#and there's levels to this stuff which means i could ramble so much but i'll stop bc i need to message people!!

[quietlyblooms-gone]

in the past, i've talked about how chiyo tends to make a lot of choices for the sake of others, willing to inconvenience herself if it means making someone else happy. there are exceptions, of course -- she's not a pushover, but it can't be denied that chiyo is self-sacrificing. in her main verse, it's one of her main conflicts in her young adulthood because while pursuing art would make her happiest, she pursues teaching first to make her parents happy.

this is often the situation in her other verses, too. in her spiderverse, dorverold au, jjk au, and kinda even in her mha au, chiyo's decision to help others is a forced one. it's a decision made out of obligation because if she can help, and she knows she's one of few who can help, then she has to do it. that's not to say she doesn't eventually find happiness while helping others, but the point is that in every universe, chiyo will ultimately choose another's happiness over her own.

she can endure, you see. she's done it since she was a child. she knows how to ignore and bury thoughts of wanting; she knows how to be content with what she has, convince herself she's fine as she is. so she'll choose that rather than make someone else choose it :' )

[daxite]

yeah i think i've fully come to terms with the fact that i'm 100% somewhere on the ace spectrum lol

[unknownsvoid]

OMG, I love your Ticci Toby writing, it's just good.

<3

I hope it doesn't sound too strange, but could you do something similar, only with Toby being a bully? You know, the typical high school bully?

It's more like an Au, I know Toby isn't a bully, but I love imagining him like that ><

Oh yeah, let the reader be her schoolmate, obviously 🦭

TOBY AS A STEREOTYPICAL HIGHSCHOOL BULLY!!

cw: fluff and smut content! toby being mean to everyone else BUT you. afab!reader. virgin reader and toby, that's it! no proof read. i'm lazy... okay?

SFW:

Toby was your typical high school bully. Bullying any loser he could find in sight. Everyone but you. The only reason being that the two of you were good friends. He would get detentions frequently, diss any teacher, and insult other students whom he thought weren't on the same "level" as him (his words, not yours) And worst of all fights. Fights were the worst because he would always get suspended after them, and you would always have to go to his house after school to patch him up and disinfect the cuts that would linger on his body, scolding him while doing so. Though he would win every fight. You'd also tell him off every time he'd get a detention, which causes him to tell you not to worry so much. "You need to stop getting detentions! That goes on your school record, ya know that? And that's gonna cause problems in the futu-" "Yuh-you worry too much, puh-princess. I'll be fuh-fine. Juh-just a detention." He also will happily beat anyone's ass if they talk shit about you. With him, it's a different story because people normally say stuff behind his back, and it's normally about how creepy he looks, his gash, his tourettes, and that's normally the sum of people's conversations about him, but when it comes to you? People say hurtful shit you're not useful, commenting on your looks or something like that. Though, during these last couple of months, he's actually started to begin feeling fuzzy and nervous around you. His stutters and tics start to heighten every time you two are together. You'd comment on it, and he'd just blame it on the weather or something stupid like that. Another month passed before he started to notice that fuzzy and weird feeling he was getting around you meant that he had a crush on you. It was hard to believe at first, but he quickly got over it. Though he would be a lot more distant with you. You noticed how his behaviour has improved. Other people wouldn't have noticed, but you did! You noticed how he would get at least over thirty sanctions a week, and now it's downgraded to twenty or less sanctions a week. You noticed how he'd normally have three fights during the five days you guys have school turned into two. Sadly, you also noticed how he's been avoiding you, and you used up all your courage to come up to him at school and ask him to hang out at your place, which he surprisingly said yes to quite fast. Like, you didn't even get to finish your sentence before barking out a yes. When you guys were at your place, rambling your hearts out. He accidentally blabbered that he liked you, and this is how the conversation went. "Juh-Jason said I luh-like you, which I do buh-but who care-" He pauses on his words and sheepishly looks up at you to see your shocked face, "Shit." "Like me?" You say with coy smile. "Um..." "I like you too, Toby!!" "Really!" He says, his gaze lighting up. "Mhm!!"

NSFW:

Now Toby had you under him, on your bed as his cock pushes in and out of you. He's being super nice, which was super enigmatic of him. Your fingers were intertwined with each other. "Fuh-fuuuuck. Your puh-pussy feels so guh-good."

His cheeks were rosy, and his breathing was unstable with each thrust. His seven inches disappearing and re-appearing from your pussy. Your wet pussy slurping his cock back in before lewdly spitting it back out, causing a creamy, white ring around his cock.

He reaches his nimble thumb down to rub swipe your clit as he plunges his cock in and out of you, watching your face fall apart from the sudden pleasure. Your pussy immediately tightening up around him. "Yu-You gonna- ahhhh- cum, buh-baby?" "Yeah! Oh Toby! Gonna'cuuuum..."

"Cum f'me..."

That was enough for the coil in your belly to snap. Your pussy fluttering around his cock as well gushing more and more juices. You don't even have enough time to relax from your orgasm because his thrusts aren't slowing down and the pad of his thumb was still probing at your twitchy clit. You jolt up. and your arms jitter helplessly from the feeling of being overstimulated. "Eee-Easy, baby. Huh-hold on a littlllle luh-longer for me. S'close, baby. Fuuuuck."

He picks up the speed until he ends up cumming. His spunk spilling inside of your pussy. The warmness of his cum causing you to moan. He pulls out, a slight hiss falling from his lips from the sensitivity. He watches his cum flow out your quaking pussy. "Yuh-Your on the puh-pill, yeah?" "...." "Hm... I'll go buh-buy some th-then."

[weltato]

The Ramble About Klavier (AA4 spoilers)

Going off this post I made a while ago, here's a ramble about everyone's favourite rockstar prosecutor :)

This is gonna be a long post, so I'mma put it under a cut, but the TL;DR is that Klavier's damage sprite hurts me physically and I absolutely think that Kristoph is the cause of it :)) Also, using Franziska as a bit of a comparison at points because I could go on about her as well honestly, but that's for a different post.

(obligatory headcanon disclaimer here)

*Warning for mentions of verbal abuse, if that's uncomfortable then please scroll on and stay safe!*

UPDATE: I wrote a fic! Read it here!

You still here? Grand.

This sprite hurts man.

(I couldn't find a gif file for young Klav, had to use the icky webp file from the wiki- I fucking hate webp it's such a stupid file type)

You see how it's the same? You see how both sprites are the same? They move exactly the same! Now, you could say that it's something related to the chord that plays every time we see the sprite crop up, but he's gonna be smart enough to know about ear protection when doing rockstar stuff. Could be a sensitive ears thing, or a cringe thing at the sound of the chord (bc it does sound bad, I'll grant that), but it's never said if Klavier has sensitive hearing or smth (afaik, bc I haven't seen SoJ yet). We know Athena does, but nothing about Klav.

So! Remember Kristoph? Remember how shitty of a person he is? Welp, in the same vein as Franziska's damage sprite making everyone go "ooh, MvK did bad things" I put forward that Kristoph also did bad things.

But not physically. Kristoph is a man who uses his words as his weapons until he just casually has to poison people and then stalk everyone for seven years bc a fangirl screwed up his plan.

The sprite when Klav's 17 is labelled as "Disbelief (Unused).

Sure, it's unused in-game, but they still made it and they made it exactly the same as present Klav!

But when he's older, it's simply listed as "Damage".

Damage is a word used for quite a few sprites tbh, since it's when they...well, take damage, from their opponent, either through scripted event or from player decision.

However! Going back to a point I made in the original post: Franziska has a different distinction. Her older sprite is listed as "Shocked" but her younger sprite is given the "Damage" title.

Look! Her sprites are different! It doesn't give any good vibes tbh, she's sort of holding herself higher up and more with both arms than with the one arm her younger self uses, but that's for a different ramble about Franzy. This is about Klavier.

Franzy goes from "Damage" to "Shocked", potentially meaning that whatever is being thrown at her doesn't hurt anymore, merely catches her off guard and this is a reflexive response.

Klav goes from "Disbelief" to "Damage", which tells me that his younger self refused to hear and his older self is now realising that things are SO much worse than he feared and that HURTS.

With Franziska, it's pretty obvious that MvK was a pretty distant parent in parenting terms. I mean, he was always there, sure, but he didn't really show much love and affection. Franzy realises this and carries on because that's how she was brought up. She can handle that. (Don't get me started on the cry sprite omg-)

Kristoph was the same.

All my homies hate MvK and those same homies should also hate Kristoph. His nickname was literally "The Coolest Defense in the West" - this man was known for being level-headed! He was known for being a cool, calm and collected person! You never know what's going on under that.

Klavier was absolutely verbally and emotionally abused. I don't think it was physical abuse in any way, and if anything happened then at most it might've been a slap in the face, but Kristoph doesn't strike me as someone who gets off on holding power over his brother by beating him. After all, Klav is in the public eye 90% of the time as a rockstar, he doesn't want to risk make-up being applied wrong and the paparazzi picking things up. Kristoph strives for perfection in everything (again, the wiki literally says this, although I'm aware that the wiki can be edited by anyone) and he sees it in his brother too: he wants Klavier to be perfect.

But then he went to be a prosecutor and a rockstar and that's...well that's not good, it might ruin the name he's made for himself if his little brother goes off gallivanting with people like that (poor Daryan). Kristoph sets impossibly high standards that Klavier just can't match because he's not the same as his brother, he's not like that, he cares about people and his decision to go study in Europe is met with more disapproval from Kristoph, but Klavier takes it all as brotherly encouragement because the boy is SEVENTEEN and there's an eight year age gap, surely Kristoph knows best...

