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mangostarjam · 5 months

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knot happening (part one) — bnha, alpha!bakugou katsuki x f!reader, aged up characters, established relationship, a/b/o dynamics, use of "brat" and "pipsqueak" as pet names, smut in the second part (coming soon), omegaverse!au for the spring fever collab run by @lorelune ! 1.2k words

your new company has some... interesting policies for employee heat cycles. you do your best to find a loophole.

"I can't do it."

"The hell d'ya mean, you can't do it?"

You give your Pro Hero boyfriend and resident alpha A Look. Bakugou Katsuki has the grace to shut his mouth, but he rolls his eyes and drapes a heavy arm over your shoulders, yanking you into him on the faded yellow couch you picked out together years ago.

"This is my first heat at this new job, and it's just... embarrassing. Do you know what they do, Katsuki?"

He raises a sharp blonde eyebrow in invitation.

"They..." your voice drops with horror, "they announce it to the whole company."

"Hah?" Katsuki sits up a little, strong thighs flexing beneath his gym shorts. He came in on the tail end of your mental breakdown, finding you pacing in the living room of your apartment with your hands tugging incessantly on your borrowed shirt. "What the fuck?"

"I know," you wail, "it's ridiculous! The president sends out a company wide email explaining your absence, and the HR team sends you a care basket, and the Sales team sets up a pre-heat drinking party! Do you know what's in the care basket, Katsuki?"

"Do I wanna know?"

"It's filled with sex toys, babe! SEX TOYS! From my company! They're branded!"

A spark lights up in Katsuki's otherwise vaguely concerned expression. "Don't they know you're mated?"

"Yes, of course, that was in my file," you wave him off, still seeing horror images of company branded sex toys floating in your mental vision. "I heard from Sasaki in Accounting that the toys are for when your mate needs a break. Y'know, from fucking."

Katsuki's derisive snort is loud and breaks you out of your personal hellhole. "What kinda fuckin' alpha needs a break when their mate needs 'em?"

"Well, not every alpha is a big strong Pro Hero like you," you point out, poking him on one annoyingly firm bicep. The familiar scent of caramel and smoke fills your nose. "And actually, maybe I should ask if they've got any onaholes for when you're the one in heat. Last time I needed another two days to recover."

"Hah?! There's no fucking way I'll use one of those!"

You peer up at your boyfriend reproachfully. "I like being able to walk, Katsuki."

"You don't need to fuckin' walk if I'm carryin' you everywhere, brat."

"Hmm, we'll see," you say. Katsuki's red eyes flash as you tap your bottom lip with your finger thoughtfully. "There's gotta be a way for me to take a week off work without telling them I'm going into heat."

"There's no way you'll be able to avoid it," Katsuki rumbles, leaning forward to catch your finger with his teeth. He nips at it lightly before leaning down more to capture your lips in a sweet kiss. That, more than anything, finally makes your anxiety simmer down. "You always smell so fucking good before it starts. Everyone's gonna notice."

"You're the only one who can do anything about it, though, so you'll have to keep it in your pants or quit picking me up after work."

"Not happening," Katsuki presses another kiss along your hairline and noses into the strands, sniffing deeply. It tickles, and you laugh, trying halfheartedly to shove him off of you. "What else do they give in these care packages?"

"Actually, besides the super cursed sex toys, they include really good snacks and electrolyte drinks to keep your energy up," you say, "and I'm really glad my company is so open about it all, but it's just so embarrassing!"

Katsuki hums, letting you vent out your worries. You look really pretty like this, dressed in one of his shirts and a pair of pajama shorts, some soft cotton thing that barely covers your perfect ass. He pulls your legs onto his lap and you flop backwards on the couch, moving on from your minor breakdown to sharing a funny story that happened to one of your new coworkers the other day. He had missed hearing about it then, stuck on overtime for a patrol, so he basks in your attention now as the two of you laze around on the couch.

