#as certain parties in lv represent one of the three

[sadpeopledancing]

x

[chemicalmagecraft]

The Gamer Hero, Deku Chapter 3

A/N: We got over 2,000 views in... what, like a month? That's good, right? Thanks for that and all the likes and stuff. Also, some of you left really funny reviews, so thanks for that.

xoxoxo

"Your Quirk is really weird," the green-haired doctor said. He didn't act too serious, so that didn't surprise me, but...

"Shouldn't you be a little more professional about this?" I asked. I was actually really excited. Who'd have thought that I'd get taken to a Quirk counselor!

"Alright," he said, then adjusted his glasses. "In my professional opinion, your Quirk is really weird. I think it's probably Mutant because it's always on, but it doesn't seem to have any effect on your appearance and manifested very late, even though most Mutant Quirks are usually present from the beginning. So you say you can see titles? Tell me what it says about me, please.

Bamboo Doctor

LV 10

Takenaka Saburou

"Bamboo Doctor, level ten, Takenaka Saburou," I recited.

"Interesting," he said, then turned his fingers into bamboo. "The title even provided a clue to my Quirk, Bamboo Shoot... What's yours say?"

"The Gamer, level six, Midoriya Izuku. It used to be level five, but I got a level up off a quest." He wrote something down on his clipboard.

"Okay. So you said that you have a main menu?"

"Yeah. I've only looked at one of the menus on it yet, but it looked like it worked like a game.

"Can you open it?"

"Sure. Main Menu!" I found out after telling my mom about my Quirk that I could trigger my skills and things by saying them out loud, too.

Status Screen

Skill List

Skill Grimoir

Inventory

Party Options

Map

Quest Log

Options

"Huh," I said.

"What is it?" Takenaka-sensei asked me.

"I have a new menu that I didn't have before called Skill Grimoir. I got something called the Skill Grimoir system as the reward for a quest, so I guess that's what that is."

"Okay... why don't you just tell me what they are?"

"Status Screen, Skill List, Skill Grimoir, Inventory, Party Options, Map, Quest Log, and Options."

"Y'know what, just open all the menus and tell me whatever you think's important. You seem like a smart kid. I trust you"

"Thanks, I think." I heard a ping.

A quest has been created!

Tutorial Level

You really should learn what your new Quirk can do. Open up all the menus.

Completion: 500 EXP, 100 Skill Fragments, Increased closeness with Bakugou

That last one was a little out there, but... "I just got a tutorial quest."

"What?"

"I got a quest telling me to look at my menus.”

"Well then do that."

"Alright." I clicked the Status Screen button. "First I have the Status Screen."

Name: Midoriya Izuku

Title: The Gamer

Level: 6

HP: 325/325

MP: 400/400

STR: 10

VIT: 12

DEX: 11

INT: 30

WIS: 12

LUK: 11

POINTS: 5

MONEY: 0 Yen

SKILL FRAGMENTS: 3500

"It shows all of the things that my title shows, though it lists them name, title, level instead of title, level, name. After that, it shows my current HP, MP, some stats, points that I think I get five of per level and can be used to raise my stats, money, and Skill Fragments. I got the Skill Fragments when I unlocked the Skill Grimoir, so I think that they're linked. I can also raise my stats by doing activities that you would expect them to be used. For example, studying raises INT and stamina exercise raises VIT"

"Alright." He handed me a piece of paper. "Write down your current stats so the readers don't have to read you repeating those, too." What? "Next menu?"

"Skill List." The Skill List opened. "A list of my skills appeared with little icons representing them."

"Skills?"

"I got some things called skills. I guess you could say that they're like spells in a game? That's not exactly right, but I don't know what else to call them. I get them by doing certain things and they seem to be able to level up if I use them enough."

"Alright, so what skills do you have?"

"There's Observe, which gives me a text box with a bunch of information on what I use it on."

"Scan, cool. Do you get, like, a background or just what it is?"

"I only get a description of objects, but when I use it on people, it gives me a box a little like my Status Screen, only for them."

"Okay, can you use it on me, then write my Observe thing on the back of that paper?" I used Observe.

Name: Takenaka Saburou

Title: Bamboo Doctor

Level: 10

HP: 600/600

MP: 650/650

STR: 10

VIT: 12

DEX: 13

INT: 32

WIS: 49

LUC: 14

Quirk: Bamboo Shoot

Emotions: Interested, curious

"I also have Meditate, which I got by meditating."

"As one does."

"It allows me to restore my HP and MP as well as train my WIS."

"As one does."

"I got three skills called Sense Danger, Sense Bloodthirst, and Physical Endurance when I got attacked by a villain. Those three are..." I tapped on their skills, opening their windows.

Sense Danger (Passive) LV1 EXP 99.99%

A skill that allows one to sense impending danger in one's surroundings.

Sense Bloodthirst (Passive) LV1 EXP 51.08%

A skill that allows one to sense other's ill will towards one.

Physical Endurance (Passive) LV1 EXP 35.24%

The body's toughness increases, reducing damage from physical attacks.

3% decrease in damage taken by physical attacks.

"Different. They say they're passive."

"So they're always on?"

"I guess. I have a skill called Tear that lets me tear things and..." I noticed that I had no idea what the first two were. "Two skills called Gamer's Body and Gamer's Mind. Hang on, I'll see what those two do."

Gamer's Body (Passive) LV MAX

Grants a body that allows the user to live life like a game.

Gamer's Mind (Passive) LV MAX

Allows the user to calmly think things through. Allows a peaceful state of mind. Grants immunity to psychological status effects.

"Both passive. One gives me the body to live life like a game, which I think might be why I didn't have a bruise after the villain attack, and the other makes me constantly calm. Both are at max level. They're probably a manifestation of my Quirk."

"Okay. Sounds legit. What next?" I completed the copies of the text boxes that he'd asked of me. "I feel like I should feel insulted by the fact that I have the strength of a fifteen-year-old, but I've literally never touched a weight before so I can't really complain. So what's the next menu thing?"

"It's the Skill Grimoir that I got from a quest."

"Okay, crack that baby open!"

"Skill Grimoir," I said. A glowing ball of green light appeared in front of me and shifted into the shape of a book. It then dulled, turning into a book with a blank green cover. "It's a book," I said.

"I can see that," he told me, then wrote something down.

"You can see the book?" I asked.

"Yup. Weird, I wasn't able to see any of the other things... Open that thing and see what's inside." I opened the book and saw a list of skills with a short description of what they were and the words "Skill Fragments" followed by a number for each of them.

"I think it's a skill shop. There's a list of skills and what's probably a Skill Fragment price."

"Well the best way to test that hypothesis would be to try and buy one," he told me.

"Okay," I said. I looked over the skills for one that looked interesting within my price range and immediately saw one that was worth exactly as much Skill Fragments as the Quest was going to give me.

Mana Bolt (Active) Skill Fragments: 100

A skill that attacks by shooting a ball of mana.

Attack power increases with INT

Range 10m

Hello, beautiful. I tapped it. A blue box appeared.

You are attempting to learn the skill 'Mana Bolt.' This will cost you 100 Skill Fragments. Confirm purchase?

YES/NO

"It's definitely a skill shop. I just got a message telling me to confirm my purchase of Mana Bolt," I told him.

"Well now we should see what happens when you purchase a skill." I tapped yes. The words on the Mana Bolt section began to glow, then the light shot into me. I felt the knowledge enter my head as the words were erased. When they were fully gone, the rest of the text shifted so that there wasn't a gap where Mana Bolt was.

