#but i think we as a society should have progressed to a point where we can understand IWTV as the horror story that it is

[elvesofnoldor]

honestly it truly is fucking nearly impossible to adapt interview with the vampire (1976) into any sort of visual medium that is 1. honest to the source material and 2. not triggering as fuck to watch. The only adaptation of IWTV that i will accept is a MAG style found footage audio drama of the entire book told as the conversation between Louis and Daniel. It'd be presented as the cassette tapes that the conversation was committed to, so it'd have the cassette tape audio effect the way that MAG episodes had. It'd also have the sort of eerie non-diegetic ambient mood music that MAG has, and the soundtrack would played over passages that's most revealing of Louis' true character. Different than the book, Daniel would interrupt Louis when Louis describes Claudia in very gross and p*do language, asking him to clarify, so that audience is more directly called to ask to question what kind of person Louis really is. And instead of ending in Daniel asking to be made into a vampire, this audio drama would end in Daniel questioning the narrative that Louis presented and Louis' intent for inviting him home after spotting him at the bar, angering Louis and prompting Louis to attack him. The cassette tapes would abruptly end with the attack. The End.

[neon-sunsets]

okay. let’s talk about jayce’s monologue, since people are calling him ableist.

for context, not that it matters: I have a significant mobility disability and a progressive chronic illness which, even when managed, can kill me. I’m not in exactly the same boat as viktor since my disease isn’t terminal, but I’ve had very similar experiences to him. this shapes my perception of him and of this storyline.

this is the monologue:

You’ve always wanted to cure what you thought were weaknesses. Your leg. Your disease. But you were never broken, Viktor. There’s beauty in imperfections. They made you what you are. An inseparable piece of everything I admired about you.

first, it should be noted that “what you thought were weaknesses” is not the same thing as “things that are good.” jayce is not saying that viktor’s disease is or was a good thing. what he is saying is that he admired (loved) everything that viktor was, which included the things viktor thought made him a burden or a problem. remember also that jayce almost doomed the world because he couldn’t let viktor die; he would never imply that viktor dying was a good thing.

the next question, then, is whether viktor sees himself as a burden or not. I think it’s implied that he does — it’s certainly not unrealistic to think that viktor might have come to view himself, or at least his disease, as a burden and a flaw. disabled people often view ourselves that way either because of internalized ableism or because society constantly tells us that we’re burdens and that our bodies are abnormal and wrong. viktor displays behaviors that indicate internalized ableism, including hiding the fact that he’s coughing up blood from jayce the first few times it happens and generally refusing to be in the public eye in a way that is self-effacing and not just him being private. yes, he says in act 1 of season 1 that he believes in himself, but he does also call himself a cripple in a dismissive way in that same scene; also, he doesn’t have the disease at that point. arguably the entire scene where he runs despite clearly being in pain is an example of his internalized ableism, but that’s another post.

more evidence for viktor’s perception of himself being negative is that he clearly has a sense that he doesn’t deserve to be loved (specifically by jayce, but maybe also in general). we see this when he asks jayce why he’s still persisting in saving him. we see this with his generally self-effacing behavior. we see this with the fact that in all of season 1, the only person he allows to touch him is jayce, and that the only person he actively touches in the entire show is jayce. viktor is reserved and not good with his emotions, which is a huge part of his arc this season. all of these behaviors point to him having a negative self-perception.

I think it’s important to really consider how jayce perceives viktor and how viktor perceives himself. I don’t think this season handled everything perfectly, but I think they handled this very well. viktor has been written with a fullness and complexity that most disabled characters don’t ever get. him being morally grey doesn’t mean he’s “problematic” or “bad representation.” obviously I’m only one disabled person, but I really love jayce and viktor and I think their story is beautifully written.

[avelera]

(Arcane Meta) The Staggering Timeline of the Hexgate Construction

The Hexgate timeline is insane, guys, it's actually insane.

So I'm writing a Jayvik fic set in the time skip between 1.03 and 1.04. Most people agree that time skip was about 6-7 years long.

During 1.04 "Progress Day" Jayce says "a few years ago", the Hexgates opened to the world. The year before, we learn from the Enforcer Caitlyn is talking to that Jayce launched a blimp "half way across the continent" which sounds like a demonstration of increased range for the Hexgates.

At some point, I would guess early in Jayce and Viktor's partnership, they also did the Distinguished Innovators competition where they needed to notch their own gears and, presumably, didn't have a lot of assistants or assistance. I only note this to point out that there was at least a year or so at the beginning where they weren't immediately thrust into limelight yet and they didn't have every resource available.

So just because Mel was buying into their vision on Day 1, doesn't mean the whole city had yet. They probably needed to prove an application for Hextech first before that happened and, likely, the Hexgates was what they came up with and that's the one all of Piltover bought in on.

So, mostly likely sometime in the first year or so, Jayce and Viktor had to provide a proof of concept for the Hexgates. Let's say for the sake of argument that by the first Progress Day of their partnership, they have one.

Progress Day / Year of Jayce and Viktor's partnership

(Let's go through the timeline)

Year 1 - Hexgate proof of concept developed and presented. Up to that point, Hextech exists and has Mel's support, but Jayce and Viktor still haven't proven themselves enough to get all the resources they'll need to build something like the Hexgates. The Distinguished Innovators competition takes place somewhere around this time. Maybe they presented the Hexgate proof of concept there (pure speculation on my part but you'll see why I think the first few years had to be laser focused on the Hexgates over anything else for any of this to make sense.)

Year 2 - Hexgates under development.

Year 3 - Hexgates under development.

Year 4 - Hexgates open to the world.

Year 5 - Hexgate distance capacity increased.

Year 6 - Events of Arcane

By the way, I say only one year to develop a prototype, it could have taken longer. But, the Progress Day post-time skip in 1.04 could be 7 years later. So all the approximations up there should be taken as "give or take a year".

Still, that means that within 3-4 years at most, Jayce and Viktor went from this proof of concept that Hextech is viable at all:

To this:

And can I say just as an archaeology nerd obsessed with stone crafting and material cultures, holy shit, do you have any idea how quickly they must have built the Hexgate tower to have it done in 2-3 years? The Empire State Building, which offers us a decent parallel for the technology available in the world of Arcane at this point, took a 1 year, 45 days, it was considered the fastest a skyscraper had ever been constructed at the time.

But the Hexgate tower is more than just a building, this thing goes all the way down into the bedrock, it is lined with Hex crystals. It has that giant globe on the top for pinpointing where to send the ship. It's not just a building, the entire thing is an engineering marvel. And it has to have been done in under 3 years to fit the most generous version of the timeline.

This would, realistically, require incredible buy-in by the entirety of Piltover society. We're talking multiple guilds vying for contracts, red tape being cut by the mile to secure the space, deep excavation beneath it, shipping to bring in materials, endless amounts of masons, metalworkers, and artisans. It's doubtful that Jayce and Viktor slept during those years. The sophistication we see within the Hexgates makes it even more mind-boggling.

Seriously, look at the base of this thing! This is the failsafe, it had to exist before they opened up the Hexgates to the world! It can't be an afterthought or a later addition!

And this Hex crystal-lined channel goes up for miles! (not literally but get my point) It needs sophisticated technicians to operate and switch out the cores!

Now, of course a Doylist explanation, the Hexgates are as sophisticated as they need to be and were built as quickly as they needed to be built in order to serve the plot, and Piltover is as technologically sophisticated as is needed for these to be built in the time required.

But, Watsonian, as someone who can't help but look at building materials and think about just how much time and effort it would take a society that looks vaguely 1880s-1920s (I would say the 1.04 Progress Day is deliberately invoking the Chicago World's Fair of 1893) it is utterly mind-boggling to me how much labor and materials and effort would have to go into building the Hexgates in a 2-3 year period. That's moon launch levels of an entire society mobilizing for one goal.

No wonder Jayce got framed as the Man of Progress, the entire city must have been working on or known someone who was working on making the Hexgates a reality in that time.

[koiblossom5]

As a chinese-canadian and a long-time user of xhs (xiaohongshu/little red book) I thought it might help to have some information and gentle reminders addressing the many rules + what kinds of content you can post on the app :)

To start, there's a lot of misconception about being able to post anime content. We aren't averse to Japanese content or media- as a matter of fact, there's a pretty big anime and cosplay community, especially on xhs!

Here are some photos from my trip to suzhou! (dungeon meshi and skip to loafer content was a mythical pull lol)

With that being said, it is disrespectful and offensive to post media and content containing or associating with the glorification/apologia, themes, symbols, etc., of Japanese imperialism and involvement during WWII. This includes AOT, MHA, and many other other popular animes.

Please note that I do not support censorship: I believe that people should have the freedom to post, express, and create media on social media platforms as well as have the ability to watch different kinds of shows - but considering xhs is an app from a foreign country, it is important to contextualize its local policies through historical lens. I strongly implore non-Chinese users to research Unit 731 and the Nanjing Massacre to better understand why certain types of content from Japan are banned and blacklisted in China.

2. There are active LGBTQ+ communities on xhs- and for many queer people in China, where the country's ideologies are still pre-dominantly conservative, social media platforms is one the few safe spaces where they can express their sexuality and/or gender identity, particularly for wlw (or le). It is important to keep in mind that progress in the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the East, specifically China, is at a very different stage compared to the West; please be respectful of the fact that the Chinese LGBTQ+ community has their own culture, their own slang, and their own ways of expression in a country where LGBTQ+ people continue to face legal and social discrimination.

3. When you first create your account, you might be quite daunted by the long, long, long list of rules and community guidelines, specifically the first section, where it states, "1. Values - XiaoHongShu encourages users to post content that aligns with current positive social values. All content posted should:

Adhere to the Chinese Constitution and laws.

Practice the core socialist values. (A list of values promoted by the Chinese government, which includes: prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity, and friendship)

Promote patriotism, collectivism, and socialism.

Spread the correct views on history, nationality, state, and culture.

Promote the excellent traditional culture of the Chinese nation.

Uphold social ethics, professional ethics, family and personal virtues, and respect public order and good customs.

Promote scientific thinking and popularize scientific knowledge.

Advocate a positive, healthy, and progressive lifestyle and social trends."

No, this does not mean the content you post or interact with has to be about praising the CCP or saying, "I love communism!! 🤩". It just means you cannot be comparing Xi Jinping to W*nnie the P*oh (ifyyk).

The point is, try to avoid political discourse or criticism regarding the Chinese government on xhs, especially since xhs is a platform more akin to Pinterest or Instagram, where its more so a lighthearted place for travel tips, recipes, aesthetic fashion and makeup tips and inspiration, cosplay, cute animal videos, productive lifestyle and snapshots of simple life, etc! You can still discuss different things about Chinese culture and society, such as healthcare system, attitudes toward foreigners, income and spending, etc. But please be mindful that there are real people behind the screen; people who are not their government. I promise you, Chinese people are just as capable of poking fun, referencing brainrot, and interacting with non-Chinese people normally 💀.

