#but to say 'an individual is powerless' is bullshit

[thesaltofcarthage]

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ― Margaret Mead

[queerlyloud]

Okay, back on my MXTX bullshit because sometimes I can't believe the slander. But I wanna talk about why MXTX deserves to get whatever profit and protection from her work that she can (other than the obvious fact that it's her fucking work, so obviously she should prosper from it, that's how jobs work?)

So, the thing that drives me insane about MXTX books, and a thing I have talked about on here before, is that she is delivering an overarching message in every book she writes, and the message says: If a system of power is turned against you, no matter how good you are, no matter how strong, or selfless, or kind, or loving, or brave, no matter how perfect you can be, it won't matter, because the individual is powerless to the system. Systemic change is the only way to protect the ones the current system deems powerless or unnecessary.

And before you come in with, "She was fetishizing gay men," MXTX literally wrote hundreds of thousands of words characterizing these men and building their relationship and devotion to one another, so much so that fanon has deemed them all aspec in varying ways. She chose to deliver a message about the power of the system to persecute the innocent and the powerless in the form of a story that was 1. Illegal, 2. Humanized a specifically targeted persecuted group, and 3. Gave them all the happy endings they deserved despite all the pain to get there. She showcased the difference that systemic support can make in the life of the persecuted as the closing arc in every single one of her books.

Don't tell me MXTX doesn't fucking care. She's still delivering her message and she's doing it louder and safer, and i hope she gets every creature comfort the world can offer.

[fatgirlfinance]

FGF 100: What the Fuck is Fat Girl Finance?

We’re inundated daily with bullshit financial advice. Stop drinking lattes and you’ll be able to avoid a house? Credit cards are why you’re so poor, or is it that they’re so good you should be ripping up your debit card? If you didn’t start saving for retirement as a fetus, you’re too far behind, and if you’re putting money into the wrong investments, you might as well not invest at all.

And atop it all, we’re living in a financial system that exploits us at every turn.

So what’s a girl (gender neutral) to do?

It’s true that working people are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to becoming financially stable, compared to our capitalist counterparts. But that’s not to say that we’re completely powerless. There are things that you, individually, can do to improve your own financial situation and become more confident in managing your own money. And there are things we can do together as a community to help reduce the harm the system is able to do to ourselves and to others.

That’s where I come in. The goal of this project is to demystify personal finance, minus the normal bootstraps bullshit most personal finance gurus espouse. My aim is to help you mitigate the harm you’re exposed to in our capitalist system, and help give you the tools to change that system for the better.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing several basic guides: how to create your first budget, the different methods for paying off debt, how credit and credit cards work, and the basics of investing. From there, the rest is largely up to you. I’ll be opening up slots for one-one-one coaching, and putting out more in-depth current events articles pertaining to causes, bills, and politicians you can support to help ease financial burdens on the working class on a larger scale, too.

If we all work together, we can change our future and our neighbors’ future. And for the better, too.

[forebodingprophet]

Moirai || Clotho C1P5

              As far as Anastasios was concerned, now was not the time to be welcoming guests and throwing parties.  He pulled the myriad of decorations off of his head, haphazardly tossing his circlet diadem into its box, dropping the earrings in the decorative box on his dresser, and beginning to tie his hair up for bed after taking off his bangles.  Just that morning, his grandfather had given him the word that no less than five of their family members living outside the house had vanished.  Some of them had been powerless individuals who’d sought freedom, but at least two of them had been information gatherers, individuals who voluntarily traveled from region to region gathering information for the house using their abilities.  That meant that whoever had done this had at least two Seers from House Ofthalmós in their possession.  Personally, he wanted to call everyone home, but he didn’t have the authority to make that decision.  Only his grandfather did, and the current patriarch deemed their ability to maintain an information network more important.  Anastasios had decided to draw up an alternative to present to his grandfather the next morning, but it was going to be hard to have that meeting with both Balia and Hikaze here to entertain.  There was just so much to do.  He really didn’t have time for this.  Not to mention, he’d have to hide all this from Balia.  No offense to her, but he didn’t need a ‘god’ taking on his family problems.  Especially when they didn’t know very much about what was going on.  She had her own country to care for.  He didn’t want to pull her into Ofhtalmós troubles.  Not to mention, once her and Celia got involved in a problem, they sometimes ended up taking things to extremes, at least as far as the humans involved were concerned.  He still remembered how much stress they’d caused Esaias when he’d been kidnapped by his own people.  He removed most of his robes, leaving just the embroidered golden halter top and black pants.  He’d just decided to skip the bath and head straight to bed when a knock came on his bedroom door.  Anastasios sighed, trudging over to open it.  He grimaced when he saw Hikaze accompanied by Théo.

              “Do you know what time it is?  Let me rest.  Arceus knows I’ve dealt with enough bullshit today,” Anastasios complained. Then he noticed Hikaze holding a pillow and a blanket.  “What, is there a problem with your room?”

              “Nah, man.  This is a perfect opportunity for a sleepover, right?”

              Anastasios looked over at Théo as if to say ‘Are you serious?  You brought him here for this?’

              “We’re in an enormous mansion where you get your own guest suite, and you want to share a room?” Anastasios asked, exasperated.

              “Come on,” Hikaze whined.  “You never let me do this before!  And now we’re the perfect age for it!”

              “Yeah!  There’s a reason for that, you moron!” Anastasios spat.  “Did you forget I can rummage through your whole history?” Hikaze went rigid.  Yeah, he forgot.  Anastasios sighed.  “Look, just go back to your room.  Guests are kept in their own wing for a reason: their own damn privacy.  Granted, it’s not exactly a perfect solution, but it works most of the time.”  Anastasios waited somewhat patiently while Hikaze mulled it over.  Granted, this might be the perfect opportunity to ensure that Hikaze wasn’t involved in whatever was going on with his missing family members, but, like Esaias, Anastasios felt pretty strongly about prying into the lives of those around him.  Hikaze took a deep breath and let it out.

              “I still want to do it.”

              Anastasios’ palm smacked into his face. This idiot.  Anastasios grumbled and scratched his head, pulling several strands of golden hair loose from its braid.

              “Fine, but I don’t want to hear any complaints about anything.  Got it?”  He regretted saying it as soon as Hikaze started grinning.  “Théo, I’ll lend him some of my pjs, so you don’t need to bring any. Go to bed.”

              “Yes, young master.”

              “And stop calling me that!”  But Théo had already ushered Hikaze inside and closed the door.  Anastasios seethed at his door for a moment before huffing and storming over to his dresser to take out two sets of pajamas, his braid falling forward over his shoulder. “Here.  Put on one of these.  Yes, the whole set.”  Hikaze took the clothes and stared at them dubiously.

              “Look, I don’t sleep with-”

              “I do not care,” Anastasios spat, flicking his braid back over his shoulder.  “You sleep in my bed, you wear pjs.”  Hikaze pouted but complied, starting to change into the new clothes while Anastasios reconciled with the fact that he was going to have an awkward night, disappearing into the connected bathroom to change.

              “Still as much of a prude as ever, huh?” Hikaze asked when Anastasios re-emerged from the bathroom, finishing the last button. Anastasios scowled.

              “I’d heard that Kazuya was quite shameless, but it appears audacity is all you’re made of,” he replied, sitting himself down on the bed.

              “Man, how long are you going to keep that up?” Hikaze sighed, sitting down on the opposite side.

              “No idea what you’re talking about.  Now behave.  It’s time for bed.”  Anastasios laid down, but Hikaze crawled across the queen-sized bed to address him directly.

              “You can’t go to bed yet, isn’t it a staple that we have to share scary or weird stories?” Hikaze asked.  Anastasios groaned and flopped back into his pillows.

              “You’re fucking obnoxious,” he sighed.  Hikaze grinned before flopping down on the other side of the bed.

              “You know you like it,” he bragged. Anastasios rolled his eyes.  This brat.

              “One story each, and then we need to sleep. You may still be riled up, but I’ve been working all day.  I’m tired.” Hikaze nodded his head back and forth. Clearly not his ideal, but he’d take the compromise… and made a quiet plan to try and stretch it as much as he could.

              Midnight rolled around, but Hikaze still didn’t let Anastasios go to bed.  And, to be honest, although he was exhausted, he’d kind of forgotten about it.

              “Hey, so where’s Celia?  I thought she would come barge in in at some point demanding to join us and be a complete brat?”

              Anastasios paused, not answering immediately.  It wasn’t like it was a secret, but it could definitely be dangerous to just go telling random people.  However, given how inconsistently it occurred, it may act as a good way to test Hikaze’s true nature.

              “Celia is out ‘feeding’,” Anastasios answered.

              “Huh?”  Hikaze scrunched up his face, clearly not understanding.

              “Simply feeding her sugar isn’t enough.  I’m not sure exactly why she was able to exist without feeding for so many years after Esaias found her, but her nature as a Darkrai compels her to feed on the suffering in nightmares.  So, tonight, because Lady Aria is here, she took the chance to go out to feed.”

              “I thought she’d stick around for the sleepover.”

              “If Lady Aria is here for multiple nights, she will.  Celia will likely remain in the house tomorrow night, and the night after that, and for however long our guests stay.  She tries not to go out often as it leaves us vulnerable.”

              “Uggghhh… I mean, I’m a little glad I get you to myself, but next time I sleep over, tell her that she has to join us,” Hikaze sighed, flopping his head on the pillow.

              “Not a chance,” Anastasios replied as he sat up, disgusted.  “Do you know how much of a pain she is?  She already invades my room for sleepovers at least twice a week.  I don’t need you encouraging her.”

              Hikaze ignored the rebuttal and waved him off with a yawn.  

              “You’ve had 14 years to play catchup with her.  I haven’t even had a day,” Hikaze replied, his voice slowly tapering off as he started falling asleep.

              “… If only a millennia could be summarized that quickly…”

              2 A.M. finally found both boys passed out in bed- Hikaze sprawled out at the foot of the bed, taking up a solid ¾ of it, and Anastasios modestly tucked in to his end.  Within an hour, however, Anastasios bolted up in bed, gripping his head and breathing heavily.  Both he and Esaias had Seen worse, but this was personal.  Anastasios looked over at Hikaze, and his skin nearly crawled off his body, forcing a shudder out of him.  Did he know?  It was possible that he didn’t, but Esaias was reluctant to let him acknowledge the alternative.  Anastasios eventually managed to calm down and let himself look back over at Hikaze sprawled out next to him in bed, covers tossed aside.  Normally, Anastasios would be dubious that a mere twelve-year-old could be involved in his family’s disappearances, but Hikaze was a reincarnator like himself.  Hikaze was capable, but the person he was before was not.  However, he knew full well, and had been warned, that Anastasios might root something like this out.  If he truly had been turned into such a cut-throat person, he would have backed out and not taken the risk…

              “What am I going to do with you?” Anastasios asked quietly.  “You’re more trouble than Esaias was.”  Not entirely true- Esaias had been a social and emotional mess that Kazuya had very reasonably dealt with using a strange form of common sense.  Kazuya had even gone along for the ride on some of Esaias’ more dangerous escapades (only occasionally causing more trouble than he was worth.)  Anastasios sighed.  Had this boy been anyone but Kazuya, he would have just let Celia eat him, but he couldn’t. One of the first things he’d done when Esaias’ memories began integrating with his was go looking for Kazuya only to spend nearly a whole day crying when he was forced to face the fact that he was dead (in Anastasios’ defense, he was six- not the height of emotional cohesion.) “Arceus, what am I supposed to do…” Anastasios flopped back down, making the bed bounce.  He would have worried about waking Hikaze, but he was busy giving new definition to the phrase ‘sawing logs’.  Anastasios resolved to see how this would pan out.  If Hikaze turned out to be a threat, Anastasios was sure that he could manage him.  He’d try to keep Celia close at hand in case things went south.  He tried to go back to sleep, but his mind was racing a mile a minute, making connections and planning contingencies.  Either way, Hikaze would be returning home the next day.  It’d be a good opportunity to test him.

[captainmalewriter]

Good Karma

I wasn't supposed to die so soon. But as fate would have it, I died after I got hit by a truck on my way to the grocery store. So ironic. I never liked driving because I was afraid of getting into an accident. And yet my stubborn insistence on walking everywhere still didn't save me from a car related death in the end.

The crash itself happened and ended within the blink of an eye. My now dead body laid there, limp and bleeding out on the intersection. I became a spirit after I died. I watched as the scene unfolded. The guy that hit me was freaking out, his buddy alongside him consoling him. The medical team covered up my body in a body bag as they prepared to take my corpse away. The police arrived to stop and redirect traffic while they took care of everything. The whole time I was just there, a floating spirit in the background, powerless to do anything except watch it all happen.

"This is an unfair death..." a voice said from above. I looked up, but didn't see anyone or anything that could talk.

"You have been met with an unfortunate end..." the voice continued. I looked around at the alive people, but it seemed like they couldn't hear the voice. None of them visibly reacted.

"However, you have led a virtuous life. You have never faltered from the path of true faith, and you have carried yourself as a strong, loving individual. Therefore, I will grant you a new life."