Mana Bolt (Active) LV1 EXP 0.00% MP 5

A skill that attacks by shooting a ball of mana.

Attack power increases with INT and skill level.

Range 10m

"I learned it. I can now shoot mana out of my palms as an attack."

"Mana?"

"MP, I'm pretty sure. The skill seemed good because it has more power the higher my INT is and I have thirty INT. It also only costs five MP."

He sighed. "Well I'm going to have to get some targets for you to test that out on. What next?"

"I'd like to know what happens if I try to open my Skill Grimoir while my Skill Grimoir's already open. I can't close it like my other windows. Or I just haven't found the X. Skill Grimoir." The current Skill Grimoir burst into motes of light that faded from existence as a second Skill Grimoir appeared with the same animation. I looked through it and it was identical to the other one. "I guess it just gives me a new one. That's good to know in case I lose it."

"What happens if you damage it?" Takenaka-sensei asked. I ripped the corner off of one of the pages. The book immediately burst into motes of light, like the old book. "Found the X," he said, and wrote some more things down. "Next menu?"

"Inventory," I said. A box appeared in front of me. This one didn't have any text and instead consisted of a grid and a separate box showing a silhouette of a person with a bunch of boxes that had my clothing in it. "I'm pretty sure that it works like a video game inventory. There's also an equipment screen, which I'm sure is what it is because it has my clothes for the equipment."

He tossed me his pen. "Only one way to find out about the other one, though," he told me. I touched the pen to the box and it was swallowed by a distortion of space... or something. "That looked so cool from my point of view." He held up his clipboard as if to write something down. He stared at it for a second, then looked up and said, "Can I have my pen back?" I handed him his pen and he said, "Right, now why don't you just mess around with it for a bit and see what happens. Maybe start by seeing if you can store something big, like that chair." I got up and focused. As I'd hoped, the inventory box moved where I commanded it to without me having to touch it. It swallowed up the chair, then spat it back out when I told it to. I tested to see how far away from me it would go and found that it stopped just over my arm's length away from my body. I then made it shrink down to one slot (with the equipment screen disappearing) and expand until it fully blocked my body from Takenaka-sensei's. Thankfully it was translucent, so I could still see him.

"Try throwing the pen at me again, " I said. He threw the pen and it was intercepted by my inventory, vanishing. I pulled the pen out of the inventory, closed the box, and threw the pen back to him. "I'm pretty sure I could catch projectiles with this."

"You're probably right, though you might want to be careful with it. Just in case. Next menu?"

"Party Options," I said. I looked at the resulting box. "It just brought up a box telling me that I need to form a party to get party options."

"Well then try inviting me to your party."

"Invite Takenaka Saburou to party," I intoned. He immediately jumped out of his chair and started protecting his face with his arms, the forearms of which turned into bamboo. "Are you okay?" I asked him.

"There's a box! It's blue and floaty and 2-D and appeared out of nowhere!" After a bit, he calmed down enough to sit back down and return his arms to normal. He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and said, "That never happened. Right, so it says 'Midoriya Izuku has invited you to the party. Accept?' then 'Yes' or 'No.' I'm guessing I should press the yes button." He pressed what I assumed was the yes button. I couldn't see his box for some weird reason. I immediately got a notification that he had accepted a party invite. "Right, so I'm going to try to do stuff that being in a party would logically allow me to do while you look into the party options," he told me.

"Okay," I said. I opened up the Party Options box again. "I can see all the members, send them messages, bring them up on the map, and kick them." I noticed a button at the top and pressed it. "There's also a second tab for other options. Looks like I can change the party name and turn on experience sharing, though that one has a warning that it won't work if there's a level difference of ten or higher. What did you-" I was interrupted by a ping.

Takenaka: sup bro

"I found party chat," he told me. "It says that there're options for sending messages to one person or a whole group and also a voice chat. So I guess you're also a telepath of sorts. I can also open up a status menu that implies I can get points from leveling up like you, though I'm assuming I have to be in your party to get that. That's probably it for parties, which is a sentence I thought I'd never say. Leave party." A box showed up telling me that Takenaka Saburou left the party. "Next thing?"

"Map," I said. "I feel like I shouldn't have to say that I got a map. It shows me where I am and has dots that I'm pretty sure are people. Quest Log now?" He wrote something down and nodded. "It's also pretty straightforward. It has a tab for completed quests and ongoing quests. They both work like MMO quests, even have checklists of what I have to do." He wrote it down. "Onto the Options. I can mess with sound, which is interesting because I apparently have background music that's currently muted." I turned the music on. It was actually really nice. It was relaxed, just the kind of music you'd expect in a tutorial level. "I could listen to this for a while. Apparently I have an option between retro-sounding and orchestral music, which is nice of my Quirk to provide. Says here I can open my music up to party members or everyone." I pressed the everyone button. "Do you hear it?"

He bobbed his head. "Yup, that's tutorial music. You should probably switch that back to just you before you leave, by the way."

I switched it back and continued. "I can invert the Y-axis, which I will never ever do ever. Oh, those are subtitles. I can turn subtitles on." I did it. "I don't suppose you know any other languages so I can see if it translates it?" I saw that even my words had subtitles. Despite the fact that they were at the bottom of my vision and there was no way I should've been able to read them, I could see them perfectly fine, like with my health bar. He said some things in... was that Spanish? At any rate, I was able to read the subtitles giving me first what he said and then in parentheses the translation (I'm Spanish on my mother's side). "I saw the translation, which is awesome. That's about it. What now?"

"Well we've gotta see what that Mana Bolt skill ya got was, but first I've gotta tell you some things. I'm a Quirk counselor, remember? Your Quirk is pretty geared toward heroics, which is good because you said you're trying for Yuuei, right?"

"Yes, I'm really hoping to get into Yuuei even with my late start."

"Right, well I'm going to send them a letter of recommendation. It won't be enough on its own to get you into Yuuei or even get one of the recommended spots, but they're probably going to be looking out for you in the entrance exam. You'll still have to actually try, but doing your best should be enough. Next, public Quirk usage laws. You haven't had to deal with these so far, but you're going to have to remember not to use your Quirk in public. At least, don't make it obvious you're using your Quirk." He winked at me. "'Course, those laws only apply to active Quirk usage. You shouldn't have to worry too much about passive skills, though if they're really obvious like, say, super speed then you might want to exercise caution."

"I feel like super speed would be an active skill that drains a lot of MP," I said.

"That's beside the point. Another thing you shouldn't have to worry about is your Skill Grimoir. While you can't make it in public, Quirk usage laws state that Quirk-created objects are fine to bring into the public if they aren't something really out there like a glowing magical sword, so long as you don't purposefully use any anomalous effects that the object in question might have. In other words, you can't buy anything and don't break it on purpose, but nobody can do anything about you looking through the pages."

"Got it," I said.

"Right, I'm also supposed to recommend what I think is the best way to develop your Quirk. You don't actually have to listen to this, but I suggest you do. You should save your points for now. They'll probably be more useful in the future when you're trying to go from one hundred to one hundred and one than now when you're going from ten to eleven. Just save them for a rainy day or something. I suggest you also only spend Skill Fragments on skills you're absolutely sure about. Something tells me that it won't be as bad with those, but you should still spend them wisely. I also think you should get a healing spell and something defensive, like a barrier. Another great thing to get would be something like elemental manipulation which can have a lot of uses. Try also to see if you can make new skills by doing something to your old skills, like seeing if you can charge mana bolt or maybe trying to release the mana differently. That's about all I can think of right now, except maybe grind your stats some more before taking the entrance exam, so let's move on to seeing what Mana Bolt can do." He got up and had me follow him. We walked to a sort of gymnasium that was reinforced. "This," he said, gesturing around the room, "is the practical testing area. It's designed to withstand the punishment some of the more drastic Quirks can dish out." He pointed at an archery target standing in one corner of the room. "Give it a shot. We'll test what happens at different lengths away from the target to see the range on that thing."

