#and the thing is is that him doing things that might seem contrived like this are actually VERY in character for him so 💀

[mad-hunts]

i'm afraid barton-core is jump-scaring someone who's investigating him by laying across a couch in their house like 'one of your french girls' and staying like that until they get home + pulling a gun on them the instant they turn on the light (barton thinks he's funny by doing shit like this, y'all, and wellll... i think it might be if he wasn't threatening their life ☠️ like WTF LMAO)

[moonstruckme]

hi!! just dropping this here as you asked: i'd love something relating to smoking with remus x reader, preferably set during hogwarts years. thanks again for considering this! <3

Thanks lovely <3

cw: smoking

Remus Lupin x fem!reader ♡ 757 words

It’s a clear night. The moon is bright and high, casting a sweet blue light onto the wood floors of the astronomy tower. A cool breeze comes in through the arched openings and swirls through the space. 

“Thought I might find you here.” 

Your head turns abruptly. You’re sitting sideways on one of the metal railings, and you inhale smoke too fast in your surprise.

“Merlin’s pants, Remus,” you cough. “You have a tracking charm on me or something?” 

Remus’ lips tug at how close to the truth you are without knowing. Though, really, he didn’t need the map to know you’d be here tonight. 

“Lucky guess,” he says. “You know, you don’t have to come up here everytime you want a smoke. You could just crack a window in your dorm like the rest of us.” 

No sooner do you recover from your fit than you’re bringing the cigarette to your lips again. “My roommate doesn’t like the smell.” 

Remus tsks. He goes to join you, setting his elbows on the railing rather than balancing atop it the way you have. “I really ought to stop selling to you. You’re getting as bad as me.” 

“Are you so bad?” you ask in a sweet tone. Remus feels warmth come to his cheeks despite the chill. “Besides, I don’t hear you bemoaning the fourth years getting dependent on your business.” 

That much is true. Remus doesn’t sell to third years or younger, but everyone else is fair game; he doesn’t concern himself with what they do with the cigarettes once they have them, or how quickly they come back for more. You’re a different case. 

The breeze picks up. Remus notes the way you pull your shoulders in close. 

“Why would you come up here without a jumper?” he scolds, tugging his over his head. 

“No, stop that. I’m fine.” 

“Just take it.” 

“Why should you be cold because of my lack of forethought?” 

Remus can think of about a thousand reasons, but the one he says aloud is, “Because I run hot.” 

It’s a dim-witted thing to mention. Remus hopes you won’t make any connections between his confession and what you learned in DADA a few years back, but something about you makes him take the risk. When you only eye him dubiously, he goes on in hopes of erasing it. 

“I’m not putting it back on, so if you don’t then neither of us will get to use it.” 

You roll your eyes and extend your cigarette. “Hold this.” 

Remus does so happily, trading you for the jumper. He really had no ulterior motives behind having you wear it, but once it’s on it sparks a ridiculous, tender warmth in his chest. He wonders if he can contrive a way to fill your closet with his jumpers so you wear them all of the time. Maybe if he pitches it to his friends as a prank…

“You want some?” you nod to the cigarette burning between his fingers. 

“That’s alright.” Remus holds it out. “I’ve got plenty. And you paid for it.” 

You take it back. “Oh, come on.” You smile as you bring it to your lips. “I know you charge five quid for these, and you only make me pay three.” 

It’s true. Remus really should stop doing that, if he wants to dissuade you from bad habits. But he never can seem to help giving you special treatment. 

“You’ll be paying full price from now on,” he fibs. 

The cherry lights your eyes, making them appear to dance with amusement. “Liar.” 

Remus pretends to hold his ground for a handful of moments. It’s a nice excuse to look at you. You’re a lovely sight, lit silvery blue by the moon and with smoke blowing from between your lips. You hold his gaze. Suddenly, having something that’s touched that mouth seems an inspired idea. 

“Alright.” Remus beckons. “Let’s have it.” 

You pass it to him with something like triumph in your expression. Tingles run all the way up his arm at the brush of his fingers against yours. Remus is painfully conscious of the feel of the filter paper between his lips, of your eyes on the side of his face as he inhales. He’s never felt more self-conscious taking a drag in his life. 

“You know,” he says around the cigarette, “I ought to finish this for you, and then cut you off.” 

“Remus,” you say, teasing, “you’d only give me the next pack for two quid.” 

Remus knows that’s true, too.

[niningtori]

clementine | preview

pairing: choi beomgyu x you

summary: after your explosive breakup and wordless, thorough disappearance from beomgyu's life, he's surprised to see that you've moved back to his town. when he happens to meet you again, beomgyu wants to apologize, maybe make amends for his unforgivable behavior, but he's devastated to find out that you've erased every memory of him. you don't want to remember him—or the love you once held onto so desperately—anymore. he knows that to be the case, so why is it so hard for him to feel the same way?

genre: angst, romance, potentially second chance, asshole!beomgyu to groveling! beomgyu (who saw this one coming...), inspired by eternal sunshine of the spotless mind tho i've never seen it and only know major plot points through cultural osmosis

warnings: angst, previous toxic relationship

word count: tbd

release date: really far in the future probably

notes: i received a request for this a while ago and i said i'd think about it then received an ask a couple of weeks ago saying another author was working on something based on the same movie. again, i've never seen the movie and i haven't read the author's work (or any new fanfiction rlly in the past few months cuz i haven't been in the headspace to enjoy it) so i will be making it up based off of the general concept of having memories of an ex erased. i said i'd wait to post it and i have every intention of doing so but i wrote this in a moment of inspiration and i've been posting previews so i thought i'd post this just as a teaser! it won't be out for a long time cuz i have so many wips and i don't want to be inconsiderate or invite weird, unsolicited comparisons. i just want to post previews bc i'm excited to get back into consistently writing after almost quitting 🥹

-

it’s jarring, to say the least, to see an estranged ex you used to love more than anything else in any unexpected context; but it's especially jarring for beomgyu as he watches you chatter away on your phone in the middle of the cafe he finds himself in. he catches your eye for just a second before you look away, and it's like he can't breathe. after your phone call, you smile as you type away on your screen. beomgyu gulps, because he knows that since you two made eye contact, it would be weird to just leave and pretend he didn't see you, though that's exactly what he wants to do. besides, no matter how much of a coward he is, he can't keep living with his unspoken feelings when he finally has the opportunity to express them, no matter how resolutely you might reject them. he hesitantly rises from his seat and walks over to you with unsure steps.

“hey,” he says unsteadily. you look up from your screen and give a forced smile, a far cry from the easy affection you used to give him. only him.

“uh, hey?” you reply. beomgyu worries he did the wrong thing by approaching you, especially because you seem confused that he said anything at all. you probably expected him to exit the cafe without a word, and the thought that you thought that he, who was once completely and utterly in love with you, would brush you off so easily brings a sharp pang to his chest.

“i… i know it’s been a while, but i… i want to, um, apologize for… everything.” he wants to lay down and die at his awkwardness, but he's wanted to say these words for so long, and no matter how much he’s compelled to swallow them down and safely tuck them away in the home they've carved out for themselves in his stomach, he knows this is the right thing to do. especially since you blocked him on everything before changing your number. especially since you moved away without a word after your disastrous breakup. especially since he hasn't seen you in so long, and he doesn't know if he'll ever see you again after this. your eyebrows furrow, and he braces himself for impact. but no amount of contrived mental fortitude could ever prepare him for your next words.

“... do i know you from somewhere?”

notes pt. 2: might delete this preview so be prepared for that possibility 🫰 peace and blessings :,) but please don't be mean or weird like actually

[audliminal]

It's Just a Game, Right? Pt 8

Masterpost

"So I think they're using other languages," Tim says, the moment Bernard opens the door.

"Well hello to you too my beloved boyfriend," Bernard responds, kissing Tim on the cheek and pulling him into the apartment.

"Shut up," Tim says, following Bernard to the table. This is hardly the first time Tim has skipped past pleasantries like that, and Bernard seems to find it more amusing every time.

"Aw, I dunno if I can do that. I really like to talk to you," Bernard grins conspiratorially. "Plus, then I wouldn't get to tell you that you're half right."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, obviously other people noticed the comment, right?" Bernard, gestures towards the computer, where Tim can see the cryptic comment. It already has dozens of responses. "Mostly people are just freaking out about it, because this is like, our first instance of direct communication from them, but one of the people who saw it actually recognized what language it is."

"Just one?" Tim frowns.

"Yeah. It's called esperanto. I googled it and apparently it's a conlang from the late 1800s which is pretty cool. It was, like, invented to be kind of a universal language, I guess? It pulls from a lot of different languages, so that's why it looks like multiple languages."

"Huh."

"But! There's still the encoded portions to figure out, because the translation as-is doesn't really make any sense." Bernard scrolls and points to the translation that a commenter had offered. It reads To be fqzuhsx-ayccas is to be qtdkv-avnwkwkb; the veil afph-gqkduik but it is meant to igpmtwi-ocdq. Determination in the face of doubt.

"Huh," Tim studies the text, then notices something. "They've specifically encoded the verbs."

"Yep," Bernard shrugs. "I haven't tried anything for the encrypted stuff yet; figured i might as well wait for you."

"Okay, well I guess we start with the simplest? We know they've used caesar ciphers before, plus this is in response to what we did with the first caesar ciphers before, so we might as well try one of your decoder websites for that first."

"Seems reasonable," Bernard says, pulling up the website from before. He quickly copies the first word over and hits the button. "Well shit, that was quick."

"Only the first half, though." Tim mutters. "Do it to the rest of them." Bernard copies and decodes the rest. In short order, they have a the first half of each encryption decoded.

"To be gravity is to be orbit, the veil disk but it is meant to eclipse?" Bernard frowns. "That... doesn't make much more sense."

"What's up with the focus on astronomy, too."

"Oh, right, we haven't gotten that far yet. They keep referencing space stuff. There's like, a running theory about these messages being supposed to have come through a black hole?"

"Is that even possible? i thought black holes ate stuff forever."

"I dunno, I'm not really into space stuff. Besides it's like, sure there's evidence for it, and space seems to be narratively important? But the premise seems kind of contrived to me."

"You think they're doing something bigger than what everybody is seeing." Tim stares at the forum thread. If anything was going to give Bernard's theory some credence, it would be what literally just happened.

"Exactly." Bernard posted on a forum arguing that he thought the game ran deeper than people realized. And the creators, who so far hadn't interacted directly, had responded to that post, with a triple-encrypted message.

"Each shift was one further away than the last," Tim thinks rapidly. "It started with language, which could be either a part of the effort to encrypt it, or a part of the intended meaning. Possibly both. Then, they used caesar ciphers for the first layer of encryption, the same thing they used in their first post. How did they encrypt things in the second post?"

"I think I kind of mentioned it before, but the second post used a vigenere cipher. The names of the people in the first video were the keys, if I remember right."

"The first is the key to the second."

"What-"

"Take the second part and decode it with the first."

"Dude your mind is scary sometimes," Bernard laughs, but moves to do as Tim says, revealing the first encrypted word. "To be seen. That works..."

Tim starts writing down the full message, as Bernard decodes the rest. Finally, they have the full text of the message the creators intended to send.

"To be seen is to be remembered; the veil distracts but it is meant to hide. Determination in the face of doubt." Tim reads.

"Huh," Bernard says, leaning over to read it for himself. "Well, now we know what it says. Now we just need to figure out what that means."

[bnhaobservation]

How much to me does AFO’s writing not make sense?

This was created due to an ask I received which is basically the title of the post. Originally I just meant to answer the ask but as this got too long I decided to make a post just for it. I hope it’s okay.

It feels bad to say so but the problem with AFO (and Yoichi) is that their writing mostly doesn’t make sense, it feels as if the author continues ask for suspension of disbelief, retcon himself or tell us things he doesn’t show in the story. All this for the purpose of a plot that wasn’t planned in advance but that he just seems to improvise and to create supposedly saint/martyr Yoichi and an evil monster AFO that he’ll pointlessly destroy at the last minute to claim he’s not a monster but a lonely man.

In case someone missed the hint this is going to be a very critical post, so if you don’t feel like reading further the back button is your best friend.

Now... I’ll list all that doesn’t work for me.

Mind you, if it were fewer things I would have probably been fine with retcons, suspension of disbelief, things told and not shown and so on because in a manga you are often supposed to give the author a bit of all of the above. Maybe, if I tried HARD, I could make sense of some of the following things.

I’m also not checking the Japanese text to see if something is unclear due to mistranslation and, as this post is LONG, I won’t dig into details too much. Plus, AFO isn’t what I usually focus about so I might have missed something that, eventually, the text explained somewhere.

My problem with AFO is it’s just TOO MUCH that feels like not making sense that I lose interest in him. It breaks my suspension of disbelief, it makes me think it’s not worth the effort because… it’s random Quirk magic and retcons and what else and everything goes and I should repeat the MST3K Mantra (some details in the story don’t need to make sense because they ultimately don’t matter) but here we aren’t talking of ‘some details’, we’re talking of world-building and a main antagonist backstory and a main antagonist action and characterization. As I said, it’s just TOO MUCH.

Now, before we start let me explain what I mean about ‘random Quirk magic’.

Quirks don’t exist so, of course, it’s up to Horikoshi to make them up and also make up the rules for how they work and so far so good. Only, through the story, not only he makes up some really unbelievable Quirks that defy the rules of the world and therefore challenge our suspension of disbelief (Iida runs fast because HE HAS ENJINES IN HIS LEGS? Mechanical parts? What the fire Quirk users burn to make fire? Without fuel a fire won’t burn!), but he also makes up the rules at random, retconning them or adding them in a way that suit the plot to solve a problem he created previously or to surprise the audience. It’s the problem of Recovery Girl’s Quirk which first heals Midoriya in a second without a care for how he’s low on stamina or how his bones needs to be set and without leaving scars behind and then it gets all those new rules because the author doesn’t want healing to come so cheap. It’s the case of OFA who gives Midoriya access to the Quirks of the previous owners but didn’t do so for All Might. It’s the case of Shinsou’s Quirk which couldn’t make people talk but then it could (because Shinsou trained). It’s the case of Shigaraki’s Quirk that normally turns people to dust but somehow didn’t manage to affect his family’s hands. It’s the case of Eri whose horn inflates and deflates when the plot says so and works even if there’s no owner telling it to heal. And it’s the case of so many other instances.

