#and im not saying that you can't ship these characters with others but its very important to keep in mind how some

[sukibenders]

I get the appeal for Cregan and Jace, but I'm already nervous about how the fandom will treat Baela and her relationship with Jace as a result. Could both ships coexist? Yes, but this fandom has proven many times over that whenever a black person, specifically a black woman, is involved said ship is often overlooked or dismissed. This can be said for many of the ships in the show, which I've talked about, and Baela's treatment even outside of mentions of Cregan (I love Heleana, but it is not lost on me how some Jace/Hel shippers dismiss Baela). Like, this isn't the case for everyone, but enough for it to be very apparent. All in all, I just want the best for my girl Baela Targaryen.

[steelycunt]

ridi im sorry i need to rant and i think youll get it 😭 like not to be a bitch but this fandom kinda going off the rails and annoying the shit out of me https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRbYASpf/ everybody in the comments unironically loving it,,, i mean wtvr ship who you want but its kinda getting delusional like ppl are just operating on thin air and pretty fancasts atp and i do Not understand or emotionally connect with any of it. at least w wolfstar theres so much material and foundation to explore but what is all the rest of this?? just hot celebrity fancasts and crack. to be fair part of me respects taking a terfs canon material and making everybody gay but the way it seems to be so oversaturating fics and the fandom that characters dont even feel like their original selves .. atp its all just surface level OCs

hello! yes! i'll be honest talking about things like this always make me a little nervous, and i feel obligated to preface anything i say with a disclaimer that none of it really matters, nothing i say matters, and you should do what you like, because--who cares. i am not an authority on--anything, frankly. my opinion holds no more weight than the next guy's, and all i'm doing here is giving it, so. essentially what im saying is--people are perfectly entitled to disagree with me, but people are not entitled to be mean to me about it xx

having said that. it is my personal opinion that s x barty is one of the worst fucking things i have ever heard lol. who even is barty who is that guy. why would s be interested in him at all. i do not understand it it does not make sense to me. from where are we sourcing the character traits and personality that we are giving barty that would ever endear sirius to him, because it objectively cannot be canon.

overall i do not get the new interest in barty + evan + pandora (+ regulus, but we won't go there)...at all, other than guessing that people were bored with the marauders and wanted a new version of them (and new celebrities to fancast) while simultaneously changing next to nothing about them other than superimposing them onto the first slytherin side characters they could rustle up. i expect ive become a bit of a broken record in regards to my dislike of the popular meow-meow-ification + complete absolution of regulus as a character in order to make him a loveable oc (just as i think erasing all the negative traits that r/s have in order to make them more likeable is just as boring), and all of that applies to those other guys as well (with the slight difference that they are, somehow, even less interesting and significant than regulus in canon), so i won't get into that too much. but i think what you say about having no emotional connection to any of it is exactly right lol--it is a sort of shift? i guess? in the fandom that is simply of no interest to me. they are characters that i just have no emotional investment in and admittedly struggle a little to understand why other people do. i am emotionally invested in, like, five characters overall (and even out of those--there's only two i'm really here for innit xx) and i personally cannot extend that investment to a creepy little side character who is mentioned maybe twice in the entire series.

and that is okay! i do not need to understand it. i don't want to say it annoys me because honestly--i don't go there, its nothing to do with me. if i dont like it i just wont interact with it, and the fact that it doesn't interest me has no bearing on what other people are into or want to do, and i couldn't give less of a shit what people do with the canon material, which is largely garbage anyway. take the bits you want from it, play around with those and ignore the rest. in that respect we are all doing exactly the same thing. but yeah i think s x barty is genuinely awful lol. hate it. very terrible. he's already got a loser werewolf boyfriend and he loves him so so much. leave him alone.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Love is Stored in the Cat: A Nepeta Leijon Character Study

I guess these are a series now! I also have a request for Feferi in my inbox that I'll get around to eventually.

SO! Dear, sweet Nepeta.

Nepeta is the troll that is most against the existence of the hemocaste.

I believe the Ultimate Self speech was originally going to be from her, not Davepetasprite^2.

She's bad at shipping.

These all make her extremely impurrtant!!!

So furst of all, I'm going to start with the same disclaimer as my Eridan essay (go read that first!!! It sets up a lot of ideas that I'm expanding on here), which is that the things Hussie says are going to be lowered in value, because he likes to play coy about plot stuff. I'm also not counting anything but the actual text as canon, and even with in that text, I'm counting everything after GAME OVER as soft canon - a suggestion of what would have been, often truncated for time, often a deliberate middle finger to the shitty fandom.

Okay, so with that squared away!

Nepeta Says Fuck The Hemocaste

I'm not going to bother doing a deep dive on Nepeta's characterization, because fur the most part, I think the fandom more or less gets her right - she wears her heart (h33h33) on her sl33ve, after all! She's a very sweet little catgirl who loves roleplay and shipping, who is also a vicious hunter of wild beasts and lives in a cave. She's very nice and friendly, but has a tough streak and a spine.

She also says fuck the hemocaste, why does that even exist:

CT: D --> Your fraternization with the base classes have 100sened your morals, can't you see this AC: :33 < no! i dont care, they are fun AC: :33 < and i dont know anything about classes or bases or blood color, it doesn't matter! AC: :33 < what does gr33n blood even mean! it doesnt mean anything to me and it shouldnt mean anything to anyone else!

This is a radical stance not outright shared by any of the other trolls. Aradia calls highbloods "hateful sn0bs" that she and Tavros shouldn't have "ever had anything t0 d0 with", the highbloods are, of course, all casteist to varying degrees, and even Karkat seems fairly accepting of the class divide, at one point taunting Vriska that her rejection from the blue team is "ANOTHER INFURIATING VICTORY FOR GUTTER BLOOD OVER ARISTOCRACY". Not to mention his long-held dream of becoming a threshecutioner.

Even Feferi, despite saying to Eridan that "W-E AR-E NOT B-ETT-ER T)(AN ANYBODY!!!!!", is actually perfectly comfortable with the caste system's existence, comparing having to stop using her royal typing quirk to "peasant-IFICATING" herself - and let's not forget that a Beforus under her rule had its caste system 100% intact.

This means that Nepeta is the ONLY troll who has said, in no uncertain terms, that the caste system should not exist. It's stupid, it's bad, and it doesn't meowtter!

AND SHE'S RIGHT.

But she's never able to fully express this opinion, which brings us to:

A COMPLICKATED RELATIONSHIP WITH EQUIUS

Now, before I say anything, I must insist that I do believe these two work as good moirails. That does not, however, stop them from being 13, and therefore, being poor to each other the way 13-year-olds sometimes are. I don't think they should break up; I think they should re-examine certain dynamics, and I think they need some space to breathe apart from each other.

Equius has a lot of problems, which I won't get into overmuch here, because... that's a whole essay on its own (are you people seeing a trend yet). But with regards to Nepeta specifically, he's extremely controlling and protective, to the point where she's a little scared of him before the game begins:

AC: :33 < well it does sound like it will be a lot of fun but i think i should get purrmission first GC: BL4R!!!!! GC: TH4TS SO STUP1D GC: H3S NOT TH3 BOSS OF YOU AC: :33 < i know! AC: :33 < but still im kind of scared of him and i think purrhaps its best to just run it by him first so there isnt a kerfuffle about it or anything

She's also afraid to tell him about her crush on Karkat, since she knows he doesn't like Karkat:

AC: :33 < well AC: :33 < i have never told anybody this not even my moirail AC: :33 < heh, actually hes the LAST guy i might tell, he so wouldnt appurrve X33 AC: :33 < but yes i have liked somebody for quite some time, but alas he doesnt know it

By the time they end their game, she's gotten over this fear, seeing as she spends many hours curled up with Equius in a pile of robotics parts, but it still must be noted that they have some issues in their relationship that were never resolved, primarily on Equius's end. What this means for Nepeta, however, is that in addition to setting her up as the most outright anti-classism troll, the comic sets her up to be socially isolated due to her moirail's paranoia about letting her associate with both lowbloods (seeing them as bad influences) OR other highbloods, seeing them as dangerous.

He's not entirely wrong - his refusal to allow her to participate in FLARP kept her from winding up entangled in the horrible chain of revenge, as Tavros alludes:

AT: iT'S PROBABLY FOR THE BEST, AT: tHAT YOU LISTEN TO HIM, AC: :33 < i dont know AC: :33 < you think so? AT: wELL, AT: iF YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO HIM BEFORE, AT: yOU MIGHT HAVE PLAYED GAMES WITH US BEFORE, AT: aND SOMETHING BAD MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO YOU, AC: :33 < hmm purrhaps

But he's still wrong. And it's probably an uncontrolled manifestation of his Heir of Void abilities - he's both consciously and unconsciously hiding her from other people.

This isn't to say she doesn't stand up for herself! Many of her discussions with Equius are pseudo-arguments, and she does get her way often enough, managing to get him to roleplay with her, and managing to get him back in the roboti% pile to talk about his feelings about Aradia. She also talks to the humans explicitly against Equius's orders, although she's keeping it a sneakret from him:

NEPETA: :33 < but equius already furbid me from doing that :(( NEPETA: :33 < not that i am listening to him, but shhhhh! :33 KARKAT: WAIT, HE DID? KARKAT: OK, THEN AS YOUR LEADER I ORDER YOU TO RP WITH THEM AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. BE AS OBNOXIOUS ABOUT IT AS YOU CAN. NEPETA: :33 < yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

But the fact that she has to tiptoe around him like this speaks to them having issues in their relationship that go unexamined and unresolved, especially since it's clear that Nepeta really would like to be friends with more people, were Equius not getting in her way. So, even though I do think they are good moirails for each other - they clearly genuinely, deeply care about one another. But they could use some relationship counselling.

In fact, Jasprosesprite^2 outright calls her lonely:

JASPROSESPRITE^2: Or the girl who likes ships! Cause they made her less lonely. ;3

So, she's anti-hemocaste and lonely, two character traits that were set up and never resolved. And beclaws this is Nepeta, in her honor, I'm going to talk about a third:

Her Unrequited Crush On Karcat

She has the BIGGEST flushed crush on Karkat. It's seen on her shipping wall twice, once with the word OTP on it.

And, despite never discussing it with her moirail, Nepeta mentions it once to Jaspersprite, and once to Jasprosesprite^2.

Now, I'm not really here to debate on the validity of KatNep - I think it's fine, even if I don't personally ship it, and don't personally think it would work out (there are lots of indications that they wouldn't work out, including Jasprosesprite^2 outright saying so). However, her crush on Karkat is both complicated and creates some interesting setups for her character. I am going to discuss it fairly critically either way, so KatNep shippers have been warned.

A lot of her feelings about Karkat - and about shipping in general - wind up being heavily interlinked with her status as a Hero of Heart, so I'm going to expand on it more there. But what I will note in this section is the fact that, despite Nepeta insisting twice that she doesn't think Karkat knows about her crush on her:

NEPETASPRITE: :33 < it was karkat NEPETASPRITE: :33 < but i never told him and im pretty sure he never found out how i felt!

He tooootally did:

KARKAT: OK, BUT TO BE FAIR, I'M PRETTY SURE SHE'S STILL OBSESSED WITH ME. KARKAT: IT'S A VERY UNFORTUNATE, VERY RED AND VERY UNREQUITED SITUATION I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TIPTOE AROUND FOR A LONG TIME, OK?

