#arc: the monster association

[webtoon-devourer]

i don't think it's necessarily the ruling opinion, but there are no doubt some people upset with the end of the Monster Association arc and how everything was "fixed" with time travel. i would like to express the level on which i disagree with this sentiment.

this dislike of the arc's conclusion likely stems from the general dislike of "it's okay, we can just go back in time!" and "it was all a dream :)" style endings, specifically the idea that these endings, under any circumstances, are cop outs. i disagree. if One Punch Man ended there, with saitama travelling back in time to stop everyone's deaths and his fight with garou, i would be immensely dissatisfied with the ending. i think that would be fair. however, vitally, it does not. those events are only the conclusion to a single arc. it brings us to a similar situation as the ending of the lord boros arc, with a city destroyed but none of the important characters dead. therefore, i would argue that such a conclusion to an arc is par for the course for One Punch Man. but there is also the vital matter of "it was all a dream :)" situations and how, in my opinion, while often used as cop outs, they are not inherently so, and dogmatic insistence against them is detrimental to good writing. having every possibility on the table is important in order to develop a plot in the way best suited to it - it's simply lazy writing which misuses these possibilities.

the vital question here is: was the time travel ending of the Monster Association arc a cop out? no, it was not. in my opinion, the events which were reversed could nearly be considered expositional. the cosmic garou vs saitama fight and the events which caused it tell us a heck of a lot about the characters. that garou retains his humanity even after becoming monsterised - when he sees takeo dead, he realises that his actions have not led the world in the direction he hoped, which was always a fairer existence. (he's really not a bad guy at all.) what saitama is capable of - man caused untold destruction during this fight without much of a care, including nearly destroying the earth if not for blast and co; on the technical side, we are shown that his power increases exponentially in response to another being even beginning to approach his level of power, leading him to easily beat a puppet channeling the power of literal GOD. that saitama actually cares a heck of a lot about genos, and clings to him for his sense of humanity, which he is barely hanging onto. it also gives us a taste of god's power, for future reference. the only reason i don't consider it expositional - that is, a "what if" scenario purely for the audience's benefit, which fleshes out the characters under otherwise inaccessible circumstances - is that genos remembers. therefore, these events actually do impact the plot through him. (there's a chance that blast and co also know, which would also affect the plot, but i'm not sure.)

the ever-increasing stakes are vital. we're still within the time frame of shibabawa's great prophecy of a god-level threat. at first, we thought it was lord boros, then garou, and now it's looking like the god-level threat might literally be god. whose power we have gotten a taste of, thanks to the cosmic garou fight. things are very much not hunky dory. there is still plenty of opportunity for things to go terribly wrong, even if it didn't happen this time. especially now that we know that saitama is barely clinging to his humanity. the deaths of everyone he knew affected him for sure, but particular emphasis was placed on the death of genos, because he's saitama's hinge to humanity. (if you deny this, i will be forced to call into question your reading skills.) this ups the stakes in a unique way. before, the concept of genos' death carried far less weight. genos fans would be upset, naturally, and saitama would be pretty sad, because it was clear before this arc that he cared at least somewhat about genos. but now? we know how saitama will react to genos' death. and it's not in a sane manner. genos' death now carries with it the stakes of the earth potentially being destroyed and saitama losing his sanity. at least personally, i will look upon any close calls genos has in future with greater anxiety. this newfound knowledge that we have only gives more ground to the idea that the final enemy might be saitama. either the final enemy of the earth, if he turns into a villain (quite possibly due to losing his mind), or the final enemy of saitama himself, as he battles his depression and struggles to stay in touch with his humanity.