Anyways, please take the time to review these rules and guidelines, especially since xhs is very strict about implementing them and can potentially lead to your account getting banned. This includes things such as:

excessive displays of wealth (be considerate of others' financial situations)

only sharing scientifically proven information/avoiding misinformation (no pseudoscience)

respecting boundaries (no nudity or sexual/sexually suggestive behavior; you can definitely show skin, but if you're making a grwm video please don't show up in your underwear - even on tiktok I never understood why influencers do that 😅)

etc, etc.

Many of the community guidelines are in line with social norms that are prominent in East Asia, which is understanding that a social media platform is a public space to be shared with others in a civil and respectful manner. And many of these guidelines refer to explicitness as a measurement - (fake) blood is fine, but gore and other such obscenities are not. You can kiss your significant other in a cute video, but you shouldn't be posting each other fornicating (this applies to both heterosexual and homosexual couples). You can swear, but you shouldn't be yelling racial slurs. Honestly, a lot of this is just common sense - xhs is supposed to be a wholesome, inspirational, and chill space!

4. Take this as an opportunity to learn about another culture, another language, and even make new friends! As long as you're civil, kind and respectful, xhs is super fun and entertaining! Of course, it's not representative of the Chinese internet space as a whole; the majority of users are women (so consider using "sis" or 姐 instead of "dude" or "bro" ). With that in mind, please be respectful in your comments - many of the women posting makeup edits or fashion videos are seeking appreciation, not sexual harassment 😅 even if a someone is posting a thirst trap, try to be tastefully humorous! If you're trying to communicate in Mandarin, I would suggest using the simplified Chinese Pinyin keyboard (QWERTY) and start learning the four different intonations of each character so you are able to sound out and type sentences using the alphabetical keyboard!

I hope this was helpful and legible, even if by a marginal amount (if this was actually incoherent, I apologize, I learned English by watching My Little Pony💀), and I hope everyone has a really fun experience on the app!

[scary-grace]

Enough to Go By (Chapter 23) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Your best friend vanished on the same night his family was murdered, and even though the world forgot about him, you never did. When a chance encounter brings you back into contact with Shimura Tenko, you'll do anything to make sure you don't lose him again. Keep his secrets? Sure. Aid the League of Villains? Of course. Sacrifice everything? You would - but as the battle between the League of Villains and hero society unfolds, it becomes clear that everything is far more than you or anyone else imagined it would be. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Chapter 23

“Good news,” the doctor says, and you look up from the compound you’re mixing at your station. “Shigaraki is tolerating the procedure much better than I expected. I can only assume it’s thanks to your quirk, and because of how well he’s handling it, we can add another quirk to the mix.”

You’re not sure how you feel about that. “What about the neural load?”

“With just one more, it won’t be a problem,” the doctor says. “All For One carries many quirks, and as Shigaraki will be the next him, it’s in our interests to get him used to it.”

That phrasing is never not going to be weird to you – Tomura not as All For One’s successor, but as the next All For One. “Okay,” you say. You know already that the doctor won’t change his mind. “Which quirk?”

“You’re familiar with our collection of quirk factors, and you know Shigaraki Tomura better than I do,” the doctor says. “Why don’t you choose?”

What would be useful to Tomura? What would he want? You think about it for a moment, try to think about situations Tomura’s found himself in where the lack of a certain quirk has frustrated him. Between the League’s quirks and the collection Tomura’s already receiving from the doctor, there’s really only one gap that you can see. “Does that Nomu’s Warp quirk work on the Nomu itself?”

“Mm — yes,” the doctor for says after a moment. “All For One has used it to travel, when it was in his possession. It would make sense for the next him to have it as well.”

The next him. There’s that phrasing. Again. The doctor is frowning. “Don’t you think he’d want something flashier?”

“Decay is flashy enough,” you say. When you think of the doctor’s quirk collection, you can’t think of anything that matches Tomura’s ability to level a city with the touch of his hand. “He should have something useful. Warp is useful, and it’s not something his opponents will be able to access, even if they do have Kurogiri.”

“Yes, Kurogiri. Has your contact made any progress in figuring out where he’s being held?”

“He’s in Tartarus,” you say. “That’s where they all are.”

All For One, Moonfish, Muscular, Overhaul, and Stain. Mustard is there too, which you find appalling — he’s underage, just like Toga, and neither of them belong in maximum security under 24-hour guard. You’ve heard things about the conditions inside the prison, and they’re awful. If you needed more reasons to win the war to come, you can add Tartarus to the list — you don’t want you or anyone else to wind up inside.

The doctor nods brusquely. “When Shigaraki liberates All For One, remind him to grab Kurogiri as well, won’t you?” Then, as an afterthought: “Overhaul, too. That quirk –”

“It’s gone,” you say. “Tomura Decayed one of his arms, and Compress –”

Something clicks in your head. You take out your phone and call Compress, ignoring the doctor’s complaints. Compress answers. “Yes?”

“Do you still have Overhaul’s arm?” you ask, and the doctor’s complaining abruptly cuts off. Compress answers in the affirmative. “What condition is it in?”

“Pristine condition, given that I haven’t released it — other than that unfortunate instance with your coffee table,” Compress says. “Why?”

“Keep it like that. We might need it later,” you say. You thank Compress, hang up, and turn to the doctor again. “We have one of Overhaul’s arms, preserved at the point it was removed from his body. Will that work?”

“Yes,” the doctor says, startled.

“Good.” You’re not sure how Tomura will feel about getting Overhaul’s quirk, and that’s the least of your worries. “Won’t that be too many quirks? If we’re already adding Warp –”

“Oh, Overhaul isn’t for Shigaraki,” the doctor says. “It’s for you.”

You stare at him in horror. “You’ve been very insistent in your role as the team’s medic,” the doctor says. “With your quirk, at the moment, you’re only useful to Shigaraki. With the Overhaul quirk, you could heal your other comrades’ injuries with ease.”

He’s right. With Overhaul’s quirk you’d be beyond effective as a medic. You already have the anatomy knowledge you’d need to use it. But you don’t want any part of what Tomura’s been going through., and when the doctor looks at you, he reads it all over your face. “We’d wait until Shigaraki possesses All For One, of course,” he says. “That would make the transfer painless. And we’d transfer a copy, to avoid any personality contamination.”

“Personality contamination?” you repeat, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“You’re familiar with the way that transplanted hearts carry the characteristics of their original owners. It’s the same for quirk factors,” the doctor says. “With a copied quirk, the level of influence is significantly lower. So there really is no reason for you to refuse to take on Overhaul’s quirk at all.”

Something about that pulls a thread in the background of your mind. It bothers you, but not as much as the idea of taking on Overhaul’s quirk in the first place. “That quirk killed one of our friends. The rest of the League won’t want me to have it.”

“The same quirk brought your friend back, didn't it? I’m sure you can convince them,” the doctor says. “In any case, if you’re certain that Warp will suit Shigaraki best —“

“I am.”

“We’ll begin preparing the transfer,” the doctor says. “How are the bullets coming?”

“I think I’ve fixed the problem,” you say. “I’m ready to run another test.”

“Excellent. We’ll run it now.”

When you test the bullets, you test them on clones of the doctor. It was his idea, not yours — to ensure the bullets are working, you need a quirk that switches off visibly, and the doctor’s clones aging decades in a heartbeat is as good of a tell as it gets. In your last trial run with the bullets, you shut off the quirk factor successfully, but tests confirmed that it began to repair itself almost at once. This time you’ve woven in another quirk — Petrification, which allows the user to paralyze any part of another person once they’ve touched them. The wielder, whoever they were, likely used it for full-body paralysis, but you’ve been tinkering with it, narrowing it down. You think you’ve created a compound that isolates and nullifies the victim’s quirk, and with Petrification added in, you can make the change permanent.

You think you’ve made the change permanent, and according to the tests the doctor runs on the double you just stabbed with one of the needle-tipped bullets, you’re right. “Excellent work,” the doctor says. “I would have come to this conclusion alone, obviously, but it’s much faster with two. All For One will be very pleased, even once he discovers how you lied to him.”

“I didn’t know I had a quirk.”

“I was there,” the doctor says. “You may not have lied knowingly about your quirk, but you certainly concealed the fact that you knew Shigaraki Tomura before his quirk awakened. If you had revealed that, All For One would have removed you.”

You knew that, sort of. Tomura definitely knew. “Still,” the doctor says, almost reflectively, “I suppose it worked out in the end. If All For One had removed you, he would have missed out on the benefits of your quirk.”

Your quirk benefits Tomura, not All For One. Tomura, and only Tomura. If that wasn’t the case, the doctor wouldn’t be talking about giving Overhaul’s quirk to you. The thread pulls a little tighter in the back of your mind, but the doctor cuts the thought off with an instruction before you can follow it. “Start production of the bullets. I’ll prepare Warp for transfer, and we’ll begin this afternoon. Things are moving along very nicely. After this, all that’s left is Super-Regeneration — and of course, All For One.”

The thread pulls tight, then snaps. It’s a good thing the doctor’s already left the room. If he hadn’t, the pure horror that’s rattling your entire body would have given everything away in a heartbeat.

You must be wrong. You have to be wrong. You’re desperate to be wrong — but as you pull the pieces together, you realize that the truth has been there the entire time, and it’s just as terrible as you first thought. Stolen or transferred quirks carry imprints of the original wielder’s personality. The effect can be reduced by transferring a copy, but the doctor is making sure Tomura gets the original All For One. Copies were good enough for the other quirks, but not that one. All this time, you’ve heard the way the doctor refers to Tomura and assumed that he meant to describe Tomura as All For One’s successor. But he’s never said successor, or heir. He always says it the exact same way — Tomura will be the next him.

All For One never meant for Tomura to inherit his role. He plans to transplant his original quirk to Tomura and steal Tomura’s body for himself.

The realization crashes down on you so hard that you nearly black out, but you drop your head between your knees and force yourself to breathe. Passing out won’t save Tomura. If you want to save him, you have to think. You have to make a plan. But planning right now feels like an impossibility. Doing anything feels like an impossibility, because you’re still you. Functionally quirkless. All but defenseless even with a clip of quirk-canceling bullets in your gun. Easily dismissed and easily overlooked and the last person anyone would ever suspect of doing anything to subvert Tomura’s — and theoretically All For One’s — plans.

