#and he's the one with structural power and she's the one who's been murdered

[artbyblastweave]

Here's one change made by Watchmen (2009) that's basically a microcosm of everything I dislike about the film. After the reveal that Comedian was Laurie's father, Manhattan espouses the idea that in spite of his search for thermodynamic miracles in contexts devoid of life, his detachment from humanity blinded him to the chain of remarkable circumstances necessary for Laurie to exist; he returns to save earth because Earth produced Laurie, specifically, his ex-girlfriend and superheroine extraordinare.

In the comic, Laurie points out that the unlikelyhood of her own specificity isn't actually less unlikely than the circumstances by which billions of other people came to exist- and that, exactly, is Manhattan's point. He expressly extrapolates this logic to the rest of humanity- Earth is a miracle factory by virtue of being the one place that can support humans, all of whom have the exact same kind of contradictory history and interiority as Laurie, all of which he was paradoxically blinded to due to his power-induced self-absorption.

This, in turn, ties into one of the biggest ideas that the comic has regarding the superhero genre, which is that it's necessarily myopic, because it's very difficult to tell a superhero story that doesn't on some level implicitly buy into the idea that the superhero specifically is uniquely worthy of attention- the world contorts itself around the person who's name is on the cover. Structurally, non-superhero characters in superhero stories find themselves in an orbit; supporting cast members, love interests kept in the dark, civilians to be saved. Cape stories that deliberately defy this dynamic exist- Watchmen itself is one of them!- but are visibly positioning themselves opposite the standard assumptions of the genre by doing so. Many of the other characters embody this myopia. Rorschach's whole opening spiel is about how intellectually and morally elevated he is over the teeming masses, and his mask killer theory is fundamentally motivated by an ego-flattering desire for the neutered institution of costumed heroism to be relevant enough to sit at the center of a widespread conspiracy. Comedian's gleeful amorality is a means of justifying his horrible actions as the work of a man who's fundamentally above and smarter than every convention and concern of the little people. Dan is the most "normal" and in ways the most cynical about the change-making potential of heroism, but when he finds out about Hollis's murder it takes less than a second for him to start throwing his weight around and threatening Comedian-tier atrocities against the entire neighborhood- because Hollis was one of the characters who mattered. And, of course, Ozymandias, who positions himself as above the sophomoric dynamics of traditional superheroism, is nonetheless still pursuing a plan by which he, the Big Man Of History, unilaterally sacrifices countless nameless NPCS in order to trick the rest of the unthinking hordes into behaving themselves, eschewing anything remotely involving collective action. Almost everything untoward that happens in the book can be directly tied to a failure to internalize what Manhattan did- that other people are important. That everyone who gets blown up at the end of issue 11 could have been the subject of a whole comic book themselves.

But in the movie- which, for space, axed most of the supporting cast even in the ultimate cut- Jon's epiphany stops and starts with Laurie. She's not a microcosm of the miraculous phenomena of humanity at large, no, she specifically- a badass superheroine played by a Hollywood starlet- is just so very special and worth saving the planet over. The scene is adapted almost word for word, right up until the part about "you and everyone else." I guess you can infer that bit, given that from there Manhattan is still out to preserve human life in general, but nonetheless the scene now feels like it's reinforcing the exact logic that it was supposed to be arguing against- that only superheroes matter, and that only the interiority of superheroes can move the needle.

[jungkoode]

THE 25TH HOUR | O9

“𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐒𝐓 𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋”

“We’re designed to fit,” he says, and you don’t know if he means your powers, your patterns, or the way your hand doesn’t shake in his.

next | index

— chapter details

word count: 6,7k

content: reality anchors, the quantum physics are quaking, yoongi being bossy again (and hot about it), elevator scene tension 10/10, jumping across buildings like it's casual (it is NOT), spatial distortion flirty edition, golden tendrils 2.0 (they touched... physically and emotionally??), temporal signature matching (yes it’s hot), someone finally says “we’re designed to fit” and i screamed, drone murder attempt ig, jungkook makes a dramatic entrance and is so annoying about it, team regroup ft. unexplained powers and too many secrets, portal time but make it traumatic.

— author’s note

KAY. LISTEN.

I know I say this every chapter but THIS ONE. this one fried several neurons and may have permanently altered the molecular structure of my spine. I started with “hm what if they walked through a reality anchor” and ended with “what if they synchronized their temporal signatures mid-freefall and touched tendrils in public like absolute whores.” I don’t know what to tell you. I blacked out. This is between me and my caffeine addiction now.

Let’s talk about the jump scene. Yes. You clocked it. That moment where Noma is calculating the distance and Yoongi says “don’t think, just need” and then she LAUNCHES HERSELF INTO THE VOID? Yeah. That may or may not have been deeply inspired by Neo’s rooftop jump in The Matrix (1999, my beloved). I am a massive Matrix nerd. That whole visual of someone standing on the edge of a building, trying to defy the physics they were born into, and being told “your mind is the thing in your way”? It’s been living rent-free in my frontal lobe since I was 13 and thought trench coats were peak fashion.

Because this chapter is, like, extremely about trust. And control. And the horror of not understanding what’s happening inside your own body. It’s about Noma confronting the fact that her mind—her beautiful, precise, analytical mind—is what’s limiting her. And Yoongi, who already knows, who’s BEEN like this longer, who knows what it’s like to break through that threshold and feel the laws of reality tilt around your perception, he’s just THERE. Guiding her. Softly threatening to reset time like a feral little guardian angel.

Also… let’s not ignore the fact that she destroys a drone with her brain and he’s like “cool. moving on.” Sir?? She just folded metal into origami. But okay go off I guess.

AND THEN THEY SYNCH TEMPORAL SIGNATURES. don’t even look at me. I wrote that and sat there like “huh. interesting. so that’s what soulmates sound like in science fiction.” I had to go walk around the block. I made them fit on a molecular level. I made their body chemistry harmonize. Why? Because I am unwell and this is my therapy.

Anyway. Thanks for reading I love you all. Scientifically.

— read on

ao3

wattpad

Reality Anchors are alive.

No one ever told you that part. No briefing, no memo, no research paper had ever mentioned that these imposing structures breathe.

The anchor in front of you rises 37.2 meters from ground to apex, its surface composed of quantum-stabilized alloy that shouldn't—couldn't—pulse like that.

Yet it does. Every 7 seconds, a wave of molecular adjustment ripples from base to tip, disturbing air molecules in concentric patterns that register against your skin at precisely 0.3 pascals of pressure.

Fascinating.

Your retinas register the faint blue luminescence emanating from seams in the structure-temporal energy bleeding through containment fields. 

It feels like reality itself is being compressed into a more efficient configuration.

"Mesmerizing," you murmur, cataloging the observable data. "The quantum-stabilized glass panels are oriented at exactly 73 degrees to maximize temporal field distribution. And the energy consumption must be—”

"No."

You blink, neural processes stuttering at the interruption.

Agent Min has stopped walking and turned to face you fully, his stance registering as 37% more rigid than his baseline.

"I didn't say anything," you point out, tilting your head 12 degrees in genuine confusion.

"Didn't have to." His eyes narrow by approximately 0.3 centimeters.

"Then what are you saying no to?"

"You know what."

"I genuinely don't." Your brow furrows, creating a 0.4-centimeter depression between your eyebrows. "It seems statistically improbable that you could accurately predict my thought patterns without established baseline data."

His mouth twitches—suppressed micro-expression, 0.7 seconds in duration.

"Were you or were you not thinking of using a little detour to satiate that insane curiosity of yours?"

Your silence registers at approximately 3.2 seconds. 

Longer than optimal for casual conversation.

"Exactly. No."

"I find your anticipation of my mental processes presumptuous," you counter, eyes returning to the reality anchor when the uppermost floors shimmer slightly—a temporal distortion effect that standard human vision would filter out. “And I do not appreciate it.”

"Get used to it," he says, resuming walking at a pace 7% faster than before. "You will."

You match his stride automatically.

"The probability of you developing accurate predictive models of my cognitive patterns seems—”

"Already developed," he interrupts, checking his modified Chrono-Sync Watch with a quick glance. "Seventh time you've tried to investigate a reality anchor. Always the same pattern."

This statement contains multiple logical inconsistencies. You've never attempted to investigate a reality anchor before. Your security clearance wouldn't permit it.

Yet your temporal analysis centers don't flag it as a falsehood.

"How would you know that?" 

He doesn't answer, instead gesturing toward the adjacent tower—a colossal structure of similar materials that rises at least 100 floors into the artificially blue sky.

"Travel spot is somewhere in the upper levels," he says, eyes scanning the building's facade. "We need to access it through the anchor first."

You process this information, calculating optimal routes.

"Why can't you pinpoint the exact location?" you ask, question emerging from your analytical centers. "Your previous statements implied familiarity with the network."

His jaw tightens by approximately 4.3 newtons.

"Travel spots shift position by 0.7 meters every 73 minutes," he explains, voice roughened. "Quantum uncertainty principle applied to spatial coordinates. Prevents CHRONOS from establishing fixed monitoring."

"That seems inefficient for a resistance network," you observe.

"That's the point." He checks his watch again—third time in 7.3 minutes. "Inefficiency creates unpredictability. CHRONOS systems are designed for pattern recognition."

You approach the base of the reality anchor, where a standard-looking entrance is monitored by temporal signature scanners disguised as decorative elements.

"How do we bypass security?" you ask, noting at least three visible monitoring devices and calculating a 94.7% probability of additional concealed systems.

"We don't," he says, reaching into his jacket and extracting what appears to be a standard CHRONOS identification card. "We walk in like we belong."

The card in his hand triggers your pattern recognition— holographic security features match authorized maintenance personnel credentials.

"Falsified identification carries a minimum penalty of 73 days in temporal isolation," you note automatically.

He almost smiles—left corner of his mouth lifting 0.2 centimeters.

"Only if you get caught."

He approaches the entrance with casual gait, and you follow—still processing the anchor's structure. 

The quantum equations rippling across its surface follow a pattern that suggests...

"I told you to stop analyzing," he murmurs, voice barely audible at 17 decibels. "Your temporal signature fluctuates when you're thinking too hard. Makes you detectable."

You attempt to modulate your thought patterns, an unusual exercise that creates a 0.3-second lag in your cognitive processing.

He swipes the identification card through the scanner, which responds with a soft tone at exactly 432 Hz—the standard confirmation frequency.

The interior of the reality anchor is even more fascinating than its exterior.

The lobby appears standard-neo-minimalist design, temporal-stabilized plants arranged at mathematically significant intervals—but your enhanced perception detects the subtle wrongness of the space.

The air pressure is precisely 0.7 kPa higher than standard atmospheric conditions. 

The lighting pulses at a frequency of 7 Hz, which is imperceptible to normal human vision but clearly designed to reinforce temporal compliance in visitors.

"Maintenance elevator is on the left," Agent Min says, guiding you with a subtle gesture. "Don't look at the central column."

Naturally, your eyes immediately flick toward the center of the lobby.

The sight momentarily overloads your visual processing. 

A column of pure temporal energy rises from floor to ceiling, contained within quantum-stabilized glass. The energy moves in patterns that defy standard physical laws—simultaneously flowing upward and downward, existing in multiple states… at once?

"I said don't look," he hisses, fingers closing around your wrist to redirect; not enough to cause discomfort.

"What is that?" you ask, unable to fully suppress your curiosity despite his warning.

"The anchor point," he says, voice tightening as he guides you toward the maintenance elevator. "Direct connection to the Master Clock. Looking at it too long causes temporal vertigo in most humans."

You save this information, filing it under high-priority data.

"And in non-humans?"

His steps falter—0.3-second hesitation.

"In Outliers," he corrects quietly, "it can trigger awakening."

The maintenance elevator requires another scan of his falsified credentials. 

As the doors close, enclosing you in a space of approximately 2.3 cubic meters, you notice the absence of standard temporal monitoring devices.

"Why aren't there cameras?" you ask, scanning the ceiling corners where monitoring equipment would typically be installed.

"Reality anchors generate too much temporal interference for standard surveillance," he explains, pressing the button for floor 30. "Creates blind spots in their system."

"That seems like a significant security vulnerability," you observe.

His mouth quirks again.

You don’t know why you’re starting to find the gesture attractive.

"Why do you think we're using it?"

The elevator ascends at precisely 3.7 meters per second, which you note is faster than standard civilian elevators but slower than executive transport. Your inner ear registers the acceleration, adjusting automatically.

"The travel spot," you begin, mind working through the problem. "You said it's in the upper levels of the adjacent tower. Why can't we access it directly?"

He leans against the elevator wall, posture relaxing by approximately 7%.

"Security protocols," he says. "The tower has standard monitoring. The anchor doesn't. We cross through the anchor's 30th floor-maintenance level, and then we use the connecting bridge to access the tower."

"And after that?"

"After that, we find the travel spot." He checks his watch again—fourth time in 12.7 minutes. "It should be somewhere between floors 90 and 97."

You calculate the search parameters.

"That's approximately 7,432 square meters of potential location space," you note. "Seems inefficient."

"I'll narrow it down once we're closer," he says. "My temporal sense can detect the quantum fluctuations at closer proximity."

The elevator slows as it approaches floor 30, and Agent Min straightens, resuming his alert posture.

"When we exit, walk like you're supposed to be here," he instructs. "Maintenance personnel check this level every 73 minutes. Current interval gives us approximately 47 minutes before the next sweep."

"Understood," you confirm, automatically adjusting your posture to match standard CHRONOS maintenance staff parameters—shoulders back, gaze forward, movements economic and purposeful.

The elevator doors open to reveal a stark corridor illuminated by temporal-stabilized lighting. 

Walls are lined with quantum-reinforced panels marked with mathematical equations that your pattern recognition identifies as temporal field calculations.

Agent Min steps out first, fluid and confident. 

You follow, checking every detail of this restricted environment that few civilians ever see.

"Don't touch anything," he warns, leading you down the corridor. "Some of these panels are directly connected to the temporal field generators."

You resist the urge to examine the equations more closely, focusing instead on maintaining the appropriate walking pace and posture.

"The connecting bridge is 23 meters ahead," he says, voice low. "Once we cross, we'll need to take the service stairs. The tower's elevators are monitored."

"Stairs?" you query, calculating the energy expenditure required to ascend approximately 60 floors. "That seems—"

"Necessary," he interrupts. "Unless you'd prefer to explain to CHRONOS why we're accessing restricted floors."

You concede the point with a slight nod.

15 degrees downward, 15 degrees upward.