Interpret that how you will for shipping purposes, but I want to propose that this is a reflection of their statuses as Heart and Blood players. Heart, despite its players' obsessions with romance, is not the romance aspect, Blood is. Karkat displays this very same romantic acumen when he tells Dave that he's known Terezi and Gamzee were a thing for a long time, despite everyone else on the meteor trying to keep it a secret from him. Heart is, instead, about identity, feelings, motivations, souls, and self. In other words:

Nepeta Is Kind Of Bad At Shipping

Let's take a look at those shipping walls.

Let's break this down a little. Nepeta's ships are not entirely wrong, but even the successful ones are kind of wrong. Here's what I mean. We've already discussed how Equius and Nepeta's moirallegiance has some... issues in it. If we go down her list of ships that actually do happen, most of them have some issues in them!

Aradia expresses her regret for getting together with Equius in the Ministrife. Kanaya and Rose suffer some major relationship problems when Rose starts drinking, to the point Karkat feels a need to step in as an auspice. Karkat and Gamzee fail, as Karkat is not calmed by Gamzee, and Gamzee stops listening to Karkat. And while Sollux and Feferi seem to be fairly healthy, after they both wind up in the Furthest Ring, he's pretty much always next to Aradia - he and Feferi don't even get to exchange words with each other once they're in the Furthest Ring. Purrsonally, I think he and Feferi are meant to end up as moirails, but shhhh.

So what's happening here? Well, this goes back to her identity as a Heart player. Heart is concerned with feelings and motivations.

They simply want to understand the one thing we all are stuck with for our entire lives, i.e. our own minds. Forging an identity is extremely important to the Heart-bound, and every decision and action goes toward building a coherent narrative of their own story. That isn't to say Heart-bound don't care deeply for their friends and allies; they just have a tendency to assume that everyone is as concerned with identity as they are.

Nepeta's shipping has also been associated with her isolation and loneliness. When you put this together, it implies that Nepeta's shipping is about her desire to understand others, and much of her ships are based on one of the parties having feelings, regardless of compatibility, feasibility, or broader implications. After all, despite the fact that she has pretty terrible romantic acumen, she IS able to instinctively identify that Eridan's advances toward her were insincere:

NEPETASPRITE: :33 < well ok i guess eridan hit on me a few times NEPETASPRITE: :33 < but his advances always struck me as cr33py and insincere

And that Karkat secretly LOVES and RESPECTS his friends:

JASPROSESPRITE^2: On the contrary Nepeta. You deserve someone who will RESPECT and ADORE you. NEPETASPRITE: :33 < well... yes NEPETASPRITE: :33 < i always hoped to find someone like that some day NEPETASPRITE: :33 < i dunno maybe youre right but in spite of whatever problems he might have i always felt like i saw something in him that made me think he could be that purrson!

Or knowing that Equius loves to play games, and still feels sad about Aradia exploding:

AC: :33 < i s33 right through your stupid act, who are you trying to kid! AC: :33 < look how you go out of your way to use words that have x's in them so that you can use your silly purrcent signs AC: :33 < or use these absurd words that you can shoehorn a '100' into, even if its not strictly replacing 'loo'!!! AC: :33 < you are so transpurrent AC: :33 < i can tell you like to play games, d33p down you are a guy who likes to play games! AC: :33 < i can smell a guy who likes to play games from so fur away with this nose, you have no idea X33

NEPETA: :33 < she was so happy, just like she used to be, and she said she would s33 you soon! EQUIUS: D --> That's a nice thought, and thank you for sharing it EQUIUS: D --> But it was only a dream, and will surely have no consequence in reality NEPETA: :33 < equius? NEPETA: :33 < are those f33lings i an detecting with my wiggly whiskery nose? EQUIUS: D --> Maybe

Because feelings, and not relationships, are her actual domain.

And speaking of Heart powers...

Nepeta and the Ultimate Self

So from this point forward, I'm going to assume you're more or less agreeing with my take that at some point after Game Over, Hussie - for whatever reason - gave up on his original ending, and wound up truncating his ideas so he could finish the comic faster. I go more into detail about that here.

So, in this hypothetical original ending, I firmly believe that the speech about the Ultimate Self would have come from Nepeta. First, let's take a look at what the "Ultimate Self" entails, as it appears within the comic:

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < everything that ever happens to every version of you is an important part of your ultimate self... like a superceding bodyless and timeless persona that crosses the boundaries of paradox space and unlike god tiers or bubble ghosts or whatever, it really IS immortal DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < but in your physical form there are all these partitions in your mind that prevent you from remembering any of that which makes your existence f33l totally linear DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < which is probably for the best! DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < in a regular body s33ing all that would be too overwhelming ... DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < and after it sinks in for a while you start coming to this understanding of a greater self DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < maybe i "got it" quicker though because of the two people i was and their aspects DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < understanding heart is all about the nuances of a distributed self DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < nepeta never got to make much headway with her aspect but shes finally gettin the chance DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < the time aspect is all about running into different versions of yourself so you kinda get confronted with it in a really literal way that can be disturbing DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < obviously davesprite stuggled with that too, but now its fine DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < hes fr33 from worrying about it all and what it means for his place in reality DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < because he can s33 now all his selves have relevance in painting the full picture of who he truly is DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < im not COMPLETELY sure because im not like some sort of ASPECT MASTER but DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < my avian slash feline intuition tells me that all roads will lead you here eventually DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < gaining the d33pest possible understanding of any aspect will bring you to the same final conclusion about your ultimate self

Now, I believe - and I hope you'll agree - that it's kind of lame, narratively, for Davesprite to have been set up with so much angst about not being the "real Dave," and for Nepeta to have all her issues with loneliness and shyness, and for these two specific iterations of each other to have never interacted, but suddenly getting double-prototyped fixes all of their problems, and they achieve Ultimate Selfhood despite being two total strangers to each other. So let's instead break down the more salient points about what Ultimate Selfhood entails, divorced from the fact that it's Davepetasprite^2 doing the narrating:

Every player in the game possesses an "Ultimate Self," an ultimate culmination of all their experiences and memories, specifically referred to as a "persona"

Normally, people are not aware of this, because it would be too overwhelming to deal with so many memories and iterations of each other.

Everyone will achieve Ultimate Selfhood eventually as the final culmination of their understanding of their aspect.

Heart is all about the nuances of a distributed self.

Let's talk about that last one some more, and by that I mean, let's see what Calliope has to say about it:

TT: I don't know why it had to be this way for me. Juggling these two waking selves at once. TT: I guess I'm used to it, but it still makes for a pretty intense existence. TT: Do you even know what the deal with that is? Like is there any precedent in your readings? UU: i don't know aboUt precedent, bUt it makes plenty of sense to me as the type of path one might expect for a hero of heart. UU: a path rUled by the heart aspect can be a joUrney of splintered self. UU: that is, the player's being may exhibit the same kind of fragmentation which certain classes coUld caUse in others. UU: i think this is what has triggered yoUr dUal-awareness between waking and dream selves, thoUgh it woUld not sUrprise me if the symptoms manifested in even more ways than this.

Now, Dirk has a clawmplicated relationship with his alternate selves, given that he's a Prince, but Nepeta wouldn't have the same struggles, or at least, not to the same degree. The problem is, hampered by Equius and her own shyness about discussing her thoughts and feelings with others:

NEPETASPRITE: :33 < i get so shy and worried what people might think of me if i say how i f33l NEPETASPRITE: :33 < im always so scared that they wont f33l the same way or just think im stupid or pathetic or something

She never actually gets to explore this part of herself.

But What If... She Did?

The way I imagine the original ending going is that each troll that gets saved by John's interference in the timeline then asks John to help them fix their own mistakes, thereby saving somebody else. Each successive trip through the meteor brings new character development, and also riddles the comic with progressively more password pages, which I think would be really funny. And throughout all this the Game Over team is searching for Vriska, Meenah, and the treasure, and resolving their arcs that way, so it's not like they would be replaced - they're the ones who get to kill LE. The process, in my mind, goes like this:

Terezi asks John to save Vriska, and prevent her from getting too spades with Gamzee, as these are her two greatest regrets.

Vriska obviously had great regrets about killing Tavros, both pre- and post-retcon, so she asks for his death to be prevented.

Tavros staying alive means that he and Gamzee wind up hashing out some stuff - Gamzee mentions that he feels "So aT ChIlL WiTh yOu" while talking to Tavros, and Tavros reciprocates the friendship and also - interestingly - acknowledges Gamzee's religion, calling it beautiful even if he doesn't necessarily believe in it. This is interesting because Karkat's inability to do so is explicitly one of the reasons their moirallegiance broke down. So having Tavros back, alive, means that he and Gamzee would likely end up in some sort of relationship, probably pale despite flushed leanings, and would bring Gamzee back into the fold.

Gamzee would then be like, yeah, wow, that time I killed Nepeta and Equius was pretty bad, huh? Especially since his decision to hang onto his friends' bodies and prototype them is often interpreted as him genuinely feeling bad about his dead friends (he tells Kurloz to shut up when Kurloz mentions all the dead friends, and his religion seems to be about a paradise he wants to share with his friends anyway). So he'd ask John to prevent him from killing them, resulting in the two of them getting to live.

Things get much more hypothetical from here, since so much of the character dynamics would have changed, but I think by this point, Equius might command ask John to let him say goodbye to Aradiabot before she explodes, which he expresses feeling very sad about. However, in doing so, John and Aradiabot end up in the same room, and when she realizes that he has the ability to change the timeline without repercussions, she'd seize him by the arm and demand that he take her back in time, to before she died. After all, she expresses regrets about her reckless actions, and how she always felt like it was all one big setup.

She would take Aradia's place in the Vriska revenge chain, being once more freed of her robot chassis, and from there, would trick Doc Scratch and the Handmaiden into thinking everything was still going according to their designs. Meanwhile, Alive!Aradia would be hanging out at Equius's place, borrowing his void powers to avoid notice, coordinating a new timeline that keeps the beats of the original (too much deviation causes unpredictability, and an paradox'd timeline offshoot without John's direct interference would still become doomed), but allows them greater freedom and the ability to overcome the machinations of Doc Scratch and associates.

This would also prevent Sollux from becoming so self-loathing, since it's no longer "his fault" that Aradia dies, although he winds up in that hole again after Feferi gets killed. Now that his Aradia is alive, he wouldn't feel like he might as well stay in the bubbles because his closest companions are there, so he'd make it to the end, and would ask John to prevent Feferi's death.

Eridan still dies; he's so disconnected and isolated from all his friends that his course of actions is largely unaffected even by everybody else's timeline tweaks. But before Feferi can suggest bringing him back, Karkat would butt in.

The Friendship Troll should be the one to demand that ALL of their friends be revived, especially if they had everyone except only one guy, and Karkat and Eridan are heavily implied to be moirails anyway. The course of Karkat's fixes are so comprehensive, and primarily romance-based, that the end result of this final loop is everybody not only being alive, but god-tiered, with appropriate character development.

Now, where Nepeta's Heart powers would play into all of this is that she would start to notice something going on. After all, Heart players are sensitive to their splintered selves, and (Nepeta) is probably much closer to Nepeta than regular doomed timeline offshoots. As the loops continue, and Nepeta has more and more time to talk to people, and meets her dead alternate selves, and even meets (Nepeta), she starts to awaken to her Ultimate Self - to come into possession of alternate memories.

And if the Ultimate Self is a very soul-y kind of concept, such that Heart players have a natural advantage in coming to understand it, then isn't it a natural fit that a Rogue of Heart - one who steals from Heart or steals Heart for others - would be naturally inclined to share the wisdom of her alternate selves, and even the very concept of the Ultimate Self, with her friends?

