#but I have such a good support system here

[garpen]

Ugh can you imagine him a bit older in this timeline too? Like in his 40s

He has no reason in this timeline to hide his intelligence. He didn't drop from med-school. He properly took control of the company after some time, giving his father the opportunity to retire.

Maybe he even has a sibling! He was only 8 when his parents past so that's not far-fetched (I have a siblings with a 16 yr age difference and an 8 year difference ). Bruce can be a doctor AND eventually run the company just like his father.

He's probably married at this point, and was able to have kids in a more "traditional" way.

Bruce is fulfilled and happy, and he doesn't feel like he's missing anything. He has his parents, sibling, wife, kids, a healthy social life and career, and gives back to his community the only way he knows how.

Now imagine the Batfam see's Bruce. Alfred, Thomas, and Martha. Bruce's sibling. Bruce's wife and kids (probably nieces and nephews too). All at a Sunday Family dinner. All happy, and chatting away, laughing, and just genuinely enjoying themselves. Never having seen Bruce seem so light before. And happy, no worries.

And Bruce still does good in the world through his philanthropy, but it's not enough for Gotham. Nobody to stop the villains. Sure there are vigilantes who popped up here and there in Gotham but without the backing of Batman and by extension the Batfam (through finances, connections, training, support and protection) they never last long.

Not to mention where would the Batfam be in this timeline?

Dick would have been groomed by the talons. Jason would have been lost in the system and likely followed in his father's footsteps. Tim wouldn't have a support system after his parents deaths. Stephanie would have still been a vigilante because of her father, but likely would have actually died. Cass wouldn't have had someone to go to after leaving her father, nothing to aspire to and no support system. Damian wouldn't even exist. Barbara and Duke are likely to be okay, living relatively normal lives in Gotham. But none of them would have Batman or eachother as support.

Without Batman there is no Batfam. Because Bruce helped train SO MANY. So even if he didn't directly do something, the people he trained definitely have saved lives/the world. And without him helping train them, those lives would never have been saved.

And the JL? So many missions completed because of Batman. Sure, maybe they would have figured things out without him, but would they have as quickly without him? How many more casualties would there have been?

Gotham and the world still exist and function without Batman, but it'd be more damaged. Worse off.

And the Batfam kids have to decide whether they're prepared to rip away their father from genuine happiness for the betterment of the world.

Oh AND! Idk if anybody has seen the show The Orville, but there's a scene where a character gets misplaced in time and creates a timeline that was never supposed to exist by having a wife and kid. So they need to fix it so I can also imagine the same thing playing out here:

They confront Bruce in this timeline and try and convince him to become Batman, but it doesn't work. This Bruce doesn't have the drive or experience for it. The kids HAVE to change the timeline. And Bruce knows it.

Bruce begs them not to that he has a wife and child, parents, Alfred, his sibling. That he's happy. And that the Batfam is cruel for attempting to destroy his life.

"Richard! I'm begging you...please don't do this! Please don't take my family away! Jesus Christ if you have any shred of decency, please don't do this!"

But the kids do it. They go back and make sure Martha and Thomas die in the alleyway like they were meant to. And when the timeline is fixed they return to their own Bruce.

And Bruce tells them that they did the right thing. But the kids know, They know they ruined their father's happiness.

Anyways here's the scenes I'm talking about for better imagining:

https://www.tumblr.com/funklope/783379911159218176?source=share

Time Travel Batfamily fic idea, but instead of your typical "the world is worse" or "something is still missing" tropes, a world where Bruce's parents don't die and he doesn't become Batman is an objectively happier, better world -- at least, for Bruce it is.

Bruce Wayne is a charming, intelligent young 20-something who went to Yale or Harvard or somewhere equally impressive. He works for his father at Wayne Enterprises and has taken over as the "face" of their charity work. His parents are alive and well. Alfred is the head of a happy, busy household.

Bruce Wayne himself isn't missing a mission. He is fulfilled by the work he does at WE and for the Wayne Foundation. He has a deep sense of justice and fairness, and he uses it day to day. He isn't "missing" anything, in that sense.

But Gotham is missing Batman. The philanthropy isn't enough, because it never was. But Bruce Wayne might not realize that, or maybe he doesn't realize his ability to alter that balance. He hasn't seen that violence and pain close-up. He hasn't been driven to the edge of grief, hasn't boiled in his own pain to the point of desperation. He has his family. He has Alfred. He has meaning.

Gotham still suffers. And the Batkids have to grapple with the realization that for their city to be saved, it needs Batman. And you don't get Batman without crippling this Bruce Wayne's life and happiness. Gotham improves when Bruce Wayne's life falls apart. And you have to be the one to do that to your father, to right the timelines. You have to reach out for this happy, lighter version of your father and tell him to sacrifice more. To lose even more, and still it's not enough.

This is the man they always wanted as a father. He isn't laden by grief or anger. He is so light, so beautiful, so beloved by this city. And yet, it isn't enough.

[jungkoode]

ALTARS IN SHALLOW WATERS | 03

➔ PAIRING: Taehyung x Y/N (ballerina x stalker AU)

➔ MOODBOARD

➔ RATING: Mature, 18+, explicit themes and content.

➔ DATE POSTED: May 12, 2025.

➔ SUMMARY: Altars crumble faster in shallow water. But he still knelt like it was sacred. No one ever warned you that worship could look like love. Or that love could look like drowning.

➔ TAGS: second person perspective, female reader, ballerina!Y/N, stalker!taehyung, obsessive devotion, psychological tension, fixation, worship dynamics, Paris setting, religious imagery, voyeurism, sacred/profane dichotomy, slow burn, touch starvation, ritualistic behavior, gradual corruption, power dynamics, mirror imagery, water symbolism, sensory details, clean/unclean fixation, contamination OCD, professional dancer, self-destructive patterns, compulsive behavior, unhealthy coping mechanisms, possessive tendencies, praise addiction, spiritual yearning, toxic attraction, dangerous adoration, self-loathing, body discipline, mental health issues, self-harm, mental deterioration, unresolved sexual tension (for now).

➔ CONTENT in this chapter: bruising, self punishing, self harm, cleansing one self, ocd portrayal, stressful situations, psych sessions, public healthcare portrayal in the mental health realm

➔ AUTHOR’S INTRO AND TRIGGER WARNINGS

➔ MASTERLIST | TAGLIST REQ | WORDCOUNT: 3,6k

➔ A/N: HELLO. WELCOME BACK TO THIS NIGHTMARE. Kiki Nation is THRIVING. And by thriving, I mean crumbling under the weight of my own pacing choices. That’s right. You thought you were getting plot? ACTION? MOVEMENT? Wake up, babe. This is Kiki Nation, and here? We move like anxiety on a Sunday night—slow, painful, and entirely internal. But listen… listen. Jokes aside (kind of), this chapter is actually doing a lot even if it looks like nothing is happening. I love writing scenes like this because, while it feels still on the surface, the psychological current is raging underneath. What’s being said without being said? What’s slipping through the cracks? What isn’t Taehyung allowing himself to articulate because if he did, it would crack him open? That’s what this is about. It’s tension. It’s claustrophobia. It’s the mind eating itself alive. We’re diving deep into the obsessive-compulsive loops here—realistic ones. I researched this thoroughly, not only as someone who lives with neurodivergence, but as someone who respects how complex OCD truly is. It’s not just “I like things clean” or “haha I’m quirky about numbers.” OCD is a deeply distressing, all-consuming, reality-warping condition that demands ritual to relieve unbearable tension, even when you know it makes no logical sense. You KNOW it’s irrational. That’s the point. But the alternative feels worse. And that’s what I wanted to capture. The thing about trauma—especially when you’re neurodivergent—is that your brain will cling to anything that feels controllable when real life becomes overwhelming. And sometimes, those fixations grow teeth. What starts as “I need to clean this” becomes “If I don’t, I am disgusting. I am dangerous. I will harm something I care about.” That’s not aesthetic. That’s hell. And yeah… Dr. Bernard trying so hard but still being limited by time, funding, caseloads… It’s a subtle nod to the very real way public healthcare systems stretch mental health care to its absolute breaking point. Because if Taehyung had money? He’d have private therapy, trauma-informed care, daily support. But no. He gets 45 minutes in a tile-counting room twice a month and a prescription that might not even be enough. It’s not fair, and that’s kind of the point. For legal reasons, this is a joke!!! 🥰 (But is it?) So yeah. I hope you’re paying attention to the mirror. The numbers. The language he uses. The way he doesn’t trust reality itself. There’s a reason this chapter feels repetitive. There’s a reason he keeps looping. And if you felt trapped reading it—good. You’re right where I wanted you. (affectionate)Thank you for reading and for trusting me to tell a story that digs a little deeper than surface-level trauma bait. Your comments and support mean everything to me. I read every single one. See you in the next chapter where… oh. Oh no. Yeah. See you there. (awkward finger guns)

➔ SERIES : PREVIOUS | NEXT

KIKI NATION’S DISCUSSION THREAD FOR THIS CHAPTER

PLAYLIST

Purple blooms beneath thumb pad. 

Bruises beneath his finger.

Taehyung presses harder, watching skin darken under pressure. 

Pain flares, then dulls. Not enough. Never enough to convince himself that yesterday was real.

He sits on the edge of his mattress, counting breaths. 

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. 

The apartment smells of bleach and nothing else. 

(bleach, he needs to bleach the r—bleach—it’s dirty, he needs bleach)

No food. No life. Just chemical purity and the faint must of walls that never fully dry.

You were there. In his store. Breathing his air.

(impossible impossible impossible)

His fingers find another patch of unmarked skin along his forearm. 

Pinch. Twist. Hold until capillaries burst and blood pools beneath the surface. 

The pain grounds him in reality, but reality itself has become suspect.

How could you exist in the same grimy corner of Paris where he scrubs floors and straightens shelves? How could something so clean touch something so dirty?

Your scent lingers in his memory—sweet almond, rose, powdered sugar. 

Macarons. 

(macarons, macaronsmacaronsmacarons)

The kind sold in patisseries where everything costs too much and the staff watches him like he might pocket something.

He's never wanted macarons before. Never craved anything sweet.

Now his mouth waters at the memory.

(disgusting filthy unworthy)

Seven new bruises track up his arm like stepping stones. 

Evidence that he exists. That yesterday existed. That you might have seen him—really seen him—even through the curtain of hair he uses to hide.

The thought makes his stomach lurch.

He stumbles to the bathroom, falls to his knees before the toilet. Nothing comes up. He hasn't eaten since yesterday morning. Just water. Just enough to keep his body functioning.

The tile is cold against his forehead as he counts again. 

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. Again. Again. Until the nausea passes.

You'd asked him a question. Spoken directly to him. Your voice precise as cut glass.

‘Why are you helping me?’

He hadn't answered. Couldn't answer. What could he possibly say?

Because your knees shouldn't touch this filthy floor.

Because you're too perfect for this place.