As you walk, your mind continues processing the reality anchor's structure, the equations on the walls, the subtle vibration beneath your feet that suggests massive energy manipulation occurring somewhere below.

"You're thinking too loud again," Agent Min murmurs, not turning to look at you.

"That's not physically possible," you counter automatically.

"Your temporal signature disagrees," he says, tapping his temple with his index finger. "I can feel it fluctuating."

This statement contains another logical inconsistency. 

Standard humans cannot detect temporal signatures without specialized equipment.

Yet once again, your temporal analysis centers don't flag it as a falsehood.

"How—" you begin.

"Bridge is just ahead. Stay close."

But the bridge…

It’s not offline. It’s gone.  

You stare at the empty space where reinforced glass and temporal alloys should’ve formed a secure pathway. 

Only support beams remain, jagged edges still glowing from whatever energy weapon severed them.  

Agent Min’s eyebrows do something statistically improbable—contracting inward by 0.9 centimeters while the skin between them folds into three distinct creases. 

You’ve never seen his face execute this particular combination of micro-expressions before.  

“They altered this sector’s infrastructure,” he mutters, more to himself than you. 

His left hand twitches toward his Chrono-Sync Watch, aborting the movement halfway.  

You pivot toward the window, retinal sensors catching a faint outline-maintenance door, 3.2 meters left of the destroyed bridge. 

Beyond it: a sheer drop, then the adjacent tower’s western face. 

Your mind calculates the distance before your ethics committee can veto the idea.  

“We could jump.”  

He doesn’t immediately dismiss it. 

That’s how you know things are bad.  

“Distance?” he asks, joining you at the window.  

“14.7 meters horizontally, 3.3 meters vertical elevation differential.” You tap the glass, triggering a subconscious visualization overlay. “Structural analysis indicates the target building’s exterior has adequate grip points for—”  

“For me,” he interrupts. His breath fogs the glass near your fingertip. “Not for you.”  

You tilt your head, analyzing his profile. “You’re suggesting I remain here while you—”  

“I’m suggesting you stop suggesting suicide vectors.” His jaw works, a muscle ticking at 2.7-second intervals. “There’s another route. Has to be.”  

You let him pace—eight steps toward the elevator, twelve back—before interrupting.  

“Average human long jump record is 8.95 meters. My enhanced musculature could theoretically—”  

“Theoretically splatter across sixty floors of neo-Brutalist architecture.” 

You frown. “We’re only thirty floors up.”

“From the anchor,” he says. “The tower’s foundation sits two levels below base-grade. It drops into a full infrastructure pit—ventilation shafts, temporal gridwork, CHRONOS substation access. You fall here, you don’t just hit pavement. You keep falling.”

He gestures down through the glass.

“Sixty floors straight into the sector’s hollowed-out gut. Like getting thrown down a well lined with concrete and death.”

How does he even know all that?

But before you can let curiosity get the best of you again, he stops mid-stride, pinning you with that look again. The one that makes your internal processors skip. 

“But—”

“No.”  

You frown, press your palm against the window, feeling the tower’s vibration through the glass. 

“Then you go first. Anchor a line. I’ll follow.”  

He’s already shaking his head. “Temporal energy doesn’t work like that. Can’t manifest solid constructs without—”  

“Without triggering every sensor in the sector. Yes.” You turn from the window, meeting his glare. “So, again, that leaves one option.”  

For three seconds, the only sound is the reality anchor’s low-frequency hum. 

Then he swears—a creative combination of English and technical jargon your language centers can’t fully parse.  

The maintenance door handle feels colder than ambient temperature suggests. You’re calculating wind shear variables when his gloved hand covers yours, halting the motion.  

“If we do this,” he says, voice stripped to its raw edges, “you follow my instructions exactly. No deviations. No calculations mid-air. Understood?”  

You nod, the movement precise. 

15 degrees down, 15 up.  

He releases your hand to grip both shoulders instead, leaning in until his mint-and-ozone scent overrides the tower’s sterile air. 

“When you jump, you don’t think about falling. You don’t think about distance. You think about needing to be on that ledge. Your entire existence becomes that single purpose.”  

You open your mouth to request clarification on biomechanical feasibility—

“No.” His fingers tighten. “No questions. Your body knows how. You just have to stop overloading it with doubt.”  

The paradox registers immediately. 

“But without understanding the mechanism—”  

“Understanding comes later.” His thumb presses into your collarbone, exactly where that freckle hides beneath synthetic fabric. “Surviving comes now.”  

You glance past him to the abyss. 

He opens the door.

The wind’s howling at 37 knots now, whipping hair into your eyes. 

“Probability of success?”  

He doesn’t sugarcoat it. “Sixty-eight percent. If you focus.”  

“And if I don’t?”  

For the first time, his face contracts—a fractional widening of pupils, a minuscule catch in his breathing rhythm.  

“Then I’ll reset time until you do.”  

The words register as raw, hovering between you for a few seconds before he finally turns toward the void.  

You watch him leap—no hesitation, no visible calculation. Just pure intent translated into motion.  

He makes it look effortless.  

And then it’s your turn.  

The wind screams. The city sprawls below, a mosaic of blue-lit grids and shadow. 

You psych up the variables: air density, potential updrafts, the exact angle of your target ledge.  

Then you stop thinking.  

You launch, and the world narrows to wind and numbers.

For a moment, there’s no sound, no up or down. Just velocity and the impossible distance between you and the ledge. 

Adrenaline floods your system, not sharp but heavy, like a stone pressed to your sternum. 

You’re aware of your own mass, the drag of your body through air, the way your limbs cut a path no algorithm could ever predict.

Agent Min is already there, turned halfway, eyes tracking your arc. His mouth moves—maybe a warning, maybe your ID number—but the rush drowns it out. 

You think of the other side. You need to reach the other side. 

The imperative is simple, absolute. 

Not crossing means plummeting. Not crossing means becoming a data point in a CHRONOS incident report.

You make the mistake of looking down.

Thirty floors up, the city is abstract. 

Cars, people, light—all reduced to static. 

The void is real. 

You feel it in your teeth, in the way your stomach seems to invert, in the cold sweat prickling your palms. 

Your calculations fracture. The ground is coming up fast.

You look up. 

Agent Min’s silhouette sharpens against the skyline, mint hair a streak of color in the blue haze. His eyes widen—first time you’ve seen that particular fear. 

He’s reaching for something, or maybe just reaching.

You’re falling.

The world tilts. Air roars past your ears. Time dilates, then contracts. 

You’re aware of every heartbeat, every useless attempt your muscles make to grab onto empty space. 

The ledge is gone. The city is too close.

Then—discontinuity.

You’re upright. Feet planted on solid ground. Breath caught in your throat. 

Your hands move before your mind does, fingers flexing, checking for fractures, for blood, for any sign of what should have happened. 

Everything responds. No pain. No missing time.

Agent Min spins, posture radiating pure stress and panic. 

His face is a study in shock—mouth open, eyes blown wide, like he’s seen a ghost.

You blink. He blinks.

Your heart is still racing, but your body is whole. You’re here. You made it. The numbers don’t add up, but the outcome is undeniable.

You’re alive.

Agent Min’s gaze darts between your left and right pupils, rapid assessment mode engaged, as if he’s scanning for damage or data.

“Damn it, Noma,” he mutters, voice rough and frayed at the edges. “Holy hell.”

His hands clench into tight fists at his sides, knuckles whitening under the strain. 

You note the micro-tremor in his fingers-2.3 hertz, consistent with suppressed impulse. 

He exhales, a controlled release of 1.7 liters of air over 3.1 seconds, then drags a gloved hand down his face, smearing frustration across his features.

Before you can catalog further, a mechanical whine pierces the air-high-pitched, 17 kHz, consistent with a CHRONOS surveillance drone. 

Agent Min’s posture shifts instantly, weight forward, arm half-raised to shield or shove you aside. 

“Watch—”

You tilt your head back, a reflex, not a decision. 

There’s a sound—metal crumpling, like foil under pressure—and the drone’s frame twists mid-flight, folding inward at impossible angles. 

It drops, a lifeless heap, 4.7 meters below the ledge.

He stares at the wreckage, then at you. 

“Well. Alright then.”

Your mind is already running diagnostics. 

“Did I cause that?”

He lets out a long, resigned breath, shoulders dropping by 1.2 centimeters. 

“Yeah. You did.”

“How?” 

Your spatial awareness logs are blank—no memory of intent, no record of action. Yet the evidence is undeniable: twisted alloy, a perfect collapse. 

You flex your fingers again, searching for a trigger, a mechanism. “Was that a manipulation of spatial configuration? A localized distortion field? I need parameters.”

He steps closer, mint and ozone cutting through the sterile tower air, but his expression is all weariness. 

“We gotta move, Noma. Now.”

You plant your feet, shifting your center of gravity to counter his subtle pull. 

“Explanation required. Did I alter the drone’s physical positioning? Compress its structural integrity via spatial warp? Or—”

He makes a sound full of resignation. 

“Look, Noma, I l—”

He cuts himself off, jaw snapping shut with an audible click. 

A recalibration. 

“I get it. I do. But we don’t have the luxury of a debrief right now.”

Your brow creases, a 0.5-centimeter furrow. 

“Understanding the mechanics of an undocumented ability is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. If I can replicate—”

“You will,” he interrupts, voice low but firm, carrying a weight you can’t parse. “Just not here. Not with drones sniffing our temporal signatures.”

You glance at the wreckage again, mind spinning through theoretical models. 

No data, no precedent. 

Just a gut—deep certainty that you reshaped reality without conscious input. 

The implications are staggering. 

If you can do this instinctively, what else lies dormant? What are the limits? Energy costs? Detection risks?

He’s watching you, reading the cascade of queries behind your eyes. “I know that look. And I’m telling you to shelve it. We’re exposed.”

“Five seconds,” you negotiate, already cross-referencing the drone’s design against known CHRONOS tech. “If I can isolate the method—”

“Zero seconds.” He grumbles, fingers wrapping around your wrist and pulling you behind him. “Survival first. Science later.”

Your logic centers protest, but the risk assessment aligns with his. 

You exhale—petulant, probably, but you do not care. 

Because whatever you did, it’s a piece of the puzzle. A fragment of who—or what—you are. 

And you’ll dissect it, variable by variable, until the equation balances.

You don’t realize you’ve been holding your breath until the air shifts.

Up here, it tastes different. 

Thinner. Filtered, maybe. Like someone cleaned it too well, stripped it of anything real. 

The ground is nothing but blur—washed out in streaks of artificial white and synthetic blue haze. Designed to erase depth perception. To flatten the concept of below into something distant. Forgettable.

CHRONOS engineering at its finest.

You step closer to the edge, boots scraping faintly against the metal grating. 

The city is unrecognizable from this height. Not a city at all, just layers of grids and light. Soft pulses of movement that don’t quite feel alive. No wind reaches this far up, only some sort of hum—low, steady, mechanical. 

You wonder if the workers stationed here can still hear it when they sleep. 

If they ever sleep.

You’ve read the reports. Rotating shifts, twenty-hour cycles, neural stimulants to bypass natural fatigue responses. Cognitive degradation flagged as acceptable collateral. Worker retention rate at 37.2%.

In other words: not sustainable.

But great pay.

You press your fingertips lightly to the edge of the railing. Cool to the touch. Grounding, somehow. 

You scan the skyline, calculating angles, distances, escape vectors you’re not sure you’ll ever need but catalog anyway. 

That’s what you do. 

What you’ve always done.

But the sky pulls at you. Quietly. Persistently.

Dark velvet stretched wide above your head, broken only by the scatter of stars. 

You tip your chin back, gaze locking onto a thousand silent points of light, each one burning impossibly far away. 

Data points you can never reach, but something in you reaches anyway.

And there—framed in that endless black—

The moon.

Not in any model you’ve ever studied. Not filtered through facility-grade optics or distorted by atmospheric interference. 

Just… suspended. Brilliant. Whole. A perfect sphere painted in shades of silver and shadow. 

It’s too much, too big. 

Your breath catches again, chest tightening like something fragile just cracked open inside you.

It escapes before you can stop it. A single word.

“Beautiful.”

Soft. Uncalculated.

You freeze the second it leaves your mouth, pulse stuttering in your throat. 

You didn’t mean to say that. 

You never mean to say things like that.

A breath stirs the space beside you. Not yours.

“…Yeah.”

Quiet. Barely more than air.

“…Beautiful.”

The confirmation scrapes against something unsteady inside you. 

You shouldn’t turn. You know you shouldn’t. But your gaze shifts anyway, slow and reluctant, as if giving your body too much permission might undo you entirely.

He’s already watching.

Agent Min.

Not the skyline. Not the moon. Not the impossible stretch of space yawning above you.

You.

And he doesn’t look away.

For a suspended second, nobody speaks. 

Then his eyes flicker gold. 

It's the seventeenth time you've seen it happen. Seventeenth. You've been keeping count, tracking when it occurs, searching for the pattern. Not random—nothing about him is ever random—but the trigger remains frustratingly elusive. 

Is it emotional response? Memory access? Some kind of power regulation failing?

You step closer until you can detect the subtle heat radiating from him—always running warmer than human baseline. 

His pupils track your movement, dilating slightly.

A measurable response.

His fingers tighten on the railing, leather creaking under pressure. You note this detail, file it away. 

He stares at you.

You stare back.

"I've been meaning to ask," you say, keeping your voice even despite the strange pressure building under your sternum—like something's trying to expand beyond the confines of your ribcage.

His throat shifts as he swallows. Blinks once.

“Ask what?"

"Your eyes." 

His gaze slides away, avoiding yours for exactly 3.2 seconds before returning. Avoidance behavior. 

Why?

The silence grows heavy between you. 

If you were better at social interactions, you might understand why he doesn't respond. 

But you're not, so you elaborate.

"I have noticed they appear to shine at certain moments." You tilt your head slightly. "The same color as your tendrils. But I can't seem to figure out the why."

His focus drops briefly to your mouth before returning to your eyes. Quick. Almost imperceptible. But you catch it—and the flash of gold that accompanies it. 

Interesting correlation.

He looks at your lips = eyes change.

Cause and effect?

Sexual response?

Your gloved hand lifts toward his face, hovering in the space between you. 

Not touching. Not yet. Just... there. Testing a hypothesis.

"Noma," he says, your nickname rough around the edges. "That's... not advisable."

Why does that name feel so familiar when he says it?

"Why not?" The tilt of your head increases, curiosity sharpening. "I'm collecting data. Your ocular anomalies appear to correlate with specific emotional states."

