#but i refuse to make the original characters

[mikeymagee]

Sam Wilson: The American Redeemer

Why Sam Wilson is the only choice for the mantel

"No super serum, no blond hair, or blue eyes. The only power I have is that I believe we can do better" --Sam Wilson,

I think one of the main things that separates Sam Wilson's tenure as Captain America from Steve Rogers's is how they functioned within the role and what they were expected to do.

During World War II, Steve Rogers was expected to protect the country from foreign dangers. He was the American protector. Keeping citizens safe from international (and interdimensional) threats. Steve protected American against "The Other" (Nazis, foreign terrorists, aliens, etc).

But Sam Wilson is someone who is tasked with protecting the country from itself. Sam stands firm against America's worst impulses (its inability to emphasize, its lust for power and status, its refusal to deal with its own history, etc,) and guides this country towards its better angels.

Sam Wilson origins in Marvel Comics

Sam Wilson was created as a result of the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960's. It's no accident that he was created to be the partner for a superhero that represented America, and its values. The first African American superhero paired with a man who represented everything this country believed about itself. Sam Wilson was created as a kind of redemption for America, or at least, the beginnings of redemption. African Americans in this country have fought side by side with white Americans in every war and every conflict. From the American Revolution to World War II and beyond. And yet Black Americans were never allowed to take part in the American dream, whether through unjust laws, or the denial of economic growth, Black people have always been shunned from the country they helped defend. Sam Wilson's creation and inclusion was a (small) way to make up for that lack justice. And even through his friendship with Sam, Steve Rogers gained a new perspective on the American identity. Sam brought America's failings into light and gave it the opportunity to correct itself.

From the very creation of the character, Sam was an opportunity for America to rid herself of her sins.

Sam Wilson in the Winter Soldier

Its notable that the first interaction we get with Sam in the MCU is as a counselor for veterans. America is notorious for touting to "Love its soldiers" but always ignoring its veterans. Many men and women who go off to fight in wars often times come back home to a country that is less willing to put the time and effort into understanding and helping the heal. You can see this with the lack of funding for Veterans Affairs offices, the housing crises that a lot of returning veterans face, the lack of adequate mental and physical healthcare that veterans are afforded. Veterans are an underserved community in a country that claims to love its military. There is a hypocrisy in this.

Yet, Sam took on the work of helping veterans heal.

The History of Isaiah Bradley.

It's no secret that America is a country that was built off of antiblack racism. I could cite multiple books, articles, documentaries, and studies that prove this. However, the narrative of Isaiah Bradley not only showcases America's antiblack racism, but the removal of Bradley's story showcases America's refusal to acknowledge its own faults. There have always been efforts in this country to remove Black history (and the histories of other marginalized groups of people). Sam Wilson, when he found out about Isaiah, not only had to reconcile with this country's racism, but he also had to reevaluate how he viewed the country as a whole. Bradley was not only court martialed and jailed, but he was experimented on and his story was scrubbed away.

The United States has always had a habit of rewriting its own history to maintain a certain image. Whether it be one of liberty and equality, or one of militaristic might and pride. America loves the image of the strong soldier, going off into the world but hates the image of the war torn veteran who still hears gun shots at night. Sam, during his conversation with Bucky in Maryland, had to reconcile America's image of itself (a bright beautiful country that welcomes all) with the reality he had just been exposed to (a Black man who did the exact same thing that Steve Rogers had done back in the 40's and was punished for it).

America's treatment of Isaiah was a sin against veterans and a sin against Black Americans, and Sam bringing Isaiah's story into the light was a reckoning that helped to redeem the country's past actions. Actions that America has no one to blame for but itself.

Karli and the Flag Smashers.

Sam's handling of Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was controversial, but the one thing he was correct about was the usage of simple labels to justify inhumane treatment of others. The United States has always been a country that others its enemies to justify violence of disenfranchisement. Black slaves in the US were called animals. Post 9/11 Muslims (and really, anyone from the middle east) were called "terrorists", Latino immigrants were/are dehumanized and called criminals to justify ICE raids and the breaking of families. During the 90's, America created the "Super Predator" narrative that painted a target on Black men and accelerated the militarization of police officers.

The government's reactions to Karli and the Flag Smashers represents the same line of thinking. Take a group of people and label them as something that is easy to hate/vilify and then take them out. We can argue that Karli's actions were extreme, and we can argue that Karli's actions were violent but we also have to understand were these feelings came from. Empathy and understanding has always been something America has refused to engage with. It's easy to say that Black people don't work hard and are poor when you refuse to acknowledge how America has burned Black neighborhoods and undermined Black education. America has always worked to eliminate the symptom rather than treating the disease.

And Sam, through his speech about Karli and the Flag Smashers, reminds America of its own failings. And again, this isn't some conspiracy that was created by HYDRA or a Nazi organization. This wasn't some evil plan, it was simply The United States turning its back on its own ideals. The blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the country.

But Sam's handling of Karli is a reminder to the country as a whole that we must choose to be better. And note how his speech isn't just for the senators, it's for the American people too. Notice how Isaiah Bradley and his grandson are watching, notice how the crowd of people are listening, notice how Torres is watching from his computer feed.

Sam is offering every American a shot at redemption.

Ross and the War with Japan

"Diplomacy must be hard for you, a man in a country to used to taking what he wants by force."

-Prime Minister Ozaki

In Captain America Brave New World, President Ross is facing an international crises with Japan over the adamantium that is found in the middle of the ocean. Originally, the world leaders, lead by President Ross, wanted to share the new resource evenly, however as negotiations breakdown between America and Japan, Ross's first instinct is to lead the country to war over the adamantium.

American Imperialism is no secret, in fact, everyone in the world is aware of America's dedication to consuming resources. In many instances (ones highlighted by Sam himself) America has a lack of understanding of how the world works, and how to decenter itself for the good of its allies. President Ross even says as the international conflict reaches a head,

"If any country is going to control adamantium, it's going to be us." --President Ross

Ross leans right back into American imperialism, and its perceived entitlement to resources. You can even draw parallels with Erik Killmonger's usage of Wakanda's vibranium and how Erik (an American man) uses American imperialism in the same way. To take whatever he wants by force. Damn the consequences.

Ross was not thinking about how the impending conflict could harm American citizens, or harm other people in the world. Ross's only concern was with the securing of international power.

But Ross's actions speak to a broader pattern of behavior that Sam has seen throughout his tenure in the MCU. The tendency for Americans to fall into simple definitions that justify a lack of empathy. When diplomacy with Japan fell through, Ross pivoted to conflict without further introspection. When Isaiah Bradley's existence threatened the ideals of American equality, America hid their shame away without needing to reflect on its own mistakes. When Karli and the Flag Smashers became a threat, America became incentivized to neutralize that threat without understanding reasons behind the Flag Smashers in the first place.

America is a country that prioritizes action over introspection, and violence over understanding. If not for the intervention of Sam Wilson, America would have fallen to its worst impulse and dove into a war that didn't need to be had.

"The fight you're taking on ain't going to be easy, Sam." --Isaiah Bradley

Perhaps this is where Steve's fight and Sam's fight differ. Steve was a warrior when America needed one. He was a man who fought whatever threat came to our shores. It was easy to root for Steve because Americans could understand that the "bad guy" was some foreigner.

But Sam's fight is with America's soul itself.

Sam isn't fighting to "save the country", he's fighting to redeem it. He's fighting to make this country live up to its ideals. And how exactly do you redeem a country that sends it soldiers off to war, but shuns them when they return? How do you redeem a country who's first instincts are to dehumanize and disregard anyone who doesn't fit the idea of America? How do you redeem a country that refuses to learn from its own mistakes, and instead works to shift the blame to someone/something else?

