#and the villains don't like that

[vamprisms]

i feel like a lot of the 'i hate kids' crowd would be more tolerant if they understood that due to a kid's limited experience of the world that 4 hour flight might just be the longest they've ever had to sit still for or that trapped finger might literally be the most pain they've ever felt in their short life or they might not have ever seen a person with pink hair ever so of course they want to touch it or nobody's told them yet that they can't run around the museum and they only just learned cheetahs are the fastest animals so of course they want to put that to the test. how were they supposed to know etc etc.

[firedragon1321]

I was just about to scream my character Beck's name and make an angry rant, but then I read this-

This is about making everyone super nice, not just a handful of characters. Which...why would you do that? You need antagonists? Even metaphorically (man vs. nature)? Also making everyone nice is boring. Have some assholes in your cast. Even on the "good guy's" side, it can be fun to have an asshole or two.

But also go ahead and plop in some cinnamon rolls. In my story, Beck's kindness doesn't exist in a vacuum. It effects the people around him. It impacts their actions. The villains and neutral parties react. Boom! Conflict!

Also, Beck himself struggles. He smiles to hide his sorrow because he doesn't want to be alone. He needs to learn to be less nice and more vulnerable. But that doesn't mean he stops being nice. It means when he wants to cry, he should cry. Those he's inspired need to see him as human and not an idol. Found family shit all around!

TL;DR- There are plenty of conflicts you can have or create with nice characters. They just can't exist if everyone is nice.

(Here's a bust of Beck, btw.)

[charlietheepicwriter7]

Despite Danny's best efforts, no matter how much time past, Amity Park refused to see Phantom as a hero.

Sure, there were pockets of support, particularly among teens, but most of the town blames Phantom for the property damage, saying if he didn't fight the ghosts then it wouldn't be so bad, to that time he got mind controlled by Freakshow and "attacked" the mayor. It wears him down. It wears Tucker and Sam down. Jazz can only try to support them all.

Then one day, a member of the Justice League visits. Someone minor, and kinda a jerk... maybe a Wonder Twin? Zan? Whatever. They don't investigate; they don't look deeper. They listen to the town folks and declare the ghost hunters, Red Huntress and the Fentons, to be the official heroes of the town.

Worse? Danny Phantom is officially considered a villain to the Justice League. Tuck hacks into the Watchtower and confirms that they have a file (a heavily inaccurate file) about how to defeat Phantom.

Danny doesn't think he can do this anymore.

A few weeks later, a young villain escapes into Amity and demands (begs) that Danny help them escape from the hero after them. No idea who, I can't find a lot of info on teen villains in DC, so let's fudge some ages and make it Kyd Wyckyd from the Teen Titans cartoon. Danny agrees, because to hell with the Justice Losers, and they defeat the hero, becoming friends in the process. Kyd confesses that they became a villain after being ostracized bc of how they look, and they've been trying to avoid villain organizations because HIVE was abusive, but it's really hard to be a villain alone bc of all the heroes.

Sam gets an idea. Tucker agrees with the idea. Jazz is just happy they'll end up making friends.

The next day, the Teen Villain Alliance is formed, ready to assist with any teenage illegal shenanigans their allies might get into.

Some notes:

It's created to be a healthier option for teen "villains" to connect with others and support each other.

It's more important that this is for Teens rather than Villains. They're tired of adult villains taking advantage of them. The TVA would rather ally with a teen vigilante than with an adult villain.

Again, no idea who the teen villains are, but Klarion is definitely here. He leaves the Light for the chaos of the TVA. Maybe Ember is there too?

Timeline wise, this is around when Tim is still Robin, but Damien has arrived at Wayne Manor.

This is because, when it comes time to try to infiltrate the TVA, they'll have a convenient child-assassin who has none of the monitors of a teen hero that Phantom immediately picks up on.

Damien, who at this point has been abandoned by his mother, dismissed and scolded by his father, and has had no success at carving his own place in the family, jumps at the chance. He is then surrounded by peers who don't insult him or try to change his behavior (too much; jazz is trying to help him find healthier methods of expressing himself). He... might not want to continue being a spy.

Danny, Sam, Tuck, and Jazz are the founding members.

Danny reinvents himself as the High Prince of the Infinite, Prince Phantom Dark. He got kingship from fighting Pariah Dark, but since he's still alive, he's only a prince. He steals the last name Dark as an intimidation tatic against those in the know; only Danny would have the balls to claim family with Pariah.

