#and generally how interesting i found their dynamic to be iirc

[rainibao]

*sorry for wall of text, lazy to get screenshots and this was a spur of the moment post

The "those lost in the darkness are my friends" line from Manipulator always reminds me of Li Tianchen, and I also like that it adds to the cultish implications in the PV visuals (where it's also shown that he does mix in with 'bad crowds'. I'm going to assume it's through these games he sniffs out weaknesses he can exploit.).

Anyways, yea, the way he perceives and experiences relationships is definitely very... unique, to say the least(avoiding certain terms bc I'm not an expert). The way they parallel and juxtapose his meeting with Tianchen against shiguang's will always be one of my favourite parts of the show, due to how it conveyed a lot about his character right away & immediately presented the friendship as a warped version of shiguang's (like, LX was definitely Tianchen's light in that moment, but that admiration allowed LX to mould him to view the world the same way he does i.e. the hunter & beast line. Not intentionally, because theories aside, I view him as a genius child who was already very sure of himself and his unique yet perceptive views(likely due to positive reinforcement) that he probably deduced from his own observations(especially when his family is...like that and rich), leading to that approach to establishing a connection at that early age. Which worked really well because of the vulnerable position TC was in).

I too, like some, thought "Huh? Cheng Xiaoshi?" when he jumped into the water and retrieved the soccer ball (very deja vu moment!) But I immediately corrected that thought when he started speaking. It was very unsettling, and I don't really know how people continued to think it was cxs, sunshine dog man would nawt say that. Cheng Xiaoshi was offering up his trust to establish a genuine connection(power dynamic shifts to LG), Liu Xiao was encouraging Tianchen to prove himself to him, after appearing to him "heroically" (establishes himself as the one on the pedestal. yea definitely not a stretch to think he would become a cult leader of sorts).

I think this scene of the two children playing in the water together from before the moment they reunited is also a juxtaposition to their first meeting. To further emphasise that yea, Liu Xiao wasn't a typical kid, and that definitely wasn't a typical friendship between two children

[atoriv-art]

Heeyyy so sorry if this has been asked before buuuttttt.. What are ur thoughts on the sand siblings?

this made me realize i didnt include their rs in the chart i posted REST ASSURED I LOVE THEM. anyway hehehe :3

a lot of my takes on them are headcanon-based (like even more than the hyugas id say) But i assume thats what people r here for anyway. Sooooo

i really like the suna siblings bc their relationship pre-chunin exams is very, like… dysfunctional, but at the same time stable? temari and kankuro are obviously afraid of their brother, and gaara is deeply unhappy around them, but they've all clearly found a "safe" position to exist in yk?

my read on those positions is that temari actually feels more conflicted about gaara than you would think — she's the oldest and therefore the one most aware of how 'wrong' their family is — but she puts her and kankuro's safety first, therefore she resorts to appeasing gaara and generally staying out of his way. kankuro is more of a show-off and while he is afraid of gaara, it's in a more grounded way, if that makes sense? he taunts him like one might taunt an angry dog, he's afraid of him because of what he can do, vs temari who dreads being around him because she's aware of what gaara carries on his shoulders and Represents

i actually 👉👈 have a suna family-centered fic i've been slowly working on 👉👈 that ive been too shy to mention on main LMAO but since we are on topic here u go [link]. it's yashamaru-focused (my WIFE) but it brushes upon the entire family :3 it'll be slow to update since i've been busy with things but if u don't mind that. i mention it here since i use the extrapolations im mentioning here to write it….

aaaanyway. the kids' relationship with rasa isn't very defined (esp for kankuro and temari) but i interpret their situation as the classic… yk, father lost his soul after the mother died sort of thing. it's a bit cliche but it makes sense LOL while the only kid we know for sure rasa was cruel towards is gaara i don't find it a stretch to expand it towards the other two, even if it wasn't as extreme.

so, with that in mind: my personal interpretation is that temari — in addition to getting the usual heir responsibilities — got put into a caretaker role for kankuro, pushing her towards cynicism and self-preservation above all else (she's also the one most likely to remember their mom, and an early loss like that can push one into hyper-independence), while kankuro was left with a bit less pressure but as a tradeoff grew hungry for acknowledgement, eventually feeding into him becoming a bit of a bully as he gets older. i think he was the one with the most... "normal" relationship with their father, but i wouldn't necessarily say that's a good thing lol

gaara is in a unique position because he was not fully raised by rasa, and his relationship with him is a lot more shallow and extreme as a result. instead gaara ended up being built into who he is almost exclusively through yashamaru's kindness and subsequent betrayal — and this is only accentuated imo by the fact that gaara does not (iirc?) at any point willingly bring up yashamaru. he badmouths his father and blames him for who he is, but the formative moments of gaara's childhood that we see are of him with his uncle. isn't that interesting? to me it reads like that's still a wound so deep he can't even bear to acknowledge it; rasa treats him like a monster so gaara is free to spit poison back at him in return, but gaara did wholeheartedly believe his uncle loved him at a point, and the idea that he did not was so world-shattering that he can't even bring himself to acknowledge his existence

all that being said, gaara as we meet him in the exams treats his siblings like strangers and i can't fully blame him for that; while the compounded traumas of 1. losing their mother and 2. the shift in rasa's disposition, cannot be understated, i think what truly "broke" the siblings' dynamic is the way gaara was likely forced into kankuro and temari's lives after yashamaru died. while they'd certainly met before, there's a world of difference between knowing you have a distant, troubled younger brother vs having that brother violently placed into your home in his most vulnerable state after another familial loss.

(yashamaru's rs with his other niblings is never really touched upon but i do think about it often. he was so close to their mom i doubt they had no relationship at all! but that's. you know. what the fic i mentioned is for.)

it inherently puts the kids into an adversarial position, especially with how rasa doesn't try to argue for gaara's humanity. so gaara, freshly traumatized and distrusting, is met with siblings who are terrified of him and a father who he knows wants him dead. to make things worse, yashamaru (my king.) made sure to crush whatever goodwill gaara still had towards the world before he died, so there's no part of him willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. no one has any interest in fixing this situation so this is the dynamic they settle into.

yet! they are still family and there are certainly glimpses of that. one of my favorite moments is temari looking out for gaara for, in our pov, the first time

it's really simple but it always gets an emotion out of me, it's why i think their relationship bothered her the most… one of my biggest gripes with the suna siblings is honestly that we just don't get a lot of them after a point! i would have loved to see them getting closer after gaara takes the first step in closing the distance.

kazekage retrieval arc is easily one of my favorite arcs in naruto it's soooo sweet to see kankuro and temari fighting so so hard for their baby :( i really like the quiet moments where you can tell there's still a lot of guilt over how things were, i wish we got to sit with it a little more because part of the reason i like their bond so much is because of those moments of doubt, you know? i think it's far more powerful for gaara to wonder if he's been fully forgiven, for temari to grapple with the guilt of not having been a good sister to him, than for them to easily slip into a healthy and stable dynamic as a trio.

how do they feel about their father? their mother? how do they feel about their uncle? they are three different people with similar but not identical experiences with all of them, and it makes you wonder how they might navigate unpacking all of that while not jeopardizing their fledgling bond. for example i'm personally a huge fan of gaara coming to view his uncle in an imperfect but ultimately empathetic light, while his siblings see little reason to extend him so much grace.

their personalities in shippuden make a lot of sense to me taking their upbringings into account too; kankuro and temari are predominantly rasa's children, and therefore have rougher edges and are way more averse to earnest displays of affection. gaara meanwhile had yashamaru's influence in his formative years; he knows how to articulate his emotions and acknowledges the importance of sincerity and kindness. i dunno if this was intentional but i think it's a neat detail!

soo much of the suna family follows this pattern of love breeding resentment (rasa's love towards karura breeding resentment against gaara, yashamaru's love towards karura breeding resentment against gaara and rasa, gaara's love towards his uncle being twisted into hatred against the world, the siblings' love for each other being corrupted then saved) it's sooo. chef's kiss. again my only complaint is that we don't see more of them. literally who cares about konoha i want to be in suna forever

[queervocasongtourn]

Queer Vocaloid Song Tournament: Side A, Round 1

Please listen to all songs before voting!

Shama by NILFRUITS feat. VFlower

VS

Zero Talking by Harumaki Gohan feat. Hatsune Miku

Propaganda under the cut!

SHAMA

"extremely potent yearning, the powerful dynamic of safety in disguise but a dangerous freedom in truth, beautiful characters…what more can you ask for?"

"if i am being completely honest i dont actually get everything that happened in shama - that can be left to all the other people who are more knowledgeable about nilfruits songs than me and immediately thought of submitting this - but I immediately thought of this song because its so SO good. the song itself is incredible and the mv adds on to make it an even greater work!! i might not know all of shama's story, but what i do know is that shama's a fantastic song regardless and i'll go crazy whenever i hear it. and i also do know that clay and kalmia (especially clay) are some great lgbtq+ rep in a vocaloid song!!! the section from 2:00-2:36, when accompanied by the mv, is maybe one of my favorite moments in any vocaloid song. what follows is also great! as propaganda i am begging the reader to go listen to shama with the mv if they haven't. i don't want to explain it because i don't entirely know how to but they're fucking gay and i really like how the mv shows this!"

"sapphic 👍👍"

"Okay so this one is kinda hard to explain but the MV is some flavour of queer for sure. Just… watch it and you'll get what I mean"

"a femme-fatale prisoner and one of her guards have a doomed romance..! the mv is by wooma, who uses a graphic colour palette to complement nilfruits's addictive guitar melody. this song is also the first in a series, so if you're interested in the prisoner's backstory, you can watch the other works to find out more :-)"

ZERO TALKING

"tbf most harugoha songs are so #yuri but this one has an actual kiss. royalty x maid childhood friends who have drifted apart over the years and the royal lady (unsure of her english title, in japanese shes just named daireijo) desperately wants to just Talk to her dearest maid dorothy again but can't get anywhere with it (hence the title). In the final chorus of the MV she has enough and kisses dorothy on the lips. They're referred to as "sisters" sometimes but this is a reference to the classic catholic school yuri trope where an older girl will take in a younger one as a "younger sister" and they have a sort of romantic friendship going on. They're like definitely not actually sisters it would make no sense. It's such a good song. the bass in it is really good. please listen to harumaki gohan"

"despite the sister term scare that happened when the mv first came out this mv is about a princess and her maid who used to be friends and i believe grew apart and the princess is trying to reconnect with her friend. also first harumaki gohan mv kiss iirc!! the song is also just a brainworm in general i looped it so much it was stuck in my head for months"

"The song is about a girl who has a strained relationship with another girl, and who wishes for things to go back to the way they were (the maid doesn't talk to her anymore). The use of "sister" is also not literal, instead being a term found in yuri to describe a relationship between women (often shorten to S/esu), as well as the comparison between the two girls and the story of orihime and hikoboshi, as well as the fact they literally kiss in the song. I don't know if you can really deny it with that."