Then we get to the final section of Turnabout Succession.

When presenting the nail polish, Klavier recognises it immediately because that's the brand his brother uses. When Apollo asks about his hesitation, he says it's nothing.

They never checked Vera's nails either and Klavier is unable to say anything because Apollo is on a roll and Klavier really hopes he's wrong, so he asks if the bottle belongs to Vera and Apollo asks back if he knows someone else with one of those...

"No." he says, "Just checking."

YES. HE. DOES! He knows immediately as soon as that nail polish is brought up, everything clicks and he's so distressed by it that he refuses to believe Kristoph could've done this. He's in prison right now, how could he poison someone??

And when the Judge isn't convinced by this, Apollo deals him the final blow.

"Prosecutor Gavin doesn't seem to think this is inconceivable."

No response. His face is unreadable, or maybe it's anguished, and when it's suggested to bring Kristoph up as a special witness, Klav says this: "I've known for some time that an impenetrable darkness lurked at the bottom of this. ...A darkness that has swallowed even myself."

He knows and it's time to face The Devil that orchestrated all of this.

Maybe he's known for a long time and only just removed the rose-tinted glasses he was seeing Kristoph through - and he's crushed by it.

When Kristoph is in the room, Klavier's words are especially defeated here. Kristoph even asks Klavier to explain what's going on.

"You're being accused again. By him. Again."

And when Kristoph asks if Klav agrees with this, he says nothing. What can he say? That yes, his brother is a dark man? That yes, he's manipulative enough to do this kind of thing? That, if given the chance, he do it again to get rid of everyone who's in his way?

Trucy even says in one of the pressed statements that Klavier "must be nervous with big brother watching!"

Kristoph even takes over from Klavier's Objection when Kristoph's pressed by Apollo about the likelihood of Vera wanting to poison herself. That bitch! He's so obsessed with control that he takes control over his own trial from his own brother who's trying to 'defend' him. When Trucy says the two together is a force to be reckoned with, Apollo notes that they could do with more teamwork.

In that pivotal last statement, Klavier acts more like his brother than he ever has in the whole game and Apollo picks up on that. Kristoph is the reason Klavier is acting different, the reason he's trying so hard to get Apollo to notice the difference - Kristoph is clearly the threat in the room.

Kristoph is cruel in public too, but only now that Apollo is cornering him. See, the abuse towards Klavier was only ever subtle in public and far more pronounced in the home, but in this trial there's nowhere for him to go and Apollo would pick up every detail. So, when Apollo brings up the stamp and Klav's taken aback by this, Kristoph takes that moment to pounce: "You've upset my poor brother to the point of uselessness. Allow me to clarify this matter[...]"

We all hate him, right? He's such a dick.

Klavier is quiet, just watching everything unfold since he has no way to confront Apollo when he himself believes that Kristoph is guilty, and when Kristoph worms his way out of things he belittles Klav: "Really, Klavier. You should be seeing through these weak-spined bluffs by now."

What can he say? It's the same kind of thing he was always told - that he should be better, always pushed further than he could go.

But then he doubles down. He's sick of this, sick of Kristoph always being the perfect brother. So he fights back and calls Kristoph the bluffer. Kristoph is shocked; never once has Klavier outright pushed back on him. So when Klavier starts to side with Apollo, Kristoph plays the game.

Now, I'm not going through the whole case beat for beat, but there's another point later on when Apollo goes "oh btw Phoenix didn't do this and lol here's evidence" and Kristoph tries to deny this by saying "oh but defense attorneys are only assigned the day before anyway" but Klavier objects and turns to Apollo, pleading with him because he needs to know the whole truth on this.

Even Kristoph is caught off guard because he thought he'd kept Klavier on his side but NO! NO HE DIDN'T! HAVE YOU SEEN HIS DAMAGE SPRITE HE'S HURTINNGGGG T^T

ahem-

Anyway, Kristoph tried to dismiss this and Klavier objects in his face and keeps his focus solely on Apollo - he even calls him by his actual name instead of Herr Forehead (which I think is kinda sweet actually but anyway-) and fuck man, this hurts me.

And as it closes in towards the end, when Phoenix's recording is mentioned and Kristoph says that his "brother is incapable of making rational judgments at the moment" (angy Wel grumbling) we soon get this:

I LOVE KLAV HAVE I SAID THIS YET!?

AND HERE'S THE KICKER:

KRISTOPH IS WORRIEDDDDD

AND KLAV DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT ANYMORE YES!

CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW GOOD THAT FEELS? HOW CATHARTIC THAT IS? THIS MAN WHO'S DONE NOTHING BUT CONTROL HIM AND USE HIM FOR HIS OWN BENEFIT AND BELITTLE HIM WHENEVER HE DOES ANYTHING EVEN OUT OF LINE IS FINALLY GETTING HIS COMEUPPANCE AT KLAVIER'S HANDS!!

OH it's great to watch, we love to see it.

Better still is the very end, after the breakdown, after Kristoph loses his cool:

The sass is strong in this line. To me, it's a final 'fuck you and everything you ever did to me' from Klavier.

We end on this line after the Judge says that nurturing is the task for all human beings: "Except for you, Kristoph. You aren't changing. You've stopped. You're not needed anymore."

And it's true. Klavier doesn't need Kristoph anymore. He's 24, he can live his own life and he doesn't need a cynical and condescending brother like Kristoph breathing down his neck every two seconds. He's broken free from Kristoph's control completely and he's relishing that.

So this is why his damage sprite hurts me to see. It's a point of pain and discontent, it's Kristoph lingering in Klav's head, it's the want to have a normal brother that loves him as he is and sees him as an equal. He got his first trial against him taken away, and we never know if there was another opportunity for the two Gavins to go up against each other again, but by the sounds of it there probably wasn't - and that's a good thing! If Kristoph had faced off against Klavier, it would have probably broken Klav's spirit to be a good prosecutor like we see in AA4 and to some extent in AA5 when he crops up in the Themis case.

On the whole, the damage sprite is a look into how Klavier hid from his brother's verbal abuse - by covering his ears and not listening to it. He didn't want it to be true, but it came at him anyway and he hated that. But it's also a parallel to how he feels about Kristoph: that is his brother and he can't bear the thought of Kristoph being not just a murderer, but also a scheming manipulator that's been skirting around the law he so desperately hides behind for seven years. Once again, he didn't want it to be true but it came at him anyway and he hated that he couldn't get away from it.

It's a good sprite, I won't lie. Great storytelling at the conflict between the two and that Klavier loves Kristoph probably more than Kristoph love him, but it still hurts me to see it because all I can think about is what kind of manipulation has Kristoph done to keep his power over Klavier. Kristoph is manipulative even to his own brother and there is nothing Klavier could have done about it. Throughout their interactions in the case there's this underlying current of "if I get out of this you're so dead" and that feels like it's been a thing forever between them.

I hope this makes sense because I should be writing my assignment rn and I just couldn't bc this has been taking up all the space in my head lol. I'm tirrrrrred, uni wears me out man >.>

[coraniaid]

buffy/willow and/or kennedy/faith

Buffy/Willow is definitely the more interesting option of those two to me. I don't quite ship it (for reasons I'll get into) but I can imagine a world in which I did pretty easily.

1) Why don't you ship it?

Honestly I think the main reason for not shipping it is just that I've not read any take on Buffy/Willow that really leans into the things I find potentially fun or interesting about the idea of the two of them getting together?

I mean, I've not really seen much Buffy/Willow content at all, but what I have seen tends to focus on AUs where Buffy and Willow slowly realize they have other-than-platonic feelings for each other in Season 4 (before Willow meets Tara) or even earlier, and that sort of best-friends-to-lovers, slowly figuring out your own sexuality in a careful and healthy way thing just isn't something I find that interesting for these two? Buffy Summers is so, so repressed and tightly wound and yet at the same time quite genuinely convinced she is (in her own words!) "pretty easy going", while Willow's dreams in Nightmares and Restless suggest on some level she views her entire life as an elaborate public performance where she has to always be wearing the right outfit and saying the right thing or people will see the real her and despise her. If you're going to ship them, why not let them be weird about it?

Also, while I do think Buffy and Willow's relationship in canon is significantly more compelling than Buffy's connection to either Giles or Xander (on pretty much every level imaginable), at the same time I think it damages the dynamics of the Core Four a bit too much if Buffy and Willow actually became some of sort of official couple. I don't put quite as much stock in the Mind/Heart/Spirit reading as some people, but I do think it's an interesting one and I think an actual canon ship would have distracted from that.

And finally I think I just strongly prefer Buffy/Faith and -- while I don't think it's impossible to like more than one incompatible ship at a time -- I guess I'd feel bad for Faith if she ever learned that Buffy was into women after all but was dating Willow of all people.

2) What would have made you like it?

To be clear I haven't ever really given this that much thought before today (except perhaps for that kind of flippant idea I mentioned a year or two ago for an AU in which vamp!Willow comes back in Season 4, gets caught by the Initiative and ends up getting chipped instead of Spike). So, fair warning, this is going to be a kind of rambling answer. But I think it's mostly a question of timing and context. They have to get together after having known each other for a while and in circumstances where it is very obviously not a good idea for either of them. I want messy drama and tears and conflict in my ship, after all.