Because I'm not worthy to watch you bend.

The memory of your cotton pads—the dented package he'd first grabbed, the horror that had seized him when he saw the imperfection—makes his fingers twitch. He'd found you a perfect one. Undamaged. Clean. 

It mattered so much in that moment, more than breathing.

He drags himself up from the bathroom floor. Crosses to the sink. Turns the water as hot as it will go and plunges his hands beneath the stream.

The burn is good. Clean. Skin reddens instantly.

He scrubs with the rough side of a sponge until his palms are raw. Until he can't feel the phantom touch of the cotton pad package he handed you. Until he can't remember the way your fingers almost—almost—brushed his gloved ones.

Gloves. He'd been wearing gloves. Thank god. Thank god.

(still dirty still contaminated still worthless)

The mirror above his sink is spotless. He keeps it that way, though he rarely looks into it. Now he forces himself to meet his own eyes.

Dark circles. Hollow cheeks. Hair too long, falling across his face in messy blindish waves.

He looks like a ghost. A shadow. Nothing substantial enough to exist in your world.

Yet you'd looked at him. Tried to see his face. Asked him a question in that voice like winter air.

His stomach clenches again, but differently. Not nausea this time. Something worse. Something like hunger, but not for food.

Macarons.

The word loops in his mind, sweet and forbidden. He wants to taste them now. Wants to know if they taste like you smell. Wants to dissolve them on his tongue and pretend he's breathing the same air that touches your skin.

The thought is so profane it makes him dizzy.

He stumbles back to his bed. Sits on the edge again. Pinches another spot on his arm, harder this time. The pain blooms bright, then fades too quickly.

You'd looked back at him from the doorway. Caught him watching. Your eyes narrowed slightly, calculating. Seeing.

No one sees him. No one notices. He's made sure of it for years.

But you had.

His phone buzzes. Work in an hour. The convenience store waits, its floors already collecting new grime, new evidence of human existence that he'll need to erase.

Will you come back? The question terrifies and exhilarates him.

(come,come you have to comeback)

He should pray you don't. Should beg whatever god might listen to keep you away from his dirty corner of Paris. Away from his contaminated existence.

Instead, he finds himself hoping. Desperately, pathetically hoping.

The bruises on his arm throb in time with his pulse. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. Evidence that yesterday was real. That you were real.

That maybe, just maybe, you'll be real again today.

Persistent. 

The word hangs in stale office air. Taehyung's fingers twitch against his thigh.

Twenty-six tiles. Wrong number. Wrong pattern. Wrong room. His eyes trace the edges where white grout meets ceramic, counting again in case he missed one. Twenty-six. Still wrong.

(wrong wrong wrong fix it fix it)

"Taehyung? I asked if your contamination fears are still persisting."

Dr. Bernard's voice is distant as a radio playing three rooms away as it filters through the fog. The man sits across from him, pen poised over a notepad that's seen too many patients. His colorful socks peek beneath gray trousers—today they're yellow with small blue bicycles. 

Taehyung notices this instead of meeting his eyes.

"Yes." The word scrapes his throat. Dry. Unused. 

How long has he been sitting here?

"And the medication? You're taking it regularly?"

Taehyung nods. 

Paroxetine. Forty milligrams. White oval pill. Bitter when it touches his tongue if he doesn't swallow fast enough. He takes it every morning at 7:07. Never 7:06. Never 7:08.

(seven seven seven)

"Good, good." Dr. Bernard makes a note. The pen scratches paper like insects crawling. "And the cleaning rituals? Any improvement there?"

Twenty-six tiles. 

The pattern is wrong. 

If he could just add two more, it would be twenty-eight. Seven times four. Perfect. 

His fingers curl into his palm, nails digging half-moons.

"About the same."

Dr. Bernard sighs. Not an impatient sigh. A tired one. The sigh of a man with sixty-three other patients. Taehyung counted the files once when the secretary stepped away. Sixty-four including him. Too many. Not enough time.

"You mentioned last time you were using bleach on your hands again." Dr. Bernard taps his pen against the notepad. 

Tap-tap-tap. 

Not seven taps. Irregular. Unpredictable. 

“Is that still happening?"

The bleach burns. Burns means clean. Clean means safe. Safe means—

(he won't contaminate you)

Taehyung blinks.

Where did that thought come from?

"Sometimes." His voice sounds hollow even to himself. "When it's necessary."

Dr. Bernard's glasses slip down his nose. He pushes them up with his middle finger, a gesture Taehyung has seen forty-seven times in their sessions together. 

Always the middle finger. Never the index. Never the thumb.

"And what makes it necessary, Taehyung?"

You. Your perfect skin. Your clean leotard. The way you move like water, untouched by the filth of this city.

But he can't say that. Hasn't told Dr. Bernard about you. About the mirror. About the convenience store. About yesterday when you spoke to him and the world tilted on its axis.

"Dirt." The answer is inadequate. He knows this. "Contamination."

Dr. Bernard waits for more. The clock on the wall ticks. Not seven ticks per minute. Sixty. 

Wrong number.

"I see." Dr. Bernard writes something down. "And have there been any changes in your routine lately? Anything new?"

You. 

You are new. You with your rose-macaron scent and perfect posture. You who looked at him—really looked—and didn't immediately turn away.

"No." The lie tastes metallic.

"Taehyung." Dr. Bernard sets his pen down. Leans forward slightly. His chair creaks. "We've been meeting for three years now. I'd like to think I know when something's changed."

Three years. Thirty-six months. Not a multiple of seven. 

Wrong.

"Nothing important." Another lie.

Through the thin wall, he hears another doctor's voice. A woman laughing. Someone crying. The Centre Médico-Psychologique never has enough space, enough privacy, enough time. His forty-five minutes will end in seventeen more. Then Dr. Bernard will see someone else. Someone whose problems might be fixable.

"I've increased your sessions on your Carte Vitale authorization." Dr. Bernard slides a paper across the desk. "Twice monthly instead of once. I think it could help."

Taehyung stares at the paper. The government seal. The stamps. The signature. 

So much bureaucracy to fix a broken mind. 

As if more sessions in this room with twenty-six tiles will stop him from scrubbing his skin raw after thinking of you.

"Thank you." 

He doesn't reach for the paper. His hands are dirty. Always dirty.

Dr. Bernard's phone buzzes. He glances at it, then back at Taehyung. 

“I'm sorry, I need to take this. Just a moment."

As Dr. Bernard steps outside, Taehyung's eyes drift back to the floor. 

Twenty-six tiles. He could fix it. Break two into halves. Make twenty-eight. Seven times four. Perfect.

(break them break them make it right)

His foot hovers over the tile nearest his chair. One stomp might crack it. 

Fix the pattern. Fix the room. Fix him.

But he doesn't move. Just counts again. And again. And again.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven.

Dr. Bernard returns, tucking his phone away. "Sorry about that. Where were we?"

Taehyung's foot settles back on the floor. Twenty-six tiles. Still wrong. Still broken.

Like him.

"They're wrong."

The words escape before Taehyung can swallow them back. His tongue feels thick, disconnected from his brain.

Dr. Bernard leans forward. "What's wrong, Taehyung?"

"The tiles." His finger points downward, trembling. "Twenty-six. Wrong number."

(wrong wrong wrong fix it fix it)

Dr. Bernard follows his gaze to the floor, brow furrowing. Understanding dawns slowly across his face. He sets his notepad aside and kneels, running a finger along the grout lines.

"The tiles—there are twenty-six. Should be twenty-eight." Taehyung's voice cracks. "Seven times four. Or at least twenty-seven. Has a seven in it." 

His heel bounces against the floor. Up-down-up-down. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. Again. The rhythm keeps him tethered when his mind threatens to float away.

Dr. Bernard stands, retrieving a black marker from his desk. Without hesitation, he kneels again and draws a thick line across one tile, dividing it neatly in half.

"There," he says. "Twenty-seven tiles now. Contains a seven."

The marker squeaks against ceramic. 

The line isn't perfectly straight. 

Doesn't matter. 

The number matters. Twenty-seven. Has a seven. Better.

Taehyung's breathing slows. The pressure behind his eyes eases.

"I'm sorry," Dr. Bernard says, returning to his chair. "I've been seeing you for three years. I should have noticed sooner." 

He gestures vaguely around the room. 

“They just changed my office last month. I didn't think to count the tiles before you came in."

Three years. Thirty-six months. One hundred fifty-six sessions. And Dr. Bernard still doesn't understand that everything must be counted. Everything must be checked. Everything must be right.

But he tried. He fixed it. Drew a line. Made twenty-seven.

(better better better not perfect but better)

"Thank you," Taehyung whispers.

Dr. Bernard nods, uncapping his pen again. 

"You mentioned nothing had changed in your routine. But something in your face tells me otherwise." His voice softens. "Sometimes change can trigger episodes like this. Even good changes."

Taehyung's fingers find each other, twisting. Counting knuckles. 

"I found something." The words feel strange in his mouth. Heavy. Dangerous.

Dr. Bernard waits. Patient. 

The clock ticks. The newly-divided tile stares up at them both.

"A window." Taehyung continues. "At work. Behind the storage room."

"At the convenience store?"

Taehyung nods. "Two days ago. Needed cleaning supplies. Went to the back room. Not the main storage. The other one. Where they keep replacements."

His sentences fragment. Break apart like the tile on the floor. 

He can't help it. 

The memory is too bright, too sharp.

"Nobody goes there. Dusty. Dirty."

(filthy filthy filthy)

"And you found a window?" Dr. Bernard prompts.

"Not a window. A mirror." Taehyung's throat constricts. "But it's not a mirror. It's a window. One-way. Looks into the building next door."

Dr. Bernard makes a note. "The building next door to your store is...?"

"Ballet academy." The word 'ballet' feels sacred on his tongue. Too pure for his mouth. "Practice room. Empty usually. But not that day."

His heartbeat accelerates. 

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. 

Faster now. 

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven.

"Someone was there?" Dr. Bernard asks.

Taehyung closes his eyes. Sees you immediately. Your reflection in the mirror as you practiced. Arms extended. Back straight. Perfect. Clean. Untouchable.

"A dancer." 

He can't bring himself to say more. Can't describe the way you moved like water. 

The way your reflection caught in the dirty glass and somehow remained untainted. 

The way he stood, frozen, watching for twenty-seven minutes before his manager called his name.

"I see." Dr. Bernard makes another note. "And this discovery upset your routine?"

Upset. Such a small word for the earthquake that destroyed his carefully constructed world.

"I went back. Yesterday." The confession burns his throat. "After work. Before closing."

Dr. Bernard nods encouragingly. "To see this dancer again?"

Taehyung's nails dig into his palms. "Yes."

"And did you?"

The memory floods back. Not through the mirror this time. Face to face. 

You, entering the convenience store minutes before closing. 

You, scanning shelves with precise movements. 