You take slow, deep breaths, trying to slow down your thought process to match. The doctor doesn’t know what he just told you. He doesn’t know that you’ve put the pieces together, and even if he did, he wouldn’t think for a second that you’d try to stop it. After all, he’s watched you stand by as he tortured Tomura for the past three months, even allowing yourself to be pulled in to help him do it. If you didn’t blink at that, why would you blink at this? You’re loyal to Tomura’s vision, which the doctor thinks is the same vision as All For One’s. You’d never dream of crossing him.

Except you’re not loyal to All For One’s plans, or even Tomura’s plans. You told Spinner when he asked, the same way as you told yourself when you set off down this path — you’re loyal to Tomura, to Tenko, and no one else. That loyalty means you’ll cross him sometimes. It means that you’ll foil his plans if you have to. In this case, it means that you’ll stop him from receiving All For One.

Even as the thought comes to you, you know it’s impossible. You could beat the doctor in a fight, you’re pretty sure — his quirk extends his lifespan at the cost of his physical strength and speed, and when it comes to protecting Tomura, you’re basically insane — but he has Nomus on his side, and if you blow your cover and lose, it’s over. So you can’t take All For One out of the equation. Tomura will wind up with the quirk no matter what.

He’ll wind up with the quirk, but there’s no reason for him to wind up with the original. If you make sure he’s given a copy instead —

The plan clicks into place and the instant it does, the urge to enact it becomes overpowering. You grit your teeth, trying to ignore the buzzing in your limbs, the panic that floods your system with adrenaline and makes your hands shake. You can’t do anything right now. You don’t need to do anything right now. Warp is being transferred this afternoon. All For One is next, and Super-Regeneration last. You have time to figure out how to make sure the quirk factor the doctor transplants into Tomura isn’t the same one he took from Tomura’s master. In the meantime, you need to make sure the doctor doesn’t suspect you. If he suspects you, he’ll lock you out of the process in a heartbeat.

He told you to work on the bullets. You still need the bullets. You clench your hands into fists, ordering them to stop shaking, and when they don’t, you lose patience with yourself and go fumbling through one of the supply cabinets in the lab for a scalpel.

You remember promising Tenko that you’d stop — or maybe just swearing that you didn’t do it anymore — and the times he’s seen you naked since you started again have been few enough and far enough between to allow the injuries to heal. You’ll have all the time in the world for the three lines that you carve into your hip to fade, and by the time you’ve wiped the blood away and taped down a sterile pad and disposed of the scalpel at the bottom of a sharps container, you’re calm again. You know what you need to do. You won’t let this happen to Tenko. You can save him. You will.

Making the bullets is time-consuming. By the time the doctor comes back from tending to the Nomus he’s cooking up, you’ve only made three. Three, to go with the five Tomura and the others stole from Overhaul — and while you’ve been working on it, you’ve added a twist to your plan. The doctor peers over your shoulder at your progress, then goes to the window to observe Tomura. “We’ll let him rest a little longer before we transplant Warp. I’m hungry. Go and bring me some food from the cafeteria — and some for yourself as well. You look terrible.”

You’ve been hearing that a lot lately. It’s apparently a good thing your costume includes a veil. As much as it irks you to act like the doctor’s servant, you need him in a good mood, so you change into a set of scrubs and head to the cafeteria, blending in easily with the other staff members. This is the kind of place you might have worked one day, if nothing had changed, if you hadn’t found Tenko again. You were proud of working at the clinic, but you’d have been proud to work in a hospital, too. A hospital would have paid better, had better benefits, and depending on the specialty you were in, maybe better hours. The kind of things you’d have needed if you ever wanted to start a family.

You don’t think about things like that anymore. You hop in line at the cafeteria, order what the doctor likes and something you know you won’t do more than pick at, and make your way back down to the lab, willing your hands not to shake, willing your breath to stay even. You deliver the food to the doctor, and then, rather than retreat like you usually do, you sit down at the far end of his workspace. The doctor raises his eyebrows. “Can I help you?”

“Sir, I had a question for you,” you say. Sir never hurts with men of a certain age, and since you’ve used it before, the doctor won’t smell a rat to hear you use it again. “All For One — the quirk — it’s instantaneous, right? The target’s quirk is gone as soon as All For One touches them and decides to take it.”

“Yes,” the doctor says. “Why do you ask?”

“The compound in the bullets I’m making isn’t that fast,” you say. “It’s quick, but if the person who was shot acted quickly enough, they could counter-strike before their quirk was destroyed. So I was wondering if — um — I know it’s the most important quirk you have, but –”

You play up nervousness, anxiousness, a desire to please. The kind of thing the doctor expects to see from a devoted servant, one who’d die for her master. The doctor smiles kindly, or condescendingly. From him, they look the same. “You’re wondering if you can have a copy of All For One for your experiments?”

You nod. “The compound in the bullets works now, but I’d like to make it even better. I want to help Tomura as much as I can.”

The last part is true, at least. “You’ve asked nicely, and you’ve been quite diligent,” the doctor says. “Of course you can have a copy. I believe there are three or four in storage, and of course Mocha can make more if needed.”

“He remembers how?” you ask. “He’s made a lot of copies recently.”

“Of course, but you may wish to jog his memory,” the doctor says. “The original is stored in the repository, the same as the others. Show it to him and he’ll replicate it again. But do try to be judicious with your work, dear. Waste not, want not.”

“Yes, sir,” you say at once. The doctor tilts his head, studying you. “Sir? What is it?”

“You don’t look well,” he says abruptly. “At this proximity, maintaining Shigaraki’s increased healing factor shouldn’t strain you.”

“I’m not — strained,” you say at once. “Just tired. Uh — and hungry.”

“You aren’t eating.”

“I was nervous to ask you about All For One,” you confess. That’s not a lie, either. You look down at your bowl, feeling tears spring to your eyes. “I don’t want to let Tomura down. I’ve been trying as hard as I can –”

All true. “But I’m worried it won’t be good enough,” you continue. “What if it’s not enough, and something happens because of me, and he –”

“Well, you can at least be assured that you won’t live to see it,” the doctor says. “Your quirk will bleed you dry to keep him alive. But we’ll render that unnecessary all too soon. Once Super-Regeneration is transplanted and combined with the effects of your quick, Shigaraki’s transformation into the second coming of All For One will be assured.”

That’s a new phrasing. He hasn’t used that one before. For a second you wonder if you’re wrong — but then as you sniffle over your bowl of cafeteria ramen and the doctor passes you a handkerchief, you decide that it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong or right. With the course of action you’re planning to take, Tomura will get All For One’s quirk no matter what. All you’re going to do is remove any chance that he’ll get All For One’s soul along with it.

The transplantation of Warp goes as well as it could. The sound of Tomura’s screams rings in your ears almost constantly, and every time a procedure ends and you’re left to care for him before he returns to stasis, you’re terrified that he won’t forgive you for your part in it. But it’s not just that he forgives you — it’s that he doesn’t seem to blame you in the first place. “It was my idea, not yours,” he mumbles, when the words blur their way out of your mouth. “Just stay here.”

“Of course,” you say, like always. The hole in his stomach’s closed now — he can eat and drink, although the only thing you’ve been able to get him to accept is a few sips of water. He wouldn’t even drink it at first. It took you dabbing a wet cloth across his lips for him to open his mouth. “You’re almost done after this. Two more and then it’s over.”

Tomura nods. His eyes are closed. “When it’s over,” he starts, then grimaces. You raise the cup of water to his lips again and he takes it from you with a shaky hand, drains it, sets it aside. “Over here. There’s room.”

You look askance at him. “On the operating table?” There’s not room by any stretch of the imagination. “Tomura –”

He shakes his head. “Not Tomura.”

“Tenko.” You lower your voice. “Will you eat something if I sit with you?”

“Why don’t you want to –”

“I do. I just want you to eat something, too.” You study him, wondering what’s going through his head, hoping he’ll agree. After a long moment, he nods. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

You end up sitting towards the end of the operating table, Tenko’s legs propped up in your lap as he picks at a plate of food. His muscles are stiff — you could tell when he lifted his legs up to stretch them across your lap — so you massage them gently, trying to work the knots out. Tenko relaxes by degrees. “What did I get today?” he asks after a while.

“You’re doing really well, so the doctor told me to pick an extra quirk for you. I chose Warp.”

“Warp?” Tenko’s mouth curves into a smile. “Bad call. Now I can come get you whenever I want.”

“If you think I don’t want to be with you all the time, you haven’t been paying attention.” You wish you were sitting closer to him, or that the plate wasn’t in the way. You want to hold him closer than this. “You were saying something earlier, about when this is over. When it’s over, what do you want to do?”

“Win. Fast.” Tenko picks at the food you brought him. “Before that I want to do stuff. With you.”

“Like, sex stuff?” You’re having a hard time thinking of stuff the two of you haven’t already done that doesn’t start to veer into kinks. The two of you haven’t talked about kinks. “Sure. I’m not sure what kind of stuff you’re thinking about, but we can probably –”

Tenko’s kneed you lightly in the stomach. “What was that for?”

“Not sex stuff.” Tenko peels one eye open and catches the look you’re giving him. “Not just sex stuff. Other stuff. Date stuff.”

“We’ve gone on dates,” you remind him. “Two of them.”

“Those aren’t real dates,” Tenko says. Ouch. “Where we go somewhere and do something. Like a movie. Or the arcade –”

“That kind of date,” you say. Your heart sinks a little bit. “I don’t know if there’s anywhere we can do that where it would be safe.”

“The PLF has other towns. Not just the one we fought in. We can go there.” Tenko’s plate is empty. He sets it aside. “And stay there, after.”

“After the date?” you ask. Tenko shakes his head but doesn’t explain. “After — oh.”

After he wins. After the old world ends, in the new one. You’ve known Tenko was thinking about it, known that some of what you’ve said has taken hold, but aside from jokes about things he wants to ban — cats have been added to the list that already contains heroes, hate groups, and bras — he hasn’t said anything concrete about what he wants it to be like. Except this. Except that he wants to have somewhere to live, and he wants you to live there with him.

And none of that will happen if you can’t stop All For One from stealing his body. “Okay,” you say to Tenko. “We might have to go on multiple dates, then. So we can decide which one we like best. I should warn you, though — I suck at arcade games.”

“I don’t care about that.” Tenko reaches for you, catches you around the waist and pulls you awkwardly in until you’re sprawled against him. It’s not comfortable, but he’s doing his level best to get comfortable anyway. “I’m good enough for both of us.”

“I know.” You’ve believed him every time he said that, ever since you were kids. He’s promised he could do it, whatever it was, for both of you, and you’ve never doubted him. You’re not doubting him now. But at the same time, you know that what needs to happen now is something only you can do. You need to do it for both of you. “Ten?”

He’s falling asleep. His grip on you is loosening even as he tries to wrap you around him. “Yeah?”