Bucky has said that Sam gives people something to aspire towards. But aspiring towards something takes work. It takes introspection. It takes being brave enough to look at one's own mistakes and being humble enough to do admit wrong doing, and then being strong enough to make it right.

In every instance in the MCU Sam Wilson gives this country a chance to be its better self. Most critics of Sam in TFATWS and BNW is his tendency for political messaging over character. Critics say that Sam is more interested in giving lectures over being a 3-dimensional character and to that I disagree. Even in isolated narratives (such as BNW), Sam is still faced with the conundrum of holding this country accountable to itself. And the narrative seems repetitive because each time America refuses to live up to itself. If Sam Wilson's story arc seems repetitive it is because the country he represents refuses to grow. It is not Sam's failing as a character, but America's failing as a nation. Sam Wilson lives James Baldwin's words:

"I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually"

Patriotism without introspection is simply stagnation. Love without growth is simply indulgence, and Sam Wilson reminds us of that everyday.

Sam Wilson may not be the Captain that this country wants, but it is certainly the captain this country needs.

But whether or not America deserves a redeemer like Sam Wilson, is a question that many are too afraid to ask.

[weaselandfriends]

The Making Of: Fargo

Today, May 4 2025, is the tenth anniversary of when I started Fargo! To celebrate, here is a behind-the-scenes/retrospective on the work. Enjoy!

I. This Is Your Brain On Anime

I started writing Fargo at the lowest point in my life. I'd been watching anime.

For years, I'd managed to not watch anime. Sure, there was Pokémon as a kid, and to a lesser extent Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh. And as a preteen cinephile who followed the Oscars, Spirited Away's Best Animated win got me to pick it up on DVD. I'd later seen a handful of anime films that similarly carried cinephile credibility: other Miyazakis (Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke), Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Paprika. But I had always refused to watch anime anime. You know what I mean. The seasonal stuff.

In 2007, the final fringe of Wild West internet before Facebook changed everything, seasonal anime was exploding in popularity. A lot of this was due to sheer accessibility. No longer did you need to find a VHS release of some OVA or hope for a play on Adult Swim. Fan subbing and dubbing communities rendered more-or-less anything showing up in Japan available to worldwide audiences via a nifty new site called YouTube. This level of immediacy, combined with the niche tight-knit communities that governed the internet prior to social media, made following seasonal anime a social event. Week by week people posted reactions, reviews, theories, and memes, driving up engagement and rapidly expanding anime's reach as an entertainment medium.

The big breakthrough title in this regard is 2006's The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a massively influential show that changed the look and feel of mainstream anime for years. But my first brush with the anime community came via the following year's Lucky Star, by the same studio and with the same moe stylings. As I prowled the boards of Nintendo's official forum, Nsider, and its successor Nsider 2 (after Nintendo, in characteristically Nintendo fashion, annihilated the site from existence without warning), I found myself constantly bumping into people posting pictures of these four hyper-cutesy anime girls with candy-colored hair. They were everywhere. Teenage me took one look and came to an unshakeable and incontrovertible conclusion:

Only girls would watch this!

Saccharine aesthetic? Lack of plot? And, god, all of the characters are girls? Girl show. No doubt in my mind. Nah, none of this "anime" crap for me. I'll stick with real media, like Leprechaun 4: In Space (which I eagerly stayed up until midnight to watch on the SciFi Channel) and Eli Roth's splatterhouse classic Cabin Fever.

Then some devious motherfucker, I don't even remember who they were, told me something truly insidious, something that would haunt me for years to come. "Hey," they said, "what if there was a show like Lucky Star except they all killed each other with knives? Wouldn't that be awesome?"

And they recommended me Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.

(They showed me an AMV with a similar feel to this one to entice me. Unfortunately that original AMV is lost to history.)

I wound up bingeing the entire 50-episode show, in 10-minute chunks on YouTube, across a single 24-hour period. I couldn't stop myself. It was the same obsessive consumption that would infest me when I discovered Homestuck five years later. Obsession so intense that after I finished it, I immediately went crawling in search of more anime and devoured Death Note in another 24-hour span.

Emerging, blinking, back into the sun, I looked around and realized I couldn't go on like this. I couldn't plunge headlong, headless, into anime. I could not become the dreaded "weeb."

So I cut off anime. No more. As quickly as my drop into the abyss began, I ended it. And a few years later, when I went to college, I cut off the internet as a social experience altogether. No more forums, no more chatrooms. I was an adult. Time to do adult stuff, like read classic literature, write novels, and play League of Legends for 10 hours every day.

Despite how it sounds, college was a great time in my life. I enjoyed learning, enjoyed going to classes, enjoyed reading textbooks, enjoyed writing essays. And I was good at it, very very good—even with the 10-hour League sessions. I felt no need to reconsider anime.

Then I graduated.

Graduating college was like slamming face-first into a brick wall. My entire life until then had seemed to be building toward something. Academia is a series of stepping stones to more prestigious levels of academia (middle school! high school! college!) with a golden gleaming Adulthood at the end of the line, omnipresent. And I did it! My success in college got me a job, eight hours in an office five days a week, much better than anyone else in my post-recession cohort. Adulthood accomplished.

It was miserable. That gleaming paradise Adulthood was a sham. I was doing less work and less difficult work than at college but they were demanding I spend way more time doing it. All sense of fulfilment vanished. There was no longer progress, no bigger and better things on the horizon. I had nothing to hope for. I'd achieved the thing people tend to hope for, and THIS WAS IT. The notion that consumed me was that my life had slipped into overtime, a dead zone past its expiration date, treading water in misery. I also had a 90-minute daily commute in SoCal traffic.

My free time was cut down to a fraction of what it was in college, so no more 10-hour League sessions. I tried to maintain my schedule of reading 50 pages and writing 2,000 words a day, but I no longer had the time or energy, and it didn't make sense why I didn't have the time or energy, because I was doing things that were so trivial and easy compared to my college courseload. Work was an arbitrary time-wasting machine with nothing ahead except 40 more years of work. I wanted to die.

Despairing, seeking nothing save relief, I turned back to anime.

In a Skype groupchat I wound up in, there were two teenagers with their fingers on the pulse of the latest anime buzz. They were my guides back into this wretched world. First, I was served up Fate/Zero, which I consumed quickly (though not with the same leisure time to afford a 24-hour binge) before asking for seconds. I was then recommended Angel Beats. Okay, I said, typing Angel Beats into YouTube, which seven years after Higurashi I still assumed was the main way to watch anime. The first result I got was called Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan. Aha, I said. Angel Beats, Bludgeoning Angel, I know what this is. It's an alternate translation of the title.

It's the kind of comedy of errors that could only happen to someone who timewarped directly from 2007 to 2014 with complete ignorance of the intervening years. Angel Beats, of course, is a tearjerking Key show about students in the afterlife coming to grips with their tragic deaths. Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan is about an angel repeatedly bludgeoning a boy because otherwise he will grow up and create a world where every woman stops aging at 10 years old—a so-called "Lolicon Paradise." (As someone who reads classic lit, seeing the bizarre cross-cultural route Nabokov's novel has taken always amuses me.)

When I started Bludgeoning Angel, I was a little uncertain whether I had the right show. Its tone didn't quite jive with Bingus and Bungus in the Skype chat. Hesitantly, I decided to react in chat to the first thing that happens in the show. "Haha," I said. "The angel really just killed that guy."

In a sadistic twist of fate, this is somehow exactly how Angel Beats begins, too. My friends responded as though everything was total normal, and I figured I must have the right show after all. Thus, I wound up watching the entirety of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, which becomes increasingly surreal, violent, and depraved as it goes on, and only learned my mistake after the final episode. That show probably tainted me forever.

Afterward, I watched the real Angel Beats (in my depressive stupor, it made me cry), Mirai Nikki, and the "only for girls" Lucky Star (it also made me cry). I was getting hooked. It was only a matter of time before Bingus and Bungus recommended me a true landmine. They did. "I think you might like this," Bungus said, tepidly, not exactly sure.