The fact that new rules are added, usually AFTER a problem arises, makes impossible predict where the story will go because rules are changed along the way so that Quirks can do things they previously couldn’t do… but this ends up feeling often a plot contrivance more than an exciting surprise, it feels unnatural, it breaks the suspension of disbelief and ends up destroying the sakes of the story. In short it’s not that the author can’t add new rules… it’s just it causes more damage than good to the plot. It’s not a problem that regards just AFO (you might notice how he’s absent in the examples I mentioned above), this is a story problem but, as AFO is a victim of this as well, I thought worth to explain it.

I want to be clear, ‘Random Quirk magic’ doesn’t have to make sense because Quirks are fictional so we already know it’s going to feel absurd and that something we’ve to accept as basis of the story and therefore we should suspend our disbelief… the problem is that when things go too overboard even suspending our disbelief on something we already knew from the start was fictional becomes hard.

This isn’t a surreal manga where everything goes, we need to feel the story has some realistic basis even in its fictional elements, that it respects some laws… and the story doesn’t and that’s a flaw in writing, one that some readers might be willing to give a pass to due to the rule of cool and that others might not. It’s very personal.

AS FAR AS I’M INVOLVED, in many circumstances Horikoshi manages to break my suspension of disbelief because it goes too overboard. For others it might be fine. Just keep this in mind when you’ll hear me talk about ‘random Quirk magic’.

So let’s start by splitting it in parts.

PART 1: THE WORLDBUILDING

So right from the start we were told:

the first person who manifested a Quirk was the Luminescent baby born in China

that a person would normally manifest their Quirk if not at birth like the Luminescent baby, at least by the age of 4.

that in the early days of the paranormal they figured out that if someone is without a joint in the pinky toe, he’s someone with a Quirk

Lastly, the Quirk one would get is either inherited by one of their parents or a combination of both. [Chap. 1]

Why this choice?

The Luminescent baby is a good choice to make immediately obvious someone is born different without, at the same time, going overboard with how different that new baby is (I mean, he’s just luminescent, which is clearly not normal but not scary, yet he doesn’t have a fish head so that his look would scare people).

The age of 4 limit is to explain why Midoriya’s mother worried about him not having developed a Quirk while Midoriya is at preschool.

The toe thing is to make definitive the fact Midoriya is Quirkless.

The inheritance makes logical sense and will become important in the Todoroki plotline but I’m not sure if Horikoshi had planned the Todoroki plotline yet at this point. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he has only planned Shouto (prototype Shouto was different from what we got).

ALL THIS WILL BE DISMANTLED/IGNORED IN FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS COURTESY OF THE SHIGARAKI TWINS.

The Luminescent Baby isn’t the first person with a Quirk, two years before his birth the Shigaraki twins’ mother, in Japan, manifested a Quirk. One year before the Luminescent Baby the Shigaraki twins were born and AFO immediately manifested his Quirk. [Chap. 407]

Why this change? AFO had to steal his mother’s Quirk so she needed to have one and he needed to be born first so he could complain the glowing baby was nothing special for just having been the first to be recorded.

Logically this should imply that other people started manifesting a Quirk when the Shigaraki Twins’ mother did and that they somehow were all so tame they didn’t make it to the news (which is less believable, really, I mean, among the people shown first showing Quirks there’s one whose body got on fire! but whatever).

Quirks don’t need to manifest by the time one reaches 4 years for things to be normal. After the Luminescent Baby was born they started to manifest in people going through puberty, not after birth, not before 4 years, something Quirk expert Garaki seemed to be unaware of even though he basically lived through those times. [Chap. 407]

Too bad the Shigaraki Twins’ mother didn’t seem that young but much older, but let’s assume it was due to the life she was doing.

As the cause that gave birth to Quirks is unexplained we can’t even say if those people were born with a Quirk and people didn’t notice because they didn’t manifest it, or going through puberty caused them to mutate.

Why the change? Because when people starts hunting people with Quirks the Shigaraki twins are still children (and if) and Horikoshi didn’t want to show the good people of Japan chasing after kids just because they’ve paranormal abilities... and also because the Shigaraki twins’ mom needed to have a Quirk that appear all of sudden.

The lack of joint in the pick toe? Unimportant in the story. AFO won’t check if his sibling doesn’t have it to see if he has a Quirk or not, at least not AFTER he gave him a Quirk thinking he had none. Considering AFO is mega powerful by the time he gives Yoichi a Quirk, he might have just asked a doctor if Yoichi was Quirkless, especially since Quirks could manifest later in life but no. Yoichi never showed signs he had a Quirk so he must not have it, let’s give him another. Who cares if it might fry his brain should he actually have a Quirk? [Chap. 59]

Quirk inherited from the parents? AFO and Yoichi’s Quirks were clearly not inherited by their mother and I’ve hard time thinking they were inherited by their father as their Quirks seems to be unique. [Chap. 407]

Really, giving the mom a Quirk that’s completely different from them is a bad idea. They should have been born with a Quirk by Quirkless parents and this should have been it... or their mom should have had the same Quirk.

We don’t need for the Shigaraki twins’ Quirks to be a mutation right at the start of things.

(Credits when it’s due, Inko too doesn’t grow confused when her son manifest a Quirk completely different from her or her husband but, I guess, we can make the argument that the joy for her son having a Quirk overwhelmed her so that she might have thought it was a mutation but didn’t care and we know that Quirk wasn’t one her son was born with... but well, no one seems to really pay attention to how odd Midoriya’s Quirk is.)

To sum it up, the Shigaraki Twins have destroyed the world building established in chap. 1. Of course Chap. 1 could have misleading, it completely hid that things weren’t all sunshine and rainbows from the start or better said due to Quirks there was chaos but didn’t clearly explain there were manhunts and discrimination for people with Quirks, it seemed only to imply that Villains emerged.

However it’s not that the text can’t be vague to the point of misleading when it makes sense for it to be (hiding the dark past of Quirk society made sense, same as having Garaki claiming Quirk owners are a new step of human evolution only to discover that in the past they speculate those with Quirk were a sub-branch of humans because now the population normally has a Quirk and they want to see themselves as the better product), it’s when it just rewrites itself at random because plot exigencies changes that things start to be harder to swallow.

Going on.

PART 2: THE KIDS WHILE IN THEIR MOTHER’S WOMB

The text rambles about how AFO stole nutrients from Yoichi when they were sharing their mother’s womb so Yoichi is weak.

Actually the fact that one twin ‘steal’ nutrients from the other is true in real life but... IT’S BAD FOR BOTH TWINS.

It’s the twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) which happens by chance (and so it’s not something AFO decided) and occurs when identical twins share a placenta and blood vessels, but the blood flow between them is not equal so one gets less nutriments than he should and the others gets too many.

About 90% of twins diagnosed with an advanced stage of TTTS very early in pregnancy are at risk of passing away before birth.

In about 85% to 90% of TTTS pregnancies that receive treatment, at least one twin survives.

In about 50% to 65% of TTTS pregnancies that receive treatment, both twins survive.

The Shigaraki twins’ mom received no treatment and she didn’t give birth in a hospital, nor the twins were well cared for after birth. The twins should have both died.

I get Horikoshi never cared about medical accuracy and I get sometimes twins with TTTS both survive but the odds are against him and Yoichi and but I think since Horikoshi doesn’t care about medical accuracy, he would make his life simpler by just not including medical conditions.

BTW Identical twins are two babies who share the same DNA because they develop from a single fertilized egg. They are also known as monozygotic twins. Since the Quirk factor is a genetic thing, this means Yoichi and AFO should have the same Quirk.

Now, generally, in the donor twin (the one that gets less blood aka Yoichi), the consequences might affect the respiratory, urinary, circulatory and gastrointestinal systems (he’s at risk for organ failure) as well as give him brain damage and give him a slower growth. He’ll also suffer malnourishment.

There is however no reason due to which the Quirk factor should be affected by it due to lack of nutrition during its formation to the point it didn’t properly form while all the rest will form just fine. I won’t nag on this too much as Quirk factors are fictional things created by Horikoshi himself so if he says Quirks don’t properly form if they get affected for mysterious reasons well, that’s his canon.

(If you’re curious about AFO, the consequences he should get would affect his circulatory system, specifically his heart, to the point it can lead to heart failure, and damage his brain as well.)

PART 3: BABY AFO AND BABY YOICHI

So, the narrative tries hard to paint AFO as kind of a monster baby and the visual plays along with it (he looks definitely scary). We’re told AFO sucked his mother’s life-force and stole the nutrients from his twin in the womb. Once born he stole his mother’s Quirk and used it to cling to his mother’s corpse as they’re taken away from the current, grabbing Yoichi’s arm as well and taking him away with him. The text claims he was imbued with hubris and disrespect for the others from the moment he was born, viewed all within his reach as his own possession and viewed with utter disgust whose who wouldn’t provide him with anything or would turn away when he cried and screamed.

Now...

About pregnancy: it’s worth to mention it can be an exhausting thing so, we don’t need AFO to deliberately steal his mother’s life-force because he’s an evil child. Being pregnant would have been enough to weakened her and combined with her poor lifestyle it would have killed her. But let’s present it as AFO being an evil baby.

About newborns/babies’ psychology: AFO believing he’s at the center of the universe and not caring for others is basically how babies work. They’re egocentric. They cry and demand their caretaker to take care of all their needs as soon as they feel them. They don’t care if their caretaker is tired, busy or sleeping, they view their needs as priorities. They need to be taught, usually at preschool, that the world isn’t their own and that they can’t hit a classmate to have the toy he has. If the story wanted to say AFO never learnt to share at kindergarten because he didn’t to attend to it, it would have been fine, but if the story tries to pass AFO for an evil baby because, from the start, he didn’t know how to share, how to have empathy... well, the story is ignorant about how babies work. The old movie “Look Who's Talking” does a better job portraying an infant and how it’s normal for him to keep his mother awake all the night because he wants to eat than BNHA does handling infant AFO.

About newborns/babies’ bodies: A baby can hold his head up at around 3 months of age. This means if newborn AFO has tried piercing his mother’s body with his mother’s Quirk, he wasn’t yet strong enough to hold himself still, so instead than piercing his mom he would have ended pushing himself away instead than piercing her. A baby’s grip instead is strong enough if he grips something, this could allow the baby to pull themselves up, so in theory he could have held Yoichi. However baby AFO wasn’t fed and we don’t know for how long they rode their mother’s body while the water moved it and, while a baby can stay awake up to 3 hours, generally it’s recommended they won’t stay awake for more than 1, 1 hour and a half. Honestly, unless it was a rather short trip, I doubt AFO would have managed to hold Yoichi for long, but this will become relevant in a following point. It’s also worth to mention newborns can’t walk or crawl. Most babies start crawling between 7 and 10 months old so AFO couldn’t climb atop his mother and the idea he ended up on it by coincidence feels forced.

About newborns/babies’ intentionality: most of what newborn do is instinctive, involuntary, experimental. We’re however shown AFO as a genius baby or one that’s incredibly mature. I’ll let it slide the whole ‘stealing Quirk’ because even if AFO has a Quirk that needs the intention to steal other Quirks, it could have been unintentional and I’ll focus on how, in order to save himself he managed to climb up on his mother’s body, immediately know how to use a Quirk that wasn’t even his own (and that his mother, the legitimate owner didn’t know how to use) to hold tight to his mother’s body, grab Yoichi without using his Quirk so as not to hurt him because he didn’t want to lose him. As said before newborns tend to have involuntary movements but here it’s all voluntary and planned.

About memory of the time in which one were a newborn: normal people can remember as far as to when they were 3/4 at best, Yoichi remembers his brother holding him as they were on top of their mother’s body. How, is unsaid.

About newborns’ need to be feed: A newborn is fed almost every hour to begin with, to move quickly on being fed each 2 hours. It’s true they can even manage surviving for up to 6 days without feeding... but who’s going to feed them and especially Yoichi who’s weak and needs to be feed even more? The next we’ll see AFO and Yoichi they’re still alone and on their own. Even assuming AFO continued to manage to keep his actions intentional he shouldn’t be able to crawl. How in the world he’s going to retrieve the milk he and his brother need to survive? Yes, theoretically we can imagine they were picked up by someone, feed and then discharged for unknown reasons year after, when they could provide for themselves but in the story there’s no mention of this.

About infections: rats can carry diseases that can be passed to humans, including leptospirosis, hantavirus, and rat-bite fever that can be spread through direct or indirect contact with rodents. Low birth weight neonates are more vulnerable to infections so it’s a miracle Yoichi didn’t catch one by the rats who came close to them... or by just being laid on the dirty ground.

About the twins’ mom and the umbilical cord: if the twins’ mom didn’t know she was pregnant, how did she cut the umbilical cord as she doesn’t seem to have with herself scissors and ends up dying of childbirth? The cord is tough and you need something sharp to cut it, never mentioning it needs to be clamped before being cut otherwise it would put the baby in danger of bleeding out.

I get I’m nitpicking things in AFO’s backstory but Horikoshi created for AFO a backstory that challenges my suspension of disbelief too much and that’s mostly not needed.

AFO (and Yoichi) didn’t need to be born by a prostitute that didn’t even know she was pregnant, would give birth near a river and die, with AFO stealing her Quirk just before rats were to attack them but they would miraculously be swept away by the suddenly flooding river and use their mother’s body like a surf board and then they magically survived by themselves.

It was enough for them to be normal orphans in an orphanage that were chased away from it or escaped after people became aware they had Quirks. This overly dramatic story feels too unreal to me, it breaks my suspension of disbelief

PART 4: THE NARRATION

As AFO’s backstory starts the text is very much oriented in not letting me get sad for AFO and this is part of the problem.

It feels weird how the Shigaraki twins are given a dramatic (and unrealistic) backstory but... the text doesn’t seem to be interested in making us feel sympathy despite the horror they faced, the text is focused on painting AFO as a demonic baby, born to become the future demon lord.

In short it didn’t matter if he had a sad backstory or not, he was born evil and he was going to be an evil adult where Yoichi was born good and was going to be good. There was no hope for him.

Now this sort of story has a dangerous side effect.

If we establish that nature is all that matter to decide the fate of a person, that someone born good like Yoichi would only grow up to be good even in the worst conditions while there was no hope for AFO from the start, then nurture loses its importance.