"Actually, it's ten meters. The skill said so," I told him.

He sighed. "Well then just hit it at ten meters and see what happens."

I took aim. I held out my right hand, palm facing the target. I'd never done it before, but channeling my mana to my hand felt so natural. "Mana Bolt!" I shouted. A ball of sky blue light shot from my hand and hit the target dead-on, blasting a hole in the center of the target. Takenaka-sensei whistled. I thought back to what he said about trying to make new skills with my existing skills. I closed my eyes, focusing. Getting Mana Bolt didn't just let me shoot mana from my palms. It gave me the ability to feel and use mana. So instead of releasing the mana this time when I used Mana Bolt, I let it pool up. When it felt ready to burst, I opened my eyes and looked at my creation. It was a giant ball of blue light. I narrowed my eyes in thought. "It doesn't feel quite right," I muttered. "Maybe if I..." I started spinning the ball. After a few seconds, I released it and it flew at the target. When it hit the target, it exploded violently, destroying the target completely and making a crater in the floor. "Oops," I said.

"Don't worry about it, that happens a lot," Takenaka-sensei told me. "You're not in trouble or anything, though this is certainly one of the more impressive craters I've seen. Did you just make a new skill?"

"Yeah," I said. I looked at the text box that popped up after I threw the skill.

You have made a new skill. What would you like to name it?

"Spiral Mana Bomb," I said. Now that I had named it, a proper skill box popped up

Spiral Mana Bomb (Active) LV1 EXP 4.27% MP 25

A skill that pools mana and spins it for increased damage.

20% defense penetration.

600% damage increase

4 second charge time.

Can be charged for an additional 10 seconds to increase damage.

Additional 25 MP used per second.

"It's powerful, but it has a charge time so I won't be able to use it on the fly. It also eats a lot more mana than Mana Bolt. I can only just barely use it at the highest power when at full mana."

"You mean that wasn't full power?" he asked incredulously.

"That was about four seconds, which is the minimum charge time," I replied.

"I know I said it was fine that you blew up the floor, but could you please not do that in here? Also you should be really careful with that."

"I figured that giant bombs are a good thing not to throw around everywhere."

"Right, good. That's about everything for today. If you ever think of any questions or concerns about your Quirk, remember that my job is literally to help you with that, so..."

"Got it. Goodbye, and thanks for everything."

"Bye kid. I expect to hear about you doing hero stuff soon." I smiled at him as I left.

xoxoxo

I couldn't sleep the previous night. Today was the first day that All Might was going to teach me hero work! I ended up staying up all night grinding my INT, WIS, LUC, and seeing if I could increase Physical Endurance by biting myself.

Through repeated studying, your INT has increased by one!

Through repeated meditation, your WIS has increased by one! (x3)

Through repeated games of chance, your LUC has increased by one! (x5)

The level of the skill Physical Endurance has increased by one! (x8)

A skill has been created through special action! By repeatedly biting things, the skill 'Bite' has been created!

The level of the skill Bite has increased by one! (x8)

That was a productive night and yet I somehow didn't feel tired at all. It was pretty obvious that it'd be harder to upgrade stats as they increased in level, but I was prepared to deal with that. When the alarm I'd set to go off when I was supposed to wake up went off I got up from my desk and went downstairs to make myself breakfast. After I was done getting ready for the morning, I went to wait by the door and started meditating. Right after my WIS increased by one again, I heard a knock at the door. "I'll get it," I yelled at my mom excitedly. This was it! All Might was going to train me! I opened my door to see...

"Hey, ya shitty Deku!" Kacchan yelled at me. I almost laughed with how suddenly the music changed from calm, homey music to heavy metal. He didn't look like he was too angry, so I used Observe on him.

Emotions: Relieved, regretful

What? "What do you want?" I asked him cautiously.

"The hag told me she heard from your mom that you finally got your Quirk. Took you fucking long enough. I figured that even if we haven't been the best of friends in a while, that's the sort of thing you're supposed to celebrate, so I... wanted to take you to the arcade or something. Maybe blow stuff up and whatever you can do later." Was he blushing? The emotions thing changed to also include embarrased, so probably.

"You certainly changed your tone about me pretty fast. Why do you want to be my friend now?"

"Shut the fuck up, shitty Deku!" Kacchan shouted. "It's not like I was worried about a Quirkless loser like you getting himself killed 'cause he can't do anything like blow shit up or punch the air so hard it makes shockwaves!" Huh, that was actually pretty sweet for him. Still, though...

"So you were worried about me and wanted to discourage me from being a hero because I didn't have a Quirk," I realized. "You do realize that there are heroes who can get by totally fine without using their Quirks, right? The pro hero Mandalay has Telepath, which lets her send one-way telepathic messages to people, and yet I've seen videos of her taking down villains. Eraserhead's Quirk doesn't work at all on Mutant Quirks, yet I've still heard about him taking down Mutant villains. I've also heard about villains still giving him trouble with his Quirk being used on them, meaning that they were skilled enough to fight without their Quirks. Recovery Girl was in the top twenty at one point and her Quirk heals people, which has negative use in most one-on-one fights. There are even more examples of people with Quirks that are useless or finicky in combat who can beat villains. Heck, a relative of mine who is Quirkless used to be a vigilante, and actually took down villains! A Quirkless person could totally be a hero, though me being a Quirkless hero is kind of not an issue anymore."

"Alright, alright, I'm sorry! There, I fucking said it! Now why don't we go blow shit up to blow off steam? I bet you could use some practice with your Quirk," he said.

"I'd like to, surprisingly enough, but I already made plans for today."

"What kind of plans?"

"Uhhh-" I was very glad to be interrupted by a familiar voice.

"Young Midoriya, is that a friend of yours?" All Might asked as he walked up in his civilian form.

"Yeah, I guess so, this is Kacchan," I told him.

"Well hello, young Kacchan!" he greeted.

"Deku I swear to God don't get everyone to start calling me Kacchan again," Kacchan growled at me. "It took half a year for everyone in first grade to stop calling me Kacchan." All Might started laughing. "And don't you dare start, fucking Skeletor! My name is Bakugou Katsuki, got that?"

"Got it memorized?" I said, with the appropriate gesture.

"Deku stop making fucking videogame references you fucking nerd. And what are you doing here, Papyrus?" What was that about videogame references, Kacchan?

"I was impressed by young Midoriya's courage in the sludge villain attack, so I decided to train him when he told me he wanted to go to Yuuei," All Might explained.

Kacchan burst out into laughter. "Deku's going to actually train for Yuuei? Fucking finally!"

"I thought you didn't want me to go to Yuuei when we thought I didn't have a Quirk?" I said.

"Yeah, but I thought that you just saying that you wanted to be a hero and then doing nothing to accomplish that except take fucking notes about everybody's Quirks, like that'll SOMEHOW MAKE YOU INVINCIBLE WAS FUCKING STUPID FUCKING DEKU!"

"Well why didn't you say anything?"

"I was already trying to get you to give up. Telling you to take karate lessons would've been a mixed message!"