I listened to the voice carefully as it explained what this new life entailed. What the voice said was true, I did my best to live a good life. I strived to be kind to others, and I repented and prayed when I sinned. I believe in the after life, and I believe that if one is good in this life, they will be rewarded in the next.

"I was right! I was right! My beliefs were right!" I cheered inside my head.

"Now, go forth! Find the body you wish to possess for your new life, and claim it!" the voice directed. It didn't say anything else after that. Not that I needed to be told twice, I was already on my way to claim my new life.

I floated over to the two guys who were in the truck that hit me. The driver, a guy in a leather jacket, was getting grilled by a police officer while his buddy in the red tank top stayed quiet by his side.

"I swear officer it wasn't my fault! That guy was running across the street while the crossing light was still red! I saw him and I swear on my grandma's grave I tried to stop in time but it was too late! Please officer, I'm telling the truth!!"

What a load of bullshit. That light was green when I started crossing. It was this guy that ran a red light and ended up killing me! I looked at the officer's face, and she looked deep in thought. It looked like it could either way, either he got off free or he was gonna get arrested. Even though I wanted to possess the hunk in the jacket as revenge, I was pissed that he was trying to get away with killing me. It was time to take matters into my own hands and go with Plan B.

I floated right next to his buddy in the red tank. He shivered loudly when I got close to him, and it caught the attention of the officer.

"What's wrong?" the officer asked him.

"Sorry officer, I just felt a really cold wind on my back."

"Should've worn a jacket like your friend here." the officer told him with a stern face. The guy nodded, and that's when I hopped into his body. He shivered even more fiercely as I possessed him. "Get a grip man, it's really not that cold."

"Hey, what's wrong with you Dave? You're acting weird," the guy in the leather jacket grabbed my arm. I felt it, I could feel again! I opened my eyes and looked at him dead in the eyes.

"Nothing, bud, I'm just fine." I said to him. I wanted to sock him in the face right then and there, but I knew a better way to get back him.

"Officer, ma'am, I have to confess. My friend here ran a red light on purpose. I told him not to do it, but he insisted nothing bad would happen."

"Bro what the fuck!? Why would you rat me out like that!?" the guy shouted at me.

"That's enough you two, I've heard enough. You're coming with me for further questioning," the officer took out a pair of handcuffs and put them on my killer. The look of disbelief on his face was hilarious! I laughed in my head as I watched it.

"We'll need you to come in tomorrow at the sheriff's office for an official eyewitness account, that alright with you?"

"No problem, officer," I told her. She then took my killer by the arm and begun pushing him to a police car. He kept glaring at me as she took him away, and I couldn't help but smile as I watched.

Bye jackass!

As for me, the other officers didn't really need me since I was just riding along in the passenger seat. They let me go after a while, and with the guy's truck no less. I hopped into the driver's seat and admired my brand new body. Yeah, Dave was definitely the better choice of the two.

Using the truck's GSP's saved addresses, I drove back to Dave's place. It was already pretty late by the time I got back. The sun had set, and night had settled in with its usual darkness.

I spent some time exploring my new place. It was pretty sweet, not my old home for sure but I'll adjust with time. After seeing everything Dave's house had to offer, I walked into his bedroom. It was only 9:30 PM, but I was tired. Dying, possessing a new body, throwing your killer under the bus, AND driving back home really drains you.

I stripped down to just my briefs, and threw myself onto his bed. It was a moment of pure bliss laying down on his cotton bed sheets. I took a moment to admire my new body. I didn't have any tattoos on my old body, but this guy had plenty. Dave was pretty fit too. I guided my hands all over my chest, each touch felt electric. I kept going lower and lower until I reached my underwear. I grabbed my dick through my briefs, and could feel it getting hard. I lowered my briefs just a bit, but it was enough for Dave's bush to pop out. All the hair was turning me on. I took off my underwear, my hard cock springing out when I did so.

I stroked my new dick, really getting a feel for the girth and length this guy had. I raised my armpit and took a good whiff of his body musk. Then, I started rubbing and feeling all over his pecs as I kept stroking. I imagined a sex scene in my head as I jerked off. Each stroke brought a new wave of pure pleasure throughout my body. Jerking off was never this good back in my old body. My strokes were getting faster as I got closer. I was moaning like a mad man until I finally shot loads of cum all over my legs and the bed. My eyes rolled to the back of my head and I could feel my legs twitching as I cummed. Then, after I finished, I ran my fingers through the cum and sucked on them. The taste of cum filled my mouth as I sucked down on each of my fingers, each one drenched in cum.

After I finished and cleaned up, I got really really sleepy. All the excitement and all the pleasure really exhausted me. I was ready for bed.

I grabbed the briefs I threw on the floor and put them on. Then I fell back on my bed, satisfied after jerking off and dozed off peacefully in my new body.

***

The night felt so short. Morning came and woke me up with its morning sunshine. I got up and checked in the mirror to make sure I was still Dave. I was, and celebrated to myself. All my good deeds and religious morals in my old life led me to have another chance at life as the young and hot Dave.

I remembered that the officer said I had to go in for official questioning. I got off the bed and took off my cum stained underwear. I got dressed, and smirked. It was time to send my killer off to jail for good, then I'm free to live my new life as Dave.

[bakubungaloo]

Dying For A Hero

Breaking News: Quirk-related accidents are at an all-time high. Stay away from red zoned people-incredible danger.

According to the World Health Organization, "disastrous quirks are evolving at an unprecedented rate... not enough genetic variation to offset the DOOMSDAY Theory."

Pros Dying Before the Age of 30, Doing More Harm Than Good

Birthrate Decline: Overpowered Quirks, Too Dangerous for Offspring

Total population of Quirkless individuals 5% as of 3022-  Many nations implement Birth programs to produce balanced quirks

Quirk-repressors, high demand, low affordable costs,

Ten years ago, the war for quirk society, fought and won by the pro heroes and high school children, but that's the part the articles tend to omit. A story for another day. Bakugou can tell you more about that. 

Fortunately, the day was saved, and now we’re able to live our lives without fear of a genocidal demigod destroying the status quo. As if the status quo needed any help.

This pro-quirk society has its flaws: quirk reform and quirkless activism have yet to reach their fullest potential. Everyone who isn’t the picture perfect example of a good person, quirk or no, has to accept things as they are. Now, there are bigger things to fry, such as pro-quirks groups growing in power and the rising spikes of evidence supporting the Quirk-Doomsday Theory. The world is coming to heel and it seems that natural selection is working in the quirkless or "normal" people’s favor. Or so it seems. I wish all this quirk bullshit would keep its foot out of my ass. I’ve worked too hard to forge my own hero related path. 

The origins of quirks, superpowers, supernatural abilities, and the quirkless, powerless, weak, handicapped, and so on remain a mystery.We don’t know why it just happened with that bright night light, baby. I say it’s nothing but the straws Zeus and Hades drew. You can guess who is which. 

Like the agricultural revolution and industrial revolution, the quirk revolution happened fast: vigilantes, villains, vigilaintes becoming villains, capitalism + reform = pro heroes, mandated and regulated quirks. The police are antiquated, heroes' commissions are like the Justice League’s Watch Tower, and hero groups like the Avengers. Pro heros came straight out of the comic books I would read in the dead of the night. Always needing a hero, hoping to be one. Quirks continued to grow exponentially, and powers people had never even dreamed of were now realities. Children soon traded tag for superpower games of chase in the skies or mudslides with water-based powers. Quirks are stronger than people care to confess because they’re harder to control. 

The caveat to a majority quirk society: the quirkless. Quirks are your key to a better life; they are the sign of evolution as a species. For a long time, quirkless people were nothing but hindrances to society’s advancement; they couldn’t be heroes, like we haven't been saving lives, fighting wars, curing diseases before that baby who we helped bring into this world. But I’m being bitter and jealous. For a long time, we were not needed, discarded, and rejected. Now, that percentage of quirkless people since there’s only a recorded 5% of the total population who were given the short end of the stick. 5% are forced into hiding, servitude, or the inevitable fate of slavery. The world is suffering from the curse of abundance, biting more than it can chew.

All for One kept that Frankenstein doctor alive for decades. He lived way past his expiration date. They built Nomus and made bodies out of nothing but a few lifeless bodies and time. Even after his demise,his theory is scaring the everloving shit out of society. The more powerful the quirk, the more terrific and horrific the inevitable self destruction. Say there are 20 people lined up in a room, only one of them is quirkless. Ultimately, that means that one person is the one who can reset the clock on an otherwise doomed quirk’s legacy. Longevity and immortality, for those without a similar quirk to those feats of humanity, are all these people want, their egos to live on. The latest pseudoscientific and credible scientific genetic studies claim that producing offspring with a quirkless increases the mutated gene frequency for every child born. Once the occurrence of quirks is reduced, the dominant genes will be tagged off with recessive traits that reduce the quirk’s dangerous nature to one’s body.

I used to envy those with quirks. Flying, superstrength, super speed, mind reading, the whole nine yards. Now I pity them. They’ve been humbled and, in their humiliation, they look to hurt us for what once was  an undesirable trait for decades. This cycle of abuse is all that remains in this fragile facade of order. 

It’s true that "not all men are created equal." The strong will always persecute the weak. Fear: we’re being hunted by the very thing we wished we had. 

I will continue this cycle and give and give and give till I break.

Quirk marriages rarely occur; they are a thing of the past. Now, quirkless people are bartered as common goods. And some unlucky bachelor has found himself an unlucky bride. Mr. and Mrs. Bakugou, unhappily fucked up ever after. 

Monday is an odd day for a party—gala. But there are odder things, like making powerful mutants like people fight in tight spandex as a career. Or hosting Monday night galas for the few pros who reach celebrity status as well as top rankings with mansions and an OK pension that lasts until they do. Forgetting that there are more underpaid pro heroes with modest lives risking their lives every day, but they’re not cool enough to be commemorated while they’re breathing. And the working hours are as flexible as a lawabiding villain. Long nights on the streets, apprehending villains and wrongdoers, spending hours on paperwork for every miniscule thing that happened, watching money leave your paycheck for justified damage from trying to save lives. I imagine it sucks. They barely have time to spend being a regular person who does their chores, goes to the park, and calls their family. I know what it's like, so I prefer sleeping in most Mondays. I can work in the hospital from Tuesday to Friday, then break from exhaustion on Saturday, study for my medical license on Sunday, and rest again on Monday. Things change all the time, I guess. 

Last year, I was a super single woman. Now I’m married, and to a top pro hero at that. It’s not like I had to uproot my life in the States to start anew here in Japan. I can always call my family instead of driving to visit them, or facetime my friends when I could be meeting them for drinks. No, I spend my Monday nights with superficial, powerful, quirky people with a fake ass smile on my face... at a gala... televised gala. My pain is entertainment now. 

Frankly, I’m living the good life. We’ve been together for almost a year now and he barely comes to his home. Three cars: business, personal, and the last for our future kids. I always ride in his business car with my own personal driver, Ronin. He’s cool. Bakugou’s house is way bigger than my simple one back in the states. There are three stories plus a basement, and each room is better than the last. Maybe he used to entertain a lot of people before he met me, or he just liked to feel less alone. We haven’t had any guests, save for his parents. Not that it matters anyway, but he’s rarely home. By the time I walk to his room, the bed is neatly made, and when I grab my French Vanilla Cappuccino mix, the dishwasher is beeping from its completed cycle. 

My morning routine isn’t much: I wake up, stretch, shower, grab an OK outfit, and eat. Today, I grabbed a better outfit: black slacks, chunky heels, and a white blouse, chic and simple. Some makeup to make it look like I wasn’t trying when I was and a simple ponytail. I have an image to maintain now. I’m a pro hero’s wife. Two phones, personal and business, like my husband, I’ve got Ronin on both, "Hey Ronin, I’m ready when you are."

It takes 20 minutes to get to the Ground Zero Agency by car. Ronin lives 10 minutes away from us in his retirement home, built with his hard-earned money from years of service as a Hero commissions agent. He drives a small sedan, new in model, and leaves it by our house. I grab the housekeys, turning off the lights as I walk to the garage door; three cars, as usual. Maybe Bakugou likes to save gas. You don’t really need to drive around here anyway, and though his vintage Mustang is enticing, it isn’t mine to use. While the garage door opens, I open the passenger side while Ronin walks to the driver’s door. It’s a midsize car: five seats in the back, a partition, a high-tech control panel, heated seats, and hidden compartments for spare support items. "Hello, Ronin." "Hello, Nikita," Echo, our resident automated voice, says. The engine is silent, gently rumbling away as Ronin backs out of the driveway to our house. The road to it is even longer; it takes a good 5 minutes to find the right trail. The trees take the place of the houses that should be around them. They are trees that he owns. The land is his. Our closest neighbor is 20 minutes away, Kirishima Ejirou, a phone call away from living in the city. I’ve only met him once, recalling his vividly vibrant red hair as I cut his clothes off following his fight with a rank villain back home. He reminds me of a shark; his teeth are sharp, ragged, and pointed. Terrifyingly handsome with a smile, he loves to show off, smiling often and loudly. He’s also very attractive. I see him more on the covers of men's and health magazines. It’s a regular thing for me to deal with pro heroes, usually incapacitated and gravely wounded, as I take care of their most urgent injuries before performing surgery on them. Fortunately for them, the pro heroes here in Japan are too good at their job, even giving villains first aid, so there are fewer people we take care of, unfortunately. 