You watch his pupils expand, blackness swallowing the iris except for that gleaming ring of gold.

"It's not a lab experiment." His jaw clenches, muscle rippling beneath skin.

He's restraining something. But what?

"Everything is data," you counter, your hand still suspended between you. "The gold appears when proximity decreases between us. When conversation shifts toward personal topics. When you look at my—"

You stop yourself. Recalibrate.

"When certain visual attention patterns emerge."

His breath changes rhythm—slower in, quicker out. You track this shift automatically. 

"And what conclusion have you reached based on these... observations?" His voice has become unsteady. 

In it, a roughness that wasn't there before.

The scientist in you needs to categorize it.

The rest of you just wants to hear more of it.

"Insufficient evidence for definitive conclusion." Your palm drifts closer to his face. "Hence the need for additional testing parameters."

"Agent." Warning laces his tone, but you note the contradiction in his body language—the slight forward tilt, the micromovement toward your hand. 

Your watch beeps softly. Temporal variance: 0.87%.

Why does your temporal signature fluctuate around him?

Why does your body recognize patterns your brain can't access?

"The gloves provide sufficient barrier protection for initial contact testing," you say, though in the back of your mind, you know that's not why you want to touch him. Not really. 

"It's not about the barrier," he says, still not pulling away.

"Then what is it about?" 

His eyes lock with yours, longer than his usual pattern. Something shifts in them—not just the color, but something deeper. 

Like barriers cracking.

"It's about..." He pauses, searching for words. "Restraint."

"Explain." 

Not a request. A need.

One corner of his mouth quirks up. "Demanding tonight, aren't we?"

Your hand inches closer. 

"Is that why your eyes change?" You push for answers, always pushing. "A failure of restraint?"

A sound catches in his throat, something between amusement and pain.

"They change when I'm..." He stops, recalibrates. "When I feel things too strongly."

"What things?"

"Anger. Fear." 

His gaze drops to your mouth again, longer this time. 

"Want."

The word settles into your chest, makes a home there. 

Your lungs feel suddenly insufficient, breath coming shorter despite oxygen levels remaining constant.

"And now?" Your voice sounds different to your own ears, pitched lower. "Which is it?"

His hand leaves the railing, wraps around your wrist. Not pushing away—just holding. Containing—touch gentle but unmistakably firm.

"What do you think, Noma?" Your nickname sounds different this time. 

Softer. Almost tender.

Why does it affect you when he says it like that?

You mentally catalog his physiological responses: dilated pupils, elevated respiration, muscle tension patterns indicating both arousal and resistance.

"Want," you determine with absolute certainty.

His eyes flare gold again—holding this time, not flickering away.

"Good analysis," he murmurs, still not releasing your wrist.

Your pulse thrums against his fingers. You can feel it jumping, betraying things your clinical mind refuses to name.

"May I?" Your gloved hand moves closer to his cheek.

Why are you pushing this? Why does it matter?

This isn't efficient data collection.

This is... something else.

His throat works as he swallows. 

"We shouldn't," he says, strain evident in every syllable. "That's my professional assessment."

"We're both still wearing gloves," you argue, logic centers frantically constructing justifications. "Barrier intact. Risk parameters acceptable."

"You know it’s not about statistics." His grip loosens slightly. 

He doesn't elaborate. 

Something complicated moves across his face, too fast for even your pattern recognition to decipher.

You need to know. You need to understand.

Why him? Why you? Why now?

Decision made, your hand pushes forward, breaking through his weakened resistance. Your gloved fingers make contact with his cheek.

And—

Oh.

The sensation defies categorization. Despite the barrier of fabric between you, something passes through the touch. 

A current.

An echo. 

Something your scientific vocabulary can't properly name.

His eyes close. He looks suddenly vulnerable in a way that makes your chest ache.

"Your temporal signature," he says quietly, "it just... aligned with mine."

Your eyes drop to your watch. Temporal variance: 0.00%.

Perfect stabilization.

That's impossible.

There's no precedent for this in any temporal physics model.

"How?" The question slips out, unfiltered and raw.

His eyes open slowly, gold filling them completely now. 

Steady and bright and impossibly beautiful.

Beautiful.

"Because," he says simply, "we're designed to fit."

You should process this information. Should file it away with all your other observations about Agent Min and his inexplicable abilities. Should create new theoretical models to explain the perfect temporal alignment currently registered on your watch.

Instead, you just... feel. 

The warmth beneath your fingers. The impossible gold of his eyes. The way your body seems to recognize him on some cellular level your mind can't access.

‘We're designed to fit.’

The implications of that statement should terrify you. 

Instead, they feel like coming home.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

You're staring into his golden eyes when a low whizz cuts through the air. 

Your auditory processing centers register the sound at approximately 17kHz—just within human hearing range, but with a distinct mechanical oscillation pattern consistent with CHRONOS drone propulsion systems.

Before your brain can fully process the threat, Agent Min's head whips around—reaction time approximately 0.3 seconds faster than optimal human baseline. His pupils contract, gold flares brighter, mouth opens to form what appears to be a warning.

Too late.

Something hits you from behind—force vector approximately 47 newtons, angle of impact suggesting deliberate trajectory. The pressure against your back lasts precisely 0.7 seconds.

Then nothing.

Air rushes past your ears at increasing velocity. Your inner ear fluid shifts dramatically, sending conflicting data to your vestibular system. Gravity reasserts its dominance with brutal efficiency.

You're falling.

Again.

Acceleration rate: 9.8 meters per second squared.

Terminal velocity approaching.

Probability of survival without intervention: 0.003%.

The analytical part of your brain calculates these figures automatically while your body experiences what can only be termed as terror—heart rate spike of 73%, adrenal glands flooding your system with cortisol and epinephrine.

"NOMA!"

The sound tears through the rushing air—raw, primal, carrying a frequency range your pattern recognition flags as desperate. 

You twist mid-air, arms instinctively moving to shield your head from inevitable impact.

That's when you see him.

Agent Min. 

Yoongi. 

Falling just above you, body positioned in a perfect diving form that creates maximum aerodynamic efficiency. 

His trajectory indicates purposeful action.

He jumped after you.

He's saying something—lips moving rapidly—but the blood rushing in your ears creates a noise barrier approximately 84 decibels. His words are lost in the chaos of your fall.

Your abilities.

The thought crystallizes with sudden clarity. 

You teleported earlier. Spatial manipulation. If you could replicate that effect now—

Focus. But how? What's the trigger mechanism?

Your thoughts scatter across multiple processing centers, frantically searching for the neural pathway that activated during the previous incident. 

Agent Min never explained the mechanics.

He should have.

You’ll make sure to have that conversation later.

If you survive, that is.

Golden tendrils emerge from his outstretched fingers, extending at velocities that defy standard temporal physics. They reach toward you, pushing against the air itself as if trying to accelerate his fall beyond normal gravitational parameters.

You struggle to replicate whatever neural pathway activated before. Nothing happens. Your fingers flex, your mind focuses, your desperation builds.

What triggered it before? Survival instinct? Specific neural configuration? Direct threat vector?

The golden traces stretch further, now mere centimeters from your reaching hands. Their movement creates visible distortion in the air, like reality itself warping around their influence.

Then—

Something shifts within you. 

Not gradual. 

Not building.

A sudden quantum change in your neural configuration. 

Your cognitive perception splits for exactly 0.7 seconds—awareness operating in multiple states simultaneously.

Tendrils emerge from your own fingertips.

Golden, like his, but fundamentally different. Where his flow like liquid, yours crystallize like faceted gold. Where his move in clockwise patterns, yours rotate counterclockwise.

Opposing rotations. 

Perfect complements.

They reach out—not by your conscious command but through some deeper programming—and intertwine with his traces. The contact creates an immediate energy transfer that registers across your neural receptors as both hot and cold simultaneously.

In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the world blurs. Spatial coordinates shift in ways that violate every physical law you've ever studied. Distance compresses, then expands.

You're in his arms.

The transition happens without intermediate steps—one moment falling separately, the next secured against his chest, his left arm wrapped around your waist with exactly 82% more pressure than necessary for stability.

You register multiple data points simultaneously:

- His elevated body temperature: 39.1°C

- His heartbeat: 172 BPM

- His breathing: rapid, shallow, 24 respirations per minute

- His face: positioned 3.4 centimeters from your cheek, over your shoulder

So close. One small movement would bring skin against skin. 

Your temporal readings spike at the mere possibility.

Before you can process this new configuration, another force vector impacts you both—lateral trajectory, approximately 93 newtons. 

Not from Agent Min. 

External source.

Someone else.

Your coupled bodies are propelled sideways at high velocity. 

The world blurs again as you and Agent Min, still locked together, phase through what appears to be solid matter. 

Glass. Concrete. Steel. 

Your molecular structure should be encountering significant resistance, yet moves through these barriers like they're nothing more than projections.

Quantum tunneling? Spatial displacement? Molecular phasing? Your scientific vocabulary struggles to categorize the experience.

Impact comes suddenly—both of you hitting a solid surface at approximately 37% of terminal velocity. The force disperses through your skeletal structure, joints absorbing kinetic energy at efficiency rates that exceed normal human parameters.

You roll, momentum carrying you across hard flooring. Pain signals to your central nervous system—data indicating tissue stress but not structural failure.

When you finally stop, every bone in your body aches with the signature of controlled landing trauma. 

Not optimal, certainly not comfortable, but survivable.

Survivable by design.

You inhale sharply—2.1 liters of air in 0.8 seconds—and your eyes search frantically for Agent Min.

Where is he? Was he injured in the landing? Who pushed you? How did you phase through solid matter?

Your golden tendrils have vanished, leaving only lingering warmth on your fingertips where they emerged. 

Your watch beeps an unfamiliar pattern: Temporal-spatial variance detected. Recalibration required.

You blink rapidly, visual processing recalibrating as you scan the environment. 

Sleek walls. Polished concrete floor. 

Location unknown. Sector indeterminate.

Blood drips onto your hand. Your nose is bleeding again—heavier flow than before. Your fingertips come away stained crimson. Your skull throbs in pulses, each one making your vision blur at the edges.

"For fuck's sake, Jungkook, you almost killed them!" 

Taehyung's voice cuts through the fog in your head, sharp with that specific tension you've cataloged as his version of concern.

"I was literally on the clock before they became sidewalk art!" Jungkook shoots back, hands gesturing wildly. "Next time maybe give me more than a seven-second window!"

"Seven seconds is generous considering—"

"Generous?" Jungkook's voice cracks slightly. "Try mimicking two completely different abilities at once! My brain feels like it's been microwaved!"

The argument washes over you in waves as you press your palm to your forehead. 

The pain isn't unbearable, just... insistent. 

Demanding attention like everything else in this mess of a situation.

Your eyes find Agent Min, seated on the floor several meters away. His right hand grips his left shoulder, features tightening in a microexpression of pain he's clearly trying to suppress. 

The joint looks wrong—angled slightly off anatomical baseline.

"We don't have fucking time." His voice slices through the bickering, rough-edged and final. "They're onto us."

Jungkook whips around. 

“No shit? Why do you think we had to pull this stunt?" His hand sweeps through the air. "We couldn't even reach you with Taehyung's interfacing—you were completely out of range! Thank god Y/N's abilities are something else entirely."

Agent Min's eyes narrow, focusing on Jungkook with an intensity that carries clear warning. 

Not a word. 

Just that look. 

The one that stops conversations dead.

Jungkook registers it immediately, jaw snapping shut, body language shifting from confrontational to compliant in under a second.

Interesting.

They're hiding something about your abilities.

What exactly don't they want you to know?

Taehyung clears his throat—a sound designed to redirect attention. 

He points behind him toward what can only be described as a tear in reality itself. A circular formation pulsing with quantum uncertainty, its borders shifting between states of matter in ways that shouldn't be physically possible.

"What about base first, arguing later?" he suggests, voice calm in that way people get when they're trying too hard.

You wipe blood from your upper lip. Your eyes find Agent Min again, seeking his reaction. His gaze meets yours briefly before sliding away, gold still lingering at the edges of his irises.

Why won't he look at you properly?

What does he know that you don't?

"What is that?" The question falls from your lips before you can stop it, analytical systems demanding data despite everything else.

"Travel spot. Portal to headquarters," Taehyung answers, shoulders relaxing slightly at the subject change.

You shift your weight, preparing to stand, when your temporal readings spike without warning. The numbers flash red: 3.17%

That's not good.

"Stabilize her," Agent Min orders, voice clipped. "Temporal cascade imminent."

Jungkook moves fast, crossing the space between you in under a second. 

His fingers press against your temporal monitor, executing adjustments with practiced precision.

"Breathing," he instructs, tone sliding into something steadier. "Seven in, seven out. Match me."

The contact triggers something—a flash of memory that doesn't quite feel like yours:

Different hands.

Same words.

"Breathe with me, Noma. Focus."

Pain spikes behind your eyes as incompatible memory patterns try to align. The room tilts slightly.

"What happened up there?" Taehyung asks, attention on Agent Min.

"Temporal ambush," he answers, face tight. "Drones masked behind a reality field."

Taehyung's eyebrows rise. "That's still in R&D."

"Apparently not anymore." Agent Min pushes himself upright, grimacing as his shoulder shifts. "They're adapting faster this time."

This time.

As opposed to when?

"Your tendrils connected with his," Jungkook says quietly as he monitors your readings. "That's what stabilized you both mid-fall."

You blink, memory fragments of golden light intertwining in freefall. 

The way your body reacted without conscious direction. 

The impossibility of the physics involved.

Agent Min moves toward the portal with measured steps. "We need to move before CHRONOS tracks the spatial distortion."

"She deserves to know what she can do," Jungkook says, voice low but firm.

Agent Min stops, spine stiffening visibly. 

“When she's ready."

"And who decides that?" Jungkook challenges, though his hands remain gentle on your monitor. "You?"

The tension between them feels old somehow. Well-worn. Like terrain they've crossed many times.

"Portal stability dropping," Taehyung interrupts, hand cutting through the air. "Either we go now, or we're stuck here."

Agent Min's eyes flick between you and the portal, calculations running visible behind his eyes.

“We are leaving.” He simply mutters, final.

“Of course we are.” Jungkook replies with a hint of something almost like resignation.

Your temporal readings begin to stabilize: 1.47% and decreasing.

Jungkook's hands withdraw from your monitor. "Stable enough for transit."

Agent Min approaches, movements careful despite his obvious discomfort. His right hand extends toward you, gloved palm up.