All Might cleared his throat. Then started coughing up blood again. I really needed to see if I could fix that a bit with a healing spell or something. "As I said, I decided to train young Midoriya. My name is Yagi Toshinori."

"How the fuck does a fucking beanpole like you know anything about fitness anyway?" Kacchan asked.

"I used to be in quite good shape," All Might explained. "I was in a very unfortunate accident and while I did survive, parts of my internal organs, unfortunately, did not. Now, I'm afraid that Young Midoriya and I must be leaving. It will take a lot of effort to get Midoriya in shape for Yuuei and I would also like to help him with his Quirk."

"You two got room for one more? I'm going to Yuuei too, so being in better shape'll probably be a good idea. Plus, this way I get to see what Deku's Quirk is too."

"If young Midoriya is fine with it, I would be glad to help develop another hero in the making."

"It's fine," I said. It actually felt really nice knowing that I could be friends with Kacchan again. "Let's go."

On the way there, All Might asked about both of our Quirks. Kacchan answered first, then looked at me like he really wanted to hear what mine was. When I was finished, he snorted and said, "Your Quirk is really fucking weird. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that a video game nerd like you would have a Quirk like that."

"Be kind, young Bakugou. Though I must say, it is really weird," All Might said. "I'll probably have to move some things around with the training, but this could actually be really good." He stopped. "We're here." Kacchan and I looked up at the huge piles of trash strewn across the beach. "Trash gets washed in by the current on this beach, and people just dump their stuff here because there's already so much trash. Fighting villains might be a part of hero work, but so is community service. By the end of these ten months, this beach will be spotless. That will be part of your training. I also have the paperwork necessary to be a Quirk tutor, so a secluded place like this with no people will be fine for the two of you to train your Quirks."

"So we gotta clean this shit up, right? Got it!" Kacchan exclaimed, then did that exploding fist punch thing that he really likes to do.

"You go ahead, Kacchan. I have to talk to Yagi-sensei about my Quirk," I told him. I walked over to All Might and pulled out my Skill Grimoir. Once Kacchan was out of earshot I said, "I think Kacchan would be okay if you told him everything, All Might. He's a big fan of yours too, so he'd probably keep it a secret if you told him. Also, could you please look this over while we're training?"

"Alright, young Midoriya. Is this that Skill Grimoir that you spoke of?"

"Yes. I discovered that if you say bookmark while holding it open to a page, a bookmark will appear on that page. Would it be possible for you to read some of it and bookmark anything that you think I might find useful? Be sure to pay close attention to anything to do with healing, defense, barriers, movement enhancement, strength enhancement, elemental manipulation, teleportation, flight, and anything that uses the words 'super mode' and 'limit break.'"

"Don't worry, young Midoriya. It may seem odd to know that an old man like myself has played video games, but I have played quite a few. I still know some cool 'strats' and 'hax,'" he said, giving me the thumbs up as he accepted the book. There was something really hilarious about All Might talking video games. "Now perhaps we should fill in young Bakugou." We walked over to where Kacchan was lifting a tire. "Young Bakugou, I must speak to you."

Kacchan looked up from his tire. "What is it?" he asked.

"I haven't exactly been entirely honest with you. It is true that I wanted to train young Midoriya because he impressed me, but that isn't the only thing. I was also going to pass my Quirk on to him."

Kacchan blinked. "I'd call that a load of crap, but Deku's Quirk makes him a fucking video game, so now I'm just curious about why the fuck Deku would want that."

"I am, believe it or not, a pro hero. The accident that I told you about that left me like this was the attack of a powerful villain. My Quirk allows me to stockpile massive amounts of energy, which lets me still do hero work for three hours each day."

"WHY THE EVERLOVING FUCK WOULD YOU DO THAT TO YOURSELF YOU FUCKING MORON?!" Kacchan shouted. "IF YOU'RE SO FUCKING BANGED UP WHY COULD YOU POSSIBLY THINK THAT FUCKING HERO WORK IS A GOOD FUCKING IDEA!?"

"Because," All Might said, "my hero name is All Might." With that, he went into his muscle form. Kacchan's mouth dropped. "If I, the symbol of peace, were to retire, there would be chaos! That is why I would like to train young Midoriya here to be my successor!"

"Dammit, this is going to have to be a secret, isn't it?" Kacchan grumbled.

"Exactly, young Bakugou!" All Might said, then reverted back to his regular form. "At least, until such time as I retire. Then I'm going to probably have to reveal to everyone why I retired."

"Okay, fine. Your secret's safe with me. Now why haven't you given Deku your Quirk yet? Shouldn't he have enough time to practice with it?"

"About that... my Quirk, One For All, is rather... powerful. The backlash would blow young Midoriya's limbs off unless he gains enough muscle to properly contain it. As such, the training is necessary to prevent that."

I blinked. "You mean I could blow my arms and legs off if I don't train hard enough?" Ping.

A quest has been created!

Roaring Muscles

As you are now, the power of One For All would immediately destroy you. Get at least 50 ViT before the Yuuei entrance exam or do it without One For All.

Completion: One For All, 5000 EXP, 5000 Skiil Fragments, Increased closeness with Bakugou, Increased closeness with Toshinori.

Failure: Decreased closeness with Bakugou, Decreased closeness with Toshinori.

"I just got a Quest to get fifty VIT in ten months with One For All listed as a reward. That's probably sufficient, right?"

"I suppose that if your Quest says it's okay, I'll just give you One For All then. That being said, perhaps the two of you should start working now?"

"Right!" we both said at the same time, then went off to pick up junk.

xoxoxo

A/N: Yeah I'm trash for fics where Bakugou is Midoriya's friend. That being said, I'd like to say that after the time skip, Midoriya will most likely have stats close to or over fifty in all categories. It just makes sense to me that he'd be a jack-of-all-stats with his intelligence and All Might's training. I unfortunately can't think of any good skills that he'd get for getting fifty aside from Mana Affinity from The Gamer and the other stat increase skills from Ryuuji's The Games We Play, and I feel a little leery about just taking the skills from The Games We Play, no matter how awesome that fic was. I'd also like to put some focus on Elementals, but that would involve having a system a bit like TGWP, too. I was wondering what to do about those issues, then I realized that you guys might be able to help me there. So please tell me if you're fine with more things like TGWP, or if you just want me to flat-out make sure I'm not copying anything aside from The Gamer and BNHA. I figure that if you guys say it's okay, then I don't have to worry about you guys getting mad at me about it. Also, for those of you who haven't read TGWP, you really should. It's what got me into The Gamer in the first place and it's actually way better than The Gamer, at least in my opinion. That being said, I'll see you guys next time!

[muthur9000]

Thanks to @londonjb for the lead. 

This article explains a lot of the psychological motivations of the Prometheus Crew and David. Very long and may require a tea, coffee or whisky.

There's been a lot of speculation around Prometheus, mainly over whether certain elements of the plot constitute sloppiness on the parts of Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott, or whether they are intentional elements of a puzzle film.  In a way, the reception to the film is a lot like Blade Runner, and the film shares as much DNA with that Ridley Scott work as it does with Alien.  In fact, I could imagine the three pictures now representing three points on a single timeline of future human history.  Certainly, the interpretation of Phillip Dick's Replicants in Scott's Blade Runner and his portrayal of synthetic humans in Prometheus and Alien express certain misgivings over the nature of humanity and whether we are too immature to be creators of responsible entities.  They are related metaphors from a single author.