Sam works as a powerless villain, but she might no be powerless? Either way, Danny gives her a bunch of repurposed Fenton tech, and she buys the rest with her parents credit card. She does NOT care if that's traced back to the Mansons. She would choose something goth, maybe something spider related or even bat?

I love Pharaoh Tucker, so I think he should get magic powers? Since pharaohs of old were considered the balance between the real and the divine. He's still a tech guy, now he's a tech and magic guy.

Jazz isn't really a villain, more of a team mom who's planning on using everyone's psyche's as her thesis paper. You know what, that's her callsign, she's Psyche. Sometimes she flirts with Nightwing.

[blackthewolf17]

Fallen Angel.

One in the morning and the best idea I had to take a break from drawing was to do this, I am not an intelligent person as you can understand.

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.

[almondcroissantsandink]

watching gravity falls for the first time at the request of my little sister and i just watched a tale of two stans and CRIED

[archerdepartures116]

Liu Qingge my beloved

(his pose was supposed to be for a tiktok but i thought it looked good so i colored him)

[faeriekit]

I'm not going to lie, there's some sweet, sweet allure in a premise based on "Johnny 13 ends up in Gotham just for shits and giggles only to accidentally settle down there."

This dude just happens to be Haunted as Fuck™️. His vibes are rank and he's rude as shit. Negative rizz. You literally can't pay him to do your goonery for you, but if you phrase it as a bad enough idea he'll do it for free...? But then like the whole building will explode for no reason or something else as equally as catastrophic and improbable?? What the fuck man

Just. This dead dude and his supernatural manifestation of bad luck is completely indecipherable from Gotham's natural toxicity to the point where he just...makes friends. Is a shitty upstairs neighbor. Shops at the corner store. Despite the odds, he's just Some Guy™️. He gets signed up for the Goonion. He reasonably could be any age between 19 and sixty. Two-Face kicked him out of his gang twice.

[danielsarmand]

guys. guys. guys. look at me. i beg of you to think about it for one single second. do you really genuinely honestly think that armand. 514 years old never turned a human never made a vampire. would make his first and only fledgling OUT OF SPITE? look at me in the eye. come on. i know you don't genuinely think that

[jhonnyhotbody]

I love drawing speedsrers rynning

[egophiliac]

heeey guess what, I'm obsessed with this idiot flamingo now

[anime-villian-irl]

"id let the world burn for you"

"I'd kill for you"

"id die for you"

"I'd sacrifice the world for you"

BORING!

Yawn snore snore. Honk shoo honk shoo.

I got twelve other guys ready to that for me. You already do that. You already destroy the world I would just happen to be there while you did.

The real question is.

Would you save the world for me?

Would you put aside your hatred for humanity and put my love for it Infront? Would you save the world because I love the world? Would you stop killing because I hate killing? Would you find a way to live because I want you alive?

Death and destruction are easy as hell. Do you know how fucking easy it is to kill someone? To blow up a building? Shure security is in the way but if it wasn't there it would be easy as hell.

You'd do the basics Shure. But would you do the hard thing and save the world because I asked you to?

Would you push aside your hatred of everyone but me because I asked you to nicely?

Would you?

[theballadofmars]

I think that we, as a fandom, should talk more about the fact that sqq thought at one point: "Thank god lbh is not a demon who eats decaying corpses because kissing him would be a bit uncomfortable" at the beginning of VOLUME 2!! My man is not "down bad" for lbh he's straight up admiting that he would kiss him even if lbh was a cannibal he has zero chill.

[solitairedeere]

i was never as optimistic about the ending of bnha as some villain stans were, but i never thought it'd end so badly it left me wondering why horikoshi ever bothered to humanize the villains or make them complex characters at all.

like-- i expected that at least 1-2 of the 3 villains who were heavily foreshadowed and outlined by the narrative as people to be saved would be, you know, actually saved. i didn't think that was a high bar. i've been let down before in fandoms where everyone was certain a character would live and then they didn't, so i tried to keep my hopes low. AND YET.

what happened to tomura was upsetting, but i wasn't that shocked after how disinterested the manga has seemed to be in him for like, the past 100 or so chapters. a bit surprised, because you'd think if anyone would succeed in the 'saving' mission it would be the MC, but whatever. dabi, well, they've spent a lot of time showing the way his quirk destroys his body even before this arc, so that also sucked but at least it didn't feel completely out of left field.