“I love you,” you say. “You know that, right?”

He nods. “Always knew,” he mumbles. His next words are slurred, almost incomprehensible. “Same here.”

You’re still sitting with Tomura when the doctor comes back in. He takes one look at you both and rolls his eyes. “Get up. The sooner we put him into stasis, the sooner we can transplant All For One.”

The doctor usually sends you back once Tomura’s in stasis, but that can’t happen this time. You untangle yourself from Tomura’s arms carefully, giving yourself time to phrase the question. “Can I stay for a little while once he’s under?”

“This again? You already know –”

“Not to sit with him,” you interrupt as carefully as possible. “I want to work on the bullets a little more. I promise I’ll stay out of the way. I won’t get underfoot.”

“You haven’t been underfoot,” the doctor says. “A bit sentimental, perhaps, but you’ve made yourself quite useful. You can stay, but you’ll have to stay overnight. Johnny will need a break after this next trip.”

“Which trip?”

“I want you to retrieve Overhaul’s arm,” the doctor says. “While I’m sure Compress has it safely stored, it’ll be better preserved here.”

You nod. Another stupid idea is churning in the back of your mind, but you shove it away. One crazy idea at once is the most you can handle. You tell yourself that, but your mouth has different ideas. “I can preserve it once it’s here, sir. If that would help.”

“That will be very helpful indeed,” the doctor says, smiling. “If you were worried that All For One would be unforgiving of your lie, Saintess, I’d cease to worry about it. He rewards loyal service generously.”

You nod, and close your eyes as the taste of warp sludge fills your mouth. One thing at a time. One plan. One course of action. Nothing else you do will matter if you can’t use your perceived loyalty to All For One to stop him from destroying Tomura.

Spinner and Re-Destro pounce the instant you get back, but then Hawks puts in an appearance, and Spinner detours to run interference while you run to find Compress. You badly need to talk to Spinner — you have to warn him what All For One is trying to do — but you can’t with Hawks sniffing around. Spinner doesn’t come to find you until you’ve already packaged Overhaul’s severed arm for transport, when you’re in the act of calling the doctor to tell him to bring you back. “You’re not staying? I thought he was going into stasis –”

“He is. This is something else.” You try to think of what to tell Spinner, what he’ll need to know if you’re caught and taken out of the picture. There isn’t much, now that you think about it. Even if the doctor catches you, it’ll already be too late. “Listen. If anything happens to me, go to Jaku hospital. Down below. That’s where the doctor is, and the Nomus –”

“What do you mean, if something happens to you?” Spinner’s eyes widen. “Is something going to happen to you? What’s going on?”

“There’s not time. Just — if I’m not back, go there. Don’t leave Tomura there –”

You break off, coughing. Warp sludge is filling your throat. “Don’t leave him. Remind him –”

“About what?”

“Who he is.” It’s the only hint you can give. Then warp sludge chokes off your voice, and when it clears, you’re alone in the darkness beneath Jaku hospital once more.

You wait through the rest of the day. Into the night. You make the doctor hover over you as you work to extract and preserve Overhaul’s quirk factor, taking up so much time that he’s glad to leave you alone when it’s done. As soon as he’s gone, you get moving. You’re familiar with the organization of the quirk database by now, and you go straight for All For One. One original quirk, and three copies. Or so you think.

You’re pretty sure the doctor doesn’t suspect you, but if you were in his shoes, you wouldn’t trust anybody when it came to preserving Tomura’s plans. You set the original quirk factor on its glass slide on the workbench and study it for a moment. It doesn’t look like much — just three full layers of skin, peeled from the palms of All For One’s hands. Your stomach twists when you think about how agonizing it must have been to remove. All For One’s palms have holes in the center of them. You don’t remember that from the hand that closed over your face the first time you came here, but you had other things on your mind.

You set the original aside, then line up the copies alongside it. “Mocha-chan,” you say, and the Nomu appears at your side. “I need a copy of the original quirk.”

Mocha makes it for you, and you affix it onto a new slide, peeling the label off of the original and adding it to complete the picture. Then you tuck it back into the archive in the proper spot and slide it shut.

Next, you pick up a scalpel, and you start with the copies, dragging the blade of the scalpel firmly across each one. You’re not pressing hard enough to cut through the layers of skin completely, but as you test each copy, they collapse into sludge when the pressure grows too firm. You destroy each one, then turn your attention to the quirk labeled as the original. Time to find out if the doctor’s even slightly suspicious of you. If he is, there’s no way he’ll have left the original All For One quirk factor within your reach. You wouldn’t.

You cut into the peeled-away palm of All For One’s hand, biting deep enough to cut through it entirely, but it doesn’t collapse. You cut into it again, amputating the thumb, but the integrity of the quirk factor remains intact. So the doctor does trust you, then. Your heart is racing, and in spite of the fact that you have the proof you need, you continue to cut, slicing All For One’s quirk to ribbons. And when that’s done, when you’re surrounded by nothing but slivers of skin, you drop the slide to the floor and crush it under your heel.

It doesn’t feel like enough. You want to stomp on it harder, and after a second, you do. You sweep the rest of the slides off the workbench, too, shattering them, and add them to the pile of crushed glass on the ground. You imagine it’s All For One’s face that you’re stepping on, that you’re obliterating what’s left of his features with strike after strike, finishing a job that All Might couldn’t. You aren’t like Tenko. You don’t blame All Might for everything, even if you do see the flaws in heroic society, even if you do believe that the world would be better off if everything about it changed. But you do blame All Might for one thing, one thing that’s unforgivable — failing to save Tenko. If All Might had truly beaten All For One, he would never have stolen your best friend away.

It feels hypocritical to blame All Might when you failed Tenko, too, but you were just a little kid. You weren’t the one who took responsibility for saving everyone. What you’ve taken responsibility for is this — not preventing All For One from being passed to Tenko, but making sure that the piece of his master’s soul gets is as weak as possible. It’s all you can do. It’ll have to be enough, and you tell yourself that it is, that it will be. A shadow of All For One isn’t nothing, but you’re not afraid of it. If you’re by Tenko’s side, you can help him keep it at bay. And maybe if your next plan pans out —

But this plan isn’t finished yet. One thing at a time. You turn to the Nomu again. It’s been watching you silently, its eyes blank and staring. “I’m going to clean this up, you say, gesturing to the glass on the ground. The Nomu says nothing. “I need three more copies of All For One.”

The Nomu makes them for you, and you slide them into the database alongside the copy you’re passing off as the original. Then you get to work sweeping away the glass, sponging away the piles of sludge and scraps of skin, concealing the evidence of what you’ve done. There’s a weird feeling of unease in the pit of your stomach.

At first you can’t figure out what it is. But the further away you get from the destruction of All For One’s original quirk, the clearer it becomes. You’ve lied, you’ve stolen, you’ve been an accessory to kidnappings and murders. You’ve used an illegal weapon and killed someone with it. You’ve been complicit in illegal human experimentation. All of that is more than enough to put you within Kazuo’s parameters. But what you’ve just done feels different. It feels like something you can’t come back from, something that’s subverted All For One’s plans directly, something he or the doctor would happily kill you for. You took the trust the doctor had in you and twisted it into a weapon, manipulated and flattered and pretended yourself into a position to ruin everything, and then you did it without thinking twice.

You know you did the right thing. You aren’t sorry about it. You’d do it again in a heartbeat. But you can’t shake the thought that of everything you’ve done since Tenko came back into your life, this is the one that makes you feel more like a villain than anything else.

<- Chapter 22

[bibibbon]

I see that you're anti Bakugou blog, can I ask something because I'm really curious? Don't worry it's not hate ask (even if I'm Bakudeku shipper).

What I want to ask is the same in this post :

"I get preferring other ships, but if you hate them (BKDK), cannot stand them... you don't love the story. How could you? The narrative is built around their relationship. How they feel about each other at any given time is how you can tell the story is progressing. In both cases, they want to compete and surpass each other, which motivates them to train harder, to be better.

This is also why I don't get people who say they love one character but hate the other. Like, you cannot love Midoriya while hating Bakugou and vice versa.

They don't need to be your favorite characters, but you have to recognize their importance to your fav and their character arc. That is simply logical, in my opinion."

Thoughts, please?

First of all thank you for the question and not sending any hate comments that's very appreciated by me!

This is an interesting perspective and interpretation of the series, even if I don't see eye to eye with you or agree with this interpretation thank you for sharing it.

To begin this of I want to say that I don't particularly agree with the statement that you provided above. While the story in itself does revolve around izuku and bakugo to an extent its not exactly that big and I would argue that it shouldn't be that big of an involvement overall.

Izuku and bakugo's rivalry or the extended version which is the Canon one harms both the characters and the plot. This is because of how their rivalry naturally is which is toxic. @sapphic-agent goes into depth about how the wonder duo fails and of the toxicity of their supposed rivalry.

From the beginning izuku and bakugo's relationship was unhealthy whether that be from izukus non stop admiration even when bakugo abused him or bakugo who thought that izuku was a nuisance in his path. I think the best route for bakugos character was for him to ditch the rivalry route towards anyone. Bakugo as a character needed to accept that there are various people who will be weaker or stronger or different than him. He also needed to accept that society proping him up as this next big hero and ultimately feeding his ego was also wrong.

In the end I still have a lot of issues with bakugo's character individually that I did talk about previously and I think that overall he should of had an arc of breaking down his harmful thoughts, beliefs and behaviours. His arc needed more focus on his character and how he treats other people not just izuku.

I also want to argue that bakugo's arc isn't that well written at all. He doesn't really change and the change we do see from his underwhelming due to a number of reasons whether that be his horrible apology or his behaviour not really changing and being played off as a gag or the way we see bakugo still uphold his old behaviour heck it's all around his arc him being the only character to follow the idea of not saving someone or him just being hyperfixated on a rivalry that doesn't have equal footing.

I think the bakugo vs izuku fight part 2 showed a lot of bakugo and izukus problems within their relationship really well. I also think that was the arc where bakugo should of been separated from izuku having people acknowledge the toxicity of their relationship as bakugo thinks izuiu owes him an explanation when he doesn't or how izuku is supposed to overcome his admiration for bakugo and realise that what bakugo did to him was wrong. @delawaredetroit made a lot of analysis based on that fight which I think is worth checking out because they point out good bakugo critiques that horikoshi doesn't address and simply let's slide for bakugo while painting his and izukus relationship as perfectly fine and a healthy rivalry that moves the story.

In the end for bakugo he becomes a character attached to izuku ultimately having no real relevance outside of izuku and that sucks for him as he isn't even able to grow an we aren't able to see that change with the way he Interacts with the world.