Because the Ultimate Self is actually, in my opinion, a pretty good narrative device. It turns the sadness of the dead and doomed timelines into something littersweet instead, and makes it so any weirdness regarding time travel and not really knowing your friends anymore will eventually be resolved, even if off-screen.

It's not really narratively satisfying when Davepetasprite^2 suddenly comes into being and reaches enlightenment, but imagine if instead it's a post-character development Nepeta comforting Davesprite on his relevance, or Jade on her loneliness, or John on not really knowing these new post-retcon versions of his friends? It would feel a lot better, since in this hypothetical, she would have reached that point after on-screen character development. Being able to share her true self with her friends on the meteor - by necessity, since what else are they going to be doing for three years - leads to her finally being able to fulfill her role as a Rogue of Heart.

Also, at some point during these repeated meteor trips, she dates Karkat (whether that's successful or not, I'll leave to reader interpretation - you already know where I stand), fulfilling Jaspersprite's musing that she might only be able to date Karkat after she dies.

So that's two out of thr33 of her outstanding plot hooks resolved... okay. So, I try not to make these essays into ship propaganda, but hear me out:

Hate Is Stored In The FefNep

Okay, so, remember that thing about how Feferi is actually a huge casteist hypocrite? Well, let's also note that the comic, post-Murderstuck, seems to put Nepeta and Feferi together a lot - they're a Commodore and Rear Admiral in the ghost pirate army, respectively, and they also wind up as Fefetasprite. So I think it's not entirely out of left field to say that these two were implied to have SOMETHING going on.

And that something... is a difference in political views.

I mean, let's be real, there's a reason Fefetasprite is the most explode-prone after Tavrisprite. Miss "The Hemocaste is Stupid and Shouldn't Matter" vs. Miss "I Love Being A Princess And Call Jade Hornless and Finless (Derogatory)"? Come on, tell me you don't see it.

Without getting too much into Feferi, this hypocrisy, and unwillingness to check her privilege (so glad I found an excuse to use that term unironically), are probably her greatest character flaws - ie, the things you would expect the story to address about her. Meanwhile, one of Nepeta's flaws, which she laments to Jasproseprite^2, is that she feels too shy to talk about her feelings to other people, leading to her having never expressed her views on the hemocaste to anyone but Equius.

I think that they initially think they'd be friends. Each one of them would go "oh man, this other girl is soooo cute, I wish I could talk to her more often!"

And then, once they do, they realize they fucking hate each other. Nepeta would go "X00 < you are such a hypocrite who f33ls like youre better than all of us!!!" and Feferi would go "You're suc)( an uneducated glubbing P-EASANT! 3X0" and then they'd claw each others' eyes out. It would be so funny, and if a homestuck ship isn't extremely fucking funny, then why are we even here.

But more importantly, this would further them along into resolving each others' arcs - Feferi would be forced to grapple with the greater implications of classism, and Nepeta - who is shown having a spine the most in defiance of somebody else - would grow more aggressive about being open about her feelings in defiance of Feferi. Even Equius would get roped into it in a positive way - you can just imagine him going "D --> Can I really believe my auricular sponge clots D --> Nepeta, you are finally taking interest in politi%" and be 100% on board with teaching her so Feferi won't be able to call her uneducated.

And then for flushed, I dunno! Karkat's an option, and Jade and Jake also both love the fuck out of furries, and Tavros seems nice. But yeah I'll die on the fefnep hate ship. Guys it would be so funny.

Thank you as always for reading! Let me know if there's a troll you want to hear me ramble about next.

[works-of-heart]

why do you ship elucien? im not trying to be rude its just genuine curiosity. to me elriel seems to be obviously canon and the author is writing them in a way that you'd genuinely find in romance with a very common misunderstanding trope. there have been so many hints to elriel being canon such as Azriel's mother being from Rosehall and the rose Symbolism with Elain. Given that Elain has shown nothing but contempt for Lucien, I just can't wrap my mind around why people will ship elucien and not elriel which appears to me to be endgame.

I don't mean any hate. I just can't understand why people would set themselves up for failure shipping a noncanon/fanon couple. I see so much in this fandom over the shipwars and wonder why the wars even exist. If elriel is canoon why do eluciens fight so hard against it? shouldnt we all be adults and accept it instead of flinging insults back and forth to each other? Not saying that you are but I see so many people go back and forth with these insults and it gets so annoying i thought we were all adults here. either way i hope you have a good day

Hi Anon! I appreciate the question, and the chance to gush about why I love Elucien.

First, however, let me start by saying anyone can ship anything and anyone they please regardless of canon or endgame. Shipping comes from the heart, it’s a feeling. Many people think of possibilities that two characters could have, or see their chemistry and enjoy it. For others, it’s the angst and connections that they have. A common trope is enemies to lovers, and that doesn’t always start off with a lovey dovey spark, but the tension and angst.

I feel that a common belief in fandoms now these days are that ships are only valid if they are canon or not, or, even more so, if they are endgame. A ships validity isn’t based off any of these factors, but how you feel about them. Crackships can sometimes evolve from a joke or meme, but then people sit down and actually find they love the idea of them and go onto creating some really awesome things for the ship! Even if it started as a joke, some may derive joy from it.

So you ship Elriel (I am assuming by context) and I ship Elucien. At the end of the day, one of them will be canonically endgame, but that does not mean people can’t still ship them. I promise, no matter what the book ends up to be, people will STILL ship who they want to, and that’s totally fine. Shipping wars have existed forever, genuinely someone will argue that one pair is better suited than their counterpart. I can understand that Elain gave Azriel some charged looks, I can see that she wanted to kiss him, and I understand why some other Elriel shippers like them. To be honest, I’ve shipped many a brooding boy with the sweet, energetic girl. The biggest example is Jin and Xiaoyu from Tekken who finally, after 25 years of teasing and build up became canonical endgame. Then there is Squall and Selphie from FF8, who did not become endgame, but I still ship them and love them.

We can all debate why we think one will be endgame over the other, some can concede and at least understand why people feel that way, others will choose to agree to disagree and stick to their grounds. One of the things I, as an Elucien hate about it is when an Elriel will call me, or my fellow Eluciens delusional for shipping a mated pair. For not seeing that Sarah is setting us up for failure when she’s played this game before. Girl likes guy, girl thinks she’s found her home, girl finds another guy whom she avoids who happens to be her mate and fights against fate. Girl spends time with guy she avoided to realize he is her equal, that he is a good male, that together they are a good fit. Girl struggles with her feelings and eventually chooses her mate who lifts her up and the two are happy in love. To be called delusional for seeing such connections and ship a pair that the author herself mated is very annoying. You do not have to agree with me, that is fine, but it does not make my ship any less valid.

Now, as to WHY I like Elucien? There are just… WAY too many reasons to list them all and this would be dreadfully long if I list everything. So I’ll name some of my top reasons.

Lucien and Elain are both underestimated. People brush off Lucien as someone who isn’t a Highlord, nor illyrian, so obviously he’s not as strong as Rhys as the Inner Circle. Elain is constantly talked down as plain, simple, peaceful and uninteresting. We haven’t been able to see Elain use her seer powers since Lucien last tugged on the bond, and with Lucien’s hinted heritage, I think we’re going to see these two show off a different kind of power.

The tension! There’s so much tension between Lucien and Elain, tension that we don’t have a full picture of. It’s clear that Elain is fighting against the bond, and Lucien, the man who promised to never love another, is now faced with a mate he believes does not want him. He’s dealing with the guilt of Jesminda while Elain is avoiding the bond. When both are faced with what the mother gifted them, finding the reason why they’re mates will be an emotional journey!

Home. People say that Elain belongs in the NC with her family, she even stated it too. However SJM seems to be showing that Elain might be a bit like Feyre in the way Feyre once claimed the SC was her home. There was a line about how the big poofy dress looked ridiculous on Feyre and how at odds she was with the place she once called home, with a man she once said she loved and made love to. The context of the book tells us that Elain is not where she’s meant to be, in fact, it was said over and over she was made for spring, she’d love spring, and her mate is currently there. I think these two are going to realize home is not a place, it is a feeling they get when they’re together.

Their potential. SJM said that Elain surprised both Lucien AND herself! There had to have been something that she saw between them when writing MAF that made her say “Yes, Mate these two instantly! Not only that, make it snap now!” Seeing that Elain is a gentle soul and Lucien is someone whose a bit of a smart ass, I’d love to see these two together. Elain would be the type of person to put him in his place, and Lucien wouldn’t baby her either, unlike how everyone else treats her! Their dynamic would be a treat to see on page.

There’s so much more to say about them, and I could go on and on! We have tension, and the possible healing and growth that was hinted at, the fact Lucien ventured with Papa A. and Elain was closest to him. There’s also the fact that Elain holds hope, she is light and warmth and Lucien who seems so hopeless, could find that in her. Elain craves light and sunshine, Lucien being the heir of Day, to having a blinding white light himself. The way when Lucien interacts with her, her powers activate. Not to mention the similarities between Solas and Cthona, Crescent City deities who are mates and lovers.

So to answer Anon, there are many reasons I love Elucien, and I will continue to ship them long after the series is over. Whether or not they’re in love right now, before either of them have a book has no bearing on their validity as a ship, or their possibility in their book. I think you’d find it easier to just let people have their ships and enjoy what they wish in peace rather than trying to tell others they can or cannot ship based off what the books tell us right now. Because as we all know from ACOTAR and ACOMAF, it doesn’t matter who you love at the start, not when you find home with your mate.

[drenched-in-sunlight]

Your genuinely one of my favorite elden ring artists, what would you say is your favorite aspect of elden ring just in general

this might be a big revelation but i think my favourite part about Elden Ring is i... actually don't really like it until the DLC.

the way the base game presented a kinda basic and fragmented story, one i'd even say i were underwhelmed about. because i went in expecting Sekiro-level of character driven writing (they did promise that in an interview) and what i got... ehhhh. that's why my fanarts for the base game is literally just fluff pieces and shipping Malenia with another character altogether that isn't even in the game. meanwhile my AC6, Sekiro and Bloodborne art... i think you can tell i have a very deep emotional connection to those games from the kind of work im putting out for them. (hell, before the DLC i actually was thinking "well i'll probably only draw some general fanarts after the DLC then go back to draw more JJK stuffs lol" famous last words)

but holy mother of God the way the DLC completely blew everything tf up.

sorry Fromsoftware, i were not aware the Sekiro character-driven part is actually about the DLC. im sorry im still not familiar with your game yet 😭

(this turns into a mini rant so imma put it under cut OTL)

before, i were pretty "...." about Elden Ring female cast. i think Melina appears too little, i think NPCs like Fia and Roderika... i can't figure out the significance of them within the narrative at all. and it kinda upset me because it feels like they regress back to the helpless / fanservice maiden trope that was usually seen in DS franchise for no reason. i don't like how Rennala ends up as and i don't like not knowing why Radagon did that to her (which turns to me not liking the way it became a popular fanon that he actually loved her he was just bound by duty etc etc...i mean what?), i actually don't even really like how Malenia's barely-there story turns out (but that's a rant for another day).

as standalone characters, sure, i'd say they all have their own merits, but if they don't play any role within the narrative... what's the point then?

but all of that is because back then, we literally did not know what's Marika's deal either.

and so she became this cardboard that everyone pins all the crimes and bad things in the world on, which is... fine? makes sense. but the following line of reasoning that she did all that because she's just...like that drives me up the wall. if i want another "woman bad" story i'd just replay DS2 😭

and that line of thought also distance her from other characters in the game. those stories are not lining up, so we literally see no point in anything.

but by giving us Marika's story in the DLC they:

shine light on the possible division between two Numen factions (Anna & Jolan story + Sword of Light & Darkness // no one is left in Marika's home (those embraces Light/Gold/ Greater Will and its Stars children) vs the Numens in Eternal City (those embraces Dark/ Black Moon/ opposing GW and its children)

the discontent with the Moon and how there are those who will never accept it as being equal to the Stars

the other half situation

the Marika's eye colour possible reveal (link her to Roderika - Roderika as a reflection of the maiden Marika once was and probably still is deep down)

give Godwyn more agency in his ending (his personal knights are on a quest for Age of Duskborn) -> link Marika to Fia (Fia as a reflection of the mother Marika is)

draw direct parallel between Messmer - the child carrying Marika's vengeance for the past, to Melina - the child carrying Marika's hope for the future

Marika as a God full of human flaws >< Miquella as a God devoid of all human emotions. both are bad in different ways. but share a same gentle origin of a simple wish for a kinder world.

the DLC singlehandedly swipes clean every problem i have with the base game. like im actually in awe they managed to do that so efficiently 😭

all that is to say. my favourite aspect of all is truly how one's perspective of this one character could alter the entire story.

i still dislike the interpretation that Marika is cold and heartless or that's she's cruel for no reason, but at the same time, i can see how ppl viewing her that way affect how they see other events in the game. just like how my view of her changes my entire view of the story itself too. and i just love how the writers pull that off really skillfully. man. and i think that's sth so unique to videogame storytelling. it's amazing!

