#but I don’t think all us Americans are complaining about nothing when they talk about money so I’m genuinely curious where their money goes

[ween-kitchens]

you ever see someone complain about something in a game that makes you think they just don’t like the game itself because why are you complaining about that. that's universally loved and your complaint is that it 'could do more'. where is your whimsy

[zoueriemandzijnopmars]

Someone I follow is occasionally complaining about house prices in the US and at first I was like: yeah I know you can’t get anything below 300k anymore much less in cities where 500k+ is more the norm. But. They dropped some prices and apparently they were talking about 200k houses???? Like where do you find those I’m begging

[maxlarens]

53) holding the other’s jaw + logan

this is to make up for what i wrote last night viv hope u like ittt 😋🫢😌 @coff33andb00ks

You meet Logan “oh, I drive race cars” Sargeant in a dive bar in Austin, Texas and you don’t know if you have the heart to tell him that you’re in Austin specifically for the Grand Prix.

It’s cute that he assumes you don’t recognise him, it’s even cuter that he tells you he drives race cars and then assumes you still don’t know he’s an F1 driver. It’s a little sad maybe— especially when Oscar Piastri and Jack Doohan are sitting in a booth across the room, trying and failing to take surreptitious glances at the two of you. But you’re trying not to think about that, probably as much as Logan also is right now.

You’re leaning with your back up against the bar drinking a vodka whatever, he’s standing in front of you. Ostensibly in line to get a drink, but he hasn’t stopped talking to you since you almost bowled him over trying to get back to your friends. There’s no drink in his hand that’s for sure, just an empty beer glass that he’s bringing back. You think that’s unbearably sweet— well, no, actually you think that’s hot.

You’re not the kind of person who’s into Formula One for the drivers. You’re into it because instead of watching football games like every other all-American family did, your dad used to sit in front of the TV every weekend to watch twenty men drive around a track. You’d grown up on the sport; the roar of the cars before they hybridised them, old-school turn names, fiery crashes ending in tragedy, the blood sweat and tears of teammate rivalry. Your dad complains that the sport has changed too much— but still he puts the races on every weekend.

You try to watch the sport for the cars, for the racing, but at the end of the day, you’re not immune to a cute guy. You follow most of them on Instagram (except the drivers you hate), find yourself smiling at promo videos and liking pictures that have nothing to do with the sport. Your dad is annoying about it, but you don’t care.

You especially don’t care when Logan Sargeant is smiling something crooked at you as he tells you he’s here with his friends. You nod, looking where he’s pointing, where you’ve already seen Oscar Piastri and Jack Doohan, you laugh a little, giggle really, and you lean toward him.

Deliberately.

“Yeah,” you take a sip through your straw, maintaining eye contact, “I know who you are, Logan.”

He goes red immediately. Pale cheeks turning a very pleasant colour. You lick your lips, lean back against the bar. He blinks his sparkling wet eyes at you, mouth gaping like a fish out of water for a moment before he snaps it shut and scrubs a hand across his stubbly beard.

“Oh— I—”

You wave his shock off, barrelling on to avoid anything awkward for him, “Sorry, should’ve told you.”

“No,” he shakes his head, apparently desperate to make it fine, to make it okay, “You’re good. I just— I didn’t expect someone so—”

He trails off, trying to start the sentence again. But you’re intrigued, very intrigued.

You cut him off, not rude, just insistent, leaning forward into his space, “What was that? Finish your sentence.”

His eyebrows go up in a flash. The blush on his cheeks grows a little more prominent. He’s biting down a little on a smile, on something.

“I—”, he flounders for words for a minute, you give him that minute in silence but you’re staring at him, a little fiery, a little intense, “I didn’t expect someone so,” he stops, whines something a little desperate, quiet enough that you’re not supposed to hear it, “cute, I guess. To know who I was.”

“You guess?”

He nods, slowly. Getting braver as he leans past you, deliberately getting in your space to put his empty glass on the bar behind you. You’re trying not to smile, you’re biting down on the inside of your lip so the biggest grin you’ve probably ever grinned can’t split across your face.

“Yeah, I guess.”

This is how you end up in a dark corner booth with Logan “oh, I drive race cars” Sargeant. This is how you end up making out with Formula One driver Logan Sargeant. You’re halfway in his lap, your legs a weird tangle as you try to fit yourselves into the space. But you’re hardly thinking about his knee digging into you or how you’re slipping off the seat every five seconds because Logan’s got a hand buried deep in your hair and another on your waist. His hand splayed against your back, a few fingers touching the bare skin at your hip.

He tastes like beer and ketchup and he kisses you like he’s starving. It’s slow, it’s deliberate but the slip of tongue and the way your mouths slide against each other is intoxicating. Makes your head feel fuzzy.

You’ve got a hand on the side of his jaw, the crook of your thumb hooked on his ear, fingertips pressing into his neck, the base of his skull. He tries to pull away from you— ostensibly to breathe, to say something. But you’re a little desperate, chasing his mouth and bringing your other hand up to his jaw to drag him back.

You feel him laugh a little into your mouth.

“What?”, you mutter, eyes closed, still kissing him, "Finish your sentence."

“Nothing,” he shakes his head, you feel his mouth move against yours as he speaks, hot breath fanning across your jaw, “Just. Do you maybe wanna get out of here?”

And this is how you end up in Formula One driver Logan Sargeant’s hotel room.

this is probably the most bordering on nsfw content that i will venture to in my writing just a heads up for people:)

[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XXI-B + Conclusion, Final War-B: The Hospital Attack)

To preface before I start documenting these final four chapters, there’s been a lot said (not least by me) about how wildly out of touch the resolution to this plotline is.  While I didn't set out to rehash all of that again, it turns out I can't actually talk about how the series portrays heteromorphobia without talking about how it resolves it—if I'd wanted to do that, the place to stop would have been with the last post. This whole piece is also destined for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be readable for those who don't follow me on tumblr. Therefore, if you've been following my #heteromorph discrimination plot posts for a while, there are portions of this post that will be pretty familiar territory!

If you're new and want my full breakdowns, you can find them in my Chapter Thoughts posts or in this pair of posts rounding up the asks I’d gotten on the topic.  Here, I will simply say that I don’t think Horikoshi’s fumbling of the plot can be read to mean that all the stuff I’ve documented thus far was just me reaching too hard, reading stuff into the manga where nothing was intended.  While I’m sure some of it is—I definitely went out on a few limbs!—I think the main answer to, “How can heteromorphobia be such a well-thought-out depiction of a logically foreseeable form of discrimination while also having such a terrible resolution?” is, “Because the mainstream opinion about how best to handle discrimination is wildly different in Japan than it is in progressive American circles.”

That doesn’t mean I’m willing to wave the wand of Cultural Differences over this resolution and forgive everything—there were plenty of Japanese fans critiquing it as well![1]—but it does somewhat modulate my feelings about it.  In any case, let’s get to it.

1: Most of what I saw was on Twitter, but there’s a Japanese site called bookmeter that’s kinda goodreads-esque, and which had several critical reviews posted for the volume, including one that felt like every point laid out was something I’d complained about as well.  Super validating, but a shame it was necessary!

(I'll be changing up my formatting just a bit in hopes that I can find a way to present sub-sub-bullet points that tumblr won't choke on in this 13K post. Pray for me.)

Chapter 370: 

O We open with a scene which we’re led to believe is about Spinner but which the end of the chapter will reveal to be about Shouji.  It’s shockingly open about the extent of the discrimination Shouji faced, and there’s worse yet to come, but here we find people throwing stones at him, telling him to die, saying he has dirty blood that will defile the land, that he should stay inside the house, and that no matter how much time passes,[2] they will never accept “his kind.”

2: Viz renders this as “no matter how much society progresses,” but the word jidai means something more like “the times”/”the age,” and the progression term used can mean improvement, but in the circumstances, probably just means forward movement.  I think the intention is more like, “No matter how much the times march on,” if only because it would be very odd for the people yelling this vitriol to frame it as themselves resisting progression.  After all, bigots don’t typically think of themselves as “regressive” compared to everyone else’s progressiveness; they think of themselves as normal or valuing tradition compared to everyone else’s moral laxity/perversity.

So, remember how I talked about the spiritual/religious charge to the language the CRC used to talk about their “sanctuary” and the League/Spinner’s presence in it?  Here’s the full scope of that.  It’s about kegare, a Shinto concept of uncleanliness associated particularly with blood and death, and while that’s normally something that can be purified simply by undergoing the proper ritual cleansings, when something is, in itself, intrinsically unclean, no amount of purification will fix it; you can only keep it sealed away.  Hence the yelling at Shouji not to leave the house.

The spirituality-based discrimination calls to mind the burakumin, originally an outcaste group of people who made their living working with all the aspects of life Shinto considered kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners and the like.   They were made to dress and cut their hair in ways that identified them on sight, barred from entering temples or schools, and lived in their own villages.  The laws mandating much of this were abolished in 1871[3] and urban sprawl gradually rolled over burakumin villages, turning them into slum areas.  While today it’s not uncommon for people to not even know they’re descended from burakumin lineage unless they’re specifically told,[4] more subtle discrimination does endure.  While it’s clearly not the only inspiration, there’s a lot about anti-burakumin bias that’s reflected in heteromorphobia.

3: Albeit not without considerable and violent protests against the liberation of the burakumin/the idea that they were henceforth to be allowed to hold other occupations and become ordinary citizens.  Arson, destruction of villages, attacks and deaths—all things considered, the anti-Kaihourei riots are probably a decent place to look for inspiration on the historical massacres Spinner’s #2 will be talking about shortly.

4: Or find out because someone who knows the significance of those old neighborhoods finds out first and they’re suddenly on the bad end of some discriminatory act or another.

O We find out that the group Spinner’s leading consists of fifteen thousand people, that number split between PLF remnants and ordinary civilians who support the PLF’s cause.  It’s unknown exactly how that split breaks down, but based on how the rest of the attack goes, I think it’s probable that the group is mostly civilians—if it were more PLF, it probably wouldn’t be so wholly defanged by Shouji’s big plea for peace.  So that’s what we might call a “bad look,” that fifteen thousand ordinary civilians feel so incredibly hard done-by that they not only flock to join a known terrorist, but that they do so for the purpose of attacking a hospital.

O They’re opposed by about two hundred police and heroes, the relevant of whom for our purposes are Present Mic, Rock Lock, Officer Gori, Shouji, and Koda.  With the exception of Present Mic, who will in any case be heading inside very shortly, they’re all minorities of some sort, with Rock Lock being very visibly, obviously Black, and the others being heteromorphs.  None of them are immediately thinking about the composition of the crowd, but rather about how difficult the crowd is being to handle.

O Rock Lock yells out that the rioters are too organized to be some random mob, a dismissiveness that gets him shouted at by the Spinner fanboys—tragically their only appearance in all of this!—that, “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!”  I have to assume that putting Rock Lock in this scene is no accident, but rather is there to make the rioters come off as short-sighted, so deep in their own pain that they lash out at someone who, if HeroAca!Japan is anything like present day Japan, almost certainly understands better than they think!

The phrasing, in any case, points towards the dehumanization that heteromorphs, especially animal-associated ones, are subject to.  After all, as Re-Destro might point out, in the post-Advent world, isn’t it the case that any given heteromorphic human’s face, no matter how strange it may be, is de facto a “human face”?  Yet the vitriol from the Spinner fans clearly reflects how internalized it’s become for them, that they don’t look “human,” despite the fact that “looking human” means nothing at all in the time of quirks.

O Koda gets called a traitor by an elderly beaked heteromorph from, apparently, a rural area, underscoring what’s been alluded to a few times prior to this, and which will be laid out explicitly in a few pages, that heteromorphobia is far, far worse in the countryside than it is in the cities.  Mr. Beak assumes—correctly, it seems[5]—that Koda’s a city kid, because why else other than ignorance would a fellow heteromorph stand against them?

5: Koda’s from Iwate Prefecture, which is only above Hokkaido in terms of population density; a bit of research suggests that its largest city, Morioka, is considered to be a mid-sized city.  So that’s definitely the hard upper limit on exactly how “big city” Koda could reasonably be.  That said, Shouji also identifies Koda as someone who grew up in a city, for which I assume he must have at least some basis.

O Spinner’s #2 fulfills the promise of his early shorthanded characterization of being a fiery, well-spoken zealot by standing on top of a building over the mob and exhorting them onward with revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric.  And boy, does he bring up a lot to talk about!    

Demagoguery for Fun & Profit

O Quirk counselling and quirk education?  Phony nonsense, he says.  That’s a fairly confusing grievance to bring up in this context, so let’s consider what he might have in mind.

• For quirk education, I would contend that BNHA has shown very little of it, in spite of having Academia right there in the title.  The academics in question are about Heroics, after all, not quirks in and of themselves.  Here’s the complete list of what I would say the reader has seen that could be qualified as actual education about quirks:

Aizawa telling the kids(/low tier villains at USJ) some broad generalities, things like a very basic explanation of how quirks work on the genetic level or how they’re classified.  Most of this is delivered in the context of how his quirk works; the only outlier that immediately comes to mind for me is his explanation of how quirks are like muscles, and can be strengthened via training.    

Mirio and Tamaki’s middle school class doing “quirk training,” which is framed as a P.E. class and is specifically aimed at finding ways for each kid to be “useful to society,” not about them learning anything about quirks in a broader sense.    

Endeavor’s recent reference to Nedzu’s alleged “quirk morality education,” about which I have already registered my skepticism.    

The bit in Re-Destro’s monologue to Shigaraki where he mentions he was taught not to judge others by their quirks.  It’s hard to judge how applicable this is to normal society because Re-Destro was raised in a cult, and the book shown during this sequence was released by Curious’s publisher.

So of those options, what is #2 talking about?  I’d say the last one is probably closest to what he means: don’t judge others by their quirks.  But of course, people judge others by their quirks all the time.  Family, classmates, teachers, people in the same neighborhood, heroes and police—we see examples from literally the first page of characters who are being judged by their quirks or lack thereof.  While that judgement doesn’t apply only to heteromorphs, they are, by dint of their visibility, going to face it everywhere they go, regardless of whether any given situation—say, going to the grocery store or on a date—involves quirks or not.  So, whatever lessons people in this society are getting about quirks and judgement, they clearly aren’t absorbing them.

It also bears pointing out, of course, that #2’s personal affiliation is with the Metahuman Liberation Army, and he definitely shows signs—as I’ll get to in a bit—of the quirk supremacism that group is so unanimously painted with in the endgame.  So while the supremacy he’s preaching is about heteromorphs rather than quirks more generally, he could well be saying quirk education is phony because he’s all for judging people on their quirks!  However, his criteria for that judgement differs from both forms of judgement taught by the society he’s railing against—what they practice and what they preach.

• Then there’s quirk counseling, a practice the story most prominently associates with Toga, who’s barely a twitch of the needle away from baseline (though her abuse is not wholly without reference to her appearance, in that her natural smile is repeatedly branded as scary or deviant).  So why bring it up in association with heteromorphs?  My suspicion is that a heteromorph—especially a heteromorph with an animal-associated quirk!—being visibly “different” in some way makes the people around them hyper-sensitive to behavioral “deviations.”

For a start, you see that hyper-sensitivity brought to bear against Toga.  Curious contends that Toga’s sense of “admiration” was a perfectly normal thing, but it was the tie to blood that made it wholly unacceptable.  It’s notable that, before she snapped, Toga was never shown to actually want to hurt people: the bird was already injured when she found it, her friend got a scrape the way any child might, Saito was involved in a fight Toga had no hand in.  She hurts people now because a lifetime of rejection and dehumanization, but Toga’s admiration of blood was not intrinsically indicative that she’d grow up to be violent; people treated it that way because of cultural attitudes towards blood and blood-attraction.

So, might the same sort of thing be true of e.g. animal-associated heteromorphs?  That they might exhibit behaviors which would, in different circumstances, be totally fine, but which they’re judged for unduly harshly because of cultural beliefs about the animal they resemble?  Let me just spitball a few possibilities:

A cat heteromorph who, as a child, showed affection by nuzzling.  That’s fine when a literal kitten is doing it, and funny and cute when a baseline child sees a cat doing it and imitates it for fun, but when the cat heteromorph does it, he makes people uncomfortable, makes them wonder if he lacks self-control, comes off as weird and too-forward.  So his parents rebuke him and bring him to a quirk counsellor to break him of the habit, leading him to feel ashamed and alienated from a harmless natural impulse.    

A snake-headed girl is the first heteromorph in her family line and the way she stares at people so fixedly, never blinking, creeps them out, makes them feel like she’s dangerous.  She isn’t and has no intention of being so, but she’s sent to quirk counselling anyway and the lesson she learns is to just never look people in the eye at all.    

A condor heteromorph develops a morbid interest in corpses in middle school.  He doesn’t want to eat them, he’s not some kind of cannibalistic animal—at least that’s what he told himself before quirk counselling, where his counsellor, like his teachers, assumed that his interest had to be tied to animal instincts.  He wanted to be a mortician, or join the police and get into crime scene investigation, but when he told people that they just looked at him like he was already holding a fork and knife.  (He ends up getting into photography, and just has to live with the fact that now people have two excuses to call him a vulture.)    