(dirty dirty dirty can't touch can't let you touch)

"Yes." His voice barely audible now. "She came into the store."

The pronoun feels wrong. Inadequate. You are not a 'she.' You are something else. Something more. Something clean in a filthy world.

"Did you speak to her?" Dr. Bernard asks.

Taehyung shakes his head. Then nods. Then shakes again. "She spoke to me."

The memory of your voice makes his skin prickle. Cut glass. Winter air. Perfect diction.

"What did she say?"

"Asked why I was helping her." His eyes find the divided tile again. Twenty-seven now. Better. "I picked up her cotton pads. Found her a new package. Undamaged one."

Dr. Bernard writes something down. "And how did that make you feel? This interaction?"

Feel? How could he possibly explain? 

The terror. The exhilaration. The certainty that he was contaminating something perfect just by existing in your presence.

"Wrong," he finally says. "I felt wrong."

"Wrong how?"

"Dirty." The word tastes like copper. "She's clean. Perfect. I'm..." 

He gestures at himself. His stained uniform. His raw hands. His existence.

"Taehyung, have you ever heard of religious scrupulosity?"

The question hangs in the air. Taehyung's fingers freeze mid-count against his thigh.

"It's a form of OCD where someone becomes fixated on moral or religious purity. They develop intense fears about contaminating sacred things or being unworthy in a spiritual sense."

Taehyung stares at the divided tile. Twenty-seven. 

His throat closes. Words retreat, curling back inside where they're safe.

(not religious not that simple not that)

Dr. Bernard waits. The silence stretches between them like a thread pulled too tight. When Taehyung doesn't respond, he tries again.

"I'm not suggesting this is exactly what's happening. Just that there might be similarities in how you're viewing this dancer."

Taehyung's jaw tightens. His teeth grind together. The sound fills his skull. Drowns out Dr. Bernard's voice. Drowns out everything except the memory of you. 

Perfect posture. Clean lines. Untouched by the filth surrounding you.

"She's just a person," Dr. Bernard says gently. "A talented dancer, perhaps, but human. Like everyone else."

Wrong. So wrong. 

You're not like everyone else. Not like him. Not dirty. Not broken. Not wrong.

Taehyung shakes his head. Once. Twice. 

Seven times.

"Taehyung?" Dr. Bernard leans forward. "Are you still with me?"

Words scatter like roaches when light hits them. He can't catch them. Can't form them. His tongue feels swollen, useless. He manages a nod.

"I'm not concerned about you seeing someone dance twice," Dr. Bernard clarifies. "That's perfectly normal. I'm interested in how intensely it seems to have affected you."

(not normal never normal nothing normal)

"You helped her pick up some cotton pads. That's a kind gesture, not contamination."

Taehyung's hands curl into fists. Dr. Bernard doesn't understand. Can't understand. Hasn't seen you. Hasn't felt the wrongness of his existence next to yours.

"Not..." The word scrapes his throat. "Not kind."

"No? What was it then?"

"Necessary." Another word claws its way out. "Had to."

Dr. Bernard makes a note. The pen scratches paper. Seven scratches. Taehyung counts them.

"Had to protect her from the dirty floor?"

Taehyung nods. His chest tightens. The room shrinks. Twenty-seven tiles. Focus on the tiles.

"Taehyung, I've known you for three years. Your contamination fears typically center on yourself—protecting yourself from outside dirt. This seems different."

Different. Yes. 

Everything is different now. The world tilted when he first saw you through that grimy one-way mirror. Tilted further when you walked into the store. Spoke to him. Looked at him.

"Let's back up," Dr. Bernard suggests. "Tell me about finding this mirror."

Taehyung's eyes close. Behind them, he sees the storage room. Dust motes floating in stale air. Cardboard boxes stacked haphazardly. The wall that wasn't a wall.

"Cleaning." His voice barely audible. "Needed bleach."

"For the store?"

A nod.

"And you found this mirror in the storage room?"

"Back room." The distinction matters. "Not main storage. Nobody goes there."

"And through this mirror, you could see into the ballet academy next door?"

"Practice room." The words come easier now. Focused on facts. Not feelings. "Empty usually. But not then."

"And you saw this dancer practicing."

"Yes."

"For how long did you watch?"

Taehyung's fingers twitch. "Twenty-seven minutes." 

The truth slips out before he can stop it.

Dr. Bernard's eyebrows rise slightly. "You counted?"

"Always count." 

"And then what happened?"

"Manager called. Had to go back."

"But you returned the next day?"

Shame burns his cheeks. He nods.

"And then she came into your store?"

"Before closing." The memory floods back. "Accident."

"The cotton pads?"

"Yes."

"And you helped her."

"Had to." His voice cracks. "Floor is dirty. She's not."

Dr. Bernard studies him. "Taehyung, when was the last time you spoke to someone outside of work or these sessions?"

The question catches him off guard. He blinks. Tries to remember. Can't.

"This connection you feel—" Dr. Bernard chooses his words carefully "—it might be intensified by isolation. Human beings need interaction."

(not human not normal not worthy)

"I'm not suggesting anything inappropriate is happening," Dr. Bernard continues. "Just that your reaction seems disproportionate to two brief encounters."

Disproportionate. As if there could be a proportionate response to witnessing divinity in a convenience store.

"She's clean," Taehyung whispers. The only truth that matters.

"Everyone seems clean to someone who feels contaminated, Taehyung."

Taehyung flinches. His vision tunnels. The twenty-seven tiles blur. His breathing quickens. 

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. Too fast. Too shallow.

"I think we should focus on your isolation in our next session," Dr. Bernard says, glancing at the clock. "And perhaps revisit your medication dosage."

Taehyung doesn't respond. Can't. Words have abandoned him completely now. 

His mind retreats to the only safe place it knows—counting. Tiles. Breaths. Heartbeats. 

Seconds until he can leave this room with its wrong-then-fixed floor and return to his apartment where everything is arranged in sevens and nothing beautiful exists to be contaminated by his presence.

Dr. Bernard sighs. Not impatient. Sad. "Our time is almost up. Is there anything else you want to tell me about these encounters?"

Taehyung stares at his raw hands. 

What could he possibly say? That when you looked at him, really looked, something inside him recognized something inside you? That for one brief moment, he felt seen instead of invisible? That helping you felt like prayer?

He shakes his head.

"Alright." Dr. Bernard stands. "Same time in two weeks, then. And Taehyung?" He waits until Taehyung looks up. "Try to talk to someone. Anyone. Even just to ask the time or comment on the weather. Human connection matters."

Connection. 

As if someone like him could connect with anyone. 

Especially someone like you.

The session ends. Taehyung leaves without speaking again. Steps carefully over the divided tile. Twenty-seven now. Better. Not perfect.

Like him.

goal: 250 notes

taglist: @cannotalwaysbenight @taevescence @itstoastsworld @somehowukook @stutixmaru @chloepiccoliniii @kimnamjoonmiddletoe @annyeongbitch7 @mar-lo-pap @mikrokookiex @minniejim @curse-of-art @cristy-101 @mellyyyyyyx @rpwprpwprpwprw @billy-jeans23 @calmyourtitts7

© jungkoode 2025.

no reposts, translations, or adaptations

[bossuary]

There's no universe where I accept that Lucanis knows anything about seduction. Sorry.

He recognizes flirting. That's it.

No innuendos, no natural smiles, no mirroring of gestures. He simply doesn't have the range, darling. And how could he? When would he have spent un-structured, non-training time with his peer group in a social setting? What peers? What friends?

To develop comfort and ease with this sort of thing it can't be a single interaction, it has to be repeated, sustained. It has to be iterated upon. There's just...no fucking way Caterina (or anyone in her employ) let Lucanis wander around making friends outside the Crows, or pursuing any of the dumb shit that people naturally pursue to fulfill themselves and be a part of society.

The fledglings probably steal time away to rebel, to goof off and get in trouble. But not Lucanis. Not the First Talon's demon of a grandson. All the knowledge he has, his skills of observation, his contacts...that's work shit. He never went to school with someone who became an accountant or a bricklayer. Never traded silly stories about pets or vacations. His socialization was limited to whatever served the role Caterina assigned to him.

The only reason Lucanis developed 'cooking' as a hobby is because he has to eat anyway, and so does everyone else. You can't get beaten for learning how to feed yourself. His only other hobby is knives. Because he doesn't understand hobbies. He didn't 'train to be an assassin,' he was forced to be THE ASSASSIN. Like, the platonic ideal of an assassin. The wiki entry.

He makes it clear that his life did not allow for personal pursuits. He says it in a lot of ways, sometimes literally but often just in how he reacts to Rook and the others. There wasn't purpose in becoming interested in things just for the fun of it, for self-actualization. Without that, he lost out on the development of interpersonal skills most of us would take for granted.

A non-comprehensive list of things most people learned to do while Lucanis was sweating and starving and not crying out at the impact of Caterina's cane:

how to work with a diverse group of people

how to resolve conflict

how to process failure

how to identify needs and boundaries...and express them

how to engage in social conversation

how to daydream

how to play

how to love

Stuff you would pick up without even realizing it, from your friends and schoolmates, your co-workers...your parents. I don't want to make it seem like I think Lucanis' life was wall-to-wall shit. He is wealthy in a way that is beyond the reach of every companion (save Dorian) we've ever had, across all four DA games. He has a support system. His kindness, humor, and ability to make a place for himself at the Lighthouse post-Ossuary mark him as a man of unimaginable resiliency. So, he must have carved out some goodness in his life.

My point is that the good moments were the exception, and in my view, they wouldn't have given him a foundation on which to build any kind of meaningful experience in terms of desire, seduction, romance, and sex.

He reads a lot! That's helpful. And I credit Lucanis' training for likely giving him a sharp insight on body language and facial expressions. But knowing HOW to read doesn't mean you've understood WHAT you read. Romance novels aren't primers for physical relationships any more than sci-fi books are manuals for technology you just haven't encountered yet.

He's 36 and he's never been on vacation, gone ice-skating, raised a pet companion, or had a relationship. He doesn't know how to send flowers, dress provocatively, or plan a romantic weekend in the countryside. He KNOWS that he doesn't know how. The Lighthouse is full of people who have done these things, and more. Rook included.

HERE, in the pantry, Lucanis moves forward without a single piece of lived experience to guide him. The man who plans his every move six weeks advance, and has a knife for every occasion is absolutely flying blind. What he knows is that he wants Rook (a thing as deep as it is new) and Rook has been so clear about wanting him that even if this goes Wrong, Rook will make it okay, somehow. And I just can't reckon that any version of him as secretly suave and confident is preferable or more alluring than this one: the weird little guy who, deSpite all of the above factors, still fucking Goes For It.

That guy can get it.

[gengor]

I think my most unpopular takes among people who have a more sympathetic view on Edelgard, but enjoy the blue lions characters, is that I don’t think it’s very likely any of them would defect.