By this logic it doesn’t matter if Enji abused his family or not, Shouto would have grown up to become a Hero regardless and Touya would have grown up to become a Villain regardless.

Now… while very little is done to change society at the end of the story, the whole Quirk counseling program that supposedly changes how kids are nurtured, seems to be in the story to tell us nurture is important too and that it can make the difference in a person.

Midoriya telling AFO he wasn’t a demon lord but just a lonely person might also imply the text might not be an impartial narrator, that the text is lying (who’s the narrator by the way? In the story we often had as narrator Midoriya and the anime gave the role of the other narrator to Present Mic but what about here? Is it AFO himself?) but this is a story read also by young readers so giving it a lying third person narrator makes the story pointlessly complicate and the fact that Midoriya, who knows ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about AFO and couldn’t figure out Tomura out until he saw his past, would instead understand AFO just because the latter obsesses over Yoichi feel unbelievable.

So more than a thing that doesn’t make sense this is a thing that’s very poorly constructed.

PART 5: CHILDHOOD

The two babies continue to grow and somehow feed themselves and keep themselves clean and warm on their own and even dress up and become children... and AFO is a murderous creepy kid, who kills people who are against people with Quirk and out to murder them but they are letting him be despite thinking he had a Quirk. Because if they had to murder or at least seriously main/beat people with Quirks, said people have to be adults, they draw the line at kids.

Again... it doesn’t make a lot of sense they’re out there aiming to hurt/kill people with Quirks but would let a child with a Quirk be, and even feel bad because they’re leaving him behind.

Even if we want to assume some might draw the line at hurting kids, accepting they’ve a hive mind and would all agree not to hurt them feels hard to swallow. Honestly it seems more that Horikoshi didn’t have them attack AFO so they would look ‘innocent’ when he murders them in cold blood, if we can forget they were out for blood of Quirk people so again, AFO is a evil child.

He’s also an evil child as he apparently has nothing to gain by killing those people who are Quirkless so he can’t even steal their Quirks, here the text seems to imply he’s doing it solely because he sees them with disgust because they don’t help him who’s filled with hubris and disrespect for others from when he was born and so he killed those ‘poor’ guys who were out to kill/beat guys with Quirks. I would have understood it more if Horikoshi were to show him then stealing their money but no, we see nothing of the sort, if he gained something from killing them is up to the readers’ speculation, the message seems to be he’s doing it because

Also, he got himself a cape to dress himself up and seems naked below so as to pull out those stabbing things from his whole body comfortably.

I won’t comment on the fighting style as we see only a panel and it might not give me the right impression of how things are going.

The next time we see AFO beating 6 adults, he might be stealing their Quirk and he... is wrapped in a robe and don’t wear shoes even though Yoichi does.

And I don’t get why dressing him so weirdly especially since he’ll become the guy who dress up all fashionable.

By the way Yoichi seems unable to walk as he seems to crawl. As an adult he could walk and even run but let’s let this slide, the problem is another.

I do get AFO wants to keep Yoichi but if Yoichi can’t walk he’s a liability and there’s no reason why AFO should drag him along when he goes in his murdering rampages or whatever he’s doing there (hopefully stealing Quirks because that’s more useful than murder people because they disgust him).

By the way, good, noble Yoichi, seeing his brother hurt people... hurts him by tossing a tin can to him and only later tells him to stop hurting people.

I would have expected Yoichi to get in between AFO and the people AFO hurt because he’s against hurting in general, but no, Yoichi isn’t for nonviolence, he is like the Heroes, he’s fully in favor of hurting who hurts (yeah, he can’t do much damage but still, he tries).

It’s worth to note Yoichi has normal clothes a sign that no, AFO didn’t have to wrap a cloth around himself because he couldn’t find clothes. Somehow he just felt like not dressing like a normal person which doesn’t make a lot of sense.

On an odd note the Shigaraki twins apparently take residence in the abandoned Shūeisha Jimbocho Building in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo. I get that’s a fun reference and it makes easier for them to find manga to read but I would have found more logic for them to take up residence in an abandoned hotel, or in an abandoned house/apartment, with beds and bathroom and a place to cook food than in a publishing company building. Since they only needed to read ONE manga for the story to work, they could have found it elsewhere.

Meanwhile genius Yoichi self teach himself to read by watching manga... and it doesn’t work like that. While kids can learn to read on their own, they actually need someone to give them instructions on which sound each graphic sign is. If not they can’t magically guess.

It would also be good to know when AFO named Yoichi, since he did so aware of what such kanji meant because he also self taught himself how to read.

Really, the Shigaraki twins needed a caretaker and all this unreal stuff wasn’t needed.

The Shigaraki twins could be just orphans in an orphanage or kids in a poor house, or kids whose parents were killed like Destro’s mother when they’re old enough to know how to read. The lack of a caretaker in their early years makes their story absurd.

By the way, note how AFO comes back covered in blood and Yoichi doesn’t even flinch as he’s busy reading the manga. Shouldn’t he care about the people AFO killed? Nope, this is siblings bonding time but... it’s not that great. Yoichi isn’t someone who gives care to AFO, if anything Yoichi tries to discipline him for murdering people in front of him and thinks deep down his brother cares for him but doesn’t manage to provide/show care for AFO.

The text tells us Yoichi hadn’t given up on his brother, that he thinks his brother’s grip had been gentle, but if his not giving up on his brother is just playing the role of failed morality pet/talking cricket and letting AFO sit near him... well, it’s not much.

If AFO needed salvation back then, before he worsened even more, Yoichi wasn’t there to provide it for him. Garaki was shown giving AFO more care and love than Yoichi.

The end goal is Midoriya tells him he’s a lonely man, but his obsession with Yoichi isn’t really well developed. He just randomly decided Yoichi AND JUST YOICHI is his. AFO will never collect other people the way he does with his brother. Shigaraki, Garaki, his relation with them is more of an utilitarian nature.

(Honestly from the way Horikoshi depicted him, it seems nothing could have saved AFO, I’m complaining because we get told Yoichi can’t give up on him but doesn’t do anything to SHOW IT).

On the other side BNHA often messes up what now fans call ‘talk no jutsu’. The name comes from the Naruto fandom, I didn’t watch Naruto so I don’t know how it played its talks but I watched enough manga/anime (never mentioning I’ve a knowledge of how things work in real life and in books) to know when a talk can be inspiring to change, in real life and in a story.

BNHA tends to have Heroes talk about justice and morals to Villains who COULDN’T CARE LESS about such things. If you want to move and push to change a person, you’ve to stuck the right cords in them, talk to them about what THEY CARE ABOUT AND HOW CHANGE CAN HELP THEM TO GET IT.

If Yoichi’s hope is that by telling AFO enough times that what he’s doing is bad will push him to change well, Yoichi is dumb. Yoichi should have shown him another way to get what AFO wanted, a world that would take care of him.

But this is a story problem as other characters make this mistake and the story doesn’t address it, so I can’t really blame this one on Yoichi.

PART 6: ADULT YEARS BEFORE YOICHI’S DEATH

Chap. 59 tells us AFO brought people together and grew to control the whole Japan, manipulating people into committing wicked acts. One would expect considering the power AFO has he became the new emperor of Japan so he could fully control it but no, it’ll turn out he became a crime lord when it would have been more logic for him to use his power to go and become emperor of Japan in a time in which the government was in chaos due to the meta, there were no Heroes and all that stood against him was a small vigilante group.

And if he really had to be a crime lord I would have expected him to be a crime lord with such important ties in the government, the state would basically be a puppet under him so as to facilitate his wish to have a world that would exist for his sake. This way Heroes and Hero schools wouldn’t have existed and Vigilantes would have been hunted as criminals. He’s a guy who has ‘friends’ in other countries, one would expect him to get the importance of controlling the government to get off with everything he does but no, the government does as he pleases even though he has plenty of people bowing to him.

All Might claims that those AFO bestowed upon new Quirk would end up becoming puppets, unable to bear the new Quirks. It makes no sense that AFO would do this to his followers, as they would become mostly useless and this is not really manipulation this is making people brain dead.

Besides the story should decide what it wants to do with Quirk when they get passed to others.

Shigaraki is just mentally fine with decay and so is Aoyama, Lady Nagant is just mentally fine with multiple Quirks, Spinner isn’t but Central Hospital ‘saves him’, the possessors of OFA died early because they too weren’t fine with OFA.

What’s the rule?

If you get more than 2 Quirks you lose your mind?

With 2 you only face early death?

If you’ll only get one, even if it’s not your own, you’ll be fine provided your body is compatible with it?

Then why not to give his allies only 2 Quirks? Why frying their brain? Are brainless servants so much better than willing servants with a brain?

AFO should have known giving people a Quirk could have downsides, because he risked frying Yoichi’s brain by giving him a Quirk, so he should have been sure this wouldn’t damage him.

By the way All Might say Yoichi opposed to AFO but all Yoichi does is saying he won’t cooperate with him, not that he would have been of any use and again play the role of failed morality pet.

I get in Japan ‘Gaman’ (我慢) which means “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity” and is a Japanese term of Zen Buddhist origin is considered a heroic virtue but I’m not Japanese and Yoichi really is shown doing way too little for me to be impressed.

AFO giving him a Quirk that’s basically a power stocking Quirk makes no sense unless he didn’t realize that Yoichi could use it to stock enough power it could hold up against him... had Yoichi done something to collect such power instead than starve himself... I guess Yoichi saw this as a form of resistance too... an useless one.

Yoichi decides not to eat as a form of resisting to his brother that... will only kill him. At this point he could have just committed suicide to make his point. Okay, so maybe he was hoping AFO would magically change. Surely he couldn’t think just telling him ‘no, this is bad’ would affect AFO, could he? Anyway starving himself still feels dumb.

PART 7: WHAT LEADS TO YOICHI’S DEATH

Kudo and his men, who have weak Quirks, somehow manage to barge in AFO’s stronghold and into what’s basically a safe holding Yoichi (Horikoshi doesn’t explain how and more often than not he does so when he too doesn’t know how this happened). Apparently they wanted to kill him but then Kudo decides to save him.

How did they do it and why?

Why would they risk their lives to get to Yoichi and murder him only to make angry AFO? How would Yoichi’s death damage AFO? And how they managed to accomplish such feat since supposedly AFO is already overly powerful? By the way aren’t we also in the middle of chaos between people with Quirk and people without? Shouldn’t this make things even harder?

But whatever, they manage to escape with Yoichi and to hide for two months before AFO tracks them.

Instead than planning a careful operation to retrieve Yoichi, mister smart guy aka AFO goes there alone and causes everyone to escape but, conveniently, Yoichi is the one who’s slowest at doing so. Also conveniently, Kudo is near him, dragging him. Bruce is also slow to escape so he can witness the scene.

AFO is upset Yoichi runs away from him with Kudo and instead than murdering Kudo or using some whip Quirk to retrieve Yoichi as he knew from the start Yoichi didn’t want to be with him and he had to keep him closed in a safe due to this so he should be prepared to Yoichi not wanting to go back, he is SO SURPRISED YOICHI ESCAPES HE MURDERS YOICHI. To regret it a moment later.

PART 8: THE MESS WITH QUIRKS

AFO will retrieve Yoichi’s hand and somehow... checks it for Yoichi’s Quirk. Maybe he wanted the Quirk he gave Yoichi back but sure it’s convenient he does because it turns out he discovers Yoichi has no more the Quirk he gave him.

Instead than assuming there’s another person who, like him, can steal Quirks (again, he should have inherited his Quirk by his father, I doubt it but LOGICALLY this is how it should have gone), we get him rambling about how, according to further examinations he discovered Yoichi had a Quirk HE COULDN’T DETECT (HOW DID HE REALIZE? Did he check Yoichi’s disemboweled foot to see if he lacked a joint in the toe? Or did he realize sooner and still granted him a Quirk risking to fry his brain? We’ll never know.)

Note that AFO was completely capable to steal Hawks mangled Quirk factor but he couldn’t even detect Yoichi’s and therefore couldn’t steal his Quirk.

By the way I also would like to know WHY AFO claims he wondered if he stole Yoichi’s Quirk by mistake. With the Quirks in his mindscape taking the shape of their owners and he and Yoichi somehow remembering what happened short after their birth, never mentioning always him being able to use stolen Quirk a short time after his own birth, he should have known if he stole Yoichi’s Quirk or not.

Anyway Yoichi’s Quirk now was passed to Kudo because Yoichi’s blood was splattered on him and he somehow ingested it... or did it got inside him through the blood splattered on his eyes? We’ll never know but AGAIN surely it was convenient.

Now, let’s go back a little to chap 59 which say that in order to inherit OFA one has to ingest the DNA of the previous owner but also the previous owner should want to pass it.

Is the story telling me Yoichi willed to pass to Kudo a Quirk he didn’t know he had? Or that, even though he refused to use the Quirk AFO stole and gave him, he wanted to give it to Kudo because if he uses a stolen Quirk is bad but if Kudo does it is fine?

I’ll give it a pass to Kudo noticing his body felt off (due to him receiving Yoichi’s Quirk) because All Might said after some hours from receiving his Quirk Midoriya would feel something too so okay, this might fit with the lore.

But now we’re told that the second Quirk Kudo has is a small, seemingly useless one.

This is a problem because All Might said that Yoichi’s Quirk fused with the perfectly normal accumulation Quirk his brother gave him so it shouldn’t be small and useless because it is now fused with a perfectly normal Quirk which yes, might not have accumulated much but is of a normal size combined with one of a smaller one. AFO suggested ‘it was absorbed’ so Yoichi tiny, unformed Quirk, absorbed a normal one and remained tiny and unformed and hey, okay, it’s ‘random Quirk magic’ but it’s one that TO ME, feels too overboard.

And anyway… which sort of machine Kudo, Bruce and Co have which could see it? Quirks are just a new thing in their world and yet they can detect a small Quirk factor? One AFO couldn’t detect? And why would they have created such a machine? Or do they have some sort of machine that analyzes DNA so accurately it can detect Quirk factors? No idea.

PART 9: CREEPY EYES

Maybe it’s meant to be symbolic but... AFO’s eyes can’t reflect anything, the test claiming it’s like they were clouded by thin membranes. And the text doesn’t mention it but they are drawn with no pupils... which would basically make him basically blind. But no, he sees. Guess he went to Italy dressed like a little girl, claiming his name was Gemma in order to meet Padre Pio who, for some reasons, granted him a miracle.

Whatever.