Two children—one with a plant-based emitter quirk, the other an eight-eyed spider heteromorph—are caught in the act of killing some insects by a local police officer.  It’s the sort of innocent childhood cruelty you might find anywhere, and, indeed, when the officer calls their school about it, that’s what gets decided about the emitter—he was just a child who didn’t know any better.  But the heteromorph gets recommended for quirk counselling instead—after all, spiders kill insects.  What if this is an early warning sign for instincts towards predatory behavior?  It’s important to nip these things in the bud.

That’s all off the top of my head or taken from some conversation with friends on the topic, and maybe it’s a reach, but it’s also a very plausible explanation for why a heteromorphic idealogue might bring up quirk counselling as a specific grievance—because, like the Villain-designation for criminals, it’s unevenly and unfairly applied.

O The next point #2 makes, and definitely the one that made the biggest splash in fandom at the time, is his invocation of a pair of historical incidents, possibly both but at least one of which was a mass murder targeting heteromorphs, carried out by a bunch of baseline types.  He names them as the 6/6 Incident and the Great Jeda Purge.  These are both stealth Star Wars references, though the former is disguised a bit better by being in the same format that Japan sometimes uses for naming events like attempted coups.[6]  Given the image we see, it’s fair to assume the event in BNHA was similar.

6: See for example the May 15 Incident or the February 26 Incident, called the 5・15 Incident and the 2・26 Incident respectively in Japan. You see this in China as well, with the Tiananmen Square massacre being referred to there as the 6/4 Incident.

Notice that the perpetrators here are mostly holding weapons.  Were they quirkless themselves, or were they avoiding using quirks such that they couldn’t be branded as Villains?  Knowing the answer to that would give us a timeframe for this.

He goes on to declaim, on the basis of these events, that the history of the paranormal is one of persecution and oppression of those with “differing forms.”[7] The term in Japanese there is kotonaru katachi, 異なる形, which uses a different reading of the kanji in igyou (異形) and muscles in a verb conjugation, which has the effect of softening the harshness of 異 somewhat.[8]  This would be a great catch-all term for those with heteromorphic bodies who might or might not have heteromorphic quirks[9] if it weren’t for the fact that literally the only person we ever hear using it is an anti-social zealot.  No one on Team Hero ever makes this kind of distinguishment.

In any case, #2 is obviously over-simplifying to play to his audience—recall the baseline woman we saw back in that shot of Persecuted Early Quirk-Havers back in Chapter 59—but, as I’ve discussed extensively, being more visible does make one a more ready target.  Also, of course, the presence of the CRC in the story lays the groundwork for this sort of historical horror story even long after the worst days of the Advent.

7: I provide my own translation here because the Viz one, “those who don’t fit the mold,” is vague to the point of uselessness.

8: The koto reading, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty rare, often tagged as archaic in words including it.  The i reading is far more common, in words that denote wrongness, divergence, abnormality, and so on.  But it may be less about the reading and more about the fact that adding the verb conjugation makes the term more of a descriptive phrase than a direct noun.  As ever, take my talk about Japanese language minutiae with a grain of salt.

9: “Differing forms” is broad enough, however, that it could also be read as covering, say, people with amputations, congenital anomalies, or other sorts of non-quirk-related disfigurements from accidents or disease.  As in real life, navigating the linguistic space between specificity and Othering can be tricky.

O Next, #2 rhetorically demands what excuse was given by those who perpetrated these slaughters?  He answers his own question with the quote, “They give me the creeps.” Note how this ties in with my earlier suppositions about the likelihood of discrimination worsening the farther one is from baseline, as well as those about the necessity of putting up a good, positive, appealing front.  It’s a perfectly intuitive leap, that more extreme variants of heteromorphy, or those who evoke negative associations—animals tied to rot or bad luck, people made wholly out of green ooze—are going to be more likely to be found “creepy” than those who look like e.g. sexy bunny girls or straight-laced guys who just happen to have pipes jutting out of their calves.  Of course, that’s on something of a sliding scale; the more biased an area is against heteromorphs in general, the easier it will be to find oneself on the wrong side of that line.

O #2 presents the idea that society has reflected on their actions and made amends, or at least that’s how society’s narrative goes.  Illustrating this, we see two of the three heteromorphs in the police force, as well as Nedzu.  Interestingly, the panel does not include any heteromorphic heroes!  I might guess that this is because heroes are meant to use their quirks to serve others; they’re really just enforcement tools, lacking any particular authority beyond a quirk-use license and some admittedly broad soft power courtesy of the social contract.[10] Conversely, a school principal and a police chief (Gori remaining the outlier here) have actual authority, such that the average heteromorphobia-denier can point to them as evidence that heteromorphobia doesn’t exist anymore.

10: Which is to say, I don’t get the impression civilians are required to take orders from heroes, such that they would actually get in legal trouble for disobeying.  The fact that people do typically follow those orders speaks more to the power heroes wield via their association with the police force, as well as the general tendency of people to assume that someone in a uniform giving orders during an emergency is probably a professional whose orders it would be safe and wise to follow.

In the same panel, we also see a baseline guy palling around with a vaguely murine heteromorph dude (he looks more like a mascot suit mouse than an actual mouse, but he’s certainly nowhere close to baseline!), illustrating another way society wants to pretend it’s moved past heteromorphic discrimination.  I can’t help but note, in regards to this specific pair, that the manga uses faces the readers know to illustrate the point about heteromorphs in positions of authority, whereas to make the point about baseline/heteromorph friendships, it has to make up a new pair to show us because the series hasn’t made the time to actually build any (heroic) relationships that actually look like that!

Now, one could argue that using familiar faces to underscore #2’s speech would imply that he’s aware of those faces, and while that’s fine for figures of authority, there’s no reason for him to be aware of e.g. Natsuo and his mousey girlfriend.  However, the same would apply to anyone placed to demonstrate a random urban friendship crossing the “differing forms” line, including those two strangers.  Who are those two, after all, that #2 is any more familiar with them than he would be of Natsuo and mouse gal?

Honestly, I think the best relationship candidate we have—a pair who would both communicate what the panel needs to communicate to the reader and who would feasibly be enough in the public eye to get pointed at for rhetorical purposes by an in-universe speaker—would be Kamui Woods and Mount Lady.  Unfortunately, they don’t work because Horikoshi has never seen fit to actually reveal Kamui Woods’ real face, so they’re much less visibly “a baseline person being emotionally close with a heteromorph” than the random two Horikoshi made up.

O The oratory continues into discussing the divide between city versus rural views on heteromorphs, and this is, to me, the first clear sign that the series is beginning to lose the thread of this plot.  Taking #2 at his word asks us to concede the heteromorphobia has been completely wiped out in cities, eradicated with that wonderful antidote called “education.”  But discrimination very much does exist in cities!  It may be less violent, less extreme, less vocal, but in the form of things like law enforcement bias, housing discrimination, microaggressions, the quirk counselling #2 himself brought up, it’s very much still there!  Now, it could be that he’s just downplaying that discrimination to focus on the really ugly stuff you don’t see in cities, but I don’t know what his reasons for doing so would be?  Not when there’s so much else he could say that would be equally inflammatory without alienating urban heteromorphs by dismissing their still very much present, modern suffering.

O He then brings up the talk of “light”—echoing Skeptic’s earlier rhetoric—and it not reaching those gathered at the hospital, so they must make their own, for people who’ve never once regretted the quirks they were born with can never be their heroes.  What this primarily puts me in mind of is Hawks’s background with heroes prior to his father’s arrest—that heroes were only on TV, not present to save him in his actual life.  Keep that in mind for Shouji’s response later on.

O Towards the end, #2’s speech finally tips over the line from what could plausibly be read as protesting unequal treatment to an outright call for supremacy.  Notably, he doesn’t call for quirk supremacy, but rather for heteromorph supremacy—for the tables to be turned, the cards reversed, for them to not merely be equal, but rather to be superior.

It’s unclear how much of this he’s sincere about and how much is just convenient rhetoric disguising views that are more quirk supremacist in actuality.  For many reasons, I want to read him in good faith: because the MLA originally struck me as being written in good faith throughout MVA and the first war arc; because #2 never once uses his quirk in this mini-arc, casting doubt on him having such an amazing quirk that he’d benefit overmuch from quirk supremacy anyway; and especially because it would be incredibly bad faith on Horikoshi’s part to make a character delivering a speech like this a total bad faith, manipulative outsider.  Unfortunately, #2’s inner monologue in later chapters will make a good faith read all but impossible to sustain.    

O Halfway through his speech, #2 unmasks himself, revealing both his face—dominated by four pairs of pedipalp-esque mouthparts, though the markings on his head are pretty eye-catching, too—and his scar.  We’re never told how he got it, but the implication is certainly that he was attacked for his appearance.  That may just be a conclusion it serves him to let people make, given his bad faith elsewhere, but thankfully the manga doesn’t go so far as to say that explicitly.  In any case, his deliberate reveal turns his wound into a form of performance art, drawing attention to it, forcing it to be a part of the conversation—the polar opposite of Shouji covering his scars because he doesn’t want them to be a part of the conversation about him, and those scars being revealed because his mask is torn off against his will.[11]

11: This also fits a larger pattern of villains, by and large, choosing their expressions of vulnerability, making deliberate shows of agency in how their weakness is perceived by the broader world—Shigaraki taking his hand off for the first time, Dabi’s video, Toga approaching heroes with genuine questions, and so on.  There are certainly exceptions, but generally if a villain shows his “true face,” it’s because they’re making a conscious decision to do so, and may be actively manipulating how that reveal is going to land.  Conversely, heroes want to present a powerful, confident, untarnished image to the public, so their shows of vulnerability all have to be forced out of them after pitched battles or acts of violence.  Heroes don’t make themselves vulnerable to the public on purpose, which feeds into the way the public then treats them when they are forced into vulnerable positions.

O Spinner’s a mess at this point, and the reason he’s a mess is all tied up in his faith in/desire to help Shigaraki.  It’s not explicitly about heteromorphobia, but on the other hand, given that the thing that drove Spinner to be here at all was his horrifically low self-esteem caused by heteromorphobia, maybe it’s not so irrelevant after all.  It may have taken Spinner longer than the Tenkos, Touyas, and Chisaki Kais of the world to reach the “fall victim to a dark influence due to the neglect and abuse you faced at the hands of Hero Society” plot, but he certainly got there in the end![12]

12: I call this The Sekoto Peak Problem, and it’s a big criticism of mine about how the final arc is framing all these conflicts as being solely brought about because Bad Faith Villain Men like AFO are scooping up vulnerable people and driving them towards violence, without acknowledging the much worse circumstances those vulnerable people might be in if they were just left to their fates.  Touya, for example, if not for AFO’s timely rescue, would likely have simply died on the mountain long before Endeavor was able to find him.

O Shouji takes the mob to task for attacking a hospital without ensuring the safety of the uninvolved innocents within, a laughable bit of sophistry[13] that accurately foreshadows how disastrous his reasoning will be throughout the rest of these chapters.

13: It’s laughable sophistry firstly because the heroes knew this mob was coming but chose to leave Kurogiri at a hospital anyway; one can mount a very reasonable argument that Kurogiri’s teleportation power qualifies him as a military objective, which would make stashing him at a hospital an actual war crime in an international conflict, as well as negating the hospital’s protected status as a civilian object.  It’s laughable sophistry secondly because it criticizes a Villain-led mob for failing to evacuate the building, as if said mob had exactly the same social cachet possessed by heroes, that they could freely walk in the front door of a hospital and start shouting evacuation orders with reasonable confidence that they’d be obeyed.  Finally, it’s laughable sophistry because Shouji is quite simply wrong about the order of the actions he’s describing—the heroes’ evacuation of Ujiko’s hospital was concurrent with their invasion of said hospital, not precedent to it.

   

Chapter 371: 

O Shouji accuses Spinner of taking actions that will set them back thirty years, which is just a really egregiously victim blamey sort of thing to say, placing the responsibility on heteromorphs for the crimes of those who hate them.

O Koda’s perspective gives us a flashback to Shouji telling his classmates about his history—his town and his scars and his reason for wanting to be a hero.  It’s all material that works in the context of all the set-up we’ve gotten—the CRC and the religious inflection of their specific brand of hatred, the rural heteromorphobia, the hints about Shouji’s own discrimination, the attack on the Ordinary Woman, and so on—but that would have been far better served to have been integrated into the story more naturally.  Koda has no specifically established relationship with Shouji (seriously, there is absolutely nothing; it’s shocking how out of nowhere his sudden deep dedication to Shouji is), nor does the scene he remembers have any specific flags for when it might take place,[14] leaving the memory feeling less like a natural extension of their arc than it is a graceless sequence muscled in to attempt to rouse some emotion in the audience when Koda has a quirk awakening he is not otherwise remotely in dire enough straits to have rightfully earned.[15]

14: Shouto and Bakugou being missing might suggest that they’re off at their remedial license course, which would put the scene somewhere in late September up through December (stretching from the aftermath of Overhaul to the introduction of the MLA), save that there are several other students missing as well—Sero, Iida, Sato, and Aoyama, none of whom where in the remedial course.

15: Nearly every other inarguable quirk awakening[※] we know of in the series has as a chief component serious physical injury: Bakugou, Ochaco, Toga.  Geten’s is the only exception, and his is tied to the strength of his feelings for Re-Destro, which are clearly and overridingly his most significant character trait!  Shouji is not anywhere near that central to Koda’s life, and he sure as hell isn’t injured enough to have gotten it that way.

※: By which measure I exclude stuff like the change in Shigaraki’s Decay or Mina’s acid attack against Gigantomachia.  Shigaraki was explicitly just breaking through a mental block to access power he already had.  Meanwhile, if Mina’s Plus Ultra moment had been a sudden quirk evolution, she wouldn’t already have an attack name picked out for it, nor would her horns have gone back to normal after it.  Acidman: ALMA is an Ultimate Move, not Mina having a quirk awakening.

O The flashback itself calls for another subsection.    

Ignoring the Difference Between the Personal and the Systemic for Fun & Profit

O The big thing here the description of the whole town coming out for a “blood cleansing” whenever Shouji touched someone.  This is depicted as Shouji, probably a preteen in this sequence,[16] being savagely attacked with farming tools, the most visible of which is a pitchfork.  This visual, as well as #2’s invocation of historical slaughters, is the darkest heart of heteromorphobia: a child being ritualistically assaulted in the open street as a matter of course, as a consequence for touching someone.  This is the image you should hold in your mind as The Problem through all of the potential answers and responses that get trotted out through the rest of these chapters.

16: Visibly older/bigger than, say, Kouta, but also visibly younger/smaller than middle school Deku.

Before moving on, I do want to examine this image in just a bit more depth.

This is, firstly, the moment that Shouji got those scars, and it’s very important to note that what we’re being shown is likely not a random, representative sample of what the town “coming out in force for a blood cleansing” looks like.  The strong implication is that this is in the immediate aftermath of the sequence we’ll see shortly of Shouji saving the girl from the river: he’s wearing the same clothes and shoes,[17] he’s the same size, and there’s a spray of blood from where he’s being struck across the mouth where he didn’t have his distinctive scars when he saved the girl.  Does that mean the blood cleansings were typically not this violent?  That’s hard to say.  On the one hand, we don’t see any other scars on Shouji, and he wears his arms pretty bare!  On the other hand, we never see any part of his body bare except his neck and arms, and since he can regrow his arms,[18] they’re not exactly conclusive evidence that he’s never been scarred there.  Also, he does say talk about his situation—the scars he bears—as something other children in the country have to bear, suggesting that the norm is rather worse than a little symbolic gash across the palm or something!     17: In fairness, he may not own very much different, as I’ll discuss shortly.     18: The duplicated ones, at least.  I seem to recall reading once that he could regrow the base set as well, but I’m still working on tracking down a citation on that.    

Secondly, as was the case with the image of the historical massacres, the adults here are using tools/weapons in the assault, not quirks.  As I mentioned in a footnote last time, them not using quirks to carry out this attack makes them merely criminals, not Villains, and therefore not nominally a Hero’s job to deal with.  While I can’t imagine any Hero in the manga these days would stand back and let this go on, the absence still stands out—no Hero is participating in this, nor observing from the sidelines, nor trying to intervene.  Heroes simply don’t figure into this picture at all.    

Thirdly, we can see a few children in the background, both there with adults, I assume their parents.  The child on the right is a passive observer, clinging close to their mother and simply watching; their father has one hand supportively on their shoulder.  Neither parent seems distressed, insomuch as we can tell from their somewhat indistinct features and rather clearer body language.  The child on the left is being actively held back by their mother, who’s standing with her back to the violence, her body interposed between it and her child.  The kid is reaching out towards the scene, but it’s unclear what the intent is.  Are they trying to intervene or do they want to join in?     Neither child appears to be the little girl Shouji saved—the one on the right is dark-haired, and the one on the left—the more likely prospect just going by the body language!—is wearing a long, dark T-shirt instead of the little girl’s overalls.  I suppose the left one could be the little girl if we assume she was hustled out of what she’d been wearing by her parents, eager to get her out of now-tainted (and also soaking wet) clothes and into something dry and warm and, in more ways than one, clean.  However, that seems like the sort of thing that would take longer than what looks to have been a pretty impromptu, disorganized bloodletting, unless everyone just held off on assaulting Shouji right out on the street until the “victim” could be present.    