the time travel ending was not a waste, nor a cop out. i encourage you to look at the bigger picture instead of allowing your instinctive reaction of "time travel clutch bad" to inform your opinions. there is still the problem of time travel now being on the table as a solution, but this can be avoided in various ways. for example, the existence of the alternate universe where everyone died and saitama fought cosmic garou as a parallel universe created by time travel, therefore not really fixing the problem, but merely rerouting it. or having time travel somehow taken off the table as a possibility. for example (this is just conjecture and not supported by canon), if god dies, perhaps time can no longer be manipulated, and saitama will have to make a decision between destroying god or saving everyone but letting god live and continue to manipulate events, a decision which he can never bypass because he ends up at the same crossroads no matter which path he takes leading up to that. i understand the concern, and am somewhat concerned myself, but i trust ONE and Murata not to end the series in a dissatisfying way. also, i think it adds another level of interest, even. if saitama's power is so great that he can manipulate time, that he can do basically anything, then hitting a single roadblock which he cannot bypass regardless of his power would undoubtedly have incredibly interesting effects on him psychologically. he could be glad to not be all-powerful, and have to actually fight for something for once, or - much like the events with cosmic garou - he might realise that finding a difficult opponent (in the form of a fighter or an impossible decision) at the expense of the people he cares about doesn't actually make him happy or excited. that perhaps he should have turned his search for feeling and a reason to live elsewhere, beyond fighting, a long time ago. idk 🤷‍♂️

[sa1tamasbiggestfan]

she’s just too pretty, I couldn’t help myself drawing her once again…

I need more fanart of her. Right now!!!

[anthurak]

Do you ever just have just like… completely random idea associations to form something that is both totally bonkers and utterly awesome?

You see, over the past couple days there are two things of particular note that I have been doing:

A: Building a Yugioh deck in Master Duel that I have dubbed that ‘What if Alexis Rhodes actually got to be the awesome fucking badass she deserved to be’ deck.

It’s a mix of Cyber Angel, Herald and Drytron focused on getting out badass ritual monsters like Cyber Angel Vrash, Herald of Ultimateness and the giant Dyrtron mechanical space dragons. Basically the kind of deck Arc-V Alexis could probably use to pound Yuri, his dragon and his smug Melvin-wannabe ass face into the dirt.

B: Watching the Bowser vs. Eggman Death Battle episode a few times, and specifically doing a post on how I found the dynamics of Team Eggman through the fight particularly interesting.

So now, after having been idly listening to the battle music after having been playing this deck a bit, I have now found myself with a particular… vision in my head:

Alexis Rhodes, commanding an ARMY of Celestial Cyber Angels, Heavenly Fairy Heralds and Giant Mechanical Space Dragons. Specifically in an epic battle against Zarc and his gimmicky gaggle of extra-deck dragons.

As in, it’s barely even a ‘duel’. Like Alexis throws down the Drytron Fafnir field spell and just starts commanding her forces from her GIANT DRAGON SPACESHIP, which can also transform into a mech. And is also crewed by various faeries, lesser angels and Cyber Girls.

And it’s all Cyber Angels, Heralds and Drytrons battling with the Dimensional Dragons and their followers. The ‘lesser’ Drytron modules going up against an army of Supreme King Darkwurms, the Cyber Angels battling the various ‘Magicians’ of the Supreme King, the various Light Heralds flying around providing support, Drytron Meteonis Draconids and Quadrantids battling the Four Dimensional Dragons and Drytron Meteonis DAD ducking it out with Supreme King Z-ARC.

Which ends with Cyber Angel Vrash wiping out all the Extra Deck dragons, Herald of the Diviner combining all the heralds into Herald of Ultimateness and cheekily negating literally EVERYTHING Zarc does in response, Meteonis Draconids clearing out all of Zarc’s remaining Special Summoned monsters, Meteonis Quadrantids wiping all of Zarc’s spells and traps and a super-charged Drytron Meteonis DAD obliterating Supreme King Z-ARC.

And then like… I dunno, Alexis and her Cyber Girls pummel Zarc into the ground until he agrees to not be evil anymore? Or maybe just punt him into space and vaporize him with Fafnir.

Like, uh… I have no idea if I’m every actually going to DO anything with this idea. I just wanted to put it down and throw it out there.