"this was in my head for weeks and weeks after it released!! the mv really makes it, the surprise near the end is so cool"

"😳"

"ZERO TALKING TALKING TALKING .Harumakigohan is the king of vocaloid yuri rn but oh my god first on-screen kiss in his songs!!! For a cute song about a princess trying to win back the affection of her childhood friend now employed as a head maid at her castle. just listen to the beat and tell me u are not enthralled. the lil "pop" noise in the song when they smooch is adorable. the song is so catchy it's ridculous i just hit that shit on loop."

[comicaurora]

hii hello 👋 just wanted to start by saying that the comic is still so cool interesting and I love how things are progressing so far, at first I wasn't sure if i was going to enjoy the current arc as much but its honestly really enganging with the bits of Falst backstory being revealed, seeing Dainix in action and put in situations, and also more interactions of the party members without Kendal really being present there (i love him sm but its interesting to see how the group dynamic is starting to really shape up, even though falst and dainix have only known each other for like a day(?), putting them in a perilous situation is a really good choice we can see open guy and closed off guy interacting and its so !! its cool) also the lighting for the cave with the fire and the ancient tech is great!

(this is already such a long ask im so sorry)

but ... speaking of ancient tech, i wanted to know how much of it has survived? we know that Erin's bag of holding is also Ancient made (iirc), and so is the storm pedestal, but is there still some other known Ancient tech used in the world? are there also significant populations/communities of people with Ancient ancestry that have gathered and do they have most of the access to that tech? If they do exist, are they more of a closed-off community or are they kind of subsumed into the local population (of ppl with no Ancient ancestry and stuff) ?

tl;dr really digging the current arc i love zombie dungeon funtime adventure. more info abt ancient tech / ppl descended from ancients pls?

anyway thank you very much and have a good day ^_^ love your work Red and it's honestly amazing how far the comic has progressed and the community's grown over the past 3-4 years ! (damn i cant believe 2019 was 4 years ago)

glad you're having fun! dropping dorks down a hole for Character Development is always a fun idea

Most Ancient stuff is in ruins, but the automatons are quite sturdy, especially the stuff created in the final days of the civil war. Ancient war machines will sometimes reactivate and un-bury themselves, wreaking havoc based on long-belayed and half-remembered orders. Dainix's desert home deals with these on occasion, which is why he's familiar with the basics of how they work.

Most Ancient tech works in ways that nobody has quite figured out how to replicate, but it can sometimes be repurposed if it's well-preserved enough - although the fact that most Ancient tech reacts with alarms at the presence of humans and elves makes it pretty hard for most people to make them do anything particularly useful. Things like Erin's bag are rare but not unbelievably so - there seem to have been a lot of them, and they're hard to break.

Ancient ancestry has been almost entirely subsumed into the overall population, and it almost never presents in any visible way - just about its only telltale signs are unusual height, and the combo of earthtone-skin and light-earthtone-hair with pale jeweltone-eyes, which is not naturally found in uninfluenced humans or elves and is rarely found even in elementally adapted populations of either (elves can have jeweltone eyes but always have skytone skin, typically patterned; influenced humans like crystal-caste will have jeweltone eyes and hair; etc)

Ancient tech responding positively to anyone is quite rare, and typically occurs in people who seem to have a significant number of Ancient ancestors on both sides of their family and consequently visibly resemble the phenotype to an unusual degree. It's very difficult to measure this sort of thing, but the general rule of thumb seems to be that a person needs to be at least 10% of Ancient descent before the tech doesn't panic on sight, and at least 20% in order for it to actually respond to them in any meaningful way. So the equivalent of one Ancient great-grandparent would work as a bare minimum, which doesn't sound too bad - unless you start doing the math of how many generations have actually passed since there were a surplus of Ancients around.

After the Ancient civil war ended and the "cave-folk" left the Singing Caves, there were barely a thousand Ancients left alive and scattered across the northern continents, in contrast to hundreds of thousands of humans and elves. And since this was over 4000 years ago, with generations happening at a rough average of three per century, there have been over 120 generations since the Emergence. One way to look at this is that every person of the Elder Races currently alive is a descendant of some set of those people alive at the Emergence, 120 generations back - they had kids 119 generations back, those kids had kids 118 generations back, etc etc, eventually leading to a person alive today whose great-great-great-(115-more-greats) grandparents were all around at the Emergence. However, this numbers game gets complicated when we do the basic math of asking "how many (118-greats)-grandparents would anyone have)" and find the answer is 2^120, or a little over 1 undecillion, which is a one with 36 zeroes after it, which is a billion billion billion billions. This many people have never been alive anywhere, because the uncomfortable truth is that after a certain number of generations back everyone's family trees stop forking and start looping, though if it happens far enough back it's not a genetic liability like it is in certain colonizing nations' royal families. So this math is already falling apart, but it is giving us some idea of how catastrophically unlikely it is for someone's Emergence-era ancestry to beat the odds and have enough Ancient make it to the modern day to be detectable.

To dramatically simplify the math and pretend generations are cleanly delineated at 3/century (and that genetics actually works like clean 50%s every time, or even that genetics as we understand it applies to this fictional fantasy world), at the time of the Emergence, the world population was around 0.1% Ancient, and in order for a modern person to make the tech work for them, their first-generation ancestry - the sum of all those Emergence people whose descendants eventually produced this kid, weighted to account for the people who are technically the 118-great-grandparents multiple times over thanks to family tree loops - needed to be at least 10-20% Ancient. It's not impossible, and there were parts of the world where the Ancient population at the Emergence was easily that high, but they're likely to be vastly outnumbered in the rest of the pile of 118-greats-grandparents as the family tree approximately doubles in size every generation.

So it happens, but it's rare and getting rarer. Most people in this field are instead trying to crack how to reprogram or build automaton control units from scratch, rather than dealing with them freaking out all the time.

[tragicvampireromanceisland]

id love to hear more of your dream prod thoughts! it was really funny reframing the fact that yeah, the emotions probably really do just have authority over everything and anger was Laser Focused on gettin rid of a director that put riley in danger

HIII yes i'd love to talk more about dream prod!! 😁 i'm gonna go ahead and put it all under the cut though, since 1) probably gonna be LONG and 2) i feel like it's too soon to talk about spoilers out in the open dhkjhkjgh. but!! yes anyways

YES god i really loved all of anger's bits in the show. loved how protective he got 🥺 one thing i always found interesting in the first movie was that the long-term workers did not really seem to...care that sadness and joy needed to find a way back to hq? might just be working in long-term that does that to you LMAO!! really fascinating that the guys working in dream productions do defer to the emotions to some extent. in a way emotions themselves are very integral to dreams! and i loved all the little things that showed this, like paula desperately looking for a happy memory to come up with a dream for, or how gigi's nightmares mostly consisted of green and purple orbs (sidenote SIGH i really wish we got to see disgust and fear interact more considering this. especially since even the sleepwalking memory was green and purple, iirc? buuut i digress. NOT just the disear brain talking i promise but maybe also a Little /lh).

also found it very interesting how the machine jean brought in to measure the. "excitement" of the dream is also a bit dependent on emotions i would say? i'm getting real technical here, but i'm wondering how riley could still react to the dream with other emotions who are not on dream duty (and even then, the ones on dream duty aren't using the console...) despite them being asleep...🤔 definitelyyy overthinking this LOLLL but it's very cool to look at the inner workings of dream prod overall! i love that they introduced daydreams in, too...and this sort of worldbuilding of how daydreams are constructed differently compared to dreams at night. really good contrast for the paula xeni rivalry!

SPEAKING of mannn i loved paula and xeni!! WHAT a fun duo. one thing i noticed was that paula's insistence on "fun" dreams and living in the past was an interesting mirror to joy's previous behavior before her character development across both movies...i thiiink this was intentional, and it's fun to see that riley growing up isn't something just the emotions have to adjust to, but everyone else in the mind word as well 🥲 i wasn't expecting to find the paula-xeni dynamic as funny as i did, either. the bit where he steals her boots made me laugh out loud LMAOO. ALSO going to mention mel here too GOD. THE PUPY. I LOVE HERRR...was talking with a friend the other day about how interacting with the personification of a hormone lets you be affected by that hormone...really cool annnd makes sense considering these guys are all brain cells LOL. makes me wonder if hypothetically this could affect emotions too...? hmm!

anywaysss i loved all the callbacks to things from the first movie...i kind of wish there could have been some acknowledgment of how joy and sadness literally broke into dream productions in the first movie since, well. that's a Pretty Significant Thing that happened. BUT it's fine HKJFHG i thought the callback to canadian boyfriend was real fun. i willll say, given both disney and pixar's....not so good reputation with this sorta stuff, i was concerned the romance! episode was gonna be. one of those "See we PROMISE riley isn't gay!!!" sorta things so i'm glad that's not the direction it went in, and that they kept the resolution for that vague. AND i love love that they really played into the romcom element with all the tropes like the love triangle. AND sadness and joy watching it together!!!! MAN. SO CUTE. 🥺 in general i adore how much joy and sadness are just. besties now. they hang out together!! they LIKE hanging out together!! AUGH. ANYWAYS. romance DID end up being my favorite episode of the bunch! joy and sadness appearances obviously. helped with this LMAO but i loooved how it really showcased paula and xeni's strengths as a team. AND I WILL NOT LIE. that sleepwalking scene did kinda stress me out and i am a grown-ass adult. i also always love when real-life phenomena get translated into the mechanics of the mind world. the camera suddenly moving on its own was sooo cool.

i ALSO found it interesting how the characters all seem to have different views of what's best for riley...jean is the antagonist obvs but! interesting that she had a rationale for the dream xeni wrote, kinda "shaming" riley into growing up...even more interesting when you think about how shame was eventually written out of the second movie drafts, AND how anxiety's original character was rewritten a couple of times because it seemed like both of them were "self-sabotaging" riley too much. interesting that jean could somehow fill this role...! i wonder if that concept was carried on into this show.