........but they're not even letting toga live???

i just-- what have we even been doing here? when zero out of the 3 characters that were marked out for saving were actually saved, you have to acknowledge that something has gone seriously fucking wrong with the storytelling. not even just from the perspective of a villain fan but from the perspective of someone who likes stories to be thematically consistent or satisfying in any way.

you can set up an expectation of these characters being saved and then subvert that and turn it into a tragedy- if done well that could even be worthwhile and interesting. but you can't turn it into a tragedy and then just... keep trucking along with the happy ending messaging and act like anything in the manga has been resolved and that the characters have somehow successfully completed their heroic origin stories.

like, maybe i shouldn't have expected this much from a shounen- at the end of the day it is still a shounen so i didn't expect to feel that it truly satisfactorily wrapped up all the themes it brought up around societal ills. but i expected it to at least resolve those things in a shounen-y way where they punch the problems and help these specific people and then you can feel good assuming that the state of things will continue to improve in the post-canon world of the manga.

instead we got... uh, none of that. the story refused to answer a single one of the larger questions it's been outlining for the past 400+ chapters. in the end, it was all flash and no substance, which again could've been fine, if it weren't for the way the story seemed to spend significant chunks of time trying to delude you into thinking it had substance.

truly makes me wonder what horikoshi thought he was doing the entire time. can it really all be blamed on burnout? the most that can be said for this ending is that it is, well, an ending. fuck dude, it is that.

and that's just... such a sad way to end a project that took up 10 years of your life.

[fellthemarvelous]

Jedi and attachment

The Jedi Order was around 25,000 years old when it fell at the end of the Clone Wars.

And I've seen people say "the Jedi don't teach emotional regulation" I guess because there are some Jedi who fell, but like, the number of Jedi who didn't fall far outweighs the number of Jedi who did fall.

And that's not to say that Jedi never made mistakes, but none of them gave into their anger and fear and hatred. Mistakes are normal, even for Jedi. Failure is the greatest teacher. They were apparently able to regulate their emotions well enough to actually learn from their mistakes and grow.

I'm not sure which part of "the life of a Jedi is not easy" isn't exactly translating well for some people.

What do people think Qui-Gon meant when he told Anakin being a Jedi would be challenging?

As Yoda said, it is a lifelong struggle not to allow fear to bend into anger. Fear leads to anger leads to hate leads to suffering. The Jedi never stop learning.

The reason they avoid attachments is because attachments distract them from the bigger picture, from their purpose. They are protectors and defenders of life, and they cannot be picky about who they choose to help, regardless of personal feelings.

As Obi-Wan has said, Jedi do not hold grudges. They cannot. They can be upset, yes, but they are given the tools to handle their emotions and often utilize them.

Anakin damned an entire galaxy when he fell to the dark side. The Jedi are not to blame for Anakin's fall. Anakin made his choice, and while he spent thirteen years being groomed by Palpatine, he made the choice to follow Darth Sidious.

ANAKIN FELL BECAUSE OF THE CHOICES HE MADE.

He is the one who slaughtered Jedi younglings. He's the one who slaughtered the Separatist leaders, and even though they were the enemy, they were defenseless and trapped in a room with the most powerful being in the galaxy after being sent there by Sidious and Grievous.

The reason the Jedi were so hesitant to accept him into the Jedi Order was because of his age. He was attached to his mother and his anger over her death is what caused him to slaughter an entire colony of Tusken Raiders. He didn't do it out of love. He did it out of hatred, and revenge is not the Jedi way.

It is not the fault of the Jedi that Anakin could not properly regulate his own emotions. He lied to the Jedi for three years. He hid his relationship with Padme, so how was Yoda supposed to know how to help him properly when he didn't have the full context? Of course his advice seemed bad because Anakin was not being forthcoming about the nature of his relationship with Padme. Yoda did not have a complete picture of Anakin's anxieties at the time, and while you can teach someone how to do something, you cannot control how they put the teachings into practice. You can only hope and trust that they are doing the right thing.

And the thing is, the Jedi would have helped Anakin and Padme. Yoda and Obi-Wan loved Anakin. We saw several instances of just how much Yoda cared about Anakin, especially so at the end of season six of the Clone Wars.