While it might be in some of their best interest to defy the kingdom, the blue lions were specifically written as the characters who are inclined to uphold the system.

I just think that a person who chooses to serve an institution that they know is flawed or is actively hurting them is a very real type of person, and is, in fact, the average person irl. I think I’m gonna start doing breakdowns of all the blue lions one by one to explain what I mean by this. I’m gonna go ahead and start with one of my favorite examples— Ingrid.

Part 1: chivalry

“Knights, I suppose. I do what I can to live like one. And I hope to die like one too…when the time comes.” - one of Ingrid’s expedition quotes

Chivalry and Knighthood are very important themes to the azure moon route. And their politics are woven into the fabric of the monarchy. It’s no mistake that Felix is to Dimitri what Ferdinand is to Edelgard, and Lorenz is to Claude.

But while Felix serves as the oppositional character to chivalry, Ingrid foils this by being an embodiment of it.

Ingrid is a character who is hurt by the system as a woman whose family values her solely for her ability to have a richer man’s child. She understands that her life is made worse by her place as a woman, and although she wants to break free of that, she can’t envision anything that isn’t just subjugating herself to a different set of rules. Ingrid strives to be disposable in a male gender role rather than a female one.

She reveres knighthood and the code of honor in death—which is often propped up as an ideal for non royal men. So while her endings where she conforms to gendered expectations are tragic, I would argue that any ending that sees her knighted is also far from a feminist tale.

And I think what a lot of people miss about this aspiration of hers is how glued it is to her grief for Glenn and the subsequent romanticization of Dimitri.

Ingrid is one of the few characters who cannot engage with criticism of Dimitri’s excessive violence. If you seek her during the exploration time within the heights of Dimitri’s recklessness she will never once acknowledge the sinking ship they are all on. For many characters, it’s common that they only retroactively acknowledge Dimitri’s instability after he apologizes and says he wants to do better. Most of the army will give you some sort of acknowledgment that Dimitri hasn’t been a perfect leader during the “kings triumphant return” chapter.

Yet Ingrid never does.

And while she does argue with Dimitri within their supports, it is only because Dimitri expresses discomfort at the rationale that places him on this pedestal to begin with. It is the only thing he can say that she cannot affirm. And toward the end of the support chain, she’s rationalized his aversion to knight codes to fit a more digestible narrative for herself. If Glenn’s death for Dimitri was the gold standard, then it means Dimitri has to be the perfect heir worth protecting with her life. She *has* to figure out how his disagreements with her can fit neatly into the narrative of Glenn’s heroic death. If she doesn’t do this, she would be forced to grapple with the possibility that someone she cared for died tragically without meaning.

I would argue Ingrid is an unreliable narrator to herself here when she claims she has moved on. If her requirements to process death involve retroactively deeming death to be good, then she is still rationalizing a random tragedy.

And this is something we see her do in her last support with Felix. I think there’s a subtle kind of horror in the conclusion of her Felix supports. She could be very well justified in lashing out at him over his repeated misogyny, but what she sees as the most important issue to correct is his aversion to chivalry.

She positions herself in a way that’s hard to combat because she is simultaneously arguing that she is *not* falling in line with any propaganda while also pushing the idea that Glenn died honorably in a way that’s worth imitating. Instead of framing this as a lesson in obedience to authority, she gives more a ‘friendship is magic’ vibe.

But the thing is, Glenn likely *was* influenced by the culture surrounding chivalry. The only characterization we have of him is that he adhered deeply to the ideals of chivalry (Dimitri claims Glenn and she are ‘very alike’ in that regard and Felix tells us that Glenn used to read him knight tales) Glenn was also child soldier, specified to have been around 15 at the time of his death. The man who raised Glenn will also state outright that he would have held his son responsible had he survived.

And it doesn’t appear to just be an isolated instance with Ingrid and Rodrigue. This kind of rhetoric is very common in the kingdom, popping up within npcs as well.

All that’s to say that Ingrid’s desire to become a knight is steeped in her baggage surrounding Glenn and cannot be copy pasted to another country so easily without breaking her character.

Being a knight under a different banner wouldn’t be the same because Ingrid doesn’t want to do many of the questionable things military personal are ordered to do on a regular basis, in fact she has an active aversion to it.

But she views her inclinations to disobey Faerghus authority as the wrong choice, a weakness she ought to instruct out of herself in order to be an ideal knight.

Part 2: Gender

So I see a some criticisms leveled at Ingrid’s character in relation to Glenn that I want to acknowledge.

I think it’s very fair to criticize the idea that she is defined through her grief for a boy she was in an arranged engagement to. I can see why some would write off her character as being just another misogynistic portrayal of a woman and move on.

But I think what saves this plot line (to me) is the implication that she idealized Glenn as someone she wanted to *be* more than marry. I really appreciate that when asked directly about whether she would have married him, she implied that she wouldn’t have.

I think there’s something to be said about the interpretation that Ingrid is an incredibly repressed sapphic or possible aromantic.

The only man she expresses romantic interest in is Dimitri, which is likely an extension of her reverence for him as a royal ideal, more so than it is a genuine interest in him. To me, her expressed interest in him undermines her claim that she has let go of her past idealization of being his knight. She is still prioritizing him first and foremost before herself, which is the heart of the issue.

I think Ingrid as a person is just very susceptible to the idea that she should fulfill some kind of established roll within the existing system instead of breaking free from all of it. This is why she only sees her life as only having two paths forward— knighthood or motherhood.

And even within the latter, which is more widely understood to be regressive, Ingrid will still make excuses for the people who attempt to reduce her to her ability to bear a nobleman’s child.

There’s a lot to be said about her hesitation to condemn her father for putting her within an arranged marriage. And within Houses, I think her Byleth supports, combined with her paralogue, communicate this well. But I think the most blunt example of this can be found in her Mercedes Hope's support

In response to Mercedes asserting that Ingrid’s family loved her unconditionally Ingrid says, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

I think it’s important to assume Ingrid’s perspective on her family is the most reliable account of them. If she says they didn’t love her. They didn’t love her.

She is a woman enduring objectification at the hands of her father. And even if she herself hesitates to name it as abuse that is textually what this was. Mercedes is projecting her own love for her brother onto these men who she has never met before.

Yet even still, her conclusions within many support chains end with her reaffirming a gendered status quo on herself. The same is true of support chains that end in her performing an expectation of femininity.

Part 3: Xenophobia/Racism

So I think Ingrid's racism is not an isolated, uncomfortable trait of hers. It is an extension of her patriotism.

When Glenn died, racism was just one of the multiple propaganda pieces that Ingrid fed herself to create a more digestible narrative.

Within her Dedue supports Ingrid seems to be grappling with the possibility that she was wrong to buy into this narrative. I think it's notable that the only thing that pushes her to reconsider her bigotry against Dedue is that he shares an unhealthy reverence for Dimitri. And within this flawed start-up, she is still expecting a victim to engage with her in an open discussion on whether or not he is a person.

Ingrid seeks to hold him somewhat responsible for not educating her on racism enough. And yeah, I don't have a lot to say on this, it just sucks.

I don't think Ingrid ever fully moves past this bigotry, which is in part due to the creators not actually knowing what an anti racist narrative would look like.

I've said this before, but it's worth stating here too.

Ingrid is far from the only racist person in Fe3h. Most of the narratives around racism end up with the characters reaffirming racism.

But within Ingrid's case, I think it makes narrative sense that she would still show signs of bigotry. Because within all aspects of her life, she doesn't escape the system.

And I know that within her gender, this is the writers themselves doing misogyny. I don't think they intended Ingrid's arc to be a tragic one. And I wouldn't fault anyone for disregarding the narrative value of this on the basis that it's not meant to be tragic. I've personally just come to love the blue lions as accidental tragedies because, regardless of intent, it just feels real. I think Ingrid is one of the few that I could see potentially realizing the flaw in her thinking someday, but it does her writing a disservice to imply that this could be a quick and seamless transition for her.

[bishovapls]

⚠️ MAJOR THUNDERBOLTS SPOILERS AHEAD ⚠️

I’ve taken a moment to collect my thoughts, so this one’s a bit more organised than just me screaming about how much this movie destroyed me. I’ve got a few of these little rants sitting in my drafts, honestly not sure if I’ll post the rest but here’s this one because...Alexei Shostakov is not a good man and I hate that (some) people seem to think that he is.

Spoilers below the cut!

Alexei is not some bumbling, well-meaning father who just made a few mistakes. He’s not misunderstood. He’s not the comedic relief with a heart of gold buried under the bluster. No. He’s a coward. A narcissist. And worst of all, he’s a willing participant in the very system that destroyed Yelena and Natasha from the inside out.

Let’s be clear: That motherfucker gave them to the Red Room. He knew exactly what that place was. He chose to hand over two little girls, two children who trusted him, to a man he knew would brutalise them, rip away their identities, their agency, their futures. And he did it because it suited his goals. His comeback. His glory. That’s what mattered to Alexei. Not the children in his care. Not their safety. Just the chance to wear a red suit again.

And when he sees them again after all those years? He doesn’t apologise. Not immediately anyways. One of the first things out of his mouth isn’t regret, it’s a rant: “I could have been more famous than Captain America. Then he buries me in Ohio. Three years! Boring me to tears. Then prison for the rest of my life.”

As if he was the victim. As if he was the one who suffered most.

No accountability. No acknowledgement that he ruined their lives. No acknowledgement of the scars they carry, the memories they can’t speak aloud. That he was the one who tossed them straight back into Dreykov’s hands. Just ego. Just bitterness.

And when he does talk about the girls? It’s not with love. It’s not with pride in who they are. It’s pride in what they became. “Yelena, the greatest child assassin in the world.” “Natasha, not just a spy...but an Avenger.” He doesn’t see daughters. He sees achievements. Killing machines forged by the very system he sent them into. He doesn’t see the brutality, let alone take responsibility for it. Because in Alexei’s mind, it worked. That’s all that matters.

And then… suddenly he flips? At the end of Black Widow, he starts trying. He says sorry. He wants to be forgiven. And the thing is, he even seems genuine. But it’s not earned. Not even close. Because barely an hour earlier he was whining about being stuck in Ohio.

Then we get to Thunderbolts, and somehow, he’s meant to be this goofy dad again. Rolling up in a limo, talking like he’s here to save the day, when in reality he hadn't spoken to Yelena in over a year before she shows up desperate, barely holding it together, practically begging him for some sense of permission to stop. And he uses it as an opportunity to talk about himself again, about how he’d love to work for Valentina. Still, it’s about what he could be. Not what she needs.

Yes, in Thunderbolts, he tries. He gives a speech. Seems to care, is genuinely trying to be supportive. And okay, fine, he’s not completely useless. He does make an effort.

But even during that big speech when Yelena breaks down, he says he doesn’t see Yelena’s mistakes. And on the surface, that’s kind. But dig deeper? It’s just more of the same. Because to him, her “mistakes” weren’t mistakes at all. She did what she was trained to do. She killed. She was efficient. That’s what matters to Alexei.