I think, if I could choose, I'd go for something post-Bargaining, after Buffy has died and been unwilling brought back to life and Willow has at least started on the path down to becoming irrevocably changed by her overuse of magic. As I've noted before, Season 6 is the closest the show ever comes to treating Buffy and Willow as (almost) co-protagonists, as opposed to the previous seasons where Willow is more clearly Buffy's sidekick (even if she sometimes rankles in that role). I think that's when a hypothetical ship is most interesting narratively: when they're at their closest to being genuine foils and having similar character arcs. And I think a relationship when they're both going through some of the worst months of their life would be kind of fun (for me, anyway). There's still some weird power imbalance stuff going on, but it's not at all one-sided.

Let's say things start to diverge from canon around Once More With Feeling. Willow's relationship with Tara is already on the rocks a little at this point -- they're arguing about magic for sure, and maybe Willow has already used the memory loss spell on Tara -- but for her part Willow is still sure she can turn everything back to normal [with magic, naturally] if she just makes a bit more of an effort.

Instead of Buffy being forced by magic to publicly admit that she wasn't in a hell dimension in front of all her friends, something else (non-magical) happens which makes her admit it privately to Willow. Maybe Willow just casually says something to Buffy about how awful her time in hell must have been which makes her snap? That way there's already this terrible secret that ties them together (well, Spike knows too, but I don't think Buffy tells Willow that he knows and it's not like Willow and Spike are hanging out socially).

Obviously Willow is devastated to find out she wasn't saving her friend from a hell dimension after all, as in canon, but she Buffy almost immediately get into a pretty vicious fight when Willow suggests using magic to fix things (again). A furious Buffy tells her how much she hates being back in the world and how far away from "fixed" she feels. Everything she told Spike in After Life, but this time putting the blame solely on Willow. How she "wishes she could feel anything" and she should never have been forced to come back because she knew in heaven that "everyone she cared about was all right". At which point Willow breaks down in tears and insists that that can't be true; that Willow herself wasn't ever "all right" over the summer Buffy was gone, and how could she have been when her best friend was dead? And she admits to Buffy how much she missed her and needed her to come back, "because I couldn't look after everyone myself, and you're my best friend, and I love you."

And then Buffy kisses Willow. And Willow's into it, just for a second, but then she breaks away like she's suddenly remembering cheating on Oz in high school, and she stammers that she didn't mean it that way and she "can't do this to Tara". And Buffy watches her run off without saying anything, and she can't quite figure out why she did that: was it because she just wanted to feel something, or because she's somehow changed after coming back to life, or because a part of her always wanted to but never let herself admit it? Does she actually feel anything for Willow? Is she angry at her or in love with her or both (or neither?). And now the kiss is one more awkward secret that they share (because who's Buffy going to confide in, exactly? Dawn? her new friends at the Doublemeat Palace, once she starts working there? Tara?).

Then, later, after Tara and Willow's relationship collapses anyway (for much the same reasons it does in canon), and Tara moves out, Buffy and Willow start secretly hooking up again. Because Buffy still hasn't adjusted to being back in the world, and because Willow hates being alone and part of her wants to prove she was right all along and that she can make Buffy happy (and, maybe, that she's more than just Buffy's sidekick but somebody just as powerful and special and important as her).

And, while they're spending time alone together, maybe Buffy gradually starts letting Willow try to use magic to "fix" her a little bit after all: instead of Willow getting the magic addict subplot and Rack and bringing Amy back, maybe it's Buffy who starts needing magic more and more in order to feel comfortable in her own skin and be able to get through the day. Not to forget that she was in heaven, but to have brief access to those same comforting fantasies that everything's actually fine for everyone. Willow doesn't try to go cold turkey this time, at least not right away, but she does try to hide her use of magic more (which is tied into all her other secrets). Maybe in this AU Normal Again happens not because of a demon or the Trio but because Willow messes up while trying to cast a spell that's supposed to just give Buffy comforting dreams about a happier time in her life.

And sure, there are some echoes of Buffy/Spike at work here, and of the hypothetical Amy/Willow S6 ship I talked about a few days ago -- Buffy is partly just trying to feel something, and Willow is rebounding from Tara in the worst, messiest way she can. But Willow and Buffy have so much complicated history already -- they both really do care about each other a lot, more than either of them can say, whatever else is going on in their lives -- and I think that makes things more compelling to me. A ship where both participants feel like they're the one wrongly taking advantage of the other, that they're somehow selfishly letting their best friend down. And perhaps part of Buffy still wishes she hadn't been resurrected at all, but the one person who can make her feel fleetingly happy again is the very person most responsible for her being back. That's pretty compelling, to me anyway.

Then, at some inopportune point, everyone finds out anyway (and maybe the others finds out about Buffy having been in heaven at the same time). And of course Xander is weird about it, and Dawn is appalled, and Tara is heartbroken (because hasn't Willow been telling her how uniquely special and amazing Buffy is since they first met? hasn't it always been clear to her that Buffy and Willow are part of an inner circle she'll never get to join? no wonder Willow chose Buffy over her; no wonder she'll always choose Buffy over her). But Willow still does love Tara, she knows this thing with Buffy can't be good for either of them, and she promises Tara she'll stop doing magic or spending any time alone with Buffy.

And for a while things are just incredibly uncomfortable, because Willow moves back to the dorms and nobody is talking to anyone. But then Warren shoots Buffy, and Willow goes on her whole Dark Willow arc thinking Buffy is dead (but actually Tara uses magic to save her, the same sort of forbidden magic Willow used to bring her back to life months earlier -- because Tara did choose to resurrect Buffy in the first place, despite knowing the arguments against it and how it had to be done, and maybe she's not that different from Willow after all -- only it takes her a while so neither of them can talk Willow down and Xander does it, as in canon [but without some of the sillier parts of that plot: no secret master plan on Giles' part this time please]).

And yeah, this wouldn't be a fun time for either of them but I think it could be fun to read about. Because it would be messy, and complicated, and painful, and I guess that's the sort of ship I like.

Alternatively I could imagine a Season 7 AU, where Season 6 played out as in canon, in which Buffy and Willow just gradually fall for each after Willow comes back to Sunnydale. (Starting from that final power sharing scene in Same Time Same Place, I guess.)

I don't really think there's as much potential for drama here, but I do think this is the point a relationship between the two of them would feel most organic. We know Buffy's type is former villains trying to find redemption, after all, and that's what Willow has become now.

And I do rather like Kennedy/Willow, as I've said before, but it's certainly true that Buffy and Willow really don't interact enough this season. So as an excuse for making them do that, if nothing else, I guess having them gradually fall in love this season works as well as anything.

(Combining these two ideas, in a Season 7 AU that follows up the alternate S6 -- a setting in which Tara is still alive because she never did get back together with Willow and so wasn't in the house to be accidentally shot, I guess I can make everyone mad at me by having her end up with Kennedy.)

3) Despite not shipping it, do you have anything positive to say about it?

Oh, yeah. absolutely. Like I said, I don't ship it myself but I absolutely think I could in the right circumstances.

Willow and Buffy are the two most interesting characters on the show to me, their relationship (platonic or otherwise) is one of the best parts of the show (and, as I said earlier, their relative lack of interaction in Season 7 is one of that season's big weaknesses).

It would be a very, very funny resolution to the initial Season 1 love triangle (in which Willow has an unrequited crush on Xander who has an unrequited crush on Buffy) to posit that Buffy in turn had a secret crush on Willow. I mean, I'll always be incredibly glad that the show didn't have either Willow/Xander or Buffy/Xander become a thing [no offence meant to Xander ... well, maybe a little bit of offence meant], but having Buffy/Willow be endgame could have worked too. (It worked for The Legend of Korra, after all...)

And there are definitely a few scenes in the show that you can read as evidence for Buffy having an (unacknowledged to herself) crush on Willow. Among others, we've got:

Buffy's reaction to finding out about "Malcolm" in I Robot You Jane, which can pretty easily be read as jealousy on Buffy's part ("I'm just trying to make sure he's good enough for you")

"I need my Willow" in The Zeppo.

Two scenes in Doppelgangland (Buffy's reaction to meeting vamp!Willow in the Bronze -- "holy God, you're Willow" -- and the way she looks at Willow in the library in the scene she realizes her friend is still alive

Buffy's attempt in Normal Again to assure Willow that the girl she saw Tara with must have just been a friend, because "Once you fall for Willow, you stay fallen." Is she speaking from experience, or...?

And of course it's very, very easy to read Willow's hostility towards Faith in Season 3 as a (probably unconscious) romantic jealousy, or to read something in to her impassioned defences of Buffy in Season 1 and 2 or the way she is so deeply invested in her love life (with Angel, with Scott Hope, with Parker, with Riley...). I don't think that's the intended reading, or even necessarily the only reading, but Willow does almost immediately like Buffy a lot and very quickly stands up for her in ways she very rarely does for herself.

Not to mention the fact that Buffy literally died for Willow just a few months after meeting her. She goes to fight the Master in Prophecy Girl for several different reasons, sure, but the most immediate trigger is talking to a tearful Willow who's just found some of her classmates murdered by vampires. In just a couple of on-screen minutes Buffy goes from begging her mom to let her run away from town because "she can't go to the dance" to telling Willow that nothing matters "as long as you're okay" and promising to do "what we have to" to keep her safe.