"Hit me," I said.

II. Puella Magi Madoka Magica

The League of Legends-induced timewarp that imprisoned me in college had the side effect of allowing me, in early 2015, to watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica completely blind. I hadn't the faintest idea what it was about, or even a hint of its reputation. Bungus said, "Watch it," and I watched it.

Believe it or not, this blindness backfired. Despite the sanctity people place on spoilers, expectations are a crucial component of the narrative experience. Unaware of what I was watching, I was not nearly as impacted by what I saw. The much-famed Episode 3 twist was nothing to me. Why? I was certain, absolutely certain, the death wouldn't stick. I felt extremely confident either Madoka or Sayaka would make a wish to bring Mami back to life.

Nonetheless, the show grew on me. The cute exterior steadily transforming grimmer was a Ratatouille flashback to Higurashi; there's something so delicious about how jaggedly the hyper-poppy upbeat OP jumpscares in the middle of increasingly hopeless situations during the show's back half. After 12 episodes and a movie I needed more. Not more anime. More Madoka Magica.

I didn't get it from the spinoffs, of which there were several even then, most of which I knew nothing about. Instead I went looking for it on more familiar terrain, another relic of my 2007 timewarp: fanfiction-dot-net. This is where people go to engage with media fandom, right? I hit up the Madoka page, sorted content by number of reviews, and got this:

Well, sort of. Fargo wasn't there yet, obviously. The other five were, in this same order. I opened To the Stars, read a chapter or two, found it impossibly boring and nothing at all like the show, and discarded it. Resonance Days, A Happy Dream, and cat's cradle [sic] all looked like shipfics, which was not my speed. That left one fic, which I would read in one day home sick (legitimately) from work, one fic that would prove massively influential on the idea for Fargo I didn't yet have.

Puella Magi Homura Magica by Lestaki, despite its second-place position on this prestigious list (behind only a work once described by acclaimed guy-with-a-blog Eliezer Yudkowsky as the most prescient depiction of future warfare ever written), is a fanfic I have never heard anyone mention once in my now 10-year stint in the Madoka Magica trenches. Even in the subculture it is a blank of memory, which makes sense if you look at its publication and last updated dates. It came out May 24, 2011—barely a month after the show finished airing—and was unceremoniously abandoned, incomplete, little over a year later. It's easy to see the fic emerging in the frenzy of activity prompted by the show's immediate popularity, rising on the tide, and vanishing under the waves of works with more temporally dogged creators.

So what is it?

PMHM is a three-arc story set after the show (and ignoring, of course, Rebellion, which it predates). Its first arc focuses on the three-man band of Homura, Kyoko, and Mami as they prepare to fight against a "demon prince"—an exceptionally powerful, city-destroying wraith—that Kyubey predicts will be born in Mitakihara soon. The demon prince is so powerful that the trio cannot possibly defeat it on their own, causing them to soon be joined by a ragtag team of original characters, spinoff characters, and a contracting Hitomi. The squad butts heads, but ultimately manages to come together to destroy the demon prince when it appears.

The second arc revolves around an inter-city magical girl war. The Mitakihara girls, for reasons I don't fully remember, have to invade and defeat an OC magical girl warlord in charge of another city. Both sides amass allies until the final confrontation involves at least a hundred magical girls. At the end of the arc, the OC villain reveals she manufactured the war to put Homura in a situation where she would be forced to continually use her time-rewinding powers to save Kyoko and Mami (whom she has come to care for over the course of the story), which is part of the villain's plot to generate enough karmic potential that she can create a new Madoka-esque god. Homura is aware that every time she rewinds time, she is helping the villain usurp Madoka, so she's torn between saving her living friends and saving her conceptual girlfriend.

That's where the story abruptly ends, mired in a series of repetitive chapters where the villain keeps finding ways to kill Kyoko and/or Mami and forcing Homura to turn back time. (It seems the author trapped themselves in the concept of showing each timeline in detail and lost momentum fast.)

And that's where Fargo begins.

III. Williston

Fargo was not a conscious work. Unlike most of my fiction, it was not assiduously planned. It was not kicked around in my head for years before I started writing it. It was not drafted and redrafted. Fargo was a creature of instinct, and because of that even now I look at it with a certain sense of wonder. Both Chicago and Cleveland Quixotic originated with me examining Fargo, trying to see what made it so popular, and laboriously reengineering whatever I concluded was the cause (I was wrong both times).

It emerged in my head not as an idea, but a vibe. Frigid, frostbitten wasteland. A tough, take-no-bullshit magical girl, dead inside. She'd use a Gatling gun. Long brown coat.

I was 60,000 words into a draft of a story I'd been planning since I first read Homestuck in 2012, a story I was tentatively calling Soulstealer but would eventually call Modern Cannibals. But I didn't want to write it anymore. At work, I was still miserable. I wanted to write a work of misery. I wanted to write a miserable human being. I abandoned the Modern Cannibals draft despite how far along it was (I was at the scene where Z. rescues Kiki from Mitchum's party). I began, as if automatically, writing something else. It was the same surrender that had led me to anime in the first place. The path of emotional, intellectual least resistance.

It's probably because I was on this path that I wound up unconsciously borrowing so many structural and worldbuilding cues from Puella Magi Homura Magica, especially in the first arc, with the Williston archon substituted for the Mitakihara demon prince. It wasn't even a conscious decision to do what I had seen in PMHM; I didn't realize the overlap until later. I was putting onto page the last thing lodged in my brain, and that was it. At work, I'd recently learned about the homeless crisis in Williston due to the shale oil boom, and that wound up in the story too.

Basically every part of the first few chapters of Fargo manifested on the page without me having any idea what it would build to. When Kyubey told Sloan to go to Williston, I knew he was being deceptive, but I didn't know how, and certainly had not figured out his elaborate plot to defeat Homura yet. Ditto Omaha. Clair Ibsen as Sloan's detested rival was a name I flicked onto the page at random (combining Clair, the gym leader from Pokémon, with Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian playwright, because I figured a character from Minnesota should have a Scandinavian surname). The girl, unnamed, who scuffles with Sloan in Chapter 1 was not yet Anoka; I had no plans for her to reappear, nor plans to make her relevant to how the Williston archon was born. When writing Chapter 2, I had no conception of Delaney or Erika (another Pokémon gym leader) as characters until I started writing them, at which point their personalities emerged, fully-formed, all at once. I didn't know Delaney's backstory, only that she was suspicious.

What made Fargo work is that I very quickly figured this stuff out.

Throwing these ideas and characters onto the board was like putting myself in an escape room, and the challenge then became to figure out how everything slotted together. It was around Chapter 4—which I had written fully before I started posting the story, and which was about the time I realized I actually wanted to go through with what was starting to shape up as a long and ambitious work—that I started seeing the connective tissue. Kyubey's plot came into view, as well as Omaha's role in it. (Hence why Chapter 5 begins with a scene involving Homura.) I figured out Delaney's backstory, though I hadn't yet figured out how she was part of Kyubey's plot yet. The end of the first arc formed in my mind: Erika dead, Delaney alive, she and Sloan en route to Minneapolis to fight Clair. I had the beginnings of an idea how the second arc would go; there was the ghost of an idea for a third arc, but that made the story seem impossibly long, so I wrote with the belief everything would end with Clair. By the end of the arc, when I had started thinking about Clair's goons, I had the idea for Anoka, and incorporated her into the Williston archon's origin story.

