#but works for canon/any au

[thesupernaturalhouse]

I'm not sure either I've said this here before edit I think Vaggie would be really good with kids

Like, in heaven, she'd get dragged to the park by a kid and either dogpiled in hugs, made to play hide and seek, or they'd insist on her telling them stories

I can see it staring cause she took a nap in the grass not realizing it was a field children often came to and made up a story of fighting a fish monster when they asked about her spear

And then a kid recognized her, dragged her to the park, and every time she left the barracks, there was a 78% chance that she'd get dragged into the kids' game or need for entertainment

Heaven can get boring with it being the same thing! Vaggie was new and always had new stories(she's making them up on the fly she has no idea why these kids like her so much but doesn't want them yo be disappointed)

She can't bring herself to know cause their so fucking tiny and cute and if she or soembody else makes them cry she'll actually kill somebody she swears to god-

If she had walked around when they went to heaven a kid would've recognized her immediately and zipped over crying and asking where she's been and that'd result in her getting dragged away and Charlie standing by very confused, but taking pictures cause this is adorable as fuck

[protagaster]

Penelope: I can take your brother!

Ctimene, laughing: In a fight, right?

Penelope: :)

Ctimene, nervous: In a fight, right?

[demaparbat-hp]

Almost

[peace-hunter]

tfone au where OP is created as the last of the primes but way after them, a sparkling born at what were thought to be the last days of the war against the quintessons, the beginning of a new generation of peace after eons of war. a child meant to be loved and raised knowing nothing of war nor sacrifice.

he's kept mostly out of the spotlight by his siblings, who don't wish to expose him to everyone's optics so young, and want to wait until the war is done and over to properly introduce him to their people.

except of course the primes are betrayed and murdered by sentinel, the war is lost and everyone who knows and cared for the truth is either banished or outright killed in order to suppress it.

and the high guard, the ones the primes trusted the most, the ones that were supposed to protect them, the ones who failed in their most important duty, have to make a choice. to take the last prime, their last hope, with them to the surface, a hostile environment where there's little to no supplies and where they'll be hunted down by both sentinel and the quintessons as the biggest threat to their regimen.

or hide him in plain sight. place him where sentinel won't think to look for him. one more sparkling among many. and hope it will be enough to keep him alive. pray to primus that he'll protect his last child long enough for them to come back for him when it's safer (even if most of them have already lost their faith on him when he allowed the rest of his children to be massacred like that)

they almost lose their resolve when they realize they will have to take the little one's cog away in order to make him blend in with the rest of the newborns (and oh do they burn with murderous intent when they see what sentinel has done to their people but it's not the time yet-) but in the end they decide an impaired little prime is better than a dead one.

and so in the chaos of thirteen dead primes and a sudden energon crisis, a little sparkling who very few mechs really knew about and even fewer had seen completely vanishes. and in the depths of iacon a mech in charge of a new batch of newborns scratches their helm in confusion as they realize they must have miscounted the first time.

optimus prime is quietly erased from any official records by sentinel, written off as dead when they find a sparkling's frame mangled beyond recognition after an attack on the base of those rebels that insist on being a thorn on his side. killing the sparkling hadn't been precisely in his plans, he probably could've found some use for it after all, but he's not particularly upset about it either.

and orion pax grows up with an ache on his spark that tells him he's missing something far more important than a t-cog and dreams of gentle and loving hands, cradling him against the frames of mechs he cannot recall the faces of.

[journey-to-the-attic]

the rest of the cast got their new song covers, so i wanted to try putting the others in a band :>

i did want to make it look a bit like an album cover but i have no idea how those are designed so eh?? i also couldn't think of any band or album/song names so. if anyone has any ideas...

[sunnymainecoonx]

How many people witnessed softie food addict horror who needed something in his mouth or he would actively kill and turn to cannibalism 🧍‍♀️ or was that just me.... anyways honestly it was silly.. he'd maybe get along with cook horror... I just like fanon crossovers guys*sadge

Anyways canon horror is also silly(really silly. What an asshole, man)(no seriously he's actually such an asshole.. I might love him for that but-) I don't think he would get along with the others(loser)

[ghostly-cabbage]

We need to talk about the worst thing about making AUs....

The fact that then when you inevitably think about crossovers you don't want the crossover with the canon you want it with your specific AU. Your brain worms, your circus, but THEN WHAT?