The afternoon passes into evening. It's a rare lazy Monday together — your new job lets you have three day weekends in exchange for slightly longer work days, and Katsuki's patrol schedule happened to line up this week. You're digging into a pint of ice cream after polishing off a plate of his delicious (but spicy) curry and rice when it comes up again.

"What're you gonna do about your heat?"

"Well, I was thinking," you slide your spoon into the thick cream and wave it at him, "I'll still need to use my authorized heat cycle time off, since I want to save my vacation and comp time for real uses, so there's no avoiding the company finding out..."

Katsuki raises an eyebrow and accepts the spoonful of ice cream you're dangling in his face. His tongue pokes out to chase a bit of cream lingering on the edge of his lip and he grins, sharp, at the way your eyes track the movement. "But...?"

You have a feeling Katsuki hasn't fully thought through the horrors of corporate sponsored pleasure items, but you have, and the thought of everyone at your new company knowing you'll be getting fucked within an inch of your life makes you want to shrivel up and die. All companies have policies in place to protect time off for heat cycles, as society couldn't function otherwise, but this is the first place you've worked where impending heat cycles are declared company-wide. Normally it's just marked as time off.

"But they don't have to find out until after it starts, right? So as long as I can get through the pre-heat stuff without anyone noticing, I can avoid the cursed care package and company-wide email!"

"Ain't happening," Katsuki says flatly.

"We've been mated for sooo long now, babe," your gaze flicks up to meet his and you pout. Your boyfriend outright snorts when you start batting your eyelashes at him. "Surely you can resist the pre-heat symptoms this one time? I swear I'll get over my company's shenanigans once I see it happen to a few other people. It's really great how supportive they are, but I need some time, that's all."

"Your heat is in like. Two weeks," Katsuki says.

You pout up at him some more.

"During your last heat cycle we broke the mattress frame when I missed your first few pre-heat days."

"Yeah, but that was because you had that mission that went long," you say. If you could just... convince him... "C'mon, babe, this will be different! You're such a strong, powerful alpha — resisting me will be a piece of cake! Unless..." you pause and scoop another bite of ice cream into your mouth, "you're too weak to resist me."

"Are you callin' me weak?" Katsuki narrows his eyes. You wave your spoon casually and shrug.

"I mean... all you've gotta do is ignore my pre-heat. I'm just an itty bitty omega..."

Getting into a staring match with Pro Hero Dynamight is not on anyone's Top Ten Good Ideas list, but you match your boyfriend's red glare steadily.

"Alright, pipsqueak, you're on," Katsuki scoffs. "We'll see who's beggin' for who by the time your heat rolls around."

part two

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starcurtain · 1 month

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I wish everyone collectively understood aventurine’s character like you…things would be so much easier! I genuinely don’t understand how people keep getting his motivations wrong??? Could it be because some of the most popular Aven fanfics were written prior to his release? That could have contributed to some of the takes we tend to see about him…thoughts?

I struggled all day to come up with a concise way to answer this and couldn't think of one, so here, have a long-winded ramble:

I don't think early fic writers have much impact in the situation with Aventurine's character now, since most people can look at when a story was posted and go "Oh, this was before we had ____ information."

I think that Aventurine's problem is being a male character in a gacha game. Gacha game characters are designed to sell. Hoyo can sell female characters very, very easily. Give her huge tits and a visible underwear strap and you're good to go. I love all my guy friends, but I'm not gonna sugarcoat it: straight men are not the hardest audience to please. Hit a particular fetish (feet, spandex, dommy mommy), and you're gucci.

Nah, we all know why Jade's trailer is Like That.™

Male characters in gacha are harder to sell because women as consumers are a little harder to predict. Does every woman want a tall, ripped hunk? Shit, no, small cute boyish models like Aventurine are selling better now? Why?! Would a bad boy be more popular than a nice guy??? It's harder to account for women's tastes, especially because they are often (a little) less visually-oriented.

Hoyo is good at what they do though, and they've figured out that male characters sell very well when they possess at least one of two specific traits:

Endearing vulnerability/helplessness

Gay ship tease

Give a character both, like Aventurine? They might as well be printing money.