Ronin is a very vigilant man. He knows when eyes are on him, often already on you before you think to look away, so I look at him through the side mirror of the car. His purple eyes are laser focused on the road, switching from side to side as he examines the other cars around us. Both his calloused hands grip the steering wheel, and at the ready, his right elbow is more loose just in case he needs to switch gears or use the control panel. His posture was straight as ever, his head lifted high and sure. He’s an older man, late 50s, with salt and pepper showing in his slicked-back hair. He’s been working for Bakugou for 3 years, but they’ve known each other for longer. He drives like he came out of the womb with a steering wheel in hand and a race track at his feet. And he’s also exceptional in crash safety and evasive maneuvers for cars. He was most likely a professional hitman in another lifetime.

 Usually, there’d be more traffic, but the city hasn’t experienced any villain attacks since last month. Bakugou is most likely pissed. Not having anyone to punch has left him stuck in the office with stacks of paperwork. Ironically, his brutal assault on the "Devastator" was so effective that crime has decreased in the area by 15%. He'll be even more pissed. We’ve been stuck together for a little over a year. I’m still trying to figure him out, but 

The car starts slowing down as we near my destination. Ronin pulls up to the curb, parks the car, and exits the driver's seat. He comes to my side, opening the door and offering his hand as I place my heels on the ground.

"Thank you, Ronin," I say with a smile.

Ever the quiet one, he bows and tips his hat. I’ll be back around 5 this evening, ma’am. The young master has requested you leave early to prepare for the gala. " He finishes. Of course, the gala is where he lets the public know he’s married, and to a quirkless woman at that.

"4: 00 if you can. I still have some errands to do before then and I need to get extra work done!" I say, walking towards the entrance.

The doors open automatically, and the front desk assistant cheerfully greets me, "Good morning, ma’am! How may I help you? " She chirps.

"Hello, please tell your boss that Nikita’s here." I say, with a small polite grin on my face. 

The desk assistant looks at the screen, searching for my information. "Ah yes, mis-- Mrs. Bakugou," she corrects herself, her posture straighter and more proper. "I’ll send for him right away, ma’am. It’s a pleasure to meet you! " She chirps, smiling. Her smile is not like I thought it would be, and I could've sworn the last time I was here she was wearing pink... and she was a he- 

"Pleasure’s all mine. And don’t bother calling, I’ll find him. " 

Ground Zero Agency , co-founded by Bakugou Katsuki and Kirishima Ejirou. Of course, they were financially supported by the previous top hero, Best Jeanist, my husband's mentor and benefactor. The building is like everything else in this damn city.  If “Everyone’s special so no one is” was a place it’d be this decrepit shell of a facility.  And if I have, I always forget how horribly tacky the interior design is. Whoever made this choice deserves a good firing, my grandmother had more life in her when she was in her coffin. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Meet the new music boss, same as the old music boss

In his 2020 book MONOPOLIZED, David Dayen describes a curious and brutal dynamic of monopolies: they breed monopolies.

"Consumer welfare," the dominant strain of antitrust for the past 40 years, has treated monopolies as innocent until proven guilty.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Companies are allowed to merge with competitors and create vertical silos, so long as no one can prove that doing so has raised prices. The only acceptable proof are the mathematical models invented by pro-monopoly economists, who are the foremost builders of these models.

Strangely enough, these models always prove that the monopoly is good, actually: not harming "consumer welfare." All potential mergers will provably not result in increased prices. All post-merger price-increases are provably not due to the merger.

Anyone who challenges these interpretations is derided for their ignorance of how these models work. Modern antitrust is a priesthood, and whenever a monopoly question arises, they slaughter an ox and read the future in its guts, which only they can interpret.

And strangely enough, the ox guts always favor monopoly.

Now, not *all* price-fixing can be waved away as unrelated to market concentration. In some cases, different companies in a sector will literally conspire to set prices, putting it down on paper.

When that happens, you don't need to make a model to show that price rises can be attributed to market power: you have the receipts.

This happens all the time. The record labels documented their CD price-rigging in the 90s, leading to a $67.3m settlement in 2002.

In 2012, the Big Six publishers colluded with Apple to raise ebook prices. They also put it in writing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.

In most of these cases, the price-fixing is only part of the story. What's actually going on is more complicated: a cartel of manufacturers are conspiring not merely to raise prices, but to fight the predatory practices of a monopolist somewhere else in the supply-chain.

With the labels, it was big box retailers like Walmart. With the publishers, it was Amazon. These monopolists had cornered significant customer-bases for the cartels' products, and the monopolists were squeezing their suppliers for all they were worth - literally.

Here's where it gets funky. Remember that monopolies are innocent until proven guilty, and it's impossible to prove them guilty. If six publishers' CEOs conspire to raise ebook prices, that's illegal. It's collusion.

If one of those six buys two of the others - if Random House buys Penguin and Simon & Schuster - then the former CEOs of those companies (now heads of divisions in a single company) can do *exactly* the same thing with little fear of legal reprisals.

Antitrust law rewards monopolies and punishes cartels, so members of cartels merge until they have monopolies.

Which brings me back to David Dayen and his book MONOPOLIZED. The industry Dayen analyzes to demonstrate this phenomenon is US health care.

In Dayen's telling, the first salvo was the mergers-to-monopoly in pharma, producing the Big Pharma giants we have today. These massive, consolidated firm started to lean on their customers, notably hospitals, price-gouging them on medicine.

Individual hospitals were powerless against this pressure: a single hospital that refuses to buy cancer meds at jacked-up prices doesn't get lower prices, it gets dead cancer patients.

But if hospitals teamed up to demand lower prices, that would be illegal price-rigging.

However, if the hospitals all merged into giant chains, they'd be able to push back in two directions. First, they could demand lower prices on drugs from Big Pharma, and second, they could pass on high prices to the insurance sector, which was still decentralized.

Again, the health insurers were not capable of pushing back as individual firms. When all the health care in a single ZIP code is provided by one chain of clinics, hospitals and ERs, an insurer can't declare them all out-of-network - not if it wants to keep its customers.

But once the insurers merged to monopoly, they not only got to push back against hospital price-gouging - they also got to charge higher premiums and deductibles, and they didn't have to worry about losing customers, because there was nowhere to go.

This is really a story of shit flowing downhill - pharma pushes hospitals who push insurers, who push...us. The patients and the front-line health-care workers, from custodians and cafeteria workers to nurses and MDs.

Monopoly breeds monopoly, with each sector of the supply chain concentrating to defend itself against the other sectors, and to exert market power over those sectors that aren't yet monopolized. The only part of the chain that can't organize are workers and customers.

Historically, workers organized in unions to push back against these leveraged assaults on their rights, but the US has all but prohibited unionization.

The public historically organized through politicians who fought for them, but unlimited corporate campaign contributions have made such fights a distant memory.

And so every sector starts to look like health-care: monopolized at every level except for labor and customers.

Writing in Wired today, Ron Knox from the antimonopoly Institue for Local Self-Reliance describes how this dynamic is playing out in music, where the new bosses are all the same as the old bosses.

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-big-music-needs-to-be-broken-up-to-save-the-industry/

It's not merely the Big Three labels colluding to rip off artists, it's also the tech partners who control distribution, notably Spotify and Youtube.

To the extent that merged-up behemoths like UMG exercise their monopoly power to get more from these digital partners, those excess gains are stolen from the musicians who earned them.

For example, big labels do minimum payout deals with Spotify specifying that millions are owed to them each quarter - but then they accept lower per-stream royalties for their music on Spotify. The result is that massive sums of those guaranteed payouts are "unattributed."

Unattributed revenues are not owed to any artist, so the label gets to keep that money. It's flat-out wage-theft, and it demonstrates the bankruptcy of hoping that a change in monopolists will make lives better for their workforces.

All things being equal, UMG would like to shift as many dollars as possible off of Spotify's balance sheet onto its own. But UMG will not, on its own, hand a single penny of that to the artists whose work generated those dollars

Which is why Knox says we have to break up all these giants - the labels and the digital distribution monopolists, including Youtube and Spotify and Apple and Amazon.

But, Knox points out, that will not be enough.

Because it's not just recording and distribution that are monopolized - it's also performance venues and ticketing (Ticketmaster/Live Nation) and radio (Iheartradio/Liberty Media), whose monopolists are rapacious wage-stealers and fraudsters.

The market can't and won't fix this. Take live performance venues: the vast majority of these are expected to fail thanks to the covid shutdowns. The private sector has a plan to bail them out: former WME exec Marc Geiger raised a vast warchest to buy them for pennies.

He will consolidate them into...a monopolist to push back against the Ticketmaster/Live Nation monopoly. If he pulls it off, he may succeed in shifting many millions from Live Nation's balance-sheet to his own. He will not give any of it to performers if he doesn't have to.

Knox's (correct) conclusion is that we have to have antimonopoly enforcement across the entire supply chain, not just in one or two sectors - from social media to recording to payments to venues to streaming to radio, we have to break them up.

And that might just happen. Two high-profile Biden appointees, Tim Wu and Lina Khan, are on the absolute vanguard of the new antimonopoly movement. Amy Klobuchar's (flawed) antitrust bill goes further than any initiative in years.

And most of all, the musicians aren't alone here. The fight they're fighting is just a part of the fight we're all in: not just every kind of artist, but doctors and patients, cabbies and riders, farmers and eaters.

Our fights have different technical characteristics and different structural remedies particular to those characteristics, but they are, fundamentally, the same fight.

The fight against monopolies.

[postsforposting]

If we are going to say "business protects its interests by using regulations and things like collusion" and call that a choice they make, then it is absolutely a choice individual people make to vote to change regulations too. It's not as simple as "vote with your wallet" OR "use regulations". Those aren't different kinds of choices, they are all choices. The invisible hand of the market is ruled by more "choices" than demand.

People aren't powerless, is the point. No one is helpless in the face of Cartoon Business, which is what the op is saying: you are not responsible, take all the oil barons out and kill them, voila paradise. That's what this meme is. That's why this is a screenshot of a headline and not a linked article.

The other obvious problem is that lots of people don't think climate change is a thing, lots of people don't believe there should be market controls or regulations, and those people vote too. Which is where the handy "you are helpless, it's the cartoon business at fault" comes in: when you lose at the polls, or when people refuse to vote because they say mine doesn't count, they get to whine about how nothing ever changes because Evil Corp rigged things and they are such tiny helpless babies and we're all doomed. It's liberal doomerism apocalypse cult belief. Same as evangelical rapture, just with a different guy coming to murder everyone.

There is a common thread of helplessness and refusal to actively do anything, refusal to actively acknowledge that things can be changed, that anything has ever changed, that anything could get better, in the mainstream left. It's a core belief. I think that comes from having converted from conservatism, or even just cultural osmosis, because this is exactly what they teach children: shut up and fear god. That lesson stays with people just as the idea of "cancelling" and punishment for deviation and challenging authority does, as does the idea that anyone who claims authority no matter how flimsy gets to threaten and speak over everyone else, meting out punishment no matter how egregious.

This is why protests block traffic instead of being planned even a little bit better, because being nasty and hateful to people is viewed as the best way to "accomplish" things--just as conservatives believe the best way to "change" people is to hurt them until they give in. Harass people and threaten them until they do what you want: the principles of torture. Even though putting in a tiny bit of thought towards what their goals are and how to do that better would get them better results and make them more effective at "raising awareness". No one 20 cars behind the front line knows why there's a bunch of assholes holding up traffic, for all they know there's an accident. Does that "raise awareness"? Would it be better, perhaps, to allow cars to pass so they can see your signs about whatever issue? But we can't have that, because that would make sense, and that would mean we aren't hurting people as much as possible, and that would mean when we fail we can't just blame shit on The Man/The System and we'd have to take responsibility ourselves to do more, and that would mean we would have to say hurting people doesn't work and we'd have to change tactics and blame ourselves for our own poor choices hurting our cause. We wouldn't be able to say we're helpless little babies and nothing will ever change.

Why does no one in these protests bring up that this is laughable bullshit and is hurting the cause? Do they bring it up, and get shouted down? Do people not care about the results they aren't getting? The only conclusion is that their goal, is not their stated goal. Doing anything to challenge the idea of helplessness means taking responsibility, and that means failure is our fault. And? Try again.

But they can't do that because they treat failure like the apocalypse. Anyone who fails gets cancelled, no appeal or context allowed. You fail, you deserve punishment, because if you had done everything right, then you wouldn't have failed, would you? Another conservative belief. And because you can't do anything right, why even try? Nothing will ever be enough.

The fact that this runs up against the belief that nothing will ever work isn't a problem, because two false things can be true when you don't examine your beliefs. You can keep doing things that don't work exactly because nothing will ever change.