[quantumleper]

Genos vs Deep Sea King | One-Punch Man | Hero Association Saga

[nezumasa]

I like it when Kon gets cat/dog motifs when paired with Ri ngl. Especially cats since Ri has a running relationship with cats in his series.

Like yes eroticism with collars, but both arcs with the Bake Neko where the theme is with grief and the ideas of truth and accountability. And the legends associated with it itself (ex. “Cat takes form of dead loved one,” the Bake Neko as an instigator of justice and retribution in the Nabeshima incident, etc.). There’s obviously the more monstrous legends too.

I think it’d be fun if Kon dies tragically and horribly during a job because he favors humans more and that just does him in. He isn’t “naive,” but he does have clear parallels and foiling to 2007’s in personalities and actions.

It’d be cliché to an extent (but that’s more because “grief drawing out a monster” has existed as a theme since humans could make stories and feel emotions), but the irony of a Mononoke manifesting from a Medicine Seller is fun.

Ri feels like he’d be someone who’d let it fester more (rather than lashing out) tbh even if he’s someone who’s keenly aware of himself (job-related). It’d be fun if the hypothetical Mononoke takes Kon’s appearance.

[starconductor]

WAKE UP BABE, OPM SEASON 3 ARRIVED AND WE'RE EATING WELL THIS YEAR

HOLYYY HELLL I CAN'T WAIT, I SCREAMED SO HARD BROOOOO

[velmashaircut]

Is it true Genos had a brother because I’ve seen people say he did but I don’t remember if it’s true or speculation. I know Genos says the mad cyborg killed his family which implies he had more than just parents but I don’t know where people specifically are getting brother from.

[omarwolaeth]

Once I'm comfy with their designs (and also monster designs and how one of them plays because OC archetype and all that), I could probably start posting Ritual AU stuff,, don't know what I'd start with though =v=;;

[sinceyousawvienna]

Wanted an extended scene where all the heroes’s wounds were patched up and they reunited with loved ones

[marshroom580]

the eyeball moon thingy in opm is giving me hi3 flashbacks and i dont appreciate it actually

[ohimsummer]

I'm telling you the second s3 comes out i'll be pumping out the opm content again no one will be prepared !!

i highkey miss writing opm but the jjk guys won't let me breathe !! i need to get it out of my system.

I simply lock gojo and geto away in their terrarium next to my desk and they watch me out the glass as I work. Foolproof (they escape and sit on my shoulders)

*idk if a manga spoiler is needed for the tags lol

[webtoon-devourer]

the monster association arc did so much for so many characters, but especially tatsumaki and amai mask... beforehand, i lowkey disliked them, because they just seemed mean and arrogant. but now i'm very sympathetic towards tatsumaki (and her love for fubuki just makes me melt 🥺) and super curious about amai mask. i also came to majorly enjoy tatsumaki and genos' dynamic, and look forward to the interesting response of amai mask to saitama's power which i've heard about. i can now say that i actually love lots of the opm characters haha

[weeblmaodotcom]

cosmic garou was overkill for the monster association arc. i think if they wanted to make him they could wait more , Meme by Weeblmao.com

[meara-eldestofthemall]

Gee, thanks DC! You Just Turned Bruce Into An Irredeemable Ass.

So, at the end of Gotham War Bruce has officially lost everything. Alfred is still dead, Selina is "presumed dead" and Bruce is both financially and morally broke. Why, you may ask, is Bruce so much worse off this time? Let me count the ways.

He preformed a psychic lobotomy on Jason

The "it's for your own good" excuse only makes the mental rape undertaken by Jason's own father that much more heinous.

Just when you think Bruce can't sink any lower he does. When Dick recognizes that Bruce has lost it, he attempts to use a failsafe disconnect that Bruce himself built into the system. How does Nightwing get thanked for that? Well that brings us to number two on the list.