Oh, yeah, to understand this crossover you need to go read this entirely different fic/series? Girl help 😭 you can't do that

[lurkinginnernarrator]

it's been so long since ive done anything mdzs so, post canon wangxian decide to go on a real vacation. except. neither of them can actually laze around and enjoy it

wwx's mind has thought up three new things to make within the first hour, lwj has already done everything he can, he's cooked meals, organized their luggage, leisurely basked in the presence of his husband.. but! they both decide to preserve, going on ambling walks together and sitting and watching the stars. It's nice.

Just nice.

Then, the village that they were holidaying in encountered a problem with a mischievous Yao, and how could they not help?

After outsmarting the Yao, and helping repair the village, wangxian lay down and find that relaxation, for them, is best found in each other, and helping others

When asked about their vacation, wangxian fondly recounts working together to locate the Yao, then putting their expertise and experience together to fashion a trap, the thrilling chase, wrangling their wiley captive, setting to rights an auntie's house in the aftermath.

something about wangxian loving being together and how they cherish that time, but how when they're both running together, united in heart and purpose, helping the common people and working side-by-side, and how they don't really need a work-life balance because (this is so cheesy my god) for post canon wangxian it's not duty, it's not work, it's all love.

Love for each other

Love for their profession

Love of generosity

Wangxian loves being generous. I think that's one of my favorite things about them.

[shroomerr]

You guys ever read the most beautiful, jaw dropping, feet kicking, leaves you with a feeling of yearning fic that it possesses you? yea that was me anyways here’s vampire Kyle and his annoying assigned bodyguard who’s also a witch

(ALSO IF YOU WANT TO READ SAID FANFIC ITS A KYLE X READER FIC CALLED ITS FALLING FOR THE IDEA BY FEDOSAURUSREX ON AO3 THAT INSPIRED ME TO WHIP THIS WHOLE AU UP)

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

The fandom can't make up its mind on what's supposed to be a joke and what's supposed to be serious because the show can't either half the time. It's a tonally disjointed mess that wants to have absurd over-the-top humor as well as a plot and moments of drama, romance, and angst that demand you see the characters as people and feel for what they're going through. Except you can't do that without also treating the dumb bullshit in a somewhat grounded way. Like, you're still dealing with the same characters. You can't just go "Oh, that? Let's ignore that!" the moment it's no longer convenient to you. You've opened this can of worms and now you have to sleep in it. So, every character flip-flops between two different versions of themselves depending on what the writers need in any particular scene.

This is not to say surreal humor can't be used right alongside characters you're supposed to empathize with, Teen Titans (not Go) did that and it worked. It's just that the absurdity can only come from the setting (Mad Mod, Mother Mae-Eye, pretty much anything Control Freak is in) or from designated joke characters (Date With Destiny). Teen Titans never had the main characters acting in clearly absurd ways as the butt of a joke unless those characters were brainwashed somehow, because the writers knew that would ruin any of the more grounded moments they wanted to write. The writers of Miraculous missed the memo on that one.

I don't disagree. A perfect example is Derision where the show takes all of the bad jokes about Marinette's crush and decides to take them seriously as if you can possible take them seriously without making Marinette come across as unhinged and dangerous. You can't, which brings us to the topic at hand: how do you even begin to understand these characters when the show is constantly making character-breaking choices?

My approach - and the approach I recommend others take if they're going to keep watching the show - is to focus on the characters' cores and reject anything canon does to violate those cores. I don't argue for this stance because I love the characters so much that I only want the good things to count. I take this stance because, if you don't, then the characters fall apart. There is no way to make them work as fully realized characters while embracing every choice canon has made. Miraculous has massive characterization issues that go well beyond the humor.

For example, Adrien has multiple moments of terrible behavior that are played in a serious manner such as the moment in the episode Frozer where he tries to start a fight with Ladybug in the middle of an akuma attack because she wouldn't accept a rose from him earlier:

Setup

Ladybug: I can't accept this rose from you. I told you already. I'm in love with someone else. Cat Noir: I know, M'lady. But if he weren't here, would things be different between us? Ladybug: Well, you know, I can't even begin to imagine him not being here. I'm sorry, Cat Noir. I really gotta get going, and you better do the same. (Swings her yo-yo to head back home; Cat Noir is sad, looking downwards, with one petal of the rose falling.)