ALSO. THE LUCID DREAM STUFF!! very cool. i've always been curious about the reality distortion filters. also a cool way to have riley interact with the mind world! i wiiiish we could have seen more of how...the emotions viewed this dream, what they thought of it etc. since their reactions are present for all the other dreams...i'm honestly very curious about Dream Duty in general, especially since it's not mentioned at all in the second movie. i think it would've been cool to kinda explain the details of dream duty in parallel to the dream production process, sorta tie the whole relationship between the emotions and the mind workers at dream prod together a bit more...buuut overall it was fun to see more of dream productions! definitely my favorite place in the mind world out of all the ones we'd seen across both movies. had a fun time overall!! and honestly my favorite thing about worldbuilding in inside out is how many strange hypotheticals it makes you think about LOL. so while i still got criticisms i'm having a fun time with it 😁👍🏾

[rouge-the-bat]

i was tagged by @princesstokyomoon owo! ty for the tag i love talking about myself LOL

nickname: [not including nicknames based on my irl name for obvious reasons] rouge is what i go by online, sometimes called rougey too :3 kurama is another nickname, so is weirdo (started based on my old url, weirdobsessivenerd). i used to go by yoshi a while back in school too with some people

sign: taurus ♉️ !

height: uhh im 5'2" or 5'3" iirc

last thing i googled: koltins locations in totk, bc im hunting down bubbul frogs rn ! i have 32 left to get atm owo

amount of sleep: eh varies tbh? usually i get around 8-10 hours but sometimes it can be a little less or a little more depending on the night

dream job: character designer for video games!!! + general graphic design n world design n stuff like that. i love LOVE designing things, especially characters, its been one of my biggest and longest passions in my life !!! characters are my absolute fave thing to enjoy and work on, and i hope to one day create characters others can fall in love with like i have for many characters!!!

wearing: a hot pink nightgown with black lace, and black lacey shorts! its so cozy n me core :3

media that summarizes me: like... summarizes my personality? my interests?? hmm... im not really. sure what would really summarize me for my personality? maybe some of my fave things since they tend to have quite an effect on me?

the sonic series i think is a good representation of how im unashamed to be genuine to myself, positive and loving what i love and not caring about being cringy. and it absolutely influenced my love for rockin music, colorful series with darker stories, and edgy antiheroes lol.

maybe system of a down would be a good thing to mention here too, i love all of their music and they definitely have rockin high energy music that can get really wacky sometimes, and ive always had a love for weird shit and identified with being weird!

favourite songs: ough hmm.. ill limit myself to like. 6 songs i really love rather than trying to figure out my Favoritest Faves bc im indecisive lol. n gonna do some different styles for a variety of my tastes!

bring me the horizon ft babymetal - kingslayer

in this moment - sick like me

omega tribe - summer suspicion

megumi ogata - fukanzen nenshou

riff kitten ft kumiho - fallen world

i dont know how but they found me - mx. sinister

instruments: this is so vague lol like. is this meaning ones ik how to play? my fave instruments?

well for ones i know how to play- well i used to know how to play anyways- i played the clarinet in band! n at some point i got an ocarina n tried learning that but never worked on it much. i used to be able to play a couple little tunes on it tho (like the jigglypuff song from the pokemon anime. or part of it at least). someday ill get back to it...

for my fave instruments... id probably say the violin and piano. i really love the sound of them, and i like how much emotion they can evoke!

aesthetic: oh god where do i even begin gkdkfbdkf i have a MILLION aesthetics i love lol. lovecore is probably my biggest one though, but i also love tech/glitchy stuff, gems, mermaid/ocean, general nature/flowers, clown/carnival, christmas, halloween, witchy, punk/goth/scene/emo (together since there can be some overlap between the aesthetics, ik theyre not the same), night/dreamy, space, yandere for a darker twist on lovecore stuff, and much much more. i love anything from pastel n cute, to neon and dynamic, to dark n creepy. i just!! absolutely adore aesthetics!!! its what im all about!

favourite author: ...i dont have one fkxbjf i havent read a book in years and even when i used to read more i didnt have one. could i just say yoshihiro togashi since he created the manga of my fave anime (yu yu hakusho) lmao?

random fun fact: i love pickles and will drink pickle juice straight out of the jar. have yall ever had pickle pops??? its like popsicles but with frozen pickle juice. i LOVE it. actually i should find our popsicle molds so i can make some soon

some mutuals to tag: if yall wanna, ill tag @megalo-station @mageofcolors @transgaykurama @foxdenji @skrunksthatwunk @l-lawliets-pussy @yoko-kurama-the-sex-god @shining-bewear @pipwife and weve only been mutuals for a short time but ill tag @shrineguardianhyena too owo

[op-sys-chaos]

As someone who loves the idea of “sassy badass grandpa butler Alfred Pennyworth” but who also knows he’s a problematic enabler, let me add my two cents.

Some of my first exposure to Alfred was comics like Red Robin 2009. Where you can see Alfred praise Tim for throwing hands with Damian (mostly because Damian was being an asshole and kinda deserved it iirc). What you don’t see in that comic is that the source of that argument, which was Damian getting Robin, came from Alfred. This thread is in fact the first time I learned that Alfred was behind that. (I haven’t read the Dick!Batman Damian!Robin run outside of maybe a single comic or two.)

But what’s interesting is even then, even when Alfred’s being sassy and all “good for you for sticking up for yourself, master Tim,” he’s still encouraging the siblings to fight. He’s enabling Tim and Damian’s whole fucked up dynamic instead of saying “hey, you two should sit down and talk it out and get your shit together.” Damian constantly tries to kill Tim and all Alfred says is “well done, you stood up for yourself and fought the child who keeps trying to kill you.”

Alfred is a massive enabler. He stands aside and lets shit happen.

Alfred wasn’t happy about participating in the 16th birthday thing iirc. But he did it anyway. Because he doesn’t say no to Bruce, no matter how wrong he is.

He did at one point quit during Tim’s 90s Robin run because he was mad at Bruce, and he went to go support Tim instead. Idk exactly what Bruce did bc it didn’t occur in the comics I was reading, it likely happened in a Batman comic and I was reading the Robin run. But Alfred does have a limit to what he’ll support. And I think him leaving and supporting Tim (who was also kinda pissed at Bruce for being an asshole) helped solidify the “Alfred loves his grandkids and supports them” stance for those who read it. It certainly helped me form my opinion of “sassy badass grandfather butler” because that was what he did in that run.

Basically, I’m conflicted. I love fics where Alfred is awesome. I love awesome Alfred. But also, I can definitely admit that he’s problematic. I already knew he was a massive enabler of Bruce’s bullshit. But I don’t think he’s so problematic that you can’t see him in a good light. And I don’t see the harm in painting him as a good grandparent in fics, because it’s fanfiction. Just like how Pit Madness is the only reason Jason was ever mad in the first place in some fics, if people want Good Alfred they can have him. Both make reconciliation fics easier, and we in the DC fandom do love our found families.

Side note, I don’t think the whole “allowed the negative narrative about Jason to spread post-death” argument is particularly relevant. Yeah, you’re not wrong, but literally everyone was saying it. Tim was saying it and the other Titans, Jason’s friends iirc, were saying it too. And it’s not the kind of thing Tim would ever say if that comic was written today! It was a product of the time. Readers hated Jason Todd so the writers talked shit about him and made him look bad. And so, the characters did too. That’s less “Alfred allowing a shitty thing to happen” and more “the writers had EVERYONE doing a shitty thing.” The whole hero community was pulling that crap iirc. So I don’t think that’s a point against Alfred since the whole hero community was pulling that.

Another side note, canon is very subjective when it comes to DC. There’s so much content that you’ll never be able to read it all. I’d never even so much as heard of Julia, because I hadn’t read comics that mention her.

So if you’ve only read Good Alfred comics you’ll assume he’s a great guy. And if you’re like me and you’ve read some of each, with Good Alfred first, then you’ll have the image of “generally good guy who can be a problematic enabler.” But if you’ve only seen Enabler/Asshole Alfred, or that’s what you saw first, that’ll be your image of him. Whatever your interpretation is, that’s the correct one. There is no “right” way to see canon. Even two people who’ve read the exact same comics in the exact same order will come to different conclusions. So read and write what you want. :)

One trope that i find weird is that during batfam reconciliation fics, the batfam members use alfred as like the big red button to bring jason back, but i feel like that wouldn't actually work. at all.

Jason would HATE alfred after everything he did after he died. Canonically, it was alfred that made the "a good soldier" memorial case, bruce wanted it down but alfred insisted he keep it up, he was the one that gave tim the Robin suit THAT JASON DIED IN, and drove him to save batman and nightwing with NO training at all. He also helped keep up all the "jason was always doomed for a life of crime, and he was an angry child that got himself killed" narrative that was spun after DitF. Alfred pennyworth is batman's biggest enabler, and has stood by while bruce did all his bullshit, such as the whole UtRH arc, and RHatO #25, where he said that it was inevitable that jason would go back on the whole no killing agreement.

Alfred may care for all of Bruce's children, but his only grandchild is damian, as shown when he made him robin behind tim's back( the whole "dick made damian robin" thing is just to add to tim angst. Dick was infact against that whole shitshow). If it doesn't benefit bruce, his pseudo son/employer and landlord, he wouldn't give a fuck.

It's basically impossible to write a reconciliation fic at all without completely rewriting characters, especially jason and alfred. Jason believes that batman's mission is flawed and useless since he doesn't permanently stop crime, so he'd never fully give up killing, the whole reason there's a rift between him and bruce, and alfred isn't this doting grandfather that always sides with his grandchildren and bakes cookies and makes tea.

Also, one major thing the fandom forgets is that alfred is canonically a shitty father to julia, his bio daughter. He abandoned his own daughter for the waynes, he'd never prioritise bruce's children over him.

[cubedmango]

once again thanks so much for putting up with my long ass ramblings, and you're welcome too :-) it actually took me a few hours to finish typing out all of it, plus that sort of post-script message afterwards, but it's not like i did it all in one go and there were breaks in between, so it's fine haha. i genuinely appreciate your concern though :') and that's the power of a relatively new fixation i'm really excited about i guess? wjdfjkcnvzs though i did cobble some parts of it from tentative posts and meta i've had in my drafts for a while now, so they're not totally things i had to come up with on the spot the other day at least. and that's okay (i do like what i've seen of your writing though), like obviously no pressure to feel as dedicated as i am when it comes to talking about my blorbos and glup shittos and whatnot - your actual passion for the media is what matters and that ofc manifests in cool different ways for each of us 🫡 [1/?]