The films want us to forget what he did. They want us to laugh with him. To see the warmth. The effort. But they’re asking us to ignore the damage. The betrayal. The fact that he let his daughters burn, and only now wants to hold the ashes like they still belong to him.

And here’s the part that really fucking kills me: Yelena accepts it.

She’s not angry that he gave her to Dreykov. Not angry about the years of torment. No. She’s angry because he didn’t call. Because after pretending to care in Black Widow, he just disappeared again.

And that's even more devastating for her. Because she’s been hurt so many times, by so many people, that even Alexei’s bare minimum, his delayed, fumbled attempt at showing up, is enough for her. She’s been taught to expect nothing, and she’s learned to be grateful for scraps. She’ll take whatever little piece of warmth he offers, and call it love, because she doesn’t know what love without condition looks like.

He was never a father. Not in the way that matters. He was another person who broke her, who gave her away and never looked back. And now, he wants forgiveness. He wants to be seen as someone worthy of redemption.

But forgiveness without accountability is meaningless.

And Alexei? He still doesn’t understand what he did. Not really.

[a-murmur-of-a-prayer]

I am going to move away from my college town, the state I've lived in for almost 20 years, and most of my friends in a week. I've known it was coming for a while, I've known I needed to move out of the state for longer (the climate makes my mental health worse and my town kind of sucks) but now that it's so close I don't know how to feel. On the one hand, this means I will be able to get a longterm job I enjoy, enjoy warmer weather, meet new people and be close to my family...but on the other hand, my friends I have here have sort of become like another family, and I'll be leaving everything I'm used to.

Plus there's the fact that I'm leaving now because I was laid off, so it sort of feels like it's not really my choice.

[stars-obsession-pit]

Hello! Can do a chapter fic off this fic prompt Danny phantom x dc: https://www.tumblr.com/corkinavoid/767516270934556672/dpxdc-legal-power?source=share

This isn’t a one-to-one recreation of that dialogue but it’s based on that as a framework/premise

Batman dropped down into the room behind a pair of figures—a teenage boy and a slumped adult—letting his landing create an audible thump to alert them of his presence.

If the teen noticed, he didn’t react. Even as Bruce approached, he continued to stare impassively at the wheezing figure on the ground, an old wooden bat with flaking green paint on its side loosely held in his right hand. Bruce had already suspected who the figure would be since he arrived, but seeing the Joker so broken was still bizarre. No laughing, no schemes. He didn’t even seem to be attempting to escape his binds, just… lying there, almost as if pinned in place.

Bruce paused a step behind the teen. “I don’t know what the Joker did to you, but this isn’t the right way to go about this.”

The teen scoffed, and Bruce felt a painful lurch in his chest as he was reminded oh so strongly of his son Jason. “And what, let him go kill more people?”

“I know he deserves to face justice, but not like this. Everyone deserves a right to fair trial. No one person should be judge, jury, and executioner.”

The teen turned to look at him with glowing green eyes, and Batman felt himself freeze. He had faced gods before, yet even using that as a comparison felt like an understatement. The boy’s eyes belonged to someone far older than his teenage form implied, and they radiated power. Inevitability.

When the teen—no, the entity—spoke again, his words carried an unearthly echo. “Perhaps, but I’m not acting for just myself.” He paused, glanced down at the Joker, then asked almost conversationally, “Do you know how many people he’s killed?”

Another pause, but before Bruce could even try to answer, the entity continued, “Eight hundred and fifty-six. He’s ended the lives of eight hundred and fifty-six human souls. I can tell you about every single one, if you want. About who they were, what their dreams were before he killed them. About the pain they felt at his hands.”

He punctuated the word ‘pain’ by raising up the wooden bat in his hands and ramming its end down onto the Joker’s arm. He let out a wheeze, muffled by the gag in his mouth.

“I have a duty to my people. I am the King of the In-Between and of all the souls that pass through it—even ones whose stays were as brief as his. I am the rightful arbiter of his fate. And with that power, I sentence him to death.”

He raised the bat again, adjusting his grip so he’d hit with the side rather than the end this time, then paused and let out a chuckle. “Of course, just because it’s based on some justice doesn’t mean I can’t have a bit of fun with it too.” He swung the bat down, slamming it into the Joker’s side, then hooked it under the clown’s torso and flicked him up through the air to slam into the wall. “We all really hate this guy.”

With the entity’s attention fully turned away from him as he sauntered towards the Joker’s slumped figure, Bruce could finally unfreeze himself.

Even if the Ghost King did have the right to pass judgement on Joker, Bruce still couldn’t let torture go on like this. He wouldn’t win a direct fight, but he could hopefully at least grab the Joker and bring him over to the police. Carefully, he reached for some of the smoke bombs and batarangs on his belt and readied his grapple. He’d have to do this very, very fast.

But before he could move, another figure entered the scene. Red Hood, emerging from the shadows on the far side of the room, an unexpected bit of a pep to his step.

“Nice to see someone else who gets that that bastard needs to die. But if I may make a suggestion, how ‘bout you use a crowbar instead of that old bat? It’d be a bit more… fitting.”

[compaculaaa]

Please excuse my attempt at being funny

[firenati0n]

i have been writing words again (slowly!) after so long, and I am so happy because they are:

a) planned, and

b) not born from unimaginable grief and loss and pain, and

c) written in a state of joy and excitement!

It's a slower, steadier, more measured process. But that's not necessarily a bad thing!

chugging right along on my multichap! hoping to start posting in May, if i keep it up. 🥰 Will share words for wip wednesday after [redacted] months. feels strange! feels scary! but mostly, feels good! thanks for sticking around through my highs and lows over the past year. appreciate y'all!!

[ken-katayanagi]

Razputin Vodello Au but it’s Truman on a mission when he’s not even supposed to be doing fieldwork. It’s tracking down Delugeionists because apparently recent photos show them with a baby?? That is very clearly not theirs. It’s Truman scooping up this child, barely more than 6 months old, realizing no one has held them, played with them, comforted them for as long as they’ve been in the Delugeionists grasp.

(Thinking of his own daughter, no more than one, snuggled safe at home in her crib).

It’s Truman finding their blanket discarded in some trash can, Razputin lovingly stitched into its delicately woven corner. It’s him wrapping it around the young boy and taking him home, to a warm bed, to a horde of agents cooing over him because isn’t he so cute, isn’t he so smart?

(Isn’t he so powerful?)

It’s Truman hunting down a family for days. It’s Truman and Hollis arriving with a care package for a family they don’t even know, who might not have even known they have a psychic child, or may not have had one before. (Some telekinesis blocks on twisty mental poles, a fire blanket, a book on how to teach psychic abilities without your own, a pamphlet for a summer camp that he’ll need, given how strong he is even now). It’s Truman almost vomiting at the site of a flame scorched ground, of a campsite left in tatters. The realization that he was too late, before he’d even known that time was running out. (How can he claim to protect psychics if he couldn’t protect them?)

(How can he claim to be able to protect his own family?)

It’s Milla cradling this tiny, perfect boy in her arms and sobbing that she’s not ready, even after all this time. It’s the whole of the Motherlobe taking on the work with her, easing the burden. (You lift us up everyday Carmilla. We will make you feel as light.)

It’s a father and mother, crying in the warm spring air, still mourning a child even after all this time. It’s a family unfindable, because the only way to stay protected is to stay moving. It’s a silent hope in every new town, every slight change in the air, that one day he’ll find his way back home. It’s the sensations that pluck at Augustus’ mind, that make the long healed burn over his right eye throb.

It’s a boy growing up knowing the world is dangerous. It’s that same boy growing up not knowing that that same world loves him so much more than any danger.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

did every hero really follow endeavor's plan during the jail break? I've never watched bnha, but I always figured there were more heros then Japan knew what do with. Was endeavor really just that worried about how the fight again AFO would go? and did AFO have the league with him? or other prison escapees? Given eraserhead was so entrenched?

As a preliminary matter--yes, it was way more than AfO. The League basically did what they did during the USJ arc and subcontracted their violent attacks. They needed a big force to first get AfO and everyone else out of Tartarus, and then they made it very clear (via loudspeaker and also fucking tweet) that they would all be very peacefully retreating while all those criminally insane and violent motherfuckers went that other direction. Ball's in your court as to how you want to tackle it.

AfO was the biggest threat, by fucking far, but it was far from isolated to him. It was the entire League of Villains + Their Very Special Friends. It was the kind of force that would be required to make the entirety of Tartarus fall for the first time in history. So the heroes had plenty to keep them busy.

And as to whether Endeavor was that scared about the next fight with AfO... Yeah.

I think bnha does a good job at establishing that All Might and AfO just exist at entirely different levels than every other person alive. Their fight leveled a decent chunk of Kamino. And I think that's kind of power and devastation is hard to conceptualize as like, people in a world where we don't have to worry about superhero fights. (as a side note--Sukuna's Big Fight in the Shibuya arc from JJK did better than any other fight in media to really capture the sheer cosmic horror of being caught as a bystander in one of those fights).

But endeavor saw it. He was there for AfO’s and All Might’s last fight. The gods were fighting. Everyone else was just an ant.

He is facing the villain that ultimately took down All Might. All Might won Kamino, sure. But he didn't get up again after. He was permanently and irreversibly taken out of play. And Endeavor has spent the last year feeling like he was struggling to be even half of what All Might was with two hours of productivity a day. He was so consistently voted to not be able to compare to All Might that he bought a wife and had four kids about it, all of whom hate him actively.

He does not think he is winning this fight. He is Japan's number one hero. The responsibility is going to fall to Midoriya Izuku to him. He is the best they have left, and the fight that would be coming was one that already nearly killed All Might, the one guy he has never ever been able to compare to. And when he really looked himself in the mirror and asked if he could stop AfO, the answer was no.

And it wouldn't just be AfO if he came back to power. It would be his followers--and he was liable to get more than just the current League of Villains roster. It would mean more Nomus. They could barely handle one Nomu--how could they possibly handle the Nomus, and the LoV, and AfO?

And the answer that he came to was that they couldn't. Not without All Might.

He thought he was sacrificing Yokohama for every single other city AfO was going to level if he had time to grow in strength again. He thought that if they threw absolutely everything they had at him while he was weak, then maybe they could contain him and the League before entire cities fell.

So. That's why he came to that decision. Why did every hero fall into line?

So what’s key to what happened here was it was this complete structural breakdown at exactly the wrong time.

Structural Flaw #1: Transportation

Was it every hero in Japan that responded to Endeavor’s order? No. But not every hero in Japan was available. Any heroes out of the immediate area were too far away to do shit.

But it's a massive crisis. Heroes would commute from all over if they could--but it's not about desire, it's about time and resources. With how imminently emergent the threat was, a lot of far-away heroes would need something like a jet to even conceivably get there in time.

Who is sending the jet?

