punishments are illegal under Article 36 of the Japanese constitution? But what if someone really, really deserves it, though? (Chapter 94)

You can see that willingness to shrug off civil rights violations as long as it means safety in the symbol All Might represents, a hero who is there to beat up baddies, not ask questions about why they're being bad. Ditto Tartarus, where the Bad People get put, regardless of whether their Bad really warrants so awful a punishment or whether the severity of such a punishment serves as an effective deterrent.[40]

As to the presupposition of guilt, if a hero thinks they saw someone Doing A Bad, and confidently testifies to that effect, who’s going to doubt them? It’s blunt to the point of headache-inducing that Midoriya Izuku, the boy who will be the greatest hero, who’s treated by the story as if he’s the first person in history to think about “saving” a “villain,” doesn’t even start to think about such a thing until he literally experiences a psychic impression of a five-year-old crying within the heart of Shigaraki Tomura.

At the press conference in Chapter 306, it’s illustrated numerous times that huge portions of society don’t particularly care about Dabi’s accusations. They don’t ask for Hawks to face justice for the murder he openly admits to committing; they don’t ask for apologies for the heroes’ wrongdoings. They ask for heroes to make them feel safe. Even if it means lying to them; even if it means asking Endeavor to go out there and “take down” his firstborn son. People are uneasy about the accusations, certainly, but what they want is not for heroes to take responsibility for their actions, to atone for them, but rather to deny that there’s any truth to the accusations at all.

This is not a society that, in the wake of Gigantomachia’s rampage, is going to be open to the possibility that some people caught up in the mass arrest are legitimately innocent and that everyone, even villains, deserves to be afforded the full extent of their rights.

The Dissolution of the HMP

Speaking of rights, let’s go over one that we can immediately see has been flagrantly violated in the manga compared to the state of real-life Japanese law—the overnight dissolution of the Hearts & Minds Party.

As discussed earlier, it's unlikely that every member is a dyed-in-the-wool terrorist. There are bound to be perfectly innocent people in the country who just so happen to agree with the HMP’s campaign platforms. Now, all of those people are going to turn on the evening news[41] and be blindsided with the news that their political party has just been dissolved and some enormous percentage of its membership arrested. This was not publicized or forewarned; it just happened, in a matter of hours. Do you think those people—people who are members of a party that specifically opposes the current status quo—are just going to nod and say, “Oh, wow, that sucks, but who am I to question the wisdom of the government and its agents? Time to find a new political party, I guess!” Would you?

I can assure you that you wouldn’t, because let me be clear: under current Japanese law, what we’re told happened to the HMP is unbelievably illegal—not only because they were dissolved at all, but particularly the speed with which that dissolution was carried out.

I mentioned earlier, in the section “Japan and Illegal Organizations,” that there were methods by which organizations can be dissolved. Now I’d like to look at that in more detail.

Any organization that’s been flagged as a potential threat—that “terroristic subversive activity” designation—can come under investigation from the Public Security Intelligence Agency. Their recommendations are then passed up for evaluation by a member of the Public Security Examination Commission,[42] who can pass a variety of prohibitions—the bans I mentioned earlier on printing activities, public assembly, and a few others. These prohibitions are issued in periods lasting up to six months, at which point they are re-evaluated and can be dismissed or renewed.

If the Public Security Examination Commission decides that the comparatively soft-pedal restrictions on freedom of the press or freedom of assembly are not sufficient to deter the organization in question from committing terroristic subversive activity continuously/repeatedly in the future, the Commission can elect to order the organization dissolved. This revokes their rights mentioned above entirely, and further stipulates that they liquidate their assets,[42] and that no member of or representative for the organization can take actions in the organization’s interest (e.g. things like opening bank accounts or buying property). The only exception to the latter restriction is a designated representative for the organization who is granted the right to manage its assets in the process of overseeing the dissolution.

Any of the designations above can be appealed, but dissolution is permanent until specifically overturned.