I think there are still signs of lack of foresight. The actual plot of Fargo's first arc is like the plot of a Legend of Zelda game. Go to three different places, fight three bosses, then go to the final dungeon where the final boss awaits. What the characters actually do, narratively, is spin their wheels in endless action sequences; all sense of progression is driven by the slow unveiling of Delaney and Erika's backstories, which recontextualizes them as characters, as well as broadening hints toward Kyubey's plot. And Sloan's gradual recovery from the precipice of despair, of course.

That last one was a mirror of the author. Fargo was an immediate smash hit of the kind I had never seen before; I was getting two to three comments per chapter, and they were good comments, too. Before, I hadn't even been able to beg friends and family to read my novels. (I once described the plot of a pre-Bavitz novel to my grandmother; she said, "That doesn't sound any good at all.") I expected obscurity, an obscurity reflected by the aggressively anti-SEO title I decided on as a joke (Fargo being a movie I don't particularly like, and the only real overlap between that one and mine being neither is actually set in Fargo). Receiving any reception at all was a miracle.

At the same time, I moved closer to where I worked, killing my daily commute once and for all. Time, energy, and hope were surging back into me. The dream I had always harbored of being an internationally-renowned author seemed to be finally coming true. Everything was looking up. Riding this momentum, I no longer worried about the ambitious length of my story. It was worth it. I was in for the long haul.

IV. Minneapolis

Clair's personality emerged as the natural foil to Sloan, the brutish, instinct-driven meathead: elegant, careful, intelligent, poised. It was my get-out-of-the-escape-room problem solving that led me to realize this made her similar to Kyubey himself; that connection inspired the plot twist that she was, in fact, a homunculus created by him, which turned into Delaney being a homunculus too. (In early Williston chapters, I repeatedly focused on Delaney's dead eyes to foreshadow her sociopathic turn; this pedestrian bit of description became eerily serendipitous for explaining how she changed her eye color with magic to hide its natural red.)

As an author, I myself was transitioning from Sloan-esque instinct to more careful and intelligent planning. I'd already come up with Anoka, but the other Minneapolis girls emerged in ways I thought would play well off of Clair, emphasizing her uncanny and aristocratic coldness. I entered the second arc with more elaborate plotting, where I would set up characters like chess pieces and knock them over in spectacular and fulfilling ways. It all centered around the Yaldabaoth fight, which was the first part of the second arc I came up with, in a first arc sense of unconsciousness: A massive monster of light, crawling across a city, chasing magical girls as they sped around in a car.

There were some speed bumps. This arc featured the only time while writing Fargo that I scrapped a scene and rewrote it; this being the Terminatrix's introduction, which originally showed her receiving her commission from Kyubey. I felt it was plodding and tedious compared to her current introduction, which remains highly popular. (As a side note, Puella Magi Homura Magica also includes a character whom Kyubey pays to kill magical girls he doesn't like.)

Otherwise, though, I was locked in. Everything just worked. I came up with an idea for a character or a plot twist and it made perfect sense with what I had already established. It was like magic. It was effortless. I was reading literature again, too, after a year away from it; my prose improved as a result. There is unparalleled exhilaration in growth. It was like academia all over again, where I learned new things day after day and always seemed to be ascending to some better place. I started imagining future greatness. It wouldn't stop here. Fargo was just the start. My next work would be even better, would be read by more people. (Modern Cannibals remained bouncing in the back of my mind.) It wouldn't be long before I was breaking out of the internet and into the real world. They'd be talking about me...

V. Mitakihara

Why did Puella Magi Madoka Magica mean so much to me?

Because, as I mentioned, it didn't leave an immediate impact. A lot of what I look at now as masterstroke storytelling—Mami's death, or Rebellion in general—I first watched insensible, uncomprehending, somewhat blandly being washed over. Only a few months prior I had watched Lucky Star, a work that would heavily inspire one of my future stories (Cockatiel x Chameleon), and was profoundly and immediately emotionally affected by it in a way I almost never am. I cried at its conclusion. There was something unbearable and tragic in the ending of such a nice world, no matter how inoffensive that ending was; in the banal high school life it depicted, I saw reflected what I had lost forever, been sealed away from on this side of Adulthood.

(Which explains why my mindset on it changed so radically from when I was an actual high schooler, its ostensible target demographic.)

I didn't have a similar reaction to Madoka Magica. I liked it, for sure, but it was not an emotionally harrowing experience for me. Yet it grew in my mind, in ways I didn't consciously understand. It kept crawling, kept forcing me to think about it, until there was no option but for me to drop what I was doing and write over 300,000 words of fan fiction for it.

I never figured out the answer until a few years later, when I chanced upon a post someone made on Tumblr. "Okay," it said, in typical I-know-everything tone, "but can any of you tell me a single THEME in Madoka Magica?"

It made me think. What IS Madoka Magica about, beyond a plot-and-character level? The story, at least in the show, is so lean and tight that it lacks a lot of obvious signposting in this regard. It's easy to look at Madoka Magica and see a sharp story founded on a series of slick twists, with a banal hope versus despair angle for a bit of emotional punchiness. Regardless of whether you agree with that assessment or not, it certainly couldn't have been what I saw in it to make me so obsessed, right?

It's not even like Madoka Magica is a story that lends itself to fanfic, past the level of shipfic or slice of life AU. Its extreme economy of characters renders it vitriolic to expansion. Everything that matters in the world of Madoka Magica is happening in Mitakihara to five specific people. The system extends beyond them but in a useless way; magical girls in Osaka or Russia or Fargo exist, but they are doomed to irrelevance, doomed to die pointlessly. Every canonical Madoka spinoff falls into this same pratfall; the best involve the backstories of the main cast or past Homura timeloops, the rest fail to rise above sideshow.

I think what gnawed at me, what made me brute force a new narrative into this story that doesn't need one, was the reflection I saw in it. The Lucky Star kids with all their hopes and dreams and pleasant optimism tossed into the clanking reality of Adulthood, forced to work jobs with no point and no hope until they finally just died. The more I rewatch the show, the more I become consumed by a socioeconomic reading of it, the financial disparities between the characters (Hitomi, free from all of this, is rich; Madoka, the redemptive savior, is too—while Mami is faking it and Sayaka is shabbily middle class in a foreboding and monotone apartment complex, consumed by dreams of an upper-class recital she once saw), the conversations Madoka has with her parents (who tell her again and again what "being an adult is like," only to then give advice that is utterly unhelpful), the emotionless and mercenary way Kyubey dissolves all meaning in the universe to a system of pluses and minuses.

Unconsciously, the socioeconomic aspects of the original story emerged in Fargo with even more exaggeration: Sloan is introduced in terms of her outrageous poverty, everyone else is on the economic fringes (prostitutes, drug dealers), and only Clair lives in a state of financial stability. (There's a sideplot in the Minneapolis arc where she plans to gentrify the city by rooting out its Ramseys, all in service of creating a model community to show off online.) Sloan pursues monomaniacal revenge for a betrayal she suffered at Clair's hands, but the crux of the reader's disdain for Clair lies in the unctuousness of her wealth and the disposable way she treats her employees. Plus, there's the plaid-shirted workers who osmose around Williston, silent as they fall into pits and keel over dead on the streets, parts of an economy founded on resource extraction not all too dissimilar from Kyubey's own system (though he, ironically, wonders at one point why humans would get so up in arms over such a "primitive energy source").

Sloan is a have-not and Clair is a have, so there's an innate sympathy for her in favor of her archnemesis, on top of the innate sympathy readers have for protagonists over antagonists. This all sets the stage for what is in my opinion the best part of Fargo, its third arc, where the story's thematic elements come together in more interesting and subversive ways. It's all predicated on Sloan's quest for revenge having been faulty from the start, her motives much less ironclad than they first appear and her bullheadedness making her the perfect pawn in Kyubey's schemes.

