#as if they'd kill him for real

[sailor-iris]

nobody stays dead anymore don't y'all know that?

art by Nikola Čižmešija from Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War: The Red Hood (2023) #1

[hemlock-dreams]

I love MJ. Peter must have really been devastated by her being affected when he was outed as Spider-Man. I have a few questions! You mentioned in the original universe she had a relapse — was it just the same universe changes that made Peter a criminal that caused there to be an MJ that was an addict? Would the venom have caused her to die in a while like most people, or no because Peter became her supplier and had presumably good control? Wouldn’t she have known the reasons he had hesitated to kiss long eventually, since he had to tell her everything to help with the venom thing? And does his venom just… come out automatically after a bit with anything, or is it possible for him to have situations where it’s not involved at all for a time? I’m sure he misses her and usually MJ and Peter are friends before they get together in many canons, so I’m really happy that he’s able to be her friend in the new universe and didn’t lose her entirely 🥺 even if he basically had to reform the relationship from scratch. (Also if Peter and Marko were such good friends, why was he willing to put him and his loved ones in danger by telling everyone?) all of this is very cool and fun ty for sharing.

So OG-MJ was an addict before she ever knew Peter(and before everything with the knock off venom.) She had been sober for two years at that point, and continued to stay sober for a few years after she and Peter officially got together.

However, Peter was always gone, flaking on all their special dates/anniversaries etc. He'd make plans and then never show up, or cancel at the last minute. And despite being super affectionate with his words, was always really physically distant. All of this left MJ feeling really alone and angry, as she was dealing with her own abandonment issues (foster care).

Eventually, everything was just a perfect storm of frustration (struggling with her boss, Peter flaking on another date, a new job opportunity not coming through) that she ended up reconnecting with some old friends who convinced her to try 'this sick new upper'.

The issue with manufactured venom (gonna call it Aurora) is that in it's impurity, it had extremely degenerative effects at lower doses. Peter's venom, while just as bad, was 'cleaner'. He can secrete it at will, but his body starts automatically pumping it when he gets excited (not to mention his fangs do not retract!!!) (They are very sharp!!!)

As for Marko, he'd been Sandman for a while before he revealed Spiderman's identity. Not only was he mentally very unstable, but he'd been very bitter over Peter going 'straight'. They were supposed to be ride or die, but Peter kept drifting away and eventually cut ties with him when it was obvious that Marko was never going to leave the lifestyle.

Then one day, during a fight with Spiderman Marko just...recognized the body language, the words, just...something clicked, then broke. Because not only did Peter leave Marko, the guy who had his back all those years in prison, his supposed 'ride or die' was also fucking Spiderman. The guy who had been actively fucking up Marko's life for years. The enemy.

Payback was an easy decision for a guy who held tight to grudges.

And for the kicker, he didn't even sell the information, just gave it to JJ for free-- that's how much he wanted to hurt Peter. Later, he would really regret it, but it would be too late at that point.

After Marko threw Peter's life into the fire, he and MJ had a blowout fight. At the height of it, MJ told Peter to 'prove he loved her' and used her own addiction as a way to control his time and attention after being starved for so long (kind of holding herself hostage).

Yeah...it all kind of went to real shit after Lmaoo

Once again, thank you SO much for the support and all these amazing asks!! <3 <3

[numbuh424]

the 2nd half of death note should've just gone full comedy complete with a laugh track and had these two dissing each other the whole time

[cloysterbell]

Look, I know that you still think about her. I know you had feelings for her. And that you still do. And frankly, I don't think you've been completely honest with me.

[ciaossn]

Squalo: Don't touch my playlist of the top 2000's music. You're going to sit there, listen to Linkin Park and like it.

Bel: Who?

Fran: Why are they linking parks?

Squalo: Hands free driving starts now.

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[cervinae-canine]

bro i never understood the want or impulse to woobify real serial killers or terrorists. "can a guy have a hobby" whatever happened to people having cool hobbies like crocheting or birdwatching and not making "adam lanza dogboy" stimboards or something

[mikakuna]

batman really just be saying shit. "killing the joker will make you the same as him"

like oh yes of course. you're definitely on par with a man who's killed thousands of innocents because you killed one person. bitch please. you're telling me bruce being a pussy enabler is why thousands of people die at the hands of one person? he should just go to therapy after killing the joker if it's that big of a deal. if you're gonna take on a role as serious and God-like as Batman/hero, you need to accept that you have to do immoral and messed up things. there's no reason to really make batman so strictly Moral if the supervillains he fights really show no shame in mass murdering and torturing innocents- innocents in a city that he swears is his and his to protect.

in a universe like dc where supervillains (+people who work with chemicals that aren't usable in the real world) exist and absolutely cannot be tied down in prison, killing is likely one of the only ways to keep cities safe. like sorry but batman has to kill the joker, a mass murderer, if he wants gotham to become a safer place. it's that or create an indestructible prison that no villains can escape from no matter what. which surprisingly hasn't been made yet, from what i know, despite all the amazing tech bruce has and can afford

[remnants]

as a jason todd fan i'd like to not see him in comics for a cool 5 months.

[firebirdsdaughter]

Have I mentioned today…

… how much I love Nate and Eliot?

[shima-draws]

Thinks about Perry covered in the blood of his enemies and swoons

[moongothic]

God I wish I could remember what Oda once said about mothers in One Piece... I can't remember if it was about Luffy's mother in particular or moms in general, but he essentially joked about how you'd have to be A Really Horrible Mother to allow your child to go off and become a pirate (dangerous business no loving mother would allow)

And just... My vague memory of that comment is living in my head right now, because truly, if Crocodile somehow is Luffy's mom, truly nothing would make him a worse mom than

Literally trying to murder his child and beating him to near death multiple times the first time they actually meet

Going so far to stop being a mom that he became a dad instead

[silverselfshippingchaos]

maybe this game is good after all 😳

[acebabecd]

I'm surprised so many people seem to be taking "It's nothing personal" as meaning Hermie never cared, and not as him saying that taking the costume is unrelated to how he feels about Normal.

[afrosarah]

I know tumblr hates business majors lol, but one of the things business college taught me is if I was ever the CEO of a social networking company I definitely should never personally field questions (in an increasingly fumbling and tonedeaf way) about a controversy on my public-facing account on the same social media service, to the intense scrutiny of the users of my service.

[m00ngbin]

I need my hair to dry so I can go to bed and not wake up with one half looking like i ran a flat iron over it 400 times on max heat and the other side being curly in ways that shouldn't be possible