For her part, Willow literally changes the course of her whole life for Buffy. Whether that's learning magic or choosing to stay in Sunnydale after high school (I mean, she pretends she isn't doing that for Buffy, but come on) or, of course, bringing her back to life in Season 6. There's a lot of debate online about the ethics and motivation of Willow refusing to accept Buffy's death. Some people think it's selfish and a sign of Willow's increasing arrogance and hubris and she should have let Buffy stay buried and moved on with her life. Some people argue Willow is rightfully worried about what might be happening to her dead best friend's soul after jumping into a portal to a hell dimension, and that it's perfectly understandable to miss her best friend who died violently at such a young age, and that she's only doing what she thinks is right for Buffy and Dawn and the wider world. But surely something we can all agree on here, as serious scholars of the show, is that either way it's ... kind of hot?

I mean, Willow eventually goes on this whole corruption arc this season, and it all starts when she metaphorically sacrifices her own innocence and anoints herself with blood in order to rewrite the laws of reality and cheat death itself just to be reunited with the girl she's been obsessed with since from the very first day they met. I mean, yeah, maybe your favorite ship is cute and healthy and wholesome, but have either of them ever allied themselves with demonic powers in order to pull the other one out of heaven rather than go on existing in a world without them? Oh, they haven't done that? So they're just kind of casual, then? Not really that committed to the relationship yet?

... OK, maybe I do ship it a little bit.

[toskarin]

some mostly flippant rambles on including elves in the Saltreave (that fantasy setting I write when I'm not working on my more serious projects) along with some setting notes in the margins

well. the setting notes are like 90% of the body of the text.

but we do get to elves. and we stay at elves for a while.

-

THERE IS NO ZERO IN THE ROMAN NUMERAL SYSTEM: Prologue to the Preramble

so I've written about my thoughts on elves as sort of "narrative level lifeforms" before, and that's still very much where my thoughts lie on them, but there are also just kind of elves around as fairly normal people in the Saltreave

this is a bit of a blurry line, because they're obviously not the nature-loving type of elf you see post-Tolkien -- which I'll go ahead and say feels like a deliberately obtuse misread of what Tolkien was implying by them living in harmony with a world that is literally described as the manifestation of a song -- but the bottom line is that Saltreave's elves aren't Tolkien elves, and they're not attempting to be subversions of them, but they are written by someone who quite likes those guys

all of that raises another question: what the hell are elves in the Saltreave?

-

I: Preramble

I put a bit of an information abyss at the beginning of the setting by design, outright saying that the "pre-apocalypse" might as well not exist at all.

to some extent you can say that it must have existed, and there is a bit of scattered writing that implies things about the state of affairs the world was in (mostly in terms of the politics between mortal civilisations and how that manifests in the modern politics of the remaining citystates), but the Advent is where the story starts

the most common explanations of what things were like before the current era are, at the end of the day, just attempts to explain what the people living in it are presently perceiving

the Advent, used as shorthand for a million things that each mean something different to everyone, is either the end of the world or the end of the old order of things. it is both the death of the symbolic plane and its violent merging with the material plane, severing every connection to the symbolic along the way

a bit further down that line of thought, even the present magic system gestures towards being derived from an older practice that was forced to adapt to sudden shift of the central symbolic source to a source diffused unevenly in the material plane, although from what exactly this magic system was forced to adapt remains a bit of a mystery

-

II: Into the Ramble

the Saltwind (the thing that gives the setting its name and effectively wiped out the previous world) is actually harmless

or more accurately, it's a visible symptom of an invisible problem, and that invisible problem is extremely harmful in a way nothing else could possibly hope to be

the "salt" in the wind is actually just salt. it's a lot of salt, but it's still just recognisably some sort of organic salt if you were to hold it in your hands

the salt is both the result of the Advent and a vessel for carrying "warped grain," an invisible ripple of magical static that functions more or less like (non-mutagenic, because I'm actually not a fan of using that as an apocalypse fiction concept) magical radiation

warped grain takes on a bunch of roles, so let's go over a few of those in relative brief

the one most commonly acknowledged fact is that warped grain is a soul-destroying pollution. it's bad stuff. it's poison that seeps into everything. it's in the water, it's in the air, it gets into the food as it grows, and you need to affiliate yourself with a citystate that has access to unpolluted (or otherwise purified) supplies to survive in the world as it exists

a bit less commonly (mostly when scholars and other big-hats talk about it) it's acknowledged as a sort of ambient magical noise that makes spells more unpredictable and dangerous. it can also periodically "complete" a spell if you take too long casting it, making it do something unintended (often killing the caster)

in a pinch, warped grain can be absorbed into the body as some kind of environmental magic energy, allowing someone to replenish their depleted magical energy and forgo resting to generate their own*

*: absorbing environmental energy in a world where it's literally poisoned will also eventually fuck up your soul beyond repair, so it's a really stupid idea and not something any serious magic-user would recommend

but most importantly for why elves are around, warped grain can be seen as the frayed threads of a decapitated cosmological order, death-rattling itself apart

-

III: Rambling About Elves, Mostly

because of their intimate connection to the disrupted symbolic plane of the world, the elves who were alive at the time of the Advent were grievously injured, experiencing the soul equivalent of radiation-induced chromosome aberration, and died a few years later. the generations following this one represent the entirety of the remaining elven population

this means that all modern elves can theoretically be divided into two categories

Selvedge Elves - while ostensibly referring to one of "pureblooded" elven stock, meaning someone whose parentage has never included a mortal. the elephant in the room is that Selvedge Elves aren't real and haven't been for quite some time. an actual Selvedge Elf had a lifespan of about 20-25 years and was not capable of having children, on account of being a wholly symbolic being born into a world where the symbolic plane exploded like an asbestos ceiling. "Selvedge" exists as a highly ideologically-charged concept, and not exactly one that lends itself to any non-reactionary interpretations

Scion Elves - everyone else. all elves currently alive are demimortal, which means that they have at least a bit of mortal parentage. even beyond elves, there are no immortals left in the Saltreave, but their descendants are absolutely still around. the term "Scion" refers to those descendants, but given that there isn't really a group to draw them in contrast to, most people prefer not to use it at all.

now it's worth mentioning, while they're all partially mortal, not all currently existing elves are specifically partially human. the stereotypical elf is human or similar, but there's nothing stopping an elf from being, say, a sylvan (the broad category of mortals who have animal ears and such)

Luuga, a character I've posted a few times, would be considered an elf if her status as a sylvan didn't make people identify that first. that's why she has longer, narrower ears than other feline-type sylvans (contrast the only other example I've drawn, Imiellith, and how her ears are much stouter)

more on sylvans and other types of mortal at some later time, but with everything out of the way, let's get down to some elf facts

-

IV: Indulgently Rambling About Elf Facts at Great Length

elves theoretically have different lifespans from mortal beings, which is something they have in common with other demimortals. elves specifically live about ten years longer on average than mortals, provided they don't die of unnatural causes, which they usually do.

additionally, they have a few notable traits that are more specific to elves

(an egregious number of) examples of these include...

elves only breathe as a learned social behaviour and theoretically don't actually need to do it. the same goes for yawning, coughing, sweating, sneezing, and similar functions. somewhat unfortunately for them, because most living things know they need to breathe, elves are still perfectly capable of knowing they need to breathe, which means they're capable of suffocating. in theory, an elf raised by people deliberately trying not to teach them about breathing wouldn't have to breathe, but that's not really a good way to raise a child

elves tire more based on time rather than effort. this is a subtle distinction, but means that an elf can exert more effort in a burst than a mortal companion, yet drops from exhaustion as soon as they've reached the limit of how long they can work. most people never notice this, since "the limits of exerted effort" and "the limits of time spent exerting effort" overlap heavily

elves are about five times more likely to die of old age on their birthday than any other day, but only if they're aware of their birthday. this is something most people are aware of, and different cultures grapple with this in different ways

in cultures with different calendars, the previous point also holds true. in cultures without the concept of something equivalent to a "year," elves just die of old age in more or less the same way mortals do

an elf's hair has a length it wants to be, with the specific length varying between individuals. if cut, it will grow faster back to this length. it cannot be grown longer than this by any means

elves tend to be quick to grasp spoken language, but a bit slower when it comes to grasping written language. this isn't always true, and when it is, doesn't tend to manifest past initial language acquisition

in exception to the previous point, elves are prone to grasping pasigraphies at the same (often accelerated) rate with which they grasp spoken languages. if the conditions were ever to arise for a wholly elven-developed language, it would likely have no direct written component, with all writing consisting of a highly contextual pasigraphy

elves stereotypically have exceptional memories when it comes to things that catch their interest. it's not uncommon for elven big-hats to keep a small stash of special expensive candies entirely for the purpose of forcing themselves to have eidetic memory for something they're disinterested in by associating it with extremely positive stimulus

because of the previous point, there is a notable market for making luxury treats aimed specifically at elven academics in cities they frequent

because of the two previous points, elven academics often develop pleasure-deprivation complexes, feeling guilty whenever they experience positive emotions that don't lend themselves to furthering their work

the previous three points are only true if they are generally understood to be true in the location where the individual is raised

if tested, most elves would appear to be colourblind. a deeper examination would reveal that elves only struggle with telling green and blue, and that this difficulty persists into the very concept of green and blue, which they struggle with disentangling in abstract. this is also true of elves with most other colexifications because I got annoyed with constantly reading people on tumblr doing pseudolinguistics and thought it'd be a little funny to have the Symbolic People run on the faulty assumptions I kept seeing

elves can get so sad they just physically die

elves can theoretically recover from any acquired disease provided that they receive adequate and comprehensive treatment for the symptoms