Now moving onto izuku's character. Izuku due to horikoshis writing decisions also suffered a lot due this supposes rivalry. Izuku doesn't ever acknowledge the abuse that bakugo committed ultimately since he doesn't ever get to either introspect or freely express emotions about this issue his whole character starts to lack introspection and hinders him from forming valuable character relationships that can help push the narrative forward as he comes to understand heroes, civillians and villains alike. Izuku also never gets a say in the relationship he ultimately becomes more passive and a shell of his former self as the series goes on to the point that we don't see him react to losing his quirk (no the moment is focused on bakugo crying instead) and we don't see izukus response to the apology that bakugo offered.

It seems that throughout their relationship izuku who once had potential and so much going for him went through one of the worst cases of character regressions and assassinations that I have ever seen . At least before the rivalry started we saw izuku express fear, awe,anger and so many more emotions towards bakugo but now he is an empty shell a clean slate that cannot feel any negative emotions towards him at all.

Going back to my original point the narrative isn't fully built around their relationship and while they do have major themes such as win to save and save to win, their relationship in itself doesn't bring much to the narrative it actually just harms their characters and makes them lack depth even more.

Izuku already has a character who is supposed to be his rival, whose supposed to challenge his views, whose supposed to understand him and be understood by him and that character is shigaraki yet horikoshi doesn't build up on their relationship and only throws parallels around when it comes to those two making the final war arc a dissatisfactionary and disappointing rollercoster filled with mountains of wasted potential.

From the beginning the story to me had a clear path that bakugo wasn't supposed to be a primary character in the series he was supposed to be something that izuku overcame, he was supposed to be a challenge that showed the damage that society caused but that wasn't the case and the direction that hori took the story ended up harming every aspect of the story whether that be the unexplored plot point of quirkless discirmation (which many speculate is unexplored to make bakugo not look bad) or the final fight between shigaraki and izuku that lacked any build up whatsoever (toga and ochako had a better one because they had time to develop)

So to sum it up while the two characters relationship is present within the series its not a well written one at all and it isn't a primary relationship that develops both izuku and bakugo but more of a relationship that develops bakugos character and hinders izukus character.

[colorisbyshe]

obviously, most it is just blatant homophobia (specifically lesbophobia) and biphobia (including corrective rape fetishes), but I do think at least some of the "lesbians and gay men can want to have sex with each other and SHOULD have sex with each other to prove they're ~real queers :3" is from people who have only read posts about very specific situations and think it's... like... wildly applicable because posts are their only connection to the lgbt community, so they just think "posts = everyone"

specifically those posts that are about being at event and a butch lesbian hits on a twink (or vise versa!) thinking the twink is another lesbian (and the twink thinking the lesbian is another gay man). not getting the "joke" in that post is that when they realized... oh, this person isn't the gender i'm into... they stopped hitting on each other? and laughed about it

the point of those stories isn't "wow, gays and lesbians could be sucking and fucking to show we aren't constrained by gender" which is insane and bigoted but rather "isn't it funny how gender presentation works and how just finding out someone's gender can completely wipe out your attraction to them?"

similarly, they'll see stories about how lesbians and gay men in the past might have gotten married or even had children together and think "SEEEE THAT COULD BE US IF WE WERE REAL QUEERS" without at all giving a single thought about how that lavender marriages or "lesbians using gay men as sperm donors" were actually about protecting each other from homophobia in a society where straight marriage is expected from people. or maybe using the only methods possible to have kids in a society that is violently exclusive towards single women and gay people (and many other marginalized groups) seeking out reproductive assistance or adoption.

this wasn't about desire or even about sex. this was about survival and working in loopholes.

like... stop just consuming posts. start talking to real people. having a conversation with even like... one lesbian who actually leaves their house will tell you that "having sex with men is more progressive actually" is a violent sentiment. like rape level violence. death level violence, in some cases.

this should be a very easy concept to grasp and yet "bisexual lesbianism" and "us real progressives know all women want to fuck men" is still being said without people being beheaded so... chop chop people

this posts only exists because i'm aware sometimes young people parrot shit without thinking but if you are older and still saying shit like this... the beheading is coming for you final destination style. just an fyi.

[my-midlife-crisis]

You said:

and this is my reply:

You said in a cocky meme that no one voted for

Anthony Fauci

Hunter Biden

George Soros

Bill Gates

Kamala Harris

Anthony Fauci is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, and the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci served under President Donald Trump as one of the lead members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. So in truth, you should thank Trump for allowing Fauci to be head of the task force. You may have not voted for Fauci but you also didn’t vote for that doctor in the ER that saved so many lives across town.

Hunter Biden is not and has never been a part of the government. Robert Hunter Biden was targeted by the Republicans and MAGA. Of course no one voted for him but it was the Republicans and MAGA that made his name a household name... even though you keep calling him by his middle name. It just shows how very little you know about the case… you don’t even know his real name.

Soros is a supporter of progressive and liberal political causes. The man dispenses donations through the Open Society Foundations. Between 1979 and 2011, he donated more than $11 billion to various philanthropic causes; by 2017, his donations "on civil initiatives to reduce poverty and increase transparency, and on scholarships and universities around the world" totaled $12 billion. However, did you know that Trump donated $175,860 to Democrats from 1989 to 2010. Why aren’t you complaining about Trump. You and your MAGA double standards. Why aren’t you complaining about Harlen Crowe to all the gifts gave to Clarence Thomas? You didn’t vote for Crow or Thomas. Nobody did. But you are quiet when it comes to that subject aren’t you.

Bill Gates is an American businessman and philanthropist best known for co-founding the software company Microsoft with a partner named Paul Allen. The man was chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president, and chief software architect of the company. Gates was a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and has donated to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs. Through a foundation, he led a vaccination campaign that contributed to the eradication of a poliovirus in Africa. In 2010, Gates and Warren Buffett founded the Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth towards philanthropy. Gates, like Robert Biden, never worked or was a part of the American government. All he did was lead that vaccination campaign in Africa and get blamed by Republicans ,who claimed he hid things in the vaccinations. Of course you didn’t vote for him… he’s never worked for the government and hasn’t snuck his way into our social security records. Welcome to the real world.

And now for the final person:

Kamala Harris.

Of course you didn’t vote for her. I didn’t vote for Trump, Pence, or Vance and yet here we are. Now, I did vote for Harris. I ignored all the splatter campaign republicans did against her. It was literally the beginning of the DEI campaign, where people like you got upset and ignored everything she has done in the past and acted like she did nothing for this country. You got so upset that you ignored that not only has she been Vice President of this country for 4 years (which is something that you didn’t do), She served from 2017 to 2021 as a United States senator representing California, she served as the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017 (which you or Trump never did). She has done more for this country in four years than you ever did in your whole life.

And yet, like a lemming, when you heard someone utter the phrase “I didn’t vote for her” you threw yourself off the cliff and repeated it like it meant something. It’s hilarious how you think you have some point while you didn’t vote for Elon Musk at all. Elon Musk has never been on a ballot. He’s not even an American. Elon Musk is everybody you complained about. A millionaire who donated to political parties, who hacked into government computers, is acting like some type of governor who has never been a governor, and thinks he can ignore that fact that NOBODY VOTED FOR HIM.

Thanks for playing.

[darkcircles4lyfe]

To Build Something Else

Whenever I read a fanfiction that takes place in the future where the hero kids continue their schooling as normal and emerge as pro heroes into the existing system, I always kinda view it as like, “AU where things weren’t as bad” or “AU where everyone is still pretending that this is the way things should be” or “AU where good and evil are morally uncomplicated.” I’m not trying to call anybody out—I’ll still read and enjoy these sometimes—but that’s how I’ve always looked at it. I’m starting to notice other people feeling it too. I’ve read fics where they point out how redundant and unfair it is to go back to being students after saving the world (remember how many pros straight up quit and left a bunch of kids to keep fighting?). I’ve seen people acknowledge how trauma will affect their ability to keep going. Perhaps the trickiest thing to wrap our heads around is how the villains will fit into it all if not through death, punishment, or imprisonment. What about all the other trappings of society? The heavily regulated quirk use, the government-funded pros aiding police control and contributing to cover-ups that maintain the illusion of peace. Hero idolization, quirk counseling, civilian helplessness. Judging a person’s worth or character based on their quirk…

It would sound too obvious and cheesy to simply point out that society isn’t “just the way things are,” that change is possible. We all know this, and yet we struggle to pinpoint exactly where to aim our sights, find the source, make any meaningful progress. The other day I read some articles from my university’s student newspaper around 1970, and it made me feel sick wondering if progress is really an illusion. Fact is, it’s easy to intellectually deconstruct society, but very difficult to imagine how to build something else.

In this fictional world, heroes have offered a mythical vision of safety and triumph. When All Might arrived, everything was going to be okay. But let’s not forget how this story began: with a moment where All Might paused, like a bystander, and in his place, a desperate civilian kid hurtled forward without any common sense. If you ask me, it wasn’t that Izuku was so good and pure and selfless, it was that he disregarded everything.

And so the person who “saves the world” (if we can even reduce it to such a concept) is not the person who puts everyone at ease and makes crowds cheer. It’s the person who makes everyone hold their breath, with a feeling in the air like the pressure changed, and it smells like rain. It is natural to be worried about the future. It’s honest. It means you can see what’s really going on. Hero society has never felt this exposed, but the people are held back from the edge of despair because there is also so much potential brewing. Electricity about to strike. The world will NOT go back to the way it was, no matter what. That much is certain. But what if we still live to see the dawn? What then? What if one person’s courage to break the mold makes all the difference?

I’m not just talking about Izuku, you know. I’m talking about Horikoshi.

To an extent, I’ve given up on predicting how exactly things will play out, because if nothing else, I can tell he’s planning something big—so big, I can’t quite picture it. I’m watching and waiting for the one person who can. I just know where he’s coming from. I think about how he’s never come this far before because his other stories were snuffed out. I know he used to struggle to see the future of his career. I relate to his stubbornly rebellious resolve to do what he wants anyway. To keep dreaming. I know that emotional sincerity is his specialty. And now he’s even directly breaking the fourth wall, having characters talk about what’s supposed to happen in comic books. Gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, we’ve been shown how something else can happen. He’s not done yet.

[medeaaa]

I rlly need a fic of viktor and jayce becoming like the power couple of piltover in like the hexgates years

(I knowwww it would be antithetical and reductive of arcane’s themes of isolation and structural oppression regarding viktor ikkk but I want it anyway)(but honestly I think it could be done well in regards to that anyway - think the cost of sacrificing your sense of self and identity in order to fit into a world that fundamentally opposes it, and then being rewarded for it, like I’m thinking about how in the show I think we get hints that viktor holds very true to the parts of him that were forged in the undercity in that he always brings up that the point of science should be to ‘change lives’ and ‘help people’ clearly thinking of his own upbringing and the people in Zaun, as well as how he seems completely detached from the wealthy piltover social scene unlike jayce, and while this is definitely in part due to classist prejudice, I also think Viktor actively shuns the elite and sees them as a source of people’s suffering. It’s also his willingness to hold true to his undercity character that I think makes piltovans avoid and disregard him.