Now, it might well seem that the HMP could be targeted under the “advocating for subversive terroristic activity” criteria, but here’s the problem with that: that criteria is based on the organization engaging in/advocating for such terroristic subversiveness as an organizational activity—that is, the activity in question is a foundational, core aspect of the organization’s endeavors. And I simply don’t think that’s how the HMP operates. To reiterate, I believe they’re a recruitment tool, meant to siphon people into the MLA (later the PLF) proper, but otherwise a perfectly legitimate political party with real political aims, outreach, goals, and so on.

Of course, I can easily see the anger over all the destruction leading the Ministry of Justice to being heavy-handed in its response to the Paranormal Liberation Front and any organization even suspected of being associated with it, of which the HMP is the most prominent. I could also simply be wrong about what the HMP says at their rallies. Regardless of either of those possibilities, however, there is still the matter of the timetable.

There was a period in Japanese history that organizations—political parties especially—could be dissolved on the spot. The Meiji Constitution granted that right to the Minister of Home Affairs, a Cabinet position appointed by the Emperor, and indeed, any number of socialist, communist, or labor-oriented parties were banned and dissolved within scant months of their establishment for their alleged leftist or subversive leanings.[44] The Farmer-Labor Party of 1925 was dissolved three hours after its establishment! So clearly there’s some precedent—or at least, there was. Like many things, the power to summarily dissolve organizations did not survive the Meiji Constitution’s transformation into its modern-day incarnation after World War II.

The Subversive Activities Prevention Act, the same one that lays out the causes for dissolving an organization, also details a legally mandated process by which this dissolution is carried out. Most prominently, organizations cannot just be dissolved with no notice, no chance to defend themselves. Any disposition curtailing an organization's activities, from the bans on their printed material to complete dissolution, is required to be announced both via the government's official gazette[45] and, if the residence of a chief officer or representative of the organization is known, also via written notification. These notifications must be sent at least seven days before the hearing date—a hearing which, further, the organization has the legal right to send agents to in order to present statements and evidence in their own favor, as well as examine the evidence being presented against them.

This clearly did not happen. Bare minimum, Hanabata Koku, as leader of the Hearts & Minds Party, should have had an address the Commission could get ahold of, especially given all the snooping they so obviously must have been doing to unearth the extent of the PLF’s reach.

It’s instructive, in this regard, to look to history. To wit, I’ve said a lot about how gun-shy Japan is to dissolve organizations outright, thanks to its history of governmental repression—but how true is that really? If the government really wanted to, couldn’t it just decide to crack down on something and ride out the controversy? Has it done as much before?

To put all this into proper perspective: no. It hasn’t. The government has invoked the Subversive Activities Prevention Act against a group rather than individuals only once in all the time since the act was passed in 1952.

It was against Aum Shinrikyo, and it didn’t happen until seven months after the subway attacks. Even with nearly unanimous desire to prosecute, even though Aum had been under police surveillance prior to the attacks, even though lawsuits against them were and had been ongoing, meaning at least some measure of investigation was being done openly, it still took seven months to gather the evidence, submit it to the Public Safety Examination Commission, allow Aum their appeal, and enact the ruling. That’s because, in a society ordered by democratic processes, these things take time.[46]

But the HMP? No one who wasn’t a member knew about their affiliation with the League of Villains—much less an underground army!—until Hawks got the word out, and the Hero Public Safety Commission had to be rigorously careful that news of their investigations not leak because they knew they had their own moles to deal with. So far as we know, the Hearts & Minds Party remained a legit organization right up until the day of the raid. It is functionally impossible under current Japanese law for them to have been dissolved in the scant few hours between the commencement of the raid and the attack on Tartarus in which the two guards mention the dissolution.

Even if the relevant agency in the Ministry of Justice submitted their paperwork the absolute minimum of time in advance, there is no way the HMP and Trumpet—and therefore Re-Destro and the League and everyone else—shouldn’t have known that the government was moving against them. The only answer is that the Ministry of Justice was evading its legal obligation to notify both the public[47] and the HMP itself, or that the Japanese government, in the wake of the Advent of the Exceptional, throttled back on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms exactly the way human rights activists today are always warning about.