All this is creepy and could be symbolic, it could hint at how he can’t see others reflected in himself (aka he can’t connect to them), but... it has no purpose. It’s just there for the creepy factor.

PART 10: WHAT GOES ON UNTIL ALL MIGHT DEFEATS AFO

AFO kills Kudo but, since he’s in denial, he claims even though he was crying his own were crocodile tears… because he’s so evil. I do wonder if he’s meant to be the narrator of his own past and wants to paint himself as evil as possible. Whatever.

Apparently Kudo felt he was about to die so he passed AFO to Bruce before being murdered and Bruce will pass it to Hikage before being murdered because someone here has a foretelling Quirk. I get that Hikage’s danger sense might have helped but still… it’s convenient how the OFA users all manage to pass their Quirk before AFO could put a stop to them.

Meanwhile AFO, instead than taking Japan’s throne, seems to establish a crime syndicate/cult, despite the world being in too much disarray to stop him and him having already an overwhelming power.

Really, this guy went to China to kill the Luminescent Baby and steal his Quirk, what’s stopping him from killing everyone in the govern?

He murders Nana’s husband but somehow doesn’t kill Kotarou.

Why?

If he wanted to hurt Nana to the point he found out she had a family and targeted it, why not finish the job also killing or at least hunting Kotarou?

Nana thinks she can hide Kotarou’s existence (which AFO should already know if he investigated over her and discovered she had a husband) by erasing him from her family register… even though Kotarou continues to have the same surname and name, they don’t even change how’s written.

Okay, it can work, there are other Shimuras in Japan so if she sent him to Hokkaido claiming he’s a orphan maybe JUST MAYBE AFO won’t track him (you wish, he’ll do it).

AFO doesn’t bother to track Kotarou down immediately though and Nana decides to pass her Quirk to All Might because he wants to be a Hero, even though she continues to be a Hero in active duty and fight AFO and without OFA she should go back on solely having a floating Quirk (let’s me not get started on the ember thing that’s clearly again ‘random Quirk magic’ that feels to overboard as the idea that you pass your Quirk and yet you still retain it to me feels too overboard again and too much of a plot contrivance).

Even though he has played this dance 6 times already, AFO, for mysterious reasons, doesn’t figure out she has passed her Quirk to All Might and, instead than stopping All Might from escaping, focuses on killing her. Then, when it turns out she doesn’t have anymore OFA for again mysterious reasons he doesn’t hunt All Might even though he’s in U.A. high which shouldn’t have been that impenetrable fortress back then. He doesn’t even hunt him when All Might goes in the USA even if All Might was hardly keeping himself hidden and AFO will claim he has friends on the other side and AGAIN, he went to China to kill the glowing baby and he’s desperate to have OFA and therefore Yoichi back. And this makes no sense.

PART 11: ALL MIGHT IS BACK

This part is complicate because it covers many years during which AFO does plenty of things that make no sense so I try to go at it chronologically.

All Might comes back around 33 years before giving OFA to Midoriya, after 5 years spent in the States in which AFO ignored him for mysterious reasons.

AFO is still not ruling Japan despite now having no OFA owner trying to stop him (which doesn’t make sense), but All Might somehow single handedly put an end to plenty of Villain activities, likely many of them related to him, showing he’s clearly more competent and powerful than his predecessors who ended killed off way too early and couldn’t really change the world.

That or AFO very logically hunted the previous OFA owners so they didn’t get much free reign while for unclear reasons, he let All Might free to act (which doesn’t make sense).

Around 7 years after All Might has come back, Enji ends U.A. high and AFO should likely start to notice his longing for power and… does nothing but keep an eye on him, which fine, it can be. I’m pointing it out because I want you to get an idea of his activities… or lack of them and of how times pass by.

Around 6 years after this, possibly early, and therefore around 13 years after All Might is back, AFO tracks down Kotarou and persuade him to have another kid. Meanwhile with Garaki he opens orphanages and grooms kids and copies their Quirk and thanks to all this they find Chisaki Kai and his Overhaul Quirk. They’ll copy it once and break away half of it turning it into the decay Quirk. At an unclear time Chisaki will leave the orphanage without them making a second full copy of his Quirk to give to AFO, WHO COULD HAVE USED IT TO HEAL HIMSELF SHOULD HE GET HURT (which yeah, doesn’t make sense). Why they let Chisaki go (and NO, despite what the fandom says, Chisaki didn’t escape because Touya set the orphanage on fire, Horikoshi himself in the volume version said the fire wasn’t worth worrying about and, anyway, the timeline doesn’t match) is never said. He could have made a fine Nomu or at least an underling but no, he’s let go (so it again doesn’t make sense).

Around 7 years after, Touya’s Quirk starts burning him. It’s a tragedy for Enji and AFO, who was keeping an eye on him could have just taken this chance to offer him a cure or something while under disguise and only later reveal he was behind it but… no, he let the Todoroki family be and content himself to watch which yeah, doesn’t make sense since he’ll claim he was keeping an eye on Enji’s longing for power and wanted to reap from it and this would have been the perfect moment. Maybe that’s because he’s busy stealing Tenko’s Quirk and then… he goes back on watching the Shimura family so no, he would have had time to tamper with the Todoroki too.

Around 5 years after, AFO gives Tenko half of Chisaki’s Quirk and then waits until Tenko decays his whole family and roams in the streets aloe for a while before retrieving him (and yes, decay activating at random is another ‘random Quirk magic’ thing, along with the fact that somehow Tenko’s family’s hands don’t get decayed) and starting to groom him. Meanwhile Shouto had the time to be born, Touya had the time to attack him and AFO still isn’t doing anything with Enji’s longing for power even though this also would be a very good moment to act.

One year after, AFO and Garaki really wish to get their hands on Eraser Head’s Quirk so they wait for him to be asleep at home and jump on him… no, they don’t do this, they wait for him to leave home and jump on him… no, they don’t even do this, they wait for him to face a Villain and when his friend dies and he survives they content themselves with getting their hands on Oboro Shirakumo’s corpse. And don’t even try again to get Aizawa. AFO doesn’t even go to shake his hand with an excuse in order to steal his Quirk. No. They don’t want erasure anymore. The sudden disinterest as well as the lack of more potentially successful approaches to steal Erasure don’t make sense. Anyway Garaki and AFO are busy turning Oboro into the Nomu Kurogiri, which has a working brain but is completely subservient. Despite Kurogiri’s amazing powerful Quirk, they use him as a babysitter for Tenko, now named Tomura, who’s being groomed into killing people so as to become AFO’s heir even though they continue the orphanage project should Tomura fail. The whereabouts of all those orphans are unknown except for one who’ll get adopted by Garaki (Tsubasa) and then will be turned into a Nomu when he was a teen. They ignore the Todoroki kids because I guess AFO is having too much fun just watching Enji’s longing for power to try to put it to some use. I take AFO is secretly a peeping Tom that gets turned on not by peeping at people engaging in sexual activities but by peeping on a man’s longing for power. No, okay, it makes no sense.

Two years after, Garaki is the doctor who tells Midoriya (who is 4) he is Quirkless. They immediately offer the mother a way to fix this like they had done with the Aoyama and… ops, nope. And it makes no sense as they couldn’t know Midoriya was going to be the main character and they could have spared us of this by having a doctor that wasn’t Garaki tell Midoriya he’s Quirkless. But no, let’s involve Garaki for… nothing.

Two years after, Touya goes on Sekoto Peak and waits for his father, Enji doesn’t reach him and for unknown reasons Touya’s Quirk turn on and Touya burns himself but manages to toss himself in a stream. AFO WHO HAS ALWAYS KEPT AN EYE ON ENJI’S LONGING FOR POWER, DESPITE NOT BEING INVOLVED IN TOUYA SETTING HIMSELF ON FIRE, happens to pass by (or he was stalking Touya or he has set a fire alarm on Sekoto Peak) and retrieve a still living Touya before Enji comes, bring him to Garaki and they put him in coma as they try to rebuild him. Because somehow they never managed to get a single healing Quirk despite Garaki working in plenty of hospitals that should attract people with healing Quirks. As for Enji… he let him be. Who cares for his longing for power? I’ve also a post already about how it doesn’t make sense that AFO wasn’t involved in Touya burning himself and his intervention ends up to be so random it’s disappointing so I won’t dig on this too much.

The year after, he grant Aoyama (who is 6) a Quirk. I guess the Aoyamas being rich made their son a most interesting recipient than Midoriya at whom he didn’t offer a Quirk even though Garaki knew he was Quirkless. He then tells them he could explode them if they disobey him but no, it’ll turn out he couldn’t and there’s no reason why he couldn’t since he showed the Aoyamas he could do it by using another person and we know he could do it as he did so with Lady Nagant. There’s also to say the Aoyamas though will be left mostly quiet until their son is 15. I don’t want to say this is senseless, AFO could have been ‘helping’ people so as to collect their help later… it’s just that, combined with how he didn’t grant a Quirk to Midoriya it becomes random bordering on senseless. He couldn’t know he would need a kid to infiltrate in U.A. high because All might would be teaching there unless he were to be able to see the future. The Aoyamas might be rich but not to the point they’re of use. So… it’s not senseless but it’s bad.

Two years after, Touya wakes up from coma. AFO isn’t around (but he’ll talk with Touya through the black screen of a computer) but Touya is in one of Garaki’s orphanages because they had kept up the habit of grooming kids who… I don’t know, they couldn’t have been all turned into Nomu as, at the start, they didn’t even have them, they’re apparently not serving AFO either as they don’t show up ever again (except for Number 6 in Vigilantes) nor they could have killed them all off as it would have been suspicious so… I don’t know what happened to those kids. Considering they let Touya escape so he could go back home and report to his Number 2 Hero father they had kidnapped him and have all the police jump on the orphanage, I’ve no idea what they do with the other kids. After Chisaki, Touya is the second kid who leaves the orphanage with no consequences but while Chisaki had no one and it was unlikely he would report them, Touya was the son of the Number 2 and they very much tried to kidnap him. That’s enough to trigger a police raid. It’s only due to luck that Touya won’t report them. By the way despite all his interest for Enji’s longing for power AFO will continue to ignore him even if now he has let Touya go. So yeah, all this doesn’t make sense. Also, around this time period ( it was few years after they took Tenko in but before he fought All Might) AFO tells Machia to go into hiding because he had a feeling he might end up being defeated by All Might. Because now he sees the future. No, really, if he felt All Might could beat him why not to keep Machia, HIS BODYGUARD, with himself as back up?

The year after All Might FINALLY murders him. Maybe All Might too had enough of AFO’s senseless behavior. Too bad Garaki retrieves AFO’s body and resurrect him. I get people might not have been very focused in guarding a corpse so it’s not senseless he managed to do it but still… it seems too convenient. By the way AFO’s brain is resurrected in a perfectly fine state. Somehow though Garaki, the man who can create Nomu, can’t give him plastic surgery and a pair of eyes and while Oboro/Kurogiri can walk on his own just fine AFO needs a mask to survive. Because it makes so much Darth Vader he just couldn’t pass it.

At this point, and only at this point, Tomura needs to become AFO’s next body, as his current one is ruined. AFO didn’t need a heir before and the whole ‘he needs anger to steal OFA so he needs Tomura anger since he can’t come up with anger on his own’ felt again like ‘random Quirk magic’, something the author made up to excuse how AFO decided to groom Tenko before really needing a new body.

Also, even though Machia should be in hiding supposedly he’s instead around searching Quirks for AFO in a very obvious manner which should have pushed the Heroes to hunt for Machia but no, no one notices except Ashido and Kirishima but they’re not Heroes so they don’t count.

I’ll skip what happens during “Vigilantes” as Furuhashi is a different author and, even if Horikoshi supervised the whole thing, I’ll also give him a pass on how mistakes could have taken place (I considered only the whole Oboro thing because it’s also mentioned in BNHA).

Six years after having been killed, AFO sends Tomura to attack U.A. high as All Might is teaching there. Note he let him be for 6 years even though All Might had been wounded too. But now that All Might has involved Midoriya without AFO knowing it feels the perfect time to attack him. I’ll catch this chance to point out that Tomura wasn’t trained at all to lead men and AFO wanted him to learn through a process of trial and error which yes, it’s dumb. What if Tomura had died there or had been arrested? Yes, AFO could brag about All Might killing Nana’s grandson or jailing him and pick up a spare kid from the orphanage as his next body but, if Tomura needs to be his next body, he doesn’t need to learn how to lead an army nor to get himself in danger, he only needs to get very pissed off at All Might. AFO should get himself busy strengthening his body (so that Garaki can operate him) and encouraging him to hate All Might, not to put him up in danger. After all he has wasted an awful lot of time on Tomura, why not putting it to good use? To continue… what about the other kids? Why not to put them too against All Might? Why not to give them to Tomura as underlings? Many of them aren’t even turned into Nomu as we see that the first Nomu’s DNA came from an adult, not from a kid.

No, AFO let Tomura free to do as he pleases without even trying to direct his actions a bit.

I guess that the idea is he’ll create chaos and will also make a name for AFO’s new body so that AFO will reap what Tomura sow. I won’t really comment on how Tomura’s plans aren’t great because the characters in the story handle them as if they are. The police is totally creeped out by him, the league is famous and people want to join it, Chisaki will want to use the League’s name, Re-Destro sees the League as a problem… it’s just Machia and Garaki who sees them as a nothing, a kid palling around with the dregs of society.

I won’t count this as senseless but it sure isn’t great.

Touya joins the League, Garaki and AFO recognize him and… do nothing. They don’t warn Tomura, AFO does nothing to take advantage of Enji’s longing for power now that he has Touya back, I’ll jump forward but AFO won’t even say he has Touya to Enji when he’ll face him in Kamino. No, he’ll reveal Tomura’s identity to All Might but will keep his mouth shut with Enji despite keeping an eye on his longing for power. Was AFO’s involvement with Touya planned already? Did Horikoshi want to save the info for later, so he could have a second big reveal scene like the one he had in which AFO told All Might Tomura’s identity? Possibly since this is what we get, it’s just it’s execute worse because, as I said, while AFO’s involvement with Tomura was consistent, his involvement with Touya felt random.

And so we get to the ‘Forest training camp’ arc and the ‘Hideout raid’ arc.

The League attacks the camp because they want to send a signal to society as well as steal Bakugou, which Tomura somehow wants to persuade to join them even though Bakugou is clearly unwilling.