Payoff

Ladyice: Cat Noir. We need to set up a trap for whoever turned the city into a giant ice rink. (throws yo-yo) Icecat: (bitterly) My feline instincts prefer to track and observe before I attack. You go your way, I'll go mine. Ladyice: Please don't tell me you're mad at me about the rose. Icecat: There may be a certain chill now between us. Ladyice: I get it, but we should really focus on saving Paris right now. Icecat: We don't always have to do everything together, after all. It's not like we're a couple. (skates away)

There's no way to argue this off as a bad joke. While Adrien has every right to feel hurt, those feelings don't excuse him acting like a pouting child in the middle of an akuma fight. It doesn't excuse him acting like this at any point! Ladybug is not a villain for telling him no. She wasn't even mean about it!

I clearly fully agree that Adrien looks awful and selfish here, but I'd still argue that it's not something that should be used to define Adrien's character if your goal is to tell the "ideal" version of Miraculous. "Ideal" being the version that canon seems to be going for based on the overall picture we can sort of make out if we back way, way, way up and look at the extremely abstract picture canon is clumsily painting.

Unless canon is going to do something monumentally stupid, Adrien is Marinette's endgame romantic interest. It's also clear that there is no plan to cut him from the team. He's going to be Chat Noir for the rest of his life or at least well into his adulthood. This means that he is supposed to be a good hero who deserves his miraculous just like he's supposed to be a charming and cute romantic lead. These are the two things I keep in mind when trying to shift through canon to figure out what writing choices I should fully embrace and what writing choices I have to either ignore or treat as true flaws that get an actual character arc. In my book, either approach is fine because most of the characters are deeply flawed at this point and you can't give them all arcs without bloating the story to nonsense levels.

My goal with this approach is never to say, "oh, that moment shouldn't count in terms of how people feel about the character." It's more, "that moment goes so hard against who this character is very clearly supposed to be that I can't take it into account if I want to tell the kind of story that Miraculous is trying (and clearly failing) to tell."

As an example, let's list off Adrien's worst behaviors. The things that make him look terrible:

He sucks at communicating his needs and feelings, leading to multiple moments where he gets mad at Ladybug for things she's totally unaware of

He has quit or considered quitting without warning multiple times and only one of those was because of something he did "wrong" (NYC Special)

He puts his feelings before the safety of Paris on multiple occasions, even going so far to purposely miss akuma fights to see what happens

He is incredibly pushy about his crush, often ignoring Ladybug's feelings on the topic by continuing to bring it up even after she asked him to stop

There have been multiple instances where he almost cataclysmed multiple people in a fit of anger

His love for Ladynette isn't strong enough to let him break free of things like akumas and nightmare dust even when he's looking her in the eyes making him a pretty crappy romantic lead

People will argue that some of this behavior makes sense for his character because of the abuse that canon has technically introduced, but that the writers seem blissfully unaware of. I don't disagree with that argument, but that doesn't change the fact that none of this is acceptable behavior for a hero and Adrien is a hero who keeps doing these things. A sad backstory doesn't give you the right to behave poorly without consequences.

At the same time, if I fully embrace these elements of canon, what I get is an Adrien salt fic where he loses his miraculous for good while Marinette finds her real true love or even just a non-salty fic where Adrien leaves for his own meatal health and gets replaced by someone who can handle being a hero right now. Canon's not writing either of those, so the only way to engage with these flaws while enjoying canon or aiming for the same end goals as canon is to say, "I guess this doesn't count" or "I guess I need to tone this way down and work through it via a character arc" or even "I guess that was just a bad joke maybe?"

That is the essence of what I mean when I call myself a writing salt, character sugar blog. It comes from looking at canon and seeing that there's simply no way to embrace the worst moments and the best at the same time. We're not dealing with a coherent plot and/or complex characters. We're dealing with a nonsense plot that will warp the characters to bizarre shapes to make random ideas work even if those idea go wildly against canon's end goals.

As an example, Glaciator and Frozer should not exist in the same universe or, at the very least, something should explain why Chat Noir randomly changed his stance on Ladybug's crush from acceptance to pushiness. As is, the pieces don't fit together. The behavior is too contradictory. Remember, this is how Glaciator ends:

Perhaps Ladybug will love me someday. I mean, like, I love her. I have to believe. In the meantime, her friendship is the best gift of all.

Where did this version of Adrien go? Why did he regress in Frozer? There's no in-universe reason. It happened because the writers weren't ready to let the love square date or grow close, but they also wanted the love square to cause drama, so Adrien ends up looking terrible just like Marinette ends up looking terrible when it's her turn to cause love square drama. Her terribleness takes a different flavor so it can be hard to realize that this is a systemic issue, but that's what it is. It's deeply frustrating, but it also clearly stems from cheap writing and not quality characterization.