Finally, there’s the pair of adults right at the center of the background.  If anyone in this picture is actually related to Shouji, I’d put money on them being here, watching but not attempting to intercede.  I don’t think it’s conclusive, though; the woman is thin and hunched, making her look older—I’d guess Shouji’s grandmother before Shouji’s mother.  That hunched posture and her hands being raised to her mouth do give her the most obviously distressed appearance of any of the adult, though, to the extent that the person with her is focused on supporting her rather than watching what’s going on in the foreground—and forward attention is what I’d expect if the dark-haired figure is related to Shouji.

So that’s the image we have of the crowd—actively taking part or observing with varying degrees of reaction running from distress to indifference to, potentially, enthusiasm.

O Next, let’s talk about Shouji’s parents.  He implies they were baseline—at the least they were significantly more baseline than Shouji himself, as they lacked arms “like his.”  That makes it quite telling that Shouji’s parents are nowhere to be seen in his story beyond the simple mention of how they were different than him.

Now, I don’t want to suggest here that Shouji’s parents are completely irredeemable people.  While I would imagine that—at least initially—they shared their town’s bigotry, having a heteromorphic child themselves would have exponentially increased the hardship of their own lives.  In a town like that, I’m sure that many if not all of their neighbors must have come to regard them with suspicion of wrongdoing or transgression—recall the first page of the last chapter, where Shouji is accused of tricking the town in his having brought dirty blood to it.  Hie parents almost certainly lost friends and likely became ostracized themselves, and ostracization in a small Japanese town can be a horrifying thing to deal with.

And yet, even with all that being the case, they didn’t abandon Shouji or give him up; they didn’t commit family suicide with him.[19]  Assuming he wasn’t removed from their custody after the incident, they’re presumably paying his school and living costs;[20] likewise, unless he just ran away from home or is carrying out an incredibly elaborate deception about what school he’s attending, they almost had to support his desire to attend a hero school to begin with.  In his situation, parents who support his desire to be a Hero is a big fucking deal.  After all, between the winning and the saving, heroes will de facto be touching people all the time!  If Shouji’s parents still live in his hometown, how do you think those people will take it when someone first realizes the Shouji family sent their kegare-riddled monster off to be a Hero?

19: The history of honorable suicide in Japan casts a very long shadow, and when it’s combined with the meiwaku culture, you get an underreported epidemic of things like parents who can’t see their way out of a bad situation taking their lives and their children’s as well, so as not to leave messy loose ends that others will have to bear the burden of dealing with.

20: I won’t get into whether or not the U.A. students’ parents are paying for any given thing on the following list, but here are some potential costs to consider, assuming that Shouji, like Uraraka, was commuting from an apartment prior to the dorms being implemented: tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, school meal plan, food not served at school (e.g. breakfast and dinner or meals when the school is on break), non-uniform attire, personal care and hygiene, housing and transportation costs, a measure of spending money for unanticipated expenses or culturally expected gift-giving, etc.

All that being said, it’s obviously not a glowingly loving relationship, either.  Think back to Shouji’s absolutely barren room in Chapter 99 and consider it in the context of the information we get in this chapter.  Is he really so ascetic by inclination, or is he just used to making do with as little as possible?  After all, it goes without saying that if him coming into contact with someone called for blood purification, anything he himself was in regular contact with was also to be considered incredibly impure.  That includes his clothes, personal belongings and living space; even setting aside his parents’ view on it, who in his hometown would even want to provide or sell things to the family that they think will go to the child with the dirty blood that’s defiling their land?

Shouji’s parents’ absence is also glaring in other ways.  For example:

They’re either not in the beating scene image above at all or they’re that central background couple hanging back and just watching; whichever is the case, what they’re assuredly not doing while their son is being beaten so badly he will still have glaringly visible scars years later is “trying to stop the violence or take the blows themselves.”    

Shouji says he has one single good memory about his body, but his parents are nowhere to be found in that memory.  Ergo, his parents have not given him a single moment of positivity about his heteromorphic form.    

Parents of U.A. students were evacuated to U.A.—not just the ones near it, but even ones like Uraraka’s parents, who live at least a two hour drive away, in a wholly different prefecture with a third prefecture in between them and U.A.  Every student we see in the departure scene in Chapter 342 is shown with their parents except Shouji.

To sum all that up, Shouji’s family situation is not maximally bad, but it’s certainly proximally bad.

O Next, we get Shouji alleging ignorance on the part of heteromorphs raised in cities, that there are still parts of the country in the modern day where stories like his happen.[21]  It’s a milder version of the same assertions made by #2 and the beaky heteromorph last chapter, in that Shouji doesn’t suggest heteromorphobia doesn’t exist at all in cities, simply that there are extremes of violence that can only be found in the country.  It still feels off, however, to suggest that absolutely no one else in Shouji’s class might ever have heard of this through any channel at all: being from similarly small towns, reading about an attack in the news, reading about factors that impact the public approval ratings for Heroes, going through a morbid phase in middle school and researching it, being talked to about it by their parents, etc.

21: The suggestion of the Viz translation of this suggests that city-raised heteromorphs do know this, but only because they’re read about it in textbooks.  My sister-in-law, who does professional translation, tells me this was a subtle mistranslation of the original text, however; the textbook framing is supposed to imply a remove of time, not merely of distance.

It’s not as unrealistic a story beat here as it would be in an American comic, as Japan does tend more towards using silence as a weapon against bigotry—children won’t learn what they aren’t taught, and similar reasoning.  Still, to portray the class as so unanimously ignorant reflects a deep incuriosity, be that in the kids themselves about the world around them or in their author about how the knowledge/perpetuation of discrimination spreads.

This is particularly the case when you consider the story’s handling of the Ordinary Woman—attacked in her own town because people were suspicious of a heteromorph out after dark, turned away from multiple shelters because of her heteromorph status.  It’s certainly true that things got worse for heteromorphs after the first war arc, but for discrimination in that specific form to emerge, there needed to be something for it to draw on.  The fear of villains and the association of villains with heteromorphs are the foundation for the upswelling in anti-heteromorph sentiments in cities.

O Mina’s reaction to all this is one of rather theatrical anger.  That is, no one around her takes her broad declarations—that the world would be better off without the people who hurt Shouji—as anything more serious than hyperbole.  This is, it would seem, the only sort of anger that’s acceptable to show in response to hearing a story like Shouji’s—empathy to the wronged, sure, but no real intent to confront the wrongdoers.

O Mineta stares into space for a second before emphatically apologizing for calling Shouji an octopus once—a call all the way back to his microaggression in Chapter 6!—and asserting that it wasn’t his intention to say Shouji was gross or anything.  Shouji responds gracefully, saying it’s “only natural” that his arms would make people think of octopus.

He doesn’t go on to say, “But that doesn’t mean people have to say it out loud,” but it’s possible that Mineta’s apology is meant to suggest that regardless.  At least, one certainly hopes this isn’t the author’s way of quietly absolving his more popular characters of all the times they’ve done the same thing!  It’s notable, however, that none of the other Class 1-A kids that have done this are in the scene.  Shouto and Bakugou, who have both used that kind of language in anger (and in the latter’s case, also just with no provocation whatsoever) are the missing elephants in the room, and even Sero, who was the actual person to call Shouji an octopus, is, in his absence, Sir Letting The Gag Character Handle This Apology So I A More Serious Character Don’t Have To.

O Shouji brings up the Heroes Who Look Like Villains rankings.  We know the Number 1 on that list is actually Endeavor, per a movie bonus booklet, but bringing it up in this context does implicitly confirm that said rankings have an unseemly slant towards heteromorphs, and what did Skeptic say about Villains and heteromorphs again…?

O Shouji says he wears the mask because he knows that if people see his scars, they’ll wonder about them, and fear he’s out for revenge.  He doesn’t want people to think that, so he covers them up.  He’s praised for this by Tokoyami, and the narrative pretty clearly also thinks it’s admirable and cool.  I have serious issues with this—chiefly that it’s prioritizing the oblivious comfort of the baseline citizens over the fellow feeling and affirmation of other persecuted heteromorphs—but I’m also curious to see if the mask will come back now that its meta-narrative purpose of hiding Shouji’s scars from the reader has been fulfilled.  I note, for example, that Shouji is not wearing the mask in the color spread for Chapter 394, and the color art does have some precedent for being an early predictor of stuff in the body of the manga.[22]

Incidentally, while I’m talking about Shouji’s mask, I do wonder how effective it would even be for him to cover his scars up?  I have my doubts for two reasons.  First and most obviously, heroes are such celebrities, all over the news all the time, such that if Shouji really does get as popular as he intends to, there will be people who want to know what he looks like.[23]

22: The big one is Aizawa’s eyepatch.  It showed up in two pieces of color art (the popularity poll results spread for Chapter 293 and the new art announcing the BNHA Drawing Smash Exhibition) before it was revealed in the manga.  Both pieces released within days of each other in early December, 2020, three months after Shigaraki raked his hand down Aizawa’s face during the war and almost two months before the latter showed up in bandages in the hospital, with another two months to go beyond that before the eyepatch itself made it to the manga in late March.  In a more stealth spoiler, the same popularity spread revealed Shigaraki’s blackened, burned face-hand two chapters prior to Spinner digging it out of Shigaraki’s pants.  The 394 spread is also my basis for asserting that Mina’s horns have gone back to normal after her attack against Gigantomachia, compared to Shouji lacking his mask and Koda having his new horn in the same spread.

23: Edgeshot’s character profile page notes that his fans are split into two factions: those who’re mad to see his real face and those who think the mask is what makes him cool.

O More importantly, though, heroes have to be licensed, and Hero Licenses are photo IDs.  Photo IDs don’t typically allow face coverage because not being able to provide a visual reference to what the bearer looks like defeats the whole purpose.  While we don’t know what full-fledged hero licenses look like to say if they’re taken in or out of costume, we do know the provisional licenses the students carry showed them in their school uniforms, despite the fact that they definitely had working costumes by then:

Pardon the sudden screenshot. The manga has this shot, too, but the anime fills in the details of the text a bit more.

It seems probable to me that the photo on a Hero License must show the bearer’s face, so that if they’re tooling around a crime scene and a cop who hasn’t seen them around before asks for their license, it can reliably be used as a form of identification.  (I wonder how Hagakure manages?)

Also, think back to the press conferences we’ve seen in the story, most recently the one post-war: at every one, the heroes are in serious, solemn black suits, not their costumes.  So at any press conferences Shouji ever has to speak at in the future, he’ll have to show his face there, as well.

O We see a direct flashback to Shouji saving a little girl from drowning in a choppy, swift-flowing river as he says in voiceover that he’d rather cling to the single good memory related to his body than dwell on the bad memories.  He very much uses his quirk to do it, with his right set of limbs used to hold onto the bank while his left ones reach out to the girl, extending out another few “nodes” of arm-length when he at first can’t keep hold of her fingers.  As they sit and catch their breath afterward, the girl clings to one of his tentacles and cries.  This is not quite what his entry in the Ultra Analysis databook was hinting at[24] when it said he wears the mask due to his scary face making a little girl cry; that’ll be next chapter.

24: My apologies for not bringing this up before; it’ll be covered on AO3.  The gist is as detailed above; the databook came out circa the Endeavor Agency arc, so this was a known factoid about Shouji by the time this chapter came out three years later.

O Wrapping up the flashback, we’re left with Koda’s memory of Shouji saying that he knows it’ll take longer than a generation to tear down a wall that’s stood for over a century, so, just as previous generations have done, he’ll keep paying it forward, being the coolest hero the world’s ever seen, “to give good memories to generations to come.”  Which sounds really nice when he says it that way, as opposed to the broader implication that people whose children have been or are in danger of being maimed by bigots should just keep their heads down and “keep paying it forward.”

The whole “be a cool hero and give good memories” bit is particularly egregious to my eye, for a few reasons.

How much good did cool heroes do for Takami Keigo when they were just on TV?  Which is where Shouji will be, because in order to be “the coolest hero the world’s ever seen,” he’s going to have to be at the top of the rankings, and being at the top of the rankings means prioritizing cities, which means all those heteromorphs out in rural areas are never going to see him in person.  And anyway, what’s stopping all those bigots from just changing the channel or going on a rant about Woke Mutie Agendas every time a heteromorphic hero crops up on TV?    

How much did the visibility of previous generations’ cool heroes do for Spinner?  Does Shouji think Spinner was super inspired and uplifted by seeing e.g. Gang Orca on TV using the emitter-like hypersonic waves his quirk gives him to beat up Villains, an undue percentage of whom are also heteromorphs?

It’s certainly nice that Shouji was inspired enough by heroes on TV to want to emulate them, but he is demonstrably not the norm when it comes to wildly disadvantaged and victimized heteromorphs.  Also, I have to wonder how much his admiration of TV heroes would have done him if he’d gotten to the girl just a little later—say, in time to get her out of the river, but too late to be able to save her life without knowing CPR.  As bad as it was for him when he saved a little girl but had to touch her to do it, can you imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d touched her and then failed to save her, being found or having to walk back into town with her body?

I realize that's incredibly dark, but it's the kind of question that presents itself when the story is so insistent on Shouji's exemplary behavior being the model for heteromorphs to follow in their own lives.

   

O Exiting the flashback, when Shouji calls out to the heteromorphs, we finally get a straight-out look at how disastrous this conclusion is going to be in the way he shouts that no, the people who hurt them weren’t justified, but that there has to be a better way, that they should think about how to use their rage—but offers exactly zero suggestions himself for what that better way might be, or what they should be using their rage to do instead.[25]

25: I have seen the argument put forth that Shouji is one (1) teenager, and one (1) teenager cannot fairly be asked to Solve Bigotry.  To this, I would counter that if Shouji doesn’t have even one (1) single idea to offer, why is the camera lens holding him up as the hero who quelled a fifteen-thousand-strong mob with only words?  He doesn’t have to Solve Bigotry, but if he’s going to be used as a counter for other peoples’ misguided but at least active attempts to address the problem, he needed to be better than a mere white knight for the status quo.

Spinner’s #2 calls Shouji out on this directly, saying that if the situation were that easy to resolve, it wouldn’t have come down to this, and accusing Shouji of having no feasible solution to offer, just childish and naïve egotism.  And call me a hopeless MLA Stan and you’d be right, but truly, where’s the lie?

His efforts in this regard, however, wind up pushing Koda to what certainly has all the markings of a quirk awakening because it upsets Koda to see Shouji being “mocked.”  Man, sure is a good thing quirk awakenings are just a dime a dozen and definitely don’t require life-threatening injuries and/or incredibly severe emotional distress over someone who means more to you than your own life, right?

O In a last little stroke of ugliness for the chapter, Spinner calls Shouji gross.  Just to, you know, make it really obvious that the villains are all totally bad faith representation for this cause and thus can be safely dismissed.  (Christ, I hate these chapters.)

   

Chapter 372: 

O We get the flashback of Shouji and Koda asking All Might to assign them to the hospital defense group.  Points of note:

Neither Shouji nor All Might can be bothered to use the Ordinary Woman’s real name, instead just referring to her by her size.  Seriously, I get the intent behind insisting that she’s just an ordinary woman, that there’s nothing in particular stand-out about her in the current age; it’s pretty much the same deal as Shinomori saying that OFA can no longer be wielded by an “ordinary” person, with that phrasing being used to ironically emphasize that quirks are now seen as ordinary, while those without quirks are the unusual ones.  However, it obviously wouldn’t work in-universe for characters trying to specify who they’re talking about to say, “That ordinary woman,” with the end result being that they have to grab for what stands out about her if they want to be understood—in this case, her obviously unusual height.  In trying to emphasize that she’s normal, Horikoshi forces his characters to define her by what makes her stand out.    

Koda says that if Shouji’s going, he is too, a moment that would really land much better if they’d had literally any interactions of note at literally any point prior to this exact moment.  Frankly, even last chapter’s flashback is pretty thin on that front, since Koda is not one of the students who gets speaking lines when cuddling up to Shouji to comfort him.  (I’m not even convinced it’s very in character for Koda to be one of the kids diving in for cuddles—he’s usually pretty shy!)    

Shouji says that he could never call himself a hero if he were to stand back while the hospital attack plays out, implicitly emphasizing the role his reaction to his own oppression plays in his heroic motivation.

O Another flashback[26] gives us Koda’s mother discussing the possibility that he might get horns like hers someday, and what those horns can do, as well as mentioning that she used to have to put up with considerable mistreatment herself, and, lastly, telling her son to grow up into a man who gets angry when people mock those dear to him.

26: The sheer number of them crammed into this mini-arc really says a lot for how rushed it is, but complaining about the structural problems of the last few arcs would be a different essay.

Breaking those down, we’ve got:

The fact that Koda’s mom says he might grow in horns like hers suggests to me pretty strongly that her own horns are a quirk evolution she just doesn’t have the language to name as such.  If it were just a matter of maturation, something that came in with puberty, there’d be no “maybe” about it.  Given what we know about the context of quirk evolutions elsewhere, this in turn suggests that she did not exactly get her horns under peaceful, wholesome, uplifting circumstances!    