The best aspect of the third arc is how Sloan is irrelevant. Seeing the outcome of her self-absorption cuts her off at the knees, and she has to grapple with the fact that the world is a lot bigger than her immediate purview. Ultimately, her role in the climax is tangential, a singular meaningful wrench tossed into a much larger machine that manages to prompt an unexpected positive outcome. She barely even factors into the penultimate chapter. (Fun fact: Chapter 41, Love, with its 10+ character POVs, was both directly inspired by Ulysses but also by a comment I got during the first arc hoping for more POVs with drastically different writing styles.) The emotional power of Sloan's arc stems from her coming to peace with her own inadequacies, both morally and in terms of greatness, and in that way she wound up being a mirror for me to the end, didn't she? In academia, I believed I was going to be someone important, and much of the existential dread of my workplace came from its boundless mediocrity. Fargo allowed me to come to terms with that mediocrity, both in the story and without; though much of that "coming to terms" was based on the new delusion that my popular fanfic would spur me on to mainstream literary success, a delusion I would not need to reckon with until after the minimal readership for my next work, Modern Cannibals.

This also explains my decision to frame Madoka's magical girl heaven as a giant office job. Though I would also defend that decision from a textual standpoint, given the esteem Madoka has for her company suit mother, and how she visualizes her mother as an example of "successful" adulthood in contrast to the cruel failure of the magical girl system.

Lastly, there's the instinctual level of things. All this socioeconomic stuff was not explicitly clear to me even as I was writing it; I didn't consciously think "Oh gotta make this about having a job." It just came out that way, an expelling of the self, the same way I unconsciously modeled some of Fargo's structure and worldbuilding on Homura Magica. The same way, I suppose, I modeled the emotional thrust of the story on Madoka Magica. A bleak downward spiral of misery and death culminating in a sudden and unexpected redemption. When, as a teen, I watched Higurashi, I remember being bowled over by its unexpectedly happy ending. I'd never seen anything like it, not in something otherwise so macabre and pessimistic. As a teen, I enjoyed that ending as a subversion of expectations, an original and novel idea. As an adult, watching Madoka Magica, it held a lot more emotional potency, and that potency was, like everything else, unconsciously replicated in Fargo.

When I wrote that final chapter, I remember being utterly drained. The finish line was in sight and I had been doing this for a year, for 300,000 words, far longer than any other story I'd ever written until then. I remember feeling like my prose was sloppy, like I was stumbling right at the end, like the chapter was no good. But the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and now when I reread that chapter I see nothing wrong with its prose or technique. Even stripped bare, exhausted, that unconscious emotional core remained, and maybe that sense of being stripped down, so that nothing else is there but it, is what gives it so much power.

VI. Retrospective

There are flaws in Fargo. The prose is not always my best, and there are stretches that are clunky. In Chapter 3 I wrote a 5,000-word fight scene, and became possessed by the notion that all subsequent fights must be even longer, which led to some truly overlong combat sequences. There are a lot of continuity errors and mistakes, some small, some embarrassing (there's a scene where Clair tortures Delaney with boiling water and it's clear I had never boiled water before). And, significant to me, there is a lack of thematic complexity compared to my other works, with long parts of the story that aren't interested in meaning anything at all, at least overtly.

That last part might not really be a flaw, though. There is a singleminded focus on plot and character in Fargo, prompted perhaps by the unconscious way I wrote it, that was a major driver of its success. Nobody has ever complained about the continuity errors, either. At the end of the day, people might care a lot more about what comes from the heart, rather than what comes from the mind.

I'm glad, though, to be writing this retrospective on the heels of When I Win, an assiduously structured work with a lot of deliberate thematic potency that managed to achieve similar levels of success as Fargo. For a long time Fargo was a millstone around my neck. What I once looked at as the start of my literary rise started to seem like its peak. This work that I, its author, so poorly understood, could not replicate even when I tried, and yet was by far my most popular story... It was a terrifying prospect for a long time. Though a lot of detail in this regard should probably be saved for if I write a Making Of post for Chicago in the future. (Side note: Despite the prominent role Cicero and the Chicagoans play in the final arc of Fargo, with their own unresolved theater of worldbuilding, I had no intention of writing a Fargo sequel until after the "commercial failure" of Modern Cannibals.)

Even at the depths of my self-esteem, though, I never resented Fargo or its success. It's a story I like. It's a story with a lot to like about it. And, even if I don't fully understand it, it's a story that has a lot of myself in it.

Thank you, everyone, for reading.

The concept art throughout this post was created by Phetaritette, from whom a fan once commissioned art of the main characters. At the end of the Making Of posts for Cleveland Quixotic and When I Win, I talked about where I got the names of the characters from, but other than the two Pokémon gym leader names and Henrik Ibsen reference I mentioned before, most of the names in this story were dredged from people I once knew. The only other exceptions are Erika's surname, which comes from Frank "Doc" DuFresne from Red vs. Blue; Bloomington's surname, which comes from rapper Dennis "Ghostface Killah" Coles (who would be the primary template for the rapper Malkwon in Modern Cannibals); and Hennepin's surname, which comes from League of Legends pro player Johnny "Altec" Ru.

[cosmerelists]

Mistborn Era 1 Protagonists as the Seven Deadly Sins

[Spoilers for Mistborn Era 1 & Secret History!]

Because turning VILLAINS into the Seven Deadly Sins feels too easy, too unsatisfying. But which protagonists embody each of the Seven Deadly Sins? Now, that feels like an interesting question...

1. Wrath: Vin...but also Kelsier

Vin did eventually learn to set aside her wrath, but I'm thinking specifically of the Vin who went to Keep Hasting and simply slaughtered everyone there, the Vin who cut Straff (and his horse) in half with a giant sword. That's some wrath, baby.

But of course, if there's one person who has a surplus rage, it's Kelsier. He's the one who wanted to simply murder as many nobles as possible in revenge for all the suffering they had caused--and anyone who chose to work for them too.

2. Lust: Allrianne

I know, I know. The optics of having a woman as the embodiment of lust are not great. But Allrianne is the character who used her Rioting abilities to make the man she wanted fall in love with her, so... Of any of them, she's the embodiment of lust, I think, of doing anything to get the object of her desire.

3. Greed: Preservation...but also Kelsier

Preservation wanted to hold on to everything he had, to prevent anything and everything from changing or going away. That's a type of greed, I think, to hold on so tightly to what you have.

And speaking of holding on...Kelsier refused to give up his life even when he died. I remember the moment when he tried to get Vin to stay with him, but Vin understood what it meant to let go in a way Kelsier never could. Kelsier and Preservation are both a little bit like dragons hoarding their gold.

4. Gluttony: Spook

I'm thinking here about the Spook who ate so much tin that he became a tin savant and had to wear bandages around his face because everything was too bright and loud all the time. That's not food gluttony, but I think it is a type of allomancy gluttony.

5. Envy: Marsh

Marsh was jealous of his brother. He was in love with Mare, who was his brother's wife (which is pretty much classic envy), and I think he envied his brother for getting to be more free, while he tried to hold it together and do things the right way.

6. Sloth: Elend

I'm thinking here about how Elend knew things were fucked up and wanted the government and society to change...but mostly he met up with his friends to discuss philosophy and drink and didn't DO anything for a very long time. Obviously, that changed once he was with Vin and got his powers, but I think original Elend could be seen as the embodiment of sloth for reasons of wanting change but not being able to move forward to enact it.

7. Pride: Breeze...but also Kelsier

Yes, Breeze likes to wear nice clothes and drink wine, but that's not entirely the pride I'm thinking about. I'm thinking more about how Breeze pretended to be above it all, that he was chill and unaffected and didn't really care...until a certain death made him break at the end. I think it's a form of pride to want to pretend to be so much above the base emotions that everyone else is feeling. And there's the nice clothes and the wine too.

But, I mean...there is one character who deliberately set himself up as a god and formed a whole-ass religion around himself, and that's Kelsier. I think that takes pride. A lot of pride.