It's like the left never grew out of the child mentality. "I can't do anything because Mommy forbid it". Folds arms and refuses to engage with anyone except to repeat their mantra.

"Hey so it turns out that the people of earth accidentally did a global experiment to see if every individual could course correct climate change through mass personal change of habits, and it turns out, no! We can't! It was massive corporate activity all along!"

[fierceawakening]

So I'm thinking about all those stories that go around about anti-choice women who get abortions, condemning clinic staff even as they get their procedure, and how weird it seems. Less because of the hypocrisy part and more... if you really saw yourself as the exception, the one person who wasn't doing anything wrong, you wouldn't curse them, right? You'd be like "the fine just means it costs $100 to park here, no biggie."

Then it hit me why that might be. (@conservativemalarkey, tagging you to ask if you think I might be right here, feel free to ignore if you'd rather not talk about this one)

Conservatives tend to have a view, often religiously based, that says humans are inherently bad. If it's Christian conservatism, which it often is though I wouldn't be surprised if other religious conservatives have something vaguely similar, we all have original sin, and we can try to do good things but we're powerless to totally stop it, not without God Blood.

Which means "I had sex and got pregnant and now I have to do an awful thing to get my life back on track" isn't actually weird--it's the exact kind of stupid and downright morally bad bullshit we all get up to when we Stray From The True Way.

Which is why, in turn, it really does make more sense to see it as about control rather than concern for life (speaking here as someone who actually does think fetuses are unique individuals and is very confused about the idea they're not because they start off microscopic).

Because the idea that people would want to do this is indeed horrifying on the conservative view, but it's not actually unusual. People are horrifying just because they are. That's how everything works! That's why we need God!

Which means condemning the very clinic worker who's assisting you makes a disgusting kind of sense. "I'm doing a horrible thing because humans do; this person is helping me, thus doing a horrible thing, because humans do. Neither of us is willing to be good and back out, because that's how humans are. So I'll make sure to state, out loud and to everyone, that we're both horrible, and I know it."

[queernuck]

The Cleveland Browns made the playoffs. The Islanders made the Eastern Conference Finals.

And that’s enough for me.

So long, so long I have been living like this, pretending that I want to keep on living, that life feels worthwhile, that I don’t want to kill myself. Suicide is for cowards but ive been chickening out for a whole decade, to the point where getting on the subway was itself something that involved convincing myself not to jump in front of it. I remember once while working in the city, I watched and waited as two trains came in and left, trying to get the energy to jump in front of them. I had decided, if I couldn’t do it by the time a second train came and went, I would go to work and save it for another day. I came very close, my legs tense like a linebacker on 4th & Goal, but I didn’t do it. Maybe it would be better if I had, I would have saved not only myself but a lot of other people a lot of pain and suffering. I’ve been dealing with feeling suicidal for a decade, an entire ten years, and made it through. And for what? I lost a retail job at minimum wage, I’ve seen the Giants go from two-time Super Bowl kingslayers to a team that relied on the Eagles for a playoff berth, I got to see Evangelion only for the final Rebuild film to be infinitely delayed, I have a useless non-degree that allows me to eloquently describe how the Democrats and Republicans alike are driving this stolen land to Fascism while sycophants tell me Vote Blue No Matter Who. I’m so tired, I’m not even the person people think me to be, since if I were, I wouldn’t be in this mess.

My paychecks, as hard-earned as they were, never seemed to be mine in any real sense, and it made me so frustrated that something in me broke at the beginning of this year. I made some mistakes, some very stupid ones, and got myself fired. I took money from and distorted the inventory of my store to get what amounted to pocket money, less than two paychecks. I was tempted because I feel so powerless, so much like nothing I could ever say or do matters, and so I decided to lash out against a place that mattered to me, against people I cared about deeply. Chain stores, corporations, all of those things are not really high on my list of things to care about. Barnes & Noble pushed out local booksellers years ago, an irony not lost on me whenever our own competition with Amazon was made apparent. We were reaping what we had sown. But what always interested on top of this irony was how symbolic these things could be to people, how much we figured into so may memories for so many. The Manga Aisle at Barnes & Noble is a staple of 2006 scene culture, a way that kids without the pocket money to afford the newest volume of Bleach it Naruto could keep up before scams became widely available. How the store was a place where people studying for standardized tests could use the test prep guides to try and get ready for the eugenic ritual of the standardized test. And just how much a chain bookstore became a substitute, socially, for the now-absent local bookstore. We bear the guilt for that, but at the same time we were still selling books, giving people a place to get coffee and sit and read and talk, in ways that libraries may not be able to. We certainly can never replace a library, given just what a library does for people. But we did do a lot of good all the same. Before it closed, some of my fondest memories came when I was the exact sort of annoying teenage customer I grew to hate, hanging out at the Columbus Circle Borders. Working at Barnes & Noble was tiring, dehumanizing, difficult, made me feel like I would never measure up to the authors we sold, the people books were written about, that I was a failure. And I am, as my death shows. But it also made me a part of something I was proud of. And that Above & Beyond pin I earned is in my jacket still, a reminder of something.

That something was shown in so many of the coworkers I had, who were incredible in so many ways. I feel awful for what I did, I genuinely do, because of how it may have hurt people who thought so kindly of me, people who deserve so much good. I wish I had the ability to address each of them individually but this decision was hastily made, and i have a feeling it will show in the things I miss in this note. Audra, your help in finding me a way to use the company policies to my advantage as a worker was something that gave me faith even after having seen the despicable firings and cuts the company went through. Linda, I can’t quite square the circle here given my actions, but I want to say your disappointment broke my heart and that while I will not be the one who shows it, your reassurance that everyone makes mistakes was welcome.

To my (former) fellow booksellers at Store 2216, all of my love and my sincerest apologies. You all have so much good in you, your willingness to listen to my ADHD-fueled rants and to discuss so many things with an incredible frankness was always impressive, in addition to part of what I loved about all of you. I want you all to be happy, and the kinship I felt with you was a vital part of what kept me going. It was tough, as you all know. But at times, it almost felt worth it.

The same is true of my CTY friends: it was a weird, magical place that frankly, a lot of us idealized for far too long and which sk many of us eventually outgrew without being able to let go of. And that was tough, that was something we had a great deal of difficulty understanding, that what helped us once was not always going to be helping us, was not always what we needed. But in eventually finding that, we found solace, we realized how life as a whole functions and just what it is that we can take from places like it.

To my other family, my Cleo family, I know I haven’t been terribly active lately, but I can never, ever thank you enough for the belonging you gave me. I have never felt anywhere as welcoming as Cleo. As warm as Cleo (even as we struggled to pay for the oil bill) was. As kind and understanding. As tolerant. As questioning and inquisitive into what that tolerance meant to us. I am thankful, eternally, for what you all did for me. The incredible experiences I had as a Cleo make me proud of what the organization can represent, and one of my dying wishes is that the organization continues to reach out to marginalized communities on Trinity’s campus. There is much work to be done in making sure abusers cannot hide in our family, but I trust you all to do that work. Tucker Carlson is a Trinity grad and we must embody the opposite of what he stands for, no matter how difficult it may be. I could go on about how this means opposing liberals and Liberalism/Neo—Liberalism due to the truth of tolerance resulting in a Popper-esque Paradox of Tolerance that implies Popper is a worthwhile philosopher, but that’s another issue.

To my friends on that Blue Hellsite, tumblr, you made a continual presence worth it, even with all of the bullshit this place brings. It’s the reason I read so much Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, read Žižek against himself, and so on and so on, and the value of that to me can never be overstated. I learned so much from the ways in which I learned to analyze the world, and that in turn became a huge inspiration for why I should try to do what I could to make the world closer to a place of revolution, one where we could perhaps eke out a living for one another. I loved how much I could be an unrepentant nerd and still love hockey on there, and while the

NHL fans on tumblr are incredibly annoying,

I can deal with that compared to the racism of most hockey fans.

Mom, Dad? I just couldn’t live with you any longer. I’m so sorry.

Grandma, I love you.

And the things I leave behind? Donate what can be donated. Hats, please auction, or at least offer to other HatHeads at a reasonable price. I had some nice ones. As for assorted albums, clothing, and other things, sell them and donate to a Harm Reduction organization, or organizations that advocate for PWUD in a radical fashion. WE DESERVE AUTONOMY!

I am a victim of the War on Drugs. Sobriety was always hellish to me, and I could never take it. I want people to be able to live how they want, to see sobriety and being on drugs as equally valuable states, to see the two as no different from one another.

Abolish all gun laws

End the War on Terror

Decriminalize and legalize all drugs, sobriety is what killed me.

I love all of you.

LET’S GO ISLANDERS!

[thewickedmerman]

My Redesigns of The Specialists

Well, since I finished with the Winx Club girls and The Trix, I figured it was time to do my redesigns of The Specialists. However, not all of them are going to be just powerless fighters. I felt it would be more fun to make their team be made up of fighters, fairies, and sorcerers. Plus, they get to have their own transformations too. The fighters get transformations similar to the Power Rangers/superheroes (Because it makes no sense for there to be an emergency and they just rush off to change clothes, which is an INSANELY dangerous time waster), the fairies will have transformations similar to the Winx Club themselves, and the sorcerers will have transformations similar to the ones from Miraculous Ladybug (Honestly, I don't know what to think for the sorcerers). Why? Because it's so much more fun that way.

Sky

Well, I got the most BORING of the boys out of the way, so that's something. For his design I used Eric's body from The Little Mermaid, the face of Derek from The Swan Princess (Or at least from a specific poster), used his second hairstyle from the show because it suits him better and look less like a surfer dude, and I used the uniforms The Specialists get in the later seasons because it's BADASS. Plus, considering that Eraklyon is related to geology, it makes sense to have some armor that looks like stones. I did change the shade of blue to match his signature color, which is sky blue (I mean, it's in his name). He is the prince of Eraklyon and the son of a sorcerer and a fairy, but they still loved him despite that he had no magic. However, that made them even more protective of him since he was a child and there was a threat of him being kidnapped and held for ransom by Yoshinoya. So Sky's best friend/squire, Brandon (Who is a fairy and has magic to protect himself and Sky) was to switch places with Sky for public appearances and in school, so that no one would know who Sky really is. The only ones who knew the truth were the royal family, the castle staff, members of the royal court, and Diaspro & her parents (Who Sky was betrothed to since they were babies). Despite having no powers, Sky refused to be helpless and studied fighting hand-to-hand combat and weaponry. Sky is a boring character but could be good if put in the right hands. Give him flaws, have him held more accountable for his actions, none of the bullshit conflict that happens with him and Bloom from seasons 4-8.

Brandon

For his design, I used the face of Edward from Enchanted, the nose of Rameses from The Prince of Egypt, the eyes of Joseph from Joseph: King of Dreams, and the body of Bolin from The Legend of Korra. I've always questioned what race Brandon was supposed to be coded as because he seemed pretty ambiguous. Was he just white but with a tan? Was he Middle Eastern? Was he Filipino? Was he Hispanic or Latino? I saw someone say he was Middle Eastern and pointed out some areas in the Middle East where they have lighter tan complexions, dark brown hair, and similar features to him. So I thought for some representation, I would go with the Middle Eastern coded option. I made him a little darker than he was in the original show by giving him Flora's skin color from the original show (Since I gave her a darker skin-tone in my redesign of her), sharper eyes, and more Middle Eastern looking nose. I didn't want to use Aladdin's nose because the noses of Aladdin and Jasmine were a little too exaggerated the same way that the noses in Lilo and Stitch were too exaggerated (Polynesians don't have potato noses). I also wanted to show some body diversity by giving him a plus-sized body. NO, Bolin's body isn't fat but it's very much plus-sized. Brandon was a fat little boy growing up because he was just built differently. However, as he got older and started training, he bulked up. He's still plus-sized but is also muscular. You're probably wondering why I decided to make Brandon a fairy. I don't know but it just works. He is the fairy of geodes! I got that idea from Diaspro's fairy form and powers. They come from Eraklyon, so the magic in that world must be related to geology. So he's basically an Earthbender lol. But his powers are rooted on rocks, stones, gems, ect. so it's no wonder his body is so solid like a rock. I also modeled his wings after Diaspro's, which I noticed are solid instead of transparent like other fairy wings. I figured that must be part of the geology themed powers. As for his costume, I based it on one of the background fairies that were seen during the destruction of Bloom's home planet, Sparx. It just looked like it suited him. He and Sky have been friends since they were little and he is Sky's squire. He's the son of one of the palace guards. Since Sky was in danger of being abducted since he was a little kid, Brandon was made to pretend he was the prince for Sky's protection. Brandon's parents were dead against it, but the king demanded it. However, it was ultimately Brandon who decided to do it, even if his parents disapproved of putting their son in danger. You may ask, how would people believe that two white parents had a brown son? No idea! I guess they just said he was naturally tan lol.