This is also why my stance is that canon as a whole only supports my Doyalistic core-character analysis style of approach. The writing is too poor quality to do Watsonian analysis where you embrace the full picture and try to put it all together. The closest I'll get to Watsonian analysis is pointing out how much the writing botches a Watsonian take by showing you all the way the writing contradicts itself, twisting into a nonsense pretzel of frustration where the payoffs never satisfy! (See the season four rant for an example or anything where I talked about Chloe's supposed damnation arc.)

There are even characters where canon is such a total mess that you can Doyalistically argue for two separate takes! Gabriel is a perfect example. He is all over the place and his ending was so poorly handled that you can make strong arguments for writing him as a cold-hearted villain or a sympathetic villain without the end result feeling like it spits in the face of canon because both takes maintain his one core element: villain.

That's the big thing I keep in mind when I look at the characters and the lore and the plots and try to come up with versions that the average fan would like. I don't think that there's one true version of any of these things, but I do feel comfortable saying that there are versions that will very clearly only appeal to people who are salty about a specific thing that canon did poorly. That's not who I want to appeal to in my adaptions, so while I'm not going to argue that those takes have no backing in canon, I will argue that those takes are not supported by canon as a whole. Embracing them requires you to take the worst parts of canon at face value while ignoring what canon is clearly trying to do with the overall story.

I get the appeal of that, but it's not fun for me because that approach feels like rolling around in the mud with the pigs. I don't want to sink to canon's level! I want to have fun! That's why I talk about how to make canon into its best self, not its worst self. If you want its worst self, just go watch the actual show. I will be shocked it if disappoints you.

[that-one-raccoon]

I adore how we know absolutely nothing about Dazai from before he was 14 and with the mafia. Nothing. For all we know he could've been a fucking retired Odd Squad agent who quit at fourteen because he fucking hated his job then was found by mori.

[toxinoire]

I want to see a scene wherein a character was asked by someone as to why they did this risky ass thing that could possibly endanger them and everyone they love and this risky thing isn't so simple, it's very complex and complicated that no one or only a few selected people know of it and they respond with "Because my best friend was in danger"

And then the person who asked says "You risked...all that. Which is literally everything about yours and your loved ones' safety, for your bEsT fRiEnD?" And the character nods or verbally responds. Then the person who asks just thinks "Oh my gosh, they're in love with their best friend."

[niranutcake]

Thinking of starting a series of 'what-if?' inserts with my sona. And the first victim is:

What if I worked at RTV's Puzzlevision Studios?

(AU by @4thwallbreakerdraws2)

(long post)

• "Healthy workers are productive workers" — that's something that I think even RTV couldn't disagree on and something that Nira was introduced to when she first started working at the famous RTV Studios.

Somewhere in the studio grounds there's a small department, consisting of a few staff members, that is responsible for taking care of workers' occuring health troubles. And Nira is part of that team.

• Her special powers are [REDACTED] that allow her to manipulate living organisms' bodily functions via direct skin-to-skin contact and In expense of her and/or the patient's energy (the amount of which depends on the patient's body condition, but oftentimes theirs is more than enough)

With a simple touch she can make headaches go away, calm nerves, release back muscle pain, heal paper cuts and coffee burns, make medicine work faster and much, much more. The possibilities are endless.

• As incredibly useful and amazing as that sounds, it also means she has the power to alternate anything in the body. Which is... Well... She tries not to think about it. That is the reason she almost constantly wears her gloves — to not accidentally hurt someone. Not that it ever happened, but still, she is simply too paranoid.

• She takes her job with great responsibility, trying to provide her best help and prove her worth to the company, despite her shyness and anxiety.

That is also the reason why she really admires RTV — The Big Boss rarely comes to the Healthcare section because of it's remote location and his many other more important tasks of being the CEO. But when he does (to check the employees' work, for instance) it's as if a celebrity came to visit.

Well, because he is one. He's confident, smart, charming, powerful and overall incredible figure in her eyes. Truly the most fitting to control The Studio. And that inspires Nira to her very core.

[tanjir0se]

This Post Canon AU has me in a CHOKEHOLD so enjoy more Adult!Genya ft Friends!!! Please please please click for full quality ily

Genya Shinazugawa the man that you could have been ARE!!!!!!

[al-luviec]

band au

[biblically-accurate-dca]

day 22: maid dress/sailor uniform ♡

i already drew a sailor uniform so here's a maid dress !! would you let them into your home (to clean it)