(rest below)

ah i'm glad my description of build was intriguing enough for you! i hope i didn't seem like i was laying it on too thick with my constantly paralleling and comparing it to aa though - i mean at first glance, the narratives of aa and build could not seem more different, but in hindsight they both prominently deal with the concepts of truth, justice, corruption, redemption/atonement, identity, and family and friendship in their own ways (though ig that's probably true of kr in general, which then makes sense as for how toku would feature as a major element in many aa cases), even if not always perfectly in either series, but the effort is generally appreciated and still pretty compelling imo. and i really love aa too (i actually discovered your blog and your twitter through your very cool and beautiful aa fanart a while back, and then when i started watching cm, i was pleasantly surprised to also see your fanart in the tumblr tags, so it was nice to see some of my interests align with that of an artist i liked and followed <3) so finding ways to make analogies between whatever i'm currently into with one of my favorite franchises ever seemed like the natural next step haha [2/?]

also let me just say that ryusen is one of the few m/m couples to get me this obsessed apart from narumitsu and the like over the past several years, so that's really my best way of recommending them. again, idk if that will truly be your experience too by the end, but hopefully you'll still find something to like about their dynamic so my being this much of a shill for them won't feel embarrassing later on kjvbrhsfjs [3/?]

and yeah the rings!! they're far from the only gay-coded kr duo to get that kind of official romantic jewelry ofc, but they were apparently one of the first to really make it popular, so yeah their overall cultural impact sure is something to not be underestimated lol. and yup i've found that it's actually fairly common for many companies behind popular japanese media to go for selling that kind of merch, regardless of the actual canonicity of the pairing in question - like capcom, toei/p-bandai, etc. are aware that there's sizeable enough shipping fanbases for said media, and yeah ig selling that stuff while not having the guts to actually canonize said pairings can come off as pretty baity which is not really Great but well that's capitalism and queer/fujobaiting for you ig 😔 and here's what the sento/banjou rings look like btw: www . tumblr . com/kabutoraiger/190132806767/a-new-entry-into-the-growing-selection-of though i can't share a picture of it rn, their names (spelled as sento kiryu and ryuga banjo) are also inscribed on the insides of their respective individual rings :-) [4/?]

as for the 'silly little rabbit with a death wish' part of that post... hehe. you'll Get it if/when you get there >:) btw sento's given name literally means 'rabbit tank' and banjou's given name ryuuga means 'i'm a dragon' iirc (although the former having that name actually has a good in-universe explanation for once, but the latter definitely has no such excuse 😭) - tbh kr (+ other toku franchises i'm sure) is right up there with aa in terms of often corny yet still charming pun names, but because they're mostly in japanese and don't have localized english equivalents, one doesn't always get it right away but i suppose that's what google and wiki are for lol and actually one other particular example that's stood out to me so far is the name of the protagonist from ex-aid (the one played by iijima from odt, and yeah he, inukai, and akaso all knew each other from their time in kr because their shows also had its own crossover movie which also featured a bunch of other popular previous rider protagonists), which is the season immediately preceding build, because it's literally houjou emu - houjou as a pun on the japanese word for 'assistance,' and emu as in short for 'emulator' and derived from the japanese word for 'smile,' because guess what that season was about? doctors who are gamers. so yeah subtlety.exe nowhere to be found here lmao [5/?]

and hell yeah feel free to join me in the madness ^_^ toku can be one hell of a rabbit (lol) hole though, so it might lead you to become interested in other shows and movies of the medium/genre, in which case we'll be in this together as i'm also still beginning to get into other kr shows in particular (like after i finish build, i think i'll be focusing on the earlier heisei seasons of ooo, den-o, or maybe kuuga). as for where to watch it, i don't have one particular strong rec for a site rn, but what i've gone for are kissasian (kissasian . fm/info/kamen-rider-build) or toku . fun (toku . fun/post/watch-online-kamen-rider-build-full-series-49-episodes-english-sub) - obviously kissasian is more of a general site for which to watch asian dramas on, but that's if you don't mind ads popping up every so often and also the subs used are not very consistent like the source for one episode's translation could be a different team/person from the previous episode's, whereas toku . fun is specifically an archive for toku shows and movies, and is more consistent with the subs and is basically ad-free iirc, albeit i think i've also heard said subs on there described as 'usually the most accurate but also the least funny/entertaining' (ig bc tvnihon, their source, tends to err on the side of 'purism' when translating), so whichever is more your style in the end? i personally switch back and forth between the two sites, purely on the basis of if there's a translation i'm not satisfied with, even if i don't know how actually accurate it is lol on a side note, build's opening song 'be the one' by pandora feat. beverly is a nice jam, and it has an official english version where i think the lyrics (+ the original japanese version too) are something that would make one come to realize just how much they fit sento and banjou's relationship by the end of the show :') [6/?]

and thanks again for giving me the go-ahead to keep on rambling ^_^ moving on to build's female characters: there are only 2 really prominent female characters (a few others pop up here and there, or have relatively big roles for an arc or 2, but not throughout the whole show), misora (as mentioned before) and sawa. imo, both are treated decently, being fun and interesting characters with their own arcs not purely tied to the men (although obviously romance with men or the lack thereof are not inherent markers of the quality of a female character's writing, it's worth noting that neither of them are written as love interests (so you'll never get the sense that they get reduced to just that role) to any male character - but tbf, kr and other popular toku aren't really big on romance, even the het ones, in the first place, maybe bc of some japanese cultural conventions or something, but i've heard that the few canon m/f relationships that are present are usually not written very well, which is once more very shounencore of them lol - although unfortunately, there is a guy with a frankly kinda creepy and annoying parasocial crush on misora which most of the other characters don't care for either but it's still played off as comic relief, kinda larry-like in that sense if we're comparing it to aa again, and that's definitely one of the show's major drawbacks; i mean i still think build is overall worth the watch, and again, since you've gone through all of aa already, you'd be a veteran wrt this kind of trope, but regardless i think it's good to give some warning in advance to help you prepare for some of the shit that's about to go down) plus misora and sawa are eventually shown having a personal relationship/friendship with each other outside of the men too :-) however, overall they're still kinda underutilized and underdeveloped (sawa in particular) compared to the guys, plus neither of them are riders, though in kr, that's also definitely not an automatic indicator for whether a female character will be well-written or not, but then again, since we're both aa fans, i'm sure we're already very familiar with the feeling of seeing interesting and compelling female characters not get their full due from their writers, so based on that, build is survivable for sure 😔 [7/?]

and idk how well they would fare next to female characters from other kr seasons, but i also think it's worth pointing out that, for all that build's writer/s are clearly still not immune to misogyny, misora and sawa's overall writing doesn't come off to me as 'so misogynistic it becomes gay' in the vein of idk, naruto or death note, bc again, neither of them were touted as viable love interests to male characters before getting shoved to the side in favor of primarily focusing on homoerotic m/m relationships for most of the story only to still get together with those men in the end, and the only thing build was really marketed as in terms of its relationship writing was the 'heated drama between men' stuff so you already get a sense of what's in store for you from the start, and so ultimately you also don't really feel that annoyed or 'cheated' you know? [8/?]

and then on to akaso: that anecdote was from a full interview with him and inukai from when the show was just starting out - docs . google . com/document/u/0/d/1BwqtHLs5d8Vs2YCJA7XJW3TxhaGta8jo9huEo70ehq0/mobilebasic there's only very mild spoilers for the first episode and then vague allusions to what happens in the next couple of episodes or so, but if you'd still prefer to wait until you've actually watched those episodes to read it in full, i'll just copy here the most relevant parts for what we're talking about: "Inukai: The first scene we appeared together in was…. Akaso: Wasn’t it the first encounter scene? Inukai: [...] At that time, it was really hot at the filming location. During out spare time we just tried to preserve our strength, so we didn’t talk much. Now that I think of it, that day, you were staring at my face the whole time. Didn’t anyone notice? (laugh) Akaso: I was feeling dizzy from the heat, but among all the actors, I suddenly noticed Inukai-kun’s face and was captivated by it, thinking “wow, he is so pretty...” (laugh) The director, Tasaki Ryuuta pointed it out to me. I instantly came to my senses. I’ve never stared at any actress like that before, no matter how pretty, but at that time I suddenly became dizzy and just kept staring in a daze. Turns out, it was a heatstroke (bitter laugh). Inukai: You had a heatstroke because you sensed the dangers of my body (laughs). That was the moment I decided I shouldn’t let my guard down around you. Akaso: Nononono, I wasn’t trying to hit on you!! Inukai: (laughs) Akaso: Please stop, don’t add any unnecessary mental images to the word “partners” (laughs). But when Inukai-kun plays Sento, you get the feeling that he’s a very smart person mulling over a lot of thoughts in his head, I think he looks very pretty and cool. Inukai: That makes me happy, I think. Thank you." [9/?]

so there you have it lol. apparently akaso did use the word for 'heatstroke,' but the translator of this interview pointed out on tumblr that it seems like what happened had no actual severe effects on him, so it was likely just heat stress at most and he just said 'heatstroke' to clearly get the point across or something. in general, akaso during his time on build seemed to have a bit of a pattern of saying some kinda out-of-pocket things that would make one go "oh he really had the nerve to go there huh but like... is he wrong?" like when he also infamously claimed at two separate promotional events that banjou was the real 'heroine' of the story (which makes his previous comment to inukai to not add "any unnecessary mental images to the word 'partners'" funnier) 😭 during the first event, he was asked to introduce his character and then himself, and when he said banjou's name, he added that he was the 'heroine,' at which takada kaho (misora's actor) interjected and pointed at herself to say that *she* was playing the 'heroine' and there was a bit of back-and-forth between them as both kept insisting they were the 'heroine' (all in a lighthearted manner ofc) but in the end i think akaso got in the last word before he passed on the mic to takada so she could properly introduce herself this time, although she didn't bring up the heroine stuff again from what i could tell lol. the video i watched from that first event didn't actually have subs, but you could get the gist of it especially since they said 'heroine' in english. as for the second event, i also watched a bit of its video but i don't think i got to the part where he made the comment, so i only saw later on a screenshot from that same video where what he said was translated as "then, when i read the final script, it said that kaho takada was feeling down because banjo ryuga was the heroine." [10/?]

and. well... neither of them are wrong exactly fnsjngkbs. like ofc misora filled the obligatory female lead role, but generally speaking, it seems like it was obvious even among the cast that banjou, in addition to being the typical male co-protagonist like in a 'buddy cop' type of movie or show, was the one pretty much framed as the story's 'heroine,' imo in the style of a shounen anime or manga to sento's shounen protagonist position (well, the shounen animanga with well-written central m/f romances anyway), with the implication of being sento's love interest in all but name officially also. like... it's still very much subtextual but also wow talk about the lack of subtlety here too 😭 and at that second event, there was another comment he made that made me go "okay come on don't do this to us" but it's related to spoilery series-finale and post-series material, so it's probably best that i save discussing it for when you're done watching, if ever. but well yeah i'm kinda obsessed with his mind for all that like. thank you for continuing to help us fans not sound delusional via all these very enlightening comments (i mean aside from how heavy the subtext already was in the actual story) but also what's his issue 😭😭 [11/?]