Stigma and Recidivism

In the same way that In Custody is not (or shouldn't be) a magic status effect preventing villains from escaping from police, In Jail is not an endgame state. Most people in prison are not there for life (or death) sentences, particularly not in Japan. Even if the majority of the PLF gets stuck in prison for decades, there will, eventually, be an “after” for them. So what happens “after”?

Well, like many countries, Japan has made efforts in the modern day to offer training classes and parole officers to help reacclimate ex-convicts into society once they’ve done their time, but it remains a difficult process, and the country has a relatively high recidivism rate. Given the stigma against criminals—present to a degree in all countries, but particularly exacerbated in Japan—it is frequently difficult for released prisoners to find stable housing or employment—both key factors helping to prevent recidivism.

So does MHA’s Japan have similar programs? Well, it’s hard to say, given that the only prison we’ve actually seen is Tartarus, which is obviously a poor model to base a lot of judgement on—save, of course, that any country that could develop a place like Tartarus is a country with an appalling deficit of care for criminals’ human rights, which doesn’t bode well for their other prisons.

Speaking of things that don’t bode well, though, we have two obvious examples in the canon of how convicted criminals fare: both Gentle Criminal and Twice are, it’s suggested, prosecuted for their foundational fuck-ups—Tobita for obstructing public duties[48] and Jin for his traffic infraction. It’s unclear whether they went to prison or not—given the relative lenience shown to first-time offenders, I’m inclined to think probably not—but even given these very mild offenses, their lives were turned completely upside-down, and no apparent efforts were made to help them through chaotic periods that saw Tobita apparently disowned and Jin losing his job.

Consider the harsh reactions they garnered and the apparent lack of assistance from any social structure despite the relative mildness of their wrongs, and things start to look very bad indeed for the PLF. Will there be any steps taken at all to deradicalize them? Does taking such steps seem likely, given what we've seen of MHA’s legal and carceral systems thus far? Further, if there is no plan for deradicalization, how exactly do the heroes propose to stop this from happening again (and again, and again and again and again)?

Here’s another alarming thought: what will be done with the children? There’s no way around the fact that the MLA, and therefore the PLF, included children[49]—and I don’t mean it in the tumblr sense of describing a sixteen-year-old as “a literal child,” though there would be some of those, too. No, I mean the grade-schoolers, the toddlers, the babies. Maybe some of them will have non-PLF family they could hypothetically go to, but as I have written about in the past, there’s a very real bias about orphans and other children separated from their parents in Japan, and even blood ties are not always enough to overcome that stigma. Alternative care is in a woefully sorry state as it is in Japan, and this would only be compounded for PLF kids—damned first for their criminal associations and again for being the children society doesn’t want.

However many thousands of them that may be.[50]

So here again, a question recurs. Where before it was, “How do you tell the guilty from the innocent?” here it’s, “How do you stop the societal backlash from ruining countless peoples’ lives both now and for decades into the future?” What kind of stigma will all these people—rank and file who come out of prison deradicalized and ready to rejoin society, children who were too young to understand why heroes took their parents away, ignorant family and friends who just lost loved ones to a massive government sweep, innocents swept up in the net and imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit—going to be facing? How long, then, before that stigma sees them radicalized in turn?

You cannot sweep 115,000 people under the rug and not expect there to be a stain—and given the narrative themes of the rest of My Hero Academia thus far, it’s absurd to think that’s even an option.

Next time: how scrapping the ex-MLA portions of the PLF undermines MHA's narrative integrity.

-----------------------------------------------------

Footnotes (Part Three)

[26] And in the legal sense, murder in the second degree.

[27] For the monstrous callousness of his comments in that conversation, said guard is immediately murdered by karma All For One. I very much hope we ever get Shishikura’s opinion on this, because I’m pretty sure the guard was his dad.