So think if the inverse happened, if viktor caved to the pressures of piltovan social pressure and tried to actively change and hide aspects of himself that the upper class piltovans found distasteful. A bit like jayce in a sense where he’s paraded around and has to change himself to appeal to the council and investors. Like what happens when they both get to be the centre of all this attention and praise and pressure and gossip. If they’re treated like a celebrity couple and they’re both become transformed into symbols of innovation and progress that is simultaneously elevating and dehumanising. And the thing is Viktor would never truly ever feel like he succeeded in fitting in, because he would always be viewed a little bit differently due to his background (I wonder the kind of narratives that piltovans would impose on his story in this scenario if it would be sort of poverty porn esque, the underdog, or the ‘good zaunite’ following what I think arcane behind to explore in s2 with vi’s character) and his disability. But also because Viktor would always have to actively choose to play this part and play at social customs and culture that are not native to him and there would be this constant paranoia or imposter syndrome, where he worries that people can see right through him and are questioning the validity of his apparent acceptance into piltovan society

And also how this would splinter into their relationship and how jayce and viktor would have this joint pressure - would it be easier with them both carrying it, or would resentment of the respective roles they have to play seep into their relationship and interactions with each other? Would there be a fundamental misunderstanding on Jaycee’s part on what exactly it means for viktor to try and assimilate into piltovan society, a society that would be actively hostile to him otherwise?

Idk this started with me just wanting some fluff and it ended up spiralling into this lmao

[irrealisms]

svsss and sexual violence pt. 1: shen yuan's realization of himself as a target

it's been a while (read: two months) since my last Big Meta so it's time for another one! this one is about my reading of svsss as in large part About sexual violence but it's gonna be in multiple parts; this one is about 1k, with a lot of quotes from canon, and is focused on Shen Yuan realizing that he has been put in a position where he is a target for sexual violence.

standard disclaimer at the beginning: i am not saying that this is the Only thing svsss is about, or that other readings are invalid; i am not intending to character-bash most of the characters here (while i will freely admit to thinking e.g. old palace master or qiu jianluo are pretty one-dimensionally shitty, lots--probably most--of the characters in this series who i mention as perpetrating SA are characters who do have depths & who i in fact like a lot! despite this meta, or perhaps because of it, my second-favorite character is luo binghe, and i am in fact a bingqiu shipper!); and, obviously, huge fucking CW for sexual abuse and adjacent topics.

(also: shoutout to @rooses40stepskincareroutine for motivating me to actually write all this out haha)

TABLE OF CONTENTS pt 1: shen yuan's realization of himself as a target (you are here) pt 2: gender and homophobia pt 3: non-bingqiu sexual violence pt 4: shen qingqiu's body pt 5: we live in a society

When we first meet Shen Yuan, he's oblivious to the idea of himself as a sexual object. He's attracted to others and at times has to deliberately be respectful and not stare, but he never considers the possibility that others might be attracted to him--much less that men would be attracted to him, and certainly not that he would be a target of sexual violence due to this desire. I could get quotes/proof on this but honestly I think this is pretty uncontroversial.

The first point at which this becomes interesting to me in the context of sexual violence is when Luo Binghe returns from the abyss. here's how the choking scene goes:

“During the day, Shizun was so intimate and gentle with Gongyi Xiao, and this evening you lit a lantern, waiting for Liu-shishu until late into the night. What sincere affection. Why, then, are you so distant when it comes to this disciple?” [...] Under the streaming moonlight, Luo Binghe looked even more peerlessly beautiful, as if his silhouette had been carved from ice and jade. He pressed very close, and he spoke with slow deliberation. “After so many years of separation, we meet amidst golden wind and jade dew, yet Shizun incessantly calls someone else’s name. That truly saddens this disciple a little.”

Luo Binghe is jealous of Shen Qingqiu talking about other people, so he "pressed very close" and starts choking Shen Qingqiu out. This is not explicitly sexual--yet--but it has some overtones. And I don't think this is accidentally sexually charged-- bingqiu is in fact our primary ship, which we are supposed to be reading as sexually charged! It becomes more and more explicit that Luo Binghe is jealous of SQQ's relationships with others not just in general but also on a specifically romantic/sexual level! And later in the same scene we get this line:

Luo Binghe looked at him, then said pityingly, “Shizun, that would require someone to believe you.”

I'll be talking more later about what svsss has to say about sexual violence being allowed and supported by society but right now I just want to really emphatically gesture at the above quote.

And then in their next interaction, in the water prison, the system (we will be talking more about the system's role in all of this later) progresses the scene by causing LBH to physically tear SQQ's robes, and we get this section:

That doesn’t mean you should tear my clothes! Shen Qingqiu clutched the remaining fabric tightly and indignantly said, “What are you doing?! Is this your only method of humiliating others?” “It was clearly Shizun who humiliated me first!” 【 Satisfaction points +50. 】 You can add points for that too?! Gross! Why does this feel so sick?!

But notably--even though Shen Qingqiu notices feeling sick and gross and humiliated about having his clothes ripped off--Shen Qingqiu, even here, does not yet recognize any threat of sexual abuse! Gongyi Xiao sees him and instantly assumes that Shen Qingqiu's been raped by Luo Binghe--the torn clothes, the panicked desire to get out and away from Luo Binghe--but Shen Qingqiu has no idea that this is the assumption being made; Shen Qingqiu is, in his narration, still primarily afraid of more physical threats from LBH, a la PIDW; he's trying to figure out why LBH isn't as good at getting wives as in PIDW, and a couple chapters later he's worrying that LBH is asexual. He's been flagged by the narrative (diegetically, even!) as a target of sexual violence--but he hasn't realized this yet.

this doesn't change for a while; while I have things to say about LBH and LQG fighting over SQQ's corpse under this framework, they're not relevant to my current point. SQQ becomes aware of his role as a sexual object when LBH sexually assaults him in the dream world--it's a kiss, so it's something that SQQ is unable to dismiss as a more platonic form of violence:

Shen Qingqiu’s worldview repeatedly collapsed and re-formed, collapsed and re-formed, cycling infinitely at the speed of light.

Suddenly, Shen Qingqiu is being made very, very aware that he is a target of sexual desire, and that people who desire him can force sexual violence on him. He tries to kick and push at Luo Binghe to get out of the kiss--he's described as "struggling with all his might"--but Luo Binghe, who is stronger than Shen Qingqiu and able to overpower him “even though their builds were similar”, keeps him trapped in the kiss. Shortly afterwards, we get this section, which is perhaps the most important section in the whole book for my reading of Shen Qingqiu's arc, which is SQQ interacting with ZZL:

That touch trailed downward until it was at Shen Qingqiu’s chest and abdomen. For some reason, the places he touched felt a bit better. Shen Qingqiu sucked in a breath, and he couldn’t help but say, “Eh, my friend, where…are you touching?” Even a few hours ago, he genuinely wouldn’t have cared where others (especially those of the same sex) touched him. They could touch wherever they liked, please go ahead. But ever since Luo Binghe had opened a series of gates to a new world for him, Shen Qingqiu’s worldview, which had been set for the past twenty-plus years, had suffered a heavy blow. From now on, he needed to look at this world with a new gaze and more sensitive attitude. Especially on the issue of befriending those of the same sex!

for twenty-plus years, shen qingqiu hadn't thought of himself as someone who could be sexually desired by men; for twenty-plus years, shen qingqiu hadn't thought of himself as someone who sexual violence can happen to. and for shen qingqiu, these realizations are the same. suddenly, he's looking at the world differently: he worries about (and imo is afraid of) being touched places where he is normally clothed, even touch that feels good. and specifically--he is touched in a way that he would have previously assumed was nonsexual due to being same-sex and he is no longer comfortable assuming that. which ties heavily into my later post in the series about gender & homophobia & how this interacts with his experiences here! but we'll tie this post up for now.

[acti-veg]

sorry for dumping this in your inbox; you’re the only person who would be even remotely sympathetic to what i have to say and i’d lose all my fandom mutuals if i posted this publicly. what i want to say is that it drives me up the wall how you cannot criticize ANYTHING about humans on here without someone calling you an ecofascist. god forbid you don’t agree that humans are “just beautiful apes who like to make art and hold hands! uwu” or “the Supreme Master Species that will singlehandedly save every other species on Earth from extinction (with no mention of the fact that we’re the reason why they are going extinct in the first place)”. even vegetarian/vegan rhetoric expressed in the most progressive, leftist terms gets branded fascism. truly anyone on tumblr who has ever reblogged any of those bullshit posts about how leather/wool/beef etc. is actually Great and Eco-friendly is just another useful idiot of carnism. all faults of the way humans relate to animals get blamed on capitalism, ignoring the fact that humans were being cruel to nonhuman animals LONG before capitalism became dominant across our society. “humans are just a species like any other so it’s okay to [act of animal cruelty that is universally accepted] because we’re part of the ecosystem!!” In what world is factory farming (or any animal ag) part of any ecosystem??? it actively destroys ecosystems. We’re not a species like any other—while I’m no fan of human extinction or governmental population reduction plans, it’s obvious that we’re a uniquely destructive species and acknowledging that doesn’t make you a fascist. In fact, fascist leaders throughout history would scoff at the idea of any other animal deserving equal consideration as humans (hitler being vegetarian does not count; he didn’t really care about the vegetarian cause, he was just a hypochondriac)

I think people have a pretty poor understanding of what ecofascism actually is, particularly on tumblr it must be said. We have this unfortunate tendency here to sort of half understand a social/political term, then we turn it into a catchphrase divorced from the original context and without any real nuance.

It is perfectly fine and in fact necessary to acknowledge the unique destructive potential and history of our species. We have more power than other species ever has, and we have wielded that power to radically reshape the earth to suit our needs. Homo sapiens wiping out most of the world’s megafauna (and possibly other sapiens as well) long preceded capitalism, and pretty much every time humans arrived on any continent or island, ecological diversity massively declines.

I actually think that the acknowledgement of these facts can be a guard against eco-fascism. When people talk about culling, a return to pre-industrial society, massively reduced population etc. we can point the fact that a vastly smaller, largely hunter gatherer human community very likely wiped out many species way before industrialisation, or even organised agriculture. We throw around a lot of ‘noble savage’ stereotypes about our ancestors and modern indigenous hunting communities, but this is really a rewriting of human pre-history to fit modern ideals about the noble Stone Age hunter living in harmony with nature. This is pure fantasy.