nothing can reduce an elf's pain to the point where they don't notice it. sedatives work, but analgesics simply do not

elves can theoretically die of any disease (no matter how minor it is) if it lasts long enough

in the same vein as the previous point every chronic illness is effectively a terminal one to an elf. the exception to this rule is that an elf will not die of a chronic illness they are born with, even if the same chronic illness would eventually prove to be terminal in a mortal

elves cannot leave permanent footprints, regardless of what they're wearing and where they try to leave them. if an elf were to step in cement, the bootprint would eventually disappear in the same way that it would if they'd stepped in sand

contrary to the previous point, if an elf writes in ink, the ink cannot be smudged or otherwise distorted on accident. the writing can still be lost by destroying the object it's on or deliberately attempting to smudge it, but this requires intention

while elves are exceptionally capable of performing magic without any formal education, this is actually the result of them being able to open the immortal component of their souls to grain, including warped grain, and therefore should never be done. this is true of most demimortals, with the mortal component of their soul being the safeguard that prevents their souls from being torn apart in the same way their ancestors' were

elves grow to be about as tall as is normal for them to be where they are raised. this is a bit counter-intuitive at first blush, but more or less means that an elf (regardless of specific heritage and origin) will grow to the height that is generally understood to be "normal for an elf" in the location where they are growing

in a similar vein to the previous point, an elf raised by mortals with no knowledge of elves (especially without knowledge that the child is an elf) will not show any physical traits of being an elf. this is an unlikely event that requires like three sets of perfect circumstances to happen, but it's not off the table

in a similar vein to the two previous points, dominant cultural understandings have a causal influence on certain other things considered "elven features," but the only evidenced ones besides height are ear length, ear angle, degree of facial hair, number of ribs, and the exact position in the chest where the heart resides

as a final note, elves always have both palmaris longus tendons, unless they are explicitly understood to lack one or both, as with previous points

-

V: Drawing Some Kind of Conclusion From Rambling About Elves. But Not Really.

this is all a very long way of saying that elves (and other demimortals) represent "those who have lost their plot armour" in a setting where the symbolic plane was seemingly once something running parallel to the material world and now exists most prominently as a severed limb bleeding all over it

because no written history of the immortals was preserved in the Advent, knowledge of the old world is heavily slanted towards a mortal perspective, containing only outside views into the symbolic plane's nature

there is nobody left alive who remembers the world before, several generations having passed since then, but to those who were told that they fell from a world of elevated importance and meaning, it can be especially tempting to view the old world as a halcyon paradise that was ruined

what remains is largely conflicting and disputed. most have long since moved on from litigating these things, faced with a world where it would make no difference

[tezuze]

A hero Hiro and his party

My cringe rambles below the cut- because I can never be short winded!

Hi welcome to the cringe rambles

Okay okay, stupid things I headcannoned:

Hiro

Class: Paladin

Weapon: Gamma sword

Stats: Balanced

Magic: Fire, wind, electric, light, dark (mid level spells)

I want some cool way to incorporate the whole Gammamon thing. Was thinking his sword at least would be cursed and be something only he can control. Maybe the sword can have different modes like the Monado to represent the other evolutions? There's some clever way to incorporate the Gamma gimmick, I just can't fully think of it....

Ruli

Class: Theif/Assassin if that's not too dark

Weapon: Dual daggers

Stats: High attack and speed, low sp. attack and HP

Magic: Wind (low level spells)

The mysterious masked Lirurun!

I know typically the theif class has terrible defense but while I was making these designs I kept going between if she should be a berserker tank like Lamortmon or be a speed type attacker like SymbareAngoramon and Diarbbitmon. Ultimately, I think it'd be cool if she was kind of a blend between the two classes

Kiyoshiro

Class: Cleric

Weapon: Staff (not pictured)

Stats: High sp. attack and HP, low attack and defense

Magic: Healing, electric (high level spells)

Church of Thetis' youngest priest!

Yes this is a fantasy setting, but his wrapped hand still has to hold no significance

His silly little integer overflow/limit break is perfect for an rpg gimmick, but I wouldn't want him to have a special gauge or anything if the others don't. Maybe he can have high healing/low spells initially and then flip to low healing/high spells if his HP is half or less to represent that? Oh that'd be so annoying.... (Also Ruli needs a gimmick)

Digimon-wise, I initially liked the idea of the partners also joining the party for a full team of 6 but I think they'd be too similar to the humans, plus I borrowed too much of the digimon's design for the overall aesthetic of the party not to look boring with digimon included.

My friend came up with the idea that the Digimon could be like spirits, that only certain humans have the ability to perceive, kinda like....

Ghosts.

Ha.

Anyway, if I go with that idea, the digimon could either bless their human with power or they could just be silly little guys that accompany the party.

Wouldn't it be funny if the digimon were the ones that sit back while the humans fight? Okay moving on...

I think Airdramon would be the first form of travel, then Ginryumon to get to other locations. (Then, maybe possibly HoverEspimon for the final form of travel, if I must incorporate them)

Also, clearly Blacktailmon Uver. Acts as a traveling merchant for items and such

And there's gotta be sidequests to add more members of the digimon gang (which means Labramon sidequest!!)

OKAY I'LL ACTUALLY SHUT UP NOW

I'm sorry to put you through that ^^" would love to hear if others have any neat ideas of incorporating stuff from the show into an rpg setting, I am  s u c h a sucker for that kinda thing

[miss-midnightt]

I just watched an absolutely incredible video about Rufus Shinra and why he can see the whispers (Link) and wanted to add on to it. It's quite long, so I'll provide a summary(ish):

Essentially, the creator of the video had three theories as to why Rufus could see them: I want to dive into the last two, which hypothesize he is Cetra or had Jenova cells injected into him (more so about the Cetra).

About the Cetra theory:

Essentially, it states that he is part Cetra because he a) can see the whispers and b) seems to possess some level of precognition, much like Aerith.

Firstly, I'd like to discuss how his mother is only mentioned to have died when he was young; this doesn't necessarily mean that Ifalna is his mother, as she can't be the only pureblooded Cetra alive after two thousand years (unless she's the product of a lot of inbreeding).

He seems to show up at pivotal moments by almost pure coincidence (or so it seems) without having any explanations offered. This sense for important moments and appearance of precognition becomes more interesting when you take a look at the Diamond Weapon's attack on Shinra Tower.

Rufus ended up having his life saved during the Diamond Weapon's attack from the very escape route he had suggested as a child, which just so happened to have the entrance exactly where he was taking shelter. keep in mind that Rufus was only five years old when he made the suggestion; President Shinra had no reason (unless you consider the humiliation aspect) to include this in the plans. However, if the President somehow knew that Rufus was special/Cetra, then the inclusion (his office is 70 floors up, mind you; installing that seems a little silly if only based off of the ramblings of a kindergartener) makes a hell of a lot more sense.

The President has also maintained that he doesn't believe in sentiment or attachment; if he had known Rufus was Cetra, it would have been a legitimate reason to include the escape route. Shinra scientists thought the scribblings of young Aerith were important, so why not the seemingly logical ramblings of a five year old who was also Cetra be just as crucial? Also, Rufus did not only say an escape route should be built, he said why; if an enemy attacked from the top their would be no way to escape...which is exactly where the Diamond Weapon attacked from.

Rufus also seems to have these...gut feelings, let's say. Sounds similar to Aerith, right? How she feels pulls to places, to things, suchlike Rufus. This also ties into the Jenova Cells theory, so let's dive into that...

Jenova Cells:

I'd like to start right off of the bat by saying this is purely speculation. I find this interesting nonetheless. This also will probably jump around and seems a bit more headcanon-y and random than the stuff about the Cetra, considering I am wayyy more interested in the Cetra theory. Anyway, let's dive in!

The theory that Rufus was the first (before even Genesis) to receive Jenova cells is plausible for several reasons. First, I'd like to discuss the year in which he was born. In the OG, his age was stated to be 25, which was changed to 30 in the remake--pretty random and unnecessary, at a glance. But it gets a lot more interesting once you realize that that would mean that Rufus was born in 1977...the year Jenova was discovered at the North Crater.

President Sinra has done some awful stuff, and I honestly don't think he'd be totally above injecting unknown substances into his unborn child (especially if Rufus was actually a bastard child that he decided to use in experiments then keep.) Anyway...

While some may argue that his eyes are blue, not glowy green, the glow and green come from mako, not Jenova. Even if there is a correlation between eye/hair color and Jenova cells, he does have light, bright blue eyes (like Genesis) and silvery blond hair. It could be a design choice, it could mean something more.

Then there are the physical strength aspects. He was able to go toe to toe with Cloud, not even showing visible signs of fatigue. Heck, he even parried a blow from the Buster Sword! While Cloud is not a true SOLDIER, he is strong enough that people think so anyway when he tells him that, and also beat Reno, Rude, and other powerful enemies. Meanwhile, Rufus soloed Cloud (with the help of Darkstar/Dark Nation) and didn't seem to be seriously injured.

Furthermore, when Rufus is infected with Geostigma in On the way to a Smile, he says something along the lines of "it felt like it [the Geostigma] was calling to me..." Now, this sounds suspiciously like the pull receivers of J cells feel to Jenova (which could help explain Rufus' presence at the Northern Crater).

I'd really recommend watching at least some of the video, as it explains things way better than I did (it's very long though, so be warned).

Lastly, I'd like to discuss something not touched upon in the video: his coins, more specifically the side of the coin with Darkstar/Dark Nation on it. This coin depicts Darkstar/Dark Nation and flowers, specifically mandragora/mandrake flowers. Why is this important? There are several reasons.