[thewertsearch]

Ask Comp 07/09

Anonymous asked: also, thats pretty distinctly not vriskas handwriting (page 2196). the hell is terezi even talking about?

Terezi, for god's sake.

@manorinthewoods asked: I'd like to note that Pyralspite's eyes are either an eighth the brightness of Alternia's sun, or Pyralspite has the ability to psychically burn out people's eyes just by wanting to. Probably the former. ~LOSS (30/8/24)

I should have guessed that Vriska's cruel and unusual punishment for Terezi was yet another case of Mindfang Roleplay.

I think it's likely that Pyralspite does have some sort of ocular ability. After all, Terezi's lusus had a vision-based power, and she's probably Pyralspite's direct descendant.

@gogogoat495 asked: Say, what do you think of the reuse/mix of animation and music from Dave: Ascend to Seer: Ascend? Is it a simple callback or are there deeper parallels between the characters and story beats?

Well, they are both lead-ups to a climactic fight between 'siblings'. Other than that, though, I'm not really sure. Dave and Terezi have always got on very well, but I can't really see any direct parallels in their personal arcs.

@manorinthewoods asked: Mindfang's classism is ridiculous. This woman straight up said 'one of such middling 8lood' about someone literally one step below her on the ladder. If she were Tavros, she would be oppressing Aradia so hard. ~LOSS (29/8/24)

In Terezi's own words, she's 'a little too teal' to be considered a true highblood. I think there's a hard line of separation here, where anyone below Vriska's caste is considered a midblood at best.

In other words: to be a blueblood, you really need to be a blue-blood.

@manorinthewoods asked: Nepeta, whose handle is arsenicCatnip, uses arsenic's atomic number as a significant element of her quirk. This implies that arsenic has the same atomic number in Alternia as on Earth, which in turn means that, at the very least, the two universes likely share a periodic table. Odd, given how one has widespread psychic abilities and the other doesn't. ~LOSS (29/8/24)

I think it makes sense that Earth inherited some of its scientific concepts from Alternia. It wouldn't be the first thing we inherited!

@heliotropopause asked: TG: maybe if you kill her at least we can finally stop obsessing over her Hah! homestuck's been over for over for almost eight years now, and people are still doing vriscourse to this day. There is no escape, i'm afraid.

'Vriscourse' is kind of killing me. I'm kind of disappointed that this is my first time hearing the term, because I'd probably have been using it this whole time.

@probablyapineapple asked: im not completely caught up on reading this liveblog yet (currently up to s67) but i think youre on track to understanding these characters better than literally anyone

Well, thank you! I have, admittedly, posted some rather hot takes in the past, though. If I recall correctly, my Act 5 shipping chart was my most controversial post to date.

@bladekindeyewear asked: Back during these times in the comic, there were broad theoryposting camps advocating for both narrower and broader interpretations of Aspect domains/powers. I know you're avoiding as much outside influence as you can, but I'm wondering if maybe after the end of this Act, you could accept some community Theorydiving from around this time that could unlock more tools for you to understand hidden evidence for Aspect Stuff you might have missed? […]

I'm definitely considering something like that. Specifically, I'd love to take a look at some of the comic's early theories - ones that had already been disproven by this point in the comic. That'll allow me to get into the headspace of Homestuck's earliest theorists, without influencing my own as-yet-unproved theories.

@manorinthewoods asked: Perhaps an older Legislacerator's job is less actually trying to pursue justice, and more going through cargo cult-esque rhythms of justice, taking its trappings and trying to bring it about while having no understanding of what they're actually doing and what the meaning of their actions is. Maybe, like the Subjugglators, they're an entire social class/blood color based around a single cult? ~LOSS (28/8/24)

I think Dave was pretty on the mark when he described early legislacerators as bounty hunters. Maybe they assumed something marginally closer to an attorney's role in Alternia's modern age - but in Redglare's era, the ideal legislacerator was a violent thrill-seeker, more concerned with bloody combat than courtroom paperwork.

@violetsquare111 asked: I do wonder how big, exactly, is the multiverse in Homestuck. I guess that's a bit of a weird question if there are "infinite universes"… but infinite potential doesn't mean infinite already-existing universes, does it? For some reason I always thought of the amount of Sburb sessions/universes being fairly small, in the grand scheme of things. Less than a million, maybe. I really don't know where I got that from, and there's probably some throwaway line in the comic contradicting it, but if applicable then it's another possible explanation for how Perfect Jack would be one-of-a-kind.

It's not impossible. That would imply that the overwhelming majority of sessions are doomed to fail - but, honestly, they might be! After all, neither of the sessions we've seen so far have been unambiguously successful.

@iris-in-the-dark-world asked: i had a dream that you went from page 3703 to page 7053 in one day

You dreamt of Sally on Adderall.

@spiddermen asked: hihi i just caught up with your liveblog and im so happy to have a chance to reread hs along with you, the first time i read it was when i was like… twelve? so nine years ago? and pretty much all of it went over my head. but now im finally getting to appreciate this masterpiece and your observations are making a lot of stuff click for me as well. so its cool to finally get to understand how freaking good this story is and i cant wait to see you react to some of the crazy later stuff also i hope this doesnt trip the spoiler sensor but some of the answers to the questions you're asking are only answered in sequel material so i do really hope you'll read those, they're ignored by a lot of the fans but they're honestly really really good and i feel like you're the kind of person who would get the intended experience out of them. and psycholonials as well! everyone ignores it but it practically is homestuck (2) to me

Thank you! And yeah, we've talked a bit about this before. Cat and I had a discussion about the subject back in Act 3, and I'm well aware that this comic isn't going to answer all of my questions. Honestly, it would be pretty surprising if it did - I've been digging really deep into aspects of the comic that are clearly just meant to be background details.

As for whether I'll be dipping into Hussie's other projects, or Homestuck's non-canon material - I'm certainly going to check them out, but only time will tell whether they get the full liveblogging treatment. That said, if it addresses questions of mine that Homestuck itself doesn't elaborate on, consider my interests piqued.

@manorinthewoods submitted: I sorta skimmed Homestuck, and missed out on basically all of the Flashes going through, so I totally missed the fact that WQ wrote a romantic fanfic about herself, which is really funny. It does have a serious aspect, though - it implies something about her relationship with WK, no? I suspect they may be friendly with one another, but fate gives their relationship a bit of tragedy - as well as a bit of 'we are simultaneously both forced to be in a romantic relationship and also only being co-rulers'. Is WQ<3WK a thing? Doesn't have to be. I suspect it may be something like WQ<>WK […]

Plus, Carapacians are clones, so it's not like the Royals need to make any heirs. Really, they only need to be co-workers - but the idea that they might have a moirail-adjacent relationship is very cute.

Anonymous asked: Grimdark Rose: "Vengeance and rage are all I live for now, seeing my dead mother makes me feel nothing, I will-" John: Exists Rose: "OMG bestie hiiiiii" ~DJ

First Vriska, now Rose. It seems like John's the perfect calming influence for any out-of-control Light Player.

Anonymous asked: Not sure if you noticed, the tapestries about the kids' quests are all referencing the [S] pages with misattributed quotes associated with each kid (pages 82, 307, 444, and 2988). The quotes are, respectively, from Maxims by Francois de La Rochefoucauld, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, Drop It Like It's Hot by Snoop Dogg, and possibly an original piece by Hussie ending with a line from Hamlet. I don't think any of them mean anything.

The quotes might not be Hussie originals, but they definitely seem to evoke the kids' respective Quests. Dave's quote is a bit of an exception, though...

Anonymous asked: "They wait for he who would drop it while it's hot whilst the pimp's in the crib." I mean, you laugh NOW, but knowing Andrew and this comic, can you honestly say this won't end up having an incredibly important and literal meaning? @walkerbehindyou asked: Is there a quest more suited for Dave than to show up at his denizen’s (certainly the pimp of LOHAC) palace in the past and drop straight fire?

...but perhaps that means it's foreshadowing something we haven't seen yet. If Dave ends up making a Choice, I wouldn't put it past him to rap an answer to his Denizen.

@iris-in-the-dark-world asked: the soundtrack of the grimdark rose segment really gets to me. i'd highly recommend the first few songs of that album

Black Rose/Green Sun was a great song. It evoked a very different feeling than anything we've heard before, and really highlighted how alien Rose has become, now that she's been fully submerged in darkness.

@manorinthewoods asked: Ooh, here's an idea - when you do the Sahlee-and-Sally Let's Play, set it in an alternate Sburb that's based on all of your incorrect theories. Every Land has a God Tier Moon orbiting it, for instance. Would be really cool - your theoretical Sburb has a lot of super fun stuff in it. ~LOSS (12/8/24)

Oh, I like that idea. It means I can finally bring back the anti-Skaia, which is probably my favourite since-disproven theory.

Anonymous asked: I never realised that the pillow that Rose uses then is the one from her mum - well spotted :,(

A mother will do whatever is best for her children.

And a daughter will remember what was best about her mother.

Anonymous asked: So. Do you think that a Horrorterror-Boosted Rose has any chance against a First Guardian Prototyped Jack Noir? We've seen that if left alone Jack can destroy Entire Worlds and his teleporting is Nigh Instant, plus who knows how far he can go in a single teleport! […]

Dark Rose is arguably a God-Tier level threat, but we've just seen Jack one-shot a God Tier. I don't think she has a hope - there's only so many bullet-time stabbings she can take!

Anonymous asked: its really interesting to see you say that rose saying she felt mom was a sister and a mother at once made u feel like there must have been camraderie. for me, it reinforced the idea that moms parenting forced rose to act like a peer to mom when it came to her alcoholism? in the sense that moms alcoholism took her out of commission, and made it so that rose had to take care of herself in a lot of ways that a parent would, putting them on similar levels. So its interesting to see a different interpretation!