Let's pin down what heroes could, conceivably, get there in time. Very few heroes are in walking distance. How do heroes typically get from Point A to Point B?

Hero society in bnha is an agency model. There is no communal pool of resources--you have what your agency has. You have a jet to transport you if your agency has the money for one, and I’m pretty sure only all might had that (he has since had it dismantled and the parts repurposed for the sake of the environment. He only had it to begin with so he could quickly respond to imminent threats. All Might thinks there's more than one way to save the world and saving the environment is part of it). Like. We even saw Endeavor flying fucking commercial.

But let's just assume, arguendo, that some agencies have jets. It would have to be the very top agencies to possibly afford it.

All of whom are shown in canon to mostly operate out of the same area. So they're going to have to send the jet somewhere else to get more heroes. Now any travel time is doubled. If they do send it out, how many people are they realistically getting? Are these heroes in multiple different cities? That's more travel time then. Maybe we just land the plane in Kyoto and whoever gets on in the twenty minute period while they're refueling is who is coming back. We'll hand them parachutes and kick them out the plane door over Yokohama. Okay. Good plan. Go team.

Who is sending the jet?

Like, who is physically making the call to send the jet? Who do they call? Do they just start ringing around their buddies and seeing if they have other plans? The city is on fucking fire and we need people fighting now, so the big name heroes don't have time to organize transport with other agencies. They’re not even thinking of that right now. Make it a sidekick's job.

They are all on fucking strike.

Fuck it. Fine. Make it an admin's job. There has to be some kind of office staff who can work a telephone who's available.

Who is thinking to send the jet?

Admins are not making strategic calls about where the company jets go. There would have to be some kind of protocol in place or someone with the authority to send the jet would have to think of it in the moment. And I guarantee you this would not be the case.

Because this is a society where they have canonically semi-privatized public safety and put people in direct competition with each other over it.

ASIDE: The Economic Structure of Heroics and Why It Sucks

I have an economic structure. You must listen to it. I promise it is relevant. This is why it takes me forever to do things it's because i get too deep into the weeds and have to explain the fucking economic structures underpinning the analysis for my nonsense to make sense.

How the fuck do heroes get paid?

I have no idea if canon ever tells us because to be so for real with you guys I have not watched this show in years. I haven’t cared about canon since the Shie Hassaikai arc. The fucking YouTuber arc broke me. I literally never watched it again. If they ever explain to us how heroes get paid I do not know and I do not care. I refuse to go back to canon. Everything I found out about canon after the Shie Hassaikai arc, I learned against my will. The ending to this story was so fucking stupid and I only have a scattered knowledge of the details but I’m still right. If canon ever tries to explain it then please do not tell me, I refuse to learn more things about this show.

But I still like poking around the potential economic structures based on the part of canon that doesn’t cause me psychic damage. So here’s the thought process for the economic underpinnings of hero society in the pez universe.

From canon, we know it can be an enormously lucrative profession, we know that it involves some degree of private interests (re: merch lines), and we know that there are some people who cannot have merch lines (Underground Heroes, e.g. Eraserhead), so there also must be some kind of public funding aspect to it as well. So. Who the fuck signs your paycheck?

Sources of Funding

a. Public Funding

There must be some kind of official governmental budget for heroics. Like. They are very much a public service. There would be no way to have a fully private heroics force without government funding. What else are you supposed to do, fucking Venmo heroes after they save you? Do they put your kitten back in the tree if you don’t have enough.

In my mind, there's public funds allocated to heroes as part of a city's budget. That funding is allotted based on the number of employees in a given entity balanced against the confirmed acts of heroics of that same given entity. There’s a base salary level and that can be increased based on how successful you are, but salary isn’t exclusively what this fund is for. The heroic entity (an individual hero or an Agency) is effectively receiving grant money from the government to run their agency. You put it into salaries, gear, office space, everything. The government is basically investing in heroes, and it’s investing more in heroes who are shown to have a greater positive impact on society.

It involves overly complex calculations regarding the scaled difficulty of a given bust/rescue/act and ranking of the villain (if there is one) and the overall public benefit for the service rendered. You get bonuses for having a lower average property damage, for contributing to community building projects, that kind of thing. It is Complex. There is a lot of paperwork that has to be submitted to strange and vaguely threatening government accountants. When Mirio and Izuku start their agency, they will burst into tears multiple times trying to figure it out once filing season rolls around, bundle all the paperwork in a Massive Tears And Shame Package, mail it off to the shadowy powers at be, and then get a perfunctory notice that they are getting a ludicrous amount of the city budget allotted to their dinky little agency for the upcoming fiscal year because they are Big Fucking Heroes and enormously good at what they do and it reflects in their stats. They will then lay on the ground of their haunted fucking office and stare at the ceiling for a very long period of time.

But this puts the heroes in competition with each other. Your public funding is chained to your stats under this model. There's only so many criminals out there--you've got to get the right numbers or it cuts into how much of a slush fund the agency is working with.

It's sort of an insane model for a public servant position, but I think it matches with what canon shows us. Imagine having firefighters pitted against each other. like, having a competitive model for public safety raises extreme concerns about how it incentivizes public servants to act.

But this isn't canon's model. It's my guess as to how canon works based on the hints i can remember and my own mental illness. So why do I think canon suggests a model like this?

It's because 1) canon does establish that heroes are in competition with one another and 2) this kind of model would likely be necessary due to the level of autonomy that heroes have.

The literal first fight we see involves heroes in competition with each other. Kamui Woods is doing a big Ultimate Move, and Mount Lady rushes in and steals the show. Like. that is crazy behavior if we are looking at this through the lens of a typical public servant. Imagine you're trying to get directions from a park ranger and a different park ranger kick flips in with a map and a desperate need for you to get your directions from them instead. You call poison control and they’re beating each other in the head over who gets to tell you you’re dying.

Still, on its own, the competition isn’t dispositive, because the private income streams (we'll get there) would incentivize competition even if public funding wasn't based on it. But the level of autonomy that hero offices exhibit also suggest some kind of competition model.

Heroics agencies are not run like a typical police force or fire station. With most entities that function as first responders, they respond to some kind of centralized force (like 911 call centers) and they have highly regulated resource distribution. Like, police forces are restricted to a specific jurisdiction. Within that jurisdiction they have multiple districts and officers typically stay in their district. They're not going to a different fucking city because they think the crime is cooler there.

But Endeavor does exactly that. He's like "hello, son who hates me. Let's go to Hosu because I want to fuck with the hero killer for street cred. won't you come along. It is non-optional" and todoroki says "i hate you father and will abandon you on our father son trip to set a serial killer on fire with my mind. it will be for mildly gay reasons."

These agencies aren't a centralized public service. They are all just off doing their own thing. They're not responding to specific areas as allotted to them by the city--they just fuck off and do whatever. Like, there's probably some coordination between agencies as to who is covering what patrol, but it likely would be more out of courtesy than formal requirement. People wouldn't step on each other's toes nearly as much if there was more of a structure to this.

Typical public agencies who receive funding in accordance with staffing and budgetary needs have more structure and formality than is exhibited in canon. Heroics Agencies act like they're all independent contractors. They probably function like grant money recipients, where they're all fighting for the same pool of funds. You have to write in and show why you deserve that money when that's the case. They're in competition with each other.

Like, is this definitively the structure in canon? No, of course not. I have no fucking idea what, if anything, canon has going on. But it definitely fits with canon.

b. Private Income Streams

We know from canon that it can't just be public funding. Izuku alone probably paid for the Mighty Agency private jet with how much fucking all might merch he bought. Canonically, heroes have merchandise lines, branding deals, commercials, everything. All Might had fucking movies made about him. Those are all extremely lucrative income streams--and likely where the richest heroes get the biggest brunt of their income.

In order to get this kind of income, you are necessarily in competition with your fellow hero.

Public attention, spending money, screen time, all of it--it's a limited resource. You have to be the person who gets to the fight first, who does the big move, who saves the day. If it's someone else? Then that's another kid buying their action figure instead of yours. Heroics is heavily commoditized in canon, and that inherently invites competition.

2. Distribution of Funds

So now that we have a theory as to where the money comes from, how does it get paid out? Based on canon, it comes down to a structure of (a) Independent/Underground Heroes and (b) Agencies.

a. Independent/Underground Heroes

I can't actually remember if the word "independent" is said in canon or if I came up with it, but I think canon implies its existence. It's basically the same thing as being an underground hero, but you're still a Spotlight hero. I also cannot remember if the underground/spotlight thing is canon or fanon or what I’m sorry I haven’t watched this show in years.

Independents are spotlight heroes without the backing of an agency. They just go out every day with the clothes on their back and a dream. They have no support staff, no back up, and no one to help them if things go sideways.

It is not a popular employment option.

Part of it is because it's that much harder to fund being an independent. Like. Say you're just out of high school and you decide to strike out on your own as independent. You're still spotlight, so you can have a merchandise line, and that'd be a nice income stream while you're just starting out.

How the fuck do you start your own t-shirt line?

How do you make contracts with the manufacturers? How do you make and copyright the design? how do you sell the stupid things? Do you try and get them in Walmart? Do you start an Etsy? Your own website? do you call your mom and cry when you have 500 ugly t-shirts with your face on them that no one wants to buy and they're taking up all the space in your studio apartment.

Agencies have preexisting structures in place to help launch these kinds of options, which is one of the reasons why they're so attractive for baby heroes just starting out. The only reason why Mirio has merchandise is because he decided that he didn't care and didn't need to make merch and Izuku came after him with feverish crack addict energy because he cared and he needed Lemillion merch like. yesterday. All Might ended up getting his agency to start a lemillion line. Mirio gets the profits with a reasonable fee to the Mighty Agency. To this day he suspects that Izuku is 70% of his sales but Izuku denies this fervently, like a liar (he actually has a small but very devoted fanbase who rabidly support him and buy all of his merch. he would cry if he knew this. Still. Izuku is his biggest fan and buys literally every single piece of new merch in triplicate.).

Underground heroes are in the same boat as independents but they don't even have the option of a merch line. They exclusively get public funding unless they're backed by an agency, which none of them are because agencies have a tendency to fuck them and their busts for the sake of the spotlight. All underground heroes are bitter and culturally opposed to agencies.

On that note:

b. Agencies.

This is where by far the most heroes would end up. But an agency is like thirty dudes with the same joint bank account. How does the money get there and get distributed out?

i. Public Funding in an Agency Context

Take the above model. How do you attribute public funds based on personal statistics if there's no single person? Does everyone get their own check? But that wouldn't make sense--this isn't just for salaries, it's for funding the actual heroics itself.

Everyone under the same agency would be counted together for the purposes of funding allotment. If Sidekick A managed 300 busts last year and Sidekick B man managed 350 busts, then congratulations, The Big Hero Hero Agency made 650 busts last year, here's a check made out to the agency, figure out what you want to do with it.