Riven

For Riven's design, I gave him the face/head of Proteus from Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, the body of Shang from Mulan, and the eyes of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. For his outfit, I didn't want to just give him the same outfit as Sky but with a different color because I wanted more individuality. So I gave him the outfits that were worn by Nex and Thoren (Sky's cousin). They looked less heroic and epic as the outfit I gave Sky, which suits Riven's more roughish nature and how he hasn't had an easy life compared to Sky (More on that later). It also has a bit of a low-key bad boy vibe to it. I still stayed true to his signature color, magenta, while making sure it didn't clash with his magenta hair, and giving him some purple to match his eyes. And I just had to give him an angry look on his face because it's Riven, so of course. Riven is my absolute LEAST favorite of the specialists. Sky may be boring as hell but Riven is ANNOYING as hell. He's poorly written, has terrible development, is always an asshole for no reason, has no backstory to justify the way he is, doesn't really change, and his relationship with Musa is absolutely toxic. In my version, I give him a backstory and better character development. His backstory is that he was born to a father that was a sorcerer and a mother that was a fairy while he was born without the ability to perform magic, which was a MASSIVE disappointment to his parents. They neglected him, emotionally abused him, and on occasion physically. This makes his actions and attitude all the more understandable. He's a show off because of how he never really got attention growing up from his own parents and is trying to make up for it, as well as prove that he is capable of great things and isn't useless just because he doesn't have powers. He's angry and a hothead but has more of a secret gentle side that he sometimes shows, MUCH MORE than the original Riven, which helps make it more understandable why Musa would have a crush on him. His emotional baggage also made it easier for Darcy to manipulate him, even giving him some magic (But takes it away when she dumps him). His backstory also gives him a reason for why he lashes out at his fellow teammates. In my version, Brandon is a fairy and Timmy is a sorcerer, so they can perform magic while he can't. He especially resents Sky because of how he was also born with parents that could perform magic while he couldn't but was still given love and attention despite this. It made him VERY angry and jealous because of how Sky manage to have parents that adore him, despite being born unable to do magic, while Riven had neglectful and abusive parents because of his inability to perform magic.

Timmy

For his face/head I used some old concept design of Milo from Atlantis: The Lost Empire and the smile, eyes, and body of Aladdin. I went with Aladdin's body because of how Timmy wouldn't be as masculine as the others but wouldn't be lanky. Aladdin has some muscles on him but he's not super built. I also gave him freckles because it's just too perfect for him. His outfit was tricky because of how I had to find a way of making him look like a sorcerer but also incorporate it with technology to go with his powers because of how he is the Sorcerer of Technology. For his scepter, I went with Tecna's Mythix wand, with some adjustments. Redheads look surprisingly really good in the color yellow. I decided to make Timmy a sorcerer because of how I feel it suits his personality. He's not as action-oriented as the other guys but more intellectual, even though he still fights. Imagine how amazing he'd be with technology with magic. He'd excel! No, I don't have him being from Zenith like Tecna but from another technology planet, though one that isn't considered as high up as Zenith. So this makes him feel a little intimidated by Tecna, that and him having a MASSIVE crush on her. He always is trying to prove that he is capable and isn't just some weak nerd. Out of all of the specialists, he's one of my favorite, if not my number one favorite. He's just absolutely awesome with how much of a dork he is.

Helia

Helia was the one that I was looking the most forward to doing a redesign of because of how I made him a fairy. Out of all of the Specialists, he's the one that really benefits the best from being made a fairy, especially when I got to his Believix and Enchantix. He has more of a feminine personality while still proving he isn't a wuss but rather a badass, despite being a pacifist. This gives him layers and depth beyond just being a typical good looking hero. Plus, his hair is just AMAZING! I used the body of Mako from The Legend of Korra, the eyes and nose of Shang from Mulan, and the head/face of Little Creek from Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. I also gave him Brandon's skin tone to make him look more brown instead of just a light Asian. His outfit is very feminine but also clearly meant for a man because of how it's kind of toga looking. But I did his toga in a way that looks more Asian inspired instead of Greek inspired. Plus, this look suits his chill and relaxed personality. I made his outfit salmon pink with some orange because those colors just look so good on him and just suit his character. I made him the fairy of art, the same way that Musa is the fairy of music. So he can make art literally come to life, turn things like paint into ropes, can control paper (Particularly when in an origami shape), create portals, can jump into paintings to hide, and you get the point. Basically, his powers are awesome!

Nabu

And now we've come to my favorite of The Specialists, Prince Nabu. First of all, I want to make VERY CLEAR that in my version, Nabu DOESN'T die! That was a bunch of BULL CRAP! I mean, he's introduced in season 3 and then close to the end of season 4 they kill him off? Not to mention that out of all the boys, they chose the darkest one, who was also the love interest of black woman! She ended up having to suffer more than any of the other girls because of this. Not to mention that in season 5 they tried to replace him with a brown (But much lighter) man with terrible blonde hair and a terribly bland and boring personality to match, Roy. Then when that didn't work, they did a dumb love triangle in season 6 where the white man that has a personality mixture of Riven and Brandon, Nex. Yeah, all of this is TOTALLY not racist! And that's coming from a white man. Also, I wanna also point out that Nabu is NOT black! He is Indian, so he is coded as South Asian. Now that we got my rant out of the way, for his design I used the face/head of Naveen from The Princess and the Frog, the body of Flynn Rider from Tangled (I wanted to use Naveen but there wasn't a base of him to use or a tasteful nude picture of him), and the eyes of Esmeralda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I also chose to keep his super long single braid instead of the two shoulder blade length braids he had in season 4. Why? Because it just looks SO MUCH better and is more badass. Non-white men just look amazing with long hair. He is still a prince but he doesn't come from Layla's planet, Andros. Why? Because that planet is water themed and his powers aren't related to water. His powers are illusions and healing, so it only makes sense that he comes from another planet, especially when the rules of Andros are black while Nabu and his family are Indian. He and Layla are in an arranged marriage, which she refuses and their relationship still goes the same way it did in season 3. Except, I'm having them meet during my Sirenix story line because that season would be about Layla, due to it being water themed. He still went by a disguised name, Ophir before revealing his true identity once they fell in love. So I'm giving true respect to the Sorcerer of Healing and Illusions.

And now for Brandon and Helia's Believix!

Just like the girls, Brandon and Helia are getting Believix and Enchantix forms. For the Believix forms I took inspiration from @teawithlemonacid, who did some fanart of The Specialists as fairies. I did make some adjustments of my own but still did take inspiration from that artist, so credit where credit is due. As I said when I did the girls with their Believix, the way they earn their Believix is pretty much the same way they earned their Charmix in season 2. They have to believe in themselves and overcome a personal struggle. I also took liberties with the Believix aesthetic because of how I want the fairy looks to be more timeless rather than dated-looking.

Brandon's Believix

For Brandon's design, I gave him a new hairstyle because if the girls get new hairstyles for each new fairy form, so do the boys. I gave him Nex's hair, apart from those dumb looking sideburns. I embroidered some stoned onto his outfit because of how he's the fairy of geodes. Since I also decided to have his race be Middle Eastern, I decided to incorporate some of that into his look as well. I gave him some curled toed shoes and some Middle Eastern inspired accessories. That was hard because of how most Middle Eastern jewelry are women's jewelry. I gave him Tecna's Mythix wings because they just really suit him for some reason. As for how he earned his Believix, well he had to overcome some hidden resentment he had for Sky that was starting to show during a trust exercise. He resented that he had to put his life on the line for Sky ever since they were kids. That really effects a child when they are having their lives in danger in order to protect someone else. Yes, Brandon did agree to do it in order to protect his friend but he also knew that if he didn't do it that he and his parents would be in trouble with the King and Queen. Sky's parents didn't really show much concern for Brandon's safety and that caused more resentment because Sky didn't really say anything to his parents about their poor treatment of his friend. Sky could tell something was up and it was only when Brandon stopped bottling up his feelings that things started to get better. It was emotional and difficult but Brandon felt better when he finally let it all out. It was then that he earned his Believix.

Helia's Enchantix

homeworldHelia's Believix was A LOT of fun to do. I loved getting to have his hair loose because it looks amazing. I didn't make too many changes to the outfit I modeled this after. I love how the gold has a paint-like feel to it. It really adds to his powers being art based. I used Flora's prototype Bloomix wings for his Believix wings because they just seemed to suit him. I also had the magic coming from his hand looking even bigger and more powerful than it was during his Magic Winx form. The way he earns his Believix was different from how others earned their Believix. instead of mainly being an emotional struggle, it was also a physical struggle because he had to overcome his passive nature. He has a lot of power but he holds himself back because of an accident that happened when he was a kid. Because he didn't restrain himself, a friend of his got badly hurt. The friend lived but his parents wouldn't allow him to be friends with Helia anymore. After that, Helia kept to himself, chose not to be aggressive, and wouldn't live up to his true abilities because of that accident. His grandfather, Saladin (The headmaster at Red Fountain), has been trying to break him out of it and live up to his true potential. It was only when his friends, specifically Flora, were in danger that he finally overcame his passive nature and started using his full power. This caused him to earn his Believix.

And finally for Helia and Brandon's Enchantix

We have come to Helia and Brandon's final transformations, Enchantix. Just like the girls, they must earn theirs by saving someone from their homeworld by making a big sacrifice. The boys were hard to do, due to how there wasn't really anything for me to go off of. However, I think I managed to do a pretty good job. I also wanted to have them be in revealing outfits just like the girls. I mean, fair is fair, after all. Let me know what you think.

Helia's Enchantix

For Helia, I wanted to do something that had an Asian influence to it that also showed his art powers being influenced. I gave him something that was very flowing to go with his sensitive and feminine personality while also having a rainbow theme to go with his powers. I didn't use the colors of the rainbow because I didn't want him to just look like a Pride themed look, which ended up looking awkward and busy when I first attempted it. So I limited the colors to the ones in his wings to make it look better. I still wanted to include his two main colors, salmon pink and gold while still making the rainbow colors pop. I went with a very Asian inspired hairstyle, which actually shows both of his eyes. The eye that is usually covered is actually blind, which goes with the childhood backstory I gave him that helped him earn his Believix, which will also play a part in earning his Enchantix, which I will get to in a little bit. I felt it would show him embracing himself while also showing the Asian culture. I took some liberties with the jewelry because of how most jewelry is meant for women, which is why most male looks are boring. I tried to butch up his shoes to make them look less girly and making the gems resemble a paintbrush. For his wings, I used Stella's Mythix wings because they look like a rainbow, which really suits Helia. I made his powers in his hand the biggest and strongest they've looked out of all his fairy forms. As for how he earns his Enchantix, I had him save his old childhood friend, who Helia had accidentally caused to become permanently blind because of his powers, which also caused Helia to become blind in his right eye. He had seen him but was avoiding him because of his guilt, despite his old friend trying to reach out to him during this time. He saves his old friend from an avalanche that was caused by The Trix, specifically Stormy. Helia not only almost died but his wings were crushed, so he wouldn't be able to fly. He said that he lost his friend once because of something he did and wasn't going to lose his friend again when he could do something about it. However, it was due to this sacrifice that he was able to earn his Enchantix and gain a new and MUCH stronger pair of wings. Not only that, but he had his old friend back after all this time. Helia apologized for what he did to his friend when they were kids, but his friend forgave him and said he missed Helia.

Brandon's Enchantix

Brandon's Enchantix was even more difficult than Helia's because of how Brandon's not as feminine as Helia. I took some inspiration from Tynix because of how Brandon's powers are related to geodes. I made his vest and best/waist thing look like diamonds. I even incorporated gems into his sash. I took major liberties with jewelry because Middle Eastern (Which is the race I decided Brandon is) jewelry is very limited in jewelry for men, at least from the google search I did. I love the one sleeve look I gave him with his emerald vest/armor. I even gave him some gems on the bottom of his pants. I gave him very Aladdin looking pants, only without the crotch being so low lol. I gave him the hairstyle of the character Thoren from Winx Club and Stella's Tynix wings. The way he earns his Enchantix was by saving Sky from being eaten by one of Valtor's minions, causing Brandon to be eaten instead. This cause Brandon to earn his Enchantix and his powers were enhanced to where he could destroy the creature from the inside. This earned him not only his Enchantix, but also finally getting respect from Sky's parents, who, AT LAST, apologize for how they treated him. Yeah, this is simple but you get the point.

ENJOY!

Credit for the character bases goes to SelenaEde, Credit for the backgrounds goes to SparxGuardian, credit for Helia's Believix wings goes to darkfairyofmadness, and credit for the Enchantix wings and Brandon's Believix wings goes to AstralBlu. All of whom are on DeviantArt.

[road-rhythm]

On Caleb turning down a job offer

Here’s the thing that gets me (I say, as if there were not 157 things in this episode that Got Me):

Ludinus made that same offer once to Trent. You know he did.

And just by turning it down, Caleb left him without any doubts that he would not be as easy to manipulate. Which put a giant target on Caleb’s back, but that’s the thing: he’s come out the other side of the kind of experiences where that is about as much threat as old age. Something to be avoided if possible, certainly; but no incentive at all not to live one’s very best life in the meantime.