"The first transit is... disorienting," he says, voice dropping to something softer. "Holding on helps with the spatial realignment."

You stare at his outstretched hand. The leather creases in familiar patterns. The angle of his fingers seems to match your palm perfectly.

‘We're designed to fit.’

His earlier words echo through your mind, connecting dots you didn't even know existed.

"Noma," he says quietly. "Trust me on this one."

The nickname bypasses all your analytical systems, triggering responses you can't explain or quantify.

Your hand moves before your brain fully catches up, fingers sliding into his with strange, impossible familiarity.

Your watch beeps once more: Temporal variance: 0.73%.

Stabilizing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“Let’s go.”

goal: 275 notes

next | index

— taglist

@cannotalwaysbenight @taevanille @itstoastsworld @somehowukook @stutixmaru @chloepiccoliniii @kimnamjoonmiddletoe @ktownshizzle @yoongiiuu93 @billy-jeans23 @annyeongbitch7 @mar-lo-pap @hobis-sprite0218 @mikrokookiex @minniejim @curse-of-art @cristy-101 @mellyyyyyyx

�� jungkoode 2025

no reposts, translations, or adaptations

[raidark]

when you think about it, it's really something that Game of Thrones took the woman that was fighting to end the current structures of power and injustices of the world and saving all the oppresed and decided to transform her into a villain compared to Satan (like, she is outright called Her Satanic Majesty in the Season 8's script) who without any reason ends up burning half a million of innocent people instead of outright targetting the one person responsible for all her misery, and then is murdered by poor crying man who swore he loved her but knows what is best

Putting aside all the HUGE problems with all of the writing, I just find it fascinating. How the end of Game of Thrones is the restoration of the status quo. The council talking about repairing and opening brothels. How the Starks, yes, despite all their suffering during the series, still remain in power at the end of everything, despite being as bad or worse than the Targaryen, not even acknowledging their sins and how much their legacy and position was built through blood war genocide and conquest, how it was the First Men who, in the TV series continuity, caused the creation of the White Walkers

Like. Of course Daenerys had to be villanized. She was too dangerous. Her ideas couldn't be tolerated. What the world needed was... to keep the status quo that benefits and oppresses the same people again and again. The best the latter can get is a little time of liberation before the rest of the world, leaded and convinced by the same powerful classes, determine you got too much and you don't get to exist or to live anymore. Isn't that what we have been watching for the last years? How everything we thought was gained has been taken and is still being taken from us, so casually? Our right to decide, to feel, to live and exist? How the supposed "mercy" is just a lie until they get tired of pretending and show they had not changed at all?

[brucewaynehater101]

Batfam Suicide Squad AU:

Villainous versions of all of the Bats are shoved into one universe together. Up until this point in the AU, they do not know each other well. They've maybe seen each other on the field (which probably ended in fights and held grudges), but they aren't family. They are practically strangers.

Amanda Waller just wants to kill them. However, somehow, there's a force that's even worse than these fuckers. She needs a team to take that down, even if the participants are unwilling.

Bruce Wayne:

A cunning villain who can naturally lead teams. He primarily works alone but has proven to be efficient with any person he has to work with. He can bring out their better attributes, but he's ruthless, wary, and an asshole. He has contingency plans to take down anyone and everyone

Dick Grayson:

Practically immortal half-Talon assassin for hire. His rumored mentors are other Talons, Deathstroke, Superman, and various Titans. His skills in combat are fierce, his abilities are enhanced by his state, and his early childhood acrobatics do wonders for his abilities to escape and fight. These pale in comparison to his natural charisma and ability to turn enemies into allies.

Barbara Gordon:

The best hacker on this side of the galaxy. While she mainly stays off of the field due to her being paralyzed from the waist down, she is a formidable opponent. A significant number of politicians worldwide owe her favors, heroes and villains work for her, she knows top secret information, employs a number of traps to protect herself, and understands the nuances in social structures.

Jason Todd:

A brutal enforcer who utilizes fear, power, and death in his territory to demand obedience to his rules. Extremely skilled in various weapons, hand-to-hand combat, bomb making, and demonstrations of force. His senses, healing speed, and reflexes are uniquely enhanced by his exposure to Lazarus Pits. Despite his persona of being quick to anger, he's a masterful tactian and manipulator.

Cass Cain:

The only candidate who does not kill. Her combat prowess exceeds all other candidates and is rarely defeated in battle. Her eerie silence, ability to read others far more accurately than even psychics, and her stealthiness lead her existence to being more of a feared rumor than a confirmed sighting.

Tim Drake:

While he can defeat a range of opponents in combat, his strength lie in the plots he enacts anonymously. He is skilled in plucking strings and dominoes to create the outcomes he desires. Other abilities include hacking, combat, stealth, disguises, and manipulation. For any battle he prepares for, he rarely loses. Only a small handful of his crimes can be proven to be caused by him.

Steph Brown:

She is skilled in deflection, disguises, social circumstances, combat, and observations. Brown utilizes a variety of personas to distract her victims and lead them astray. She's deadly, but hides this aspect well.

Duke Thomas:

A daring and charismatic leader of a meta rights movement. His group has committed various crimes in their pursuits. He is the only born meta of the group, extremely skilled in utilizing his powers, decisive in outcomes, skilled in combat, and ruthless to prejudice. He can be charming and is extremely emotionally intelligent, which is a skill he uses to subtly influence others.

Damian Al Ghul:

Due to his high kill count, special permission has been given to allow the sixteen year old to be entered into the program. He's exceptionally skilled in all weapon combat but primarily uses swords and knives. He's astute and can utilize his age as a finely tuned weapon to infiltrate, distract, or disappear. He has experience with leading, murder for hire, and complex missions.

Alfred Pennyworth:

A formidable marksman and retired serviceman for MI6. His skills with all styles of guns, acting abilities, unflappable manner, medic training, vehicle maneuverabilites, and sharp tongue aid him in any supportive role. Although he is unlikely to assist on field, he will provide necessary background aid.

Tim and Barbara, in this AU, have both grudges and respect for each other. Tim does not match Barbara's computer skills, but he's a far better foe to her than most. Usually, Tim has a policy to bow out when Barbara is involved or find a way to hide his involvement from her.

Bruce doesn't know Damian is his biological son. Damian hopes to keep him in the dark. Dick, due to his training with blood scents, is the first to know about their relationship. This only occurs after Bruce and Damian get injured on separate missions and Dick makes the connection.

Jason and Damian both have tried to kill Tim. Because Tim seemingly can't die to their attacks, the two have made a game out of trying to kill Tim whenever they see him. Jason and Damian do not know the other also does this. Jason refers to Tim as a "cockroach-like bastard."

One of the batkids jokingly refers to Bruce as "Dad" and Alfred as "Gramps" due to their older age. This catches on with the rest of the batkids until it becomes a regular and fond nickname for the older men.

Bruce had a plan to escape with the help of Kate. After seeing Damian (he doesn't know that's his son), Bruce decides he can't leave a kid. Then he becomes fond of the rest of the group and delays his escape plan again until he can escape with them.

Which of the Bats know each other from encounters in the field? Who holds grudges against each other? What led each Bat to become a villain?

As far as background shit, idk.

I might update with a criminal dossier for each bat later

(In case it wasn't clear, this is a batfam meet late forced found family AU)

@hisaribi helped me with this ^^

[river-of-wine]

I know I’ve mentioned this plenty of times before but I’m still kind of annoyed by how the fanbase just kind of completely declawed the four lords and placed the entirety of the responsibility for their wrongdoings on Mother Miranda.

The Baker family are great, I love them, they’re an incredible unit of antagonists who are intended to be very sympathetic, at least for the most part. Jack and Marguerite in particular have lost all control over their minds and their bodies, turning into extremely violent murderers and cannibals who threaten and attack their own family, kill anyone unfortunate enough to come across them and, especially in Marguerite’s case, lose complete autonomy over their own bodies. Marguerite turns into a walking bug hive who’s only purpose is to feed her family and birth her new children. Jack is an unstoppable murderous force of patriarchal violence who has so much fun chasing down and harming his victims, which in the Daughters DLC includes even his own daughter. The exception to this is obviously Lucas, who has been cured of his infection and his acting of his own free will. All of this is caused by Eveline, everything Jack and Marguerite do controlled by her, and yet Eveline is just as sympathetic as the rest of them. She’s a ten year old girl. Even Jack, who has watched his family and their victims suffer because of her infection, doesn’t seem to hold any of it against her. She just wants a family of her own, after all. It’s a complex and tragic situation.

The four lords, while I suppose being similar in structure, are not the Baker family. Not in dynamic, not in character, not in the kind of tragedy that they embody. I could talk for a while about just how completely different they are, but I don’t know if I really need to.

The Baker family are so tragic because they were just innocent bystanders trying to help a woman and a little girl they found in a shipwreck out in a storm. That’s the only reason they ended up in the situation that they were in. While the lords have similar origins, being victims of Mother Miranda’s experiments to bring her daughter Eva back, an important distinction between them is that in the case of the lords, all four of them are still acting of their own free will. Yes, Mother Miranda has undeniable power over them. She leads the cult they are part of, she has control over the village, she is their superior. However, I really dislike when every negative action by the lords is pushed onto her, as if the lords are not all grown adults who are for the most part acting independently of her.

With Alcina, she is the head of her own extremely brutal crimes. I think a lot of people have forgotten quite how horrifying the situations of the maidens are, possibly due to the prevalence shipping between Alcina and the maidens, and though we have minimal information what we do know is very frightening. Alcina uses her work force like livestock, draining them for their blood in a cellar full of horrific torture devices, and leaves their corpses to shamble around, armed and ready to attack any unwanted guests that have slipped out of the daughter’s clutches so that Alcina still doesn’t have to do her own dirty work, given how highly above everyone but Mother Miranda she appears to view herself as. While yes, Alcina does need human blood to survive, her methods are brutal, and none of this has been enforced upon her by Mother Miranda. Similarly to Jack on occasion, she takes a great deal of pleasure in hurting and attacking Ethan as he runs from her. Additionally, everything she does to Ethan is against Mother Miranda’s request. While yes, it is retaliation after he killed Bela, the part I often see people leave out is that Alcina is equally as upset that he entered her property and was attempting to steal from her, and she isn’t just after him to kill him.

Alcina has also been an active participant in aiding Mother Miranda with at least one experiment, considering that I’d how she got her daughters. While I’m sure her strong admiration for Mother Miranda and Mother Miranda’s power over her has absolutely had an affect in this, that’s not something I’ll deny, Alcina is still a grown woman and in her written entries about this shows no qualms about her participation in this. Her general attitude towards others, using young women as a good source and turning men into scarecrows, also leads me to believe that she does not exactly care who gets hurt or taken advantage of when it comes to her and Mother Miranda’s personal endeavours.

Donna and Moreau are the two more sympathetic people within the four lords, but they are not innocent. To start with Moreau, he’s desperate for Mother Miranda’s approval, as well as the other lords. He’s insecure and lonely, and he’s doing what he has been instructed by Mother Miranda when it comes to protecting the flask. However, he does also take quite a bit of joy in trapping Ethan in the reservoir and swimming after him with the intention to eat and kill him. Moreau though, given his conditions and circumstances, is the one I think is the least to blame for what he does.

Donna is hard to discuss because we know so little about her. Her parents are dead, as well as whoever Claudia was to her, she communicates through Angie and she can cause those who enter her house to hallucinate. According to Mother Miranda, Donna is severely mentally ill and that is what has made her an unfit vessel. I think a lot of people took this to mean that Donna is unaware of what she is doing, that the hallucinations she is showing Ethan are frightening, but after having been a fan of this game for years I just can’t agree with that anymore. Donna intentionally lures Ethan into her house with visions of his supposedly dead wife. Donna is going after fears she likely knows Ethan has, making him relive Mia’s death, take apart a mannequin of her, listen to her voice panic over something being horribly wrong with Rose, all building towards the horrifying baby that chases him through the house. There is no way Donna doesn’t understand how what she is showing Ethan is distressing, especially when you consider that, given how she can make herself appear and disappear at will within Ethan’s vision and that Angie is sitting in the hallways stationary and unspeaking, Donna was likely close by Ethan at all times and could see and hear his frightened reactions to what she was intentionally showing him.

Donna’s death is upsetting, but Ethan was not just chasing her down and killing her. Donna was attacking him, or at least she was controlling her dolls to do so. It’s still a hallucination, but Ethan doesn’t know that. When faced with a threat that is keeping you trapped and trying to end your life, you will likely try to get away or try to fight back, as Donna is doing to Ethan after he starts to attack her and Ethan is doing to Donna when he thinks his life is still in danger. I would also like to remind everybody that Donna communicates through Angie. What Angie is saying, that’s Donna. Angie doesn’t talk or move once she’s dead, it is Donna who controls her.

Lastly, Heisenberg. I think Heisenberg is the one of the four most entrenched in headcanons. Headcanons are fine, I am never in this post trying to suggest they aren’t, but my issue comes in when people use them to try and change the canon of the game. For example, it’s fine to believe that Heisenberg was experimented on by Mother Miranda as a child, but that isn’t canon. It’s fine to believe that Heisenberg mourned the deaths of his siblings, but that isn’t canon. The opposite is, with Heisenberg not viewing the cult as an actual family and being very openly mean to all three other lords, even Donna and Moreau who seemingly haven’t done anything to slight him. While his goal of killing another Miranda is a very understandable and sympathetic one given what she has done to him, using a six month old baby as a weapon and trying to bring her father into the mix only to try to get him killed when he denies him is not. I cannot overstate quite how little Heisenberg actually cared for Ethan and Rose’s safety when it came to his goal, and given that we are playing as Ethan, Rose is the priority.

Heisenberg has built an army of corpses he has presumably stolen and desecrated. This is kind of fucked up actually, and done completely independently of Mother Miranda. He also puts Ethan through a very dangerous lycan gauntlet before he even reaches the factory, which makes it even stranger to me that people seem to interpret Heisenberg’s deal as something that would have benefitted both him and Ethan and as if he ever had Ethan’s safety in mind.

All four of the lords have tragic aspects to them and there are definitely reasons to sympathise with all four. They’re victims of Mother Miranda, who knows they will all be killed. She wants them to be, giving her less to deal with by the time she has Eva back. They never meant anything to her. Not Alcina or Moreau, who were desperate for her attention. Not Donna, suffering from her unspecified but apparently severe mental illness. Not Heisenberg, who was seemingly her favourite creation. However, all of them are grown adults who do their own bad things independently of her.