It's not impossible. To me, Rose's monologue reads as if she's trying to express her admiration of her mother. This is the first time she's admitted to having positive feelings for her guardian, and I think she's regretting that she never voiced these feelings to the woman herself, before it was too late.

That's just one reading of her words, though. I think her monologue here is meant to be ambiguous, just like the Lalonde mother-daughter relationship always was.

@manorinthewoods asked: Ooh, you're thinking of a Carapacian player, huh? That would be interesting - imagine if they go in with, like, complete knowledge of how Sburb works, so they prototype something super strong in order to buff the Ring that they then steal and equip. ~LOSS (12/8/24)

That would be interesting. Carapacians are the only species where the game can't fully compensate for the power of your race by buffing Underlings, since buffing the Underlings would also buff the Ring I'm abusing!

@skelekingfeddy asked: re: troll romance: i generally lean towards xenopsychology, mixed in with a secret 4th thing (humans can also feel troll romance), with a little dose of propaganda, and also an undercurrent of parody (because Hussie. everything has an undercurrent of parody (e.g. pretty much all the trolls are based on internet stereotypes). i COMPLETELY disagree with the notion that the quadrants are made up unhealthy bullshit. i think theres a genuine evolutionary biological origin for the quadrants if matespritship is all about Companionship, then kismesissitude is all about Competition, Rivalry, a drive to push yourself and make yourself better. both are generally healthy and beneficial in their own ways. the evolutionary basis for moirallegiance and auspisticism is the need for pacification, a better half, to prop up matespritships and kismesissitudes and keep them from being interfered with (as described in-comic). each quadrant is the result of a genuine primal, biological urge

I don't necessarily think the quadrants are fabricated, but I do think that the version of them that exists on Alternia are unhealthy more often than not, particularly when it comes to black romance. Monogamous auspisticism requires an overwhelming amount of emotional labor, all the kismesissitudes we've seen have been toxic at best, and there has to be a better way to do this.

Anonymous asked: My brother's been going through your liveblog recently and it's been fun getting to re-experience it through him, especially being reminded of all the theories you have that are shockingly accurate in very inaccurate ways. The two that come to mind are your theory that Jade was engineered in a lab (which, she kinda was, but that's not unique to her) and that John's version of Sburb is bugged (the meteors, it turns out, were a part of the game as it's meant to be played, but this whole 'tumour' thing sure isn't). Also, while I'm here, going to recommend checking out Temporal Shenanigans by Rachel Rose Mitchell, which is a gorgeous fansong about Aradia that shouldn't have any spoilsies at this point. I would also rec PhemieC's music with the caveat that many of their songs are spoilery - while most of the troll-specific ones should be alright, I'd definitely say to get someone else to go through them first to be certain. Hope you're doing well!! And I look forward to seeing more of your liveblog if and when you return to it! -Megido

Oh yeah, I was talking about how Jade was made in a lab! I'd totally forgotten about that theory.

You know, her Dreambot is actually interesting in retrospect. The bed that controls it looks suspiciously like a Quest Bed, which makes me wonder just how much Grandpa knew about Sburb's lore, and what exactly he was trying to do here.

Anonymous asked: I find it a bit funny (in good way) how aspects of your troll and human sona are kinda opposites, like life and death type of thing, sweet

Really, it's mostly just me hedging on my own Aspect. Plus, having two 'sonas lets me explore twice as much Sburb lore, allowing me to come up with two weapons, Lands, Title powers, and the like.

Within the hypothetical context of the fic, I've been thinking a lot about why there'd be two Sallys. Like, was one 'sona partially cloned from the other? If so, who was the original? Technically, the Alternian version would have existed 'first', but the existence of time travel ensures that that doesn't mean much.

@manorinthewoods asked: Rather appropriate that Rose's weapon is her Thorns. ~LOSS (10/8/24)

Ayyy!

@ipunchvampires asked: "You should understand [Rose has] been corrupted by various entities with some rather questionable motives," says Entity with Rather Questionable Motives corrupting her. Kind of the perfect Doc Scratch line, honestly.

Doc Scratch is an awful person, but he's still a funny fuck.

@heliotropopause asked: wait. is that *Guybrush Threepwood* in the boat there??? @elkian asked: At the risk of being the 88th person to say something, the troll in the dinghy is a Guybrush Threepwood cameo (using the more cartoony style from Curse Of Monkey Island etc.). Man's truly unfortunate, or maybe he's lucky for not being a focal character? XD Anonymous asked: that 'one random motherfucker on a little dinghy' is in fact, guybrush threepwood from the monkey island series, thrown in as an easter egg by one of the artists who made assets for the flash @sanctferum asked: the troll on the dinghy is Troll Gybrush Threepwood. the guest artist for that scene confirmed this on the now-defunct MSPA forums IIRC

Ahahaha. Mystery solved, I guess!

I've been wanting to play Monkey Island for some time - and now I need to, so that I can understand the true backstory of of GY'BRSH TRPWUD.

Anonymous asked: I love this section, because I think it really shows something about Dave (and Rose). Because Dave just says whatever pops into his head, when he's getting command prompts, he just repeats them uncritically. (That also supports that when he said he didn't love his Bro, it was his honest reaction) @ben-guy asked: David "Zero Filter" Strider was absolutely not ready to have thoughts beamed directly into his head by an exile lmao @krixwell asked: It's so funny to me how when thoughts are incepted into Dave's subconscious mind, they just come falling right back out his mouth at the first opportunity. Filter, what filter? Those sunglasses don't hide shit.

Reminds me of his stress-rambles from early on in the comic. The reason he wears those shades is, I think, because he is a naturally expressive person - he just doesn't want to be.

[peaterookie]

Lupin Week 2024 Day 4: AUs and Mythology

Goemon's face looks like he's seen a ghost.

ahhhh god ok my stupid stupid silly au i made a year ago.... this will be a bit long so get ready

tldr: lupin died, the gang is alive. goemon finds lupin but he's a shark merman!? and lupin remembers nothing!!!

long version:

so this AU follows upon the story of shin lupin, which basically, the gang gets killed off by zenigata because he rigged an island full of explosives.

instead of them all dying however, lupin decides to knock the gang unconscious and find a way for them to escape off the island safely, leaving only him in the island to die.

the rest of the gang had no idea how they escaped and assumed that lupin had sacrificed himself for them. they woke up adrifted on the ocean until they eventually got picked up by a ship where the invisible captain from new adventures returns. but ah ill spare the details for another day

---

2 years have passed and the gang just kinda separated to do their own thing. we'll only focus on goemon cuz he's the featured character of this comic.

goemon decided to escape the life of crime that has burdened him for years living as a part of the lupgang. he's mostly a wanderer now and tries to do good and help people along the way

funnily enough, goemon is not the first person to find lupin, but I'll talk about this later. but goemon is definitely very mixed about seeing his friend who he thought was dead for years. he doesn't know whether to be happy or worried.

---

lupin, at the brink of death after the explosion, plummets down the ocean and wakes up one day, feeling like he's been rebirthed!

essentially, lupin became a merman because right before he could die, his body (i mean what's left of it 💀) interacted with a magic crystal that has the ability to grant life to a living being.

It's really rare, but it exists in clusters deep in the ocean floor or- deep under the rocks of an island :) you can say im bullshitting, which i am but i dont think exploding an entire island down to every rock has happened before, so it can kinda make sense why something so coincidental about these crystals could happen. (I AM TOTALLY MAKING EXCUSES I JUST WANTED TO MAKE LUPIN A MERMAN.)

and so these crystals used whats left of lupins body and reassembled him back, and idk other essences of the ocean to make him a merman!

the memories of his past life have definitely been buried deep inside his brain to the point he can't remember any of it though, so he thinks that he was born under the ocean and has lived there for his entire life. other than that he retains almost everything about himself, down to stealing stupid shit and messing with humans just for the fucks of it. he's kinda seen as like a nessie.

---

anyways, y'know how i said goemon wasn't the first one to meet lupin? that's because lupin has met zenigata before!

living a life with only fishes around means lupin's kinda lonely and likes to stalk humans sometimes. the interaction with him and zenigata did not end well though, and lupin has no idea why zeni wants him dead so much.

after that he's way more cautious around people that look like zenigata- hatted big men with guns. its gonna be fun once he sees jigen.

ok what else... i think that's all i want to reveal now. will i do more of this? maybe. maybe not. kinda embarrassed of this because of how silly it is but i hope you people find this interesting! byebye

[astro-eats]

Any reason why you ship Gangle x Zooble?

( i also ship them ) 🥺❤

TYSM FOR ASKING AHEM

1- They would just work together (I love the ship dynamic so much!!!)

2- They would comfort each other like when zooble hates themselves she would say cute stuff and tell them how amazing they are

3- Zooble would gladly kill Jax for her <3

4- they would stand up for her when she's too scared too

5- Both have fragile bodies so they could relate to eachother

6- I feel like zooble would have physical affection unless it was from her

7- They would hang out often and yap about their hatred for jax

8- yapper x listener?! <3

9- Cuties are my favorite characters <3 fav character x fav character hits different

10- They're so different from each other which is cuteee

11- I feel like Gangle would dream about them often :3

12- Its really funny imagining Gangle begging zooble to go on an adventure

13- Caine would pick up on their closeness and use it to his advantage (ex: Telling zooble if they went on the adventure they could pair with gangle)

14- Cute weeb probably obsessed with sanrio and cute things X punk baddie who never really thought about that stuff until they met her

15- Zooble would also probably think of her whenever they see any cute stuff

16- Gangle would help them find parts they like

17- zooble would help Gangle fix her mask often

18- date where they murder jax <3

19- Zooble would try their best to comfort Gangle

20- I feel like they would both have mood swings (Zooble wouldn't have them as bad as gangle tho duh)

21- Their ship name is literally abstragedy its meant to be

22- Zooble would try to protect her from jax

23- They're just drawn to each other cuz they're soulmates

24- I cant remember if this was a dream or not but gooseworx posted a photo of her liked posts and one of them was zooble and Gangle hugging?! (Don't take my word for it tho I have bad memory But im pretty sure it did happen)

25- "Gangles too shy to say anything about it.." HOW CAN YOU HEAR THAT AND NOT SEE THE LOVE IN THEIR DIFFERENTLY SIZED EYES?!

26- "What about zooble..?" Not her being the only one who cared? Not her loving them and wanting to marry them?

27- also her wanting to save them but kinger won lol imagine STOP ABSTRAGEDY COMMUNITY WOUKD BE GOING CRAZY IF GANGLE WON ROCK PAPER SCISSORS SOMEHOW AND SAVED THEM

28- The christmas promo where zooble gave her a new mask?!

29- Gangle probably is obsessed a little

30- Zooble makes her feel like shes cared about and that she matters <3

31- I want coleslaw

32- Zooble has a lot of knowledge about animes Gangle likes because she's a yapper like that probably

33- Uh not zooble putting their hands near their heart and looking more relaxed when they talk about her? The love is showing they can't even hide it

34- Gangles probably a scaredy cat so she would run to zooble when something scares her

35- Zooble would actually take time to get to know her which makes her feel loved

36- Zooble would be so confused and like idk about their own emotions because they've never felt this way for anyone else

37- Gangle would be very concerned about how they feel about stuff which no one has really cared about that before

38- They would hide their relationship from Jax to avoid getting teased and stuff

39- Gangle would be such an idiot around them when she first realized she liked them cuz she was nervous

40- zooble thought it was cute and silly when she did

41- Its true love you can't deny we all saw the look in their eyes when talking about Gangle and also the way they glanced at her while saying they aren't straight?! Why would they look at her while talking about their gayness IF THEY DIDNT LIKE HER?! @starspangledbatter Im pretty sure is the one who pointed that out <3

42- We might get more abstragedy crumbs as the show progresses hopefully

43- They've been in the same shot like 3 whole times :0

44- Ignore the fact they called her an idiot that's irrelevant

45- Wait imagine them calling her an idiot in an endearing way :0

46- I'm literally listening to an abstragedy playlist rn its just in my blood to love abstragedy (I do have to admit, in the first month I didn't ship abstragedy... I shipped ribbun..... BUT WE DONT TALK ABOUT THAT ANYMORE!!! IT WAS A PHASE!!)