Trent Ikithon does one thing extremely well, and that is control the narrative of events--largely by convincing others that he has that control in the first place. But ultimately, like all of us, he lived his life at the mercy of his own internal narrative, and his contained a crucial processing error. It’s implied that he survived trauma of some kind himself. Considering how most wizards hit level 20, it almost seems like a gimme. All armchair psychology about his patent control issues aside, he almost certainly found himself powerless under the will of some extremely powerful individuals along the way to becoming one himself, and some of those almost certainly abused their power against him, because that’s just how it goes. It’s likely their motivations were fundamentally petty. IRL, they almost invariably are.

People are hard-wired to look for meaning in trauma and experiences of powerlessness. We create narratives for ourselves about those things to satisfy that need for meaning. Trent Ikithon told us what his narrative is back in c2e110, and it’s that trauma makes greatness.

Which is bullshit. The fact that it’s bullshit is demonstrated repeatedly in his own Volstrucker program, but he has to believe it because if he does not, he has nothing. Because he believes it, he was easy for Ludinus to manage, and cultivate, and use.

Caleb by this point has confronted the much more painful truth that trauma means nothing in itself and that injustice just fucking happens and that none of it, taken alone, makes a coherent story--never mind a heroic one. He doesn’t need to perpetuate the cycle of abuse; he’s come to grips with the fact that there’s no point. Because of that, despite that realistically, he will probably live with CPTSD symptoms including periodic relapses and regressions until the day he dies, he is freer than his teacher could ever hope to be.

And he can tell Ludinus Da’leth to get fucked.

[qqueenofhades]

Trump's SCOTUS pick scares the ever loving shit out of me. I'm trying not to have a full blown panic attack actually.

Sigh. I know.

I’m not going to say that picking someone literally, un-exaggeratedly out of The Handmaid’s Tale for SCOTUS, especially to replace someone like RBG, isn’t mother fucking terrifying. It is.  Especially since Mitch McConnell is trying to set her final confirmation vote for October 29, literally five days before the election. Yes indeed, that would be a third Supreme Court seat filled by an impeached president who lost the popular vote by three million votes, (possibly) confirmed by Republican enablers (some of whom are absolutely going to lose their seats in this election) who represent a sizeably smaller fraction of the US population than their Democratic counterparts, in a display of outright, staggering, truly breathtaking hypocrisy about the protocol of election-year vacancies on SCOTUS, which they themselves shouted about to no end with Merrick Garland in 2016. This is how tyranny by minority rule works, and... yeah. It’s bad. It’s awful. When is this going to end.

That said, however: we do not yet exist in this theoretical grimdark future where some dystopian 6-3 (or even 7-2) conservative SCOTUS strips us of our rights at every turn, with no recourse except for us to sit passively and take it, and there are a lot of things that we ourselves can do between now and then to make sure that it never happens. First off, House Democrats have proposed a bill to introduce 18-year term limits for SCOTUS justices, rather than it being an automatic lifetime appointment. This would also give every president the ability to appoint two justices per four-year term. Because SCOTUS has become such an instrument of partisan warfare, and because the obvious implications of having a partisan head of state pick the senior federal judges for a lifetime is part of what has fucked us up now, this would be a GREAT improvement. House Dems can’t make it into law right now, because Democrats do not hold a majority in both chambers of Congress and they do not hold the presidency. You know how this COULD be passed? If Joe Biden was elected with a blue House and Senate. That way, even if God forbid the GOP horror show snuck Coney Barrett onto the bench just before the election, this could be fixed.

Here’s another way to think about it. I myself have a HUGE problem with catastrophizing: a bad thing happens, and then it seems like an inevitable chain of nonstop bad things until everything gets irredeemably, unfixably even worse. This year, obviously, has not done much to help that, because yes, the bad things keep coming. But they’re still individual events and have not yet crystallized into some unbreakable, unavoidable future. History is made up of thousands of millions of choices, accidents, unforeseen developments, total random bullshit, and much more, as much or more as it is made up by the macro-scale actions of oligarchs. Obviously, globalization and capitalism have made us all more connected to each other, and thus changes to the system can ripple more broadly, but they are not the only people who make history. If there’s one thing I can tell you as a historian, it’s this: the future is just history that hasn’t been made yet, and it is subject to the exact same unpredictable bullshit that has constituted history throughout, well, history. Nothing is unavoidable and we have never existed in a world where we can’t do anything at all. Also, authoritarian regimes (especially those imposed without the consent of the people -- willing subjection to authoritarianism is one thing, but the other, yeah) have a relatively short shelf life, historically speaking. That won’t help all of us who could be hurt right now (though we can STILL fight back and speak up and help our neighbors), but it’s the truth. Authoritarian rule (especially when it’s not balanced by economic security, which sure as hell isn’t happening right now) can last for a while, sure. But it is always its own worst enemy, and it will always be ended. How that ends is a choice we can make.

This isn’t the “get out on the streets and Start The Glorious Revolution!!!” nonsense that the armchair internet leftists, none of whom are actually starting a glorious revolution or doing anything except bitching on Twitter about how Biden and Trump are alike, are fond of. This is an active choice to realize that there are always things you can do, that there are things you can do right now, and one of them, most obviously, is voting. This mess was all completely goddamn avoidable if people had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But well, they didn’t, and we get one last shot to fix this by democratic process. Trump is already openly setting up to contest the election results/try to invalidate them/throw out ballots. This is all old-school fascism. This is what is happening. He is counting on another razor-thin margin of votes that he can then contest in his hand-picked SCOTUS; he wants another Bush v. Gore very, very badly. The only way to blow away any legitimacy for anything like this is to vote in such overwhelming numbers that there’s no question of Biden’s victory, no need to wait for mail-in ballots (another reason the GOP has been trying so hard to destroy the post office) or anything else. At heart, Trump is a coward. He’s also an egomaniac. If it comes to stepping aside peacefully or being dragged out of the White House by the FBI for everyone to laugh at for the rest of time, hmm, I doubt he’s going to go for that. (And if he does, well, I will also savor the sight of him in handcuffs for all eternity.) However, that doesn’t mean the GOP machine won’t TRY, because Trump is not just Trump, but is his entire miserable cabal of enablers. I have written my fingers raw about how badly people need to vote. This is literally your last chance to do it.

I’ve seen a lot of the-sky-is-falling, we’re-doomed, they-have-the-votes-so-don’t-even-bother handwringing in the last few days. To some degree, yes. We all feel doomed. We have all been asked to find strength to deal with massive and unending waves of terrifying bullshit past anyone’s normal capacity, and we’re tired. We want it to end. But it’s SO CLOSE to ending, if we can all just get out and vote for Joe Biden in massive numbers on November 3 (or if your state has early voting, sooner; BANK YOUR VOTE). That’s such an easy thing to do. Nothing is set in stone. We can still fix things and make it so, you know, we’re not living in a fascist state ruled by Gilead. (And besides, all this Chicken Little rhetoric is super easy for the Russian troll farms to exploit. Don’t listen to it. Shut it down. Reject it.)

They want you to think you’re powerless. You’re not.

They want you to think this will never end. It will. We decide how.

They want you to think this is a foregone conclusion and you should just go back home and let it happen. You don’t have to.

They want you to think your vote doesn’t matter. It does.

They want you to think your rights are gone. They’re not.

They want you to think this future is inevitable.

IT’S NOT.

Hang in there.

Lots of hugs.

[tundrainafrica]

Remember when Kenny Ackerman mentioned that “Everyone is drunk on something to keep pushing. Power, family, dreams, children etc. Everyone was a slave to something.” I find it really intriguing and fascinating. I think SnK story is just really well written and deep.

Anyways... I want to ask if Levi is also the same. If he is also drawn to a strong desire and be drunk on that desire to keep on pushing. I know he wanted to fulfill his promise to Erwin, but aside from that, what would be the the humanity’s strongest soldier strongly wished for?

Thank you.

Hello Anon, 

This is a super interesting ask and I was super excited to tackle this so here I am at 4am just writing this because the last episode made me sadder than I expected to be. 

 “Everyone is drunk on something to keep pushing. Power, family, dreams, children etc. Everyone was a slave to something.”

Kenny is right. I honestly think to a degree we can apply this type of thinking to real life, particularly during war torn periods because in the most hopeless situations, we kinda have to explain how people are able to pull motivation out of their asses and keep fighting during trench warfare for example etc etc. I actually ended up reading a lot on post war ideologies shaped from trench warfare commonly used in WWI and WWII when I was finishing up AOT and I think I applied some of it in this fic. 

And I do have this headcanon that this idea that you have to be drunk to continue fighting and to stay motivated was particularly stronger among the survivors (soldiers and citizens alike). Because the realization that the world is a shitty place through exposure to suffering, war, violence and general hopelessness of the situation comes slowly in the battlefield, especially when means were made for battle to last longer (like trench warfare.) And these long drawn out battles give soldiers time to think about what the hell they are really fighting for and these longass reflections can really make or break people and sometimes, we need an (almost) unhealthy attachment to things to stay alive.

And with Attack on Titan in particular and that paradigm where they’re the only surviving members of humanity left? I think that general paradigm tends to push fighters and victims to desolation more than hope.

I don’t think Levi is an exception. Actually, the fact that Levi stayed alive this long and had such a shitty life even before going out to the battlefield? Having lived one of the most arguably difficult lives in the survey corps, he had to have something to keep him going or he would have given up on life early on or I don’t think he would have gotten so strong in the first place. I wrote a fic on this long ago with the intention of making a character study of Levi with focus particularly on interactions with everyone he has ever loved. I only got two one shots written so far. You can read it here. 

(I was just getting back into writing though after a long ass hiatus so I’m not too proud of the quality of this one in comparison to my latest works so I have plans on cleaning it up after getting back to it.)

But generally, the point of my sharing that fic is: I had, for a long time hc-ed what Levi could have been drunk with and I’ll try to articulate here meta-style instead of fic-style. 

Let me start by pointing something out. 

In my opinion, Levi is the most selfless, kindest and most pure hearted person in the series. 

Of all the characters in Attack on Titan, Levi is the only character I have never seen act selfishly.

Okay fine we have seen him act recklessly, we have seen him act childish and we constantly see him impose his penchant for cleanliness on every single person. We know he likes to take advantage of the survey corps budget to buy some good tea. But when it really mattered, when has Levi ever made a selfish decision? When has he ever decided something for himself? Personally, I don’t think I have ever seen Levi’s desires articulated explicitly in canon. When Levi feels strongly about something or when he makes such a controversial decision to do something like maybe beat Eren to a pulp? Or, throw out bodies? It was always to save someone’s life. 

Levi was first introduced as some crazy rash soldier with the courtroom beating scene but I think most of the character establishing moments happened in the 57th expedition with Levi telling Eren to do what he wants and just not regret it. We saw Levi admonishing the soldiers who wanted to go back and get a body. We saw him so willingly ready to throw the bodies out to give the soldiers a chance to escape and we saw Levi willingly give Petra’s badge to a mourning soldier so he has something to bring home. Also, we got ACWNR so we also get crumbs on the bond with Erwin and the will to follow him.

And what is the commonality among all the establishing character moments of Levi? For one, there is Erwin and the ‘ackerbond’ but even before that, how was Levi so easily able to live on despite all the bullshit he deals with? 

More than anything, I believe Levi was drunk on bonds and on the friendships he built with people.

And this particular concept manifested in so many different ways. It manifested in his high regard for human life particularly which stems from his ability to empathize so easily with other people. 

A high regard for human life stems from empathy more than anything. 

Levi has this uncanny ability to empathize and to see the human in every single individual he encounters and I think this ability rivals his actual combat abilities in the battlefield. 

Let’s talk about Levi’s godly sense of empathy for someone who grew up with such a shitty life. We see it in the soldier badge scene, we see it when he makes Nick watch the refugees go and we see it in how Levi supports Historia in opening up that orphanage and what made Levi so empathetic was the fact that he lived a life of struggle. There are two ways people can go about suffering, they can use it as an excuse to be an asshole or they can think to themselves “I don’t want anyone to ever have to experience this again,” and I think Levi’s general mindset is towards the latter. And really let’s give Kuchel some credit for having raised our boy so lovingly that he ended up thinking like that. I have so many headcanons of this because she had to be such a great mom for Levi to adopt this way of thinking.

When Kuchel died, Kenny came in and Levi started to understand that to survive in this world he has to do questionable things which explains his tendency to settle issues with his fists. Either way, Levi never did forget the general foundation that life is precious and that’s why he’s able to balance so easily those two facets of his personality. And possibly that was generally the start of Levi’s personality of willing to do the questionable for some greater good. 

He experienced the worst things the world has to offer and that is why Levi is so easily able to put himself in other people’s shoes and this fuels his decision to act on what he believes is right. And even before that, all of the questionable decisions Levi has ever made was always for someone. 

Levi had a godly sense of empathy and of course he empathizes, he feels it too, he feels the need for companionships, bonds, human contact and a sense of belongingness. 

Why did Levi decide to learn how to fight? Why did he decide to beat up people? He wanted Kenny’s approval. And we already know how painful it was for Levi when Kenny left. 