And it’s fine to still like them. It’s fine for them to be your favourite character. It’s fine to have happy or nice headcanons about them or want to kiss them or be their friend or to want them to have survived. It’s fine to like characters who do shitty things. It’s to be expected in a game series like Resident Evil. It’s a horror game series. People are going to do bad things.

I just find it so boring when people take away all their bite. What makes a character like Lady Dimitrescu so fun it’s that she’s completely over the top. She’s campy and ridiculous, her castle layout makes no sense, she’s got three kids made of swarms of flies dressed like a set of goth triplets, she’s a lesbian who’s castle is full of naked statues of women, she turns into a big dragon and laughs maniacally while flying around and trying to eat you. She’s evil and it’s fun. It’s the same with Heisenberg. He’s a campy show off with a fun voice and a massive hammer he never actually uses. He can control metal. He looks like a cowboy. He pronounced Miranda in a funny way. He talks to you over an intercom while trying to get you killed. They’re fun and evil and they fight over who gets to kill Ethan like they’re two little kids. It’s absurd.

What makes a character like Donna so scary is that she’s silently working in the shadows, unassuming at a first glance and unseen for most of the time in her house. She is the least threatening of the four upon first glance, and yet she has undeniably the most frightening part of the game. Pretending as if Donna is completely unaware of what she is doing and babying her like she is an incapable child waters her down completely and takes away from the effectiveness of her character.

Villain characters are great! They’re very often the highlight of the story they are in, and they aren’t real! The four lords especially are often so completely exaggerated in what they do as well. It’s fine to like villains! It doesn’t make you bad! Characters can be bad people and you can still like them!

It’s just frustrating seeing a group of very fun and exciting villains, all designed with different aspects of horror, all over the top and campy and stupid and fun, all doing their own set of fucked up things, watered down to a set of poor innocent victims who have never done any wrong ever. If you want Jack and Marguerite, take Jack and Marguerite. Lady Dimitrescu loves killing and eating women and Karl Heisenberg turns corpses into soldiers. They’re bad people and they do comically exaggerated bad things. If you can’t stomach liking a character like that, horror is probably not the genre for you. Unless it’s Resident Evil 7, I suppose, but apparently tall women aren’t hot when it’s Marguerite Baker crawling on the walls.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

Du Wen at Her, the bar she started last year, in Shanghai. “I think everyone living in this city seems to have reached this stage that they want to explore more about the power of women,” she said.

Her is a self-described feminist bar in Shanghai where women gather to talk about their place in society

Tang Shuang at her bookstore, Paper Moon, in Shanghai

Wang Xia, left, and her Xin Chao Bookstore space in the Shanghai Book City in Shanghai

The female bookstore, Paper Moon, in Shanghai

In bars tucked away in alleys and at salons and bookstores around Shanghai, women are debating their place in a country where men make the laws.

Some wore wedding gowns to take public vows of commitment to themselves. Others gathered to watch films made by women about women. The bookish flocked to female bookshops to read titles like “The Woman Destroyed” and “Living a Feminist Life.”

Women in Shanghai, and some of China’s other biggest cities, are negotiating the fragile terms of public expression at a politically precarious moment. China’s ruling Communist Party has identified feminism as a threat to its authority. Female rights activists have been jailed. Concerns about harassment and violence against women are ignored or outright silenced.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has diminished the role of women at work and in public office. There are no female members of Mr. Xi’s inner circle or the Politburo, the executive policymaking body. He has invoked more traditional roles for women, as caretakers and mothers, in planning a new “childbearing culture” to address a shrinking population.

But groups of women around China are quietly reclaiming their own identities. Many are from a generation that grew up with more freedom than their mothers. Women in Shanghai, profoundly shaken by a two-month Covid lockdown in 2022, are being driven by a need to build community.

“I think everyone living in this city seems to have reached this stage that they want to explore more about the power of women,” said Du Wen, the founder of Her, a bar that hosts salon discussions.

Frustrated by the increasingly narrow understanding of women by the public, Nong He, a film and theater student, held a screening of three documentaries about women by female Chinese directors.

“I think we should have a broader space for women to create,” Ms. He said. “We hope to organize such an event to let people know what our life is like, what the life of other women is like, and with that understanding, we can connect and provide some help to each other.”

At quietly advertised events, women question misogynistic tropes in Chinese culture. “Why are lonely ghosts always female?” one woman recently asked, referring to Chinese literature’s depiction of homeless women after death. They share tips for beginners to feminism. Start with history, said Tang Shuang, the owner of Paper Moon, which sells books by female authors. “This is like the basement of the structure.”

There are few reliable statistics about gender violence and sexual harassment in China, but incidents of violence against women have occurred with greater frequency, according to researchers and social workers. Stories have circulated widely online of women being physically maimed or brutally murdered for trying to leave their husbands, or savagely beaten for resisting unwanted attention from men. The discovery of a woman who was chained inside a doorless shack in the eastern province of Jiangsu became one of the most debated topics online in years.

With each case, the reactions have been highly divisive. Many people denounced the attackers and called out sexism in society. Many others blamed the victims.

The way these discussions polarize society unnerved Ms. Tang, an entrepreneur and former deputy editor of Vogue China. Events in her own life unsettled her, too. As female friends shared feelings of shame and worthlessness for not getting married, Ms. Tang searched for a framework to articulate what she was feeling.

“Then I found out, you know, even myself, I don’t have very clear thoughts about these things,” she said. “People are eager to talk, but they don’t know what they are talking about.” Ms. Tang decided to open Paper Moon, a store for intellectually curious readers like herself.

The bookstore is divided into an academic section that features feminist history and social studies, as well as literature and poetry. There is an area for biographies. “You need to have some real stories to encourage women,” Ms. Tang said.

Anxiety about attracting the wrong kind of attention is always present.

When Ms. Tang opened her store, she placed a sign in the door describing it as a feminist bookstore that welcomed all genders, as well as pets. “But my friend warned me to take it out because, you know, I could cause trouble by using the word feminism.”

Wang Xia, the owner of Xin Chao Bookstore, has chosen to stay away from the “F” word altogether. Instead she described her bookstore as “woman-themed.” When she opened it in 2020, the store was a sprawling space with nooks to foster private conversations and six study rooms named after famous female authors like Simone de Beauvoir.

Xin Chao Bookstore served more than 50,000 people through events, workshops and online lectures, Ms. Wang said. It had more than 20,000 books about art, literature and self-improvement — books about women and books for women. The store became so prominent that state-owned media wrote about it and the Shanghai government posted the article on its website.

Still, Ms. Wang was careful to steer clear of making a political statement. “My ambition is not to develop feminism,” she said.

For Ms. Du, the Her founder, empowering women is at the heart of her motivation. She was jolted into action by the isolation of the pandemic: Shanghai ordered its residents to stay in their apartments under lockdown for two months, and her world narrowed to the walls of her apartment.

For years she dreamed of opening a place where she could elevate the voices of women, and now it seemed more urgent than ever. After the lockdown, she opened Her, a place where women could strike friendships and debate the social expectations that society had placed on them.

On International Women’s Day in March, Her held an event it called Marry Me, in which women took vows to themselves. The bar has also hosted a salon where women acted out the roles of mothers and daughters. Many younger women described a reluctance to be treated the way their mothers were treated and said they did not know how to talk to them, Ms. Du said.

The authorities have met with Ms. Du and indicated that as long as the events at Her didn’t become too popular, there was a place for it in Shanghai, she said.

But in China, there is always the possibility that officials will crack down. “They never tell you clearly what is forbidden,” Ms. Tang of Paper Moon said.

Ms. Wang recently moved Xin Chao Bookstore into Shanghai Book City, a famous store with large atriums and long columns of bookcases. A four-volume collection of Mr. Xi’s writings are prominently displayed in several languages.

Book City is huge. The space for Xin Chao Bookstore is not, Ms. Wang said, with several shelves inside and around a small room that may eventually hold about only 3,000 books.

“It’s a small cell of the city, a cultural cell,” Ms. Wang said.

Still, it stands out in China.

“Not every city has a woman’s bookstore,” she said. “There are many cities that do not have such cultural soil.””

[floweryanarchy]

I find myself curious about Cazador, The Emperor, Dame Alyin, and Dark Urge. What roles do they play in the au. BTW as a Texan and a History nerd I love how your have handled the western setting.

Ayyeee I’m glad ur enjoying the western au, I’m just going off the knowledge I have from RDR2 hehe

I’ll leave the emperors lore for another time or ask because he involves a lot of the main lore that’ll also need to be explained which also ties in Mystra plus Gales sickness. This post would be a mile long. But for the rest of them, here you go!

Dame Aylin: The daughter is Selune and the leader of a secret rebellion movement against the tyrant Ketheric Thorm. Her Mother Selune whereabouts are shrouded in secrecy, a protective act to keep her safe from her sister Shar and her followers. Dame Aylin had been the figurehead, uniting the group rebellion under the name of the “Selunites.” Till one day, a raid that had taken place when awry, the group attempted to aid the citizens of moonrise and take down Ketheric ended horribly, resulting in Aylin being taken prisoner. Most believed she to be dead. Question is what falling out did Ketheric have with Selune that he turned against them.

Cazador Szarr: To the upper class Cazador had made his name into a symbol, he’s a wealthy aristocrat, a patron of the arts and lavishes in the finest luxuries money can offer. To the public he’s seen as a man to be respected, a man who donated money to orphanages, attends operas and galas alike. But beneath the surface, he’s a ruthless monster that runs one of the most powerful drug/crime organizations in Baldurs Gate. A trade that was passed down to him from generations. His chosen seven, referred to only as “The Spawn” are kept on a tight leash that had the unfortunate circumstances of falling into the man’s clutches. They deal in flesh, opium and stolen goods, done simultaneously most of the time. His drug trade is what brings in the most cash, keeping the rich and desperate dependent on his supply. Cazador believes himself to be superior, a man of culture ruling over cattle. As for his “Spawn” he chooses each one carefully, grooming them to be perfect in his own image, as their own identities are stripped away and forced to be dependent on him. His spawn are not free, they are his property. And Astarion was one of his greatest projects.

BHAAL: No one knows where he came from, his most loyal followers knew him to be an ex-preacher, a man of faith that turned to madness. He believes that murder is a sacred act of utter devotion, a holy ritual. It was easy to amass such a cult following, with cold hearted bloody thirsty killer roaming the west just looking for an excuse for unnecessary bloodshed. His followers believe in his words, that the law and civilization are weak when compared to utter chaos. They seek To break down these structures, and begin a new era in the west. One under Bhaals rule.

THE DARK URGE: They were once Bhaals favored, an orphanage child that was groomed into the man’s cult. They were trained only to know blood and carnage and nothing else. Till one day, they went missing, and no one from the cult were able to locate them. Perhaps Orin had played a hand in their disappearance, but all they know is they woke up with a massive headache and a serious case of amnesia.

[themotleymirage]

I just wanna talk for a second about the contrasting parallels between the wizard Keen and Eioghorain. And yes, I do mean both contrast and parallel, because despite occupying very different places in the world of Umora, both characters are presented to us, the viewers, as eminently dangerous from minute one of their introduction. We're given this information through a six year old Suvi's perception of Eioghorain and present-day Eursulon's insight to Keen, so of course both are biased views (the music reinforces both these ideas though, oh god does Keen's theme put me on edge and Eioghorain's makes me want to hide). Through Steel, the story has repeated that Eioghorain is a threat specifically to the Empire's plans, and Keen is presented as an unsettling enforcer of those same goals as a member of the prince's retinue. As different as the characters and their wildly contrasted positions of power are, the parallels in the way they're presented to Suvi specifically caught my attention.

Its important that only after Suvi begins to untangle her justification machine from the Empire's imperial goals/practices do we get to meet Keen and Eioghorain. Keen was a previously unknown player on the field, but from the moment of his introduction is described as inhuman. Eursulon instinctually identifies him as evil, and Suvi at the very least finds Keen unsettling. Eioghorain, in contrast, has been a threatening presence looming over the narrative since the Children's Adventure, someone dangerous that was going to reemerge eventually. He's called monstrous over and over. Both characters are deadly, but Eioghorain has been built into a nemesis figure for Suvi, the alleged murderer of her parents, and Keen is a bastard who's nonetheless on the same side as Suvi.

Going into this episode with that limited knowledge of Keen and the baggage of Eioghorain's deeply felt impact in Suvi's world, it's incredibly pointed that we get Keen's precise violence first, and directed at Ame. The member of the trio least equipped for combat of any sort, whom Keen identified as the easiest one to trap, and who he plainly acknowledges is not his target. With Ame completely at his mercy, Keen still makes very real threats to Ame and the Fox's lives in order to procure Suvi. Keen is brutal in a way emblematic of the Empire wizards' emphasis of logic and intellectual rigor, brought to their full might by a person with the institutional authority to wield both his own and the Empire's power however he wishes. It's very specifically the kind of insidious violence only an institutional power structure could exercise. Meanwhile, Eioghorain's interaction with Suvi begins far more violently, but the initial brutality of their encounter feels more honest. Straightforward murder from one side of a war to another, a bloody animal violence that is terrifying but somehow less horrifying. And then to have Eioghorain tell Suvi the unvarnished truth as he knows it, to be the first person in the know to be entirely honest not only about the inner workings of the Citadel but also about his own actions and motivations? Incredible.

Every episode has advanced the erosion of Suvi's justification machine and belief in the institution that raised her. The monster from her childhood being the one to both further shatter those systems for Suvi and encourage action toward making right the wrongs she sees in the world around her, while the representative of the empire Suvi has dedicated her life to threatens people she cares for and prevents her from reaching kidnapped children is such an interesting way to galvanize Suvi into her first truly treasonous act.

[lexsssu]

Beast (Dion Agriche)

TAGS: Dion/Dragoness!reader, pining, pervy thoughts, breeding, oneshot Ao3 ver. | Ko-fi | Commissions (OPEN)

This place felt…sad.

The towering manse was objectively magnificent and yet an air of gloom seemed to envelop the very air that passed through the exquisite halls. Though perhaps it could be attributed to the unmistakable metallic scent that hung heavily within almost every corner of the estate. 

Whether it was the main courtyard, the gardens, or from deeper within, the darkness that settled over the entire structure was like a shroud of death that beckoned victims to fall into the sweet embrace of oblivion. It’s only through luck however, that they can either meet a swift end or a drawn out and miserable one. 