But what about incidents that involve multiple heroes from the same agency? Let's say that The Big Hero Hero Agency is involved in a big bust. It is Sidekick A's baby. They have spent months doing this. This has been blood, sweat, and tears. When the day comes, they are joined by Sidekick B, Sidekick C, and Big Hero himself. Sidekick B has been helping Sidekick A for the past three weeks on this case. Sidekick C got called in the day-of to help.

Big Hero showed up for the last twenty minutes of the fight when they were mostly done with everything.

So. You're filling out the post-arrest paperwork. For funding and for public statistics, you need to make sure to properly account for who gets credit for the bust. It has to be one person--if you had everyone individually credit themselves for the bust, then it looks like you've resolved four incidents instead of one under this financial model. it's artificially inflating your numbers for public funding. that's fraud. Who should get the credit: Sidekick A, Sidekick B, Sidekick C, or Big Hero?

Well, there's nothing stopping Big Hero from writing their own name. So let's go with Big Hero. He helped.

This was one of the big sources of the sidekick strikes: a lot of agencies had an absolute policy of attributing successes to the name hero if they touched the case at all, because there was no rule against it. It was better for the agency, after all--unrealistically high numbers on the biggest name meant the agency as a whole appeared more successful.

So there were a lot of heroes artificially inflating their stats with things that were more properly credited to their sidekicks. Which made it all the harder for sidekicks to leave because their stats were shit because their boss was taking credit for their work.

ii. Private Funding in an Agency Context

But that’s just public funding. How would agencies distribute private income streams?

Big Hero Agency is proud to announce its newest line of Big Hero Action Figures, featuring the Entire Big Hero Team, now retailing for $39.99. Get it now from a store near you.

So. An agency is selling an action figure line featuring Sidekicks A, B, and C, as well as Big Hero himself. We’ll round up to an even $40. How do we split up the cash?

You can’t give everyone each $10. You have to first pay the suppliers, the advertisers, the trucks that shipped the toys to the store, etc. Then you have to pay back into the agency to fund miscellaneous expenses—the stationary, the insurance, the coffee in the fucking break room. Everything. By the end, there’s only $4 of profit left over. Not great, but hey—they’re selling a lot of toys. So if they each get a $1, then it should add up quick.

Right. But. If you think about it, people are only really buying it for Big Hero. He’s the best hero of all of them—his name is on the agency, and just look at how much higher his stats are. So it’s only fair that he gets $3.70 a toy and the rest of them can get $.10 apiece. Don’t worry, it’ll add up quick.

Not all agencies would have been like this. But a lot of them would be. Money is a hell if an incentive to screw people.

END OF ASIDE.

With all that in mind—why would they feasibly have a structure to fly in help from other heroes far away? That’s their fucking competition. Sure, we have team ups, but they’re all either well in advance or in the heat of a moment. If they are in the heat of a moment, half the time the heroes resent it because they just stole their fight. They’re gonna what—pay the exorbitant jet fees to fly in someone who’s just going to steal their hard work in the eyes of the public?

Okay, but what about situations like this? Massive emergencies where you need more people?

Those haven’t ever happened before. They had All Might.

So. The heroes on the ground calling in help are out. What about the heroes who are close enough to make it there by ground transport? No one calls them, they just show up out of public need. How are they getting there?

Trains are out. All the trains into the area are shut the fuck down. We are not giving the freshly escaped villains a bullet train to the rest of the country. Same thing for buses. No fucking bus driver is making their regular route into a fucking battleground.

Private transportation it is. Anything more than a few hours out of the area is completely out of the question. Like, good ol’ Manuel from Hosu City and all his buddies? Not making it. The wild wild pussycats? Watched this on TV from their mountain home. Gran Torino? On FaceTime with All Might, who is watching the fight with Midoriya Inko’s hand gripped in his left and Bakugou Mitsuki’s hand gripped in his right. Gang Orca? Twelve hours away and on a fucking island so he needs a boat AND a car to get there. Or he just fucking swims.

But there has to be at least some hero that saw this happening and heroically climbed in their Mazda sedan to make the three hour car trip. Why didn’t they go to the fight in Yokohama instead of the one against AfO?

Frankly at that point those literal children were visibly doing way better than the actual heroes were faring and any heroes showing up went where they were most needed and uh. It wasn’t by the kids.

If we have the agency model as given to us by canon, then that means there is a decentralization of resources. If you want to utilize your public defense force in the case of emergencies, then you need a way to fucking get them to the emergency. Canon does not have that. This is a huge structural failing that only wasn’t a disaster sooner because most emergencies required one guy and he had his own private jet. So most heroes in the country never had to even consider if they would listen to Endeavor’s order because they were completely cut off and useless at the time.

So. Now the analysis has been narrowed from all of Japan’s heroes to just the ones in the immediate vicinity of the fight. That’s still a fuck ton of heroes. This is a heavily populated area with a bunch of heroes around. You can’t go outside without tripping over a hero.

Most of those guys were on fucking strike.

Structural Flaw #2: Over-Reliance on and Abuse of Sidekicks.

The vast majority of the workforce had to be sidekicks. Like, just from a business model perspective. Even the smallest agencies we saw had 2-3 sidekicks. Endeavor’s agency had at least double digits, and I think Idaten was at over a hundred or something. We were probably looking at, conservatively, a 1:10 ratio of heroes to sidekicks.

All those guys are on strike.

Okay. But not all of them, right? Idaten already settled and got their sidekicks back. That’s like a hundred guys.

Except the Strike was not isolated to the Tokyo/Mustufasa/Yokohama area. Idaten sent out a lot of their sidekicks to other regions to help alleviate some of the strains of the strike. (As a note, this was not the Idaten sidekicks crossing the picket line. Them picking up the slack for other sidekicks still striking would have helped minimize effects on the public. However, the agencies of the striking sidekicks would have reaped no benefit from this under the compensation structure outlined above. Idaten would have gotten the credit for everything their sidekicks did, so the other agencies would still be bleeding from this while risk to the public was slightly alleviated. Idaten’s entire function in this strike was to set an example for quick settlement and minimize public harm. There’s this entire sub-analysis on Idaten’s internal culture and how it intersects with broader heroics standards that I won’t get into now this is already way too long.)

Idaten is at 1/10 capacity. It has like, ten guys, all of whom have been working say, thirteen hour shifts (voluntarily—again, it was a decision made to try and minimize the public safety risks of the strike while still allowing their colleagues their best chance at improved conditions) daily for the past month.

All of those ten guys responded to Tartarus before Endeavor made the call.

To understand the exact nature of the breakdown, you really have to see the chaos of how exactly this unfolded.

The LoV and their merry band of criminals hit Tartarus. The heroes do not realize at this time that they intend to let everyone out, give them transportation, and point them straight towards the mainland. They think that they’re just there for AfO. That’s still a huge crisis that needs to be shut down immediately, so they call out all of their best. Endeavor responds. Hawks responds. Eraserhead responds. Mt. Lady, Kamui Woods, Miruko—everyone in the vicinity who could conceivably respond show up. For a second, it looks like it’s going to end here.

Once the LoV get AfO out of his cell, the entire tide of the battle turns against the heroes. Now everyone’s out. All of those horrible, terrible villains. Tartarus has fallen. They have to make hard decisions. The high ranking, very powerful heroes who are most likely to break the line on Endeavor’s decision? They’re already at the fight by the time he has to make it. It is chaos and something they cannot easily leave.

The LoV’s picked right now because they knew that the heroes were operating at less than a tenth of their regular capacity. They picked right now because they knew the system had structural faults, and if they hit them just right, it would all come down on the heroes’ heads.

But the sidekicks broke strike lines to respond, right? Why do they all go to endeavor’s side?

For one thing, it wasn’t all of them who showed up—maybe a third of them were not even in the area any more. It wasn’t malicious, or intentional, or anything like that—they were off visiting their families for the first time in a long time or taking vacation. All of them had spent the past few years being completely overworked and abused by their jobs. They just weren’t there.

So now we’re down to 2/3rds of them who can even try to show up.

A lot of it wasn’t actually made as a reasoned choice. For many of them, they ended up where they did because of all the chaos.

So you’re a sidekick. You’re on strike. The entire world has gone to shit. How do you normally find out about the world going to shit?

This is a competition model streamed through individual entities. There’s no central command structure. Your agency calls you.

Well, your agency either fucking fired you or they cut you off completely during strike negotiations. This time, you find out through the news when the story breaks. Now what?

You frantically try to get in touch with your (ex) agency. Who is picking up the phones?

No one. That was your fucking job before you went on strike.

I used to work at a government public-service type deal, and let me tell you, they abuse the fuck out of non-unionized workers. You are doing everyone’s job. No one ask why we don’t get more support staff because they have unions. Like. I had a law degree. I was hired to be a lawyer in that office. They had us all doing the jobs of four people, and by that I mean it would be the literal entire job description of another fucking position in that office and we were all expected to just do it too.

Unions incentivize treating workers right. The absence of them opens the door to the opposite.

Why the fuck would agencies hire more people to lighten the load on the sidekicks and let them focus on actual heroics? Just make the sidekicks do everything. What are they going do, complain? They’re a dime a dozen. Hire more of those fresh faced kids with no standards just out of school.

You know when you had a job where you’re like. This fucking place is going to fall apart without me. But they treat you as disposable and easily replaceable and you’re like “okay bet” and so you leave and you find out from the people left behind that it actually fucking fell apart without you and you’re just like :o

Yeah. So that happened.

There has been a massive break down in the function of heroics offices for the past month and change because the sidekicks were not there. They were the ones who actually did most of the day to day handling of the office. They were the ones coordinating transport and figuring out the actual mechanics of who would be deployed where in a crisis. All those things that would be super helpful now? Yeah, those guys aren’t there, and they’re locked out of the fucking offices and can’t get in to un-strike for the sake of societal crisis.

But they know where the fight is. It’s on the news. Why don’t they just show up?

Where’s their gear?

Who owns it?

Heroics support gear must be an enormously expensive thing. It would have to be provided by the agency itself. Literally the only reason why Mirio has gear is because 1) all might would NEVER let his pseudo step son run around without proper support so the man would have bankrolled it himself if needs must and 2) the UA support class has a stipend each year where they can make support gear for active heroes and those heroes get it for free in exchange for free advertising for the students trying to kick start their careers, so he is decked out in THE most experimental bullshit from Hatsume Mei Industries (I have this entire side plot where the support class this class year low key became a sort of religious cult haha not really it’s just a joke it’s not really a joke and power loader is afraid every single day when he comes to work he is afraid under the iron clad rule of Hatsume Mei’s weird girl energy and they all decided Mirio was the Tabula Rasa, a figure of prophecy, and I just cannot get into that right now it’s too long it’s too long already. But it’s so fun).