When Levi started his gang, I think it was more of a Robin Hood type of set up. We didn’t really get the details behind it but I think a lot of Levi’s work there was making sure a lot of the orphans in the underground or a lot of the less fortunate had means of making money. We did seem crumbs of it in ACWNR. When he gave a lot more money to that one kid who was sick?  Maybe because he saw in them his powerlessness at being unable to save his mom.

Levi was particularly protective of Isabel and Farlan. And even in Ilse’s journal, we’ve seen that same protectiveness when Oluo was almost killed and when his special squad was killed, did you notice how Levi’s eyes went a little red in the anime when faced with the female titan right after finding out his squad died?

People are saying the ackerbond is a myth and whether or not it was a myth, I think Levi choosing to follow Erwin after losing everything he loved could have been a combination of both. He needed someone to protect but more importantly, I see that as Levi trying to find something else to live for. He left everything he has ever known in the underground, the only two companions left of his life there were gone and in those few moments before Levi talked to Erwin in ACWNR, Levi was broken, lost and trying to find something to live for. 

And what does he decide to do? Follow Erwin. Right?

And let’s segway to some parallel a decade later when the only person left from his old life before decides to sacrifice their life in that godforsaken chapter 132.

(Yams wouldn’t have given us three panels of this if he didn’t want to show something.)

We have to admit Levi did grew up, he didn’t go crazy on some titan after they killed Hange and maybe because he was too injured or maybe the chapter just didn’t allow it. But Levi did have to cope for a chapter or so. 

And what kept Levi fighting in ch. 135? 

Bonds and Companionship again. He didn’t want anymore unnecessary deaths. 

It probably can be considered ‘reaching’ for me to compare how Levi coped with Isabel and Farlan’s death vs. Hange’s death but I really think that the way Levi coped with them is similar. 

Because for one, these weren’t just deaths, these were the last people from Levi’s certain points in Levi’s life, i really think that’s why they hit harder than before. With Isabel and Farlan’s death, Levi lost all remnants of his life underground. Levi was quickly able to see hope in Erwin and that’s why he was still able to continue fighting and Levi said this multiple times in the ending of ACNWR. 

With Hange’s death, Levi lost all remnants of his life with the vets. Hange was the last vet and I think that’s one interpretation as to why we saw Levi practically die  with Hange in 132 with those eyes. 

(I’m a Levihan fan though so I have way more interpretations than that but I’m not dropping it here and making this meta longer than it is rn)

And a few chapters later, we see him scrambling for some reason to continue fighting. And what is the first thing he decides to do?

Risk his leg AND HIS LIFE for both Connie and Jean. And I honestly think that already says A LOT about his motivations for fighting. I mean Levi could have I dunno... Just mind his own business fighting titans right? But Levi decided to focus on keeping who he has left alive for a reason. 

And as painful as it was to watch. I think it just paints a beautiful picture of his personality.

Levi has never done anything like that for himself. Levi has never fought for just himself. I think at the start of his life, he decided to fight for Kenny and every time he meets someone that person becomes his reason to continue living and fighting. 

So maybe Levi was drunk with companionship and this desire for a sense of belongingness and his god tier empathy fueled by that drunkenness is what is pushing him to create a world where everyone can live with those too?

I really hope this makes sense. I’m writing this at 4am and I gotta leave for work soon but...

Thanks for the ask anon!

[tanadrin]

I suppose because politics is what means I have no future of any kind left, so it's hard to be silly about it. And I seem to have landed myself in a sector of social media filled with people who are very smug about how smart and nihilistic they are, and I hate all of you with the hatred that only a miserable, powerless person can feel.

I don’t buy it. Unless you are quite literally scheduled to be executed at dawn, “no future of any kind left” because of politics is catastrophizing. People in very dire circumstances the world over often manage to build some kind of life for themselves; it may not be the life they want, and the suffering they endure because of the circumstances they are limited by should not be dismissed, but to say that someone in such adverse conditions has no future is to infantalize them and deny them the agency they do have to shape their life to some extent.

And this is an insight I’ve found important when dealing with depression in myself: even if one’s catastrophizing is not irrational (say, you’re a queer person stuck in an extremely homophobic environment, at minimum for the next 5-10 years), that does not mean it is useful. To put it another way: circumstance might justifiably make you angry and sad and frustrated. That may be rational. Deciding, in the face of that anger and sadness and frustration, to surrender to it is not rational.

So--assuming that you are not a political dissident due to be executed, nor suffering from a terminal illness which somehow for political reasons cannot be cured (if either of these things are true, you have my sincere condolences)--I have to say, this ask reeks of someone who’s depressed. If you are depressed, you will always be able to come up with reasons why happiness is unattainable for you, due to circumstances entirely out of your control. This is not a crazy thing to think, because if you are depressed and not treating that depression, most if not all the things you try to do will not solve your unhappiness because they are usually orthogonal to what is making you unhappy. Your very ability to accurately imagine future happy states and what might bring them about is suppressed by depression; for instance, you might, if you are depressed and you know it, rationally understand that exercise often helps with your depression, but be unable to motivate yourself to exercise because the intuitive link between if I do X I will feel better is broken by an internal forecasting system that refuses to spit out predictions other than “nothing I do will help with anything.”

A depressed state is not a psychotic break--it doesn’t cause you to lose touch with reality--but I think depressed people would sometimes benefit from treating it like one, because it does subvert your ability to accurately model the world, and therefore you can’t trust your own ability to reason or intuit about certain topics. I have both experienced this from the inside, and seen it from the outside: friends whose depression causes them to believe they are unlovable, and thus that nobody loves them, even when told (and shown) repeatedly that they are very much loved, and very important to the people around them.

In fact, you remind me of this post: depressed and anxious people who notice politics is depressing and anxiety-inducing, and that depressing and anxiety-inducing problems confront the world and society, and therefore conclude that their depression and anxiety are a rational and reasonable response to the world. But that doesn’t follow at all! A lot of responses to a depressing and anxiety-inducing environment are more useful that shutting down and withdrawing, or letting yourself be paralyzed; and even if there are negative external factors in the world affecting your life, if you have nothing in your life that is a sufficient source of joy to offset these things at least somewhat, then you have problems sufficiently severe that I don’t think your depression or anxiety can be laid at the feet of the world at large alone; more likely, you’re dealing with shitty personal circumstances, and these are far more likely to be tractable to your individual capacities than, like, all of climate change. And if you do have some sources of joy in your life, you can cultivate those further.

To put it another way: humans are very bad at reasoning about things on large scales or over large timelines. One reason we’re slow to solve problems like climate change is that we tend to be pretty blasé about remote and impersonal problems, which is actually often useful as well--because it means we’re capable of adjusting our hedonic barometer to create joy even in catastrophic circumstances. If you are constantly worried about big issues like climate change or the Trump presidency to the point where you can never do that, then the conclusion you should draw isn’t that you’re a uniquely rational human being with a uniquely accurate worldview, it’s that your brain is broken and you should not trust your intuitition.

Emotional states are not rational models of the world. They are tools our brain uses to motivate certain kinds of action. They probably have their origin in our social evolution, but this means they are extremely untrustworthy when it comes to complex, large-scale, philosophical, or impersonal issues, because these are not scenarios our brains evolved to handle before the advent of high-population, highly-stratified societies.

Now, I realize it’s hard to convince someone they are depressed and/or should seek treatment by rational argument (lord knows I’ve tried in the past!), because after all, if we were being perfectly rational, we would not feel depressed. We wouldn’t feel anything; again, emotions are contingent tools, not highly rationalized responses to the world! So I won’t belabor this point any longer. Instead, now I’m going to get annoyed with you.

Because here’s the other thing depressed people do--and I have done myself. They see people who are not depressed, whose hedonic barometers are functioning normally, and capable of experiencing joy even in arguably (or inarguably!) shitty circumstances, and they get mad at them. How dare you be capable of laughing at a joke, or sharing a meme, or having a nice day, when everything is so bad!

This is a common response, not only from depression, but also I think from grief, or fear, or trauma, or lots of other things. But it’s bullshit. I’m sorry, but you don’t get to demand that everyone feel your suffering as acutely as they feel their own. You don’t get to demand that just because you’re a pessimistic ball of frustration and anger that everyone else be, too. You get to--and ought to--demand that people treat you with empathy and respect, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get to make jokes about topics you find depressing as hell. Yes, even topics that personally affect you, and may not personally affect them (though, of course, a lot of times people assume the person making the joke isn’t personally affected by the topic, when in reality they are and the joke is a way of relieving stress and coping with frustration).

That calvin and hobbes meme I reblogged is an extremely generic political compass meme; the only relevance it has to the world today, I suppose, is acknowledging that, like, politics is a thing that exists. If you’re upset by that--how dare people laugh at politics, the source of all my problems--you’re being a dick.

And this leads my to my final point, which is this: while we are all of us owed compassion, we also owe others compassion. And people caught up in their own anxiety and depression and anger often don’t see the way their emotional states impose costs on the people around them. They often treat the people around them badly--worse, at any rate, than they normally would--and react defensively if this is pointed out to them.

I’ve done this. I have friends who have done this. I get it. It doesn’t make someone a horrible person! It doesn’t meant they deserve to feel the way they do. But it does create the second half of a twofold moral obligation. You see, I believe that the, call it “utilitarian selfishness” view, is essentially correct: if all humans are of similar moral worth (they are), and you can only help one person (often true), and that person is yourself, it is no less moral to help yourself than it is to help someone else. This is usually framed as a grant of permission: “you are allowed to be selfish sometimes.” But it’s also an obligation: “you should not be a dick--even to yourself.” You have a positive obligation to care about your own suffering! And you have a positive obligation to try to reduce the costs your suffering--your bad mood, your depression, your anxiety--imposes on the people around you.

Because I’m not a smug nihilist. I actually believe, with embarrassing intensity, in a large number of abstract principles. And while I believe circumstance or injustice can conspire to make people feel miserable and powerless, and I have the utmost sympathy for you feeling that way, no one is so omnipotent as to be able to truly excise our power to do something with our life that is rewarding to us, no matter how modest. Your subjective feeling of misery is not license to be a dick to people, or to misrepresent them or their motivations. And if reading my tumblr (or anyone else’s) makes you miserable, you have a positive moral obligation to stop, because you’re being a dick to yourself, which is no more justifiable than being a dick to me. And being a dick to me because you don’t like my Tumblr, because you’re miserable and I’m not, is pants-on-head stupid.

I, too, have been so convinced of my misery and powerlessness, and so utterly convinced of my inability to make improvements in my life, that I have yielded utterly to the feeling of myself as a despised, helpless, wretched thing. You can spend years in that state. A lifetime, even. I suppose it relieves you from the burden of having to try, which is a tiny shred of comfort when the climb up the hill seems so steep. But I have found that in the long run it brings no other relief; there’s no regression to the mean, just an endless prolongation of misery. It required some courage, and not a little determination, to try to climb out of that pit. Sometimes you struggle. Sometimes you fall back in. Sometimes it’s easier to believe there’s nothing beyond that place of unhappiness. But there is, and you can get there, and the choice of whether or not to reach it lies only with you.

[deans-haunted-baby]

The Ones Left Behind

Alrighty time for some truth bombs. I’ve had almost a week to absorb the end of Supernatural and season 15 as a whole. And I think this is the moment where I need to throw in my two cents. For all intents and purposes I won’t go in-depth into 15x20 seeing as that conversation will just open up a whole other can of worms and I don’t need that headache. I have my reasons for being less than indifferent with how the Winchesters’ story concluded. So I won’t go there.

Instead I’ll be focusing all my energies on the unsatisfying conclusions of 4 particular characters. Two of which were main cast members (one that was on the show 12 years and one 4 years) while the other two (played by the same dude) were brought back after a decade long hiatus for a much-anticipated comeback only to be wasted and mangled unfairly by Dabb and his hack horde of a writing staff. Call this a follow up to my last post. If I sound bitter I am because these people don’t have a single clue on how to helm these characters, their relationships or their storylines 😠 Nor do they deserve them.

And yes I’m well aware of Kevin Tran, Rowena, Ketch and several others who got the shaft on this show. Those could be future posts for another time.

But I cannot stress this enough; ADAM MILLIGAN, JACK KLINE, MICHAEL AND CASTIEL ALL DESERVED FUCKING BETTER. There is no arguing these facts, none whatsoever. Not one of these characters deserved that exit to be the final chapter in their story. I won’t do an entire analysis of each character’s arc and role in the show as I’ve already done that in my rant about 15x19. But I will highlight how much season 15 royally screwed over these characters and tossed them aside like trash; as if none of them were ever part of/contributed anything to Sam and Dean’s history/world building of Supernatural’s universe.

*WARNING* This is going to get heated.

Before I dive into the heart of these issues I want to state this is not a “shipping post”. I don’t ship anyone on Supernatural, hopefully this blog has been pretty self-explanatory. So I have no arguments/opinions in those areas. I’ve been a fan of this series for 15 years because of the characters, the familial bonds and relationships formed between characters throughout its run. And I’m well-aware that the Winchesters are the lead protagonists of the show, no need to remind me. These are purely my own thoughts based what I’ve obtained from show canon. Let me just say I can’t get over just how much these writers contradicted and ignored what they put forth in the journeys of these four individuals. its a real headscratcher.