[connoisseursdecomfort]

The Stories and Symbolisms behind the Garden Codenames (1) The Sleeping Beauty, its origins and its symbolisms

[Manga spoiler alert: Spoilers after the keep-reading line]

Since Endo has given us new details about the Garden and its members (*cough* to be honest that one member), maybe it's time for us to attempt to connect the dots.

A. Dornröschen KHM50 and the Thorn Princess

Let's start with the obvious.

Yor's codename comes from the title of the Grimm/German version of Sleeping Beauty, Dornröschen (Dorn ["thorn"] +‎ Rose [“rose”] +‎ -chen [diminutive suffix used to make people, animals and things cute and small]). Dornröschen is translated to be 茨姫/いばらひめ (ibara ["thorn"] + hime ["princess"]) in JP, and Little Briar Rose in English. The princess is named Rosamund. The image of Yor, or to be exact, as the Thorn Princess, has always been associated with roses, too.

(Source)

B. The Eddas and the warrior goddess

While I was trying to reverse-engineer things and google いばら姫 (Yor's JP codename), I found this essay about the origins of Brothers Grimm's on the first page. Something on P.2 caught my attention: "戦死者の霊をヴァルハラ天堂に導く戦いの乙女" (the warrior maiden who guides the souls of the fallen soldiers to Valhalla, "the Hall of the Slain".) Guess who's also interested in 戦うヒロイン (heroines who can fight)? Endo.

(Source: Eyes Only, P.199)

The Sleeping Beauty has its origins in Nordic mythology and Germanic heroic legend. There is a similar scene in the Eddas where the hero, Sigurd, wakes up Brynhild from a magical sleep and marries her. Except the more interesting fact is that Brynhild is a valkyrie, a warrior goddess/maiden. Brynhild's story does remind me of Yor: "Odin stuck her with a sleep thorn and declared that she must marry." (Source)

The other thing about valkyries that are quite Yor-like is that with the connection with Odin, valkyries "existed in an earlier role as "demons of death'", but as they "became popular figures in heroic poetry," they "were stripped of their 'demonic characteristics and became more human, and therefore become capable of falling in love with mortals […].'" (Source) In the most recent Jump+ exhibition, Endo has said that Yor is the character that has the most character development since the start and he uses the exact same phrase - "she has become more human". (Source)

Ch.108 Yor being the "demon of death"

The Edda has continued to be inspirations for modern culture, such as Tolkien's The Hobbit, and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. And I mean, Wagner. Germany. War. *cough cough*

C. The Sleeping Beauty, the Eddas, and Greek mythology

Of course everything is related to the Greek mythology and the epics. Some claim that the good and bad fairies in Sleeping Beauty are based on the Moirai and the Norns. Not only because of the spindle, but also because they are there to "tell" the fate of the princess. Brynhild also has the ability to prophesy.

Ch.108

Other than Melinda, the Shopkeeper actually has all three symbols of the Moirai on him: the spinner (the needle), the apportioner (his role as the Shopkeeper), and the one who cut the thread (the scissors on his button).

Ch.115

It is also suggested that the bad fairy is based on Eris, the goddess and personification of strife and discord. She has initiated the Judgement of Paris by dropping the golden apple. Eris is "the rouser of armies", but she "does not participate in active combat, nor take sides in the war." (source) There's a theory suggesting that the soccer game between Westalis and Ostania is a metaphor for the conflicts and competitions between the SSS and WISE. By refusing to join the soccer match, it could be a way to show that the Garden doesn't want to take sides.

We do have tonnes of sxf characters which seemingly have been linked to some sort of Greek culture. We have Anya's chimera, the Desmonds' griffin, Sugmund Authen's "Eureka!", Barbara's and Demetrius's name, etc.

Yor's name has its Greek origins too. Endo originally wanted to name her Yolanda and it's later shortened to Yor. The Greek form of Yolanda is Iolanthe. There is an opera titled Iolanthe, and if you go to Wikipedia, literally the first sentence describing the first act says, "The beloved fairy Iolanthe [...] committed the capital crime (under fairy law) of marrying a mortal man." Interesting.

D. The Garden and the Beauty Sleeping in the Woods

Let's circle back to the story of Sleeping Beauty. The other Japanese name of the story of The Sleeping Beauty is 眠れる森の美女 (The Beauty Sleeping in the Woods). Where is the Garden located? In the woods. In Lin's tweet about M115, he calls the meeting "a secret meeting deep in the woods" (森奥の密会).

Ch.115

For Yor's character, we could interpret the transition of "being more human" to be "being awaken". However, it seems like there's another "thing" that is "sleeping" in the woods.

Ch.115

According to the story, when the princess falls asleep, the whole kingdom falls asleep with her, too. The good fairies try to reverse the effect of the curse - as a result, the princess won't die. She will only be asleep for 100 years.

Remember the theory about how once upon a time Westalis and Ostania used to be of the same country/nation/empire, but there's a split? If that is really the case, is the unification sort of an "awakening"? And frankly, that's probably how the Forgers can stay together without further complications? Anyway.

E. Others

Endo is from a prefecture called Ibaraki-ken 茨城県. Yep, the same ibara as Ibara-hime. His hometown, Koga-shi 古河市, is known for garden roses バラ/ばら "bara". Some think that "ibara" (thorns) is a transliteration for "bara" (roses). It's common to use the Chinese words 薔薇 to name/call the roses, too.

Now we've finally come full circle. Do you remember what the JP title of Dornröschen is? 茨姫/いばらひめ Ibara-hime. Some scholars think that Ibara-hime is a confusing translation - the ibara here doesn't mean only the thorns, but the rose bushes with thorns. (source) And therefore Yor's codename is not about the thorns, but the roses.

[vivid-wisp]

Shakes the bars of my cage like an insane person

No but SERIOUSLY, there was so much potential that could’ve been fully realized with Error’s backstory and how the themes of it could’ve tied into Aftertale, more specifically Geno’s mindset. Had the idea of Error actually being Geno was fully written into existence, there could’ve been a throughline of how isolation was always this inescapable fate for Error. How his desire to destroy could tie into a subconscious twisted feeling of wanting to destroy himself, for getting a happy ending and then because he was too stubborn, he didn’t. He didn’t listen to Sans, he didn’t listen to him again. So he let his negative emotions fester and eventually consume him, losing his sense of sanity. And since this time no one is there to help him, he never recovers.

And Blue/Swap Sans being there could’ve tied into the arc of how despite Blue also turning into an error, Blueberror, it’d follow the original story of how he still CHOSE to help and befriend other AU characters. How even if he wasn’t the same and could never go back to his universe, he eventually finds a NEW home—the Omega Timeline. He finds comfort with new people, he chooses to seek companionship while Error never does.

Both Error and Blueberror experience a change that transforms them forever, but while Error enviably let his negativity consume him and refuses to change, Blueberror didn’t wish harm on others and actively wanted to seek companionship. You could even say his desire to be friends and make connections with other AU characters was because he failed to help Error

RATTLES MY CAGE VIOLENTLY THERE WAS SO MUCH THAT COULDVE BEEN EXPLORED THERES STILL SO MUCH I HOPE MORE PEOPLE REALIZE THIS

Also Error and Blue’s dynamic from the askblog is underrated there’s not enough content about them.