47- I headcanon gangle going to zoobles room in the middle of the night when she can't sleep <3

48- Gangle would be a listener when she needs to be

49- Zooble would help her get out of bad situations

50- She would hug them like a snake

51- They would constantly glance at eachother then look away really fast before they started dating probably

Anywayssss this took way too long- But heres 50 abstragedy stuff!!!!

[pjsk-headcanons]

PINNED!!!!

Headcanon submissions are currently closed.

other things are alright tho just no headcanons since i rlly need to clean up the inbox kndlsjd

hi! i thought a blog like this would be fun. i was inspired by @/projectsekaitakes.

layout by @vividly-idol-archives here

blog run by @vbs-kaitos-big-naturals

you can submit through asks!

(apologies in advance if i ever misinterpret something you tell me, im either distracted or very tired while queueing thingswww. you can tell me in asks or messages if i get something wrong!)

Rules:

You are not allowed to have more than 5 headcanons in the queue. dont feel too stressed or guilty about this, its not really a big deal. if you lose track, just wait about a day and you should be fine.

You are not allowed to complain or hate on the headcanons in the replies or reblogs. you are, however, allowed to give your own.

I. e., "Honami can't stand the smell of car exhaust." can have people in the replies saying, "i always thought she would hate the smell of lemons"

You are not allowed to submit headcanons exclusively about gender/sexuality/romanticism. those can get oversaturated really quickly, so to avoid it ive decided to not allow them, sorry. you can send shit like "akito is a little whore slut babygirl" and I'll probably post that since it doesnt really have to do with actual identity or orientation.

Don't misgender Mizuki or erase her representation.

No sexual headcanons. sorry! I'm okay with that stuff, but im also aware that many people aren't so let's not do that here! again, more jokey submissions are okay (read: akito is a little whore slut babygirl) since that isnt really explicit but I'd rather not do anything past that.

No asks that perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

No use of the word "Latinx". you can use latine or latino instead!

AU headcanons are allowed! in fact, i would love them! all i ask is you make a lil note about it before the actual headcanon so people have Context

please notify me if i don't tag something correctly! I'll try to add trigger warnings for everything but i might make mistakes!

if a hc includes a ship, I'll tag that ship. i may tag a group of two or more characters that dont have a name (i.e. shinonome siblings, white day trio, etc.) with "[ship name] hc" (looks at akian) but ill only tag things with the actual ship tag if the characters are explicitly stated to be something other than friends

if submissions get repetitive or follow the same topic/character a lot, i wont queue them and wait until it dies down to put it in the queue. i won't ever delete an ask unless it breaks a rule above!

in the tags of the post, i, blog runner, will share my thoughts on the headcanon. i wont be negative, i promise!

[note: the tag for kohane headcanons is #kohampster hc]

most of all, have fun! that's what fandom is about!

[nyapollo]

here's a hot take: as a buddie fan, I don't hate tommy kinard and the intense hatred towards him honestly kinda annoys me

was i rooting for tommy x buck to be endgame? absolutely not. but i didnt hate the guy

i understand the tommy hatred in the lens of his past racism because. that was for sure... odd! and although i can say, "well, hen & chim clearly forgave him for allat and if he hadn't changed then there would have been more backlash to eddie & buck casually hanging out with him," i feel like that's not the major reason most buddie fans hate him.

this is, again, repeating the cycle of having a favorite MLM ship being "broken up" by a love interest of one of the guys, causing massive fandom hatred. but, of course, they can't hate someone for no reason, so they nitpick every line that the character has said and try to find something slightly off that is at least *a* reason to hate them.

at the end of the day, i could really care less if somebody hates tommy. i mean, yeah, im writing a whole tumblr post about it right now, but this isn't going to effect my life in a major way. the biggest thing that actually bothers me is that a lot of tommy haters are just straight up calling lou ferrigno jr ugly (but in very mean ways).

i haven't seen it on tumblr as much as i have tiktok, but my personal favorite (its not) is them calling him a dinosaur. this is where it crosses the line for me. is it likely that lou ferrigno jr will see these tiktoks and be sad? No. but this contributes to a problem that i see so incredibly often, which is: people don't understand how to seperate the actor from the character, and see actors as nothing more than people on their screen rather than real human beings.

actors are real human beings. even though they probably won't see your post about how you think they're ugly as shit, other people will. maybe other people who have the features that you are calling ugly as shit. i also just think its incredibly inhumane to start nitpicking every single little thing about one person because you don't like the character they play on tv.

hate tommy kinard *as a character* all you want, it doesn't hurt anyone. what DOES hurt people is when you start critiquing people's looks and calling them ugly. i really didn't think i had to say this out loud, because i thought everyone had come to a consensus on this but.. i guess not!

tldr: as a buddie shipper, i never really liked tevan as a ship, but i hate the constant hate on tommy kinard because it goes back to the era of "hating every female love interest that gets in the way of your gay ship" and additionally, people not being able to seperate the character from the actor.

[cherries-in-wine]

SPOILER WARNING FOR AOT JUST SOME OF MY RAMBLES

English is not my first language please don't be mean okay thank you <3

honestly I didn't hate eremika as much as I thought I would- both of them are emotionally immature idiots who feel a lot but have no idea how to deal with said feelings. their relationship is definitely a lot of wasted potential but idk they are cute in their own imperfect and somewhat uneasy way. was that ending scene weird definetly but like eh gothic romance fan I've read and seen much worse things and called it peak romance so it's like weird but like okay also im very drunk slightly tipsy and I just finished aot just cuz I wanted to feel something and man I feel a lot of things also I think there might be a cultural difference too because in the west it's all like gulululu sloppy kiss gulululu fucking and like I grew up with old Bollywood romance where mfs don't even kiss so stolen glances and flushed cheeks and "ill always wrap your scarf over and over again" means wayyyy more than an infinite number of kisses. I get why people don't like it but yea I like them they are so fucking embarrassing and stupid. Eren's randi rona (hindi phrase exact translation is whore crying but semantics is probably bitch whining) was so funny and pathetic i've never laughed so hard but it is embarrassing in a way that makes so much sense for this suicidal maniac. I thought I would hate mikasa because I linger in the subreddits because social media kalesh and lafda is something I feed off of like a vampire sucking blood after escaping the coffin that held them for centuries (kalesh/lafda is hindi for fights) anyways so silly goofy fun idk what y'all are on about she's so kool not really a Mary Sue because she sucks at emotional intelligence and as a leader like definitely too driven by feelings but tbh I love that about her and her bond with other characters is so precious to me. I get why she's unlikable she is so flawed but idk I love her. the fanfic writers are so mean to her like oh my god why is she always this weird obsessed stalker that gets in the way of eren and y/n and historia is always someone y/n is insanely jealous of like please why can't we all be best friends and braid each other's hair

A little something about erehisu too- tbh I don't think its obsessive desperate fan behaviour like it's a very good ship imo. I have mixed feelings about it but idk lowkey makes sense. not in a "these people are great for each other and will be so cute as more than friends" way but more like a "oh wow they have a lot going on, they are good friends and the people they love are people they can't be with so it would make sense if they both are emotionally vulnerable enough that they end up doing something" kinda way. would've definitely made it more interesting because I thought sidelining a character like historia who had so much potential would hopefully have a bigger meaning and some greater part of Eren's plan but no bro is an idiot who has no idea what he is doing.

Mixed feelings about historia too- I liked her arc but the amount of plot armour that surrounds her kinda pisses me off. also the irl jaegerists and incels on reddit are so annoying they've made her into chaderen loser's trad wife who sits at home with the baby and shakes her head with a disapproving pout when he returns home after genocide like I know for a fact canon historia would be disgusted by this narrative. also oh my god the lengths these people go to prove that her relationship with Ymir was just a one sided obsession and not a lesbian romance is insane. like yea historia doesn't have to be lesbian she could be bi but that relationship was definitely mutual and romantic

I have sooo much more to say maybe when im sober ill organise everything and make it pretty but im in my senior year of high school with like no time on my hands so idk will see please stick with me but always thank u for reading meri jaan have a lovely day/night :))

[angstflavoured]

You have any fic recommendations? Any fandom really lol. You have good takes and interpretation so I feel like you’d have some fire recs

AWH WELL THANK YOU !! I dont actually know how great the ones I read are gonna be since usually the fandoms Im in are scarce on content 💀 but ill go ahead and list a bunch of the ones I really like. I definitely spend way too much of my time reading one shots. REALLY wanna get back into longer fics, but its hard to find ones I care enough to sit down and dedicate time to these days 💔

Smiling Friends

bittersuite, charlie/pim: AND THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED !!!!! THIS FIC CHANGED MY LIFE FOREVER !!!!! It is hurt/no comfort, but its soooo good it hurts so good and also there is supposed to be more eventually so i'd get on this one first bc when the second one drops its gonna be a day in history

Dimples, charlie/pim: I just read this last night and was so pleasantly surprised ☹️ Its so damn cute and I love how it delves more into both of their characters.

Portal 2

interface, chell/wheatley: HANDS down, best portal 2 one shot out there. the way the characterize chell is fucking insane, altered my brain chemistry forever. also wheatley is so hehehheheheh

You Do It, adventure/fact: I have a very love/hate relationship with this author..... Im not the BIGGEST fan of how they characterize them, esp Fact, but its definitely the most decent factventure content out there. I so like this one quite a bit, though their ideas are definitely better in theory than completely in practice. That's how I feel abt a lot of their works, but this person unironically holds the title for like 90% of the factventure content. If you just want some quick cute smut of them, i'd say you should check out their acc, cus I get the factventure fandom is starving LMAOO

I've got the fuse if you've got the light, adventure core/reader: ....erm, very self indulgent for me hehe!!! i was so fucking excited when this dropped

Half-Life/HLVRAI

Autonomous Sweet Mesa Response, benrey/gordon: THIS FIC IS SOOO FUCKING FIREEEEE !!! OH MY GOD, I can't even count the times I've read this one. their dialogue is as good as it comes next to canon. If you like this one, this is the first in a huge series and litearlly all of them are just as good as the first. such a good sit down and binge author. They also have a shit ton of other good hlvrai stuff on their page and they make fire art

If You Asked Me To, benrey/gordon: the way they wrote the sex scene in this changed my brain forever, it was so fucking awesome.... frenrey dynamic makes me WILD

Whispers and Moans, barney/gordon: this whole author has a lot of super cute freehoun :'[ this one deals with them before the resonance cascade AND after and shows how things changed between them and its so precious grrraah

Promise, barney/gordon: again, deals with the timeskip stuff which just always makes my heart hurt... also shower sex smiles

It’s Only Natural, barney/gordon: I DIDNT REALIZE THIS FIC JUST GOT FINISHED THIS YEAR OH MY GODDDD I WAS OBSESSED WITH THIS need to reread this immediately

Team Fortress 2

He's a Rebel, sniper/spy: SUPER fucking cheesy and corny but oh my god its like one of my fav fics ever..... it's just so much fun, like stereotypical fanfic and that's always a good time to me. biker gang member/school teacher au are you fucking kidding me i'll vomit

It IS the Size That Matters, sniper/spy: erm.... BLOWJOBS!! always find myself coming back to this one sorry i really like it hehe

Secure, demo/solider: Not a lot of fics of these guys, which really sucks!! super underrated ship. I liked this one a lot tho, its pretty cute and a little emotional

Something to Rely On, sniper/spy: casual sex but really sniper is in love will forever be my favourite thing ever, it never gets old istg

The Silent Game, sniper/spy: can you tell I really like sniperspy, MORE BLOWJOBS!!!