This is backed up by her mention of the “real cruelty” she faced.  Interestingly, this kind of raises some questions in relation to Shouji’s assertion last chapter that people like Koda who grew up in cities lack an understanding of the extremes of heteromorphobic violence that endure elsewhere.  Did Koda’s parents move to the city from the country at some point when Koda was young/before he was born, and the “real cruelty” was out in the country?  That might track with the overalls she was wearing.  And of course, Koda’s mother was a younger woman then, so maybe it’s just the fact that heteromorphic discrimination was worse at the time.  Either way, Koda’s mother is clearly open with him about the fact that she was mistreated because of her appearance, though she may have downplayed the severity of it.    

The idea of Shouji being “dear to Koda” is immensely frustrating for how utterly groundless it is, based on absolutely no prior grounding within the story other than the general bond among the 1-A students.  That’s just me complaining, though—more pertinent for this essay is the problem with how this moment frames anger.  Like, the whole mini-arc has the same problem, but this chapter is particularly rotten with it.  To preview: Koda’s anger is portrayed as righteous, as was his father’s, because their anger is about protection, about defensive reaction, about intervening with harm currently in progress—basically all the stuff Heroes are supposed to do.  It is notably not about action based on past harm or proactive attempts to prevent future harm.

O Koda’s bird attack knocks Spinner’s #2 off the roof in one of the most egregious examples of, “I can’t come up with an actual counterpoint for his arguments, so I’ll just shut him up through force,” I’ve ever seen.  Sure, there’s something to be said for not engaging bad faith parties in good faith arguments, but like…  That guy already had a platform of his arguments—he was standing on the roof of a tall building!  The author gave him several pages to make his pitch; the argument’s already out there in the readers’ minds!  The only thing getting rid of him does is guarantee that the person the taciturn Shouji actually has to argue with is…Spinner.  Who is not exactly a born orator at the best of times, and he’s very far from even that level here.

Now, #2 will get a few more lines next chapter, but they’re against one of the people on his own side.  No heroic character has to argue #2 down; instead, they get to match wits with the literally drooling Spin-zilla.  Which is a bit like stepping into the wrestling ring with someone who’s had a bag thrown over his head and his hands zip-tied behind his back.

This confrontation is, woefully, not the only place in the endgame where a heroic character gets all the time and freedom in the world to make their big pronunciations while their opponent gets shut down by some outside factor—interference from other villains, psychological decay, literal possession—but it’s in particularly stark relief here.

O Shouji contends that the crowd is letting their pain be exploited, which is a fair cop, but will become difficult to square with his praise of them next chapter.

O He says that these peoples’ children might be the next targets, presumably because of their actions here today.  This is particularly maddening because it’s coming from someone who was, himself, already targeted as a child!  Not because of anything his parents did, and certainly not because of anything bad he did, but simply because of the bigoted, backwards views of his town.  Children already and still are being targeted!  Shouji’s backstory is all wrong for this stand, and there’ll be another angle on that next chapter as well.

O Here we finally fulfill the promise of Shouji’s databook entry and see the Little Girl Crying Because His Face Was Scary.  She wasn’t crying because she was just scared of his face in isolation, but rather because she sees his face being scary as her fault, directly correlating his wounds to her rescue.[27] Those wounds stand in marked contrast to what happens when other people save small helpless children from danger, and underlines the biggest problem with this whole resolution: the idea that simply Being An Hero will create change.

27: My big question is, “Given that him being in contact with her was so bad it got him scarred for life, how did she even sneak out to see him again to give him this tearful apology?  Did young Shouji even want this apology, or would he have preferred she not risk the two of them being seen together again for both their sakes?

Now, it’s certainly likely in Horikoshi’s world that this little girl will, herself, grow up to be different from the people around her, that she won’t think heteromorphs are tainted.  And like, that’s at least one less person being awful, right?  And doesn’t every one count?

Sure, of course—but what happens when she runs up against that prejudice herself?  Will she try to intervene the next time she sees a blood cleansing?  Will she simply abstain from such action and teach equality in her own household without trying to change the village around her?  Will she simply move away and leave her hometown worse for her absence?  If she does stay in that town, will she herself become an outcast for her views—a form of silent, passive harassment that can be absolutely life-wrecking in those small Japanese villages?  If she gets married and has children, will her husband have her back in trying to raise those kids free of hatred?

For that matter, isn’t there a chance that, being surrounded in people who think heteromorphs are tainted, that she’ll just internalize something like, “It was my carelessness that got that poor heteromorph boy beaten so badly.  He was trying to help, and it only got us both hurt—him for the beatings, me for being in contact with his filth.”  Like, she’s so young in that scene; she’s got a whole lotta years of having the anti-heteromorph narrative reaffirmed at her before she’s old enough to do anything different herself.  It feels to me like the kind of thing that she could easily fall back into as she grows up, only to have a huge spiritual crisis about it once she hits her late teens to early twenties.

In any case, it's just a lot to put on a single child—on her and Shouji both!

O Spinner rallies enough to yell out a message of his own, but it’s just a quote of what he told his followers when he first sent out the call, not anything new to rally them, nor tailored to respond to what Shouji’s saying.  This has been the danger of the plotline all along, and here it comes to fruition: in putting bad faith villains with ulterior motives[28] up against an underdeveloped character who’s hidden the evidence of his mistreatment from Day 1, someone with no apparent intention to ever speak up for others like himself, no one comes out looking good.  Truly, heteromorphs deserve better rep.

28: #2 is the obvious one, but Spinner’s here in bad faith, too.  While I’m sure he’s not totally indifferent to the matter of heteromorph rights, it’s self-admittedly not his current priority.

O That said, if what Spinner says is old hat to the crowd, it is new to the audience, and it serves to sharply up the ante on from what we knew previously about the persecution he faced in his hometown!

But it would have gotten better if he’d just put on a mask and dealt with it, amirite?

Recall that Spinner has previously only said that people in his town called him names—this is self-evidently many steps worse.  Note, though, that it’s another example of the violence heteromorphs face not involving anyone using quirks—that is to say, nothing that’s a hero’s jurisdiction to deal with.  That being the case, how much could Spinner get away with fighting back or running before the “it’s okay to use quirks in self-defense” stops holding?  After all, is it still self-defense if biased cops[29] can accuse him of “escalating” the conflict?  How far away can he get by climbing on walls before it becomes, to some small-town local Hero, unlicensed public quirk use?

29: If policing in HeroAca Japan still works basically the same as it does in IRL Japan, then in truly backwater areas, ones too small to afford the upkeep of a police department, an officer would be sent in from another area to live in a home attached to the police box.  That being the case, it’s not a given that the officer would share the locals’ bigotry.  That’s where we come back to the whole “what percentage of Villain-designated criminals are heteromorphs” statement and what it implies about bias in the law enforcement system.  Also too, building a strong relationship with the community is absolutely essential to rural policing, and there are, oh, so many stories about what happens when someone new in a small Japanese town gets between the inhabitants and their “traditional spiritual practices.”

O Pig Nose Guy starts making an impression by noticing the doctors—most prominently Dr. Yoshi, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a baseline nurse—forming a human chain in front of the hallway leading to the Inpatient Ward.  This drama is undercut on both fronts by the fact that Spinner is not looking for the Inpatient Ward, and in fact barrels right on past that hallway without even glancing in its direction.  So, the mob stops because they’re struck to hesitation by a group of people protecting a part of the hospital that the mob was not even intending to assault in the first place.

O As part of stopping, Pig Nose Guy seems to have some sort of flashback to a time he saw Dr. Toad caring for an elderly baseline man.  This raises a lot of questions to my by-this-time hyper-critical eyes.

What past circumstance brought Pig Nose Guy—presumably fairly rural, as most of this crowd is implied to be—to Central Hospital, the most technologically advanced hospital in the entire country?    •  If Pig Nose Guy is not rural, but was still so fired up about heteromorphobia that he joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital, wouldn’t that suggest that a lot of people in the story have been misleading us about the extent of anti-heteromorph sentiment in cities?    

If the person in the bed is someone related to Pig Nose Guy—perhaps someone with a rare illness that requires specialized treatment?—why is the guy entirely baseline?  If it’s just a friend, then they must be very close, given that PNG was willing to take a trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area to visit him.  But if PNG is that close to a baseline guy, why did he ever believe that baseline folks are such a lost cause that he, again, joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital?    

Why is this important, impactful memory one of a heteromorph in a caretaker role instead of being taken care of?  To elaborate on why that question matters, a common issue you’ll see minority groups raise when talking about representation in media is the role any given minority character performs in their narrative—the gay best friend there to give the straight female lead advice, the Black person there to help a white person self-actualize, that sort of thing.  This is not so much a critique of any given, specific character as it is criticizing the restrictions on of what demographics are allowed to be portrayed as full, rounded individuals in popular media versus which are relegated to stock stereotypes or supporting cast.     This isn’t something BNHA addresses explicitly, but I do think we have some precedent for suspecting heteromorphs in this world have similar problems—think of the image for Class B’s play in Chapter 173, Gang Orca playing the Villain at the license exam, and, most egregiously, the Hug Me Corporation and its all-baseline-all-the-time image of bystanders and victims.  That being the case, it really gets to me that Pig Nose Guy’s memory here has the man in the hospital bed being baseline while it’s the doctor who’s the heteromorph.     Like, what does that communicate about his mindset, exactly?  “Oh, I remember this time I saw a heteromorph who’d managed to actually kind of Make It in society and he was nice to the baseline guy in his care.  But the spider guy leading us, he didn’t sound like he wanted us to be very nice at all.  Is that what I am?  Not nice?”  On the other hand, if the whole point of this memory is to remind PNG that there can be peace and support between heteromorphs and “people with human faces,” why in heaven’s name isn’t this a memory of a heteromorph being cared for and supported by a baseline person?  Why does the person doing the labor in this picture have to be of the oppressed class?

I hate this panel so much.

   

Chapter 373: 

O The last conversation plays out between Pig Nose Guy, #2, and Shouji, revealing #2 to be a bad faith idealogue who thinks of Shouji with microaggressions and his followers as meatshield patsies.  It’s real bad.

O Shouji says that the feelings that led the mob to come today are neither useless nor wrong, and that their willingness to keep thinking about everything makes them look like a bright and shining light to his eyes.  However, he carefully does not engage with the fact that those feelings, which were previously aimless and directionless, were only stirred up and stoked to the point of “coming today” by the villains.  It’s the same sort of thing the villains always get told, really—you may have a point, you have suffered, but when you act on that point, that suffering, then you’ve gone too far.  All you’re really supposed to do with that pain is—what, exactly?  Thinka bout it and choose to Nobly Endure?

O The last little bit of insult to this chapter, to my eye, is #2 getting an apology from some anonymous hero we’ve never seen in our lives, who says, “We’ve heard your voices loud and clear today.  Sorry for not realizing sooner.”

Remember the bit where the person who apologizes to Shouji for the octopus comment is Mineta, the gag character, instead of Sero, the serious character who brought it up in the first place?  Remember the conspicuous absence of Bakugou and Todoroki, who have actually used that language with conscious demeaning intent?  This apology is the systemic version of that absolute unwillingness on Horikoshi’s part to let his sympathetic/popular/important characters look bad.  It’s the same thing that led to none of the heroes who retired after the war being heroes the readers know and care about, the same thing behind the total collapse of the series’ critique of All Might.  Heroes are allowed to be ignorant, but they are not allowed to be complicit.

Notice, too, what this random hero does not say, what Shouji does not offer, the absence that damns this resolution: any promises of concrete change.  We’ve finally gotten to the crux of Horikoshi’s point, as delivered by Shouji, and it really does all boil down to this:

And I can’t overstate enough what a terrible resolution this is, especially given how Shouji’s own experience puts the lie to it.  Remember, Shouji saved a child from drowning, one of the absolute most prototypical actions someone can do and get called a Hero by the bystanders/victims/evening news.  The only thing he could have done that would have been more stereotyped would have been saving her from a burning building!  He saved that little girl from drowning and the townsfolk attacked him with farming tools for it.

How much more heroic would he have needed to be?  How much more of a shining light could he possibly have been?  In what universe could someone with that backstory possibly think that the answer to systemic bigotry—violence that goes wholly accepted by the community and wholly unpunished by the broader society—could be this Model Minority bullshit?

Ultimately, for Shouji’s backstory to realistically have given him the motivation he professes, his actions needed to have changed the people in his village for the better.  If the reader is meant to believe that Shouji’s “answer”—the premise that selfless heroism can change the hearts of bigots—then we have to see it.  And, you know, even if that had been what we got, there would still be grounds to criticize it!  It would still be a perhaps-too-idealistic depiction of fighting oppression; it would still put too much responsibility on the victims!  But at least it would justify Shouji’s own stance.

As it is, we have Shouji choosing to believe in the changeability of people who specifically shouted while throwing rocks at him that, no matter how much the times advanced, they would never accept him.  His answer does not entail a single non-heteromorph working to bring heteromorphs living in the darkness a light; it entails them kindling their own.  As with Pig Nose Guy shutting down in the face of a memory of a heteromorph doctor, this resolution asserts the life-changing power of…being told that heteromorphs have to do all the work to make baseline people feel better.

   

Conclusion

Do I think that this terrible resolution means heteromorphobia was poorly set up or retconned?  No, I don’t.  I just think it means that Horikoshi is a Japanese man writing a Japanese story from a position of demographic privilege in Japanese society.  I think he’s fully capable of setting up a detailed, intelligent, thoughtful discrimination allegory, a logical, internally consistent extension of the discrimination in the world around him to the alternate future he’s created—and then coming to a completely different resolution than I would because his context led him to different answers than I wanted or found acceptable.  Compared to the U.S., Japan as a culture is more communal, more collectivist; they have less history with successful protest movements, more history with protest movements turning violently extremist or just being ignored by those in power.  The idea of “not making trouble for others” is an incredibly deeply engrained value.

I have a decent idea why this resolution is what it is.  I can try to make myself view it through the more generous, forgiving lens of Cultural Differences; I can fail to do so and instead conclude that this is portrayal is much less about Cultural Differences than it is yet another in a long chain of Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Author Writes Discrimination Allegory, Fucks It All Up Because of His Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Centrism.  That doesn’t mean I believe heteromorphobia came out of nowhere, and I hope this essay has at least demonstrated that much, whatever you might think of its resolution.

——————————

Thank you so much for taking this journey with me, all! At 42,000 words and 93 pages in Word, there's definitely more I'd like to do with this, chiefly taking a spin through the Vigilantes spinoff, which I've always found to be very good at grappling with practical questions and concerns BNHA Core largely ignores. The character of Kamayan is particularly relevant to this topic.

However, for now, I'm going to take a break on this subject and turn my attention to something else. I'm not sure what it'll be quite yet, but meta projects that have moved towards the top of my list concern the ridiculous series of nerfs Toga has been subjected to in this endgame, arc thoughts on everything I hate about the stupid, stupid All Mech fight, and an organized argument for the endgame being chock-full of retcons that are obvious if you look at them for more than the five minutes it takes to read a chapter each week.

You may notice that all of those are pretty negative-sounding, and you would be right. Given that the whole reason I stopped doing my chapter posts is that I was weary of the constant negativity, the actual next thing I do will probably be to get back to one of my neglected MLA fanfic projects.

'Til next time, all!

[samgirl98]

Mending a Family 22/?

Prev | Next

Father and son day out!

Danny vibrated with excitement as dad put on a leather jacket. (He didn’t know why his dad put one on; it was the middle of summer.)

The sun hadn’t risen yet, and the stars were in full view. Today, it would be a father-son trip to the planetarium.

“Have fun, you two,” Jazz said. She wore a robe, and her hair was all over the place.

“We will, Jazz,” Danny said, excited.

His dad put Danny in the booster seat. He didn’t even complain because the sooner they left, the sooner they would get there. It would take almost six hours to get there. (Danny suggested flying, but his daddy said it was too dangerous.)

Danny watched as the sun rose in the sky and read the pamphlet his dad had printed out over and over again.

“Can we go to the gift shop at the end,” Danny asked.

“Of course, chum. What’s a trip to a planetarium if we don’t go to the gift shop afterward?”

“Yay,” Danny yelled in excitement.

Danny spent the car ride giving his dad facts about space. Anything he could think of, from constellations to black holes to galaxies. Danny talked about it all. He even talked about how gravity differed in Space from Earth and the equations used to determine how far anything was. Danny was afraid his dad would get bored after a while but could feel his dad’s enthusiasm.

Danny cheered when he saw the “Welcome to Montreal” sign in French and English.

“How much longer, daddy?”

“Half an hour,” Jason said, smiling at the excited little boy.

How did he get so lucky to have Danny in his life?

Jason parked and carried a vibrating Danny into the planetarium.

Danny’s overwhelming happiness and excitement hit Jason like a freight train when they entered the planetarium.

Jason put his little boy down but held on to his hand so he wouldn’t run off.

“Bienvenue à le planétarium du Montréal. Comment je peux veux aider?” (Welcome to the Planetarium of Montreal. How can I help you?)