These flowers have been involved in stories and superstitions about magical powers and other tales of the like. It was said in some tales that they could only be harvested in moonlight by a black dog attached to a cord (Darkstar/Dark Nation, anyone? She does appear on that side of the coin, hmm....) after proper rituals had been conducted. Some tales said that they were tied to dark powers, that, get this, drove men mad if they heard their roots shriek. The roots are also highly poisonous.

Now, I'd like to look at color theory and the symbolism of colors in FFVII. In this game, the color yellow seems to symbolize life, hope, and rebirth, whereas purple seems to symbolize desolation, corruption, and death. Yellow is associated with Aerith through her flowers, and purple with Sephiroth for his shadowy magic. They are also contrasting colors; two sides of the same coin (pun absolutely intended). How does this connect to the coins and flowers, you ask? Well, the mandragora/mandrake flowers have a color range of...purple to yellow. Interesting, because Rufus is easily one of the most morally grey characters in the game.

Again, all of this is wild ramblings and pure speculation, so take it with a grain of salt.

[hyuneflix]

account updates :) :)

here's some updates to my page, if you're a love-coded.exe fan you may want to read this.

hi, wow, okay. so my blog has been growing a lot faster than expected after i posted that 100 follower chan fic. honestly thank ou guys so much, to go from 100 last night to nearly 150 today was kind of a shock. need to get episode two of the cure 'cause it may be coming waaaay sooner than i thought.

lets get the uninteresting stuff out of the way first:

you can now browse by cast/love interest from dash, or this link.

fan favourites is also on dash, or you can find it linked here.

but here's the fun part !!

my 'buy me a coffee' page is now live!! i of course don't expect anyone to pay for my content, it will always be free. however, i thought that it could perhaps be nice to have a separate space where i can engage with you guys on a more personal level while also getting you more involved in the content i release.

a lot of you guys fill my comment section up with fun theories and cool observations and it would be really dope if some of those ideas made it into the final products. i had planned to release a poll after season one of love-coded.exe to let you guys decide who becomes the focus of season two, but while that isn't happening (this time) anymore, there will be plenty of other opportunities to make polls and get you guys in on the action.

but that's more so a future plan if the account reaches enough interest and engagement that people might want an ongoing membership.

right now though, i've got something that's probably gonna be of most interest to people !! see screenshot below

this means that for $1+ you get early preview's of any fic due to be released the next day. at the moment parts of love-coded.exe's nexy day is posted and available for anyone who wants to take an early look. i'll always make sure to preview the best parts of my content too, so don't worry about that!

there will be plenty more perks coming soon, i've already got loads of ideas that i'm going to play around with. for example: "ask the boys anything", with your one time contribution you can ask the love-coded.exe groupchat, or an individual member, anything you'd like to know about them, the series, the lore etc.

i also plan on showing you guys the behind the scenes of how i make my content with tips, tricks and a whoooole bunch of life hacks if anyone's interested in that.

in addition to the week's preview of love-coded.exe, there is also a blog post where i've tried to put down as many things about me as possible if there's a single soul who cares for all that, haha. i'm going to post my wips too for a little insight into what i'm up to. finally, there's also a link to my socials which is currently only this blog and instagram. i don't use social media much, oops!

if this all sounds peachy then please do let me know in the comments because i'd love your guys' feedback on my rambles. if you have suggestions, requests or criticisms drop me a message, comment or ask.

so that means, if you were to make a contribution today you would:

have access to my blog post (boo hoo, i know)

be able to preview next week's episodes of love-coded.exe

receive an optional shout-out for donating

see the current wips/ideas i've got going on

links to my social media pages (womp womp)

but again, i can't stress this enough: you do not need to contribute financially in any capacity this is completely optional and only there for people who are particularly interested in consuming my content in a different, more engaging way.

i love you all, thank you so much for the time you take out of your busy day's to engage with my blog and enjoy my stories. it honestly means the world to me, i can't say it enough <3

[blackjackkent]

@trellanyx replied to this post:

Personally I like squid!Karlach while Rakha and Wyll go their separate ways. I think the most satisfying ending to Rakha’s arc IS her having to learn to find the peace and identity she seeks as herself, whereas her becoming an illitihid feels like… idk, the game giving her an out? It���d def change her personality, unless you wanna hc otherwise, and I like to think she takes Jaheira’s words of “no you gotta walk the same path as the rest of us and figure it out on your own” to heart. (1/2)

But by that same token, I don’t think going to Avernus would be good for her long term. I guess you could make a case for her continuing to follow both “kill with purpose” and the future she sees through Minsc of being able to turn madness and violence toward just ends. But idk, Rakha’s greatest desire, the core Need of her character, has been “peace”, and I feel like going to Avernus to further embrace violence and killing, even if it’s to nobler ends, wouldn’t make her happy. Maybe after she travels alone for a while and figures out who she is independent of Wyll or the beast, can she make the decision to go with a clearer and surer mind. But similar to the squid ending, I feel like her jumping into Avernus immediately post-game is kinda like a circumvention of what she actually needs. Like how one keeps themself busy with job after job because they don’t know how to handle themselves when they’re idle.

-----

Honestly, I've been starting to lean towards this take for a while but was having a terrible time articulating to myself WHY it seemed like the correct choice. And I love this writeup so much. (I know intellectually that people are reading the stuff I write, but when y'all toss it back to me over the net and draw in all the specific details I've put effort into, it makes me rather emotional. So thank you. <3 )

I think you're right that the way Rakha has evolved, particularly in Act 3, makes both the mind flayer and Avernus endings feel less satisfying than they might otherwise be. There are satisfying ELEMENTS - her self-sacrificing for a greater good, or being with the man she loves, etc. But it's not really a culmination of her overall arc which, yeah, is about her trying to find peace.

And the super-sappy romantic in me wants her and Wyll to have a happily ever after forever but the truth is I think ultimately her relationship with him falls into the same category as Jenna and Thane did way back in my Mass Effect days - I don't think it's a relationship that can last forever. They have been good for each other in this crisis period, supported each other, had each other's back, made each other better. Rakha absolutely would not have made it through the whole ordeal without him, and perhaps even vice-versa.

But she needs to learn to stand on her own feet and figure out who she is. And Wyll, frankly, deserves someone he doesn't have to be carrying all the time. One thing that has frustrated me in writing Rakha's story is that Wyll's particular character flaws (self-sacrificing levels of kindness, etc.) mean that he keeps getting subsumed in Rakha's issues.

Wyll is a good, complex dude in his own right and deserves more exploration than Rakha's story has always been able to focus on; I'll definitely have to find avenues to write more about him separately. (I definitely hope to have some story lines more dedicated to him in "Hellraisers.")

It's not exactly the romance that I wanted to write when I initially decided to do Wyllmance Durge - but Durge is a messy, grown-up story and I guess in some sense it makes sense that it would end up with a messy, grown-up ending as well.

Anyway, this got terribly rambly, but TLDR - I think I might be leaning towards this approach. As usual, nothing's set in stone until I actually walk Rakha through it, and she's been known to surprise me in the past. But yeah... very interesting thoughts here. :)

[ozzy-boy]

You kind of implied Cole, Volks and Scale either dont get drunk or are not allowed to get drunk anymore in your last hedcannon. Buuutt what if they did? Drunk or high?

hehehehehehe i was born for posts like this. this one is already getting kind of long so i'll do a part two with them high ;P

-

Scale:

-The Order has an alcohol ban on Scale for their work parties because he gets MESSY when he's drunk.

-He doesn't drink often so he has a crazy low tolerance for alcohol. Which means it takes a lot less for him to get fucked up.

-He has fun when he's drunk, but he doesn't like to drink too often because he doesn't like feeling like he can't operate. What if he's too inebriated to pull off his sick ninja maneuvers and someone attacks you?????

-He'll usually save it for special occasions, but with a little prodding he'll agree to drink with you.

-He doesn't really like the taste of alcohol so he prefers drinks where you can't really taste it. (This does nothing to help how drunk he gets) But he'll kind of tolerate anything.

-I could see him being a whiteclaw guy somewhere down the line.

-He also likes fruity, sweet drinks but he's a little embarrassed to get them because they're not 'manly' drinks.

-Laughs a lot while drunk. EVERYTHING is funny to him. Also be prepared to pull him down from doing stupid shit because the alcohol makes him waaay too confident.

-There will be at least one time where he's trying to get up onto a table, insisting that he's perfectly sober enough to do a backflip (he isn't)

-He's also very honest when he's drunk. Be prepared for some messy kisses and some slurring about how much he loves you that he's gonna be really embarrassed to remember later.

-Please take care of him. He'll be a complete baby the whole next day if he ends up with a hangover. If you want to have a good time though, Scale is a good choice to drink with if you can convince him.

Volks:

-I think Volks just doesn't particularly enjoy drinking. Not enough that he seeks out opportunities to do it, at least.

-Although, if you insist then he'll drink with you. He likes dark liquors like bourbon and whiskey, but he paces himself and doesn't really let himself get fucked up.

-Volks hates loud places, so sorry but bars, clubs, and parties are off the table. If you want to drink quietly at home or at a nice restaurant then that's fine. Good LUCK trying to get his ass in the clubbbb

-PLUS, Volks' face turns red when he drinks a lot and he thinks it's embarrassing. He doesn't like people other than you seeing him like that.