That sound you hear is Hoyo's stock prices rising.

So, from the very beginning, Hoyo is incentivized to create a character that appeals to people, a character people will want to crack their wallets open for. And they achieved this, first and foremost, by giving Aventurine traits that female players (in particular, but men too), find especially appealing: emotional and physical vulnerability.

We see Aventurine's pain. We sympathize with his grief. We identify with his struggle to make meaning of his difficult life. He's our woobie, blorbo, babygirl, whatever the hell they're calling it now.

He can't hide his suffering anymore. He's on the very edge. He's a dude in distress. He's surrounded by enemies! He misses his mama! He's been betrayed! No one understands him like you do, dear player!

The ultimate feeling evoked is: He needs to be saved.

When people talk about male power fantasies, I think they forget that women can experience them too, and "Emotionally vulnerable man that only I (or my favorite character) can fix" is actually a female power fantasy.

And from there it's really easy, right: the people who shell out cash to buy warps for their harmed-husbando feel like they've saved him; the people who are into mlm ships look for the nearest hot dude to be the savior Ratio was waiting for his time lol.

Morally and intellectually, this type of deep-down-golden-hearted, emotionally-wounded male character is very easy to digest. There is nothing to dislike about this type of character or role in the story: this character is a good guy who has just gone through so many terrible situations, whose victim status makes him endearing, and whose lack of agency means that any of the questionable or downright bad things he does are always the result of someone else forcing his hand, and never something he would have chosen himself.

His motivations are always clear and consistent: get free, heal, and live happily ever after.

Insert the Wreck-It Ralph meme: "Do people assume all your problems got solved when a big strong man showed up?" But to be fair, a big strong man did kind of solve Aventurine's problem, so--

Anyway, it's simple. It's straightforward. Morally, it's pretty cut and dry, black and white: Aventurine is our hero, which means everyone dictating the course of his miserable life is evil.

Hoyo is not remotely discouraging people from literally buying into this emotional appeal.

And trust me, I get it. I'll be the first to admit that hurt-comfort is its own entire genre in fandom because it is so appealing. People eat up Aventurine's tragic backstory like candy! The idea of watching a character go through hell at the hands of bad guys just to finally find a happy end is like the definition of everyone's favorite story.

In fact... people love Aventurine's suffering so much, they have invented whole new ways for him to suffer that aren't even in the game.

This is where we get all the headcanons that Aventurine was a sex slave, every single person he meets hates him because of his race, the Stonehearts are executioners holding knives to his throat, Jade enslaved him to the IPC with a lifelong contract, his material possessions belong to the company, the IPC is forcing him to take only the most dangerous missions where he is being required by his evil jailers to continually put his life on the line... You name it and I promise you, I can find a fanfic where Aventurine suffers from it. 😂

Bro can't even sleep in on his day off; life is so hard for this man.

Being serious: if the game is telling us that Aventurine is a victim... Why not make him the perfect victim?

Why not envision an Aventurine with no freedom, who bears no responsibility for any of the horrible situations he is in or any of the dubious things he does?

It's so natural to like that version of Aventurine, so appealing to see a totally powerless underdog use his own wits and charms to claw his way up to freedom. Or, if you're the kind who really relishes angst: It's even appealing to see Aventurine lose more. To delight in fics where he loses his wealth, where the IPC punishes him for past crimes while he's powerless to stop them... (I assure you, this is many people's cup of tea and the fanfics prove it!)

Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with liking characters who are exactly this straightforward! It's completely fine to embrace characters that are intentionally written to be morally above-board, whose primary role in the story is to generate angst by being a good person who suffers, or those characters who never show unlikable traits, bad decisions, or contradictory actions.

The problem is that that's just not who the game is telling us Aventurine is.

Hoyo may be capitalizing off people who love to envision poor Aventurine still living his life as a slave... But the game also needs to tell a complicated enough story overall to appeal to people who don't care about this specific husbando--Aventurine's role in the actual game's plot has to be interesting enough for almost everyone to appreciate it, not just Aventurine's simp squad. (Don't get mad, I'm in the simp squad with you.)