“Daddy, what did she say,” Danny asked while tugging on Jason’s shirt.

“Bonjour, j’ai besoin du deux billet, mais je suis américain. Je puis obtenir des services in anglais?” (Hello, I need two tickets, but I’m American. Can I get English services?)

“Of course, sir. How many tickets?”

“I need one for an adult and one for a child, please.”

Danny had tuned out the two adults and stared at the ships they had hanging on the ceilings. It had been so long since he had the chance to come to a planetarium. He had been ten the last time. (He ignored that he was five this time around. It was too confusing to think about.)

“Okay, chum, I got our tickets to enter and for the shows. Ready to go in.”

 “Yeah, yeah!” Danny jumped up and down excitedly.

“Have a good time,” the lady said before turning to the next family.

Danny led his daddy deeper into the building. He stared and drooled over the exhibits. There was alien technology that would never exist on his Earth.

The Metropolis Space Museum had recently lent the planetarium its Krypton exhibit. There was a model of Superman’s baby spaceship. A few imitation kryptonite rocks and part of the meteor Superman had been in during his ride to Earth.

Next, there were smaller exhibits on Tamarian and Martian technology and culture. Danny ate it all up. Jason had to remind Danny to be careful with his eyes as he stared at the new technology he had never seen in his dimension.

It was nothing new or exciting to Jason, who had met Superman and Starfire. He had fun watching his son’s adorable face.

They caught a show of Clark’s passage through space when he was a baby. He had donated the images when he found them in his spaceship. They went to another about every known sun with civilization and how each culture interacted.

(This was thanks to the Green Lantern Corps.)

Then, they watched a few shows that were closer to home. As much as Danny enjoyed learning about alien culture and technology, there was just something fun watching about the phenomena that happened on their turf.

Danny enjoyed the one that showed all the planets and different constellations from the Earth’s perspective while playing orchestra in the background.

Jason took them to eat and then to an activity room where children could replicate satellites and space telescopes with Lego.

Finally, at the end, Jason took Danny to the gift shop. Danny bought a plush of Martian Manhunter, a rocket he would build, and a lamp with planets orbiting the sun. He also got a keychain for Jazz and a starry blanket for Ellie, all with daddy’s money, of course.

Jason had to carry his little boy to the car. Danny’s sleep contentment enveloped Jason, and he reveled in it.

“Did you have fun, lad,” Jason asked as he buckled his baby boy in.

“I had the funnest day ever! We don’t have aliens in my world, so learning about the different cultures was the best!”

“I’m glad you liked it. What was your favorite part?”

“Learning about Superman and Martian Manhunter. I think Martian Manhunter is my favorite Justice League member!”

Jason laughed.

“Remind me to tell you stories about Uncle Clark later.”

“Who’s Uncle Clark?”

“I’ll tell you a secret: Uncle Clark is Superman.”

Danny woke up a bit hearing that tidbit of information.”

“Y’know Superman? He’s your uncle?”

Jason laughed while feeling a ping of guilt; he hadn’t told Danny much about his time as Robin.

“Yeah, he’s da—Bruce’s best friend, so he came around the Manor a few times. Plus, I met him in the Watch Tower in space.”

“You’ve been to space? Have you met Martian Manhunter?”

Jason regaled his son of his time as Robin on the ride home. Danny fell asleep to his daddy’s voice as he told his stories.

Jason couldn’t wait to have another day out with his precious boy.

I've never been to a planetarium, but then I thought to myself, this DCU, they have aliens. I can put whatever I want. Anyway, if anyone has actually been to the Planetarium of Montreal, sorry for it not being accurate.

@itsberrydreemurstuff @idontgetpaidenoughforthisshit @skulld3mort-1fan @theauthorandtheartist @emergentpanda-blog @jaggedheart11 @fisticuffsatapplebees @booberrylizard @fantasticbluebirdfan @thegatorsgooseoose @cyrwrites @kjoboo91 @crystallicedart @amaramizuki666 @spekulatiusmuffin @meira-3919 @kilasmess @bubblemixer @lexdamo @wonderland-daisy @mj-arts-n-stuff @amyheart19 @dolfay @the-church-grimm @undead-essence @aph-mable @lizisipancardo @purrloin77 @writer-extraodinaire @charlietheepic7 @sinfulloccultist @nootherusernameworked @coruscateselene @chaoticchange @itsberrydreemurstuff @gmkelz11 @feral-bunny31 @paroovian @thatonegaybitch68 @d4ydr34min9 @overtherose @fandomwandererer @vipower001 @thordottir45 @blackrabbitt3t @rosecinnamonbun @bianca-hooks123 @epilepticnerd @dat1angel @consouling @flamingenchiladadragon @all-mights-asscheeks @ender-reader @fuyu-bitch @ravenswife

[thee-horny-thicky]

The 141’s Music Taste

A/N: The genres and artists I’ve selected were chosen through the lenses of a Black American, and I have no clue how popular they are in the U.K. However, given that these men have traveled the world, I doubt that really matters. Anyway, enjoy :)

Captain John Price:

Now, I know he’s canonically only in his late 30s, but I imagine him loving oldies. And when I say oldies, I mean songs older than him. Blues, jazz, and classic rock have his heart. After a mission, he loves nothing more than to kick back with a cigar and whiskey, with some Ray Charles or Louis Armstrong playing in the background.

The only modern genre he really likes is R&B, largely due to how much the aforementioned genres influenced it. And by modern, I mean the stuff around during the early 2000s.

Also, despite his love for old music, he cannot stand classical. It gives him a headache and irritates him to high-heaven.

Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley:

I see a lot of people headcanon that Ghost is a metalhead. It’s an obvious choice and honestly makes sense. However, given his past, I believe that he’d have an aversion to metal. He might not be opposed to the classic rock ‘n roll sound, but metal? That’s a no-go.

I imagine him loving music that centers around self-expression and conveying what the artist has gone through. It grounds him and helps him feel a little more human. Thus, I think that he’d love blues and rap above all genres.

He especially loves 2Pac because of how often he talked about the social issues around him, even if Ghost himself can’t relate to the bulk of them. He just likes that 2Pac used his fame to talk about what his community was going through, and he loves his versatility.

R&B is another genre he regularly listens to, and I can even see him dabbling in pop. And by pop, I mean Lana Del Rey esc music. Also, as odd as it may seem, I can see him really liking Melanie Martinez.

Johnny ‘Soap’ McTavish:

Soap’s the metalhead of the bunch. He can give you an in-depth critique of all the famous bands and has a list of underground metal artists he adores. Due to being a part of an elite task force, he rarely gets a chance to see his favorites, so when he does, he buys a ludicrous amount of merchandise to commemorate the show.

However, though he’s a metalhead first and foremost, he can vibe with any music he can dance to. Beyonce’s Renaissance? He had it on repeat, playing it so much, that his bunkmates were too annoyed to even tease him. And after a particularly rough mission, I imagine he’d turn to a softer-sounding genre like R&B.

But don’t play anything too slow around him, because he will complain. And opera? It makes him murderous.

Kyle ‘Gaz’ Garrick:

Gaz was the only one to willingly listen to Renaissance with poor Johnny. I don’t know why, but I can picture him being a big Bey fan, his love for her going all the way back to her Destiny Child days when she was his celebrity crush. Play any Beyonce song, and he’ll be able to tell you the name of it within 2.3 seconds. And since he grew up during their domination, he’s also partial to the Spice Girls.

Prince and Michael Jackson are two more of his favorites, and he even managed to get Sosp hooked on them.

Now, he does also enjoy more ‘masculine’ music, the primary example being ‘90s gangsta rap. However, I imagine him preferring genres like R&B, pop, melodic rap, and neo-soul. And unlike Ghost, his pop music doesn’t need to have a sad girl or sad-core lilt. No, he’ll be fine jamming to Britney Spears, Dojo Cat, and Dua Lipa.

If you can’t tell by now, R&B is basically the only genre the 141 can agree on. Rhythm and Blues is a very versatile genre, allowing every member to enjoy it despite their varied music tastes. And honestly, I’m kinda obsessed with them blasting it during missions.

[facewithoutheart]

Personal update after the break ❤️ heed the tags

I’ve always been a bit of a TMI mess so just throwing this out there because a) I like people knowing this but hate updating people individually and b) it’s helping me process.

At the end of my 2.5 week South American vacation with my husband I came down with what I thought as food poisoning. (Or, at the very very start, acute hatred of crowds at museums.) Anyway I went back to our hotel and started puking for about 18 hours. Which was a problem, given we were meant to go home the next day. Eventually my husband agreed with me that I was not getting better and we delayed our flight for another day.

On Jan 3 at about 3pm I finally felt normal. Like, I got an appetite. It was amazing. I sent my husband on a mission to bring me food and took a celebratory nap.

This is likely when my appendix burst.

I woke up in severe pain. Like. Severe. 6 or 7 on the pain scale. We waited all night but nothing made it better. Eventually my husband got me dressed and ready for the flight because a) we still thought this was a really bad case of food poisoning (I made him google appendicitis since the pain was that bad but nothing we read made it sound like that’s what I was experiencing.) and b) whatever was hurting me we wanted to be back in our own country where we had access to more resources and spoke the same language. My husband can speak some Spanish, but struggles with vocabulary, and this wasn’t a situation where we wanted to miss things in translation.

I was under the delusion that if I could just curl up in my own bed everything would be better.

Onward through a bumpy cab ride, pre-customs (where I had to sit on my luggage to not pass out… keep in mind I’d barely eaten anything besides some water and Colombian pedialyte for 2.5 days), get through security, walk to the gate (by this point every movement of my feet felt Sisyphean), get through a second, special, just for me baggage check where I had to take off and put my shoes on (seriously cannot overstate how painful that was), and then suffer through a 6 hour turbulent flight. All without looking sick because we were afraid they wouldn’t fly us home if I looked sick.

Ok! So now we’re back in the states. I am holding on for my comfy bed (remember: delusionally). We get through US customs in a surprisingly efficient manner, then head for our Lyft with Larry. Oh, Larry. He was the world’s slowest driver, bless him.

We get home, I pout at the bed until my husband put the sheets on, and then immediately flopped onto them.

And did not feel better. Worse, actually.

After being betrayed by the bed that was meant to cure me, I made more sad noises at my husband until we decided to call in the A team: my sister, the nurse.

She didn’t answer.

So I called my mom. Or, I called my mom and made my husband talk to her while I continued to make sad noises. We all have our coping mechanisms. She told us to go to urgent care, which is a shock if you know my mom. She’s minimized my illnesses my whole life so when she said, “Christina doesn’t complain about being sick until she’s really sick so maybe you should get it checked out.” Then my sister called back and helped talk us into a stand-alone ER which has facilities much like a standard ER but much faster and with a private room.

That’s probably the purpose of this whole story so holding it again: I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I saying going to a stand-alone ER (in the US) saved my life. Or at least helped avoid an invasive longer recovery surgery. To find one, you’re basically looking for an ER associated with a main hospital group, but not inside the main hospital compound. They’re a little hard to find so that’s the best I can do.

Ok so onward to the stand-alone ER. I’ll remind you at this point we’re still operating under the idea that I have really bad food poisoning, maybe severe dehydration. We get to the ER, check in, get taken back to the room, sing our story for some IV fluids, and I even got a warmed up blanket.

Heaven, if you ask me.

Fast-forward: they do a series of tests on me and conclude that my appendix has ruptured, possibly some time ago, and it’s imperative that I get surgery. Like, appendix where are you? They can’t even see it lol. They do double check my gall bladder just in case, which is another common problem FYI keep that in mind people who were born female.

Now the only question is whether or not I get a bed. Keep in mind I’m sitting pretty. The warm blankets, remember? The hospitals nearby are all full. People in the hallways waiting for care. Not ideal! The doctor tells his own horror story about his father being unable to find a room in a hospital to wait for surgery that will come 🤷‍♀️. (Coincidence: this doctor was Peruvian so that was fun! Since we’d just been.)

Luck is on my side because there’s a surgeon who will take me straight to the operating room. I get an ambulance ride (no sirens ☹️) but I do have a fun, chatty EMT who gawks at the number of ambulances stuck in the ambulance dock at the hospital to which I’m transferred. (Another bonus: the hospital is five minutes from my house.)

I pretty much immediately go into surgery. “Teetering” is the word the surgeon used about how bad I was doing. My husband estimated that I likely wouldn’t have survived another 24 hours in that condition. Fun times! Something to process later.

Moving on. I’m two days post-op, feeling great (great enough to write this!) and I’ve moved onto clear liquids, which is so awesome you guys. JELLO! ON PRESCRIPTION! I had a grape slushee yesterday, things are swinging back my way. I do have recovery issues (need to poop ☹️ need to get my ng tube removed ☹️☹️☹️ need to be able to blow a little green tube until it reaches 2,000 or something), but I’ve reached a stage where recovery is measurable so omfg my engineer husband is so happy. He has notes. He is getting a whole thrill out of making doctors explain things to him like he’s an idiot. Aside from the fact, you know, his wife’s appendix tried to kill her or whatever and the fact he’s got to actually go into the grocery store.

Meanwhile I get to measure my success in farts, which is really fun. The surgeon was like “I know you ladies don’t like talking about gas” and I was like “sir you saved my life with minimally invasive surgery but I cannot begin to tell you how little I care about talking about farts. Farts, farts, farts.” And then tried to see if we knew any of the same doctors so he’d pull my ng tube faster. No dice. He used this thing called “logic” and also “your belly was full of puss that I had to suck out so maybe do what I say” blah blah blah (no seriously I am super grateful for him; modern medicine, hospital system mess aside, is a marvel and I’m so happy I live in a world where a laparoscopic surgery was able to treat my issues with minimal side effects).

Anyway, that’s my story! Appendixes: sleeping nightmares, apparently. Lurking. Even when you’re 36 and way past appendicitis phase if you ask me. Way more trendy for a woman my age to have gall bladder issues.

Also: props to every man who said there’s no way a man would ever let this issue get as bad as I did because of my insane pain tolerance 🤣 like, thanks for the shout-out but I could do without the hospital stay.

Second shout out to my amazing husband who has been such a champ, getting me things, pushing doctors for answers, advocating for me, and also taking time to slap my ass every time I accidentally flash him with my very sexy hospital gown. He knows how to make me feel both cared for and alive. Ugh I’m gonna cry just thinking about how grateful I am to him. I won’t even make fun of him for WALKING INTO A SONIC SERIOUSLY WHO DOES THAT YOU ANIMAL but I will tease him for googling appendix and saying, “Do you know they don’t even know what the purpose of an appendix is?” Like. Honey. Yes, everyone knows that. But I pretended to be surprised anyways because, like I said. Champ.

Also my husband said my lung exercise machine looks like it has “a dick” which was exactly what I was thinking. Fist bumps. Never grow up.

The end!

[shadowpreacher1015]

Passing Ships #1

Chapter One: Lifeless Frame

Pairing: Joel Miller x f!Reader Word count: 1.7k Summary: You live next door to Joel. Your older brother knew him and had smuggled with him in the past. You make your rations by taking bodies from trucks and burning them. However, the body of a 15 year old girl catches you off guard causing you to have a panic attack and Joel attempts to comfort you. Warnings: mention of bodies, fluff, panic attack, anxiety, sleepy Joel. AN; This is the first fic ive ever written but im making a series out of this. im 20 and i have no idea what im doing i just thought this would be fun to write and it was. Please give me some feedback I would love to hear what people think ❤️

Harsh sunlight peaks through the dusty shades of your so-called room and you toss and turn in your bed as you try to fight the sun's gaze. Sleep never comes easy to you. It never really did as your older brother Jake playfully recalled to you every time you complain.  

“Can never get any fucking sleep with you around. Too much wriggling” he’d say before he ran to Portland. You close your eyes and you’re met with that pursed smirk you know all too well.

It was just meant to be a ‘quick trip’ as your Mum said on the plane to New York from Liverpool, where Jake recalled being completely content. There was nothing quick about it though. The outbreak prevented you from going home. You couldn’t remember much and it left you with an empty calling, like you knew you didn’t belong here. You have always longed for more and you always will. You and Jake don’t talk about her much anymore. You can feel it though just like he can, there’s no need to talk about it and you’re both comfortable with that. Your accent hangs loosely from your lips whilst your brothers remains, despite the years being surrounded by Americans.

You languidly roll yourself off the stained mattress, even when it longs for you to crawl back in and shield yourself from the world. You take one more glance at the imprint your body left behind before sighing and stretching yourself awake. You sniff your tank top, deciding on whether or not it's ready to wear for another day or two. It's not like anyone cares besides you anyway and no one's got the time to worry about whether they smell or not. They're too busy struggling out every breath they can, whilst they still have breath.

You nod with satisfaction that you don’t smell like hot garbage. Your jeans hang just below your stomach and are rough as they rip your thighs to shreds as you walk to the bathroom. The standard toothpaste rationed out to you every month tastes bitter and bland on your tongue. Your brothers' hands-offs, shirts, jeans and jackets are all you have as a reminder of how much he used to take care of you. Everything he had to give. It all went to you.