btw build isn't actually akaso's first kr show - it's amazons, specifically its 2nd season, which also got released in 2017 some months prior to build's airing. amazons is one of those aforementioned more adult-oriented toku webseries and was meant to be a 'darker and more mature reimagining of the 1974 television series, kamen rider amazon,' but it got more mixed reviews overall compared to build, especially since iirc a lot of fans think it didn't handle said darker themes too well or something (there's cannibal cultists?? i think??? idk if akaso's character hiroki was one of them though). but the upside to it is that it was precisely his work on amazons that got akaso cast on build (from what i can tell, hiroki is nowhere near as dumb as banjou, but there's a similar delinquent vibe, albeit hiroki's aesthetic seems to be somewhat edgier). i find it funny though bc hiroki is apparently a 17 year old high schooler, then a few months later akaso made the jump to playing a 23 year old (which was his actual age at the time of filming) ex-pro fighter... the range of this man jwkfjksfdlms [12/?]

on a final side note about something that's not really relevant to all that other stuff but still kinda funny: i just remembered that apparently back when cm was airing, and that moment in ep. 2 (?) where adachi forces the elevator doors open to ask kurosawa out to dinner happened, people were commenting "well that's kamen rider training for you" and yeah i definitely believe banjou could/would have done something like that. though he probably would have punched the doors in the process too, or because he's a dumbass, he might also let himself get accidentally hit by the closing doors and then that's when he'd punch them in response lmao also i think i'll save my further thoughts on the kamen rider yuri and also the few canon lgbt+ characters the series does have so far + the varying qualities with which they've been written for later messages, bc once again this has gotten far too long and there's already a lot of things here for you to process and respond to so. thank you so much again and bye for now 🙏🏼 [13/13]

thank You again for all the info omg theres so much detail again ur a legend..!! reading it is so fun too i can rlly tell u like the franchise a lot that makes me happy ty for sharing all this w me 🥺 and actually to update u i watched a couple of eps since ur last asks (currently on ep8 kdjfksj i did a littol binging) and 1) it is Very different in tone from what i was expecting! i thought itd be like . moody and serious action etc but its actually rlly silly and thats a huge plus for me i love me some silliness always and 2) did take a bit of getting used to the format (+ to akaso and inukai in these roles theyre so different from cm and odt How are these the same guys) but honestly im rlly enjoying the buildup of the mystery?? and the charas are v endearing i care them already. also i cannot believe they dropped this one me in ep *ONE*

LIKE HELLO??? all i could think at first was "this is so nrmt in turnabout goodbyes coded" with the whole "i believe in you" thing but goddam . u werent kidding about these two huh. i get why the rings now i get it. Man. but yeah big fan of their dynamic so far !! and a little unrelated but im hoping they keep up the bit w banjou figuring out best matches in 1 second its my favorite thing rn fkdjsjfjdfhs

(also also this bit im just . thinking. a lot. kind of a crazy line to drop in the middle of all the silliness isnt it 👁👄👁)

anyway . onto misora and sawa omg theyre so good too ???? misora esp shes so funny and i keep wondering when theyll get into her whole powers deal its been on my mind since ep1 ........ these two are def not getting as much screentime ive noticed but at least the times they show up are great so far and none of that forced romance stuff which is what im used to sadly so ill take it 👍 just hope we do get to their backstories too eventually or im gonna be :(

also little cut to the villains too since theyre p prominent but although i already figured gentoku was involved somehow from the start i cannot for the life of me figure out what blood stalks deal is???? like is he just there for the drama of it all . whys he kind of helping the guys what does it Mean-

THE INTERVIEWS HELPJFKDJF ive heard legends of mr akaso eiji and his out of pocket commentary im understanding now ..... that "heroine" thing is Crazy though like surely he had to have known the implications right ????? doesnt he know that stuff is dangerous to fans come on man 😔 ur right abt the range tho im already so impressed by his and inukais acting in here since its so different from the charas they played in cm and odt but still p similar in how they do emotional scenes so im enjoying seeing those 👀

i think ill keep watching bc mostly i just. Really need to know what the mystery is (and still that "silly little rabbit has a death wish" thing, tho im starting to have a hunch about who its referring to.........) so yeah maybe ill have more liveblogging updates for u next time if ur interested in seeing my reactions akfjkdsjf

(before i go one last thing . ACE ATTORNEY REFERENCE???????)

[a-slut-for-smut]

Idk why but I always like scenes where Levi beats up Eren in front of an outraged Mikasa and she can't really do anything about it. For some reason it makes me horny and was the reason I started shipping RivaMika is the first place besides for the fact that they look so aesthetically good together in a way Mikasa and Eren don't, especially short-haired Eren who just looks like a generic anime protagonist with that haircut which is a boner killer tbh.

Hi Anon!

Apologies for the delay, ive had a slow recovery from what we call "life" and its just been a struggle to get back to my usual slutty smutty groove but im getting there slowly but surely!

Anywho allow me to breakdown your ask:

Idk why but I always like scenes where Levi beats up Eren in front of an outraged Mikasa and she can't really do anything about it. For some reason it makes me horny and was the reason I started shipping RivaMika is the first place

LOL i'll tell you why it makes you horny- POWER DYNAMICS BABY!!! You gotta love those relationships where its starts off with an undeniable tension (enemies to lovers is great with this) you just get this push & pull dynamic that threatens to stretch to the point of breaking and when it finally does? that shock of that sweet, sudden release is just MMMMM! *chefs kiss*

To expand on that- Mikasa obviously hates Levi early on for his violence on Eren and wants more than anything to reciprocate but can't due to a) Levi is a superior officer b) she has a begrudging respect for his strength and later his leadership- which in turn shows growth on her part on how she sees him, building onto that tension.

In Levi's case, yes he probably gets a kick out of beating the shit out of Eren because who wouldn't, but I also like to see it as a way for him to irritate Mikasa for her attentions because he knows how much it bothers her hehe. Man i love it when couples go out of their way to annoy the shit out of their love interests as if it's their kink- i LIVE off this shit its also incredibly hilarious 😆🥰

they look so aesthetically good together in a way Mikasa and Eren don't, especially short-haired Eren who just looks like a generic anime protagonist with that haircut which is a boner killer tbh.

You aint wrong anon, and might i add- PREACH! Levi and Mikasa look fan-fucking-tastic together, both have that cool stoic demeanor despite their limitless lethal potential- they have absolute confidence in their skillset/know they're hot shit but aren't arrogant about it where its a flex, just an unspoken fact. Love that shit.

Simply said, they make an incredible team that are shown canonically to mutually accept and respect each other - something that was never showcased (IIRC but honestly my brain actively tries to delete this shitshow story from my memory) with Mikasa and Eren which is why i was never drawn to the ship myself. Also re: Eren being generic- yah altho for me it was more his personality that i never found particularly appealing/attractive. Idk if its fair to call him a basic bitch but personally i need to be attracted to BOTH characters for them to be an OTP, i just can't find myself invested as much otherwise!

[etirabys]

// incoherently getting this out before going for dinner

there's a twitter user who I believe is a friend of a friend – shows up on my feed sometimes, generally makes funny and enjoyable posts. Once made a post that was like, "when men have messy apartments I'm like yeah okay, but when women have messy habitats I'm a little freaked out and I judge them more"

I was. amazed by this. My dude, this is literally sexism! You have wrapped around all the way and returned to normal sexism! How do you not recognize this! I almost pointed this out, but decided we didn't have the rapport / character limit for this conversation to have P>0.8 of going well, and scrolled on. And my read was that they made this post because they exist in a milieu where it is normal and accepted to react differently to men and women. (Tumblr is like this as well – c.f. bisexuals going "when men do blah it's gross, when women do the same it's different and cute, idk why?" I wonder why indeed.)

almost everyone in my extended irl and internet sphere wants Equality in some vague way. they want the Dynamics to not Be Fucked, but they mill around doing things that are not "literally trying to treat people the same way regardless of gender". And my axe to grind is that (1) anything other than genderblindness will tend to deposit you back into Literal Normal Sexism land, (2) even if you're in some New Weird Sexism land, it's still sexism and you should cut that out.

when I was younger I used to be a hardliner on "literally treat people the same way". then I became more corrupt or less autistic or whatnot and now recognize this isn't possible, but I still think genderblindness should be the starting point. And people seem so freaking interested in doing anything but this. They want to analyze gender differences and digest them into different gender-based treatment. They themselves have personal or social incentives for wanting or giving certain kinds of treatment. And those incentives will win out over (my) (genderblind) ideology

I was hosting a party last week, and found out a potential woman attendee had (1) drunkenly gone around grabbing men's asses at a prior event, (2) made public posts complaining about being shot down unnecessarily cruelly when one of them declined to cuddle with her. Said guy was telling me this in an uber back from buying alcohol and I was amazed, like, wait, you're relaying this so casually – don't you want her banned? Should I ban her?

And he didn't want that. He said that while he now disliked her, and felt slightly violated, he didn't mind that much, and he didn't want her banned just because a man in her position would have been banned. Fairness was not near the top of his priority list the way it is on mine. (Which is his prerogative.) It was one of many moments when I perceived that very few people on any ideological branch are on board with the idea that seems obvious to me, that we will not have equality until we are willing to treat people equally. The forces of unequal treatment are just that powerful.

Everyone else in the car (iirc including another harassee) was also like "yeah nah don't ban her", so I acquiesced, but I feel passionately that every exception to equal treatment we make because we just don't feel like it undermines the whole project – a culture that won't ban her cannot defend the norm of banning male harassers either.

sigh. I'll soon shut up and hit post and go out for dinner, and probably during dinner I'll start squirming about participating in culture war and delete this

but. come on! I know this isn't 100% possible, but can we shoot for 90% or 80%? Can people not see that new double standards, of any kind, are not the way out?

internet user pedestalizing young attractive women or interpreting their behavior much more charitably than they would for another demographic: being nicer to women is feminism, yes? I am fighting the incentives that make things weird and bad?

[bitimdrake]

What DC comics runs/storylines would you recommend for buying trades?

A great question! That I am...sort of equipped to answer. I've only read in individual issues and never actually used a trade so I can't comment on the quality/value of the trades themselves. But I trawled through a list of DC collected editions for this, and will now call out those I've read and enjoyed.

This is mostly just Titans and batkids at the moment. I have a super high tolerance for mediocre comics that feature my faves, but I will try to be discerning here and add notes.