[xjulixred45x]

Azul would be impressed by CS!Yuu’s natural charisma, using her talents in dancing and singing at the Monstro Lounge to lift his customers spirits while also coming out one at a time with meals and drinks, giving everyone a smile as she hopes they’ll come again

The Monstro Lounge ends up becoming very popular and busy whenever CS!Yuu is working, either as entertainment or as a little waitress *trainee*

Azul is impressed by CS!Yuu’s abilities despite her age, showing she’s very smart and capable

CS!Yuu becomes the little Pearl of the Fish Mafia, as she’s able to handle a lot of work while keeping her bubbly smile that encourages others to come back again for the food

Floyd calls CS!Yuu ‘Shrimplet’ because she’s a ‘Young Shrimp’ and likes whenever she suddenly starts to dance and sing catchy little tunes and songs from her world (He either joins or watches her dance and sing, it’s a coin flip with him)

You can’t tell me Floyd wouldn’t dash and snatch CS!Yuu up and run off with her in his arms to play games, nap or do something fun *Ignoring everyone chasing and yelling at him to put her down right now!*

Jade or Azul make a beverage after CS!Yuu because she was dining with Grim and wanted a drink that looked as fancy looking as the students but something she can actually drink (The drink ends up becoming very popular at Monstro Lounge) and it is, yes, a Shirley Temple, but they name it after Child Star!Yuu

CS!Yuu is more willing to eat Jade’s mushrooms because growing up in her time she couldn’t be picky with food

Fun Fact: Shrimps and Eels have a symbolic relationship, Cleaner Shrimps help clean Moray Eels and Moray Eels provide Cleaner Shrimps with protection, as CS!Yuu helps the Tweels with cleaning duty as well as helping them with any tasks and the Tweels in return protect CS!Yuu if they notice any bullying or teasing that’s ‘not nice’

Their whole entire dynamic is a very wholesome and platonic Fish Mafia with CS!Yuu being their little Entertainer (It’s very wholesome and cute)

This ends up being so much funnier if CS!Yuu gets the upper hand and outsmarts Azul, as he originally saw her as a naive child, but now he realizes they’re birds of the same feather and is now much more affectionate and friendly towards her (Like how he now is with Jamil) only, Vil steps in to pull CS!Yuu away with a glare that tells Azul to back off!!

This is what I have so far with the Fish Mafia (I refuse to spell out their dorm because I can’t remember all those letters 😭)

💖 Anon

I LOVE THIS!! It definitely feels quite in character for the Octavinelle trio to a certain extent.

Child Star! Yuu probably wanted to start working at the Monstre Louge before the events of Book 3. After that, as compensation, Azul lets her participate, seeing that, unlike her classmates, she DOES have a good singing voice (he'll never admit he feels bad about almost killing a little girl).

Honestly, Azul was expecting a decent performance, but nothing extraordinary (Vil: poor fool), he just wanted to get the debt out of the way. What Azul didn't expect was that Yuu would also be good at dancing and entertaining the general public, even without a specific script. Yuu's improvisational ability and the way she connected with the audience was genuinely extraordinary for someone so young.

Not only that, but people even outside the dorm LOVE HER, and can he really blame them? It's a novelty, and a very good one at that. So Azul allows her to continue coming whenever she wants, alternating between working as a singer or as a waitress apprentice (with Jade and Floyd supervising her, obviously).

Speaking of the twins, Yuu now practically has her own bodyguard duo. Sure, they love to bother her from time to time or give her cleaning duties, but they stop when Yuu calls them on Azul or when they go too far. They also make sure no one tries to mess with the little shrimplet (many students have tried to take advantage of their age difference to make tasteless jokes, take advantage of Yuu's physical disadvantage, or, at best, exclude her from activities).

Jade is happy that someone is finally eating his mushroom dishes so eagerly, though he's slightly worried that Yuu won't even hesitate for a second to eat whatever you put in front of her as long as it's not rotten (it reminds him of a certain hyena...). The idea that he and Azul decided to make a drink so Yuu could have something like the other students is very sweet.

Floyd definitely tries to encourage Yuu to be more chaotic, or at least let him be chaotic for the both of them. Yuu is so used to the point that at some point during the day, Floyd will just come, pick her up like a stuffed animal, and drag her off to do something with him (while having several students looking on, worried, confused, etc.), much to the displeasure of Vil and the other members of Pomefiore, who will probably try to chase him in vain (he has long legs, that's coal).

I don't know why the idea of Yuu and Floyd dancing makes me so happy. Probably because Floyd is so tall, he has to either 1. lift Yuu up to his height (and probably spin her around more than he should, lol), or 2. Floyd has to bend down a lot to even get on decent level with Yuu (he'll have a sore back later, but it was worth it!).

We already know that it's Yuu (the player) who ultimately defeats Azul in Book 3, but that doesn't mean our Yuu doesn't also have a part in his downfall. After all, pretending to be innocent is a great tool, something Azul respects. It's ironic how before he acted like he wanted to suffocate this girl just for existing, and now he gets stressed if she doesn't come to visit at least once a week.

Absolutely, Azul and Vil are pretty tense right now. Azul has tried (and will probably continue to) get Vil to sign a very partial contract to "share" custody of Yuu, which Vil cursed without thinking much about. It's like a constant tug-of-war, but at least they have the decency not to be violent when Yuu is present or looking in their direction (they're definitely giving each other death glares when she's not looking).

Anyway, the perks of being the fish mafia's favorite.

_______

(ESPAÑOL)

AMO ESTO!! Definitivamente se siente bastante en personaje para el trio Octavinille hasta cierto punto.

Child Star! Yuu probablemente quiso empezar a trabajar en el Monstre Louge desde antes de los acontecimientos del libro 3, después de eso, por compensación, Azul le deja participar al ver que, a diferencia de sus compañeros, ella SI tiene una buena voz para cantar (el nunca admitirá que se siente mal por casi haber matado a una niña pequeña).

Sinceramente, Azul estaba esperando una actuación decente, pero nada extraordinario (Vil: pobre iluso), solo quería quitarse la deuda de encima. Lo que Azul no esperaba era que Yuu también fuera buena con la danza y entretener al público en general, incluso sin tener un guion concreto. La capacidad de improvisación de Yuu y la forma en la que congeniaba con el público era genuinamente extraordinaria para alguien tan joven.

No solo eso, sino que la gente de incluso fuera del dormitorio LA ADORA ¿y realmente puede culparlos? Es una novedad, y una novedad muy buena. Así que Azul permite que ella siga viniendo cuando quiera, alternando entre trabajar como cantante o como aprendiz de camarera (con la supervisión de Jade y Floyd obviamente).

Hablando de los gemelos, Yuu ahora tiene prácticamente su propio dúo de guardaespaldas. Claro, ellos aman molestarla de vez en cuando o darle sus tareas de limpieza, pero se detienen cuando Yuu los acusa con Azul o cuando van demasiado lejos. Además, se aseguran que nadie intente meterse con el camaroncito (muchos estudiantes han intentado aprovecharse de la diferencia de edad para hacer bromas de mal gusto, aprovecharse de la desventaja física de Yuu o en el mejor de los casos excluirla de actividades).

Jade está feliz de que alguien finalmente se coma con tanto desespero sus platos con hongos, aunque está ligeramente preocupado de que Yuu ni siquiera dude un segundo en comer lo que sea que le pongas en frente con tal que no esté podrido (le recuerda a cierta hiena…). La idea de que el y Azul decidieron hacer una bebida para que Yuu pudiera tomar algo como los demás estudiantes es muy tierna.

Floyd definitivamente trata de animar a Yuu a ser más caótica, o al menos dejarle ser caótico por los dos. Yuu está acostumbrada a este punto que en algún punto del dia, Floyd simplemente vendrá, la levantara como un peluche y la llevara a hacer algo junto a él (mientras tienen a varios estudiantes mirándolos preocupados, confundidos, etc) muy para el desagrado de Vil y los otros miembros de Pomefiore que probablemente intenten perseguirlo en vano (tiene piernas largas el carbón).

No sé por qué la idea de Yuu y Floyd bailando me pone tan feliz, probablemente con lo alto que es Floyd el tiene que 1-levantar a Yuu para que este a su altura (y probablemente procede a hacerla girar mas de la cuenta lol) o 2-Floyd se tiene que agachar muchísimo para siquiera estar a un nivel decente con Yuu (¡el quedara con dolor de espalda más tarde, pero valio la pena!).