You brace yourself on the sink as you push out all the breath out of your lungs in an attempt to shake the thundering against the side of your head. Once your shoes are secure for their large size against your smaller foot, you aggressively open the door. Frustrated as to what job you will have to be doing today in exchange for mediocre ration cards for food that catches in your throat as you swallow down the bitter aftertastes.

You grimace at the job card given to you yesterday: ‘Waste removal’, meaning taking poor souls from trucks and burning their bodies to a crisp. The thought makes you pause before you see the scruffy broad shoulders out of the corner of your eye make their way towards the door next to yours. You acknowledge his presence with a nod, and he stares blankly through his eyebrows. A passive remark that hes not going to offer you the same consideration, despite knowing your brother before he made his way to Portland. You scoff, irritation bubbling in your chest. Before you can dig yourself a grave, you lock the door to your room and watch as he opens the door to his before slamming it shut behind him, making the door frame creek due to the force. Fuck you then.

You carry endless bodies to the fire pit from the truck. your eyes watering due to the fumes from the fire which licks at the air. It grows as people continue to chuck the bodies in. You dont think about the time passing. Your mind is set on the outcome for this shit job. You all do the work that they cant be bothered doing. They dont want to take responsability for the bdies so they leave it to the lot of you. Its easier to forget they were people once if you throw them in trucks and send them away I suppose.

You’re coming to the end of your 6-hour shift and pushing yourself through the grueling process of removing the lifeless frames from the truck that came in 3 times a week. Frames that were once filled with people. Up until now you have been rather good at keeping the wall in your mind solid. Not thinking too much about what they were. You couldn’t let yourself realize what you were doing. You turn and your eyes don’t open but you can see it plain as day. The air escaped your lungs momentarily as you saw the last limp body of what you presumed to be a young girl in the truck. They couldn’t have been more than 15 based on their height and weight. Their face was wrapped tight, but you couldn’t help but picture their presence in your mind. What they sounded like. The thoughts and pictures were swirling in your brain, washing away all your other senses. You could feel your chest constrict as you throw her into the flames. You hold the emotions that want to roll down your face at bay. Holding that feeling of the weight in your throat and stomach.  

You make quick work of collecting your ration cards for your work that day. The icy feeling in your sternum thawing and you know you can't hold it for long. Night is casting shadows over the decrepit buildings, and you can feel the atmosphere swiftly change dark as you quicken your pace towards your room. You don’t even make it 3 feet in front of your door before the feeling in your chest breaks loose and shatters through you. You can physically feel the lump in your throat grow and harden. The tears sting your eyes, and you slid down the wall clasping at your mouth and neck. 

No sounds escape. You won't let them. The tears lick at your face, and you can taste them as they slip onto your lips. You sit in silence and breathe deeply, your face grimacing. A child. Shot and killed. You rip the gloves off your hands that had touched her.  

Just as the breath in your lungs returns and your vision clears enough to see the moldy wall in front of you, you take one final moment to collect your remaining thoughts and lock them away. The door to your right creaks open and out comes a dark figure. You don’t have to guess as to who it is.  

“I heard your brother made his way into Portland”. The low, hoarse voice startles you for a second despite knowing he was there. You hadnt expected him to make any attempt to talk to you. He had no reason to after all and Joel isn’t the kind of man to make conversation with anyone let alone you. It wasnt that he didnt like you. You knew that it was pure disinterest. You didnt have anything he wanted and you were content with that knowledge for some reason as wherever he and Tess went someone always ended up bloody and you happened to like your face the way it was. You cast your eyes over him, hed obviously been asleep from the look of his hair, the way it sticks up and out.

“Yeah. He...Uh...got out of this shithole”. You chuckle dryly and sniff back the emotions laid bare on your face. Even with the veil of darkness on your faces, you could tell he was reading your face like a book or trying to. It's certainly not hard to tell what was reeling in your head. He understands. You know he does. He just doesn’t wear his thoughts on his face or anywhere else for that matter. They're hidden. They don’t breach the surface. Not for you anyway and you don’t want them too. You don’t need anyone besides Jake. You’ve been just fine with him. Your brother can read you like no one else and you love that. The unspoken trust and dedication towards each other are something you must have in this world. Almost like a father and daughter considering hes closer to Joels age than yours.

“Always a good one. Never sold me short, even when he could” Joels face is stern but there is a sleepy softness to it like he hasn’t finished putting his mask on yet and the menacing aura you and everyone else is familiar with is just ebbing under his skin. Waiting for a reason. You drag your limbs upward from your place on the floor. He steps back and gives you a nod similar to the one you gave him earlier.  

“I’ll see ya, Joel” You groan as you stand and make the rest of the way over to your room but before you have a chance to put your key in the door, Joel moves calmly but swiftly to stop you by taking your arm. You snap your face to him and watch as he tries to come up with words like he wasn’t expecting this of himself, and neither were you.  

“Dont think. Its better that way” he says lowly as if he doesn’t want anyone else but you to hear. His gaze lingers on your lip as you nod and accept his words. He doesn't even know your name and yet he exudes such familiarity and softness even though you’ve never spoken to him. He loosens the light grip on your arm, and you lick your lips, the taste of your salty tears still lingers on them, a reminder of why you were so exhausted. You quickly wriggle out of his grasp, overwhelmed. Turning the key and moving through your apartment, closing the door behind you with a light force. You don’t hear Joel move; you only hear the soft sound of his breathing on the other side of the door before the sound of his is closing once again

What the actual fuck.

You are left breathless as before. Although, the delightful fire in your lower belly causes your legs to press together. Ah. You hadnt expected Joel Miller to coax the screams from your head and lash them at the wall but you werent complaining. 

No.

Your focus was finding safe passage to Jake. This was fucking stupid, you dont have time for this. You kick off everything besides your underwear and curl yourself up under the covers. Your skin burns on your arm, where he touched you. His skin lingers on yours and with that knowledge you somehow find sleep that night. 

[hannahssimblr]

Chapter Thirteen

Jude slides into the seat across from me at the table of this brightly lit Turkish kebab place on Liffey Street. He’s only bought a bottle of Pepsi, while I’ve piled the table high with taco chips, lamb kebab, chicken goujons and a giant strawberry milkshake. I eye him as he twists open the cap of his drink. 

“Wow, greedy.” I say.

He laughs. “Yeah you’re going to have to have me airlifted out of here. Can I’ve a chip?” He reaches out but I smack his hand away. “You’re doing that thing that boys always complain about, when girls don’t order enough food so they steal theirs.” 

“Come on.” He says. “Just one, for God’s sake.” I relent and let him, but only one. I eye him suspiciously as he plucks it out of the box.

“Did you want to count it?” He teases. “To make sure I’ve not hidden another one in my hand?”

“Okay just shush for a minute.” I urge him. “I just really want to eat.” He signs and leans back in the seat, taking slow, leisurely sips of his pepsi while I tear at my food like some kind of feral beast. Nothing has ever tasted as delicious as this particular kebab, in this particular restaurant, even though the floors are sticky and there’s a drunk man snoring in the booth across from us thus creating an interesting ambience. 

“Skipped dinner?” He queries after a few minutes of silence where he allows me to satiate myself.

“Mmm.” I say. “Didn’t have time to eat.” I grab a napkin and swipe it across my mouth, afraid that it’s as coated in sauce as my hands are. I try to get some small talk going to distract from what is probably an abominable sight for him. “So you ate at some Mexican restaurant earlier?”

“Yeah, we did.”

“Risky move, I’d say, bringing an American to a Mexican restaurant.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because everyone knows we can’t ever compete with the way they do it over there. Everyone’s always like ‘Oh you don’t know Mexican food until you go to the states’. Or whatever.”

“Or Mexico.” He supplies, and I grin.

“In case your memory has been lost to the sands of time, I did actually live my entire teenage life in Dublin. I was here for the inception of the burrito craze, but still, you’re right. It’s not the same.” He drums his fingers on the side of the plastic bottle. He’s still got some of that zippy, restless energy that he used to have, but not as intensely as before. I no longer get the sense that he might rocket out of his seat at any moment. “It was nice to see Shane and Claire again, they both look good.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah! Shane looks so much fitter than he ever did, he’s in great shape.”

“He’s been training a lot. He has to drive back home twice a week to train with the team, and even outside of that he’s in the gym the whole time.”

“Good for him.”

“Bit miserable though, you don’t think?”

He smirks. “Clearly you think so.”

“Well.” I begin, swallowing a huge mouthful of kebab. “He doesn’t really ever do anything fun. He gets barely any free time, and even at that his coach has all these strict rules about how much he’s allowed to drink and whatnot.”

“Alright Evie.” He says in a mock-condescending voice, but it makes me feel a little ashamed all the same. I never realised how easily unkind words spilled out of my mouth before, and it’s not even like I have a particular problem with Shane. But Jude is being nice, he goes on speaking before I start flailing around looking for an excuse for myself.

“I remember having to do that back when I was on my school rugby team.” He reminisces. “Funnily enough, another rule was abstinence.”

I glance up from my food. “Really?”

“They said that sex’d diminish our energy and testosterone and we’d end up playing a weak game, but…” He shrugs. “I don’t think it ever made a real difference. It was probably another one of those weird Catholic rules that your country is obsessed with.” I bristle a little bit against the way he says ‘your country’ like he’s divorced from it, like he hasn’t got our weird Catholic blood in his veins. 

“So come on, Evie.” He says, leaning his elbows onto the table. “What’s been going on with you? I can’t believe it’s been so long since we spoke.”

“I know.” I say. “I guess we lost touch at one point there.” I slide my eyes up to meet his, not feeling as jovial as I had a minute ago, and his smile falters to become a little rueful. “Yeah, I regret that. Life got so busy for me so quickly after I moved, I guess it was kind of a whirlwind situation.” He touches his hair self consciously. “But I thought of you often, I always imagined that we might see each other again.”

“Ah well, here we are.” I say. “A year and a half later.” I watch his hand reach out to touch my arm but I swiftly move it out of the way to grab my milkshake so that his palm hits the table instead. He curls it slowly into a fist and pulls it back onto his lap. “You look really different.” He says. “You know, I always think of you with that really long hair.”

“Yeah I cut it all off.”

“ And are you still running? And swimming? Do you still do all of that?”

“No, actually, I don’t.” I say. “I suppose I fell out of the habit of it when I moved here, I don’t really do many of the things I used to do.” I’m different now, I’ve changed so much since we last spoke. I look different, I do different things, and I feel differently about him now than I did when I was seventeen. I have to keep repeating this in my head as he gives me the kind of familiar smile that threatens to wipe out the last nineteen months. 

I stare at him unsmiling. “How’s things in Berlin? Better than they were here after all?”

“Really good. Hey.” A frown comes between his eyebrows and the corners of his pretty mouth turn downwards with concern. “Are you angry with me over losing touch?”

“Why’d you ask?”

“You’ve just gone so chilly all of a sudden, I don’t know.”

I pause for a moment. “It’d be a bit intense if I was still angry over something like that, wouldn’t it?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Well, good to know you got my email. It’s a pity it wasn’t worth responding to.”

He laughs with surprise, as though he was expecting me to act the way I used to act. Docile. “Oh, come on, don’t be like that. I could have dealt with it better, but I was in a new city, and there were all of these new people. I left it sitting there too long and then, well, it felt like it’d be weird to respond after so much time.”

“Well, you know if you really wanted to you could have emailed me in a new thread.”

He arches his eyebrow “And equally, you could have sent the first message.”

I snap my mouth shut and pick through my food again, knowing that he’s right, but also knowing that I wouldn’t have been capable of doing something like that, double emailing him, like some kind of pathetic, desperate fool. The kind of pitiful low that I’d never have stooped to, not in front of him. 

“You have a new piercing in your ear.” I say quietly after a few moments of silence, grasping at anything that will stop this conversation heading down a too-vulnerable path. He reaches up to fiddle with the third tiny hoop in his ear, this one on the left side, looped around his anti-helix. 

“Yeah I figured that I already have a girl’s name and my dad thinks the other two piercings mean I’m gay so I might as well double down.” He grins. “I got it done when I went to Slovenia, actually. It was painful.”

“Little baby.” I tease. “I don’t remember mine being that bad, I got it done when I was like sixteen.”

His eyes go wide as he suddenly recalls. “I remember your piercings, you used to have four on one ear. Let me see.”

I turn my head to show him that they’re all gone now, nothing dangling from them but a simple set of gold hoops in my lobes. “I took them all out.” I admit. “They just didn’t feel like me anymore.”

“Damn, I always thought they were cool.” I almost remind him that nothing about me back then was cool, but then stop myself because I know now that language like that is a trap and he’ll only feel obligated to deny it. 

“Any other surprises up your sleeve?” I ask him, and he quickly steals another chip. I don’t stop him, finally starting to feel human again. 

“Funny you should ask.” He says as he chews on it. “I got this in Thailand.” He rolls up the left sleeve of his sweatshirt to show me the tattoo on the smooth inner skin of his forearm. It’s a mango on a stem with two leaves, done in simple black ink with this appealing, sketchy style. It looks a bit like something he might have drawn.

“Oh, nice.” I say. “Did you design it?”

“No, the woman in the tattoo parlour did. We were just passing by and I knew I had to get something done by her, like, I knew it was a kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

“Does it mean something special?”

He grins. “Nope, it’s just a nice drawing.”

“Fair enough.” I wonder what it’s like to be so nonchalant about something that’s going to be on your body for the rest of your life. It’s exactly the kind of free spirited thing that I wish I was capable of doing, but sometimes I have anxiety dreams that I’ve gotten a tattoo that I regret in a really prominent place like my face and for some reason nobody will laser it off for me. I take them as a sign that I’m not ready for anything so permanent. He picks at my chips again and I slide them towards him so he can tuck in with fervent enthusiasm, and while he eats I ask him about Thailand. 

“I went May last year.” He says. “I always wanted to visit. So my friend Jonas and I decided to take off for a month while we had the chance and it was incredible. Seriously. I think everyone should go and experience it if they can.”

“Really? What was it like?”

“I can’t even do it justice by trying to describe it to you. C’mere.” He pats the seat next to him and pulls out his phone. “I’ll show you some pictures.”

I slide out of my seat and move in next to him, being very careful to leave enough room for Jesus between us in case our legs touch and sand of those dangerous feelings I used to have come flying back. 

“No Blockia.” I comment. 

“Hm?”

“Your old phone. It’s gone.”

“Yes.” He grins. “I couldn’t fight the future anymore, it just wasn’t practical, I needed Google Maps to get around.”

“They have torches built in now, did you know.”

He exhales a laugh and shakes his head. “Alright, well, let’s look at my holiday to Thailand, when you’re ready.” And he starts scrolling through photographs of the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, his phone screen becoming like a travel brochure with almost unrealistically spectacular vistas. Thailand looks like paradise, crystal blue waters and white sand, these huge rocks covered in lush vegetation jutting out of the sea and the sky awash with gold as the sun sets over a bay. “That was Railay Beach.” He narrates. “Jonas got food poisoning from a street vendor and was holed up in the hotel for two days so I just wandered around on my own.” Next he shows me photos of beach bars with thatch roofs, of intertwining roots of mangrove trees and of people selling shell necklaces under colourful tents. He’s taken a snap of a hand painted sign that says, in English: Beach This Way.

“You know, in a funny way, it kind of reminds me of the beach we stayed on.” I tell him. “Just something about the way those signs are painted, it’s like how it was at the Surf Shack.”

“Actually, I thought the same thing.” He says, and flicks to the next picture, which is him and a big, blonde German looking guy, presumably Jonas, standing in a little wooden boat holding a pair of oars. “Oh, this is when Jonas was better.” 

“I like your hair band.” I say, snickering. 

“Ha. Yeah, well, my hair was longer, I needed to keep it out of my eyes somehow.”

“Did you keep it?”

“The hairband? Why? Do you want it?”

“Oh yeah for sure, gimme. It’s so stylish.” 

He laughs and flips through more, and tells me about them all, Phuket, Ko Samui, Phi Phi islands, and even Bangkok for a few days before they flew home again. In all of the photos he’s got that golden tan that I remember he used to have, summer coloured skin lost now to the winter, and he looks so free and easy and so happy, riding on a motorbike, lying in a canoe, shirtless on the beach and stretched out doing a goofy pose on a sun lounger, I find myself mesmerised by this depiction of his life, like he’s only ever having good days, only ever in gorgeous places, smiling, happy, and I let myself get sucked into the fantasy that a life like this is possible for me too until he scrolls too far and I have to look at a picture of him kissing his girlfriend. My stomach drops instantly. 

“Oops. “ He says. “Went too far.”

I laugh awkwardly. “Oh, don’t worry, it’s okay.”

“That’s my girlfriend, Astrid.” 

“She looks pretty.” 

He nods in agreement. “She’s, yeah… she’s absolutely beautiful.” He quickly flips to another photo of her where she’s not locking lips with him and makes me look at her smiling face so that I can pretend I didn’t spend months cyber stalking her. I don’t really know what to say. “Yeah, wow, she’s something else.”

He stares down at the phone with this adoring expression on his face as though he’s the luckiest man alive and this feeling comes over me that I haven’t felt in a very long time. It’s the same way I felt when he rejected my misguided teenage attempts at seduction, and the same way I felt when I saw his face when he spoke to Michelle. It’s the feeling that I’m not what he wants. I’ll never be what he wants. The memory of it is too much and all over again I feel the stinging pain of knowing that I offered my love to someone who saw no worth in it. 