-If you do get him to indulge with you, you'll get to watch his face slowly get pinker. He also gets really smiley and soft.

-Volks will inevitably reach a point where he gets caught on some deep tangent about life. It's super cute watching him ramble though, especially since he's normally on the quiet side.

-He doesn't get much hangover in the first place- he's lucky like that- and he's especially fine considering he's responsible and does stuff like 'pace himself' and 'drink water' 🙄

-He'll chastise you for overdoing it and getting a hangover but he'll still take care of you.

Cole:

-Again, Cole appreciates nice alcohol like wine, but he prefers not to get fully drunk. A little tipsy is fine but he doesn't often let himself get truly hammered.

-He is the type of guy to drink a bloody mary or mimosa at like 9 am though lol.

-Cole likes to maintain a certain level of... control. Especially around you. A level of control that is difficult to keep up when he's drunk.

-I want you to envision Cole on a normal day, and how clingy he is already. Now multiply that clinginess by 2. That's Cole when he drinks.

-If you convince him to drink with you, he will be glued to your side the whole time.

-Hugging, squeezing, pressing his face into your neck and shoulder.

-His lips get a little loose when he's drunk, too... He tries not to outright say how obsessed with you he is, but it becomes hard when he's inebriated.

-He's halfway into a rambling about how pretty you'd look tied up or inside a little cage before he remembers that- oh yeah, that's kinda weird to tell someone out of nowhere.

-(Although if you're dating him at all, chances are you're into his freakiness anyway.)

-He'll reach a point where he's just hanging onto you and slurring to himself about something you can't quite make out.

-Somehow doesn't get hungover. At all. It's super annoying. He's so smug about it.

[alliseearekingsandthieves]

Hi!

First of all, I'm in love with your work, I think your time travel fic might be one of the best ones I read on mha so far!

It's so original, the way Shigaraki ponders each decision like he's in a videogame is so charming, and I love your Kurogiri!

Also your Hana survived AU is such an original idea.

Speaking of, my real question for you.

What are your thoughts on canon Shigaraki?

The fact that in your AU he still had one family member he cared about around during his formative years means that he now has that tad more of emotional intelligence (even though his stats are still shit) to be honest with himself about his feelings for his League. Therefore, he thinks about them with genuine care, reflectiong on ways he can take care of them better this time around, proving that he noticed stuff about them even in the first run. Not that he's all healthy, he's possessive in a way, and I'm surprised the fact that surrounding himself with people he cares about while working against AfO might be dangerous for them hasn't yet crossed his mind, but still.

He cares, he knows he cares, he's working to show he cares.

Canon Shigaraki on the other hand, the one who spent fifteen years of his life with zero human contact aside from his sensei and a nomu, do you think he realizes he needs the league on a different level than their skill sets? Does he care more about total destruction or about giving them the freedom they desire? Does he listen to their reasons to be villains, is there some anger for them too in that bundle of hate inside of him? Does he miss Kurogiri, does he think of him as a parental figure? Does he know that they care for him?

I guess you could summarize the question like this: does Shigaraki canonically love his League, and do they really care for each other, or is it just us wanting to see this group brought together by desperation and isolation happy?

Fuck, I'm sorry, this is a super complicated question.

Thank you for reading, sorry for the headache, have a good day ✨

Hi! Wow! Thank you so much for enjoying my work! I'm glad it's something which appeals to you and that it's entertaining! Thank you so much for reading and for your kindness!

Regarding your question: no worries! I get it! This question is complicated but I love to ramble!

My thoughts on canon Shigaraki are complicated and they are colored by the fact that I haven't read the comic properly in several years! There's a ton of people out there who do some really clever analysis work on him and how he is; I am very much not one of them. The following information is probably wrong and when I reread the comic and find I'm wholly incorrect about a ton of things in this answer, I'll shrivel up inside. This is gonna be long and rambly, so buckle up!

Anygay, I don't really love canon Shigaraki all that much. I don't think enough was really done to justify why the League is so devoted to him, so a lot of my work is meant to weave into the places where the reader wasn't allowed and explain where he might've had softer points with them. Like a lot of other LoV fans, I am fixated on the part where he tells his League they should be able to get what they want. And I don't think he really truly wants total devastation as much as he wants the world to just stop hurting.

His name literally means "mourning" and All for One made him wear his family's hands so that he would never stop feeling terrible. He always seems to me like destructive grief. When you're passively suicidal, you want to stop existing for a while. He wants everything else to stop existing, and I see that as grief more than anything else.

He's got all the mental trauma and very little of the reason for said trauma up until he fights Re-Destro and suddenly it comes flooding back. He cannot physically handle his emotions and violently rejects them over and over again through vomiting. His body seems constantly like it's trying to reject Overhaul's quirk and I would make guesses that he feels ill and unsettled all the time, but it keeps turning into bad temper because he's got no other outlet. I could make some metaphors here about how discomfort in your body leads to you harming others and/or harming yourself when you lash out, but I can't think of something with a 1:1 ratio right now, sorry.

He's constantly destroying things, but it's not just other people's things; he destroys his own things in fits of rage and then has to deal with the fact that he did. He's obviously very mentally unwell and has no tools for fixing that, and he dies thinking of his League and how he wanted to be their hero, which does suggest that he loved them a lot.

I've mentioned before that I read the Smash! comics (not recommended and I did not like the humor most times), and the Shigaraki in those is a little funnier and more openly awkward and weird. He wants to make friends with the League and wants them to see him as cool, and you can watch him kind of struggle through that in some of the little League comic strips. My favorite is the one where he wants to show the League how great he is by playing Dark Souls, like, buddy...

But him wanting to impress the League and keep them around him is canon. He has to try and convince them to stay with him and he takes vengeance for Magne. (I can't say for sure that it's really on her account though as the narrative seems to drop her existence afterward and she doesn't show up in his line-up for the League of Villains when he says he wants to be their hero, so it's like :/) He lets Compress attack Overhaul first in order to avenge his arm, he defends Himiko, he and Spinner are Very Close. I think he and Dabi do not vibe in the goddamn slightest, which is probably due to Dabi's loose cannon tendencies and Shigaraki's own temper.

I don't know if he loves Kurogiri in canon! I think he takes them for granted, but that could be chalked up to the fact that he's twenty, twenty-one, and at that age, you take your parents for granted. Or that could be my "Kurogiri is his dad!!!" lunacy talking and it could be that Kurogiri is just an adult who he can trust and he's acting out to see where the boundaries are. Because canonically, as much as Kurogiri defends him, All for One is still the "favored parent."

TL;DR I think canon Shigaraki loves his League the best he can, but I think he knows it wasn't enough in the end. I think we are reading more into it than we're shown because we want them to be happy, and they were at points! They were happy! It just wasn't enough to save them.

(But that's what fanfic's for, right?)

Haha, thanks for the ask and for enjoying my work! I loved trying to answer this question and I hope it makes at least a little sense. Have a marvelous rest of your day and stay safe!

[dogtoling]

I mean, you quite possibly saw salmonid-ink die... I loved running it, but splatoon 3 pretty much killed my passion. I still love the stuff I made for splatoon on the whole, but man do I get it. nintendo had interest in worldbuilding for like five entire seconds, where it just STOPPED because they wanted to sell a product. salmon run is a popular game mode, so we can't develop little buddy THAT much... why explain mechanics when they can just HAPPEN because. idk, ~future~ or something

genuinely, I wish you luck with any projects you make in the future! I enjoy seeing your OCs quite a lot, so I'll continue to view them, splatoon or no. I hope things can look up for you a bit!

Yeah, I remember, it was a shame but I fully understood where you came from back then (and now, lol). For the record I think the developers DO have interest in worldbuilding and the series is a big passion project for at least a handful of people on board. I unfortunately also believe that when you're making video games in-house at Nintendo and half the business is just about the profit margin, you don't really get to decide to spend half the budget on story when the gameplay focus is on repetitive multiplayer that could as well take place in a box and it wouldn't matter for most people who are genuinely in it for the gameplay. Unfortunately, and i HATE THIS OBVIOUSLY, unless you have a game series that's a story game as its selling point, it's REALLY unlikely that the story will be good... indie games win in this niche because independent developers CAN pretty much do what they want a lot of the time, the industry has no such freedom. Hell, nintendo HAS a story-focused big series in Zelda, and i use story-focused VERY loosely because.... well. Lol. these are all reasons i went to school for video games and never want to work in the industry for the record. i hate everything about it

I started rambling but TL;DR falling in love with a product is devastation waiting to happen at some point I think. my expectations of future games USED to be "SURELY, expand on the world and adapt the gameplay to those settings, it ONLY makes sense". If literally anyone ever has played Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, that's the kind of world and level setup I could see Splatoon somehow realistically do and it would be SO GOOD and it's ALMOST THERE EVEN, they're just... allergic to actually letting you IN THE WORLD. Nowadays, thinking about the future of Splatoon, i'm HONESTLY more inclined to believe future titles will be "new random micro-setting, random one-time-use goop because we need an Evil Goo to combat our Good Goo, unconsequential supervillain causing unconsequental but supposedly world-ending events, and poorly done plot with forced climax". Which is Not Good but it keeps happening. My smile and optimism gone

ANYWAY, thank you! I'll post here once I do anything. Mostly whenever I get an account set up for whatever I get going with.