You mean to tell me that after TWELVE DAMN YEARS of Castiel being a rebellious warrior angel, searching for his own identity and meaning in life; making that promise to Kelly Kline about raising Jack as his own/risking his life for him. After sacrificing himself for his son a year ago, acknowledging he was satisfied with his role as a father which restored his faith; that it was all because of/for Dean Winchester? 

You mean to tell me that after Michael, THE PRINCE OF HEAVEN and PROTECTOR OF HUMANITY, was locked away in a cage with a human whom he emotionally bonded with for thousands of years (10 years our time); who was abandoned, betrayed and manipulated by his neglectful/abusive father. After choosing free will and aligning himself with TFW for humanity’s sake, just sided with the Earth’s destruction because his little brother called him names? 

You mean to tell me that Jack, A THREE YEAR OLD CHILD, who’s barely just beginning his life and spent his entire duration on the show wanting to be normal and not wanting to be special. Connecting and being integrated with humans; a child who’s biggest fear was outliving everyone he ever loved. Is suddenly ready to walk away from his family, his home and his teddy bear; to give up being a kid forever and run the universe?

You mean to tell me that Adam, SUPERNATURAL’S MOST INNOCENT CHARACTER and FORGOTTEN THIRD-WINCHESTER BROTHER, after being eaten by ghouls; pulled away from his mother out of Heaven, manipulated by angels, trapped in Hell for thousands of years because Sam and Dean left him there to rot. After coming back and helping his neglectful siblings save the world only to be ripped away from his best friend and THE ONLY OTHER PERSON who gave a damn about him; is sentenced to a life of loneliness, homelessness and turmoil until he dies and ends up in Hell where he’ll mostly be tortured and turned into a demon?

NO. I DO NOT AND WILL NEVER ACCEPT THIS BULLSHIT! 

Season 15 not only manages to contradict itself where these characters are concerned (while assassinating them before the final curtain). But the writers deliberately discarded them before giving us that *sarcasm inserted* epic solo-Winchester conclusion. Regardless of how you feel about Adam, Castiel, Jack or Michael, ALL OF THESE CHARACTERS are connected Sam and Dean’s story and part of Supernatural. And when you throw them away like they mean nothing, you’re essentially throwing away a part of the show’s history. You’re ignoring 15 years worth of story building. 

As I said I’m not going to go into 15x20 for reasons, it doesn’t offend me as much as what was done before that finale. Because I think those other show exits really affect 15x20 even worse than people realize. You want to know why, I’ll explain.

Lets start off with Castiel and Jack, OH BOY! We know where they end up; running Heaven and the Earth together which is all fine and dandy. I love my Dadstiel father/son duo being an endgame family unit. But here in lies the problem, we never saw it. Not even a cameo. And technically their onscreen storyline ends at 15x18 and 15x19 which is an ugly, anti-climatic bookend to an incredibly deep relationship that had 4 years of development. First you have Castiel who completely forgets why he made that deal with the Empty to begin with. HIS FUCKING SON. Not to mention it wasn’t about true happiness it was about giving himself permission to be happy; there is a difference. And then you have Jack wandering around next episode, vacuuming up power cause suddenly he’s a machine now, acting like he doesn’t give a shit over losing his dad to an entity HE’S BEEN DREADING ABOUT FOR A FUCKING YEAR. 

Towards the end of season 15 I noticed neither of these characters were acting like themselves. Their motivations, their personalities and strong ties to one another had mysteriously dissolved. Castiel became less concerned about the danger his son was facing after 15x15 (what the hell was that in 15x17?) and more about speaking when spoken to by either Sam or Dean. Does he know how Dean truly feels about Jack; proclaiming the child is “not family”? I doubt the in-character version of him would let Jack leave with Dean after that insult. Castiel’s not even worried whether or not his son is alive or safe before he makes the big confession later. And for some reason Jack (who’d become heavily suicidal) was more concerned with clinging to the Winchesters, willing to die for them, instead focusing on himself and the one person who’s shown him nothing but unconditional love and given him strength since birth. Both of these characters are canonically depressed and suffer from low self-esteem that was never resolved which makes me furious. 

When Chuck killed Jack at the end of season 14, this devastated Castiel in the first half of season 15. He actually got to grieve that loss throughout the episodes and deal with his anger over it, allowing the audience to anticipate the day they’d be reunited one last time. This part of Castiel’s S15 arc also ironically mirrors Jack’s S13 arc of mourning Castiel’s death until resurrecting him. And when this son finally returned to his father, who got to rescue him, it was such a poignant moment between the two. It was a cathartic payoff after witnessing Castiel in so much pain over Jack. There was so much building up between that Dadstiel reunion in 15x11 and the Empty’s pact in 14x08; this was suppose to be a tragic yet pivotal plot-point in both Jack and Castiel’s stories. And with SPN wrapping up we all expected something BIG. Yet somehow the writers retconned the whole thing by making it all about Dean, which is such a gross disservice to these characters and 4 years of storytelling.

For instance, since 15x18 was Castiel’s exit episode, why wasn’t he allowed to hug his son or Sam goodbye one last time? Why didn’t he have more of a focal role instead of standing around majority of the episode with barely any dialogue as so much precious air time was wasted on frivolous things? Why didn’t he get one last badass fight scene with someone like Death instead of being choked out and tossed around like a powerless mortal? Why did the group need to be split up to begin with when it served no purpose either than that *ugh* moment? Why wasn’t Jack allowed to call Castiel “dad” once before the show ended? He deserved to hear his son address him as dad!

AND WHY THE HELL COULDN’T JACK FEEL CASTIEL’S DEATH THE MOMENT IT HAPPENED? 

The show already established to the audience the significant cosmic bond these two characters shared since before Jack was even born. It was so powerful it boosted Castiel’s grace. Jack could remember who Castiel was from the womb and that he’d protected his mother. Not to mention HE FUCKING RESURRECTED CASTIEL OUT OF THE EMPTY ONCE WITHOUT GOD’S POWER. You’re telling me Jack couldn’t feel his dad being taken away forever despite how far apart they were? No, he’d feel it in his heart. Had we’d been given a scene like that at the end of 15x18 (something of substance) with actual grief shown in 15x19 maybe the episode would’ve faired better for them. 

That said it wasn’t, because Jack was treated the exact same way in his final exit. Hardly any lines and just a bunch of scenes of him standing/walking around until that pathetic reveal at the lake. HE DOESN’T EVEN GET TO INTERACT WITH JAKE ABEL’S MICHAEL/ADAM which would’ve been a great follow-up to the AU!Michael storyline in seasons 13 and 14. I swear these directors didn’t give Alex and Misha any motivation during their last three episodes and it’s evident in their hollow performances. But why would they when the scripts are basically telling their characters to quickly fuck off so the brothers can have their final outing. Jack doesn’t even behave like himself after he becomes the new God. His personality is apathetic, cold, alien, stiff and way too mature for the 3 year old child so closely connected to his family/the human world. In that moment I saw Alex Calvert not Jack Kline. It’s bad enough he doesn’t get a meaningful farewell but again Castiel, HIS DAD, is a complete afterthought to this kid 🥶

And that’s what we’re left with. Forever. A frigid, hollow ending to one of Supernatural’s most healthy, touching, family dynamics. It makes you wonder what was even the point. I can’t even fully enjoy the fact that its canon Jack and Castiel are together fixing Heaven because of what the show presented onscreen as their last hurrah. It’s not sitting right and it makes 15x20 even less appealing to me.

Moving onto Michael and Adam. Get ready for this. I could rant forever about how dirty my boys were done by this show. How they were discarded in the SPN series finale recap etc. just as they were FOR THE LAST TEN FUCKING YEARS. Was there even a plan going on here or was this just everyone making things up as it went? Their ending is the most unsatisfying and cruel thing because its INCOMPLETE. There is no real closure or resolution with them thanks to the monstrosity that was 15x19. AND NO ONE CARES ENOUGH ABOUT THEM TO GIVE A SHIT. 

Much as I’ve enjoyed this show for many years, it NEVER deserved Jake Abel, his talent or his time. I keep seeing so many anti posts about Dean Winchester’s final fate in Supernatural and all I can think about is “try being an Adam Milligan fan for the last decade”.  I’ve had to watch this boy go through hell with nothing to show for it either than years of memes. ridicule and the show’s mockery in forgetting him. Actually he’s the ONLY CHARACTER in this series you’re encouraged not to remember 😡 Also quick question: why give us this really interesting and healthy relationship between an archangel and its vessel if nothing was ever going to become of it? 

At this point I don’t know why Adam or the idea of him was even introduced way back in season 4 let alone revisited in season 5. Because the only thing I see when I look at this character now is SAD WASTED POTENTIAL. Storylines never explored. Relationships that never got off the ground. Backstory we never got to see (like for instance his past with John Winchester and his time in the cage). A character’s birthright (Men of Letters) that was never actualized. AND the unexplained factor that Adam could look directly at Michael’s true form without his eyes burning out (making him a special case). And the thing is he could’ve been a really great character, both him and Michael. They could’ve easily reached popular status just like Castiel given the chance since Jake is a freaking acting-powerhouse. We were given a taste in 15x08 just how awesome these characters could be and how they could’ve contributed so much to the story and its core group. But unfortunately it wasn’t meant to be.

Michael will never redeem himself after years of scrutiny and being made out to be some kind of unhinged monster. This show constantly enjoyed pounding into our brains how fearsome Michael was. Warned us via Lucifer (LUCIFER, PEOPLE!) that he wasn’t rational, compassionate and didn’t care about anything except war, death and destruction. And that he was incapable of feelings and emotions. This is how Supernatural saw Heaven’s Prince and guardian of the Earth. Christ, they actually did a two-year storyline about an evil Michael from the AU world who enjoyed torturing and killing while trying to destroy the universe. I want to know WHAT THE HELL THIS SHOW’S WRITERS HAD AGINST THESE CHARACTERS? Why they felt the need to bring back Jake Abel, AFTER A DECADE OF FANS WANTING THIS, if it was simply to piss all over his characters one last time before the show wrapped. This is absolutely unprofessional and childish; the fact that Jake is taking this bullshit in stride makes it all the more shameful 😡

We could’ve learned so much more about Michael’s past and his present relationship with Adam. These characters didn’t need to sit in the cage for a decade they could’ve easily been incorporated back into the show as far as season 8 or 10! And been an asset to the Darkness storyline in season 11.There were characters and storylines introduced that served no purpose. Why did we need to keep seeing characters like Charlie Bradbury or (as much as I like him) Crowley or Garth (love him too) or Lucifer or Abaddon or the Wayward sisters? I would’ve much preferred having Adam and Michael around and got to know them instead; especially after 15x08. I would’ve wanted to see what their dynamic with TFW could’ve become had they been long-time allies. Did John ever tell Mary about Adam’s existence? I’d like to see what her reaction would’ve been like had the Winchesters remembered him during that damn 300th episode. I guess that’s another loose end untied.

But because of what Supernatural did to these two characters, it forever taints Sam and Dean. I don’t think Dabb or purist fans realize this. But when new viewers come into this show about two brothers preaching important things like “saving people”, “family first” or “family don’t end in blood” they’re going to see how badly the main protagonists treated their innocent half brother. How Castiel and Jack were treated. They’re going to see the heroes of the story abandoning this kid in Hell forever with no intention of EVER rescuing him. And that’s why their final appearance leaves such a bad taste going into 15x20. Cause as much as Dabb and co didn’t give a shit about Adam and Michael they also didn’t give a rat’s ass about protecting Sam and Dean’s integrity. That’ll be a stain they can’t undo. 

So through all of it, we’re stuck with the abomination that is 15x19 aka the eye-soar to an unfinished/unpolished story of two horribly disregarded characters. Michael gets the pleasure of being character assassinated right before he’s stupidly killed off instead of going out a hero or becoming the next God (as it was his birthright and the setup was there in the narrative). And Adam gets killed off-screen, OUT OF HIS OWN DAMN BODY, then brought back by Jack only to live a miserable, isolated existence since his brothers have nothing to do with him (the dog and car are more important); his best friend is dead, he has no job or money or a fucking home and he’s legally dead! Really what is there left for him besides the brutal fate awaiting in Hell when he dies?  

SERIOUSLY THEY COULDN’T GIVE US ONE SCENE WHERE THE WINCHESTERS CHECKED IN ON ADAM TO MAKE SURE HE WAS SAFE?! 🤬 His last scene pretty much sums up this shit for what it is. Tragic. I feel like crying for this poor sweet boy.

Congratulations Dabb, BL and co for giving us these much deserved broken story arcs of characters you destroyed and made OOC before leaving the airways. You did your show’s protagonists justice by doing this *sarcasm inserted* after 15 years of being onscreen. I doubt these idiotic decisions are going to age well in the long run. They certainly don’t look good on the Winchesters. Anyway that’s my hot take for the day. 

ALL THESE ACTORS AND THEIR CHARACTERS DESERVED BETTER.