I start gathering my empty milkshake cup and the greasy papers onto a tray to dump them into a nearby bin. “We should get going now.” I tell him. “I’m sure everyone else is waiting for us at the bar, and they’ll be closing soon.”

“Right.” He says, pushing himself upright and swiping salt from his black jeans. “Thank you for the chips, by the way. I wasn’t even that hungry but those things are like crack to me.”

“No problem. And I appreciate you coming with me to get food.”

Prev // Next

[sageistri]

Im really sorry but I really want to know your opinion as it’s really valuable to me

So I’ve heard many people consider Jimin being a queer rather than being straight. I can see where it comes from - him being extremely clingy to Tony, flirting with American interviewers, crushing on Shawn Mendes etc.

But I’ve read in one post and I was concerned about one thing - has he/they ever fought with internalised homophobia?

Many fans talk about him(them) having hyper masculinity traits like boys shouldn’t check their selfies/boys don’t use cream/ it’s strange for man to hold hands etc. and I don’t disapprove, they all have said controversial stuff, but did they truly believe in their words?

He was willing to get a kiss from Jk for ages, I don’t understand his obsession actually, but I see him being very genuine about this. In Bon voyage 1 when Jin asked JK which of them he would like to get a kiss, Jimin was unexpectedly curious and when someone requested to play rock paper scissors to decide he didn’t even sat properly, the only one getting ready but then realising it’s a joke. But when tables turn and he had to kiss Taehyung he hated it. “This is too much” he said

What it was? Internalised homophobia(?) or his shyness/he’s not attracted to V? How do you think? I can actually see his point - when you have a punishment to kiss a friend it’s uncomfortable, considering all cultures

For me personally Jimin was more mature and open minded than the rest, but those stereotypes and desire to be loved by fans because he thought that it “was the only way” this all put him under the pressure. For example Jimin was the first one who disagreed when members complained about wearing a dress, said that makeup is a part of his life, gifted presents to members, called out for saying that man don’t check selfies.

So what it was? Internalised homophobia or just his attempt to fit into image?

Thank you for reading!

This ask is definitely something.

First of all, saying Jimin was curious with jk but resisted the idea with Taehyung sounds like some jikook shipper stuff to me because only someone who shipped him with jk would notice something like that because they want to, secondly I don't even recall the exact clip you're talking about so of course I have nothing to say. It seems you already came to your own conclusions on this topic so I doubt you need my opinion.

[mezmer]

VENT!!! Chronic illness!!!!

Second paragraph is about epilepsy if you want to get to the “good part”. Kind of complaining maybe but I noticed people sigh and roll their eyes about me having severe scoliosis in general. I’ve gotten all sorts of responses like “yeah my back hurts really bad too, right here” which I think is strange and doesn’t come across as sympathy. You know, and worse i won’t dwell on since it does feel as if I’m just complaining about it. I wanna swallow that pill and detox. It’s hard to describe this… I used to talk about my condition way more in high school because it was still then such a shock to me. Genuinely reaching out to people and admitting to them how much it affected me, seeking a connection because I wasn’t making one. I won’t touch on that experience in detail but I learned to start keeping it to myself which is probably the right thing to do anyways and more noble to “suffer in silence” how corny that sounds. Another nit pick of mine is my mother, bless her heart, has never been motherly to me about my condition. Never once did I wake up to “how are you feeling?” I know how ridiculous this sounds. There’s people without mothers, or abusive mothers. So yeah, I am probably sounding insufferable. She never congratulated me when I found a noninvasive treatment provider I had sought out since my diagnosis ar 14 (i did indicate to my mother around 11 years old there was something wrong with my body and she said I would grow out of it. Early intervention with scoliosis is key to preventing severe curves.) My mom is just another eye roller, along with exes, old friends. If they weren’t being negative, it felt like they didn’t care. Sometimes I felt as pathetic as I seemed to be. Along with my silence, I did stop caring that they didn’t care, but the negativity hurt. Oh gosh, and the way I tried to make friends with several women I knew who had scoliosis. None tried at all to connect with me, besides one woman, Rachel. She was an addict and had a curve much like mine, and we had nearly the same birthday. She passed away of an overdose last year and she was a mother like me……

One point I can make that has further cemented how little a chronic spinal deformity matters is how it compares to people’s perception of scoliosis vs epilepsy…in my firsthand experience. The drastic difference between how I’m treated for both. With seizures, people become so compassionate towards me and I can see the extreme concern in their eyes and hear it in their voices. Even Johnny… yeah, it’s disgustingly clear the epilepsy chokes him with fear and love for me, when scoliosis just.. I don’t even know what he thinks because he doesn’t even talk about it. To me, scoliosis is just as frightening as epilepsy. People don’t give a fuck about scoliosis and scoff at it, but epilepsy is somehow the edge of death to them. This is kind of a running joke in the scoliosis community (97% women!) that we aren’t taken seriously, it’s a condition only weird dorks get. There’s an American dad episode about it :) And I WISH I COULD ADVOCATE FOR SCOLIOSIS. but it feels like I’ve never been taken seriously. And it’s time I got over it; maybe writing my little tumblr post will close the door on the last decade of embarrassment and shame for being who I am. None of what I mentioned includes my struggle with opiate addiction, feeling pathetic and alone. or how my body looks from having scoliosis. Every inch of my body is asymmetrical and I can’t look in the mirror naked still after all this time. It’s terrible and… I’m praying I can be stronger about this. I can forgive God, but it’s hard to forgive my own partner and my own mother. Yes I have made it clear and opened up as wisely and honestly as I can convey. Nothing changed.

Thank you to those small few of you who have treated me with compassion. Yes, it means this much to me. I’m not seeking attention; I’m just confused why this condition is so…

[agaypanic]

Can I request alysssa from teotfw and it’s literally just the reader as James instead!! But the reader is ever so slightly more normal - literally go crazy I just thought that would be a cool idea!!

Two Girls and a Car (Alyssa Foley X Reader)

Masterlist

Request Something!

Summary: You and Alyssa, two rebellious loners, find each other at school and decide to date. Her being sick of her new family and you tired of your boring life, you decide to steal your dad’s car and skip town.

A/N: teotfw but make it sapphic>>> couple things, 1: this is based off the first episode (im using a script teehee) where reader is james with less murderous tendencies. 2: idk how good this is gonna be bc i usually write in second person, but bc of the show being told in first person perspectives, this is written in first person but only from reader’s pov. 3: if you couldn’t tell from my derry girl fics (or any other non-american media i write), im american so i dont really know english lingo or anything that well. 4: this could be a two parter?? Or maybe a series??? Lmk what yall think

***

I’m Y/n.

I’m seventeen.

And I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong with me. Like, really wrong.

When I was eight, I realized I didn’t have a sense of humor. At first, I thought that my dad was just the worst at jokes. And he is, probably. But nothing’s really amusing to me, and I don’t know why.

I’ve always wanted to punch my dad in the face. That seems like a problem, considering he’s my dad and all. But if you met him, you’d probably agree. Even if he looks all cheery and nice, he’s a bit of a prick.

When I was nine, my dad bought a deep-fat fryer he had seen on an American shopping channel. One day, I put my hand in it. I wanted to make myself feel something.

It worked, but only for a moment. Now I have a fucked up hand, all for a moment of feeling something.

I was in the cafeteria when I first met her. Alyssa. She was the new girl, and after shouting at her friends and smashing something on the ground, she made her way over to me. She stood right in front of me, staring me down.

“Hey.” I hear after taking off my headphones.

“Hey.”

“I’ve seen you skating.” I didn’t know how to respond. We stared at each other for a moment before she spoke again. “You’re pretty shit.”

“Fuck off.”

Alyssa was interesting, to say the least. After school, she found me again, sitting on a bench outside.

“Are you waiting for me?” She asked. I wasn’t; I just didn’t want to go home yet. But instead, I nodded, and she sat on the bench beside me.

The next thing I knew, we were making out. I didn’t really mind it. Alyssa was a bit of an aggressive kisser, but I had never really kissed anyone before, so I didn’t feel like complaining. 

I wonder if I could fall in love with Alyssa. Maybe not. But I could pretend.

She grabbed my hand and placed it on her boob, but then she pulled away.

“What happened to your hand?” Alyssa asked, gesturing to my fucked up hand that was on her tit. 

“Shut up.” I didn’t want to talk about it, and luckily, she didn’t feel like pressing. So I just switched hands, letting the messed up one grip at her sweater as we continued snogging. It was an okay way to pass the time, better than sitting at home. 

Eventually, we had to leave. So we just started walking. I don’t think either of us knew where we were going, so we just wandered down the middle of a vacant street. I would’ve ridden my skateboard, but apparently I was shit at it.

“I haven’t got a phone,” Alyssa said suddenly. 

“Okay.”

“I smashed it.” So that must’ve been what she’d thrown in the cafeteria today.

“Okay.” I could feel her look at me.

“Like, on purpose.” Did she want me to think she was crazy? Maybe she was, but I don’t think I had any room to judge her.

“Okay.” 

“So you can’t call me.” This time, she turned to me slightly as she spoke, like she was trying to invoke a reaction in me.

“That’s fine.” She seemed surprised that I had finally given a different response. “I don’t have a phone either.”

“Really?” Alyssa asked, turning to me again.

“Yeah. I hate them.” I didn’t see the point of them. Just like I didn’t see the point in this conversation. What did people in love talk about? “Wanna go on a date?”

***

She said yes. So I took her to a diner, one that was cheap but still looked nice and had decent food. But it didn’t last long. Alyssa had ordered a few things, and the waitress made a comment about how hungry she was. They both giggled, but Alyssa’s was more insincere.

“And an extra fucking spoon.” Alyssa finished off, setting the menu down. The waitress looked horrified.

“Excuse me?”

“For her,” Alyssa said, gesturing to me. I guess it was nice of her to think about me, but I didn’t feel like eating a banana split.

The waitress scoffed, closing her notepad.

“Sorry. You can’t use language like that. Otherwise, I’m gonna have to ask you and your friend to leave.”

“She’s my girlfriend.” Alyssa corrected.

“Fine, I’ll have to ask you and your girlfriend to leave.”

“Okay.” Her tone was mocking, and the waitress gave her a look. Alyssa sighed, seeming more sincere. “Okay, I’m sorry. Sorry.” The waitress seemed pleased, but that’s when it really went to shit. “I will have… a great big banana shit with extra fucking cherries all on top of it.”

“Right, yeah, that’s it. Marvin!” The waitress called back to the kitchen, where the only other person in this diner was. 

“Oh yeah!” Alyssa raised her voice, staring the woman down. “Go get Marvin! See if Marvin can make a banana split for me, you fucking cunt!” Then she grabbed her things and stormed out of the diner, slamming the door behind her. 

It was clear that Alyssa had a short fuse.

“Sorry about her,” I said. The waitress and I stared at each other for a minute before I grabbed my board and left. Alyssa was stomping down the street, so I used my skateboard to catch up. She had her usual deadpan expression when I got to her. “...You okay?”

“Shut up.” I didn’t feel like arguing. “God, I think we live in the most boring town on the planet.”

“Probably.”

“Everyone’s so fucking square.” She said with a huff. Then she looked at me. “Are you boring too?”

Probably.

“No.” 

We walked for a bit before Alyssa spoke again.

“Can we go to your house?”

***

I said yes. When we got to my place, Alyssa said my house was weird and had too many windows. I didn’t really notice until she brought it up. 

Alyssa likes to touch and grab things. I guess looking at it wasn’t enough for her, but it was starting to get on my nerves a bit.

“Is this your mum?” She asked, holding up a picture.

“Yeah.” I didn’t have to look at the photo to know it was her. I didn’t like looking at pictures of my mum anymore. “She lives in Japan.” She doesn’t.

“Cool.” Alyssa stared at the picture for a moment. “You look like her.”

I felt stiff after that. Alyssa didn’t seem to notice, and if she did, she didn’t care enough to mention it.

Then the front door opened, and I felt even stiffer.

“Fuck.” I muttered. This day was shit. Before Alyssa could ask what was wrong, my dad’s voice bellowed from the hallway.

“The hunter has returned!”

When he saw Alyssa, he insisted on us sitting down for a cup of tea so we could all chat. I couldn’t remember the last time I sat down and had a chat with my dad, but I definitely didn’t want to start now. Dad sat at the head of the table while Alyssa and I sat across from each other.

“Well, this is nice!” My dad said. I could feel the idiotic smile radiating off of him.

“What is?” Alyssa asked. 

“This. You two.” Dad gestured to the two of us. I drank my tea so I wouldn’t have to say anything. He let out a laugh. “What a relief! You know, I always thought there was something wrong with her.” This was a good reminder of why I didn’t talk to my dad. “I thought probably she’d never like anyone, or would even… Well, you know. Which is fine, obviously. But, here you are.”

“Maybe she doesn’t,” Alyssa suggested. She was a very blunt and confrontational person. Maybe it was a good thing we met. “Maybe she’s asexual. Maybe I’m just bi-curious.” Alyssa leaned back in her chair and took a sip of her tea. “We’re dealing with a really broad spectrum these days.”

We fell into an awkward silence after that. The only sounds made were drinking and the occasional sniffle. Eventually, my cup was empty, but I wasn’t about to stick around for another.

“Let’s go to my room,” I said abruptly, standing up. Alyssa was hot on my heels, clearly also wanting to get away. Dad said goodbye to us, but neither of us answered.

When we got to my room down the hall, I shut the door and opened the window. I climbed through it to sit on the roof, and Alyssa sat beside me. We stared out of the neighborhood and the setting sun for a while.

“Your dad’s a prick.”

“I know.” I sighed, laying down and crossing my arms and ankles. I felt like I could be honest with her, like she wouldn’t judge me for whatever I said. “Sometimes, I feel like punching him in the face.”

“You should definitely do that.” She responded, lying down with me.

If you looked past the slight brashness, Alyssa was sort of… Sweet.

“Have you ever eaten a pussy before?”

Sort of.

“A couple.” It was a lie, but she didn’t have to know that.

“I want you to eat mine.”

“Now?” I lifted my head and looked around the roof that we were lying on. “Here?”

“Tomorrow.” She rolled her eyes, but there seemed to be a hint of amusement on her face. “And not on your roof. I’ll be here at eleven.”

Alyssa got up and crawled back through the window. I would’ve walked her out, but I didn’t want to get up. Or see my dad again. 

But when I sat up again, she was down below on the pavement, walking away.

“Alyssa!” I called out. She turned around, squinting up to look at me. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow, Y/n.”

***

I was ready at ten. I needed time to prepare. I figured the best place to give Alyssa head would be my bedroom, but I had to be ready for anything. For all I knew, she’d lay herself down on the table where we had tea yesterday. She seemed like she’d do that, to get back at my dad or something.

When it turned eleven, I sat on the couch and waited. I quickly grew restless, and I didn’t know why. I took out my pocket knife, fiddling with it to pass the time. My dad had gotten it for me when I was about twelve. Said it was a good tool to have on you, that you’d never know when you’d need it. I didn’t exactly use it for intended purposes. Mainly carving up shit in the house when I was bored or pissed. Either my dad didn’t notice or just didn’t want to say anything about it.

When twelve came around, I started to think Alyssa might not be coming. That I did all that waiting for nothing.

But then, at half past one, someone started pounding on the door.

“Y/n!” It was Alyssa.

As I walked to the door, I put the knife back in my pocket. I wondered what had taken Alyssa so long. But when I opened the door, I didn’t even get a chance to ask. She walked past me into the house, tossing her jacket on the floor.

As she stomped off to the living room, she started to take off her shirt. I quickly shut the door and followed after her. I found Alyssa sitting on the couch, head leaning all the way back and eyes closed. She must’ve been deep in thought.

“Come here.” She said, sitting up properly. I did as told, looking at her from the corner of my eye as I sat next to her.

“Did you still wanna…” I trailed off, clearing my throat as I gestured between us. “You know.”

“I dunno.” Alyssa sighed. That made me a bit relieved because I don’t know if I was in the mood to eat pussy now. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What?”

“I’m serious.” I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Alyssa not be serious. “Let’s leave this shithole town. Now. You hate it, I hate it. Our parents are dickheads. You’ve got a car.”

“It’s my dad’s.” But all the other reasons were very convincing. 

“Who’s a dickhead.” That was fair. “Look, I’m going whether you come with me or not. Are you in?”

I didn’t have to think about my answer. I hated everything about this place. I hated my dad, hated school. I was even starting to hate how many windows our house had. 

And I think I liked Alyssa, or at the very least tolerated her.

“Sure.”

Alyssa put her top and jacket back on, and I grabbed my shoes. Dad would be coming back any minute with groceries, so all we had to do was wait for him to pull into the driveway.

I heard the car pull in, and Alyssa followed me out the door. My dad was walking towards us, a huge stupid grin on his face as he saw us. 

Before I could even give it a second thought, I swung my fist at him. I punched him in the cheek, and he was quickly on the floor. I snatched the keys that flew out of his hand off of the ground, and soon, Alyssa and I were speeding out of my driveway.