Anakin betrayed the entire Jedi Order because he allowed his fears to consume him. He participated in the genocide of the order he had been part of for thirteen years just to save the life of ONE PERSON who ended up dying anyway BECAUSE of him.

No one has ever said the Jedi Order is perfect because there is no such thing as perfect, but they were not ever the villains. They were never the bad guys. They were pulled into a war orchestrated by Darth Sidious who weaponized the compassion of the Jedi as a way to destroy the order.

When you look at the handful of Jedi who fell and claim that the Jedi "don't teach emotional regulation" you're just erasing all personal accountability from the fallen Jedi WHO MADE THEIR CHOICES.

There is only ONE Jedi (that I am aware of) who fell to the dark side involuntarily, and that was Ahsoka Tano. She was corrupted against her will and then killed. Anakin was able to resurrect her, and while he did a good thing, it only made his fear of losing her again even worse.

Maul murdered Satine and forced Obi-Wan to watch, but Obi-Wan managed to control his emotions and not go on a killing spree. He actually held a dying Maul in his arms. Ahsoka was failed by the Jedi Order, but she didn't fall to the dark side. Yoda lived for 900 years and never once fell to the dark side.

There are a variety of factors that went into Anakin's fall, but he is the one who made the choice to do the monstrous things he did. He was not being mind controlled. He had Jedi training, but he threw all of that away for one person. He gambled the fate of the galaxy on the belief that Palpatine would help him save Padme from dying, knowing that Palpatine was a Sith Lord and knowing that he was the one who was actually responsible for the war. He made a selfish choice at the expense of everyone else in the galaxy and the only person who won in the end was Darth Sidious. It was the biggest lesson that Anakin ever learned.

This is not a failure of "teaching emotional regulation". This is the failure of someone who allowed his personal feelings to overshadow his Jedi training, and he is responsible for the consequences of his own actions.

End note: This is not an Anakin Skywalker bashing post. I love Anakin Skywalker, but he absolutely is to blame for his fall to the dark side. He's a fascinating character. I could write a whole ass separate post on why I love him so much. Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is an icon.

[sunderwight]

Thinking about Black Widow Luo Binghe.

Hear me out -- so just like in canon, Shen Qingqiu self-destructs to save Luo Binghe, dies, and Luo Binghe steals his body to put on ice while he looks for methods to resurrect him. But unlike in canon, staving off decomposition is simply not that doable for a matter of years, even with cultivation and Luo Binghe pouring qi into the process. The qi costs are still high, so is Xin Mo, and now Binghe also needs a special artifact that can actually preserve Shen Qingqiu, but that runs on blood sacrifices.

To get the thing working, Luo Binghe feeds it a bunch of prisoners from the Water Prison. Then he starts kidnapping cultivators to drain for his own qi reserves, but that's difficult, controversial, and he can't use the same victims for the blood sacrifice afterwards. Frankly, between one thing and another it would be easier to satisfy Xin Mo with dual cultivation, and focus on finding victims for Shizun's Snow White style glass preservation coffin without having to choose between using targets for one or the other. Especially given that, if he finesses it, Luo Binghe can extend the use of his sacrifices and get more out of them with fewer deaths that way.

He's pretty sure that Shizun would want fewer deaths.

Of course, he is not a fan of the logistics of the plan itself, but he'd do worse things to one day be reunited. He consoles himself that he's building up bedroom experience for one day being with Shen Qingqiu, and that it doesn't really count because his heart's not really in it, and also if Shizun got to spend all that time in brothels then it's only fitting that Luo Binghe be his equal in this as well. It still doesn't make it pleasant for him, but it makes him able to tolerate the necessity of it.

So Luo Binghe ends up marrying a string of rich and powerful figures -- mostly the villainous single fathers and mothers and evil uncles of harem members from PIDW, rather than their daughters -- and coming up with creative ways of making all their deaths a few months into the process look like accidents. After the third one people are undeniably wary of marrying him, but there's always someone with a big enough ego to think they'll be an exception, or stupid enough to believe that it really has just been so much bad luck up to that point. It helps that the universe is predisposed to let him hit it.

When SY wakes up in the shroom body and hears about Luo Binghe's succession of marriages, he's not surprised. What he is surprised by is the bisexual graveyard of toxic dilfs and milfs that has replaced the harem.

What did he do to cause that?!

And what does Luo Binghe mean that he wants to marry his own shizun now? Is this his new method of revenge??? Binghe, you don't have to marry someone to kill them!