During the attack they lend Tomura a Nomu which is then entrusted to Dabi. Yaoyorozu places a transmitter on it. When the League is whisked away by Kurogiri the Nomu is brought into the Nomu factory/Garaki’s spare lab/whatever. Although people blame Touya, he had no chance to check the Nomu for devices… and they probably did as we will be told the warehouse in which he was, was a decoy. So AFO deliberately had the Heroes find it, deliberately he didn’t warn Tomura that the Heroes were on him, deliberately showed up to deal with the Heroes and save Tomura and have a fight with All Might.

I’ll say… it’s not a bad plan. His surprise attack works and could have done even more damage if it wasn’t for Best Jeanist, sending the Nomu at the hideout could have also done more damage if it weren’t because Enji is strong (he’s the one disposing of the most of the Nomus), the League is freed without much damage, if he had retreated with the League using Kurogiri’s Quirk or his own Quirk he could have just came out victor.

I won’t hold it against him the fact he wanted to kill All Might as, even though he was outnumbered, he seemed to be stronger. I mean, beating All Might would have been a big victory. Honestly, even if he lost, this part was good.

It’s chronologically late in his life but it’s meaningful it’s EARLY in the story. AFO, at the start of the story, was making sense. Yeah, he could have used more Nomu and Gigantomachia to insure his victory but arrogance is a fitting flaw for him and, as I said, it did seem like he could make it.

Then he gets jailed straight in Tartarus instead than in one of the jails in which, in Japan, they put people who didn’t undergo a trial. It’s clear since he killed people and he’s not even attempting to deny it, he’ll be sentenced to death. Japan is slow at executing people so it theoretically makes sense he’s not immediately killed off (yeah, many in the fandom think there’s no death sentence in BNHA but it actually there is as we were told Moonfish was an escaped convict on death row).

To be honest, since Horikoshi worsened a lot the conditions of prisons and since AFO is what it is, it would make more sense if they had just executed him and be done with him put since the plot will need him to stay alive, I do get why Horikoshi decided to take advantage of how Japan is slow at carrying on its death sentences.

What doesn’t make sense, but this isn’t an AFO problem but a Tartarus problem, is how he’s kept constantly tied on a chair (because, contrary to what many in the fandom think in the story there are no Quirk cancelling means beyond Chisaki’s bullets and Eraser Head’s Quirk). This isn’t just torture, this is unhealthy as hell… but again Horikoshi doesn’t care about medical accuracy so it does nothing to AFO.

All Might goes to talk with him, claiming with such body AFO could have lived forever instead he wasted everything manipulating, exploiting and toying with people. The problem with All Might’s words is that AFO gained such body EXACTLY because he manipulated, exploited and toyed with people, if he hadn’t he would have probably died of starvation as a baby or, even better, drowned because he wouldn’t have stolen his mother’s Quirk.

Yeah, he got the lifeforce Quirk by a willing Garaki, but Garaki wouldn’t have been willing if AFO hadn’t been who he was.

AFO then claims he chose a successor because All Might stole everything from him. Too bad All Might too should have been able to sniff the lie. All Might, as said before, ruined AFO’s body (killed him) 6 years before, AFO got Tomura way before that and if All Might had checked the fate of Shimura Kotarou he should have known… All Might though seems to believe him, which means he didn’t check and it makes no sense he didn’t check as AFO could have lied when he told him Tomura is Nana’s grandson.

AFO though manages to talk in a way that shows he understands how people work and can manipulate them while, at the same time, managing to look scary.

He won’t get to do much until he somehow also awakens in Tomura’s body because… ‘random Quirk magic’… and now he’s obsessed with retrieving OFA. This is more or less the narrative point in the story in which he stops making sense.

The sudden obsession for OFA, the ‘random Quirk magic’ that allows a copy of him to possess Tomura, the way he does it in such a way that gains him Tomura’s hate and pushes Tomura to fight against him when before Tomura cared for him, the fact when questioned by Shuichi about why they’re leaving behind their comrades he gives an answer that immediately betrays he’s not Tomura and that doesn’t win him any favor in Shuichi’s book where before he was good at manipulating people, all this clashes with the previous AFO.

AFO doesn’t win the loyalty of the league, they remain with him because they’ve no better option, he goes freeing people who aren’t loyal to him from jail but fails to free Kurogiri (because Horikoshi retcons him as not being anymore in Tartarus as he was shown there moments before AFO’s attack) and doesn’t bother freeing his allies from prisons that are clearly less guarded than Tartarus, and the other prisons he attacks.

He doesn’t even bother freeing Kurogiri, whom he needs and for whom he’ll send Shuichi to free him ON THE DAY OF THE BIG ATTACK WHEN THE HEROES WERE ON GUARD or Machia, whom he also need and for whom he’ll also send people to free him ON THE DAY OF THE BIG ATTACK WHEN THE HEROES WERE ON GUARD and that will cause him to lose’s loyalty (which honestly, feels forced because Machia decides to stop being loyal to him when AFO sends people to free him), and this doesn’t make a lot of sense.

We continue with him setting some convicts to hunt Midoriya among which Lady Nagant, to whom he gives a Quirk that conveniently doesn’t damage her brain, and set on her an explosive that turn on should she betray him because he doesn’t trust her… and she confirms he was right in not trusting her because she betrays him… yet he’ll be surprised later on when she’ll get in his way again WHICH DOESN’T MAKE SENSE.

And then we go on with a list of things that don’t make sense but, at this point, I don’t really care anymore.

The moles he places in U.A. high, who remain unused for a way too long time, it seems as if AFO is saving them for when U.A. evacuation procedure will start?

The fact he first seemed fully AFO as he possesses Tomura but when he fights Star and Stripes his identity is unclear because… ‘random Quirk magic’ at play.

How AFO didn’t reinforce his mask so that it wouldn’t break easily even though it’s his most glaring weakness and Horikoshi said they could use Detnerat’s technology.

How AFO didn’t blast Hawks, Tokoyami and Jiro away as he did with the Heroes in Kamino, knocking down even Jeanist who got seriously hurt, but let them gain time until Enji was up and fighting again.

How the Quirks inside him start rebelling to him for a new dose of ‘random Quirk magic’ that previously not even New order accomplished because now they’re sentient and observing the battle and are encouraged by Jiro and Tokoyami’s attempts at resisting him.

How it turns out he doesn’t have hyper regeneration Quirk or a copy of Overhaul’s Quirk (yes, I know, Garaki isn’t there anymore to give them to him but he should have had them FROM BEFORE) so if he gets hurt he doesn’t have a Quirk that can heal him.

How he knows Jin’s dying wish even though he hardly knew Jin.

How he knew Nagant was murdering Heroes for the Hero commission even though they surely didn’t let anyone know about such thing.

How he didn’t manage to say something to gain back Machia’s trust despite being this super good manipulator.

How he steals fierce wings from Hawks instead than just killing him, even if he calls Hawks’ Quirk garbage and the whole thing seems so damaged he can’t use it.

How he goes back on being able to feel anger again.

How his whole body starts to glow (a sign he got the glowing baby’s Quirk but one that doesn’t make sense now as why should he turn on the glowing Quirk?) [Chap. 400]

How when he couldn’t find Stain at Tartarus, he felt Stain might turn against him (because even though he couldn’t get news from outside and was kept in solitary confinement he had to know Stain wasn’t executed or moved in another place like Kurogiri was… oh, wait, did he know Kurogiri was moved? Because apparently not even Horikoshi knew it as moments before the attack he was shown at Tartarus…) so he collected a Quirk specifically against Stain, ‘bloodlet’… as if he could just shop for a Quirk that could work against Stain. I mean, it’s not like such Quirk was common and the idea that AFO conveniently stumbled upon it is yes possible but feels so unlikely it’s unbelievable.

How he supposedly has a Quirk, ‘antigen swap’ that he kept because in this way he wouldn’t let traces of himself. He calls it one of the secrets of his long rule. As if he’d even been discreet.

How Tomura could somehow rather easily refuse to allow AFO’s Quirk activation to teleport him.

How AFO realizes only then how Bakugou resembles Kudou and not before when Tomura targeted him or when they kidnapped him.

And there’s probably more I missed because I do hate the last battle and this list is long enough.

Overall it’a pity because AFO got completely ruined in the final part of the story when before he was cool and scary… a least those are my two cents over him.

Thank you to everyone who managed to read this now and sorry if I missed something or messed up something.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Another part of untangling the Garashir knot i.e. trying to make their relationship make sense for fic-writing purposes is the question of Bashir’s ability to trust and be vulnerable around Garak.

I got to thinking about that because of this 10-year-old post (yay old meta dives!) that points out that Bashir is just as emotionally closed off as Garak in The Wire, and it’s really true - he never explicitly tells Garak he that he cares about him, but instead frames his care for him through their doctor-patient relationship, or through his higher ethical convictions (that is, when Garak says “Have you considered I might be getting exactly what I deserve?” and Bashir says “No one deserves this”). And given that part of the conflict of that episode is Bashir’s uncertainty as to whether Garak actually considers him a friend or cares for him on the same level as Bashir cares for Garak - as indicated in Bashir’s conversation with Dax - I think it speaks to a level of emotional self-protection on Bashir’s part that’s pretty often at play in his relationship with Garak.

Because for all that he wants Garak to open up to him in those early episodes - it comes up in a more playful mode in the way they banter with each other, but The Wire shows more legitimate frustration from Bashir at the possibility that Garak might not trust him - Bashir never actually leads by example there. When does he ever share anything about his personal history with Garak? When does he ever confide in him about his hopes and fears and insecurities? Pretty much never! And he’s not at all averse to sharing things about himself, whether it’s to get laid (like the adapted story about his medical exams) or to make a friend (like him telling Miles about Palis in Armageddon Game, or telling that pregnant woman about Kukalaka in The Quickening). He gave Jadzia his medical school journals (to get laid… and make a friend?). And there are plenty of instances of him confiding in his friends - Miles, Jadzia, Ezri - about his insecurity, fear of failure, feeling like he’s a monster because of his genetic engineering, etc.

But not with Garak. The closest he gets to sharing anything significant about himself is his grumpiness about turning thirty in Distant Voices, which isn’t even close. And you could argue that that’s a contrivance of the writing, a consequence of their relationship not being allowed to be developed more. But I actually think it makes a lot of sense from a character angle. Because for all that he seemingly can’t stop talking about himself, Bashir is a lot more selective about what parts of himself that he shares than it initially seems, as is most obviously demonstrated by the fact that he hid his being genetically engineered from everyone for years. So I do take him at his word when he tells Jadzia in The Wire that he doesn’t exactly trust Garak either, and I think that’s modeled in his (possibly subconscious) reluctance to truly open up to him. I mean, in Distant Voices he casts the guy telepathically attacking his brain as Garak! Which he and Garak laugh off in an extremely charming scene at the end of the episode, but it really does say something about how he sees Garak on a subconscious level.

So it’s honestly much easier for me to imagine fic scenes and whatnot in which Garak opens up to Bashir, because there is plenty of precedent for that in canon - largely in The Wire, but also when he vents to Bashir about his frustration with Tain and desire for Tain’s forgiveness in In Purgatory’s Shadow. And there’s a real sense that he really does want to unburden himself to Bashir, even if primarily in his own evasive, circumlocutionary way. But it’s so, so hard for me to get Bashir to a place where he’d do something similar with Garak, because given his characterization wrt their dynamic, I just feel like there’d need to be so much more work done in their relationship to get him to feel that kind of trust towards Garak.

(This dovetails with my headcanon that they weren’t that close in the later seasons, because the events later in the show would honesty make that even more difficult. After being interrogated by an intelligence organization, I imagine Bashir would be even warier of Garak!)

There’s also the fact that the most intense intimacy between the two of them always comes up in situations where Bashir is the stronger one, and Garak is the one who needs to be cared for, who’s being pushed into being vulnerable. And that again is a contrivance of the writing, but it is something that I think is compelling to contemplate when it comes to their relationship dynamic - specifically, how it might affect a long-term relationship dynamic in a post-canon setting. Because Bashir can be something of a fixer-upper when it comes to his romantic relationships, and I do see him as drawn to dynamics where he’s the stronger one who’s positioned to care for and guide the other person. And so, while I don’t think Bashir would be the sole cause of any difficulties that might arise in their relationship - trying to get open and honest communication from Elim Garak really would be like pulling teeth - I can really see him falling into a pattern of thinking with Garak wherein Garak is the one who needs to be cared for, the one who needs to communicate with him, etc etc, but being very very bad at being open and communicative with Garak in turn. Even if their relationship does develop sufficiently for him to feel more comfortable sharing himself with Garak - and I really think that it could - I still imagine his first impulse when he’s Going Through It would be to close himself off from Garak. And that does cause problems.

A broader angle that canon does not really bring out is the potential for Bashir’s dynamic with Garak to draw out some of Bashir’s hypocrisies, or aspects of his ideology that are incomplete or contradictory. Bashir on Cardassia post-canon has a lot of potential to do this - not that I’d want him to let go of Federation ideals, but the reality of living somewhere else would necessitate those ideals being qualified, or him becoming more flexible. And with the shift in their dynamic, in which Garak is in his natural habitat (even if it’s drastically changed from the Cardassia he remembers) and Bashir is the outsider, Garak could potentially be put in the role of having to guide or protect Bashir. And given the nature of Cardassian politics, the actual methods he might take in order to do so would imo not necessarily be within Bashir’s comfort zone. And I like the idea of that conflict, and that kind of testing of Bashir’s values and expectations and perceptions, coming through on a smaller scale just within their relationship, wherein Bashir really wants Garak to communicate with him but finds it (not even consciously!) very difficult to reciprocate that.

[petalsandantlers]

for @jilymicrofics/ march prompt n.2: chaperone (1000 words) regency AU

enjoy xx

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Lady Lily Evans had made a habit of avoiding Lord Potter at every possible turn.

It was not an easy task, given the season’s insistence on hosting insufferable balls and outings, where every eligible woman was meant to flutter her lashes and charm her way into a man’s regard. Lily, for all her mother’s best efforts, found herself wholly unsuited to the endeavor.

It was not that she lacked beauty—she had been told often enough that her red hair was a rarity and her green eyes remarkable. Nor was it that she lacked wit—if anything, she had too much of it, sharp as a blade and just as likely to cut. No, the trouble was that she had no patience for pretense. She would not simper, she would not curtsy demurely when she disagreed, and she would certainly not be charmed by James Potter.