“Are you scared?” She asked, a big smile on her face. It didn’t look as stupid on her as it usually did on anyone else. 

“I dunno. Maybe a little. ” I answer. “But my hand hurts a little.” My knuckles were throbbing. I had never punched someone before. “Are you? Scared?”

“No.”

I didn’t know where we were going, or if we’d ever come back. But I punched my dad in the face and stole his car. That felt like a good place to start.

[le-trash-prince]

I told myself when I was younger that I’d only come out to my family as queer if I started dating someone because I didn’t like the idea of causing a fuss over something that would otherwise have nothing to do with them. But then I ended up coming out to them after the Pulse shooting, when it occurred to me that I didn’t want them to have to find out someday on the news, if something like that ever happened to me.

They weren’t 100% surprised, but they weren’t 100% prepared to process it either. Ironically, I ended up dating someone almost exactly a year later.

But I didn’t come out to them as genderfluid because being gay was already a lot, and because again it felt like I would be causing a big ruckus just over my identity. I think it would be different if I were a trans guy or had a stronger need to physically transition, but my gender is kind of just a private, me thing. And also I think at that time it would have been a very difficult conversation with a lot of explaining on my part, endless questions from my mom, and a lot of my dad being dismissive and emotionally repressed.

But then Trump won the election later that year, which had a very deep impact on my family, as my dad is Mexican American, and we live in Texas, and it was a constant daily stress factor for us. Obviously things are still shit, but every single day of those four years was awful in a way that I am still unpacking.

It changed a lot of things for my parents. They were both Republican in 2016, but my dad truly, honestly believed we lived in a country where a man like that would never be elected president. He wore black every single day for two years after the election, until he decided he was ready to let hope in again.

I don’t think my parents will ever vote for the GOP again. They weren’t bigots before, and they certainly were never radical conservatives, but they were very complacent and very ignorant to the nature of our country and our society and the oppression that so many people experience. I think they just believed what they’d always been told. And after Trump was elected, they finally started questioning those things and working to educate themselves on the reality of our country.

I used to never open my mouth about US politics around my parents because I felt like I wouldn’t be listened to. And now it’s like, not only can I talk about things that upset me about our country, but they’re always either emphatically agreeing with me, or they’re the ones who started complaining first.

Like last night, my mom and I were once again ranting about anti-trans legislation and my dad was just nodding along in agreement. And my mom was very clear about trans kids needing affirmative counseling and support, and we also talked about intersex kids and the things the medical system puts them through.

And I got home later, and I realized, like, I can just openly talk about trans rights with my parents without being afraid of what they would think of me being trans. Like I haven’t come out to them, and I’m not particularly itching to do so, but I realized that not only could I come out to them, but it would be an extremely easy conversation. Like it would just be part of a normal conversation where I talk about the way I experience gender. And that is a very strange feeling.

Anyways, that’s all I wanted to say. My family supports trans rights without me even telling them I’m trans, and I’m still getting used to that.

[donnabroadway]

Hypergamy

I was recently watching a show where a billionaire tech guru was accused of having an affair and murdering one of his subordinates and one of the controversies was that he was like many successful men, he had a white wife. In one of the scenes with his black female lawyer, he said he knew of the criticism and his justification is that she was with him when he had nothing. I noted that but left it on the backburner. Today, I was scrolling through TikTok and someone who is regularly known for speaking on relationships and how many people settle for subpar partners and are unhappy, answered a question where the person stated many of the attractive men in our community, and I mean black because she and I are both phenotypically and culturally black, were hood men and she agreed. I immediately tied the two together. The hood men have a certain swag, they fast talk, look good, smell good, and they actually talk to women but aren’t good people overall. The nerdy men often say they got with white and other women outside their race because black women weren’t checking for them before they became successful. It got my wheels to turning. I see many men who claim to be good men complaining about women not checking for them but when you dig deeper, their idea of flirting or asking out was to put themselves in the friendzone, have random run ins, or stare at the woman they liked or dream about her, everything but ask her out and they become so hurt and slighted when someone, who they perceive as not as good as them, actually asks her out and she accepts. It doesn’t matter how good of a man you are; most women aren’t mind readers and most black women are taught not to pursue men because religion says that your husband will find you and pursuing a man is out of order. Tell that to the future hypergymists. They see a man with million, billion, or even hundred thousandnaire potential and dig their claws into him and hold onto him for 10-15 years because they know that swag can be bought or developed but talent and the ability to actually use their potential to its full capacity is rare. They often learn how to spot future high earning men very early on from the women in their families and they use those skills to land a future baller very early on and they don’t let go until it is the ultimate end or they are walking away with half his earnings, several luxury cars, and several big homes all while never working a day in their lives and having no immediate plans to ever get a traditional job, even after divorcing.

There is a quote that says most people miss opportunities because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work. We often miss the future gems because they are nerdy, can’t dress, don’t look good on the outside, may not have the best social skills but they have potential to give you a good life. They are trained to spot the diamond in the rough and subtly polish him off. Think about it. There have only been 4,000 NBA players in the 50+ years that the NBA has formally been the NBA, which means although there are millions of young men wanting to have one of those spots, only  60 men get them every year. There are tens of thousands of D1 college hoop players who will never professionally touch a basketball on American soil. What makes these 4,000 men different? I believe a lot of luck but also hard work and dedication, which often means not having as much of a social life but many of them have had a high school or college sweetheart who was there before he started getting attention because she saw the potential. If you see someone who is shooting 60% efficiency from the free throw line and is starting to get some media attention, but the girls aren’t on him because he’s not “fine,” why not get in on the ground floor? If you see someone who codes in their free time and is very smart, why not get with him before he has anything? What I’m saying is many women who have successfully leveled up did so by getting in on the ground floor. They recognized the potential and stuck around. Does this always work? No but it is more likely to work when you have someone who has never had a girlfriend and you were his first. Men are still men in spite of the money and status. Let’s not pretend the women supporting their future doctor, lawyer, engineer, businessman, NFL or NBA player don’t see the future payout. It doesn’t matter if they support him for 5-10 years while he gets his degree or affairs in order, they know once he’s settled and he gets his first big boy paycheck, she will be on easy street and she will never have to work again. It is the long game. If she says she put in the work, she is entitled to payoff from the sacrifice she made so he can become who he is. Vanessa Bryant famously never shot with Kobe in the gym but is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars from deals Kobe made before he passed. Their marriage wasn’t easy with his very public infidelity and them almost divorcing, but Vanessa got married when she was 18 and even Kobe said all she would do is sleep all day while he went to two a day practices, so besides being a mother, Vanessa’s job was to sleep all day and manage their home. This is a woman who has never had a job a day in her life, do you think she was really going to divorce Kobe? Many of them are taught to turn a blind eye to the infidelity and embarrassment because having access to his millions, or even billions, is a lot better than alimony and child support.  They are not stupid. They know it is a business arrangement and mistresses, sugar babies, IG thots, and even outside children be damned. They are not leaving that million-dollar lifestyle for anyone. They may live in a different multimillion-dollar home in a different city but they are not giving up the lifestyle, the title, and benefits simply because their husband’s penis slipped into another woman or he paid $60,000 bills and benefits for his sugar baby. She spends that much in two days. Who cares? Many wives know and they don’t care, which is why they laugh in the mistress’s face because, again, she put in the work and she’s not giving up her lifestyle for anyone. She earned it.

The problem is many of us choose men with potential and no drive, men with no potential, or we get pregnant too early in process and we derail everything because instead of getting 18 years of child support payment, he may  marry them but now he has a family to support, which means putting his dreams aside and getting a real job that pays significant less than his potential earnings, had he stayed the course or even worse, he may not want the responsibility of fatherhood and now you are a single mother who is fighting for the minimum child support payment.

I know we like to make women victims and mean the criminal masterminds, but women aren’t stupid. I would be very surprised if Ned Fulmer’s wife, Ariel, went anywhere. She has been with him for many years and his infidelity was an open secret. She may not have known known but she knew. He may be fired but he’s good financially. The Try Guys had to buy him out because his home and money was used to film the first few Try Guys video and all of the other members claim he did a lot of the groundwork  of building the brand but Ned will be fine. He helped build a million-dollar brand, which means even with the public disgrace a company, or some aspiring social media star will ask for his help and he will be making six figures a month again very soon. He’ll eventually do a public reconciliation with the Try Guys, make a series of apology videos, they will talk about what happened and Ned may recover a lot better than the Try Guys because it seems as if he was the business mastermind and Ariel has to consider if she wants to be a broke, single mother or if she wants to stomach the temporary embarrassment but take advantage of the fact she has Ned by the balls and can get whatever she wants. These are the real decisions made in a marriage where there are a lot of assets.

[justiceheartwatcher]

Harris' Double Speak Speech

For an old, dead white guy who has nothing to teach us, William Shakespeare sure did know what he was talking about when he wrote “King Lear.” It's about an old, senile king who thought he could turn over his kingdom to his daughters and still remain in power because they loved and respected him so much. Spoiler alert: It didn’t work out too well. Flash forward to today. Just one day after Joe Biden announced that he would not run for reelection and endorsed Kamala Harris, but that he would remain in office through January, Harris was already acting as if she’s the President. And she immediately proved she is completely unfit for the job. After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Harris emerged to talk about how she’d taken a tough stance with him and talked about what “she” would accept. She said she relayed to him “MY serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians,” and pressured him to sign a ceasefire deal with Hamas. What’s wrong with that? Let me count the ways. First of all, Hamas is to blame for there being no ceasefire. All they’ve ever had to do is surrender and release their hostages, who still include American citizens. But Hamas has rejected at least 11 ceasefire deals so far because they’ve figured out that due to Western useful idiots sympathizing with them, the longer they hold their hostages and force Israel to have to strike them while they hide behind civilians, the more blame Israel gets. They have no concern about “innocent civilians” in Gaza; they see them as nothing but expendable tools for retaining their power. If they cared about them, they would’ve spent some of the billions in aid that Gaza has received over the years on things like food, schools and hospitals instead of weapons and terrorist tunnels. Second, her remarks showed that she shares the muddled thinking of leftist protesters, claiming that “the war in Gaza is not a binary issue” (nothing is with this crowd, apparently), so “let us condemn anti Semitism, Islamophobia, and hate of any kind.” Again, she’s suggesting that both sides are equally to blame for the violence. No, Hamas staged one of the most barbaric, unprovoked attacks in history on Israel on October 7th, slaughtering, torturing and raping innocent Israelis. That’s called an “act of war” for a reason, and when you do something like that, you had better be prepared to get obliterated. Third, sending the message that the White House is appeasing its terrorist-supporting nutjob wing further encourages Hamas to keep retaining its hostages and refusing to surrender and call a ceasefire. Netanyahu complained of how Harris’ comments have made the entire situation more dangerous and a ceasefire less likely. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/netanyahu-reportedly-upset-harris-over-vps-israel-remarks-white-house-pushes-back Finally, could someone please tell Kamala Harris that she is NOT the President? Speaking as if she is while making such dumb and dangerous comments signals to Hamas, Iran and all our enemies that nobody knows who’s in charge at the White House, but whoever it is, they don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing. Related: I suppose I should mention that Netanyahu also met with that Biden guy who’s still hanging around for some reason, acting like a king and leering at people. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/netanyahus-meeting-lame-duck-us-president-was-inconsequential-anyone-expected Here’s more on Harris’ doublespeak speech from Matt Vespa at Townhall.com: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/07/26/kamala-harris-speech-on-the-gaza-war-was-a-gross-doublespeak-exercise-n2642560

[txxfiles]

hello?

I don't know what to write about this month! so I’m just going to stream of consciousness and see where we go. 

I was going to write about my holiday but I started a travel journal and did like 2 days and then was so exhausted every night that I didn’t do it! It was an amazing holiday tho, like once in a lifetime sorta shit. it was a bit hit and miss if we would even go but we did and it was wonderful and I appreciated having so much time with my brother as I miss him. It was so full on tho like it was a group tour thing and it was like go go go and we walked 20 thousand steps one day bc my brother and I were like ‘Yeah sure we’ll climb that mountain with u no stress’ and then basically got lapped by the American women over 60 who came with us lmao. I was so careful as well with putting on suncream and shit and I STILL got burnt!!! the curse of being so fair burdens me every day. I am mostly nicely tanned and the redness has gone down so we chill but it’s so funny bc everyone else in my family is so nicely tanned and then there's a tomato girl walking around with them. my freckles have come back tho so that's nice. 

it gave me a lot of time with my thoughts tho, which I hate. Also being forced to spend that much time with my parents is always interesting. the other people in our group were telling them how good of a job they did raising myself and my brother which always makes me feel weird. I don’t think the good parts of my personality have come from my parents, I often value all the bad things about it to them which may seem harsh but my instinctual politeness and willingness to help wasnt fostered by them teaching it to me, it came from fear of getting yelled at if i wasn't this way and getting in trouble for doing anything other than cutting myself in half to do what was asked of me. I hate the person I become when I spend so much time with them as well like I become so angry and snappy and my tolerance for shit just plummets and I come home and it’s like a wave of relief because I feel so much calmer instantly. And then the next minute I feel awful for not seeing them very often and like guilty for having my own life and actually enjoying not seeing them very often. My mother makes a point of talking about not seeing me and missing me and I struggle to wrap my head around the idea of them missing me because when I see them they don’t talk to me! they don’t ask me shit they just take it in turns complaining about the other to me and I’m sat in the middle with my head in my hands wanting to die! I told them both at separate points that I wasn't getting involved and then got the silent treatment and I was just soooooo doneeeeeeee. I’m so grateful I could go on the trip and the highlights totally outweigh the bad bits but it’s hard to remember the good parts when the last 4 days were spent in a state of tension and arguments that I couldn't walk away from because there was nowhere to go! it’s like a constant battle of being grateful and then being annoyed over and over again and I don’t know how to deal with it so I just don’t! 

Going away with your family at my age is weird as well. my brother and I look very young so everyone else in the group very much assumed we were younger than we are which was funny and I guess a blessing. no shame in it but one of the other ppl in our group wasn't much older than me and she’s married with a house and a stable job and I just sat there like ahahahahahaaaaaaaaa. I know it’s bad to compare yourself to others and I’ve gotten better at not doing it but in situations like that, it’s hard. I said last time how I feel like I’m behind everyone and that's still stuck. I’m not doing bad per se but I’m not really making any money and I’m no closer to starting the career I want and that’s not for lack of trying like I keeeeeep applying for jobs and getting turned down on no response at all and it hurts. I worked so hard for my degree and some days it feels like it was for nothing. I know something will come up soon but the waiting is slowly killing me. 

I didn’t smoke the entire holiday either as I couldn’t because my parents don’t need another reason to be disappointed in me and now I’m back in the UK I can’t afford to buy any cigs but GOD DO I WANT SOME PLEASE. I know it’s bad for u and shit but I just want a little treat. I didn’t miss it when I was away and because I literally couldn't get any it didn’t even really cross my mind bc I was so busy but now I’m back and the corner shop is 5 minutes away i’m like uwu yes pls gimme the lil death stick. I think that's one of my biggest issues, if something is within my reach I literally cannot deny myself it. goes for food, people, drinks whatever, if I can get it I’ll have it even if it’s not a sensible thing to do within the budget I have. I think it stems from my childhood but I’m not getting into that right now. 

In other news, I’m actually having a birthday party for the first time since I was a kid!!! wooo!!! hopefully, I won’t cry this birthday other than from happiness!!!! everyone I’ve asked is well keen as well so I was like yay amazing! and then one of my mates whom my relationship with is so complicated I wouldn’t even know where to start was like ‘Yeah sure I’ll come’ and I was like fab ok and then the NEXT TIME he messaged me he was like ‘oh it’s the FOOTBALL FINAL SO I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN COME’?????????????? HELLO???????????? I’m honestly fuming. I get it, your team might not get to the final again fine whatever but the matches are like in the afternoon so u could still come after???? oh my apologies for thinking I, your friend or whatever whom you have been through an insane amount of shit with, might be A BIT MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE FUCKING FOOTBALL???? I hate men oh my god I’m actually mad and maybe that's selfish but what the fuck. I’m currently leaving him on delivered because I’m not about to start shit between us for the millionth time but considering the conversation we had about new years and how he had fomo you would think he’d wanna come but no. If he does end up changing his mind I’m so tempted to be like ‘nah don’t bother’ but that goes against every single particle of my being so WE’LL SEE. if he tries anything imma whack him (probably) but regardless, it should be fun and it’ll be nice to see all my friends in one place and shit. I’m very nervous about it bc I’m convinced no one will come but everyone I’ve asked has been enthusiastic so hopefully, it goes well. hopefully. I don’t want another birthday where I end up feeling upset or like a burden or whatever. thinking about it reminded me of one birthday I had where my so-called friend made out with the guy I liked when we were in the cinema knowing full well I liked him. good vibes!!! 

anyway, that’s me! once again not particularly positive but I’ve realised I use this as a way to get things off my chest I’m not sure how to properly talk about in person. which I think is kinda the point of this anyway. but regardless, I’m tanned and travelled and back to the grind like the alpha male I am. 

peace out homies

eucalyptus ᡣ • . • 𐭩 ♡