[28] Who, in Chapter 35 of that series, leads a group of police firing rubber bullets at an active villain, emphasizing that the police are trained in non-lethal tactics, and any escalation from that is not to be taken lightly.

[29] Indeed, you could make a fair argument that that’s exactly why the manga included the Noumu to begin with, though the lower-tier ones wind up captured as often as not.

[30] Vigilantes, Chapter 74.

[31] This sidesteps the matter of “rescue heroes,” those who focus on disaster response and evacuation. Note, however, that this is not a categorization that pits those heroes against non-quirk-abusing civilians. Non-quirk-abusing civilians are criminals for police to deal with, not heroes of any stripe.

[32] This would be in keeping with real-world de-escalation tactics. So for e.g. the purse-snatcher in Chapter 1, where we’re told he didn’t use his quirk until he’d been backed into a corner, I would bet that Kamuy Woods or whoever confronted the thief didn’t start actually using their quirk on the man until he went into giant mode. That is anyway a kinder interpretation than noting that he was a heteromorph and would have been using his quirk automatically just by virtue of existing in public.

[33] After digging him out from under the stairway it had a teenager drop on top of him, I mean. Did he even have much of a chance to use Incite at the villa, do you think?

[34] Though given that literally every member of the MLA we’ve met is addressed solely by their code name, I don’t for a second believe he could have gotten real names out of everyone he talked to.

[35] And judges virtually always grant warrants. It’s that presumption of guilt thing again.

[36] But that panel of the normally taciturn Edgeshot shouting at a bunch of high schoolers not to let a single person escape is pretty damn telling too.

[37] 14% of the Japanese populace is under 14 years old, so that’s not too far off, though I’d be inclined to think, based on everything we know about them, that the MLA was having more kids than Japan at large, not fewer.

[38] This should have been Uraraka, by the way.

[39] An exaggeration, but only by a handful of tenths of a percentage point.

[40] Though until recently, it’s served as a great check on recidivism, clearly.

[41] You know, assuming that they weren't all arrested in the middle of their workday or cleaning house or going to university or what have you.

[42] Both are among the agencies that make up the Ministry of Justice. I’d be willing to bet that, in-universe, the Hero Public Safety Commission is also under the Ministry of Justice umbrella.

[43] The funds are then remitted to the National Treasury.

[44] Though one thing to note for our current context is that, even when those parties were dissolved, it did not automatically follow that any duly elected representatives were expelled from office. Unless there was legal reason to remove them, any elected officials were simply rendered “Independents” rather than being affiliated with a political party. The constitution stipulates that Diet members can only be expelled by a two-thirds majority vote, though in such circumstances, most politicians choose to step down from their positions before it comes to such drastic measures.

[45] A newspaper or other bulletin officially authorized by the government to publish public and legal notices—in Japan these days, it’s an online site/newsletter.

[46] And they’re often still controversial with progressive activists, as the invocation against Aum was even contemporaneously! Incidentally, Aum’s dissolution lasted for a mere two years before the government panel ultimately declined to make it permanent.

[47] And if you don’t think the HMP had someone watching the official Japanese government website, you’re clearly not taking them seriously.

[48] And possibly more besides; the dialogue in question trails off in a way that suggests that the obstruction charge is only the first in a list.

[49] Start at Yotsubashi Rikiya being inducted when he was still in schoolboy shorts and continue right on up through the people we see in school uniforms in various mass battle scenes involving the MLA rank and file.

[50] And it easily could be thousands. If, say, even 10% of the PLF are minors, that’d be well over 10,000 kids, and thus we’re right back to overcrowding problems, except this time they’re about Japan’s child services programs, and the last thing they need is a new group of kids that numbers a full third of the number of children already in their care in real-life Japan. Naturally, the number only climbs if you think Re-Destro wasn’t counting kids in his initial reckoning of the MLA’s membership.

#bnha analysis #bnha meta #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha spoilers #my writing #plf arrests #stillness has salt

81 notes · View notes