None of this means that humans are inherently bad or destructive as individuals. Our story not a story of a vindictive species destroying for the sake of destruction, it is a story of a species whose technological power quickly overtook our wisdom, and that is still the case now. Plenty of humans use that power for good, and plenty of us have lived ecologically successful lives without harming our wider communities. Our history should be used to inform our future, so that we can avoid making the same mistakes.

Where things start to veer into ecofascism is when we begin to brand humans as some sort of disease. When we talk about humans as an ‘invasive species that needs to be culled,’ when we blame this destruction on overpopulation or industrialisation. This all too often translates into harmful and often racist policies like forced birth control, sterilisation, and other anti-natal policies.

I think the left accuse each other of ecofascism a lot as a silencing technique, but in my experience it tends to be what happens when right wingers weave environmentalism into their ultranationalist views. Ecofascism is a harmful ideology that should be taken seriously, and that just isn’t what we’re doing when we throw the term at anyone who is trying to seriously reckon with the destructive history and potential of human animals, and our obvious exclusion from natural ecosystems.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The Warning With Steve Schmidt:

Donald Trump’s assaults against Canada are a disgrace. They defile the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers on a hundred battlefields around the world where they fought and died for freedom. They kept the peace often side-by- side with their American brothers and sisters in arms.

Canada is a giant nation, not because of her immense geography, but rather the magnitude of her immense contributions towards peace, justice and human progress. Donald Trump’s aggression will fail because Trump is small, and Canada is great. Yet, this season of abject idiocy and insult will long linger. It will long stain our national honor. If that formulation of words seems strange or antiquated to you then please consider that might be a major cause of our current dilemma. A great nation cannot remain so for long when virtue becomes an endangered species, and nobility becomes an alien concept in a society that is built on a foundation of ideas about human liberty — not nihilistic philosophies about the rights of the strong to destroy as they please, and take what they want — whether it be from a person, a family, a community, or a smaller nation. The overwhelming majority of Americans find Trump’s bluster around Canada to be incomprehensibly asinine. They do not take his threats seriously, which is a mistake. It is well past the hour when the White House gangster should be taken both literally and seriously.

It should also be acknowledged that there are far too many Americans walking around with a frightening gleam in their eyes. These are the people who have become excited and enthralled around the idea of smashing and burning everything they see so it can be great. What I am describing is a human sickness. It is manifesting itself in a place — the United States — where generations thought it could not. Yet, it has. Donald Trump’s inaugural tirade was a declaration of repudiation against the Atlantic Charter signed in Placentia Bay, The Bretton Woods Agreement, the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and NATO. It is time to appreciate his intentions and understand that if he could make what he is saying so, he would in an instant. The failure to fiercely object to his insanity from the first instance only encourages more of his aggression. No sane person should think Donald Trump possesses the capacity for restraint. Each day’s actions are a probing attack at the boundaries of what might be possible or achievable. Would Donald Trump imprison journalists and kill his opposition if he could?

The answer is yes, and only a fool would debate the point. When Donald Trump puts his head down at night he does so dissatisfied. He dreams of becoming Putin, a man with no constraints. He dreams of being a czar. The biggest mistake of the last 10 years has been the singular inability by anyone to tell Donald Trump, “NO!” The time has come. He must feel the wall. He must be turned back, or he will move forward. [...] Why have no American leaders stood side-by-side with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and (almost former) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, and denounced Trump’s sinister recklessness — and the real harm to real people, who are being made to feel great anxiety about their economic well-being, safety and futures. Canada is being squeezed by MAGA maliciousness on one side, and the pathetic weakness of the Schumer Democrats on the other. They are bound on one side by menace, and on the other with fecklessness.

[...] Donald Trump is directly, repeatedly and consistently threatening Canadian sovereignty and the liberty of 40,000,000 people. This aggression is both real and a staggering betrayal. Canadians and Americans have fought together, bled together, and died together. Their shared cause and faith was the liberation of the oppressed and enslaved. Neither country has waged wars of conquest for territories and empires. The sons of each can be found buried in French soil, where the graves all face home towards the free nations of the North American continent. This is not who we are. We must never become what Donald Trump’s dark dreams imagine we might become as he seeks to remake America in his image, while pulling Washington, Lincoln and King’s portraits off of the wall. One thing is for sure: the placement of Winston Churchill’s bust in the Trump Oval Office is like inviting a convent of nuns to a whorehouse happy hour. There are Canadian-American families on both sides of the border. Donald Trump is attacking each and every one as he seeks to take what is not his — and never will be. Canada is not for sale and the United States of America is not Putin’s Russia, regardless of whatever sick fantasy swirls in the head of Orange Nero, his ludicrous vice president, or his Ketamine-addicted unelected prime minister.

Steve Schmidt wrote a solid piece on why Americans must stand with our Canadian neighbours, even as Donald Trump is trying to bully Canada into giving up its independence and sovereignty.

[galedekarios]

Keeping this anon, but I hear you hate bloodweave. I was curious on your take to why.

You don't have to reply to this if it makes you uncomfortable thought!!

i'd like to preface this again by saying that this is my opinion. idc what you ship.

i've talked about this here, but i don't mind reiterating my points:

they have no chemistry, to the contrary, gale shuts him down right away during their first talk and ast*rion's manipulation attempts. i assume that gale sees right through him from the beginning. a lot of people love to hc gale as naive as or as completely taken with ast*rion, but it's the complete opposite. i imagine his many years in waterhavian society made him realise quite quickly what type of person he's dealing with. the relationship they have doesn't progress much from that. by act iii they - at best - begrudgingly tolerate each other.

they are diametrically opposed in the things they value as people as well as their morals. gale is kind-hearted, he approves of helping those in need, children, mothers, slaves, refugees, even the animals you meet in-game. he seeks to avoid bloodshed, approves of letting people who want to pay the party back for their help keep their money and belongings. he seeks knowledge and even power not for selfish reasons or a taste for the darker things, but because he seeks to better their odds of survival against a seemingly invincible foe. ast*rion meanwhile is selfish and cruel and vile. he delights in violence and bloodshed, he finds the struggle of people caught in the crosshairs amusing. he is greedy and short-sighted, seeking power for himself, no matter the cost to others.

they are completely incompatible in terms of what they look for in a relationship and a potential partner. gale wants and needs a deeper connection, a tangling of the souls, and he needs someone to be there for him unequivocally, to love him for who he is as he is. he is not taken in by someone's looks or image they present of themselves, nor does he do hate sex / endless bickering / enemies to fwb / etc.

the first things he cites for trusting the protag are their good actions (helping mirkon, helping arabella, seeking to ease the tension between zevlor and aradin), it's all those things that at first make him trust the protag and later - when they unselfishly offer him help, give him artefacts - makes him fall in love with them. sex and immediate gratification isn't important to him. sex is a component - one way in an array of ways to proclaim love.

for ast*rion, it's manipulation first and his entire romance hinges on that. his partner falling for his looks and his text book manipulation into sex. that's already where this breaks apart for me in terms of this ship because that doesn't work with gale.

add to that ast*rion's cruel remarks about gale's when he is need:

[after gale's background story reveal] You'd have us debate? That Netherese jack-in-the-box should be a blip on the horizon by now!

[after mystra's demands] I can't believe Mystra's demanding Gale sacrifice himself to destroy the Absolute. It's just a waste of a perfectly good cult that we could be controlling. And a waste of a perfectly good Gale, I suppose.

[at the stormshore tabernacle] Well? Go on, then - it's rude to keep a goddess waiting.

[after orin potentially kidnaps gale] So, we kill Gortash or Gale dies? It's not an easy call. On the one hand, killing Gortash would be fun. On the other, Gale can be very annoying. We should probably save the wizard, though. He does have his moments.

i think it's very clear, given the fact that these reactions range from act i to act iii, that he doesn't give a singular fuck about gale. contrast this to karlach's reactions, or even shadowheart's:

Karlach: That bloody freak won't get away with this. That's my wizard she took. And we're going to get him back.

(particularly karlach has many reactions like this.)

...unless you play either of them as an origin char and make the most ooc choices, i do not see how this pairing is supposed to work.

additionally, as i've discussed more in my previous post, the parallels people draw between them are shallow at best or can be drawn virtually between any of the other origin companions, or are non-existent at worst. ast*rion having a reading animation that he shares with gale (as halsin and shadowheart do too), or having their tents next to each other (like wyll and gale do in act i) isn't really enough for me.

as i've said previously, i have tried to engage with the pairing because it's sadly inescapable since people often don't bother tagging, but there's nothing except shallow ooc stuff.

[ms-scarletwings]

Irken Zim’s 8 biggest fans

For funsies! As we are well aware, this guy has a lot of gut-haters and censurers across the galaxy. Over his long years of life, he’s gained a proud infamy from every corner of the Irken empire, all the way to the fringes beyond, and the number of critics snapping at his heels only grows with every adventure. Whole civilizations sit at their seat’s edge waiting for this invader’s downfall, but what of those who defy all odds, expectations, maybe even logic? Even devils somehow find worshippers, even criminals get fan mail, and even Invader Zim has someone rooting for him within the 4th wall. Weirdly quite a handful of them, actually, let’s recount.

8. Table Headed Service Drone Bob

It’s humorous, how odd circumstance can make for strange advocacy. The show’s universe operates on the rule of funny, and Bob just so happened to be in the right place and time to comedically become the only Irken alive with something to gain from Zim’s success, and so much to lose for his failure. The sheer unfairness of what the Tallest put him through along with Zim serving some hope for a miracle ticket out of his low standing seemed to snap something in him, even if just for an episode. It would make sense for anyone in his position to have a much more dampened love for their society and leaders, to the point where cheering on its greatest enemy would be preferable than another moment of being a doormat. An underdog rooting for an underdog, even if for purely selfish and coincidental reasons.

7. The Judgementia Control brains

Even more deliciously ironic, isn’t it- That Zim’s praise was be sung once from the very bottom rung of Irken society and then again from the highest spike? What better to follow up poor Bobby than another victim of astronomical circumstance, or rather, three victims together? The nutshell recap of “The Trial’s” plot climax spells out the tragedy of, what is basically Irk’s highest court officials, to become he first ever victims of Zim’s malignant code becoming a contagion. They’ve joined the Fanclub, even if against their will, and all the better for Zim this time to have support from such a high place, seeing that it literally saved his hide in this instance.