The current brou-ha-ha in the web community is, of all things, "were the Engineers mad at humanity for killing Jesus?"  I'm going to leave this to theologians who like science fiction.  In short, this way-out-there question is based on the fact that parts of the facility in the film were about 2000 years old, and that Ridley Scott seems to have implied in a recent interview that he and Lindelof discussed whether Jesus was an Engineer sent to redirect humanity at the start of the Roman Empire.  Much like the "Is Deckard a Replicant?" question from Blade Runner, this will provide fans with decades of debate that is largely besides the point.  It is true that the film can be seen as a twisted spin on the New Testament, with wanderers arriving to an inhospitable desert sanctuary on Christmas Eve, an impossible birth announced by a sexless homunculus, isolation to a "manger" for an impossible delivery, an amoral potentate seeking miracles without redemptive faith, shattering of a "Temple Curtain," a resurrection of the Impossible Child from his tomb, and bodily assumption of the Mother into Heaven.  The designation of the moonbase, LV 223, apparently leads to a verse in Leviticus (22:3) that has to do with defiling the Temple and angering the Israelite God.  But again, these are matters beyond my ability to discuss them above a cocktail party level.

    Instead, let's just deal with two main aspects of the film, and where psychiatric theories can give us insight and further appreciation of the narrative.  Both concern the filmmakers' ideas about empathy versus individualistic survivalism.  One thread runs through the relationship between the Engineers and Humanity, as illustrated by the puzzle in the film, the responses of different crew members to the Engineer trap being sprung, and Liz Shaw's story.  The other thread concerns the very odd familial triad of Weyland, his daughter Vickers, and most importantly, the inhuman "child" David.  I'll get back to this triad in the next diary, and touch back on Blade Runner and Alien in the process.

    At its simplest level, the conflict between empathy and individualistic survivalism is one of sacrifice versus self-preservation.  The latter has always seemed to be the evolutionary imperative, the "animal" nature of humanity, leaving empathy seemingly in the provenance of theology and certain secular philosophies.  Even the early psychoanalysts saw the "base impulses" of Id to be primary, consuming and reproducing as the animals did, and the "civilizing influences" of Superego to magically appear through the ministrations of parents and societal rules.  We are now just coming to challenge these notions in earnest, as we find brain circuits vital to a sense of feeling the pain of others, and realizing that they are highly overlapping with the social learning circuits that likely gave our hominid ancestors a literal "leg up" on the quadrapedal competition through the manufacture and instruction in tool making/use.  Cognitive neuroscientists like Jean Decety have found that self-reflection, painful remorse, identification with others, social responsiveness and autognosis (understanding one's own emotional/cognitive state) are all dependent on some of the same cortical real estate, and that learning from others is intimately tied into all of this on a basic wiring level.  Paleoanthropology has begun to debate to what extent our balance of individual autonomy and group dynamics gave us advantages over other primates, apes and hominids.  Richard Leakey succinctly expresses this as the idea that a bipedal creature will have great evolutionary pressure to cooperate, as an asocial biped with a broken leg will not be likely to survive.  It doesn't just take a village to raise a child, it takes a village to live long enough to conceive one.

    On its surface, of course, Prometheus is a Von Daniken-Esque story that steals back the holiness of empathy from these scholars of human brains, development and evolution.  We have these impulses because our creators were the kinds of beings who would kill themselves in order to seed new worlds.  They were also white and blue eyed, but let's not get too far off track now.  The thing is, the film never conclusively establishes that they made us.  The mythos hints at their visiting periodically and influencing cultures, as well as having a change of heart sometime in the early Roman Imperial period (although the root cause may have been in Asia or Africa or America or everywhere at once).  It also states clearly that they are related to us genetically, and by extension, to Bonobos and Chimps.  The thing is, the mythos is open-ended enough that it doesn't negate what we know scientifically, and several characters raise the incongruity of Shaw's interpretation with known biology.  She sees the DNA match as validating her theories, but it only establishes a common lineage.  The Engineers may have been a culture of humans so far advanced that they left Earth tens of millennia prior.  Ridley Scott states that the opening sequence is meant to establish the Engineers' psychology, rather than it showing what happened on Earth.  They are seeding many worlds, and they have an aim for the hominids here on Earth.  More than that we do not find out.

  Thus, Von Daniken-Esque or not, the story is one of humanity falling short of loftier goals that involve the denial of self-preservation.  This isn't just the Prometheus crew, or us chimps down here on Terra, but the Engineers of the LV 223 installation.  The first we see them on LV 223, in a holo-playback, they are fleeing something.  This something leads to widespread death and bodily defilement.  It is the interaction of the bioactive muck with them that has led to this something.  However, we know that the muck can do different things to different beings.  It may have mutated some of the worms on the planet into body rending serpents.  It turns the craven geologist into a rampaging wendigo gone amok.  On the Engineer head with the panic center (locus ceruleus) activated, it is literally explosive, a dark mirror image to the gradual dissolve at the start of the film.  And mixed with reproductive cells in humans, it leads to a rapidly gestating Xenomorph face hugger.  At least one Xenomorph has already been unleashed by this process before the Prometheus gets there, as it is in a wall mural in the storage room, and this may have been the Something that hunted down the Engineers.  But this is ostensibly the same (or similar) muck to the stuff at the start of the film, which is harsh but ultimately benevolent in result.  Is the muck different, or does its effect depend on the user?  What if the fear in the LV223 Engineers is what weaponized the substance?  And conversely, what if the subtle effects of the substance on the Engineers made their motivations darker than that of their brethren?  If they were as willing to die as their kinsperson at the beginning of the film, they could have launched a suicide mission, loaded up with the goop in their own bodies, and unleashed it upon landing and coming out of stasis.  That isn't their plan.  And that mural of the Xenomorph doesn't look like a warning.  It looks like a shrine.  Something is different about the psychology of these Engineers.

    I wouldn't be a Science Fiction fan without my own pet theory.  What if they never turned on us per se?  What if they had some of this muck in select locations, away from most people's view, in various places on Earth?  Then, whatever we did that was so messed up, whether it was unseating the Roman Republic, crucifying Jesus, destroying the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem (that's a good place to hide bioactive muck), having Russell Crowe fight Joaquin Phoenix, or some Dynastic Coup in China ... whatever it was polluted the goop with hostile intentions, and the Engineers took it to the LV 223 "Human-Engineer Visitor's Center" to see if they could fix it.  This makes more sense than setting up a weapons facility on the moon to which they gave directions already. The Earth Embassy was retconned into a decontamination site for the Earth biomuck. This failed.  It unleashed nightmarish biotech, but also changed the Engineers on the moon itself.  At some point, the muck changed the thinking of the Engineers on that world, hence the mural deifying the Xenomorph and the stockpiling of the muck to unleash (or perhaps to venerate).

   The best evidence for this failure of empathy on LV 223 is that one of the Engineers finally decides: "Screw this.  I'm safe in this ship, so I'm going into stasis."  When he comes out, he is not a high-minded angel.  He is disappointed at Weyland, and responds by using the human's creation (David) as a blunt weapon.  Now, he doesn't owe Weyland any more of an explanation than Dr Tyrell did for Roy Batty, when Roy had the same wish to look upon his creator and ask for more life.  But when Tyrell hems and haws and refuses to try, we are supposed to see it as a flawed human move, and we almost sympathize with Batty's extreme reaction.  Here, the clearly flawed being is the Engineer, and Shaw merely asks what went wrong.  The Engineer believes itself to be above its creations, above its dead comrades, and above reproach.  When it is stopped by an act of sacrifice by the Prometheus flight crew, it does not question its judgment of the little humans.  It goes on a rampage to kill the human who questioned it.  There is a lot of dialogue devoted to the flawed nature of David's creation and tutelage, but the implied narrative about creation is that our "guides" are also a decidedly mortal/flawed lot.  David is the only character to explicitly state this, but the behavior of the Engineers, as much as it can be deciphered, is one of seemingly condemning behavior that they themselves are prone to carrying out.  In a pinch, or under the effects of bad bioactive muck, or both, they opt for saving their own skins and lashing back at any and all who would threaten it.