So his character doesn't stop at just being a pure-hearted victim who is still waiting to be saved.

Aventurine is not that easy to label, and I think the biggest struggle in this character's fandom right now is between people who prefer the even-more-angsty, still-a-slave Aventurine versus people who want a morally grey, self-destructive character instead.

To me personally, while I greatly understand the appeal of fanon!Aventurine and the joy of a really juicy angst fic where characters lose it all, I think that missing out on the depth that canon is suggesting would be a real loss on the fandom's part.

The character motivations that Aventurine shows in the game are complicated. They cancel each other out. They're basically self-harm! He makes almost every situation he's in worse for himself--on purpose.

He is a good person, but also a person who has done unspeakable things. He does have morals, but he's not above allowing those who don't have them to use him to their advantage.

He's both the victim and the victor. He's his own worst enemy. He's a lost little boy who's been making terrible decisions for himself since he was like eight years old, and a grown ass man who is barely managing to fake his way through an existence that destiny is not letting him quit.

This kind of character is a lot harder to embrace. He's done things that most people would find appalling--like willingly joining up with the organization that let his entire race be massacred. He's invented a whole new peacock persona to frivolously flaunt riches he doesn't even care about (Poison Dart Frog Self-Defense 101). He actively plays into racist stereotypes about his people to manipulate others through their preconceived expectations. He's made a mockery of his mother's and sister's hopes and dreams by endlessly trying to throw his own life away.

He has flaws! He bet everything he had on a ploy without doing his homework to find out if the people he was risking his life for were even still around. (Maybe he already knew, and couldn't bear to admit it, even to himself.) He's intentionally off-putting and obnoxious to everyone he meets (Poison Dart Frog Self-Defense 102). He terrifies everyone who gets close to him by (seemingly) carelessly throwing himself into the jaws of death without the slightest provocation.

He knowingly allows the IPC to exploit his power and talents for profit. Did everyone forget that his role in the Strategic Investment Department is asset liquidation?! Like, his actual day-to-day job is ruining people's lives. Canonically, Aventurine kills people when his deals go bad.

His motivations change off-screen in two lines of story text. We're told in one line that his biggest reason for joining the IPC was to make money to save the Avgin, then in the next line we find out that's impossible. And... then what? What motivations does he even have now? The whole point of his character arc from 2.0-2.1 is that he was on the edge of giving in to utter despair and nihilism because he couldn't even perceive a single reason to stay alive. He has no purpose in life before Penacony, and that didn't start with the Stonehearts at all??

People keep saying Aventurine was held in the IPC by golden handcuffs, but how do you tie down someone for whom profit is meaningless? What can you offer to a man whose only desire is to bring back something already lost forever? How do you imprison someone whose only definition of freedom is, canonically, death?

Working for the Stonehearts is obviously not healthy. But that's why Aventurine was doing it--because taking dangerous missions allowed him to put himself at risk. The job that he originally pursued hoping to save his people became a direct means to self-harm, and the IPC's only real role in that was just happily profiting off the results.

The journal entries for Aventurine's quests are there deliberately to tell the player what is on his mind, and none of it has to do with escaping from his job:

Like... Work is the least of this man's problems.

At really the risk of rambling on too long now, he's also just a massive walking contradiction:

Aventurine is among the most explicitly religious characters in the game, yet he's one of the only people in the entire game that we have ever seen actively question his people's aeon.

You might be tempted to think Aventurine's risky gambles with his life as an adult are a result of giving up after finding out about the Avgin massacre... Butttt no, Hoyo makes sure to tell us that even at knee-high in the Sigonian desert, Kakavasha was already willing to risk himself in a fight to the death against monsters because even back then he found his own life to have less value than a single memento.

He's the "chosen one" who will lead his people to prosperity... except they're all dead.

He's explicitly suicidal... andddd also a pathstrider of Preservation.