6. Dib Membrane

Yeah, that’s freaking right. He’s on the list. You think being a hype man and a mortal rival are mutually exclusive? You either haven’t been watching enough DBZ or you haven’t been watching enough Hellsing and should fix that. Anyway, and I’m speaking within the actual canon dynamic of these two… it is very important to Zim that Dib is perceived as a formidable opponent to bluster his own ego, and vise versa. Dib is not in any self-serving position to accept what an actual mess Zim’s operation is, even though he has more evidence of the alien’s horrible tactics, nonsense plans, failures, etc. than anyone else on the planet. Gaz can see Zim for exactly what he is and why fighting him doesn’t have to be this 24/7 urgent priority. Dib refuses to get that because stopping Zim’s pop-up schemes only keeps the score tied for them. They’ve both been at this long enough to get incredibly frustrated with the lack of progression regarding the big picture goals, taking over the world, and exposing a live alien to the world, respectively. I don’t think he has to keep describing this space goblin as some ultra-cunning master of villainy, or GIR as this nefarious minion because that’s what he actually thinks of them, but because if he admits otherwise, that’s not a great reflection of his own merit for the obvious reasons. Just the presentation of another dimension’s version of himself succeeding against Zim before him causes a spiral of self doubt, just as it can bring Zim to a minor panic watching other invaders leaving him in the dust. Dib wants this guy to be a challenge worth the victory lap when he finally gets what he’s been fighting so hard for.

When Zim is getting on some truly idiotic antics, Dib doesn’t actually revel in his disorganized stupidity, but meets it with a baffled or annoyed disappointment. Like me watching a character I thought was super badass suddenly do something that reveals them to just be utterly lame. Too often he almost comes off like he is critiquing Zim’s performance as a villain rather than,, you know, the fact that Zim is a villain in the first place. It more than once has led to accidentally giving the guy new ideas or pointers on how to do his own job better once in a while. If I were in Dib’s place I would under NO circumstances be giving Zim advice or corrections on what he’s doing “badly” when it comes to the invader thing, but, whatever makes you feel cool & smart, you little dork. There’s also the whole “Dib’s hatred for Zim belies his geeky fixation with aliens broadly” angle I’ve mentioned here or there before, and don’t mind to again. Studying/stalking Zim is only partially about defeating him. His curiosity over Irken tech, biology, etc. is still coming from a place of genuine scientific passion, as literally all of us know. And of course, on occasion the two make for unlikely allies against much bigger shared enemies.

5. Minimoose

Oh come on, how much could I even have to say about this moose-weapon? He has two fathers and is fully aware that Zim is one of them. Assuming we all here know about the cute Florpus quote; no need to recap the whole existence of the lil guy.

4. Invader Skoodge

Now this guy… this guy ain’t right. Exactly here, at this (I say with love) loser of an invader, we reach two tipping points when it comes to Zim-affinity. One, the tipping point where Zim ceases to ask for and ceases to appreciate the toadying. Two, the point where I actually kind of struggle to find any rational explanation for the toady’s behavior. Like I’ve tried and I genuinely don’t know how to put together how Skoodge keeps jumping into this position other than ‘it’s that funny’ or some weird familiarity from smeethood factor. All of the invaders know what Zim has done and what he’s capable of. He’s a consistent terrorist of his own kin and defamed as the greatest disgrace to the Empire. The two options for how to feel about Zim as any random Irken soldier are fear, and/or loathing. If Skoodge were just neutral or indifferent of Zim, that’d be pretty freaking odd. But Skoodge interacts with Zim on the level of at least a lukewarm acquaintance, readily even deferring to his command, despite the fact that he nearly dies every single time he does so. He survives miles of being chased by a monster on Hobo-13, he makes it to the finish line, and his first reaction is to let Zim know he’s made it in one piece. He decides to lay low and slack off after getting fired (into the blighted surface of Blorch) and out of the entire universe to choose from, he decides to go hole up at Zim’s place and stay conveniently out of the way for some time. Dude finally shows himself in the unfinished scripts, and it’s to motherfucking help Zim troll around with Dib. I’m up at night wondering what is going on in Skoodge’s head because he’s n o t an idiot. He’s a real invader in all other respects, just as competent and nationalistic as the rest of them. Easily suggestible, yes, but not stupid. There’s basically no way for him to be ignorant of the big lie the Tallest sold Zim, yet he chooses not to utter a peep on the matter. Pity? A bizarre sense of solidarity?? A delusional one sided friendship??? Don’t look at me like I know other than the fact that he’s on our protag’s team, in spirit. The wannabe Irwin to Zim’s Billy, essentially.

3. Keef

So yeah of all things to blow Skoodge’s unhealthy attachment clean out of the water, we stumbled into this freak of a human child. Keef is a loyal compadre to a fault. A huge, creepy fault. Kid was originally supposed to make a return as well, wherein he was no less of a stubborn stalker than already proven once. And extra points for the irrational selflessness. Even while demonstrating an understanding of what Zim did in Dark Harvest, possibly even with the memory of that whole squirrel incident, he still wishes nothing but for the ability to put a smile on his green friend’s face.

2. The Amoeboid Cult

And when none thought that the scary conviction Zim garnered on Earth could be his biggest fans, you find this little ditty in the comics, and it starts turning into an irresponsible god analogy fairly quick. The short recap is that following a crash on a strange planet, the Voot Runner starts leaking fluids that inadvertently spark abiogenesis, which results in the creation of a rapidly evolving race of blob-things. Seizing an opportunity, Zim at first demands their followership, and then shortly after gets fed up with it as he did the previous fanatic on the list. Nonetheless, the cell people continue to reproduce and age thousands of years their time in the span of a couple minutes, never losing that zeal for their unintentional creator, even going so far as to repair the cruiser despite Zim’s rejection of them. Out of what little they gathered about him during his short visit, they correctly learned he’s a destructive god who planned to abandon them as soon as he could. Their last wish as a civilization? For this god to also obliterate them, as final treat. Such was their devotion that it even left Zim himself completely baffled for a moment when its full depth was revealed.

1. GIR

You watch this show, right? Yeah? Henchman and sidekick number one? Chaotic thing this whole fandom can’t decide to perceive as an adoptive child or a talking pet? He may not be as competent in pleasing Zim’s wishes as minimoose, or as focused, but his heart and loyalty are ultimately with their intended master, unconditionally and for as long as this setting has continued.

[9w1ft]

why do non swifties, and hell, often haters are against gaylors and insist taylor could NEVER be lgbt? "she said she's straight" no she hasn't, you wouldn't know that, and why would you? why do you care if she's straight or not? and why do you care what gaylors do? i swear taylor antis are very much parasocially invested and infatuated with taylor because no way you can talk about someone you don't like this often 😂

hahah at first i read your question wrong and thought you were asking about swifties. oops. i’ll keep that answer attached to the end of this i guess, if anyone wants my opinion on swifties.

as for non taylor swift fans,

i do think things would be different in the discourse if taylor put it in writing and unequivocally spoke it. not that this should be a requirement of any gay (umbrella term) person, rather that this is the society and culture that has unfortunately been built around coming out.

to this point, we have to consider the backdrop of society over the past 8 or so years, where gayness has permeated popular culture especially in america in a way where you have a whole generation of kids that grew up more or less where being gay was socially accepted in school, and that reality was being reflected in media, society, to some extent.. we have many more “out” celebrities and artists and so it feeds into the idea that if taylor wanted to come out, she could and she would. (i don’t know if this is actually the intention of the line but i often think of the lyrics “i was so ahead of the curve the curve became the sphere, fell behind all my classmates and i ended up here, pouring out my heart to a stranger” as a way of taylor saying that she’s been flagging for forever and at some point more of her industry peers just started being openly gay and her way of expressing herself became behind the curve)

i think people often forget or do not consider how taylor is an artist whose mainstream career has spanned multiple decades and genres and i think often people forget that a lot of her success she has built while navigating different times in our society culturally. the 2000’s was a different time.

there’s also a strong cultural sentiment of hate (understandable) amongst progressive people (who are often stanning different artists) towards the rich, so taylor’s wealth i think feeds into this idea that if she wanted to come out she would because she can magically protect herself with money.

and then there is the advent of another level of actual conspiracy theory thinking with the q shit etcetera post-2016 and especially in america where i think a lot of people have had bad experiences with their families and internet rabbit holes and so a lot of people get an almost allergic reaction to gaylor/kaylor/etc stuff in terms of how they perceive people on our side discuss it. it’s sad because cherry picking goes on, but i can see how we all got here.

all and all i just feel like people on the internet don’t think to deeply or don’t think about the intersections of taylor’s identity when considering why or why not about such things. a lot of people are just yapping. i think if people looked more deeply into the story she’s been telling, and the path she’s taken, it ought to make more sense to the average person.

—//

so now in terms of swifties:

i think part of the “why doesn’t she just come out then?” sentiment for some swifties is rooted in the the idea that if taylor was gay (umbrella term), she would tell us, because we have a special relationship with her. this gets translated into the sentiment “taylor would never lie about that” when i think a lot of swifties are really saying, “taylor would never lie about that to us” and to be fair, to a lot of long term fans, taylor very much created a level of unmatched parasocialism with many of these fans over the years, backed by proven facts with physical evidence 😆. sending fans personal gifts, inviting them to hang out at her houses (secret sessions), and the handpicked aspect of that, which is all pretty true. and taylor does act genuine with her fans in a way, so for gaylors or otherwise to say that she’s not sharing everything with everybody just doesn’t match up for the experience of a lot of swifties, and people turn it into a question of “why are you hell bent on forcing me to think taylor lies when you don’t know her like i do” or “why are you trying to tell the world that taylor is inauthentic after all the hate she got in 2016/2017 how can you even call yourself a fan?”

of course there is the whole question of homophobia (whether internalized or overt) which is merited in a lot of cases but i think distilling it to that is only productive up to a point. i think the problem for a lot of swifties isn’t even centered around gayness for them, it’s about how they perceive our treatment of taylor.

i’ve also said this in so many words before but it’s been interesting to see how ‘gaylorism’ ie museless discourse has progressed because even as it has made progress in the realm of discussing gaylor as simply and academic endeavor rooted in the history of the gay experience—thereby making the tent bigger—it also ironically comes up short in terms of considering taylor’s own history, or trying to answer the why of why she might be closeted. nobody should ever have to come out when they do not want to, that is very true, but avoiding any discussion about why, i think, makes the whole thing a bit tough for a lot of people to try to understand. for better or for worse. and so you get a bit of trend of people saying what does taylor’s work through a queer lens say about the queer experience? it speaks to my experiences as a queer person. her songs are addressed to us. etc. that can be very meaningful and everyone in the fandom does this and queer people very much have the right to as well but i worry that to some it misreads like more evidence towards gaylorism being a projection of our experiences onto her. i feel like ideally there is some balance that can be struck when putting forward an argument as to why taylor is the way she is, but it’s often difficult to take the middle road when explaining things online😆