Judging from the melancholic or downright pained expressions upon the ghostly specters that roamed the area, it’s safe to say that this was a place of great suffering and tragedy. None of the actual living occupants could see them, most especially that man whose soul harbored an impressive amount of corruption for a human. No matter how many angry spirits clung to him in hopes of dragging his soul straight out of his body in order to enact their just revenge, each death done or ordered by his hand only seemed to further the taint. 

It’s almost as if he drew power from the lives he’d stolen.

He wasn’t the only one who attracted the attention of the restless souls. The man’s children who tried to follow in his footsteps also had a trail of bodies before them even before they could be called adults. Even one of his wives, a seemingly spritely woman with doll-like features, took lives as easily as getting rid of unpleasant pests.

In conclusion, this family is as cursed as the land they had stained with rivers of blood over the years.  

Much to your surprise however, not every Agriche shared a penchant for senseless murder. One of the eldest living daughters (Roxana) only had a single ghost following her and even then, the ghostly image of the teen boy didn’t seem to want to tear her limb from limb like all the others. Rather, he followed after her much like a puppy who only wanted to keep up with her pace. Sadly, the blonde never seemed to take notice of the boy who bore remarkably similar features with her even as he tried to reach his hand out to touch her. 

For she lives within the plane of the living, while he now resided in between life and death, unable to move on due to regrets or some other unfinished business you didn’t know of.  

The question is…are you content with staying as a mere observer?

The blonde youth perks up the moment he realizes you can see him, sheer relief brimming from every pore within his spectral body when you speak your first words to him. He is rich with the secrets Lante Agriche fights tooth and nail to prevent from ever seeing the light of day. 

A lonely boy becomes lonely no more and a displaced dragoness finds that becoming lost wasn’t too bad when you have good company around you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dion doesn’t dream.

Considering the amount of blood that stained his rough hands, it is better that he only descends into nothingness whenever he rests his eyes, for one could only imagine what horrors lay in wait to torment him for all the atrocities he’d committed. He’s not afraid of the ghosts of his victims, but rather finds it useless to think of flames that had already been snuffed out when they could no longer influence the living in any way.

But then something changes.

He feels a soft, warm touch that gently traces the length of his nose, cups the sharp angles of his face, and even delves into his dark locks. Though his eyes remain closed, his own subconscious supplies him with the image of hands much smaller than his own large ones that poked and prodded at him without fear. 

While he would have caught the appendages and mayhaps stuck a knife into anyone who decided to lay their hands upon him, Dion knows that this could only be a dream because who would even dare to caress him so gingerly in the middle of night within the Agriche’s own manor? If anything, he finds his dreamself to commit to memory the feeling of such a gentle touch being bestowed upon him, because rationally he knows that he has no need for softness. In the confines of his own subconscious however, he supposes that he can allow himself this at the very least.

When he wakes up at the crack of dawn, it is to open windows with its blinds fluttering as the morning breeze makes its way to his room, bringing with it not just the familiar scent of iron that seemed to permanently surround the place he’d grown up in. 

Though he cares not for flowers specifically, he does have knowledge on their practical uses such as poisons and the like. He also prefers knowing the native flora and fauna of the hunting grounds he’d be thrown into in order to get a better grasp of the terrain.

Blooming honeysuckles make his brows furrowed in confusion despite his stone-cold exterior, confused as to how and why such a scent overpowered the ever present iron tang in the air. 

Curiouser and curiouser.

Dion remains oblivious to the shared laughter between a woman with ivory in her hair and a boy whose eyes reflected the deep, bright expanse of the open sky as they watched him stick his head out of his windows to locate the origin of the oddity.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“YOU...”

“...Me?”

Dion feels his body practically burning from the inside-out, his heart beating several miles per minute as he finally gets a good look of the poltergeist that haunts his nights. He remembers the tender touches you press against his skin, the warm caresses that leave him gasping for breath and his loins aching for sweet release by the time he’s released from your clutches once dawn has broken. 

He does not need your sweetness.

He has no use for your gentleness.

And yet he craves it.

He has never desired anything. 

He has never felt so strongly about anything other than the swish of his blade, the gurgling of his victims, and the blood splattered against the ground as another mark of his martial prowess.

And yet you drove him to become more of a feral beast than he ever was as he now wished for nothing else other than to possess your whole being just as you possessed him without even meaning to.

“...are MINE”

Your surprised squeak is music to his ears, the flush on your cheeks pleasing the beast that sought to have you pressed down on the ground and taken ruthlessly, flooding your fertile womb with his virile seed...

.

.

.

To be continued(?)

[pjo-tvs-version]

So I I’ve been thinking about Percy’s relationship with masculinity, him being a male demigod and his relationship with male gods and the men in his life, how that can affect him, how he feels about it, Ect.

I wanted to ask what your thoughts are on with Percy and women, and the women in his life. Cause honestly while Percy’s relationship with older male figures in his life is complicated, some being abusive, neglectful, murderous, Ect.

The exception being Paul, but he’s limited in what he can help and guide Percy with.

Most of the guys he’s friends with have their own lives and complicated consistency in his life.

His relationship with the women is his life can take a different tone. Percy loves his mother but was always kind of afraid of not being worthy of her love or thinking she doesn’t want him around before he finds out the truth.

Then there’s Annabeth, Clarrise, Thalia, Rachel, Reyna, and Calypso. All very different relationships, but there’s always this subtle undercurrent of Percy wanting in some way or form their approval or acceptance.

With Thalia and Clarrise it’s more combative and aggressive but you see him despite their strained relationship try and make peace.

Then there’s his relationship with the Goddesses Athena, Hestia, and Artemis. Lots of times Percy is on guard or inherently suspicious of gods, and with Artemis and Athena that’s true too, but he seems to take special not of when they approve or disapprove of him.

All this is to say while has a more strained relationship with masculinity and men, Perhaps he has the opposite problem with women. A need to seek their validation or approval.

Obviously it’s not overt, if a goddess or older demigod woman hates or wanted him dead he’s gonna meet fire with fire, but I do think he has a unconscious habit or need for that.

What do you think?

I apologise for answering this ask after such a huge delay. The thing is that life goes on and I really wanted to think before answering this.

Okay, seriously, this whole take on Percy's relationships is chef's kiss. You've dug into something really core about his character arc, especially that whole dynamic between the guys and girls in his life and how he navigates seeking... well, something from them. Let's unpack that vibe a bit more, going deeper.

First up, let's talk about the male figures in Percy's orbit, because honestly? It's kind of a mess a lot of the time. When you look at the powerful dudes, especially the gods, the pattern is pretty stark. You've got Poseidon, his dad, who clearly loves him but is also super distant, bound by ancient laws, and often feels more like a powerful, occasionally helpful, enigma than a present father figure. Then there's Zeus, who basically radiates suspicion and hostility towards Percy from day one. Hades starts off firmly in the antagonist camp, representing death and grudges. Ares is just a straight-up bully, embodying the worst kind of aggressive power. Even figures like Hephaestus are more gruff and preoccupied than supportive. And Apollo? He’s a whole chaotic vibe unto himself. The overwhelming energy Percy gets from these divine masculine figures is that power is dangerous, conditional, neglectful, or outright hostile. Trust isn't freely given; it's barely earned and easily broken. This is reinforced by the sheer number of male monsters and antagonists he has to face, from Luke's betrayal to Kronos's manipulation to Gabe's abusive behaviour back home.

Sure, there are exceptions, but they often highlight the rule or exist outside the main power structures of his demigod life. Chiron is an incredible mentor, wise and caring, but he's not human, occupying a different space. Paul Blofis is a gift – a stable, loving, supportive human stepfather, and a genuinely positive male role model. But his influence is largely anchored in the mortal world, separate from the godly drama and life-or-death quests. Then you have his peers like Grover, his absolute best friend, but their relationship is built on mutual support and shared chaos, not mentorship or authority. Jason Grace offers a parallel, another leader and son of the Big Three, but again, it’s a relationship between equals navigating immense pressure. So the overall message flashing in neon lights for Percy? Powerful dudes are often dangerous, unreliable, or just plain absent when you need them.

But then you look at the women in his life, and it's like stepping into a whole different universe, even with all its own complexities. It starts, obviously, with Sally Jackson, the absolute queen. She is Percy's bedrock, his moral compass, the reason he keeps fighting. His initial fear in this new world isn't just about monsters; it's about protecting her and understanding the massive secret she carried for his sake. That drive not to disappoint her isn't just seeking approval; it's rooted in profound love and respect for her sacrifices and unwavering belief in him. She's his rock, his 'why,' and letting her down feels unthinkable, like failing everything that truly matters.

Then there's Annabeth Chase, and let's be real, Percabeth is foundational. Initially, yeah, maybe Percy is looking for her approval. She's smart, experienced, knows this world inside and out, and maybe seems a little intimidatingly capable to a newbie like him. But that dynamic evolves so quickly into this deep, powerful partnership built on mutual respect and absolute reliance. He doesn't just want her approval anymore; he needs her insight because he genuinely believes in her strategic mind and trusts her judgment implicitly, often more than his own. They become this incredible team, equals who cover each other's weaknesses and amplify each other's strengths. He values her opinion not just for validation, but because he knows it's valuable.

It plays out differently with other powerful young women like Clarisse and Thalia. With them, the dynamic is initially pure rivalry. What Percy seeks isn't warm affection, but their respect as a capable warrior, someone who belongs on the battlefield alongside them. He wants them to acknowledge his strength and competence, especially Thalia, who shares that unique, heavy burden of being a child of the Big Three. Making peace often starts pragmatically – they need to work together to survive – but it grows into a genuine if sometimes grudging, respect for each other's power. He respects their strength and wants that respect mirrored back. Later, encountering Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano, the Praetor of Camp Jupiter, brings another dimension. Here, Percy needs her trust and acceptance primarily as an ambassador and potential ally. Gaining her approval is crucial for bridging the gap between the Greek and Roman camps; it’s about proving his worthiness and reliability to a strong leader representing a whole different culture. It's strategic respect he's fighting for.

Even his interactions with goddesses carry this undercurrent, though warped by their immense power. Athena's disapproval is a huge deal, partly because she's Annabeth's mom (talk about scary MIL vibes!), but also because she represents wisdom itself judging him. He desperately wants, if not her blessing, at least her tolerance. With Artemis, a figure of immense power and independence whom he respects deeply, gaining her respect feels like a validation of his honour, especially after his interactions with Zoë and Thalia. Her disapproval would signify a major moral failing in his eyes. And then there's Hestia, the quietest goddess, representing home and hope. Percy treats her with innate kindness, and her gentle, often silent, approval feels like a profound confirmation of his core decency, something fundamental he strives to maintain amidst all the fighting and godly politics. It just hits differently.

So yeah, is Percy seeking approval or acceptance from these female figures? Definitely. But it's not some generic neediness; it's nuanced. With Sally and Annabeth, it's woven into love, loyalty, and deep personal connection. With Clarisse, Thalia, and Reyna, it’s about earning respect as an equal, a capable fighter, or a trustworthy leader. With the goddesses, it’s often about proving his honour, his worthiness, or his strategic value against the backdrop of immense power and ancient biases.

And honestly, this whole pattern makes SO much sense when you remember the male side of the equation. With positive, powerful male role models being so scarce, unreliable, or downright dangerous in his world, it feels natural that Percy gravitates towards seeking stability, wisdom, reliable strength, and moral guidance from the women around him. He learns through experience where he can find trustworthy anchors, sharp minds, and dependable allies in his chaotic life, and surprise! It's often with the formidable women he knows.

The amazing thing is, that this doesn't make him weak or lesser. It actually shapes Percy into a kind of hero and a kind of man that's... genuinely good. He learns to value partnership, to respect female strength and intelligence intrinsically, not as an exception but as a norm. He isn't afraid to rely on others, to show vulnerability, or to admit when someone else (often Annabeth) has the better plan. It’s a stark contrast to the often toxic, distant, or power-obsessed masculinity displayed by many of the gods and monsters he encounters. He's not threatened by strong women; he partners with them. That's a strength, not a weakness.

So to wrap it all up, your observation is spot on. Percy's constant navigation of approval, respect, and acceptance from the major female figures in his life feels absolutely connected to the often negative, unreliable, or dangerous landscape of the male figures he encounters. He finds his strength, his counsel, and his most reliable partnerships there, shaping him into the loyal, respectful, and ultimately heroic figure he becomes. And honestly? It’s one of the best parts of his story and his character.

Also I truly am sorry for how late I am to post this @darkmist111

Edit: This comment by @intellectual-punk has to be shown up here too because every single word of it is 💯💯💯

[genericpuff]

This plot point annoyed me so much! I thought she was finally going to open up to Persephone about the reasons why she hated Hades so much, about what he did to her, but no! They just introduced a new yet unnecessary character to the story 🤦🏼‍♀️

What are your thoughts about it?

oh yeah it annoyed the piss out of me too and for one very big reason that is CHRONIC in LO:

It's a solution to a problem Demeter didn't have.

This happens to a lot of characters throughout the comic. They'll have some kind of plot-driven conflict or character-driven flaw, and then it will be solved by something else entirely that had nothing to do with their original problem or doesn't line up with the theme of their storytelling. Minthe had insecurity issues and a toxic relationship with Hades? Just give her a classroom full of children to babysit! Hades had infertility issues? That's fine, Persephone somehow fixes those issues because at the end of the comic they have babies and Hades has his happy ending so it's fine! Hera was in an unhappy relationship with Zeus and had trauma from her past as a victim of Kronos? No problem, just make her an all powerful fertility goddess! Persephone accidentally causes winter which kills possibly thousands of people? Gaia is here to save the day, and also she's the one who makes Persephone return to the Mortal Realm for a couple months with full visitation rights. Apollo is a serial rapist who's attempted murder on several occasions, even against his own father in an attempt to take the throne? Community service, that'll solve it.

Demeter is one of the biggest examples of Rachel's inability of writing an actual cohesive plotline. She writes like the only goal is to come up with new twists to keep people reading each week without ever considering what themes or questions she should be answering throughout. So when she does pose questions, the answers often wind up being severely disconnected because she can't be bothered to actually plan out a plotline with narrative structure, she just needs 'things' to happen. To put it bluntly and simply, she writes like how a 13 year old on Wattpad would write, no actual thinking about the material she's presenting, no consideration for the curtains and what color they are, just "make the things happen so that people will keep reading because that's what writing is!"