And yet, somehow, she had been saddled with him.

“I do not require a chaperone,” she hissed as they strolled through the rose gardens of Lady Macmillan’s estate. The evening air was cool, perfumed with the scent of late summer blooms. Behind them, a few other couples took similar turns around the gravel paths, watched closely by watchful mothers and vigilant aunts. “This is entirely unnecessary.”

James, the picture of casual elegance in his dark coat and cravat, merely grinned. “And yet, Lady Evans, here I am.”

She shot him a glare. “I know full well why. Your mother and mine are in league.”

“They are, rather.” He did not seem the least bit bothered by the fact. “I find it charming, don’t you?”

Lily made an exasperated sound. “Hardly.”

Her mother, in a fit of desperation after yet another suitor had left their house red-faced and insulted, had contrived with Lady Potter to ensure Lily had at least one acceptable escort this season. James had been all too willing to take up the role, much to Lily’s eternal vexation.

He was not the worst of men. That, Lily would grant him. He was respectable, wealthy, and of good family. He was clever, which she might have appreciated were it not for the fact that he used that cleverness almost exclusively to irritate her. And then, of course, there was his utterly infuriating ability to smile as if everything in the world was delightfully amusing, especially her indignation.

“You needn’t look as though I have personally doomed you to misery,” James remarked, glancing down at her. “You might even find my company agreeable if you gave it a chance.”

She scoffed. “Highly unlikely.”

“And yet,” he mused, “we always seem to find ourselves in each other’s company. A rather telling pattern, don’t you think?”

Lily did not dignify that with a response.

They walked in silence for a moment, the sound of their shoes crunching against the gravel the only thing between them. Other couples meandered ahead, slow and dreamy in the moonlight, whilst she and James were locked in this endless battle of wills. It was exhausting. It was—

“I heard about Lord Snape,” James said suddenly, voice quieter, more serious. “He left your house in quite a state.”

Lily pursed her lips. “He deserved it.”

“I’m sure he did,” James said, and though his tone was light, there was a flicker of something else in his expression. “Still, I hope he did not distress you overmuch.”

Lily hesitated. It was a rare thing for him to drop his mask of amusement. She was not quite sure what to do with it.

“He said something unkind about my sister,” she admitted after a moment, voice clipped. “I did not take it well.”

“Good.”

That startled her. She turned to look at him properly, and he was watching her with an intensity that stole the breath from her lungs. “Good?”

“Yes.” His mouth quirked up in a half-smile. “You should not take such things well. You ought to send every fool who insults you or those you love running.”

She did not know what to say to that. Her fingers curled against the fabric of her gloves. “My mother was not pleased.”

“No,” he agreed. “I imagine she was not.”

Silence stretched between them again, but this time, it was different. Less combative, more… thoughtful.

The path curved, bringing them back toward the great house, where the light and music of the ball spilled out into the night. Lily exhaled slowly, gathering her wits.

“I suppose I must thank you,” she said begrudgingly. “For this… chaperoning business.”

James raised his brows, clearly surprised. “You suppose?”

She gave him a look. “Yes, well, I am certain you are only enduring it to please your mother, but it is preferable to some of the alternatives.”

James stopped walking then, and Lily, caught off guard, did too. She turned to face him, irritation flaring again—until she saw his expression.

“I am not enduring anything,” he said, his voice quiet, steady. “Do you truly think I need my mother’s prompting to want to be near you?”

Lily’s heart skipped, stuttered. Her throat felt suddenly dry. “I—”

“I have danced attendance on you all season, not because I was made to, but because I wanted to.” His gaze burned, something raw beneath the teasing veneer. “And if I am to be your chaperone, Lily, then let it be known—I am only protecting you from men who are not me.”

Her breath came short. She did not—she could not—

Somewhere inside, a new set began, violins sweeping into a waltz. The world pressed in, too many eyes, too much heat, and yet, for a moment, it was only the two of them, balanced on the edge of something precarious.

Then James stepped back, offering his arm, his expression shifting into something lighter. “Shall we?”

Lily hesitated—only a fraction—before she placed her hand upon his sleeve.

And as they stepped back into the light, she wondered how long she had been mistaking the battle between them for anything but the beginning of surrender.

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[calp0sa]

what do you like and dislike about airy?

CRAZY MESSY INFODUMP INCOMING OH LORD

well there’s nothing i truly dislike about airy, because everything about him just makes him who he is. i just wish we got more insight to him as an Actual person rather than his host facade, even though that was sort of the point of one 17-18, i feel like the fact that he’s pretty much a regular ass dude went over most people’s heads (Not mine though because im really smart and could beat albert einstein in a rap battle) i know the mystique is the most prominently interesting aspect of the whole show… but yknowwww it’d be nice to know a little more about him personally considering how we now know he’s far from a one-dimensional character and shouldn’t be taken at face value (i am side eyeing a huge chunk of the one fandom as i say this) now okay if i were to talk about everything i like about airy we’d be here til the next solar eclipse but i’ll try to jot down everything i can. airy, to me, is the most fascinating object show character there is. i swear every time i observe something about him it’s like i’m opening a matryoshka doll as i dissect his character further and further… every rewatch of one i notice something, whether it be minuscule or glaring, there’s always something for me to brutally analyze. see, and here’s where i contradict myself, because while it’s frustrating not having much official trivia on him, i actually quite love how mysterious he is. i love how he seems like he knows a lot more than he lets on. i love how his caginess only sparks more questions. and i love how FESTERED he is. how you can tell there was so much that led up to him being so numb and stagnant… it does nothing but pique my interest. and i love how this festered-ness parallels with the contestants. i can’t help but feel as if the true extent of airy’s suffering was reflected through those on the plane, how the contestants went through so many fluctuant stages of sadness, denial, hopelessness, anger… all in the midst of isolation akin to airy’s forest. it makes me wonder if ONE served as catharsis to airy. not just a purpose or a distraction, but something to spark resonance within a desolate soul. speaking of distraction, it’s really interesting to me how reliant airy is on escapism, and this is most evident in how he literally takes on such a gilded and contrived host persona to the point where it’s difficult for the viewer to discern who he is OUTSIDE of “airy”. big fan of how the show basically tricks us into thinking he’s this ruthless malevolent all powerful entity until it takes us by surprise and reveals that he’s Just Some Guy, and it could’ve been anyone in his place. but this isn’t to defend him… no… airy was definitely a selfish and inconsiderate asshole (sorry yall) he just isn’t as awful as everyone makes him out to be. airy is not evil, nor is he good, he just kind of sucks LOL. and i love him for that honestly! the thing about this is he should’ve stopped and asked himself “what am i going to gain from this” yet he was so absorbed in trying to hoist himself out of that inevitable pit of dread that he did not care if he destroyed everything else in the process (Might i add that this is a huge parallel to liam’s impulsive vengefulness… i swear i could go on and on about how those two are brothers from another mother) another interesting thing about the hosting stage of airy is the chance that he probably did feel some sort of regret. especially after the shock of breaking his face, being confronted by harsh genuine emotions after such a long time… an iota of the pain and fear he assumed was long gone… as well as the crushing reminder that he basically threw himself and all his senses away just for a stupid game. What a loser amirite. even if he had some semblance of a wish to end ONE, he knew he couldn’t. i’d imagine he told himself mockingly “yeaaaa you basically dug yourself into this, you’re not backing out any time soon” (even though he could’ve easily backed out he was just a loser ass COWARD!)

i didn’t know the paragraphs had character limits! interesting. anyway i can’t help but wonder if airy made that effort to take care of liam in an attempt to break the cycle, the cycle of destroying everything else, including your very self, for the purpose of One thing. maybe airy thinks violence and spite is just a huge waste of time yes of course, but i think he understood liam to some extent (remember what i said about resonance 😁😁😁) i just love how everything about airy is so subtle, yet so major, so jarring and confusing yet when you piece it all together it makes such a scary amount of sense. i love making sense of how nonsensical he is. (of course i do. i am possibly the biggest fan of nonsense there is) now i will add a funny little thing i like about him. i like how he’s all impatient and snarky. and i know you’re probably thinking “franklin how in the abraham lincoln’s bootycheek do you think he’s snarky” Listen, it’s really funny once you actually notice it. there were so many instances where he sounded exasperated with the contestants. my personal favorite being

“yes, as long as you are here, you can’t die”

>”WE CANT DIE?”

“Yes… that’s… what i just said 😐”

he has this barely noticeable “oh my god can you let me do what i need to do” attitude and it’s SO funny. i like to imagine he rolled his eyes a lot while he was hosting. its really funny to imagine. and its also funny to imagine him smiling like an idiot like he did hosting in one 17. that scene was really cute it makes me want to run into ongoing traffic and get continuously ran over by 12 different semi-trucks. if you ignore how miserable the contestants were (sorry contestants) it’s actually really endearing how excited and eager airy was when he got ideas for challenges. i bet he felt so proud of himself it’s honestly kind of sad. he’s sad. what the hell. he really thought he was the SHIT when he said “riches… immortality… whatever your heart desires 😌” Oh my god he’s so pathetic don’t even get me started MY ONLINE CLASSES ARE STARTING I GOTS TO GO BUT ANYWAY FEEL FREE TO ASK FOR AN ANALYSIS ABOUT LITERALLY ANYTHING AIRY RELATED I HAVE MORE THAN A HUNDRED BIBLES’ WORTH OF SHIT TO SAY ABOUT HIM BYEBYE THANK YOU FOR ASKING THIS

[aihoshiino]

chapter 164 thoughts

This post discusses suicide and suicidal ideation in the context of Oshi no Ko.

Chapters Until The Story Ends Without The 143 Kiss Being Addressed Or Acknowledged: 2

Bizarrely, I feel like I don't have a ton to say about this chapter. Not because stuff doesn't happen in it but because… fuck, man. What do I even say. I can't quite 100% shake my suspicion that Akasaka has some asspull up his sleeve and that Aqua might come back in style form, even if altered to the point that he isn't the Aqua we know anymore, but this chapter is clearly set up for us to think he's dead and for us to see other character's reactions to this news, so I'll talk about the text with that assumption in mind. This one will probably be kind of all over the place so bear with me ig

That being said… this is all kind of dumb as fuck, huh

Like. There's just so many insane contrivances with this setup that it's impossible for me to take it seriously. Putting aside that there's no way on planet earth Aqua's plan should have fooled anybody, why in God's name are his family and friends finding out about this from a news broadcast and not, like… Being contacted by the police?? Or at least hearing about it beforehand??

I also really don't like that we're setting up to have a whole chapter focusing on Ruby's response to all this while Aqua's Literal Mother and all his friends get like. Two panels to be shocked at the news. If the series ends without giving them all the space to grieve I think I will be legitimately really pissed off lmao

The presence of 15 Year Lie in this chapter also makes me agonizingly aware that we know basically nothing about it to this day, even though the contents of the movie are what this final arc revolves around. Aqua's plan relies on Kamiki's crimes as exposed by the movie being heinous enough that Kamiki would kill Aqua to silence them but…

WHAT FUCKING CRIMES???

The Kamiki we saw in the movie was only ever portrayed as a victim in the scenes we see. Unless the story is trying to imply that Kamiki is somehow responsible for Uehara and Airi's deaths or that 15YL makes him directly responsible for Gorou's death or - literally I have no idea what this could be referring to.

I dunno, man. It's hard for me to really want to buckle down and analyse this because so much of it feels entirely contrary to the story that came before. I've always insisted that the one thing that we could guarantee was that Aqua and Ruby would survive the series and be happy because so much emotional weight is put on Ai's wish for Aqua and Ruby to grow into adults and be happy, and it really seemed like we were building up to an ending of Aqua deciding for himself that he wants to finally live for himself, so this sudden swerve into Aqua being told by God "actually your purpose in life is to nobly commit suicide for your sister" is uh, jarring to say the least.

Part of the issue with this is that I think Akasaka doesn't think of Aqua's sacrifice as being a suicide, narratively speaking, even though Akane literally acknowledges it as such. But the thing is, Aqua's "sacrifice" is emergent from all the same things as his suicidal ideation - his belief that his life is intrinsically less valuable than everyone else's and his continued guilt and self loathing as a result of his trauma. Aqua literally says to Ruby's face in 143 that he feels guilty just for being alive and it's literally never addressed again.

So it's very difficult not to read this ending as the story approving of Aqua killing himself, but only if it's for the right reasons. Not only is that an insanely irresponsible message to put into a story as widespread and visible as OnK is right now, it's also just fucking ghoulish.

Idk. Even if Aqua lived here, I just really dislike this idea of his whole life's purpose being Narratively Affirmed as being to uplift Ruby at his own expense. Aqua is very much like Ai in that he's a person who has spent basically all of both his lives in service to other people, unable to pursue the things that he wants and that make him genuinely fulfilled - an ending that parallels Ai, where he is denied this to the extent that it kills him, is not a bad idea on paper but the execution here makes it fall apart. Like, if the framing was that Aqua and Kamiki were both unable to move on from the past to the point that it kills them, I'd vibe with that or something like it. But as is, this shit is just baffling.

It doesn't help that Aqua's death is just completely unmoored from anything the series has been setting up all this time. I've seen people defending this as being what Aqua's revenge was building up to, but this very explicitly isn't about Aqua's revenge. It's about "protecting Ruby's future", but the idea that Kamiki was a threat to Ruby specifically is something that was introduced all of four chapters ago. Even then, it's deeply undercooked. Like, what it is about Kamiki that makes him SUCH a threat to Ruby that Aqua has no choice but to take the nuclear option and kill them both? Why is this the one and only way to stop him? We don't know - we basically know nothing about Kamiki besides "he's Ai's crazy ex" which is such a massive letdown for an antagonist who's been built up for this long.

Speaking of Ai…. where the fuck is she!!!

I know this is predictable background noise from the Ai Wife Guy, but it really is baffling to me that she's such a nonfactor when the climax happening right now is her son confronting the man who killed her. At best, we get mild lipservice as to her existence but the series is so all-in on this "protecting Ruby's future" framing that Ai's absence here feels jarring. It's not just that Ai should be relevant because I like her (but I DO and she SHOULD) but because it makes for a bizarrely deflated finale. Instead of the tragedy we've been building up to avenging for over 140 chapters, Aqua's death comes as the result of a plan he came up with on the spot to deal with an ill-defined threat that only came into existence 4-6 chapters ago.