All those sidekicks on strike lost valuable time trying to get back into their agencies so they weren’t showing up to an S-class villain fight in their fucking jammies. Then, when some poor admins figured out what was going on and let some of them in, everyone was frantically gearing up and getting in whatever transport van they were pointed at. Some of them didn’t know they werent reporting to Yokohama until they were already at the other fight. There’s was so much chaos and confusion that very few people had a clear idea of what was happening.

With the sidekicks, some of them never made it, some of them just got in a van and went wherever it took them, and some of them chose to obey Endeavor’s orders. Some agreed with the decision. Some disagreed but deferred to his experience. With how the Sidekick Strike had left their infrastructure, very few sidekicks were able to respond fast enough to make any real difference.

Now for the last possible demographic: the heroes that weren’t on strike and weren’t initially deployed to the Tartarus Prison Break. Why didn’t any of them go to Yokohama?

Structural Flaw #3: All Might was that one kid doing the entire group project for like forty years and some of these people are having to be heroes for the very first time and realizing that they don’t actually want to risk their lives to save people they just sort of liked the idea of this job.

It may be a bit too specific to be a structural flaw but I’m counting it anyway.

So, just to give a bit of a recap: We consider every hero alive in Japan as a candidate for Endeavor’s order. The vast majority of them are too far away to do shit, and there’s no centralized transport network to get them there faster. Toss in those who are dealing with personal medical issues or are away on vacation or just can’t come for some reason or another, and you’ve lost most of the heroes in Japan as respondents. Probably ~80% of potential heroes are culled from this alone.

So we have, generously, 20% of Japan’s heroes left as potential people to respond. ~90% of those are sidekicks on strike. They’ve got hours before they make it to any fight, because of the aforementioned structural breakdowns.

Now we’re down to 2% of Japan’s total heroes.

Some of that 2% were first responders to the initial Tartarus prison break. All the big name heroes in the area. But there can’t be that many top heroes—so let’s say 0.2% of them were at the initial fight.

Now we only have the remaining 1.8% of heroes to analyze.

There have to be a percentage of those who agreed with Endeavor’s call as a tactical decision. If they show up to any fight, they’re going to be obeying his order.

So we only have the ones who disagreed with his call left to look at.

These are small-time heroes. All of the big names are already at the fight. So they are less likely to have flashy Quirks, be especially talented, or consider themselves to have an especially large effect in the grand scheme of things. They have likely spent their entire careers living in a world with All Might.

It has never actually been down to them.

Think of Uwabami. Momo did her work study with her.

Her hero outfit is a fucking evening gown. She spent the entire work study doing commercials and meeting with her fans. She explicitly invited the young heroes that she did because she thought they were cute enough to be in commercials with her.

Now, she’s had some good if minor moments helping rescue civilians. It’s not that she’s never saved anyone.

But all of the top heroes are already committed to the fight against AfO. The current Number One Hero just ordered all her colleagues to report there. And Yokohama has a lot of S-Class villains en route.

And what the fuck is she going to do to stop them? It’s just her. Half of those villains took All Might to stop the first time. She is not fucking all might.

Is this a hero likely to go to Yokohama completely on her own to fight *checks notes* literally the entire prison population minus one guy? The worst guy, albeit. But one guy.

These are all heroes who have never had to be the actual thing standing between society and destruction. There has always been someone more powerful or capable or heroic nearby. Until recently, there has always been all might.

This isn’t to malign them. A decent percentage of them are legitimately well meaning about being a hero. They do good. But when it came to the big, blowout fights, they have always, always, always been the heroes evacuating civilians in the background or performing rescue in the aftermath. It has never been them who had to stand up and do the fight itself.

Every single one of those villains represent a big, blowout fight. And this hero trying to decide if he’s going to obey Endeavor’s order? They are one guy. And they’re not sure if they could even beat one of those villains alone, let alone all.

The reason why no one disobeyed Endeavor’s order was because, frankly, at the end of the day, they did not want to die.

Endeavor’s order signaled to everyone that there was no guarantee anyone would show up to Yokohama. It actually put good odds to the opposite. If you decided “fuck that, I’m going to Yokohama” then you’d likely be doing it alone.

What Class 2-A did was considered a death sentence. People who didn’t know them and their bullshit were shocked that they all made it out alive. These were the worst villains their society had ever faced and it was all of them at once (minus that one guy).

The heroes who were in a position to disobey endeavor didn’t actually think it’d make a difference if they did. They’d just… lose.

Most if not all of these heroes made the decision to become heroes during all mights era of peace. Everything just had lower stakes. Crime was less frequent and less serious. The big fights always had someone there who could handle them, because All Might was there. They’d fight the odd mugger or purse snatcher and help put out fires and go home at the end of the night. They’re heroes. That doesn’t mean they’ve ever truly had to grapple with a life or death fight.

If they went to Yokohoma, they thought they’d die. So they might as well respond to a fight that has a chance. Even if they feel ashamed as they do it. Even if they think Endeavor made the wrong call and wanted to go to Yokohama instead. All Might wasn’t there anymore. And they were afraid.

But there is one thing that Class 2-A had going for them that gave them an advantage over these heroes. And that was the fact that they are all medically insane.

It’s that they were together.

It’s a decentralized heroics structure. If you have a large agency, you are necessarily a top hero because no one else would be able to get that many people to agree to work under them. So you’re already at Tartarus and this isn’t a decision you had to make.

Maybe you’re independent. Maybe you have a small agency with 2-3 people. There is no preexisting centralized line that you can use to try and gather more people to go to Yokohama with you. You’re stuck with your immediate colleagues and maybe a few other heroes you’re close enough with to have their number. You really don’t have time to try and ask around to see if anyone else wants to go to Yokohama instead—you need to pick a battle and get there yesterday.

What good is 2-3 people going to do in Yokohama? You’ll just get massacred and it won’t have made a difference. At least if you go to stop AfO, you’ll have a chance at doing something that mattered.

Maybe you disagree with Endeavor but you defer to his training and experience.

Maybe you don’t go at any fight at all. Maybe you’re afraid. Maybe you became a hero in a time where you had a symbol of peace, and you realize you can’t keep doing it in a time without one.

I think there’s a small subsection of heroes that quit in the aftermath of Yokohama. Because they wanted to disobey endeavor’s order, and they thought they’d just die and it wouldn’t matter, and then dawn came and a bunch of school kids had managed what they were too big of a coward to do. I think the fact that they fell into line when their hearts told them they shouldn’t made them seriously doubt whether they were good enough to be a hero.

But they were alone when Endeavor made the call. And it felt like certain death. And—yeah, it sort of felt that way to Class 2-A when they made the decision to respond. But they weren’t alone when they did it.

They were together. And they always felt braver when they were together. Together, they could make miracles happen.

[whatdoinose]

as a osdd system i feel incredibly isolated in system communities not only cuz theyre so alter-based but also. every fucking OSDDID specific space is founded because they don't like endos and not cuz they just wanna have a nice supportive place for OSDDID folk. its incredibly stupid. like what are we even doing atp?

[statementlou]

So I see folks pointing out that Louis' circle A tattoo is more likely an aesthetic choice than an announcement of a political commitment to anarchism, and saying basically that that maybe makes him a bit of a poser and I mean- I GUESS. But I don't like to look at things that way and I don't think it's useful. As I see it the subversive sexiness of the symbols of resistance have ALWAYS been gateways for people who are drawn to the struggle in vague ways and that's GOOD. Aligning yourself with those values is good no matter the reason, in my book, especially given the wretched options available out there, but also the journey doesn't necessarily stop there. Gatekeeping queerness victimizes people who are just trying things out and starting to discover that it may run deeper than just trying on a new look who should instead be welcomed and helped along their path, and I fail to see how gatekeeping political affiliations is any different (plus how counterproductive to actual movement building is that?)

ANYWAY. What I really want to say about Louis is that while I KNOW that Louis is probably not secretly a theory reading anti-state communalist anarchist, I think that actually Louis' optimism and idealism (and his unwavering commitment to allying himself with the working class and embracing those roots) are a perfect fit for the philosophy and always have been. I know that anarchism is mostly understood as being about throwing molotov cocktails and fighting the state (and the allure of its symbols are that they signify this, a terrific aesthetic for him to choose to sign on with in my book), but that's honestly largely cartoonish stereotyping that comes directly from anti-anarchist state propaganda. That resistance is necessary in this hellscape of oppression we live in and is super important, but in its heart anarchism is only about the state in that the state and capitalism currently stands in the way of its goals. The whole point of anarchism is that it's NOT about the state! It's about being able to imagine something better than a state, it's about how we live and about how we SHOULD live, it's about HOPE and picturing something utopian and something free of the ways capitalism pits us against one another! What could be more Louis than that?

"I need you and you need me and I love that" is as beautiful a way of talking about the cornerstone of anarchism that is mutual aid as any long winded essay I've read (even if what he meant was contextually different), and I think when he talks again and again about how special the space fans have made around him is he is expressing an intuitive understanding of the importance of autonomous zones, places and moments outside of the shitty life imposed on us by the system (also a huge part of anarchist thought). Maybe I'm just being an optimist but I think that Louis DOES understand that caring for people and wanting self-determination and freedom for all and allying himself with the working class involves a certain amount of resistance to and positioning yourself in opposition to the state. Thinking the symbols of smashing that state are cool isn't meaningless; it's a CHOICE. There are other cool symbols out there and I just happen to think that feeling a resonance with certain ones is something in and of itself, even if at this moment he does not choose to start a fight with the media about it all.

[justworthlessreblogs]

workshopping out the characterizations for the riochika swap au is making me realize just how good of a dad genichirou usami is. i think we should stan him

[getvalentined]

Got an email to fill out a survey on the concept of tumblr Premium and related features, and while I'm assuming that I'm not supposed to talk about it too specifically in case some things mentioned in the survey aren't fully implemented, the features listed as possibilities sound pretty solid. Limit increases, monthly benefits (both for the user and as gifts for others), special badges and decorations, etc.

There were no features listed that are already available for free, so they're genuinely looking at offering new features for paid users rather than following in Xitter's footsteps and locking existing features behind a paywall. Likewise, nothing listed would be obtrusive to the current tumblr experience or unfairly favor a paid user over a free user any more than dropping a few bucks on a Blaze already "favors" the person being Blazed. (Which is up for debate, since that whole feature is literally "LOOK AT MY POST, BOY" and is one of the most tumblr things that tumblr has ever done.)

I was extremely leery going into the survey, because "premium" features these days are generally not premium at all, but I'm feeling very positive about the upcoming features now. Overall—and I say this as someone who has worked in webdev and digital marketing, used to pay for icons on LiveJournal for multiple RP accounts, currently pays for ad-free here, and has been doing beta testing for so long I once had the personal email addresses of both the founders of deviantART—it sounds genuinely good! Nothing anyone can't live without, but a good number of fun things that would actually be of interest to the tumblr userbase.

Now I'm just waiting to see how many of the features floated in the survey wind up in the final package, and how much that package is going to cost.

[gotyouanyway]

in a hell of my own making or whatever