Demeter's problem wasn't her failing to understand Persephone. It was people failing to understand her when she had reasonable cause to both be wary of Persephone moving to Olympus as well as Hades and his intentions with her daughter. But because Rachel needs to have the perfect happy ending for her self-insert power fantasy couple, she resorts to gaslighting both Demeter as well as the audience by extension into believing that the solution to Demeter's character arc... is understanding Persephone more.

Like first of all, the moral "people just want to be understood" is way, WAY too "baby's first storyline" at this point in the story especially when we've tried to tackle much bigger topics like sexual assault, and when we know how complex Demeter's backstory is. There's no way she needs to be told by Hebe that people just want to be "understood". She absolutely knows this already, and has been fighting to be understood by her siblings and peers and family for centuries, but of course, everyone sees her as just "the contrarian".

But then the final solution is... the sudden appearance of Demophoon as her long-lost child, and Hades giving her the volcanoes. That's it. She doesn't get to actually become Queen of the Mortal Realm, she never really gets closure over the past 2000 years of abuse from everyone around her, Hades just - like with everyone - buys her affection and she gets a new baby to pour her attention into instead of Persephone and we're all just forced to go along with it for the sake of Rachel's fantasy.

Rachel can't write (￢_￢;)

[ghostlynightpanda]

HELLO AGAIN! was wondering if u could do an aguni x chubby reader fic where like the chubby reader doesn't look like she's strong/can fight but she actually can ✊ (again, if u don't feel comfortable doing a chubby reader u can always switch!) take ur time and have a good day/night!

A/n: I tried my best to write chubby reader, I hope you like it! Also, it's probably ooc Aguni, since I never wrote for him before.

Aguni - Tower of Terror

synopsis: In a deadly survival game, you and Aguni battle through a collapsing tower filled with ruthless enemies, pushing your limits to claim victory. As blood is shed and survival instincts take over, an unexpected bond begins to form in the midst of chaos.

Warnings/Content: Aguni x fem!reader, description of violence and blood, character death

The world was ending. Or it had already ended, but that equaled the same thing, right?

This place was an exact replica of Tokyo, maybe even the whole world, but you never ventured beyond the city's borders to confirm. It was like a ghost town. No people were to be seen, except during the games.

That was the biggest difference. Everyone here was just a visitor in this world, bound by visas that would eventually expire. And if they did expire?

Boom.

A laser through the head.

Dead.

To extend your visa, you had to play deadly games. If you survived, your visa was extended by the number on the card you played.

Every game was different. You had survived seven games so far—seven agonizing, terrifying, and brutal games. You weren't sure how you had made it through, but somehow, you did.

Well enough that the Beach had taken you in. The Beach was a supposed sanctuary, a safe haven for the best players. Not for everyone—only those skilled enough to contribute. It was a former beach resort turned into a survivalist compound, housing around seventy players.

Now, you stood before a towering structure, waiting for the next game to begin. You had arrived with two others from the Beach. Survivors were always split into different groups to gather cards more efficiently. But that didn’t mean you were allies. Betrayal was a possibility in every game, and so was murder.

A metallic voice announced the start.

Seven of Clubs. A team battle.

Players had to fight their way up the multi-floor tower to reach the top. Every three levels, the threats intensified. Any floor left uncleared within the time limit would collapse, dooming anyone still inside.

"Don't get in our way," one of the militants snarled. "Not that I think you have a chance anyway," he eyed you with an amused smirked, clearly expecting you to not be able to fight or run. Well, he was in for a surprised if he'd underestimate you.

The militants were the Beach's enforcers. The only ones allowed to carry weapons. They were meant to uphold order, but most of them abused their power, taking whatever they wanted without consequences.

You met his glare but remained silent. There was no point in provoking him. Especially since the other person here was their leader, Aguni. He probably wouldn't hesitate to back his own.

"Let's go," Aguni ordered.

Twelve players stepped through the first door.

The first three floors were manageable—basic combatants wielding bats and pipes, runners who tried to grab and hold players in place, and deadly traps like spike walls and drop floors. Three people died almost immediately, but none of them were from your group.

Floors four through six were worse. Sword-wielding enemies fought in synchronized formations, and snipers forced players to either take cover or keep moving. You had managed to grab a bat from one of the fallen enemies, which helped with defense. But the snipers were another issue entirely. Running and dodging under fire was exhausting. You were strong, but speed had never been your strong suit. Every step felt heavier, sweat dampening your clothes. Your breath came in sharp, labored gasps.

Only five of you remained when you reached the eleventh floor.

"How the hell did you make it this far?" the militant sneered, eyeing you with disdain as he wiped blood off his blade.

Before you could reply, the next wave began.

Silent, hooded figures emerged from the darkness, attacking with blinding speed before vanishing. They were almost impossible to hit and far stronger than their wiry forms suggested. The room was riddled with traps—electrified floors forcing players to jump between platforms while dodging attacks.

Then it happened. One of the hooded figures moved too quickly to block, slicing the militant's throat open before he could react. His gurgled screams filled the air before he collapsed. He clawed at his neck, eyes wide with disbelief, but within seconds, he was still. Dead.

You and Aguni fought fiercely, dodging and countering where you could. You saw him get thrown to the ground, an enemy raising a sword for a killing strike. Without thinking, you rushed in, swinging your bat hard into the attacker's leg. The figure dropped with a muffled grunt, and you followed up with a devastating blow to the head.

"You okay?" you panted.

Aguni stared at you for a moment, surprised. Then, reluctantly, he took your offered hand and let you pull him up.

"Thank you," he muttered, clearly hating the admission. But there was no time to dwell on it. More enemies swarmed you.

"Move!" Aguni grabbed your wrist and pulled you toward the staircase. The door slammed shut behind you just as the floor collapsed beneath the corpses.

"The next floor should be the last," you gasped, your legs shaking from exhaustion.

The final floor was different. One vast, dimly lit room. And one opponent.

A towering figure stood in the center, clad in black. Two gleaming swords rested in his hands. His stance was calm but menacing.

The moment you stepped forward, he attacked.

He was impossibly fast. His blades were a blur as he struck, forcing you and Aguni back. Every block sent shockwaves up your arms. Every dodge left you gasping for breath. You weren't built for prolonged agility, but you had endurance—and you had sheer stubborn willpower.

Then, you slipped.

The enemy's blade sliced into your arm. A sharp, burning pain shot through you. You hissed, staggering back. Aguni immediately intercepted the next strike, his eyes flashing with something—anger? Worry?

"You alright?" he barked, never taking his eyes off the enemy.

"Just a scratch," you gritted out, ignoring the sting.

Aguni's frown deepened, but he didn't argue. Instead, he adjusted his grip and lunged again.

It took every ounce of effort, but you finally won. A well-timed distraction allowed Aguni to land the killing blow. The enemy crumpled. The game was over.

The card materialized in the center of the room. Neither of you moved, still catching your breath.

Then, Aguni turned to you, his gaze immediately landing on your wounded arm. Before you could dismiss it, he reached out, brushing his fingers lightly against the torn fabric.

"You should've dodged that."

"I'd like to see you dodge everything when you're built like me," you shot back, offering a tired grin. His lips twitched—almost a smirk.

The journey back to the Beach was silent. But after a while, Aguni suddenly stopped the car, leading you inside a pharmacy, before gripping your wrist firmly.

"Sit."

"What?"

"Your arm."

"It's fine—"

"Sit." His voice was sharp, leaving no room for argument.

With a sigh, you obeyed. He crouched in front of you, rummaging through his pack before carefully cleaning the wound. His hands were surprisingly gentle.

"You're weirdly nice right now," you mused.

Aguni rolled his eyes, pressing the bandage against your skin a little harder. You hissed.

"Alright, alright, I take it back."

"Tch." He shook his head, but his touch lingered a little longer than necessary.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. The air felt heavier, charged with something unspoken.

"You should take better care of yourself," he murmured.

You smiled. "Guess that means you’ll have to look out for me now."

He exhaled sharply—almost a laugh.

Then, he offered you a hand. You took it without hesitation.

As you walked back together, something had changed. A quiet understanding. A bond forged in survival, growing into something more.

Masterlist

[bekkandaa]

Tom Riddle: Narcissism, Heritage, and Mental Breakdown

This analysis will delve into Tom Riddle's narcissism, heritage, and my own hypothesis that a mental breakdown led to the ultimate murder of his family.

Before I begin, it's important to define some key psychological terms for anyone unfamiliar with the subject. I'll try to simplify things down, but if anything doesn't make sense don't worry too much.

Malignant Narcissism: This term describes individuals who exhibit all three traits from "The Dark Triad"— Machiavellianism, Psychopathy and Narcissism.

Machiavellianism : Commonly characterised by manipulation and exploitation of others, unemotional callousness, self-interest, and an overall lack of morality.

Psychopathy : Commonly characterised by continuous antisocial behaviour, selfishness, unemotional callousness, and an overall lack of remorse.

Narcissism : Marked by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and an overall lack of empathy.

In Psychoanalytic theory, primary narcissism is a normal part of child development, involving self-interest and object-love. Children often harbour notions of greatness and believe they are immune to any consequences. As they mature, they become disillusioned from these grand notions to integrate into mature society. pathological narcissism actually develops when this process is disrupted, resulting in defective narcissistic structures.

( Interestingly, a number of psychiatrists have established a direct link between malignant narcissism and evil— a perspective likely considered in the creation of Tom Riddle's character. However, it is important to note that while there is a connection, it does not necessarily define someone as evil.)

Tom Riddle's behaviour aligns perfectly with Heinz Kohut's theory of object-love. According to Kohut, a child requires a mother to affirm their grandiosity or, lacking this, seeks an adult to create an "idealised parent image." Tom, lacking a mother figure and grandiose figure to emulate, proceeded to construct his own powerful parental figure.

This is evident when we see Riddle question Dumbledore about his father's wizardry, as Tom assumes his mother could not have been a witch as if she was she wouldn't have died. This belief is shattered during his teenage years, which inevitably triggers his (narcissistic) rage of his idea being disillusioned. Tom Riddle has always been a character with an ongoing quest for identity and self-validation, which is seen in his prolonged search for the Chamber of Secrets to confirm his status as Heir of Slytherin.

Tom Riddle's obsession with power and control is a fundamental aspect of his character we can't ignore. The pursuit of control is a primary human motivation, gaining control is actually proved to enhance one's sense of well-being. For someone like Tom, when this control is threatened, they would resort to coping mechanisms to preserve their sense of self. For a narcissist like Tom, a threat to his control equates to a threat to his very self.

Now, to my entire point. The revelation of his true heritage and the truth about his parents triggered a mental breakdown, causing an identity crisis. Freud posits that human behaviour is influenced more by the unconscious mind than the conscious. The unconscious mind protects itself by concealing negative memories, which can affect behaviour and attitudes. In Tom’s case, his father's abandonment left a mark, which he could not reconcile. His only solution was to eradicate this source of shame and hatred.

Tom Riddle’s patricide and subsequent name change to Voldemort signify his profound self-loathing and rejection of his humanity. This action eradicates the evidence of his shameful heritage. According to Krech, hatred often correlates with anger, manifesting as a desire to destroy the source of hatred. Riddle’s murder of his father and paternal family was an attempt to reclaim control and restore his ego. TLDR :  Tom Riddle has a fragile sense of control and ego, loses the sense of control once he learns of his true heritage. Causing a mental breakdown and killing his family. In conclusion, he is miserable and hates everyone. ( even himself to a point.)

[nobodypunk]

Vampire Knight Analysis: Classism

Long Post !

10,000 years ago, climate change caused the apocalypse. Because of lack of food and resources, vampires are at the top of the food chain, preying on humans. Kaname is a pureblood and the progenitor, we first see him as the Lord of a village, in which he gives the villagers his blood to sustain them and keep them healthy, but in secret he takes their blood to sustain himself. Eventually, he run-out the village when they suspect he is a vampire. 

He is in a position of power over his people and while it is framed as benevolent that he is healing them and helping them live, he is also stealing from them in secret. I think it is a fair comparison to equate this to money or goods. Serfs work the land for their lord and in return he offers them protection. While the lord may be a good one, he is still partaking in a power structure that ultimately benefits him. A lord still takes their livelihood as payment and in the way of secrets, may be oppressing them in ways they are not aware of, taking things they did not agree to give away. 

Kaname along with The Hooded Woman observe how their kind, pureblood vampires, have taken to turning many humans into vampires. But the hooded woman says this is not for equality, the purebloods are turning humans to make slaves of them. So purebloods are explicitly abusing the power structure as the upper class and abusing the lower class (humans) turning them into slaves (Level D). 

As the story continues The Hooded Woman and Kaname oppose the purebloods, rebel against them, and also search for a cure to vampirism. They recognize that the system that they are both a part of, needs to be dismantled. 

Through their research, Kaname becomes disheartened but wishes to make the necessary sacrifice to liberate humans from vampire tyranny. The Hooded Woman however is the one who has been working with a group of humans, having them ingest her blood to gain her power. In doing this she creates Hunters. Hunters who are human yet possess the strength of vampires given to them by a pureblood. She then casts her heart into a fire that will produce the Parent Metal which they can then make weapons to defend themselves against the vampires. 

Which I find to be such an interesting dynamic as we can view this as a royal who despises the royal class, donating all of her funds to lower class people for a rebellion. The upper class woman willingly sacrificed herself “Viva La Revolution!” style for the lower class. However for me, this feels a little weird subtextually. The Hunters having their genetics changed by her pureblood makes them have similarities to vampires, like Kaien living an unusually long life, or the Hunter Twins curse. I will return to this thought later. 

Kaname fights the revolution with Artemis for a period of time, but eventually loses hope that vampires will ever be stopped or cured. He abandons the cause, abandons the humans, abandons the Level D/E vampires to their doom. 

Let’s now focus on the time period that Vampire Knight takes place:

In VK we now have a very literal class system of vampires as illustrated by the pyramid in the manga: 

Level A: pure bloods that are the reigning class (born vampires, beautiful, precious, powerful, manipulative)

Level B: the noble/aristocrat class (not as powerful as purebloods but still beautiful and have specialized powers) 

Level C: common vampires (that we see very little of … I can’t think of a single named character that is one) 

Level D: vampires that used to be human (can only be turned by the pure bloods, seen as lesser and generally not accepted as part of vampire society)

Level E: vampires that used to be human who have lost their humanity and sanity (ugly, bestial, outcast, thought of as murderers, violent, often dressed like they are poverty level). 

And finally humans (viewed as a food source, but strangely are treated socially above Level D and Level E vampires, almost a Level C/F combo???). 