Batman attacks up his eldest son for doing what he's supposed to do when Batman has gone rouge.

Bruce beats him up because nothing proves you are in control of your sanity like hitting your children. While Dick is holding back, Bruce does no such thing. He hits Nightwing hard enough to send him flying. It could have gotten even worse if Tim hadn't shown up.

Tim arrives and attempts to talk some sense into Batman.

Tim tries to talk Bruce down. It doesn't go well. When Robin is trying to help, as he always does, Batman uses the attempt to reason with him to put the smack down on his son. Bruce could have killed Tim but apparently feels no remorse or guilt.

If there was any teeny tiny little doubt that Bruce will not win the Father of The Year award in 2023 it died a horrible screaming death when Batman abandons his children to potential arrest. Yes, he left a batarang for Dick and Tim but any glimer of possible hope associated with that action was instantly extinguished by Damian's reaction to Batman's callous betrayal.

Bruce abandons Damian.

Look at Dami; he's devastated. Since he came into Bruce's life, Damian has struggled with feelings that he can never earn his father's love and respect. Well, that negative self-image was reinforced in way that may never be repairable. Bruce just utterly destroyed a 13 year old child because of his inability to feel any kind of empathy.

And how does this all end? The best part is that Bruce takes all of his parental responsibilities and dumps them onto Dick.

Thank you Chip Zdarsky and Trini Howard. You've taken Batman from being an edgy anti-hero and made him into a callous monster. Part of me hopes that Bruce never comes back because he doesn't deserve his family.

The only positive aspect in this convoluted mess is that Damian and Tim will be far better off with Dick than with Bruce. Yes, Tim is mostly independent but he still needs guidance (particularly since Tim's first instinct is to try and save Bruce). Damian is essentially Dick's son emotionally anyway so this might help to sustain the positive character growth we've seen in him as of late.

The point of this rant is to wonder what on earth DC thinks they're doing. This story arc has been pure character destruction as far as Bruce is concerned. It's bad storytelling too; rushed, frenetic and massively disappointing.

Hasn't the popularity of Good Dad Bruce in Wayne Family Adventures proved that fans are tired of Bruce being a dark depressed and brooding edge lord? We all accept that Batman is a character with deeeeep issues who is in desperate need of therapy. I, however, draw the line at Bruce being an abusive a**hole.

In years to come when fans wonder when Batman jumped the shark, this is the plot line they'll point to.

[maxwell-grant]

There's a trend people have pointed out in superhero stories over the past 20 or so years that is the death of "regular" supporting casts, an increasing absence of un-powered sidekicks or people involved who aren't in the thick of the action or in the hero's secret. Everyone who interacts with superheroes is a couple issues away from becoming one, every story involves a supervillain encounter or several dozen, every hero's gotta have a lunchbox-ready "superhero family" made from these characters, and every side character that doesn't join them is either going to die or become a supervillain.

The defining example people use for this is Spider-Man's supporting cast, with every Spider-Man cast member short of Aunt May and J Jonah Jameson getting some kind of powered upgrade or symbiote, and I'm gonna say Amanda Waller is an excellent case study of how this kind of thing happens, and I think it helps to explain why Amanda Waller has been, Like That, for the past 30 years.

She’s wearing a grey shirt underneath a blue blazer and it’s tucked into a similarly blue skirt that stops at mid calf. She reminds me of the neighbourhood aunties I used to see leaving for church every Sunday morning.

My mom used to say that you are the company you keep. So what kind of person does it take to keep a variety of bruised, battered, and dangerous personalities in check? - Amanda Waller: DC's Most Terrifying Woman

To those of you who haven't read John Ostrander and Kim Yale's Suicide Squad, there once was a time where Amanda Waller was something more than a powerful antagonistic force able to butt heads with the biggest superheroes, and something other than a heartless establishment face out to make superheroes miserable for ill-defined reasons. Structurally speaking, Suicide Squad is a comic about marginal DCU characters forced to deal with actual real life problems, and it's central character is a marginalized person forced to deal with DCU problems and characters. The members of the Squad are a rolling parade of costumed misfits and maniacs assigned to go around the globe to fight and kill and die on dirty missions to deal with dirty laundry and stop war zones from erupting, while Amanda Waller is forced to shuffle around her cadre of D-list supervillains and disgraced superheroes and get into stand-offs with secret spy societies, living nukes, voodoo cartels, and Batman.