It just doesn't really feel satisfying, especially when the series has been so wishy washy when it comes to focusing on Aqua and Ruby's relationship. If the series was going to make that connection The central axis on which this climax revolves, then it needed more fleshing out than it got, regardless of if the series went the AquRuby route or not.

Two chapters left………..

[hellaversity]

Anyone else think the TV Tropes pages for Helluva Boss feel lowkey kinda biased?

They bash Stolitz all the time, make Stolas out to be this awful person who sexually harasses Blitzø with no remorse, say both get too much screentime (nevermind that the show wouldn't exist without them) and downplay Stolas' problems because he was born rich. (Which is literally part of his character arc.)

Meanwhile they jerk off Stella and claim she's only written the way she is to make Stolas look better, but have no problem with Crimson, Mammon or Valentino and don't say they only exist to prop up Moxxie, Fizz or Angel. Some pages do call this out, but the vast majority are just pro-Stella propaganda. They also talk like the show has just suddenly turned from a typical adult sitcom about assassins to a gay love story, and they CANNOT stand that.

Strangely enough, they don't seem to have the same "Eat the rich" mentality about Verosika that they do about Stolas, basically kissing her ass in the Apology Tour page and any time the episode is mentioned. They don't ever possibly stop to think for one second that her obssession with spiting Blitzø or arranging entire parties about this one guy for years on end is maybe a little... petty and unhealthy? Nope, they treat her like a saint because she said it was for the purpose of helping people that Blitzø allegedly hurt feel better, no matter how contrived it sounds. The fact that Dennis, Wally Wackford and Vortex were there doesn't even cross their minds.

They slapped the "Bi Not Too Bi" trope onto Blitzø and Loona, because Blitzø's romantic or sexual relationships with men happen to be happen to be important to the plot and he didn't fall in love with Verosika the way he did Fizz or Stolas, and in Loona's case it was because the only hint of her attraction to women is calling Bee hot. (Personally I hate that such a trope even exists on the website because it implies that you have to "prove" your bi/pansexuality or else you might as well be straight or gay, which perpetuates the stereotype that bi and pan people either have to go all out or "pick a side".)

On a less important note, they describe Blitzø's appearance unfavorably, calling him a "Kavorka Man" (ugly guy who still gets all the ladies and sometimes the dudes) and apply him to the "Ugly Guy Hot Wife" trope, saying he looks like a Xenomorph, yet they turn around and call Barbie Wire, who looks just like a female version of her brother, a "Ms Fanservice" and say she looks attractive in both human and demon form. I get it, these entries are probably all written by straight men who don't know the first thing about what makes other men attractive to people anyway, but it still baffles me.

[bucksboobs]

Re your “what was the point of bringing Gerarrd back” post: it’s so maddening that it honestly makes me wonder if there was a better plan in the S7 writers room that got pivoted due to studio notes like maybe the network didn’t want to touch anything that might be too “woke” (or just Tim getting distracted by Brad, who tf knows)

Like i know this show just doesn’t plan things, but it’s weird how very planned it seemed right up until that plan went nowhere fast and it would make the dropping of pretty much all the S7 plot lines (all connected to Gerarrd) make more sense if someone on high just demanded they kill it quickly and without fanfare

The interconnectedness of Tommy explicitly referencing how Gerrard is just like his father, the setup for the mystery of how Gerrard got put back at the 118 that was supposed to be answered with the reveal that Gerrard and Ortiz are somehow friends, that Buck has never worked under any captain BUT Bobby. The idea that Buck would be treated as the golden boy until Buck comes out to Gerrard, or the idea of Buck and Tommy having conflicting opinions on whether he should come out to Gerrard and that being Baby’s First Homophobia. The interplay with Gerrard being a military style man and Eddie’s history with the military. Up to and including 801, it looked like all of that was set up perfectly and then 802 was extended into two episodes and that was fine at the time but then 804 was very clearly written to be two episodes that got drastically shortened into one to make room for the stretching of 802 and 803 (which IMO wasn’t necessary. If you cut out one of the passenger emergencies and the drama with the copilot waking up and then having a heart attack and just land the plane at the airstrip instead of the freeway, and maybe even cut the final shootout over the black book, then you wouldn’t have had to do another episode.) and then so much of Hotshots and Wannabes is taken up by Brad’s stupid little storyline when they could have left him behind in 804 to focus on expanding Eddie’s storyline with Fr. Brian to help pave the way for Eddie’s decision to move

If I was planning out the 8 episode half season it would have gone

801-802: Plane disaster

803-804: Mara storyline Gerrard is actually still out of commission for more than a day and doesn’t come back until 804 at which point it’s revealed he was in cahoots with Ortiz. Hen is the one who records Ortiz instead and Gerrard goes down with Ortiz as an accomplice. The court drama lasts more than one single scene

805: Bobby’s back! still the cute little Halloween episode, instead of hurting Denny though, we focus on HenRen the drama over PTO. This is meant as a breather before the breakup and Eddie storylines

806: have the breakup be about Buck’s uneasiness being Queer In Public, using Picture Girl and Hot Waiter as a compare and contrast flashpoint instead of Abby. Keep the Glee speech but have the breakup be about how Buck keeps rushing headlong in but can’t say the word bisexual apparently. If Buck can’t acknowledge Tommy as his boyfriend to Picture Girl then how can he be ready to move in? Make it about Buck and Tommy as people, not a contrivance that Tim stole from a video he watched once.

807: this is where Eddie should have first started thinking about moving and he should have a conversation with Hen about losing Nia and nearly losing Mara as well and then one with Maddie (or about Maddie through Chim if you combine it with previous convo) about missing some of Jee’s milestones that convinces him he doesn’t want to miss any more of Chris’s life. Fr Brian should play some role in this decision too so he can discuss his thought process.

808: the moving reveal happens early in the episode, just as Buck has slowed down on baking and it immediately ramps up again. He takes the products to Maddie and they have a coded conversation about people leaving him (Maddie thinks they’re talking about Tommy until the end of the scene when Buck tells her it’s about Eddie) inadvertently foreshadowing Maddie’s kidnapping. We end on Buck basically begging Eddie not to leave in an Emotionally Charges Scene that is Up To Interpretation. Eddie at some point asks “is this really about what’s best for me and my family or is it about something else?” Because perpetual martyr Eddie can’t believe something is actually about him and then as Buck leaves he gets a text from Tommy “Can we talk?” It says. Cut to black before we see if he answers.

[quill-and-whetstone]

“The Sniper Problem”

I have a favorite litmus test that I apply to just about everything I write: “Could this entire plotline be resolved by one sufficiently trained sniper?” The hypothetical sniper is there to evaluate the quality of the conflict I’ve set up. If they can resolve the whole thing by taking out their target then I… probably have some rethinking to do, because the test succinctly highlights a few key issues with any story that fails it.

First, the obvious: if the problem your protagonists are facing can be solved this way it’s probably just not as interesting as it could be. A conflict of “big bad evil dude does a big bad evil thing and our hero goes and mercs him about it” can make for a fun blockbuster action film, but the plot of those films are rarely–if ever–the point. Stories with a central villain stand to gain a lot of narrative depth from asking yourself what issues would linger if they were suddenly removed from the picture. What internal struggles might remain in your protagonists? How might the world around them still need to be changed or healed? Which elements or areas of the story just seem empty without the big bad to fill the narrative space, and how can we develop them?

The second facet of the sniper problem is an inverted Occam’s Razor, a call to ensure that there’s a good reason the protagonists aren’t just using a simple and direct route to solve their problems. It’s like how modern horror movies have to cripple the victims’ cell phones to justify everything else that happens, though ideally less contrived. When revising a story through this lens, it’s almost difficult not to improve it. It aids suspension of disbelief, lets your protagonists present as more competent, and gives them more to do outside of biffing people they don’t like which in turn showcases more of their personality.

A great example of all of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Throughout the show the bottom line is that our heroes are out to defeat the Firelord to stop the atrocities he’s committing against the rest of the world. So it stands to reason to ask, why not camp outside his house early on with an assassin good enough to score a quick or lucky kill? But the show answers this amply with just its concept, mostly without having to draw direct attention to it. If Firelord Ozai dropped dead in the pilot there would still be a whole Fire Nation pursuing his goals complete with other emotionally unstable royals and military officers. It wouldn’t actually… solve anything. “Defeat the Firelord” is just the mission that sets our heroes on the path they need to take to stop a war that’s destroying the world. The real solution is cultivating friendships across cultures, healing and maturing together, growing spiritually, protecting and empowering victims of generational violence, dismantling fascistic power structures, and ultimately even finding a relatively peaceful / humane solution to the problem of the Firelord. While they do call this out directly in one episode, they didn’t have to, because with the way they structured the narrative it was already evident. As a result of that good planning the characters got to do a lot of interesting, character driven, thematically resonant things and the show isn’t just one long and kind of dry martial arts training montage until they show up at the finale.

So keep the sniper problem in mind as you write! Or even as you read, watch, and analyze other media for what worked and what didn’t. I can’t promise it’ll be relevant to every story, but I can promise that it’s a quick and easy standard that’ll help you layer in a lot of nuance and flavor into your narrative.

[thelivingautomaton]

y'know if there's one thing i have to critique about season 2 of severance (and idk, this may just be the difference between binge-watching season 1 over about a week versus watching season 2 week by week over three months) it's that like...to me it feels like the writers came up with the Big Impact Moments(TM) first, and then sort of floundered with how to get their characters to the Big Moments (or alternatively, shoo out characters who aren't or can't be involved in said Big Moments) in a way that feels organic and diegetic

this seems most obvious to me with the birthing cabin subplot in the latest episode: you have this (fantastic!) image in your mind of cobel in flames and darkness, standing face-to-face with innie mark. great! but the whole process of getting mark (and devon) to that cabin then feels...idk, very contrived? i can mostly buy devon calling cobel in desperation (especially after finding her brother seizing on the floor after his basement brain surgery), but the deliberate lack of answers cobel gives them in their forest meeting -- and the fact that the three of them, what, wait in the woods together for eight hours until darkness falls? -- felt very much like a out-of-show parameter (i.e. "this scene Has To play out this way so we can get to the Big Moment we really wanna have") forcing itself into the context of the story, rather than something that makes intuitive sense within the world

you can also kind of see this with reghabi flitting in and out this season -- she Shows Up in front of mark's parked car in 2x03 because...she has to, for the plot and for the Big Moment of the episode (mark reintegrating, but not really reintegrating because we have to save that for other Big Moments like him getting flashes of helly/gemma). and when devon decides to call cobel -- which, again, i can MOSTLY buy given her character and what she knows -- reghabi exits stage left because...because! because reghabi doesn't Fit into the Big Moments that the writers have in mind. so she has to leave

idk, maybe if i were to go back and look at season 1 this would stick out to me too but at least there the progression from plot point to plot point and characters going from A to B (in terms of actual location as well as narrative arc) felt much more organic? maybe it was also easier for it to feel that way since the scope of the show (number of characters/subplots, locations, etc) was diminished then.

i also think that if the show had more episodes and more space to flesh out these arcs it would make everything feel less contrived -- again, this most recent episode felt like the worst offender in this regard just because it was so obvious that they were doing everything they could to wrap up almost every hanging plot thread (irving and burt, gretchen and dylan g, miss huang, etc) that doesn't involve mark (and by extension, helly and gemma). but that might also have been forced by out-of-show circumstances (rumors that john turturro may or may not come back for season 3, sarah bock presumably has to go to college LOL)

idk idk IDK WHAT I'M SAYING, like i'm still here for all of it and i am really enjoying the show's sense of those Big Moments, but the overall storytelling feels...clumsy, in places. that's all 🤷

[phantomchick]

Naruto and being the Underdog

Okay so recently I was discussing naruto's characterisation in the comments section of a fanfic and the author was explaining that they don't like/never vibed with Naruto's character (which is totally fair). But then they explained how they felt the supposed underdog setup was contrived and didn't really work because Naruto never actually starts at zero thanks to his jinchuriki powers and being the yondaime's son. (And so here I am, on my soapbox to discuss how Naruto and the concept of being an underdog relate.)

On a physical level perhaps this applies, but Naruto places an equal (if not larger) amount of focus on the emotional action as it does on its plot action.

On an emotional level he has to work for each and every one of his personal relationships.

He wants to be hokage a role he can only take if he is both respected by his village and powerful enough to protect it. It''s a twofold goal. And in terms of the social aspect this is clearly stacked against him due to the hatred and exploitation of jinchuriki as well as shinobi in general, achieving emotional connection and dialogue between people who are used to might makes right or who are pre-disposed to look down on him or want to kill him puts him firmly at a disadvantage narratively.

With the notable exception of Hinata whose love is unconditional, whether it's Tsunade, Neji, Sasuke or Gaara or even Kurama the respect and attention that naruto craves are things he actively pursues in both good and bad ways and he earns them through his own effort.

He does this both by striving to understand these very different people and where they're coming from as well as surviving all the shit the world throws at him. Emotional and physical tasks.

In terms of being a jinchuriki and getting the rasengan easily thanks to his shadow clone bullshit / birthright connections to the yondaime It must first be acknowledged that the jinchuriki power is more of a disadvantage than a boon to him at first. First, because of kurama actively going out of his way to mess with his chakra control as a kid while doing the leaf exercise he was unable to learn the regular clone jutsu; it also results in him experiencing the trauma of discrimination and isolation from a young age which could easily have led to festering self-hatred and alienation if not for Iruka's intervention, it results in multiple S ranks who are fully capable of killing even shippuden level Naruto targetting him, and while the trade-off of boundless energy and survive-ability is immense those same boundless resources have the potential to burn him alive if he loses emotional control/gives into his most negative emotions - that's basically making the subtext text at that point, the story is about his emotional development and growth, something his "OP buffs" don't earn for him. Let's talk about boundless chakra resources for a moment. At the end of the original series, he only knows the rasengan; the rasenshuriken, the shadow clone justu and sage mode/yinyang mode by the end of the series and that's like 5 justu tops if we're counting yin/yang/bijuu mode and sage mode as jutsu. The majority of what he learned from jiraiya for three years seemed to be taijutsu only with a side of failed bijuu control. Naruto has his jinchuriki chakra from the start but that doesn't translate to an ability to use it, he has to spend hours working out how to do the shadow clone, he did not figure out how to do the jutsu because of his chakra even if that was the reason he was able to use it at all, and when it comes to the rasengan I will cite [someone who deleted their reddit account] here:

Naruto completed the first stage in three days and one night. He figured out how his chakra needed to move to burst the water balloon (thanks to a cat) but because he didn't have the necessary chakra control, he improvised by using another hand. He completed the second stage in three weeks or so. The next day(?), Jiraiya gave him a hint to improve his focus which allowed him to finally complete it. And the third stage was completed seven days later to win his bet with Tsunade. Once again, Naruto didn't have the control to focus his chakra the correct way despite his continuous efforts. It wasn't until he came up with another improvised method by using a shadow clone to focus the chakra that he was able to complete the final stage.