Let’s break down this pyramid: 

Purebloods are reflective of royalty. At one point Kaname was formally titled The Vampire King, and even though they are not per se a legally recognized monarchy, the role of the Kuran family is the same. They are a hierarchy based on ancestry and bloodlines exactly like a monarchy. “Pureblood” is very obviously a classist ideal. Blood unmixed, blood not dirtied by “lower classes” or also in this case, human blood. Royals were thought to have “blue blood”; that they were called by divine right as sovereign, and that they were special and above everyone else. It is very much the reason why incest in royal families was practiced to “keep the bloodline pure”.

 Incest is a reoccurring theme in Vampire Knight that is controversial and something I have always been confused by and wildly uncomfortable with. We have themes of incest with Kaname and Yuuki, Haruka and Juri, as well as Rido, and later with Ai and Ren.

Incest between Rido and Juri is framed as assault and not right, but the incest between Juri and Haruka is framed as loving and pure. When Yuuki finds out Kaname is her brother she remarks that it’s strange that she was in love with her brother this whole time, to which Kaname says: ‘Vampires are just beasts in human form. We are already betrothed. Our parents before us were siblings.’ He justifies the incest as bestial and a system that she was born into as a pureblood. (Which is an interesting contradiction as animals do not often practice incest as it is not good for genetic diversity. However, selective breeding can be something that humans force animals to do which does have parallels with royalty practicing incest. There is a different theme in VK that is “Humanity VS Beasts (in human form)“ that I will hopefully write about separately but right now we are going to focus on Classism)

I think having this correlation between royalty and incest makes the presence of it in this particular series make more sense and as a part of the horror genre (and generally) incest is supposed to be uncomfortable and grotesque. Vampires often manifest our social anxieties with class and sexuality.

I also want to touch on the term “pureblood” and how it is a clear link to eugenics. 

Japanese vampires have distinct differences in interpretations from western vampires, there is a wonderful video about Vampire Hunter D that explored some of those differences (UNFORTUNATELY, It was by @thegamingmuse on YouTube and IT HAS BEEN TAKEN DOWN but have this one ‘History of Vampires in Japan’ instead). Like how Japan’s view of classism is very affected by the country’s long history with feudalism and subsequently their past with fascism. I want to stress that these may not have been the author’s clear intentions but rather things that affected her writing subconsciously. 

Eugenics began to gain popularity in Japan around the 1880s when scientists introduced a theory that through selective breeding they could make the people of Japan (the Yamato race) stronger and smarter to dominate over other cultures including the west. They valued “junketsu”--pureblood and looked down on “konketsu”-- mixed blood. Social Darwinism, forcible sterilizations and abortions began occurring more and more in the early 19th century and specifically in the 1930s at the height of imperialism. They deemed certain traits to be undesirable such as disability, genetic disease, criminal inclinations, and even race (look up the indigenous people of Japan like the Ainu), etc. Ableism and xenophobia are still very much ingrained in Japan’s culture today because of this. 

It is hard to talk about purebloods and not talk about Level E’s at the same time. Only Purebloods have the power to turn humans into vampires so they are therefore responsible for all Level D and Level E vampires that come into existence.

 Level D vampires in Vampire Knight are treated with disdain, they are usually servants or scandalous lovers to their higher class pureblood masters. As we see with Shizuka, she took a human lover that ended up being a target because society did not approve of her relationship to him. As well as Shizuka’s master bond over Zero. He physically has to fight to harm her because the power of the bond, Master vs Servant, Creator vs Creation, is so strong. They are meant to be slaves with no will of their own. 

Vampires that used to be human need the blood of a pureblood to remain stable and sane and when that blood isn’t given they lose their humanity. They roam the streets with insatiable thirst, killing to barely survive a cursed life. Food that did not die, only to be used and discarded. Level E vampires are those that are discarded, plaguing the humans with violence and fear. 

So purebloods, like royalty, are framed as desirable, beautiful, fashionable, the peak of society versus Level E’s that are portrayed as starving, ugly, bestial vermin that need to be slayed. They both prey on humans but one is deemed more villainous because of their lowly state. The Level E’s are the lower class created by the upper class. The upper class took their resources and left them in the streets to die. They are othered and thought of as a plague to both human and vampire society. Does that remind you of the eugenics that I was just talking about?

 The Level E’s are also portrayed as mentally unstable, mirroring Japanese disdain for mental illness. Hikikomori is a phenomenon in Japan of severe social withdrawal. One of the reasons this could be happening is because it is not socially acceptable to have a disability, visible or not. It is more acceptable to remain inside your home. Much like ‘The Ugly Laws’ in the United States: “These laws targeted poor people and disabled people. For instance, in San Francisco a law of 1867 deemed it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.”

I’ve always thought it was interesting and really sad that in VK they search for a cure for vampirism, but they never specifically say that it’s to help Level E’s restore their humanity or their sanity. It’s almost as if the cure is more geared toward curing purebloods and the acceptable parts of vampire society. But that view was most certainly influenced by a group.

Aristocrats are exactly like they sound, they are privileged in high society. In VK they hold a lot of power though they are not as powerful as the Purebloods they are subservient to. Still they pull the strings and abuse their station. In many ways they control what is socially acceptable and what is not. Vampiric Aristocrats are as their nature is, greedy and hungry for blood. Pureblood is coveted by them and held as a rare and precious commodity. They are the ones encouraging incest to keep their blood stores full. In Shizuka’s case it was her family and the aristocrats that kept her caged after deeming she was unstable (there’s that disdain for mental illness and disability again, even though inbreeding can cause such things even in royalty) The Aristocracy is also responsible for supplying humans for Purebloods to feed on, such is the case with Kaname meeting Seiren. 

The Aristocracy benefits most from how society has been set up, even with their dealings with humans. The secret of vampire society is best kept, and that is why they sneer at vampire/human coexistence. Humans are just food and tools. Like the Hunter Society. 

The Hunter Society as it is in VK’s time is corrupt, we find out the President has been in league with the leader of the Aristocracy, Ichio. In exchange for protection they get pure blood for their drinking pleasure. Though it is not explicitly said, the Hunter Society is basically an extermination system for the victims of purebloods. Hunters only kill targets on the list curated by the corrupt President who with their ties to the Aristocracy would know what humans were turned into Level Ds and Es. The real world equivalent for hunters is the police. The police are funded by the government, are easily corrupted, and often unfairly discriminate against the lower class, arresting them for stealing food when the upper class hoards it all to themselves. 

So like I said before we have this really interesting view of the Hunters as being like vampires: being a part of the leech, upper class, and feeding into a system of oppression.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I might do more parts to this as a series, such as analyzing the class system and how it pertains to certain characters, but those were all the thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for the last two months. Let me know what ya'll think or feel free to request a take!

[woman1festo]

big info post about the Maryland mall shooting and the shooter, Darion Aguilar.

( i have compiled this post in my notes from all different news articles, sources and google searches. it wasn't too easy to find much, but i hope this is enough insight/info.)

Darion Aguilar was a 19 year old, as described by his mother as a as 'a gentle, sweet kid' who has never been interested in guns.

'If you were to go in his room you would see what a gentle sweet kid he was,' she said, adding that he was a vegetarian because he was concerned about animal welfare.

He was also described as a "good kid" who "is quiet, kept to himself. Nice, normal, calm demeanor."

That was until January 25, 2014. He took a taxi around 10:15am, then he had entered the The Mall in Columbia where he was dropped off.

He went downstairs to a food court directly below the store, authorities say surveillance tapes show him sitting and walking around for nearly an hour. this may have been due to the fact that he was obsessed with the Columbine shooting. it's suspected that he waited until the time of the shooting had lined up to the original one in 1999.

(Investigators found thousands of searches on Aguilar's computer related to mass murder, school shootings, guns and explosives.

He also looked up websites for people with mental health problems, and he told a doctor he was hearing voices in the months before the shooting.)

Reports have said that Aguilar took a picture of himself inside the dressing room at Zumiez in the minutes leading up to the shooting and posted the photo to tumblr with a caption reading,

"I had to do this. Today is the day. On previous days I tried this I woke up with anxiety, regret and hope for a better future this day I didn't, I woke up felt no emotions no empathy no sympathy. I will have freedom or maybe not. I could care less."

It was said in mentioned selfie that some of way he is dressed, wearing a white t-shirt, boots and cargo pants with his shotgun in a sling around him, is reminiscent of one of the Columbine killers.

Police say he bought a shotgun last month – a 12-gauge Mossberg – and kept it hidden as a taxi cab dropped him off at the mall. before exiting the dressing room, Aguilar dumped his backpack out, changed his clothes and assembled the gun.

As soon as Aguilar stepped out, he raised his gun, took a few steps, aimed at his first victim, Brainna Belolo (21), and fired, killing her instantly.

He continued on to aim at his next victim, Tyler Johnson (25) , who was said to be near the front of the store, hitting him multiple times. he also died instantly.

Aguilar then stepped out of the store and fired two shots across the mall on the upper railing. One struck a railing while the other struck a woman in the heel. He then turned towards the food court, fired one shot and struck a wall right outside the Great American Cookie store, very narrowly missing more victims.

Next Aguilar turned back to Zumiez and fired through the glass at a mannequin before re-entering Zumiez, sticking the shotgun in his mouth and shooting, killing him instantly.

A total of nine shots were fired by Aguilar, out of the 54 rounds of ammunition he brought with him. The backpack he had with him contained homemade explosives, most likely made with fireworks, but were not powerful enough to cause major structural damage, police said.

"(Aguilar) was just silent. Focused. There was no sort of expression or emotion," an eyewitness recalled.

Despite officers arrived less than two minutes after the first 911 call, they entered to find Aguilar dead.

Desperately searching for a motive, police discovered his journal, which was about 20 handwritten loose-leaf pages in roughly chronological order. In a portion police released, Aguilar makes an angry, expletive-laced statement in which he anticipates the killings in "a couple of hours."

"I'm going to [fucking] kill you all in a couple hours I'm anxious, I hate you all so much you are pathetic pieces of [shit] who deserve to die. Worthless you all are [fucking] worthless. Everything seems fake. I think that I may already be dead," one journal entry read.

He apologized to his family for what he was about to do, that he wrote he was ready to die, that he wanted to die and hated others. He never mentioned to his family that he needed any help for his mental illness. While he talks about killing people, he never gave any specific targets.

Sources say it also shows a hatred of certain groups and a general unhappiness with life. 

[itsclydebitches]

The narrative H/C potential of switching Cazador and Orin’s kidnappings is just delicious to me. Instead of Astarion’s siblings waking him up and giving the party the chance to defend him, the player arrives back at camp (or finishes a long rest if Astarion is currently in your party) to discover that he’s just gone. No note, no sign of a struggle, nothing. Insert any hand wave-y means of abducting Astarion quietly here. The point is that this would wreck him.

Not just because he’s now back in the clutches of Cazador (though that’s obvious), but because you’re not coming for him. See, having Orin as your kidnapper is actually one of the more reassuring options, despite her murder-happy disposition. Even if she nabs a struggling character like Gale who might believe they’re unworthy of rescue for any number of reasons, Orin is one of the few baddies you simply have to engage with. Significantly, knowledge of that necessity is baked into the actual story-world. We see fighting her as a gameplay mechanic—defeat three mini bosses to reach the final boss—but that structure still exists as a Save The World quest for your party. No stone, no victory. No Orin, no stone. Ergo, they’re fighting Orin. So whoever is kidnapped knows that the party will show up eventually, even if it’s not for them. That’s it’s own wonderful, angsty assumption—“You came because it was the right thing to do, not because you care about me. My rescue was always a byproduct of saving the people who truly deserve it”—but at least there’s still reassurance in knowing you’ll see them again. All the kidnapped member has to do is not piss off Orin in the meantime and hope the party doesn’t die along the way. Not stellar odds, admittedly, but are they really any worse than what they’ve been dealing with all along?

Getting kidnapped by Cazador on the other hand... oh boy. He’s a missable boss, both mechanically and narratively. Who’s worried about him when there’s a fucking Netherbrain threatening all of Faerûn? Sure, sure, your Tav might have spent their journey helping every idiot with suitably convincing puppy-dog eyes, but Astarion is very much not a refugee tiefling/snake-threatened child/shadow-cursed hero/etc. He’s a chaotic, caustic bitch whose trauma is expressed more through biting fury than soft bouts of crying. Not only is he (in his own mind) not the sort of person people go out of their way to save, but would you even know where to begin? Depending on your approval rating you might still be iffy about Astarion’s past, as well as this upcoming ritual. Has Tav met any of the siblings yet? Do they know that Cazador’s Ascension would pose a threat to all of Baldur’s Gate? Do they have any means of finding the entrance to his palace without a former resident in the party (or convenient map marker)? Now, toss in the fact that, depending on how many long rests you’ve done, the party has only been traveling together for a matter of days/weeks. They know one another deeply (yay trauma bonding) but once separated that timeframe feels pretty insignificant, particularly to someone who has existed for over 200 years. Even if you’re romancing Astarion and he has more reason to believe that this short period of time was emotionally meaningful, he’s still admitted to manipulating you, to molding your emotions to best ensure his protection... but protection never extended to this.

Besides, Astarion has literally been here before. No heroes rescued him across two centuries of enslavement. Why would they rescue him now?

Except, it’s far worse this time around, isn’t it? Cazador isn’t merely his abuser, he’s now set to become an all-powerful vampire whose hold will truly be unbreakable. Astarion isn’t merely a slave to one individual, he’s now got a ticking time bomb in the form of a parasite set to enslave him to another. (And isn’t that something to chew on: him cursing the fact that the artifact’s protection still extends to him. At least as a Mind Flayer he wouldn’t feel anymore, would have a chance to fight back.) This time around Astarion isn’t just another beloved “child” of Cazador’s, he’s uniquely gifted in his ability to walk in the sun and resist commands. The hells only know what Cazador will make him do with that newfound power if he survives the ritual— or how Cazador will ensure Astarion’s continued “loyalty” while he does it. Worst of all though... now Astarion has had a chance to see what life could be like. Freedom. Agency. People who love him despite all the reasons they shouldn’t. Whoever said, “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” was a fucking fool. It’s so much worse to go backwards, to have lost not merely the life you dreamed of, but also the ability to pretend you never needed it in the first place.

Imagine that Astarion. Picture how broken he would be.

Now imagine the party kicking down Cazador’s door. The look on Astarion’s face when he realizes that despite the danger, the practical hurtles, the bigger stakes at play, the fact that it’s him... they came anyway.