    Maybe, then, the Engineers are the stand-in for the innate capacity for great acts in either direction.  They are not the past, so much as what we could become.  They are what we know instinctively is "in us."  We can elect to take an inclusive view that sees all our acts, creations and neighbors as carrying pieces of us, and that leads to a wide net of preservation that may motivate us to act in a fashion that does not prioritize our own immediate interests or even our immediate safety.  Or we can focus on threats, excluding others, attacking others, and seeing legacy in a very narrow light.  As Pinker points out in "Better Angels of Our Nature," you can't take the group minded view if everyone around you is slashing their sword, so neither is automatically more adaptive.  The flexibility to go back and forth is adaptive, so long as the overall trend among all people is towards the broader view.  This is also not purely partisan, for those keeping score at home, although it is political.  Here, most people would say, "Oh, we're progressives, so we take the altruistic view."  Not when we focus on the threat from conservatives, and from my POV, rightly so.  In fact, the "pearl clutchers" vs. "red meat progressive" arguments here are between the empathic vs. survivalist viewpoints.  And I myself have alternated camps, depending on the item being debated.

    But back to Prometheus, and how the crew of tiny people is as variable as the Engineers.  With the exception of three members, the crew is representative of a humanity without mythos.  Here at DailyKos, we might see this as a good thing, an Earth clear-eyed and unbound from ancient superstition.  However, mythology is a good thing.  As first articulated by Henry James and later by Carl Jung, myth provides metaphors for the unfathomable, and allows people to cope with capriciousness in life.  Not everything can be known in one person's lifetime, and this will confound the person who lacks stories to root his or her experience.  Failure to have a sense of one's own story at the end of life is associated with despair or desperate actions, as per Erikson, and this task is difficult to achieve without a broader cultural story.  Carrying myths is not the same as substituting belief for knowledge, as secular individuals who avidly read speculative fiction have a cosmic mythos without any degree of faith in it.  Prometheus' crew, for the most part, are not these kinds of secular individuals.  They speak in terms of money, sex, power, and discoverable fact.  Even Weyland, who has some degree of unscientific belief, does not want a cosmic framework for his life, only cosmic powers; he has not achieved Eriksonian ego integrity at the end, serving as an Ozymandias figure placed into space opera.  It is really Shaw and her partner who strive to rediscover a mythos, and neither utilizes it to allow for mystery.  They must have a personal relationship with the Engineers, which places them on equal footing.  Given that the Engineers are not gods, this is logically reasonable, but in so far as they are inscrutable this is not a recipe for success.  Perhaps we could even go so far as to say that the rise of personal-level theology and the decline of mystery about 2000 years ago is what caused the catastrophe with/among the Engineers.    

    Many of the crew have been locked in by a lifetime of exposure to corporate materialism.  The geologist is so set on his job that he is more frightened of the mission expanding into archeo-biomedicine than he is at the sight of the dead bodies or malevolent biotech, although the latter disturb him plenty.  He has become overly specialized.  

The biologist is almost a parody of how fundamentalists see many of us here, unwilling to challenge past theory and implicitly trusting of fauna that clearly looks sinister to us.  Neither of them can see well anymore, nor critically examine information outside their training.  No wonder we witness signal glitches and errant static and broken visors do them in: outside data is increasingly meaningless to their thought processes.  And the LV 223 trap plays on their flawed singular-mindedness when it transforms them.  The more motivated biologist is hollowed out by the creatures he wishes to study.  The greedier geologist is transformed into a singular minded killing machine, mowing down anything living in his path.  

Even the doctor, who does not meet a bitter end, merely acts as a functionary.  Eventually, unquestioning of her directives, she is a willing pawn in David's side projects.  She has become slave to a machine, less creative than a robot.  There is no meaning left in any of these professionals' lives, a lack which is merely made explicit as the Prometheus mission goes off the rails.  The corporation has hollowed out and stripped much of the empathic thinking from these people.  More tragically, their survivalism is no longer individualistic, having been utilized by Weyland Corporation as a subversive means of control.  Slavoj Zizek, a popular psychoanalyst and philosopher in Slovenia, has written volumes on the lack created by the modern materialist imperative to continually consume in the pursuit of individual enjoyment.  I await his response to this element of the film, as I am pretty sure he will carry out an even more detailed analysis of it.

    This control is not absolute, however, as the flight crew manages to break out of it.  For much of the film, they speak flippantly about bets and sex and collector's items they have bought.  They retaliate impotently against their female boss by using objectifying language, brought to a head by Idris Elba's captain challenging her humanity by daring her to have sex with him.  If she can satisfy lust, then she's not a machine, recapitulating the erroneous thinking of the humans in Blade Runner.  Even his devil-may-care warbling of "Love the One You're With," which elicited a chuckle from the audience, has a darker undertone that the sexual revolution has reached a flaccidly unsatisfying and meaningless hedonistic conclusion.  To touch back to Freud, there is only Id craving other things, with atrophied Egos that cannot generate complete senses of autonomous selves.  Yet, faced with the destruction of the planet, these men find something else to prize on it.  We never know their individual motivations in detail, although the Captain speaks for a time on the imperative that the rest of humanity be able to go on.  They will not receive things or even recognition for this.  They will not collect on their bets with each other.  It does not seem that they anticipate heavenly reward either, although they allude vaguely to "the other side."  Instead, the idea that they share enough basic humanity with those back home is sufficient to trigger the "other circuitry" that acts in opposition to consuming and persisting.  Even unrecognized, something of themselves will remain in distant and close relatives who will live to see another day.  They cannot articulate it, but their bravery speaks it.  And it is instinctual, whereas the other impulses have been reinforced by the civilization, in concert with more recent psychological theory that does not see one or the other impulse as more innate.

    Let's finish by looking a bit at Shaw.  She has been turned into an outsider by her own life circumstances.  She has serially lost both parents as a child and has discovered she is infertile.  Thus, she is cut off from the most immediate level of the biological thread early on.  Her deeply held theories on human development are not widely accepted, as she must rely on an eccentric billionaire for funding (although the state of governmental grants is unclear in this world's backstory).  Her talents do not readily bring her acclaim or power.  There is nothing driving her other than personal satisfaction.  She wants to be proven right, but since she already believes she is correct, data is always spun into confirming her narrative.  There is very little narcissistic weakness for the world of 2089 to play off of and manipulate.  That said, she is hardly concerned with humanity as a whole, except as a study piece.  She and her partner form a pair walled off to some extent from others, and she herself seems largely walled off from instinct.  The drive present is one to know.  In some fashion, she is the character most alike to David, rather than Vickers.