He wants to die... He doesn't want to die. He wants to make it end, yet goes to staggering lengths to continually survive. (Every plan risks his life on purpose--but every plan's win condition is also to live.) He life is the chip tossed down, but his hand is trembling beneath the table. When faced with an otherwise unsurvivable situation, Aventurine literally became a winner of the Hunger Games. He beat other innocent people to death with his own chain-bound hands just to come out alive.

He knows the IPC failed the Avgin and left them to die... and he still willingly sought out a position of power in their organization. Maybe he really is after revenge... but maybe not.

He starts his journey in the IPC with a truly noble goal in mind: to help his people using his newfound wealth and power. He's a good guy who did genuinely want to save the Avgin and repay all those who helped him. But once it became clear he was too late, once it was obvious he would have no use at all for that monetary wealth and power he risked his life to get... What did he do with it? Unlike Jade, we don't see him over here donating to orphanages. (I'm not that heartless; I'm sure he does actually do a lot of good things with his money on the side, but the point is that the game does not show us that--it shows us, over and over again, Aventurine putting on a wasteful, over-indulgent persona toward wealth. We've supposed to feel how meaningless money is to him, how meaningless everything is becoming to him.)

He outright refuses to use underhanded tactics or to cheat at gambles, which is meant to show us that's he's more morally upright than his coworkers. There's an entire exchange where he says that he'll never stoop to using manipulation the way Opal does. But... he doesn't have any issue fulfilling Opal's exact agenda. He was never remotely morally conflicted about denying the Penaconians their freedom by dragging Penacony back under IPC control.

He's willing to risk his own life, which is one thing--but he's also willing to risk other people's well-being. Topaz accuses him of constantly egging their clients on into dangerous situations; we've actively seen him shove a gun into Ratio's hands and pull the trigger with no care for how Ratio would feel about that on their very first meeting... Dragging the Astral Express crew into the entire Penacony plan in the first place was exceedingly dangerous...

To me, I just think it's vital to understand his character through the lens of these contradictions because they demonstrate the extreme polarity of Aventurine's life: from rags to riches, from powerless to empowered by multiple aeons, from willing to kill to survive to killing himself... He has quite literally lived a life of "all or nothing," and while he is the victim of many terrible situations out of his control, his arc as a character involves facing the truth of himself and the future his own actions are hurtling him toward.

Frankly, the Aventurine that canon is suggesting is a little annoying. You want to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and say "Why are you like this?!" And he won't even have an answer for you, because he doesn't even know why he's still alive.

In the end, to me, this is so, so much more interesting. I can read an endless supply of hurt-comfort fics where Aventurine escapes the evil IPC and Ratio is there to fill the void in his life with the power of love and catcakes and be a perfectly happy clam online, but I want canon to continue to serve us this incredible mess of a man who constantly takes one step forward and two steps back.

Who is fully aware of his role as a cog in the grotesque profit-wheel of cosmic capitalism and still manages to say he never changed from the rags-wearing desert rat of the Sigonian wastes.

Who over and over again flirts with nihility but, ultimately, even if he has to wrest it from the grip of the gods themselves with bloody, chain-bound hands, chooses life.

#honkai star rail #aventurine #aventurine meta #hsr meta #character analysis #listen I see you angsty fic writers who bully our favorite for maximum emotional gain #I am a ratiorine fan with the best of them #so I fully understand the appeal of the “I can fix him” fic #but like #there is so much else just waiting in the text of the game #that makes Aventurine such a rich complex and nuanced character #admitting that the IPC is the least of his issues makes him MORE interesting #not less #I promise #also like #getting so tired of reductive reads of my posts #just because I don't think Aventurine is a slave of the IPC #doesn't mean I think the IPC are good people #I'm not sure how many times I can say #'They're evil and are actively exploiting him for profit'#before people will stop saying I'm an IPC apologist lollll #I promise it is possible for Aventurine to have agency AND for the IPC to still be evil #those two statements can co-exist

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