Meaning he is the one who comes up with unorthodox methods, such as also using his other hand, or using a shadow clone to focus the chakra, to learn it in four and a half weeks but he still had to figure out how to do it all himself. The shadow clone would've been useless without his understanding of the jutsu or his ability to do the individual parts of the jutsu. He earns the jutsu and could conceivably have learned it the old fashioned way were he not under an artificial time limit as both Jiraiya and Kakashi, both without jinchuriki power, know it and can use it.

Now I'll talk about his supposed privilege as the yondaime's child: Sasuke gets chidori and later kirin thanks to HIS connections but that's never remarked on in the same way. And in fact most people in the naruto-verse learn a big jutsu from their clan or parent; see Might Gai, the genius of hard work, learning the eight gates thanks to his father. The rasenshuriken is something he's only capable of learning thanks to his chakra and shadow clones I hear you quote Kakashi, but it's again, something he couldn't do without actually putting the work in to learn the jutsu. Naruto is on a time crunch because of Akatsuki, the fact he is capable of learning the jutsu once he has advice on wind chakra from Asuma and has practiced forming the rasengan and doing windblades enough means he didn't need the extra chakra to do it, having the chakra didn't automatically make him capable of the rasenshuriken all it did was speed up his chakra control practice exponentially, it would have taken him more time practicing but he could have learned the jutsu eventually even if he wasn't a jinchuriki. Now summons. Being the Yondaime's child might get him an in with Jiraiya to let him have the toad contract, but Sakura and Sasuke also get summoning contracts thanks to personal connections with Tsunade and Orochimaru and Jiraiya only gets him the opportunity. It's Naruto who has to use his willpower to stay on Gamabunta's back and it's Naruto who has to form relationships with his summons like Gamakichi, (a bond that becomes instrumental toward the end of the 4th war). Additionally learning Sage mode wasn't just a result of Naruto getting the contract because neither Sasuke nor Sakura achieved it despite both having contracts (and despite Kabuto managing it where Sasuke didn't) Sasuke with the Hawks as well as the Snakes. And importantly Naruto was unable to use clones or his extra chakra to speed up his training in this. In fact the clones only come into it after he has successfully mastered sage mode and function as a limited extra resource that's can't go beyond three shadow clones meditating and this doesn't function as more sage powah but as a means of extending his sage modes duration, a workaround that's only needed because his being a jinchuriki gets in the way of him gathering sage mode in real-time with the toads on him. In conclusion while his chakra lets him practice jutsu to learn them faster, this is not the case in either his sage mode or the yin yang release and only applies to the shadow clone, rasengan and rasenshuriken - all of which he had to actually learn and understand the mechanics of otherwise the jutsu wouldn't have worked no matter how many shadow clones he had try it and that with the exception of shadow clone he demonstrably could've learned them without being a jinchuriki. And in the case of rasengan and rasenshuriken he is under artificial time-limits imposed by Orochimaru and the Akatsuki.

So that's shadow clone, rasengan, rasenshuriken and sage mode covered but what about bijuu mode. An overpowered special mode he only gets for being a jinchuriki, that B only bothers to teach him because he's a jinchuriki, surely that's LEGIT op bullshit. No? No. At least not in comparison to the Sakura's forehead seal from Tsunade, Sasuke's Mangekyou abilities like izanagi, giant purple warrior and amaterasu, Obito's mokuton, Madara's sage of six paths abilities or the rinnegan's everything, anyway. Not to mention what the edo tensei are capable of.

The only reason bijuu mode works is that he earns Kurama's regard on an emotional level, it's not something which being a kage's kid or having jinchuriki chakra levels actually does fuck all to contribute to. He was that all along but Kurama still hated him and tried to take over his body. It's Naruto himself who has to reach out and make that effort to understand this person who he's always seen as a burden or a curse or an annoying tenant who doesn't pay rent, a monster who tries to kill him and take his body. It's Naruto who has to put in the emotional labour and see Kurama as a person, no matter the harm he's done.

Naruto is the underdog in spite of being "the chosen one" and having the strongest bijuu and a kage father because emotional labour is never easy and in a world like his it seems insane to even try. It's why everyone except him was prepared to give up on Sasuke, Naruto recognises his anger at Itachi and desire to avenge his family as valid, Naruto when he finds out the truth about Itachi from Danzo tells Sasuke he gets it, why he wants to destroy the village, why he's so angry, when Sasuke changes his mind and decides to become hokage instead of destroying it so he can change it, Naruto understands WHY even if he still wants to be kage himself. The problem with Sasuke is that his anger is self-destructive and self-isolating, not that it exists, it's when Naruto fights him one last time and makes Sasuke realise that he's only hurting himself and his loved ones at this point, that "talk no jutsu" finally works and Sasuke is able to listen to Naruto and come home.

It's also why Naruto earns being hokage; in a world full of killers, someone who is capable of acknowledging the harm done and not ignoring or forgetting it (like how he tells pain he can't forgive him), but who is also capable of looking past that and understanding the motivations and feelings of the person he's dealing with and talking to them on that level as equals hits so hard. It just felt like a fantastic set up for a diplomatic hokage capable of dealing with other kages and achieving a peace in spite of the fact they're all to the last, untrustworthy ninja mercenaries who are generally very ends justify the means. In a world of kill or be killed Naruto is still willing to kill, but he's also willing to understand and to talk. And he wasn't born with that, he worked for it and failed often, especially with Sasuke, it was never easy, it often appeared hopeless but he kept trying.

And we rooted for him because of it.

[caesarflickermans]

My hatred towards this book is on principle. The entire point of Katniss and Peeta watching Haymitch’s tape in CF is to gain a better understanding of him. This book renders that scene redundant. I’m sure there could’ve been some things cut/edited that would’ve affected how Haymitch’s own people saw him without it effecting how Katniss and Peeta saw him. This book did not take that route at all. Never mind the fact that events in book are very much not “almost, but not quite” as bad as the berries, and Haymitch had no reason to not tell them about the “truth” of his Games in that moment, if the intent was that we were truly missing so many details.

Grrrrrr this could have been such a good first Quarter Quell story! Sometimes I think this book was made for the movieverse and the propaganda angle was added to try and gaslight book readers, and other times I think this was made to be a first Quarter Quell story that was forced to be changed to be the second Quell. The themes of propaganda and implicit submission fit the minimal lore we have about the first Quell so well already, the Games that are presented here feel way closer to the 10th Games than the 75th, and the story of a failed rebellion would’ve made so much more sense with a cast so much closer to the Dark Days.

-T&PLB (why can’t we send asks on side blogs wahhhhhhhh)

Both interviews Collins has done for Sunrise on the Reaping suggest that she does have a great care for the political thought she places into these stories, and I think they equally suggest intentionality that it had to be the 50th Hunger Games.

So I disagree that the propaganda element was an afterthought. It seems clear to me that this is how she approaches the books, and I think that passion can be seen through the pages.

I take issue with the execution of her passion. Just war theory was never directly mentioned in the original trilogy; we as readers had to figure this out for ourselves. For some reason, Suzanne Collins does not trust modern readers to grasp the message—or feels like her previous novels were not clear enough on the message—and thus has dumbed down the explanation to blatant statements. Some of these statements are fun to read; I can easily envision Plutarch to openly talk about implicit submission to someone like Virgilia, but it is quite strange he'd do so to Haymitch then. Maybe they would have had this conversation in Catching Fire, but not in Sunrise.

It is fairly clear from the interviews she has done on SOTR that the elements she came up with were not part of the Catching Fire story, but were elements she worked off of. And I think it is fair to be disappointed by the story we now received, regardless what other fans might say on the matter. Like, it's just a fictional story, we are inevitably just readers who can decide whether we like that story or not, and I find it ridiculous of some readers to disregard criticism based on arbitrary virtues that need to be met. It's completely fine for fans who have had their own story in mind to not like SOTR because it does not fit their vision. This is just a book. It's not that serious.

I'm saying all of this because I agree with you that the plot elements we had in Catching Fire turning into this completely warped story in Sunrise are strange to say the least. I did enjoy my read more than Ballad, but many plot points were contrived all despite the fact I've never given much thought to the arena itself. Haymitch received an abundance of plot armour and there is a legitimate question to be had on why the 74th were not manipulated in the same way as the 50th. By Sunrise's logic, Rue's funeral would never have aired and the berry scene would have been manipulated—but we canonically know they haven't.

I personally quite enjoyed the Orwellian manipulation of history because that is what the Ministry of Truth does, but the extent that we received was extreme to say the least. Personally, I imagined that Panem's past—starting at the Dark Days up to Panem's founding as well as everything before—were strongly adjusted for historical revisionism, but not the Games themselves in the moment they are being watched.

At this point, we not only can ask questions about the book's continuity (Re: Rue's funeral), but also between the film franchise and the books. While, yes, there is one main source, for over ten years we knew that the Capitol aired with seven seconds of delay. And you are now telling me that isn't true? This is nothing major, but I take issue with the fact that this new canon addition is troublesome to fit into the collective canon.

While I did enjoy returning to the world of Panem, and I will gather some larger review in another ask (kisses at @firstkil), I sincerely hope that the epilogue of Sunrise suggests an end to the world of Panem, because I would much rather see what she has in mind for a new world rather than picking apart a current one that risks throwing up major questions for the previous entries.

[bibibbon]

Chap 429 made me realize I can't stand Class 1A anymore, I like individual students like Tokoyami but as a whole I can't stand them. Their bond is so artificial especially when none of them gave any concern about Izuku's well-being throughout the first year and took Bakuhoe's word immediately. Plus, they are mostly flakes riding off of Izuku's heroism and hard work during the Villain Hunt arc. None of them doing were jackshit about the criminals including "Symbol of Victory" Bakuturd until they remember that Izuku exists. The fact that Hori never lets the students addresses or think about Izuku's quirkless nature after the OFA reveal is something I will never forgive Hori for.

Hori tries so hard to glaze them as this unbreakable team of heroes, but he cheats using plot armor and plot contrivances to make his point seem valid but most of these kids would be dead if the villains were allowed to kill them instead of Hori holding them back with puppet strings. I hate to sound deranged but if some of the students had actually died during the first battle then I could see 1-A actually building a bond and realizing how precious life is and the dangers of being a hero then their concern for Izuku's well-being would seem more valid after all of the other crap they were ignoring about.

Lastly, I hate that damn poem that Hori claims was the inspiration for Deku because it feels like an excuse to justify his narrative abuse of Izuku and deny him any moment of confidence or pride in his achievements. This was supposed to be the story of the Greatest Hero not Class 1-A nobodies. Meanwhile he is too busy celebrating Bakuhoe's moments for during the bare minimum and fans on reddit and elsewhere eat up like its pure cinema or something.

Fair enough it's not that I actually hate class 1A but for some reason I can't simply believe that their dynamic is one of a little happy found family. I just can't and its probably because there's too many characters and we don't get the screentime needed for them to develop such a dynamic.

That is to say I don't hate class 1A like I love the individual characters like tokoyami, iida, jiro and I even love the little groups they have or at least the potential that was in those groups and dynamics.

It doesn't help that it's class 1A that gets the whole we are all heroes thing and the whole we will be there for you Izuku in the vigilante arc. I don't know it falls flat and becomes underwhelming simply because their dynamic isn't well built neither is it well developed. Also them saying they care for izuku seems like it's quite difficult to believe considering that we haven't seen them voice concerns over Izuku's injuries or even visit him during the first war arc when he was in a coma but maybe that's me saying too much because they were in a war and everyone was busy with stuff and trauma.

When it comes to the whole thing with bakugo I personally think that he was supposed to be a minor character for izuku to surpass but him being Izuku's symbol of victory and all of that shows us exactly that izuku hasn't DEVELOPED AT ALL IN THE SERIES!! izuku has continually been an incredibly static character and the ending shows that. Izuku still thought of OFA as a gift from all might instead of his own quirk, he literally never understood the wrongs of the hero system and he never stops viewing all might as this big hero who does so much. Like ugh this could of been things that izuku develops from and becomes a better person but I guess not.

Realistically many 1A members should either be

1) expelled (how is mineta and bakugo still there)

2) dropped out (Iam sorry you're telling me all of these kids parents let them contribute in this bs like are your parents that bad)

3) dead (you're telling me in a field of naive and not properly trained first years none of them have died really?!?!)

These factors would definitely make 1A closer to eachother and would show that they would care a lot more because of what they experienced and what they might blame themselves for what happend previously and it would be realistic/make sense within the series.

Also less 1A members would show just how competitive and tiring the hero course can be (proving aizawas words right) and it would also make the characters big moments that hori gave them have more actual suspense and impact within the narrative and plot.

I have mixed feelings about the poem and the post "the uselessness of izuku midoriya" while I do think it's a good post that shines a different perspective onto things Iam also just not a fan of the concept. I suppose it's because I don't think MHA was built in a way where it's story is a tragedy, like I don't believe tragedy suits the plot of MHA especially when it's not being treated as one.

However, I do think that it could be used as something that izuku starts with at the beginning and then develops into something much more. I think that having izuku choose the name deku and then developing into the name deriku would be fitting just how I would of liked for him to develop from someone whose acknowledgements and influence aren't recognised to someone whose achievements are recognised but not overly praised or anything of the sort something like having him be somewhat of a myth someone whose influence is known but works in the shadows (not literally) but he isn't directly known and isn't like all might. Ugh I don't know how to word it but I hope you understand. I suppose the closest example I can think of is Kim dojka (minus the angst)

(for context this is the poem I assume you're talking about)

Edit

I suppose this maybe better phrasing to what I was trying to say last paragraph.👇