Year Ones:

Robin: Year One (2000) - little 4-issue story featuring Dick as Robin

Batgirl: Year One (2003) - mini-series about Babs becoming Batgirl. A follow-up to R:YO, but stands on its own. iirc there's a trade that collects both together.

Teen Titans: Year One (2008) - a little more mixed quality imo, but still a fun miniseries about the original Titans as kids

Superman: Birthright (2003) - Sometimes I read things that don't involve bats or titans!! This miniseries is just a solid retelling of Superman's origin, from leaving Krypton to first fighting Lex Luthor.

Team Runs:

New Teen Titans (1980 & 1984) - 40 years later, this is still the seminal Titans run, if you can make it through the various outdated artifacts of the 80s. Dear to my heart. Though quality in this series dips in the last few years, all the collected editions seem to be from well before that, so no worries there. (ft Dick, Donna, Kory, Vic, light of my life apple of my eye Joey Wilson, etc)

Young Justice (1998) - collected in 5 books - a wacky, fun, consistent run featuring the then-youngest generation of heroes coming of age. (ft Tim, Kon, Bart, etc)

Birds of Prey (1999) - collected in 12 volumes - featuring the Oracle-led team. Unfortunately I...have no recollection of which volumes are the best (see: reading as issues instead of trades), but I absolutely enjoyed the run as a whole.

Titans vol 1 (1999) has never been collected afaik. Which, like, yeah, valid, it has flaws. But it also is the run that sparked my interest in the og fab five, and I still love their dynamic, so fuck it, honorary mention.

Outsiders (2003) - If you are me and very attached to Dick Grayson and Roy Harper, you may enjoy the first part of this series (trades: Looking for Trouble, Sum of All Evil, Wanted, Crisis Intervention). ...Or just pick up issue #11.

Villains United & Secret Six vol 2 (2006) & Secret Six vol 3 (2008) - if you would like to read about a team of villains, many of whom you have probably never heard of, being absolute idiots of a found family I have great news. (And cannot emphasize enough that these are about villains who often do villainous things in comics written for adults.)

Individual Bats:

Batgirl (2000) - Cass's run. Serious and character-focused. I am too tired to entangle how this has been collected, but it's all good.

Batgirl (2009) - collected in Batgirl: Stephanie Brown vols 1-2 - Steph's run. Lighthearted and fun.

Nightwing (1996) - Objectively more mixed quality, but Dick's major run in post-Crisis times. Looking at the trades, I think my top recs are The Hunt for Oracle (crossover with BoP), On the Razor's Edge, Love and War, Freefall, and The Great Leap, but take that with a grain of salt. Remembering which issues are which is hard.

Robin (1993) - Like above, mixed quality, but Tim's major run. I can't even begin to guess at which trades are best. Before this run. he also had three comparable miniseries (Robin (1991); Robin II: The Joker's Wild; Robin III: Cry of the Huntress).

Red Robin (2009) - Big grain of salt! Every comics Tim fan is lining up at this moment to inform you that his characterization here is not to be taken as gospel and very influenced by current trauma. Along that line, I think this is best viewed as the direct continuation of Robin. Recommend the first half of the series (so collected: The Grail, Collision, maaybe The Hit List) more than the second.

Batfamily Stories:

Batman: Knightfall - It's so-so and very 90s, but still a classic story.

(Here we are really getting into the classic 90s batfamily stories. All flawed and messy, but my favorite era of the fam.)

Batman: Prodigal - This first time Dick took over as Batman--long before Bruce's "death"--with Tim as Robin.

Batman: Contagion, Legacy

Batman: Cataclysm

Batman: No Man's Land - Possibly the longest batfamily crossover story ever? I personally enjoy the second half of the story most, because that is when the kids join in and I'm predictable.

Batman: Gotham Knights: Transference - Gotham Knights (2000) had a great early stretch of batfamily content. Unfortunately, it looks like this is the only trade from that era, and the rest are from the later issues that abruptly turned focus onto Hush.

Bruce Wayne: Murderer? / Fugitive

Batman: Hush

Robin/Batgirl: Fresh Blood - Tim and Cass team up after Stephanie's death. (Collected from Batgirl (2000) and Robin (1993)).

Batman: Under the Hood - Jason's return

Batman: Face the Face - Look...I vaguely recall this one. DC did a "one year later" thing across all runs that didn't reboot anything, but gave a nice new starting place for readers. I think I enjoyed this one.

Batman: The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul - One of Damian's earliest stories, with Dick and Tim still as Robin and Nightwing. (And also Bruce ig.)

Batman: Gates of Gotham - a miniseries featuring Dick, Tim, Cass, and Damian during the Dick!Bats era.

The New 52 Is Bad But I Have Trawled For The Diamonds:

Batman: The Court of Owls / City of Owls - part of the 2011 Snyder/Capullo run, which I am still only partway through, but enjoying immensely. There are more trades from this series, but I haven't gotten there yet.

Batman and Robin vol 2 (2011) - The Tomasi/Gleason run featuring Bruce and Damian. Again, I am partway through this, but really enjoying it so far. Not sure how it's been collected.

[incorrect-ikevamp-quotes]

hey so I’m not trying to be gross but this genuinely something that I wonder about like how does mc survive on her period in a mansion full of vampires? Especially with a pure blood like Comte or Leonardo like can’t they sense it? sorry if this is weird I’m just genuinely interested In like pure blood and vampire lore and like what they pick up on especially comte as he’s a fave. I’d love to hear your thoughts as always I love your posts and I hope you’re doing well and staying safe and healthy 💛☺️

Haha, please don’t worry! 😂😂😂 I’ve often wondered about the very same thing, and while I don’t have any canon answers, I can offer the most likely scenario from my understanding of the game. Hope you’re doing well too, lovely, thank you! Stay safe out there~💛💛💛

Given what I know, and the fact that blood is only a small component of the discharge that comes with one’s period, I’d wager it poses a low risk generally speaking. I think the plan would be to make sure everyone’s on guard and has been keeping up with their usual doses of Blanc/Rouge (no waiting until you starve, Jeanne, yes that is a threat) but otherwise everyone proceeds as they normally would. I think it would be hardest on the vamps who are most sensitive to the presence of blood/have a harder time controlling their thirst, like Isaac and Arthur. 

Purebloods have been canonically established as having a much lower tendency to bloodlust by comparison to lesser/turned vampires, so I very much doubt Comte or Leonardo would react much. A blip on the screen for them, nothing more. (I often categorize Jeanne as the closest to pureblood level reactivity because his ability to control the thirst is exceptional; the only time he has ever come close to attacking MC was when he was at a point of intense starvation.) I think the only time her period could potentially become risky is if one of them was starving (and therefore reacting on the level of base instinct) or grievously injured. If they have feelings for her or she’s in a relationship with one of them, it may make them want to bite her more, but I don’t think they’d necessarily act on it. I’d assume most of them would be reluctant because MC is already losing blood as it is? Better to be safe than sorry, and all that.

As for whether or not they can anticipate it, I’m really not sure? It’s possible they might sense hormonal changes, but given I haven’t seen them react to anything so slight I can’t be sure. Purebloods I’d say it’s a coin toss; it’s very possible they can sense it before it comes--but I just have no way of knowing for sure. Lesser vampires, I very much doubt it. 

That being said, you bring up a very timely contention (for me) as of late. Which is to say: what are purebloods capable of sensing? I’ll be elaborating on a recent JPN collection story event that included Comte, as it had a very interesting tidbit that I’d like to share with y’all. It isn’t a huge spoiler as I’ll be focusing on the pureblood lore that was included, but for those who don’t want to see it I’ll be placing it under a cut. (Also some slight spoilers for Comte and Leo’s main story rt).

Mandatory spoiler warning:

So this last event featured MC and her suitor taking care of a child for a few days, in which they act like a pair of surrogate parents. Naturally, being a feral Comte stan, I got his story. In it, both he and MC are taking care of a young girl named Emma--the daughter of a fellow aristocrat (a friend of his). At some point during the story, MC accidentally loses sight of Emma while hanging up the laundry. MC searches the entire mansion but can’t find her anywhere, and she begins to panic when Comte encounters her. Alarmed, he gently asks her what’s wrong and she explains what happened. There’s a brief pause [”...”] and then he says “It’s okay, MC. Emma is–”. Comte then leads her to the gazebo where the little tyke is fast asleep, taking a midday nap in the shade. Naturally MC is relieved to see her safe, but also a little baffled as Comte led her directly to Emma. 

MC: “I’m so glad she’s okay. But…how did you know she’d be here?”

Comte: “Purebloods are good at sensing/detecting nearby human beings.”

And I ????? Granted it’s possible it got translated incorrectly but...I really don’t understand how else he would have known exactly where she was? If MC asked around and searched the entire place and still couldn’t find any trace of her, how would Comte have just known in an instant? Additionally, if he spotted her before he found MC panicking, then I doubt he would have just left her there without an adult/guardian nearby--he would have either stayed there or taken her with him. 

So this makes it plenty plausible that he really did just sense her presence in the vicinity. But........like..........howmst in the fuck. Is that even possible. I have no idea, but I find it a little shocking that I’ve only discovered this now? I mean maybe I missed it somewhere else where this tidbit of lore came up, but as far as I know they don’t discuss it much? The most I remember is Comte giving very clear indications that purebloods were able to sense each other, but I assumed that was restricted to purebloods only...

That being said I’ve been thinking about it and, well, there are at least three pretty strong instances in the game that could affirm his claim in this story. Namely: the beginning of the story itself (Comte’s POV of the prologue), the kidnapping incident in Comte’s main story, and the beginning of Leonardo’s main story.

I remember @a-maidens-dream asking about something very interesting in Comte’s POV story, and at the time I was a little unsure what to do with the information--it wasn’t aligning in a way that made sense. But I think this might help that tidbit fall into place? I think that Comte really hadn’t realized she followed him into the door until she was already in the mansion, and as such this ability to sense humans would explain why he knew she was there before Napoleon even told him anything. If purebloods can sense human people, then he would know a human being entered the house because of the species signature; the only human person living there otherwise was Sebastian. I’m not sure if the sixth sense is acute enough for him to be able to differentiate between human people. (My guess is that it’s not that specific, or if it is, the pureblood has to know the person very well to be sure.)