Amanda Waller neither looks nor acts like the kind of character that stars in a superhero comic, and she is the central character throughout the 66 issues of the run and we follow her character arc from beginning to end as she's forced to spin plates to accomplish her goals and prevent bad situations from getting worse. She is the most fully realized character in the run and everything rests on her shoulders. We spend a lot of time inside her head, her team, her associates, she is the center holding together an extremely chaotic book with no two characters on the same page. She is, and has to be, an extremely powerful person, someone who stands her ground no matter what, an unbeatable force of will because that is the only way she's going to survive the situations she's in, the only way she can be "The Wall", the kind of person who can repel Batman, command a platoon of monsters, talk her way out of Deadshot's contract, someone who can stare at Darkseid and credibly threaten the President into letting her live.

That's the part that everyone is more or less familiar. But there is, or at least used to be, much more to Amanda Waller than just being The Wall, not in the least because being The Wall is also hampering her effectiveness as well as straight up killing her.

"Amanda's toughness has taken her a long way" "It's taken her as far as it can. But it can't take her no further. It's actually starting to drag her down. I'm scared for my baby sister, rev - scared that the anger in her is congealing into hate." - Suicide Squad #31

We get to know her backstory, her plans, her points of contention with the system, her relationships with people around her, and how deeply she cares about things and people even as she sends them to the meatgrinder. From the start we learn that Waller staffs her team with people she's prone to getting into disagreements with, like Simon LaGrieve and Rick Flag, specifically so they can cover her moral blind spots and pick up the slack in emotional intelligence she's lacking, be the heroes that she can't afford to be. It is unspeakably crucial that the Squad is led by Rick Flag as well as Bronze Tiger, a fallen hero who owes Waller for his recovery who eventually takes Flag's baton. Waller stands up for her team, gets into fights with her superiors when they decide to terminate them, and takes the fall for them when necessary. Waller is a person who does Bad Things - but she is not a Bad Person.

The book in no uncertain terms frames the Suicide Squad's existence as monstrous in a scale Waller doesn't understand until the very end, and it digs deep into the unethical things Waller has to allow for and perpetrate in order to keep it running no matter how many lives it saves, and she spends the first half of the book on a downward spiral. But then there's the 2nd half of the book:

In the first 39 issues, Amanda’s flaws are her undoing. As she pushes away the people she hired to act as a balance, she grasped tighter and tighter to her uncompromised vision of the Suicide Squad despite the constant changes and derailment. Her choices had consequences: the death of Rick Flag, her demotion, employees quitting, and finally, the disbandment of the team.

The last 27 issues have Amanda rising up from the ashes after a year in jail. She’s less in her own way – she communicates, her anger isn’t driving her, she’s more receptive of alternative perspective and recognizes when she’s wrong in real time – but she’s still just as scary.

Waller rebuilds her relationships with the people she drove away, takes a different tack to how the team works, and starts going out into the frontlines with the Squad. She brings Oracle (who actually made her debut in this comic) into the fold, saves her life and plays a big role in Barbara making progress in overcoming her Joker trauma. She genuinely puts in the work to improve as a person and do things a better way than before, even if there is an inescapable immorality to the very existence of the Squad and what they do. That immorality never goes away, and it only further horrifies her when learning how badly her project has gone. In fact, it's that very inescapable immorality that ends her arc.