Ya sabemos que es Yuu(el jugador) quien le termina ganando sobre Azul en el libro 3, pero eso no quiere decir que nuestra Yuu no tenga parte que ver su caída también, después de todo aparentar ser inocente es una gran herramienta, algo que Azul respeta. Es irónico como antes el actuaba como si quisiera ahogar a esta niña nomas por existir, y ahora se estresa si ella no viene de visita al menos una vez a la semana.

Totalmente Azul y Vil están bastante tensos ahora. Azul ha intentado (y probablemente siga) hacer que Vil firme un contrato muy parcial para “compartir” la custodia de Yuu, el cual Vil maldijo sin pensar mucho. Es como un tira y afloja constante, pero al menos tienen la decencia de no ser violentos cuando Yuu esta presente o mirando en su dirección (definitivamente se están dando miradas de muerte cuando ella no ve).

En fin, las ventajas de ser la favorita de la mafia pez.

Shares, reblogs and comments are very welcome!

[deceptive-yogs]

I have a couple draft posts of art and writing but I'm doing that thing again where I get really nervous Abt sharing AU stuff publicly.

Probably in part to the fact family thinks all my interests are dumb and I kind of connect what their reactions would definitely be to what this is to what stranger would react like.

It's funny because it's not even an insecurity about my writing or really even the art I'm doing. I am actually feeling confident in my storytelling and the art I'm doing for this.

There is also the fact that I know some of the IRL members do lurk and even less-than-lurk on this website and in the fanart tags. The insecurity Abt sharing is definitely more worried Abt outsider reactions rather than thinking it's not good enough. Which surprisingly isn't connected??? Because I really like and enjoy what I've been doing???

I'm definitely thinking Abt blocking some of the content creators that I know are around on Tumblr that the characters of the au share a namesake and possible appearance with.

But I'm also like "That's rude what if they like it?"

This au is such a mash of content and then just original ideas that it really only vaguely feels like the sources. But there's some obvious pulls and references.

Ahdjjsbsb Social Anxiety haver spotted in the wild real not click bait.

[nikoco11]

spider nico (spider bot…. sometime i call him circuit too) ((he’s like what if spiderman sucked ass))

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

It was the last and only time I stepped into a Papist church.

Created for @theterrorbingo prompt: Angst

[lotus-pear]

rewatched madoka magica again today bc i fucking hate myself and to absolutely no one’s surprise i went through all five stages of grief in a single evening

[evorathesylvurr]

Sinners as programs:

Yi Sang – Cortana/Siri/similar “AI”-that-follows-specific-rules programs. I don’t think poetry generators exist.

Faust – Any calculator game. Look. I love girlfail Faust as much as the next person, but she would be a calculator.

Don Quixote – Shimeji. Ok that’s the post.

Ryoshu – Either comedic malware like Reisenware, actual malware, or mspaint.

Meursault – Windows explorer/non-windows equivalent. He is your file explorer.

Hong Lu – Any digital pet, OR he is a collection of PNGs kept solely on your second monitor for a digital pet rock. I don’t know how to explain this one.

Heathcliff – It’d be far too easy (and a misinterpretation) to go with the malware route. Heathcliff has game engine energy and I am specifically referring to Ren’Py. he’s a Visual Novel engine.

Ishmael – Ishmael is specifically placid plastic duck simulator. No, but actually, Ishmael is any casual game like stardew valley or minecraft. she is never subnautica.

Rodya – Rodya is one of those email websites that boomers adore ❤️ /pos

Sinclair – Sinclair is a book library, like a kindle fire type thing.

Dante – Too easy to say a clock. Dante is an emulator.

Outis – Too easy to say a Trojan virus. She’s honestly a scheduling app.

Gregor – Again, far too easy to say malware (because bugs, get it? I’ll see myself out). He’s notepad.

Bonus:

Charon – An email that glitched out and was sent in like 1786 or whatever the earliest year a computer can claim

Vergilius – Far too easy to say tasque task manager. He’s an antivirus. Scares the viruses into not doing that shit.

Erlking(?) Heathcliff – Yeah he’s malware. He infects your computer, and spreads to other computers.

[fumifooms]

What if we were both magic prodigies and it otherized us in different ways and we devoted ourselves to protecting a family member who has general other goals & priorities. What if we both did self-sacrifical devotion in opposite ways.

What if we were dark mirrors of each other and where I've grown overcontrolling you've grown complacent. What if, bought as a servant into a pretty loving home, ownership and control is what love looks like to me, and to you neglected and lonely growing up, love is gratefully taking any scraps of it you’re lent.

By belonging to someone, even if she comes back injured or fails at finding Delgal, she feels like she belongs and is cherished, by owning someone he feels safe in them not leaving him.

She’s what’s tethering him do you see… And he’s the only thing giving her direction and purpose in her state. She needs a compass and he needs a support.

They’re both so out of it 😭 It’s the weirdly intense and unearned mutual trust and reliance on each other?? They’re each other’s weird little comfort codependent teddy bear. Or at least they were headed towards that before SHE DIED THEN HE DIED THEN THEY BOTH FORGOT ABOUT EACH OTHER AND NEVER MET EVER AGAIN. Though she’s also the guard attack hound keeping him safe… And vice versa he heals her and can rewrite her very being with just one wave of his hand. They’re both so so mentally and physically vulnerable both but they cling onto each other. They can’t perceive things accurately but despite it all someway somehow they stumble into something closer to resembling companionship just before they both die. Falin is just that kind and Thistle is just that lonely. Overworked.

We both haven’t lived for ourselves in a very long time, haven’t we.

They both have a similar devotion to the people they love but again the difference is that Thistle starts overtsepping while Falin is self-effacing. The other difference between them is that people care about Falin <3 People have given up on Thistle long ago, and he has given people reasons to, while people refuse to give up on Falin. Yaad has a mini arc about it dw about it it’s ok he’s not all alone in the end 😭😭 He reached out for Marcille’s hand but they already all wanted to help him, they just had to be given the chance to, Yaad just had to be given the chance to, it’s okay I’m okay

Hey what if we learned to get in touch with our own identity and the world around us and living in the present again through being in the worst codependent situationship ever.

Falin and Thistle sitting in a tree, sucking on flowers together because they’re h-u-n-g-r-y 💕💕💕

I bet he’s only ever thought of flowers as useless ornaments. Weak weeds. But she shows him they’re tasty and useful and good and pretty in their own right too and deserve existing without proving their worth and waaa <33 Thistles…... Did you know thistles taste sweet if you remove the thorns and eat them?

"Even as a chimera, her kind nature remains" you can’t suppress her in the way that matters. You can’t soothe him in the way that matters. It’s doomed. You’re doomed. It’s all doomed. Save me.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Felled by one bowl.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[ki1ldeer]

Ahh the escapism of drawing my silly guys

[eleu22]

drunk nights

[namelessprince]

ok all the characters i have figured out for dsmpd au below the cut:

ranboo as the wisperer

tubbo, quackity, and fundy as the rest of the pd

sam as the mentor

tommy as ashe

techno as mark

phil as Dead Wife(best friend in this au lol)

the egg as overlord (B.A.D. militia more like bad's militia)

dream as mal

ok now random characters ive thrown in different places:

schlatt as david bell (seriously considered making him origami)

purpled as cantrip

sapnap as doug

karl as professor cross

wilbur as lightspeed but with wordsmiths powers

puffy, foolish, eret, and callahan as the rest of watch (callahan is like their bacon man. in a way <3)

connor as le frog but hes literally just c!connor. that guy is always in situations

george as clarence bcus lol

and ofcourse. slime as fartbo