Building on that, this is a subtle distinction, but it still stood out for me. In his main story route, both MC and a fellow aristocrat (a woman she was friends with) are taken to these small cabin things in the middle of the woods. All Comte, Napoleon, and Jeanne have to go on is the general location of these hideouts. They decide to split up; Comte goes one way, Napoleon and Jeanne go another. I find this instance particularly interesting because Comte’s POV indicates a kind of loss of rational thought--he is 100% in a panic state, just moving to satisfy one objective: save MC before time runs out. This suggests that Comte very much could have been relying on that sense to pinpoint her and her assailants. We have no evidence to believe he was ever a soldier or somebody with extensive experience in tracking--or that knew the landscape well. But he only trusts she’s alive and unharmed for sure when he has her in his arms again, suggesting either that this sixth sense has its limits (in regards to specificity of the person being detected) or that his judgement in that moment was too compromised for it to be clear.

The last one, and perhaps the funniest possibility of the three, lies in the beginning of Leonardo’s main story route. Iirc, Leonardo spends much of that time hauling MC around the mansion to interact and properly situate herself in the mansion’s social dynamic. While this may just be a coincidence, MC notes that she actively tried to hide from him and make herself scarce, but whenever she tried no amount of stealth worked. One can certainly argue he just paid attention or asked other residents about where she was, but I do think it’s worth considering? I need to re-look at the chapters, but I seem to recall her trying to hide in a garden shed and he still found her immediately and just picked her up and walked right back out. 

Tl;dr: So does this mean Comte/Leo can sense when MC is on her period? I have no idea, but at this point I really can’t be sure what abilities they do and don’t have!

[softcannoli]

you are the person who got me to watch the untamed and now I am BEGGING you to tell me what guardian is and where I can watch it.. is there time travel because sometimes I see two gifsets that do not seem like they're from the same show

ooohhhhhhhhohohohohohohohoohohhooo ohhhhhhh boy where do i even start

so uhhhhh Guardian is an on-fire trashcan of a show and also the only thing I've been able to think about for like a month. It's based on the novel of the same name by Priest, which I have not yet read but have heard is very good.

I say "based on" bc I have been given to understand that it is a VERY loose adaptation, bc the novel is pretty much entirely about That Gay Shit™, the undead, reincarnation, and literal gods, all of which IIRC are big no-nos under censorship laws. So the show had to get a little creative, and so now it's about aliens? and time travel? sort of? It's weird, but that's okay, because the show is far more interested in the homoerotic subtext, of which there is OODLES.

So basically our two main characters are:

Zhao Yunlan, who is a regular human dude who is in charge of Special Investigations Department, or SID, which is essentially the department of Supernatural Monster Cops, who are responsible for making sure superpowered underground alien people don't come up to the surface and run roughshod over regular humans, and

Shen Wei, a mild-mannered university professor who is Actually Ten Thousand Years Old, and is also secretly a superpowered underground alien person. He knew a dude 10,000 years ago who looks exactly like Zhao Yunlan for unknown (timey-wimey) reasons, and was very obviously in love with him, so when he meets Zhao Yunlan he is IMMEDIATELY lost in the yearning.

There's also a bunch of other people who work under Zhao Yunlan in the SID, and they are all absolutely delightful and have a whole found-family sort of dynamic going on.

Is this a good show? I think if I'm being totally honest I would have to say no? But is terrible in a bunch of truly delightful ways. The CGI is literally shit-tier. Some of the props could not more obviously be made out of craft foam and paper-mache. The quality of the dubbing work is really uneven, and by the last 15 episodes or so they seem to completely give up and some of the lines are dubbed over by someone who is CLEARLY not the same voice are the person speaking. A lot of the writing choices make NO sense, and the plot starts to go completely off the rails somewhere just past the halfway point. (there's also some stuff that is bad in like, a bad way, but I'll talk about that a bit at the end of the post)

The thing about this show is that it's gay. Like GAY gay. Like The Untamed was pretty gay, but I could conceivably see someone cover their ears and shut their eyes to all the gay subtext in that show and convince themselves there's a heterosexual explanation for everything. Not so with Guardian. Like, I really, legitimately cannot fathom even the most willfully ignorant person not picking up on the vibes between Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei. I simply cannot picture it. There is, in fact, NO heterosexual explanation for them.

The show throws in the most flimsy, half-hearted nods to the idea that Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei are just Good Platonic Buddies, and then in the next scene will just drop in a 5-10 minute sequence of Shen Wei taking a sick Zhao Yunlan home, tucking him into bed, staring at his sleeping face with a face full of tenderness and longing, and then cleaning his apartment and folding his laundry for him. It's fucking unreal.

The show was very clearly trying to push the limits of subtext to see exactly how much they could get away with, and as far as I can tell the answer they got was "not that much", bc I've heard some suggestion that the show was pulled shortly after broadcast for another round of edits.

So it's on Viki, but if you don't want to pay for a streaming service and don't mind sliiiightly sketchier subs, it's also on Youtube! It might be some other places too, but those are the ones I know about.

I'm going to stop now bc this post could seriously be like 5 times longer but please watch Guardian and join me in my daily cries about Shen Wei (Zhao Yunlan can come too I guess, but it's mostly about Shen Wei, bc of the inherent eroticism of loyalty and life debts)

Lastly, bc I would be remiss not to mention it, here's some warnings about the worst things I can remember off the top of my head. I personally still think the show was well worth watching, but there's a few things I sort of wish I had known going into it, beyond the vague warning "the ending sucks". It's gonna be spoilers, so read at your own risk.

There's some talk about suicide in the first arc which isn't really that bad in the grand scheme of things, but can come across as dismissive and/or insensitive. There's an arc somewhere in the mid-20s that leans on some really ableist "split-personality" tropes. I will fully admit that the only thing that kept me watching at that point was the knowledge that this would be over in an episode or two, and the fact that the youtube subtitles translated comments about other character's behavior as "cringe", which I found an extremely funny translation choice.

And lastly, the finale. The finale is bad in a number of ways, but the biggest and easiest to explain is that the show goes full Bury Your Gays and kills off both Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan. ( and then another entity takes control of Zhao Yunlan's body?? so the general public doesn't actually know he's dead?? which I found pretty uncomfortable) But like basically my view of the ending is that if something bad happened, No It Didn't. Which seems to be the general opinion, since apparently Priest went back and wrote an extra epilogue chapter to fix the drama's ending.

[riddlerosehearts]

last night had me freaking out over knowing leona's dream was out and that i'd have to wait for translations of it (i actually try to avoid spoilers as much as possible until i can read the update, so i don't even know what happened in his dream but i've heard some things about it that make me both excited and scared), and then freaking out over how cute rook's birthday groovy is and how the box is a reference to the evil queen's box in snow white, and then freaking out over cater when i didn't expect to be doing that at ALL because i thought we'd have to wait until at least january to hear anything about the heartslabyul update! i slept at very weird hours but i did eventually sleep lol.

i'm glad i posted my prediction for who would get the card before we suddenly found out last night that it was cater... my first guess was actually trey because of his closeness to riddle, with cater being my second guess, but now i'm glad that it's him who gets it! i think he needs a serious dream that really adds to his character and not just something quick and silly, and i also think his dynamic with riddle is super underrated. cater clearly does care a lot about riddle and i'm sure he actually won't just leave him out of his dream. also i agree on being sad that these cards don't get vignettes... i guess the logic is that these are based on what's going on in the story, so they don't need a vignette, but i don't really like that there are cards without vignettes in general.

i assumed that riddle's card suit would be a heart but oooh it'd also be interesting if it was a diamond!! if we don't get to find out in this coming update then i really hope we do eventually. and, in ruggie's dream it got confirmed that NRC students have to pay for lunch out of pocket and (iirc, i didn't take screenshots/write this part down) get the uniform for free at first but if you damage it then you have to pay out of pocket for a new one. which already makes things harder for anyone whose family isn't well-off, and then they're always losing to RSA in every competition, and most of the dorm leaders are varying degrees of bad at their job plus all seven of them have overblotted in a single school year now... so yeah i don't blame any of the characters for not wanting to be at NRC but i do find it incredibly funny at the same time ASKJGFDF.

if riddle ends up just getting written out of cater's dream world and not appearing as a result of cater being the dorm leader then i'll be literally so sad not just because i want to learn as much about riddle and cater's dynamic as possible, but also. imagine seeing first year riddle with his card suit mark on his cheek 🥺

[bthump]

How have you come to read Berserk? Do you remember what your thoughts and impressions were while reading this story for the first time?

ty for your interest!

I actually watched the 97 anime first. I watched it with a friend like a decade ago and I don’t remember those first impressions very well because a lot of weed was involved lol. But I do know I thought I’d be bored by it and ended up surprisingly invested and engaged. I of course shipped griffguts and I was definitely shocked at how close to canon it was, with scenes like Casca’s cave monologue and Griff’s torture chamber monologue.

Then I found the Band of the Hawk scanlation and read that bc I wanted more, though I often found it confusing. I actually just checked and realized I still have a little wordpad doc I wrote notes in back then while I was reading it. So here’s some highlights:

- I adored both Guts and Griffith, and I called Guts “Gatts,” thanks to the scanlation.

- I found their trauma backstories really fascinating since I’d never rly seen that with male characters before.

- I hated Puck a lot lol :(

- From around the Lost Children arc: Hell, he's doing the same as Griffith did - building a mountain of bodies. I predict that he will eventually use the Behelit, and his sacrifice will be... Griffith! Because enemies can also be the most important person to you. But then he will turn it down. Also if he takes Jill, she'll be the Casca to his Griffith. Waaaiiit... if they explicitly state that it's a possibility Gatts'll use the Behelit and get all demon-y... well, obviously the temptation will be soon, and he'll say no. Not a climax as such. Just an event. Damn. Well, unless a central theme of the rest of this is Gatts' temptation to monsterize himself.

well hey I called Guts getting his own Casca parallel follower, I just didn’t know it would be Farnese.

- I was seeing Casca and Griffith parallels apparently, but I was being vague so I don’t know what parallels exactly. Maybe just the ‘shell of former self’ thing.

- very exasperated by how no man can interact with Casca without trying to rape her.

- went ham during hill of swords ofc but surprisingly not at Guts forgetting his urge to kill lol: OH MY FUCKING GOD THIS CHAPTER IS CALLED REUNION ON THE HILL OF SWORDS OMFG REUNION OMG OMG OMGOMGOMGOMGOMOMGOMGOMOGMOGMOGMOMGOD OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD

- bb me still knew what was up re: Griff: He's not sociopathic, he's just so singleminded that he'll do anything for his goal. I was going to say that he's so single minded that he doesn't care what he does for his goal, but that's not true - he DOES care, he just does it anyway.

- I was getting bored with the Millenium Falcon arc and didn’t care about any of the new characters aside from kind of liking Serpico and absolutely hating Isidro. I didn’t say anything about Farnese but I do have a vague memory of getting excited that there was another female soldier character followed immediately by disappointment that she can’t actually fight. So if I didn’t like her back then that’s probably why.