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

(don't mind me I just need to get some thoughts in order and ramble into the void about it)

I want to write more, but I'm feeling very, demoralized, I guess, about it? Not with fic, though I've been having some issues there too, but with my original works. Fic is easy. I mean, it's not, it's still a lot of work and is very much its own skill, but the process feels so much easier. I still want to put out the best quality work I can when I post something to AO3, but I don't feel like I have to. No one's here for professional-quality writing, just blorbos in situations. I can bounce ideas off of friends when I get stuck or just want to spin something for a little bit, knowing that they share my love for the characters and settings. We're all playing with dolls on the playground, and it's fun.

I don't remember how to get that same kind of fun and satisfaction out of original works. I've been writing since I was in third grade, and it used to be just as 'easy' as fic. When I was a kid, and even into my early 20s a little, I just wrote down whatever I wanted. My wife and I spent hours in our teens coming up with different characters and settings to write or roleplay, some of which did start out as fic OCs that later developed into something so far removed from the source that you could hardly tell, but many of which were fully original.

Somewhere along the way, though, I got stuck. When I read old fic that's clearly at a lower skill level, it's a little embarrassing, but overall I can laugh about it and remember it fondly as part of my journey. When I read old original works, I just feel sick. I want to delete it all and never think about it again. I think about how every time I let someone read what I wrote, their response was always, "this is great! you're a really good writer - for your age."

Idk, I think maybe I need to give up on trying to be A Real Writer™. I feel like I've hit a giant brick wall, and it's been there for years, and can't figure out a way around it. My wife keeps encouraging me to write more and says she likes what I come up with, but whenever she does read it, she just says "it's good" if she says anything at all. I know that's just the way she is in general; she's not a writer, and the most excited I've ever seen her get about even her favorite media is "this is good, you should read/watch this." But it's very tepid compared to the excited reactions I get from fic, and it feels like there isn't really even a point in sharing.

I know I should write for myself. And I want to, but I also want people to love the characters I love, or at least like them a little bit. But I keep thinking that if I hold out my lil guys and go, "look, isn't he neat? :D" like I want to, then at best I'll get that same tepid reaction. I keep thinking that every time I share something I've written, readers are just going to go, "oh, that's...pretty bad, actually :/" or just not care at all.

It's not that I don't want constructive feedback and critique if it is bad. I don't want platitudes, I want to improve! And I can't do that if I don't know where the weak spots are, but even con-crit requires some level of emotional investment in the story from the reader. At least with fic, I can get feedback from other writers who already love the characters and settings. I want that for my original stuff too. There are online groups for this sort of thing, but I burned out on those a long time ago because I always got the same non-responses I struggle with now. There are workshops, but that requires a level of funds and social energy that, being unemployed and disabled, I simply don't have.

I don't know. Sometimes I think maybe I'm just stressed and tired about other things going on in my life, and this will resolve itself when I get a better handle on that. Sometimes I think maybe I'm whining too much and just need to work harder. But more and more I think maybe I'm only holding onto this out of stubbornness, and I should let it go and stick to what I'm actually good at.

[noblechaton]

gonna ramble a bit about the ml art style change bc ig I have more thoughts about it than I knew. tagging this as leaks but no like story stuff is gonna be mentioned bc I don't really know any lol

so going off what little we've seen of it (and in arguably the lowest possible quality at that) I think it's gonna make the show very visually pretty which isn't to say it couldn't be or wasn't in the older style(s) but that was def more inconsistent between studios and such so if this new style is the standard then like. yeah it's gonna look great

buuuuuuuut I also think it looks kinda. generic? like what's happened to a lotta brand logos that used to have personality but now all look super flat and simplified. like the Pepsi logo or whatever. it's a similar situation to the movie (I'll get into this in a bit) where like yes it looks pretty but it doesn't really look like Miraculous to me? like ik the style kinda varied somewhat between the studios but it was largely consistent enough and felt much more unique. like I could see a screencap from any timestamp of any episode and place it as Miraculous just bc of the visual style

now tho it looks less unique to me and more....like a mobile game ad? some kinda un-marketed direct to streaming movie? not trying to sound mean or anything but it just doesn't strike that same feeling the old style did for me as of yet. it feels more like an attempt to ape off a generic Pixar/Disney sorta style which the movie's style did too - and that ig is a good excuse for me to kinda dive into my thoughts there bc like. it looks way more like that movie now right? the y'know completely non-canon movie that to my knowledge wasn't received too terribly well lmao. I feel like this is on some level purposeful tho

I made a post the other day about how someone (especially the youngins) might go into season 6 thinking it's actually more of a season 1 only to presumably find that very much isn't the case pretty quick lmao - but that's still a new viewer, which makes number go up, which is a Good Thing. that s6 looks to be something of a fresh start given the whole Gabe in da Ground situation makes me believe this more since I'm pretty sure he got got in the movie too (<- does not remember the movie she saw twice) albeit in a different way. very real chance they view s6 as something of a soft launch pad with the hope of ppl who only saw the movie just jumping in without looking first. I also have an even more insane conspiracy theory that they're using movie assets at lower res for the sake of cost management but again. nutso hunch

regardless I'm kinda surprised they're changing it so drastically this deep into the series and I have no idea how the quality of animation is gonna hold up from episode to episode, season to season. presumably this is part'a why we haven't had s6 drop yet, that they've been working on it thoroughly, but it's been a good minute since s5 ended and I feel like the drought in content isn't really worth it?

like it's been so long that to me sometimes it's felt like the show straight up ended and while I don't mind a wait like this, the show then coming back looking entirely different to how it used to is gonna be jarring. I'm giving it a chance bc we haven't really seen it yet and that footage is very likely a wip of some sort but all the same I'm not terribly impressed? the emotions seem more stilted and flat, there's a few sorta redesigns that look....off (namely Adrichat, imo), and it feels too much like an attempt at cashing in on whatever success the movie might have had by bringing the look of the show more in line with it

think what gets me the most is that the style and animation of the show was one of the biggest things that drew me in beyond the bugcat of it all. it was the first CG animated show I'd seen where I felt as if the animation really worked; the world felt alive and vibrant, the city lived in and populated, but it didn't feel uncanny or like realistic in any sense, and there were plenty of gaffs and flaws throughout but I feel that only endeared the look of the show to me more - it had its own style that stood out for better or worse and I think that played more a role in the show's success than most have given credit for, and now that it's being entirely dropped in favor of a style that feels much more like some generic CG animation style I can't help but feel a bit disheartened and even nervous about the future of the series tbh

want to say that I'm not looking to hate it - I'm gonna give it a chance, and again I think it does visually look pretty, but I feel like it loses a lot of what made the show stand out to me and changes things I don't think really needed changed. time will tell but as of now I'm really not sold on it

also think having a special (or two? maybe?) in the old style just to drop us into the newer one presumably shortly after is kinda weird. wonder what happened there. bad timing? tbh using a special to introduce it mighta helped a bit but idk for sure

[eksentrismi]

Wait whose Mr. Tophat and Bill? I haven't seen em before?

What do they look like? :O

Mr. Tophat and Bill are some of the characters in my OC/crossover-universe thing which I've pretty much just nicknamed "Rénee's universe" (even though it takes place in a big city, but oh well, lol). I could ramble about that world and its characters for ages because there are TONS of stuff in that world and it's very dear to me, but I'll try keeping this kind of short, lol

Mr. Tophat: An intimidating massive dude, who works as sort of a henchman for a mobster boss (my own AU-version of Sykes actually, lmao, the Disney villain I mean). He's 7'1'' (217 cm), like... he's seriously tall and massive, also extremely strong. Strong to the point that he could literally break somebody's hand when giving a handshake, so he has to be careful in that. People are usually intimidated or terrified of him, due to his appearance and also his intimidation/extortion skills. However, he's a gentle guy to those whom he cares about and to whoever his boss trusts. Mr. Tophat gets his nickname from the fact that he's always wearing an old top hat. No matter what, he always has the hat on (except when all alone, of course); it's also a mood indicator pretty much, because if he takes it off in the middle of a fight/argument or such... yeah, you should definitely run, because that means that he really is gonna like break bones and such. Mr. Tophat isn't his real name, of course, but it's become a silly joke for me at this point that he never ever reveals his real name..... I know what it is, but I won't tell >:) He usually is just seen either trying to extort debt money from guys like Nerome, Bill etc; either that or he's just standing menacingly in his boss's office during any interviews, meetings etc.

Bill: Much like Mr. Tophat, he used to work for Sykes as well... but he got fired for literally being way too angry and argumentative, even towards his colleagues, lmao. Bill is basically defined simply by just one word: anger. This man is angry, oh boy, this man IS anger itself. The most grumpy foul-tempered man you’ll ever meet! Eternally pessimistic and just an annoying person to be around most of the times. Bill’s a rude loudmouth, who always wants to make his opinions heard loud and clear. In fact, he always wants to be loud and clear. Not afraid of anyone or anything, or whatever anyone’s gotta say. He is really argumentative and angry, he gets into fights super easily and usually for no good logical reasons either. It doesn’t even matter if he loses, he just won’t give up and he’s way too angry to even give up. He's quite a nuisance, though not to the same levels of destruction that Nerome then has. And despite being fired, he's a petty guy and keeps still showing up to his old workplace often, only to annoy everybody there or steal food from the workplace's canteen. He's also a massive strong dude, though definitely shorter than Mr. Tophat at around like 6 ft tall (182-183 cm) or so. That and he's also more scruffy and he stinks <3 He does have a softer side towards his very few rare friends though, of course; he just shows it rarely and in his own chaotic ways, lol

Old art here, but yeah lmao, them <333 The nasty dudes <3