Disco Elysium

The Collision in Cardiozone HQ, harry/kim: holy. fucking. shit. actually life changing i am not joking. so fucking heartbreaking, it left me hollowed out for like a WEEK after the ending. A longer one for sure, but SO worth it like oh my god

The Catacomb Killer, harry/kim: I don't think I ever fully finished this one, but I remember REALLY liking the whole case the fic was set around. there was so much thought put into it, it was genuinely interesting like a murder mystery show

Retour à nouveau, harry/kim: I did really like the whole plot and buildup in this one, but from what I remember, them getting together was super anticlimatic :P i recall being disappointed, but the whole actual case and their interactions during the fic are super cute

Mortal Kombat 1

the game of idiocy, johnny/kenshi: BY THE SAME AUTHOR AS BITTERSUITE!! this one is sooo fucking cute, the way they write them interacting is so much fun. a little troupey and on the cheesier side, but cmon who doesn't love that

Undertale

Flowey is Not a Good Life Coach: no ships but delves a lot into flowey and papyrus relationship and there's so much good sans development too. SUPER GENERIC, it IS one of the most liked fics, but I remember reading it back when I was a teenager and it blew my fucking mind. ghhghggh i love the way they write the brothers interacting so much

The Party Incident and Other Embarrassing Anecdotes, sans/reader: uhmm.... soo sorry, this fic will forever hold a special little place in my heart. I'm sure if I read it now it would be SO corny cus oh my god it was fucking 2016 like are you kidding, but I'm just a fucking sucker for fake dating. there like 5000000 troupes in this one and theyre all so cute and its just a fun and silly time. it subconsciously inspires so much of my writing in fics. will probably forever be unfinished before they get together though HAHAH so definitely do not read if you're looking for a solid ending. its just about the journey i swear

[jams-sims]

I wrote a whole ass essay for Philza now Im gonna do it for Jaiden. In defense of the lack of content with Jaiden in it (real quick). Being an old goat of fandoms I can explain it (don't worry this won't take long and also it plays into her character's overarching narrative of a grieving mother.) Plain in simple women in Minecraft are notorious for getting shit on by the collective fandom. (Everyone has to take part in making sure that it stops happening.) She is mainly a YouTuber which makes a dissonance between mainly youtube viewers and Twitch watchers. So it's harder to catch her just because you have to go to another site. Also, she doesn't stream as often as everyone else. This makes for a lack of content, just because Jaiden is just a low-key person. This is the recipes for a lack of content BUT that does not excuse people who are being weird to her or think she's in the way of any ships etc etc.

BUT

Narratively speaking all of those things above make for perfect storytelling. (below the cut I go deep into Jaiden character I mean I go DEEP)

Even though Jaiden has the support of the whole island. At the end of the day- she goes back to that same house. Climbs to the very top and she fall asleep on the chair facing the sunset. This means that everyone else has moved on, especially Roier. She is forever stuck in that same place.

I can't be the only one who noticed every single stream, she logs out at the house. BY HERSELF (I think Roier built? Someone corrects me if I'm wrong.) It's so subtle that you wouldn't even notice it at first.

When asked where she was living by Etolies. She doesnt say her and roier house, she doesn't even say where bobby use to live. She specifically says " I am squating in Roier old house". She puts herself on the outskirts of what is further from the truth. Shes not squating in roier house im 100% sure Roier shares everything with her. It is her home too!

Next when it came to the marriage between cellbit and Roier. She was surprised that she was even invite. Its as if as soon as Bobby died all her friendships and relationships died with him. No matter how many people are around her she has this ice wall of isolation and deep lonely-ness.

Her grieiving is less theratical than Charlies its so sudtle that you can miss it. While Roier throw himself into drink and into a relationship. (Which has admitedly worked out in his favor. He gets a husband a new son, a world of love. Something that can lessen the sting of Bobbys death.)

Jaiden on the other hand threw herself into a a impossible task, "protect the eggs." She doesn't know anything about any group or fractions. That is her only wish and the federation saw that and picked her to use. She has nothing everyone else has seemingly moved on of course. They haven't stopped investigating but they death of Bobby mostly everyone has moved on. Besides Jaiden this is her driving force so no one will suffer like she did. (on a side note her and Charlie should team up for lore and to both work for the federations.)

ITS PREFECT! Oh are you greiving has everyone else seemingly moved on? Your friendly neighborhood bear has a book full of instructions. Don't think, I'll guide you.

Before it fell apart the federation was going to secretly use Jaiden and she was going to do everything alone. But because Jaiden can't keep a secret to save her life. This leads to everyone realizing how at risk Jaiden is at being used. They are all with her in an instant. But part of her character is now that she sides with the Fedration and no one sees it yet. While everyone else think they are the bad guy. Her story is shifting because cucurucho is there, because cucurucho is nice to her, because Jaiden is cucurucho favorite.

She is being drawn in whether she knows it or not to be om their side. Think of it this way-

Fit is team: Spy thats off the island

Cellbit and Crew are team: AntiFederation

Jaiden the one that is left alone is the perfect choice to slowly pull her onto the federation side. It's perfect! The self isolation, the want to connect but feeling like she can't. It would be so easy for someone to take advantage of that.

[bitchimasnake-sss]

At this point, I'm just stalking your page! Like I've said before- MASTERPIECES ~

So, if you see me spamming your notifications. I'm just coming in and liking all the posts, now you know why!

But I do have a request for you for the monster trio. Could you write one where the reader talks so much about her family to them, like they feel like they're already part of the family?

Like they already know what family members like and don't, what ticks them off, and such- like they want to meet your family! They want to meet the family that helped raise their girlfriend into the most amazing person in the world! They want to say thank you for allowing them to be part of her world.

So when they hear they'll be going to the island you're from. They get as excited as you to meet/see them, trying their best to look presentable. (Even showering!- I'm looking at you, Luffy, and Zoro👀)

When they met, not only did they welcome him into the family with welcoming arms- HE GETS TREATED BETTER THAN YOU! I can see the family telling them embarrassing stories, showing pictures of you as a kid- He ends up taking some copies of them back to the ship because they can't believe how adorable you were.

Little did he know that they'd already been accepted into the family way before you guys started dating. She would send her family letters telling them how amazing of a boyfriend they are.

I'm so sorry! I got too excited and wrote all this- if it's too much to do to it's okay! I'm close to my family and love them a lot- like I know the monster trio didn't have a great childhood, didn't know their family, etc. Being around a family where you can love each other very much moves them.

Sorry- I'm just rambling! Again! Love your work!!!

this has been in my inbox for fucking months. but im obsessed and finally motivated. lets get fucking wholesome. (idk if youd even see this but hopefully it lives out to your expectations!!)

time of my life ft. monkey d. luffy!

set-up: growing up in a small island with a tight knit community simply meant you were the closest with your parents. they had been your support system, from their grand gestures of love like being present on your important days to the small ones like just offering a shoulder to cry on when you had a rough day, they were truly everything to you. so, it's only natural that you mentioned them a little (or maybe a lot) to your boyfriend. and it may/may not have been a grave mistake.

luffy:

(going off a slight tangent here but its so funny that luffy's character design is just him having giant bug-like himbo eyes and smile. love him 🙏🏼)

♡ everyone loves luffy. that's pretty much his thing. the easiest way to describe him is by thinking of him as a baby goat. no matter how hard you try, you're probably gonna like him at some point or the other. even if you hate animals and babies. its gonna happen because its inevitable. ♡ so, it didn't take you long to figure out that he'd probably fit right in with your family (especially since he was so close with ace whenever he visited, family seemed like his kinda thing) ♡ even before you started dating, when you'd receive letters from your family, luffy was usually the one to ask how they were doing and what you were gonna write back. so, at one point, it seemed as if he knew your family like his own. ♡ he knew of your father's knee pain and your mother's distaste for drinking (she'd probably hate zoro and force him to bath). he knew of your younger sibling's favourite dishes and that they freak out when they see spiders of any size. he listened whenever you talked and for that, you were grateful. ♡ in your recent letters, you may have talked about him. how he's a bit of an idiot but has the heart of gold, how he makes you laugh when you miss your family and how within the crew, you found a new family altogether. ♡ so ofc, one day when you mentioned very briefly that your island is nearby, he and nami had to take a quick detour. ♡ ideally, if your boyfriend knows everything about your family, they'd try to be the perfect boyfriend and do everything right. but this is luffy. so he just remained the exact same and info dumped everything he knew in front of your family (neurodivergent tendencies i presume). ♡ but ofc ur family was obsessed. your mom almost wept tears of joy from how much this bitch was enjoying her food (both you and her lost count after the 17th plate tbh). your sibling almost murdered luffy because now they had to clean a significant amount of plates now. but everyones having a jolly good time (except you 👍🏼) ♡ but now you're parents are showing pictures from your childhood and WHY ARE YOU BUCK NAKED IN LIKE HALF OF THEM JESUS FUCKING CHRIST MOM STOP IT!! YOURE LIKE EMBARASSING ME!! ♡ you ended up leaving after a good three days (the crew had other stuff to get to and a detour can only be so long), but everyone left the place with good memories. sanji has now acquired ten new recipes, zoro may have stolen some alcohol concoction recipes and luffy may have stolen all of your parent's affection towards you. ♡ well whatever, its okay ♡ also, you're not supposed to know this but luffy now has three of your baby photos (all of them may/may not be embarrassing as fuck). it's okay though because it just proves to him that you were adorable then and are adorable now.

a/n: zoro's and sanji's parts will be up soon y'all im trying to write fluff 😭✋🏼

[love-byers]

Hi!! I binge-read some of your byler analysis, along with other users', and I can't help but STILL feel on the fence about hoping for byler endgame. I guess I just don't want to get my hopes super high only for them to be crushed by whatever CGI fest the düff3rs got in store to "go out with a bang" (while, obvs, sticking to the status quo and what they think the GA wants to see). I've seen so many intelligent people write media criticism pieces and analysis in support of the ship, but I still dread that the writers cry plausible deniability on all the clues they DID lay, that the people behind the N*f1ix social media accs confess that they've willingly posted queerbait to boost their engagement and thus get a bigger paycheck (I wouldn't blame them if they did, obvs; besides, it still means that some higher-up approved those misleading posts) and, worst of all, that this whole thing may end up blowing up negatively like the JohnLock conspiracy or the Voltron shenanigans or, y'know, the Supernatural fandom after Castiel's introduction and up until that lame ass final season. In your opinion, what makes byler different? Is there real hope for a satisfying mlm relationship from a show made by het men that capitalizes on 80s nerd culture nostalgia?