- I was a little disappointed when Guts got the berserk armour because fight scenes aren’t as cool when the protag has a magic power up. I was right tbh.

- I seem to have quit writing around the beach chapters. I think I did actually drop it around there probably, I’d already taken one break and I was forgetting stuff and generally losing the thread of the story iirc.

also I believed Griffith was very likely to get redeemed at the end? Here’s my “reasoning” lol:

Consise, laid-out reasoning why Griffith will be redeemed. He'll probably die right afterwards, but he will certainly sacrifice himself in an act of redemption. 1. The slug-dude did so for his daughter in an act of foreshadowy self-sacrifice. 2. Skull-knight dude tells Gatts that he perhaps has the power to stop fate or whatever. 3. Griffith's whole friendship speech that throws everything in motion. It's super important, but one aspect that is truly important is that for him to call someone a friend, he has to be an equal - following his own dream, etc. When he becomes Femto, this gives Gatts the motivation he needs to get real. If Femto/Griffith eventually sees Gatts as his equal, this metaphorically equals friendship. Of course this will manifest in a respectful arch-enemy thing, once Femto learns to truly fear Gatts, but the metaphor is still there and it will come out when he eventually DOES sacrifice himself because he can't bear to lose his one equal/bff/etc. It will be very Final Gameish. 4. The only man who made Griffith forget his dream is Gatts. Gatts has a huge amount of power over Griffith in regards to his desire to rule everything. 5. Portions of the story are still seen from Griffith's point of view - indeed, a humanized Femto - and this gives me great hope that during these bits we'll see more greyscale characterization. 6. Also in a weird way they kind of have a child together apparently. Idk. 7. Based on the whole sequence before The Golden Age, Gatts gets dark. And ruthless. Mirroring Griffith's transformation, just a bit. 8. Also the fact that Gatts has a freaking

I didn’t fail to copypaste it properly, I just never finished that sentence. But it was probably “behelit” if I gotta guess. Final Game def references the never-made 70s Doctor Who episode where the Master was going to sacrifice himself to save the Doctor, fyi, not the Sherlock Holmes story. Me lowkey comparing every hero/villain dynamic to Doctor/Master when I was 20 is presumably why I assumed they’d get to a respectful arch nemeses vibe lmao.

I guess tbf I wasn’t talking about a redemption arc so much as a humanizing death lol, I just wouldn’t call that a redemption now. I don’t completely disagree with my past self, though I def had some dumb ideas.

It sucks that I dropped it before all the good parts of the MF arc tbh, Griffith vs Ganishka and Guts and Zodd teaming up etc. I wonder what I would’ve thought of it.

Anyway yeah lol, ty for asking and prompting me to find this lol, it was fun to reminisce!

Oh also if you want to see my more recent and technically third impressions lol I did start this blog just to liveblog my more meta-y re-read of Berserk. Here’s the tag for that in chronological order.

[kanohivolitakk]

Have you done Krekka for the ask game? I know you're a huge Nidhiki fan, curious if you have any thoughts on his partner?

I haven't gotten Krekka yet actually. So far I only done Toa Ignika and Axonn for the Bionicle ask game (which Im still accepting). That being said great choice. Krekka isn't necessarily a big favorite of mine (partially because I'm not that fond of the "dumb brute" archetype barring a few exceptions), but I have to admit I do have a soft spot for the big guy. Krekka is a relatively simple character when it comes to characterization/backstory/role in the story (especially when compared to Nidhiki), but that doesn't mean I don't have any "deeper" thoughts regarding him or that there isnt stuff worth discussing.

Anyways some thoughts/headcanons/general musings:

This is a weird thing to start with but... Krekka is kinda adorable for me. I think its kinda this ...overgrown puppy (bulldog??) vibe due to his loyalty and dumbness. I admit BOADH is a big reason for me feeling this way since it gave him a few moments that made me go "AWWW he's so cute". Just..love his loyalty so much.

His undying loyalty makes him stand out for me across the other dark hunters. While many dark hunters we ha e are opportunistic and schemy, Krekka is just...very loyal. Maybe too much so. But I love that he is loyal. Feels refreshing tbh.

And now I cant help but feel that TSO is just "guys stupid but at least he wont double cross me and is easy to keep in check" when it comes to him.

Not to go woobifying villains but I genuinely dont think the guys that bad. Hes just really stupid, overly loyal and doing his job. Its kinda like w Lariska being a decent person despite being a knife happy murder girl although to a much lesser extent since guys a literalminded fool and also just smashy boy.

I do like his backstory of being a former guard who lost his job and started wreck havoc until one day a dark hunter found and hired him. It isnt anything too complex but it works well for his character and explains why he is so loyal to Dark Hunters. It also helps bringing a bit more light to his homeland and I love when we get more info of places through character backstories, makes the world feel more real that way.

Also can Gorast please stop hurting charaxters I like. This is the reason shes my least favorite character in the 2001-2008 storyline that isnt just a glorified extra or a plot device.

When it comes to Krekka, one scene I always think of when I think of him is in BOADH where he temporarily forgot to fly and Nidhiki was just "WAIT A MOMENT LARISKA TOLD ME YOU CAN FLY????" and Krekka just goes "whoops I forgot". That was adorable honestly. You dumb idiot, forgot you could fly.

Also, I know he's kinda "the idiot character", and while I am NOT saying he isn't, I do think its worth pointing out that he's basically literal minded. In BOADH (again) when Nidhiki tried to do that training scenario Krekka basically was like "wait I’m here, there’s nothing there why should I move there". This is

Another thing I really like about Krekka is that how, despite being an absolute idiot and tool, he still is willing to sometimes not take Nidhikis bullshit, see preventing him from getting the Zamor launchers (geez BOADH did a lot for this guys characterization lmao)

I sometimes call him truck boy because his name is one letter off my languages word for truck.

Also unless canon/word of Greg says otherwise I don't think every member of his species is as stupid as him. Like possibly on similar level but still.

It is made pretty clear that Nidhiki couldn't stand Krekka at all, but I do genuinely wonder how Krekka feels about Nidhiki. Based on the little we have I'd say he liked him to some extent or at the very least, didn't hate him to the same degree. I also have to wonder how aware he was about Nidhikis haterd towards him.

I also love the idea that when Nidhiki was mutated, Krekka just...wasnt afraid of him at slightest, no fear in this dumb boy. (I also like the idea he didnt recognize him at first and Nidhiki just, had to explain to his thick skull who he was. It took a while but eventually he got it.)

On a related note, I find it interesting how the LOMN website describes him working with Nidhiki because guy knows where to get the good jobs or something rather than being his goverment (read TSO) assigned partner The way the twos relationship were described makes it feel that by this point the staff hadnt figured out what they wanted to do with Dark Hunters , or if it even was an organization or just these two tools.

Its really interesting for me how Krekkas characterization not only varies between the books/comics (where hes more intimidating and him being a simpleton isnt as pronounced) and the movie (where hes more of a dumbass) but also how his characterization evolved. Like, his loyalty wasn't that pronounced trait but now I feel its just as important part of him as him being a dumbass (which is to say, very interesting)

I remember how the aftoermentoined Metru Nui movie website described that Krekka hated toa to the point wouldve hunted them for free if Nidhiki didnt make sure the two would get paid. I feel this is somewhat early installment weirdness as it isnt mentioned anywhere else but at the same time Krekka being willing to fight without payment sounds 1000% in character if you ask me

Something I have been confused over: when exactly was Krekka recruited to the dark hunters??? The timeline is very vague about this and I wish we knew.

It's been AGES since I watched my home countrys dub of LOMN but what I recall I really liked Krekka's voice in that dub. He sounded more badass and I loved it, the VA had a pretty unique sound. Sadly dont think there is any clips of the LOMN dub, which is a shame. UPDATE: I rewatched the dub and I love the voice itself but felt the voice direction made him sound kinda inconsistent

This is more a "Nidhiki and Krekka related thought" rather than just Krekka related but one thing I really like about Krekka and Nidhiki is that how they are like a more serious and competent take of "those two evil henchmen with contrasting personalities" trope. Often these types of villains are rather goofy, but these two could be rather dangerous as well and I really like that. I also like their dynamic of just doing Nidhiki being done with Krekkas bullshit. One of the main reasons I wish LOMN was a miniseries rather than a movie is because I really wanted more screentime with the two.

On a related note can I JUST SAY I LOVE the way the two compliment/pararell each other. From design (Krekka being bulky mostly blue colored, Nidhiki being slender and monstrous, mostly green colored) to personality (Krekka being foolish and simpleminded but loyal Nidhiki being cunning and ambitious but treacherous) to powersets (Krekka being strong physical attacker, Nidhiki being weaker(??) but faster and more special attacker).Heck, even their backstories have similarities as they both lost their orginal purpose in one way or another and didnt have anywhere to go but Dark Hunters (the main difference being that Nidhiki inflicted his fate upon himself by betraying the toa while Krekka didnt really do anything iirc)

Now for something crossovery, Krekkas and Nidhikis dynamic reminds me a lot of Kronk and Yzma from Emperors New Groove. Yes I have drawn a parody of the "pull the lever kronk" meme, yes I intend to make more screencap redraws. They also remind me a lot of Mummymon and Archenemon from Digimon 02, partially due to the dynamic (smug spider that tries to be cunning and intimidating but gets outclassed by most other villains in that + loyal blue dumb boy) partially due to their ultimate fate being rather similar.

I don't know how familiar you are with the franchise, but Krekka reminds me a fair bit of Gamel, one of the four villain generals in Kamen Rider OOOs, mainly because "the dumb brute major villain that's kinda cuteish and loyal a f while everyone else is an asshole".

I remember reading a p good oneshot fic that was just him accidentally killing a civilian when all he wanted was a hug and...honestly that is p much what I imagine him being like. Guy may be strong, reckless and a fool but like I said I dont think hes all that bad and just a puppy. An overgrown, moronic puppy but a puppy nontheless

For AUs, I remember I have thought once of "What if Krekka survived but Nidhiki died" and just ...guy wouldve been very lost and confused and unsure what to do tbh. He would most likely returned to Dark Hunters but Mata Nui knows how say TSO wouldve felt about that. Its not too complex au yet but I am thinking of developing it further one day.

Thank you for asking.

Sorry this took longer than expected. I had too many thoughts and half of them were deleted so. I hope its worth the wait tho. I do have a lot of Krekka thoughts and tbh wasnt sure if I was even able to get them all here.

(I am still doing the ask game so if anyone wants to send me a bonkle I will try to give thoughts, meta and headcanons on them)