She learns that the CIA has started using a new Suicide Squad to support a brutal regime in South America, and when faced with the full extent of her complicity in Western imperialism? She decides right then and there to end the Suicide Squad for good after they liberate the population of said regime from said Squad. She is the only person who gives a shit about the country enough to start the assignment for free once she knows about it, force the Squad along, lead the mission in field, and personally (and even gently) usher the villain to his death at the end, to end what began with her.

She does bad things, and she does good things. She cares about people, and she uses people. Her decisions ruin as well as save the world. She spins a million plates to match wills and wits with the strongest, wickedest, most cunning humans and superhumans alike, and she still has superiors to answer to and people close to her she hires to judge her for what she does. She endured racism and misogyny and poverty for decades and rode whatever she could to attain as much power over her own life as someone like her could possibly attain, and to have it, she must be a willing tool of the state and bend the knee to Ronald Reagan, the man she derides for what he did to her community, hating every minute of it.

She lost her family to sexual and racial violence, and now she wrangles a penal battalion comprised of some of the worst people on the planet to inflict violence on her orders. She has saved and redeemed people, and she's haunted by the corpses she's left in her wake. She is oppressed and oppressor, someone who could only escape the ravages of American imperialism by becoming one of it's chief enforcers, and still she rebuilds herself into a better person from it upon confronting and challenging her role in it. She is not a bad person, she is not a good person either, she is just afforded a degree of agency and complexity unpowered characters in superhero books simply don't get.

Okay cool, now what is she up to these days?

That, I guess. That is what a strong but unpowered person who does not allow themselves to be bossed around by superheroes or supervillains looks like now. Everytime there's a call for a military bad guy, Waller gets tagged in to be DC's Henry Gyrich. There was a point where Waller was made to contrast the likes of Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling, someone who butted heads with them because she was a well-meaning person working for and committing evil as often as she attempted to stop it. These days, the most consistent beat with her is that she is the most dangerous person alive and worse than the villains she wrangles into working for her. She is a thing to be overcome, a hypocrite to be exposed, a challenge to the natural order of the universe, and she is too terrific at it to be shuffled off quietly. She is a Bad Person and so everything she says and does is Bad (and thus can be ignored).

Integral to Suicide Squad's structure was the fact that Waller was the center holding everything together, the ultimate third party: spinning plates working with, for and against all of the others so she can bend rules and be bent by them. Bent, but never broken, because The Wall doesn't break, others break first. Waller was a one-of-a-kind character, and that broke her, because beating Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling at their own game means replacing Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling. Waller doesn't look like them, she doesn't look like the superheroes either, and so she can't be one of them. She can't even look like herself a lot of the time, they try to slim her up everytime they think they can get away with it.

Suicide Squad was preoccupied with exploring a perspective from a world outside the superhero worldview, but we no longer have her perspective or that of people around her, we only know her through the superheroes she inherently defies and has had an adversarial relationship against from day one. She is someone with a viewpoint that is charitable to neither superheroes nor institutions, and thus, the universe is increasingly less sympathetic to her, the less utility she has to the grander narrative where everyone has to pick between one of two options. If she wasn't powerful and assertive, she'd be another Leslie Thompkins, another Jiminy Cricket the heroes passively ignore. But because she is powerful and doing morally compromised things without asking Batman's permission, she must have a personal grudge. She must be a government monster. She must attack the superheroes for no reason, no ideology, no motive.

So now she's just The Wall 24/7, the mean icy establishment boot who is strong and clever and cruel and hates superheroes and wants to destroy superheroes and rule the world from the shadows. Everything she does is a fuck-up she refuses to take responsability for, everyone is right to hate and distrust mean old Waller, and now everyone gets to look good by dunking on her. They couldn't make her a superhero, so they made her a generic supervillain instead. And now that she's a bad guy, she no longer has to believe anything, she doesn't really have to mean anything, they don't have to write stories about something other than superheroes and supervillains, and they don't have to let a fat woman of color take up space and screentime they could be giving to Harley Quinn and Slade Wilson instead.