    According to Jeffrey Arnett, who formulated the concept of Emerging Adulthood about 20 years ago, the transition from adolescence to full adulthood in the modern age is one of determining where to live, what to do, and who to love.  His ideas are an expansion on concepts of adult identity first articulated by the first generation of Freudians, as well as the young adult conflict of Intimacy vs. Isolation postulated by Erikson.  This phase of development is supposed to be marked by repeated failure, as well as multiple breaks and rapprochement with the elder generation.  Inability to have a solid sense of answers to the three lifestyle questions by the mid-30s is often associated with continued immaturity in interpersonal interactions and/or a midlife crisis.  Shaw, who has been robbed of an elder generation and does not appear to have replacement proxies, has followed the example of her widowed father.  There has never been a chance for rebellion.  She sees her life's work as primary, which determines her partner and her world-traversing lifestyle.  She enters her mid-30s without a hint of crisis, but also without much ability to interact with people outside her work.  This is not the careerism present in the other crew, as she can think critically about a wide range of topics, but her social development seems frozen.  She relies upon her partner as the spokesperson and interlocutor for much of the first half of the film.  In fact, until the crisis reaches its climax, she almost appears to have a less rich emotional inner life than David (who as we will discuss in the next diary, is likely hiding his responses).

    This changes as her partner is ripped from her.  This not only challenges her assumptions about the benevolence of the Engineers, but strips her of her intermediary.  She is exposed to the hostile world for the first time since the death of her father, making David's touch back to this event all the more cruel.  Having opted for one clearly intimate relationship, she can choose total Isolation or find a way to rely on others.  As she is betrayed by David, by the medical crew, by Vickers and Weyland, and by the Engineer, she relies more and more on her life's mission.  Her quest for answers, never at odds with whatever the details of her Christian faith are, becomes even more central.  And her Christian faith cannot be that of the literalist, even if she believes that Jesus and the Engineers are one and the same, as she has ideas clearly divergent from the account in Genesis.  Pursuing that mission first takes her on a survivalist path, and then shifts to a more inclusive view.

    The medical bay Caesarean is a survivalist action in some ways but not others.  On one level, she is the archetypal female action heroine, socking out anyone standing between her and the med bay.  She endures pain and injury to live another day.  However, here, it is an unearthly child that threatens to kill her.  Her child, in a sense, as it shares some genetic material with her, or at the very least with that of her partner.  But Shaw is uniquely qualified to recognize that this creature is an invader rather than part of a continuing biological thread, as she already sees herself as outside that ongoing chain.  Since this is not reproduction, there is no primal level gain in sacrificing herself for it.  I am shocked that the Fundamentalists have not seized on this scene as a grotesque of the Virgin Birth, but more surprised still that either side in the Culture Wars has not seen how this is a reflection of the zeitgeist as we confront questions of delivering or terminating pregnancies with foreknowledge of congenital/genetic malformations.  The dedicated modern woman, with an adult existence centered outside of home and hearth, who elects to live another day rather than bring something she does not recognize as hers into this world.  This is not to boil down difficult questions to simple science fiction struggles for life and death: no potential mother (or her partner) can see any real world pregnancy as merely an alien invader.  Nonetheless, uncanny narrative threads in horror or gothic or any speculative story where reality's rules are suspended ends up reflecting that which cannot be spoken of comfortably in the real world.  This is what Freud called Unheimlich, which means both Uncanny and "The Un-Hidden."  This pregnancy, both enabled and poisoned by the Man of Technology (who is also a Corporate Man!), is only a terrible choice thrust upon her.  And she must rely upon yet more corporate technology to save her, which she must both appropriate forcibly and then convince/reprogram to do the job.  Is this not the impossible nightmare our moral arguments and advanced knowledge have thrust upon every woman, the seemingly barren and the fertile alike?  Even now, do we not hear the Corporatist funded scolds redirecting women and their physicians to always choose measures to bring every pregnancy to delivery, like David and his effortless take-over of the Weyland med crew?  Even in nations where access is not an issue and pollution is being addressed, is the foreknowledge we can now have not the genesis of such nightmares, made all the more scary by the fact that the developing fetus is part of our biological chain?  This is survivalism turned in on itself.

    Having made the terrible choice to rip a creature from her womb, Shaw is now met with almost preternatural calm by David, Vickers and Weyland.  She is not taken back to the cryo-beds, nor arrested, or even reprimanded.  Weyland is more concerned with her accompanying them on his quest for more life.  The corporation and its godhead must persist.  The implied option is: "If you will not bear a child for the corporation, will you nurture the corporation itself?  If you will not act solely for yourself, can you broaden your worldview to support me?"  However, these are purchases, not empathic pleas.  Weyland does not come as the weary senescent in need of help.  He announces that this has been his plan, that he is in control.  Having just come from one crisis of modern feminism, are we now not smack dab in the middle of the other?  If you will not bear a child, then you must be a company man.  This is also the crisis of our aging population, where so much of the work is now in health care and elder care.  Vickers and David are along for the ride, both for their own ends, and we will return to this in the next installment.  But neither accompanies Weyland entirely because they want to take care of him, even though David has followed his programming and been attentive.  They have farmed this work out to others: the scientists, the crew, the technology, the medics, and the Engineer.  People who take "pink collar" jobs in our world may often start off entirely fueled by empathy and purpose, but can quickly get drawn into much more materialistic and unempathic motivations.  This is survivalism masquerading as an emphatic plea.  Shaw does not take the bait, agreeing to go along but beginning to remember her core motivations.

    Everything changes when she witnesses the battle between the Engineer and Weyland.  Denied his individualist/survivalist aims, Weyland is struck down by the Engineer, who is unimpressed with the narcissistic achievement of arriving to wake him up.  Nevertheless, the Engineer is no less driven by the same instincts, refusing to engage in a discussion about actions/morals and simply maneuvering to continue his own existence.  False gods abound in this room of mere mortals.  Remembering her discussion with the Captain, and how his motivations are already in the process of change, she takes a chance and reaches out to another for help.  She asks him to make a sacrifice that only he can, on behalf of countless people that neither of them will see again.  And then, she takes an even bigger risk, providing David with a chance to help her and offering to help him.  It is at this point that she regains her cross, lost when she was first infected with the growing invader within her.  She has begun to participate in a genuine dialogue with others, offering assistance that may not be reciprocated and making requests that may not be fulfilled.  She trusts not just in her life's mission, but in others that she is not intimate with, others who have betrayed her before.  She does this because it is the only way to allow for Earth to survive, and as it turns out, her bet pays off for herself and for Earth.  Ironically, the purely survivalist Xenomorph Facehugger acts as the Deus Ex Machina, bringing the corrupted Engineer to his end in the same way he had denied Weyland further existence.  But it acts in its singular minded way, as it has no empathic instincts.  

    In the end, Shaw's growth and reconnecting to her full human nature allows David to learn the benefit of an empathic sense.  The Immortal Man made Invalid, he is now the homunculus with broken legs, dependent on another person to help him along.  Without him, Shaw cannot achieve her more intellectual mission; without her, David has life without further experience.  We have seen the theoretical dawn of human empathy reborn, its survival advantage spelled out for us.  This recapitulates the pre-denouement of Blade Runner with Deckard and Batty, but with a happier resolution for both actors, and stands in contrast to Alien where Ripley is left alone.  In the next diary, we will go back and review the unhappy family of Vickers, Weyland and David, and speak of narcissism and malignant narcissism in more detail.  In the process, we will see how such persons (corporate and human) that lack a full capacity for a sense of the other loom large as chief antagonists in Prometheus and our own world.

By Ptolemy  Thursday Jun 21, 2012 · 3:56 AM AUSEST

Part II

[solenelanza]

Even stuck at home, he was on the spot. The great British artist decided to create an Art Club broadcasted every Monday night on Channel 4. A digital one for sure. As life is still in lockdown in the UK, I had to sort out my memories to find some amazing surprises like meeting the top-notch creator once.