Sorry for coming off so jaded: I do wish for a byler ending, but it's been hard to keep my hopes aflame against these worries :c

i think everyone has some amount of doubt, which is totally understandable.

lgbt representation has come a long way, but a lot of us fans who are a bit older grew up consuming media that either had no representation or shitty representation. we sought ourselves in the media we loved and never found it, and corporations exploited that. nowadays there's way more representation that isn't left up to interpretation or censored, but a lot of the time that's in shows that are about romance and drama, high school a lot of the time. which is great, but stranger things is a sci fi show with romantic sub plots. it's easy for queer characters to end up being left out of a show like ST, but they haven't been at all.

one of the big messages of ST is embracing weirdness and being different. loving whatever it is you love, unashamed. when a character strays from being their true self or pushes away the things they love, there are consequences for the character. they become less likable to the audience. the entire theme of s4 is living in the truth, not hiding things, embracing love, being misunderstood simply because you're different. all of that is very queer coded. and it happens to be the season where will's love for mike fully comes into light.

there has been so much thought put into stranger things. the duffers have said there are no coincidences. they put thought into everything, thats why it takes so long to make a season, because they care so much. there are endless details i could point out not related to romance. they've also said they've been set on the ending for a while and will not be changing it to please people. i believe they said some people might not like the ending, but they don't care because they're making the story THEY want. which so far has uplifted queer people and promoted being different. so some antis may call be stupid for trusting them, but im choosing to. i believe they'll do these characters justice.

and my favorite quote from them is "The best plot twists don't make the audience say "wow I never saw that coming!", it makes you say "I should have seen that coming."

as a writer and a creative writing major, i definitely look up to the writers of ST. they are all incredibly talented and i hope one day i can put this much thought and love into a project. and, as a writer, i cannot see them throwing mike and will's relationship down the drain.

so, what makes byler different? there's very few shows where this much thought is put into everything. its not debatable that they do that, they've said it and its evident if you watch the show. so i refuse to believe all of these things between mike and will are just coincidences or accidents. there's just no possible way. i definitely had a klance phase and i can confidently say voltron writing is nowhere near the level of ST, and neither is supernatural. supernatural is one of those shows that has a lot of seasons and has gone all over the place in terms of writing and plot. the duffers have known the ending to this story since season 1. and unlike those shows with lots of seasons, ST only has 5. it won't be dragged on and beaten like a dead horse like some shows.

you don't have to completely eliminate your doubt. even i have doubt even after all i've said and posted. there is simply no way to confirm what'll happen before s5 releases, and they want it that way. just hold on until s5 friend

[remusawoooo]

anon here, excited to read the essay! i asked you because i really like your takes and i see people in the more canon-adjacent parts of the marauders fanbase to complain about the extremes of the fanon one, though personally ive never really seen anything Too extreme, tho thats probably just tantamount to how well i curate my spaces i suppose (ive seen people say that fanon makes remus really “alpha” or makes sirius “bimbofied” and while ive seen hints of those extremes here and there, mostly it looks like it varies from person to person. ive just seen remus be more assertive than he probably is in canon, or sirius being more dramatic and “fem” than he probably is in canon). from what i know people like exaggerating events (the prank, etc.) or shifting some personality traits, but i dont really think thats a bad thing - i personally enjoy it. as long as they dont completely turn characters into stereotypes (though its a pitfall of every fandom, i fear), then whatever its just camp.

people are allowed to criticize stuff like that though, not taking that away from anyone, i personally just dont really care enough to be totally accurate esp since this hyperfix is kind of the bottom of the barrel for me LMAO. but i ask mostly bc im just curious to see what other peoples opinions are, and bc i think - especially in a fanbase like this - that its incredibly important to be at least a little critical with your media experience and reflect on it. saying “oh fuck canon we’re just having fun” is fine and all, i dont think anyone is stopping you, i think the personalities people have made up for characters that have zero screen time are super fun and the little ships are not everyones tea but like its fine. but even still, people should be way more aware of what characters theyre dealing with and from what franchise, and like reflect on any biases you may have. if youre making shit up for a random DE character, or retconning some sutff, okay, whatever, but be sure to not defend or like suddenly turn to really weird rhetoric. idk i think its the bare minimum in a fanbase like this

i definitely rambled way too much here, super sorry op! i hope this doesnt bother you, feel free to reply or feel free to not. i just really like hearing peoples thoughts on things, and i like your takes and your blog so i hope i didnt catch you by surprise. i really am just an outsider trying to look in LOL

hello anon, I'm sorry I lost your ask. I was writing on my laptop and saved the draft (but apparently had to press on alt, and didn't do it) so I basically lost your question and half of my initial response. Ty for sending in another ask!! Not a bother at all, i find this very lovely :D 

I was mortified to find that someone who isn't really a part of the fandom was perceiving me while I was complaining about fictional characters ahahaha. still, thank you for validating me and asking my thoughts on the mischaracterization of marauders!! I do talk about it daily, unfortunately, and without any prompt too. I'll try to gather all my thoughts here. I don't necessarily come across fanon as much as I did when I reentered the fandom and honestly, I can not be more with you about curating your space !! at the end of the day, I am just here to have fun, and really, pointing out these issues is not a good time at all! But I do post a lot about these, I can't be bothered to bottle up any thoughts lol.

I think the major issue I have with current interpretations is the underlying bigotry that comes along with it. There is a lot of unchecked problematic content that doesn't sit right with me.

Flanderizing characters in fandom interpretations is not limited to marauders fandom obviously. any popular media will face this because so many of us want to interact with one character so their traits are simplified for easier consumption and to find a common ground. this is also not limited to new marauders fandom. even in the older era, leather jacket-wearing, motorbike-driving quintessential bad boy siruis was a thing. so I won't nitpick on silly simplifications.

I just want to say that this isn't about me wanting everyone to have the same interpretations as I do about the canon. I follow so many lovely people and I don't agree with all of their posts. But, we all just simply share the love for these characters in the text and form an imaginary community. So, if we were to remove all the issues I will mention, it is still very well possible to have different personal takes.

Here are some of my issues:

Queerness, Gender roles, and misogyny:

My biggest problem is the representations of queer relationships. the fandom packages these couples in a strange and obvious heteronormative mold where the individuals fit into male and female gender roles. mlm and wlw are now an “f/m”* stereotype and characterization gets affected by the ships. Heterosexual relationships shouldn't have these limitations either, anyway. There is no one way to be a woman or a man. With queer relationships in particular, we have reclaimed the word queer now but it was used to describe the unconventional weirdness in the relationship. We didn't fit into the normal portrayal of a loving relationship. So, it really bothers me, even in fiction, that queer ships are popularly consumed in a way that represents a traditional template. (*this is not about gender itself but the gender roles! f/m can very well be queer!). 

Let's take the biggest victim in this fandom: sirius.

Sirius’ portrayal concerning his gender and sexuality has heavily changed his characterization in the fanon. We have a character who is popularly headcanonned as trans and is it a coincidence that all their traits have changed from the og material? Sirius is suddenly vain, whiny, and dumb. Canon doesn't suggest this interpretation, it has to have stemmed from somewhere. It's the implicit bias. Sirius becomes a caricature of what a woman “should be”. When we focus on sexuality, there is the suddenly short twink sirius who has the same new traits- proving the point of fulfilling gender roles. These characteristics are a stand-in for the “female” role of the traditional relationship and it becomes more clear in the example of new age wolfstar. Remus is now the big alpha stoic manly man- the obvious stand-in for the “male” role. I could go on, it is apparent in the way you can see remus becomes a caretaker and sirius is taken care of.

The point I am trying to make is not to discourage gender/sexuality hc. I love them, keep them coming. But, why is female sirius not tall suddenly? It is not inherently bad at all to have a feminine and masculine pairing! But why do we need to change the constitutions of these characters to consume their relationship?

I'll keep dropping disclaimers because I hate being misinterpreted: I don't obviously mean every single person is doing this or that doing one of the things means doing the other too. 

Race:

It is related to the point above. I was personally so excited to see the popular desi james hc. Even in fanon, I have never seen such a prevalent and encouraged brown rep, it was quite sweet to come back to that. But the problem is the change of characteristics that comes with race hc. Desi james is also a manly dude who is big and buff as opposed to the white petite and delicate regulus within jegulus ship. The melanin is directly proportional to the manliness here. 

This is a propagation of race stereotypes. Maybe jegulus was a bad example because usually there are seen as blank templates. I will raise the argument that this can't be all we can come up with for blank canvases then. Either way, my point about race still stands when you repeatedly design interracial queer relationships so they fall into heteronormative roles. Anyway, same issue with wolfstar when there is a brown remus.

Canon, JKR, and hypocrisy:

Refusing to engage with source material is funny when we are picking characters out of it. the interpretations of the characters will be from their book. otherwise, they are just original characters with the same name. you can add onto the traits and a lot of the time fandom comes to a consensus regarding a few things! This is common in every fandom but I don't think I have seen such reluctance to not only critically engage with media but also shame others who do. We are surely in special circumstances with this fandom but I really do think jkr and how we navigate the fanon should be two different things.

Most of us don't condone jkr or even remotely agree with any nonsense she spews on the daily. Most of us can see the problematic nature of even consuming this media and staying in this fandom. It is one of the reasons I even left the fandom. Most of us are simply doing our best to engage carefully while distancing ourselves from her. So, it is quite laughable when some love to take the moral high ground for rejecting canon while still engaging with the same characters. (the rejection of canon in question being sirius’ height, lol)

(Sirius' height is quite a polarising fact apparently. Unfortunately, the point about height is also discussed so disingenuously. When I talk about sirius’ height, it is not really about him being 6 or 7 feet. It will not really impact my life. It is about what it represents. He is bimbofied as he becomes short. It's an issue of "WHY" again.)

Of course, this isn't an accusation of intentional bigotry from everyone here. The problem with this fandom is that the people in it tell themselves that it is progressive and to run away from the problematic creator as much as possible. We are not progressive if all we do is co-opt queer and racially diverse identities on such a superficial level. The bias manifests in subtle forms. I just wish we check ourselves from time to time, that's all. 

There is a lot of hostility when we try to discuss issues in the fanon. Things are interpreted in the most misguided way to just win the argument. Like I said in the beginning, we all just want to have a good time. That also means creating a welcoming space for vulnerable groups (especially when the same identities are used to pat yourselves on the backs for inclusivity points). I didn't even cover everything btw, I just wrote about the issues that concern me. queer and poc also partake in biased representations, I also probably have some biases that I didn't identify yet. I just think it would be super neat if everyone tried to make an effort to unlearn and engage with media without hurting anyone. 

I have other issues but they are all just super subjective opinions and smth I can ignore when others do. ex: I really don't like giving tragic backstories to bigots in the story. Not every supremacist loser has a trauma that forced them into oppressing people! There is also "tropeyfication" of all major ships. Just an overall issue in the reading world I think, though.

Anon, I didn't mean to make it preachy in any way btw. You probably asked for a silly little rant and I went full lecture mode, so I apologize for the tone shift!! I mentioned these because every other issue can be brought down to these imo. Like you said, I also don't have any fixation on everything being canon-compliant. I only complain by asking about the thought process behind certain kinds of changes, if that makes sense! I hope this wasn't a drag really and you can see where I am coming from. If I misspoke anywhere, pls lmk. Thanks for sharing your opinions too!!

This is a long long rant, anyone who read everything, you are wonderful and patient. Thank you for taking the time. This huge post and the content can make you think, “who cares this much?” or “it's not that serious” and yaa it really isn't that serious. The characters aren't real but we all are. the identities projected are real. so, it does matter to talk about this.

Everything said this is a fun place to be once you find your own corner in the playground.