Even by the time of Waller's debut on the tail end of the 80s, her career opportunities were on their way to extinction

Days Of Future Past marks the triumph of the superhero comic that's pretty much concerned with no-one but superheroes. Where Ditko and Lee's Spider-Man featured a single costumed crimefighter in the context of a commonplace existence, the X-Men of the 80s focused on a huge cast of mutants who had little if any lasting involvement in the everyday world.

By the 21st century, the corporate superhero comic would largely - if not exclusively - concern itself with little beyond a large class of superhumans and their fantastical existence. I suspect there's a significant correlation between that and the continuing cultural  peripherilisation of the superhero comic - Colin Smith

Amanda Waller is one of the strongest characters in all of comics, she was as powerful as an non-superpowered character given center stage could possibly be, a perfectly designed character from which an entire corner of a shared universe was developed out of with her as the center making it work, but as the room for civilian casts and unpowered protagonists got smaller and smaller, so did Waller's options. If she was a Spider-Man character and somehow didn't get killed or made into a villain, they would have slimmed her up and given her a symbiote, because you're nobody unless you're web-swinging. Characters didn't look or act like Amanda Waller, and unfortunately, they still don't. It's just instead of making more characters like her, they gutted Waller to be more like the rest. If she couldn't make it, who else even could.

Keep your eyes peeled for this summer when she'll team up with two meaningless robot baddies to burn down the Justice League and I guess the universe for the next reboot or something.

[bonefall]

bones. bones they made moonpaw a schizophrenia and plurality stereotype. bones. bones help us

OH NO IS THAT WHY THERE'S 16 MESSAGES

I TURNED MY BACK FOR 5 MINUTES GREAT GOOGLY FUCKELING MOOGELY

I still have to finish reading Star (you have to forgive me for being a capital G Gamer who's been uber distracted) to gather together my final fair assessment, so I can start putting down the fragments for BB!ASC. But I WILL tell you this;

The whole Moonpaw Discourse from a couple of months ago really opened my eyes to just how pervasive intersexism and plurality stereotyping is, even in this space.

Not all of it is malice-- like many other cultural biases, people often just pick up negative stereotypes passively and don't realize they reflect poorly on real people. "Scary evil head voice" is one of them. Yes, intrusive thoughts exist (they are something I deal with), but it's about the snap, subconscious association between "voice in head" and "mental torment."

As the case and point; Look at how FAST the fandom conversation changed when the team first teased it. What was a fantastical, equal parts sincere love and horror exploration of shipping a cat with a magic pool morphed. Overnight, The Voice was an abusive thing, an expression of a dead baby who wanted to live, or a reincarnated monster, or another evil Ashfur-esque posession spirit.

Something bad, malicious, unwanted. By contrast, the voice of the moonpool was mostly portrayed as a supernatural yet good thing. Genuinely asking her for help.

(Part of me also ponders the religious angle of it. "Voices in my head" that come from God are generally much more socially acceptable than "Voices in my head" that come from the self. Regardless,)

So, as always, I Don't Rewrite Arcs Until They Are Done (I DRAU TAD, if you will), BUT... I know for certain that I will want to subvert this.

If Canon!Moonpaw must be a system, and we're all ready to buckle up and bunker down through how the Erins handle this one, then for BB!Moonpaw I'll try to do the same. But for my portrayal, I want to write her relationship with her headmate to be generally positive. Or at least more complicated and multifaceted.

One idea in particular I like is the thought that she absorbed a twin... but writing it as a chance the twin GETS to live, NOT a life denied. Death would have claimed them if they didn't become part of her. So, they love her-- of course they do. They're two souls with one heart.

The specifics will have to come with time. I need to see how her plurality impacts the plot, the overall story being told, plus wait to assess the criticisms that real systems and fusion chimeras in our fandom will have. But I can say with certainty that I would like to attempt my redux with the sad truth in mind that headmates in media are almost never approached as non-malicious. I'd like to do what I can to make a difference.