Même enfermé chez lui, il savait rester sous les feux de la rampe. Le génial artiste britannique a même créé son Art Club, retransmis tous les lundis soirs sur Channel 4. De façon virtuelle évidemment ! Et comme la vie au Royaume-Uni est toujours au temps du confinement, j’ai trouvé en rangeant mes tiroirs de jolis souvenirs ensevelis, comme cette rencontre avec le créateur so British ! 

As a journalist, I had the chance to meet legendary photographer Martin Parr, to attend to comedian Chris Addison Opera’s premiere and to visit Grayson Perry’s first solo show since 7 years with the artist him-self. Another step into British culture with this unique creative mind. 

Ma vie de journaliste m’a poussé à suivre les pas de Martin Parr, photographe sociologiquement respectable,  permis  d’assister à la première à l’opéra du comique Chris Addison et de visiter la première exposition solo de Grayson Perry depuis 7 ans avec … l’artiste en personne. Un pas de plus dans l’exploration de la culture anglaise. 

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🎨"What a piece of art!" The kind of comments you can't do for the moment at the museum 🤷‍♀️ * 🇬🇧 Is it the new map of #london ? Well @alanmeasles is always right 🐻 #art * 🇨🇵 Les expositions me manquent. 🖼️Hâte de vous revoir à la prochaine virtuelle @saiankata @mathilde_pipelette 🤓 On t'attend @aurepouiki 🤭Qui vient à la prochaine ?

A post shared by WTFrenchie in Rocking London (@soleneelle) on May 14, 2020 at 1:46pm PDT

Too many colors. Why is it so provocative ? That’s the kind of comments I heard at the Serpentine Gallery. Well, that’s true that the Brexit Map of the entire England, a bling-bling motorbike called Kenilworth AM1 and Reclining Artist, giant nude of the artist could deeply catch the eyes. As that time, Grayson Perry invented « The Most Popular Exhibition Ever ». A very modest and totally ironic, as usual, view point on art and society for this unique British artist.

Trop de couleurs ? Et de provocation ? Voici le genre de commentaires entendus à la Serpentine Gallery. Bon il est vrai que la carte de Brexit du pays, la moto richement décorée et un nu gigantesque de l’artiste lui-même pouvaient un peu surprendre. En ce temps-là, Grayson Perry était le maître de  « The Most Popular Exhibition Ever » (comprenez l’exposition la plus populaire jamais faite). Une vision, et totalement ironique, comme toujours, sur l’art et la société  de ce concepteur.

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Back to business with #arty time 🤔😘 Welcome back to #brexit Land 🖌���😣 * Tout, vous saurez tout sur la vision du Royaume-Uni par Grayson Perry sur @lepetitjournalcom.londres * 🏞📣 He lives in a House A very big House in the country It's like animal farm That's the rural charme in the country 🐮🎵 * * #London #art #hydepark #serpentine #Gallery #inspiration #feelinggood #House #home #uk #arts #graysonperry #politics #cute #kawaii #Mountains #exhibition #colours

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The artist can be indeed a bit surprising. Winner of the Turner Prize, Royal Academician, CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, Grayson Perry never hesitates to wear pants, lipsticks and dresses. Claire, « a 19th century reforming matriarch, a middle-England protester for No More Art, an aero-model-maker, or an Eastern European Freedom Fighter » was not only his alter ego but also the inheritance of his experiences at the Roxy punk Soho club, partying with his next famous roommate-to-be, Boy George.

Ce n’était pas la première fois que le plasticien désarçonnait son monde. Honoré par le prix contemporain si convoité Turner Prize, Membre du Royal Academy of Art, récompensé de l’Ordre britannique à l’occasion de l’anniversaire de la Reine, Grayson Perry n’a jamais hésité à porter jupon, mascara et robes ! Claire n’était pas que son alter égo mais aussi l’héritage humanisé de ses expériences au club punk de Soho, le Roxy, à l’époque où il faisait la fête avec son colocataire futur pop star, Boy George.  

It was not Claire but Grayson who was the unique guide of a Super Rich Interior Decoration. With a kind of Message T Shirt which read My Life is a Crap. What an entrance for this decoration style show! Well like in a house, first step was a big Tapestry called Large expensive abstract painting, more or less animage of a kind of London, « spiritual home to so many of the world’s super rich ». A World where shopping is key as it is seen in the giant glazed ceramic on which his heroin Claire « as a manic grand dame » strikes the pose in front of every single luxury shop.

Ce n’était pas Claire mais bien Grayson lui-même qui vint faire le guide de l’exposition : Super Rich Interior Decoration. Avec une façon de savoir accueillir son monde et une énorme inscription : My Life is a Crap sur son T-Shirt du jour ! Belle entrée pour cet événement autour de la décoration d’intérieur. Et comme dans chaque maison, la première étape était d’affronter la tapisserie géante qui faisait face à l’entrée! Une certaine idée de l’urbanisme londonien, « la maison spirituelle de tant de super riches de ce monde ». Un univers où le shopping est roi comme sur la céramique « Shopping for Meaning » sur laquelle son héroïne Claire prenait la pose « comme une grande dame excentrique » devant tous les magasins de luxe de notre époque.

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Talking about image with the success of Instagram, the artist had to gather some copyright free images to create his Searching with Authenticity ceramic. « The global conformity of those who refuse to be labelled. » For the social critic, we shouldn’t look down as the giant carpet representing a homeless man is named. Add a bit of tax heavens to get the perfect cocktail, that’s what the visitor had to take a ride with the Sponsored By You woodblock print  and the characters of the piece of art : Claire and Alan Measles. 

D’ailleurs en parlant d’image, et avec la mode d’Instagram, l’artiste a voulu rassembler des images libres de droits sur un vase pour créer un certain « Searching With authenticity ». Pour la critique sociale, il fallait jeter un coup d’oeil plus bas. « Don’t look down » représentait un SDF sur un tapis luxueux. Pour avoir le cocktail le plus savoureux, il fallait ajouter un brin de paradis fiscal et c’était le cas avec Sponsored by You où le visiteur était invité à prendre le large avec le panthéon personnel de l’artiste : Claire et Alan Measles.

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As the artist loved introducing his wife the author Philippa Perry in the Art School TV show, he is really stuck to his teddy bear named after a disease : Alan Measles and his many incarnations haunted Grayson Perry’s creation. As in a Limited edition Handbag designed by Grayson Perry in collaboration with Osprey, the London luxury leather handbags. If it looks like a well crafted Louis Vuitton replica, the face of the special Teddy Bear and especially this very male way to open the bag can ring a bell, that it was, after all, more a piece of art that the new It-Bag. In Three words: Provocation, politics and humour. British humour. 

A l’image de la femme de l’artiste omniprésente dans son émission de télévision, il était très attaché à son nounours d’enfance nommé d’après une maladie : Alan Measles ; ses incarnations hantaient l’oeuvre de Perry. Et ainsi, un sac semblable à un accessoire griffé LV intitulé « Limited edition Handbag designed by Grayson Perry « en collaboration avec Osprey, le maroquinier londonien, le visage du fidèle ourson et surtout sa façon si particulière et virile d’ouvrir ledit sac pouvait rappeler que ce n’était pas le futur it bag à la mode mais bien une oeuvre d’art. En trois mots : provocation, politique et humour. Mais British humour !

Texts & Pictures: Solène L.

Pour d’autres histoires musicales à Londres, suivez-moi ou contactez-moi 😉

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